Relating To Our Hair:

1. Is that your real hair?

2. Can I touch your hair?

3. How did you get your hair so curly?

4. I hate humidity…my hair poofs up into a huge afro, ugh!

5. Do you take your hair off at night like Annalise Keating?

6. Have you ever thought about straightening your hair?

7. Do you know any good places I can get a weave?

8. Why do you wear a bonnet at night?

9. Do you wash your hair with a weave? Like, how does that work?

My problem with a lot of these questions is that people really act like they can't do a quick google search and find the answer (i.e. questions 7 and 8). For other questions, like 1, 2, 5, 6, and 9... you honestly just shouldn't ask these at all because they're high-key disrespectful. My thing is, why do my answers to these questions matter to you at all? Why does it matter if my hair is in an afro or if it's in braids? You definitely wouldn't ask a white girl if her hair was real, right? So why does asking a black girl make it OK? You wouldn't ask a white girl if you could touch her hair, so why do you want to touch mine? #5 is a problem within itself:

If you watch television, and a black person is being portrayed a certain way, don't think this representation is the end-all-be-all of all of us.

Also, stop asking us if we wash our hair. Again, it's disrespectful, and why does it matter to you? Do YOU wash your hair? Yeah, I thought so. In terms of #3, I can't believe I've been asked this. My hair is curly because that's how I was born...there's no complicated science or logarithms behind it. As for #4....I just shake my head at this. You really see people's true perceptions when they say certain things like this. What's wrong with have a huge head of curly hair? I don't see the problem. Sure, it might be hard to manage if you don't know what you're doing (and no, #6, I won't straighten my hair to make it more "manageable"), but there's really nothing wrong with having big poofy hair.

Relating to Stereotypes:

10. Do you know how to swim?

11. *at night* It's dark... I can't see you!

12. You don't act like other black girls

13. Do you eat fried chicken for dinner every night?

14. Do you play basketball?

15. I didn't know if I should talk to you at first because you seemed scary!

16. Don't be an angry black girl

17. Have you ever been in a gang?

18. You're white on the inside and black on the outside

19. *insert any condescending remark about my intelligence or economic status*

I thought we left stereotypes behind in middle school, but I guess not. I thought we left jokes about race in middle school, but I guess not. None of these are funny and none of them ever will be. Furthermore, I shouldn't have to debunk all of these stereotypes for you, just to prove that I'm not what the stereotypes say that I am. #15 also makes me really upset, because it makes me wonder about all of the people who I could have been friends with, but because they thought I was scary looking, they decided not to talk to me. Then again, if they thought that, maybe I shouldn't be their friends in the first place. I'm usually a happy person and I'm always smiling and giggling... you're saying I look scary because of the color of my skin? Nonsense.

I've actually been asked #17 by someone where I live this year and I laughed it off like it was a joke, but they were dead serious. Becuase of course, since I'm black, I must have been in a gang before, yup that makes total sense. For #18, I always feel personally attacked when people tell me this. Yeah, because I speak with perfect grammar and I listen to Fall Out Boy, I'm definitely white. Since when was doing certain things only for a certain race? Can't I be black and enjoy everything this world has to offer (oops, I'm sorry, I can't even do that because some people decided they wanted to take away my people's freedom some 300 years ago).

Relating To Our Features:

20. For a black girl, you're really pretty

21. You look so exotic.

22. What do those big lips do?

23. You look so much like *insert another black girl who looks nothing like me*

These are real things, guys, that real people have actually told me. #20 is a REALLY funny story actually. I was on the bus with a girl, who was drunk out of her mind, and she goes, "You are so exotic looking. You're light-skinned and pretty, not like the other ugly dark black girls". I've told some people this and they told me to cut her some slack because she was drunk, but how could I do that? She literally called my black sisters ugly for being darker than I am. Aren't all blacks girls beautiful, regardless of if they're light or dark? ON ANOTHER NOTE, a lot of these statements stem from the whole fetishizing complex people now have (i.e. Jungle Fever as some people say).

STOP FETISHIZING BLACK PEOPLE FOR THEIR FEATURES.

This is a whole topic I feel like I'll be writing another article about very soon, but this is a topic that's been bothering me for a while now. I literally used to get made fun of back in middle school and even high school for having so-called "black features", and now y'all wanna fetishize me for those same features? Try again.

Black people are not trends for you to start loving or labeling as "goals" because of social media; if you didn't love us before, you can't love us now.

