Peace, y’all. This one’s been on my spirit—it’s a long one, but it’s time to let it breathe. Thank you for bearing witness to me, and to my perspective.
I didn’t write this to romanticize suffering.
I didn’t write it to perform Black pain either.
And I damn sure didn’t write this blog to weaponize the memory of Afrika in the Black community.
Too often, our remembrance is expected to bleed—to beg, to grieve, to suffer out loud so that others can try to understand it.
But what I carry and what carried me this morning—is something ancient, something deeper, and far more whole.
This is a story born of a dream.
A blood memory.
A message not steeped in sorrow, but in truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help us god.
Not in what was done to us—but in what lives through us.
The Afrika I feel in my bones is not frozen in pain.
She is radiant. She is rhythm.
She is beyond resilient wrapped in spirit.
And when she visits me—my ancestors visit too…they don’t visit to mourn.
They visit to remind me.
To steady me.
To call to me.
I woke up this morning, earthside, breathing and crying from a familiar song on my heart.
Not from sadness—but from knowing.
From remembering.
Something I didn’t live through—but that lives through me.
The dream wasn’t just a dream.
My ancestors came bearing a message—a charge, a call, a confirmation.
Had to hurry up and write it down when I woke up, but they said:
“Chile of our blood, keeper of our stories,
Don’t you forget. We are more than what was done against us. We are what we’ve become in the soul of it. Tell your story, baby. Tell ‘em how it hits you. How it moves through your spine and rattles your bones.
Tell ‘em, even if they ain’t ready. Shit, they might not never be ready.”
I lay there, between snot and saltwater, whispering
thank you, thank you, thank you
over and over again.
My ancestors sweet words made my crying ritual less about pain. It was about communion—a holy remembering. Their voices fed me good like a hot pot of oatmeal in the morning, sticks to the ribs all day.
Thank you for my Afrikanface and lineage. Thank you for trusting me with our ache and our beauty.
Thank you for trusting me with our memory and our brilliance.
Because I don’t imagine my Afrikan ancestors petrified in shame.
I see you crossed over into something whole.
I see you transcendent. Not only survivors of the unconscionable horror of the Maafa—our Afrikan Holocaust—
but as the Afrikan diaspora, builders of civilizations, cultivators of language,
lovers, rich in rhythm and reason. I feel you everywhere—in the marrow of my bones,
in my blood memory that carries you in it.
And when you show up?
You don’t come to grieve.
You come to guide.
To remind me that healing flows both ways.
That the line between ancestor and descendant is not a closed gate—but a living bridge.
I know you haven’t forgotten us.
You know we still carry what you could not finish. And when the moment calls—when the ache echoes—you return.
Not in sorrow.
But in strength.
You reach through time to steady us,
to move with us,
to remind us:
We are the continuation of your story—too sacred to die.
And With Remembrance Comes Responsibility
Because while I write from a place of reverence—for our ancestors, for the truth—they also left me with a charge: to protect the memory, not just feel it. To tell it whole. To stand guard over it. And that includes challenging and checking anything that distorts or dishonors it—even when it comes from within our own community. Let’s face it, we’re a community — not a single bulging rock of Gibraltar. But that doesn’t mean we let shit slide. Accountability matters for every Black person on this planet. Being real with each other — even when it’s hard — is how we grow. It’s how we heal, not just as individuals, but across generations. Together.
Lately, I’ve noticed a growing trend in our community around narratives that, while often framed as empowering or rooted in cultural pride, dangerously distort or outright deny the historical facts of what our people endured during the Middle Passage. We can’t afford to rewrite trauma into myths or pride into denial. Honoring our ancestors means confronting the full weight of that history by facing it honestly, not reshaping it to make ourselves more comfortable. And while I know some of these ideas come from a place of wanting to reclaim identity and autonomy, we have to be honest: some of this shit is deeply harmful, historically inaccurate, and unintentionally echoes the erasure we’ve fought so long to undo.
