by Jennifer Arnise Carter

I still remember feeling him hook the inside of his huge forearm around my neck and pile-drive me to the bed. I landed so hard the impact made both of my Etienne Aigner sandals fly off and hit the wall on the other side of the bedroom. I was only 17 years old and I was being raped by the first of two men who would change my life forever.

by Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Ph.D.

It started as I pondered Black Twitter’s response to Starbucks’ #RaceTogether campaign, a well-intended but clumsy foray into America’s racial morass. The poorly conceptualized initiative spawned a hashtag of its own: #NewStarbucksDrinks. It captured the ridiculousness of discussing serious racial issues—police brutality and marginalization—over a cup of coffee. Hilarity ensued.

@brokeymcpoverty Latte My People Go
— Poor Dollaz (@Chinaija) March 17, 2015

Malcolm Xpresso #NewStarbucksDrinks
— jujoffer (@jujoffer) March 17, 2015

"I feared for my safe-Tea" #NewStarbucksDrinks pic.twitter.com/uszYRIwGzP
— Ess (@ScottyLiterati) March 17, 2015

Police Brew-tali-Tea #NewStarbucksDrinks
— Jen P. Otter (@that_crazy_jen) March 17, 2015

I laughed until my sides ached and I had tears streaming down my face. How could something that came from such a truly compassionate place go down in flames so completely—and with sarcasm was so spot on, so brutal? And when the company pulled the plug on Howard Schultz’s program, it was a perfect testament to the level of successful snark.

It was shade-throwing at its best, which Black Twitter does so well, over and over again. The level of disrespect is funny, original, and unreplicated in other communities. It is also the bitter residue of a people who have mastered the art of dismissing and humiliating others with humor and sarcasm after having been degraded for years ourselves. I’m at a loss when I try to identify any other community that has been able to use a social media diss as well as Black folks do.



But our ability to read others is not exclusive to social media. The age of reality television and the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have created a climate that has elevated the brilliant social interaction known as the “diss.” Through the use of memes, hashtags, and Vines, African-Americans have taken advantage of social media platforms for shared humorous cultural expressions that, while entertaining and unique, reveal the painful psychology of a people who live in the margins of American society.

Black women are central to this phenomenon. In the age of reality TV, as personalities on these shows jockey for attention and popularity, the most effective method for reaching the top of the heap—second to throwing drinks or punches—is successfully and artfully dismissing one’s peers and competitors. In 2011, in a televised shot-heard-around-the-world at Tami Roman, Evelyn Lozada coined the phrase, “You’re non-motherf*cking-factor, b*tch,” which in turn spawned a T-shirt and then a hashtag, and serves as the model for the TV-to-Twitter diss meme.

Uh oh lol RT @D_Mabry10: Everybody using @EvelynLozada u a non motherfucking factor bitch
— Evelyn Lozada (@EvelynLozada) March 10, 2011

The coldest line from "Basketball Wives" came from @EvelynLozada "You are a non MF factor B" Lmbo! I just love the way she said it!!
— Lakoiya Williams (@75SexySag) March 7, 2011

Fast forward to when @BlackGOPChick’s misplaced pride in her culinary skills gave birth to the hashtags #StruggleChicken and the even more popular #StrugglePlate. Once the smoke cleared from the bombing on Twitter—along with the fumes surely created when that poor bird was cooked—the world was left with a durable comedic gem for our online lives, a handy tool to describe things and people that are not quite on the level that they should be: #Struggle. Brilliant!
In a similar vein, we have seen the rise of the more general form of hashtag dismissal: #ByeFelicia. Originally a scene between Ice Cube’s character, Craig, and actress Angela Means Kaaya’s character, Felicia, in the movie Friday, the term has become a way to depersonalize and dismiss the recipient, simultaneously refusing the subject the dignity of their own name while demanding their exit from the conversation. It is the harbinger of all things irrelevant.



