Applying for Blackness: An Open Letter

By Chiazotam Ekekezie


Dear friends,

No disrespect is intended and nothing but realness meant. I know it’s long, so digest it in slow increments if necessary. Please share your wisdom and let’s dialogue. Things have been on my mind all day and then some. This email is in response to the use of terms like “incog” and suggestions of who’s involved in the black community and who’s not. I refuse to believe that one’s involvement in the black community is limited to something as superficial as “making the right appearances” or lip service. And I want us to take some time to respect each other’s own personal contributions to building black community here at Harvard and beyond. With that said, regardless of what you think you did to make you an authority on who’s black and who’s not, who’s in the black community and who’s not, which organizations are black organizations and which ones aren’t etc, at the end of the day, we’re all in this together. This goes beyond lack of attendance at the MLK celebration yesterday and towards defining what community means to each of us. Yes, there is no singular “black Harvard experience” and no all-encompassing notion of community. But I think that the discussions raised, however passionately infused, all have a common, well-intentioned goal which is to discern how we can better become a community because of the substance of what we do to empower each other collectively, and not how we decide to deride and divide ourselves based on superficial justifications....

“Curriculum vitae of the ‘incog’ seeking a position of blackness”
We were wondering if someone could at some point send out the standardized list of regulations and requirements for fulfilling the criteria of what it means to be black at Harvard and/or involved in the black community. When we got here Pre-Frosh weekend, they forgot to put a handout in our little red folders. And upon arrival that fall, we went to check the various manuals and catalogues laid out on our dorm room desks, but all we saw were manuals for choosing concentrations and picking classes… you know, the unimportant, important stuff.

Every now and then we check our mailboxes and we check our email accounts and we check online and we ask around, but it hasn’t come yet and no one seems to be quite sure of the criteria, as it may have changed significantly since the ’70s. Kuumba’s changed. There’s no more “Afro.” And the Barker Center is no longer the Student Union. And it’s no longer in style to take over the President’s office in the name of divestment; no, now we sign petitions, praise ourselves for caring and showing that activism among our population is not dead. We pray every now and then to silent forces that the administration honors its end of the deal until they decide to backtrack and we silently retreat to problem sets, hoping no one has noticed that the pulse of our passion and action is asystolic. Afros are about as necessary as spirituals ‘cause we’ve traded those in for fades and proceeded to draw our courage/strength/resolve and upliftment from Three6Mafia, DJ Webstar and Young B. After all, “chicken noodle soup” cures all, does it not? And what is our life, but one big “hustle”? Please don’t stop my “flow.” What we reap is what we sow. Don’t you know? Don’t you know!

Don’t you know? It’s been some years now and we’ve been doing our best to tutor and mentor black kids, raise awareness about black women and AIDS, sing and share black music and creativity. We’ve paid dues for certain groups and paid fees to enter different Celebrations and Tributes and dimly lit, poorly secured dance parties where we’ve done our best to gyrate to the beat (simulating African ancestors we tell ourselves we know intimately). We acquiesce to being groped and manhandled by “the man” who’s always fuckin with our groove. We’ve sat on boards and cabinets to help get black events funded and black campus issues more attention. We’ve written pieces on black issues, spent hours in labs researching HIV and sickle-cell anemia, been the voice of dissent in paternalistic discussions on race and black identity in various sections and lectures, yo check this, we even have many. Black. friends. And now, as we look back at all of this, we’re increasingly worried that we’ve forgotten to fulfill certain requirements that could leave us labeled as “incog” or much worse. We don’t know every single black face on campus nor does every black face know ours… but we can work on it. We don’t go to every meeting pertaining to black issues… but we can even try to change this too so long as it means that on the day we receive our respective diplomas, we can call ourselves true black people, which is what we thought we were, but have come to find that we are still in the endless process of becoming.

We know it’s exam period. We know we’re all really busy. But please, whenever you get the chance, do try and send out those requirements because it’ll be a damn shame if we graduate from this place without having fulfilled the necessary requirements. And a lot of us are confused, a lot of us are worried, and a lot of us are in the same boat, enduring a Middle Passage from the mythic to the realness… on a journey towards an ever-purifying legitimacy validating a supreme existence distinct from the regular folk surrounding us, thereby qualifying us as: “real blackness.” My goodness, what we wouldn’t give to be in that Talented Tenth.

Tell us what we have to buy and how we have to dress. Tell us what we have to say and what we have to do. Tell us where we have to be and where we have to go. Tell us who it is we are and who we have to know. We constitute a blank canvas waiting to drop it like it’s hot and quote Malcolm with the best of y’all. We want to be your Deval. We want to be your Obama. We want to be your tribute and your celebration. If only you will let us… let us be. Black. enuf.

We wonder what America would look like today if all those who came before us prioritized their GPAs and YouTube over freedom. And we are increasingly convinced after having been at Harvard and having seen the greatest minds of our generation at work, that that world would have been a beautiful, beautiful, perfect, perfect place… synonymous with a nightmare. But instead they shared a Dream and communal struggle was birthed. Perhaps, now, community is obsolete and, as such, died its death. Yet, in their “Field of Dreams,” they believed as we do now that if we build it, it will come: freedom. Unconstructively divided, however, we destroy it.

With love,
the brother and sister you do not see,
buried beneath the rubble of community.