The Beat Within: Black and Complaining

This week from our incarcerated youth.

Black and Complaining
My complaint isn’t a complaint
it’s an every day problem I’m facing
Why so many people in the world got to be racist
My complaint is why is it so hard for a black man
Everything we do, we say we hope,
but we never say we can
Wonder why we hustle too hard to get a job
Everybody else eating good,
but we living off corn on the cob, pretty much
Everywhere, even the ghetto we are the most hated
It seems like everyone in the good movie,
but we are x-rated
Best known for rapping, and sports
We became big time celebrities when we go to court
I love being black
but I’m complaining because it’s too hard
The sad thing about it is no one can change it
Not even the Lord.
- Reggie, Land

"Hands Off the White Woman!"

Another aspect of whiteness.

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Brother Peacemaker blogs about America's infatuation with white women:

It would be easy to blame the media for such obvious white women favoritism. But the real problem is our culture that places such emphasis on looks, youth, sex, race, money, and other features and factors people use to compensate for the shortcomings of their character. Media is only a hapless pawn serving to feed the insatiable hunger of its master the character weak, wealth exchanging, public so tremendously concentrated in the white community. Until we have a more even distribution of wealth among all racial communities and/or a realignment of people’s priorities away from the secular and more towards a true all encompassing community oriented spirit, be prepared to hear more stories in the news from the undiscovered Susan Smiths and Natalie Holloways that are destined to become pawn in society’s perpetual endeavor to make pretty white women the focus of our attention.

Image From:
Public Record Office Victoria

Erase Racism Carnival Coming Up

It's been almost a year since I hosted the Erase Racism Carnival, and this month I'm hosting it again. I've already gotten a few posts submitted to me but they're not exactly what the Double Consciousness team is looking for. We want posts that mainly cover:

• White privilege
• Explaining what it is, how it manifests itself, breaking it down, history of white privilege.
  
• Combating white privilege
• Racism in 21st century America
• Institutionalized racism
• Government, families, law, etc.
• White supremacy
  
• And generally posts on racism itself. Not just posts (some of which I have received) on how racism is bad and how we all need to just get along.

You can e-mail me your posts at jack [dot] m [dot] stephens [at] gmail [dot] com.

Image From:
Brother Peace Maker

Live from New York, Here's Your Saturday Night Minstrel Show!

From Aretha Franklin to Star Jones, Kenan Thompson is no stranger to making a spectacle out of the large black woman. The fictional character of Virginiaca Hastings literally takes the cake as Kenan's most minstrelesque role on Saturday Night Live.

This is not merely a matter of dressing in drag, but a much deeper racist and sexist mockery of the hypersexualized black woman.



As the skit opens, we are taken to the Baby Gap, and the high class narrative voice of a man says, "and now, shopping with Virginiaca." It's no accident; the man's upper-class intelligent voice serves to poke fun at the name itself--it's reminiscent of stereotypical black names like Laquesha.

Kenan Thompson then stomps into the store dressed as the stereotypical large black woman with a small cheetah-skinned purse and long nails. To top it off, he's stuffing cake down his throat. When approached by a young white male worker, who asks if he is looking for baby clothes, the conversation turns into "can you lift me up over your head," and "do you wanna see me in some baby clothes?" Then it gets worse, as "Virginiaca" pulls out her phone and calls for her daughter, "girl you are gettin' on my one big nerve, where is you?"

Then Ellen Page, the leading actress in Juno, runs in with a loud husky voice and a huge black afro. The two proceed to obsess over small children's pants as "booty shorts," and are insulted when the worker insists they won't fit Virginiaca's step daughter, who complains, "mama he's tryin' a seminate that I'm fat or sumthin'."

After complaining that they need the shorts for their "booty back and forths," they show the worker their dance--which is basically just them shaking their butts. The skit ends as Virginia stuffs her face with chips from her purse and hits on the worker by flaunting her large breasts on the counter and then jumping onto a table and shaking her butt. The worker proclaims, "I quit," and leaves the set, with Virginiaca still on the table.

