Experimenting with Black Girls (Love w/Microaggressions) - For Colored Girls Who've Considered S****

Experimenting with Black Girls- Love with Microagressions

Hypothesis 1 : Other Women are for beauty. Black women are for novelty.

Kennedy blurted out during our jazz lesson "You're beautiful". I was so taken aback by the unexpected interruption . She crooked her head, curiously scanning my face with her eyes and continued. "I never really looked at you, but looking at you now, I can see that you're actually really beautiful". I thanked her, stifling back a tiny thought. In all the months and years we'd known each other, what had stopped her from "looking" or perhaps seeing before.

When 12 Years a Slave came out, four people told me that year that I was so "beautiful like Lupita". It's the way Jim's mom had said it that struck me the most. It's as if she'd discovered for the first time that dark skinned girls could be objects of beauty too.

Benedict said he was so excited to kiss a black girl when he got to America. And perhaps unknowingly, had sent me the excited monkey emoji. We never met. Oscar told me he had a fetish for strong, powerful, sexy black woman - These things were true, but I wasn't sure how he'd come to that conclusion. I had Sara Barelleis lyrics and a picture of me in a flower crown in my profile.

Hypothesis 2 : Other Women are for real love. Black women are for other things.

Danny was my first love. The day we became official, I was excited to capture our newfound bf-gf status. I reached for my phone to take photos of us. But he pushed it away. He said he didn't like taking photos. I promised I'd take just one and never show anyone else. He leaned his pale face towards mine to pose for the photo. I kept it private, showing no one, holding on to it as if our "love" was really our (his) little secret. A tiny rumble sounded Is it because... I shook the thought from my head. But one week after he broke up with me to go and date Katie Sallinger, I saw the photo of the two of them on my Facebook newsfeed, pale skin and dark hair , big smiles standing side by side at the local bowling alley. I felt the rumble again.

Tim's grandma told him that he could date me but not marry me. I'd met her once in passing, exchanging pleasant hellos, not long enough to have formed a lasting impression. I'd coached him through many a self-hatred spiral and was kind to him. When he broke up with me, he cried and told his friends that I was an angel. And while I wouldn't have married him, I wondered what about me had made me unworthy of being his wife. His grandma hadn't had the gall to say it to me, but I heard her too. Black girls must be for frivolous and unserious things. White girls/other girls are for real love.

We spend 4 years , being looked through as though blackness had invalidated our womanhood. Hookups and relationships were for others girls. When the boy in my class talked about how he liked blondes, I don't think he meant me in my blonde lacefront. When he said he liked brunettes, he didn't mean me either. And when men who looked like me, seemed to follow suit in passing over darker skinned girls in favor of anyone lighter and whiter, suddenly, it clicked into perspective. As if liking black women seemed to be it's very own rare sexual orientation.

Like many black girls, I prayed that love would be safe for me. I watched every Nora Ephron movie, every popular rom-com, romance film seeing myself in all the complicated and messy manic dream girls - like Summer, like Clementine, and like Celine. But in those movies, girls like me were never there and if we were , we certainly weren't love interests. We were the help, spiritual mediums, magical black negresses here to help white people find their way. Magical Mammy godmothers who'd sprinkle our black girl magic away to help lost white people find themselves. And maybe if given storylines, we'd even help them learn how to show us empathy.

But he had no empathy, not any to spare for me, which seemed in hindsignt to be more familiar than it should've been. He seemed to find ease in telling me in a world that had already told me this so many times, that I wasn't enough, that I had "no power", enjoying putting every flaw of mine on display, enjoying the feeling of putting me beneath his feet.

And so when he called it an experiment, I searched long and hard for where it hurt because I felt it somewhere deep and familiar. But for a long time just couldn't place it. I threw out pillows, opened cabinet doors trying to find where it had nuzzled itself, bumping into many forgotten things on the way to find it. But it was there, living with the rumble.

Two systems kept us both in our place and so it seemed fit of him to remind me of mine. In those systems he sat at the top and I at the bottom, with "no power" only dreaming of what he had in reach. I thought of the white skinned girls in movies who were free to be weak and in exchange were offered protection. I

chided for a moments of "unassertiveness", keeping my calm because girls who look like me don't have the privilege to be angry. We have a public relations issue when it comes to our assertiveness. Our sadness, our assertion, is often translated as anger, which for some reason obscures our humanity, turning "allies" into deaf ears.

