ISSA RAE: DON'T JUMP AT THE FIRST OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED

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ISSA RAE'S 10 RULES FOR SUCCESS

ISSA RAE: INTERNET SERIES STAR AND PRODUCER  ("Awkward Black Girl," "First")
TO HBO STAR AND PRODUCER ("Insecure")

RULE #8

Stop trying to be someone you're not
Stop trying so hard period
You don't have to

I remember constantly feeling like i wasn't...I wasn't...I wasn't what was expected of me.  And a lot of that had to do with my skin color

It feels so stupid but

...it had to do with Not feeling black enough
...like I wasn't the right kind of black, 
...like I wasn't cool enough 
...like I wasn't fun enough
...like i wasn't...I just wasn't good enough

OR

What was being painted of me. just even on television and music
And that was really disheartening

And I would tell me my younger self now... Embrace who you are now. 

You don't need to be that
Embrace who are now
Embrace how you're different

This particular TOP 10 RULES FOR SUCCESS is filmed in a choppy way. It could be the people who made the video didn't have as many sources as usual since she's new on the scene. 

But I love listening to Issa Rae because she's an AWKWARD BLACK GIRL that is the most like ME. 

So I listened to it. And I'm glad I listened to it. When she's talking about personal experiences, telling stories, she's a natural, she's funny, and you know what she had inside to share with the world.

The reason she's a success is because she's a stumbler and get-back-upper. She's a hustler. 

The best thing about her is she learns from her mistakes and tries something new the next time the same situation comes up. 

My favorite take-away on failure and getting back up had to do with how Rae blew a major opportunity by trying to be a "yes-woman" instead of being true to her vision.

But when she screwed up something important, she didn't lie down, she didn't stop to beat on herself for a good long while. She felt destroyed, but she kept going.  She continued working on her projects. When another opportunity presented itself she was still prepared, even better prepared, because she had decided to be confident in her creative vision during last failure.

When the next opportunity came up, she didn't just say "yes" when people asked her to change things.  

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HOW DANAI GURIRA MADE HISTORY ON BROADWAY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM LUPITA

A repost from 2016

Gurira's political drama is
the first Broadway play 

written by, 

directed by, 

and starring women 

-- and black women at that 

The play ECLIPSED was written by Danai Gurira star of television's THE WALKING DEAD.

Inspired by a news story about a real black female rebel soldier called "Black Diamond," Gurira's story follows the paths four women during the Liberian Civil War.

A brief description From Amazon

"It’s best to work with the system, and right now – the system is war.

In 2003, civil war is raging in Liberia. At a rebel army base four young women are doing their best to survive the conditions of the war. Yet sometimes, the greatest threat comes not from the enemy’s guns, but from the brutality of those on your own side. With the arrival of a new girl, who can read, and an old one, who can kill, how might this transform the future of this hard-bitten sisterhood?

Gurira's plays have been around for a while. And one of them played in Los Angeles in 2009. The fact that this play ECLIPSED is still around and Lupita Nyong'o decided she wanted to be in it bad enough to be part of an ensemble cast instead of a in a play where she could be a headliner --due to that Oscar in her pocket-- speaks volumes as to the quality of this play.

The play opened on Sunday, March 6 2016. I was able to see it in May of the same year.

Until I started researching what ECLIPSED was about, I didn't realize that I'd seen another of Gurira's plays years earlier when she wasn't famous.  Her Obie Award winning play IN THE CONTINUUM is about black women and AIDS in Africa.

When I first started realizing I wanted to tell stories from an African female perspective, I felt pretty lonely out there,” Ms. Gurira said. “I had to be like a mad scientist and have the hypothesis that if I put a multidimensional narrative about an African woman in front of a Western audience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/theater/african-plays-danai-guirira-jocelyn-bioh.html 

IN THE CONTINUUM showed me a relatively recent world where the social power of women was so low in the 1990s and early 2000s that a black woman in country X in Africa could get AIDS from her husband, yet automatically be the one blamed for bring AIDS into the household. Then this wife would be labeled as a cheating whore.

 As I recall, all of this was entirely due to men's status being so much greater than women's 

The wife's whore status could lead to death as this status could stop her getting the little treatment that might have been available for AIDS patients at the time.

Danai Gurira is truly a black girl that rocks. And this is why she won an award at BLACK GIRLS ROCK in 2016 and gave an awesome speech. And I hope you got to check out her acting skills in BLACK PANTHER.

