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The Unlocking*: Joining the Conversation Around Lupe’s ‘Bitch Bad’

The Unlocking*: Joining the conversation around Lupe’s ‘Bitch Bad’

by Ádìsá Ájámú | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

I admire Lupe Fiasco for offering us another contemporary example of what conscious artistry merged with rooted activism looks like. I respect his unwillingness to use black pathology as a scaffold to climb to success. Trafficking in Black pain and sorrow and then using some miniscule portion of the profits for uplift has been used so often by everyone from politicians to drug dealers to preachers to aspiring media moguls and rappers that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was used as case study at Harvard Business school. But if you gotta bleed me to feed me, I’ll pass on the meal.  I appreciate that his music asks more of us than to just bob and weave as if high from the last hit of a bangin bass line, that it asks us to join him in a conversation. Which is what I think his song “Bitch Bad” is: an invitation to a conversation.

I love the message in “Bitch Bad” more than the song. And I applaud any brother or sister trying to illuminate the ills that hide in the shadows of white supremacy that reside in regions of our minds especially with so much negativity clouding the airwaves. But here’s my discomfort: With so much work for brothers to do on themselves within this patriarchal order I am still a bit uncomfortable with men instructing sisters on the finer points of womanhood, no matter how well intended.

Is the tradition of brothers challenging other brothers on and off wax around patriarchy so storied and grounded in our ethos that we are now free to instruct women? Because I haven’t seen very many brothers correct each other about what their sons listen to? Nor have I seen very many brothers challenge each other around respecting women with the same alacrity they seem to have received this song. Nor have I seen brothers challenge one another about listening to songs that are clearly misogynistic. I hear an awful lot of brothers talk about the artistry of Hip Hop while equivocating on the misogyny of Hip Hop: “Well, that track about rape and murder, that’s just one track”…”he aint talkin about all women and you know some women really are bitches.” And was it not brothers who elevated the word bitch to damn near a synonym for Black woman, and managed to go platinum doing it? That’s not a critique of Lupe's efforts. I’m simply a participating in the conversation and sharing my discomfort and concern about who is best positioned to give certain messages, and the ways in which patriarchy empowers men to speak forcefully on women’s behavior—to excoriate and correct them—and the ways in which men and women are conditioned to accept that as progressive. Just ask Congressmen Akin and Ryan; just ask folks who want to hold forth on women reproductive liberty.

Patriarchy is premised upon women being told by men who they should be and how they should act: It’s about situating them in the world according to men's whims. Sometimes who brings the message is as important as the message because it conditions how we receive it and examine it for its quality of truth. Don’t believe me: How well do you think Black folks would receive a white rapper doing a song instructing Black folks on the ills of using the N word, especially given that Europeans introduced the word in the first place.

I love Hip Hop and in many ways it is our Rorschach test. It was the first art form in which I grew up and the first art form that grew up in me. I'm of that generation of brothers that grew up celebrating in hip hop even as it gradually morphed into a more materialistically grotesque misogynistic apparition, only to later challenge it without really changing or challenging our participation in the patriarchy that created it. The very patriarchy that created the foundation for our manhood—this ain’t aqua boogie, you cant swim in the water of patriarchy not get wet. Funny thing about foundations is if you destroy them, then everything you built upon them also falls. Which is why a lot of men (and a whole lot of women) have a vested interest in retrofitting patriarchy rather than demolishing it. And because the demolishing of a foundation, no matter how unstable, is too uncertain, our equivocations on patriarchy are what allow us to sleep in house built on faulty foundation standing on a white supremacist fault line. And in this society when it comes to meaningful manhood and womanhood: We are in collusion with our confusion.

