Hey Baby, I’m Talking To You!

If you’re a young woman and have been in any big city for at least 24 hours then you know what I’m talking about.

It starts out with the kissy noise or the whistle you hear faintly behind you, but you convince yourself maybe it was just in your head….then the catcalls start.

“Hey baby!”

“Can I get some of that over here?”

And the ever so classy “Mmmmm…nice ass!”

The cocoon of independence, confidence and empowerment you weave around yourself every morning has been split open.

You tuck your coat even tighter around you. You quicken your pace, and you finally heave an exasperated sigh, because it has happened once again. You’ve been a victim of street harassment.

Street harassment towards female pedestrians is an overlooked form of sexual harassment since it doesn’t take place at work or in school. It’s lurking on every sidewalk, at every corner, and in every passing car,  and it can’t be escaped or avoided. It has become an institution in metropolitan cities across the U.S. and has been generally accepted as a product of a male-dominated society.

I’ve been harassed when wearing anything from a dress to a t-shirt and jeans to sweats and at all times of the day whether I’m coming back from a late night at the library, going to class or just doing a quick food run to the grocery. It’s frustrating, it’s belittling, it’s disturbing, and it’s borderline tragic that simply being a female in a public space equals you being public property.

And one day last week, I had enough of it.

I was carrying groceries back to my apartment late Tuesday evening when this older man approaches me and starts making comments about how I look and asking me my age. I executed my usual course of action and just ignored him.

This backfired.

Instead of seeing my blatant aversion as a deterrent, he became angry that I wouldn’t acknowledge him, and the situation escalated. After a few minutes of following me and attempting to talk to me, he physically stepped in front of me and blocked my path.

To make a long story short, my typically calm demeanor evaporated as I found myself locked into a heated yelling match with a very intimidating stranger. He asserted I should be flattered (Ha!) and appreciative (Ha!) of the fact I garnered his attention.  I begged to differ.

This incident uncovers the very root of street harassment: the grossly skewed perception by some males that women enjoy being talked to in sexualized.

It’s patriarchy and male supremacy flexing its muscles, and I refuse to flinch.

My situation didn’t move beyond verbal abuse into violence, but knowing that it easily could have was jolting.

Organizations like HollaBack California, HollaBack New York and the Street Harassment Project were started to give women an outlet for the daily frustrations they face with street harassment and verbal abuse. A growing trend started by the HollaBack sites is to have  women take a mug shot of their harasser and upload it to the site with their personal story. Organizations like this bring street harassment into the public dialogue and help raise social awareness of the sexual terrorization women face every day.

So to the next perv who hits a nerve by thinking my first name is ‘Baby’, I’ll have my camera phone ready.

Beware.

Why Blacks Should be Down with the Green…

When you hear the all-too-familiar news story about the crazed environmentalist who lived in the branches of a redwood tree for three weeks because the city planned to cut it down to build Starbucks #673, you would probably imagine a young and unshaven guy who wears North Face jackets, carries an L.L. Bean backpack and doesn’t mind the occasional bong hit. A working-class black guy or a single black mother from the inner city doesn’t really come to mind.

There has long been an underrepresentation of minorities in mainstream environmentalism with many tree-huggers and green lobbyists being considered the “white elites” who have a college degree and come from stable financial backgrounds. In the wake of the green age where more and more people are becoming more aware of their carbon footprint and how they use resources, minorities are being left behind as mainstream environmental groups like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth tend to have low minority enrollment.

The reason for this underrepresentation is usually class related. Upper class whites would have the disposable time to devote to issues like wilderness preservation and wise resource management, while working-class minorities would not. Even they did have the available time and resources, all of their activism would rally towards causes they felt had a direct impact on their lives like issues of social justice. No one has time to worry about an endangered species of dung beetle or the Amazon jungle when they’re battling institutional barriers daily. The jungle they’re trying to keep from plunging into chaos is the concrete jungle of their neighborhoods and communities.

However, there is a common thread between environmentalists and working class minorities and this thread has the power to cross class and race divisions. Minorities face environmental threats every day in their community as they tend to live in communities where the land is cheap and are often targeted by corporations for the placement of toxic dumps and hazardous waste facilities. In addition to dealing with decreased air, soil and water quality, these same disenfranchised communities face unequal protection under the law as the government is slower to enforce environmental laws in their communities, facilitating and encouraging environmental abuse by companies. These unequal environmental burdens fueled by racism and structural discrimination disproportionately impact minorities as their health and quality of life is adversely affected.

