Lil' Kim: Diary of a Mirror

Lil' Kim: Diary of a Mirror

by Esther Armah | Ebony.com

'Emotional Justice' warrior Esther Armah ponders about Lil' Kim's—and all of ours—personal relationship with beauty

1996. Damn, even in the mug shot Lil' Kim is pretty. Brown, smooth skin, nice eyes, cute nose. We all checked pictures of the petite rapper and concluded God gave her genes-with-benefits.

No longer. The most recent pics of Lil' Kim remind me of arguments surrounding the merits of plastic surgery and the freedom and right of some to choose to re-arrange their image. Those arguments do indeed exist, but for Generation X and Y in particular, it’s hard to look at the Queen Bee now and make them. We remember when.

Of course, Kim is a grown ass woman making choices, but Black beauty is more than facial features; it is a complicated, precious, powerful living history that includes intimate connections with violence—and is tangled with stories of rejection, privilege, love and lack, favor and hatred. Black beauty’s mirror has never just been our individual reflection staring back at us, it has been a history of a relationship with nations all over the world, their lens on our features and bodies, their opinion, their version of our beauty, how that version has changed and stayed the same over time–the mirror is our intimate revolution.

Lil Kim's transformation isn't new, nor is it news, but I ran across some recent pictures of her and was stopped in my tracks. Not because of any individual feature. But rather because I was looking at a face that was almost other-worldly, alien, unknown, unfamiliar, bearing no resemblance to a self of several years ago. No-one looks like this. Her bone structure—now unrecognizable, carved with seeming self-hate and accentuated with blush—a nose that could stab rather than sniff and eyes permanently on stare. This is hard. That’s why ‘emotional justice’ matters. It’s the term I created to deal with our legacy of untreated trauma that has tumbled down from generation to generation and manifests in all different forms. Black beauty is one of those forms.

Read More

***

Esther Armah is a NY Radio host, playwright, national best-selling author. ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’ is her annual arts & conversation series. Follow her on Twitter: @estherarmah #emotionaljustice or Facebook: www.facebook.com/emotionaljustice

Birthdays, Legacies, Love, Leadership: Letter to Winnie Mandela on Her Ex’s Birthday

Birthdays, Legacies, Love, Leadership:

Letter to Winnie Mandela on Her Ex’s Birthday

by Esther Armah | HuffPost Black Voices

Dear Mama Winnie,

Wednesday July 18 2012  

It’s Nelson’s birthday. Headlines celebrating him as peace leader and iconic African symbol adorn papers in the four corners of the globe. I’m thinking of you, wondering how you are today. Like so many millions all over the world, I love and respect your ex. All over the world, your ex’s name on lips – black, brown, white, yellow, red - is a smile, a celebration. Yet, your name is a pause, a silence, a quiet - our now created memory of your magic turned mayhem, a time that is best forgotten. It is not that I refuse to celebrate your ex’s birthday, it is that the world would not know yours just by opening a newspaper or turning on a tv anywhere in the world   We don’t know yours – not like that. And we should. But we did not find space to sanction your walk through bloody revolution. You did not leave apartheid’s legacy with the glory your ex did. That wasn’t your story.

You became the other woman, not in your marriage, but in a movement.  You became this third wheel in the African National Congress (ANC), a revolutionary home-wrecker in this new South Africa, a casualty in a relationship between the ANC, apartheid leader F W De Klerk and the intrusive eyes of a global mainstream media that no longer wanted your presence nor recognized your contribution. You know the way the world side-eyes the side chick, knows exactly who she is but avoids any mention of her that is not disparaging. How did you become that?  You became the punch line in a Chris Rock joke about how much easier it was for Nelson Mandela to survive 27 years of incarceration but then submit to divorce  6 months after he was released. All this after you walked hand in hand with a husband who created freedom songs behind walls and bars for more than two decades. Your walls and bars were global and lethal when they came. We watched as first your freedom ride was this global celebration. Here in New York, now my new home, the streets rang out to calls of both your names, real live revolutionary love against the odds, an apparent power couple. We loved it. I was in London. I remember Brixton, South London when hand in hand you and your husband walked streets lined with hope, change, and revolution.

