Dash Harris
NEGRO - FINDING IDENTITY: Angeley - Blackness is Not Confused
In this timely interview, Angeley Crawford talks about how many AfroLatin Americans were never confused about their Blackness. Couldn’t afford to be ambivalent on the subject as it has very real and often deadly consequences...across the Diaspora. We see this consistently, whether in Cuba, Panama, Colombia, Puerto Rico, or Mexico. We all face the same social ills no matter our geography as anti-Blackness knows no borders. She points out, critical to mention, that in *this* iteration of the “AfroLatinx Movement” in the United States, that is, as Latin America has always had social movements centering negritud, the focus is on the mestizaje-fluidity confounding the “question” of race. For many, this was never even a question. We knew the answer. True to white supremacy’s function and power dynamic, Blackness and whiteness know exactly where they belong on the spectrum and she speaks to the Casta activity her students did where they arranged themselves on the spectrum of phenotype, color, and class and how this informs the access one has positioning their proximity to whiteness. The ones closer to whiteness and the ones furthest from whiteness unequivocally knew what time it was as this is the very utility of race.
Angeley elaborates: "Whiteness does not differentiate and Blackness is not confused. Let’s have these hard conversations. Let’s live in the tensions that the work of decolonization requires. As the homie @diasporadash said “There is space in understanding the high cost of claiming blackness in anti black nations and space in acknowledging that many of us survived by arming ourselves in it.” We must continue to complicate the narrative."
