Tyler Perry and Chris Rock: Black Film in 2009

Taraji Henson, Mary J. Blidge, and Adam Rodriguez

With Tyler Perry’s release of I Can Do Bad All By Myself, as well as his collaboration with Oprah and director/producer Lee Daniels (Shadow Boxer, Monster’s Ball, The Woodsman) to be released in November, and Chris Rock’s recently released Good Hair, I’d say black film is doing all right in 2009. Finally, Tyler Perry released a film of some caliber with I Can Do Bad. The always beautiful Taraji Henson and a star-studded cast were wonderful, real, and touching, and luckily Perry didn’t ruin the film with his presence as Madea—she was only in the film for about 20 or 30 minutes. I noticed with I Can Do Bad that Madea has become rather gratuitous and useless in Perry’s films, even more so than she was from the start. He seemed to throw her in this film briefly just to satisfy his viewers and probably his producers. Thank goodness I Can Do Bad wasn’t a “Madea film” but a real contemplation on black womanhood, motherhood, grief and loss and, of course, love. Nonetheless, I’ve finally developed an appreciation for Perry as a writer and director—it should be noted that he seems finally to have gotten away from his stage roots in this film, making use of film technology by presenting some very interesting frames and transitions.

With all this said, I am still not a big fan of Perry’s work, and probably never will be. I am particularly disappointed that he and Oprah—after her butchery of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for which I will never forgive Oprah—managed to get their hands on Sapphire’s novel Push. Perry’s and Winfrey’s adaptation titled Precious, named for the central character of the novel, seems to have destroyed a central element of the story, a character in fact. I’m never a fan of film adaptations of novels because they always seem empty in comparison. And I understand that a film writer can’t follow a novel exactly, due to constraints of time and such. But I do expect film writers to stay true to the characters and the message(s) of the story. In Push, readers encounter a dark-skinned, nappy-headed, overweight, sexually-abused (by her mother and father) and almost illiterate black girl, who hates herself for all of these reasons: her dark complexion, her natural (i.e. nappy) hair, her weight, her sexual abuse, etc. Indeed, she feels that inside, she is white (or at least light-skinned) and skinny with good hair and that if others would see this they would treat her better. Not only does her father sexually abuse her, but her mother does as well, the latter of which creates in Precious a strong hatred toward lesbianism. As such, the fact that her salvation comes in the form of a dark-skinned, nappy-headed (dreadlocked) black lesbian is extremely significant. It forces Precious to see her beauty and to reject ideal beauty standards that equate light skin, good hair, thinness and heterosexuality with female beauty and worth.

Gabby Sidibe and Paula Patton

This is all to suggest that the film adaptation—although I’ve only seen the trailer—will be a failure in terms of message for one reason: Robin Thicke’s wife, Paula Patton (Idlewild), is cast as the teacher. Fair skin, whiter than Halle Berry, good-hair, skinny Paula Patton. She’s probably not even a lesbian in the film. There is only one reason for this absolute refusal to stay true to this central character in the book: to stay true to that character, the film would have to reject those ideal standards of female beauty that permeate almost all Hollywood films, and nonetheless risk near certain failure in the box office. After all, who wants to see a nappy-headed, dark-skinned, lesbian save a nappy-headed, dark-skinned, overweight black teenage mother? As such, I have no desire to spend money on this film and support their overtly prejudiced project. I’ll likely wait until Netflix.

Good Hair

On the subject of good hair and female beauty standards, Chris Rock’s Good Hair  seems to be causing a stir. The film is not yet available where I am, and probably won’t come here in fact. But I’m very interested in seeing it, although I have my reservations. It seems that there are a few schools of thought with regards to Rock’s film, and I fully support each school of thought. Group A feels that Rock’s film is 10 years too late, in the sense that now natural hair has become a trend amongst black women, considering that many black women are choosing to embrace their natural hair. Group B feels that Rock will paint black women with “permed hair” one-dimensionally, as women who are simply playing into dominant, white standards of female beauty, while in fact many if not most of these women understand that their hair can never look like white people’s hair. Furthermore, if we look at the pageantry of outlandish hairdos women with permed hair exhibit—the old school fingerwaves and waterfalls, etc.—it is clear that these women are not trying to imitate white hair. Instead, they are trying to appreciate their African hair and show how malleable their hair is to a plethora of hair styles, unlike white women who are not nearly capable of creating so many hairstyles with their straight hair. This same group feels that the film would have been better coming from the perspective of a black woman—it should be noted that Rock is being sued by filmmaker Regina Kimbell for allegedly copying her film My Nappy Roots.  Group C feels that the film will now give white people license to ask black women about their hair, and thus put salt on a wound created by whiteness in the first place. I agree with these viewpoints. But let’s hope his film goes beyond the mere argument that good hair is a preference amongst black women and that this preference plays into dominant beauty standards.

Overall, though, I’d say black film has done all right in 2009. All of the aforementioned films are provocative films, despite any of their flaws and it’s simply a breath of fresh air to see black film directors broaching issues of serious concern within black communities. There have been some trainwrecks (i.e. Madea Goes to Jail, which I’ll try to forget) but, in general, it has been an interesting year. Let’s hope the films keep coming.

Counter-culture Coochies: A Comment on “The Coochie Chronicles”

(Okay, yes, I promised a post on Tyler Perry, which will be delivered, but this play seemed much more urgent at the moment.)

