Father’s Day has come and gone again. As someone who did not grow up with a father or father figures, this day has not traditionally been on my radar at all. These days, though, it’s hard to forget Father’s Day, besides all the incessant commercials urging you to buy the fathers in your life any number of useless objects, there are all the obligatory posts and profile picture changes on social media that serve as poignant reminders.  I often smile wryly when I see these public declarations regarding fatherhood. Some posts seem like wishes for what a father might have been. Others describe idyllic fathers who listened, laughed, and stayed around. I know the truth for most of these folks is somewhere in between because fathers, like mothers and everyone else, are wonderful, terrible, flawed, complicated, and messy. 

It’s been over twenty-five years since I last saw my father. I was about five or six years old. My mom and I returned to Puerto Rico to visit folks after moving to New England the year before.  I remember few things about the trip, but what I do remember has always stood out and is only now beginning to fade with the passage of time.

My mom and I stayed in a motel that had a chain lock, which I remember thinking was very fancy. My mom bought a package of Vienna Finger cookies and I remember lovingly eating every cookie I could get my little hands on. I can tear a box up of those things to this day. We went to a friend’s house and I used the bathroom and this lady had a toilet roll cozy that had a doll on top of it. I remember taking it out of the bathroom and telling my mother that this lady kept a doll in the bathroom. My mind was blown. My mother was embarrassed.

But maybe she was just embarrassed by her friend’s taste.

I remember seeing my father. He had a mustache and a five o’clock shadow and looked a little bit like Tony Orlando.

Daddy?

I remember him being really tall and having a scratchy face. We went to a park, I think, and there were swings. He hugged and kissed me. It was a fun day. He said he would come visit me and that we would be together again soon.

Truth is, I never saw him again.

As a little girl, I used to wait for his call and used to pray that he’d send me letters and a plane ticket to see him. When my mom and I waited for the bus in the heat or the snow, I wished he’d come pick us up. My mom said he had two white cars, a Camaro and something else I can’t remember now, and that he lived in a big house he owned himself. We lived in public housing. I wondered why he would leave me where I was while he lived in nice big house all alone, one that didn’t have a cute little brown girl who liked to read, and sing songs, and who loved him very much.

Things were tough with my mom and I think that as much as she loved me she was also really bitter that she had to raise me alone. If I ever asked questions about my father or his family, she’d get really upset. So, I learned not to ask questions, although I had already learned that I was a surprise pregnancy and that the conversation that occurred when my mother told my father she was pregnant was not unlike Kirk and Rasheeda’s recent banter about their little growing Georgia Peach.

For a long time I felt really angry at my father. I felt abandoned and unwanted. It’s taken me a long time to stop wishing that the past was different and to focus on creating and maintaining relationships that are reciprocal with folks who are emotionally available. That’s a journey that I’m still on. And it is that lesson that I am left with this most recent Father’s Day. I am happy to see so many of my friends and colleagues honoring the fathers in their lives who held or hold them close and those who are making a way in their own lives as feminist fathers, godfathers, brothers, uncles, play cousins, mentors, and so on.  For example, check out the work Spark Reproductive Justice Now and Strong Families have been doing around Papa’s Day, honoring the myriad of ways we come together as families.

What’s your take on father’s day, fam?

Come one, come all! Join us in Atlanta at Charis Books and More on Friday, June 28^th, 2013 at 7:30pm EST for CF Robin Boylorn’s book talk for Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience.

The CFC is so proud of our girl Robin! Earlier this year, she published her first book with Peter Lang Press, Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience and we want the world to know about it!

Sweetwater is a semi-autobiographical narrative that poignantly describes Robin’s experience growing up as a rural Black girl, while also reflecting on the lives and relationships of Black women in her village community. The book reflects on the significance of black women’s storytelling in coming to terms with issues such as friendship, family, spirituality, poverty, education, addiction, mental illness, romantic relationships, raising children, and everyday survival. But perhaps what is most compelling about Sweetwater is its emphasis on Black women’s interiority firsthand. Historically, Black women are often overtheorized, pathologized, and just plain old talked about, but Sweetwater joins the ranks of other Black feminist work that highlights Black women’s agency and how we make sense of the world ourselves.

