This was especially true of my final year at Cornell, after taking a leave of absence and nearly leaving the school due to depression, lack of money, and being entirely fed up with the racism that was rampant on campus from students and faculty alike. I returned in 1998 to the same racism, poverty, and depression. Yes, there was the day I went to speak with a white professor during her office hours about ensuring a spot in her class, which explored Shakespeare from a feminist perspective and she literally jumped when she opened the door. I’d knocked and waited when she said, “Just a minute.” But she still jumped when she saw me standing there with my short dreadlocks, JNCO jeans, and hoodie and then made many excuses for why I shouldn’t take the course, as it was a senior seminar (I was a senior), English majors received priority (I was an English major), and we were two weeks into the semester. (I’d been attending the class since Day One and had done all the reading but was still not officially on the roster. I ended up taking that Restoration class instead.)

Since college, I’ve continued to come across these moments of synchronicity. Unlike in college, these revelations don’t earn me a spot on the Dean’s List. They only confirm that which for so many years before college I never wanted to confirm: just how deeply entrenched racial animus continues to be in American culture.

When I last wrote frequently in this journal, we were gearing up for the election of the first African American president. I watched slack-jawed as women I had read and idolized as a young, budding feminist let their unacknowledged white privilege and, in some cases, white supremacy, ooze onto the digital pages of the Huffington Post, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. I again leapt to my bookcase, to grab Angela Davis’s Women, Race & Class, George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations About Race. That a racist dog-whistle was in heavy use by the GOP (and at times Hillary Clinton’s own campaign) was galling, but again, only confirmed much of what I had learned both while studying history and during my own 32 years as a black woman in America.

And so now.

Three years after the Oscar Grant shooting. Three years after I ended a relationshipwith a white man who couldn’t conceal his contempt for black people being angry about the shooting and believed sympathy should lie with the white cop, who clearly had the worse day of his life when he killed an unarmed, restrained black man on a cold, BART platform in full view of a train full of passengers on New Year’s Day. Three years since I watched Barack Obama’s inauguration with my heart in my mouth and then watched hisfirst dance with Michelle with tears in my eyes. Three years since I contended with a police officer in Oakland who didn’t believe I could possibly have an innocent NPR driveway moment like so many white people do in my car outside my own apartment.

It’s been three years, and I’m living in Austin, Texas now, working for a game company again.

On, March 25, I went to a coworker’s wedding. I had a pretty good time despite the aunt who said in front of me that there were a “lot of angry coloreds” in Vegas the last time she went. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and it seemed to dawn on her that she’d said something wrong. But it took her three tries to say, “Blacks! A lot of blacks!” and I couldn’t even be angry.

Why couldn’t I be angry? Why couldn’t I, fightingwords, Queen of the Taint Kick, Worshipper of Tire Irons, be angry?

I couldn’t be angry at this old, drunk woman from Lockhart because Shaima Alawadiwas dead, her head actually beaten in with a tire iron in her own El Cajon, CA home and a note calling her Iraqi refugee family terrorists and telling them to go back to their country left beside her body. I couldn’t be angry because Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68-year-old veteran was Tasered and then shot to death by New York police officers responding to a medical alert call at his White Plains home–and though the entire episode was recorded, police officers have yet to be charged. I couldn’t be angry because Rekia Boyd was shot in the head in my hometown of Chicago by an off-duty cop who claimed a man near her had pointed a gun at him when he rolled up in an unmarked car to scold a bunch of adults for hanging out in a park after dark. (No gun has been recovered, and according to the supposed gunman, who was shot in the hand, the policeman admitted he fired because he thought his cell phone was a weapon.) I couldn’t be angry because Anna Brown died on a cold, jail cell floor in St. Louis, MO after being denied treatment by staff at the local hospital because they assumed that the homeless black woman was just seeking drugs and had her arrested for trespassing.

And then there’s Trayvon Martin. Do I even need to talk about this?

I grew up in Florida. I went to junior and senior high school in Miami Beach, where I can say from experience that being Hispanic (or Latino) does not in anyway exempt one from participating in anti-black racism. It is to understate things to say that one of my my best friends in high school was forbidden to speak to me. To say it plain, upon meeting me for the first time when Chris and I came to pick her up from work, his mother refused to acknowledge my presence and cursed (in Spanish) all the way back to Treasure Island, where we all lived. She pulled over on a busy road to let me out of the car instead of pulling into the circular driveway in front of my high-rise even though she had to drive past it to get to their apartment building a block and a half away. She threw his clothes out of their second-floor windows, took away his keys to her car, and hung up on me whenever I phoned Chris after that night. Chris and his mother were Chilean. The police officer who shot and killed a black motorcyclist in Miami in 1989, a year after my mother and I moved there and which led to three days of rioting, was Colombian. And everyone knows that race has always played a huge role, and sometimes a deadly one, in Latin America…right? Why is it so surprising that the racism of Central and South America (and the Caribbean) dovetails neatly with our domestic variety, and especially in the south?

