![]() ![]() While I did endure hair relaxer treatments at times (an essay for another day), standards of beauty were generally intended to accentuate our natural features. ![]() When my father’s Edo community gathered, children ate the same foods as the adults there was no such thing as a “kid friendly” menu. My friends in Black households didn’t “talk back” to elders the way my white friends did. Over these years, I absorbed that our at-home, Black culture was different from that of my mostly white public school and the media and entertainment they consumed. I was as interested in the show’s contents as much as I was in seeing when my parents laughed. To know me and the family dynamics from which I come is to understand that while I was not permitted to watch the decades-running animated sitcom The Simpsons, a show that my parents disliked for its regrettable, white-centric presentation of children disrespecting their parents and causing shameful mayhem, they had no issue with me watching In Living Color, a groundbreaking, risqué sketch-comedy that was decisively more explicit, but centered Black culture and experiences, even as it aimed to be universally, and hilariously, offensive. Distributed throughout the house was a collection of sculptures my Nigerian dad imported from throughout West Africa, and a teeming bookshelf featured authors like Alex Haley and Angela Davis. An expansive range of Black identity and history was accessible to me through my parents’ LPs and cassettes. Black liberation-as a term-didn’t exist in my household growing up, but looking back, I realize we talked about it all the time. ![]()
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