Para-Meta Subjectivity: Post-Shock/Renewed Black Awakening

PARA-META SUBJECTIVITY: POST-SHOCK/RENEWED BLACK AWAKENING

By Kofi Forson

Essence of livelihood as a human person, or the tradition and origin of one's existence as para-exemplar begins with orientation on matters pertaining to identity, family dystopia, and culture, traditional and transnational. 

Once given into forms of spirituality, assuming the role of ghost, claiming the highest self or with parameters broadened towards the acceptance of God as guide and principal ruler, one's para-existence is channeled.

The ghost persona is deliverable when one lives beyond the means of the human equivalent. That is when the conscience is pulled beyond what it's capable of ascertaining. The body then reaches a limit. Life hereafter assumes an experiencing of the body afloat, hence the spirit manages all that is felt and sensed. 

Future assumption that one is alone in the world is void of any truth or reality, since, firstly, we are made of human flesh and blood through the union of two physical beings. Thus, the psychic and psychological references to the mother or father figure are examples of a fury of instinctual responses and reactions which determine prosperities for a fuller life, a quagmire which is reflected upon and adds to the complexities of living.

Our recognized gender identity prepares for the impressions and interpretations one makes during the life experience. These are the masculine and feminine prioritizations which determine what is felt, acted upon, imagined and rendered cancelable or embraceable.

Citing of a Trans or queer identity is with relevance to what is familiarized with the human subjectivity. Perhaps societal acceptance is not without rejection. Hyper-supposing a given speculation of self-origin.  

Who or what determines such a conclusion, rejection of one's gender at birth, transforming into a preferred gender?

Is the trouble with love; relentless power granted the human being as a sexual animal? 

Love as a demon renders the sex act hellish. More so, the human person's ability to imagine, further suppose the role of animal, rather lover, a human element which allows for absolute enhancement of the act becoming the dynamo that meets a measure of death.

The French interpretation of the orgasm as "little death". 

Our para-selves are relevant to the ordered physical human being only if one thinks beyond the physical rendering.

The human body as a physical specimen is susceptible to violence, that of a fallen world, but without determination there are psychical probabilities when a person is traumatized, an occasion when the para-subjectivity of oneself is under torture. The experience doesn't border physical violence, rather it is interpreted through examples of panic or psychic attacks, moments when the body and its mind break down from extreme stress.

Another example of para-subjectivity is para-sexuality. A transient experience when the body and its mind are overwhelmed and under the governance of a spirit or ghost. There's a mild suggestion of rape. Not an actual physical rape but the inability to resist as the mind is fixated on an unwanted sexual advance and the body sways and swerves to a sexual rhythm.

The psychical breakdown of the human mind and the effect it has on the body can be referenced to psychiatry. An informal interpretation would suggest chemistry, much as the biochemistry of an individual determines their ability to adjust to the environment, be it natural or disordered psychology, the concept of what is chemical is of a normalized human manifestation where one feels, emotes, releases endorphins, or becomes perplexed when under stress.

The prefix "para" therefore assumes an entity or spirit or ghost. The soul of the human body as it travels through lived human experiences and takes on a life of its own.

Points of reference are dictated in warrior personas and those who serve as essential and eternal gifts to human lives.

Blessed in the spiritual community is the realm of the Holy Spirit.

The abundance of humility it requires to absorb this realm and come to an understanding of forgiveness; most importantly allow this spirit to enter the body. A process which requires trips through darkness, hopefully resolved moments when the Holy Spirit enters the body, are all means of reclaiming the body in its non-physical, eternal self.

In keeping with the truth, we are not alone, is the work done to accept and respect order within the universe. This presents one with multiple interpretations of God.

That there is a God is a message that frees the human body from self-torture. To say, there is a power greater than me; I turn to this power at times of uncertainty, responds to one's humility and willingness to transport whatever trouble one feels to a superior entity.

Much as prayer and meditation helps with the balancing of call and response between the human person and the God reference, there are many forms of behavior that allow for such frequency, yoga for example, which recalls the idea of seeing beyond the physical self.

The behavior of being in the moment yet allowing the spirit to exist on another plain helps enhance the para-existence.

Endurance in the living process comes with an acquired experience. Knowing one's prowess or power of the chi isn't asserted as a power play. With regard for experience, it comes only in the living and not the imagined. We may exist in our minds but once we dare to put our beliefs to the test we are living beyond our human self.

Gaming is an example of the fantasy world being a blueprint for actual life battles.

This is where our meta-selves break with tradition and become full-fledged entities of absolute power.

Given one's imagination, much can be said for the athlete's confidence overcoming the experience of another. And yet experience begets confidence. Only difference being confidence is a natural drug.

The most courageous are those who know no limits to their power.

The manic as a depressive knows defeat. Both sides to this coin are necessary to acquire the power which makes one meta-sensed.

Many speak of absolute power usually with a weapon in hand. The operative metal object only stands to reveal the absolute fear one feels and thus merits possession of the weapon.

To reach the status of meta, one has to come from defeat, see into the beyond, know about the life damage endured, prepare for the trials and tribulations in reclaiming the self.

The transcendence, the mind being put to the test, reveals the original threat to the human body. The overcoming of this threat is victory only very few are able to experience.

The para-meta self therefore is an example of the baby leaving the womb. We experience this once. Resolve with which the para-meta human deals with trauma or professed defeat to level the forces of fear and triumph reveals notion of self-referencing the self as a mirror copy.  

The para-meta being then looks into that mirrored-self and sees a spiritual being beyond the very self.

This is the notion of para-meta: power granted thee doesn't belong to you.

In the face of absolute power, how does one promote free will and encourage a living process where one allows for that spiritual being beyond the very self to work in accord with our vulnerability and humility to bring about our exceptional self, a persona, ethic which is revolutionary in its imagined existence.

The cycle of work, rest, repeat is method for any life.

There are those who work portions of the cycle in extremes.

The manic spends time expressing mania. End result is downfall of depression.

The cycle is lived moments at a time.

The most exaggerated examples are that of years lived under extreme measures. Best way to interpret this is the Shakespearean three acts of a play, or the simplified "birth, work, death".

With utmost extreme measure of living or working for years, it results in another several to many years experiencing deathly means.

This is the body at a crash or burn out.

What this certifies is our post, post-post realms.

To live a traumatic experience and survive brings with it many years to a lifetime of continuous trauma.

The term what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is relative if and when, conclusively, it is made known what doesn't kill you also shocks you, which essentially becomes the post shock realm.

The post-shock realm places the individual in a form of existence whereby his conscience is under attack from the prior experiences of shock.

These are trending prospects for a lifetime undergoing moments when the mind is traceable back to points when the mind and body endured trauma.