On March 26, two days after I saw the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ novel,Jezebel published an article entitled “Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed” about the outcry on Twitter (though it was also alive and well on Facebook) from fans who not only lack reading comprehension skills but were upset that some of their favorite characters from the trilogy were played by black actors in the record-breaking film. Notable among the hundreds of comments and tweets are those by @sw4q and @JashperParas, respectively:

“Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture”

“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself”

It’s also worth noting that not all the table-flipping over casting choices came from white fans.

On March 27, Stephanie Eisner published a political cartoon about the Trayvon Martin shooting in University of Texas at Austin’s student paper, the Daily Texan. Stephanie Eisner is a student at UT, and unlike my coworker’s relative at the wedding, can’t possibly be a relic of a time in which it was ever acceptable to refer to black people as “colored,” regardless of her position on the media coverage of Martin’s killing. And yet.

On March 28, a black burlesque performer in the Bay Area, Dorian Faust, posted to her Facebook page:

“white burlesque performers: no it is not okay for you to do a song that has the n-word in it repeatedly. sorry. start shit on my page if you want to, i’m done with it.

#youarenotsuperfly”

Nearly immediately came the condemnation of the “n-word” by white commenters of any usage of the term, by anyone. Few commenters addressed the actual situation about which Dorian posted–white performers using songs rife with the word “nigger.” But many chimed in to add their $.02 that the word itself is ALWAYS off-limits, no matter who is using it, as though their own commitment to this, the laziest aspect of anti-racism, is only conditional, as though if we call each other “nigger,” they feel entitled to call us nigger, too. No one actually said this, but more than 70 comments in, it’s become quite clear that this is the prevailing notion.

Listen. There are black people in this world who may call me their nigger, and it sounds like “sister,” feels like an embrace, lets me know I’m home. But that word in the mouths of white people, whether they are singing along with Patti Smith, John Lennon, or a song they heard on a contemporary radio station, will always trigger within me dread and a fear for my personal safety. Yet, it seems that some white people have decided that the only way they will promise not to say “nigger”–people who have never been bought, sold, raped, lynched, harassed by law enforcement, or turned down for housing or a job while a white person uttered that word–is if I promise not to say it, either. Because they find it offensive. And isn’t white people’s discomfort with anti-black racism (and the ways we’ve learned to deal with it) the most important thing ever?

On March 30, the Internet lit up with video of GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum seemingly calling President Barack Obama a “government nigger.” Well, okay. He didn’t say “nigger.” He said, “nih” and then caught himself. (One of the best comments I’ve seen on this is “I guess ‘nih’ is a derogatory term for ‘blah’ people.“) Aside from nearly dying of not-surprise from yet another slip of the tongue from the GOP candidate who has spent weeks lambasting Obama for daring to use a teleprompter during his speeches, this moment simply brought into focus the last few weeks of rage-worthy news. The Republican Party has dispensed with the racist dog-whistle and bought a vuvuzela. That, or they just watched Blazing Saddles for the first time.

My friend and former coworker B.J. West posted on Facebook several days ago, ”I am beginning to think that the stability of the United States for the last 100 or so years was solely due to the lack of high-speed communications technology.”

And I do not disagree. While I am grateful for my access to information, I am also very clear that right now, I am walking a tightrope. It is not true that I was not angry at that wedding when that woman referred to black people as “coloreds.” I just couldn’t let myself be angry. It was not the time.

I was angry. And I am angry that my enjoyment of The Hunger Games was cut short by the realization that at least one of the people watching it at the Alamo Drafthouse with me was probably aghast that a character he or she had grown to love, and had mourned, looked like me. (While there have been a couple of hundred comments identified online of people who feel this way, it’s safe to assume they represent a more common, but unvoiced, perspective.)

I am angry that the idea that white people are always innocent–and that black people never are–is why Trayvon Martin (and Rekia Boyd and Kenneth Chamberlain and Anna Brown) is dead right now, and that their character is being posthumously trashed to justify their deaths.

