Hi,
As of today, my blog will be at a new location:
This name change is something i’ve been thinking of doing for a minute and now it’s happening. You can expect pretty much the same things.. talks about race, politics, music, culture, whatever else I feel like. As a matter of fact, I’m throwing up my first blog over there now about this documentary I saw and whiteness and hiphop and privilege and… you get it.
This blog’ll stick around for a bit I guess until I feel like the trickling is done. I will miss it very dearly but I’m older now and I know more than I did before.
Posted at PostBourgie.
It would be tough to say Clarence Thomas was ever a popular figure, at least among non-conservative americans. He had relatively little experience (two years as a federal judge) when GHBush nominated him to Supreme Court in 1991, was anti-affirmative action, and proudly undecided on abortion because, according to him, he had never discussed reproductive rights with anyone. At most, he was a fill-in for retiring civil rights advocate and first black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. He maintained the racial make-up of the Court while tipping the scale quite significantly to the right.
It was only apt that when Thomas was having enough trouble getting nominated (the Senate Judiciary Committee split its confirmation vote seven-seven which moved the nomination to the floor of the Senate), a former employee of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission where he had worked said she had been sexually harassed by him. Anita Hill, a black female law professor at the University of Oklahoma at the time, responded to the Senate’s investigation with claims that Thomas had made repeated and unwanted explicit remarks about sex acts and pornographic films while she was working for him. There was no viable way for people to belittle her testimony via suggestions of moral deficiency or aspirations to be famous–distractions which are typically based on a person’s occupation, legal record, or upbringing. She appeared to be credible, both personally and professionally, which in theory, made it her word versus Thomas’s.
In reality, it ended up being Anita Hill v. male solidarity, as Ms. Hill had to defend herself against the doubts and questions of white male Senators whose determination to undermine her testimony was predicated on an unwavering faith in men’s rights to power (and therefore men’s truths) and what was likely a complementary disdain for women’s rights – particularly as they relate to their bodies. What we saw was the common routine of a woman brave enough to face the unbelievably difficult task of speaking about sexual harassment being punished for having a voice. Senators and witnesses said Hill was scapegoating Thomas for her own insecurities derived from not feeling attractive; aspiring to be “the Rosa Parks of sexual harassment;” and engaging in “transference,” a psychological condition with which you transfer your feelings from one person to another. Basically, she was a crazy woman.
Within some circles, the Thomas-Hill controversy was seen as a catalyst for the revitalization of feminism. Women came together across color lines to support Anita Hill, labeled by some an accidental hero. And indeed, although the gains have dwindled over time, 1992 did see women running for and winning public office at record numbers. It was a moment within which people who had experienced a lull since second-wave feminism could find a popular cause.
And then, Clarence Thomas went and did all that he knew how to do. He called the hearings a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Or, in other words: Y’all stay trying to keep the black man down. From what we know about lynching, it was a heinous and inhuman act executed by white men in america largely against black men, often in public spaces. And Thomas is invoking this painful part of history to regain his footing in a sexual harassment case involving him and a black woman? And it worked?
Essentially, what Thomas did was assert the black masculinist narrative that guides our conventional conception of blackness and some people’s aspirations to attain “equality”. By invoking the extremely violent and male-specific associations of lynching, he assumes victim status and thereby casts Anita Hill as an antagonist, asking the general public to defend him. She is now not only an assault on male power but also on black masculinity. Her blackness somehow becomes less than his, and she is effectively transformed into an anti-black figure (SEE All women are white, all blacks are men). Through the shift of public support, we see the conditions under which black women will be protected in public space: 1. If they are silent and 2. If they follow male leadership. And because of the naturalness with which we consent to patriarchy, this was okay.
One thing to take away from this case is that solidarity does not mean homogeneity. When women come together to support an issue, it is important not to cloak it as a “women’s issue” at the expense of acknowledging the other factors that are at play such as race, class, or education. Feminists needed to reflect on the fact that Anita Hill was indeed a black woman, and that issues of turning race-traitor, black masculinity, and respectability were likely to arise. This is in some ways an age-old lesson of cross-racial struggles: to not let specific and independent causes be subsumed into dominant discourses. Black feminism bares the responsibility of both acknowledging the oppression shared by all women and illuminating the struggles which are specific to black women. The Thomas-Hill case was in some ways an upset in the latter, but hopefully also a prelude to the day when more people will identify with black women’s rights than with patriarchy.
