I’m about to get in my feelings as a black mother about this bullshit unsolicited advice to Blue Ivy Carter. I freely admit that I do not give even a tiny bit of a fuck about whatever literary conceits are about to be defended as part of justifying it. Because this letter was not written in a vacuum. This letter was not written out f any genuine concern for her health or safety. This letter was little more than a stunt that used a child of color & her parents to bolster a career. Yes I am sure she will say she meant no harm or disrespect. That she was trying to say good things to Blue Ivy, because she wants to help. Some will likely even say that her message was positive & for the best. Guess what?

We do not exist in a world where mothers of color can walk around without someone passing judgement on their right to be mothers simply because of the color of their skin. We do not live in a world where a woman of color becoming a mother is supported or respected. We do not exist in a world where white women who think they know best have not harmed families of color. We live in a world where white women often decide to “rescue” children of color by taking them from their homes, their cultures, and their mothers. So when a white woman decides she is “helping” by addressing a child of color she does not know as though her words will have any value to that child? I am already wary.

The fact that she is speaking to a newborn about topics that are emphatically none of her damned business & are in fact the province of that child’s parents just makes it even more offensive. It is a curious sort of racist White Woman’s Burden logic that allows you to engage with mothers of color in ways that would be patently offensive to you if the tables were turned. I have seen white mothers of children of color get deeply offended when conditioner and oil are suggested as remedies for the “unmanageable” hair of their child. Often that suggestion comes while they stare at the hair of our children and want to know how we get it to behave.

Meanwhile you often feel entitled to speak to us of everything from religion to sex as though we do not have our own morals to impart to our children. I have had my own share of “helpful” white women who do not know me, but who feel quite comfortable questioning my parenting decisions on every front. Over the last 12 years I have had unsolicited input from those women on everything from what I feed my son with food allergies, to how much responsibility I give to my son with special needs. These are not white women who are my friends, not women who my children know well, these are not even white women who have set foot in my house.

Instead they are little more than strangers (or in some cases employees at a child care facility) with little direct contact with my children. But they feel their input is worthwhile because I am black and a mother, and clearly I can’t know what I’m doing. Here is a thought for those white women who feel the need to approach mothers of color, or their children with unsolicited advice. Don’t. Really, just strangle whatever urge it is that drives you to behave so offensively, and practice the fine art of minding your own damned business. You are not our elders, our partners, or in fact in part of our lives. You do not know what is best for our children, or how we should raise them to survive in a racist society that allows your children safety & security that our children will never know. Spend more time teaching your kids (and yourself) how to engage with people of color as people, and less time finding ways to stroke your egos by attacking ours.

Dear White Women Who Think You Mean Well, -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

This is a Facebook message I just found hidden in my inbox (sometimes Facebook’s habit of hiding messages works out in a person’ favor), from someone named Cameron Baird. I know people usually blot out the names of people who say ignorant things on Facebook. But, so much of my life went on display after Salon picked up my post about my medical abortion that I don’t feel like letting people like this hide from their words. For those using screen readers the image is a racist comment about me & my appearance and my history of medical care that reads:

[Cameron Baird

You the lying nigger bitch that wanted a free abortion? What I can't figure out is how your ugly ass got pregnant!!!! Your old man blind? Fuck you you lying cunt. How many babies have you left on the floor so far?]

This isn’t the only message like this one I’ve gotten, & for a long time I wasn’t going to post any of them. But time & distance seem to have thickened my skin up a little bit. This is what happens when you are a black woman who blogs about her life & people don’t like what you have to say.

-- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I’ve seen a lot of posts talking about OWS, police brutality, race, gender, & intersectionality. Many of those posts include links to the famous stories of police brutality. And those stories are important & should be told. But, by only talking about those stories I worry that we’re giving the impression that police brutality is relatively rare in communities of color. I’ve posted in the past about the cop who called me a nigger when I was 12 & the time my (then) 13 year old husband was beaten up by a cop. But, those weren’t our only run ins with abusive police officers. Experience has taught me to worry about the cops. I think of them as a risk to navigate more than I think of them as people who are here to protect me or my family. My husband & I have already had the talks with our oldest son about how to act when he’s stopped by the cops. Notice I said when he’s stopped.

