30 “Dates”–The Rest I Got Around To

By: like black butterflies
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11. Blueberry picking in summer–June 2018 I’ve been wanting to do this for years but would either forget about it until blueberry season was nearly over, or not really find people interested in going. I made it happen this year. We drove to the middle of nowhere Mississippi, really middle of nowhere to the point…

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Academic Racism

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As I’ve been working towards my PhD, one thing that’s often struck me is the way in which white researchers, white academics, write about issues that affect Black people. Even some of the authors that I think have a decent racial analysis, who discuss the ways in which structural racism operates to create systems of…

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#FBF–Cachoeira to New Orleans

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Maybe a year ago, maybe more, I was going through old photos and I stopped to look through the images taken while I was studying abroad. In 2009 I spent a semester in Northeastern Brazil, my first time really living in another country. I’d visited other countries before, but for a matter of weeks, not…

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30 Restaurants: Bennachin & Antoine’s

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Bennachin Restaurant This is a West African restaurant, specifically based in Gambia and Cameroon, although there were some menu items from other countries int he region, located in the French Quarter. It’s tiny, you could miss it walking by, as I have on COUNTLESS occasions. It’s right near Verti Mart if you know where that…

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Book 18: Eloquent Rage, A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower–Brittney Cooper

By: like black butterflies
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What I loved about reading this book is that she spoke so directly to so many of my life experiences, particularly when it comes to Black exceptionalism, overachieving, and adherence to respectability. While we decidedly had very different economic upbringings, it was like we experienced the same social frustrations and racial animosity of instructors and…

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Whitney Plantation

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I’m trying to resist writing too much about my experience at Whitney, but it’s difficult because it was such a great tour. If I compare Whitney to the narrative I was presented at Melrose Plantation earlier this summer, it’s like night and day in terms of content and critical race analysis. Basically the Melrose tour…

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On a Year’s Sobriety

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In exactly one week I will break my year-long commitment to sobriety. In exactly one week I will be 30 years old. Over the course of the year being sober has been revealing, but maybe not in the ways that people would expect. But backing up, how did I get here? Why would I decide…

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Why Am I Doing?

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Not what. Why. I’ve been putting off this post, because I knew it would take more mental energy to write it than I had at the moment when I started. Yesterday my planner called me out. Everyday there’s a quote on the note’s page. Yesterday’s quote was: People lose their way when they lose their…

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