Is that not dependent upon where your ancestors came from? Africa is a very large place, with various groups people who have been there a very long time. The tall Watusi and the short Baka come to mind.
Huh? No. I am talking about a Black Americans. It is common for black American women to have ‘ample rumps’, compared to our white American counter parts…or compared to our men. It is just by and large more likely for us to be shaped that way, just like it is more likely for white women to have, say, blonde hair, and that is something that is ‘prized’ by American men. Doesn’t matter if the women’s ancestors are from Sweden, or whatever. So no…it isn’t dependant on if my ancestors are Watusi.
If one more person ever says to me, “Africa is a large place” I think I’m gonna snap. Please don’t ever presume that I don’t know the scope of Africa.
Just to clarify that I didn’t intend to play the moderator card.
My request, which started with “please”, had the tags around it in an attempt to make the post more light-hearted. The tags of <moderating, even though not moderator> and <\vigilante moderating> weren’t trying to claim some sort of position of authority.
If it came across differently, well, that wasn’t the intention.
w.r.t. your main point, yes arguably if I’d read the OP properly I would have known to be alert in all the posts that followed, and I hold my hand up because I didn’t.
From the thread title I assumed the links were going to be about hair products and as I skimmed through the initial posts of the thread, I saw a comment about typefaces and thought it might be an interesting link.
It doesn’t matter if they’re glorifying or not – if you’re viewing something at work that’s likely to cause offence then you could get in trouble.
I could easily imagine someone getting a formal warning for viewing material like this (at their desk in plain sight) irrespective of the reasons for doing so.
Of course not, I was pointing that out to others reading the thread. My point being that different areas of Africa have different genotypes just as do Central and Northern Europe, Scandinavia and where ever my Celtic ancestors came from; but I’ll just back off. 
I didn’t mean to snap at you, carnivorous. I have a lot of passion on this topic, and I really am learning not to discuss these topics with logic and not emotion. I’m getting there, slowly but surely.
**
you with the face**, I thought long and hard before responding to your post. I really did. I have finally accepted that you and I just come from different worlds, and I can put out of my mind whatever crazy notions I had fantasized about us being united in Black Sisterhood or whatever.
Our experiences are wayyy different. When you said that ‘black men love big butts’ is a myth, oh my.
I want to say, maybe it is my ghetto, hip-hop culture upbringing, because I don’t know a lot of guys that don’t sing the praises of the big booty. But I can’t blame the ghetto, because I have met black men across all socio-economic backgrounds, and most of them appreciate a thick* woman.
Are there plenty black women with body issues? Of course. Are there some women that don’t like having a big booty? Yes. Just like there are white women with blue eyes that wear brown contacts. But that shit is rare. Because blue eyes are prized in white women’s culture, and big ol’ booties are prized in black American culture. It just is. It is not because, “we can’t change it, so we may as well accept it”. Oh no. It is because it is lovely to us, and all the propaganda in the world wasn’t able to change it. It had sexual meaning…our men are excited by it on a primal, physical level, so it surely lends itself less to propaganda. The same can be said for our big lips, ‘fat ass thighs’…these things are said in compliment form in my culture.
Any body issues a black girl has usually comes from being fat or too skinny. Very rarely is it about having a big booty. In my culture. I have accepted that we come from two very different cultures. I am putting to bed any idea I had of some ‘unified black culture’.
I do feel that it is important to point out to mainstream society that black women love their hair, their bodies. We do, inspite of being a product of a larger society that taught us it was undesirable.
If we don’t make that fact known, the propaganda machine loops.
We get ‘hip-hop’ videos with women that all look a certain way. Didn’t used to look that way, but increasingly so, they all look like mainstream models. If we buy that crap, our kids will buy it and it will become truth.
But right now, it aint the truth. The shocking truth is that a big ol thick (not fat) sista will put to shame one of those models, in real life. She walks in the club, (where all the peacocks come together to spread their feathers), and the show stops. The image that is being pushed on us in the so called black mainstream media (lightskinned skinny girl, long straight hair) can stand right next to that thick ol’ girl and not get a second glance.
