Who you callin a b*tch?

My older sister used to sing this song all the time when I was younger. It wasn't until recently that I heard it again and actually listened to the words. Queen Latifah addresses the sexism that women have to go through. We get called sexist names, harassed and discriminated against. My favorite line is, " You gotta let em' know, You aint a b*tch or a hoe". Women need to respect themselves more and not tolerate being called derogatory names.

am I in the elite black?

I grew up in a very small town and I lived in a community that was considered to be wealthy. I never thought of myself as being in the elite class of african americans because I didn't consider my parents money to be my money. I was tought to work hard for what you want, and with dedication anything is possible. I still consider myself to be middle class, but I know that if some were to visit the street where my parents, grandparents and other relitives reside then some may call me elite and the stereotype me for it.
I did have to endure some of those stereotypes growing up. I was call bougie, uppity, a "house nigger" and a lot of other names that made me look at race and class in a completly new way. I was sent this video from my cousin who reside in a very wealthy community in Atlanta and is a lawyer. She has also had to face stereotypes that come along with being in the elite class of african
americans.

was it a double standard??

I saw this article on the examiner.com, but the media has been covering it since the moment it happened. Read the article and then I'll share my thought.

For those who haven't heard Adam Lambert raised eyebrows and inspired some complaints to ABC during his performance of "For Your Entertainment" when he had one dancer kneel at his crotch and a bit later in the same performance grabbed the keyboard player by the hair and smooched him. This happened on Sunday, 22 November 2009, at around 10 p.m. when the show was about to end.

According to MTV's Hollywood Crush, Lambert these questionable acts were improvisations and totally unrehearsed. In the original choreography, he was only supposed to look meaningfully at the male dancer, but decided to grab him by the head and shove his face into his crotch or near enough to mimic oral sex. Near the end, he also grabbed Tommy Rafliff and gave him a kiss. What's to complain about? Did people complain about Madonna and Brittany Spears?

That was on MTV in 2003 and Madonna also kissed Christina Aguilera. Also on MTV, were a set of dancers simulating fellatio. Three men and three women of the group Afroborike tried faux fellatio to impress the judges on the last season of Randy Jackson presents "America's Best Dance Crew." Even the judges weren't sure if it would be allowed to air on TV. But, of course, this early September incident was men having women perform on them even though theoretically, it should be three times worse. Shane Sparks asked for a slo-mo and noted that while moves like that are often watered down for TV, he respected Afroborike for not backing down. MTV isn't exactly network TV, but ABC is.

Even more recently than that was on ABC itself on "Dancing with the Stars." Did Derek Hough really not realize how questionable that move with Joanna Krupa would look during the mambo marathon? He brought it back for the salsa routine. Jimmy Kimmel had fun with that pose. Having former Playboy playmates does mean that ABC is treading dangerous waters, particularly when they interview Hugh Hefner about Krupa.

Both DWTS and MTV's ABDC had earlier time slots. Where were the morality police then? The Parents Television Council called the show "tasteless" and "vulgar" and worried about the effect it would have on American teenagers, particularly teenaged girls. You'd think with a guy doing it to a guy, the PTC would be more concerned about teenaged boys.

For Lambert, the fallout was ABC's "Good Morning America" canceled his performance, but the video of his performance is a hit and he's gotten interviews from many other media sources and he was on CBS' "The Early Show." Good for him, but whatever the reason for his bad behavior shock approach to performance, he does raise a good point. Is there a double standard?

I saw the performance when it first aired on TV, and I can honestly saw that my mouth was open the entire time. I did not know much about Adam Lambert and I am not a fan of his music, but I was shocked by the level of sexuality in his performance. Maybe I'm more modest than most, but I did think that his performance was over the top. I didn't have a problem with the sexual acts being performed with other men, but I did have a problem with them being televised. I was babysitting my 11 yr old neighbor and without any type of warning Adam Lambert comes on doing a lot things that I found inappropriate. I don't think it was a gender bias because he is a homosexual, but I think he lacked a level of class in his performance.

"Hello, I'm Bisexual"

I saw this article on one of my friends blogs and I was suprised to learn that was a day to actually "come out". It seems like more of a celebration than a struggle, which I thought that many people felt about the day they decided to "come out".

