CAAS just isn't going to be the same without him...

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

When I saw the call go out for students to participate in his tribute video on campus, I felt like I had to participate, even though they were looking for students who had taken multiple classes with him and I'd only taken one. My first African-American Studies class. The first time I ever had a class with an instructor who looked like me. 

I firmly believe this man is responsible for fundamentally altering the course of my life, and besides what I conveyed in that video, he will likely never know the impact he had on me. How can one measure the effect of being exposed to Du Bois for the first time? Of first reading bell hooks? Of knowing that someone you watch on television knows your name and will take the time to talk to you when you run into him at the mall? 

I started asking questions like I'd never asked before with this man. I stopped taking the world the way it was presented to me for granted. I felt this rush of wanting to learn that was long-forgotten and refreshing at the same time. No one else inspires me like this man has inspired me.

So I can't help but feel like Princeton has lost something precious. But at the same time, I know that CAAS will keep doing big things, because the entire department is chock full of superstars, many of whom may have been struggling for room to shine. 

Neglected to post this when I first discovered it

But it's still awesome:

I went to Princeton, bitch!

Not that I'm thinking about next year's Reunions already, but...

Tiger leggings! Want!

Reblogged from 18° 15' N, 77° 30' W »

 

But as much as I want to say it's impossible

to let go of a place (and/or people) that made you who you are, I can't without feeling dishonest. To some degree, I have already done this. I think about the people who were my best friends in high school: TJ, PD, and RB. These guys were my whole world. We were on the phone for hours every day, hung out after school and on weekends at each others' houses, passed notes back and forth in the hallways... I would have been hard pressed to tell someone about myself without talking about them. Those friendships and the way I developed while I was in that tiny group was, at the time, entirely indicative of who I am. If you'd asked me then, I couldn't imagine not being friends with them any more at X point in the future.

...And now I barely even talk to any of the three of them. PD and I stayed the closest throughout the past four years, but even that closeness is like, months and months of not talking and then a very long and emotional catch up session, often in person. TJ and RB and I are still all totally cool with each other. We hang out in groups when we're home and it's really easy to fall back into familiarity with each other, even as we change, but that bond we had is gone. The people we were then are gone. Erased. Forever. Changed immutably by the new places we've gone, experiences we've had, people we've come to know and love and define ourselves according to our relationships with. I don't regret being the girl I was when that was my life, but I also wouldn't want to go back there for a second, even if it meant regaining those friendships and that experience, even though they once occupied nearly the entirety of my heart. 

There are friends from high school with whom I did keep in fairly regular contact during high school: TN, SH, and FO. TN and SH are the two people in the world I've been closest to for the longest period of time, and though our friendships have gone through lots of changes over the years, I'm pretty damn confident they're going to be my friends for the rest of my life, though the contexts and contents of our friendships will change. FO and I didn't really become friends until after high school, when I was already in the process of undergoing substantive Princetonian change, so he fit right into my "new me" life with all of my friends from school.

And then I changed from the person I thought I needed to be to be a Princetonian (aka "Freshman Year Maya") to the person Princeton actually made me. Remember, in the acknowledgements of my thesis, I thanked the University as a whole "for introducing me to myself and allowing me to reintroduce myself". In so many ways, from what's on my head to what's in it, from what I wear to where I am, from intellectual development to more intimate ones, I feel in this moment as though I was never in my life as "me" as I am now, as these four years have made me. 

...The only thing that keeps tripping me up is this: I don't feel like four years ago, when my family sat on the bleachers at Oakcrest High School for my graduation like we did for my little sister on Thursday, I would have told you that I *didn't* feel like myself. Perhaps, had I already absorbed sociological/psychological language, I would have said that I often felt like a passive participant in the construction of my self. If I was feeling particularly introspective, I could have told you I didn't feel like I was my WHOLE self with anyone. But even that didn't make me feel like who I was wasn't "real", even if that realness was separated into bits and pieces to be shared in different spaces. So if that self was real and this self is real, but somehow to a higher degree than the old self because I'm actively working to make and maintain the person I am now, then there's no way of knowing whether in 2, 5, or 10 years I'll still be this self. Well, okay, actually it's a pretty sure bet I'll be different in a lot of ways, but will I look back on these old blog posts and still recognize myself in the person I am now? I don't know.

And that terrifies me. Not because I'm afraid of change or because I absolutely love the person I am now (though I am pretty happy with myself, if I'm being honest), but because I don't want what happened with my friendships with TJ, PD, and RB to happen with my friendships with KS and EY. I'm scared that my deepest closest most intimate friendships are the ones that are most vulnerable to falling apart when I undergo deep intimate change. I mean, it makes sense, right? When the whole of who you are is wrapped up in this friendship and then the whole of who you are changes...I think only time can tell whether the friendship is strong enough to stand the change.

But you know, I think there is one thing that I share with my college friends, both the closest of the close and just the people I'm good friends with (hell, and even with all the random internet people who read this blog), that I didn't have with even my closest friends from high school. It's a word I toss around in the classroom a lot. It's a word that interests me when you put an identity category in front of it or the word "politics" behind it. With these people, I feel authentic. I don't feel like I'm taking on roles I don't want or playing up some aspect of myself to fit in...I feel like I just kind of came along and laid myself bare on a table or something and they were like cool and rolled with it. I don't ever feel like I'm frontin', and though I would never have been comfortable using the word frontin' four years ago, I couldn't have said that about the vast majority of my closest friends from home at the time.  I was able to be vulnerable with those people like I am able to be vulnerable with these people, but not wholly, not in all the ways I needed to be. I wasn't able to be strong when I needed to be with them either, sometimes. I had to pretend sometimes, like I don't know. Like I don't want to in the future. Like I refuse to in the future.

So, am I going to stay absolutely as close with my best friends from college as we were in college for the rest of ever? Of course not. That's absurd. We're in different places and leading separate lives and off on our own great adventures. We're going to figure out how people in "the real world" make friends and make new best friends in our respective places. I certainly wouldn't be upset if EY and I talk every day like we did when she studied abroad junior fall, but I'm certainly not going to demand it either. The demand I will make is that I never want to fall out of touch with the people who mean the most to me right now. I never want to not know where they are or what they're up to; I don't want it to be weird if I call/text/email/facebook/tweet them on a whim. I also want to let myself grow in ways only DC can make me grow, like Princeton made me grow in ways only Princeton could have made me grow. There's no point in starting a new chapter if you don't give it the opportunity to affect you deeply, right?       

Princeton = over? Error: Does not compute.

