Soulmates: the movie

Be afraid, be very afraid.

A few years ago the talk of the black message boards was down low men.  Who are they, how can you spot them, are you dating one.   When JL King went on Oprah that cemented it.   Yep, now not only are they gay, with white women, or incarcerated now the ones we think might possibly be looking our way are also looking at dude walking behind us. 

Just when we thought the black terror dating alert button has gone down to yellow we are back up at orange.  The new mantra is 70%!  “70% of us are single, ya’ll!  Sev-uhn-tee, what’s the black race gonna do?”  Damn, I’m married and I’m scared.  I want to arrange a trip with my single black females down to Jamaica we they can get their groove back and find them a nice young dude to marry but I’m afraid that instead of coming home with a Winston like Stella, they’ll find a Jonathan like Terry.

Damn!  Can’t find no men nowhere.

The lastest thing that set off my terror alert for bw is the new film, Soul Mate.  I saw the clip on the website but I’m curious if it offers viable solutions.  I’m going to have to find it and screen it before I give it out.  I have a friend I owe a birthday gift to and it might be perfect, but on the offchance its not I have to make sure.  Sybil just turned 40 this year and she’s looking for a few good men just so she can find one to marry.  Well, she has made things a bit harder for herself since the man she wants should be hindu and Asian –Indian preferably.  I’m not exactly sure how she’s going to find that here in the midwest, but stranger things have happened.  But since she’s 40 and single and I don’t think she’d appreciate a film that reminds her that she is 40 and single or tell her she should find happiness in being 40 and single.  She would like a film that can tell her how to find Prashad and get his behind to the alter in six months or less.

But as things stand right now, my sisters, its still not safe to get back in the dating waters.  Check your local blogs for the latest updates in the war on dating terror.

Just Slap the B@#$!

I’m all for freedom of speech, but some people should just be gagged. 

And when I say people I mean Ann Coulter.

Elizabeth Edwards tried to have a conversation with someone who is certifiably insane.  Elizabeth, just haul off and hit the (bleep).  I’m sure 99% of America has your back and the ones who don’t are locked in a sanitarium. 

BlacKorean Conflict

Last fall I thought I might do a human interest piece on these two Korean church ladies who come from the ‘burbs once a month to feed Korean food to innercity children.  My best friend Vee gave me the idea for the story.  It’s her church they congregate in on that weekday night.  I thought the story would make a great human relations piece and illustrated that although Black/Korean relations might be strained in other cities it wasn’t the deal with mine.

So I went down and interviewed them yet ended up putting the story aside.  A few months later I offered the notes to my husband, J,  so he could finish up his thesis on (what else?) Black/Korean relations in the United States.  He has read virtually every book and every article ever written on the subject but needed a local slant to add new material.  Although he is Korean every Korean business that he entered that primarily had a black clientele didn’t want to talk to him.  One business owner cited his “bad English” and offered his niece to talk to J instead.  The niece happened to be blasian (half black and half Korean) and gave J some of the information he was looking for but wouldn’t fully open up. 

When J got my notes he decided to go down and check out the Korean dinner hour for himself.  Armed with his camera he took pictures of the women serving the children and got quotes from everyone.  But as we were leaving he noticed the same thing with one of the Korean women.

“She wouldn’t answer my questions,” he said on the car ride home.  He was speaking of one of the ladies who owned a black hair store. The other woman, who was a professor, was very forthcoming but the hair store owner steered away from questions on race, preferring to talk about her community work.

Maybe things aren’t as easy going as I thought.

But if they have been watching the news I can see how they might find it best to stay mum on race relations in the states.  Every so often discord between African American and Korean American communities flare up and when it does the media has a front row seat.  Blogger Wendi Muse over on Racialicious discusses how a video that was popular last year on youtube was akin to scapegoating.  Richard Fruto, former reporter for Korea Times Weekly, blames the media for the stereotypes of Korean merchants during the 1992 LA riots.  “They often played into the hands of street agitators and boiled it down to a problem blamed on rude merchants,” Fruto said.   

The true nature of the conflict can’t completely be laid at the feet of overzealous reporters, although they do often give it a spin most people can relate to.  When judge Roy Pearson decided to sue a small dry cleaners for losing his slacks most people just chalked it up to this being a litigious society with a judge who wants to rake in a few bucks.  But once discovered that Pearson is black it gives a whole different spin on it, locally and nationally.  Once Pearson’s race was discovered many African Americans wrote to Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher to complain about bad run-ins they’ve had with Korean merchants.  A black business owner said she appreciated Pearson, “appreciate his suing on my behalf. Obviously $60+ million is ‘over the top.’ And I understand that Korean-Americans have made efforts to be ‘nicer’ to their Afro-American clientele, but I think these cases are examples of their needing to be more sensitive.”

