How Black Girls Rock: An Interview with Beverly Bond

Beverly Bond talks how she started her celebrated mentoring program

How Black Girls Rock: An Interview with Beverly Bond
by Felicia Pride

You can only wish that all DJs were built like Beverly Bond. But it’s not just her ability to represent the best of the art form and move the crowd that makes her noteworthy. She’s also the founder of Black Girls Rock, a weekly mentoring program. Every Saturday, at the Scratch Academy in New York, Bond works to transform the lives of young girls and help them see their own worth and talent.

To help fund the program, Bond began organizing award shows to celebrate black girls and women who rock. This Sunday, November 7, BET will air the annual award show which will honor icons, influencers, and rising stars like Ruby Dee, Raven-Symoné, Missy Elliot, Keke Palmer, Teresa Clarke and Major General Marcelite Harris. Hosted by Nia Long, the show includes performances by Jill Scott, Marsha Ambrosius, Kelly Price and Ledisi among a plethora of appearances by black women of all stripes.

Here, Bond tells BackList about the beautiful struggle of building a meaningful, creative program that makes a difference.

BackList: What was the motivation behind Black Girls Rock?
Beverly Bond: There were conversations going on from several black women and others in black communities about not seeing the best of us represented. As a DJ, I pay a lot of attention to this from the lyrical content of music to how some guys perpetuate stereotypical images without realizing that they’re doing it. I feel like this was my calling—going from being a model to seeing girls in videos taking their clothes off and calling themselves models. As an empowered woman who knows that I carry my weight beyond my physical self, I didn’t feel like these were the right messages to send our young women.

BackList: What was the first step that you took?
BB: I had this idea to make a t-shirt that would feature the names of women who rock—black women in history, politics, and across the board. I started writing the names down. As I wrote and reviewed the list, I realized that it was bigger than a t-shirt. It was an affirmation. It had almost become acceptable to be picked on and objectified. All our girls need to hear and see that they’re special and they rock.

What did you do next?
BB: I had a big epiphany at one time. I decided to start a mentoring program to help young girls be inspired and to provide them with role models so they aren’t looking to scantily-clad vixens as the only people they could be.

I wrote my proposal, filed my 501(c)(3) and for my incorporation. I talked to different people who had mentoring programs. The process reminded me of when I first started spinning and people didn’t take me seriously because I was a model. Some people in the nonprofit world shunned me a little because they looked at me as a model turned DJ starting a nonprofit.

We launched in 2006 and did our first awards show in Brooklyn. We honored MC Lyte and DJ Jazzy Joyce. DJ Premier and I spun. Joan Morgan was our keynote. It was amazing and empowering, so we followed with a second, third and fourth show. We stayed consistent with our mission to honor and celebrate black women.

Read the Full Essay @ theBacklist

'For Colored Girls' on Proenza Schouler's 'Act Da Fool'

Us Against the World
by Jennifer Williams (For Colored Girls)

Proenza Schouler called up Harmony Korine to direct a film for their new ad campaign. Korine is best known for writing Kids (1995) and writing and directing Gummo (1997). He brings his usual surrealist and nihilistic aesthetic to Act Da Fool, a short shot in the Nashville projects, featuring a crew of black girls.

The film is shot beautifully. The juxtaposition of fashion and the detritus of the projects is provocative enough to make viewers think critically about consumerism, if we weren't being encouraged to go out and buy Proenza Schouler's hip gear. There are also parts of the voice-over narrative that I think adds brilliantly to the setting: "I believe that the earth is a big ball of shit. That's why the dinosaur died out." "Sometimes I can spend up to an hour staring at a bird in a tree. I wish I was that bird and could just fly away." I couldn't help but think of similar lines Richard Wright penned for the iconic Bigger Thomas who would stand and watch airplanes and dream of flight.

The narration supports scenes of the girls lingering near trash heaps and old tires and downing 40s. In one uncomfortable scene, the girls's lips form a tight seal around the bottles and they drink the malt liquor like babies taking in milk. Korine is clearly trying to critique poverty, but what, if anything, does all of this have to do with fashion?

Or maybe it's just that black poverty seems to be in fashion as of late. Echoing some of the responses to Lee Daniels's controversial film Precious, critics are weighing the artistic merit of Korine's short film against the exploitative nature of it. Sharon Toomer at BBN encourages readers to call retailers who sell PS and express their anger about the ad's debasement of black girls. Geneva Thomas at Clutch reads the film very differently, describing it as "a deeply honest, strong and undisguised narrative about an underclass of obscured urban Black girls in America." Nsenga Burton agrees with Toomer that the film is exploitation posing as art and argues that the girls are objects of a colonizing gaze. A spot-on critique by Minh-ha Pham over at Threadbared discusses the film as a kind of cultural tourism. The largely white fashion industry as well as PS's target consumers (preppy and wealthy white girls) get to fetishize exotically classed and racialized "others" from a position of comfort and privilege.

Read the Full Essay @ 'For Colored Girls'

Crossing the Street While Black & Woman

Seattle officer punches girl in face during jaywalking stop

By KOMO Staff

SEATTLE -- Seattle police are investigating what they call an assault of an officer in South Seattle.

However, a police officer is seen punching a 17-year-old girl in the face during the incident captured by a video camera on Monday.

According to Seattle police, the incident began when an officer spotted a man jaywalking in the 3100 block of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S. at approximately 3:10 p.m. The man was some 15 feet away from a pedestrian overpass, police said.

