EARTH TO JORDI: Prioritizing Black Love as a Non-Binary Polyamourous Person
It’s taken me a while to get here
What is Blackness?
An Affirmation
Black is the color that birthed all of the colors. Black is the underside of the rainbow that holds the dense nutrients of the spectrum. Black is the rich Earth that is constantly mined and profited from and still nourishing. Black is the relationship with the Sun mxnifested in our bodies melanated. Black is complex. Black is ever-changing. Black is unification. Black is love.
Nina speaks from a time of great dissonance. I would argue we are still living in times like these that I would describe as oil and water. These times of separation call for a deep shaking in order to see what these energies create together. This shaking comes from a place of urgency that I feel in her voice. An urgency that found me a lot later in my life.
Before I talk about love I have to talk about Blackness and my own journey with this aspect of myself.
Blackness
I identify as Black. Not African American. Not POC (Person of Color). It’s taken me a while to get here. I come from a Black family. My parents are Black. My Grandparents are Black. But Blackness was never talked about in my family. Particularly our ancestry. This is no surprise to me due to the racism of the census process in the United States. Where are we from? What is our culture?
Due to separation and abandonment, I was not connected to my Father’s side of the family. Even now with more information and knowledge of our migration, the history of that part of my blood is hazy. My mother’s side of the family came from Arkansas and Baltimore and had settled in California 50 years before I was born.
The migration of people under the African diaspora due to violence, lack of resources, and racism is very interesting. This move switched the trajectory of my family in ways I am still trying to understand. They went from people who worked closely to the land, gave birth at home, raised and killed animals on the land that birthed them, to people who drove on paved roads, shopped at grocery stores, and were tasked with integrating into white-dominated communities and infrastructure.
In 1960, San Jose’s recorded census documented the cities population as 96% white with Black people as 1%. The largest population of non-yt people at the time was Japanese documented at 1.4%. This is where my family landed.
My maternal grandmother's family migrated from Arkansas in 1958. Out of nine of my grandmother’s siblings, only four married and had kids with Black partners, making a majority of my Mother's first cousins mixed. This was the environment for my first understanding of Blackness and family. A melting pot of many different cultures that mxnifested many shades and variations of the diaspora, gathering once/twice a year in homes with Black matriarchs at the epicenter. With cousins lighter than me and cousins darker than me, my view of Blackness and my own deep understanding of color didn’t really expand until college.
Until then it was a question of who’s who and how some people look the way they do without verbally communicating these questions, which opened me to a deep acceptance of what family is and looks like. I didn’t have two families I’d commune with, so this was my only understanding of what a Black family is and what it looks like. We didn’t talk about it. Even though we all experience varying levels of anti-Blackness within our own communities, colorism, racist structures, etc….we never talked about those things.
Assimilation
My relationship with my own Blackness is a complex one that I was only recently able to start healing with. I went to a school with very few Black people. It was one of the more diverse spaces I have been in with many students from other countries with English as their second language and first-generation students, but at the core, it was built on white infrastructure. My understanding of white infrastructure is a foundation and system that has been built to uphold the majority needs of white people, these needs at their core being white supremacist due to colonialism and the violence of white migration and settler mentality.
My school used to be an all-boys catholic school turned college preparatory school. Thanks to a scholarship, I got to attend. I don’t know much of the details about the scope of the financial aid, other than the amount my mother still had to pay required her to work more than 3 jobs during the course of my education. Not only was there a dearth of Black people, but I was also around a certain class of people that I felt distant from. Because of that, my main focus was blending in.
Navigating my own individuality as a queer gender non-conforming person was hard but I did it. I found ways to mimic, integrate, explore my own identity seemingly “outside” of my Blackness. Black culture was popular culture. Everyone had access to it, the language, the dances, the music, the movies more so held some sort of intimate audiences mainly for us…..I don’t know many yt people who’ve seen How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
People would say things to me like, “You look mixed, are you something else, you’re not JUST Black”. I registered these aggressions as social cues of how to respond with what they wanted to hear. Because of my skin color, proximity to people who are mixed, and lack of understanding around my lineage I was able to lie and tell people what I thought they wanted to hear very easily. That I wasn’t JUST.
