A Contoured Face = A Whiter Woman.

WOMANIST

If you're anything like me, or other females, you probably have a few group chats on your phone, separating your friendships by how you know each other "sorority sisters" "friends from home""turn up crew" and whatever else may apply to your life. In my "friends from home" chat we have been talking about make-up recently. Well myself, I've been more so listening (reading) the dialogue because I don't know specifics, I just do what works for me, and change it if I end up looking like a ghost. The topic of contouring the face had been broached and carried on for about 1-2 weeks and it really had me thinking. If you're unfamiliar with the process, contouring the face is a method by which you highlight what you want to stand out and/or draw attention away from bigger features. Myself, I usually highlight my nose if I'm wearing a full face, but don't do the entire highlight/contour process on it. This method is actually used by transgendered men/drag queens so they can look more like women.

Some women contour their entire face, meaning highlighting the forehead, drawing the dark lines down the cheekbone and then highlighting above/below, and so on and so forth. As I was reading the dialogue in the group chat, I began to realize that highlighting and contouring makes women look more ethnically diverse, or White. By contouring the nose, you look more like a White woman because it elongates the nose so it appears more pointy. By highlighting the cheekbones and doing the contour in that area you look more "modelesque" therefore more ethnically ambiguous. I began to realize that by highlighting my nose, I had been playing into the ideal of needing to look like a White woman. As a woman with natural hair who only straightens her hair twice/year, this can be direct opposites. I never want to look in the mirror and realize that I'm trying to look like another race because I'm not proud or happy with the Black features God gave me. My lips are pretty full and I love them, I don't try to hide them, my hair is big and I feel like that means I'm closer to God. I haven't always felt this way about my hair seeing as how I had been getting relaxers for over 10 years, but I grew to love what I had and not dwell on the wet and wavy Mixed Chics type of hair. I didn't need to be like them because I'm Black and I don't give a Sugar Honey Iced Tea who doesn't like my hair. 

Teacher: "Ashley" (Black girl w/ natural thick hair) take that hat off your head. Are you having a bad hair day or something? (in front of class)

Student: shakes head yes

My client: (predominantly White with straight hair) When I have a bad hair day, I just wash my hair that morning.

Me: Black girls can't do that. It takes us hours to wash our hair.

This teacher upset me because she said it so loud in class, it could have embarrassed her and it really wasn't culturally appropriate in my head.

I also had a conversation with my line sister recently, Sheena, about dating and how it's difficult for her to find quality Black men, which I believe is the case for a lot of Black women. In her words, "they want women who look ethnically diverse, they don't don't want regular Black women any more". It kind of broke my heart, to hear that come from her but I couldn't agree more. Every time I'm on Instagram there's a big booty, big tit, female who doesn't look Black, or she's a light bright with soft wash and go, loose wave hair. 

Will I continue to highlight my nose? Quite possibly, but I'll always have those tape recorded feelings of cognitive dissonance playing in my head "are you trying to look more White" "your nose isn't pointy enough".

I went out with a friend over the weekend for her birthday, she rarely ever wears makeup and someone did her makeup for her. Her words, "I look different. I don't like it. I don't look like myself when I look in the mirror". It was funny at that moment when she said it, but now I understand what she means.

Driving While Black (Friday Shopping)

Domesticated

Thanksgiving, I ate until I was going to pop. The day before Thanksgiving everyone on Instagram and Twitter kept lamenting "don't post your food pics people, we'll all be eating the same thing" "no one wants to see your paper plates" "some of ya'll food looks nasty" and so on and so forth; therefore, I decided not to post my food not to anger the Twitter audience because 1) my food is on paper plates, cuz we aint washing all those dishes and 2) everyone does pretty much eat the same thing. But not at my aunt's house for Thanksgiving, we have fried oysters, crab cakes, and chitlins to go along with all of the usuals. I didn't even have turkey on Thanksgiving, actually. The only time I get chitlins is during the holidays because they stink and they take too much work to clean and prepare. Thanks to my mom, I have a whole HEAP of chitlins and greens at my house. Does your family make anything that's not the norm for Thanksgiving? 

