Now mind you, he had handed down the assignment a good three weeks before it was due. But I am a habitual sufferer of that most classic form of self-sabotage: procrastination. So while I piddled away those 21-odd days leading up to the big deadline doing only Lord knows what, I could’ve been working incrementally towards getting ‘er done and done thoughtfully, carefully and introspectively. Instead, I found myself flipping through books and printouts like a raving madwoman, typing the first incoherent thought that came to mind in order to make page count rather than impressing him with my wit and insight. For almost 24 hours, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t shower and—I ain’t too ashamed to admit it—I didn’t even brush my teeth.

I drove like a Dale Earnhardt groupie to campus in what I slept in, hair sprazzled all over my head like brown cactus spines, and made it to his door at 3:48. He wasn’t even there.

We all have at least one personality quirk that can be filed squarely under the self-sabotage category. It’s easy to get in a habit of blaming circumstances, situations and people for halting progress in our lives when in actuality, it’s that trait (or two or three) that deserves the bulk of the blame. That’s a hard pill for anybody working toward a bigger goal to swallow. You can plan and make vision boards and jot down as many courses of action as your Papermate can pump out, but while you’re waiting for success, you need to get clear about things you’re doing to slow down your own progress.

You have an issue and you’re not taking the steps to correct it. There are too many self-help books, too many support groups and—don’t be too proud—too many licensed therapists to be carrying around baggage from bad relationships and negative experiences that mentally and emotionally bind you. Black folks, for whatever reason, consider it a badge of honor to absorb as many hurts as life can throw at us. But bottling that mess up only works to be a hindrance. You’ve got to figure out why you do what you do in order to stop doing it. I’d lay across somebody’s couch in a hot second if it meant the difference between a life of accomplishment and a life of cyclical craziness.

You engage in self-destructive behaviors that you’ll beat yourself up for later. You swore up and down you weren’t going to do it again. Made your friends and family hold you to it. Vowed that you’d learned your lesson that last time and there was no way you were going to get caught doing the same bullcrap anymore. You have to recognize your triggers when you’re about to start sabotaging yourself. If your thing is sleeping with the same dude who’s dogged you out a thousand times, take a pause before you hop in the shower for your pre-booty call scrub down to notice what you’re about to do and make a different decision for yourself. There’s always time, even in the middle of the same ol’ same ol’ routine, to stop setting yourself up for your own disappointment. You ain’t going to do nothin’ but use that as a continual excuse to keep doing it over and over (and over).

You stall out before you even start. Just do it already, dammit. Make a move. You’re waiting on the planets to align but you’re wasting time because they’re never going to be exactly where you’d like them to be. I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve learned the hard way that procrastination is a flagrant waste of time. It’s jacked up plenty of my plans and thrown an unnecessary wrench in the progress towards things I passionately claimed to want. But I had to learn that that kind of behavior is a crutch to keep me from stepping into something new. Move on. Move up. Chile, just move.

Do you ever sabotage yourself? How do you deal with it? 

The post Un-mastering the Art of Self-Sabotage appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

There’s no valid reason why a 10-year-old boy should have his hands, or any other part of his tiny little person, on the rear end of a grown woman. There’s no valid reason why a grown woman should allow a 10-year-old boy to inappropriately put his hands on her rear end. And yet we’ve seen the debauchery play out just like that, in the YouTube videos and online infamy of Lil’ Poopy, an unfortunately named prepubescent rapper who is grabbing cheeks and bringing the ruckus, one booty smack at a time.

Dethroning other pocket-sized offenders like Lil’ Wayne and Luda for the title of hip-hop’s smallest misogynist was easy. Silencing the backlash against his dad, Luis Rivera, might be a little harder. The Brockton, Mass. police have (rightfully) filed a complaint, inciting the state’s Department of Children and Families to investigate Poopy’s father for possible abuse or neglect. First thing defenders say—after slapping him high-five for palming the rump of gals ostensibly old enough to be his babysitter, if not his mama—is that no one involved in this hotmessness has violated any laws. In fact, it’s within his little 10-year-old First Amendment rights to be able to artistically express himself.

Mmm. That may be true. But anyone worth their moral salt knows that sometimes what’s legal permissible and what’s ethically upright doesn’t always jibe. And they ain’t jibing in this case.

