Tag: #blacklivesmatter

Lynching Was About Race, But Also About Land and Power

By Teka Lark (October 1, 2019)

They lynched Mexicans.

“They” being white people. Texas has always been home to nightmares. It is where my half my family who didn’t go to LA from Louisiana ended up. It is where my great-great aunt was burned alive. I read in Manitowoc, Wisconsin this weekend. I love Manitowoc, but somehow I ended up watching PBS and this show about the Porvenir massacre came on. The state (the US) under the guise of outlaws under the guise of Texas Rangers killed Latinx people for their land; they killled women, children, men. 

But I want to stress they killed people who owned land. Why do I stress this? Because really there is nothing white nationalism hates more than empowered people of color who don’t need their help. This PBS show made it seemed like it was a battle and sort of implied they did stuff too and I said to Charles’ parents, “That is bullshit they killed them for their land, they are thieves! This show is bullshit I am from California. I have friends whose families were here before the white people stole it!”

The story of lynching is that it is just about race. It is, but it is also about land and power. The people who they lynched Black and Chicano owned land, had businesses. White nationalism is not random in its viciousness.

teka

When I Meet Young People who Want to be an Obama

By Irami Osei-Frimpong (August 5, 2019)

The problem isn’t that Obama bought a 15 million dollar house. What else are you going to do with the money?

The problem is:

a)  that you all thought he was ever going to do anything for Black people that would jeopardize the family  buying a 15 million dollar house.

b)   he did it as a public servant who could have pushed for policies for Black communities, but pushed for policies that led to a 15 million dollar house, instead.

When I meet twenty year olds who want to be Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I am heartened. Ella Baker, I’m down. When I meet twenty year olds who want to be Huey Newton or Fred Hampton. I am heartened. Bayard Rustin. Same deal. When I meet 20 year olds who want to be Angela Davis. I think, right on. I hope they read her older stuff. However, when I meet twenty year olds who want to be Barack or Michelle Obama, I’m always sad, and I back away, with my hand on my wallet. 

I also keep my kids away from those people.

irami

 

 

 

Waking Up to the Lie of the Second Amendment

By Teka Lark (August 4, 2019)

The United States is a country which creates narratives to not only create policies, but to shape minds. When the Pilgrims arrived to what is now the Massachusetts in 1620, the tribes of the Wampanoag people prevented them from starving and as a thank you the Europeans brought communicable diseases and enslaved them.

In 1643, William Penn said of the Lenni Lanape “In liberality they excel, nothing is too good for their friend; give them a fine Gun, Coat, or other thing, it may pass twenty hands, before it sticks; the most merry Creatures that live, Feast, Dance almost perpetually; they never have much; Wealth circulateth like the Blood, all parts partake; and though none shall want what another hath, yet exact Observers of Property.” The Europeans saw this and stole the Lenni Lanape’s land between what is now Delaware and New Jersey– in one of the United States’ first narratives of the “fair” and “honest” deals this country “offered” to the Indigenous inhabitants of the country they would later just outright steal.

You probably read about the finished draft of this United States’ “narrative” –the Manifest Destiny.

“And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us,” from John Louis O’Sullivan in an essay entitled Annexation, in 1845, advocating that the U.S. admit the STOLEN Republic of Texas into the Union.

The United States learned quickly in the beginning in order to continue to enslave, murder, and steal from the Indigenous people of the country they stole and in order to continue kidnapping and enslaving Africans –they couldn’t have the people of the world viewing either of these two groups of people, as people or innocent.

They had to be dehumanized and demeaned, because the average person is not going to sign on to kill and steal from their fellow person, at least not just because, but if the person wasn’t characterized as a person or even better, they were characterized as an enemy, well that might be a better sell.

And it was a better sell.

Had the Indigenous people had been even a ¼ as violent as the Europeans said they were, the great experiment of “America,” would have never happened.

Fast forward to modern day. The European, now the white man has ended slavery, because, apparently Abraham Lincoln was a generous and just man, at least that was the story told in African children (now Black) history books.

“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature — opposition to it is in his love of justice,” Abraham Lincoln, 1854.

On December 26, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history.

We didn’t hear that part of the story, because Lincoln freed “the slaves.” Lincoln murdering the people whose land the United States stole, well that wouldn’t have been very consistent.

Because it is all about the consistent lie folks.

The United States has been built on the backs of Black and Brown people.

Both of our names have been changed –to protect the guilty. Our histories have been hidden, and our borders and histories keep shifting to fit whatever lie the United States wants to tell on a particular day.

