"I'm a Single Black Girl and I Refuse to be Scared by the Statistics Saying I Will Never Get Married"

"Dating While Black is Kinda Like Mario Kart.

I love playing Mario Kart. On paper, Yoshi is a solid bet. He’s a dinosaur, small, and moves pretty fast. But don’t discount Bowser and Donkey Kong. Drive next to one of those guys and your ass will get knocked off Rainbow Road. Despite their size, they still accelerate faster than Mario and Luigi, even though both Mario and Luigi are better at handling and can absolutely outmaneuver Donkey Kong and Bowser off-road. Yes, statistically, Yoshi is the game favorite, but that doesn’t mean Mario or Donkey Kong can’t win the game.

Life brings obstacles but it also brings rainbow boxes of opportunity...

In the words of Maya Angelou, if you can’t change it, change your attitude. Stereotypes, expectations, and other people’s opinions don’t define you as a person unless you let them. A hundred people could tell you they don’t want to date you because you’re black and you can choose to be angry or choose to see it as a hundred people you were able to weed out on your way to Mr. Right. I mean let’s be real, you probably didn’t want to date those dudes anyway."
http://www.xojane.com/sex/im-a-single-black-woman-and-im-not-scared-of-the-dating-statistics

"Rape Culture – Cover Your Eye"

"Rape culture is when I was six, and my brother punched my two front teeth out. Instead of reprimanding him, my mother said “Stefanie, what did you do to provoke him?” When my only defense was my mother whispering in my ear, “Honey, ignore him. Don’t rile him up. He just wants a reaction.” As if it was my sole purpose, the reason six-year-old me existed, was to not rile up my brother. It’s starts when we’re six, and ends when we grow up assuming the natural state of a man is a predator, and I must walk on eggshells, as to not “rile him up.” Right, mom?"...

When I have a daughter, she will know how to fight. I will look at her like the sun when she comes home with anger in her fists. Because we are human beings and we do not always have to take what we are given. They all tell her not to fight fire with fire, but that is only because they are afraid of her flames. I will teach her the value of the word “no” so that when she hears it, she will not question it."
http://while-you-were-sleeping.com/2014/02/04/rape-culture-cover-your-eyes/

This is beautifully written

"The trouble with white friends"

"Whether it was their wealth, their beauty or their status, I genuinely thought that proximity to white people would rectify all of my inner turmoil. As such, I thought I felt less comfortable around most black folk, but those feelings were not facts. I’m fortunate to have pro-black, loving parents who were by no means perfect, except in their unconditional love for a son who’d gone off the racial identity deep end as a side effect of attending predominately white private schools for 12 years. Additionally, instances like a black coach in high school telling me and my Brad and Chad wannabe buddies “You can f*ck ’em, but you can’t be ‘em” were appeals that would go unheeded for a decade...

Maybe I envy people like Ben Carson or Don Lemon or Raven-Symone. The way I might be jealous of my cats when I’m rushing to leave for work with them staring blankly at me as I close the door, or a baby in a cart in front of me in line at the supermarket when I’m not sure my card will go through. Their minds are so fogged over with white supremacy that they don’t have a care in the world beyond the now. But if I’m real with myself, I know how tiresome the Sisyphean task of seeking out white approval and assimilation really is, and how harmful their bullsh*t is to any sort of cause in the name of black liberation...

Many a night, I’ve been screaming “Where y’all at?” like Rihanna when the All Lives Matter crowd is totally silent on the police killing of a white person, even if it’s a 6-year old boy who looks like Macaulay Culkin in his prime. When it’s 1 a.m. and I’m staring at my timeline asking myself “How Sway?!” at the sight of another black man, woman or child murdered or beaten or humiliated, sometimes I can’t help but hear Bill Duke in Menace II Society asking “You know you done fucked up right?,” considering most if not all of the friends I have late night convos going with are white. How many of those nights have I gone to bed furious and dejected because whoever I did talk to just didn’t get it. Only to then go into work the next day and see mostly white faces who definitely don’t get it."

http://blavity.com/the-trouble-with-white-friends/

"At a Neurological Level, Narcissists Are Needy"

"Narcissists may say they have high self-esteem, and their boastful behavior could be interpreted as a sign that they do, but the brain scan evidence suggested otherwise. The more highly students scored on narcissism, the less connectivity they had between the MPFC and ventral striatum. Chester and his colleagues described this as evidence of an “internal deficit in self-reward connectivity” among narcissists. In other words, they may struggle to have rewarding thoughts and feelings about themselves, prompting them to seek out affirmation from other quarters as a kind of compensation for their neural deficit...

As Chester and his colleagues explain, “clinical interventions can readily alter white matter integrity,” which means it could be possible, in theory, to devise therapeutic interventions to help narcissistic people feel better about themselves without resorting to their usual “look at me” methods."
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/07/a-neurological-level-narcissists-are-needy.html?mid=twitter_nymag

Huh. This makes a lot of sense.

"Yes, Your Dating Preferences Are Probably Racist"

"Here’s the thing: when asked during in-person meetings, 90% of my clients report having racial preferences. Which maybe doesn’t sound so bad, because I mean, they have other preferences, too. Height, religion, career paths, Netflix show most recently watched, the list goes on and on. But of the 90% of the reported racial preferences, 89.9% are preferences for white people. So . . . that is bad. And I’m not just talking about white-on-white preferences. I’m talking about all my clients, only 55% of whom identify as white. (This seems as good a time as any to mention that when I say “all my clients,” I do mean clients of all sexual orientations. Let’s not get heteronormative now; we’re only in the third paragraph.)...

But no one will talk about this, because no one likes being called racist. Except it’s hard for me to find another word to refer to “people making negative assessments of large groups of individuals that they’ve never met, based solely on the color of their skin.”...

this kind of racism is so deep-seated, so ingrained, that people genuinely believe their attractions are chemical. That these “preferences” are out of their hands."

http://www.theestablishment.co/2015/10/30/online-dating-racism-matchmaking/

There are a lot of conversations that happen in college, when people are looking at race and trying to figure out I'd they're racist (really, trying to figure out how they can continue to feel like they're not racist) and people say things like "I would totally date someone who isn't white" or "my parents would be fine with me dating someone who isn't white!". But it's clear there that it isn't a preference, or even something they really expect to happen. It's like when you say "if you hadn't been accepted to this college, where would you have gone?" or "Hmmm, I'd we can't get a reservation for our preferred restaurant tonight, would you be okay ordering pizza?".

This feels like one of those problems that can't he solved as much as phased out over another generation - and by phased out, I mean that our generation has to actively address the problem and aggressively interrogate the institutions that are creating these racial preferences.

Related: "Why I'm not scared of the marriage statistics"

"Stats wiz Nate Silver: For black Americans, US is about as dangerous as Rwanda"

"To put this into context, Silver explained, the murder rate for white Americans is similar to the murder rate for people living in Finland, Chile or Israel. The murder rate for black Americans, on the other hand, is similar to the rate found “in developing countries that are war zones even, like Myanmar, or Rwanda, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, places that have vast disorder. To me that stat was so striking that I thought this was a case where even if you kinda zoomed out, that was a data point that helped to inform the discussion.”"
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/stats-guru-nate-silver-for-black-americans-us-is-about-as-dangerous-as-rwanda/

"SEASON TWO: EPISODE 06 - 5 O'CLOCK SHADOW"

https://serialpodcast.org/season-two/6/5-oclock-shadow

This was a particularly good episode, getting at these interesting questions I hadn't ever heard answered about the War on Afghanistan, the real experiences of being a soldier, and this interesting exploration of a personality that weirdly reminded me of my own.