Let’s pretend that this was a little girl aspiring to be a rapper, outfitted in all of the stereotypical accoutrements of rapper-dom, including an entourage of groupies. (I could launch into a whole other rant just about the chicks lending themselves to these videos and being willing participants in this filth.) If a grown man were to thrust his johnson anywhere near her, even rub up against her suggestively we, as a community, would pounce. We would verbally pulverize the videographer, call for the blood of the director, set the homegrown studio on fire, boycott the label and call her parents everything but children of God. We would rally for the protection of her innocence and virtue.

But this is a boy, and boys are encouraged to start knocking chicks off as soon as they can learn what to do with an erection. It may not be verbalized outright, but the atta boy spirit that undergirds their sexual activity, no matter how early, makes it par for the male libido course. It’s just part of a guy being a guy.

I know a dude who got head from two girls when he was six. Not one, but two girls. Not when he was sixteen, but six. Who was in the first grade having oral sex threesomes? He laughs during the retelling of the story—I think he’s almost proud—but I was horrified to hear that two little girls would even think, to even know, to do that. He had gotten his first taste of freak before he was even old enough to cross a street by himself.

Grabbing a handful of tush is a demonstration of male bravado. But in Lil’ Poopy’s case, it marks a double standard in the hypersexualization of boys, that folks are willing to grab torches and pitchforks when it comes to the violation of young women but consider that same behavior a rite of passage when it comes to young men. Sexual exploitation is sexual exploitation is sexual exploitation. His videos have since been stripped from YouTube, but I suspect dad is too busy making money off of him to really be daunted by the controversy. Their little program of crazy will continue.

I don’t have a son. And as the time winds down on my biological clock, it looks like I never will. But I’d like to think I’d expect him to have the same level of respect for his body and his sexuality as I want for my girl child.

God willing, Lil’ Poopy will mature into a teenager and an adult, and these things that he has learned as a child will be exercised in grown manly fashion against someone’s daughter. And the objectification he mastered so early—that was never cute in the first place—will be even less cute when he’s passed the advanced course in perversion. I mean, when you’ve been smacking up, flipping and rubbing down grown lady booty since elementary school, it’s pretty safe to assume he’ll be well beyond his years in sexual maturity. We’ll blame him for being a pig and devaluing women and call him out for being an assortment of wrongs. But we’ll have to remember how he was unprotected as a little boy and where he got his first misguided lessons.

The post On Behalf of Little Boys Growing Up Too Fast appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

But every time I see one of those commercials, I roll my eyes because for reasons known only to her, she’s been OK with years and years of scripting that have made her come off as a modern-day mammy. In order to lend extra credibility to the power of Pine-Sol, she’s had to oomph it up with a little baby-honey-sugar catch phrasing. I guess, in the minds of the advertising team over there at Clorox brands, if it’s endorsed by someone who looks and sounds like she could be an old-school domestic, then maybe consumers will believe that it really must be that good.

I’m not against the way she talks. Black speak is my first language, too, the tongue I feel most comfortable chatting, even blogging, in. By day, I’m a freelance writer and copyeditor. Though the latter is necessary, it’s certainly not the sexy, artistic, Carrie Bradshaw side of the editorial field. Where writing is creative and freeing and, if it’s good, full of turns of phrase that sparkle with self-expression, editing is like math with words: constructed, linear, exacting.

Personal style takes a backseat to the rules some grammatical superpower established as gospel long before you and I got here and, very often, there’s a conflict between what I know is technically sound and what just sounds right. I’m beholden to standards that feel awkward because lines like “With whom will you go?” come off as stodgy, pretentious and just not something anybody would say outside of a Charles Dickens novel. My native ear is fine-tuned to the linguistic mechanics of my Black, working class background that could give a damn about a dangling modifier and instead makes me want to say, “Who you goin’ with?” And that’s appropriate—in a relaxed, familiar, conversational setting, but not necessarily on a global platform.

Turn with me to Ecclesiastes 3—I rock with the New Century Version these days—which tells us, in so many words, that there is an ideal time for everything. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to be sad and a time to dance. A time to look for something and a time to stop looking for it. And in that beautiful line of thinking, one could argue that there’s a time to talk in dialect and a time to talk like you’re in mixed company.

Code switching used to be one of those rote lessons of Blackness that was passed down in little handbaskets of tried-and-tested wisdom, like not eating at just any ol’ body’s house and avoiding travel through certain neighborhoods after dark. There was an expectation to know when to turn it on and off, especially as education became more accessible. So Standard American English, or at least a wholehearted stab at it, was pulled out for job interviews, classroom discussions, speaking to and in front of White folks and other situations that called for “talking proper.” But I’m not so sure that’s the standard anymore.

