User Submitted: The time I realized I was white.

A note from me about this submission: I wish this reader all the strength in the world to withstand the traumas of white privilege and also remind him or her that love of tacos does not a Latino make.

One day, I woke up and looked down and was like, “DAMN.  I’M WHITE!!”  This was really disheartening because I love tacos so much that I thought I was a full-blooded Latino.  It’s just so sad, because it is just SO difficult living with white privilege, you know, with the higher salary, absence of housing discrimination, and the ability to walk down the street without every suburban housewife reaching for their mace.  I have learned to live with my whiteness, but one day, I hope that people will except those of all colors, including the whites.

User Submitted: Black History Month: Separate but Equal

A note from me about this submission: Frustration over Black History having a month isn’t new but I like this personal story of past teachers. For the record, Black History Month began as Negro History Week and was proposed by Carter G. Woodson. The expansion to a month was the work of black students at Kent State University in the late 1960s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_History_Month#Negro_History_Week_.281926.29

Black History month pisses me off. Why isn’t it just part of “history”? When I was a kid, I learned about Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman right alongside Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Amelia Earhart etc. Of course, my 6th grade teachers history teacher was black, so that might’ve motivated her to include them in our history lessons in our mostly white town. And I leaned about Jackie Robinson from Mr. Morrison our math and science teacher, who might have played pro baseball, except he was older than Jackie Robinson, and was simply not allowed. He made a better living teaching white children decimals than he could in the negro leagues. But man he was still great to watch him play baseball, he was just awe inspiring. Of course it’s great to insist on including “black history” in school curriculum but really, “separate but equal”? NOT. What, is the rest of the year white anglo saxon straight male history?? Am I an idiot or what, for not realizing that that goes without saying?

Long Island high school senior Kwasi Enin gets into all 8 Ivy League schools, makes those of us who just got into one feel kinda dumb but mostly hella proud

theboondockstv:

Official Season 4 Trailer.  Yep, Boondocks is back. 

Me + Kimberly Bryant (Black Girls Code) + Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) at TED 2014 - The Next Chapter – View on Path.

User Submitted: Post Racism is Great! Good Thing I'm Not Getting Tenure

Post racism is a great time to be alive. As a black assistant professor who just published her first book with a top tier press, I think it’s about time I be denied tenure. Ironically, my book is largely about racism within occupations and academia and it’s black history month, so it makes perfect sense that some of my colleagues allowed a man who hates women and minorities to chair my tenure committee and guide me right out the door. No matter, as we speak they are busy tring to find another person of color to fill the highly sought after position of Successful Minority to Underappreciate. After all, the official building capacity does not permit any brown people that are actually more accomplished than many of their white colleagues.

User Submitted: Why can't kinky-headed women of all races unite?

Here’s my rant: You think hair bias is ‘racial’? HA! Why do black gals think that “good hair” is just a black thing, when we are ALL judged by the culture on a Womanly Worthiness Scale with Swedish stewardess blonde-silky-curtains at the top and frizzy kinks at the bottom? —and why can’t our black sisters get over it and be brave and welcoming role models for black AND white girls with kinks? When I was in high school and Afros got big (literally), I let my own dirty-blonde fuzz go free. (It wasn’t even a Jew-fro, I’m an Irish-German Catholic with lucky hair genes.) No more torture sessions with irons, hair dryers, sleeping on beer can-sized curlers. I carried an Afro pick and joyously terrified little old white ladies in public bathrooms by using it. But the moment seems to have passed, and now we have a whole body of documentaries and stuff by black women, 30 years later, still trying to figure out why sistahs can’t love the hair God gave them. Hello? You think YOU’re challenged to embrace the kinks? At least YOU have those cool ’70s icons to harken back to—Angela Davis, blah blah—not to mention awesome salons in happening black neighborhoods where I fantasize about how gorgeous black women bond over hours-long sessions with mystical African braiding wizards. Us kinky white girls get nothing but Failed Swedish Stewardess Syndrome. We sneak into Duane Reade and buy Miss Jessie’s Curl Creme (it works great on us, too), and fantasize about having the guts to get locks or cornrows. We treasure our few curly Caucasian role models (Alex Kingston, I’m talking to you, beautiful!) We hate black women who wear straight blonde hair—traitors to a cause that won’t even acknowledge our membership. And you know what really makes us crazy? Black women (like one published author) who think it’s “racist” when white girls toss their long, straight hair around in bars or elevators. We have been HATING those same white girls all our lives, starting in kindergarten parties in our whitey-white neighborhoods. But unlike you, we cannot unleash our Cultural Stereotype of Coolness in our own defense; we’re just the Frizzy-Haired White Girls, the sisters you won’t own. HAIR, ladies—it’s NOT just a black thing!

