I try not to tweet myself, but like this is ,.

No shirts, no shoes likely arose en masse as a way of avoiding hippies and the counter culture.

Clubs have all sorts of no timbs no baggie jeans rules to keep black people out.

Mask rules are to stop people from dying. https://twitter.com/KendraWrites/status/1259692659192541184

That people, most of whom are white, are pretending that being made to wear a mask in a store during a pandemic is anti-ethical to freedom when I spent my 20s flat ironing my hair for job interviews to get employed is literally enraging.

You don't have the right to kill people.

An erosion of freedom is showing up to a job interview and having the interviewer immediately making it clear that you're not getting the job because he thought you were a man.

It means, not getting the job because the interviewer tells you he thought you were white.

An erosion of freedom is showing up at the border and having a customs agent spend extra time grilling you because he thinks you're a sex-worker (which is itself a problematic bias).

The reason he thinks you're a sex worker ? You, a lady, went on vacation to the carribean alone

An erosion of freedom is meeting someone who went to college a couple of towns over from you and bonding over your school's parties and the sundown town that separated you, that everyone of your pigmentation knew not to stop in after dark even if your car was on fire.

I want to be clear: in so many fucking ways I'm incredibly privileged. My parents made choices that blessed me in innumerable ways.

But every, single one of those privileges is atop this backdrop of racist bullshit of what it means to be black in America.

The cost of moving us into a "good" neighborhood was living alongside neighbors that had literally circulated a petition asking the previous owners of my childhood home not to sell to a black family.

I'm incredibly lucky that when it became clear that me and chemical relaxers don't mix, my mom was like that's fine.

But she still made me heat straighten my hair before every single job interview because I would be un-hirable otherwise.

That was her lived experience.

The ways in which POC are made to contort themselves to fit performative whiteness are incalculable and absolutely infringe on our freedoms.

It takes me 4 hours to straighten my hair. It takes me 10 seconds to put on a mask. I pick mask every time.

Shit, require a durag too.