| An open letter to black women | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 19 2012, 06:37 PM (1,193 Views) | |
| Shirley Brown | Jul 19 2012, 06:37 PM Post #1 |
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I ran across this open letter to black women, it is written by a black woman and she talks about how black women are presenting themselves on televsiion and in the media. I just want to share this letter with you all. http://elev8.com/583331/an-open-letter-to-black-women/ |
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| Veritas | Jul 19 2012, 08:27 PM Post #2 |
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Interesting letter Miss Brown. It piqued my curiosity to see what the sistah had to say. While I found the letter poignant and revealing, the things she had to say, in my opinion, transcends race. I submit that when Black people who feel that they must carry the burden of an entire race , or in this case, the gender of a race and realize that that it is an immpossible burdento carry, then they will be free. Free from feeling that every time they see a negative news story, program, book, or whatever, regarding Black people, that it doesn't mean that it has to be personalized or internalized. In my view, we can't allow ourselves to accept responsbility for "bad behavior" by those who might look like us. While it might make us cringe and we always breathe a sigh of relief when someone has done something really stupid and crazy and they weren't Black, we, indvidually, have to understand that we are not the ones behaving badly. Too many of us have bought into the long held refrain that "all Blacks are alike." Especially when that "label" is applied in a negative way. Suffice it to say, that if somone is levleling an attack against Black people that impacts all of us, we should definitely stand up agianst it with all that we are, but we can' t take a collective responsibilty for the behavior of thugs, bank robbers, drug dealers, rapists, pedophiles or 300 kids who flash mob Wal-Mart. "Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul." Robert G. Ingersoll |
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| VoiceofReason | Jul 19 2012, 08:41 PM Post #3 |
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I didn't want to read the letter because I thought to myself, if it's about how black women are portrayed via media, it should be an open letter to the Entertainment Industry. Then I thought, well the Industry only does what makes money, so consumers should not support it. Then I thought, well, I'll read the letter. Maybe I'll be surprised. I read the first paragraph. She's complaining about black behavior on Reality TV while watching, supporting the very thing behaviors she's criticizing. Fail. Epic Fail. I don't support reality TV that shows black people in a negative light. I don't watch it. Period. End of story. No I didn't read the entire letter, because my first thought is the author needs to put her money where her mouth is. Maybe the letter got better as it went on. In my case, she lost me at "watch my regular dose of Reality TV". Oops. Guess I didn't make it entirely through the first paragraph after all. Edited by VoiceofReason, Jul 19 2012, 08:45 PM.
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| VoiceofReason | Jul 19 2012, 08:46 PM Post #4 |
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"Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul." Well damned if that ain't right. |
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| Veritas | Jul 19 2012, 08:54 PM Post #5 |
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Good comments Truth. I got the gist of what I thought that the stistah was "trying" to say. I simply thought hat she was going about it disingenuously. BTW, I abhor reality TV. The world's greatest oxymoron in my opinion. Though, it seems to be what's in vogue today. My reality will NEVER be based in some TV program. Some will say that it's just entertainment and perhaps it is, but it seems more like an obsession to people I know who watch it. Back to the sistah's letter, I do think that she was well intentioned in her narrative, but as you said, she unwittingly contravened what she intended to convey.....in my opinion. |
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| Mario | Jul 19 2012, 09:05 PM Post #6 |
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As a black man I'm upset about the way that black men are showing a negative image of black men on television. So I can understand right thinking black women being upset about the negative images that a lot of black women are putting out there on television. |
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| Mario | Jul 19 2012, 09:08 PM Post #7 |
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Truthisrespect there is no balance on television when it comes to blacks people. If 50% of the imnages of black people on television was positive and 50% were negative, that would be a lot better. But 95% of images of black people on television is negative, and that shapes people view of us as black people. |
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| VoiceofReason | Jul 19 2012, 10:55 PM Post #8 |
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You are right. I think many of these Reality shows are the NEW exploitation films. Once the studios come up with a basic formula that works, they create spin offs to represent each group. I saw a promo the other day for a Gypsy Reality TV show. It's becoming ridiculous. But I know it pays; people are watching, otherwise they wouldn't exist. |
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| VoiceofReason | Jul 20 2012, 01:08 AM Post #9 |
