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A (Black) Feminist Note to Young White Feminists

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The idea for this post came to me while I was reflecting on my work as a teaching assistant and teacher over the past year.

It is interesting how much I have changed as a person, having taught such hairy issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, double jeopardy, the matrix of oppression etc.

My ability to read the energy in a room is sharpened, I feel empowered to intervene and de-escalate when it is clear that a situation may become out of control and harmful.

I saw a lot of promise in my students. They were interested in creating a better world. Some were very conscious of the privileges that they held in terms of class, race or gender. They were pariticulary floored when they learned that only 27% of the country has a bachelors degree.

The young white women students seemed to be most moved by the fact that their male peers could possibly earn more than them, even if they have the same training. They looked down right sad. When I saw this I told them that they looked down right sad. I also told them that we are arming them with this information so that they can go out in the world, and that they would be a apart of a long line of people who have seen issues with the world and decided to do something about it.

What I want them to be mindful of is the distinction between structural issues and individual issues and how they are both connected and distinct. It was challenging for them to think about how social systems, schools, church’s and families teach them what being “man” or being a “woman” is as most of them have been trained to think about the individual and choice. For the most part, they eventually got it.  In fact, they were really clear on the connection between the individual and the institution when it came to issues of reproductive justice. They understood that a woman can only make a “choice” based on the conditions in which she finds herself.

What was the most interesting thing about them is their ability to spot contridictions. It freaked me out at times. It kept me on my toes after I realized that they could spot contradictions the way that they could. In creating my lesson plans I anticipated their ability to spot contradictions.

For instance:

They were able to see the contridiction between the idea of the “melting pot” and the “all american beauty.”

They were able to ask why, when women out number men, are women not more frequently placed in positions of decision making authoritity?

They were able to see the contradiction between women “having it all” and women being expected to do all of the house hold social reproductive labor.
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Lastly, they were able to see the contradiction between a society that claimed to treat everyone equally yet perpetually paid women less for the same work that their male counter parts did, because in our social system, paying half of the workforce less means more money for profits.

I wanted my students to understand that it is up to them to take their lives seriously.

I want them to know that women are both similar and different, and that these differences should not stop them from engaging in social justice work. That we are ALL human beings. This does not mean that I am not Black and they- at least most of them, are not White, because we have our respective packaging and that  our “packaging” has histories.

One of my most impressive students was a young woman who wants to be a federal agent. And if she sustains her passion for reading and writing and work, she will be one. One day she asked me, Ms. Jarmon, “What do I do if I go on a job interview, and I get the job, but the employer is racist.” I was floored. Because this is a profound question.

I said to her, “Wow, well, there are a few things that you can do. Let’s talk about your options. Thank you for sharing this with me, because as your teacher, working through these kinds of issues are important.”

We then proceeded to discuss what her options would be in this kind of situation.

It was in this moment that I was reminded of my passion for teaching and how fulfilling it is to connect with students.

#ummhmm.

What would you tell a young white woman who is interested in social justice work?

As a teacher, what are your favorite moments?

Have you noticed how my writing has changed over the last year? I guess that is a question for long time readers.

Rough Draft: Malcolm X + Lil B and Black Men’s Sexuality

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I woke up with the portion of the post on Lil B and Malcolm in my head.

“….Writing about Black men’s sexuality is important because sexuality is racism’s third rail. Sexual domination, violence and the threat of violence have all been tools to keep Black folks, women and Black women in check. An examination of sexuality, the language around sex can teach us a lot about ourselves.

Also, in the post “An You Even Licked My Balls: A Black Feminist Note on Nate Dogg” I argued that we need to interrogate how White men’s desires for certain images of Black men shapes the music that we consume. White suburban men and women singing “And You Even Licked My Balls” takes on a whole other connotation when we consider how segregated we live in the United States. Many White folks learn what they learn about Black people from the television. This makes Nate Dogg’s catalog take on a whole other significance.

I also know that I need to write this because as a Black woman who blogs about rap music, I unlike other rap bloggers am not interested in becoming friends with rappers or becoming beholden to a rap label. (Wait…some rappers do check for #allcity. Let’s be clear.) This free’s me up to say things that a rap blogger would NOT say, out of fear of sabotaging a relationship with a music label or an artist. I am beholden to myself as a writer and to my audience. Full stop.

I write this because I care about Black people in general and Black women in particular. I also write this because homophobia is a tool of sexism. Homophobia directed towards men, is rooted of the hatred of the “feminine” in men.
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I also write this because I am concerned not just with the relations between Black folks and white folks, but between Black men and Black women as well. So when Lil B decides he is going to name his album “I’m Gay”, I pay attention. Especially given the influence that he has on young children, I will absolutely pay attention.

