The Thing About Your Daughter's Virginity
Originally published on Those People
I was 14 when I met my high school sweetheart. He was 17. We lived in East Oakland. My friend told his friend she had a friend and our rendezvous was arranged, like a heist.
We all met up after dark when our mothers thought we were spending the night at each other’s houses, the go-to cover-up of the late 90's. He was tall and dark and smelled like Ralph Lauren and Winterfresh. Both of us were a bit awkward, clumsy in our youngness — the way you are when you’re trying so hard to be grown up.
He wasn’t like the other boys. He openly tried to impress me without the guise of ambiguity — he confessed upfront to being a nerd and confessed upfront to being humbled by my beauty. At some point that night he held my hand and I told him he could call me. We might have kissed, who knows. Kissing wasn’t the point. The butterflies and feelings were the point, and leaving childhood behind was everything.
“A year later we had sex up against the side of my grandmother’s house.”
I didn’t even know yet that my body could do those things. The furthest thought from my mind was what my parents would think. Or what God would think. Or that my boyfriend had just turned 18 and legally what we did could be considered rape. I was thinking about being banged against the dust-blue siding, disguised by the shadows that dipped between the streetlights.
“When you’re a teenager your body is basically all you have.”
You don’t own anything, you still need permission to walk out of your own front door, but in the quiet of your bedroom or some dark corner…your body is yours to touch, share, or desecrate.
And like death — you are alone in your virginity.
You are alone in keeping it, you are alone in giving it away. I have never regretted the end of my virginity taking place when I was not quite sixteen. I have never regretted who I gave it to. I didn’t feel regret, but I did feel other things.
Growing up I kept hearing how virginity was this sacred thing that should be kept and guarded. It was constantly implied that my virginity belonged to the world — not to me. I owed it to God, my family, my community. I was to be judged by others based on how I touched my own body, how I felt about being touched by others and by when I chose to explore the blurred lines of adolescence. I was to look closely at the girls around me who had babies and had — at one time or another — contracted diseases and remember that those were the consequences when girls had sex. I was to take in after-school specials and Lifetime movies and Sex Ed videos and commit to memory the scenes in which some confused girl had sex with some brash, overstated boy only to be shunned and embarrassed afterwards.
“No one ever told me that my body belonged to me and that I could do with it what I pleased.”
And so within the act of feeling liberated and stirred after my first few sexual encounters, I also felt dirty, disrespectful, deceitful and disappointing. No one tells young girls to do what they want with their bodies because they know that at some point young girls are going to want to have sex. And God forbid a girl should open her legs and explore her sexuality.
Instead, women are taught their their bodies exist because men exist. That their sexuality should be controlled by what men think and feel. Their fathers or male protectors will guard it, their political officials will regulate it and the boys they choose to lay with will determine its importance.
No one tells their daughters that sex is sex and love is love and each can be enjoyed without requiring the other. No one tells their daughter that when a boy wants to have sex with her, she should consider one thing and one thing only — if she wants to have sex with him.
Instead we teach our daughters that despite having wet panties and perked nipples and all the necessary emotions and “equipment” needed to engage sexually, that they should hold off — not because perhaps she doesn’t have the time to deal with the physical realities of sexual activity (i.e. remembering to take a pill, having your naughty-bits rubbed raw on occasion, having to maintain a new standard of personal hygiene, keeping up with your menstrual cycles and knowing what questions to ask a potential sex partner) but because the boy won’t respect her, or Jesus won’t like it or she may end up pregnant or itchy or dead or sad.
When we decide to besmirch adolescent sexuality we are actually closing the possibility to have a real conversation about sex at a time when that support is most needed.
We are neglecting to empower a girl at the brink of womanhood. We are creating shadowy sensationalism around something that really doesn’t need the added pressure. Girls who think their bodies don’t belong to them are more likely to believe that women are a lesser species. They are more likely to make choices based on what they are being told and not how they feel.
After all:
What’s the difference between you telling her she shouldn’t have sex and some boy telling her that she should? Either way she is ignoring her own mind, her own desires and her own convictions.
“Your skirt is too short, you’ll attract the wrong attention.”
“Don’t dance like that, boys will get the wrong idea.”
“Respectable girls keep their legs closed.”
These are the narratives we use to keep women in line only to turn around and proclaim that they can change the world, that they are powerful, that they should be proud of everything that makes them up. But teaching a woman to be empowered begins with teaching her the power of her own body. Teaching her that sex should be about her choices, her desires, her curiosity, her mind and her requirements.
We should be teaching our girls that sex does not define us — be it the abstinence from it, or the indulgence in it.
If I could go back to the days that followed after I lost my virginity and change one thing. I would want to have the courage (and the open invitation) to tell my mother that I had experienced sex for the first time — instead of her finding out from a diary page I had left carelessly exposed. I would want to talk about all the new feelings I had. Maybe she could have helped me not get so caught up in this new role of “sexual being”. I would have wanted her to congratulate me, prepare me, and hug me.
