Day 3: Gender

"Black Brother" by Angie Stone

...He is my King, He is my one / Yes he's my father, Yes he's my son / I can talk to him, cuz he understands / Everything I go through and everything I am...

If I wasn't already a staunch womynist, I would be after this semester.  I am taking three women's studies classes to satisfy the credit hour requirements for this Bachelor's in Psychology (finally).

One of them is cross-listed with African American studies: The History of African American Women (AFAM 491).  I love it.  I love to learn and discuss the experience of women but I worship the knowledge about the experience of women of color, especially African and African American women.

AFAM 491 uses the textbook To 'Joy My Freedom by T. Hunter.  I have read 2 of the 8 chapters I should have read by  now (but I just bought it soooo).  In these 2 chapters, I have read of the disturbing system that was chattel slavery.  I was reading about the work that 6 year old children were accustomed to doing, work I will NEVER do, and vowed in a written statement in the margins that I won't complain about the work I must do.

This week, we discussed the way in which race informs gender and gender informs race and the continual exchange that occurs between the two.  To no group is this more pervasive of a concept than to Black women living in the United States following the collapse of slavery.

From the history we have discussed, Black women following slavery were more inclined to defend their race first, and then their gender.


While White women were out protesting the universal suffrage of men, Black women were praying, pushing, fighting, marching, arguing, screaming, writing, and hoping for their Black men to get the vote.  White women thought they should get it first.  Some Black women wanted suffrage too, but for now, they had to focus on their men getting political power through the vote.  Black women evaluated that it would be nice to have the vote as well, but it's a step in the right direction if the system is at least willing to consider allowing their men to vote.

A big theme of this class is the way race and gender intersect and the tradition race has had of trumping gender for Black women in social and political considerations (until the divisive campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in which the conversation erupted over which was more important: race or gender?).  It is interesting to see the kind of solidarity, community commitment, and collective preservation mode Black people had and were in in the years following the Civil War.

It was exceptional to see how the Black woman argued for and tried to augment the rights of her Black man.  And it was even more exceptional to see how the Black man aggressively campaigned for legislation protecting the chastity, virtue, and pride of his Black woman.


I was reading it and eating it up.  It was beautiful to read of people who look like me spoken about in such a way, despite their lot.


Fast forward 145 years and what has happened?  Black men don't respect or cherish Black women and Black women don't respect and have given up home on Black men.  Black girls get pregnant (or get educated and make themselves ineligible for marriage) and Black boys go to jail (or die).


Additionally, in our contemporary times, the momentum of Black female improvement has slipped only to rise again.  We see CNN specials all day long about why Black women are still single.


Black, educated, self-reliant, professional women are out of the running for Black husbands (y'all better stop playin' before we take off with them Italian/Dominincan/Brazilian/Samoan/Phillipino/God forbid White boys).  They have educated themselves out of the pool.  Black men are having a hard time catching up to the academic and professional achievements of their women and are intimidated by or not attracted to this new "Buppie" (Black yuppie) population of women.

Black America is also quite fragmented and Black culture is perverted.  Hip Hop culture has become synonymous with Black culture and it  is not Black culture.  It is a subculture.  It is of Black people.  It was intended to communicate the atrocities of inner cities that America chose to ignore while genocide was being committed on American streets.  

But it is not the sum total of Black culture.  There is a rich African remnant, seasoned by slavery, preserved by the Civil Rights Movement, but left in the freezer and forgotten in the age AIDS and crack.  And all this (with much more that is too viscous to include here) has worked to fragment Black America.  

The old people think the young people are crazy as hell.  The young people think the old people are useless and judgmental.  The men think the women are to blame for all that's wrong with them.  The women think that they have nothing to do with all that's wrong with men.  The light ones hate the dark ones for making them go out of style.  The dark ones still hate the light ones for being light.  The permed up ones hate the natural ones for complicated reasons.  The natural ones hate the permed up ones for complicated reasons.

On what issue can we come together?  Children starve, can't read, don't know how to tie their shoes, have no sense of respect, can't count, get put into special education too quickly and too frequently, have babies they can't take care of...all types of mess...and they are children.  I'm not even talking about adult pathologies yet.  None of that brings us together.

