Sunday, August 02, 2009
What is the required spirit for these times?

When Sojourner Truth spoke about working the fields as hard as any man, about ploughing planting and gathering into barns, when you read about her showing her powerful muscles to her audience, you just know that strong (physically) black women had to be the rule not the exception in her days. There were no two ways about it, she was a creation and necessity of her times.
But are we still in the age of the strong black woman? Do people even realize that a different type is required for a different epoch?
These two questions above actually underscore what should be general understanding (an understanding that I dont sense many black folk have) that, you first of all observe that there has been an era change and then the tools, skills and attitudes, even approach needs to change to keep pace.
In bible times, blessings were reserved for those who had the ability to observe the changing times. We see repeated in the scriptures, the theme of seasons, times, watching, observing, etc with some of the most revered of society being the prophets and seers.
It was so important to keep in touch with the times and know what the season was in the broad sense of the word.
Yesterday was 'Emancipation Day' (celerated by certain countries of the world), and I went along to a 'black' function. I was struck by how stuck in a bygone era some factions of the black political movement are. A lot of the stuff being proposed bordered on irrelevant, things that were effective 50 years ago. A kind of turning totally inwards tends to produce this 'out of touch-ness' among many black folks.
Anyway, back to my point;
For those who have been attentive and can observe, we are in new times, times which require a new type of black woman with a new type of spirit girding her, enabling her to do what needs to be done in her situation.
I believe that the spirit required for black women now, is the spirit of courage.
Courage is required to admit hard things, heartbreaking things, things that quake the spirit and knock the knees. Courage to mourn and cry yet get on with the task at hand, the task of forging a new path and indeed starting over.
Yes there are things one would rather ignore or try to wish away, things you would prefer they be different than they are, and courage is required to realize that a reevaluation of principles, a change of plans and surrendering of closely held concepts and idea has to take place, in some cases, until you are 180 right around.
Courage is in its own way strength but it's essence is quite different from that underlying 'strong woman' which is about being able to take anything and put up with anything.
Black women need courage to admit they have been dupped and used by those they trusted and burnt bridges for, they need courage to admit that they can no longer remain in denial or keep pretending or keep holding out and hoping things will sort themselves out on their own, so they can continue along the path that was decided years ago. They need courage to admit that there has to be a change of framework, plans, actions, courage to relearn and retrain themselves in new ways of being and relating to the world, courage to forge new networks, family links and comfort zones. They need courage to take on the spirit of humilty required to re-establish contact with the rest of society and courage to get on with it now, and while they still can!
Get clued up about interracial dating, read the Interracial Dating E-Book
Send your questions to relationshipadvice@dateawhiteguybook.com (I will try my best to give a reply/answer)
Monday, July 27, 2009
Give it up or Embrace the fruits thereof...(updates in green!)

I'd sign up to be used and abused by black men If it will help them in their quest to rise above white men"
Do you know how farmers in indonesia catch monkeys ?
They build little wooden cages and put peanuts inside and set them down in the middle of the forest where monkeys are known to inhabit.
The farmers are so sure of the effectiveness of their plan, that they then return home for the night. Anyway, no sooner have they left the vicinity that monkeys descend from the trees where they have been hidding, to investigate the cages. They are chattering excitedly and when they see the peanuts, they are even more excited. Each monkey makes for the cages containing the peanut. The monkeys have to hold their hands up and straight (in the manner you would hold out your hand for a handshake) to fit into the cage spaces. They pick up the nuts easily enough but then comes the snag. They try to pull out their 'bunched round the peanut' hand and it is not happening. Their bunched fists are bigger than the cage spaces. They keep trying to force their hands back out but to no avail.
As soon as they flatten their fists and thus let go of the peanuts, they can extract their hands from the cage with ease. But they want the peanuts, they refuse to let go of it, so they keep trying to pull out the peanuts contained within the bunched fist.
So bent on having the peanuts are these monkeys, that the farmers still find them at the task of trying to get their bunched hands out of the cage the next day. They haul as many as they can off to sell or for captivity.