An interview with Danai and Lupita is here at the link below, an awesome photo is located there too

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/02/26/lupita-nyongo-danai-gurira-ew


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FROM TONI MORRISON ON HER BIRTHDAY

“We were not strong, only aggressive; 

we were not free, merely licensed; 

we were not compassionate, we were polite; 

not good, but well behaved. 

We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life.

We substituted good grammar for intellect; 

we switched habits to simulate maturity; 

we rearranged lies and called it truth.”

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY
http://www.dw.com/en/the-strength-of-compassion-toni-morrison-at-85/a-19049659

MORE QUOTES
http://www.buzzfeed.com/juliapugachevsky/impossibly-beautiful-toni-morrison-quotes?utm_term=.rhbbB2yrB#.jdQGKaQXK 

BLACK PANTHER BRINGS THE NEW GOLD STANDARD FOR BLACK WOMEN IN BLACK MOVIES

I was shocked by the casting so many dark-skinned women in Black Panther, three of them well known.

No lie. I mean it. I almost fell of my chair when I found out big name dark-skinned women like Lupita N'yongo and Angela Bassett were both in it. And I gasped when they added a new comer Letitia Wright. Then I found my homegirl, the kick ass playwright Danai Gurira --who also plays Michonne in THE WALKING DEAD-- was going to be in BLACK PANTHER too, I was in danger of passing out due to joy overload.

But now that I've seen the movie, I've had another shock. These four women were in the entire movie. 

Lupita, Danai, Letitia, and Angela

They were in the ENTIRE movie

That is, they didn't have one pretty cool scene each as I fully expected. They were in the entire movie.

They had lines to speak. They made choices. Two or three of these women were truly main characters and they played women that had their own lives. Little black girls in the audience got to see dark-skinned black women have these awesome, massively long action scenes in a movie with more than a little bit of sci-fi going on. 

And Omigaaawd, these women had opinions that did not agree with their love interest's. Even after ugly things got said and uglier things got done, mutual respect returned (I think. Can't say more.) 

Dark black girls got to imagine themselves as spies and generals and as the superhero's super capable sidekicks who can hold it down when he's busy elsewhere.
The movie wasn't perfect. The father probably wasn't fleshed out enough to truly explain a fairly significant plot point. But I suppose the movie would have been too long. And you won't really notice it if you don't think about it too hard. And you're not supposed to think about Superhero movies that hard.

But you should think about THIS PARTICULAR SUPERHERO MOVIE hard or at least just let the values be absorbed into your skin naturally. 


THE SOCIAL ATTRIBUTES OF BLACK PANTHER1) Colorism reduced by 98% (can't bring myself to say 100. And maybe there could have been one more pale-ish sistah in there, for a a minute.)

2) Sexism reduced by 90%

3) Feminist attitudes up by 4000%

4) And best of all there were black discussions of race; class; immigration; isolationism; selfish self-protectiveness; legitimate anger at white supremacy; and discussions about copying the oppressor's methods to set oppressed black people that live elsewhere free.
I can't believe I was disappointed Ava DuVernay didn't wind up directing this movie.

Ryan Coogler brang it.

Coogler brought everything to this movie I thought only a female black feminist could bring. (And he might just be doing better than Ava on the colorism thing. Not sure. We'll see what Coogler's next movie looks like when the movies not mostly set in sub-Saharan  Africa)

TRUST!

Ryan Coogler has raised the bar as to how black female characters should be handled in black movies. Frankly, I really don't know how the heck will Spike Lee, John Singleton, F Gary Gray are going to make movies that please more than 65%  of the black community after this.

BLACK PANTHER WAS AWESOME.  I don't care if you don't usually like Superhero movies. Go see THIS ONE.
  
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AMY JACQUES GARVEY BEYOND MARCUS GARVEY TO FEMINISM

Feeling Rebloggy

Amy was a lot more than just Marcus Garvey's wife, especially after he was imprisoned.

“The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey” is the first book-length biography of this important but unsung figure. 

Born in Jamaica in 1895 to an educated “brown” family, Amy Jacques suffered from bouts of malaria and, in order to live in a malaria-free area, moved in 1917 to Harlem. There she became involved in the UNIA, serving first as a traveling secretary and later as private secretary to its leader, to whom she was married in 1922. 