Sounds wonderful, right? Be sure to check out Sweetwater’s awesome book trailer over at Robin’s website.

The CFC is also super excited to be partnering with fierce feminist bookstore and legendary local Atlanta institution, Charis Books and More. Charis, the nation’s oldest independent feminist bookstore, opened its doors in 1974 and since then has become known, not only in Atlanta, but also across the South, as a special gathering place for book lovers and those interested in social justice. Charis specializes in diverse and unique children’s books, feminist and cultural studies books, and LGBTQ fiction, as well as general literary fiction, and it has consistently hosted events that have brought progressive communities together. Charis Circle, the non-profit arm of Charis Books and More founded in 1996, organizes programming, initiatives, and events that aim to “foster sustainable feminist communities, to work for social justice and to encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices.”

Elizabeth Anderson, the Executive Director of Charis Circle, says the following about the feminist community that is uniquely fostered at Charis:

At Charis we practice our feminism by curating literary, social

justice, and hands on community education programming that affirms the

rights of all people to access information that helps them make

positive choices about their bodies, their families, their food, their

land, and their communities. We do this in the presence of our

literary ancestors, surrounded by the business of books, with the

understanding that a bookstore is a space that many people can access

without having to declare themselves. The low barrier to entry means

that seredipitous conversations and opportunities for learning can

occur and people can try new ways of being in the world without fear

of judgement or failure. We have very few remaining public spaces such

as Charis; our bargain for the wide open spaces of the internet has

often been losing the comforts of a physical hearth to which we may

come home. Charis seeks to be that home for justice seekers, truth

tellers, and cultural workers.

In a time when the numbers of feminist bookstores are dwindling and more and more independent bookstores are shutting their doors (RIP Outwrite, but there’s still time to help Marcus Books in the Bay), it’s important for us to support these spaces that mean so much to us.

We look forward to seeing all our ATLiens (and folks from the surrounding areas—I’m talking about you Birmingham, Charlotte, Columbus, Savannah, etc.) at Charis Books and More, getting crunk and talking about Sweetwater and Black women’s interior lives with CF Robin on Friday, June 28th at 7:30pm. It is always such a pleasure to see our crunk fam in real life. Plus, there’ll be sweet tea and pound cake. #justsaying

Hope to see you there, fam!

***

Charis Books and More is located in the heart of Little Five Points, at 1189 Euclid Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30307. The venue is wheelchair accessible and has a gender-neutral bathroom. If you are taking public transportation to the event, the nearest MARTA station is the Inman Park/Reynoldstown station.  Call 404-524-0304 for more info.

For more on Charis, check out their website, www.charisbooksandmore.com, follow them on Twitter @Chariscircle and “like” them on Facebook, over at

www.facebook.com/charisbooks

They’ll be happy to order you up a copy of Sweetwater, so you’ll be all caught up before the reading!

Want to donate to Charis Circle?  Check out http://bit.ly/11MzwDK and put your coins to good use.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,

it is self-preservation,

and that is an act of political warfare.”                           

–Audre (the) Lorde

High blood pressure runs in my family.  I have been taking medication to regulate it for six years and I recently started getting intense headaches and migraines that I realized were related to hypertension.  Deadline-driven days have become so commonplace in my life that I didn’t recognize or respond to the “stress” anymore.  It became normalized.  A way of life.  The way my life is.  This is a problem.  And sometimes I won’t sit down (read: take a break from work) until/unless I am hurting.  That is also a problem.  I always tell myself that I am going to take better care of myself, but the priority of paying attention to my emotional and psychic needs usually gets put on the backburner—behind things that seem to require my immediate attention.  I will take care of myself after I teach my class…  after I mentor the student…  after I attend the meeting…  after I finish grading…  after I write the last 5 pages of the paper that was due last week…  after I read the thesis, write the report, and wash the dishes…  After…after…after…  My life is a continuous cycle of roles and responsibilities that make my personal wellbeing an afterthought, something that can perpetually wait.  Until now.  I am learning that undue and unnecessary stress has no place in my life.  And looking at the lives and legacies of black feminist foremothers reminds me that I have some agency around strategies for saving myself. (For a beautiful reflection on this, see Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ piece The Shape of My Impact)

