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I understand there’s been some talk about Betty ’round these parts before. Let me just go on the record as saying that I find Betty Draper to be a terrible human being and an utterly compelling character. Her character was in classic form yesterday. But we’ll get to that. More… Every couple of years or so, we seem to get drawn into national conversation about niggers and niggas – or n-words, if you prefer – and which group of people should and shouldn’t be able to use the word. We’re now a week into this silly debate following Dr. Laura’s racist on-air rant without really digging down into her most salient point: comedians and rappers are saying this shit all the time and no one cares! Did you all know she was watching old episodes of “Video Vibrations” and “Def Comedy Jam” like that? Guess her bodyguard must have put her on game. Anyway, this is a great time to revisit some classic – we use that word very loosely – songs that drop an “n-bomb” or two on our so-sensitive ears. The list includes a few from some unexpected sources, not unlike Dr. Laura who seemed mighty comfortable with the word. 1. Mr. Nigga by Mos Def (Brokey) 2. Oliver’s Army by Elvis Costello (Jamelle) 3. Woman is the Nigger of the World by John Lennon & Yoko Ono (slb) 4. One in a Million by Guns N’ Roses (Melissa) 5. Sucka Nigga by A Tribe Called Quest (Blackink) 6. Killa Hill Nigga by Cypress Hill (Naima) 7. Gold Digger by Kanye Fest featuring Jamie Foxx (Monica) 8. I’m Real (remix) by Jennifer Lopez featuring Ja-Rule (Shani-o) 9. Anti-Nigger Machine by Public Enemy (Angela) 10. Nigga Please by Ol’ Dirty Bastard (Blackink) I’m sure we missed a few or couple hundred. Re-educate us below in the comments section. Peace, my nuckas. Hopefully everyone is as Dr. Laura’d out as I am (giving any racist whose words may offend too much attention is 1) a waste of time and 2) distracts us from the racist institutions and policies that can really f@*! us in the end) but this video from This Week in Blackness, host Elon James White, pretty much wraps up all I would have wanted to say about her usage of the n-word. partake! (More fried chicken jokes!) Season 3 of the Boondocks ended on Sunday, and I haven’t heard much chatter round the interwebs about it this week. There’s good reason for that: it wasn’t very good. I’ve had mixed feelings about Aaron McGruder since my former blog-mate saw him give a talk at our Alma Mater in which he maligned Obama (fair enough), but then demanded the student who videotaped the talk fork over the evidence to him (not cool). Then, at another campus talk, he said Obama wasn’t black because he didn’t fit the comic’s own myopic, and factually-shaky definition of blackness (you have to be a direct descendant of slaves). Who made McGruder the black people police? But on to the show. There’s a fine line between toying with a stereotype to prove a point, and playing out a stereotype on screen for cheap laughs. Time has shown that McGruder is much more adept at the latter. Or maybe it’s that one can only talk about stereotypes for so long before it becomes an instance of laughing “at” us versus laughing “with” us. Back in June over at Ta-Nehisi’s, Dwayne Betts made an interesting point to that end:
I’d have to say Betts is dead-on here. On both shows, at three seasons in, the fried chicken jokes and “ripped-from-the-headlines” stories about random negroes acting up got old. With the Boondocks, all of the stories were stale when this season started. More after the jump.
At Colorlines (which has become one of my go-to sources for news, and it should be one of yours), Jamilah King posts about the backlash to this picture of two young men. She quotes Rod 2.0, who writes:
Rod’s (very valid) point aside, my first reaction was that this image is totally sweet. It’s not clear whether this is filial affection or romantic, but either way, two people showing love is always a good look in my book. Crossposted from Campus Progress. One in eight Americans — a record high in both raw numbers and percentage of the population — are on food stamps. Many are recent additions due to the recession. Yet food stamp benefits are being reduced to help pay for other recession-fighting programs and secondary food initiatives. Colorlines reports that some of the money for a $4.5 billion initiative to feed hungry school children with healthy food will come from the food stamp program. Essentially, the new initiative, pushed by Michelle Obama, will feed kids in school while their families struggle to feed them at home on benefits that come to about $25 per person, each week. It’s obviously important to improve the quality of school lunches for children, and to subsidize healthy food for those who can’t afford it. But choosing between home and school as a place to build better nutritional habits is not appropriate. Ellyn Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs pyramid [PDF] has been making the rounds on the Internet for some time now — Racialicious, Jezebel, and Change.org have all riffed on a post by the Fat Nutritionist that seeks to explain why many fat people eat less-than-healthy food, and why poor people are so often overweight.
