I "Be Like" Confused

I feel stupid asking these sorts of questions constantly but I really need someone to explain to me the objection Black people have to using correct grammar.  Is it because it's too many words to use and they feel that they can communicate more effectively by completely eliminating parts of speech so as to be more concise?  Is it because speaking correct English conforms to a European standard and to be "really" Black is to rebel against the slave master's language by butchering his language?  Black people embrace every other thing the slave master beat into us: his religion, his standards of beauty, his social mores, but I’m supposed to believe that we are rallying against prepositions and dangling particles because the white man gave it to us?   

I've heard the argument that Black people are simply replicating the patterns of speech from West Africa and even ancient KMT but that's absurd.  We don't replicate anything else from Africa, why only speech patterns.  And maybe I’m the only one who can see the obvious but it seems clear to me and anyone with half a brain that Black peopel are clearly replicating the speech patterns of the slave, not the West African.  Is there some moral objection to speaking correctly I'm unaware of?  I'm really confused why conjugating verbs seems to be so offensive for Black people.  I don't want to assume it's only because the educational system has handicapped us to be inarticulate.   I know that schools in Black neighborhoods aren’t held to the same standards as those in rich, white neighborhoods but it CAN'T be because we don't know that they are speaking incorrectly because everyone has a television and access to  . . . . Oh wait . . . I think I just partially answered my own question.  Almost every Black TV show, movie, and certainly every Black song on the radio butchers the English language beyond recognition to some sort of ghetto code so it's very likely that people just don't comprehend that they are not speaking correctly; they believe that they are using the English language in its correct usage. 

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm super Black.  I'm Blackety, Black, Black, Power-to-the-People, Raise-Your-Fist-in-Defiance, Red, Black, and Green, Black.  Not once have I ever considered my correct usage of the English language anything other than an effective tool for communication. I don't think, and maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't make sense to me, that using multi-syllabic vocabulary words makes me a sellout.  I use the correct tools when I garden.  I use the correct tools when I sew. I don't think that using a Frisbee and a can of sterno will enable to make a gourmet meal because those aren't the proper utensils. I use the correct tools when I speak and when I write so that I might be able to effectively communicate my thoughts and feelings to others.  It seems to me that the Black community is wallowing in butchering the English language and proud to do so because they . . . I'm not sure why they are so intent on slaughtering the English language, thus the formulation of my question.  Communication is the foundation for the way we interact with people and it appears to me that Black folk are content with third grade linguistics and not much more. 

Dear Mr. White Police Officer,

I’m really going to need you to stop murdering unarmed Black men in the streets.  Come on, let’s be honest with each other, between you and I, you know this is getting out of control, right?  I get it, I really do.  You don’t see Black people as humans.  You hate us for our music, our slang, and the way we wear our clothes.  I understand, I really do.  You think we are inherently criminal, loud, lazy and that we are the reason that everything is wrong with this country of yours.  I would say country of ours, both yours and mine considering I was born here, my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and my great-great grandparents were born here as well.   They were slaves but technically that made them citizens, or 3/5ths of one at least.   My lineage in this country is long and I have just as much right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as you do.  But, let’s be honest it’s not my country at all.  It’s your world, you run it, and you have decided that people who look like me are underserving of sharing the air that you breathe. 

You might not think so but I understand you very well.  You watch Fox News every night, you obsess over hating Obama, you hate Mexicans for taking American jobs and speaking that damn Spic language, you hate Muslims because they are all terrorist towel heads, you dislike Asians, well, just because they are aren’t white.  But it’s those niggers you hate the most, isn’t it?  You hate us because you believe we are inherently criminal, inherently stupid, inherently deserving of being slaughtered like pigs, don’t you?  You despise us because our hair is wooly and disgusting to you.  Our lips and noses are repulsive to you, hideous.  And if we’re being honest with each other, and we can be, you hate Black men for having bigger dicks because it’s not fair that your little penis is so small but you know in your heart that you are supposed to be superior.  In all fairness, we can’t do anything about the proportions of our features, we are not responsible for that, we have no control over our genetics.  Even though so many of us covet your stringy, limp hair, your thin lips, and your pale, pasty skin, altering our aesthetics to conform to your narrow standards of beauty, you don’t really hate EVERYTHING about Black people, do you?  Shhhhh, I know your secret.  I know that at home, in private, you secretly lust after that big, hard, strong, thick, BLACK cock.  You want your wife to be fucked by it, you want to sexually submissive to it.  You want to worship it like it’s your God and you lust after it to the point of obsession.  When you put on that uniform, however, when you put on that badge and that gun and you’re around your good ole boys, you can’t let anyone know your secrets so you tell those nigger jokes, you tase us for not wearing a seat belt or waiting for our children, you use illegal choke holds to restrain us , choking the life out of us, and you shoot us over and over and over again to prove to yourself and the world that you really are superior, that we are nothing more than scum that needs to be disposed of like trash. 