Being an artist or being a genius does not give a person a free reign to be greasy.”

More is coming. I need to read the Malcolm book and also collect the links to stuff that has been written about Lil B.

Thoughts?

Have you read the Malcolm book yet?

On Unemployed, College Educated, White Men

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When I saw that the Wisconsin governor was openly attacking White working class folks last month in Wisconsin I was floored.

Why?

Because the White working class, historically, has exercised significant official political power in the US. Read Richard Pearlstein’s Nixonland for more on this. (Rob do you know of any other contextual pieces on the history of the White working class?)

Labor or Work is organized by gender and race, so this means that your gender and race shapes, constrains and structures the kinds of jobs that are available to you.

This is why most African American women were domestics until the 1970’s, this is why many of the IT folks in the Bay Area Indian, this is also why the chief executives of most Fortune 500 hundred companies are White men.

This morning reading the New York Times my antenna were zapped when I read an op ed article about young  kids who are both college educated and under and unemployed.

In a society organized by and for men, this is significant.
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24 year old Matthew Klein writes in The New York Times,

The cost of youth unemployment is not only financial, but also emotional. Having a job is supposed to be the reward for hours of SAT prep, evenings spent on homework instead of with friends and countless all-nighters writing papers. The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future. They are indefinitely postponing the life they wanted and prepared for; all that matters is finding rent money. Even if the job market becomes as robust as it was in 2007 — something economists say could take more than a decade — my generation will have lost years of career-building experience.

We are not talking about  the  lazy negro men or women narrative, nor the undocumented Latino men and women narrative, which are both popular narratives around work and unemployment in mainstream media. We are talking about a narrative from a young white man.

If the young people in this country began to connect their plight to the plights of young unemployed people, in other parts of the world, we may arguably see a change, that only those us of us who walk by faith and not by sight, have sensed would occur since 2007.

Do you think that it is significant when young White men and women question a system that historically has favored many of them?

What does this mean to young people of color?

Isn’t this opposite of the narrative of apathy that we often see used to describe young people?

Is your rent paid?

And You Even Licked My Balls: A Black Feminist Note on Nate Dogg

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So I have been thinking of Nate Dogg in general but rap music in particular and the difference between how I as a Black woman and how White men relate to rap music.

While I understand that sexism and patriarchy is systemic, that we LEARN and are taught how to be “men” and “women,” how to be racist, how to be sexist as well as  how to Love, how to forgive.

What I am getting at is, to be crude, we don’t pop out of our mommas knowing how to be men and women, we are taught from infancy on through blue and pink clothing,  girls being told to sit a certain way that is lady like, boys being told crying is weak, and not manly etc.

I also know that there are several structural things impacting the lives of Black men and women such as archaic drug laws, mandatory minimums, three strikes, the underdevelopment of public education, gentrification, police who shot and kill Black people with impunity, and the lack of good grocery stores in working class and low income neighborhoods. All this shit matters.

Culture matters as well. Culture meaning,  music, books, websites and films.

Culture is hegemony’s goon.

Which brings me to Nate Dogg. The recent coverage of his death clarified for me why some issues that I have thought of about rap music but didn’t have the language to articulate.

I am a little troubled over how White mens investment in Black mens misogyny in rap music isn’t interrogated. And how that shit impacts me and the women who look like me.

Society is organized by and for men.

And our lives in the US are hyper segregated racially.

By and large Black people don’t live around White folks, so most White men can experience the pleasure of singing “and you even licked my balls” in the comfort of their cars, homes and apartments, whereas a young Black man said to me nearly two years ago on 125th street that he wanted to “stick his dick in my butt.”

On the street, in broad daylight.

That shit was so absurd I thought HE was singing a rap song initially. No, he was talking to me.
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Consequently, largely, White men are  not subjected to the kinds of violence and sexism that is sung about in the songs that Nate sang the hook on. As a Black woman, I am.

As a woman, as a Black women who Walks like she has a right to be in the street, this means my ass is toast.

For example, there is an officer in my neighborhood that harasses me so fucking much that I am now on a first name basis, Peace to Officer Anderson. Typically he stops me because there is apparently a 11pm curfew in DC for children under 18 on week nights. He normally asks me from his car, “Hey, how old are you.”  Dead ass, the second time he did it, I responded saying I was grown. o.O

After the third time, I was like “Mr. Officer whats your name because this is either the second or third time you have asked me that, and seeing as we are going to keep running into each other, I thought we could just on speaking terms.” He smiled. Doesn’t MPD carry 9mm’s too? Sassing officers of the state who carry legal weapons?  Ummhmm. And, he told me his name.

