It's a Wrap

So... Rihanna's AMA not-so-hairdo. You saw it. I heard about it. I performed an image search. Subsequently I formed an opinion. Upon first viewing of these photos with cute little blinged out, Bobbi pinned RiRi I said, "Bitch, you's a WHOLE mess. I guess you were on your way to the Valero to get a hot pickle and some pork rinds when you got a text from your manager telling you to get your black ass to the AMAs." Then I rejected that thought, hastily replaced it with another and probably gave Rihanna too much credit and invaluable time in the process... this would be what you are now reading. Even if she didn't intend for it to be or doesn't possess the wherwithal to grasp such an abstract notion, I think RiRi's wrap is mad womanist.

As you know, I wail against stupidity in general but I am most passionate about the way black women are portrayed in the media. Why? Because more than any means of communication, social and mass media shape the PERCEPTION of a culture and, through some kind of unholy osmosis, the culture itself. Lately black women have been run through the media wringer and just how the Colorado River tried to play the Grand Canyon we have been worn down and cut through by a seemingly unstoppable ancient force. Also eerily similar to this same wonder of nature, we are a glorious sight to behold in spite of our weathering. With this, the black woman's figurative social erosion in mind, I think it's beautiful that RiRi stepped out dressed to give these hoes HELL with face beat to the cosmos and her hair done in what is unanimously known to sistas as our "Dear God please don't let anybody see me as I make this midnight run to WalMart" maintenance style and was STILL a glamour beast. It just goes to show that even at our supposed "worst", fellow Negresses, we can still face those flashing lights with dignity and F.A.C.E. (Fierce Attitude and Confidence Effortless.)

I am also quite interested in the very creatively ignorant ways this non-hairstyle is being described/interpreted by our pigment bereft brethren. My favorite was "faux pixie crop". (Meanwhile on #BlackTwitter... broads are doubled-over in tears of laughter.) It just goes to show that even without understanding the most benign and fundamental components of our daily lives, non-blacks assume they just KNOW what makes us "us". Baby, you can't even BEGIN to dig it. Go 'head, Ri.

Miss Girl said "Fuck ya award show. Picture me rolling when I comb this down tomorrow morning."

Next thing you know Miley and crew will be trying to brush that lil piece of hair she got around the circumference of her skull with all kinds of Bobbi pins and clips and thangs. Good luck, ho.

On this "The Best Man" .gif ish...

(that you people probably don't remember because it happened over 30 minutes ago but DDT does not forget).

1. Y'all hoes petty as all fuck.

2. Stop hatin' and get money.

3. Shit like this is the reason why 
Tyler Perry is still relevant in black film, television and theatre.

4. Yes, 3 out of the 4 black leading men in the quintessential black Rom-Com are in reality booed-up with white women. So the fuck what?? Let these niggas live! Yes, one of them is nearly every black woman's boy-next-door fantasy crush and one is the nice young man that spent just a little too much time in the library (but could still get it) and the other one has green eyes and "good" hair... but does the race of their spouses equal to the ejection of black women from the good black man's dating pool? No indeed. All it means is that THESE THREE black men, for whatever reason, have decided to mate with snowflakes... and how many of you genuinely give a damn?? If you can be counted in that number, I have no choice but to feel sorry for your lack of better things to do.

I am somewhat interested however in the motive behind this much reposted image. Perhaps it was a brotha that has been so brow-beaten by his woman's incessant cooing over the actors in the film while asserting that he ain't shit in comparison, that he decided to knock her and every black woman in America down a peg. Maybe it was an embittered sista whose sincerest devotions had been abused by one too many disingenous, womanizing black men and she wanted to expose Taye Diggs and co. for the "traitorous niggas" that they really are. It might have even been a white girl with a severe enough case of jungle fever to start a malicious smear campaign against the legitimacy of black love. Or maybe it was some white boy tired of being snubbed by black women simply because we're so hung up on the ideal of our "beautiful black kings" that we refuse to entertain notions of dating any non-Negro other than Robin Thicke or Robert Downey Jr. Whosoever the perpetrator just know that the mutha fucka is very likely narrow-minded and short-sighted.

And I know what you may be thinking, dear loyal reader: DeDeT, you're a comedian and whatnot--since when can't you take a joke? My reply: I can take a joke just fine, ho. What I do NOT have it for is hack work that further promotes the farce of black female nothingness that is supposedly our day-to-day condition. 10 times out of 10... I ain't laughing at that dumb shit. Everyday on Twitter, Instagram and all other social media outlets black women (and self-appointed black woman elect Miley Cyrus) get dragged for F I L T H, baby. Yeah, everybody laughs, cries, dies and retweets, but what I wanna know is, when will black women and our imposed novelty no longer be a part of society's running gag? When will our torment no longer be something to poke fun at? And WHEN will you broads stop P A R T I C I P A T I N G in your own subjugation????

