Teka Lark – Page 2 – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

You Plan to Go Hand to Hand with Robocop?

By Teka Lark (October 30, 2019)

The current Bosstown Dynamics video circulating is a parody of the very real Boston Dynamics and you should still be concerned.

The only thing fake about it is that the technology isn’t quite there yet, but it is only a decade off. According to Stars and Stripes (June of 2018), Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert was a former military contractor who got much of his funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Since 1994, Boston Dynamics has received over $150 million in defense funding.

I have talked about this for a decade. The police are tools. And yes, we need to discuss the individuals, but we also need to discuss the unsexy-might-be-longer-than-a-tweet policies, economic and constitutional. What kind of anti-bias and unconscious bias training do you have planned for police robots? What kind of advisory board do you have planned for drones? How long should a robot sit in jail for murdering you?

So you plan on fighting back in hand to hand combat? You are going to do a shootout with a robot? What damage do you think you can do when technology can come at you from above with a drone that never goes to sleep.

As we need to think tactically about the knowledge we have in regards to labor and technology, we also need to start thinking this way when it comes to the criminal injustice system.

The future wealthy won’t need humans to do the killing directly, they will only need the police and a system that enables them to enact those policies.

What Would Justice for Botham Jean Look Like?

By Teka Lark (October 3, 2019)

White America believes in vengeance. It believes in an eye for an eye. The Botham Jean case was so very hard to watch, because here is a Black man who was perfect, as perfectly good as a human can be–because if he hadn’t been, the defense would have found out his imperfections and smeared them all over the Internet.

People say if he were a white man, Amber wouldn’t have shot him or she would have gotten more time than 10 years – but here is the thing: a white man with Botham’s credentials and talent wouldn’t be living next door to a cop. If Botham were a white man he’d be living in NY making half a million dollars. The reason he was living next door to a cop in a Dallas suburb, was because he was a Black man, because these are the kinds of people that even the most talented of Black people end up next to when they do well. They end up next to angry, barely middle class, white people who have failed. And this puts us in all kinds of danger. People who have grown up with trauma, who are angry, because they have had their dreams crushed owing to capitalism, and only have their whiteness to lean on, are dangerous people for Black people to be around. Well they are pretty dangerous for anyone, but typically it is OK to kill Black people if you feel angry and say “you’re scared.”

They are never scared. I learned that a long time ago; they just lie, the police lie, the women on the cellphone lie, and the people next door lie, they are all liars.

Our system of justice is dishonest, punitive, and sadistic –just like our country, the United States.

You know I don’t want the kinds of wins that white nationalism celebrates, that Americans celebrate. It has never brought me joy to see a person sentenced to the maximum prison time or the death penalty, even if I know they did it.

What would a victory for Botham Jean have looked like for me? A victory would be him being alive, a system where no one has to fail, a system where everyone feels supportive, and a system that doesn’t create situations that are unforgivable. Anything less than that to me –is still losing.

I don’t want your eye. I don’t need your eye. I don’t want vengeance, I want justice.

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.

People Will Die As Long as We Teach Kids There are Always Losers and Winners

By Teka Lark (August 7, 2019)

Your worldview is shaped by your community, family, media, education system, and essentially all the people, things, and actions that you interact with and provides you with information.

Your view on the world starts from the minute you hit earth. Fairytales, TV, the Internet, video games, books, what your education system decides to teach you in school, and what they decide to leave out, it all shapes who you are.

In the United States, when you begin school, and maybe even before you start school, if your family has been in the US two or more generations, you are told that some people must lose.

That idea is drilled into your head. As adults people sneer, “This everyone gets a trophy nonsense, kids needs to understand that someone has to lose! ”

But what is losing? What are we preparing young children for when we tell them that some people must lose?

It seems like we’re saying some people must be homeless, some people must be poor, and some people must die— at least to me.

The United States encourages cruelty and violence, from dodgeball, to our media, to how we share about injustices.

Do we really need a video of someone being shot in the head, to know that you shouldn’t shoot people in the head? Apparently in the US you do, because that is part of the fun of being an “American,” being outraged, yet slightly entertained by the suffering of someone else who you are under the idea that you have more privilege than, at least for now….

In our media what do the troublemakers look like? Who are our villains in fiction?

Good triumphs over evil is the story every kid in the US has been told from birth. This theme even goes in our history books,In the United States the good people won the game.

A game that we all agreed to play, so no one needs to tell anyone sorry for hitting someone in the face with the figurative ball over and over and over again, because this was a game, and if you had tried harder and had better morals– you would have won –and any deviation from the game results in being taken out of the game by capture, fire, gunshots, or lynching.

The reason you can’t get federal gun policies passed in the United States, is because the point of guns in the United States is to protect “everyone” from Black (African) and Brown (Mexican/Indigenous) people. In the North they do it by making rent so high you can’t live next door, in the West they won’t allow you to work, and in the South –they have their guns.

Unless something is done to change the average person in the United States’ worldview–a culture that encourages punitive cruelty, racism, nationalism and sexism–we’re going to continue to have people dying in violent ways.