I am angry that in the comments to news stories about Shaima Alawadi’s murder, there are white people claiming that this obviously ethnically-motivated killing wasn’t ethnically motivated at all–that someone left those racist notes to throw the police off their trail. (People on the internet not only lack reading comprehension but also have never heard of Occam’s razor.)

I am angry that supposed white and non-black “allies” in the burlesque community have made it clear over the last three days that they are only willing to commit to not calling me a nigger if I censor myself because otherwise, it’s just too damn tempting.

There is information. There is synchronicity. And there is anger. And in these post-Livejournal days, I am trying to figure out what do with all of them.

I have always lived somewhere rife with natural disasters. I was born in Chicago and spent the first ten years of my life with regular tornado warnings. I then moved to the Bay Area, where I learned that an earthquake could feel something like a truck rumbling past our apartment building. Right before I started junior high school, my mother and I moved to Miami Beach, Florida; Hurricane Andrew hit while I was visiting my grandmother back in Chicago the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, and when I returned a week or so later, the many-ton air conditioning unit of our 500+ unit high rise on the Intercoastal Waterway had been blown off the roof, there were still trees down all over the city, and we had to boil water to drink. My mother spent the next year working for FEMA in Homestead, the little town of trailer parks that had taken the brunt of the storm. When I came home for the summer after my first year of college in Ithaca, where there was always a risk of ice storms and blizzards, I split a studio apartment across the street from the Atlantic Ocean with a friend from high school and was subjected to a mandatory evacuation as Hurricane Erin launched itself first at South Florida before landing in Vero Beach.

After college, I moved to California. I lived in Los Angeles for two years and the moved back to the Bay Area for what would have made ten years this August had Jason and I not relocated to Austin. Our first weekend here, there were tornado warnings two counties north of us as deadly storms struck all over the south.

Listening to Ray Nagin tonight, it something occurred to me that hadn’t before. Jon Stewart questioned him as to why the city hadn’t prepared for the kind of damage and need that came after the storm, and he said, frankly, because it hadn’t happened before. Taking a quick gander at Twitter right now, I see a number of people clowning Nagin, but I get it. Why? Because of Japan. And because people still live in San Francisco.

Japan–earthquakes are not new there, but no one anticipated what happened earlier this year, or the extent of the damage that the ensuing tsunami would cause.  Japan is one of the best prepared countries in the world when it comes to natural disasters, but still, what happened there in March was inconceivable. Similarly, it was not Katrina herself but the flood that followed that made the situation in on the Gulf Coast in 2005 so dire.

And what does this have to do with San Francisco? Well, people still live there. It’s not because they don’t know that The Big One is going to hit eventually (an earthquake that won’t be the same kind of quake that hit Japan, for geological reasons, but still The Big One). It’s because… it hasn’t happened yet.

Now imagine that San Franciscans were evacuated two, three times a year because there was going to be an earthquake, but that quake was never The Big One. That is the reality of those who live in both Hurricane Alley and tornado country. We watch the news, we see the warnings, and if we have the means or our municipalities the resources to help us, we evacuate. But the storm is never as big as it is supposed to be.

People continue to live in earthquake zones with the knowledge that doing so is inherently fraught with danger. But we don’t spend six months of every year hearing that The Big One is coming in two days. Perhaps if we did, and it never came, we would stop evacuating, too. Especially if we couldn’t afford to.

One last comparison, though. This show really does take me back to high school, when I loved bad boys. Logan Echolls is hot (and really well acted by Jason Dohring, who manages to capture the mischievousness and sensitivity of the character instead of turning him into a one-dimensional asshole). On the other hand, Teddy Dunn as Duncan Kane is so boring, I keep thinking to myself, “God, he’s such a fucking Riley.”

Enjoy.

Right now, I don’t really want to talk about Michael Moore, and his entirely misinformed and irresponsible behavior over the last week. Suffice to say, he repeated obvious and already-debunked untruths about the rape allegations against Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange, helped further publicize the names of the accusers, and openly mocked the accusations.

Nor do I really want to talk about Keith Olbermann, who, like Michael Moore, further spread misinformation about the allegations and about the women accusing Assange of assault, and since has given us all an object lesson in how to completely alienate a bunch of your fans and also undermine your own credibility with the handy-dandy tool known as Twitter.

I don’t even want to talk about whether or not Assange raped those women. Because that’s not even the point here. The point is two women reported having been assaulted and have since been publicly named and smeared. Whether or not the investigation of Assange is politically-motivated is also not what I want to talk about right now. I believe it is, most definitely, because generally no one gives this much of a shit when a woman reports being assaulted. But, again, that’s not what I want to talk about.

No, the person I want to talk about right now is Naomi Wolf.