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I cut & pasted for you, an interesting article I scanned today by Tanner Colby, writer for Slate. It’s been a banner year for lambasting the deplorable state of race and television. Lately it seems you can pick a fight just about anywhere on the dial. Grey’s Anatomy showrunner Shonda Rhimes recently got into a Twitter dust-up by calling out the lily-white casting of ABC’s Bunheads. That was a minor skirmish compared to the scorched-earth campaign of criticism waged over Lena Dunham’s Girls this past spring. Mad Men is too white. Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns is too black. Then there are your reality-TV disasters: VH1’s Basketball Wives isn’t doing the modern black woman any favors, and we’ve got lawyers suing ABC over The Bachelor because it casts only white contestants, a lawsuit that must represent a new low for civil rights litigation in America. Friday Night Lights and The Wire both offered intelligent, thoughtful portraits of race. For laughs, we’ve still got the smart and subtle humor of NBC’s Community, FX’s Louie, and Comedy Central’s Key & Peele. But in what is supposedly a new age of groundbreaking, “novelistic” television drama, one of the most dramatic threads of America’s cultural history is strangely absent. We did Mad Men, the well-lit, glossy “before” picture of white America, taken just as the civil rights movement was about to upend Madison Avenue’s cushy status quo. And we’ve done The Wire, the gritty “after” shot of urban America in the wake of white flight and the drug war. But we skipped the middle chapter. We haven’t done the part about how America stopped being Mad Men and turned into The Wire. That would be the story of the failure of racial integration in the 1970s. The reason this chapter is missing—both from television and from our collective pop-culture narrative in general—is because it’s ugly. Most of America’s history with race is ugly, but it’s ugly in a way that’s tailor-made for Hollywood’s preferred mode of storytelling: good guys and bad guys. Protagonist and antagonist. Conflict and resolution. The North fought the South and Lincoln freed the slaves—The End. The noble Negro children of Birmingham stood up to Bull Connor, Martin Luther King went to the mountaintop, and white people learned a lesson—The End. Is this a reductive way to look at history? Yes. But it can be done; the narrative building blocks are there. The Civil War and the civil rights movement are both more complex than we typically portray them, but both were fundamentally matters of right vs. wrong, and anything that’s a matter of right vs. wrong can generally be reduced to good guys and bad guys. Then we come to the story of integration in the 1970s. Where desegregation was a matter of right vs. wrong, integration was a matter of who gets what. Once the walls of Jim Crow came down, blacks had won access to society’s resources. But what did that mean, exactly? How much were they owed as compensation for America’s crimes? How much were white people willing to share? How much could white people be compelled to share? In a world of economic scarcity, these were messy, divisive questions; nobody had put a great deal of forethought into the answers. Meanwhile, inside the black community, integration appealed to those who wanted to share in the opportunities across the color line, but the idea of an open society threatened to undermine the power of black leaders and businessmen whose status was rooted in a separate, blacks-only world. The scramble over who gets what pitted not just black against white, but black against black as well. When your story is a matter of who gets what, it’s a whole different kind of ugly. The grim saga of real estate integration—which would be your “A” storyline in any TV show about race in the 1970s—offers the clearest example. Republicans are typically cast as the bad guys in this narrative because, well, that’s how they cast themselves. They decided to be the zealots opposed to any and all forms of housing integration. In their bizarro world, that made them the good guys: They were the noble defenders of private property rights against “big government” encroachment (i.e, the extension of private property rights to blacks). In this role, when Lyndon Johnson was trying to pass the 1968 Fair Housing Act in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Republicans attached a series of amendments to the bill that rendered it impotent, incapable of forcing the issue of open housing on white neighborhoods. And the Democrats let them. Got right on board with it. Voted it through, and declared the Fair Housing Act a triumph. Because it was more important for liberals to have an expedient, symbolic victory than to pass a bill that actually protected black America’s property rights. Subsequently, many of the public housing programs that Democrats did pass amounted to social engineering blunders of such astounding incompetence that the net result was to segregate the American cityscape even further and drive black neighborhoods deeper into poverty. Despite this spotty track record, white liberals have been on a sanctimonious victory lap ever since, beating their chests as the Righteous Friend of the Negro and raking in the lion’s share of the black vote every November when, really, the best you can say about them is that they’re not as horrible as the Republicans. Which isn’t a very high bar to clear. Can you find the good guys and the bad guys in that story? I can’t. Then we come to the other side of the coin. The government’s failure to create real fair-housing laws gave free rein to the practice of blockbusting. Blockbusters were predatory real-estate speculators. They exploited fears of a black takeover, harassing white homeowners, scaring them out to the suburbs, and picking up their houses on the cheap—only to then turn around and sell those houses to black homeowners at a scandalous markup, leaving them stranded with underwater mortgages in declining neighborhoods. White flight didn’t just “happen”; it was well-orchestrated. In the blockbusting storyline, you’ll find a lot of bad guys. Thing is, not all of them were white. White realtors and black realtors often worked in collusion, the white realtor targeting and harassing white residents, the black realtor lining up the prospective black tenants who’d be used to flood the neighborhood. Some black realtors even went door-to-door in white neighborhoods themselves, inquiring about properties for sale. They knew full well that the color of their skin would incite a panic in white residents, producing a slate of properties they could pick up on the cheap. And because black homebuyers were being denied fair mortgage credit at banks, black-owned banks and mortgage brokers enjoyed a captive, inflated market; their clients often had nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, from city hall to Capitol Hill, black politicians lobbied for housing policies that kept low-income blacks marooned in urban housing to create solid voting blocks; integration threatened