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Author Martha Southgate on Why the Film “The Help” is a Symptom of a Larger Issue: My Thoughts.

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In entertainment weekly, one of my favorite authors, Martha Southgate (@mesouthgate) discusses the film “The Help” stating that,

There have been thousands of words written about Stockett’s skills, her portrayal of the black women versus the white women, her right to tell this story at all. I won’t rehash those arguments, except to say that I found the novel fast-paced but highly problematic. Even more troubling, though, is how the structure of narratives like The Help underscores the failure of pop culture to acknowledge a central truth: Within the civil rights movement, white people were the help.

I would say that she certainly has a point there. And, given the fact that I am swimming in readings about women in the civil rights movement, at this VERY moment, I am particularly sensitive to claims about women during the civil rights movement.

White people did play a substantial role in the civil rights movement.  However there were incredible tensions in the civil rights movement because “women” were seen as the help. Looking at how gender played out in the civil rights movement in fact may poke more holes in Sockett’s narrative. For example,

  • Many White feminist wanted to organize under the auspices of women united for solidarity but did not want to acknowledge the differences between women. See Benita Roth’s “Separate Roads to Feminism.”
  • Stokley Carmicheal, of the Black Panther Party alleged that the best position for a woman in the BPP was “prone.”
  • There were some White feminist lesbians who felt that engaging with men was apart of the problem so becoming separatists and living amongst and supporting women was the solution. See Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in DC.
  • Here is a link to Assata, Angela Davis and Elaine Brown discussing how sexism impacted their work with the Black Panther Party.
  • Black women played a prominent role in organizing the March on Washington but they were not allowed to SPEAK at it.

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I by no means intend to conflate the Black Power movement with the Civil Rights movement. They are overlapping yet distinct in tone and intent.

However, I wanted to bring the issue of “Women” to bear on Southgate’s article on the film and book, The Help.

Here is her excellent closing paragraph, which actually upended me from my reading ABOUT women in the second wave and compelled me to write this blog post. She writes,

This isn’t the first time the civil rights movement has been framed this way fictionally, especially on film. Most Hollywood civil rights movies feature white characters in central, sometimes nearly solo, roles. My favorite (not!) is Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, which gives us two white FBI agents as heroes of the movement. FBI agents! Given that J. Edgar Hoover did everything short of shoot Martin Luther King Jr. himself in order to damage or discredit the movement, that goes from troubling to appalling.

Why is it ever thus? Suffice it to say that these stories are more likely to get the green light and to have more popular appeal (and often acclaim) if they have white characters up front. That’s a shame. The continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step toward justice that this nation has ever known is infuriating, to say the least. Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn’t need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them.

·Southgate’s fourth novel, The Taste of Salt, will be published in September.

By centering White women as actors in the civil rights movement, we mask, hide and erase the work of Black men and women, and we negate the ways in which WOMEN were treated in many instances like “The Help” in Black and white organizing circles. #Ummhmm.

Black Girls and Sexual Violence; A Response to @DopegirlFresh

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Image from Rihanna’s Man Down video.

One of the reasons why I write about my experiences with street harassment, and the gendered and raced aspects of violence and the threat of violence, is to create a space to talk about how Black women historically and currently have to fight for the right to not be touched without consent by strangers AND people they know.

I often tell Black men, I don’t want you touching US without our consent and I don’t want the police touching YOU without your consent.

In simultaneously theorizing power, gender and race, most of the times- they get it. Other times they look at me like I am batshit.

@Dopegirlfresh has a post up at Feministe (follow her here) about how her eleven year old play niece *Brianna experienced sexual harassment and the threat of sexual violence, defended herself, YET, the police was called on the play niece.

It is powerful because @dopegirlfresh demonstrates the psychic violence that occurs when children are not protected from being assaulted by OTHER children or adults, it demonstrates how adults can be complicit in children being dominated, it demonstrates how Black bodies can get entangled in a criminal justice system when they have been in fact victimized and are in need of assistance. «<My inner lawyer just came out.

