Where Blackness Is Its Own Nation
“It’s a shock, whenever you leave the U.S., to realize how much other people understand that history matters”
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve always been surrounded by whiteness.
My mother’s parents integrated our Massachusetts suburb in the late 1940s, and her mother, my grandmother, grew up in 1910s Portsmouth, New Hampshire — a member of a Black community in what has been consistently one of the whitest states in the nation. My grandmother had a phrase for this existence: “The only raisin in the pound cake,” a culinary reference that only reinforces her status as a Black New Englander.
When I was younger, blackness was not a separate nation from these places. It was clearly defined in our living rooms and backyards, during the Black History Month celebrations, and Black student group meetings and Kwanzaa parties, and the NAACP meetings my grandparents held in their home — a whole calendar of activities centered on ensuring that Black communities had space to…
