Part II: Black for What?

|| the bitter//sweet project || chapter one: san//kofa|| part two- Black for What?||

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

   I cannot be comprehended

     except by my permission.”

                                                                 Lines 47-49

“Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” - Nikki Giovanni

The original title for this project was Blackness in Shades of Bittersweet. It came to me at a time when I was trying to articulate for myself the joy and pride I feel as a Black person and how these feelings exist in tandem with those of exhaustion, and in the darker moments, hopelessness. As I grappled with how best to articulate this sensation, a single word continued to emerge and reemerge to color my thoughts: bittersweet.

Bitter like kola nuts, neem, and Allafia Bitters. Like thrice-mended sweaters, dirt roads, and hand-me-downs. The bitter process of healing and the sacrifices that thread the fabric of love, inspiring moments of warmth and resourcefulness. Reminders that we often grow from discomfort.

And aching sweetness too. Sweet like palm wine and hugs tight enough to squeeze the breath from your lungs. Things to swell your stomach and heart like camel humps of joy; moon-drunk nights, towering tales, and belly laughs.

Both “bitter” and “sweet” are words that correctly shade my experience of Blackness, but together they create a new, paradoxical idea that is somehow more real than the singular dimensions their old forms represent. I fell in love with the binary and the balance of the word, reminding me how binaries create each other, representing connection rather than separation.

I felt this sentiment gorgeously echoed when reading Imani Perry’s “Black in Blues” book in February of 2026.

“Black people sing the blues…some things are terribly reliable, like suffering. But despite the scourge of injustice and the regularity of misery, we have learned to sing–and therefore live– in a full-throated way, without fear of an ugly mouth or crumpled face…This blue-Black living and doing is a bittersweet virtue, mastering in heartbreak, and raw laughter from the underside.” (Perry, Pg. 2)

I was around 11 years old when I first discovered my Blackness through the lens of whiteness, and many more still before I would even be able to begin to understand it. The interesting thing about identity is that it always exists in two capacities: the one you experience for yourself, and the one you must negotiate and communicate with the rest of the world.

I had lived years as a Black boy, raised beneath a scorching Ghanaian sun, my bare feet kicking up the red dust of unpaved roads and fingers sinking into the rich soil that sprouted neem and abrofukatie trees to make mud pies and grass soups. These were never things I needed to think about; I merely was. But when we moved to America in 2011, I first began to learn the social currency of Blackness, and the many ways it gets spent, extracted, used, and voided.

 I am not a person inherent to understanding people or group dynamics. As a child, I was very much the oblivious kid when it came to social situations. I was the too-loud whisperer, the turns-whole-head-around-to-stare-at-who-we’re-talking-about kid. Trust me, I’m not proud, and years of life and social situations have allowed me to curb these tendencies of mine, but they are still my base instincts.

Books were one of the ways that I got better at understanding human behavior outside of my own scope. In addition to this, I’ve spent the majority of my life in movement, from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, country to country, with each new place containing its own histories, cultures, unspoken rules, and humors that I often felt had to adapt to in order to communicate and relate with them.

During this time, I had a steady culture of personality and communication among my nuclear family unit, and as such, found comfort in a style of communication that only really worked with people who already knew me intimately. This framed my perspective around interpersonal relations with subjectivity.

Because I hold an English degree, this ultimately winds its way into a discussion about language and definition. The connotations attached to calling someone a “weirdo” in California, the first state my family moved to when we returned to America, are different from the connotations that would be in Atlanta, where I would move next, or even Colorado, where I live now.

As most people who obsess with language know, there is no static meaning to words; they morph and change and twist with time, contorting to fit the different societies that use them. I know that words hold meanings and legacies, but that these things warp with time and space.

This is especially true for a word like “Black” that is so broad and an area that is constantly inundated with new thoughts and efforts to adjust or clarify its meanings. In fact, through the discussions of my experience of Blackness, this is a piece that will be doing this very same thing.

As I age, it seems more and more that Blackness is merely another face of liminality, a penumbric realm of ontological being from which any identity may be wrested from its depths. There are many different types of Blackness, and we all choose which one we choose to bring forth from the ether of identity.

Every two to four years, I feel that I am challenged to rediscover myself in the new world. To understand how to translate the formless expanse of my being into ideas, ideas into words, and then to consider the legacies of these words and their transmutations: negro, negro, Black, African, American, African-American. These identifiers are a series of contracts and permissions that determine where my body will be allowed to go and how it’s treated once it arrives.

English is a minefield of etymology, built atop buried villages and exhumed gravesites. Its beauty carries the uneasy familiarity of finding an ancestor’s skeleton in a museum, or driving through a beautiful town and noticing that all the street names are Native American but none of the people are.

The more that I began to investigate language, scratching beyond the surface of words, the more I would come to recognize the faded letterings and peeling paint of something older and forgotten, and too often, much uglier, beneath. Having seen these artifacts, the grotesque corpse-pose of words like gypsy and Eskimo, the less comfortable it is to see these words being thrown around in conversation.