As Black Afrikan descendants — people whose brilliance and greatness were violently interrupted by one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity — we carry the living legacy of that trauma. Our ancestors, who built civilizations and inscribed wisdom into stone before others even knew how to write, were kidnapped, trafficked, raped, and enslaved through the transatlantic slave trade. And while that chapter may be behind us, its impact is not. It still lives in our bodies, our families, and our communities today.
To twist or deny that truth doesn’t uplift us — it endangers us. It fractures our connection to each other, to our history, and to the land that is inherently ours.
There’s a growing wave of trendy narratives in our community — ones that deny our connection to Afrika. “I’m not Afrikan, I’m Carribean .” “I’m not Black, I’m colored.” “I got Indian in my blood.” The message is the same: anything but Afrikan — even when the truth is written all over our faces and carried through our bloodlines.
You may have heard versions of this:
“Black people were Indigenous to the Americas.”
“We didn’t come from Afrika — we were already here.”
Some of us cling to other lineages to distance ourselves from Blackness — especially Indigenous ancestry. And while many of us do have Native roots, the reality is, Black people are often excluded from those very communities. Anti-Blackness exists there too. Claiming another identity doesn’t erase the legacy of the Middle Passage or the generational impact it left behind.
And on the flip side — there’s nothing wrong with having multiple ancestries. I do. I carry European ancestry through my father’s lineage — something I’m still working to unpack and reconcile with, especially given the history attached to it. But that’s a different story for a different day. The point is, many of us have mixed heritage. That’s not the issue.
The issue is: why is it always Afrikan that gets denied? Why is that the lineage treated as taboo, as something to escape or erase? That’s not pride — that’s colonization.
Even the idea that Afrikan people on the continent mistreat Black folks from the diaspora is often exaggerated, unstudied, and weaponized. That narrative is part of a larger agenda: to keep us disconnected. Because a disconnected people are easier to control, divide, and erase.
These narratives might feel empowering, but they don’t liberate us — they fragment us. Reconnecting to our Afrikan identity is not weakness. It’s healing. It’s truth. And we owe that to ourselves — and to our ancestors
The Truth Will Set Yo Ass Free Or On Fire. It’s Sacred Like That.
Yes, there is some scholarly debate that early Afrikan explorers may have had limited contact with the Americas before European colonization. What of it even without much evidence to back it up. That’s not the threat.
The real danger is when that conversation gets distorted—twisted into claims that chattel slavery didn’t happen as we know it, or worse, that Afrikan descendants in America have no direct connection to Afrika at all.
That’s not pride.
That’s not empowerment.
That’s erasure—plain and simple.
And here’s the hard truth:
We’ve always expected false supremacists delusion to erase us.
We’ve watched European institutions systematically steal, distort, and bury the truth about Black scholars, scientists, inventors, leaders, and entire civilizations since the beginning.
That erasure is nothing new. It’s part of their playbook.
But when it comes from within our own community—when we see Black folks resharing or reshaping false narratives that disconnect us from our ancestors, from the Middle Passage, from the truth of slavery—it does something even more devastating.
It harms us twice.
Once by repeating the erasure,
and again by making it harder to heal from it.
Because when the lie comes in a familiar voice, wrapped in cultural pride or spiritual language, it’s easier to let our guard down. Easier to believe. And far harder to undo.
That’s why naming it is important.
That’s why truth-telling is sacred.
And that’s why we must honor our ancestors fully—not just with candles and cloth, but with historical clarity and accountability.
Why This Matters
This kind of historical revisionism might sound empowering on the surface, but in practice, it harms us in very real ways:
- It erases our ancestors’ suffering and resistance. Pretending the Middle Passage didn’t happen, or minimizing it, dishonors the generations who endured and resisted brutal conditions so that we could exist today.
- It severs our connection to Afrika. We’ve already had our languages, names, and cultures stripped away—so doubling down by disowning what remains of that connection is deeply damaging to our collective unity.
