The ad I saw on Groupon for an “Atlanta Colon Hydrotherapy Session” was a photo of a white woman making a heart on her stomach with her hands. This would not be my first colonic, so I was looking forward to the familiar feeling of becoming so full that I could pop, followed by the satisfying release that would leave me perfectly raw and empty. I imagined my insides as sparkling kitchen countertops—clear and scrubbed clean. A fresh start after a long stretch of eating junk.
When I arrived, I opened the door to the small office and was immediately made aware that it was a Black-owned business by the pictures of smiling Black women in stark-white lab coats on the walls. I cheerfully called out, “Hello?” but I was the only one there, so I sat in the waiting room on the zebra-print, stiletto shoe chair until, minutes later, the employee walked in.
“Sorry, I had to pick up a package,” was her only greeting.
There was no package in her hands.
The first thing I noticed was her size. Her frame occupied the entire doorway, and her stomach fell well below her waistline. I took note of her hair, as she hurriedly thundered past me and settled behind the window to check me in. Long blonde braids caught in the crack of her tights when she walked. Then, I noticed her color. Her skin was dark, about the same shade as mine, and her lips were darker. When she parted them to speak, a gold tooth glinted out.
Late, I thought to myself as she gestured toward the paperwork I would need to complete.
Off-center and unprofessional, I thought while answering the questions.
Doubt started to creep in. I looked closer at the photos on the wall.
Loud makeup.
Once I finished the paperwork and she walked me to my room, I immediately began scanning the space for faults. There was a white couch, and I noticed the leather peeling and that it was flecked with stains. In the corner, a tall white lamp with a base that looked like it had never been cleaned. When she left me alone to undress, I crouched to examine the wood floor.
Dusty. And what are these stains? Are they qualified for this?
I remembered my last colonic at a spacious office in Buckhead, where I laid comfortably on the machine, enveloped by jasmine and lavender scents. And the time in Riverdale when the petite white woman checked me in and let me pick the music for my room. I could have returned to either of those places, but I wanted the Groupon discount.
While I laid on the bed during my service, I continued to look around the room. From the certificate on the wall, I learned that a woman named La’Meishia was the owner. She earned her ACT (Association of Colon Hydrotherapy) certificate in 2018. It read: ‘Foundational Certificate.’ If I had had my phone and could concentrate on anything other than the urgent sensation in my stomach, I would have Googled what a ‘Foundational Certificate’ was.
Does that mean the bare minimum?
I noticed statues of Buddha in every place the eyes could look from that position except the ceiling.
She probably doesn’t know that using only the Buddha’s head without the rest of his body is forbidden in Buddhist culture. She probably not even Buddhist. There ain’t no African deities she can put on the walls? I’m sure we have symbols from our culture that promote peace. Black folks always running to Buddha when they want to sell wellness.
On and on, the chatter in my head went.
Ninety minutes later, my time was over, and the employee came in to turn off the water. “You okay?” she asked, with a big, gold-toothed smile.
“I’m great,” I smiled back weakly and thrust my thumb in the air.
She looked over at the tube running from the waste hole in my machine and into a collection container. “Oh, you filled my machine up. That means you’re full of shit.”
We both laughed.
When it was time for me to check out, she gave me parting instructions while watching a loud video from Twitter on her phone. She didn’t bother to turn the volume down or use headphones—one of my biggest pet peeves.
Ghetto.
Before I left, she asked if I wanted to sign up for more sessions.
I politely replied, “Maybe in a few months.” I remembered my time in Riverdale when I immediately signed up for another session.
She looked at me as though she was waiting for an explanation.
“I don’t want to overdo it. This is a really nice place, and I’ll definitely be back.” I faked a smile and left.
If it hadn’t been for reading the chapter on white guilt which examines the intersection between yoga and cultural appropriation in Jessamyn Stanley’s book, “Yoke,” while sitting in stiff pigeon pose on my yoga mat later that day, I would have forgotten the messy inner dialogue from my appointment, wiped it away with the rest of the shit.