Is it coincidental that certain hair types don’t “whip,” or am I being crotchety? Maybe as a child I got made fun of because my hair didn’t whip or blow in the wind. Am I too busy being a black girl with thick hair to enjoy a joke? Someone clue me in already. I get it but I kinda don’t!!! I miss the good old fashioned Sesame Street version of “I Love My Hair” =(
Oh, while I’m at it
#parentsagainstthewhippingofhair (via Anthony Kelley)
POC (puppets of color) unite.
In an attempt to summarize a dining experience I had that didn’t exactly rub me the right way, I explained to a friend: “You know how white people will come home after work and turn on the blues? … It was kind of like that.”
Music for me can be a touchy and emotionally charged subject, and – for the most part – I try to avoid discussions that are driven by the sole need to essentialize genres according to race. While it is clear to me that certain music has origins in circumstances in which race was an unequivocal factor, I’ve grown into an understanding that much musical development occurred within an environment of cross-racial, -cultural, often transatlantic influences. Borrowing has happened, sometimes even mutually.
Still, there is such a thing as black music: music that is derived from or inspired by black people and culture. Among this music is the blues and soul – both of which have picked up a lot of momentum amongst white listeners – be they punks, hipsters, or music junkies.
My issue/criticism/complaint is that this music is often not understood within its cultural, historical, and emotional context. This music comes from someplace, and is part of the experiences – the pain, joy, struggles and historical memories of black folk. There is something assuming, unsettling, and comfortably privileged about a white person throwing on a Bessie Smith record they found at Salvation Army at a dinner party. In thinking specifically about the blues, it was birthed from the realities of being black and without resources. Rhythms were created with feet, hands, and mouths. Similar to how some jazz musicians used instruments discarded from the Civil War, the blues was born from the specific situation of not having: a situation which has been commonly entangled with being of color in the U.S.
What is it about white people getting off up under black music that is so troubling? Perhaps it is the romanticization of black experiences that accompanies the thoughtless enjoyment of the culture that is born from them? Or is it the consumption of black pain as product? There is something disturbing about being confronted with music that for me is significant, evocative, and tied to an actual feeling in a space such as a hip restaurant in Brooklyn. I’m here to eat brunch (first mistake) and you have Otis Redding muted on the TV (presumably) singing and jumping around on stage, and – as though to say “AHA!” – you are also playing a completely different album by him on the sound system. At first, I offered the restaurant the benefit of the doubt, considering that perhaps this was the decision of a black owner who, like me, loves southern soul. But, there was something distinctly white about this. Aside from its offensively conspicuous “down-home” New Orleans theme and obviously new location in gentrify hot-spot Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, the ease with which black expression was on display as a backdrop just reeked of the detached, uninformed consumerist indifference that is fed by commodity culture. It was like an exhibit of southern black feeling that most of the “mixed crowd” patrons probably could not have related to on any personal level but could rather mindlessly neglect while eating barbecued shrimp and grit cakes. Anyway, taken completely out of context, Otis became 30-something inches of energetic sweaty black man, invoked to rouse a fake nostalgia for a time that most white people would, quite frankly, rather forget.
In being white and, to an extent, in being a part of sub- and counter-cultures which value history and the creation of things, one is faced with an abundance of options for musical cultures that are available to be listened to, researched, experienced, and enjoyed. (Take for example the fact that being a rock n’ roll fan might lead you to the unavoidable fact that many artists, including The Rolling Stones and that Elvis guy drew directly (and in some cases stole) from blues influences, such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson.) There are endless musical cultures to be discovered, particularly when you aren’t exposed to certain genres in your childhood. But it is important to consider the stories, histories, pain, and oppression that such music has been inevitably steeped in, and to seek to really understand what it means, and where it comes from – culturally, historically, emotionally – as opposed to appropriating whichever part of its aesthetic seems useful. Everything is not simply for your listening pleasure or dining experience.
Hi, so for a while there I was without home but now I am back and with an exciting number of things under my belt to get accomplished.
I’m on as a regular contributor at PostBourgie, and just threw my first blog up there, which has probably missed enough heads and rubbed enough people the wrong way for the week. I’m going to post that blog here in a min and in the future will try to make a habit of x-posting everything.
That’s really it. I’m excited to join the talented team of writers there and hopefully won’t say anything controversial enough to get voted off the island ;)
Black history for that ass.
