I wrote this in 2004....
Irony's always ironic.
America pumps it’s market driven interests throughout the globe only to naively ask, “Why do people hate us?” and then answer their own question with “because we’re free”. Now I now one true fact about my life – IT AIN’T FREE.
Art ain’t free. It’s very expensive when working within the capitalist model. Working outside that model? Here in the US that’s called underground. To be an underground artist takes work and perserverance and either rich parents or a job that’ll pay a living wage. Not that it can’t be done- but we’re talking about models here. Sure the underground model can work. It builds prestige, a market base and respect among comrades. The most important product of this work is the integrity the artists feels about the art s/he’s creating. The integrity of the work, the spirituality of the creative process, perhaps even the illumination of truths are indeed rewards in themselves to the artist. But will it support you? Probably not. And I’m sure there is somebody this has worked for but I’m talking about large monetary scale support. But how much money does one really need? Does the truth sound better or ring truer when delivered in a Bentley?
Underground is what it is because it’s outside the radar of populust consumptionist culture. Any hip-hop created outside the states is underground in the US. Any art aimed at communities of color that isn’t commercially marketed is called underground. Once the underground moves into the light of success it loses the edge- some argue the truthfulness- of it’s alleged pre capitalist roots. Finding diasporic artistic movements and contributions is an effort to Americans. To find out about different (read as non American) forms of artistic revolutions takes effort. It takes time and desire to experience something else. Why when bred in a culture that tells you that you are what everyone else on the planet either wants to be or destroy, would you look outside to find other modes of artistic expression? MTV et al barely show non mass produced music and images from within the US. When you’re told that art is either an imitation or a negation of what you believe to be art, why would you not believe that your expressions (and for a lot- not all- of this generation of “urban” youth it’s hip hop) can’t be translated into a global struggle against oppression?
Why can’t we Americans get up off of that? Because it’s a “Lovely Day” when the Gap tells us to all look alike like most proletarian/ elite models. We see through the unitarianism of our systems, not specifically governmental, but the transnational bent of American corporations the need to create a consistent market base for their products. Products! It’s sad to think that James Baldwin, Fela Kuti, Gil Scott Heron, Nina Simone, etc could be thought of as product. But when looking at the current cultural landscape of mass produced “artistic” endeavors… you have to wonder if you would even have heard of them today. When we make an effort to move through cultural differences it’s apparent that colored artists all over the world living in “decolonized” war zones are moving in a similar rhythm.
True power comes from controlling one’s own destiny. Money is not (always) the answer to that problem. Changes in policy, educational curriculum, early cultural and media studies education are some of the steps to freeing the minds of youth of color to see the links they are in the struggle for the global destruction of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Moving past methods of control and searching for ways to find truth and integrity globally through art could be the key to bridging power structures leading to the bonding of the links to personal freedom.
06 November 2008
22 March 2007
Comments on 300
Interesting. I've been getting a barrage of comments on my "300" post that mostly consist of people telling me to "chill out, it's only a movie". I have no idea who these people are and they have obviously only read post and not the entirety of my blog. I'm a media studies scholar. I'm a media literacy expert. It is my job in life to read the context of things on a grander scale than those prescribed. Of course, it's only a movie but if we don't contextualize the entertainments we're being fed, then we aren't aware of what we're being told to think. America doesn't create entertainment to entertain you. This is a capitalist society that creates commodities that serve the greater needs of the prevailing power structures. It depends on us being sheep and having no/low critical thinking skills to go to jobs to make a pittance of what someone is making on your backs. During the 1940's the medium of film was the most powerful propaganda machine for creating support for WWII. Do not think for a second that Hollywood is there to entertain you. It is there to sell you things. Lifestyle particularly. So for all of those who find it necessary to leave me comments simply about "300" who haven't read my thesis or any of my other work, while I appreciate your visit, you can save your typing time. Your comments are simply annoyances if they hold no serious critical comments. Thanks.
17 March 2007
300
This film is about 300 Spartan warriors lead by King Leonides who held against King Xerxes and his horde of "Persians". You can read any review somewhere that will tell you of the debate brewing about this movie. I agree with most criticisms and cringe at the affirmations. That being said here's what I think:
Propaganda. Blatant sheer racism. The upholding of American national identity at its most precise. Americans racist xenophobia against Iran was so clear (really against the whole world that doesn't adhere to the same code or is the same color) that I laughed out loud. Spartans discarded the weak, sickly, or misshapen babies leaving only strong warrior men born to Spartan women. They respect their women above all. These women would have been crushed beneath the weight of the soldiers who's airbrushed six packs made even the boniness of the women pale in comparison.
That's not really how I want to say that either. I left the theater furious. They've got all the blacks and people who look like me behaving like animals when the Persian Empire was one of the greatest forces of civilization in history. (Ironically enough the Persians believed in truth above all else, no wonder we're at such a historical impasse.) Making the Persians a hyper-sexualized conglomerate of all non "Western" people who are all slaves to a megalomaniacal god/ king monsters exemplifies America's demonization of those who don't share their adolescent mindset. In Xerxes harem, the traitorous hunchback is offered the pleasures of the flesh from beautiful women of color who smother him with kisses, undulate seductively beneath him and (sigh) lick his hump. At that I stated, in perhaps not my quietest inside voice: "This is some bullshit. The only women who look like me are licking a hunchback. Black ladies will even fuck a hunchback. This movie is some real bullshit!" I concede the inappropriateness of that behavior, but I was incensed.
For the generation of young boys sitting in their basements playing their x-boxes and wondering what this world has in store for them the idea of doing something for glory must be appealing. It's appealing to me. To believe in something so strongly that you'd give your life for it has moved men and women since the beginning of time. But at a moment when America's intention is to overpower Iran, to not place this film in a contemporary context belies a naïveté I don't believe we can afford as a democratic nation right now. Americans are the world leaders on propaganda. I know I help create it. We have created a national identity out of who we want to be or at least want the world to believe about us, not who we are. We tell ourselves so many lies and ingest so many that we can't separate them. A friend of mine said it was propaganda for going to the gym and working on a six-pack. It most certainly is. Because that's what we believe about ourselves. We believe we are those perfect, powerful, noble Spartans. Well then we'd be doomed, because the majority of Americans couldn't lift a spear nor hold a shield and would run the other way before risking their life for another. But we're not all soldiers. Oh, yeah right... Abu Ghraib & Gitmo. Right. Soldiers.
The black lady licking the hunchbacks back made me really mad though. And they were the only women who's ribs you couldn't see. They could be warriors. Not those bony Spartan women. And the homophobia... Did I mention that Xerxes was all done up like a video ho? So terrible.
Oh and Leonidas' last speech of the movie stating that they fought against mysticism and tyranny. Really? Is he running with Giuliani next year? This thing was a mess and it was not the best movie since the Matrix. What a load of crap. That's what got me in there. But imagine the feeling you might have had (I know I did) when I first say the Matrix. Not only was it visually stimulating, but also the story was unprecedented. They worked in tandem. This story was so bad that the effects meant nothing to me. But I'm old school. I still go to the movies to learn something about myself or others that don't exist in my real personal life. Yes it's an escape, but there has to be something that draws you into a fantasy of escape that truly grabs you. Something that holds you rapt. But I'm old school.
Maybe more later, but I do feel better now.
Propaganda. Blatant sheer racism. The upholding of American national identity at its most precise. Americans racist xenophobia against Iran was so clear (really against the whole world that doesn't adhere to the same code or is the same color) that I laughed out loud. Spartans discarded the weak, sickly, or misshapen babies leaving only strong warrior men born to Spartan women. They respect their women above all. These women would have been crushed beneath the weight of the soldiers who's airbrushed six packs made even the boniness of the women pale in comparison.
That's not really how I want to say that either. I left the theater furious. They've got all the blacks and people who look like me behaving like animals when the Persian Empire was one of the greatest forces of civilization in history. (Ironically enough the Persians believed in truth above all else, no wonder we're at such a historical impasse.) Making the Persians a hyper-sexualized conglomerate of all non "Western" people who are all slaves to a megalomaniacal god/ king monsters exemplifies America's demonization of those who don't share their adolescent mindset. In Xerxes harem, the traitorous hunchback is offered the pleasures of the flesh from beautiful women of color who smother him with kisses, undulate seductively beneath him and (sigh) lick his hump. At that I stated, in perhaps not my quietest inside voice: "This is some bullshit. The only women who look like me are licking a hunchback. Black ladies will even fuck a hunchback. This movie is some real bullshit!" I concede the inappropriateness of that behavior, but I was incensed.
