I Need a Break From Being a Woman of Color
It’s just exhausting
Of course, I don’t really want to give up who I am: a black, biracial, African American, and white woman. But I sometimes crave a break from having to trudge this descriptor with me into every thought and memory, every writing assignment, or vacation — every single new encounter with a stranger.
I write about race, gender, and social justice. This is my work. My calling. My vocation. The chemical components of the oxygen I breathe.
But sometimes I wish it weren’t.
It would be so refreshing, I think sometimes, as I curl up on the couch to re-watch the Dowager Countess fire off one-liners on Downton Abbey. There isn’t a black or brown face for miles around that Yorkshire landscape — with the exception of Jack Ross, whose forbidden affair with Cousin Rose was quickly extinguished. But I don’t care. I could watch all six seasons again and again — and have done, three times — simply because the show has the power to transport me far away from the place where I’m required to be, day in and day out: a woman of color.
Zora Neale Hurston also tired of the suffering protest narratives. “Can the black poet sing a song to the morning?” she asked in a 1938 essay. No. We can’t, she answered. Because “the one subject for a Negro is the Race and its…
