100 Quotes by Jenna Wortham

There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

I've endured humiliating experiences trying to get a cab in the various cities I've visited and lived in. Available taxis - as indicated by their roof lights - locked their doors with embarrassingly loud clicks as I approached. Or they've just ignored my hail altogether.

There's a lot of paranormal activity in my family. Whether it is more than most other families is hard to say, but we seem to have more than most.

Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes a ghost isn't always a ghost. Sometimes, telling a ghost story is a way to talk about something else present in the air, taking up space beside you. It can also be a manifestation of intuition, or something you've known in your bones but haven't yet been able to accept.

The first ghost story I ever heard was from my mother.

When I visited my family in Virginia, I tracked down my seventh-grade best friend and sat in TGI Fridays near a mall for hours, laughing while her daughter took insane-looking selfies on my phone.

Falling head over heels in love with women was a habit I thought I'd thoroughly grown out of in middle school, when a group of about five girls and I color-coordinated our outfits and spent weekends and even some weeknights sprawled out in each others bedrooms.

Once, at Thanksgiving, a neighbor wandered in while my cousin Lisa worked on a turkey, shearing meat off its frame and sliding the steaming slices onto a big flowered plate. 'Hey, that's the man's job,' she yelped, in between slurps of her Big Gulp. No one even paused to acknowledge the comment; everyone just laughed and laughed.

I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember - which, in mixed-people speak, means biracial.