The Urbanista

Bye Bye Blogger

2008-07-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

Hi Everybody!

I am no longer blogging here at this temporary spot. I have finally moved. I will be over at

http://theurbanista.wordpress.com/

on July 14, 2007, I will be launching my Urbanista 2.0 blog.

Join Me!

Happy Juneteenth

2008-06-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a great article about the celebration of Juneteenth:

A Primer on Black Independence Day

According to the AFP "Obama Tells Black Fathers to Act Like Men"...Really?

2008-06-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

H/T: Prometheus 6 and Assault on Black Folk's Sanity

Didn't the mainstream white media just have a field day with this. I think that this image speaks for itself. It makes fun of all the racist assumptions that whites have of blacks.

It is interesting how this is the face of black fatherhood. As you can see in my post below, there are millions of good black fathers who could have been spared such racist generalizations. Nobody cares, blacks are allowed to be reduced to the lowest denominator.

Happy Father's Day

2008-06-15T06:56:00.000-07:00

I always loved this from Will Smith sampled from Bill Wither's "Just The Two of Us". I dedicate this to my dad, grandfathers, uncles, cousins, friends and friend's fathers=)

I especially dedicate this to my dad. His favorite band of all time was indeed the great Earth, Wind & Fire. This is one of my favorites and it always reminds me of my dad (tear).

Here are some great books for Father's Day:

Daughters of Men: Portraits of African American Women and their Fathers by Rachel Vassel

Pop: A Celebration of Black Fatherhood by Carol Ross

JVC Jazz Festival in NYC

2008-06-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

In The Morning/ Alright by Ledisi

The JVC Jazz Festival is kicking off on June 15 and will go on until June 28th, 2008 right here in NYC. I am a regular to the JVC Jazz Festival. There have a great line up this year with acts like Ledisi, Ravi Coltrane, Mos Def, Lizz Wright, Chris Botti, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Gil Scott-Heron, Herbie Hancock, Jill Scott, Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, Al Green, Dianne Reeves and countless others.

Here are the schedule of Events

Summer Jam: Beautiful Day by U-N-I

2008-06-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

This is a hot track by U-N-I coming out of Englewood, Cali. It's off the album "Fried Chicken and Watermelon".

Rev. Pfleger is My Homeboy!

2008-05-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

The problem is that whites in this country have been unfortunately sheltered and deluded from the often truthful and fiery discourse of their brilliant black brothers and sisters and Pfleger. When they hear the likes of Wright and Pfleger, they go mad! They just cannot believe it. It's over the top! It's hate speech! Yet low and behold its happening under their noses on a regular basis. Listen to any black radio show, read any black blog, sit around for conversations with black people, you will hear it. Nothing Father Pfleger had to say was shocking or new. However it was sure as hell funny...Hillary-ous is the word!! "I'm white! I'm white...a black man stole my show!" I say this everyday but not as good as he did!

This cannot be an issue. It just cannot be. America we have more important things to talk about don't we?

Universal Mind Control (UMC) by Common

2008-05-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

Common is dropping his highly anticipated "Invincible Summer" album in July.
The first single produced by Pharrell off the album has been leaked.
All I can say is that I am a bit confused? As a loyal Common fan since he was Common Sense, I will have to warm up to it. However it does have that Afrika Bambaataa ol'skool feel to it=)

The response to the track has been mixed. What do you think?

Sisterhood: The Games Black Girls Play by Kyra G. Gaunt (2006)

2008-05-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

“Somebody/anybody
sing a black girl’s song.
bring her out
to know herself.
(Shange 1977)

The other day was gorgeous and I decided to take a walk and do a little shopping. Ok, I will be honest, a lot of shopping! In my shopping escapade, I stopped off at the bookstore. As I walked the aisles, I tried to interest myself in everything from cooking to self-help books, to books about fashion to home décor to history and politics. I walked the usual music section and then I speed over to the “African American History and Culture” section. I realized that I read most of the books or at least owned them until my eyes caught the flashy colors of Kyra D. Gaunt’s The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes From Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. I was immediately excited. Just looking at the front cover made me flashback to a more innocent time.

