acting white

“Acting white” (1980s- ) is the idea that acting too much like white people is a bad idea. It is found particularly among Black American teenagers who use it as a put down. It takes in not just clothes and music but even speaking proper English and doing well at school!

It has been the subject of several studies since the 1980s, particularly with a view to how it affects school performance. Black students overall underperform compared to whites to a troubling degree, so maybe this is why. The latest and probably the best study on acting white was done by Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer. It came out in 2006.

In 1999 Fryer asked students what were some of the ways you can act white. Among other things they said:

• speaking Standard English
• taking Advanced Placement or honours courses
• wearing clothes from the Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch (instead of Tommy Hilfiger or FUBU)
• wearing shorts in winter

Who wears shorts in the winter?

Fryer took the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AdHealth) of 90,000 students and looked at how one’s race, grades, popularity and the sort of school one went to all affected each other.

Past studies asked students to rate their own popularity. Fryer did not trust that. Instead he looked at how many times a student was listed as a friend by other students.

He found that acting white was mainly an issue only at certain kinds of schools: at public (government-run) schools that were less than 80% black and where most people had at least one friend from another race.  At the most integrated schools, inotherwords.

For whites at these schools the better your grades the more popular you were. For Hispanics it was the complete opposite! For blacks it was in the middle: your popularity only suffered if you got top marks. No word on Asian Americans.

Here is the chart that shows that. At the left are the D students, at the right the A students. It shows how your popularity rises and falls according grades for the three races (Hispanics count as a race in this case):

For most people their popularity comes almost completely from within their own race. A drop in popularity is rarely made up by having more friends from other races.

Fryer sees three possible reasons for why acting white becomes such an issue:

1. Oppositional culture: blacks teenagers, in trying to make sense of who they are as blacks, find the answer in being the opposite of whites.
2. Crabs in a barrel: black society is so screwed up that it punishes those who try to succeed.
3. Defence against brain drain: blacks are afraid of losing their best and brightest to white society so they punish those who seem to be moving in that direction.

Fryer says it is the last one: it is the only one that makes sense of why it seems to be an issue mainly at the most integrated schools – because there whites are a bigger threat to keeping blacks together.

See also:

• Why all the black kids sit together – based on Beverly Tatum’s book. She says it is an oppositional culture thing.
• growing up black
• Standard English and Ebonics
• Black IQ
• black reading scores
• The Wigger Fallacy

Read Full Post »

The Bechdel Test and race

The Bechdel Test (1985) says that a film is not worth watching unless it fulfils three conditions:

1. It has to have at least two women who
2. talk to each other about
3. something besides a man

It comes from Allison Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”. She in turn got it from Liz Wallace at her karate class.

It can apply to any story but Hollywood fails the test at a surprising rate, even now more than 20 years later.

NPR did a piece on the Bechdel Test a year ago. In it Eric Deggans, who writes about television for the St Petersburg Times, gave his own form of the Bechdel Test for race:

1. At least two non-white characters in the main cast …
2. in a show that’s not about race.

I did not know about the Bechdel Test till I read about it in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s post yesterday at the Angry Black Woman, but even I had something like it in my head:

1. At least two black characters
2. who are not stereotypes
3. whose love lives we know about and
4. who have their own storyline

“The Secret Life of Bees” would pass (the storylines of Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo), while the “Imitation of Life” would not (black characters are stereotypes).

Johnson gives the strict form of the Bechdel Test for race:

1. It has to have two people of colour in it.
2. Who talk to each other.
3. About something other than a white person.

Like Deggans, I would add that talking about race would be, in effect, talking about white people.

Johnson says most shows fail, though “Battlestar Galactica”, “True Blood”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Veronica Mars” pass.

A show can pass the Bechdel Test and still be racist – and, likewise, it can fail and yet not be particularly racist at all. But it is a quick way of separating those that probably are racist from those that probably are not. And, more importantly, it gives you a way of thinking about stories and how white male they are in their point of view.

Deggans says that most shows fail the Bechdel Test because most successful television writers are white men. They just do not know what women or blacks talk about when they are not there.

Jennifer Kesler at The Hathor Legacy says it is worse than that: when she was learning to write for Hollywood they told her, in so many words, to fail the Bechdel Test: main characters should be white men and no one cares what women (or presumably blacks or anyone else) talk about unless it is about the main characters – who are white men!

But why? Because the white men who run Hollywood say it is what the “target audience” wants. But just what is this target audience? Kesler says in their minds it turns out to be “a construct based on partial truths and twisted math – to perpetuate their own desires”.