I believe the stress of weighty expectations and doing too much takes its toll on us.  It doesn’t happen all at once.  It happens over weeks and months and years of pushing our own needs and desires down until we can’t feel them anymore.  It happens, subtly, until it makes sense to do too much because that is just the way things are, the way things have always been.  That, too, is a problem.  It is a problem when caretaking (taking care) becomes something we do for other people and not ourselves.  It is up to us to survive and not just survive but thrive in our lives.  To not put work above living.  To not make ourselves our last resort.  To not wait until we are tired to rest.  To not wait until we are sick to make healthy choices.  To not wait until we have pleased everyone else to think about our own needs.  To not postpone our own happy.  To not just tolerate foolishness.

I have been working on a list of ways to take care of myself and to honor the lives and legacies of the black feminists before me whose lives ended too soon.  I worry that our foremothers were worked to death.  I worry that they didn’t see death coming because they were too busy taking care of other things.  I worry that they had too much to do and ran out of time.  I worry that they didn’t get to see themselves as celebrated and loved and worthy of celebration and love.  I worry that they worked too much, too hard, and for too little pay.  I worry that people saw them as strongblackwomen and forgot to see them as human.  I worry that our jobs, our families, our friends, and sometimes our supporters expect too much and we expect too little.

I am no longer flattered when people ask me to do things because I am “so good at it…”

I will not be punished for a job well done.

I will not be overworked and underpaid.

I will not do free labor (there must be some kind of reciprocal exchange, which does not necessarily mean money but means I don’t prostitute my gifts).

I will not let people use me.

I will not feel guilty for saying no.

I will ask for what I need.

I will walk away if I don’t get what I need.

I will fight against injustice in the world, starting in my own life!

It is inconceivable that we are expected to just get used to injustice (racism, sexism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, etc.).  We have to resist injustice and talk back to it, but not at the expense of being well.  I don’t want to give myself over to the struggle.  I don’t want to be superwoman in my twenties, strongwoman in my thirties, and suffocated in my forties.  We can’t let the work (and there is much work to be done) take us out.  We have to be mindful about how we engage others and ourselves, especially when it comes to obligations and expectations of our time, minds, bodies, thoughts, experiences and hearts.  I don’t want to give myself away.  And the labor of love that is my life is not free, nor is it worth my emotional/physical/mental/spiritual health.  I am disinterested in being a martyr.

In a posthumous collection of her work, Some of Us Did Not Die, June Jordan writes:

…But we have choices, and capitulation is only one of them. 

I am always hoping to do better than to collaborate with whatever or whomever it is that means me no good.  For me, it’s a mind game with everything at stake.  For example, what has what kind of savagery blurred or blocked or buried alive?

This is an excerpt from my Poem To Take Back the Night:

What about moonlight

What about watching for the moon above

the tops of trees and standing

still enough to hear the raucous crickets

chittering invisible beneath the soon lit stones

What about moonlight

What about moonlight

What about watching for the moon

through windows low enough to let the screams

and curses of the street the gunshots

and the drunken driver screeching tires

and the boombox big beat and the tinkle

bell ice cream truck

inside

What about the moonlight

What about the moonlight … .

Luckily, there are limitless, new ways to engage our tender, and possible responsibilities, obligations that our actual continuing coexistence here, in these United States and here, in our world, require.

