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Black Girl Voltron and My Fear of Black Girl Cyborgs

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Yesterday on Tumblr, I was having a conversation with @latinegrasexologist around some of my ideas about and my resistance to Black Girls as Cyborgs. This conversation came about as I was discussing some of the tension that I have been feeling around blogging around digital Black feminisms. On one hand I feel uniquely suited to do so, on the other hand I am hesitant to mix up something that is work and interesting, with something that is work, but also an escape and joy.

Ultimately, @latinegrasexologist encouraged me to think about how Black girls can claim cyborg status, and what it means about how I have used my blog as space that I have claimed as my own, as a space where I feel free, as a space that belongs to me, as a space where I have explored elements of my interior life publicly.

Then holy shit this morning it all came together. Walking to my newly discovered writing place, I realize that the thing that I am most interested in is the conversation that occurs when Black women cultural workers and Black women web developers and computer scientists get in a room together, and get this shit gina, I have already started such a group; Black Girl Voltron.

Black Girl Voltron is: me, @afrolicious, @Marqueez, @salinabrown_nyc, @LatoyaPeterson.

Our first meeting which was via Skype the day after Thanksgiving 2010, Black Friday. We talked about many things from, the rise of mobile technologies, why Youtube and Itunes will not scale for independent artists, the opportunities that mobile may offer for Black women artists, the intersection of social justice and technology, the future importance of Big Data.

I took notes that day, but what was so amazing to me about this conversation is that I knew that we had something special, but I just didn’t know what it was.

Not until this morning.

Walking on the way to the train, I thought to myself, what I really want to do is have a focus group, where a group of Black women who possess an oppositional lens on racial, gender and sexual politics can get together and talk about the intersection of technology and Black girl cultural projects that are online.

Crossing the street, I was like shit…I have already been doing that, but I just never thought about it that way.
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So now that I know that I have identified what we have been doing as being theoretically significant, I now need to realize how we can have other conversations that can be documented.

Which brings me back to Black Girl Cyborgs. I have championed when other Black women have claimed cyborg status. The first two people that come to mind are Erykah Badu (Robot Girl), Janell Monae. But for me to do so, shit feels weird. Don’t get me wrong, I ride for #blackgirlsarefromthefuture, but the cyborg makes me uncomfortable.

I think this occurs for two reasons. First, it is a challenge for Black women to be seen as human beings by many people in the US, so claiming machine + human cyborg status is real to me. Second, technology within captialism in the US is framed as means for a more efficient systems.  Efficiency, when brought to bear historically on Black women’s bodies has historically meant that our ass is grass. See, US Chattel Slavery, See, Henrietta Lacks, See forced sterilization of Black women in South Carolina. For me, there is an acute tension between efficiency and human becoming more human in 2012 and beyond. I take this idea of becoming a more human, human being from Grace Boggs.

All of this being said, I felt the need to write this because pieces seem to be coming together. I also heard someone use voltroning as a verb, and didn’t acknowledge #allcity. #keepiteven.

To be clear, voltroning…is a term that I have used to describe when I get together with folks, and my favorite voltrons are spontaneous joints. It’s Libra season, so there should be a lot of voltrons happening ;p.

I also see this post as an opportunity to reflect on why the idea of the Black girl as a cyborg troubles me.

Black girl cyborgs?

Do you read sci-fi? Does anyone do Black women as cyborgs other than Ms. Butler?

 

Is it Me Or…………….

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In August, I ran into a friend from the Bay who I knew when I was in high school. We chatted it up and exchanged numbers, and I assumed we may connect for an after work function, at the max.

He has sent me a text message once, after we exchanged numbers,  again a couple weeks later and yesterday when his birthday passed.

Is it me or is this inappropriate?

I am not a part of his inner circle and we were close once, but that was more than 10 years ago.

Which brings me to my question, is it acceptable for people who are in (presumptively) monogamous relationships be allowed to have passive contact with someone from their past?

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Am I putting 10 on 2 here?

Do you get random text messages from people?

What do you do? Ignore them?

 

Bodies or Taxes: Ideas on Gender and Technology

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I am beginning to think that part of my calling is at the intersection of technology and social justice. I just had a really long conversation with a man of color who is a cybersecurity expert and it became clear to me that there is a difference between #ConservativeBlackpeopleiwithaGoodGovermentJob who care about social justice and those who don’t. The guy was nice and I learned a lot from him in our conversation about the history of the internet, but it became very clear that he was a boot-strapper, and that I felt that all of our boats would rise or fall together.

Now, in a  conversation with a White man who was also a developer, about a month ago,  we concluded that we are in the midst of a huge paradigm shift where we can either pay with bodies or taxes, made a huge impression on me. Because it showed me that there is immense thinking power that occurs when a person sits at the intersection of being a futurist, of understanding technology and has a sense of social justice.

I think it is very interesting when people bristle at the idea of bringing a gender lens to the underrepresentation of Women in STEM. How can we not when STEM careers are the careers positioned to grow in the next thirty years. When women are disproportional clustered in low wage service sector jobs, low wage care work jobs, I think that is important that we start asking where is the money, who has it and why?

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Why people be bristling?

