We are not on display.

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

Every time I go to the National Portrait Gallery

I am captivated by this bronze bust of Booker T Washington.

Photo taken by me!

For dramatic effect (at least, dramatic for those of us who get more caught up in drama from a century ago than in today's celebrity gossip), the museum places this bust and a portrait of Frederick Douglass on opposite sides of a small wall, spatially articulating their radically divergent viewpoints and envisioned directions. As much as I prefer Douglass's philosophy (though I've learned to at least see where Washington was coming from), I have to say that his portrait is little match for this bust. Sitting on a pedestal that makes him over 6 feet tall, the bust is as imposing as I imagine the man must have been. His eyes are too high to look back at me, and I can't help but feel slighted. Given the sad state of urban and rural public education these days, I am of the firm belief that you could bring Douglass and Washington into the present day and their arguments would change significantly. Bearing that in mind, I can't help but stand firmly rooted there for a number of minutes, measuring myself up to this man, wondering what he might think of me.  

Click this link.

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Listen to the play bar at the top.

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(...for your jaw to be down here.)

I can only handle so much race-related bullshit in short periods of time

I've had problems with Vogue for a while. In response to criticism about their lack of diverse models, Vogue launched the spinoff "Vogue Black" which is cool and all, and I'm glad to see us celebrated, but Vogue, in case you haven't heard, separate is inherently unequal. I wanna see women that look like me in the pages of your worth-gazillions-of-dollars magazine, not relegated to an interesting corner of the interwebs. 
But this makes that look like a stroll in the fucking park: Vogue evidently thinks large hoop earrings are a throwback to the fashion statements made my my enslaved foremothers. That's right, while we all thought they were out there just trying to work hard enough to possibly not get whipped by their overseers and struggling to keep their families together and avoid legally sanctioned rape, and dealing with the psychological trauma of being an object rather than a human being, they were also evidently totally concerned with the image of beauty they portrayed. I mean, I know they didn't get paid or even get enough food to support their families, but they totally rocked gold earrings. And who cares about the food situation anyway?--the emaciated look is still en vogue. //end sarcasm

Vogue says about gold hoop earrings:

"If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom." 

I'm pretty sure my latest interpretation is pure ignorance and a complete trivialization of history and its lasting effects on your part, Vogue. 

*disgust* 

Disney Doing What It Does Best.

Dealing with problems of race ambiguously at best, not dealing with them at all at worst, right? Wrong. I'm used to Disney ignoring racial issues. Even being marginally racist at times (going back in history there's all kinds of animalization of black peoples--the baboons in The Jungle Book, the crows in Dumbo, etc., and don't even get me started on everything that's wrong with Aladdin). So evidently, in an effort to combat these issues in the company's past, or maybe just riding along on this recent American wave of post-racialism/colorblindness, Disney has now chosen to IGNORE AMERICAN HISTORY COMPLETELY and mark the struggles of African-American soldiers (like my paternal grandfather, a decorated WWII veteran) entirely irrelevant. Great choice.

What am I talking about, you ask? I had the night off from work tonight, so I decided to go see Captain America with K and a couple other friends. [No major spoilers coming up, I pinkie promise.] We trudge along through America's involvement in WWII, from the volunteer army to the Uncle Sam posters and the war bonds...then suddenly we're in Italy facing the 50 or so members of the 107th infantry who didn't get captured by the evil Germans...and there are Black and Asian faces intermingled with the White guys. Huh? Hold up. Wait just one goddamn minute. No they didn't... 