The Samba, the Tchamba, the Daka. the African, the slave, the n*%ger, the negro, the Negro, the Colored, the Black, the Afro-American, the African American are not really African, according to the United States.

AND

The Nahuatl, the Maya, the Indian, the s*vage, the Native American, the Mexican, the *illegal, the Chicano, the Latino, the Chicanx/Latinx have crossed the border into OUR (white people’s) country “illegally,” according to the United States.

The Second Amendment was ratified to protect the Slave Patrol. The slave patrol is the basis for modern publicly funded police departments (aka white men vigilante types with guns who are institutionally supported to murder and/or round up and detain Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people), the Feds, the Border Patrol, ICE…the reason that Black and Indigenous people die at higher rates by these departments is no accident.

It is by design.

The Second Amendment was created so that white men could continue to kill Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people with the power of the narrative that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are violent, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous are stealing white people’s job, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous are raping white women, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous are sucking up resources that could go to white people, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are loitering in spaces where white people want to walk around and not see us, that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people have crossed the border without the proper paperwork, and that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people need to be controlled lest they do to white men what has been done to them.

Removing the Second Amendment is not about gun control.

Stripping the Second Amendment is about stripping the lie away, from white men that they have the right to kill people for being Mexican, for being Black, and/or for being Indigenous.

This is what I don’t think white men on the far left understand or they don’t care about.

Stripping the Second Amendment from our US Constitution isn’t taking away anyone’s rights, but the white man’s.

Who else can use the Second Amendment, maybe white women…I can’t use it, Chicanx/Latinx people can’t use it, only white people can use it.

Twelve year old Tamir Rice can’t use it. He was sitting around with a toy gun and white men emboldened by their Second Amendment rolled up and shot him.

Philando Castile couldn’t use it, when they shot him with 4-year-old Diamond Reynolds in the car who said after the murder, “Mom, please stop screaming ’cause I don’t want you to get shooted”

Stripping the Second Amendment is removing the symbol and protection that white men have as their god given manifest destiny right to murder people for not just not being white, but for being a descendant of the the people whose land this was stolen from or for being a descendant of the people who were kidnapped and brought here, because that is the only reason the Second Amendment exists. The Second Amendment exists to hold up the lie that built this country and keeps this violent sadistic place pasted together with the blood and tears of our ancestors.

I’m not fighting or debating for the right to empower white men to kill me, again.

The lie told over and over again is one of the most powerful tools the United States has at its disposal, stop letting them tell this one.

teka

Laughter in the Face of White Mediocrity – and other strategies for anti-oppression excellence

 

By Christian Matheis (June 21, 2019)

“What do I tell my kids?” a student asked me last spring in an intro class on community problem solving. She, African-American and one of the few (4, she tells me) on the municipal police force of around 450 officers, caught my words.

 

“What do I tell my kids???” she repeated as I searched for an answer worthy of the question.

 

Here is what had prompted the question. In response to a class discussion about the covert and persistent versions of authority, white supremacy, and white privilege in institutions, I made a casual remark about mediocrity. Paraphrasing something Lani Roberts told me many years ago I said, “Remember, bureaucracy tends to select for mediocrity. And mediocrity tends to bolster bureaucracy. Act excellent, show brilliance and you’re a threat to the mediocre who have careers built on mediocrity. Stay mediocre, get promoted.” I voiced it matter-of-factly.

 

Her question, “what do I tell my kids???” was not casual. It was urgent.

 

In the moment I didn’t have the kinds of liberation-informed response I wish I had. So, I’ve given it some thought and reflection over the past few weeks and I at least found some of my voice to try again. In other words, through the cruel irony of white mediocrity itself I had casually named white mediocrity while a Black mother in a class I taught lived it, felt it like a ton of bricks and instantly had to wonder how to parent in spite of it.
More and more recently, a growing number of people have written about and re-emphasized Black excellence — a term by Black people, for Black people, about Black people that highlights the successes of Blacks who thrive despite and in resistance to global white supremacy. Or perhaps irrespective of white supremacy. I do not know.
I think it is not for me to say much at all about Black excellence, except that I think it stands in critical, liberatory opposition to white supremacy, white privilege, and white mediocrity by making these latter systems wholly irrelevant (or as much as possible) to how African Americans treat one another. Or to paraphrase Toni Morrison, “When I started writing I found that all the stories by Black men about Black people were about someone locked in a fight with their oppressor. Once I decided to kick the oppressor out of my stories I could write the realities of Black women, for us and about us” (my recollection of her remark at the Sheer Good Fortune event at Virginia Tech in 2013).
I want to reiterate that the mediocrity here is not just any mediocrity, not just any bureaucracy. It is *white* mediocrity. And it helps maintain and fuel white bureaucracy, white privilege, and white supremacy by any and all names we might call these systems.
Intersectionally, white mediocrity as the paradigm inside of white bureaucracies depends on the entire system of capitalist imperialist cisheteropatriarchal mediocrity (riffing on bell hooks).
(As much as I admire Bonnie Mann’s work on “sovereign masculinity” (2013), we have to read our Marx and Engels closely enough to notice that an elite class struggles with sovereign masculinity, while the vast majority of people exploited, abused, and murdered by patriarchy suffer in systems of “bureaucratic masculinity”)
White mediocrity plays out its favors and punishments through a system that at least includes:

– Aesthetic white mediocrity: collapsing and controlling beauty, awe, wonder, ineffability, the sublime, etc. in ways that protect and further entrench the role of whites as the paradigm of aesthetics, the benchmarks of all beauty, pure and magnificent. All others, ugly, impure, and mundane.
– Moral white mediocrity: assessing right, wrong, good, bad, and any complex value determinations in ways that protect and further entrench the role of whites as the best evaluators, the best at making judgments.

 

– Political white mediocrity: adjudicating claims of injustice, distributing resources and opportunities, distribution of social benefits and burdens, and ranking individual and group interests in ways that protect and further entrench whites as the best deciders.
– Economic white mediocrity: conceiving of quality of life, social welfare, distribution of resources and opportunities, etc. in ways that protect and further entrench whites as the best owners and controllers — to say little or nothing of interrogating and dismantling ownership paradigms in themselves.
Let’s get a few things on the table.
White mediocrity has promoted me.

 

My refusal to collude in white mediocrity, when I have mustered the strength and strategy, has also cost me. But it has never cost me as much as it has promoted me. The cost is optional for whites.

 

I both have and can still give talks titled, “Anti-Racism for White People: Or How to Stop Worrying and Become a White Race Traitor” knowing that it is a luxury, an option. White mediocrity allows me to do so, but with as much or as little efficacy as I choose.

 

The social positionality allows me to write about it, in this moment, with relatively limited consequences.

 

We know all too well that whites can count on cashing in the white mediocrity chip at any time, anywhere, and that it benefits us to remain unaware of this particular form of corrupting privilege (Peggy McIntosh).

 

White mediocrity may take familiar forms. Though because systematic oppression operates to conceal itself it may not always appear obvious when one has come face to face with white mediocrity. For that reason, I want to try to help expose the anatomy of white mediocrity by naming what seem like common aspects:

 

– Assume authority is yours for the taking, that as white you deserve it if you put enough loyal years into an organization.

– Speak with the tone and cadence that always, flawlessly implies the threat, “I decide, or must I remind you.”

– Seek managerial promotion in white-dominated bureaucracies as an inherent good.

– Treat others as if they want managerial promotion in a white-dominated bureaucracy.

– Reward/encourage others as if they want promotion in a white-dominated bureaucracy.

– Sanction/discourage others who resist promotion in a white-dominated bureaucracy, especially anyone who doesn’t “play ball.”

– Defend your mediocre decisions as best for the white-dominated bureaucracy.

– Offer to mentor, coach, or advise people from underrepresented groups in how to obtain the fruits of white mediocrity by assimilating.

– Avoid people from underrepresented groups who question and challenge the mediocrity of white rule over white-dominated bureaucracies.

– Pat on the back anyone from any group who validates your fragile, white mediocre ego.

– …what else? This must be an open list.

 

These and many other normalized traits of administrative leadership and managerial authority depend on and bolster white mediocrity. We whites dare not admit to it. What would become of our claims to authority, force, power, rule? All so flimsy.

 

One salient insight into white mediocrity I can now recall was with a supervisor during an annual performance evaluation meeting. At the time I served in an advocacy role in a university, my salary paid for by student fees. During the conversation while I listened to “recommendations for professional growth” I had a sudden and inexplicable need to explain, “I think you think I someday want your job. Or the vice-provost’s job.” She looked shocked. I went on, “I took this job because I want this job, this work right now. I’ll hopefully take the next one for similar reasons. But I have zero aspirations about promotion, about climbing the status ladder.”

 

She, a cis heterosexual woman of color, confided in me several months later that that remark had seriously upset her. Not because it wasn’t fair or relevant, but because she realized that she had never once in her career questioned her desire to climb the administrative hierarchy. It was a given.