For the generation of young boys sitting in their basements playing their x-boxes and wondering what this world has in store for them the idea of doing something for glory must be appealing. It's appealing to me. To believe in something so strongly that you'd give your life for it has moved men and women since the beginning of time. But at a moment when America's intention is to overpower Iran, to not place this film in a contemporary context belies a naïveté I don't believe we can afford as a democratic nation right now. Americans are the world leaders on propaganda. I know I help create it. We have created a national identity out of who we want to be or at least want the world to believe about us, not who we are. We tell ourselves so many lies and ingest so many that we can't separate them. A friend of mine said it was propaganda for going to the gym and working on a six-pack. It most certainly is. Because that's what we believe about ourselves. We believe we are those perfect, powerful, noble Spartans. Well then we'd be doomed, because the majority of Americans couldn't lift a spear nor hold a shield and would run the other way before risking their life for another. But we're not all soldiers. Oh, yeah right... Abu Ghraib & Gitmo. Right. Soldiers.
The black lady licking the hunchbacks back made me really mad though. And they were the only women who's ribs you couldn't see. They could be warriors. Not those bony Spartan women. And the homophobia... Did I mention that Xerxes was all done up like a video ho? So terrible.
Oh and Leonidas' last speech of the movie stating that they fought against mysticism and tyranny. Really? Is he running with Giuliani next year? This thing was a mess and it was not the best movie since the Matrix. What a load of crap. That's what got me in there. But imagine the feeling you might have had (I know I did) when I first say the Matrix. Not only was it visually stimulating, but also the story was unprecedented. They worked in tandem. This story was so bad that the effects meant nothing to me. But I'm old school. I still go to the movies to learn something about myself or others that don't exist in my real personal life. Yes it's an escape, but there has to be something that draws you into a fantasy of escape that truly grabs you. Something that holds you rapt. But I'm old school.
Maybe more later, but I do feel better now.
13 March 2007
it's really dumb not to write here
I'm writing everyday but not posting on this thing. I have to split my focus to do both and I'm not really sure if I want to do that. The other writing's getting really good to me. I do have a few rants to get out of me. Like the person who changed the time. I'm pretty pissed about that. I don't know why Caesar has decided this is a good idea to get some history books to take heed to something other than greed and mongering of all kinds on his behalf. I have to choose my words carefully because this is the main agent of information to all agencies. But come on. Really! And global warming is real. So are vulture funds. So is slavery in Guatemala and the Cote d'Ivorie and others. Things are not right. Whatever your idea of right is. But I guess as long as Britney Spears is on the loose, nobody cares.
Oh, that felt good. I can do that more.
Oh, that felt good. I can do that more.
13 December 2006
Getting it Together
HARD WORK BUILDS CHARACTER.
DON'T FEAR IT.
DO IT!!!!
Write like your life depends on it
-BECAUSE IT DOES.
DON'T FEAR IT.
DO IT!!!!
Write like your life depends on it
-BECAUSE IT DOES.
love
Soft like an easy chair-
my ass.
It's just the mood I’m in right now, I guess.
I don't write about love-
don't want to write about it because it makes
me feel like a romantic fool.
There's no room for romantic notions
in a hyper technologized world of IM.
The time to develop the intensity of feelings
and bonds of trust have become truncated into
smiley faces and empty and
quick "I love you emails" and text messages.
I say it so much that the feelings I used to have
when I felt it is gone.
The heat and swelling in my chest.
The flush of my cheeks.
My hands going numb.
Ears throbbing and mind made blank by an emotion
so intensely overwhelming there was, as
the alcoholics would say, the magnificence of God.
But I say it back to everybody that says it to me and
when I think about how much I don’t mean it-
it only adds to the emptiness I feel
about my everyday existence.
When I don’t think about it but feel how empty it is
All I want to do is drink.
Booze is no muse though.
It only magnifies the desperation of being surrounded by
I love you’s" and not feeling loved.
It does, however, temporarily hide the fact that all of
this means nothing.
Nihilism is on short order after a bottle or two of montepulciano.
And whisky knocks it down that much better.
So love-
I’m writing about love and it’s new status as an apparition.
A ghost of what was and what everybody hopes to attain
Without knowing its true nature.
With no experience base of its highs and lows.
Because sans this understanding of the heart and mind
that relegated it to the dream realm,
the nether regions,
we all believe in reality TV’s version of love.
And that’s some real bullshit.
my ass.
It's just the mood I’m in right now, I guess.
I don't write about love-
don't want to write about it because it makes
me feel like a romantic fool.
There's no room for romantic notions
in a hyper technologized world of IM.
The time to develop the intensity of feelings
and bonds of trust have become truncated into
smiley faces and empty and
quick "I love you emails" and text messages.
I say it so much that the feelings I used to have
when I felt it is gone.
The heat and swelling in my chest.
The flush of my cheeks.
My hands going numb.
Ears throbbing and mind made blank by an emotion
so intensely overwhelming there was, as
the alcoholics would say, the magnificence of God.
But I say it back to everybody that says it to me and
when I think about how much I don’t mean it-
it only adds to the emptiness I feel
about my everyday existence.
When I don’t think about it but feel how empty it is
All I want to do is drink.
Booze is no muse though.
It only magnifies the desperation of being surrounded by
I love you’s" and not feeling loved.
It does, however, temporarily hide the fact that all of
this means nothing.
Nihilism is on short order after a bottle or two of montepulciano.
And whisky knocks it down that much better.
So love-
I’m writing about love and it’s new status as an apparition.
A ghost of what was and what everybody hopes to attain
Without knowing its true nature.
With no experience base of its highs and lows.
Because sans this understanding of the heart and mind
that relegated it to the dream realm,
the nether regions,
we all believe in reality TV’s version of love.
And that’s some real bullshit.
18 September 2006
Traveling while black
Okay, so I'm in Tulum, Mexico. Tons of Italians (apparently August is their month off) and my friend Simone says Argentians. She's deduced this from all the staring. And I don't mean a curious look of not expecting a person of color (who's not Mexican and in service of some manner). I mean a fork in the air- mouth open-full minute stare upon entering a room. Sitting at a table of compatriots and everyone at the table fully turning around and staring boldly even after the party of color- namely my friends and I- are seated and going about ordering cervezas. Sunni says it's because I'm beautiful that the children stare (thanks honey, right back at you). I buy that but what explains the adults? There are few cultures left on the planet in which this degree of staring without speaking is acceptable and many more where it's downright rude. When I give my friendly "Hola" there's no response. Of course, they're mainly Europeans and I must admit I don't expect many human courtesies from them- sorry. But the staring must stop.
On the other hand, I must say that during this trip I've never been so happy to see black people in my life. Remember, I'm from segregated Chicago and honestly believe that there are black people everywhere. Or, at least, we've been there. The people I know have been all over the globe so I don't believe I'm like James Baldwin when he went to Sweden. But, maybe I am. Dude. My people. We've got to travel more. It's fucking cheap down here. and a black person told me about it. Only here it's clothing optional (as I believe the entire beach is here in the Mayan Riviera) and I'm constantly aware of the historical context of my naked body (naked HOT! body). The reality of the skinny women in bikinis give me visions of Aushwitz. It's very disconcerting. I do love that the Spanish and Italians have some meat on their bones. The Americans are crazy skinny or crazy fat.
But being black gives me the feeling of unwanted novelty. I'm obvious everywhere and everyone remembers me. It was easier to think about when my friends were here. But today as my first full day alone, we'll see. I don't want to go to the pounding techno music party in Playa but to one closer to home at Mezzanine down the beach. I was there last week con mi amigos. Lets see what happens when I go alone, dancing and a little drunk hopefully. We'll see what the interest is then.
16 September 2006
8.4.06
So reinvention is heavy on my mind again. When I think about Chicago, I know I can do it. Go back more traveled, less known and so some society. But not like the Links, something entirely new with the same kind of social mores. I do think this is somehow part of my deal. I have had a dream of society, but I need to define what it is. I want to create my own with it's own rules, but only exclusionary to a point of behavior and belief. (Oh no Charity. That's not megalomaniacal at all. Everyone wants to recreate society.) Since ghetto is the rule rather than the exception it must be the point of departure for rule creation. So we have to define what ghetto is in order to destroy it and see what we shan't be. But I'm actually more interested in value systems than behaviors. Values define our behaviors. So what do I want to propagate?
yeah, yeah- i know
It's been like a month of Sundays, but I forgot my password in Mexico. I actually forgot all of my passwords in Mexico, sue me. I'm 32 now and gonna forget a lot more. Here's what I wrote while away... Enjoy
23 July 2006
In Speech to N.A.A.C.P., Bush Offers Reconciliation - New York Times
In Speech to N.A.A.C.P., Bush Offers Reconciliation - New York Times
Ha-What? Do I still live in the 21st Century? This is an age when I can sit here all day, playing in my computer and come up with all kinds of information. Now I understand that this guy is theoretically "running the country" but we all know the truth about that one. Did he really just defer to Karl Rove like that? No... that couldn't be so.