Dear Disney, the United States Armed Forces were not integrated until President Linden Johnson's Executive Order in 1948. During the second World War, African-American soldiers were segregated into their own troops, who were rarely sent to battle, and if so sent into zones considered too dangerous for their white counterparts. They were grunt workers, easily disposable. Their officers were not widely respected, their men treated with more respect by civilians abroad than by their own countrymen. Do I need to bring up the Tuskegee Airmen? (Don't even get me started on Tuskegee in general!) I don't care how many billions of dollars your company is worth; I don't give a shit how much easier it is to cast your movie without regard to race; if you thought it didn't matter, it does. I will not stand by and let the honor of my grandfather and the thousands of African-American men like him who had to fight for the right to fight for their country, and came home to find no honor, no love, no respect, and certainly no veteran's benefits like the GI bill (which could have singlehandedly erased the Black-White wealth gap, had Black veterans been given the opportunity right to go to college or purchase homes as were their White counterparts) be trampled upon. In the same way I cannot tolerate history textbooks that relegate Blacks', womens', or LGBT-persons' histories to colorful boxes and side notes, if they mention them at all, I cannot and will not tolerate you erasing the struggles these men endured. I cannot and will not sit idly by while you piss all over their legacy.

Aren't there people whose job it is to make sure you don't do anything blatantly ignorant like this? Shouldn't someone be checking these things when you're casting? Doesn't anyone care? Minor historical inaccuracies like the details of a uniform or the use of a car that didn't exist yet don't bother me; I realize that it's not actually possible to travel back into time and get everything perfect. But we're not talking about something minor like that. We are talking about the struggle for basic human dignity endured by my father's father, Black peoples of his generation, of previous generations, and to an extent even of today's generation. We are talking about civil rights. We are talking about the way the media likes to subtly cover up the sordid details of our nation's past and pretend everything is all hunky-dory. 

Captain America can't be shown as fighting for an America that actively denied its citizens the very "inalienable truths" it was founded on, huh? That's not gonna sell tickets. Disney, I love you, but this is not okay.   

When History-Makers Meet

This warms my heart a little. The iconic Norman Rockwell painting, entitled "The Problem We All Live with", depicts little six year old Ruby Bridges marching determinedly between US Marshals on her way to her first day of first grade at New Orleans's William Frantz Elementary School. Her mother's staunch support of the Civil Rights movement led her parents to respond to a call from the NAACP for young Black children to take a placement test to determine if they were academically eligible to integrate the all-white school district. Though five other students passed the test, only Bridges enrolled in a new school, thus becoming the first African-American child to attend an all-White school in the South. She was met with an angry mob outside the school, who cursed, shouted, and threw things, but she never showed an ounce of fear. She was the future. 
And on Friday, she met someone I'm sure she never imagined being able to meet within her lifetime--Barack Obama, the United States's first President of African descent. 
I will never forget the night of November 4, 2008. I will never forget being in Pennsylvania with the College Democrats, going door to door trying to get the last reluctant would-be voters to the polls before they closed, and witnessing what can best be described as an explosion of joy as the state was called in Obama's favor: shouting could be heard from the surrounding households, people in their cars honked their horns and screamed out the window. It was a huge victory. Upon getting back to campus I ran to the Carl A. Fields Center, where they were having a watch party for the election results. As the night went on, and the blue began to outnumber the red on the map of the country, I felt an excitement unlike anything I had ever known--all my campaigning, all my postering, all my voter-registration-drive-ing, all my phone-banking, all my HOPE aside, I don't know if I ever really thought he would win. But there it was, unfolding clearly before my eyes...I witnessed history. When the final decision was announced, the joy and excitement in that room was palpable. I will never feel emotion like that again in my life. I have photographs that do some justice to what happened...I don't have the words to describe it. We, roughly 18-22 year old fairly privileged (as Princeton students) AfroCarribedescendedfromslavesandmaybeAmericans, felt like the world had opened up and something great had been achieved.

And if that's how we, the young and only somewhat aware, felt at this moment, I cannot imagine being Ruby Bridges. I talked with my father, who marched with Malcolm X, and my grandmother, who marched with Dr. King, about this moment, and I can barely understand their reactions. They have witnessed much more history than I have. We have all played small roles in shaping history. Ruby Bridges, much like Barack Obama, molded it with her own two hands. They have gone boldly where no one before them had gone, and Norman Rockwell's photo can have no better home than the walls of the Oval Office.  

