Not Your Version of Black

I was eleven when I learned that even a voice could flinch.

I had just been to my first concert—a packed arena where the Fugees shared the stage with Busta Rhymes and Cypress Hill, bass pulsing through the floorboards, sweat and sound thick in the air. Lauryn Hill’s voice had stayed with me, ringing through my chest long after the lights went down.

The next day, I stood in a dim kitchen with linoleum floors that smelled faintly of Dettol and stew peas. I had pulled out a CD from my backpack—a Fugees album, battered at the edges, the cover showing Lauryn’s gaze full of something I didn’t yet have words for. I pressed play. The bass kicked low, deep as a heartbeat pressed against the walls of the room. Lauryn’s voice came in—warm, sharp, untamed—spilling from the small kitchen radio, still carrying the charge of the night before.

And then it happened. My mom, halfway through pouring herself a drink, stopped mid-motion. Her voice came out thin, tightened at the edges like a cinched belt.
"Dem sinting deh a music?Mi cyaah believe yuh a mek dem noise pass yuh ears. Back inna mi days we did have real tune.Yuh cyaah find something good fi play?"

Her words were about the music. But I heard the tremor underneath. I felt it in the back of my throat: a deep, taut fear—fear of what was too Black, or the wrong kind of Black. Fear of being seen through the eyes of those who had taught us to fear ourselves. I didn’t understand it yet. But my body did. My stomach knotted. My mouth went dry. A memory encoded itself that day: there is a way to be Black that is acceptable. And a way that will cost you.

It was not the last time I would hear that tremor. When I fell in love with the raw wail of Jimi Hendrix, the aching howl of Slash’s guitar bending space and time, the shame came again. Why you listening to that white music? When I played Tupac loud enough to crack the windows, the same voice softened—now that’s real.

We have all inherited versions of this moment.

Maybe it wasn’t music. Maybe it was the girl with the shaved head and the septum ring. Maybe it was the boy whose pants hung too low. Maybe it was the cousin who spoke with too much Queens in her voice, or not enough. Maybe it was your own reflection in the mirror when your edges didn’t lay flat, or when your dark skin flashed too loud against a pale backdrop.

Colonial conditioning did not only teach the world to fear Blackness. It taught Blackness to fear itself.

Divide them. Rank them. Make one form acceptable, another dangerous. Separate the respectable from the radical. The intellectual from the sensual. The spiritual from the secular. The African from the Diasporic. The old from the new. Purity of Blackness? A myth. Purity was never the goal. Control was.

It’s an old game. The divide and conquer of the soul.

And it works best when we mistake it for our own taste.

How many times have you heard it? She’s doing too much. He thinks he’s white. That’s not real music. That’s not real culture. They’re embarrassing us. We need to be taken seriously. We need to represent.

Represent what?

The unspoken answer: Not yourself. Represent the version of Blackness they’ve deemed safe to consume. The version they’ve taught us to police in each other before they have to.

This is the first violence. The violence of invisibility. Of hierarchy. Of silencing. And too often, it happens before a single white gaze is even present in the room.

⸻

I can still smell it. Burnt hair and Just for Me relaxer, sharp as vinegar and wire, clinging to my skin like shame. The sting rose behind my ears before the heat hit my scalp. Every two months, my mother smoothed the chemical into my roots while the women in the kitchen traded their invisible currency: approval. She’s gonna look good for school this year, my aunt said. Not like those little girls runnin’ around with their heads all crazy.

I remember wondering—what was crazy? What was good? Why did it seem that the closer my hair lay to someone else’s idea of beauty, the more pride my family felt in me?

It was my first initiation into the silent politics of Black presentation. One of many.

But who told us what was real?

Who told us which sounds, movements, tongues, bodies, hairstyles, politics, and prayers were allowed inside the invisible border of acceptability—and which were to be kept out?

The answer is older than we want to admit.

Colonialism didn’t just shackle Black bodies. It fragmented Black consciousness. It taught us to rank one another against standards we did not create. To fear the full spectrum of our own expression. To shrink our joy into boxes that would not offend the eyes of power.

You can hear this inheritance in the subtle shifts of voice at family dinners. You can feel it in the glances exchanged when a queer cousin enters the room fully embodied. You can smell it in the breath of elders who still believe that louder means lesser. You can taste it in the language we use to diminish each other:

"She’s too dark."
"He talks too white."
"That’s not African enough."
"That’s too African."
"She’s too bougie."
"He’s too street."
"That’s not spiritual."
"That’s ghetto."
"That’s soft."
"That’s not Black."

Not Black?

Tell that to the bones that survived the Middle Passage.
Tell that to the fingers braiding memory into hair.
Tell that to the tongues stitching Yoruba to Patois to Creole to English.
Tell that to the beat in every drum that was outlawed and resurrected.
Tell that to the child born today with a spirit too big for your box.

Not Black? You insult the ancestors who dared to remember themselves in every form.

The truth is this:

We will not survive what is coming by shrinking each other.

Not when the world is already trying to shrink us. Not when every spiritual tradition from the mother continent teaches us that the tribe survives through multiplicity. That spirit takes many forms, not one. That no drum beats alone.

