Death of A Mad Black Woman...

This week, I finally gathered the words up from deep within my soul to write about Sarah Reed.
It has since been published on Lee Jaspers website (below):

Please read Sarah's Story. Share it amongst your friends and family. Hers is a story that must be told. Her voice was silenced but together we will raise up her name beyond the white noise and #SayHerName

http://leejasper.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/death-of-mad-black-woman.html?m=1

Yours In Solidarity, Daniella 

I never carried a rifle 

On my shoulder 

Or pulled a trigger. 

All I have 

Is a flute's melody 

A brush to paint my dreams, 

A bottle of ink

All I have 

Is unshakeable faith 

And an infinite love

For my people in pain

​ Tawfiq Zayyad

The Deconstruction of the Female Body 1

There is big business in promoting fallacious insecurities. For Caucasian women, there is the merciless advertising of the obtusely named ‘anti-ageing’ cream. A woman must marry, toil, slog, sweat, endure parturition and then raise happy, healthy balanced children. Statistics dictate that she will invariably end a hapless marriage once those children flee the proverbial nest, by which time she will have capitulated and sacrificed so much that she must embark upon a spiritual excavation to unearth who she is in her own light; yet her experience and wisdom must never show on her face or body. The tapestry of wrinkles, frown lines, furrows, stretch marks, cellulite, caesarean scarring, weathered hands, and crows feet that illustrate the intricacies of her glorious journey are a repulsiveness that must be eradicated. The media says it is so, and so it must be. £554million is misspent chasing the anti-ageing phantom in the hope that eventually a cream will freeze women in time, never to display another laughter line or forbidden wrinkle again. In the USA, the promotion of fallacious insecurities has been so lucrative that the $832mn industry surmises ‘Anti-ageing’ profits will burgeon by 46 per cent between 2010-15.

The presence of melanin in the black skin makes Black women a tough sale for so called age defying products. However, they breathe a sigh of relief at having branded and packaged a different fictitious flaw that must be eradicated: blackness. 

Her Caucasian counterpart is victim to a constant pressure to starve, snip and squeeze herself into the diminutive sample sizes flaunted by high end fashion labels. Kelly Osbourne, after a lifetime of purported pride for her curves, announced after losing several stones she could now fit into fashion sample sizes as though she had been knighted. The envied Sample sizes, that every model must be able to don commodiously, vary from between a size 0-2. A size zero in America is a UK size 4, meaning the fashion victims (victim being the operative word) waist must be less than 22inches if she is to stand a chance of being en vogue, at which point she will share her waist size with that of an average 5/6 year old child. Unfortunately, for the women captive to fashion, the idols dictating their beauty standard are mostly homosexual men. The relevance of this seems to be that the homosexual designers from Armani, to Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent openly design for the snake hipped boyish sylphs they wish their models resembled. Julian McDonald, who was not long ago awarded an OBE for services to fashion was famously outrage that a size 10 model might be considered for America‘s Next Top Model seethed: 'This is a serious show. A catwalk model is a size six to eight. You can’t have a plus size girl winning – it makes it a joke.' He may well find womanhood a joke of hilarious proportions but the young girls trying to live up to the rules are going the way of all flesh prematurely in their bid to shift as much of it as physically possible.

In 2006, young supermodel Luisel Ramos complained of feeling unwell before she fainted on her way back to the dressing room during while participating in a fashion show during Fashion week in Uruguay . She was to die of heart failure caused by anorexia nervosa the very same day. Ramos's father later informed police that she had gone days without eating in preparation for the show and that had adopted a diet of lettuce and diet coke for the three months before her death. She weighed just 97lbs. 

The same year, 21 year old Ana Carolina Reston was hospitalized with kidney malfunction. She had been surviving on a diet of apples and tomatoes since attending a casting call in China in 2004, where she was reportedly informed that she was 'too fat'. She later died in hospital. 

