We demand an explanation!

Face palm
and the addendum

I think I am done explaining things to people.

To explain things to people is to relegate the thing you are explaining to an open source object. It has a cause, a reason, that led to a very basic result. It also implies that whoever you are explaining the thing to has some right to an explanation.

( Side note an explanation is NOT an apology,why you did something is not the same thing as being sorry you did something)

That New York Times article and it's comments ( sweet blistering Christmas the comments) hits all of my major problems right now with media as I am relating to it as a Black woman.

An institutionalized practice of violent omission, minimization and tokenism, is being used to justify shoddy historical contexting, minimization of personal realities,classist posturing and cocktail drenched inner circle justification masquerading as insight.

It's the Black experience as distilled for white folk, so they don't feel offended . Often times written BY POC. ( and oddly enough about Black Women often NOT by them I have no idea Ms. Saint Louis race nor does it matter but I had a heart to heart with someone I love who is a POC but not black about getting opportunities to write about Black Women as her foot into industries while her culture is/was erased exoticized and not "marketable" enough )

These recent articles are written with a presumption that writing in any way AT ALL about issues facing Black women is " cutting edge" ( mind you the addendum is so laughably obtuse on the significance of the moments it chooses as to ellicit my straight HUH?!? face) and that letting a black/brown woman write about it is EXTRA special.

Because objects don't get explanations. The presumption is that the comings and goings and even the bodily states of Black women particularly are up for consumption.

Not engagement, discussion but consumption . The article itself is written with the offhanded flippancy one discusses lipstick changes. The audience that this is directed to and for is not expected to be moved by this much less living it every day in blood curdling reality.A demand for an explanation of why on Earth we have to pay real attention to WOC bodies, in a waythat reaffirms our alieness. Money quotes thats ound like astronomical figures when most everybody else spends ten times as much on their own hair care and breast implants.

It also carefully constructs itself to create a world where the natural haired are authenticity watchdogs arbitrarily judging the level of others blackness. Even though being natural is STILL in the minority.

A minority that was called by no less than an editor of Glamor unemployable political and used to symbolize terrorist radicalism in the New Yorker

LAST YEAR

that the interest in this topic is sparked because no less than the President's ELEVEN year old is regularly called ghetto trash for being seen in public with her natural hair.

And reduces the actual physical effects of a perm to a mild nuisances.

And I know to some I am nitpicky and don't I see the good in being mentioned at all.

And they would be completely and utterly right.

This isn't NEW this isn't even remotely unknown, this isn't even THAT DEEP ( want a deep convo ask about fashion versus kulta use of dread locks that one PHEW ). This is what it ALWAYS is.

It is the pain and suffering and consistent societal beatdown of black women as an " interesting tidbit"

It is the simplistic assertion that if it was only about Black women , it wouldn't be enough to get a dander about. That while every beauty, sexual and othe rissue that is entirely white centric is SRIUS BIDNESS.

Women of Color, and black women have to EXPLAIN, and if that explanation is accepted she must then submit to invasive consumptive abrasive attention.

While everyone whistles a happy tune and shows up a day late and a dollar shot on Caster Semenya being treated like a modern day Saartje Baartman at

EIGHTEEN. EIGHTEEN THE CHILD IS EIGHTEEN. GOD BLES IT THIS CHILD IS EIGHTEEN!

based on the fact her very black body is considered always fit for public dissection ( please remember that people said the same thing about Florence Griffith Joyner being to "muscley" possibly the most femme athlete who ever walked the planet and competed in sport forever Amen)

So you know what ?

Someone else get really excited that someone deigned to "translate" black women for you, someone else get really hyped that OOOOH we're in the New York TImes liek someone isn't getting paid off of doing the bare minimum when it comes to black folk.

I will take comfort in the fact that there are amazing spaces for Black women to work it out and no you aren't invited and nope

You get no explanation.

http://immigration.change.org/blog/view/hate_crime_victim_julio_maldonado_wrongfully_convicted_now_being_deported

Happy Birthday To Me.

Free write response to this by Lisa ( x posted Feministe)

and I want your eyes.

