I used to hate GIFs. Not the software itself, but all the memes it begat. I definitely didn’t think they had a place in formal PR communication and most certainty not in a place like the Smithsonian.

And then  I saw these

Via Smithsonian Libraries Tumblr

Imagine history coming alive at your very fingertips. Imagine something to keep your kids entertained in the checkout line. Imagine a real use for your grumpy cat meme at the office.

So I’m hanging up my GIF snobbery for “highbrow” organizations. Do it right and it’s art in itself.

So I have a guide that can help you with this thing called new media, in terms of how museums, cultural centers, arts groups and community organizations can use it to be the rockstars and statuettes they were meant to be. Click here to pick it up.

LGBTQIA+ Led Support for Endometriosis and Similar Illnesses

Our goal is to keep the endo community up to date with information about how endometriosis can affect anyone.

endoQueer Founder, Les Henderson

On September 16, 2020, I, Les Henderson, gathered several folks together to talk about various aspects of living with endometriosis as an LGBTQIA+ person. Check out their presentations. Plus, if you are a fellow LGBTQIA+ #endoWarrior (patient, possible patient, angry body part haver), I’d love to have you join us in our special, #endoWarrior Facebook group. And everyone is invited to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram where we share all kinds of information for healthcare providers, caregivers, and friends, as well as tips to keep those angry body parts in check!

Les Henderson (she/her/they) is the founder of endoQueer and host of the Be A Beacon Podcast.  As a Black masculine of center lesbian, her endo journey has been complicated due to erasure in medical and online spaces.  In 2016, she survived a spontaneous pneumothorax (lung collapse) that happened due to endometriosis. Les unfortunately experienced 5 more lung collapses between 2016-2022. She knew that she had to get out here and tell her story and create a space to help others. Her story has been shared by Vice, Cosmo UK and she has contributed her experiences to a few medical journals and books.

To book Les for your event or conference, please email [email protected] for dates and rates. Members of the press on a deadline who would like to speak with Les can also email [email protected] to set up a long-form press interview.

Create and Manage multiple contact forms using single dashboard. You can show Form on any single/every page of your website. You can also collect payments, leads and much more…

Robin Chang

Create and Manage multiple contact forms using single dashboard. You can show Form on any single/every page of your website. You can also collect payments, leads and much more…

Rown Wiesly

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Jex Polack

I am thankful for the decision to work remotely, to stock up on my favorite foods and to write this post to warn folks of weird weather times. Of course, I saw a lot of the last point on that list yesterday.

This is a special snow and sleet-covered edition of Placebook, live from the middle of the storm. In fact, because we are in storm conditions, the roundups are going to be a bit different this morning. I give you Snow and Everything Else.

Snow

Yes, cars in Raleigh caught on fire. I’ll admit, just like Slate has said, that we are a mess (but so are most of the states on the East Coast). And people did camp out at Southpoint Mall. I did have several Facebook friends in this state who were walking home after leaving their cars, or getting their cars home after commutes of  minutes became commutes of an hour or more. I know of at least one accident and marveled at the 100 in Greensboro alone within one hour (scroll down, this is the running post of snow coverage in Greensboro). However, everyone I know is safe, people were fed and clothed and people were generous.  For that, I commend you. Please continue to exercise  safety and caution, and look at these pretty pictures! Play this game  when you watch the TV coverage of the snow/ice/sleet event.  Call the power company and go to a shelter if you have to.  Otherwise, just stay home.

Everything Else

A man spent 28 hours on a bus by choice and he loved it.

Somebody else asks why poor people can’t have nice things, namely nice stores.

How to become a shareable city.

A dose of railroad-related Black history.

He’s not a player and now posthumously, he has own street he can cross.

An electric car especially for wheelchair users.

And lastly, touchscreen Subway and Metro-North maps in NYC.

It’s another day in the world of urbanism. It’s a day when I feel like all of my friends are being heard and getting stuff done and getting money and doing whatever they want to do, many live from the 23rd Congress for New Urbanism in Dallas. That’s what makes it an interesting, invigorating, fabulous day. Because it’s not just a day, it is our day.

