Black History Month—
not a quiet memorial space.
It is the present.
It is strength.
It is pride.

It is the graphic shared by the Cherokee Nation
for Black Cherokees,
for Cherokee Freedmen Descendants—
and the knowledge:
these are my ancestors.
Not a footnote.
Not a side remark.
History with names, bodies, voices.

Growing up with the N-word.
With “mixed breed.”
With looks that measure,
and questions that are not curious
but controlling:
“Where are you really from?”

I know the difference between those
who are allowed to touch everything
at the Christmas market,
and me, being told:
“Don’t touch.”

I know the schoolyard.
“Come on, let’s play slaves.”
A game for some.
An inheritance for others.

And I know
the language of violence to this day:
newspaper articles
speaking of “mongrel,”
of “African blood in the veins,”
and of the “blood of Indians.”
This blood-and-soil language is old.
And it is never innocent.

But
Black History Month
is not only what was done to us:
it is what we survived.

It is the Caribbean.
Sugarcane plantations
where Black bodies sweated,
where African, Taíno, and Sephardic histories
were forced to intersect.
The blade that cut the sugarcane
could also cut chains.
And the heads of those power structures
that believed themselves eternal.

Our history—
not only labor and pain.
Resistance.
Resourcefulness.
Passing things on.

Work songs.
Spirituals.
Gospels.
Music as survival knowledge.
Wade in the water,
wade in the water, children,
wade in the water—
God’s gonna trouble the water.
This song sits in my throat.
Not as nostalgia,
but as code.
As guidance.
Still today.

Black History Month is also
pop culture, stage, present tense:
Bad Bunny’s halftime show.
A Caribbean body at the center.
Spanish. Rhythm. History.
And the sentence that remains:
The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

Love not as sentimentality,
but as a force of resistance.
As the decision to stay.
To live.
To speak.

And then there is Hagar at the well.
The enslaved, cast-out woman.
She explains nothing.
She asks for no permission.
She names God:
“You are a God who sees me.”
Not sanitized.
Not adapted.
But me.
As I am.

Somos aquí.
We are here.

Not despite our history.
Because of it.

We are here—
with scars and voices,
with songs in our throats,
with love as strength,
with pride that does not apologize.

Yet here we are—
to stay.