It may not be popular opinion, but I support the riots in Baltimore. Is being a good little nigger or nigger lover the proper response for violence against a people? MLK wasn’t murdered by the federal government for being his normal passive aggressive self. He was murdered because in his last days, he began to consult with Malcolm X and admitted that his non-violent approach was all wrong. They gave us passive aggressive solutions to a passive aggressive movement and hence why we are still dealing with this crap 50 years later!

Nothing was ever resolved in this world without some act of war or violence. This country has declared war all over this planet in response to real and imagined danger to cheers and well wishes to the decision and the soldiers but we want to condemn and point the finger when black people do it in the land where we were born? You want them to shut up and suck on the supremacy lollipop like you do. I need my brothas and sistas to wake up and get realistic before it’s your unarmed child, brother, sister, mother, father, uncle, aunt, cousin, or grandparent laying dead in the street.

To see some people trying to justify these deaths is appalling and disgusting to me. Sorry but not sorry for the people I offend, but that “black respectability” mess is for the birds. People are innocent until proven guilty by the court of law, not before the barrel of a gun. When police approach you, you become a suspect, meaning you are suspected of breaking the law. I suspect a whole lot but who deserves to die based on a suspension? Its real easy for ppl to make excuses and point fingers in a situation that you have never been in but let’s see how many of you behave docile when your family member is leaking in the street because he ran a red light, or resold a pack of cigarettes, or play with a toy gun in the toy department of Walmart, or police raid the wrong house and kill a kid….

I’m sorry but I just don’t believe in peaceful protest. Where the heck has that gotten us as far as convictions for the unarmed killed lately? No where. I think the reason for the riot is way more disgusting than the riot. I say that now that they have their attention, focus should shift fiscally. Boycott with your money. How cruel that the ppl who salaries you pay have the right to kill you and say things like “F*** your breath” as you die? So we really think singing negro spirituals and holding hands gonna make ppl like that suddenly see the light? NOPE!

It’s a spit and a slap in the face every time I hear someone try to justify this. Some people are gonna run straight into the anti-christ arms like a long lost lover because you don’t know who the enemy is. Windows, police cars, and store merchandise is not more valuable than people’s lives. If I have to die, go to jail, make a scene, or break the law so that my little precious nephew could one day walk the streets without some person seeing his very blackness as a crime, then so be it.

What a sight I would be standing in someone yard who disrespected me, stole from me, or any other offense against me singing negro spirituals and holding signs. “I am gonna go peacefully protest in my enemies’ front yard” said no one ever. Why do we have armies?  Soooo we can just all roll on over to Iraq and peacefully protest? Fuck that!

I can’t live my life based on how people who are racist view me. I used to be super conscious about perpetuating stereotypes, but why should I? I am not the problem. My skin in not the problem. I don’t consult my blackness to have a critical thought so why should my blackness take responsibility for decisions that I make like any other human being on this earth? I won’t allow paternalism to make me feel ashamed for my desire to see young black men walk the street unarmed with their lives in tact.

If you ever told a soldier “thanks for your service”, served in the military, cheered the “War on Terrorism”, didn’t bat an eye when you learned about the Boston Tea Party, have civil war memorabilia, carry a confederate flag…you can politely shut the fuck up about the rioters in Baltimore.  Do I think that the looting is called for? No. But I don’t think killing unarmed people is fucking called for either!  I support you Baltimore!!!

So intricately entwined we are that even when we are apart I feel you wading through my waters, creating ripples and whirlpools. Awakening me deep.  Cascading over my body like a cool splash of liquid electricity.  Your touches, beyond my skin. Stroking places that I didn’t know existed within me. Places only you know about because you have dwelled within so long.  You have learned my distant locations and explored them from dept to surface.  I am transparent before you.  Even as I hide behind this wall you can still trace my silhouette and capture my essence in a way that if I ever forgot myself you could make me remember better than I did before.  My soul knows what my mouth won’t say.  It loves you. I love you.  My soul stirrer….

