Disrespecting the Black Women

WriteOnline
4 min readMar 20, 2020

The other day, I was out for lunch with a friend when I spotted a cool cardigan in a small retro clothes store. It looked like original artwork and might have been the costume from a blaxploitation movie. Think Tenafly starring James McEachin. It had a rounded oversized 1970s collar with dark brown calf-pelt panels stitched down the front. I liked it immediately.

Walking into the shop, I pulled it off the mannequin and tried it on. It looked good in the mirror. So, I turned to my friend and asked, what do you think?

She said, “I don’t like it.”

But why? — I asked. Is it too pimp? Too much animal skin on a black man?

The white woman browsing a few feet away looked up from a clothes rack and said, “It looks cool.”

Thanks, I reply. I think so.

She glanced behind at my friend for a moment, a beautiful black woman standing by the door, and then, the white woman turned to me again, “It fits you very well in the shoulders,” she said. “Do you mind?” But before I could say or do anything in response, she had reached out to stroke a patch of the animal skin on my chest. “It suits you,” she smiled.

I had no interest in this woman whatsoever beyond a bit of banter with a stranger in a shop. But my friend, on the other hand, was livid. I could see…

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WriteOnline

Often found in far-flung places reading Walter Mosley with a rucksack on his back.