The popular hashtags have also given way to the ubiquitous meme. One that we see time and time again is the use of the phrase “so-and-so be like” along with a corresponding image, which has proven its sarcastic durability on social media. Perhaps its most effective use was to trash the Wendy Williams’ produced Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B on the Lifetime Network. The questionable casting of actors who were not exactly the doppelgangers of the people they were intended to portray provided ample fodder for the Twitterati with the hashtag #LifetimeBeLike:

Imma buy you a drank: the T-Pain story #LifetimeBeLike #LifetimeBiopics pic.twitter.com/hXeMwS9vNT
— CJ...Oliver? (@OJohnson_21) November 16, 2014

“@OJohnson_21: Imma buy you a drank: the T-Pain story #LifetimeBeLike #LifetimeBiopics pic.twitter.com/O0cUSrCqqs” 😂😂😂
— Dont Shoot (@KushtieMutsie) November 17, 2014

@RickeySmiley these hilarious #LifetimeBeLike memes #AaliyahMovie: http://t.co/RlfTJoUBIE lol pic.twitter.com/1SOS07GYcQ pic.twitter.com/pvXoacBgAV
— Corey D Chambers (@coreydcham) November 17, 2014

As entertaining the phenomenon of Black Twitter may be, it is an extension of very old traditions in black comedic culture. Over the course of our difficult history in America, humor has served as a self-defense mechanism for African Americans. We are no strangers to the put-down. In her essay, “African American Oral Traditions in Louisiana,” Mona Lisa Saloy traces the practice of “playing the dozens” to the period of slavery when the feeblest of the enslaved were sold in groups of twelve. It was the lowest rung on the ladder of oppression and to be associated with it was a source of shame and later put-down, giving birth to the cultural practice.

In the introduction to Honey, Hush!: An Anthology of African American Women’s Humor, Daryl Dance refers to “the relieving balm of humor.” “Humor for us,” she writes, “has… been a means of surviving as we struggled… We laugh to hide our pain… to shield our shame. We use our humor to speak the unspeakable, to mask the attack… to warn of lines not to be crossed, to strike out at enemies and the hateful acts of friends and family.”

Black women have developed their own unique traditions as well. We call it “sass.” Scholars like Joanne Braxton have identified it as a discursive tool used by black women as a form of verbal self-defense. It was perfected by our foremothers during the period of enslavement as a way to diffuse and redirect tensions with white slave masters and mistresses. Later during the Jim Crow period, black women were left vulnerable because black men—as the primary targets of lynching violence, economic repression, and convict leasing—had trouble protecting themselves, much less their own families. As such, sass became a useful weapon in their arsenal as black women stood in defense of their households, their children, and themselves. This self-defense mechanism, when misunderstood, has unfairly been turned into the racist caricature of the “Sapphire” stereotype—the loud, overbearing, unfeminine and unladylike shrew who dominates her man. In this way black women have been forced not only to fight for their survival, but abused for the mechanisms they’ve employed to achieve.

In addition to being a tool for self-defense, humor has also been a way for African Americans to express themselves creatively, strike back at the system, and cope with the deep pain and shame that came from living lives in the margins of American society. Writing in 1925, Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Fauset described the source of black humor, that it rises from the “very woes which beset us.” Bambi Haggins explains this phenomenon in her book, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America:

[B]lack comedy is tied inextricably to the African American condition….The function of humor and the therapeutic value of the accompanying laughter, inside safe, communal black spaces....As Langston Hughes notes in the autobiographical prose of The Big Sea, the laughter was, more often than not the weapon used to fight the pain.

Now, through the medium of social media, our life-preserving wit—these private comic discourses once hidden within our communities in our own private spaces for fear of the white gaze and the judgement that would follow—are becoming public. Hashtags and memes offer an electronic translation of the eye-roll, the neck roll, the sucking of teeth, the arm akimbo, the raised eyebrow, and all other habits of our signifying culture.

We're laughing out loud, at long last, but sometimes I wonder at whose expense?

As creative and funny as Black Twitter can be, some of the humor is tragicomic. As we proceed toward new levels of viciousness in the pursuit of ratings, likes, and follows, I worry about the conversation spinning out of control in this race toward the bottom. We must be cognizant of the pain this habit of humor is borne of, and be careful about the direction it takes us.
The tongue creates psychic wounds that pushes people to physical retaliation. This escalation takes on a life of its own, becoming viral on social media. There are a proliferation of images of black women on TV fighting each other, i.e. the celebrated season finale of Empire and the fight between Cookie and Anika. These have been outmatched by thousands of videos of fights between black women and girls in communities across America, such as the massive fight at a McDonald’s in Flatbush, New York. Then there is the more recent brawl at a housing project in Tallahassee, Florida, where scores of women, and a few men, engaged in a wild free-for-all, leaving behind a field scattered with torn-out hair weaves and abandoned shoes.