See also:

• racialbechdel.tumblr.com – a blog that reviews film, television and video games according to a racial Bechdel Test.
• Kesler: Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test
• Alaya Dawn Johnson: The Bechdel Test and Race in Popular Fiction
• The blackness of American television
• Hollywood
• white gaze
• black actresses
• If blacks ran Hollywood like whites do
• stereotype

Read Full Post »

Aaliyah

Aaliyah Haughton (1979-2001), better known as just Aaliyah, was an American R&B singer who sold 24 million records worldwide and was an up-and-coming Hollywood actress. She died eight years ago today at the age of 22 in a plane crash. She called her singing “street but sweet”. As one fan at her funeral put it, she was beautiful both on the outside and on the inside.

Her number one songs on the American R&B charts:

• 1994: Back & Forth
• 1996: If Your Girl Only Knew
• 1996: One in a Million
• 1998: Are You That Somebody?
• 2002: Miss You

I mainly remember her for these (their chart position in parentheses):

1998: Are You That Somebody? (#1)

2001: More Than a Woman (#7)

2002: Rock the Boat (#2)

Aaliyah was born in Brooklyn but mainly grew up in Detroit. Her mother gave up being a singer so that she could bring up Aaliyah and her older brother, Rashad. (Despite their Arab names, they seem to be Catholic.)

Aaliyah had singing lessons from an early age, took part in school plays and at age 11 appeared on the television talent show, “Star Search”:

1990: My Funny Valentine

She lost, but later that year she performed with Gladys Knight in Las Vegas and a year later got her first record deal. You see, her uncle was married to Gladys Knight and managed R. Kelly! Kelly wrote and produced Aaliyah’s first album, “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” (1994).

It came out when she was 15 and produced a number one hit, “Back & Forth”.  But she was not the only 15-year-old girl with a number one hit that year: Brandy had one too: “I Wanna Be Down”.

That summer Aaliyah and R. Kelly got married! They both deny it but there is a marriage certificate. Aaliyah put down her age as 18, not 15. Her parents had the marriage annulled because she was underage.

After that Aaliyah and R. Kelly parted ways. She went to Atlantic Records where Timbaland and Missy Elliott wrote and produced her second and third albums: “One in a Million” (1996) and “Aaliyah” (2001).

She graduated from high school in 1997 and then went into acting, her second love. She appeared in “Romeo Must Die” (2000) opposite Jet Li  and in Anne Rice’s “Queen of the Damned” (2002).  At the time of her death she was set to appear in the Matrix films and was on a level with the likes of Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba and Zoe Saldana in terms of the sort of parts she was getting.

Flying back to Florida from the Bahamas on August 25th 2001 after doing the video for “Rock the Boat”, the plane went down right after take-off and blew up. She and seven others on board died instantly. The plane was overloaded.

At her funeral in New York her body was taken to the church in a silver casket inside a glass carriage pulled by horses. At the end of the funeral they let 22 white doves fly into the sky, one for each year of her short life.

– Abagond, 2009, 2015.

See also:

• Aaliyah: More Than a Woman
• Zoe Saldana – a year older
• Rosario Dawson – same age
• Kelis – same age
• Beyonce – two years younger, but also on “Star Search”

524

Read Full Post »

En Vogue: Hold On

Remarks:

My sons, ages 12 and 13, say this song sounds ancient, but say it is just the sort of thing I would like – which is true! I think it is the best En Vogue song ever, (“Don’t Let Go (Love)” (1997) comes second for me) and one of the best songs of the 1990s, period. Good video too: it is hard for me to tear my eyes off of Cindy Herron.

Lyrics:

When I had you
I treated you bad
Wrong my dear
But since, since you went away
Don’t you know I sit around
With my head hanging down
And I wonder who’s loving you

Oooh, my first mistake was
I wanted too much time
I had to have him morning, noon, and night
If I would of known then
The things that I know now
I might not have lost the time I complain about

Don’t waste your time
Fighting blind minded thoughts of dispair
Hold on to your love
You gotta hold on
Hold on to your love
Ooh, ooh, baby hold on
Hold on to your love
You gotta hold on
Hold on to your love

The art of playing games now
Is not the hearts you break
It’s bound good love you make
When it’s heart’s on fire
Give him love everyday
Remember he needs space
Be patient and he’ll give his heart to you

Don’t waste your time
Fighting blind minded thoughts of dispair
Hold on to your love
You gotta hold on
Hold on to your love
Ooh, ooh, baby hold on
Hold on to your love
You gotta hold on
Hold on to your love

