Wednesday, January 31, 2018

FROM KERRY WASHINGTON ON HER BIRTHDAY

Feeling Rebloggy 


With Scandal coming to an end of the season, it looks like Kerry Washington is quickly lining up projects!  Washington is officially set to executive produce a new ABC Family comedy series titled Man of the House.  
The series is about a teenage star quarterback who finds himself unexpectedly the only male in a house full of females when his recently-divorced mother moves in with her recently-divorced sister and their daughters. 
Man Of the House falls under the overall deal Washington and her Simpson Street banner have at ABC Studios.
~ HOLLYWOODBLACKRENAISSANCE 

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

CEILING BREAKER: RITA MORENO

Feeling Rebloggy
Lena Horne and Rita Moreno

From Vintage Black Glamour

"Lena Horne and then “starlet” Rita Moreno in 1953 after her performance at Hollywood’s famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Watching the#SAGawards tonight made me think of this picture, which I haven't shared in a few years. Ms. Moreno, the legendary Puerto Rican actress and singer is now 86 and one of the few performers who has won an Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy Awards. This photo appeared in the December 10, 1953, edition of JET magazine. #RitaMoreno #LenaHorne #EGOT#vintageblackglamour"

https://www.facebook.com/VintageBlackGlamour/photos/a.172850202754851.32912.172849239421614/1765833620123160/?type=3&theater 


From MAKERS
Still busy performing at 80 years old, Moreno’s latest roles include the sitcom Happily Divorced and her autobiographical one-women-show, Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup which she debuted on stage in 2011. Her wide-ranging body of work and success has earned her two of America’s highest honors – the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush in 2004, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2009.

https://www.makers.com/rita-moreno?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000046 




TOURISM DOWN SINCE TRUMP TOOK OFFICE COSTING U.S 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS AND 40,000 JOBS



International tourism to the U.S. began to wane after Trump took office, leading to a so-called "Trump slump."
Experts say that Trump's proposed travel bans, anti-immigration language, and heightened security measures have had a negative impact on the U.S.'s attraction for foreign visitors. 
“It’s not a reach to say the rhetoric and policies of this administration are affecting sentiment around the world, creating antipathy toward the U.S. and affecting travel behavior,” Adam Sacks, the president of Tourism Economics, told The New York Times.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/tourism-u-s-down-trump-took-office-costing-4-6-n840326

Monday, January 29, 2018

DID LARRY NASSAR HIDE HIS SEXUAL ABUSE BEHIND CHILD ABUSE ALREADY IN PLACE?

Part 3



I've been trying to figure out how the girls in gymnastics and other sports were sexually assaulted for more than two decades without anybody's parents reporting Larry Nassar to the police rather than the people in business to produce bronze, silver, and gold medals for the United States.
In various discussions I've had over the past few weeks, a number of women tried to tell me that girls don't tell, that this is the reason this abuse went on for so long. Dozens of studies do show children don't tell on their sexual predators. 


Continued from 
THE PARENTS OF LARRY NASSAR SURVIVORS ARE NOT CO-VICTIMS
http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-parents-of-larry-nassar-survivors.html
During one discussion on social media, sure enough, upwards of 90 percent of us -- including me-- never told anybody until years had passed.  And a bunch of us never told our parents.

The thing that amazed and dismayed me during that discussion was that:
 - some grown women actually thought these studies meant that virtually nobody but the sexually assaulted* little girls knew --over the course of more than 20 years. (Little girls acting abilities are generally not Oscar worthy) 

- that my persistent question: Why didn't the girls tell their parents? could somehow imply the girls are at fault rather than their parents they were too afraid to talk to.

In fact, this is just one symptom of what amazes me about how this story has been warped into a young women triumphant story in the news when this is a failure to recognize child abuse of the sexual variety for decades.

These children, some of them 8 years old, had nobody to protect them from routine sexual assault UNTIL one of the little girls grew up and did protected herself as a young woman 
Rachael Denhollander was the one that stopped screwing around with entities in business for profit (USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and Karyoli Ranch) and went to the police. 

I don't know if other PARENTS went to the police over the course of 20 years, possibly ignored because our press is to busy trying to turn this garbage into a feel good story that I have no idea if anybody is asking parents of the gymnasts anything but softball questions.