 

Given by whom? By mediocre whites.

 

White mediocrity can co-opt, tokenize, and assimilate people from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds.
Various scholars of liberation such as Jane Nardal, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Audre Lord, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, etc. have shown that oppression plants in the oppressed the seeds of their own liberation, while at the same time it (oppression) also masks that fact.

 

This is probably why Black excellence is so crucial to undermining white mediocrity. Black excellence exposes and at the same time treats as irrelevant the scheme of white mediocrity, or so I suspect.

 

In “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) George Orwell tells about the time in his young adulthood when he served as part of the brutal, colonial British military force occupying India. Many years later, reflecting on the depth of his acculturation into white imperialist rule he remarks, “Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. …I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East.”
What catches my attention is not that Orwell merely notices and confesses to his acculturation into British imperialism, doing the job while hating the job. It is the pattern of events that Orwell says most frustrated and upset him at the time, and what helped to expose to him the mediocrity of British bureaucratic oppression over India and Burma. In the opening of the essay he writes,

 

“As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow [sic] faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves.

 

Then later, in closing, “The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”

 

What if white mediocrity has no immunity to laughter?

 

Perhaps what white mediocrity fears most is that the oppressed will realize how preposterous and mediocre white rule has always been. How laughable, unimaginative, and incoherent white supremacy actually is, and how it appears maybe most laughable in its bureaucratic administrative formations. Moreover, laughable in that so much of the scheme and scam of white mediocrity is about whites coercing whites to remain ignorant of it, and to use white bureaucracy to eradicate spaces in which people of color can create overt language – a language in which to talk about white mediocrity in institutional settings (e.g. in the workplace, classroom, research conference, annual performance evaluation, etc.).

 

Where and when can we talk about white mediocrity? Cisgender mediocrity? The mediocrity of the temporarily able-bodied? Masculine mediocrity? Heterosexual mediocrity? And so on.
“What do I tell my kids?” she asked.

 

I do not know.

 

At least for today, I hope she tells them to consider laughter and Black excellence — Tell your children to laugh and love their Black excellence.

When the Klan was Tax Supported in Ohio

By Teka Lark (May 28, 2019)

People say that in Dayton, Ohio that only 9 members of the Ku Klux Klan showed up and that it was a win for US, the community.  But that was no win. According to the Time Magazine article, “9 People Showed Up for a KKK Rally in Dayton, Ohio. They Were Drowned Out by 600 Protestors” by Tara Law, it was stated that 350 police officers showed up.

I would interpret that as 359 people showed up to assert the rights of the Ku Klux Klan and white nationalism. I know it is redundant to say the Ku Klux Klan is white nationalism, but as a country, we are losing historical and institutional memory.  So I’m going to restate that as redundant as it may be for people born before 1980.

The far-right isn’t a fringe group. It is the foundation of this country. It is the 2nd Amendment which exists, so that white nationalism can protect itself against the presence of Africans and Indigenous people. It exists in the prison industrial complex, which overwhelmingly jails the poor of all races and Black and Indigenous people across socioeconomic lines.

It exists in the economics, where white households median net worth is $141,000 and the median net worth for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx households is under $15,000; where the probability of a loan denial is 36.9% higher for black-owned firm in comparison to a white, male owned business counterparts according to the American Economic Association; where all minority groups small businesses faced racial discrimination based upon data from the 1998 and 2003 Survey of Small Business Finances according to the American Economic Association.

The narrative of the far-right rights has a stranglehold on the vast majority of our school’s curriculum and states that this country was discovered by Christopher Columbus instead of stolen from Indigenous people by murdering them and moving them to locations in the coldest and most barren parts of the United States, where nothing grows.

The far-right says we’re a country that is a nation of (European Immigrants) with an asterisk on Chinese immigrants who provided the huge amount of labor needed to build the majority of the Central Pacific’s difficult railroad tracks through the Sierra Nevada mountain. The existence of this railroad created prosperity and opportunity for many white people in the US, opportunities denied to Asian, Indigenous, African, and Latinx people until after the 1960s.

The far-right also minimizes the impact of the enslavement of African people who prior to the inception of this stolen country until 1865 were legally classified as property.

The far-right is the police department who has at every point in US history taken the side of white nationalism, until it was not economically fruitful to do so.

