a black girl

The Beauty Battle Royal

Monday, February 11, 2008

A black girl was chilling in contemplative hibernation, reevaluating the content of her blog (and by that I mean, not thinking about it at all) when she opens her email and finds a message from a mindful sister that gave her notice of some crazy ish on the internet that needed some vigilant lip pursing.

Okay out of third person.

This email I received made me aware of an online blog/mag named Jezebel with a centrally white readership that is asking for pictures of embarrassing hairstyles from Black women. (I’m not even going to the not-so-ironic-irony of the name of the magazine.) In light of a past two years of white-supremacist fetishization over Black women’s hair (i.e. Imus, Boortz) you’d think white folks would just pretend they don’t have an issue. Instead, the recent years has merely given permission for frank white-centered discussions about how different, crazy, wild, and wacky Black women look.

I’m actually not offended by the idea itself. We (women across the racial spectrum) all have embarrassing photos of our hair at one point or another—particularly if we’ve lived more than two decades. For example, I have a picture of an ear-to-ear bang via the 80s that is absolutely INSANE and in my teens I rocked a wave-nuveau which was inevitable for me in killer Kali. Sisters can crack up about it as much as I do (especially those who know what I wave nuveau is!). But in the real estate of thought its all about context, context, context. There is a way in which this racialized voyeurism (i.e. white chicks wanting to specifically look upon Black chicks) lends itself to a Beauty Battle Royal of sorts. A spectacle of excessive Blackness through black hair, that also is a reminder to Black women of the unattainability of Eurocentric beauty.

Look but don't look, they say. Don’t desire this thing, this thing is not yours.

The racial context of this contest raises an eyebrow, and rightfully so. I would like to see how this whole thing pans out—how far viewers comments go to dance around their horror, awe, and amazement of the gravitational defiance of Black women’s hair. Lets see how many or how few comments directly drop the p word (I don’t mean pussy.) to describe youthful female blackness. We’ll see if "nappy" even comes up, with arms folded, lips pursed, eyebrows raised.

We’re looking at them, looking at us. Defiantly.

And so the post blackness of my generation allows that much. Allows the chance for the white gaze to do its thing as it will (they will even look at us as we look at them). As we watch, analyze, and understand ourselves in the process. I’d hope we’d heal, as is the call for much of our "take the power back" discussions. Not through this kind of ish, but in spite of it. I cringe when "take the power back" means join them in their jeering and peering. It’s as sad as teased children making fun of themselves in the face of bullies. I’d hope that we’d heal not by joining them, but by putting the burden where it belongs, in the arms of white supremacy. By pointing to the irreverent and insensitive racism. By gazing back. Relentless, unforgiving gazing back. This has certainly been a process for me.

An un named uber leftist white woman with… matted hair tries to make comparisons to my locks and share "hair stories." I simply reply no, and look at her (as to not embarrass her in the professional setting we were in) so as to remind her that her hair is blond, long, and fine, and her eyes are blue. "We" have no shared hair stories this was not MLK’s dream.

I’m with a friend who has been invited to her neighbors’ house. Her neighbors are a white lesbian couple who have recently adopted a black baby boy. They hem and haw around the issue that they don’t know what to do with his hair (acknowledges collective exasperated sigh from sisters everywhere). What they’ve told me is that they wash his hair every day and put tea tree oil in it. They still don’t know why his hair is dry. I give some basic pointers for the sake of the poor kid and hope the books we’ve given, along with the little djembe my friend has given him will give him some smoke signals early on.

(I’ll discuss the unhealthy black hair generation to be raised by "colorblind" gay white folk some other time.)

This is not to say that I cannot talk to white people about hair in general. This can happen (and it has with white folks who know that there are hair differences not only visually, but historically), what cannot happen is a conversation about hair that assumes a similar and parallel history when it comes to my embodiment as a Black woman. I cannot be the one to consistently educate white people on Black hair and the politics of it. Ignorance of some of these basics is merely evidence of white supremacist notions of racial and aesthetic normalcy that results in a "what’s the difference?" "black people are so sensitive" response to Don Imus or Neal Boortz’ comments on Black hair that reveal a deeply historic and psychic fetish about Black hair.

