The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

"I'm not ok." Black women have been uttering that phrase in one form or another over the course of this summer. Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles are elite athletes in their respective sports and have placed a spotlight on the expectations placed upon Black women to always be on, always perform, always win. Regardless of the mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical cost. This expectation has been for four hundred years. Black women have been marginalized, demonized, idolized, and demoralized in a country that does not see them as human. Nikole Hannah Jones, earlier this year, made the bold move to not accept the Johnny-come-lately offer of tenure only after UNC was publicly shamed for not giving it to her in the first place. She announced she would instead go to Howard University and be celebrated for her brilliance instead of tolerated for her contributions. Black women this year, after the year of loss of everything that seemed normal in an abnormal world, decided to so so...

  I gave myself a gift a few months ago. It was accidental, honestly. I had to change my Facebook password. When I did it, realized I had to change it on all my devices. The problem, turned moment, was that I forgot what it was. So I did a thing. I deleted it off my iPhone. Then I sat in stunned silence. After all, I manage communications for my job and as a social and racial justice minister, I often engage on social media. It was part life and part work, but I let it go. The silence. It was so welcome, I deleted Twitter off my phone also. Only Instagram remained and primarily for the original use I added it - posting about the literary circle. What happened afterwards was a bit interesting. I began to evaluate how much of my life is consumed. Content. Created. Consumed. No, I do not live a "fake" life to be an influencer, my life is very much real, but how much of it I was sharing began to intrigue me. Long gone were the anticipated rip open of the photo envelope from the l...

  T oday is my birthday. The sun is shining, the trees are waving through my windows, surrounded by the sounds of the wind from the oceans just a few miles away. It is the first bright day all week and I'm claiming it for myself. I was doing a lot of thinking about life. That seems the thing we do on the day before or day of our birthday. My late father once told me he had more years behind him than in front of him. He was in his mid-60s at the time.  I'm not there yet, of saying that, but who knows? So I am deciding that of the years I have in front of me, I'm making some intentions about life. When you are an older Black woman, an educated, cis-het Black woman working in spaces that wants to erase your brilliance for the sake of an empty "woke" and "real pain",  you sometimes stop and wonder what in the world happened. I found myself questioning the work I'd been doing for the past four years and if any of it mattered, after all I was no longer tha...

 I, like many African Americans, waited for the verdict on the Derek Chauvin trial. We waited because in the middle of a pandemic, a Black man was brutally murdered, 9 minutes and 29 seconds of the knee of hate on the neck of George Floyd for simply being Black. Human beings, we are human beings, and his cries were ignored while a white man with a badge callously kneeled on his knee, with his sunglasses on, careless. I mourn with his family and all the young people who were brave enough to record that murder. The trial was heart and gut wrenching, hearing the testimony of the witnesses who were helpless because of the power of that badge to dehumanize Black and Brown people. We watched the trial when while it was going on, another Black man, Daunte Wright, became an ancestor too soon. His life taken over air freshener in his mother's car that she let him borrow and a white identified Hispanic woman forgot 29 years of police training to claim she thought her taser was a gun. What wa...

W hy? When will we be able to simply be in this country? When will our lives matter? I intentionally check-out of the news and social media for the majority of the weekend. It was consuming, with the trial and the obstructions still coming from one side of the Senate floor, that I simply tuned out. It is the start of my daughter's spring break and I was at a conference, so whatever was happening in the world was going to happen with out me for a few days. Then, I turned it back on. It is Monday and I needed to attend to something.  Twitter was breaking news and up-to-the-minute-reporting. Another Black man. He was barely a man, twenty is not an adult, yet. He couldn't even legally buy a drink, he was just beginning.  In the car his mother purchased for him, for his start in life, and he met a fate we fear. A traffic stop. His death comes just days after seeing the video of the encounter of the Second Lt. Carion Nazario who was driving through Windsor, Virgina, some no-dot-on-t...

 Light penetrating darkness through the balcony glass doors of my townhouse, everyone still asleep, just coffee and another long day on my mind. Instinctively picking up my phone as I made my way to the kitchen and stopping mid stride. There were twenty missed texts and calls.  How did I sleep through all that? Forgetting that I had turned my ringer off the night before, my fingers swiping up trying to read and make sense of the CALL ME posts over and over from my son's fiancee. Then the voice messages and one rather frightening one from my middle son. My fingers did the tap tap to dial his number. "Good morning." "Been trying to reach you all night." "Long day, was asleep, turned my phone off." "Your son has been shot, not sure he will make it." I dropped to my knees and screamed. "NO!"  "Yeah, you need to get here. Call his fiancee" He gave me as many details as he could, his voice was weary, like the Navy Veteran he was...

 It is funny, that world we never intended to enter - Facebook. We connect with it and through it. So when you make a post - or in my case, a repost of a CNN article  that a renowned Bishop posted with his commentary about christian nationalism - and it is immediately flagged by the bots of Facebook saying you violated some arbitrary community standards - it makes you stop and wonder what this thing is even for. No doubt, we are in trying times. There are Senators representing 44% of the population, themselves well fed and vaccinated, trying to thwart the will of the people who overwhelmingly chose new leadership. The people made a choice, many of them first time and BIPOC stood in lines and wanted a better tomorrow. They were met with falsehoods that a reality-start-turned-into-their-idol "won" and instead played on their racism, narcissism, nationalism, and incited them to do what hadn't been done in generations. Despite all this glaring across the television screens on...