Authentic Blackness

I am an African woman, technically bi-racial, who was adopted and raised in Washington, D.C. by a Black American family. As an adult, searching for myself, I returned to North Africa for several years, got into loads of trouble as an uneducated low rent film actress...but returned to the land of my citizenship (America) with a new outlook as a womanist, a freedom fighter for Sudan’s SPLA, and most notably, as a novelist and poet.

PROOF, of course...is the term that many Africans use to describe the “one true hair” that is the unique Crown of the black man and the black woman. Black Americans (who, to me, are Africans) refer to it as “Nappy Hair”..

And as the Cushitic-Hebrew folktale goes...”God put “the Proof” on the black man’s head as a marker that he is God’s son, the first man made in the image of God, and that the only way to defeat, conquer and destroy the black man...is to remove the Crown (the Proof) from his head. I was taught as a little girl in Sudan that no other race of humans were given this hair but Blacks; and that anytime you find our hair growing from the scalps of non-blacks, it is because those people have some African blood and are a bastardized extraction of us...we being the first race; the blacks, the Africans.

Taghut (Satan), I was taught, is in a never-ending quest to destroy and conquer Africa by killing the black man...which can only truly be done by removing “the Proof” from his head. For without it, the Cushitic-Hebrew folktale goes, he is not really a black man.

And it wasn’t until I finally analyzed the self-destruction and the erasure of blackness in Black Americans and in Black British, and the ways that their legendary self-hate is now imported to Africa itself, that I began to take this folktale from my childhood seriously.

America is a western society that completely fears, hates and seeks to erase black people and Africa. And I would say that most Black Americans (at least 70%)...also hate black people and Africa...but because they themselves are black, they don’t realize it. They will curse the photos of a lynched black man hanging from a tree as white people sit around having a picnic...but they will not give birth to that black man again. Instead, they will marry the lynch rope and produce children who look more like the lynchers at the picnic.

