I read your comment to Why Do Black Folks Love the Clintons So Much:
Let's be done with this quasi-intellectual clit flicking/meat beating over the Clintons and BET.Many of US think white, talk white, walk white because WE are ashamed to embrace the fullness of OUR blackness, including any such images of US broadcast by US that don't conform to white norms.
You got me thinking. Maybe I have not made clear on this blog why I abhor Bob Johnson and BET. So for you, Anonymous, and anyone else who is confused, here's the straight dope:
I don't hate BET for broadcasting tepid, mediocre shows. You can find those all around the "dial." I don't hate BET for showing black folks dancing, of which you say:
And as for those BET booty shaking videos, think surviving (though perverted) Africanisms. If the white man his woman hadn't blasted OUR mother cultures, plural because though WE are all African, WE, as Tami has said, are not a monolith, the images many of US hate to see would be experienced and appreciated in their proper contexts. WE are the dancing people. Fertility dance, Matrimonial dance, Funeral dance, War dance. The drum, movement, call and response voicing have ever been OUR cultural hallmarks. There was a time when the female booty grinding would have been seen as a rite of initiation, no less lascivious of presentation, but within a female circle, away from the eyes of any man -with no "free love" connotations.
I hate BET because it serves up a narrow diet of the worst and most offensive black stereotypes for the consumption and entertainment of the American public. I hate BET because it takes hypersexuality, misogyny, materialism and thugism, and calls it black entertainment. I hate BET because it hates me; the station regularly reduces black women to gyrating and jiggling body parts, bitches, whores, props, adornment and Hottentot Venuses. I hate BET because a lot of black folks give the channel a pass for doing all these things that would have us screaming from the hilltops if they were broadcast on CBS or NBC or a cable channel perceived as "white."
See Anonymous, I embrace the "fullness of my blackness," but my blackness has nothing to do with the way I walk, talk or think and certainly nothing to do with BET. And I won't have my race and culture narrowed to such stingy definitions. Agbekor, the African warrior dance, is not the same as droppin it like it's hot. And BET culture is not the same as black culture, at least not my version of it.
This womanist is not letting black men, like Bob Johnson, who make their fortunes on the backs of black women, off the hook so easily.
Now, if the BLACK man is to be man, must he not, likewise, master woman? I'm sure that, to a WOMANIST, it all adds up to male domination but, as Diddy says, "...sumn a stallion, sumn Italian, or maybe Puerto Rican if y'catch me in Paris..." Who knows what race Nicole Scherzinger is but you get it, don't you? BET merely puts flesh with word in service of the urge to be free as defined by the white man.
Don't blame the oppression of women on white men. There is a young girl in Africa right now suffering the pain and humiliation of having her external sexual organs mutilated because of misguided patriarchal beliefs that have nothing to do with European culture. And whoever made the rules here in America, black men who know what it means to be oppressed shouldn't be so eager to be oppressors. Male domination is male domination, and even Diddy, that sage of race relations, can't convince me its okay for you to step on me while getting yours.
So, Anonymous, my hatred of BET is more than mere mental masturbation, and it doesn't make me any less black.
P.S. Your view of white women is equally as offensive to me as your view of black ones.
11 comments:
Don't wast your time on misogynists like this. They are the kind that will find a way to blame white men for the epidemic of infant rapes by thousands of grown ass African men in South Africa.
And how about the women of Darfur -many of the men eviscerating and raping the women are blacker than anyone on this blog... they aren't all Middle Eastern.
I'm sick of the 'poor me it's everyone's fault but mine' negroes. And I wish that the REAL black men would stand up and not leave it to women to fight black fools like Mr. Anonymous
my friend and i often share our disgust of BET. just yesterday we talked about Bob Johnson using our backs for his billion dollar profit.
reading your post stirs up so much on the inside of me. i have yet to see a show on BET that says my black is beautiful without a man throwing a dollar bill at it or worse...swiping a credit card down my behind.
there is so much to say, but you summed it up best by saying, "i hate bob johnson, because bob johnson hates me." couln't of said it better myself.
