Sweetness

My Arms are “Too Short” to Box with the Devil

My Arms are “Too Short” to Box with the Devil

Young man—
Young man—
Your arm’s too short to box with God.

Young man—
Young man—
Smooth and easy is the road
That leads to hell and destruction.
Down grade all the way,
The further you travel, the faster you go.
No need to trudge and sweat and toil,
Just slip and slide and slip and slide
Till you bang up against hell’s iron gate.

From James Weldon Johnson’s poem The Prodigal Son

Everyone has been talking about the rapper Too Short in the past few days.  It seems the genius creative minds at XXL magazine decided that he should be featured in a series of videos talking to young boys, giving advice I guess as to how to “keep it real” or whatever the popular saying of the day is.  Well, keep it real he did and Mr. Short prepared and presented a step by step guide to adolescent and pre-pubescent young Black boys on how to “go for the hole.”  He laid out archaic and violent instructions on how to seemingly find her clitoris and make her orgasm although he wasn’t clinical in any way.  Rather, he simply suggested that these young boys molest young girls, ramming their hands between their legs in search of some mythical “spot” that will be the prize.  The response to the video from Black women has been tempered but disturbed.  The overwhelming response from Black men has been, “Hey, what do you expect from Too Short?” 

Here’s what I expect from Too Short.  An apology.  I expect him, or someone with a modicum of intelligence in his close proximity, to issue an apology that explains how he understands now that his words are going to put young girls at risk for being assaulted and how he never really understood until now that he had been socialized to see women as objects and not human beings.  I expect him to show he’s sorry by working diligently to alter his perceptions and grow and evolve as a man and to make sure NO girls are assaulted because of his misguided advice.   

Here’s what I expect from XXL Magazine:  The IMMEDIATE termination of Vanessa Satten, the white women who is the Editor-in-Chief at XXL who not only thought it was a good idea to have Too Short handing out fatherly advice to young Black boys but who authorized the publication of a video that taught them how to rape young girls.  I expect XXL to be held accountable by creating videos and articles that speak to the issues of violence against women and girls and to teach boys NOT to rape, molest, assault, or denigrate women solely as objects for their pleasure. 

Here’s what I expect from Black men.  I demand your outrage.  I demand that you not just dismiss this as “boys being boys” mentality and you speak up in horror and disgust that not only Too Short and XXL magazine but Black society as a whole has allowed women’s (and girls) bodies to be violated with no little or no repercussions.  I want you to empathize, to put yourself in the shoes of the young girl pushed against the wall with an aggressive and sexually immature stronger male pushing, prodding, and poking your private parts looking for “the spot”.  I want you to hurt for your daughters, sisters, nieces, and all young girls who have ever been subjected to such treatment. 

When I was in high school, I was SKINNY and unattractive and boys didn’t like me.  I craved attention from the opposite sex and one day after school when Greg Sheffield showed me attention, my heart sang.  I thought he wanted to be my boyfriend; I was that naïve.  He lured me to a laundry room in the apartments next to the school and within minutes, he was pushing me against the machines and pulling down my pants and ramming his fingers in me as hard as he could.  I ended up on the floor with him on top of me, hurting me, and wondering what I did to deserve this.  I don’t remember if I cried or yelled or asked him to stop.  Apparently, whatever I did, I didn’t respond the way he wanted me to and he got frustrated and called me names and left me there, lying on the floor, half-dressed, sore, and confused. 

I’m a woman.  In many ways, “I’m Every Woman,” as the recently departed Whitney Houston sang.  I’m a Black woman who loves Black men despite the fact that they might not love me the way they should at times.  I’m a woman who has been the victim of sexual violence and abuse; I’m a woman who wants to heal the rift that exists between the genders, and I’m a woman who is passionate about her struggle to address Black sexuality in a way that is healing, transformative, and enlightened.  I’m also a woman sickened by the patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny that persists in the Black community to the detriment of our beautiful, young Black girls and our Black boys.  Raising boys to be sexual perpetrators not only hurts the girls upon whom they inflict their violence and aggression, it stifles the boys and prevents them from ever fully becoming, whole, complete, fully integrated human beings capable of loving, sharing, and committing to a real relationship. 

