Every great dream begins with a dreamer

10 THINGS I WANT SAY TO A BLACK WOMAN Joshua Bennett

I’d first like to say all women are beautiful from every nationality. This is nothing against any other nationality.

1. I wish I could put your voice in jar, wait for those lonely winter nights when I forget what God sounds like, run to the nearest maximum security prison and open it. Watch the notes that bounce off the walls like ricocheted bullets, punching keyholes into the sternums of every brother in the room, skeletons opening, rose blossom beautiful to remind you that the way to a black man’s heart is not through his stomach, it is through the heaven in your ‘hello’; the echo of unborn galaxies that pounces forth from your vocal cords, that melts ice grills into oceans, baptizing our lips, and so harsh words fade from our memories, and we forget why we stopped calling you divine in the first place.

2. When I was born my mother’s smile was so bright, it knocked the air from my lungs, and I haven’t been able to breathe right since. It’s something about the way light dances off your teeth, the way the moon gets jealous when you mock her crescent figure with the shape of your mouth. Queen, you make the sky insecure, self-conscious for being forced to stare at your face every morning and realize that the blues of her skin was painted by that symphony doing cartwheels on your tongue.

3. Who else can make kings out of bastards, turn a fatherless Christmas into a floor full of gifts and a kitchen that smells like the Lord is coming tomorrow, and we must eat well tonight. I used to think my sister was a blacksmith, the way she baked fire and metal and made kitchen miracles at fourteen, making enough food to feed a little boy who didn’t have the words to say how much she meant to him back then, or enough backbone to say so the day he turned twenty.

4. Your skin reminds me of everything beautiful I have ever known: the colour of ink on a page, the earth we walk on and the cross that hung my Saviour.

5. I’ve seen you crucified too, spread out on billboards to be spiritually impaled by millions of men with eyes like nails, who made mothers of your daughters; so I’m sorry for the music deals, for Justin Timberlake at the Superbowl, and that young man on the corner this morning, who made you undershade your flesh and become invisible. Never doubt, he only insults you because, men are confused. Now we are trained to destroy or conquer everything we see from birth.

6. If I ever see Don Imus in public I will punch him in the face, one time for every member of the Rutgers and Tennessee Women Basketball Teams. Then I’ll show him a picture of Phylicia Rashad, Assata Shakur, Arthur Kit, my mother, my grandmother and my seven-year-old niece, who’s got eyes like firebombs, and then dare him to tell me that black women are only beautiful in one shade of skin.

7. You are like a sunrise in a nation at war; you remind people that there is always something worth waiting up to.

8. When we are married I will cook, do the dishes and whatever else it takes to let you know that traditional gender roles have no place in the home we build; so my last name is an option, babysitting the kids a treat we split equally, and our bed will be an ancient temple where I construct altars of wax on the small of your back. We make love like the sky is falling, moving to the rhythm of bedsprings and Bell Biv DeVoe. Angels applauding in unison, saying this is the way it was meant to be.

9. My daughter will know her father’s face from the day she is born, and I can only pray that the superman complex lasts long enough for me deflect the pain this world will aim at her from the moment she is old enough to realize that the colour brown is still not considered human most places. But my daughter will have a smile like a wheelchair, and so even when I am at my worst, when the Kryptonite of this putrid planet threatens to render me grounded, the light dancing off of her teeth, will transform the shards of my broken body into heart-shaped blackbirds, taking flight on a wing that reminds me of my Saviour’s hands, my daughter’s smile, my mother’s laugh when I was in her womb.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Color Studies - Pink by Carissa Gallo

Color Studies: Pink is a stunning photography series by Portland-based photographer Carissa Gallo, aiming to document her recent obsession with a multitude of muted colors.

what do white people have to say to black people that we don’t tell them every day already with our actions, judgments, racial stereotypes, laws, and police force?

white people don’t have anything to say to black people because we already have a say in everything they do and have done for the last few hundred years. one movie where black people have the spotlight over white people, calling out blatant and subtle racism in our society, isn’t going to kill us.

 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (via elegantly-tasteless)

*snaps*

"I was asked to do a show with the emerging African nations. At that time, I was wearing me hair straightened. I wasn’t comfortable in the woman’s skin wearing that style of hair because I knew that they didn’t wear their hair straightened in Africa. So, I went through rehearsals with the straightened hair but the night before the show, which was being done live, I went to a barbershop in Harlem called The Shalamar where Duke Ellington used to cut his hair.

I told the barber to cut my hair as close to my scalp as possible, then shampoo it so it could go back to its natural state. He then sat down. When he regained himself, he came back to me and said, ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

The next morning I go to the studio with my hair wrapped in a scarf. I go to makeup and costume. Then when the director said, ‘Places.’ I took the scarf off…You could hear a hair hit the floor. So finally he walked up to me and said, ‘Cicely, you cut your hair…” I sheepishly held my down and shook my head. Then he said, ‘You know, I wanted to ask you to do that but I didn’t have the nerve. [smiles]

Then there was George C. Scott who asked my agent to send me in to meet with them for East Side/West Side. I said ‘Well, what do I do about my hair?’ They said, ‘Your hair? Leave it that way.’ And that is what created the natural hair craze. That show and my wearing it that way. I got letters from hair dressers all over the country telling me that I was affecting their business because their clients were having their hair cut off so they could wear it like the girl on television.

The cornrow in Sounder, I knew during that period that women in the South cornrowed the head. So, I said that [her character] Rebeca would wear her hair in that manner. But everytime I changed the hair it had not to do with me, it had to do with authenticating the character that I was playing.” 

Nas’tassia S, 21, Miami, FL

Submitted by: nastassiasays.tumblr.com