Even as we rush to pronounce ourselves progressive anti-patriarchalist (it is no longer cool for progressive brothers to overlook patriarchy under the guise of artistic expression one now has contextualize their complicity for proper cover before pressing play); even as we pat ourselves on the back for finally acknowledging what should have been as obvious as oxygen from the giddy up: that women deserve our respect; even as we celebrate those brothers in hip hop who have addressed misogyny in their records or in their writings as critics (despite the rhetorical distinction patriarchy is misogyny; it’s the velvet gloves over the fists of woman hatred): We often overlook that we, progressive brothers, didn’t so much arrive at this luxurious progressive space so much as we were brought here by sisters like dream hampton, Joan Morgan, Raquel Cepeda, Imani Perry, Tricia Rose and many others, who loved us and the music enough to expect both of us to reach for our higher vibrations. We may pride ourselves on the space we are in now, but we should remember the meter is still running and we have yet to pay the full fare to those sisters who brought us here. So much of how we receive and celebrate Lupe's message with regard to women is more a product of their efforts than that of progressive brothers.

It is one thing to celebrate and applaud a message that is long overdue; it is another to support it by putting our principles in practice in ways that do more than cheers from stands. What good does it do to applaud Lupe's efforts if our spotify/ ipod/pandora playlists could pass for the soundtrack for a Luther Campbell biopic; if our best moments are spent playing cumulonimbus clouds in a strip clubs— if your soul is attached to a pole; if our best idea of womanhood is shrinking them to fit into our most microscopic conceptions of ourselves; if our ideas of loving and partnership begin with the Bible, the Koran or Odu and put always end up in the adult movie section.

I’m not hating on folks choices or what folks legally do to keep their paper game strong. You do you. I am merely pointing at that we live in world of connections, that it’s all connected, that were all connected. We are all a part of the problem and a part of the solution. That everything we do says some things about us, about who we are, about what we value, about how we really feel. Our values are not given to us nor are they inherited (what we get from our parents are their values, not ours). Our values are earned in the Octagon of life, by what we are willing to sacrifice to preserve them, by how far we are willing to go to advance them, what we are willing to do to defend them and how consistently we live them.

Pushing yourself forward, while simultaneously pulling yourself back is an exercise in inanity. You see we, Black folks, want to be free, as long as we dont have to change the things we enjoy that also enslave us. We love sharing our religious faiths, just dont ask us to give up the things that undermine our spiritual growth. We love tolerance, just don’t ask us to give up our hard earned prejudices. We love judging, just don’t judge us. We love equality, just not for the folks whom we feel are unequal. We love our music, so what if it denigrates us, disrespects us, provides permission for others who don’t know us to do the same…That shit was mad disrespectful but yo I was feelin’ that joint…You see that’s the inanity of our insanity: We want to be free as long, as we don’t have leave the plantation.

Hip Hop has always been more than street journalism latticed over sixteen bars, we never needed MCs to tell us what we were living on the daily, no matter the weak-kneed excuse some rappers and their apparatchiks put forward for trafficking in black pain and sorrow for profit. At its higher vibrations hip hop, like jazz and the blues, is quintessential Blackness—celebration, cerebration, confrontation, improvisation, transformation and transcendence—disguised as sound waves reminding us that we “begin in earth and last”, as Neruda would say. True creative genius for a people at the bottom is about converting those sixteen bars into sixteen rungs on a ladder of liberation.

This is the beauty of Lupe’s artistry, here is an artist committed to using his sixteen bars as a GPS helping us locate himself-ourselves, to orient himself-ourselves and invite us to have a discussion about the best route to the reclamation of our best selves. As artist sometimes you have to follow your inspirations and seems to be following his—and I love him for it—but I just think this would have been a more forceful song if it had been directed to the brothers, who so often are producing the music that so many sisters self denigratingly vibe to.

I love Lupe and dig the weight he has decided to carry. Love the message, I’m just not sure brothers are the most effective ones to carry it forward to anyone other than other brothers. Some things are better left to be worked out in circles of women. I love hip-hop because is it for us, by us and about us. I just love Black folks more. And if you ask me to choose between something that sounds good but disrespects us, I’ll choose us every time, and look for my sixteen bars of bliss somewhere else.

