Tanya Lasagna - Black, Liberal, and a Woman

Institutionalized racism. Intraracism, feminist exclusion, Black sexism, Black Exploitation, Sexual Exploitation and appropriation, Stereotypes and Expectations, Communal assumed responsibility, Assumed Communal Response (..the black community), Marginalized Issues, Our voices minimized by our color, Disparity in the Judicial System, etc...

[tanyalasagna]

I'm watching Scandal

1104 others are also watching. Scandal on tvtag

[tanyalasagna]

I just unlocked the Scandal: Randy, Red, Superfreak and Julia sticker on tvtag

3569 others have also unlocked the Scandal: Randy, Red, Superfreak and Julia sticker on tvtag

Where on Earth is Olivia Pope? Thanks for watching the Season Four Premiere of Scandal! #TGIT Share this one proudly. It's from our friends at ABC.

[tanyalasagna]

I just unlocked the Penny Dreadful Catch-up: Séance sticker on tvtag

1459 others have also unlocked the Penny Dreadful Catch-up: Séance sticker on tvtag

You're catching up on Penny Dreadful: Séance. Thanks for watching! Share this one proudly. It's from our friends at Showtime.

[tanyalasagna]

I'm watching Insidious: Chapter 2

Check-in to Insidious: Chapter 2 on tvtag

[tanyalasagna]

I'm watching The Best Man Holiday

“Waste of perfectly good movie time”

Check-in to The Best Man Holiday on GetGlue.com

[tanyalasagna]

[finofilipino]

[restless-soul-enjoy-your-youth]

[theavirginsbeauty]

[brutereason]

When they became free citizens, black women’s reproduction was no longer directly tied to profit. In this new context, black mothers became the object of fierce eugenics efforts. In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts explains how the state employed involuntary sterilization, pressured women to submit to long-term birth control, and restricted state benefits for large families as a means to control black women’s reproduction. Black mothers were again blamed as the central cause of social and economic decline in the early 1990s, when news stories and popular films took up the theme of ‘‘crack babies.’’ Crack babies were the living, squealing, suffering evidence of pathological black motherhood, and American citizens were going to have to pay the bill for the children of these bad mothers. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, authors of The Mommy Myth, explain that media created the ‘‘crack baby’’ phenomenon as a part of a broader history that understands black motherhood as inherently pathological. They write: ‘‘It turned out there was no convincing evidence that use of crack actually caused abnormal babies, even though the media insisted this was so… . Media coverage of crack babies serves as a powerful cautionary tale about the inherent fitness of poor or lower-class African American women to be mothers at all.’’

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen (via brutereason)

[brutereason]

[The ‘Angry Black Woman’] stereotype does not acknowledge black women’s anger as a legitimate reaction to unequal circumstances; it is seen as a pathological, irrational desire to control black men, families, and communities. It can be deployed against African American women who dare to question their circumstances, point out inequities, or ask for help. Both white policy makers and black patriarchs can dismiss gendered claims as the ranting of eye-rolling, neck-popping, ‘oh-no-you-didn’t’ angry women. Black women’s concerns can be ignored and their voices silenced in the name of maintaining calm and rational conversation. Their anger is not experienced as a psychological reality but is seen through an ideology that distorts black women’s lived experiences. The angry black woman stereotype hamstrings sisters who find that they cannot forcefully and convincingly advocate their own interests in the public sphere—either in black political movements or in American policy environments—because their passion and commitment are misread as irrational.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen (via brutereason)

[brutereason]

Not only have faith communities helped black women counter negative images of themselves, African American churches have also been the primary site of black women’s political organizing. More than three decades of social science research have outlined the organizational resources that accrue to black churchgoers, mapped the psychological resources that contribute to the political actions of African American believers, and established the centrality of religious practice in black life. Because black women constitute the majority of the church’s regular membership and the vast majority of active participants, they have been the link between the black church and political action. Still, despite their numbers and activism, the work of black women in the church often goes unacknowledged. Both in popular imagination and in much social science research, the black church is imagined as a place where charismatic African American men offer stirring social commentary from the pulpit and bring about radical social and political change. From David Walker’s Appeal to Martin Luther King’s Dream to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the voices of male religious leaders symbolize the black church’s prophetic moral politics. The role of African American women has been largely invisible to researchers.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen (via brutereason)

[brutereason]

Black people can be collectively punished for the actions (or imagined actions) of a single person. Southern lynch mobs and Northern white race riots made no allowance for the innocent people in the path of their murderous hunts for ‘black criminals.’ American racial terror was predicated on precisely this unwillingness to distinguish among black people. Terrorism targets its victims not for their actions but for their identity.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen

Terrorism targets its victims not for their actions but for their identity.