Does King Deserve to be King?

One of the biggest tangible changes being an African-American studies certificate pursuer has made in my life is my like, newfound...let's say "objection" to Martin Luther King Day as a holiday, as part of a larger...yeah, I think we can actually say "disgust" with the commonplace representations of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary American classrooms and homes. I hate being lied to, particularly by authority figures. I hate the images of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln that are portrayed to young children everywhere. I hate when culture tries to rewrite history to make it more convenient. And similar to all these hatreds, I hate that America puts MLK up on a pedestal without addressing any of the flaws in his strategies and ideologies. 

Now don't get me wrong; Martin Luther King was an incredible man who did phenomenal things for black people in this country, and who tried to do similarly phenomenal things for poor people. There was a time when I would have said that I owe my very lifestyle to him; but that kind of statement, and the mindset it reflects, is exactly what pisses me off so much about this holiday. I owe my lifestyle to the Civil Rights Movement, fact, but while culture elected King as the Movement's face, there are so many other people who made contributions just as--if not more, in light of the fact that I am a black WOMAN--relevant and effective on my day-to-day being. With all of my knowledge of African-American history, I can think of NO reason King deserves to be elevated over Malcolm X or Ella Baker. I can think of NO reason for the American public--even the BLACK American public--to think of Rosa Parks as just some little old lady who wouldn't get up from her seat on the bus one day, as opposed to the die-hard political activist she really was.

Martin Luther King was many many wonderful things, but he was also a stickler for some pretty bad ideas: a) political sexism, and b) passive resistance. I think that to some degree, the black "community" as a whole is still struggling to recover from the lasting implications of the utter dominance of these ideologies, and the effective hero-worship and idolization of King in this country simply pushes conversations about the inherent badness of these ideologies further and further under the rug. If we can't address the faults of the persons we are told to view as having been great in the past, how will we ever recognize them in the future? Sexism in the black community is STILL un-talked-about by anyone but black feminists, and fact: no one really listens to them anyway. My mother STILL says she's oppressed as a black person but not as a woman, and black women's position in society will NEVER increase until we can eradicate the existence of such limited mindsets. But how can we if we continue to praise King as our savior? Political sexism is, in some aspects, even worse than in-everyday-life sexism, because it's like saying there are specific areas in which women can never be equal to men and certain arenas in which they should never be listened to, as opposed to just being generally ignorant. Passive resistance too often leads to just sitting there and taking the shit this country throws at us, and maybe I'm a radical but I will fight to the death for the things I deserve. We all should; it's the only way to get anyone to listen. The Movement has DIED; now we all practice passive resistance, and our men and boys rot in jail, and our children fail in failing schools, and our success stories are ostracized and remain single and childless for being strange exceptions to unwritten rules...it's not getting us anywhere. Blindly accepting King as the face of the Movement, as the King of race relations in America and as having the chief ideas that should be recognized and remembered just sets us back into the faults of his time, and I for one shall not regress.

I'm black. "Ally" isn't even a strong enough term for my support of gay rights. THIS ISN'T THAT RADICAL. Get over it.

“It is something resting with the parties themselves, for them to decide. If they choose to face this possible prejudice and think that their own pursuit of happiness is better subserved by entering into this marriage with all its risks than by spending the rest of their lives without each other’s company and comfort, the state should not and cannot stop them.” –Justice Carter, Perez v. Lippold (California Supreme Court case from 1948)

The powerful language found in this week’s readings for my Race and the American Legal Process class, regarding the nullification of antimiscegenation laws struck me not only for the sheer forcefulness of the Courts’ opinion, but also for the clear and profound connections these decisions seemingly should have to the current gay rights movement. I have always had an understanding that the gay rights movement has ties to the civil rights movement, and as such been thoroughly disgusted with the heteronormativity and blatant homophobia that categorize such a substantial percentage the African-American community at large, but these court cases have elevated that understanding to a new level; I honestly cannot understand how, with such potent precedent to stand on the shoulders of, LGBT rights activists have not yet secured marriage as a “fundamental…basic civil right” for same-sex couples. My first question is what exactly places the freedom to marry within the scope of basic civil rights; when was it first guaranteed that citizens of the United States have a right to marry? And after gaining a better understanding of that history, I would like to know how the heteronormativity and homophobia that led to the Defense of Marriage Act differ from the white supremacy and precept of inferiority that led to the antimiscegenation and criminalization-of-sexual-relations laws Justices Traynor, Carter, and Warren speak so forcefully against?

