My Piece on their Piece called "To the Girl in My Jazz Class"

This week the theme I picked the idea of trying to take away one's "blackness" to be accepted. I found this video titled: Aziza Barnes and Safia Elhillo- "To The Girl In My Jazz Class". This video is from a YouTube channel that I have grown to love by the group called The Strivers Row. The Strivers Row is a group of spoken word artists that originally hailed from Yale that travel, perform, make, and post videos of their different performances in different places. This video was just posted September 4, 2015 so it is fairly new and I have only watched it once but it spoke to me personally that is why I picked it, This piece talks about their inability to understand why people claim to be color blind but constantly make a big deal when black people put their name on something and "make it black", it also talks about how people look down on things if they are considered "black art". The idea of making oneself "less black" so their art can be accepted is also discussed. I found this interesting because of the truth behind it and because of how much I can relate to it as an artist. As a spoken word artist, I write a lot of things about race and experiences as a black girl/person so my poems could be labeled as "black art" and talked about as such. When topics such as race are talked about a lot of the time they try to censor them or only show them to certain audiences so the line "why are you trying to wash all the color out of this story" really stuck with me. That line basically means that people are trying to take all of the black aspects out of black art that they had no part in making to make it more comfortable for them so they can accept it. I really appreciate and respect this poem a lot and it has motivated me to continue to write about the things I write about.