"When did you first learn that you were a non-human? For me, it was a slow realisation. To begin with, I formly rejected the idea. When a white boy in third grade called me a n*gger and I ran to my white teacher in tears, she, unmoved, simply shrugged her shoulders and told me to ignore it. And that was that. (...)" Emejulu (2022:11)
"Granny, as we called her, had incredible stories. Her stories were my first introduction to Blackness, and, by extension, aspirational humanness." (ibid.:15) "My grandmother did not want to be white, even though (...) she had the ability to disappear into whiteness. It never occurred to her to be white - she wanted to be human. But, of course, I now understand that it is impossible to separate the two." (ibid.:17)
"The understanding of my non-humanity crept up on me and now I cannot let it go. I want to pick it up, turn it over in the light. Study it. Understand it. And embrace it. I can't say exactly how I came to this realisation. I felt my exclusion from the supposedly universal category of the 'human' most keenly in my alienated relationship to the social sciences: much of it didn't apply to me or Black women more generally because it was the work of white scholars describing their implicitly white world. Also, in my exhausting encounters in feminist activist and academic circles, I had to constantly remind my white 'sisters' that Black women were, in fact, women (...). (ibid.:19f)
"To believe I am non-human does not mean I believe in my own inferiority. Rather, it means I believe that the human is a construction of whiteness and any discussion about Black inferiority is a product of the futile struggle to be recognised as human." (ibid.:23)
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- Emejulu, A. (2022). Fugitive Feminism. Silver Press.
- photographs of Diana Ross by Harry Langdon via and via
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