The entire skit is a minstrel show--the mispronounced words, the exaggerated outfits, the big hair, the obnoxious voices, and of course, the dancing. The presence of the young white male worker is most important, for he is the character that non-black/female audiences are meant to immediately identify with. His purpose in the skit is to serve as the white male gaze and simultaneously lasso-in the audience into an us against them--the two "black women."


As a consequence, we get a minstrel show which focuses primarily on the large black Virginiaca who throws herself at us constantly. Along the lines of Eddie Murphy's horrible Mrs. Rice character. We are then supposed to derive a perverse pleasure out of watching her big, overeating, big-breasted body disgust us nonstop.

Yes, perverse. It's a disgusting pleasure that comes from observing a large, sexualized black woman made into a complete spectacle by a black man dressed in drag.

Saturday Beats: Would Anyone Know?

More writings from our incarcerated Bay Area youth.

Would Anyone Know?
I wonder if I were to die in here, would anyone know,
would my sister know, would my brother know?
I always wondered.
If I were to die would I have a funeral?
Would I have a tux with a casket
or will I have a sheet in a cold refrigerator.
I wonder if they would notify my father.
I wonder would I be buried or will I just be dead.
Most likely nobody will know…
I’ll just be another dead person in the world.
No one would miss a beat ….
no one would care I’ll just go and nobody will know.

Always Eat NutRageous

As a complement to "Where Race Matters" (which is everywhere), here's a Michael Moore video that illustrates very well the very real effects of race in America (and by effects I mean a hail of hot fucking lead).

Where Race Matters

During work today I was talking to one of my co-workers about jury duty. He said the last time he had to do jury duty was two years previous when a young man was given around two years of prison time for "selling" drugs. He said he felt bad for putting him away and that he didn't want to and was creating a hung jury because of it, but he eventually relented. Curious I asked him about the case.

Basically, the case involved a young Latino man who was arrested at a club because of an incident involving a few people. Someone was caught with a gun and everyone was searched. When this young man was searched they found eight pills of ecstasy on him. OK, bad for him, he got caught in possession of an illegal substance. Except the problem was some young white hot shot prosecutor (as he called her) decided to lock this kid away for a much longer time and decided to bust him for selling instead of being in possession.

During the trial the white prosecutor kept mentioning the phrase, "If you walk like a duck, talk like a duck, and act like a duck, you're probably a duck." Now this young man was Latino and wore typical hyphy regalia to the courtroom (big mistake, I know, at least wear a nice collard shirt and some slacks, but hey). They had no evidence on the guy whatsoever, it was pretty much circumstantial, he was caught with some pills. Yet the jury (mostly white, a few Asians) believed that he had been selling despite the protets of my coworker that there was no actual evidence of this.

Now let's go back to the "duck" phrase. Why did this prosecutor keep harking on the phrase, "If you walk like a duck, talk like a duck, and act like a duck, you're probably a duck," over and over again. What evidence did she have that he sells drugs, or is a gang member? All she knew was this boy liked to dress in baggy cloths and have prints on his shirt, and that he took ecstasy at club events ("Oh No! Not pills!"). Yet she was "convinced" (or just looking for a nice win in here record) that he was some "gang member."

Essentially what she was preying on was the jury's feelings on race and on youth. In society we are conditioned to look at people a certain way by what we see on the news, in newspapers, books, TV shows, music videos, etc. More often then not young Black and Latino men who are dressed in baggy cloths are shown as gangsters, drug dealers, dead beat dads, ignorant, dangerous, etc. This is the image that is imprinted on the mind of many whites (and anyone for that matter); not to mention the hundreds of years of racial history ingrained in us.

So when this prosecutor kept harping on the "duck" phrase she was, consciously or not, exploiting the fact that this man was young, brown, and liked to dress in hyphy attire. What she was essentially saying was, "If he walks like a brown man, talks like a brown man, acts like a brown man, he's probably a gangsta." Which is essentially saying, "If he's brown and dresses in the cloths most kids dress up in these days he's a danger to (white) society."

If the kid had been white and had been able to afford a decent lawyer (not a public defender) than more then likely the trial would have ended in charges of possession; because honestly, when seeing a bunch of white kids (like the kid pictured above) walking down the street "aping" like their Black, what cop is going to pull them over?

This is why being critical of race matters.

Image From:
Silly Dad