Minority vs minority conficts come into play when the subgroups vie for the limited resources in the area.  One hundred years ago it was the Irish, Italians and blacks all fighting one another.  In the new century its blacks, poor whites, Asians, and Latinos with different match ups at different times.  One group believes that another group is getting special privileges that are unobtainable to their particular subset.  Lies are believed and rumored about one another.  Words are said and either fists are flying or someone is running to court. 

So this is nothing new and it won’t be the last.  Until something else comes along to replace minorities there will always be interracial conflict unless the goods are distributed more fairly. 

Lionizing the Stupid

You have to love a country that worries about the education of their children but continually elect government officials mostly on their charisma. 

As Al Gore re-emerges (finally able to cope with the loss of he 2000 election to George Bush) we are again reminded of how intelligent he is.  Not by Gore himself, but by people who love to write about it.  Here’s an interesting take.

Global Hip Hop

I remember when rap couldn’t get a video on MTV and to hear it you had to listen to get mixtapes (my brother had them on 8 tracks).   For the last few years hip hop culture has gone worldwide.

Hip hop aficionado Jeff Chang‘s new book Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, is about how rap has crossed the globes.  His previous book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is about the history of rap.

Listen to an interview Chang did with News and Notes here.

The Comfort of Stereotypes (part two)

“What do Asian men like about Black women?”

It’s a loaded question.  It begs for generalities on both sides.  First, the speaker has to be the spokesperson for hundreds of men who might share a similar attraction for the same ethnicity. Secondly, the women are then described in interhangeable terms as having the same demeanor, physical attributes and outlook.

But for some reason the women want to hear it.  Many times I have seen the question on interracial message boards with black women.  The question is usually asked by young women of various ages and once its said it seems to placate the readers because then they begin to offer their general answers to what they find attractive about Asian men.   

On most of the interracial boards that I have been on people spoke of other races they were attracted to with sweeping statements, albeit positive.  A few touted their attraction to other races as an indicator of how America was on the road to becoming a colorblind society, missing the irony how their attraction was directly linked to another person’s color.  Some ascribed certain behavior and attributes to someone based on their race.  Black males holding up white females as being less combative and more receptive than their black female counterparts.  White females in awe of the black males masculinity and gentleness.  White males equally upheld black women for their strength and beauty and black women loved white males for their diligence and commitment to family.  I asked can’t you find these attribute in any person of any color and a few that answered said no, you can’t.  These things were inherent in that race, they were sure.

But its not necessarily true if the person of that different race is of the same gender.  On a lot of interracial message boards black females and white females rarely strike up friendship, even if they are parents of biracial children.  The black males and white males aren’t always on the best of terms.  The person who has good feelings and high regard for someone of the opposite sex is often doesn’t extend those feelings to someone of their same gender.

Some attribute the fetishizing of race and color a result of the laws and social order that helped to keep people within colorlines since the inception of this country.  Although there are people who truly find love regardless of what color someone might be there are those who are fascinated with the packages along with what is on the inside.  In Colorlines Magazine (Winter 2004) , Daisy Hernandez wrote an article called Playing with Race.  It was about couples who took BDSM to another level by incorporating what they referred to as “race play”, using racial name calling and slavery scenarios to help heighten a couple’s sexual pleasure.  Monoracial couples can still get in on the act.  For some cuckolded men the allure of a Mandingo servicing his wife is a turn on.

“Most black men are not offended by the stereotype that they’re well-hung,” he continues. “But what gets on my nerves is when the ad says, ‘We want a gold-toothed, baggy-pants type,’ or, ‘We want you to look like Allen Iverson or Usher.’ You know what? The typical bull on Craigslist is not going to look like Usher, so get over your stereotype and deal with it.” (from Nerve.com)

When just going for a sexual fantasy or an easy pickup cultural/racial fetishing makes life easy for some.  But for those looking for long-term relationships, a person wants to know if its them or their race.  A recent letter to an advice column had a young asian male questioning the intentions of a white female he just met (Lincoln Journal Star. Lincoln, Neb.: Mar 20, 2007).   Writer Barbara Hernandez goes on a bit of a rant about the problems Latina and Asian women have in dating whitel males in her article “A Woman of Color Who’s Seeing Red” (LA Times, Aug 24 2006).  In the article she discusses the latent prejudices some white males have who only want to date certain women and how trying it is on a woman of color’s psyche.