The time to address the misogyny and sexism in hip-hop is about ten to twenty years too late.  Black men are so used to seeing women as things to acquire, not people with feelings that it doesn’t even bother them when things like this Too Short debacle occur.  They are accustomed to being socialized to think that their manhood is in their penis.  If we don’t take drastic measures to address this problem we are doomed as a subsection of society.  We cannot continue to have men believing that their manhood is measured in the number of women they bang and that women exist to satisfy their lusts.  I’m tired of fighting with Black men to show them that women ascribing to stereotypes of Black men being big-dicked sexual savages is not only detrimental to the women they violate, lie to, cheat on, and use, but to them and to our community as a whole.  It’s an exhausting fight to get men to see that they need to evolve past the notion that sex validates them.  I can’t fight anymore with men who don’t care that women are objectified and oppressed by a culture that doesn’t care if we are used up and spit out as long as they get a nut.  My arms are too short to box with the demon of sexism and misogyny that tells little boys that it’s okay to use little girls on laundry room floors and step over them like a piece of lint that can be swept away like insignificant trash. 

Copyright 2012 Scottie Lowe

Anal Erotica

Click HERE to listen

This track is only for true anal enthusiasts.  It's explicit, it's hardcore, it's extreme.  At almost 6 minutes long, it's the soundtrack that will accompany you right up to your moment of explosion.  Be forewarned that this is only for those individuals who think that backdoor sex should be natural, raw, and primal. 

Menage-afro-Trois

Black Gold

Esperanza Spalding - Black Gold (feat. Algebra Blessett) from Concrete Loop on Vimeo.

Nigga What?

We embrace calling ourselves niggers, like that’s empowering, when in actuality, it’s disrespectful to our ancestors and just plain ignorant.  To believe yourself to be a nigger, to behave like you are an ignorant sub human (the true implied meaning of the word) has no benefit or value.  Defending the use of the word, trying to rationalize that it has been changed into something positive is insanity.  Nine times out of ten, the usage of the word is meant to be disparaging and degrading, EXACTLY the way white people intended it to be used, and on the tenth time, it’s an empty a sign of self-hatred masquerading itself as a term of endearment. 

White people expect us to behave like niggers, so calling ourselves that, ESPECIALLY in front of them, does nothing but reinforce to them that we are inferior.  To carry yourself like royalty, to walk with dignity, to boldly declare that you are not only equal to but better than white people with your speech, your actions, and your intellect is FAR more threatening to white people than calling yourself a nigga.  Want proof?  Write a blog calling yourself a nigga and talking about cars, drugs, guns, rap, sex, sports, and how much you love living in the ghetto.  You won’t get a private response or two from white people.  Well that’s not entirely true.  You might get a response or two asking you to fulfill their sexual fantasies.  Then, write a blog, grammatically correct and spell checked, that talks about the greatness of black people, our strength, and our ability to excel despite racism, oppression, and bigotry.  Write about how our true history of greatness has been distorted with white lies and deception.  Discuss academically articulated with footnoted and documented proof, advanced African civilizations and how white people re-wrote history to make themselves appear superior.  White people will crawl out of the woodworks to tell you that Black people are ignorant and that you are nothing but a nigger. 

You have to ask yourself, what would you rather be called, what benefit do you get from calling yourself a nigga?  If calling yourself that makes you feel connected to other black people, consider yourself a slave on the plantation.  If you do nothing else this year, decide to stop using the N word to describe yourself, to describe other black people you want to look down on, or as some sort of synonym supposedly meaning Black person.  It’s negative, unenlightened, and stupid. 

Copyright 2009 AfroerotiK All Rights Reserved

Sweet Spot

Now THIS is Afro-erotic

Not my image but she is working that fro. 