PTSD of a veteran or soldier from war is a good example. A person having endured acts of violence perhaps physical or psychical whether it's in a prison setting or family household.

Best defined the mind at rest experiences forms of awareness. These are impressions given of one's sensitivity and vulnerability. Without defiance or a shield to protect, the sensitive mind undergoes extreme measures which may be dealt with at face value, meaning without help or protection.

Rawness of the human body experiencing trauma recalls moments of fear. Lived fear repeating itself, or an impression of fear being experienced for the first time.

Fear is the base root of every conscience. It is important to know what the body rejects in order to possess the ability to overcome it. In some cases, the mind and body are triggered not by an experience, more so, the culprit or person who is the cause of the experience.

Living in the post-shock realm one has to prioritize a safety net. Fear becomes intensified as paranoia. Shock from the experience permeates the conscience in a hot and cool mode creating a fog-like perception of the living experience.

Jungian or Freudian psychoanalysis is a form of self-mirroring when the patient or client can subject the mind and body to the lived experience of shock and as per guidance from a therapist, the probable notion of fighting back as a past-post cause enables clarity from the points of shock.

Micro aggression, psychical shock, experienced as stress and anxiety, forms a linear pattern to post-white shock.

The black mind central to its origin of thought and knowingness is predominantly triggered by a colonized history. Our post-colonial history symbolizes that constant bell ringing to remind us that our minds are subjected to triggers from a past shared history, slavery as a common reality, but also examples of displacement in our modern history.

Post-white shock commonly represents the black person's resistance from white influence. This form of revolt in the black person sharpens the cause of the shock felt from the prior lived history with white people. These moments of psychic shock are felt at any given point when the black person becomes overwhelmed due to a trigger from a white person.

In philosophical terms post-white shock is viewed as a narrative. More than just a trigger, it becomes a conditioned means for existing when the black person builds resistance to the original sins of slavery or acts of colonization of the black mind. In doing so the black person is engaging in meta-notion of looking defiantly at fear, managing rules for change.

Modernized black activism is a meta-stance.

The reshaping of the black mind as a hyper-verse recognizes the white construct of denial. The exact moment now where acts of self-delivery from reverberations due to centuries of violence, colonization and death must be engaged through self-education, work done at the university, or stages of personal growth.

The renewed black conscience is occurring at a time now of the Covid-19 pandemic. When a black female justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been voted into the nation's Supreme Court. A time when societal violence, along with the politicization of our conscience are forms of a post-post modernity defined by white nationalism/black revolt.

The pandemic is referential to all the elements of the para-meta existence and the shock of post trauma.

These are times of "death and birth, birth and death".

Our post-conscious minds are under torment of a post-post conscience.

We are living the examples of the selves we forecasted or hoped to be.

There's no looking back.

The time is now.

Black Dispiritedness: Glamorization of the Black Model/White-Colonization of the Black Mind

BLACK DISPIRITEDNESS: GLAMORIZATION OF THE BLACK MODEL/WHITE-COLONIZATION OF THE BLACK MIND

By Kofi Forson

In the upcoming February 2022 issue of British Vogue, photographer Rafael Pavorotti gathers a group of African models for the cover portrait.

The stark image of glamorous African women on the cover of British Vogue refrains from the normal acceleration of white beauty generated by the all-too familiar sight representing what is sold to the world as naturalness, or what essentially has been recognized through-out art history, cinema and yes, fashion, as to what the ultimate sense and characterization of beauty is:

tall and thin Caucasian woman with blond hair and blue eyes; be it she is curvaceous or brunette, her essence is in the skin's whiteness, pink formation; what the artist would highlight with the combination of titanium white and ocher.

Very important to note this past week the famed editor at large at Vogue Andre Leon Talley passed.

In a poem I wrote and later performed as a lead-in poem during the Great Weather for Media Ten Minute Feature, I made a request:

"Andre Leon Talley, pardon moi monsieur, introduce me to that country place of Von Herrs".

Andre Leon Talley, in the poem, is shown a regard for preeminence. The application of his knowing the appreciation for wealth and prosperity is heightened by my suggestion that he might know the Von Herrs; a name that would suggest affluence.

Once again the progress and ascension of a black person with an erudite manner must navigate a white-accelerated "scene".

Much the clever circumstance for Edward Enninful, British Vogue editor-in-chief, to allow for such a marking and detailing necessary for the furtherance of what must be recognized also as commercial beauty, and that is blackness and the African woman.

What is important here, more than just appreciation for black beauty, is the regard for Africanness and the female.

Perception here would be what is beauty in the African American woman and how has that been ushered into the world's conscience, and what is beauty in the African woman, with all the prejudices showed against the immigrant?

How then is this exceptional cover of British Vogue specifically curating an article on beauty, or does it become renowned in proclaiming outrightly what once was beautiful in its original form and has been historically canceled, can once again be claimed as beautiful, if not rendered eternal?

There's a contra-speculation that brings up the "elephant-in-the-room" concept of non-togetherness within the black diaspora.

Furthermore, it creates a supernova of complexities that highlights hatred, jealousy and absurdities in how we as black people interact or fail to render commonality within the black race.

States in America, more so neighborhoods, each has a representation of vernacular which differs from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Imagine the controversy of how people fight, disagree, communicate to "get along" or to protect the diversity of what makes black people unique.

Back to the assertion of black beauty, this British Vogue cover is a pronouncement not only of black beauty but a lesser regarded notion of how beauty is marketed to populations in Africa, which in essence calls to the Europeanization of the African woman; a post-colonial reality which pulls from the majesty of the Queen of England to the model Twiggy.

Black women as an image on the cover of British Vogue references the Afro-futurist movement, or the quiet call to Black awareness or "wokeness" in politics, culture and entertainment.

Remarkably, it is Enninful, a man with a Ghanaian heritage working as an editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who is seemingly in a perfect position to highlight beauty in the African woman.

Whereas the African American woman has graced the movie screen, cover of popular records and albums, theater stages, television, music videos and so much more, there is little conditioned knowledge of who the African woman is and what she looks like.

Certainly, actress Lupita Nyong'o has created a world-wide ambition for the grace and beauty of the African woman.

History will prove that the model Iman heralded into the conscience of the fashion world the uniqueness of the Somalian woman's physicality and moreover her attractiveness.

Alek Wek followed with a celebration and charm from a Sudanese woman.

Ghanaian women were definitive of my early upbringing on the notion of familial love as well as budding sexuality.

All these were evident in the establishment of home-life represented among the young women from the villages of Takoradi and Kumasi and elsewhere who were brought into the city to live with and help raise the children of middle to upper class families.