After stumbling upon a listing for the Cincinnati spoken word stage play, The Coochie Chronicles, I knew it was a must see. Advertised as a “frank, melodic exploration into the lives, sexualities, stereotypes and realities of women of color,” the play features several Cincinnati poets and local black women who seem to be making their mark in the Ohio and Kentucky area. Written and directed by Jennie Faith Wright (aka Black Budda’fly), the play stands as something of a black Vagina Monologues, every bit as limited as the Monologues and yet so much more engaging and compelling for me as a woman of color. The play was produced as part of the I KNOW campaign, a project focused on increasing HIV/AIDs awareness by encouraging everyone to know their status. Before, during, and after each showing of the play, condoms were available, as well as information and private HIV screening and counseling services.

The Coochie Chronicles is essentially comprised of a series of spoken word pieces performed individually by poets Black Budda’fly, Rewop, Silent Poet, Jori, Gifted, DuWaup, and Lionness among others. Such titles as “Reclaiming Coochie,” “H-O-E,” “True Coochie,” “Blackberry Wine,” “Flowless,” and “I Got Old Coochie,” provide some sense of the tone of the play. The play covers a variety of issues relating to black women: issues of racial discrimination in medical treatment, parenthood, general relationship drama and self-esteem, lesbianism, abortion, etc. However, just like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, the play remains limited in its exploration of “sexualities” (emphasis on the plural) in that only one spoken word segment or skit focuses on or even mentions lesbianism. Indeed, nothing other than black female heterosexuality is explored throughout the play. As such, despite Wright’s attempt to create a feminist-oriented play, her play normalizes heterosexuality in black female experiences, thus maintaining a heterosexist framework while feminism generally seeks to destabilize such a framework.

With all that said, my own general reaction to The Coochie Chronicles? It was absolutely awesome, a fabulous revision of the Eve Ensler’s production but one that also stands on its own. After every spoken word piece, the audience is entertained by popular music with themes relevant to the preceding spoken word piece: we hear songs such as Aretha Franklin’s “A Rose is Still a Rose,” Lauryn Hill’s “Zion,” and TLC’s “Creep,” among many others. These musical interludes provide a smooth and relaxing transition into each spoken word piece. Mid-way through the play the cast performs an original song titled the “Da’Blues,” a hilarious, frank, and well-performed song about the urgency that sometimes strikes us when we simply need some sex, when we suffer from the “need some dick blues,” as the hook of the song proclaims.

It is difficult to choose a favorite piece out of this wonderful array of daring and interesting poems, yet “I Got Old Coochie,” in which poet Rewop details the history of black women in America and loudly proclaims that her coochie is named “Coochie X,” that “my coochie even had the dream,” remains stamped in my mind. Others such as “H-O-E” (which explores a woman’s reasons for prostituting herself), “Blackberry Wine” (a poem reminiscent of Oscar Brown Jr. in its melodic rendering to jazzy background music), “All Fruit Ain’t Fresh” (which discusses issues of sexually transmitted diseases), and “Daytime Hours” (which humorously discusses the issue of dealing with trifling men and learning to love oneself) stick out as particularly strong as far as performance and poetry.

I can only hope that Wright will eventually take this production to other places (or at least make it available for other individuals to replicate in other locations), as we WOC need a space where we can be frank and honest about our sexuality and identity, about the oppression of our coochies, an oppression caused and perpetuated by us (yes, black people), by patriarchy, by a heterosexist capitalist white supremacist culture. We need a space outside of academia and theory, a space where all black women, regardless of education, can find a voice to express their concerns about themselves as black women. We need a space where we can talk, vent, analyze, create: we need a counter-culture coochie space. The Coochie Chronicles is a great beginning.

Taking a Day Off?

Ever just want a day off from race or race issues? I often do, but then I wonder what does that even mean? If I take a day off from thinking about blackness, what does that mean, especially being that my racial identity is an essential part of who I am? It’s an essential part of my sense of self. And you can’t take a day off from your self, after all, unless you’re dead.

Well, at any rate, I’ve neglected updating my blog recently as sort of an attempt to take a day (or numerous days) off from thinking about blackness or race issues. I can’t say that it’s worked, but it has been something of a relief to just go with the flow temporarily.

But new blog entries will be coming very soon as a belated celebration of my blog’s one year anniversary. On the 9th, this blog celebrated it’s first birthday. I will be posting two new posts about Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad and some commentary regarding the upcoming film Precious, a film adaption of the Sapphire’s amazing novel Push. So look out!

We Just Wanted Candy

This is a rough draft of a piece that was inspired by my trip to Australia and the aboriginal town of Palm Island this summer as part of a writer’s workshop. As such, I apologize upfront from any spelling errors and grammatical errors.            

            Our dirt-crusted soles and heels carried us around the small town of Winchester, Arkansas. Spring, summer, or fall, we scurried about town on our bare feet but we avoided the roads, some paved and some gravel, during the summers. Such surfaces were dangerous during the heat of an average Arkansas summer. There were some areas where you had no choice but to walk briefly on the gravel or pavement, and if we desired some candy, ice cream, slushies or other refreshments from one of the two town stores—Bud’s or Murphy’s—my brother and I would brave those burning surfaces. The hardness of my feet some twenty years later tell the tale of those days.

            Memory is a tricky thing, choosing to make itself available in some places and unavailable in others. You remember one moment while others remain cloudy or else completely unavailable to you. And sometimes it only takes a smell, a taste, a touch, or a place to make that memory available, to remove those clouds that inevitably come with age.

            As I stood in front of the community market in the aboriginal town of Palm Island, a whole hemisphere away from home, I was home again. I watched the tiny bodies of the aboriginal children, some barefooted and some not, dashing around in pairs or groups, their parents nowhere to be found. I watched them, amused, because I was watching my brother and me when we were about the same age. One child came up to me and asked in a thick, Australian accent, “Where you from? I like your sunglasses.”

