87. " I'm not a smart man..."

My first year of college, when I would call home, my mother had a habit of asking "So... do you have a boyfriend yet?" in every conversation. I never had a boyfriend in high school and, well... college being what it is, she was anticipating my sexual and romantic awakening at any moment. Rather than answer that question semi-daily for 4 years, I promised my mother that I would tell her as soon as I had any boyfriend-related news, and in return, she agreed to stop asking.

Fast-forward 11 years. Just as I'm settling into my grown woman groove, here come the (female) relatives wanting to know where the boyfriend is, and when I'm gonna become a We. I explain my solitary disposition and how my cup of freedom runneth over, but they're not buying it. I'm told that a lack of desire for companionship is, without a doubt, nothing other than a lack of experience in love. To love... to be in love, is to crave the beloved. All day, every day. To eat, sleep, and dream him.

I object, but I'm over-ruled. Love is need. Love is "Everything with you, is better than everything without you." Love is all the time. Not to have felt that way is not to have been in love. And I am She Who Has Yet to Love. Just wait. It'll happen to me one day.

I have stopped objecting, for now. I won't say that I have been in love. I won't say that I have craved and wanted and missed and dreamed of. I won't say that I know the feeling, and that it passes. I will never say that I have loved harder than their in loves. Or that I have melted with my beloveds over miles and time zones. I won't say that Love is deeper than love, deeper than sex, and deeper than sympathy. I won't say that I know what I know.

"... But I know what Love is."

86. Recessionomics

Am I the only one getting an endless stream of 50% off coupons in the (e-)mail? I'm sure I'm not. But my goodness. If ever you wanted to step up your fashion game but couldn't quite afford the right labels, now's the time to pull triggers.

Banana Republic (where I've invested considerable amounts of disposable income) used to have a 40% Off sale once or twice a year. Now it's every other week. Coach, reknowned(by me) for sending useless $10 coupons that barely cover the tax on most of what they sell, just dropped a $50 gift card in my mailbox. I'm walking out of that store with something that costs $49.

What other stores are doing this? And how do I get on their mailing lists?

85. "I Like a Long-Haired, Thick, Red-Bone."

Once upon a time, I was going to write an essay for Essence magazine on color (complexion) politics in the Black community. It never got off the ground. Not too long ago though I came across a discussion in the culture blog of The Atlantic on some comments Jill Scott made about inter-racial dating, ironically in Essence magazine. She referred to that feeling she gets when she sees an attractive Black man with a white woman. She called it 'The Wince.'

And in response to that thought, and some people's reactions to it, I was (at least in part) able to express some thoughts of my own. It's not an Essence article, but it's what I have for now. And though this blog is supposed to be an exercise in new and regular writing, I'm re-posting those thoughts here. I think I just want to launch them in my own space. As a way of saying, "If I were a writer, here's something I'd write about." That's the truth.

And so is this:

I've been turning this argument (and this issue) over in my mind for some time. I've read Ta-Nehisi Coates's critique of the arguments against black man-white woman interracial dating, and I found it compelling. I keep coming back to my own wincing though.

The issue for me is not that so many black men prefer white women that black women who prefer black men are at a palpable mating disadvantage. The issue is rather with a kind of aesthetic color preference that many black men still exhibit, and with what that color preference does to many black women's psyches.

However small the percentage of black men who actually marry white (or non-black) women, the reality of light-skinned privilege in the black dating world makes the sight of a black man with a white woman an uncomfortable one for many black women. In some ways, white women are simply the aesthetic extreme of (many) black men's preferences for lighter skin. Even those black men who ultimately partner with darker skinned women often exhibit (whether in speaking or dating patterns) some degree of light skinned preference (being "color-struck").

So for many black women, inter-racial dating becomes a particular instance of a very general kind of color politics they constantly contend with. As a black woman who appears to be biracial (but isn't), I can only say that being a light skinned black woman in a world of black men is like passing for white in a room full of white people who feel perfectly comfortable saying all those things they would never say in mixed company. It can be genuinely horrifying.

Looking at it this way, not simply in terms of white vs. black, but of lightness vs. darkness (which I think is what it has always been) black women's anxiety starts to make a lot more sense. We could note that many black women have similar reactions when they see black men with very light skinned black women. More interestingly we could note the euphoria amongst black women at Michelle Obama's being not only black, but darker skinned.

It's not just about black and white to black women. It's about black men's wanting a woman who does or doesn't *look* like she grew up on the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or East St. Louis. A woman who doesn't have the extra exoticism of maybe being part white or Asian or Latina, but who is simply Black. It's about the extra points those women get from black men, over women who look like Michelle Obama. As someone who gets those points, even on my most raggedy day, I understand how they feel.

84. Now Reading: The Wretched of the Earth

The 2004 Grove Press version. I admit it--I've never read Wretched all the way through in a single sitting. 

