IssaRae
The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
I'm a fan and long time supporter of independent film and video production. Dating back to the time when I worked for The Black Filmmaker Foundation I had the wonderful chance to promote the work of people of color and several of them were sisters like Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Kathe Sandler, and Michelle Parkerson, who were just getting started in a world where even few black men could gain a foothold. Other organizations have continued to focus on the work of our sisters in the industry- among them is Sisters in Cinema.
Rarely did they delve into the realm of black humor. There are times that we need to laugh-with-and-at ourselves.
The internet and youtube are opening the doors to women in comedy-so join producer IssaRae in her look into the life of a modern awkward sistah.
Color Lines featured efforts to promote and assist in fundraising for this refreshing web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, written, produced and starring recent Stanford graduate IssaRae.
This review from the Liberator will give you a glimpse into why the series is so appealing:
She had me at “I’m awkward.” Such a simple admission -- such a reflection of a significant amount of self-awareness on the speaker’s part. J, the protagonist in Issa Rae’s “The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl,” uttered this phrase at the end of the insanely hilarious web series’ first episode. I was hooked by the fourth episode, during which she and her Indian co-worker, CeCe, invoked Nettie and Celie in a game of The Color Purple-esque patty cake at a staff meeting, in honor of their budding interracial friendship.
After the fifth episode, I went on an unsuccessful iTunes virtual hunt for the Doublemint Twins’ “Booty Shawts,” from the MABG soundtrack. There is much to love about this show, beyond J’s frackin’ funny internal monologues that morph into soliloquies, and the classic, clever one-liners woven into each scene. Case in point: there’s a completely random reference to The Mystery Team, which -- from a personal perspective -- provides much appreciated assurance that I’m not sole black body guilty of adding that flick to my Netflix que...and enjoying, rather immensely, its simultaneously slick and uncouth humor.
Rae’s show is a refreshingly cathartic addition to a narrow public discourse on black woman-ness that considers few descriptors, and perpetuates a debilitatingly limited definition of beauty -- one encapsulated in Weezy and crew’s unending fascination with the “long-haired, thick, red-boned” among our ilk. It’s also complex -- problematic, even -- particularly around issues of queer identity. Yet, J’s voice is just as relevant as that of Lucille Clifton and as resonant as those of other black woman warriors who appeal to our more intellectual and political selves. It adds another chapter to the collective narrative of black womanhood, and functions as a reminder that we all want to be known, seen, valued, and, oy vey, loved for our authentic selves. And our authentic selves are a little weird -- from time to time. And richly textured -- all the time.
The series is now looking for backer donations to extend their season. The cast discusses the show here:
Here's episode one:
I grew up an awkward black girl. Days of dating, crying in the mirror and insecurity are now long past, but this series brought back many memories - and elicited quite a few belly laughs.
So-if you would like to share some chuckles with me - check it out.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In 2005, when the State Department invited Native Deen, one of the most prominent Islamic hip-hop groups in America, to do a good-will tour of Mali, Senegal and Nigeria, the band’s members did not know what to do. New York Times: A Diplomatic Mission Bearing Islamic Hip-Hop
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“We had a debate in the community,” said Abdul-Malik Ahmad, one of the three members of Native Deen. “ ‘Should we do it?’ ‘Should we not do it?’ Some people were saying, ‘Y’all are going to be puppets, going over there saying: ‘Everything’s O.K. We’re bombing your country, but we have Muslims, too!’ ”
The United States was not bombing those countries, of course, but the band was aware of the animosity in the Muslim world toward the American government. So Mr. Ahmad, now 35, and his collaborators — Naeem Muhammad, also 35, and Joshua Salaam, 37, who all live outside Washington — convened a shura, or community consultation. They asked for help to determine the proper course of action.
“We invited people of knowledge,” Mr. Ahmad said when we met Tuesday afternoon in a Georgetown bakery. “And we decided not to take every offer, but if it’s our mission to spread tolerance and faith, it can be O.K. to take this offer.”
Since that time, the trio of rappers and musicians — who use only percussion, because some Muslims believe other instrumentation is un-Islamic — has also traveled with the State Department to Egypt, Tanzania, Jordan and Palestinian territories. On July 1, Native Deen (“deen” is an Arabic word meaning religious system, or way of life) released its third album, “The Remedy,” featuring songs like “Only Fear Allah” and “Ramadan Is Here.”
