MAYOR BETTY McCRAY BLACK & COP BLOCKED, Down The Road From Ferguson

KINLOCK, MO - BETTY McCRAY

A few minutes away from Ferguson in Kinloch, MO (population 300) the newly elected mayor, Betty McCray, won with 76 percent of the vote -- that is, 63 votes. "But the Board of Aldermen refused to swear her in, and now McCray can't get into city hall...She was denied entry and handed impeachment papers by the city attorney James Robinson."

 The irony is that Kinloch was one of the first African American Community in St Louis County. It could be it's just happenstance that the one blocking her entrance and giving her papers to say she's been "impeached" before she's begun is a black man (James Robinson).  Sometimes you have to do your job when you don't want to. Sometimes.

But until more facts become known we should all wonder how many parts racism to sexism there is in this particular potion of prejudice.

 The shameful lack of concern for Rekia Boyd, Miriam Carey, and other black female victims of white police officers doesn't allow me to give James the benefit of the doubt. The fact that I learned about Betty's plight through a general reference to her situation without the "brother" even bothering to mention her name or provide a link made me double down on not being able to give James the benefit of the doubt.

 CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT HOW BETTY  McCRAY WON 76% OF VOTE BEFORE BEING LOCKED OUT OF MAYORS OFFICE

The Kinloch administration is also notorious for its lack of transparency. A county judge ordered the town to stop going out of its way to limit public access to municipal court procedures. But old habits die hard. Even though James Robinson insists that Betty McCray was served with impeachment papers, he declined to make copies available for the press or to identify which members of the Board of Alderman voted to impeach McCray.

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2041880/mayor-of-kinloch-gets-cop-blocked-why-was-betty-mccray-locked-out-of-city-hall/#uPMTCKlYPDh9GOmJ.99

IF BLACK FEATURES WERE CONSIDERED ATTRACTIVE ON BLACK WOMEN, WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE?

Imagine!  Just imagine what it would be like if black women's bodies were considered attractive on black women

Keke Palmer might be playing a black 'Black Widow' in "The Avengers, The Age Of Ultron" this summer.

Cinderella's Black Fairy God Mother in ABC's "Once Upon A Time" wouldn't have been killed off less than 20 seconds after she appeared, never to be heard from again (in the first few seasons). I think Sir Lancelot, also black, lasted an entire episode before he was killed.


The producers of  CBS's "Person Of Interest" might have paid Taraji P. Henson absolutely anything to stay on the show as a rocket launcher toting, bad ass cop that's also a loving mother and the heart of the show.

Would Michelle Obama might have been able to wear her hair any way she wanted to during the 1st and 2nd terms of her husband's presidency? If blackness on black women was considered attractive?

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Alas, black features are only considered attractive on white people and white women to be specific. And the white fascination with black features on white women (without acknowledging that black women exist at all) sort of reminds me of an inverted doll test.

You remember the doll test, right?

That's that decades old race/racism test where researches presented dolls to children that were exactly the same except for "skin" color.  Small white children choose the white doll as prettier, smarter, more honest, and cleaner while the black doll was uglier, dumber, dishonest, and dirty. Not that big a surprise in some ways. But even in 1950s and 60s it was surprising that teeny, tiny children had absorbed white supremacy. It seemed like some were no more than 4 years old.

What did surprise researchers in the 1950s or 60s was that the black children also chose the white doll as smarter, prettier, more honest, cleaner, and just better overall. Again, these doll tests showed that even the tiniest children were being affected by the white supremacy washing over them daily.

When researchers tested older children, the black children in particular, they knew not to pick the white doll anymore, which doesn't say a thing about how the children really felt about themselves. They just knew the correct answer after a certain age; Black children said they liked the black doll better or said that both dolls were the same.

Signs of  internalized racism aside, white features and white beauty is the only beauty that's truly seen more often than not, even today. Supposedly "interracial" magazines, bill boards, movies, and television tell the story.  And when white women culturally appropriate a black female features, they do so without acknowledgement. Black beauty is taken from us as if we do not exist.

Things like thicker lips and thicker butts become BEAUTIFUL on white women and put forth as if a new fad, something completely new and different...as if black women's full lips and full backsides do not exist.

Black women appear to be invisible to white people (and black men too, as would be indicated in the lack of outrage over Rekia Boyd's death)

WHITE (ISH) WOMEN FAMOUS FOR BLACK FEATURES

EXHIBIT A:  Kylie Jenner's surgically enhanced Lips  (left) and black woman's natural lips right.

Black child picking white doll to play with

READ MORE ON THE FASCINATION WITH JENNER'S NEW LIPS http://mic.com/articles/116222/what-the-fascination-with-kylie-jenner-s-lips-says-about-beauty-and-race?utm_source=policymicTBLR&utm_medium=main&utm_campaign=social

On How MICHELLE OBAMA'S HAIR was connected to BARACK OBAMA'S PRESIDENCY?

You can file this  2 minute talk under things that are so obvious to black women that they don't even need to be discussed very much. And this topic is so very symbolic of the fact that we, as a country, are no where near a post-racial United States of America.

