Link A number of thought provoking studies on race and performance in American culture have demonstrated that class identities in America have been constructed through the symbolic use of African American bodies. The bulk of these studies have looked at minstrelsy in 19th century America. David Roediger (1991) has shown that minstrelsy, a popular form of Vaudeville-type entertainment wherein White performers (usually male) blackened their faces with burnt cork in order to impersonate African Americans, played a key role in White working class formation before the Civil War. Artisans, craft workers, and other members of the wage-earning urban masses projected their fears about the transition to capitalism and their longings to turn back the hands of time onto imaginary ‘Black' figures. Minstrelsy created a space for discussions about class tensions between Whites that might otherwise have remained submerged as racial disguise was used "not only to mask tensions between classes but also to mask tensions within the working class" (Roediger, 1991:116). Erik Lott has argued that minstrelsy played a central role in helping to maintain the fiction that laboring black male bodies did not play any role in reproducing capitalism. As he put it:
The body...becomes a central problem in justifying or legitimating a capitalist (or indeed a slave) economy. The rhetoric of capitalism must insist ... that capital has the magical power of multiplying itself. ...In reality, of course, it is human labor that must reproduce itself as well as create surplus value. In these societies the body is a potentially subversive site because to recognize it fully is to recognize the exploitative organization of labor that structures [the economy]. Cultural strategies must be devised to occlude such recognition (Lott, 1995:117).
While these studies are excellent, they have focused almost exclusively on men. They have not considered what function, if any, symbolic representations of Black female bodies might have played or may continue to play in mediating class and gender tensions. Nor do they consider how competing images of Black and White femininity are called into play when discoursing about class through a real or imagined Black female interlocutor. This paper aims to fill this gap. It argues that contemporary capitalist culture uses the bodies of African American women to communicate and reinforce ideologies about how to properly motivate and discipline the self in a capitalist society. Its guiding premise is that the self-help movement, in its varied forms, promotes the idea that human beings should function as their own Panopticons, continually policing themselves and subjecting themselves to ruthless self-surveillance (Bartky, 1990). The paper uses the reality television show, Starting Over, and the internet based message boards associated with it, to argue that the bodies of African-American women are being cast as the feminine voice and gaze of the Panopticon who alternately chastises and advises, criticizes and cajoles.
Panopticism is an idea that grew out of Jeremy Bentham's Panoopticon, an architectural plan for a prison, school, or asylum whereby the structure is built so that inmates can be put under constant surveillance. According to Foucault, self control originates with the Panoptic gaze. True self mastery comes when those who are subjected to the gaze learn to police themselves, even when the guard is no longer watching.
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (Foucault, 1995:203).
More and more venues in contemporary culture-talk shows, reality television shows, and self-help books-are casting African American women in the role of advisor and helpmate whose job is to remind White Americans how to police themselves. Starting Over is a typical example of this. Hosted by Iyanla Vanzant, an African American, the show is built around two core ideologies: Self Empowerment and Personal Responsibility. Indeed, the two ideas are frequently conflated. As Vanzant put it: "Personal responsibility is the greatest gift you can give yourself" (Lang, 2005:1). Unlike the imagined Black male bodies of the minstrel stage whose antics were used to deny the centrality of the body in capitalism, the real life bodies of African American women are used to reinforce the idea that the highest form of freedom is the freedom to sell ones own labor power and use the proceeds to fuel further consumption. Where previously the blacked up bodies of White men were used to evoke the specter of Blackness and in so doing chastise White workers who failed to properly internalize the rhythms of the capitalist work day now African American women are the figures who preach the gospel of self-discipline, self-improvement, and consumption as holding the keys to upward mobility and financial success. In both cases the Black body becomes a vehicle for denying the centrality of exploitation in capitalist social relationships while simultaneously acting as "feed and seed for the ideological body of the dominant society" (Stanley, 2007:47). Present day figures whom Patricia Hill Collins (2005) calls "modern mammies" evoke the traditionally female domains of spirituality and nurturing to manage and mediate class and gender tensions while encouraging women to consume their way to happiness and self-fulfillment.
