African-American Print, White Owners

I just spoke to a vendor of the Essence Music Festival and she said how difficult it has become over the years since Essence Communications Inc. contracted Rehage Entertainment to run the festival.

She explained that previous coordinators worked with grassroots and unknown visual and performing artists, fashion designers, jewelry makers and other afro-chic vendors, especially from Louisiana, but after Hurricane Katrina things have changed.

Rehage has removed previous workers and policies to implement ones that are silently eliminating those artists who have created the very fabric of the Essence Music Festival.

Also, this means that Rehage is a significant stock holder in this event and they'd be damned to let anyone mess up their money. If anyone knows you can make a lot off of black talent, it would be Rehage.

Rehage Entertainment is known to host its very Caucasian, "Voodoo Experience." It is annual event that brings white rock bands and diluted pop artists to NOLA to bastardized and commercialize black spiritual culture.

Essence Music Festival is just one example of black media, hell black arts only having a blackface.

You ever wondered how black festivals either get coopted or they go under? There are many reasons, but some of the main ones are around sponsorship, in-fighting, and commerciability.

The bigger festival coordinators want to grow, the more money is needed, therefore making festivals solicit to big corporate dollars such as Coca-Cola or Chase Manhattan Bank that put hugre and compromising clauses in their sponsorship contracts. For example, it is known that beverage companies emphasize that only their drink can be sold by venords.

In-fighting is another downfall. The egos and the greed by formerly well-meaning and conscious festival coordinators is an often implosion to events.

As well, festivals face the inevitable of being more "appealing" or "universal" to audiences to expand its traffice, and their goes the neighborhood. Soon you'll see more outsiders attending the event than locals and performers will feel more like Saarjtie Baartman (aka Hottentot Venus) standing naked in a Parisian square than an expressive soul.

This leads to my overall point, African-American print media now has white owners. Hence, Essence magazine that was bought by Time Inc. several years ago.

It is also well-known that Robert Johnson sold Black Entertainment Television to Viacom. I am not surprised by this because I was at a conference years ago when BET attempted to release a soft-porn station and Johnson was asked by a black reporter why the station continued to devolve in its programing. He blasted back with a comment I will paraphrase saying that what he did was entertainment and did not have to tackle serious issues because it was not what BET was about.

The once famous, The Source hip hop magazine has changed hands several times with its current owner, John Lewis Partnership out of the UK. As well, the fleeting, XXL and now defunct King is owned by Harris Publications.

The comatose Vibe was recently rebought by Quincy Jones, the former founder.

In September, Newsweek reported that Johnson Publishing's Company CEO, Linda Rice has been attempting to woo Time Inc. and Viacom to buy Ebony.

The only black-owned magazine that is still standing is Black Enterprise owned by Earl S. Graves Publishing Company, so they say.

I point to these print publications because most of these were trailblazers in black global media, spearheading issues and images you would never see. Now they are commodified parts of black culture in America that many think is still black owned. Moreso, the weak and diluted stories they've been covering for the last 20 years have compromised the voices of blacks in America completely.

This is where the discussion of political change versus economic change comes into play. Print magaiznes such as the Source or Jet had political positioning, but lacked basic economic foundations to be rooted media like the Washington Post.

Ironically, Oprah Winfrey who is still standing and dominating, used her positionality as a mammy for desperate housewives and white middleclass to do more in black communities across the globe fiscally (as well as finance her own tour to support President Obama) than all of these newspapers combined. Basically, her business moves are not only genius, but technologically savvy, though I heard her personality is extremely ugly.

So next time you save money to go stunting at the Essence Music Festival and you are at the Superdome trying to find your husband or look cute, please keep in mind you ARE NOT recycling black dollars.

Images and the Face of Female Labor

With the recent uproar regarding Google's Images and First Lady Michelle Obama, I decided to do a little query of my own.

I have been thinking about labor for the last several months. I've been trying to put into words how I can convey this notion of us re-thinking the value of our physical, intellectual, emotional, and cultural labor---especially with the Internet utilizing all four and making ka-zillions.

I Googled "labor" in the images section and the second image was the famous poster you see in the beginning of the blog called "Roise the Riveter." This symbol was conntected to white women's labor movement during WWII.

