Tag Archives: african-american

Strictly 4 My Blerds

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Here’s an idea, perhaps for fanfiction: bring all the best-known African-American nerds and geeks from television, film and comics together under one roof. To solve a mystery, to find love, to save the world (or some other planet, like America), to go Hunger Games on each other, to break out of a dystopian neighborhood/school together, to do a heist of somebody’s dream, I dunno.

I just want to see all the black nerds (blerds) and geeks to get together in an alternate universe. For once, they won’t be sidekicks and best friends, but the center of the story.

I’ll flesh this out more later.

On the lies of “black genocide”

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Christian anti-abortion folks who harp about a “black genocide” are some of the most uncaring, hard-hearted, shame-projecting liars.

* As if any of them care one bit about AfAm women’s lives, equities or freedoms as much as their uteri.
* As if any of them care that the fetuses which develop into infants will grow up into less-than-desirable AfAm women and men.
* As if specifically *our lives* matter to the anti-abortion activists.
* As if any of these activists think of AfAm women outside of the “welfare queen” “poppin’ out babies” stereotype.
* As if any of these activists consider that birth control, condoms and other tools of hygiene should receive more investment and less demonization.
* As if any of them are not the ick-attracted authoritarian jackasses who never offer solutions beyond “ban abortion” and “make sex sacred”.
* As if you care much about the growth of the AfAm population for as long as abortion has been legal in this country, but that’s an inconvenient truth which disrupts your feigned “black genocide” martyrdom.

Seriously, I wonder why the Southern Baptists ever allied with you lying jackasses after their racist hissy-fit over integration. But you lie about a lot of things to get your ban in place, especially about AfAm women, their bodies and the women and men who love both. You are as fake as the Exodus, Willie Lynch, the “War on Christmas” and American exceptionalism.

We won’t live by your savior narrative. Look at yourself, and say no to #misogynoir‬.

#‎BlackLivesMatter‬

The story of another direct action to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds back in 2002:

“Assuming the guise of his nom de guerre, the Reverend E. Slave, [Emmett Rufus] Eddy donned a black Santa suit, carried a ladder bearing the names [of] black rights organizers to the South Carolina State House, set it up next to the flagpole, climbed to the top of the flagpole, cut down the Confederate flag, shouted ‘this is for the children,’ and lit it on fire, as state police heckled him from below and tried to douse him with pepper spray.”

We’re Just Getting Started in Fixing Ourselves

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After a conversation I had last night, plus a thread posted by Pariah, I just realized something.

When people ask African Americans to “get over it”, for us to move beyond slavery and Jim Crow, I wonder if they’re aware of just how long we lived under both. Not just on this continent, but this hemisphere. The first African slaves were brought to the Americas in 1501 (in modern Haiti/Dominican Republic and Brazil); the first person to be declared a slave in North America was in the Virginia colony in 1644. Slavery was last abolished in the Americas in 1888, in Brazil; in the United States, in 1865. This is a difference in hundreds of years. For the United States, it’s a difference of 221 years. Thanks to “partus sequitur ventrum”, a 1662 policy in Virginia which mandated the inheritance of slavery regardless of one’s portion of White English parentage, multiple generations were born, raised and died in slavery. That’s a culture.

Jim Crow: Reconstruction ended in 1877, thus signifying the beginning of the Jim Crow regime. The last outstanding vestiges of Jim Crow were federally dismantled by 1968, the year MLK was murdered. That’s a difference of 91 years. Again, multiple generations were born during this period, even those who were locked into the underclass thanks to the state-level “one-drop rule”. A large portion of our living population was born prior to 1968. That’s a culture. 221 years of chattel slavery, followed by 91 years of violent civil and economic segregation. We’re asking or demanding people who went through a generational culture of state/economic violence, only 47 years out, to “get over it”? 47 years? That’s just two generations away!

So if you wonder about how long it will take for us to “get over slavery” or “get over Jim Crow”, you will probably get an answer from us African-Americans some 312 years from 1968, in the year 2280. Because that’s how long it will take for us to build a longer history and culture than both slavery and Jim Crow combined. That’s how long it will take for generations of culture under both systems to be subsumed into a history of civic equality (if not equity), to adapt even further to this system on our individual terms, to form nostalgias which harken to far more than just those two systems. Until then, don’t expect us to “get over it”.

