Showing posts with label Gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender. Show all posts
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Media’s Obsession with Unmarried Black Women
The Media v. Black Women:
The Peculiar Case of the Media’s Obsession with Unmarried Black Women
by Diane Lucas
By now, everyone in the country with access to a television, the internet or a book store has gotten the memo that black women marry at a dismally low rate compared to women of other races. We’ve seen and read it in the Economist, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Essence Magazine, Ebony and on The View, Oprah, and Nightline, among others. We know that of the hetero-black male population, there are significant numbers of black men incarcerated, lower rates of higher education, and disproportionate numbers of black men marrying outside of their race, as compared to black women. We heard that even setting aside those factors, there are fewer black men than woman in the U.S. population. No one is denying that there is an issue. It’s been an issue for a while now. So why the New York Times recently published what seems like the millionth and one article on why black women can’t find a man is absolutely baffling.
I have been thinking a lot about this issue and discussing it with friends — black and white, male and female — to pinpoint precisely why these articles bother me so much. I, like many other black feminists/womanists, constantly call for more discussion of issues affecting black women and other women of color in the mainstream media. Black relationships and the black family are important mainstream topics. But the media is obsessed with unmarried black women. One black woman commenting on the ABC Nightline post put it best — she said she is waiting for the article about black women tripping down altars riddled with reporters and social scientists. The inundation of these articles, T.V. specials, and books is an attack on black women. The overall message conveyed is unproductive and harmful.
Specifically, here’s my beef (and bear with me, because I have a lot of it):
Blame Game
The media often places the blame on black women for their perceived inability to find successful black men, especially when black women become more educated and achieve greater success in their careers. Although some articles and T.V. specials acknowledge the disparate number of available black men vís a vís black women due to the racialization of the criminal justice system, the discussion rarely turns to how black men can improve their romantic interactions with black women. Rather, the media often focuses on black women and their “issues.” Many of these articles, T.V. specials and books are purposed to instruct black women on how to be more desirable to black men or how to lower their standards. A prime example is the book The Denzel Principle: Why a Black Woman Can’t Find a Good Black Man, which blames black women for setting their standards too high — they apparently only want Denzel Washington, not the mail man.
The Nightline multi-part special entitled “Why Can’t a Successful Black Woman Find a Man?” sent the message that, as the title implies, black women are to blame for many of their problems finding a man. The Nightline special posed questions that begged for “experts” (including Steve Harvey, a comedian, whose “expertise” on black women and relationships remains unclear) to figure out what is wrong with black women. Are they too strong? Too powerful? Too aggressive? Too demanding? Of course, these stereotypical characteristics of black women are the same traits often attributed to successful people generally, regardless of race or gender. So the take away to black women is that the very characteristics that made you successful are the same ones that will keep you single, lonely, and of course unhappy.
Instead of being asked to make a choice between being either strong and independent or married, black women would be better served if our strengths were celebrated and not demonized, and if we were recognized as individuals. Black women would fare better if writers, experts and social scientists would take a break from hyper-examining and over-analyzing us to figure out what our “problems” are.
Read the Full Essay @ Feministe
Diane Lucas is a Attorney in New York City
The Peculiar Case of the Media’s Obsession with Unmarried Black Women
by Diane Lucas
By now, everyone in the country with access to a television, the internet or a book store has gotten the memo that black women marry at a dismally low rate compared to women of other races. We’ve seen and read it in the Economist, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Essence Magazine, Ebony and on The View, Oprah, and Nightline, among others. We know that of the hetero-black male population, there are significant numbers of black men incarcerated, lower rates of higher education, and disproportionate numbers of black men marrying outside of their race, as compared to black women. We heard that even setting aside those factors, there are fewer black men than woman in the U.S. population. No one is denying that there is an issue. It’s been an issue for a while now. So why the New York Times recently published what seems like the millionth and one article on why black women can’t find a man is absolutely baffling.