However, just as the theater pit functioned as an interactive space wherein displaced artisans and newly urbanized workers spoke back to the characters on the minstrel stage, internet chat rooms enable viewers communicate with each other on message boards hosted by sites such as www.realitytvworld.com. Direct communication between former cast members and viewers via blogs on MySpace and Blogger.com also provide Starting Over fans with alternative ways of thinking about the show's core messages about class mobility, individual agency, and personal responsibility.
The basic premise of Starting Over is quite simple. Half a dozen women are selected to have their lives taped upon entering the "Starting Over house," where they will live for twenty weeks. The women in the Starting Over house are there to receive counseling not from trained psychologists, but rather from "life coaches" Iyanla Vanzant (who is African American) and Rhonda Britten (who is White). Upon entering the Starting Over house each woman shares her story and shows a series of pictures to provide a visual accompaniment to the narration of her life. The cast members' pasts inevitably involve overspending, overeating, and broken relationships. The goals they come into the Starting Over house to achieve inevitably revolve around losing weight, getting out of debt, healing a broken relationship, or enhancing self esteem. Thus, some of the goals from the show's 4 seasons include: Lose Weight and Gain a Sense of Self; Stop Running from Life; Eliminate Chaos; and Become a Woman of Honor. In order to achieve her goal, the cast member must complete a series of exercises designed to get her to change her thinking, face her fears, and recognize and discontinue negative patterns of behavior. Once a woman has achieved her goal she is rewarded with a makeover and a graduation ceremony. She also receives a "graduation gift" to help her start a new life. Graduation gifts have included small scholarships to pursue additional training, money to purchase a new wardrobe of work clothes, or a piece of equipment (camera, computer, etc.) to help launch a new career.
As is typical with reality television shows, the thousands of hours of tape were edited down and shaped to fit within 15 one hour episodes. The show's creators explained that their aim was to "fuse reality t.v with the daytime soap opera" (Rogers, 2003b). The show was given the moniker "soprah" by the press as it blended soap opera style stories with the type of self-help issues found on the Oprah Winfrey Show (Rogers, 2003b). The editing of the program was such that the flow of each day's activity was regularly punctuated by breaks wherein the women entered a "confessional" and gave their comments and opinions about various cast members and their conflicts. Unlike other reality television shows such as Survivor and The Apprentice the women were not competing for a cash prize. Rather, they were competing to "graduate" from the Starting Over house and into "real life". Every few episodes the women were given a grade by the life-coaches. Those receiving a B or above "passed" and were allowed to stay on the show. After one failing grade contestants were placed on "probation" by the life coaches. Two failing grades resulted in expulsion.
Self Help and the Panoptic Gaze
Writers as diverse as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W.E.B. DuBois, have written about the role that ideologies about the laboring self have played in the justification and maintenance of the capitalist system. Smith and Weber celebrated the ‘ethic' of capitalism that they believed was present in a select few and endowed them with the necessary personal attributes-chief among them self-discipline, acquisitiveness, and ambition-that enabled them to achieve prosperity. DuBois and Marx, however, were much more critical. Marx criticized the ideological maneuvers of the bourgeoisie which used ideas about individualism and the free market to obfuscate the exploitative social relationships that were cornerstone of capitalism. In Capital he analyzed how seemingly neutral ideas like freedom and equality derived their logic and meanings from the demands of the market, which he described as "the very Eden of the innate rights of man."
There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour power, are constrained only by their free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodieties, and they exchange equivalents. Property, because each disposes of what is his own. And Bentham because each looks only to himself (Marx [1867], 1967:176).
DuBois (1965:21) also railed against the ideologies disseminated by colonialists and captains of industry who justified the inequality produced by colonialism and slavery by insisting that "poverty was the result of sloth and crime; wealth was the reward of virtue and hard work."
