Long Weekends While Black & Precariously Middle Class

If you browsed my Instagram feed around Memorial Day weekend 2019, you’ll see lovely photos of incredible hotel views and Los Angeles brunch life. Beautiful black kids, urban and hipster-dressed and blissfully unaware of their privilege. It was a long, picturesque weekend in the life of a black and precariously middle-class family.

I was sitting in a Westin in Downtown LA, clothed in nothing more than the hotel’s signature white robe, enjoying an epic view from the 30th floor. At the same time, my kids played on their devices in the living room, and my husband watched Jeopardy (I kid you not). I was struck with a sense of surreality. My black, immigrant, and “first GEN” everything self, who stood in lines for free food and toys as a child. Who clearly remembers the first time her parents took her out to eat at a “restaurant” (McDonald’s) in the 4th grade could not compute.

Driving up to the hotel valet, with its outrageous $50/night charge, I felt a pang of guilt and self-doubt. Should I splurge on one night in a hotel convenient to the conference my husband is attending, or should I have sent my mother an extra $200, or should I have given more money to my homegirl’s non-profit that just helped fund the release of another Hispanic family in inhumane detention at the border. Can I really afford this, and if I can, should I really spend this money when we have so many things that regularly require us to stay liquid? I said as such to my husband, and he noted that the hotel was already booked and paid for, so relax.

Life is not so simple when you are black. It is even less simple when you are black and poor. It is very strange and precarious when you are black and middle class in America. A country built on the free labor of your ancestors. A country with a dwindling middle class that a few of us still cling to. A more modern serfdom for black folk relegated to communities where their precious plots of land will not properly appreciate in value until colonized by gentrifiers opposed to their traditions and sounds.

These are the truths, the struggles, the examples of continuous systemic inequality that make something as simple as booking a fine hotel room and paying for overpriced and nicely ambianced breakfast food seem like both a blessing and a mistake the “universe” is waiting to correct.

I hope you enjoy your long weekends; I will admit that I sometimes struggle to enjoy mine.