Columnist Jalynn Harris

Recently, I tried googling “Are Black people Aliens?” to see if the internet could provide any clarity to why I feel like E.T.’s first cousin sister. But mostly I just fell into a pit of anti-Black blog posts justifying slavery.

If you read my column last semester (shouts out the haters, couldn’t do it without you UNC Fan 1), you followed my six-month trek through Azanian soil, or more colonially known as South Africa. Transitioning from Cape Town to Chapel Hill is in the realm of Alien Politics. A column of this size cannot get into the intimacies of Alien Politics, but I can throw out some definitions for you to grapple with.

Alien is generally used to describe people who belong to a foreign country, a negatively connoted term demarcating who does and doesn’t belong in a space. Walking through Chapel Hill, faux fur coat, painted lips, my womxn Black body can make me feel galaxies far from home.

Afro-pessimist theorist Jared Sexton says, “Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space.”

Black bodies across the diaspora experience an intergenerational embodied displacement. Entering into the intentional process of reclaiming such a scattered self can only be done in Black communion. But more so the quote shows how this attempt at communing with one’s selves is inherently counter-culture.