However, our dialogue about twerking reflects a larger system of cultural appropriation, commodification, and sometimes exploitation that has resulted in the birth of “ratchet culture.” Ratchet has become the umbrella term for all things associated with the linguistic, stylistic, and cultural practices, witnessed or otherwise, of poor people; specifically poor people of color, and more specifically poor women of color. (Yes, ratchet is a very feminine gendered term. See: Ratchet Girl Anthem). Remember when people who weren’t actually from the ghetto started to use the word “ghetto” to describe everything from their friend’s booty to a broken blender (real life examples)? The same phenomenon is happening with ratchet, even for those who do not use the word itself. It is super easy to borrow from the experiences of others as a way to be “fun,” or stretch boundaries on what is “acceptable,” without any acknowledgement of context or framework.

But being ratchet is only cool when you do it for fun, not if those are valid practices from your lived experiences. We watch shows like Basketball Wives, Real Housewives (of all the cities), and Bad Girls Club where women act ratchet as hell all the time. But they do so in designer clothes and at 5-star restaurants, and this paradox acts as a buffer for the ratchet that is the real reason for the shows’ success. Internet sensations like Sweet Brown are the perfect example of how “ratchet culture” is appropriated and commodified. “Aint nobody got time for that” has made its way to memes all over the internet and is used by folks from different backgrounds as punchlines and witty retorts. Sweet Brown has been contracted to sell everything from real estate to dental services. We witnessed the same trend with Antoine Dodson. It is becoming more and more common for folks to use “ratchet” to sell their not-at-all-ratchet products.

On an (inter)personal level, ratchet works to simultaneously police and defy gender, class, sexuality, and respectability norms. Folks with certain privilege are willing and able to float in and out of ratchet at will. The term ratchet became popular for me when I was still in undergrad about three years ago. All of us young, black scholars (constantly trying to justify the black side of the coin or the scholar side, as if they are polar opposites) were enamored with this term as a way to distinguish when we were or were not on the “right side” of the respectability table. When it was time to party we would say, “Let’s get ratchet!” But when I would go check my mail with my hair still wrapped in a scarf or was overheard talking to my friends from “back home” in our local dialect, I was just ratchet. Another example of the fluidity of ratchet was playing double dutch on the quad. At our predominantly white institution we were presenting a form of community building and fellowship that fell outside the boundaries of “appropriate” and “acceptable.” But our privilege as collegiate scholars allowed us to present ourselves in that way without the same push back we may have received if we were just black girls playing double dutch in a predominantly white community park.

I know that for me and many of my friends, the use of the term ratchet was a constant navigation of our identities as young, sexual, inner city hood Chicago-raised, black girls and privileged, college educated, Western women. I can’t stress enough that pop culture trends like twerking, “aint nobody got time for that,” or even just using the word ratchet to define the wild things that happened at last night’s party are all rooted in someone’s lived experience. Sometimes it’s your lived experience, but if it’s not, please stop for a moment to consider your privilege and what role you may be playing in the appropriation of someone else’s exploitation.

“

—

Let’s get ratchet! Check your privilege at the door

By SESALI BOWEN

(via unapproachableblackchicks)

!!!I can’t stress enough that pop culture trends like twerking, “aint nobody got time for that,” or even just using the word ratchet to define the wild things that happened at last night’s party are all rooted in someone’s lived experience.

(via newmodelminorityarchive)

Black Slam Style

glitterlion:

blackfoxx:

One day we are going to talk about how everyone uses the poetry reciting Slam Style of Black folks for effect and punch. Like that is pretty much the standard now…. I dont know if I have a problem with it persay… But much like everything thing else I feel like that will be forgotten and folks will be talking about its universal and American. I need it to be known that that style comes from Black pain, rage, and triumph….

omg. I was just fucking thinking about this! And the bold.

On Audre Lorde’s Legacy and the “Self” of Self-Care, Part 1 of 3

lowendtheory:

[Please do not be that ass who reblogs this image and deletes the text below.]

Update: Part Two here.