I'm only in Homi Bhabha's foreword and my brain is already shooting sparks:

"The landscape of opportunity and "choice" has certainly widened in scope, but the colonial shadow falls across the successes of globalization. Dual economies create divided worlds in which uneven and unequal conditions of develoment can often mask the ubiquitous, underlying factors of persistent poverty and malnutrition, caste and racial injustice, the hidden injuries of class, the exploitation of women's labor, adn the victimization of minorities and refugees."

Special Thanks to Booksfree.com for always being there.  xoxo.

83. The Blogger Who Doesn't Blog

It's remarkable, when I think about it, how much of life is not optional. My conception of the good life still consists mainly of a leisurely writing career and exorbitant amounts of free time. A well-structured life is, for me, a fairly slow-paced one. Long, early mornings of writing, afternoons catching up on correspondence and wandering through museums, cooking and eating in the evening, and reading may way into sleep. All at my own pace, never under threat of any kind.

But that's not the way this life works. There are always things that must be done, things that ought to be done, and things that would be nice to do. Until now I have imagined that I would someday collapse these lists into one list of Good Things that I would always and happily do. As it is, my Must Be Done list comes first, my Ought To Be Done list is almost untouched, and my Would Be Nice To Do list is collecting dust on a shelf in the corner of my mind.

Case in point, last fall I bought a membership to the Art Institute of Chicago. I thought that having made a financial investment would motivate me to spend time in a place that, for my creative health, I ought to have been spending time. Last week I got a form in the mail to renew my membership. Nearly a year has passed and I have not been back since I joined 10 months ago. So much for that.

I'm not sure, but I suspect things might be very different if I aspired to be only an academic, or only a writer, or only a teacher. I imagine that being any variety of things requires a fair bit of one's time. While I'm increasingly committed to the laundry list of lives I've decided to live in my short time here, I'm not yet ready to accept that they'll be powered by coffee and quick naps, instead of daydreams and Impressionist paintings. Perhaps I'll be someone who spends her lunch breaks wandering the halls of the Art Institute of Chicago.

82. That Guy

I love me some Bill Simmons. Cuz he be sayin what I be sayin. Specifically, on the possibility of LeBron going to Miami:

I think it's a cop-out. Any super-competitive person would rather beat Dwyane Wade than play with him... That's why I'm holding out hope that LeBron signs with New York or Chicago (or stays in Cleveland), because he'd be saying, "Fine. Kobe, Dwight and Melo all have their teams. Wade and Bosh have their team. The Celtics are still there. Durant's team is coming. I'm gonna go out and build MY team, and I'm kicking all their asses." That's what Jordan would have done...

LeBron joining Wade after his 2010 playoffs flameout, in my opinion, is... the move of someone who, deep down, doesn't totally trust his own talents any more. And maybe he doesn't.

What should LeBron do? Pick Chicago. That's where the rings are. The fact that he didn't say to Bosh, "Come to Chicago with me, we'll play with Rose and Noah and win six titles together" was the single most disappointing outcome of the summer. That team would have been a true juggernaut with pieces that actually complemented each other, unlike this pickup-basketball situation that's brewing in Miami...

As a Chicagoan and natural D. Wade fan, I can't be that mad about the rings that may be about to pile up in Miami. And my sister had a sympathetic theory about how LeBron maybe never wanted to be That Guy. Maybe he always just wanted to be a really good player on a team of really good players, who could have fun and win titles. But... as a Chicagoan and child of the Jordan era, it's hard to watch a guy choose not to be That Guy. His "King" branding doesn't help either. Let's see how Nike spins this one.

And as usual, the entire Simmons column is worth reading.

81. "The Decision"

True or false... June 8, 2010, will be remembered as the day we learned that LeBron James did not want the crown.

80. The Things They Won't Say

In case you weren't aware, I'm in Senegal. I've been here for a month and I head back to the States today. And I've done a bit of international travel but I am not an international travel guru like Puff (or other sundry homies) so what follows is based on the experiences of what you might call a seasoned amateur.

Those who really do international travel and living often have a lot to say about how wonderful it is. How amazing it is to explore and expose yourself to different cultures. How ignorant/stuffy/spoiled/boring the United States is in comparison. How everyone ought to do it and do it often and if you just did you would really see how much you are missing and what an experience it all is.

In my humble opinion, all of the above is true.

But there is also the other side. The things that they won't say. And I didn't begin to consider it this way until a short conversation with Mr. about the number of Senegalese I'd met who wanted to go to the United States because life here is "hard." He simply asked whether they knew how tough life in the U.S. is--fast-paced, stressful, everything is too expensive and, of course, then there's the racism. But I said, no, of course not, because the hype about the United States being the land of milk and honey is so strong, that even those who leave have internalized it to the extent that they won't say all of the problems the United States has, all of the roadblocks the social and political structure here throws in front of immigrants much less people of African descent, much less talk about the different culture. They feel as though if they speak against U.S. life or express any hardship, people back home won't believe them and in fact blame them for not "making it." So they won't say it.