The Wail Has Gone Live...

So ya girl is doing stand-up comedy things... De De T what they call me. Partake.

From Bugatti to Honda

This can also be found in the JUNE 2013 issue of Cognition Magazine at www.cognitionmagazine.com.

So… two months ago I came across this YouTube video and as with just about everything from YouTube brought to my attention by way of Twitter, I was chagrinned to find that human beings are still rather under evolved.  I didn’t write about it then because I was so disgusted by what I saw that I could scarcely gather my thoughts well enough to speak with any eloquence on the matter. Fortunately for you, I do believe I am able to do so now. (I will do my best to refrain from any This-Dumb-Bi*@es and Look-Here-H@es.) I won’t mention the name of the video blogger in question but I’ll say that her name is also synonymous with the infamous “struggle plate” as she believes she is a master chef in addition to an Internet life coach. (In my opinion she holds neither claim.) Quite frankly I’m not here for the further advertisement of such nonsense, so this time around kids, you will just have to take me at my word if you haven’t seen it yourself. She began the video with the obviously metaphoric tale of her downgrade from Bugatti to Honda at the tender age of 14 and how she instantaneously became every bit as expendable and common as every other Honda or “box Chevy” on the block. At first I thought the bitch was trying to make a point about the futility of materialism but she soon made me aware that I had given her WAY too much credit. This ill-formed allegory actually made reference to the loss of her virginity. She proceeded to postulate inarticulately and ad nauseum about how she finds that being a virgin is special and this “nuance” makes a girl socially superior and higher in demand than her non-virgin peers. In short she believes that when a girl/woman who loses her virginity she loses value and her feminine singularity in the process.

Now if you’ll entertain the exercise, allow me to break down for you ALL the ways that this little allegory is so f@!#ed up. There is possibly no object of our time more symbolic of the male ego than the automobile—none. A man will hang damn near all his masculinity on the type of car he drives and congruently on the kind of women he can get to ride in it with him. This woman has not only allowed her vagina to be reduced to that of a material object whose value is in part based on its mileage but she has directly identified her  female sexuality as an extension of that male ego. She has totally bought into the ideal that the only woman truly worth having is one that no other man has had. And if it weren’t sad enough that she has molded her own psychosexual identity in the image of a man’s prized possession, she’s passing the dysfunction down to her daughter and other girls under the guise of motherly advice.

Ladies, are we still teaching our girls this ass-backwards, patriarchal ideal that a woman should base her value on how many men she has or hasn’t slept with? Seriously? In 2013 we’re still doing this? The optimistic side of me would like to believe that this dumb b—this woman is the last of her kind, but alas, I know this cannot be so. There are plenty of you out there who still equate your worth with your “number” and our society’s inability to come to terms with the many degrees of female sexuality speaks quite loudly to that belief. Now I can’t tell any one of you how to think but be for real—sexual attraction, desire and activity are some of our strongest, most basic human instincts. If we weren’t all (women and men alike) supposed to bone we wouldn’t be so driven by that need, and this chick who got up on this ridiculous soap box knows it. She has HUGE jugs that she is not at all shy about flaunting. She is hardly above bending over in front of a camera with her ass out, but by all means, Madame let your daughter believe that she is less of a woman for behaving like a sexual being. Maybe the problem is that YOU, Miss Self-Proclaimed YouTube Sage, feel like a Honda and YOU have commoditized your own body in the process. Look here h—woman: if you feel devalued for losing your virginity at a young age then that is YOUR hang-up and yours ALONE so don't project your self-subscribed notions of depreciation onto every last woman in the world. That isn't a burden for all of us to carry alongside ya.

Yes, we should teach our kids to make good decisions in all aspects of life including sex but we are not in a position to cast down judgments of shame on them for simply being human. If we adults could pass on to younger generations that we are sexual beings and stop belittling them for acting on these urges, then just maybe we’d have much less sexual dysfunction within our society. Maybe if we would stop treating homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, etc. like deformities of our purported “heterosexual nature”, people would feel less psychological pressure to conform to a lifestyle that goes against their true individual nature and in turn be less prone to self-destructive and abusive behaviors. Or maybe we all should just be for real about what we want on an individual level society as a whole would reflect that same self-assurance… I’m just saying.

