"Realize however, that at some point you have to actually take the plunge in...

 

 

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"Realize however, that at some point you have to actually take the plunge into the pool. Trying to..."

via TheRedTree on 10/15/10

"Realize however, that at some point you have to actually take the plunge into the pool. Trying to analyze how water moves and how you can swim effectively by staring at the ripples in the water as you sit on the sidelines will have its limits. The time is rapidly approaching to simply jump in. Once in the water, you will know instinctively where you want to swim to next. You may think you do while you are on the bench, but hypothetical thinking is not reality. Sometimes you simply can't know for sure until you are in the situation. We learn about life by experiencing life, not by analyzing life on the periphery."

-   —Susan Miller.

 

 

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tkoed: loudminority: oliveinthunderland: rememberg: (via...

 

 

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tkoed: loudminority: oliveinthunderland: rememberg: (via...

via Liquor&Spice on 10/15/10

tkoed:

loudminority:

oliveinthunderland:

rememberg:

(via meabanks)

 

 

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Are you free?

 

 

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Are you free?

via maia medicine on 10/15/10

superhussyisms:

The minute you stop caring what other people think; the minute you stop trying to control outcomes; the minute you decide to adhere to your core beliefs; the minute that other folks' constructs have no bearing on your life; the minute you realize that you are the prize…is the minute that you are free. Are you free?

 

 

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On ‘The Mean Girls of Morehouse’

 

 

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On ‘The Mean Girls of Morehouse’

via The Crunk Feminist Collective » On ‘The Mean Girls of Morehouse’ by moyazb on 10/14/10

Having gone to Morehouse's (unofficial) sister school I feel compelled to comment on this Vibe Mean Girls article and subsequent fallout. In fact it feels kind of good to once again put this "audacity of parenting" thing on the back burner. Y'all ain't ready :)

If you haven't heard, Vibe acknowledged the fact that there are queer black folks in the world (more than CNN could do), let alone at the elite single sex HBCU, Morehouse College. The article profiles queer students who actively blur the binary line of gender and look damn good doing it. They wear their fierce so loud, proud and unapologetically they were dubbed "the plastics" by an ostensibly straight Morehouse brother of theirs.

The article title, while again evocative of a favorite literary device of mine, is sensational. It conflates the appropriated "plastics" moniker to girl identity which none of the students interviewed do themselves. They articulate a reveling in androgyny and gender bending that makes a lot of "straight" dudes uncomfortable, even administrators, hence the infamous dress code barring students from wearing women's clothing (Read my thoughts on the dress code here). One student is interviewed while shopping in a women's boutique in Atlanta and a store employee makes her shock regarding his attire known, providing a little more drama for an article already doing a lot by acknowledging the realities for these students. What we don't learn is how they are treated in the classroom or how daily jabs impact their ability to concentrate on their school work. A lot of them leave. Despite President Franklin's claim of a Morehouse that accepts all identities, students that too obviously flout gender conventions have a nearly impossible time of making it on campus.

Looking at the comments section made me swear off them for good as it was filled with the most hateful language and threats. I attended school when Gregory Love was attacked in the shower with a baseball bat for supposedly looking at another student. My then ally identified self went 30 deep with other feminist and queer sisters and brothers to a panel at Morehouse that disintegrated into violence when folks tried to discuss the issue. This reaction is not unique to black people but the costs of homophobia in groups that are multiply marginalized are so much higher. If we can't be at institutions that are on some level supposed to be for us, where do we go?

Morehouse may tout itself as a single sex institution but it is not a single gender one, as much as it may want to be. If female-assigned-at-birth students in the AUC can take classes there, hang out there, spend the night there (covertly :) ) etc. why can't male-assigned-at-birth students do the same in the same heels and make up? If any group should understand the fallacies of looking a certain way to be treated humanely its black people. And ye, black folks are determined to traffic in a politics of respectability that does little but make some of us tokens for a power structure that not all of us can access. People wonder why King's beloved community has given way as we increasingly limit the criteria for admittance. If the people who decide who has access are middle class, straight, Christian, black folks, that leaves a lot of people out in the cold.

That said, I get the nihilism and "do you" mentality of so many black folks excluded from "proper" blackness. When you know that people think and treat you as though you are  less than human why continually try to convince them otherwise? Why not just go for self?

The cycles of violence created in the name of "uplift" never cease to amaze me. If we truly want a different world it's going to take seeing people for who they are not what you want them to be. Morehouse has a unique opportunity to engage students around questions of blackness and gender identity, to craft new black men and more, poised to create a better reality for many communities. We can't afford to hold on to antiquated notions of gender and blackness. The future is fierce.

 

 

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For T

I saw you seeing me.
I saw you dark skinned black girl across the room of white and light.
Flash of a smile that held more then we could say
not there, not then

thought I’d get around to talking to you later
thought we’d shoot the shit
discuss our teenage love of white boys that didn’t love us back
our slip into the sensual sumptuous embrace of our queer selves and lovers
see each other at parties and share the same secret smiles of understanding

But you are gone
were gone before i could make good on the “later” I’d resigned our talking to

i think about you though.
we weren’t close but you are remembered.
not just by your (white) friends
but by a reflection.
I see you, still, in the mirror

i hope we can still talk, much much later than i had planned.

