What would you tell your eighteen-year-old self?
Category: Anecdotes
Life occurrences intertwined with the themes of race, gender and young adulthood. All names and locations have been changed unless noted otherwise.
What Death Teaches the Living
On July 17, 2014 my father and I found my aunt, his older sister, deceased in her apartment. She had passed days prior to our visit, much to our oblivion. We drove to My Aunt’s apartment after her nurse called my father and informed him that she missed treatment. My aunt went to dialysis a…
Dim Your Light Dark Girl: Invisibility and Black Femininity
After my first semester of teaching I was invited to meet with the department chair, a frumpy, middle aged- white woman who treated me like white retailers have my entire life–as if my presence depreciated the value of the company. She arrived over thirty minutes late for my meeting, a fact she would casually disregard…
The Burden of Blackness: Hoodies, 4a Curls and Other ‘African’ traits
I wore a hoodie to work on a rainy day nearly a decade ago. I was a nineteen year old girl working her first real job as a college student on summer break, naive to the racist perspectives others held of blackness. Upon arrival, a hispanic college looked at me as if she had seen…
My Grandmother’s Face as a Gateway to Unveiling a Conscious Beauty
The reception to a comment I made on a post last week unveiled a problem in discussing racially ambiguous beauty with regard to black female identity. Namely, my comment praised multi-ethnic or biracial beauties like the late Vanity and another starlet who shall remain nameless due to her contentious comments as of late. As a…
A Telling Exchange between a Free and Enslaved African
I read an interesting exchange in my blog this weekend. The exchange was beneath a post authored earlier this year regarding interracial dating. The comments painted members of the black collective somewhat predictably—those who understand interracial relationships as a strategy of our oppressors and those who individualize the subject and become intractably defensive. However, in…
Bon Voyage For Now, or Forever? Travel the and Temperate Escape
I journeyed to New Orleans as a college freshman in Spring of 2007. Like millions throughout the world, I heard of the damage caused by Katrina and seen the images on television of blacks planted on top of their homes with the water rising just below their feet. These images were frightening, not because of…
Why I Won’t Date a White Man
When I first started dating my boyfriend, he took me to a wharf alongside the Belt Parkway of New York City. It was the middle of the night and the city wore an unfamiliar silence as we walked alongside one another under the night sky. Our bubble of new love was abruptly popped when our…
Celebrations and Contributing to a Conscious Kingdom
I turned twenty-nine this week, and it was different yet somehow similar to all the other “birthdays” I had since turning 18. If you’re lucky, as a child a parent, sibling, teacher or caretaker will assume the burden of making your day conventionally special. As an adult, it becomes entirely your duty to make the…
Assessing the Howard Experience on its 150th Anniversary
The HBCU discussion has become a frequent component in many of my current conversations. This is partially in lieu of BET’s new series “The Quad” which issues multiple perspectives regarding the HBCU experience. My HBCU experience is scrutinized for one of two reasons. One, from those who believe that black means inferior, thus are convinced…
The Brother on the Bridge: The Miseducation of Black Suicide
“Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.”
What Teaching Taught Me
I still remember writing my cover letter for my first college teaching job. I wrote that I wished to be the example for other minority women who wish to go far with their education. While my ambitions have proved fruitful at times, as an instructor I have too often become a canvass for a persistent…