- It undermines the fight for reparations. If our history is erased or rewritten, how can we demand justice for what was done?
- It creates confusion that empowers oppressive systems. Muddled narratives about Black people make it easier for those wielding power to avoid accountability. And that confusion isn’t new—it’s by design.
Historical Erasure Is Political
Historical erasure isn’t passive. It’s not accidental. It’s political — and it’s been weaponized time and time again against Black people. But what’s often overlooked is that this erasure doesn’t only come from outside forces. Sometimes, it happens within our own communities. And even though the forms of erasure differ in power, in context, and in consequence, both must be named. Both must be held accountable.
False supremacy has always relied on erasure to justify itself. From textbooks that reduce slavery to a footnote, to museums filled with Afrikan artifacts stolen and displayed without context or credit — the project has always been to strip Black people of our humanity, our histories, and our contributions. And those artifacts haven’t just been inanimate objects. They’ve included real Black people — human beings treated as curiosities and exhibits. Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Afrika, was paraded and displayed across Europe in the early 19th century as a spectacle emphasizing distorted and racist ideas about her body and race, her image used to justify pseudoscientific claims of racial hierarchy. Her remains were kept in a museum for nearly two centuries before being finally returned to her homeland in 2002, where her body was laid to rest. El Negro, a young man from southern Afrika — likely Botswana or South Afrika, had his remains stolen in the 1830s by French naturalist Jules Verreaux, who taxidermied him like an animal and put him on display. Initially, his stuffed body contained his original skull and several arm and leg bones. He was exhibited in the Darder Museum of Banyoles in Catalonia, Spain. Specifically, it was exhibited in the museum’s natural history section for over a century as a colonial curiosity before his remains were returned to his home of South Afrika and given a proper burial in 2000. This is erasure by dehumanization, by objectification, by institutional violence.
Black inventors, freedom fighters, scholars, builders, and artists have all been systematically removed from the dominant historical narrative. In their place, a sanitized version of history is sold — one where white figures are centered, heroic, and civilized, and everyone else is peripheral or disposable. That kind of erasure isn’t just about ignorance — it’s about control. If you erase someone’s past, you disempower their present and limit their future. It becomes easier to criminalize Blackness when you erase its brilliance. Easier to gentrify a neighborhood when you erase who built it. Easier to justify inequity when you erase the systems that created it.
But erasure isn’t something we’re immune from doing ourselves. Within our own communities, there’s sometimes there can be a reluctance to embrace Afrika, or even a complete denial of it. A rejection of the continent as ours — whether from pain, miseducation, shame, or the psychological trauma of displacement. But when we deny that connection, we participate in a quieter kind of erasure. We erase our ancestors. We erase the rich cultural lineages that false supremacy tried to sever. We lose access to the pride, resistance, and beauty that existed long before colonialism or the transatlantic slave trade. And that too has consequences.
We can’t afford to let these forms of erasure — external or internal — go unchecked.
Yes, the violence and legacy of yt historical erasure is more systemic, more resourced, and more deliberately constructed. It’s reinforced by governments, schools, media, and cultural institutions. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t interrogate our own narratives too. If we want liberation, we need to recover truth — all of it.
Accountability must move in every direction. Not to shame, but to build. To rebuild. To remember who we are and where we come from — fully.
Because every time history is erased, a lie is told. And if we don’t fight those lies with truth, someone else will write a story that doesn’t include us at
When “Progress” Becomes Performative
Just like the misleading historical narratives, we also need to talk about the performative progress we see in systems claiming to support us. Take terms like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I.) or Critical Race Theory (C.R.T.)—they sound dope and revolutionary on the surface. Cute-Catchy. Academic. Progressive. But who actually benefits?
Too often, these frameworks become elitist, inaccessible, and disconnected from the lived realities of everyday Black people. They’re wrapped in corporate language and filtered through institutions that continue to harm the very communities they claim to uplift.
