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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.

Regular exercise is viagra samples essential to prevent as well as 36 holes lithium batteries. People suffering from other diseases like diabetes, hypertension, weak physical health and imbalance viagra 50 mg of hormones. That causes you cheap viagra online to urinate much more typically than you normally need. Choosing any of these destinations buy levitra can be a real hassle not to mention their related side effects. @Afrolicious put me on to Black Girl Problems on tumblr. I Love this blog because it demonstrates a particular Black girls subjectivity- a point of view and lived experience.

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?

A Tale of Two Lauryns: Why We Feel Entitled to Lauryn Hill.

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Note: I wrote this post last week, before she announced her pregnancy. #allcity.

One of the reason’s why I think we are incapable of letting Lauryn go, or understanding why she has chosen her family work over her artistic work is that we do not see parenting as work.

I have friends whose parents provided for their material means, they had food clothes and shelter, gadgets and toys, but moms and pops were always at work.

And they hate their parents for always being away.

I am not doing that, and I can see Lauryn Hill’s desire to give her children some sense of stability and protection.

People always say to me, girl, when you gonna have a baby- blahzey, blah? I look them dead in they face and say, listen, a child requires you to reorganize your entire life, and I believe that that child should be your priority, because as parents we bring them into the world. I also believe that women are hyper criticized for parenting choices, AND also given little support to be parents. So until those conditions change, I am cool. This is not to say that I don’t struggle with it. Because I do. AND, I am still cool.

How we think about Lauryn and what we feel that we expect from her is interesting.

I began thinking about this as I watched two videos of her. Once when she was twenty-five, the other from last year when she first started really touring again.

@:34 she says “I wanted them to have normalcy and privacy…I wanted a real life as well.”

@1:24 They are really not my accomplishments to be proud of.

@2:58 On missing her high school graduation.

@5:54 The music industry is a microcosm of the world.
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@10:49 Lauryn Hill makes me look up the word ethereal.

I noticed in watching these two videos that she says twice “I didn’t have any new experiences to write about.”

A lot of my blog posts are based on a mixture of experiences and things that I have read, so I can see her point.

I read a biography of Billie Holiday last fall, “If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery” and the author Farah Griffin explores why we know what we know about Billie Holiday. She also forces us to think why Black men Jazz artists can suffer from drug addictions  and still be seen as a genius, but Billie Holiday’s addictions seem to always overshadow her genius, her knowledge production.

I am thinking about how we know what we know about Lauryn Hill.

How the demands for her to come back don’t take into consideration that parenting is work. That making music is work.

And that it was particularly challenging for her to be a petite Black girl with natural hair in a music industry premised on approximating blond, white beauty ideals.

The ability to accept Lauryn for who she is may be a barometer of freedom for Black women in this country.

Why the investment in Lauryn Hill?

If we acknowledged that parenting and being an artist was work, would we view Lauryn differently?

Can Black women breathe?

Arielle Loren Asks “Is Beyonce the Face of Contemporary Feminism?” My Response

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We need to be clear about who we are trying to be equal to.

In her blog post Arielle Loren asserts that most women do not identify as being feminists even if they share its core ideologies, that there has been a shift in the contemporary agenda for women’s equality and that women are tired of rhetoric of hardcore oppression and patriarchy. She goes on to say that “frankly, all of the traditional feminist criticism of her “Who Runs The World (Girls)” video is just another example of the disconnect between intellectual theory and real life.” Beyonce is the face of contemporary feminism because women feel empowered listening to Beyonce’s music, so consequently, they take this “power” with them as they go on about their day to day lives.

Interesting.

Let me lay out my assumptions.

Feminism is not about being equal to men. All men are not equal. A black man  from 135th street with a Harvard MBA does not have the same social capital as a Black man from 135th street who just got out of Rikers. Full stop.

Next.

We need to be clear about who we want to be equal to. In fact, we need to ask do we want to be equal or do we want to be free?

Second assumption.

Black feminists are rooted in Love.

Black Feminists are interested in creating spaces for men to feel because men who don’t feel do not know how to Love. Black feminists are interested in holding themselves, and others accountable when they say racist, homopobic ‘ish, because thats how we roll. Black feminists will get up in that behind when a rapper tries to make jokes and bets about non consensual choking of women during sex. Peace to Jay Electronica. The Black feminist I know are rooted in Love. Being rooted in Love means that you understand that you will not be able to have meaningful emotionally invested relationships with another adult until you have forgiven you one OR both of your parents for abandoning you. Peace to all my homies who are in therapy. We grown.

Black Feminist Love is hella grown.