A few weeks ago, I volunteered to help high school students here in DC write their college application essays and prepare in-person responses to mind-numbingly pointless, but nonetheless mandatory, interview questions. Some of them came in spirited and jazzed to get their A game together. But true to the form of atypical teenager-ism, many skulked in listless and bored before I even got my introduction out. I was already expecting that, especially because I have a 14-year-old of my own and know firsthand how swiftly disinterested they can be in everything.

What did catch me off guard was their readiness to present themselves and their cases to get into a school just like they would shoot the breeze with one of their friends on the block. The concept of code switching was foreign to at least five of them and clearly, the thought of being obligated to speak in one manner with the people they love and are most comfortable with and another in front of a group of complete strangers—college administrators and educators, at that—never crossed their minds. Clearly, if they were taught how to switch between the two forms of English, it was a lesson they were determined not to apply.

It really made me think. Even in my advising, I was talking just like them. In conversations with random Black folks every day, like the teller at the bank, the waitress at Joe’s Crab Shack or the Verizon customer service rep, I shirk my technical training to fire off sentences with misplaced modifiers, illegal subject/verb agreement and the habit of drawling “girl” into a seven-syllable word. So what was so wrong with being true to the way we’ve remixed English? Why was I so irritated about The Pine-Sol Lady being all sassy sistagirl when, despite the stereotyping, it’s the way my friends, my aunties, the women I grew up with in church, millions of other mothers, grandmothers and big mama-types, and I talked?

Obviously I’m guilty, at least partly, of pandering to the social convention that dismisses the way Black folks speak as sounding uneducated. But that same system of beliefs—and, let’s call it what it is, discrimination—allows Spanglish and other cultural dialects to be exotic or worldly, even endearing. There’s no Rosetta Stone for Ebonics, but that doesn’t make it any less of a viable, authentic language, as undervalued as it is. So let me stop singling out the poor Pine-Sol Lady. She didn’t create the dynamic. She’s just trying to get her life and get a check.

The post The Whens and Wheres of Code Switching and “Talking Black” appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

In the quiet, lush backwoods of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, there’s a little white rambler with red shutters perched atop a fairly steep hill. It looks like something cut and pasted from the front of a gift shop postcard, encircled by sky-high trees and surrounded by a sprawling yard that’s much prettier to look at than it is easy to mow. It’s the house my grandfather built, literally with his own hands.

Back when he was a young man with a gold tooth, a wavy conk, and a mischievous smile, he kept my Nana in the family way for five consecutive years to eventually produce four daughters and a son — the second to last in that string became my mama — and he knew his growing clan was going to need space. So after long, laborious days working at a steel mill, he would come home and construct the Harris homestead with the help of his brother and a few friends. No 5-hour Energy, no Red Bull, no jolts of caffeine from some fancy-pants Starbucks drink. His motivation came from the fact that he had a wife, four little ones, and another on the way to take care of, and he wanted them to have a home of their own to spread out in.

It took him about eight months to finish, my grandmother told me, and when he did, it had four small bedrooms, a two-car garage and a basement. He wasn’t thinking about grandbabies at the time he was building it, I’m sure. But a second and then a third generation of rambunctious Harrises eventually burned through there too to create a testament about its sturdiness, playing Ice Capades in our socks on the hardwood floors and daring each other to jump over the steps from the living room into the concrete garage.

The little house on the country road wasn’t anything big or fancy. And, because it looks the same way now that it did back in the late 1940s, it still isn’t. But it means everything to our family, especially to me. It’s a physical monument to the kind of man my Granddaddy was: a man who provided, a man who was honorable, a man who worked hard and didn’t mind or complain about it, a man who preferred to show you how much he loved you rather than get his emotions all tangled up in words.

I belong to that unfortunate fraternity of dismissed children whose fathers couldn’t be bothered to be daddies. I never laid eyes on that paternal mystery and, to my knowledge, he’s never expressed a desire to lay eyes on me. Once, not too long ago, his name popped up as a suggested friend on Facebook and I was so caught off guard, my beloved laptop went toppling to the floor. He is an enigma. But I never felt like I was missing out on anything because my grandfather, just by being himself, showed me what I should and could expect from a man. He is the standard by which I measure the dudes I consider dating, though that is an increasingly difficult comparison to make.

The memories closest to my heart about Granddaddy paint a picture of his awesomeness, even for a perfect stranger. He dutifully monitored my first wobbly efforts to pedal my two-wheeler, even after I careened over the poor man’s foot, little-girl-shrieked all in his ears and made him jog with one hand under the banana seat for my own comfort and security. He built me my very own swing, dangling from a favorite tree in that massive yard, and crafted a dollhouse for me that was an almost exact replica of the very one he’d constructed from the ground up decades before.