Such is the furore voiced by organisations (a furore which appears to agitate fashion designers) that the new kid on the catwalk is the transsexual male. The latest craze for men whom naturally possess the manly bodies, devoid of waistlines, plump backsides, dimpled thighs and inconvenient breasts (that even the most diminutive of models struggle to starve off) that meet the grade but are feminine enough in the face to keep the female populaces drooling with brainwashed envy.  The darling of the catwalk this year is 28 year old Brazilian model Lea T (born Leandro) whom shot to super stardom after being discovered by Ricardo Tissci the creative genius behind Givenchy.  Since her discovery Lea has become the face of Givenchy‘s women’s clothing, a muse of Carine Roitfeld and Kate Moss's co-model on the cover of LOVE magazine as well posing nude on French Vogue. Exactly how women buying Givenchy clothing are meant to feel is apparently irrelevant. The nude image of her standing skeletally naked, raven hair cascading down her back and her hand casually covering her penis screams that women are simply not up to the job. Of his muse, Riccardo Tisci gushed (while metaphorically sticking his fingers up at every woman in the world) 'She's a true goddess. She's always been very feminine’. The Guardian labelled her ‘the perfect high fashion package: alluring, whippet-thin and with a face too distinctive to be considered merely pretty.’ Hot on her tail was Andrej Pejic the Serbian-born 19 year old model from Melbourne. Now the face of Marc Jacobs newspapers described  him as the perfect woman ‘With his long blond hair, huge almond-shaped eyes, Angelina Jolie lips and a body as flat as a surfboard, Andrej Pejic is the toast of women’s high fashion the world over.’ In the 21st century the woman is simply too womanly, even when starved to within an inch of their lives. The thought that women actually respond to such an impertinent act of abject misogyny is disturbing to say the least. In the fashion industry, womanliness is a dirty word, the very existence of her hologynic features a drawback and a hindrance. Nonetheless, women still aim to adhere to manmade size zero trends never grasping that it is, in actuality, a process of complex unsexing that is virtually impossible to attain. 

Bitch Better Have My Money

 

Female Chauvinist Pigs... 'Bitch Better Have My Money'...

No Honour Among Thieves, No Solidarity Among Women

Alpha Unit

There is little doubt that female rappers and so-called 'artists' have largely been indoctrinated by the same agenda, and victimised by the same driving force, as any other bedevilled female. The difference is that in embodying the male fantasy they perpetrate the annihilation of their very own sisters. This type of female rapper is Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pig. They are the women who abandon all sororal instincts to carve their success in a man's industry by emulating the worst of emasculated behaviour. They are the fem-bots who have achieved fame and profit by objectifying their fellow women regardless of the devastation. Rihanna's recent song 'bitch better have my money' (a phrase popularised by Hollywood pimps who would growl the words before unleashing violence on their exploited victims if they had not earned enough money on street corners and alleyways) has been represented by a video that is case-in-point. She hunts, kidnaps and tortures a woman: all for the love of money. The world of pimping is after-all, big business. Ubiquitously in the background, the profit to be made from any pro-prostitution agenda is huge, the profit to be made in trafficking humans for sex is around 5 billion to 7 billion dollars a year.

Each year approximately 20.9 million women and children, are bought and sold into sexual servitude. 2 million children are exploited every year in the global commercial sex trade. There are around 10 million or more women and children who are living at risk of violence daily somewhere in the world due to slavery at the hands of their pimps. 2,000,000 children in Benin and Togo are sold into domestic, sex or agricultural positions to nearby Nigeria or Gabon. In Nepal more than 5000-7000 women and children are sold into forced prostitution annually. Twenty percent of these prostitutes are young girls under the age of sixteen. This is big business; globally, it is an over 30 billion dollar industry, all money made from selling children and young girls to be raped. Do not think for one moment that the Gangster Rap Pimp Agenda has missed that memo.

