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Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:
Clockwise: Zora Neal Hurston, Betty Davis, ZZ Packer, Alice Walker
Many online spaces traffic in trashing Black women,
so I was excited when I came across Quirky Black Girls.
The sites purpose and intent made all the more sense,
when I learned that it was created by Moya B., the Spelmanite
who, along with others, criticized Nelly's request to have
bone marrow drive on the Spelman campus while refusing to
have a conversation about the images of Black women in his
videos, namely, Tip Drill.
The site reflects a Black Feminist Politic. Given this, often
times when you go to a website, and the topic is race or
gender you can feel you blood pressure rising.
QBG is different because while the members of the sites
offer critiques that may be reactionary, the members focus
most of their time on talking about ways of being, ways of living,
and loving the fact that we Black and quirky. Here is the manifesta:
Because Audre Lorde looks different in every picture ever taken of her. Because Octavia Butler didn't care. Because Erykah Badu is a patternmaster. Because Macy Gray pimped it and Janelle Monáe was ready.
Resolved. Quirky black girls wake up ready to wear a tattered society new on our bodies, to hold fragments of art, culture and trend in our hands like weapons against conformity, to walk on cracks instead of breaking our backs to fit in the mold.
We're here, We're Quirky, Get used to it!
…. Quirky Black girls don't march to the beat of our own drum; we hop, skip, dance, and move to rhythms that are all our own. We make our own drums out of empty lunchboxes, full imaginations and number 3 pencils.
Quirky Black girls are not quirky because they like white shit; rather they understand that because they like it, it is not the sole province of whiteness.
Quirky black girls are the answer to the promise that black means everything, birthing and burning a new world every time.
Sound it out. Quirky, like queer and key, different and priceless, turning and open. Black, not be lack but black one word shot off the tongue like blap, bam, black. Girl, like the curl in a hand turning towards itself to snap, write, hold or emphasize. Quirky. Black. Girl. You see us. Act like you know.
We demand that our audiences say "yes-sir-eee" if they agree and we answer our own question "What good do your words do, if they don't understand you?" by speaking anyway, even if our words are "bruised and misunderstood."
Quirky black girls are hot!
Whether you're ready to see it or not.
Quirky means rejecting a particular type of "value," a certain unreadiness for consumption and subsumption in an economy of black heterocapital. This means that Quirky Black Girls act independently of dominant social norms or standards of beauty. So fierce that others may not be able to appreciate us just yet.
No matter what age we are, we hold onto that girlhood drive for adventure, love for friends, independent spirit, wacky sense of humor, and hope for the future.
Quirky Black Girls resist boxes in favor of over lapping circles with permeable membranes that allow them to ebb and flow through their multiple identities.
Quirky Black Girls- Embrace the quirky!
In a word. Awesome.
What do you think of the Manifesta?
Seen anything quirky lately?
Originally Published June 2009
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