Such women were present when my parents lived in an urban neighborhood called the Nyaniba Estates, and helped to raise me and my younger brother.

It was a traditional family with a home, an outdoor space with plants that decorated the front of the house, a tree and a cesspool were positioned far off and a gate which kept everything enclosed. We had a dog named Hope who was later euthanized for being sick. I soon showed signs of fear of art and music.

On the wall in the living room was a painting of a Northern tribe called the Dagomba. In the painting they wore masks and raffia skirts, carried spears and appeared to be dancing. The colors within the painting were dazzling and brilliantly displayed. 

I feared this painting. There was something horrific about it. Not sure what about the painting made me afraid but revelry, dancing especially while masked, and the sight of spears all added to the notion of terror which was later exemplified among the Kakamotobe, a bunch of men on stilts who sauntered into neighborhoods during the holiday season.

I also cried when I heard the song "A Rose in Spanish Harlem".

This was where I experienced my first Ghanaian maid.

Without much recollection, I have a vague memory of a plump fair-skinned woman who bathed me, clothed me, fed me and helped me go to sleep.

When my parents moved further into the city, in a neighborhood called the Airport Residential Flats, I was raised by a young dark-skinned woman named Akua.

She was in her late teens and usually bathed me. Unusually, she was also naked. She watched me while I splattered water all around me, and with soap and sponge, she washed me clean.

The image of Akua as a young, nude woman brings to mind paintings of bathers by Mary Cassatt.

I was alarmed by the darkness of Akua's skin, almost as dark as charcoal. With beads of water over her body and washed over as well with light reflecting over it, she appeared precious.

Akua often sat with me and showed me pictures from a book. Times when she was very playful with me and she brought joy out of me.

There were other maids. One in particular was more feminine and mature. Her name was Efua.

She had a dominant persona and was very mothering. Times when she joined in on the activities in the kitchen to make fufu. A coordinated process whereby she sat with a wooden pot before her while a gentleman stood up holding a long wooden stick. With an up and down motion the gentleman pounded cooked yams and plantains within the pot and systematically, Efua used her hand to turn the yams and plantains around in the pot, until they became firm and shapely.

Efua was stylish and displayed a sexual identity. Moments when she had affairs with the men in the neighborhood. One afternoon I caught her making love to a houseboy. In a room with mosquito netting guarding a window, she lay on a bed while the houseboy performed on her. Outside the window, I stood on a bookshelf and I could see everything. Days later, she got into a dispute with the man. Efua cried and cried and was visibly shaken with her eyes red with tears.

There was another called Abena, a tall skinny woman with dry burnt umber-colored skin. She was sarcastic and often told jokes. Despite her slim build and potential elegance, she wasn't very feminine. It wasn't until she was joined by another maid, Koko, a shy unassuming woman, who stood with her arms folded and kept her gaze looking downward. Together they discovered makeup and lipstick, and casually wore pretty dresses during the day. Koko was later to join me and my mother and brothers on our way to the United States to live in New York City with my father. Before then we lived in a house on my grandmother's compound. During this time I was overcome by a sexual charge which was inspired by the girls who lived in the building of the Airport residential Flats, girls at the Royal Preparatory where I attended classes and friends of my cousins who came to visit when we lived with my grandmother.

When I was living in New York City with my father and the rest of the family, Koko discovered drawings I had made of nude women taken from adult magazines. It was a strange time of sexual self-discovery. My mother promptly enrolled me in classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I discovered the nude art figure. These nude portraits were different from the orgiastic visions of women in the adult magazines. Overall, they were also images of white women. Much like the girls I studied with at a Catholic grammar school, I felt a strange attraction.

I had been quietly having psychological issues such as anorexia. I also experienced a psychosis of losing my sense of blackness when I literally felt blackness being pulled away from my conscience. During this time I had a strong hatred for Koko since I felt she was interfering with my upbringing. It resulted in me refusing to look at certain images of black people on television. The white-colonization of my mind had begun, fueled mostly by the notion of a whitened art history and heavy metal and rock and roll music. I survived the early hip hop craze peripherally, as I lived it voyeuristically through cable television and my brothers.

Black women were a nonentity in my life since I spent four years studying at an all-boys Jesuit high-school. Only black women I encountered were my mother's African friends from work who came to visit her. One such visit was from a daughter of one of her friends. She had come to get fitted for a dress. I made it a mission to woo her. It took ten years of an off and on long distance relationship that eventually made her my lover. She later died of  a brain aneurysm.

The hyper-intervention of my white-colonized mind came when I sought housing and ended up living in a group program for some of the most disturbed people living in New York City. The nine years spent living this dangerous life experience, I was monitored by mostly female counselors. Living with black men and getting counseled by black women were my first intimate and detailed encounters with mostly African American men and women. More or less baptism by fire, I was introduced to street culture with its dynamic of drugs and violence.

The black female counselors shaped my notion of the African American woman. Someone I had seen mostly in hip hop videos, urban soul and crime movies or haphazardly met in passing on the streets.

I lived this reality of a reinstitution of the black female identity within my conscience and embracing of the black female as an added attraction to my masculinity as a black body.

Point of survival was knowing that I, too, was damaged, albeit as a matter of psychology due to racial transformation, and as a black body, there was no need to pretend.

As a sheep among wolves, I enabled a visibility of what it meant to be black; the awareness of history, both personal and cultural; vulnerability, acceptance of this as a weakness as well as a sign of strength; how to build on survival tactics particular to one's unique identity.

The counselors in this regard were less mothering as the maids. The counselors were more detailed in the psycho-social attempt to help me garner a sense of positive living and more so a healthy livelihood.

The black women at once glamorous on the cover of a magazine brought me back to the discipline of the love I had for black women. How the danger of a supremacist culture can damage the mind.

What it takes to recover a sense of blackness.

Realizing, once damaged from a system where the black conscience is altered from aggressive processing of white images, there's no-entry-way back to normalcy.

The world turns as the mind bends.

Psychoanalysis and Whiteness: White Female/Black Male Reassurance

Psychoanalysis and Whiteness: White Female/Black Male Reassurance

By Kofi Forson

“On the Good Ship Lollipop” was a song Shirley Temple made famous.

Growing up in Ghana, two Caucasian females made known to most familiar with pop culture and political icons were the aforementioned Shirley Temple and the Queen of England.

From a previous generation, might and merriment of post-colonial discourse ushered in popular figures like Twiggy and Dusty Springfield. A share of models, musicians and actresses from England were the fancy of men who had traveled abroad or were tuned in to BBC radio.