Here are a few survival tips (in no particular order) for black women who are asked to do too much:

1. Take some time to/for yourself and be unapologetic about it.  At least one hour of your day should be yours.  Whether your vice be a glass of wine and reality TV, Facebooking, caking, going to a sporting event, talking on the phone to a friend you haven’t seen in a while, going to listen to live music, reading a book, writing in a journal, a bubble bath (don’t forget the candles), etc., it is important to take the time to do something that allows you to decompress, unwind, and relax.
2. Say no! (I have written about this at length here and here, but essentially I have learned how to say no to others and to say yes to myself.  This means that I don’t over-extend myself, I don’t do things I don’t want to do, and I make “no” my default response to spontaneous or last-minute requests.  I believe that women feel obligated to say yes even when they want to say no because it seems/feels polite.  Be impolite!  Say no (without an explanation/reason).
3. Reject negativity.  We all have well-meaning folk in our life who have something to say about everything and have unsolicited opinions about our lives, loves, choices.  While it is important to take responsibility for the choices (and consequences) we make in life, we don’t have to take on other people’s baggage.  Surround yourself with positive people.  Have people in your life who  inspire you, love you, affirm you, encourage you, tell you how wonderful and beautiful you are, smile when you walk in a room, tell you the truth (in love), and are positive influences.  As for anyone and everyone else… hellwitem.
4. Pay attention to your body.  If you are tired, take a nap.  If you are craving chocolate, have a candy bar.  If you listen and pay attention you will know/learn your body well enough to know the tell-tale signs that something is wrong.  And if/when something feels wrong/off, see about it.  I have a high tolerance for pain and am known for “bearing” discomfort.  I am learning that it is unwise to ignore the signals your body gives you that something is not quite right.  When your body speaks, listen!  And do something about it.
5. Sometimes, though, symptoms of distress are asymptomatic (making them even more dangerous), so have a bi-annual or annual check-up.  If you do not have insurance take advantage of clinics, Planned Parenthood, and other agencies that are available to help you get screened, tested, and taken care of. Also, know your history.  While sometimes our family medical histories can be mysteries, it is important to know what to watch hereditary diseases or ailments you may be at risk for.  The leading causes of death for African Americans include heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes.
6. Do a regular inventory and purge anything toxic in your life.  The same way you clean out your refrigerator and/or pantry every few months, get rid of things that are expired in your life.  Not everything or everyone is meant to stay in your life forever:    This includes people, relationships, thoughts, habits, and hobbies.  Nothing and nobody should find a place in your life or headspace that is not purposefully and regularly adding to it.  Don’t keep things in your life that are old, outdated, spoiled or rancid.  Clean house!
7. Let people go.  Especially those that don’t honor and respect you.  I believe that black women oftentimes put up with too much ish in their lives from people out of fear of rejection, abandonment and loneliness.  Don’t be afraid of being alone.  Never keep someone or something in your life out of desperation.  Be clear about your principles and standards (for friendships, networks, romantic relationships, etc.) and never settle.  If someone fails to treat you like the queen you are…On to the next one…
8. Don’t be a people pleaser.  I personally think that post-30 should mean you don’t give a damn about what people think/say/believe about you.  Turning 30 was a turning point in my life (real talk, it was probably around 28) and when I stopped making decisions based on what I thought other people would think/say/believe about me I became more self-confident and free.  Living your life for yourself and not other people makes a world of difference.
9. Have a confidante.  We should all have someone in our life we don’t have to “put on” for.  We need at least one person we can talk to about deep-seated and deeply personal issues without judgment, someone we can cry with/to/in front of; someone we can tell our secrets to; someone that will hug us and pat us on our back when we just need to wail.  This might be your best friend, partner, sister, or mother, but it might also be a professional counselor, mentor, or spiritual advisor.
10. Celebrate yourself and your accomplishments even if/when you have to do it (by/for) yourself.  Don’t miss an opportunity to acknowledge all of what/who you are and where you come from.  Sometimes even the victories are significant and deserve acknowledgment.  Whether you finally completed a long-term project, got over a long-term relationship, or made it through a grueling week, celebrate!
11. Take care of yourself mentally, physically and spiritually.  This means different things to different people.  For me it means (mentally): that at the end of a semester I do/read something that I don’t have to think/talk/write about (usually Cosmopolitan magazine).  I laugh, a lot.  I also cry.  (physically):  I try to make healthy choices (doesn’t always mean everyday…) I stopped drinking sodas and started juicing, I limit my intake of salt and sugar.  I have good intentions (that I don’t always meet) of getting some exercise in every week.  (spiritually):  I pray, I listen to inspirational music, I call my mama, I do yoga, I meditate on my life.  Figure out how to best take care of yourself.
12. Kick it, regularly, with your homegirls.  This can be magic.
13. Let people do things for you.  When someone offers to do something for you, let them!  Oftentimes, I think, we reject offerings of help and care because we are not used to it.  Get used to it!

