Alora Young presents|Savants&Syntax| Week of August 20, 2025

This Week’s Update

This week has been very busy! I applied to some Lit Mags and Fellowships, but I prefer not to say anything unless I win. I wrote three relatively short poems and worked on my Neurodiverity project. I’m considering doing a Livestream presentation of my curriculum because my presentation got cancelled. Let me know if you would be interested in something like that! This week in therapy, I’m working on my anxiety about money! Wish me luck! Recently, I discovered that in accounting, everything comes with a fact sheet. Personally, I think everything should come with a fact sheet. I’m planning to work on that at some point! 

My most exciting idea was for a dictionary of new words I have created to describe complex minority experiences! I think I would call it “Herminutical Justice: a compendium of new language for complex minority experiences.” I love making up words. I am a quarter of the way through my 100 rejections challenge, where I endeavor to get rejected 100 times in a year to take away the fear of being told no. It’s going pretty well so far!

In neurodivergence, there is a very cool acronym that summarizes what is necessary for a person with adhd to be motivated to do something: INCUP Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. That means if a task doesn’t contain one of these attributes, you’re probably not going to do it. But the thing about it is, the science says we actually tend to have our best ideas when we’re doing something OTHER than what it is we have to do. 

If you give your brain the pieces necessary and then go do something else, you are more likely to come up with a good idea than if you just sat and stared at the computer for an hour. According to a research paper in the jornal of Psychological Science, Participants in the study reported that about a FIFTH of the days most important ideas happened when they were mind-wandering and not actively working on the task at hand (Psychological Science, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2019). “These solutions were more likely to be associated with an aha moment and often overcoming an impasse of some sort,” Schooler said.

“Letting yourself daydream with a purpose, on a regular basis, might allow brain networks that don’t usually cooperate to literally form stronger connections,” Green said.

Another remarkable thing that they found was that for highly experienced musicians, the mechanisms used to generate creative ideas were largely automatic and unconscious, and they came from a different part of the brain,  the left posterior part. Less-experienced Musicians drew on more intentional and deliberate brain processes in the right frontal region to compose creative music (special issue of NeuroImage on the neuroscience of creativity (Vol. 213, 2020). “It seems there are at least two pathways to get from where you are to a creative idea,” he said.

And do you know what that means? That means there has to be a mechanism through which you transition from AN INTENTIONAL CREATIVE TO AN AUTOMATIC CREATIVE! I want to figure out what flips that switch. More updates to come in the following weeks. 

Word Of The Week: Phantasmagoria refers to a constantly shifting, complex succession of real or imagined figures, or a bizarre combination of images, as in a dream or a magic lantern show. The word originates from the Greek phantasma, meaning “image” or “phantom

Concept of the Week: Shock diamonds 

The purple-blue geometric shockwave left in the aftermath of a sonic boom from a supersonic jet engine 

HIGHLIGHT 

Bonnaroo had a dream and was wagging her tail in her sleep. It was adorable. 

Featured Poem

Antlia=air pump 

The Antilia is a poem form I created that is named after the constellation Antillia, Antillia meaning air pump in Latin. It is A poem in 7/8 time where a word from the next line is drawn up to be the last word of the preceding line. It’s an air pump. It draws the words up. It can be written and read forwards or backwards. If writing forwards, take the last word of the first line and make it the second word of the next line. The intention is to twist the word with every passing line and create a pulling sensation. It’s in trochaic heptameter, and because it’s supposed to emulate ⅞ time, there are three lines in the first stanza and two lines in the two preceding stanzas for a total of 7 lines with seven syllables in each line, to go with the 7 stars that make up the constellation Antillia. If you write 3 antillias, together they form one poem that adds up to 21 lines, which is the smallest fibonacci number and also a triangular number, and most importantly, the antillia was the 21st constellation named by Ptolemy in his original 88 constellations. 

