Drexciya, mythology created by the Detroit electronic music duo of the same name, suggests that the babies of pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard in the Atlantic effortlessly transitioned from their amniotic sacs to the ocean and formed an underground society, or Black Atlantis.
While this narrative is a myth, it explores the concept of myth or abstraction being employed as a representation of the Black experience, which is often indescribable to those unfamiliar.
The suspense when any non-Black person says something about Black people provides an out-of-body experience.
When the resident racist inevitably says something slick, an instinctive sense of collective anger overcomes me before I’m forced to show an ungodly level of restraint.
One cannot describe feeling left out of a conversation you are being invited to. It makes as little sense as the reason for feeling left out — momentarily making a quarter of my vocabulary inaccessible in an attempt to be professional (a played-out, fake concept).
The ability to instantly change personalities to one of many different versions that I believe palatable for my peers or coworkers is not something I even think about now. I was not explicitly taught to do this, it just started happening and has not stopped.
Perhaps the most unexplainable part of it all is the frequency at which these instances occur. Every day of class or work on campus features multiple Gideons thanks to an intangible set of rules and restrictions.
When parts of an experience are seemingly unreal, representations should focus on displaying that unreal feeling as opposed to creating something “real.” Accurate representation is necessary at times, but fails to capture or explain the unfathomable as Drexciya does so well.
“Abstraction has always been like a freeway, a permission slip where I can take everything I’ve been thinking about and pile it in,” Adrian Culverson said in a panel of Black women abstract artists.
This is true of abstraction anywhere, but when discussing people who have been stripped of their autonomy, essentially playing life by someone else’s rules, this method becomes a route of freedom not accessible in daily life. Freedom that can be used to accurately represent what is otherwise unrepresented.
Use of abstraction will not by any means create representations widely understood by Black people, nor should it have to as we are not a monolith.
What abstraction can do is create feelings or spaces that extend beyond the scope of what is available to us living in a world we haven’t built, something that artist Torkwase Dyson does.
Dyson uses abstract drawings to create new liveable geographies. Geographies that consider the racist-built environments Black people inhabit. The tragedy of the Middle Passage is distant, but not isolated, and modern problems need their Drexciya as well.
“From the concrete form of failed levees in New Orleans to the three 60-by-60-inch concrete sidewalk squares underneath Eric Garner, we must be able to interrogate current infrastructure with new design solutions to advanced environmental conditions with our political and material futures in mind,” Dyson said.
Whether crafting equitable solutions or rewriting narratives, myths and abstractions should be utilized by Black artists to grapple with the strange idea of nearly the entire world, or places affected by colonialism at the least, hating us for our skin color.
And to those who aren’t artists, lie to non-Black people when you feel like it. They probably won’t understand the real things you have to say anyway. 
Gideon Fortune is a 21-year-old mass communication major from New York, NY, and entertainment editor for The Reveille.

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Courtesy of Gadgets Arena