My Anger

Being an African American person takes the most patience in the world. Every day is another game of who's going to touch my hair today without asking? Who's going to comment on my voice (I don't regularly use ebonics)? Who's going to make a tacky joke about black people being inferior or unintelligent? And after it's said and done, to tell you it's not a big deal because it's just a joke. Who's going to sit in your goddamn passenger seat and rap along with your music and say "nigga" without batting an eye because it's just the lyrics, chill out. 

I am tired. 

The pain I go through as a black person in this shitty ass country is only an afterthought to so many white Americans. I'm tired of my skin color being the butt of your tacky little jokes, of you touching my fucking hair, of having to tell you to not say nigga.

I'm tired of explaining to white people how to not be racist.

And I get it. White people see me and they see me as the beacon of what all black people should be. They hear my voice and think: Oh, she's one of the good ones. Before I shaved my head because I was tired of being imprisoned by my hair, they'd see all sixteen inches of that relaxed mane and think: Wow, she looks so put together for a black girl (then again, of course, they never saw what sixteen years of chemical burns did to my scalp, a good analogy for the increasing self hatred, that seemed to grow every time I got my hair done, due to the overwhelmingly toxic European based feminine beauty ideals that plague America's core). White people see me and they see the eloquently spoken token black sidekick in their favorite childhood Disney shows. They see me as an excuse for their subconscious and deliberate racism because "Look! I have a black friend! Look at how fucking diverse my friend group is!"

The thing is, any regard for the pain of black people has always been an afterthought in America. All of you get to live in a safe little bubble. You wake up and you go about your lives and when you hang out with your friends you don't have to worry about what neighborhood you're in at certain times of day. You don't have to worry about people thinking you're stupid because of your dialect. You don't have to constantly think about how others perceive you. You don't have to worry about people mispronouncing your name for ages and then trying to get you to let them call you something else because they're too fucking lazy to take a crash course in phonetics. At fifteen when you go shopping at the nice mall in the white neighborhood for a change and you want to go into Saks Fifth with your mom and pretend things are okay for a bit, you don't have to worry about the clerk following you around with a hawk eye and that tight lipped fake ass smile. You don't have to deal with any self hatred because of how dark you are, or because you sound different, or because your hair is unmanageable and you don't know how to take care of it because most hair salons don't do natural black hair because once again, beauty ideals in this country are solely based on European features. I am tired!

Google has existed for a little over twenty years, and libraries for centuries. The only way to truly stop racism - I think - is to educate yourselves about black people, and to truly make an effort to understand the struggles black people face every day. Here's a hint: Racism doesn't just exist externally, it's internal too. Read about racism in this country. Read Sojourner Truth, W.E.B Dubois, Ida B Wells, Booker T Washington, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, the list goes on. If American school systems spent as much time brown-nosing Albert Einstein and George Washington on teaching black literature and black history (which is also U.S. History, especially since we fucking made this place the America it is today) things just might start to turn around. The good 10% of me left that still has hope that one day America will truly see African Americans as people and not puppets is what keeps me going, but god is it dwindling, and going fast.