They forced me to sleep with 50 customer a day. I had to give the pimp all my money. If I did not earn a set amount, they punished me by removing my clothes and beating me with a stick until I fainted, electrocuting me, cutting me. Kolab, sex trafficking survivor.

Rihanna assuming the role of pimp, speaking with pimp rhetoric and exerting violence upon women spits upon the girls and women whom live and die at the hands of pimps every single day. Shame on her. A victim of domestic violence herself, Rihanna's palpable disregard (and worse still, propagation of) violence against women is utterly contemptible. Her video 'We found love' earned her a backlash from anti-rape campaigners.

There exists records of handfuls of Jews whom profited from tipping off the Nazi’s about the whereabouts of their Jewish friends in hiding. There is no doubt that some African merchants profited from slavery, some even exploited the situation for their own tribo-political conceptual volitions. Whilst this added to the power of the enemy, It never erased the blame from the originator of the butchery. These were the smattering of stool pigeons whom wrongfully sought solace on the side of the enemy. In any modern democratic struggle be it in the media or Palestine there are those who would play Judas if it meant their own survival and monetary gain. Some would call it cowardice others opportunism. This is the weakness of human nature; and it does not for a moment take the sting out the suffering of the milked majority. In this case this is mostly because there has only ever existed less than a handful of these Female Chauvinist Rappers among thousands of male misogynist rappers that we have seen emerge in the past two decades. The damage they have inflicted in terms of reinforcing man-made stereotypes has been colossal, yet they simply do not exist in enough of a quantity to balance out, justify or erase, male accountability in this quagmire.

"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. . . . The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object." John Berger ‘Ways of Seeing’

Optimists say Rihanna's (and company's) overt slackness is a nod to the freedom of individual expression and new aged empowerment. I say, this is yet another well designed ruse of mainstream marketing designed to injure women in the same vein as her male counterparts. The final scene of the BBHMM video ends with Rihanna staring at the camera, presumably having murdered her female victim, in an image eerily reminiscent to the photograph released during her post-Chris bashing.

 

 

In 2009, pop singer Rihanna, the 20-year-old Barbadian-born star and daughter of an abusive father, sustained trauma to her face and body, including major contusions to both sides of her face, a split lip, swelling, bruising and a bloody nose after her boyfriend R’n’B singer Chris Brown beat her and attempted to choke her to death. Rihanna survived the brutal attack and feminists the world over prayed for the teenage idol to make a phoenix like return, emerging from domestic violence as a new voice for the cause. Instead, she became an advocate for violence almost overnight. She emerged donning necklaces with gun shaped pendants. Posing proudly with Snoop and Warren G, 'Thug Life' etched onto her stomach in marker pen, toting a spliff. Despite a feminist backlash self-proclaimed 'good girl gone bad' then made the bizarre decision to have a handgun tattooed onto her ribcage. In 2011, Rihanna released hit song ‘S&M’ and waxed lyrical about the joys of being slapped and spanked by men before her bevy of young and impressionable fans.

‘I love to be tied up and spanked. Using whips and chains is too planned... you have to stop and look for the whip. I prefer them to use their hands."

Much like the diaspora whom expectorate The N word, such women provide ample ammunition for the vast apologists who list female antics as among the reasons misogyny in Gangsta Rap is admissible. Clearly there is far more to be gained from siding with the misogynist enemy than there is from being an ambassador for vulnerable women. Whenever an opportunity might exist for a strong black woman to lead others, the Gangsta industry turns her into a traitor as slippery as he and laughs heartily as his army multiplies.