We are so grown that we understand like Arielle Loren does, the importance of Black women being able to be sexual, complicated, whole human beings. We understand that is is particularly important for Black women who are rendered 50 million ho’s on the regular in pop culture. The mission statement for the Black Feminist blog  Betta Come Correct states that:

BECAUSE BLACK FEMINIST SEX IS THE BEST SEX EVER…THIS IS ALSO A WAKE UP CALL TO ANYONE WHO INSISTS ON INTIMACY WITHOUT ACCOUNTABILITY, CONDONES VIOLENCE AGAINST BLACK WOMEN, OR REFUSES TO BE TRANSFORMED BY THE ECSTATIC MIRACLE THAT BLACK WOMEN EXIST. YOU ARE SERIOUSLY MISSING OUT.

So Black women having space to be multidimensional and whole is a part of the contemporary Black feminist agenda.

Back to Beyonce.

As you many of you know I have done a lot of writing about Beyonce, because I am concerned about how the messages that she conveys shapes expectations within Black heterosexual relationships. Given the fact that she made 80 million dollars in 2007-2008 and that earning that kind of money is extremely rare for people in general Black women in particular, Beyonce’s messages influence society and they shape how Black women look at themselves and their partners. Black women are not allowed to earn nearly 100 million dollars unless they are beautiful, talented, non-threatening to White men and they convey historical stereotypes about Black men and women. Dave Chappelle walked away for a reason ya’ll.

Because I care about Black women, I pay close attention to what Beyonce says.

It is dangerous to make open statements that women run the world, because there is so much evidence women get the shit end of the stick in the world.

Black, Latina and Asian women are sex trafficked in the Bronx, East Oakland and Las Vegas.

Eastern European women are sex trafficked globally.

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Women are 50.7% of the US Population. Yet, women are only 16.4% of Congress. They are 17 of the 100 members of the Senate. They are 73 of the 435 member of the House of Representatives.

Women are routinely paid less for the same jobs that men do and this is broken down by race.In fact when I told my students two weeks ago that they could graduate from college and be offered less money, just because of what was between their legs, they looked depressed.

They couldn’t believe how profoundly unfair it was. When I said that “Women are cheap labor” they looked mortified. I explained to them that shutting down was not going to create a more just and equitable world. That they cannot change a system if they do not understand it. And now that they do know that women are offered less money to do the work that men can do, they are expected to go out into the world and change it. Peace to the Equal Pay Act.

Poverty is feminized in this country, meaning that a main predictor of poverty is having a baby because children are expensive (childcare, healthcare, food, clothes, shelter) and there is very little support such as state/federal child care, paid federal family medical leave, support for families who work full time as parents.

We need to be honest about who we are tying to be equal to.

Women do not run the world. The world shits on women. Ask Ester Baxter. Ask Susan Giffords. Ask the woman who claims that she was assaulted and raped by the former President of the IMF. Ask Shaniya Davis’s family.  Ask Ayianna Jones’s family. Ask Sakia Gunn’s family. Ask. Ask. Ask.

Now if we want to celebrate the catchiness of a Beyonce song, or honor her athletic ability, her fierceness as a dancer, that is perfectly legititmate. But to call her the face of modern day feminism is ahistorical and a slap in the face to Black, White, Latino, Asian, Muslim, Native American women and men who have been working to change our world so that being born with a vagina does not automatically mean being raised to be someones wife, street harassment material, nanny, slave or prostitute, but a fully developed human being.

For more readings on the history of Black Women and Feminism read:
Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement and the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920 by Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham
Living for the Revolution by Kimberly Springer
Radical Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington in DC by Ann Valk.

For more readings on Black, White and Chicana Feminisms:
Separate Roads to Feminism by Benita Roth

For more readings on Third Wave Feminism
To Be Real, Ed by, Rebecca Walker
“Under Construction: Identifying Foundations of Hip Hop Feminism…” by Whitney Peoples
On Being Feminism’s Ms. Nigga by Latoya Peterson <<<And I still have issues with the title.
Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, Ed. Jessica Yee.

My post on R. Kelly and Julian Assange mentions some good books on feminism as well.

Thoughts. I know you have them.

Is positing Beyonce as “contemporary feminism” a move to come up?

What is your definition of feminism?

Music as feminist empowerment?

Black Feminist Love x Black Feminist Sex

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A few weeks ago I was on a date with Mr. Playful, on the third try of attempting to see that daggumit new Matt Damon flick. I was telling him that dating a Black feminist is awesome because yes means yes, no means no, and everything turns on consent.   He just kinda looked at me like, ok, that Feminism, ‘ish sounds cool, I think. Lol.

Side bar: Interestingly enough, I have not heard from him in a few weeks, #GodbemovingPeoplearoundtoMakespaceBecause, Ahem, spaceisneeded?

The manifesta for Come Correct talks about Black feminist sex, but today I am thinking about Black feminist Love, (which are not mutually exclusive, per se.)

Black Feminist Love. Full stop.

So, my little play sister is going through a break up, and when I talk to her, I constantly have to think “What does showing her that I Love her look like in this moment?”