I saw and experienced the effects of anti-blackness and racism when I began meeting men for anonymous sexual hookups at the age of 13. The ads were very straight forward. Age, Race, Height, Weight, Body Type, etc, along with pictures of my body. The men I would interact with would ask if I was mixed after sending them my pics and already specifying that I was Black as if they needed me to say, “Yes, I’m mixed”, before being interested in me. Usually, I would.
After seeing how many men had a preference for non-black men I began to lie on the ads I would post to ensure I would be desirable enough for them to want to interact with me. It would definitely work more than saying I was Black when using the same photo.
“I usually am not attracted to Black guys but you’re hot, you’re mixed that’s really cool, white or Latino only...just my preference.” This environment was toxic for my understanding of Blackness and desirability/sex. My Blackness was either fetishized or minimized in order to be palatable to not just yt men but others as well. I wasn’t able to heal and process this information until years after I left home.
It was at school at Carnegie Mellon that I was able to understand the value of union amongst Black people. In a space where we were still very few, I found family and communion amongst the Black students there. The Black actors and musical theatre majors had a tradition of holding gatherings and dinner at each other’s houses. This was very foreign to me and felt like another box to fit into when I rebelled particularly around boxes of other aspects of my identity like sexuality. So it took me actually going and showing up, hearing what the other students had to say, and talking with each other about the program that I understood.
I remember one of my friends having a conversation with me about Blackness and self-identifying me as a Black actor before I could do that for myself. He challenged me and uplifted me in the same breath. And spoke affirmations of Blackness with the same urgency that Nina Simone spoke with. I still remember his voice telling me how beautiful Black is. I needed these affirmations. I needed them to come from him. It was his words and the power of his urgency that illuminated where I needed to heal myself from the constant barrage of attacks on Black I had experienced individually, collectively, externally, and internally. I had to decolonize and heal from my own anti-Blackness directed at my own body and other Black bodies around me.
Healing
This process of self and communal healing took place in many ways. In ceremonial art we danced ancestrally with Orishas who communed with us. 3 Black actors. In communion with each other during our last show of the year before graduation. The Brothers Size. It was a portal of healing for my lineage, my relationship with my blood, with spirituality, and my understanding of the world that wouldn’t show up again until 2 years later. How was I showing up for myself and the love I needed? I would post affirmations up around my room. I am beautiful, I am kind, I am connected to the world around me, I am magic, I am confident, I am sexy, I am loved.
I affirmed myself every day, spoke these out loud, took baths, listened to my body, and followed the thread of different traumas to their sources and healed them there. A large amount of this work was done in private and processed through journaling and art.
Healing in community came later when I went to a Black Lives Matter meeting for the first time in July 2016. I went with a friend of mine who is white and we arrived at a meeting place that a thousand people also decided to show up at. They were prioritizing who would be let into the space first. Telling all the Black people to come to the front line. It was new to me to not only be self-identified Black but to take action publicly because of it. Most of my relationship with race had been reactionary up until that point.
A few days later I joined a camp of organizers who held space for 56 days collectively outside of City Hall. It was in that space that we held intentional Black-only healing circles to understand ourselves and where we were emotionally during that time. It was in that circle that I saw how hard it was for Black people to gather, not because we didn’t want to, but because the resistance met by non-Black people was so intense. It was powerful to have a space to embrace our identities together and TALK. This gave me an understanding of how I want to gather and what kind of healing spaces I want to hold.
Black Love
My desire for Black love comes directly from being able to hold space with complete strangers and still feel a deep sense of union and community based on collective intention.
When Black people gather with intention the magic of their medicine arises and allows for immense healing to occur. This magic is met by violence, by policing, and by creating environments for these meetings not to occur. This need is ignited by a swelling urgency to heal myself and my Black partners’ lineages (platonic, romantic, sexual) through deep self-love, intimacy, care, and intention. In a world that is very much fighting these relationships, depicting them as problematic, and creating a myth of disharmony around them my desire for Black love is deep and resounding. Driving me to understand what it means to prioritize.