Stanley says, “…white supremacy exists as a cultural and spiritual genocide. It’s filtered into each of us to the point where, now, we’re all racist. Racism only begets more racism, and it’s a problem we have to solve together.” I began turning this idea over in my mind and felt unease in more than just my joints. What she proposed felt too inclusive. Surely, white supremacy is something only accessible to white people.
Even in my unbelief, I allowed myself to explore the ways in which white supremacy might be playing out through me, and I wanted so badly to deny that it was, but I had acted it out so naturally just a few hours earlier. But Black people can’t be racist. It’s politically and economically impossible, right?
Enter Tessa Thompson’s character from the 2014 series, Dear White People to explain that “Black people can’t be racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racists since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.”
Thank you, Tessa! This is the logic I had used for years to happily ignore the elephant in the room. That circus was someone else’s problem. But on that day, I couldn’t help feeling like the clown.
Ever since thought leader, Imani Cohen, also known as The Hood Healer, said to her collective of followers, “There is a white man who lives in your head,” I have considered it and tried to become aware of how “he” affects many of the things that I do, don’t do, gravitate toward, and avoid. The omnipresent white gaze and phantom white approval have influenced more of my decisions and preferences than I’d like to admit.
I own a business in the financial service industry, and I realize that I change my entire persona during business hours. We play only classical music in the office; everyone must wear a suit, and we train incessantly on office etiquette. This is so that when our clients (who are Black) walk in and see our Black staff, they feel like they are in good, professional hands—no funny business. We even avoid labeling ourselves a “Black-owned business” online to keep a corporate image and not scare away customers. And for the most part, I truly believed that that’s how it should be. I am uncomfortable if a Black business in the service industry (outside of a club or restaurant) hasn’t mastered the corporate mask.
But me? Jamila, at home? I don’t listen to no damn classical music, and I’m ripping my suit and my mask off the moment I get in the car at the end of the day.
My work day is entirely an act. I plaster on a plastic smile and shuffle around stiffly as if I’m playing Black Business Barbie. If my home self met my work self, they wouldn’t even be friends. I wholly betray myself, and I’m turned off when other Black folks in the workplace don’t play the role and do the same.
Then there’s the other side of me.
The DJ.
She wears a pineapple-cut gold grill on her teeth, which she shows off with a long, acrylic-nailed pinky finger hooked into the corner of her mouth. She wears revealing outfits and daring hairstyles of colorful braids, bantu knots, and locs. She cranks the music up loud and puts on an ass-shaking show. And she loves to see people’s faces when they recognize: That’s a girl spinning! And she’s Black!
They can’t believe it. They lose their minds, and she watches them scramble for it on the dance floor. Then, once the music is off, I hang the DJ back in the closet and release the recording of the set she performed online. I assign the sets names like Ghetto Haus, Chocolate Tonic, or Afro-Techno, and I’ve even posed nearly nude for the covers. Thousands of folks click on them and listen. Selling Blackness for entertainment is natural. It’s alluring, and it’s been the easiest way for me to stand out in the ways that I want to in a white, male-dominated industry.
As I sat on my yoga mat getting my mind obliterated by Stanley’s discourse, I was disgusted at what was pouring out of me.
Who am I? I have to wake up and decide which mask to put on depending on what I’m doing that day? How many other Black businesses have I put under a microscope and compared to their white counterparts, then made decisions on whether to support them based on how closely they could come to offering me the vanilla experience I was used to?
Stanley says, “You can’t accept yourself without accepting that there are collisions at the intersections of your identity.” And, “Sooner or later, it’s gotta be time to clean house. Mucking out your house isn’t fun, but that’s okay.” I became embarrassed by the fakeness and prejudice I displayed during my colonic, but even more embarrassed by how long it took me to face myself.
Stanford psychologists Michael Rizzo and Steven Roberts published a study called The Psychology of American Racism, where they outline the seven main components of racism in the U.S. Out of the seven, they state, “Perhaps the most insidious component of American racism is passive racism; an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems exist.” While I was never at the point of denial of these systems, I was not going to sacrifice my comfort or any of my time to do anything about it— not even check my own attitudes and behaviors. According to Rizzo and Roberts, I was “…taking refuge in the comfort of being a societal bystander, fearing the ramifications of speaking out against racist institutions, and denying the full weight of the consequences of living in a racist society, which all passively reinforces racism.”