What we really need? To call that racist shit what it is, and to hold those racist beasts accountable for the irreparable damage they continue to cause. We don’t need more buzzwords, panels, or watered-down training modules that let racist systems and their people off the hook. On the surface, it looks like progress. But honestly? Progress for who? To me it’s a band-aids on bullet wounds. Distractions. Decoys. Pretty lil’ lies dressed up in inclusion and equity with kente’ cloth on it.
From Iron Brands to Barcodes—How Corporate “Diversity” Echoes A Violent Legacy
We’ve seen this before. Y’all saw how Target played in our faces—slappin’ Blackness and queerness onto products for profit. Pan-Afrikan flags and rainbow pride put on T-shirts, mugs—you name it. That’s what I call visibility without ja plan for justice. Identity without a plan for liberation. It’s branding, exploitation with no empowerment. It’s a lack of organization and mobilization.
And speaking of branding—let’s talk about how violent that legacy really is. Back in 1710, if you encountered an enslaved Afrikan owned by the Royal African Company (RAC)—an English mercantile company chartered in 1672 to trade along the West Afrikan coast—you would witness a brutal system firsthand. The RAC held a monopoly on English trade with Afrika, initially focused on gold but later primarily involved in capturing and selling enslaved Afrikans. This company played a major role in the Transatlantic slave trade, transporting more enslaved Afrikans to the Americas than any other single institution. To mark their human property, they seared the letters ‘RAC’ into the chests of enslaved people using branding irons like the ones pictured below—similar to those used for cattle.
This violent practice extended beyond the RAC. Plantation owners across the Americas adopted branding as a method of control and dehumanization. Take for instance a colonial beast named Volsey B. Marmillion from Louisiana. He and other plantation beasts like him didn’t just tax our ancestors’ heads like livestock—they branded them like livestock, too. Literally. They burned their initials, family crests, and imperial symbols into Black flesh like a cattle’s raw hide. Marmillion branded his initials—VBM—into the forehead of an enslaved Afrikan man he owned name Wilson Chinn, to mark ownership over him. A human being, reduced. Branded like cattle. Treated like cargo.
That wasn’t just ownership.
That was complete annihilation.
Barbarism.
Unconscionable.
A crime against humanity so vile, that I will always hate them, that I will always wish for them to be shot in the morning for betraying my people. I digress.
We Are Not Just Descendants of Pain—We Are Architects of Power
We carry their knowing. Their fire. Our people are the mathematicians of Timbuktu. The master builders of Kush and Kemet. Like I said earlier, we carved stories into stone before others learned to write. We mapped the stars while empires crawled and crumbled. We are scholars. Scientists. Griots. Birthing experts of the world’s most sacred knowledge. Black genius didn’t begin in struggle—it was interrupted by it. To be Black is to be a vessel of ancient intelligence. To be Black is to be a living archive of sacred, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual wealth.
Our creativity is our resistance.
Our joy is our protest.
Our memory is our legacy.
Truth Is Our Sheild—Not Just Against Lies, But Against Forgetting
Black people have always resisted—even if you’ve got Kanye Wests claiming we didn’t, even saying Harriet Tubman never existed, as if he was there beside her in the fight. That kind of revisionist talk isn’t just false—it’s betrayal.
One of my poems, from my first solo collection I’m working on, answers that. It traces how we’ve resisted—spiritually, physically, culturally—since the moment of capture. It doesn’t just remember the truth. It proves it with facts. Resistance is in our blood, our breath, our bones. We’ve always resisted and loved in the catastrophe of it. Created too. Reimagined. Taught. Reclaimed. We are here because they endured.
The Maafa is not the whole story—but it is part of the truth we refuse to let die. False theories that erase the transatlantic slave trade don’t just erase our pain. They erase our resilience. They erase our power to transform tragedy into art, to spin suffering into sovereignty. These stories rob us of our full inheritance—one paid for in blood, yes, but also in brilliance.