This was the redirect from political discourse of a country that had sought and gained independence. Reverberations of what was once a colonization of the black mind was maintained in the assertion of what was good literature, musical taste, encouragement of social reverence and all that was heralded in the continuous influence of white ideology in the minds of those who were cultured, disciplined by an African fascination.

Much as television shows featured programming from Europe, that notion of the idealized white female wasn't made present in the minds of those I grew up with. That element was prevalent in the minds of aunts and uncles who had traveled internationally. Whether it was a go go-dancing aunt who brought home ABBA records or my father and his earlier propensity for dating white women.

Regard for the white female was central to what was unattainable and when she became attainable there was always the tension behind what was the accord of black and white alliance and the known resistance.

The idea of the black student or journalist traveling to the West to set up a future was fashionable with all its idiosyncrasies of the black African discovering the white female. What grounds and merit he fought against to maintain familiarity with disillusionment of beauty; discovery of the cover girl or centerfold. Playboy magazine and other adult magazines as the broaching of what was sex between the African male and the white female.

It was with this cult of self-discovery that I was displaced from the notion of the black female student and impressionable black village girl who was seduced into city life for a better education with hopes of traveling to the West, to the awareness of white beauty in the paintings of prostitutes by Picasso and ballerinas by Monet.

My earlier discovery of what was blond hair and smell of white skin excelled to the presence of that very blond white girl in a setting void of the interruption of Ghanaian girls, exclusive in its Catholic impression with the African-American girl as voyeur, making this somewhat illicit and sub-cultural and problematic.

This was an exercise which reached proportions of a raping of the mind. The very criminalizing which took place when cable television pornography in the late 70's of public access adult programming ruined the minds forever of those displaced youth not ready for such display of vulgarity, behavior known only in the child-like truancy of a former life.

The black discovery of what is titillation in the sexualization of the white female is the referencing of black masculinity with white female submissiveness.

Such an intervention has always been actualized through sexual behavior. The black male discovery of the white female is usually evident through schooling, displacement or gentrification.

Initial suspicion is brought about in what is the known taboo, inter-racial copulation.

This fascination plays itself out in the masculinization of the black male. How he plays a part of the thoroughbred, willing to engage the white female in sexual misbehavior.

Lessening of such instinct is the processing of pedagogy, role of the teacher to the student. If prioritized through Christianity, in a Catholic school, element of a nun to student relationship takes on other proportions.

The method is then protracted in the accord of the white female and her superiority over the black male. This in a sense is a mothering of the emotions, both intellectual and rabid, in the black male.

In literary and cultural terms, she is seen as a savior, a heralded Christianized angel ready with answers to salvage the black male from victimization.

Element of slavery and the relationship coordinated between the white female and the black male has always been left up to suspicion. How did the white matron value the difference between the black male who worked in the fields and that of the slave visible in the everyday household discipline?

Chronology of the white female and black male relationship in history are relevant through slavery, colonial period, civil rights, jazz age, black renaissance, 70's blaxploitation, 80's rap and Neo-Expressionism movement, 90's gangsta. There's always the litigational representation of the black male, the black male as muse, lover, pop cultural figure, martyr. Recent victimization of black men by the police has increased the awareness by white women brought to these cases in protests and activism for justice.

Questions that ignite curiosity is what the white female seeks in the black male? What is the initial attraction?

Is it a sense of racialized guilt? Love of the black male identity? Self-denial of racism?

The motherly, superior, post-colonial agent, sex muse, taboo subject, lover, the black male finds in the white female is developed and underdeveloped with a totally different equation when the black male as patient seeks therapy and a psychoanalyzing of a diagnosis.

Attention must be given to the white male as psychoanalyst, and how he conducts therapy with the black male. In its origin, there's the institutionalization of the black male. Perception of him as criminal and rapist, is a conduct brought about in the initial investigation of the black patient's psyche. A broadening range is interpreted between the presumed excellence of the white male psychoanalyst and his disdain for a black male patient.

Initially this is ignorant and racist. The difference therefore between a psychoanalyst working in a community hospital and that of a private practice. The manner with which a black male patient seeks psychotherapy in a community hospital stems from one's psycho-social disability, dependence on government funding, or types of insurance.

There isn't much care given to the emotional and intellectual potential in the black individual. He is viewed as stubborn, criminal-minded and under-educated.

In a given session, the black male is treated with frustration. There isn't a commonality drawn between the psychoanalyst and the patient. Inter-balance of communication is a problem.

What is present in the attempt to intervene in the black male's life is the acceptance and respect with which the psychoanalyst, first, views him as human. The step to acquire a leveling of thought begins when the black male patient is given his due as a human person born into a world beyond his capability, with no proper resources for growth.

Given the potential for elitism, the psychoanalysis begins with ill-attempt at profiling the individual. Many approaches are taken from trying to gain a fleeting, momentary friendship to a laughable impression of what a black male psychoanalyst's behavior would be. What in this moment is the white psychoanalyst trying to be a black brother, uncle or father.

The psychical and mental frame white psychoanalysts have of black patients are usually formed from the societal conditioning of a typical black patient's life. This notion is grouped in the general understanding of how each patient should be treated.

Betterment for approaching each session is the dismissal of how the media portrays black men. Much has to be understood in the difference between how a medical doctor treats a black patient and how a psychoanalyst determines the mental capability of a black patient.

The greater challenge to determine, interpret, basically think in a Europeanized circumstance has more to do with family life, schooling and genetics. The black patient isn't given the trust and wherewithal for examining his or her very own conscience as vigilant or prophetic.

The notion of the thinker has been placed upon the minds of white male authors of the canon. Perception of thought in its origin based on African philosophy of thinkers, like Ptahhotep or pre-modern philosophy in North Africa, has been erased prominently from intellectual discourses.

Modernizing of African philosophy is based on the cycle of African students who travel to places in America and Europe, then return home to reflect on the terms of racial discrimination. That has been the manner for intellectual development in the African scholar. Such behavior of making that trip to the West for discovery; hence, referenced as thought-reflection and awareness, has roots in the modern intellectualizing of African thought.

It's with an astute reckoning that we state a claim on the perception of the black person as thinker, make known the history of language, shaping of the thinker, and with credit reward the African male's intellectual prowess.

Whereas the white male psychoanalyst perceives the black male patient as an enigma, the white female psychoanalyst draws a conclusion on the black male's patient's deficiencies from the original method of the psycho-sexual understanding of the black male ego.

This notion and process of the curiosity with which the white female and black male have curated a life through history brings about a sympathizing of the black male emotional content.

He is valued in a humanized form, or so is the set up. This misconception is the reality of the white female psychoanalyst not being able to empathize with the black male.

His aura, machismo can be perceived as arrogant.

The discipline the white female psychoanalyst uses to manage the determining of a black male patient's disability, as subtext, can be interpreted in all its relevance to the psycho-social history of black men.

