An Open Letter to Karrine Steffans

Dear Karrine Steffans,

I ride for you. I really do. Most people have no idea why. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Dr. Ebony Utley, a writer and an associate professor of communication at California State University Long Beach. I write and teach about popular culture and relationships. When Confessions of a Video Vixen dropped, I assigned it to my hip hop class and made all my students purchase it.

Confessions was important because it forced readers to contextualize a vixen’s life. After my students exhausted all the different ways they could call you a ho, I pushed them to move past their judgments and critique gendered double standards about sexuality. I demanded that they imagine how it would change them if they were sexually assaulted, abused, and abandoned as a young girl. I encouraged them to consider the conditions that lead to escapism through sex, drugs, alcohol, and hip hop fantasies. Your book was a perfect opportunity to discuss how and why women make choices in a man’s world. I asked them to respect the chutzpah of a woman not that much older than they were who put it all out there—haters be damned.

When it came time to build my brand, I modeled it after yours. Your early websites were my favorites. I learned form you that pink is a power color. You taught me how to be sexy and smart. I subscribe to the newsletter, buy the books, read the damn blog. In fact, The Vixen Manual is kinda like an Our Bodies, Ourselves for the hip hop generation. Okay, that’s an overstatement, but the pictures were a nice touch.

Your newest book How to Make Love to A Martian was a birthday gift to myself and it continues your prosex, prochoice advocacy. It was a brave decision to share your abortion story. It was also an important decision in a world where women’s rights to choose are being systematically stripped away.

Baby News: Fuck!

Four Weeks

And while Martian is a page-tuner, I’ve got to draw a line. The “love” that you and Lil Wayne have is dangerous. I know you have a niche. I know you have a core audience with expectations. I know you need to make that money, but I can’t ride for you and let other people think that your depiction of love is okay with me. Now, I generally don’t make a habit of telling people they love wrong. I’ve been flying around the country collecting definitions of love from women and children for my research, and I know there are as many definitions as there are people.

For my current project Shades of Infidelity, I’m interviewing women about their experiences with infidelity, and I’ve asked all of them to define love. I’ve learned so much about life and love that this isn’t me passing judgment on your open relationship with Lil Wayne. This is me telling you that a relationship that lacks mutual trust, respect, and honest communication isn’t a healthy love. Here come the spoilers. You define love as “the spirit of caring to the maximum level of shared connection.” Fine. Then you describe love with Wayne:

“Wayne didn’t want to know everything or anything at all, except that I loved him.”

“Wayne was loving me the way he wanted to love me, but I was loving him the way he needed to be loved.”

“He was a jealous and possessive man when it came to the women he loved. He never wanted to hear about other men. Ever. Even though all this women had no choice but to hear about all his other women and accept it.”

All bad, Karrine. Per your own definition, you’re coming up short. Is this what the maximum level of connection looks like? More importantly is this what the maximum level of connection looks like?

I know you’re both working and these representations are part of your jobs. I’m certain they fail to accurately reflect the extent of your relationship, but for all the babygirls that are fans of yours, I need them to know that:

• When you can’t talk to your partner about that time he hurt your feelings when he flew you across the country, holed you up in a hotel, and never showed up to meet you, it’s not okay
• Sleeping with his friend just to make him jealous instead of telling him that his getting everybody pregnant and you hearing about it on the street was hurtful, is not ideal.
• Being in a relationship where there is no reciprocity is not a healthy relationship.

If you were just sexing Wayne for pleasure, that would be fine (although I’m not entirely sure what you see in him), but to call what you describe in Martian as love is not fine. Not. At. All.

I agree. Sometimes a man and a woman have an understanding that even they don’t understand. I have been there. But this is not that. There’s no understanding. He hurts your feelings. You swallow them. You try to move on. Love relationships require communication to achieve that understanding and that maximum level of connection. I need to communicate to you that you deserve better. You’ve been hurt. A lot. But don’t give up on yourself. Learn from your mistakes. Olivia Pope is wrong (but that’s another post). Love is not supposed to hurt more than it heals you. Love yourself first. Tell yourself the truth about this unhealthy relationship. If you can agree not to glamorize the pain anymore, I’ll agree to keep riding for you. Can you and I share that understanding?

Dr. Ebony Utley
The Woman with Ideas
theutleyexperience.com

 

Hip Hop: Is There Any Meaning Left?