The following year, the government brought charges against Marcus Garvey — claiming fraudulent sale of shares in the UNIA’s black steamship line; over the next years he was imprisoned and eventually deported. (A number of factors — including the hostility of J. Edgar Hoover, Marcus Garvey’s lack of business acumen, and the antipathy of other black leaders — are said to have contributed to Garvey’s downfall.)

Thrust by these troubles, in her husband’s absence, into a prominent position in the UNIA, Amy campaigned for his release, kept his words and philosophy before the public, and developed a female Pan Africanist philosophy on the women’s pages of The Negro World.

“She blossomed,” says Taylor, “by honing her journalistic skills, writing commentary on the international situation, and refining her discourse on Jim Crow.” But it was after her husband’s death in 1940, she says, that Amy Jacques Garvey took flight as an independent thinker. While the UNIA lauded the promise of black capitalism, for example, Amy took note of its limitations. And she became less concerned with getting people to join the UNIA, says Taylor, than with getting Pan African ideas into existing organizations.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2003/02/26_garvey.shtml

I've also read that Marcus did not hand off power over the UNIA to Amy while he was in prison. That may be one reason the organization did not survive and transform. But after reading Elaine Brown's book on how violent some black men got within the Black Panthers when they thought their [toxic] masculinity was being challenged, this decision/action of Marcus' may have protected her

...On the women’s page of the Negro World, black women activists articulated the position Sojourner Truth had emphasized so many years earlier: 

• The struggle for women’s rights cannot be divorced from the struggle for civil and human rights.

Following the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in August 1920, the Jamaican black nationalist Amy Jacques Garvey praised the amendment for expanding opportunities for women in the public sphere. She was not oblivious to its limitations especially as it pertained to black women in the United States. But, [Harvey] saw it as a source of inspiration and a step towards greater liberation for all women.

In [Harvey's] writings during this period, she often drew comparisons to white feminist movements in her efforts to encourage black women to push harder in the fight for their liberation and the liberation of other people of color. 

“White women are rallying all their forces,” she argued, “and [they are] uniting regardless of national boundaries to save their race from destruction and preserve its ideals for posterity.” “We see them in the law courts pleading as advocates; they preside as judges and administer laws; while in less numbers, yet they are to be seen in parliaments, congresses and council chambers legislating for their people.”

“Be not discouraged black women of the world,” she added, “but push forward, regardless of the lack of appreciation shown [to] you. A race must be saved, a country must be redeemed...” 

Read More:

http://www.aaihs.org/on-transnational-black-feminism/ 

BLACK PANTHER BEGINS TODAY AND IS ALREADY BREAKING RECORDS

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'Black Panther' is outselling every previous
superhero film in advance ticket sales

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/02/media/black-panther-fandango-ticket-sales/index.html

Marvel Studios is one of the most successful brands in Hollywood. The Disney subsidiary has broken box office records, brought in more than $13.5 billion worldwide, and had each of its 17 films opened at No. 1. Yet, not many of its films have enjoyed the same level of buzz generated by "Black Panther."

The film, starring Chadwick Boseman and directed by Ryan Coogler, opens in more than 4,000 North American theaters this weekend.

Industry analysts are projecting that the film could bring in about $145 million domestically in its opening weekend, which starts Thursday. "Black Panther" could rake in more than $160 million during the four day President's Day weekend, analysts say.

Disney anticipates an opening in the $150 million range for the four day holiday weekend.

"Black Panther" could easily become the biggest February opening in history, toppling "Deadpool," the R-rated superhero film from 20th Century Fox that brought in $132 million when it opened in 2016.("Deadpool" also holds the four day President's Day opening record at $152 million).

"Black Panther's" three day projections would also put it in the top openings for a Marvel Studios film and in the top ten opening for the superhero genre overall.

~CNN

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/14/media/black-panther-opening-weekend-projections/index.html

FOR ONE NIGHT WAKANDA WAS REAL: MARVEL'S BLACK PANTHER FASHION SHOW

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With Black Panther’s release date coinciding with Fashion Week, it was only natural for Marvel to throw a show of its own. 

“Welcome to Wakanda” brought together fashion designers in celebration of the film. Cushnie et Ochs, Tome, Sophie Theallet, Chromat, Brother Vellies, and LaQuan Smith were a few of the brands that created bespoke pieces for the charity auction event (proceeds will benefit Save the Children). Even the cast stopped by: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira waltzed in past the black carpet.

