Posted on 08/18/2017 5:04:20 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I’ve been meditating on an image of Kerry Washington wearing her curls wild and free for the past week. She stepped out Sunday with her curly fro in Los Angeles, and it has brought me much joy. I haven’t seen Kerry’s hair big and frizzing since 2001 when I cut class to watch Save the Last Dance. Her hair, occupying more space in a world intent on blocking black girls from our blessings, was a dose of beauty, affirmation, and strength that I needed — especially now.
Just a day before, a mob of racist white people holding tightly to tiki torches and white supremacy gathered Saturday in Charlottesville, VA. The aftermath of their “Unite the Right” march has left three dead, more than 30 physically injured and a nation having to reckon with its racist roots and reality.
To say it’s complicated to sit and write a beauty column in these trying times is an understatement. I do not feel like doing this — just as I do not feel like reading, tweeting my outrage or tuning into deeply unsettling TV news (seriously, I turn my head away from the split-screen madness of cable news at airports). I don’t feel like doing anything — really. All I want to do is meditate on Kerry’s curl pattern, Beyonce’s cleavage, and Rihanna’s bejeweled curves while listening to “Bodak Yellow,” “Wild Thoughts, ” and The Read.
When I tell friends that I avoid political headlines from the White House and have muted Trump on Twitter, they meet me with such tenderness and say, I get it. I want to escape, too.
But these images and sounds are not escapism, nor are they extracurriculars for me. They are a means of grappling with a reality that feels so damned that I seek pleasure to keep me going, to keep me hopeful, to keep me dreaming and thinking and loving. Joy and bliss, love and beauty give way to resistance, especially for black Americans, people of color and/or LGBTQ+ folks. I want — no, I need — to see images of black girls and femmes twerking, slaying and primping, just as much as I need to see Symone Sanders bopping her head and Representative Maxine Waters reclaiming her time.
I call on these images for strength as I grapple with the ubiquity of Trump’s image: an indignant, ignorant, and irresponsible white man elected to the nation's highest office, the one who declared that there was blame on “both sides” of the violence, stating that these white supremacists were “very fine people” in Charlottesville “innocently protesting” Confederate monuments. This homegrown terrorism is rooted in white supremacy and it is not new. It’s part of a deep, sordid history of violence perpetrated on black Americans and other communities of color.
Frankly, Trump and his dangerous white mediocrity have surpassed my threshold. I will simply pay him no mind, as trans revolutionary Marsha P. Johnson used to say. It does not mean that I do not care and that I will not continue to do vital work alongside my communities and comrades. It means allowing myself to recognize that I will not fight the same battles my forebears have fought trying to get white people on our page, trying to get white folk to recognize that it is dangerous for them to separate themselves from those torch-carrying racists when white supremacy continues to blanket them, covering and sheltering them while it kills us. They do not get to eat cake, as Tina Fey instructed last night on “Weekend Update.” No, white people need to do more than channel their outrage safely into sweets. They need to do the work of checking their privilege and their people and challenging a system that they continue to benefit from.
I have seen Trump move masses of white people to outrage. He has become the catalyst for political action for many who feel failed by our political system. They are finally outraged, and Charlottesville makes them even angrier, but I am not surprised by the overt racists that have felt emboldened and newly energized by the 45th President of these United States.
As a black, native Hawaiian, poor-raised trans woman of color, I am not shocked. I was born outraged. I was born without, knowing my people were not counted, not included, not centered. I struggled through low-resourced schools, communities, and housing projects. I saw my neighborhoods ravaged by poverty, drugs, and over-policing. I spent my life navigating systems built upon me — a black child in America — not making it out.
Yet, I did. I found my reflection in books written by black women, including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I sought refuge in deep, restorative friendships with other trans girls who shared how they made a way out of no way, helping me gain access to healthcare and develop skills that helped me survive, including beauty tools and sage advice that made me feel more confident. And when I felt overwhelmed, I found the courage to ask for help and seek safe spaces.