In 1986 Run DMC released the song “My Adidas”.  Run DMC had been heavily criticized for wearing shoes with no laces, and for promoting stereotypes. So the rap group wrote a song called “My Adidas”. The wrote this song because as DMC stated “Yeah, we wear Adidas with no laces, we got gold chains, we got Cazals and all of that, but I go to St. John’s University.

The song meant something to them. The song meant something to the masses who followed Run DMC, and rocked the shelltop Adidas to show their connection with the group. It was a way of saying “don’t judge us by what we have on, or by what we look like.” It was a moment when being a rapper, being a b-boy, being poor, being from the streets didn’t mean you had no hope. It meant that you could wear your Adidas on the stage at “Live Aid” and still have people applaud. Run DMC  showed that you could be who you are and sign million dollar contracts. “My Adidas” was a song that debunked stereotypes and inspired people. I have never wore Adidas in my life, but in 1986 ‘My Adidas’ meant something to me.

Adidas partnered with Run DMC to form a clothing line of their own. It was this song and Run-DMC’s attitude that showed that Hip Hop was not just a form of music, or some lyrics put on a page. Run DMC showed that Hip Hop was a lifestyle. Since 1986, many artist and entertainers have followed the model set by Run DMC. Adidas was the first company to reap the benefits of hip-hop marketing, and hip hop expanded by a partnership with corporate America.
The entire history of Run DMC is a series of firsts…

• The first rap act to chart in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 more than once
• The first rap artist with a Top 10 pop charting rap album
• The first with a R & B charting album
• The first rap artist with gold, platinum and multi-platinum albums
• The first rap act to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine
• The first rap act to receive a  Grammy Award nomination
• The first rap act to make a video appearance on MTV
• The first rap act to perform at a major arena

Fast forward to 2012 and Adidas now sponsors a hip hop artist called Two Chainz, another average rapper, with a major contract, who has just released his first album. Unfortunately this sponsorship seems more like pissing all over hip hop and it’s history, and the struggle of those that came before. Business are smart to look at a fan base and seek to capitalize off of it. These corporations don’t care if an artist has talent,or what they are saying, they just want access to the fan base and the rappers oblige them. Rappers as unproven commodities with lyrics devoid of meaning proudly hawk perfumes, clothes, liquor, colognes, headphones, ect…because they were never told where they came from, so they have no idea of where they should be going. They turned on the television, or went to youtube and saw other people had done and they copied that and become just another produced rapper.

Hip Hop is something you live

There is no struggle, no heart, no art, it’s a business. That’s all it means to them, that’s all their fans mean to them. Hip Hop means nothing to them, you can hear their passionless voices clinging to a hook. You can see it in their videos and the issues they do not speak on. They have taken the money, in exchange for the meaning. They have taken promotion over the substance and this is why these partnerships, no matter how much capital is put into them, mean absolutely nothing. They are all in such a rush to be just another rapper that history will forget.

Is it the partnership with corporate America that has caused the meaning to leave hip hop?

Was it Run DMC’s promotion of materialism, Hip Hip’s ultimately ruination?

Does Hip Hop simply not have any meaning left in it?

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Just White

Father Time–white man, white hair

Uncle Sam- white man, white hair

Santa Claus- white man, white hair

Moses- white man, white hair

The Forefathers- White men, white hair

Baby New Year- White baby

Jesus- White

Mother Nature- White Woman

Helen of Troy – White Woman

Lady Godiva- White Woman, White Horse

White knight, white noise, white lies, white diamonds, Snow White, White House, and the ever popular white rose.

White velvet cake, white tea, white rice, white truffles, white potatoes, white onions, and oh yes blonde roast coffee

White peaches, white pumpkins, white wine, and White Christmas.

White is the ultimate authority, they set it up that way, so that ain’t nothing good until it’s white.

Look at chocolate, dark, sweet, cream, milk–but no that wasn’t enough they had to go and make

that white too, and white chocolate isn’t even chocolate!

You don’t see chocolate vanilla do you. I knew they wouldn’t stop at milk. They may as well say,

here drink this, white it does a body good.

Racism is everywhere and its not subtle.

