A small step against climate change by widening a bridge in Lower Austria

Perchtoldsdorf Tower

Perchtoldsdorf is an old town in the Austrian province of Lower Austria, characterized by a millennium of wine making and trying to keep invaders from Turkey out, nestled on the hills West of the large and fertile Vienna Basin.

vineyards of Perchtoldsdorf

Today, Perchtoldsdorf, with 18,000 inhabitants, is one of the suburban towns forming a crescent to the South West of the Capital City of Austria, Vienna. This crescent is nicknamed "Speckgürtel" - "bacon belt" - for the wealth the inhabitants and business bring, while still keeping a focus on quality of life including Austria's famous "Gemütlichkeit" ("cosiness") and dedication to picturesque landscapes.

As with most suburbs worldwide, one of Perchtoldsdorf's challenges is providing quick access for the commuters to the big city of Vienna. Residents have the choice between an efficient and reliable commuter train that rides through on the Eastern part of town or the highway that runs outside of the city, beyond the Eastern part of town.

Busses provide access to the two major train stations, whereas a few arterial roads drain most of the automotive traffic to the highway, obviously clogging during rush hour. One of these automotive arteries crosses and bottle necks over a bridge spanning over the commuter rail line, which inconveniently separates  the Western and smaller Eastern part of town. Christian Apl was always bothered by that bottle neck bridge.

Christian Apl riding down a main street, a major artery  "draining" towards the highway

Christian Apl is town council member of Perchtoldsdorf and in charge of Mobility and Sustainability. As a member of the Green Party, he has made his agenda to take measures against climate change.

In 2007, he saw the opportunity to broaden the bridge and losen the bottle neck. His goal was not to give fossil fuel powered cars the opportunity to drive quicker through town and over the bridge off to the highway, but rather to add on a generous pedestrian and bicycle path, keeping the car lanes width intact. Studies showed that widening the bridge and adding a bike and foot path, would reduce daily car trips by 2,000.

 at car/bike/pedestrian round-about to bridge crossing rail road

Finally almost ten years later, bridge inspections indicated the bridge was no longer structurally sound. This was the opportunity to propose to widen the bridge during a comprehensive structural renovation. City council accepted the proposal. The bridge was structurally renovated and widened to include a bike and foot path in 2018.

While initial cost estimates were off and the project went way over budget, to the dismay of many town council members, Christian Apl was able to tap into subsidies from provincial government and national climate grants to partially cover costs for the widening of the bridge to add a bike/foot lane.

View from bridge onto the train station and bike/foot paths (planned to be widened) to small industrial park

Regardless of the costs, the new widened bridge definitely allows citizens to comfortably cross the bridge by foot, by bike, on stroller or wheel chair. This new infrastructure also lessens the divide between the East and West side of town; the 2,000 citizens who live East of the bridge now definitely have easy access to the commercial center, church and school on the West side of the bridge - and they can leave their car parked at home.

pedestrian on bridge walkway

Garbage Juice in Charlotte

written 2017

Pam and her belongings

North Carolina’s recent “garbage juice bill”, Bill 576, requires DEQ to allow spraying of municipal landfill wastewater into the air to help it evaporate. Clean Air Carolina explains that this bill allows “taking toxic landfill wastewater accumulating for years and then blasting it through a high-speed fan that turns it into tiny particles in the air is a public health concern”. Basic human instinct (at least mine) is to react with disgust at the idea of spewing liquid waste into the air. In comparison, sorting manually through solid waste - even before it has been sitting, seeping, and accumulating nasty wastewater for years - is gross enough.  Nevertheless, two years ago, Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Division contracted Gershman, Brickner & Bratton, Inc (GBB) to sort through residential waste. According to Brad Kelley, on-site project engineer of GBB, the local temporary workers were equipped with heavy duty protective gear; they were motivated with donuts, coffee and Gatorade. Nevertheless, despite incentives and protective gear, the task and constant stinging smell of decaying anthropogenic waste are so nasty, that the first few days, several workers just walked out on the job.The purpose of getting a crew to sort through residential trash was to develop a waste characterization study(http://charmeck.org/mecklenburg/county/LUESA/SolidWaste/ManagementPlan/Documents/Mecklenburg%20County%20Waste%20Characterization%20Study%20(2015).pdf), which will help improve the County’s waste management system which can help with improving recycling behaviors.
Brad Kelly concluded: “The main take-away from the sort is that (…) about half of all recyclable materials are still ending up in the trash.” While the county has engineered this study which showcases that Charlotte citizens can easily reduce their waste in half by simply recycling, some citizens are already privy to what goes on in residential waste bins, by simple observation of the volume of trash they produce vs. that of their neighbors.One of these people is Pamela Murray. She is a waste generating minimalist. Her mantra is reducing and re-using; recycling comes last. 

