White Republicans May Be Too Racist to Appreciate Obama…But the French Aren’t. Obama 2017!

Wow! Obama for President…of France!

A Citizens’ Petition Calls For A New French President: Barack Obama

The French presidential campaign has been marked by scandal, surprises and upsets as the April election approaches.

Now a petition is calling for an even bigger plot twist: the return of President Barack Obama. As in, French President Barack Obama.

Earlier this week, the Obama 2017 campaign was launched, calling for the former U.S. president to step forward as a candidate in the French election while there’s still time.

“Barack Obama has completed his second term as President of the United States,” the site says. “Why not hire him as president of France? … [He] has the best resume in the world for the job.”

Posters for Obama 2017 have been plastered around Paris. The slogan, of course: “Oui on peut,” French for “Yes we can.” And a campaign-style website is gathering signatures to persuade Obama to run.

It’s not the first time French citizens have expressed longing for Obama’s leadership — at least two petitions were started last year — but it’s by far the most successful. According to the site’s organizers, some 27,000 people have signed the petition so far.

A group of four friends — “basic 30-year-old guys from Paris” who work in creative industries — came up with the idea “after a drink,” according to one of the people behind the site. He asked NPR not to use his name, to avoid possible legal consequences that could damage his career.

“We were thinking about French politics and saying that we were fed up with the fact that we all the time had to vote against someone,” he says, “and how it would be cool to be able to vote for someone we admire. We came up with Obama.”

“I think the whole world would love to have him as president,” he says.

They have an Island Prison where they kept their last dictator, Napoleon… Think we might be able to work a deal and use it for the Chumph?

 

The Black Father They Don’t Think Exists

Riding the Subway downtown, I see a lot of different folks. From the millennials in natty suits, to the homeless. Coming back to the office from a meeting out in the ‘burbs on a train which travels through one of the poorer sections of the city, I wound up next to a young black man, in dreads and a T-Shirt… Who was pushing a baby carriage.  Struck up a conversation with him. Turns out he was the father, and he took care of the child, a little girl about 18 months old, on weekends – so his unmarried ex-girlfriend could get chores done and have some free time. He was a worker for the Subway system, who worked on the repair crew at night, and had gotten the job shortly before his daughter was born. He had taken the child on a walk along one of the waterfront parks, and announced that her birth had really turned his life around…

The Black Dad That You Don’t Think Exists

The black dad that you don’t think exists falls asleep with his son on his chest after rocking him for what felt like forever. His wife transfers the baby from his arms to the crib and coaxes him to bed where he only sleeps for three or four hours. He spent most of his wife’s pregnancy talking about legacy and is determined to create one. So he rises at 3:30 in the morning to take photographs of the city at its emptiest. He has to be to work at 7 and knows he won’t have the energy to chase his dreams after a dehumanizing 12 hour shift.

The black dad that you don’t think exists hasn’t taken a shower alone in a week. Lately he’s been combining the baby’s bath time and his own shower to maximize the ever evaporating resource of free time. After, he likes to dress his son in color palettes to match his own.

The black dad you don’t think exists wants to give his son everything, even the things he doesn’t have, yet. He wants to learn how to fish so he can teach his son how to fish. He wants to take him camping. He says things like, “we need to look up activities to stimulate the baby’s sensory development.” His wife is content to let their son bang his toys together.

The black dad that you don’t think exists sees a pretty sunset and insists upon a family portrait by the water. He takes a lot of family portraits. And still he laments about wishing he took more. The black dad that you don’t think exists fights with his wife about who gets to comfort the baby when he cries. He’s designated Sundays as family day. He slow cooks sausages and peppers. He refuses to miss his son’s doctor’s appointments, the same way he refused to miss his wife’s prenatal appointments. He dreams up family field trips. Plans to show his son the world.

The black dad that you don’t think exists sneaks his son a taste of whipped cream. He says he can’t believe a day will come when his son won’t give him unlimited cuddles. He lets his son use his dreadlocks as handlebars to pull himself into a standing position. He wishes he could make a room entirely out of pillows so his baby never fell down on anything hard.

The black dad that you don’t think exists is nurturing. He is soft. He is kind. Gentle. Thoughtful. Hardworking. Dedicated. Creative. Sleep-deprived. Caring. Devoted. Well-informed. Present. Supportive. Dynamic. Loving. Important.

The black dad that you don’t think exists does. And he is not an anomaly.