I Love

I have an unnatural addiction to all things vanilla. That’s not a metaphor for white men, I just love the flavoring.  I love vanilla scented candles, Good Hope Vanilla Tea, smelling vanilla extract straight from the bottle, I love vanilla. I love to juice mangoes and pineapple in the summer and drink it for breakfast it on my balcony. I love salads with avocado and black olives and home grown, organic tomatoes. I love salsa music with a passion and a dance partner who is taller than me when I’m in heels.  I love going to a jazz club and sitting so close to the bass that I can feel the vibrations in my chest. I love cuddling on the sofa, spooning in bed, finding that perfect place on my lover's chest where I just fit, and waking up with him aroused and rubbing on my butt.  I love listening to the piano being played solo, the first day of spring when I can wear sandals outside, the look of my feet in high heels with clear polish on my toes, taking a hot bath and feeling my body temperature rise, rubbing my head after I just got my hair cut, sucking on a newborn baby’s perfect little toes, herbal tea with honey, pumpkin seed chili, and pear cobbler from Lush Life Café. I love when I sweat and it's that slippery kind of sweat.  I love my grandfather.  I love that he was a civil rights leader and taught me the importance of having integrity. I love that my grandmother gave me the love my mother never could.  I love that I have had the opportunity to help two wonderful loved ones transition peacefully.  I love raspberries, blueberries, cherries, and really juicy peaches and plums. I love the fact that I'm not average. I love organic gardening and making fresh pesto sauce from basil I grew on my porch. I love blasting Lewis Taylor in the car over and over again and singing it at the top of my lungs.  I love being in love and spoiling my partner and knowing that he appreciates it.  I love Cafe 290 on Sunday nights and a decadent picnic basket with gourmet foods. I love throwing dinner parties for friends and using my cloth napkins. I love all my ex's for teaching me how to love and making me a better woman.   I love Law & Order marathons when every episode has Jesse L. Martin, HGTV, documentaries about Black history, and Alvin Aliey’s Revelations make me cry every time I see it.  I adore making love to men with the same skin color as me, when I don’t know where he begins and I end.  I love writing a story and seeing the words come alive on the paper and realizing that I gave birth to transformative words.  I love playing games online that stimulate my brain and learning the words to amazing songs in different languages I don’t speak.  I love having my nipples sucked softly like a baby and the art of Woodrow Nash.  I love drinking coffee with amaretto creamer at night before I go to bed.  I love egg custard snow cones, unagi, learning things most people don’t know, women with thick, wooly, nappy afros and smooth dark skin.  I love late night phone sex with men with poetic hearts and radical minds.  I love the feeling of finishing a creative project, writing in my journal, chilled white wine, bone china, crisp, freshly laundered sheets, smoked salmon, making love in the candlelight, talking dirty during sex, white chocolate, dark chocolate, Stevie Wonder, I love telling people that Earth, Wing & Fire's September was written just for me because my birthday is the 21st night of September.  I love Ledisi's Feeling Orange CD even though it costs an arm and a leg and is more rare than a split atom, musicals from the 60s and 70s, and meditation.  I love conversation with deeply cerebral individuals who appreciate me for me and not my aesthetics and who don't judge me for my politics.  I love when people tell me that something that I've written has helped them, healed them, moved them, aroused them, or given them a new way to think about things.  I love wearing dresses and going out to dinner and knowing that I'm going to go home and make incredible, passionate, sensual, AfroerotiK love.

Where the Kisses are Hers, and Hers, and His

Blue Black

On the Tip of My Tongue

You Said a Mouthful

Ebony Janet Jacme Sucks Big Dick

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was the WORST in Human History

In the history of human beings on the planet, there has never been such an atrocity as that of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In sheer numbers alone, it decimated the continent of Africa of its strong, child-bearing, healthy citizens. Think about the impact that had on the people left. SIXTY million Africans were stolen, not six million, not sixteen million, but SIXTY million Africans were kidnapped, slaughtered, left to die, murdered, and enslaved. There has been no other example of slavery BASED ON RACE that has destroyed a people's history, culture, identity, and religion. Slavery, based on race, does not have the same detrimental effects as slavery based on class.

