Breaking Down the Bars - OWN

If you haven't seen Breaking Down the Bars program your dvrs to record the episodes ASAP. The show chronicles the lives of women serving time at Rockville Prison in Indiana. These women are bearing their souls on this show. Rather than reinforcing the difference between offenders and non-offenders, this show highlights the humanity of offenders. BDTB gives the viewer the woman's history, her crime, the traumas she has suffered (and her addiction, if she is struggling with addiction). They show old photos, and tell the woman's story from her perspective. The most amazing part of the show is that they incorporate the family members that are waiting for them to return home, most often this includes their mothers, children, and sometimes their lovers. I love this show because it gives you the good and bad, and what you are left with is this tangled knot of a life. It just feels real to me. In the end, I am rooting for the women to get out of Rockville and back to the people that love them. Some of my favorite people featured on the show:

Larretha is a young black lesbian, a who got caught up in an armed robbery. She was a basketball prodigy, who hopes to play for a college upon her release.

Amanda "Shardea" is a gangsta ass white woman, who used to rob people. She is getting help with her addiction and finding out that their is life beyond thuggin.

Tiffany, is a bi-racial beauty who used to strip and robbed men who offered her money for sex. One of those incidents went terribly wrong when her boyfriend beat a man up so bad that he almost died. She is close to being released and will return home to her children. Tiffany's mother has colon cancer which is rapidly progressing.

Dr. Stephanie Covington, Addiction and Trauma Therapist is a standout. Among the people that work at Rockville, she is the most caring, compassionate and informed. She does not treat the women like offenders, she treats them like human beings. This woman is one of the best listeners I've ever seen on television. Covington is drastically different than the "in-house" prison staff. The in-house staff treat the women like they are their crimes and always lead with their disappointment in the women. It is easy to see how "in-house" prison staff are in the business of making more offenders rather than rehabilitating them. They all act like really bad parents who claim that they want you to do better than shoot down all of your hopes/dreams and laugh at you when you have minor setbacks. Thank the universe for Stephanie Covington and everyone like her.

Many of the women's backstories involve them being sexually abused as
children, which is really sad and it points to the magnanimity of sexual
abuse and, in my mind, reinforces the fact that we need a national
movement against child sexual abuse. We need more than lip-service. We need a national awareness campaign. We need to de-stigmatize mental health therapy. We need low-cost therapy.

Also many of the women are dealing with addiction, in many cases the women turned to drugs when they were trying to numb the pain of the sexual trauma. Marinate on that.

Black Women, Size, and Beauty

I recently joined an online group dedicated to Black women’s fitness. I thought it would be fun. More importantly, I thought it would be a way to maintain motivation through connecting with other women who might share the same issues, such as hair, body type, and skin protection. As a black woman who exercises on a pretty regular basis and has a hard time finding other black women to work out with, I thought that this community was right for me. I started following their website and their twitter feed. I couldn't have been more was wrong.

My first inclination that this group was wrong for me was that their target audience was black women with processed hair. One of the hottest topics on the website is maintaining one’s hair. This is a considerable issue among black women who relax their hair because it is chemically straightened and the more you wash it the more likely it is to “go back” to its natural un-straightened state. I have worn my hair natural for 14 years. I have locks, so I do not worry about them too much. If I have just freshly twisted them I tie them up and get on with the business of working out. Also, there are so many natural hairstyles that are deemed acceptable at corporate jobs, there are few reasons to maintain a perm/relaxer these days. But still, I don’t bash women with relaxed hair, but I don’t like to spend a lot of personal time listening to them complain.

So, I ignored the hair issue because I am still interested in having a community, when I should have seen it as the canary in the coal mine. Then the other day on twitter, I saw them tweeting the following, “Feeling like you want to up chuck means that you worked hard.” Then she adds that her husband told her this little nugget of wisdom. Uh no. In my world, feeling like you need to puke means that you did not wait long enough after eating to work out. Then the woman tweeting on behalf of this group goes on to talk about using running as a way to preserve the sexy. As if the only good reason to workout is to maintain your sex-appeal. Um no. I think that working out to maintain your health, challenge your body, connect with your body and nature, or train for a marathon. I do not work out to be deemed acceptable within the size regime of US beauty standards. Why would I, no matter how much workout I will never be a part of those standards or that regime because it does not include black women, thin or not.

Why do black women need to get involved in the size movement? Because our bodies are considered not the ideal therefore, even when we are not “fat,” many of us cannot fit into the clothes at mainstream stores because of our hips, butts, and small waists. Or we cannot fit because we are voluptuous all over, large breasts and butts, hourglass style. Fashion designers need to accommodate women’s bodies, especially the bodies of women of color. For those of you who are very thin, and do not have a large butt or breasts, who think that you don’t have to worry about this issue because you fit into their standard of what a body should fit, you should join the movement in solidarity with other women. And because there will come a time when you will not fit because bodies are precarious rebellious creatures.

The US Regime of thinness says, that if you don’t fit into clothes sized 00-12 then something is wrong with you. It says: punish your body to get into those sizes. Don’t eat, and workout to the point of exhaustion, perfection is around the corner. To further encourage us to keep our eyes on "perfections," we are bombarded with images of women’s bodies sans cellulite, giggling thighs, arms, etc. And the only time we see non-photoshopped images in mainstream media is when a celebrity is showing us that they are indeed--that thin. Of course there is resistance, youtube and blogs are full of images of real human bodies that are unvarnished, but those places are outside of mainstream media.

