Monday, July 31, 2017

TARAJI P HENSON TO HOST BLACK GIRLS ROCK

Feeling Rebloggy
Talk about a dream team. Page Six reports that Taraji P. Henson will be the host of BET's Black Girls Rock Awards honoring Issa Rae this August. Held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, NJ, Black Girls Rock is an initiative to empower Black girls to take charge and live their life through the arts. These awards serve as a reminder of just how much they can achieve...
Specifically, 2017's awards will be honoring Issa Rae, creator of HBO's Insecure, which just started airing its second season. Rae will be given the Star Power Award, but many other important women will be receiving honors of their own.

~Refinery29.com

 And adding to the Black Girl Magic, Internet Famous Up and Comer Franchesca "Chescaleigh" Ramsey will be writing some of Taraji's material for her

Look For Black Girls Rock on BET
Sunday, August 20, 2017

* * * * * 
From An Taraji P Henson Interview
with Refinery29.com
What do you think is the biggest lesson you learned while working on Hidden Figures

“Don’t complain about your situation, because it is what it is. The question is: What are you going to do about it? If Katherine Johnson sat around and complained and complained and complained, would we be on the moon? Would we be on our way to Mars?" 

"We all need to stop being lazy and pay attention. As a people, with the last administration, we got lazy. We were like: Everything is going good, we’ve got a Black president, LGBT people are getting their rights, it's all good. We got lazy. And then this happened. So when people ask what to do next, I want to say: Wake up, everybody! We’ve got work to do. Pay attention, read, research, figure out what you can do in your own backyard that will make a difference."
http://www.refinery29.com/2016/12/133485/taraji-p-henson-movies-hollywood-pay-diversity-interview

All I can say to that is, Amen 

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

J K ROWLING NEVER SAID HERMOINE GRANGER WAS WHITE AND SHE KINDA WASN'T

WITHOUT PEOPLE OF COLOR A LOT OF OUR STORIES DON'T MAKE SENSE

EVEN J.K. ROWLING'S "HARRY POTTER" DOESN'T WORK
"Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense.

What I mean by that is: if it wasn’t for race, X-Men doesn’t sense. If it wasn’t for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn’t make sense. If it wasn’t for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn’t make sense.

Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential."
Junot Diaz
"The Brief Wonderous Life Of Oscar Wao"

This is true for the Harry Potter Series as well.

To be specific, the Hermoine Granger character doesn't make sense without her having a history very much like that of black and brown people.

Hermoine's character is based on her being thought of as, not just an outsider, but a biological outsider. Her story is the story of white supremacy, of eugenics, or of dominant culture racism.  Her story is our story. Hermoine cast as a black girl would have made Hermoine's outcast character make a lot more sense on screen.

J.K. Rowling wrote her perfectly. Her physical description lends itself well to a black or brown girl with huge, coily, natural hair. And I so wish she'd been cast as black or brown in the movie because the most important thing about Hermoine's character was her character, intelligence, and friendship.

As it was, it was good to see boys and girls respect one another as equals on screen.  It would have been awesome to see ethnicity and/or race added to that to strengthen black and brown children with positive images and educate white children against the ambient white supremacy their parents and culture are unwittingly bathing them in daily.

Black Hermoine would have been good for everybody all the way around.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alannabennett/what-a-racebent-hermione-granger-really-represen-d2yp?utm_term=.amYwBpMv7#.xub9DROKM 


Sunday, July 16, 2017

IDA B WELLS ON HER BIRTHDAY


Ida B Wells sat down to stand up for her rights 71 years before Rosa Parks on a segregated train instead of a segregated bus. However, Ida wasn't a trained activist like Rosa. She made a personal decision to give up her seat for a white man. They had carry her out of the train car she was in. She was kicking and biting the whole way.

She sued

Ida wrote about it for a hewspaper

She lost her case

She wrote about that loss for a newspaper

White Ida B was out of town some years later, friends of hers were lynched, ostensibly over a game of marbles being played between a white child and black child.

When two children started fighting, the black and white adults separating the fight started arguing. Things escalated things until over a day or so three black men were lynched.
Ida B came back home to find out that the white grocery story owner who had had a monopoly on business in the area wanted the black owners of "The People's Grocery" run off. And it was the white business store owner successfully parlayed the game of marbles into a lynching. 
White Mission Accomplished: White Store Owner has a monopoly again


Ida B. wrote about it for her newspaper

Ida B. wrote about it again and again, no matter who got mad or scared, until she got a protest going.