This unlikely intersection of environmentalism and justice provides a unique opportunity for proponents of environmental justice and environmentalism. The banding together of these two seemingly disparate groups in the fight for a healthy environment, both in the wilderness and in the cities, makes room the exchange of knowledge and tactics that would expedite the solving our environmental crisis. While mainstream environmentalist usually focus on lobbying and strategic litigation, environmental justice leaders use direct action through protest and boycotting as their weapon. The combination of these battle methods could create an unstoppable top-bottom approach in saving the environment and our cities.

For the sake of saving green, let’s hope black and white are colors that go well together.

Class trumps race in America’s inner cities

The marriage of wealth and power means disaster for those who have neither, and it’s a catastrophe for low-income people of color.

In urban centers across the country, minorities are being shunned to the side as real estate developers turn them out of their homes, and housing authorities turn a blind eye. The forced gentrification of majority minority neighborhoods is happening quietly and deliberately as bloated rents force impoverished renters to vacate in order to make room for the wealthier tenants. Public housing projects in inner cities like Oakland, Chicago and Brooklyn now face the threat of demolition as city-planned ‘urban renewal’ duplicitously masks city-conspired ‘gentrification.’

There is a shift of high-income families back to the urban centers. Real estate owners want low-income people displaced so they can bring in white-collar tenants who can pay more.

The city of Oakland, Calif., recently approved a plan called the Hoover/West MacArthur Vision Statement that would allow the redevelopment of several housing projects and result in the displacement of hundreds of low-income renters. This is all part of the city’s plan to “clean up” the Hoover/West MacArthur area.

In their vision statement, the West Oakland Project Area Committee wrote:

“This area is a containment zone for Oakland’s social problems… We need to attract residents with disposable income, who don’t soak up social services, who can fix up the housing stock, who will in turn attract retail businesses.”

This plan of fixing up the impoverished parts of Oakland is a thinly veiled collision between housing authorities and real estate developers to get rid of the poor. Land is money. Landlords are raising the rents to exorbitant amounts so tenants are forced to vacate, and developers can swoop in to renovate the buildings. This attracts upper-class tenants who can afford to pay higher rents, thus raising the property value.

It’s another classic example of low-income people being pushed out of their neighborhoods once their presence becomes an inconvenience. Blacks and Hispanics were once driven to the inner cities after World War II by the possibility of jobs and pushed out of suburbia because they were usually denied access to suburban home purchases. Now history is repeating itself in reverse, as whites flee back to cities and oust low-income tenants. Now it’s primarily class and not race that has become the separating line. Fifty-three outraged Oakland renters even filed a $53 million claim against the city in 2008 because they felt their rights had been violated.

The situation doesn’t bode any better in San Francisco, where the St. Peter’s Housing Committee faces an even bigger challenge since most of the victimized tenants it serves are immigrant Latinos. Landlords are raising rent prices while the incomes of Latino immigrants are dropping due to the recession. It all paints a dire picture for the low-income residents of San Francisco.

Rents have doubled in the last 10 years, which forces immigrant families to either move out of the city or live in overcrowded conditions. Picture three families sharing a household meant for one or a family trying to break their lease because they can no longer afford to live there.

It’s more of a class issue than a race issue.

High-income people don’t want to live near the projects either because of dipping property values or because of perceptions they have of the poor as criminals.

In the fight for equality, it looks like America has only managed to make a lateral move with the invisible barrier becoming class instead of race. The truth is being silently mapped out across urban grids everywhere, as income becomes the great de-equalizer. The war on poverty has finally turned into a war against the poor where class can substitute for race.

Hold the applause for The Princess and the Frog

Six decades after making the racist Song of the South, the Walt Disney Corporation has finally made reparations with the highly touted release of The Princess and the Frog. There you have it, folks. America’s first black Disney princess.

Her name is Tiana (Her name was originally Maddy, but writers changed it because it sounded too similar to Mammy). She likes long walks by the bayou, and her turnoffs include evil voodoo priests and waitressing.

Many critics are giving Disney a pat on the back for the historic release of this hand-drawn cartoon movie that is set in the 1920s era of New Orleans and centers on the life of a black waitress and her subsequent misadventures as a frog. Well, this one Disney lover, who waited patiently through the Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and limitless others, is refusing to applaud.

Not that I expected the first black Disney movie to be a shining example of changing popular culture in the age of Obama, but come on.

