Slave Descendants

Come on.

Take a chance.

Take off that mask.

(It ain’t doin’ you no justice no way.)

Present yourself to me.

I will be the mirror that shows you how worthwhile and beautiful you are.

Show yourself.

I see the parts you’re hiding – we don’t have to talk about that yet.

You’ll soon find out that there’s no need to hide.

I see the parts you show off.

You’ll find out too that they’re not as impressive as what you take for granted –

Those parts that are so much a natural part of you that you don’t even see or acknowledge them.

Or worse, somebody or bodies have convinced you that those plusses are minuses.

(Those assets are deficits?)

You look in a mirror and see coal where I see diamond.

Please. 

Let me show you.

Alice Walker:

"No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is...

"...a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for granted as a child;...

"...a chance...to encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving...

"..I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear you everywhere I am, which is the right place."

So many people were stunned when he became President.  How did this happen?  How did we not see this coming?  Consider that, in this age of hundreds of television and radio channels, magazines, newspapers, and other news sources, many of us see and hear only the ones that validate or support our own points of view.  By having so many choices, we can choose to not see or hear the other side of the story.  Recently in the Times Sunday Magazine, one writer suggested that social media is helping us become more polarized by filtering our messages.

“We’ve heard about the power of social media to help us empathize with others.  But what if, instead, it’s just cocooning us with our friends?”

“Each time I liked an article, or clicked on a link, or hid another, the algorithms that curate my streams took notice and showed me only what they thought I wanted to see.”

“Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.”

“The…new messaging features work to bind private groups tighter together, by making it more fun to talk to one another than to engage with the world at large.”

“Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with.”

The wonderful and lost art of debate taught us to study both sides of an argument to the point that we could effectively argue either side.  (Oh please see “The Great Debaters” with Denzel Washington.)  Debate taught us that we could not defeat what we do not understand.  Trump and his ilk walked away with this election because we could not imagine that a rational argument could be made for supporting him.  We couldn’t imagine it, so we didn’t look for it.  “Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.”

Another article that challenges what is difficult to imagine appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times Style section.

What Is the Color of Beauty?

“…Ghana’s new ban against certain skin-bleaching creams was unlikely to work…”

“…they are flooded with messages – and not even subliminal ones – that tell them that white is beautiful.”

Sad, right?  There was more to this article, but nothing new.  There is a case for understanding how American Blacks were bamboozled.  We took in the theory of white superiority with mother’s milk and were stripped of any alternative theory.  No other culture, language, religion or standard of beauty was allowed in this land of the free.  But how has this claptrap message been accepted internationally?  Has it all been money, media and power? Or maybe the message hasn’t been accepted.  Maybe the folks bleaching their skin are just the ones that made the news – like drug dealers in South America or gang members in Harlem – creating the perception that all Africans want to be white, all South Americans are criminals, and all of Harlem’s young people are in gangs.

I tell you, truth is seldom the first thing you see or hear.  If you want it, you have to work for it.  If you don’t work for it, your name is Complacent and your president's name is Donald Trump.    

Who Knew ?

And I quote Gregory Cowles of the New York Times quoting Margot Lee Shetterly:

"We all know what a scientist looks like," Shetterly writes on her website: "a wild-eyed person in a white lab coat and utilitarian eyeglasses, wearing a pocket protector and holding a test tube.  Mostly male.  Usually white."  But when Shetterly was growing up in Hampton, VA, she writes, "the face of science was brown like mine.  My dad was a NASA lifer, a career Langley Research Center scientist who became an internationally respected climate expert.  Five of my father's seven siblings were engineers or technologists.  My father's best friend was an aeronautical engineer.  Our next-door neighbor was a physics professor.  There were mathematicians at our church, sonic boom experts in my mother's sorority and electrical engineers in my parents' college alumni associations....I knew so many African-Americans working in science, math and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did."

Huh.

Red and Yellow, Black and White

The Sunday New York Times had this huge two-page spread recently about the experience of Asians in movies and television.  It was interesting.  I take the liberty of sharing a few quotes:

    "It's never been easy for an Asian-American actor to get work in Hollywood."

They are pleased, of course, to be making progress -- and dissatisfied, as they should be.

     "Hollywood has been casting white actors in Asian roles for decades now, 
     and we can't keep pretending there isn't something deeper at work here."

Of course you can't and you shouldn't!

     "The mainstream Hollywood thinking still seems to be that movies and 
     stories about straight white people are universal and that anyone else is 
     more niche."

Yup.  Like it's their world and the rest of us are just taking up space until we can prove ourselves worth of access.

     "Everyone seems to be becoming slowly aware of how overwhelmingly white 
     everything is ... It's almost like the whole system is slowly being shamed 
     into diversity, but it's moving at a snail's pace....Just look at the movie 
     posters you see.  It's all white people."

Yes.  It was an interesting and comprehensive article.  There were lots of examples of white actors playing the part of Asians -- and scripts being rewritten to accommodate white casting.  

But in all those columns of newsprint, it struck me that there was no mention -- no mention! -- of any of the other populations that have suffered identical treatment.  I am hoping that it was the journalist who was responsible for such a glaring omission because it makes me a little nauseous to think that none of the Asian professionals quoted wanted to align themselves with all the Black, Brown, and Red peoples who plowed this ground before -- and along with -- them.

It's a wondrous thing to c how this city is run. Those of us who live here complain about every little inconvenience. But the truth is that it's close to a miracle that this super complicated home of 10 million people using thousands of businesses, vehicles, buildings, roads, and connectors of every kind stays up & running 24/7/365 !

Nail Salons

Hi All.

We women have all had the uncomfortable experience of manicurists/pedicurists conversing with each other in foreign languages.  So annoying!   So when I read the recent New York Times article about these women's experience, I felt compelled to share.  Following are excerpts from that article; nothing more for me to say.

"...$100...the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job."
"She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage...[t]hirty dollars a day."
"Workers endure all manner of humiliation, including having their tips docked as punishment for minor transgressions, constant video monitoring by owners, even physical abuse."
"...starting wage of $10 a day."
"...$1.50 an hour during a 66-hour workweek..."
"Workers of Korean descent routinely earn twice as much as their peers..."
Chinese workers occupy the next rung in the hierarchy; Hispanics and other non-Asians are at the bottom."
"...routinely work up to 12 hours a day, six or even seven days a week."
"...Hispanic colleagues were made to sit in silence during their entire 12-hour shifts, while the Korean manicurists were free to chat,"
",,,had to eat lunch every day standing in a kitchenette with the shop's other non-Korean workers, while her Korean counterparts ate at their desks."

(The High Price of Pretty Nails, New York Times, May 10, 2015)

What more can I say?

The nail salons reviewed for this article were all in New York -- and all parts of New York.  The Upper West Side, the Village, the Upper East Side, and the boroughs.  What is unfortunate is that, as a result of this exposure, NYC or NYS will begin regulating nail salons ... salons will close ... many, many jobs will be lost by women with few or no options ... and the cost of manicures will jump up like crazy.

Life in these here United States.  Sigh.