I am not alone in the wanting of your eyes everybody wants them.

We need youto look at us and where we tell you to.

I am kind of failing at an AMC wrap up I know but to be honest I am not so sure what to say.

I know I saw my loved ones but I also know my wife felt overworked , the people who advised her my sisters barely got to use the things they did all the advising for. I know I watched peopel race because this is the only space they had to be happy and had to spend most of it networking rather than enjoying it because how often would this come again

I know I was excited to meet the babies I have loved from afar but frankly were they happy were they comfortable were their mamis comfortable.

I know that from a session on the state of media , the time I ( and others BFP,Ilyka,Bint Sudy) have said is upon us.

Large corporations are bum rushing blog space. They want to be liberal and with it , they have more resources than your average blog , even your average big blog .

And in terms of progressive blogs there is no cohesion and even less of a plan.

People got the careers they wanted and quietly , surely but quietly did EXACTLY what they pledged not to do.

Pop culture rules the day rather than any substantive report or support of anything not " cool" and consumable.

Success is measured not by affect in the community but the ability to model themselves after the oppression kyriarchy in getting colonialist " rooms of our own" MSM mentions and the ability to be slightly more enlightened in gut wrenching privilege and ignorance. Archival history has begun and is OVERWHELMINGLY white and middle class, menawhile most of the innovative ideas being watered down and commodified

were POC/queer generated

but they wonder where we are*

oh and all of the leders we are battling supposedly are white women.

Sexual rights and freedom is till about creating experts and product rather than spirit respect and space.

While a Bi-racial president has resulted in race issues coming forward, they are as narrow and insulting as can be. Shallow as possible and entirely focused towards white audiences with POC as subjects or case studies not agents. Did you know Biracial also meant POC/POC mixes? OR that certain cultures ( mine being one ) are inherently multicultural?

And that while blackness is the currency du jour it is till tinged with an insiduous classism that seems only to allow certian folks to provide thinly disguised racist commentary behind " post black/modern posturing"

Because for some reason , the only "important black work" is the stuff white people recognize" or the traumas only matte rif it's where white folk can see it.

and that comes at what cost
.
Folks are so quick to be colorblind they'll destroy any POC they come across to be that way

Your eyes , your web clicks justify existance now, feed or don't feed people and are the difference between action and non action. Your email is being trolled, and peopel are having four figure lunches in " liberal" circles to send you blasts on how to be better.

BUT

In order to justify it's bloating system , must also instill in you the feeling that you are not there yet. That it is never enough , that you MUST listen to them, that this next thing this next demographic, or push is the ONLY thing to get us closer.

More and more media literacy, has NOT been a part of this "movement". No one wants to show the work , because even "change" and " Hope" and liberalism .feminism and progressivism , are based on keeping you scared,beliving that never not yet are you ready now

find the pain

But that is not the point

for me.

It never was . It was about getting love.

It was about getting attention, about getting your eyes.

It was about a naked need to be affirmed

and now it still is.

It is a need to not feel helpless, and hopeless and distraught when things happen like this becuase they will.

It was about my family my iological family , and now it is about my family my internet family , my biological family my work family my job family.

It does not work if there is no goal beyond just your eyes. for me now I

I want your eyes ,because well shit I want food and money and decent credit

but I want your eyes because they shouldnt go towards fear but the horizon.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*I feel like an asshole bringing this up. I do but frankly I am pissed .

The short of it.

I am asking anybody who was and did boycott Seal Press to continue.

I am asking anyone who stopped to pick it up.

The offensive ass pictures that caused the boom of 2008, are still for sale . In fact at netroots right now.

Where there will be a presentation of Women and blogging and essentially why aren't WOC bloggers more succesfull.

even when it was happening to ME in teh maelstrom I didn'ts ay too much about it but now I am.

Because essentially it is being treated as if everyone forgot.

Yes means yes? I looked through finally and no mention is made of the extensive battles and changes made FOR free by WOC/LGBTQTS bloggers from it's original offensive ass pitch.

Mind you I am NOT calling for a pile on a flip out or any other flame war.

But straight up this is now MOCKERY .

