Inside the mind of a kind of quirky, pretty stubborn, way too opinionated, twenty-something, heteroflexible Black female newly employed up-and-moved-to-DC Princeton GRADUATE who's just trying to sort out her life. An uninhibited celebration of all that is me, this blog is an exercise in self-discovery and live-with-your-heart-wide-open-ness. Though I make respect a habit, I will not always be politically correct, and I believe in the power of making audiences uncomfortable to inspire change.
"How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber
stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of
synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me
from another person?"
--Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Choosing Pancakes and I, along with some of our other friends, were having a conversation last week sometime which briefly touched upon the concept of the self as body v. the self as something like a soul. She seemed quite surprised by the fact that I don't believe in somethings-like-souls. And I think that very little of that disbelief is due to the fact that I associate the term "soul" with religious indoctrination, or religiosity at the very least.
I just don't see where something-like-a-soul comes in. To the best of my knowledge, everything that I am and have been and will be results from combinations of nature and nurture--that's genetics and the biological aspects of my body and mind that I don't necessarily understand on one hand and ecological processes, the spaces and places and sociocultural situations I've found myself in throughout my lifetime on the other. I have nothing to convince me that some other person with the same biology and who has been through the exact same set of everyday lived experiences as I have been through wouldn't come out to be me (though I suppose I have nothing to convince me that this hypothetical person would be me either).
What am I, really, essentially? I am thoughts in a brain in a body in a particular social location in a world. I am memories. I am hopes and dreams and decisions and emotions. I am a mind. If a critical difference lies between the term "mind" and the term "brain," then perhaps there-in lies the "soul," but I don't know that I buy that. I could fathom calling something the "soul" that is actually the sum of one's lived experiences that have come to shape who and what they are, because that's the only thing I can say is essentially me, but I feel like that's not what my friends were talking about. The better terms for what I'm talking about, I suppose, are the "self" in the social-psychological sense, or the "self-concept" or "identity" in a sociological sense. I am me by a series of happy and unhappy accidents. I could have been anyone. Anyone could have been me. That negates the idea of a soul, in my mind.
I was reminiscing about our very brief session of middle school drinking games on Thursday night, in which a very good friend of mine asked me why my ex and I broke up. And I sighed and I told her exactly what happened, and then I let her comment on how ridiculous it was, and then I delved a little deeper into what I think we did wrong as individuals trying to be a couple. And contrary to when I clung onto T for dear life immediately after we broke up, or when cried into the phone during all of M's lunch break, or when it felt like K was the only glue holding me together, or every single thing I blogged for the next month...it didn't hurt to talk about this. I wasn't actively suppressing any emotions. There was no choking up. I didn't want to cry; in fact, if someone had suggested that this might be too difficult for me to talk about, I would have laughed at them. And I don't think it was just because I was a little drunk.
So, thinking out loud, I tweeted:
It's weird when you're totally over a situation. Last night, [Choosing Pancakes] asked me about something that had me torn to pieces over the summer, and
I could just lay out the facts like it was something that had happened
to someone else. I'm not that person who was so hurt anymore. #growth
And she responded:
@SuchAnAfroholic In one way, that's comforting, but in another way, it worries me that everything becomes ... less meaningful?
And I replied:
I don't think I could function if everything that ever happened to me retained its original meaning throughout time and space.
Could there be "moving on"? Could I "get over it"? I feel like
distancing oneself is a necessary component of development and growth.
She said:
but then that makes me feel stupid for feeling things so intensely now, like i'm exaggerating.
And that is so totally, completely, and thoroughly the opposite of how I ever want to make anyone feel that I had to try to remedy it.
I think that feeling things intensely in the moment is incredibly
important. Those kinds of rushes and losing ourselves in things are
the moments we feel most alive and like what we're experiencing matters.
It's like we're artists, and those moments are when we're
painting. We get lost in the colors and the strokes and in creating this
glorious thing. But when we're done and it's hanging on a
wall somewhere, we have to be able to step back and say, I could have
done this differently or next time I'll do this instead. We can
still be proud of our work, but if we stay in that fever of creation forever, will we ever grow as artists? I'm dubious.
