...common roles illustrate how Black women, and their sexuality, have often been synonymous with deviance. And reclaiming, repackaging, and/or discarding the roles has given women agency; a control denied the Good Girl who is essentially invisible. She needs that.
So we had a Title IX briefing. My ears were weary; my soul hurt; and my brain nearly exploded. But before it did I recorded these to share with my colleagues sometime after I meet the Wizard and get myself some courage: Pro-tip 1: Transgender, homosexual, non-binary, bisexual--none of these are synonyms for pedophile or [...]
So what if the mission of those profiting from Black Death porn is to accomplish their stated mission: to remind The State (of mind) that Black and Brown lives should be recognized and treated as actual lives? What if The State (of mind) changed as a result of their activism? The Black Death porn market would be diminished, right? No demand so no need for a supply. No supply no profit. So another what if--what if Black Death porn proliferates in order to keep this market going?
“We can no longer adequately enact the stations of loss…And even the writers cannot keep apace with their elegies.”
— Stacia L. Brown
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3zfgyi_prince-1999-1982_music
1. “Don’t worry. I only want you to have some fun.”
It depends on the mother. But some begin to lose themselves in the fleshy, post-birth folds around their waists, in the feeling of excess blood, decreasing and slowly recalibrating its flow, in adjusting to the less taxing burden of one body again, instead of the heft of two.
It depends on the mother. But for some, childbirth is beset with instability, the worry attendant to a partner’s precarious presence. Now you see him, texting in the delivery room, now you don’t, at the 3 in the morning beside the changing table or hunched over the diaper pail.
He is at once flesh and apparition, at once as essential as the braided DNA inside the baby and as intangible as desert air. One too many complaints and he could slip away for good. One too many worries voiced and…
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When we gonna start naming black women whose bodies have been abused by a system that fails to see beyond the melanin that covers them (or maybe sees them and responds in kind--another argument for another day)?
Rape culture is NOT gendered. We make a mistake of unwittingly participating in the victimization of those who are also, or are in danger of being, affected and moreover abused by it when we don’t acknowledge that.
There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure. Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.
It is no easy demon to face who has dressed you and your entire context as “fine.”
#rapeculture
#digginginthecrates
“She will leave the house on her own. She will have friends. She will learn to drive. She will go out. And there will be men who she is not interested in who will be interested in her. Some might catcall from cars and corners. Some might grab her arm or her waist at the bar. Some might buy her a drink. Some might approach her on the street.
Some of these advances will be ignored or unacknowledged. Some met with kind but deliberate body language to convey her lack of interest. And some will even be met with actual words; her actually saying some form of “I’m not interested” out of her actual mouth. But, while she can control how she responds to the approach and how she communicates her lack of interest, she can not control the response to her response. She will have no idea if…
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From August 2014…
#digginginthecrates
“Unless you know, you don’t know.”
RIP Robin Williams
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someday you will find this. in some box of old syllabi and grammar drills or with some notes for something i planned to write and revise and publish. you will find it and you’ll sit down right where you are. you will stop. stop everything and take some time.
and you will bunch your eyebrows together, or raise them. and your mouth will open. that bottom lip drop way. or else you’ll feel your lips tighten together to hold in the spit. because your mouth will get dry. and you will read this. and you will say something like ‘i never knew.’ either out loud or to yourself. or you will think ‘i figured that.’ and you will start to piece incidents and comments together to try to shape this into something like sense.
you’ll feel a little guilty and…
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darlene anita scott 