For Tiana & Black Children: AfroVisual/AfroDigital Love

8C8880633-tdy-130906-TianaParker2-tease.blocks_desktop_teaseLike most black women who I know, I was really upset this weekend when I saw the news coverage of beautiful, 7-year old Tiana Parker, a straight A student, as she shed tears when her school officials castigated her hair/locs!!  If you ever thought black hair could be politically neutral in our social world, then you may never truly understand these kinds of tears. After being continually harassed, Tiana’s father was forced to enroll her in a new school because her charter school banned all dreadlocks as inappropriate, calling Tiana’s locs a distraction from learning/thinking.

I talk/write/think a lot about the white violence and terror that black girls face in school and this example rocks me to my core.  I find myself remembering what E.M. Monroe wrote about her son’s (Miles) first day of kindergarten this fall in the post, “Models Monday: Black Boys, Trayvon Martin, and the Politics of Comfort.”  In the post, Monroe talks about the humanity of Ms. Malcolm, a teacher who can see Miles’s humanity:

I tell you, it was a damn good surprise to have someone who sees your black child as having a life worth preserving temporarily responsible for their keeping. She’s a model for how a person might demonstrate their liberal views: You want to prove to me that you aren’t racist, well then how about you showing me that you Always choose to be an Aide and not an Assassin.

Monroe captures brilliantly the kind of teacher and school that I think black children like Tiana so rarely experience.  It is clear to me that the adults at Tiana’s school belong to a kind of violent trajectory that Monroe discusses in this post that she relates to the murder of Trayvon Martin.  Make no mistake about it: this demonization of Tiana’s hair— a part of black bodies— belongs to the same ideology that demonized Trayvon Martin’s black body.

Like what Ms. Malcolm offered Miles, Dr. Yaba Blay offered Tiana and black women a similar kind of witnessing.  Dr. Blay’s response has been the most brilliant with her focus on Tiana’s spirit.   She created what she calls A care package of sorts. A digital book of photos and messages from 111 women and girls from all over the country and all over the world, all of whom wear their hair in locs, all of whom want Tiana to know that she and her hair are PERFECT.” The result is simply stunning (followed by a new facebook community).  Click on the digital booklet below that Dr. Blay left open for embedding and sharing across multiple platforms:

It’s an important reminder about the political power of healing and loving black children and the role of always offering them visual images for staking out who we are.  This digital care package also offers black communities a way to inhabit digital spaces outside of the white norms of collecting images and videos to showcase family consumption and bourgeois achievements— after all, that is the same kind of whiteness that left Tiana in tears.  E.M. Monroe and Dr. Blay offer us real images and processes of what it looks like to show and love black children in a digital age.  These are the only kinds of AfroVisual/AfroDigital spaces that can recognize our humanity.

AfroDigital-Sensitized: Black Sensibility Online

440x296_2200-white-people-dancingGranted, I probably take the public nature of a digital universe too seriously.  I will concede that.  When I see “professionals” in my field uploading videos of themselves where they are dancing to one beat, their small child dancing to another beat, and a black artist’s song playing in the background with an entirely different beat altogether, I think: oh hayell TO THE naw.  If that weren’t bad enough, these folk got the nerve to be singing along, karaoke machine in full display, to the tune of yet another beat, wearing the paraphernalia of their college alma mater.  If I were the president of that college, I would have to pull these folk aside and talk to them.  It’s like an audition for American Idol that has gone very wrong: someone has got to step up and just say naw, baby, this right here ain’t for you; focus on another goal.  Call me an essentialist then… I think this might just be a black thang.  The black folk who I know and who raised me simply would not be out here uploading videos of pre-rehearsed performances (copied from TV) to broadcast for the world where they and their CHILDREN are singing and dancing with NO KINDA RHYTHM, RHYME, or TIME.  You have to be the Jackson Five for that kind of thing!  In what I define as black culture, when you publicly display yourself, you better be ready for sharp critique: think Showtime at the Apollo here— the youtube before youtube.  It ain’t nuthin nice when you need to be told to exit that public stage. Even with those youtube videos that bougsie black folk like to critique forever and a day of black mothers twerking (with their kids mimicking in the background), you have to concede one thing: them. folk. CAN. dance.  I’m not saying all the black folk that I know can sing and dance, just that when they can’t, they KNOW it and so don’t arrogantly display it for the world.  At the end of the day, even in the worst kind of minstrel show, black folk just don’t get the option of public display without an iota of talent or rhythm.  And though we are never credited as such, the black folk who I know and those who raised me have some high standards by which you come to understand yourself.

It ain’t like I don’t have a sense of humor.  I laughed all day long when I saw Jimmy Fallon, Robin Thicke, and the Roots do a rendition of “Blurred Lines” with children’s musical instruments.  Thicke never sounded better and this version of the song is so much better than the already played-out radio version.  The brotha playing the banana might be the new love of my life.  And, interestingly, this New-Skoolhouse rendition makes the song more than a wanna-be Marvin Gaye clone and the new rhyme rewrites some of the song’s problematic gender politics.  You see, even for the sake of humor, black folk don’t give up the seriousness of real rhythm and creativity… and knowing what the hell you are doing and who you are.