So soon after, you became a woman whose woman-ness was forgotten.  And, yes relationships break down, they end. This is not about that. Your body – like so many millions – became a battlefield as men fought for political power.  Being tough on you as the world watched was evidence of this new South Africa. Headlines detailing horrific actions that led to the loss of life of a boy would become the narrative that would haunt and condemn you. Battlefields create dead bodies at the hands of all engaged in war. In war, blood drips from all hands, so you often can’t tell whose blood or from whose hands by the end of war. But this was not that. This was a people defending themselves against state-sanctioned violence, a legitimate defense on an international stage. Your blood and your hands were marked. De Klerk suffered no such fate. Steve Biko’s killer endured no such humiliation. But you did.  I watched. We watched. And you took the stand, stood on the stage and wanted to fight, to protest this treatment, to call out this behavior, to condemn this re-written narrative. Revolutionaries don’t inherit thrones, however.

Remembering: Philadelphia 1996. You were the keynote speaker for the Million Woman March. I listened as some American White liberal women spoke of you in degrading tones, questioned your presence, and challenged the validity of this platform just because your name was attached.  I thought about re-written narratives. These women who claim a home in feminism, but failed to recognize how your revolutionary choices ultimately helped move a people to political freedom and certainly enabled a man to become a symbol. I wonder, how you are now? 1997 was my first time in your homeland. A virgin traveler to this particular corner of the Continent, a stranger in this familiar land – I imagined this would be home, space to breathe and be. Midrand, Johannesburg was where I stayed initially and then I travelled around the country, saw the beauty of mountains hugging Cape Town, and tasted the poison of apartheid’s cancerous legacy. I did not understand the potency of legacy. I had never felt apartheid until then, only protested against it.

Got in a cab made my way to another space in the township. I stood and listened as an Xhosa woman spat her words of anger at your now ex demanding whose authority he had when he asked the Black majority to forgive the White minority. “Forgive them,” he said. Two words aimed at a white minority who had profited from legislating your inhumanity, creating economic injustice from that legislation and then demanding it be maintained even as Soweto babies bled and died fighting to breathe legislated freedom. Your ex told a nation “Forgive them.” I see brown eyes. A Xhosa woman’s eyes asking me who she should forgive for her children buried because they weren’t willing to sit and wait for freedom while their parents were too afraid to step back into the fire of rubber necklaces and brutal regimes.  She wanted her babies home. God called them home, ancestral spaces no mother wants to experience.  I thought about your daughters; left in homes when authorities came and snatched you due to your latest revolutionary infringement. Their fear as their mother was continuously disappeared, their father already incarcerated, their trauma left untended and what that ceded for them as they became women.

I listened  as Desmond Tutu, loved and cherished, sounded  his clarion call for truth and reconciliation. The Commission he created was hailed as a model for the world to emulate, a place of unraveling secrets of horror. Was it just that?  Or was it also a rewarded hypocrisy – treasure by a global predominantly White male media congratulating Black men for not punishing White men who committed state-sanctioned violent and heinous acts on Black bodies. Your fate was not to escape. You were punished, humiliated on a world stage, and banished from the public gaze. Yes, still a force in townships, on streets, with the people all but invisible via a world lens – that space was now occupied by your ex, Desmond Tutu, F W De Klerk, the global mainstream media. You were no longer a revolutionary, you became a cause for  apology. Desmond Tutu demanded you apologize to the world for your actions on the battlefield, actions that others walked away from – unscarred and unscathed. This is Africa, post independence, post apartheid. This Continent whose leadership is always celebrated as long as it acts outside of its own people’s interests and instead represents those of the minority – the 1%. In South Africa, that equals whites.  The 99% equals Black South Africans. You occupied freedom, freedom was a slave master who took your efforts, energy, strategy and defiance and sold it at the auction block of political compromise. So, I wonder if there were moments when freedom and forgiveness became an ‘f’ word; the taste of blood and pain on your tongue.