During the 19th century when individuals were being separated from the land and turned into landless wage workers capitalist ideology centered on the notion that ‘freedom' was to be defined as the freedom to sell ones labor power. In our contemporary moment, although that particular strain of discourse remains central, another equally powerful ideological trend has emerged. Contemporary capitalism, Barlow (2003:8) explains, is marked by the degree to which globalization puts pressure on "political elites to reduce the scope of government regulation of business and entitlement programs for the middle class and the poor." The fact that the state has dramatically reduced its responsibility to its citizens by subjecting ever greater aspects of social life to the discipline of the market has had a profound impact on the discourses about self and society that have taken center stage. Contemporary capitalism is marked by the degree to which the welfare state model is being abandoned in favor of the "private investment state" wherein redistributive programs aimed at social welfare are replaced by "government support for personal capital investments, making each person responsible for his or her personal welfare" (Barlow, 2003:74). As a result, Americans are being ideologically primed to "expect little from the government other than continuing growth of the criminal justice system, as public education, public health, and other social benefits deteriorate" (Barlow, 2003:77).
The idea that the primary responsibility of the individual is to discipline and care for the self so that the state doesn't have to lies at the center of much of contemporary culture. Laurie Oulette (2004:232) uses the term "neoliberal technologies of everyday citizenship" to describe the thought processes and behavior patterns that are necessary to support this self-discipline. Self help books that encourage people to blame themselves rather than social structures for poverty and lack of opportunity and talk shows that make poor and working class people objects of ridicule and in so doing encourage the belief that poverty is a function of morals, rather than property relations, are two examples of these "neo-liberal technologies" which re-define a citizen as a person who can effectively "function without state assistance or supervision as a self-disciplining, self-sufficient, responsible, and risk-averting individual."
Talk shows, self-help books, and self-help reality t.v. shows have taken center stage in contemporary culture and they play a critical role in disseminating ideas about disciplining the self in capitalist society. Because these shows are targeted largely at women, they offer a narrative about self-help that is gendered in particular ways. While control over the body has always been a central tenet in capitalist ideology, the ways in which women are told to control and discipline the body center around the body as a consuming rather than laboring entity and encompass ideologies about the physical shape and size of that body. While White middle class male bodies are depicted in capitalist culture as perpetually active-investing, acquiring, saving, working-middle class White women are meant to be idle, unless they are engaged in the act of buying. As McClintock (1995:160) explains, it was during the Victorian era that "the idea of the idle woman was born." Thus, images of women's bodies are both classed and gendered in that the ‘fit' and ‘healthy' body is coded as both disciplined in terms of its class attitudes and behavior and as having appropriately shaped itself to conform to the desires and imperatives of the male gaze. As Urla and Swedlund (1995:298) explain, "hyper-thin bodies and hyper-consumption-are very much linked in advanced capitalist economies that depend on commodity excess. Regulating desire under such circumstances is a constant, ongoing problem that plays itself out on the body." Susan Bordo (1990:97) likewise makes the point that contemporary American society offers so many opportunities for consumption that human beings are "conditioned to lose control at the very sight of desirable products." As a result, "we can only master our desires through a rigid defense against them. The slender body codes the tantalizing ideal of a well managed self in which all is ‘in order' despite the contradictions of consumer culture."
Ideas about Whiteness are strongly connected to these images of self control. As Dyer (1997:23) explains, "it is not spirituality or soul that is held to distinguish whites, but what we might call ‘spirit': get up and go, aspiration, awareness. ...A hard, lean body, a dieted or trained one, an upright, shoulders back, unrelaxed posture, tight rather than loose movement, tidiness in domestic arrangements and eating manners...abstinence or at any rate planning in relation to appetites, all of these are the ways the white body and its handling display the fact of the spirit within." White women thus occupy a highly contradictory ideological space. The requirements of their race dictate that they become industrious, active and frugal. The requirements of their gender and class are that they appear idle, except when engaged in the act of consumption. Become too active and they risk a dangerous gender transgression. To consume too much and to work too little, however, is to risk a dangerous racial transgression. It was thus that McClintock (1995: 161) describes idleness as "less a regime of inertia imposed on wilting middle class wives and daughters than a laborious and time-consuming character role performed by women who wanted membership in the ‘respectable' class."
The Panoptic Body of the African American Woman
Talk shows have a dual function in capitalist consumer culture in that they simultaneously promote the ethics of endless uncontrolled consumption and rigid self discipline. Talk shows tend to alternate between showcasing individuals who are presumed to have achieved self mastery in American consumerist terms and turning individuals who have failed at the task of self discipline into spectacles. Thus, a typical talk show features movie stars, models, weight loss success stories, and the newly wealthy almost as frequently as it features stories about morbidly obese people (especially women), women whose houses have been overtaken by clutter, compulsive shoppers and gamblers, and substance abusers and sex addicts.
