Friday, September 26, 2014

Post Ferguson: Lest We Forget Young Black Women

American society is rallying around black male teens.

On August 9, 18-year-old Mike Brown was shot six times by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. The young man was unarmed, and an autopsy performed found that the fatal bullet struck him in the top of his head.

The country has held protests almost every day and night since Brown was slain. Rallying around the teen and his family, protestors wore T-shirts like “Don’t Shoot Me” and sent selfies of themselves with their hands up in the air as if surrendering. Their cry for Brown’s justice, Trayvon Martin’s justice, Oscar Grant’s and many others, has been the same “No justice, No Peace.”
Mike Brown was 18-years-old when he was shot 
and killed in Ferguson, Missouri
The killing of black men in America by police officers is an ill, cyclical atrocity. From slavery, through reconstruction, to the Civil Rights movement, those killings, were justified or excused in some way.

In 1955, when black teen Emmett Till, 14, was murdered for whistling at a white woman, the defendants were easily found not guilty by an all-white, all male jury. After the two men were acquitted, they comfortably admitted to Till’s murder in Look magazine.

Brown has been trot out in the media as ‘guilty until proven innocent’ when revelations that he allegedly robbed a convenience store were brought to light by the Ferguson police department. A rotten, irrelevant calamity that his loving parents could not protect him from. 

But tragically as mothers and fathers fight more and more to keep their sons safe in what should be a post-Emmett Till era, there is a bittersweet lag in that goal.

Their daughters.

On July 29, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, pointing out that young women of color face some of the same odds as black men, but they are often overlooked.

“In February, when Mr. Obama announced the [My Brother’s Keeper]  initiative — which is principally financed by philanthropic foundations, and did not require federal appropriations — he noted that boys who grew up without a father were more likely to be poor. More likely than whom? Certainly not their sisters, who are growing up in the same households, attending the same underfunded schools and living in the same neighborhoods.

The question “compared with whom?” often focuses on racial disparities among boys and men while overlooking similar disparities among girls and women. Yet, like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores. Black girls have the highest levels of school suspension of any girls. They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently. The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys.”

Young black women might not be facing cops’ fear factors – that police shoot black men first out of fear – like black men, but tragic killings happen.

Many months after Trayvon Martin’s death, but just 8 months before Brown’s, there was Renisha McBride.

McBride, 19, was and shot and killed in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, when she went to a stranger’s home for help after she was seriously injured in a car accident and could not use her cell phone to call for help. Although McBride was unarmed, her killer, Theodore Wafer, claimed self-defense.
Renisha McBride

In Salon, author Roxane Gray wrote that "Trayvon Martin was murdered while walking home from a convenience store" while "Renisha McBride thought, like any reasonable person, that she could ask a stranger for help." Both of their deaths, she argued, are evidence that the "environment in the United States is toxic for black people."

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the statistics that Williams Crenshaw pointed to in her article, 673 black girls 10-24 were killed with a firearm between 2008-2010 is the highest among all other ethnicities. Black men ages 15-19 were eight times as likely as White males of the same age and two-and-a-half times as likely as their Hispanic peers to be killed in a gun homicide in 2009, ChildDefense.org says.

By implementing My Brother’s Keeper, Williams Crenshaw suggests that the idea is let’s take care of our young boys first and then the fixing will somehow trickle down or bubble up.

“Proponents of My Brother’s Keeper — and similar programs, like the Young Men’s Initiative, begun by Michael R. Bloomberg in 2011 when he was mayor of New York — point incessantly to mass incarceration to explain their focus on men. Is their point that females of color must pull even with males in a race to the bottom before they deserve interventions on their behalf?”

And this Darwinist idealism is not hallucinated by Williams Crenshaw.

Barbara Smith, an African-American activist, who taught the first class on black women’s literature at Emerson College in 1973, talked about the sexism that she experienced during the Black Power Movement as it related to black nationalism in the late 1960s, winding up in the late 1970s.

“A part of the black nationalist perspective and analysis was that black men were kings and black women were supposed to be queens, and our major role was to walk three or seven steps behind our men and have babies for the nation.

“Black studies and black literature was about black male experiences, and women’s studies, which was just beginning, at the same time was very much about white women’s experiences,” Smith said. We [black women] were just left out of the curriculum.”

In 1965, during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, black women were visible but unsung.

From Schmoop.com, listed as a digital publishing company that provides credible academic resources written by educators and experts from America's top universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, said in an analysis called “Civil Rights Movement: ‘Black Power’ Era” that:

“Despite the fact that women spearheaded the Birmingham Bus Boycott, galvanized the "freedom rides" and sit-in demonstrations, and served as important political representatives, men controlled the organizations, often disregarding the weight of these contributions. For instance, in 1963, at the height of the movement, tens of thousands of women, including activists and organizers such as Jo Ann Robinson, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer, joined the March on Washington, yet the all-male march committee neglected to invite any woman to make a speech before the crowd.”

“There’s a Chinese saying, ’Women hold up half the world,”’ said Julian Bond, a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to NBC. “In the case of the civil rights movement it’s probably three-quarters of the world.”

So what, per se, should be the initiative for young women of color?

While in Ferguson, St. Louis rapper Nelly indirectly pointed out that incarceration is a plague that has disproportionately infected young black men.

“We've got to understand that we have options and stop choosing the reaction option ‘cause at the end of the day we gonna pay - our brothers are gonna be the ones in jail," he told a crowd via the Independent during a Mike Brown rally.

