racism

Yesterday, Old Navy sent out a tweet to alert us all to a sale. Woohoo! Cheap summer clothes! Everyone likes cheap clothes! Right?

I spent my undergrad years as the president of the feminist organization, so I have a lot of experience spending time with feminists. The people I worked with were passionate, thoughtful, and often downright hilarious. And a lot of these people became my very good friends and people I admired.

Still, as my school was majority white, a lot of these feminists were white. And, sometimes, they were White Feminists.

As a woman of color, this was something that became difficult for me to navigate.

That man shakes me to my core. Actually, not HIM, per se, but the people who blindly follow him. The out-and-out bigots who will call me the N-word just as easily as they’d call their buddy “Bob.” The people who SWEAR they're not bigots, but support him because they believe in his promise of new jobs and deportations.

As a black female academic, I know only too well what it feels like to have people look right though you. Let me give one instance — from just a few weeks ago, when I felt unrecognized for who I am.

I approached the podium of the lecture hall at the university at which I am a tenured professor. It was the first day of class and the instructor of the previous course was still around, talking informally with her students. Looking around the podium, I noticed that the classroom was not equipped with a computer.

I asked my colleague, whom I did not know, if there was a computer hidden in the cabinet. She proceeded to instruct me: “Faculty are provided computers, they bring their computers, and use a dongle to project on the screen.”

Her words told me she didn’t recognize me as faculty; she did not see me as professor.

This is no small thing. The institutional barriers to achievement faced by Black women are staggering: African American women earn only 64% of what white men earn, and they earn only 91% of what Black men earn. African American women held 8.58% of the bachelor’s degrees held by women in 2012, though they constituted 12.7% of the female population. The poverty rate for African American women is 28.6%. In comparison, the poverty rate of white, non-Hispanic women is 10.8%.

Here’s what it means to be unapologetically Black: full lips, natural curves, kinky curly coils, shaded brown skin, and thus relentless criticism for being what was once believed to be despicable and unworthy of many people (particularly white).

Yes, once upon a time, our skin complexion was too grungy for pools, our juicy lips weren't allowed to share water fountains, and our round bottoms weren't welcome to sit any and everywhere.

At some point, Black became “in” amongst the white race (or maybe it always was, secretly, of course), beginning with the tanning and plastic surgery, and now our overall style, thanks to celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Kylie Jenner, who have blatantly stole what was once ours and made it theirs. Or so the rest of the world would have you believe.

Let me tell you something, ladies. There are a million people in this world ready to tear you down at any given moment, for reasons they know, and reasons they don’t know. They will all but sell the blood of their firstborn child to make sure you know that they think you ain’t shit.

Black women have endured the unfathomable. We’ve watched our leaders be assassinated, and our hopes go with them. We’ve watched the nation’s leaders be assassinated, and watched our hopes float away with them too. We’ve buried our 5-year-old daughters after they were bombed to death in church, our 12-year-old sons who were playing in the park, and our 29-year-old daughters who were stopped for simple traffic violations.