To settle my nerves a bit and sooth away all the secrecy and perhaps nudge my shoulder and say, “If you were safe and you felt ready, then I’m proud of your choice.”
We can keep pretending that women are these put-upon, exempt, mutations who should be kept in glass houses, fondled by a lucky few and acquired by the highest bidder, or we can all take a moment and admit that women (of varying ages) invented sex, that it belongs to us and we can do with it what we damn well please.
Loving While Black
Originally published on Those People
“No one taught us how to do this shit.”
My mother and father never taught me that ‘forever love’.
I learned a temporary love from them. The kind that lasts minutes, lingers on a perfectly timed kiss, falls off, fades to black. I learned how to put up my hands in defense of love. How to cherish its memory. I knew love by ubiquitous reputation, but it slipped through my fingers in streams of smoke. Again and again.
Hell, I didn’t even know love could be a tangible thing. I thought it was just an idealistic fairytale. Something you thought about before you drifted off to sleep next to someone who sufficed, with whom you lived some asshole sufficient life. Holding love now feels like I stumbled into a room I don’t belong in — that I was never invited to. That I’m dressed all wrong for. Afraid to touch anything.
I look around the proverbial room at my peers and wonder if we’ll all figure it out.
But we are the leap children of the 80’s, stuck in a paradox of two realities. We do not know how to love, but we desperately want to love. We want to hold hands on street corners and make beautiful brown babies who exist in a world full of light and possibility. We want to live our dreams and have partners who help us grow into better versions of ourselves. We want these things so bad we can taste them.
In the late 90’s there were over half a million Black men in prison.
One of them was my father. I sat in hair shops on the South side listening to Black women talk about love in all of its various forms and it sounded like a box of tacks shaking in my ear. Good men paid child support. Good men proposed after a year. Good men didn’t go to jail. Good men didn’t look at other women as they walked by. Good men paid the light bill. Good men pulled their pants up and had a steady pay check.
Good men looked good on paper and will still ruin your life but you should be okay with it. Because your mom was okay with it and so was her mom. Because when the nation is built on your back you have bigger problems than trying to understand your partner’s love language. Or making sure your child’s sensitivity stays in tact by lovingly validating all of their feelings.
Fuck 40 acres and a mule. Every Black person in America needs therapy.
We need to sit in a circle and hold hands and sing kumbaya and hug and cry together. Because even while basking in our own glory we’re still damaged. Ill-equipped and armed with snippets of love, filling in the rest with hope and faith and saliva on fingertips. It takes more than just a generation and a Black president to heal these kinds of wounds.
And maybe we see our scars as beauty marks now but that doesn’t change the origins. The fact that some Black men only see what they didn’t get from their mothers when they look at Black women. That some Black women live in total defense of themselves at all times. That being unapologetic is even something that must be acknowledged. That Black families sit on generations of guilt and secrets and things unsaid. That most of our grandmothers were raped. That most of our fathers were beaten. That only a few generations back we were kept as machines made of flesh and bone. Now we’re sent out into the world as the first generation to try and create the New Black Family out of good intentions and Black Magic.
I wish someone had reminded me I wasn’t a whole person before I got married. Warned me that I would look at my husband and see my father and feel like my mother and say and do the things she should have done but never did. That he was still 8 years old inside and would be silent instead of aggressive and aggressive when he should have been silent. And who could blame him? No one ever asked us if we were okay. No one ever asked our parents and grandmothers if they were falling apart inside.
But they probably were.
Everyone knows love — any kind of love — starts from within.
That if you don’t see yourself clearly and live and accept what you see, you can never truly offer anything to anyone else. No one’s perfect. White love ain’t perfect, but Black love is magic because look around you. If on our worst day, bound by our pasts, hindered by hatred and low expectations we can rise as high as we have, I can’t help but imagine how far we can go, how far we will go, if we could only just heal.
It's Time to Talk About Our Light Skinned Leadership
Originally published on Those People
I remember the first time anyone ever called me “light skinned.” It wasn’t until my first day at Frick Middle School when a boy named Milton leaned over in first period and said:
“Aye. What you mixed with?”
My lineage was Chapter 8 in our social studies book: slavery.
We, us black children, are sorted into rows and sections based on the distance between us and our nearest white ancestor.
If you’re dark:
you should say less
expect less
and show some talent to express your worth.
If you’re fair:
you’re given more passes
you’re forgiven quicker
you’re versatile and exotic.
I barter with my consciousness on occasion, hoping it’s just a coincidence that some of our most prolific and recognizable black faces would pass the paper bag test with flying colors. We all know with certainty that Barack Obama got a pass because his mother was white. If not by the powers who got him into the White House, then by the millions of moments in his life when he was given a ‘yes’ when a darker complected man would have received a ‘no.’
