The Illusion of Separation is Over
I do it for the people. I do it for the people who do it for me. I always have and I always will. The illusion of separation is over. Everything is everything. There is no more “I” or “Me” without “We.” It can’t be. Nothing that I am was made in a vacuum. All my influences made me who I am. I am nothing without the ones who made me and raised me and gave me my game. Instead of hiding that fact out of shame like white supremacist colonialist capitalist thinking would have us do, I celebrate it. I am because you are. The meaning of that is “ubuntu” and it comes from Africa. Ideas of humanity and interdependence seem to be one of the few things the western world doesn’t steal from other cultures and repackage as their own. For the western world to admit to their influences would mean giving credit to all the cultures and people they’ve raped, pillaged and stole from. It would mean returning all the cultural artifacts that are kept in museums or hidden from public view. It would mean a very deep inventory of personal wrong doings and an accountability that few posses. It would mean widely acknowledging the beauty and power of the cultures and people who have been so severely devalued to make slavery, war and colonialism possible in the first place. This mindset infected everything and it even taught us to devalue ourselves and each other. It taught us to hate our own cultures and our own peoples and to want to be…
