Barack Obama’s “dwindling sex appeal”: the penis and the POTUS

Two years and some change (or, depending on who you ask, nearly three years and NO change) into his presidency, Barack Obama’s policies have upset and disappointed me. I had high hopes for a President who had spent so much of his youth abroad, who was brilliant and refined, an elegant and unapologetic intellectual. In spite of Obama’s initially robust and repeated promises,  my government is still heavily embroiled in simultaneous wars for profit in the Middle East and only recently began military pull-out in Iraq. Military drone strikes – part of the increasingly nebulous Bush Administration legacy dubbed the”War on Terror”  – continue in Pakistan, killing civilians and allies. Guantanamo Bay is still open, and doesn’t appear to show any serious signs of closing, either.

I have watched the president I helped vote into office soft-pedal domestic issues like increased border security, tighter immigration restraints, and basic social services for undocumented immigrants, all in the name of reaching out to an ever-obstinant group of conservatives.  A group who had decided in November 2008 that he could do no right, and stood aside as their supporters proclaimed Obama a chimera of a bogeyman: closet socialist, fascist, and a Nazi. I have watched blatant and arguably racist acts of disrespect aimed at Obama take place on the Congressional floor.  I have watched as Sarah Palin stepped down early from her governance post in the midst of a national economic crisis, and trotted around the country with the Tea Partiers,  openly admonishing the President to “do your job.” I have watched with frustration and growing anger as Obama, seemingly in the name of diplomacy and “getting along”, pandered to folks who didn’t vote for him the first time around, and absolutely will not be doing so in 2012.   I know what it is to feel at least a little let down by the President, a man whose mind I so admire. Simply put, I voted for his brain. (Want more? Sure, ya do! Go here and read the rest.)

That is SO not post-racial!

You may have heard of Bethany Storro, the White woman in Washington State who, in August, claimed that she was attacked by an unidentified Black woman “with an athletic build” who threw acid in her face.  In spite of serious holes in Storro’s account of the incident (just for starters,  her eyes were protected by sunglasses that she was wearing at night) this story made national headlines.  While police searched for a suspect, sympathy cards came flooding in from all over the country to the hospital where Storro lay recuperating from her injuries. 

 This week, Storro confessed that she made the whole thing up, and that her injuries are self-inflicted. The Black female assailant everyone’s been looking for?  Completely fabricated.

Unbalanced White criminals blaming fictional Black perpetrators for offenses they have committed is (regrettably)nothing new. Susan Smith did it in 1994, and Charles Stuart did it in 1989…the list goes on and on. What seems to be a relatively new twist on everybody’s favorite go-to lynch mob meme is the addition of self-inflicted injuries to the roster.  Remember Ashley Todd, the McCain supporter who in 2008 claimed that she was robbed at knifepoint by a Black assailant who carved a “B” (for Barack) on her face?

Oh, and then there’s Sergeant Robert Ralston, the Philadelphia cop who shot himself and blamed it on a Black man with cornrows.  

Black men with any manner of hair were stopped and questioned by police in the Overton section of Philadelphia for about a week after the incident. Fortunately, no arrests appear to have been made in relation to the falsified report, but the potential for harm was substantial.  I mean, just imagine something like this happening with the NYPD! Oh, wait.

What fascinates me about all this is that the key to making these offenses plausible has been the addition of an imaginary Black offender. The perpetual  troping of Black people as violent and criminal (among other things) creates a myth of  constant potential White victimhood, and the more damaging and sinister countermyth of the necessity of unrelenting vigilance against Black criminality.  What troubles me more is that some White people are willing to actually invent a crime in order to have a Black person to blame it on.  Ralston, Smith and Stuart dumped their crimes at the doorstep of unidentified Black offenders to throw the police off their guilty trails. Todd and Storro made shit up with the specific intention of  vilifying Black people.  Ya know, because we don’t have it hard enough as it is. SIGH.

As saddened and outraged as I am about this, I’m not surprised. There’s bound to be at least one more case like this before the year’s out. World, get better.