So after experiencing the biggest party in this hemisphere (judging by amount of Bud Light purchased) for three days at Princeton Reunions--the events of which included a more intimate reunion of my own with [name-redacted], hayyyyyy, a ridiculous amount of free alcohol, a surprisingly large amount of time spent with non-Quad friends, and the P-Rade which will actually go down as one of my favorite things about Princeton*, Princeton kept the party going for seniors with three full days of events celebrating us and our collective accomplishments. 

On Sunday, there was the baccalaureate ceremony with speaker Michael Lewis who told us to recognize when we're claiming domain over all the extra cookies and learn to share (#everythingIneedtoknowinlifeIlearnedinkindergarten). There was Pan-African graduation, a beautiful ceremony to which my family rolled 14 deep, making me feel surrounded and overwhelmed by love (but which also served as a moment of me feeling "not Black enough" because I'd actually never heard "Lift Every Voice and Sing" sung in full before, let alone know the words). There was the Step Sing, a tradition in which the entire class gathers in the biggest archway on campus to sing together, and during which we sang "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan as a tribute to our being 90s babies and "Closing Time" by Semisonic so that we could remember that "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end".

On Monday, Steve Carrell spoke at Class Day and prompted our University president to make at TWSS joke. We granted honorary class membership to my favorite dining services employee who works in the dining hall I called home freshman and sophomore year, which made me really happy. Unfortunately my family wasn't able to be there for Class Day because my mom's nurse needed to come change the dressing on this tube thing she's got going on for blood drawing and medicine giving, but they made it up to Princeton for the African-American Studies and Sociology receptions. AAS spoiled us with pins, really nice messenger bags with the logo and tons of pockets, and a soft warm-looking sweatshirt with the logo on the front and a quote by Brother West (who couldn't bear the thought of Princeton without The Great Class of 2012, evidently) on the back. I learned that I didn't graduate with honors at the SOC reception, but I gave surprisingly few fucks. Monday evening, FO, TN, SH, and my little sister trekked to campus to accompany me at senior prom. Look how pretty we are:

And then Tuesday was our actual commencement ceremony, which having both sides of my family together for made as drama-packed as possible. The ceremony was quite nice, and Aretha Franklin was there! They gave her an honorary doctorate in Music. Surprise! We walked out of the Fitz-Randolph gates (not even close to my first time after accidentally breaking the superstition last year...not graduate in four years, my black ass...anyway) and to our departmental receptions to pick up our diplomas and have the University buy us alcohol for the 5th time in 6 days. And then it was like, well, party's over! Time to pack. You need to be out of here by noon tomorrow. You ain't gotta go home, but you gotta get the hell out of here... Tuesday night consisted of packing, a very extended dinner with some pre-Quad friends at PJ's Pancake House, being filled in on the details of CC's life, some tearful goodbyes, and more packing. We shifted from celebrating to wiping away the tears so quickly. 

And now I'm home. I've been home for 4 days, minus a second trip to DC to find a place to live yesterday. I've been home and wrestling with the idea that Princeton is over. This thing by which I define myself but don't want to be solely defined by, has come to an end. 

...And then I was catching up on the blogs I follow and came upon a post of RG's about how "Princeton" his life still is a year after graduation and, while I totally understand him saying he needs a break from that, it made me let out this huge sigh of relief. Who was I to think that Princeton was over just because I up and graduated? That the "Orange Bubble" extends only as far as the Fitz-Randolph gates? I'm moving to city with the second largest concentration of Princeton alumni in the world (the first being NYC). I have no doubt that I'm going to get involved with the Princeton Club of Washington on some level--remember, I don't know how to be in a club without helping to run it, lol. I know a few recent alums who live/work in DC (BK, RG, AM, YN, JG), and know that there are more I'm not friends with yet but could be! And I also know that now that we're on that #grownperson #salaried status, distance doesn't have to mean the dwindling of friendships. EY will see me in Denver before the year is out. KS and JB will get sick of me taking weekend trips to NYC. 

To make a long story short, it's absurd of me to think that something as huge as Princeton could "end" just like that. No one in the world keeps their college experience going the way we do (#highestratesofalumniparticipationontheplanet). It's only over if I want it to be over. And come on now...me? Want it to be over? #onceaTigeralwaysaTiger #PrincetonBlood #2012forLife                                                  

I've decide to come out and say it. Full disclosure, right? I'm...a feminist.

A lot of you might be looking at me like, "Well duhhh." But until very recently, I purposefully did not align myself with "the feminist movement". Distancing myself from it was a conscious political decision on my part. I had bought into this idea of feminism as a White woman's thing, concerned with getting them out into the working world while Black and Brown women took care of their kids and no one took care of our kids. I saw feminism as a perpetrator of racism, classism, homophobia, and various other -isms in their focus on the horrors of sexism. And yes, I knew of the existence of feminists of color and of "womanism" as a concept (a concept unrecognized by spell-checkers everywhere, but a concept nonetheless), but I suppose I regarded these feminists sort of like I regard Black Republicans, as entities that fundamentally confuse me, and I rejected Womanism because in my limited understanding of it, it was caught up in religion and y'all know I don't do that.


But then, out of a combination of curiosity and ChoosingPancakes's urging, I took a class this semester called Ain't I a Woman? Women of Color and the Politics of Feminism. I had taken quite a few things that are cross-listed with Gender and Sexuality Studies before, as you might expect, but nothing that dealt so specifically with feminist discourse that has emerged from marginalized populations. During our first seminar, we watched a video that featured some women who espoused a lot of feminist notions but adamantly refused to identify as feminists, and while some persons in the class were condemning them, I totally understood. I had "feminist tendencies," but damn if I was gonna identify as a feminist because I didn't like the history of that word. A rose by any other name, right? Why did it matter if I didn't call myself a feminist if I still fought for the rights of women (and all people more generally)? 

Then we read Benita Roth's Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave. Roth shows how these movements were all interrelated and grew out of and from and through one another. She also shows that particular strains of feminism, especially Black feminism, really seem more like the general human rights activism that I have always identified with. I was intrigued. Then we read bell hooks, who made her theory quite accessible and suggested in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center that marginalized populations have a sort of backwards privilege towards understanding the way oppression works because we so often experience it in myriad ways. By this point in the class, I understood liberal feminism as saying "Women and men are equal," radical feminism as saying "Women and men are different, but those differences shouldn't stigmatize women,"' and hooks as saying LOL HOLD UP WAIT A MINUTE ALL WOMEN (AND MEN) AREN'T EVEN THE SAME AS EACH OTHER. *intrigue grows* If there's anything I can always get behind, it's some good old intersectionality. (Shout out to Bonnie!) hooks said feminism is for everyone and redefined it as "a movement to end sexist oppression," and when it was noted that sexist oppression cannot be ended without an end to all of the other oppressions that plague women, I started to warm up to this "feminist" idea.