I have been thinking a lot about this issue and discussing it with friends — black and white, male and female — to pinpoint precisely why these articles bother me so much. I, like many other black feminists/womanists, constantly call for more discussion of issues affecting black women and other women of color in the mainstream media. Black relationships and the black family are important mainstream topics. But the media is obsessed with unmarried black women. One black woman commenting on the ABC Nightline post put it best — she said she is waiting for the article about black women tripping down altars riddled with reporters and social scientists. The inundation of these articles, T.V. specials, and books is an attack on black women. The overall message conveyed is unproductive and harmful.
Specifically, here’s my beef (and bear with me, because I have a lot of it):
Blame Game
The media often places the blame on black women for their perceived inability to find successful black men, especially when black women become more educated and achieve greater success in their careers. Although some articles and T.V. specials acknowledge the disparate number of available black men vís a vís black women due to the racialization of the criminal justice system, the discussion rarely turns to how black men can improve their romantic interactions with black women. Rather, the media often focuses on black women and their “issues.” Many of these articles, T.V. specials and books are purposed to instruct black women on how to be more desirable to black men or how to lower their standards. A prime example is the book The Denzel Principle: Why a Black Woman Can’t Find a Good Black Man, which blames black women for setting their standards too high — they apparently only want Denzel Washington, not the mail man.
The Nightline multi-part special entitled “Why Can’t a Successful Black Woman Find a Man?” sent the message that, as the title implies, black women are to blame for many of their problems finding a man. The Nightline special posed questions that begged for “experts” (including Steve Harvey, a comedian, whose “expertise” on black women and relationships remains unclear) to figure out what is wrong with black women. Are they too strong? Too powerful? Too aggressive? Too demanding? Of course, these stereotypical characteristics of black women are the same traits often attributed to successful people generally, regardless of race or gender. So the take away to black women is that the very characteristics that made you successful are the same ones that will keep you single, lonely, and of course unhappy.
Instead of being asked to make a choice between being either strong and independent or married, black women would be better served if our strengths were celebrated and not demonized, and if we were recognized as individuals. Black women would fare better if writers, experts and social scientists would take a break from hyper-examining and over-analyzing us to figure out what our “problems” are.
Read the Full Essay @ Feministe
Diane Lucas is a Attorney in New York City
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Protecting Caster Semenya's Humanity
Results of the gender investigation aside, Caster Semenya’s humanity has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.
Semenya's Race and Sex Struggle
by Kai Wright
What stood out most as Caster Semenya faced reporters at last week’s track and field world championships was that she’s just a kid. Baby-faced and leery, she parceled out answers to ostensibly innocuous questions. “What was your running background before this year?” But a more insidious query lurked for the teen: What kind of freak are you, anyway? That’s the real question the world wants South Africa’s new star athlete to answer.
The International Association of Athletics Federations has demanded Semenya, who won the 800-meter gold last week, submit to a sex test; bookies are taking bets on the results. But whatever the IAAF’s shameless doctors conclude, the verdict about Semenya is already in—she’s a monster. What remains is to determine what type of monster we’re gawking at. A hermaphrodite? An intersexual? A genetic boy whose parents raised him as a girl? Or just a mannish woman, after all?
If “science” concludes the latter, Semenya can keep her medal. Her humanity, however, has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Say My Name: Women in Hip-Hop
'Say My Name': Women MCs Tell Their Stories
by Mark Anthony Neal
Say “women in hip-hop” and the conversation is quickly reduced to what is widely known as the genre’s “woman problem.” In the edited collection, Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, co-editor and filmmaker Rachel Raimist writes, “Many of hip-hop’s ‘women problems” come in the monolithic and repetitious representation of hip-hop as simply a sexist male rapper surrounded by an entourage of nameless and faceless gyrating bodies in video after video.” Issues of representations, as expressed by Raimist are at the heart of Say My Name (Women Make Movies) , the Nirit Peled documentary about women and hip-hop.
The film’s opening montage features a cascade of women’s voices, highlighting the lack of available space—sonic and otherwise—allotted to women within the genre. The lives, desires, and struggles of women are literally obliterated in the resulting cacophony as the montage serves as a metaphor for hip-hop’s relationship with women. Raimist cautions that “We must resist and counter the limited views of women in hip-hop… there are many agents of hip-hop and it is the sum of all of our parts to make this a living, breathing, and active culture.”
