We are at the halfway mark of Holy Week and there is something that has stuck in my craw for years. It’s time for another PSA/ “Grinds My Gears”segment.
*Drags soapbox to the middle of the room, steps up and taps mic*
Excuse me, excuse me. May I have your attention please?
As you all gear up for Easter/Resurrection Sunday and are buying all these pastel colored dresses, Steve Harvey suits, hats, and finery, it grinds my gears when some of you people randomly do stuff and accept things just because they are in popular culture. Here’s a biology lesson just case you all didn’t know, rabbits/hares/bunnies DON’T lay eggs. Never in the history of the world has a rabbit or rabbit-related organism laid a multicolored, painted, glitterfied chicken egg. Not the Cadbury Bunny, not Bugs Bunny, no daggone bunny lays eggs!
When The Lord rose from the grave and the stone was rolled away there was not a bunny sitting at the threshold with the angel waiting to announce His resurrection. There wasn’t a rabbit there pooping out colored hard-boiled eggs and jelly beans on top of pink plastic grass.
Just as a bit of history for you, chicken eggs were dyed red by early Christians in Mesopotamia to symbolize the blood of Jesus shed on Calvary. The shell represents the tomb of Christ and the breaking of the shell a symbolic representation of his breaking the chains of death. The Easter egg custom was adopted by the Catholic Church in 1610 A.D. by Pope Paul V. We as Christians can see the egg as a symbol of resurrection as the egg contains new life within it. How this morphed into adults hiding cooked eggs that were dyed the night before while watching the Ten Commandments is beyond me. Hiding eggs in the grass, trees, bushes, under cars, etc. has to be one of the stupidest things I have seen. Kids are fighting and pushing each other out of the way to get an egg that you know they won’t even eat, it will decay in a plastic basket next to pink and blue marshmallow Peeps that will NEVER decay. You know that at least one of those eggs won’t be found and less than a week later as it rots in the sun, just out of sight, you will be complaining about a sulfur smell and dumbfounded as to where it is coming from. I have no issue with Easter eggs as long as you understand and explain to kids the symbolism behind it.
To do something, anything for that matter, just because it has always been done (tradition), just because, and/or without the right context is off putting and asinine.
Your ignorance is showing, tuck it back in, nobody wants or needs to see that.
And that my lovelies is what grinds my gears!
*drops mic, climbs down off soapbox, places a purple dyed egg covered in glitter on the ground and exits stage right*
Even the bunny is confused…
Food for Thought
T. Nicole
T. Nicole's Graham Cracker Crumbs 
Don’t Put Your Labels On Me – Part II
Here we are yet again… *sigh*
I’ve had multiple instances in the past couple of weeks where someone (in this case WASP / White Anglo Saxon Protestant female manager bolstered by another authoritative WASP woman) automatically assumed I was lying and tried to “catch” me by offering up what they saw as “proof”. I had to write detailed explanations of the circumstances, justify myself and provided my own absolutely irrefutable proof that I was indeed being ethical and truthful from the very beginning. (I.e. I shut this mess down quickly with perfect tact, professionalism and screen grabs.) This was followed by the most insulting five words I’ve heard in recent memory, “Thank you for your honesty.”
Thank you for your honesty?! That insinuates that you assume that everything I say and/or do is fabricated until you feel you have sufficient proof that I’m telling the truth. This coming from the same non-POC people who, when the tables are turned, and I KNOW that non-POC has glaringly lied through their perfectly veneered teeth, tell me to “assume positive intent” or that I “misunderstood” what they said/did/asked/instructed/demanded. I am positive that it was intended to make me out a thief of time, a fabricator of salacious falsehoods and unethical to boot. Nothing there to misunderstand.
To compound all of this and add insult to injury, the earlier exchange is later followed by a backhanded compliment of a recorded WebEx presentation I did 3-4 weeks ago saying, “… it was very professional and easy to follow. I was very impressed with your presentation skills…”. There again are the micro aggressions.
It is automatically ASSumed that we are lying. It is automatically ASSumed that, despite our experience and education, we don’t have the same or better skill set than our white counterparts. And when we prove we ARE telling the truth and we DO have the knowledge and expertise, they are “impressed” with our professionalism and presentation skills. You ASSume because of my milk chocolate hued skin, my Afrocentric name and my love of head wraps that I couldn’t possibly be poised and polished and able to lead, teach, and inform the masses, let alone the white masses. I have to prove to you beyond what is expected of my white counterparts that I AM and that I CAN.
This is what it is to be black in Corporate America. This is what it is to be black in America, period.
#staywoke #resist #DiaryOfAMadBlackProfessionalWoman
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Posted by grahamcrackercrumbs09 on October 21, 2017 in Social Commentary, Work Life
Tags: Corporate America, Culture, Diary of a Mad Black Professional Woman, Life, Micro Aggressions, Opinion, Race, racism, Reflections, Resist, Social, Social Commentary, Stay Woke, Tanesha Graham, Work, work life, Working While Black