The parents may not be villains. But they are not co-victims either, even if the girls that were abused want them to be.  


The other problem I'm having with the way this story is being sold is this: We are not addressing the societal problem at the root of the Larry Nassar Scandal. 


One of the reasons Larry Nassar got away with sexually assaulting little girls for more than 20 years is due to it being normal in our society to ignore the pain, fear, and anguish of women, much less little girls. 
And it is here where the sexual child abuse of little girls and #MeToo overlap. But they are not the same. However, the #BelieveWomen crap putting mud in the water here too because it IS true that these female children were not believed BUT IT IS not true in the case of women such as those in Hollywood.  
Plenty of men believed women were being sexually "harassed," they just didn't care or call it "sexual harassment" much less "sexual assault."  
Some men knew they could get away with abusing women because they have more social power while other men thought "boys will be boys" about their buddies. 
Ben Affleck grabbed a woman's breast while on camera. His brother had crew members and such exposing themselves on a public set before he supposedly got in bed with a female co-worker. Director Brett Ratner commented that he could hear woman's vulva flapping while she walked while on a public set. And he was questioned on a rape charge long before that. #BelieveWomen has nothing to do with this behavior.    
But these little girl gymnasts weren't believed when they spoke up. And if their fear and upset was as obvious as it sounded during the victim statements they gave during Nassar's trial, then their pain and fear was ignored by the adults around them in a dozen different ways


Women and girls being ignored and/or not being taken seriously is not new. I've had a number of conversations in real time and I'm on social media where doctors told women their pain was nothing. I


I experienced this first hand when I was eleven. 
Less than a year after I began my menstrual cycle I began having horrific cramps along with gastrointestinal problems and vomiting that would last for the first two days of my cycle every month. EVERY month. 
Doctor after doctor and eventually my father said, "you have to be able to endure a little discomfort." 
I lucked-up and got a female doctor in my late teens that told me about breaking the progesterone cycle with ibuprofen....which required a cycle as regular as a clock. That let me out. So timing my medication which was about as effective as using  he rhythm method to avoid getting pregnant.  
Later, as an adult in my thirties after things got worse, I went to a female doctor who actually did tests, took blood work  and did an ultrasound -- just like she was taking my pain seriously. It was she that told me I was likely having cramps as bad as giving birth every month because of the huge number of fibroid tumors I had inside my uterus, in the walls of uterus and on a stalk attached to my uterus. 
I was admitted to the hospital for an embolization rather than a hysterectomy some time later.

In my own home...
My parents would protect me from all manner of nonsense from adult white racists that I would encounter in classrooms and guidance counselor offices. But inside the house, it was different. My parents, my mother in particular, had an infinite capacity for ignoring any emotional pain or general upset that was caused by the rare physical abuse, the regular verbal abuse and gaslighting, and even threats of being hit by an adult with a baseball bat. 

All of this is why I thought maybe I was projecting my own neglect and occasional abuse on these girls. So I listened to others and bent over backwards to understand what the parents might have been doing that enabled them to allow this sexual form of child abuse to continue

....over a period of 20 years

I even decided that the worst thing some of the parents did was abdicate responsibility for their children to USA Gymnastics and Karyoli Ranch, where they trained. 

But then I heard Larry Nassar sexually abused these children while some mothers were in the room.

He positioned his body so they couldn't see him put his hand down the girls shorts.  But these adult women couldn't see their child's face during and immediately after the assault?

In discussions over the past few weeks a number of young women who have been sexually assaulted as children in the past as well wanted me to believe that they were such superb little actresses that their parent(s) couldn't have known.  And I can tell the gymnasts want to believe the same thing of their own parents.

Who wouldn't?

Nobody wants to believe their parents either aren't paying enough attention or that they're not invincible when they ARE paying attention.

Despite all of the justifications I've heard in regards to the parents, regardless of what the girls decided to tell or not tell, each parent in the room during the sexual assault had to have seen discomfort and pain on the faces of their girl child. 