Pamela moved to Charlotte in 1989 after graduating from Georgia Tech. From the first Earth Day on, she has been concerned about reducing, reusing and recycling. Pamela is currently an institution within the bicycling community (see BikeFest, Charlotte Spokes People, Bike Benefits, PMTNR, Cycling savvy) – she has that same perseverance when it comes to reducing waste. 

Pam's treasure basket

Part of Pam's waste reduction regimen:

1)    She produces one 8 liter bag of waste a week.
2)    She recycles and composts hard core.
3)    She knows her plastics and typically avoids them – she always has her own shopping bags, she uses and reuses cloth rice and flour bags for grain, breads, tortillas, bagels. Any plastic that she does inadvertently end up with goes to the Harris Teeter recycling box.
4)    She plans her meals wisely and doesn’t waste food
5)    She buys heavy duty tin foil which she uses several times – for example for baking potatoes and brownies
6)    When she eats out, she does not use straws or lids, she declines extra bags for her food. 
7)    She travels with her own set of silver ware and chopsticks in a nifty container always found in her basket on her bike. 
8)    She scrapes out lipstick tubes and toiletries with a popsicle stick in order to use up every ounce.
9)    She shops wisely – always in bulk and uses up everything
10) Glass jars, old candle tins, bottle tops become plant containers
11) She avoids using too much dishwater soap (thus the bottles they are contained in!) by cooking with cast irons that do not need soap to clean them
12) She bikes to the grocery store with a Travoy trailer. Because everything goes into the trailer, she does not need (plastic) bags.  When she buys meat, she requests meat paper instead of styrofoam meat trays. For produce, she doesn't use plastic bags.
13) She buys durable bike tires (she gets 12,000 miles out of them and has ridden 28,000 miles since 2011) and durable clothing. 
14) Once she suggested cutting up old bike tires to use as rubber bands to tie ponytails!
15) She reuses plastic wrapping (especially from bulk toilet paper packing) to line her trash cans at home, from which she often pulls out the recyclables from her daughters’ rooms!

So, anyone who feels irked by the “garbage juice bill”, and wants to reduce their “garbage juice impact”, yet suffers of severe political fight fatigue, well, they can immediately make a difference by following Pamela’s lead of waste reduction by starting with an inventory of their waste production and instantly changing their waste producing and improving their waste minimization habits.

Reverend Brenda Tapia

The morning after the first riots on dark highways of Charlotte, N.C., protesting the shooting and killing of a black man, Keith Scott, by a CMPD police officer, Reverend Brenda Tapia was sipping a cup of tea at a sidewalk café on Main Street of the quaint college town Davidson, NC, 20 miles north from Charlotte, NC.   I spotted Reverend Tapia like a garden of Black Eyed Susans, bright and resilient in a patch of Piedmont red clay; she was wearing an earthy yellow and brown African shirt that soaked up beautifully her dark skin and contrasted perfectly with the red bricks that lined the streets and houses of pedestrian-friendly down town. 

We were groggy from the news of the night before. Quickly, she informed me that a perturbed friend had called her to ask, “What are you going to do about kids and the riots?” She shrugged her shoulders, leaned forwards and said, “I have been working on that problem my whole life”.

Shortly after that, as if on cue for a celebrity watch, four separate Davidson college functionaries stopped by our table, greeting Reverend Tapia, and chatting briefly. Although in retirement from her Davidson duties for ten years now, Reverend Tapia remains a legend.

Reverend Tapia is a Davidson native. Apart from going to Howard University for a degree in psychology, then working as a counselor in Washington, DC, later attending Johnson C. Smith Seminary and working as a pastoral counselor in Atlanta, GA, and before being ordained in the Presbytery of Charlotte in Charlotte, NC, she has called Davidson home most of her life.

She grew up in a large extended family in strictly segregated Davidson. Today, college life and culture spills into the downtown – outsiders have brought in tolerance to diversity that Reverend Tapia initially worked very hard to weave in from within just 20 – 30 years ago. Back then, a “plantation mentality” still hung over the town and college;  “Yes, Missah” she added quirkily to make sure I understood her point. Her great grandmother was born a slave and remained on until she was eight years old in Davidson.