Attention: Attention: Young black woman? Looking to talk about empowernment? See
A few days ago I highlighted in a discussion that black women have a deep resentment towards white men, which they refuse to give up. A commentor also gave an example of an incident were a black woman threatened to 'cut up' a white man who brushed past her. That incident reminded me of a similar experince I had, when I got unto a bus to discover a black woman and white man having this most hate filled exchange. You could feel the deep well of hatred there, and that it wasnt just whatever had just transpired that was the issue here. I agree with Felicia and have indeed written in my book (see below) that black women blame white men for the failure of black men and the mess of the community and this is one of the key causes of this deep well of hatred and anger against white men. And it is so easy to trigger these feelings and get black women going in this hatred. I see black men press the button to charge up hate in black women so frequently. In fact yesterday I was at a meeting and a black man started going on about 'the man,' immediately black women in the audience started giving the 'amen', 'thats right,' and got all side tracked in their white folks blame session. The truth was that this man had been under pressure to account for something and he immediately wiggled out by redirecting the focus.
Black women will never win if people can wind up their emotions at will and when they can get them side tracked so easily. Folks understand black women's psychology well and it is all down to the fact that we have refused to be sensible and reasonable and to value comonsense and wisdom. That's it simply, we are so predictable in our hangup and hates. And even if white man do not know whats up, they still sense the deep resentment festering.
But not just that black women have a hatred of white men, they do not want this anger resolved. They are sworn to an eternal feud with white men. Even if this hatred is costing them greatly, they cling to it and wont give it up. In fact there is a part of their identity that is built on it and they believe that they would be lost without this 'centering' hatred of white men. Yep what is a black woman without this hate and anger at white men to ruminate on!
See everyone else have learnt or is learning to get along, even white men and black men. Visit London and you will see how many black men and white men go out to the pubs and are in deep freindships. Even criminal gangs are known to be integrated. I was shocked to open a paper one day with an article stating that gangs had learnt their way around the police by using their stereotypes against them ie white man in the getaway car etc.
So indeed while everyone has managed to or is making great strides in being sensible about others so they can get along and function effectively in a multicultural environment, black women have instead chained themselves to railings of their bitterness and anger particularly at white men.
Thats often why bw are going round and round in circles over their dating options. Sometime some of us think we are talking to black women who we can help, what we dont recognize is that it is this hate that is in the way of them being free to consider other men (yes other non-black men apart from white get entangled in this hate). Indeed and more importantly these women are struggling because the issue is about them giving up their dearly beloved need to retain this right to hate white men. Anyone with half a brain can see that interracial dating is the way out for loads of black women, so why is this option skirted and avoided or down played (indeed whole conferences are held where black women never even talk about this option staring them in the face). In truth it is the hatred of white men holding black women hostage. plain and simple!
And dont be fooled with the protestations of 'I just want to honor my race and I love my brothas etc', very few black women are motivated by just this sentiment. This overwhelming 'love' of all things black is twined up with bitterness and hatred for white males. No matter how they try to slice it, this is about black women saying, 'The White man has done black people wrong, he must remain my eternal foe.' 'I will never let go of my anger, I will stew in my bitterness and I will never do anything that could resolve it, and if it costs me my chance at happiness, companionship, children, so be it!'
continued....
After years of churning on these feelings, a black woman can become attached to it and fearful of loosing her hate because she believes that it undergirds her committment to her race. 'White male focussed hate', now stands on a sacred altar which can never be taken down, no matter how hard it makes life's journey.
My advice to black women is, 'LET IT GO'.
Pour away the hate!
You are not bound nor obliged to continue ancient feuds and to sacrifice your life for them. Give it up, it is not worth your limited and restricted life. You might think this, but no one requires you to hold the torch for the race in this way. I know some of you think, 'Some of us must keep alive this hate for white men, our race requires it'.
We have let our lives be poisoned and restricted unncessarily. Yes I am firmly convinced that black men dont even have as much hate and resentment towards white men as we do, which is probably not suprising given that black women always get to carry the heavier load and this case encouraged to continue to carry the most toxic load that will poison them and sabotage their lives!
If you must pray, fast or go for counselling or perform a 'pouring away' ritual, to let go of white male hate, then do so, so you can move forward with your life and stop being trapped in negative feelings.
Let it go.
But for others who do not feel they can let go of these feelings and that it is important to despise white men as a symbolic gesture for the race, then I want you to embrace it, feel comfortable with it and with the fruits it will yield. Stop running back and forth and being of double mind. Dont be all over the place, ie one day on IR blogs and then the other, at websites that encourage these hateful feelings. Be grounded and settled in your decision to continue in your negative perspective.
I am saying this because a number of you are vacillating; today one position, tomorrow another. Today 'maybe interracial dating', tomorrow, 'maybe not'. And you have yo yoed like this for years, its not just a thing of a few months. Come to the understanding that it is your need to hang on to your negative emotions against white men that is causing you to be unsettled, and then, just embrace your resentment of white men and be done with it.
Tell yourself 'I want to retain this anger, it is useful to me to have it and it is very essential for my world view'. Make peace with this position and commit to whatever it brings, it will be a much healthier approach than bouncing all over the place.
.....................................................................................