But, if we are being completely fair, just between you and I, it’s really your fault that Blacks are in the socio-economic position we are in and the criminal behaviors that result from being denied equality for so long.  Well, maybe not you personally but white people as a whole.  It was the overwhelming and offensively arrogant ego of white people who decided that strong, beautiful, resilient bodies of Africans were unworthy of freedom; it was whites who decided that people of African descent had to labor like beasts, with no education, no income, no right to their heritage, culture, or history, to build a country for which they got no credit.   You know that you and your friends do more drugs and alcohol than Black people could ever dream of doing.  You know that you are more sexually deviant than Black people ever could hope to be.  Deep down inside you know that it’s not Blacks who are inherently inferior at all, don’t you?  Black people aren’t inherently criminal or lazy or stupid.  We really aren’t.  If we are less advantaged than whites, it’s because you wanted us to be.  You stop us from getting jobs that could provide for our families, you don’t want us to be educated so that we could be equal to you, you put us in prison for things you turn a blind eye to when your neighbor does it.  You want us to be relegated to a life of despair and poverty with no hope and now you are killing us because we are victims of a system that archetypal “you” put in place centuries ago.  As much as you don’t want to admit it, as much as you are in denial that there are long-term, tangible, and compound consequences to the legacy that is slavery, you are murdering us for something that is not of our own doing, not our fault at all.  That’s . . . not very fair. 

So, Mr. white police officer, I’m going to beg you to not massacre us like animals in the streets so you can hide your conflicted and tormented beliefs.  I’m going to beg you not to leave our bodies laying in the streets for hours.  I’m pleading with the part of you that is just and fair and right to not fill our beautiful brown bodies with lead so that you might not ever have to reconcile your very racist beliefs and your conflicted sexual desires.  We do not deserve to be murdered for circumstances that we did not create, for the inner demons you are unwilling to fight. 

Sincerely,

The mother of a movement to educate and enlighten,  Scottie Lowe. 

A Luta Continua

In my years of being AfroerotiK, I’ve had to contend quite a bit with those who say, “That’s porn. That’s inappropriate!  That’s dirty!”  Or, the ever-popular, “Well, that’s okay in private but I can’t put that on my Facebook (or any other public acknowledgement of their affinity for my work) because I don’t want people knowing I get down like that.”  It’s always from the repressed and pseudo-conservative middle class Black folk who want to insist that anything sexual is offensive and beneath them.  They are the people who are disconnected from their sexuality so much so that they do things behind closed doors that they condemn and denigrate people for in public.  They watch porn, they have unprotected sex, they engage in dysfunctional sexual and emotional relationships because they are so disconnected from any sense of healthy sexuality that they are in denial but they condemn, denigrate, and demean my work as offensive because they are desperate to hold on to this make-believe façade that they are asexual and sexually conservative. 

Then, there are the freaks.  They don’t want to hear anything about love or monogamy or intimacy or communication or emotional maturity.  Any time they see or hear the words dick, pussy, and fuck they proclaim how horny it has made them.  Any nude picture they see is porn, they have no discernment between porn and erotica, no standards, and they don’t care if an image is taken with a cell phone, out of focus, and only shows a close up shot of a woman’s cervix, they think it’s hot.  They don’t care about objectifying women, they don’t care about degrading women, they don’t care about anything as long as it’s sexual.  Nothing is offensive to them.  Their Facebook pages are filled with images that would get me banned if I had them posted, they belong to every sexual group there is, all with the same pictures of guys with pictures of their dicks next to remote controls and messages from women with their ass bent over saying, “How was your weekend?  Hit me up if you want some of this.”  The men have 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of pictures of women’s body parts on their computers and it doesn’t seem to get old or boring or tired.  The women all want endless compliments on pictures of their body parts, their feet, their asses, their lady bits.  They are really content to be sexually immature and anything other than heterosexual vanilla sex is  . . . ughhhh, God forbid . . . that’s nasty. 

