In Response to “Howard Girls Just Want to Pop Out”: Howard Glo’d Me.
As a black woman throughout my entire high school career… I had never felt …enough. I was always too light, a little curvier than other plank board 9th graders and my sense of style was awful :(. As a person that made me feel bad, useless, and also made me excel in school because I felt like being smart was the only thing I was “good at”. I wasn’t athletic, I couldn’t play an instrument or sing, and I wasn’t pretty. “You are just so smart” became a compliment I grew tired of hearing because it was never accompanied with anything else. I HAD BEEN SMART SINCE I WALKED INTO A SCHOOL BUILDING. When was I going to grow into a woman I was proud of to look at in the mirror? Someone I actually considered beautiful?
My senior year of high school I became so used to not caring how I looked that I stopped trying, I wore sweat pants, a t-shirt, and my hair in a ponytail EVERY DAY to school. My mother eventually made a rule that I could only wear sweats twice a week. I looked like I was in mourning. Nothing had died but my self confidence. I lost any ambition to attempt to make myself feel or look prettier.
And then I got accepted into Howard. Both my mother and father went to Morris Brown and began to stress how much my outward appearance then mattered because I was not “the smart black girl in that one AP class” anymore, I was entering a realm with intelligent black women in every size, shape, color, and background. My world would flip. Upon entering Howard U, I lost roughly one or two pants sizes. As my waist started to morph and senior year started to come to a close I began watching Howard videos and looking up the hash tags and seeing exactly who I would be spending my college career gawking at.
These women were something I had never seen before, respected, beautiful intellectual, charming, and just well put together all around. At that moment I realized what I had been missing. I did not think I could be pretty and smart at the same time. I would pick one in my head and smart was always chosen over pretty.
I chose Howard. With choosing Howard that means finally choosing pretty and intelligent, smart and beautiful, I could do my makeup and attend class and no one would judge. As a black woman I felt better, my aura was more laid back, and for once I looked in the mirror more often just to see my changes, and I was finally content with what I saw looking back at me, a woman who chose to watch makeup tutorials and read Malcolm X speeches. I became in tune with my beauty as a black woman and I left that insecure intellectual back home with those baggy gray sweat pants and messy bun.
“Howard Girls Just Want to ‘Pop Out’” was a complete and utter disregard of who I am as a person. If you scroll through my actual tweets where I can type actual words rather than just the “media” tab on my twitter (@ThePoshLife_) you will see the inner most workings of my mind which very rarely include tidbits about my makeup or hair or short dresses or anything of that nature. If you know me, you know I actually hate popping out because I am a MESS in heels (SHOUT OUT TO MY HOWARD SISTERS THAT DO HOWARD HILLS IN HEELS, TEACH ME PLEASE!) My twitter is typically filled with my long winded rants about various social issues, political issues, environmental sustainability issues, and Kanye West lyrics. So no, as a Howard woman I do not “just want to pop out”.
I want to pop out and learn myself and learn others and write emotional poetry and be on the Forbes top 30 under 30 list and graduate and work for either Apple or Google and be a beautiful successful black woman in a technical field and be filled with magic and glittered finger tips and honey colored melanin.
Oh, and did I forgot… I wanna pop out too :)
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