NILF

By. Katanya Moore

Content Warning- Racial Slurs 

Title:  NILF

Text: NILF.  The. Nigger. I. Would. Like. To. F*ck.  

This first time I heard this term was almost a decade ago, at work, of all places.

This morning, as I sit in my bay window listening to the rain angrily beating against the earth, I feel the weight of that term all around me. 

I look at my nearly waist-length dreadlocks in the reflection of the window. I laugh, and at the same time, a tear breaks free and tumbles down my chocolate brown cheek. 

I laugh at the idea that there is piece of legislation floating around Congress to protect my right to wear my natural hair texture to work. But I cry because, at this place where racism and sexism and, often colorism, intersect,  there is a loneliness that I cannot explain.   

There is a lack of protection that I cannot articulate. My emotions - laughter and tears - reflect a duplicity that I am all too familiar with.

You see, to be both “brown” and “woman” is to exist void of any semblance of privilege.  Your loyalty to yourself is constantly being torn between your womanhood and your brownness. It is as if skin is fighting body; and body is fighting ancestry. 

Then, words like, NILF, thrown like casual daggers across boardrooms, remind you that you cannot be separated.  These words are burned into your memories, searing into your soul until, for better or worse, they become tattoos you cannot escape.  

But those words ... those words ... also challenge you hold your brownness and womanhood together. They demand that you remain whole. So, you do. And, perhaps, that is your magic. 

I move from the bay window and flip my dreadlocks from one side of my head to another - a habit I have, recently, picked up. The scent of honey blossom and nectar shifts to other side of my body, along with my hair. 

Just then, I begin to move away from the window, but the rain calls me back.  It is furiously knocking on the window trying to find its way inside. It is reminding me who I am.

So, I return to it.  I open the windows and invite the storm in. I am brown and I am woman.  So, the storm is where I thrive.

Katanya K. Moore is a securities attorney, consultant and author. She has worked in the securities industry for 20 years, served as Deputy Commissioner to a state regulator, Counsel to a federal regulator and has held various senior legal and compliance roles.  Katanya touts her first book, My Softer Side, as “an exercise in vulnerability.” “In an industry where my “otherness” enters the room before I do, I became afraid to express myself in anyway that put it more on display,” Katanya says. First, I had to write to overcome that fear. Now, I can write to empower women.