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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?

On White Men and Their Fascination with Odd Future

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Looking for a database of Odd Future’s lyrics, I came across this article last fall in The Voice by Zach Baron. I remember reading it, but I didn’t have the head space to process and write about it. Baron writes,

To condemn Odd Future for their lyrics we’d have to talk about Eminem, Cam’ron (unspeakable misogynist in rhyme), and Clipse (drug dealers who know what they do is wrong but do it anyway, at least in song)–all rappers who have long since made it into the pantheon of most working critics and music fans. “The avant-garde need not be moral,” Jon Caramanica once wrote in these pages about Cam’ron’s Purple Haze, a sentence that has been pretty influential in sorting out how me and my friends process music with reprehensible content. And it’s true. It’s also true, however, that the real line of defense most listeners have for stuff like this is they didn’t actually do it. As Jay-Z writes in his new book, Decoded, “The rapper’s character is essentially a conceit, a first-person literary creation.” He would know. And after all, Jay writes, it’s not like we actually think Matt Damon is out “assassinating rogue CIA agents between movies.”

Few thoughts:

Is saying it doing it? If we take this “well they ain’t really doing it, so it doesn’t count” logic seriously, let me ask you this.

If Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman got up and said “kill all the n-words” (the one with the ‘ers) and “kill and rape all the ‘illegals'” would that logic stand?

Would folks be willing to say “well they ain’t really doing it, they saying it.” I am inclined to think no.

People buy what makes them feel comfortable. Why does Odd Future make White men feel comfortable?

Doesn’t comparing Matt Damon to Odd Future the Clipse and Cam’ron obscure the fact that mainstream media does not feature African Americans prominently; That Black men and White men have two different, yet connected, histories in this country.

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And this is where article takes an interesting turn. Baron brings in a Jay-Z’s decoded to discuss WHO the listener identifies with. He writes,

And yet it’s disingenuous to separate Odd Future from their lyrical content, dishonest to say you can enthusiastically listen to the group without constantly encountering and processing the incredibly dark stuff they’re talking about. Why does art like this appeal? InDecoded, Jay-Z talks about how he’s heard that executives and businessmen listen to his songs about shooting people and slinging crack and use them for motivation before big meetings, PowerPoint presentations, and job interviews. The point he then makes is that with art like this you never identify with the victim, the proverbial “you”; you identify with the person speaking, and that person is a bad motherfucker, and thus so is the listener. Through this type of identification, art allows us to explore the weird frisson between reality and fantasy, the gulf between who we are and who we’d like to be.

Again.

The point he then makes is that with art like this you never identify with the victim, the proverbial “you”; you identify with the person speaking, and that person is a bad motherfucker, and thus so is the listener.

Well shit gina, I don’t know what to say.

The comments in the post are telling as well.

Thoughts?

What do you think of the “saying it ain’t doing it” logic?

Do people buy what makes them feel comfortable?

On Mambu Badu and Black Girl Problems Tumblr x Essence’s New White Male Editor

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Earlier this year I said that Mambu Badu was the freshest thing since Honey Magazine. The Quirky Black Girl magazine from 2000 that articles on Lil Kim and Lauryn Hill. The articles seemed to reflect a vision of Black girls that wasn’t as focused on racial uplift, natural hair guides, and finding a “good Black man” in the way that say- Essence is.

Mambu Badu is significant to me because it appears to be made with the explicit intent of centering the lives and art of Black girls. Where else is that?

Furthermore it is unique in that it doesn’t seem to be in response to an event. It appears to be an endin and of it self. That kind of work is powerful.

Disclosure, two of the creators are my homies @alice_wonder and @dascruggs. The third creator is the awesome @kameelahwrites.However, the whole time they were working on it, I had not idea of the scale of it. I say they should do a limited printing of 100 copies and sell them.

On to Black Girl Problems on tumblr.

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This blog resists the erasure of Black girls and for that reason it is hella fresh.

Oh. Essence just got a White male managing editor. #Ummh. Talk about the importance of Black girl subjectivity.

You up on Mambu Badu? What did you think of it?

Black Girls Problems? Thoughts?

Making Connections between Odd Future x Jay Z x Beyonce

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In my head I have been trying to make sense of Beyonce, Jay-Z and Odd Future and how audiences have received, accepted and criticized their work.

I have written about Beyonce here and here. Jay-Z here. I add Odd Future because I have yet to see a feminist analysis of them and I am theorizing that there is a connection between how audiences see them and how audiences see Jay and Beyonce.

Jay and Beyonce

Many of my friends get incredibly irritated when I say that I want Beyonce to sing about her husband. To talk about how he likes his eggs. Does he like cheese on them, hot sauce, cracked black pepper, scrambled hard.  I am not interested in how the man likes his eggs per se. I am using it as a way to open up a conversation about how audience desire shapes what artists talk about. I contended that Jay Z does not talk about loving his wife because honestly white and black audiences, and multiracial audiences are not interested in hearing about him talk about her.

“Take em out the Hood, Keep ‘Em Looking Good, But I don’t Fucking Feed ‘Em. – Jay Z, Big Pimpin‘.