Of the Black relationships that require my attention, the one I have to give the most attention to is the one with myself. How can I prioritize Black communities, friends, family, and lovers if I am not mending traumas I have with my own relationship with Blackness, real-time wounds that impact my navigation on this planet, and repatterning my relationship with love?
The first Black relationships I was exposed to were very complex and rooted in a pattern of toxic monogamy resulting in cheating and dishonesty with my mother on the other end of the pain these relationships caused. I saw Black relationships in my family follow this same pattern. One of the most powerful Black partnerships I witnessed was that of my Aunt and Uncle who would both describe themselves as God-fearing Christians and as much as I am thankful to have experienced ALL of these relationships to understand the variety and complexity of Black love I searched for any images/stories of Trans, Gender Non-Conforming Black partnerships.
This required me to center and seek out Black community. To prioritize being present at events, gatherings, parties, that center Black queer people — which is very hard when the congregation of our bodies is an act of rebellion against the state and met with violence. Violence in the form of venues harming our bodies, police being called, passive-aggressive neighbors, and non-black people taking up space and resources.
Still, I’ve been lucky enough to witness and participate in environments like this. It is no utopia. There isn’t a perfect blueprint that arrives when Black people gather that stimulates harmony and union. There is messiness, pettiness, and toxicity. Those things exist because we are human just like everyone else. And what I’ve been tasked with is holding space and prioritizing the healing work within Black communities while also balancing my own self and capacity for the energy involved in healing socially/publicly anywhere.
How can I show up to Black love with greater compassion than I’ve shown any other love in my life? How can I remain open to the universe and the experiences that my soul calls to itself? What ways can I love deeper in all directions while I’m on this planet?
I feel like my polyamory allows me to answer these questions for myself and release the anxiety of having to within one relationship. Or even limiting how I process relationships that aren’t at all sexual but are emotionally and physically intimate. The first relationship I’ve ever been in began a year and half ago, which propelled me into a world of dating in the open I never knew. This was the beginning of answering many prayers for myself around partnerships that I had put out into the ethers.
Because of my polyamory and non-monogamy I didn’t feel like I couldn’t be with this person who wanted to share love with me even though they weren’t Black and that Black partnership was a loud prayer of mine. I’m still weaving and desiring stability around this prayer. Calling a deep sense of understanding and communication within all of my partnerships and especially the ones with Blackness at the core.
My intention is to hold space for our own growth and love when the world seeks to silence or quench the swell of Black love, especially between Trans GNC (gender non-conforming) bodies.
My intention is to make clear my desires and attract Black lovers who are interested in the same.
My intention is to love deep and hold compassion for myself as I repattern Black love saturated with all my Genderqueer nonbinary magic.
My intention is to love myself so deeply the well is tapped and overflows in all of the relationships I’m blessed enough to experience while I’m alive. This takes me into a place for the desire to build practice for myself.
My love life is complex, the dating scene is a completely different process for a Black Trans Nonbinary person. I’m thankful for this because cis-heteronormative dating bores me… the only thing remotely intriguing and also terrifying is how quickly babies can arrive through these unions. Ultimately, I’m thankful to be able to create things I’ve never seen before with my love, with my sex, with my pleasure and share them with a world thirsty for it.
I send love to all the Black people reading this. Love to my Black communities, love to Black lovers, Black sexual partners, Black friends, and Black family. Thank you for sharing the time it took to read the thoughts of my brain. Here are some next steps I felt called to include.
XO Earth To Jordi
Loving Yourself
Practice Radical Self Love Routines: Showers, baths, massages, drinking water, day naps, visiting nature
Communicate Your Desires: sharing my intentions, sharing my goals, sharing my dreams, sharing them openly so people around me can receive
Ask for Help: “it takes a village”, talking to the local matchmakers, talking to couples I admire
Release Control: acknowledging the things I want and allowing them to take flight and return to me in ways that I couldn’t even imagine, not holding on to the expectation of anything and embracing the reality of it
Affirmations:
I deserve the love I desire!
I am in love with all aspects of myself!
I forgive myself for any pains I have caused myself or others!
I am a complex being who has the right to be loved!