I truly believe that the improvement of any people in any place is contingent upon how they treat their women.  People have been saying it for several decades in Africa after the last of the countries gained their independence from White Western countries.  Educate the women (about anything) and they take it back to their cities, to their villages, to the grandpas, fathers, sons, brothers, children, everybody.  When you provide something for an African woman, you inevitably provide for those she provides for.

Look at what is going on in Haiti.  An organization had to introduce a food program aimed just at women because they know the women will feed the children and the elderly who cannot stand in line to wait for bags of rice.  Men were appearing at truck doors and with their strength, hauling away the food to cook for themselves.  So they revamped the situation, started handing out tickets to women to appear at a certain place in the morning hours to be given bags of rice.  The men stand in an audience outraged by this seemingly sexist move.  But without such a move, Haiti's children may not be fed because when you don't provide for a woman, you disenfranchise far more than just that woman.

Black women in America are getting it right (sometimes).  I have not even a suggestion for a solution but I would like to propose that the minute the solidarity between Black women and Black men returns, it's a done deal.  Black men, we know you have been through a lot and we are willing to help nurse wounds and protect you from further damage.  But you gotta meet us at the halfway mark boo. 

And ain't no woman like a Black woman gonna nurse your wounds like us anyway.

Day 2: Environment

"We Don't Care" by Kanye West

...drug dealer buy Jordans / crackhead buy crack / and the White man gets paid off of alla dat...

Happy 2nd day of Black History Month.

Sticking with the theme of "the kids", I would like to speak about environment.

The conversation about nature versus nurture seeks to address which facet has more of an imprint on the way a person develops and ultimately behaves.

Are people born with the behaviors, tendencies, habits, etc. that they conduct?  Or does the environment (people, punishment, personal experience) create the behaviors, tendencies, and habits a person demonstrates?

In the age of advance science and research, most people agree that some of our behaviors and characteristics are intrinsic and some are shaped by the environment a person finds themselves.

Language is a good example of the interaction between nature and nurture.  In humans, language is acquired so fast, that linguistics and other researchers hypothesize that the human brain is wired for language and that there is a language acquisition device (LAD) in the brain.

Infant children who are pre-verbal are able to recognize the syllabic boundaries (when a syllable ends and when a syllable begins) of any language, suggesting that the human brain already has a system ready to accept the acquisition of language if exposed.

This is where the nurture part is introduced.  The child has to be exposed to a language to acquire it.  The child has to interact with other verbal human beings in order to finesse the processing and expression of language.

In studies conducted on toddlers, socioeconomic status strongly influences the level of verbal ability of the child.  Children of high socioeconomic status tend to be exposed to more words and have larger vocabularies than children of low socioeconomic status by the age of 4.

This goes to say that all the children exposed to language (barring cognitive difficulties) do learn language.  But the level of aptitude in language is dependent upon exposure.

In my opinion, low socioeconomic status in code for colored people.  I don't mean to say that there are no poor White people.  However, race and socioeconomic status seem to converse frequently and people of color are disproportionately poor.

Poverty (you again) interrupts the potential for successful development afforded by biological devices.  The children are not exposed to appropriate language and therefore do not acquire it.

When does this end?  I ask again, what do we accomplish by blaming the poor for being poor other than keeping their children poor so we can blame them for being poor adults?

Children of poverty who are unable to disengage from the tantrums of being poor are surrounded by children and families just like their own.  They do not have examples of how to live differently.  Those things that surround you are those things you believe are possible, attainable.

So if everyone a person knows doesn't completes anything higher than high school, never travels, lives in the same neighborhood for most of their lives, is never really financially successful, what standard of living do you expect them to adopt?

However, this is a conversation about nature versus nurture.  Even if you are surrounded by a lackluster environment, you have some personal accountability.  I do not say that such environments give you the excuse to never accomplish anything.  I suggest, however, that it makes sense when a person falls into this lower standard of living when that is all they know, for a poor diet does not nourish the body.

Warning! Controversial!

The morning of April 16, 2007, I was a sophomore in college, awaking from a long weekend of partying.

When the news of the shooting spree at Virginia Tech was hitting the airwaves, my tv was still off, I was still snugly in my bed, at my apartment, sleeping.

I heard my phone ring and it was the ringtone of my best friend at the time, Melanie.

Because it was her, I decided to look at it.  I was hoping she was trying to invite me to Shafer for some breakfast (God knows how much I love Shafer Dining Court at VCU).

