What’s good, Medium?

10/11/2016

Joel Leon. on “talking white” and the reality of code switching:

Oh. Speaking White. You ain’t know? It’s a thing. I feel it most when I laugh a certain kind of laugh that doesn’t feel like Bronx me. It feels more like the went to high school in Midtown me. And those are two very contrasting worlds, worlds with varying degrees of hue, that never converged. You learn to make these worlds meet in accordance with who sits in the rooms. We do it without knowing, at times. It sits outside race, ethnicity, lives in culturism, outside our periphery — there is a tinge of Dominica that rests under my tongue whenever my Uncle Winston talks about lobster tails around me; it is a comfort. White speak is comfortable for other White people, or maybe I am imagining this world, that sort of existence? I know how it feels to say the word “dope” in a room full of non-colored people, and the smiles or chuckles that come from it. Because it is not normal for them, as it would be normal for those who breathe the vernacular, who are steeped in the culture, and that live not in just Black and White. That kind of coding is relevant to the Dominican, the Puerto Rock, the Asian or White who has been in the circle or lunchroom with the same people that they ride the school bus with.

stacia l. brown’s corporate life hack? Be like Al Roker:

Don’t let these white folks mistake you for docile; not when you’ve paid your jovial decades of dues. Make them understand you as human, as in possession of a loving home life, a highly accomplished, incomparably brave life-partner whose deep brown skin radiates against your own, a grown and high-achieving child, an expertise in meteorology trusted nationwide. Hold the best bits of yourself aloft; too many of your coworkers do not deserve them.

Jenn Marie’s open letter to the family who owned her family:

Growing up in rural South Carolina, I lived under a Confederate flag, trusted my public safety to Klan members, took field trips to plantations, and always used the colored entrance at the town drugstore.

Because… I’m not stupid.

I never realized how peculiar my life might have been until my father revealed a family secret to me when I was 13 years old.

“You know your 6th-grade teacher’s family used to own us.” My father casually mentioned one night.

And with that, my entire world was shattered.

Paul A. Bromley’s ode to his son’s Black joy and Black hair:

We have to learn to let our Boys be free. When you stifle, police and control Black boys you leave unfinished works in progress who grow into men who are still boys at heart. Confused about our identities. Little boys who become men who never feel like they are enough. Little boys who become men who equate their manhood and masculine identity in the amount of money they make and the amount of women they can sexually conquer. Boys who suffer from anxiety and depression. Boys who never feel like they are enough …but can’t talk about it because men don’t talk about our emotions. This isn’t creating strength; it is fostering weakness. We are creating men who do not know who they are, but are forced to navigate the world pretending that we are fully in control of our identities, sexualities, bodies and our emotions. The reality is many of us are a wreck inside because of all of the constraints we have on our lives as Black men. And it all starts from the first time you question when is that little Black boy getting his nappy hair cut?

Ezinne Ukoha on Ava Duvery’s new Netflix documentary 13th :

When we scream the names of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Matthew Ajibade, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile and so many others — we resort to a habit that is never off-duty. It is a ritual that fits into the scope of what makes us who we are — even when it hurts so bad. DuVernay’s latest offering does not stray from her signature style of hitting us with the spectrum of a map that is withered with the trials and tribulations of an open secret. The secret that seduces America without feeling or hope.

The knowledge that White America uses to box Black America to the ground with no mercy. We know the history. It is taught and presented as a dire thesis — composed of bloody remains and shattered spirits that float without direction.

Now, they can find a place to rest.

They have a home in DuVernay’s stellar landscape — that accosts the primed duration of slavery and all its settled mishaps — through the gangster eighties — and into the boiling pot of the nineties that toppled into the disbelief that as I write this piece — nothing much has changed.