Dopegirlfresh writes,

To realize that Brianna had already internalized the idea that she was not worthy of protection (even by her own means) was absolutely heartbreaking for me. Already? She already knows nobody will give enough of a fuck? I felt betrayed. I felt all of the rage from my own experiences with street harassment and groping. I identify all forms of unwanted touching, especially in what I call the bathing suit areas, as sexual assault. And sometimes I forget that not everyone does. But, whether you think of these actions in a particular way or not, I have to ask: WHAT THE FUCK? Why make the child responsible when they’ve come to the clear realization that adult intervention is needed? Isn’t that your job as a fucking camp counselor or group leader or whatever title you’ve got?

At which point do we realize as little Black girls that other people will not give a fuck?

What happens to our sense of self when that happens?

How do we cope? What impact does that have on our sense of OUR sexualities?

*Name was changed to protect her identity.

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Walgreens is Going to Sell #WhiteGroceries?- Race, Food and the City

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I just came from the local co-op where a half gallon of organic milk was nearly $5.00 and the cereal, much of which looked like granola and berries was $5.00 as well. I like granola in yogurt. I DO NOT like granola as cereal. I had a $5-6 budget for cereal and milk this morning. I walked out and went to the local bodega which of course has a $8 debit card minimum.  She let me slide with $6.50. I should have went to Target yesterday.

All of this brings me to news around food deserts and #whitegroceries. According to Jorge Rivas at Colorlines, because of Michelle Obama’s advocacy around food, health and nutrician Walgreens and Walmart amongst other retailers are going to start to sell fruits and vegetables. Rivas writes,

Last week, Michelle Obama joined a group of large retail chains in announcing a plan to provide access to healthy, affordable food to millions of people in what have come to be known as the country’s food deserts. The retailers plan to open or expand over 1,500 stores over the next five years in rural and urban neighborhoods. The first lady’s high-profile endorsement, as part of her anti-obesity campaign, is the latest in her work with large chains, including controversial companies such as Wal-Mart, which has been greeted with both praise and criticism.

He goes on to say,

A 2010 report published by PolicyLink and The Food Trust found African Americans were nearly four times as likely to live in a food desert as whites.

The largest partnership announced was with Walgreens, the nation’s largest drugstore chain operating 7,773 stores nationwide—45 percent of those are in “underrepresented” communities, the White House said. Walgreens has committed to converting at least 1,000 stores into “food oasis” stores.

You know I Love to eat. I have a green thumb. My favorite room in a house is the kitchen.

I also know that having access to jobs, food and safe and affordable housing is a social justice issue and an issue of economic power.

I have three issues here.

First I would like to say that I am glad that this conversation is happening. However it seems to be lacking vision.

The three issues that are not being address are pleasure, marginalized low income earning bodies, jobs and seeing a corporate model as the only model.

I also know that folks who do work around health with marginalized bodies do NOT take into account how pleasure and education factors into the equation.

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Isn’t it more pleasurable, and albeit worse for your body to grab that Coke and some Doritos?

The second issue is jobs. Why is the main vehicle for addressing obesity only utilizing multinational corporations who could care less about whether or not children of any race get obese or whether or not they work.

Being poor is expensive. Having a minimum wage job is expensive.

Corporations are bound to their shareholders not to chubby children.

Where is the effort to build  national network of year around, indoor outdoor farmers markets with youth led cooking classes.

I remember going to Housewives in downtown Oakland with my grandmother and momma. It was the closest thing to a indoor farmers market I have ever seen.

Young people would be paid to teach OTHER young people how to grow, buy, prepare, food.

Farmers markets could make a direct connection to the people who make their food.

Why the dependency on Walgreens?

Is having banana’s at Walgreens really going to make a big difference to a low income rural White teenager or a low income Black teenager in the city?

Race, Class and Prostitution in the City: Washington DC’s Black Madam- Odessa Madre

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For @AlaiaWilliams for continuing to remind me to write this. Readers are a precious commodity.