Then we read this awesome anthology called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color which had stories and testimonies from lots of feminists of color and I identified with so much of what they said. We read Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis, who comes at feminism from a Marxist perspective and brings in so many of the class issues that worried me about feminism. We questioned the role of academics in feminism, as well as the tensions between scholarship and on-the-ground activism, the concept of "truth"(s), and why we've been taught to devalue experience as a source of knowledge. I was really getting into this stuff, to my own surprise. I got to write a paper about Erykah Badu as a source of Black feminist thought and it was awesome.

We asked the kind of crazy questions with no answers that I live for, like "What's the difference between objectivity and generalizability?" or "How do we know it's normal to group ourselves?" and a HUGE one for me, "How do you have unity and diversity simultaneously?". We read things that were half in English and half in Spanish, like Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands, and felt what it feels like to be linguistically excluded from scholarship/activism in your own favor. We read Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment and discussed the matrix of domination, the way very diverse experiences can come together under it, and the idea that everyday survival can be a form of activism. We talked about the fetishization of the idea of the individual genius, when really the overwhelming majority (if not all) of thought is produced in dialogue. We talked at length about the politics and power of self-definition, and I realized I was falling in love.

I had to miss the week we read Audre Lorde because my thesis was due in three days, so I am saving her as a treat for when I miss academia in the coming months. The few things I've read by her in the past (mainly "Uses of the Erotic" and some random quotes) suggest that I will wish she had adopted me and raised me as her own. We read about Third World Feminism and talked about how essentialism arises both within and outside of communities, how people with colonialist mindsets often totalize minority populations, taking some aspect or attribute of a subset of the population and characterizing the entire population as having that aspect/attribute, the notion of cultural authenticity and how to reconcile it with generational changes, and internalized sexism and how patriarchal culture is not always enforced only by the patriarchs. We asked more questions that make me want to moan with scholarly/activisty pleasure: What happens when we bring labioplasty in the US into conversation with female genital mutilation in sub-Saharan Africa? How does that change the "cultural" arguments that are usually made about female genital mutilation? When do we consider things disabilities or abnormalities instead of recognizing that everything exists on a spectrum?

Our last week of class, I gave a presentation on an anthology called Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, and even though those women were all about my mom's age, theirs was a feminism I could totally get behind. It raised issues like the lack of truly safe spaces in any human interaction, feeling like a particular identity of yours isn't "enough" for an identity-coded space, feeling like your birth family isn't the family that can best support you, the politics of the "people of color" label, colonization in interpersonal romantic relationships, sacrifice, the lack of space for mixed race persons in the White/poc dichotomy so often presented, feeling like you can't be fully yourself in identity-coded spaces, accountability, gentrification, HIV, hip-hop and empowerment, the intersections of motherhood and class, the subtle-ization of racism, the politics of femininity and femme-ness, the politics of sex-positivity as a woman of color, guilt amongst the successful daughters of unsuccessful parents, etc. etc. etc. It's a book I'm torn between selling back so that I can get more money to furnish my apartment and keeping because I want to have it on my bookshelf forever.

And if all of that wasn't enough, we had this incredible final project. We were to pick a subset of feminist thought and create an anthology around it. I chose trans feminism, because it seemed to me a sort of final frontier of inclusive feminism, and because the struggles trans women undergo in their quest for acceptance in feminist spaces reminded me of the struggles of Black/Brown women and lesbian women in the past. I read so many things, first from radical feminists who said things so terrible about trans women that I refuse to repeat them here, and them from trans women themselves responding to that and developing scholarship about their own oppression out of it and wanting to reconcile trans activism with feminism, and then finally from people who are not necessarily trans or women who believe that feminism cannot be true to itself without the centralization of the trans experience. And that's when it hit me: if these women can be feminists when a non-trivial percent of feminists wouldn't even call them women, then what the fuck am I doing? It's not feminism that's wrong, it was my previously held interpretation of feminists and feminism as homogenous (White, privileged) things. It was my failure to realize that a feminist identity should be allowed the same degrees of freedom as any other identity. It was my failure to realize that, by the measure of the scholars I value most in the field, the work I do is already feminism, but naming things and being able to stand in solidarity is important.

So, I am a feminist. I am a militant, Black, class-conscious-but-struggling-with-her-own-changing-class-perspective, outside-of-the-gay-straight-dichotomy, likely to drink a beer while wearing a dress, sex-positive, unwanted-children-negative, big-titties-embracing, revolution-demanding, self-loving, hegemonic-standards-of-beauty-rejecting, romantic-comedy-loving, stereotype-eviscerating, all-inclusive, no-kids-wanting-but-motherhood-respecting, checking-my-own-privilege-but-checking-yours-too, articulate-but-still-will-grab-a-n*gga-by-the-collar-quick, justice-fighting-for ready-to-fuck-up-some-traditional-gender-roles, academic-who-curses-too-much feminist. I am everything I am...I just didn't realize it could all fit under one word.    

Reblogged from Who Needs Feminism

"For absolutely so many reasons. But mostly to stand in solidarity with every man, woman, trans, gender-queer individual who has ever felt degraded, ashamed, fear, sadness, rage or despair at the hands of the patriarchy." -- Who Needs Feminism

"...because apparently talking about my period out loud to a friend is vulgar. But the guy three seats down made an announcement about his threesome last night and is getting high fives." -- Who Needs Feminism

"I need feminism because the fact that I’m an overweight, person of color, and a female isn’t anything to be ashamed of, nor does it tell you what I’m capable of. Three strikes against me my ass." -- Who Needs Feminism

And the tl;dr version of this post: "because a friend of mine said she doesn’t declare herself as a ‘feminist’ because she ‘doesn’t believe in everything they stand for’. As if every feminist must hold the exact same opinion/criteria of beliefs. The reality is we each have individual opinions, ones we agree and disagree with but we are united with the common need for equal rights." -- Who Needs Feminism

 

Regret is a strange beast.

My final class as an undergraduate was this past Wednesday. That fact, coupled with CC gchatting me recently to tell me that someone had lastchanced her (which introduced me to lastchance) had me feeling some kind of way about this guy (who shall remain moniker-less). 

