Blackness

Bitch is the New Black

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

I don’t believe bitch is the new Black any more than I believe that thirty is the new twenty. As our most recent racial shenanigans have reminded us, Black is still its same ol’ Black self. And anybody who engages in the same shamtastic behaviors at thirty as she did at twenty is just plain trifling. That said, I think y’all should check out Helena Andrews recently published memoir Bitch Is the New Black.

We know good and well that it ain’t easy out here on single Black women. And the Tyler Perryization of Black women’s lives has made it possible for the likes of Steve Harvey and every other jackleg Black relationship expert to capitalize on our story but us. Since Black women are always represented as loud, sassy, and inappropriate, our silence has been deafening. It’s high time that we get bell hooks with it, and start talking back. Helena Andrews has done that masterfully.

Hers is a delicious Black girl story, one that hits so many familiar notes that you are transported episodically to different moments of your own life to recall how you handled a similar situation—family conflicts between your mom, your grandmother and your aunties; your first cheating lover; a pregnancy scare; a ridiculously stressful and uninteresting first job; your first encounter with the domestic abuse of a loved one; your love affair with The Cosby Show. And yet, Helena Andrew’s story is also all her own—unique, self-contained, and filled with the kinds of idiosyncrasies that remind us we are not the same, no matter how many two-dimensional portraits of ourselves we encounter daily.

Here we learn what it is like to be a Black girl reared by a lesbian mother, in a family that associates same-sex love with pedophilia. We encounter a bohemian Black girlhood, one associated with movement, not because of poverty or military life, but because of her mother’s need for new surroundings. For the adult Helena, this translates to a life of literally walking the walk. She doesn’t drive and has no interest in learning, even after two muggings. And when she isn’t walking it out, homegirl Helena is talking it out, in classic Black woman fashion, with an endless string of refreshingly familiar girlfriends and colorful female characters.

The text is, of course, not without its hiccups. But then, neither is the path of a professional Black woman approaching thirty. There are moments when the transition from e-chat speak to text are choppy and disorienting. That’s a technical issue. There is, however, also the sense that while Andrews grew up with a lesbian mother, she wants us to be very clear that she’s as straight as they come, whatever that means. There are, thus, endless recourses to referring to the most mundane of things as being “so gay,” or as in a chapter called "Trannygate," referring to a transchick as “the she-man... name unnecessary.” Uh, not cool.

Andrews certainly didn’t need to get didactic with it, but her own childhood put her in a unique position to represent queer folk humanely and heterosexual dating in ways that might have avoided such strident heterosexism. That said, I know now in a very real way how much courage it takes to let others into your life—particularly among sisters who can sometimes be the worst critics among us—and so I refuse to be overly critical of this book. I don’t promise that you’ll like everything in it. You might even dislike the author, given her self-professed bitch tendencies. But what she has proved is that our stories matter—and if you don’t like hers, write your own.

This is a book for every Black woman who’s ever needed to read, hear, feel, breathe another sista’s story, a book for every girl who’s ever dealt with inappropriate sexual conversations from a mother who’s trying to be hip, an ex-dude with stalker tendencies, or a dead end relationship that kept you pinned down because the sex made your toes curl. And while Andrews has her admittedly bitch moments in this book, she does not shy away from admitting the vulnerability that informs those moments, or from brutal, gut-wrenching honesty in general, even when it means discussing the suicide of a close Black girlfriend in a culture where strongblackwomen just don’t do that.

When I heard about this book last Fall, its title caused me to approach it with the same skepticism with which I approach Tyler Perry movies. I didn’t need to have anyone else calling me a bitch just because I’m educated, especially not a sista. Unlike TP, however, this text does not disappoint. When you read Bitch Is the New Black, you will know that there’s another Black chick out there, who’s slogging through it, who’s working it out, perhaps very differently from you, but who ultimately gets it.

Written by: Crunk Feminist Collective, August 10th 2010

Kinky Gazpacho: Love, Life, and Spain

admin — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:00:00 +0000

By Lori L. Tharps

Atria Books

Lori Tharps’ Kinky Gazpacho does what memoirs do best: it brings us the author’s journey through her inner psychological life. The book spans Tharps’ kindergarten “Culture Day” in Milwaukee, Wisconsin through her present life as a freelance writer in Philadelphia. Even as a child Tharps feels “something in Spain is certain to change [her] life,” so when given the opportunity to live in the country through her college’s study abroad program, she takes it.

The book’s subtitle—Love, Life, and Spain—should have also included Blackness, as this is the experiential theme that strings the events discussed in the book together. When she arrives in Spain, Tharps is amazed at the lack of what she terms “political correctness.” She encounters stereotypical images of Africans used to sell products that are supposedly African in origin, like chocolate, or those that are simply dark in color, like soda. In one anecdote, Tharps recounts a group of school children that followed her singing a jingle for a cola she later learned to be visually represented with an African caricature.

Eventually, Tharps loses all political correctness of her own and begins a mission to discover the roots of xenophobia in Spain. She asks Spaniards she meets about the nation’s historical involvement in West African slavery. Despite the overwhelming insistence that Spain took no part in the slave trade, or that only rogue Spaniards were involved, Tharps uncovers a 200 year history of slavery in the country. Her eventual discoveries bring her a sense of peace with her identity as a Black woman in Spain.

While falling out of love with Spain, Tharps falls in love with a Spaniard with whom she begins a romance at the end of her time in the country. The couple must face the challenges of an interracial relationship—such as his grandmother’s refusal to acknowledge her when she visit’s his family’s home and her partner’s shameful admission to having enjoyed dressing up in blackface for festivals as a child—in addition to their physical separation when Tharps returns to the United States at the end of the study abroad program. This reality of this unlikely long-distance relationship is portrayed realistically: the couple breaks up, reunites, tries dating other people, and explores other escape routes created in relationships that privilege rational thought above emotional connection. The couple’s earnest commitment to negotiating their cultural differences through maintaining an ability to laugh at themselves and forgive each other’s flaws allows their relationship to triumph in the end, as the pair eventually gets married.

Tharps is at her best when writing about her emotional experiences. For example, she adroitly expresses her shock at her White high school classmates’ use of racial slurs when describing Black Americans, particularly as it’s done in such a casual, non-threatening manner: _"So," Mrs. Fletcher was saying, "instead of your uniforms you are all supposed to come to school dressed in the clothing of your ancestors. So if your family is German you can wear lederhosen or one of those cute dresses with the white pinafore." This being Milwaukee, the majority of my white classmates claimed German heritage and got it right away…I felt my cheeks burn. If they hadn't been brown, everyone would have noticed that they were red. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone, in case they noticed my discomfort or figured out my shame. My ancestors were slaves! I was the descendant of a group of people kept as chattel, who lived in shacks, worked themselves to death, and, if luck was on their side, fled up north with Harriet Tubman and disappeared. What was I supposed to do? Come to school dressed in rags with a handkerchief tied around my head? And food? Slaves didn't get to eat good food. Maybe my mom could bring in some table scraps for everyone to sample. I could feel my heart beating loudly in my chest and my skin went cold. How was I going to deal with this? And me being the only Black child in my class, my shame was my own. _Her prose falters only when she moves briefly into the realm of critical theory then returns to personal narrative without adequate explanation of how the theory she presents was borne out in her situation.

Kinky Gazpacho was a difficult book for me. I recognized early on that my standpoint was quite distant from Tharps’. I appreciated that she told her story in an intensely personal voice, but my inability to identify with many of her experiences made it challenging to connect with her story.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Thomas Murphy, September 26th 2009