What do I do?

What do I do?

What do I say?

What do I say?

As a black woman, race has always been a prominent part of my life.

I have never been able to escape the fact that I am a black woman in a white supremacist country.

My blackness has woven into how I dress each morning,

what bars I feel comfortable going to, what music I enjoy,

what neighborhoods I hang out in.

The realities of race have not always been welcome in my life,

but they have always been there.

When I was a young child, it was the constant questions of why I was so dark

when my mom was so white.

Was I adopted?

Where did I come from?

When I became older, it was the clothes not cut for my shape,

and the snide comments about my hair and lips and the teen idols that would never,

ever find a girl like me beautiful.

Then it was the clerks who would follow me around stores,

and the jobs that were hiring until I walked in the door and then they were not.

It was the bosses who told me that I was too loud,

the compliments that my hair, the comments that my hair was too ethnic for the office,

...