After watching a free screening of the film, it became apparent to me The Princess and the Frog perpetuates countless stereotypes and is a slap in the face to generations of young girls of color who waited their turn in line for a black Disney princess they could post up to their walls, stick onto their notebooks and wear on their clothes.

Strike #1: The setting of the movie is in Jim Crow-era New Orleans where Tiana works as a waitress struggling to make ends meet and wistfully waits for her prince to come. (The original cut had her working as a maid, but then, once again, as they did with her name, they changed the story line to make her waitress.) How many more times will African-Americans be portrayed as waiters and waitresses and butlers and maids? It’s time for Disney to move out of the service industry and into the 21st century. Many African-Americans are contributing to society not with their hands and their labor, but with their brains and their intellect. I know The Princess and the Frog is just a stumbling, baby-step beginning, but it would have been nice to see a pop culture representation of blacks not include the South, scrubbing dishes or Jim Crow.

Strike #2: The voodoo priest who turns Tiana and her prince-to-be into frogs gives an inaccurate portrayal of the voodoo religion, painting it as evil and frightening. Voodoo is a West African religion that was carried by slaves through the Middle Passage into Haiti and Louisiana. It draws on African traditions, Catholicism and Islam, and contrary to what the movie would have you believe, is not about devious charms and spells. Voodoo focuses on saints, spirits and moral values, and true voodoo bears no resemblance to the superstitious, fictionalized voodoo highlighted in the movie’s witch doctors and Cajun fairy godmothers. The exoticized vilification of voodoo in The Princess and the Frog begs the question of whether Christianity or Judaism would ever have been portrayed the same way.

Strike #3: Did I mention that Tiana spends most of the movie not as a black princess but as a frog? Yes,  the central plot of the movie is that she’s trying desperately to become human again, but would it have killed the Disney writers to not hide Disney’s first black princess away in an amphibious form for two-thirds of the movie? It’s all too easy to forget her skin color is a mahogany brown when for most of the movie, she’s hopping around as a ribbity green. Making Tiana a frog for most of the film removes the prevalence of her race and makes it harder for white audiences to identify with her as a black female.

That’s three strikes Disney. You’re out.

Disney is more than just a company, it provides millions of children with a world view that they will carry around in their minds into adulthood. Is this the impression of the world we want them to see? It’s time to step up to the plate Disney and accept responsibility. You may have moved eras beyond Song of South, but you still have a long way to go before you reach the 21^st century in racial representations. You can start with giving black girls the Disney princess they deserve.

People will argue that at the end of the day, it’s just a movie designed to entertain kids. However, it does so much more than just entertain; it brands the imaginations of future generations. And what small imaginations they will be if all they’re exposed to are aged stereotypes? Maybe one day Disney will get its act together and provide our impressionable children with culturally competent representations that glorify instead of gloss over our world’s diversity.

Or maybe it’s just time for me to stop living in a fairy tale.

Has the chapter closed on black bookstores?

“Eso won” is Yoruba for “water over rocks” and symbolizes the wealth of knowledge the Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles provides. Lately, however, it represents the troubled waters that Eso Won and other black bookstores across the nation are facing.
Last year’s closing of Karibu Books, the nation’s largest black bookstore chain with six locations in Maryland and Virginia, was the death knell for other specialized booksellers. The untimely end of Karibu is a story being played out coast to coast as large mainstream chains and internet booksellers, like Amazon.com, take over.

Barnes and Noble and Borders have become the Starbucks of the book selling industry and the go-to place for books, leaving independent bookstores coughing in the dust. (This makes events like the Harlem Book Fair this weekend increasingly important in promoting black literature.)

Barnes and Noble didn’t use to be an issue, but now their stock of black literature has grown. On top of that, if a person can go online and pay less, that’s what they’re going to do, even if they want to support black bookstores. Another nail in the coffin.

Another problem plaguing black bookstores is the stigma associated with the type of content black novelists produce. Part of saving black bookstores is convincing readers that black writers write about topics outside of hardship and oppression and that black novels do bear relevance to their lives. If black readers want a history book, they’ll pop into a black bookstore. But if they want light summer reading, they won’t go for a heavy book dealing with racism.

While large chains do carry black literature, their selection of books give an inaccurate representation of the black experience and the genres available. In a New York Times editorial, Their Eyes were Reading Smut, a black author describes his horror after visiting a Borders bookstore and discovering the majority of their black literature inventory was erotica. It’s all stereotypical blaxploitation, and blacks have a lot more wisdom to offer about the world than what’s in the bedroom.
The closing of black bookstores poses a cultural threat, since they play an indispensible role in preserving the annals of black culture. In the race for profits, mainstream booksellers usually skip over culturally significant literature and go for less than savory titles that sell. The big chains are more interested in what’s flashy, what’s up to date, what sells the most. This often means ignoring literature reflective of the true black experience.

