Tag: black history

Women’s History Month: Behind Hollywood on the Set Scenes

FROM MY SPIRIT, Uncategorized, Woman Power Up

By Tokunbo Salako  with AP   •  Updated: 14/03/2023

Given the enormous success of Everything Everywhere All at Once at the Oscars, you could easily be forgiven for missing one of the night’s other significant and memorable moments for women. 

The ceremony also saw costume designer Ruth E. Carter become the first Black woman in history to win two Academy Awards. 

Four years after winning Best Costume Design for Marvel’s Black Panther, she took home her second honour in the category for its sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

As lead costume designer, Carter played a crucial role in making the film a cultural phenomenon with her garments helping to bring the fictional country of Wakanda to life.

Here is a partial article about the history of black women in costume design by Shelby Ivey Christie. Link at the bottom for complete article.

Until the late 1950s, black actors appeared on screen mostly as slaves or domestic workers, leaving little room for creative costuming. Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning role as Mammy in 1938’s Gone with the Wind is a prime example of this kind of caricature casting; her wardrobe was marked by a house dress, an apron, and a headscarf. Similarly, when James Baskett appeared as a plantation worker named Remus in 1946’s Song of the South—a role he won an honorary Academy Award for—he did so in the type of plain, tattered pieces synonymous with poor blacks at the time.

1957: Carmen Jones

“I’d have to say my favorite costume moment is Carmen Jones,” shares Stacey Beverly, a Hollywood costume designer who’s worked on Girlfriends, The Game, and Black-ish, among other projects. The 1957 classic stars Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen Jones, a factory worker who, outside of her blue-collar job, wears a now-famous look: a curve-hugging red pencil skirt and black off-the-shoulder top. This was significant—not only were audiences seeing a black woman portrayed outside of a domestic role, but that black woman was also the epitome of glamour, dressed in luxe fur coats, dresses cinched at the waist, and hoops (gold hoops, to be specific, which were not de rigueur in 1957). Dandridge made history as the first black woman nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award, and while she didn’t win, her portrayal of Jones did succeed in sending an empowering message to scores of black women.

1966–1968: Batman and Julia

In 1966 Eartha Kitt was cast as Catwoman in Batman—a role that saw her costumed in a tight leather catsuit and mask, bringing the sex appeal and allure of black women onto the small screen. Two years later, when Diahann Carroll became the first black woman to star in a TV series by landing the title role in Julia, the milestone was also a seminal moment for black costume design. A widowed single mother—which many black women could relate to, as the U.S. had entered the Vietnam War three years prior—Julia had an impeccable wardrobe reflective of the times. As the ’60s ushered in a fashion awakening that saw a departure from classic A-line silhouettes and an embrace of mod styles, Julia was costumed in swing dresses, paisley prints, and leisure suits; her hair was worn in the short, asymmetrical cut popularized by Vidal Sassoon, and she completed her looks with round-toe shoes and nude lipstick. Black women finally saw themselves as active participants in American pop culture and trends. They weren’t just the women who scrubbed the floors and burped the babies, they were now professionals, earning their own money and curating trendy wardrobes. Mattel partnered with Carroll to create a Julia Barbie, and in 1969 Carroll won a Golden Globe for the role.

https://coveteur.com/2019/02/22/history-black-costume-design-film-television/

~Nikki

I love fashion and I wanted to be a fashion designer growing up. It was the only dream I had had for a very long time. It still burns within me. I like anything that involves clothing. However, costume design in on another level of creativity and imagination to me.

The Love Experience: “Black Love” My Perspective

FROM MY SPIRIT, Uncategorized, Woman Power Up
Don’t panic super saved people. It’s just a sculpture of a giraffe in the background.

After reading the article (posted and broken into two parts) from my previous two blogs, the word resilient is what comes to mind. However, for others who are supposed to be geniuses, I can’t see how they don’t understand the need for Black people or any minority to CONFIRM and AFFIRM themselves after hundreds of years of degradation. It takes years, possibly hundreds more, to undo the damage and heal as a group of people while simultaneously fighting off more destructive behavior, prejudice, systematic injustices, violence in the community and violence from without. To say the least, it’s a lot.

If people were so intelligent and so superior, they would understand psychology or seek to understand the psychology of abuse, slavery, suppression, oppression and the effects it has on a group of people. Maybe, because they are so smart, they should know it. But they don’t. “Get over it” is one of the most unintelligent things uttered to people of color or minorities. The empathy and sympathy, the “never forget” for those with lighter pigmentation is overwhelmingly evident. So, if anyone is going to love themselves, if any race or culture or minority group, it has to come from within. It cannot be expected from without. It cannot even be expected from those that are of the same religion or denomination as you if they are of a different race. You can look at how many Christians excused and upheld the prejudices, racism, biases of a particular political leader. Some even stayed silent.