After that conversation, I wrote this in my travel journal (so excuse any loose grammar or typos):

And then there were all the things that she didn’t tell the people back home about how she hated Dakar. She hated its dirty streets and fishy congealed garbage smell. How she sometimes walked home railing against the inability of Dakar’s citizens to understand how critical it is to put their garbage in garbage cans, to throw things away properly, to take pride in their own city streets--this although she knew very well the structural factors that made something as simple as proper disposal of a pizza container impossible (reliable sanitation services and available trash bins for one).


How she hated not having air-conditioning at her host family’s house and how she used too much water taking two (sometimes more) showers a day just to wipe the stink of sweat, sand, dust, dirt, exhaust and smoke from her skin. How the food gave her indigestion and the meals were too starchy--how she’d die for something sweet and creamy just once, something baked, something chocolate, something beyond a mango as the occasional dessert. How she hated the roaches and flies and ants--but especially the roaches. How she hated the toilets that were only holes in the ground, how she didn’t understand how women stayed clean using only water to wipe, how it seemed so unfair that toilets did not flush all the way down and how the water that sprayed from the small pipes next to the hole always splashed her with God knows what was on the ground that day. How walking was draining but cabs were expensive and public transportation unreliable. How she came home exhausted from fighting cars that passed too close and street vendors that became too insistent but couldn’t complain because whatever she was going through couldn’t hold a candle to what her host family dealt with on a regular basis.


How the practice of hetero-patriarchy pitted mother against daughter, wife against maid, even wife against guest in ways that bit down hard on her sense of feminism and sense of self and left her feeling isolated and drained by the micro-aggressions of internalized sexism from the women and girls around her. How she didn’t expect it to be this hard to live in a Third World country--in part because she saw Senegal as “in development” but was only now finding out how far from “developed” that really was, and in part because this was her first time grappling with how comfortable with her own privilege she’d become. In all kinds of tiny ways--from laundry machines to gas stoves to inexpensive running water---she hadn’t realized that her politics were paper thin when faced with the actual fact of living in an industrializing nation. And she wasn’t even close to the hard life--her U.S. salary put her at lower middle-class at worst.


So what she really didn’t tell the people back home was how far from grace she’d fallen in just two short weeks there, how she was not the woman she thought she was, how she was not ready for what she imagined was the constant distress of living so far away from modern conveniences, and how all of this shocked her sense of self completely. She was a Blyden, it turned out. She was a Delaney. She was a turn-coat and a traitor to the change she wanted to make in the world. And she was comfortable being that way.


But even after all of this, she did not, as some have argued of Blyden and Delaney, see herself as fundamentally different in her blackness from the Senegalese. If anything, her sense of solidarity with them, of shared history, hurt, and oppression--of raced-ness--only deepened as days progressed. From both sides of her double helix--the Puerto Rican and the African American--she felt a kinship reaching outward towards this land that felt like home. And she struggled to grasp and understand this feeling even as her toes prickled to brush past candy wrappers, old newspapers, plastic covering, crumbled water bottles and dirty Kleenex. She struggled to better conceptualize the Affinity she felt. It became difficult to do so when the sun beat down especially hot and roasted undrained water lying along the curb, lifting the smell of human waste, car oil and cleaning solution into the air, but luckily it wasn’t something she could help. The Affinity, like it or not, remained, combining and recombining with her privileged outrage and creating in her a new Afro-diasporic DNA strand all in concurrent time. So that at the same moment, she, annoyed, shoo-ed away another boy attempting to sell her sunglasses, she also admired the familiar hustle; at the same time she drank a Coke, purchased at the toubab [foreigner] price from the boutique on the corner, she cut and ate a mango with a knife she carried in her bag, sitting on a stoop in the shade near the curb, one leg curled in her lap, a sandal half-hanging from the other dusty foot, looking for all the world like any other Centre Ville worker on their lunch break. Looking like there was nowhere else she’d rather be. And at that moment--at every moment--it was true.

When I wrote this, every bit of it was true. But it was the strangest thing--as soon as I said to myself what international travelers won't say about international travel, it stopped being important to say. As soon as I stopped pretending everything was okay, I stopped being bothered by everything that wasn't okay and began to take it all in stride.

The entry is dated June 26, 2010, so I had about a week and a half left and a little over two weeks behind me--a justifiable halfway point. And I'm posting it now, even though I leave tomorrow so it is quite late, because I'm not a fan of silences (or illusions). Let's hype up what should be hyped but let's also be real about it. I'm posting it now because I wasn't brave enough to do it while I was here but I know someone, somewhere is having their own "what they won't say" experience and they should know: Hey. It's cool. Come holla at the kid. She knows exactly how you feel.

79. Booty Envy, part 2

Me: I like this dress, but it's too short. I don't wear dresses this short.

My mother: No, it's good. It shows how [thick] your legs are.

Me: ?

My mother: Really, you can see just enough to know you've got some nice legs under there.

Me: ??

My mother: (laughing) I mean come on... You don't have a chest. You gotta use what you got.

Thanks, Mom =).