When I first drafted this, I was sitting at a co-working space in the DeepEllum district, a district founded by Black Dallaseans denied opportunities to do business and live in other areas. While many of these areas often die and get leveled, Dallas’s build and sprawl at any cost policies may have saved this neighborhood from complete ruin.While there’s not as much of the original blues, jazz and other black businesses and entertainment spaces, the area remains in tact, with quirky businesses and good property owners, one who has been a follower of the site and who I was able to chat with on Thursday evening.When we were at the co-working space, we’d not heard about the charges brought upon the officers involved in the recent police brutality action in Baltimore. I had yet to officially announce my upcoming move to Kansas City, MO to my family, friends and followers. I’d not seen a lot of the CNU crowd, just my fellow Streetsbloggers. The CNU had not had a fellow Black urbanist speak truth to power in a plenary session.

All I’d done was paint a few benches, sweat a bit and recover from being in Chattanooga.

Speaking of Chattanooga. I don’t often get to do design charrettes in the kind of places we like to write off as the “hood.” You know, the ones that for whatever reason, be it white flight, redlining, black flight, crimes real or imagined or sadly, the lost of livelihood and ability to live on in a place, the neighborhood suffers. I froze a bit physically as I walked the streets with my facilitation group. I met great people. I learned so much. I’m going to finish this post and write another about what I did learn.

Now back to what I felt in Dallas atCNU 23.It’s Friday night and I debated why cars have no place in new urbanism. I wish I’d itemized all the car related expenses that have kept me in a mild bit of debt over the past four years. I went to the mall. Figuratively, as I brought in the wrong type of consumerism, to make my point that we have to make our developments sustainable.

Honestly, I was doing well to debate. I was thankful that just a few miles away, a solidarity march for Baltimore march had one victory to celebrate, in the charges filed against those officers that sparked the latest round of unrest in the city. That a well-known Greensboro conservative finally saw the light on police violence. That I’m going back to work on Tuesday, for an amazing organization and I can keep blogging about how to make our cities better. Oh, I’m going to Toronto, to mentor, to nourish, to see Canada finally (and get a passport).

So yeah, I was a bit distracted and a bit tired during this year’s Congress. I spent several afternoons in my room and only went to one session in the convention hall, outside of sessions where I was actively participating. And I think that what will make future Congresses work best is that if we turn it into an opportunity to work together, while we are all in the same place.

I am a firm believer, that if we work hard as a greater Congress, that we can make any city we go to better. No, we can’t always eat after 11 p.m. or dance past 2 a.m. Sometimes we have to take Uber when we want to take the bus. Not every pie shop has whole pies on demand. You are never too old to play in a treehouse. Some eyes should stay shut. And you can make the transect apply to fashion.

I will say this though: WE MUST HAVE EVENTS THAT ARE FREE OR LOW COST. Now that we have a degree of racial and gender diversity supported in our movement, we need to take on class next. In the quest to make sure everyone’s voice is on the program, we must never forget that we have to keep extending invitations. We have to keep communicating together. We have to listen and learn.

On a more serious note, I want to give a shout out to the staff, the board, and anyone who I was able to meet throughout the Congress. I want us to realize that we, even those of use who feel like we are shut-out by the founders sometimes, are élite. People come to our seminars, read our books, hire our firms, and let us partner with our friends on projects. Even if we sometimes have to repeat our names, if we keep showing up (newbies, keep showing up), then someone will listen. Maybe we have to change the leaders, but we can make our own spaces, with paint or with words.

And if we stay on one accord, within intellectual reason, we can do what we need to do and that’s fixing our cities in both design and in policy.

Between the Trayvon Martin verdict and the recent youth fights resulting in our downtown curfew for the remainder of the summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do to make sure downtown is solidly diverse, without sacrificing safety.

I’ve had to think long and hard about what my response would be. I could rail and say that this city is forever racist, that the kids will never amount to anything, that there will never be any chain stores or any other negativity that has been thrown at downtown and even our city lately. However, it is just like I told Sarah Goodyear of Atlantic Cities in this article:

Kristen Jeffers, a Greensboro native who lives downtown, founded the blog The Black Urbanist. She says that anxiety about young black people who flock to the entertainment district masks deeper issues facing the city’s development.

While there’s been a lot of investment in high-end rental housing, and the city is talking about putting in a performing arts center, Jeffers says the area still lacks basic services like pharmacies and a full-scale supermarket.

“For a neighborhood to be a true neighborhood, and not just a vertical suburb, you need those services,” she says.

What the also downtown needs, she says, are amenities that attract more people of a variety of ages, like playgrounds for families and a first-run movie theater. And young people should be supported with more structured programming, rather than marginalized. “Our city needs to bring back a full-on youth program,” says Jeffers, the type of effort that includes job training as well as recreational opportunities.

What my solution look like?