Antilia 

Horizons fade like flashbacks 

Played back  collapse is Pop Rocks

We’d rock to Bright Side sound high

Too high to go home and live 

Watch live bands fail at first shows

Can’t show tattoos or hickeys 

More hickeys than horizons

She can’t love me 

She tells me she can’t love me 

Burns me up like red giants 

The ants beneath her footsteps 

She steps into her own fate 

I’m fated to long for her 

Watch her zoom to nebulas

Eyelashes wick away tears 

The Ecosphere

The ecosphere was heaven 

Given the world adjacent

Descent into the future

Nurture  tomorrow’s secret 

Concrete 30 feet below 

So low that we can’t find you 

When you give up on the dream

Featured Essay

Herminutical injustice and the different kinds of black experiences we don’t always talk about 

Let me start with, I am not claiming that colorism does not exist. It does. It is systemic and harmful. And colorism is a prejudice against darker-skinned black people. Very often, people say that conversations about colorism are not the place for talking about the harms lighter lighter-skinned black people face in society. And I agree. But I think it’s a conversation worth having. In its own space at its own time. I believe that in a society that is so plagued by isms and phobias, there is room for all of the black experiences we experience. And I don’t believe anyone’s black experience is less valid than anyone else’s. I think the language we use around this conversation is a major factor in the discourse and arguing we see in the black community.

 The lack of language to talk about two different black experiences is a hermeneutical injustice, which is a term that means the injustice that is done when society deprives you of language to discuss complex minority experiences, so you internalize the trauma and feel as though it’s a personal failing. This was a major plot point in the famous book 1984; the characters were subjected to “doublespeak” to such an extent that they didn’t have the language or conceptual grounding to communicate the ideas of rebellion.

I will repeat that the time and place for talking about the isolation lighter-skinned people face from their community is not during conversations about colorism and the harms that are done to darker-skinned people. I must note that as a lighter-skinned black person, I know my experience has been completely different than my brown sister and brother (both my parents are black, my family is split right down the middle, half brown, half high yellow)

It’s sort of a controversial topic, but my idea is that there needs to be a distinct separate word for the experience of lightskinned and mixed black people that is not the word colorism, because fundamentally colorism is discrimination against darker skinned black people, and by using the same word for both things we are actually upsetting everyone and helping no one. It’s like how there is a separate word for discrimination against bisexual people that is not just homophobia because it’s a completely distinct experience that necessitates its own language to describe it. Bi erasure is a major issue in the LGBTQ+ community, and I see some parallels to the way we force lighter-skinned or mixed people to “pick a side” or the notion that mixed people “aren’t really black,” the same way that bi people “aren’t really gay.” It’s a fundamental,l unchosen and unchangeable aspect of your identity that other people think they are more qualified to speak on than you because they are “more” of the thing than you. 

IT’S NOT COLORISM

And I know what you’re thinking, it’s exactly what my brown sister said to me when I raised this topic. “nigga are you talking about reverse colorism🤨?” 

And the answer is no! It’s not the same. The word is part of the issue! It conflates the two when they are actually a distinct set of experiences! The fact that people call it reverse colorism is actually creating more problems. Because fundamentally, colorism is discrimination against darker-skinned people! What lighter-skinned people experience is a separate set of experiences that are also valid but different! This is what I have been trying to explain to people. The fact that they use the same word is actively creating more problems. And I think it’s on purpose. Because if we’re fighting over whether or not something is colorism, we’re not talking about the actual problems! It’s not colorism! That’s the point! It’s a completely separate complex black experience! A nd it should have its own world, so people stop having this frankly annoying and stupid argument over semantics! We could just make a new word! It would be so easy! 

So I propose a new language. A word that encompasses the mixed, the albino, the tragic mulatto, and everything left in between. Pallorism. Based on the word Pallor, meaning the state of being pale. 

I think we need a new word because the term “reverse colorism” immediately draws a parallel to reverse racism, when the whole concept of reverse racism is that white people think they’re being discriminated against when literally nobody is doing anything but explaining why things are racist with what I am calling “pallorism,” it’s a fundamentally different and complex kind of social isolation and difficulty experienced by lighter-skinned black and mixed people. I know many light-skinned people who have no problem admitting to the realities of colorism, yet they still feel a deep internalized hatred for their skin color, not as a result of being too dark, but as a result of being both too dark and too light. It is an active sense of isolation from your community because it is treated as if you are inherently less black than your full blooded siblings for a random happenstance of genetics, and also the constant reminder when looking at your own face and body that you are the product of 10 generations of rape and abuse. 

