First, state your credentials. It’s okay to be a woman, but not a black woman. Their lived experiences are immaterial and can be dismissed as merely anecdotal. Make it clear that you are not racist or sexist, you are merely concerned about their plight. What plight? Well, pick one. Or several. Marriage, children, lack of [...]
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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 [...] One of the things I think progressives who ignore history don’t understand is that just like racism is taught, so is distrust. Especially in Af-Am households where our parents & grandparents who have lived through Jim Crow, Cointelpro, Reaganomics, & the War on Drugs (better titled the War on Inner City [...] 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. [...] My sons are 12 & 5. They’re black. Male. Adorable. Sweet. Sarcastic. Silly. Oh sure, my oldest is biracial, but he can’t pass for anything but light skinned black male. And he chooses to ID as black. Some of that is probably about his biological father’s abandonment & his subsequent attachment to his black stepfather. [...] 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. [...] 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 [...] Back in 2009, I wrote a post about race & self-identification and how being Black & X is treated differently than any other form of being multiracial. (The comments were special & filled with wank from someone determined to insist that being multiracial in America is just one overarching experience.) At the time I was [...] A thing I’m noticing in pop culture is this idea that black women can’t be traumatized by anything that happens to them. Usually when a female character is sexually assaulted/kidnapped/abused it works to make the audience sympathetic to that character. We certainly see that trope enough in books/movies/TV shows with white characters. In fact such [...] jhameia: “Dressing up as ‘a Native American’ furthers the already popular notion that they aren’t real, diverse, complex human beings. There’s a reason that dressing up as a white guy isn’t nearly as effective on Halloween; there’s no ho… |
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Copyright © 2005 - 2012 The Angry Black Woman - This blog and associated pages are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Header Images: "Angela Davis" by Jesus Barraza of dignidadrebelde.com | Sojourner Truth monument. Text from her “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech. |
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