Heart Reached.

 

 

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Heart Reached.

via The Crunk Feminist Collective by moyazb on 5/24/10

Dear Janelle Monáe,

Wow. Your album reminds me of something Mdot always says: Black girls are from the future.

I've been a fan since forever, like since before you and I existed in present forms. The dorm tour, Dark Tower days, a jam session at Chuck Lightning's… for real a magical night that is the stuff of grandparent "when I was in college…" lore.

Its been amazing to see you come into yourself, like the magnificent sculpture that emerges from a lustrous wood and the work of a fine crafter. You were/are before your time.

With ArchAndroid, I've been transported and transformed.

What you and your wonder twin have done this year for music is like what Octavia did for Afro-futurism before she transitioned.

Prophets heralding a new world era where black women, clothes on or stripped bare are changing the game.

Having a wonder twin and twin myself, I really love that way of naming your relationship to Erykah Badu.  Where as she sometimes gives an audience a thread to hold onto in the way of a sample or familiar phrase while gently pulling us by the heart and third eye to the future, you ask that we tip on it, take a risk and jump; sink or swim, fall or fly. Well luckily I am properly prepared, newly reminded that I'm 20 feet tall and I can jump up in the air and stay there.

ArchAndroid reminds me to reach for my higher self, that my playing small does not serve the world. It reminds me why I started quirky black girls and what I want for us.

I am so grateful for your words, the precision of your art, and the divine intention that your work reveals. You are a patternmaster, catching and transforming us with every note you sing.

You reached my heart.

Sincerely,

Moya B.

P.S. I loved your interview on 106 & Park! Also like your wonder twin, you seem to short the circuits of conspicuous consumption and groupthink. I love that you wear that tuxedo to honor your family and the girls who look up to you; A uniform for the cold war. Thanks again for reminding us to reevaluate.

 

 

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Dear Kiely, Pt. II

Hello Kiely,

I hope all is well in your world. I came across a short movie that reminded me of a question I'd asked in my initial letter to you. I wanted to know what a consensual one night stand without a walk of shame might look like.

Take a look; I think it's pretty awesome.

Obvious Child from Gillian Robespierre on Vimeo.

It'd be nice to see people of color make a film like this, no?

Best,

Moya B

All the Single Ladies… are 7

 

 

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All the Single Ladies… are 7

via The Crunk Feminist Collective by moyazb on 5/16/10

I don't really watch mainstream news so it took a friend to bring the 7 year old single ladies to my attention. Have you heard? A pack of surprisingly skilled Orange County 7-9 year olds shaking what they don't have to Beyonce's unrelenting anthem Single Ladies at a dance competition went viral on the interwebs.

CNN, ABC, MTV, E!, have all been talking about how far is too far as they play the video of the girls in nearly nothing on a loop, in between reporting on Miley Cyrus' lecherous lap dance, the latest drama on The Hills, Teen Cribs, and commercials for age defying skin cream. Not to mention, one too many bloggers said the routine made them feel dirty and uncomfortable. Needless to say, not one of these entities takes any responsibility for contributing to our youth and sex obsessed culture, nor the inevitable merger of these two larger than life forces in media. Can we really feign surprise at the hypersexualization of seven year olds when just a few years later they are used to sell any and everything in ads and on runways around the world?

Bey's video is pretty tame compared to what some (white) choreographer taught these white girls to do. Her video is built on the 1960′s Bob Fosse choreographed, Gwen Verdon danced Mexican Breakfast; middle aged white women prancing around a studio does not exactly equal risque. The parents claim that Sasha is just too fierce for their girls and that they got the moves from Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel. You be the judge (I'm giving serious side eye to the parents). And how is it possible that Bey & Co's outfits are less revealing than the 7 year olds? Which soccer mom stitched those costumes together? And if perhaps in their lust for a trophy, in their craze for victory, they hired a black choreographer or had a brown person sew those tiny nymphet outfits by hand, its still connected to the white privilege of parents who employ people of color to sex up their seven year olds.

I mean lets be honest, part of the reason white folks are upset is because its white girls killing those suggestive dance moves. I did some youtube research and found numerous videos of little black and brown girls doing their best to put a ring on it but none of them quite compare to the tour de force that is this routine. They didn't invoke a public outrage or garner CNN coverage.  When a group of equally young brown boys and girls, spurred on by cheering adults,  do some dancing of their own it didn't make the evening news. So why is the nation up and arms suddenly about children being sexualized? It begs the question, whose children?

This pattern is visible with more serious things like missing children, childhood sexual abuse and child murders. White children are eagerly searched for and black children may not even make the evening news. This disparity in dance however has been marked by other bloggers before without interest from mainstream media.

In addition to the way whiteness is operating in this story, the technical skill of the girls is part of the reason this story has captured the national imagination. Little kids trying to do grown up things is one thing but little girls successful execution of straight up stripper dance moves is something else.

Unlike their brown and black contemporaries on youtube, little Jamie and Allison aren't doing it for love, they have to win. In an age where upper and middle class helicopter parents are paying Olympic coaches to train their children in team sports, a 7 year old's reproduction of Annie at the school talent show just doesn't cut it. If winning means more sex in the routine, fewer clothes, no mistakes, parents are willing to teach their kids to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Good to know you've got them learning the important life lessons so early; win at all costs.