All the greens my mom gave me. Talk about a mother's love!!!

That weekend, since I had a ton of mac and cheese left I switched the breakfast game up. I made an omelette stuffed with spinach and macaroni and cheese with yams and turkey bacon on the side. JESUS! It was absolutely amazing. I made two kinds of macaroni and cheese, but I used the pepper jack mac for this omelette. Hallelujah! What did you do with all your leftovers?

Pepper jack mac with honey wheat pretzel crust & mixed cheese mac with italian bread crumb crust

Mac and cheese & spinach stuffed omelette with yams and turkey bacon

Womanist

I drove back home after Thanksgiving and decided to take a last minute trip to the mall to do some Black Friday Christmas shopping. I picked up a couple of steals from my favorite store and some Christmas gifts for Justyn. I am now driving at close to midnight and about 0.5 miles from my house when I see a cop car on my left, in the middle lane. I had a sneaky suspicion (intuition) I was going to be pulled over on this night, but I had no clue what for, so I made sure to drive the speed limit since the cops were out everywhere. This cop then proceeds to get behind my car, ride me for about 5 seconds, then turns on his lights. I giggle out of amazement, then continue to drive and pull into a well lit shopping center around the corner from my house. The first thing I do as a young Black woman is think "I need a witness, just in case something happens, cops are killing Black people left and right, and I don't want to be a Trayvon, dead without proof" so I pull out my phone, call my mom, and have her sitting on the line the entire time. Can you imagine being pulled over by a cop and the first thing that goes through your mind is "if I die, I need someone to hear to me die"? What a horrible way to survive as a people. So I do just that, the cop claims he pulls me over because the tint on my car is too dark as he asks for my license, address, and where I am headed. He then wrote me a ticket for a tint violation after measuring my tint with a tint-o-meter. (I had no clue my tint was illegal, I just bought the car October 2012, but this young White cop likely trying to move up the ladder, didn't care.) My gut tells me he was looking for DUIs out on the road, so he was hoping I was intoxicated and hoping to score big off of me. Luckily, I don't drink and drive, so he can catch fire in that regard. I plan on going to court for this stupid ticket and fighting it, we'll see how that turns out.

Black people (and Asians) love chicken.

Where does the stereotype that Black people love chicken come from? I must say that when I used to work in a predominantly White environment I would never pack my baked chicken wings like I wanted to. LOL! Nevertheless, thanks to Yelp I found an amazing Chicken spot that I used to live right around the corner from. I always though Bon Chon was just a semi-fancy Chinese food place. Well one, it aint Chinese it's Korean and 2 they have the most amazing chicken. I mean, I even questioned if my fried chicken lived up to this succulent meaty goodness. Yelp has a section on there where you can see the top rated restaurants in your area, so that's how I found Bon Chon, the majority of the reviews were positive. I learned from there that Bon Chon double fries their chicken, so it takes 30 minutes to cook, so I should call and order ahead if I want to eat in, so I want be seen gnawing on a thumb. They have 2 flavors, one soy garlic, the other soy garlic HOT, and amazing seasoned fries sprinkled with mozzarella cheese. I tasted garlic and seasoning salt on the fries. Justyn and I ordered 20 wings half and half and a small order of fries for $27. AMAZING! We had plenty of leftovers. The hot sauce was Asian sriracha.

I got this groupon deal for this place called Chasin Cajun in Arlington $10 for $20 worth of food. When Justyn and I went to Houston January 2012 we ate like 2 fat cows. While there, we went to a Cajun restaurant and everyone, I MEAN EVERYONE, had on a bib and a table covered in crawfish. Being the Hampton/Newport News, Virginia bred folks we are, we didn't know how to eat them. Le sigh, so we sat at the uncool table and ordered other seafood.

Fried goodness: Fish, frog legs, crab cakes, shrimp, and oysters.

Fried gator. I wonder if I gotta pimple after all of this fried food. Most likely.

This is where they chowed down on the crawfish I believe.

This time I am determined to eat crawfish. I've been studying the art of crawfish eating from true Naw'lins (correct?) people on Youtube. Yes, it's that serious.