While she grew up in a protective extended family, where as the first grandchild she was “spoiled rotten” with love, her first vivid memories of town life in Davidson are of racism, some of it including Ku Klux Klan violence. She didn’t even know what was going on and her family tried to shield her from the truth, but one of her first memories was getting the newspaper from the newspaper receptacle one morning as a five year-old in the 1950s, and seeing a burning cross planted in their front yard, highly visible facing the main road that lead in and out of Davidson.

The week leading to this event, her uncle was a local host of an international church meeting. He was the only local person in the entire group – as a result, he was also the only black participant. This “odd” situation confused the white folks in a town where everyone knew everyone – why was this black Davidson man being treated like a student and not acting like a servant, as he was supposed to, amongst all these white foreigners? On the last day, one of the participants needed medical attention, so Reverend Tapia’s uncle lead the injured person and some others to a medical office. While in the waiting room, he sat in the colored section. A young Swedish lady thought this was ridiculous, so she playfully (and naively) left her “whites only section” and went to sit on his lap …. and even licked his ice cream.

It didn’t take long for the whole town of Davidson to find out about this “egregious” act. Later that night, at the good-bye party of the event, a bullet whizzed by Reverend Tapia’s uncle’s head. Not long after, his brothers quickly and secretly took him into hiding. The next morning, the burning crosses were put in the front yard of Reverend Tapia’s house, the Dean’s office and the football field of the college. When I asked if she thought the European church event participants knew of the repercussions to the black man and his family for a young white lady sitting on his lap, Reverend Tapia said, “Of course they never learned what happened; they flew back to Europe the next day”. They had no idea what raw and primitive associations the white townspeople made with the playful gesture and how violently they would react.

But, for Reverend Tapia, that was when her journey started.

That is also why she asks, one to two generations later, “Do the Charlotte rioters of today really know who they are and Whose they are?” Reverend Tapia has suffered oppression, segregation and racism since the day of her birth. She also has a very strong family, and faith in God. Her Afro-centric Christianity tells her that God is everywhere. She hopes the rioting youth understand that, or at least find strength and guidance from either God or family but preferably both.

That is why she started the Love of Learning Program at Davidson College.

In the late 1980s, while she was Assistant Chaplain at the College, she was asked by a Committee to help increase enrollment of black American students up to 100 (up from typically two), and increase the number black faculty from five to ten. The ultimate goal was to “create” black PhDs, who would want to come back and teach to make sure that each student would have had at least one black professor while getting a degree at Davidson.

When the committee approached her to ask if, with that in mind, she could develop a two-week enrichment course for black students, she merely laughed. After she recognized that her sporadic and genuine laugh was a faux-pas in white Corporate America, she couldn’t help but add in her typical semi-humoristic way, “Let me first ask my Boss”, and when her literal boss, who was sitting beside her, gave her a weird look, she pointed her eyes to Heaven. The committee understood she would work on this, but needed to think first how to do this best.

Starting in 1987, she developed Love of Learning, not a two-week crash course, but a five-year intensive four-week summer program, which offered academic enrichment for local black high school students. Based on her personal experience with her parents, as well as with her work as a counselor in Atlanta, she decided the program would have to involve the parents; therefore the students would come back every other Saturday from September to May with their parents. She worked on self-love, and self-awareness. She wanted the students to really understand who they were. She wanted them to learn to love themselves as much as God loves them. She also explained the practical, social and cultural realities of racism to them.

Black Pride was also a component of Love of Learning. She decided to bring to her group of students what she thought had been lost with de-segregation of schools: an academically stimulated and caring all-black community. She explained that when her all-black high school closed and she went to academically challenging classes in majority white schools in the 1960s, she witnessed how her former black teachers and principals were demoded to petty jobs, and also that her white teachers did not bother to critique or even correct her work – instead it merely received a quick grade. She felt the humiliation for herself, her family and her former teachers and principals. She also felt lost, for while her parents set high standards for their children, they were not sure how best to relay it – by default they neglected the components of love and pride.

Love of Learning would offer her flock of students stringent critique, but also tough love, and black pride, as well as sense of black community with an intellectual and moral elite they could look up, so that they could tackle and excel later on in academia  – be it black or white. Her program was a success; her alumni cherish her professionally as much as personally.