A number of reality shows that focus on self-improvement are hosted by African-American women whose bodies carry crosscutting, but nevertheless complementary, symbolic meanings. The Oprah Winfrey Show is, by far, the most popular. According to Haag (1993:112) "she is our mammy, our therapist, our cheerleader, our moral conscience, our role model, and our harshest critic when it is appropriate." In addition to Winfrey there are number of other lesser known, but nonetheless successful shows that also use African American female hosts. Clean House and Neat, two cable shows that showcase and help Americans whose houses have been overtaken by clutter are hosted by African American women. Judge Hatchett, also African American, is the host of a court-t.v. show who dispenses legal judgments and life-lessons in equal measure. Tyra Banks, the first Black model featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, is creator and host of America's Next Top Model, and advises aspirant models on the importance of not only the right look but the right attitude towards hard work and success. These are just a few of the many reality television shows that use African American women as spokespersons, thus demonstrating that ideologies about self-discipline and self-mastery are gendered as well as raced.
From slavery onwards, American culture has been premised on the idea that although there are opposite definitions of femininity for Black and White women, White femininity, like Whiteness itself, only gains its meaning through contrast with the dark ‘Other'. As Diane Roberts (1994:155) explains:
The body of the white woman, particularly the white lady, was held to be the farthest removed from sexuality, yet was also the most endangered by it, specifically black sexuality, at every level from the ‘low talk' of black servants to the physical threat of the ‘black beast rapist'. ...[I]n the postwar South, as in the slave South, upper-class white women were identified with civilization: black sexuality imperiled the very fabric of society itself.
This ideology of high/low and civilized/savage contained within it a curious contradiction. Even though Black female bodies were symbols of corporeal excess, savagery, laziness, and unbridled sexuality that were a danger to White women, Black women also occupied a central place in White domestic life as the nurturer of children, keeper of secrets, and the caretaker of hearth and home. According to Patricia Hill-Collins (2000:74) the mammy is a "surrogate mother in blackface" whose job was to articulate the values of the socially powerful about the proper class, gender, and racial order. As Manring (1998:39) so aptly put it: "the mammy understands the rules as they apply to all women."
It must also be remembered that the mammy existed not only to comfort, chastise, and cajole, but to create consumers. Aunt Jemima, America's most famous mammy, sold millions of boxes of pancakes. She also sold an ideology about work, leisure, and the body in capitalist society. Thus, it isn't surprising that Aunt Jemima "began as a white man, in drag, wearing blackface, singing on the minstrel stage" before she became a female face on a bag of pancake flour (Manring, 1998:1). The Aunt Jemima image figuratively disappeared the reality of labor for both Black and White women as she enabled food to be depicted "not as the result of labor but part of the joyful order of things" (Manring, 1998:138). Manring (1998:141) makes the important point that the disappearance of the Black body in the economy and increased patriarchal domination over White women in the home proceeded together.
The white leisure of Aunt Jemima ads is inextricably linked to the very real black labor of slaves-a clever pitch for a laborsaving device because it transferred the idea of doing any work to an imaginary person rather than the purchaser and ultimate user of the product. ...Aunt Jemima ads were an idea about the South designed to speak to white women as they increasingly became household laborers instead of managers of household laborers, a drearier life than that imagined in the tableaux presented by [advertisers].
The central and most enduring Black/White couplet in the Starting Over house is that of the two Life Coaches, Iyanla Vanzant and Rhonda Britten. Vanzant is an African-American woman who gave up her legal career to become a minister, studied as a Yoruba priestess, became a "spiritual counselor" and eventually founded the Inner Visions Spiritual Life Network. In books like Yesterday I Cried, The Value in the Valley, and In the Meantime she writes revealingly of her "checkered past," which included shoplifting, writing bad checks, bouts of homelessness, domestic violence, abandoning her children, and infidelity. Britten, Vanzant's White partner, has an equally tragic and extreme past. As a teenager, Britten witnessed her abusive father (who once tried to kill her) kill her mother and then turn the gun on himself. In her twenties she became an addict, attempted suicide three times, and became sexually promiscuous. Much like Vanzant, she drew on her own experiences as a way to provide tools for "fearless living." She went on to write a book of the same name and to found the Fearless Living Institute, which, like Vanzant's Inner Visions provides Life Coaching, corporate counseling, and motivational speakers.