We’re still learning to read Audre Lorde, who should have been 79 today. We’re still learning to become the collectivity, the “we,” that would make reading Audre Lorde possible. The Audre Lorde that I think is especially worth reading is not the Audre Lorde that reads like a bumper sticker. Nor is it the Audre Lorde that settles the score, once and for all, the Audre Lorde who puts the full stop on the conversations we’ve needed to have before we’ve had them. The Audre Lorde I’m interested in is perhaps too queer to set things straight for us politically. Which also means that it’s also not the Audre Lorde who exists as an alibi. The Audre Lorde that’s most interesting to me is the Audre Lorde who is a complex, often contradictory historical figure, a figure whose brilliance resides not in her individual insight but in her capacity to creatively animate and inhabit the very contradictions in which she lived. It is that kind of brilliance that makes her A. Lorde and not, well, a Lord; that is, not a god-like figure whose authority is to be deferred to once and for all, but someone whose life and work provide an rich world of problems, questions, and ideas worth thinking with, borrowing from, confronting, and, of course, disagreeing with. I’m interested in claiming Audre Lorde as a human. Which is to say that in many ways, she was not, ultimately, that much unlike you or me. Even in her radical difference. Even because of it.

Read More

nerdbyrd:

glitterlion:

thugzmansion:

hey willow, can you teach us how to dress like you?

I’ve seen this shared a few times now and, to be honest, this kind of bothers me a little bit, but I’m not sure if it’s my place to voice that concern or if the feeling is legitimate.

Given the way Jada and Will talk about their relationship with their children, the work that they’ve been doing in political spaces, and the type of music/art that Willow has been producing, I have no doubt that she’s probably familiar with these amazing folks on the shirt.

But this is obviously shopped.

And there’s something weird and appropriative about non-consensually using the body of a Black girl, especially one who is in a business that requires owning your image in order to make profit, to sell products produced by someone who appears to be a non-Black person using AAVE.

^^^commentary. I didn’t know it was shopped, that’s pretty messed up.

thepeoplesrecord:

The troubling viral trend of the “hilarious” Black poor person
May 7, 2013

Charles Ramsey, the man who helped rescue three Cleveland women presumed dead after going missing a decade ago, has become an instant Internet meme. It’s hardly surprising—the interviews he gave yesterday provide plenty of fodder for a viral video, including memorable soundbites (“I was eatin’ my McDonald’s”) and lots of enthusiastic gestures. But as Miles Klee and Connor Simpson have noted, Ramsey’s heroism is quickly being overshadowed by the public’s desire to laugh at and autotune his story, and that’s a shame. Ramsey has become the latest in a fairly recent trend of “hilarious” black neighbors, unwitting Internet celebrities whose appeal seems rooted in a “colorful” style that is always immediately recognizable as poor or working-class.

Before Ramsey, there was Antoine Dodson, who saved his younger sister from an intruder, only to wind up famous for his flamboyant recounting of the story to a reporter. Since Dodson’s rise to fame, there have been others: Sweet Brown, a woman who barely escaped her apartment complex during a fire last year, and Michelle Clarke, who couldn’t fathom the hailstorm that rained down in her hometown of Houston, and in turn became “the next Sweet Brown.”

Granted, the buzzworthy tactic of reporters interviewing the most loquacious witnesses to a crime or other event is nothing new, and YouTube has countless examples of people of all ethnicities saying ridiculous things. One woman, for instance, saw fit to casually mention her breasts while discussing a local accident, while another man described a car crash with theatrical flair. Earlier this year, a “hatchet-wielding hitchhiker” named Kai matched Dodson’s fame with his astonishing account of rescuing a woman from a racist attacker. But none of those people have been subjected to quite the same level of derisive memeification as Brown, Clark, and now, perhaps, Ramsey—the inescapable echoes of “Hide yo’ kids, hide yo’ wife!” and “Kabooyaw,” the tens of millions of YouTube hits and cameos in other viral videos, even commercials.

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

Ramsey is particularly striking in this regard, since, for a moment at least, he put the issue of race front and center himself. Describing the rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives, he says, “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!”

The candid statement seems to catch the reporter off guard; he ends the interview shortly afterward. And it’s notable that among the many memorable things Ramsey said on camera, this one has gotten less meme-attention than most. Those who are simply having fun with the footage of Ramsey might pause for a second to actually listen to the man. He clearly knows a thing or two about the way racism prevents us from seeing each other as people.

Source

Now that you know this is a thing, please stop sharing these memes. Poor Black people speaking candidly about various serious incidents isn’t a hilarious joke.

orbsteeb:

this sentence is like one of those face/vase illusions b/c every time i look at it i discern a new way to be offended

so fucking vile.

Walt Disney Company: Stop their application for the trademark of "Dia de los Muertos." »

dakotawhatever:

angryasiangirlsunited:

solaceames:

sulitati:

STOP DISNEY FROM TRADEMARKING DIA DE LOS MUERTOS! I am signing this petition to stop Walt Disney from appropriating and exploiting Mexican religion and culture.