Trust and honesty too
Must be the golden rule
You’ll feel the strength of passion in your soul
Burn so deeply within
Ooh, the magic that you share
So sacrifice and show how much you care

Don’t waste your time
Fighting blind minded thoughts of dispair
Hold on to your love
You gotta hold on
Hold on to your love
Ooh, ooh, baby hold on
Hold on to your love
You gotta hold on
Hold on to your love

Don’t let go
Keep the ties
Hang on tight
And don’t let go
Oh,Oh,Oh
Do Daba Do Dabo Hold on
If you need him
Really need him
Just keep on
Just keep on hanging on
Little trust, honesty, golden rules
Feel the strength of passion in your soul
It’s burning so deep
Have faith
Just keep the fire burning at home
Hey yea
He’ll come home to you
He’ll be there for you
He’ll want to have you…

Read Full Post »

beauty and race and television

Is it just me or do most black women on American television look either ugly or loose? While Asian women, on the other hand, are pictured as being better looking than they are?

I have no facts or figures or university studies to prove it, but it has seemed this way to me for a long time.

I am pretty sure I am right about Asians: when I came to New York one of the first things I noticed were the Asian women: they were not nearly as good-looking as I expected. But then it hit me: most of the Asian women I had seen before then were on television or in magazines – nearly all of them model beautiful. Like in those ads for Singapore Airlines (pictured).

Not so with black women. There is like the Pine-Sol Lady (“That’s the power of Pine-Sol, baby!”) on the one hand and video vixens on the other, with not all that much in between. Where is the broad middle of Claire Huxtables? You have to pretty much go back to R&B videos from the early 1990s to see black women regularly pictured as having both grace and beauty.

The cover story of the June 29th 2009 issue of TV Guide is “Hot Bods!”  You turn to the story and all the men and women are white. Go through the rest of the issue and there are only five black women (listed here in order of age):

• 55: Oprah Winfrey
• 45: Michelle Obama
• 45: Gloria Reuben
• 39: Niecy Nash
• 37: Jada Pinkett-Smith

I do not know anything about Nash, but the rest are admirable women. I think Gloria and Jada are still physically beautiful. But the youngest of them is 37! All the young, beautiful women in that issue are white. They do have young, beautiful women who are black on television, but, apart from old network reruns, most seem to be video vixens in rap videos shaking what they got.

A good example of what I am talking about is “Night Court” from the 1980s. I loved that show. It had both black and white characters, so it was doing good on that count, but look at the top female actresses, black and white, Marsha Warfield and Markie Post:

Markie Post is pretty. Meanwhile Marsha Warfield is what? The Pine-Sol Lady.

So why is this? I offer the following reasons:

1. Television is written and produced mostly by white men who do not take black women seriously as women: they are either undesirable or prostitutes – sexless or oversexed. There is no healthy, ordinary male reaction to them as women.
2. Blacks mostly play supporting characters. Supporting characters are not supposed to upstage the main characters. So in practice that means blacks on the whole are not allowed to upstage whites.

See also:

• The blackness of American television
• stereotypes about black women
  • Mammy stereotype
  • Jezebel stereotype
• black actresses
• video vixens
• race and beauty
• race and crime and poverty and television

Read Full Post »

The police

The police are those who are charged with protecting citizens from crime. They can arrest those suspected of breaking the law and put them in jail. They carry out court decisions. They are allowed to use violence, even deadly force, to keep the peace and preserve public safety. They maintain law and order.

That is one view. From living in New York I have come to have another view: They serve and protect the rich from the poor and whites from blacks and Latinos. They care little for black lives, even middle-class ones. They are a law unto themselves, cover up for each other and even get away with murder. Judges believe their lies,  newspapers tend to take their side and the powers that be turn a blind eye.

Nearly 90% of the people that New York policemen shoot at are black or Latino. It has little to do with blacks and Latinos somehow being more dangerous: 77% of the time the police are the only ones doing any shooting!

Blacks in New York are ten times more likely to be stopped by the police than whites. It has little to do with crime: only 10% of the stops lead to an arrest or summons. Nearly half of blacks are searched for weapons when stopped while fewer than a third of whites are – even though white suspects are 70% more likely to have a weapon.

I used to live in a part of New York with a high crime rate: hundreds were shot dead every year, black and Latino. You could hear the gunfire. Then one night I saw something I will never forget: policemen along the north side of the street that served as the colour line, one every few blocks. They were guarding the quiet white and Asian neighbourhoods behind them. If blacks kill each other, who cares, so long as white people are safe.