I say white women's labor movement because women of color in the US have always worked.
This iconic image challenged traditional notions of femaleness in the United States and represented women's support of war efforts by working in places males usually occupied up until the war.

Hmmm, I thought, this is interesting. One, because the poster says, "Honor Labor;" two, because there has existed a female labor force waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy before this photo.

Since America's inception, women of color have labored their whole lives, in non-traditional ways, as well as "traditional." And much of our labor is not even close to being honored, or even recognized.

Women in my family were known to be very muscular because of the physical labor endured when picking cotton, cutting sugar cane, or using a mule for the plow their whole lives crafted biceps that would make today's bodybuilder sick with envy.

These women were not much of women in the eyes of mainstream America, but workers who looked far from pale daintiness.

Women in my family also have various stress-related illnesses with dealing with careers that undermine their intelligence, or neglect their very presence.

And when they are recognized, it is a bitter struggle where they are the anomaly, who becomes the face of success.

She is broadcasted and becomes why institutionalized sexism and racism validates that Forutne 500 companies are indeed diverse thus the lack of color is the lack of savvy, leadership and brillance. This woman looks like this...
And even though women of color range in labor within the labor force, it is all too familiar that a woman in labor looks like this...but isn't new life supposed to be beautiful?

My Unthanksgivings List

When I was a staff writer for a print publication, my editor and I had stark ideological differences during our Thanksgiving issue.

Though we both agreed on the history of Thanksgiving and all the falsities and historical amnesia it encouraged, she chose to write a commentary about the things she was thankful. I, on the other hand, wrote about the hypocrisies.

She would often say to me that we must be grateful for the blessings that some people have. I would tell her that I totally agree, but why must we do it on this day, a day that gives energy to the same oppressive forces that keep us in the same miserable conditions.

Furthermore, why must we give "thanks" for being less miserable, and less fucked-up than the other person when in fact, that person's misery is our misery in some way or the other. We are not these disconnected people. Though we are disjointed in our actions and thinking, we are still linked, so in the end, we either reap each other's joy, or pay dearly for our sorrow.

So in truth fashion, I continue with my annual Un-Thanksgiving’s List for several reasons:

Firstly, few people recognize how the United States operates more like a slave camp than a united nation that celebrates the richness of its people and attends to its needs.

Secondly, holiday (holy days) fit the political, economic, and cultural agenda of the agenda setters and not the masses; we pay for overpriced food, alcohol, gas, and airline tickets to refill the coffers of those that exploit us.

Thirdly, instead of people resting, many right now are seeking double-time pay to make up for the mountain of bills in trying to the live the American dream.

Lastly, in my conscience, I can never forget the domestic genocide that occurred in the present-day Americas regarding the indigenous folk of this land.

EcoSoulintellectual’s
Un-Thanksgiving’s List

(Gobble Gobble on this)

1. I am Un-grateful for the current umployment rate for black/African-Americans that is 15.7%, the highest compared to Latinos who are in a close second at 13.1%, whites at 9.5% and Asians at 7.5% (October 2009 reports from the US Department of Labor, Burueau of Labor Statistics).

2. I am Un-grateful for people telling me that I need to be happy that I am working, although I have several degrees and am still underemployed, uninsured, and overworked.

3. I am Un-grateful for the atrociously high levels of homeless women and familes, mentally ill, and disproportionately increased percentage of black Veterans.

4. I am Un-grateful for professional, collegiate, and high school teams that still use racist Native American caricatures as their mascots and blatantly justify their actions as being a "tradition" at their institution.

5. I am Un-grateful for the 18th Century images of Native Americans in feathers, in face paint, and on horses as the current visual idea of how Native Americans look as if they are extinct.

6. I am Un-grateful for the 1.5 million Native Americans who live on reservations and are dealing with serious issues of survival.

7. I am Un-grateful for the ignorant and xenophobic Native Americans who deny the progeny of Native and African American peoples a rightful place in their nations and their histories.

8. I am Un-grateful for African-Americans who are more comfortable with saying they are Cherokee before they say they come from African bloodlines.

9. I am Un-grateful for a black President who is surveillanced by audacious white privilege and a white power structure that situates him as being a powerless figure-head who must apologize for being black, and apologize for the black people who challenge his supervisors.

