A Brief Note on Bald Heads, JIm Crow and Charles Blow.
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I’ve shaved my own head bald for a little over 20 years. (I’ve also been drug and alcohol free for a little over 20 years. There is a correlation.) The primary reason I started shaving my own head bald was because I’ve had a receding hairline for a long as I remember and figured that if MJ can do it for the same reason, so can I.
Shortly after I began shaving my head bald, a few female acquaintances and friends (only) usually asked me for permission to rub my bald head for good luck. When acquaintances began to ask, I think that I had vaguely heard of this peculiar custom of rubbing a bald head for good luck but thought it was a rather odd custom. I had several uncles who also wore their heads bald but I never thought to ask them to rub their bald heads for good luck, even as a child.
Only when my good friend, N., rubbed my head (and endearingly called me a “bald-headed MFer”) was this gesture even anything that even resembled affectionate. Otherwise, I think that it’s a strange superstition.
On a couple of occasions, women that I was acquainted with managed to sneak up behind me and rubbed my head as a sort of a surprise hello. Those women realized very quickly that I was not amused.
Both women happened to be white.
Because I had observed that others (usually women) also rubbed the bald heads of white guys for good luck, I did not think that “rubbing the bald head of a guy” had racist connotations; bald heads were especially common in Chicagoland during Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls championship era of the 90’s (not so much now, although it’s not rare). I was aware of the fact that, generally, black men were considered to be able to wear a bald head better (”when white men shave it bald, you can see the stubble and it’s not attractive to me,” I remember one woman telling me) but I considered that to be an aesthetic issue related to skin color but not necessarily ethnicity.
In the course of researching the origins of the superstition “rub a bald head for good luck” is, indeed, of racist origins and I found a few interesting references to the superstititon (my favorite one involved Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier and Otto Preminger). I think that I recall a version of this from one of the Uncle Remus stories.
President George W. Bush was infamous for giving rubs to bald heads.
The most infamous bald head rub that I could find was the one Muhammad Ali and Earnie Shavers (now THAT was shady and disrespectful of Ali, a bit!).
While the history of this particular superstition fascinates me, there’s a small point about what we know to have been “Jim Crow laws” that needs to be made.
What we know of to be “Jim Crow” consisted of a lot more than simply the legalization of separate and unequal access to public accommodations for whites and blacks.
“Jim Crow” also consisted of the unwritten rules of social etiquette between the races. I touched on some of these unwritten rules in my 10/20/15 essay on honorifics. There were also unwritten rules governing body integrity whether we’re talking about a white man striking a black man with or without a reason or whether it is simply rubbing a black man’s head (bald or otherwise) for good luck (as if black people have magical powers or something).
(And do I really have to go there with white women touching black women’s hair...)
I say all of this to say:
Most people commenting on Egberto Willes’ thread concerning Charles Blow’s anger at Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany did seem to understand that McEnany’s gestures, at the very least, were condescending and may have had strong racist overtones.
Quite a few others could not see what the big deal was.
Issues of bodily integrity are always personal and, especially as black people went a long time in this country without being able to control whether a white person could touch them or not for any reason…
Having control of who touches my person under whatever circumstances is something very essential to what I, as a black person, would call freedom.
After all, for most of the history of this country, the black body was controlled and manipulated in greater or lesser degrees.
If Mr. Blow does not want to be physically used in the way that Ms. McEnany attempted, he has every right to object.
By the same token, if you want to rub my bald head for good luck….I would rather you not, quite frankly, but if you must, ask me first.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Stop the co-opt. In this EBONY.com series exploring Black hair origins, we trace this intricate form of braiding to Ancient Africa Ebony: The History of Cornrows
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“Boxer braids,” “KKW braids,” and “Birthday braids” are the cutesy terms used to describe cornrows whenever they’re worn by Kim Kardashian or Kylie Jenner as opposed to simply calling them cornrows or plaits.
Braids are nothing new, but it depends on what mainstream media outlet you ask. Last April, Cosmopolitan posted a tutorial titled, “Double Cuff Mohawk Braid,” but the hairstyle being showcased was clearly cornrows. To make matters worse, Cosmo promoted the video using the subhead, “You’ve NEVER seen a braid like this before.”