Please share your strategies for survival and/or the names of black feminists who are gone too soon.  May we honor their lives and legacies by learning from them and about them.

The black feminists I name are Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Claudia Da Silva, Aaronette White…

Brittney Griner is not the first female athlete to come out about her sexuality, nor is she the first black woman in the WNBA to do so.  What she is, though, is the first black woman athlete of her caliber (she is compared to the late great Wilt Chamberlain) to come out on the front end of her professional basketball career.  A towering 6 feet 8 inches tall, Griner is no stranger to attention or controversy.  Her feats on the basketball court have earned her numerous awards including an ESPY Award for Best Female Athlete and two Naismith trophies.  She is sorta a big deal!

As women who are non-gender conforming, female athletes regularly face public scrutiny, discrimination, and accusations about their sexuality and sex.  People often comment about women athletes as if they are trying to be or imitate men, calling them “mannish” or “tomboys.”  Accordingly, women athletes are often afraid of being seen as unpretty or unkempt (remember when Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball Team as “nappy headed hoes?”) and may feel the need to exaggerate their femininity to fit in and/or avoid innuendoes about their sexuality.  (As a child I was a big Florence Griffith-Joyner, aka Flo-Jo fan.  Her appearance was even more memorable than her speed and elegance on the field.  She wore long hair, sexy outfits and fingernails, unnecessary adornments that seemed to serve as a reminder that despite her athletic prowess she was still first and foremost “a girl.”)

The one and only Flo-Jo

Brittney Griner doesn’t feel the need to wear dresses or look feminine to prove she is a woman.  Her gender performance is masculine and she embraces it.  She is not concerned about what other people think or say about her.

But what makes Brittney Griner special is not that she is a powerhouse woman athlete (we have seen that before), an amazing talent (we have seen that before), that she is openly gay (we have seen that before) or even that she can dunk a basketball (we have seen that before).  What makes Griner extraordinary is that she is a gender-bending, woman-loving, basketball playing, androgynous woman superstar-in-the-making who is unapologetic and unsecretive about her sexuality or her past.  In fact the 22 year old opens up about more than her sexuality in her recent interview with ESPNW and ESPN The Magazine.

She is beautiful and handsome and while people don’t know what to do with that.  She doesn’t hide behind the anonymity of being an athlete or shy away from the fact that the general public is generally homophobic and resistant of difference.  She is proud of who she is and is determined to live in her truth.  As one of, if not the most, famous black woman basketball players in the world right now, she is using that platform to represent other transgendered and/or lesbian blackgirls who are ball players.

Griner is doing her thing and being herself which is opening up some important conversations about what it means to be different.  Here are five (of many) reasons you should be a fan:

1.  Even if you are not a (women’s) basketball fan you have to respect Griner’s raw and unquestionable talent.  In her WNBA debut she broke a record by being the first player to dunk twice in one game!  And have you seen this clip from 2009 when she was still in high school?

2.  In a personal essay for The New York Times in response to Jason Collins coming out, she wrote: “Just as basketball doesn’t define who I am, neither does being gay.”  Even though folk attempted to pit her against
Collins because his “coming out” announcement received more publicity than hers, she didn’t take the bait and instead expressed her excitement and appreciation for Collins.

(It is, however, important to note that it took a gay black man to come out in a major sport for the world to take notice. The fact that Collins’ announcement followed Griner’s by 11 days and some venues erroneously credit Collins with giving Griner the courage to come out is beyond problematic (but the topic of another blog, another day).  In the New York Times article Female Star Comes Out as Gay, and Sports World Shrugs, Jim Buzinski, a founder of Outsports.com suspected that the non-reaction people had about the revelation of Griner’s announcement was because she was a woman.  He is quoted in the article saying, “Can you imagine if a man did the exact same thing? Everyone’s head would have exploded.”  How true his prediction was!)