10. I am Un-grateful for greedy corporations such as airline carriers that are getting away with bloody financial murder and creating a divide between who is able to travel and who is not worthy enough to see their family.

11. I am Un-grateful for a body of black people who think Obama can "change" America with his two hands, and just hold side conversations during lunch hour at "prestigious" jobs to educate their white co-workers. Only to have never done a goddamn thing in communities of color because they are so preoccupied living the dream by going to work, the club, church, the frivolous sporting events of their children, or a nice Negro Kwanzaa.

12. I am Un-grateful for prosperity churches that are the neo-pimps of religion and are led by hypocrite pastors who literally wear the tithes of poor people and pseudo-middle class on their backs with $5,000 tailor-made outfits.

13. I am Un-grateful for prosperity churches and missionaries leaking religious toxicity in Africa, and all black and brown nations all over the world. Then in America claim they are saving souls, much like former slavers and colonizers.

14. I am Un-grateful for this only day that allows a significant chunk of people to eat with their families, especially working class folk in which this "holy-day" represents their ancestors' and thus their enslavement, colonialization, demonizing indigenous spiritual systems, family disruption in homelands, dismantling of culture and worshipping of slave masters.

15. I am Un-grateful for a spineless United Nations that does not stand up to power-hogs such as America, but agrees to bully countries that have less military amunition.

16. I am Un-grateful for the blatant move of using war and domestic surveillance as a means to create jobs instead of building infrastructure in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and Oakland, and the rural areas, and neglected areas of Mississippi that have not been rebuilt since Hurricane Katrina.

17. I am Un-grateful for a dual-political party system that uses communities of color during tight elections, but forget about them for the rest of the terms.

18. I am Un-grateful for the colorism that still exists throughout all oppressed communities in which bi-racial children and white populations have set the standard of beauty based on the lightness or whiteness of one's skin, and in some cases, the texture of one's hair.

19. I am Un-grateful for over half a million children in the foster-care system who wish they had better circumstances, especially during the holidays.

20. I am Un-grateful for voice enhancer machines such as Autares (autotune) and Vocopro.

21. I am Un-grateful for America projecting its domestic violence issue on Rihanna and Chris Brown.

22. I am Un-grateful for some members of the LGBT community blaming the African-American community as being one of the main reasons for its political set back in California; and attempting to make the black community the face of homophobia while disregarding the intrinsic sexuality issues throughout this country's history.

23. I am Un-grateful for the perception of mainstream America that three or more black people on a television series makes it a "black show."

24. I am Un-grateful for the constructed divides between race and ethnicities across the lines, but especially within black and brown communities that often perpetuate these divisions.

25. I am Un-grateful for an economic system that uses paper currency as a way to weight one's labor worth, when the labor itself holds far more weight than a paper bill. Only for this currency to be justified by people who will bend and fold for a dollar.

26. I am Un-grateful to the financial architects of a disastrous economy who are eating very well today, and sleeping good tonight, while those who are gravely affected are worried about the next meal and where they will sleep tonight.

27. I am Un-grateful for an old corroded stock exchange system that is on its last breath, yet the news lies about the DOW and Nasdaq's current status. These news entities are not owning up to the fact that many nations and individuals are leaving these forms of exchange for older and more efficient ones such as bartering actually resources and labor.

28. I am Un-grateful for a climate that makes people fear, harshly criticize, and avoid not admitting that being clear about what we do not like or are ungrateful is some type of moral sin.

29. I am Un-grateful for the unhealthy food we are about to eat.

BTW, thanks for reading this post :-)...my cornbread is cooked ready to serve to some people who need to eat.

Invisible Lives of Caribbean Nannies

On any given Sunday in Central Park, upscale Washington D.C. parks, or in the parking lots of frou-frou stores in Livingston, NJ you become aware that many upper class white women do not raise their children.

Often times, it is a Caribbean woman who must take care of other peoples' children six or seven days out of the week, while leaving her children behind or at home to be cared for by extended family.

Caribbean nannies are invisible women that have replaced African-American domestics. There are of course Latinas, especially from Mexico and Central America, but it seems to be something about a black nanny that soothes childhood memories of the rich, white soul.

These diligent women cannot be forgotten. It was one from Guyana who blessed me one day when I was on the train job-hunting in West Orange. She sat next to me and we began to talk about our lives. She told me that she worked 5-6 days a week in West Orange. Usually, she went home to Queens on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings. She told me she did this to put her children through school.

