It is mid August, over six months after I got some unexpected news that I believed would take me closer to my dreams. After four years of writing, studying, and working at white institutions as a part- time college instructor I was admitted into a doctoral program at a historically black institution. People had doubted…
Category: Anecdotes
Life occurrences intertwined with the themes of race, gender and young adulthood. All names and locations have been changed unless noted otherwise.
A People Divided: The Diasporic Dissonance of the Dark Race
A Recurring Query “Catherine Saunders” stated my soon-to-be seventeen-year-old student in a desperate attempting to portray a conspicuously scripted conversation as natural. I felt a familiar feeling that foreshadowed where this conversation would go. So, I silently exhaled and tried to relax my muscles from an anticipated tension. “Are you mixed with Indian…
Twenty-Five Years A Slave: Identity, Intersectionality, and Cultural Realization
Carol was a physically beautiful girl. She had tanned dark skin, dark eyes, and thick, curly hair. Intrigued by black culture, and even more so by black men, she sought to consummate her sexual curiosity by juxtaposing herself to black women—seemingly hoping to outshine black femininity with a presumed exoticness. Yet, somehow her invitation to…
To Save a Slave: Consciousness, Ambivalence, and Social Responsibility
I write from a place of intense but familiar disheartenment. A feeling that only accompanies the stresses of being black, proud and hopeful that these feelings will prove contagious. While the state of the black collective is a general cause of concern given our systemic programming to self-destruct, this post will focus primarily on the…
Things I Would Tell My Eighteen-Year-Old Self
What would you tell your eighteen-year-old self?
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…
