It’s been a rough past few weeks, hasn’t it? Between the SCOTUS rulings, Zimmerman trial, another recent discovery of a serial killer who has targeted Black women, and the general tomfoolery of white supremacy experienced on a daily basis, it seems like we can’t catch a break. Certainly, it’s never easy to be a person […]
Category: Self-Care
How to Not Die: Some Survival Tips for Black Women Who Are Asked to Do Too Much
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” –Audre (the) Lorde High blood pressure runs in my family. I have been taking medication to regulate it for six years and I recently started getting intense headaches and migraines that I realized were related to hypertension. Deadline-driven […]
Getting Free & Staying Free
It might seem a bit cliché for an English professor to be all like “Beloved is one of my favorite novels,” but it’s the truth. I love that book with a fiery burning passion. It’s one of those texts that I can always go back to and that never gets old. I can open any […]
Atlanta Harm Reduction: Prevention as the First Response
Dear CFC Community, There are some places where people are warned never to go, known for violence, drug traffic, and poverty. For those who have not grown up in these environments we are taught to fear and/or condemn people who live there. This is not true of everyone. There are some s/heroes who “see the […]
Not that Kind of Dr.
She has a substance abuse issue, she has anxiety disorder, she had an abortion during the semester (did not tell parents), she experienced sexual abuse by older female family members, she experienced being homeless (on her on) before coming to college, she is escaping a dangerous neighborhood and has lost several friends to gun violence, […]
Dear Universe: A Book Talk with Yolo Akili
One of the perks of writing for the CFC is I get to shed light on projects that excite me. Dear Universe is one such project and it comes from my dear friend Yolo Akili. We had the opportunity to talk about his unique book and how it pushes the boundaries of traditional self-help and […]
Single, Saved, and Sexin: The Redux
One of the most controversial posts we’ve ever had here at the blog was called Single, Saved, and Sexin’: The Gospel of Getting Your Freak On. In that piece, over two years ago, I argued: Sex is a form of creative power. And it is in the literal fact of its creative aspects that we […]
thank you: a women’s history month mix
“You are magnificent.” So read the final line of an email I received from the CFC’s Moya Bailey the first Friday of 2012. The subject line was, “Love for you in the new year!” It recalled the summer we became friends and its consequence on her journey. She offered thanks and called me by a […]
Getting to Happy, or The Myth of Happily Ever After
Happy Endings? “Is this going to have a happy ending?” This question rose from an otherwise quiet classroom from a student who was getting worried since the documentary we were watching seemed to be going awry. The documentary, Home, follows the experience of a working-class single black mother of six children on her journey to […]
Love Me Like You Love Your Lover
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else. We can give ourselves the unconditional love that is the grounding for sustained acceptance […]