Let me be clear. Forgiveness is revolutionary practice, not race baiting. What I was waiting for was your ex’s suggestion that you forgive yourself. \ I call this emotional justice – looking at the toll of injustice on who we become emotionally and how that legacy reaches from those past moments into our present and far into our future, demanding our attention. That your ex forgives you for what you endured in your bid to walk a delicate treacherous balance in that apartheid world. I wonder about that. Forgiveness for me, like black love, is revolutionary. So, I waited to hear your ex ask black South African men and women to forgive themselves and each other for what they must have put themselves and their families through in order to navigate hostile apartheid waters and come out breathing. That didn’t happen. Your ex asked the Black majority to forgive the white minority – and he continues to be rewarded for that act.

Your ex is an icon, a living symbol, and a celebrated hero. You are not that. Your name is revered by those dismissed as marginal revolutionaries calling for now long gone times of your heyday, when towns to which you were banished still heard your call for freedom and equality for the South African Black majority. I am not mad at Nelson, nor his beautiful wife Graca Machel. This is not about that. This is about emotional justice – it is about a woman’s contribution to a nation’s freedom not being re-written and new narratives of negation and subjugation replacing revolution. It’s tough when your ex is the icon and folks want to reduce you to the bitter ex-wife who never really helped realize not just her husband’s dream, but that of a nation. Silence was my mother’s best friend out of untreated trauma. It didn’t work for her or this girl child. I don’t want that to be a cancerous force for you either. So, on this day, your ex’s birthday; I wonder how you are? As I acknowledge, celebrate and smile for Mr. Nelson Mandela, I just wanted to check in with you.  Your ex is good. I hope you are too.

Love, Esther

***

Esther Armah is a New York radio host, playwright, national best-selling author, international award winning journalist. She now lives in New York. She hosts Wake Up Call on WBAI99.5FM Mon-Thurs 6am – 8am. She’s a regular on MSNBC’s ‘Up with Chris Hayes’. She created and hosts ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’, a multi-platform, multi-media, multi-generational conversation series. On twitter, follow @estherarmah. Like her on Facebook: www.facebook.com/emotionaljustice

The ‘Real Black Man’ Is Dead? Frank Ocean and Black Masculinity

The ‘Real Black Man’ Is Dead? Long Live Emotional Justice!

by Esther Armah | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Winning: that’s a good word to hear within social justice movements. Over the last several weeks, the President voiced his support for same-sex marriage, followed by hip-hop’s leading man, Jay Z. Then CNN’s Anderson Cooper came out, followed by Frank Ocean, an African-American singer in the world of hyper-masculine hip hop publicly released a letter affirming that he once loved a man.  And just this weekend, the first sitting US congressman, Barney Frank,  married his long time love. Politics, policy, social justice, successful same-sex marriage legislation – that’s been the conversation. Those rights have been hard fought, with sacrifice, strategy and struggle.  But that’s not the only part of the journey. Behind every policy, protest, pivotal moment, is one person’s story, one’s journey of love, hurt, loss, fear, strength, and pain.  Frank Ocean is one example of another step towards a different victory—an emotional revolution in re-imagining the rigid, narrow straitjacket that is conventional masculinity.

Frank’s love letter was a display of freedom, a call to action for all men. Our association with emotionality and homosexuality is hardly new and still complicated. This becomes a moment to have an intimate public conversation around our notions of masculinity. That conversation is tied to legacies of racism, notions of gender (and the threat of crossing gender boundaries), and rigid ideas of patriarchy. It’s problematic, painful and needs interrogation.

Reaction to Frank was broad and swift. Conviction and execution on Twitter was matched  by Twitter justice in support. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry spoke to author and public intellectual Michael Eric Dyson. The New York Times featured pieces that quoted the voices of some of hip hop’s great cultural critics including activist scholar and author Mark Anthony Neal, hip-hop feminist cultural critic Joan Morgan, film-maker Nelson George. They all spoke to a social shift that meant Frank would not mourn the death of a career at his own truth-telling hands as he might have done had this happened 5, 10, or 15 years earlier. The brilliant writer dream hampton captured the significance of Frank’s action as she languaged his revelation in these contexts: today’s media, the lack of real risk and low stakes for the white privileged world of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper versus the high stakes, high risk world of hyper-masculine hip-hop out of which came Frank Ocean   and, for me, most importantly, within the powerful seat of  love, loss, legacy and learning.

