I was born in exile. Wanted by no one, belonging nowhere. My life has been a quest to belong, while owning some sense of dignity and respect. And in belonging, to somehow find meaning. So, I have consistently interrogated my own identity and the environment that shaped it. However today in this American moment I am lost and alas still in exile. I didn't know the world that I was coming into. Some say that we choose the lifetimes that we will lead.

I don't know. It's complicated. I would've chosen a world without religion or divisions of race or gender or sexual orientation or class. I would have chosen a world where we could be with who we wanted to be with physically and spiritually without societal taboos. Instead, I found a world where we walk in lockstep behaving according to societal norms and entirely afraid to disrupt the status quo. We are a nation and a world of cowards. Enter Donald Trump. He knew that we were a nation of cowards.

So, it was very easy for him to bully his way to the presidency of the United States and to tromp all over civility on the way there. We were so married to the rules of decorum that we couldn't realize when an enemy of the people was truly among us. Our collective marriage to etiquette killed America. Marginalized and disenfranchised populations always knew that the only way to be heard was to make noise. To live out loud. To disrupt. If African Americans were loyal to the rules of civility, we'd still be slaves today. Harriet Tubman helped overturn the apple cart when she ushered enslaved Africans from lands of bondage in the southern US to lands of freedom in the North.

Martin Luther King, Jr. helped lead a revolution during the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Panther Party figured out that White folks only respected the bullet and the fear of death; so they donned black berets, black leather jackets and shotguns to storm major metropolises throughout this country, while administering self-help within ghettoized communities. That is the America that I entered. I was born in 1963. I was raised in a cauldron of fire and shaped by JFK, MLK, RFK, Lyndon Johnson, West Philadelphia, the Black Panther Party, nightly Vietnam telecasts, the Black Church, the Beatles, the Stones, Motown, the Weather Underground, Jesse Jackson, hippies, yippies, the Nation of Islam, the '60s, the '70s, the KKK, the Brady Bunch, white citizens councils, Vernon Jordan, arts and culture immersion, the Partridge Family, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Earth Wind and Fire, Stokely Carmichael, Howard University, RUN DMC, Stevie Wonder, Watergate, presidential resignation and assassinations.and so it goes. But most importantly I was shaped inside of a nation dedicated to White Supremacy.