So let me get this straight:
I am supposed to believe that the "extension" of a law that protects my rights as an American citizen is bridge building?
Wait a minute... what would have happened had it not been extended? Would I have to recite the capital of all 50 states to be able to vote? Would my voting rights be revoked? Why do we still have this anyway... It's not about registering to vote it's about motivating people into believing their vote counts and that their voices will be heard. People don't get bopped over the head anymore to register. They're just hard pressed to go on a Tuesday morning to vote for someone that's not going to do anything to change their lives in any tangible way.
This is all some bullshit. More bullshit to get black people's heads away from the fact that more hell is being raised in the middle east and more black people are going to die because of it. If we don't get our heads out of the past, our actions out of the past the future is going to eat us alive. I thank God everyday that I don't have to suffer the inhumanities my parents did. They worked hard to make sure I, not only, didn't know that kind of hatred but also had a healthy love for justice and the truth. Only they couldn't train me for this new form of racist/ classist insidiousness. I might not be called a nigger (that often) but people certainly attempt to treat me like one. Like our current administration. That guy, GW, is so busy blaming history for his ignorance and lack of concern for a group of HUMAN BEINGS... I don't know why I'm allowing that to make me angry. He does it all over the planet to anyone who's not part of his clique. Oh, but I remember why I'm allowing it to upset me: CAUSE I DO VOTE. I'm from Chicago and I vote early and often and it still didn't work.
I have to think more on this and see what else I'm supposed to be paying attention to while this is being waved beneath our noses. I bet they're gonna pull OJ out of a hat soon... They tried a little Michael Jackson business, but it didn't move us past Lebanon.
Ha-What? Do I still live in the 21st Century? This is an age when I can sit here all day, playing in my computer and come up with all kinds of information. Now I understand that this guy is theoretically "running the country" but we all know the truth about that one. Did he really just defer to Karl Rove like that? No... that couldn't be so.
So let me get this straight:
I am supposed to believe that the "extension" of a law that protects my rights as an American citizen is bridge building?
Wait a minute... what would have happened had it not been extended? Would I have to recite the capital of all 50 states to be able to vote? Would my voting rights be revoked? Why do we still have this anyway... It's not about registering to vote it's about motivating people into believing their vote counts and that their voices will be heard. People don't get bopped over the head anymore to register. They're just hard pressed to go on a Tuesday morning to vote for someone that's not going to do anything to change their lives in any tangible way.
This is all some bullshit. More bullshit to get black people's heads away from the fact that more hell is being raised in the middle east and more black people are going to die because of it. If we don't get our heads out of the past, our actions out of the past the future is going to eat us alive. I thank God everyday that I don't have to suffer the inhumanities my parents did. They worked hard to make sure I, not only, didn't know that kind of hatred but also had a healthy love for justice and the truth. Only they couldn't train me for this new form of racist/ classist insidiousness. I might not be called a nigger (that often) but people certainly attempt to treat me like one. Like our current administration. That guy, GW, is so busy blaming history for his ignorance and lack of concern for a group of HUMAN BEINGS... I don't know why I'm allowing that to make me angry. He does it all over the planet to anyone who's not part of his clique. Oh, but I remember why I'm allowing it to upset me: CAUSE I DO VOTE. I'm from Chicago and I vote early and often and it still didn't work.
I have to think more on this and see what else I'm supposed to be paying attention to while this is being waved beneath our noses. I bet they're gonna pull OJ out of a hat soon... They tried a little Michael Jackson business, but it didn't move us past Lebanon.
06 June 2006
The anti-no fear
My mantra of "no fear" keeps me afraid. As long as I'm waiting for the moment to be fearless, I'm ignoring the present. I can live outside of social conventions and fear. I have to move past the superficiality of success and action that I perceive from others and create my own momentum. The springtime of my discontent is over. It's time to move. And instead of recklessness based on fear- stemming from fear- I'm going to turn it into a recklessness of confidence and boldness. I can't be afraid of motion. I will not allow cigs and booze to be an excuse for not moving and succeeding. By the end of the year I will be a well paid published writer fully engaged in the process of my work and enjoying the writing because I'm not afraid of it. Trusting it and myself. Trusting being prolific. I think I can be. I know I must be. Be about the business of it. I have to remove the "shoulda/ gonna" fakeness of it. Being engaged, not having a choice. And getting money. A lot of money for it without losing myself or my love. All of this spiritual work is the build up to this. I must be engaged in my life. Not researching it. Not asking other people about it. Being really terrified about it and doing it anyway.
19 May 2006
Feeling Better
I decided I'd feel much better about myself today if I'd posted to my blog before I went to my swim class. My Thursday and Friday swim classes with the women I most affectionately call "my old ladies" are the only real moments of structure in my life.
I love them because they inspire me. They show up weekly, as their schedules permit, and I love that they have these busy lives even though they could just sit around being grandmas. They've taught me just how skin deep beauty really is. That our inperfections (remember we're in bathing suits) are as beautiful, natural and human as what we might laughingly refer to as our perfections. They remind me of my grandmas. Only since I don't officially belong to them, I get a degree of candor about their lives that my grandmas would never reveal to me. Our naked steamroom talks are like fellowship meetings among women who've lived (and live) active productive lives. Their reassurance of me finding what I'm looking for in this life is comforting because I can trust their collective "don't worry about that sweetie, you have plenty of time". They have collectively been all over the world and still travel every summer. They give me recipes and tell me about the special days and activities they still share with their girlfriends. They tell me about meeting their husbands and their grandchildren's triumphs and problems. Most importantly to me, they see me as one of their own. But as a young woman with infinite possibilities who is taking advantage of life. They know my money woes are temporary although I feel like it's the end of the world sometimes. Coupled with my own experience, I know it's not the end of the world. They also want me to buy property. To go to jazz clubs to find a boyfriend- a jazz musician preferably (but been there- done that). To continue to travel and be free. I just love them. And now I'm on my way to go work off this ass of mine in the second of the 2 intense aqua-aerobic workouts of the week. I'm still taking aspirin from yesterdays. And they move. I'm sweating in the pool. But I know if they can do it, I can too. When I began going about a year and a half ago, I was gonna chicken out. I hadn't been in a pool outside of vacation splashings for years. That's when Miss Ruth said "well you're here now, go put your toe in the water. If you don't like it- take a nice steam." A year and a half later, that's what I know tell myself about everything I get scared about.
It also doesn't hurt that comparatively I look like, to quote Miss Victoria "a Playboy Bunny". Nice.
I love them because they inspire me. They show up weekly, as their schedules permit, and I love that they have these busy lives even though they could just sit around being grandmas. They've taught me just how skin deep beauty really is. That our inperfections (remember we're in bathing suits) are as beautiful, natural and human as what we might laughingly refer to as our perfections. They remind me of my grandmas. Only since I don't officially belong to them, I get a degree of candor about their lives that my grandmas would never reveal to me. Our naked steamroom talks are like fellowship meetings among women who've lived (and live) active productive lives. Their reassurance of me finding what I'm looking for in this life is comforting because I can trust their collective "don't worry about that sweetie, you have plenty of time". They have collectively been all over the world and still travel every summer. They give me recipes and tell me about the special days and activities they still share with their girlfriends. They tell me about meeting their husbands and their grandchildren's triumphs and problems. Most importantly to me, they see me as one of their own. But as a young woman with infinite possibilities who is taking advantage of life. They know my money woes are temporary although I feel like it's the end of the world sometimes. Coupled with my own experience, I know it's not the end of the world. They also want me to buy property. To go to jazz clubs to find a boyfriend- a jazz musician preferably (but been there- done that). To continue to travel and be free. I just love them. And now I'm on my way to go work off this ass of mine in the second of the 2 intense aqua-aerobic workouts of the week. I'm still taking aspirin from yesterdays. And they move. I'm sweating in the pool. But I know if they can do it, I can too. When I began going about a year and a half ago, I was gonna chicken out. I hadn't been in a pool outside of vacation splashings for years. That's when Miss Ruth said "well you're here now, go put your toe in the water. If you don't like it- take a nice steam." A year and a half later, that's what I know tell myself about everything I get scared about.
It also doesn't hurt that comparatively I look like, to quote Miss Victoria "a Playboy Bunny". Nice.
16 May 2006
Dying to Get Rich
In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles produced, directed, edited, and starred in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which has now been dubbed the first “blaxploitaion” film. The films of the decade that followed used the commercial success of this film showing a Black man against the system and diluted the revolutionary-ness of the image to cater to white mass-market sensibilities. It’s this marketing and the re-appropriation of the caricature to a commercially viable creation that concerns me. As long as rappers can espouse “thug life” as cool and make lots of money from it- for themselves and more for their white owned record companies- this stereotype retains it’s power to terrorize white America while creating dangerous situations for Black men at large. The phenomenon of racial profiling is hinged on this caricature.
