Wayetu Moore Flower Garden In October of last year, a 12-year-old Liberian boy named Jacob Gray was beaten into a coma in a Philadelphian neighborhood while walking home from school. The boy was immediately hospitalized and has since significantly healed from the brain swelling and broken ribs, but still remains mentally, physically, and emotionally scarred from the vicious attack.  Gray’s disorientation was inflicted by a group of young African-American males who all reportedly screamed random cultural slurs such as “go back to Africa!” while they beat him. The irony of this is that forty years ago, it was African-American children that were being beaten and told to “go back to Africa” by white parents and white children who slung racial slurs and imposed the same harm and misfortune upon them. The challenge is this: If American ideologies are so far removed from the best interests of black people that the culture has successfully trained people of color to hate each other and subsequently beat each other up; spiraling into a cesspool of self-hatred, misery, and disassociation from its members, how is the black race to ever find or obtain global consistencies in health, pure democracy, and freedom? And with this disconnect and subsequent bondage, how is the black woman (a sub-group of the precedent) ever to find consistencies in identity, esteem, and love? I do not discredit, or know, the personal experiences of black women that have been victimized by other black women. There are always two sides to every story. One side perceives that the other is cocky, bewildered, and undesirable. The other side claims that the first is ignorant, malicious, and vain. What I can gather, however, from my own personal experience, and the fact that I can identify with most cultures of the African Diaspora, is that we are all at the bottom of the barrel together. Whether or not we choose to realize it, the outside world sees us and they see the same thing: a black woman. They don’t see a writer, daughter, dancer, friend, believer, activist, or lover. They see our mahogany first. And we have to work nine times over to show them the things that their blurred vision won’t allow.   Shaken by Gray's story, and by the realization of how black people, and further, black women, lack knowledge of each other, I decided to do something about it. My friend and classmate Ashleigh Staton and I began a “coup”—The Coup Magazine —in an effort to bridge the gaps of ignorance and desired disassociation between women of the African Diaspora.  That includes African, African-American, Black American, Black European, Black Asian, Black Australian, Black Indian and West Indian women.  How can these sub-groups listed possibly EVER be unified, or even consider such a thing without being taken aback by the thought?  By this: we are all tulips. The tulip is the only flower that continues to grow after it has been cut from its root.  The tulip is the only flower that continues to grow after she has been taken from her home, sucking all that she can out of breathing water, trying all that she can in life until no years of breeding or selection alone can redeem her.  We are ALL tulips.  We are all caught in a desperate pursuit for home, self, and equality.  And though we have managed to keep growing, to keep reproducing ourselves, and to keep finding ways to squeeze all that we can out of the little water we are given, we need each other to survive just one more day.  We need each other’s motivation and stories. We thrive off of each other’s strength.  We lay in beds of roses, whose scents perfume the world, whose beauties stand restlessly within themselves, envied to a fault.  We lay in beds of roses, but we are tulips.  We are all refugees from environments of rough winds, that still, by the grace of God, grow effortlessly, surpassing normalcy, rewriting definitions of ourselves, and surviving though always seventh best.  Always last.  Always the displaced that await their day of rest in a cool place.  In a safe place.  Let us survive together.   — October 2006 Copyright © Wayetu Moore