            I smiled and straightened my sunglasses on my face: “The United States,” I said and the little boy—he looked no more than six or seven—nodded very knowingly.

            “What you doing here?” he persisted, and I think I found myself quite stunned by the boy’s aggressive pursuit of information. He exhibited a striking and almost frightening maturity, as he stood looking up at me, a piece of candy of some sort sticking up from his shorts pocket. He was likely the kind of child who spent much of his time around adults, interested in adult conversation and adult topics, unable to remain in a “child’s place” as my mother used to tell me again and again.

            “Just going around, looking at the islands. I’m a writer, see, and I’m with a bunch of other writers,” I pointed toward the group of white students hovering near to entrance to the market, feeling somewhat disappointed as I saw one of them approaching me. I knew the child would leave once this person who looked like neither of us approached us. “Anyway, what you doing? Where’s your mama or daddy?”

            “At home,” he said, very matter-of-fact. “Me and my brother, Edward,” he pointed towards a building adjacent to the store, where on a porch step sat a withering old man with curly white hair and mahogany skin and a tiny honey-colored child with a head full of dark hair who resembled the boy standing before me. “We wanted some candy.”

            “What ya’ll kids doing by yourselves? Who watching you?” Many a passerby at Murphy’s asked my brother and me. Murphy’s was a gas station located off the highway you take to go South from Winchester to McGhee or North from Winchester to Dumas. Going North, it would take you all the way to Pine Bluff, just a hour South of Little Rock. We met a lot of people passing through, on their way North to Little Rock or South to Louisiana or Mississippi. An older black woman, every now and then, would see me and my brother leaving the store both of us cradling a bag of candy and a slushie. The woman, being an out-of-towner, would pose us this question in the most incredulous of tones, looking around for the mama or daddy she felt we should have been with. “What parents would let their four and six year olds wander about unsupervised,” she would think, still scanning the parking lot and the road that led into town, trees and swamp on one side and wide open cotton fields on the other side—Murphy’s itself sat directly in front of the cotton fields that lined the highway, and it appeared as something of a interruption in the scenery.

            “Neta cooking. And we just come for some candy and slushies,” I remembered saying on numerous occasions. We always called my grandmother by her nickname, a shortened version of her first name, Romineta. “We live right up that way,” I’d point. My brother rarely said a word, or if he did, clouds have long concealed those moments.

            With a nod of her head, a smile, and a “Be careful, you hear,” the woman would eventually move on. I remember receiving a dollar or so from some of these women, just before they’d move on. Always grateful to have more money for candy, I never questioned why strangers would often give me or my brother money. Typically, the older white women who stopped us were the ones to leave us with a little money, though I was a little less loose-lipped around these women. I knew how much Neta disliked the man, Mirian, who owned Murphy. He was an overweight dark-haired Jewish man, who seemed to have an attitude whenever he spoke to Neta. And since these little old women looked like Mirian, I was never sure if I should like them either.

            Neta preferred Bud’s, a store ran by a man of the same name, a man with a face full of reddish freckles who also looked like Mirian. I preferred Murphy’s because it had better candy and it had blue slushies. But Bud was kind to us, spoke to us like we were his children and to my grandmother like she was family. I later found out that he was passing for white and that, according to rumor, he never let his mother, who looked black, leave the house.

            Bud’s was the town market, whereas Murphy’s was just a gas station on the edge of town where people went to buy candy or cigarettes. Bud’s sat in the middle of town, near the railroad tracks, and looked something like an old house or shack that had been converted into a store. There was a shop where Neta bought locally-made honey or syrup almost directly across the street from Bud’s, and it also looked like it was once an old shack.

            When we lived near the edge of town in my grandmother’s single wide trailer, closer to Murphy’s, my brother and I walked to Murphy’s which took only about ten minutes on our short legs. When we lived deep in town off a gravel road, lined with impenetrable swamps on one side and on the other side houses sprinkled here and there in front of rice fields, we walked to Bud’s. Walking to Bud’s was a long walk along a mostly quiet back road. I remember the smell, swamp and pear trees. The road wound as we passed a shack, once inhabited by a very old black lady, Joe, who use to frighten us, though faded memory prevents me from understanding now why we found her so intimidating. We eventually arrived at an area with several trailers on the one side and a house in the swamps on the other side. To get to May Anna, the woman who lived in the swamp house, we had to walk through the cypresses and across a rickety bridge constructed with square wooden planks. Terror always gripped me as I walked on those planks, terror that one of those planks would give and send me to the alligators. We never went to her house without Neta and she passed before I was old enough to really remember her.

            We’d walk on, past the trailers along the adjacent road where much of our family lived: aunts, great aunts, cousins, second-cousins. Practically everyone was family in Winchester. We’d walk on, as the road wound and we passed another house surrounded by a wire fence. We’d walk on until we finally came to an intersecting road, the road that led to Bud’s and we’d turn right, cross over the train tracks, below which more swamp water rested—my knees shook when I crossed these tracks.

            My brother and I had been walking along these tracks once, for these tracks would also lead us back in the direction of home and presented more excitement than walking along the road. The sky was clear and blue that day as it often was in Winchester during the summer, and we walked along the tracks, almost past the swamp below, when one of the wooden planks gave. In a matter of seconds, my leg was trapped in the hole left by the rotted piece of wood that had fallen. I’m sure I screamed. I’m sure my brother screamed. What if a train came? I thought, a thought that had rarely occurred to me all the times we’d walked along the train tracks. I’d never seen a train along that track. What if I fell in the swamp waters, what the adults called “the bayou” slurring the “you” so that the word sounded like “bow?”