The predicament of Female Chauvinist Pig is much the same as the fans of 50 Cent who seek to please him insomuch as in siding with the Original chauvinist pigs they ultimately lose. It is a man's game. Since his fantasies are based on his hatred of self and of women, attempts to fulfil his warped fantasies only fuel his hatred and spur him to disrespect her more. Tila Tequila tried to jump on the man-emulating bandwagon and would later attempt suicide before seeking psychiatric help, turning her back on the entertainment industry and changing her name. It is a futile endeavour. Rihanna may try traitorously to wield the male baton and beat women with it, but she will never truly be accepted by the boys-club she is seeking membership to. This is the fate of the ‘Walking Talking Rapping Vagina‘ whom tries to gain membership, in vein, to a boys club that seeks to stamp out her and all like her.

It is dangerous for a woman
to defy the gods;
To taunt them with the tongue's thin tip,
Or strut in the weakness
of mere humanity,
Or draw a line daring them to cross;
The gods own the searing lightning,
The drowning waters, tormenting fears
And anger of red sins.

Oh, but worse still if you mince timidly--
Dodge this way or that, or kneel or pray,
Be kind, or sweat agony drops
Or lay your quick body over
your feeble young;
If you have beauty or none, if celibate
Or vowed--the gods are Juggernaut,
Passing over . . . over . . .

This you may do:
Lock your heart, then, quietly,
And lest they peer within,
Light no lamp when dark comes down
Raise no shade for sun;
Breathless must your
breath come through
If you'd die and dare deny
The gods their god-like fun.

Anne Spencer Letter To My Sisters

Hounds On The Trail: Legacy of Jim Crow

'Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an 'unwritten law' that justifies them in putting human beings to death' (Ida B. Wells) There was a reason lynch mobs enjoyed the tarring and feathering of black men in Deep South America: for they knew the emasculation of the black man was the apogee in dehumanization. The soul-scars of his humiliation would remain an eternal reminder to his own people whilst the psychological flogging of his manfulness would garrotte him slowly, surely, mentally, physically. There was a reason lynch mobs engineered circus-try, torturing their victims publicly before the noose became their final relief and reprieve; To defile his spirit and castrate him before Kodak cameras was psychological warfare at it's most grotesquely effective; to tell the watching world, both black and white, that the Black Man could, after all, be conquered. They grinned at the camera lens, smiling and pointing at their prey to demonstrate that to snatch a black mans life without the foreplay of first raping him of his dignity would lessen the pleasure. Mighty black leviathans disempowered by yellow bellied invertebrates. Traumatised black carcasses, triumphant white egos. The penalty of minor infractions judged but never proven. When the LAPD pummelled Rodney King on a roadside captured by a shaky video camera (the very reason we know Kings name) officers issued some 33 blows and at least six fully-charged kicks. They swarmed like hyenas in the night, drunk with power, wielding phallic weapons. And just as the victims of lynch mobs were often hung from a noose after they're deaths (having already died of the injuries sustained from whips and kicks and boots and blows) as a brutal rubber-stamp of their prowess; King (despite being unable to move) was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and cordcuffs. Rodney King devoted the subsequent 21 years to leading a war on police brutality, he was a husband and father, he was awarded $3.8 million in court for his troubles. He was admitted to rehab to conquer the demons that ravaged his mind. He was found in 2012, aged just 47, drowned and pumped full of alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, and PCP. I say, the police killed him that March evening as they laid blows into his emasculated body. It simply took two decades for those 33 thrashes to reach his cerebral cortex where self-mutilating hatred finally took an addictive hold and whispered to him in suicudal symphonies. For the anguish of his hard-hearted flogging to shackle itself around his heart and plunge into the condition lying dormant in his arteries and stop it's beat. I've no doubt in my mind that Slager enjoyed the spectacle of watching a respected, loved, mature father of four run like a deer in his metaphorical hunters crosshairs. Many a lyncher has enjoyed revving their chainsaw, releasing bloodhounds, or firing shotguns into the weeping skies and watching their prey scurry into the woods. And as Walter Scott ran into the woods, my sinews wailed as he ran; a deer amidst trees that had once perhaps borne strange fruit. I balked at every bullet; bent down to hear his final sigh. I wept as they crouched down to cuff him. And left him there alone. It is not simply the murder of black men than wreaks of the lynching of old, it is the grimace, the grinning, the execution of an age old tactic in humiliation. It is the one moment in which Slager paused to eagle-eye Walter Scott scamper and scuttle before taking aim and shooting him five times that must surely Remind Us that lynching, in all it's cool-blooded, delivery and demeanour; in all it's bestial liturgies and rites; in all of it's seasoned venatics and big-game hunting ... Lives On. The memory of the United States of Amnesia might be conveniently sawed off and niggardly, but our memories must be long. 'My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps.' Maya Angelou)

