Thank You, Lynn!
Lynn, I saw this comment you made over at Faith’s blog. You said:
Here's a few thought towards these chicks who have been reading these blogs for years, yet are constantly going around the blogosphere bleating about the evils of BWE:
Some of those 'empowerment' ladies are constantly berating BWE, yet using a lot of those beauty tips Khadija would post on Fridays
Some of those ladies are over there, purchasing and using Evia's vetting series, not to mention the free advice she gives liberally, and still berating BWE.
Some of them have read Faith's inspirational quotations, using them as a guide in real life, and guess what! Still berating BWE.
I bet just about everyone of these so called "I have concern for the next generation" chicks has tried one of Faith's healthy recipes, using cinnamon to counteract high blood pressure, bought the book joynousnerd has to grow their hair, tried P90X after Khadija blogged about it, utilized one or more of the dating websites linked to BWE websites, and/or developed additional streams of income....all the while insisting BWE is all about “worshipping white men!”
Some of those ladies use the new vocabulary Halima has thoughtfully and accurately supplied (hellooo, virulent racio-misogny, anyone), when describing bw/bgs unique stituation, and yep; still berating BWE. (Thank you so much Halima for one the crowning achievements of BWE!)
Some of them are commenting on Sarah's latest posting about lewd actions of young bgs and how they are not being trained to do better,.....and still berating BWE.
Some of them are busy getting a free education by utilizing the free educational internet links and courses, the free motivational links and courses, links to little known, uplifting entertainment by going to non mainstream media forums depicting bw in a healthy way, everything 'old skool' BWE has provided so generously to any bw with the gumption to use it!.…...and still berating BWE!
They will insist upon their dying breath they cannot get behind BWE. All the while benefitting in at least one area in their lives from the information! Poisoning the well for the next generation. Way to show concern for our daughters. Well, I'm insisting BWE is life-saving, life-enhancing, uplifting, and a true blessing for bw/bgs.
Lynn, I hear you. And I truly appreciate how you showed reciprocity by standing up in the middle of a hostile crowd at What About Our Daughters to support the movement that (overall) has supported you and other Black women. THANK YOU, and may God bless you.
Human Frailties, Mixed Motives And Victory For Those Few Who Dare
Please understand that the vast majority of African-Americans (AAs) are incapable of giving reciprocal support to any Black person or Black-led movement that supports them. It’s very similar to Black consumer dynamics. The vast majority of Black consumers are incapable of responding appropriately to any Black-owned business.
Here’s why: Because most AAs have deeply embedded slave programming on top of the everyday collection of human frailties shared by all humans. Most AAs have been successfully programmed to sabotage anything that could possibly enhance or save their lives. Most AAs will take any and everything and twist it around into something destructive. AAs take new ideas and superimpose their same old, dysfunctional thought patterns onto the new idea. In the end, the new idea become merely a new slogan that’s used to justify the same old dysfunctional behavior.
This is why AAs have turned every past solution into a new catastrophe. There are almost endless examples of this. We collectively did the “bait and switch” with many past solutions. We took desegregation and turned it into a pretext for engaging in a permanent, undeclared boycott against all Black-owned businesses (with the partial and dwindling exception of barbershops and hair salons).
We took the language of multiculturalism and turned it into a pretext for maintaining our racial self-hatred and internal colorism. And there’s usually a sophisticated and fundamentally dishonest discourse surrounding each “bait and switch” episode. All of this leads to sincere people being confused about these events, and about what’s driving these events.
So, instead of talking in code, I’ll try to say some things the plain way.
It’s good to be as compassionate as possible (without enabling self-destructive behaviors), and keep human frailties―including our own―in mind.
This post at What About Our Daughters served as a tacit invitation for everybody who’s ever had some type of personal grudge or gripe against various BWE bloggers (and some BF-IRR bloggers) to come and vent.
