Lorna Simpson, She (1992), photograph, collection of Collection of Jack and Sandra Guthman.

Personal and political issues have an inexplicable hinge; to deny such a connection is to deny the centuries of conditioning that shape behaviors. It also becomes a mechanism that allows dormant behaviors and biases to proliferate. This is not me claiming moral authority—though I find, now more than ever, that I must disclaim this when speaking on anything that includes my opinion, I wonder if Jerry Saltz or Anderson Cooper have to do that too. This leads me to wonder why, and how often, my challenges result in me being labeled "angry," "difficult," or “superior,” echoing the dynamics named in Sister Citizen, Melissa Harris-Perry. I have read thinkers ranging from Hegel to Lorde, not because of academic requirements, but in the hope of understanding more deeply the complexities at play in my day-to-day life to avoid personal heartbreak. This is the plight of many marginalized people—some choose to disassociate as much as possible. In contrast, others choose to confront the labels, attitudes, and actions that serve only to differentiate, alienate, and other them. I cannot ascribe negativity or positivity to either camp because it is a profoundly personal experience of survival in a world where the conditions and agreements were not made with them in mind. The problem arises when these agreements are accepted as normal. Fallouts, breakups, and career deviations are natural, but the spirit in which communication devolves into racialized claims is where the hinge of the personal and political becomes evident. Some people aren’t openly any type of ist or phobic until you make them mad or have emotions that do not serve a feel-good sentiment. “The strong Black woman figure is an image so familiar that it can be invoked with little explanation. (…) We are ridiculed, vilified, and dismissed when we fail to meet expectations of unrelenting strength.” Now, this is not to claim that people who don’t like me are inherently racist, but if I had a penny for every time the angry Black woman archetype aligns with people’s grievances with me, I’d have more than one penny, and it’d be kind of weird, right? And it’s interesting because when I talk to other Black people about similar dynamics, any time we truly piss someone off, every stereotype comes bubbling to the surface. It can never be that I don’t desire to continue, and if I say that, I can’t just say that. There must be a flaw, not just in my behavior, but in my character, and the flaw is often a stigmatized flaw that exists somewhere in the collective imagination, attached evidently to my skin color. for me, survival is reading or writing these things out, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,” or even Joan Didion’s “The point of self-respect is the ability to be one's witness. The point of self-respect is that you can never really make yourself believe that someone else's version of you is true.” Nevertheless, all personal responsibility and dignity can unburden you from the isms or phobias in amorphous form, the prejudices are sinister and insidious, and is quiet as kept why must any marginalized identity have to walk so softly as not to provoke the dormant collective beast?