Shonda Rimes and My Mother

She refuses to leave the house without curling her hair into waves more palatable for the white-washed suburbs in which I was raised. She piles on layers of makeup as though it will defend her from my father’s casual emotional abuse and psychological manipulation. My mother holds a Ph.D in Psychology, but it has not protected her from a society whose racism she never understood. She has never been able to name the forces ranked against her, because in our Jewish society, racism is difficult to properly name and deal with. Many of our Eastern European and Western European forebears must have intermarried with people from Africa, because we have so many members who look like my mother, obviously multiracial. Yet we as a community choose to label people like her “white,” which means the racism she encounters every day of her life goes unacknowledged. <a href="https://medium.com/fourth-wave/shonda-rimes-angry-black-woman-ba9aa81c29e">Click Here</a>