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August 26, 2006
Keepin' it real
Today I was driving home from Rainbow and happened to hear the end of an interview with E-Fierce on the radio.
I had never heard of her, but she was promoting her new book, The Sistahood: On the Mic and for some reason I lingered long enough to get hooked into listening, and thankfully so.
She talked about what it was like for her growing up in the Mission, with relatives in Bayview, and then being shipped off to Lowell, the rich kid school, through some kind of affirmative action program.
And she talked about her work with young people, and the complexities of race, and the realities of growing up multi-racial.
Eventually, I cried. A good kind of cry, a touched kind of cry... but geez. As a queer, white though I may be, I feel like I'm learning a lot about what it might be like to be a person of color just by paying attention to what I face and going from there.
When she talks about the struggles of youth today, and how some things haven't changed from when she was growing up, I feel that. And when she talks about a girl who doesn't know yet how to be comfortable in her own skin literally, because of its color, well, I can only imagine that, and I cried. I know what it's like struggling to be comfortable in other things, like my genitalia and what they meant to everybody else around me growing up.
I cried because of the similarities of experience, and the direct connection from that girl's pain to mine... but also because of the question, something like, "Is it really this difficult? Is it really so hard to live together and not hurt each other?"
I don't think I'd asked it before; I think I'd taken it for granted on some level that childhood inevitably means getting fucked up, whether you realize it or not (and that the folks who are convinced they had "good childhoods" are among the most dangerous, like sleepwalkers with weapons in unaware hands).
She talked about the way we put people in boxes, just by looking at them and making the assumptions we make. I do that. Nearly unconsciously.
It's not an everyday experience, right, to be driving in the car listening to the radio and hear something real that actually touches something real in me. I think I'm going to check out the book.
She mentioned two other interesting authors, Black Artemis and Jeff Chang—the latter's history of hip-hop culture looks interesting, and I remember something said about one of the former's books that made me think I should read it.
Anyway, passing them along to y'all out in cyberspace. One more bit o' signal, or noise, as the case may be.
Posted by Josh A. at August 26, 2006 05:33 AM