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At least once a week, I think about how different our lives are from White folk. It reminds me of that scene in Save The Last Dance, when Kerry Washington’s character tells Julia Stiles about the world she and her brother come from. Stiles responds, “There’s only one world, Chenille.” And she hit her with a painful truth. “That’s what they teach you. We know different.”
Whew chillay. The accuracy.
There are countless examples of the ways in which our cultures differ. And what is obvious or natural to us is entirely foreign to the White people to which we live in such close proximity.
Just earlier today, I stumbled upon this tweet.
https://twitter.com/itsjeanine_/status/1148414910163906560
We have our things. And I like that we have a whole world that White people don’t have access to. Honestly, they’ve taken enough. But in the days of representation, increased coverage of the issues affecting people of color and more, our “secrets” can present a bit of a problem in the media. Take for instance this most recent example from The New York Post. They shared a tweet talking about a girl “setting her hair on fire.”
At first glance, I didn’t exactly get it. It didn’t look like she was trying to harm herself in such a drastic way. I figured if you want to set your hair on fire, you would start at the scalp. And if you look at it harder, you think maybe homegirl was just trying to seal her ends. And it reminded Black folk across the Twitterverse how much White people don’t know about us. And they let their voices be heard.
