Earlier this year, I wrote a plain and simple post about the plain and simple, authoritative nature of current GOP leadership desires. I was flagged by Medium and contacted via email. Being from Mississippi, I was immediately suspicious. After all, Mississippians aren’t supposed to have access to technology, according to popular culture, let alone know how to use it to critique our government and culture. However, I say this sadly, January 6, 2021 “proved” that everything I typed in that blog post was true.
Earlier this year, I posted about how Mississippians of color actually view the GOP. While it…
It is helpful to study other Black cultures in a comparative sense. No, I am not talking about learning a foreign language — as comparative studies are traditionally taught in the academy. I am talking about looking at the colonial situation throughout various points of the African Diaspora, and comparing those attempts to colonize gender divisions to African Americans.
One of the thorniest points in researching and presenting my book to potential publishers was how I classified African Americans. Let me just tell you, that my classification of African Americans alongside other, formerly-colonized Black populations garnered me raised eyebrows from…
While we hear political pundits talk about the mythical “angry white voter” or Trump supporter, we never hear about why these white folk are angry. What we are living through is a type of American language that does not line up with American history or its current present.
When I last posted, I talked about cookbooks and synonyms. As an English doc/professor/nerd, there are times when I am going to pay close attention to the language. As a reader of this blog, there are times when you have run across a number of my typos. I am accustomed to writing…
My mad obsession with old cookbooks taught me that Black people are not monolithic.
I have a confession: I LOVE COOKBOOKS! Whenever I can get my hands on an old cookbook, I simply cannot pass it up! For me, the older the better. Let me see an African American cookbook from the late 1800s and I get all giddy on the inside. I quickly grab it, flip through the pages, cruise all of the recipes, laugh at the little folk sayings, and find secret joy after secret joy. Words like “teacup full” or “whip batter 30 times” gives me a…
I do not own the copyright to the music below. I used it in my class this previous semester in lecture. The conventional criticism and writing about RAP are that it is nihilistic, misogynistic, and materialistic with no spiritual backbone. But RAP has always had a spiritual backbone and has always been globally influenced while being a global influencer. Like Blues, it was the music of po’ folk, so it has traditionally been marginalized popularly and academically and its spiritual contributions have been unacknowledged while its cultural contributions have been outright dismissed.
I have just wrapped up one of the…
In most cases, a certain segment of African Americans simply feel that Hip Hop artists have not “earned” the right to speak as African Americans for African Americans.
Each generation faces its challenges. Sometimes, natural disasters strike us with a ferocity that leaves us speechless in their wake. They come through without much warning, ripping and tearing with an almost personal touch. From hurricanes to tornados to wildfires, they break us down to that lowest common existential denominator of ourselves until we realize that those who play God were only playing — and we somehow always knew it. For that…
The current controversy with Ice Cube, the Clinton debacle with Sister Souljah 30 years earlier, and the dismissive tone that academia takes with Hip Hop scholarship are long acts of continual high-handed dismissal of socio-economic, political activism Hip Hop artists and those who actively participate in Hip Hop culture. Sadly, this is nothing new.
In 1992, during the height of the Los Angeles riots, RAP recording artist and activist Sister Souljah (Lisa Williamson) was giving an interview in which she was trying to explain the mindset of the average gang member. Lisa Williamson, who grew up in public housing on…
In an era when the nightly news brings yet another police murder of a Black man on television, it is more important than ever to listen to Black men speak about themselves. I feel so strongly about it, that I wrote a book that nobody cared about, that actually got me called “crazy” on more than one occasion, I almost self-published, and took 14 years to finish!
How do Black men speak about themselves? Do we know? Do we ask? When they do speak about themselves, do we listen? If we seriously listened to TuPac, would we get past the…
In the spirit of Zora Neale Hurston
One of the most enraging, hurtful things that I experience in my career is to watch my Black academic colleagues write about, give conference papers on, and build their entire careers around the critical analysis of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston while they do not even acknowledge that a person like myself sits in the room. Do not get me wrong here: I know who I am. I do not clamor for external validation. I am a large brown woman from the Pine Belt of Mississippi who grew up in a Black…
Before I begin, I do not own the rights to the music posted below and I do not post it as click bait. I have actually taught these videos in class (and risked being fired) as part of a demonstration on the limiting effects of the politics of respectability and how African American artists sometimes rebel against them.
Last week, I wrote that there is much more behind the controversy surrounding “WAP” and “Black Man Magic.” Part of the controversy are the politics of respectability that have constricted African American creative and spiritual expression since Reconstruction.
One of the funniest…
LaToya R Jefferson-James
LaToya Jefferson-James has a Ph.D. in literature. She specializes in literature of the African Diaspora and cultural criticism.