So many Black Americans have forgotten that when they look upon African people or look upon the very darkest black woman...what they are seeing is the living REPLICA of their ancestors...what’s left of them...in their natural state. And yet, they don’t make the connection. Instead of cherishing and protecting the ethos of their ancestors, many of us...both African and Black removed from Africa...assist the slave master/colonizer in destroying, lying upon and degrading this image. We claim that there's only one race...the human race....yet we hate the Blackness in human beings. We see blackness as a deformity...a curse that White women or White men can cure by breeding it out of us. We hate Africa itself. And in the United States...we are encouraged to breed it out. Everytime we watch B.E.T (a true nigger and coon channel) or countless films that highlight the beauty of Lightness and disallow representations of darkness...unless those representations are male and paired up with light or white images...everytime we see Mary J. Blige transmitting to little black girls that she can't possibly be cute unless she's got platinum blond hair...everytime we see a famous, successful black man choose a White woman or a Latina Woman (which on television and in the media is MOST of the time)...everytime we see Michael Jackson's Casper-white complexion or hear phone messages played on the news of him saying, "I hate my nigger hair!"...everytime we step out of our front doors in America...we are given the message that blackness is inferior and sub-human and that the answer is to hate and ERASE it. Worldwide NiggerStock Black Americans don't like the word "nigger", but it's crucial that we understand what a nigger really is. Whether he be in North Sudan, South Africa, Jamaica or the United States...a nigger's true goal is to erase himself and become the image of his master. Skin bleaching in Africa...marrying the lightest person we can find in America...denying that the Black race even exists...that only HUMANS do, as if Hitler or the Slave Master or the African dictator or any other Power on this planet ever gave a damn about anybody else being human. Seriously. A nigger's true goal is to erase himself and become the image of his master. They will call out the words, “Mother Africa”...but the lowest, most despised, hated person in Black America is the authentic Black woman. And the reason is...her WOMB makes them black, therefore, she is the enemy. And they make all manner of excuse, create any and every bald-faced lie against her...their own mother...in order to place the White man’s mother above her...as a savior; as a bridge out of blackness. Through the white man's mother, they lose the proof. They achieve the disconnection from black people's suffering...and BY DEFAULT...they join with White Supremacy, whether they be reddish-yellow, yellow, high yellow or vanilla-bean bi-racial...they become EXTRACTIONS of blackness that mainly reiterate "whiteness as normal--blackness is something you EVOLVE from" and bellie the slave master's contention that black people (Africans) are inferior and lightskinned people are an "improvement". As so many white mothers of biracial babies candidly point out during afternoon talk shows--an improvement on the "dark nappy" babies--the authentic blacks. Truly, in America, you begin to understand it. As Alice Walker wrote...“It only takes one lie to unravel the whole world”. And in America, that lie manifests itself in the racist admonition that...”one drop” of African blood defiles everything else in a body’s universe and marks any and everyone possessing that “one drop” as a black person. Tragically, Black Americans were forced through hundreds of years of conditioning to accept, believe and demand their slave master’s rule, to be ignorant of any African standards or rules, and as a result, they have been put on Automatic Self-Destruct by striving to produce children who look more like their slave master than like their ancestors, but at the same time, continuing to call themselves “black” by virtue of this insidious and ridiculous “one drop” bullshit. PROOF Magazine....is but one of my rebukes, as an African woman, wombbearer and mother...against the racist American notion that Black people should think so little of themselves that just anybody can BE them. And, naturally, this is an extremely painful position to take...because although I love all races of human beings, and although I have family members who are mixed, biracial and now even White...it is seen as “racist” to proclaim one’s blackness, to cherish it and to separate it from the ownership of those who are not black. But still, if my people are to survive...and to survive as themselves, it’s a position that must be taken. And taken without apology or hesitation. Many say that I, Kola Boof, am not “authentically” black, because I am the daughter of a white Arab Egyptian man. Of course, in Africa, because my skin is chocolate and I have “the Proof” of my ancestors growing from my scalp, I am considered a Black African woman, but to disgruntled Black Americans I say....fine. You can call me “inauthentic”, but I am still going to fight for the dignity and integrity of the Authentic Black people...and I will never promote the evil erasure of black people by claiming that Lenny Kravitz is a black man or that Vin Diesel is just as black as Denzel Washington or that Mariah Carey is black or that Halle Berry is just as black as Lauryn Hill. This is not only a lie to claim that Vin Diesel, Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey are black...but, historically, this has been a strategic tool in making authentic black people invisible and keeping them from having representation of their own group. By putting mixed and yellow people in their place, celebrating and elevating Mulatto images as “normal” and castigating Blackness as something to be “evolved” from..and in particular, this has been the way that the authentic Black woman’s image has been denigrated, disallowed and killed by her own black children in the west...by pretending that Lena Horne is the mother of the Black Americans, when the truth is...Esther Rolle and Cicely Tyson are what the mothers of the Black Ameicans actually looked like. The Black Americans being the children of the West and Central African Kingdoms. If you watch this white supremacist minstrel network, BET (aka "the mulatto follies"), if you attend a dinner at the NAACP, if you carefully analyze the majority of women presenters at “The Soul Train Awards” (where child molesters are given Life Achievement Prizes..provided their victims are little black girls that no one protects or gives a shit about in our community, just like back in Africa), or if you watch the majority of films produced and directed by Black Filmmakers...you will notice that the WOMB of Black people...the authentic Black woman; authentic meaning the darkest, the one possessing the Crown (“the Proof”), the one with Nilotic, Ethnic or Negroid features..is almost always disallowed. You find yourself looking at gorgeous African-looking men like Michael Jordan, Morris Chestnut, Kanye West, Djimon Hounsou...and you wonder...where in the hell did these beautiful authentic black men come from? Because, you see...the “mother image” that it took to create these chocolate royal looking men is never allowed to be shown...unless she’s presented as an old woman. But you will never see the 19 year old deep chocolate beauty that produced these men. It will not be celebrated.