That is the real truth. I hate to come into great debates, because I rattle on letting my emotions best me, and I don’t bring to the table any cites and such.
But on this topic, I will. (sigh. If pressed) Studies have been done that show that black women don’t have the same kind of body issues that white women do (on the same scale). Black women are praised for their very negroid physical attributes, within our own community. We are praised for a lot of things that the mainstream media doesn’t ‘show’. Our people are quick to point out the loyalty, resilience, and beauty of our own women.
If we begin to believe the media idea, it will loop for sure. The media will teach us that we hate ourselves. We will believe that we hate ourselves. We will begin to hate ourselves. See? That is dangerous.
I wish you would tell me in what way I am biased by the fact that I have noticed that mixed women seem to have a hard time believing that black women don’t want mixed or white hair.
And I did want to respond directly to this:
I don’t buy this. Not for a moment. Racism ! = thinks blacks are inferior.
I honestly don’t believe that just because we are pushed images of black ugliness that the people doing the pushing believe it to be true. And I don’t believe they are fooling half the people that pretend to be fooled.
*“thick” is a term used in black culture to refer to a woman who is bigger than other women, but her weight is in her hips, thighs, butt and tits…not her stomach.
Maybe our experiences are reflective of what we look like, too. I don’t have anything close to a “ghetto booty”, and yet I have no problems attracting black men who like what I have. So when I hear the “black men love big butts” meme touted as fact and in a way that suggests that that’s all they like, then yeah, I’m gonna consider that an overstatement (if not a myth). But socio-economics probably has a big influence on this. The preferences of black men seem to coincide with the preferences of the mainstream the more money and education they have.
Interestingly enough, the white men I’ve been involved with seem to have more of big butt fetish than the black men. So I think the preference you are attributing to black men applies to a lot of men. White women are getting butt implants. Beyonce’s figure is admired by huge swaths of people, not just the black guys. As I’ve said, curvy women have always had their fans.
I lack the motivation to point out anything unless I think it’s the truth. Not saying you aren’t motivated by the same desire, but I could care less if white people think that black people have issues with their hair! I don’t blame them if they think we do, because all one has to do is turn on the TV, walk down the street, or go to your average office building and they’ll see black women sporting hair completely unlike the hair that comes to them naturally.
Now we can come up with alll kinds of explanations for this observation, but to declare that some of those are explanations “myths” out of emotional reasons that are inconsistent with history and the testimonies of plenty of other black women…I consider that irrational.
I think you have valid reasons for believing what you do and I think you’ve articulated that clearly, Nzinga. But going over what I wrote earlier in this thread, I can’t see why you would disagree with this so strongly that you have to take deep breaths and so on and so forth:
My point is that the hair-straightening practices of black women follows a tradition that started as an attempt to “fix” something that society had deemed undesirable. That being kinky hair. Straightening was a tool to aid in conformity that had implications on self-acceptance. Today, few people may be consciously trying to “look white” when they straighten, but to go to the other extreme and say that black women straighten their curls and put Korean hair on their heads to look more black is far more inaccurate, I feel.
Hope you see what I’m saying.
I doubt it. I am speaking about an entire culture in which I live. The music, the hip-hop, the poetry (from the Harlem Rennasaince, onward), the art, the graffiti, the clubs, the dads and uncles making their comments about the women at the barbeque in hushed tones, years before I ever developed any curves of my own.
No one is saying that there are no black men that like small booties.
I am sure you receive no shortage of black male attention for your attractive, trim, frame. I am not saying that there aren’t black men out there that will court, love and marry women with small booties. I am merely saying that in my experience, it is not a myth that big booties are prized by the black men in black American culture.
Yes, there are men in all cultures that like women with big booties. But it is actually a ‘thing’ with black men. In my experience. I know this so fully from my perspective that it honestly feels really bizarre to even be having this conversation.
