Are Black People Allowed to Be Curious?
Curiosity has always been a way of life for me.
As a kid, I was that child. The one who asked too many questions, who didn’t mind getting a whooping or being on punishment if it meant finding out why. I wanted to know more about my world. I wanted to know more about boys, the streets, and people. Why they did what they did, thought what they thought. I wanted to know more, period.
I grew up in a house where we talked. A lot, actually, but not about everything. There were certain topics that were off-limits. Things that were considered taboo.
So, like many of us, I had to go out and seek the answers for myself.
And I think that innate curiosity shaped everything about the woman I became — the journalist, the storyteller, the community builder, the spiritual seeker.
We weren’t really a church family.
We went to Catholic school and sometimes to Catholic church. Mostly for that Catholic discount (you know what I’m talking about), but religion wasn’t central to our home. Still, something in me wanted to know more about God.
At sixteen, I started going to church on my own.
My sister recently reminded me that I used to hand out church pamphlets at my high school
That same year, I cut off all my hair and went natural — long before it was trending.
I didn’t do it because anyone told me to. I did it because I was curious about what it would feel like to meet myself without the mask of conformity.
Looking back, I realize that curiosity has always been my compass.
It’s what led me to explore other people’s experiences and put myself in their shoes. It’s what made me fascinated with artists and thinkers like India Arie.
It was what made me read all the books Toni Morrison, even Beloved 😣which was not meant for 14 year old minds, as a teenager.
It’s why Malcolm X back then, and today is my hero.
They were all people who refused to accept the world as it was handed to them. They were fueled by curiosity, by the desire to create new worlds within systems that never gave them permission to expand their minds.