Visually, the differences between Vanzant and Britten could not be more extreme. Vanzant is dark, heavyset, given to effusive gestures and demonstrations of physical affection, and favors caftans and other flowing "earth mother" garments. Britten is thin, blonde, and officious. She rarely demonstrates physical affection and is often shown with her arms and knees tightly drawn; glasses perched at the end of her nose. Based upon their visual images one expects that Vanzant would play the role of nurturing Mammy to Britten's hard-bitten careerist persona. Their official biographies, as posted on the Starting Over website, confirm this. Vanzant is described as having a "special breed of empathy" as well as being "down to earth" and "approachable." Britten, on the other hand, is described as "warm, humorous, yet firm." Viewers are thus encouraged to interpret Vanzant within the long-standing cultural conventions whereby African American women "simply and magically fulfill the White desire for parental comfort" (Colombe 2002:7).
At the same time Vanzant is the quintessential "noisy, bossy, fat, authoritative black woman who is going to make ladies out of white women" (Manring, 1998:38). Posts about Vanzant's physical body clearly show that some of the posters viewed Vanzant much the way 19th century mammies were viewed-as simultaneously nurturing and terrifying. The mammy is, after all, a large black body that carries with it a host of contradictory meanings. As Roberts (1994:2) explained, her "enormous bosom signifies her maternal feeding function: she is a nurturing body." At the same time, however, that body was excessive, engulfing, and dangerous. Thus, Lana42, for example, remarked that Vanzant's "nurturing Mother routine is to gain their [houseguests] trust and get them off their guard." BeeBe agreed: "Iyanla [Vanzant]is treating them [the houseguests] in a very motherly way, it seems. But then, they haven't put up much of a fight yet. If and when they do, watch out! I don't think Iyanla [Vanzant] will put up with that for long."
Just as the body of the mammy was read in contradictory ways in the 19th century, so too is Vanzant's body ‘read' by posters in contradictory ways. When Black female bodies are deployed in the role of personal Panopticons, their Blackness is simultaneously the source of their credibility and their lack thereof. Black women who adopt a critical stance toward the welfare state by advocating personal responsibility over government and corporate social responsibility have heightened credibility because Black female bodies are so closely associated with the welfare state's expansion. Images like the "Welfare Queen" have been deployed in such a way that "poor Black women simultaneously became symbols of what was deemed wrong with America and targets of social policies designed to shrink the government sector" (Hill-Collins, 2000:80). According to Wahneema Lubiano (1992:338) the Welfare Queen represented both a "moral aberration" and an "economic drain" whose problematic status became "all the more threatening once responsibility for the destruction of the American way of life [was] attributed to it." Vanzant, a self-described former "Welfare Queen" thus occupies the contradictory position of having her race and her past simultaneously legitimize and de-legitimize her. Vanzant is often given the responsibility for coaching clients whose lives have become unmanageable due to their out of control eating and spending. Viewer posts indicate that Starting Over posters are fairly evenly divided between those who see her "checkered past" as something that enhances her credibility and those who believe it detracts from it.
Vanzant, like Aunt Jemima before her, is a figure that clearly does not practice self-discipline, but nevertheless exists to promote it in White women by encouraging them to consume. Vanzant's body represents what Stallybrass and White (1986:9) call "the grotesque body" which is marked by its being "protuberant and incomplete...an image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, ‘spirit', reason)." However, it isn't her intelligence or self control, but rather the Black woman's perceived instinctual ability to "help Whites get in touch with their better selves" that fits her for this role (Hill-Collins, 2000:74).