Other reactions explored this idea: that Frank’s acknowledgment that he loved a man is essentially liberating some of his straight brethren from their own bigotry. On the site Black Youth Project, reaction to Frank Ocean’s and Anderson Cooper’s “coming out” is expressed this way in a piece by writer scholar Summer McDonald: “Coming out also seems to work as a plea for the continued recognition of one’s humanity. The reaction to these public, quasi-confessions reveals to me that coming out seems less about the person revealing the “secret” and more about the response from the people witnessing the emergence from the closet. Coming out seems to be a really dramatic way of humanizing a concept and asking, “Will you still love me…?” McDonald quotes a piece for Time.com, in which writer and cultural critic Toure puts it this way:

Studies show that people are more likely to be at peace with homosexuality even if they only know homosexuals through parasocial relationships — the sort of one-sided relationships we have with celebrities. It becomes harder to hate gay people when you find them in your living room all the time via Modern Family or Will & Grace. So coming out remains important because the visibility and normality of prominent gay Americans makes life easier for less famous gay Americans, some of whom commit suicide because they fear the life ahead of them.” McDonald responds in her thoughtful must-read piece: “In other words, coming out is important because it helps straight people stop being judgmental bigots. Perhaps I am in the minority in this, but this line of thinking is not at all okay. None of my identity serves to make people comfortable nor do I exist to make them better at being people. It’s just not my job. (It’s Google’s.) If coming out is important because of its utility to straight people, then I’d rather not come out.

I hear that. Coming out conversations may do little for those who now walk that journey, but there are thousands more living in different spaces – spaces where Frank’s words matter and are a life-line to becoming. Plus, there has always been a price to pay  for action that liberates so many who are not engaged in the fight, not exposed to the ridicule of others, and not living with the consequences of that exposure for social justice and humanity.

Emotional Justice

In New York, I do a conversation series about the ways in which we are loved and then go on to love one another and shape Black leadership, institutions, gender relations as well as family and love relationships. It’s called: ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’ – it’s an annual, multimedia, multi-platform, multi-generational, mixed gender arts and conversation series. We are in the third year; the panel and audience crosses color, culture, gender, sexuality. It really breaks down the politics of emotionality and the integral ways in which they continue to shape our motion and interrupt our progress.

This year’s theme: “Black Love: A Re-Imagining,” we’ve had straight men, lesbian women, straight women, conversations between the sexes. On the April panel, activist scholar, Dr Marc Lamont Hill appeared alongside Brooklyn State Committeeman, Robert Cornegy Junior. Discussion circled again and again about the impact of conventional masculinity and its noose-like grip around necks choked by its rigidity. They talked about that plus childhood trauma; its spilling into adult emotionally dysfunctional behavior and the sanctioning of that via conventional notions of masculinity. Marc Lamont Hill said this about conventional masculinity, “I think of all the things that are possible if there wasn’t a cap on masculinity. For me masculinity itself is a construct that must be destroyed – it can’t be re-imagined. There is nothing healthy. I think there’s ways to have healthy, emotionally just constructs without this notion of masculinity We don’t want to destroy men – we want to destroy manhood.  It’s built on all of these things that dehumanize not just others but us.” 

That conventional masculinity often manifests as the ‘good black man’. Just say that line, “good black man” or “real black man” to brothers and groans, sighs, and arguments might ensue. Let black men hear that phrase from the mouths of black women and they hear a judgment, an unattainable prize, a statement of inadequacy and being held to some standard that leaves no room for the imperfect beauty of humanity to seep through. It is a standard that eludes them, causes fights, accusatory and blame-filled exchanges. It seems to make everybody mad.