Call me naïve, but I am imagining a world in which the quotes from the Perez v. Lippold and Loving v. Virginia read like this:

“Since the right to marry is the right to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice, a statute that prohibits an individual from marrying a member [of his or her same sex] restricts the scope of his choice and thereby restricts his right to marry.”

“The right to marry is the right of individuals, not of [groups of people with the same sexual orientation].”

“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry or not marry, a person of [the same sex] resides within the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Are these conceived statements really so farfetched? What would it take to bring them to fruition?

Thanks, Giving

I always chuckle to myself when folks call this Turkey Day

I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve always been a ham kind of girl.

I always wonder when folks call this Thanksgiving Day

who exactly I’m supposed to be thankful towards

For Jesus is someone else’s Lord and Savior, and I don’t

praise Allah either. My thanks are jokes to Life’s daily

demigods and I’d like something a bit more substantive

than thanking my lucky stars. The Universe just sounds like a

cop-out for people who don’t like the sound of God.

So who am I thanking?

My mother, for bringing me into this world and damn near

breaking her back every day to give me every inch of life she can spare?

The ex-stepfather I abhor, because if he hadn’t walked into my mom’s life

mine would have been displaced, my friends and family misplaced, a family

of two and two alone gone back to Georgia, my mom’s first home?

Georgia, where my family has lived since before we had a choice.

Should I thank my too-many-greats-to-count grandmother for surviving the passage

in the dank disease-infested bottom of that ship?  Or my grandfather

of the same generation for liking what he saw up on the auction block

enough to sneak away from his wife in the middle of the night  and

sell his daughter away when she was born with blonde hair and blue eyes?

Blonde hair and blue eyes, like some of my closest friends,

so should I thank the late Dr. King for taking the glory from everyone who’d

dreamt before him?  Chris Hall, my high school’s English Department Supervisor

for making me realize the dreams I’d dreamt weren’t lofty enough, that I was calling

a sledding hill a mountain when I had the tools to tackle Everest? Chris Burch,

my first sweetheart, for teaching me that sometimes it’s better when dreams don’t come true?

The admissions committee member that tossed me into the right pile, for reminding me that

sometimes, they do? Nene, for seeing what I was repressing and getting me involved?

India.Arie for reminding me to Slow Down and appreciate the Little Things, like

whoever instituted a monthly Soul Food Night at the Princeton Quadrangle Club?

Under chaos theory, tabula rasa, and the idea of alternate realities, should I thank everyone

 with whom I have ever crossed paths, for without them I might not be me? All six billion, eight-

hundred-eighty-four-million, thirty-seven thousand, eight-hundred-forty-six people on the planet,

because the world might somehow be different without one of them? Should I just thank myself,

or include things I simultaneously love and hate, like society and affirmative action, like my father? 

The power went out as we were warming the candied yams. I used my laptop as a flashlight during the

candles-and-matches-hunt, and as we joined hands to bless our candlelit Thanksgiving dinner, I realized

exactly how many people and things and bittersweet circumstances I have to be thankful for. They each

have their own masters, Gods, and engineers, and so today I will simply thank the ties that bind us all.

An exerpt from "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" by Alice Walker

"Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)--eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children--when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion, in stone or clay?

How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our "crazy," "Sainted" mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period of centuries), who died with their real gifts stifled within them."

...This is perhaps the best reason I have ever identified with as to why I must create.