3.  She is a badass blackgirl role model.  On the cover of ESPN’s “Taboo Issue” she is seen flossin’ a huge yellow snake (she says she can relate to snakes because they, like her, are misunderstood for being different) around her neck like a necklace.   She is fearless, brave and unapologetic about being (all of) herself.  Her self-acceptance and graceful response to the vitriol of (social) media attacks and bullying will help normalize difference and hopefully encourage young all people to be self-loving.  She is committed to work with LGBTQ youth.

4.  She calls people out for their homophobic bullshit!  She faces cyberbullies and mean-spirited commenters head on online regularly reading comments though rarely responding to them.  Having been teased and taunted all her life for being/looking different she has found a way to not take the hate-speech to heart.  She has also been transparent about the fact  that administrators at Baylor (the private Baptist university where she attended college and played basketball) enforced a don’t ask, don’t tell policy against homosexuality, and pressured her to keep her sexuality a “open secret.”  She was not allowed to not talk about or openly express her sexuality.  By not continuing to keep the secret of the circumstances she faced as a gay college athlete she will hopefully force Baylor and other schools with similar hidden policies to not push athletes into closets they don’t want to be in.  One’s sexuality has nothing to do with one’s athletic ability and should therefore not be used against them as student athletes.

5.  She’s not going anywhere!  Griner was the #1 overall pick in the 2013 WNBA draft (to the Phoenix Mercury) and has had an impressive start to her professional career; she has a Nike contract that will allow her the freedom to  wear menswear apparel (something that has never been done before); she is involved with the Its Get Better campaign;  and she is positioned to be a game changer in the league.  Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has said that he would consider recruiting her, which is likely a publicity stunt but brings up some interesting questions about what it would mean for men and women to compete against each other in professional sports.  Despite her openness to the possibility, it is unlikely that Griner will ever play with “the big boys,” on “the big stage,” it is heartening that she is able to utilize her celebrity to shake things up a little bit.

I have been pretty ambivalent with professional basketball for the past few years (I could literally care less about the Playoffs this year) but I am a big Brittney Griner fan.  I think you should be too!

****Spoilers****

Welp.

I watched the premiere of  Tyler Perry’s latest train wreck on OWN last night for two reasons. A.) Morbid curiosity and B.) I didn’t wanna hear negroes’ mouths about how I didn’t give it a chance and was therefore uninformed and unqualified to speak on his show (despite the 12 or so movies and 2 stage plays of his I’ve paid to go see and time I spent watching episodes of his existing tv shows that I can’t get back.) Anyway. Here are my thoughts.

1.) Tyler Perry is a cultural batterer:  the cultural equivalent of an unrepentant wife-batterer. Why, you ask? Well, let’s see. In under 15 minutes of episode one there were three Black women: Hanna, a maid, who speaks like she just left the plantation; Veronica, a rich black lady bitch, who throws her coat and hat at the maid; and Candace, the maid’s daughter, a scheming, conniving prostitute who tells people the mom is dead, later can be seen raising her hand to her mom, has her own son who is God knows where, is allegedly in law school, but paying for it by questionable means, and ultimately by the closing scene of episode two can be seen raping the white patriarch/politician.

The fact that Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire, along with their remixes (Bad) Baby Mama, Golddigger, Freak and Hood Bitch showed up in under 15 mins is surely a new world record.

A few caveats: no knock to domestics who speak in Southern dialect — I am from the deep, rural South, love the cadences in our voices, and have a beloved, and dearly missed grandmama who cleaned white folks’ houses well into her sixties.

(But I know a fucking controlling image when I see one.)

No knock to sex workers, who I think should have rights, benefits, and legal protections. Black women sex workers in primetime is a whole different deal representationally, though, and we need to OWN that.

Black women deserve better.