From spending my early childhood years in the Bronx, I can remember the summer afternoons through evenings when all the girls from the block would play double dutch. Everywhere from the driveways, to the front lawns, to the sidewalks and into the streets were public spaces for human expression and creativity. I remained a bystander because for some reason, I was always scared of getting hit in the face with the rope. Whenever you are scared to get hit in the face with the rope, you get hit in the face with the rope. I was always much better at the hand games and of course the stepping contest that used to take place every year during our annual block parties. I could remember all my old childhood friends right now: Natasha, Maxine, Alexis, Keisha, Brittany and Siobhan. Now they could jump rope! Two interlocking ropes moving so fast that when they hit the ground, I thought of the lashes my great-grandmother would promise me if I ever was to stray too far from the front of the house or get my clothes soiled. They chanted and rhymed about all who had a man, all who did not have a man, all who was ugly, how fly they were, how good they were etc…etc… While the gyrating that took place often made grown folks shake their head with dismay. There was a certain precision, musicality and intuition that one must posses in order to keep such good rhythmic flow.

The brick buildings and row houses were not enough and much to scorching to contain our sweltering hot and excited black bodies. My aunt did not mind me outside much yet my parents would drag my sister and I inside once they got home around 5 and 6 o’ clock. They were never too fond of the neighbors. My mother would call the police on anyone who trespassed passed the first step. I was never allowed out on weekends when my parents were home. They preferred to take us to my grandfather’s estate in Bedford Hills, NY. Where my family would gather on the balcony and/or the garden roof with lemonade and pasta salad to discuss moving and the noisy, bad behaved neighbors. The suburb of wealthy Westchester County, NY was enough to give me cultural homelessness. I did not want the lemonade, I wanted a quarter water. I did not want the pasta salad; I wanted my neighbor Mr. Johnson’s jerk chicken. For in the streets of the BX especially in the summertime, I saw culture. I saw a culture that my parents did not see and refused to see because they were so blinded by the “great white American” standard. I always saw something in those streets from the use of public space and resources, to the resident’s use of their bodies, to the overwhelming creativity, to the lack of conformity to outside forces and simply leisure and good times- the beauty of organic cultural invention and performance. I came to feel too compromised in the environment that my parents later taught my sister and I to adapted too when my parents moved up that side a few years later. Many members in my family saw nothing distinctive in black culture, play and performance other than “loose” behavior. I always saw something more complex.

Presumably, Gaunt observed the same thing. In her book, she analyzed the cultural performances and games of young black girls in its relation to the development of various musical styles including hip-hop as well as its artistic relevance in the unique black American cultural landscape. In the very introduction she writes:

“When we think of the music that drives the popular culture of African Americans, our first thought is not of double-dutch: girls bouncing between two twirling ropes, keeping time to the tick-tat under toes, stepping out with snatches of song and dance that animate their torsos and release their tongues with laughter. Instead, what comes to mind is hip-hop, neo-soul, go-go, crunk and R&B. The games black girls play-handclapping game-songs, cheers, and double-dutch jump rope-may not even register as a kind of popular music because the term is chiefly reserved for commercial productions often dominated by men. Commercial popular music tends to exclude or simply incorporate the communal or everyday forms of popular music that cannot be assigned individual authorship or ownership…” But everyday, black girls generate and pass on a unique repertoire of chants and embodied rhythms in their play that both reflects and inspires the principles of black popular music making. This book is about those games: the musical games that are passed down by word of mouth and body, beyond the scope of Billboard charts and Soundscan.” Listen in on girls’ daily broadcasts from the sophisticated approach to non-verbal syllables that mirror the melodic and linguistic approaches found in jive talk, scatting and the verbal free styling of hip-hop. Watch their daily routines, which mix colloquial gestures and verbal expressions, and you’ll be hooked on their fascinating rhythms, their use of call-and-response from the word to body, and their rap-like manipulation of phonics and rhymes for the fun of it. (Gaunt 1)

