Reflections on The Help

So I finally sat down to watch the film, The Help.  I thought about the heat in Georgetown, SC...that Africa heat that saturates the soul.  I thought about how hate to move around in that heat.  I thought of my granny walking those 11 miles to Huntington Beach to tend the homes of white families I am certain resemble those in the movie.  I thought about the home of one woman who walked out of her panties and left them for my mother to pick up.  I thought about how the man of the house spoke to my auntie when she read the newspaper before him.  How she was scolded for even unfolding the paper...told to mind her place. 

I have never walked to any job in my entire life.  The closest job to my granny that I've ever held was as a childcare provider.  I respect the women in my family who understand the work and the struggle.

Reflections of Stagnation

I am stuck. 

I need to find another job.
I need to buy another car.
I need to make more money.
I need to make sure that my child gets into a decent college.

I need to find another job after I get another car.
I need to make sure that the new job pays me more money so that I can have medical insurance.
I need to have medical insurance so that I can take care of my child TMJ concerns.

I put it out there with the prayer of Jabez on the tip of my tongue.

Open Letter to SlutWalk

http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2011/09/open-letter-from-black-women-to.html?spref=fb


We had a heated spirited discussion about her reaction to the article. 

I am a third wave feminist. 

My daughter is a fourth wave feminist. 

There is so much more I could write...but it would be there for everyone to see.  I will say that we are works in progress and leave it at that.

I'm Coming Back

It has been a while since my last post.  I have experienced this magical time thief called Tumblr that has captured my attention with the pic and articles.  I will attempt to build a presence with words.  That is all.

I'll bet he had more ass than a toilet seat...LOL.

MINNIE

Happy Tuesday!

Voice Online :: Black children have longer wait for adoptive families

Voice Online :: Black children have longer wait for adoptive families

BOYCOTT: Companies that Support the Tea Party

Primer: Toward A Koch Industries Boycott

By Shoq, on February 27, 2011, at 8:30 pm

Rumblings of Boycotts are Not Boycotts

As I suspected would happen, the Koch boycott idea is gaining traction fast. That's why I hacked together this primer last week, hoping to encourage and/or report on more formalized embodiments of the idea as they emerged. I still haven't learned of one worth repeating, but I expect to any day now.

The Koch Industries Empire is Vast

Koch Industries is one of the two largest privately owned companies in America, with holdings in almost every industry sector, but energy and paper are two very big interests.
I am leery of tossing around the B-word casually, but as @Stopbeck proved, there are many kinds of boycott-type consumer actions, and when properly conceived and executed, they can be and have been effective.  And while it's certainly easier to bring pressure on public companies, even private empires hate losing money.
While coal and electricity are tough to boycott, Koch has many other revenue streams. Some associates and I have been working on a robust database of products and brands that would be useful for a real boycott against Koch. In the meantime, this list, by Daily Kos write Geebeebee, provides a pretty good glimpse of the big products in this empire of evil:

As always, your Retweets help a lot. See the button below.

The Products of Koch Industries

Georgia-Pacific Consumer products	Georgia Pacific Building products	Invista® Products
Angel Soft toilet paper Brawny paper towels Dixie plates, bowls, napkins and cups Mardi Gras napkins and towels Quilted Northern toilet paper Soft 'n Gentle toilet paper Sparkle napkins Vanity fair napkins Zee napkins Georgia-Pacific paper products and envelop	Dense Armor Drywall and Decking ToughArmor Gypsum board Georgia pacific Plytanium Plywood Flexrock Densglass sheathing G/P Industrial plasters (some products used by a lot of crafters)    Agricultural Plaster    Arts & Crafts Plaster    Dental Plaster    General Purpose Plaster    Glass-reinforced Gypsum (GRG)    Industrial Tooling Plaster    Investment Casting Plaster    Medical Plaster    Metal Casting Plaster    Pottery Plaster FibreStrong Rim board G/P Lam board Blue Ribbon OSB Rated Sheathing Blue Ribbon Sub-floor DryGuard Enhanced OSB Nautilus Wall Sheathing Thermostat OSB Radiant Barrier Sheathing Broadspan Engineered Wood Products XJ 85 I-Joists FireDefender Banded Cores FireDefender FS FireDefender Mineral Core Hardboard and Thin MDF including Auto Hardboard, Perforated Hardboard and Thin MDF Wood Fiberboard – Commercial Roof Fiberboard Hushboard Sound Deadening Board Regular Fiberboard Sheathing Structural Fiberboard Sheathing	COMFOREL® fiberfill COOLMAX® fabric CORDURA® fabric DACRON® fiber POLYSHIELD® resin SOLARMAX® fabric SOMERELLE® bedding products STAINMASTER® carpet SUPPLEX® fabric TACTEL® fiber TACTESSE® carpet fiber TERATE® polyols TERATHANE® polyether glycol THERMOLITE® fabric PHENREZ® resin POLARGUARD® fiber and LYCRA® fiber

The Koch Brand Logos To Watch For (And Avoid)

Boycotts and Strikes Are Never Easy Projects

Again, I suspected the Koch boycott idea would pick up speed as the Wisconsin protests continued to grow. But until I see a real (organized and funded) project that can make do a sustained effort, I'm going to refrain from saying there's a real boycott under way. And while I think one would be important, I would much rather spend my energies with the general strike idea, something I have been advocating for many years.  It's our best available tool if we are to ever really get serious about challenging the plutocratic regime that has seized the United States, while everyone was busy working for it.
I created this short URL (http://j.mp/genstrike) to give folks some background about general strikes. I plan to write a full-blown primer soon.