359 people showed up in Dayton to support white nationalism and 350 of them were backed by our tax dollars and our government.

teka

Black Women and Choice in Alabama

By Teka Lark (May 17, 2019)

My mother said when she was pregnant with me the doctor asked her if she wanted an abortion. My mother was married, a housewife, had no other children, and owned a home with my father, but still that was the first question that the doctor asked when she went to the doctor to confirm what she had already knew. She and my father planned it, as they were responsible and that’s what responsible Black people do, so they won’t bring the wrath of racism.

Because if you’re perfect, you’ll never, ever have to experience racism.

This opens up my relationship with birth.

I have always been pro-choice I still am, but as a Black woman my relationship with choice is a different one.

A Black woman in urban America has never had a problem getting an abortion — now birth control, information on safe sex, sex positive information, a job, those were hard to come by, but an abortion, that has always been pretty easy.

I know all about abortion, not because I had one, but because I had driven my friends to them. I had a car and my birthday was on January 1, so I ended of being the driver in many rock and roll and unlucky in love adventures.

I drove a friend to get three abortions. Why did she get three? I don’t know. I have always had a it’s none of my business kind of policy. That is why I am a good driver.

In the early 20th Century the US had a eugenics program. Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years approximately 60,000 sterilizations took place.

Black children are five times more likely to be be incarcerated.

Black infants have the highest infant mortality rate.

Post antebellum America has never been a welcoming place for Black babies.

“I’m pregnant” said Pamela Harris, before she was murdered by the state.

Growing up the worst thing you could do was to become an irresponsible Black woman with children.

That was worse than murdering people, stealing, pretty much the only thing worse than a Black mother (married, unmarried, it doesn’t matter, the institutions don’t differentiate between the two) was a Black mother on crack.

I always think about crack when I drive through the middle of the country and see places where people can dispose of their “diabetic” needles, wouldn’t have been nice if the same courtesy had been granted to people who had “diabetes” in South Central, Brooklyn, and Chicago?

Black people have been murdered, hypersegregated, and terrorized in the South since the inception of this country.

The politicians who are now enacting draconian laws to restrict the rights of white women, because they’ve already done everything they can to the rest of us, have always been draconian.

Black people didn’t vote for Governor Ivey of Alabama, we would have never vote for such a foul person.

Black people don’t get the luxury of a wedge issue, even anti-choice Black people will vote pro-choice. We have to look at the bigger issue. We have to look at justice on a larger scale.

I have often talked about the evils of the South, many people have, and to people now, who act as if the evil of the South is something new, I really want to ask where the fuck have you been sister, where the fuck have you been?

teka

I’m Not Your Blackface

By Teka Lark (January 31, 2019)

I think one of the most important things to know is who you are and the second most important thing to know is who others think you are.

I like to think of the world and my life as a journey, but I am aware that many people, entities, systems, view each individual as a game piece.

As a younger person I ignored this, as I felt self awareness was enough to not get “played.”

Though I was raised around Black people and in a Black family, I have always had the ability to talk to anyone, to connect with anyone, regardless of race, class, nation, sexual orientation and/or religion.

I am in some ways a performer, as I view writing, especially online as a performative act. I have always been aware of my audience. I live in the US, the biggest audience in the US (by the numbers if you want to break down by race) is white. I am aware of that and while I write from a Black point of view I know that white people are the predominant race of people who are reading what I write. This isn’t the case for all Black people, but it is the case for Lark.

There are certain things I do not say owing to that, people say, “It shouldn’t matter.” But see it does matter. I have mostly written for predominantly white leftist publications. When Obama was president these leftist publications would ask me specifically to write about Obama. I would always refuse.

Never in my life have I ever made the problems of capitalism, injustice, and institutional racism about one person. You probably have noticed here that I rarely talk about Trump. The reason I do not talk about Trump is because I do not believe that removing Trump will remove the problem of injustice in the US. That is not to say I support him or I would stop you from expressing your opinions on him, but for me I have limited time. I will never turn my issue with capitalism into a one individual person issue.

Most of my white friends on the far left agree with this EXCEPT when it has to do with Black politicians, for some reason they are often obsessed with politicians with Black skin even though the night before we have all just had intense conversation that it is the system not the people in the system which is the problem.

So if you’re waiting for my thought on Kamala as a leftist, well why are you not waiting on my thoughts on Elizabeth Warren or Tulsi Gabbard, no one is waiting for this, because within this game my job is supposed to be talking about the Black people. That’s my role in the game. I understand that role, but that is not who I am. Who I am is a person who looks at the bigger picture. I do not believe that within this system there is a magic bullet politician who can solve it all, because my belief is that this system that is rooted in stealing and murdering Native Americans and kidnapping Africans to work as slaves is not a system that can be fixed.