Come again?
Sure, we’ll pretend that Alicia Keys didn’t stun in beautifully adorned cornrows during her first couple of years in the spotlight. We’ll also pretend that Beyoncé never rocked cornrows during her Destiny’s Child days. And we’ll act like Cicely Tyson didn’t show off her cornrows in a national TV appearance years before White actress Bo Derek mainstreamed them in the 1979 film 10.
In 2014, Marie Claire tweeted that Kendall Jenner had taken braids to a “new epic level.” Months later, the LA Times creditedCara Delevingne, Rita Ora and Kristen Stewart for cornrows “moving away from urban, hip-hop to chic and edgy.” So, in other words, cornrows are only chic and edgy when the person wearing them is white?
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BALBINA, a woman from Mombasa, Kenya’s main coastal city, remembers fetching her neighbour Abdullah’s body from a police station. “It wasn’t so terrible,” says Balbina (not her real name). Surprisingly, “there was not even any blood.” The wound was hidden at the back of his head; his face was serene. He was killed by police, in what they claimed (but she does not believe) was a shoot-out. “Abdullah did wrong. He went to Somalia, maybe he killed innocent people.” But he deserved justice, she says, not to be shot in the back of the head without a trial.
Such stories are easy to find on the Kenyan coast, where young men are often recruited to fight for al-Shabab (“the Youth”), a Somali jihadist group. Some go to fight in Somalia; some carry out terrorist attacks at home. In recent years the government has cracked down on anyone it suspects might have joined al-Shabab. In December Haki Africa, a human-rights group, published the names of 81 people, almost all young Muslim men, who it says were killed or “disappeared” by police since 2012. The real number is probably much higher, says Francis Auma, the group’s co-ordinator, since many cases go unreported or leave few clues implicating the state.
The coast of Kenya has long felt different from the rest of the country. Under British rule a ten-mile littoral strip was nominally part of a protectorate administered by the Sultan of Zanzibar, rather than part of the colony of Kenya. Unlike the rest of the mostly Christian country, the coast is largely Muslim, with a large ethnic Somali population to the north. And since independence from Britain in 1963, it has had a rebellious streak, built on anger about the unequal distribution of land and jobs, perceived persecution of Muslims, and dislike of rule by elites from Nairobi, the capital.
It is these resentments that help al-Shabab to recruit. Abdullah, says Balbina, “had no parents; he was lonely and jobless.” That made him easy prey for recruiters, who stoked his anger while also flashing cash and promising him a better life in Somalia. Money is a big lure, says a local official. Some jihadists even pose as recruitment agents for jobs in the Gulf, she says. “You see a man in a good car, he takes three or four guys, promising jobs.”
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Ebony Media's CEO told The Root this week that it may bring Jet magazine back to newsstands for the first time in almost three years.
"We are considering repositioning Jet for millennials with a focus on entertainment and having limited newsstand publication," wrote Cheryl Mayberry McKissack in a February 15 statement on The Root. McKissack also suggested the company would produce more digital content through Jet's website.
The Chicago-based and Black-owned Johnson Publishing Company printed Jet weekly from 1951 to 2014. Like the monthly Ebony, which the company first published in 1945, Jet geared its cultural and political coverage towards Black readers. It holds distinction as the first magazine to publish photos of Emmett Till's body in 1955 and it closely covered the Civil Rights Movement in subsequent years.
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Growing up in the working-class mill town of Orange, Mass., Genevieve Gaignard wrestled with her identity. She was the fair-skinned daughter of a black father and white mother. She was the proverbial middle child. She struggled with body issues. Often, she says, she felt misunderstood, if not invisible.
Now 35 and living in Los Angeles, Gaignard has a strong sense of herself and her place in the world as a multidisciplinary artist. In “Smell the Roses,” the artist’s first museum show in Los Angeles, Gaignard tackles the big issues of race, class and, especially, identity.