Is it because the absence of women in STEM points to fundamental racial and gender inequalities?

Kathleen Collins and the Redemptive Softness of Black Women

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Still from the film “Losing Ground” directed by Kathleen Collins.

This post has been a long time coming.

I Love Black women filmmakers, because I believe that Black women filmmakers see us. Not just the uplifting “We shall overcome” versions of us, but they see us in all of our beauty, contradictions, nuanced, strength and fragility.

Last fall, while reading Jacqueline Bobo’s Black Women Film and Video Directors, I kept coming across the name Kathleen Collins.

Come to find out the reels for Collins’ film “Losing Ground” were at the library so I took an afternoon and I watched it. The film blew my mind.

The main protagonist in the film is a Black woman philosophy professor who is searching for the ecstatic experience. Yes, honey, she is searching for ecstasy.

In an interview in Black Film Review Collins stated that,
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Actually, the only hope for any sort of feminine salvation in this country– and the sad thing is that Black women are giving it up  in favor of a quietly growing, kind of strident white feminism. But the only residual softness that is possible in this culture as far as I am concerned is in the hands of Black women.

When I read this I thought. Wait a minute, the people who have been historically represented as lewd, lascivious, unrapeable, gold diggers, rich and lonely,  hoochie mammas, are the ones who have the redemptive softness?????

Film scholar L.H. Stalling takes this idea of the residual softness of Black women and runs with it. She writes,

Kathleen Collins’s solution to the violence done to black women and their image insists that such redemption come from those who have been positioned as the most abnormal and dysfunctional in society, black women.

This idea of Black women being the site of redemption because they are some of the most maligned is interesting, and I believe that I have heard it before in Audre Lorde’s work.

For me it takes on a greater significance when I watch reality television shows featuring the narratives of Black women. Love and Hip Hop Atlanta in particular is what comes to mind.

Stallings goes on to underscore why I enjoy movies directed by Black women filmmakers when she states,

Collins produces a film that imagines a viewer or audience who can get turned on by seeing a black woman think, be conscious, and create consciousness on screen. Black independent filmmaking (be it documentary, cinematic fiction, or pornography) continues to be the only space in which black filmmakers can explore and represent various sexualities and subjectivities.

So, what do you think of this idea of the redemptive softness of Black women?

Black Women’s Hair & Gabby Douglas: Standing Straight in a Crooked Room

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In the book, Sister Citizen, Dr. Melissa Harris Perry argues that many Black women in the US find themselves standing straight in a crooked room because of how we experience both racism and sexism. According to Harris-Perry, Black women are standing straight in a crooked room

when they are confronting race and gender stereotypes, black women are standing in a crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with warped images of their humanity, some black women tilt and bend themselves to fit the distortion…To understand why some Black women’s public actions and political strategies sometimes seem titled in ways that accommodate  the degrading stereotypes about them, it is important to appreciate the structural constraints that influence their behavior.

This is immediately what came to mind when I saw the conversations about Gabby’s hair, conversations, many initiated by Black women about who thought it wasn’t straight enough.

No Gabby’s hair does not look like the Black women on Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, and that is fine. The women on LHHA stay fried died and laid to the side and Gabby’s pony tail is the pony tail of a young Black woman Olympian. Full stop.

And just in terms of Black girl visibility politics, Gabby Douglass is a Black girl who had global media attention and she does not look like a well kept video vixen and she doesn’t have to. She is petite, muscular and brown with a high voltage smile. When was the last time you saw a Black girl like that getting mainstream attention? I’ll wait.

I know that some Black women felt that because Gabby was on a global stage she was “representing us.” My retort to that is Gabby belongs to herself, not to you.

Hair is serious for Black women because the mainstream standard for beauty in the US and arguably pop culture globally is long, preferably blond, straight, wind swept hair. If you think I am wrong, check out the magazine covers at your local grocery store check out stand.

I always find it peculiar when the ways when which Black women regulate on each other finds its way into mainstream media conversations. It is not that we don’t like each other. I think that socially women are not taught to like each other. Openly liking and being nice to women is a political act for this reason. The culprit in many ways isn’t Black women per se, but that many of us have internalized what White standards of beauty AND we tried to hold other women to these standards,we are also taught that the work that women do isn’t valuable.

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I also think it may may make some Black women uncomfortable to see another young Black woman who is so clear about both her purpose and focus. A young Black woman who is clear that her investment in being an Olympian is more important than having music video bone straight hair, at this moment. I am not talking about human beings here, I am talking about what happens when you encounter a spirit that is so clear you can see yourself in its reflection. It ain’t no joke. #ChangeJobs. #ChangeGods.

Gabby Douglas put herself first and her desire to be an Olympian. You can’t become an Olympic champion by being raggedy.

I also know that as Black women we are socialized to put our mothers, our children, our husbands, our wives, our girlfriends, our boyfriends, our step-children, our brothers first. But never us, and we suffer for that. Our lives are constrained in particular ways when we do that.

So Gabby, I see your gravity defying, futuristic Black girl self.

Gabby Douglas give you goosebumps?

Why is it so hard for people to acknowledge how White mainstream beauty standards figure into this conversation?