What you see in the left oval is an area that consists of a YMCA to the top right of the oval, a magnet performing arts high school flanking the left side of the oval and school administration building between the two surface lots. The right oval shows how close this area is to Elm Street, the new hotspot for everyone that’s become ground zero for the fights, and also new upscale stores and development. My office is also in that oval and my apartment is just southeast of it’s boundary, along with our central bus depot and Amtrak train station.

We are talking about roughly a square (rectangular) mile here. This area is also owned and managed by either the county school system or the Y. The Y already has programs for youth, even though they are fee-based. The school system has a mandate to educate the teenagers that go through their building. Adults already know this area as a place that is family-friendly. Teens know this area has places they can go and not be pushed out.

The only caveat is that this area is adjacent to the county jail. However, this also means law enforcement is quite close by and can deal with people who fight. Otherwise, one of the surface lots along with the brick school administration building can be upfitted into a family entertainment center, with lazer tag, bowling, a skate park and playground, go-karts, and a movie theater. The administrative functions could move to another building that the school system owns just north of the school building. The center could be closed during school hours except during the summer. A deck could be built next to the Y building to accommodate the increased traffic to both the Y and this entertainment center. It could also accommodate jail parking, which has been a need since it opened last year. The playground area would be a public, free facility, or the Y could open their existing playground area to the public. A private company could operate the entertainment center, and employ students of either the high school or nearby colleges. Students could even build the center, as this high school at one time housed one of the construction trades programs in the county.

In addition to beefing up the existing Greensboro Youth Council, these initiatives would go a long way in serving the growing and in many ways already existing youth population who want a place to go downtown, along with the adults.

This also does not excuse the current curfew, nor let other areas off the hook for being accepting of students and youth. As long as youth don’t fight each other, they have every right to play sports on the lawns and sit on the benches of Center City Park like everyone else. Yet, once that park closes, they could go to the Y or the entertainment center and spend the remainder of their evening in a place that is ready and willing to accept them.

During a conversation at the recent Streetsblog training in Kansas City, I was asked about the name of this site. I stated that often in the media, the word urban has been equated with the word black. Likewise, but not as much, other ethnicities have been tied to areas where they are very populous. With development types as a “safe” proxy for labeling something as an ethnic object or activity, the practice of using  development types  is now ubiquitous. Yet, I wanted to confront that issue head on, by naming my site in an oxymoronic matter. Still why is my site name an oxymoron? It shouldn’t be.

First of all, people of all races have lived in the three commonly recognized types of development: urban, suburban, and rural. A glance at the U.S. Census backs up my claim. Only in New York, Philadelphia and , until recently, DC and Chicago did  bad equations such as white=suburban and black-urban work perfectly. Segregation was and is more of a neighborhood by neighborhood phenomenon. Maybe that neighborhood was a neighborhood of farms and a church versus three-flats and a corner store, but the notion is the same. No one racial group can be tied to one city, unless that city was once an over-sized, segregated government housing project, a segregated suburb with cul-de-sacs and no city hall, or a segregated mill town. The key word here is segregated.

Secondly,  the issue primarily comes from the mainstream media.   Urban development is one thing, but naming something or someone as urban, when they are really just black is a problem. The terms used to describe development are very different than race. It is flat-out lazy for media outlets to continue the conflation of terms, when all it takes is one more pica to state the word development, with a hyphen, next to whatever type it is. Or even better, let’s use the word black (or African-American) or Latino or whatever culture. Political correctness is many times a shot in the foot. It’s great to see the AP back off of using illegal or schizophrenic to describe people, or many other news outlets stop using the full name of the Washington NFL team. Yet, can we get a stronger entry in the Stylebook for development types, that bans their use for people much like illegal?

What re-jogged my issue initially with words was several things, notably a performance of Clybourne Park . Set both a few days before the move of the Younger family in  A Raisin in the Sun‘s move into their new home and 50 years later when a white family wants to come back and tear down the home that was such a prize 50 years ago, I was compelled by what was and wasn’t said. How it wasn’t so much of a thing of race and gentrification as much as it was an issue of trusting one’s neighbors and feeling a shared affinity. How when all the ugly slurs and jokes were stated instead of implied, there appeared to be some sort of quiet resolution. No one leaves either scene happy, but there’s no hiding from any labels, not just racial or development-styles, but feminism, disabilities and even religion (or the practice thereof).

