Sardonic Sistah Says

Akon and Wilber Pan.

Man, I thought that Mos Def and Terrence Howard took entertainment hoing to stellar heights.  I have to give it to Akon, you can’t turn on the radio without hearing him on someone’s song; I swear I’ve heard him on a country joint recently but maybe I was just hallucinating.  But he’s branching out world wide and I can’t hate on him for that.   Well, I could but he makes it hard cuz he got that cute smile.  He doesn’t have three wives and six kids for nothing.

I think I mentioned before that a MySpace friend recently moved to China to pursue her dream of living there, learning the language and finding love.

Needless to saying she’s living and loving it.  When she gets a breather she posts updates but they are far and few between.

So, I will have to ask her about two articles I came across the other day.

Is Lou Jing a bird in a guilded cage?

The first is Euphoria Luv’s link to a Time  magazine article about a young Blasian (African and Chinese) girl competing in China’s version of American Idol.  The young lady had been getting worldwide buzz not because of her pretty voice but because she is obviously biracial in a monoracial society.  To make matters worse she was conceived through an affair her mother had with an African American male who soon left the country (reasons not revealed).  Then to top it off her mother was married to a Chinese guy at the time who left his wife when the child came out looking obviously black.

Yeah.  Damn.  If the Guiding Light was kicking out a story like this maybe it would still be on the air.

Her story brought attention to the show but in an ethnocentric culture it also brought out the racists with people reproving Lou Jing’s dark skin over the preferred fair coloring and objecting to her participation because she of mixed race, not full Chinese.  They even disparaged Lou Jing’s mother for her infidelity.

“As China continues to open up, this kind of phenomenon will become ever more prevalent,” says David Zweig, a professor of humanities and social sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to Time Magazine. “This is part of the process of internationalization, but we can only hope that Chinese people, including netizens and the people whose views tend towards extremism, can come to accept that there are many mixed-race people, both in China and worldwide.”

I hope this story continues with an addendum on this side of the world, maybe seeing Lou Jing come to the U.S and gets reunited with her father and her mother getting the back child support she is long overdue.

Another story I found on China Smack.com with a link to KDS Life.   What is the gist of the story?  A Shanghainese man riding the commuter train with his black girlfriend.

Really.  They have nothing better to do than to spy on a lovely couple enjoying their morning train ride?  Maybe they should just learn to ride the wave because with Chinese men outnumbering Chinese women intermarrying with different races may be the fastest way to bring balance back.  Ethnocentrism be damned.

I try to live green.  In our home we have two bins for recycling, try to combine car trips to save on gas and reduce emissions and, of course, we try to remember to bring our own bags to the store instead of accepting the plastic or paper.

Sometimes I fail, but I still try. 

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one struggling to be an avocado (black on the outside, green on the inside).  In an effort to reduce his own carbon footprint and to raise awareness of green living for African Americans TV One and Van Peebles got together to create the show Mario’s Green House which airs tomorrow night at 6pm.  On the show you watch Van Peebles and his family try to green their home.

In a recent interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Peebles explains why many African Americans may not have embraced green living yet.

And it’s pretty cool because we live in a neighborhood, the Baldwin Hills neighborhood, which is, you know, predominately African-American, and it’s interesting because I think in certain communities there’s a little bit of a mistrust of the dominant culture, because we were taught, you know, well, asbestos is really good. It’s cool. And then we, you know, we’re the last ones to learn, no, asbestos really probably isn’t so good. And so by the time you get enough money that you can buy that Lincoln Navigator, you’re being told you should have a Prius, and you think that somehow this doesn’t apply to you. But it totally, it applies to all of us together.

Tell Me More 23 Sept 09

So check the show out.  Who knows, maybe it will inspire more blacks to become eco-friendly, although I’m not sure if black women are ready to dump the Dooney and Burke purses for one’s made of used tires just yet.

“In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.”
- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

I don’t have words for this. And sadly, she wasn’t the only black woman to do this. A British woman named Shenise Farrell also flew to Panama to have this procedure done and nearly went blind.

When Shenise Farrell read on the internet about a £5,000 operation which could turn her dark brown eyes light blue, she wasted no time in heading off to Panama.

Less than two weeks later, British surgeons were battling to save her sight.

They had to repair a hole in her iris and remove implants. It is unclear whether she will suffer long-term damage – and her eyes are still brown.

‘It was the biggest mistake I have ever made,’ said the single mother of three from Perivale, West London.

From the Daily Mail 29 Aug 2009

My people, my people when will the madness stop?

The biggest clue for these women is they had to fly to Panama to get it done. England and the US are two capitalist countries that would sell to you your own saliva if they could so if the operation isn’t offered here chances are the whole thing is sketchy.

What price for beauty? Going blind is too high for me.

In this corner we have the champion, Jay-Z whose known to knock nuccas out and rumored to be the GROAT.

In the other corner is a contender, young and scrappy.  Here’s Timothy De La Ghetto!

The verdict:

Ooooo, I’m torn.  I’m gonna set this one out and let the comments decide.

The Noisettes.

This makes me happy for a myriad of reasons, but the main one is that my daughter won’t make me listen to Mind the Gap over and over and over and over and over again.

But don’t buy the cd for the above song because the whole album sounds like they’ve gone through a time machine to make a hit in each of the last 4 decades.  They have disco songs, sixties pop influences song, 80s new wave and 90s grooves.

But does an obvious rock band have to stick to one sound and be formulaic?  Yeah, I guess if they want to be mainstream and sale.

Thank God they went the other route so I can have real music to listen to.

Well, this is the week where it suddenly seemed BF/AM couples were everywhere.

Okay, not everywhere.   Just a few places… like three.