We speak about “dragging” our enemies, literally and figuratively, in an analogy born in the days after Ray Rice battered his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, in 2014, dragging her unconscious body from a hotel elevator. Janae’s misfortune as a victim of domestic abuse wasn’t enough to prevent us from harvesting a golden nugget of humor from her personal tragedy.

Black Twitter is a two-sided coin. We should be careful that we don’t chuckle our way to oblivion, overseeing the slow deterioration of our culture and our community, and the erosion of our sisterly bonds.

Photo: Shutterstock

Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Ph.D., is a historian and author in South Florida. Her forthcoming book, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida, will be published by the University Press of Florida in August 2015.

by Bee Quammie


As we celebrate what’s left of Black History Month and look forward to Women’s History Month, it’s important to remember that Black women around the globe have made incredible contributions to world history. From Brazil to the United Kingdom and everywhere else, Black women have done incredible things, created incredible things, and have been incredible people. Take a passport-free journey through time and geography and get to know about 5 such women.

by Eboni Rafus


My father was a good man.

As the eldest of five children, he stayed behind and cared for his alcoholic father after his mother divorced him and moved to Florida with the rest of my father’s siblings. He was eleven years old. As an enlisted infantry solider in the U.S. Army, he was a strong leader who climbed the ranks quickly and retired as Master Sergeant after 23 years of service.

by Elizabeth Dawes Gay

July marks the time of the year when a Black woman’s earnings finally catch up to a white man’s earnings from the previous year - a startling timeline representation of the largest pay gap. Black women only earn 64 cents for every dollar a white man makes. As much as this might spark somber reflection on the economic and racial inequality that persists in our nation, it is also a time of celebration. On July 16th we celebrated the birthday of fearless social justice activist, suffragist, politician, and journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

by Lyndsey Ellis

July 16th marks the birthday of eminent journalist, Ida B. Wells, whose early leadership in the civil rights movement and endless fight to shed light on injustices on behalf of women and the Black community makes her an unforgettable champion of truth. Whether you want to get familiar with the renowned female crusader’s life for the first time or you need to get re-acquainted with her work, be prepared to see into the compassionate heart and brilliant mind of one of history’s greatest figures.

If you're in the United States, today you'll see activist Dorothy Height represented in the Doodle at the top of your screen. Dr. Height would have been 102 years old today.

Like many of the women whose work were integral to the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-century, Dr. Height's contributions are often overlooked in historical texts.


She helped plan the March on Washington in 1963, and even sat on stage with Martin Luther King, Jr as he gave one of the most remembered speeches in history.

But Height would not become a noted name in the movement until many years later.

Height was born in Richmond, Va., on Mar. 24, 1912, but grew up outside of Pittsburgh. She was awarded an Elks scholarship, and graduated from New York University in 1932 with a bachelor's degree in education and a master's degree in psychology. Though Height was admitted to Barnard, she could not enroll because she was Black.

She went to work as a caseworker in New York’s Welfare Department, and began volunteering in support of civil rights activism.


Dr. Height's work has been recognized nationally. She was awarded both the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.

President Barack Obama called Dr. Height "the godmother of the civil rights movement" upon her death in 2010.

---

Kimberly Foster is the founder and editor of For Harriet. Email or Follow @KimberlyNFoster

by Stephanie Gates

“Slavery is in the marrow of this country.” Dr. Cindy A. Crusto

12 Years a Slave is a movie that is racking up accolades, and I’m glad. I have seen it three times, and I thought it was such an important film that I took more than 120 students on a field trip.

It is a film that continued to marinate in my mind long after the last credits rolled. And though I have heard a number of people grumbling about another movie about slavery, I don’t see it that way. This powerful, must-see-movie was one filled with lessons for me. And I am not alone. When I read the article Watching “12 Years a Slave” Could Save Your Life by Dr. Cindy A. Crusto recently on the Root’s website, I better understood the movie’s lingering affect on me.