            Memory refuses to reveal to me how I survived that incident, how I got out of the hole, but with my brother’s help I got out and survived. With my brother’s help. I never walked along that track again, but always crossed it with a certain degree of urgency. And with my brother, we’d walk directly to Bud’s, just a minute away from the train tracks, a haven in the middle of nowhere.

            Who was watching us? The community, I suppose. Maybe even God. Were we afraid, walking blocks and miles by ourselves and barely in kindergarten? Not really. In the end, like the little boy and his brother Edward, we just wanted candy.

“An Illusion of Superior Minds”: The Problem with Academic Scholarship

When I recently finished rereading a chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish alongside several short stories and a novel, I finally accepted something that has hovered in the back of my mind since I began graduate school: the futility of academic writing and academic scholarship. In other words, I gained more from those short stories and that novel than I did from Foucault, whose writing has long been viewed as the ultimate specimen of academic thought, writing and scholarship, at least in some circles.

Of course, academic writing and scholarship is not futile for the academic/scholar, in the sense that the more one publishes academic writing the more likely one is to become known, receive tenure, and ultimately obtain a secure means for keeping bread on the table and a roof over one’s head. Otherwise, however, academic scholarship and the world of academia are futile. I have begun to understand why many of my students say to me, “Look, I’m just here to get the degree so I can get a job.” I understand that now because I think if you did take it seriously, you’d go near crazy. Why? The minute you begin to take academia seriously, the moment you begin to view it as avenue for self-expression which will thereby lead to greater understanding of yourself and the world, the moment you begin to see academia that way is the moment you also realize that this is not what academia really wants for you. Indeed many departments advertise themselves are being primarily concerned with turning students into critical and thinking adults. But only to a certain extent.

A Problem of Writing, Thinking, and Praxis. I find graduate study in the humanities—particularly English, as I can’t speak for all of the humanities, nor can I speak for all humanities’ departments—to be principally about training graduate students (i.e. future professors in most cases) to be critical in a certain way, to think in a certain way. What is that certain way? Well, I’d say we’re trained to be critical (or to write critically) in a way that obscures. We are trained to think in a way that obscures. Obscurity is of principle importance. The more we obscure our message to our readers and to ourselves, the more we are admired (if we even have a message; in much academic writing, I sense that there is no message; the sole purpose is to fill pages with academic flourish). Academic writing then is not about discovering any sort of truth or new way of seeing the world or about combining ideas and praxis. It is about obscuring such truth and the possibility of praxis. Such writing is often comprised instead of self-interested and vain rewordings of old ideas that many of us have heard from elders in our families. I’m often struck by an author who manages to become an academic superstar by virtually rewording in a more convoluted and obscure manner things and words of wisdom my grandmother dispensed to me when I was young. I do not suggest that there is any problem in pointing out the obvious. Often we get so bogged down in the details that we forget the obvious, and as such, sometimes the most advantageous thing we can do in intellectual discussion is point out the obvious. However, I do suggest that it is simply ridiculous that one can become an academic superstar, someone who others see as virtually beyond critique (meaning if I or anyone dismisses this superstar, we are viewed as intellectually vapid or lacking) and/or a tenured professor by churning out useless book after useless book wherein he/she says virtually nothing. On the other side of the coin, some of these superstars get so lost in the details that the obvious escapes them or strikes them as unworthy of discussion; such superstars are not only horrible writers but have rather underdeveloped thinking capacities in that they can’t seem to connect their minute details to the larger and more obvious point. (Ever heard that cliche about the person who goes into the forest and misses the forest for all the trees?) They can’t seem to combine ideas and praxis, furthermore, for they get so lost in their details and ideas.  Both of these types of academic writers make a fairly obvious topic more difficult than it need be, either due to a pretentious need to sound intellectual (type 1) or due to a general inability to connect the details with the big picture (type 2).

I believe it was Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, who said, “There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.” In that same book, Nietzsche also made another significant point: “AN ILLUSION OF SUPERIOR MINDS. Superior minds find it difficult to free themselves from an illusion ; for they imagine that they excite envy among the mediocre and are looked upon as exceptions. As a matter of fact, however, they are looked upon as superfluous, as something that would not be missed if it did not exist.”

I have, nonetheless, become somewhat if not entirely disillusioned with academia, for academia has revealed to me what happens when knowledge, when the intellect becomes institutionalized: it becomes centrist, rather than progressive (and yes, I know this is a whole other topic deserving of a whole other post), another point Nietzsche made in discussing what he called the Machine. The Machine, and academia is nothing less than a machine, “makes of the many a machine, and of each individual a tool for one purpose. It’s most general effect is to teach the advantage of centralization.”

This is not to say that nothing can be gained from academia. On the contrary, I’ve learned to juice it for all its worth, as my grandmother used to say. So far, I’m not exactly sure what it’s worth. But I will say that my foray into academia has allowed me to become acquainted with some truly progressive writing and ideas, despite the fact that I’ve had to dig around a barrage of convoluted, useless academic scholarship and theory to find it all. I have managed to find my way around academic scholarship and theory, that which was meant to guide my intellectual development in a direction that would benefit the institution of academia and prevent me access to any truth that exists contrary to said institution.  I  have managed to happen upon ideas and writings that are about something larger and more important than page limits and tenure and conferences. Some of these ideas I found in non-fiction (i.e. Stephen King, James Baldwin, Alice Walker), fiction (the list is too long). It can be stated then that in most of the academic literature I’ve read, I’ve found little truth or intellect, but mainly convolutions and self-aggrandizing attempts to appear intellectual.