At a community hospital, a psychoanalyst would base this concept circularly and not with humility in treating each patient as an individual.

The subtext, once again, is pragmatically basis for each session. The black male patient isn't honored as an individual, rather is stigmatized. The debasing of character disallows any attempt for upholding integrity or a one-up-man-ship.

The non-empathy of the white female psychoanalyst for the black male patient stresses the original depiction of the black male as case number.

The industrial prison complex and its animalizing of the black male is a system which disregards any potential for the black male to possess or show intellectual productivity.

Such is the frank and disheartening attitude present in the white psychoanalyst's devaluing of the black male patient.

The very practice of psychoanalyzing the black male prioritizes society's reluctance to come to terms with what is determined as a black future.

Black futurism as a map becomes the dizzying array of thought, images and color, the psychoanalyst wishes away, but is necessary to analyze the root of any malady.

A modernist of this variety, a black thinker, writer, artist, presents the analyst with utmost content for analysis.

Conceptualizing the form and figure of a human subject in art is credited to Euro/Americanized framing of the image.

This as a starting point redefines for the black artist the dimensions of the human figure. What Leonardo da Vinci depicted in the “Vitruvian Man” naturally shouldn't be the optimal physical form for every human figure.

How then does the black artist interpret the image of the nude white female? What psycho-erotic perceptions does he derive from seeing a naked white woman in print?

As a psycho-sexual subtext, how does the nude white female accentuate the black male's hunger for the black female.

Is it versed as literary, a hyper-text, that cancels the innate black male physical drive for the black female?

Whereas the African male student studying in the West comes to terms with defining and accentuating his perception of the white female, when does he absolve himself of any physical attraction to the white female, and uphold what is understood as decent and proper livelihood with the black female.

Circumstantially, when does this societal raping of the black male conscience reach a crescendo?

Pornographizing of black male death is mirrored in the obsessiveness of labeling beauty as best defined in the Euro-American female.

The subject of sex and death is present in the white female psychoanalyst and the black male patient.

However void and free it is of the actual, physical act of copulation, the conscientious imaging of sex is present.

Death is the interpretative space the analyst and patient work from to get to an equation.

The paradigm shift is the white female psychoanalyst freeing herself of any racialized concept of the black male patient. That very problem is the system used to evaluate or devalue the black male patient. He, in turn, must remove himself from the obsessing of the white female psychoanalyst as muse.

Given this complicated exercise, the white female psychoanalyst and the black male patient are able to reach a conclusion once they base the session on its end product.

How does the black male patient meet the need for his recovery? Does the white female psychoanalyst hyper-accentuate his vulnerability?

What is his experience with fraternizing of black masculinity? How does the unavailability of a black male psychoanalyst help or hinder his recovery?

Systematically, is a white female psychoanalyst problematic for the black male patient's discovery of self?

Order and pattern which the white female in society has based her theory on black male prowess, be it intellectual or rabid, has created a certain phenomena in the idolizing of a Tupac Shakur, Jean-Michel Basquiat...

Internet porn has hyper-accelerated the modernized inter-racial sexual ideology.

The rabid nature of a young black male is given a conduct for sexual release.

Seemingly his cult and masculine status is raised levels higher in how the white female perceives him.

This then is the post-modernizing of beauty and death.

Death of the black male as pornography.

The Karen-izing of the white female.

Psychoanalysis and Race: White Governance/Black Trust

Psychoanalysis and Race: White Governance/Black Trust

Kofi Forson

“I'm illin'” is a term used by mostly ethnic people to suggest someone is losing their sense of control, usually dependent on a drug binge or need to act upon violence.

"Going crazy" is a reference point for many rock and rollers. A sentiment often echoed at time of party or heavy drug use.

I think of known rock and roll musicians. How the sense of “craziness” was highly glamorized. Whether it was Iggy Pop on stage or Ozzy Osbourne allegedly biting off the head of a bat.

It is never given the thought for mental health-self-care or psychoanalysis. This is so because the opposing view of losing one's mind is hyper-aligned with a stigma.

What is celebrated is the cult persona of someone who is jeered and cheered for being "hardcore". Yet when the person is of a differing level of class and social status, perhaps homeless and on the streets, the perception of this person is that of a crazy person.

Growing up in the city of Accra, I knew of such a person as a derelict from the streets, helplessly and hopelessly deranged, talking to himself. Much of this behavior didn't stem from recreational drugs so much as it was a debilitating breakdown in one's mental and emotional faculties.

Quite clear, the perception of mentally deficient people back then when I lived in Accra, was that they were best left alone to wander the streets, fend for themselves. I had no notion of therapy or hospitalization. Although there was always gossip about an asylum where people were brought in from the streets.

My first experience with the strange, bizarre and phantasmagorical was back at the Airport Residential flats in Ghana, where I lived with my mother, brothers and a series of maids. My father was traveling most of the time.

Basis for this was accessibility of the television and shows I watched, elements in arts and crafts and night of a memorial service for a neighbor who had died. Shows that were featured on television included "Koliko", a show about marionettes, the popular comedian Super O.D., and the scary "Ghost Town".

"Koliko" was a childhood favorite because these marionettes portrayed characters that told stories relative to life experiences. The startled look and impression of their faces and how they were maneuvered with strings brought a slight chill to the notion of what was imagined as a caricature. Somehow these characters brought a warped feeling to the mind.

Super O.D. as a comedian was very theatrical. He was dynamic in his behavior and his act was full of exaggerations and sarcasm. The sight of him on stage was an example of someone who was pulling at the edges of all possible human derangements.

The theme of the show "Ghost Town" was explanatory. It was a drama that revolved around soap operatic narratives that included interjections of phantoms and occasional screams.

Presence of psychical threat and interpretative fears were present in the depiction of arts and crafts, sculptures and paintings.

As a child these fears pervaded my conscience, whether listening to music, sound of the flute or other instruments meant to evoke a feeling of dread or death. When I heard the melancholy in the song, "A Rose in Spanish Harlem" I cried. Also a painting from a Ghanaian Northern tribe, Dagomba, scared me. The painting featured men in raffia skirts, wearing masks and holding spears.

Objects such as the typical African sculpture of the naked woman with a vase positioned on her head, or generally the concept of the African person's suffering and pain ingrained in the conscience seeped into the rather sensitive mind as a child.

These fears were heightened culturally in the example of the Kakamotobe, a group of men dressed in hilarious colors accompanied by musicians. They wandered into communities during the holiday season. Their purpose was to alert people to the celebrations of the upcoming season. And yet their costumes, towering figures standing on stilts and wearing huge masks, as the musicians rattled off instruments and beat on drums, all made children in the many neighborhoods afraid. When the sound of the Kakamotobe was evident from miles away, children would run and hide.

