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February 10, 2025
Growing up in my Dominican household, I heard it all. “Don’t go in the sun because you’ll get darker, and your skin will look dirty.” “You have bad hair or ‘pelo malo.’” Marry lighter to “better the race.” This type of culturally ingrained and anti-Black self-hatred of dark skin, curlier hair textures, and African features holds our sense of humanity, worth, and dignity imprisoned in internalized oppression. So, how do we find freedom? And is this liberation external or internal?
I’ve grappled with those questions for years. Reading the works of Black feminists like Audre Lorde taught me that the answer to the latter is “both.” In order to experience liberation, we must look closely and decipher how we uphold the same systems we seek to transform. It has taken me years to unlearn what others taught me about myself and other Black people. For this reason, I wanted to contend with that aspect of the oppressor that lives within us. There is no guarantee that we will behave differently than how we have been socialized — but when that is left unexamined, we can become complicit and replicate anti-Blackness in our daily lives.
I spoke with author and poet Cole Arthur Riley whose digital project and book of the same title, Black Liturgies, integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. Arthur Riley, like many of us, took on the task of confronting the internalization of anti-Blackness and other forms of oppression.
I wanted to have this conversation with her because, so often, when we talk about Black liberation, the focus is on policies, systems, protests, and advocacy. But what do we do when we recognize that there are degrees of anti-Blackness within us? Can we find room to grapple with the parts of ourselves that reflect the oppressor’s eyes? This is some of what she shared.
Adeline Gutierrez Nuñez: When we talk about Black liberation, it is always external, and we never contend with our own anti-Blackness, our own misogyny. And so, that’s really the spirit of the conversation that we wanted to have with you. To start off, how important is it for us to unlearn anti-Blackness?
Cole Arthur Riley: I think if you only consider liberation to be about these external circumstances that you’re trying to alter, it can be not only exhausting but lead to a lot of despair. And I like to remind myself and others that there is a kind of liberation that occurs in the interior, that the systems — the external systems designed to terrorize us and keep us from freedom — some part of them can find themselves grown in the interior life and our interior landscape. Some seeds can be planted along the way, and we always have a degree of agency to root out those seeds habitually to find where the sites of anti-Blackness that I’ve adopted — what in me is in secret alliance with these systems that are meant to destroy me. And I feel that once we begin to examine that, once we begin to root those out, it’s much easier to see and name when something is in contrast or something is in conflict or a threat to that interior dignity.
If you’re a person who’s on the journey of exposing your own anti-Blackness, of decolonizing your inner life, my advice to you would be to look back, to look at the people who have survived what we’ve survived on some level, and have found in mystery some way to retain a sense of beauty and life and joy about themselves.
Why do you think internalized oppression is dangerous?
Internalized oppression is, in many ways, even more dangerous than an oppression at the hand of the tyrant or this external force because it is grounded in a belief. It’s one thing to be treated as less than. It’s another thing to believe it, and then replicate that belief in yourself — replicate that belief in the world around you. If I don’t know who I am, if I don’t know what I’m afraid of, if I don’t know my desire is what I want, if I’m not really well acquainted with what’s happening in me and how it relates to the systems of oppression and exploitation, I am going to mimic and mirror all of those systems in the world around me. They’re absolutely connected.
I mean, it always begins with the mirror in a way when we’re little. I think for many of us, there’s this shift in terms of how shame lives in the body. One day, you meet your own face in the mirror, and you realize that some of your thoughts aren’t your own, some of your thoughts might not have begun in you, and how you’re interpreting your own face.
For me, I had a father who went to great lengths to protect my reflection, protect my experience of myself. So every morning, he would braid my sister and I’s hair and grease our scalps a few times a week. And he would lick his thumbs and press them against [our] bushy eyebrows. And he had this thing, he would say, ‘You look good. Do you feel good?’ And every morning, we’d say, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I look good, and I feel good.’ And there’s this kind of ritual of dignity, ritual of kind of reimagining [and] envisioning that we have to do for our children, but we also have to do for ourselves and our communities to remind ourselves of our faces. Otherwise, you have situations in which a little girl meets herself in the mirror and sees something she doesn’t entirely feel content to see. And then, when she sees the face of her mother, what will that experience be when she sees the face of her sister or eventually her classmate? What will that experience be?
I love the story about your dad and the way that he nourished both you and your sister. Who did you turn to when you wanted to confront your internalized anti-Blackness and love your Blackness, and what did they say?
When it was time for me to confront the anti-Blackness in me, confront the kind of systems of oppression in me, I feel like I really ran backwards. I ran to the past. I ran to how I was raised. I think there was a kind of original family culture, a family spirituality. I would even say that was about Black dignity, that was about reverence for the Black body, as opposed to the trauma and destruction of it. And when it came time for me to reclaim that, I experienced it less as a kind of awakening and more as a remembering. I went back to the couch where my father greased my scalp. I went back to my grandma in the supermarket looking someone in the eye that wouldn’t look her in the eye back. And yeah, I experienced it kind of in memory.
I also went to the artists in looking for how to reclaim myself — decolonize my interior. I found a lot of solace in poetry that was comfortable with the imprecise — that encouraged me to make language and make sense of language for myself.
What do you want to say to those navigating their own anti-Blackness?
I think if you’re a person who’s on the journey of exposing your own anti-Blackness, of decolonizing your inner life, my advice to you would be to look back, to look at the people who have survived what we’ve survived on some level, and have found in mystery some way to retain a sense of beauty and life and joy about themselves. I would say, look back. I would also say, in certain seasons, it’s good for us all to remember. James Baldwin. He talks about never really being able to see your own face. He calls it the tyranny of the mirror.
He says, ‘Mirrors can only lie to a certain extent and that we need each other. We really need each other to see ourselves clearly.’ So, whenever I talk about rooting out anti-Blackness or this interior excavation, it’s important to know sometimes we can’t be trusted to perform our own exorcisms — that you need the face of another. You need people that you trust who really see you clearly, who can kind of point to the places and say, ‘No, that’s not your nose. This is your nose. Let me tell you about it.’
In the book, there’s this prayer that has stuck with me. It’s called “For Marveling At Your Own Face.” What were you thinking about when you wrote those words?
When I wrote that, I was thinking of my nieces actually. They’re young and vivacious, and they have this kind of sacred audacity, this kind of belief that they have a right to be here. That is so beautiful. And I’m still, on some level, aware of that always being at risk. And I want to just protect it and put it in this case where no one can touch it. And so, I had them in mind, and other children as well, to have some counter words for the moment where the glass box maybe shatters or tilts.
This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