When I met this guy a full four years ago, during our Princeton visit weekend, I was kind of curious about him. He seemed like a person I would like to get to know. When we had a class together freshman fall, I was impressed by him intellectually, but my romantic interests were elsewhere at that time. By sophomore fall when an extracurricular activity brought us around each other regularly again for a little while, I felt that old There's something about him that I want to know better creeping up again, but a friend of mine who knew him better than I did informed me of something that led me to feel like I'd be wasting my time/emotional energy developing that feeling, and a roommate of mine was basically appalled that I found him attractive, and I just took these things at face-value (*facepalm*) and left it on the back burner and kept doing my thing. [Insert semester-long flirtation with someone I'm no longer even remotely interested in or attracted to here.] While that was going on, he and I had class together again and started to commiserate about our professor and impending decisions about what to major in, and had I not been so preoccupied with the very slowly developing thing I had going on with other dude, this might have been the perfect time to make a move. But it came and it went.

By junior fall he was still on my short list, though I was still fully accepting hearsay which suggested that I was wasting my time. Junior spring: [insert relationship with my ex here]. I ran into him at a party the first week of senior year, and he did the whole, "We should hang out sometime..." thing, which had me so geeked that KS noticed and asked if I liked him. I confirmed, and I'm pretty sure K's reaction was to say something vaguely approving and to the effect of I needed to be with someone bigger than me anyway (which the guy we're talking about is). Then we got sorted into the same group for an extracurricular activity we both participate in, and I relished the chance to be near him and hear his thoughts/stories each week. All year, I have gone out of my way to see/hug/talk to him at parties or other social events, but at the same time, I've seen a few things that suggest confirmation of the thing my friend told me sophomore fall. I had resigned myself to just letting it go, but as I got to know him better through this activity we do, the vague interest I'd been harboring for years intensified. I found myself sometimes thinking about him. 

I casually mentioned my interest in him to CC after she told me she had been lastchanced, and she told me I should go for it. I said, 'What do you mean go for it? We have x-number of weeks left on this campus and after that we'll be on opposite sides of the country." She then argued that I could at least hook up with him. I may have surprised even myself when I responded that actually, I don't think I could. I don't want to hook up with him; I would date him. To quote ChoosingPancakes, "I [would] relationship the shit out of him." And I think that means that even if I could lose myself in a hypothetical moment and make something happen with him, it would just be damaging in the long run. 

And when I realized that, I cursed myself for not having acted on it earlier. I realized that this might be one of the few things I legitimately *regret* about my time at Princeton.

But when I was talking to CC and making her sad at my resolution to let it go, I came to another realization: "Honestly, while I've been vaguely interested in him for a while, I don't think that an earlier version of me would have been anything other than adverse to the idea of pursuing anything with him [for reasons I've detailed above]. I feel like my deeper interest now is related to my being the person I've become. So I can't regret it too much."

And that realization has made me kind of question the concept of regret in general. I think it's fundamentally based on an "If I knew then what I know now" mindset, and that's just impractical, infeasible, and unproductive. So I used to try to say I live with no regrets somewhat facetiously, but now I'm going to try to mean it. Experience is the best teacher, and regret is a wasteful feeling. If I wish I had known in the past what I know in the present, I must be wishing away both long-ago-past and recent past experiences, which would mean wishing away myself. And I am certainly not something I regret. 

A quote from a comic about genderqueer/trans identity that I'm including in a final project for my feminism class:

"I have always been becoming what I am right now."

--Katie Diamond and Johnny Blazes, "transcension"

 

We can add Donald Glover to the list of famous people Princeton has introduced me to:

Yes, that is my arm around his waist. I also got to see him shirtless and sweaty immediately after the show. All in all, it was a good day, haha.

Final Bows for Balancing Act, or My First Big Last.

Backstage on our second night, some of my fellow cast members and I were discussing whether we get emotional at the end of shows. I was saying that I'd never been before--I'm usually more excited to stop missing all the things that hell week/shows made me miss. 

Saturday night was different. About halfway through the show, we were signing cards for our directors and stage crew, etc. when I casually mentioned that it was hard for me to figure out what to say to MJ, as I had been her mentor the year before, and LC because she's actually my favorite person in the class of 2013. They're both people whom I would say have been integral to my Princeton experience, and trying to sum up what they mean to me in a few lines on a group card was impossible. This prompted one of our freshmen stars to suggest that I be the one to speak at the end of the show and present everyone with their flowers and cards, "because it means the most to me." 

It didn't really hit me how right she was til I was there after our final bow asking everyone to stick around because we as a company had some things to say. I gave every member of the crew their cards while EM distributed flowers. Then I stepped into the middle of the stage with MJ and LC on either side of me and gave them their cards and flowers and hugs and encouraged the crowd to give it up for them. I talked about how my freshman year, there were seven people in BAC|Drama, including the director's boyfriend whose participation may or may not have been voluntary. There's no way something of this magnitude would have been conceivable, let alone possible. MH came down onto stage and I said she was right there with me freshman year--we never imagined seeing the company grow to something like this. I was so incredibly proud of them, of the company as an abstract idea, of the actors and actresses (some of whom I'd just met that Monday but already felt so close to). It wasn't until after they'd each spoken and I was hugging people trying not to get my running mascara on them that someone pointed out to me that I should be proud of myself too, because the work MC, JB, and I (and countless others) had done in earlier years created an environment in which dreams this big were able to be realized. 

There are only two organizations in which I've been actively involved since my freshman year--the Black Arts Company Drama troupe and the Princeton Association of Black Women. These were among my first extracurricular homes on campus. There are few other things which I have played some role in shaping in which I can see such substantive change in over the course of my time at Princeton. Few other things played such a role in changing me--I had never acted before, never written for the stage or directed, never felt comfortable standing on a stage with a bright light shining on me. I don't know how I went from being a person who'd barely even seen plays to being a person who has been in 7 productions, co-directed a one act, co-wrote a one-act, and wrote directed and performed a monologue, a person who can improvise her scenes as she goes along without fucking anything up and making the audience crack up. Acting/writing/directing is something that was given to me in this space and it's something I'm unsure I'll ever really have again. 

Coming to the end of that took a lot out of me. It was the first of the Princeton-specific things in my life to come to an end...the first of many. It has been a beautiful experience overall, and I can't think of a more fulfilling end than Balancing Act. Much love to the whole cast and crew, and I'm looking forward to making the trip back to old Nassau to see you all do Aida next year. *sniffle*    

Pics or it didn't happen, right?

Isn't it beautiful?

