"As long as it's not rap."
Then there's the awkwardness of people trying to look at me or my husband from the sides of their eyes. Trying to gauge our reactions without us noticing. But of course we notice. We see the false preoccupation with lint on shirts or pants or hair. We feel every scrape and creak of the chairs we sit in. All around us bodies make to go places, but are confined, going nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
We are black and so we must like rap. Are we offended? Not in the way one would assume. Rap is not my favorite genre of music, for one. Yet when people sneer at the thought of it, I become a target of that disdain, whether or not that was the intention (and sometimes that is the intention). At that point, I wonder what else this person is intolerant of. What else is presumed of me that they'd rather not exist?
