"Midday" Distraction: Remember the (wack) Times?

so, I was hella tired and mildly frustrated at work today so I went for a little internet fun (DSW is having a KILLER sale right now, FYI)...i digress.

so, i go to FB, which leads me to WUSTL's Student Life "StudLife" online publication. I run across this and article and I DIE!

Ok, first of all why is the "news" of the day (or week for that matter) some upperclassmen "sneaking" into Club 40. Now for those of you affiliated with WUSTL, but whose memory has seen greener pastures, "Club 40" is the outdoor dance party for Freshman under the S40's clock.

Among the concerns: running out of root-beer from the 3 "kegs" provided (typically there are only 2); the presence of open containers (on a veeery wet campus); inappropriate behavior.

#only@wackWUSTL

oh the memories!

*muah!*

"It's Complicated"

so, i, the long-term happily single one, has decided being "in like" sucks. i mean, think about it, being "in like" complicates everything. well, not everything (oh, stop, you know me, i'm prone to exaggeration), but a lot. for example...

...you spend all of your (previously) free time trying to figure out if s/he likes you, how much s/he likes you, how much longer before you give up the goodies, if you should offer to pay for tonight's date, if you should tell her/him that you really don't care for soy lattes, in fact, you're okay with consuming cow's milk in several varieties (therefore soy dream ice cream is unnecessary), wondering when you'll be introduced to her/his friends, if it's okay to mark your territory at her/his apartment, how to tell the cutie at the gym/grocer/school you're taken (wait, are you?!), trying to decipher what "dating exclusively" and other bullshit terms mean...i digress...

i mean, REALLY?! i'm calling bullshit. it's overrated.

boogie...longing for the simpler life (and taking suggestions on how to get it back)

101. Dozens, "Blacktags" and Other Ish Black People Do

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to report that black people use twitter.

*gasp*

Yes, chile. And their use of twitter is so fascinating that some white folks even stay up late at night to peer into the heart of darkness and chuckle at the witticisms of these little nigs Negroes blacks and enjoy their “hilarious, bizarre or profane” midnight dances conversations into the wee hours of the morning.

*sigh*

I hope that paragraph above does all the work it needs to. I hope it shows how misguided Farhad Manjoo and the editors at Slate were to even post such an ill-informed and nineteenth-century-esque article. If it doesn’t then find your way over to Because, Really, the Black Snob or Instant Vintage for a much longer, funnier breakdown (@innyvinny even has a gallery of black twitter birds for your cutting, pasting and posting pleasure--see mine?).

If and when you read it, I hope the problems with the Slate article are more obvious to you than to @fmanjoo--problems like monolithic blackness, the rap-circa-2001-generically-brown twitterbird, the preoccupation with stats say nothing but do their best to mystify something very simple: that “black people are online:”

“Yet much like discovering a country where people are already living, anytime the mainstream picks up on something that black people have been doing since forever (wasting time on the internet, shooting the shit like everyone else) it is supposed to be indicative of some larger, big, mysterious thing.”

Turn your clinical digital spotlight upon me! Make me visible and by doing so make me real! Ahh! The power of the mainstream (which you could also read as white or as emanating from a legacy of whiteness and white privilege although Farhad himself is not white) gaze!

But I'm not writing to jump into the internet swarm that is headed straight for Farhad’s twitterfeed and Facebook page. I’m anti-swarming (peace and love, yall, peace and love). And I'm upset not at the piece itself but at the way its existence obscures and butchers a phenomenon that deserves a lot more attention--and a historical eye.

After all, why does the hashtag fun that occurs throughout the day--not just late at night, jeez talk about fantasies of the exotic--vibrate with a kind of diasporic and urban blackness even though the hashtags themselves are fairly innocuous (his examples included things like #annoyingquestion and #ilaugheverytime)? And why do ALL TYPES and so many people participate? You wouldn't know that from the Slate article because there is no sense of diversity so there is no reason to question why that diversity exists. In fact, I'd wager Farhad’s most obvious #racefail is that he uses a monolithic blackness that obscures differences within the United States (let’s throw out some of the common dichotomies and even these are stupid simplistic and bound to be ripped apart by any given twitter including myself: urban vs. rural, young vs. old, blitterati Root writers vs. 2dopeboyz music pirates) while at the same time perpetuating and obscuring differences across global blackness. Even his first example (#wordsthatleadtotrouble) crosses the Atlantic at least once before hitting trending status and this gets barely a mention--it’s all put under the heading of “blacktag.” Because, ya know, we all the same in this piece.

