A PhD in Blackgirlology

That Awkward Moment When Someone Calls You on Your Shit…

I am not a member of the LBGTQ community. I do not know anyone who is transgendered. Hell, I had to Google what cisgendered means and I didn’t fully understand the definition that I came up with. I am an awkward black girl and have been one for the 32 years that i have walked this earth. I love Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (#teamwhitejay) but I’m a little concerned. I watched the most recent episode online, I laughed my ass off, and even bought the Tshirt Jay was wearing in the episode.

Then the controversy hit. Crunk Feminist Collective called out Awkward Black Girl for their use of the word “tranny”. (I apologize for not dotting it out, but I want people to know exactly what I’m talking about here). They wanted to remind Issa Rae that words matter and this word is used as a means to enact violence on the transexual and cisgendered community. They were right and they critiqued the show in a nice way. I’m not mad that they told the truth, I’m mad because I didn’t notice the problem when I first watched the episode.

As a self defined Awkward Black Girl, I notice the racism that I have to deal with everyday. I interact with white feminists on a regular basis who refuse to acknowledge that race plays a large part in my experiences as a woman. I also interact with a lot of Black men who forget that “black” or African American (depending on who I’m talking to) also includes the experiences of women. And, I have had conversations with people of all races who refuse to acknowledge that my poor upbringing colors my outlook on the world. What I don’t have is the daily experiences of being transgendered, so it’s not something I pick up on regularly.

So when I read the critique of Awkward Black Girl, it made me remember that we are all privileged in some fashion. I respect the response Issa Rae gave to the CFC’s letter but it does not alleviate my concern. These controversies only come up because we do not take time to concentrate on the oppressions of other people—only our own. Whether you think Issa Rae’s response was thoughtful or it was full of shit, I guarantee when she sits down to create the next episode she’s going to think about this incident. But when we as fans sit down at our computers to watch the show we need to do the same thing. We can show our support for the show without telling other marginalized groups that they are “being to sensitive to the jokes” or “the show is supposed to offend everyone.” I, as a fan, claim Awkward Black Girl because I have been marginalized within mainstream media, within academia, and within my my communities. People who did not understand my pain told me I was being too sensitive. And you know what? It didn’t make it hurt any less.

Awkward Black Girl is a great show because we can relate to the characters. This show is great because most mainstream TV shows would not star a dark-skinned black girl with short kinky hair. I love awkward black girl, because I am one and I know how hard it is out there for me. But we as fans can’t tell our transgendered brothers and sisters that they are being too sensitive about being offended when we don’t understand their lives. We can’t get online and have them carry our heterosexist garbage, just because we have our hands full with the racism and sexism that someone told us we need to get over because that (fill in the blank) offends everyone so you shouldn’t be mad.

Awkward Black Girl messed up. I hope she fixes it. But we messed up too. Not because we support the show, but because we overlooked another’s pain to make ourselves feel better.

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The Illusion of Post-Black(Hair)

Departmental parties in graduate school are not the most fun I’ll have on a Friday night, but I go because it’s part of the PhD game. I get to watch my professors drink a little and let loose and interact with students that don’t get to see much because my head is stuck in book somewhere. So while these things may not be interesting, they’re really the strict academic definition of social. I forced my daughter to go to this with me (and at 12 she really only cares about the quality of the free food) I guess to show to my department or try to convince myself that I am really more than a graduate student and me being in this program means more than getting a piece a paper that will serve as the key that I swallow once I lock myself in the ivory tower. For me this is real shit. And since, I’m the only black person in my cohort, every now and then it makes me feel better to have another black person in the room with me.

But like the script of a rerun of Law and Order:SVU someone always asks me how do I maintain my and my daughter’s shoulder length locks. The first assumption is that it’s weave and that I sit in a chair for hours and pay hundreds of dollars to have our hair braided. Then when someone finds out that it’s attached to our heads, the next question is, “How do you take it out?” I then say, “To get rid of locks you have to cut them out.” Then the feminist of the room asks, “Well if you cut it won’t your hair be short? I respond, “Yes but it’s only hair it will grow back”. Next, there is the “How do you wash it?” question. I say “with shampoo” and wait for the confused look. The whole conversation ends with a mini demonstration on how black people lock their hair. Does this whole exchange end with a greater understanding of black women’s beauty rituals? Of course not. Me and my daughter become further from the norm because the process is completely foreign to straight white hair.

So when I read about the teacher who took a sharpie to a student to fill a part in his head, I can’t say I was surprised. Black hair is deviant because it does not “flow” the way that white hair does. It’s a problem because whites don’t understand how black hair works and even after you explain it to them, they have the privilege not to take the situation seriously. So when someone tells me that we are in a time in American culture when we can go beyond race, I’m hesitant to agree. If we can’t get a past a like thing like how we groom ourselves, then we probably won’t get past the big racist problems that we need to deal with.