It’s an issue that my Brother’s Keeper has also pledged as an important call to action; one other artists feel connected to.

Jay-z, attended a Trayvon Martin rally in New York, and during a performance with Justin Timberlake, he dedicated his “Forever Young” performance to Martin.

And while several artists like Nelly and Jay-z understand how crucial it is that young black boys and men of color are not dehumanized, these are the exact men who young black women need as ralliers in a different sense.

In Nelly’s music video “Tip Drill” he proceeds to slide a credit card down a woman’s backside; Jay-z’s (and other artists’) comfort level with saying ‘bitches and/or hoes” isn’t challenged as destructive to women (by male rap artists). Neither is the pervasiveness of pornifying black women as commonly as buying a magazine on the street and registering it as appropriate “speech.” And there are far to many more explicit examples.

The pornification, dehumanization of black women in music videos, lyrics, books and elsewhere is so trite that it runs the risk of fostering an indecisiveness in young women; wrongly pointing out their value to men, and in turn, how society should value them.

Dorian Miller Rosenberg, of Elite Daily writes, “Self-aware misogyny is the best kind.
Every day, a child is born to a woman who will someday grow up to think, talk and rap just like this. Judgment is corny, but examining the cultural forces which shape our perceptions and actions is essential.”

The signs held up in protest during the Civil Rights marches and demonstrations, “I Am a Man” sum up what was called for, perfectly. These signs were also held by some of the protestors in Ferguson, explaining that the heart of the matter is that all people deserve to be respected and viewed as human beings.

Admittedly, these salacious, unredemptive images and lyrics about women are not murderous, but they too call for signs that read “I Am a Woman.” The question is will America’s conscious hold them up.

Emmett Till will not be forgotten, neither will Mike Brown or Trayvon Martin, but lest we forget our black girls.



Sunday, March 23, 2014

Beyonce's not a Feminist, She’s a Boss

Madonna wore the Like a Prayer bra with the dizzying cone spirals in 1990, Lady Gaga held a lit ice fountain of some sort wearing a plastic see through “dress” with plus signs covering her nipples in 2011, and this year, at the Grammy's Beyonce wore a La Perla thong to show her “fatty.”

Associated Press
These aren’t examples of feminism or anti-feminism (each of these women have struggled to call themselves feminists). These are examples of women who are clearly comfortable with starting pseudo-sexual revolutions -- for profit.

In the book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Bell Hooks, a leading black feminist and scholar said, "It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation, I choose to re-appropriate the term 'feminism,' to focus on the fact that to be 'feminist' in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination and oppression."

When Forbes questioned whether the Drunk in Love performance was for record sales. The answer is yes, and Bey should not disagree.

Off the Grammy stage, however, Beyonce is liberating herself from the sexist role patterns by taking up a good cause. In a recent campaign to ban the word “bossy” as being damaging to young girls’ desires to be leaders, Mrs. Carter one of #BanBossy’s spokespersons said, “I’m not bossy. I’m the boss.”

But the best bosses -- and Beyonce is one; she made $53 million last year out earning Jay-Z -- get the “good good” for their companies.

"I'm never satisfied," she told Forbes in a 2009 cover story. "I'm sure sometimes it's not easy working for me... I've never met anyone that works harder than me in my industry."

Part of what the media perceived as feminist was Beyonce’s argument in the letter she wrote for The Shriver Report which pointed out the fact that the gender inequality gap is largely economic.  

“Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change. Men have to demand that their wives, daughters, mothers and sisters earn more – commensurate with their qualifications and not their gender. Equality will be achieved when men and women are granted equal pay and equal respect.”

Tapping in to that “equal respect” idea, when Target choose not to sell the self-titled album after she gave iTunes a one week digital exclusive, Bey went to a Wal-Mart store in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and offered every customer the “first $50 on me”during the Christmas season, effectively giving Target the finger and figuratively saying ‘here’s some extra money to buy my album.’ That's what bosses do: protect their brand.

But in the quest for the almighty dollar, do artist's pause for a moment to consider how much power they have? Great art foes require great responsibility. 

Recently, on the Bill O’Reilly show, the Fox host gasped at guest Russell Simmons’s  (the co-founder of Def Jam) belief that Beyonce’s Partition video, which is about sexual interludes in the back of a limo, is art. O’Reilly asked Simmons if that video gives “girls of color” who look up to her a bad impression.

Simmons just said, “She’s a great artist.” 

Bey gives her hubby space to croon on Drunk in Love by role playing with the lines Ike Turner forced on Tina as their relationship became even more abusive. "I'm Ike, Turner turn it up / Baby no, I don't play / Now eat the cake, Anna Mae / I said eat the cake, Anna Mae. I'm nice." 

These examples aren’t oozing with feminism. And if feminism is about embracing sexuality, it does so with some morality.

What is moral about Beyonce’s Beyonce are her references to African novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDx talk from which she sampled lines for her song Flawless.

"We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are,” Adichie said. “If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about our sons’ girlfirends, but our daughters’ boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.” 

But girls are not boys. So girls, by nature are not going to be sexual beings in the way that boys are. It’s not a learned thing. It’s a gender thing.

For example, boys/men think about sex 19 times a day, according to scientists. Girls or women think about it 10 times a day. 

The pop icon quotes Adichie’s definition of a feminist as “a person who believes in the social, economic and political equality of the sexes.”

Women should not have barriers to being their own bosses, or starting decent sexual revolutions, but when we continue to allow men to accept what is unacceptable, then one third of feminism falls into nothingness. And that, then, is not feminism.

What do you think?