black

As a Black woman, I don’t have the luxury of not caring what others think about me.

If I couldn’t find clothes that fit me while I viewed the Eiffel Tower at night or sipped on a proper cappuccino, was the world really mine to occupy?

I recently went tubing with a new friend. We met at our seasonal summer job and decided to spend the day floating down the Green River.

I was angry and felt defeated. I also knew deep in my heart that this would have never happened if I were white. I had been using Uber for over 2 1/2 years and never came across anything similar to this.

[W]hy must the acknowledgment of my beauty be predicated on how well and how often I contort to attempt to fit into some kind of ideal? Why can’t I be all the iterations of me and still be beautiful?

As much as you want to believe people are all the same, we don’t have the luxury of being seen as the “default” in the same way white, straight, cis people often are. We don’t have the luxury of dismissing our painful history and systemic issues for the sake of everyone getting along, because we’re still in the middle of them.

Some human rights campaigners argue that now is an important time to scrutinize federal funding of highly-militarized police trainings in the Miami area that may contribute to surrounding police agencies’ aggressive tactics.

It’s like being a deer in the headlights. You’re in imminent danger. You know it. But you can’t move. You can’t speak. No reaction whatsoever. You just stand or sit there, frozen in time, waiting for the crash.