Another poem from It Ain’t Just the Size

 

Holler If You Hear Me

After the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Connecticut where 18 six and seven year-olds were shot and killed by a single armed individual, President Barack Obama took to the airwaves and we all heard his emotional condolences to other affected. Back in 2008, when Candidate Obama was being honest he said that cultural changes will make people “cling to their guns and religion”, he couldn’t have been righter. In fact some would say that the gun is a religion. The United States of America has more guns than any other ‘civilized” country in the world. We have more people in prison than any other civilized country, prison is supposed to be a deterrent–obviously what we have been doing isn’t working. It can even be argued that the violence we do abroad is merely an extension of the violence in our hearts that sometimes spills out at home…

You will hear the terms “Kids killing Kids”, “Boys will be Boys”, “Guns don’t kill people”, these are paid for slogans that turn shooting tragedies, like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School into nothing more than nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes right along side other rhymes like “babies having babies”, “Just say no”. Slogans that make you feel better, as if someone has a handle on it enough to craft a catchy slogan for it, while another avoidable shooting becomes nothing more than a parade of faces and a footnote in history. Disregarding the warnings from these events, the media and political framework from these events have become common. They pick sides, cloud the issues only to keep the same ways of thinking in place, year after year, incident after incident, half-measure after half-measure. Why half-measure and promises, because this is the culture of violence that we have created…all of us.

You will also hear words like “troubled”, “problems” and if no on is troubled or has problems. These media slick personalities will cloud the issue by making it a mental health debate. If the individual “snapped” how an examination beforehand reveals that is beyond any psychologist. They will also turn any remedy it into a privacy issues, or a rights issue. One as arbitrary as, at 18 one can smoke and at 21 one can drink alcohol, how is that working out?  They aren’t working, they don’t work. We as a society have not revisited those issues either, but it makes us feel better that we did something, maybe not the right thing, but we did something. “But it’s our right” they’ll scream, but since 9/11 the same screamers have allowed their right to be taken and twisted and their privacy to be intruded upon, without so much as a whimper—why? Because it was for the “Greater Good”. In the case of guns, finger pointing usually follows a shooting like this, but taking money out of the pockets of elected officials can save lives.

This tragedy in Sandy Hook, Connecticut will be tied to false arguments and false conclusions, just as all the tragedies before it were. You hear the questions being asked: What happened to the shooter to make him act in this manner? This can’t be normal, he’s a monster, a monster really–so is America raising monster? This is all done to prevent us from squaring look ourselves in the face. Looking at the society we have created for ourselves and for our children to grow up in. Arbitrarily putting people on a ‘not eligible’ list, stopping the poor for getting guns, preventing minorities from getting guns, ect… none of it will work. We all know it that’s why we pray, we hold vigils, and we debate.

A week after the Sandy Hook shooting the NRA held a national press conference that blamed 1980 and 1990 era video games Splatterhouse, Bulletstorm and Mortal Kombat, and sports for America’s violent culture. The NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre urged congress to create a national database for the mentally ill, he also blamed the media for being complicity in misinforming people and President Barack Obama for cutting funds. The NRA proposes that every school in America has a police officer. The press conference was so out of touch and so sickening the only thing missing was the Wayne LaPierre brandishing a gun, and metaphorically he was. However, the NRA’s proposal seems like a great solution until the armed protector is the shooter. Make it tougher to get a gun won’t work, because the capitalist will find something else deadly to market and sell to the violence hungry masses. Scenes like the ones at Sandy Hook Elementary School have become as common as law enforcement police shooting unarmed people,and  as normal as the violence from our unmanned drone strikes in other countries. We the so-called educated masses, have lost the clarity and the fortitude to do the right thing.

How many guns does a person need? One for upstairs, one for downstairs, one for the car and one for the white tail deer. I know hunting is a way of life. Yes hunting defenseless animals with high powered weaponry for sport, is a way of life that desensitizes us to the value of life as a whole. We as a society hold the power to take life as our absolute right if someone, anyone offends us, unfortunately the taking of life is in direct conflict with the constitution the evangelist praise so highly, but just as so many religious do with their text, the constitution is left largely unread. Thinking that one right can take another right has to be a mental condition.

Here is what you won’t hear.

• 77% of all traced guns used in crime are hand guns, not so-called assault weapons. 
• 70% of homicides are do to a firearm. 
• Firearms account for 30% of all murders, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
• 50% of firearm murders occurred during an argument, brawl.
• Every 15 minutes someone commits suicide with a firearm, this is not including attempted suicides.
• Males are far more likely to use a firearm than a female, most mass shooters, bombers are predominantly white males, defiantly pointing to our culture. 