Relating To Our Culture:

24. Where are you from?

25. Can you speak *insert African or Caribbean language here*

26. Sis.......

27. Issa husband *heart eyes*

28. Am I allowed to say the "n-word"?

29. But what if it's in a song?

30. Have you heard the new song by *insert mainstream rap artist here*

For #25, just like how it's weird to ask a white person if they can speak Italian or ask an Indian person if they can speak Gujarati, you really shouldn't ask me if I can speak Patwa if I'm Jamaican. Furthermore, Patwa isn't even a language, it's a dialect, so please educate yourself before you ask me stuff like that. For #24, my friend and I were just having a conversation about this. She's African American, which means her ancestors were literally shipped from West Africa, stripped of their culture, and put to work as slaves. The only culture they know is the "American (Europeanized) culture" that the slave masters whipped into them. So when you ask them where they're from they're like, "uhhh...." because... they literally just don't know. Stop being ignorant. #26 and #27... just stop, please. You're not my sis, and you wanna slander me for using African American Vernacular, yet you wanna say "issa" on twitter? You sound dumb, please sit down, and be humble. And I feel like I shouldn't even have to explain #28 and #29, yet people still think they can ask me if they're allowed to say it.

Relating To My Black Friends:

31. You should be friends with *insert black girl name here*, you guys would get along!

32. You should date *insert black guy name here*, you guys would look so cute.

33. Why do you only hang out with black people?

34. Would you ever date a non-black guy?

I recently tweeted, "looking for new friends... qualifications: must be black" a few weeks ago, right? Tell me why non-black people were really answering me, and giving me names of black girls who they thought I would hit it off with. First of all, skert, you're crossing a boundary. Because, even though yes, I tweeted it to the general public, it was only meant for people who met the qualifications. And no, that's not racist (see below). I literally don't go around telling other Asian girls or Indian girls or white girls, "you should be friends with so-and-so or you should date so-and-so", just because they're the same race as them. I'm crossing a boundary because I'm not Indian or Asian or white. I don't know what types of guys or girls would be good for them. I tweeted that tweet because I wanted more people around me who understood my struggle and who I could go to when I wanted to vent about these issues. Not just because I wanted another black girl next to me on my Instagram page.

Relating to Social Justice/Inequality:

35. Why is everyone kneeling now? It's not a trend to disrespect our country.

36. Don't you think affirmative action is unfair to everyone else?

37. Shouldn't you focus on black on black crime instead of police brutality?

38. The black men are in jail because they are guilty of their crimes

39. Black Lives Matter is pretty violent, don't you think?

I'm sorry, but if you're not black, don't talk to me about social justice issues unless you have thoroughly educated yourself. If you think I'm making this about race, I'm not. I have a lot of non-black friends who I talk to about social inequalities and we're on the same page. But if you're just saying opinions that your parents have drilled into you or that you hear Trump saying, without doing any research about it to find out truths behind this stuff, then don't talk to me.

Don't tell me about the black men in jail, when most of them are doing life sentences for petty crimes. Don't tell me about disrespecting our country when this country has been disrespecting my people since they dragged us here on ships.

The kneeling movement literally has nothing to do with disrespecting our armed forces or who's off at what war. We sit down during the National Anthem because it's a song that preaches this idea of "freedom" when blacks were promised their freedom after they served in the Revolutionary War, and still never got truly received freedom for another 100 years. Even then, they weren't really free. We're kneeling because of this country still doesn't treat black people like they are real citizens of this country.

Affirmative action is another thing I want to touch on in another Odyssey article, especially around the time of college acceptances. The things people have said to me and my friends about affirmative actions and how "unfair" it is, is really baffling. Educate yourselves.

Relating to Race:

40. I don't see color and you shouldn't either

41. Not everything has to be about race

42. That's reverse racism!

43. Racism doesn't exist anymore.

Ridiculous. Nonsensical. I've said this many times, and I'll say it again:

There is no way for racially oppressed people to be labeled as racist.

The definition of racism is oppressing a group of people because of their race and because the oppressing group thinks their own race is superior. How can I, a black girl who's been oppressed her whole life, be racist to white people, who have privilege in this country? How? There's such thing as PREJUDICE. Yes, prejudice does work both ways. Am I justifying it? Of course not. But there is no such thing as reverse racism.

Also, news flash: If you're describing someone and you just say, "she's short, black, glasses", you're NOT BEING RACIST. You're just describing someone's appearance so the person you're talking to knows who the heck you're talking about. Now, if you said something derogatory about them being black, then that's racist. But I just wanted to clear that up, because people have the wrong perceptions about what it means to be racist.

Moving on, please don't talk to me about how you don't see color when you know good and well that this country was based on race. A lot of the issues we have today are because of race. Part of me thinks that maybe we should be a "colorless" society because, in the end, we're all just people with souls and bones and organs. We all look the same on the inside. But then again, somehow some people will still find a way to oppress others. The other part of me thinks that race matters A LOT. If you're racially colorblind, that means you're not able to see the disadvantages around you because you are of the so-called "superior race".

Relating to The Struggle:

44. Why isn't there a white history month?

45. White privilege is a myth.

46. I've listened to Jay-Z's newest album/took a race class/read the autobiography of Malcolm X/watched Roots... I totally understand your struggle.

Stop right there. Again, please educate yourselves before you ask anybody certain things. With #46.... there's no way anyone who's not black can understand the struggle black people have gone and are still going through. You can definitely empathize with the struggle. You can definitely know about it. But if you have not actually been through it, physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially, then you are in no place to talk to me about you understanding this stuff. You never can and you never will.