The show presented two seemingly opposing themes. Some of the fabrics and hairstyles — like Ikiré Jones’s palm-print suit and a model’s small Afro — felt familiar, while other elements — like the electric eye makeup on most of the models, or LaQuan Smith’s sequined suit — conveyed an out-of-this-world sense of the future. Witnessed live, the show’s Afro-futurism undercurrent felt a bit like Blade Runner: Nigeria....

~THE CUT

 

READ MORE:https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/black-panther-fashion-show-nyfw.html
 COUNTDOWN TO BLACK PANTHER: 1 DAY

DARK-SKINNED WOMEN CAST AS MAIN CHARACTERS, THE BLACK PANTHER ANOMALY

Repost
Feeling Rebloggy

From The Huffington Post

Another really big reason “Black Panther” is going to be an emotional roller coaster is the number of dark-skinned black women who were cast front and center for this film.

It doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal, but it is, especially considering the uncomfortable relationship that we — black people both here and abroad, even in the motherland — have with the insidious force known as colorism.

Colorism is defined as the discrimination, bias or prejudice leveled against folks with darker skin tones. And that phenomenon usually occurs among folks of the same racial or ethnic background. Even brown-skinned people, who fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from light-skinned and dark-skinned, are not spared from colorism.

This is why “Black Panther” is sort of an anomaly. Based on everything we know about colorism, who it affects, and what exactly feeds into it, we wouldn’t expect that many (or really any) dark-skinned and brown-skinned actresses would appear in “Black Panther.”

And yet there are. And here’s why it matters:  

‘Black Panther’ goes out of its way to cast dark-skinned women in every single role that calls for a woman — including the love interest.

 Dark-skinned and brown-skinned black women are abundant in the movie. You can see it in the background characters, the promotional material and in the much talked about Dora Milaje - an elite team of female bodyguards that defer to our good King T'Challa played by Chadwick Boseman. And every single significant speaking role has been cast with a dark-skinned or brown skinned actress...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-panther-is-ready-to-take-dark-skinned-actresses-and-colorism-seriously_us_5a7a090ce4b0d0ef3c0a2049 


COUNTDOWN TO BLACK PANTHER: 3 DAYS
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BLACK PANTHER SHOULD HELP KILL THE ABILITY OF SOME FOLKS TENDENCY TO MISREPRESENT AFRICA

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‘Black Panther’ creates a precedent that kills the ability of folks to misrepresent and distort the continent,” Gurira said. 

“The things that it checks off: complex African female characters; African language on a big screen; African characters who are varied in many different ways and heroic; the heroism of Africans for themselves and not needing a White hero—go figure—to reach their goals; celebrating so many specific African cultural-isms. No one can really now try to put forth some product where Africa is seen begging for a White superhero to come and save it.”

~COLORLINES 

Read More

https://www.colorlines.com/articles/danai-gurira-black-panther-will-change-hollywood-depictions-africa?

COUNTDOWN TO BLACK PANTHER: 2 DAYS

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Michelle Obama Creates Romantic Valentine's Day Playlist For Her 'One and Only' Barack

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Barack and Michelle Obama are arguably the most musically aware couple that has ever graced the White House: They called on Beyonce to sing on Inauguration day, they consistently support Chance the Rapper in any and all of his endeavors, and apparentlythey’ve fed Frank Ocean raviolis.

Music and its culture seem to have been a solid thread in the 25-year relationship between the former president and first lady, and Michelle took the time to highlight that with a Spotify playlist especially curated for her man -- "my one and only," as she called him in an adorable tweet with the playlist -- this Valentine’s Day.

~BILLBOARD.COM

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8099709/michelle-obama-valentines-day-playlist-for-barack-spotify

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HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

Love is composed of 
a single soul 
inhabiting two bodies 

- Aristotle

IMAGE: WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER JOSHUA DWAIN

https://www.joshuadwain.com/

From Frederick Douglass On His Chosen Birthday

MARTIN LUTHER KING ON PROTEST

THE BLACK PANTHER ANOMALY: DARK-SKINNED WOMEN CAST AS MAIN CHARACTERS

Feeling Rebloggy

From The Huffington Post

Another really big reason “Black Panther” is going to be an emotional roller coaster is the number of dark-skinned black women who were cast front and center for this film.

It doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal, but it is, especially considering the uncomfortable relationship that we — black people both here and abroad, even in the motherland — have with the insidious force known as colorism.

Colorism is defined as the discrimination, bias or prejudice leveled against folks with darker skin tones. And that phenomenon usually occurs among folks of the same racial or ethnic background. Even brown-skinned people, who fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from light-skinned and dark-skinned, are not spared from colorism.

