Resplendent Musings

A blog that serves as a channel on how I see the world.

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Thanks to @mstaboorunsbrooklynlove22 for the lovely Christmas present of being able to spoil myself with some awesome local music! No more boring road trips! #casspernyovest #ph #reason #fificooper #princekaybee #buylocal #musicmakestheheartbeat

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Friends forever! #loveliveshere

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Friends forever! #memulo #NandilesMemulo #zulugirls

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"Oh I love a Zulu girl! Oh! I said, oh! Oh, oh I love a Zulu girl! Damn I love a Zulu girl, yeah I said Damn! Damn I love a Zulu girl!" #zulugirls

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This photo reminded me of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" because of the range of emotional reactions and my friends' varied levels of elevation not to mention the long one - sided rectangular table. So glad I was able to capture the moment on such an awesome day.

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Nandile's Memulo

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Waiting for Nandile to take off umhlehlwe. #memulo #NandilesMemulo

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Nandile's Chanel cupcakes and metallic matte cappuccino cakes in glittered gold which were one of the assorted flavours. Heaven on the tongue! #cakes #cupcakes #NandilesMemulo #memulo

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Nandile mostly got R100's and R50's. That's a sign of good character. I'm so glad to have her as a confidante. #NandilesMemulo #memulo #ritesofpassage

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When you realise you have to sing and dance all day in the hot ass sun even though you slept at 3am practising ukusina #NandilesMemulo #memulo

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Me, Nandile and @nokwandamathe "Ngob' ubab' uthe mangimule! Ayeye, angesisaba isidwaba!" #ritesofpassage #memulo #funtimes

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@the_shlamster @nokwandamathe and I having a laugh at Nandile's Memulo today just out of sheer joy that comes when you are with your oldest friends. #NandilesMemulo #memulo #friends #blessings (at Kloof, Durban)

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There Is No Nicki Minaj vs. Sandra Bland. Black People Can Discuss Both.

Incredible author, activist and media personality Janet Mock responded so well to the consistent misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny; term coined by the brilliant Moya Bailey) in the media yesterday when she replied to Entertainment Weekly and their poor depiction of Nicki Minaj’s critique of the music industry and Taylor Swift’s response (and EW wasn’t the only outlet to do this either). This came about because Nicki specifically mentioned MTV not nominating “Anaconda” for Video of The Year. This video is an important expression of Black women’s bodies reclaimed as a site of beauty, sensuality, pleasure and in the control of Black women, diverting thin Eurocentric beauty norms and White perceptions of sexuality. It’s also incredibly artistic and playful in a way rarely acceptable for Black women to express ourselves in. In her tweets, Nicki also alluded to misogynoir in the industry in general, and in relation to Black women’s bodies, cultural production and influence. When Nicki tweeted that she is “tired,” it spoke to something really specific in Black women’s experiences with marginalization and erasure. 

(Screencap via Your Media Has Problems, since Entertainment Weekly deleted their tweet.)

Taylor Swift wrongly dived into the conversation in true White feminist fashion. However, I am not overly interested in discussing Taylor Swift doing the typical White woman, White feminist four step, though I sent one tweet about it. I have plenty of past writing on derailment, gaslighting, erasure, misogynoir, racism and anti-Blackness from mainstream White feminism and White women, in general. I feel like if people really cared about Black women, this tweet wouldn’t seem like such a revelation or surprise (as some people acted this way). It means that they’re not engaging with the reality that Black women in the media and Black women in our daily lives deal with. 

