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Invisible [no more]. Walk good. 28all. Eya. The Warm-Up: “Oh, have you looked in the mirror lately? (Lately)/ Wish you could trade eyes with me ‘cause (Oh)/ There’s complexities in complexion/ But your skin, it glow like diamonds/ Pigment like the earth, you be giving birth/ To everything alive, baby, know your worth/ I love everything about you, from your nappy curls/ To every single curve, your body natural/ Same skin that was broken/ Be the same skin takin’ over/ Most things out of focus view/ But when you’re in the room, they notice you (Notice you)/ ‘Cause you’re beautiful/ Yeah, you’re beautiful…” ~Beyonce, Blue Ivy, Saint John, WizKid, Brown Skin Girl The Core: “We are only as blind as we want to be.” ~Maya Angelou “What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.” ~Alice Walker “A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.” ~Zora Neale Hurston “Reading is important - read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.” ~Gwendolyn Brooks “The idea is to write so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” ~Maya Angelou “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be trapped into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” ~Audre Lorde “Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.” ~Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give “People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.” ~Octavia Butler “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” ~Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara “I’m only human, & inadequacy is what makes us human, & if we was perfect we wdnt have nothin to strive for, so you might as well go on & forgive me pretty baby, cause I’m sorry.” ~Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf “She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing ‘happens.’ That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.” ~Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha “Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning-because that ain’t the time at all...when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.” ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun “There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.” ~Nikki Giovanni Last Set: “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.” ~Audre Lorde Food for Thought: “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” ~Maya Angelou Food for Thought II: “For Black women, perhaps the most intimate test for friendship is letting another watch you as you have your hair done. There’s an incremental intimacy that goes from watching you have your hair washed to sitting between a friend’s legs and having it braided. There is special intimacy and a vulnerability that comes with watching someone having her hair straightened. For those of us a certain age, it is a journey in five senses: the heat of the hot comb, the slight sizzle it makes on the hair oil as it ‘fries’ the hair straight, the smell of heat and oil, the vulnerability that comes from having tender scalp near heated metal comb, and finally the understanding that this is a very personal moment, a glimpse into another level of reality. Finally, for many of us, it’s a time-traveling trip back to childhood, complete with its own vocabulary with words like tender headed and kitchen, and nappyand kinky.” ~Jessica B. Harris, My Soul Looks Back
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