Posts pertaining to being black / African-American.
in some ways, the following post is a departure—an aside, if you will—from this blog's usual content matter, while in other ways it's entirely not. either way, i'd like to take a moment to share a random snippet of my dealings with reverse culture shock as a repatriated Black American...
two months after moving back to America from Japan, i've finally done what i've been dreaming about doing for years...! that is, cutting off my butt-length locs of 11 years-- i.e., the #BigChop...
whether we want it to be or not, #BlackHair is often Political, especially in its’ natural, unstraightened state. combine this with #Blackness itself...
as the clock counts down to me sitting in a hairstylist's chair to get my hair chopped off—a clock that started its countdown years ago in my head, but has only recently been given a definitive calendar date of May 18th, 2019—i've on-and-off made an effort to help my mom 'get over it.'
i have never been a fan of History. from as early as elementary school, i learned that when people said "History" they really only meant theirs and not mine. by junior high school it was clear that my own history—that is, the history of people who are Black and American like me, in so far as U.S. History textbooks were concerned...
sometimes i think about how growing up in Las Vegas has affected me. usually this is triggered by something reminding me that growing up listening to house & trance music on the radio isn't exactly common, or when i happen to have an occasion-- for whatever reason-- to question my own apparent insensitivity to public displays of nudity, sexual innuendo, etc. even when it comes to more mundane things...
One-third of my life. That's how much of my life I've lived outside of America. My so-called "home country."
content warning: homophobia, suicidal ideation …so, my sister sent me this video out of the blue today. she often sends me links to all kinds of random, obscure videos from the depths of YouTube, to the point that i didn’t bother clicking the link until hours after she’d sent it, thinking it to be another one of those videos. needless to say, i was pleasantly surprised. my appreciation of this video is beyond words. <3
so i finally got to see Black Panther again ( #WAKANDAFOREVER AHHHHHH–) and am now at a Starbucks basking in the afterglow of the movie, about to attempt to herd my thoughts into a more coherent cacophony of words than exists in my head at present. wish me luck.
cw: rape apologism …so i just had lunch with someone who is essentially a random woman who chased me down at a train station last week because she admired my locs and wanted me to start locs for her. had this woman not been a black woman, had she not been an older black woman, had she not been literally beaming from ear to ear just looking at my locs, so earnest about wanting to start locs herself and having nowhere to turn– had it not been for all those things AND had we not been in Japan, i wouldn’t have given this lady the time of day. especially since she made me miss my train. but she was and we are and so there i was, meeting this over zealous woman at a cafe for lunch because #AfroHairSolidarityInAsia✊? if only the conversation had steered clear of politics, things would have been fine. i…