And I'm not really guessing here. 
Mattie Larson, one of the gymnast-victims, said she kept calling her parents begging them to let her go home. It is safe assumption she never said why based on other interviews I've seen. But it's worth noting that crying and begging weren't enough for her to be allowed to leave.
In an interview on Good Morning America, Larson actually said she pretended to fall down in the shower at home, loud enough do that her parents could hear it....all so she didn't have go back. It was an elaborate ruse, complete with splashing water and injuring herself.  (see the link at the end)
Do you know what I finally realized about the mothers that were standing in the room while her daughter was sexually abused and the mother who initially defended Nassar against the allegations?
These parents were used to seeing their daughters in pain, sometimes fairly bad pain.
That is, I think the anguish and pain on their daughters faces wasn't any different when Dr. Nassar was sexually abusing them on Wednesday from when Dr Innocent was torturing them by stretching out overused muscles and joints on Thursday.
Seeing their daughters suffer was normal. 

As stated before, I think adults are conditioned to ignore the emotions of girls, to label their tears and upset as "over reactions." But USA Gymnastics created an atmosphere where ignoring the the humanity of little girls was raised to new horrific heights. 

And the parents of these girls signed up for all this hoping for glory at the Olympics one day.
 

In another interview where the girls are explaining why they didn't tell and save themselves --instead of parents explaining why they didn't see their child was being abused-- Mattie Larson said her and the other girls would get in trouble for saying they didn't sleep well. They would get in trouble for not smiling. They would get in trouble for saying they didn't feel well. 

Another girl revealed that parents weren't allowed in some of the practice gyms at all. 


These girls were being working hours upon hours per day so that they can compete on the behalf of our country, stretching and building muscles upon muscles so that they can perform feats that look almost super human....feats that will leave some with shoulder pain etc for life. 
When it comes to elite artistic gymnastics, most female competitors begin the sport at before the age of five and train around 40 hours a week, pushing their strength and flexibility to the limits, at times defying anatomy and biology to stick their routines. 
Naturally, that level of physical and psychological stress can have an effect on a growing body, with most elite female competitors retiring from the sport in their early twenties.
"Stress fractures are common amongst former gymnastics," says Natasha Melacrinis, a physiotherapist from the Sydney Sports Medicine Centre and former elite sports aerobics competitor. 
Many female gymnasts have low bone density issues. Decades of extreme physical exercises can lead to a later onset of puberty and therefore a lower level of oestrogen being released in the body. As a result, "bones play catch up" to fast-growing muscles.  
.
https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/science/humans/article/2016/08/09/what-happens-gymnasts-body-it-ages


This is why these girls are going to doctors like Nassar constantly instead of only going when they are sick like the rest of us do. 

And these girls are being worked like they are at a full-time job, because it is a job. 
Endorsements worth millions of dollars at stake.  Those girls are working 40 hours a day on their bodies. And when they called home crying wanting to go home --without much of an explanation-- did their parents say "no pain no gain" Did their parents say, "You said you wanted to do this...we've wasted too much money for you to just...." blah blah blah. 


When the girls didn't want to do their "job" -- those abused by Nassar and those not abused by Nassar-- were adults really telling them "Shut up and do your job" and "Don't talk back to the boss" and "Never tell the boss crap he doesn't want to hear." This kind of work advice is the same all over except we're talking about children.


This is why I consider Larry Nassar to have hidden his sexual assaults, his sexual abuse of children inside regular/everyday non-sexual child abuse.

Child Labor laws were designed to stop child abuse. Why don't these laws apply to the gymnastics?

Listen to the victim impact statements for yourself. Then try to imagine a little girl calls home crying to come home. Why did Mattie Larson have to bang her own head against something, injure herself in order to NOT go back to a place she was that terrified of?

Does it really matter that she didn't name Nassar and say exactly what he did when she was THIS afraid? 

In the final analysis I'm not sure the parents not knowing about the sexual assault is the biggest factor in why those girls remain exposed to Larry Nasser.

Ordinary girls, not gymnasts working 40 hours a week, are taught the emotional pain that sometimes causes them to cry is so much nothing. But boys are taught by patriarchy soaked parents that crying makes them a sissy, a girl. So now I'm trying to imagine what might be happening to little boy athletes at their professional gig. 

It could conceivably take an even longer time for a scandal involving boys to surface. 

When a child is being hurt by an adult and we are asking why the child didn't report what was happening to a virtual stranger or a temporary adult fixture in their life instead of their parent, we need to ask what's wrong with American parenting. 