What if we did? What would be a more sensible explanation or context to place the twitter hashtag game in than the one where all black people around the world are up late at night (one timezone yall) to go in on twitter? Maybe something that consider the global aesthetics of hip hop--which at this point is decidedly not limited to either the hip hop industry or people of the brown persuasion? Or the global politics of sex (which for me leads down the road of thinking about race but need not do the same for everyone)? Especially considering the examples he choose to use and his emphasis on the nastiness of it all. Or why not consider how twitter and other social media has created a public sphere, town hall AND insurgent lingua franca which people of ALL ages use to give voice to their own sexual agency, make political commentary and...oh wait, be social?

But I’ll admit, even these questions still shy away from the truly afro-diasporic resonance of the hashtag. And I don’t have the stats to “prove” that there are or aren’t legions of faceless and nameless black people using the hashtag late at night in creative and lurid ways so I won't try. Still, a little bit of cultural literacy might have gotten Slate to the underlying--and much more interesting--query of why a social media like twitter might intersect very nicely with black expressive culture writ large.

Old wine = blues, jazz, street slang, jive, playing the dozens, 16 bars

New bottles = 140 characters, a worldwide audience, a hashtag to keep the beat

Zora Neale Hurston, while doing research in the 1920s era South, described what was called “playing the dozens”:

“...which also is a way of saying low-rate your enemy’s ancestors and him, down to the present moment for reference, and then go into his future as far as your imagination leads you. But if you have no faith in your personal courage and confidence in your arsenal, don’t try it. It is a risky pleasure.”

And Robin Kelley, doing the damn thing, wrote:

“We are, after all, talking about cultures that valued imagination, improvisation, and verbal agility, from storytelling, preaching, and singing to toasting and the dozens.”

Storytelling as getting over, quips as verbal warfare, rhythmic and poly-rhythmic improvisational wordplay that has survived since SLAVERY in one form or another and has created one of the most controversial and lucrative industries in the world--besides helping generations of blacks survive the worst of the worst of the worst.

Are we surprised that it manifested again, with twitter hashtags as the clave? Well, I’m not. And I won’t be surprised when, now that the creative work of blackness has gone mainstream to the point of being RE-NAMED the “blacktag” (oh how clever), the creative juice that powers our (read: diasporic, global black Nanny maroon there if you wanna) resistance and survival re-emerges in a new form. On Tumblr perhaps? Doing its thing until the next enterprising traveler anthropologist scientist mainstream blogger or reporter decides to turn a corner down an alley they imagined in their head and see what the culluds is up to.

The fact that Farhad couldn’t see anything interesting in the hashtag phenomenon beyond its edgy sexual politics and the brown-faced twitter icons is frustrating beyond measure. His piece reeked of a kind of voyeuristic elitism and itinerant fascination that is better left in the 1920s. Especially considering there is nothing in this post that couldn’t be found online (even the quotes are courtesy of Google Books).

But ya know, that’s fine. That’s cool. After all, as Sheila Walker writes in “Are You Hip to the Jive? (Re)Writing/Righting the Pan-American Discourse:”

“Are you hip to the jive?” was a question I often heard my father, James Walker, and his friends ask when I was growing up in New Jersey. They were questioning whether or not you really understood what was really happening, as distinguished from what you only thought you understood about what might only appear to be happening--from the simplest to the most profound meanings of that understanding.”

The power of perception may not be wholly in our hands. Farhad’s piece is already circulating on twitter and along the interwebs as a work of “serious” journalism (must be all those pesky stats). But we can still release the pressure and have a nice, hearty laugh, Ellegua/Masking Sambo style, at his expense. #ifyouainthip #youainthip bruh.