My clarity on this issue came about after I read a excerpt of a post on NPR about Nate Dogg by Jozen Cummings. He writes,

“There’s also “Ain’t No Fun (If The Homies Can’t Get None),” a song that was never chosen as a single from Snoop Dogg’s debut album, Doggystyle but has become a favorite for many DJs trying to work a room. The song is a tour-de-force of misogynistic lyrics, but only Nate Dogg can make a verse about dismissing a one-night stand sound so sensitive and endearing.”

“Remembering Nate Dogg, Hip-Hop’s Hook Man”

by Jozen Cummings, NPR.org,  March 16th, 2011

(via beatsrhimesandlife)

Then I reblogged and responded on tumblr saying:

In some ways, Cummings comments re Nate Dogg remind me of why I think The Chronic and Doggy style are the Devil, in terms of rap music. Men in general and White men in particular have a different relationship to the kinds of violence that I am subjected to as a Black woman who WALKS like she has a right to be in the street. Shit…two weeks ago I told two dudes to kill me or leave me alone. Dead ass. This ain’t for play. This is our lives.

Have you ever thought about White men’s investment in rap lyrics by Black men that are hella outta pocket?

I went to look for Cummings racial identity and I learned that he is African American, Japanese and Korean, so I am not saying that he is White. What I am saying is that his writing about Nate Dogg’s misogyny reminds me of how when the misogyny bomb is dropped, people who look like me tend to get hit with hella sharpnel. Whereas White men get to live out their thug fantasies singing along with Nate “And you even licked my balls.”

The Chronic and Doggystyle are sonically genius, however, did they up the ante on allowing White men and even some Black ones live out their Black sex fantasies?

Do you see the connection between Black women and White men that I am trying to make, why or why not?

Mommas, Artists and Interns: All Expected to Work for Free

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On the train a couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I was tripping off of the notion of the student intern, and how that socializes young people to accept working for free.

@RafiKam and I have had several conversations on twitter about who is an artist, who should get paid to be an artist, etc.

So on the train I came to the conclusion that like mommas and interns, artists are expected to work happily for free.

Think about it. People expect artist to create websites, write articles, DJ and do God knows what else for them for free. And I understand that there always times that we do things for people on the strength, however I am talking about the assumption that because you are creative then you are happy to be exploited.

Creative people need MORE dough. We are eccentric as shit, so that tends to mean that we like nice and or absurd things. AND, all this creativity requires food and vices. Okay, not vices but defiantly food, lol. I have two empty plates of food, an empty soda can, and a half glass of coffee on my table right now. Brain cells burn twice as much energy as ALL THE other cells in the body.

More exposure for my work does not pay the cell phone bill.

When folks want cheap or free labor, where do they turn? To students. The assumption is that there are so many of them, why not pay them chump change to do entry level work?

Now Maria Mies helped me to put this all into perspective. I have had this book out, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, since September 2010 and so I am happy that I am able to write this post.

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“by defining women as housewives, a process which I then call housewifization, not only did womens unpaid work in the household become invisible, unrecorded in the GDP…but her wage work was  considered to be only supplementary to that of her husband, the so called bread-winner and thus devalued.”

We have to remember that before mass industrialization, the entire family worked to keep a house hold going. Making soap, making food, making clothes, heating lamps, building fires, all this shit took ALL DAY and a squad.

She goes on to say that there is a connection between the work that women do in the home and the ability for men to earn the cake they earn and for corporations to earn the profits they earn. She writes,

It became clear that women’s unpaid caring and nurturing work in the household was subsidizing  not only the male wage but also capital accumulation.

Which brings me to the wages that men earn and the labor situation in Wisconsin. Mies goes on to argue that what has been occurring is that men’s labor is being housewiferized. She writes,

…demonstrated that not just that housework and housewifization were models for womens labor, but that transnational capital, in its effort to break the dominance of the trade unions, and to flexiblize labor, would eventually housewifize male labor:  that is to say, men would be forced to accept labor relations which so far had been typical for women only. This means labor relations outside of the protection of labor laws, not covered by trade unions and collective bargaining, not based on a proper contract – more or less invisible, part of the ‘shadow economy.

Treating working men like women regarding wages and negotiation? How in the hell is any of this sustainable? Removing the right to collectively bargain? Treating men’s labor outside of the home, the way that women’s labor in the home is treated?

This is profound B.

Had you ever thought of the origins of the idea of the housewife?

Are you a momma, artist or intern whom people always expect to work for free?

How do you navigate or negotiate?