And here’s the real kicker: “White Americans who are passively racist are further advantaged by racism, whereas Americans of color who are passively racist continue to be disadvantaged by it.” I’d been participating to my own disadvantage by carrying racist attitudes toward other Black people. It is racism that allows me to perpetuate the double standard of ostracizing someone by calling them “ghetto” and, at the same moment, supporting Hip Hop, which was born out of the projects in the Bronx. It is racism that allows me to remain stagnant and silent in the face of a flawed system.
I had even convinced myself that I was protecting my community by not acknowledging it.
The way I sat so gingerly on the edge of that colonic machine, clutching my purse as if it could do me physical harm, harkens to “Karen’s” white fragility in Black spaces. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the service I received that day. To not patronize them again or avoid recommending them to others would graduate my behavior from prejudice to racist, as it would be directly disenfranchising their business based on the color of their skin.
Social media has put these injustices at the forefront of conversation as we globally witness more young Black people barred from school because of their hair and hear stories of micro and macro aggressions against Black people in all types of settings. One rebuttal I often hear in the dialogue surrounding Blackness and professionalism is that “there’s a time and place for everything.” While that may seem harmless, those comments don’t address the fact that we as a culture have not had the luxury or power to define that time and place for ourselves. We hold ourselves to a standard imposed on us so much so that now we’re the ones doing the imposing, and it’s exhausting to both police others and try to be sure that we’re “presenting” in the correct manner in public.
When do we get to just be?
At what point does code-switching cross the line into a normalized multiple personality disorder?
And how do we begin the work of “mucking out our own house?”
Jessamyn Stanley puts it succinctly in a 2021 interview with People Magazine about addressing white supremacy. “I realized I don’t have shit to say to anybody else that I don’t first need to say to myself—and that is the most important work of all.”
Fast forward two years. I’m living in New Orleans, Louisiana, a vibrant city where Black folks are the majority and I can watch my dollars circulate in our community more frequently than I have in any other city. My soon-to-be husband and I are on a detox kick, and I browse Groupon once again for colon hydrotherapy treatments. My last experience in Atlanta is far from my mind as I walk hand-in-hand with him to the door of a small brick building on an easy, clear morning. When we step inside, we’re greeted with an upbeat “Grand morning! Peace queen, peace king. Welcome in.” A caramel-colored woman in a patterned head wrap stands behind the desk and asks for our name. My charismatic beau chats her up while I, without missing a beat, almost like it’s a reflex, stand back so that I can have a good view of the furniture. The lighting. The pictures on the walls.
I hear that old, critical voice crank up like a needle dropped on a record and fill my mind with the dumbest observations. Oh, looks like they got that diffuser from Walmart. I tense, and I remember that woman who walked into her colonic two years ago, and how truly lonely, unhappy, and anxious she was all of the time—constantly bending and transforming, hoping to win the approval of everyone. I give her a slight nod to let her know that I see her, but also to remind her that she is safe and that there is no need to build these absurd barriers between herself and her people. She is worthy of kindness, respect, and friendship just the way she is, and so is the woman behind the desk. No performance necessary.
I step forward, away from her, and compliment the woman on her dope and colorful nails, and tell her that it’s been a while, and that I’m grateful to be there.
“Chapter VIII.” Dear White People, created by Justin Simien, season 1, episode 8, SisterLee Productions, 2014.
Pfeffer, Stephanie Emma. “Yoga Teacher Jessamyn Stanley Believes White Supremacy Has Polluted Yoga — and It’s Time to Talk About It.” People Magazine, 8 June 2021.
Roberts, Steven, and Michael Rizzo. “The Psychology of American Racism.” OSF Preprints, 1 June 2020. Web.
Stanley, Jessamyn, and Jessamyn Stanley. Yoke. Workman Publishing, 2021.
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