It was a text message and the text message read something like "Are u awake? u watch the news?"  I responded that I hadn't and that her text message had awaken me.  She told me to take a deep breath and turn the tv on.

I have anxiety so I was really freaking out in my head.  I am also my mother's daughter and I immediately started thinking worst case, end of days scenarios.  I turned on the tv (to CNN, no doubt) to live coverage of the shooting spree at Virgina Tech.

Melanie and I were on the phone by this point and I really could not hear anything she was saying.  My little brother goes to VTech, and the prospect of him caught in a madman's crossfire was worse than the end-of-days scenario I was sweating over.

I immediately hung up with Mel and called my brother.  Of course! It went straight to voicemail.  God wouldn't make it any less dramatic.  I called him several times, wanting to know I would see him again.

It then occurred to me that my parents and all of our huge extended African family was probably trying to call him too.  And he was probably trying to call out as well.  Calm down Zainab.  Just call Dadddy.  So I called the house to speak to the parentals.  My mom was at work and had not been told yet.  We don't usually tell mom about crises until we have concrete information because the woman just goes wild (later on, I found out she was at work with her younger sister.  My aunt told her about the shooting after we found out my brother was okay.  She fell to the floor in thorough Afrakan dramatics before her sister could mention that her baby was okay.  She is just wild).

My Daddy hadn't spoken to Sheikh yet and he said no one has been able to speak to him.  Well, the panic began.  I didn't even know what to do.  I wasn't sad or even really panicking that he was dead.  I was just fixed on how am I going to get in contact with my baby brother?  It hadn't occurred to me yet that he could be dead.

Half an hour later, my Daddy called to say he spoke to my brother and that he is safe in a friend's dorm room.  My brother is a computer engineer major and had all his classes, save for one, in the very building, in one of the very classrooms in which students were murdered.

He said that when he was walking to his nine o'clock class, he heard gunshots.  He says that because of the farmland and forestry that surrounds the campus, one often hears the gunshots of cattleherders and hunters.  But he said these gunshots sounded uncomfortably close to campus so he turned his Black self around and went to a friend's dorm room, so as not to have to walk all the way to his own dorm room.  He said it freaked him out.

I used to make fun of my baby brother for being a "punk".  I used to strongly perpetuate the hyper-macho, masculine ideal to my brothers all the time.  Sheikhy was in no way interested in investigating things, finding out sources, etc.  He was adventurous and aggressive in play like most boys are, but anything that he was afraid of or weary about, he stayed away from.  And really, in all my ridicule, it was his "scaredie-catness" that kept him alive.

In the days and weeks following, as investigations and commentary flowed through the news and our living rooms, we students on our social networks put up profile pictures (like the one featured in the beginning of this entry) in support of the Virginia Tech community and in remembrance for the lives lost on that day.

I remember going to a vigil held on our campus for the murdered students, crying so bitterly about the crazy world we live in, as if parents don't have enough to worry about when they send their children off to school; about the loss I almost had to deal with; about the loss people are actually dealing with.

Over the summer, after the news frenzy had waned a little bit, I came across an article about the www.lansing.com cartoonist who created the cartoon image I use for this blog entry.  The article, written by an HBCU alum, discussed the lack of HBCU mascots in the social network campaign to support VTech.  He (or she, can't remember the author) said it was difficult for him to find something that expressed a unity of his alma mater and VTech.  Many universities had flags with their mascot and Tech's mascot linked by a compassionate message of support and condolences.

The article also wondered why in the construction of that cartoon, the artist did not consider the HBCU's of Virginia who were also feeling the pain of the massacre, or students of HBCU's who suffered a personal loss because of the massacre.


I guess in the safety of not suffering the loss of my brother and being some months removed from my initial emotional reaction, I could entertain the message of the article.


Such an article begs the question "Why does it matter?"  Why does it matter that the HBCU's were left out?


In the grand scheme of things, given that 32 innocent people died that day, I would say it doesn't matter.  But on a smaller scale, within the contextual conversation of race relations, I think it is very significant.  This White artist failed to consider the Black institutions' response to the massacre, which was the same as all other institutions.  All of us with breath and soul were sad for Virginia Tech and sad for the turn American culture has taken into violence.