 

Dr Cornel West and the Politic of Hate

Cornel West on CNN

 

CORNEL WEST: You can’t talk about wealth and inequality, you can’t talk about education, you can’t talk about massive unemployment and under employment and you can’t talk about drones being dropped on people in other parts of the world without talking about white supremacy and its ways in which it operates. It doesn’t have to be overt. The president is right about that.

But too many black people are niggerized. I would say the first black president has become the first niggerized black president.

CNN ANCHOR: What do you mean by that?

WEST: A niggerized black person is a black person who is afraid and scared and intimidated when it comes to putting a spotlight on white supremacy and fighting against white supremacy. So when many of us said we have to fight against racism, what were we told? ‘No, he can’t deal with racism because he has other issues, political calculations. He’s the president of all America, not just black America.’ We know he’s president of all America but white supremacy is American as cherry pie.

We’re talking about moral issues, spiritual issues, emotional issues. White supremacy has nothing to do with just skin pigmentation, it has to be what kind of person you want to be, what kind of nation we want to be. Democrats and Republicans play on both of those parties in terms of running away from the vicious legacy of white supremacy until it hits us hard. Thank God for Ferguson. Thank God for the young folk of all colors. Thank God for Staten Island and fighting there. Thank God in Baltimore, now the precious folk in Charleston.

President Obama delivers the eulogy for the dead in Charleston…

 

RESIDENT OBAMA: Giving all praise and honor to God.

(APPLAUSE)

The Bible calls us to hope, to persevere and have faith in things not seen. They were still living by faith when they died, the scripture tells us.

(APPLAUSE)

They did not receive the things promised. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.

We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith, a man who believed in things not seen, a man who believed there were better days ahead off in the distance, a man of service, who persevered knowing full-well he would not receive all those things he was promised, because he believed his efforts would deliver a better life for those who followed, to Jennifer, his beloved wife, Eliana and Malana, his beautiful, wonderful daughters, to the Mother Emanuel family and the people of Charleston, the people of South Carolina.

I cannot claim to have had the good fortune to know Reverend Pinckney well, but I did have the pleasure of knowing him and meeting him here in South Carolina back when we were both a little bit younger…

(LAUGHTER)

… back when I didn’t have visible gray hair.

(LAUGHTER)

The first thing I noticed was his graciousness, his smile, his reassuring baritone, his deceptive sense of humor, all qualities that helped him wear so effortlessly a heavy burden of expectation.

Friends of his remarked this week that when Clementa Pinckney entered a room, it was like the future arrived, that even from a young age, folks knew he was special, anointed. He was the progeny of a long line of the faithful, a family of preachers who spread God’s words, a family of protesters who so changed to expand voting rights and desegregate the South.

Clem heard their instruction, and he did not forsake their teaching. He was in the pulpit by 13, pastor by 18, public servant by 23. He did not exhibit any of the cockiness of youth nor youth’s insecurities. Instead, he set an example worthy of his position, wise beyond his years in his speech, in his conduct, in his love, faith and purity.

As a senator, he represented a sprawling swathe of low country, a place that has long been one of the most neglected in America, a place still racked by poverty and inadequate schools, a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment — a place that needed somebody like Clem.

(APPLAUSE)

His position in the minority party meant the odds of winning more resources for his constituents were often long. His calls for greater equity were too-often unheeded. The votes he cast were sometimes lonely.

But he never gave up. He stayed true to his convictions. He would not grow discouraged. After a full day at the Capitol, he’d climb into his car and head to the church to draw sustenance from his family, from his ministry, from the community that loved and needed him. There, he would fortify his faith and imagine what might be.

Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean nor small. He conducted himself quietly and kindly and diligently. He encouraged progress not by pushing his ideas alone but by seeking out your ideas, partnering with you to make things happen. He was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.

No wonder one of his Senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as “the most gentle of the 46 of us, the best of the 46 of us.”

Clem was often asked why he chose to be a pastor and a public servant. But the person who asked probably didn’t know the history of AME Church.

(APPLAUSE)

As our brothers and sisters in the AME Church, we don’t make those distinctions. “Our calling,” Clem once said, “is not just within the walls of the congregation but the life and community in which our congregation resides.”

(APPLAUSE)

He embodied the idea that our Christian faith demands deeds and not just words, that the sweet hour of prayer actually lasts the whole week long, that to put our faith in action is more than just individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation, that to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society.

What a good man. Sometimes I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you’re eulogized, after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say somebody was a good man.