The exhibition at the California African American Museum includes photography, video and assemblage works, but the nine large photographs, all richly colored performative self-portraits, are standouts. Like the artist Carrie Mae Weems, Gaignard uses the medium to explore the contemporary African American experience; like Cindy Sherman, she dons wigs and heavy makeup to create female caricatures that humorously embody societal stereotypes. The women she portrays are both anonymous and familiar — individuals steeped in aesthetics from pop culture, drag queen hyper-femininity, the working class, ’70s chic à la Netflix’s “The Get Down,” TV news and street fashion, among other influences.
In one image, a woman in a cropped “Thug Life” T-shirt and a bandanna across her forehead poses in front of a mural of the American flag, clutching McDonald’s takeout. In another, a small-town housewife, eyeglasses perched atop her blond bob, waits beside a thrift-store bridal salon, cradling a bag of groceries in one arm and a loose watermelon in the other. Another photograph depicts an older woman in her Sunday best, clutching a Bible in front of a New Orleans row home.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The anti-apartheid, white South African poet, writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach, was exiled after marrying a French national of Vietnamese descent while studying in Paris in the early '60's. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and The Immorality Act of 1950 made it a criminal offense for a white person to have sexual relations with a person of a different race. He made a trip to South Africa in 1975, was discovered in the country, (it has been reported that the ANC betrayed him to the government because they didn't trust him), arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for High Treason. Massive international intervention ultimately secured his release in 1982, he returned to Paris and obtained French citizenship.
Nigerian poet, novelist and musician, Chris Abani has a prescience that is almost uncanny. His first novel, Masters of the Board, about a neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria earned him praise as "... (A)frica's answer to Frederick Forsyth." The government, though, believed the book to be a blueprint for an actual coup and sent the 18 year old Abani to prison in 1985. After serving six months, he was released; but he went on to perform in a guerilla theatre group which led to his arrest and imprisonment at the notorious Kiri Kiri prison. He was released again, but after writing his play Song of a Broken Flute, was arrested a third time, sentenced to death and sent to the Kalakuta Prison; where he was jailed with other political prisoners on death row.
Languishing most of the time in solitary confinement, Abani was finally and fortunately released in 1991. He lived in exile in London until 1999, when he emigrated to the United States, where he currently teaches at UC Riverside in California.
Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach
There are stones even here
worn into a malevolence by time
gritting the teeth and tearing
the eyes with the memory.
Out in the desert, the wind
is a sculptor working the ephemera
of sand. Desperately editing steles
to write the names of thousands of slaves
who died to make Pharaoh great.
It is a fool’s game.
And we are like the blind musician
at the hotel who tells us with a smile:
I’ll see you later.
The guard at the pyramid eyes me.
Are you Egyptian? he demands,
then searches my bag for a bomb.
At the hotel they speak Arabic to me,
don’t treat me like the white guests,
and I guess, even here, with all
the hindsight of history we haven’t
learned to love ourselves.
I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot
explain why. How do you say: In my country
they buried me alive for six months?
And so you lie and tell yourself this is love.
I am protecting the world from my rage.
Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves
here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa.
Do you have a knife? Do you have one?
the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me,
searching us. We call this on ourselves. We
are clearly political criminals.
I trace the glyphs chipped into stone.
As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could
I too would carve myself into eternity.
Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me
you’ve found a spelling mistake in it!
A line of miniature statues is placed
into the tomb to serve the pharaoh.
One for each day of the year. Four hundred.
The overseers are a plus. I think
even death will not ease
the lot of the poor here.
Statues: it seems the more I search the world
for differences the more I find it all the same.
Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too
when he said we are all one.
Mona argues about who should pay
to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can
treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists.
A woman nearby tells her husand she can see
dead bodies at work. Why pay?
Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask.
That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees.
From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops
spread out like a conference of coffee tables.
Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs
like family secrets sunning themselves.
Two white goats on a roof chew
their way through the debris.
On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me
she wants to be Celine Dion.
She is my sister calling me home to Egypt.
Perhaps one day I will be ready.
For now it is enough to know I can
be at home here.
-- Chris Abani
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