I took a short break to confirm that my extended metaphor was working, then continued:
Then I'll say that, to the best of my understanding, most brilliant art arises out of intensity. But art is expression
in the moment, and an opportunity for communication and reflection once
the moment has passed. I don't think it loses significance
from the intense-creative-expressive period to the thinking-reflection
period; on the contrary, without a period in which we can view
it somewhat objectively and understand the process and plan what to do next, why would the intensity matter at all? It would be
giving and giving and giving OF ourselves without ever giving back TO ourselves.
She liked my metaphor. I do too, a lot, so I figured I'd share. Also, I would like to formally retract a statement I made when I was still anti-Twitter about 160 characters not being enough to drop knowledge.
Me: Yup! It'll be my two year blogging anniversary next week!
W: *looks at me quizzically* You've changed a lot since you started wearing your hair like that. (By "like that" he means in its 3c/4a kinky-curly natural texture, rather than fighting losing battles with flat irons and humidity on the daily.)
Me: This is me. I just finally started letting it show.
I have heard these things in real life, I swear. And not just from White girls, but people of various non-Black-woman race/gender combinations. "It's almost like you're not Black" is actually too close to home; I'm writing about times that has been said to me in my personal memoir on Blackness for my Comparative Literature class. Fuck other people feeling like they have some sort of authority to tell me what I'm supposed to be as a Black woman. Hell, even as a person. But to go along with the theme of the video, I shall reveal what I believe is the most ridiculous thing a white girl has ever said to me:
"It's like I'm a big Black woman trapped inside a skinny white girl's body!"
She later became a dear friend of mine, but saying this like the second time we'd ever met? The opposite of cool.
...except maybe a good dance, but these things are erotic in different ways, I guess. A good conversation makes me want to keep you around for a while, whereas a good dance makes me want you right now and then I don't really care if I see you again. A good conversation is enticing.
I saw S, one of my oldest friends, for the first time since early September last night. We had the obviously necessary catch-up conversation about how school's going, how surprisingly unweird relations with my ex are, and what kinds of jobs I'm applying to and where on my end, and how moving out of his mom's house is going and whether he likes his new job on his end, and Thanksgiving plans and fabulously boring love lives on both of our ends. It was touching to listen to him protest to me applying to jobs in faraway places like Chicago and California, and when we hopped in the car for a late night Wawa run, I realized that there was one other thing that has developed in my life of late that he should know.
Sitting next to him in the semidarkness of the car, I mulled over how to bring it up. I opened my mouth and closed it again without saying anything. You shouldn't deliver bad news while someone is driving. You also shouldn't do it once they're back in your dining room enjoying a turkey bowl and donuts. You shouldn't do it while you're exploring etsy together, and you shouldn't do it after he yawns and says he should be getting home. Life is full of inopportune moments for this conversation. Is there a right time? How do you say, best friend from childhood, who once made my mother a macaroni necklace for Kwanzaa and whom she often refers to as her favorite son (my little brother's existence notwithstanding), my mom has cancer?
Compounding all of this is the fact that I'm not entirely sure I need to tell him. Does he have to know? (Of course, when something happens with him, I tell my mom and she is genuinely concerned. I know that he would care.) I just...this isn't a topic for casual conversation. I'm not at a point where I can discuss my parents' illnesses in the context of catching up with someone. I wish he read this and just knew; that's how everyone who knows but E, K, and my dad found out. I feel like a hypocrite having shared this with people all over the internet, but some things feel too close to home to be shared with people I distinctly feel as though I'm losing touch with. I don't want this to become one of our regular topics of conversation. I want to stick to safe topics. I want our most complicated things to revolve around our love lives or how this process of trying to grow up is going.
I don't think I'm going to tell him, unless we somehow start talking about my mom and some sort of seamless segue seems possible (which seems highly unlikely). And maybe that signifies all sorts of terrible things about how I'm letting my friends from childhood/adolescence go in favor of my Princeton friends, many of whom I'll probably let go over time in favor of the friends I form in later places and times. Maybe there's a level of emotion that I can't bridge with them anymore; maybe we're just not close enough for them to need to know everything about my life anymore.