When it comes to online spaces, I use a black sensibility to tell me what is wrong and what is right.  I might offend folk with what I am saying but the structural racism that I discuss is not something I haven’t examined/read closely.    But that too is a black sensibility: say what you gotta say and whoever feels a certain way about it, let them go on and feel it.  That ain’t my problem or cross to bear. Mostly, it’s my standard of performance, skill, and appropriateness that I see as AfroDigital-Sensitized.  In just a few weeks, I will be teaching three sections of first year writing (FYW) where students and myself will interrogate digital literacies and digital empire more closely than I ever have before in FYW.  The modules are finally coming together and I am quite clear that I am using an Afro-Digital-Sensibility to craft the units of study, the framing of the course, and the polemics of digital spaces.  This is about more than what African Americans do or consume online; it’s about an ideological framework inside of yet another system we have not designed.  Like I seem to be saying over and over again here, I haven’t ever needed to look further than the wisdom of my people to know how to navigate the world, digital or otherwise.

“The Unwritten Rules” Writes B(l)ack

I am not a regular watcher of RHOA, those Hip Hop minstrel shows (Flava of Love, Love and Hip Hop, T.I.& Tiny, et al), or any reality TV actually.  I have seen some of the episodes and have read other people’s commentary but that’s about it.  I didn’t watch weekly episodes of Scandal or even the Wire; I watched entire seasons all at once on Netflix after the hype.  I was usually disappointed.  I have, however, watched every episode of “The Unwritten Rules.”  “the Unwritten Rules” is a web-series based on the book, 40 Hours and an Unwritten Rule: The Diary of a N**ger, Negro, Colored, Black, African-American Woman, by Kim Williams, the executive producer and writer of the show. Each episode revolves around a young, black woman, Racey (Aasha Davis), and her life as the “Black Co-Worker” in a white workplace.  Last week’s episode, part of the new Season 2, may have been my favorite.

unwritten-rulesIn just one, rather short episode, there is a parody of the WWCW (white woman crying at work), the transracial adoption of (Madonna’s) African children, the attack on the head black official as a socialist, issues around black hair & discipline with white parenting, the difference in expectations of black female labor vs. white female labor, and the definition of white privilegitis… now this is TELEVISION, honey!  After Issa Rae’s success, an opening was created (inkSpotEntertainment and BlackandSexyTV are my favorites) for these shows and the hits seem to keep coming.

This is, by far, my favorite workplace comedy because the comedy actually depicts experiences that I can relate to and call my own.  For some of us, racial micro-agressions, institutional racism, and anti-black hostility are as everyday as taking a lunch break.  Isn’t it ironic then that for most of the television viewing of my life, these everyday realities have been relegated, at most, to a special episode?  For me, “the Unwritten Rules” also highlights how politically and ideologically bankrupt our requests for “representation” often are.  We constantly ask to see larger numbers of ourselves on film and television but that is meaningless unless our request also demands a sharp airing of the social and political issues that we face. This web series is a step in the right direction.

Thank You to Vaughn!

When it comes to classrooms, it feels like I have seen it all in these past 20 years.  I did student teaching in a third grade classroom in South Central Los Angeles, moved to a junior high school in the Bronx, then high school, then college teaching.  I have been to more funerals than I care to count, prayed with and for ex-convicts to find a way out, watched over small children while single mothers took care of business, worked with public safety to protect female students from physically abusive male partners (who have been known to come to campus to look for their ex-girlfriends/wives), helped students fight racist teachers, helped gay students fight homophobic campuses, helped parolees check(-in with) parole officers, fed/transported students who had no way there.  You name it, I have seen it.  It’s the nature of what it means to commit to working class/working poor communities in one of the central racist institutions that holds them hostage: SCHOOL.  The college classrooms that I have taught in are not that much different than that first junior high school where I taught in the poorest congressional school district in the country.

The statistics tell us that 1 in every 4 or 5 female students in college  (depending on which stats you look at) have been raped.  I don’t need them stats though: I can attest to that number via the conversations I have had with female students in every college classroom I have taught in.  The only thing that really connects all of these experiences and classrooms is the TOTAL incongruence between who these students are and how they get depicted— whether that be so-called “educational research” or scholarship or media depictions.  In media, they are savages who cannot control themselves.  In scholarship, they are hopeless remedial readers and writers in need of a paternalistic white savior (or, the distant cousin— the pied-piper of color) who has studied all of the right strategies (we might want to START wondering how any graduate program/college can prepare you to teach the communities that they are NOT enrolling or really employing as faculty).  For those who are privileged, these students are just authorized to be self-hating, anti-Ebonics, and anti-black since those things get anointed as post-racial or non-essentialist.  In everyday parlance, we imagine these students to be so hopelessly bamboozled by mass culture (often called “popular culture” by post-modernists) that they do  not know they are being robbed of time, money, spirit, and sanity.

The one thing I can count on is that I can’t count on media or academia to speak to, for, or about the people who I have had the opportunity to call my students.  It’s an important reminder that can shake me loose when my mind gets stuck on stupid.  Thank you to Vaughn Ephraim who shook me loose in this moment. Vaughn sent me the following video, “NA-TU-RAL” by  Qu’ality that he thought I might enjoy.

Qu'ality

Qu’ality

He was right.  Vaughn’s message when he sent me the video was equally deep for me.  Here is part of that message about why he knows, values, and listens to Qu’ality:

The song is called “Na-tu-ral” and it features shots of young ladies with all different kinds of natural hair styles. It is put together very well and I think it’s important to acknowledge black men who promote and acknowledge and love the beauty in black women. He is in within my age group, which is another important factor as it shows our generation is not fully tainted or corrupted with the vile and chauvinistic conditioning of white male western dominance which is simply below sub-par.

I agree with Vaughn.  Vaughn’s sentiments as well as what we see and hear in Qu’ality’s video are not what we often see and hear about young black men and women today.  Thank you, Vaughn!  Keep on pushin!  I am learning from you.