But black bookstores carry out a function much more essential than just selling books — they’re a meeting ground for the black communities they serve. The sense of community, which drives black bookstores and makes them so important, is what could save them in the end.

Ultimately, to preserve black culture, let’s hope that this story is one with a happy ending.

Dear American Media,

Up, up and away. As I watched the integrity of our country’s media float off into the stratosphere, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of compunction at the fact I was more than a witness, I was a conspirator. By being a player and an observer in their high-stakes game of ratings and sensationalism, I had helped to bring about this horrific moment in journalism, being dubbed by many as Balloongate.

Where was the fork in the road, Reporter Joe? When did the role of the media to inform, educate and enlighten degrade into a 24-hour news feed of an empty balloon in the sky?

Forget swine flu, President Obama needs to declare a national emergency for our nation’s press.

Law enforcement officer running towards the balloon. It was empty.

The ability of the media to focus on one boy NOT trapped in a balloon and NOT facing imminent death is simply astounding. What made Falcon (Ha! Falcon, classic) Keene different from so many other children facing danger and death in the United States? In the affluent northern Colorado neighborhood of Fort Collins where the Keenes lived, nearly 15 percent of the population lives under the poverty line and out of that, 8 percent are under age 18. Out of a city population of 130,000, that means more than 1,500 children in Falcon’s city are living in poverty and being forced live without the basic necessities of life.

Let’s move out of the Colorado suburbs, and jump to Chicago. In the South Side, the threat is not a hot air balloon. A Chicago youth is more likely to die from a drug overdose or be a victim of gang violence than they are to graduate from high school. The same goes for inner cities around the nation.

Where is their CNN news coverage and festering swarm of ravenous reporters? Are these children doomed to fade away in obscurity because their plight wasn’t TV-ready? Do they all need to pile into a balloon and float away before a single news camera swings their way? In the hectic 24 hours when the media was busy covering the Balloon Boy, 7,000 American students dropped out of high school.

In Balloongate, which is being touted as a watershed moment when the media became indistinguishable from a reality show, the nation’s press and viewers from coast to coast were sucked into a vortex of quick, easily-packaged news.

The Balloon Boy story had a strong visual: the repeating videos of the balloon in flight became ingrained into the public’s mind, and a sense of immediate danger: the fear that the boy could die at any moment. These elements are what made the story so TV-ready and what gave it the power to captivate millions.

But an innocent urban youth, trying to navigate the treacherous terrain of his crime-ridden neighborhood and entertaining dreams of success while living the American nightmare, just doesn’t make for good television. When that young man dies from gang violence, there will not be hours and hours of airtime discussing his life and his untimely death. Unless of course, someone happens to catch his brutal death using a video camera on his cell phone as with the case of Derrion Albert. Then you have an alarming visual to loop over and over again on the airwaves. Throw in a somber voiceover, a couple of interviews, pictures, and you have an Emmy award-winning story.

It appears as though we have reached the age where the sympathies of the American public cannot extend any further than a three-minute news package. Perhaps it’s just easier to focus on the dream-like, fantastical qualities of a boy in a balloon than on the reality of how the other half lives.

Whatever the reason, a serious breach has occurred, and there is now a gaping hole between what deserves media attention and what’s getting it. The gaping hole is the 24-hour news cycle, and it’s eating our children alive.

Let us deflate the belief of the American public and American media that the clear and present danger to our nation’s children is wandering into a hot air balloon and floating away. Let us remember what is truly at stake and come back down to earth.

Sincerely,

A Disillusioned Viewer

Untangling the Truth Behind Real Hair

‘Real hair’ is a unique phrase that has always held a special purport among black American women. I’m now a junior in college, and I still remember the school yard whispers of “nappy-headed” or “bald-headed” or “she need to get a perm” that drove many young girls to spend painful minutes with corrosive relaxer in their hair, hours getting braids put in or spending money on clip-ons and weaves.

Real hair became the enemy, something that had to be tamed and conquered. What else was my generation to believe? What did we see when we watched television? When we went to the movies?

