Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear, I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise, I rise, I rise.-
Still I Rise” -Maya Angelou
Dr. Ayanna Marie Amoke Blackmon-Balogun
Black Public Service Announcement: We have added a new ancestor to the libation roll—Reverend Jesse Jackson. His passing during the centennial year of Black History Month feels like alignment. His words still ring: “I am somebody. I am beautiful. I deserve to be protected and respected.” That affirmation reminds us to walk boldly in our Blackness.
Now, to RLAM—Phase 3: Separation and Isolation.
My Nigerian name is Amoke—“one to be cared for and cherished.” My Ghanaian name is Akosua Nyarkoa—a Sunday-born woman, “Dove.” I received both names while in Africa, during seasons when I removed myself from America to find clarity. Each name marks a return to myself. Each signifies care, protection, and peace.
While on the ground of the Motherland, whether in Nigeria or Ghana, my body and spirit aligned. I could imagine without interruption. I could create without fear. In that stillness, I envisioned one of my most successful gatherings, A Queens Meeting. On my most recent trip to Ghana, I clearly saw the Racial Liberation Ascension Model (RLAM) take shape as a Black Paper. Isolation was not emptiness—it was expansion. It was the first time I fully experienced my own existence without negotiating it.
By contrast, living inside colonized norms—where Blackness must constantly defend itself—wears on the psyche and the body. Phase 3 begins when you can no longer move as you once did. You cannot “unsee” oppression. You now see with faith, intuition, and spirit. You understand who you are, whose you are, and where you stand in history.
This knowing creates distance. Not superiority—protection. You separate to guard your peace and preserve your contribution to the work. You stop falling for mass confusion. You recognize the difference between assimilation and liberation—and you choose freedom.
THE SCIENCE OF SEPARATION AND ISOLATION
Separation is the process by which spent stages of a rocket detach to reduce weight and allow remaining engines to operate more efficiently. Each stage’s separation is precisely timed to maintain momentum and ensure the vehicle continues on its intended path.
In rocket science, there is a silence more profound than the roar of launch. It comes right after Main Engine Cutoff—the instant when the rocket stops fighting gravity and begins trusting guidance. The first stage, those fiery boosters that carried it through the densest air, falls away. Separation rockets ignite briefly, pushing the spent shell aside. The protective fairing—the armor that once guarded the payload from the atmosphere—breaks apart and drifts into blue.
What remains is lighter, more precise, and infinitely more vulnerable.
I think of liberation this way. Ignition opened my eyes. Launch taught me courage. But now, at this altitude, awareness alone cannot carry me higher. The air thins; the pressure changes. The tools that lifted me no longer sustain me. The old ways—compliance, performance, the need to belong—begin to suffocate. And so, as every rocket must, I release what can no longer fly. I fly vulnerable and isolated, but FREE.
Every rocket must separate from its boosters to reach orbit. Every soul must release what no longer sustains its flight.
Separation and isolation are not failures; they are the laws of ascent. A rocket isolates to preserve trajectory. A soul isolates to preserve truth. The fairing jettisons, meaning the outer shield that once protected the rocket now falls away — not because it failed, but because its work is done. What once protected now constrains. What once sustained now slows. When the air thins, it breaks away—not in defeat, but in devotion to purpose. Its protection was never meant to last forever.
I breathe deeply, bless the boosters of my past—the mentors who shaped me, the movements that molded me, the armor that kept me safe—and I let them fall away. This, too, is science: the physics of faith, as we have seen in each phase of this existential journey toward liberation.
THE METAPHOR OF SEPARATION AND ISOLATION
There is a sound that follows separation. It is not the scream of engines or the applause of ground control. It is a silence so pure it almost hums. In this silence, you will feel the ache of distance. The ground that once held you is far below. The familiar voices fade. What remains is just you—suspended between gravity and grace.
It is within Separation and Isolation that one begins to acknowledge their own journey of knowing and as they dive deeper into themselves and history they realize they cant ever go back to the way they moved in spaces, the way they responded to situations, the way they see the world. It has become clear that tools of oppression, colonial ways of thinking and knowing, policies and historical practices go directly against who you are and who you are becoming.
Because you have a firm understanding of who you are, whose you are, your history, identity and path into liberation, you can’t “unsee things” but you possess “insight” to things using faith, intuition and the spirit. Consequently, this knowing causes you to separate from the majority and isolate yourself. This isolation is not because you are better, this isolation is to protect your energy, your spirit , your peace and your future contribution to the work. A person in this phase is actualizing their place and taking up space to contribute to the collective good.
