The Potty Mouth Granny

  • Wisdom and Age Ain’t the Same Thing

    Perhaps one of the reasons some Black women are leery of receiving advice from older women is because some of these Crones are out of order. Age does not automatically bring wisdom, emotional maturity, accountability, or honesty. Some older women are still deeply invested in patriarchy, bitterness, competition, respectability politics, and suffering in silence. Some…

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  • The Policing of Black Female Sexuality: A History Written on Our Bodies

    There is something deeply exhausting about living in a world where your body is never simply your own. For Black women, sexuality has never been allowed to exist in peace. It has been surveilled, dissected, judged, legislated, mocked, feared, exploited, and weaponized for centuries. Black female sexuality exists under a microscope built by racism, patriarchy,…

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  • Whole, With or Without Him

    I’ve always joked that I’m the youngest only child—caught in that strange little space where the age and gender gap between me and my siblings made me feel like I was raised solo. But that strange little space turned out to be a gift. It taught me how to enjoy my own company. I had…

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  • We Were Never Meant to Be Silent: A Love Letter to Black Feminist Thought

    Let me tell you something plain—Black feminist theory didn’t come out of a classroom. It came out of kitchens with cracked linoleum floors. Out of bus stops in the cold. Out of women raising babies with one hand and holding themselves together with the other. It came from us. Before anybody gave it a name,…

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  • Ain’t No Apology in My Story

    I can’t speak for all Black women, but I know this much—I don’t owe a motherfucker an explanation about anything in my life. I was a mother to two children by the age of twenty-one. I received welfare assistance. I didn’t get my GED until I was twenty-seven. I know what it means to start…

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  • The Politics of My Hair

    We as Black women have a real complicated relationship with our hair. The texture and length of our hair have long been tied to ideas of beauty and social acceptance — especially when it’s judged as the “right” texture and the “right” length. Too often, those standards were never designed with us in mind, yet…

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  • Fabulous Me

    In May, it will be twenty years since I graduated from college. Me—the high school dropout they quietly counted out. Me—the mother of two children by the age of twenty-one. Me—the welfare recipient society loves to reduce to a statistic. And also me—the college student who walked across that stage with a 3.8 GPA, a…

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  • What is Feminism?

    Feminism is the radical, sometimes inconvenient idea that women are fully human—with minds of their own, bodies that belong to them, and lives that are not side quests in someone else’s story. Feminism is about autonomy. At its core, feminism says women deserve political, economic, social, and personal equality. Not favors. Not protection. Not pedestal…

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  • When Blood Recognizes Itself

    Lately, I’ve been seeing the faces of my ancestors in strangers. A jawline in the grocery store line. A pair of eyes on the bus that feel like déjà vu with a pulse. A woman laughing two tables over, her mouth moving exactly like my mother’s used to when joy caught her off guard. It’s…

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  • What Is Black?

    “Black” is not a single thing. It’s a constellation. Black is a people, first—descendants of Africa scattered by history’s rough hands: trade winds, chains, migrations, love, survival. Not a monolith, not a hive mind. Nigerians, Haitians, Gullah Geechee, Afro-Brazilian, Black American, Somali, Jamaican—different tongues, foods, rhythms, gods, jokes. Same sun in the bones, different stories…

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