In my last essay,1 we talked about protection. About how your nervous system softens the sentence before anyone else can.
In this piece, we name what trained it.
I don’t remember the first time I softened my voice on the page. If I had to guess, it was probably back in high school.
That’s the thing about internalized oppression — it doesn’t feel like oppression. It feels like rigor. Like discipline. Like being good at writing.
You don’t just wake up one day and realize you’ve been policing yourself. That’s not how it works. You get interrupted. You do a writing exercise that forces you to notice what you delete before anyone tells you to. You trace it back. You remember the moment someone told you the way you wrote something was wrong — and you decided authenticity wasn’t enough. Approval was safer.
And from there, the policing becomes automatic.
Writing sentences, then deleting them before anyone sees. Using a cultural reference, then explaining it even though your community doesn’t need the translation. Code-switching automatically, your hands moving faster than your conscious mind.
You learn what gets rewarded: performance of whiteness.
And what gets punished: authentic Blackness.
The really insidious part? There’s no white English professor marking up your work anymore. No editor telling you to “tone it down.” No workshop facilitator calling your voice “unprofessional.”
You’re doing it to yourself.
The price of approval is erasure. And once you’ve paid it enough times, you don’t even need external pressure to keep paying.
White-dominated publishing has spent centuries systematically working to steal pieces of Black and Brown writers — our voices, our authority, our right to exist on the page without translation.
And because it’s so ingrained, we don’t even notice it happening anymore. The publishing industry no longer has to work as hard as when the plan was implemented centuries ago.
We’ve internalized the theft, which was the plan all along.
What They Took: A Non-Exhaustive List
They took our language.
Ebonics isn’t “incorrect or broken English.” It’s a legitimate linguistic system with consistent grammar rules, developed through creativity and survival. But writing workshops call it “unprofessional.” Editors (not me) “clean it up.” Teachers mark it wrong.
So we code-switch on the page without even thinking about it. We translate ourselves before anyone asks us to. We erase the way we actually think and speak to make our writing “acceptable.”
They took our specificity.
White stories about white people in white suburbs are called “universal.” Our stories about Black communities, Brown families, cultural traditions — those are called “niche.”
As if whiteness is somehow the baseline human experience and everything else is other. As if our specificity is a limitation instead of exactly where our power lives.
So we try to write broadly. We add white characters for “relatability.” We explain cultural references Black readers already understand. We perform “universality” which really just means: accessible to whiteness.
They took our authority.
How many times have you been called (or called yourself) an “aspiring writer”2 when other writers with equal or less experience call themselves “authors”?
How many times have editors and agents questioned whether your lived experience is “authentic enough” or “marketable enough”?
How many times have you been told your perspective is “too political” when white writers get to write politics as if it’s just craft?
They took our authentic voice and called it “unprofessional.”
Too direct. Too emotional. Too angry. Too joyful. Too raw. Too honest.
All those “too much” criticisms? They’re not about writing craft. They’re about controlling what we’re allowed to say and how we’re allowed to say it.
So we soften our edges. We moderate our emotions. We perform the kind of “professionalism” that really just means: palatable to white comfort.
They took our right to complexity.
Black characters who are flawed — because what human isn’t — get called “stereotypes.” Black characters who are successful get called “unrealistic.” Black joy is “not grounded in the reality of systemic oppression.” Black rage is “making it all about race.”
We can’t win. So we perform a kind of sanitized, non-threatening Blackness that proves we’re “one of the good ones.” That makes white readers comfortable. That never challenges anything, including our own thinking.
And in the process, we lose our full humanity on the page.
They took our capacity for opacity.
The right to NOT be fully legible to white readers. The right to write for our community first without translating every reference. The right to have inner lives and cultural practices that don’t need white approval or understanding.
Fred Moten and other Black studies scholars talk about opacity as boundary, as protection, as sovereignty.
But white publishing wants us transparent. Explained. Accessible. Digestible.
So we perform clarity that’s really just code for: we’ve made it easy for white readers to consume us without doing any work to understand our context.
How the Theft Happens
The truth: most of this doesn’t happen through explicit feedback anymore.
You’ve internalized it so completely that you police yourself before anyone else sees your work.
You write a sentence in your natural voice. Your hands move to soften it before you even consciously register what you’re doing.
That’s how colonization works. Eventually, you don’t need external censors. You’ve become your own.
The high school English teachers who marked up my essays and book reports? They’re not in the room anymore.
The instructors of the courses I took and studied my ass off to become a professional editor? They’re not in the room anymore either.
I no longer hear their voices when editing the writing of others. But sometimes I still hear them when I write. I still catch my hands moving to “fix” sentences that don’t need fixing. I still have to consciously choose not to translate.
Like many other writers, I learned early what gets rewarded: performance of whiteness.
And what gets punished: authentic Blackness.
The theft isn’t just what they took. It’s how they trained us to keep stealing from ourselves.