You CAN NOT objectify someone for their hair texture, facial features, skin color, or other inherent differences if they are the same race as the enslaver. You can't inflict psychological damage on someone because you tell them how inferior they are to you because of their skin color, eye color, or hair texture, if they look exactly like you. Additionally generational enslavement of Africans erased our history of self. No other enslaved people have had their history annihilated by enslavement, certainly not to the extent of Africans who were enslaved and their descendents. Every other enslaved people have been able to keep their names, their religion, their sense of who they are, they've been able to pass on stories that belong to them and them alone about their history prior to enslavement.

So with all that being said, there is no other example of enslavement that exists in Earth's history that even comes close to the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Sure, there have been horrific examples of human atrocities against one another, but none share the collective of circumstances that make up the horrors of Africans who were enslaved. What the Natives endured as the hands of heinous white people is unspeakable and horrific, but they were not transported 1000s of miles from their homeland, they were not forced to assume different identities and relinquish the stories of their past. They still have the traditions and rites of passage that existed long before hateful white men every landed on these shores. Sure, a lot were lost, and it's tragic to be sure but it's not the same cultural annihilation as Africans who were enslaved.

Jews were enslaved for seven years. Their Holocaust was horrible but it was not generational. Jews were not born in concentration camps, never to have known freedom a day in their lives, they were not socialized from birth to believe themselves inferior. After their ordeal, they retained their names, their sense of belonging in the world, their God, their art, their songs, their traditions. Jews have an identity that belongs to them from the beginning of time (or so they rather arrogantly claim) but slaves born in this country have NO such history to hold on to.

If you steal a person's identity, their sense of belonging in the universe, if you take their traditions and practices and force yours upon them, you have destroyed the very thing that makes human beings have an identity. I REPEAT, NO OTHER FORM OF SLAVERY HAS DONE THAT TO ANY OTHER PEOPLE. We do not have a language we can speak, we were forced to adopt a God who did not look like us, who we had no relationship to other than that which the slave master gave us. The long term effects of that make the Trans-Atlantic slave trade exponentially worse than any other example of slavery in the history of the world.

So, all you people who say that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was not the worse in history, ask yourself these questions: Were the people kidnapped and transported to another country where they did not speak the language, where they did not share the same history or culture, where they could be readily identified by their physical characteristics? Were they able to secretly practice their religion, recite tales of their history to their children? Were they forced to take on different names, worship a different God, to the point that the have NO clue what religion or history they possessed prior to enslavement. Was their enslavement generational, meaning were they born into a system of slavery that was dehumanizing and race based that taught their children, infants, babies, and toddlers from birth to death, that they were inferior simply because of their color. If a person were to escape in another form of slavery, would they be able to integrate into society seamlessly, create a new identity and fit in without being recognized? Ask yourself if ALL of those conditions exist in any other form of slavery. Ask yourself about the sheer numbers. Ask if the numbers of people kidnapped and enslaved would leave nothing but the sick and the elderly and the very small children in villages to survive, what impact that had on them.

So in closing, I'll state again, that no matter how hard arrogant white men want to insist that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was not the worst example of slavery in history, they are WRONG. It is their need to deny the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that is racist and ignorant. IF the slave trade wasn't in fact as horrible as I claim, descendents of slaves wouldn't be at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, we wouldn't be incarcerated in outrageous percentages, we wouldn't be as psychologically damaged as we are. Those who want to claim that the Irish had it just as bad simply can't because the evidence is not there to substantiate it. If their treatment had been as bad, they would be suffering in the same ways that African Americans now suffer. They are not a better people, able to endure more hardships, they are not more resilient or inherently superior to African Americans and able to rebound and excel because they are smarter, have more integrity, etc.  It’s because they are white and they can fit in without being denigrated for their hair and skin.  Their treatment wasn't as bad thus their ability to rebound is much easier. They were not denigrated for their stringy hair and pale, pink skin, flat butts, and little dicks that looked exactly like that of their enslavers; they were not singled out because they worshiped a God their captors didn't understand.

Africans who were enslaved were not truly inferior, as racist white men would have you believe. We are not inherently criminal, we are not genetically predetermined to be lazy or stupid. Those are all things that were the cumulative effects of our enslavement. We were socialized to believe ourselves to be inferior and yet we still excel despite being subjected to the worst example of slavery in the history of the planet.

Scottie Lowe 2012