I don’t concern myself with other cultures or minority groups as they love on themselves and foster love in their communities. I only ask them to extend their love to all of humanity. That is the real challenge. If hearing other races or groups talk or shout about their love for each other makes you feel uncomfortable then the problem is not them, it’s you. For they are trying to undo the narrative by a surplus race that they are somehow unlovable and lack value as human beings. You don’t get to decide the course of healing African Americans take or any other minority group. You don’t get to control that. Imagine the abuser telling you when to heal and how to heal. I don’t think so. Yet, there is room for assistance. There is always room for forgiveness and collective healing.

~Nikki

The Love Experience: “Black Love” History Part 2

FROM MY SPIRIT, Uncategorized, Woman Power Up
Photo by Junior Karrick DJIKOUNOU on Pexels.com

Warning: This will be a tough read for some.

Continuing the article written by Koritha Mitchell, I suggest you read yesterday’s article as well. You know sometimes it’s good to just read and understand instead of telling an entire culture/people/race what to think, how to feel, and what they should do. I think this type of approach comes from a feeling of authority and slave master mentality. The invalidation of our thoughts, religion, feelings, emotions, experiences, perspectives and knowledge is alive and well today. I do think at times it’s subconsciously done. Yet, still problematic. Instead, I think some should learn to simply listen, assist and work with other cultures, races, and communities. “Seek ye first to understand and then to be understood”- Steven Covey. Clearly, there is not enough seeking of understanding, let alone any seeking of truth.

Article beings here:

Those who care about Black families and communities sometimes hesitate to celebrate Black marriage. Praising traditional marriage can contribute to the overall devaluation of queer intimacies. It can also align with the routine vilification of all households that do not fit the heteronormative nuclear family mold, with its male breadwinner and financially dependent wife and children. As important, highlighting Black marriage can easily feel like another attack on single Black women in a society with self-help franchises and religious cultures based on scolding Black women for not properly preparing themselves to be “blessed” with a mate.

And yet, the hesitation to celebrate traditional Black marriage, of which there has never been a shortage, also amounts to erasing the degree to which African Americans do, in fact, choose each other. 

Ever notice how examples that contradict dominant assumptions fail to gain traction? Many understood that it mattered for Barack Obama’s credibility among African Americans that Michelle Obama was brown-skinned, but the couple’s prominence has done little to change the impression that Black people rarely choose each other.  American culture is built on presumptions of Black pathology even though, as Coates puts it, such characterizations should ring false “in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of Black fathers, on the rape of Black mothers, on the sale of Black children.” 

It is no accident that Americans of every background struggle to recognize how thoroughly the Obamas represent, in Coates’s words, “Black people’s everyday, extraordinary Americanness.” That is, African Americans often embody exactly what the nation says it respects. Their doing so is common, but it is also exceptional because they must reach every goal while the nation robs them of every public resource, including safety. Against the odds, African Americans create and nurture life-affirming and community-sustaining bonds of affection—bonds that are distorted, diminished, or ignored. 

Black Americans have always cared more about cultivating intimacy than about specific domestic configurations (like the heteronormative nuclear family), but whenever they achieve what dominant culture praises, white violence emerges to put them back in their “proper” place. That “proper” place has been enforced  with physical violence, but it has also been reinforced with discursive violence, including how Black people choosing each other is assumed to be most palatable when the woman is light, bright, almost white. 

Keeping African Americans in their “proper” place also involves excluding traditional Black households from the nation’s family portrait. The quintessential American family is always assumed to be white and middle class, no matter how often white people prove to be less than committed to that model. And this is the case even as the United States provides white people with resources like safety—not having to fear that police officers or civilians will kill their loved ones without consequence.

Marriage relies on and bolsters economic standing, and the United States has always deprived African Americans of the financial resources to support their unions. Despite these formidable obstacles, marriage has not been rare among Black people, but it has been ignored. As Hunter shows, in the early 1900s, African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and other elites insisted that traditional home life would dramatically improve Black people’s social, political, and economic prospects, but “somehow they missed the fact that most Black families conformed to the very behaviors they wanted to indoctrinate,” given that “by 1900, marriage was nearly universal for adult African Americans still living in a mostly agricultural society.” 

Then and now, American culture ensures that few would ever suspect Black people’s consistent, stable history with marriage.  

