Adiba Nelson

Apparently, we Black women have a smell. And it’s been bottled and labeled and is being offered up for consumption by Sunflower Cosmetics. Yep. You read that right. There is a legitimate company out there who is selling a perfume called “Black Women.” If my girlfriend hadn’t posted a picture of it in a local shop, I would have called her a damn liar.

Nicely done, MAC. Nicely done.

Then we had that talk that made my eye twitch: the budget talk.

If 93% of the Academy is White, but as of 2014, only 62% of Americans were White, and art is supposed to imitate life...

So, by your reasoning, it’s safe to say that we should go into areas where one group of people are thought to be terrorizing another group of people, round up the terrorizers, and get them off the streets. OK, cool. I see your proposal, and I raise you “history."

I applaud you for being here. I applaud you for giving life the five fingers of death and deciding to show up for whatever the day brings — every day.

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.

They basically gave the Oscars the middle finger.

It was the weirdest thing. I looked at this tiny human and felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. No overwhelming joy at finally meeting this person I’d been so excited for in months prior, no lurking sadness about no longer being pregnant and relishing in those shared “inside mommy’s belly” moments. Just... nothing. My brain said, “You have a baby now,” and that was that.

Enter: Lemonade. [...] Beyoncé reminds us that she is as real a woman as the rest of us. She is a strong woman, yet made even stronger in her ability to start anew.