We danced to Charlie Parker in the dining room and watched boxing side-by-side on Saturday nights. I spent every weekend with my grandparents. Every single weekend. But I never minded. That’s how amazing they were, so amazing that a kid would give up sleepovers and school dances in the heart of the city to hang out with two old folks in the crux of the countryside.

I’ve been honoring a lot of people lately — my Nana, my best friend, and most recently, Zora Neale Hurston, who I revere like family — and today is the day the good Lord saw fit to call my grandfather home. I was only 12, so I could question whether I’m just romanticizing how fantastic he was since my pre-teen years are getting farther and farther (and unfortunately farther) behind me. But whenever I’m in that little town back in Pennsylvania and folks realize I’m a Harris, they tell me stories about how my grandfather helped them fix a car when they were stuck on the side of a road or how he made sure someone got home safely after they’d had too much bottom-shelf liquor at a family barbecue. He was a decorated World War II vet, but he was a local hero. And my hero.

I’ve noticed an increasing disconnect between younger folks and our elders, and it disappoints and saddens me. We can’t carve out time for a lot of things in schedules that have to be electronically managed because they’re so packed with comings-and-goings. I’m guilty of that myself. But I encourage you to spend time with your grandparents, your great-aunties and uncles and other seasoned people in your life.

I wish I could still sit at my grandparents’ feet and listen to how things were back when they were kids or retell stories their parents shared with them about times even farther back. But I can’t. So you do it for me. Love on your grandparents, y’all, if you’ve got them. And if yours have gone on like mine have, keep on singing their praises so they’re not forgotten. They’re as much a part of who we are as a people as the Nat Turners and Harriet Tubmans we’re going to spend all next month celebrating.

The post I Don’t Know My Dad, But I Had One Hell of a Grandfather appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

I went to a friend’s house on the spur of the moment on Saturday. We’ve been down like four flats since my freshman year of college—I’ve known this dude since I had Poetic Justice braids and he had an S-Curl and used to make emergency runs to the local Dollar General for Pro-Style gel—so we go way, way back. We just don’t see each other as often as we used to and, rather than subject myself to a curse-out for being the culprit behind another missed get-together, I trekked from DC to Jersey to have dinner with him and his husband. He steamed some shrimp and relished in the company. He clearly loves playing host.

Barring the dreaded S-Curl, he’s always been a bit more high-brow than I am, so when he looked over and asked me if I wanted a ramekin, I looked back at him with an expression of pure confusion.

“What’s that?” I furrowed, peeling back what could’ve very well been my 822nd shrimp.

“A small bowl. You know, for the garlic butter,” he explained.

“Oh. Sure,” I said, totally unaffected.

My social refinement deficit had once again reared its ugly head. In another time and place, I would’ve experienced a rare moment of embarrassment at my lack of home training. Maybe even breaking a sweat like Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman, silently obsessing to the point of distraction about where my napkin should go, which direction I should pass the food and other fine points of table etiquette that I’m too ig’nant to even realize I don’t know.

But I’m not that worldly kind of girl. And I’m OK with that now. I can talk to you rather intelligently about Harlem Renaissance literature but I can never, ever remember the difference between a salad fork and a dinner fork. Oh well. So sue me. Or don’t invite me over to dinner.

This time of year generally calls for some obligatory self-reflection which, unfortunately for some of us, dissolves into an excuse to pick ourselves apart. It’s a bad habit shrouded by all of the hoorah that goes along with crossing the threshold into a fresh set of 365 days and with them, a bounty of new opportunities to become you and me 4.0—thinner! smarter! wealthier! healthier! more organized! more accomplished! just better overall! In that pursuit of personal reinvention, goal-setting can dissolve into fault-finding, what with Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers volleying seven or eight commercials on the hour, every hour, and self-help gurus pushing the products they claim will help us become the people we’re striving to be.

Self-improvement is good. Self-improvement is necessary. But there’s also something to be said for being happy where you are, with who you are, without feeling like a complete personal overhaul is in order for the new year, a birthday, a fresh relationship, a career change, whatever. That fixer-upper spirit can be emotionally and psychologically draining, especially if you consistently fall short of your own expectations which we, as women, tend to set astronomically high for ourselves. If we’re never going to be perfect, is there ever a point where we’re satisfied with who we are, sans a little fine-tuning here and there to accommodate the ebbs and flows of life?

