#BlackGirlsarefromtheFuture @ SXSW Interactive!

^^^This is that NY Taco Fun…I needs that Austin Taco Fun in my life.

#blackGirlsAreFromtheFuture #ForReal.

My presentation proposal, “Race, Sex and Blogging: The Limits, The Possibilities” has been accepted into SXSW Interactive.

Please help take #blackGirlsfromthefuture to Austin, so we can GET LIVE!

The more votes I get, the more likely I will be chosen. This isn’t just about me ya’ll, this is about the blog, our conversations about race, sexuality, hip hop, feminism, Errythang. Needless to say I am juiced.
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#allWeDO is win.

Please RT, Facebook and spread the Love.

Every vote counts.? Much appreciated.

~Nains.

#Nixonland Reading Schedule #NMM Book Club

Let Them Eat Crack by Banksy

@tkoed @skippcoon @mdotwrites @arieswym @MZ_of_TSS

I am not sure if this will work but lets try it.

What do you all think of this.

For the next three Monday’ s, we can Tweet/Chat #Nixonland. On Sunday’s I will put up a blog post w/ guiding questions. If you have ideas, questions thoughts, put them in the comment section of the blog…so that we can have a home for the conversation.

Who: @tkoed @skippcoon @mdotwrites @arieswym @MZ_of_TSS

What: New Model Minority Book Club

When: 8pm Monday August 16th

How: Use Hashtag #nixonland for discussion

Where: On Twitter
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Why: Learning about the past helps us to shape our future.

Reading/Discussion Schedule

Pages 1-300 Monday August 16th

Pages 300-400 Monday August 23rd

Pages 400-500 Monday August 30th

Pages 500-600 Tuesday September 8th

Pages 600-700 (end) Tuesday September 15th

What do you all think of this schedule? Are you available for the chat time? Any alternate suggestions?

Looking forward to your feedback.

~Renina

Hope Is Hella Underrated: Musing on Youth Social Movements

Black Youth Rising, by Shawn Ginwright is a book that changed my life because it addresses violence, East Oakland, social movements and the need for folks to understand how the crack epidemic’s most profound impact may be the ways in which it underminded Black city residents ability to hope that shit might get better.

Given what has happened in Oakland with Oscar Grant, given the fact of how Shirley Sherrod was treated and given the fact that the New Model Minority book club is reading Nixonland, this book offers a great counter point and broader context of the above issues. Especially for folks who are interested in social movements and? young people.

I will provide quotes with comments below some of them.

Hope + Urban Social Movements

…activism in the post civil rights era has to deal with both dismantling of structural barriers to opportunities and the internal consequences of exposure to years of of intensified urban poverty. More than electoral policies, community organizing and advocating or a better public policy we concluded that the activism in the post- civil rights era should re-build hope and heal communicates from the trauma of urban violence and racial marginalization. We didn’t render electoral polices, community organizing, and civil rights strategies obsolete, but rather, we believed that healing and hope were critical prerequisites for activism and social change.

Here Shawn is saying “How you gone win when you ain’t right within” ~Lauryn Hill.

I had never thought of putting hope and healing first. This was an eye opener and I was only on page 7.

A Community of Care

…care in this sense allows young people to see themselves in a broader context of justice and liberation…

…care is facilitated by building critical consciousness among black youth and providing opportunities and space for political expression and engagement.

I like this idea of political engagement because it feeds into both online and offline activities.

Community

Community, on the other hand, is more than networked relationships, trust and mutual expectations. Community is a consciousness of the interrelatedness that one has with others.

Care as a Political Act

Caring relationships, however can confront s and foster beliefs about justice among young people. These caring relationships are simply not about trust, dependence and mutual expectations. Rather they are political acts that encourage youth to heal from the trauma by confronting injustice and oppression in their lives. Care builds hope, political consciousness , and the willingness to act on behalf of common good…Young people must heal before they can act.

The connection between healing and hope is real.

I am not sure that healing and acting are this linear. Healing is a lifelong process. There certainly has to be a willingness there tho.

Hope and Radical Imagination

Daily survival and the ongoing crises management in young peoples lives make it difficult to see beyond the present. In healing communities, however battle scars are mended, racial wound are healed, and ruptured communities are made whole again. Ultimately hope is restored.

The central argument throughout this book is that intensified oppression in urban communities has threatened the type of community spaces that foster hope.

Hope and radical imagination are important perquisites for activism and social change.