The very moment calls for a direct and serious gaze back. To let folks know that they are looking, and looking as if difference merely belonged to us. To let them know that our sensitivity is rooted in a history that has maintained whiteness as normal and default. That we are gazing back not only to neutralize their gaze, not only to reveal to them their outright racism, but to access our embodied power, to challenge the fetish. To take off our blindfolds in this battle royal.

Labels: black women, blogging, history, nappy headed ho, race, racism

uttered by a black girl at 6:17 PM. | 0 comments

. . . . . . Let me begin here...

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

First thing's first. You must experience it:

Get music video codes at Bolt.

*sigh*

Lets go get em...

Many of the issues in this video/song have already been noted i.e. his blatant homophobia by saying "gay" to call out the "fake ass emcees" as he dubbs them. Also is use of the word nigga is contestable. I ain't here to talk about that (entirely) I just want to focus on some of the gendered issues at play here.

Certainly inspired by recent comments made by Bill Cosby (who he notes as a man who calls all of them out too) there is some serious blame the victim here. While I am down for the whole calling out mainstream rap's obsession with bling, hypersexualization etc. I think there is a fine line between critique of prorities in rap music and a kind of fire and brimstone about what it is Black people should do to prove themselves respectable citizens. I think this becomes most evident in his critique of women in videos ("video vixens" and emcees alike) who do exploit thier sexuality. While it is clear that I have my own beef with that, what NYOIL does not do is critique the misogyny at play within the two worlds he critiques together yet implies are seperate. Basically, there is no examination of how misogyny influences what role black women take in rap videos and popular culture. While critiquing these "hoes" (yes he calls them hoes) he demands the same migonynistic powers that are demanded of them in the videos to "suck his dick." Not only this but he differentiates young queens from these women-- aparently these women have been dethroned. But I could be asking too much of him. Clearly he stated his mission and purpose in his critique of male rappers. Citing who they are and what they do as "gay." The misogynistic overtones of anything that comes in his critique of women will certainly spill over into his assumptions about what being a woman and a man is. He posits in one of the verses, a case in point where a black woman is being sexually and violently abused/used by a white man this juxtaposed to his liberal use of the term gay to describe these "Uncle Tom" (in service to white people) rappers looks to me like some of the historical associations of gay men and women as traitors to the race (read heterosexual black men). The first for as Eldridge Imagined in his pivotal text Soul on Ice the "faggot" would allow the white man to fuck him in the ass (of course black gay sexuality was constructed around interracial relationships). This fucking allies the gay black male an intimate way to white power, thus selling out "the race." This black women in this pseudo rape vignette is allied to the white man similarly without regard to the power issues he set forth in his verse--she is traitor for her act because in allowing this white man to "nut in her face" she has rejected the black man (read the black race).

Its classic and nauseating. I'm just comforted by the fact that I know hip hop can be more intersectional in its presentation.

p.s. I don't think Malcom, Martin, Garvey, or even Oprah would agree that any of these emcees should get lynched. I just want to go on record as having said that.

Labels: culture, hip hop, history

uttered by a black girl at 1:08 AM. | 5 comments

. . . . . . Black Fat

Sunday, August 27, 2006

This is a rough expansion of a few previous blogs on fatness, race, and sexuality including:

Revisiting Aunt Jemima's Big Black Ass

Revisiting Aunt Jemima's Big Black Ass #2

Eating, Sitting, Loving, Living, While Fat

There, I speak more of the intersection of race, fatness, and sexual objectification which is only a part of my feelings towards race and fatness. While I have not read or shared on the experiences of women of color who are not black... I do feel the expereince of fatness for Black women is quite particular. There is an amazing article on the subject by Doris Witt in Kimberly Wallace Sanders' Skin Deep Spirit Strong called "What (N)ever Happened to Aunt Jemima" (it is also in an issue of Discourse I dont know which. It talks about perceived notions of Black peoples' acceptance of fatness, and the racialized notion of appetite for Black women. There is this broad beleif that somehow for Black women it is more acceptable to eat (and therefore become fat) because "we" (black folks) are more accepting of fat on women. Simultaneously you have this fat Black woman trope called the mammy. The mammy is always fat and associated with food (Aunt Jemima for example), and therefore the archetype of a particularized Black womanhood: the fat Black woman.