Right now authorities are looking into which adults at USA Gymnastics and the University Of Michigan. But every adult anywhere near this, including the parents, should be investigated. Anybody who didn't call the police needs to be questioned.

I know that sociologists have shown us that human beings have a funny relationship with authority. And studies like the Milgram Experiment have revealed that many people or most people will obey an authority figure even if they are told to do something heinous to another. And history of Europe shows us this, especially in the 1930s and 1940s.  


But the parents still need to explain what they knew when and why they didn't report what was happening to the police instead of the authorities at USA Gymnastics and Michigan Univeristy and Karyoli Ranch, the training facility.

If the press was reporting this as a child abuse incident involving sex, I think we'd be discussing this in public already.  

We cannot afford to let the families "have their privacy" in regards to this part of the story. If we do not figure out what went wrong we won't figure out how to prevent Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar from being followed by others. Predators will always be with us. We can't have ONE predator prey on hundreds, possibly thousands of children again and again.    
We have to stop this from happening to again or at least limit the scope of the predator. And in order to do that we need more knowledge.

To be even more specific, we should all know before this story fades away whether the parents believed that digital penetration was part of the treatment when the judge said at sentencing that the "parents were groomed too" 
MATTIE LARSON INTERVIEW 
This level of parental incompetence needs punishment. And the threat of punishment might be enough to get some parents to call the police to investigate a questionable handling of their child instead of the people who are most likely to say what those parents wanted to hear, "Nothing bad is happening to your daughter."

In order for us to get a real investigation going, in public, we're going to stop the feel good story from women over-coming and change it to child abuse that went unchecked for decades that helped hide a sexual predator.

A LITTLE WISDOM FROM OPRAH ON HER BIRTHDAY


SADDI KHALI

There are still some artists left who do it for love, whose voices speak to so many because they take the time to listen. Unbound by conventions of beauty and being, Saddi Khali is one such artist.
Khali’s faithful walk from writer to producer and image evangelist is marked by trials and transience.


Displaced overnight by Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans native returned unsheltered and untethered to his beloved community of 30 years. Khali lost a lifetime of artifacts and keepsakes, departing with bear means, memories and a budding love for photography. For Khali's new work to signify reframing one's narrative, he first reframed his own, repurposing his circumstance to a calling.

Khali soon found beauty in losing everything, in letting go, in coming to the realization that in spite of all this... "I'm okay." His ascension is not a portrait of loss, but a portrait of faith and faith's labors.
Nine years removed, Khali's photography has now been featured in magazines such as ESSENCE, and on the covers of a number of books, like Random House’s TRIKSTA. As the favorite artist of many discerning collectors, Khali has featured in exhibitions worldwide, including Rush Arts Gallery in New York and the Coast Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2014, Saddi Khali was Polk State College’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence and coproduced the historical fantasy short film ASE shot on location in Nigeria.

An acclaimed poet and performer, Saddi has also featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and the ApolloTheater’s Salon Series, and is published in over 30 anthologies and journals.

Crediting traditions that are distinctly southern, yet unapologetic in their aesthetic, Khali continues to craft a bold and brash brand of art and arts practice through his exploration of vulnerability and courage -inviting viewers to welcome the possibilities that arise when they choose both. 
It is through this listening lens that Khali stakes claim to a healing arts renaissance, which fearlessly intends the restoration of black love and black beauty.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

THE PARENTS OF LARRY NASSAR SURVIVORS ARE NOT CO-VICTIMS


Journalists keep having the girls explain why they didn't tell anybody when the answer is kind of obvious before they say one word: 
They were children and 
they didn't know what was happening to them. 



continued from
LARRY NASSAR IS THE SECOND COMING


OF JERRY SANDUSKY AND MORE WILL FOLLOW 

The girls want to explain. I can see them straining to explain. I can imagine how strong the impulse is explain to tell people that it wasn't their own fault when that's not even close to necessary.

Unfortunately, I endured a brief sexual assault myself at the hands of a group of boys 2 to 5 years older than me when I was 12 or so years old. So I the feelings of guilt and shame because I felt them myself in response to an incident that was much, much shorter in duration - microscopic in comparison.