After school, my friends and I would always rush home to watch Fresh Prince of Bel-Air since we all loved Will Smith, and we paid attention to the type of girls he wooed and courted. They never had kinks or a fro, but straight, relaxed hair or perfectly tempered and tamed curls.

Long and straight was the only acceptable way to go, and if you dared to sport a different style, you were exposing yourself to taunts and teases.

We were being imprinted with a skewed perception of beauty, and we weren’t even aware of it. One of the girls Will ceaselessly pursued was his childhood heart throb, Jackie Ames, who, ironically enough, was played by a young Tyra Banks.

Earlier this week, Tyra Banks, in a moment of honesty and liberation, walked out on the set of the revamped Tyra show without a weave, a wig, braids or a clip-on. After a week of publicity and hype, she showcased her natural hair in all its glory. For people my age, this held weighty significance since her character, Jackie Ames, was often a model of perfection and beauty during our most formative years. We admired her swishy, straight, perfectly dyed hair and strived to emulate it in every way possible.

I was a part of that generation of young women who hid their natural hair under the tyranny of perms, braids, and weaves, and it never occurred to me that my real hair might be considered beautiful.

So to see Tyra going natural on live television in front of millions of fans put another crack in the wall of distorted ideals we had grown up with. It didn’t tear it down, but it at least put a small hairline (no pun intended) fracture in the wall that we had put up around ourselves and our natural beauty.

Am I and other young women like me ready to finally go without weaves or perms and wear our natural kinks and curls with pride?

The sad truth is no.

Black women have years, possibly generations, to go before we feel free to do that, and the cause is rooted in a vicious web of racial history and cultural assimilation. But because of what Tyra did on Tuesday, we’re a bit closer than we were before to untangling the web that still holds many of us captive.

Fade To Black: Racelessness In The Age of Obama

The new 21st century epithet of racelessness, which most associate with the positive qualities of a post-race society, can actually be a guise for a much more sinister motivation. The tendency of society to assign the quality of racelessness to only successful African-Americans and other minorities, denotes an underlying belief that a minority who doesn’t let go of his racial identity gives up a chance at success. Racelessness becomes code for “whiteness,” making it the norm that members must abide by to climb the social ladder. Raceless non-identity becomes the normative benchmark by which our society’s hegemonic structure judges racial outsiders. If Barack Obama had marketed himself as the African-American candidate, he would have alienated white voters and potentially lost like so many other black politicians before him who were seen as the “black candidates” such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. In the new era of race and ethnicity precipitated by President Obama’s election, the designation of racelessness to successful African-Americans reflects how America’s hegemonic structure still strives to perpetuate negative stereotypes.

Racelessness is a quickly rising form of cultureless non-identity that allows one to “rise above” the labels of race and be seen as simply human, devoid of the epithets that subject many to stereotypes. President Obama has often been praised for his ability to transcend race and become “raceless,” garnering a broad appeal to diverse demographics. Fordham suggests that academically or professionally successful African-Americans must adopt a “raceless” persona and reject their cultural links in order to achieve social mobility. Success and intellectualism are qualities that are stereotypically not assigned to the black community, so in a form of internalized and structuralized oppression, successful African-American have the title of racelessness forced upon them. These transcendent individuals are allowed to break through barriers and be accepted by the hegemonic society as equals.

The title of racelessness is often a double-edge sword however. The goal of being racially transcendent implies that race is a bog that must be overcome. One would only want to “transcend” their ethnicity if they find the label oppressive. Giving an African-American the title of racelessness can actually be a way to disassociate that person’s accomplishment from their race. Racelessness becomes code for normal and in America, the normative standard is often seen as white. Racelessness becomes the 21^st century name for whiteness, a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. The very fact that being raceless or racially transcendent is a quality only assigned to minorities, but never whites, shows that whites are perceived as already having this quality. The other races are abnormal and need to conform to the white standard Americanness. Calling President Obama raceless may seem an innocuous claim at first, but it is dissociating him from his accomplishments as a black man. In a hegemonic structure where European Americans have dominated for centuries, achievement and success is a designation reserved for whiteness only. High-achieving minorities defy social expectations. This threatens the white hegemony and in order to maintain the status quo the individual’s race is simply erased. In order words, the black basketball player who also becomes a Rhodes Scholar is suddenly no longer seen as “black-black.” He has crossed over into the realm of racelessness, lest his success defy stereotypes and introduce the dangerous idea that all minorities are capable of such multi-platform success.