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.

Direct Action Will Work Against ICE

By Teka Lark (June 24, 2019)

Direct action is a tool that should only be used when it needs to be used. Protesting with a permit is not direct action. Anytime you appeal to authority in a way that puts them in the position of reasonable, you’re not doing direct action.

What is direct action? When you resist with your body or with your wallet. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is an example of direct action.

The most effective direct actions understand that the system is corrupt and unreasonable, not parts of the system, the ENTIRE system and people resist accordingly. i.e. You can’t call the police on ICE.

I have been involved in three direct actions in my life, both involved law enforcement and children. I taught little kids in the fall, but in the summer I taught bigger children. When I went from teaching in the wealthiest schools in LA to some of the most economically oppressed, I realized I needed some kind of code to guide me, one of them was I don’t help the police and I don’t help LA Migra (now ICE), because I was not in education to make things worse.

One time I refused to let the police interrogate my student, even after the police got in my face and told me I was “a ‘stupid’ woman for dealing with ‘thugs’ and to not call them when I found that out who I was dealing with.” I told the police and my principal that they weren’t going to violate my student’s rights and they explained, “We can interview minors without a parent present.” And I said, “The laws of this stolen country don’t guide me and I do not consent to a searching of my classroom.”

I didn’t know whether that was within my rights or not, but I just knew they weren’t questioning my student alone while I was in charge. We already know what happens to teenage Black boys when the cops think they did something. To my surprise the police actually left, they left pissed, but they left, all because I said no, because they so rarely hear no, at least from a Black woman with a college degree, who was supposed to be vetted to be “one of the good ones.”

Another time was when I was teaching poetry at a community day school. The police came in my classroom for a student who was in the bathroom. They said, “Where is James?” And I said, “He didn’t come to school today? Is there a message you have for him?”

The third involved La Migra and a parent and I can’t discuss it.

I do not believe in the prison industrial complex and I will not cooperate or abet in putting someone in the hands of the police.

In my life I have always thought if I could just convince more people to stand up with me, we could really do so much to prevent injustice.

This brings us to current day. The #ICERaids are delayed, but they aren’t stopping, they never will. The point of #ICERaids is to terrorize people into shutting up, so they can be exploited. As Adam Serwer said in regards to Trump, “The cruelty is the point.”

What I really want you to do now is to understand your power. When you are on social media, when you watch the news, what they are trying to do is take away your courage, take away your power, to convince you that YOU CAN NOT make a difference. I know for a fact that is a lie.

If we all understood our power, we could stop injustice. When ICE comes for your neighbor (regardless of who is president), I don’t want you to go on FB Live and record them taking your neighbor away, then edit music into it, and share it with thoughtful words of how angry you are, what you need to do is to STOP them.

We all occupy different spaces in oppression, currently your job is this, if ICE comes for someone in your physical space you need to do whatever you can to stop them from taking away the person in their custody. Get creative, but we need to all mentally prepare ourselves that ICE doesn’t work, because we’re not going to let it work.

We all say:
If it was during Jim Crow, I would have…
If it was during Slavery, I would have…
If it was WW2, I would have been fighting the NAZis like Josephine Baker…

Here is your chance to put on your best lipstick and do something. They can’t arrest everyone, not if we all decide that no one is going anywhere.

Direct action, it will work, if we all agree that is what we’re doing.

So you agree, right?

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.

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?

“Three Mexican countries” is About Controlling the Narrative

By Teka Lark (April 3, 2019)

When I see things like, “Three Mexican countries…” often I hear people discuss how ignorant people are.

“How can you have power and be so ignorant to not know the name of countries?!”

I am not sure if the people saying these things are saying them because they too are playing the game. I hope that they are, I hope they know this is not just a game, but a war.

The war of grasping the narrative. The Internet has made most facts pretty easy to obtain, but they have always been easy for the privilege to obtain, but some facts the rich, don’t care about, because they feel they don’t need to.

Part of the US right’s playbook is controlling the narrative.

The narrative is you are not a human being. The country you are born in is not real. Your culture is not real. You are not human and you exist to serve. And not even serve like a dog, they like dogs, but you, they don’t like you. They view you as a broom, a hammer, a sex toy, a soda dispenser. You aren’t real. We aren’t real. We are things to them. We are when we get out of line broken toys or collateral damage.
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They are not ignorant when they call El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras –Mexico, they are calculated.

They are not even being funny, not funny the way we view funny. Their humor is part of how they swing their power. Like a bully tripping you in the hallway or calling you a racial slur and then saying, “I didn’t know or it was an accident or a mistake.”

They do it to show that they can disrespect you, to tell everyone else, to not respect you. They demonstrate to their base how they can call you out your name and how you will still accept their apology by accepting them in a position above you.

Every “joke,” every comment that is hidden under the guise of ignorance is them demonstrating their power over you to take it and to keep taking it.

It’s a signal to the people who admire them –of their power and a signal to their minions who to harass, discriminate against, and murder with few consequences.

The white, rich, and powerful, they are not ignorant, they know exactly what they are doing, they always have.

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.

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.