Death and culture was the most present at memorial services and funerals, or in the worship and believability in the fetish priest.

Blackness is symptomatically connected to death. Not in the celebrated and general appeal of blackness as revolt, fight for independence or even notion of blackness as beautiful. Torture of black pain and need to overcome is what delivers one from that downturn into an elevated plight of victory.

Psyche of the black person lends itself to histories of enslavement, colonialism, imperialism. The meeting point is the role of the white person in dismantling all that has been developed and managed within black cultures.

This psychical space is full of fury, deception, conspiracy, truths, hate, anger, lust... It can be imagined as an emotional environment where there's no probable climb to success. One, knowing of their internal grip of their blackness is fueled by that outside notion of white rage, white violence, Euro/American concept of art, philosophy and culture.

Overwhelmingly, defeat of such damning thinking present in the colonization of the black mind, refuted through decolonization, excites the power of the black mind once the black person draws a conclusion.

To uphold knowledge of ultimate black thinking one must be aware of white defiance. That the black person is working towards something. This is when black success meets white rage.

Post-Obama and the recent American presidency from 2016, there's a cult and resounding push back from black societies from the "in plain sight" attempt to elevate whiteness.

What then is the merit of whiteness?

One must then be made aware of rise of anti-racist activists internationally, the Black Lives Matter movement, or even the critical investigation of whiteness, as seen in the research work of Leeds, England's educator and speaker, Shona Hunter, on identity, power, privilege, and oppression.

Identifying the incessant display of white rage is a counter response to the self-delivery and black cultural awareness of our responsibility to find fortune in our awakening and "woke" discipline.

This is our level of self-care; a mental health responsibility to meet our advantage given weakness and inability to always demand our personal fight and outwardly gather in numbers. What becomes of a protest or policy making expected of leaders who are voted into office.

To then refer to the themes of death; the mental breakdown in the black individual, it is clear to note, the black self is defenseless and without help, if not for the commonality and acceptance of the skin color as black, with regard for other black people. What is found in the diaspora, communities and new magnitude of the "black struggle" as blueprint for all struggle.

What is the identity of the black person with regard to the racial structure, diminishing of self involvement whether education, employment or social standing?

One must look to the status of each black person with regard to history, lineage, cultural representation, place of birth, immigration and/or citizenship.

Understanding of nation and country defines the honor with which each black person moves forward, thrives. That life is ongoing. What merits instinct and survival is day to day.

What is comfort for the black person?

The supposition of a Black Republican as better advanced than a Black Democrat is fiction.

Therein lies power granted to the hustler, or those involved in the street game. Three cult personas of the black person are the pimp, gangsta and savage.

These facets play themselves out in how the black person finds love, gets what he or she wants by all means and how they are defensive of what they have.

In other words, the black person is of his or her optimal figure or self once they form a basis for their political or hyper-politicized self.

Discussion must then be brought to the focus of the mindset of the black person. What does he or she do to protect the structural damage done to the conscience, given our role in history and its evolutionary period and counter-protest.

We are led to believe in a higher power. We suppose that to be God and the basis for worship in a church. The God representation can be found in self as conquering, availability of a loan shark, drug dealer, prostitute. That is the root of the street ideology. How one takes drastic measures in an ordered high-strung level of existence. Furthermore God's existence is relevant only in its religious interpretation as the "street game" is religion. The posse defines who or what manages threat and response. Observation of what is life is expectation to survive to make it to another day.

Further explored, what happens when the mental breakdown can't be repaired or solved with drugs, sex and violence?

When does the black person seek therapy? How does the black person manage trust in a family member, priest or counselor? What are the probable steps a black person can take to get on the "right track"?

Divisions for recovery from a mental breakdown in the black person begins with social status, education and/or family representation.

Truthfully, the black family rules against psycho-therapy of any sort. More so psychoanalysis brought into the black identity is often rejected.

Much of this stems from the suspicion of a "white" doctor trying to fix a "black patient". The mistrust of a psycho-therapist exploring the mind of a black patient draws back to extreme measures rendered in psycho-therapy throughout history, like electro-shock therapy for example.                                                                       

Other steps are taken as in the mother/son relationship. At least the son has the mother. More often the black daughter turns to the world outside to fend for herself, where she meets danger in so many different ways.

Within a middle to upper class black family there are many reasons for concern and immediacy with which to curtail further debilitating circumstances. Given schooling and education, perhaps there is a counselor. Once again the level of trust is an issue. Trust among members of the same race is an issue. Supposing trust in a superior person of the opposite race is even more troubling.

What can be brought into the social dynamic and vision or picture for racially psychical interpretation of inter-connectivity in the living process in a modern world is belief in an order beyond the human order. There are systems beyond our control. Those found in the spiritual world. For a black person of pragmatic means such thinking is incomprehensible.

The black body has shape and trappings of terror. The person existing within this body is defiant. Call it a warrior's mentality, a soldier at war, a gang member protecting his territory.

Psychoanalysis and race begins where we form a bond between therapy and medicine and vulnerability and acceptance of one's diagnosis.

Subjectively, the "white" doctor analyzing the "black" patient is where we have our differences. It begins there. How then can we meet the great divide where if it is made presentable that the black patient seeks therapy in a black doctor.                                

The problem is stigmatizing of a psychiatric diagnosis and the eventual refusal of therapy.

Progressively a lot is being done to introduce the probability of success from psychoanalysis in the black activism from a Hollywood actress, like Taraji P. Henson and the television therapist Iyanla Vanzant.

Outside of the Hollywoodizing of therapy, there is stress in the everyday. The reality of what to do when a person is struggling with a psychosis. Given the high-wired tension in the moment who does one trust?

It brings about the high profiled cases of the police and their mishandling of black people having a mental crisis.

What is the cultural language in the moment between a white police officer and a black patient having a panic attack?

The obvious reaction is that the police officer treats this case much like any other case of tension and potential danger. Initial cultural fear or hate of the black person is officially present. This suggested opinion is different with each officer. But racially that is the purpose for each and every call whereby a white police officer has to determine how safe he can be in the presence of a black person in crisis.

That is the problem.

Our standard for living between the races is an ongoing problem where we as black people have to determine who and when we can trust a white person with an official status.

Psychoanalysis is made more difficult because the robbing of black person's mind is colonial. Histories of enslavement before then is critical to upholding a belief in Europeanized methods for recovery.

With education and philosophy one would be introduced to Freud or Jung. On the issue of psychoanalysis and race Franz Fanon investigates the determining of the black mind under governance by a white standard.

