Writer and Self-Editor: A Microcosm of the Black Identity

by Akiyah Smith

In “Start at the Beginning”, the first essay in Morgan Parker’s collection You Get What You Pay For, she talks about the shift that comes from realizing you are Black—the consciousness split. You are “broken” into who you believe you are as a Black person and who others think you are as one. To help explain the “broken” selves, she writes, “When we think “upstanding American,” we do not think of Black people. When we think of Africans, we think of hungry ones. When we think of African Americans we think of slaves”. To be Black in America is to be all of these things at once and yet nothing at the same time. Each name being indistinguishable from each other, it can be hard to find where you stand, to understand your “place”, especially as a child. There is a multistep process to begin deconstructing the ideas surrounding African-Americans and the weight of the “overpronounced hyphen, invisible and glaring”.

To grow up Black in America, then, is to constantly navigate between self-definition and imposed definition, between the freedom to be and the expectation to represent a certain way of being Black. Parker writes, “The development of a Negro child will vary depending on behaviors modeled, media consumed, lessons absorbed, and the belief systems to which they are exposed and by which they are evaluated, such that these beliefs become the standards by which the child might evaluate themselves. Perhaps their very worth.” Identity is not something naturally possessed but rather something constructed through social perception and cultural conditioning. For Black children, self-awareness develops under the weight of external judgment and inherited stereotypes. As I read Parker, I find traces of my experience and thought patterns mirrored in her words. I grew up mostly surrounded by Black people, yet most of the media and stories I consumed were white. Whiteness was both invisible and omnipresent, shaping what I thought was normal, beautiful, or valuable. Like Parker, I was unable to fully articulate the quiet tension of existing for me and existing for the white gaze. The process of figuring out my identity continues in my work as a writer and self-editor. 

The process of writer and self-editor walks the same line of expression and the pressure to conform. Writing is a way to define myself on my own terms while contending with the narratives imposed upon me. While self-editing asks you to create a double consciousness. It asks you to filter the pieces created through questions of representation: How might people read my voice? What do they expect it to say? And who does it speak to? In both roles, I’m constantly negotiating between authenticity and audience, between personal truth and social expectation. In that way, the creative process of writer-editor becomes a microcosm of Black identity, a continual rewriting, revising, and reclaiming of the self.  

Parker talks about how as a Black child your first introduction to yourself is “framed by sorrow and inadequacy [you feel] those things to be both [your] history and destiny.” Her essay pushes readers to question what it means to form an identity within structures built to distort it and how reclaiming that identity becomes an act of resistance as much as self-knowledge. “I am writing to make evidence of myself. I am doing that because, after three decades or so, I have come to realize that the self I thought I had was given to me by somebody else, set upon me a destiny with bad intentions.” I write as a way to insert myself—my people—into stories that we would have otherwise been exempt from; as a way to forefront Black people showing emotions that they’ve neglected to let us show.