Radical Healing

Radical healing involves building the capacity of young people to act upon their environment in order to create the type of communities in which they want to live.

We don’t create societies for young people. We help them deal with their hearts so they can create the hood that they want to live in. Awesome, no?

On Solving Other Peoples Problems

This means that we ask not so much what we can do for black youth, but more important, how relationships can recalibrate what black youth can do for themselves.

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It isn’t patronizing. It treats young people like the agents of THEIR OWN LIVES. And it allows for everybody in the hood to make a contribution, regardless of status or income.

Truth

Young people feel, if you respect me enough to tell me the truth, then I have greater respect for you.

Game for free.

Forgiving Fathers in Prison

In a section of the book on Black masculinity Ginwright explains how a young man, who had not been in contact with his father, decided to go to the county jail to visit his father and confront him on being absent from his life.

Vinces father didn’t respond with excuses blaming his mother, or blaming the system, the way Vince anticipated. What his father told him shook him to the core. …His father looked him directly in the eyes and said in a low sincere voice that he was so very sorry for causing him and his mother pain. “Nothing I can say or do will ever heal that, I did y’alll wrong and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. But you, Vince, can make another choice and not repeat mistakes I made.”

…Vince realized that his encounter with his father was more than his own individual healing; his act of courage also opened the door for his father to heal as well.

I was crying when I read this. How many people WISH they could say this to their parents, but never get the courage nor opportunity?

Lord knows I have worked hard around forgiving my father. I guess this scene spoke to me, to my history with my poppi.

Systemic Change and Young People

…we must consider how structural inequality shapes young peoples lives while at the same time prepare youth to contest, challenge, respond and negotiate the use and misuse of power.

Systemic change focuses on root causes of social problems and makes explicit the ways that various forms of oppression work together. This helps counter the low self esteem that comes from youth being blamed for their own oppression.

I thought this was useful in that it reminded me of Audre Lorde’s quote that we have to teach our children how to Love and Resist at the same time, or they will not survive. #ummhmm.

Black Masculinity

Ginwright has lead a camp, Camp Akili, for groups of 100 youth for 5 days of activities.? One of these activities is the sexism ritual, which teaches young men and women about sexism. In the following excerpt a young man talks about learning about taking women seriously. He says,

” I had a real problem with disrespecting women. Bilal would always call me out and check me when i was thinking about a woman in a disrespectful way. Like if a woman was speaking or something, I wouldn’t give a fuck because I would be looking at her ass or something. I would be sitting hearing her talk, but thinking she got a big ass. But now when a woman speaks, I listen to her opinion, I want to know what she has to say….”

I found this section to be powerful because it shows how young men are socialized to look at a woman’s “ass” rather than listen to what she is saying when she is speaking. I appreciate this for its honesty. It gave me hope.

Power vs. Information

Many of the problems facing Black youth come from a lack of power, not a lack of information. The capacity for youth, for example, to sit on police review boards and participate in hiring teachers and school principals focuses more on shifting power to young people than changing behavior.

I like this because it gets at who has a say in deciding how an institution is run and who doesn’t.

In the end Ginwright makes the argument for community based healing centers, which I think is practical necessary and awesome. This came about in a study funding by Oakland’s Task Force on Youth and Safety and Violence. Ginwright goes on to say that the recommendation outlines how the impact of violence poverty and lack of access to health care have been traumatic to young people in Oakland.? The question is how to do it. #ummhmm.

Care as a political act? What do you think?

Using relationships to help young people make moves in their lives?

What would happen if hope was restored? You think this is possible? Why or why not?

Notes on Black Male Privilege x Towards a New Black Masculinity

Robert Johnson, Blues Musician This post is for my nephew, who inspires me to this work.

Black Mothers Raise Their Daughters and Love Their Sons ~Saying I/we have heard

…The oppression of women is a difficult issue for our community partly because it is such a personal one. It is passed on to us through media, schools, religious institutions, friends and families. Although it has been said that Black women are held in held in high regard by the black community, the reality is that black women are either denigrated as whores or enemies or are placed on a confining pedestal as superwomen….~Black Men for the Eradication of Sexism

The act of simply being willing to question masculinity and learn about it threatens how society is organized. #ummhmm. Peace to the men and women who are willing to learn ~nains

Yesterdays post on Black male privilege was a hot one.