I think what one of the father's says is true. I think the girls don't know what they are doing, aren't particularly clear on how their dance moves are being interpreted by the masses. I think they are having fun, excited that they can mimic the movements of adult women. Unfortunately, in this world we live in, its really hard for their accomplishments to be celebrated because of how their movements and outfits are so sexualized.

But I'm not surprised. American culture sexualizes children just as it infantilizes women every day. Bieber Fever is professed by women of all ages, male bloggers created a countdown clock to when the Olsen Twins turned 18, and as soon as girls get body hair they are learning how to remove it. We say we don't want children to be sexualized too early but we allow advertisers and media to use sex to sell EVERYTHING and then act shocked when children pick it up or parents use sex to give their kids a competitive edge in a dance competition.

This has everything to do with consumption. Who is consuming these 7 year old sexualized bodies and for what ends? We say we don't want our kids sexualized but we love to tease pre-schoolers about having boyfriends and girlfriends when they can barely talk, we make bikinis for babies, sexify children's cartoon characters and yet we still refuse to talk to our children about sex. All of this and we still feed children the myth that sexual predators are out there somewhere and not in our neighborhoods, intimate relationships, and families. All of this as we pretend that people who abuse children are "sick individuals" as opposed to people we know shaped by the world we created. All of this and we teach children that its their responsibility to defend themselves from "bad touches" from strangers as we dangle sexuality in their faces, or have them dance in ways that are overtly sexual. All of this and we have the audacity to pretend that none of it is connected.

What will it take for us as a society to say that we care more about people than profits? Children than competition? Where will we draw the line and begin the serious work of examining culture and the way it informs the way we behave?

 

 

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Blogging Against Disableism

 

 

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Blogging Against Disableism

via Quirky Black Girls by MB on 5/2/10

I wrote this last year for BADD and it's still true. I want to highlight it again in light of what's happening in AZ, the fact that the Atlanta protest had just a handful of black folks and others marching in solidarity with an almost entirely Latino crowd, and the fact that movements really need to figure out how to connect to each other. I hope this piece will ring a little less true 2011.

So I've been reading the blogs for Blogging Against Disablism Day 2009 (2010) and I'm overwhelmed with the daily violences enacted through ableism. So much of ableism seems to be connected to a capitalistic understanding of the body, i.e. the body is a tool for generating capital in the world as constructed by temporarily able bodied people. There's no understanding or room for folks who challenge the very structure of our social structure with the ways they move (or don't) through the world.

I've been trying to imagine a different world, one in which "work" was not assumed to be a requirement for anyone. Instead of thinking in terms of what people can do, it would be about how people care for one another and the earth. How can we each do a bit to care for each other and help sustain each other and help sustain the things that help sustain us (plants, animals, ecosystems, etc.)? A radical decentering of humans is necessary, and even how we understand humanity has to shift too right?

Critiques of temporarily able bodied or nondisabled bodied folks fears of disability, particularly drugs and disability, really reached me. I wonder about my own problematic beliefs about drugs and my desire not to use them, my own belief in an evil consumerist big pharma selling sickness to the world. And I wonder if this might be a both/and. That I am both ableist in my thinking that I'm a wimp for needing tylenol for cramps every month but biomedical interests need some serious critique for testing in Africa, patenting plant compounds that indegenous communities have been using for centuries, and over medicating the world. Isn't some disability the by product of oppressive capitalism and other isms, like racism, sexism, and ageism?

As today was also May Day, Labor Day, International Workers' Rights Day, I was thinking about the connections between the two and how these blog communities seem so segregated. Race is rarely mentioned in these disability blogs. Class, gender, and even sexuality come through more clearly than race. Yet if we investigate, we see that most of these bloggers are white. Most of these bloggers live in the US and UK. White is a race. Race matters. This always makes me wonder.

I have a lot of people in my family with disabilities, though none of them would consider themselves disabled. In talking with another radical woman of color, it seems that disability is so the "norm" in our communities, it's often not marked as an identity unto itself. I often wonder about what a release it might be for women of color to see disability as a framework that intersects with race and gender, to not always feel the need to keep fighting, even when it hurts, to let go of the ways that we as cis and trans women of color in particular, have taken up ableism in ways that reproduce harm to ourselves and the communities we "work" so hard and care for. Why does disability mostly look white?

And while it seems so necessary, to bring these movements and experiences together, to use an intersectional lens, I think it's so important that we don't flatten out difference when we look for similarities. I think we are so use to ticking off that ever expanding list of race, sex, class, gender, sexuality, age, dis/ability, indigeniety, etc. we forget that intersection does not necessarily mean equal or parallel. While there may be no hierarchy of oppression, I think that there are ways in which our tendency to compare racism to ableism to sexism to homophobia can make us miss the nuances and the unique ways each of those plays out in the unique constellation of individual lives.

This is why I'm so excited to be a part of this blog community. I think this is proving to be a space where we all see the situatedness of our analysis and yet we still reach for each other and understand the value of each others' standpoint. I'm ever hopeful these days and I thank you all for contributing to my optimism.

 

 

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