She goes on to write on the next page:

“While the embodied musical practices performed by girls are ordinarily visible in African American neighborhoods and urban communities, the appropriation of black girls’ musical game-songs by male commercial artists is overlooked. It makes sense that girls borrow from, say, hip-hop or R&B, or that the folklore of girls’ musical play is a repository of ideas from mass-mediated realms of music and dance. But what do we make of hip-hop, an art form predominantly associated with males and masculinity, sampling from the familiar chants and beats of a female musical expression? Are men incorporating the public into the commercial, the feminine into a patriarchal interpretation of keepin’ it real, or is there more to the gender politics of this exchange that could enrich our understanding of the politics of authenticity, aesthetics and taste in black popular music?" (Gaunt 2)

Wow, she got all of that out of girls playing double dutch, chanting and hand games. I lovesssss it!! This book gives credence to my lifelong proposition that there was more to the black street performance than meets the unobservant and unappreciative eye. When others hear “noise”, I hear the authencity of black cultural expression in all its forms. When others see girls merely “playing around”, I see a more serious production with intricate components. Gaunt touches on this as well as the gender dynamic of the situation in regards to black culture in relation to appropriation and commodification. When black culture becomes a commodity and commercialized, it loses its sense of community, which is an aspect of black cultural collectivism and kinship that runs throughout the black experience in America. On the commercialized front, the credit is given to the artist and the artists are often times male. The black female is often disregarded as a cultural force. Females in black male cultural performance become objects rather than subjects. Instead of Gaunt solely looking at appropriation of aspects of black cultural styles and performances by the white dominant community, she addresses in depth the appropriation of black female cultural performance by black males. She looks at black female cultural performance as initiator and creator rather than a subordinated or muted body. This sets up an interesting dimension in regards to the place of black females in not only a white dominant society but also a patriarchal society that continues to suppress and overlook their contributions to and influence upon black culture and culture on a whole. One can see this in not only culture but also in politics, cultural and social movements, history and in societal subject matters. I am only up to the third chapter as of today, Wednesday May 28, 2008. However when I get through with it, I will update this post. In the meanwhile, I will kindly ask my readers to also partake in Kyra D. Gaunt’s fascinating look at the cultural invention, creativity, fun and agency of young black girls and “the games they play”. It is a worthwhile summer read!

References

Gaunt, Kyra. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning The Ropes From Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: The New York University Press, 2006.

Hillary Clinton: Dirty Politics

2008-05-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

I just got this toliet brush . After her latest shenanigan, I just had to get it. It's on sale over at Urban Outfitters.com.

Governor David Patterson Pardons Slick Rick

2008-05-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

Hip-hop pioneer 'Slick Rick' pardoned by governor
By MICHAEL GORMLEY

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Pioneering rapper Ricky "Slick Rick" Walters, who spent more than five years in prison on a 1991 attempted murder conviction and faced threats of deportation years after rehabilitating his life, was granted a full and unconditional pardon Friday by New York Gov. David Paterson.

Walters, 43, has been under threat of being sent back to his native United Kingdom, although he has lived in the United States since he was a child. In a statement, he expressed gratitude to Paterson and his lawyers, and hoped that he could finally put the turmoil behind him.

"This has been a long and difficult road and I am happy for this to be settled once and for all," Walters said. "I look forward to enjoying this time with my family and friends and to continue leading an honest and productive life."

In announcing the decision, Paterson noted Walters' commitment to helping young people.

The eye patch-wearing star behind '80s rap classics like "La-Di-Da-Di" and "Children's Story" was a successful rapper when he was convicted of shooting his cousin and another man in 1991. Both survived.