2.) Tyler Perry can only represent Black men positively by throwing Black women under the bus. Since dude’s plotlines are so simple a 13 year old could write them — no disrespect to 13 year olds–, there are of course 3 Black men to balance out the 3 Black women. They include the husband of the rich lady –he’ll prolly be comparable to Scandal’s Cyrus, or at least Tyler prolly thinks that’s what he’s doing, lol; his son, a drug counselor (respectable profession); and the son of the maid, a Shemar Moore lookalike and all around good guy, whose sole aspiration in life is to — wait for it — drive a tow truck. So 1.5 solidly good guys out of 3 ain’t bad. Why 1.5? Because of course the rich drug counselor is on the DL, which in TP’s world makes him a sexual deviant. We’ll see how this plot line develops, but since TP outs dude by way of terrible slow pan shots, meant to simulate not-so-secret longing after the buff white dude, I am not optimistic.

Black gay men deserve better.

3.) I feel some type of way that Oprah would be in league with such foolishness. And that is because I AM NOT AN OPRAH HATER. And I have little patience for people who are. The chick is doing her thing, and I’m proud of her.  And I really want to see OWN do well. That aside. I like to think she has been duped, hoodwinked, and bamboozled. But I know that ain’t the whole truth. Really, OWN is struggling. And when networks struggle, they pimp the “urban demographic” for ratings and money. And once they are set financially, they bounce. The Fox Network did it: Living Single, Martin, In Living Color. The WB, UPN, and the CW all did it. So I see what O is doing, and I resent it.

Why?

I know she and Tyler  share that nouveau-riche-Black-southern-abuse-survivor-started-from-the-bottom-now-we-here connection.

BUT

Oprah doesn’t seem to understand, that a rich, independent, college-educated chick like her, who shuns traditional marriage, is in Tyler Perry’s world the DEVIL, a veritable, conniving bitch, who hates babies, men, and old people, needs Jesus, plus a good slap from a sexy Black man, and will still probably catch AIDS and live in misery because she chose not to conform to the dictates of Christian respectability.

Why Oprah doesn’t get this is beyond me. It seriously is.

OWN deserves better.

4.) On his best day and her worst day, Tyler ain’t even in Shonda’s stratosphere. This whack-ass mashup of Deception + Scandal + The Help in no way compares to anything Shonda Rhimes is doing. I can already hear the brothers now, talking about how Candace’s character is comparable to Olivia’s character. They are comparable in only one way: they both sleep with white men. Comparison over. And that is how you know that Black men’s primary issue with Olivia is not her moral choices, but her racial ones.  (But Edison was a good guy even though he didn’t get chose; and Harrison — well let’s just say I’m #teamGingham all the way.)

 I digress.

My love of Scandal should be a clear indicator that my problem with TP is not about respectability politics. In other words, I am not advocating for positive representations. I’m advocating for complex, human representations. TP doesn’t complicate Black women; he demonizes them.

Candace is not just a sex worker, but a sextortionist and a rapist. A predator. She does not merely have mother issues, but she nearly slaps her mom and can’t account for her baby’s whereabouts.

We don’t hate Liv, because while we might reject many of her choices, we identify with her as a human being with needs, emotions, and as a person with the ability to do good in the world, despite the bad she also does.

Tyler Perry just thinks Black women — other than maternal domestics– are bad. That’s why he can’t complicate his analysis. But they have therapists for that, and I wish he’d see one. Posthaste.

And this brings me to my final point:

5.) Tyler Perry is dangerous. He has made Black women mistake hate for love. When his heavy-handedness is still not enough to chastise and discipline us for being independent, driven, and sex-positive, he will resort to straight up distortions of history, and assume that his working class audience will miss the sleight-of-hand. Case en point: that rape scene! Because of course history is replete with poor Black women raping rich white men. Not.

And the fact that he would traffic in such an utter fiction — a fiction that is the very basis for centuries of brutality against Black women on the grounds that they are by nature un-rapeable, a fiction that drove the creation of the culture of dissemblance and the politics of respectability — makes his cultural production not merely bad but despicable.

And that is why I titled this essay: “Tyler Perry hates Black Women.” How can he not?

Share your thoughts. Did you watch the show? What did you think?