Urla and Swedlund (1995:300) make the point that "it is women's bodies and desires in particular where structural contradictions-the simultaneous incitement to consume and social condemnation for overindulgence-appear to be most acutely manifested in bodily regimes of intense self-monitoring and discipline." True to form, Starting Over continually juxtaposes consumption against rigid self-control
The irony here lies in the fact that although many women come to the house to get help with managing excessive debt or to deal with houses and lives that have been destroyed by clutter, the cast members (and viewers) are repeatedly given the message that consuming more, rather than less, is the path to happiness. Even in the case of cast members who come to the house to lose weight, the path to fulfillment is presented as discipline of the self through more consumption-of diet books, diet foods, and health club memberships.
Because Vanzant is an ambiguous figure, whose background and image work to both enhance and detract from her credibility, it expands the space for resistant readings both of her and the ideologies about race, class, and gender that she espouses on the show. This type of critical reading happened several times during the course of the show's four seasons, most notably, however, in season 3 when Vanzant assumed the role of mammy cum personal Panopticon to Jill, a cast member who was morbidly obese, bankrupt, and thus couldn't afford to have a large tumor removed. 53% of posters who wrote on the issue were highly critical of Vanzant when she instructed Jill to examine the "disabling patterns of belief" that had caused her to physical and financial problems. The episode ended with Vanzant telling the Jill to look within, take personal responsibility, and finally to shout to the heavens that she "chose joy".
Starting Over aims to present its cast members as, quite literally, "people without history" insofar as that history includes structural determinants of success like race, class, and gender. Because the overriding purpose of the show is to reinforce the idea that an individual's thoughts and feelings are the primary determinants of their life circumstances, very little is presented about the class backgrounds of the cast members or their families. We are told next to nothing about the economic forces that have shaped these women's lives. However, viewers are given a tremendous amount of information about the women's "negative thought processes" and "disabling belief patterns." Some viewers, as evidenced by their internet posts, have been able to reject key aspects of the show's message that individuals need only change their attitudes if they want to change their lives. Some viewers have also been able to see through the show's overriding message is that race and class have far less impact on the trajectory of a woman's life than her subconscious beliefs, patterns of relating learned during childhood, and her level of willingness to, in the words of Life Coach Vanzant, "tell the truth about who she is."
Conclusion
In the contemporary moment, Americans are viewed less as citizens and more as consumers and who are expected to operate as their own personal Panopticons. Preaching the gospel of self-help, African American women have been made doyens of the talk-show world play a critical role in mediating class tensions in America. The juxtaposition of the mammy and the White woman, "symbolizes the oppositional difference of mind/body and culture/nature thought to distinguish black women from everyone else" (Hill-Collins, 2000:73). This long standing cultural convention about the oppositional difference of Blacks and Whites serves to suggest that, in some instances, the Black woman knows more about what it means to be a White woman than the White woman in question. It is thus that "controlling images of Black womanhood also function to mask social relations that affect all women" (Hill-Collins, 2000:73). The ongoing dialectic of consumption and control marks class and race differences in how and what women consume as well as their ability to discipline their own bodies and exercise self-control.
It may seem ironic, at first, that African Americans, who not only tend to have very little in the way of property, but were once property themselves have, since slavery, been put in the position of being capital's most avid spokespersons and defenders. It makes sense, however, when we consider that the role that African Americans were forced to play (especially women) was that of the nurturer-the beings that existed for others, rather than for themselves. "The traditional iconic mammy nurtured dominant society. She suckled children, gave sage advice, fixed wonderful meals, exhibited exceptional loyalty...all at the expense of her own needs of those of her family or community" (Stanley, 2007:45). When she was forced into the role of promoter and defender of the system that denied her humanity, it served a dual purpose. It provided support for the fiction that the exploited actually gained more from the unequal relationship than the exploiter-one of the central myths of capitalism. It provided ‘proof' that systems of domination served dominator and dominated equally. At the same time, the knowledge of the degraded status of the African American body stood as a specter and warning for those who would dare to flaunt societal conventions.
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In thought, I equate the Panopticon as the current Civilization. It is that panoptic, which we are living and taught to support through our labors and works.
Its history is the one that most of us are through personal efforts trying belatedly to correct or reject.
The world we live in is not the one that was supposed to have been.
It is the world as defined by the barbaric and cruel minority.
Thanks for the interesting link.