There have been 28 mass shootings since Columbine and 19 mass shooting since the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, 30,000 gun deaths yearly, 100,000 people get shot yearly, 18,000 people commit  gun suicides each year, yet there has been no meaningful change in the gun laws or the gun debate. Unfortunately, American citizens will fork over trillions of dollars and  the wherewith all for wars, but they no longer have the guts to do the right thing here at home. Any of these numbers should have indicated that our culture is in crisis, has been in crisis and every decision we make stems from the bad ones before it. This time, this incident in Connecticut, involved so many children and females in particular involved that the assault weapons ban might get a national tweak, might.  What if the next mass shooter’s are girls would that be enough to make us think? Probably not.

“The issue is not just violence in the media but the construction of violent masculinity as a cultural norm. From rock and rap music and videos, Hollywood action films, professional and college sports, the culture produces a stream of images of violent, abusive men and promotes characteristics such as dominance, power, and control as means of establishing or maintaining manhood.”

For one segment of American society the gun itself is a symbol of honor, human mastery over nature, authority, individual self-sufficiency and history. To that segment by opposing gun control affirm the value of those symbolic meanings and the vision of the good society that the gun helped to construct. However, to the other segment of  society guns perpetuate illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers, and the only way the the fearful can sleep at night. To this segment supporting gun control means repudiation these things, meanwhile one sides interest’s are realized at the detriment to the other side. The truth is that injecting partisan cultural values into this debate are inappropriate. People have a tendency to adopt views shared by others of their cultural orientation, this is self-reinforcing. We need a new vocabulary, we need new voices on the matter and no compromise, or middle ground solution will remedy this. We must change our thinking completely.

What would the forefathers think? Where is congress on the matter? Who is paying who? It’s too much for the busy citizenry to deal with, right? So lets put it to a vote, and watch every year as the numbers for a ban grow, but that’s when the real violence will happen. The shooter could have used an SUV and ran down just as many young victims crossing the street to school. Why didn’t he? Because guns and ammunition are far cheaper and more effective ways to kill, when you are killing for power. So why not make guns more costly, but then only the wealthy would have them. We could make it into War on Guns, but how have the wars on Terror, Drugs and Gangs turned out? Why not just ban the firearm and keep the 2nd amendment, which is doable, but the capitalist would never allow that.

The numbers and our actions just don’t add up, what would happen if we as a society were to take firearms out of the equation?

MG Hardie

 

America, still as racist as ever

How does one explain that the one billion dollars you spent on a presidential election got you soundly drubbed by over 100 electoral votes margin? How do you justify the loss of each congressional candidate that was backed by 300 million in ads?

In the most telling of moments of the 2012 election it was hurricane Sandy showed people racism and prejudice is not functional for a forward moving country. Racism exists, prejudice exists, and it exists culturally and institutionally, especially for whites. This polarization runs across race and across class. After the re-election of President Barack Obama tens of thousands have signed petitions to secede from the union, an absurd proposition, but the sentiment that prejudice carries trump common sense. In the midst of this loud and prevalent ignorance some are waking up. Some realize that we cannot longer look at the countries the USA has attacked over the years or will engage in the future and say that they weren’t peppered with racist notions.

Today blacks that graduate with college degrees are twice as unlikely to get hired as their white counterparts. To say that America is racist is not a rhetorical narrative. White America is not prepared to view the world how it is or how it is becoming. They want everyone to think like them, many of them have a stuck in the past mentality. When they are confronted with a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-racial society they retreat to what comforts them and politicians and the 24 hours networks give them that comfort.

The media plays it loud, clear and repeatedly that they can go back to a time when half the country wasn’t free, to a time when the natives were being exterminated and their land occupied, to a time when the theft of Mexico’s land was underway, to a time when 4 million where enslaved. How can this narrative be the main one that is played over and over again by journalists, networks or any responsible party, because it is their agenda? And the disillusioned, jaded masses find solace in these and every fringe narrative propagated by the media. Then they present specials on why social media sites are often deluged with racist, sexist and homophobic rants as if the media didn’t bring people on to put it out to the masses.