Tami,
As a fellow person who, as I stated in my last post, can't stand BET, I say THANK YOU!! I am so sick of people defending BET. There's virtually nothing good about it other than the fact that it employs some colored folks, but then so do crack dealers.
BET is 23-hours (one hour of decent programming can sneak in sometimes) of sewage 365 days a year.
As for Anonymous' comment about men being the masters of women, Anonymous needs to get a clue. Being a master implies more than domination, it implies slavery and the ability to force thought and action upon another person. A slave can never truly love a master. Love is given and not forced.
If a man wants sex from his woman, does he, as master, have the right to take what he wants? Can a man as master beat his woman or kill her? Up until the 1980s it was legal for a husband to rape his wife.
There's misconception that women are weaker than men. That isn't true. Study after study shows that women are genetically stronger than men. Female fetuses are stronger. Girls mature faster. As educational statistics show, women have surpassed men in the number of attendees and graduates of college. When given an equal playing field, women do better in school.
In saying this, I'm not advocating a belief in female supremacy or male inferiority. Instead, I point these facts out because I'm tired of the overwhelming misogyny in human society. Why is it that we criticize some by saying that throwing like a girl is wrong?
In the wars of the last 20 years, rape has become a standard tool of warcraft more so than has been reported in the past. In Bosnia, Serbians raped women en masse. Now in Congo we see organized rape as a terror tactic, too. On 60 Minutes this weekend, an anchor reported how Congolese women are regularly raped by different fighting factions. Some of the rapes occur with foreign object that tear women's bodies. This results in fistulas, torn urinary or rectal muscles.
When you look at BET and the relentless degradation of women and men, why do you not recoil in horror? Why can't we see that men are equally debased? They are not empowered by their depictions.
The booty shaking in of itself is not wrong, the sensuality is beautiful. What is wrong is the context. Instead of an act of love, it is done with the begging neediness of the poor desperately hoping for a scrap. The act of sensuality between a man and woman is debased into commerce and slavery. There is no equality there. It is the weak using flesh as currency.
(And, from a creative stand point, the videos suck: cliche after cliche after cliche--guys hang around showing off greenbacks, posing with Ferraris, and then zoom-ins on women shaking butts for the approval of men. It's like 2 year old pizza that someone found underneath the bed: what once was good is now foul and disgusting.)
At some point, we have to say enough is enough. Why can't we have mutual, respectful sensuality that doesn't depend on the weakness of another?
As for Bob Johnson, I said it yesterday and I will say it again: the man deserves to be shunned! Cast him out until he repents.
Seeing a billionaire African-American willfully stabbing Barack Obama through the use of racist imagery tells a horrific tale of Johnson's corruption. Could anyone think of John Johnson, the founder and publisher of Ebony Magazine, doing something like that?
It's one thing for Johnson to support Hillary Clinton but to go after a good man using the racial stereotype of black man equals drug addict is disgusting.
Was Ebenezer Scrooge as evil as Johnson? Hmm...I think not.
May Johnson's diamond life turn to coal.
Thank you, Anonymous coward!
Thank you for all your bad ass talking trash talking and your ignorant sexist and racist rantings, that you don't have the guts to sign your name to.
Thank you for proving that every word that Tami writes is brave, truthful and powerful and that everything you say doesn't matter.
Do us all a really big favor and start your own blog and stay off other folks' blogs until you grow or steal the stones to use your name and e-mail address when you comment.
Real men don't hide behind anonymous posts. Go away!
Please delete the troll's posts in the future. He clearly has no life and needs the attention -- only a very lonely, pathetic man will set up shop to pick a fight with women he doesn't know.
Wow, that was quite a comment you got, Tami.