ChoosingPancakes made an interesting comment that talking about theses is very much like talking about having children. I concur. We walk around for months with people asking us, "When are you due?" Then there's one last big push to finish everything, once our work is done people take it away from us to make it pretty, then we pick it up and hold it for the first time and feel this sense of precious-ness and joy and "Look at this beautiful thing I created!" The entire process seems quite similar, imho.

[cue sappy moment]

I figured that I'd share my acknowledgements page with you all, so that you could see exactly how much this means to me:

Acknowledgements

This work is for anyone who didn’t know their racial or ethnic self until they came to college, and for anyone who thought they knew, but faced some racial schooling once they got to campus anyway.

I would like to thank the following people and institutions, without whom I wouldn’t have become who I am, and this work would not have been possible:

My mother and my father, who each always managed to affirm and insert Blackness in my life in the smallest but most meaningful of ways. My family more broadly, for the innumerable little things they did and do in support.

C**** H***, former supervisor of the English Department at Oakcrest High School, who will most likely never know that he was the first person to tell me my dreams weren’t big enough. All of the teachers and supervisors in my past who thought I would be an engineer, who helped make me who I am, even if that person isn’t who we thought I’d be.

“The Black community”—problematic as the term may be—at Princeton, for providing my encounter, serving as my immersion, and letting me grow into internalization.

K****** S****, for helping me think through every issue with this project from start to finish, as well as for being generally invaluable. E**** Y**, for being my conscience. S.O., J.B., and the entire Large Library Crew, for helping me find my voice. The Princeton Quadrangle Club more generally, for being exactly what I needed.

Professors Douglas Massey and J. Nicole Shelton for their guidance and challenges, along with everyone who participated in and passed along my questionnaire.

The African-American Studies Program at Princeton University, for instilling in me the idea that my lived experiences and those of my people are subjects worthy of study. No other coursework or interactions have so fundamentally reconfigured my worldview.

The Sociology Department of Princeton University, for teaching me to see things from a new perspective, for inspiring me to ask questions that seem to have impossibly large answers, and for giving me the tools to seek those answers out anyway.

Princeton University, for introducing me to myself and allowing me to reintroduce myself, for taking care of parts of me I hadn’t even known existed, for teaching me the value of dialogue, and for naturalizing the concept of “speak and be heard”.

It's done.

The writing of it, at least. All 211 pages of it. It's currently in the hands of the company that will print it on 25% cotton paper and hard-bind it with a goldstamped leather cover.

Yes, it's that serious. And it cost me actually $100 to get it printed and bound.

But, as much as I hemmed and hawed about this whole process, I have to say that I have come to be quite attached to my thesis over the course of the last month. It became a much more significant project than I was anticipating it to be before I actually ran any of the data. In my head, before I'd really written anything other than my literature review, my thesis was just going to be this thing I did because I needed to graduate, a sort of embarrassing little work that was too long to be published as an article but not good enough to be a book and thus kind of useless. And maybe none of those things have changed, exactly, but I still somehow came to see it as this thing that actually represents me.

This may have something to do with the meeting I had with my advisor a week ago, during which he basically told me that the draft I'd turned in was fine for someone who was just looking to fill the requirement of writing a thesis, but that I seemed like I wasn't that person. I seemed like I was a person to whom academic work is significant, and thus he was going to show/tell me all the ways I could do what I was doing better. And it nearly took everything I had and caused at least two minor breakdowns, but I did nearly everything he suggested. I am a being of integrity, and I've come to believe that my thesis is as well.

The proverbial fat lady hasn't sung yet, because I still have to email an electronic version, print out my two unbound copies, pick up this bound copy tomorrow, and walk the whole 633 pages over to my departmental secretary's office by 4pm tomorrow. I told the company I'd like to pick up the bound copy by 1pm, so that should be fine. Of course I also have to be obnoxious and take pictures with my bound copy to send to my parents and post here. 

So I suppose that I shouldn't talk about the entire process like it's over yet, to ensure that I don't bring any bad thesis karma into the world (it's bad enough already that it's due on Friday the 13th. Not cute.), but it already feels strange being able to distance myself from this giant thing that I've been working towards for so long. I suppose that it's a miniature version of how I'll feel a couple days after graduation, when I'm suddenly just a person in the world rather than a student at Princeton University. 

And that leads me squarely to #holyshititsending, which I'm not prepared to deal with at this moment, so, on to other topics!

Thesis Updates

So...my thesis is absurdly long. It's actually a fucking book. And I'm still not finished with the writing. But I was feeling really confident and like I had everything under control. I was pushing myself too hard towards the beginning of the week and I let alums and other seniors convince me that I was in a good place. And they weren't lying--I'd made a to-do list of every little thing that needs to be done between now and turning it in, and at this point only three of those bullet points still involve any new writing. I was feeling good, man. 

And then I get an email from my advisor, after I sent him a partial draft a week and a half ago, containing lines like these:

"I would like to have seen more concrete statements about HOW you expect students’ college experiences to influence identity and the direction of change you expect to see.  In order to sharpen and limit your analysis, I would also have recommended focusing on one particular group (such as African Americans in comparison with whites).  Given the distinctive history and features of each group in the United States, I would expect to observe different patterns and processes of identify formation for Hispanics and Asians."

"I would have thought that you would draw on these earlier studies to describe what is already known about students’ backgrounds, identities, and on-campus experiences"

"I would have focused on a particular group for study rather than gathering data from multiple groups with very different histories and experiences."

"the appropriate statistic would be an overall measure of categorical association, such as Somer’s D or other indicator." (I have legitimately never heard of Somer's D, and don't understand how it's kosher to expect me to know about and use some statistical measure we aren't taught in our SOC statistic class, but okay.)

"The problems mostly come in the execution of the analyses, which are not guided by clear hypotheses derived from prior research, do not really get at issues of attitude CHANGE on campus, consist mainly of exploratory bivariate associations, and could be presented more clearly.  Specifically, the tables showing relationships between categorical variables would be better presented using percentages rather than absolute numbers and instead of showing multiple z-scores accompanied by an overall measure of categorical association.  Hopefully some of these issues can be attended to in a final revision." 

Basically, what this man is telling me right now is that--even though I told him exactly what I was planning to do way back in October when we first met--he "would have done [the entire premise of my thesis] differently," in a way that lots of other scholars have done and which I am specifically trying to go against because I don't think it's productive. AND on top of that, he doesn't like the way I analyze my data, and if he's actually going to make me re-do all of my analysis, that means upwards of 104 tables and 80ish pages I need to re-write in the next 8 days. But also he's like, asking me to use percentages to describe my data rather than testing those percentages for statistical significance and I'm just like SIR, THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! 