A Dream Deformed: Glenn Beck marches on Washington

   

 Saturday, August 28, 2010 was an extraordinary day here in the United States.  The date marked the 55th commemoration of the lynching death of Emmitt Till. It also was the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s incredible “I Have A Dream” speech, which was arguably the single most important moment in the Civil Right’s movement of the 20th century.  And on Saturday,  Glenn Beck,  Sarah Palin, and a host of other conservative politicians and political  figures including   Michele Bachmann  and (sigh) Alveda King gathered with hundreds of thousands of their conservative supporters for a “non-political” rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  (Beck insisted that the date selection was purely coincidental.)  I watched with equal parts outrage, sadness and amusement as the Restoring Honor march/rally/hullaballo-making unfolded on Saturday. With so many politicians spear-heading and keynoting the event, if promoting a political agenda wasn’t the goal, then what was? (Do you want more? Heck yeah, ya do! Go, read, enjoy!)

Every time Glenn Beck cries, an angel gets its wings. So kick him in the shins.

Laughing Racism: Beyond the #browntwitterbird

Last week, an article in Slate entitled ”How Black People Use Twitter: The latest research on race and microblogging”   caused a  bit of a stir and some moments of sheer hilarity on Twitter and in the Black blogosphere.  The piece’s incomplete research and (unintentionally) racist and insulting tone  was noted and brought to the attention of the author himself both on Twitter and on personal blogs.  Author Farhad Manjoo’s 6-month surveillance of the Twitter habits of young Black people smacked of virtual cultural tourism.   (By the way, Manjoo defended his article, stood by his theory and flawed research, and as of this write-up, hasn’t changed his tune one whit. )

Adding insult to injury, Manjoo’s piece featured a brown redux of the classic blue (but possibly racially White, apparently) Twitter bird as a brown, oversized-cap wearing bird holding a mobile device.  (Wanna read more? Of course you do!  Click away!)

DAMN, that’s racist!

 

Can we talk about how the Israeli government’s on some bullshit now?

We didn’t talk about it when this happened. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this.  Or this.  And now, we have this.

So can we talk about it now? I mean, really. Can we talk about how condemning the actions of the Israeli government is common sense? Can we have this discussion without having it all boil down to ridiculous polarization and accusations of anti-Semitism? And can we openly condemn anti-Semitism when it does appear -because it will - and remain confident that doing so only strengthens the case for right? Can we just come the fuck out and say it when we see shit is WRONG, know that its WRONG, and call it what it is? Can we do that?  

I know that economic sanctions are just not going down (it’s a nice thought, though, isn’t it?), but appalled citizens are welcome to join the ongoing ethical boycott.  World, get better.

Tea Partiers. STILL about the stupidest motherfuckers who ever lived.

::: blink, blink :::

I know I talked about this before, but it bears repeating. I read this sign a few times with my mouth hanging open…proof positive that one can become stupefied by stupidity. Maybe that’s what these folks are going for? I don’t know. I DO know that these were the same assholes who sat with their thumbs up their apolitical butts whilst the previous administration initiated and escalated two concurrent wars-for-profit that made a small cadre of elites rich at the expense of several countries, including this one. I also know that they are LARGELY responsible for this chick’s continued relevance. 

Sarah Palin, pre-$50K makeover, no doubt in the middle of saying something incredibly stupid.

Sarah Palin stepped down from governing Alaska in the midst of a national economic crisis to hitch her moosey wagon to the Tea Party’s star and publicly admonish the President to do his job. Seriously. THAT was her plan. She quit to criticize Obama and promote her book.  Here’s what I said about that on Teh Twitteh. Parenthetically – if she insists on not fading quietly into obscurity (and she does),  can we at LEAST stop calling Sarah Palin a “pageant queen”? She won Miss Congeniality. MISS CONGENIALITY. Hell, I could win Miss Congeniality, right now, sitting here in my funky ole t-shirt and pajama pants with the hole in the crotch. I’m just saying. (Oh, and here’s the sister woman who beat her ass swept the talent portion of the Miss Alaska pageant and was crowned  Miss Alaska 1984.  Go on ahead and smirk. I am.)