What I am interested in is how some fellow Black people are using this moment for what has been called #TwitterComparisons, where a false equalization is created to silence one topic in place of another, and usually by fellow Black people who exhibit few opinions on either topic presented, outside of baiting other Black people who may express opinions on both. Some Black people are using this conversation about Nicki Minaj to pretend that no Black people are discussing State violence and the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, which I believe was in fact an extrajudicial execution. Her death deeply pains me and is difficult for me to discuss. And this idea that I must discuss it all day is actually quite violent. Further, I still resent what amounts to trading lynching post cards when endless visuals of police harm on her and Black people in general are hyperconsumed and it is virtually impossible to find an article where this is not standard practice. I elaborated on this in years of work on what I call “post-mortem media violence.” And to be clear, for the 1,342,338 time, my discussions of post-mortem media violence are NOT solely about my personal mental health care and my psychological response to being expected to endlessly consume visuals of Black death (usually without my consent; the content is usually forced on me) or about self-care/trigger warnings. It is about the dehumanization of Black life, the consumption of the harm on Black bodies as bodies supposedly not truly susceptible to pain, and the lie that the sheer consumption of the hypervisibility of Black death is equal to activism against State violence. (I mention the latter because some people–primarily Whites and Black men–have been willfully misconstruing my work or not even willing to engage it as honestly and as thoroughly as they would if I were White/male.)

Thus, when some Black people suggest that no one should discuss Nicki Minaj and instead discuss Sandra Bland, I have a problem. They are not critiquing the problem with post-mortem media violence being construed as awareness and activism. They are also erasing the amount of activist labor–usually lead by Black women at that–that already exists for Sandra Bland. They are erasing how people responded in sheer pain to further revelations on the case today, such as video footage of Sandra’s encounter with the police that award-winning film director Ava DuVernay alluded to; it may have been tampered with. (I have no issue with specific analysis like this; thoughtful and truthful engagement with my writing on post-mortem media violence would reveal such.) But a larger form of erasure is occurring in three key ways. One way is that this juxtaposition rests on respectability politics. Because some people demonize Nicki for her presentation, her “value” is deemed below someone they view as “respectable” like Sandra Bland was. But see, this same respectability politics issue is why people are more likely to recognize Sandra Bland’s name than Kindra Chapman’s. The second way is the performance for the White Gaze. One of the reasons why some Black people demand silence of joy (beyond both Black and non-Black people being invested in denying Black women joy in general, which I discussed in Misogynoir and The Concerted Effort To Deny Black Women Joy) is the idea that our joy and our pleasure are irresponsible. Or shouldn’t happen anywhere Whites can see. Thus, the idea is that Black people who make jokes about Taylor Swift (or Meek Mill’s odd “expose” tweets last night on rappers who don’t write their own lyrics; which I have thoughts on as well) are not “performing” Black humanity properly and won’t be viewed by White people properly. The trouble with the White Gaze. But…they oppress us and kill us regardless. Regardless. The humanity of Blackness is denied. This anti-Blackness is something that incredible Black thinkers and writers such as Frank Wilderson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton and @so_treu elaborate on with a specificity and genius unmatched. 

The third way is that some Black people (and society at large actually; Black people do not “solely/uniquely” engage in misogynoir and the notion of such is anti-Black) do not examine the connections between misogynoir in pop culture and misogynoir at the root of State violence against Black women. In response to Janet Mock’s tweet of a video clip of her show So POPular and her guest Tamara Winfrey Harris, who discussed the “angry Black woman” archetype (something that I’ve discussed before myself) in her book that I am currently reading, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women In America, I tweeted the following, in summary:

The “Angry Black Woman” archetype that the national media uses to harm Nicki Minaj is also used to justify Sandra Bland’s death. Discussing Nicki isn’t frivolous. People say discuss State violence, not pop culture. As if they are not connected via misogynoir. #SayHerName exists because once State violence is discussed, people center Black men. Thus, I already know the “discuss Sandra not Nicki” rebuttal is about erasure of both, actually. “Ignore famous Black woman!” “Focus on Black men for State violence!”

