Are you f-ing kidding? Reebok EasyTone commercial

Beware Young Girl.

This broke my heart…  how many Sara’s will we lose to the sexualization and objectification of women?

In response to the constant objectification of women, the recent gang rape of a 15 year old girl in Richmond, CA, the unjust incarceration of Sara Kruzan and even the highly publicized violence faced by Rihanna, conscientious rapper and activist Jasiri X has put out a track that discusses the injustice and inhumanity of these crimes.

you can find the lyrics at Beware Young Girl. – Feministing.

Disney Racefail

Sometimes, I just don’t know what to say. The next time disney pulls something from the vault and releases it as “remastered” I’m going to have some questions!

crossposted from Sociological Images

For more posts on Disney princesses, look here, here, here, here, and here.  Two other great posts include this rejection letter (”we don’t hire women”) and this post on the original inclusion of black slaves in Fantasia.

[Love Isn't Enough editor's note: Note, too, that but for Jazmin, who is kind of brownish, Disney's princesses hold fast to a European-influenced beauty hierarchy.]

Hat tip to Jezebel for alerting me to this post. Also on Jezebel, see what one woman is doing to make Barbies more diverse. It’s awesome! I’ve never wanted a Barbie before, but now…

Genevieve wrote:

When I was in high school, I did a report on Race and Gender in Disney for History Day. The report itself was weak (I was 14 years old), and I still have a soft spot for Disney, since I was raised with it and their movies are visually masterful, but this post reaffirms what I was trying to get across to the judges: that Disney does promote messages that are actively harmful, and whether or not that’s deliberate, they have a responsibility as providers of entertainment for children to be responsible in the messages being sent. Then that got into a whole capitalism-responsibility debate (if you don’t like it, don’t watch, etc.), plus the fact that my topic was considered a bit unsavory, I think.

Some major things that I really felt strongly on were the rewriting of Pocahontas’s history (REAL PERSON) and the Mulan story (Here: Mulan was a SUPER-PATRIOTIC lady who served in the army for her family since her brothers were too young, and in the end, astonished her comrades by revealing she was a woman, since they never would have guessed. Vs. Disney’s Mulan who goes into and stays in the army for her father, falls in love with her commander, and, when revealed, uses, you guessed it, her sexuality, this time socially conditioned sexuality, to save… a man. Although apparently, there was a Chinese TV show that used the romance theme as a gag when Mulan’s general has to confront his “homosexuality.”). Oh, and Fantasia, of course, but no one ever believes me on that until they see the video for themselves.

“Beauty and the Beast” tends to break the mold (despite Belle’s lack of a mother, her motherish “fairy godmother” Mrs. Potts, and the clownish “gag fat woman” dresser/chiffarobe/thing). HOWEVER, this is due to the outright theft of the “Belle as bookish” motif from the novel “Beauty” by Robin McKinley (published fully 23 years before the 1991 movie release)– the library gift in particular is almost word-for-word what ended up in the film– in response to protest over “The Little Mermaid,” plus the theft of the Gaston archetype (and other visuals) from Cocteau’s film “Beauty and the Beast.”

Esmerelda, oddly, is not included as a Disney Princess at all, despite Mulan’s inclusion, and she’s not a princess, either. I think it’s because Esmerelda is seen as too sexual to be a role model, honestly. Then again, I remember my main impressions of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” being that Esmerelda was gorgeous, and that Frollo was waaaaaay too creepy for me to begin to be comfortable with. Speaking of sex, Tinkerbell is heading the “Disney Fairies” line, which is nice, especially with the introduction of POC as other fairies; but she was originally introduced in Peter Pan (which is like a black hole of women- and race-related issues, seriously) as petty, vain, and sexualized, but who eventually redeems herself. I understand Hugo didn’t help by killing Esmerelda off in the source material, but as I recall, Tinkerbell dies in the Peter Pan book, as well. I guess you can sanitize the sex out of a white character, but not out of a brown one?

I’m concerned about “The Princess and the Frog,” because at first I was hoping Disney was just feeding off of HBO Family’s “Fairy Tales for Every Child,” but she still appears to be a traditionally “European” princess as far as dress and hairstyling go. Her turning into a frog for most of the movie is also an issue for me, but I was more stunned by the giant, fat, bipedal gator (a la All Dogs Go To Heaven) in the trailer to really analyze the “ethnically ambiguous” prince. Despite how happy I am we’re finally, officially getting a black princess, I would watch it by myself before I took anybody’s kid to see it.

Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 4:50 pm ¶

via Disney Princesses, Deconstructed | Love Isnt Enough – on raising a family in a colorstruck world.

all inner city kids need is a nice white lady

I know I said I wasn’t going to post anymore stand alone videos as a blog entry, but I just had to throw this one up last night when previews of The Blind Side were getting on my nerves. The Nice White Lady Movies are getting a little old for me. I knew better than to start an actual rant at 1AM, and I thought I’d saved this as a draft but I guess not!