This is why “Black Panther” is sort of an anomaly. Based on everything we know about colorism, who it affects, and what exactly feeds into it, we wouldn’t expect that many (or really any) dark-skinned and brown-skinned actresses would appear in “Black Panther.”

And yet there are. And here’s why it matters:  

‘Black Panther’ goes out of its way to cast dark-skinned women in every single role that calls for a woman — including the love interest.

 Dark-skinned and brown-skinned black women are abundant in the movie. You can see it in the background characters, the promotional material and in the much talked about Dora Milaje - an elite team of female bodyguards that defer to our good King T'Challa played by Chadwick Boseman. And every single significant speaking role has been cast with a dark-skinned or brown skinned actress...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-panther-is-ready-to-take-dark-skinned-actresses-and-colorism-seriously_us_5a7a090ce4b0d0ef3c0a2049 


COUNTDOWN TO BLACK PANTHER: 3 DAYS
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WAKANDA FOREVER ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BLACK PANTHER

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FROM THE ROOT

1. Black Panther remains socially and culturally relevant because it imagines a world where black people continually triumph over the influences of capitalism, Western imperialism and white supremacy. 

Part of the reason I’m so hype for Black Panther is that it’s bound to explore the existence of black people in the Marvel Cinematic Universe beyond America (and the small group of them in Asgard) and in a way that isn’t colorblind....

2. Black Panther Puts black women at the center of this black utopia. As it should.

You don’t have to be an astrophysicist to notice that black women are sorely lacking in Marvel’s movie-verse. You also don’t have to be an astrophysicist to note that when it comes to black liberation, black women (and queer and transgender people) are the focal points of black resistance.

So what happens when you notice these two things and decide to address them both in one fell swoop?

Well, you essentially get Ryan Coogler’s reimagining of Black Panther.

Read More: 

https://www.theroot.com/wakanda-forever-on-the-importance-of-black-panther-1820459283

COUNTDOWN TO BLACK PANTHER: 4 DAYSBLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

SOJOURNER TRUTH ON BLACK WOMEN FACING MORE THAN ONE OPPRESSION

[In 1867, when female suffrage was still very much being debated, Sojourner Truth said] 

“I feel that I have the right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.

'Black Panther' is outselling every previous superhero film in advance ticket sales

Following a star-studded world premiere on Monday in Los Angeles, ticket sales for the Marvel Studios production, which stars Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o, has also eclipsed every other movie that currently has tickets for sale on Fandango.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/02/media/black-panther-fandango-ticket-sales/index.html

COUNTDOWN TO BLACK PANTHER

GROWING UP WHITE, CHRISTIAN, AND QUIETLY RACIST IN RURAL AMERICA

Feeling Rebloggy 

...The real problem isn’t East Coast elites who don’t understand or care about rural America. The real problem is that rural Americans don’t understand the causes of their own situations and fears and they have shown no interest in finding out. They don’t want to know why they feel the way they do or why they are struggling because they don’t want to admit it is in large part because of the choices they’ve made and the horrible things they’ve allowed themselves to believe.

I grew up in rural Christian white America. You’d be hard-pressed to find an area of the country with a higher percentage of Christians or whites. I spent most of the first 24 years of my life deeply embedded in this culture. I religiously (pun intended) attended their Christian services. 

I worked off and on on their rural farms. I dated their calico-skirted daughters. I camped, hunted and fished with their sons. I listened to their political rants at the local diner and truck stop. 

I winced at their racist/bigoted jokes and epithets that were said more out of ignorance than animosity. I have watched the town I grew up in go from a robust economy with well-kept homes and infrastructure to a struggling economy with shuttered businesses, dilapidated homes and a broken-down infrastructure over the past 30 years. 

The problem isn’t that I don’t understand these people. The problem is they don’t understand themselves or the reasons for their anger and frustration...

Another problem with rural Christian white Americans is they are racists. 

I’m not talking about white hood-wearing, cross-burning, lynching racists (though some are). I’m talking about people who deep down in their heart of hearts truly believe they are superior because they are white. Their white god made them in his image and everyone else is a less-than-perfect version, flawed and cursed.

The religion in which I was raised taught this. Even though they’ve backtracked on some of their more racist declarations, many still believe the original claims. 

READ MORE 

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/insider-explains-rural-christian-white-america-dark-terrifying-underbelly/