That’s because I have been stopped while doing everything from taking a walk to grocery shopping to helping someone move. My father in law runs a Medicar service that primarily caters to the elderly who need help getting from their homes to doctor’s appointments. My husband used to ride along to help him out, since it’s a family business. One day they were stopped by the police because some cop decided a white van leaving a hospital on the West Side of Chicago fit the description of a tan truck that had been involved in a robbery in the Loop. They forced them out of the vehicle at gunpoint while a bunch of elderly people watched & worried. When it became clear that they didn’t fit the description? The cops told them they were free to go and left. That’s it. No apology, no consideration for all the people in the vehicle, but then everyone involved was a POC.

Matter of fact, let me tell you about Kourtney Wilson. I’ve known her since she was a teenager. She’s a nice young lady who unfortunately has lupus. Two years ago she had a seizure, her roommate dialed 911 & when the paramedics came (despite being told about her health status), they manhandled her & had the police arrest her.  As if that wasn’t bad enough they took her all over the place (two different precinct houses & two different hospitals) so that she was denied medical treatment for 9 hours. Think about that for a second. NINE HOURS after she had the seizure she finally got the help she needed. And that’s a case that only made the local news & the blogosphere before vanishing into the Wayback machine to be dug up by people like me with a reason to know her name. Imagine being afraid to call an ambulance when someone you love needs one because they could be arrested for being sick. Imagine being killed in your own home like Kathryn Johnston or Aiyana Jones. Imagine being harassed or having a gun pulled on you just because you’re going about your day while being of color.

We don’t have to be at a protest, or actually fit the description of a suspect to have a negative interaction with the police. Officers like John Burge have tortured POC into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit & gotten away with it for decades. We know the police cannot be trusted. So, to see the police using pepper spray on protestors, or going out dressed in riot gear to evict them from encampments? Not at all a shock. I know some will say “Well now we know, & we’re trying to fix it for everyone” but you’ll pardon me if I don’t buy that the changes OWS is fighting for will extend to POC. Not when every time someone brings up race and OWS there is invariably a “It’s not about race, it’s about class. Why are you being divisive?” response from multiple people. POC of every class have to be concerned with the possibility of police brutality, & until OWS addresses that reality, how can it represent the entire 99%?

On Police Brutality, Living While Of Color, & Why Brutality At OWS isn’t Shocking -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I can remember the very first time someone called me a nigger. I was 12 years old and in the 8th grade. I was walking from the gifted program at Kenwood high school in Chicago back to Kozminski, my grammar school. I wasn’t alone, there were 5 of us that walked that way every day. Two boys and three girls. All kind of nerdy, but with delusions of coolness ahead in high school. And every day these two cops stopped us, and made us late getting to our regular school. They always asked the same questions, and we always gave the same answers. This day, for some reason or another they were really dragging out the BS & one of the guys with me made a comment about them making us late every day.

One of the cops was a white male who always seemed super angry that we were coming from the advanced program, and he took Larry’s offhand comment as backtalk. Next thing you know he’s got the boys on the ground, and is talking about arresting them. Being me (I was born a smart ass know it all), I said they hadn’t committed any crimes, and that he couldn’t do that to them. His response? He shoved his hand in my face and yelled “You uppity little nigger, don’t you talk to me that way!” It was loud. Loud enough that it drew the attention of an adult in the store on the corner. He came out to see what was going on, and the cops took off.

We’d never told anyone about the daily harassment, and while we were explaining ourselves to the store’s owner he told us to go to school, and tell our principal everything. Our school was only another few blocks away, so we booked it thinking that the cops might show up again. They didn’t. In fact we never saw them again.

I’d like to say they realized the error of their ways, but I suspect that it had more to do with us telling our story, and the principal calling our parents, Operation PUSH, the local alderman, and the precinct captain. Probably in that order, and probably with a threat to involve the media. That wasn’t the last time someone called me a nigger, it wasn’t even the scariest time someone said it to me. But, it was the time I remember the most vividly, because it came from an adult that we were supposed to be able to trust.

So, when people claim that Woman is The Nigger of The World? I want them to remember that not every woman is going to be called a nigger. Trust me, if I could give that word up I would, I certainly don’t want it. But I can’t, and I refuse to pretend that what happened to me could happen to a white woman. I can’t even give a rough estimate of how many times I’ve been called a nigger. Online it happens fairly often from people I’ve pissed off & trolls. Offline, people are less willing to say it to my face, but I know it’s still getting said. I have no idea why it is so important to be able to use that word for some people, but they really want to use it. Okay. Use it.