After you’ve weathered the vicissitudes of your you-ness, navigated the ups and downs of the dating experience and survived a gauntlet of humbling moments in the professional world, you learn just as much about who you aren’t as who you are. What you’ll stand your ground for. What makes you feel insecure. What really excites and interests you. What pisses you off.

Nestled comfortably in my 30s, I feel like I’m finally starting to know me for real. I’m not the woman who finds great joy in working all day and then mustering up the enthusiasm to cook dinner. I’ll do it because I have to, but it’s usually pretty far from what I want to be doing after eight or nine hours of chasing deadlines and filing stories. I used to chastise myself for not loving it because my mama and her mama used to serve these elaborate meals on weekdays but baby, that just ain’t what fulfills me.

I’m not the woman who loves sports, try as I have. I’d much rather watch a documentary or a rerun of Sex and the City than sit courtside at a basketball game. I can follow what’s going on, but in all honestly, I only selectively care.

I’m not the woman who can curb too many feelings before I have to vent to a friend or hit a bathroom stall and pray myself into check. I’m not a poker face. I’m an open book. I’m complex and overly analytical and emotional and brash and sometimes self-righteous and quite evidently under-refined. That’s me. I have things to work on, and I will, but my only resolution this year is to be the best me I can be, though that reads terribly clichéd much more than it did in my head before I typed it out. I have learned, without apology, how to celebrate the woman I’m not as much as I celebrate the woman that I already am.

The post The Woman That I’m Not Makes Me the Woman That I Am appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

I, on the other hand, gravitate to smart-alecky, big-boned, dark-skinned men. My resume is full of ‘em. Perhaps I’m subconsciously picking up on the love of chocolate that my dear cousin clearly lacks. There’s just something that inherently attracts me to that adorable I-was-a-football-player-back-in-my-heyday look. Even my old celebrity crushes tell the story: I was in love with Jadakiss once upon a time and I single-handedly headed up Team Cam’ron until he got slim (and more obnoxious). I didn’t intentionally align myself with the prototypical thick, dark dude with attitude. That’s just my type, I guess.

There’s no fighting the law of natural attraction. We like what we like. But sometimes we get so settled into being drawn to one type of person—the backpacker intellectual, the edgy thug, the quintessential pretty boy, the upwardly mobile business man—that we close ourselves off to other possibilities. And the way the dating pool is now, we need as many possibilities as we can get. Not out of desperation just to be attached to somebody, mind you. Being pressed out to have a man is so 1955. But most of us have life plans that do include marriage and family somewhere along the line, and limiting ourselves to one physical or one personality type, even without realizing it, is sentencing ourselves to round after round of the same ol’ same ol’.

An influx of statisticians, experts and random folks with an opinion have come out the woodwork to tell Black women that we need to date white men. But some of us haven’t even opened ourselves up to brothers like we should before we can throw up our hands and cross over the color lines. I know ladies who refuse to date dudes who didn’t go to college because, in their little high-powered corners of the world, a man without a bachelor’s degree at minimum and a fancy-titled white collar position couldn’t be their equal and therefore isn’t worth adding to their contact list.

Look, I’d holla at a bus driver or a construction worker so long as he knew how to make a living and had some ambition. You don’t need a degree to be intelligent and you don’t need to make six figures to be a good man. Anyway, most of the gals I know turning up their noses at blue collar dudes and dismissing them for being not their type don’t come from money in the first place. They’re Jack and Jill debutantes only in their heads.

Sometimes we just need to take one of those rare moments to pause and do some self-reflection. Why do you like who you like? Have you dated the same type of dude your whole life because that’s who you feel comfortable with and, give or take individual experiences, you pretty much know what to expect from them? There are all kinds of deep-rooted psychological reasons why we’re attracted to the same kind of men, and I’m certainly not the one to try to play armchair therapist and pick them apart. I just know they exist because I was caught up in the pattern myself—not just in my love of thickums, which is the most harmless part of my typecasting but because, after two relationships that boiled down to 11 years, one baby and no ring, I realized I was picking dudes who had maturity issues.

Fear of marriage. Fear of success. Hell, fear of growing up. And because they couldn’t cheerlead themselves, they certainly had difficulty supporting me in my ever-growing accomplishment-chasing. My attraction to snarky big boys had turned into a long-term love affair with dead weight.