In fact in this post Britini Danielle @ Clutch Magazine discusses Wiz Khalifa claiming Amber Rose publicly and the proliferation of the “we don’t Love them ho’s comments on blogs.

I am interested in Black people being rendered as human being in pop culture and in there day to day lives at work, on the train and in the grocery store. Why? I want all people in general and Black folks in particualr to be rendered as human beings. Singing about how your lover likes his or her eggs is incredibly humanizing. Talking about how much you love them is humanizing as well.

Honestly, I prolly wouldn’t care how Jay-Z liked his eggs if Black men and women controlled how their stories were created, told, distributed.

1. If they could greenlight their own films and Hollywood and control how they were distributed.

2. If there wasn’t a need for documentaries exploring the “lack” of women in hip hop.

3. If there was a space for Black women in pop culture who don’t fit the “Long haired thick red bone” aesthetic. Peace to Jennifer Hudson.

Does pop culture have to be humanizing for Black folks? If no, what is at stake if it doesn’t humanize us. If yes, what does that look like?

Odd Future

The first time I heard a DJ spin Tyler’s Yonkers, I was like who the hell is this? The beat sounded bare like early Clipse work. As a blogger, I read about what music bloggers are writing about, often before or whenI listen to the music. In fact conversations tend to percolate in my twitter timeline before writer #Natureofthebeast.

Here is Odd Future at a show performing Kill People, Burn Shit, Fuck School. @1:42. 109,664 youtube views.

Here is Tyler the Creator’s Yonkers. 14 million + youtube views.

There as been a ton written about Odd Futures popularity on the Black and White blogosphere and with multiracial audiences.

In the Chicago Sun-Times profile by Thomas Conner, Odd Future members contend that,

Odd Future’s lyrics, they maintain, are preposterous artistic expressions rather than reportage or incitement to action.“Nothing is really serious,” Hodgy Beats told the Sun-Times this week from a tour stop in London. “It’s just like all the things in our music. It’s in the atmosphere, it’s in the world, and it’s in our lyrics. … I think it’s funny that people flip out about s— like that.”

In an article titled “Odd Future and the Middle Class White Music Geeks that Love Them” the author writes,

It’s the general consensus of music writers everywhere (almost all of them white) that Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All can do no wrong.  The 11-piece L.A. collective, consisting of singers, rappers, producers, and visual artists between the ages of 16 and 23, has been praised as the next Wu-Tang Clan, the future of rap, the ultimate 21st century hip-hop group, etc., etc.  Their confrontational lyrics and gritty No Wave approach to hip-hop seem to attract more people than they scare off.  However, almost all of this praise has come from middle-class white critics and fans with interests in underground music. A photo of one of Odd Future’s notoriously raucous gigs shows a sharp contrast between the black, teenage group members onstage and the pale, white, twentysomething audience.

What does it mean that the most laudatory voices for Odd Future are White Male “music geeks”?

Should Odd Future be able to make the music that they desire, for largely White audiences given the history of Black images in this country?

Beyonce x Jay Z x Odd Future

Earlier in the post I stated that there is a connection between how audiences see them. However, we can’t really have a conversation about Black people and images without looking at the history of Black images.

Dave Chappell walked away for a reason ya’ll.

So, what is the history of images of Black people in the US? Whitney Peoples in the article “Under Construction: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop  Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second-Wave and Hip-Hop Feminism” gives a thorough explanation. She writes,

Much of mainstream rap music has been reduced to a never-ending obsession with monetary gain, appropriation of patriarchal notions of power, material possession, partying, women, and sex, all of which are secured and protected through the hyper masculine threat of violence. Mainstream rap music is most easily commodified because it represents ideas of blackness that are in line with dominant racist and sexist ideologies; it has economic potential only because it works hand-in-hand with long established ideas about the sexual, social, and moral nature of black people.

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In other words, the images of black male violence and aggression that dominate mainstream rap music are highly marketable in America because of already existing ideologies of racism that long ago named the black male as supreme aggressor and physical and sexual threat. Similarly, the images of sexually available black women that pervade rap music are marketable because of already existing ideologies that designated black women as hypersexual and morally obtuse.
Peoples is essentially saying that mainstream rap and I would extend that to say Odd Future (they are clearly underground but beloved by “White music geeks”) is popular and earns corporations money because they affirm already existing ideas around black men being homophobic, violent and hypersexual.

Having written this, I am left with a few questions.
Does Odd Future get a pass because “White music geeks” have the power to legitimize rappers with a sizeable fan base who think that rapping about rape, murder and homophobia isn’t really that serious?

Does Beyonce need to write about how her husband likes his eggs?  What does it mean that a middle class woman, who earned $80M in ’07-08 , spent a significant portion of her career writing about men soldiers, men who hustle, etc?


Is it legitimate for Jay to have continued to rap “about crack” when he was a millionaire? Is this selling a fantasy of a certain kind of Blackness to young people of all races? Can the man who wrote about Big Pimpin’ write about his wife?

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.