macchiatabro:

“In prioritizing the company of other brown girls, I am no longer valuing inquiring minds. They come second, if that. I am no longer caught mid argument with a ball of tears in my throat, reasoning against a movie’s negligence or elucidating why what that famous person said is racist. It’s an everyday nuisance. So terribly wearing. Thing is, those tears originate from the fluctuating rhythms of hopelessness and frustration — the cavity created from years of feeling outnumbered (my whole life, most of my friends have been white) and wondering if it would ever become possible to incorporate myself while preserving — scratch that, celebrating — my identity. Advocating for myself in a room of brown women who grasp that what exasperates me has metastasized into what ails me, that over time has encouraged self-omittence, is less about advocating and more about taking pleasure in the company of silent nods. Of clapping in agreement because it comes so naturally and expels the limitations of the unsaid. Our dumb-happy smiles overcome us because relating feels closest to co-conspiring. To shining bright….My choices aren’t up for debate. You did not discover me. You cannot collect me. I will not be governed by some fabricated sense of anticipation, some counterfeit hope that someone will soon stumble upon my work. Because here’s what I know: I was never voiceless. As Arundhati Roy once said, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Teachers spoke to brown girls differently. Carpool parents confided in us, volunteering commentary about my mother and father’s parenting decisions. For brown girls, to act our age felt like a breach of contract. We were born dutiful in the eyes of authority whereas white women are afforded a prolonged adolescence. Lest we forget: Williams is only 25 years old. For brown girls, obligation to everyone else has regularly outdone autonomy.”

durgapolashi // ‘On Brown Girl Exclusivity’