So when white people tell me of all the crime that black people do compared to whites, which they always say like it proves something profound, I just want to roll my eyes. If their neighbourhoods were as ill-served and ill-protected by the police as black neighbourhoods are then over time they would have terrible crime rates too.

Most black men have been stopped by the police for no good reason. Obama too. And even those who have never been stopped (yet) have heard enough stories to know how racist the police can be.

The reason things like O.J. Simpson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr become such heated issues in America is because whites and blacks view the police so differently. Because their experience of them is so different.

Most whites seem to have a childlike trust in the police that is naive and unfunny. It is hard for most blacks to feel the same way. So when a Sean Bell or Oscar Grant, unarmed black men, are killed by the police it is not seen as a “mistake” but something far worse.

See also:

• slave patrols
• How white people think
• Race in New York
  • Jamaica, Queens
    • Sean Bell
  • Romona Moore
• Harvard
  • Chanequa Campbell
  • Henry Louis Gates, Jr
• North Carolina
  • Henry Louis Wallace
  • The Rocky Mount Killer
• Ohio
  • Virginia Dotson
• California
  • Oscar Grant
  • Mitrice Richardson
• Houston
  • Gary Graham

Read Full Post »

The blackness of American television

American television for the most part is the world according to white men. Because most of the writers and producers are white men. That is why black characters on television are few and are mostly flat or stereotyped.

Some general patterns in American prime time network television:

• When a network is new it will come out with plenty of black shows, like “Martin” and “Roc” on FOX or “Girlfriends” and “Moesha” on UPN. They do this to get their numbers up quickly in certain key cities. It works because blacks are underserved by the older networks. But they are just using blacks as a stepping stone. Once they get a foothold, white shows drive out black shows.
• Half of black characters appear on comedies while less than a third of white characters do. That was as true in the 1970s as it was in the early 2000s.
• Black dramas are rare, particularly middle-class ones. When they do come out they tend to be safe, boring and not given much of a chance to catch on. That means that most dramatic roles for blacks are on white shows where they mostly play safe, boring supporting characters.
• Many shows have no regular black characters at all, supporting or otherwise. Like “Cheers”, “thirtysomething”, “Seinfeld”, “Friends”, “Sex in the City” and so on. In fact, it seems like most shows are either almost all white or all black.

These are just general patterns. There are, for example, some white shows with good black characters – who get their own storylines, who have love lives, who are more than just cardboard cut-outs. “ER” is a good example.

But most shows are not like that. If they have black characters at all they turn out to be sidekicks, best friends, judges, doctors, secretaries, police officers, etc. They are there only to serve white characters. Like the doctor on “The Simpsons” or Uhura on “Star Trek”.

The great thing about “The Cosby Show” is that it did not show blacks in a flat or  stereotyped way. And it also showed the black middle-class, something you barely ever see on television.

In 1999 the Screen Actors Guild counted the number of black characters on prime time network television. America is 13% black but its prime time characters were 16% black. But half of those were on comedies on UPN and the WB. Those shows are gone.

To get a rough idea what the number is now, I counted all the black people in the latest issue of TV Guide (July 27th 2009). Not counting the ads, it comes to just 6%.

Cable television is worse: blacks are seen mainly in reruns of old network shows and in rap videos and reality shows that push the worst ghetto stereotypes imaginable. In the 1990s BET, the main black cable channel, was kind of good but now it seems to hate black people. That leaves TV One. Is it any good?

And for news how come Michel Martin does not have her own show on MSNBC? Her and Pat Buchanan would be priceless.

See also:

• stereotype
• The black middle-class in America
• If blacks ran Hollywood like whites do
• black actresses
• white gaze

Read Full Post »

Janet Jackson: Love Will Never Do (Without You)

Remarks:

A Janet Jackson song I never get sick of. I like most of “Rhythm Nation” (1989). Djimon Hounsou appears in the Herb Ritts video for the song. If you are lucky, you can see it above in some form (it often appears on YouTube but then is taken).