But, be prepared for possible consequences. I don’t care if you were joking, your black friend is okay with it, you didn’t mean it the black way, or whatever other dumb shit you want to tell yourself to justify it. At best? We’ll all know you’re untrustworthy as an ally, and we’ll probably assume you’re racist. (Trust me, no one gives a shit about your intent when you’re spouting racial slurs.) At worst? Well…you should have health and dental. Really good health & dental. Racism can be expensive.

On Being An Actual Nigger Woman -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

I have a lot of black men in my life that I love. My husband, my sons, my nephews, my friends…I’m crying right now so this may be scattered. Any of the men I love could be Troy Davis. My husband’s first brush with the law was at 13 when a cop beat him up. Didn’t arrest him. Didn’t even tell him why he hit him. He was playing with friends one minute & being beaten the next. Think about that for a minute. No crime was committed. The cop didn’t explain, and nothing happened to that cop for that incident. Sit with that for a moment. Now, let us consider that 7 of the 9 witnesses that originally testified against Troy Davis have reported police coercion as a factor. Let that sink into your soul for a second. Any of them could be alone, dying in pain, for a crime that no will ever be sure they committed. I look at my sons and I try to imagine the pain of knowing that they are hurting and I will not even be allowed to comfort them as they go into the dark and then I get hysterical. If you are feeling any kind of urge to claim race was not a factor in this? Don’t. Really, I need you to kindly shut the fuck up and let black people mourn this lynching. Let us come to terms once more with just how dangerous it is to be black in America. You won’t give us justice, so how about you give us some silence?

RIP Troy Davis Time of death 11:08pm -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

One of the great things about the internet is how it lets people do things like exchange information. In many ways it has replaced things like the Green Book or word of mouth for transmitting info about places where stopping for more than gas (or stopping at all) wouldn’t be safe, where hotels will be welcoming, & where to avoid after certain times/at certain points of the year. Folks pass around info about where to find food/clothes/cocoa butter as well as what job markets are likely to be more welcoming and/or to require you to be a token in fact if not in name. This is important information. And yes, this information may make you feel something…unpleasant when you have to confront our view of the towns where you like to spend summers or where you grew up or whatever. Guess what? I feel something unpleasant when I can’t stop to pee for 50 miles because even though Jim Crow is over, no one in my car wants to risk a fight/jail/death because I forgot to tinkle in the last place we saw brown people walking around. Sundown towns had to put away their signs, but that doesn’t mean they had to put away their attitudes.

So, as you’re seeing these conversations roll across your screen, you may feel a need to jump in the middle & explain how that one family in that one town isn’t like that so we shouldn’t lump them in with the 35 other families in that town that are like that. Unless that one family in that one town is going to provide me with an armed escort? I don’t care about them. I care about the motherfuckers that might think it’s a fun game to run me over. And if you think that could only happen in the South? You haven’t been paying attention to where all those police brutality cases come up. Or what happens when POC go missing. Here’s a hint: Except for our friends & family no one really seems to bother raising a hue & cry over our disappearance.

Now, I know there are about to be some more feelings splattered all over the place because I wrote this post. Feel free to have them. You can even share them with me if you must, but do please give us all a break from your need to get in the middle of other conversations to insist that because your white self is safe in these predominately white spaces all other bodies are safe too. I’m sure you’ve never seen any racism in that all white neighborhood/town/region. That doesn’t mean it’s not there, that just means no convenient target has presented itself when you’re around.  Now, if you want to do something to change the impressions of these places? Don’t waste energy arguing with us to go against all common sense. Go talk to your neighbors/cousins/friends about exactly why POC avoid the places where they live. You know why I advise you to do that? Because it would actually be a step toward resolving the problem, instead of continuing to ignore it in favor of hoping that we’ll make it go away. Pro tip: The people who are the targets of bigots aren’t the ones with the problem.

Dear White Privileged People: This Post Is Not About Your Needs -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

This pledge is titled, “THE MARRIAGE VOW: A Declaration of Dependence Upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY.” … To their partial credit, their pledge opens by acknowledging that one cannot claim to defend marriage without focusing on the high divorce rate, broken families, infidelity and other challenges (besides THE GAYS) “threatening” traditional marriage. … To their discredit, the first bullet point is:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

This is the point at which my brain started to bleed from the anger + incredulousness + assault by batshittery.