The sport of politics continues on as the ratings driven media engine and fringe bloggers gently pull the racial heart strings of the prejudice and ill informed masses. In a free country demographics change, times change, but you still loudly heard the chants of “take our country back!’  Networks and commentators echoed these very same chants. Networks sieges on and repeat flawed and absurd narratives even when the rhetoric came from non-credible sources. This repetition not only reinforced this racial psychosis, but allowed people to cling on to racist notions, and live happily every after with ignorant sound bites. In the end, some believed, even subconsciously,  that race was more important that correcting the countries dire economic situation. This belief was and is so strong that some are willing to allow the country to collapse, to not hire people, and to undermine the President.

Politicians don’t have the fortitude to tell their constituents that the country no longer looks like it did when your forefather had power. Instead they fleece and exploit and lie to them to stay in office, to stay relevant. Countless commentators are willing to blow dog whistles and toss red meat as long as networks will give opportunities to commentate.

For liberals, conservative and anyone in-between the entertainment complex contains far too many bad acting participants to name, however, there is a market for hate, racism and prejudice. This market has led its followers, its donors and its noble activist to often be mistaken about the nature of the America’s problems. They become jaded, biased and socially irresponsible, quite simply it’s a sickness. This complex pits one vs. the other, lauds and celebrates party identification even though this identification inherently forces people reject factual narratives and new information. Some people feel as though they are nothing without the party, the party is a part of their identity. It is this party identity that urges people to vote against their and the country’s best interest.

The election is over and for Americans, all the ill will is no longer on the front page, the negativity is no longer blaring 24 hour a day. And on we trudge without so much as an apology, without a hint of remorse, and without a resolution to the sickness. For Americans it’s business as usual and on to the next crisis for the news media, on to the next pundit that seeks only to continue the debate and on to the next election of cruelty. Forward.

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An Open Letter to President Obama and Congress

Dear President Barack Obama and Congress:

With all due respect President Barack Obama we demand that you mandate fixing of educational standards and end the educational money-pit,  encourage the formation of a Black Defense League. prompt the Department of Justice to look into the 11% of cases of inmates they have said shouldn’t be incarcerated, investigate and reverse every racially biased law, revamp America’s legal sand prison system and give reparations to slave descendants that only applies to the 1st two years of college.

We also request that you revive the truth in advertising laws, stop the advertising of drugs and alcohol on television and cable, stop the advertising of adult and sexual themes on children’s networks, stop using war and conflicts as a jobs bills, stop giving South America and drug cartels 200 billion per year, stop giving all other countries billions of dollars yearly to be our ally, pull our troops out of 162 countries, close the border and regulate it, reform immigration policies, and change US foreign policy.

We implore Congress incentivize corporations to build in Africa not take its natural resources, decrease the importance of the Stock Market, end Matching Funds, reform election rules (including those of broadcast stations), float the idea of creating multiple viable political parties, stop drilling for oil off the coast, let Detroit automakers go bankrupt, mandate females to register for selective service, pull embassies out of countries that don’t like us, stop building nations and reallocate forces to rebuild bridges, roads and schools in America.

We request that you ensure that All laws are equal, stop absurd differing age regulations due to state, end baseball antitrust exemption, leave Cuba alone, stop funding Mexican drug cartels, tax companies that outsource, change the tax code, require that all companies that do business in America pay a minimum wage to workers in other countries, legalize marijuana, ban guns (which contrary to popular belief is entirely possible and legal), reduce the size of the military, ban lobbying and encourage companies to release the cures for human conditions instead of merely maintaining conditions for profit.

Yes the president isn’t God an the Government can’t do everything for us. Most of these things listed were allowed and pushed by president and government, so this is were we Americans begin negotiations. Of course we could keep slowly rolling along with the same movements, but we are in unprecedented territory and now is the time for us to be unprecedented! We have to let go of of the old, the outdated, anything else is unacceptable.

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Smashing the Homie

I was going to marry the mother of my daughter.

I was working a regular nine to five.

I had just got promoted to supervisor and everything.

I came home early one day and there she was, smashing the homie.

The whole time I was fucking dude up, she was saying

“you’re always working!”,

“you’re never home!”

While I was choking old dude I kept thinking “that bitch just didn’t love me!”

I was hurting him, because it was hurting me.

When I was in county jail, she kept visiting me saying “I’m sorry”, this that and the third.

She even told me how much she really needed me.

When I got out I went over to her house and there she was,

pregnant by this other dude and he was kicking her ass and shit.

It almost made the GPS bracket worth wearing.

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