I believe all this beauty shit started back in undergrad. You see, once upon a time I attended a medium sized HBCU in Virginia. After getting a healthy dose of freshman college basketball politics, I found myself, perhaps for the first time, unenthused by the game that I loved so deeply. I was ten-plus hours away from home and with splinters in my ass from riding the bench, I was looking for an outlet. So in search of a release, I did what any straight man with a 7 to 1 women to men ratio would do-- I studied. That's right I began studying. Applying myself in the most rigorous and intentional of ways. The subject at-hand you ask? I was studying none other, than the gorgeous, intelligent, low-cut nike-Air Force-one-wearing, coco-butter-smelling, lip-gloss- popping, brown women of the campus. 

In the first installment of #5Minutes Austin sits down with Jovonne J. Bickerstaff, a scholar of gender, race and emotion work. She is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Mellon-funded African American History, Culture & Digital Humanities Initiative at University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation, “Together, Close, Resilient: Essays on Emotion Work Among Black Couples,” probed the emotion strategies partners co-construct to foster emotional intimacy, navigate differences and cultivate a shared identity - offering a rare window into black intimate lives.