I think maybe a smaller influence that some may think. As much as I love the ghetto (and yep, I do!), I somehow have managed to rub elbows with black men across all socio-economic classes. Yeah…surprise! They are nothing like Billy Dee in a colt 45 commercial. They are nothing like the guys on Girlfriends, and any other silly BET sitcom. They are just…black men. They usually like big booties. Usually.
I care. It is very important because images and propaganda are flying at my daugher a million miles a minute, and it is a predominately white media that is doing the pushing. Also, the white folks that are being fed the same ugly lies that my baby is being fed are not my enemy. They are my fellow man. They need the truth as much as we do. Together, we must all come together and ensure that our youth are not given ugly untruths that will cause them to hate their own selves.
It happened to me. I was taught that slaves were weak, docile creatures that looked up to white folks as ‘massa’. I was never taught the truth at school…that there wasn’t just one hero like Harriet Tubman to come and save us all. Oh no. We were, as a people, not docile weak creatures that looked up to white folks as massa! That was a lie that, if left unchecked, would have convinced me that I came from that mentality, and it would have left me with that craziness in my brain.
We must all come to the truth. Black people are a self respecting people. That is the message that should come to our youth, from all races.
Well, I blame them if they do. Unless they are going to start spreading lies that all brunettes have self-respect issues for sporting hair unlike the hair that comes to them naturally. Ditto for bottle red-heads, fake eyelash wearers, lipstick wearers, mascara, blush, and all that other goopy crap women be smearing all over their faces, colored contact lenses, tanning booths, bronzers, curly perms, etc.
Black women are sick of having to prove they love their own hair. We do. Accept it.
I took two deep breaths. The first one was at the end of a post that was too damn long… I was trying to indicate that I realized that. The second was a sigh. The sigh was a veiled plea to anyone reading to not press me for cites on the body image thing.
Neither breath was to show you any disrespect at all, because if I didn’t respect you greatly, I wouldn’t even bother with all this stuff that is a bigger deal to me than to anyone else still paying attention.
While I do cop to a tendency to get emotional about topics when logically, it serves no purpose to do so, I flat out deny that I allow emotions to make me irrational about a topic of which I am very well versed. We can throw that notion out the window.
I’m confused. Are you saying that racists do not think blacks are inferior? (sorry to paraphrase, I got tangled up in the tense).
Call me when 75% of brunettes are dying their hair blonde, and there are hardly any famous white women who have brown hair. And shoot me an email when brunette children as young as 7 are being dropped off at the salon to have their hair dyed or bleached. And text me when you can find a brunette who has ever been teased, bullied, or nagged for failure to change their hair color.
As the stats currently stand, though, it’s common knowledge that blonde hair is an obsession of many. So the “lies” of which you speak have been spread already. I’ve seen many white women who would rather have brittle-looking dead, blonde hair than brown healthy hair. Interestingly enough, many of these same women tend to be low-income, just like the black women who have fried their hair so much that they wear extravagent weaves to mask the damage. So yeah, they got self-acceptance issues, too, chasing after the blond-hair, blue-eyed mystique that America associates with beauty and affluence. Do you balk at this characterization?
Are there any home hair coloring kits targeted to kids like there are for hair relaxers?
Forget the hair relaxers, though. I’ve seen kids as young as four walking around with weaves that would make Tyra Banks blush. What child is asking for weave at that age?
Sorry to interrupt you ladies, and this may be irelevant to your discussion. I grew up in a white town east of St. Loius at a time when segregation wasn’t a legal issue but it was a reality. Pale white skin doesn’t turn me on unless she’s a redhead. I’ve always preferred brunettes to blondes and dark eyes to blue eyes. Half of the women I’ve dated have been asian/latina/other.
A couple years ago it seemed like every dark-haired woman in the US was bleaching her hair. I think that trend is going away.
I think Jessica Alba was the most beautiful woman in the world as a brunette. A little narrow in the hips, but still gorgeous. I’d love to get her in the gym & get her squatting heavy weights… Sorry, lost my train of thought. Yeah, hair. As a blonde, Jessica’s OK, but just OK. Same with Tyra Banks; She’s stunning with her natural hair color but the bleached hair looks phoney on her. And I don’t mind the extra weight on Tyra. And Beyonce? smokin’. As for straightening & weaves? I dunno, I like hair natural & touchable regardless of the race/texture.