X-Posted at Nuñez Daughter

Vote for Gulf Coast Reporting Labs!

Over at PBS NewsHous, our buddy Imani Cheers is part of this project which is competing for funding via the Pepsi Refresh Project:

How is the Gulf oil spill affecting young people? What are some compelling stories that will keep people informed of what is happening in Gulf communities after the news of the spill drops off the front page?

NewsHour Extra is applying for this grant in order to fund a core group of student journalists in the Gulf Coast region of the U.S. to report on the effects of the oil disaster.

Our Student Reporting Labs connect high school students to public media mentors, who teach them how to identify, investigate, report and synthesize information, using journalism as an innovative form of purposeful learning.

These reports will bring to light untold stories, and engage youth around the world to keep track of the oil spill and reflect on the lessons presented by the catastrophe. The students who participate will become problem-solving, critical-thinking and concerned citizens, as will the millions of people who watch their stories.

Here's some video from the gallery.  Support, support, support!  Vote here!

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The Obligatory Menstrual Post (or “The Diva Cup, Race and Blood”)

X-Posted at Nunez Daughter

I'm cranky. I'm horny. I'm bloated. And I'm fatigued.

It's period time.

Yeah I said it. I'm on my period. Let the blood flow.

There's clearly nothing very cerebral here. Really. I just wanted to make that announcement. But I guess my point is why NOT make that announcement? One-half (this is unofficial, give or take to factor in kids) of the human population goes through a week of estrogen cartwheels every month. Sometimes two weeks. Sometimes to the point of becoming severly depressed or having debilitating physical symptoms like intense cramps. And yet we're expected to walk around like everything is okay. Like today is just another work day.

I call bullshit. I'm not amused by the jumping jacks going on inside my body right now. I'd like it to go back to being cool, calm and familiar. And all I really want to do is take care of myself this week: run, sleep, do yoga, dance, meditate, whatever. Believe me, if you gave me a week off to do that, imagine how much more productive, happy, healthy and whole I would be once I got back to work?

In any case, the second part of my announcement is more fun. I am not only my period...

*drumroll*

...I am also using the Diva Cup!

Yeah. I'm a feminist. But I have been slacking on my commitment to women's health. By slacking I mean that I know that abortion is a right, abstinence is a perfectly legitimate choice but not good public policy, AIDS is an epidemic and we have yet to respect or understand the psychological and sociological impact of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault on our society seeing as 1 in 3 women around us have experience it (yeah. look around you. count it up. one-third of the women in the room are survivors). Given all of the above, I thought I was pretty well-informed.

Until my housemate schooled me on a few dirty little facts about the sketchy safety of long-term use of birth control pills, how you actually GET toxic shock syndrome (friction from the cotton in tampons causes tiny cuts in the vaginal walls and the TSS comes from the infection caused when that cotton gets stuck there--wtf???), how even if you don't get TSS the bleach used in the cotton is going right into your bloodstream...

In the meantime, I'd also heard about the Diva Cup before but I wasn't quite primed to take the plunge [Note: This is a link to a post on Feministe in case you are currently boycotting them for their unremitting race/class/sexuality issues. The post is on menstrual blood but there's a very instructive discussion in the comments on the Diva Cup and other alternatives to industrial tampons and pads].

But my housemate was taking her sister to the "crunchy store" to get her a Diva Cup so I tagged along. It looked so tame! It also cost 40 bucks but the cup will hold for 12 hours (compare to the 8 max of a super tampon) and the cup itself lasts several years (the saleslady let us know that you are supposed to chuck them every couple of years but they only say that so they don't go out of business). You just boil it for five minutes after your period and tuck it in the little sack until the next month. You aren't supposed to use it if you've delivered a child through the vaginal canal (as opposed to C-section) but they also suggested you consult your physician and there is plenty of information to sift through in the FAQs on the site



