For Rainbows that Present Themselves Boldly to the Colored Girls Who Doubted that They Were Enuf

for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf

...I get it... 

I'm storytelling... my choreopoem

• Talked in class today about the pain I feel at the intersection and all the circumferences of my identity.

• Returned the rental car and wanted to pay for the gas on another card. The attendant didn't know how to do it. Her colleagues wouldn't help her. She went to the back where I heard air her frustration with, "That negrita has so many stupid questions. She should just worry about catching her flight" 

• Got to Ontario airport and was profiled based on my intersections and my circumferences (literally).

• Flew into Las Vegas to fly out of the gate of the very same gate agent that profiled me in the same manner with less tact in May, as I traveled to NCORE with my students, glare at me from her podium and ask the attendant next to her, "Is the flight full? -No- Ok we're good then."

• Boarded the plane to have a well meaning white woman tell me how pretty I was followed by, is all of that your hair? Y'all have such interesting hair.

• I am headed to OKC to do work that I love for NCORE (National Conference for race and Ethnicity). But I have to admit that today cost me a lot. Just being ... BEING.... Is exhausting and painful. Navigating is treacherous... And I believe that I have been purposed to Be so that those coming behind me and walking next to me can also be... 

But I am tired. I am weary.

In this moment I better understand why it was so important for Ntozake Shange to pen a work like

for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf….

Now I see that she wasn't talking about the want to end her suffering...

She was merely voicing an unspoken-clearly disseminated truth- this world around me

(at all my intersections and circumferences) 

is so afraid of me, and my potential to disrupt the cancerous or toxic axis that it sits on that it 

Daily/Hourly/Yearly 

finds ways of

Assaulting/Aggressing/Invalidating/Erasing/Hating 

me with the intent that it will
                           
Teach/Indoctrinate/Oppress 

                                                                 me to consider facilitating my own complete

                                                                   Silencing/Assimilating/Assaulting/Hating/Murdering

AND... 

       Despite...

                 ALL...

of this constant loop of oppression, I can look for 

Tomorrow/Freedom/Peace/Love 

and see my own rainbow and know

that it 

        ...

               and I
                        ... 
                      am
                             
                       enuf

                                  .

                                                                           

Are you building common ground through story telling OR are you just telling stories?

"Telling stories" - the nicer way to call someone a lie because you do not have the political/human capital or social privilege to call them a liar. (I.e. Grandma you told a story when you said you took your medicine, I see the unopened pill bottle by your bed.)

I'll connect this at some point but I didn't want to lose the question.

It was all a dream, I used to read Highlights Magazine...

It came to me in a dream.... The blogs to come will be social justice adaptations of standard fairytales. I am excited for this journey. Hope you are too.