The artist who drew the cartoon is not a racist because he left out the HBCU's.  But what does it say about our culture, about White culture, about the relationship between Black people and White people (in higher education, mind you) that the HBCU's had a hard time finding symbols, illustrations, flags, etc. to express their condolesenses to the Virginia Tech community?


Is it because we (all of us who reside in America) don't consider HBCU's to be serious institutions?  We don't consider them to be 'mainstream' because they are for Black people?  We just don't consider them.  What are the social experiences that Mr. Lansing drew from (no pun intended) that caused him to fail to include HBCU's, as if people who go to HBCU's had no opinion or sentiment about the massacre?


That is the point of the conversation, I believe.  In almost anything that seemingly affects us all, regardless of any group characteristics, Black people are often left unconsidered.  I say that Mr. Lansing is not necessarily a racist because he did not include HBCU's in his drawing because it is possible that it did not occur to him that there are HBCU's in Virginia.  It is possible that he doesn't know any HBCU's in Virginia.  

As a White man, belonging to the dominant, oppressive culture, he does not have to look to either side of himself to see the marginalized groups and how they live.  If he did know of HBCU's and deliberately decided not to include them, then he would be a racist.  I have no way of knowing which case is true (which is the grand conundrum of being a person of color and experiencing racism. In this day and age of legislated equal rights, few instances are outright and inarguably racist. Some circumstances are more subtle and draw on the past experiences of the person of color being discriminated against, which allows a person to assume they are being discriminated against).


This is a controversial example of how race informs so much of what we do and how we do it because innocent people were murdered.  The conversation I address in this blog entry is seemingly just a distraction from the facts of the matter: 1) 32 murders  2)Virginia Tech's negligence evidenced by their failure to shut down school after the first 2 early morning murders  3)the transition from college (or anywhere) from a place of institutional business to a place vulnerable to the attack of any given sociopath.


If I had lost my brother on that day, I would not give a damn about this conversation.  I mention only because I find it so interesting that conversations of race are relevant to almost everything in this culture.

Day 1: Poverty

"Daughters" by John Mayer

...i know a girl / she puts the color inside of my world / she's just like a maze / where all of the walls are continually changed...

Happy Black History Month.  My, how time flies.  It is already February.

This is the first February in a long time in which I am employed.  And I have the very appropriate job of teaching young Black girls.

When I was looking for a job, I was looking for more clerical and administrative work, thinking I was not qualified to venture into education, although I love it.

My students suffer from the devastating condition of poverty.  The symptomatology of their situations include distracting and destructive environments, young and/or inept parents, minimal monitoring, poor educational systems, cultural incompetence, and much more actually.

I live in Richmond, VA and my students also live in Richmond, VA.  However, by the questions they ask about the simplest things (like where I bought my lunch from, what kind of food it is, where is the restaurant I bought it from, etc.) you would think we live in different worlds.

It may not seem like a big deal that they are unfamiliar with the restaurants I frequent, as I am a diverse eater.  However, because I am in class all day and then report to work immediately after, I usually stop at generic franchises like Chipotle or Qdoba because they are on campus and don't disrupt my travels to the school.

They don't know what Chipotle or Qdoba is because they are prisoners of their projects.  If it isn't in the projects, they don't know what it is.  Many of them come from homes which don't have access to transportation and public transportation in Rich City is unreliable.  Therefore, they don't even travel around their own city.

The Chipotle and Qdoba on the campus I attend school is less than 5 miles from where most of them live but that 5 miles, which seems negligible to us cultured, working, educated adults, is a world away to my beautiful Black girls.

Atop that, they don't know what the food is called.  They don't know what a quesadilla is.  They don't know that there is a difference between Southwestern food (food of New Mexico, Texas, and them) and Mexican food (although, I wonder how many people at all know there is a difference).  The only food they were familiar with was the burrito.

I felt slightly elitist because of the shock I felt at the things they didn't know.  I caught myself continuously saying "How can they not know that?"

But why should they know about that?  They are left in their neighborhoods, alienated and isolated by poverty, a poverty thorough enough to make them culturally incompetent to the culture within a 10 mile radius of their residences.

And when the kids grow up, we blame them, ridicule them, judge them, and shake our heads at them for what they have not seen, what they do not know, and what they do not understand.

But it starts when they are children.  I knew what a quesadilla was at age 10, mostly because I am a fat ass and I love to eat because my parents, the educational system I was in, and the resources I had to access popular culture all helped to inform my cultural competence.  