And I don't really think I need to feel bad about this. It seems...like a natural consequence of personal growth and relocation. This post may seem like a counterargument, again, but...I feel like it's different talking about the details of my life with people who haven't known me and my family since elementary school. And if that's unfair...life's tough. Get a helmet. (Boy Meets World ftw.)
Everyone still has TIME for each other. I think I had forgotten what it was like to have a whole group of girls gathered in a circle around my room eating snacks and having hours-long conversation about boys/relationships/love/sex, fears, being a woman, the future, ways we think we'd raise our hypothetical children, insert-anything-else-under-the-sun-here until damn near 4 o clock in the morning. This is bonding. This is how friendships are made and cemented. This is part of what I want to always remember about college. I used to have roommates (three of the four girls in my room tonight used to be my roommates), and this kind of thing happened often, but since we all moved into singles, my girl-talk has been mostly one-on-one or (don't call me a traitor) with guys. (Guys can girl-talk surprisingly well. Many of my closest male friends are incredibly insightful, oftentimes in very different ways than my closest female friends, and I value that more than they may realize.) I am so tempted to say that nights like these somehow ARE college. They're the quintessential experience I'm not sure it's possible to have under other circumstances. Even when you feel like the conversation keeps circling back to earlier points/roadblocks and going nowhere. Even when you feel like it's the entire room against one or two of you. Even when shots are fired at a member of your group and everyone else falls all over themselves laughing. Even when inside jokes/knowledge are exchanged between certain members of the group, leaving others out. I was in a philosophy class for 25 minutes once. I couldn't do it. I prefer my philosophy to be of the 4-am-exchanged-between-friends variety.
How do we ever lose time for this? Why do classes and homework and things with deadlines take precedence? When does this time for each other and stimulating conversation become a waste? It didn't always when we were roommates. What do these walls (read: buildings) between us do to us? How do we make it stop?
This is reblogged from The Good Men Project, and I would like to rename it "How to Talk to Ignorant People about Life," because it is a widely known fact that not all White people actually need talking to about race, and there are people of every social category imaginable that need talking to about SOMETHING.
"1. Do not debate. Declare.
I’ve come to realize that debating is just another derailing tactic.
If you come across a white American who wants to argue, cloud the
issue, split hairs, etc., then you’ve reached the end of the
conversation – period. Social justice is not a cult; it’s not your job
to “convert” people. They have to choose to either be a decent human
being or to support the racist colonialist system that is America. (<---- THIS. RIGHT. HERE.)
If they talk a lot about their “opinions”, end the conversation.
If they ask you if you really do experience racism, ask them why they’re asking you that.
End the conversation if they start with lines like,
“I can’t imagine”
“I refuse to believe”
“I just don’t see”
And no, you do not have to be nice about it. 2. Racial discussion is not an “exchange” of ideas.
This isn’t about what we can learn from each other – this is about
you learning from me, and you’re already behind by four centuries. 3. Do not end racial discussions on a positive note.
If white people end racial discussions on an optimistic,
the-future-is-bright note, they’re happy, they feel absolved, and they
tell themselves that things “will eventually work themselves out”.
That’s why they have to leave these discussions bothered, troubled, and
deeply perturbed.
We don’t get a slow, gentle, candy-coated introduction to the pains
of American racism. Never have. White folks shouldn’t get to either. 4. Maintain realistic expectations.
What leads to frustration is most of us operate under the misguided
notion that intelligence is all someone needs to learn something.
Learning, in fact, requires additional components to intelligence, like
consistent practice, research, recall, overall self-discipline, and a
need for the absolute truth of things. White privilege conditions much
of this out of most white Americans by the time they hit puberty.
5. Stop being afraid.
You don’t need white Americans to like you – if they cross the line,
make them uncomfortable. We have already overcome and survived a lot in
this country and contrary to popular belief, we did so with an
overwhelming lack of support from white America. So do not doubt your
worth or tone down your voice or temper your strength.
