Mutilation

The mutilation of the Black mind begins at an early stage. It happens even before a child knows how to put words or sentences together, even before they learn the idea of critical thinking.

The mutilation is a peeling at the soul—an insistence that you do not belong, that you will never belong, that you are not enough. It is so relentless that the soul begins to separate from itself, longing to be something else entirely.

I have a five-year-old daughter with thick, luscious curls and brown skin. She is a goddess. Yet when she looks at herself at five, she sees something unworthy. It bleeds my soul and my insides in a way one could not imagine. I wish I could take that pain—pain this five-year-old did not earn, did not work for—and cut it into tiny pieces and hand it to the white supremacist world that cannot fathom that racism is a pit of hell that should exist nowhere.