Although he had completed probation requirements in the attempted murder case and resumed his musical career, he was arrested again in June 2002. Immigration agents stopped him after he returned to Miami from a weeklong Caribbean cruise where he was a featured performer.

The arrest was on a 1997 Immigration and Naturalization Service warrant that had not been pursued earlier, and he spent 17 months in jail, despite calls for Walters' release from such luminaries as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Will Smith and Chris Rock.

A federal judge eventually ruled in October 2003 that the Bureau of Immigration Appeals denied Walters' due process when it issued the warrant, but Homeland Security officials pressed forward in the case. In 2006, Walters told The Associated Press he was simply going to keep working and play out his appeals.

"If you were in my shoes, how would you look at life?" he said then. "You'd ride life out, too. Anger would just make life not enjoyable, you know what I mean?"

The Democratic governor noted that Walters is now a rap artist and landlord in the Bronx who has not had any other criminal problems since his release from prison and has volunteered at youth outreach programs to counsel against violence.

"Mr. Walters has fully served the sentence imposed upon him for his convictions, had an exemplary disciplinary record while in prison and on parole, and has been living without incident in the community for more than 10 years," Paterson said. "I urge federal immigration officials to once again grant Mr. Walters relief from deportation, so that he is not separated from his many family members who are United States citizens, including his two teenage children."

Thank You Governor David Patterson! I love Slick Rick!

Happy Memorial Day Weekend

2008-05-23T19:16:00.003-07:00

My favorite summer jam growing up!! Now that its unofficially summer, I will be posting a song each week!

I'm Back!

2008-05-23T18:56:00.000-07:00

Obviously, It has been about two months since my last post. I am often too busy to think and often to easily distracted to write. However I will be blogging consistently now.

You can reach me @ ms.rhondacoca@gmail.com

Remember Dr.King 40 Years Later...

2008-04-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

Sisterhood: "Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave."

2008-04-01T16:52:00.000-07:00

hat tip: TheRoot.com

I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.

When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.

The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.

I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.

When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.

Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.

We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Namaste;

And with all my love,

Alice Walker

Cazul

Northern California

First Day of Spring

Denial: It's A White Thing, A Concise History of Black-White Race Relations, White Lies by Barry Deutsch

2008-03-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Many seem unable to understand white privilege and racism in the United States. Therefore, I think that these cartoons by Barry Deutsch a political cartoonist out of Portland, Oregon will help these people understand it.

hat tip: Brother Peacemaker

"Denial! It's a White Thing" March 14, 2008

"A Concise History of Black-White Race Relations" December 19, 2000

"White Lies" July 31, 2007

Sisterhood: Black Women and Hillary Clinton

2008-03-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

This is a great essay by Princeton Professor Melissa Harris Lacewell discussing why many black women would not support Hillary Clinton on the basis of sisterhood.

You can see it also on the Root.com "Hillary Clinton's Scarlett O'Hara Act" and her blog http://melissaharrislacewell.com/Blog/ where it entitled "Mammy Goes to Washington?".

Mammy Goes to Washington?

by Melissa Harris Lacewell

There’s been a lot of talk about women and their choices since Super Tuesday, when African American women overwhelmingly voted for Sen. Barack Obama, while white women picked Sen. Hillary Clinton. Some pundits automatically concluded that “race trumped gender” among black women. I hate this analysis because it relegates black women to junior-partner status in political struggles. It is not that simple. A lot of people have tried to gently explain the divide, so I’m just going to put this out there: Sister voters have a beef with white women like Clinton that is both racial and gendered. It is not about choosing race; it is about rejecting Hillary’s Scarlett O’Hara act.

Black women voters are rejecting Hillary Clinton because her ascendance is not a liberating symbol. Her tears are not moving. Her voice does not resonate. Throughout history, privileged white women, attached at the hip to their husband’s power and influence, have been complicit in black women’s oppression. Many African American women are simply refusing to play Mammy to Hillary.