In the essay “Working for Nothing but a Living” Dr. Sharon Harley describes the life of  Odessa Madre, a dark skinned Black woman who became a Madam in the 1940’s because as a high school graduate, who as dark skinned and described as “not attractive, but smart” by her peers, being a madam was one of the major options available for her to make decent money in Washington, DC in the 1940’s.

Born in 1907 her mother was a seamstress and her dad and uncle operated a Madre Brothers barber shop and a pool hall.

During the 1940’s Madre was estimated to have had controlled six prostitution houses, employed twenty women and garnered a net annual income of $100,000.

What is fascinating about this essay is that Harley shows how even though Madre was born in a working middle class family, and that she went to Dunbar, and when she graduated from high school her parents gave her a car, Madre felt that the main job open for African American women- being a teacher was not an option for her. So she chose to become a madam instead. To be clear, Madre was not a member of the Washington, DC elite. However Harley theorizes that Madre’s skin color and looks would have prevented her from joining if she desired.

Color, race, class and the politics of the city are all at work here.

Harley describes Madre saying,

Odessa Madre was a prominent figure in mid twentieth century black Washington, D.C., underground economy. As a graduate of Washington’s elite Dunbar Senior High School, she could have found employment in the legal labor economy or lived comfortably due to her parents financial success….For good reason she recognized that the few professional and clerical jobs available to educated black women  were more likley to be filled by  light skinned, so called attractive women or to have a predominance of such women.

Skin color and earning power is central to my research. Recently I have been looking at the erotic capital of strippers. By erotic capital I mean the ways in which skin color and body size translates into higher earning power for women.  I am really interested in the erotic capital of video vixens and waitresses.

While erotic capital isn’t at work with the Madre’s own personal narrative. Harley does touch on it she writes about Ceclia Scott, a black businesswoman who operated a bar on U street next to the Howard theater. According to Scott,

 Attractive light skinned young women…were good for business because her patrons who spent freely on liquor and tipped handsomely, preferred such women. Indeed some of her friends approached her about hiring their daughters because as she stated she “paid a decent wage and because of the type of clientele we attracted- doctors and big time hustlers who paid large tips. Besides they knew we would take care of their daughters.

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The line between legitimate and illegitimate business practices is being blurred here as well. Harley writes,

It is a story of how certain resourceful, ambitious, and courage Black women with limited legal economic opportunities resorted to criminal activities to earn a living for themselves and support kin and Black institutions- goals which they shared with their law-abiding neighborhoods and family members.

Another aspect of this narrative that I found interesting is how race relations between Madre and her young white male peers played a role in he ability work as a madam.

Madre was raised in neighborhood off  of Georgia Ave which was mixed with Irish folks on one side of the street and African Americans on the other.  The young Irish boys who were Madre’s playmates as a little girl went on to become members of the Metro Police Department, and they “proved invaluable to Madre’s eventual rise to the top of the underground hierarchy.”

Madre died penniless in 1983, having been in and out of jail for drug dealing and possession. African American’s in DC, remembering how Madre had historically shared with low income and impoverished families and children in DC- collected the money to bury her.

Did you know of Madre?

What do you think of the idea of a woman madam? Does it seem more insidious than a man who is a pimp?

Skin color limiting employment options? What do you think? Have your Aunts or Grandmother’s ever talked about how their skin tone shaped their job options?

She needs a documentary, doesn’t she?

A Feminist Analysis of Sheryl Sandberg and the ‘Male Dominated’ Silicon Valley

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In a society organized by and for men, it makes sense for women to be exluded from pursuing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

STEM research and jobs spur the innovation for our Capitalist economic system. You can’t have innovation, at least how we are thought to conceive of it, without STEM. Which leads me to ask, what is at risk by excluding women from this field. But, let me take a step back, as I just I got ahead of myself and will address that later in the post.

As a Black woman and a young scholar, one of my research interests is the inclusion and exclusion of women in general and women of color in particular from STEM careers.

Women are disproportionally clustered in jobs that pay minimum wage, (waitresses, cashiers, nurse aides, child care workers) yet they are expected to provide the resources to take care of children and do the work in the home to raise children- married or not.