Crying Racism – A Guest Post by Abagond

 Abagond is a computer programmer in New York, who writes 500 words a day on various topics. Abagond has been blogging since January 8th, 2006.

 

Crying racism is the idea among white Americans that blacks see racism in every little thing, that they are looking for cases of racism. The phrase is supposed to remind you of the story of the boy who cried wolf. Blacks are seen as “whining”, as being “oversensitive”, as “having a chip on their shoulders”, as “blowing things out of proportion”, as “playing the race card”.

What is going on here is the opposite of what it seems. It is whites who are being oversensitive. You are challenging their colour-blind image of themselves. You are shaming them so they are trying to shame you back – to shut you up because they do not want to hear it, to discredit you so they do not have to admit they are racist.

They have made “racist” into such a dirty word among themselves that it is like calling them a liar. It has gone from being a description of certain kinds of acts, of lines crossed and mistakes made, to questioning their whole character, which they must then  defend.

That is why they do not want to admit to racism even when it is staring them in the face. That is why their apologies come out so half-baked – because they do not want to admit to being racist in the first place.

To them racism is rare, something from the bad old days that has died out. But it did not die out – it just changed shape: from hatred to a smugness and contempt that is covered under a thick layer of politically correct words. They cannot see through their own lying words. Or do not want to.

“Crying racism” assumes that racism is rare. If you are white it is rare! So rare that it seems like blacks are just making it up. It is hard to believe in something you have never experienced, much less understand it.

Yet despite their lack of experience, despite their lack of understanding, despite their wanting to read events in a way that avoids seeing racism and admitting to it, despite all that they still think they are the best judges of when something is racist! That is what the word “oversensitive” assumes.

That makes no kind of sense. But they notice none of this. Because they do not want to notice it. Because they talk mainly just to other white people. Because they have created a vast Talking Machine of newspapers, blogs, cable news and talk radio that repeats their self-serving white point of view over and over again.

Blacks appear on their stage only as complainers and not, say, as hosts of news shows who can frame issues and report the facts they think are important, helping to keep the reporting of others honest. Because of this the injustices that blacks talk about appear unimportant and, because only blacks see them, they are merely “perceived” injustices – just black people crying racism.

Some White People – A Guest Post by Renee

For all of those who found themselves offended by my generalizations of Midwestern whiteness in the previous post, I have one response. And I think Renee articulates it better than I can at the moment. Check out her blog at Womanist Musings. Just a side note: Generalizations or stereotypes, as I’ve always been taught hold some shred of truth and the important thing is to not simply dismiss the stereotype but to understand where it cones from and the reason for that shred of truth in the stereotype. This goes for the ABW stereotype, as I mentioned in the last line of my previous post. I have no interest in dismissing the ABW stereotype, but I have every interest in helping people understand why it’s problematic, where it comes from, and why it might just be true for some black women. In other words, if white people take a look at themselves, they might just begin to understand why they view many of us as ABWs and why some of us might just be ABWs. In addition, whites might just understand why they are so offended when POC, people who are nearly always painted as stereotypes in our culture and understood through these stereotypes, decide to generalize whiteness for the sake of provoking serious debate.

                                          ——————————–

When I started this blog, one of the things that I promised myself is that I would speak unabashedly about race.  Often whiteness exists without challenge and when POC do find spaces where they are able to speak about systemic inequality, we are often bullied into silence by the language police. We are routinely told if we spoke in nicer terms we would be less alienating, as though whiteness has any real interest in  divesting itself of its power.  Gee, if only we had realized that the key to ending white hegemony was speaking in respectful terms, it never would have been necessary to go through the heartache and strife of a civil rights movement.

It is not hate speech to speak critically about whiteness nor is it racist.  Due to the fact that whiteness has been so normalized in our society, it is often created as the invisible norm and any challenge to its authority is resisted.  We are not post racial and to ask the POC to be complicit in the mendacious meme is to expect our collusion with our own social diminishment.

When I speak about whiteness, I am speaking about white racial privilege and the systemic nature of the ways in which racism functions.  There is a clear bifurcation between individual white people and whiteness as a force, yet there are those that still insist on the usage of the word “some”.  It seems that any opportunity to discipline speech when someone dares to challenge the hegemony of whiteness is almost irresistible.  Insisting on the insertion of the word some, even when intent has been made clear is an assertion of power and an attempt to set the rules of engagement. 

The fist shaking and pearl clutching begins as the reader rushes to defend their supposedly attacked identity. This only proves that the reader was not paying attention in the first place.  You see, it can be difficult when the whole world affirms who you are to accept that there are spaces that refuse to dedicate the bulk of its time promoting the “everything that is good is white meme”.  Whiteness is so used to seeing itself reflected, that even when commentary is not about a particular  person, the default position is offense.  Note to readers: if it isn’t about you stop making it about you.  If you feel a desire to center yourself in the conversation and find offense, perhaps it is more reflective of a form of privilege that you have been ignoring than any statement about white people as individuals.

It is irritating enough to continually be forced to repeat 101 basics because people refuse to even attempt to learn before engaging but to then have your mode expression questioned from a position of ignorance and privilege is positively maddening. There is no honesty in this kind of exchange, only a repetition of whiteness as ultimately possessing the power to control the dialogue.

I am continually annoyed with the hypocrisy displayed by so many.  When I speak about the cost of speech and the difference between hate speech and free speech, there is invariably an accusation of censorship and yet when whiteness calls POC angry as a way to silence, that is not censorship.  When our lived experience is routinely questioned and then dismissed what is this but censorship?  Referring to our critiques as pulling the race card is yet another method of minimizing us. 

