I walk up to the reception desk at Albany Medical and say, “I have COVID.” I do not say, “I think I have COVID,” because at this point I am certain.
Continue readingWe Can’t Breathe. COVID During the Black Lives Pandemic.
Sacred Black Space
TMI Project’s Black Stories Matter program is a sacred space. Sacred is the only word that comes close to describing how it feels to me. This is in part due to it being a space for people to be vulnerable, to share their truths and their stories. But, more than that, it is Sacred Black Space, of which there are too few.
Continue readingBenny Eichert
“Why do I still feel like a fraud? Like I don’t belong. Like I’m not black enough.“
Racism has been a big part of my life, I just never acknowledged it. I hate stuff like this. It makes me uncomfortable, as I’m sure it makes a lot of us. It’s easy to make excuses and look away. But something this morning is calling me to confront this feeling. Two more lives were lost. Another black man and another black woman to add to a huge list of those taken by people who are supposed to protect and serve us. There is something wrong with America. And it’s not just COVID 19. Racism has been here for a lot longer.
A year ago, I did a DNA test. I read it and was stunned. I’m 1/4 Portuguese and 1/4 Spanish. I’m 27.1% African from Northern and Western Africa. Why do I still feel like a fraud? Like I don’t belong. Like I’m not black enough.
I was adopted by two Caucasian people. I was told I was Hispanic and Italian. I don’t blame them for this misinformation. It’s very possible that my biological mother, whom I never met, didn’t know who my father was. I had 6 other adoptive siblings. Five were African American. I never felt I belonged. But, we all dealt with a lot of racism early on.
I was called a Spic and nigger in first grade.
I was told my real parents didn’t love me.
I was targeted by teachers and classmates because of my white parents.
I had a barber tell me that he didn’t have clippers for “my type of hair.”
I was looked at differently because of my color.
I feel a pain in my heart. A chill in my skin. I can’t describe it. I reach down at my chest where my heart is and feel something wet and warm. I raise my hand and see pain and hurt. It is like a dark moonless night. I don’t know why I thought if I ignored it long enough eventually I would be okay.
My art has called to me to create from this pain. It is one place I cannot hide what I feel. My art is real, honest and painful. Sometimes I hate it for this reason. But, my art has led to such growth in my life. It’s an outlet where I can say I am sorry to the younger version of myself for not validating this pain. I am sorry for not acknowledging my place in this fight.
I am a puzzle with a lot of different pieces.
I am Portuguese, I am Spanish and……
I am Black.
This story was received as an online submission.
Want More Black Stories Matter Content?
Stories have the power to increase visibility, raise awareness, change people’s hearts and minds, and inspire people to take meaningful action. We are making every effort to ensure all of our Black Stories Matter content is easily accessible, widely consumed, and is accompanied by tools to deepen the impact.
Listen: The TMI Project Story Hour, Season Two: Black Stories Matter, launches this fall. Learn more and subscribe to our podcast HERE
Host: a Black Stories Matter viewing party and discussion from anywhere in the world. Click HERE to learn more and sign up.
Share: TMI Preoject’s mission with Black Stories Matter is to elevate the underrepresented stories of the Black experience in America – the full spectrum – the triumphs, humor, beauty, and resilience. Click HERE to submit your story to be featured on the TMI Project blog.
Perla Ayora
(she/her)
I don’t know if I deserve to live in America. I have a job I love and feel safe in my house and have a colorful backyard.
Do I deserve to be free?
Why me?
Why can I sleep at night?
I think about the other immigrants, the ones who are in the camps right now, away from home, away from their favorite foods, their friends and families. Instead they are locked up in a room full of strangers. I imagine how it feels to spend years planning, leaving everything they know to chase The American Dream, to have a better future, but now the only dream they have is to get back home safe.
I am not better in any way.
I am not more kind.
I am not more wise.
Why can I sleep at night?
What about the people that I left behind? The architects, doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs who are living in Mexico trying to live a simple life, maybe trying to buy a house or pay their debts, but they just can’t.
I am not smarter.
I don’t work harder.
I am just another one.
Another Mexican.
Another immigrant.
Another human.
Why can I sleep at night?
Perla participated in a TMI Project online mini-storytelling workshop. This story was received as an online submission following the worksop.
Jaggar Harris
“The American dream — the dream that makes you believe you can have equality and the same opportunity available to any American — is a nightmare for me because I’m Black.”
After watching the horrifying and brutal killing of George Floyd on national TV I cried. I was deeply sickened. I wanted to do or say something that would help others understand what it’s like to be Black in America because racism not only exists in the police departments, the criminal justice systems and the government, it exists in the workplace too.