My role will never be to call out only the Black players in the system, especially not for a predominantly white audience, who cannot see this system beyond the paradigm of Black and White.

teka

The US has Avoided the Task of Anti-Black Racism

By Irami Osei-Frimpong (January 30, 2019)

Heather Heyer died for going to a rally against White supremacists. She didn’t wake up that day to die. She woke up that day to go to a rally against White supremacy. But she paid the price. That’s simply what justice costs. Our unwillingness to pay that price is why we ended Reconstruction.

I think that not so deep down, we all know that the nation has avoided the task of directly addressing anti-Black racism. The Germans went through the work of de-Nazification; White Americans erected monuments to Confederates.

Maybe it’s because they wanted to keep our housing values, secure our inheritance, or send their kids to the school with the higher scores or didn’t want to offend their vaguely supremacist friends or boss or spouse or parent or colleague. Maybe it’s because they wanted to keep our kids safe, even when we knew the “stop and frisk” sensibility or targeted traffic stops were disproportionately taxing on Black men and communities, and the best way to do that is concentrate all of America’s race problems into Black neighborhoods.

But I think that deep down, White Americans know that the vaguely anxious feeling that White House staffers feel about Trump’s twitter account, petulance, and erratic decision-making is the same feeling Black Americans walk around with all of their life with White America. It’s a steady state of terror that starts as young as pre-school, when you see the stats on how 3 year olds are disproportionately punished before they can barely talk, and the trend simply doesn’t stop on through adulthood.

irami

Surviving Misogynoir

By Teka Lark (January 8, 2019)

When I have events I never have music. I don’t like music.

I came of age in the 80s and 90s.

I came of age when music was getting pretty mean and I knew immediately that I did not like hiphop. I didn’t like hiphop, because it seemed to specifically be talking about how it hated me as a Black girl, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to have the words, but even as a kid I liked myself.

I wasn’t going to purchase and listen to music that seemed to specifically hate me, even if it had a good beat.

I don’t use hate flippantly.

“Tired of my face, Telling lies gettin’ n—s wives tied up and raped.” — Rick Ross

There is something that listening to soundtrack of Black women hate that turns even Black women against Black women. It’s propaganda with a producer.

The lyrics were not only violent towards Black women and sexually graphic, but also had to on top of all of that it had an undercurrent of respectability politics, like “we all raped this 12 year old, but if she had dressed like a lady and loved Jesus, well that wouldn’t have happened…”

Self righteous, objectifying, and mean.

I also came of age in the beginning of music videos, MTV was actively and openly racist, it wouldn’t play Black artists, so BET was started and initially I watched the R&B, until I noticed not just the songs, but the videos.

I noticed there was a lot of colorism, sizeism, and just women as objects, R&B had become like hiphop, but with singing. Art is supposed to be fantasy, so when you listen to music and watch videos you sort of fantasize that it’s you, and I didn’t want to be dancing in a music video in a g-string sitting on some evil child molesting uncle’s lap.

People say well all music is sexist.

Many Black women academics say that hiphop is from the larger culture which is sexist.

They are correct the US is sexist.

All art is sexist, but you know what, I’m not embracing an art form that has for the last 40 years specifically described people who look like me as a bitch, whore, gold digger, prostitute, and baby’s mama over and over and over and over again.

I’m not embracing an art form that views me as a hole for masturbation.

I’m not embracing an art form that ranks Black women by shade and hair texture, so that even Beyonce who is unrankable (and husband is Jay Z) gets ranked a B, because she isn’t biracial with wavy hair, because even light skin won’t exempt you from their wrath.

I’m not embracing an art form that would openly disrespect Beyonce, because she is a Black woman and you can get away with disrespecting a Black woman, even if the Black woman is Beyonce.

I’m not embracing an art form that claims it loves Rihanna, creepily stalks Rihanna (Drake) then collaborates with the man (Chris Brown) who tried to kill Rihanna.

You will not call me out my name in my own neighborhood and in my own home.

In the past I brought this up to people and I got a lot of push back as there were bigger fish to fry, you know, racism, because politically some of these men accidentally made some good points like NWA’s F*** the Police.

“Dr Dre has changed…”
Fuck Dr. Dre.

As a Black girl in a Black neighborhood, the racism I witnessed and experienced on a daily basis was on rotation on the radio and cable television —songs by R Kelly, Dr Dre, NWA, Kanye West, Rick Ross, and Snoop Dog and as I was from LA, I didn’t just hear the songs I knew friends who had personally experienced the brutality of these men and the culture that uplifted them and stomped on Black women and girls’ souls.