Long before the initialed alias “G.W. Bush” became another way of saying “nitwit,” there was an individual with those very same initials, a journeying man and pioneer who was responsible for establishing a settlement in the Puget Sound area of the Pacific Northwest, and spurring the territorial legislative action that led to a special act of Congress which secured his land title in 1855.
In 1844, when black people were legally prohibited from settling in certain parts of the United States (and unlawfully prevented from settling in others), George Washington Bush led a group of settlers, which included his family and five other families, from Missouri into Oregon Territory by way of the Oregon Trail. He was not new to journeys or the Pacific Northwest, having made a trip from Mexico to the Columbia River in 1820 trapping and hunting, and having worked many years in Oregon Country for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Unable to settle in the Willamette Valley due to laws passed by the Provisional Government of Oregon prohibiting blacks from owning land, Bush and his party traveled across the Columbia River and established Bush Prairie in what would eventually become Tumwater, Washington.
At a time when the trope of the American frontier was being claimed as integral to the project of constructing a white male identity in the New World, George Washington Bush was among the black frontierswomen, men and homesteaders to provide an alternative to the monochromatic narrative. His story complicates the traditionally white masculinist tales/fantasies of journeying, exploration and discovery, and casts light on the black (or “other”) presence during an era in which whiteness was at once an invisible and omnipresent part of defining what it meant to become American.
George Washington Bush was one of the first American settlers and the first black settler in what would become the state of Washington. He was a veteran of the battle of New Orleans and of the war of 1812. He helped finance his fellow pioneer Michael Simmons’ logging company, and was responsible for the construction of the Tumwater area’s first gristmill and sawmill. At one point during his expedition from Missouri to Washington, when his party was crossing the plains and running low on supplies, he purchased enough flour at $60/barrel and sugar at $1/pound to last them until they reached Oregon City. In other words: get on his level.
Because of my longstanding commenting policy, which I was moved to make a post about today, I haven’t approved some of the comments that come through my queue. This means my readers don’t get to see the often inexcusably wack shit people try to say in response to some of my blogs. These comments usually include a statement of FBI statistics or an obscene word, and they are usually coupled with an invalid e-mail address.
Today I received a comment from an individual, who, for one reason or another, thought their e-mail address didn’t matter and communicated this by entering “dont@matter.com” for their e-mail. Sorry person, but it doesn’t go down like that.
Although I see no point in approving this individual’s comment, I do think they put forth some concerns that, perhaps, many people share when they read my blog. So, in an effort to relieve inquiring minds, I am going to attempt to answer this person’s questions and concerns in an open format. Please note that their comment is in bold.
talk about racism! yo the only thing you should also consider is that racism lives on because people like you refuse to let it die. everything you see is black and white.. or whatever race. “white people love to play guitar” “white people love to go on the roof” “this is a black people neighborhood.” WHat is the purpose of this blog?
The purpose of this blog is to create dialogue around whatever it is I feel like talking about. Sometimes these topics are about race, sometimes politics, music, or things I find funny. If you can’t figure out the purpose, then it’s clearly not for you.
I think it’s safe to assume, based on your simple analysis of why racism “lives on” that you haven’t done much work to understand race or racism. If we let you tell it, racism exists because I write about it. How does that work?
Racism “lives” in institutions. The United States was built on racism. I’m not keeping racism alive – it’s an enduring part of history. Something like racism, which is so deeply embedded in the way this country operates, and which is largely responsible for its prosperity, doesn’t just “die” if we stop talking about it.
In talking about white people, I am trying to communicate a criticism on the construct of whiteness, which if you can’t understand, then, like i said, this blog is not for you.
Have you ever tried looking at people as being similar and equal? try it.. its nice. you identify so much with black (BLACK scientist) that you have stopped identifyin with the rest of humanity! get your shit together.
Unfortunately, because you are so simple, you’ve made it almost impossible to address your comment seriously. But, I’ll try.
I don’t force things. I don’t have the typical militant American desire to see things as equal no matter what. SHIT AIN’T EQUAL, homie. I don’t gloss things over, I don’t support ill-founded historical revisionism, I don’t make myself believe things so I can feel better. Period. When I write about whiteness, blackness, injustice, and so on, I am not talking about how I look at people. And I don’t believe in making the argument “we are all the same” to engender change, justice or equity. I think you are failing to realize that it doesn’t matter if I see people as “similar and equal”. We are talking about how people are actually treated in the eyes of the law, schools, prisons, the state.