When I told her I was in school for my PhD, she beamed in pride and began to whisper, "You know it is hard for us." She rubbed the skin on the back of her hand signaling her blackness and mine as well. I smiled and said, "Yes ma'am, you are right. It is very hard."

She asked me where I was going. I told her I was reluctantly going back to Newark. I was trying to follow-up on a job and spent my last money taking the train to trek down a professor at a conference. You see I really wanted to go to this conference at CUNY on Blackness (this was a year or so ago), but did not have the money.

Without thinking, she pulled out a $20 bill and told me to go to New York and keep the change. She gave me blessings and said if we never saw each other again, she prayed to the Lord that I finished. Now that was some deep love I need and wasn't expecting on a cold Northeastern day.

To me, this is one of the reasons why I persevere on the hardest days, because this doctoral thing is not just for me, but for the people's whose shoulders I stand.

When we got off of the train, I saw her gait had a little limp. Maybe arthritis, maybe years of picking up other peoples' kids and tending to the them when her back and hip did not permit.

I can never forget the Guyanese woman who helped me that day. It was on a Friday and she was coming from work and had given me some of her work money she just got from her "employer" who paid her in cash and under the table. That woman and all the women who clean stinky booties, scrub nasty floors, and go grocery shopping for people who pay them pennies, but have millions stashed, are the invisible we really need to see.

I thought of both of my grandmothers who were domestics in the South and the reality of the past hit me in the face. Where you had extended families of the South often rearing the children of family members, these Caribbean women may have limited support systems, or newly inducted kinship ties to make it through.

Rarely anyone addresses the high numbers of black Caribbean women tending to wealthy women's babies. A juxtaposed irony, one privileged white woman and one working-class black immigrant woman. One who exploits, but is ever so dependent on the emotional and physical labor of the very person that is exploited.

Especially in the celebrity world where women fashionably have technologically implanted embryos, show off baby bumps to paparazzi, only to dump them onto nannies who silently rear the children as if they are their own mammy.

Or you have the other scenario of the celebs who adopt babies from brown and black countries as if they are socially conscious accessories. They show these children off in public with hair sticking up all over the place. Then they have Little Azziz smile for the camera on the way to Kabbalah class without a clue that they are being pimped.

These celebs who poorly immitate the work of humanitarians like Josephine Baker who adopted twelve children from around the world in the 50s and 60s. After she worked as a spy helping the US and France in WWII where she received full French military honors upon her death, she reached further into herself and adopted. Furthermore, she used all of her money from years of performing in France and throughout the globe to rear her children.

An unwavering supporter of Civil Rights, Baker was asked by Coretta Scott King to take the place of her husband after he was assassinated. You see, in the midst of adopting babies, she helped desegregate Las Vegas, Miami and upscale New York restaurants, march on Washington DC, and fundraise for the NAACP. To Coretta's dismay, Baker declined stating she could not do it because she did not want her children to lose their mother at a young age.

Another thing, Josephine Baker was sensitive to orphan children because her own mother, Carrie, who eventually helped her daughter rear the children until she died, was adopted in Arkansas in the late 1800s by a recently Emancipated couple.

Baker herself knew what it was like to be claimed by someone who was not kin. Her mother mysteriously got pregnant with Josephine while she was a domestic for a German family in the South. A local musician named Eddie Carson, accepted the responsiblity (well, he claimed her).

Unfortunately, Baker spent all her fortunes rearing her children (her white American husand left her because she wanted more) and ended up homeless. She was kicked out of her chataeu in France and onto the street, living similar to a bag lady. Actress-turned-princess consort, Grace Kelly, offered her a home in another part of Europe. Kelly befriended Baker years back when Baker was refused service in a New York socialite supperclub.

Baker, a woman deemed as the most beautiful by Poet Hemmingway, was innately pristine---to the point that she gave her last dime to her children. Something Madonna or Angelina Jolie WOULD NOT.

Moreover, it was Baker's children that were reasons why she went back to performing. She needed to make money to support her household, although she was of failing health. She died after her first night being back on the stage.