The formation of racelessness is a 21^st century phenomenon that was a response to a painful history of failed race relations. It’s nothing but a modern day version of W.E.B DuBois’s double consciousness where African-Americans struggle to reconcile two warring concepts of self. In DuBois’s coined term of double consciousness, American Negros are constantly waging an internal battle of identity between how they perceive themselves and how dominant society perceives them. He writes in The Souls of Black Folk:

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife: this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity of being an American, a Negro; […] two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

A history of cultural assimilation has warped black identity since the Reconstruction era to where African-Americans have been forced to choose between the two consciousnesses, one with the positive association of whiteness(aka racelessness) and one with the negative association of blackness. Conformity becomes the conduit through which minorities are able to enter the mainstream, and one of the dangers of double consciousness as expressed by DuBois becomes reality: the forgoing of black identity in favor of an acceptable white identity.

The racially transcendent label has been applied to the most prominent and professionally successful of the black community. The marking of these individuals as exceptions to the racial rules only reinforces the racial rules under the guise of “color-blindness.” A well-known example of a raceless individual is President Obama, who rose to racelessness in the realm of politics. A cultured intellectual who didn’t feel the need to bellow “Black Power!” into the nearest microphone, he was palatable enough to win over white voters, a difficult feat in the world of politics. Doing what was believed to be the impossible, he struck a blow at centuries of racial stereotypes, sending some white conservatives scrambling. What to do with this articulate, biracial young man who had risen from humble political roots in Chicago? How to separate him so the stereotypes of African-Americans being lazy, uneducated and unmotivated aren’t challenged? The answer was to redefine his race as something unique from black by designating him as raceless and making his racial identity less noticeable. Instead of reformulating stereotypes, white America just called Obama an exception, an exception that proved an immutable rule.

The most blatant example of an African-American who was bestowed with racelessness and then lost it by fulfilling the most salient black male stereotype is O.J. Being the first NFL player to rush over 2000 yards, he was arguably one of the greatest football players of all time. He was loved across racial boundaries and seen as the first honorary white athlete. O.J. was allowed to transcend race because of his wealth, fame and achievements in sports. All of this changed on June 12, 1994. His wife Nicole and her new boyfriend Ronald Goldman were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home, and one of the most publicized trials of 21^st century would ensue. The issue of stereotypes and mainstream perspective of race was dragged out into the open like it had never been before, as O.J.  was demonized and bashed, losing the elusive crown of racelessness. He was suddenly a black man again, and it was now acceptable for him to be one, since he now earned the stereotype. Since days of slavery, black men have perceived as violent and raging beasts that needed to be tamed. He now fit this mold in the eyes of white society, and he something to be feared. The only thing that saved him from the fate of any other black man was green, the only color justice recognizes.

A more recent example of a raceless African-American who was cast from his pedestal is Kanye West. In a September stunt at the MTV Music Video Awards, Kanye grabbed the microphone from pop singer Taylor Swift as she was giving her acceptance speech and said the award should have rightfully gone to Beyonce Knowles. Kanye, who has been called by many a “cross-over” because his appeal jumps over racial lines, had committed the great betrayal. The only black male stereotype second to being violent is being uneducated and uncouth.

An explosion of racism on Twitter

Kanye had broken the rules, the blinders came off and white society was indignant to learn that this unruly African-American had been masquerading as an “acceptable black” right under their noses. In an outburst of racism, the twitterverse and the blogosphere blew up with the N-word and other racial slurs. Bigotry that had been simmering right below the surface boiled over, and the beloved artist who had fans among hip-hop trendsetters and sheltered suburbanites alike, was under a race-fueled hailstorm. Everything is always fine with raceless individuals until a breach occurs, and race become salient once again.

Racelessness can hold dire consequences for the development of a healthy racial identity and for the prop functioning of multi-cultural society. It sets American off the track of egalitarianism and helps to perpetuate stereotypes. Labeling successful African-Americans as exceptions to the rule or as raceless propagates the idea that a normal black person would never attain such heights. The successful African-American becomes an anomaly, and the classification of the person as an anomaly reinforces what the society sees as normal. Therefore saying that Obama transcends race and isn’t a normal African-American perpetuates the negative portrayal of African-Americans. As blatant racism becomes socially unacceptable, dominant society will always find covert ways to make sure its ethnic and racial hegemony stays intact. Before in the 20^th century when flagrant bigotry was more of the norm than tolerance, the accomplishments of such a high-achieving class of minorities would just be ignored. The numerous contribution to society by pioneers like Benjamin Banneker, Madame C.J. Walker, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Mark Dean were simply glazed over in the annals of history. Now that many white Americans would feel compunction at the outright dismissal of black success, they found a way around it by just dismissing the person’s race entirely. Racelessness turns black accomplishments into just accomplishments, and preconceived notions remain untouched.