English is also the medium through which I understand and interpret myself to the world and vice versa. It is the language through which I engage with some of my most enduring passions, reading and writing, and the focus of my college degree. But I know it is not my home, and because of that, I must always be careful of the many traps and hazards laid throughout.

It can be difficult to tap into the power of Blackness without falling into its trappings. I engage with so much media that is dedicated to celebrating the experience of Blackness that I forget at times that it is a sphere of identity that wasn’t initially chosen by us, and exists as a denigrative social marker. To forget this in my love for Blackness is to forget that I am loving an active battlefield, that Black was a distinction given to us as the shadow of White, a negation to mark inferiority and bar access to the rights afforded to Whiteness. Black stories are told as shadows on a stark wall of history, carried in razed libraries and the haunting echo in children’s nursery rhymes.

  The World Wars are often discussed in consequence of the casualties and atrocities committed amongst the empires of North America and Eurasia, but not of the cost that these wars incurred in places like the Congo. We laud the strength and positions of figures like Winston Churchill for standing against figures like Hitler, while ignoring the active participation in similar systems that they engaged in places like India, Palestine, and Haiti. Nearly every accomplishment of this country has been gained with an asterisk of some avenue of Black death or labor that is overlooked for the “greater good.”

Black is also what we have made from it, though. It is hush puppies and Underground Railroads. It is Fela Kuti and Paul Robeson. It is hip-hop and voodoo. It is freedom schools and free lunch programs, spinning gold from straw, again and again, existing at the center while living in the margins. And it is this alchemic power, this culture of struggle and resilience, that gives Blackness its paradoxical flavor of being.

Its legacy is full of both pride and shame. There is a lot of discussion around the barrier of Blackness because it is inherently an extractive quality, possessed by Black people, but consumed and imitated en masse. It makes those on the inside of Blackness sensitive to who is allowed into our spaces and how they leverage their Blackness.

When I go to the movies, my mind is occupied with the ways in which Blackness is allowed victory or happiness. Where it is positioned in the narrative, and the conditions under which it is allowed to achieve success.

It is a well-known trope at this point that Black people are often the first people to die in classic horror films, but this is a smaller symptom of the way that Blackness is portrayed in media overall. Even when highlighting the realities faced by Black people, they can often veer into an infatuation with our pain rather than our perseverance.

In 2018, a movie called “The Green Book” was released, following an African-American musician by the name of Don Shirley. The movie’s title is a reference to a real artifact created in the 1930s that detailed the places that were safe and friendly for Black people to visit or stop at when traveling through America.

The movie follows Don and his Italian driver, Tony Lip, who is charged with escorting him across the country from one more mildly racist state to an extremely racist state, and is supposed to highlight how Black people and White people can work out our differences and get along. As you can probably tell, I am not the biggest fan of the movie, and that is merely based on my impression of the trailer; I’ve never even watched it.

I am typically reluctant to speak against anything I haven’t directly experienced because I don’t like to argue from a place of speculation, but I have also learned over the years to trust my instinct to avoid these American Black struggle movies that continue to be reproduced over and over.

This made me feel very vindicated when I read Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “My Favorite Thing About Don Shirley” in his book of essays, “A Little Devil in America”. In it, he shares many of these same feelings about the movie, most notably for how the actual talents and achievements of Don Shirley, and the monumental achievement itself of The Green Book, play as footnotes in this larger tale of a White man learning that he can respect a dignified Black man.

What this highlights is that there is not only a difficulty in getting Black stories told, but also in getting them told from a lens that honors what we hold sacred about our stories.

That is why there is a certain voice to Black media that dances along this delicate blend of success and a little something more that complicates it; success enough to leave the theater with hope, but with the grounding to know that the story does not end there.

On February 15th of 2024, actor, rapper Vince Staples released the first season of his pseudo self-biographic comedy show “The Vince Staples Show.” Similar to Donald Glover’s Hulu series “Atlanta,” it utilizes a blend of satire and dry humor, along with a dash of absurdism, to examine different realities of Black life.

I have been a fan of Vince Staples’ music since I was introduced to his song “Norf Norf” by my college roommate during my freshman year at Howard University. Back then, I loved his nasally Cali accent and breathless energy that he brought to tracks, which over time has developed into a style more focused on laid-back flows and a refinement of his rapping ability.

As I started to come across his interviews, I started to become a bigger fan of his personality than I was of his music. He has such an honest and unapologetic way of speaking, along with an impeccable sense of comedic timing, that I found myself just as excited when I came across a new interview of his as I would be about an album release.

  When he first announced that he would be releasing a comedy show, I was over the moon, and I quickly burned through the five 20-minute episodes when they dropped. Across various interviews, Vince Staples talks about how difficult it was to get even these 5 episodes greenlit, saying it was a process that took roughly eight years to work out, and how the success of these episodes would play a large role in their approving a budget for the show’s continuation.