We can suppose psychoanalysis or lack thereof in how the fetish priest deals with a visitor in the country of Ghana. How is that different in the trust between a Ghanaian immigrant seeking therapy in the country of England or America? What would the deficiencies be in a Black American without probability of therapy or medication?

In a developed country there are many means with which to seek therapy. There shouldn't be a theory as to what works and what doesn't based on race alone.

As with everything in life, it's up to the individual and how he or she meets his or her fate to reclaim the defeated self.

Greater problems include treatment of the diseased homeless person. How prisons are used as places of confinement for those needing therapy, with disregard for psychiatric institutions.

What would then be outpatient treatment?

In a given situation where a person is brought into emergency for psychiatric treatment, he or she is eventually transferred onto a psychiatric ward. After time spent being evaluated, whether days, weeks, months or even years, they are released. They then continue treatment on an outpatient basis.                                   

The black person looks at him or herself in the mirror and sees a black person.

If for a moment they see the world in the face within the mirror, it would be a step to encouraging progressive living, and an adventurous undertaking.

It begins with trust and faith. If not in a God then whom?

The plight of a person accepting nothingness as a life product. We begin there. To be something, you have to be nothing.

The black person has been robbed of so much. To be nothing means death.

Death of the mind is close to that. To "die" oneself is the beginning of a new life. That death prospect is what we deliver onto ourselves. Psychoanalysis is a different form of death and rebirth.

It's mirroring. How a black person can look at a white person and see him or herself. The same for a black person looking at another black person.

Truth is the world is black and white.

ART PERSONA versus BLACK IDENTITY: Psychical Mirroring/White Conditioning/Afro-familiarizing

ART PERSONA versus BLACK IDENTITY: Psychical Mirroring/White Conditioning/Afro-familiarizing 

Kofi Forson

To look at myself in the mirror, I see a black person. To exist as this black person, I've been pulled into thoughts and consciences magnified through concepts of whiteness.

The black person within my body, who exists in the flesh, therefore struggles in this manufactured world to think and carry on as a black person.

Concepts of whiteness in pop culture, socio-politics, social circles, all keep a lid on the freedom to seek the essence of decolonization.

White supremacy as probable instigator that which fuels the powering of racial politics, labeling of white beauty, philosophical thought, art history, colonization, separates the culturally white-conditioned person of African origin to encourage a livable circumstance where the body and mind exists on one's Afro-familiar origin.

For me this came with displacement, whereas some experience this through education, employment or industry.

The transference from propelling one's Black African origin, once subjected to a white conditioning, plays upon the history of race, enslavement, white violence, black poverty, black death. The physical black self, the actual body becomes a vessel for encouraging the very discipline which destroys.

Issue of sadism and masochism becomes prevalent when the conscience consistently draws from the programmable principles that certify whiteness as priority.

Moment in my very life when I felt this happen for the first time was when in anger towards one particular black person, I experienced disdain towards certain black pop cultural figures I admired. It was short-lived, but in the moment I saw myself hating myself, not for being black, but because other black people I knew were not experiencing the dying of their black conscience.

In this act of self-denial, I had created a persona which was to keep me isolated among black people for life.

Afro-familiarizing is real in the acceptance from other black people within the black diaspora.

Afro-culturalization is a given.

In the greater world one must learn instinct and survival. This differentiates what it means to be accepted by other black people and the will to manage an organized social structure which creates a manifestation, outside the diaspora and black cultural niche.

Afro-familiarizing for me is rooted in family. That protective circle, original in its history and lineage, which created the very person I am. Hence is responsible for all my self-damage, as well.

Mirroring of my conscience came in the association with the very center of the problem. My social circles were full of white students, friends, love interests, muses, who determined my psychiatric evolution. All of which increased in its psychosis.

The 2016 American Presidential campaign season saw a lot of this concentrated mind-bomb explode once I was exposed to white anger, rage, paranoia and elitism. It upended what I had known as a black person living in a white world.

Difficulty then was re-identifying myself as a person, artist with a sense of placement. Given my displacement I had found an acceptance in white culture, Christianity, art and rock and roll. To experience a shift in the social-structuring of race as experienced in my social circles, it was difficult to originate as self-disciplined.

Who and what I had become was under self-questioning.

Coming up from a spiritual and intellectual manifestation and concentration on black literary history, virtual pockets of anti-racists, I have slowly seen my body give way quite naturally from a karmic and psychical evaluation. I am faced with an attraction to a newly defined understanding of the self in its blackness, not as a black person living in Ghana, but as someone who developed a conscience as a set up from white colonization of the black mind, broadened in social circles.

In the city of Ghana, I was born a boy to Ghanaian parents, with a lineage to other Ghanaians who have existed and passed on and those who continue to exist there, or have migrated to other countries, but exist as Ghanaians within the associations and inter-connectivity with people from other countries and races.

Life as a boy in Ghana consisted of my school days at the Royal Preparatory, where I first expressed talent as an artist. These drawings reflected my love for sports, consisting of drawings of football (soccer) players and equestrians at the race track.

Given the culture I was surrounded by the sentiment and notion of a modern city, Accra, buildings, compounds, cars, fashion, music, and indeed art. One piece of art I was familiar with was a painting from the Dagomba tribe of masked men wearing raffia skirts holding spears. The painting, multi-colored with dazzling brush strokes frightened me. Not sure what the subjectivity of violence within the painting was enough to affect my psychology.

There were men known as the Kakamotobe, who were similarly dressed, more so extravagantly, in costumes and standing on stilts, accompanied by musicians, who stormed into neighborhoods during the holiday season and danced and caused a raucous.

These were all parts of the themes and subject of art and psychology growing up as a boy in Ghana.

The warrior mentality seeped through the minds of young boys, whether playing football, challenging another boy for the love of a girl, or that of guarding and protecting personal possessions or warning against intrusion onto another person's territory.

My immediate family, cousins, aunts and uncles, outside of the roles of mother and brothers, my father was traveling most of the time, were more creative in the arts and not drawn ideologically towards machismo or body-sizing. That notion of manhood was visible at times when there was a get-together for a feast, when my uncles chased and slaughtered a goat or killed a live chicken to be prepared and cooked for a stew.

The Telfers, my mother's maiden name, were prone to psychosis. The Buckmans, my grandmother on my mother's side's maiden name, displayed talent for draftsmanship.

Combination of socio-psychology and the fine arts is relevant to the lineage on my mother's side. Much of this is rooted in my very own karma and psychiatric development.

Life as a Ghanaian boy was exemplary in the discipline of my African spirit and pride. I was a black boy among other disciplined black people, whether I had a crush on a Ghanaian girl or was raised by a series of young Ghanaian girls who had come into the city from villages in search of an education or a better life.