WINNING THE WHITE HOUSE, FIRST TERM
PARTIAL COVER FROM THE NEW YORKER

WHITE FEARS
NATURAL HAIR AS FOREIGN AND THREATENING

Michelle Obama With A Photoshopped Fro during President Obama's First Term. Otherwise FLOTUS's hair has been straight.

BLACK HOPES
PHOTOSHOPPED NATURAL HAIR

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SECOND TERM =  FREE TO BE BLACKER?


White House Correspondents' Dinner
SECOND TERM

A MORE NATURAL LOOK
 FREE TO CHOOSE

Straight Haired, but Michelle Obama's Attitude Was Openly Free and Black
At Black Girls Rock - click here to listen

LENA BAKER RECEIVES PARDON 60 YEARS AFTER EXECUTION

Her murder trial lasted just a day, without a single witness called by her court-appointed lawyer. She was convicted and sentenced to death.

John Cole Vodicka, director of an Americus-based inmate advocacy program known as the Prison and Jail Project, said Knight had kept Ms. Baker as his “virtual sex slave.” She was his paramour, she was his mistress, and, among other things, his drinking partner. If you read the transcript and have any understanding of black-white relations, Black women were often subjected to the sexual whims of their white masters, their white bosses, or some white man who had control over their lives or the lives of their families.

“Here is one who resisted and paid the price.”

- From Black Then (see link below)

Lena Baker Innocent of Killing White Man, E B Knight

Black Then | African American Woman Who Received Pardon 60 Years After Execution

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Ikard and Baldwin on Black Female Patriarchy

A REPOST FROM NEW BLACK MAN BLOG
http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-breaking-silence-toward.html

A pivotal moment in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) sees the churchman and patriarch Gabriel being confronted by his sister Florence over a devastating past infidelity.

Upon fathering a child with his mistress Esther, Gabriel

James Baldwin

stole the savings of his first wife Deborah and gave it to Esther to hush up the matter. Deborah wrote a letter to Florence testifying to Gabriel’s ruinous behavior, which left her neglected, isolated, and economically dependent on him.


When Florence musters up the courage to confront Gabriel, ten years after having received the letter, the effect on his psyche is profound:

“It had lived in [Deborah’s] silence, then, all of those years? He could not believe it…And yet, this letter, her witness, spoke, breaking her long silence, now that she was beyond his reach forever” (212).


Confronted with the suffering wrought by his patriarchal authority, Gabriel reels from the memory of Deborah as it is framed by Florence’s criticism of his actions. As if to underscore the power of speech in these women’s intertwined voices, Baldwin has Florence rebut Gabriel’s power over her by uttering,


“When I go, brother, you better tremble, cause I ain’t going to go in silence” (215).

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David Ikard

Ikard’s chapter on Go Tell It on the Mountain is exemplary in this regard because it introduces the idea that both men and women have a stake in black patriarchy—a dynamic that underscores the need for genuine intergender dialogue (rather than, say, a feminist critique of male oppression as “ONLY” an issue of men dominating women).


On the one hand, Ikard shows how the novel’s patriarch, Gabriel, consistently shores up his sense of masculine identity by compelling the black women in his life to submit to his religious and familial authority.

When his mistress Esther is left on her own with their unborn child, she is “virtually at Gabriel’s mercy” because she is a “poor pregnant woman of disreputable social standing” (64). Esther might reveal Gabriel’s infidelity to the church, but Ikard understands this as an impossible choice, given the practices of community policing which downplay such infidelity in the name of securing strong black male leaders.

In this way, Gabriel’s sense of himself as “the chief victim of white oppression and the burden-bearer of his family” continues to justify his ill treatment of black women.

Yet in his chapter on Baldwin, Ikard is also keen to show how the novel “disrupts the victimization discourse that allows black men like Jones and Gabriel to explain away their subjection of black women” (50).


                                                                        *    *     *    *   *


Crucial to this narrative disruption, according to Ikard, is black women’s recognition of and rebellion against their complicity with black patriarchy. In the figures of Elizabeth (Gabriel’s current wife) and Gabriel’s mother, Ikard identifies how “women unknowingly support patriarchy in their relationships with men,” particularly through the“internalized…expectation of black female self-sacrifice” (50, 67).

1) Elizabeth buttresses Gabriel’s authority by assuming guilt for being a “bad mother” and having had sex prior to their marriage.

2) Gabriel’s mother is a more resonant example of black female patriarchy in that she “rears him to believe that as a man he should expect black women to cater to his every emotional, physical, and material desire” (55).


In both cases, Ikard outlines a convincing case to extend the study of black patriarchy to women who support its ideological and institutional viability.

Importantly, this perspective does not cast judgment on black women for supporting patriarchy but instead seeks to understand

1) how their stake in it is conditioned by white supremacy, and

2) how a more inclusive politics of resistance would overturn both racists and gendered structures of oppression.


Ikard’s perspective is echoed in the character of Florence, who emerges as the novel’s privileged witness to the range of patriarchy’s harms precisely because she has also suffered from black women’s (her mother’s) investment in patriarchy.

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FROM A NEW BLACK MAN A PARTIAL REVIEW OF
"BREAKING THE SILENCE: TOWARD A BLACK MALE FEMINIST CRITICISM"  by David Ikard. Read More -  http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-breaking-silence-toward.html


Click Here for more about the book itself