At this point, I want to point out what the dictionary actually lists as definitions for urban, suburban, and rural.  Urban, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary means “of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city.” Sadly, the dictionary is now including online Faebook comments on entries. Even sadder was a woman who noted she’d taken an online quiz that stated she was an urban princess. She went on to state she thought urban meant black. (She appears to be African-American).

Moving on to suburb[an], Merriam-Webster notes three definitions:

1. an outlying part of a city or town
   
2. a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city
3. plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town

It’s the first definition I want to highlight, that even a suburb has to be defined by a city. As I’ve stated before, some places think they are suburbs when they aren’t. There is a broader provision for these under this definition, but so many are becoming their own cities and many were self-sufficient towns. Some still are. Nothing here says they equal white. What of Asian Chinatowns, Koreatowns and the like? Just because there’s been some Asian suburbanization does not mean we are losing the entire community to the suburbs. Still, thanks to marketing, as examined by the new book  Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, much of what we think of as the “suburban” experience was racialized into a white American experience.

Now I come to rural, which  Merriam-Webster defines as “of or relating to the country, country people or life, or agriculture.” Once again, no race in the definition. A heavy Latino rural connection could be traced to the bracero program that brought the first  government-sancioned wave of Mexican migrants beginning in 1942 to work on farms. As time went on, as chronicled in Hannah Gill’s book The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State, migrant farmworkers began to settle in rural areas, some which resembled the rural states in Mexico that these later day migrants came from. She also talks about the growth of Siler City, an outpost I remember being about 20 minutes too long from my grandparents and having a good seafood restaurant. This area is now one of the most rapidly growing Latino communities in the state. None of this explains the “irony” of the large communities of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York City or Mexicans in Chicago, many who descended from the braceros who stayed behind after their visa expired. Of course, we forget that much of the Southwest, home to the majority of our remaining Native American population that is on reservation was part of Mexico. Many Mexicans claim a dual native/Spanish identity that has coalesced into the modern Hispanic/Latino.

As I come to a close, I want to make it clear  we have no room for racialized descriptions of development and development as euphemism for race. Currently, all ethnicities (and class levels) are experiencing some form of loss or pain, whether it’s home value, medical problems, rising tuition, job loss, or a combination of all these and more. People are losing ground in their own neighborhoods no matter where they are located. The mixed-use entertainment and novelty district,  suburban experiment , thinking that sustainability is only for one race, and the complete write-off of rural areas is not working. Sustainability is for all races, anyone who takes breaths of oxygen. If we can just focus on development, redevelopment, or maintenance, kindly nudging change in our communities, then we can finally jump over the hurdle of conflating race with a development type.

Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.

Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.

However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.

Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.

First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.

If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.

I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.

I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.

One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.

And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.

I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.

I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.

We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.

I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.

The Death of a Inspiration

The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.

I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.

Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.

Hey everyone!

After a week in Buffalo, I realized that it was time for me to shift focus a bit and finally get around to publishing my first full-length, hardcover book. That and the fact that I’ve got moves and some major family stuff, as well as day job and board service that I all need to figure out how they will happen, along with the growing Kristen Jeffers Media activities.

However, that doesn’t mean I’m disappearing off the web completely. I’ll be writing my North Carolina Placebook daily emails, which now include in addition to the news, short sections of facts about North Carolina. Eventually, when I get a decent amount of those, I’ll be releasing an e-book featuring them. Also, I’m working on a moving guide. Check all the social networks for a survey to help me gauge what you guys would want in a moving to North Carolina guide. Both the fact book and the moving guide will be for sale and will also be in physical form. Those sales will help me do more traveling and get back to producing the content you love and want from me on this site.

I will be podcasting. My goal is to produce one show a week. And yes, the one I promised during CNU is on its way. I will be asking some of you to come on and chat with me about various issues. Look to your emails and social media feeds for invites.

For those of you who are APA Virginia members (and also my DC area folks since it’s not that far out), I’ll be giving this year’s diversity keynote at the APA Virginia Conference at the Wintergreen Resort just outside of Charlottesville on July 22nd at 8 a.m. I will also be doing an afternoon breakout on the Civic Inferiority Complex at 2 p.m. If you can’t attend, I will be checking on audio and video opportunities and if I can share anything I take. Also, if you want me to speak or present at your event, please contact me. I would be glad to discuss the opportunity with you and find out what you need.

