ABSTRACT
Home is the only place where there is no race. Awakening in the morning I do not look at the image of my face in the bathroom mirror and think a black woman is washing her face. Watching that face I think about acne, looking to see if there is a new pimple. I think about all the ways acne has followed me from my teen years into this menopausal time of life where I am told by doctors “acne worsens in women with age.” Acne has no race. It creeps upon the body indiscriminately—anyone can be caught. It steals beauty. Beauty is clear skin—no hurting sores, no ugly reminders that it is all illusory. Acne sufferers are constantly reminded that the body is not fixed and static. The body, like everything else, is subject to change. And yet we live in a culture that has made race a fixed reality, race that is always identified with the body. We live within the economy of the body as though there is no mind, as though the idea that is race is more a binding physical imprint. And yet it is when I am home, facing my body, that I am most free of race; it is there that my mind offers me liberation.