I could add the word some to my commentary and it would not change a thing because the real fault is having the nerve to question whiteness.   This space has even been referred to as racist and judgmental because privilege denial is deemed unacceptable in direct contrast to the ways in which it is actively promoted across the blogosphere.   The false colorblind world that whiteness attempts to project is  harmful and I refuse to promote this mendacity, so that some may find it more comfortable to perpetuate their undeserved privilege.  You are not a committed anti-racist until you can look at the ugliness of racism without flinching and understanding that it is not your place to quash the voices of the oppressed or decide unilaterally that you exist above critique.  Discomfort is a sign of unacknowledged privilege and not a reflection of “reverse racism.”

                                              —————————–

Finally, I’ll leave with a quote from Rev. John H. Thomas that sums up my response to anyone who would suggest that I ”modulate my tone” in my discussions of race, racism, and whiteness:

Rev. John H. Thomas, in defense of Rev. Wright and on race debate and African-Americans:

“Our language is not always going to be gentle and quiet and graceful because racism is not gentle and quiet and graceful.”

Stop Hatin on Obama: The Problem With Being Critical of Obama

I realized recently that whenever I begin to criticize Obama in the presence of black people, I become extremely uncomfortable. In fact, I tend to avoid it now, except on occasions when I feel something simply must be said or discussed, or when I’m in the company of close friends. Why? We had only take a glance at the criticism launched against Cornell West and Michael Eric Dyson, two public black intellectuals who have dared to publicly criticize Barack Obama on various occasions. Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell launched a lengthy retort against Tavis Smiley, whose rather vapid but nonetheless interesting documentary included commentary about Obama (the documentary included commentary from West and Dyson). Her retort is nothing compared to the outrage sparked throughout the black blogosphere, outrage against Dyson and West for being haters essentially. To crudely summarize, the central response was, “These hating ass intellectual negroes, always got something to say and ain’t doing shit.” When randomly asked about whether he would ever consider a position working with Obama in the White House, West infamously stated, “That’s not my calling. Yeah, brother, you find me in a crack house before you find me in the White House. I’ll go into the crack house before I ever go that far inside.” Meanwhile, Dyson has repeatedly taken Obama to task on his disregard for the working class. At the comments of these two brothers, Obama’s troop of hate-blockers pounced and bared their fangs in what seems to be an endless effort to police any and everything that is said in criticism of Obama.

As such, I have become rather hesitant to discuss the man while in the presence of his supporters, particularly his supporters who are black. And this policing of myself is a damn shame. Of course, we all should have seen this coming: ever since last Spring, it has been impossible to say anything critical of the man and/or his agenda without being attacked. Usually, a few things (or perhaps all) happen whenever I’ve criticized Obama while in the presence of another black person: 1) it is implied that I’m just hating (or cynical) and obviously have no understanding of how politics work, 2) it is implied that I have no right to criticize the man if I’m not actively doing anything to change my situation or the situation of those less fortunate, 3) it is emphasized that he has only been president for four months, so give the man a break, or 4) it is stated that one cannot expect Obama to have a black agenda and that to expect such reveals one’s lack of awareness about how politics work.

Here, I want to respond to all of these responses, but first emphasize how such responses simply deflect attention away from the issues being debated (issues of the economy, foreign policy, health care, education, etc.) and instead draw attention to the person criticizing Obama in attempt to paint the person as a hater. But let’s just be straight: it should not be about the person criticizing, it should not be about hating. That shit is trivial. The issues should be the focus of the conversation, not whether the person is being a hater. In effect, such responses strip the person criticizing Obama of any validity and allows the other person to forego true examination of the issues (and Obama’s handling of those issues) presented.

My responses:

1) I’m just hating and obviously have no understanding of how politics work. In fact, I have the same amount of understanding about how politics works as does anyone who is not a political scientist or politician, which is the majority of people in our great nation. As such, does that mean none of them, including yourself has no right to criticize because they don’t understand how politics works? Funny, this never stopped us from criticizing Bush, or any other of our past Presidents. Just because he is black, does not mean we as black people can’t hold him up to scrutiny. It is dangerous to not criticize and expect anything of our politicians because then we allow them complete power in which they are capable of anything.

2) I have no right to criticize the man if I’m not actively doing anything to change my situation or the situation of those less fortunate. It is arrogant to assume that a person isn’t doing something to change their situation or those of others, however small that something might be. Activism does not have one face. Activism comes in the form of rallying, volunteering, writing, and even teaching. To accuse one of choosing to sit back and criticize rather than doing something about the situation implicitly devalues that person’s life and lifestyle: one can never know what small things a person does to positively affect the world that he/she lives in. Just because you can’t see readily the activism in the person’s lifestyle, just because he/she refuses to go around exclaiming about all his/her good works, that does not mean he/she takes no action to better his/her life and lives of others. Not all of us are capable of or have the means to found our own non-profits or run for political office, and as stated, that is not the only type of activism available at the disposal of Americans.

3) He has only been president for four months, so give the man a break. When a person (and his/her administration) has billions of lives in his/her hands, I will not “give him/her a break.” I will not give him/her a break when he/she is administering the dropping of bombs on Afgan civilians daily and increasing the number of troops in a failed attempt at neo-colonialism. If a ship is sinking, I don’t think it has to sink completely before we accept that the damn ship is sinking and try to intervene. (This is not to say that Obama and his administration is a sinking ship, but this is also not to say that he and his administration isn’t a sinking ship). Yes, he has only been President for a few months, but my criticisms are about his ideas and thinking, some of which were made apparent during the primaries. I am interested in the man’s motivations, as I’m aware that he’s only capable of so much in this space of time. And so far, his words, ideas, thinking, and ostensible motivations do not make me comfortable. (Consider his speech in response to the torture controversy back in February: his statement that essentially, what’s past is past and we must move on. Such a statement devalues the experiences and the lives of those who were tortured. Always, we brown and black people are told we must move on, that the past is past. I’ve always said, “When the Jews forget about the Holocaust, I’ll forget about slavery and Jim Crow, which will be never, because such crimes should not be forgotten and simply moved on from.”