Having an individual identity (be it racial, cultural, regional, whatever) and identifying with “humanity” do not need to be mutually exclusive. And an important thing to note about identity is that it is individual. Therefore, you can’t tell me how I identify. And again, if you can’t understand the significance of the name of this blog, then guess what? It’s not for you.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to do things like this but it is apparent that people can need a little direction. So I will make it easier for people who, for one reason are another, are unsure if they “get it”. If you can identify with any of the following sentiments, then you don’t get it, and it’s not for you:
If you…
1. Ask yourself why I talk about race so much.
2. Find yourself reading about white people, and thinking about someone you know (and how they’re not like that).
3. Believe that statistics about imprisonment or “crime” rates actually prove points about groups of people.
4. Believe in colorblindness.
5. Find yourself arguing about whether homos have it harder than blacks. or blacks have it harder than jews. or farmers have it worse than teachers, etc etc etc
6. Think that ethnic studies/black history month is wrong, because it’s divisive or exclusionary.
7. Believe that if we all just stop talking about race, it will disappear.
8. Find conversations about race “tiring,” or refer to people of color discussing injustice as “complaining”.
–
I’ll end the list there for now. Anyone who has anything to add, please do. I hope that the person who sent the flippant comment will return at least to give this post a read. And I hope that I had at least enough patience to convey an important message regarding why I discuss race. Because it affects people’s lives. It is a social and cultural discursive construct – with an undeniably vital role in history and very real present-day effects.
Welcome again friends and I hope, if you know now that you get it, that you’ll stick around.
Hi,
I haven’t had anything like a commenting policy up but I got a rather dull-witted comment today and thought I should make a couple quick notes.
Oh! First, I want to apologize to the folks whose comments have taken weeks to get approved. I switched phones, didn’t have blog email coming to my new phone, and wasn’t in the habit of checking it online. So, my sincerest apologies and I’m going to fix that situation!
Now, two things that absolutely have to happen in order for your comment to be approved:
1. A real e-mail address. Sorry, but if you use an email like “me@123.com” or “dont@matter.com” (Yes I’m talking to you – and i’m about to put you on blast in a minute. keep reading.) then your comment will not get approved. And I’m sure that it’s no coincidence that these fake emails are usually accompanied by embarrassingly crass comments.
2. Your comment needs to be relevant in some way, shape or form to the blog that you are responding to. And it needs to be MORE than racist, sexist, ageist, etc. That is to say, I understand some people are racist (sometimes without knowing). But if you are using your commenting privilege as nothing more than to rant about how black people DO kill more than other people, then you’ve picked the wrong blog.
Now, to the entertaining individual who inspired this post. Because of your bitchassness (no shade), I can’t approve your comment. Howeverrrr! Because it was so stoooooopid, I want to address your concerns. Actually! It deserves its own post. See next.
First order of business: rock and roll is black. blues is black. and it doesn’t get any blacker than american folk music. now that we’ve cleared up the simplest of things.
I live in Lefferts Gardens Brooklyn. This is on the east side of Prospect Park and situated kind of in between Crown Heights and Flatbush. I’m relatively new to the neighborhood, having been here for just under a year. When I moved here, it was quite unlike the west side of the park – a neighborhood known as Park Slope – where the demographic is mostly white and affluent. Lefferts was black, predominantly Caribbean, with some Italians and Chinese folks here and there (think Do The Right Thing).
Some very curious things have been happening as of late.
ONE. As I was coming home last week at around 2 in the morning, I exited the train to find a large group of white people gathered up the street. They were being loud, taking up space, and I kept asking myself “what is going on?” and “where did all these white people come from?” I crossed the street and examined closely, looking for some indication of why this was happening–a jam session that drifted outside of the park perhaps? As I looked through the bodies, I managed to make out the words on the building where a fish fry spot used to be
LINCOLN PARK TAVERN
…
TWO. I was walking home last night, from the same area. Tavern on my left, two white girls discussing curtains on my right. As I came upon one of my favorite pizza places in the neighborhood, I heard the light strumming of strings. I looked up to find two white men, one in his 20s, the other probably in his 50s, playing guitars on the sidewalk. “What has caused these generations to band together?” I asked myself. Then, I looked passed them and realized they were standing in front of a new restaurant with nothing but white people inside of it. “Open sesame?” I wondered to myself.