The officer was talking to the man when he saw four young women jaywalk across the same street at the same spot. The officer asked the women to step over to his patrol car, but the women were being "verbally antagonistic toward the officer," according to officials.

One of the women, later identified as a 19 year old, began to walk away from the scene despite the officer's instructions, prompting the officer to walk over to her and escort her back to his patrol car.

The girl then "began to tense up her arm, and pull away from the officer while yelling at him," investigators said. The officer told the girl to place her hands on his patrol car, but she refused. When the officer tried to grab hold of her, "she pulled away and twisted, breaking free of the officer's grip several times," the blotter report said.

When the officer tried to handcuff the girl, another girl, this one 17 years old, intervened and placed her hands on the officer's arm, "causing the officer to believe she was attempting to physically affect the first subject's escape," police said.

The officer pushed back the second girl, but the girl came back at him. The officer then punched her, police said.

The officer then handcuffed the 19-year-old woman. Other officers arrived and helped handcuff the second girl.

Read the Full Essay @ KOMO News

Trenton, Irresponsible Black Girls, and Savior Russell Simmons

Trenton, Irresponsible Black Girls, and Savior Russell Simmons
by Fallon

My heart grieves not only for the seven year old black girl who was gang raped, but also for her 15 year old sister who sold her body and her sister’s body for money. Yes, my heart grieves even though many people are angry with the older sister for not protecting her little sister calling for “the book to be thrown at her.” To say the least, the big sister is going to jail for a very long time. But yet, my heart weeps for her as it wept for Precious’ mother, Mary. It weeps because it says something about the level of sexual abuse she herself must have experienced to make the idea of being complicit in her sister’s rape plausible. My heart moans because she like other girls knows that they can make a living by selling their bodies. It wails and weeps because no one stepped in to stop her first sexual abuse. My heart grieves.

The question is: Can we really be angry with the 15 year old sister for what she did? And I am having a hard time answering this question because a part of me wants to be angry at her for not protecting her little sister. However, I have to assess how much of my sadness and anger is in response to the crime of rape and how much of it is in response to her not being a good big sister. You know the type of big sister my older sister was forced to be completely responsible for raising me when she was only a girl herself because . . . momma had to work late . . . momma did not like being tied down . . . daycare is expensive . . . momma had a second job . . . momma was gone . . . momma had to party . . . daddy was gone . . . so she became responsible for raising and protecting “us” her younger siblings.

Read the Full Essay @ The Black Youth Project

Black Girls Are Still Enslaved

The sexual trafficking of our young females is happening at an alarming rate. Who will free them?

Black Girls Are Still Enslaved

by Salamishah Tillet |

This Saturday, mogul Russell Simmons and civil rights leader Al Sharpton are expected to deliver speeches at the "Stop the Violence" rally in Trenton, N.J. This rally is a direct response to the revolting news that seven men, ranging in age from 13 to 20 years old sexually assaulted a 7-year-old girl in Trenton's Rowan Towers apartment complex last weekend.

According to the police reports, the girl attended a party with her 15-year-old stepsister, who then sold herself and her younger sister to a group of men for an undisclosed amount of money. While the proverbial Bush-speak of "shock and awe" come to mind, this alleged incident is yet another stark reminder that the sex trafficking of younger and younger African-American girls is not only on the rise in the United States, but is fast becoming the forgotten slavery of our times.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

A Young Father Thinks About 'Precious'

Thinking about Precious, Talking about Black Cinema
by Abdul Ali

I’m not sure if there’s been a film in my generation that has been the object of so much mixed emotion, and perhaps vitriol, drawing a line in the sand along gender lines. Almost all of the guys that I know have talked about Precious at arm’s length. Some of us have even said “I’m not ready to see that film.” Yet my female friends have almost unanimously said “I got to go see it”, etc.

The movie’s been out for a few weeks now. Granted, I’ve been busy but I know I could have seen it sooner. There was almost an instant retreat when I saw the extra large darkskinned black women featured prominently on film—a rarity for contemporary film. And this is unfortunate as the darkskinned black woman is a part of all of us, so why the hesitation? I suppose it’s because the big-boned black women aren’t framed in a flattering way and this is a part of a larger narrative. Remember growing up we’d call the fat black girl in class “fat and ugly?” Seeing this film made me confront the inherent self-loathing that so many of us have inherited.

For starters, I’ve always felt that American film, Black American cinema in particular, was lacking in so many ways. It didn’t have the pacing of indie films that I so love. I didn’t treat its viewers as intelligent. There wasn’t much poetry or going on with the cinematography—as these are all things I look for in films, as well as literature. And of course, most black characters are written as flat, stereotypes, never truly inhabiting that space that we all know is human and difficult to categorize.

Add to that, in my entire twenty years of movie going there may have been only ten films worthy of discussion on an intelligent level. The rest of them seem to embarrass the race rather than illuminate audiences about black life.

Considering all of that, I said “what the hell” and went to see a 9:30 showing yesterday evening and I was instantly surprised. Surprised because I knew angry black women back home in New York who were that cruel to their children, who were that mentally ill, and who were that invisible to society at large. Then all of a sudden, I didn’t think much about all of the “stereotyping rhetoric” that has been programmed from reading Donald Bogle and taking literary criticism in college.

Instead, what I saw was a young woman-child who was curious, fierce, and longing to be more fully human.

Read the Full Essay @ WORDS MATTER