I thought of all of my sisters , at the bottom of this societal totem pole, sitting right there beside me at this bus stop at the intersection of racism and sexism, hit with bricks, pain turned into memes for entertainment, bodies experimented on and experimented with to help man satisfy his fascination with novelty and make big his ego. How after all this time we're still so unprotected, even while liberal white women chant on the internet "protect black women" or "listen to black women". But somehow 100 years later, we're still crying out "Aint I a woman". And some days, adding to our chorus, "Ain't I a human".

Our value reduced to sexual prowess and ability to serve or to labor for you. Humanity invisible. We fight to be seen.

When I realized you had me turn on my sister, thinking I'd been the chosen one, celebrating her disrespect, not realizing we were the same, I inflamed my own wound. When you kept me in your room , when you didn't hold my hand in public or speak about me unless asked, or let me post photos of me and you, I felt a burn that reminded me of Danny again. When you ignored me that night in front of everyone, and reached for my body later when we were alone, I felt it again.

When I asked you if you were ashamed of me, I hadn't yet realized that behind the calm tone was a scream calling out from the depth of a place I couldn't quite find. And when I could finally trace the sound back to the source, I found the answer. I found it.

This little place only black girls have and only black girls will know. A hollowness from never really being seen, from being women forced to be strong , labeled as angry or aggressive when our tears hit the air too loudly. Never being able to be free to be vulnerable, to be weak, without being taken advantage of. Eternally confined to unconsentual mammyhood. Putting everyone always before ourselves. And yet, still seen and treated as other, as lesser, a reminder you were liberal in giving me. Thinking love could save us as we watched other women be held gently like tiny delicate things, we found ourselves so clumsily thrown overboard like flotsam from broken ships. Neglected, disrespected, and unprotected. Always wondering why it seems like our lives don't matter.

And so when he treated me like the help, like my life didn't matter, I should've expected it. And when he said it was an experiment, a part of me thinks for the first time, someone had finally just said the honest thing.

For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Not Enough

Macolm X said the black woman is the most disrespected creature in America. Years later our pain turned into memes and entertainment for audiences. When laughing at black women comes as natural as breathing, seeing us as other is more than just easy. Diffusing our justified anger into comfortable lazy tropes instead of empathizing with us is common.

But we change the world with what we do. The sheer amount of black girl things, black girl physical attributes, black girl features, black girl vernacular, black girl music, added to sex and turn up playlists, with people dancing like black girls for laughs in rooms with no black girls in sight.

The world loves our culture, but not us , we say. Even our brothers betray us , slander , us, who hold them down like their mothers before them, across every picket line, and every protest march. And we find them returning the favor through twitter rampages and podcast diatribes. And watch as they turn around to sprout angel wings for fairer skinned women.

How much mistreatment do we expect black women to endure? Even those tasked to care for us fail us. Doctors think we exaggerate pain, think we can feel less pain than others, like we are inhuman mythical beings. A deeply ingrained bias that I'm sure exists outside of hospital rooms with smart people in white coats. Do they think our resilience against the worst that the world has to offer means that we like the pain? That we're so invincible that our bodies and our minds aren't able to break.

But we are human . We are real. And we're on the edge too, and for a long time we plodded along working and lifting and laboring our way through distracting ourselves from what's been done to us. Because if we think for too long and remember too much, we'll find ourselves in places where the rainbow isn't enough.

And we ask for open ears. And our allies say they'll do better. They're checking their privilege. They're doing the "work", but when they find themselves uncomfortable, they revert back to the original image and it's back to every black girl for ourselves. And maybe the anti-racism literature wasn't clear : Consumption of what we do, does not equate to respect. If you get something out of it, have you really pushed yourselves that much yet?

We're exhausted by bad allies - white women who pick patriarchy and whiteness every time; black men wielding patriarchy to feel the power that blackness couldn't give to them. Both tripping over themselves to invalidate the experiences of black women.

But we're pushing for everyone and we've been laboring long. But we're so tired of seeing the same old shit just keep on going on.

Normalized mistreatment and cruelty, setting trends, but still not part of a standard of beauty, always helping and serving, but never protected. We do everything everywhere and are still neglected. Tired of bodies like ours opposite cop cars, unarmed, sleeping sound, white men violence hand-me-downed from slave catchers to 5-0- to 12 to white men in the workplace, and worst times in your own bed. The violence, the aggression, the apathy is so exhausting.

We're not angry, we're sad. We're tired. We're disappointed. We're trying to weather the storm for our sisters, for our mothers, for our grandmothers, for our daughters and their daughters. We're here, if only us, for each other. At the corner of misogynoir road, we stand together. I'm holding my sisters with both of my hands. We're holding up everyone and maybe ourselves if we can.