The post conflated several separate issues into one. Basically, the post did a “bait and switch.” It took legitimate objections that have been raised about opportunists trying to hijack the BWE social justice movement and used these objections as a pretext for encouraging African-American women to rally around “fat acceptance” ideology. Despite the growing numbers of African-American women who are dying early from obesity-related ailments.
The post also characterized desire for marriage as “mancatchin.” Despite the growing numbers of African-American children who suffer due to the lack of marriage and stable families among African-Americans.
I’ll note that on a practical level, it’s even harder to lose weight (by several orders of magnitude) when you remain tethered to the same people, places and practices that led to your weight gain in the first place! It’s very difficult to move forward on any level while carrying a rotting corpse. It’s very difficult to dance while handcuffed to a rotting corpse. What is commonly referred to as the African-American community is a dead and rotting corpse. It’s been dead for a long while. The vast majority of the inhabitants are dead or dying. They have tunnel vision, and can’t see or envision anything other than the death that has become normalized among them.
Here's an example of what I mean by tunnel vision. In a comment to this post, I strongly suggested that―for their own physical safety―African-American women stay away from public gatherings where there are large numbers of African-American males. Much of the blogger’s reply centered around “…I’m not becoming a recluse subject to the whims of these ignorant predators…”
As if becoming a recluse is the only alternative to attending AA gatherings where one is subject to enhanced risk of being assaulted. As if there’s nobody else on this planet or in this country for African-American women to socialize with other than AA males.
This is a good example of the points of disagreement I’ve had at times with the advocacy at WAOD. Any advocacy that does not actively support African-American women fleeing the dead Black community is a literal dead end for Black women. Because at the end of the day, that type of advocacy leaves Black women and girls remaining among the same people, places and practices that are destroying them.
If you want to make progress, you almost always have to let go of the people, places and practices that held you back in the first place. So, yeah, I would expect it to be very, very . . . VERY hard for any given Black woman to lose weight while she’s living among, going around, and socializing with AAs who subject her (and other Black women) to a never-ending stream of denigration and downright physical danger.
Many folks with long-term, pre-existing gripes used the comment section to that recent WAOD post to vent their gripes. Some of them were readers who had fallen out with various bloggers because they were unable to get the bloggers to change their positions.
One blogger who commented has a multiple-year grudge against Evia. I don’t know how it started; but it’s been going on for years. You can never really tell looking in from the outside. But it appears to me that whenever there’s an opportunity to take a swipe at Evia or anything that’s been discussed on Evia’s blog, she often takes it. It appears to me that her criticism of BWE and BF-IRR blogs is sincere, legitimate criticism mixed with this long-standing grudge against Evia in particular.
Another (now retired) blogger who years back had written an absolutely brilliant series of essays about political strategy took the “bait” dangled by this post. She wasn’t able to resist the temptation of doing something that undermines the long-term interests of the Black women and girls she clearly cares about. She chose to publicly vent the disappointment she apparently felt when private discussions showed her that various BWE bloggers have human frailties. Human frailties in BWE bloggers. Imagine that! {smile}
There were women who took the opportunity to vent their gripes from years ago about “The Mammy Chronicles” (TMC) conversations that were held at Evia’s blog. It was so long ago that I don’t remember the exact details of this incident. Here’s what I do (vaguely) recall. Years ago, an extremely witty and talented commenter at Evia’s blog submitted a series of comments (or were they guest posts? I don’t recall) called “The Mammy Chronicles.”
From what I recall, TMC was a biting satire. Satire that highlighted the contrasting fictional experiences of an overweight, self-sacrificing and totally indoctrinated AA woman versus a slim, self-actualizing AA woman.
Oh, many AA women were outraged at the time. And, by God, they’re still angry to this day about TMC. If I gambled, I’d be willing to bet money that many of these same Black women who are still outraged about TMC have no problem with spending their money to see Tyler Perry’s Madea flicks.