I received mostly positive ones and a few angry ones that were unpublished because they were anonymous and were more interested in being angry than listening and reflecting. Disagreeing with me is one thing. Thats fine. I have been trained to argue, I am? good at it. But coming at me sideways because you think I? “keeping the Black man down.” Puhlees. Last time I checked, Black women didn’t run the country, the Courts , probation, the Federal government, Fox news, Goldman Sachs etc.

People tend to react strongly when I write personal and they should.?? The intensity that I receive when I write about dating a giver, or about misogyny? in hip hop or about the consequences of Black boys not being raised to feel their feelings is the similar to me because it comes from the same place.

In this post I am going to respond to some of the comments yesterday, discuss some more ideas around Black Male Privilege and talk about what a new Black masculinity may look like.

I laid these out as notes? number 1-4.

Note #1

The post was guided, perhaps unconsciously as I have reread it 5 times this month, David Ikard’s essay “Like a Butterfly in a Hurricane, Reconceptualizing Gendered Resistance in Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered Always Outgunned.” Like a Butterfly is significant because takes it to the gut around Black anger, Black gender relationships and a new Black masculinity.

Ikard On Black Anger Quoting Walter Mosely

The anger that Blacks harbor towards whites stifles Black social and economic potential.

When I read this, I couldn’t believe it because I KNOW how draining anger can be, but I never thought of how our collective anger towards white folks could harm our ability to do MORE with and for ourselves, collectively.

Ikard on Black Honesty

Mosely asserts that ….if we Love each other…and our race, then we have to be critical of ourselves and honest.

Critical and honest and Loving. Trust. I wouldn’t spend the time if it didn’t come from a place of Love.

Note # 2

Black Male Privilege, the premises

These three factors lay the foundation for the existence of Black Male Privilege.

-Black women are raised to take shit from, Love and take care of and tolerate Black men. This means we tend to put ourselves last.

-Many Black mothers raise their daughters and Love their sons (however we also raise our boys NOT to feel, which creates men who don’t know how to Love, mindboggling, I know!) Read the comments here.

-This is a society organized by and for men.

Is Black Male privilege a term that I am going to stick by forever? I don’t know. What I do know is that unless we name it, we can’t do anything about it.

@tkoed reminded me repeatedly that this term may alienate more people than it enlightens.

I’m sure people said the same thing to Malcolm, Zora and Barbara, all three of whom inspire me.? #ummhmm.

I get his point, however, until I find another term that gets at what I am talking about,? what we are discussing, I am sticking to this.

Talking about violence IS painful, and it does anger folks, but more than anger we need to find the language to learn how to grieve the losses that have occurred because of the violence that has happened between Black men and Women. #ummhmm. That Black men have done to Black women, Women to Men, Women to Women, and Men to Men. #nohetero.

Beyond anger is an awesome title, #ummhmm.

Note # 3

Some Black Male Privileges

There are three that come to mind. First, the physical? and verbal violence that Black men commit against Black women tends to not be taken seriously by Black men and Black women for that matter.

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Third, Black women are socialized to, are expected to and receive pressure to date and marry Black men only. If we choose to date a non Black man, or a woman for that matter, all hell breaks loose.

Socially, it is as if the “Health of Black American Communities” rests on who we date.? Black men get way more leeway in this area.

Its also as if the crack epidemic related violence, crack cocaine sentencing disparities didn’t have a profound impact? our ability to sustain healthy heterosexual relationships. As if the lack of a state and federal commitment to live up to its civil rights promises of decent housing, schools and jobs has not created the conditions under which we date.

Jewel Woods offers:

1. I don’t have to choose my race over my sex in political matters.

3. When I learn about the Civil Rights Movement & the Black Power Movements, most of the leaders that I will learn about will be black men.

7. I can live my life without ever having read black feminist authors, or knowing about black women’s history, or black women’s issues.
8. I can be a part of a black liberation organization like the Black Panther Party where an “out” rapist Eldridge Cleaver can assume leadership position.
9. I will make more money than black women at equal levels of education and occupation.
10. Most of the national “opinion framers” in Black America including talk show hosts and politicians are men.

48. I have the privilege of believing that black women are different sexually than other women and judging them negatively based on this belief.
34. I can hear and use language bitches and hoes that demean women, with virtually no opposition from men.

82. I have the privilege of having not been raised with domestic responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and washing that takes up disproportionately more time as adults.

85. I do not have to worry about being considered a traitor to my race if I call the police on a member of the opposite sex.