Here is the article:

This Sunday, October 11, is the 21st Annual observance of National Coming Out Day. It's now an internationally recognized day, with events all over the world aimed at promoting equality and awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues.

Here in the U.S., National Coming Out Day is managed and promoted by the Human Rights Campaign: This year HRC is running a "Conversations from the Heart" PR campaign encouraging everyone to have candid conversations with family and friends about where they stand on LGBT equality issues. Check the HRC events map for a National Coming Out Day event in your community. If you can get to Washington, the main event is this weekend, October 9-11: Visit NationalEqualityMarch.com for more info and a full schedule of events.

Why October 11? National Coming Out Day honors the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and the first display of the NAMES Project Quilt. The first official observance of National Coming Out Day was held one year later, on October 11, 1988, recognition that a national LGBT equality movement had to have visibility if it was to be a success. As Harvey Milk put it, a decade earlier, back in 1978:

“I cannot prevent anyone from getting angry, or mad, or frustrated. I can only hope that they’ll turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive, so that two, three, four, five hundred will step forward, so the gay doctors will come out, the gay lawyers, the gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects … I hope that every professional gay will say ‘enough’, come forward and tell everybody, wear a sign, let the world know. Maybe that will help.”

This year the Bisexual Index and other organizations are reminding us of the B in "LGBT" that sometimes gets forgotten by gay rights groups: Click through for a "Hello, I'm Bisexual" badge like the one above for your website, blog, or Facebook page, then proudly display it this week in the leadup to National Coming Out Day.

Whether you're heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, take the opportunity this Sunday (and every day) to come out in support of LGBT equality.

Stereotypes

In my CST 207 class we are exploring gender roles and the way they effect our forms of communication. My professor show the class this Youtube video:

I was surprised by how much the media sticks with gender stereotypes. I had overlooked the fact that most of my favorite television shows growing up had stay at home moms, and the fathers all went off to work each morning. Without realizing it back then, it did have an effect on how I perceived roles of men and women to be. My images of fathers were that they went to work and many all the money to support their family. I believed that mothers stayed home and cared for their husbands and children. My ideas have since changed as I have gotten older and I no longer see set roles for men and women.

African American Women and Good Hair

As an African American women I have always had a Love-Hate relationship with my hair. I'm certain that women of other ethnicity's have the same problem, but I can strongly identify with my African American race. Chris Rock created a documentary about African American women and the adventure they go through to have "good hair".

Here is the movie trailer:


While watching this I found myself laughing. Yes, some of the things said were funny and the documentary has a humorous way of address African American and their hair, but after all the laughter a real problem in our society is found. I began to question why African American women felt the need to have straight hair? Why we use chemicals, such as relaxers to get hair that we think looks like other races? And why does society tell us, as African American women that our hair is not okay being the way that it naturally is?

I also found a great article in the Miami Herald that addressed the struggle many African American women go through because they want to have "good" hair.

For many black women, hair reflects who they are

By HALIMAH ABDULLAH AND WILLIAM DOUGLAS

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Black women can tell hair-raising stories about their trials and tribulations with their hair.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, proudly wore a smaller, Angela Davis-type Afro during her 1970s college days at Yale University and the University of Virginia, but later she abandoned the natural look.

"I was a revolutionary," she said. "I had a natural, which I enjoyed. But the upkeep, it took too much time."

Today, Lee has a combo hairstyle of both smooth, straightened hair and braids, and thinks that how a black woman's hair looks is very important in the working world.

Straight or natural, cornrows or close-cropped, dreadlocks or pressed, black women's hairstyles represent a personal or political statement, an expression of freedom, a lifestyle choice or an approach to American corporate culture.

Comedian Chris Rock trains his lens on black women and their follicles in "Good Hair," a new docu-comedy film out in theaters this weekend that delves into the women's attitude toward their hair, the amount of money they spend on it, and how their hair reflects who they are.

Rock said that he was inspired to make the film after his young daughter raved about a young white friend's hair, then asked, "Daddy, how come I don't have good hair?"

Inherent in her question were tangled attitudes about identity, cultural authenticity and the nation's complex socio-political and racial history, said Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American studies professor at Duke University and the author of "New Black Man" and "Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic."