This story originally appeared in Dominion of New York

Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes presented the story of Louis Allen, whose murder is being investigated under the FBI’s Cold Case Initiative. Five years ago, when the Bureau began the project, I was beginning my book, If Sons, Then Heirs, with a long-hidden lynching at its emotional center. Like the great-grandfather in my book, Mr. Allen was a law-abiding owner of his land and various businesses.

Allen’s tragedy began when he witnessed the murder of another black man by a white state legislator and was pressured not to tell. Unable to stand the silence, Allen did, in fact, talk to federal authorities. Soon after, the sheriff in Liberty - real name, Liberty, MS - came to drag Allen out of his house at night. He beat him, smashed and broke his jawbone with a flashlight, and took him to jail as Allen’s young son watched. Allen was released, but later murdered at the cattle gate to his land. His son found him there, under his truck.

This case and the thousands others we’ll never bring to justice really did and still do reverberate as what some psychologists are calling “racial battle fatigue,” by violating, without recourse, so many boundaries: the body, mind, and spirit of individuals and families, family privacy, security, and memory, community sense of viability and power. And land.

“Check your damn fences.” It’s how my character, King Needham, tried to talk to his family about their wholeness and integrity.

Like a feudal lord, Needham made himself in evidence everywhere on his land at all times. He and the boys and Selma and then Bobo, together with King’s brother Richard and his family, and Amos and Mary’s children who came to stay in summers, invested each acre with their presence: their ploughs, threshers, mills, hitches, wagons, and trucks; their homemade blacksmith operation; their mules and mare, the nanny goat and kids, the big brown-and-yellow milk cow the brothers share, the chickens that laid green-and-white pullet eggs; their voices, halloed over the machinery, improvised song in time to the implements and changed with the rhythm of the season; the stench of their fertilizer and the whiff of brown creek water that collected behind their sticks-and-stone dam and ran through ditches across the new orchard; the hum of bees there and in flowering vines that intersperse with brambles, and the hive boxes they installed at the edge of the South field. Whatever they could buy or claim, stamped Needham into each tidy corner.

Scholar Jan Carew calls it a “total war” that was waged on the post-Civil War generations: legal, cultural, and physical intimidation and force, up to and including, murder. Fifty years later, Louis Allen’s son still fights for his father’s case to be prosecuted, and my character’s voice reverberates in his great-grandson’s head. If we forget them, it’s like killing them twice:
As Rayne stepped between of fair-to-middling raised beds structures, King’s old phrases came to mind, almost as if Rayne had been there to hear them himself:
Know your boundaries, boys; what am I talking bout?

Before breakfast or after supper, Selma said, the towering King, his son who died in the war, and Jones traced the periphery of the land. In this way, eight or ten acres a day, they maintained each area. They policed the weeds, disrepair, insects, varmints, neighbors. By the end of the week, they’d circled the farm. Bobo remembered King carrying him on these jaunts as a toddler: in his arms, on his shoulders, in a sling over the big mare mule.

Gramma Bett used to say: Little by little hen drink the water.
A day off on Sunday and do it again.
Think with your feet boys, Bobo quoted him. Think with your eyes, boys, your ears; taste and see. We gonna notice what other men miss—Pay attention, boys!

It was the only way to keep the land.

It’s not only enough to remember how they died, but also how they lived. Louis Allen would not keep silent. The integrity of that gives us encouragement in our own times. And we need it, because in our communities and families, the injustice of these cases has not grown cold.


Lorene Cary’s new novel, If Sons, Then Heirs (Atria Books, April 2011), recounts a love story for our time while exploring a searing racial history that haunts—and impoverishes—its unforgettable characters. Publishers Weekly calls it: “an absorbing and moving tale.” Cary’s other books include: the best-selling memoir Black Ice, an American Library Association Notable Book for 1991 often taught in colleges and high schools; The Price of a Child, a 1995 novel chosen as the first One Book, One Philadelphia selection; Pride, a contemporary novel, and FREE! Great Escapes on the Underground Railroad, a collection of true-life stories for young readers, published in 2006.