That liberty to live and think as a Ghanaian was gradually removed from my conscience once I was displaced to New York City, when my mother, me and my brothers, along with a maid, took a plane and came to join my father.

The process of my mind being conscientiously whitened took on manifestations when I discovered the white muse, as an example in centerfolds from adult magazines, models in my mother's fashion catalogs and the young white female students at a neighborhood Catholic grade school.

The white female muse is sold to Africa as a colonial heroine, either the Queen of England, or Hollywood celebrity, like Shirley Temple.

These two were my earlier notions of the white female. There was a particular evening when my grandmother welcomed onto her compound, members of the Peace Corps for a gathering.

It was the first time I had seen a white person. There was the unusual perspective of their white skin and locks of yellow-brownish hair.

Here in New York City, I was welcomed into the circumstance of studying with other students who were primarily white. For once, in their company I immediately felt myself losing my sense of blackness. Whatever means I had of being a black person slowly diminished among the company of mostly white students, but also Indian, Puerto Rican and Black American.

The feeling of having landed in a foreign country was evident that first day of school. Much as the students fawned over me and made me feel as comfortable as they could have made me feel, I was confused and isolated in my thinking.

Somehow I was received as Jesus' second coming or a rock star. These examples were made much clearer to me as I became orientated in American culture and the idea of worship. The Almighty God being the first, but also those found in pop culture.

I prioritized the white muse in art when I started illustrating centerfolds. Several summers when I studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was introduced to the female nude. During this time I voyeuristically watched adult programming on cable television.

Subject of art and pornography seeped into my conscience. It was also early on when I experienced abnormal behavior, like an eating disorder, which set the tone for future disorders.

The art persona which suits my chronic development was revealed much later when I read Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's "Venus in Furs". Along with Marquis de Sade and the development of sadomasochism, I had found a psychological patterning of an ideology relative to my thinking.

How art and sexuality overshadowed one's social interaction. Cult of which was the understanding of one's growth as thinker and social pathology. Moment when I discovered Roland Barthes, George Battaile and Jean Baudrillard in a humanities class at the School of Visual Arts.

During the course of my existence in New York City, I have also existed as muse to those within white circles, whether from boroughs of New York or other cities within the United States or white Europeans who had moved to New York City. 

Indeed I have been a tragic figure, whether reminiscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat or Kurt Cobain.

Uniqueness of my persona as an artist with an international status served me well when I moved into transitional living and was confronted with examples of black men, different from the ones I had known or imagined. Worse yet they existed as examples of my greatest fear.

This has been my notion of blackness, not the hip hop artist, or well-to-do businessman or politician and even sports figure and Hollywood celebrity.

My experience with blackness has come later in life in a world where I had to fend for my life on a daily basis, when I lived among diseased, drugged men addicted to elements of troubled living and lifestyles. That environment opened my eyes to prioritizing instinct and safety.

Notion of one's individuality, either art-driven or God-blessed is enough to carry the person through any difficult circumstance. My survival is only valid because I was able to be myself, and draw from my background in schooling, family, social communities.

For years I balanced extremes of street culture with philosophical theorizing with a group of British artists within the virtual sphere and partying alongside artists from the New York City art world.

My art persona was always disassociated from the self-willed privileged authority present in most artists within the art circles. The very persona was also different from the world of emotionally violent dystopia I inhabited.

In essence I've had to mastermind a life whereby I fit in. As if I was a master of my very own psychosis.

Post-trauma and post-shock, and given the promoting of hyper-awareness of blackness, for the first time I've had to look at myself as a black person. I've always existed as a person who was black without prioritizing my blackness.

That was understood in my life as Ghanaian.

Blackness as viewed in the black diaspora is sometimes different for every person. We don't always claim a unified blackness. The perception is that we all love Bob Marley, Tupac and Barack Obama.

Whereas black self-governance, independent of spirit is a work load we all carry, the black spirit is central to each and every black person no matter where he or she comes from. We are in agreement of black pain and black success. How we experience these matters is relative to the individual.

At least this is what I believe to be true. The black person finds respect in the origin of our differences more than the similarities we share. Perhaps we all began from a given point in our histories. How we develop is a personal struggle. A struggle we have to conquer on our own, rather than seek blessings from each other.

The noise is outside.

In the greater and bigger world everyone is different.

Having endured the American presidency of a would be authoritarian, and experienced my share of eye-opening and mind-bending examples of white privilege, the very supremacist ideology that had influenced my upbringing and education and socializing, for the first time I questioned.

It created a self-paranoia of who my real friends were. Especially within some of the circles I had evolved from, there were examples of growing racism, or at least perceptions of white authority which reflected upon renewed changes in political and cultural placement.

I've had to associate art and blackness with racism. Something I never did before. The perception of living a white-oriented life was no longer safe. If not just as a socially conscientious entity but as a community of thinkers and talented people, I felt the terror of a personal history where I was not accepted as a person, but as fiction. Further accentuating the notion of whimsy and fantasy prevalent in the artist. As if to say by being an artist, one is an idea of a person, minimalist or abstract-expressionist. I thought to be black and be an example of this, one is totally obscure and living a faux self.

I found it difficult to exist both as an artist and as a black person. Conceptually, my artist self was driven by white principles. The black self more reliant on family circles. I found it difficult to bring the idea of family into my art. In other words there was no prioritizing of black-centeredness in my world outside of family. In a post-sensibility of decolonization, that is changing gradually. I have accentuated my virtual self profoundly as intellectual. In doing so I now attract like-minded people of color. Or at least those who promote black themes.

I have never questioned my identity. 

Awareness made relevant in today's culture allows for that. The very need for manifestation in order to fit in the juxtaposing of the art persona with black identity.

One has to understand the origin of the black identity.

Academicizing of this origin is a fortune.

The black artist void of the academic relevance either lives in an art dystopia of false examining of self or he creates an environment where he articulates the notion of blackness, be it reserved in self-definition of blackness or meeting a regard for a diasporaic standard.

The post-post realm has encouraged a post-post-post realm given the reality of the world's Covid-19 quarantine.

The world and its life to come would have reorganized the notion of race, broadened the awareness of black reorienting through white circles and vice-versa.

The person I am and have become is an ongoing experiment governed by a spiritual God.

The glamorized and idolized gods who have come before are now part of a history that had to overcome, be born again, "die itself", to be true to its nature as human, self-willed.

To move further into other renewed circles, I have to trust and realize, mirroring is not a matter of race.

Mirroring is the psyche attracting another psyche, and of its mind and body, one is made situated.

This is the ultimate form of placement.

For a displaced person, it is everything.