Janelle Monae’s “Q.U.E.E.N.” featuring Erykah Badu. This song is a much better anthem than, dare I say, “Run the World (Girls).” It is funky and fierce with thoughtful commentary about those who judge and put others down. Check out Monae interview yesterday on 106 and Park.
Black Girls Code Trailer — the short film about the Kimberly Bryant’s San Francisco organization, and directed by Shanice Johnson will be shown at the Cannes Film festival this month. The organization is also developing a web-series and a feature.”
My Black is Beautiful trailer for Imagine A Future documentary, which will be released in July on BET (it showed with the Tribeca Film Festival last month), is part of the Imagine a Future initiative that began last year with Black Girls Rock and United Negro College Fund to open up a dialogue with young black girls about self-acceptance, beauty and empowerment. The film follows Janet Goldsboro trip to South Africa as she learns to accept herself as a beautiful. However, although I think this is a nice effort and I want to see it, I find it problematic that Procter and Gamble supports the film and My Black is Beautiful, but also sells “skin lightening” creams all over the world (read all the articles here). Hmmm? Some people say that these are only skin tone evening creams, but is that how they are marketed or used? I imagine a future where companies actually do make a legitimate effort not to make money off our low self-esteem, not seem to support something to assuage their guilt (but should I expect companies not to be hypocritical in their actions?)
As you may have heard, Rick Ross came out with the controversial line from his latest song, “U.O.E.N.O.” : “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.” A few days later, he addressed the lyrics with an “apology” that made me give him one of the biggest side-eyes ever. The kind of side-eye equal to smacking him (hey Ross rapping about murder, it is always clear that it is about murder. however when you rap about rape, you tend to excuse it like you are doing now). This incident with Ross comes on top of others like Lil’ Wayne‘s lyrics about beating a woman’s vagina like Emmett Till was beaten, reactions to the Steubenville Case, tech developer Adria Richards receiving death and rape threats and was fired after reporting sexual harassment, and the countless rapes of people all over the world. The war against women and control over their bodies continues, even in Women’s History Month, and so I am giving a loud and clear message to all out there:
You do not have the right to give me any substances especially if they may be harmful to my body without me knowing it. You do not have the right to do anything to my body without my permission. You do not have a right to do what you want with my body because of my own personal choices with my body. You do not have the right to disrespect my body and my mind, and call me out by a name or a statement that I do want addressed to me. You do not have the right to patronize me when I call you out on your bullshit. You do not have the right to define rape for me. Rape is when I do not give you absolute consent. It does not need to be said as rape for it to a disgusting action in which you take advantage and use your power over someone’s body. If I say no, if I am unconscious and cannot consent, or if I look scared or uncomfortable, do not touch me; do not enter my body with force! If you really think I am a queen and the greatest gift to man, you would know that. So here is a message from the future (and not the rapper Future who decided to cosign that mess); now you know it.
For more information on how to respect Black women, their minds, their bodies and their bodies, take a look at Black Girls Are From The Future website.
When some think of the song “Lady Marmalade,” one of their first thoughts is that it is a song about a New Orleans prostitute. On the surface it may be, but the song is much more nuanced and has deeper meaning beyond that. Listening to the song, I realized how ambiguous it is.
First, the title is “Lady Marmalade” for a song supposedly about a creole prostitute. For a woman who is a sex worker to be still called a “lady” is important despite that this aspect of the song is rarely discussed. She is a lady no matter what she does; she is still respected. Another is that she is creole. Looking into Caribbean studies, there is a lot of literature on the significance of creolization (creolite)– the hybridity or syncretism of cultures (ex. Santeria’s use of Catholicism), but in connection to the song, also the fear of racial and sexual miscegenation that Lady Marmalade represents. How do men in power suppress their fear about a sexually independent or powerful women or guilt about taking advantage of her; they usually call her a “hoe” or “prostitute” (i.e. Jezebel). Additionally, the lyrics themselves do not fully suggest she is a prostitute; it at most sounds like she is a sexually powerful woman. But even it being about a prostitute, the song refutes the sentiment that a song about a woman classified as a “hoe” or “prostitute” is not about one of us; it does concern all of us (“hey sista, go sista”).
Angela Davis is more than an afro and if you think wearing an afro is radical and revolutionary enough, then you do not know much about Angela Davis’ life. Having grown up in Birmingham and knowing the girls who were murdered in the Birmingham church bombing, Davis seemed destined to want to make a change in the world and she did. Here was a black women who received a Ph.D. in philosophy, spoke out against the Prison Industrial Complex long before it was a popular phrase and in the mainstream, was tracked by the FBI for her outspokenness and links to communism and the Black Panthers, and later came out as a lesbian. And she did this all as a black woman!
