Potent quotables
Honestly, I would be just fine spending my time finally perfecting the dance breakdown from Janet Jackson’s “If” music video or finally taking an art history course just for funsies or, you know, enjoying the luxury of being a multilayered person like white dudes are allowed to be, but that’s just not how things are.
The point is that we are aware that how our hair is styled determines how we will be treated by others, and that treatment or mistreatment (for example, the word angry doesn’t get hurled at me nearly as much when my hair is straight as when it’s in an Afro) can affect our own opinions of ourselves.
If someone is going to be racist toward you, BURDEN them.
this question and this label unfairly positions a black woman at a disadvantage, where she becomes either flustered or unintentionally defensive.
basically, my brain is an iPhone that doesn’t have enough storage on it anymore because I used it all up to take poorly lit photos of omelets.
And his insistence upon approaching the world, both real and make-believe, with openness, humility, and a desire to learn more than to teach has always been for me a model of white privilege–checking before there was a phrase for it.
PSA: Catcalling me by stating that you would let me do your laundry is just a roundabout way of saying, “Hello there, beautiful stranger! Just thought I’d let you know that I’m giving myself a HJ tonight!” Seriously, catcallers, knock it off. Stop assaulting me with comments about what domestic stuff I can do for you, stop demanding that I smile, especially when you see me carrying something heavy, stop berating me if I reject your advances, and enough with following me because I didn’t respond to your yelling. I know you think you’re being persistent like in all those rom coms where the basic plot is “women have bird brains, so it’s up to men to charmingly badger ladies until they want to sheath your penis in their vajeen the way Jaime Lannister does his sword into his scabbard.” But behaving as if you know what’s best for a woman, especially one you haven’t met, as if she has no agency of her own, is not cute. It’s creepy and it’s giving us serious Law & Order: SVU vibes. If you really do want to compliment a woman, then find a more creative way to do it than yelling comments at her the way Spike Lee does at the New York Knicks during a play-off game.
Lit review
Phoebe commented on my Substack once and I nearly passed out.