The loyal Mammy figure, who toiled in the homes of white people, nursing their babies and cleaning and cooking their food, is the most enduring and dishonest representation of black women. She is a uniquely American icon who first emerged as our young country was trying to put itself back together after the Civil War. The romanticism about this period is a bizarre historical anomaly that underscores America’s deep racism: The defeated traitors of the Confederacy have been allowed to reinterpret the war’s battles, fly the flag of secession over state houses, and raise monuments to those who fought to tear down the country. Southern white secessionists were given the power to rewrite history even as America’s newest citizens were relegated to forced agricultural peonage, grinding urban poverty and new forms segregation and racial terror. Mammy was a central figure in this mythmaking and she was perfect for the role. The Mammy myth allowed Americans in the North and South to ignore the brutality of slavery by claiming that black women were tied to white families through genuine bonds of affection. Mammy justified past enslavement and continuing oppression.

Privileged, Southern white women were central in creating and propagating the Mammy myth. In 1923, the United Daughters of the Confederacy were nearly successful in lobbying Congress to erect a statue on federal land to honor “the memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South.” The desire to memorialize Mammy reveals how Southern white women reveled in the subordinate role of their darker peers. These black women were vulnerable to the sexual and labor exploitation of slaveholders and household employers. These women masked their true thoughts and personalities in order to gain a modicum of security for themselves and their families.

The Mammy monument was meant to display black women as the faithful, feisty, loyal servants of white domesticity. In the face of the Mammy myth, real black women spoke for themselves against the monument. It was substantial, sustained, opposition from organized African American women and the black press that killed the Mammy monument proposal.

Media have cast the choice in the current election as a simple binary between race and gender. But those who claim that black women are ignoring gender issues by voting for Barack just don’t get it. Hillary cannot have black women’s allegiance for free. Black women will not be relegated to the status of supportive Mammy, easing the way for privileged white women to enter the halls of power.Black feminist politics is not simple identity politics. It is not about letting brothers handle the race stuff or about letting white women dominate the gender stuff.The black women’s fight is on all fronts.

Sisters resist the ways that black male leaders try to silence women’s issues and squash women’s leadership. At the same time, black women challenge white women who want to claim black women’s allegiance without acknowledging the realities of racism. They will not be drawn into any simple allegiance that refuses to account their full humanity and citizenship.Black women want out of the war.Black women need health insurance. Black women need decent schools for their children. Black women need a strong economy that creates jobs. Black women need help caring for their aging parents. Black women want a Democratic win in the fall. Sisters chose Barack on Tuesday because they believe he can deliver these things and that is much more empowering than just having a woman in the White House.

I noticed that those who read her blog and my reaction in comparison to the readers of TheRoot.com vary a great deal. You can go ahead and see for yourself. I realized that in the blogosphere and in various media outlets, certain perspective are not always widely accepted or understood. I believe that the disparity in reactions is due to the lack of knowledge and discourse regarding the history, thought and experiences of black women in America. When a middle aged white woman scolded me for not supporting Hillary because I was a female, when the media distorted the identities and motives of black women when thy claimed we had two choices (a woman and a black man), when I read Gloria Steinem’s Op-ed piece in the New York Times, when I heard Oprah being called a gender traitor, when a white female in a lecture class told me that I was a woman and needed “to starting think about that too!”, when I met a firing squad when I brought up black women, feminism and identity politics in a public arena, I realized that our society in general, is very confused about the identities, experience and activism of black women. Black women's history and thought has been suppressed and their contributions to our society are mostly overlooked. Many don't understand intersectionality. They are unaware of the relationships of black women and white women in America. They don't understand black feminist theory.