In Sweetback the movie’s stars were the Black community. In later movies, such as New Jack City (directed by Melvin’s son Mario Van Pebbles) the idea of community is used only to create a market for its own destruction. I use New Jack City as an example because it shows the generation of children born in the blaxploitation era and raised in the Reaganomics era of excess. Given the rise of drugs and violence in everyday urban life and the image of whites living “Dynasty” lives on TV, these children (now teenagers and adults) see money as the great equalizer. But the pursuit of material comforts demand an individualist capitalist modus operandi that is destroying the Black community and making Black men moving targets while commodifying Black women. In New Jack City, while they gave away turkeys to the community at Thanksgiving the “Cash Money Brothers” were in the process of turning a low-income apartment building into an all-inclusive crack haven. Therefore their seemingly generous gesture was really just a marketing scheme to win the trust of the community they were about to decimate and murder for profit.
Now with the popularity of everything hip-hop, what began as protest and revolution in lyrical and musical style, the line between commercialism and revolution has been smashed. Hip hop/ rap is used to sell everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Chevy cars. Hip-hop as a culture has, beginning in the mid ‘90’s become about “money, hoes, and clothes- all a nigga knows” (Notorious B.I.G. “Juicy”). The line between fiction and reality in hip-hop has blurred and the drug dealers become rappers Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Doggy Dog, Fat Joe, Jay-Z, Master P. are just a few of the more popular (and lucrative) examples. The violence needed to become a successful drug dealer bled into the reality of being successful rappers. Even rappers who had more middle class upbringings, like Tupac, fed into the brute stereotype because it sold albums. The “badass” moved from being an agent for revolution to a puppet for capitalism. Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac paid for their roles with their young lives.
The flip side of this image is the searing of it in the minds of white America. The brute image was created to instill fear of free Blacks into the minds of the post Civil War white consciousness, particularly white women. The conglomeration of the sexually indiscriminate and uncontrollable Black buck with the violent animalistic Black brute is what can be seen today most in media images. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was the visual marriage of the two images locking the Black man’s sexuality with violence leaving the brute image as a predominate staple of American popular culture. In the “Law and Order” clip I showed in class the perception of the threat of rape, whether real or imagined, got a man killed. The perception of violence got Amadou Diallo massacred. Emmett Till was murdered for allegedly looking (sometimes the story is whistling) at a white woman in Mississippi in the 1950’s. It’s a commonly held perception that Black men are dangerous and they are being sold as such. From the Supreme Court to Brentwood, even outside of the hip-hop community Black men are dangerous.
But are they? I think so. I think so not because of the threat of physical violence but as a Black woman who is acutely aware of the psychic violence that is currently breaking down the Black community and communal ties. I’m aware of being called a bitch or a ho or being perceived as a gold digger or being bought for the price of a dinner. The media doesn’t tell me that’s how I’m treated, experience does. The rapper Nas released a song “You Owe Me”; he tells a young lady that she owes him her body because he’s bought her things. Female rappers aren’t blameless either; they perpetuate the wonton sexuality slave masters used as an excuse for their rapes of female slaves. Yet my concern is with the Black men, because it’s costing them their lives.
Sweetback was necessary viewing for the Black Panther Party because a Black character standing up for himself and rebuking a comfortable life as a nonentity was unprecedented. He used his sex to get himself out of trouble and even his sexual encounters were communal activities. He moved from being controlled by it to controlling it and using it as power. There are still flaws in that schematic, but he’s not a victim. Nino Brown killed his “brother” G-Money in New Jack City over what came down to his capitalistic individualism at the expense of the Cash Money Brothers (his created community), but still in the midst of that, a woman he “took” from G-Money. The notion of being “your brother’s keeper” keeps literally getting shot to bits and forget about being “your sister’s keeper”. There is no responsibility taken by these men (and women) for their actions. Yes- as an artist one should have the right to express themselves however they see fit. But it’s the proliferation of this one image for more than a century that is obviously gotten into our psyches as well. The saddest part is that as evidenced in the Fat Joe and R. Kelly video “We Thuggin’” simply being Black and Latino means thug… because they’re singing, dancing, talking about what they have and ogling women. That’s not thuggin’ not by Nino Brown’s standards. The contemporary rappers with their “ghetto fabulous thug” mentality now equate sex with money with power and it’s destroying the community- by my estimation.
In Sweetback the movie’s stars were the Black community. In later movies, such as New Jack City (directed by Melvin’s son Mario Van Pebbles) the idea of community is used only to create a market for its own destruction. I use New Jack City as an example because it shows the generation of children born in the blaxploitation era and raised in the Reaganomics era of excess. Given the rise of drugs and violence in everyday urban life and the image of whites living “Dynasty” lives on TV, these children (now teenagers and adults) see money as the great equalizer. But the pursuit of material comforts demand an individualist capitalist modus operandi that is destroying the Black community and making Black men moving targets while commodifying Black women. In New Jack City, while they gave away turkeys to the community at Thanksgiving the “Cash Money Brothers” were in the process of turning a low-income apartment building into an all-inclusive crack haven. Therefore their seemingly generous gesture was really just a marketing scheme to win the trust of the community they were about to decimate and murder for profit.
Now with the popularity of everything hip-hop, what began as protest and revolution in lyrical and musical style, the line between commercialism and revolution has been smashed. Hip hop/ rap is used to sell everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Chevy cars. Hip-hop as a culture has, beginning in the mid ‘90’s become about “money, hoes, and clothes- all a nigga knows” (Notorious B.I.G. “Juicy”). The line between fiction and reality in hip-hop has blurred and the drug dealers become rappers Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Doggy Dog, Fat Joe, Jay-Z, Master P. are just a few of the more popular (and lucrative) examples. The violence needed to become a successful drug dealer bled into the reality of being successful rappers. Even rappers who had more middle class upbringings, like Tupac, fed into the brute stereotype because it sold albums. The “badass” moved from being an agent for revolution to a puppet for capitalism. Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac paid for their roles with their young lives.
The flip side of this image is the searing of it in the minds of white America. The brute image was created to instill fear of free Blacks into the minds of the post Civil War white consciousness, particularly white women. The conglomeration of the sexually indiscriminate and uncontrollable Black buck with the violent animalistic Black brute is what can be seen today most in media images. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was the visual marriage of the two images locking the Black man’s sexuality with violence leaving the brute image as a predominate staple of American popular culture. In the “Law and Order” clip I showed in class the perception of the threat of rape, whether real or imagined, got a man killed. The perception of violence got Amadou Diallo massacred. Emmett Till was murdered for allegedly looking (sometimes the story is whistling) at a white woman in Mississippi in the 1950’s. It’s a commonly held perception that Black men are dangerous and they are being sold as such. From the Supreme Court to Brentwood, even outside of the hip-hop community Black men are dangerous.
But are they? I think so. I think so not because of the threat of physical violence but as a Black woman who is acutely aware of the psychic violence that is currently breaking down the Black community and communal ties. I’m aware of being called a bitch or a ho or being perceived as a gold digger or being bought for the price of a dinner. The media doesn’t tell me that’s how I’m treated, experience does. The rapper Nas released a song “You Owe Me”; he tells a young lady that she owes him her body because he’s bought her things. Female rappers aren’t blameless either; they perpetuate the wonton sexuality slave masters used as an excuse for their rapes of female slaves. Yet my concern is with the Black men, because it’s costing them their lives.
Sweetback was necessary viewing for the Black Panther Party because a Black character standing up for himself and rebuking a comfortable life as a nonentity was unprecedented. He used his sex to get himself out of trouble and even his sexual encounters were communal activities. He moved from being controlled by it to controlling it and using it as power. There are still flaws in that schematic, but he’s not a victim. Nino Brown killed his “brother” G-Money in New Jack City over what came down to his capitalistic individualism at the expense of the Cash Money Brothers (his created community), but still in the midst of that, a woman he “took” from G-Money. The notion of being “your brother’s keeper” keeps literally getting shot to bits and forget about being “your sister’s keeper”. There is no responsibility taken by these men (and women) for their actions. Yes- as an artist one should have the right to express themselves however they see fit. But it’s the proliferation of this one image for more than a century that is obviously gotten into our psyches as well. The saddest part is that as evidenced in the Fat Joe and R. Kelly video “We Thuggin’” simply being Black and Latino means thug… because they’re singing, dancing, talking about what they have and ogling women. That’s not thuggin’ not by Nino Brown’s standards. The contemporary rappers with their “ghetto fabulous thug” mentality now equate sex with money with power and it’s destroying the community- by my estimation.
12 Things The Negro Must Do For Himself
Ask Yourself: Are We Living The Dream?
If The Negro Would Try
"The Negro race has never tried to do very much for itself. The race has great possibilities. Properly awakened, the Negro can do the so-called impossible."