Why stop at two-parent households? Let’s celebrate the free housing, healthcare and meal plan offered to every black slave! You know what else slavery did for black people? Exercise! Oh it was just great! We even got to work outside. Speaking of work, today, African-American unemployment is over 16 percent. In Milwauke, Wisc., over one-third of black men are unemployed. But during slavery times, every black man had a job! See, things were better in the past, and now things are bad. Ah, the good old days…

Scope whole thing over at Baratunde Thurston’s blog.

From The Angry Black Tumblr | Comment below or Reblog @ Tumblr

This has been linked everywhere but I’m going to post it again because everything he says is true and this needs a signal boost to the sky.

Perhaps when our alien overlords do finally come, they will spare some of us because of this man.

Baratunde Thurston Lays It All Out For America -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Today in my class we were trying to learn a camera technique. We decided to use funny youtube videos to illustrate the proper way to shoot the scenes we wanted. And my classmates decided that the Antoine Dodson videos were such GREAT candidates because man, wasn’t he SO FUNNY?!?!? I tried to point out the fact that he was talking about his sister’s rape. The response? They didn’t mind that, they were not laughing at him (o rly?) and my personal favorite…”At least he has a sense of humor about it”. And then they went on to discuss dressing up as him on fucking HALLOWEEN.

And this wasn’t just the white kids. There were the other black kids in on this, who thought it was just as funny as the white kids did. After all, isn’t he black and gay and lowerclass and acting in ways not coded masculine? Isn’t that so uncomfortable for us middleclass folk?And his actions and his way of expressing himself became the goddamn story, instead of WHAT he was saying, which was that he was pissed at his sister being almost raped. Hell his sister was written out of the story entirely, so that we the class privileged, we who act our genders as society dictates, we racially privileged, we the women who want to want to believe that rape will not happen to us because we live/work/walk/drive in the right places could laugh. because rape is so fucking funny. because standing up for your sister’s right to lie in her fucking bed without being targeted is so fucking funny. hell it’s not even worthy of note, because your brother’s method of expression is not societally sanctioned and that is much more important than the fact that this fucking culture has a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM IN THAT RAPE IS UBIQUITOUS AND NEEDS TO BE FUCKING STOPPED. Oh i forget. women are not really human are they? Especially if they are poor. Even worse if they are of color. Immigrants. Prostitutes. Women come in classes, people and dignity and humanity are a zerosum game.

And anyway, he got money from it! (After we made it quite clear that we as a society would completely refuse to take him seriously, to busy reinforcing our class, race, gender presentation and other privileges to see the humanity in a woman being attacked and her brother coming to her aid. They are not worth society’s outrage and protection are they? Of course not.) Hell, even BET, got into the fun. They brought him on to make him perform the “Bed Intruder” Song. Yes, yes they did. A young woman’s near rape was turned into fucking entertainment for the “best and brightest” at the “premier” black awards show!!!!

Oh, and just to make this situation even MORE fucked up, Mr. Dodson is a rape victim himself.

And this is how the mainstream news proceeded to frame it:

Like many, Dodson is hoping to take his 15 seconds of celebrity and turn it into a greater opportunity. “I just want to be the voice of people who are going through similar situations that have gotten their case swept under the rug,” he says. “Most of my fans are victims of rape and molestation and they reach out to me anyway so I just talk to them and comfort them. I try to tell them the ways that I dealt with it because I’m a rape victim myself.”

Because its HIS fault that that the society found this fucking FUNNY and made him into a famous internet meme.

You know what? Other people have taken apart this situation way better than I can:

Think twice

think twice before you laugh at antoine dodson. i know everything is supposed to take a backseat to short-lived fame and exposure. but how would you feel if your sister was attacked by a rapist and people did nothing about it? officials laughed at you, police took their time coming to investigate, media crews didn’t arrive until you called them, and then your time on the news gets spoofed to entertain others instead of warn them. antoine’s taking his time in the spotlight in stride, and i think he’s doing it for kelly’s sake. i hope all the people laughing and singing “hide your kids, hide your wife” are writing all of the people in kelly’s community and state to do something about catching the rapist.

i planned to write about this at feministe, fast on the heels of the gang rape of a 12-year-old at a nearby skatepark. what does it mean when you read about attack after attack after attack, and one of the thoughts in your head is “i hope no one auto-tunes something like this” or “how can this story garner more attention than it’s gotten,” when these stories should be enough to knock ten people on their asses with grief.MORE

Flava Of The Month?: The Antoine Dodson Aftermath

By now many of us know how the story started: on the morning of July 28th, a man broke into the Dodson home in Huntsville, Ala. and, according to Antoine’s sister Kelly, attempted to assault her in her bedroom. As originally reported by WAFF-TV, Antoine struggled with the assailant, who subsequently escaped.