(APPLAUSE)

You don’t have to be of high distinction to be a good man.

Preacher by 13, pastor by 18, public servant by 23. What a life Clementa Pinckney lived. What an example he set. What a model for his faith.

And then to lose him at 41, slain in his sanctuary with eight wonderful members of his flock, each at different stages in life but bound together by a common commitment to God — Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson.

Good people. Decent people. God-fearing people.

(APPLAUSE)

People so full of life and so full of kindness, people who ran the race, who persevered, people of great faith.

To the families of the fallen, the nation shares in your grief. Our pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a church.

The church is and always has been the center of African American life…

(APPLAUSE)

… a place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.

Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout “Hallelujah…”

(APPLAUSE)

… rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement.

They have been and continue to community centers, where we organize for jobs and justice, places of scholarship and network, places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harms way and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter.

(APPLAUSE)

That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means — our beating heart, the place where our dignity as a people in inviolate.

There’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, a church…

(APPLAUSE)

… a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes.

(APPLAUSE)

When there were laws banning all-black church gatherers, services happened here anyway in defiance of unjust laws. When there was a righteous movement to dismantle Jim Crow, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached from its pulpit, and marches began from its steps.

A sacred place, this church, not just for blacks, not just for Christians but for every American who cares about the steady expansion…

(APPLAUSE)

… of human rights and human dignity in this country, a foundation stone for liberty and justice for all.

That’s what the church meant.

(APPLAUSE)

We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history, but he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress…

(APPLAUSE)

… an act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination, violence and suspicion, an act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin.

Oh, but God works in mysterious ways.

(APPLAUSE)

God has different ideas.

(APPLAUSE)

He didn’t know he was being used by God.

(APPLAUSE)

Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer would not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group, the light of love that shown as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle.

The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn’t imagine that.

(APPLAUSE)

The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley, how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond not merely with revulsion at his evil acts, but with (inaudible) generosity. And more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.

Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood — the power of God’s grace.

(APPLAUSE)

This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace.

(APPLAUSE)

The grace of the families who lost loved ones; the grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons; the grace described in one of my favorite hymnals, the one we all know — Amazing Grace.

(APPLAUSE)

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

(APPLAUSE)

I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

(APPLAUSE)

According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God.

(APPLAUSE)

As manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace — as a nation out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind.

(APPLAUSE)

He’s given us the chance where we’ve been lost to find out best selves. We may not have earned this grace with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace.

But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate Flag stirred into many of our citizens.

(APPLAUSE)

It’s true a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge, including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise…

(APPLAUSE)

… as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride.

(APPLAUSE)

For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression…

(APPLAUSE)

… and racial subjugation.

(APPLAUSE)

We see that now.

Removing the flag from this state’s capital would not be an act of political correctness. It would not an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.

(APPLAUSE)

The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.

(APPLAUSE)

It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.

It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races, striving to form a more perfect union.

By taking down that flag, we express adds grace God’s grace.

(APPLAUSE)

But I don’t think God wants us to stop there.

(APPLAUSE)

For too long, we’ve been blind to be way past injustices continue to shape the present.

(APPLAUSE)

Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty…

(APPLAUSE)

… or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.

Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate.

(APPLAUSE)

Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal-justice system and lead us to make sure that that system’s not infected with bias.

(APPLAUSE)

… that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement…

(APPLAUSE)

… and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure.

(APPLAUSE)

Maybe we now realize the way a racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal…

(APPLAUSE)

… so that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote…

(APPLAUSE)

… by recognizing our common humanity, by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin…

(APPLAUSE)

… or the station into which they were born and to do what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American. By doing that, we express God’s grace.

(APPLAUSE)

For too long…

(APPLAUSE)

For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.

(APPLAUSE)

Sporadically, our eyes are open when eight of our brothers and sisters are cut down in a church basement, 12 in a movie theater, 26 in an elementary school. But I hope we also see the 30 precious lives cut short by gun violence in this country every single day…

(APPLAUSE)

… the countless more whose lives are forever changed, the survivors crippled, the children traumatized and fearful every day as they walk to school, the husband who will never feel his wife’s warm touch, the entire communities whose grief overflows every time they have to watch what happened to them happening to some other place.

The vast majority of Americans, the majority of gun owners want to do something about this. We see that now.

(APPLAUSE)

And I’m convinced that by acknowledging the pain and loss of others, even as we respect the traditions, ways of life that make up this beloved country, by making the moral choice to change, we express God’s grace.

