“The Help” at Condé Nast’s Bon Appetit Magazine

This morning I woke up black in America. Waking up black in America over the last, oh, four hundred years has been painfully and excruciatingly exhausting. Waking up black in America over the last two weeks has been a constant trigger of that pain and exhaustion. That pain of being black in America falls over you with such crushing weight on a daily basis, that respite must be sought out, self-care must be prioritized, as a matter of our own mental health. When simply going to work makes it hard to breathe because you have to deal with both overt racism and microaggressions towards you, you need that self-care.

Racism is an everyday affliction for black people and people of color. We absorb the trauma and then go home to find that respite, and the way we do that is like everyone else: a TV show, a movie, a book; and of course, YouTube videos.

My partner and I watched the Bon Appetit test kitchen videos on YouTube. He is a radical black trans scholar who does not put up with whiteness lightly. When we started dating and I started playing the test kitchen videos, he commented on the overall whiteness of it. He commented that he “had issues with white people teaching me about food and culture” that “almost never feature black people.”

All valid. All true.