We Are Not Just the Wounded—We Are the Healers
It’s easy to forget that we birthed civilization itself. That Afrika is not just the cradle of life—but the creature of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, literature, law-you name it. We, the descendants of the Afrikan Holocaust, are also the descendants of creators. We’ve birthed so much life—spiritually, culturally, artistically—that it literally informs the entire planet. That’s why I always say: our steez is a spiritual. We are not only the hurt—we are the healers. We are the chain breakers. We are the restorers, the rememberers, the revolution that is now televised.
We stay in the struggle not just for historical accuracy—but for spiritual integrity. We are more than suffering. More than trauma. We are sacred. We are scholars. We are sovereign. And this is why false pride and supremacy can’t build their own tables, they have to steel yours. Folks don’t get to remix our grief for clout. Don’t get to delete the names of stolen Afrikans just ‘cause the truth will burn them alive. Reparations aren’t optional. Justice is not theoretical. The restoration of Black dignity begins with the telling of the full story. And we must tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help us god.
Reclaiming Our Story Is Reclaiming Our Power
We must uplift the voices of scholars who center Afrikan truth—not those who flatten or erase it. If you can’t decolonize it, burn that shit to the ground—books and all.
We carry the brilliance of minds like Cheikh Anta Diop, whose The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality proved Afrika’s central role in world history. Molefi Kete Asante gave us Afrocentricity, a framework to reclaim our narratives and center ourselves. And Catherine Acholonu, through They Lived Before Adam, revealed Afrika as the true cradle of civilization—rich in science, spirit, and legacy.
Let’s speak of the genius that rose from the ashes—jazz, hip hop, blues, soul—Afrikans in America and the Caribbean shaping the world’s soundtrack. Of Black feminists, freedom fighters, and thinkers who birthed new worlds. Toni Morrison’s language, Zora Neale Hurston’s vision, James Baldwin’s fire, Octavia Butler’s futures,Abraham Traore’s reclamation—and trailblazers from my very own community, with Sonya Mann-McFarlane’s Imani, and Evita Colons Speak to My Soul. And still, the list goes on—these are but a few among many who continue to shape, shift, and imagine us forward.
All the divine doulas, barbers giving fades and mentorships, street corner griots pushin’ pen to paper, freedom singers, hood therapists holdin’ group sessions at the corner store. We are still pouring libation and practicing liberation—on buses, in boardrooms, behind registers, drum circles, in pulpits, at protests, in prisons, in prayer—even the brotha without a home, walking back-and-forth from the street to the sidewalk, whispering to his ancestors. What some call madness, we recognize as masked medicine—a spiritual gift misread by a world that’s forgotten how to listen. He’s not lost; he’s in ceremony. A living altar between realms. So leave that man the hell alone.
Black excellence is not void.
It’s the shadow.
It’s ancestral.
What We Must Do Is Use Our Collective Memories to Heal Now
Again, the Afrikan Holocaust is not the beginning of our story—it was a brutal interruption. But it could never erase us.
We are not ghosts of stolen people—we are here, writing blogs and singing our songs, guardians, a living legacy. So when I use the popular phrase, Put some respect on our names—I don’t just mean respect our pain. I mean…
Put respect on our power.
Put respect on our breath.
Put respect on our possibility.
Put respect on our contributions,
Put respect on our compassion,
Put respect on our clarity,
Put respect on our cosmic knowing.
Because we’re here—in living color, building every dream we want. Master teachers and master students. Creating more life. Restoring to wholeness what was once fragmented. Thriving in the face of every force designed to erase us.
And with that respect comes deep responsibility. As individuals, we must:
- Speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.
- Honor our ancestors by preserving their stories, not rewriting them.
- Support reparations, both legislative (like H.R. 40) and grassroots.
- Challenge misinformation, especially online.
- Reclaim Afrika, not as a distant myth, but as an integral part of our identity, our source, our center, our home.
