The effect of monolithic blackness

Over spring break, my mother, sister and I all went down to Panama for the week. We did our touristy things, traversing Casco Viejo for two days before going to a resort and sitting out in the sun for the next few days. This was our second trip down to Panama, and it felt completely different from the first.

This second trip was the first time I didn’t feel like my blackness was nullifying my Panamanian cultural identity. I definitely couldn’t say the same about my first trip.

The first time we went, the trip had a much more important and personal significance. It was the first time my sister and I ever got to the see the place our paternal grandmother called home.

Because my paternal grandmother died before I was born, I had always had a very disjointed understanding of Panama. It was a place of mystery and intrigue for me, personified by a woman that I never knew.  I don’t really remember my father’s aunt, and my grandmother’s sister, my Auntie Tia, never really talked about Panama when my sister, my cousins and I were growing up. My father left the country when he was 3 years old, so he was never a real wealth of knowledge. My great grandmother isn’t particularly forthcoming; she left Panama when my dad was in high school to live with his family and never really looked back.

I grew up not feeling attached to my Panamanian roots. For a long time, I felt I was only Panamanian in name. It was always a fun anecdote for ice breakers and get to know you games.

My Panamanian roots felt like a vague addition to my very African American experience of life. I think I always felt that way because of how the idea of monolithic blackness permeates black culture.

Because of the way in which the black community was stripped of its original African cultures and languages, we are homogenized as one thing.

Taking the cards as they were dealt, black people since have created such a dynamic and beautiful black American culture. To no fault of their own, the black community in doing this had their cultural representation manipulated by the white dominated society. Think of the narratives that exist about black people, think of the ones about Asian people, Latinx people, Native people.

The monolithic idea of blackness plays into stereotypes about us. So anything that goes against that stereotypical viewpoint of black people, ones that black people buy into as well from time to time, is looked at as odd.

My Panamanian heritage felt very loose. Even though all of the Panamanians I’d ever met up until the point I stepped foot in Panama were black, it was easier to just define myself as solely a black American than claim my father’s culture and my grandmother’s country. It was easier for everyone to play into the monolithic and stereotypical idea of American blackness than to subvert it by claiming that black people and their language, experiences and cultures aren’t in a vacuum.

When I went to Panama for the first time, I had the ability to confront my own aversion to labelling myself as something other than solely this canonical idea of “black.” I was able to see black people moving around the streets of Panama City just living their lives in a place where black people are considered just as Panamanian as everybody else. That is when it dawned on me that I could and should live in my Panamanian heritage. I should claim it because it is mine to claim.

I felt more self-assured of my cultural diversity in blackness. The idea of  monolithic blackness plagued me for so long that when I was finally free of it, it felt like coming home.

We should really be throwing away this idea of blackness being one thing or another by starting to contextualize blackness as part of our image of the greater Spanish-speaking world. In doing so, we can start to challenge the stereotypically narrow viewpoint that we seem to try to fit black people into.