Lyrics:

Other guys have tried before
To replace you as my lover
Never did I have a doubt
Boy it’s you I can’t do without

Our friends think we’re opposites
Falling in and out of love
They all said we’d never last
Still we manage to stay together
There’s no easy explanation for it
But whenever there’s a problem
We always work it out somehow
Work it out somehow

They said it wouldn’t last
We had to prove them wrong
’cause I’ve learned in the past
That love will never do without you

Other guys have tried before
To replace you as my lover
Never did I have a doubt
Boy it’s you I can’t do without
I feel better when I have you near me
’cause no other love around
Has quite the same ooh ooh
Like you do do do do babe

They said it wouldn’t last
We had to prove them wrong
’cause I’ve learned in the past
That love will never do without you

They said it wouldn’t last
We had to prove them wrong
’cause I’ve learned in the past
That love will never do without you

Read Full Post »

Homi K. Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha (1949- ) is a Harvard professor and one of the top postcolonialist thinkers. He wrote “Nation and Narration” (1990) and “The Location of Culture” (1994). Harvard was happy to get him, but some think he is just so much hot air.

Some of his buzzwords: hybridity, negotiation, ambivalence, in-betweenness, liminal space.

He says that what drives white people to take over the world and spread their way of doing things is not power or even wanting to get rich, but their screwed-up way of looking at the world.

Instead of seeing the world as a huge coat of many colours, they see it in terms of good/bad opposites, putting themselves always at the “good” end and everyone else who is different at the “bad” end: East/West, civilized/savage, First World/Third World, Western liberalism/Islamic fundamentalism and on and on. It leads to save-the-world thinking.

But the world is not like that. For one thing it puts everything that is not Western into one box, as if it were all the same. The world is more than just the West and the Rest, as Bhabha knows from his own life.

Bhabha was born a Parsi in Bombay in the shade of the Fire Temple. The Parsis came to India  from Persia long ago. They are the Persians who would not or could not believe in Islam. They still follow their own religion, Zoroastrianism, but that is all they have left from the old country. Otherwise they have lost their Persianness and become Indians.

Bhabha studied at the University of Bombay and then went to England to study at Oxford. He studied the works of French post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. He is also a follower of Edward Said, a giant in postcolonialist thought.

Bhabha is Parsi yet Indian yet Western. The clean either-or lines of Western thinking do not help him to understand himself, his own coat of many colours. And yet even if he tried to become completely Western, say, it would still be a Indian/Parsi sort of Western, a hybrid. But even “Western” is itself a creation of many such hybridizations from the past.

Bhabha is famous for his bad writing. This piece won him a bad writing prize:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

As one professor put it, “One could finally argue that there is no there there, beyond the neologisms and latinate buzzwords.”

One student came up to him and said, “I’ve been reading your book and I really like it, but it frightens me. Did you have to study to become like that or was your brain always that way?” Probably a bit of both, he says.

– Abagond, 2009.

See also:

• Frantz Fanon
• American academic prose
• How white people think
• Edward Said
  • Orientalism
• Foucault

Read Full Post »

June Jordan

June Jordan (1936-2002) was an American writer, poet and professor. And one of my favourite authors. By the 1990s she had become one of the top black women writers in the country. She was best known as a poet, though she wrote children’s books and essays too.

She was born in Harlem. Her parents came from Jamaica and believed in the American dream. They later moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Her father was a postman, her mother a nurse. Her mother was “shadowy” but her father was “very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.”

Her father beat her, from the age of two, while her mother stood by and did nothing. Her mother would later kill herself. Jordan was sent to an all-white boarding school in New England, when that kind of thing was rare.

Growing up she read and studied the writings of dead white men, but one of them she particularly liked: Walt Whitman.

She went to Barnard and fell in love with a white man. They married – in 1955 when that kind of thing was rare, even in New York. She dropped out of school, had a son and helped to put her husband through grad school. But it did not last: in 1965 they divorced.

After that she supported herself mainly by teaching English literature at universities: City College (late 1960s), Sarah Lawrence (early 1970s), SUNY Stony Brook (1980s) and Berkeley (1990s). At Berkeley she taught black and women’s studies. She made full professor in 1982. She cared about her students and loved teaching – she did not see it as a burdensome duty like some professors do.

Jordan began writing poetry at age seven. She never stopped writing, whether it could pay the bills or not. She saw words like a lover, seeing their naked beauty and their naked faults. She did not write the sort of books that could be made into Hollywood films or be safe enough to become best-sellers.

But that was her strength. She wrote the truth, she wrote what she saw with her eyes and felt in her heart. But they were not just in her heart: The things that were inside me that I did not know how to say, she knew how to say them and she did.

First they said I was too light
Then they said I was too dark
Then they said I was too different
Then they said I was too much the same
Then they said I was too young
Then they said I was too old
Then they said I was too interracial
Then they said I was too much a nationalist
Then they said I was too silly
Then they said I was too angry
Then they said I was too idealistic
Then they said I was too confusing altogether:
Make up your mind!
They said, Are you militant? Or sweet?
Are you vegetarian or meat?
Are you straight? Or are you gay?
And I said, Hey! It’s not about my mind.

