~Interlude~
You’ll begin to question whether my telling of this journey is one that merely repeats the tale of every other passionate, black scholar’s revelations when seeing that the wall at the end (beginning?) of the dark tunnel goes further back than they’ve been taught. I ask that you keep reading nonetheless. My story is one that questions whether the tunnel is, in fact, dark, if that wall exists, if it’s creators—in whatever shape, color or form that they existed—wanted it to be used as a ‘tunnel’ at all. You might be confused and quite frankly I am too…well just a little but I promise to explain as much as I have come to know myself.
This structure of writing and the motivation for sharing myself with you in the way that I am was inspired by N.K. Jemisin and her Broken Earth Trilogy. She made me question how my interactions with you were reflective of my own internalized perceptions of my ancestry—an ancestry that society taught me. An incomplete one. One that (supposedly) started playing in the grass…just before the ships docked on the coasts.