But hearing these girls explain makes me cringe. And allowing them to do so without the proper context makes me worry for the girls listening.

I keep wondering if we, the public, aren't encouraging girls to think they actually have something to explain when they don't. They were children sexually assaulted by an adult and other adults didn't take care of them regardless of what they reported or didn't report.

According to the victim statements I heard yesterday these girls had trembling, stomach problems, nightmares, and things that sound like PTSD symptoms that any adult around them before or after Nassar's "treatments" should have been able to see.

Some of the mothers were actually in the room when Nassar assaulted their daughters. Nassar positioned his body between the girl and her mother when he slipped his hands down her underwear or shorts, but the actual violation wasn't the only thing there was to see.


Researchers say children seldom report sexual assault by an adult. And I'll take that at face value. But out of Nassar's hundreds, possibly thousands of victims the small fraction of child victims that usually report abuse should have been a significant number.

Now we know that a number of the girls did indeed tell adults at USA Gymnastics, the University Of Michigan, and their parents


Young women reported Larry Nassar for decades. No one took them seriously — until now.



https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/1/25/16928994/larry-nassar-mckayla-maroney-gymnastics-me-too

That headline is not correct. Little girls reported Larry Nassar for decades. 

Furthermore, this matter overlaps #MeToo but it is not precisely #MeToo. Furthermore, I resent the #BelieveWomen aspect of this white female version of protest.  The people that protected men that  sexually assaulted women DIDN'T CARE about the sexual assault and mis-named sexual harassment. Belief was not the issue. 
Belief isn't an issue here, with these girls either. But ignoring these girls needs to be approached as adults ignoring child abuse.

When a television journalist finally got around to asking the parents about what happened when they re-reported what their daughters told them to USA Gymnastics or the University Of Michigan,  the journalists didn't ask the parents the obvious next question: 
Why didn't you go to the police when you weren't satisfied with Nassar's explanation of why he was penetrating your daughter with his fingers?


Furthermore, it's unclear if parents did go to the police and police turned them away because children (especially girls) are considered poor witnesses.

But because the language is so careful around sexual assault of children is humiliating for victims and shaming for parents, journalists are doing an exceptionally poor job of making it clear the exact details some of the complaining parents knew.

But "knowing" all the details of abuse is not necessary to know when it's time to pull your child out of harm's way.

If a child calls a parent panicked and crying -- as did happen in multiple cases with these gymnasts-- and says that she wants to come home from a training camp, maybe that shouldn't be ignored as girls being "emotional?" or "undisciplined?" or not understanding "no pain/no gain" part of becoming a professional athlete when you're as young as 8 years old.    


In my mind, it seems to me that sexism and gender stereotypes almost had to have played a role in parents being able to ignore their girl child's anguish. 
American values probably played a role too but we'll talk about that later.

Furthermore, it is one thing for a child to not understand that sexual assault* is happening to them.

It is another thing entirely for an adult, a parent, to not understand when their child describes a sexual assault* and doesn't call the police. I'm pretty sure that's what more than one of the mother's was trying to say on a television news special that aired the day Nassar was sentenced..

Again, it's not clear as to exactly what some of the parents knew
even when their girl child told them Nassar was touching them in a way that made them feel bad...long before Rachel Denhollander grew into adulthood and went to the police herself. But it's still time to change the laws so that an adult's failure to call the police when a child is being sexually assaulted is a crime.

Yes, some of the officials at USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University should be at risk for being arrested. But some of the parents should at least be interrogated at length.

It's time to stop treating parents like co-victims when they are supposed to be a child's first line of defense.

As a survivor of abuse and neglect, I'm very cognizant of the potential of an interrogation of a parent making a child feel re-victimized. And I worry about what a police investigation might do to a child psychologically. But I am at the point where I believe parents cannot be trusted to act in the best interest of their child when the children and parents have certain goals in mind, have certain things they are afraid of losing

 -- like a spot in a prestigious gym and a chance to be on an Olympic team.

I'm not saying police and lawyers should be allowed to force a child's testimony in court etc. Maybe the child doesn't even have to be involved in the reporting of the crime itself.  But parents should be forced, by law, to at least report a sexual assault or face jail time --even if they refuse to let their child talk to anyone directly for fear of psychological damage.   

