Flower Crown Magazine: Issue 2

day interactions. Some of that might be by supporting
organizations doing incredible work, but it might also just
be affirming people whose humanity is regularly denied.
When and why did you decide to make your blog?
I think I made it my sophomore year of college on a
whim. Honestly, I thought it was going to be a fashion
blog…which is a bit funny in retrospect. I really did start
it with the intention of sharing photos of Afro-diasporic
people in dope clothing. And while that’s still part of what
I regularly (re)post, it definitely shifted pretty quickly to
encompass a lot more.
How do you navigate through patriarchy and White
supremacy in academia?
Not easily! Sometimes I get upset with myself because
I didn’t take care of myself well at school, but then I
remind myself that the institution itself was built with the
understanding that bodies like mine are not human. I
made it through because of my friends and community
(especially groups like the Women of Color Collective),
but it wasn’t easy. I felt like waking up every morning was
in and of itself a painful act of resistance. That is not a
sustainable way to live. My blog helped me remember
there is a world beyond my campus, but even that wasn’t
always enough. I found myself constantly having to
balance between keeping pain to myself for the sake of
my pride and unveiling my wounds to people who would
often dismiss them. I also got through it by reading Black
feminist authors. Everything I was going through, someone
had been through before. It helps to know you’re
not alone.
Many of us are bloggers and are in the position
to bring awareness to the recurring extra judiciary
killings in America, and the devaluing of Black life.
However, sometimes our attempts to raise awareness
can be counterproductive by inadvertently eliciting
the apathetic consumption of Black death. How
can we raise awareness to the devaluing of Black life
without advertising the consumption of Black death?
I think we have to recognize that sometimes that’s not
even within our control, but we can also try to be strategic
about what our goals are. Do we just want people to
know that Black folks are being slaughtered? Or is there
something else we are asking for? And I think a lot of
times we don’t know what that “something else” is…and
that’s not necessarily wrong (because we are allowed to
want our pain seen, we are human). But it does make it
harder to rally public awareness in a constructive way.
Before I write something that will involve invoking Black
death, I try to ask myself “to what end?” What do I want
the reader to come away feeling or doing? Sometimes
having a tangible goal like that can help mitigate the
feeling that we are just putting Black suffering on display
to be consumed.
My parents are both African immigrants, and I’m
very proudly the product of trans-continental love.
I’ve always sort of felt like an intruder in America,
because of my Blackness, and a stranger in South Africa
and Nigeria because of my western upbringing.
Do you have any advice for children of the Diaspora
on how to reason with this feeling of displacement?
Oh goodness. That’s my whole life—and it’s very much
a work in progress. I think about this all the time. I don’t
know that I have the answers, or that anyone does. What
I am trying to do right now is to reckon with how my diasporic
identity enables me access to things in this country
that African American people are sometimes barred
from. I know the lines are blurry, that Blackness is complicated,
that we are intertwined in complicated ways that
can’t exactly be mapped out perfectly. But the biggest
piece of advice I have for fellow diaspora kids is to not
feel like we have to rely on existing identity frameworks
to make sense of ourselves. It’s okay for your identity to
shift, for your knowledge of self and place and society to
influence you in different ways as you grow. But try to be
conscious of how your identity affects other people, how
you fit into a larger web. Don’t discount other people’s
pain in your rush to find a place for yourself.
Do you think of that “hashtag activism” is effective
in sparking and maintaining movements? Also, how
do you think social media has affected social consciousness
and activism?
You know, the discussion around that term really frustrates
me. Very few people who use hashtags and social
media as one of many tools think it is the be-all and endall
of activism. Of course it has its limits; so do protests
and rallies and boycotts. All activism has limits. Activism
has to be multi-pronged, and I see social media as one
of those many prongs. When you look at moments like
Michael Brown’s murder, it becomes really evident that
social media, Twitter in particular, served as this incredible
space for people to come together, strategize, keep others
informed, and ensure that this boy’s death did not go
unnoticed. That’s powerful. For a lot of people who have
been pushed out of newsrooms and traditional journalism,
social media is a way of talking back. We can speak
out—and we can do it in real time. Sure, social media can
also bring out people’s combative sides, but what organizing
space has ever been free of conflict?