Carter G. Woodson
12 Things The Negro Must Do For Himself by Nannie Helen Burroughs
(Circa Early 1900's)
1. The Negro Must Learn To Put First Things First. The First Things Are: Education; Development of Character Traits; A Trade and Home Ownership.
*
The Negro puts too much of his earning in clothes, in food, in show and in having what he calls "a good time." The Dr. Kelly Miller said, "The Negro buys what he WANTS and begs for what he Needs." Too true!
2. The Negro Must Stop Expecting God and White Folk To Do For Him What He Can Do For Himself.
*
It is the "Divine Plan" that the strong shall help the weak, but even God does not do for man what man can do for himself. The Negro will have to do exactly what Jesus told the man (in John 5:8) to do--Carry his own load--"Take up your bed and walk."
3. The Negro Must Keep Himself, His Children And His Home Clean And Make The Surroundings In Which He Lives Comfortable and Attractive.
*
He must learn to "run his community up"--not down. We can segregate by law, we integrate only by living. Civilization is not a matter of race, it is a matter of standards. Believe it or not--some day, some race is going to outdo the Anglo-Saxon, completely. It can be the Negro race, if the Negro gets sense enough. Civilization goes up and down that way.
4. The Negro Must Learn To Dress More Appropriately For Work And For Leisure.
*
Knowing what to wear--how to wear it--when to wear it and where to wear it, are earmarks of common sense, culture and also an index to character.
5. The Negro Must Make His Religion An Everyday Practice And Not Just A Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Emotional Affair.
6. The Negro Must Highly Resolve To Wipe Out Mass Ignorance.
*
The leaders of the race must teach and inspire the masses to become eager and determined to improve mentally, morally and spiritually, and to meet the basic requirements of good citizenship.
*
We should initiate an intensive literacy campaign in America, as well as in Africa. Ignorance--satisfied ignorance--is a millstone abut the neck of the race. It is democracy's greatest burden.
*
Social integration is a relationship attained as a result of the cultivation of kindred social ideals, interests and standards.
*
It is a blending process that requires time, understanding and kindred purposes to achieve. Likes alone and not laws can do it.
7. The Negro Must Stop Charging His Failures Up To His "Color" And To White People's Attitude.
*
The truth of the matter is that good service and conduct will make senseless race prejudice fade like mist before the rising sun.
*
God never intended that a man's color shall be anything other than a badge of distinction. It is high time that all races were learning that fact. The Negro must first QUALIFY for whatever position he wants. Purpose, initiative, ingenuity and industry are the keys that all men use to get what they want. The Negro will have to do the same. He must make himself a workman who is too skilled not to be wanted, and too DEPENDABLE not to be on the job, according to promise or plan. He will never become a vital factor in industry until he learns to put into his work the vitalizing force of initiative, skill and dependability. He has gone "RIGHTS" mad and "DUTY" dumb.
8. The Negro Must Overcome His Bad Job Habits.
*
He must make a brand new reputation for himself in the world of labor. His bad job habits are absenteeism, funerals to attend, or a little business to look after. The Negro runs an off and on business. He also has a bad reputation for conduct on the job--such as petty quarrelling with other help, incessant loud talking about nothing; loafing, carelessness, due to lack of job pride; insolence, gum chewing and--too often--liquor drinking. Just plain bad job habits!
9. He Must Improve His Conduct In Public Places.
*
Taken as a whole, he is entirely too loud and too ill-mannered.
*
There is much talk about wiping out racial segregation and also much talk about achieving integration.
*
Segregation is a physical arrangement by which people are separated in various services.
*
It is definitely up to the Negro to wipe out the apparent justification or excuse for segregation.
*
The only effective way to do it is to clean up and keep clean. By practice, cleanliness will become a habit and habit becomes character.
10. The Negro Must Learn How To Operate Business For People--Not For Negro People, Only.
*
To do business, he will have to remove all typical "earmarks," business principles; measure up to accepted standards and meet stimulating competition, graciously--in fact, he must learn to welcome competition.
11. The Average So-Called Educated Negro Will Have To Come Down Out Of The Air. He Is Too Inflated Over Nothing. He Needs An Experience Similar To The One That Ezekiel Had--(Ezekiel 3:14-19). And He Must Do What Ezekiel Did
*
Otherwise, through indifference, as to the plight of the masses, the Negro, who thinks that he has escaped, will lose his own soul. It will do all leaders good to read Hebrew 13:3, and the first Thirty-seven Chapters of Ezekiel.
*
A race transformation itself through its own leaders and its sensible "common people." A race rises on its own wings, or is held down by its own weight. True leaders are never "things apart from the people." They are the masses. They simply got to the front ahead of them. Their only business at the front is to inspire to masses by hard work and noble example and challenge them to "Come on!" Dante stated a fact when he said, "Show the people the light and they will find the way!"
*
There must arise within the Negro race a leadership that is not out hunting bargains for itself. A noble example is found in the men and women of the Negro race, who, in the early days, laid down their lives for the people. Their invaluable contributions have not been appraised by the "latter-day leaders." In many cases, their names would never be recorded, among the unsung heroes of the world, but for the fact that white friends have written them there.
"Lord, God of Hosts, Be with us yet."
*
The Negro of today does not realize that, but, for these exhibits A's, that certainly show the innate possibilities of members of their own race, white people would not have been moved to make such princely investments in lives and money, as they have made, for the establishment of schools and for the on-going of the race.
12. The Negro Must Stop Forgetting His Friends. "Remember."
*
Read Deuteronomy 24:18. Deuteronomy rings the big bell of gratitude. Why? Because an ingrate is an abomination in the sight of God. God is constantly telling us that "I the Lord thy God delivered you"--through human instrumentalities.
*
The American Negro has had and still has friends--in the North and in the South. These friends not only pray, speak, write, influence others, but make unbelievable, unpublished sacrifices and contributions for the advancement of the race--for their brothers in bonds.
*
The noblest thing that the Negro can do is to so live and labor that these benefactors will not have given in vain. The Negro must make his heart warm with gratitude, his lips sweet with thanks and his heart and mind resolute with purpose to justify the sacrifices and stand on his feet and go forward--"God is no respector of persons. In every nation, he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is" sure to win out. Get to work! That's the answer to everything that hurts us. We talk too much about nothing instead of redeeming the time by working.
R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R
*
In spite of race prejudice, America is brim full of opportunities. Go after them!
If The Negro Would Try
"The Negro race has never tried to do very much for itself. The race has great possibilities. Properly awakened, the Negro can do the so-called impossible."
Carter G. Woodson
12 Things The Negro Must Do For Himself by Nannie Helen Burroughs
(Circa Early 1900's)
1. The Negro Must Learn To Put First Things First. The First Things Are: Education; Development of Character Traits; A Trade and Home Ownership.
*
The Negro puts too much of his earning in clothes, in food, in show and in having what he calls "a good time." The Dr. Kelly Miller said, "The Negro buys what he WANTS and begs for what he Needs." Too true!
2. The Negro Must Stop Expecting God and White Folk To Do For Him What He Can Do For Himself.
*
It is the "Divine Plan" that the strong shall help the weak, but even God does not do for man what man can do for himself. The Negro will have to do exactly what Jesus told the man (in John 5:8) to do--Carry his own load--"Take up your bed and walk."
3. The Negro Must Keep Himself, His Children And His Home Clean And Make The Surroundings In Which He Lives Comfortable and Attractive.
*
He must learn to "run his community up"--not down. We can segregate by law, we integrate only by living. Civilization is not a matter of race, it is a matter of standards. Believe it or not--some day, some race is going to outdo the Anglo-Saxon, completely. It can be the Negro race, if the Negro gets sense enough. Civilization goes up and down that way.
4. The Negro Must Learn To Dress More Appropriately For Work And For Leisure.
*
Knowing what to wear--how to wear it--when to wear it and where to wear it, are earmarks of common sense, culture and also an index to character.
5. The Negro Must Make His Religion An Everyday Practice And Not Just A Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Emotional Affair.
6. The Negro Must Highly Resolve To Wipe Out Mass Ignorance.
*
The leaders of the race must teach and inspire the masses to become eager and determined to improve mentally, morally and spiritually, and to meet the basic requirements of good citizenship.
*
We should initiate an intensive literacy campaign in America, as well as in Africa. Ignorance--satisfied ignorance--is a millstone abut the neck of the race. It is democracy's greatest burden.
*
Social integration is a relationship attained as a result of the cultivation of kindred social ideals, interests and standards.
*
It is a blending process that requires time, understanding and kindred purposes to achieve. Likes alone and not laws can do it.
7. The Negro Must Stop Charging His Failures Up To His "Color" And To White People's Attitude.
*
The truth of the matter is that good service and conduct will make senseless race prejudice fade like mist before the rising sun.