A few summers ago, I met a guy who fit my physical type but lacked the swagger I was used to (yeah, I said I was going to give up that word but I haven’t found one to replace it yet). He was hella thoughtful and kind-hearted and all the things I said I wanted, but he didn’t present the challenge I thought I craved. I was used to trouble. He seemed like he’d be too easy, I had to check myself from rejecting the man because he wasn’t my type. We celebrated our two-year anniversary this week. Far as I’m concerned, even if we never stroll down the aisle, this is a success story because it forced me to try something new—not Sanaa Lathan’s or my cousin’s kind of way, though his is something old by now. But the spell of wanting only one kind of dude has been broken.

The post Stop Holding On So Tight to Your Type appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

She painted pictures with words and created masterpieces with the colorful inventions of her mind. Zora Neale Hurston took the same mechanics of modern-day language afforded every other English speaker and somehow made hers dance and play and sparkle across a page. Under her tutelage, nouns, prepositions and conjunctions shimmered. Even “the” and “but” shed their mundane normalcy and became magical under her creative direction. She is, without hesitation, my favorite writer and a homegirl in my head, and today is her birthday. Go ‘head, Ms. Zora. Get your life.

Her fame comes from 30 years of legendary wordsmithing: four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and dozens of short stories, essays, articles and plays. I first read “Spunk” as a high school freshman, got overwhelmed by the dialect, gave up, wrote her off, was assigned to give it another go in my senior year, fell all the way in love with Their Eyes Were Watching God, and have re-read it just about every year since. To a girl with dreams of someday becoming a writer, Zora Neale Hurston has been the established standard of excellence. She is the bar.

Factual information about her life is intermittently wrapped in mystery, evidence about the type of person she was is clear. She was a gift to the literary world for her talent, indeed, but she was also a standup, unapologetic Black woman with feminist ideals who didn’t dress them up in full, in-your-face regalia. She was just being true to who she was and in the process, to us. Outspoken. Opinionated. Fully vested in her her-ness.

My favorite picture of her is from the 1940s when she sat, flanked by curls of smoke from a lighted cigarette, a defiant smile pushing those high cheekbones up into an expression of coyness. I like to imagine that I could’ve sat across from her, chatting over a nice, crisp glass of water since I don’t smoke, questioning her Republican political beliefs and challenging her sometimes contradictory ideas about race and religion until she got too cantankerous to continue the conversation or I got too exasperated to listen. She was as colorful a character in her personal and professional life as the ones she so vividly constructed with her keystrokes.

We have the Lord to thank for giving us Ms. Zora, but the great Alice Walker to commend for bringing her work out of obscurity and back into widespread appreciation. This month also marks the 35th anniversary of the re-issue of her magnum opus, Their Eyes Were Watching God, after Walker set out on a mission to not only find Hurston’s unmarked Florida grave, but reintroduce the public to her masterpiece. Thank goodness. A literary world without Janie Starks, Tea Cake or the familiar-feeling townsfolk of Eatonville would’ve been suffering from creative robbery and never even known it.

Today, if she would’ve had her druthers about hurdling those dark, dramatic years at the end of her life, would’ve been her 122nd birthday. Her actual, factual, honest-to-goodness birthdate has been as creatively interpreted as her work and she was as inventive about her real age as she was with her storylines. At one point, when she fixed it in her mind that she was going to finish high school at the age of 26, she lopped a decade off how old she really was. And she kept right on passing for at least ten years younger the rest of her life. That’s the way she lived—on her own terms, even if it made things a little harder than they needed to be at times. But she learned, and somehow shared those lessons with the rest of us so we could learn them, too. Or, at the very least, have a chuckle at their expense.

She died after 69 years in the same month she was born, this amazing woman named Zora Neale Hurston. My girl. But her writing is a demonstrative catalog for anyone who needs to know what fierce looks like in print. I like to think her spirit lives in anyone who calls on upon it to make their own words dance and play and sparkle across the page, just trying to get close to that bar she set so high. I know I don’t want to even attempt a novel if I don’t think it’s Zora-worthy, if she wouldn’t read the manuscript and push those cheekbones up into a smile. I have a long way to go. A long, dusty road, she might even say.

Happy birthday, Ms. Zora. You rock. You always did.

The post Celebrating the One and Only Ms. Zora appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

You never saw it coming. You’re standing in line at Starbucks, waiting for your fancy frappe mocha caramel latte whatchamacallit thingamajig to be whipped according to the specifications you had to repeat three times and wondering how in the hell you managed to rack up a $15 tab for a drink and a little pastry when you spot him.