The reason why I am interested in this among us Black people is because this is my focus when I write. Our thoughts. Our feelings. Our healing. Our activism. Our pain. Our pleasure. Especially so for Black women. Thus, I am not interested in arbitrarily pathologizing Black people here. I am interested in how these forced comparisons function as erasure of Black women in our own community. Whether we are trying to live and unknown, whether famous and used as media/public punching bags in ways that impact non-famous Black women let alone those famous ones, whether we are killed via intraracial gender violence or by the State. Thus, there is no service to Sandra Bland that happens by ignoring the very same misogynoir that killed her being used to demonize Black women in the media like Nicki Minaj. Until people understand what anti-Blackness and misogyny actual entail for Black women, we and everyone else will continue to pretend that pop culture and State violence do not operate in the same spheres. The same media that degrades Nicki is the same media engaging in post-mortem media violence of Sandra Bland. This does not mean that Nicki’s fame, platform size and her first generation of wealth should be ignored. Of course Black women–especially womanists and Black feminists–discuss nuances of privilege intraracially and among Black women. See, if able to, we can truly hold multiple ideas and viewpoints in our consciousness simultaneously. The anti-Black ableist lies about inherent inferior Black intelligence are ones that I reject. I don’t think that Nicki should be paid attention to because fame matters more than non-famous people; rich Black celebrities don’t exactly need the same type of defense non-rich non-famous Black people need. Nicki’s situation matters because it is the same misogynoir as to why Sandra Bland is viewed as angry and deserving of death by many in the public, the media and the State itself. Angry. Black. Woman. Archetype.

Certainly someone can choose to focus on Sandra Bland and not comment on Nicki Minaj at all. Certainly someone else can choose to focus on misogynoir in pop culture and allow other womanists, Black feminists, and activists in general to focus on State violence. I personally discuss both. Our emotion is not only conveyed through measurable outputs of labor. I am not just the work that I do. I am a person. This idea that Black people have to shut up about one thing to care about another reduces our humanity into a falsely equalized stance where Black women have to pick and choose between the violence we face daily–partly the responsibility of the media–and the violence that we are at risk for in our own communities and at the hands of the State. All of these impact us. Black women matter as whole people. Fellow Black people–especially ones that assert that Black Lives Matter–would do best to understand this. Black women are whole people with whole lives. And the same reduction into controlling images (i.e. Jezebel, mammy, Sapphire), stereotypes (i.e. welfare queen, welfare mother, emasculating matriarch, mule, gold digger), archetypes (i.e. Angry Black Woman, Strong Black Woman) and labor output that happens to us via non-Black people, especially via Whites, is not something that I want to experience from fellow Black people, especially ones who suggest that they’re activists. Activism that doesn’t center the full humanity of Black women (and Black LGBTQIA people regardless of gender) is activism that is of no interest to me. Black people truly can choose what to discuss and consider the wholeness and humanity of Black women in these discussions.

Related Posts: BlackOUT Collective’s Powerful Statement Honoring Black Girls and Black Women’s Bodies and Lives, The Erasure Of Black Women’s Experiences As Victims Of State Violence Is Unacceptable

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You should read "Fear" on Wattpad.

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Love Lives Here! #Repost @manthepeng ・・・ I remember this night. Our first night at Inc (then, a very new club). We went there specifically for Dj Kent and boy oh boy did he not disappoint! Dancing on tables 😂, sweat on the dance floor, weave game on fleek💅🏾💇🏽! Fun was had that night! I miss those days sometimes but I appreciate the memories! Most of all I miss hanging with these girlies!❤️❤️❤️ #throwbackthursday #tbt #mygirls #inc #funwashad #funnyfaces #dancingshoesonfleek

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This protest against the killing of unarmed black women by the police gave me goosebumps. It took place today in San Francisco's Financial District. It is so powerful to see naked black women who reclaim and affirm their bodies on their own terms instead of our bodies being subjugated for sexual consumption. Society isn't comfortable when black women own their own bodies but are happy when the tits are out in an exploitative porno. So here for my sisters in America. "Owning our bodies is power" - @brownblaze #SayHerName #KeriaBoyd #Blackwomenslivesmatter http://www.okayafrica.com/news/naked-prostest-bodies-that-matter-femen-african-history/ #Repost @brownblaze ・・・ This morning's action was so powerful. Black women's bodies are not shameful and there is so much power in embracing our full selves. African women have long used bare breasts as a powerful conduit to change. #SayHerName