Living in a world where power and knowledge is equaled to mainly male, white and heterosexual, all of that was quite a feat. We need to know about her and others like her as a part of our history, and the many aspects of them that connect to us. As Erykah Badu said in The Black Power Mixtape, what we need to do is read, write and document our stories because if we do not, we allow people to twist those stories in their favor. Shola Lynch’s film Free Angela and All Political Prisonersis another chance for the hunted to take back their story from the hunter. Happy Women’s History Month to Angela Davis and the film will be in theaters April 5th.
These two songs and videos are sadly relevant for today. This is dedicated to KimaniGray, Trayvon Martin, Hadiya Pendleton, and the countless other young people who are victims to violence everyday.
Since yesterday was International Women’s Day and today is International Fly Girls Day, here is post dedicated to some topics, news and resources about us black women. But first, “I’m Every Woman” from Chaka Khan, one of the first music videos:
It’s amazing how many aspects of my culture and other cultures, too, are either hidden or diluted. One, for example, is the limbo dance that originated in Trinidad and Tobago. For many, it is only a fun dance game in which you try to pass under a long horizontal stick while bending over backwards and each time you pass the stick is lowered. But the dance has a deeper meaning as the video above mentions. It is similar to W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness or afrofuturism’s exploration of hybridity, that unstable feeling of in-betweenness. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who is from my mother’s home island of Barbados, captures the essence of the limbo feeling during the transatlantic trip. For more on limbo, here is Wilson Harris’ “History, Fable and Myth,” in which he discusses the limbo, anansi and Hatian Vodun as phantom limbs — attempts to reconstruct a dismembered god — as well as act as gateways to the new world.
Last week, I read a post about time travel in Black Nerds Network. While we have not reached physical time travel yet and I am not sure I would want that, let’s consider mental and spiritual time travel. The imagination is probably our first vehicle of time travel. Through media, art, artifacts, symbols, stories, traditions, memories and speculations, we move back and forth through time in our minds, exploring our relationships to the past, present and future. Our present environments are gateways to recapturing experiences from previous periods of life, imagining experiences of the next ones and even existing outside of time. As we already know, for people of African descent now, time travel is difficult for us given our histories of slavery, colonialism and racism, but we still time travel despite them, often in hopes that the societies we live in honestly take a look at themselves and their pasts and in hopes of a better present and future. Below are a few time traveling thinkers (BTW, I may update this later):
“Framing the future: Ngwatilo Mawiyoo at TEDxNairobi”
Ngwatilo Mawiyoo uses poetry as a way to return home and make the future look back at itself. She quotes Robert Pinksy who said, “and as poets too, one of our responsibilities is to mediate between the dead and the unborn.”
We should be“…moving past keep it real…let’s keep it surreal.” Musician Vernon Reid said this in his presentation of Artificial Afrika and it stirred some thoughts on “keeping it real.”
I see it as reality that is presented to us and the reality we create or perpetuate can always be called into question. Reality changes, multiple realities exist and we go outside of our given realities. What we perceive as reality is one sense a set of social performances constructed for and negotiated with a particular audience. Much of the reality we view everyday is not real, but the illusion or mask is often more entertaining and more powerful.
And the people who audiences expect or hope to “keep it real” and truthful seem to be the ones most faking it. Finding out a while ago that rapper Rick Ross was formerly a prison guard and took his name from the real drug dealer “Freeway” Rick Ross, was kind of surprising, but he is not the only rapper, or artist, who has a fabricated image. Nicki Minaj recently confessed that she is not bisexual, but told people she was in order to get attention. Terrell’s response to her on tumblr reveals the silencing effects of shaping an image based on marginal communities which one is not a part. This is also seen in the wearers (including college students) of racist Halloween costumes, which sparked the “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” campaign. Speaking of campaigns, I am also reminded of the presidential campaign, in which there is Mitt Romney, who is always changing his face, and President Barack Obama, who may be a bit more truthful, but also has to put on a certain persona to be acceptable to the general public.
Online PhD sent me a link to this list about female philosophers and the post generated some thoughts about the lack of attention around women in philosophy, particularly black women, leading me to a few interesting finds. Philosophy, which means “love of knowledge or wisdom,” is one of the oldest studies in human history. Afrofuturism itself can be considered a philosophy or a philosophical field, since it is a way of thinking about, feeling and engaging with the world. But often philosophy is attributed to men, especially white European men. Philosophers like Aristotle, Sophocles, Kant, and Nietzsche are constantly mentioned and praised with little criticism outside of the usual boundaries. Sometimes other cultures are mentioned in philosophy, like Chinese philosophers, Indian philosophers or a brief mention of the Egyptian Ptahotep, but other than that not much else. So, what space is there for other kinds of philosophers, including female ones of the African Diaspora.
In 2007, the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers had their first meeting to gather together women who are in the field. Later in 2011, when The Philosopher’s Eye did a post on the future of philosophy to celebrate World Philosophy Day, all of the philosopher’s included were men, showing still an uphill battle in recognition of women philosophers and philosophers of color There is already a small percentage of black philosophers, and the amount of women who are is even smaller. Below is a list of some of them:
Last week, I read a post about time travel in 