I just wanted to point out something that struck me recently folks.
Did you notice that when Michael Jackson wanted to beget offspring, in all the cases where this was highly possible, he choose to put himself in with white women (Lisa-Marie, Debbie Rowe and the other unknown woman who is more than likely to have been white).
But when MJ suddenly needs a Mammy, to do the hard bit of raising, the choice became all to clear. Indeed look at the first and second, in fact only choices he made on that matter.

Now some folks will be saying, 'Its just coincidence etc etc.' Sure it is.
Not once, twice but thrice did MJ choose a white women to bear his kids or potentially do so as in the case of Lisa-Marie but not once but twice did MJ nominate black women to be the carers (Katherine Jackson and Diana Ross) now that he has passed. If you have also kept an eye out for these things, you will notice that Michael Jackson consistently choose black nannies for his children (who were very aggressive in their roles of protecting them from outsiders).
Now Black women lend me your ears cause I wanna tell you something:
You need to be very careful of black men because many are assigning you your roles and status based on the 'Handbook of White Supremacy'.
Yes I can agree that it might not even be a conscious thought in their minds, but this makes it all the more dangerous; uncritical black men who mimic and model racist thinking and racist practices.
Do not even bother to try to open their eyes to the pattern of their unconscious thinking or 'educate' them, as I heard someone took it upon themselves to do with the man who put together the 'light skin only' party. Any black man who has to be told, informed or made aware of his own racist actions, is already lost.
Let the drift wood float away!
Get clued up about interracial dating, read the Interracial Dating E-Book
Send your questions to relationshipadvice@dateawhiteguybook.com (I will try my best to give a reply/answer)
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
When you are in your 20's...
...You can afford to play around and mess about with crucial and critical issues around the reality of black women and the condition of the so called 'Black Community.' Indeed in my last post, it was revealed that it was an 18 year old that decided to 'bless' us with her broad knowledge of the world and lecture us on how things should be, that is before scuttling back to, 'Y'all are grown ass women' when we decided to engage her on the points she raised.
I feel sorry for a host of black women who are taking notes from women under 25 on these critical issues as raised on these blogs. Now I have nothing against young black women giving advice, but a 24 year old black woman and a 34 year old black woman are in a different place, they are in different seasons requiring different priorities and with different opportuntities available to them. Do you know where you are on the time/priorities spectrum?
Yes I was doing my trawl round blogsphere and came across the comments of a black woman who said that now she was in her thirties, she could 'see' the sense in a lot of the stuff that Black women IR/Black women empowernment bloggers had been saying all along.
See it wasnt that we were not making sense, it was that we didnt need to make sense to her at a time before now. She could afford to dismiss the key issues we were raising, for a few more rounds on the merry go round before she realized that it was time to get off and face reality. But you can imagine all the women she must have given 'bad' advice to based on where she was (at a place of not needing to get real or take these issues seriously) in the past. Some of you are lapping up advice from women who are either so very ok with being self-sacrificing mules or who can afford a few more years of joking about with critical issues. Some of you are taking directions from such ones, looking at their content and happy faces on the merry-go-round and deciding, 'well if CC is unperturbed then maybe I shouldnt, there must be some hope.'
I am sorry but I cannot teach black women comonsense. I know that black women have had their comonsense and survival instincts screwed with, to make them better 'zombies' working for others, but black women have to find a way to come up with some kind of framework within which they can sort themselves out and stop being 'used' and conned by others so easily.
At anything from 18-30 black women can afford to 'blast' IR and Empowernment bloggers and the critical issues they are trying to get black women to confront. The problem comes when some of you who are at an age where these issues are critical, listen to such ones and base your decisions or put off your decisions because of what they are saying.
Deep down I think some of you do not want to survive and to achieve what you want from life, if you did, some of these things would need no spelling out. You would already know what kinds of actions and philosophies would get you where you want to be and not just that, you would have the courage to step out and do what is needed.
Maybe all this confusion and 'headlessness' is because black people in the West are no longer proverb-telling cultures. Jesus taught so much with proverbs and sayings, and I think these proverbs caused people to both think rather than operate on auto pilot, but it also had a way of by-passing human psychological guards and the rebellion against being told what to do.
There is a Nigerian proverb I learnt that says:
When the Lizard and the Mouse go out to play in the rain, the Lizard comes back and is dry in no time, while the Mouse is still wet and cold.
Now according to an aunt, this proverb is used to tell children and adults that they must be aware of their particular circumstances before they go along with everyone or anyone else because it might not turn out for them the way it will for others. In this case the Mouse did not take into consideration that it had a furry coat as opposed to the leather skin of the Lizard which lent itself to rapid drying.
Black women are a diverse group across age, beliefs in their worth and in what they think they are due and what treatment think they deserve. They generate ideas, view points and critiques based on these different positions, therefore it behoves you to determine where each black woman is across a range of key issues before you jump into their car and ride off with them.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
An update on a previous post...

