This is a prose piece I wrote last year after Rachel Dolezal became famous for cultural appropriation. The Spokane community, a community I lived in and still live in today, had a town forum for those who wanted to discuss the issue and move on. Many people continually said how "we must be compassionate" for her. I did not speak at this forum, but this piece that I wrote a day or so later shares my reflections. These are my own reflections, from my own experiences with her and within the Spokane community and work environment with Dolezal. After a year of holding this piece in limbo, the realization that she is still banking on this appropriation allows me to feel fully in my right to share.

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Do you find yourself as a Black person looking forward to Black History Month (BHM) every year but also dreading it… yes I said dreading it. Today is March 1st, and this year was actually a leap year, so there was an extra day of February sanctioned for one more activity dedicated to Black people. Well as a Black woman with a doctorate and undergraduate degree in Black studies, I get excited at the ability to go about openly for a month discussing the accomplishments of my people and as I have decided as my personal mission to correct history by ensuring what has been taught to the World is corrected.

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That moment when a student says something to you so much more profound than any scholar you’ve read, heard or learned from, more profound than any activist, and within your soul you remember why you teach about race and the issues that tear this nation apart, and tear you apart, and makes walking into that classroom worth it.

As a young Black female professor, working the adjunct options, and holding a degree in Black studies, walking into the classroom on the first day is hit or miss but mostly a miss because in the classroom race always matters. 

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Reprieve is the cancellation or postponement of the punishment of someone, especially someone condemned to death. Black America has been under fire, more so now than some of us who grew up singing along to the original motion picture The Wiz (1978) have ever felt. In the past three years turning on our televisions has become an all out assault on our psyche. At times we cannot handle it. At times we ask for no bad news.

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Autumn will soon begin and so too the weather will cool down and the change that many dread will begin. Yet some of us view the opportunity of autumn as a time to shed the dead skin and begin again. So as the leaves will change; brighten in color, fade to dark, fall from them limbs, crumble on the earth, and fertilize the ground that will next year create a new leaf—so too can we. It all resides in our perception of whether or not we can change or we should change. Perhaps it is whether we perceive that changing is actually a form of positive evolution within ourselves.

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