And if that’s not enough, now there is this emerging faction that seems to stand in unyielding opposition to AfroerotiK, it seems to be growing quite large in fact, that consists of young, Black, “educated” (and I use the term quite loosely because the educational system has dangerously mis and undereducated our youth for several generations now) “feminists” (again, using the term loosely because feminism has come to mean displaying vulgar sexuality with impunity, not fighting for women’s rights and equality like it meant in the good old days) who feel that anything and everything that Black women do is okay.  Degrading yourself?  Yeah, that’s great!  Objectifying yourself?  Yup, that’s not just fine, it’s great.  Conforming to patriarchal, misogynist, sexist, oppressive standards of what is means to be a woman?  You bet’ not say anything bad about the women who do that because they are choosing their own degradation and that’s empowering.  Wallowing in unhealthy, dysfunctional behaviors that are self-sabotaging and unenlightened?  Yeah, that’s their rallying cry, that’s the foundation of their movement. 

I get where it comes from.  Their motivations are pure.  They are tired of men and society in general demeaning and denigrating the Black female form.  They are trying, however misguided they may be, to assert that they are sisters with all women, regardless of their socio-economic status and position in life and they are saying that in solidarity, they want to be seen as equals to men.  Unfortunately, the “men” (using that term in the most generous way possible because Black males have been socialized to be emotionally stunted somewhere around pre-teens for several generations now) that they are trying to be equal to are not the standard by which anything should be measured.  They are genuinely trying to strike out against the status quo that says that men can be vile and repugnant and get a pass while women have to be held to absurd standards of purity and chastity in order to be considered valuable. 

The problem is that they are fighting the wrong fight.  They should not be fighting for women to be able to be as vulgar and sexually indiscriminate as men without repercussions.  What they should be fighting for is a system where men are held accountable, where they evolve, mature and grow, where women are not relegated to positions of sex worker, stripper, and ghetto diva.  They find the concept of women carrying themselves with dignity offensive, they fight against it saying that it’s “respectability politics” or the policing of women’s bodies to keep them oppressed.  They have no concept that there is something in between the standards of Victorian clothing and saving yourself for marriage and only having sex on Friday nights and having men pay to degrade and use you.  They can’t even comprehend of anything in between where women carry themselves with respect and own their sexuality without shame.  They are unilaterally outraged by the concept of me saying that you can own your sexuality, not be in denial of it, but it’s not okay to display it for all the world to see either or that it’s unhealthy to spend hours of your time making your ass clap so you can show it off on Vine.   They hear any critique of women’s sexuality as, “You are saying that women are bad for being sexual.” 

I can’t tell you how many Black folk fall into one of these three categories?  I obviously can’t give you an exact percentage but it’s the vast and overwhelming majority.  The people in the, “That’s nasty,” category aren’t reading this because I’m too offensive for them to follow.  The people in the second category aren’t reading this because it has too many words and all they want to see is porn.  The people in the third category read it all the way up to the part where I identified them and are right now preparing their counter arguments about how I’m slut shaming and about how they can twerk, make a few bucks on the stripper pole, use men for money while wearing seven inch platform heels to be sexy, and study for their exams and there’s nothing wrong with that. 

Then, there are the few, the proud, the AfroerotiKs.  There aren’t many of us, but there are a few who Black folk who don’t want to be ashamed of our sexuality anymore, who understand that we are entitled to pleasure and it shouldn’t be something we have to hide and pretend we don’t like in order to feel superior to anyone else.  We aren’t aroused by the sexually immature who are addicted to vulgar porn and who have no standards for what they find arousing.  And there are a few, hopefully growing in number, who understand that a great deal of the sexuality displayed in our society by the oppressed is unhealthy and detrimental and that there is a happy medium between purity and denial and “It’s all good.” 

So, I will continue to make erotica that shows people of African descent in loving, holistic, erotic, sensual depictions. 

I will continue to create art that doesn’t dismiss unhealthy behaviors as benign. 

I will continue to fight for ALL people of African descent to see themselves as sensual and erotic. 

And I will strive to create a new paradigm where there is balance, symmetry, and equality.  I will fight against oppressive standards that tell Black women that they must be virgins or they are whores and the diseased mindsets it creates in the men and women who believe on some level that sex is bad and dirty.  I will fight against the adult industry that dehumanizes, degrades, and objectifies women for the amusement of misogynists for a profit.  And I will not take up arms against those who staunchly defend unhealthy behaviors because they have never been shown a model of what healthy sexuality could be and they know nothing else.