“My presence is resistance.”

​

hey girl!

If you've read this in its entirety, you're probably dancing on the margins of difference, just like me. I wrote this for you as an act of love. As a pocket of literary love and warmth that I wish I had experienced earlier.

You are probably navigating the ever-murky waters of racial hypervisibility. You know -- and feel -- that you are different, and visibly so. You know it from the curious disinterest of your non-black peers, you know it from the way people seem to slow down their speech when they talk to you and will know your difference by their slight surprise every time you differentiate yourself from a doormat.

I know that your brave little heart chooses to fight, that your soul would rather extinguish than fan the flames of your oppression. I wrote this advice for the days when you don’t feel like being Black, the days you don’t feel like standing up for Black people, the days where you want to have it easy and pretend - even for a split second, that you’re just like everyone else. If, like me, you want to breathe more often than not, you probably found this this advice top tier.

These musings are an articulation of reflections on navigating a predominantly white institution. By navigate, here, I mean perform whiteness as best as you possibly can. Sometimes, that is all that can and will keep your spirit from breaking.

While my advice to you in this work was funny and light-hearted, my hope is that you receive it as an honest and authentic narration of the reality that being “the Other” in any space is difficult work that requires all of you. It requires alertness, deliberate self-preservation and laborious conversation. Some days are more difficult than others. Some days you won’t want to show up at all. After all, you are at an institution where the founders probably didn’t have you in mind. I hope that these satirical rules have grounded, centred and hugged you on the days when you do not want to be a teaching moment. I hope you took this my advice with a little bit of heart and a whole lot of humour.

Most importantly, in case it wasn't already obvious, I hope that received this work as deliberately satirical - not to evade the seriousness of conversations about the role of race in your experience, but to reclaim the narrative of your story in a way that maximises the ease with which other people connect to and engage with you. Importantly, these “rules” are meant to poke fun at and ridicule the subconscious standards to which you will be held at some point or another on your college journey.

All in all, I hope that this work is to you, a reclamation of self, of satire and a celebration of stubborn, persistent survival, even from the margins.

​

Love, 

B