About Koch Industries

Koch Industries, (pronounced "coke"), is the largest privately owned company in the United States with 70,000 employees and annual sales of $100 billion in the fiscal year ending December of 2008. [1] Cargill comes in second for privately owned companies. Operations include refining, chemicals, process and pollution control equipment, technologies, fibers and polymers, commodity and financial trading and consumer products. The company operates crude gathering systems and pipelines across North America. One subsidiary processes 800,000 barrels of crude oil daily in its three refineries

Read more: http://shoqvalue.com/anticipating-a-koch-boycott-a-few-of-their-products#ixzz1MfGtignT

kiss my black ads: Mikito Ozeki / Cut Out

kiss my black ads: Mikito Ozeki / Cut Out: "This kid's got relentless timeless hand skills. This is what they mean when they say 'cuttin' it up!' Cutting by Mikito Ozeki ..."

Brother Ahmed Sirour

William Jelani Cobb: " Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow"

Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow

William Jelani Cobb | March 29, 2011

In the three weeks since the New York Times [1] broke the story [1] of a child’s rape there, the events in Cleveland, Texas, have morphed into a category-five media storm. The Times piece, which echoed and amplified currents of victim-blaming in the town, generated a tide of criticism. Yet beneath the outrage was a parable of modern media. Aside from the familiar and incendiary themes it contained, the Times article seemed an object lesson in what happens when cash-strapped newspapers parachute a reporter into a complex situation hoping for coverage on the cheap. In-depth coverage requires resources and the time to do the deliberate, painstaking gathering of facts that were in short supply in James McKinley’s article. “The New York Times,” as one friend put it, “can no longer afford nuance.”
Add to that equation the fact that Twitter-orchestrated protests, web petitions and Facebook posts pushed the Times to apologize (or at least come close to it), and our understanding of the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl becomes yet another front in the battles between old and new media. Even the way the assault became public knowledge—digital images traded around on cellphones—seems to be part of the narrative of modern technology and information.
Yet for all this modernity, the most troubling aspect of the ongoing fallout from Cleveland is the way it resurrects themes of race, sexual violence and provincialism long interred in American history. Some weeks ago I taught students in my civil rights history class about the plague of lynching, which claimed the lives of more than 3,000 African-Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond the horror of the organized murder of black citizens, students were most troubled by the recreational nature of it all: the images of smiling white citizens, fathers and sons, upstanding Christians gathered in fellowship around the smoldering ruin of a black body—all preserved on postcards.
If you asked any of these people in the abstract if it is right to hang a person, set him on fire and then riddle the body with bullets, they would likely have called those actions illegal and sinful. But there is an asterisk: unless that person was black; unless he had demanded his wages, or been to slow to vacate a sidewalk when a white person walked by, or been “unpopular” (these are all actual reasons cited for lynching). These are actions of people who have been given a moral escape clause, an asterisk in which upstanding Christians can sate the demonic appetites of their collective id. Thus an act of abomination becomes a moment worthy of commemorating with a photograph.
I thought about that discussion of lynching again as news spread that the alleged perpetrators were so utterly secure in the righteousness of their act that some of them snapped pictures or recorded footage on their cell phones. We have, in 2011, reached a point when the public display of charred human remains is no longer acceptable. But the response of some of the citizens of Cleveland, Texas, to this horrific assault has brought us face to face with a kind of gender Jim Crow. Here the asterisk is not failure to conform to racial etiquette but the lax adherence to an equally stringent gender code, one where “innocent” is a relative concept and rape, like lynching, can be elevated nearly to the level of civic responsibility.
The rape, which allegedly took place in a filthy trailer, has been mitigated by qualifiers on the child’s innocence—and necessarily, the guilt of the accused. It is, as an abstract idea, wrong to force a preteen child to have sex with a dozen and a half men. Unless she was “fast,” or dressed like a much older woman, or had slack maternal supervision. Add enough exceptions and even the unconscionable begins to look like a six-in-one-hand undertaking. It is the bitterest of ironies that African-Americans in Cleveland have been the most vocal proponents of this warped ideal. We of all people should understand how the moral exception game works. (For those who believe the fact that the girl is Hispanic has colored the responses to the crime, rest assured, “fast” 11-year-old black girls are seen as every bit as disposable within the black community.)
It is worth remembering that in the age of lynching, as now, new media technology served as a kind of antiseptic, airing rancid behavior in forums much larger than the moral echo chambers of Deep South counties. Southerners were, on some level, stunned by the national firestorm that the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till created. They were incapable of understanding why a single murder of a black man—an act that had been Southern business as usual for decades—unleashed torrents of criticism and outrage nationwide. The behavior was the same, but exposing it on television created a completely new dynamic. In the face of this new circumstance, Southerners retrenched and expanded their contempt to include media and all other such “outside agitators.” They excavated the Confederate flag and elevated it to a place of honor as a symbol of their recalcitrance.
Among the bitterest ironies in a situation filled with them is that the tradition of lynching is, on some level, connected to the victim-blaming and asterisk-brandishing afoot in Cleveland, Texas. The wrongful convictions and killings of black men for bogus charges of sexual assault remain deeply placed in the historical memory of many black communities. And anyone who knows of the Scottsboro trial, the Central Park jogger case or Tulia, Texas, where forty African-Americans were arrested on false drug charges, is necessarily skeptical of mass arrests involving African-Americans—especially those involving sex crimes. But history cannot absolve what is voiced in Cleveland now, a nightmare cliché born of those lynching galleries: the victim had it coming.
It’s likely that the feelings of some residents of Cleveland are a curious echo of what those Southern partisans of a bygone era felt. Rancid behavior in their town—and more important, the values that undergird it—has been given a national airing. Outside agitators have assailed their views—140 characters at a time. But would that these kinds of views were confined to a small outpost in East Texas. None of us who saw fans rally around R. Kelly during his pedophilia trial or heard the bullshit rationales given for Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna could feel secure in pointing a judgmental finger at Cleveland, Texas. Gender Jim Crow is a national concern.
We have yet to appreciate that in Texas and beyond—whether we are talking about murder or rape or any of the myriad violations of human dignity that happen every day in communities across this country—there are no asterisks, only excuses. And sorry ones at that.