Dia de los Muertos is a religious observance during which people, and particularly native peoples, in Mexico, the United States, and abroad, honor ancestors and loved ones who have died. This important religious, spiritual, and cultural observance pre-dates the invasion of Mexico by the Spanish. We celebrate and honor our deceased loved ones by making altars and placing offerings of food such as pan de muertos baked in shapes of skulls and figures, candles, incense, yellow marigolds known as cempaxochitl, and offering prayers and the smoke of copal.

I initially couldn’t believe this, so I verified it from another source. Ugh, I fucking hate Disney.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION!

guys this is really important

cuttlefishculler:

wanna know why nobody’s acknowledged that it’s asian/pacific islander american month?

because people want to keep it as low as possible. how can we keep all
of these people quiet about what we did, while reaping the benefits of how beautiful their culture is? simple: we pretend they aren’t living, walking people. we pretend there are three left on the planet. we pretend their needs are not needed.

we make them fictional characters. we make them spiritual (but in a silly way, in a way where their religon is just suspension of disbelief like greek myth, they are equal to a white religon but only one that is dubbed extinct) and lofty, we make them an impossibly carefree people, they are as waves in the ocean because they are of the ocean because they—fuck that shit

but we are people. we have a month to celebrate our culture and nobody talks about it because it’s dangerous—if we start talking about it, you don’t have any way to hide what you did. it was too recent with too much outcry and communication, there’s no way to bury what you did, what you do, what the imperial U.S. has always done.

i am Hawaiian and i hate what you did. you pointed weapons at our Queen Liliuokalani and announced that the land that was ours was now yours. you placed our ruler under house arrest. i hate you and i will never forgive you.

fivelettered:

angrybrownbaby:

I am sick of anthropologists trying to pry into our lives and archaeologists prying into our dead. LEAVE OUR DEAD ALONE. I don’t want my ancestors to end up in your white people museum so later on we could be auctioned off to some asshole that’s going to put us on their mantle.

Fuck off. All your shit’s stolen and y’all don’t feel bad because you have no conscience.

reasons museums are semi-triggering to me. i just think “who’s great-grandpa’s regalia am i looking at here?” “who’s grave was disturbed to get all these artifacts?” and seeing them on loan by Whitey McWhiterson’s foundation or “personal collection” is bullshit.

not to mention the violent otherization of Native and African peoples, and the overusage of the word “delicate” in regard to East Asian antiquities.

Searching for Knowledge: so-treu: and another thing about that Asian fraternity using blackface... »

so-treu:

and another thing about that Asian fraternity using blackface at UCI………

one day we’re going to have a conversation about how non-Black greek organizations ACROSS THE BOARD straight up pilfer and steal shit from Black greek culture, specifically from the “Divine 9.” (because there are Black greek orgs outside of the Divine 9, but they’re smaller/usually regionally based)

because stepping? that was us. stepping/dance competitions and yard shows? that was us. hand signs and calls? that was us. strolling? us. crossing jackets? us. pledges locked up and gritting? us. any type of public performance (i mean generally speaking ANY) put on by pledges (which are now outlawed but were a big deal at one time) or new members? us.

now, i don’t know much about the Asian frat at UCI, Lambda Theta Delta. but a quick trip to their FB page shows pics of the throwing up some kind of fraternity hand sign. and apparently one of their biggest events is a hip hop dance competition. and they were founded 27 years ago.

and that last sentence is my real point. 27 years ago. the youngest of the Divine 9/D9 orgs will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and 5 of the 9 were founded 100+ years ago (my sorority is currently celebrating it’s centennial year). so you have all these POC orgs - i.e. Latin@, Asian, “multicultural,” etc. - who are young by greek standards and thusly could start any type of tradition they want, but instead of creating their own, they simply mimic Black greek culture. like why do you HAVE to have a hand sign? why do you HAVE to lock up? why do you HAVE to step? how much of those decisions are based on wanting to garner attention and look cool on the yard versus ANY kind of indigenous performance tradition? versus what you’ve seen Black people do? why do Black bodies and Black culture have to be means through which non-black/”multicultural” orgs articulate their collective identity?

and then there’s the other end where you have predominately white orgs that in some cases are a couple of centuries old who also like to leech off Black greek life.

so i mean, all of this is another case not of cultural misappropriation but of the politics of obliteration. like it wasn’t enough to have the hip hop dance competition, or the hand signs, it had to be the blackface too. it’s not just “let’s do this black thing b/c it makes us cool,” it’s that the violation and obliteration of blackness is what gives non-Black subjectivities their very cohesion.