User Submitted: Am I black?

Before buying the book, I think I should first try and figure out “Am I not black or am I black and just not doing it properly?”  How would I know?  There really should be a test — and not one of those damn standardized culturally biased Princeton elitists type tests either.  (I put the gris-gris on them long ago after they told me I should give up the sciences and go into a field like social work!) 

I think race is like beauty — it’s only skin deep, so don’t hand me any of that “look in the mirror” crap either.  When I look in the mirror left and right are backwards, so how do I know the colors aren’t backwards too?  Besides, there’s no black or white in the rainbow so I have my doubts about the whole so-called “EM spectrum” those guys in the *white* lab coats are always talking about.  (Whose pocket do you think THEY are in?)

But when black people meet how do we determine who is blacker (or, not to be racist, which one is least white)? The usual method - waiting to see which one the cops question first - isn’t always practical.  The alternative of asking someone “How black are you?” can lead to some very unpleasant results (something I can personally attest to).

And while you’re taking questions - something that, as an author, I believe you’re legally required to do - I have one more.  Every time I go to church Jesus seems to get whiter and whiter.  In a few years I fully expect Him to be 6’4”, have blond hair, speak with a Finnish accent, and hang from an Ikea cross.  Don’t people ever look at the atlas and see he probably looks more like me than Sven?

I’m jonesin’ for a snack.  Later.

User Submitted: Every Day I am Reminded

The Black American is a relatively new cultural phenomenon.  We are not culturally African, but in practice we are not fully American.  Every day I am bombarded by evidence of European, Asian, Indian, Jewish, Hispanic, and Islamic cultures, but mine, it would seem, is an accumulation of conflict with the dominant American demographic.  I refuse to simply forget my culture simply because it makes some people uncomfortable.  It is an immense part of this country’s history, and it’s the only history which the many generations of my ancestors in America have been able to preserve.  It is uniquely ours, and should be remembered by everyone— not just Black Americans— as both a testament to the enduring human spirit and a lesson on the price of inhumanity.

Me + @wkamaubell @billcosby #standup #cosbyshow #sxsw #blackselfie #blelfie?

#tbt #tbtunde

itooamharvard:

Promo video for I, Too, Am Harvard made by Ahsante Bean, Harvard College Class of 2015

Wonderful

I could be any one of these 10 people & imprisoned in Iran. Time to #UnlockIran http://bit.ly/unlockiran http://thndr.it/1fBKCC9

#tbt #tbtunde

The Strand bookstore in NYC is showing some serious love to my book. Honored! Thanks to Katie Kimball for the alert. 

mergermania:

After deciding to join forces with the design and animation studio I Shot Him, we weren’t about to issue some boring press release. No, sir. Instead, we ordered a Mergetron 9000 and began imagining an entire universe of mergers that could exist as part of #MergerMania. 

Visit cultivatedwit.com to learn more of this most holy union, and be sure to like, follow, friend, subscribe, and pledge unending servitude to Cultivated Wit for more amazingness soon to come! 

Very excited that my company is growing, and oh what a fun way to do so!