Here We Go Again

As I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, eyeballs rolling over various headlines like, Top Ten Restaurants That Sell Pork Belly Flavored Pabst or whatever, I came across a piece of true journalistic - if it can even be called that- garbage.At first I was convinced it was some kind of joke- an Onion article or a Fox News blog post, but nay.

This shamelessly off-putting virtual punch to the throat was titled, “It Happened To Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes And I’m Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable With It.” However, the entire article is about this girl and her discomfort with herself in relation to a black woman who was taking the class for the first time. This person is a human being with the emotional capacity of a bag of bath salts. There have been some pretty great responses to that stinky heap of dinosaur dung, but I am going off topic to open up the discussion of how this nauseatingly self-indulgent experience made it onto a website that  "is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded – regardless of age, size, ability, location, occupation, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic status, relationship status, sexual preferences or lifestyle choices…“ blah blah blah. I think they forgot to add, at the expense of other women (of color). I would just like to know what the process these "pieces” go through before being birthed into the blogosphere to be read by unsuspecting individuals who carry a modicum of sense in their brain pouches and don’t want to read racist aha moments written by oblivious observers who will seemingly never understand the topics they feel the need to so efficiently debase and ruin with ignorance. I took a gander at XOjane, I think I may have poked around the site a few years ago, but there was obviously a reason I never looked back.

It’s more than upsetting that the anecdote was published on a site that is suppose to empower women, but thoroughly did the opposite, which is a continuous trend in feminist culture. As I’ve written before, there is a disconnect between women of color and our white counterparts. It’s inherently different to be a black woman than to be a white woman in society and when we can all embrace and understand this difference maybe we can find some common ground and move on with our agenda as women to better the world we live in where we all ride unicorns and shoot laser beams out of our nipples.

Regardless of how “uncomfortable” some white women may feel about accepting this harrowing reality, it would be soooo much easier to have discussions if everyone wasn’t walking on gd eggshells. The yoga woman as she’s so infamously referred to these days (2) who wrote this is so painfully unsympathetic to how this newcomer may have felt, possibly having a brand new experience with strangers, but instead makes herself the focus of this woman’s discomfort. Privilege doesn’t even begin to explain her warped notions. Granted, I could not make it through the whole thing in fear I would destroy everything around me, I cannot imagine there being any redeeming qualities of her incalculable callowness. All I can hope is that writing what she did made her a better woman for it. I hope that she took the time to read some of the well thought out comments and actually understood where they were coming from- a place of severe frustration with the status quo. 

Just... Don't.

I’m tired of black women being objectified even in satirical videos. I’m just tired of seeing black women gyrate because “they’re so good at it,” or because it adds an element of (exoticized) sexiness to a video. I’m tired of people being seen as too uptight, or unable to have a sense of humor because there is this very real ideal they don’t find comical.

I get it. This video what’s her face did is suppose to be making fun of all of the crap women go through in life. It’s suppose to be this retrospective on women in pop culture, but it just seems like time and time again black women are on the outskirts. They’re being represented but not in the same way other women are being portrayed in these grand commentaries on feminism. I’m just kind of over it. I don’t need a pop star telling me about feminism.

I don’t need anyone to continuously defend (never apologize- that would be ludicrous!) their, though stupidly oblivious, sordid decisions. I just want more people to read. Read a book on why these videos satirical or otherwise are incredibly offensive. Read a book about why certain cultures have evolved into what they are and that culture (EVERYONE’S CULTURE) is so much more than what society insists on showing through tiny little filters in the media. Read a book about race. Read a book about race-relations or talk to someone who is black who is willing to explain, why, yes, anger is an appropriate emotion to project when black culture is constantly misconstrued and perpetuated absurdly in flagrantly unbelievable ways. Nobody likes to talk about racism which is why I guess I find myself writing about it on multiple occasions. There needs to be an open dialogue. People should get irritated, bewildered, flustered, startled, alarmed, amazed, confused about racism. It’s a confusing thing considering it’s all a global social construct, but whew. That’s for a different time. Let me reiterate here how perturbed I am by the lack of open discourse not only about race, but race in feminism.

I went to this forum about a month ago, where a whole bunch of “lady bloggers” (some worked for The Hairpin and Jezebel among other feminist/women-focused websites) addressed all sorts of vapid questions about how they fund their sites and how they got to where they are today, but there were absolutely no questions about race and feminism. I won’t even bother to talk about how ridiculous the term “lady blogger” is- OMG *takes a breath* Ok. Then it was the audience’s turn to ask questions. When one lady at the end of the Q&A attempted to get the panel’s opinion about race in terms of the feminist perspective, the moderator simply didn’t get to it. She just ignored it. I was floored. That would have been the perfect setting to discuss issues with minorities in feminism, but even there, WITH MINORITIES ON THE PANEL, no one wanted to talk about it. Mind-blowing. Sometimes, I just don’t care know about society…