Positionality Statement: Take Space
Another world is possible.
“We’ve come from there… from the other world.”-Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
I identify as a Jamaican-American from Oakland, California, which is the unceded territory of the Ohlone—Chochenyo speaking—people. I speak and write only in English, which is a colonial language and limits who I can speak to, and what I can accurately speak about. I am conventionally able-bodied and cis-gender. I have been to more than 50 countries during my three decades of life. I am able to travel more easily because of my class, able-bodiedness and my American passport. My American accent and passport, upon presentation, can—at times—eclipse my Blackness in certain parts of the world. I have grown up with and retain some social capital. While my family nor I are rich, my social capital has endowed me with proximity to privilege. More than anything, being institutionally educated and having social capital has meant that I know how and where to access resources and can use elite language. My American privilege often causes me great concern, but allows for my Jamaican identity to be mostly symbolic and uninterrupted by the geopolitics of power that restrict the mobility of those who come from what we inaccurately call the “global south.” Although I’ve mostly lived in cities, growing up I had many positive nature experiences including in my grandma’s yard in Spanish Town, Jamaica.
What I connect to more than my American citizenship, is Blackness. I am deeply connected to a Black diasporic identity, which is not beholden to one country or a monolithic culture. I encounter variations of Blackness and the influence of Black culture most everywhere I go. Blackness is not a specific geography, although it is inherently geographic. Blackness does not belong to a specific nation-state, though it is often seen as being inherently American. For some it is a global, political identity and collective consciousness. For others it is a lens through which to understand shared conditions and state-led / state-sanctioned subordination. Blackness results from past and continual displacement, as well as resilience and resistance-innovation. Blackness is adaptability, it is evolution. Blackness is humanness, because first and always we are human. Reclaimed Black identity is an evolutionary response to colonialism, it is a refusal to be defined by borders that were not drawn by us. The saying goes, “we did not cross your borders, your borders crossed us.” I understand Blackness as a way to articulate complexities and relations to power that may be difficult to articulate in daily life.
As my understanding of my identity continues to develop, I’ve now begun to situate my Blackness more directly in spaces of radical geography, environmental analysis, queerness and a politics of ‘de-‘ : decolonization, decentralization, and decommodification. Even as a contested concept, I understand decolonization as necessarily including decentralization and decommodification. The centralization of power and control to certain geographies was a colonial strategy, which has extended itself into cultural and environmental imperialism. When culture and resources are centralized and monopolized with the intention to create as much profit as possible, they become commodified. This is extractive to the groups from which the resources come, because their home is now seen as a commodity. This ignores the interdependent relationships we have with where we live. This has, in many ways, been the case with mainstream Black culture and feminism.
The centralization and monopoly of Blackness as quintessentially American reinforces American imperialism, of which patriarchy and capitalism are integral. It has made it seem like Blackness and racism are only situated in the USA. As if Blackness is divorced from the global forces that perpetuate racism and the European histories / geographies that produced it. Similarly, a feminism that is centered in the U.S. and Europe, amplifying the voices of mainly White women, is hardly a feminism at all. The feminism I’ve come to know will not be centralized and Western, it will be globally networked and from the soils of countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
I believe that decolonization must come with the decentralization and decommodification of Blackness, feminism, and environmentalism. So long as there is capitalism, there will be racism, patriarchy and the concentration of abundance controlled by a select few. Capitalism is a model based in extraction that thrives because of the power dynamics produced through racism and classism. It needs imperialism to continue changing. Like cancer, when our bodies try to rid itself of this disease—capitalism transforms by finding new ways to embed itself into our lives so that we cannot tell that it is killing us. Some of us are dying more slowly, but we are all dying. Imperialism works like arteries carrying this disease to ever more remote places. We must be clear and careful not to support any extensions of imperialism that claim to be authentic or universal. Environmental equity and human dignity is about nuance and specificity. We must be clear and careful to state our position, privilege and pronouns: Black cis-womyn human, holder of American citizenship, and responding to she/her/we.
As I seek out alternative spaces of belonging and pathways to a co-collaborative future, I am acutely aware that inclusion is not enough—we need co-creation. As I continued to search for the other world, I realized that some of us—those of us deemed ‘other’—are the other world. In my search for justice, equity, sustainability, and healing spaces, I witness new frontiers being created and impossibilities being mapped. I recognize that one of the new frontiers for ‘Blackness’ is Europe (really an old frontier depending on how one understands history). I recognize that Black youth on the continent of Africa are creating impossibilities in their countries, where previously they were told there are none. I recognize that womyn and non-binary people are the architects of solutions for climate crises and environmental violence. I recognize that certain geographies are not peripheries, rather calling them that comes from a specific colonial ideology. This ideology is continually reinforced through knowledge production and historically imposed by those claiming to be the majority, when in reality they are the global minority. We are the global majority. Claims to objectivity are false, no one is neutral. We need new language.