What It Cost Us
Every time I changed my lived experience, I practiced erasure.
Every time I explained a cultural reference Black readers already knew, I centered whiteness.
Every time I softened a sharp truth to make white readers comfortable, I betrayed my own voice.
And I’m not alone in this. Which is why I’m so committed to my work.
Every Black and Brown writer I’ve had conversations with has stories like mine. The feedback that was really racism. The “advice” that was really assimilation. The ways we learned our authentic selves weren’t acceptable.
The cost isn’t individual. It’s collective.
We’ve lost entire generations of voices who were silenced not necessarily by explicit gatekeeping, but by exhaustion. By the constant code-switching. The grinding effort of trying to make ourselves acceptable to systems that weren’t designed for us.
We’ve lost the books that would have been written if we didn’t have to spend so much energy performing palatability.
We’ve lost the radical truth-telling that happens when writers feel free to center their own communities instead of translating for white comfort.
We’ve lost the full complexity of our humanity because we learned early that complexity makes people uncomfortable, and discomfort means it’s less likely we get published.
The cost cannot be calculated.
Strategic Theft of Our Liberation
What Spirit wants you to know: what was taken can be reclaimed.
Not by asking permission. Not by proving we deserve it. Not by making ourselves more acceptable.
By stealing it back.
Yes, you read that correctly. By stealing our shit back.
Strategic theft of our own liberation.
I’m stealing back my voice — the one they told me was unprofessional (especially to be calling myself an editor and writing guide).
I’m stealing back my authority — the one they tried to gatekeep behind their approval.
I’m stealing back my right to opacity — the one they demanded I sacrifice for “universal” appeal.
I’m stealing back my language, my specificity, my complexity, my authentic expression.
And I’m on a mission to teach you to do the same. We finna get our lick back.
What We Take Back
We take back our language.
Ebonics in our narration, not just dialogue. Code-switching as a narrative device showing cultural navigation and range. Our actual voices without apology or translation.
We take back our specificity as strength.
Writing for Black readers first. Period. Not explaining shit that don’t need to be explained. Knowing that cultural references are for us, not them.
We take back our authority.
Calling ourselves writers without qualification. Standing firm in our lived experience as expertise. Refusing to prove we deserve to be here.
We take back our authentic voice.
Sharp when it needs to be sharp. Soft when it wants to be soft. Angry, joyful, complex, messy, human — without moderating for white comfort.
We take back our complexity.
Flawed characters who are fully human. Black joy without justification. Black rage without apology. The full range of our experience without sanitizing it.
We take back our right to opacity.
Writing that centers us. Boundaries around what we share and what we protect. Sovereignty over our own stories. Writing from liberation instead of survival.
This is what liberation looks like.
Not waiting for the system to change — cuz it won’t. Not asking for permission — cuz it won’t be given. Not performing until we’re acceptable — cuz we’ll never be.
So we say we’re taking it back.
Language.
Specificity.
Authority.
Opacity.
But are you? For real?
Reclaiming something in theory is easy.
Reclaiming it on the page is where the fear shows up.
If you’re still translating your cultural references before anyone asked you to…
If you’re still softening direct statements so they sound “fair”…
If you’re still explaining your anger so it feels reasonable…
You haven’t taken it back.
You’ve simply renamed the protection.
That’s the part that’s hard to admit.
White publishing trained the reflex.
But you’re the one revising the sentence.
So before you celebrate reclamation, ask yourself:
Where am I still editing for approval I claim I don’t care about?
Where am I still making my work digestible for readers who are not centered here?
And what would this paragraph look like if I stopped doing that?
Not to make it louder or meaner.
But to show — to myself — that I’m uninterested in being understood by everyone.
This is the work.
Not naming the system. That’s public info at this point.
The work is refusing to keep cooperating with it.
The next time your hand hovers over delete, pause.
Ask yourself:
Is this craft?
Or is this compliance?
If this struck a nerve, if you recognized your own hands hovering over delete, that’s not coincidence. That’s the Worthiness Wound asking to be witnessed.
Write From the Wound is a self-paced 7-day shadow work journey built for this moment. Real tools and practices for teaching your nervous system it’s safe to stop complying.
It’s $47, and you gain access immediately after joining. And it will ask you to be honest in ways this essay only introduced.
If you’re ready: JOIN HERE
If you’re not ready yet, download The 3 Wounds Blocking Your Writing. It’s free and it’s where the excavation begins: SIGN UP HERE
Who Are You Writing For — Really? - my essay on the internalized critic you’re protecting yourself from
Stop Calling Yourself an “Aspiring” Writer - my essay on why this language undermines your authority, especially as a Black or Brown writer
The piece that jumped out at me was the right to complexity. That urge to over explain is…whew.
This essay is a contemporary to Zora’s essay “What white Publishers Won't Print.” Its bout time we reclaim all of us on the page 🖤