Now I’ll take my bald white man self out of this conversation.
Yeah. I’m saying, lots of times, they don’t. They are hoping they can convince others that they are, though.
Lest anyone think black hair is no longer a political issue (via Jezebel)
I have to agree with Benedick, from the Bard’s Much Ado About Nothing. He enumerates at great length the sterling qualities the woman he would love must have, and finally declares, “And her hair…her hair shall be the color that pleaseth God.”
Goodness. That certainly differs from my experience.
I was talking to my sister about this today, and she was of the opinion that the racism of other geographic areas (other than our own) is rooted in socio-economics rather than inferiority issues. So maybe it’s not that way, there where you are.
We come from a place where the so-called inferiority of blacks used to be taught in church (of all places!). Where the root of the continued problem stems from this legacy that Granny taught - who wants to say their Granny was wrong? Where many people (sadly), to this day, are firmly convinced of it.
It certainly was very plain to me (at that time) that black girls were expected to iron their hair, at all costs. I was in the 4th grade before I attended an integrated school (1968). I asked my mom what had happened to those little black girls, to put those funny marks around their ears. “That’s where the straightening iron burnt them”. :eek: Even worse-seeming (to my lazy self) was that the girls had to get up extra early to let Mom or Auntie “fix their hair” before school or church.
I am happy that today you can look at it differently, but the straight-hair-look-like-white-folks thing truly was a Hateful Thing.
Plenty of people think white women who do these things are trying to be “ethnic”, if not black. Do you ever hang around black message boards?
Just curious. When you see black female celebrities (like almost all of them, from Patti Labelle to Beyonce Knowles) pointying up their noses, what do you think? Do you think they are driven by different pressures from those affecting white women who plump up their lips or get butt implants? Or do you believe the straightened black nose is just as apolitical as straightened black hair?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t see anything too controversial or “myth-spreading” about what you with the face said. I mean, just think about it. Our grandmothers definitely grew up hearing a decidedly “black ain’t beautiful” message. So even if “black is beautiful” is the message we hear today, it doesn’t seem implausible that our grandmother’s nagging voices are still whispering in our ears, telling us to get out of the rain lest our hair goes back “home”. Didn’t Stephanie Mills sing the praises of going home? What’s so bad about home, Gramma?
I didn’t know anything about my natural hair until I got to college. Since then, I’ve discovered that it has a bunch of hair textures, from kinky to frustratingly straight. My mother was shocked because she assumed it would all be kinky. She talks about how beautiful my hair is, if only I would comb it regularly ;). Blah, blah,blah. One day, I asked her if she would have still relaxed my hair as a child, knowing what she knows now about my hair. Her answer was an unapologetic yes. Great googly moogly. My natural hair is supposedly beautiful, but apparently not as beautiful as it was when it was straightened and brittle. But it was long then. And it sorta kinda “flowed”. My hair looked awful when it was relaxed, but because she forced me to get on the horrible treadmill of constant touch-ups, I was a prisoner to it. I was an unwilling addict to it because my mother was afraid. I’m not sure white women who have perms go through that.
When black mothers stop reflexively straightening their children’s hair or at least leave the choice up to them when they’re older, that’s when I’ll stop assuming that hair straightening is free from all racial baggage.
If you can post a cite, Nzinga, Seated, that supports your view about all of this being a myth, I think we would all appreciate it. Perhaps especially the whites in the audience, who can only talk our word for it. I know I can dig up tons of online testimonies of black people who had negative, racially charged experiences when going natural. And I have talked to people–folks of non-“mixed” ancestry as well as mixed–who have stories that corroborate with mine. But maybe we’re all delusional, black-hating, biracial-wannabes with chips on our high-yella shoulders. Or it could be that your experience isn’t as wide spread as you’d like to believe.
