Breaking Down the Bars - OWN - Good Programming

 If you haven't seen Breaking Down the Bars program your dvrs to record the episodes ASAP. The show chronicles the lives of women serving time at Rockville Prison in Indiana. These women are bearing their souls on this show. Rather than reinforcing the difference between offenders and non-offenders, this show highlights the humanity of offenders. BDTB gives the viewer the woman's history, her crime, the traumas she has suffered (and her addiction, if she is struggling with addiction). They show old photos, and tell the woman's story from her perspective. The most amazing part of the show is that they incorporate the family members that are waiting for them to return home, most often this includes their mothers, children, and sometimes their lovers. I love this show because it gives you the good and bad, and what you are left with is this tangled knot of a life. It just feels real to me. In the end, I am rooting for the women to get out of Rockville and back to the people that love them. Some of my favorite people featured on the show:


Larretha is a young black lesbian, a who got caught up in an armed robbery. She was a basketball prodigy, who hopes to play for a college upon her release.

Amanda "Shardea" is a gangsta ass white woman, who used to rob people. She is getting help with her addiction and finding out that their is life beyond thuggin.

Tiffany, is a bi-racial beauty who used to strip and robbed men who offered her money for sex. One of those incidents went terribly wrong when her boyfriend beat a man up so bad that he almost died. She is close to being released and will return home to her children. Tiffany's mother has colon cancer which is rapidly progressing.

Dr. Stephanie Covington, Addiction and Trauma Therapist is a standout. Among the people that work at Rockville, she is the most caring, compassionate and informed. She does not treat the women like offenders, she treats them like human beings. This woman is one of the best listeners I've ever seen on television. Covington is drastically different than the "in-house" prison staff. The in-house staff treat the women like they are their crimes and always lead with their disappointment in the women. It is easy to see how "in-house" prison staff are in the business of making more offenders rather than rehabilitating them. They all act like really bad parents who claim that they want you to do better than shoot down all of your hopes/dreams and laugh at you when you have minor setbacks. Thank the universe for Stephanie Covington and everyone like her.

Many of the women's backstories involve them being sexually abused as children, which is really sad and it points to the magnanimity of sexual abuse and, in my mind, reinforces the fact that we need a national movement against child sexual abuse. We need more than lip-service. We need a national awareness campaign. We need to de-stigmatize mental health therapy. We need low-cost therapy.

Also many of the women are dealing with addiction, in many cases the women turned to drugs when they were trying to numb the pain of the sexual trauma. Marinate on that.

Maya Moore Spokeswoman for Jordan's

This is indeed good news. Maya Moore has been selected to be a spokesperson for the Jordan brand. She is the first woman basketball player that has been welcomed into this brand family that represents excellence at the highest level of competition.

I must digress and say that this has been a long time coming, too long. Were Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi, not great enough? Women athletes have been badasses for a long time, but are only now getting the accolades. I'm very glad that women are beginning to get the big endorsement deals and bigger salaries (but they are far smaller than men in the same sports), but I can't help but wonder how long until things are equal, or at least equitable.

Right now the average WNBA player has to play a season in the US and when that is over hitch a plane to another country and play another full season. What is nice about it is that these women are not solely tied to the NBA for all of their earnings and do not have to feel like highly paid indentured servants, but it is a hard life. I follow Tina Charles on twitter and just the feel I get from her tweets is that it is tough to spend your life on airplanes in different cities (in another country) all the time. Being a professional athlete is hard, and it is even harder to do that outside of your country of origin. And the reason why they have to do that is because their salaries are so low. Players make between $50,000-$90,000 a season in the WNBA. So they go overseas and play for 4xs that amount.

Some will argue that the pay disparity is due to newness of the league and the attendance is lower. Well NBA is in the name and they have more than enough money to spread around. The profits of the NBA are ridiculously high and players, owners, and coaches make a ton of money. And let us not forget that they have a huge audience because we did not have a professional women's league. If this country was not deeply conflicted about strong women, we would not have the disparities in revenue and attendance between women's and men's sports.

The naming of Moore as a Jordan's Spokesperson might signal the coming of a new era in women's sports, where women can garner the endorsements and accolades that have been reserved for men. I can only hope. Congrats Maya!

Amazing Race Winners Season 18 LaKisha and Jennifer Hoffman

These lovely ladies recently won the Amazing Race! They are sisters and sistahs. LaKisha and Jennifer Hoffman are the first pair of black women to win the reality show. Other black winners have been male and female pairs, who were also married couples; Chip and Kim won Season 5 and Uchenna & Joyce won Season 7.

The Hoffman sisters were both Division 1 athletes who played basketball at the University of Louisville, so they were athletically ready for this challenge. If you have ever watched the show before there have been other black women on the show who were not physically ready for all of the challenges and they were quickly eliminated. They are not new to the show, they actually appeared on season 14, but they were eliminated early because Jennifer did not know how to swim. Jennifer rose to the occasion and took swimming lessons. And when they re-appeared on The Amazing Race Season 18 they came out victorious. Major kudos to Jennifer because too many black women (in the US) do not know how to swim and are unwilling to learn.