Point blank and simply put, you don’t fall for the okey doke of misunderstanding and you are not on the bullshit that everyone else is on. And you are ok with that because you know the difference between liberation and assimilation. You have chosen to make strides toward your own freedom and that of others, in spite of the risk of going alone or without the people you had hoped would be accompanying you on the emotional journey.
This is what I call holy loneliness. Every seeker of truth meets this space. Moses knew it in Midian. Jesus felt it in the wilderness. Harriet walked through it in the woods. Baldwin wrote from it in exile. To speak truth in a world trained for silence is to enter an atmosphere where few can breathe.
Loneliness, I’ve learned, is the tax on vision. When your sight sharpens, your circle narrows. When your clarity deepens, your comfort diminishes. But loneliness is not punishment—it is purification. It strips away the noise so you can hear the whisper of your own calling.
When I began speaking more boldly about race, power, and liberation, invitations changed. Doors that once opened quietly closed. Colleagues shifted in their seats. The air got thinner. I mistook it at first for loss. Now I know it as lift.
Separation always sounds like silence before it sings like freedom.
WHAT WE KNOW
In earlier phases, there was a thirst for knowledge—a search to understand historical wrongs and reclaim self. In this stage of separation and isolation, we begin making sense of it all by shedding the “stuff” that hindered our continuum of knowing. Old frameworks fall away. Outgrown language dissolves and new language emerges. This separation allows us to stand confidently where we once shrank. It becomes a “know that you know”—an undeniable alignment between your spirit and your understanding. Your “re-claimed” presence embodies what you know and people sense it.
At this level, you recognize divisiveness, deflection, and distraction as patterns of oppression. You find language to name what is happening, even when others dismiss your clarity as “conspiracy” because it challenges the status quo.
Liberation takes shape in your thinking and being. The question is no longer whether racism exists, but to what depth and degree it is embedded in systems and oppressive policies—and how much harm it has caused. You see how Jim Crow and redlining devastated communities while the prison industrial complex generated profit for others.
By this phase, my eyes had adjusted to the light. I cannot unsee what I have seen. Racism is not only structural—it is atmospheric. It moves through institutions, partly feeds capitalism, coded as “professionalism,” “civility,” “fit.” It regulates tone, dress, and diction. It decides whose intellect is respected and whose is dismissed as “passion.”
Whiteness operates not as color but as curriculum—training obedience to standards never meant to affirm our humanity. Excellence, measured by colonial norms, reveals itself as constraint disguised as aspiration.
Yet I also see lineage. I see how our people refused erasure—through sermon and song, through hush harbors and ring shouts, through art and story, through drumbeats that outlived the ship.
Liberation, I now understand, is not rebellion against oppression—it is reunion with truth. It is memory returning to itself. This knowing burns illusions. Once consciousness expands, there is no returning to shallow belonging.
I know who I am. I know whose I am. And because of that, I move differently. I no longer perform humility to soothe discomfort. I no longer pretend neutrality in the face of injustice. My vision is sharp. My lungs have learned thinner air.
WHAT WE DO: ACTION AS ALIGNMENT
In this phase, action becomes boundary. I start saying no. No to panels that tokenize. No to committees that dilute truth for comfort. No to partnerships that want Black presence without Black power. No to people (family, friend or colleague) who don’t add value to the journey. Each “no” recalibrates purpose.
Some separations are gentle—quiet withdrawals from what no longer fits. Quiet moments of centering, focusing on self and times of pouring into your spirit. Choosing to be silent, meditate and resist instead of answering ongoing calls for our bodies to operate in violence and noise. Other times of separation are sudden—a slammed door, a withheld invitation, a silence heavy with consequence. Yet, I must refuse to chase what demands my smallness as the price of admission.
I choose engagements with precision. I give my words where they can water something living. I turn toward what affirms wholeness. I stop auditioning for rooms that cannot hold my light.
Some of us rename ourselves—(Re)claiming African identities, ancestral languages, spiritual names whispered by elders. Others (Re)claim the cadence of our voices, our laughter, our rest. Our rest proclaims our resistance. We unlearn apology. We rediscover Sabbath. To some, this looks like rebellion. To those refined by fire, it is clarity. This phase names that rebirth out loud.
It is also a season of boldly calling out and confronting the “isms” that constrict us—naming systems and acting for collective return. Action here is movement building and sacred space making. We align with organizations, people, energies and spaces that affirm who we are becoming.
And once the shedding of useless ”weight” is done, we build—differently. Not for recognition, but for resonance. Not in crowds, but in constellations—small clusters of light signaling across distance. Movement grows quieter, wiser, rooted in rhythm instead of reaction.