The band performs about 40 shows a year, mostly at Muslim cultural conventions and summer camps. In the last 10 years, they have sold about 40,000 CDs, although, Mr. Ahmad noted, “usually our CD is bootlegged cause there is poor distribution channels for Islamic music.”
From left, Naeem Muhammad, Joshua Salaam and Abdul-Malik Ahmad form the Islamic hip-hop group Native Deen.
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Quiet as it's kept, a number of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance fell along the LGBT rainbow spectrum.
The Root: The Gay Harlem Renaissance
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Next month's National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C., features a play called Knock Me a Kiss. It dramatizes a black wedding of the early 20th century -- the 1928 marriage of Harlem Renaissance poet laureate Countee Cullen and Nina Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W.E.B.
Despite a lavish event -- she had 16 bridesmaids! -- the marriage was short-lived. Three months after the wedding, Cullen sailed to Paris with his best man, and bride and groom officially split up shortly after.
Quiet as it's kept, along with Cullen, a number of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance fell somewhere along the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rainbow spectrum. It actually isn't that quiet. Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Langston Hughes, all luminaries of the New Negro literary movement, have been identified as anywhere from openly gay (Nugent) to sexually ambiguous or mysterious (Hughes). In a 1993 essay, "The Black Man's Burden," Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root's editor-in-chief, notes that the Renaissance "was surely as gay as it was black."
In the last few decades, a number of authors and filmmakers have revised the revisionist history of the period and unlocked history's closet. The book Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (2003), by A.B. Christa Schwarz, puts the life and work of Cullen, McKay, Nugent and Hughes in an LGBT context.
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Rep. Keith Ellison, the Muslim lawmaker who tearfully defended his faith this spring, has a question for Islamophobe GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain: Why is he trying distinguish himself as the religious bigot of the presidential race of 2011 and 2012? Colorlines: Rep. Keith Ellison Calls Out Herman Cain’s Religious Bigotry
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Ellison posed the question in an interview with Salon.com this week. Cain is a conservative Tea Party favorite and former CEO who’s positioning himself to be the country’s second black president. He’s made headlines week after week with his denouncements against Muslims, including his latest remark that communities in the U.S. should have the right to ban mosques.
Yet Ellison questions why Cain would willingly play into such religious bigotry. As he told Salon.com’s Justin Elliot:
It seems to be a strategic move on their part. I don’t know if Herman Cain is just a sick individual, or if he is using bigotry to strategically move his campaign forward. But in either case it’s reprehensible that he just will not relent with this bigotry and that he actually thinks it’s going to enhance his chances to get the Republican nomination. If I were a Republican, I would be outraged. Anyone who cares about religious liberty and inclusion has got to be offended by Herman Cain.
Ellison admits that he hasn’t spoken to Cain directly, but notes that it likely wouldn’t make a difference since the presidential candidate’s bigotry seems to be a strategic ploy to win votes.
Take him — and you can even add Newt Gingrich to the list — these guys are not without resources. If they want to know something, they can find it out. If they want access to people ti give them information, they can get it. They’re saying this even though they know what they’re saying is likely to antagonize and inflame people. I have to say, it’s a scary prospect. A lot of times ideas take years to germinate. But if you keep whipping up hate and hysteria against a religious minority long enough, catastrophic things can happen.
Ellison makes an important point. After all, it was only last summer that the country was rocked by a series of anti-Muslim hate crimes.
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Dancing across, and often blurring, the line between the overtly political and outstandingly gorgeous, photographer Zanele Muholi captures the lives and love of Black lesbians in post-Apartheid South Africa. Colorlines: Zanele Muholi Photographs Lesbian Love In South Africa
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The artist self-describes her work as representing “the black female body in a frank yet intimate way that challenges the history of the portrayal of black women’s bodies in documentary photography,” and her website provides visitors with a wealth of photographs, writings, and videos that “map and archive a visual history” of her subjects.
Despite having the first constitution in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation and becoming the fifth nation in the world to legalize gay marriage, South Africa has a troubled history of anti-LGBT sentiments, especially outside of its urban centers. Lesbian women are routinely targets of hate crimes, and societal acceptance outside of South Africa’s major cities needs improvement.
Muholi has a gift for portraying the tangible, human emotions that her subjects possess. She celebrates love, and her work makes us want to do the same.
Thierry Ehrmann/Creative Commons
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Some properties in central Johannesburg have been hijacked by criminals who siphon off rent; squatters occupy others. Taxes aren't paid, and neighborhoods go downhill, thwarting revitalization plans. LA Times: In South Africa, residents worry as developers eye 'bad buildings'
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Derek Mutigo's home is pitch black and as cold as a fridge. To reach it, he descends broken steps into a cavernous basement and edges along a corridor holding a small plastic flashlight, its pale beam revealing haphazard plasterboard walls that don't reach the ceiling.