Cary’s essays have appeared in publications including Newsweek, Time, Essence, and O Magazine. She lectures nationwide and has received five honorary doctorates. She also serves as president of the Union Benevolent Society.

Eunice Johnson was an entrepreneur and visionary whose dedication to promoting and celebrating positive Black images led her to create some of Black America's most enduring enterprises.

With her husband, she began Ebony Magazine in 1945.

Many years later she created Fashion Fair Cosmetics the first department store makeup for African-American women.

Ms. Johnson's crowning achievement, however, was the creation of the Ebony Fashion Fair in 1958.

Ebony Fashion Fair provided an outlet for Black beauty and creativity- launching the careers of countless models and designers who never would have been highlighted by the mainstream.

But the show was more than extravagant gowns. Over the years it has raised more than $55 million for charitable causes.

It's a shame that five decades after Ms. Johnson brought Black glamour to the masses we still get giddy upon seeing Halle Berry on the cover of American Vogue or Chanel Iman on Paris Couture runways.

It was Ms. Johnson, after all, who convinced Rudolph Valentino to use Black models in the 60s. There is still progress to be made.

Just days after her death in January of 2010, Mrs. Johnson was honored with a celebratory luncheon at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Guests included Former President Bill Clinton, Whoopi Goldberg, and current CEO of Johnson Publishing Desiree Rogers.



We honor you, Mrs. Johnson.

Black Women Who Changed History honors the contributions Black women across The Diaspora have made to the world. Each day in February we will feature a different woman and her achievements. The column will be weekly hereafter. Don't miss any of our featured women. Subscribe, Like, and Follow For Harriet today!

The story goes something like this: On a cold afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama circa 1955, a little feeble black woman just so happened to the spark the Civil Rights Movement when she refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus to a White man. She was a seamstress with worn out and tired feet—so tired that maybe her sense of decorum had been temporarily altered. There was no way she could get up from that seat, so an arrest had to happen.

Known to many as the "Mother of the Civil Rights movement," Clara Luper is, perhaps, the most influential modern civil rights figure you've never heard of.

On August 19, 1958, The NAACP Youth Council of Oklahoma City began a series of sit-ins at segregated area lunch counters and restaurants. These sit-ins were the first in the south and went on to compel desegregation of public accommodations in southern states.

Clara Luper, a high school history teacher, and 12 members of the NAACP Youth Council, ages six to 17 including her own two children, walked into the Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City and ordered 13 Coca-Colas.

Ms. Luper discusses her inspiration for the sit-ins in her autobiography, Behold These Walls.

"I thought about my father who had died in 1957 in the Veterans' Hospital and who had never been able to sit down and eat a meal in a decent restaurant. I remembered how he used to tell us that someday he would take us to dinner and to parks and zoos. And when I asked him when was someday, he would always say, "Someday will be real soon," as tears ran down his cheeks. So my answer was, "Yes, tonight is the night. History compels us to go, and let History alone be our final judge."

Ms. Luper used her local notoriety to continue the fight for desegregation and equality in Oklahoma as a champion of integration of Oklahoma City schools. Her desire to effect change later led her to run for Senate in 1972.

At 86 years-old, Clara Luper continues to lecture on racial justice and equality.

Women are often relegated to the sidelines of history. We musn't let our foremothers be forgotten.

More on Clara Luper:

Complete Biography

2005 Interview

Phyllis Hyman had it all: a stunning voice, perfect figure, and supermodel beauty. She was, quite simply, one of the most incredible jazz musicians the world has ever known.

Though Phyllis never reached the heights of success she deserved, she made an indelible mark on the world of jazz and r&b.

You may recognize the statuesque beauty from her short cameo in Spike Lee's School Daze. (She sang the slow jam "Be One" during the bathing suit party scene.)

Phyllis Hyman ended her life on this day in 1995 at the age of 45. On the anniversary of her passing, take a few moments to get (re)acquainted with her amazing body of work.




Betcha By Golly Wow


Living All Alone


You Know How To Love Me


Don't Wanna Change The World


What are your favorite songs sung by Ms. Hyman?