The racialized notion of Black women's appetites is so pervasive in culture and science that medical doctors concluded that Black women simply eat too much although their research proved otherwise.* Some Black women under-eat and remain at with slow metabolisms. The perception has also blocked the reality of Black girls' and women's eating disorders which are not only over eating but involve anorexia, and multiple forms of bullemia, and dangerous yoyo dieting.

My expanding thoughts on that essay would be to interrogate those attributes attached to mammy further for example: her a-sexuality, her willingness to nurture all but her own, her attitude, her duties in the mater's house, her relationship to other slaves on the plantation, her location in the house etc.

The mammy archetype of course is something Black women choose to run away from... just as we have historically run away from the other tropes: Jezebel, Sapphire etc. So, in actuality, in the lives of Black women, appetite is not acceptable. Within the Black community fat is only acceptable in certain amounts and in certain places on the body. Other fat women are jokes, ("She looks more like Freddy Jackson!" - Friday) sidekicks (think of every Black film or TV show with a female protagonist... Kim to Moesha in Moesha, Love Jones, Jason's Lyric, Two Can Play At That Game, The Preacher's Wifeand the PATHETIC role of Gloria in Waiting to Exhale) or aggressive Bitches (Queen Latifah's role in Set it Off and Bringing Down the House, even Sophia in The Color Purple).

While history has shown that it was in fact mammy, who was continually raped and brutalized the need to see her as a-sexual of course stems from her corpulance. Ideaologically, her corpulance distances her from femininity, and is therefore pushed to the masculine. This trips up the other stigmas of the mammy:

In regards to her place in the house would also push us to think about how white women attach themselves to fat black women. It would be interesting to do a run down of white women's attachment to Oprah (examine what happened with her audience when she lost weight for example) or white feminists' attachment to Audre Lorde (why not June Jordan if one must dig a Black feminist lesbian?) Early white feminists' attachment to Sojourner Truth...

I would argue that fat black women epitomize the inverse of what it is to be woman (again expanding the discourse on the notion of black women--with no disctinction on size--as the anti woman). A woman has restraint (doesn't overeat and therefore become fat, isn't sexually uncontrollable and therefore is not Black) she is also frail and managable ( fat women aren't physically managable and too solid to be frail, Black women are too angry, masculine etc. to be managable or frail... think Sojourner Truth) women demand coddling and attention (mammies are made to cater to those needs... even and especially when it involves taxing demands on her own body -- wet nurses for master's children without breastfeeding her own. Mammies never have needs of thier own. I am reminded there of a moment in Gone With the Wind where Rett Butler gives Mammy a red silk petticoat. She is given it as a joke...

Why the hell does mammy need a silk petticoat? She has worn the same dress every day for the past 30 years... The luxury of the gift mocked her status as slave. Also it was red silk--a very erotic fabric and color... again to mock her a-sexuality. In the scene Mammy is extremely bashful about it... like a 13 year old girl who has gotten her first compliment.

Oprah with all her money has always had to tuck away her sexuality. Even the richest woman in the US is not free of those things because of her race. The discourse around her and Steadman is extremely sexless. Therefore the new discourse that speculates her homosexuality makes complete sense. A-sexuality brings about the spectre of homosexuality for women. Where there are no men who are present as sexual releases for women they are speculated to be with women. Black women have always been placed in this strange space where not only where they a-sexualized into lesbianism, but also oversexualized into it as well:

Sarah Baartman for example was pathologized into lesbianism because of her physiology....

Even Audre Lorde with all of her talk about her sexuality and her own desires is suppressed in the literature of those who laud her. Her words in the "Erotic as Power" are taken as cautionary earth mother goddess advice rather than open discussions on her sexual relationship to her body (we are much more interested in how she dealt with her dying body). Masani Alexis DeVeux speaks a little on white women's attachment to Lorde in her Biography Warrior Poet.

I could go on but these are just a few ramblings to pin down some of the racilized aspects of Blackened fat. Watch for the developing queered black fatness version... (That was more of a threat than an announcement.)

*As a food for thought: Black women die in the largest numbers of stress related diseases such as hypertension and heart disease. Science has blamed this on fat and unhealthy diet, not on daily traumas of racism that cause the heart to beat rapidly for short intervals. It would be fucking relvolutionary for science to admit that Black women are slowly dying of racism!

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Labels: black women, fatness, history

uttered by a black girl at 12:04 AM. | 4 comments

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