I resisted and thrived despite it all, like many resilient black people navigating these systems. Self-preservation is not complacency for black people. It's work. Self-preservation is knowing that I do not need to perform activism for anyone. It recognizes that how I am feeling and hurting is not always up for public consumption, that being quiet and crying and grappling with the ways of this world alone, with my family, and my loved ones are my right. I do not have to justify my need to care for myself, and my communities in the age of Trump, or even react or respond to his every move.
As I write now, I grapple with images of overt racism that I have always felt and sensed, but never really saw displayed as blatantly as I’ve always experienced my entire life. These images are disturbing as all hell, yet I take solace in the fact that what I’ve felt for so many years — every microaggression, every closed door, every moment when I was (and remain) the only — is finally showing up fully, confronting white people with clear-cut, unavoidable white supremacy.
What black people experience and continue to experience is absolutely real. We did not make any of it up. It is not paranoia. This madness does not shock me in the ways it’s shocking white Americans, and I will not feel an ounce of guilt for turning my head away and seeking joy and strength and affirmation elsewhere. I will leave that to white folk to reckon with, to use their shock and outrage to act, to educate, to protest. I won’t spend my limited time and energy doing that work, work that my forebears and my communities have done and continue to do today.
So, I urge you — especially the black and brown, the queer and trans, the undocumented and disabled — to celebrate yourselves and your community. I urge you to prioritize your well-being just as you prioritize your movement work. Dismantling these systems will take lifetimes, and none of us can be useful if we are depleted. Making a difference in the world should not mean disregarding yourself. It is not selfish to care for yourself in a world intent on you not existing.
I encourage you to do what you need to do for you: take a few days off from social media and the news cycle to think, to gather, to see or create art. Why don’t you indulge in an extra therapy session, a massage, or a sister/sibling circle? Seek images, sounds, stories, and activities that restore you and offer you strength and joy, whether that’s going for a drink or a walk with a friend; engaging in a meditative or spiritual space; or simply making Kerry’s curls your wallpaper. Most important, ask for help, assistance, and guidance when you need it.
I, too, am angry and hurt, feeling exhausted and nearly apathetic. I write this, not only as a means to push you to center yourself and your needs but as a reminder to myself that I cannot contribute until I contribute to me.
[As a black, native Hawaiian, poor-raised trans woman of color, I am not shocked]
Got all the victim points down.
“Pick a target.....freeze it.....polarize it............”
Miss Hurston was a Conservative Republican who would've been a Trump supporter. I'm guessing she didn't know that.
She WAS a male-—now she’s a chick,according to Wiki.
Pathetic.
.
Native Hawaiians are not black in the true sense. A real Hawaiian might kick it’s ass for saying that.
It is called an “mahu”.
Extreme racism is alive and well within the black community.
Such Nazi tendencies! No one ever said Nazi philosophy had to be white driven....
File under ‘Know the Enemy”
"I had no choice in the assignment of my sex at birth... My genital reconstructive surgery did not make me a girl. I was always a girl."
I says:
"What do them pesky chromosomes say...fool?"
What the hell is a Kerry Washington?
And who gives a rat's ass?
Who the F is Kerry Washington and why should her freakin’ HAIR become a political statement????
The lady author was born male so I suppose big hair fascinates her.
.
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Black and beautiful? Really? There’s something really quite ugly going on these days from the so-called beautiful people.
The left politicizes everything. And that is the first unwritten rule of totalitarianism—Politicize EVERYTHING
I don’t like beating around the bush in responses to articles. But in this one, I would have to tear the black race a new one to undo this racist’s mentality. It’s going to happen - whites are going to turn on blacks - if this keeps up. What a dang shame the racists are getting away with this.
How can anyone take these whackjobs seriously?
O, cripe! Another freak. I should have known.
O, cripe! Another freak. I should have known.
________________
Interesting that this is what the cosmetic industry uses to rope in women and separate from their money in the name ‘self esteem’ and ‘liberation’.
Way to facilitate mindless narcissism. How revolutionary and woke.
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