See also:

• The best American writers live north of 110th Street
• Harlem
• Jack Kerouac
• Ntozake Shange
• bell hooks
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Terry McMillan
• Noam Chomsky

Read Full Post »

Meagan Good

Meagan Good (1981- ) is an American actress and beauty. She was named for an NAACP Image Award for playing Cisely Baptiste in “Eve’s Bayou” (1997). But despite her beauty and talent, she mostly winds up playing supporting characters. She has yet to play the lead in a film that makes it big.

She is one of four children of a Los Angeles police officer, growing up in Canyon Country north of the city. She is part black, Cherokee Indian, Puerto Rican and Jewish. Her father’s father came from Barbados.

She started acting at age four in television ads. In her very first ad she had to skate but did not know how! She was in ads for Barbie, AT&T, Pringles, Burger King, etc. But it was not till much later, when she saw Danielle Harris in “Halloween 4” (1988) and “Halloween 5” (1989), that she knew she wanted to be an actress.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s she guest starred in over a dozen television shows, like “Moesha”, “The Steve Harvey Show” and “Touched by an Angel”.

She started getting into films too. When she was hired for “Eve’s Bayou” she was just 16 and pretty much unknown. But after that she started getting steadier television work: she was Nina on “Cousin Skeeter” (1998-2000) on Nickelodeon and Katie on “Raising Dad” (2001-2002) on the WB. She was Vanessa, Junior’s girlfriend,  for five episodes of “My Wife and Kids” in 2003 but then was suddenly replaced by Brooklyn Sudano for reasons unclear. After that she gave most of her attention to film acting.

She has been in some well-known films, but almost always as a supporting character. None of the films she has starred in has been a big hit, though some have done well, like “Stomp the Yard” (2007). She has yet to take off as an actress.

Her dream come true would be to play Aaliyah:

I really, really want to do Aaliyah’s life story; I was a huge fan of hers. I think she’s such a positive role model. She really kind of handled the industry with such class and such respect for herself. Even though there are things that you may have heard, here or there, the way that she handled it and the way that she was, was just so classy and so beautiful.

She has also been in music videos, like 5o Cent’s “21 Questions” (2003) and has made the cover of King magazine, entering the whole video vixen world through her acting, which is the opposite way of how most do it.

She is much better known for her looks than her acting. It is not too hard to find websites that have over a thousand pictures of her!

She has black hair, high cheekbones, thick lips, beautiful eyes and a thin but nice figure. She is 5 foot 4 (1.63 m) tall. Her measurements are 36-24-34 (91-61-86 cm) and has a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of 0.71.

According to at least Internet rumour she has dated Jamie Foxx (he denies it), Joseph Gordon, Nick Cannon, Ty Hodges, Thomas Jones and Soulja Boy.

See also:

• Aaliyah

Read Full Post »

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson (1958-2009), the King of Pop, the Gloved One, was an American singer of pop, R&B and rock music. He sold 750 million records worldwide – only Elvis Presley and the Beatles can even hope to match that – and had the number one album of all time, “Thriller” (1982), which sold 65 million. Janet Jackson is his sister.

He was American, he was black, he was universal. Even Imelda Marcos, she of the many shoes, cried at his death.

He was famous also for his dancing, making moves that no one thought possible, like the moonwalk.

His number one songs on the American R&B chart:

• 1969: I Want You Back (Jackson 5)
• 1969: Who’s Lovin’ You (Jackson 5)
• 1970: ABC (Jackson 5)
• 1970: The Love You Save (Jackson 5)
• 1970: I’ll Be There (Jackson 5)
• 1971: Never Can Say Goodbye (Jackson 5)
• 1974: Dancing Machine (Jackson 5)
• 1979: Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough
• 1979: Rock With You
• 1982: The Girl is Mine (with Paul McCartney)
• 1983: Billie Jean
• 1983: Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
• 1983: Somebody’s Watching Me (with Maxwell)
• 1985: We Are the World (as part of USA for Africa)
• 1987: I Just Can’t Stop Loving You (with Siedah Garrett)
• 1987: Bad
• 1988: The Way You Make Me Feel
• 1988: Man in the Mirror
• 1988: Another Part of Me
• 1992: Remember the Time
• 1992: In the Closet
• 1995: You Are Not Alone

This does not even list the songs that “merely” made it to the top ten, like “Thriller”, “Ben”, “Got to be There” and “Black or White”.