A Note on Bleaching out Brownness

Subject: Modern celebrities are white-washing standards of beauty by bleaching out brownness. When a visibly paler-skinned Kim Kardashian sashayed her way through crowds in Paris this week, the paparazzi went wild for her platinum mane debut; my heart sunk. Not because I have a personal vendetta against blonde as a hair choice but because it is yet another feather in the cap for Aryan-ised trends. All the while, the features of black and brown women are becoming seemingly out of season. Just weeks ago, Zandaya was the subject of a fracas for brandishing a natural african hairstyle; the fallout of which included a so-called Fashion Police surmising that Zandaya smells of patchouli and weed. Yet as Kim Kardashian parades lighter skin and blanched tresses she is hailed as fashions unlikeliest yet most recent trailblazer. This once exotic, tanned, black-haired Armenian reality star has now banded a growing trail of paling celebrities. Beyoncé, Rita Ora, Amber Rose, and a myriad of others whom are endorsing a niche that is steadily diminishing brown features (Unless, of course, it is the sexualised Venus Hottentot inspired Africanesque derrière) from the modern teenage girls conceptions of comeliness. It is hard not to view this as a backwards step in the centuries -old battle for black and brown women to be recognised as natural beauties in arenas where blonde and blue-eyed standards have long been considered elite.

As Black Boys Slay Eachother

There was once a time and place in which we did not gauge masculinity by the acquisition of land and the construction of buildings, the claiming of earth with guns and territory and lines drawn with blood; these were learned from the colonialist blueprint. We once built foundations on the inheritance of a given name, a sacred ancestry; an identity exhumed by illustrious history, purpose manifested by nurturing historic soil, sowing and reaping; the responsibility handed from father to son, from mother to daughter. The whyfor and whatfor held in the honour of hoisting tradition onto our shoulders. Our boys now claim corners on streets that have and never will be their own; they boast postcodes that were written up long before our diasporic arrival, defend corners that were never the bosom. Corners they are scoffed at for treading only footprints into by true blues and bluecoats whom need no warrant to stop search and remove them from the street sign they lay claim to. As though reading from scrolls penned by colonials themselves; they bulwark lanes with odonyms for Romans not Africans, champion territories that belonged to Mobs before Mandem. They lay claim to the machete heirloom that skinhead Brick Lane Massive's wielded to look-see black men. Retired now, they recline and relax as our sons lynch on their behalf, plunging blades into mirror images of themselves but never seeing the suicidal irony. Belowing 'this is MY endz', as black boy blood saturates cold concrete lands. They obey the colonialist command and never question the abject absurdity of it all, for they no longer see themselves in the selfsame whose soul lies lifeless within chalk lines and yellow tape. Taking selfies by corpses reminiscent of happy Deep South lynchers who captured black souls hung from ropes in their luminous glare. Their victims preserved as visual souvenirs; modern L.D Nelson's strung up before deerstalkers who are no longer white hicks. Conscripted soldiers in a cold war, Manchurian candidates launched into unrighteous battle. There is no bequest or birthright in a land that was never ours; no endowments in estates; merely a divide and conquer master plan rendered effective and achieved. As black boys erase themselves before our eyes.

Rodney King Baby Yeah Beat Her Like A Cop...

