I’m thinking this morning about how much of our Black feminist politics of refusal do not take into account the ancient world before the onslaught of the transatlantic slave trade.

It’s understandable that we spend lots of time in that historical portal. There are millions of ancestors who need to be venerated, there. And, I also think that it’s important to develop discernment between veneration and the inhabitation of perpetual sorrow.

I want my refusal to embody and perpetuate Afro-indigenous knowledge, first and foremost. This includes sorrow and it also includes the deep encoding of joy and resolution.

This is not to say we should put a blanket “we were all kings and queens!” statement on everything and use this, for instance, to skip over grief, justify blind ambitions for money or fame (not to mention the gender erasure that statement perpetuates); or that we should ignore the world “as it is”; I just think there is too much emphasis in Black femme refusal politics on the world “as it is” and the sorrow about its failures — that is a refusal that stays stagnant in merely opposing the status quo. Which keeps us beholden to it. It produces a spiritual gridlock that imprisons us inside of the Theater of the White Imagination, and I’m not here for that.

My politics of refusal are framed first by refusing the white imagination altogether through (re)claiming and (re)connecting to an ancient, ancestral-based Knowing that essentially has nothing to do with the modern world. I call this “re-indigenziaiton” rather than what I used to say, “decolonization,” (🚨 NEW LANGUAGE ALERT!) because of the oppositional nature of the prefix “de”. I’d rather move toward something (“re”), than perpetually move away (“de”).

My politics of refusal is/are founded in remembering what the world was Before White Imaginary dominance. It is Earth-based, Afro-indigenous. Spirit-filled. It does not purport to believe this was a “perfect world” without conflict, war or absent of greed; because that also denies my humanity; but it is certainly a world that recognizes the symbiosis between ancestors, the living, and the yet to be born.