(APPLAUSE)

We don’t earn grace. We’re all sinners. We don’t deserve it.

(APPLAUSE)

But God gives it to us anyway.

(APPLAUSE)

And we choose how to receive it. It’s our decision how to honor it.

None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight. Every time something like this happens, somebody says, “We have to have a conversation about race.” We talk a lot about race.

(APPLAUSE)

There’s no shortcut. We don’t need more talk.

(APPLAUSE)

None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy.

It will not. People of good will will continue to debate the merits of various policies as our democracy requires — the big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates.

Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again.

(APPLAUSE)

Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual. That’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society.

(APPLAUSE)

To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change, that’s how we lose our way again. It would be a refutation of the forgiveness expressed by those families if we merely slipped into old habits whereby those who disagree with us are not merely wrong, but bad; where we shout instead of listen; where we barricade ourselves behind preconceived notions or well-practiced cynicism.

Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the south, we have a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.”

(APPLAUSE)

What is true in the south is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free, too.

(APPLAUSE)

That — that history can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind. But more importantly, an open heart.

That’s what I felt this week — an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what’s called upon right now, I think. It’s what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.”

That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible.

(APPLAUSE)

If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace, amazing grace.

Amazing grace…

(SINGING)

(APPLAUSE)

… how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now, I see.

(APPLAUSE)

Clementa Pinckney found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Cynthia Hurd found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Susie Jackson found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Ethel Lance found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… DePayne Middleton Doctor found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Tywanza Sanders found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Daniel L. Simmons, Sr. found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Sharonda Coleman-Singleton found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… Myra Thompson found that grace…

(APPLAUSE)

… through the example of their lives. They’ve now passed it onto us. May we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift as long as our lives endure.

May grace now lead them home. May God continue to shed His Grace on the United States of America.

 

Dr. Martin Luther King said:

“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”

Think it’s time Cornel West heed those words.

 

Amazing Grace – President Obama

President Obama brought down the house, and there were quite a few with tears in their eyes…

 

True Puppy Love

This little guy in diapers has a friend for life…

I am not a big dog fan, but it is mostly because with my lifestyle I don’t have the time to take proper care of a mutt, with travel and variable hours.

 

If you are a fan of pups… There are more pics here.

 

Why I Don’t Sleep With White Guys

Ok…Now that I got your attention – This one isn’t about me.

Not that it’s any great loss to the gay community – I’m a heterosexual guy who likes the ladies.

But this one caught my eye from a Student in Canada. Interesting viewpoint, since it’s now in style in some parts of America for some black women to get their “swirl” on. And I certainly have run into black guys “who only date white women”. So I wonder if the reverse sort of thing is going on with those women. And do some of those women feel the same way?

And no – the eye candy isn’t the author – I just couldn’t find a decent pic..

They say nothing comes without a price. However, in the case of being one of the only coloured girls in my city, nothing comes without a race.

I live in a predominately white city. Not by choice (I’m from Toronto), but to attend university. When I first got to the city, I thought people would be incredibly racist and I’d be excluded and snubbed by my peers. Well, the opposite happened.

Arrogance aside (I promise), everywhere I went, I was white men’s object (emphasis onobject) of desire. And it wasn’t just white men — all races of men I’ve never encountered, but white men seemed the most enthralled by my presence. But the initial adoration and my swelled ego soon subsided after I realized that men were not attracted to me for being just a “pretty face” — I was being objectified, exoticized and sexualized for being one of few coloured girls in a sea of white men. I felt alone. And more importantly, I felt disgusted with myself.

Feminist, social activist and African American author bell hooks terms this kind of attraction to the ‘Othered’ body as “Eating the Other.” This is the phenomenon where white men as well as the media view coloured women’s bodies, especially black women’s, as a site of difference. The coloured body is stereotypically everything the white woman’s body is not: she is not “pure,” “fair,” or “docile.” Rather, her body represents deviance, darkness, temptation, evil, and hypersexuality. This detrimental image generates a deep sense of desire and adventure within the white man — a desire to colonize her body — ‘eat’ it up, and use it to come to know himself.

Through fucking a coloured woman, the white man transcends his ‘whiteness’ and innocence, moving into more experienced and dangerous territory. Literally through her body, he learns what he is and what he is not. He gains access to cross the border into a dark territory that only he, of all his friends, has yet to venture to. But after ‘consuming’ her multiple times, he becomes sick and repulsed, as with any overconsumption of food, and spits her out.

