My father and his closest friend, a man I call an uncle, discovered an easy way to save money: always wet your toilet paper and paper towels. Apparently, once these rolls dry after you have wet them, they no longer roll as easily because ripples have been created. This will slow down your roll, LITERALLY, if you take too much toilet paper when you are on the throne, for instance. People use less paper products, the fewer paper products you need to buy, the more money you save: it’s all a vicious cycle. I hover back and forth between two adjectives for this practice… CHEAP…and… RIDICULOUS. It does, however, offer me endless opportunities for shit-talking with my father. I could tell any array of such stories to convey how frugal my father is, but I hope this lumpy toilet paper saga will suffice.
Unlike some of my peers, I was never the type of child to be embarrassed by my father’s frugality, not even them $2 grocery store sneakers. I think a lot of people could use the character building that comes from building a real sense of worth rather than buying labels as the sole sign of worth. Given the high price African Americans have had to pay for every advancement we have achieved (think back on the parents who sent their children into the terrordome of Central High School in 1957 Little Rock, Arkansas as just one example), paying yet another high price for something as insignificant as a clothing label seems, at best, redundant for us. Continue reading
This fall, I taught a writing class where I introduced students to 
A few years ago, my partner and I were riding the train and a man, lit up from the floor up, entered wearing a horse costume. The horse head and body protruded about 2 feet in front of him, like an adult version of the child’s costume pictured here. He shook his cup of change while walking through the train, singing “Oye Como Va” very loudly. I’ll give him credit: 
Most recently, I was leaving campus and going home when the double doors where I was entering the subway did not open. Only one door worked. At 6pm in New York City, at least 40-50 people are moving in and out of each set of double doors at the same time. When only one works, it takes forever and you could miss the chance to board… and this was a day when I was tired, having left home at 7am, and just wanted to get home. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in the sentiment because the sistah a few steps away and I yelled in unison: OH HAYELL NAW. It was destined!
We ended up standing next to each other the whole ride home (there were no seats left). She is an administrative assistant at one of the posh law firms near my campus where they have cut all assistants’ vacations and overtime possibilities. She starts work at 9:30am each day but arrives to her destination at 8:45am. She goes to her favorite spot for tea and maybe a light sandwich each day, takes some quiet time for just herself to enjoy her tea, and then enters the hustle and high pressure setting in which she works. Like her, I arrive to campus almost an hour before my classes, just for the quiet and the time to center who I am going to be and what I am going to do with my students for the day. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about this woman’s mental and spiritual morning practice (yes, I consider the quietness that she gifts herself each day a spiritual practice). Apparently, her bosses/the lawyers learned of her ritual and started coming to her spot to discuss their ideas for new projects, etc. with her even though her work clock starts at 9:30. Yes, you heard that right and can probably guess my automatic response: OH HELL NAW! Faced with her new reality, she did what any self-respecting intelligent woman in high demand would do: found herself a new spot where them fools couldn’t find her! We shared many stories like this about work, disrespect, black women, and exploitation. In fact, it seems safe to say that the conversation that I had with her was more politically charged and ideologically introspective than most conversations I have on college campuses and yet, these are the “critical theorists” who supposedly have some kind of deep knowledge. Don’t think so!
I recently watched the movie, The Perfect Holiday, where Morris Chestnut was a shopping mall Santa who enchanted three little kids and their mother (played by Gabrielle Union; the added bonus as Terrence Howard as a rat, evil dwarf, etc). Morris Chestnut is one Santa no one would need to make me believe in! Clearly, capitalists don’t care about black people’s dollars; otherwise we’d see family movies like this everywhere. Instead, this year’s blockbuster will be a black man dressing up as a black woman who then dresses up as Santa (i.e., Madea) for a 2013 Christmas Coon Extravaganza. The images that we see and don’t see of black people during these holidays are not motivated by the economics of neoliberalism alone; these economics are nested quite snugly with maintaining a white lens and a white world, a reality 100s of years in the making given the history Dr. Nelson provides us. Like I said, if it was all about money, BLACK WOMEN would be the center of all marketing campaigns since we are the ones with the most buying power. You know something deep is going on when NO ONE tells you this. I am not suggesting that buying power and wealth are the same thing and that black women and communities have wealth in the United States. It just seems telling to me that American consumerism functions according to a logic that deliberately omits black faces but exploits their cultures and dollars.