Well today is Day One on the Diva Cup so here is the real deal so far. It was a bitch to put in and I chalk that up to my own ignorance about how my girly parts work. Even though the instructions said to fold the cup and insert it horizontally, I kept trying insert it vertically. I couldn't wrap my mind around the geography down there. Which just made me feel salty because I am supposed to know how to walk around my own block! Talk about socially constructed hang-ups. I also expected it to be as easy as a tampon, in the sense that you just slip it in and it does what it is supposed to do. But you also need to turn it to get the cup to unfold and "seal" around the canal. Let me tell you, chile, just doing that--unfolding and pushing aside this, inserting a finger here, turning that, twisting my body around to figure out what was happening where, freaking out when I thought I'd "lost it" in there then realizing that this is patently impossible since it is so soft all you do is insert a finger alongside it and coax it out which made me laugh out loud at my minor panic--taught me more about my own body than I ever learned in 6th grade sex-ed.

Which was probably the best part of the damn experience. It was a sweaty, fun, frustrating and triumphant time.

I finally got it to seal only after I gave up on th idea that I ever had any idea where things were down there and followed the damn directions. And it felt great. Better than a tampon because I didn't feel that scratchy string and I don't have to worry about counting hours before pulling it out. I might have forgotten that it was there except that I'm writing this post. It is that comfortable.

Of course...removing it will be a new adventure. But if I measure how much I like the Diva Cup by how much more comfortable I am (and empoweredI feel) I'd call it a win.

So why didn't I know about it before? Which brings me back to the beginning of this post--why NOT discuss these things? Why isn't this kind of information widely disseminated? I was stunned to read on the box that the Diva Cup has been around for some 70 years. I could have learned about this in 6th grade sex-ed or at least in high school at some point. Of course, if I had, would I have been as comfortable with the idea of something so tactile? Touch the cup, touch myself, touch blood--all things we are taught as little girls not to do. We are dirty, smelly, sweaty. Blood is dirty, smelly sweaty. None of this makes even the idea of a Diva Cup very attractive; I mean I turned off myself when I first read about it.

I'm going to keep it Sherrod right here and just admit it: I put the Diva Cup in the category of feminist-shit-that-only-white-women-do.

But, um, I don't know about you, but I'm not dirty or smelly or sweaty. Sweat isn't even dirty or smelly. Blood isn't dirty or smelly or sweaty either. Not even menstural blood. It is just blood. And considering the industrial strength soap we buy at CVS, believe me, it washes off the hands.

bell hooks has a great piece (I can't find the citation, please bless me with if you know what I'm talking about) about African American women, how comfortable we are with our bodies AND our bodily fluids and systemic racism which conspiraces to make us feel dirty, sweaty and smelly regardless of how many showers a day we take. The point being that from slavery, one of the undercurrents in our culture have been how disgusting we are even as that same sweat and dirt (the result of hours upon hours of field labor, mind you) left us vulnerable to the hyper-sexualizing gaze of white society, white men in particular.

Our own comfort with our bodies, like everything else, is political. It is part of how we survive in this world. Just trying the Diva Cup and seeing it as an adventure, for me, was a win on the side of righting wrongs a few centuries old. Discussing it with you here was another.

We Collect Inspiration: Phoenix Savage

"I was in New Orleans before the storm and I had this body of work based
on Aunt Jemima but it was castings that I had down of women in my
community when I lived in Nashville and the work ended up in New Orleans
with me and I had to leave the work behind and I moved but the work was
made out of plaster so it got destroyed in the storm and that’s what
lead me to the casting because I felt so vulnerable from that
destruction and I felt like I wanted to work in a way where my work was
indestructible.”  Savage’s desire for preservation lead to her new
practice of cast iron sculpture however the implication of preservation
extends beyond the physical. ” Casting is very difficult, it’s very time
consuming and casting iron is more difficult, more time consuming than
casting bronze or other metals and most people don’t like it because
it’s iron so you don’t get that same glory feeling from it but the iron
is who I am as a black person.”

via Zora & Alice.  Read the rest. 

Sexual Violence at HBCUs (Part 2)

Things You Should Read/Watch:

via New Black Man