They keep hoping we forget ignoring critique,using ideas and then allowing the same five people to pump out more shit that is racist, exclusionary and highhandedly self serving.

While using pictures of people like me and mine as kitch or zeitgiest.

Then telling POC they have no market.

While pointing to "their POC" as proof that it isn't racism , while continue to sell and market racism .

It's not even an anger issue it's a what's right and this is not it. And since our felling words and adding yet another piece of media that is silencing and violent to teh experiences of POC is not reason enough.

Maybe a hit the bottomline will be.

Pain Porn

It's been a real rough time to try and blog not so much personally rough. But rough in the 500 piece Beatle White Album puzzle.

The first thing I did at AMC was the Women's Equity Media Caucus ( which full disclosure I am still involved with for hope ) .

And my sisters
can tell you
more about that.

The inside/outside role is special in those cases.

Because you can't forget

No matter what you are IN the room. Something about you , your work your life, luck of the goddamn draw means your in the room.

And when your there your glad , sometimes cause you've arrived.

Other times because being in the room lets you know how many decisions and discussions and deals .

God the deals.

Listening to someone say I am here because I know what deals get made and I need to be here because my people get fed or not fed by these deals.

That you can't walk out , that god maybe maybe this time it won't be that again.

That inside the room you won't be outside.

And then you open your mouth, maybe you ask can we clarify gender ?

Please don't take my picture.

What black folk are you exactly talking to? How is this my rep . I didn't elect this person?

And you think people think you're an outsider like a vampire a leather jacket.

And you get there and the tension makes you ssquirm and burn because for you this is not just "awkward".

That that outside, that foreign is in the room in your body, in this chair wondering if right now it's safe to be here.

And I'm scared because I don't want to.

I don't want to become that girl with the story again.

Because when I say it someone releases someone comes to something and it feels like porn sometimes.

Pain porn a line I am stealing from witchsistah here:


That no one believes you till they come somewhere to a realization to an understanding. Safe set up distant from the dirt . Raw enough to get off on but far enough to be processed " intellectually"

" People will KILL me"

" ICE has been in my house"

" He beat me "

" People told me I was ugly every day"

" People treat me like a zoo animal now"

That climax that part of yourself that gets hurt over and over and over again

gets hurt one more time.

Pain porn. It's made on our sweat and passion and lives and it's packaged digestably into bite size bits . And really it's never good until a liquid flows.

Maybe if we are very very lucky it's just tears.

It gives a release a shake off a boost if you will.

Now you can sieze the day ,now you can believe the words,

Maybe you feel justified in the mission to save " those poor girls"

as if the problem was the porn itself, as if it was our lives that were the issue

and not the feeling that we were disposable digestable and used for certain purposes.

That peopel talk about us all the time , we're ON the agenda but we don't set it

And many of us ain't gonna do it no more.

But I

I honestly don't know.

I'm built like an ox maybe I can take it?

Maybe if I keep ending up in rooms, and saying

" No really this thing these people you keep talking about and around and planning for , NO really maybe this time you stupid stupid assholes you'll get these are people!?!?!"

That we're not a documentary where you can write about us from 64 million dollar budgets and Maybach Benzes and tell us why we shouldn't be angry about you making your name telling the world how we fail at life.

That I am real, and those immigrants are real, and those women are real and not conditional and that mama is real.

And those cuts we made and the sheer pain we feel at those sounds and the eating to feel the ground or the starving just to clock out are real real.

That maybe this screaming match about the lies you believe about us/me /this/that.

Maybe if we coallate the data and postulate and point out and figure it out one more gain we can get into the NEXT room that if we cry hard enough

We'll finally STOP having something to cry about.

Where's Aniysah

Really

What amazes me a time and time again is the level of incompetency that is not only allowable but encouraged when it comes to brown and/or poor children and their safety.

A never ending maze of unaccountability that not only is damn near impossible to navigate then blames you for that inability.

But it's not like the people in this system love their children, or these children are worth anything  to those who love them.

I mean that's what we will hear, that this is happening because no one wanted or cared for her, that that's why she is now lost.

We are looking.

Find this child