If you’re being dehumanized socially, assert yourself and walk way.
If you’re being dehumanized occupationally or academically…lawsuit.
Tolerance is a bullshit term, and we need to stop tolerating from hereon
out, online and in real life – period. 6. Stop referring them to Tim Wise.
Since referring white people to Tim Wise as their introduction to
social justice hasn’t had the necessary effect, stop doing it. Instead
refer them to David S. Reynolds’s “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who
Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” (2006)."
My [female heterosexual] boss: You should be a model. Me: *blushes (you know, without any actual reddening of the skin)* *smiles widely* *covers smile with hand* Boss: I'm serious! I always look at you and I don't want you to think I'm just staring, but you have a beautiful face. You should be in magazines. Me: *hasn't taken hand away from face yet* Thank you! Boss: Why do you seem so surprised? Me: ...That's just not something I hear often. Boss: *looks like she's confused* You've never thought about it? Me: NEVER. Boss: Well you should! Now get out of here, you're too cute!
I'm keeping my job throughout the school year, at more hours than I originally figured were possible, and my boss thinks I'm hot but isn't hitting on me, so I kind of believe her. And that lady I talked about before compared me to Billie Holiday again today.
I don't know what's going on, but Life, if you can hear me, feel free to send some more of it my way.
I know you meant well. Or at least, that you didn't mean me any harm by what you said. I must admit, it was slightly amusing watching you struggle to dig yourself out of this hole you realized you'd inadvertently dug. It led to an interesting discussion about the differences between "white culture" (after questioning what exactly white culture is and whether it can be separated from mainstream American culture more broadly) and Jewish culture--you tried to draw an analogy between my personality:blackness::Jewishness:whiteness, and really, I want to commend your effort. I guess majoring in Psychology, Philosophy, and Economics makes you more attuned to the reality of cultural sensitivities and how to handle them with finesse more than most of my non-ethnic-minority friends. And don't worry, you're far from the first person to say this (or something similarly-themed) to me. I just a) hoped I had embraced my blackness enough in college to dispel such observations, and b) can't help but feel as though I should be offended, either on my own behalf, on that of black people as an amorphous group, or both. I cannot blame you--and am not trying to--for your statement because, as I learned during the Black Solidarity Conference this year, even [at the very least some, a concentration of whom I interacted with at Yale in February] of my peers and current race scholars don't see me as fitting into the larger overall picture of blackness either. But don't think for a second I'm condoning this, because I'm not. The fact that lots of people, even insiders, do this, does not in any way make it any more acceptable, or any less racist. So, friend, peers, scholars, larger world, I must again beg you to reconsider the apparently negatively themed definition you give to blackness. Who are you excluding from that group, and why, and what do you presume gives you the authority to make those cuts? I ask you to remember that race itself is a social construct, an idea that our forefathers made up to promote white privilege and deny persons with whom they were uncomfortable (or did not even consider to be persons) the rights of citizenship or even simply the rights of man--sure, it's one made visible by the color of my skin, the texture of my hair, the breadth of my nose, but again, these are all things that human beings themselves defined as fitting the construct of blackness, not inherent distinctions.
We struggled to define white culture when trying to establish Jewish culture's distinctiveness. I would like to raise the challenge that black culture, and (though I know little about it, everything I know about the world as a sociologist or even as an observant member of society leads me to believe that) even Jewish culture cannot be limited to one narrow definition against which to pose some other narrowly defined cultural group. Every mainstream culture has a counter-culture, usually multiple counter-cultures. There is always an underground, a counter-movement, even the smallest of revolutions. There is always someone who is unafraid to open their eyes, see their surroundings for what they really are, and say, "Hey, wait, this isn't what I want. This isn't correct/right/fair/justified/appropriate/normal/what-I-should-be-striving-for." There is always someone pushing for change. So, I have more rock on my computer than hip-hop/rap. That doesn't mean I can't spit a T.I. verse back at you, and it doesn't mean I'm not black. I will never fight someone because they scuffed up my sneakers, most likely because I'm in a cute pair of flats. That doesn't mean I'm not black. I have owned exactly two pieces of clothing from a "black" clothing brand in my lifetime, and they were both from JCPenney on clearance. (I can't turn down a good deal.) That doesn't mean I'm not black. I'm not a great dancer--I learned how to two-step less than two months ago and I cannot (and may never be able to) pop or lock (though I can drop it). That doesn't mean I'm not black. Enunciation and complete complex sentences define my natural linguistic structure; while that might make my 6-year-old cousin interrupt Thanksgiving dinner to start the following exchange:
V: Maya, why do you talk like that?
