How 'The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill' Taught Me To Love Blackness

Language advisory: This story includes a racial slur.

If he could see through the propaganda which has been instilled into his mind under the pretext of education, if he would fall in love with his own people and begin to sacrifice for their uplift — if the "highly educated" Negro would do these things, he could solve some of the problems now confronting the race.

—Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)

Let's love ourselves and we can't fail
To make a better situation

—Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)

So, I'm going through a bit of a nigrescence. You heard of it? It's a thing. My sister, a psychology professor, has diagnosed me as being in "the process of becoming black." William E. Cross developed the theory to account for "the identity transformation that accompanied an individual's participation in the Black power phase (1968-1975) of the Black Social Movement." His model has since been applied to other minorities, like African and Caribbean immigrants to the United States. I'm that newer kind of nigrescent: I'm a Zambian who moved to Maryland in 1989. Growing up, I often worried I wasn't black — because my father's