When Black Ain't Beautiful - Skin Bleaching in Brown Communities Across the Globe

I recall my sister buying Ambi Fade Cream when we were in high school. She said it was for blemishes, I knew otherwise. She still hasn't shaken her esteem issues around her color and beauty.

This is not just an African-American issue, or a black issue, but a practice that is rampant across the globe. Lighter is beautiful in Western aesthetics.

When Sammy Sosa's photo revealed the dark brown Dominican's attempt to look like a ligher Latino, it open the flood gates of the worldwide bleaching phenomenon that has never been excluded to women.

However, I must mention, more women practice skin lightening because it is related to marriageability. (Click photo to hear an audio blog about Asian whitening)

What folk don't talk about is the pressure to be white is prominent in Asia. In ads throughout Japan, Korea, China and India, celebrities are used to promote how whiter skin leads to better partners and more success.

In Africa and the Caribbean it is heartbreaking. The phrases are similar, but the affects are harsher. The products shipped to these countries are riddled with chemicals that have burned through the skin, causing cancer, permanent skin damage.

If you ever see an African woman or Caribbean woman who has tons of make-up on, it might be due to the damage caused by lighteners. I saw that a lot in Africa.

But the off the counter products found in Africa are just a touch of what you see throughout Asia, America and Europe. Just a hint: Fair and Lovely is made by the parent company of Dove, you know the one that promotes that you be beautiful and content with who you are.

Who Sits Next to Black Men on Trains

I've been preparing for a class presentation and some of the readings involve perceptions of black men being unsavory, untrustworthy, confrontational, and deviant. Of course I know about these things. My father is a black man who talked about the daily frustrations regularly of these false images projected onto him.

However, sometimes I forget how salient those conversations were with my dad because I am very comfortable around black men. I guess that's why I never really pay attention to who sits next to one on the train or the bus.

Lately, I've been taking mental notes about who sits next to whom when riding the NJ Transit and the PATH rails into New York. Usually there is an empty seat reserved for the nothingness right next to a black man.

Like tonight, as I came from New York, the train was semi-crowded. There was one seat on my right that stood between myself and a brother. No one, and I mean absolutely no one took that seat.

What does this form of psychological racializing and assumptive behavior do to black men themselves and the people who consciously and unconsciously engage in the daily practices of dehumanization? And I am not absolved either.

For one, we miss out on social interactions that are priceless. Like the day I spoke to an older black man on the PATH train. It was a simple hello. This particular day the route we were taking became temporarily out-of-service as we stoo on the platform, so we had to reroute ourselves and go back up to 34th Street (New York's Penn Station) to catch another train into Newark.

The elder turned out to be a WWII Veteran who explained with detail and depth his experiences as a black soldier in Europe. It was better than Spike Lee's movie, Mircale at St. Anna's.

After we hooted and hollered about his experiences and his attempts to get proper Social Security at 80-plus years with a bum knee, he then told me how viciously segregated the New York and New Jersey trains were back in the 40s and 50s.

I wanted to tell him that in many ways, they still are.

As I think back to this older black man, it was a simple gesture that gave me access to historical gems from the lens of someone who is perceived as deviant.

I look back to that day. I now recognize that, that older man was as an extension of my father. Then I think about tonight as I ride the train, looking at the blue-collar, black man sit "alone" on a crowded train.

I ponder how my father or my significant other feels when people make it a point not to sit next to them. For this I cry.

We have created segragationist lines in our psyches and in our social stratum that cannot be erased by laws, but simply justify an inequitable system that bites us all in the ass.

FREE SARAH KRUZAN

When a Riverside teen named Sarah Kruzan was 16-years-old, she killed a thirty-something male who coerced her into prostitution, along with other girls. She was tried as an adult and convicted to life without parole. Today at 29-years-old, she is facing the reality of being imprisoned for defending herself against a sexual predator.

A self-professed overacheiver when she was in elementary and middle school, Kruzan talks about how a man called "G.G" roped her into sex trafficking at the age of 13; simply by taking she and her friends to the mall for roller skating. According to Kruzan, he was the father figure she lacked until she had sex with him, and then he became her pimp.



Cases like Sarah Kruzan, a young, African-American woman, are unfortunately not rare, especially in the state of California, where women, juveniles, the poor, and those from troubled backgrounds fill the penal system. These penal systems that are privately owned make money from several avenues. Firstly, they are subsidized by federal and state money. Secondly, the cheap labor that is produced garners these privately owned-corporate entities billion dollar profits.

