An inside look, just for A+ members, from Autostraddle’s editors on the process, struggles, and surprises of working on what you’re reading on the site. We learn so much from this work before it ever even makes it to your eyes; now you can, too!

This is my third year editing Autostraddle’s Black History Month series. I began planning my first one just a few weeks after I started full-time as an Associate Editor. I was looking back on that time this morning, hoping to be “inspired” about what to say today, and found this:

“It’s my favorite holiday. Maybe it sounds strange to you to call Black History Month a holiday. After all, there’s no Santa Claus coming down the tree or an Easter Bunny bringing baskets. No ‘day after’ sale on candy. No rainbow colored balloon arches like the kind that adorn gayborhoods every June. In fact, Black History Month is probably thought of as stodgy – tired black and white photographs of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson.

Here’s the secret about Black History Month: few people know how to celebrate the way Black people know how to celebrate. And we celebrate this month FOR US. We don’t look towards white eyes or ask for white approval. The morning of February 1st social media streams are filled with gifs and memes, well-timed quotes and inside jokes, words of affirmation. Black churches host banquets. Community centers put up billboards draped in red, black, and green. There are talent shows and pageants where little black girls are forced on stage in itchy thick white cotton tights to recite Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman’ and ‘Still I Rise.’ Our littlest ones fumble through the words of the Black national anthem, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ There are dozens of these traditions happening all across the country this month, and I love each and every one of them. At the 2017 Emmys, Issa Rae told a reporter, ‘I’m Rooting For Everybody Black’ and even though it wasn’t technically Black History Month when she said it – nothing better captures the attitude.”

It’s still true, you know. I am unapologetically, over the moon, absolutely just cheesy cornball, would probably make you roll your eyes levels, proud of being Black, especially during this — the 28 Blackest days of the year. And still, I found this year’s Black History Month hard to plan. Hard to even be excited for.

I’m sure part of that is pandemic exhaustion. Pandemic exhaustion wears more heavily when your Black. When your people are in every way bearing the brunt of the virus — between two and three as likely to contract it, overrepresented in the essential work industries that put them in daily direct contact with it and in the resulting unemployment caused by its economic effects, conversely underrepresented by nearly every measure of who has access to a vaccine.

I went into lockdown on March 11th, 2020. My father called on Sunday March 22nd to tell me that he was being hospitalized with difficulty breathing. He was put on a ventilator the next day. He stayed on that ventilator for nearly two months. It was 102 days — July 2nd — before he walked back out of that hospital. There’s an entire Spring he won’t remember ever again, vanished from his life. An entire Spring that I spent traumatized. A Spring of learning medical terms and keeping haphazard notes in a small yellow notebook, of waking up nauseous every day and unsure how to steady my next steps, of doctor’s phone calls on top of doctors phone calls and memorizing the name of every single nurse — just hoping that if they remembered my name in return then maybe, just maybe they would treat my father like he belonged to somebody. The surgeries when I couldn’t be there.

I don’t know why I’m sharing that now. I never have before.

I think it’s because recently a (white) friend of mine was talking about the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and how she felt “reinvigorated, like a world of change and ‘people power’ was finally really possible” and all I felt was worn out and exhausted. I’ve loved Black people since before I knew the words or how to spell them. I’ve been in the streets for our lives long before last summer. Where others feel inspired, I’m left wondering what took so damn long. I’m left frustrated knowing that this, too, won’t be change.

Maybe I needed you to know all this so you could understand what drew me to this year’s Black History Month theme. When I first read Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham’s Black Futures in December, I was spent out of possibility. I also didn’t have the energy to keep circling the past. But within their gorgeous multimedia art book (which you should absolutely cop if you haven’t yet, consider it my Official Editor’s Recommendation) was a simple premise: “What does it mean to be Black and alive?” Starting from that inquiry, they assembled an archive of the digital landscape and communities built and the art found in the living life and breath of Black people right now. It was small, just asking us to look around and see the magic in our every day — and that was my restoration.

I wrote out a prompt. I sent Sarah (the graphics genius and design director behind all the beauty you’ve witnessed this month) an embarrassingly rough looking mood board. Then miraculously, carved deep into the late nights around the ongoing Autostraddle fundraiser that’s eating our days, the two of us got to work.

My first attempt at a mood board. Ever.

Sarah turned my mood board into this gorgeous collection of calls for work.

I’ve loved every essay we’ve published this month. They easily represent my best editing work at Autostraddle, and one of the truest distillations of a vision I’ve had go from concept to completion.

It’s a small party of sorts, carefully curated, and I’m ecstatically proud (what did I tell you about being a cornball) of each and every one. I’m so grateful to Lazarus Letcher and shea martin for the meditations they provided on gender, of politics, of finding yourself in the past — or letting go of what’s there once you do. Without knowing each other, their pieces find a harmony, each picking up where the other let off. And if that’s the case, then Khalisa Rae Thompson turned up the heat! Once you read the line “When I was twelve or thirteen my mother caught me and a female friend dangling our vaginas” — you really can’t come back from that, in the best kind of ways. And today here I am, rounding out our group with some memories of my Aunt Lorna, who taught me everything about telling Black stories that I know.

There’s two days left in Black History Month. Make the most of it. Tell Black Stories. Encourage Black Storytellers. Don’t stop in February. Tell them every other day of the year, too.

Addendum

Thank You to Sarah Sarwar for being a friend, and for putting up with my terrible graphic design skills with a smile, patience, and flourish. Everything she makes is a treasure — and here’s some behind the scenes of what that looks like in practice:

Carmen’s Notes:

“I love how she looks with the starry night, I love the richness of the purple flowers. I love how it looks like a collage and multi-media art. I just LOVE  it. I can’t stop gushing… I’m also wondering what it looks like with the purple pushed back to the edges more so it is crowding her less? I made a very terrible mock up of what I mean.”

Sarah’s Final Version:

“I can DEF try this!!! great idea!”

Carmen’s Notes:

“shea (the author) has a lot of really great photos of themself on social media, I’m wondering if incorporating one or two of them will help fill the space and also take the singular focus off of Kamala? Don’t laugh at my ‘art’ LMAO but — does this make sense to you?”

Sarah’s Final Version:

“It does!!! Also I think we could add in images of Sojourner Truth? Also what if the pearls cover Kamala’s eyes? seems more aligned with what the essay conveys.”

✨

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!