They were predators going after underage girls and bragging about not falling in love with them, but raping them. There are songs that explain in vivid detail these activities, no one was hiding anything.

“Mister, mister, before you make me go
I’m here to let you know your little girl is a ho
Nympho, nympho, boy is she bad
Get her all alone and out comes the kneepads
I know she is a minor and it is illegal
But the bitch is worse than Vanessa Del Rio
And if you decide to call rape” —Ice Cube, 1991

There has never been a misunderstanding.

For me there has never been a conflict in my head.

I have never been confused about R Kelly, Dr Dre, hip hop or rap. You don’t like me, then I don’t like you. There is no confusion or conflict for me.

When I brought this up in the Black community I was told that I was being unfair, because #NotALLUrban music and when I brought this up in predominantly white feminist circles I got a lot of, “This is complicated and bell hooks said it was OK…” bell hooks didn’t say this was OK, but whatever…

Sexism for some reason always becomes more complicated when it involves Black girls/femmes/women, because Black in the eyes of society makes you not a woman ala “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave,” and feminism is for (white) women, not Black girls.

I remember once I was at a women event, run by non Black women and to be inclusive they played hiphop, and though it wasn’t a hateful song it was by an artist who I knew was hateful.

I got sick of explaining why as a Black woman how hurtful it was (and is) that women who are not Black, but claim to be feminists, feel it’s completely OK to uplift a lifestyle that that hates me, for the sake of some fake diversity.

I also got sick of asking Black women who love hip hop, Dre, R Kelly etc…why they liked music that insulted them, degraded them, the people in the genre won’t even marry people who can’t pass the paper bag test, these men clearly think the average Black woman is disgusting and they say it over and over and over again. They rank you a D and they do it publicly. They call brown and dark Black women gold diggers for wanting to be treated nicely, they hate you, and the ones with “positive” lyrics collaborate and party with the ones that hate you, so why, why do you continually defend them? Why do you set yourself on fire to keep these men who wouldn’t even waste spit to help you, if you were actually on fire?

I stopped explaining this topic.

I was exhausted at having to explain this to Black men, Black women, POC, white people, just everyone.

I stopped asking, begging, appealing to reason as to why people feel the need to continue to play and support the hateful genre of music that hurts Black women.

Imagine going to an event with music and someone made a derogatory slur about you at least three times an hour, because that is what it is like for Black women, that is how prolific the hate is.

This is why I don’t have music at my events, because if Black women can’t freely dance, then no one is dancing.

teka

What Does the Research Say About Black Intimate Partner Violence?

By Tommy J. Curry (December 14, 2018)

Many, if not most, Black academics do not really want to solve domestic violence. Over the last few days, I have seen Black academics posting articles from Blavity, The Root, and blogs discussing domestic violence. You want to know why they post from these sources because very few Black people actually study intra-racial violence. For comparison look at Twitter and observe the threads of white scholars on these issues. What do they share? They share datasets, analyses, pages, and articles they wrote on the topic. Black academics increase their popularity by spreading deliberate misinformation about the nature and causes of intimate partner violence b/c the Duluth model provides a powerful ideological weapon against ecological accounts of Black pathology.

See many Black academics make their money convincing white liberals how dangerous and backward poor Black folk are. They want you to believe that the men and women who raised most of us are pathological. I am a first generation Black man from Lake Charles, Louisiana. I have seen domestic violence, death, police brutality, etc., and not once have I ever thought these ills were the result of the character of Black people.

You want to solve IPV/IPH amongst Blacks? Ask yourself what does the actual research say:

1. Poverty is the major driving force behind IPV.
2. Alcoholism plays a huge role in the decrease of inhibition between couples and plays a role in male to female and female to male abuse.
3. Fetal alcohol syndrome has a major role in the lack of impulse control amongst poor Black populations, maternal care and early detection of pregnancy in urban Black women is key.
4. Bidirectional abuse and murder has been documented amongst Blacks since the 1930s. We must deal with conflict resolution and female perpetration.
5. Previous trauma (child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, and neglect) accounts for IPV/IPH more than sexist attitudes.
6. Ignoring female abuse socializes children in households to accept abuse as routine. Simply witnessing IPV increases the child’s likelihood to be a victim or perpetrator.

Sources:

1. Denise Hines, “Intimate Terrorism by Women Towards Men: Does it Exist?,” Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research 2.3 (2010): 36-56.