All of the adults who potentially knew and did not call the police should be interrogated in cases like this. I do not care how bad some of the parents feel already. We need to stop treating parents like co-victims or the Larry Nassars and Jerry Sanduskys are going to keep on coming.
As many stories as I've read on Jerry Sandusky, I never could figure out if the boys had parents or if they were orphans at a shelter or what any parents might have known when.

As much as I read about Sandusky at the time, I should have a very clear picture of what their parents did or didn't do. I suspect I don't because the same thing that is happening this time happened last time.

The parents are being treated like co-victims instead of thoroughly investigated. Even if they made understandable "mistakes" we all need to know what those mistakes were so they aren't repeated


...like they've been repeated already.
I don't care how bad the parents feel. I don't care if might have failed in the same way if I'd been the parent of one of Larry Nassar's victims or Jerry Sandusky's victims. We need to figure out how hundreds possibly even thousands of parents failed to protect their children from A SINGLE PREDATOR. 

Child predators are always going to be with us. But we can reduce the number of victims per year by hundreds possibly thousands if we start demanding that ALL OF THE ADULTS charged with children's protection answer for obvious failures.

That said, even though I think parents need to be interrogated as if they may have done something wrong, in all honesty, I think gobbling down American values is mostly what's wrong with American parenting in this case.

Even so, I'm not going for the "parents were groomed too" excuse even though I believe this to be partially or even mostly true. The parents of these girls should feel guilty and ask their children for forgiveness and make their girls understand they DID do something that requires forgiveness so these girls don't find parallel ways to neglect their own children that only look different.

 It appears that a lot of the victims's fathers might not be going for the "Nassar groomed the parents" explanation given by the judge in this case either. That's probably why we've pretty much only seen mothers with survivors talking about now they were tricked by Larry Nassar once they knew what Nassar was doing to their children.


Gender roles being what they are, I'm guessing the fathers know they abdicated their responsibilities in protecting their girl children... in ways the mothers and the female judge don't seem to on the surface.



The vast majority of Larry Nassar's victims, just like Jerry Sandusky's, were entirely preventable.  Every single adult that knew what Nassar was doing and never called the police directly should be considered an accessory to his crimes.

We need to change the laws to make this a reality.

To do that, we need journalists to stop trying to morph this into a #MeToo empowerment story for women. The Larry Nassar Story is about sexual child abuse and the adults that failed them. 

UP NEXT: The parents that REALLY DID NOT know that Larry Nassar was sexually abusing their girl children but DID KNOW that their girls were begging them to come home. 

LARRY NASSAR IS THE SECOND COMING OF JERRY SANDUSKY AND OTHERS WILL FOLLOW

....IF WE DON'T MAKE A CHANGE

It's taken me a long time to figure out why my anger at what happened to Olympic hopefuls in gymnastic programs run by USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University goes so far beyond Larry Nassar.



I'm so glad that Nassar will be in jail for life I was actually worried that the judge did let her anger show so obviously that she may have given his lawyers a basis for appeal. But may that's even not possible if someone pleads guilty. 

I've realized that I'm probably worried about nothing. He's never going to see the light of day again.
fork in the road

However, I agree with what Nassar victim's have essentially said. This group now calling themselves SISTER SURVIVORS have stated that Nassar is just the tip of the iceberg. 

This group of women, who were children as young as 8 years old at the time of the sexual assault*, have successfully attacked USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, Nassar's employers, for protecting Nassar and not calling the police.

Some of the people involved have "retired." But so far nobody looks like they are in danger of going to jail. And that needs to change.

When this story first broke, a lot women --even feminists-- tried to tell me that Nassar got away with it because children don't tell when they are being sexually abused.

I won't bother to look up the research again. But I think the rate of children not reporting sexual abuse is somewhere between 75 to 95 percent depending what study you read. 


Women I spoke to real time and chatted with online seemed to confirm these figures. Almost all of them told me about incidents where they were sexually assaulted* but didn't tell. And I told my own stories because I didn't tell either. 

But the research is all so much baloney when you're talking about a grown man preying on little girls over 20 years.