I don’t think recognizing that this is a type of black experience is a bad thing. And I don’t think it’s less valuable than other black experiences, but when you’re dealing with systemic issues like racism and colorism, the two being lumped into one word literally just creates tension and leaves zero room for the other necessary conversation to happen. Another example is how if we didn’t have a word for how people are mistreated based on their hair texture, we would lump it into colorism, but it’s not actually colorism, it’s its own distinct thing, known as texturism, because you can be brown skinned with looser hair.

I don’t expect darker people to feel bad for lighter-skinned people, because there are absolutely so many ways in which being darker-skinned is more difficult and traumatic than being lighter-skinned. I just don’t think telling people their life experience is inherently false is a good thing to do. Being actively rejected by both of the communities you should belong to is harmful. And it’s a conversation that needs to be had. But it needs to be its OWN conversation.  We are just making everyone more upset by lumping them together. It’s an intersectionality problem at its core. 

TRAGIC MULLATOS

 I frequently felt like my skin color was a genetic defect. Because my mom would jokingly pat my hand and say, “Poor little baby ain’t got no melanin.”It’s just not as simple as the notion that being light-skinned has no negative impacts other than feeling bad about being light-skinned, like being white. I’m going to provide some historical context to expand on the complexity of this topic. First, we will talk about the tragic mulatto trope.

The tragic mullato is a character trope that appears in American literature and media. It’s a stereotype of a mixed-race, or lighter-skinned black person (a mulatto) who experiences severe depression and even suicidal tendencies because they feel like they can never completely fit into either of the two American societies, being whit or being black. 

There was a famed trope in 850 literature popularized by Lydia Maria Child in the short story The Quadroons, where light-skinned mixed women who were raised by their enslavers as if they were their legitimate white children are sold to another enslaver by their own families when the white members fall on hard times. Here, the mullato is abused, raped, dehumanized, and ultimately dies in disrepair and disgrace. 

Tragic mulattos die, that’s what they do. In every movie, book, or play, if there is a light-skinned black woman, they meets a heinous end. Mulatto women in real-world slavery were often singled out for sexual slavery because their more European features made them appealing to intended rapists/ enslavers. 

The fundamental feature of the tragic mulatto is self-hatred. Whether they hated black people for not accepting her, hated the blackness in herself, or envied darker black people and hated her distance from blackness, it ended the same. A deep, unyielding self-loathing 

I will admit I have struggled with such self-loathing in my own life. From a young age, I was enamored with the beauty of brown skin; it was everything I wanted to be, all that they embodied, a connection to the ancestors, the glow under sunlight, hair that defies gravity, defies physics, and I wanted it. I wanted it so bad, but it was something I could never attain by fault of my DNA. For years, my mom, in a joking manner, would pat my hand and go, “Poor little baby ain’t got no melanin!” and that really got under my skin. Because it was a reminder of what I was, and more importantly, what I wasn’t.I mean, how would you feel if your skin were living proof of the rapes of your foremothers? 

In the film, The Imitation of Life, Delilah, a brown skinned cook, has a daughter named people, who was white passing. During the film, she abandons her mother to go live as a white woman in the city. This betrayal is so hard for Delilah that she dies of a broken heart, and in the final moments of the movie, Peola falls over her mother’s casket and wails, “I killed my mother!” This is a good twist on the trope in that it demonstrates that for the tragic mulatto, they are often not the only one hurt in the crossfire of their unyielding identity crisis. The impact of the movie was so major that people took to using the name Peola as a slur for light-skinned black women! 

Mary in Sinners is a tragic mulatto. She lives in white society, not by a desire to be white but by a sense of obligation to use her white passing to get a leg up in society. She is deeply in love with Stack and attends the black party even though her being there puts everyone in danger. As an octoroon, she grew up in the black community, was raised by black people, and they even called her family, but still, people who didn’t know her looked shocked or upset to see her there. She was called by her black side, she was in love with a black man, but she was never fully accepted or belonging. She is the one to go out to talk to the white vampires because she thinks she can use her looks to help her community make the money they need. She tries to toe the line. To play both sides, and for this, she is killed and turned into a vampire. And in the end, when she and Stack escape during the final battle, she only does this because she doesn’t feel the unity with either group enough to die fighting for them. So she and her beloved run away and get to be together in the end as vampires. She spends her entire life in search of belonging and only finds it in love, and she gets to live to see a day when her love is not perceived as criminal.