Is it my opinion that 14 is too young to start having sex? Hell yeah it is. A 14 year-old can’t get a damn job to support a kid. A 14 year-old can barely rationalize the changes he/she is going through in his/her own body and mind and much less understand the many responsibilities inherent of being sexually active. Hell some grown folks can barely reconcile that shit. But even though I think 14 is too young to lose one’s virginity (for strikingly different reasons than Madame Box Chevy), I would NEVER suggest that a person has undermined his worth by doing something that comes all too naturally. And, hey, if any of you reading this happen to be virgins, I am in no way suggesting that you have made an “unnatural” decision to wait. The point is we all have to make our own choices when it comes to sex. We all have our own way of figuring out what lifestyle works best for us and if your lifestyle doesn’t hurt or violate you or anyone else then I say, “Baby go ‘head on”.

White American Intolerance Month

As I hope you all well know, this month is observed as Black History Month. While we Negro folk use the occassion to educate people all races of our very rich and meaningful history in this country and abroad, some people (non blacks) find it to be an exclusionary exercise in reverse racism. To my chagrin there is much ado about the lack of a month designated to spotlight the white contributions to history from our caucasian brethren come February (even though the reason why there are specific historical appreciation months dedicated to the contributions of numerous minority groups is because they have marginalized by the over-saturation of white patriarchal ideals as it pertains to the narrative of American life). I am especially dismayed at the number of bigoted YOUNG white folk who have expressed their intolerance for ANYTHING that would take whiteness from the forefront of American culture even if only for a month or worse shed light on the ill-doings of their ancestors. God forbid that whiteness should EVER have to stand in the umber of Negro antiquities. Honestly I'm shocked to find that there would even be so many vehemently racist and culturally retarded white kids in this country with their love of all things Weezy. Has this rap music radio takeover given these young whites the notion that a thing such as Black History Month no longer has merit or cause based on our dominance in the entertainment sphere? Could it be that they are getting the wrong ideas about the value we place on blackness with our Fuck-all-these-niggas-cause-I'm-gettin-money bravado? Or perhaps is it our half-Negro President-elect that has given them the notion that we live in a post-racial society with no justifiable need for such an arcane tradition as Black History Month? Hell no. The problem is that they're being taught the same fucked up values that have been passed down through generations of racist assholes who are so preoccupied with minorities remaining underfoot that the simple truth of human oneness completely eludes them after 400 years in a country filled almost completely with IMMIGRANTS. Yes, you white people are the descendants of immigrants--just like Keisha, Pablo, Kim Soo and Amir. No matter how many generations removed, all of us (barring the N A T I V E S) are imports to this United States of America.

Since after ALL this time of alien occupation in this country the white man STILL refuses to teach his children racial tolerance, how about we go ahead and give them that appreciation month they've had to endure every year without once and for all? I hereby declare that the month of March should be recognized as "White American Intolerance Month". During these 31 days America will celebrate A L L the reasons why Black, Latino, Native American, Women's history weeks/months exist by highlighting every racist, sexist, imperialist, elitist, discriminatory act committed by "our" forefathers to showcase THEIR very rewarding contributions to American societal development. During White American Intolerance Month we will go over everything from the near extinction of the Natives to slavery to homophobia to sexism to the unlawful occupation of other nations to cheap outsourced labor--

No? Those aren't the contributions you were talking about? I find it odd that there would be any objection since my recollection of my historical education is riddled with the glories of white American bravery and sticktoitivness. Sure we grazed over the less honorable white American moments like slavery, the Teapot Dome Scandal, and the Klan but I don't remember much about the Black Power movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Watts and Chicago riots, Black Wall Street, the Back to Africa Movement, or the Louisiana slave revolt but as an America Negro I'm probably what Bill O'Reilly calls "biased".

As an objective and fair woman I am willing to take that charge AND compromise so how about this? We KEEP these culturally specific appreciation months as they ARE and white folks should try to educate themselves for the duration. We black people don't want to keep BHM just for our own nubian edification. No, we NEED Black History Month to remind everyone in this country of the fact that we are here and our story matters every bit as much as any other. Do we seek to demonize white folk and bludgeon them with past transgressions for the entire month of February as a bitter revenge for all our people have been made to suffer at the hands of their predecessors? No but I'd be lying if I said I was in any way opposed to that as a side effect. If it was up to me we probably wouldn't have a BHM. If it was up to me I'd rewrite every American History book to include everything black that ever happened since the day we got here but I ain't in charge of that shit. I believe the ONLY reason BHM still exists is because our children, our offspring, our generations are still being whitewashed by these unfathomably limited education systems we have to rely on to craft their young minds. Our kids STILL go to school everyday wondering where exactly they fit into the ethnic patchwork of Americana. Thanks to BHM you white folk have to work something of ours into your lesson plans... Even if only for a month. It's called "due diligence" bitch. Handle it with some mutha fuckin decorum... And quietly if you can manage to do so.