*
God never intended that a man's color shall be anything other than a badge of distinction. It is high time that all races were learning that fact. The Negro must first QUALIFY for whatever position he wants. Purpose, initiative, ingenuity and industry are the keys that all men use to get what they want. The Negro will have to do the same. He must make himself a workman who is too skilled not to be wanted, and too DEPENDABLE not to be on the job, according to promise or plan. He will never become a vital factor in industry until he learns to put into his work the vitalizing force of initiative, skill and dependability. He has gone "RIGHTS" mad and "DUTY" dumb.
8. The Negro Must Overcome His Bad Job Habits.
*
He must make a brand new reputation for himself in the world of labor. His bad job habits are absenteeism, funerals to attend, or a little business to look after. The Negro runs an off and on business. He also has a bad reputation for conduct on the job--such as petty quarrelling with other help, incessant loud talking about nothing; loafing, carelessness, due to lack of job pride; insolence, gum chewing and--too often--liquor drinking. Just plain bad job habits!
9. He Must Improve His Conduct In Public Places.
*
Taken as a whole, he is entirely too loud and too ill-mannered.
*
There is much talk about wiping out racial segregation and also much talk about achieving integration.
*
Segregation is a physical arrangement by which people are separated in various services.
*
It is definitely up to the Negro to wipe out the apparent justification or excuse for segregation.
*
The only effective way to do it is to clean up and keep clean. By practice, cleanliness will become a habit and habit becomes character.
10. The Negro Must Learn How To Operate Business For People--Not For Negro People, Only.
*
To do business, he will have to remove all typical "earmarks," business principles; measure up to accepted standards and meet stimulating competition, graciously--in fact, he must learn to welcome competition.
11. The Average So-Called Educated Negro Will Have To Come Down Out Of The Air. He Is Too Inflated Over Nothing. He Needs An Experience Similar To The One That Ezekiel Had--(Ezekiel 3:14-19). And He Must Do What Ezekiel Did
*
Otherwise, through indifference, as to the plight of the masses, the Negro, who thinks that he has escaped, will lose his own soul. It will do all leaders good to read Hebrew 13:3, and the first Thirty-seven Chapters of Ezekiel.
*
A race transformation itself through its own leaders and its sensible "common people." A race rises on its own wings, or is held down by its own weight. True leaders are never "things apart from the people." They are the masses. They simply got to the front ahead of them. Their only business at the front is to inspire to masses by hard work and noble example and challenge them to "Come on!" Dante stated a fact when he said, "Show the people the light and they will find the way!"
*
There must arise within the Negro race a leadership that is not out hunting bargains for itself. A noble example is found in the men and women of the Negro race, who, in the early days, laid down their lives for the people. Their invaluable contributions have not been appraised by the "latter-day leaders." In many cases, their names would never be recorded, among the unsung heroes of the world, but for the fact that white friends have written them there.
"Lord, God of Hosts, Be with us yet."
*
The Negro of today does not realize that, but, for these exhibits A's, that certainly show the innate possibilities of members of their own race, white people would not have been moved to make such princely investments in lives and money, as they have made, for the establishment of schools and for the on-going of the race.
12. The Negro Must Stop Forgetting His Friends. "Remember."
*
Read Deuteronomy 24:18. Deuteronomy rings the big bell of gratitude. Why? Because an ingrate is an abomination in the sight of God. God is constantly telling us that "I the Lord thy God delivered you"--through human instrumentalities.
*
The American Negro has had and still has friends--in the North and in the South. These friends not only pray, speak, write, influence others, but make unbelievable, unpublished sacrifices and contributions for the advancement of the race--for their brothers in bonds.
*
The noblest thing that the Negro can do is to so live and labor that these benefactors will not have given in vain. The Negro must make his heart warm with gratitude, his lips sweet with thanks and his heart and mind resolute with purpose to justify the sacrifices and stand on his feet and go forward--"God is no respector of persons. In every nation, he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is" sure to win out. Get to work! That's the answer to everything that hurts us. We talk too much about nothing instead of redeeming the time by working.
R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R
*
In spite of race prejudice, America is brim full of opportunities. Go after them!
27 March 2006
Inside Man
This is an incomplete thought, but I saw the new Spike Lee and I have to say something. It was the top grossing film this weekend and the most money in a single weekend Spike has ever made. But I didn't like it. It reeked of Spike Lee. The story was hot. The actors were hot. Denzel was doing that thing he does now, like Bill Duke in the police scene in Juice, a lot of "smiley talking". Spike didn't write it but it still sunk into preachy monologues. How?
And the reality is- Jodie Foster's character was bad as hell. She was the kind of woman that I still hope to be when I grow up-only with a stronger moral compass. But how could the word "cunt" still be used to describe her? No, really? (Spike didn't write this one either.) Isn't bitch bad enough anymore to describe assertive women with questionable ethical behavior? I think bitch still works.
Oh and did I mention the part where the female bank robber is remembered for her rack and in trying to identify her, the women who fit the big busted profile are asked to unzip their tops.
Okay, that's enough for now. I'll have more later.
And the reality is- Jodie Foster's character was bad as hell. She was the kind of woman that I still hope to be when I grow up-only with a stronger moral compass. But how could the word "cunt" still be used to describe her? No, really? (Spike didn't write this one either.) Isn't bitch bad enough anymore to describe assertive women with questionable ethical behavior? I think bitch still works.
Oh and did I mention the part where the female bank robber is remembered for her rack and in trying to identify her, the women who fit the big busted profile are asked to unzip their tops.
Okay, that's enough for now. I'll have more later.
01 March 2006
I can't believe I haven't written in over a month
I'm working and sleepy all the time now. I can only muster enough strength to play Monopoly at games.com.
More later.
More later.
28 January 2006
27 January 2006
I'm Race People
I’m race people. I come from a long line of race people. People who raised me to be a black, proud, smart, well mannered lady. It’s a sentence I don’t feel should even be written in the 21st century, but it’s the sentence that keeps me from writing about race. I’m so concerned now with being multi-culti, and my blackness so intrinsic to my being that writing about it seems obsolete to me. But we’re in trouble and my talking about it and not writing about it is part of the problem.
I had Tyrone put a texturizer in my hair, blow it out and straighten it…
And it’s straight and all Nona Hendrix right? (Or like Malcolm X before he went to jail.) And then I watched John Henrik Clarke’s "A Long and Mighty Walk" and went and washed the straight out of my hair.
I love having an Afro.
I love looking and being black. I do believe in race. It’s very important to me. It fills me with an incredible sense of pride.
But that all still sounds very pedestrian to me. Simple statements that don’t reflect the complexities of the subject. My intersection with race is directly tied to my particular environment. But since my environs have evolved so has my spin on race. I’m not of the school that race doesn’t exist because I don’t live in the world of people not noticing my race first. I mean, I’m black. People who try to describe others without race when race is the obvious distinction annoy me. “The guy, you know he had on a baseball cap and a blue jacket. He was standing over here.” “You mean the black guy?” “Um, yeah.”
Now isn’t that more to the point. It isn’t as if calling someone black is an indictment. All of this political correctness is making it difficult for any serious conversations on race. By being so obtuse, we are denying a fact of life on these shores. And living in a dream world. The fact that simple descriptions are politically loaded- that’s the problem. I’m offended if I’m the only black somewhere (like at work) and people go ten ways around the moon to describe me as opposed to “she’s the black girl” (although I guess I’m quickly moving from girlhood.)
But here in NY, surrounded by the people I’m surrounded by, race is even more complicated than my Chicago definitions. I love it. It confuses me and challenges me.
And I watched Amistad today and wish the straight-backed pride of being Africans, of being sure in our skins, of being wonderful (and boy I love Djimon Hounsou) was the reality of the totality of my people today. But the calling of ancestors, regardless of its cinematic merit, should be a common virtue (practice?) of all in the African Diaspora.
I’m quite aware of the fact that I wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t chosen to live in deplorable conditions, chose to live in general, for me to exist. I am the promise of things unseen. I am the promise of many sacrifices and I must succeed because of the sacrifices and choices made for me to draw breath. Regardless of what Budweiser tells me late at night, I will fulfill this promise. My writing this is a testament to my belief and fulfillment of this promise.
I had Tyrone put a texturizer in my hair, blow it out and straighten it…
And it’s straight and all Nona Hendrix right? (Or like Malcolm X before he went to jail.) And then I watched John Henrik Clarke’s "A Long and Mighty Walk" and went and washed the straight out of my hair.
I love having an Afro.
I love looking and being black. I do believe in race. It’s very important to me. It fills me with an incredible sense of pride.
