america in black

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    I Tried to Land a Date From a Street Sign

    We sit around the dining room table on the cusp of the itis. Somehow we gather enough energy to keep the party going into dessert—homemade flan. I slide my spoon into the substance. I’m a picky eater with immature taste buds. I already know the outcome. I do not repeat. “So, y’all got any friends,…

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    My Grandpa and the Land

    “I shuddered to think that while we wanted that flag dragged into the mud and sullied beyond repair, we also wanted it pristine, its white stripes, summer cloud white. Watching it wave in the breeze of a distance made us nearly choke with emotion. It lifted us up with its promise and broke our hearts…

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    Jersey Black

    When I tell people I’m from Jersey that usually garners one of three reactions: “Oh yeah what part, Newark?” Translation: All Black people from Jersey live in Newark. “Like Jersey Shore?!” Translation: That’s the most memorable Jersey reference I have.   “Oooooh so you’re a Jersey Girl?!” Translation: I still don’t know what this means…

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    The Whole Black Church and Me

    One of the first sermons I ever preached was titled “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” In it, a very young and naive preacher, emboldened by an atmosphere that allowed impenitent homophobia to go unchecked, uses the language of revulsion to articulate why he believed same-sex relationships were wrong and not in line with…

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    All the Ways I Did Not Die

    When sitting in the passenger seat of a car with a known drug-dealer during a high-speed chase, one should always wear a seat belt. Always. Thankfully, I came to the realization of this maxim seconds before the tire burst as I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car with a known drug dealer…

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    To be a Black American Muslim Woman Is to be Both an Insider and an Outsider 

    If I had to describe my relationship with Islam in one word, it would be nuanced. Two words? Profoundly nuanced. I’m not a hijabi Muslimah, and because I don’t wear hijab, I blend. I blend in with other black Americans who like other people, don’t recognize that my entire name is Arabic, which could be…

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    A Tale of Two Faces

    My mother tells me I look like my grandmother, a brown belle whose features I know only through faded photographs and choppy 8mm film strips. I try to imagine the experience of a woman with whom I seem to share a face, with her growing up under Jim Crow in the 1910s and 1920s as…

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    The Unbearable Blackness of Being

    Shortly after I entered the world via Detroit’s now-shuttered Grace Hospital one summer day in 1981, I set upon what was an unmistakably black-ass upbringing in one of America’s chocolatiest cities. That which we refer to as “black people shit” as an adult was simply childhood by default: a quarter for a baggie of assorted…

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    America. In Black.: A VSB Essay Series About the Unique and Individual Experiences of Black People in America

    One of the best parts about VSB over the course of our existence—which is going on 11 years(!!!!!) come March—is that we’ve had the opportunity to write about and share many different aspects of blackness in America. Some of it has been serious and some of it has been fun, but the vast majority of…