In this context, it is worth noticing that representations of Black family life have not changed with Michelle Obama’s prominence as not only a mother but also the wife of an affectionate husband. Indeed, her success in these roles has been simultaneously ignored and attacked. Attacks came in the form of asserting that she hurt the feminist movement by calling herself “Mom-in-Chief.” Meanwhile, her becoming first lady—woman of the nation’s house—was ignored in that it did not inspire popular culture representations of African American stay-at-home moms. Instead, The Help became a runaway hit, suggesting that Americans did not want to be reminded that Black women are homemakers, but they would relish seeing Black women pretending to be 1960s maids in 2009 (when the book was published) and in 2011 (when the movie was released). 

That was not enough, though. In 2016, 63 million Americans voted to move the United States “From Mom-in-Chief to Predator-in-Chief.” The message was clear: African American marriages and traditional families may exist, but they will be excluded from the nation’s portrait of itself. Black women are acceptable as house slaves and housekeepers, but not as homemakers. That has always been the American way. Meanwhile, and nonetheless, Black people keep loving each other.

Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching and the new book From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. She is also an associate professor of English at Ohio State University and a Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF) board member. Follow her on Twitter @ProfKori.

~Nikki

The Love Experience: “Black Love” History Part 1

FROM MY SPIRIT, Uncategorized, Woman Power Up
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

Warning: This will be a tough read for some.

Before you ask a silly question like, “What does it matter?” or “Isn’t love color blind?” Read. Read why we shout “black love” to each other and why we have been trying for years to undo the damage done to the unity of black love and black families. I mean after all, it’s American and World History. America and the World by enlarge has a culture of negativity, lies, and unnecessary fears surrounding people of African descent. Here is a Part 1 of an article written by Koritha Mitchell.

For instance, when Black men publicly explain why they find Black women unattractive, the reasoning is not ignored but gains traction as a story. Especially for those who extol the virtues of Asian American or “exotic” women, African American women are “not feminine or submissive enough.” The men making such declarations do not constitute a majority, but their insistence upon offering unsolicited negative assessments must be seen for what it is: the American way. It aligns with the contours of mainstream American culture, which is invested in the erasure of Black people choosing each other.

This erasure has roots in slavery. Knowing their captives were human and maintained human agency, enslavers tried to brutalize it out of them. Although United States law did not recognize sexual violence against Black women as rape, they were forced to have sex with enslavers or with other captives. This practice did not simply enrich white people because children inherited the mother’s slave status; it also attempted to make the bondswoman’s feelings irrelevant. Nevertheless, the historical record is full of testimony from Black women who enraged white “masters” because they loved partners of their choice.

Not surprisingly, then, many African Americans celebrated Emancipation by reassembling their families and making their marriages legal. As Black people invested in the legal protections of marriage, white Americans disregarded those bonds by asserting that Black men were rapists obsessed with white women. These claims worked to obliterate the image of Black men happily paired with Black women; it was a form of discursive violence that emerges as a response to African Americans’ success at loving each other against the odds. Even if historians haven’t found much archival evidence, queer intimacies and domesticities no doubt existed and attracted violence. In those cases, people were punished for the victory of knowing that their right to belong did not rely on sexual conformity. In all instances, discursive violence was accompanied by physical aggression. As historian Hannah Rosen documents, even while declaring that Black coupling was nonexistent and that white women were in danger, mobs “ku-kluxed” black homes, often raping the wives of accomplished Black men. White terrorists destroyed Black domestic and intimate success while insisting it never existed.

Several decades after Emancipation, distorting Black love was no less meaningful in shaping American culture. Between 1890 and 1940, Progressive Era reforms lifted European immigrants out of poverty with education and employment opportunity, but African Americans were treated as irredeemable. As Khalil Muhammad has shown, Black Americans’ financial struggles were criminalized rather than addressed with community investment. 

Denying Black people’s right to public resources that typically accompany citizenship required casting them out of the nation’s family portrait. As a result, African American mothers were said to produce natural criminals. Crime became “Black,” so its existence among whites was deemed an aberration. The pathologizing of Black families in the 1965 Moynihan Report may be better known, but its depiction of Black women as matriarchs who damage Black men and boys was a continuation of earlier assertions, including those of Black sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier. If Black love existed, it was pathological—not empowering. It did not create households that functioned as safe havens but rather as dens of delinquency and dysfunction. 

All of these portrayals erased the truth about the love that had sustained African Americans through the horrors of slavery and beyond. As Tera Hunter’s Bound in Wedlock makes clear, African American men and women went to extraordinary lengths for family, including returning to bondage after securing freedom in order to be with loved ones. The refusal to highlight how routinely Black people choose each other advances assumptions about a lack that, if true, would have already obliterated the race.