Did you know that prisons are built in California by looking at the third grade reading scores? That is a helluva projection that definitely encourages populations of people to fuck up. And even when they do not, the "Justice" system will find a way.

Another issue that is hardly touched is the Juvenile Court System. It is structured where the Judge presides and decides the fate of children, no jury, and in many cases a disregard of their legal representation. Historically, complaints have been waged against juvenile judges who pass prison sentences to children in a trial that blatantly shows the defendant was not guilty, or at the very least, did not deserve jail time for a minor defense.

But leave it to Good Ole' America, the jails must be filled, so this country can continue to lead as the #1 industrial country that has the highest population of people in jails and prisons. Capitalism, gotta love it!

Furthermore, the US sex trade of teens, both girls and boys of all colors, ethnicities, and classes is a neglected issue that oozes out like an unattended infected social sore from the suburbs, to the rural areas and throughout urban regions.

Prison + America = Neo-Slavery FREE SARAH KRUZAN

11 Black Women Dead and Counting: There Goes the Neighborhood

(Photo of first victim found, Tonia Carmichael)

When a man who passes out bar-be-que (let's hope it was cow's meat), served in the US Marine Corps and has a pacemaker is arrested for raping, stranging and burying at least 11 black women in your neighborhood, do the neighbors question themselves?

There are reports of the residents often smelling the foul, decomposition of bodies, but somehow no one put two-and-two together.

Could it be perhaps that the missing were low on the social totem pole? Black women with "checkered" pasts, some in-and-out of jail. Others who had fractured family relationships.

What do I mean. A news outlet in Cleveland opened up its story about the first victim Tonia Carmichael with the the following leading sentence, "Tonia Carmichael often left her family for days at a time, searching Cleveland's streets for happiness."

So who in the world would even look for someone who is described as "often hanging" out on street corners rather than saying something like "she was a local socialite who knew many of the neighborhood residents." The way people and things are framed invites readers to dismiss a serial murderer who probably has done a lot more murdering than three black women.

What even gets more frustrating is that a woman named Tanja Doss reported a kidnapping and assault by the suspect Anthony Sowell in 2005 when he forced her to strip and started chocking her after they had a beer in his home. She said that she reported the incident, but police officials simply did not call her back.

Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly. Many disturbances in black communities are not addressed by law enforcement, especially when it comes to domestic issues, and complaints of abuse by men against women.

When it gets down to it, I question the level of elasticity in black neighborhoods that at one time were close-knit communities where everyone knew each other's business. Up to the point of who beat their wives, who drank too much, and who had a maybe baby with the pastor.

As a product of growing up in a black neighborhood, I know the power of communal rearing. And I have seen the effects of residents allowing the one fucked up family on the block to reak total havoc. Okay, maybe two or three families on my block post-crack epidemic in urban cities.

Frankly, in many neighborhoods in America, we have employed turning the other cheek to our detriment. Look at Jaycee Dugard's case.

Nevertheless, we have people allowing a drunken, young black woman wander the streets of Malibu! That one still gets me. And now, we have black women who have gone missing for months, are found out to be buried in their neighbor's backyards.

When Sleeping Giants Hybernate Again

Last night, the Democrats who thought they could ride the shortening coattails of our President were thrown off the quick train of political breezeways.

The low turnout of black voters, young voters, and a noticeable shift by independents bitch-slapped Democratic elected officials back into reality.

You gotta do much more than kiss Obama's ass and throw his name around to keep sleeping Giants somewhat amused or interested. Or perhaps you haven't noticed, people are still unemployed, losing jobs, out of cash, and miserable.

Democrats still have not learned that you actually have to back up your promises, and do the WORK to get votes.

The age of transparancy shows that the spines and talking points of the Blue Donkeys are weak and superficial.

On the other hand, the Republicans who have been relentless in their constant branding of failed governments, used their propaganda brawn to be ruthless and predictably calculating in fighting for more power.

All the while, people who look like me have been stepped over and disregarded since November 2008. Ahhh, the smell of political backlash is like a bold pot of coffee, strong, biting, invigorating; but will loosen up the bowels is drunken too much.