Back in the olden days, Naomi Wolf was my hero. This was back when I was a junior in high school, and I chose to read her first book, The Beauty Myth, for my humanities class. I was blown away by her words, even those that I would realize later, when I was a more seasoned feminist, were problematic and really not about all women and definitely not women like me. But that was later. At the time, it was Naomi Wolf and her book who began to form the foundation of my blossoming feminism.

About a year after I read The Beauty Myth, I was raped. I was raped by a boy I knew, who lived in my building, with whom I’d made out. I was raped when this boy locked me in his room and held me down on his bed and put a pillow over my head until I stopped struggling. When it was clear that running for the door and saying no and putting up a physical fight wasn’t going to get me out of being raped, I asked him to at least put on a condom. The only thing I wanted less than to be raped was to be impregnated or given HIV while being raped.

At the time, I knew it was rape, and yet I didn’t know. I knew I’d had no choice, and yet I blamed myself anyway. I was angry that he’d taken my virginity and ashamed of myself. I told no one about it for years.

(Apparently, the boy didn’t realize he raped me, either. On Thanksgiving of this year, a full 17 years later–half my lifetime–he contacted me via Facebook as though we were just old friends who had fallen out of touch. As though he hadn’t raped me.)

But back to Naomi Wolf, my first feminist hero. Since I read The Beauty Myth, my reading list has expanded a lot. Wolf has been displaced by bell hooks and Audre Lorde. “Feminist” has been slowly purged from the ways I identify myself after years and years of being alienated by white feminists. My disgust with trying so hard to belong to a movement that has made it clear it doesn’t want me as a member has led me to abandon mainstream feminism and look for more inclusive communities committed to the goals of dismantling the kyriarchy, not simply replicating patriarchy when it benefits them to do so.

But all that said, it still never occurred to me that Naomi Wolf would at some point rewrite the definition of rape for the sole purpose of protecting a leftist man accused of rape. It never occurred to me that Wolf would actually fix her mouth to say that having unprotected sex with someone who is asleep counts as consensual sex. It never occurred to me that Wolf would say that having unprotected sex with someone who is asleep and has made it clear while awake that she will not have unprotected sex is consensual.

But she did.

No, really. She did. Really. Click that link. There’s video.

What’s really disturbing here, aside from the actual case in question, is Wolf’s implication that if a woman does not specifically say “no” to sex, she’s consenting. The absence of “no” is consent. The absence of “no” is “yes.” Our default position on someone having sex with us is apparently one of consent.

So, apparently when I’m sitting on the couch with my fiancé watching television, I’m saying yes to sex. When I’m sitting at my desk in my office, I’m consenting to sex. When I’m driving across the Bay Bridge, walking to the BART station, eating dinner at the Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks away, I’m saying yes to sex. I’m always, ALWAYS, consenting to sex. Always. Until I say no.

Thanks, Naomi, for clarifying.

I opened Facebook and saw six posts in a row, all fewer than five minutes old, celebrating the imminent repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The seventh post was about the defeat of the DREAM Act by House Republicans.

I couldn’t really get that excited about this “victory” for LGB* civil rights–a victory that revolves around participation in the U.S. military will always feel hollow to me–but what struck me was how obvious it seemed that this victory was a quid pro quo for demolishing the first progressive legislative attempt at immigration reform we’ve seen in at least a decade.

A friend of mine put it this way: “In 2010, the Senate IS Thunderdome.”

*Aside from the extent to which the T is casually tacked on without any regard for whether or not gender-queer and trans people, much less their concerns or best interests, are actually included, the abolition of DADT still doesn’t protect transgender people. You’d need to go to Australia or Canada for that.

More prominently on the website agenda is locating decent Facebook and Twitter plugins (for adding/following and for sharing). So far, I’ve just gotten annoyed with the widgets I’ve found, but I’m sure the proper solution is out there somewhere.

Just like “the truth.”

I’m not used to cheers and pom-poms and rallies. It’s true that I spent my early childhood watching a lot of baseball on television with my grandmother, who loved not just the White Sox, but the Cubs. She was perhaps the only black women on the south side of Chicago who adored that team that played on the white side in a neighborhood that generally wanted her and everyone who looked like her, who looked like us, dead. Yes, Chicago made sport into a race war, and maybe slam is, too.

Maybe every poem about police harassment, about black-on-black crime, about the embarrassment of a father’s Filipino accent turns that stage into a battlefield. But it’s a war worth fighting, even if I’m a veteran now, no longer on the front lines, but cheering the bombast, rooting for my own home team.