On top of all that he made music videos into an art form in their own right, thus making MTV’s name. The strange thing is, MTV did not want to play him at first because he was black!

He was on stage by age six, on television coast to coast by age 11. Everyone loved his music, even white people, even then.

But growing up so famous meant he never had a proper childhood. That is why Elizabeth Taylor was one of the few who understood him. Even worse, his father was cruel. In some sense he was never a boy and yet always a boy.

He bought a place north of Los Angeles and called it Neverland Ranch, after the Neverland of Peter Pan. He put in a zoo, a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel. He invited children over, many of them dying of cancer.

Some of the children stayed over night and, sadly, some parents took advantage of that to spread ugly stories about him to take him to court for his millions, in 1994 and 2005.

Nothing was ever proved, but he had become so strange by the early 1990s – he had a pet llama and doctors were slowly turning him white – that many believed it.

He married, twice, first to Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis, and then Debbie Rowe. He had two children by Rowe, Prince Michael (1997) and Paris Katherine (1998). They divorced and he had a third child by an unknown woman, Prince Michael II (2002), better known as Blanket.

Hoping to make a comeback, Jackson sold out 50 shows in London for 2009, but then died suddenly just weeks before the first show.

See also:

• In memoriam: Michael Jackson
• songs
  • Jackson 5: I Want You Back
  • Jackson 5: Got to be There
  • Jackson 5: Never Can Say Goodbye
  • Michael Jackson: Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
  • Michael Jackson: Remember the Time
  • Michael Jackson: They Don’t Care About Us
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Quincy Jones – the producer for “Thriller”
• colourism
• beyond black

Read Full Post »

Bell Biv DeVoe: Poison

Remarks:

This is one of those songs that I hated at the time (1990) because they played it too much, but now I like it. Al B. Sure is the same way – but not Jodeci!

Lyrics:

Yeah, Spiderman and Freeze in full effect
(Uh-huh)
(You ready, Ron)
I’m ready
(You ready, Biv)
{I’m ready, Slick, are you}
Oh, yeah, break it down

Girl, I must warn you
I sense something strange in my mind
Situation is serious
Let’s cure it ’cause we’re running out of time

It’s oh, so beautiful
Relationships they seem from the start
It’s all so deadly
When love is not together from the heart

It’s drivin’ me out of my mind
That’s why it’s hard for me to find
Can’t get it out of my head
Miss her, kiss her, love her (Wrong move you’re dead)

That girl is poison
Never trust a big butt and smile
That girl is poison

If I were you I’d take precaution
Before I start to meet fly girl, you know
‘Cause in some portions
You’ll think she’s the best thing in the world

She’s so fly
She’ll drive you right out of your mind
Steal your heart when you’re blind
Beware she’s schemin’, she’ll make you think you’re dreamin’
You’ll fall in love and you’ll be screamin’ demon, hoo

Poison, deadly, movin’ it slow
Lookin’ for a mellow fellow like DeVoe
Gettin’ paid, laid, so better lay low
Schemin’ on house, money, and the whole show
The low pro h** she’ll be cut like an afro
See what you’re sayin’, huh, she’s weighin’ you
But I know she’s a loser
(How do you know) Me and the crew used to do her

Poison-poison-poison-poison
Poison-poison-poison-poison (Poison)
Poison-poison-poison-poison
Poison-poison-poison-poison
Poison

I was at the bar, shake, breakin’ and takin’ ’em all
And that night I played the wall
Checkin’ out the fellas, the highs and lows
Keepin’ one eye open, still clockin’ the h**s
There was one particular girl that stood out from the rest
Poison as can be, the high power chest
Michael Biv said that I’m runnin’ the show
Bell Biv DeVoe
Now you know
Yo’, Slick, blow

It’s drivin’ me out of my mind
That’s why it’s hard for me to find
Can’t get it out of my head
Miss her, kiss her, love her (Wrong move you’re dead)

That girl is poison
Never trust a big butt and smile
Poison
She’s dangerous
Poison (Oh yeah, oh, yeah)
Poison

Yo’ fellas, that was my end of
You know what I’m sayin’, Mike
Yeah, B.B.D. in full effect
Yo’, what’s up to Ralph T and Johnny G
And I can’t forget about my boy, B. Brown
And the whole NE crew

Read Full Post »

The genocide in southern Sudan

The worst genocide since Hitler took place in Sudan. No, not in Darfur, but in southern Sudan and the Nuba mountains. From 1983 to 2000 at least 1.9 million died, all of them black Africans, most of them Christians.