…..RODNEY KING BABY… YEAH… BEAT HER LIKE A COP….. Over the years I have focused on the most blatant forms of destruction through Gangsta Rap as means of demonstrating how italicised and underlined the writing appears on our community walls. The sad reality is that the signs are all too often written in code, the detection of our demise mocked openly by Gangsta Rap not as opaque as we might like. This bloodcurdling thought came to me some weeks ago as the belligerent sound of Lil Wayne (the ‘lil’ perhaps the source of his palpable insecurities) poured from the mouth of a teenage boy on the bus. Lil Wayne sneered at me vicariously (laughing as he did so) ‘Rodney King baby yeah beat her like a cop’ his, now fairly old release, ‘Mrs Officer’ a song which, on a surface level, addresses his fantasy of seducing a female police officer. It would seem that the devoted, fervent mood that spiralled after Rodney Kings violent thrashing was caught on an eighty-one second video tape and sparked the controversy regarding police brutality and led to eventual indictments of the officers has packed up and gone to a leisurely luncheon. Let us not forget the unforgettable riots that followed, resulted in the bloody deaths of 9 people injuries to over 138. Before and after this bloody episode, ‘excessive force’, ‘police brutality’ were terms that sent shivers down the spine of the collective. We were once Rodney King. We once squirmed at the mention of Rodney Kings mauling, writhed at the memories of Rodney’s hands raised protectively over his head as he cowered beneath the thrashing batons and brutal shoe soles of the local authorities. We held our heads in our hands as we saw ourselves, our fathers, our sons lying powerlessly on the pavement, shamed, degraded, disgraced, brutalised like a scene from 1940’s Harlem. The very image of a group of white Here To Serve men beating a single unarmed black man too much of a painful reminder within our genetic memory, an emblematic twinge, the symbolism of which thumped us, changed us, moved us. Twenty four years on, however, it would appear that Lil Wayne might openly use Rodney’s experience as part of his perverse sexual daytime chart topping music. He is authorized to explicitly and unreservedly declare Rodney’s name as he fantasizes. He is allowed to and we let him. We let him because we do not hear him as we buy his CD’s and absorb his messaging. I’m sure there is a suited blissfully ignorant Daily Mail reader whom would keenly assure us that we are no longer moved by any disrespectful reference to Rodney King because we have simply ‘moved on’, police brutality is a rarity, we have the benefit of being able to laugh casually because we are part of a modernised, innovative, peaceable society. In 2006, Eunice Barber competed for Sierra Leone and then for France and won the heptathlon at the World Championships in Athletics in 1999, the long jump in 2003 and finished second in heptathlon in 2003 and 2005. Barber, who like many black female athletes symbolised physical female endurance, and success the likes of which we so rarely witness, ‘participated’ in what the news flagrantly termed a ‘Police scuffle’ (notably a term which Wikipedia is reluctant to change). Eunice, a local and national treasure, had on the day of her alleged ‘scuffle’ taken a wrong turn down a road, the consequences of which were devastating. When the police approached her car, Eunice wound down her window, at which point the male officer slapped her around the face. Others arrived, and a full-blown attack ensued. Eunice, who sat at a Parisian Press conference wearing a neck brace and relayed an account which included her hands being stamped on, being kneeled on by five officers, the loss of use of her arm, hair pulling, racist taunts (‘Do you believe you could behave like this in Africa?’) sat in bewilderment relaying her sordid experience, “Mentally, I’m bewildered. I feel as affected psychologically as physically.” A hero abused by the country she championed. And as the police bent over into her ears and sneered ‘You are lucky that there are people looking; otherwise, we would have done much worse. When you get out of here you’ll need crutches ’ somewhere in the distance Lil Wayne drools ‘Rodney King Baby yeah beat her like a cop’ and no one flinches. In his world, Eunice's experience is simply a modern male fantasy. His need to embody the white cop and become the victimiser himself more important than his need to defend his sister.