“I Don’t Need No White Validation”: On Blackness, Belonging, And Community In The Southeastern United States

This project is an autoethnographic sharing of my embodied experiences as a black person in predominantly white spaces. Specifically, I choose to think through my (and some others whom I love) experiences in punk and DIY (do-it-yourself) spaces; these are spaces that are close to my heart, spaces that have, and can, feel like a home. Sometimes, these DIY spaces can feel like a home in which I am in a plastic hamster ball, meandering around, but feeling separated by some things, and someones, which can result in alienation. This project is concerned with working through this “weirdness” of the body and body-centered knowledges of anti-black violence in examining the contrasts between white experiences of reality and what Christina Sharpe (2016) calls “the wake,” an “afterlife” of slavery. By doing so, I hope to contribute to on-going conversations about knowledge production, black being, and ideas of community in spaces that both racialized and non-racialized (white) bodies occupy, whereanti-racist liberation is valued, but nonetheless subject to the complications and intricacies of racism and the resulting hierarchization of oppression(s).