I grew up in rural North Carolina, lived in Florida for six years, and have spent the last six years residing in sweet home Alabama. My relationship to the south, particularly the deep south (though North Carolina would be considered upper south), as a blackgirl is complicated. Despite my penchant for visits to large cities, […]
Author: rboylorn
What If We Were Free?: Riley Curry and Blackgirl Freedom
Unlike many of my homegirls, my love with basketball goes far beyond the 2000 film featuring Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps. While I have never been able to play worth a damn (I’m an artist, not an athlete), my mama and older sister were basketball stars in our small town (my sister famously played on […]
A Black Mother’s Love (or What Love Looks Like in Public)
I planned to write a blog about the unconscionable inconsolable injustice that is plaguing the black community right now. I was going to write about how black lives matter (always have, always will), how condemning black folk for hurting, and calling them animals and savages for being treated like animals and savages, is just that […]
The Bold and Beautiful Possibilities of a Transgender Storyline on Daytime
Soap operas have been an on-again-off-again part of my every (week) day life since I was a little blackgirl trying to keep up with conversations in my mama’s living room. All the grown women in my family watched “the stories,” whether it meant having them on while they cooked and got ready for a second […]
A Scandal and A Lawn Chair: Why Olivia Pope Can’t Save Us From Racism
Like many other folk, I was in my feelings after watching “The Lawn Chair,” episode of Scandal a few weeks ago. So much so that I spent the weekend offline playing the best solitaire app I had recently found on my phone, and pre-gaming season 2 episodes of House of Cards in preparation for […]
What Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman Teach Us About Respectability & Black Masculinity
Like 114.5 million other folk, I was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night, the most watched show in U.S. TV history (shouts out to Missy Elliott’s halftime performance, yes gawd!). As a Carolina Panther fan I was not terribly invested in the outcome, but I was low key rooting for the Seahawks 1) because […]
Color(ism) Complex(es)
When I heard a documentary called Dark Girls had been produced in 2011 to share the often silenced stories and experiences of dark-skinned women and girls, I felt a wave of emotions and had a range of reactions fluctuating from curiosity and anxiety, to excitement and anticipation. I wrote an ode to dark (skinned) girls […]
Waiting to Exhale
(For Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and numerous others) Wait. Over the past few days, weeks, and months there have been eloquent words spoken, passionate poems and prose written, and thoughtful commentaries and reflections offered about the righteous rage, indignant indifference, fear, sadness and ambivalence that black folk and allies have felt as […]
Working While Black: 10 Racial Microaggressions Experienced in the Workplace
I have worked, on and off, since I was fifteen years old. My summer office job at the beste Norske online casino financed the name brand school clothes my mother couldn’t afford and grounded me in the work ethic I learned from watching the women in my family go to work from sun up to […]
On the Glorification of the Side Chick
So, the question has been asked, is 2014 the year of the side chick? When thinking about this there are a few things to consider. Is this a declaration, a compliment, or a fear? According to popular media, side chicks, or women (usually women of color) who are knowingly in a relationship with a man […]