Sudan is two countries that the British made into one: the north is Muslim and Arabic-speaking. The people are dark but not black Africans. The south is black and mostly Christian. It has two-thirds of Sudan’s oil.

The government that carried out the genocide was run by Arab-speaking Muslims from the north. It was not just a case of genocide: it was also a jihad, a Muslim holy war, the largest in living memory.

As a genocide it is upstaged in the Western press by Rwanda, where 800, 000 were killed, and even Darfar, where 300,000 have died so far. Both are much smaller genocides.

As a jihad it is upstaged by the one fought by Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which, so far, has been far less deadly, though it is directed against Western interests.

The genocide was directed against the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk and Nuba. It sold tens of thousands of them as slaves. It destroyed Christian churches, schools and hospitals. It wanted to clear the lands where there was oil.

The government kept food from reaching the south knowing full well that people there were dying of hunger.

For example in 1998 in Bahr al-Ghazal, the very province that Alek Wek fled more than ten years before, government bombings spread terror and caused 700,000 Dinka to flee their homes. Then the government stopped Westerners from flying in food, causing 70,000 to die of hunger.

In the Nuba mountains in the centre of the country the Nuba were sent to “peace villages” where the women were raped by government soldiers – to make their offspring lighter (the Nuba are very dark). Their children were taken from them and sent to the north to serve as slaves. Over 100,000 Nuba “disappeared” never to be seen again.

The south was fighting a war of independence against the north, it is true, and the rains in those years were not always the best. But if you look at scale of the killing and who was killed and what the government did and did not do, it is clear that it was bent on wiping out its own citizens based on race and religion.  That is genocide.

For some reason all this got very little press in the West and few knew about it. I find that very odd. Darfur and Rwanda had no trouble getting plenty of press.

In any case word of it in America spread mainly through churches. It became an issue with the Christian right, a big part of President Bush’s base. And so America pushed for a peace deal for southern Sudan and got one in 2005. But now the Sudanese government is doing the very same thing in Darfur, where the people are black too, but in this case not Christian.

See also:

• Sudan
• Darfur
• genocide
• jihad
• Alek Wek
• George Bush
• Hitler

Read Full Post »

Alek Wek

Alek Wek (1977- ) is a supermodel from Sudan. She is known for being dark-skinned with very short hair. She was at her height from 1997 to 2004, though she models even now in her early 30s.

She is a Dinka from southern Sudan, near the middle of Africa. Her father was a schoolteacher; she was the seventh of nine children. Growing up she did not know she was poor and black. Her family was together and she was happy. She did, however, have a skin disease, psoriasis, and thought she was ugly. The doctors could find no cure.

Then the war came.  She saw bodies on the way to the well. When soldiers shot out their front door one night, they knew they had to leave. Her father got hurt and went to Khartoum, the capital, for an operation.

At age ten she talked her way onto a military plane leaving for Khartoum, where her father lay. As she got on board she turned to look and saw the sadness in her mother’s eyes. Soon the rest of her family got to Khatoum, but then her father died of the operation.

Her mother just wanted her children to wake up every morning safe and be able to go to school. So she got Alek to London where one of her older daughters lived. Alek arrived in London in 1991 at age 14.

Soon after she got to London her psoriasis went away.

Four years later while shopping in south London she was discovered by Fiona Ellis, a scout for Model One. She did not take it seriously and, besides, her mother said she should complete her schooling first. She was going to the London College of Fashion at the time.

But Model One kept calling and Wek saw that they were serious.  She had some pictures taken and then offers started coming in. It changed her idea about herself. She talked her mother into it.

She signed with Ford in 1996 and became a fashion model. Whenever someone asked for black models she never went. She found that sort of thinking backwards and disrespectful.

Her big break came when she appeared on the cover of Elle in November 1997. The rest is history. That year MTV named her model of the year. I-D magazine went further and named her model of the decade.

Oprah said of Alek Wek:

If you’d been on the cover of a magazine when I was growing up, I would have had a different concept of who I was.

Although I am glad she is out there helping to stretch people’s idea of beauty, I do not think she is beautiful myself. She is striking  and hard to forget, has a great smile and looks like a work of art, but I would not call her beautiful: No, I honestly do not think it is her dark skin, but her eyes. They seem too squinty or something and for me eyes makes the difference between pretty and beautiful.

See also:

• South Sudan
  • The genocide in southern Sudan
• black fashion models
  • The most beautiful black women models
• Lupita Nyong’o

Read Full Post »