The Potty Mouth Granny

“Black” is not a single thing. It’s a constellation.

Black is a people, first—descendants of Africa scattered by history’s rough hands: trade winds, chains, migrations, love, survival. Not a monolith, not a hive mind. Nigerians, Haitians, Gullah Geechee, Afro-Brazilian, Black American, Somali, Jamaican—different tongues, foods, rhythms, gods, jokes. Same sun in the bones, different stories in the blood.

Black is a social category, invented and weaponized. Europe needed a justification for theft and terror, so it drew a line in human skin and called it science. That lie stuck. Laws, borders, wages, schools, prisons—built around that fiction. Race isn’t real in biology, but it’s very real in consequences. Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it.

Black is a culture, alive and improvisational. Music that taught the world how to feel—blues, jazz, gospel, hip-hop, soul. Language that bends English until it tells the truth. Humor sharp enough to cut despair into something survivable. Style as resistance. Beauty as refusal. Joy as a radical act.

Black is a political position, whether one asked for it or not. To be Black is to be read, measured, feared, desired, dismissed, and policed before opening your mouth. It’s being told you’re “too much” and “not enough” in the same breath. It’s resilience misnamed as strength because the world doesn’t want to admit how much it takes.

Black is a lineage of thinkers and dreamers. Scientists, philosophers, healers, poets, aunties with kitchen-table wisdom, grandmothers who could make a dollar holler and a child feel safe. Literacy passed hand to hand when schools were closed to us. Knowledge smuggled like contraband.

Black is not just pain. Pain is part of the archive, yes—but so is laughter that shakes walls, love that outlives policies, tenderness that refuses to die. Blackness contains multitudes: rage and mercy, grief and celebration, sacred and profane, Sunday morning and Saturday night.

At its core, Black is humanity insisting on itself in a world that tried very hard to say otherwise.