Numbers are scrawled in black ink on rickety doors. Nothing's painted; everything looks as though it was filched from a building site.
"Warning, strictly no alcohol, smoking and fighting," says a scribbled sign on a wall. In a stairwell, young men in thin clothes huddle around a fire in a tin drum.
Mutigo's door opens just far enough to squeeze through. Inside, in a space about 5 feet by 10, his wife, Rose, squats in the dark. On the other side of a curtain wall, another family lives.
"It's quite small," says Mutigo, a father of two schoolboys who makes $12 a day collecting trash for recycling while his wife works as a maid in upscale Sandton. "At least we are together as a family."
Their apartment is in one of hundreds of "bad buildings" in Johannesburg's Mad Max downtown. Some have been hijacked by criminals who siphon off the rent. Others were taken over by desperate squatters after the owners abandoned them.
For the city, the result is the same: Taxes aren't paid, and neighborhoods go downhill, thwarting plans to revitalize the central business district.
Amid this squalor, a few brave entrepreneurial spirits see opportunity, a chance to buy bad buildings and make them profitable again.
The Mutigo family’s single room in a "bad building" in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, is off a frigid basement corridor with no lighting. Turned-off utilities are often the first sign of impending eviction. (Mujahid Safodien / July 21, 2011)
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The ramifications of bigotry and hate, practiced here in America, has manifested itself overseas; and the consequences have proved tragic. Almost a hundred young people were gunned down at a Labour Party youth camp in Norway; their crime? Being liberal, promoting peace and multiculturalism; for being trained in the political process which would find them in leadership roles later.
The shooter cited Koch funded personalities and publications, he cited the Pam Gellers the Frank Gaffneys and the Andrew Breitbarts; he cited publications from Americans for Prosperity, the right wing Middle East Forum and the mysterious Clarion Fund, all Koch backed, by the way; in fact, he is a member of Norway's version of The Tea Party and wrote glowingly of the U.S. version. Koch backed speakers have spewed their particular brand of hate and bigotry at right wing rallies in Norway, in which the assassin attended; and also elsewhere across Europe.
So it surprises little that true believers would take up arms and attempt to enact the right wing politics of hate and bigotry. That is what these fomentors of hate hope for and expect.
What is a love person from a love people to do?
Continue to love, of course; but also to call a bigot a bigot when bigotry exists, to call out racism and the class war. To deride sexism, homophobia and religious intolerance; and to raise our voices for a call to action against injustice anywhere.
Lovingly, of course.
my poem
a love person
from love people
out of the afrikan sun
under the sign of cancer.
whoever see my
midnight smile
seeing star apple and
mango from home.
whoever take me for
a negative thing,
his death be on him
like a skin
and his skin
be his heart’s revenge.
**
lucy one-eye
she got her mama’s ways.
big round roller
can’t cook
can’t clean
if that’s what you want
you got it world.
lucy one-eye
she see the world sideways.
word foolish
she say what she don’t want
to say, she don’t say
what she want to.
lucy one-eye
she won’t walk away
from it.
she’ll keep on trying
with her crooked look
and her wrinkled ways,
the darling girl.
**
if mama
could see
she would see
lucy sprawling
limbs of lucy
decorating the
backs of chairs
lucy hair
holding the mirrors up
that reflect odd
aspects of lucy.
if mama
could hear
she would hear
lucysong rolled in the
corners like lint
exotic webs of lucysighs
long lucy spiders explaining
to obsure gods.
if mama
could talk
she would talk
good girl
good girl
good girl
clean up your room.
**
I was born in a hotel,
a maskmaker.
my bones were knit by
a perilous knife.
my skin turned around
at midnight and
I entered the earth in
a woman jar.
I learned the world all
wormside up
and this is my yes
my strong fingers;
I was born in a bed of
good lessons
and it has made me
wise.
**
light
on my mother’s tongue
breaks through her soft
extravagant hip
into life.
lucille
she calls the light,
which was the name
of the grandmother
who waited by the crossroads
in virginia
and shot the whiteman off his horse,
killing the killer of sons.
light breaks from her life
to her lives…
mine already is
an afrikan name.
-- Lucille Clifton
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The Front Porch is now open.
Grab a chair, sit down and rap with us for a while.