Healing From Our Collective Memory—and Why Reparations Matter: My Final Peace
The trauma of the Middle Passage and the Maafa isn’t a myth or some distant history lesson—it’s on record, a living wound in our collective memory. It runs deep in our bones, in our soul, in the stories passed down from generation to generation. Healing from that kind of pain can’t happen when we keep pretending it didn’t happen or when we allow false narratives to cloud the truth of our people.
This trauma is real, and it’s not just in the past. It shows up today as what Dr. Joy DeGruy calls Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS)—the deep, generational trauma passed down from centuries of brutal oppression. PTSS helps explain some of the violence and dysfunction in Black communities—not as an excuse, but as a starting point to understand why healing is so critical.
When we see cycles of violence or struggle in our neighborhoods, it’s not because of that’s who we are—it’s because of what we’ve been forced to carry for hundreds of years. The pain of being stolen, dehumanized, and disconnected from our roots still echoes today. But knowing this isn’t about blaming—it’s about breaking the cycle. It’s about starting the real work of healing together.
And that healing requires more than words; it requires tangible action-Reparations. Reparations aren’t just about money or politics—they’re about restoring rightful order. Returning what was stolen: our dignity, culture, history, and place in the world. True reparations begin with truth—no sugarcoating, no denial. Because healing starts with honesty.
It doesn’t matter that yt people today may not know exactly which of their ancestors committed these atrocities, or that they themselves didn’t directly participate or have no responsibility in it at all—the reality is one of us exists as descendants of those whose ancestors inflicted grave and lasting harm, and descendants on the other side who are still recovering from that damage. Afrikans born in America live alongside people whose last names were forced on them—names that carry the weight of stolen identity—further immersing us in this cesspool of inherited trauma and injustice.
Meanwhile, Black people have yet to receive the full reckoning, apology, or reparations that other groups—like First Nations peoples, who have secured land rights and formal apologies for colonization; Holocaust survivors, who received reparations from Germany for genocide; Australian stolen children, who were officially acknowledged and compensated for forced removals; and displaced Chinese Americans, who received a formal apology and reparations for the Chinese Exclusion Act—have been granted, often gleefully with “cherries on top.”
Reparations aren’t just about money or politics—they’re about restoring rightful order. Reparations are a real, material commitment to righting historical wrongs—not just symbolic words. They turn talk of justice into action, revealing where a nation’s values—and heart—truly lie. You can’t claim to care about justice without investing in the repair of the people harmed. Words may acknowledge the pain, but reparations put your money where your mouth is. Real care requires real commitment—because dignity, responsibility, and love demand more than cheap talk.
When we say “Black Afrikans were stolen—and must be restored,” we’re speaking of more than survival. We mean reclaiming the power to thrive—physically, financially, spiritually, and culturally. It’s about repairing our roots, healing our lineage, and moving forward whole.
Our ancestors fought for us to be here—not just alive, but alive with purpose, creativity, and strength. Reparations are a way to honor that fight by investing in our communities, preserving our stories, and rebuilding what centuries of oppression tries to destroy.
Healing isn’t just an individual thing—it’s collective. It’s about all of us, together, facing the full story. When the truth about the Middle Passage is denied or erased, it stops the healing. It keeps the wound open, the trauma alive. That’s why reparations are more than a policy—they’re a pathway to collective freedom. We don’t need charity or pity. We need justice and restoration. And we won’t stop demanding it—not for guilt, but because it’s right and necessary for us to heal and reclaim our future.
So yeah, telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help us god—even the parts that might stop some hearts—is how we honor our ancestors, respect our present, and protect our future. Because sometimes, to be truly reborn, we gotta face the most visceral truths to set out souls free.
The history of a people can’t be eradicated.
Black people were there.
Black people are here.
Black people are in the future.
Love y’all yo!
Asé’O—
TheeAmazingGrace
GirlrillaVintage the Blog 