 PEOPLE WITH ALBANISM

People with albinism for generations have been considered “cursed.” albino babies were, at one time, placed at the gates of a cattle barn after birth, and they were, in most cases, trampled to death by the stampeding cows. Only if an albino baby somehow survived this would they be allowed to live. Albino people are treated as side show oddities, boggled, mocked, and laughed at. In a family of entirely dark skinned people, an albino person has their blackness questioned for a happenstance of genetics. Nobody accepts that you’re related to your own biological family. They are forced to ask the question, “Is a black woman still a black woman with no melanin?” They are shunned. They are seen as cursed or diseased. There are so many albino villains in the media, the davinchi Code, The Matrix Reloaded, The Princess Bride. Our society rejects anyone who brings into question the strict and binary system of racial categorization we live in. If an African albino person, who could be 100% African, is questioned on their blackness based on the color of their skin, one can come to understand how we might treat people who can’t prove their blackness to such an extent. 

Light-skinned children may face bullying or social ostracization. Light skinned people are often made to feel like they are not appropriate or true members of the black community because they are lighter where brown skinned people are rarely questioned about their blackness unless they exhibit other traits that black people consider “ acting white” like liking anime or alternative music, speaking standard american english, being suburban, or being a “nerd” or “weird” in any way. Many of these even darker skinned black people who are penalized by their community for being “oreos” are actually neurodivergent, and the black community has a big problem with ableism that we don’t have time to get into today, but what im saying is that, the mockery and ostracization that is done to lighter skinned people has negative impacts on all black people. Black people were actively and purposely divided by slavers and white society as an intentional act of division. By sewing seeds of discontent between black people and white people, they were able to keep us fighting amongst ourselves instead of fighting against the real man behind the curtain, systemic racism. 

It’s just not as simple as everyone makes it out to be. I just feel like it’s a conversation worth having. I feel like every human experience and all of its complexities deserve to be explored and acknowledged. It’s fundamentally an intersectionality question; it’s why misogyny needed a word. Light-skinned men face a kind of demasculinization. Based on the assumption that their lighter skin makes them feminine. There are a lot of jokes made about light-skinned men being pretty boys or dramatic, which is not as serious as the treatment of darker-skinned men in regard to white society, but in many circumstances, liking a skin tone to a type of behavior is always problematic.

WHEN THE OUTSIDE AND THE INSIDE DON’T MATCH

Some of our most famous civil rights activists were lighter-skinned black people, from malcomX to Thurgood Marshall, to Rosa Parks. And I believe this is a symptom of lighter-skinned black people being more ‘palatable’ to the media and thus giving them greater platforms for public demonstration 

But as it was said in a TikTok I watched, “ nobody is more pro black than a light-skinned black person who is tired of people thinking that they’re mixed” 

My grandmother was the black sheep of her family for many reasons, one being she was lighter skinned, and because of this she had an extremely difficult time making friends with everyone, even her own sisters, and in this story we see an example of colorism, her aunt Jewel, a light skinned woman, would bring yvonne lavish gifts and wouldn’t get her brown sisters anything. Jewel was famously “color struck,” as they called it back in those days. And this was a harm done to her sisters by colorism 

I was obsessed with Amandla Steinberg because she looked like me. I felt seen and recognized, and it was the representation I needed at that time. Hollywood has a problem with only casting biracial or lighter-skinned actresses to play black women, and fundamentally, that is colorist and needs to change. I also think that seeing those girls on screen was beneficial to me. It was a recognition from a world that hated me. I hope brown skinned black girls can experience that same thing. I like Zendaya’s method of taking roles that were intended for white women and existing as a black woman in the role, in the face of racism in Hollywood, but I think that all shades of black have a place in media and America. 