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This is a disgusting view on women in general Black and White. It makes it seem that White women have no clue who they are and can't be strong on there own. It makes Black women look like all they are good for is teaching White women how to be white. They use Black women as a buffer to protect there corrupt system. They Blame them for welfare and say get a job not understanding it ain't easy finding a Job.
It's shocking to me that the First Aunt Jemima was a Man. But it should not be surprising because society felt not only were Blacks not smart enough to do any thing of value, but that they could play a Black person better then the actual Black. They did the same thing with chinese people also.
White women need to realize that they don't need man to tell them who they are. They are wonderfully made. The stereotypes of White women being only good for is spending money and consuming things is idiotic. White women have as much strength in them as any other women. But they have the stereotype on T.V. that the white women is standoffish and Firm. They can't show a loving side.
Black women have always been strong minded and supporting of their children. A lot of that sadly has to do with raising children in a single parent household. They had to play both the role of Mother and Father. Black women have been trying to instill in their children pride in who they are in a society where they are hated and feared. This program starting over uses a black women in a way I don't like. First they have her on because she fits a certain stereotype that they are trying to return to from the 40's. Where all Black women were people who are Big and just happy to help the "master" out.
It's time we see on TV a program on Big women where the main premise is not on weight or diet. Big Women deserve just as much exposure and respect like the unrealistic women sterotypes we see on TV. There should be programs for women of all sizes because that is society we live in. Why should a big little girl feel she is not worth much because she does not fit the image they show on TV. Too much children are growing up with low selfesteem because of seeing all the pressure there is to fit a certain "Look". And when they don't fit this look the feel ugly and useless. It's time for women to realize that they are all beautiful in Gods eyes. Black women need to stop straighnting there hair to make it look like "White" hair. They should reailze that the hair they have is beautiful already. The curlyness of the hair is something to be proud of and not to be ashamed of. I speak about the Hair of Black Women because it is a big issue with Blacks in general. They call hair less curly as "good hair", this is sad because it tells the little black Girl that if she does not have this hair that she automatically has "bad Hair". This puts pressure on the girl to put chemicals in her hair that sometimes burns the scalp all just to fit into what society says is beautiful. Not realizing that the curly hair she has is already "Good Hair" and does not need improvements. The pressure on Black women to straighten ther hair is enormus. Even family members make fun of there daughters if she does not straighten her hair. Black women need to realize they are strong, beautiful, and don't need to conform to what society says is beautiful White women need to stop trying to make there body "perfect" there is no such thing as the perfect body. Be proud of who you are. White women need to stop having surgeries on every little socalled imperfection. White women need to be proud of who they are don't let whats on TV make you think that you have to look like that image. Take pride in all of you even the faults. White women live in society they are somehow supposed to aspire to be what society says is beautiful and be some mans Trophy to be paraded around and not use their brain to there full advantage. White women have there own issues with self hate with hair, where being Blond and blue eyed is a better look then any other, so a lot of white women bleach there hair and where contacts to fit what man says is the most beautiful. White women are pressured to be slim more so then any other women. Understand that I know that All women struggle with these diseases Anorexcia, Bulimia. It seems White women especially because the truth is we live in a white society where they are more pressured then any other women to be thin, They think they have to have plastic surgery and implants to look beautiful. Most of it has to do with the image portrayed on TV.
Black and White women and All Women in General must overcome there differences and come together. *ALL* women need to see that they are pressured by society to fit a false sence of Beauty that hurts women rather then helps them. *ALL* women are beautiful and don't need a man to tell them how good you look. When you look in that mirror All women should tell themselves that they are Beautiful regardless of size, women should not let man decide what a womens worth is, they should realize that there mind is equal to a mans. Use your brain because whatever a women puts her mind to she can do. God made Both Man and Women. Women are more important to the world because even though they can do any job a man can do they can do something men cannot, bring *LIFE* into the world. Women must realize just how much they are needed on earth and stop thinking about how to always please man. Society's image of women is a form of control over women so women are preoccuppied with reaching this standard instead of getting equal treatment and respect women deserve. Don't let societ dictate to you anything change society for the better.
Peace
Posts: 9651 | From: Reace and Love City. | Registered: Oct 2005
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