Almost 30...

Almost 30

The closer i get to those magic numbers the more i start discovered that thing that i have always envied about older women. Women like nia long, jill scott, ms badu, they all have one thing in common. Beauty? Yes. But there is something else , self love and self awareness. Nothing more breathtaking than listening to an interview that jill scott did for the breakfast club and hearing her talking about her journey to becoming a woman, knowing that she wasnt born that perfect being that i often view her as. She had to take some time and come to terms and hold herself accountable for events that happened in her life and during that course she started falling in love with herself on a different level. 

The closer i get to 30 the more i am coming to terms with the woman that i am becoming. It took a really bad relationship to shake me up and wake up that woman inside of me. Before then it was so easy to place the blame on man for every bad thing that had happened but then i sat down with myself and said its you girl. You chose him, you chose to deal and then one day it clicked and i just wasnt anymore. Something about truly loving yourself is knowing and being in firm in what you deserve. That love that you need to nurture you. And knowing when to avoid the people that arent giving it. I look at the men and women of our generation and there are so many that arent planted and are just flowing where the wind takes them. Nothing against being free but in order to truly be free youve got to accept your roots, know what is for you and what isnt. Im learning that. Its ultimately a bumpy ride and it isnt always easy, everyday i dont wake up loving that extra cushion, or mole that just appeared over night or my melanin but you got to. No one else is obligated to go on your journey with you and i have accepted that. 

I love me and everything about me. From the crazy to the self assured. It is what makes Ingrid, simply Ingrid. Almost 30 and I love the woman that I am and that I am becoming. I don't care what people think about me or what I choose to put my energy into. I am vocal about it. I write about it. Might even sing off key about it. I dance to my own rhythm and I dont need the audience anymore. 

Almost 30 and it feels damn good. And it looks damn good. 

"Why Do We Hate Our Sistas?"

"I wonder why we take from our women? Why we rape our women, do we hate our women? I think it's time to kill for our women, time to heal our women, be real to our women" -Tupac Shakur; Rapper, Actor, Revolutionary


Define visionary. Define prophecy. Both words are synonymous with Tupac Shakur. Let me connect the dots for you, follow me. The above quote is from a song called, "Keep Ya Head Up" by Tupac, released in 1993. The next line is "And if we don't we'll have a race of babies, that'll hate the ladies, that make the babies". Again, this song was released in 1993.

Fast forward to 2016. Black women, do you constantly feel like black men hate black women? I'm sure a good bit of you do. I hear it all the time and see it all the time... sometimes I even think it for you. So if nothing else, Tupac's words proved to be prophetic in the way that this is even a conversation. Social media is an eery place. It has developed into what has commonly been coined as a 24 hour news cycle. But the news is not only the news that the government sees fit to share with us. It's constant links and opinions and gossip from everyone in the world. Those paid and unpaid alike have almost an equal voice. Which is dangerous. So let's use twitter for example. More specifically, #BlackTwitter. If you have a substantial amount of people you follow and said people have a substantial number of followers, you probably are privy to the same "news" cycle as everybody else in #BlackTwitter. It's a numbers game. So I think more so than anything else, this is the root of black women 35 and under feeling like black men hate them. It's definitely not the genesis. Black stereotypes have long been perpetuated inside and outside of the black community but now there's really and endless platform for the rhetoric. The frustration. The complaining. The timeline!!

I pride myself on being a logical thinker. Which is a gift and a curse. But for this conversation I can't just use logic. Because logic tells me that there's clear agendas here. Logic tells me that if you're a woman you're going to be more susceptible to the complaints about women than you are about men. Which would lead you to believe that the complaints about women are more. I'm not here to defend that claim. I actually believe that in 2016, from my experience and what I've seen it could actually be true. And that's partially because I feel, now more than ever, it's more accepted for men to complain publicly. Which is alarming to me. I was taught, for better or for worse, that a man's first job is to protect. More emphasis was placed on that during my upbringing because I'm black and black women in America face oppression and attack like no other. With that being said, BLACK women feeling like black men hate them, hurts me. It annoys me. It angers me. And it's very frustrating to me. Unless you're new here, you know I write blogs that mostly cater to black women. Giving them somewhat of a spokesmen to my male contemporaries that can't understand what they're saying. Because it's emotion vs logic and most men weren't raise to embrace understanding and analyzing emotion. So when women speak from an emotional place, most men weren't typically trained to properly listen to that. I've wrote many blogs that give what I hope is clarity. I'm not a woman, more specifically a black woman, at all but I always wish to understand. Wish to learn. So that's what I want to focus on here. I don't want to discuss who complains the most. I want to discuss why our women feel like we hate them.