Racelessness can also serve to perpetuate a feeling of inadequacy among those wish to pursue racial identity. A new generation of black millenials may feel that they must adopt racelessness to succeed. In a study of school age children by Fordham, black identity was divided into categories that included ‘idealized’ and ‘alienated’ with ‘idealized’ referring to black students who felt a  strong racial identity and with alienated referring to those who felt a weak racial identity. Those with idealized racial identity demonstrated poorer performance than those with an alienated racial identity and scored lower on tests.  The justification for this in the study was that black students with a strong racial identity had internalized society’s negative regard for their capabilities and didn’t apply themselves in school. African-American students who wished to pursue and display blackness were also more likely to devalue areas where black have traditionally been unsuccessful. This leads to these racialized black students distancing themselves from behaviors that could lead to academic success in order to ensure their self-esteems are protected against failure. Highly racialized students in the study also illustrated a higher awareness of barriers to their prosperity and were more likely to reject positive attitudes and behaviors. Alienated racial identity, which falls on the side of racelessness, can spread the belief that being too black can push away whites and also lead to failure. Racial identification is discouraged as blacks begin to associate it with low achievement, never realizing that success and racial identity don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Racelessness can also serve to alienate racial minorities from raceless minorities. ‘Good’ blacks become stratified from ‘bad’ blacks based on how much they display their racial identity. This creates a class schism in the black community not too dissimilar from the slavery age schism between house slaves and field slaves. Some scholars feel this has led to President Obama not being fully accepted into the folds of African-American society as a black leader. Claiming that he isn’t black enough, black liberals have accused of not addressing issues in the black community, especially after his relative silence on the Derrion Albert murder in his native Chicago. Black political commentator Lenny McAllister writes:

“Mr. Obama is the president, and that is historic, but he is not a Black leader — at least not right now — and we collectively need to stop treating and defending him as such. Respect him as the president, but remove him from the mantle that you have him on with Dr. King. Many African-Americans have defended President Obama’s vanilla treatment of Black issues since his meteoric rise to the presidency by stating these issues are beneath his current status, but I pointedly remind them that Dr. King […] tore down walls of segregation, yet he died defending the rights of garbage workers.”

African-Americans begin to divide themselves in terms of how ‘white’ or how ‘black’ they act and socialize accordingly. This fracture in group solidarity precludes the possibility of ever developing an overarching racial identity based on racial dignity and cultural stability.

Racelessness is a pyrrhic victory at best. It gives the outward façade of being racially transcendent at the cost of leaving behind the various racial identities that support a multi-cultural society. Yes, we ‘transcend race’ and rise about it, but in the end, we are also transcending true egalitarianism. If American society is unable to integrate its plethora of ethnicities into a democracy, then a tragic failure has taken place. When stereotypes and race-based expectations become irrelevant to how black or how white someone is, the classification of racelessness for those who defy stereotypes need not exist.

WORKS CITED

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Is Obama Black Enough?” 2007. Time. <http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1584736,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar>

Dubois, W.E.B. “The Souls of Black Folk.” 1903.  http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DubSoul.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

Harper, Brian. “Racial identity beliefs and academic achievement: does being black hold students back?” 2006. <http://dennislearningcenter.osu.edu/references/Racial%20identity%20beliefs%20and%20academic%20achievement.pdf>

McAllister, Lenny. “The end of Barack Obama, the first black president.” 2009. <http://theloop21.com/news/the-end-the-first-black-president>

Neil Amdur. “Race and Sports in America.” 2000. The New York Times. <http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/070200sports-transcript.html>

Uelmen,  Gerald.”The Five Hardest Lessons From The O.J. Trial. ” 1996. <http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v7n1/lessons.html>

You’re not special, Polanskeevy…

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

By ‘Rome’, I mean our celebrity-obsessed culture, by ‘Romans’, I mean Roman Polanski, and by ‘do’, I mean rape a 13-year-old girl when you’re 43 and then flee the country before being sentenced and then have the nerve to bitch and moan when you’re finally arrested at a Zurich film festival, but still get off the hook because oh yeah that’s right you’re a famous film director and $500,000 plus Martin Scorsese equals problem solved.

Whew.