I found hooks’ theory to be overwhelmingly comforting. It came at a time when I was trying to make sense of what was happening to my body and how it was being perceived. It especially came at a time when I found out the guy I had been seeing had a white girlfriend and was sleeping with me to finally make his fantasy of fucking black girls come true (wasn’t I lucky to be the first?). As a mixed-race girl, I also found it unsettling that the colour of my skin allowed people to label me as “Black,” or as something tropical and exotic — it was always one of the two. I was getting sick of being approached at bars by white men, changing their pick up line from “Are you an angel? ‘Cause it looks like you fell outta heaven.” to “I love black people. I have black friends, you know — now can I take you home?”

Sometimes it was more of an excited squeal, a wide-eyed gawk, their hands shaking as they coyly tried to place their hands on my ass, exclaiming, “I’ve never danced with a black girl before,” looking at me the same way one would attack a Quarter (Dark Meat) Chicken Dinner at Swiss Chalet. Dressing up in cheetah print made it worse. My skin colour and mixed heritage had given me a label I didn’t like — that “Black” girl at the bars, that “Island girl” on the bus. Nobody knew what I was, so I was immediately placed in a stereotypical category that both separated me from others and made me mysterious. I was always that girl, not just a girl.

After months of self-hatred, feeling dirty inside and out and wondering what I was doing wrong, I finally started to come to terms with what was happening around me. Being a racial minority female in a city of racially dominant men made me exotic. I was a hot coloured commodity in a rather colourless city, because they had so few “people like me.” The exotification of women comes from being that racialized woman — the Other kind of woman who does not carry “white” features or practices “white” culture.

It is not a compliment, because like eroticization, it sexualizes, objectifies and racializes the female body, jamming it into a tight space where hypersexuality, primitiveness, danger, temptation and difference are forced upon us. The exotification of the racialized body is a way for non-racialized subjects to, like hooks reminds us, come to know themselves. By casting coloured women as different, they maintain the status quo of race and sex dominance while marginalizing, sexualizing, and dehumanizing coloured women.

This is not to say I have become the mad mixed woman in the attic and have cast off all white men. It’s also not to say that this can’t happen with all races of men — I just have yet to find an interracial relationship where my difference isn’t at the forefront. I have yet to find that guy who hasn’t used me to see if sleeping with me makes him a new man, or a guy who hasn’t made the wretched “I love black people” disclaimer upon meeting me.

Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. But I am speaking to something more structural than just the colour of my skin and people’s reactions to it; I am talking about privilege, racism, colonialism — systems and institutions of power and hierarchy that allow for women of colour to be exotified and Othered; to be treated as sex objects and animals instead of humans. To be treated by non-coloured men as cheapened territory that becomes a game of conquering. Until I find that guy and regain my trust in white men, I’ve saved myself from being checked off someone’s “To Do” list again. And although I could be missing out, it’s a good feeling to know I’m finally in control. And it feels great.

 

Lionel Richie on Love and Keeping Marriage Alive

Lionel Richie, Barry White, and Teddy Pendergrass have to account for about 1/2 of the marriages in the US with their crooning over the past 25 years. After a long time out of the public eye Richie ha started hitting the public circuit again.

A new album in the making?

Hello…

 

New Twist Yo That “You Don’t Love Me!” Thing.

Ok Guys – you know you been through it, when your lady sets the program for you to once again prove you affection with the “You don’t love me!” meme.

Seems this woman in Spain really went overboard!

Spanish woman fakes kidnapping to test husband: police

Spanish police have detained a woman who faked her own kidnapping to test whether her husband would pay ranson, sending him a photograph of herself with bound hands and feet, police said Monday.

The man received the photo on his mobile phone from someone claiming to be one of the kidnappers along with a text message demanding a ransom of 20,000 euros (26,000 dollars) for her release, they said in a statement.

The ransom request was repeated in later text messages as well as warnings that the man not go to police, which he ignored.

Police launched a search and spotted her car, which they followed to a shopping mall in the town of Gandia on the Mediterranean coast.

“The woman, who was travelling alone and was in perfect health, was the supposed victim of the kidnapping,” the police statement said.

At first she told police that she had been released that morning but later confessed to faking her abduction “to find out what her husband would be willing to do for her”.

In 2008 a Spanish court sentenced a woman to three-year-a-half years in prison after finding her guilty of extortion by faking her children’s kidnapping seven times.