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Quote by Ezinne Orjiako, Nkem.

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Ezinne Orjiako, Nkem.

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“You better shut your big blubber lips.” We would call each other “jungle bunnies” and “bush boogies.” We would talk about each other’s ugly, big lips and flat noses. We would call each other pickaninnies and nappy-haired so-and-so’s. “Act your age, not your color,” we would tell each other. “You gon thank me when I’m through with you, Ima beat you so bad, I’m gon beat the black offa you.” Black made any insult worse. When you called somebody a “bastard,” that was bad. But when you called somebody a “Black bastard,” now that was terrible. In fact, when i was growing up, being called “Black,” period, was grounds for fighting. “Who you callin’ Black?” we would say. We had never heard the words “Black is beautiful” and the idea had never occurred to most of us.”

BlackProudAssimilationBlacknessBlack PowerBlack Is BeautifulBlack Struggle
Book:Assata: An Autobiography
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“melanin is memory. is the blue weight of the ocean. sewn into the red dusk of sky. living in the soil of your body. it is alive. leaping and sweeping you. against. into the sun. your skin was the first astronaut. the first in space. you touch. talk. are intimate with the sun. everyday. and do not perish. melanin. is the world. before this world. before the word. slave. during the word. slave. after the word. slave. it is the books. written into yourself. wild math in the pads of your feet. soft science in your hair. language down your back. invention in your mouth. melanin is why you are still alive. after. the torching. it is a second lung. the next heart. and the next heart. and the next. a never ending. regenerative. breathing thing. a ceremony of life. while you are asleep. a cosmos. in conversation. immortal. melanin is a wisdom that knew. hate would be the anti light come to devour. defile. destroy. a wisdom that did not flinch. a wisdom that is not bothered by such things. melanin is memory. future memory. past memory. your memory. the memory of life. all. in your skin. — melanin”

BlackColorBlacknessSkinMelanin
Book:Nejma
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“you want a romance with my blackness. and how it holds you. how it illuminates your skin. makes you break your breath. against itself. and how is this possible. when your world has never made you breath. not once. ever. but my blackness makes you think about yourself. in a way you have never. and you are open. a question. alive. and now hungry. my blackness is your first love. you are convinced it is. showing you what your eyes could ‘never’ see before. a ‘world’ bigger. brighter. dark. dusky and wild. unashamed of itself. rebellious. and it’s cosmic. your relationship with how the night rolls off me into your hands. you and my blackness are soul mates. you met so you could learn. more. expand. because you always knew you were not like the others. who made sure they ate one white thing every day. no. you were always uncomfortable with yourself. you wear my culture around your neck. bask in and praise its jewels. pick it up on days when you want attention. put it down when it starts to stain. (you don’t want to be disrespectful and take more than you should. you just want to be a part of something so beautiful.) my blackness came to save you. came to help you escape. the clutches of racism. of having that beast anywhere inside you. around you. next to you. your comfort. intimacy. proximity. with my blackness confirms. and affirms. your nonracism. your lack of hate. it is this heady trip. this painful awesome tryst. that brings you. flushed and moon eyed. to my door with thank yous. and i love yous. you have taught me to be a better person. you have changed my life. but this was never a relationship. i have no idea who you are. and i laugh incredulous and insulted. at the notion that my blackness could ever be your first love. that my blackness is your freedom. that my blackness is yours. — fetish”

BlackAdmirationBlacknessFetishBlack FetishFetishizing
Book:Nejma
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“[P]assing expresses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing—as a limited durational performance—signals a “return” to a natural-cum-biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans-identificatory practices—both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic referent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness provided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “some- thing akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliberate calculation” of one’s fungible status. Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open—that is fungible—and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow.”

TransBlacknessCritical Race TheoryTrans Studies
Author:C Riley Snorton
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“That is a fair lord and a great captain of men," said Legolas. "If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising." "And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building," said Gimli. "It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise." "Yet seldom do they fail of their seed," said Legolas. "And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deed of Men will outlast us, Gimli." "And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess," said the Dwarf. "To that the Elves know not the answer," said Legolas.”

HopeLossGreatnessPromiseFutureGlory
Book:The Return of the King
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