If only 5% of us report our own sexual assaults out of guilt and shame when we're children, that's one in twenty girls that report sexual abuse. The SISTER SURVIVORS of Larry Nassar, 156 of which gave victim statements at his trial over 7 days, believe that Nassar may have sexually assaulted thousands of girls over a period longer than 20 years.

That's a lot of girls who may have tried to report Nassar. And some of them likely reported Nassar to their parents. 





And if we find out none of the girls reported Nassar to their parents in enough detail to be understood -- a simple describing of what he physically did -- then its time to figure out what's wrong with American parenting and/or what's wrong with what Americans are communicating to children about secrecy and sex because something is wrong with the adults, not the children.

In Larry Nassar's case, same as the Jerry Sandusky case,  at first everybody stood around talking about, "Oh my gawd! Nobody knew!"

Just like with Jerry Sandusky, most of public was probably waiting for the other shoe to drop. When Sandusky was first exposed as a sexual predator, most of the public was waiting to find out how many OMG-ers were lying because once one, two, or ten, or twenty years passes somebody notices a sexual predator.

In Sandusky's case, at least a dozen different people were identified as having known what Sandusky was doing to the young boys he brought to Penn State.

One man actually walked in on Sandusky a naked little boy. That man reported what he saw to his superiors at the college and let it drop instead of going to the police when Sandusky continued to work and continued prey on little boys. Some of these adult witnesses were shamed in the press but that's as far as their punishment went.

All Penn State cared about was keeping their reputation so they could keep on winning at college football.

And the same thing is happening here in regards to the girls involved in Olympic gymnastics. All the adults cared about was the ability to keep on winning at the Olympics.

The press, in cowardly fashion, have avoided talking in a very direct fashion to the girls' first line of defense, the people who could have stopped Larry Nassar 20 years back, before he sexually assaulted hundreds if not thousands of girls, their parents 

The judge who handed down Larry Nassar's sentence said that Nassar groomed the parents at the same time that he groomed the children, but that's not enough of an explanation. 

And some of the parents appear to know this, if I'm reading between the lines correctly.

This isn't just about accurate blame for me. This is about prevention in the futre.

So we need to explain to ourselves how it is a young girl who was sexually assaulted as a child had to wait 
until she was an adult so she could go to the police herself.

The press, in weak-willed fashion, is allowing the Larry Nassar story to be turned into a feel good survivor story within the #MeToo movement when we're talking about the sexual abuse of girl children.

There is no victory in young girls having to become adults to stop sexual assault* themselves.

The other thing that is making my stomach churn about how this story is unfolding, is how everyone seems to be okay  these girl CHILDREN were voiceless but not examining the most obvious part of their voicelessness -- their parents.

Journalists interviewing these young women keep implying that getting justice and putting Larry Nassar in jail for life was the outcome of a decades long battle between little girls and Nassar where Nassar lost. 

These girls were children when they were assaulted by an adult and a series of adults failed to protect them. And while the girls cannot accept that their parents were part of the line of defense that failed them, we have to accept this. 

When I was a child going to a school where white adults did not want me around their children because I was black, all the battles were fought by my parents. I understand that most parents didn't know details. 

But lets talk about the ones that did know at least some details.

Parents are the first line of defense, not USA Gymnastics and not Michigan State University and not the owners of Karyoli Ranch, where girls trained and practice. All of these businesses have some responsibility. 

But after watching a couple of television specials, I now realize that some of the parents knew their children were being digitally penetrated by Nassar. They reported what was happening to their girls to these businesses and asked questions. 

But the parents never called the police. 


During the interview I saw last night, one of the girls now a young woman, complained that a woman coach, Kathy Klages at Michigan State University "didn't even tell my parents." The journalist didn't bother to ask the girl if she told her parents herself and what her parents did about the sexual assault.*   
Before this section of the interview, the gymnasts --the youngest assaulted at 8 years of age - said that parents aren't allowed in the gym at all. The girls talked about a number of ways in which they were isolated from the parents.
To me, it sounds like abdicating your responsibility as a parent is central part of the olympic gymnastic program.
To me the decision to allow these rules to cut you off from your child is ground zero of expecting these girls to take care of themselves like adults.    

