... black cat nine lives short days looong night living on the edge not afraid to die...

I recently got a cat... she's cute, sort of standoffish, only slightly needy and possibly an insomniac. This isn't really relevant to this point, it's just that I could describe myself in the same way... This might be a match made in heaven.

Anyway... when I was looking for a cat I really only had one criteria. I wanted her to be black. I've wanted a black cat since I was little. My mother's birthday is on Halloween and she raised me to believe that all black cats are good luck for us (defying conventional wisdom). As a child this made sense to me but now... not so much. How the hell would a black cat be good luck for me? I wasn't born on halloween! Whatever... it doesn't really matter because all I learned from this was that black cats are cool!

So when I went looking to adopt a cat, this was the only thing I wanted. I ended up falling in love with Kat, the aforementioned cat (hehehe). When describing her I always mentioned her personality and then that she was black, with a bit of white on her belly. Actually, I describe her as "black, with a little bit of white that she can hide. like me!" I thought it was just a funny throw away comment until we were bringing Kat home yesterday and my friend said something about me even racing my animals.

I laughed because it was funny, but then I thought about it and I realized that... yea, it's totally true. So what can we learn from this kids?

1. I, and presumably others, look at the WORLD in a raced way. Sometimes we focus on how we race people, but what about how that translates in other ways? Now my very literal racing of my pet is one thing, but it happens in other, more significant, ways. For instance, all of my cousins wanted to own pitbulls and rots because they identified these animals as "acceptable" dog breeds for black men. (Cats were not an option.) Also my grandfather, and myself, tended to equate weird things with whiteness. For instance, whenever we saw little white kids throwing a full-on tantrum in public, cursing and sometimes hitting their moms, we would look at them and say "white people." And if you know me then you know that I still do this, so...


2. How does our racing of the world shut us off from having new experiences? Strangely enough, while in Target picking up cat stuff, my friend and I ran into a Black woman with cats. One of her first comments was that Black people generally don't like cats and she was shocked to see two Black people with them as pets. This is something that I've experienced a lot and it goes well beyond people's allergies (or faux allergies in my mom's case!). Most Black people I know just really don't like cats. I've also heard this about pets in general. I know a lot of Black people, older, who don't like pets at all. Well that's not true. Actually a lot of older Black people just don't understand the reason for keeping a pet. Now I'm not saying that everyone should like the felines, I'm just saying that why is that such an identifiable trend? What is the connection here between race and pets?


3. Is this a form of racism? I haven't thought this one out so much, but there does seem to be something about racing the world in these subtle ways that is inherently racist? or racialist? or wrong? Hell I don't know, I'm just thinking outloud here.

This has all been an exercise in attempting to think about race in new ways. And whatever the outcome to this whole situation I've got a cat... named Kat! She seems pretty awesome and she's definitely pretty as hell.

She's black. I'm black. We live in a Black world. Well at least she does. When I step out of the apartment things change drastically...