John Cho

Gabrielle Union

In LA-LA Land a blasian couple will be a staple on ABC’s new TV series Flash Forward when Gabrielle Union  takes on a recurring role as the wife of series regular John Cho.  I am awash with surprise because from all the premieres I saw over the summer it seemed it was going to be a white season but now I will definitely be tuning in to watch this new series.

Flash Forward premieres on ABC  Thursday September 24 at 8pm. 

A few weeks ago on Bravo,  Real Housewife Lisa Wu Hartwell took her friend NeNe Leakes to meet her Chinese family(episode 5, Home Is Where the Heartbreak Is; original airdate 27 Aug 09).  It was an odd segment because, for some reason, NeNe kept going on about how she didn’t see Lisa as Asian  although she met Lisa’s extended family who were all Chinese.  Lisa even looked a bit like one cousin and spoke Chinese with another.  Finally NeNe made her peace with it by saying Lisa was a black girl with good hair.

Yeah… okaaaay…

And the third is about a person who used to be on a hot TV show as a child.  Congratulations to

Hannibal and Kellie

actress Kellie Shanygne Williams from the show Family Matters on her marriage to business man Hannibal Jackson (my friend says he’s blasian although I think he might be Samoan, but either way it’s close enough to note them here).

Asian male/black female pairings are small so it’s refreshing to see us popping up in a few places.  I’m still waiting for that show with a blasian couple as the lead (tapping my toe impatiently).

“Hey, what class are you in this year?” I asked the tall young man standing before me as I handed him a computer pass.

“I’m a senior  this year,” he puffed up full of pride, his chest sticking out. 

A smirk came over my lips as I lowered my head and raised a brow.  “You’re a senior?” 

“Yep,” he took the pass and swaggered off. 

“You really think you’re going to graduate?”

“Yeah.”

“For real?”

“Watch me.”

“I’ll watch,” I said skeptically.  I suspect over the last year and half I’ve seen him more than his teachers have.  He constantly skips here and maybe once or twice he’s been caught in some truancy sweeps.   I wonder if he passed the Ohio Graduation Test?  I wonder if he has plans for life after high school?  I tried talking to him and his friend G before we banned G for two years because he was acting up.  I sent them to the college advisor we have here every Tuesday.  I told them I didn’t want to see them in here during school hours any more.  But they seem hell bent on living up to the low expectations society has set for black men. 

Although a lot of attention is put on underachieving African Americans who attend low performing innercity school there’s a growing number of blacks who attend private schools.  (No, not charter schools).  Often, the plight of black students from various economic backgrounds who attend private majority white schools gets overlooked.  But new research intends to shed light on them

The first comes from University of Cincinnati doctoral student Michelle Burstion-Young who recently presented a paper the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in San Francisco about high achieving black students in elite private schools.  (Full disclosure: Ms. Burstion-Young is a good friend of the family.)  In her study Burstion-Young writes:

“Little is known about how students negotiate the social world of school or how being labeled black (by others and/or self) may influence their social decisions, either by removing options (such as being purposefully excluded or not being included) or creating other options (such as a black social world)”

Science Blog, Aug 2009

The paper examines four aspects of a black prep student’s life: assimilation, integration, separation and marginalization. 

“One of the most important findings of this study,” writes Burstion-Young, “is that most students simultaneously use a variety of different coping strategies, but they do so in somewhat different combinations for somewhat different reasons. At the center of their negotiations, however, is an overall concern with identity; more specifically, their coping strategies are geared towards reconciling different, and sometimes contradictory, expectations on identity.”

The documentary film “The Prep School Negro” also examines the lives of African American students at private schools.  Under the Director’s Statement, Andre Robert Lee writes this:

While at GFS, I also thought of the family and the community I had left behind. We had been trained to live as second-class citizens, and I felt guilty about gaining access to this world of privilege and knowledge. I wanted to share this new world with those who were not able to walk with me. My former elementary classmates were not reading “The Iliad” or travelling the world on a choir tour. The idea for The Prep School Negro grew out of my first days at GFS. It has been with me every since. As I reflect back, I can see more clearly the internal struggles I faced as an adolescent and as a young adult. This documentary will tell my story and the story of other prep school Negroes like me.

The Obama girls are attending Sidwell Friends but they wont’ be they won’t be the only blacks there –although I’m sure there are probably only a few.  Expand your mind as we shift the paradigm.

Here is a funny video by comedienne Jen Kwok. To see more of her work go to her website, A Certain Je Ne Sais Kwok.

I’m too old to be considered a hip black kid, although I’m vying for the title of hip black mama but the two brats I raise have said, “Nuh uh”. 

They just hate my swag.

An interesting articleon “The Root” says there is a racial divide for black kids and white kids on the net.  According to this article all the black kids flock to MySpace whereas all the white kids are on Facebook.  Danah Boyd describes the white migration from MySpace to Facebook as an electronic white flight.  I was thinking maybe it has less to do with race and more to do with class, age, and the area one lives in.  My daughter migrated to Facebook a few years ago when a lot of her friends in higher grades went to college; within the last year my stepson has done the same.  My nephews who live in another state are constantly on Facebook. 

From what I noticed from the kids at the library (and having an account on MySpace and Facebook) is that kids socialize differently on both sites. Facebook has a minimalist look,  perhaps harkening back to the little houses of the early suburbs.  Everyone’s page is just a blank white screen although you can post up what you want to on it.

MySpace has more of a pimp my webpage type of thing going.  People proclaim who they are by the design not by what they post up; some people’s pages reminds me of graffiti.

But what I noticed with the majority of the kids who come into the library the website of choice is Urban Chat.  Sometimes the younger kids will go on MySpace to put on their updated Meez pic,   but Urban Chat is where it’s at for them. 

So what do you think?  Is it much ado about nothing?  Check out the article on The Root.com