“Running round in circles, lost my focus, lost sight of my goals, I do this for the love of music, not for the glitter and gold.” – India Arie
When I started writing professionally in 2003, I started writing for myself. To be a writer is to have something to say. Full stop. If it resonated with others, that was gravy, but my initial writing career was about having a well of words and stories to tell and was a therapeutic process for me.
It was about being a young Black woman who moved to the whitest state in the country after almost 30 years in Chicago and living in either Black spaces or multiracial spaces and then finding myself in the whitest state of the country. I kicked off my third decade of life struggling with being in what felt to me like a completely foreign environment, but also needing to be here to make my son’s life easier as he deserved at least one parent who could think beyond their own needs and desires.
The Maine I encountered in 2002 was a place where it wasn’t uncommon to hear white people referring to Black folks as colored or mulatto. Not even the few Black folks here referred to themselves as Black; they were African American, as if they wanted to assimilate into the hyphens that remove us from our essence. I was (and still am) a dark-skinned, loud-ish Black woman who wasn’t interested in assimilating into the then-Maine version of Black folks. I wanted to create a place and space where I could live my truth and maybe—if I was fortunate enough—maybe by writing I was putting out an SOS to any other Black girls from other places who, for whatever reason, found themselves in Maine. One of my oldest friends to this day is a Black Caribbean sista who found herself in Maine after a stint in the Navy and marrying a white boy from Maine. My twin, as we refer to each other, found me through my early days of writing for the now-defunct Portland Phoenix newspaper.
Over the years, I would learn that my writing was a balm to many of the young Black immigrants who were trying to make sense of what this “Black in America” thing was all about as they juggled the duality of their own identity. My personal blog would become the first stop for many U.S.-born Black folks looking to either visit or relocate to Maine—to the point that I used to joke that I was the unofficial tourism board of Maine for Black folks. Or for white folks with Black partners and kids.
My speaking career was literally launched because I was asked to speak at various organizations and events so often that I realized it was taking up a lot of my time and was work, and I couldn’t afford to give away my labor—especially after my divorce. I have worked in schools across the state and at one point served as the keynote speaker for the annual Civil Rights Team’s spring conference. I have literally spoken at almost every University of Maine campus and the bulk of the private colleges in the state of Maine, as well as some engagements outside the state.
It was through a combination of my writing and my day job as executive director of organizations in both Maine and Massachusetts that I befriended several lawmakers over the years, leading up to my own brief stint in public office when I served as the vice chair of the Portland Charter Commission in 2022-23. It was through my friendships with those lawmakers that I learned my writing on race and racism allowed many of them to bring that equity lens into their work in a state that for far too long acted as if nonwhite people in Maine were a blip and not a foundational part of our state.
Seventeen years ago, when I landed my first non-interim executive director position in Maine, equity wasn’t on the radar and meetings as a Black executive director meant being treated like a poor relation. When I attended meetings with my peers and community members, I was typically treated as if I didn’t have a master’s degree in management and hadn’t cut my nonprofit chops in Chicago working at larger organizations.
The landscape in Maine has changed; we now have many organizations that proudly proclaim themselves to be Black—Black-owned, Black-focused—and I love to see it. I love knowing people have options for learning about Black folks in Maine beyond my lens and scope.
We now have foundations that eagerly support equity work, foundations that just a decade ago wouldn’t have dared to disrupt the white status quo. In some cases, these are organizations that my own organization consulted with at the beginning of their journeys to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Even my organization’s decision to start working in Maine in 2019 was prompted by longtime readers and colleagues in the state asking if we could offer Maine-based programming, as we had people in Maine traveling long distances to develop their anti-racism praxis with my organization.
I share that long-winded exposition to say that while the current state of Blackness in Maine is developing, we have to acknowledge that there is progress and that while it is slow, it is happening. Also, it stands on the shoulders of others and we need to make sure that in our quest to carve out our spaces that we don’t forget those who came before us.
Blackness isn’t just about the promotion of Black people’s achievements or recognizing our sorrows, but also the fact that we historically have been people whose survival has been based in community and the ties forged in community by our shared identity and challenges. It was looking out for one another and showing up. It was being truly communal and going beyond the Instagram “perfect moments” and social media likes.
When I moved to Maine in 2002, there was Victoria Mare, who wrote on race. There was Keita Whitten, who would later become a well-known Black therapist in the community but who, when we met, was another transplant from a big city, making a life for herself and her boys. A woman who, despite the challenges of single motherhood and school, made time for community and showing up—who to this day remains a dear sista-friend. A sista-friend who came with others in the Black community in 2004 when my mother died and brought food to sit with me in community.