My parents wanted me to know about other cultures.  When I saw a restaurant I wanted to try, we would try it and I would always love it, and I would add the items of the menu to my vocabulary.  I would then know what was in that particular item and see if their was a correlation between the ingredients and the name.  

For example, the quesadilla is called such because it is queso (Spanish for cheese), cooked into a tortilla, a round, flat bread made of wheat.  Hence the name quesadilla.

Mind you, the process I just described is not an active one in which I am conscious or slightly aware of becoming cultured.  I simply had access to these things and had parents who would indulge my curiosity.  I had no idea I was becoming "cultured", even in this rudimentary example of my introduction to quesadillas.  I elucidated the process for arguments sake only.

If a child is introduced to Mexican food, understands where Mexico is, and understands this food, although native to Mexico, is something the child likes and has access to, by human nature alone, and some education, a child will wonder what other people live in the world and what do they eat?  Who are the Japanese and what do they eat?  The French?  The Hungarians?  The Gambians?  The Egyptians?

These questions don't just elicit knowledge about food.  These questions reveal that the child is considering that there is a world beyond the neighborhood, the city, the state, or the country the child lives in.  There is more out there.

My students are wholly unaware that there is more out there.  And it is not their fault.  They are not stupid.  They are not ignorant.  They are not uninterested even.  They just have no access, no encouragement or reason even to wonder.  And even if they did wonder, how will they learn?  They are stuck, physically, culturally, and intellectually.  Poverty literally keeps them stuck.

They want to know.  They ask me where my lunch comes from.  They ask what kind of food it is.  They ask how it is made.  They ask how I found out about it.

I took knowing about Chipotle and Qdoba for granted.  I, becoming more culturally competent everyday of my life, take it for granted.  I do not even notice I am learning.  And I have forgotten how I was even introduced to these things.  And I assume that we all are introduced to these things.

My story of course is different because I am an immigrant and as such, I am almost inherently interested in other immigrants living in America.  But I grew up with African Americans who, now, are just as educated and culturally competent as I, even without the arguably inherent interest in immigrants and the immigrant experience.  

My best friends, Gwenny & Christina, are just as intelligent as I am.  They know there is a difference between the Chinese and the Japanese, between the Hungarians and the Dutch, between the Nigerians and the Sierra Leoneans (actually ery'body know the Nigerians are a totally different species or something).  I wouldn't be surprised if my students have never heard of Hungary or Sierra Leone or think China and Japan are one nation.

But Gwenny, Christina, and I are products of adventure.  We were allowed adventure by not being confined to the projects and we had some resources.  We saw things that introduced us to the concept of a bigger world, which allowed us to wonder about what we have yet to see, which allowed us to research, either in school or in experience, what else was out there.

And that is how you form a human being.  A human being must be aware that there is more to life and to the world than the small network she knows, the street that she can see from her window.  That's how people become compassionate for experiences other than their own, work to improve the lives of those in a culture/space/country/time in which they don't exist.  You cannot empathize with he who you don't know exists. Duh.

So how do we expect our beautiful Black children to want to participate, professionally or socially, in our society, contribute to their country if they have no idea that the world is bigger than Gilpin Court?

Everyday that we blame the poor for being poor, the children remain ignorant.  They grow up to be ignorant adults who we continue to blame again for their condition, not realizing they were ignorant, isolated, alienated, imprisoned children from day one.

Everyday that we blame the poor for being poor, we miss thousands, millions of opportunities to show children, who are enslaved by poverty, that this is not all they are meant to be.  This is not all they are meant to see.  There is a big world with big problems, with big fortunes, with big chances that they should be allowed and encouraged to participate in.

They say incarceration is the new slavery and I agree.  But poverty precipitates ALL the social ills we speak of: drug use and distribution, teen pregnancy, STDs, HIV/AIDS, health problems and poor health maintenance, violent crime, high rates of incarceration, domestic abuse, child abuse, high school dropout rates, illiteracy rates, generational welfare dependency...I cannot think of a single social issue that we fight about on the House floor, in our workplaces, or in casual conversation that is not found within the parameters of poverty.

I get paid to teach these beautiful Black girls and I have programmed into my job description that they will know more than Mosby, more than Gilpin, more than Highland Park, more than Hull Street.  They will know a world exists for them and there is no reason why they should not see it.