We Was Kings & Sh*t!

It seems that whenever a person of color asserts an identity that is not rooted in primitive or enslaved ancestry online, a standard comment is quick to follow:

“We was kings & sh*t!”

It is meant to make anyone “woke” to the truth of their history and identity feel small. It feels like a rehearsed form of gaslighting designed to make us believe that any identity we hold other than Black is the work of myth-making—an attempt to distance ourselves from what the white gaze perceives as our traumatic reality.

It is one of the most powerful tools oppressive forces have at their disposal to keep us under the spell of BLACKNESS.

Yes, you read that correctly.

A spell is a deliberate ritual use of words, symbols, actions, objects, and focused intention meant to influence a person, condition, event, or spiritual force.

And BLACKNESS—when imposed as a totalizing racial identity—operates like a spell.

The Spell of Blackness

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about what I mean.

By the Spell of Blackness, I do not mean the cultures, kinships, resistance traditions, solidarities, or sacred practices Black people have created among ourselves. I mean the totalizing racial caste imposed through European colonial rule—the command that once a person is classified as Black, every other ancestry, nationality, citizenship, treaty relationship, and political inheritance must become invisible.

The spell does not merely name us.

It tells us which parts of ourselves we are permitted to remember.

The spell of Blackness is very much like our experience of the color black. Black is perceived where little visible light is reflected back to the naked eye. The light may be present, but the observer does not receive it.

When we take into account that many unrelated ancient wisdom teachings draw connections between light and the most Divine aspect of a human being, the comparison becomes clear.

Black identity can be seen—defined—as the byproduct of the world’s inability or refusal to see the Divine light that bridges us from this world to Source.

Another important point is that modern racial Blackness, as a social and political identity, was constructed in relation to whiteness. At its core, Black identity describes a population whose existence has been shaped in relation to white people and white interests.

Accepting this as fact is the first step in breaking the spell of Blackness.

As a divine being experiencing humanity through a melanated body, one could easily feel unseen in this world. As unfortunate as that may be, life has taught me that the true travesty only occurs when that fact impairs our ability to fully see the radiant divinity dwelling within our innermost selves.

“We was kings and sh*t” is regurgitated by white and Black people who, for one reason or another, refuse to acknowledge the truth of who they are and where they come from.

Trying to make them see the evidence-backed reality of who you are is to remain under the spell.

We release ourselves from the spell by realizing that we were, in fact, kings and sh*t.

The Kings History Forgot

History is littered with people from African ruling families who, through war, betrayal, white greed, and dishonest dealings, found themselves defined as commodities within the transatlantic slave trade.

Figures like:

• Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori—the son of a ruler in the Futa Jallon highlands of present-day Guinea and a military commander in his own right. After being defeated and captured in battle, he was sold to Atlantic slavers and resold to a Mississippi planter in 1788. He remained enslaved for approximately forty years.
• William Ansah Sessarakoo—a member of one of the most powerful ruling families at Anomabu in present-day Ghana. In 1744, his father, Eno Baisie Kurentsi, sent him aboard an English vessel with the expectation that he would travel to Europe for education. Instead, the ship’s captain betrayed the family and sold him into slavery in Barbados.
• Broteer Furro, later known as Venture Smith—who stated in his 1798 narrative that his father, Saungm Furro, was a prince of Dukandarra. Invaders tortured and killed his father, carried Broteer and other survivors into captivity, and eventually sold him into Atlantic slavery. He was later enslaved in New England.

The point is not that every captive wore a crown.

The point is that the auction block was designed to make every identity preceding enslavement legally irrelevant—and to make those identities sound unbelievable to their descendants.

Now is probably where an educated person would ask:

What percentage of “Black people” have royal ancestry, and what difference would it make today?

My Own Ancestry

Here is where I will offer my own ancestry to show just how powerful that ancient truth can remain today.

I am what many people would consider a foundational Black American: a Black person whose ancestors have been on American soil since before the Revolutionary War.

I find that label to be a bit misleading because very few of my ancestors would have considered themselves Black when this nation was founded.

Yet they all experienced the power of Blackness—meaning that their identities were forged in proximity to white interests.

Some of my ancestors were enslaved in Baton Rouge and Texas. They were surely called Negro.

Some of my ancestors were free people of color from Saint Landry Parish. They were called mulatto.

And some of my ancestors were known to be Indigenous to this land. They were called Indian.

Although I have yet to find any royalty in my bloodline, I have found kings.

And that may prove to be even more valuable.

The Kings in My Bloodline

I am the descendant of Muscogee Creek Nation citizens—a people whose identity has been formed under the most extreme pressures of whiteness.

My ancestors exchanged their homeland, spiritual identity, and even their freedom for survival. This exchange is documented through centuries of broken treaties.

Within the Creek Nation, my ancestors included enslaved individuals and slave owners alike. Like many Creek families, mine is divided on paper between “full-blood Indians” and Creek Freedmen.

This ambiguity may cause some people to doubt or question my sense of belonging and entitlement.

Ironically, it is the kings in my bloodline that give me—and thousands of others—a royal-like claim to this land.