Maryline Blackburn. Singer. Model. Democrat.

 One thing I’m glad about? It took the tea baggers and their more violent, extremist ”fringe” (I’d say “core” was more accurate, but okay…) to shock mainstream media out of its reluctance to call them what they are: xenophobic, anti-intellectual, racist, reactionary, anti-progress and most emphatically un-American. Oh, and stupid. Really, REALLY fucking stupid. Did I say that already? Eh. One more time couldn’t hurt.

Oh, Skip Gates. You silly bitch.

I’m at capacity for Teh Stoopid right now, so please read this summation, this hilarious take-down, and this excellent dissemination of this piece of poo.  Enjoy!

Country songs I actually like. A lot.

As some of you know, I kinda hate country music. Haaaaaaaate. Like a preacher hates the dingdang devil. I have called country music “the soundtrack to lynching.” And that’s not historically inaccurate! Growing up in the South, when I’d hear country music in an establishment, I would make the hastiest departure that I could. There’s something about the twang of a banjo that gets a lotta rednecks amped – better safe than sorry.

That said…I like these songs. Very, VERY much. And I can sing the SHIT out of every single one of ‘em. So, once again, I get to wear the hypocrite cap. Fine, whatever. Come through here and take my Black card if you want to, ahown care.  If Aretha Franklin had stopped smoking thirty years ago I wouldn’t even be looking in country music’s damn direction. Have you heard her recently? Her voice sounds like a rusty Buick tryna crank up. Anyway…here’s my songs.  Don’t judge me.

Fellow buxom, bubbly Capricorn, Mizz Dolly Parton…

And, of course, my unofficial relationship anthem (I sang this in the shower once, to the endless amusement of a certain former lover, LOL), Shania’s best.  Her twang continues to baffle me – she’s from Canada – but apparently being gorgeous covers a multitude of sins because to my knowledge no one’s ever questioned her about it. Enjoy!

REPRESENT!: B.Scott Slays With The Fabaliss

I loooooove B.Scott, and I am so thrilled that he’s coming up the way he is…just the fuck AS he is.  His “Bitch. Boo. Bye!” vlog post is one of my all time favorites.

He just radiates Southern charm (he’s from North Carolina, and yes, he’s been a gender noncomformist since childhood…and he says “dirt dauber” on a regular basis, JUST like my mama and prolly his) and grace, and I didn’t think I could love him more than I already did. And then…this!

*SQUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEE!*

 For those of you don’t get the reference:

Purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka!

Anyway, congratulations, B.Scott. You so earned it!

Still Makes Me Smile: Lisa Stansfield’s “Change”

This remains my favorite song by her.  “All Woman”  is a close second, though.  Enjoi!

Trading That “Good-Good”*: Placing Slave Rape On The Consent Continuum

PREAMBLE:   I’m neither a fan nor a follower of Touré, the person whose online shenanigans inspired this post.  I’ve said before that Twitter is gonna ruin quite a few public images and careers before it goes the way of the virtual boneyard known as MySpace; this certainly seems to be the case with him. In the span of about a year he’s gone from being a journalist I liked and respected once upon a time ago to an attention-hungry jerk  a provocateur who agitates for agitation’s sake.  If one wanted to make the argument that Touré goes out of his way to irritate Black people  they’d have quite a bit of supporting evidence.  Between referring indirectly to Michelle Obama as a “ghetto girl”,   compiling a list of sex symbols for the “thinking man” that was oddly bereft of Latina and Black women (Touré’s schoolboy gushing over “stunning blonde”  femme d’un certain age Governor Jennifer Granholm and omission of brilliant and sexy  Shakira  struck me as particularly odd - buuuuut alright), complaining on Twitter about alllll the criticism his interracial marriage (his wife is Lebanese) receives from Black folks,  asking for tips on caring for his son’s “Black” hair  because he and his wife   just don’t have the foggiest about it,  and most recently his statement that self-identified Black Latina Zoe Saldana plays “Black” (he later stated that he meant African-American), he’s drawn ire from a lot of people  - including yours truly.  Touré’s clumsy race dialogue tweets and half-assed, hyper-defensive apologies have become something of a running joke in my Twitter stream, inspiring everything from snarky hashtags  to virtual halibut smackdowns.  And there you have it, some background on “Not-Quddus.”               

