Money Corrupts

If money was alive, we would all be slaves--black and white alike. I came to this realization after looking at all of the struggles I am going through to simply get a higher education. I am having to borrow from a friend here and a friend there to save up the money for ONE book.

The men of huge corporations are giving themselves bonuses that, combined, could most likely pay for every aspiring young adults college education or at least give each one a stipend. Yet, I have a job and I can't afford my college books.

Why has college been turned into a business? If the government can give away free money to people who's goal is to survive off of hand-outs, then why must the people trying to amount to something pay triple?

If college is so essential to becoming a successful, productive citizen then why am I paying for it? I can get free money, shelter, and food if I wanted. Why can I not get a free education? I'm not going to try to figure this one out because the day that I understand is the day that I'm in a dark place within the synapses of my brain and I choose not to EVER go there.

Pants on the Ground : )

Pants on the ground/ pants on the ground/ lookin like a fool witcha pants on the ground/ gold in ya mouth/ hat turned sideways/ pants on the ground/ thinkin you a cool cat....

Question. Is reality tv EVER real? Just asking.

Praying for Pretty

Ever since I was a little girl, I've been praying for pretty. Not for a transformation into a princess, or a unicorn because even in pre-school, I was never a fan of artificiality--coined by kaydigs. Pay me for your usage :) But anyway, I never beckoned God for a cute hair day, or to wake up as Laktika from Slum Dog Millionaire, but for beauty--real and captivating.

I write cuter with a rhinestone encrusted pen than a typical Bic or those ugly Roseart ones. I do school work better with cute nails. I talk better in the presence of a cute boy--not so abnormal,I know, but it's all subconscious for me. That's what's abnormal. I'd do my homework better if my room were turquoise with tons of black and white pictures on my wall. I pray for pretty.

But, I don't discriminate. I pray for ugly. Not ugly in a sense that it's unpleasant to me, but society's view of ugly. I pray for more Alek Wek's in the media and the day it is ok for a woman to be black, literally. I pray for some stretch marks and some cellulite in some love scenes in a theater near you. I pray for a plus size woman on the cover of American Vogue. I pray for a woman crying and angry in a HPV commercial. I pray for less prop "h8" and gay marriage in 50 states and the day that little girls stop wanting to be a Bratz doll and start wanting to be them. I pray for pretty--real and captivating.

Lonely Heart in Haiti

I want and I work. I work and I get. I want. I work. I get. But, how does it feel to want and yearn, to bleed and erode, to suffocate and shatter, but never get; to never feel, as a part of the human race, that anyone sees your anguish, sees your house collapse on top of you, hear your screams?

Over 500,000 and counting have been killed by the earthquake in Haiti. The island has been utterly destroyed. Red Cross has run out of supplies and so has every hospital in Haiti.

So as I sit on my comfy couch, sippin my coffee, and watchin the Today show on a big screen--epiphany. What is not lavish to me is a miracle, a dream to a young girl, an old woman, a civilian in Haiti. I am the dream. America is the dream.

Before the earthquake, there were barely any telephone lines and now this mass destruction? So the question is, how dare I sit idle when there are people who look like me, my grandmother, my friends, my cousins trapped underneath stone and granite or have escaped but are wearing the same bloody, dusty clothes from 3 days ago because there little belongings are lost among the bodies and rubble? Had there been a turn of events deep in my family history I could have been trapped beneath that same rubble only to be rescued back into hell.

So, I have no money. I have a college that does and I have a voice and I refuse for there to be one lonely heart in Haiti. I can't physically feel the anxiety of not knowing if family lived or died or of carrying a dead child in my arms, but I know what it feels like to feel abandoned and I know what it feels like to be human and that is enough for me...and it ought to be enough for you.

Downtown Love Letters

Check box: yes or no. A letter folded into an origami arrow. The most important decision of a young girl's life and I live for that moment, that feeling. I get it every time I go downtown and see the lights; see the people. The girls in polyurethane, and the guys in cotton--all made in China. The graffiti, the Ethiopian vallets and the crack heads slippin check boxes to EVERYBODY that passes. They just want to be loved. They want to feel it shoot through their body, slowly so their left empty for fewer hours. I can open my mouth and get full off of the youth. It tastes like love and not the Hollywood kind that tastes sweet for two seconds. It feels like a cosmic locamotion that we all wanna ride until we all arrive at the secret to life. That's what a love note feels like. So Dallas, you're a liiiiittle corny... but i check yes.