Let me know what you all think about this list. I’m SURE you have things to say.

Note #4

Towards a Feminist Black Masculinity

Folks seemed to want to engage in this conversation and I am excited. I think that a conversation about a New Black Masculinity, or Manhood is needed and many ways it has already begun. I think what is new on this blog is that it is happening online and within the context of privileges.

There are several scholars who have written about this such as the above mentioned David Ikard, as well as Mark Anthony Neal and bell hooks.

In a blog post on Tea Cake as an Imagined Black Feminist Manhood, Mark Anthony Neal casts Tea Cake Black male feminist? work in progress.

“Janie saw beyond Tea Cake?s youth, lack of money and cavalier attitude (perhaps best captured by his gambling addiction or hustle, depending on your vantage), in large part because of Tea Cake?s ability to be attentive?not simply in the way that one is attentive to someone that they are attracted to?but attentive to the womanist reality that was Janie?s life. To that point there?s a simply lovely passage in the novel where Janie wakes from a nap as Tea Cake combs her hair and she ask ?Whut good do combin? mah hair do you?? and Tea Cake responds ?It?s mine too?it feels jus? lak underneath uh dove?s wing next to mah face? (103)”

But for Tea Cakes violence, given how he BEAT Janie, he does in fact represent a work in progress towards a new Black manhood.

In my post,{ Black} Masculinity: Fragile and Illusive I discussed this using Harry Broads text.

In my post Black Men x Love x Domination I used bell hooks to discuss how when we raise our boys to suppress their feelings we end up with men who don’t know how to Love. #ummhmm. Read those comments too.

I will close with David Ikard’s words. In the conclusion of the book “Breaking Silence, Towards a Black Male Feminist Criticism” he says,

The black male feminist project is most useful because it strives to establish visble notions of black malehood are not premised on black female subjugation…Identigying the underlying problems of black male identity is necessary for a productive approach to the problem…it is equally important to esablish alternative models for Black manhood to offset conventional ones.

A new Black manhood and for that matter womanhood entails recognizing that we don’t have the language to grieve the violence that we commit against one another and that we? need such a language in order to heal from it.

Black men need to take the verbal violence that we endure on the streets seriously and understand that we are dominated because of our skin color and because of what is between our legs. In 1969 Black feminist Frances Beal called this double jeopardy.

Black Women heterosexual, lesbian and queer need to understand the importance of working with men to create the spaces in our lives for boys and men to be able to simply feel.

While looking for an image to accompany this post. I found it hard to settle one one. First was The Mack film poster (not visionary enough), then a photo of Alice and John Coltrane (too hetero), Just Another Girl on the IRT film poster (not broad enough), and then something told me the Blues!

I don’t think it is a coincidence that I thought of the blues. Blues music is a place where historically Black men were able to, encourage to, and appreciated for feeling their feelings publicly. Maybe, just maybe the Blues may be able to tell us something about what we are grappling with here.

What does a new Black manhood look like to you?

What do you think of the Black Male Privilege List?

What are some of the ways, where are some of the spaces where we can engage each other and start to unlearn this shit so we can learn some new?

Black Male Privilege x Male Privilege

This piece is dedicated to Michele, T.Dot, John, and Pepe
Shout out to Bianca for the above image.

While on an awesome date last weekend, Pepe hesitated, then proceeded to challenge me on the idea of Black Male Privilege. He didn’t want to because he suspected that it would derail the date.

It didn’t.

In fact I appreciated the conversation because he forced me to think of things I had not conceived of.

The first thing was a question which was “What is the difference between Black Male Privilege and Male privileges period, name some Black male privileges.”

The first is that Black Men are born male in a society that is organized by and for men.

The second is that Black men (who read as heterosexual/straight) can go from point A to point B, from the train to the house without the risk of sexual verbal and physical violence. By sexual verbal violence I mean men yelling out at cars, men leaning into you as you walk down the street, hearing fifty eleven hey baby’s, or can I get a piece of that.

Yesterday I had two confrontations with Black men.

9 either honked or said something.

One on Rhode Island and 3rd, the other a block from my house. It was hot, my skirt was short. In both instances these Negros were surprised that I spoke back. By the time dude said something to me near my house I had had enough. HE claimed that he was BEHIND ME ON THE PHONE TAUMBOUT he wanted to take me to Red Lobster. What he really said was that he wanted to take me to bed. He lied to kick and said he ain’t say that, but you can’t sprinkle sugar on shit and call it ice cream. I heard him.