Me: Talk like what?
V: All...proper.
it doesn't mean I'm not black. I am and will continue to become highly educated at very elite universities, where my study of blackness and black peoples should not separate me from them. That doesn't mean I'm not black. I disdain of the use of the word nigg- by any and all persons, much in the same manner that I disapprove of faggot and cunt and a lot of other entirely inappropriate derogatory terms. It doesn't mean I'm not black. I don't like collard greens, but I won't eat macaroni and cheese that hasn't been in an oven and trust me, your sweet tea isn't sweet enough for me. This doesn't mean I'm not black. I don't have fake gold hoop earrings with my name in them, but again...I think you're getting the picture here.
I guess the more significant way to approach this is to examine what means I am black, besides my aforementioned skin, hair, and nose. 1) My recognition of the history this country tries to hide and the havoc that history and its hidden status wreaks on the black population even in 2011. 1b) My disdain for the term post-racial, no matter how you're defining it. Like my homeboy Brother West says, Race Matters. 2) In my house, Santa and Baby Jesus were both black, and though I didn't grow up to believe in either of them, I learned to see the world from a black person's perspective. I learned about the black tax (which I still believe in), and I learned the importance of remembering where you came from, because no one else is going to. I learned Kwanzaa and sweet potato pie and the foods you have to eat on New Year's to bring good fortune. I learned everyone from the Temptations to India.Arie. So I would like to take this time, world at large, to throw your assumptions about my cultural background back in your face. 3) In line with your mainstream negatively-themed ideas of blackness, world at large, which I do not agree with but feel the need to address, I am no stranger to struggle. I know what it is to be on food stamps. I know what it is to have the electricity/water/cell phone cut off due to nonpayment of the bill. I know what it is to not have food in the house. But knowing all those things taught me to dream, taught me to work towards a goal, taught me dedication and resilience, and combined with a lot of luck, those things have made me successful. Fact: either success nor lack of it are definitive of status as a racial minority. 4) R&B/Neo-Soul is my favorite genre of music, which is just as rooted in the black community as hip-hop. 5) My ideal breakfast features grits. 6) AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, I am black because I SAID SO. Honestly, that's the only reason you should need. Because this is an identity I have adopted as belonging to me and people like me and lots of people who aren't like me in many ways EXCEPT for their adoption of this same identity. If the work I'm just beginning on racial identity and college students has taught me anything, it is that beyond being a social construct and a category that people will try to place you in no matter what, race and your identification with your race is a choice. Whether that choice is manifested through organizational involvement, circles of friends, or something as simple as being the little guy's advocate in a classroom debate, it is an active decision. It is a decision I have made, it is an identity that is important to me, and while I certainly don't want it to be the only thing you categorize me as, I do want you to stretch your notions of blackness to include me. In fact, today, tomorrow, and every day until you concede, world at large, I will do nothing short of demanding it.
because she makes an active effort to include me in post-amazing-meal-my-Nana-has-prepared discussion among the adults. As the only person in my local family who falls into my age category (ahhh, emerging adulthood constantly on the brain. Thanks, JP), I usually end up curled up on the couch in a corner reading and observing this conversation from afar. But now, she asks my opinion on things, or will direct something at me, and it is slowly having the effect of pulling me into the "adult" category of my family, as opposed to downstairs with the kids. But when I want to, I can still dip out of the conversation and return to my book and my couch. It's nice, I like no longer being isolated, but not having to be totally included either. Oh middle ground. :)