Within a few minutes of online research, though, I discovered two more photos taken on the same day in 1916 by Harris & Ewing at an Emancipation reunion.  As the official White House photographers of the early 1900s and then the nation’s largest photo news service, they rarely snapped shots of African Americans.

But on that sunny fall afternoon, they posed a group of black mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians in front of Cosmopolitan Baptist Temple at Tenth and N Streets, NW.

Now propped on canes and dressed in their finest clothes, these men and women had spent the first four to five decades of their lives in slavery. That the four women in the initial photo all were centenarians—and strong enough and determined enough to stand—made the image all the more remarkable.

via Four Free Women: 1916 Emancipation Reunion « A’Lelia Bundles.

Armond White

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I’ve realized something. Armond White is certifiably allergic to films which depict “Black Pathology” or “Black Victimization” writ large. He hates “Precious”, he hates “Selma”, he hates “The Butler”, he hates “Monster’s Ball”, he hates “The Help”, he hates “Do the Right Thing”, he hates all of the films made by Tyler Perry, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen and most of those directed by Spike Lee.

He praised, among other films, comedies such as “Meet Dave”, “Norbit”, “Marci X”, “Little Man”.

He thinks of the above films he hates as “sob stories”, perhaps because they reflect very much upon social or socio-psychological vulnerabilities of Afro-American characters in unequal ways. Films like Meet Dave, I guess, don’t reflect on that vulnerability or victimization.

Maybe he is contrarian (in a #Diogenes of Sinope way) when it comes to films directed by Black people, or has experienced anger from other critics regarding his reviews of such films, because he has different standards or expectations about films in general.

But I think that, in his hatred of depictions of vulnerability and “sob stories”, he shows a bit of his own vulnerability as an African-American moviegoer in a society which heaps praise or scorn upon films which affirm the prejudices of the status quo viewers.

Unfortunately, he now writes for the National Review. Oy.

Not Surprised by #Ferguson or #Occupy

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“A system cannot fail those it was never built to protect”.

– W.E.B. DuBois

As I see how the demonstrating public lashed out in Ferguson against the state of their community, and I see the prevailing national reaction to the local reaction – “violence/looting/burning buildings isn’t the answer”, I think back to #Occupy 2011.

I remember the police abuses of young white Occupy protesters, from New York to California. I remember how the police were defended by those who decried Occupy as “dirty”, “lazy” “thugs” and “trust-fund babies”.

I remember how they were exceptionally othered by those who are incredibly addicted to their own comforts and distance.

I remember the gross class resentment against college students, from people in a likely-similar income bracket as those protesting. I remember some bastard who screamed “stop raping people!” for his online fans’ shits and giggles.

And when Zucotti Park was forcibly cleared, signifying a formal end to the Occupy period, the police were cheered for “bringing law and order back to the streets” and “allowing businesses to function again”.

That moment was about class inequality. This moment – Ferguson – was about racial inequality.

And yet the militarized police, once again, show their ugly head. And their groupies itch for the police to save them from those who would “bring down America” through upsetting the status quo.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who said it best, so long ago:

And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

Most concerned about tranquility. Damn the urban peasants, especially those “colored” ones. Damn the college students. “Get out of our country if you don’t like it.”

The “Founding Fathers'” Revolution can’t repeated with these defenders of the status quo. Another Constitution can’t be drafted with these people.

The folks who defend police conduct toward unarmed protesters/AAs are likely the same folks who decry jackbooted government thugs elsewhere. I find this comfort for hyperviolent forces of the favored status quo to be funny, in a gallows-humor kind of way.

Stop inconveniencing the thugs in black and blue. Stop inconveniencing their slavish, status-quo-defending groupies. Stop disrupting the flow of traffic, of capital, of bigoted values, of firearms, of military training.

Worship our agents. Accept your inferiority. Do what we tell you. Appear how we want you to appear. Never resist us.

Then tell yourself: I AM FREE.