In an on air interview for my radio show Wake Up Call on WBAI99.5FM,  activist and writer Darnell Moore said this when talking about his own journey through childhood trauma into becoming a gay black man and loving who he saw in the mirror:

When I looked in the mirror, I saw failure, I saw someone who not only failed God, but also failed to meet this ideal of what one might call the real black man. I did not play basketball. I wasn’t tough. I did not fit that characteristic. Who’s affirming a black boy for deciding not to fight, who runs in the opposite direction as opposed to putting up their hands? Failing to live up to society’s expectations of what a real black man is supposed to be was a wonderful thing , because had I listened, had I continued to think that I’m not supposed to cry, I am supposed to be physically strong and therefore exert my power over women, I am supposed to think that cool equals anti-intellectualism and anti-education (all of these things that pushed me away from the type of adult and human being who needs to live a life socially responsible), I would not have been able to be cultivated into that. It’s funny to say, but I failed at being straight. I’m happy about it. It enabled me to be the human being in my fullness that I am today. So in many ways I lift that up. I think that the failure that I saw was such a good thing, that’s my reframe. Because I failed at being who everyone else wanted me to be, so that I could be who I was designed and created to be…and that’s success.

What Frank did was some grown men ish when it comes to feelings and love. Not that world of conventional masculinity where the accepted channel for all feelings is sex and anger, but a way more sexy world where masculinity is re-imagined and swagged-out. So, your swagger includes your sexuality, your panorama of feeling, your declaration of hurt. Your swagger need not be castrated due to expressions of emotionality. Now, for sure, hip hop’s hyper masculine world is not fairy god daddy transformed with the publication of one letter. I’m not talking about that.

Frank Ocean’s act equals emotional justice; emotional revolution. 1 step at a time. 1 conversation at a time. 1 revelation at a time.

I created that term to tackle a legacy of untreated trauma stemming from a brutal and violent, history of racialized violence. Those battlefields of movements – abolitionist movement, civil rights, Black power, women’s rights – moved nations forward, scored victories. They also left scars, like keloids on the soul. Bodies were broken and mended. Hearts broke and stayed broken. Some atrophied, rigor mortis settled in for several lifetimes. No time to tend to those wounds when humanity was on the line and Black folk were catching hell as they fought to escape nooses, to vote, to acknowledge and celebrate their identity, seek equality. Some wounds were bandaged; many festered, so many were passed generation to generation. Silence did not still their passage; indeed, in some ways it made that neglected emotionality more deadly.

Movements moved nations until slowly a nation that profited from human bondage emerged from that space. Black folks’ journey has never been a single story.  The blood, brutality, battlefields also saw love, laughter, creativity, community, and entrepreneurship. Success bloomed. As movements rose, fell, staggered; neglected emotionality continued its journey. We had intimate relationships with violence, risk was life and death, blood and breath. So love was this dangerous, forbidden thing, and it became revolutionary. Emotional justice is about giving voice to hurts – present and historical – to speaking the most intimate truths, not being held hostage to a generational inheritance of untreated trauma and to shaping your future and not being shaped solely by an unresolved past. That past manifests in our present; in how we love and stay, how we build family and community, shape relationships, construct institutions, negotiate power, navigate leadership.

And so now we arrive at a moment to pay attention to what was necessarily neglected. Why now? Because there is a Black president in a White House, because a congressman married his love, because a mainstream news anchor declared his sexuality and an R&B singer in the hyper-masculine world of hiphop wrote his love letter to personal truth and freedom.

Did Frank Ocean’s letter body the phrase “real black man” –no it didn’t kill it – but it did crack the window open a bit more for other conversations, and in that space re-imagine masculinity.

* Originally published at HuffPost BlackVoices

***

Esther Armah is the creator of ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’, the multi platform, multi media intimate public arts and conversation series. She’s a New York Radio Host for WBAI99.5FM, a regular on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes and an  international journalist, Playwright and National best-selling author.  Follow her on twitter @estherarmah For Emotional Justice, go to www.facebook.com/emotionaljustice.  Her upcoming book is: ‘Emotional Justice; A Kiss Goodbye To Struggle’

'Black Love: A Re-Imagining; Swagger, Sexuality, Masculinity' A conversation on love, loss, lessons with Darnell Moore & Dr Rich Blint. Moderated by Esther Armah: Tuesday July 17th 7pm, The Dwyer Cultural Center, 258 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York, NY • 10027. For more information tel: 212 209 2815.

