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White Husbands and Black Maids: from Drylongso

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Gimmie a Break on You Tube, for a refresher on Black maids

I read Drylongso by John Gwaltney while working on The Crack Project. Drylongso is an ethnography of? Black people in North Eastern cities in the late seventies. Ironically, The Graduate (the man for whom I played number two a few years back//that was fun, and he is now my friend) recommended that I read it.

I am glad that I called him and asked for his help (he is a historian) as reading Drylongso helped me to conceptualize why oral histories are really a powerful and important tool for documenting the lives of Black people.

But for introductions to the individual chapters, and a fourteen page introduction,? the book is? mainly testimony straight from the people that Gwaltney interviewed.

Gwaltney sums up his intentions with writing Drylongso when he says,

…I share the opinion commonly held by natives of my community that we have been traditionally mispresented by standard social science.

…This is not therefore another collection of street-corner exotica but an explication of black culture as it is perceived by the vast majority of Afro-Americans who are working members of stable families in pursuit of much of the same kinds of happiness that preoccupy? the rest of American society.

…far often than not, the primary status of a black person is accorded by the people he or she lives among. It is based upon assessments of that persons fidelity to the core black standards. the categories “real right” and “jackleg” cover the spectra of statuses…

Rereading this book over the last week, I was moved by how Black women theorized racial relations between them, white men and white women.

Now, quiet as it’s kept, these white men try to rule their wives like that too. And if they can’t beat them, then they toles them with nice things. If my husband had encouraged my children to go out here and treat some woman the way white boys have tried to treat me, I would leave or he would have to leave. But that’s because I do not need a man to feed myself. White women don’t, either, but they think that they do, so they just put up with all this stuff that they should not stand for. Now just like I have to get out here ad hit it, they could too…

I have worked for many white women and most of them did not have the sayso any more than I did. Not as much as I did sometimes. If I had been the kind of woman that they might find in bed with their husbands, there wouldn’t have been anything that mot of them could do about that commonness but maybe? get their husbands to fire me. Now, that won’t work with black women because Black men don’t have anymore than we do. How I’m gone boss you if you got just as much as I got? ~Nancy White

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I thought her comments about race, and white women, work and power were incredible.

“How I’m gone boss you if you got just as much as I got?”

The assumption here is who ever got the dough, has the right to dominate. Which if you have been reading my blog for the last month, is Patriarchy 101.

We rarely talk about the the connection between Black and White people,? the power relationships that arise when it comes to work and labor.

In fact, prior to the 1960’s most Black women worked as, nurses, nanny’s and maids, as that is what society saw them as being naturally fit to do. With integration and the creation of affirmative action, Black women were able, and all women for that matter were able, to attend school in larger numbers and obtain fancy jobs, sit down jobs, city jobs, academic jobs.

Have you ever been a nanny or maid? for a family of another race?

Have you ever hired a nanny or maid of another race?

How did that work out?

What do you think of Ms. White’s comments?

Amadou. Sean. Lovell. Oscar. Aiyana

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Photo Courtesy of Thomas Hawk @ Now Public

(Young African American man, hand cuffed in police car, January 2009 after Oscar Grant Murder Protest in Oakland, I wish I knew his name.)

Amadou. Sean. Lovell. Oscar. Aiyana.

Oftentimes, when it comes to personal violence and race and structural violence and race, I turn to other writers, better writers who can capture how I feel.

Baldwin understood? and articulated the purpose of the police, arguably better than anyone else I have read.

This is all I can offer today on the Oscar Grant verdict, protests, looting and subsequent media coverage.

I hope that it helps.

Similarly, the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the Police Comissioner’s men, even the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes’ controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent the entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and what that worlds real intentions are, simply, for that worlds criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun, the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt….
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…there are few things under heaven, more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, hie is and is the reason he walks in two’s and three’s. – from Fifth Avenue Uptown

And here is another quote,

The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policeman, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white word, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up. – from the essay Fifth Avenue Uptown

One one hand a Mehserle verdict was a slap on the wrist. On the other hand, white police, historically, have rarely been charged with? nor found guilty of killing Black people, unarmed or otherwise.

Amadou. Sean. Lovell. Oscar. Aiyana

Baldwin? “They represent the force of the white world.”

Thoughts on the verdict?

*note. it wasn’t until I began to look for photos for this post that I found myself crying inconsolably. It’s a combination of working really hard, lack of sleep and seeing these images of uncut Black rage.? The pictures made it real.? Feelings of survivors guilt. I do my part, and I am grateful for all of the gifts that I have. Looking at these images reminds me that I escaped a real serious East Oakland fate. I am a human being. How could I not feel something. I am from Oakland. How can I not feel something?

How Adrienne Rich Helped Me Forgive My Ex.

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My ex contacted me a month ago. For many of my long time readers, ya’ll know that I had a torrid affair with Filthy. When you are? a#blackgirlfromthefuture and you ride with your partner, thirteen hours, while being sick, to meet and kick it with his family who is White, that’s Love on both ends.

Well, he contacted me via email a month ago taumbout congratulations on completing your first year of grad school.

We ain’t spoke since last year when the relationship ended. So, I was like ummmmm….why is the first point of contact an email? However, I found out from a mutual friend that he was considering calling but he hesitated.

The petty part of me was like the fuck?

The adult part of me was like, well, he doing what he could do at the time, I should go ahead and just let him live.

Last Sunday, looking for an earring underneath my dresser, I found a book,? “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” by Adrienne Rich, that he gave me last August. I guess it fell back there when I moved. He didn’t give me books. He let me hold them, all the time. But his books were his books, and I get that as a scholar. You be needing to go back to your copy to refer to notes in margins and what not and to clarify quotes.