A critical part of decolonization is recognizing that, as Canadian Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick says, these geographies are “ongoing and innovative spatial practices that have always occurred, not on the margins, but right in the middle of our historically present landscape.” In other words, decolonization is recognizing that we are already here and have been. Recognizing that we have been and are producers of knowledge. We are the extensions of our ancestors, made up of their ashes and spirits, and they were uncolonial. The cosmos are not colonial, they just are.
I’ve been considering uncolonization rather than decolonization. The reason I prefer to use uncolonial as opposed to decolonial is because I do not believe we can, or need to try to reverse colonialism. The Latin prefix ‘de-’ connotes reversal. We cannot and are not to reverse colonization, rather we need to undo it from our bodies. We must shed the layers of colonization from our mind. We must deconstruct institutions with colonial foundations. Reminding ourselves of the uncoloniality of our ancestors. The indigenous and first nations peoples around the globe and those who populated the ancient civilizations on the continent of Africa, were uncolonized. Uncoloniality starts from indigeneity.
We have the opportunity for Blackness, feminism and environmentalism to work towards liberation. As governments attempt to limit women and nonbinary people’s rights to our bodies, climate change is disproportionately affecting womyn and people of the global majority. Now more than ever we must realize there is no separate survival. And if we are to survive, we have to fully embrace uncoloniality, decentralized ideologies and decommodified culture.
How I identify is entangled with all of the work I do, and various mediums it takes. My privileges and subjectivities are threaded through how I show up in the world. My writing and witnessing are from the myriad and complex positions that I occupy, as well as my values. Rather than obscuring complexity, I aim to take space and make space for it. To be silent about the realities of my position is a disservice to the work. It is a disservice to the research and resistance that will eventually lead to liberation. How I’ve chosen to live my life is an attempt to redistribute privilege, resources, and space. Having space to just be is a form of freedom. Taking space is, as Adrienne Maree Brown says, like “tiny reparations we give to ourselves.” Let’s get free together and take space.
Additional Notes on My Values:
The goal is to decolonize and decentralize. Centralization is foundational to colonialism and White supremacy. Using tools like surveillance (Foucault’s Panoptican, if you will) and the globalization of economics (World Trade Organization agreements, if you will) to further hegemony and Western geographic dominance. Liberation will be uncolonized and truly networked through localized communities and sustainable ecosystems. In other words, let’s build some new shit not confined to the structures we have now.
Racism is a form of social control necessitated by capitalism. Environmental and other forms of racism thrive because we think we are not like them, and we are just glad the problems are not in our immediate proximity. Racism is an issue of human empathy; the greatest example of false consciousness is that we don’t think we are each other. And because of this grave misunderstanding, we are now destroying ourselves. See, if we are each other, then we wouldn’t want ourselves to suffer.
Charity is not a substitute for justice. When thinking about climate change and racial equity we cannot let perpetrators off the hook because they participate in philanthropy or charitable development. In fact, philanthropy exists because of systemic inequity. It is a fundamental imbalance of resources, wealth, and power. Philanthropy needs structural inequality to exist. If we want true justice and radical change, we have to work beyond philanthropy and charity.
I often overstate my Jamaican identity as an attempt to reframe theoretical assumptions about (my) Black Americanness. It has been the case that Caribbean scholars, and particularly women, are subsumed into the broader category of Black American scholarship. Women like Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, Barbara Christian. While it is known that they are Caribbean, often their work is situated in Black American Thought without fully acknowledging how their nuance and positions are heavily produced from their Caribbean identity. As Barbara Christian once wrote: “Periphery too is a word I heard throughout my childhood, for if anything was seen as being at the periphery, it was those small islands which had neither land mass nor military power.”
Progressive spaces have largely forgotten about or ignore working class struggles. In these spaces, we have sometimes set aside the stifling nature of class (particularly poverty) in order to over-extend the power of race. We use elite language and jargon peppered with words like: oppression, marginalization, resistance, and resilience. I am guilty of this; I am still learning how to decolonize my language. English is inherently limiting because it is a colonial language, I only know colonial languages. Progressive spaces often do not practice a class analysis that is central to anti-capitalism, collective power, and liberation. Because of how and where I work, I am often with others who have also developed social capital and access to resources even if they are cash-poor and lacking wealth. Our work is not comprehensive if we do not work along side and along with all people who are the most financially marginalized.
Quoted References
Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 2017: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 2006: University of Minnesota Press.
Adrienne Maree Brown, PGM One Summit keynote: May 9, 2019.
First published June 3, 2019 (most recently updated April 2024)