Throughout our history as black Americans we have strategically been taught to hate to ourselves. To hate each other. Divide and conquer. It worked. Unfortunately, it worked. But again, a man's first job is to protect. And black men, we have failed our women. So many of society's ills show this but I think the reason our women feel we hate them is because most men fail to understand that despite the stereotypical flaws, even on the occasion that they apply to particular women, men rarely take into account why they're that way. Because from their perspectives, if you really understood how painful it was for the woman you're complaining about to raise her two kids alone you wouldn't be complaining about her trust issues. If you knew how painful it was for Ashley to see her mom get beat by her boyfriend growing up you every two days but never leaving him you wouldn't be complaining about why Ashley doesn't like being submissive. If you understood how Ebony was always treated worse than her light skin sister you wouldn't complain about why she take offense to dark skin women jokes. If you understood that all Brittney's life she was told she was too fat, then when she got smaller she was told her butt wasn't big enough then you wouldn't be complaining about her body insecurities. Why don't you understand? Furthermore, why don't you care to understand? Why do you think this is funny? Why do you, a grown  BLACK man feel the need to say so much negative about black women when you know they have been told they have to be perfect or they're worthless directly or indirectly their whole lives? "An oppressed people will always feel under attack, similar to a war veteran that will always feel like loud noises could be gunshots." Because oppression isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. It's something that's done over a substantial amount of time and the dominoes fall in line. Logic says, I, a black man, shouldn't have to deal with your attitude because you had to raise your two kids alone. I wasn't the father that abandoned your kids. Logic says, I, a black man, am not Ashley's mom's boyfriend. I didn't throw a punch so why do I have to get attitude from Ashley every time I ask her to do something. Logic says, I, a black man, shouldn't have to not prefer light skinned women because Ebony is dark skin and was treated inferior her whole life. I could just like light skinned women. That doesn't mean dark skin women aren't beautiful. Or that I have to discredit a light skin woman's beauty because I want to uplift dark skinned women. Logic says that, I, a black man, can't help it if I love thick thighs or if I'm into slim girls. It's not wrong for me to have my own PERSONAL preference. That's what logic says. But hate is an emotion. Black women feeling like we hate them, no matter the specific reason, is emotion. A very hurtful emotion. And black men are supposed to protect. I can't protect you from your past. Someone has already failed you, beautiful black woman. Whether the failure was intentional or unintentional. Your father may have never left the family, but he missed the signs of you feeling like you weren't pretty enough. I can't blame him if he was the best father he knew how to be but somewhere he failed.

However, beautiful black woman, of all shapes, sizes, and shades I love you. What I'm attracted to physical doesn't negate who I love internally. But I understand that it feels like you're constantly under attack. That doesn't mean I can't voice my frustrations from time to time, that doesn't mean I can't recognize an emotional setback in the behavior of another black woman, but because I know occasionally I do both, I want you to know I still love you, black women. I understand in this constant 24 news cycle it could feel like all you hear/see is black men talking negatively about you. Negativity travels at the speed of light. But, still, we failed you. Our fathers and our grandfathers, failed you. Because as the protectors of the households, we didn't protect you. We allowed you to raise kids by yourselves and for those scars to develop. We allowed division to cause resentment. We allowed outsiders to degrade and abuse you. We allowed even our counterparts to neglect their families with no recourse. But I love you. I have a group of friends, who while we all love differently, we all love black women. Does that mean all of my friends have never dated outside the race? No. Does that mean all black men that date or marry outside the race don't love black women? No. Because no matter who I choose to marry, or date, no matter what her pigment or race may be, I love black women. I will protect my mother, my sisters, and my other "sistas" no matter who I choose as my personal companion. That, even though I understand how some women may feel this way also, is not an indictment against black women. Love is love. So in conclusion, I know these scars are present and there's a thin line between jokes and insults, but black women I will love you as long as my lungs have oxygen in them. I'll love you as long as my mind works. I'll love you as long as my heart beats. Because without a black woman, I don't have lungs, I don't have a mind, and I don't have a heart!


