Discussion Dissects Discourse of Blackness
BY ADRIAN LEUNG

Last Tuesday, at 7:30 p.m. students, faculty and administrators gathered in King 306 to join in a panel to analyze the notion of “Blackness.” 
Key organizer senior Aubreya Lewis began by welcoming everyone to “The Many Faces of Blackness,” thanking people for helping her and introducing guest facilitator Leslie Saunders.

(photo by Tom Shortliffe)

The student panel included sophomore Dominique Atchison, junior Yvonne O. Etaghene, junior Kwasi Kwakwa, first-year Vida Vazquez and sophomore Lisa Merriweather. After their introduction, Saunders set the tone for the entire room’s participation in discussion, saying, “You all are actually the more important panel.”
Saunders also explained her expectations of a successful discussion. “If this works out right, we’ll be leave here with more questions than answers concerning what constitutes blackness and the black experience,” she said.
Saunders posed some initial questions to the panel, “What is the black experience? Can you define it?”
Etaghene answered first, saying that strictly defining the black experience would be presumptuous. She explained a number of difficulties arising from her simultaneous identities as African, specifically Nigerian, and black. She also spoke about her bisexual identity, being exoticized by everyone, including the black community, for instance, within recent hip-hop videos. 
Etaghene also expressed dissatisfaction with peoples’ viewing her behavior as “intimidating,” when she stood up for herself. She said, “I get a lot of stuff about being intimidating. Being a black woman in this society, you have to say something because otherwise, you’ll get put down. So we have to buck up. I don’t want to accommodate anymore. I’m oppressed all day. I just want to speak.”
Vazquez spoke next, prefacing her experience with her ethnic background: an Afro-Cuban father with dark skin and African features and a mother who’s white and Jewish. Vazquez identified herself as multiracial and Latina. She argued that blackness isn’t about features, rather, “it’s found in the way you communicate, in the way you act, the way your family is.” 
Vazquez added that since beginning college, she’s developed a “double consciousness, having to do homework and go to class but also having obligations to organize.”
Contextualizing blackness internationally, Vazquez spoke of the intersection between Latino and black identity. “Many Latinos are able to deny their African heritage. They might not look it, so they’ll live their lives without being black. But how can you identify as Latino without acknowledging the African heritage?”
Atchison continued the notion that blackness was hard to define, drawing on Marlon Riggs’s film Black Is Black Ain’t and his metaphor between blackness and gumbo. “Everyone puts their own different ingredients into gumbo, but there’s one thing that holds it all together that still makes it gumbo,” she said.
Atchison also offered examples of her personal experience, intersections of religion, sexuality and race, which often made situations difficult, having to sacrifice one identity over another, especially at college. She said, “The different groups I identified with were never seen as a problem, but when I came here, I felt I had to choose one.” One example was her experience in Dance Diaspora where she felt her religion posed a difficulty.
After Atchison, Merriweather spoke on her continuous childhood experiences with people telling her she wasn’t living the black experience. “There was a contradiction between the way I was expected to be and the way I was raised — middle class, well-behaved, proper-English speaking. People considered this outside the black experience.”
Merriweather said her experience at Oberlin helped her see that no single solid definition of the “black” existed. “Being in Oberlin helped me get over a lot of my internalized racism. Being around wonderful students helped me realize there isn’t just one solitary image of blackness.”
Last in the panel, Kwakwa admitted that he could not come up with a definition that wouldn’t exclude someone. “It’s somewhere between where you’re from, what your culture is, how you behave and what you experience,” he began.
An international student from Ghana, Kwakwa explained his predicament, being black in Africa. “Even though there’re blacks above and below you, you don’t know where you stand relative to whites. Almost every white person you see is rich, and they also command more respect than you.”

Growing up knowing that foreign television depicted his country as underdeveloped, Kwakwa told the audience how he was still surprised by the ignorance of Americans upon his arrival. “I didn’t think foreigners would believe it all. But when I first came, people asked me, ‘are there schools in your country? Is there famine and disease? My friends were asked if we still lived in mud huts, whether or not I played the drums. All this when I come from the suburbs of an industrial town.”
He also contrasted the divisions in Africa, based on ethnicity, to the divisions in the United States, based on race. “In Ghana, ethnicity is what becomes important, my parents are from two different ethnicities which are traditionally in conflict. This makes it interesting. But in the United States, it doesn’t matter what I do or what I say, it only matters how you see me, point-blank.
Lewis intended to present a panel with a wide range of experience. “I wanted the panel to include five students with varied perspectives on blackness and black experiences.”
After Kwakwa, Saunders opened up the floor for the audience to participate, asking and answering their own questions. 
Many students spoke of their own expereinces being told they weren’t black. And most students agreed that defining blackness was not possible, and in some cases, undesirable.

Junior Kim Mosby agreed with the failure to define blackness, and she further questioned the entire process of creating boundaries. She said, “My biggest problem lies in boundaries. I realize to make a solid community, one must erect boundaries, but where must you draw those boundaries? Is blackness what one must possess to understand or identify with the “black experience?” Is blackness visual? Is blackness spatial? Is blackness cultural? Is blackness a social construct or an actual identity? Can one person be “more black” than someone else? Is blackness based on the one drop rule or is there other criteria that determines such factors?”
Ombudsperson Yeworkwha belachew also felt that a liberal stance was required in determining blackness. She said, “When people talk about Asianness or blackness, or any other categories, we feel that we have to conform. We need to respect the pieces we’ve gone through that make us different. At some point in my life, I’d like to see us all feel comfortable about who we are.”
Professor of African American Studies, James Millette said, “Blackness is a color. The problem is that Black people have been socially constructed into a particular race and class, historically constructed into a subordinate culture. Black people are international, found in many cultures of the world, Spanish, English, Chinese, Japanese, etc. It’s difficult to speak of blackness as one monolithic thing. The institution of slavery assigned social value, or lack of social value, to black people. We can’t conceptualize blackness unless we historicize it and see how people came to recognize people as black and came to associate certain social characteristics and values with blackness.”
MRC Africana Community Coordinator Kwame Willingham was happy with the turnout but concerned with the demographics. “I was happy and refreshed with the tunout, specifically with the number of students of African descent. But I’m concerned because most of those students were women. There needs to be more of a male presence at those discussions to make it more well-rounded.”
Willingham was hopeful about future panels. “I would like to see the conversation continue. The next step would be to discuss ways to move forward [with these concepts],” he said.
Lewis, who will be graduating, hopes to include more underclass students in the future organization. “I will encourage underclassmen to continue to organize discussions of this nature because they seem to have a way of healing spirits. I, too, will continue these discussions wherever I happen to go after Oberlin.”

Concerned with the non-capitalization of “black” and “blackness,” Etaghene said, “Whites have capitalized on us already. We should at least be able to capitalize ourselves. The “b” in black should be capitalized.