I was going to write about how I refuse to write about that family who uses black features and people as props in their tv show to perpetuate their own fame. Then, just thinking about it I got annoyed and tired. I need to tell you all about my week. Listen, I'm tired as hell. Besides not sleeping because, college. My spirit is tired.

Many of you know that I am a sociology major. But, I've taken most, if not all, black-focused courses that my small liberal arts offers. I fill those gaps by taking a course at Cornell in the Africana department. I say this to say, when I discuss this, I'm not just chatting, my degree is in sociology but just know it's an Africana degree.

I digress, now this week in my African American literature course we basically spent the week reading slave narratives. If you've ever read Harriet Jacobs then you know, my spirit is heavy and sad as hell. If you haven't read it, I honestly won't tell you to. Why?

The whole book is about the shit us woke people are distinctly aware of. The narrative discusses the rape, chains, brutality and even Jacobs living in a crawl space for seven years, but that's not what screwed my mind up. It was the discussion of the depth of degradation involved with the experience of being a slave. The physical brutality is one thing. But reading a narrative written by someone who lived it was being forced to see how her personage, far deeper than the welts on her back, was shaken. It messed me up.

Then I had to sit in a class of five and talk about it. Point blank, I told my professor I'm done with slave stories. I told her to make it required reading for her intro English classes. But this isn't an "I'm tired of slave stories" article, oh no, I'm not done.

For Black History Month, we've always done a movie series, one of the major things that we work at is making sure the movie is meaningful. I suggested "Selma," I had never seen it, and I thought now was as good a time as any. I started the movie, laughing and joking as the room slowly filled and sitting on the table in the front row.

Literally five minutes in, I'm considering getting some chips as on the screen little girls discuss baptism and messing up their hair as a group of them go down church steps and there is an explosion. I slid off the table with my hand over my mouth and sat down, trying to grasp that these were real events and these girls, this church, was bombed. Those little girls died. This is five minutes into the movie. Needless to say, amid police brutality and protests set in the '60s, I cried my eyes out for the next two hours.

Wait, there's more. "Black-ish," that ABC show, with Joan from Girlfriends as the mother and that gorgeous teen actress whose natural is always on fleek, got real as hell. Now, we know black comedic sitcoms of the 90's had those real ass moments. "Fresh Prince" had the episode with Carlton getting a gun when Will got shot, and then the one where Will's dad showed up and left, and the time they got arrested for being in a nice car, listen there are a lot of them. Then, "A Different World" had the time when Dwayne got arrested with those racist jocks, the Rodney King episode and just went there on a regular.

This week on "Black-ish," they did an episode on police brutality and the current racial climate and I was floored. They addressed the ongoing issue of trusting the justice system as a black person, and when to let children become aware of these issues as black kids are so often forced to grow up far too soon.

I was stressed, not because it was anything new but because at one point Anthony Anderson had a monologue about hope and President Obama and he made me look at my roommate and address something I hadn't brought up since he was elected seven years ago.

We were so excited and full of hope and joy on Inauguration Day. But do you know what our biggest fear was? Our fear was that all that hope would be snatched away. Like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King who they love to quote, they would kill him and our little bit of hope that things would change would die with him, just as it has in the past. Man, I'm tired and heavy. My shoulders are weighed down with this mess that the country is in, presidential election predictions and the weight of being woke. So this week I couldn't write about pop culture and how much it pisses me off because I'm tired.

We are facing the end the best Black History Month ever, thank you Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar, but never forget, all of our victories and joy is celebrated with a shadow and weight that some people, including those of us who are not woke will never understand.