*The Unlocking - Ursula Rucker's reminder.

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Ádìsá Ájámú serves as the Executive Director of the Atunwa Collective Community Development Think Tank located in Los Angeles and is co-author of The Psychology of Blacks: An African Centered Perspective and the recently published fourth edition of The Psychology of Blacks: Centering Our Perspectives in the African Consciousness(2010).

Market Place: Why Do Women Get Smaller Raises Than Men?

Market Place:

Women still lag behind men when it comes to earnings and promotions. Some attribute this to factors like poorer negotiating skills. But this new study offers something else: Ammunition, for women who want to break that cycle. Professor Maura Belliveau of Long Island University in New York set out to learn why men land more significant raises and promotions than men.

Belliveau's study found that two-thirds of available money for raises went to men. She posits that this gap occurs because managers believe that women are more willing to accept "symbollic rewards," such as more respect over pay. The attitude, she says, is more "I get to do something nice for her."

Dr. Treva Lindsey: A Perspective on Women's Opportunities in Hip-hop

Professor Treva Lindsey (University of Missouri at Columbia) at the Hip-Hop Literacies Conference at Ohio State University (May 2012).

Saying 'Vagina' in the Pulpit

Saying 'Vagina' in the Pulpit

by Reverend Wil Gafney, Ph.D. | Huffington Post

I, like many other priests, pastors and preachers am preparing to preach on the Gospel story of the woman with "an issue of blood" as I have heard it referred to euphemistically for most of my life in Mark 5:25-34 as part of the larger text assigned for July 1 this year according to the Revised Common Lectionary used by Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and many other churches. 

More recently, I have heard her ailment referred to as a hemorrhage, but I do not recall ever hearing that she had a vaginal hemorrhage. I do not believe that I have ever heard the word vagina used in the pulpit. And based on the silencing of Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown after -- and many would argue because -- she used the word vagina in her remarks opposing further restrictions on abortions designed to prevent women from accessing health care when they determine they need it and choosing to terminate pregnancies, all of which is legal, I think it is time to talk about vaginas in the scriptures, in the church and in and from the pulpit.

First of all, it needs to be said that vagina is an anatomical, medical term, like arm, leg and prostate, all of which occur in our public discourse without censure. The attempt to codify the word vagina as unfit for mixed company reflects the equating of women with vaginas -- when women's (and men's) bodies come in many configurations -- and the devaluing of women as full participants in society, demonstrated recently by the rash of legislation pertaining to women's health care, bodies and vaginas: laws requiring medical personnel to insert ultrasound probes into women's vaginas without their consent or medical necessity determined by a health care professional; proposed legislation giving employers the right to deny birth control to women, leading to discussions about women giving men repeated, unfettered access to their vaginas making them sluts. Add all of this to the recent silencing of Rep. Brown (and MI State Rep. Barb Bynum after she used the word vasectomy).

One response to the silencing of Reps. Brown and Bynum was a performance of Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the Michigan State House. That performance was a contemporary example of a prophetic response to an injustice. Biblical prophets were poets and performance artists. And their language was regularly graphic and shocking: Ezekiel speaks of the rape of menstruating women (22:10), Ezekiel also speaks of Jerusalem as a woman being handed over by God to men who will strip, beat, stone and cut her to pieces (chapters 18, 23); Hosea speaks of the skulls of babies being crushed and pregnant women having their wombs ripped open (Hos 16:33); Jeremiah accuses God of overpowering him using a verb that means rape in other contexts, (Jeremiah 20:7, see also 2 Samuel 13:14). 