Favorite Things Volume One

Ginger + Liz Nail Collection in Brown Sugar is just the right nude for my skin tone and it vegan!

I understand it is more eco-friendly to use the dishwasher,

so this product is my friend.

My friend, Melynda, introduced me to this

curried red lentil dip in March and I love it. 

I try to make sure I have the ingredients

in my house just in case I need to

make something fast and fulling. 

Another treasure found thru Melynda, although

I heard about on http://www.younghouselove.com/ 

years earlier.  I would see it at Kroger, cuss and keep it moving. 

I love the smell and currently have the dryer sheets,

window cleaner and of course the dish soap!

Mom's sweet potato pies...no further explanation needed!

Southland...the best show you are not watching! 

Awesome storyline that had me hooked one evening

watching 4 episodes OnDemand. 

Hell you gotta love Regina King!

I generally used to hide in my jeans but now

I found denim trousers and I wear those

mofos to work and play! 

This is grown up ice cream. 

You can purchase it at Whole Foods for $10 a PINT

and after the use all of the profanity in your arsenal, you go

ahead and taste it!  You too will be crazy like me a make return

purchases...with flavors like Salty Caramel, 

Brown Butter Almond Brittle,Bourbon Buttered Pecan,

Ugandan Vanilla Bean, Wildberry Lavender,

Riesling Poached Pear and Cherry Lambic

you'de be crazy not to try!  You can thank me later.

Coffee is sublime with this in it.

I have been using this gel for 4 years now. 

It controls the fro and gives my curl definition! 

The best part of spring and summertime!

I LOVE THIS...IT'S MY NEW FAVORITE THING!

I want this car and I lust after it on the road. 

I don't have it yet but my time is coming!

Beautiful jewerly.  Local artisan!

Melynda introduced this product to me and

my skin is so smooth and soft now. 

Great book.  Awakened the griot

that had slumbered for too long.



$4 a gallon people...

I appreciate the idea behind this but

then I went to the gas station today

and it took $33 to fill my car up...

I am feeling more of the later.

Memories of Mekha the Toddler

Oh the memories of Mekha as a toddler and the Big Comfy Couch

on PBS! 

And don't forget our favorite, Gullah Gullah Island...Binyah Binyah!

Thirty years ago today, the world lost Bob Marley... I was 11 years old and was probably too engrossed in MTV to notice.  Go figure.

Happy Sunday!

Really Washington Post?

Call the Washington Post, 202.334.6000 & ask them to un-invite their White House Correspondents' Assoc. celeb dinner guest DONALD TRUMP. Email editor@washpost.com, or letters@washpost.com. Each news outlet chooses a celeb guest to sit at their table and the Post has picked Trump--meaning they support his BS! Please call or write and help SPREAD THE WORD!

*winking at you Trump*

Caution: Work in Progress

Good afternoon.  I have decided to blog because my facebook can't handle all I want to share.