The white folk decided to take all the black people's guns away and make it illegal for them to have them.

This was one of the most significant things that happened that made black people realize that they needed the right to vote. Owning things and property wasn't enough. People with political power can and will take anything they want from you, legally. The people with political power have the power to make and change the laws.


Ida B. wrote about the reduction of black rights in town until the protest went from WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO LIVE **to** WE ARE OUTTA HERE She scoped out a location in Oklahoma, came back, and managed to get black people to pick up and move west.


The whites relatively new railway stopped getting black business

White Businesses started drying up.

Ida B started getting death threats

Ida B did research on lynching from state to state and wrote about it. (A sociologist long before most if not all of the famous European Sociologists)

One of the most interesting things that she found was that black men were only ever accused of rape in 1/3 of all cases. Rape was made up/played up by white men in the white news papers as an excuse for lynching. And southern white men needed an excuse for lynching, whether there was a white woman available to lie or not, because the white south needed Northern money and European money for investment in the south after having lost the Civil War.

As for the real sex happening between white women and black men? Ida B reported on the savagery and suggested that some of the "rape cases" were actually interracial relationships between white women and black men.

White women's virtue having been called into question led to white folk wanting to Lynch Ida.

Ida B had to move.

Actually Ida B was out of town when word of her planned lynching reached her. She found out she couldn't go back to Mississippi 



Ida B would write for newspapers and also wind up making 102 speeches while in Great Britain, calling on the people there to start Anti-lynching Societies. Translation: She  got the British to stop buying southern white cotton from southern white murderers who tried to justify lynching. She would eventually be one of the founders of the NAACP.  And the NAACP would take up anti-lynching as one of it's first causes.

Seventy years later Martin Luther King would expose the south in the same way that Ida did, except he wouldn't have to take newspaper articles he'd written and pictures of lynchings and carry them on a boat overseas to get anti-lynching commitments.  Martin Luther King would get international support for equal rights by using television to show the world what was going on in the United States.

That concludes my thumbnail sketch of Ida B Well's activism and leadership. But my favorite thing about "Sword Among Lions" by Paula J Giddings is that it told the entire human story of Ida B. Wells.

Ida would be broke as a church mouse, get depressed, and go put money down a really nice dress.

She'd get indignant about class issues too. She'd worry about people looking down on her due to her lack of formal education. She could be touchy. She spent real time worrying about other folks maligning her character. And she rarely let a slight go unremarked. Some of this may have the times she was living in. But she was solidly in the camp of folks who believed that (what we now call) "respectability politics" was the way forward to equality with white people.

...UNTIL the lynching of three of her friends

I haven't read Ida B. Wells' autobiography, but reading her personality in the "A Sword Among Lions" biography it isn't hard to imagine that in writing about herself most of her heroic victories would have been left in and some of the humanity left out -- much like writers of textbooks have been doing to the history books in this country for decades.

The other human thing in "A Sword Among Lions" is the sexism black women endured.

Ida B. Wells needed the support of mostly male run black newspapers while she was in the U.K. stumping for Anti-Lynching Resolutions and she didn't get it. Some black newspapers and politicians went so far as to say she was making things sound worse than they were in order to secure their current standing in the cities they were living in at the time or simply because they didn't have faith that her approach was going to come to anything.

 And she called them on it, publicly.

Frederick Douglass himself, wanting to stay on the good side of a white women's suffrage group---a group that needed southern white women in its numbers-- did not fully commit himself to her or her campaign while she was Britain. He was the only one she didn't call on the carpet, hero abolitionist that he was in her eyes.  But according to Giddings, she did slyly let him know, in private, that she did not appreciate his occassionaly mealy-mouthed support.

The contributions of IDA B WELLS are not be missed. She was a feminist before the word "feminist" caught on. And she managed worked harder than most to secure the vote for women. In fact, Wells' Chicago was one of the first places where women were allowed to vote.

A SWORD AMONG LIONS is a long dense book. But it conveys so much about the black women's club movement and black women's history in general.