Historically, for many African-Americans, "a lot of it has to do with it fact that the ability to be seen as American and not foreign or 'other' had a lot to do with their look," Neal said. "Because skin color couldn't change, hair became a way to articulate a sense of American-ness. If kinkiness marked them as foreign, the ability to straighten hair marked them as more acceptable to the mainstream or 'American.' "

During slavery, African-Americans of mixed white, black and Native American ancestry were seen as more valuable and more attractive because their lighter skin and straighter hair was closer in texture to whites. After slavery, many blacks internalized this barometer of attractiveness when measured against the majority culture's standards, Neal said.

Middle- and upper-middle-class African-Americans in turn founded social groups and churches where the test for admittance was skin lighter than a paper bag and hair that could be combed without tangling. Later, those same standards of beauty were elevated in American culture in advertisements, television shows, videos and movies, and on fashion runways.

Such cultural pressure led to a long-standing trend of black women placing a premium on their hair. It's no coincidence that Madame C. J. Walker became one of the nation's first black female millionaires in the early 1900s by producing and selling a line of beauty and hair care products aimed at black women.

Today, African-Americans spend an estimated $9 billion a year on hair care products in an effort to fry it, dye it, lock it up, weave it, or make it lay flat and smooth, according to industry estimates. Still, black women often debate whether certain hair styles - cornrows, locks or Afros - hold them back in professional work settings such as financial and legal firms or in broadcast media.

It hasn't hurt congressional Delegates Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and Donna M.C. Christensen, D-Virgin Islands, who both display close-cropped, chemically unprocessed "natural" hairdos.

Still, it's a serious enough concern that one woman wrote to the "Ask the White Guy" blog at the DiversityInc.com Web site and asked whether her natural hairstyle would prevent her from climbing the corporate ladder.

The "White Guy," Luke Visconti, replied: "There's no doubt in my mind that Black people have been overlooked for promotions because of natural hair or darker skin color. Psychological tests show that people most trust people who look like them. Since white men run most corporations in this country, straightened hair and/or lighter skin is going to be an advantage (disturbing, but let's keep it real)."

Orien Reid-Nix, a 63-year-old Philadelphia-area resident, made waves in the 1970s by sporting a neat, evenly rounded Afro when she was a consumer affairs reporter for KYW-TV and later WCAU-TV. There were only a handful of black women on TV newscasts at the time, and even fewer who wore Afros or non-chemically treated hair - a trend that continues today.

Reid-Nix felt black and proud, but her mother wasn't thrilled. Reid-Nix recalled her mother giving her a big hug and a kiss during a visit to Atlanta, then taking one look at her Afro and saying, "You look like the devil."

Some think that black women's focus on their hair does indeed hold them back in some areas. Jim Ellis, who created an all-black competitive swim team in Philadelphia in the 1970s that was the inspiration for the 2007 movie "Pride," said the reluctance of many black women to learn how to swim is because their hair tends to return to its natural, tightly curled state when it gets wet.

That's a problem, Ellis said, because blacks drown at higher rates. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, blacks drown at a rate 1.25 times higher than whites do. Black children between 5 and 19 drown at a rate 2.3 times higher than white children in that age bracket, the study said.

Times have changed since media professionals such as Dorothy Reed, a reporter for San Francisco's KGO-TV, was suspended for two weeks in 1981 for wearing cornrows on the air, and since 1971, when the management of New York's WABC-TV initially threatened to take reporter Melba Tolliver off the air if she didn't change the Afro hairstyle she wore while covering Tricia Nixon's wedding.

Recording artist India.Arie's hit single "I am not my hair" was a lyrical declaration that the politics of authenticity as measured through hair texture needs to end.

"There's been a shift in attitudes about natural hair beginning with the black pride movement of the 1960s, when people wore their Afros and took pride in that. In the '80s and '90s, blacks embraced natural styles, twists and locks, and that kind of thing," Neal said. "I think it's still a hard sell in corporate America, especially on air, and executives are suspicious of what audiences will read into those hairstyles. There's a fear that they'll be viewed as less than professional and less capable of having the intellectual ability to be in the classroom or in front of the camera."

In reading the article I found that it is not always other ethnicity's that place the importance of "good" hair on African American women, but it is other our own race that places a high value on it. So, instead of places the blame of everyone and everything else, one must look at themselves to help change what they find to be unacceptable in society. Whether you have "good" or "bad" hair you should still be treated in a respectable fashion and not judged based on your outer appearance.