So with this I ask, is playing guitar a way that white people claim space? When I saw those men, I couldn’t help but think that there was no better marker for whiteness, no bolder or more conscious indicator that white people had arrived. and in numbers large enough to feel comfortable claiming public space – in a manner as american as with the steel string guitar.
NEWSFLASH: You’re in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York in top hats and vests playing folksy music. Your aesthetic and your sound are asking people like you who share your historical memories to long for the place where what you’re doing actually exists (SEE white rural america). Our nostalgias are not the same. You are trying to conjure a sense of (be)longing in the minds and hearts of the people you want to feel at home here. You are jacking off white people’s imaginations.
It’s one thing to be white and move to a black neighborhood. It’s another to open a business there. But need you really set up shop on the sidewalk and employ selective cultural cues to assert yourself? Come onnnn.
Visit white people, before white people visit you.
Looks like they changed their minds.
“Nah, go to by inbox” is now “Just go to my inbox, I’ll try buzz later”. Hmm…
What I was just saying about black people and language and culture and absorption, re-appropriation, etc etc?
(Click on the image for a closer view)
And what’s up with the “sweet!” juxtaposition? could this be filed under the ‘black women are always the ones to say no’ category? sure! sweet, this is great! vs. nah, take me where i was going. implications, anyone?
I was watching the Superbowl with a racial melange of people when this commercial came on:
The few black folks in the room all paused, and, mostly in confusion wondered if we had heard what we thought we just heard. Thanks to the future and the ability to rewind television, we watched it another 3 or 4 times and learned the baby was saying “milka what,” in response to the comment about someone (presumably her) being a “milkaholic”. We couldn’t get over the fact that “milka what” sounded strangely similar to “nucca what” which is a variation (if you will) of “nigga what”.
While I was discussing the commercial with a friend of mine, she pointed out that when black culture becomes widely accessible through media, lines about (in)appropriate usage and re-appropriation can become blurry. She cited the popularity of the saying “talk to the hand” in the 90s, as well as the use of “daps” and “pounds” to greet others as examples of black culture becoming absorbed by mainstream and popular culture. We talked about the fact that black culture can sometimes be such a part of mainstream culture that it is disconnected from its source and is recognized only as an ambiguous association within a popular culture built upon associations. That is, a particular saying, intonation, or movement that is derived from black culture can seem only vaguely familiar to non-black people, in the sense that they have ingested it in various forms through mass media but perhaps never experienced it within its original context (black spaces). (This can also be true for black people who experience ‘blackness’ as-we-know-it through media). Furthermore, once adopted by media, an expression that once existed within black communities begins to be reshaped, reimagined and given some kind of ‘new’ meaning through the process of being constantly reproduced.
Take, for example, the usage of “milka what” in this commercial. It is the intonation of the phrase, in addition to the body movement (the way she comes in from the side of the screen with a cocked head***) and the fact that “milka what” actually sounds like “nucca what” that makes it a play on something black. Whether that something is black culture “itself” or the representation of it within mass media is a little unclear (cue Art vs Reality). It could in fact be a play on mass media’s portrayal of black-person-with-attitude saying “nigga what,” which would make the commercial a reference to itself (an irony not uncommon in media within the last few years). Or it could be a reference to the use of “nigga what” that actually occurs within black communities. (Although these two things are not necessarily opposed).
It is not uncommon for black culture to be used and referenced in mainstream white culture as a source of entertainment. The auto-tune Bud Light commercial was a hip-hop reference (although auto-tune existed before T-Pain, he is its most accessible representative in our chronically short-term collective memory.) And references to things that were at some point black are not, per se, always problematic. But when is the line crossed?
Perhaps with a baby embodying half the gamut of white media’s black stereotypes and referencing an expression with the n-word in it? Entertainment that relies on racial (mis)conceptions/(mis)understandings/stereotypes cannot exist without a serious commitment to education and anti-racism (READ chappelle show, and the boondocks). Thus, this commercial, while in humor (or something?), is inappropriate because it depends on potentially problematic understandings of how “race” is performed for its appeal and plays on a word that has an extremely violent racial history.
- – - – -
***I realize she’s a baby, and therefore, someone was probably holding her in order for this movement to be achieved. so the question of how much her body movement was choreographed doesn’t necessarily have a clear answer. however, the fact that the commercial as-is made it to TV lets us know the end product was, at the least, satisfactory.