White Washed

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
~Zora Neale Hurston

I grew up "the white girl" whose first alphabet book was "Jumbo Means Hello," a book of Swahili words. I spent the early '90s living on a HBCU campus with my mother. I was constantly surrounded by black, red and green Africa pendants and listening to Arrested Development. I grew up like a meek Michael Evans from Good Times, retreating to the library during class to read books of African-American history and African tribes. I would examine the plains of my face and take a mental picture, comparing it to the young, painted and scarified faces and I would report to mama every night during dinner where the Diggs' came from. We've been temporarily Ethiopian, Kenyan, South African, Cameroonian and more ... but when I got to school, I was just an "Oreo," black on the outside, white on the inside.

So was I my parents' sick joke? I mean, my name is Kimberly and in my short life, I had never sat in a churr or turned a do' knob but apparently all the other black kids around me had. I grew up in Dallas--totally out of place.

I felt like an impostor because as brown as my skin was, I was treated as if I was going to school in black face. I was intelligent. I had long, thick hair, a sharp nose, and an accent that hugged each syllable like a long lost lover. I thought I was black, but apparently I was white-washed -- a black person who talks, dresses and acts white out of shame and disgust of blackness.

So if I am white for being intelligent, do I have to be ignorant to be black? If I am white for liking to read and write or for speaking correct English, must I dumb myself down to be black? If I am white for never wearing breads or always wearing glasses, do I have to spend $500 on my hair and buy contacts to be black? I can't help that I lived a good portion of my life in the suburbs but does that now mean I have to move to the "hood" to preserve my blackness?

If being black is only based off of an ignorant, uninviting, poverty-stricken existence, then wipe me clean of my family history right now because clearly the right race did not..choose...me.

But I know this is not the case. Why? Because my grandmother picked cotton in Douglas, Georgia as a little girl and wasn't able to go to school like she wanted. She lived and fought in Jim Crow's south, so that my mother didn't have to. My mother was one of two black kids in her school; the other one was her sister. She was called racial slurs and ostracized for a while, until they got to know her.

Here I sit, the benefactor of all the work that the strong women in my family have put in so that I may live a more comfortable, integrated life in pursuit of education and progression and I'm supposed to braid my hair and dance like Sambo to be accepted amongst my own race? Absolutely not.

It took me 15 years into the voyage to find myself for me to realize that I am the epitome of black.
My skin is brown, my hair is corse and I am the great-great grandaughter of a slave. I may not know what countries in Africa my family started in, but I know exactly where I belong now. I represent a tribe of super fly, almond brown intellectuals that originated down south to turn this country out. Bad Brains and Jimi Hendrix are village people too.

I am but a burnt sienna spec in a techni-colored sea of people. The word "black" doesn't do us justice. We are custard yellow, mahogany and everything in between. The skin colors of African-American people being so vast is evidence that everything else within us can be as well. And it is -- whether some want to live an eternity in the 1800s or not.

I rock out in my underwear when no one's home. I wanna be buried in a J. Crew store. I hate catfish and I find absolutely nothing funny about Tyler Perry plays, and it makes no sense for anyone to call me less black for it. I chronically use the word awesome. I'm not Baptist and I will promptly shut anyone out of my life for calling me a bitch, whether it was "in a good way" or not.

I don't need my own music, hair care products and clothing labels. I wish I didn't need my own magazines, television shows and political activists. I don't try to make the other races around me comfortable by looking and sounding like them, and I also don't hold my tongue when I witness injustice.

And yep. Last I checked, I was still black.

3: 52 of Emancipation

The song that I listen to when I feel like a brownie in this Easy Bake Oven Earth. It gives me a little more hope for humanity and for my life because if pure,unsifted hip-hop can emerge from the "M.O.B" (Money over Bitches) rubble, then I can kick down that oven door and create something beautiful. No additives. No light bulb burners. Just a better me.