In fact I have contended that the issue isn’t the fact that single mothers raise low achieving children or are bad parents, but that women are not paid enough to do the work that is considered “women’s work.” Lets not start on the narratives around Black and Latina single mothers, that is a dissertation and a few books and conferences in and of itself.

So, it was with great interest that I read Ken Aueletta’s profile on the Facebook executive  Sheryl Sandberg. There are a few things that struck me about Sandbergs social network, economic background, and educational background.

She came to Facebook from Google. She attended Harvard, majoring in economics and took a class with Lawrence Summers- Public Sector Economics. According to the article she did not speak or raise her hand in his class, but she received the highest midterm and final grades. Born in DC in 1969, her father was an opathamologist, her mother was a doctoral student who chose to leave school and focus on raising Ms. Sandberg and her little sister.

Summers eventually recruited Ms. Sandberg as a research assistant after she earned her MBA and worked for the consulting firm, McKinsey and Company. What is incredibly interesting is that as Larry Summers career evolved, so did Sandbergs. After working for Summers at the Treasury Dept she went to work at Google in 2001 and Facebook in 2008.

As I read the article, I wondered, where is the baby, does she have a child, where is the baby. Then bingo. Here it is:

Sandberg fell in love with Dave Goldberg, her longtime best friend, and the two were married in 2004. Their first child was born in 2005. She struggled with her own work-life balance, and developed a sense that too many women at Google and elsewhere were dropping out of the workforce after becoming mothers, in part because they had not pushed to get a job they loved before they began having children.

I don’t expect a media writer to have a gendered critque of labor. So let me unpack this a bit.
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Aueletta and ostensibly Sandberg are basically saying that the reason why women DO NOT have more institutional power is because they fail to get the jobs they want because they don’t strategically choose when to have children.

Is it possible that the reason why women do not have more institutional power is because society needs women to bear children, in order for our population to continue to replace itself.

The article does go on to offer a critique of Sandberg stating,

Critics, however, note that Sandberg is not exactly a typical working mother. She has a nanny at home and a staff at work. Google made her very rich; Facebook may make her a billionaire. If she and her husband are travelling or are stuck at their desks, there is someone else to feed their kids and read to them. A more sweeping critique is that it’s not enough for women to look inside. Marie Wilson, the founder of the White House Project, which promotes women for leadership positions, attended Sandberg’s TED speech and knows and admires her. But, Wilson says, “underneath Sheryl’s assessment is the belief that this is a meritocracy. It’s not.” Courage and confidence alone will not compensate when male leaders don’t give women opportunities. She adds, “Women are not dropping out to have a child. They’re dropping out because they have no opportunity.” And she doesn’t agree that new attitudes can close the gender gap. Wilson points to Norway, which requires that all public companies have at least forty per cent of each gender on their boards.

So there are some folks who understand that it is one thing to say “women need to work harder, speak up, and be strategic about family planning.” It is something completely different to say “I am in a privileged position, I have support staff at home and at work and because of this I have other opportunities available for my career.”

Keep in mind that Sheryl’s mom left a doctoral program to focus on raising her and her sister.

I understand the instituational exlusion of women. As I sit here with my stacks for readings for my doctoral comprehensive exam in August, trying to wrap my head around feminist research methods, feminist techno science, intersectionality and  various epistemologies I am well aware of how the day to day constraints of life (working, buying groceries, laundry, caring for loved ones) can influence women’s abilities to pursue elite careers and paths of study.

I am glad that this issue is being discussed, but it is short sighted, disrespectful and ahistorical to blame women for their lack of advancement within STEM research paths and careers.

To put it another way, if men had the child bearing capacities of women, federally subsidized childcare would be available, accessible similar to Starbucks and McDonalds on nearly every major intersection in this country. I kid you not.

When women are given the support and expectation to soar, we do. I am proof of it. The women bloggers, engineers, professors, lawyers, graduate students, biologists, filmmakers and editors are all proof of it.

To blame women for their “lack of achievement” is short cited, individualistic and it fails to consider that raising children is work and that mothers who work both inside and outside of the home are penalized for it with lower wages and fewer promotions.