The work remains movement building, but from higher ground. We design spaces—initiatives, classrooms, collectives—that hold truth without fracture. We form ecosystems that multiply rather than mimic. Our “no” clears the field so the right “yes” can take root.
Separation is not retreat. It is reorganization. What looks like isolation is alignment with divine order—a remembering of who we are and how we are meant to build.
THE RESEARCH JOURNEY: BLACK EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE DEEP WELL OF KNOWING
Research in this phase is no longer isolated to academics—it is excavation. I dig not for data but for self. I study systems, yes, but also the soul within them. And I do so largely alone. Within the Separation and Isolation stage of this freedom journey, you seek out information that will assist you in analyzing local policies and pathways that move the freedom consciousness and liberation work.
This is the loneliest study: when books become colleagues, ancestors become faculty, and truth pulls you from the crowd. Writing becomes a refuge. Solitude is not emptiness—it is initiation.
Frantz Fanon teaches that liberation thinking is written in exile. In Black Skin, White Masks, he exposes colonization’s psychological violence—the oppressed forced to see themselves through hostile eyes. Decolonization begins in the mind. Separation is psychic before political. One must leave the internalized master to reach the liberated self.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues in Decolonising the Mind that language is captivity. The colonizer’s tongue rearranges reality. To reclaim mother-speech is rebellion. Each time I reach for Sankofa, Ashe, Ubuntu, I practice that return.
bell hooks reminds me that love is the practice of freedom and research is relational. To study our people without love reproduces harm. To love justice without applause is a scholar’s faith.
Marimba Ani, in Yurugu, critiques Western “objectivity” as fractured—intellect severed from spirit. She permits rigor to include intuition and ancestry. Separation from Western epistemology is not abandonment of discipline; it is reclamation of ceremony.
Assata Shakur and Angela Davis model principled isolation. Confinement became curriculum. Clarity required standing apart. Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah insist vision must become structure—faith meeting framework.
Across exile and refusal, a pattern emerges: separation sharpens. Black epistemology is not a canon—it is a conversation across oceans, living in drum and text, protest and prayer.
So when I sit alone with these voices, I remember: I am not alone. Every page is libation. Separation is preparation for collective ascent.
CULTURAL MEMORY: THE MUSIC AND ART OF LONELINESS
Our ancestors left a symphony for this phase—an archive not of notes, but of knowing.
When they sang, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” they were not complaining; they were consecrating. The song was a coded prayer, teaching breath beneath bondage. The earliest field hollers—those cries across cotton rows—were sonic flares against isolation: I am here. Call and response became communion. Even separated, we harmonized across distance.
That is how we survived diaspora. Rhythm became signal. The drum was outlawed because it carried language and resistance.
The blues inherited that ache. Each twelve-bar lament was diagnosis, not despair—mapping exile and making loneliness legible. Jazz followed—our first sound of flight. Solo and ensemble, separation and sync. Miles made silence a note. Coltrane turned sound into prayer. Jazz proved loneliness could swing.
Gospel named God as companion. The spirituals sang exile yet bent toward reunion. Hip-hop continued the lineage—turning absence into anthem, solitude into testimony. It built family out of frequency.
Visual artists did the same. Romare Bearden’s fragments formed coherence. Jacob Lawrence painted migration as pilgrimage. Elizabeth Catlett carved endurance into form. Art became strategy—memory in motion.
Even hip-hop carries that lineage. It was born from absence—abandoned buildings, discarded records, disinherited youth—and turned scarcity into sound. The DJ looped a beat to fill a void. The MC narrated the solitude of the block. Tupac’s question, “Do you see the real me?” is less performance than plea. Nipsey Hussle’s lament, “Who detached us?” is not rhetorical—it’s theological. Both are psalms of a people asking what it costs to be whole in a world that profits from their fragmentation and isolation.
In the hush between notes, the ancestors answer: You are not alone in your aloneness. Cultural memory is the communal cure for isolation. So when separation aches, I remember their symphony—harmony from rupture, prayer from pain. And I listen.
CODA: THE PRAYER OF SEPARATION
When the noise thins and the air grows still, I discover silence is altar. What once felt like exile now feels like embrace. The quiet has a pulse. The solitude has a song.
I do not shrink to be understood. I do not bend to be accepted. When I refuse to dilute my light, that is separation. When I guard my “yes” with a sacred “no,” that is devotion.
Every ascent requires a shedding. The rocket releases what first carried it. The soul releases what once defined it. Not rejection—refinement.
There are nights when memory calls me back to smaller rooms. But I have tasted another altitude. Separation is not absence. It is alignment. To let go is to lift. To release is to rise.