This must be why journalists are allowing this story to be cast as little girls versus big bad adults of USA Gymnastics and Michigan State and Karyloi Ranch. These girls have been treated like little adults since they were tiny. This must be why none of the "journalists" seem to be asking the question that makes me the angriest: 

Why did a little girl gymnast have to wait to become an adult then contact the police herself?  
LINK TO PART 2:
THE PARENTS OF LARRY NASSAR SURVIVORS ARE NOT CO-VICTIMS
http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-parents-of-larry-nassar-survivors.html


#MeToo AND #TimesUp FINALLY SCOOPS UP CASEY AFFLECK


"By tradition, Affleck - who won best actor for Manchester By The Sea in 2017 - would have been expected  [by decades old tradition] to present the best actress award this year.
The actor, brother of Hollywood star Ben Affleck, was sued by two female crew members for alleged sexual harassment in 2010.
He denies the allegations, and the lawsuits were settled out of court. 
  • [Note: There were two female accusers on the same project. Casey Affleck is the brother of Ben Affleck who was also re-exposed by #MeToo as well due to his squeezing a woman's breast while he knew he was being filmed.]

Read More: 
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42827210

I find it incredibly ironic that Casey Affleck won an award for a movie that depicts exactly how damaging Toxic Masculinity is to men without the men who made the movie OR the men who gave this movie awards realizing that's the movie they had done.

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA is about a man that is so damaged by a tragic mistake and his inability to cry and grieve, that all he decides to live in an unfurnished closet, go to work every day and get drunk enough to express his sorrow via the violence of getting into a bar fight every night. When his brother dies and he must go home to help his nephew grieve, this man has no ability to help this boy and no ability to accept forgiveness or love from anybody.

But the main character ends the movie his macho intact.  The movie almost ends with this man being a tragic hero for not being able to forgive himself, for not even being able to try to access all of his grief, forgiveness, friendship, or love.
It's incredible that the men who made this movie and the men that judged this movie as Oscar Worthy didn't actually understand what this movie says about American Toxic Masculinity. 


http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-difference-between-sexual.html


Friday, January 26, 2018

FROM ANGELA DAVIS ON HER BIRTHDAY

A repost

“We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to
 our being consumed by it. 

As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.”


---

Do you remember the popular phrase, from a James Brown song entitled, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud?  How about the four black brothers, from the Olympics, who saluted Black Americans, with clinched fists only to have their medals snatched away? What about the bombing of the 16th Street Church, in Birmingham that left four innocent little black girls dead?

I can fondly remember a time when Flagg Brother shoes and Eleganza Pants donned the bodies, of most young black males, as they sported huge Afros called “bushes”, that were accompanied by peace-sign picks. When the city, of Nashville, Tennessee hosted its annual Black Expo at the Municipal Auditorium, and the general public was allowed to mix and mingle with those in the know.  The celebrities, singers, activists, dancers and entertainers of a generation gathering to support the struggle for the generations that followed.
When Jessie Jackson and Operation Push were the voice of hope for civil obedience, which proceeds a time when Black America had witnessed the assassinations, of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Meagar Evers and Malcolm X. I remember the vivid image, of a young intelligent black woman who was sought by the FBI, and listed on their Top Ten Most Wanted List, after the failed prisoner break to free the Soledad Brothers.  The woman named, Angela Yvonne Davis....


Read More Of This Black Girl's Magic Biography

http://www.jayepurplewolf.com/PASSION/ANGELADAVIS/ 






THE POWER OF IMAGERY IN CREATING A BLACK GIRL'S VISION OF THE FUTURE

Feeling Rebloggy 
In 2011, [Aesha Ash] launched the Swan Dreams Project to inspire kids in the community she grew up in. The original idea was to post images of herself in a tutu all over Rochester. "I remember growing up and in the bodega you'd see images of girls in bikinis on motorbikes," says Ash. "I wanted to replace those with photos that show women of color in a different light."


She knew the power imagery can have: She still remembers what it felt like as a student at the School of American Ballet to see a photo of black ballet dancer Andrea Long. "That image was everything on days when I was feeling disenchanted. I'd see that picture of her, and know that the struggles I was going through, she went through them, too."

Read More:  
http://www.dancemagazine.com/aesha-ash-wandering-around-inner-city-rochester-tutu-2307053851.html  

See and Read More About SWAN DREAMS PROJECT :
http://www.theswandreamsproject.org/ 

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM