When I was in the 7th grade, I moved from Connecticut to South Florida. I was a nerdy kid that loved reading, science, and social studies and had been tracked into the gifted and talented track during my years of schooling. But when I got to Fort Lauderdale I entered a middle school where we […]
The Bold and Beautiful Possibilities of a Transgender Storyline on Daytime
Soap operas have been an on-again-off-again part of my every (week) day life since I was a little blackgirl trying to keep up with conversations in my mama’s living room. All the grown women in my family watched “the stories,” whether it meant having them on while they cooked and got ready for a second […]
A Scandal and A Lawn Chair: Why Olivia Pope Can’t Save Us From Racism
Like many other folk, I was in my feelings after watching “The Lawn Chair,” episode of Scandal a few weeks ago. So much so that I spent the weekend offline playing the best solitaire app I had recently found on my phone, and pre-gaming season 2 episodes of House of Cards in preparation for […]
#CFCTaughtMe: 5 Lessons on Life & Relationships On the Occasion of Our 5th Birthday
This past weekend, I hung out with the Harvard Black Law Students Association at their Annual Conference. Mega-brilliant, these young Black folk are poised to do great things, and I really enjoyed kicking it with them. I was on a Black Media Matters panel with the Very Smart Brothas and Kimberly Foster of For […]
What Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman Teach Us About Respectability & Black Masculinity
Like 114.5 million other folk, I was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, the most watched show in U.S. TV history (shouts out to Missy Elliott’s halftime performance, yes gawd!). As a Carolina Panther fan I was not terribly invested in the outcome, but I was low key rooting for the Seahawks 1) because […]
Serial and the Power of Storytelling
Like so many others, I spent the last few months of 2014 listening – first avidly, then with trepidation and ultimately with disdain – to the hit podcast Serial. The podcast follows a single story, week by week. The story centers on Adnan Syed, a Pakistani American high school student who was accused and convicted […]
Color(ism) Complex(es)
When I heard a documentary called Dark Girls had been produced in 2011 to share the often silenced stories and experiences of dark-skinned women and girls, I felt a wave of emotions and had a range of reactions fluctuating from curiosity and anxiety, to excitement and anticipation. I wrote an ode to dark (skinned) girls […]
What’s Up With Dudes Not Being Able to Give Compliments?
I tend to roll with a crew of badass bawse women in addition to being one myself. (It’s 2015 and time’s out for lack of self-confidence.) And because I’m grown and love myself, I no longer date asshole dudes. But I do date dudes who love badass bawse women. In theory at least. But […]
Citizenship and Silence: Speaking the Stories Aloud
I walk to the mailbox in a small town about an hour outside New York City: Slowly, I make my way down our cracked driveway. I marvel at the blades of grass; so soft and fragile yet they’ve managed to disrupt the concrete and find their sun. I fancy myself this strong when I observe […]
Embracing “Crazy” in the “Land of the Free”
Guest post by Jillian Ford Folks have called me crazy much of my life. For the first two decades, “crazy” was a term of endearment: a way to signal my individuality and creativity. In my 20’s, “creativity” slid into “eccentricity.” Now in my third decade, “eccentricity” […]