The first thing to note is that WAFF’s original story was not a live-shot. Meaning both the reporter, Elizabeth Gentle, and her editors had virtually the entire business day to get an interview with either a police spokesperson or the crime scene investigator shown at the scene to add to the story and respond to Antoine’s allegation about there being “a rapist in Lincoln Park” – for instance, had there been similar incidents in the area as of late? Gentle also had time to get a description of the alleged assailant from either the Dodsons or the police department, information that would be useful when the suspect in a forced entry and attempted sexual assault is still at large.

Instead, as you can see, the bulk of the story is devoted to capturing Antoine’s anger. And while the visceral emotion might have made for “compelling television,” that kicked off the most disturbing part of this entire affair. While it’s possible this is because of her own choice, Kelly Dodson, the original victim of the assault, became a non-factor in the story. In fact, WAFF aired a follow-up story that completely ignored her and focused on the online fuss surrounding Antoine, while absolving itself of any fault for its’ own reporting:MORE

On Feminism, Liberals, Black Folks and Antione Dodson

In the midst of this institutional racism are the actions of three groups that cannot be ignored:

1. the viewers and listeners who openly mocked Dodson, completely ignoring the rape survivor narrative embedded in his story
2. the white middle class hipster-nerd comedy troupe that made money off of the rape and attempted rape of poor black women and girls and the one man willing to stand up for them
3. the mainstream feminist blogs and feminist communities who have remained largely silent on Dodson’s sister despite the core issue of rape

The multi-racial viewers and listeners spent their time laughing at Dodson and mocking him and his sister in print in the youtube comments for days. The video received some of the largest hits of the week when it first went up. The auto-tune version played black radio stations and a black marching band even set did their own rendition, laughing at the “ghetto” in ways that I personally cannot excuse as black humor as survival but rather black humor as classism and internalized hate. Amongst the 100,000s of people commenting on Dodson or the autotune song, very few talked about the heinous act of rape, the existence of a serial rapist in the area that had gone unchecked for an unspecified amount of time, or the engineered tragedy of the state’s willingness to abandon poor women and girls to predators. In other words, the chance to mock an uneducated black man was more enticing than the fact of violence against women and girls. MORE

Finally we hear from Kelly Dodson video at link with full transcript

Kelly: (unintelligible) There’s really not much that I can say right now because I don’t know how to explain it to you because you really did a lot of damage to me whether you know it or not and if it wasn’t for Antoine, you probably would have got what you came in there for but you didn’t. I just want to know how you feel about the situationMORE

and The accidental fame of Kelly and Antoine Dodson has a different perspective on the subject:

Even though the whole debacle can be seen by some through the lens of “poverty porn,” this can also be viewed in another light. A light that by instead of being stoic and polished, the Dodsons actually got more attention for their plight and the issue of crime in poor communities BECAUSE people found the clip unintentionally funny. Antoine’s message was received (“Obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park …”) and the community took notice.

Said Kenyatta Cheese of KnowYourMeme.com to NPR:

“Kelly and Antoine may be victims but they are fearless,” Kenyatta told me. “They both take control of the camera and call out their attacker. They issue a call to action telling people in their community to look out for the perpetrator. And yes, Antoine may not seem traditionally articulate, but he uses his time on camera to be performative and create spectacle and that gets our attention. In that sense, he’s probably more effective in getting his message out there than a more traditional community ‘representative’ would ever be.

“To me, Antoine Dodson is brilliant.”

MORE

The last time I checked, Mr. Dodson had used the proceeds of “The Bed Intruder Song” to move the entire family to a safer neighbourhood and is planning to go back to school. The spotlight isn’t on Kelly Dodson as much, so I am not not able to discern what she is going to do.

Rape is a multifaceted problem, and it happens not only because someone decides to overpower and forcefully assault a weaker person, but because society condones it. And the lower you are on US societal heirarchy, the less society gives a fuck a fuck about your safety and wellbeing. This series of linkspams will try to examine the various ways in which society’s prejudices help to perpetuate the rape culture in the US (with an occasional piece on Canada).

