Siddity in the City

Could someone please tell me where this word came from and how it got to be so damned popular? I saw it for the first time about three days ago, and now it’s EVERYWHERE.

I’ve spent the afternoon cruising the feminist blogs.

This right here made me want to weep with anger. Like my earlier post on male-on-female violence, here’s a man invalidating women’s experiences because he hasn’t seen them with his own eyes or heard them with his own ears, and then arguing with them when they’ve had the grace and courage to relate their lived experience by implying it’s their own fault, because he must just know better people. (Warning: this is triggering like a muhfuggah. Over 600 comments of Trigger. And about a quarter of the way down the comments, you can find the response from the man who inspired this post, who had been blocked because of his earlier refusal to acknowledge women may actually have a point about all this, and who decided, even after reading hundreds of comments, he just had to email the bloggers to insult women further by blaming them for not having better friends, classmates, family, and encounters with strangers, apparently. Oh, and he has a daughter. Jesus. h/t Renee, who I now will read regularly, and who’s alerted me to Hoyden, which lead me to Shapely. Whew.

And then I went to Crunk + Disorderly for some comic relief and found this horrifying mess. I’m frightened. Why? I know almost everything there is posted for hahas, but why is this even remotely funny? And why has all the commentary turned to black men on the DL (which yeah, is a problem) instead of discussions of rape culture in prisons? Oh my sweet baby Christ.

I turn to the sweet, comforting arms of a glass of pinot noir and a movie.

Remember a while back when Barb Wawa was regularly losing her motherfucking MIND on air?

damali ayo has a little something that may have stopped that kind of foolishness cold.

I want. Hard. Immediately.

I found this shirt while cruising the comments section of this Feministe post (cross-posted at the authors own site) yesterday. Two things:

1. I wish that essay were mandatory reading for all non-black people. Actually, I think everyone could benefit from reading this one over. Renee points to our right to “bodily integrity,” and it’s a fair point that I wish were stressed more. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay for Vixen that addressed my complaints as an instructional negress, including the issue of whites assuming the right to touch or question my hair. What I couldn’t mention in that piece, because it was obviously off-topic, is that so many other black women feel they have the right to touch or question my hair–and then to question me when I assert my right to bodily integrity, demanding I tell them why I want them to stop sticking their fingers in my shit. I’d love to just, you know, not be anyone else’s tool for working out their hair issues.

2. I would love for more people to stop rushing to defend against criticism without ever really thinking about what’s being said. I’ve been called on my own privilege before, when I’ve caused offense without intent. It wasn’t comfortable. But I’d have been a damned (privileged) fool to brush the feelings of the offended aside without really examining what they were saying because, well hey, that isn’t what I meant, I didn’t realize the context, and I deserve to be comfortable at all times. Yet as I read through the comments on each version of that essay, I see numerous commentators insisting the writer give non-black people a pass because they’re curious and that’s natural, or because someone touched their hair once and they didn’t consider it racism, or hijacking the conversation by rolling it back into their own issues with their hair as white women.

Why is my aversion to being touched by a stranger or interrogated by my so-called peers so difficult to understand? If you have the barest hint of tact, you don’t call another human out on their hair color, or grab a breast, or tug at man’s suddenly thicker hair–unless you intende to other them, to humiliate, to put them on the defensive. And yet I am supposed to believe you’re doing it to me out of innocent curiosity? Fuck all the way off. Whether you realize it or not, for some reason you have just assumed that your right to satisfy your curiosity is greater than my right to my own person. Think about that for a second and then tell me again in seriousness that what you’ve just done isn’t privilege in action.

A lighter take.

And for the record, I still want to cold-cock Barbara Walters just thinking about her presumption.

I mean, I’ve had BFF and Mr. BFF in town (great times), and then a ladies’ weekend with Shaz and M, and I’ve seen K and ‘Chelle…and other than that, I chill with my cat.

No, really. He’s crazy entertaining!

I’d explain, but Mr. Safety already has, via his Youtube Mean Kitty vids. And he looks better doing it.

My cat? Just like Sparta. And I’m surprisingly glad there’s another cat out there as batshit as mine.

The video which begs the question, “How the fuck do we ‘posed to keep peace?”

Somebody failed T-Baby.

h/t Shaz!