It's weird to have to explain why misogyny and stereotypes are tough to enjoy.
Whoa! A lot of the backlash against Anonymous sounds to me like knee-jerk feminist/haterist rhetoric. I don't think the brother intended to excuse every crime perpetrated against women worldwide because "the White Man did it first".
But to be fair and logical rather than emotional, one has to acknowledge misogyny and exploitation in all its forms and not just paint Bob Johnson as the devil out of convenience. Unfortunately for women, as noted recently by NY Times columnist Bob Herbert, the mainstream has of late sanctioned misogyny to an appalling extent. Of course as black women, it hurts more coming from our own men but are they any more at fault?
I think the valid point Anonymous makes is that the objectification of women by Bob Johnson and by black men generally is to some degree explained (if not justified) by the understandable desire of black men to lay claim to the same badges of masculinity that are awarded to and respected by white men in this culture, deplorable as they may be. Black men are for the most part unable to attain many of the traditional indicia of manhood - those things that in sum would result in financial stability - because the white boys hoarde them out of a long standing sense of entitlement (to say nothing of the pervasive deprivation of the black man's physical liberty).
But lo and behold, over the last couple decades what was regarded as the white man's ULTIMATE entitlement, his dominion over women - brown, black and especially white - suddenly became a free commodity. I'll agree it's a shame that so many brothers, Bob Johnson included, have rushed in to grab a piece of the perceived prize but is it any wonder...? Women on the whole are easier for a brother to enter than the job market, and that's not even meant as a pun. Moreover, exploiting women is about the most lucrative game going.
The white man's been exploiting our a**ses for centuries and no sign of stopping. Why is it worse when Bob Johnson or any other brother demands a share of the profit? Isn't there a logical argument that says it's an improvement? Or at least, doesn't the one problem (denying black men equal dignity to white men - i.e., the right to make a profit off any trick they can pull no matter how undignified) exacerbate the other (black men resorting to disrespect and domination over black women as their sole means of validating their manhood)?
With regard to BET, I think at a minimum we need to start apportioning some of the blame to all the other black folk - the rappers, the actors, the dancer/models - whose complicity has helped Bob Johnson build an empire out of booty and minstrelsy. Why don't somebody go throw an egg at Superhead or Mo'Nique?
Cousin,
I certainly agree that Bob Johnson is not solely responsible for degrading images of black women. There has been much debate about Supahead and other "video vixens," David Banner, TI, Nelly and other rappers, here and on my sister blogs, especially What About Our Daughters. Gina from WAOD and Shecodes from Black Women Vote attended the federal hearings on hip hop last year. I think we all understand that there is plenty of blame to go around. And certainly much blame rests with the white heads of Viacom and other companies that peddle minstrelsy as entertainment. But still, Bob Johnson is the person Hillary Clinton had shilling for her and so Bob Johnson drew fire.
Personally, I reject the notion that the white man is responsible for misogyny. Men are oppressing women in Africa right now and have been for years. What about clitoral mutilation, a custom that has nothing to do with white people? Now, the brand of sexism practiced in the West, okay, that is a European creation. But black men get no pass from me for buying in to it. Black men know oppression and so shouldn't be so eager to oppress.
We can only use "the white man" as an excuse for so long before it gets tired. Plenty of good black men choose not to denigrate women.
There has to be a special place in hell for people who sell their own down the river to "get theirs." People take conservatives like Clarence Thomas to task for crimes against the black community all the time, why not Bob Johnson?
KimcheeB, you're dealing with man-hating, narrow-minded, ultra-orthodox d phobes. A moderate voice, such as yours, won't likely be heard.
The cultural practice, on which T holds forth, is not observed by all African peoples but, though ss different from white folkways as the Riverdance from the Boogaloo, it's also, for those who are so stirred to celebrate, as deeply rooted in a system of beliefs as is excised male foreskin a custom predicated on belief of Guy in the Sky.
thank you!
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