When any black man will do!
Get clued up about interracial dating, read the Interracial Dating E-Book
Send your questions to relationshipadvice@dateawhiteguybook.com (I will try my best to give a reply/answer)
I feel sorry for a host of black women who are taking notes from women under 25 on these critical issues as raised on these blogs. Now I have nothing against young black women giving advice, but a 24 year old black woman and a 34 year old black woman are in a different place, they are in different seasons requiring different priorities and with different opportuntities available to them. Do you know where you are on the time/priorities spectrum?
Yes I was doing my trawl round blogsphere and came across the comments of a black woman who said that now she was in her thirties, she could 'see' the sense in a lot of the stuff that Black women IR/Black women empowernment bloggers had been saying all along.
See it wasnt that we were not making sense, it was that we didnt need to make sense to her at a time before now. She could afford to dismiss the key issues we were raising, for a few more rounds on the merry go round before she realized that it was time to get off and face reality. But you can imagine all the women she must have given 'bad' advice to based on where she was (at a place of not needing to get real or take these issues seriously) in the past. Some of you are lapping up advice from women who are either so very ok with being self-sacrificing mules or who can afford a few more years of joking about with critical issues. Some of you are taking directions from such ones, looking at their content and happy faces on the merry-go-round and deciding, 'well if CC is unperturbed then maybe I shouldnt, there must be some hope.'
I am sorry but I cannot teach black women comonsense. I know that black women have had their comonsense and survival instincts screwed with, to make them better 'zombies' working for others, but black women have to find a way to come up with some kind of framework within which they can sort themselves out and stop being 'used' and conned by others so easily.
At anything from 18-30 black women can afford to 'blast' IR and Empowernment bloggers and the critical issues they are trying to get black women to confront. The problem comes when some of you who are at an age where these issues are critical, listen to such ones and base your decisions or put off your decisions because of what they are saying.
Deep down I think some of you do not want to survive and to achieve what you want from life, if you did, some of these things would need no spelling out. You would already know what kinds of actions and philosophies would get you where you want to be and not just that, you would have the courage to step out and do what is needed.
Maybe all this confusion and 'headlessness' is because black people in the West are no longer proverb-telling cultures. Jesus taught so much with proverbs and sayings, and I think these proverbs caused people to both think rather than operate on auto pilot, but it also had a way of by-passing human psychological guards and the rebellion against being told what to do.
There is a Nigerian proverb I learnt that says:
When the Lizard and the Mouse go out to play in the rain, the Lizard comes back and is dry in no time, while the Mouse is still wet and cold.
Now according to an aunt, this proverb is used to tell children and adults that they must be aware of their particular circumstances before they go along with everyone or anyone else because it might not turn out for them the way it will for others. In this case the Mouse did not take into consideration that it had a furry coat as opposed to the leather skin of the Lizard which lent itself to rapid drying.
Black women are a diverse group across age, beliefs in their worth and in what they think they are due and what treatment think they deserve. They generate ideas, view points and critiques based on these different positions, therefore it behoves you to determine where each black woman is across a range of key issues before you jump into their car and ride off with them.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
An update on a previous post...

Get clued up about interracial dating, read the Interracial Dating E-Book
Send your questions to relationshipadvice@dateawhiteguybook.com (I will try my best to give a reply/answer)
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