Just My Thoughts

You Won't See Me on TV

"Because I ain't shucking and cause I ain't jiving, some of these crackers won't stand beside me, And cause I ain't killing and don't support pimping, some of these niggas wanna call me a Cosby" -Phonte; Rapper, Singer, Songwriter

Remember when we Claire and Cliff AND Martin and Gina? Remember we had Will and the Banks family, but we still had Jazz? Remember when we had a majority black woman cast that were dating tastefully (You can pick Living Single or Girlfriends) while also being professional women? Remember when we had A Different World? Now ask yourself why these are such distant memories? Do we need these exact shows? It would be nice, but no. That's not the point. The point is we had representation. Broad representation. Respectful representation. So the real two questions are:

1.) Why don't we have an equal amount of balanced representation now?

and

2.) Why don't we care about it?

For all the trivial daily outrage I see on social media, why aren't we really attacking this issue. We, being black people, and the issue being, not having proper representation of us. Bias or not, black people are such a diverse people. But all I see representing us on mainstream tv is "ratchet-ness". I'm neither naive nor oblivious to the fact that we do have our "ratchet" side and I'm also not dismissing the fact that it can be entertaining in moderation. But there's no moderation. There's a landslide. More specifically, as a black man, I only can think of one positive representation of myself on a major network. A black man that cares about more than his next sexual conquest. One of honesty and integrity that prevents him from cheating on and lying to every woman he deals with. One with a career that doesn't involve working on his next mixtape (I love rap. Don't confuse my point). One that isn't, or once was, heavily involved in drug dealing. That one example is Dre Johnson. The father on the hit show, Black-ish, played by Anthony Anderson. I love Black-ish but I also know there's more than one type of cohesive black family in the world. I know there's more than one black man in this country capable of loving a black woman monogamously. I know there's more than one group of intelligent black kids that didn't come from a broken home!!! But "All I see is victims", to quote Pusha T. All I see is {no}Love and Hip-Hop and it's offspring. Is there a place for shows like this on television? Of course. I'm no monk, I have guilty pleasures. My biggest issue with these shows is the fact that they run year round, with entities in different major cities that rotate by season, and in essence, corner the market. If we had one Black-ish for every Love and Hip-hop entity, Black Ink, and Empire, you wouldn't hear a word from me. But the writing is on the wall. The very criteria of being on love and Hip-Hop isn't that you actually have to be a formidable working artist in Hip-Hop, you just have to have 6 degrees of separation from someone who WAS, and either be dogging and degrading black women or being one of the black women being dogged and degraded. You have to either be cheating or being cheated on. You have to be either a regularly drunk and belligerent and physically fighting black woman, or a gossiping naive one with poor taste in mates.  So news flash, you can't have a positive lifestyle and be on this franchise. Which again is fine, but if you don't live like these people, where's your representation?

Let's dissect another angle: other than "Bow" Johnson (Dre's wife, played by Tracee Ellis Ross) how many other positive images of black women on a major television show are dating a faithful black man? I'll wait. The closest thing to it would be "Cookie" played by the stunning Taraji P. Henson. However, Cookie dates black men on the show, but they're always temporary characters as she somehow always leaves them indirectly because of her ex-husband Lucious Lyon. Lucious and Cookie aren't bad representations of black people. While Empire is more of modern day Soap Opera, in my opinion, I wouldn't label them bad representations. They are successful and family oriented. But they had to be sullied. Both are former drug dealers who became successful off of drug money first, and then the music business. A common tale in the music business, specifically hip-hop, tho.   Lucious is a lying (Lyon), cheating, unethical, immoral, murderer that also is a shrewd, effective businessman. Ehhh. Then you have Ghost and Tasha. Another black couple, from the show Power that started in drug dealing. Not to mention, Ghost is cheating on Tasha with a white/ Italian woman, and Tasha was cheating with a younger black man. Cheating and drugs. We are more than that. While I love Power and love what the success that Empire quietly represents (and the amazing job Taraji P. Henson does), why can't we "get right" on TV? Olivia Pope, played by the beautiful Kerry Washington, on the hit show Scandal, only dates white men. I have no, absolutely no, problem with interracial dating, I just want them to stop putting the poison in the candy. I also want us to open our eyes to the subliminal messages.