Touré . Who has no idea of how to properly care for "Black" hair. (Yes. That's an Afro.**)

  Here’s where  things get interesting (and relevant to the title of this post): On March 1,  Touré  posted a series of  eyebrow-raising tweets about sexual relations between enslaved Black women and White masters. These tweets were first attributed  to his wacky, “Ph.D. candidate” cousin, who had somehow gotten a hold of his Blackberry and was causing a Twitter ruckus.   Realizing that raising the spectre of slavery-era rape by invoking the trope of the Jezebel and juxtaposing this image with contemporary prejudice faced by Black male-White female relationships was inaccurate and offensive,  Touré  wisely deleted these tweets from his feed altogether and had his “cousin” apologize - but not before said tweets were screen-captured on several sites.    

Watching the whole mess come to a rolling boil on Twitter, I noticed a disturbing theme emerging in the dialogue around the tweets.  Rape,  a sex crime typically defined by the absence of non-coercive adult consent, was redefined before  my very eyes in 140 characters or less.  A surprising (to me, anyway) number of people did not consider sexual congress that took place without the threat of immediate violence (brutal coercion) rape.  Because visuals help me think, I hastily assembled a linear color spectrum to better understand this new information. 

Child—————————————————————————————————Adult     

Enslaved——————————————————————————————Free     

Rape ———————————————————————————————————Sex   

   

The Consent Continuum. (Not great at visuals. Sorry.)

  While my idea of  consensual sex rests firmly  in the purple-indigo area of the consent continuum above, other folks seemed to veer towards the yellow-green part of the spectrum (where I’d place things like absence of physical resistance or encouragement of advances, ability to solicit favors on behalf of self or other enslaved individuals, and so on.) I read comments that argued that the legal age of consent has long been a point of contention; that people didn’t live as long back then so it made sense to become sexually active earlier; that Black people mature faster sexually (yes, someone took it there); that slaves sometimes loved their masters and so it wasn’t RAPE rape, etc.  

 The re-imagining of master-slave sexual relationships is nothing new. It is part-and-parcel of the romanticism that accompanies certain forms of revisionism in the analysis of American history.  Predictably,  Sally Hemings was raised. Hemings’ relationship with Thomas Jefferson is often touted by revisionists as the quintessential slave-master love story. During the discussions, I was dismayed to discover that most people aren’t aware that Jefferson began engaging in sexual congress with Hemings when she was in her early teens, that their children were never officially freed while Jefferson was alive, and that she herself was NEVER freed by Jefferson – not even on his deathbed. In fact, records indicate that Hemings and at least one of her relatives were sold to a nearby plantation in order to settle Jefferson’s significant gambling debts. I argued that Jefferson – by having sex with Hemings when she was a child, by being her owner, and by never freeing her – was a rapist on multiple counts. I also argued that Hemings frequently visited Jefferson’s grave after his death, and that the Abermarle county census of 1833 listed her as a free woman (she died in 1835).  I closed by stating that while it is extremely likely that Sally Hemings loved and was loved by her rapist Thomas Jefferson,  her love for him did not absolve him of his crime, because whatver benefits Hemings or any enslaved women enjoyed by virtue of her relationship with her master were entirely relative to her status as human property.*** 

With all of that in mind, let’s compare this:”…[Some enslaved women] were cunning and brilliant enough to use their bodies to gain liberation thus fooling massa.” 