As one of her first students, Thea Rhinehard, explains, “the most important feature of Love of Learning was an environment where we encouraged to embrace our blackness as a positive. Remember, the world tells black children that they must minimize their blackness, keep it quiet, and gain respect by assimilating into the larger, white culture.

“Brenda tried to teach us that blackness wasn't shameful, wasn't a liability, wasn't something to swallow to make white people be nice to us. She taught us that we could be proud of our history, our heritage, ourselves. We learned about black luminaries, social structures and all sorts of things that aren't taught in schools. History books are written by the victors, not by marginalized people; some black churches try to fill that gap, but Brenda went all out to help us see a richer, more complete view of ourselves and a more fleshed out understanding of our country.” 

Reverend Tapia developed hatred for white people when she had to be transferred to a majority white public school in North Charlotte – there she felt ignored by white teachers. Then, she developed hatred for black people while attending Howard University by experiencing racism by some other blacks against her own very dark skin – she even made me note that she was so black, her lips and palms were black; in some black cultures being very black is asset but in others, it is a liability. As she grew, she realized that a part of racism comes from a lack of spirituality, which to her is basic love. If we find love, first in ourselves, we can heal individually and then as a group when we can learn to come sit at the Table together – in the Biblical but also worldly, real and practical sense: not just Jesus’ Table, but also the corporate board room table, the surgical, classroom or dinner table.

Reverend Tapia has also had very practical (and somewhat absurd) racial instances to deal with. She learned from those experiences, and repeats that we can turn “stumbling blocks into stepping stones”. With the 2016 Davidson College Homecoming Queen and King being black and sporting “Black Lives Matter” sashes at the Half Time of the football game, we can trace the stepping stones leading to the success of many black students in and from Davidson, directly back to Reverend Tapia.

Reverend Tapia never boasted the quantitative success of her Love of Learning program, instead, Thea Rhinehard states, “Brenda can count many PhDs, attorneys, community leaders, political operatives, etc. amongst Love of Learning graduates. But the degree count isn't what's most important to me.”

After sitting with Reverend Tapia for almost three hours, her approach, accomplishments and status become alive and impressive. While the topics covered come from sad and deep places, it is her special light and twinkle that you carry away most from her; she is the kind of person you want to steal horses with.

Is Black Beautiful?

Ugly Duckling

“What was that?” Thea’s mother inquired after she finished her speech at the 1989 General Baptist State Convention Oratorical Contest – a contest that gives young Christians the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their intellectual thinking and oral presentation skills following Christian themes. Thea herself didn’t know what had come out of her mouth. She thought she was well prepared for this State competition: she was simply going to repeat the same speech she had been using at all the previous Oratorical Contests – the same one as at the Contest at her First Baptist Church in West Charlotte, where it all began, through the two other contests she won and that led her here to the State competition. But here, in this 10,000-seat arena, she completely blacked out and her mind went blank. She could not remember her speech. After regaining herself somewhat, as if in a trance, she completely improvised a speech.

And her speech rocked. It had a flow and it was infused with countless Bible Quotes that made the Christian audience nod in approval. The judges were mesmerized by this petite girl, who had powerful lungs, a strong voice, a fearless mind, and an unwavering Biblical message! Although her body did not carry the weight to offer a sermon-like intonation of the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., and although the selection of certain words and her pronunciation made her “sound white”, she won the State competition and a $2,500 scholarship for a black college!

Her knees were shaking from the size of the venue, the thin air that her oratorical speech seemed to have come from, and the delirium of victory - especially since she didn’t believe much of the Bible quotes she was using. But she was not surprised that she won - she loved this competition! She loved having a microphone, she loved challenging thoughts, she loved carrying them over to others. As of a young age, this activity of public speaking empowered her. It took her intellect to places she loved to be.

She was an ambitious teenager. With this title under her belt, she knew she would love to be a TV reporter. But there was one problem: she was ugly. She had a big nose, her skin was too dark and, worst of all, her hair was too nappy. She would never be a TV reporter.

Thea at 18 with Wave Nuveau Perm

Since she could remember, she envied her lighter skinned cousins, the slender noses of her aunts, and especially the curly hair of her own mother. Every morning her mother reminded her that she had “bad hair” after combing – or trying to comb - through it to try to make it look “respectable”, of which the result was usually just a bunch of ripped out hair. Her mother would typically resort to decorating her hair with a dozen plaits, so Thea would at least be identified as a girl. She had the worst type of nappy hair.