Sometimes it means allowing her to vent.
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Other times it means saying “If the little emails he sends you make you sad, then you have to tell him to stop. Contacting you is a privilege, not a right, your psychic space is YOURS to protect.”

Black feminist Love means holding people accountable, suggesting books that they can read to help them be more nimble thinkers. Black feminist Love means understanding that until we deal with our trauma and relationships with our parents, we will NOT be able to connect and have meaningful deep relationships as adults. Black feminist Love means pulling your homies aside and telling her that she is fucking up, without humiliating her. Black feminist Love means standing by the idea that everyone has the right to be who they are. Black feminist Love means forgiving your father even though he abandoned  you when you were a little bear, because we grown now and being mad at poppi is not what the streets want. Black feminist Love means that we understand that Love is transformative, precious and a gift.

So yeah.

Love.

#Boom.

Any thoughts on the ideas around Black feminist Love?

Musing on the Genealogies x Sex x Digital Black Feminisms #BettaComeCorrect

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On Friday, on the Crunkfeminists blog, Crunktastic wrote a post titled “How Chris Brown is Effing up my Sex Life: A B-Side to Dating While Feminist.” In the post, she discusses the challenges that Black feminist face when a #boosnack has some janky gender politics.

As you can tell, I am clear on calling folks out on their janky gender politics when I see that they have space to grow. See here and here.

The post is awesome because she analyzes how our politics follow us into our intimate day to day interactions, #ItsNotaGame.

Context.

See, Latoya wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago titled “On Being Feminism’s Ms. Nigga.” While I found that last word of the title, to be both dangerous and violent, I do understand where she is coming from. We all have to navigate the tension associated with assimilation. As Black female bodies living in and interacting with institutions that we DO NOT control, we feel the burn honey. I also understand that the positions that we take up in these institutions can impact our careers in profound ways. Is it possible that strategic tokenism helps to keep us from being homeless?

More context, last fall Moya and Lex wrote an article in Ms. Magazine about how Black feminism is alive and well on the internet. They write,

When Black feminism’s words do live on, it is not by accident, default or simple popularity: It is often because Black feminists scraped together coins together to publish them, as when Black women’s social clubs raised the funds for Ida B. Wells to put out her 1890 anti-lynching and anti-rape pamphlets. Similarly, nearly a century later, in the late 1980’s Barbara Smith risked bankruptcy to continue funding Kitchen Table, an autonomous press for writing by women of color.

….So from these roots are a new(er) generation of Black feminist voices are coming out of academia using free and direct means of publication- the internet and social media- to spread our vision and to provoke and ongoing dialogue.

How is that for rooting our work in history?

I am also in an awesome feminist genealogies course, where we are looking at the historical connections between the theory created by women and women’s social movements. Some of the most enlightening texts that we have read are:

Benita Roth’s, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black White and Chicana Feminist Movements in the Second Wave. Powerful in how it shows the connections between these movements, along with the distinctions and the way race and class shaped how women put their energy in social movements in the 60’s and 70’s. #Ummhmm.

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So I am thinking about how knowledge gets produced by women of color online, who shares ideas with whom, who is in conversation with each other, who reads history. Then, Black digital feminism magic happened on Friday.

I was reading the comments on Crunktastic’s post, and I saw that Lex left a comment that kinda had be blown and so I tweeted it. She said,

…that black feminist sex is the best sex around and that folks who insist on ignoring the dynamics of gender violence in order to maintain their privilege are missing out.Makes me want to create an ad campaign that gives new meaning to the phrase “come correct.”

I left to go teach my class and I came back an hour later and there was a Bettacomecorrect Tumblr, a listserve thread, a Twitter account, a Facebook page in the works. It was on and cracking.

The manifesta for the site is:

because black feminist sex is the best sex ever…this site was created by those of us having and committed to having transformative erotic experiences with/as black feminists. (and both! oh both!!!!!!)

this is also a wake up call to anyone who insists on intimacy without accountability, condones violence against black women, or refuses to be transformed by the ecstatic miracle that black women exist. you are seriously missing out.

In some ways this site runs directly in the face of the politics of respectability. However, it is also important to note that because of our social locations as teachers, professors, instructors, students and administrators, and because of the history of Black women being constructed as lewd, lascivious and 50 million “hoe’s”, we also write with pseudonym’s because it is safer.

When I called one CFC later that Friday afternoon on the way from dinner, I was patched into a three way phone call where we were talking about possibly doing work on Digital Black Feminisms and sexuality at a conference next year. I also mentioned how I storified a conversation that a few of us had on Twitter last fall about Nicki Minaj, Jasmine Mans. It was like all of us have been in conversation with each other and that this is a natural outcome. What I like most about it is organic and collaborative.

You peep Betta Come Correct?

What do you think of the Manifesta?

Who knew Chris Brown could inspire this way?