The psychological costs of being treated like a sex worker on the streets is lightweight unspeakable.

The truth of the matter is that they would NEVER talk to White women like this loud, open and in public because they would be in jail as sure as rice is white.

For many Black men in the street, an attractive Black woman is prey to get at, not a human being returning from running errands so she can go home to write for the evening.

The privilege here is that they know that if they say it to us, more than likely they can get away with it, and that shit is wack sauce. Not the kid.

If you think that I am putting ten on two and that negro men don’t really be fucking with us on the street see,

Black Woman Walking, by Tracey Rose

The college student who was shot in DC for not giving out her number

The Comments in this post

Hey Shorty, a Doc on Street Harassment by Girls for Gender Equity

Walking Home

Going back to Pepe’s question, means that by being born male, they will benefit from the social structure that says that MEN naturally have the right to public space.

The right to earn more than women doing the same job. (statistically Black men’s unemployment is hella high, but when they do work they work in jobs that, across the board, earn more than women, they often tend to be union jobs. See Paula Giddings When and Where I Enter for more on this.)

The right to dominate women and children and be violent towards them if they get out of line.

The right to beat another Negro mans ass if that negro man threatens his property which is his house, car or “his woman.”

The right to be visible leaders and to make directional choices about the future of the household, community and society.

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Black men have a different relationship to the police than white men. Oscar Grant, Sean Bell etc. Black men also have a different relationship to each other than white men do. Derrion Albert & Philly’s, Newark’s and Chicago’s homicide statistics. Black men have different relationships to trying to get and keep a job than white men.

They also read differently based on the persons class, their social standing, their income.

Different masculinities have different kind of privileges. This is how patriarchy works.

In addition one further thing that I have realized while writing this is that Black male privilege is different from “male” privilege in the same way that Black Feminism is different from Feminism (which is known as being organized by and for middle classed White women), further more there is Womanism to knowledge as well.

The second thing he said was that he thought the term Black male privilege may do more harm than good, in that it could alienate Black men, who may otherwise be allies.

My response was that first, that I find the words that I choose to be very important. Second, while it is true that using the term Black Male privilege may alienate some cats, so be it. When dealing with violence and oppression this is not the time to get coddled. He disagreed with me on this point and I am fine with that. I don’t want Black men to think I am attacking them, I am not, I am asserting ALL of our humanity and if they can’t that, that’s between them and they Jesus.

In reading Dumi’s post on Black male privilege I had an epiphany today. I realized that it is a challenge for many people to understand that victims can be perpetrators.

Dumi gets at both Black male privilage and the idea that victims can be perpetrators when he writes,

The hidden and overlooked nature is what is crucial for understanding privilege. It is the careful analysis of the social fabric of our world that will make privilege visible, even to Black men.

and

BMP is akin to White privilege in that it is often invisible to those who benefit from it the most! It is the accumulation of these unearned advantages that matter but are often dismissed as inconsequential. These advantages are often thought to be insignificant, unless of course you are on the receiving end of the oppression.

Meaning that Black men who are oppressed in a society dominated and controlled by Whites, turn around and try and dominate Black women, because thats what society says that men do.

There are many people who feel that because they had fucked up childhoods, or that they were oppressed as Black men or women, or for that matter as White men and women that they have the right to be rageful or abusive to others.

You don’t. No one does.

Just because my father was an addict for more than for nearly half my life, that that shit was fucked up and that drugs took him away from me and my mom and that our lives were profoundly impoverished after he left, doesn’t give ME the right to take that shit out on the people that I meet today. FULL STOP.

Conversely just because the White world treats Black men like shit doesn’t give THEM the right to be abusive and violent towards us.

The more I experience and read and write about this topic I believe that a street harassment awareness/education campaign may be awesome.

A whole new value system is needed. #ummhmm.

Here are some resources to start with:

Girls for Gender Equity does work around street harassment.

As does Men Can Stop Rape.

Read Kevin Powell’s Ending Violence Against Woman and Girls and take one of the recommended action steps.

Men having conversations amongst themselves around how they treat women in the street can be powerful too. #Ummhmm

You buying my Black Male vs. Male Privilege?

Is it all patriarchy?

Or does it read differently on differently bodies?

Someone sent me a video of a young Black woman on the streets of Brooklyn walking from home to the train, dealing with street harassment.? Please leave that link again! Thank you.