I sent him a length and assertive without being recalcitrant email last night, and now we have a meeting at 2. I'm trying to find a way to be like, "Lookie here, I'ma do what I'ma do and you gon like it," without actually coming off like I think his opinions are idiotic and he just doesn't get my whole point. I suppose that his opinions kind of matter to my grade and whatnot. The man is just infuriating me right now, though. I have EIGHT. DAYS. What is he tryna get me to do?! 

*end rant*

#angryblackgirl

This is the hashtag that best describes my life and attitudes with regards to what is going on in America right now and for the forseeable future. 

A fellow Black Princetonian (DD) asked me last Monday night how I was feeling. I responded, "I feel..like I wanna blow something up. Like I wanna fight somebody." He put down his soda and gave me a fist bump, saying "Yesssss. If someone punches you in the face, you don't go and run to the administration saying, 'Excuse me, can you do something about this?' You punch them right back." 

Another hashtag that I have used recently and will likely continue to use in the near future is #Ishouldabeenablackpanther. My hashtags are not unrelated. It has taken me so long to write this post because earlier in the week, I was tense and shouting and shaking with anger. Anything I wrote would have boiled down to FUCK ALL OF THE PEOPLE, EVERYONE, I CAN'T EVEN FUCK WITH THE WORLD RIGHT NOW, and that's not what I want to say. 

This conversation with DD happened minutes after leaving a Black Student Union meeting at which we discussed (1) the racist comments left on a Daily Princetonian article my friend MJ, a Black sophomore, wrote about the application process for Creative Writing courses (a commenter called her a "whiny black girl" and from there all hell broke loose), (2) the small-scale protest we as the Black Princetonian community launched against the Sanford PD's failure to prosecute George Zimmerman:

What looks like a Black Power fist is actually me fixing my glasses, but I kind of wish it were an intentional Black Power fist, because that would be pretty baller. I'ma call it a subconscious act of resistance.

and (3), the unfair arrest of fellow Black Princetonian Mandela Sheaffer, '13, who while home on Spring Break was thrown into county jail for "obstruction of justice" when visiting a White friend at home in Ohio over Spring Break. I'm not going to post about the details, because it's an open case, but nothing in the vibe that I get from him as a person suggests that anything in the police report is factual. We all collectively smell something fishy, even if you don't want to toss around terms like "racial profiling" all willy-nilly. 


In the time since that meeting, my friend MH discovered this lovely message scrawled across the map in an elevator in our student center:

Let's let this serve as the fourth piece of evidence in the claims I will make in this post.


I'm sick and tired of fronting like progress is being made and everything is gonna be okay. It's fucking pouring outside, and I'm not expecting to see a rainbow after the storm.

I feel like no matter which way I turn, I see my people under attack in this country. In this particular post, I'm talking about my people as (young) Black people, but similar things could be said about women as my people, or people who don't identify as straight as my people, or the [lower sections of the] 99% as my people. 

Granted, I was 11, but I don't think I actually feared as much for the state of my life as I know it after the September 11th attacks as I do now. I'm actually afraid that I'm coming of age in a country where my views, opinions, and rights simply don't matter to anyone in charge AND it's uncouth to even suggest that that might be the case. I'm so over this post-everything era. I want to be able to talk about racism and sexism and classism and homophobia and cissism, etc. in public spaces. I want to be able to say that I. don't. feel. safe. and not be looked at like I'm paranoid or insane. 

Hold on. Let me not just put that into the atmosphere with no context. One of the things that has stuck out the most to me with everything that's going on with #TrayvonMartin and the conversations I've had with friends about the case is the degree to which racism operates in sexist and classist ways. I have never had an unfairly negative encounter with a police officer, though I was raised to try to handle things without their interference. I can walk around campus at 4 am and never feel like one of the campus safety officers is going to stop me and ask to see my ID, which I know has happened to various Black male students on this campus. Trayvon's hoodie had nothing to do with his death, but it honestly felt weird to wear my hood up on my hoodie, and it took me quite some time to figure out what to do with my hair on Monday to even make wearing the hood up feasible--if the "hoodie" (which Trayvon wasn't actually wearing when Zimmerman began following him, let us remember) is part of what makes young Black men suspicious, then I'll never be that. I have been told that my ... self can be intimidating, which hurts, but that's a rarity in my experience, rather than a frequent occurrence in the lives of Black men I have spoken to about this. Similarly, I can count on one hand finger the number of times I've been made to feel like I don't belong in an integrated academic space, like I have to prove that myself and my ideas are worthy of my professor, preceptor, and/or classmates' time, and while that is undoubtedly related to the fact that I'm a Sociology major with a certificate in African-American studies and a bunch of Gender and Sexuality Studies classes under my belt, and while I hate trying to map systems of oppression onto any sort of hierarchical scale, I just don't feel as directly persecuted as young Black men are in today's society. 

And I know that it's not only cases of young Black men meeting unjust ends that get ignored by the mass media. I know about Rekia Boyd, and that cases like hers aren't rarities. And so maybe this is where class (or the fact that generally speaking, I've never hung out with large numbers of Black people publicly outside of this campus) comes in, but I've just never ever been made to feel like my life is in danger in a racialized situation. The closest I've ever come to this is probably this little gas station my family stopped at in this little town with giant crosses on the sides of the buildings when we were on our way to Ithaca, NY when I was college visiting. I was oblivious to anything going on at the time, but my mother and grandmother told me that three muscular White men were staring at our car the entire time we were there, and that the cashier refused to take my mother's money out of her hand, but rather made her put it down on the counter and pick her own change up off the counter.


Regardless of all of that, I feel like we've regressed into a system where talking about "Black" issues means talking about the issues pertaining to Black men, and talking about "women's" issues means talking about the issues of liberal White women of at least some financial and/or educational means. (Did we ever actually grow out of this system? I'm finding it hard these days to reconcile my conceptualization of the world as shaped through the literature I'm exposed to in my classes and the blogs/news sources I read and the actual reality of the situation to people who aren't sociologists and/or race/gender scholars.) The only "big" stories about Black women I can remember existing in the past few years are all OMG BLACK WOMEN AREN'T GETTING MARRIED WTF IS WRONG WITH THEM WHAT SHOULD THEY DO?! and we're going to table that discussion for the purposes of this post. 


