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.