BLACK LOVE: A RE-IMAGINING: Swagger, Sexuality, Identity, Masculinity - An Intimate Public Conversation

EMOTIONAL JUSTICE UNPLUGGED 2012

In partnership with

WBAI99.5FM

presents

‘BLACK LOVE: A RE-IMAGINING’: Sexuality &  Masculinity

Feat: Dr. Rich Blint  & Darnell Moore

Moderated by Esther Armah

Come on out to this intimate public conversation.

This is Emotional Revolution. One conversation at a time.

There is nothing more revolutionary than black love.

Let’s talk Sexuality and masculinity. How have those who loved and raised you informed your relationship with your sexuality and masculinity? What was your journey to coming out? How was that journey shaped by those who raised, influence, loved, hurt, helped, left you? How do you live and walk your masculinity and sexuality? How do we re-imagine swagger and sexuality? How has the way you love been informed by how you were treated? How do you express your identity, sexuality and masculinity? What lessons, legacy, loss and learning can you share around your masculinity and sexuality? What have you had to unlearn? In what ways did you need healing?

This is Emotional Justice. Join the conversation.

Join:

Dr Rich Blint - Writer and Cultural critic. He has taught courses and guest lectured at NYU, Columbia University School of Law, Hunter College, Yale College, Vassar College, and The Brecht Forum. He is co-editor of the Winter 2013 special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin.

Darnell Moore - Activist Scholar & Writer. His work examines notions of race, gender, and sexuality. He is presently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University.

Moderated by:

Esther Armah – New York Radio Host, Award winning international journalist, Playwright, National best-selling author

DATE: TUESDAY JULY 17 2012

TIME: 7PM TO 9.30PM

VENUE: The Dwyer Cultural Center, 258 St. Nicholas Avenue • New York, NY • 10027 Entrance on 123rd Street between St. Nicholas Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard

Subway: A, B, C, D, B to 125th Street

ADMISSION: $10 cash only; first come, first served

This is part of Season 3 - 2012 ‘EMOTIONAL JUSTICE UNPLUGGED

The Arts & Conversation Series’

Multi-Media, Multi-Platform, Arts & Critical Community Conversation series: Live, On Air, On the Stage, On the Page

EMOTIONAL JUSTICE UNPLUGGED: ‘BLACK LOVE: A RE-IMAGINING’ Love: Lessons, Legacy, Loss, Learning

EMOTIONAL JUSTICE UNPLUGGED

In partnership with WBAI99.5FM

presents

‘BLACK LOVE: A RE-IMAGINING’ Love: Lessons, Legacy, Loss, Learning

A Conversation with Marc Lamont Hill & Robert Cornegy Jr

Moderated by Esther Armah

***

There is nothing more revolutionary than black love.

How do you define love? How have men, women, lovers, parents, friends influenced and impacted how you love? How has the way you love shaped your relationships: work & love? How has rejection, abandonment and loss shaped how you love? How does the way you love shape your masculinity? What lessons have you learned? What do you need to unlearn? What legacy has the way you love created for you? What lessons would you share? Where do you need healing? Join the conversation, re-imagine love.

Panelists

Marc Lamont Hill: Activist Scholar, Author, TV Host, Political Commentator. Associate Professor of Education @ Columbia University; TV Host of Our World with Black Enterprise, Author The Classroom & The Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America

Robert Cornegy Jr: State Committeeman/District Leader 56th AD, Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Brooklyn College, Husband and father of 6

Moderated by

Esther Armah: NY Radio Host, Playwright, National Best-Selling Author

DATE: WEDNESDAY MAY 16TH 2012

TIME: 7.00PM TO 9.30PM

VENUE: The Brecht Forum, 451 West Street between Bank & Bethune

Subway: A, C, E to 14th Street & 8th Avenue

ADMISSION: $10 cash only; first come, first served

Plus book signing: 'The Classroom & The Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America'

Twitter: @estherarmah