But that all still sounds very pedestrian to me. Simple statements that don’t reflect the complexities of the subject. My intersection with race is directly tied to my particular environment. But since my environs have evolved so has my spin on race. I’m not of the school that race doesn’t exist because I don’t live in the world of people not noticing my race first. I mean, I’m black. People who try to describe others without race when race is the obvious distinction annoy me. “The guy, you know he had on a baseball cap and a blue jacket. He was standing over here.” “You mean the black guy?” “Um, yeah.”
Now isn’t that more to the point. It isn’t as if calling someone black is an indictment. All of this political correctness is making it difficult for any serious conversations on race. By being so obtuse, we are denying a fact of life on these shores. And living in a dream world. The fact that simple descriptions are politically loaded- that’s the problem. I’m offended if I’m the only black somewhere (like at work) and people go ten ways around the moon to describe me as opposed to “she’s the black girl” (although I guess I’m quickly moving from girlhood.)
But here in NY, surrounded by the people I’m surrounded by, race is even more complicated than my Chicago definitions. I love it. It confuses me and challenges me.
And I watched Amistad today and wish the straight-backed pride of being Africans, of being sure in our skins, of being wonderful (and boy I love Djimon Hounsou) was the reality of the totality of my people today. But the calling of ancestors, regardless of its cinematic merit, should be a common virtue (practice?) of all in the African Diaspora.
I’m quite aware of the fact that I wouldn’t be here if someone hadn’t chosen to live in deplorable conditions, chose to live in general, for me to exist. I am the promise of things unseen. I am the promise of many sacrifices and I must succeed because of the sacrifices and choices made for me to draw breath. Regardless of what Budweiser tells me late at night, I will fulfill this promise. My writing this is a testament to my belief and fulfillment of this promise.
I Don't Know If You Know How Much I Love Oprah Yet
I love Oprah. I can't watch her show all the time, because... well I just can't (a recent incident with a pair of boots she had on has kinda set me off the whole "watching her show thing"). But as a powerful black lady...I adore her. As a writer (and a budding capitalist) her bookclub selection is up there with me winning the Pulitzer. I didn't read the Frey book because I'm not in the least bit interested in any rehab stories, but the story around it... well- let's put it like this: Michael Jackson was acting up again this week and I didn't even google it. So here are a few words from me on the spanking she gave this lying sack of....
There's not enough money in the world for me to be in trouble with Oprah. I'd have been laying on the ground crying and holding on to her feet screaming "Please! Please Miss Oprah!!!! Please don't be mad at me. I'm so sorry. I'm the worst. Please. I love you so much. It was that lady. She made me do it. She treated me like Miss Millie treated you in The Color Purple. You know how that is. Oh, Lord. I think I'm gonna fall out. Please!!! ARGHHHHHHH!!!!! PLEASE!!!. I'll do whatever you want me to do. I'll go pull sex offenders out of cars or playgrounds, or wherever they hole up. I'll pay more attention to Dr. Phil. I'll wear the right sized bra. Please don't relinquish me to a place where Miss Oprah's light doesn't shine on me. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!! Sweet Jesus, NOOOOOO!!!!!"
but that's me.
Excerpts From 'The Oprah Winfrey Show'
The following are excerpts from a transcript of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" from Jan. 26, 2006, featuring the author James Frey and Nan A. Talese, the publisher of his book:
OPRAH WINFREY: I have to say it is--it is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped. I feel duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. And I think, you know, it's such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly. And so now as I sit here today, I--I don't know what is truth and I don't know what isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with--with The Smoking Gun report titled "The Man Who Conned Oprah." And I want to know, were they right?
Mr. FREY: I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely. I think they did a good job detailing some of the discrepancies between some of the actual facts of the events and...
Ms. WINFREY: What they said was that you lied about the length of time that you spent in jail. How long were you in jail?
Mr. FREY: I was in jail for--they were right about that, I was in for a few hours, not--not the time...
Ms. WINFREY: Not 87 days?
Mr. FREY: Correct.
***********
Ms. WINFREY: ... [W]as there a Lily?
Mr. FREY: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that--that's been a question for a long time before...
Ms. WINFREY: Well, the thing that doesn't make any sense to me is, if you were in jail for 87 days, and you say on page 420 of the book you and Lily are saying goodbye and, 'I have to go to jail in Ohio and it's only going to be for a few months and I'm going to write you every day.' And I have to tell you, James, that when I was reading that book and I get to the last page and Lily has hung herself and you arrived, you know, the day that she hang--was--was hung, and I couldn't even believe it. I'm, like, gasping. I'm calling people, like, `Oh, my God, this happened.' So if you weren't in jail all that time and you're telling her to hold on, why couldn't you get to her?
Mr. FREY: I mean, what actually happened was I went through Ohio. I was there very briefly. I went down to North Carolina, where I was living at the time...
Ms. WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FREY: ...and I was closing up my life there.
Ms. WINFREY: Uh-huh.
Mr. FREY: The process was vastly accelerated from what I wrote in the book. She did...
Ms. WINFREY: I don't know what that means. What does that mean, "vastly accelerated"?
Mr. FREY: I mean, it happened in a much shorter period of time. And we were planning on meeting up with each other, and--and she committed suicide before we met up.
*********
Ms. WINFREY: I called defending you on "Larry King" because I believed that the essence of the book was true, and at the time, I didn't know Smoking Gun was true or not, because you had had a strong relationship with my producers and they so believed in you. And we had asked the publisher if this was true when we started to get criticism after the book--after we had announced the book, and the publishers had all told us it was true. So that's why I trusted you and believed you. But this is--this is the thing. Why would you lie--why do you have to lie about the time you spent in jail? Why did you have to do that?
Mr. FREY: I mean, I think part of what happened with a number of the things in the book is when you go through an experience like the one I went through, you develop different coping mechanisms, and I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was sort of this image of myself that was greater probably than--not probably, that was greater than what I actually was. In order to get through the experience of--of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was, and it--it helped me cope. And when I was writing the book, I--instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image.
Ms. WINFREY: And did you cling to that image because that's how you wanted to see yourself, or did you cling to that image because that would make a better book?
Mr. FREY: Probably both.
********
Ms. WINFREY: Nan Talese is the publisher and editor in chief of "A Million Little Pieces" and the senior vice president of Doubleday, which is a division of Random House. ... Nan is the person who would have overseen the publication of James' book, which you did, right?
Ms. NAN A. TALESE (Publisher of "A Million Little Pieces"): Correct.
Ms. WINFREY: Correct. And so, Nan, James has admitted that he embellished his memoir. And I--what responsibility do you take in that?
Ms. TALESE: Well, I can only tell you how the book came to me and how I read it. And I read the manuscript as a memoir and I thought it was an extraordinary story of a man with drug addiction, going through hell of both the addiction and the recovery and the process. And I thought the book was absolutely riveting. And you talked about the novocaine and you know, you were implying that perhaps that was a red flag, that the publisher should have said, 'Hey, this couldn't possibly be true.'
Ms. WINFREY: Yes!
Ms. TALESE: In fact, I have had a root canal without novocaine, not particularly because of the choice but because of a extraordinary inept dentist.
Ms. WINFREY: OK.
Ms. TALESE: And I'm here and I, you know, it's really awful. It's very much as James described it. So I didn't think that it wasn't a red flag to me.
Ms. WINFREY: Do you--I don't know why that wouldn't be a red flag to anybody, Nan. I'm sorry, even if you'd had it yourself. That whole--the whole book, one of the reasons why we're all so taken with the book is because it feels and reads so sensationally that it--it--you you can't believe that all of this happened to one person. When did you realize that James hadn't told the truth in his memoir?
Ms. TALESE: I learned about the--the jail, the two things that were in Smoking Gun at the same time you did. And I was dismayed to know that. But I had not--I mean, as an editor, do you ask someone, 'Are you really as bad as you are?'
Ms. WINFREY: Yes!
Ms. TALESE: Because someone...
Ms. WINFREY: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you do. Yes.
********
Ms. WINFREY: You never questioned it?
Ms. TALESE: No.
Ms. WINFREY: OK. Because I'm thinking as a reader, up until this moment, sitting on the show, that Lily hung herself. Well, obviously, after all these reports came out, I started to think, `Well, if he wasn't in jail, if that's true, and he wasn't in jail all that time and he was trying to get to Lily, then maybe there wasn't even a Lily.'
Ms. TALESE: Well, no, I understand that. And I understand the questioning. The tragedy is not in the hanging or slitting her wrists. It's in the suicide. And I'm not excusing it.
*********
Ms. WINFREY: Let me say this: Eight days after we announced this book, and it had already made the bestsellers list, we were contacted--eight days afterwards--by a former Hazelton counselor challenging the truth of James's memoir. And our producer told me about it, because this woman is now saying that what James is saying in the book isn't true. I said, `Well, did she work with James? Was she there when James was there?' I said, `Well, I--I--I don't know if what she's saying is true. What you need to do is contact the publisher. Contact the publisher and ask them if it's true.'