The whole family, the entire black community was under pressure to abide by white Western norms of beauty and worked hard every day to make themselves look “respectable”. The black community had to overcome all the stigmas related to once being primitive slaves, they had to overcome any stigmas of – God forbid!- indecencies related to the civil rights movement, they had to overcome all current stigmas of being the lower class smooching off the government or landing in jail. They needed and wanted to show the world their decency. Appearance mattered. Nice clothes, clean smells, and made-up hair mattered. Thea felt the pressure especially hard, because she got the short stick when it came to hair that could be made respectable and play her part in showing the world how decent the black community was.

Her hair curls up into tiny little coils.  In addition, she has lots of hair and the strands are fine. So while others who have thick nappy hair can straighten it with hot irons or chemicals, doing any of those treatments leads her fine hair to fall out and/or her scalp to burn.

Her mother has lighter skin and curly hair, curly hair that is very workable. Her mother’s family descends from slaves and white slave owners. Rape of black female slaves by white male slave owners was common to procreate more slaves at no extra cost– a person born from a female slave and a white slave owner was still just the slave of that white slave owner. Thea’s family in Lincolnton County, North Carolina, is a result of that practice and it can be seen in hair and skin tone.  

Her mother took her to the hair salon at age six for the first time and then regularly for special occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. Thea endured hour-long sessions where they worked on a concoction of straightening out her hair with a hot comb and slobbering pomade on it to avoid it getting nappy again. After those torturous beauty salon treatments, as a young and conscientious six year-old, she would take a shower cap with her everywhere to keep any potential rain from destroying the effort. Also, she was tired of being labeled “tender headed” by her mother and hairdressers, because she whimpered from the pain of all the work on her kinky, bountiful and fine hair –so she did anything to avoid treatments.

Thea at 4 with plaits

Thea knew from an early age on that she had a healthy intellect. She excelled at school, she sought academic competitions, she challenged the church preachings whenever she felt like it. All those empowering and liberating activities, however, were dampened by the constant reminder that she was black, that she looked black and that she could not hide it, especially with her “unrespectable” hair that was so hard “to tame”.

As a teenager, and aware that she was a gifted student, Thea fought to find herself the best education the system could offer. While navigating a complex system all alone as a teenager was a monumental task, maintaining respectable hair was considered the norm, although that actually took a much more monumental effort than navigation schooling options!

Thea at 11 with hot-combed hair

It was considered acceptable by 12 to use heavy duty chemicals on your hair. Starting age twelve, every six weeks, Thea went to a hair salon to have chemical relaxers applied to her hair to take the nappiness out. The chemicals used are as strong as the drain cleaner, Drano, and resulted in bald spots on her scalp that she covered by herself at home with pomades.  In her teens, she also tried fashionable perms – at that time there was the Jheril Curl, which was greasy. That style also broke her hair off.

Thea at 13 with Jheril Curl Perm

From the grooming perspective, during her teens, Thea was caught in an ongoing battle of alternating relaxing her hair with chemicals and getting a greasy perm, which both lead to breaking hair. After each new style, she would have to let her hair grow out “virgin”, which gave her a head of hair with two textures. She would camouflage her virgin hair by having a stylist hot-comb the growing-in hair. Ideally, she would have just cut her hair short, but that would just make her “unrespectable” and possibly a laughing stock…

In college, with no money, a high respectability-curb with academic peers, and declining desire for chemicals and hours of treatment, she decided to buy wigs. She cut her hair short and bought wigs on mail order. It worked well and was easy, so she kept the wig solution as she started her professional life.

Thea at 21 wearing a wig

One day, after she had established herself as a serious professional and had good relationships with her colleagues, she decided to go work without a wig on and just let her hair be natural. It still meant she had to put in a serious amount of hair preparation: twisting and untwisting her hair, and applying products.  It was a big risk, but she felt confident enough to take it. She walked into her office and immediately, a colleague commented that she looked like a “pick a ninny” – an insulting term for “little black child”. She felt humiliated and immediately reverted to wearing wigs.

In her late twenties, she tired of wigs and she went one last time to straighten her hair into a bob. She also briefly tried a bun. Then, after the straightened and bobbed hair broke off, she went for a totally new look and tried microbraids, made from braided natural hair, which took hours to put in, cost a fortune, and if put in tightly to look neat, hurt at the scalp and needed regular tightening to maintain a fresh look. Microbraids, hot combs, chemicals, pomades, burned earlobes, scalps, painful hair roots….. by thirty, she was tired of all this - she made a brave leap to step out into the world with her natural hair.