A play on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the pyramid lists the food needs that must be met before a person can reach the apex: “instrumental food.” Instrumental food is food that’s selected carefully from a variety of available food, has nutritional value and tastes good, and is used to keep the eater both satisfied and healthy. In other words, instrumental food is the food that many middle-class and rich people take for granted. The bottom of Satter’s pyramid are two words: “enough food.” In a country where excess appears to be everywhere, it’s hard to believe that one in five Americans suffers from “food insecurity,” which is the government’s current term for being hungry. In order to get to a place where people can select food that is both healthy and tasty — and everyone deserves food that meets both of those requirements — they need to start by getting enough food to fill their bellies. Unsurprisingly, that often includes calorie-laden, nutritionally light-weight, cheap, processed foods. The next step up, “acceptable food,” depends a bit on the person, but generally, it’s food that isn’t spoiled, or infested with bugs, and won’t cause illness. After that is “reliable, ongoing access to food.” This is having food security. It’s only after these three needs are met that people can even begin to think about preparing good-tasting food, working with variety — or “novel” foods, and then making instrumental food choices. And this is why the recent and impending cuts to food stamp benefits are so devastating. Children won’t learn to eat healthy food if they’re only getting it in school. School food won’t take them through the steps of the hierarchy. Growing up in a home where acceptable, healthy, tasty food is readily available is imperative in the fight against childhood obesity — and it’s something that won’t be possible if the government reduces the already meagre funds that families have to get acquire that kind of food. In an ideal world, both food stamp funding and school nutrition funding would be increased. And yet, as The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points out, it’s easy to get votes to cut food stamps for needy people suffering in a faltering economy, but nearly impossible to get votes to cut multi-billion dollar subsidies to big oil and gas companies.
This article was written by seansmyph, co-creator of our blog Splackavellie Central: Ridiculous Moments in R&B and Beyond. It’s part of a series of posts called “The Worst of MC Hammer,” which is part of a series called “Worst of the Best,” which probably doesn’t make much sense the first time you read it. —– The video for M.C. Hammer’s “Get 2 No U” takes place in a club where everyone dances in slow motion. Everyone, except for Hammer. Hammer dances to the beat of his own drummer, and that drummer is apparently on some pretty powerful drugs. Things to watch for: 0:24 – Faux fur coat? Check! Slicked back hair? Check. Faded sideburns?! YOU KNOW IT! This is the introduction of the guy I want desperately to be Pleasure Ellis. He’s Hitting one of his many long and drawn out falsetto notes. They get more ridiculous as the song goes on. 0:44 – Awkward dance sequence between Hammer and his love interest. She’s trying to figure out how to dance with him…he’s trying to shake that fur loose off his back…and never the twain shall meet. 0:47 – Hammer says “She be rubbin’ my back, when I’m on my back.” I’m not sure what that means. I kind of think it means that Hammer freestyled this entire song, which is a bold move. 1:47 – Hammer starts talking about.. praying? I think he was having trouble with his conscious after all the the old creepy uncle talk to the young lady and started talking about God. In my head, his wife walked in the room while he was recording this song and he was like, ‘Oh, hey honey! Uuuuuuh… I’m talkin’ about God on this track! Not no girl! Sexy…Sexy…God! And I want to get to know HIM! Heh heh…see!?!’ 2:21 – J.D. Greer starts a trend of singing really loudly in girls faces. A trend that I intend to carry out in my everyday life. 2:39 -Pleasure Ellis over-does everything and sings sooo loud in this girl’s face. He’s out of control! 2:51 -Yeeeeeeeessssssss! (c) Pleasure Ellis 3:00 -Everyone wants to leave, but Hammer keeps dancing and they can’t go until he finishes gyrating. 3:39 – Pleasure Ellis tells the girl with the big forehead to walk on down a long dark hallway without him while turns and sings himself into everyone’s heart. And he sings….and he sings…and then at 4:11 he hits one of the worst falsetto notes I’ve ever heard. His finger points up…but his voice never quite gets there. Nothing in this video ever quite gets there. Nothing does. *Update: We did some research on Pleasure Ellis. Turns out he’s not the white guy in the fur coat, as we were hoping but… we’re gonna continue to pretend that he is anyway. Check out his video “Body Language” which… kind of sounds like “Get 2 No U.” Let’s start off with a semi-serious note, if only for a moment: We probably should stop referring to the expansion of marital rights as gay marriage. The only meaningful difference between marriages involving heterosexuals and opposite marriage is the genitals. And really, it’s not all that meaningful of a difference for the purposes of the state. Either way, the fight for marriage equality continues to unfold in California. One day, I can’t help but think that we’re going to look back on the days before marriage equality and refer to it as the Stone Age. Meanwhile, I just felt my marriage get stronger. Anyway, a day late but always right on time, you roundup of links for the week: 1. First, a little PB-related self-promotion: Ross Douthat doesn’t know what he’s talking about (Jamelle); a brief word on black people and their “culture” (Monica); and Oh, that hair (Shani-o) 2. An ode to Elizabeth Warren, everyone’s favorite consumer finance advocate. (Monica) 3. Things are starting to look very bad for Congressional Democrats. (G.D.) 4. Hallowed Ground. (Blackink) 5. Is it time to worry about Alvin Greene? (Shani-o) 6. Annie Lowrey explores the relationship between unemployment and suicide. “The stories show the deeper wounds of unemployment, and especially long-term unemployment. It is not just the loss of a job, but the loss of community, routine and purpose. It means worse health. It means higher rates of divorce. It means alcohol abuse. All of these are also risk factors for suicide.” (Blackink) 7. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will become a columnist for Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, part of an effort to secure protection from Sweden’s laws that shield journalists. (Blackink) 8. Five years later, Slate tallies the ecological damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina. (Blackink) 9. Following the apparent suicide of the accused Craigslist killer, Professor Douglas Berman asks whether we should be “pleased or frustrated” at the development. Phillip Markoff’s death has also raised questions about the safety of inmates. (Blackink) 10. The 21st century will be dominated by megacities, not nations. (Blackink) 11. A new survey finds that commuting is bad for your health. (Blackink) 12. Life without gender. (Blackink) 13. Lauren Kelly breaks down why poor people eat unhealthy food. (G.D.) 14. Speaking of junk food, Pamela Michelle Johnson has – literally – turned it into an art. (Blackink) 15. Everything you ever needed to know about boiling water. #nerdalert (Shani-o) 16. A Seton Hall Law graduate is fuming mad that a law degree hasn’t been the answer to all his financial problems. (Blackink) 17. “Community” is coming back. Forget about topping its amazing first season, will it be able to maintain now that it’s going up against against geek favorite “The Big Bang Theory”? (Shani-o) 18. For the moment, at least, Usain Bolt is no longer the world’s fastest man. He’ll be sitting out the rest of the season with a back injury. (Blackink) 19. A recent study confirms a “long-suspected connection” between ALS-like motor disease and concussions and brain trauma. The new finding suggests that “Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease.” (Blackink) 20. And finally, because people can’t get enough: LeBron James, Akron native-reigning NBA MVP-our new national punching bag, tells GQ that he actually grew up hating Cleveland. And other things. The writer who followed him around for three weeks dishes to TrueHoop Blog.
The story lines of rejection this week are two-fold. The first describes Pete Campbell’s inability to reject his father-in-law’s business, partly because he worked really hard to get the account and partly because his wife’s dad ruins her surprise that she’s pregnant. But that’s a minor hitch soon overcome, Pete uses it to leverage even more business from his father-in-law’s company. The bigger story line, though, ties into what we already know about Pete and fatherhood: the child he had with Peggy, who put it up for adoption and kept it a secret. When Peggy told Pete about the baby, she acknowledged that she could have used it to snag him but decided, instead, that she wanted other things. In doing so, she rejected the idea that having a baby and snagging a husband was all she needed, and sorta rejected Pete. The fruits of that decision come to bear in this episode: Peggy’s part of the shifting New York scene that augers a new future, the one advertisers like Don Draper may struggle to survive in. That new world is also hinted at in Peggy’s campaign for the new Pond’s cream, the client that is pushing Pete’s dad-in-law out. Peggy think that the idea of ritual self-indulgent will sell the cream; the old hats think it should be touted as a way to snag a husband. Unfortunately for Peggy, the focus group turns into a crying session in which the women polled talk about their cheating boyfriends. That gives Don’s secretary, the one he had through the zipper sex with a couple of episodes ago, a chance to cry, confront Don, and finally leave. The woman running the focus group thinks they should shift the campaign back to one concerned with snagging a man, but Don refuses to be part of that retro idea and argues that advertising has the ability to shape expectations. Meanwhile, when Peggy finds out about Pete’s news, and is understandably having a hard time with it. The two have a moment, and it’s actually sort of nice, a respectful, quiet exchange between two characters who might share the only secret left in the small agency. I haven’t read the responses to the episode yet, since I wasn’t sure when I was going to have time to write this, but I’ve been concerned this seems, to some, as a sort of anti-feminist moment for Peggy who, this season, has admitted to more complicated relationships with the idea of men and relationships than she has before. I don’t think so, I think it was just a nice acknowledgement of what must be the kind of decision that is never easy for women to deal with treated in an adult way. Peggy doesn’t rend her clothes or becoming incapable of serving as a functional human being, the way conservative women would have us believe. She just reminded of what was a less-than-awesome moment in her life. But the juxtaposition between an old and new way of thinking was what’s really in play here, and Don looked ready to jump ahead of the curve, after all.