This first part of the work—before we can talk about celebration, before we can talk about unity—is unlearning what we were taught to see. To see the wildness as a gift. The range as a strength. The difference as a sign that the collective body is alive.

And yes: this means facing the voice in your own head. The one that flinches.

The one that hears a brother speaking Yoruba and thinks that’s too much.
The one that sees a sister in couture chains and thinks that’s not elegant.
The one that hears a guitarist named Slash bend a note like a wail and thinks that’s not us.
The one that watches Erykah Badu spin incense and sex into scripture and thinks that’s not sacred.

That voice is not your own. It is an inheritance of survival. It is not your nature. It is your conditioning.

And the first act of spiritual rebellion is this: notice the flinch—and refuse it.

But it is not our fault. We have been conditioned to police each other before anyone else gets the chance. This is how survival was sold to us: If you blend in, if you behave, if you do not embarrass the race, you might live.

Respectability was a currency. Survival was its price. And the interest is still accruing.

This is why we flinch—at the piercings, at the locs, at the split tongues of our diaspora.
This is why we correct each other—in the name of love, in the name of shame.
This is why we dismiss Solange as too strange, James Baldwin as too radical, Barack Obama as too safe, Grace Jones as too other. We’ve been taught that there is one “right” way to be Black—and it is always someone else’s version.

I have done it. You have done it. We have all sat in the invisible jury box, handing out verdicts to our own. Because the conditioning is deep. Because the fear is real. Because survival once demanded it.

I’ve looked at another Black woman in her fullness—adorned, unapologetic—and felt the gut-twist of conditioned judgment. I’ve looked at another Black man moving in softness and questioned his strength. I’ve heard tongues I didn’t understand and mistaken my ignorance for their inferiority. I have been colonized in ways I am still unlearning.

And here is the spiritual violence: Every time we shrink each other, we fracture the whole. We deny Spirit’s infinite creativity. We spit in the face of the Divine, who dared to make us so various, so wild, so unrepeatable.

In African spiritual traditions, community is not built through sameness. It is built through the honoring of difference. Each tribe, each face, each drum, each dance, each tongue contributes to the collective soul. To flatten the range of Blackness is not just a political act—it is a spiritual betrayal.

Not your version of Black.

This is the invocation now. This is the spell-breaking. I will not be your version.
You will not be mine.

And if we are to survive—if we are to become more than the sum of our wounds—we must remember how to honor what we were taught to erase.

But first—we must unlearn what we were taught to see.

The sting of that relaxer.
The sharp intake of breath in a family kitchen.
The voice in your head that flinches.

Name it. Face it. Refuse it.

Because the next part of the work is coming.
And it will demand more of you than you have ever given.

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There are things they could not kill.

They tried.
They tried with whips and chains. With Christian hymns sung over stolen bones. With plantation laws and hair laws and language bans and paper bag tests. With Eurocentric curriculums. With “professional” dress codes. With marketing campaigns. With bullets.

But they could not kill the pulse.

They could not kill the way a Black body bends—not to break, but to bend space.
They could not kill the wail in a blues riff.
They could not kill the forbidden stories whispered through generations disguised as song.
They could not kill the defiant geometry of braids, the mathematics of kente cloth, the forbidden languages hidden in our hands and hips and tongues.

And they could not kill our range.

Not the jazz musician who stacks sound on sound until the air itself vibrates.
Not the metal guitarist in locs and leather.
Not the androgynous model gliding down a Paris runway.
Not the griot with a calabash drum on a Brooklyn stoop.
Not the ballroom queen voguing angles into portals.
Not the auntie humming gospel under her breath in a board meeting.
Not the priestess who moves between pole and pulpit and prayer.
Not the street dancer spinning physics into poetry on cracked concrete.
Not the scholar decoding Ifá in a Western academy built to erase it.

We have never been one thing.
We were never meant to be.

Orisha do not walk one path. They shape-shift. They cross-dress. They love in every direction. They rage and seduce and teach and destroy and create again. A single body contains multitudes. A single lineage contains contradictions. A single beat holds past and future at once.

To flatten us was the colonizer’s project.
To honor our range is the ancestor’s command.

And so the versions of us they could not kill became the versions of us that live in you.

Even if you were taught to fear them.
Even if you judged them once.
Even if you tried to exile them from your mirror.

That part of you that longs to move differently to the music?
That is your ancestor remembering freedom.
That kink in your hair you tried to tame?
That is the texture of memory.
That tongue you held back to sound more “neutral”?
That is your lineage daring to speak.

We are the living proof that Spirit cannot be colonized.

Look around.
A 19-year-old poet conjuring futures with her mouth.
A South African designer draping memory into cloth.
A bass player bending low-end theory into the sacred.
A trans choreographer inventing new geometries of prayer.
A seven-year-old girl twisting rhythms in her hips the ancestors remember.
A griot in Ghana teaching children to hear the world behind the world.

Every version is needed.
Every version is a drum in the circle.
Every version is the song they could not silence.

This is why we celebrate. Not because the battle is over, but because the dance is the medicine that makes us whole.

To deny another Black body its version is to spit in the face of the Divine.
To celebrate that range is to remember who we are.