4) One cannot expect Obama to have a black agenda and to expect such reveals one’s lack of awareness about how politics work. I don’t expect the man to have a black agenda. It would be ludicrous to expect such a thing. However, I do expect the man to show a modicrum of respect for the people who got him elected (blacks and latinos): such respect would be displayed, for instance, if his administration dedicated more energy to remedying some of the problems in our healthcare and education systems (problems which affect blacks and latinos most forcefully due to the fact of the class status of the majority of blacks and latinos in this country), instead of dedicating all their energy on Afganistan and the finacial plight of corporate bosses. Poor people are always the most affected by the economic, education, health, and social welfare problems that plague our country, and yet we have another President who seems to turn a blind eye to some of the most vulnerable people, poor people, in our country. Again, this is a criticism I’ve had ever since the primaries with Obama’s constant emphasis on the middle –class. I sensed, then, that the working class would find themselves neglected for another four years.

With all this said, I will leave you with links to a couple of interesting posts I’ve found recently. Though, I tend to avoid writing on Obama, I will not stop being critical (openly or not) of the man and his administration. I will not keep it on the down low when lives and livelihoods are at stake.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elon-james-white/thats-whats-wrong-with-bl_b_214527.html

http://skepticalbrotha.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/come-on-people/

Feminist No More: Why I’ve Finally Decided to Shed the Label

The Guerilla Girls

I refuse to call myself a feminist anymore. Many folks who know me will read that first line with awe, as I put on the label at least five years ago and wore it proudly and loudly. But, the truth is, I was always somewhat uncomfortable wearing it. I often felt as though I were hiding a part of me behind it, as though in wearing the label I was covering some naked part of me that was shameful. The problem was that I knew I had nothing to be ashamed of, yet something in the label sought to make me feel shameful and invisible. 

I remember  reading a discussion of the term “Womanism,” created by Alice Walker in 1983, her effort to create a space for black women to articulate their experiences as women. But more importantly, the term was an effort to create a space for black women to express their experiences as women and black people. I remember reading about the term some years ago, when I was a junior in college, and I remember feeling that, although I understood Walker’s impulse, there was something trite about the term. I felt that such a focus on mere terms, Womanism vs. Feminism was trite, and that it only distracted us from very real woman-centered concerns. Womanism. Feminism. It was like comparing two brands of bottled water, I thought, and since I’d already chosen a bottle, I didn’t see any point in wasting time comparing it to another brand. Water was water: a tasteless fluid, necessary to my health and well-being. I have since realized that not all bottled water is the same and that, indeed, some bottled waters are much better than others. For instance, I live in Iowa and there is a particular bottled water I like that is made from springs in Hot Springs, Arkansas.  I prefer this particular bottled water, most likely because I grew up near Hot Springs, Arkansas and the water tastes familiar. It has a taste that I grew up with and to which I am, nonetheless, accustomed. My experience with the terms feminism and womanism is not that different from my experience with bottled water: I realized that there is a difference between these two labels and that, indeed, one is better than the other.  Or rather, I realized that one rings familiar to me because it holds tenets that I grew up holding, tenets that were dispensed to me either explicitly or implicitly when I was a child and teenager. I realized that Womanism just tastes better.  I guess Alice Walker got it right.

This realization hit me recently, and it hit me hard, several times. I felt the first punch last semester, as I sat through a class with a feminist-centered professor who seemed interested only in discussions of white women, when she wasn’t discussing white men anyway. Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth, as usual, served as the token black women in our syllabus. Rarely, or perhaps never, did we discuss black women (or Native/Indigenous women of this country). We didn’t even gloss Mexican women when we discussed texts concerned with the annexation of Mexico.  Brown/black women were simply unimportant in her feminist-centered discussions, with the exception of Jacobs and Truth.

The second punch occurred when we discussed a Charles Chestnutt short story titled “Sis Beck’s Pickaninny,” about a black slave woman who gets traded for a horse and thus separated from her infant son. I came to class ready to seriously discuss issues of black motherhood, black womanhood, and slavery, and yet my professor was more interested in discussing the marginal white female character in the story. (Just to provide context: the story of Sis Beck is a story within a story: a former slave Julius works for a white couple who has just moved from the North due to the white wife’s sickly disposition; the couple is childless and the wife is relegated to the home as was the case with middle-to-upper class white women of the late 1800s and early 1900s; thus she has nothing to do but lay around and feel sickly; Julius tells the wife the story in order to make her feel better.) After I make a few comments about Sis Beck, my professor quickly turns the discussion to the white wife: our discussion of “Sis Beck’s Pickaninny” ends up revolving completely around the white woman and having nothing to do with Sis Beck. We end up not discussing the black slave woman, whose name is the fucking title of the story. While Sis Beck is worked like a mule, in misery about being separated perhaps permanently from her infant son, my professor is concerned about the illness of the childless, white middle-class housewife. What is her sickness? And what does it represent? What does it suggest about white womanhood? Sis Beck is invisible, as black women usually are in feminist explorations carried out by white women. I sat there thinking about what Chestnutt, the author, would have to say if he were alive and in the room. As a writer, I know I would’ve been pissed off, enough to simply walk out. I sat there in utter shock at the nerve of some white feminists, that this woman could feel it okay to centralize white femininity in a story that is explicitly about a black woman. She didn’t even make an effort to talk about white femininity and black femininity in conjunction, and that’s the least she could have done.