Black women are unequivocally the most controversial humans on earth and it starts with our hair.  From the moment when we are little girls getting braids, ponytails, kinky afros tamed with tight headbands, burned with hot combs, and eventually even more burned with chemicals, our hair defines us.  I remember loving my braids with the beads on the end. Hearing them clack together.  Some of my friends got jerl curls but that didn’t look very appealing to me the way it always dripped with liquid.  In the 5th grade, all my friends had relaxers while I still had ponytails with barretts on the ends.  I remember one of my classmates leaning over and telling me that my clothes were always nice and stylish but my hair always looked a mess.  She told me I needed a perm.  I was freakin 10!

I became self-conscious about my natural curly, wavy, poofy hair suddenly.  I noticed all of the women in my family were getting relaxers and some transitioning from curls to relaxers.  Braids were still popular but only if you added extensions. Not one person.  In my small, rural, Alabama town had dreads.  Old ladies even got their silver curls pressed and curled with metal the temperature of hell.  My mom finally allowed me to get a relaxer when I was in the 6th grade.  I was so happy the first day of school to show up with my bow tie ponytail (which was not invented by Lady Gaga!) and Shirley Temple curls hanging down the back.  I got tons of compliments on my thick, long, black, perfectly coiffed hair.  That was 1994.  By 2001, I was so sick of sitting under the dryer for 3 and 4 hours, getting my scalp burnt, and having to chop off my hair because of breakage that I just began getting braids.  I would relax my hair only a few times a year.

A friend of mine who lived in Atlanta was working at a funeral home.  She told me how she could tell the difference between people who put chemicals in their hair compared to people who didn’t.  She said their skulls would be green and looked like mold was on it.  That was it for me.  I cut the rest of the perm out of my hair and began rocking a short, curly fro.  I got barely any love from the fellas but I felt so free from the perm.  But I noticed that people approached me and judged me differently.  It was like my hair became a political statement, like it defined me and placed me in a category that I didn’t even know existed.  When I felt myself becoming a victim of Eurocentric ideas of beauty and professionalism as I pressed forward in my career, I didn’t pause to think how much guilt is associated with it and how my black brothers would respond to either state of mind.  But as I got older, I quickly saw that my guilt and desire to just be comfortable in my skin (and hair) was bigger and more controversial than I ever thought and my brothers were pointing the fingers right along with the world.

With that being said, I want to address something with the men who love to get on black women about wearing weave and makeup. Makeup is not exclusive to black women. Makeup is used by all women and it is merely a beauty enhancement but I agree that too much of a good thing is never good, so please don’t place that on only black women, ok. The thing about weave and perms, well you know what, I have been permed before, I wear my afro, and I wear weave too. But there is no other woman on the face of this earth who cause more drama looking the way that she came out of the pussy than black women. We get called nappy headed hoes if we wear a fro, hair hatted if we wear wigs and weaves, and trying to be white if we chemically straighten our hair. Then you turn around and have the balls to praise white women for being born into a world that celebrates them the way they came out of the womb, a world that is Eurocentric. Black women are not white women but we can’t live in peace either way. I remember when I first cut all my perm out and was sporting my short curly fro, it was another sister with a perm and weave down to her ass who warned me that I wouldn’t get the job I wanted because my hair was “too afrocentric” and dammit if she wasn’t right. A black man can cut off his braids, dreads, beard, put a tie around his neck so that he can fit into the world or get a certain job/career but dammit if a black woman put a track or perm in her hair to get some peace, she suddenly isn’t worthy. Amazing how men pretend they are not affected by our Eurocentric society but are quick to shave and cut away the evidence of their African roots every two weeks in the barber shop. If you are not wearing dreads/braids/fros, a Jesus beard, and a dashiki to your job everyday, my brother, you can just shut the fuck up.

Black men and women are effected by European standards of beauty. Point blank period….by why do we women have to take all the heat for being victims of it?