Now if I can get those in hybernation to dream up a new political party. Hmmmm, any suggestions?

While you're thinking I thought Soul II Soul's "Back to Life" was appropriate for this blog. Check out the lyrics Democrats and get your ish together.

Married Priest in the Catholic Church? MAKING the rules then BREAKING the rules

Raise your hand if you were traumatized by going to Catholic school. Do you see my hand? It is reaching about a mile high. Not only did I go to Catholic school, most of my formative years, but I was reared in the Catholic Church.

I bore witness to the Catholic Church’s hypocrisies firsthand. One of the “religious principles” that I always did not understand was the rule in which priests and nuns could not get married. It magnified as I got older and would look at these shriveled up white nuns, and agitated priests attempt to tell me about the Lord, with orgasms backed up from three decades ago.

I am sorry, that shit is not normal. It is not the oath of celibacy that is abnormal, but an order that imposes a law on a group of people that have notoriously defied it since the formation of Popes and Bishops who have historically been known to have lovers and children.

Now, after all these years of children being raped by priests and nuns; and scandalous love affairs that went on the rectory (or should I say rectal-ry) and convents, the Washington Post reports that Pope Benedict XVI makes an official announcement that they will allow Anglican priests to join the church as liturgical leaders, even if they are married.

Now come on people! This should be an outrage to Catholics who have banged their children over the head for many years out the piety of celibacy among priests and nuns. But like Marx says, “Religion is opium for the masses.”

If I was a priest or nun, I would run naked down the aisle on Sunday masturbating to a porn magazine asking, “After all these years I had to suppress my sexuality, these Anglicans can get their fuck on!?”

Overall, this shows just how political religion and religious organizations really are. At the drop of the dime, a centuries old ordinance can be changed to increase the numbers of Catholic membership due to the huge economic loss and political sway the Catholic Church has.

This loss of membership has also made the Vatican re-strategize converts and recruitment to the Dark Continent of Africa. There, Catholicism has not only become a religious order, but one that denotes a certain class.

Consequently, the savages have become the biggest promoters of a religion that once upon time held a liturgical edict known as the Papal that gave the Pope the authority to tell European explorers it was a divine right to enslave Africans and dissemble the present-day Americas for the purpose of “religious expansion.”

This critique does not excuse Christianity period, because it has been integral in backing many historical brutalities in the name of Jesus, God and the Trinity (and we are talking about the Matrix).

Not only past Christians, but current ones turn the other cheek as pastors, deacons, and ministers turn pulpits into pimp houses. And let me not forget the witch hunts in the “Name of God” that go on in Africa killing elder women and men for traditional practices.

Anyway, here is another case that proves rules are carved out with the idea of control and a social order where someone will always be on the bottom, thus relegating the rule makers as the top.

What the Vatican really needs to do is allow same sex marriages in the church, starting with the priests and nuns themselves.

Tyra Wears her REAL face, BLACKFACE

I refused to give energy to Tyra Banks’ attempt of sensationalizing real issues in communities of color such as hair, colorism, and body image. I even bit my tongue when she showed her “naturally’ permed hair at the beginning of the season. This time; however, I must speak on the inexcusable.

This past week, I was flipping through channels and stopped to watch a couple of minutes of the America’s Next Top Model. The photo challenge was to see how models posed in bi-racial costumes, a couple including models in black face.

Hmmm, I thought, this is something interesting; especially when there was a hoot a couple of weeks ago about a European magazine (Vogue Paris) that did the same thing on its pages.

Vogue Paris features Dutch Woman as a Moor

Of course, fashion “experts” including Tyra would probably use the artsy-fartsy excuse, but a report stated that Tyra was simply showcasing bi-racial identity.

Tyra’s response is very tired; especially since she’s been hooting and hollering about the lack of black models on the runway. Her display validates the continual use of white, or fair complexioned models who only need to charcoal their skin for the black scenes.

How “politically incorrect” of you Tyra? To use a platform to perpetuate the ignorance of color and black face performance, and exploit the serious issues around bi-racial identity. Your attempt to make biraciality “fashionable” was a fashion faux pas and a blatant gesture that shows how you try so hard, but consistently fail to be “intelligent and edgy.”

These two words cannot fit into one sentence when describing your recent tactless tactics that scream a tired and twisted ode to a bi-racial President.