THE HARD PART

I will admit, I hate the color of my skin. Not because I want to be white, but because I want to be as black as I feel inside. I want to feel like I belong in my community, I don’t want to feel out of place, and look out of place in pictures, and hate the parts of who I am that divide me from the community I would die for. I recognize that I come from a privileged position. I have seen my sister be treated differently by everyone around us, be called ugly, be mistreated, and I will do everything in my power to fight against the institutions of colorism until one day my descendants will be free to be black because that is their culture, and their community, and their blood. And nobody will tell them if they are or aren’t black when they know they are. 

Have you ever been told by your own people you’re not black enough to experience racism when you have two black parents, when you have sixteen black great-great-grandparents, then you don’t know, you don’t know how devastating it is. You don’t know how much it hurts. You don’t know how much it fucks with your sense of self. It’s lonely. My hypothesis for what causes so many “tragic mulattos” to kill themselves every year is the loneliness. Humans are built for communities. Everyone is supposed to find their community somewhere. In the earliest eras of human history, if you didn’t fit in with the group, you went out in the cold, and you died. Some things change. But the anxieties don’t. I have a (3/4) white boyfriend. And honestly, I’m so fucking scared. I’m scared that I fell in love on accident and now my children will never belong anywhere. Having two black parents was the thing I clung to to prove that I should belong in black spaces. And I can’t give them that and be with the love of my life. My boyfriend told me he sometimes felt like I hated that he was white, but that’s not true. It makes me scared because if my children are any lighter than me, then someone will tell them how much of a shame it is that they don’t have any melanin. 

That someone whom I love will be disappointed in them for the color of their skin. That they will feel they don’t have a right to their ancestors. That they will feel their lack of melanin is proof that their culture is not theirs. I come from a long line of griots. And with the gift of the word comes the voices of the ancestors. They don’t guide you astray, but they implore you to remember, because to be forgotten is to die a final death. And I fear that one day, one of my descendants will inherit my gift, and they won’t recognize their ancestors, and when you don’t recognize them, they are just scary voices. When you don’t recognize them, they haunt you. I am scared that my children will be haunted by a part of themselves they have grown to hate. That they will view it as the last bastion of an identity they feel they don’t have the right to take part in.That they will forget me and all the stories I spent my life telling. I’m afraid that my community will push them away, and the white community will push them away, and they will live the tragic lives that such a sense of isolation predestines them for. 

WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS!

I feel like, as a culturally aware society, we should be past the “ oppression olympics” as it is called. It’s not right to tell people their struggles are not real or nonexistent because other people experience worse issues. And soon I will write a paper on colorism and all of its harms because I see it, and I believe in it, and I hate it. I strive to be actively anticolorist in every undertaking I engage in. I just can’t stop thinking about this. And I know I’m gonna get absolutely flamed on the internet, and people are going to do to me exactly what I discuss in this paper because people on the internet are often mean and have very little going on. But I don’t think I should let that stop me? As I have recently learned in therapy, your truth is your truth, your experience is your experience, and nobody gets to tell you what you have lived through is false. 

Yes light light-skinned people have an easier time in the system that perpetuates all the isms, but they are still minoritized people. They are still experiencing problems that originate from this racist system. And they are experiencing different problems that other people would not know about. And on this blog, in my own little corner of the internet, I just want to let them know I see them. And their pain is no less legitimate than anyone else’s pain. And the best thing to do in a world that hates ALL OF US. is to lend to the fellowship your Bow, or your axe, and fight the good fight in the hopes that all of these problems can be solved. 

What’s Coming Next

T minus 3 months until I submit my next book, “June and Maya’s Almanac,” to my agent! 

I will be speaking at the Southern Festival of Books on October 19th! 

Closing Note

Thank you for reading and signing up for my newsletter. I could not have imagined so many of you would actually subscribe. I even got some paid subscribers! (shout out to my aunts and uncles and momma J)

If you enjoyed this, feel free to leave a comment or message me. You all mean so much to me, and I’m really glad I did the impulsive thing and just jumped right in to creating with abandon. That is my job after all. 

May the spirit of Octavia Butler be with you, 

Lomeister, out. 

 ~Alora Young