Up until now “breathtaking” had been a word dusted off as a corny reaction to stuff like the vastness of the Grand Canyon or the New York City skyline all lit up at night. But this man standing three customers behind you in line was just that: breath-ta-king. It’s all you can do to get a grip on the specialty drink the girl behind the counter finally managed to get right. You flash him a 1,000 watt smile. He grins back. You give him a smoldering, Jet-Beauty-of-the-Week stare down. He keeps grinning. At this point, it only makes sense for someone to approach the other and spark this love connection since, in but a few nanoseconds, you’ve managed to picture your wedding day and what your children—twin boys and a girl—will look like. The question is: are you going to be the one to make the first move?

For a brief period in our lives, usually from pre-K to fifth grade, girls dominate the dating game. We knock dudes upside the head on the rug during reading time and inform them that they’re our boyfriends. We lay out the rules and expectations of our contrived new romances and they fall in line faster than groupies with backstage passes. Two days later, we’re chasing a new beau across the playground, plowing over the has-been ex in the process. It starts and stops just like that. Then somehow, as we grew up, we lost the power to call the shots. Slowly but surely, we get sucked into this social conditioning that we have to wait for guys to speak to us first, ask for our numbers first, call us first, initiate the date first. Considering most guys think they’re on a communication roll if they’re putting three cohesive sentences together at one time, that’s a pretty big gamble to take.

Contrary to what you might have heard or told yourself, though, being the first to approach a fine-looking fellow doesn’t take an incredible amount of sexiness, beauty, even confidence. It’s more about being personable and approachable than it is about having all the right one-liners and a presence that oozes sexuality. As much as the average brother would like to think he’d be armed and ready with a set of impressive innuendos and witticisms if Melyssa Ford should happen to saunter up to him, he’d probably fare much better in real-life conversation with the random chick at Starbucks visually sopping him up like a biscuit on gravy.

Truth be told, guys actually welcome the break from having to do all the pursuing since that shift way back in middle school when old-school mamas and grandmothers drilled into their little girls that it was appropriate to wait for a boy to call them, not be the one to do the calling. So anything from the cold/hot/nice/crappy weather to the music blaring from their car at the gas pump can be the conversation piece you need to break the ice and get that holla going. If the chat falls flat and nothing comes of it, there’s absolutely no loss, no rejection, no knock to the self-esteem. You were nothing more than a chatty gal making a little small talk at the A&P who kept it moving after business was done. But if there’s a little something to work with, you can weave that into a date, and maybe another and another. Go on ahead and work that.

The post Holla at Your Boy: Finding the Heart to Approach Men appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

In 2007, the NAACP brought a predatory lending suit against banking giant Wells Fargo — and eventually, 14 others like it, including Citibank and HSBC — for lobbing unfair and discriminatory practices against brown folks. Last year, in the first formal enforcement action and largest consumer-enforcement fine ever imposed by the agency, the Federal Reserve strong-armed the Wells Fargo powers-that-be into paying $85 million in restitution for allegedly steering borrowers—again, of the Black and Latino variety—into high-cost, subprime loans, though they never really admitted any guilt.

Then, in the beginning of 2012, the company also agreed to a $175 million settlement in a fair-lending case for saddling the same kind of customers with those cursed and dreaded adjustable-rate loans, forcing them to unknowingly pay more than white borrowers. Between 2004 and 2009, Wells Fargo was showered with accusations and findings that pointed to the active pimping of our communities. It’s not a secret, it’s not classified information. It’s all over the news, corporate press releases and the web.

So it stands to reason that, even if he didn’t know anything about their underhanded financial debauchery before, Tavis Smiley could’ve, at the very least, performed a simple keyword search online (“Wells Fargo, African-Americans” works quite nicely) before agreeing to galvanize the masses and lead them into “wealth-building seminars.” Hosted by Wells Fargo for five years until 2009, the events, held in Black communities, were introduced as part of the company’s reparations package following its reign of lending tyranny. Tavis was the face of the effort and lent his celebrity and credibility to get attendees involved in the programs. Incidentally, Wells Fargo also helped to finance his radio show.

For leading the lambs to slaughter, he was paid a handsome $4 million. All we got was shafted with what Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan called “nothing more than sales pitches for high-rate subprime loans.” Tavis severed his relationship with Wells Fargo and issued a statement about his involvement, throwing in that closing the deal caused him to lose a great deal of money, but the damage was already done. Before you sign up for any endorsement deal or business partnership, it’s your responsibility to know who you’re working with.

So on her show last week, Melissa Harris-Perry took Tavis to task, albeit a little late, comparing him to Nurse Rivers, the woman who infamously led some 600 men into deception about the real purpose of the Tuskegee Experiment with syphilis. (Mmmm…ouch.) One consciously allowed the people under her care to be put through agonizing medical trial, the other rallied the troops to jump over the financial cliff.