The third punch occurred recently in a U.S. sexuality class I am currently taking. As we go through the history of sexuality in the United States, my professor manages to avoid or at the very least give very scant attention to black women or Native women. Any real intellectual knows full well that American sexuality, particularly white American women’s sexuality in this case, is founded on the denigration of black women’s and Native women’s sexuality. As Patricia Hill Collins suggests, the pure and (by the nineteenth century) asexual white woman exists only because of the creation of the impure and overly sexual (i.e. whore, prostitute, etc.) black woman and Native woman. Yet, this professor manages to gloss such a fact in her discussion of white women’s sexuality. When race does come to the center of her discussion, it revolves around interracial relationships between white women and black men, and even in these cases, it’s not really about black men. It’s all about white women. I guess Gloria Hull also got it right back in the 1980s: all the women are white and all the blacks are men.

The fourth and final punch occurred when this professor, as well as the texts for the course, discussed the interracial “relationships” between white men and black women during slavery in the antebellum South. That was enough. What a way to soften the gruesome violence that white males committed against black women, their subordinates, during slavery! A relationship involves consenting partners. Any sexual interaction between a white master (or his son) and a black slave woman cannot be understood as a relationship. It was rape, sexual coercion, sexual violence, due to the very nature of the power positions of each individual involved. I actually sat there at my desk, thinking, “How did this cow manage to get tenure?”

These are just two examples of what black women often have to endure when we encounter feminist discussions, except for those orchestrated by WOC. Very simply, all the women are white. American feminism, as a formal school of thought, though its white practitioners would like to think that it has changed from its white-women-centered beginnings, has not changed. The intervention of various WOC within feminist discourses has added some diversity, which many white feminists are often all too eager to absorb for their own scholarship, but feminism and the meaning of that word has not changed. It is still about white women and mainly middle-class white women, although now they’ve at least begun to discuss working class white women, although marginally.

As a result, I have decided to take off the label. I’m done with it. No, I’m not interested in reclaiming the word: it was never mine, or any other woman who looks like me, in the first place. That word always belonged to white women. The very mention of the word makes many black women and WOC cringe in distaste. The very mention of the word makes many young women of all colors cringe in distaste. Why? Because the domination of feminism by middle-class white women, the domination that still continues, prevented the growth and evolution of feminism. It is still associated with those middle-class white women of the 70s who were often lesbian-centered (and in the popular imagination known for hating men), who were white female-centered and middle-class centered. As such, young women who are not lesbian often feel little or no connection to feminism. As such, women who are working class often feel little or no connection to feminism. As such, women who are not white often feel little or no connection to feminism. As such, feminism, as an idea and in the way that it is currently practiced in the academy, has little or no value for anyone who is not a middle-class white woman.

With all that said, I’m done with the label. I will no longer call myself a feminist. I will no longer wear a label that seeks to make me invisible. I don’t know whether I would like to assume the label of Womanism or not, but I will say that I am more aligned with Womanism than I will ever be with feminism. I will end my discussion here, but I will do a brief follow-up post on Womanism, what it means and how it came about as a type of Afrocentric feminism for black women.

Reverse Racism and Sotomayor: As Usual, Limbaugh is a Moron

In a speech at UC Berkley in October of 2001, Sotomayor said the following: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  For this statement, conservative figures such as Rush Limbaugh (because we all so value his intellectual opinions) have accused her of being a racist, in yet another example of what frequently happens when a POC vocalizes any criticisms of whiteness. I don’t know the full context of her statement, so I won’t go into a discussion of it or even her. I want to simply state that I, too, hope that a Latina or other WOC with such experiences would be more equipped to make decisions about the lives of WOC and POC than a white man or white woman who has never and will never live those experiences.

I am constantly annoyed by the fact that many white people somehow feel they are more equipped to tell me, a WOC, about my life and my experiences, about how I can resolve my problems as a WOC. This sense of intellectual superiority is not often overt, but usually expressed in the subtlest of ways: for instance, this sense of the intellectual superiority of whiteness is evidenced in the very fact that I, an African-American woman, will eventually find myself competing on the job market with white Americans to teach African-American literature and culture. Somehow I will have to prove that I’m more equipped to teach my history than a white person with a similar degree. The notion of the intellectual superiority of whiteness is institutionalized and part of every system of our nation; it is a clear example of the institutional nature of racism.  How long have we had to sit back and allow the dominant group (through the natural sciences, through education, through the social sciences, etc.) to dictate to us about our lives? The dominant group fails to realize that not only are they ill-equipped to tell WOC and POC about our lives, but, in all actuality, they are ill-equipped to tell us about American life and whiteness. Paulo Freire, James Baldwin, and Frantz Fanon, amongst others, have constantly argued concerning the dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed that the latter know far more about the former, and that in fact only the latter can save us all and begin to resolve the problem of oppression.

I don’t mean to go on a tangent here, but it is never a surprise that when POC become vocal about whiteness they immediately come under the charge of reverse racism. I have had to endure some of my students making arguments about reverse racism, only to later disabuse them of the plausibility of such a notion as reverse racism. For all of those white individuals who so love to accuse POC of reverse racism, take a second and do two things: 1) look in a mirror, and 2) research the meaning of the word “racism.” Obviously such white people are racist in their very assumption, implied in the accusation of reverse racism, that POC have no right to be critical of whiteness, that whiteness indeed should be beyond the critique of POC. To such people, I say, get over yourselves. To Sotomayor, I say “Right on! Damn straight!”