Black Girl From Eugene: Just an act
3 min read
by Ayisha Elliott, Black Girl From Eugene
Ever sit in a café and cry? It’s a moment, for sure. I know everyone is going through something, and I only hope we can face it with grace and integrity. Clearly, that ability is harder to practice than it is to type, but it feels absolutely necessary.
I’m sitting in a café, writing. Writing a book, my first book ever: It is my podcast transcribed and the stories in between, and it’s wild to have your life in your own words played back to you. All the memories and feelings come flooding back at once.
I was never performing or trying to convey anything that wasn’t honest, so the experience truly resonates within my transformation. It covers the passing of my mother and of my father.
It is so deeply painful to revisit these moments in my life and the final moments of theirs. Yet, in the full weight of that loss, I know how deeply fortunate I am to have had the relationship we had. The relationship we have.
My dad was a historian, a Black man to his core, with a deep, disciplined focus on understanding and challenging the dynamics of Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism. His studies were his gift to us.
We learned more than almost any kid we knew—not the kind of learning measured by grades or degrees, but the kind that comes from spirit and that settles into your bones and changes how you see everything, a living curriculum passed down during dinner conversations, between a quick correlation in the history of jazz blaring from the car windows and our daily assertions.
There was a particular way he’d pause before he answered a question, like the truth deserved the right entrance, and the information should be common knowledge.
This week the Voting Rights Act was gutted, a move he predicted over 20 years ago.
I recall him telling me that “an act is just an act, only good until they decide to stop pretending.” I had no idea what he meant at the time.
As I grew and learned more about how institutional violence actually works and how it plays out in front of our faces, masquerading as hope and justice while serving only those who accumulate more power at the direct expense of their victims, it all came into focus.
The guise has always been: As long as you aren’t the worst, you have a chance to be the best. It’s smoke and mirrors, and too many of us have fallen for it. How did anyone become the worst? Compared to what exactly?
There were more than hints of this from the very moment voting rights were ever debated. We can trace it back to counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a human being in order to shape elections. The Electoral College. Districting.
None of it was ever designed to maintain power within the people. And we fell for it…
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Ayisha Elliott is a relational leadership coach assisting in centering introspective alignment to intention and impact, who will work with any organizations. Contact her by email: BlackGirlFromEugene@gmail.com. You can subscribe at BlackGirlFromEugene.substack.com.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ayisha Elliott. All Rights Reserved. Read by Ayisha Elliott for KEPW Whole Community News and reprinted with permission. You can follow Ayisha on Instagram and Substack.
