And I'm following him on Twitter and have to fight myself hard not to tweet everything I find profound and tag him in every single tweet. I'm considering it an exercise in self-control.
But I have to share this, his writings on another Black student telling him he wasn't Black:
"Why was I working to reject being defined by the white gaze but not also working to reject definition by the Black gaze?...Who gave him the right to determine what is and is not Blackness for me? Who made him the judge of Blackness? To say I'm not Black is to accuse me of apostasy as if Blackness were a religion that could be escaped. But we cannot abandon Blackness even if we commit treason against it. It's permanent. Even an Uncle Tom must suffer beneath the boot of white supremacy. And I'm not a Tom just because you don't understand me. I may be a work in progress but I will always be Black. The only things in life that I am obligated to do are pay taxes, be Black, and die."
--Toure, Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now, pg. 97
In the book, Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander says she is haunted by “a continual underestimation of my intellectual ability and capacity, and the real insidious aspect of that kind of racism is that we don’t know half the time when people are underestimating us.”
ReplyDelete...how interesting keep us posted on your thoughts about the book!