With the show being partly autobiographical, we see scenes that highlight these dynamics, like in the second episode titled “Black Business,” where he explores the stigma that his career as a rapper carries when he is in professional or corporate settings.

Episode 3 is titled “Brown Family,” and it follows Vince Staples as he attends a family reunion. The entire episode is split between two perspectives: Vince Staples and his girlfriend, Deja, who both have individual adventures.

Deja is dragged along by Vince’s mother, bouncing around the family function as backup in her war against another auntie, Paulette, who created a separate group chat without her and brought a second platter of mac-and-cheese.

At the same time, we see Vince Staples struggle to relate to his family with his changed status as a successful artist and celebrity, with different family members asking him for money, or pretending they are much closer than they are.

 It is one of my favorite episodes of the show because it highlights the chaos of Black family reunions, affairs that are both absolute joys and pounding headaches all at once. It showcases the messy work of love, of large families with deep histories and disparate personalities, creating space for each other.

At the end of the episode, once tensions over the mac-and-cheese have finally boiled over and honest remarks (and some hands) start to fly back and forth, one of the old men shakes his head and throws up his hands, exclaiming, “I just don’t understand. Why are we Black?!”

It is at once a light, comical punchline and a deep ontological question, calling to the long history of what being Black has meant for us, and to the chaos that those circumstances often cultivate. However, the question is also one of love. It is an acceptance of meeting family where they are to get to where they need to be: an admonition and celebration all at once.

In an interview he did to promote the release of this show, Vince Staples discusses this scene and mentions how he believes it is a question that every Black person has asked themselves at one point in their lives, and I agree.

To know oneself as Black is to know Whiteness, and to know the privileges and realities that divide these two states of being in the world, one would inevitably ask, “Why am I this?” And the answer to that question determines what your Blackness will mean for you going forward. How you treat it, and how you will allow the world to treat it.

Some find Black to be an inclusive term that links the unique experience of people of color across the diaspora, and others find it to be a term that waters down their individuality. If you meet an older African-American person, you might discover that there are many who object and even find offense in being called Black. These are typically people who lived through the Black power movement of the 60’s and 70’s and remember a time before there was such a strong artistic push to redefine that term from a negative into a positive.

In Assata Shakur’s autobiography, she details what it was like growing up as a young Black girl in the 1950s, saying, “Black made any insult worse…in fact, when I was growing up, being called ‘Black’ period was grounds for fighting.”(Shakur, pg. 30).

Blackness was not made to be hospitable, inherently an arid space of nonbeing.

Returning to the words of Imani Perry, on this subject, she meditates, “The truth is this: Black, as such, began ignobly– through conquering eyes. Writing that makes me wince because I hold my Black tightly, proudly even.” (Perry, pg. 21)

This pride she feels in Blackness is one I share, as is the constant struggle with its history.

Blackness is a semi-permeable membrane– a prison to some and a vacation home to others. Porous and stratified.

 It is impossible to think of Blackness through a single lens, just as it is impossible to understand the experience of Blackness through a single perspective. Blackness is mercurial, and the experience of all the diaspora. It is greater than I could hope to encapsulate and translate in the short bounds of these essays, or of my singular lifespan. It includes more people than I could think to consider, and more even than might consider themselves, for self-rejection too, is an aspect of the Black experience. Blackness is a context I live within, and a history I am connected to: a recurring prophecy.

Memory is a communal act, and the purpose of this project is to interact with how my Blackness fits into this current iteration of the world.

Blackness is a dark cave that we were shut within to feed the nascent gods of capitalism and colonization. In that darkness, we found new ways to see. Time is a type of magic, and with it, we’ve made Blackness much more than it was made to be. We learned alchemy, creating legacy from tragedy.

We remembered the seed and listened to its story. Learned to harden ourselves and hold space within us to nurture what comes next. The slow crawl upwards, burrowing through heat and pressure with the slow build of rootwork, piercing dirt and concrete to find a small pinprick of heavenly sunlight.

Pulling moisture from air like a thread through a needle’s eye, learning photosynthesis in breaths. Drawing in light and plucking out the colors of life out in deep pulls, getting its mess all over us– faces stained with the red passions of hibiscus and watermelon. Tongues chasing pulpy orange hope around our cheeks, teeth cracking open sunflower seeds to get at the yellow joy inside. We sowed green into the earth and reaped the blues it gave us, indigo spirituals and violet love songs. Black is no longer a tale of what we were given, but what we’ve made of it. We created a home here.

Citations

Abdurraqib, Hanif. A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance. Random House, 2022.Farrelly, Peter, director. Green Book. M2, 2019.Giovanni, Nikki. “Ego Tripping (There May Be a Reason Why).” Poets.Org, Academy of American Poets, 12 Dec. 2024, poets.org/poem/ego-tripping-there-may-be-reason-why.Perry, Imani. Black in Blues. HarperCollins, 2025.Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Zed Books, 2016.

Staples, Vince. The Vince Staples Show, Netflix, 2019.

Thanks for reading Aingkhu’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

[Originally posted March 1st, 2026]