This limited view of women in hip-hop dates back to the culture’s origins in the Bronx, more than 35 years ago. While much of the culture’s early mythology was driven by larger than life male figures like Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), Afrika Baambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, there were always women involved, even if, for some, only at the level of mimicking performances with hair brushes in front of the mirror as female rap veteran Monie Love recalls in the film. By the early 1980s, there were several visible women rappers including the group Sequence, Sha-Rock (a founding member of the Funky Four Plus One) and Sparky D, though these women were largely on the periphery of mainstream perceptions of rap music and largely treated as little more than novelties within the industry. Accordingly it was a novelty track—a “diss” song—by 14-year-old Lolita Shante Gooden that proved the first significant breakthrough for female rappers. “Roxanne’s Revenge,” by Roxanne Shante (Gooden), was a response to UTFO’s popular “Roxanne, Roxanne” and instigated a string of response records.
In the film, Roxanne Shante recalls popular DJ and producer Marley Marl reaching out to her to record the track and having to tell him that she had to do it quickly, so that she could get back to her laundry chores. It’s a humorous moment in the film, but one that gets at the heart of many of the struggles that women rappers face, trying to balance the demands of the industry and the domestic expectations that society places on them. Roxanne Shante, for example, was a teen-age mother at the height of her popularity in the late 1980s. In this regard, hip-hop is reflection the challenges that many women face in the workforce. The sad irony is that these tensions are ripe for exploration as lyrical content, though few, if any, mainstream female rappers have been able to mine this subject matter with any success.
There was a relative critical mass of female rappers in the late 1980s including MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, and Monie Love. When Queen Latifah and Monie Love collaborated on the popular “Ladies First” and joined forces as the Native Tongues with The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest on “Buddy” expectations were high for female rappers. Unfortunately when hip-hop became the business of “big business” in the early 1990s, the range of images and voices within hip-hop became limited. For female rappers (as well as male rappers) that meant much less focus on their technical skill and more of a focus on the “package.” In this environment, it became a struggle to maintain commercial viability for many female rappers. As MC Lyte notes in Say My Name, “female MCs’s names have always been larger than their record sales.”
In the film, Rah Digga laments that “everybody in the world that I meet, calls me their favorite female MC, but I haven’t been able to drop an album since 2000.” Indeed, at the beginning of the 21st century the so-called video-vixens far outnumbered female rappers in mainstream hip-hop culture. When commentators and activists began to police hip-hop culture on the basis of its sexism and misogyny, women rappers were ironically left out of the fray, excepting the vitriol directed at Lil Kim. Say May Name offers one of the few opportunities for female rappers to weigh in on this particular aspect of the culture. Erykah Badu, for example complains in the film, “I really get tired of people shaking their ass on camera.” Remy Ma takes a contrarian view: “I’d rather see a girl at the end of a video shoot at the trailer [waiting for] her check, than to see her butt-ass naked in strip club counting singles.” The debate aside, one of the strengths of Say My Name is that it does not foreclose views that cut against the film’s more progressive aims.
Of the more compelling stories throughout Say My Name are those of Detroit based rapper Miz Korona and one-time MTV sensation Mystic. Miz Korona recounts being beat down by a male member of her hip-hop crew as she began to generate more attention among local industry types. She was 15 at the time. In the case of Mystic, she recalls using rap to record a track about raped in high school. It was only after recording the track that Mystic finally discussed the attack with her mother—years after the fact. According to Mystic she had a responsibility to tell that story in an effort to show many of hip-hop’s female fans that they have the strength to persevere. As Jean Grae suggest during Say My Name’s closing montage, “The most beautiful music comes from pain and struggles.” Too bad mainstream commercial culture has chosen to ignore much of this music for so long.
The film’s opening montage features a cascade of women’s voices, highlighting the lack of available space—sonic and otherwise—allotted to women within the genre. The lives, desires, and struggles of women are literally obliterated in the resulting cacophony as the montage serves as a metaphor for hip-hop’s relationship with women. Raimist cautions that “We must resist and counter the limited views of women in hip-hop… there are many agents of hip-hop and it is the sum of all of our parts to make this a living, breathing, and active culture.”
