Arn't I A Woman?

Derrick Bell was one of my favorite race scholars ever. He pioneered critical race theory and wrote about American race relations in parables (see: Bell’s ‘The Space Traders’). I’m currently reading an article about Bell’s theory on racism’s permanence in our society. The author (George Taylor) attempts to deconstruct and make sense of the apparent paradox within Bell’s work: if racism is permanent, how can Bell contend we must still fight against it? So Taylor just BROUGHT IT HOME with his preliminary analysis. I’m not done reading the article but I had to take an aside to explore how I’m feeling about his theories. To quote from his article “Racism as ‘the Nation’s Crucial Sin’: Theology and Derrick Bell”:               “ The acid bath             of Bell’s thesis of racism’s permanence lays reality bare; it strips away our illusions. To lay reality bare is a virtue unto itself. We now know and must acknowledge with what we are faced …Once we sweep away the de

This quote resonated with me when I heard it recently. At first I thought, that's totally true; not many "big moments" exist in someone's life. The ones where, in a split second, everything's changed. Sometimes maybe you don't even know they are those moments until years after they have happened. But you only have a few of them. I'm gonna go ahead and take a break here and just say that I am listening to all the best Whitney Houston songs right now and her death is still very fresh and I may be feeling a little crazy and not able to turn my thoughts into anything but written gibberish. Actually Whitney Houston can probably just be tied into exactly what I'm talking about. Here's the second part of my thoughts on how frequently important moments happen in life. While I have had a few "big" moments, many things that have shaped the direction I have taken in life have been because of the sum of many "small" moments. Moments tha

Things have been super weird for me lately. I go into days/ sometimes weeks where everything is off, and I feel my whole world sort of fall apart in front of me, and it drives me into a deeper isolation disconnecting me from reality. I always pull myself out, somehow, but it seems each time I enter into this sort of self induced despair, it becomes harder to reattach myself back to my life. It makes me worry that one day I will dig myself so deep it will be impossible to come back to life. A lot of this right now has to do with my relationships to people and how I perceive the world around me. When you have constructed the world in a certain way, and reinforced this as truth for 26 years, it becomes hard to break down those walls and let in reality. Sometimes, or most of the time, I base how I feel about myself on how I think other people view me, or how other people are treating me. This prohibits me from developing my personality and self-worth around who I really am, and instead I