To this:  

 A stereotype persists of African American women as immoral and therefore less deserving of protection from violence or sexual exploitation. In 1744, Edward Long, in an attempt to support slavery, published his conclusions about African women. He characterized them as “ignorant, crafty, treacherous, thievish, and mistrustful.” 

And this: “Of course most were raped, we know that, but some were sharp enough to trade that g00d-good for status or liberation.”   

To this: 

 Slave women were property; therefore, legally they could not be raped. Often slavers would offer gifts or promises of reduced labor if the slave women would consent to sexual relations, and there were instances where the slaver and slave shared sexual attraction; however, “the rape of a female slave was probably the most common form of interracial sex.” A slave woman explained, “When he make me follow him into de bush, what use me to tell him no? He have strength to make me.” 

Without the aid of actual documentation, musings about the daily survival of our enslaved ancestors are pure speculation. My foremothers were absolutely survivors – I’m living proof. And while I don’t like to think about everything they had to endure, I absolutely believe that in order for this country’s race relations problem to be well and truly healed, we’re gonna have to acknowledge  this and EVERY horror-filled aspect of our national legacy, square-on and courageously. This discussion and the others must take place, and they must be handled with the intelligence,  nuance, sensitivity and historical perspective that they deserve.

 

*Good-good? Really? REALLY really?

** Yes. An Afro.

*** What tends to be forgotten in these discussions is that enslavement was not a natural, immutable condition. A slave’s owner had the power to grant a slave their freedom at any time they wished - if they desired to do so.  Viriginia law did not allow freed slaves to remain in the state, and Hemings, as a free (if kept) woman would have to move to a neighboring state, away from Jefferson.  I strongly believe that Jefferson’s decision to allow Hemings to remain enslaved – in spite of his own grave concerns about the fundamental immorality of the  institituion of slavery –  was tied to his desire for her company, excluding any other possible White suitors. Your woman could leave you; your slave could not.

THIS dude.

BWAAAAHAHAHAHA! Ahhhh, it’s funny ’cause it’s true.

Monday Morning Coffee Type Joint: Amel Larrieux’s “Get Up”

Before I get this video on, two things I wish everyone knew about Ms. Larrieux:

1.) She’s not Creole. She’s the biracial child of an African-American mother and a White American father with a gotdambed French last name. And for the record, can we STOP with the whole “Creole” exoticization/Blackness-dodging grossness? And by “we” I mean Black people. Who should know better. The shit is embarrassing! /end rant

An embarrassment to Black Creole fokes everywhere.

2.) She’s living proof - if one needed it – that not all Black people can dance.   That side-to-side thing she does is…whoo, it’s sad.

Alright. Please enjoy one of my favorite songs and videos.

Oh, John Mayer. You silly bitch.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not a John Mayer fan.  To me, he’s indistinguishable from every other suburban White dude who grew up wanting to be a musician because it looked like it might lead him to some pussy. I mean, a guitar and a garage do NOT a musician make. That whole song about body wonderlanding did not make my heart melt. What can I say? I hear words like “porcelain” and “alabaster” and just tune the fuck out; you’re CLEARLY not talking to my sexy brown self, so all we are is in each other’s way. Don’t even get me started on that ridiculous and vaguely creepy song about daughters.  ::: shudders ::: 

Ah, but Johnny, being the jackhole that he is, felt it necessary to elaborate in a recent interview with Playboy, where he basically dropped the n-bomb with abandon and said he wasn’t really interested in experiencing the joys of the cocoa honeypot. (Because, ya know, that’s all Black women are good for. SIGH.)  Now, since Strom Thurmond basically used to say the same thing, I’m giving the statement full-on side-eye.  The lovely Thembi covered this (hilariously) already*, so no need for me to waste time on it.  Because this whole mess feels familiar, I thought it might be a good idea to cross-post Jay Smooth’s take on the Asher “Nappy Headed Hos” Roth and the dangers of becoming too comfortable. LORD.

(*Mayer refers to himself as a “douche” in this interview.  I think he has function envy. But that’s just me.)