Farhad Manjoo writes about how black people use Twitter, and, more specifically, the prevalence of black-created hashtags on the site:
The Slate piece, despite its cringe-inducing title, is not a bad bit of analysis of a subgroup of black people who use Twitter. It’s undeniable that there are generally one or two top trending topics (especially late at night) being primarily used by black people. The question Manjoo seems to be trying to answer is why black people dominate the conversation on Twitter. One of the people Manjoo interviews, Brandon Meeder, seems to be on to something. Meeder proposes that the tightly interconnected black communities on Twitter send certain hashtags spiraling upward. Speaking anecdotally, I’ve seen this happen many times. Although there are several very popular black twitterers that I choose not to follow, the same can’t be said for other black twitterers I do follow. Hashtags, some very tempting to join in on, creep into my Twitter timeline regularly. Merits of the piece aside, what troubled me on first read was that Manjoo quoted only men — four popular male twitterers served as the voice of blacks in the piece. While they all had valuable insights to offer, it’s frustrating to read yet another piece about black people that only quotes black men. I e-mailed Manjoo about this, and he acknowledged that as a flaw in the piece, but I’m looking forward to a day when I don’t have to call someone out on something so simple. But what bothers this black twitterer more than any of that is this: that the story was clearly written with a befuddled and bemused white audience in mind. This notion exists that the ways of black folks are so very mysterious that it takes a brown man — Manjoo basically serves as a bridge — to explain them to whites. But one of the explanations is pretty simple: black people on Twitter, just as they do in real life, maintain tight-knit communities where they trade jokes, bicker, and play with each other. The same could be said about any other community using the site. I’ve seen many a journalist-oriented hashtag show up in my timeline. To address the question about the ‘dominance’ of black twitterers, I believe the answer lies somewhere in this combination of pretty mundane facts: Poor and working class people are more likely to access the internet through mobile devices than they are through expensive computers with expensive high speed internet plans, and 25 percent of black people live in poverty. Young people are also more likely to access the internet through mobile devices. The median age of black people in the U.S. is 31.8, compared to 38.2 for whites. Young black people on Twitter are right on trend. That is, when a large percentage of a racial group is young and doesn’t have a lot of money, they’re going to dominate a free service that ties in perfectly with their most common mode of communication. Manjoo concludes: “Given that these hashtags are occurring in a subgroup of black people online, it is probably a mistake to take them as representative of anything larger about black culture.” He could have left the “probably” out.
PostBourgie: The Podcast #7: The CBC, Ground Zero and Prop 8. Shani, Joel and Monica discuss the corruption investigations of several prominent black lawmakers, The “Ground Zero Mosque,” and the repeal of California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Key Links: Charlie Rangel: List of Charges. (CBS) Ethics Panel Outlines Charges Against Waters. (NYT) The Problem With Incumbency, by Jamelle Mosque Near Ground Zero Clears Key Hurdle (NYT) Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition (NYT) Text of Judge Walker’s Ruling Overturning Proposition 8 (HuffPo) “Louie” (Official Website) With at least 7 pounds, 10 ounces and 20 inches of newborn to care for these days, our blogsister Stacia has a lot on her hands and heart and mind. And because we never miss a chance to do it big when it comes to celebrating milestones – as she once said in advance of my big day earlier this year – we’re devoting this Friday’s Random Ten to songs in honor of Stacia and the lovely Story Jean. Below, you’ll find a medley of tunes about mamas, babies, baby mamas and baby babies. As always, be sure to add your own blessings, plaudits and/or suggestions in the comments section. Because it takes a village and all that jazz: 1. If I Could by Regina Belle (Brokey) |
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