As a black man, I constantly feel attacked, in the media. From the examples I just gave you I feel like the message is, I, a black man, will never be good enough (for the public). Because I can't be successful without a drug background or music career. And because I'll cheat on every woman that loves me. That Dre Johnson is an anomaly. Also, whenever we see a black man on the news who has allegedly committed a heinous crime, he's a thug. Or every rapper or fan of rap is a thug (See: Bill Blanton's comments). However, when a caucasian adult or young adult is guilty of similar acts they're considered "troubled" or "mentally ill". It's privilege at work. We are all aware of this; even the ones that don't care to publicly admit it. Personally, I'm not one of those people who try excuse, without accountability, crime just on the merit of "a white person would get away with it". But I don't think this perspective is extreme. I don't think I'm overstating. Somebody has to say it. Somebody has to change it. Somebody has to care. We need equal representation. We also need accountability. We air our dirty laundry proudly; and we support every second of the clothesline, it shows in the ratings. So why would they change the formula? When will we get tired of it? When will we wake and see the social engineering? Where's the writers? Where's the trailblazers? Where's the real activists and community organizers? I just want the balance. I want critical acclaim worthy representation. I want positive influences. I just want to see {me} on TV!

Just My Thoughts,

Travis Cochran

Why You Shouldn't Let Your Child Work for Chick Fil A

I usually don't eat fast food because it makes me feel horrible after. It's also expensive as hell and the prices keep going up. But I'm not here to bash fast food because in some ways it makes the world better. What I am here for though is to tell you why as a person or parent you should never want to or let your kids work for Chick fil A...

Yesterday at work I got a coupon for a free chicken sandwich. Never the one to turn down free food I went to get my sandwich and I planned to get some fries and a Coke which totally violated my no fast food rule. I noticed that Chick fil A has the absolute very best customer service I've ever had in a fast food spot. I literally waited 2-3 minutes for my food and when I got it they called me by name, (not sure how.. Unless the digital coupon had my name on it) thanked me for my business, and apologized for my wait. I was absolutely blown away because most places won't apologize no matter how long you've been waiting. Everyone was so happy and upbeat! As I was walking to my car I really wondered how does Chick fil A maintain its high, energetic, almost flawless customer service.. Then it hit me! Chick fil A only hires super young kids who don't know anything about the world let alone customer service. The difference between them and other restaurants is that you either see high school aged kids or 30 plus adults, nothing in between. This is probably the first job for most of them and I'm sure you can remember how excited you were for that first job. How you were on time everyday with your shirt tucked. And I'm sure somewhere along the way the excitement faded and turned to "I hate my job." It happens to everybody because you can tell when somebody doesn't want to be at work. Not in Chick Fil A though! They've developed the perfect system of making kids believe that work is always supposed to be like this. How else can you explain the amazing service and hot food. If you go in and close your eyes I'm sure that's what heaven sounds like. These bright eyed teenagers don't know how good they have it because just on the outside of those friendly walls, with pictures of happiness and joy, is a miserable world that is ready to drain every ounce of joy they have. I almost feel bad for them because Chick Fil A is sheltering them under a building where nobody is unhappy. They make you happy to eat fast food everyday because you want that warm feeling inside that comes from an eight count nugget and waffle fries and not having to deal with an attitude to get it. I've never even seen a drink spilled in Chick Fil A. The place is nothing short of a perfect world only to be realized once you leave it. The real world is no joke and Chick fil A doesn't prepare these teenagers for that at all.