Most representations of African Americans throughout American history have downplayed bonds of affection, and have purposefully avoided presenting them as defining characteristics of their families and communities. Whether the loveless impression emerges in mainstream depictions or in casual remarks about not dating Black women, it fits the pattern of erasure too neatly to be incidental. Not surprisingly, then, the tendency to denigrate Black women has a parallel. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “the crude communal myth about Black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to Black women—either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women.”

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

Source: https://www.aaihs.org/the-resilience-of-black-love-in-black-history/

Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching and the new book From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. She is also an associate professor of English at Ohio State University and a Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF) board member. Follow her on Twitter @ProfKori.

~Nikki

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

FROM MY SPIRIT

We, as Christians, give honor to whom honor is due. This is biblical. We, as a people, as a nation, give honor to whom honor is due and historically, we give honor to those whom honor is not due. I believe anyone that is of peace, of valor, on the side of right and humanity should be honored. If they foster hate and division. If we have to constantly say, “Well, they really didn’t mean it “that” way or “it was just a joke”, I don’t think we should hold them to any esteem. I don’t think people that spread lies as truths should be honored. I don’t even respect them.

I’ll never forget a co-worker of European dissent said, “I don’t even know why we are off that day or why he has a day” as two African American women stood in the room. We let her walk out without saying a word. We were stunned. We were stunned because we for one thought of her as a good co-worker. One that didn’t show the prejudices and outright racism prone to be displayed at this non-profit organization. Stunned. Perhaps it was straight ignorance but, I don’t see how. It’s not like she didn’t know what the man was trying to do.

Oh, how I wish I had told her I don’t know why we have a day for Christopher Columbus or why banks and schools are closed but, we do. He certainly wasn’t about peace and equality. I wish I had told her that we wouldn’t be working together if it wasn’t for this MLK and many others of many different races and cultures. But I missed that opportunity to help a co-worker “understand”. However, I know many people of other races, “don’t understand”. I also “understand” how they choose not to understand.

~Nikki

Alma Woodsey Thomas: My Inspiration

Creative Confetti, FROM MY SPIRIT, Uncategorized, Woman Power Up

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Today I want to take a moment to honor Alma Woodsey Thomas. She was an African American Abstract/Impressionist Artist. She is the biggest influence on my art. She is an inspiration.To find a black woman, who painted abstract art, gives me confidence in myself and my artwork. I put a link to the article in the comment section. Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978).
“Alma Woodsey Thomas developed her signature style — large, abstract paintings filled with dense, irregular patterns of bright colors — in her 70s,” writes the National Museum of Women in the Arts. “Thomas became an important role model for women, African-Americans, and older artists. She was the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and she exhibited her paintings at the White House three times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/weekinreview/11cotter.html

 

 

~Nikki ❤

 

Sunday Morning Coffee Musing: I am Many

FROM MY SPIRIT, Uncategorized

 

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What is novel is what we have not seen and heard before

 

The great debate on what to call a people sold or captured into slavery has been going on for many years. Mostly, among those that are descendants of slaves and those slaves were descendants of Africa. Call me Black. Call me African American. Well, you are not the color black some say. Well you are not from Africa some say. You are American. And on and on it seems to go. I was once told by a guy from Nigeria that I am not African so I cannot be African American. Everybody has an opinion but, the real issue that bothers me is the fact we have to engage in dialogue about who we are. This is the sad fact for those of us living in America as descendants of a vast country. What is more sad is our inability to adequately trace our roots beyond this continent.

In a group of diverse women on Facebook and many from Africa, I had a conversation with one lady about my age. We were discussing in the group the some of the interactions between Black people/African Americans/Americans. How unfriendly some of those interactions can be or awkward. She said, “I can’t speak for all of Africa but, mostly where I am from we call you cousins. Our cousins in America.” In that group that no longer exists, we learned about all of the similarities we had in common from traditions and proverbs to ideas about slavery and freedom. I learned so much. They shared pictures and we did, too. You really understood just how vast and diverse the countries are in Africa.

Am I black? If you are describing me as the same color as a black crayon then no, I am not black. If you are describing me as Black, a word that has become associated with Black Power, Black and I am Proud, Black Girl Magic, Black Girls Rock, then I am cool with that. Am I American. I am just as much American as the people who are not Native Americans that took this land. Am I African American? My history didn’t start with slavery it started with Kings and Queens. I am African American. I am many.

~Nikki