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Test Anxiety

I am anxiously awaiting my professor to email me the very first exam of my doctoral student career. Yeah, I’m probably making way too much of it, but what can I say…I’m the anxious type. I place so much emphasis on doing well in school because right now there is really nowhere else for me to go and I’ll owe still owe all of that money in student loans whether or not I actually finish my PhD. So I keep pressing on. I feel like it’s my destiny to finish this program, because I didn’t leave home to come all the way out here for absolutely no reason.

But this brings me to bigger questions for today: What is stereotype threat? and Why as much as I don’t to buy into it, I do anyway?

For those unaware, stereotype threat is the belief that because a group that you are a member of (i.e. race, gender) is stereotypically bad at something that you will believe that the person evaluating you will believe that you will do as poorly. As a result you screw up the test, the paper, or whatever it is that you are working on.

Now, I’m not a psychologist and I don’t even play one on TV, so I’ll concede that I may have my facts wrong on this one. But I can’t help but wonder if a case of “Solo Negro Syndrome” makes me a little more anxious about this test. Since, I’m the only black person accepted to the program this year, I can’t help but think it is important for me to make a good impression on the department so they won’t (or I won’t) feel like accepting me into the program was a waste of time. But, I’ve done take home tests before and I successfully completed a master’s degree so I understand how grad school operates so this should not be the biggest issue in my life. These are just hoops you jump through to get to the next level. But it’s pretty hard to block out those voices that tell me that there is something wrong because I don’t see very many people that look like me. It makes me feel like I am forced to prove myself as well as all black people.

But that is way too much emphasis to put on one little test.

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Crushed by My Crush

I have a mad crush on Isaiah Mustafa aka The Old Spice Guy. He doesn’t know me probably never will. I have no intention of leaving my real life love for an image created for me on TV. (But he is still really hot!) But it’s really all a mirage. No matter how much I want to believe that the man and the image share the same characteristics, the character that Mustafa plays in the commercials is NOT him. As much as the intellectual in me wants to separate the man from the media image, it’s hard not to imagine that the man in the Old Spice ad holding two tickets “to that think you like” actually exists in reality. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to. Maybe it’s because I’m so bogged down with other things like (tumblr, facebook, the flavor of the month reality TV shows) that I simply don’t have time to.

And that’s my problem.

As I scrolled through my enormous list of unread news articles on my rss reader, i noticed that the Blogmother at What About Our Daughters called out Essence Magazine for doing damage control when Mustafa said some really dumb things about black women’s hair. While I won’t step out on the ledge and call Isaiah Mustafa a “black woman hating bigot” as she does (even though she might be right), as a kinky-haired black woman the fact that he could let anything remotely close to “good hair” come out of his mouth is offensive and ludicrous. 

But that’s not what I’m even mad about.  

The media creates this facade of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. When I first watched the commercial “The Man Your Man Should Smell Like” I knew this was something different. A black man was being held up as the epitome of masculinity by performing as the face of Old Spice. In my eyes, it was a corporate acknowledgement that black can be beautiful (even if it’s just beautiful enough to see a few bottles of body wash). As a black woman, I was excited to see a black man not being demonized for his sexuality or even regulated to the buddy figure. And I think that allowed me to get sucked into the fantasy that this particular black man,when out of character, could have some respect for black women of all shades and hair textures. And I guess I was wrong.

The fact that Isaiah Mustufa is attracted to women that have straighter hair than I will not affect my life (remember we’ve never met). But with all the negativity that surrounds the representations of black women on TV, on the internet, and in black music, it totally sucks that I can’t even hold on to the fantasy that black men on TV appreciate black women for who they are.

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Yet Another Person Writing Another Blog Entry

I guess if you’ve read the title and used a little context clues then you know who I am. I’m a blackgirl. Dive a little deeper and you’ll figure out that I’m a graduate student. What you don’t get is that I’m a mother, a lover, a fighter, and an all around opinionated human being.

But who isn’t right?

I struggle with blogging because it’s something that everybody does. You surf the internet long enough and you’ll find that someone has an opinion about something or another and an all out flame war breaks out if someone decides disagree with your topic or opinion of choice. I’ve observed a lot of “isms” on the internet and I generally attribute them to the fact that people can let their true selves emerge because that have the mask of anonymity to protect them. It’s kind of annoying because it detracts from real dialogue about real issues and it makes each and every one of us enact some self-important stance of relevance in a world that doesn’t give a shit what we think as individuals. Because our importance is directly related to the amount of monetary power we have, us “little people” may not have a chance in the age of corporate personhood.

So, I figured I would add my voice. My voice is not overtly political. It’s not super nihilistic. And sometimes it’s down right lame. But if the only ones that get to speak are the ones with money or the ones who want to sell our souls to corporations then there really isn’t any hope. So I’m going to risk being eaten alive, risk being seen as boring with nothing relevant to say, and I’m going to risk outing my own contradictions to tell the story of a blackgirl’s (mis)education in the University of Life.

Let’s see what happens.

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