So, we contacted your representatives, and we were told by them that the claims that this woman was making, we were assured that there was no validity to those claims. And we asked if you, your company stood behind James's book as a work of non-fiction at the time, and they said absolutely. And they were also asked if their legal department had checked out the book, and they said yes. So in a press release sent out for the book in 2004 by your company, the book was described as brutally honest and an altering look at--at addiction. So how can you say that if you haven't checked it to be sure?
Ms. TALESE: You know, Oprah, I mean, I think this whole experience is very sad. It's very sad for you, it's very sad for us...
WINFREY: It's not sad for me, it's embarrassing and disappointing for me. That it's embarrassing and disappointing to me.
Ms. TALESE: But I don't--I do not know how you get inside another person's mind...
WINFREY: Well, this is my point, Nan: otherwise, then anybody can just walk in off with the street with whatever story they have...
Ms. TALESE: But you know...
WINFREY: ...and say "this is my story."
Ms. TALESE: That is absolutely true, and people in publishing and editor...
WINFREY: Well, that needs to change.
There's not enough money in the world for me to be in trouble with Oprah. I'd have been laying on the ground crying and holding on to her feet screaming "Please! Please Miss Oprah!!!! Please don't be mad at me. I'm so sorry. I'm the worst. Please. I love you so much. It was that lady. She made me do it. She treated me like Miss Millie treated you in The Color Purple. You know how that is. Oh, Lord. I think I'm gonna fall out. Please!!! ARGHHHHHHH!!!!! PLEASE!!!. I'll do whatever you want me to do. I'll go pull sex offenders out of cars or playgrounds, or wherever they hole up. I'll pay more attention to Dr. Phil. I'll wear the right sized bra. Please don't relinquish me to a place where Miss Oprah's light doesn't shine on me. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!! Sweet Jesus, NOOOOOO!!!!!"
but that's me.
Excerpts From 'The Oprah Winfrey Show'
The following are excerpts from a transcript of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" from Jan. 26, 2006, featuring the author James Frey and Nan A. Talese, the publisher of his book:
OPRAH WINFREY: I have to say it is--it is difficult for me to talk to you, because I really feel duped. I feel duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. And I think, you know, it's such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly. And so now as I sit here today, I--I don't know what is truth and I don't know what isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with--with The Smoking Gun report titled "The Man Who Conned Oprah." And I want to know, were they right?
Mr. FREY: I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely. I think they did a good job detailing some of the discrepancies between some of the actual facts of the events and...
Ms. WINFREY: What they said was that you lied about the length of time that you spent in jail. How long were you in jail?
Mr. FREY: I was in jail for--they were right about that, I was in for a few hours, not--not the time...
Ms. WINFREY: Not 87 days?
Mr. FREY: Correct.
***********
Ms. WINFREY: ... [W]as there a Lily?
Mr. FREY: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that--that's been a question for a long time before...
Ms. WINFREY: Well, the thing that doesn't make any sense to me is, if you were in jail for 87 days, and you say on page 420 of the book you and Lily are saying goodbye and, 'I have to go to jail in Ohio and it's only going to be for a few months and I'm going to write you every day.' And I have to tell you, James, that when I was reading that book and I get to the last page and Lily has hung herself and you arrived, you know, the day that she hang--was--was hung, and I couldn't even believe it. I'm, like, gasping. I'm calling people, like, `Oh, my God, this happened.' So if you weren't in jail all that time and you're telling her to hold on, why couldn't you get to her?
Mr. FREY: I mean, what actually happened was I went through Ohio. I was there very briefly. I went down to North Carolina, where I was living at the time...
Ms. WINFREY: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FREY: ...and I was closing up my life there.
Ms. WINFREY: Uh-huh.
Mr. FREY: The process was vastly accelerated from what I wrote in the book. She did...
Ms. WINFREY: I don't know what that means. What does that mean, "vastly accelerated"?
Mr. FREY: I mean, it happened in a much shorter period of time. And we were planning on meeting up with each other, and--and she committed suicide before we met up.
*********
Ms. WINFREY: I called defending you on "Larry King" because I believed that the essence of the book was true, and at the time, I didn't know Smoking Gun was true or not, because you had had a strong relationship with my producers and they so believed in you. And we had asked the publisher if this was true when we started to get criticism after the book--after we had announced the book, and the publishers had all told us it was true. So that's why I trusted you and believed you. But this is--this is the thing. Why would you lie--why do you have to lie about the time you spent in jail? Why did you have to do that?
Mr. FREY: I mean, I think part of what happened with a number of the things in the book is when you go through an experience like the one I went through, you develop different coping mechanisms, and I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was sort of this image of myself that was greater probably than--not probably, that was greater than what I actually was. In order to get through the experience of--of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was, and it--it helped me cope. And when I was writing the book, I--instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image.
Ms. WINFREY: And did you cling to that image because that's how you wanted to see yourself, or did you cling to that image because that would make a better book?
Mr. FREY: Probably both.
********
Ms. WINFREY: Nan Talese is the publisher and editor in chief of "A Million Little Pieces" and the senior vice president of Doubleday, which is a division of Random House. ... Nan is the person who would have overseen the publication of James' book, which you did, right?
Ms. NAN A. TALESE (Publisher of "A Million Little Pieces"): Correct.
Ms. WINFREY: Correct. And so, Nan, James has admitted that he embellished his memoir. And I--what responsibility do you take in that?
Ms. TALESE: Well, I can only tell you how the book came to me and how I read it. And I read the manuscript as a memoir and I thought it was an extraordinary story of a man with drug addiction, going through hell of both the addiction and the recovery and the process. And I thought the book was absolutely riveting. And you talked about the novocaine and you know, you were implying that perhaps that was a red flag, that the publisher should have said, 'Hey, this couldn't possibly be true.'
Ms. WINFREY: Yes!
Ms. TALESE: In fact, I have had a root canal without novocaine, not particularly because of the choice but because of a extraordinary inept dentist.
Ms. WINFREY: OK.
Ms. TALESE: And I'm here and I, you know, it's really awful. It's very much as James described it. So I didn't think that it wasn't a red flag to me.
Ms. WINFREY: Do you--I don't know why that wouldn't be a red flag to anybody, Nan. I'm sorry, even if you'd had it yourself. That whole--the whole book, one of the reasons why we're all so taken with the book is because it feels and reads so sensationally that it--it--you you can't believe that all of this happened to one person. When did you realize that James hadn't told the truth in his memoir?
Ms. TALESE: I learned about the--the jail, the two things that were in Smoking Gun at the same time you did. And I was dismayed to know that. But I had not--I mean, as an editor, do you ask someone, 'Are you really as bad as you are?'
Ms. WINFREY: Yes!
Ms. TALESE: Because someone...
Ms. WINFREY: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, you do. Yes.
********
Ms. WINFREY: You never questioned it?
Ms. TALESE: No.
Ms. WINFREY: OK. Because I'm thinking as a reader, up until this moment, sitting on the show, that Lily hung herself. Well, obviously, after all these reports came out, I started to think, `Well, if he wasn't in jail, if that's true, and he wasn't in jail all that time and he was trying to get to Lily, then maybe there wasn't even a Lily.'
Ms. TALESE: Well, no, I understand that. And I understand the questioning. The tragedy is not in the hanging or slitting her wrists. It's in the suicide. And I'm not excusing it.
*********
Ms. WINFREY: Let me say this: Eight days after we announced this book, and it had already made the bestsellers list, we were contacted--eight days afterwards--by a former Hazelton counselor challenging the truth of James's memoir. And our producer told me about it, because this woman is now saying that what James is saying in the book isn't true. I said, `Well, did she work with James? Was she there when James was there?' I said, `Well, I--I--I don't know if what she's saying is true. What you need to do is contact the publisher. Contact the publisher and ask them if it's true.'
So, we contacted your representatives, and we were told by them that the claims that this woman was making, we were assured that there was no validity to those claims. And we asked if you, your company stood behind James's book as a work of non-fiction at the time, and they said absolutely. And they were also asked if their legal department had checked out the book, and they said yes. So in a press release sent out for the book in 2004 by your company, the book was described as brutally honest and an altering look at--at addiction. So how can you say that if you haven't checked it to be sure?
Ms. TALESE: You know, Oprah, I mean, I think this whole experience is very sad. It's very sad for you, it's very sad for us...
WINFREY: It's not sad for me, it's embarrassing and disappointing for me. That it's embarrassing and disappointing to me.
Ms. TALESE: But I don't--I do not know how you get inside another person's mind...
WINFREY: Well, this is my point, Nan: otherwise, then anybody can just walk in off with the street with whatever story they have...
Ms. TALESE: But you know...
WINFREY: ...and say "this is my story."
Ms. TALESE: That is absolutely true, and people in publishing and editor...
WINFREY: Well, that needs to change.
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