More "Trauma-Free Blackness" Please

An excerpt from CNN - 

We need more 'trauma-free Blackness.' Here's a start

There are vast regions of Black life that are filled with joy, romance and beauty. Here are some favorite examples.

By John Blake

I was scrolling through Facebook one evening when I noticed an odd image that someone had posted on my page. It was a screenshot of a solitary Black man on roller skates, freeze-framed in the middle of a country road flanked by horse pastures.

As I clicked on the video I braced myself, expecting to see a Black person being brutalized by police or accosted in public by White strangers. But that's not what I saw.

The man flashed a wide smile and he started to dance. He had a gray beard, but he skated like someone 20 years younger: rolling his shoulders, shimmying his hips while Mary J. Blige sang "Not Gon' Cry" in the background. Soon I was smiling, too.

The video had no caption, but I had a name for what I was watching: It was a snapshot of what I call "trauma-free Blackness."

Here's my wish for a new year: more trauma-free Blackness.

Last year was a rough one for most Black people. We watched videos of Black men being brutalized or killed and read about Black women fatally shot in their homes by police. We've watched a pandemic devastate our community. At times I, too, have felt exhausted by what one writer calls "the relentlessness of Black grief."

But my boogie-down skater buddy reminded me of something I had almost forgotten: There is a Blackness that exists outside of trauma.

There are vast regions of Black life that have nothing to do with suffering or oppression. We lead lives that are also filled with joy, romance, laughter and astonishing beauty, but those stories don't tend to grab the headlines. It's time to change that.

What follows are my favorite examples of "trauma-free Blackness" -- striking expressions of Black life that aren't filtered through the lens of racism.

I also asked my CNN colleagues to join me in creating a list of our favorite trauma-free moments. To do so we pored through movies, TV, music, art, literature, internet memes and other slices of Black culture. It's by no means an exhaustive list -- just a good place to start.

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/trauma-free-blackness-culture-queue/index.html