And lastly, thanks everyone for reading and sharing and supporting over these last almost 4 years. As much as I love to produce this site, I do have to consider my health and the ability to produce coherent thoughts, such that the community can be helped in the right way and not just in a “I have this awesome idea that I think might work” way. Once I have my bearings again, you’ll start to see more posts come back here. In the meantime, I’m on Twitter and Facebook and you’ll be hearing my voice on the radio show. And of course, that book that I mentioned at the top of the post will be forthcoming and will be just as awesome as what you’ve been reading on this site. And it will be in a format that you can take to the beach, read during the no-electronic devices and no wi-fi portions of your trips and help you get to bed sooner. See you on the other side!

Welcome back to Eight Years a Washingtonian, a series where I talk about what I’ve learned since I moved here in 2016. That year was consequential for not just me but the region and the so-called country I live in, so I am, in a way, treating this like I’ve hit a whole decade here and I’m looking back. because it’s felt like a whole decade. You can read the entire series and get more insight into what my goal with it was here. 

I’m running a little behind on getting this series up, so I’ve decided to combine my Part 4 and 5 reflections on being part of a bigger African diaspora and having unfettered access to gendering myself however I see fit and loving whomever TF I want to love. Also, I’ve been trying to make companion YouTube videos, but I think I just want to get the words out, so between now and Election Day, I’m going to hit you up with some reading distractions until we get there. Oh and yes, the title is a reference to the 2007 Common song.

So I’ve arrived in this Chocolate Rainbow Mecca. Why do I feel so sad and lost though?

I came up out of my basement in early 2017 for these amazing images that Jay’s Fine Art Photography used to build his portfolo. And this is the only image I can find, but yes, I really was into “making it after all then.”

I’m not going to lie, I did expect the Black head nod when I got here. I also expected to find more like-minded Black radicals with a dash of care and concern and Black southern hospitality. Basically, I was told that a lot of my cousins were here, so I should be able to fit in and not have to change too much. However, I’ve barely seen my actual cousins here, because this area is so vast, it’s easy to get into your groove. Oh, and my cousins and I have a lot of differing views and I tend to be more radical in more ways than one.

In the last part, I talked about how much the federal government’s presence really shapes everything. Still, I want to go even deeper and talk about what it means to be in a metropolitan area where every form of Blackness is represented. There’s no universal Blackness, while we still contend with this being a settler colony. Still, only half of us were enslaved in said colony and the other half were either enslaved elsewhere or seen as an equal colonizing force.

Now I also adore how many cultures and cuisines are here. But I have noticed that no matter what, people are so tied to doing the “right thing” and the status quo, that some of those unique flavors are muted out.

And, yes, I’ll say it, all this affluence and falling in line makes people change. If you’re straight, middle-class and above, and able-bodied, this is a gilded age. If you don’t care about being near Metro, plenty of neighborhoods will happily house you and your children. If you don’t care about working for a company that bombs parts of your homeland, they are happy to have you sign on the dotted line and write a six-figure check.

But sadly if you and your children are too poor, queer, and/or disabled, you will hear about how much more you need to do and how you might be failing or “not networking” right.

But in the meantime, it’s great to see what it would be like to live in a land where Black folks don’t have as many barriers based on our race, leaving us to just battle ableism, queer antagonism, and classism.

Not the first time I’ve been in a parade, but my first DC Pride Parade I was in was kind of a big deal, lol. 

Real talk, I would have never come out as a nonbinary genderfluid polyamorous pansexual as soon as I did in North Carolina. Ok, maybe I would have found a Les somewhere else, say on UNCG or Guilford’s campus, or milling about downtown Durham, or in the mountains enveloping Asheville, but she wouldn’t be my Les.

Plus, the law allows us so many options to not only protect who we are in all of our uniqueness, but we have been able to be in the same hospital room for years, I can be legally partnered with her here in the District without losing future disability benefits eligibility, and I can find plenty others who are also delightfully quirky and queer.

Now, let me be clear, I can love a bunch of people at once, but I’m not looking for anybody else. Living here has exposed me to so much gender practice, not just theory and not just confined to where whatever liberal arts college is in town. I know I would have made it to this point in Greensboro, but now, I have more legal support at my job, and in public spaces and there are affirming Black churches here so I can even pray as a nonbinary genderfluid polyamorous pansexual without being threatened with a hell. 

But as I said at the start of this newsletter, that does vary within our affluent suburban communities. businesses, organizations, and individuals can still find loopholes to treat you terribly without recourse. Queer and disability respectability and class politics still show up and show up hard in a land where no one cares what color or shape you are, as long as you serve the goals of the empire, good or bad.