During my eighteen-year career in higher education, which spanned from 2001 to 2019, I was the victim of racial discrimination four different times by three different employers in four different cities in the states of Colorado and California. The American dream — the dream that makes you believe you can have equality and the same opportunity available to any American — is a nightmare for me because I’m Black.
The first time I was discriminated against was in 2001. I was terrified and didn’t know what to do. My friends said, “Don’t fight. You’re just one person and nothing you do will make a difference.” My family said, “Don’t fight because if you make waves you’ll lose your job.”
But after years of being harassed, humiliated, and stripped of all dignity, confidence, and strength over and over again, I stopped hearing everyone around me and started listening to God. God inspired me to speak my truth no matter how painful it was and to do my best to prevent others from experiencing the devastation to their lives and careers that I had painfully endured.
I fought back against the first employer and each subsequent employer. When they realized that I had documentation that could prove the severity and frequency of the discrimination I endured, each one paid me hush money to buy my silence and hide the racism in their organizations. They also blackballed me from the industry that I loved, in the city that I worked, so I was forced to relocate and start over. Each time, I moved to a different city hoping to get hired by a company that was free of racism and, sadly, I found that in America no such place exists.
I’m tired. My battles against racism in the workplace that I have been forced to fight for the last eighteen years have left me broken, traumatized, and emotionally spent. At 52 years old, I’m getting too old to keep starting over. Even worse, I’m witnessing my children, who are now all grown up with careers of their own, suffer the same fate and it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking.
I share my story about fighting back, not only to help me deal with the trauma of racial discrimination, but also in hopes that it will make a difference, for my children and others.
This story was received as an online submission.
Want More Black Stories Matter Content?
Stories have the power to increase visibility, raise awareness, change people’s hearts and minds, and inspire people to take meaningful action. We are making every effort to ensure all of our Black Stories Matter content is easily accessible, widely consumed, and is accompanied by tools to deepen the impact.
Listen: The TMI Project Story Hour, Season Two: Black Stories Matter, launches this fall. Learn more and subscribe to our podcast HERE
Host: a Black Stories Matter viewing party and discussion from anywhere in the world. Click HERE to learn more and sign up.
Share: TMI Preoject’s mission with Black Stories Matter is to elevate the underrepresented stories of the Black experience in America – the full spectrum – the triumphs, humor, beauty, and resilience. Click HERE to submit your story to be featured on the TMI Project blog.
My Covid-19 Message in a Bottle
Dear Friends,
Like everyone, all of us at TMI Project are doing our best to stay calm and make the best-informed decisions possible as the COVID-19 landscape changes daily. We are committed to the well-being of our local community and have decided to postpone our April 1st Podcast Launch Party and all other in-person programs until we are confident it is safe for all to attend.
So this is my message in a bottle. During this time, TMI Project will remain dedicated to helping you tell your stories and stay connected even if we can’t be in the same room with each other. To that end, I’m excited to announce that we are hosting our first-ever digital mini TMI Project Storytelling workshop in lieu of the podcast launch party at 7pm on April 1st!
We’re going to do what we do best – offer a mini TMI Project workshop with spontaneous writing and then daring ourselves to read it in community. Warts and all. It’s scary, it’s exhilarating, it’s cathartic. And for the first time, we’re going to do it virtually.
So if you’re sick, a caretaker, or just bored from the drudgery of social distancing, join us! Space is limited.
Listen to a special message I recorded for our TMI Project family.
If you haven’t yet, subscribe to The TMI Project Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to receive a notification on April 1st when our first series, Tragedy + Time = Comedy launches with eight binge-worthy episodes! If you can, listen to the premiere episode about the amazing Verna Gillis prior to the workshop. We promise it will provide much-needed laughter and inspiration.
In the meantime, stay safe, wash your hands, try not to panic and leave some toilet paper on the shelves for your neighbors. And, if you’ve got something on your mind, something that’s weighing you down, join us for the online workshop and write about it! You won’t regret it.
Stay safe and well. Sending much love to you all.
Eva Tenuto (she/her)
Co-Founder/Executive Director
TMI Project
P.S. If there’s an online offering you would like, let us know. We’d love to hear your ideas. Email info@tmiproject.org with the subject line “Virtual Programming Ideas.”
TMI Project Featured in Chronogram Magazine
Thank you to Chronogram Magazine for a wonderful feature article about TMI Project, including a Q&A with our Co-founder and Executive Director Eva Tenuto on the eve of our 10th Anniversary. Be sure to check out each monthly issue of Chronogram through December. A story from TMI Project’s archive will be published in every issue for the remainder of the year!
Get Your Early Bird Tickets ($25 off) for Life Lines: Queer Stories of Survival!