Thea at 27 with relaxed hair

She was scared! Would people take her seriously? Would she be called names again?  Would they treat her like a thief anytime she entered a store? Could she walk around in jeans and a hoodie with such hair without being stopped by the police? This may seem absurd, but it was a big and real risk for an African American woman. She decided to do it anyways… with the price of working on her hair manually every time before she walked out her door, twisting the small coils until her fingers and arms hurt. 

Thea at 31 with twists

The natural look worked for her and her immediate community seemed alright with it; and best of all, she was somewhat liberated from hair treatment servitude … but then her thin kinky natural twisted hair kept matting….

So, the logical succession was dreadlocks, which worked stupendously with her hair! But soon her dreadlocked hair took over her petite frame – she felt like she was sporting a mane. And then the dreadlocked hair started breaking off….

Thea at 36 with dreadlocks

She resigned to the fact that her hair was a lose-lose situation for her.

Not only that, in the South, no matter how hard she, her family and her black community worked on sounding, acting and looking respectable, they were still “just black”. In her thirties, even as an emancipated and educated professional woman, she experienced not just once being harassed by police officers for no offense whatsoever, for just being a black female. No matter how smart, how professional and how eloquent she was, not matter how many hours she worked on making her hair look less black, being black was still her primary identity. At work, in stores, on the street…

On a whim, in her forties, she left the South and moved to NYC.

She met a man, in fact a white man, who liked her hair – natural, short, slightly greying. He liked her feminine and fun clothes and did not make her feel like she had to constantly prove she was not an angry black nor the clichéd over-sexual African woman white people love to label black women as, but simply a smart, educated and curious woman, who wanted to work, think, debate, play and wear nice clothes like everyone else. She was not the black fetish of a white man. He just liked her -the whole package with her own set of stubborn priorities.

Other steps miraculously fell into place.

She found a hairdresser who convinced her to cut her hair short and keep it short. The hairdresser wasted no time telling her, her natural short and slightly greying hair was just fine and complemented her body perfectly. The hairdresser  - who is white - has perfected a cutting technique that takes 40 minutes every month. And it requires no twisting!

When Nethea went to the dentist for a check up, he asked her to do a TV ad for his office with her “big horse teeth”. At first, she thought this was just another tasteless joke that she was ugly. It was not – her big teeth were healthy, a great asset, and a lucrative advertising tool for him.

When she was downsized from her investment job, on a whim she submitted camera pictures of herself for a TV show that was looking for forty year-old women with a healthy natural look and wellness concerns. No one was more natural than her – although her hair had endured endless trials with products, her skin had not: she grew up in a world where makeup was designed and created for white skin. She had black skin, so she had no “makeup look.” They liked her look, her natural ease with the camera, the intelligence of her appearance, and she was hired for a daily TV show viewed by millions of Americans.

Thea at 44 on stage

Now, the “ugly duckling” does TV advertisements for dentists and TV shows for skin care products, and feels all right and very feminine… with natural tight coily and short hair.

Reflecting on how her looks have lead her on a 180 degree shift in course, she thinks the trigger was her former boyfriend’s authentic reaction of being perplexed that a black woman would think being black is ugly. He was the first person she met who had not bought into the social norm that Eurocentric of Anglicized beauty was superior to black beauty. He did not see her blackness as a fetish, a novelty or a liability. This played a role in liberating her from some racial pressures and taught her to embrace what she has. This is absolutely new territory to her – with less internalized racism, she feels less racial self loathing and doesn’t feel ugly. She has been able to put aside the reflex of having to put white people at ease in front of her black skin and kinky hair.  She is simply a middle aged professional woman ready to tackle the world.

For the first time ever, taking care of her looks is not a battle to be respectable and conforming, but an activity that brings joy, includes a healthy dose of well-deserved vanity and even a career in TV and journalism. If only that teenager who won the Oratorical Competition 25 years ago would have known.

Thea at 39 after cutting off dreadlocks

The “ugly duckling” still does have a hard time believing compliments that she is in fact beautiful. Black and beautiful is still a new concept to many, even the black and beautiful themselves. Even the black, beautiful and brilliant. She still balks when white Manhattan doormen open the door for her, a black woman. But hopefully her new swan-like wingspan will help her fly away from that conflict.