BLACK MAGIC

I am dripping melanin and honey. I am proudly black and unapologetic

Upile

I don’t know why I start my blogs so abruptly. I should introduce myself before I can get your attention because if I don’t do so I would be rude or uncultured some even go far as to calling it characterless. I will be unfair to myself and my readers.
‘

Hello, my name is Vanessa April Jones;’ ……….

This was what I wished I was called when I was a young whitewashed black girl child who wanted to look like all those pretty girls I saw on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. They always had the contradicting color to mine they were lighter way way way lighter, they had straight long hair or wavy curly and long hair. I always looked at myself and wondered if I was enough if my skin was the ‘IT’.
At the age of ten I was slowly getting indoctrinated into the idea of not being enough I was unaware of myself because they didn’t teach me to love myself at school. The white family in all my books had nice things and the black people had the average things. They didn’t teach us to love being black no they taught me mathematics and history about baboons and how they were so closely related to my blackness ;
‘Africa the Cradle of life’ they called it
‘The first Homo sapien skull discovered in Tanzania’.
That is exactly what I was taught, that our closest ancestors were Apes and we are the evident proof to the realization of this theory but hey this is a story for another time.
I grew up in some way inferior with a lacking identity or individuality so again I am going to introduce myself.

‘Hi, my name is Tarisai Nyamuranga;’

it is not easy of the tongue but you have to learn like how I had to learn to say, Mitchel or Francis.
No one wants to feel less or little of who they are but I was programmed by what I heard and saw to think that I wasn’t. I remember how all the black girls on the famous 2000s hits were always light and had straight hair and perfect bodies.

The truth was that they looked like the closest thing a black woman could come to being white. Look at the mirror at that time the black woman would have resembled the emblem at that time of a white woman. It always bothered me, was my skin not worthy of television or billboards and magazine covers.
Yet yes times are evolving, yes some pay to look like us and others well they appropriate to feel like us. I appreciate what our pop culture has started to do, ‘they have begun the movement’. They have created the representation a black boy isn’t that curly-haired light skin anymore there is more representation of the dark chocolate boy. They now have the ‘I can’t run my comb through my hair mom’, kind of girl, they have the chubby bubbly sweet brown skin little girl with a bright smile being the lead. Despite this, I still see the difference in the division.

I am very proud to be black, but black is not all I am.

Denzel Washington

I truly started seeing it when I was 11 I grew up around black African Zimbabwean people; the, everyone older than you is your father, society. I remember the first time I learned that I was black, we had gone for a netball match that was away. We had played the sport well like how we had been taught maybe even better and we won. We won the match that day but lost our integrity, yes we were young but I learned a valuable lesson that day that haunted me to this day. Black had been averaged to failure by some sick ideology. One little girl in her innocence ran to her mother crying and shouting
‘Mom we lost to THEM’

I then started seeing the segregation our bags had been placed a few meters away, they refused to shake hands to honor good sportsmanship. There weren’t any straight looks but side glances, no laughs or smiles.
‘Difference’ it oozed out into the atmosphere I tried not to care but it was so dense it choked. That was when I realized that I was black and that wasn’t some underlying condition or bold patch I could cover up with a cap it was all over me everywhere. I was confused, but in my confusion, I felt the pride in me grow. We were taught to be inferior to the color of our skin is bad, for example, Blackmagic and the black zone these are all thing characterized by evil or some crazy idea of impurity.
I looked at my little brown hands and told myself I would have been damned if anyone tried to pry that from me or if I could think that I could be any different.
I still had my wide nose, 4c brittle hair, and my pigment. I was black, am black, will be black, and die black. Black was my pride and my identity I wasn’t going to let history stay unwritten and not moved.

If you’re white and you’re wrong, then you’re wrong; if you’re black and you’re wrong, you’re wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green – God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now

Bob Marley

There is more to being African or black than just our color we are a close but distant future.
All this came to mind when the black lives matter movement arose. I didn’t want to write something because I felt I was also a hypocrite shown in my previous blog. I didn’t want to create a false forced ideology I didn’t practice like the Pharisees, but now I want to say something about being BLACK. Let’s make black the new white.