In finding and re-reading this book I realized that I could not be tight with him over our recent communications. Reading this book and understanding that that he gave it to me. This man Loved me. In fact, I think he gave me the copy that he got from a garage sell.? A first edition copy. #ummhmm. #Love.

There are three sections that really get at why this book is special to me.

The first is:

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence grappling, with hard work….It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. ~from Claiming an Education

The second is:

Women and men do not receive an equal education because outside of the classroom women are not perceived as sovereign beings but as prey…. the capacity to think independently, to take intellectual risks, to assert ourselves mentally is inseparable from our physical way of being in the world, our feelings of personal integrity. If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library because I am a woman and I can be raped then, how self possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit and work at the library? How much of my working energy is drained by by the subliminal knowledge that as a woman, I test my physical right to exist every time I go out alone. ~from Taking Women Students Seriously

This line killed it for me, “because outside of the classroom women are not perceived as sovereign beings but as prey.”

The third? is:
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I think of myself as a teacher of language: that is, as someone for whom language has implied freedom, who is trying to aide others in freeing themselves through the written word, and above all through learning to write it for themselves. I cannot know what it is they need to free, or what words they need to write; I can only try with them to get an approximation of the story that they want to tell. ~from Teaching Language in Open Admissions

“I cannot know what it is they need to free” #ummhmm. Her pedagogy weighs a ton.

Rereading this book, I realized that I was tripping because the communication didn’t happen the way that I preferred.

HA! Thats life.

More than anything, this book helped me to make sense of this last year of school, of my process of claiming my education and my voice in the classroom, on THIS blog and publicly, in real time on Twitter.

How can I be tight with a person who helped me do that? #Ummhmm.

When its time for us to chat we will. Until then. God bless him. Change me. #ummhmm.

Besides resentment and Love can’t live in the same heart, and if? I’m tight with him I am impacting my ability to see new Love awesomeness on the horizon.

I felt vulnerable writing this. But I posted it anyways.

#wingsup.

You forgive anyone lately?

Why or why not?

You know Adrienne Rich’s work?

The Crack Project: On Philippe Bourgois

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If you know me, you know that I am fascinated with crack, the dominant discourse around it and the lack critical discourse around it, as it pertains to Black + Latino inner city neighborhoods. And how it affects men, women and children differently.

I plan on doing a post on my crack project proposal, but I just wanted to excerpt In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio by Phillip Bourgois real quick. My two favorite quotes from the introduction are:

This book is not about crack, or drugs, per se. Substance abuse in the inner city is merely a symptom – a vivid symbol – of a deeper dynamics of social marginalization and alienation. Of course on an immediately visible personal level, addiction and substance abuse are among the most immediate, brutal facts shaping dily life on the street. Most importantly, hoever, the two dozen street dealers and their families that I befreidned were not interested in talkign primary about drugs. On the contrary, they wanted me to learn all abou ttheir aily strugges for subsisstence and dignity at the poverty line.

The other quote is,
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The anguish of growing up poor in the richest city in the world is compounded by the cultural assault barrio youths often face when they venture out of their neighborhood. This has spawned what I call “inner-city street culture” : a complex and conflictual web of beliefs, symbols, modes of interactions, values, and ideologies that have emerged in opposition to exclusion from mainstream society.

I love this idea of a culture developing in opposition to being excluded from mainstream society. It totally avoids treating Black and Latino’s from the hood like pathological deviants.

#ummhmm.

Thoughts?

Thinking about Tea Cake + Violence

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You all know that I LOVE me some Their Eyes Were Watching God.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Anthony Neal posted a piece about Tea Cake as an Imagined Black Feminist Manhood.

I like the idea of taking Tea Cake for this purpose. However, I was insistent that Tea Cakes violence be dealt with front and center.

In particular, I took issue with the fact that Neal rephrased the beating as occasional hitting. Which was problematic.

We went back and forth over it,? and he came to see my point about the importance of violence being acknowledged and I acknowledged that Tea Cake represents a possibility, not perfection. But I been on the symbolism of Janie and Tea Cake? since January. TC and J helped me open my heart to Loving and being Loved again.

So, you know the historian in me went back and re-read the passage where Tea Cake beat Janie. I was actually light weight mortified and reaffirmed that I stuck to my guns because of the explicitness regarding his motivations and reaffirmed.? Hurston writes,
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When Mrs. Turners brother came and she brought him over to be introduced, Tea Cake had a brainstrom. Before week was over had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relived that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss. Everybody talked about it the next day in teh fields. It aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made the men see dreams.

“Tea Cake you sho is a lucky man,” Sop-de-Bottom told him. “Uh person can see every place you hit her. Ah bet she never raised her hand tuh hit yuh back, neither. Take some uh dese ol’ rusty black women and dey would fight yuh all night long and next day. Nobody couldn’t tell you ever hit ’em. Dat’s de reasons Ah doe quit beatin’ mah woman. You can’t make no mark on ’em at all. Lawd! Wouldn’t Ah love tuh whip uh tender woman lak Janie! Ah bet she don’t even holler. She jus cries Tea Cake.

Yeah.

What was bugged out was when I re-read it, its like he beat her on general principal.? Like I’m insecure, so let me knock the shit out of you a little bit and let everybody know wassup. #ummp.

Thoughts about Tea Cake and Janie?

Remember when I went from looking for Tea Cake to becoming Janie?

Josephine recently said that she BEYOND becoming Janie, ummhmm.