Because everyone wants to believe in a great beige hope.
Woke
In the last six years, the most important strides taken by the black community have been in political activism and self-empowerment. The Black Girl Magic movement happened alongside the Black Lives Matter movement which happened alongside the new Natural Hair movement — providing a keen education for those of us who may have forgotten how pivotal black community presence can be. Yay. However, I can’t help but notice how quickly these black moments got whitewashed.
When Colin Kaepernick took a knee during that pre-season game last year, the country lost its collective mind. While white people burned their Kaepernick jerseys, black people wore theirs with brand new meaning — it was a statement of black uprising. But he wasn’t the only NFL player to take this notable bow against police brutality. Michael Bennet, Marquise Goodwin, Adrian Colbert, Jeremy Lane were just a few of the other players who took a knee in the wake of high profile police shootings. Why haven’t they gotten much press?
If this movement hadn’t been started by a biracial black man with white parents, would it have become a movement at all?
This isn’t some recent development in black history. Many of our most radical social justice representatives have sported lighter skin and straighter hair — W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey P. Newton, Gwen Fontaine, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Françoise Vergès, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, Cornel West — their aggression muted and made palatable somehow. More recently, aside from Colin Kaepernick: Jessie Williams, Ava Duvernay, Angela Rye, Michaela Angela Davis, Common, Cory Booker, Shaun King, Elaine Welterorth. Yes, they’re all delivering strong, positive black messages, but they’re also examples of how fair skin — biracial or otherwise — helps that messaging cross over.
If you have darker skin, you can’t just be relevant or cool, you have to be fascinating. You have to be true-black like Duckie Thot, or androgynous-black like Grace Jones, or dressed-up-in-approachable-negro gear like Deray McKesson or married to the president like Michelle Obama. You can’t be too aggressive or take up more space than anyone wants to give you and you cannot make too many mistakes. You can come from the hood, but you must shed 80% of your hood tendencies (if you’re not gonna rap). You can be black but you must speak proper white English. You can be woke but not angry, and if you are angry, please be light-skinned and pleasant-faced. These are the rules every black person learns when they enter the real world, and these are the rules that bind even our social leaders.
Blackness takes up too much space — this we know, and can’t afford to pretend not to know.
The most recent natural hair movement is no exception.
This natural hair movement was originally intended for girls like me — women who for such a long time were told that their natural hair was nothing more than an inconvenience. It was quickly hijacked, however. Suddenly it was just another measurement of beauty that “regular” black girls couldn’t reach. The braid-outs, the twist-outs, the curl manipulators, the extreme methods of loosening one’s hair grade so that it can hang instead of stick up was brought about by this new standard of natural hair — curly, not nappy. And with that shift, we once again traded one hair-taming method for another, to satisfy a white audience, or worse, ourselves. The black hair movement eventually became championed by mixed women including afro-latinas with big, voluminous curls that hung around their fair-skinned faces and none of us even knew how to begin taking issue with it.
Some of us even opted for “natural” wigs because we couldn’t do the natural thing, naturally.
Black activists are heroes, no matter their DNA makeup. No matter their hair grade or skin tone or freckle ratio. These brothers and sisters and non-cis leaders are deserving of the highest regard and praise for the work they do and the example they set. These are history-makers. But for every light-skinned history maker, there are a dozen whose pain, story and fight has gone relatively overlooked, who isn’t as cool on Instagram: Tarana Burke, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Erica Garner.
The question that burns in my mind is out of pure curiosity:
Do we need fair-skinned activists to get ahead as a people?
Black activism — whether for social justice or physical self-acceptance — has to be sold just like any other form of entertainment. There must be a hashtag, a t-shirt, a red carpet event, a public-facing plea to the powers that be and there must be an easily digestible black face pinned to that message. This package is then fodder for water cooler conversations, where the acceptably-black news bite from the previous weekend gets thrown around in an effort to sound woke, but also perfectly non-radical.
It’s a careful balance.
We all walk around carrying the weight of the light-skinned slave complex, but we don’t say much about it because, after all, why sully the name of any of the voices of our generation just because they’ve gained acceptance? The conversation doesn’t have to and shouldn’t result in a dethroning, but the message should be made clear:
We need voices of all colors, shades and backgrounds to make an impact, no matter how comfortable we are with promoting those voices.
We must remind ourselves, and each other, that white supremacy should not rule the way we think about our activism. Regardless of how it’s received, our drive to uplift each other should have less to do with the masses and more to do with ourselves — all of us. It is, by far, more effective to teach a young black child her worth than it is to teach black worth to white people.
Your melanin may at times determine how you’re received.
Your melanin may at times determine the impact of your opinions.
Your melanin (or lack thereof) should never be a measure of your worth.