This limited view of women in hip-hop dates back to the culture’s origins in the Bronx, more than 35 years ago. While much of the culture’s early mythology was driven by larger than life male figures like Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), Afrika Baambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, there were always women involved, even if, for some, only at the level of mimicking performances with hair brushes in front of the mirror as female rap veteran Monie Love recalls in the film. By the early 1980s, there were several visible women rappers including the group Sequence, Sha-Rock (a founding member of the Funky Four Plus One) and Sparky D, though these women were largely on the periphery of mainstream perceptions of rap music and largely treated as little more than novelties within the industry. Accordingly it was a novelty track—a “diss” song—by 14-year-old Lolita Shante Gooden that proved the first significant breakthrough for female rappers. “Roxanne’s Revenge,” by Roxanne Shante (Gooden), was a response to UTFO’s popular “Roxanne, Roxanne” and instigated a string of response records.
In the film, Roxanne Shante recalls popular DJ and producer Marley Marl reaching out to her to record the track and having to tell him that she had to do it quickly, so that she could get back to her laundry chores. It’s a humorous moment in the film, but one that gets at the heart of many of the struggles that women rappers face, trying to balance the demands of the industry and the domestic expectations that society places on them. Roxanne Shante, for example, was a teen-age mother at the height of her popularity in the late 1980s. In this regard, hip-hop is reflection the challenges that many women face in the workforce. The sad irony is that these tensions are ripe for exploration as lyrical content, though few, if any, mainstream female rappers have been able to mine this subject matter with any success.
There was a relative critical mass of female rappers in the late 1980s including MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, and Monie Love. When Queen Latifah and Monie Love collaborated on the popular “Ladies First” and joined forces as the Native Tongues with The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest on “Buddy” expectations were high for female rappers. Unfortunately when hip-hop became the business of “big business” in the early 1990s, the range of images and voices within hip-hop became limited. For female rappers (as well as male rappers) that meant much less focus on their technical skill and more of a focus on the “package.” In this environment, it became a struggle to maintain commercial viability for many female rappers. As MC Lyte notes in Say My Name, “female MCs’s names have always been larger than their record sales.”
In the film, Rah Digga laments that “everybody in the world that I meet, calls me their favorite female MC, but I haven’t been able to drop an album since 2000.” Indeed, at the beginning of the 21st century the so-called video-vixens far outnumbered female rappers in mainstream hip-hop culture. When commentators and activists began to police hip-hop culture on the basis of its sexism and misogyny, women rappers were ironically left out of the fray, excepting the vitriol directed at Lil Kim. Say May Name offers one of the few opportunities for female rappers to weigh in on this particular aspect of the culture. Erykah Badu, for example complains in the film, “I really get tired of people shaking their ass on camera.” Remy Ma takes a contrarian view: “I’d rather see a girl at the end of a video shoot at the trailer [waiting for] her check, than to see her butt-ass naked in strip club counting singles.” The debate aside, one of the strengths of Say My Name is that it does not foreclose views that cut against the film’s more progressive aims.
Of the more compelling stories throughout Say My Name are those of Detroit based rapper Miz Korona and one-time MTV sensation Mystic. Miz Korona recounts being beat down by a male member of her hip-hop crew as she began to generate more attention among local industry types. She was 15 at the time. In the case of Mystic, she recalls using rap to record a track about raped in high school. It was only after recording the track that Mystic finally discussed the attack with her mother—years after the fact. According to Mystic she had a responsibility to tell that story in an effort to show many of hip-hop’s female fans that they have the strength to persevere. As Jean Grae suggest during Say My Name’s closing montage, “The most beautiful music comes from pain and struggles.” Too bad mainstream commercial culture has chosen to ignore much of this music for so long.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Zillah Eisenstein: "Hillary is White"
Published on Sunday, May 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.orgHillary Is White
by Zillah Eisenstein
It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.
None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.
And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.
Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.
Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.
by Zillah Eisenstein
It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.
None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.
And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.
Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.
Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.
Read Full Essay
***
Zillah Eisenstein is professor of politics at Ithaca College, a feminist anti-racist activist, and author of ten books in feminisms and feminist theories across the globe. Her most recent book is Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2007).
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