Loving my haters
“Haters” has become a popular new piece of slang. i used to roll my eyes whenever someone spoke of having haters, being blind to their haters etc. It seemed both silly and self-important. Now i’ve got some haters of my own. LOL. Someone has been attempting to sabotage what is a very good opportunity that has opened up for me. i have no idea who it is but it is obviously someone who knows me, most likely a close acquaintance or colleague, perhaps even a “friend”.
my first reaction was disbelief that someone could be so willfully and strategically hateful, spiteful and mean.
nothing rolls off my back easily but i’ve decided that whatever will be will be. i’m not stressing.
whenever someone is grudgeful of whatever it is they think i have i laugh to myself. i’ve been blessed and life has been good to me. i’ll be the first to admit that i enjoy tremendous privilege. but there is also the living on the edge of sanity, literally waking up each day and having to choose to live, to hold it together, to take life one day at a time. there is the long, hard, impossible road i’ve walked- so much pain and shame that it is a task not to let it overwhelm me.
i only wish to do a little good in the world, to honour all that i’ve been given. and when i give, i give generously of spirit which is all i have and all that really matters anyway.
so i’m sending a little love to those that are wasting their time hating me and trying to put obstacles in my way. i will rise and i hope you do too. the world is big enough that we can all be brilliant. now stop the foolishness!!!
Filed under: personal | 2 Comments
Tags: haters
back to school
So much for making this blog less personal…
The last few months have been my most stressful ever and in many ways both my lowest ebb and my brightest moment.
i’ve taken that giant leap of faith in myself and resigned my job (a job i quite liked and was doing very well in) and joined the ranks of fulltime studenthood again. and while this is a humdrum piece of news, it was a major decision for me. much of my life has been characterised by scarcity and i’ve been basically on my own money-wise since i left secondary school so the decision to stop working was not an easy one. in fact, it kept me up at night. literally. i still feel a tremendous amount of shame about being unemployed (i know, i know, technically i’m not unemployed but that’s the way the people who matter to me most see it, sadly).
nonetheless, i know it is a privilege to able to do research that i’m passionate about without the grind of a 9-5. it is great gift and i am fully committed to honouring all that i have been given. i attended a friend’s graduation this weekend and i cannot wait to take that walk myself. i look forward to that new beginning and in the meantime i’ll enjoy my PhD journey. after all, i worked very hard to get to this point.
this post is my little reminder:
1. do not worry about money
2. you’ll get through the daunting list of interviews, trust me
3. you’ll develop a love for microfiche, stay with me here
4. you can write 80, 000 words
5. all 80,000 of them will make sense
6. you will graduate in 2011, you better!
7. there is work, life, love after university
8. dreams do come true
9. life is what you make it
10. write! write! write!
Filed under: education, personal | 8 Comments
Tags: faith, graduateschool, PhD journey
Racialicious Indeed
The question is whether this, for all of its moral urgency in the local sense, qualifies as education under any serious definition.
Typical is the curriculum of one African-American Studies department in a solid, selective state school west of the Mississippi. In this department, racism is, essentially, everything.
Since i started reading racialicious i’ve been asking myself, doesn’t the blog itself fetishize race? i find that collectively the ideas expressed are less an interrogation of race as a social fiction and more a creation of race and racism as always already menacingly present with the simplistic trope of the eternal victim foregrounded in the commentary. this criticism is by no means specific to the racialicious blog i read often but it is the collective spirit of the posts which leaves a bad taste in the mouth- the idea that the single most-defining characteristic of life for persons who are referred to as minorities in the US is their shared victimhood. For example, when Solange Knowles spoke about being a slave to black women’s hair culture by spending US $50,000 on hair (not her exact words). i found it mind-boggling to associate victimhood with being able to spend that much money on something as frivolous as hair ought to be. (When i learnt that there were online natural hair support groups for black women i couldn’t help but think that turning yourself into a victim in need of therapy is utterly ridiculous. we’ve all been through the hair drama wallowing in the pathology of it just seems so counterproductive.)
Understanding that race in the Caribbean is very difference from race in the USA i did not feel qualified to make such statements nor to question the USA’s diversity industry and how diversity itself becomes fetish.
John McWhorter’s piece has provided an opening for these questions to be considered.
There is a lot of social inequality in the Caribbean that needs to be addressed. The US tolerates more social inequality than any other wealthy nation. There is a lot to be redressed but if we are collective victims how do we get anything done? How do we even manage to get out of bed in the morning? The point is that we’re not. Discussions on race, gender and social inequality should have moved passed such a simplistic framing of the issues. It’s about time.
Filed under: culture, education, race | Leave a Comment
Tags: black women's hair, education, Good Hair, John McWhorter, natural hair, politics of hair, race in the Caribbean, race in the US, race/class/colour/gender in the caribbean, racialicious, Solange Knowles