I guess we’ll never know.
I don’t know what you mean by being happy that I ‘can look at it differently’. It is just my own understanding, from my own studies and observations. Racists put a lot of energy in portraying blacks to be a certain way. They did this to justify their crimes against the race. By teaching that we were not human, they hoped to get away with treating us as subhuman. That is not to say that these very learned men who built nations and captured slaves were so dumb as to actually believe that the people they were enslaving were actually beasts. They knew differently and they made sure to employ tactics to make it look to the more uneducated masses that we really were animals. I will not go into what those horrific tactics were. Look them up, if you need to know.
My point is, racists don’t have to believe blacks are inferior in order to be racist.
As for your stories about little girls with burn marks on their ears, we know. We know. We know that blacks have had issues with their kinky hair, based on the fact that they were taught that their hair was ugly and bad. No one in this thread is denying that happened, so you story is…duly noted, but not really relevant.
Some of us were there, monstro. Although I can’t put myself in your shoes totally because I’m not black, I certainly witnessed it. Not to be too antagonistic to Nzinga, but I think perhaps young folks don’t really understand what it was like, not so very long ago. (Geez, I sound like Granny!)
Paying attention to history is a tricky thing. I liken it to looking in the rear view mirror as you drive down the street. It’s helpful to glance back every now and then. (Don’t stare into it, though, or you’ll have a collision!) We don’t need to deny that there was such a past, or that “black = ugly” was never pushed on us for decades.
That’s all I’m saying.
Thank you for the clarification. As I said before, I was a bit confused. I think our opinions differ somewhat on the above quoted point.
Sorry that you didn’t find my experience relevant. I was attempting to bolster the argument that “yes, this was the case”. Maybe I am still misunderstanding what you are saying.
What on earth kind of cite would satisfy you? A testimonial from sisters saying that they have not gotten any negative feedback, in fact, only positive feedback and compliments about their natural hair? Cause that is my experience. No one has ever once said to me that my afro is unattractive. Whites and blacks alike.
This discussion is starting to take an ugly turn. All this talk of biracial wannabes and high yella and and all that nonsense is something that has never come out of my mouth. As a matter of fact, I’m gonna state flat out right now that this high yella / dark skinned divide is another overstated myth. Every black family I know runs the spectrum from high yellow to black. And when I talk about things changing fast, let’s discuss how light-skinned boys being cute has actually** gone out of style ** in the black community over the span of two decades. Me discussing issues with a 'you are all just high yella wanna-bes) slant is ridiculous, given the skin tone of my mom, my baby, my green eyed sister and blue eyed niece. No. That’s not my style, so let’s drop that idea too. Likewise for indications that I ever said that blacks straiten their hair to look more black, and a host of other statements people in this thread are projecting into my posts. My posts are straight-up raw enough. They don’t need to be colored.
People keep eluding to things I’d like to believe, and stuff like that. Please don’t do that. I have spent 20 years researching my history, absorbing my surroundings, loving my people, and coming to terms with who I am. I am proud of that. It was hard. I had to accept that most in this country would not accept me for who I am. I had to learn how to accept myself for who I am then. I have done that, and it can’t be undone. Ever.
It is my intention to make sure to fight with every breath to make sure little black boys and girls in the ghetto get the truth. When I see ugly lies being pushed in the media to blacks and whites alike, I will speak out against it. Period. Every time, and I will not back down. I realize you are very educated, and people know that, it is evident. It is probably not wise for a women like me to try to debate anything at all with you. But this is an area that I know what the hell I am talking about. So I will not back down on this. It is my own personal mission to spread this message - Black people are not a bunch of no-self-respect-having self-haters. It is not true.
If someone comes up to a little black girl with a great voice and says, “We will make you a star…you are going to have to straighten your nose and hair”, then I would not be surprised if the po’ thang went ahead and did just that. So I do wish people would stop showing me Hollywood examples about how much black women must hate themselves for changing their noses. I don’t know any black women that want a nose job. That is Hollywood nonsense, and has nothing to do with black self-hate.