Lisa Maxine Writes

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly being asked to make other people more comfortable with truths that have never been comfortable for you to live through. Not because you are unclear. Not because the harm is imagined. Not because there is no evidence. But because your honesty unsettles people who have spent most of their lives protected from needing to confront what you are describing directly. As a mental health counselor and a Black woman, I find this...

There is a quiet discomfort that enters rooms the moment someone begins to outgrow the role people assigned to them. Not fail. Not collapse. Just outgrow. People will clap for your survival story because survival keeps you relatable. They will support your healing as long as your healing remains aesthetically pleasing and non-threatening. They will encourage your growth until your growth begins to challenge the version of themselves they’ve avoided confronting. That’s the part people rarely...

Picture yourself seated in a graduate school classroom listening to a professor at the predominantly white institution proclaim, “Poor black children don’t have books in their homes.” As if I were being pranked, I immediately scanned the room for allies / co-conspirators who would aid me in correcting his ignorance. There was only one person, one Latina sista in the struggle who volunteered to join me in an attempt to address his verbal assault on Black families as my remaining classmates, a...