To a man as gifted with words as he was with people Espoused to justice Awarded an eternal flame of …
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 Happened When I “Came for” Cardi B.: The Cardi B. Conscious ClapBack
I’ll be honest with you, I never intended to author a post on Cardi B. The post reflects an aspiring writing seizing an opportunity to practice the skill to which she has dedicated my life. Before I continue, I want to state that I do not regret anything that I posted. I do however regret…
Well Don’t Read it Then!: An Accidental Lesson in Communal Ethics
Last week, I was assigned the task of editing a manuscript of a now popular piece of literature or poetry. The assignment failed to satiate my desire to be consumed in blackness by offering no black authored texts for edit. Although certainly not in the same position as my privileged peers, the assignment awoke…
White Delinquency and the Black Scapegoat
I write from a place of extreme frustration. I will eschew implementing the term anger as my term of choice, because “angry” has become synonymous with black emotion. Particularly, “anger” has become banal in compartmentalizing justified black emotion/action, and white extremism in “response” to what conventionally functions as anger. I write this piece as an…
The Stride Toward Consciousness, A Play With Many Acts but few Characters
Making the choice to continue my education has unveiled a slew of surprises and stresses that affords me a literal and figurative headache after each class. The implicit and explicit racism of the white, and non-black students “of color” does not surprise me, but the behavior and ideologies of the black students implemented as intellect…
Gentrifying The Black College, Deferred Dreams, and Institutionalized Ambitions
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…
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?
Whispers of a Womanist 