My family’s fate was sealed in the 1866 Treaty between the Creek Nation and the United States.

Article II declared that qualifying persons of African descent lawfully residing within the Creek Nation—and their descendants—would hold:

• All the rights and privileges of native Creek citizens—not a lesser or second-class membership
• An equal interest in the soil—a share in the entire Creek national land estate
• An equal interest in national funds—including treaty money, land-sale proceeds, and per-capita payments
• Equal protection under Creek law

In 1867, the Creek Nation adopted a new Constitution that established a bicameral national legislature consisting of the House of Kings and the House of Warriors.

Each recognized tribal town, or etvlwv, elected one representative to the House of Kings for a four-year term. This was the upper chamber, broadly comparable to a senate.

Each town also elected one representative to the House of Warriors for a four-year term, plus one additional Warrior representative for every 200 people belonging to the town.

During the post-1866 constitutional reorganization, three Colored tribal towns were formally organized or officially recognized within that political system:

• Arkansas Colored
• North Fork Colored
• Canadian Colored

Under the constitutional government, these African Creek towns were represented in the national legislature.

These towns became political centers through which many of our ancestors exercised their treaty-affirmed rights. They were distinct, constitutionally represented political communities within the Creek Nation—not merely settlements or racial enclaves—and their citizens participated in national government through elected representation.

To put it plainly: because our ancestors were warriors, chiefs, and yes, kings & sh*t, their verified descendants may therefore qualify as identifiable successors to historically organized Creek political bodies, capable of seeking enforcement, accounting, compensation, or negotiated restoration where a specific treaty, statutory, or federal duty can be established.

What the Spell Has Cost Us

As a people—especially in the United States—the Black community has been forged in relation to white interests more than any other Americans, even white Americans.

In my own bloodline, the Spell of Blackness—the pursuit of white interests—shaped my ancestors’ freedom, sovereignty, wealth, and even life expectancy.

As a Muscogee descendant, my ancestors were removed from their ancestral homeland because of the land greed of white colonial settlers.

Their grandchildren were ultimately separated from the sovereign land that was “forever set apart as a home for said Creek Nation”—as well as from their power to govern themselves—through congressional actions aligned with white Confederate interests.

Their children were dispossessed from their “inalienable homes” through the coordinated effects of Jim Crow, government corruption, and KKK recruitment into the institutions responsible for protecting their rights.

And even today, their descendants are being displaced from the communities they built—through unimaginable resilience—by gentrifying white liberals.

Rising Above the Spell

Let us revisit what a spell is:

A deliberate ritual use of words, symbols, actions, objects, and focused intention meant to influence a person, condition, event, or spiritual force.

“We was kings & sh*t,” along with other tools associated with the Spell of Blackness, is designed to obscure the truth of our identities.

These tools serve white interests in a powerful way. They make it difficult for us to concentrate our power toward recovering what we are entitled to.

It is time for us to rise above the Spell of Blackness.

We do this by no longer wasting our vital life force begging for human decency from people who have proven themselves incapable of seeing us as human.

Blackness is designed to make us believe that our only pathway to human liberation is to pray for the day when white-aligned interests become benevolent enough to give it to us.

To subscribe to this is to overlook the fact that, for many of us, the tools of liberation are our birthright.

It is time we demand enforcement of everything our ancestors were guaranteed in good faith.

We do not break the spell by becoming ashamed of Blackness.

We break it by refusing to allow a racial category to consume the whole truth of who we are.

We recover the names.

We recover the nations.

We recover the guarantees.

We recover the political relationships our ancestors actually held.

The Question That Remains

Now let us consider this question:

How many Black Americans today have been disenfranchised from treaty-affirmed rights and obligations?

In 1867, federal agent J. W. Dunn identified 1,774 African-descended people whom he determined were entitled to Creek citizenship.

During the same postwar constitutional period, African Creek political participation was expressed through three represented tribal towns: Arkansas Colored, Canadian Colored, and North Fork Colored.

By the closing of the Creek rolls, federal sources counted approximately 6,800 Creek Freedmen among 18,702 total enrolled Creek citizens—roughly 36 percent of the enrolled Nation.

A recent federal demographic analysis estimated that between approximately 43,500 and 117,300 descendants of those Creek Freedmen citizens were living in 2022.

Many of them may not know, understand, or fully appreciate who they are.

And that is just one of the Five “Civilized” Tribes.

Beyond Indian Territory, the United States ratified hundreds of treaties with distinct, politically organized tribal nations across this continent.

We can only wonder how many of those nations have descendants who are now understood merely as Black individuals, while the treaty-affirmed obligations owed to their ancestors remain unfulfilled.

“We was kings and sh*t” is supposed to end the conversation.

It is supposed to return every person classified as Black to the auction block and make every identity preceding that classification sound imaginary.

But some enslaved people really did belong to ruling families.

Some people later called Negro had once belonged to sovereign nations.

And within the Muscogee Nation, African-descended citizens belonged to represented tribal towns that sent elected delegates to an actual House of Kings.

The joke was meant to make us feel foolish for remembering.

But yes—some of our ancestors were kings and sh*t.

And some of them elected representatives to the House of Kings.