(via brutereason)

[brutereason]

Although Jim Crow drew a bright line of legislated shame around the entire race, women were particular targets. Victorian sensibilities held that women were uniquely endowed with morality and ethics. Because they held authority in domestic matters, women were considered the tender sex whose delicacy required special dispensation in public spaces. The special treatment of fragile women was a signal of civility, and those who treated women rudely or roughly in public were labeled barbarians. But this courtesy was extended only to white women. Black women, regardless of class, education, or status, were potential targets of public abuse, ridicule, and mistreatment in the Jim Crow South. The permissible mistreatment of black women was a vicious form of collective shaming. One site fraught with this tension was public transportation. Historian Blair Kelley’s Right to Ride vividly illustrates the shame imposed on black women who were shunted from ladies’ cars on trains, trapped behind cages on street- cars, and refused passage on buses. By refusing to treat black women as ladies, Jim Crow meted out a gendered form of collective shame.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen (via brutereason)

[brutereason]

Faith in a benevolent and loving God is a common tool black women employ to straighten out the crooked room of race and gender stereotypes. God provides an alternate measuring stick for judging their human worth. When judged against social values rooted in white beauty standards, economic success, political power, or normative domestic arrangements, African American women consistently fall short. By focusing on a divine valuation based on their character, kindness, service, and strength, black women shift the angles of the crooked room and produce a new image for themselves. Faith is a resistance strategy. And faith for many black women derives from the experiences and teaching of African American Protestant churches. The historical and contemporary practices of many of these churches are based in patriarchy. In many ways these black churches create new forms of subjugation for black women through their promotion of inequitable gender leadership and their teachings about male domination in the home. Thus, although God is understood as a companion in the struggle for recognition, the place where many black women come to know God can be just as unequal as the broader political world.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen

Atheists need to understand this shit. And they need to understand that they cannot reduce the influence of religion in our society without becoming inclusive of people of color (and other marginalized groups) by understanding their religious experiences and working to reduce their marginalization. There is no other way.

(via brutereason)

WOOOOO

[brutereason]

What begins as empowering self-definition can quickly become a prison. By adopting and reproducing the icon of the strong black woman, African American women help craft an expectation that they should be autonomously responsible and self-denying caregivers in their homes and communities. This means that they are validated, admired, and praised based on how they behave, not on who they are. Loss of social standing is an ever-present threat for individuals whose social acceptance is based on behavioral traits rather than unconditional human value. Any mistake, bad act, or bad outcome can be translated into a global sense of failure. While all individuals are publicly judged by their actions, the strong black woman imperative is unusual in that it requires tremendous personal fortitude from a group with few structural resources. It thus exposes black women to more opportunities for shaming. African American women hold up the strong black woman as a shield against the shame-inducing negative stereotypes of the crooked room. To protect against always being seen as inferior, they declare themselves uniquely capable, but this strength is a shield full of holes; it sets up new possibilities for being misrecognized.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen (via brutereason)

[brutereason]

Shame and its attendant physiological effects may be partly implicated in racially disparate maternal health outcomes. African American women are much more likely to have low-birth-weight babies, to endure infant mortality, and to have worse maternal health during their pregnancies and in the first postpartum year. Recent research on the effects of stress on birth outcomes shows a substantial racial difference in psychosocial stress. Researchers found that infant birth weight suffered in conjunction with a mother’s perception of racism—an effect that was independent of medical and social variables. This means that the racism black women feel throughout their lives affects the health of their infants. Black pregnancy is not just a personal life event; it occurs within a sociopolitical context of shame and stress.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen (via brutereason)