I moved to Maine as a still wet-behind-the-ears youngish adult but was forged in the fires of adulthood with a capital A, when my beloved mother died two years to the day after my move to Maine. In my 23 years here, I have lost my closest elders—they are now my ancestors who guide me daily. I became a mother for the second time in this state and I have raised that child, who will be 20 in a few days, completely in this place. It is while living in this state that I became a grandmother multiple times via my son’s partnerships.
I watched my star rise and my career accelerate and I became the shiny new thing who used to get the media calls and now, in this next act of my life, I have become less important in a world that celebrates youth and shiny new objects. I am ole-skool in a world that prefers the new-new, but I have lived long enough to fully understand that anything we build as Black folks without a solid community and relational base risks becoming something performative for the white gaze and those who seek to assuage their guilt by throwing money when they don’t want to really disrupt the systems. I sometimes fear that Maine, with a relatively recently enlarged Black community, risks a foundation of straw.
Last year, when I was commissioned to write a piece on Black leadership in the state, I killed the piece after several interviews in which the common thread amongst the Black leaders I spoke to was the lack of a true cohesive Black community and most certainly no single leader.
I have been sitting with those interviews for over a year and wondering: How do we create a community at a time when we as Black folks are as caught up in the rapid cycle of change as much as anyone else; where the folks who get the most attention are the leaders of the moment but there is never time to build? How do we do it when, as a community, we have a shortage of accessible elders to learn from and even when they are available, the folly of youth often isn’t interested in hearing and learning?
Our Black community in Maine is not a monolith of shared culture but a tapestry of the larger African diaspora that splits between the new Maine transplants from far more diverse places and the fewer who are generations deep here, as well as between Black Americans who are descendants of slavery and African immigrants who have settled here. And this lack of cohesion is amplified in a world where the strategic operating system of whiteness too often pits us against one another by controlling access to the funds that still reside in white hands with conditions often based on white supremacy standards.
We celebrate Black excellence but what does that mean if it is not rooted in love and relationships and understanding that we need more than moments of sparkle to truly thrive as a community?
Some years ago, when my work was taking off in Maine, I was talking to a dear friend who isn’t quite an elder to me but is a decade older than me, and she quietly reminded me of another Black Maine writer, whose work I was familiar with, and how I wasn’t the first Black woman in Maine to shine a spotlight on race. It was market conditions that allowed me to get farther than Victoria had. It was a humbling conversation and I have carried it with me all these years. Now as a middle-aged woman, I understand how important it is to see those who came first and honor them for easing that door open, and I say to the younger Black folks in Maine and those who support them: Do not erase the work of those who greased the wheels for the progress we are making.
Unfortunately, like the larger society, too often the work of Black elders is erased and I find myself at that crossroads, knowing that my words no longer carry the same weight and power they once did despite still being active and recognized. I also know that as fascism takes hold of our nation, our survival and successful resistance will only happen if we grow cross-generational connections that are allowed to deepen.
Growing up as I did in Chicago, Black elders were a part of my daily life and while there were many times I rolled my eyes at some of what they would say, I have lived long enough to recognize the truths they spoke, even if I didn’t at the time.
I am admittedly struggling with my own erasure and a growing sense of wondering if my work is still relevant. I am reminded of Barbara Smith, a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, a group whose work was pivotal to modern-day movement work. Yet, despite being part of a group whose influence continues to spread, she has had to literally crowdfund her pension plan because despite the depth and breadth of her work and teaching at prestigious colleges, she didn’t have a retirement fund. This is yet another way we erase Black elders and particularly Black women. We lift people up in their prime, while too often not properly compensating them and eventually moving on from them, thus creating a secondary underclass of elders who struggle to survive after we have used them for their brilliance and boldness.
I admit today’s post is a detour from my writing of late, but increasingly as I watch local happenings in Maine and in the larger world, I can’t help noticing who isn’t in the room and who doesn’t get acknowledged. Noticing how we all lose when we only look forward without the acknowledgement of the past and recognition that we can still learn from it (and those who are still very much active).
How much richer would our communities and movements be if we took care to not forget those who forged the paths that we now get to walk on? Lack of historical awareness and holding people in memory is at the root of so many of the issues we face as a nation. Fascism becomes attractive to many when there is no one to tell you how awful it was before. Selling the trad-wife fantasy to young women becomes attractive in a world that demands so much, if you avoid telling those women what the world was like before women had actual rights. Suddenly, having a passel of kids before the age of 30 doesn’t feel as exciting when you realize how limiting it can be in the long term.
To move forward, we must know where we have been, so that we can have an honest assessment of the progress we have made. Bringing those older folks along even when they aren’t as shiny and fun anymore, and supporting them throughout their lives rather than using and discarding them, aids in the process.
I’m not saying the new-new isn’t relevant. I’m not saying it’s inferior or bad inherently. But we need to remember and recognize the elders, both while they are still alive and long after they pass.
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