Seriously, where have the sane people gone? They certainly aren’t in Hollywood where world-renowned actors and directors have no problem whatsoever defending a pedophile rapist who evaded punishment.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought The Pianist was an incredible piece of cinema, and the satanic rape scene (irony!) in Rosemary’s Baby still makes me squirm, but you must separate an artist from his art. In the media hubbub of Polankskeevy’s arrest and the Hollywood elitist backlash that followed defending the beleaguered director, one detail seemed to be passed over again and again.

He raped a child.

According to accounts the girl gave in 1977, Polanski gave her champagne and a Quaalude before performing numerous sexual acts on her despite her protests. He confessed to these crimes in court and served 40 days of his sentence before fleeing the country. As I watched coverage on the arrest, I expected a public outcry of approval that someone who had escaped justice for more than thirty years would finally be forced to pay for his crimes. But what did I hear instead?

Whoopi Goldberg, whom I’ve always respected, on The View, saying what Polanski did wasn’t “rape-rape”. Penelope Cruz demanding that Polanski be allowed to stay in France since he is a French citizen. Harvey Weinstein circulating a petition that Polanski be released. Woody Allen…well, I’m just going to stop there because the jokes for that one would need their own blog entry.

There must be a severe dearth of causes in Hollywood for celebs to be rallying to save a child rapist. The chorus of the defense is all the same: He is an insanely talented director who simply had a lapse in judgment 30 years ago.

Talent doesn’t put you above the law. If you rape a 13-year-old girl, you deserve to go to jail for a pretty long time. It’s what a society of laws dictates and what common morality dictates. You can’t just say you’re sorry and then peace out. There are consequences for every action, and winning a couple of awards doesn’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card. By Hollywood’s logic, the sports world should have rallied around O.J. Simpson since he was a talented football player, but they didn’t as Chris Rock pointed out on Jay Leno. The reason why plays into race, which again would be another blog entry.

Time doesn’t change anything. Life was changed forever for the young girl Polanski raped. Thirty years doesn’t even begin to erase what happened to her, and it shouldn’t erase what should happen to Polanski.

Twitter: the racial equalizer of social media

Facebook, a popular social media site and the bane of most people’s productivity, reached 300 million members this week, giving it more members than there are citizens of the United States. The site has seen meteoric growth since it was created by Harvard students in 2004, and its influence has reached far and wide from enabling stalking to even deciding an election.

Facebook, for all the good and bad it brings into our lives, became the new social media frontier. If that statement sounds familiar, it’s because just a few years ago, people were saying the same thing about the now practically defunct, social media graveyard MySpace. With its flashy backgrounds and annoying music embeds, it was the way of online networking for the old and the young alike.

What precipitated its downfall? One only has to compare the landscapes of the two social media sites and the reason becomes clear. MySpace quickly became the “ghetto” of the social media world with its users increasingly becoming African-Americans and Latinos. The all-caps statuses, the hip-hop videos, the blingy backgrounds scared middle and upper class whites from the site who couldn’t bear to be associated with anything so uncouth even if it was only over a digital landscape.

“White flight” is no longer just an inner city phenomenon, it has changed and masked itself to adapt to the digital age. Race and class has always snaked itself into the most basic of human interactions, and social media sites are no exception.

However, as our society struggles to become more equalized, the ways in which we communicate evolve to reflect that. The harbinger of this trend is Twitter.

In the new era of race and class catalyzed by President Obama, Twitter is quickly becoming the great equalizer. From celebrities to multinational corporations to twenty-somethings and high school students, everyone is tweeting regardless of racial or socioeconomic standing. The mere question of “what are you doing?” is the raceless epithet that has begun to transcend differences.  From Obama’s health care proposal to Kanye West’s outburst at the VMAs, tweeters from all walks of life tweet about current events and their daily routines.

“What are you doing?” is a question that surpasses ethnic and social strata. Our lives, as variegated and contrasting as they may be, are compressed into a brief micro blog that in its conciseness squeezes out the boundaries that normally separate us. Unlike Facebook and MySpace where identity is more blatant through pictures, wall posts and personal info, Twitter is social media simplified. Users aren’t defined by their networks, their colleges, their party photos or their choice in music.

One only needs to check out the trending topics to see the diversity of issues being discussed on Twitter. Everything from G20 to Iran to Kanye West to Oprah is bound to pop up, reflecting the multifaceted myriad of people who use Twitter, a site that’s set to break 12 million unique visitors this year.

Twitter is bridging the racial divide of the digital landscape, 140 characters at a time.