#wildflowersunscripted A Secret Revealed

not my photo

Strangers will defend you faster than friends. Black men appreciate white women more than they appreciate the black women that are fighting for them. The tears aren't there because it doesn't bother you as much anymore.

In the middle of the night as I hopped out of my car all I could think was getting in the house and refreshing my mind. The last 9 hours had worked my brain to a level of stress that only corporate America knows how to bring on. So I threw my stuff in their respective places, got comfortable, and opened the laptop for the good reading. After a few blogs I came to one about the appreciation of the black woman. At the top of the post was a picture of actress Lupita Nyong'o. The blogger's point was that she's struggled to find beauty in herself because of other people's remarks, but it's amazing when you see a black woman walk out into public loving every bit of the skin she's in. Then my phone started going off.

Actually it wasn't ringing or text message. It was my twitter mentions. Random black people (it's important to point this out) were in my mentions saying the most demeaning things they could think of about photos of me. Why? I had asked a question days ago to some guy that thought a famous black man had a "bad" white woman on his arm. If he would have gave his reasoning, it could have all been cool. I was met with silence that day, so I forgot all about it. I'm going to write about the white woman/black man thing later. Anyway, that guy was feeling some kind of hatred and his friends was sipping from the same hate kook-aid that night. They were going hard.

The thing is their comments were bothering me. What was bothering me was the fact that I didn't know where their anger stemmed from or how they found me up until the umpteenth tweet. Why'd it take me so long to react? When I finally did reply to the initial instigator I gave him only kind words. Well, I mentioned something about being nice and that he should go study on this history since it's black history month. He insulted a national holiday built to honor people who fought for us and told his stupid followers to attack me some more. That was when I learned the beauty of the block button.

I also learned about that there are good people online in the middle of the night that will react. Some woman said she realized I meant no harm by the question and she reported them all as spam when she saw what they were doing. Another woman, probably someone who likes to argue, started arguing with them too. I had blocked the trouble makers, but I could see her comments. She wasn't back down from a fight.

But there's a reason why this moment was so important.

A long time ago when I was feeling very alone I decided if I could ever make friends for life, then I'd fight for them. I'd fight for them, argue for them, cuss out men I didn't know for them, and just be a good friend in general for them. However, I had an incident last year that showed just how much someone I call a friend would go for me.

The incident involved some dude that I had cut off months prior. Apparently sex makes a man call the cops, or possibly fake cops, on you after he's tried to set you up for something you didn't do. It was odd, but I called the first person I could think to call after. I saws a little shook up, but when I told her the story she laughed. She thought is was funny. That laughter hurt me to the core and even after I tried to explain why there was nothing funny about it, she didn't want to understand. What kind of friend reacts this way? See, this person is actually a good person at heart, so I've tried to redefine the meaning of friendship since then. Another person I spoke with at the time also had the same reaction. This one was a male friend and I think he wasn't listening. It didn't hurt when he did it. It pissed me the Hell off and my reaction was more than explaining why the shit wasn't funny.

It doesn't hurt so much anymore to see a friend not stand up for me in that way, but it does feel good to see strangers defend me against some assholes with nothing better to do than drag other people in the gutter with them.

So the part of black men like white women better than black women was said by a man in a group on Facebook. There's more to this, but it will be placed in another post. Stay tuned…

BTW, someone told me I should write about the crazy "police" phone call about the weird dude. What happened with him didn't bother me as much as the reaction from the initial two close friends I told.