Black to the Future

DNA RESEARCH HAS been a sacred journey of mine for the last 10 years. What started as an exercise in building my family tree evolved into a global adventure unearthing my West African roots. Little did I know that more than 50 percent of my ethnic heritage traces back to West Africa through Nigeria, Benin, and Cameroon (connected to the Bamileke people).

The African roots of the Puerto Rican story often remain obscure. Like many Puerto Ricans, I was taught a one-dimensional story of my heritage. Puerto Ricans often, with beaming pride, share their connection to the cultural heritage of Spain or their Indigenous roots, namely the Taino Indigenous peoples. But, for many, the African strands of identity are held at a distance, even suppressed like a muted djembe beat.

West African influences undergird many parts of Puerto Rican culture, beginning with our food. One of our signature dishes, mofongo, is prepared by mashing plantains and adding liquids to soften them, which is a technique that hearkens back to Angola. Bomba, Puerto Rican folk music, derives from West African drumming and inspires a vibrant conversation between drummer and dancer, a form of call and response. Bomba was created in the Puerto Rican towns of Loíza and Santurce near the coast, where many enslaved Nigerians arrived.

In the United States, West African influences can be found in jazz, bebop, and even some of the musical structures used in hip-hop beats. American culture, to some degree, now more openly credits the Black influences on musical icons such as Elvis, and it more readily acknowledges rock and roll’s roots in the blues. Yet we experience pushback from within many spaces of whiteness on Black cultural thought such as critical race theory and intersectionality, frameworks that accurately describe our world of racial inequality.

To laud the vital, even foundational cultural contributions of Black people casts light on the image of God in Blackness. Christian theologian Justo González, in the “Hispanic Creed,” wrote that “God [was] made flesh in a person for all humanity / God [was] made flesh in an age for all the ages / God [was] made flesh in one culture for all cultures.”

God continues to be made flesh through the cultural contributions of Black people across the globe. One of the most forward-facing examples of this is Afrofuturism, a movement that leads with Black imagination and possibility for our world through the arts, science fiction, aesthetics, and queer rights, with a reclamation of Black joy. Afrofuturism recognizes that oppression attempts to stunt the possibility of imagining a future of flourishing for Africa and the Black diaspora. In light of this, February is being claimed not just as Black History Month but also as Black Futures Month: a way of not only celebrating the contributions of the past but also becoming hosts to real-time cultural brilliance toward a new future. In other words: On earth as it is in Wakanda can be made flesh in our world today.

To be able to imagine a brighter future is a spiritual practice that can lead to a better world for all who are oppressed. Black culture is leading the way back to the future.