Currently Jennifer Hoffman is an assistant basketball coach at U of L, and Lakisha Hoffman is a graduate student. And even more good news, Lakisha is an OUT lesbian, which makes her the first OUT black lesbian to win the Amazing Race. And besides Wanda Sykes, Sheryl Swoopes, and Felicia Snoop Pearson, she joins a very small group of black women that are fully out of the closet. So thanks for being out and proud. And thanks to both of you for showing the world that black women can do anything they put their minds to.

Naima Adedapo

I've started watching American Idol, and there is a jem of a contestant this season named Naima Adedapo. She is the daughter of jazz singer Adekola Adedapo.

According to her Wiki entry, you know Idol has a history of keeping biographical info to themselves to that they can 'manage' their contestants identities, she is a mother of 5 children, with 2 biological children, and three step-children. She studied Dance at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and continues to dance in Ko-Thi an African Dance Company, and sings in a band with her husband. 

This girl sings and dances. Her signature Afrocentric ascethetic cannot be denied. Despite being on a mainstream show that is famous for candy-coating its contestants, she remains true to her style. However, it is evident that American Idol did make her cut her dreads shorter. Other than that, she stills stands in contrast to the Eurocentricism standard that is usually upheld on the show. Beyond Naima's dress, she brings an afrocentricism to her performances that have been unseen in previous seasons. She did a reggae number in the middle of performing Rihanna's "Umbrella," and added African Dance to her performance of Lionel Richie's "Dancing in the Street."

Based on those performances, it is clear that she is stretching the boundaries of American Idol karaoke style performances. But this is in the midst of one of AI's least diverse season's to date. The only African American performers left are Naima and Jacob Lusk. Ashton Jones, another African American contestant was voted off March 10th. Thia Megia is repping for Asian Americans, she is a Filipina, and Karen Rodriguez, who was voted off on March 17th, was repping for the Latin@s. And of the entire top twenty-something, there were 4 more people of color.

Although she is turning the standard on its head, it is quite obvious that she has a very light complexion and blue/green or hazel eyes. It begs the question, could dark skinned contestant of African descent break with the Eurocentric standard of dress and hair style. Is Naima given a pass because she has light skin?


Racism and white ideals still prevail in much of popular culture, but there are cracks. And I'll keep looking for them.

Summer is Upon Us/ Fantasia Barrino Sings "Summertime"

This performance still gives me chills. I just wanted to remind myself that summer is coming. Fantasia's rendition of Gershwin's "Summertime" gets at the complexity of a black life with ease. The song was written for the opera/musical Porgy & Bess, which explores the hardships of African Americans Summer is a season known for its fair weather and lush vegetation that reminds us of the bounty that the earth offers human beings. The song contrasts this with the limitations of life expectations of African Americans, who lead lives that are constantly being limited by systemic racism and abject poverty.

Enjoy!

And doesn't Quentin Tarantino sound like a jerk at the end? 

Amber Rose: The Latest Fat-Shaming Victim

Ahh, yes, Mediatakeout is up to it again. They are running a story calling Amber Rose fat. My take on it is: She is not fat, and if she was, So What!?! I am so sick media outlets doing stories like this. Amber Rose is what we, in the black community, call thick, meaning that her body is voluptuous in all the right places. But I digress, fat is a feminist issue, a woman's issue, a human issue. We should be banding together against body snarking (making fun of people's physical appearance) , body policing, and shaming fat people/fatness/fat in general. 

Women's bodies are policed by popular culture in many ways, but I'm going to stick to the size issue for now (there will be more to come on this topic). They are often judged by the size of their clothes rather than their talent and intelligence. If you are against sexism, and claim to be a feminist than stop policing women's bodies. Do not judge a woman by the size of her pants. Sexism, and patriarchy have convinced us that the amount of fat on a woman's body is a measuring stick for her worthiness. Take a minute and think about how misconstrued the reasoning is on this issue.

Moreover, African Americans/ black folks, should not be checking for this stuff because we have been marginalized in popular culture because of the color of our skin, body type, and plain old racism. We need to be standing up against exclusionary practices rather than validating and participating in them.

Amber did not make things better by tweeting: "I'm 5'9" and 148 lbs." "How am I fat?" As if to say, hey look at my numbers, I'm not fat. A feminist response would have been to say, 'I love my body, so you can kiss my ass' in her Tyra Banks voice. (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Tyra went back on her bodacious bodily love by getting all skinny again claiming that she still wants to model, but they cant take that youtube clip away from me.) I can dream, cant I? 

Here is the clip of Tyra telling the press to shove it!

 

Welcome to Black Pop Culture Watch

I started this blog because I wanted to see a different type of Popular Culture Blog for African Americans. I am  growing tired of the unrelenting snark on the gossip blogs, but still did not see enough coverage of African Americans in mainstream popular culture websites. So, I am starting Black Popular Culture Watch. This site will cover a variety of topics from television shows, movies, youtube celebrities, fashion, mainstream and queer (LGBT) celebrity news (minus the snark), book reviews, film reviews, natural hair information, health news, and commentary on the news items that affect African Americans. And I'm going to do all of this with an intellectual flair and a feminist perspective (I hope). 

Like Margaret Cho said, "I'm the one that I want."