2. Denise Hines and Emily Douglas, “Predicting Potentially Life-Threatening Partner Violence by Women Toward Men: A Preliminary Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28.5 (2013): 751-771.

3. Denise Hines and Emily Douglas, “Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Men Who Sustain Intimate Partner Violence,” Aggressive Behavior 38 (2012): 31-46.

4.John Archer, “Sex Differences in Aggression between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin 5 (2000): 651-680.

5.Murray Straus,“Why the Overwhelming Evidence on Partner Physical Violence Has Not Been Perceived and Is Often Denied,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma,” 18 (2009): 552-571.

6. Raul Caetano, Suhasini Ramisetty-Mikler, Craig A. Field, “Unidirectional and Bidirectional Intimate Partner Violence among White, Black, and Hispanic Couples in the United States,” Violence and Victims 20.4 (2005): 393-406.

7. Linda G. Mills, Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse, 2003.

8. Carl C. Bell, High Rates of Neurobehavioral Disorder Associated with Prenatal
Exposure to Alcohol among African Americans Driven by the Plethora
of Liquor Stores in the Community,” J Fam Med Dis Prev 2016, 2:033.

tommy

For Fellow White Women, After the 2018 Mid-terms

By Nicole Berland (November 7, 2018)

To other white and white-passing women, here goes a long and potentially unpopular post:

I’m stoked on many of the results from yesterday’s election, but, per usual, the returns saw the majority of white women voters cast our ballots for Republicans who legislate against women’s interests in places like Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Whether or not *you* voted Republican (if you’re reading this, you probably didn’t), *we* ww are responsible for the violence our demographic continues enact upon marginalized groups.

A few things:

If you’re wondering why white women vote Republican:
The reason ww vote for candidates who seek to consolidate power for rich white men is because we derive most of our privilege from our whiteness. The ww who vote Republican fail to recognize the ways in which our lives would all be immeasurably enriched by moving toward a more equitable society.

If you are still surprised that voting for Hillary wasn’t enough:
First, she was not a progressive candidate, and she’s proven time and again that she would have actively upheld white supremacy, probably without recognizing it as such. That being said, IMHO it’s great that you voted for her. Trump’s policies are caging children and killing countless more. It’s not that you shouldn’t have voted for her, it’s that voting isn’t enough, and her winning wouldn’t have been enough, especially in a two-party system that has functioned primarily and historically to consolidate power in the hands of white men.

What to start doing now, the day after election day:
1) Learn the difference between interpersonal and systemic racism, and fold it into your observations of every institution and interaction to which you’re party.
2) Press for actual progressivism in your political candidates, and begin at the local level. Hold your Democratic politicians accountable for policies that seek to redistribute privilege.
3) Follow WOC and other BIPOC activists, educators, and artists on social media, and pay them for your education via Patreon or Paypal, but don’t comment or send them DMs unless they explicitly request it. You don’t need to tell them how their work makes you feel or ask them to elaborate anything. Work out that stuff on your own or with your other white/white-passing friends, and let them focus on themselves and their communities. This is the first way to practice letting go of your privilege. I like @rachel.cargle, @kendrianaspeaks, @ihartericka, @shishi.rose, and others.
4) Start working on your “apolitical” friends and relatives or anyone who thinks that “staying out of politics” is possible. This doesn’t mean you should be hostile, but these are people who either don’t realize: a) that inaction supports the status quo; or b) that supporting candidates who are explicitly hostile to marginalized populations is a form of violence. Elaborate the stakes.

What not to do:
1) Don’t get defensive. To quote ShiShi Rose and others, if this isn’t about you, it isn’t about you. If you are worried about all the specific traumas white women suffer, think about how helping WOC dismantle the violences they experience at higher rates would also benefit you.
2) Don’t talk to POC or other marginalized populations about how their suffering makes you feel or ask them how you can help. There are plenty of educational resources online about how you can help. Read those.
3) Don’t take issue with a POC’s tone or methods; just listen.
4) Don’t think it’s on you as a white person to solve racism. When we’re upset, many of us want to organize actions, without realizing that there are already plenty of ways to support POC who have already been doing this forever. Even though it isn’t flashy, the best thing to do is probably to educate yourselves, give money, amplify WOC and other BIPOC voices, and collect your people to the best of your abilities.

If you feel guilty, remember that we are not born into this world with an understanding of our own privilege and how it impoverishes our humanity. The more you sit with these feelings, the easier it will be to start acting more justly.