Trayvon Martin's death hurts me. It is my issue. It is the issue of decent human beings everywhere. And I don't use hormonal birth control, but it and abortion are my issues, not even as a woman, but as a sexual being. I don't see stories in the media about people like me, but at the same time, I see these stories and can't help but see myself or my brother or someone in my heart. Humanity is in my heart. 


I'm getting off subject. The point I want to make here is that I'm hurt and upset by...basically everything that's going on in our country right now. I'm hurt by action, by inaction, and by responses to both. I'm outraged, and I'm even further outraged that people are outraged about my outrage, and I don't give a fuck if that makes me sound like an #angryblackgirl, because that's what I am right now.

But I want to harness that anger. I can write a blog post and wear a hoodie and help to write an open letter, but none of these things feel like active resistance. I'm sick of low-level resistance. It's not working for me anymore. 

One of the things that came up at the BSU meeting last week was that more Princetonians would have participated in Martin Monday if they'd known about it. So I'm toying with the idea of creating a like, Social Justice at Princeton Facebook page. It would be one place for every person or group with a cause to find other people who care, even if that issue isn't particular to their defined community. The first step to resistance must be the creation of an army, yes?   

Is this real life?

Princeton University will never cease to amaze me with the way it connects me to other people. Meeting famous people is always great. Meeting people with academic interests that are similar to yours is fantastic. But when you get to meet someone you admire and respect on both intellectual and artist levels, and substantively meet him, rather than just shake his hand or get something signed...that's amazing. And when you get to have a half-hour conversation with him where you talk about things you've both experienced and you realize you're both just normal people (except one of you has watched and wowwed at Youtube videos of the other), that's incredible.

That's what Princeton gave me today. Which is why I'm not even mad about being locked out of my room until tomorrow morning because I refuse to pay $30 for Public Safety to come open my door. It's why the seemingly endless monsoon outside isn't even getting me down. There is a smile in my heart if not always on my face for the rest of the evening (don't want to look like a smiling idiot sitting at work in the library) because I got to have that incredible experience with the one and only Joshua Bennett this evening. 

Y'all probably remember me gushing about how amazingly talented he is a few months ago. (If not, click here.) A friend of mine posted his 10 Things I want to Say to a Black Woman video sometime last year, and I said "Mmmmmm!" more times than I could remember ever saying in response to anyone's words ever before. 





So when my friend M told me he was a first year graduate student here in our English department, I pretty much died. And by "died," I mean started concocting a plan to meet him without seeming like a stalker. And the very next day, I heard his voice while I was walking down the street, and looked up to see him walking along across Prospect Street. And once I saw him walking through the student center. And so, when he walked into my Mellon Mays Holiday Mixer this evening, an uncontrollable smile broke out on my face. And when we got paired together to learn more about each other and introduce each other to the group, I wanted to squeal. 


I tried to play innocent. We did introductions, I talked about my research, we got food, but by the time we sat down to keep talking, I just couldn't take it anymore. I had to tell him. "Okay, I have to be honest--I know who you are. I've watched your YouTube videos and I think your poetry is amazing and when I heard that you were a grad student here I just had to meet you. I hope you don't think I'm crazy..." And do you know what he told me? Joshua Bennett told ME that I made his day. That he sleeps on a futon, and so for me to say that I'm a fan is humbling. And I was just honored to meet the man. 


It's strange having someone you've admired from afar/the internet materialize as a real person with real jokes that you can laugh at and have him laugh back. That you could be in the same place at the same time having different experiences with shared stories and compare notes. He's looking for more of a connection to Black students on campus, and thinks my thesis is particularly interesting with respect to Princeton, and there's a decent chance we might just get to be friends over the course of my last few months here. He was also just mad chill and it was fun to be around him even after I was over the shock of my good fortune in getting the chance to talk to him (hopefully without coming off like a stalker). How can awesome people be so normal? My mind is blown.

Shoutout to those guys

who know how to talk to a woman.

Princeton had a Ball tonight--please do your best to refrain from snickering at how pretentious we are--that seemed more like a high school dance than anything else at times. I had a cute dress, matching shoes, fly ass jewelry, and a baller hairstyle as inspired by this video:

Successfully tried it at home:

Anyway, I'm not tryna sound cocky or anything, but quite a few people told me they liked my hair or my makeup or my dress (or any combination/permutation of the above). A few even told me how great/pretty I looked. And all of these things made me blush (kind of) and smile and express much thanks, but none of them compared to when E told me I looked "beautiful." 

Maybe it was a line. Maybe he said that to every girl he saw tonight. I don't care. It didn't matter. In that moment, I felt like he actually saw me as a whole package and liked what he saw. I felt special. I felt...noticed and appreciated. It just makes you feel so good about yourself, as shallow as that may be.


And then later I ran into another friend of mine walking in the door to Charter, the eating club that is the farthest away from campus. I was leaving as he was coming in, and though I'd already run into him a few times tonight, I decided to stop and give him a goodnight hug. I tapped him on the shoulder and he stopped, looked at me, and said that I was "just about the only person he'd stop for in this cold."

Again, I felt like I'd just been honored.


So this is a shoutout to all the guys who know how to talk to a woman. How to make her legitimately feel good about herself (and your relationship, of whatever sort) with just a few words. I want you (and guys like you and guys unlike you and guys who just want to be like you) to know that I appreciate your appreciation. That it will stay with me for the next day or two. That you will be behind the little smile on my face as I finish this post and go to sleep. 

I felt so...visible. These aren't just things people say in social situations because they're deemed acceptable. These things felt meant, and that more than anything else makes tonight memorable and more than worth it.

Yesterday, in seminar, the white girl in my AAS class told a funny story

Well, it was immediately funny to about half of the class (3 or 4 people) and our professor. The rest of the class chuckled along a half-second later, but I remained puzzled. I tossed the little anecdote around in my head once everyone was done laughing, but just couldn't quite figure out what was so funny about it. Not being afraid of a little classroom embarrassment, I decided to ask to be enlightened. 

Her statement was this:

"When I moved back to the US from Asia, I remember being so embarrassed when I was going somewhere with my friend and I was like, "Your Dad drives your car?!"

What was so outside my range of understanding that I could not comprehend was that she was used to having a driver.

I, on the other hand, distinctly remember phases of my childhood in which we didn't even have a car. Imani Perry was telling us about a trip she took some students on to Chicago, and how almost none of them had ever been on public transportation before, and some of the kids in our seminar nodded along like they sympathized, while my own face was screwed up with incredulity.  (What a great demonstration of the contextual nature of comedy--humor depends entirely on social capital.)

I know I shouldn't be surprised, but sometimes I forget what kind of people I'm dealing with in this place.