And if we are to move forward—not merely survive, but evolve—we must begin here:

By seeing what lived through fire.
By honoring what was carried through the blood.
By loving the versions of us they could not kill.

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The hardest work begins in the mirror.

Not the one you check before leaving the house. The deeper mirror. The one that reflects not your features, but your conditioning.

The one where your mother’s voice still lingers behind your eyes.
The one where your teacher’s gaze still edits your speech.
The one where your grandmother’s shame about skin tone still curls in the corners.
The one where the algorithms of empire still program your preferences.

It is in that mirror that we learn which versions of Blackness we were taught to love.
And which ones we were taught to flinch from.

This is the part no one wants to do.
It is easier to chant “Black joy” on Instagram.
Easier to buy the t-shirt.
Easier to post the curated celebration of “diversity”—without touching the wounds beneath.

But real celebration is impossible without the mirror work.
Because what you cannot love in yourself, you will attack in others.
And what you cannot embrace in another, you will exile in yourself.

Ask yourself:

When a Black man moves in softness—does your body relax, or recoil?
When a Black woman commands the room without apology—do you cheer, or compete?
When a queer Black elder walks in full regalia—do you smile, or shrink?
When a dark-skinned girl with coils untouched by heat walks past—do you stare, or see?
When a Black artist bends genre beyond recognition—do you open, or dismiss?

The flinch is the signal.
Follow it.
Name it.
Deny it.
Because every flinch is a thread back to the colonizer’s project.

None of us are immune.

I have had to ask myself:

Why did I feel a flicker of discomfort watching a Black man weep in public?
Why did I dismiss certain hairstyles as “too much”?
Why did I once crave the validation of white taste before trusting my own?
Why did I police the volume of my voice in certain spaces?
Why did I envy the freedom of those who wore their fullness without shame?

This is the mirror work.
And it is not about guilt.
It is about reclamation.

Because when you refuse to do it, you remain an agent of the very system you claim to resist.

You become the parent silencing the child’s joy.
You become the gatekeeper of the colonizer’s standards.
You become the Uncle Tom, selling out your own to survive.
You become the enforcer of someone else’s idea of Black.

But when you do the mirror work—when you name the flinch, face the root, and deny it—you become something else.

You become a space where other Black bodies can breathe.
You become a vessel for ancestral memory to move through, unshamed.
You become a portal through which new versions can emerge.
You become a mirror that reflects truth, not distortion.

And that is sacred work.

Because every healed mirror multiplies.

Your unlearning becomes your child’s inheritance.
Your acceptance becomes your community’s expansion.
Your refusal to shrink becomes someone else’s permission to grow.

This is how we rebuild.
Not just with celebration—but with eyes that can finally see.
Not just with words—but with bodies that no longer betray our own.
Not just with performance—but with presence.

And so I ask you:
Before you post the hashtag.
Before you praise the next icon.
Before you critique the next sibling.

Look in the mirror.
Do the work.
Become the space.
Reflect the range.

Because a liberated Black mirror does not distort.
It illuminates.

⸻

The work does not end in the mirror.
It begins there.

The mirror work clears the sight.
But what we build next is a living vow.

A new vow to ourselves.
A new vow to each other.
A new vow to the ancestors watching and the generations yet to be born.

Because expression without responsibility becomes spectacle.
And celebration without reverence becomes mimicry.
And “representation” without spiritual grounding becomes another costume for the world to parade.

So let us name the vow clearly:

We will honor the fullness of who we are.
Without hierarchy. Without shame. Without false binaries of real and not real.
Without gatekeeping. Without needing to shrink one version to make room for another.
We will honor the bluesman and the ballroom queen. The high priestess and the hood poet. The elder in white and the youth in locs and leather. The scholar and the shapeshifter.
All are needed.
All are sacred.

We will refuse the flinch.
We will notice it. Name it. Deny it.
We will become the generation that stops passing the flinch forward.

We will protect the space for the many forms we carry.
When we see another Black body moving in fullness, we will not police it.
We will not diminish it to soothe our own conditioning.
We will become defenders of expansiveness — not just consumers of it.

We will do the mirror work continuously.
Because the conditioning is layered.
Because the wounds run deep.
Because the mirror is a living surface — it must be tended.

And we will remember the blood.
We are not inventing expression.
We are reclaiming what was flattened.
We are remembering what our ancestors embodied before the ships, before the chains, before the screens.

This is sacred work, not performance.
This is spiritual work, not branding.
This is ancestral fidelity, not aesthetic trend.
This is evolution, not assimilation.

And when we move from this vow—when we hold this charge—we become dangerous in the most holy way.
Because a people in full expression cannot be contained.
A people in full expression cannot be bought.
A people in full expression cannot be erased.

A people in full expression become a portal for the Divine to move.

So this is the new covenant:

Honor the fullness.
Refuse the flinch.
Protect the space.
Do the mirror work.
Remember the blood.

And let every room you enter—every art you birth, every word you speak, every body you witness—know it.

Not your version of Black.
Not mine either.
The living expression of Spirit in motion.

And so it is.
And so we begin.

One love, ESS xo