{"id":11188,"date":"2015-11-17T16:33:14","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T16:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/dear-john-green-you-wrote-an-entire-essay\/"},"modified":"2015-11-17T16:33:14","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T16:33:14","slug":"dear-john-green-you-wrote-an-entire-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/dear-john-green-you-wrote-an-entire-essay\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Dear John (Green),
\nYou wrote an entire essay online about how groundbreaking it is
\nfor a teenage girl
\nto kiss a teenage boy in a tragic movie about being white and pretty and dying.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the only times I see girls like me
\ngetting kissed on screen is when they\u2019re being felt up by some old man in a tragic movie about being
\ncolored and poor and abused.<\/p>\n

Brown teenage girls do not get love stories like the movies,
\neven though we are taught straight from the womb that
\nwe are no more than curves and wild fight that still shines in our eyes after the white boy kisses us in secret,
\nafter the white boy does not want to be seen with us in front of his friends.
\nBecause we\u2019ll always bring drama and bitterness,
\nwith our loud voices
\nand attitude,
\nuntil we are finally broken
\non the night something is slipped into our drinks,
\nor we\u2019re evicted from our house,
\nor we lose the basketball game,
\nor a family member climbs on top of us,
\nand wraps the silver screen around our bodies like butcher\u2019s paper
\nfor the meat
\nthat we have been portrayed as
\nsince birth.<\/p>\n

No, we do not get Shakespeare quoted to us,
\ninstead we become the bitter narrative,
\nthe comfort to the suburban parent,
\nthank goodness their little girl is the one with the \u201cnice young man,\u201d
\nand not the one getting her teeth knocked out by the \u201cthug\u201d,
\nand why does Hollywood only
\nfind colored girls palatable when they are hardened by the world,
\nto the point where we see them as grown women?<\/p>\n

You want groundbreaking story telling?
\nWrite about a girl with brown skin
\nwho is so filled with joy,
\neach one of her breaths is like tasting cinnamon,
\nand she lightens even the darkest moments.
\nWrite about a hijabi girl,
\nwho is so empowered,
\nthat she can convince a generation of young women of every shade
\nthat we don\u2019t need to kiss a boy first
\nto feel in charge of ourselves.
\nWrite about a Latina girl,
\nwho is so in love with life that she tiptoes on the heads of her problems.<\/p>\n

Portray colored girls as soft,
\nas naive,
\nas quickly,
\nas teenage girls in love,
\nbecause we deserve a narrative as sweet
\nas diverse
\nand as powerful
\nas we are.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Dear John Green, or, How Hollywood Told My Me I Would Never Find Love Like the Movies (via <\/p>\n

lohazepoetry<\/a><\/p>\n

)<\/p>\n

Wowowowowow.
Beautiful.
Awesome.
YES.<\/p>\n

(via cynfinitebeyond<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Oh that last line<\/p>\n

(via i-kool-kat<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear John (Green), You wrote an entire essay online about how groundbreaking it is for a teenage girl to kiss a teenage boy in a tragic movie about being white and pretty and dying. Meanwhile, the only times I see girls like me getting kissed on screen is when they\u2019re being felt up by some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-2Us","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}