Leaving my Blackness at home

I am was supposed to be going to hear this speaker talk about the African American community and Catholicism today at noon.  But when I woke up with tears in my eyes, and the first thing I saw when I checked my daily news was more outcry about the Trayvon case; this time a letter from Sinead O'Conner, and then uproar from The Hunger Games fanbase about Rue being black...I just had to check out. I called my mother and told her how tired I was of either being villianized or victimized.  "Can't we just be left alone?" I asked her.  Maybe that's too much to ask for, or maybe its "wrong" to want that but that's truly how I feel at times.  Is the Trayvon case a race thing? Or is it a justice thing?  Or is it both?  Why is Rue being black even an issue?  Quite frankly I side-eyed it myself as she supposedly came from the agriculture district.  Alas, I didn't read the books so I brushed it off as perhaps my own misunderstanding of a situation.  The "fans" claim that it was just because she was not how they pictured her in their minds when reading the book...while the Black community feels some kind of way about the renig of emotion because somehow the love and affection felt for Rue doesn't apply to a little chocolate girl.

I am just exhausted.  You know that old joke, where the plane is too heavy and they are making people jump off in order of ethnicity? The first call is for African-Americans...then Blacks...then Coloreds and the black man says, "Sorry hombre but we're niggas today."  I feel like that.  Let it be somebody else.  Anybody else, stop looking to me for action.

Ironic though it may be that I am writing this post...but sometimes you just get tired of your skin (and all that it holds for you and other people) being the topic of discussion.  My 11 year old sister said it quite profoundly, "its just fear." If you ask me, the world could use some sage.  A cleansing, and moving of all darkness to the light.  Why is American blonde hair and blue eyes?  That's not my American.  Can't we just expand...can't we hold more than we've been given? Can't we accept more truths than those in history books?

There is a woman coming to speak about the porn industry and the demonization of the black body.  Supposedly black women are hyper sexualized in the media, or maybe black people more readily accept the sexual energy that we hold.  Who draws the line between acceptable and obscene?  Are we trying to save the little girls who shop at Abercrombie like we try to save the video vixens?  One of those groups are grown women capable of making their own choices.  And why porn?  The sports industry is in some ways comparable to slavery, where is the uprising there?

I just get tired.  I wish I could leave my Blackness at home and for once not be someones fucking political cause, social justice issue, discomfort, or charity case.  But maybe that's just me.