Melissa Harris Lacewell's usage of history is a way to explain why many black women would not vote for a white woman on the basis of sisterhood. She chose to look at it from an historical perspective in order to show how deeply ingrained it is. Lacewell is not calling Hillary Clinton a racist. Also keep in mind that Harris is not implying that black women who support Hillary Clinton is a mammy. That's not at all what she is saying nor is it the basis of her essay. It is metaphorical. The mammy in the minds of many black women is a symbol of passivity and subordination amongst other things.

In addition, the comparison of Scarlett O'Hara and Hillary Clinton is almost...classic. Hillary Clinton in this election has managed to play both aggressor and victim very cleverly. This ability to play both "aggressor" and "victim" is not clever in that it is a brilliant tactic; it is clever in that the she is using her white female privilege. Remember sisters, this is a privilege that we as black women do not have! This is due to the construction of white and black womanhood in our society.

The Scarlett O’Hara effect is the idea of black women playing a supportive and even inferior role to that of white women because of white privilege. This is something that cannot be denied and it is the history of our relations. During all waves of feminism, white women have been suppressive of black women and women of color in general. They wanted us to drop our true experience and realities of whole identity in order to support their agenda. When I say whole identity I am speaking to the fact that women of color have to deal with a double jeopardy-race and gender (for many it is also class). A movie that I would chose is Imitation of Life!! The connections are stark and modern. I would prefer for you to look at the 50’s version rather than the original 30’s version. When white feminists were fighting for respect and recognition in society with particular attention to the workplace, black women were the reason why that was possible. Black women stayed in their supportive roles and took care of the children and the household so that they can enter the workplace. White women possess a social mobility that black women do not. Hillary Clinton is my junior senator and I will give her credit where it is due however she would not be where she is if she was not linked to white male patriarchy. This is not Hillary Clinton’s fault; it is a result of our racist, sexist and classist society. Hillary could work as hard as possible but it was her connection to white male patriarchy that has allowed her to get the respect and recognition that she is getting, if she was Hillary Rodham? It would have different story. Now can you imagine a woman who is not connected to white male patriarchy? A woman of color whose male counterparts have been denied the very liberties and opportunities that this country promised its citizens in almost every living document.

I don’t believe that anyone should vote on the basis of identity politics. However when I hear the media’s distortions of black women as having two choices-between a woman and a black man, when I read Gloria Steinem’s point of view in her Op-Ed piece and the views of other white feminists and when I was taken to task by various people for not supporting a women and sisterhood and blah blah blah, I became weary, I felt that I needed to speak up and refuse to have my voice suppressed as the voices of many of my sisters have been for too long.

*I would like to shout out to Hillary Clinton, where was the sisterhood when you supported your husband and betrayed Marian Edelman Wright (Children’s Defense Fund) when your husband implemented welfare reform that effected the poorest children and their disenfranchised mothers. Too many disenfranchised black women do not have access to childcare or a mammy!! to take care of their children when it was/is time to go into the workplace. Therefore they are not able to be socially mobile.

Here is great footage from Democracy Now! with Melissa Harris Lacewell and Gloria Steneim=). It is a great argument!! Lacewell brought it!

Part I

PartII

Part III

Part IV

Sisterhood: March is Women's History Month

2008-03-09T11:46:00.001-07:00

OK ladies and... gentz,

March is Women's History Month. I hate how our society has taken one month out of the entire year to discuss issues that should always be at the center of our discourse. I always concentrate and discuss issues that are relevant and important to women and their identity in our patriarchal society. I will always. The same way that I will always discuss Black issues, thoughts, politics and experiences outside of February.

Nonetheless, I will be heightening my talk of women's issues, politics and experiences this month with my "Sisterhood" Series. In my sisterhood series, I will showcase essays, books, history, politics and socio-economic issues, experiences and more.

Enjoy!

Welcome to the NEW Urbanista!!!

2008-03-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

The Urbanista blog is dedicated to sharing my perspective on everything from culture to politics and fashion to social issues.

You can forward me information and updates at rhondacoca@gmail.com

Enjoy!!