For the duration of my public high school experience (prior to attending The Peddie School for the second part of tenth grade through my senior year) I was reassured by my brother that I didn’t have to worry about people verbally or physically abusing me because he would take care of me. When I got to the Peddie School I did not even notice that there was any bullying.
When I was in school, I read about a popular program that involved trading guns for various things that were considerably more helpful to society and less dangerous to it as well. There were trades of guns for food and guns for toys — the programs were meant to get guns off of the streets and to benefit the hopefully former gun holders. I feared that the same people may have just gone out and illegally acquired more guns so that they could get more toys and food but that was just me.
Poor Beyonce. She’s been put through a lot lately — and it’s all be done by her own wringing hands. Her Fake Baby Pregnancy meme won’t die. She’s been caught stealing from Bob Fosse. Now, her “Blackness” is being called into question — yet again! — by her own perverse sense of self and Racial identification.
We have wondered here in the past about the cultural constrictions we press into skin color, and a related and deeper issue is one of darker skin — Black skin in particular — and how it is socially demonized by negative, historical, intellectual and emotional touchstones associated with “Blackness.”
Take a look at the cover of Beyonce’s new album below. Is that her natural skin tone? Is that what her real nose looks like? Are her arms and legs that skinny? Why is she not comfortable in her own skin? Why is she publicly rebelling against her bones?
Rape is a heinous, unspeakably morally evil crime for which there are no excuses — no matter what a person was wearing in the club when you met them or what you may have perceived as being signals. The moment that a person tells you that they are not interested in sex, it means that you are not to attempt to have sex with that person or it is by definition considered rape. As such, the accusation of rape is a strong one to make and there is unfortunately a long history of people fabricating rape and sexual assault that goes back even as far as the Bible — where a young Joseph, son of Jacob, is sexually tempted by the wife of the man who bought him as a slave repeatedly until she decides to take her revenge by accusing him of attempted rape. Given his stature he is not believed and put in prison.
On January 8, 2007, I wrote an article — Wearing Your Death Mask in Life — that concerned the masks we wear to protect us from who and what we’ve become:
We all wear masks. Once you’ve lived long enough, you begin to recognize and read people via the mask of their face before any words are spoken. There are few original masks in the world and once you’ve reacted and interacted with one face you quickly begin to learn all masks of that sort behave and express in the same way. What happens when the faces of the dead are resurrected into masks of the living?
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