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Screen shot from the sci-fi short film written and directed by Kenyan filmmaker, Wanuri Kahiu.
At the 5th African Movie Academy Awards, she received a total of five awards including Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture for her film, "From a Whisper".
Pumzi
Screen shot from the sci-fi short film written and directed by Kenyan filmmaker, Wanuri Kahiu.
At the 5th African Movie Academy Awards, she received a total of five awards including Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture for her film, "From a Whisper".
Pumzi
Over the years, I have developed coping strategies to "manage misogyny." In the past, I defiantly put an "X" in the air
Wayne and Drake perform at BET Awards
while walking off the dance floor, persuaded the deejay to play more woman-friendly songs, or created other words to replace the ones I could not bear to hear. Each year, I emotionally prepare myself to watch the BET or MTV awards. As a new crop of crooners emerged, I began listening to more R&B than rap to no avail. The love songs don't even love me. These days, I find myself storming out of clothing stores and restaurants, feeling accosted by the background sound taking over the physical and psychic space. I cannot turn off or tune out all of the car stereos, metro ads, or highway billboards where these images and words have become commonplace. Just how much hate can one woman tolerate?
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and I want to take time to reconsider the matter of words. I want to think about the weight they carry in the everyday lives of black women. More than a discussion about our love-hate relationship with popular culture, I want to take seriously the way misogyny impacts our relationships with menfolk and ourselves. "Managing misogyny" has become an unwanted, collective group experience for women and girls of color from the hip hop generation(s). Language that humiliates, demonizes, objectifies and threatens is a form of violence. It is verbal and emotional abuse accelerated and intensified by mass media technologies that make it so pervasive and systematic it is virtually inescapable. We know how language impacts our lives. We are witnessing how the state deploys labels such as terrorists, insurgents or enemy combatants to dehumanize (and kill without accountability). What about the words echoed by the black (male) speaker and transmitted by state-regulated media to dehumanize black women and girls? How does the language of hip hop sustain an environment conducive to our continued sexual and gender exploitation? Rap misogyny is verbal abuse. Let's name it. Let's call it what it is because we've spent too many years feeling silenced by it.
Words hurt.
~ Aisha
This month, consider the language of popular hip hop music within the context of violence:
From the U.S. Department of Justice website: Domestic violence can be defined as a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner.
Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.
dialysis: lucille clifton rebirth broadcast #15 from Alexis Gumbs on Vimeo.
"I am alive and furious." We can be grateful that we have survived without sugar-coating the experience of our survival. Lucille Clifton certainly isn't sugar coating. This week...write about how it really is.
blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/survival-school
Taken awhile back at a demonstration.
Fair game.
THANK YOU! This is so fantastic.
the israeli/palestinian scoreboard
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.
Check tweets by @shelbygoodwin, @dopegirlfresh, @aliciasanchez and @crunkfeminists for more on #NWNW.
As folks debate a concept on twitter that marginalizes Black women and puts them on the defense because they are essentially being blamed for Black fatherlessness, I am thinking of the young woman in the photo above. Her name was Shannon Braithwaite and two years ago, she was murdered by her cousin Tiana Brown; they were both 15. I knew Shannon, so this is very personal. I didn't know Tiana, but I feel for her as well.
Tiana obviously had problems, and Shannon asked her mother to take her in. Two days later, her mother, Marva, walked into their apartment and found her baby in a pool of blood.
The trial began yesterday in Brooklyn Superior Court and while I suspected that Tiana had some deep-seeded issues, I could not have fathomed that she was raped by three men at the age of 13 and that the man she knew was her grandfather was really her father — she, herself, was the product of rape.
Tiana never got the help she needed. I am betting that Tiana's mama never got the help she needed. This suffering is cyclical. This suffering is intra-generational. Now, Shannon's family is dealing with the loss of her baby; the beautiful, bright being of light, Shannon.
There are some of us Black women who are climbing the class ladder and our lives have become typical of those who are comfortable; we have financial planners, take international vacations, enjoy good educations and the like. As we climb that ladder, some of us are reaching out with our hands and our hearts to bring others along, while some of us are playing the blame game and positing ourselves as better than those who "have not" made it. Which one are you?
If there were more of the former in Tiana and her mother's life, maybe, just maybe, they would have gotten the help they needed, but I bet you the latter was there, playing the blame game, making themselves feel better and not offering any sound, tangible solutions.
I ask you, as you go about the rest of your week, think of Shannon, Tiana and their families and the pain that they are all going through. Then, think about how you can work to positively change the life of one Black girl, particularly one like Tiana, who deserved love and healing.
Shannon, you are missed. Tiana, I pray for you.
I have a long history of hating black men and now I am one.
The caricatures and stereotypes in the media are a large part of my internalized racism and self-hatred. I don't know how to be a black man. I find myself without the coping skills to survive in the world that you learn when growing up with other black men. It is a process discovering who I am going to be. A lot is how comfortable I am with myself, getting rid of the defensiveness I had as a woman, and finding balance in terms of male privilege and still being a feminist man.
More than anything I want to be a person of integrity, no matter the gender or color. I want to be a "white oxford shirt" kind of man: kind of bland, kind of comfortable. Even bland men are visible and part of being visible as a man is that lack of attention, being just another guy.
— Lyle at 43