And into the tradition of the Israelite prophets Jesus of Nazareth was born to a woman in what classical Christian theology calls the scandal of the Incarnation. I once heard Cornel West say that the scandal is that Jesus emerged from a woman's body in intimate proximity to urine and feces. Using those medically appropriate terms, like specifying that Jesus emerged from the vagina and not just the womb of the Virgin Mary, would probably be shocking to many contemporary congregations, yet neither the claims nor the language would be shocking in the world(s) of the scriptures: King Rehoboam's advisors tell him to say that his little finger is thicker than his father's penis (most translators choose the word "loins" in Two Kings 12:10). And while the Church would eventually seek to limit the participation of women in religious and public life in the name of Jesus, it would do so disregarding the Judaism he practiced and modeled. (Patriarchy and the subordination of women is neither endemic nor unique to first century Judaism -- of which there were many varieties.)

And so I turn to the story in the Gospel of Mark in which a woman bleeding profusely from her vagina touched the tzit-tzit fringe on Jesus' clothes -- that symbol of observant Judaism that endures to the present day. She takes it upon herself to effect her own healing, believing that touching the clothes of Jesus would make her well. And it did. His response to affirm her healing and her agency in securing her own healing -- "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease" -- does not treat her or her vaginal hemorrhage as any different from any other ailment he heals.

In the aftermath of the silencing of Rep. Brown, I confess that I took some delight in the many tweeple who took to the twitterverse to speculate on what if any euphemistic term would have been acceptable in lieu of the medically appropriate anatomical term, vagina. And I affirmed the sentiment in and reposted the Facebook meme saying that people [men] who could not say "vagina" should not legislate about them. But beyond the hashtag still lies the question of whether women can be seen as full human beings when our very biology remains unmentionable.

Lastly, the representative's point in her remarks before her censure that her Judaism permits and even calls for abortion in some cases to save the life of the mother was overlooked in much of the debate about her use of the word "vagina." It is an important point about religious freedom. She insists as is her right under the United States Constitution to the free exercise of religion without having anyone else constrict her religious practice by say, denying her or her daughter access to legal medical services because of their religious beliefs.

And finally (I know I said "lastly" above but you can count on many black preachers to add one more point after "lastly") hear the word of the Lord through the urban hip-hop prophet 2Pac Shakur:

And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
... Keep ya head up.

 

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Wil Gafney, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and is an Episcopal Priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Pennsylvania. She is also a member of the Dorshei Derekh Reconstructionist Minyan of the Germantown Jewish Center in Philadelphia PA. In addition she has co-taught courses with and for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in Wyncote, PA. 

Shirley Chisholm's Lifelong Legacy

The Melissa Harris Perry Show Examines the Legacy of Shirley Chisholm.

Did Malcolm X Hate Women?

Manning Marable's controversial book takes a hard look at Malcolm's complicated relationship with women.

Did Malcolm X Hate Women?

by Natalie Hopkinson | The Root.com

Malcolm X was furious to learn at the last minute that a speaker had decided not to appear at a rally at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, N.Y., on Feb. 21, 1965. A flustered aide said that he'd phoned Malcolm's wife, Betty, with the information, according to Manning Marable's controversial biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

Malcolm exploded: "You gave that message to a woman?! ... You should know better than that."

The remarks, hours before he was assassinated, capped off a lifetime of frustration with, dependence on and anger at the women in his life. The fact was, Betty, pregnant with twins, did not know how to reach him. She and her four daughters had been living with friends since they were evicted from their former Nation of Islam-owned home -- which had just been firebombed. Malcolm kept his distance from the family to keep them safe.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root.com

Libyan women ground their artwork in tradition

The Libyan women also show the darker side of society.

Libyan Women Ground Their Artwork in Tradition
by Natalie Moore

To many in the Western world, Arab women are mysterious, repressed and shrouded in long black robes. And many Libyans are aware of that sweeping stereotype. But Libyan women are active in politics, academia and government. They also have a presence in the arts.

Listen to the Full Story HERE

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As the reporter for Chicago Public Radio’s bureau in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Natalie Moore covers news and issues in that community and surrounding areas.