Now, we already know there’s bad blood between her, Tavis and Dr. West. There’s nothing worse than when a group of highly intelligent, highly influential, highly visible Black folks with a heavy dose of media influence and airtime dedicate their energy to volleying digs back and forth at one another. It’s exhausting for the viewer (namely me) who just wants to know the issues without being sucked into the commentator’s personal vendettas. I love me some Melissa Harris-Perry — this video right here is part of the reason why — but it took a little dirt-digging to come up with this one. Still, Tavis deserved to be called out for his double-dealing. That obligates her to stay squeaky clean, though, because best believe he and Dr. West are going to be on the prowl for the next round of retaliation. Scholars gone wild…even better than Real Housewives.

The post When #Nerdland Attacks: Melissa Harris-Perry, Tavis Smiley & Wells Fargo’s ‘Tuskegee Experiment’ appeared first on Clutch Magazine.

I get so tired of Black women being portrayed in a constant state of antagonism with somebody, everybody, anybody, but especially with each other. A simple Google search in preparation to write this post produced hits that, for the most part, made us seem about as lovable as wolverines: can Black women really be friends? Can we be trusted? Do we even make good companions for one another?

The uncertainty about our ability to have—maybe even fool around and enjoy—close-knit, intimate relationship is another poke in the cage. I already feel like we’re the universe’s favorite sociological subject. Folks have gone to great lengths and executed plenty of studies to prove we ain’t getting married, especially not to a Black man, we lead the pack in a bevy of unfortunate diseases, we’re overachievers in education and career but struggling with our health, our spirituality and our self-image, we don’t work out because it messes up our hair. On paper, it sounds pretty sucky to be a sister. Now we can’t even have friends, particularly with women who look like us. Dayum.

The reality TV machine does nothing but fan the flames of monolithic characterization that paint us all in one Tamar-and-Nene stroke of color and sensationalize the stereotypical backstabbing, cattiness and general mistrust that’s supposed to seethe between us. My experience has been nothing like that. At all. I’ve never had a regrettable meltdown with any Black woman, sans one scuzzy girl who tried to steal my boyfriend and two grimy heffas who got ahold of my credit card in college, way before “identity theft” became a convictable buzzword, and ran it up buying Victoria’s Secret and Coach bags. Even then, I didn’t assign their trifling behavior to a problem with all Black women. I chalked it up to the obvious conclusion that their mamas had raised some thieves and moved on.

On the same HBCU campus where they were hatching their criminal master plans, I met beautiful, authentic, kind-hearted young ladies. I was born and raised an only child, but when I came out of school I had not only sweated and studied my way to finishing a degree—insert my church lady shout right here—I had an amazing circle of friends who have been like sisters, and had the nerve to find others to add along the way.

There’s an intrinsic intimacy about our relationships, born from a connection that ties us culturally and has created, even on the most basic of levels, a shared experience. It’s the reason I can go into the store to buy tires and come out with the cashier’s phone number because we’d spent the last 15 minutes talking about lace fronts. It’s the reason the Verizon customer service rep and I were on the phone talking about an issue with my bill and chatting casually about Christmas shopping for our kids. It’s the reason why I went to two parties over the weekend where I knew only one person each and ended up dishing out hugs to other attendees I’d hit it off with. It’s the reason why me and a girl in my apartment building, who have just about nothing in common, can talk while she smokes weed and hocks rockets of spit outside. We’re all part of a sisterhood. That’s not to say that we can’t have deep, meaningful friendships with women of other races, and certainly being Black and a woman doesn’t obligate anybody to hit it off. I just feel like something special unfolds when we do.

Today my best friend turns 33—yep, I told it—and I’m reflecting on how much she’s grown, how much she’s changed from that know-it-all girl I knew in college to a young lady trying to figure out what she wanted to do with the days stretched in front of her to a gifted woman called into a life of service to fix some of the issues that bother her about the world. She’s so passionate about so many things—she will launch into a monologue about fair trade or foreign policy at the sound of the wind—that it inspires the people around her to be more concerned, more involved, more dedicated. But she’s also, as one of our other friends pointed out, a dream pusher not content to live out her own goals. She’ll brainstorm and idea you to death until you live out yours, too. She’s the kind of friend we all need, at least at some point. I’ve just been blessed to have her for 13 years. We’ve gone from spotting rainbows to chasing them. And to me, she is the definition of what real sistagirl friendship looks like.

The post That Something Special Between Sistagirls appeared first on Clutch Magazine.