Because very little of AA women’s outrage is based on principles they apply across the board. Instead, most AA women’s outrage is based on how any given stimuli intersect with their comfort zones and (often dysfunctional) coping mechanisms.
Ahh, . . . human frailties. We all have them. I’m often reminded of Sting’s song “Fragile:”
If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime's argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are
On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are
On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are
How fragile we are how fragile we are
Indeed.
Rejoice To Be Among The Living!
The behavior pattern Lynn described in her comment goes way back among AAs. There’s nothing new or even unexpected about that particular equation.
Slave Programming + AA Female Self-Sacrificing Indoctrination + Normal Human Frailties = Anti-BWE Backbiting Behaviors
At this point in time, there’s also nothing new about the obesity-related, premature health problems and death among the masses of African-American women. This has become normalized over the past 25 or so years.
What IS new is the success of the BWE social justice movement. Before BWE, AAs were on track to have nothing but casualties among AA girls and women. A lot of you thought I was exaggerating when I spoke of AAs falling into the abyss and becoming a permanent underclass. A lot of you thought I was exaggerating when I said most AAs are already dead for all practical purposes.
I hope this little episode has lifted the scales from your eyes. It’s not just the AA underclass that’s dying and dead. The AA middle class (which is transitioning back into poverty) is also dying and dead. The educated AA class is also dying and dead. This includes AA professionals. You see this in how many of them use their advanced educations to come up with sophisticated slogans in support of Suicide By Food. So, one might ask, “What about our daughters?” They’re mostly dying and dead.
The AA women that some of you thought were alive and thriving (because they went to grad school, or are articulate, or go to church, or scrounged up a non-supportive, inadequate Negro to marry) are also dead. The “good girl” daughters these dead women are raising are also dead. When you scratch the surface of these church/mosque-going, studious young ladies’ mindsets, you discover that they’re also dead. The support these women and girls give to R. Kelly, Chris Brown, Steve Harvey, Tyler Perry, and so on lets you know that they’re dead.
Many of the AA women that some of you assumed were alive because they married nonblack men are also dead. The support some of these women gave to erasing Black women from their own history via Red Tails lets you know that they’re dead. In short, the vast majority of AA women and girls are casualties. They’re dead.
These women are dead because tinkering around the edges of the Black community’s racio-misogyny is insufficient. Tinkering is not enough. Trying to reform the dead Black community by cyber-protesting each notorious instance of anti-Black woman hate speech is insufficient. Reform is not enough. Mindlessly repeating BWE terminology without internalizing BWE values is insufficient. Slogans are not enough.
If you’re not willing to undertake a complete transformation of harmful personal traits, then you’re not going to thrive. In this era, you probably won’t even survive to live (what used to be) a normal life span. The odds are that you’ll join the high blood pressure/dialysis/insulin/cholesterol medication crowd, and fast track your way into the afterlife.
Transformation is never easy. It’s often quite painful. But the rewards for those who dare to reach for it are significant. Personal transformation increases your odds of being among the handful of AA women who are not only surviving to live a normal life span, but are thriving.
BWE has been able to significantly increase the number of surviving and thriving AA women (or “sojourners” as I call them). BWE has increased the numbers of Sojourners by popularizing some life-enhancing and life-saving ideas for AA women. I talked about this at length during my final post at Sojourner’s Passport. For here, I’ll mention an abbreviated version of an Overton Window:
Unthinkable → Radical → Acceptable → Sensible → Popular
Just think about all the various self-actualizing ideas for Black women the BWE movement has pushed along this path. In just a few short years, the life-saving ideas promoted by BWE have gone from being perceived as unthinkable. . .
. . . to being seen as acceptable . . .
. . . to being seen as sensible . . . and some are even becoming popular among many so-called “mainstream” African-American women.
Considering how deeply entrenched the slave programming and assorted other indoctrination is, BWE’s victory is truly a miracle. All praise is due to God!