Professor Perry also made an interesting statement while those of us from money-less backgrounds were prefacing various statements with that fact--she said that by virtue of being here, we are among the ranks of the Black upper-class. 

I had a conversation in a Sociology seminar last semester about social class at Princeton. A lot of the people in that class were from more privileged backgrounds than myself, and the dominant viewpoint of the class was that Princeton serves as this great equalizer, where you can't tell what class anyone is in because we all roll through in Princeton gear and it's just not that big a deal. I voiced a dissenting opinion, and highlighted the ways in which Princeton serves to propel those from lower-class backgrounds into higher social status.

My sociological education here is unparalleled, but sometimes I wonder whether the social education I'm getting here isn't just as important: I've learned so much about different kinds of cheese and tea, the proper way to pop a cork, how to pronounce "crudite", what Brooks Brothers is, how to be an effective bullshitter and a functional alcoholic. I have taught people how to read a bus schedule, how to get various stains out of fabrics, where to look for streaming television shows or online coupon codes. Maybe equalizer is the right word. Maybe both sides are gaining the social capital we need to interact with the other half. 

I don't know how to drive. We're getting to the point where I may never have the opportunity to learn. ...Will I be the person with the driver someday? 

 

I met Forest Whittaker on my way to class today.

Saw a group of my favorite professors (Imani Perry, Daphne Brooks, Eddie Glaude) hanging out in the lobby of the African-American Studies building, so I walked over to say hey, when lo and behold the guy from Panic Room (not even what he's famous for, I know, but it's what my head instantly shoots to) is in the middle of this circle just chatting it up with Daphne. 

I run upstairs to tell my classmates and we come back downstairs and start awkwardly lingering outside this circle, not wanting to interrupt but also not wanting to miss this opportunity. Eddie Glaude tries to shoo us upstairs, but of course we retreat all of 3 inches and continue to ogle. Eventually I guess he notices us and breaks away from the professors to come over and say hi--what a gentleman! We each introduce ourselves and he shakes our hands and then more people show up so we run away giggling like schoolgirls and give our fellow classmates the chance to meet him before class starts. 

Then we get back to our room and start talking about how like, if we were normal people in the real world, running into a celebrity would be such a big deal. I've met so many famous people here (Philicia Rashad, Toni Morrison, Tavis Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, CK Lewis, Frankie Muniz, The Far East Movement, now Forest Whittaker, and that's not even counting my famous professors...) that I'm almost desensitized to it. I just introduced myself and was cool...and that's CRAZY when you think about it. 

Oh, the things Princeton has done to me. And damn, this place is awesome.

Black and Different Unite!

So y'all know that my blackness relationship to the dominant cultural narrative about what blackness is is something I struggle with. And while the Black Princetonian community definitely makes me feel less jarringly out of place than do/did most of the other interactions I've ever had with peoples of African descent--let it be known that I LOVE my fellow Black Princetonians, even when I don't feel like I mesh well with the group--I've never really totally been able to shake that puzzle-piece-that-got-wet-and-now-just-won't-fit-no-matter-how-hard-you-try feeling. (Something along the lines of I can stand strong with the group in a discussion forum like a BSU or PABW meeting, but Idgaf how popular the dance is, I will never portray any part of my body as "stanky". I can seek/give advice to fellow naturalistas on campus, but I don't believe in God. I feel like parts of me are both the thesis and the antithesis of the norms of our community, and so I've come to a happy medium with one foot in and one foot out.) So after getting internally frustrated trying to totally Black-ify my life for two years, I joined an eating club and Sustained Dialogue and have finally started to have the rainbow coalition of friends I'd always wanted. Again, nothing new here--I've talked about this before. 

What I really really love discovering, though, as I brought up yesterday in my post about Awkward Black Girl, is that out there in the interwebz world exist lots of other people who feel just as torn between their true selves and what the world wants their "Black" selves to be, people who want to change the narrative, people who get the vibe from other people, both Black and non-Black, that their racial validity is being questioned. Part of me wants to call this the rise of those who get called "Oreo," but I'm positive it's broader than that. [Side note: it wasn't until Sustained Dialogue this year that I heard the terms Banana and Apple (see definition six). Blew my mind. Also part of the reason I really don't want to limit my thesis about racial identity on campus to Black students--there are all kinds of tensions and derogatory in-group names I was entirely unaware of.] Some call us "awkward". Some call us "nerds". Some call us "bougie". Maybe we're all of those things. Maybe we're none. What we definitely are, though, is Black. And here, in large numbers. 

These two articles on the subject made me smile today:

Excerpt One (though I don't support other Black Americans trying to threaten my race card either--if anyone should recognize a broader interpretation of Blackness, it's us): 

"It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how "down" I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me, as a Black woman? Unacceptable."  -- Issa Rae (aka AWKWARD BLACK GIRL HERSELF), from The Huffington Post

Excerpt Two:

"My experience of surprising White folks has continued my whole life....the near-hostility from non-nerdy Black folks has been the most painful....So, I have tried to be Black in stereotypically recognizable ways....American people of all races have a hard time acknowledging the complicated ways that blackness exists...Some of us just want to be free to be our complicated Black selves and kick it however the wind blows." -- PhyllisRemastered

Another thing that made me smile: a black staff member here at Lewis, who I met at a Fields Center event and is leaving Princeton for Northwestern, called me "Sista" when he was saying his goodbyes. I love getting called Sista. Makes me feel like the person addressing me recognizes that I fit despite all the ways in which I am not normative.

Shit just got real.

My mom called me last night to say

"Mayaaaaa, guess what I just got in the mail from Princeton Universityyyyyyy???"

Any guesses? Anyone? Financial aid has been doled out already and that info comes directly to me, not to her, so I didn't have any guesses either.

It turns out it was a postcard. I'm imagining it featured a lovely picture of Nassau Hall, because on the back was all sorts of important information and dates concerning my imminent graduation. It detailed the whole process: Baccalaureate, Senior Prom, Class Day, Commencement, how many tickets I get for each of these things, etc. Like I need to stop playing around like it's not coming up, because it is evidently already time to make plans. Like damn, I actually am a senior. *lets that word ring out for a moment* Towards the end of last school year, I told my mom and the then-boyfriend that there were certain words that were off limits and not allowed to be spoken of to/around me: the s-word (senior), the t-word (thesis), and the g-word (graduation). I suppose it's time to face the music now, though. Or...I could just keep

According to Wikipedia, ostriches don't actually do this. That saddens me, though it's probably good for the species, haha.