the power base that guaranteed electoral victory for urban political machines. On the 5 o’clock news, black politicians blamed the black man’s ills on the white man, and white Republicans wagged their finger at all the black welfare queens. Yet behind the scenes, both groups engaged in a tacit, unholy alliance to carve up city and suburb to their mutual advantage, no matter the ill effects for the average family looking for decent housing and schools. Are white people the architects responsible for putting this system in place? Of course. Most of the blame lies there, but the point is: Once the system is up and running, everybody’s hands get dirty. Everyone accommodates out of self-interest, and the whole thing just grinds on. That’s why the history of integration doesn’t fit into neat, little packages. If we put it on television, the moral of the story would not be that white people did horrible stuff to black people and so white people need to learn a lesson. That’s your “white guilt” storyline. It’s an important arc for the series, but it’s not the whole show. The real moral of the story is that when you create a corrupt system, there just aren’t a whole lot of good moral choices to be made, and it’s very difficult to be the person who makes them. The story of racial integration isn’t good guys and bad guys, but it is full of good and decent, if imperfect, people, white and black, mostly just trying to take care of their families in a world of limited choices. Most people are not the architects of the problem; they’re trying to make a life inside the problem, and in the simple act of looking for a good school they’re helping to perpetuate the system that keeps the country divided. Which is why it’s so necessary to tell this story, but if we’re really, really honest about what happened in the wake of Jim Crow’s demise, white conservatives, white liberals, urban political machines, black businessmen—nobody comes out clean, and a lot of the assumptions underpinning today’s racial politics get challenged. Which may be why we haven’t wanted to look too closely. Maybe I’m oversimplifying. But then oversimplification seems like it’s been the point. Look at the pop culture references to race that date from the integration era. There’s All in the Family, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. There’s the blaxploitation classics like Shaft and Uptown Saturday Night. It’s comic, pulpy fare, for the most part. What’s the lasting cultural landmark on race from the 1970s? That would be Roots. A classic, and an important one, but, again, one that takes refuge in the past, in the moral certainty of right vs. wrong, averting our gaze from the messy reality of who gets what in the present. Until very recently, the storytelling tools of television weren’t that sophisticated. Short of something like Roots, the complex issue of race had to be shoehorned into Very Special Episodes of Charles in Charge. But our new, post-Sopranos era of series TV has evolved into the perfect medium to tell the story of race. Good television is now capable of going beyond good guys and bad guys. We can do moral ambiguity on a grand narrative scale now. And viewers seem to love it. I see a television show in my head. Set in an integrating working- and middle-class neighborhood of a Great American City. Black and white neighbors trying, and failing, to coexist. We follow its residents to school, to church, to the office, to city hall. We follow the white establishment power brokers and a newly elected black mayor as they cynically carve up the cityscape to their mutual benefit. We follow the black company man who’s fighting his way into middle management, fighting the conservative obstructionism of the old boys’ network on one side while enduring the gooey condescension of white liberals on the other. We go with the black kids on the bus out to the hostile, lily-white nether regions of suburbia. We follow the white ladies in the PTA and their husbands at the city planning meetings, wrestling with white guilt but always acting out of panicky self-interest. We follow the interracial newlyweds, wondering how to raise their mixed-race kids in the midst of all of the above. Season after gripping season, we watch what happens as school busing and affirmative action and all these other programs try to force the country together, only to tear it apart. It’s got everything: the sprawling, interlocking narrative of The Wire plus the production values and period detail of Mad Men, all set in the Superfly 1970s. It’s a rising tide of Black-is-Beautiful, Afro-American consciousness crashing headlong into the poor fashion choices and stony self-entitlement of a silent suburban majority. Think of the costume design. Think of the soundtrack. This could be great television. I actually ran this idea past a Hollywood agent a few months ago. In typical agent fashion, he told me “No” five different ways in less than a minute. Not because it wasn’t a good idea, he said, but because only one network in the country would even consider making it: HBO. And if HBO turns you down, you’ve got nowhere else to go. But then why wouldn’t HBO say yes? They’ve already got great working relationships with David Simon, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. Surely the creators of The Wire, Do The Right Thing, and Mean Streets would be tempted by such a great canvas on which to tell the story of race and urban decay in America. The entire casts of Oz, The Wire, and The Sopranos already on speed dial? All the pieces are in place. What better way to comment on the segregated nature of television than with a television show that tells the story of why we failed to integrate? It’s a show that’s practically begging to be made. People would watch it, and it would be good for America. Or we could just sue ABC to get more black ladies on The Bachelor. I’m sure that would work, too. Edited by VoiceofReason, Jul 20 2012, 01:14 AM.
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| Mal | Jul 20 2012, 08:42 AM Post #10 |
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Not sure if I can take the letter writer seriously. If you think the issue is reality tv and its bad portrayal of black women-why watch this rubbish, watch better programmes. No one makes black women behave like that or watch these shows-stop doing it. |
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10:33 AM Jul 11