What a Week

Being "Ghetto" is the worst thing that you can be, if you're a little black girl. While you don't understand everything, you do know that there's a thin line between expressing your emotions and being called a hoodrat so you don't roll your eyes, your neck or snap your fingers in a Z formation. But now as a Black woman, I can't log onto the internet without seeing white publications and tweeters adopting black slang or casually using gifs of black women doing thing that would have gotten me called "ghetto" 20 years ago.  I'm annoyed and Aneisha has to listen to me gripe about it. 

Can Black people dress up in Blackface? Is it worse if a light skinned Black person does it? Is it less offensive if it they're dark skinned?  Aneisha and I aren't sure. The one thing I know for sure, is that Aneisha wasn't prepared to learn that her fave Queen B has been accused of Black face. We also talked about the Queens of appropriating Black womanhood, aka none another than Ariana Grande (Grand-ee not Grand-Ay) and her ponytail and a family of women who shall not be named. 

It's Black History Month, and as it's been for much of the history of the United States, people have decided to take all of the nice things away from Black people. No one needs to put more RESPEK on the name of Black History Month more than the fashion industry. I sat down with my good friend Aneisha to talk about all of the Blackface gracing the runways in year of our lord 2019. 

Points of reference:

I sit down with my good friend Cass Alcide (@cassndra_ on Twitter) to talk about how exhausted the Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly made us. Everything about those six hours sucked the soul out my body: the lack of empathy from R. Kelly's apologist, the overt complicity from so many people and the complicated relationship that black women have being supportive and being supported was enough to make us want to rip our baby hairs out. I just needed to vent about what hurt me, what enraged me and what truly bewildered me. While we laughed through some of our pain, this conversation is really just us supporting each other as friends and more importantly, as black women. (I'm still working on finding a place with good acoustics, so I do apologize for the echoing.)

I worked in media as a writer and then suddenly, I didn't. Media companies everywhere have been downsizing their editorial departments as the entire industry has made a collective "pivot to video". This week, I talk to my friend Sankara (@s_sankara24), who works in the media department of a major media company, about what a pivot to video means and our projections of the future of digital media. *Spoiler Alert: The future looks incredibly messy*

In an attempt to rectify a massive child pornography problem, Tumblr announced its plan to remove any content containing nudity from its platform. A lot of people have long abandoned their tumblr accounts brushed past this new update because they felt that this was a news item that wasn't relevant to them. However, I'd like to argue that this change actually raised some major red flags in terms of what the future of the all social media platforms might look like.