By Readers of The Sun Magazine — 2003
I live in a culture that’s only too eager to court my vanity.
Read on www.thesunmagazine.org
CLEAR ALL
For many of us, men with broad shoulders, narrow hips, taut muscles, and white skin — sun-kissed or pale under hot lights — became an ideal we couldn’t escape. We coveted images of these bodies like treasure, and they educated us in the rules of attraction.
A few months and many deaths ago, I woke up exhausted, again. Every morning, I felt like I was rebuilding myself from the ground up. Waking up was hard. Getting to my desk to write was hard. Taking care of my body was hard. Remembering the point of it all was hard.
Who owns your identity, and how can old ways of thinking be replaced?
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To the list of identities Black people in America have assumed or been asked to, we can now add, thanks to this presidential election season, “Obama’s people” and “the African Americans.”