On Eddie Long and #NWNW

 

 

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On Eddie Long and #NWNW

via The Crunk Feminist Collective by moyazb on 9/30/10

So I'm trying to write a dissertation and support some really amazing disability justice activist friends of mine so I really don't have time to be messin' around with this Eddie Long/#NWNW business but…

Here I go.

This will be real quick though. Promise.  Point by point even.

1. Abusing children ≠ "gay" – I am all for us critiquing and thinking about Eddie Long's desires for men but the truth is (yes, I think he did it) he abused his power and at least four vulnerable boys, as their age defines them in the "courts of justice."  There are plenty of people who embrace their same sex desire and incorporate that into their identity or choose to keep that part of themselves to themselves. But they don't abuse children. That's what we should be talking about with Eddie Long, lest we equate repressed same sex desire with gay identity and subsequent child sexual abuse. LGBQ people choose to love each other and enter relationships; they don't coerce vulnerable children with much needed affection and affirmation and prey on them.
2. "No one man should have all that power." -The power of the pulpit co-creates these situations with ample collateral damage.  Did you know that absolutely awesome phrase that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" was written about papal power in the Catholic Church? We can all see how relevant it continues to be in that religious context and beyond. When Eddie Long stepped up to the pulpit and put his glasses on to the roar of his congregation I couldn't help but think of that line from Malcolm X (h/t to Tobias). It didn't matter what Long said (and he didn't say he was innocent), the congregation "supports its pastor, period." The inherent hierarchy of the church exacerbates abuses of power and the fact that we've seen iterations of these abuses over and over again doesn't seem to change the way folks feel about their "prophets." Regardless of their desire for adult men or lack of desire for adult women, preachers/priests/pastors and self proclaimed bishops' unfettered access to vulnerable children and the immense amount of power we grant them, should give us pause (no homo).
3. No Wedding No Womb- I'll give you that you just picked the title b/c you liked the alliteration (it's a favorite literary device of mine too), that your inadvertent and untimely use of the word "wedding" amidst the fallout of the prop 8 black people controversy and ongoing debates surrounding same sex marriage is more an issue of semantics than out right heterosexism. Okay. But to act as though a commitment between two people is the solution to men— wait, I take your pass on heterosexism back—dipping out on parental responsibility seems to completely misrepresent what actually is a crisis in infrastructure, resources, and cause to question our reliance on a nuclear model of parenting in the first place. People need community, love, dough (both kinds) to raise kids. Married or partnered parents are not better than other parents.
4. Solutions – #NWNW has critiqued dissenters for not offering solutions (though I feel like we've been offering them) so I'll be explicit here.
   1. Let men be queer-  I mean let men express emotions that are typically gendered "woman", like sadness, love, happiness, etc. without saying they are less of a man because of it.  Allow men to shed hypermasculine notions of being in terms of how they dress, behave, etc. How dope would it be if men could shed their cold detached unfeeling personas? This has the effect of allowing men to be emotional beyond the confines of nuclear family and be more loving to other children and women in their lives, regardless of whether or not they're related. It has the added effect of destigmatizing traits that are read as feminine in men, which in turn might reduce some of the homophobia that energizes the Eddie Long situation and these recent tragic "suicide" deaths of young people. Homophobia Kills.
   2. Demand more infrastructure to support parents- The government owes its people and its children more than its giving. It passes the buck to individual households to do the heavy lifting. The classism and ableism at the heart of the nuclear family has got to be unpacked. Even in married two parent homes there's not always enough to go around. The assumption that people should be able to do it on their own as a single family unit perpetuates the myth of independence. We all need help to get through life and most of the time we act like we don't because that supports a capitalistic ethic of individualism.
   3. It takes a village- We see the fallout of thinking that children are the individual responsibility of their parents in #NWNW own posts. In the greatest of ironies, the founder said the crisis of black fatherlessness was responsible for Eddie Long's indiscretions as opposed to reading his marriage and patriarchal power as an enabler of his behavior and the reason that people thought he was safe. Surely a married, wealthy, pastor with kids who does good things in the community can't hurt these boys. We remain attached to the myth of the predator "out there" as opposed to examining the conditions that create the power imbalances that cultivate abuse. How might this situation have played out differently if everyone thought of those boys as their "spiritual sons?" What would it mean for all adults to feel accountable to all children in their community? Would individual fathers who weren't present matter? As is evident in cultures around the world, the primacy of biological parents is not a given. There are a myriad of traditions of child rearing that don't center biological/nuclear parenting and the kids are more than all right.  Two people, man and woman, even with rings need resources to raise children and to ignore that as well as the accompanying hypermasculine gender expectations for black men in those structures is to miss the issue all together. Perhaps black folks' ambivalence about marriage signals problems with the institution itself and not with black people.

Check tweets by @shelbygoodwin, @dopegirlfresh, @aliciasanchez and @crunkfeminists for more on #NWNW.

 

 

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