Many of the mainstream media outlets do not have any real diversity. What they call diverse is a cafe-au-lait black and Latina women that are barely distinguishable from white women. And there are so few Asian women and Indigenous women it is really embarrassing. For the few that are on network television are relegated to second string jobs, while the white woman is the lead female anchor, who is seen as second string to the male anchor. For example, on The Today Show Meredith Veira is the anchor, a little known fact is that Viera is Portuguese, but today that is defacto white. I digress. The women of color, Natalie Morales, Anne Curry, and Tamron Hall, are all second string correspondents, while Viera is the anchor. Anne Curry has been on the show the longest and was doing the news portion when Katie Couric was still on the show. Was she promoted to anchor? No. Now, The Today Show's 9:00 hour the people of color are allowed to anchor, but that is not so on the main hour. There is a rumor that Viera will leave, I wonder if any of those women will be promoted or if they will find another white woman to be the "face" of the show.

Even when women of color  meets the standards of skinniness, has European features, and demonstrates professionalism they are still passed over for jobs in mainstream media, be it fashion or a daytime talkshow. Check out the film below that follows a black fashion model trying to get booked during go-sees.

The Colour of Beauty: Elizabeth St. Phillip, 2010

Featuring Renee Thompson, Part 1

Part 2

This film highlights all that is bad in the fashion industry. The recent outbursts of John Galliano illustrate how this culture of exclusion is closely related to racialized religious oppression and marginalization. The idea that some bodies are in, and others are out, is the kind of binary thinking that leads to genocide. People are more than bodies. And People Matter.

The story isn't all bad. Some designers want to break with the old rules. I want to say thank you to Christian Siriano for casting mainly women of color in his winning runway show on Project Runway. He specifically said that he wanteH black girls because they are fierce. He did not rant and rave about their hips and butts. he wanted the best models and for him that meant brown skin. Now, some might argue that he was exoticising them, but I would have to disagree because he was admiring their beauty not exaggerating their differences. The history of exoticising in fashion is long and the practice is pretty overt. Here is a prime example:

This image of Alek Wek is an example of exoticising. She is being made to look like an other worldly creature, an animal. She has a headband that consists of two horns, her tongue is sticking out, and she is wearing a black bustier. All of this is done to make her look less human, and allows the viewer to fetishize her dark skin.

The few times when women of color are the inspiration for something in fashion, the product is used to propel racist ideals. Example Rodarte's collection for Mac that was "inspired" by the city of Juarez. Colorlines writes: 

The makeup company MAC released its new “Juarez” collection in collaboration with the high-fashion label Rodarte, with lipglosses named “del Norte,” bloodstreaked eyeshadows in a shade of “Bordertown” and a pale nail polish called “Factory.” The Rodarte designers said they were inspired by Juarez and the lines of women workers who’d make their way to factory jobs in the middle of the night. Sleepwalking, they called it. It was this collection that spawned their makeup line with MAC. (Read more of this article here.)

This line of makeup was appalling, especially when it is coming from one of the few manufacturers of  makeup that is pigmented enough to show up on brown skin. Brown girls in the States know that Mac is a go-to brand because it actually shows up on our skin, unlike many department store brands, which does not have enough pigmentation to do anything, but leave our skin looking ashy. Bloggers took them down and eventually, Mac apologized and donated the proceeds to efforts to help Juarez.

The fight for more inclusivity in the fashion industry is a move against exclusionary thinking, which is the close cousin of racism and oppression. 

Wishful Thinking: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Most people don't know that I love Jazz music, especially singers like Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald. I got this love from my mother, Sarah Vaughan is her favorite and by default she is mine too. Okay, not default, Vaughn was a singing virtuoso. I need this song and Vaughan's voice, today,  more than I could ever express in words.  

When she sings, "Someday I'll wish upon a star, and wake up where the clouds are far, behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops; that's where you'll find me." Don't you want to believe her? I do. 

Personal Lent

The picture kind of sums it up, but I will elaborate. My girlfriend and I are having our own personal lent, meaning that we have each decided to give something up for the next 38 days. We are calling it our personal lent because neither of us are religious and we decided to do it after the 'official' start of the Catholic Lent, which was last week. You might want to know why we are doing this. It is strange to do something religious when you are not religious. We are doing it because we just want to remind ourselves that we live in a state of plenty, meaning that we have plenty of everything to make our lives possible, plenty of food, shelter, love, etc. and privileges, when so many people around the world do not have what they need to clothe, feed, and protect themselves. We can live without somethings to help us to remember all that we do have in our lives. Furthermore, our lives are just fine without some of the gluttonous over-consumption that is encouraged and celebrated in the US.

So I'm giving up chocolate. I will miss this dear friend. But I know that its availability in the US is dependent on slave labor conditions and unfair import export rules that govern globalization. My girlfriend is giving up bread and sweets. So there will be minimal bread, sweets, and no chocolate around the house for the next month.

Of course there is whole host of reasons why self-denial is a bad idea for women, who are already well versed in putting themselves last, but for me, this is a personal choice to help me reconnect with the fact that I am a privileged person living in strange days in a country on the brink of something wonderful or horrible (depending on your perspective).