“Weirdness aside, prejudice always came up,” Hernandez writes.  “Our differences were relatively easy to ignore until the immigration issue came up. And as I masochistically watched Lou Dobbs, the comments came…That’s the moment your woman of color is really asking to find out just what kind of man you are…So I waited for the boyfriend to say something offensive. And he did.  Women of color dating white men seem to eternally be the teacher in the relationship, one of the biggest turnoffs to their hotness in bed.”

So when critics clamor that leaving out the racial problems and sometimes racial allure of the characters on tv shows is somewhat disingenuous perhaps they are right.  Maybe too often in real life a non-black male is more concerned with getting hot jungle/ghetto sex with a black female instead of who she is on the outside or a non-hispanic female knows that latin male can take her to new sexual heights all the while speaking spanish in her ear.  Its not really the content of our character but the color of our skin which can’t be seen when the lights go out.

The Smart One in the Family

Younger siblings now have someone to blame their lot in life.  Its those overachieving elder children and their bad luck at being born behind them.

Recent studies have shown that the oldest child has a higher IQ than his/her younger siblings.  Although only slighte, with the average difference in IQ being three points, scientists say its a clear indicator of family dyanamics and not biology.

Last summer a report came out that showed that only children had a learning advantage over children who had siblings.  In both reports of only children and eldest children they cited more time with parents and higher expectations as reasons why the children excelled.

Asian Males Talk About their Image

Big ups to Reappropriate for bringing this video to everyone’s attention.  For the last few years the Asian male image/masculinity in America has been discussed and dissected through books so its nice to see Asian men on a panel having a conversation on it.

Battle of the Sexes: Finding Love Through Hate

It’s war.

On a few blogs that I frequent black females have declared a war on black males.  They are urging black women to date outside the race, they are advocating sanctioning black male performers by not buying their music or watching their films or tv shows.  They are writing threads and long soliloquies about the trifling behavior of the modern day black male.  Black women are alone and angry and angry at being alone.   So its on.

But I am going to have to be a conscientious objector and head to a mental Canada for this battle.  This is part of the war I do not want to take part of, where I lead legions of black females to become martyrs and throw themselves on grenades.  A few years ago I would have been a part of such kamikaze tactics, hell I could have been a five star general with the things I’ve gone through and seen on the black love warfront.  But in the middle of the warfield, armed with my bayonet of words to ram a nucca through I looked around me and I didn’t like what I saw.  I thought, they are winning.  We can’t find them on their turf.  We can’t win the war coming at them the way they’ve been going at us.  So I laid down my burdens and decided not to study war no more.

I understand their anger.  I can virtually feel it; their anger is palpable.  Its like a pall that encases you wherever you go.  Anger gives you a false sense of strength.  It eats at you and you want to inflict the pain you are feeling onto the person that caused it.  But you can’t.  Because the people you are angry at are already dealing with their own pain, their own issues and your anger at them just increases what they are feeling so it pings back. 

In the end it gives black males more power than they deserve.  Screaming at someone to love you, to pay attention to you, to respect you doesn’t give you the desired result.  Actually, it brings about the opposite.  The person you feel negativity towards derives power from your emotions.  They know they don’t have to give you what you want but you will still be around anyway, even in an antagonistic form.  Because they know if you didn’t love them, you wouldn’t hate them so much.

I guess I won’t pack my mental bags and head north, but I’ll stack around and see what the next battle will be.  Hopefully its the one where a few more black females get a glimpse of themselves in full battlement and hate what they see.  They’ll join me on the sidelines and realize it takes up too much energy to hate when what they really want to bring into their realm is love.  And they will.  They will go out and find themselves someone, regardless of color, without using a datebook and bogging themselves down with the rules.  Once black women decide that there is no war, just choices they’ve been denying themselves all along the major battle will be won and both sides can sit at the table and draw up a peace treaty.  On the woman’s terms, of course.

But right now, that’s not the battle we’re in.  Right now is the battle of containment.  And with so few black female soldiers on the field and even less black males knowing they are in a war I don’t think we are going to win this one.

Missing: Jessie Davis

This just is not a good time for women.

Both of these cases, Stepha Henry and Jessie Davis, creeps me out.  I just hope for the best possible outcome in each of them but it looks bleak. 

And I definitely feel for her son.  I hope she comes back to him well and sound.