Life Lines: Queer Stories of Survival
November 5, 2018, 7pm
The Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center
New York, NY
In honor of The Trevor Project’s 20th anniversary, a cast of 11 LGBTQ storytellers from around the country, selected from a nationwide call for stories, will take part in a TMI Project true storytelling workshop this November led by Academy Award-winner James Lecesne alongside TMI Project Co-founders Eva Tenuto and Julie Novak. Life Lines: Queer Stories of Survival is the culmination of that work.
The production will feature inspiring true personal stories of triumph in the face of suicidal attempts or ideations with a goal of raising awareness about the importance of The Trevor Project Lifeline and similar suicide prevention services.
Vicarious Resilience to hit the film fest circuit!
We are proud to announce that TMI Project’s documentary short film Vicarious Resilience, produced in partnership with the Mental Health Association in Ulster County, is an official selection of the 2018 Woodstock Film Festival and the Atlantic City CineFest!
Vicarious Resilience follows three Hudson Valley residents over the course of a 10-week TMI Project storytelling workshop presented at The Mental Health Association in Ulster County (MHA). In this workshop, the participants face mental illness, childhood neglect and addiction head-on; and, ultimately, share deeply personal stories about love, loss and triumph.
The screening will be followed by a Q & A.
We hope to see you there!
Date, time and other details about the Atlantic City CineFest to come!
Reflecting on a year of Black Stories Matter and what lies ahead
Tameka Ramsey (she/her)
One year ago today, on Martin Luther King Day, Eva and I launched TMI Project’s Black Stories Matter initiative at the Hudson Valley Writers Resist in Woodstock, NY.
In true TMI Project fashion, I’ll be transparent; we didn’t know we were launching anything! We knew that we had a platform through TMI Project and that in the wake of Trayvon (and Eric, and Dante and Sandra, and…) that we wanted to use that platform to amplify the voices and stories of Black people in America, and specifically in our own community.
So over the course of 6 months, Eva, Sari and I worked with a group of committed writers to craft the Black Stories Matter inaugural show. Rev. James Child at the Pointe of Praise Church in Kingston, NY agreed to host us and the show debuted on March 25, 2017. We hoped for an audience of 200, maybe 300 if we were lucky, and 600 of you showed up to watch the Brooklyn Technical High School all girls step team perform and eleven writers read deeply personal stories about the richness and complexities of their lives.
That evening was the true start of Black Stories Matter as a TMI Project initiative. In the year since, we’ve developed a few projects that carry and extend the original production: we’re working with the Kingston Public High School to to develop a teen version of Black Stories Matter. And in the Fall of 2017, we collaborated with Historic Huguenot Street to create and perform Reclaiming Our Time, written, in part, during an overnight stay in enslaved people’s quarters in New Paltz. Now, one year later, I’m excited to announce that I’m officially coming onboard to work with TMI Project as the Black Stories Matter Program Director!
“I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.” Dr. Martin Luther King
What is Black Stories Matter and why are we doing it?
Black Stories Matter is TMI Project’s way of making an impact in addressing incidents of hate, bigotry and racial injustice in our local community while also participating as an organization in the national outcry of injustice. In alignment with TMI Project’s mission to empower people and bring about change through true storytelling, Black Stories Matter seeks to raise awareness around issues of inequality and injustice through true storytelling and amplification of the voices of those who have inspiring stories to share about black people surviving–and thriving–in the Hudson Valley and throughout the United States. We aim to provide audiences the opportunity to listen, expand their awareness, possibly identify internalized racism or uncover unintentionally racists points of view. This heightened awareness will enable audience members to replace biased belief systems with informed knowledge, deepened compassion and an active commitment to work for justice for all.
What’s next for Black Stories Matter?
This year we’re focused on creating true stories that will deepen the listener’s ability to feel empathy and compassion; programming that will ignite the humanity of the audience (our readers, after all, are already human) around issues of race in America and how that manifests in our own community. In addition to performing the show with the original cast at both Bard and the Kingston African American Library, we are expanding the programming to include facilitated community discussions so that we can work through and face the problems caused by systemic racism and segregation together.
We wish there were no need for an initiative like Black Stories Matter, but events like Charlotteville clearly demonstrate the need to combat ignorance with truth. These stories and so many more that are reflections of Black life in America, past and present, must be shared and amplified. Especially in our own community, where segregation (and the insidious redlining that enables it) is as alive here as it is in everywhere in America.
So on this Martin Luther King Day, one year to the day that Eva and I stood on stage in Woodstock and announced our intention to create Black Stories Matter, we’re pledging our renewed commitment to working hard in 2018 to create and support the development and amplification of Black stories through our platform.
- Tameka Ramsey, TMI Project