H/T to {RAGE against the MINIVAN} for the video.. I remembered seeing it a few days ago and of course I think of it every time the preview comes on. So I went to hunt it down and saw Kristen had since written about the movie from a transracial adoption perspective in the feel-good adoption movie I don’t want to see

The first thing I noticed when I watched the preview was that, with the exception of the main character, every black person in the movie is bad, and every white person in the movie is good. We see a female black relative who appears to be an addict, several thugs who threaten the mom, and even a sassy black social worker who further plays into stereotypes. Then, on the Great White Hope side, we see sacrificial parents, concerned friends, loving coaches, and encouraging tutors. The subtle message: if we can just get some of these kids away from BLACK PEOPLE, then they might have a chance.

Walking the (color)Line

WARNING – Racial Smog Ahead

Proceed with caution. If you have a low tolerance for white guilt (stage whisper: that’s code for, if you’re black) or tend to have defensive reactions during conversations about white privilege (stage whisper: that’s code for, if you’re white), I recommend some form of psychiatric medication or perhaps even the liberal use of recreational drugs before proceeding.

Know your limits. Step out of the sweat lodge as frequently as necessary.

How did I not know about this?

I could have used this last week after I asked a coworker what made the guy that schooled him on the courts the night before “look like he knew basketball”…

you know he went there.

AngryBlackBitch: On that ig’nant as hell Louisiana judge or why I need a lifetime supply of Excedrin Racial Tension Headache meds….

via how could I not know about this?.

Video Vixens, Hip Hop Honeys & Ghetto Booties: dear white folks

This is an open letter to my people… particularly white women.

Do you know Saartjie, birth name unknown?

Perhaps you know her by her slave name, Sara Baartman?

Maybe you know her by her freak show name, Hottentot Venus?

Every white woman should know Saartjie’s name too.

 

You may ask why in the world I think this has anything to do with you… maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But some of us are the mothers of Hip Hop’s White Audience, which is largely young white men & teenagers.  Some of us are mothers of young men and women of color.

When our children buy this music, when we allow them to watch these videos, and when we fail to talk to our children about sexual exploitation of women, particularly women of color, we are part of the problem.

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ~ George Santaya
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, page 284

What Tami Said: Please remember Sara.

via What Tami Said: Please remember Sara.

Project Implicit® – subconcious reflections on race

So I just took two Harvard Implicit Associations Tests.

It is well known that people don’t always ’speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

Skin-tone (‘Light Skin – Dark Skin’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to recognize light and dark-skinned faces. It often reveals an automatic preference for light-skin relative to dark-skin.

Race (‘Black – White’ IAT). This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of European and African origin. It indicates that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.

 I doubt my first result will surprise anyone who knows me.

Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Dark Skin and Light Skin.

I’ll be blogging more about my second result.

Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for African American compared to European American.

 Project Implicit® – Select a Test.

via Project Implicit® – Select a Test.

Racial Meme Suddenly Infuses Discussions of President’s Enemies

 The media are belatedly acknowledging a racial subtext to many anti-Obama protests, thanks to what one scholar calls the ‘drip’ factor.

 As anti-Obama protests escalated over the past six months, race largely remained an unspoken subtext in media coverage — “the elephant in the room,” in the words of NBC News’ Mark Murray. But in recent days, many prominent members of the press have begun pointing at the pachyderm.

via Racial Meme Suddenly Infuses Discussions of President’s Enemies.

my daughter confronts the N-Word… with love

I wrote a blog a couple years ago about the controversy surrounding the Don Imus fiasco, where he referred to a championship basketball team of women as Nappy Headed Hos… which led to a conversation with my children about the words ho and nigger, among others. In this entry I titled Don’t call me out of name, a phrase which comes from street vernacular and means don’t label me something I’m not, I struggled with a heavy subject… how could I give my children not only the tools, but also the strength to take a stand for themselves against the lure of the n-word in peer situations. While it’s probably unlikely my kids would feel pressure to use the word themselves, I wanted to empower them to “be the change” and influence others in a positive manner to not only discourage others from using the n-word to address them, but to also reconsider their use of the word, period.

I realize that’s a mighty tall order… and from a white girl at that. Like black folks haven’t been trying to discourage their kids from the use of the word for more years than I’ve been alive. And I can get up on my soapbox with other white folks and let them have it over the n-word… cuz to paraphrase a handful of white folks who are way smarter than me… racism is a white problem. We created it, we benefit from it… we need to address it within ourselves, our families, and our communities. And I feel pretty confident in teaching my children not to tolerate for one second a white person calling them by that pejorative. But I really struggled with how to guide my brown-skinned children through the minefield of the n-word when it’s used a so called endearment or as a sign of solidarity. I’m not naive enough to think that being called a nigger lover gives me any kind of authority on what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the n-word, whether from the mouth of a white or black person… and while I know that anyone who lived through the civil rights movement and the first generation after would be hard pressed to justify or tolerate it’s use, but I guess part of me did figure that it was somehow less painful for the younger generation to hear, that whether they used it themselves or not, they were desensitized to the vulgarity of the word due to the prevalence of it’s use in music and media. I was very much mistaken in this assumption, and exactly how deeply wrong I was became very clear to me last year as my daughter first encountered the complexity of social cliques… part of the shrapnel I mention in that post was one girl’s foul mouth, including her use of the word “nigga.”