Siddity in the City

Remember a while back when Barb Wawa was regularly losing her motherfucking MIND on air?

damali ayo has a little something that may have stopped that kind of foolishness cold.

I want. Hard. Immediately.

I found this shirt while cruising the comments section of this Feministe post (cross-posted at the authors own site) yesterday. Two things:

1. I wish that essay were mandatory reading for all non-black people. Actually, I think everyone could benefit from reading this one over. Renee points to our right to “bodily integrity,” and it’s a fair point that I wish were stressed more. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay for Vixen that addressed my complaints as an instructional negress, including the issue of whites assuming the right to touch or question my hair. What I couldn’t mention in that piece, because it was obviously off-topic, is that so many other black women feel they have the right to touch or question my hair–and then to question me when I assert my right to bodily integrity, demanding I tell them why I want them to stop sticking their fingers in my shit. I’d love to just, you know, not be anyone else’s tool for working out their hair issues.

2. I would love for more people to stop rushing to defend against criticism without ever really thinking about what’s being said. I’ve been called on my own privilege before, when I’ve caused offense without intent. It wasn’t comfortable. But I’d have been a damned (privileged) fool to brush the feelings of the offended aside without really examining what they were saying because, well hey, that isn’t what I meant, I didn’t realize the context, and I deserve to be comfortable at all times. Yet as I read through the comments on each version of that essay, I see numerous commentators insisting the writer give non-black people a pass because they’re curious and that’s natural, or because someone touched their hair once and they didn’t consider it racism, or hijacking the conversation by rolling it back into their own issues with their hair as white women.

Why is my aversion to being touched by a stranger or interrogated by my so-called peers so difficult to understand? If you have the barest hint of tact, you don’t call another human out on their hair color, or grab a breast, or tug at man’s suddenly thicker hair–unless you intende to other them, to humiliate, to put them on the defensive. And yet I am supposed to believe you’re doing it to me out of innocent curiosity? Fuck all the way off. Whether you realize it or not, for some reason you have just assumed that your right to satisfy your curiosity is greater than my right to my own person. Think about that for a second and then tell me again in seriousness that what you’ve just done isn’t privilege in action.

A lighter take.

And for the record, I still want to cold-cock Barbara Walters just thinking about her presumption.