Rape Culture USA: How race, class, misogyny and homophobia intersected in the Kelly and Antoine Dodson story -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Okay, so I think we all know about Taylor Swift being interrupted last year at the VMA’s right? Right. Kanye West caught all kinds of hell for it, and even for his subsequent apologies. So, then why is the video I linked her performance from this year’s show? You can’t convince me that you don’t want to talk about the past when you do a performance all about it. Barefoot, standing like a broken doll, and all but crying your way through the whole thing. Ooh, a whole stage show geared to present this image of delicate white femininity while you sing about your innocence being violated. By a scary black man.

Gee, that’s not a coded message we’ve seen before at all. Oh wait, let’s talk about the idea of white people feeling violated by black people “not knowing their place” and what that’s meant historically to American society. Better yet, let’s really dig down into why we’re singing about violated innocence like being interrupted on stage is at all equivalent to being physically assaulted. Oh, but then we might have to get into who interrupted her and whether this would be such a big deal if the racial makeup was different.

I’m certain someone will swear she didn’t mean to stir up the kind of images that she did. Especially in this “post racial” society. Which, if we were remotely post-racial might hold some water. Not a lot. But some. As we’re not actually post anything? Intent (or lack thereof) only carries so much weight before it doesn’t matter why you’re encouraging the same virulent hate that spewed last year in the immediate aftermath of Kanye’s bad manners. Yes, I said bad manners. Because being rude is what he’s guilty of and not much else. He’s a jackass with issues that he let spill all over her big moment. That sucks. But, that’s not a reason to still be playing the victim a year later and using dog whistle racism as a subtext in your performance.

Taylor Swift’s paean to being Kanye’s “victim” makes me want to roll my eyes at her routine as well as some of the reactions to it. Because if this what happens when someone is rude to a white woman in public we really haven’t come past race at all. Not even a little bit. In fact, while we’re on the subject of coded language and images let’s talk about the phrase “White Women’s Tears” and why it seems to be both problematic and accurate in this situation. There’s a case that could be made for inherent misogyny in the way the phrase is used. After all Taylor’s feelings were undoubtedly hurt and she’s got a right to express that pain right? Right. So, as a musician she expresses those emotions in the way that best suits her and we shouldn’t read more into it than her telling her side of the story.

Except she’s not expressing those emotions in a vacuum, and she’s well aware of the racial subtext after a year of her fans using racial epithets about Kanye at every turn. She’s had a year to debut this song (especially since according to her camp she wrote it in her diary last year) but she held onto it for a publicity stunt last night. There’s some complicated historical and social subtext tangled up in the use of tears this way, and in the reaction to those tears. It’s a subtext that makes the phrase “White Woman’s Tears” a convenient shorthand for a situation that boils down to a white woman wielding her tears as a weapon against a POC. We’re back to intent and the question of whether those tears (genuine or otherwise) and their ability to derail and/or escalate a situation can be separated out from the emotions that may be prompting them.

Personally, I look at the reaction to Kanye’s interruption of Taylor Swift and I think that we have a long way to go before the major concern is the terminology and not the act. But then, I’m not a white woman and my tears don’t have any power so I’m obviously biased by my experiences with the phenomenon. This time the goal of the tears is likely to generate some more sympathy, but we can’t ignore the death threats against him that were generated a year ago, or the ones that might have been generated tonight.

ETA: So, a further dissection of the lyrics was called for by a few commenters on another blog. And I went digging. Okay, let’s assume she’s not singing about her violated innocence and the whole song is about Kanye. That’s…not an improvement. We’ve still got her stage show based around White Damsel (love that one by the way), poorly written lyrics (I recognize that this one was a given) that left me and whole lot of other people thinking she was singing about herself with a verse aimed at Kanye, and for an added bonus she’s infantilizing a grown man. So we’re right back to coded images, complete with a White Man’s Burden’esque routine about about childlike black people. Again, in a country with a long history of using such images to justify terrible things. Since I know someone will claim (and probably already has) that any complaining is just proof that Taylor Swift cannot win with “those people” let me point out that mashing up one racist coded image with another isn’t exactly new or any less offensive. The truth is she cannot win as long as she’s using racism as currency. Once people stop doing that? Everyone wins.

Son of ETA: I’m sorry we lost all the comments in the hacking, but people are free to have at it again if they like.

White Women, Tears, and Coded Images (Repost) -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman