Sometime last season they lost me. Perhaps it was the abandonment of Daya by her officer boyfriend and the dream selling around the mother of the man who raped her raising her kid. Maybe it was the explicit rape scene of Pennsatucky. It could be the fact that Piper is completely and utterly insufferable as a human being much less a show runner and the sound of her whiny entitled voice sounds like nails screeching across a chalkboard. I’m not sure what it was but I stopped watching the season about halfway through season 3, sometime last year. I resumed and finished earlier this year and was unsure of whether I would engage this new season. But the hype around the new season and the genuine comradery I feel when I watch some of the Black characters interact drew me back in. So this weekend equipped with nothing but time, I watched pretty much all of season 4 in an impressive binge session.

I quickly tired of Piper and Alex but pushed through, I wanted to watch the season before anyone ruined it for me on social media. The storyline with Judy King was contrived. It seemed a sad mix of the realities of Paula Deen and Martha Stewart. Upon the revealing of Judy King as a “former racist” I saw very quickly there was supposed to be a sense of sympathy for her and perhaps women like her, the Justine Sacco’s and the like. You know the mistaken racist. In a moment of casual uncertainty just did a dainty little misstep and if we only just got to know them as people we would understand. We were almost aggressively forced to get to know Judy King so we could see she was just harmless and made a “mistake.” Sure.

Although I could probably write an entire book based on the problematic and questionable writing of OITNB, I primarily want to push back against the terrible handling of Poussey Washington’s character in season 4. After we are made to believe love has miraculously cured Poussey of her pesky drinking problem, the writers usher in Soso as her romantic solution. Soso and Poussey form a little world of their own where they are downright infatuated and we all breathe a collective sigh of joy. After watching Poussey be softly rejected, but rejected nonetheless by Taystee in earlier seasons we are excited that one of the most lovable characters of the show has found love.

Unfortunately the love is founded on a bit of a fallacy when Soso reveals her racist underpinnings. But just like Judy King, it’s just a pesky little misstep and if we would just watch this flashback we’ll see it’s not her fault really she’s just always been that way. Lol, shrug. After calling Poussey a poor Black girl, her parents drug addicts, and casually slipping the word nigga into her conversation, Soso apologizes. Not for the nigga thing, just for making up stories in her head and just like that Soso and Poussey are back on, because that’s right kids love conquers all even racism. I write this in a tone of biting sarcasm because the writer’s room of OITNB (no Black people included by the way) must think me and you a fool to believe any of this does not have any implicit or explicit messaging. Poussey is harshly offended to be compared to the Blacks that have addictions and are poor because she is well travelled and multilingual. She is a new Black and how dare it be insinuated that she is anything like those “others.” It seems Poussey is not bothered so much that she is dating a racist or idolizes one just that these statements are dragging her along as well.

Poussey has done in this final season what I see now has been the buildup all along, she has made white people comfortable. She is the Black girl who dates outside her race, doesn’t get too upset by racist, speaks a few languages, travels, has a relationship with her father who doesn’t abandon her despite her sexuality, and drinks her pain away in peace without engaging in any hard drugs. She is sweet and lovable and that is nice and all but I’m not here for respectable Blacks. I’m here for the drug dealers, the murderers, the fat Black people, the dark skin ones, the Black kids given up for adoption, the addicts, the ones who only have GED’s, the ones who can’t read, Black people with PHD’s, all sorts and kinds. I’m here for all Black people.
Poussey’s death comes on in a moment of chaos after she accepts peaceful protest as a means for change and gets up on the lunch table with all the other prisoners. I would like to make note here that I don’t believe peaceful protest is the only way to liberation. The violent and inhumane behaviour literally every person in the prison is subjected to cannot be abolished via a calm stand in. Though in a sweeping moment of drummed up emotion we are made to feel this way by the writers of this show. When Suzanne goes into an episode after having been subjected to harassment, violence, and a lack of mental health care Poussey takes up for her. Sweet and endearing until the very end Poussey desperately tries to be Suzanne’s saviour. In her final moments Poussey is pinned to the ground a la Eric Garner, begging to be let up for air. No one pays her notice except a few inmates and she dies right there on the ground. Her body is left there for a while reminiscent of Mike Brown. The entire writers room must of patted each other on the back, they had effectively addressed Black Lives Matter and Samira can go explore her career elsewhere. I’m not so convinced.

The officer who murders Poussey is the most likable of the entire bunch. Clearly a follower who has struggled his whole life to carve out his own identify or voice, he just stumbles into this job. We are made to feel as if his boyish charm and inability to grow up is just a result of not knowing where to fit in. From high school up until now as an officer smuggling in panties, he’s harmless. A little misguided at times but harmless. So when he murders Poussey, it is empty for me. It was an explicit choice to use an officer who was likeable and relatable and probably didn’t do it on purpose. It was also an explicit choice to use Poussey, who was one of the good Blacks even up until the last moment of her life by trying to save Suzanne.

This messaging is not for me, it’s not for Black people. It’s for people like Soso and Judy King and your white co-worker who will inevitably try to engage you about your thoughts on the show. It’s for the racist among us or the oblivious or the misinformed, whatever you prefer to call them. It’s for them. It is to pacify their white guilt and make them believe that the deaths of Black people by state sanctioned power are incidents that could very well be accidents by oblivious officers and done to people who very well might just be the type of Black person you would’ve had a fling with in college. The truth is far from this white fictional circle jerk.

The deaths of Black people by police officers is done purposefully and the sheer numbers that occur within any given year should be indicative of that. These officers are not just making slight errors of judgement after stumbling into the job and being under-trained. They are murdering Black people because this country has been founded on such violence and nothing makes them happier than to continue this honored tradition. The Black people they are killing are selling loose cigarettes on the street, pulling over after a traffic stop, running from a traffic stop, and walking down an alley. They are sometimes fond and likeable and other times assholes. Regardless of what kind of Black person they are their lives matter to me.

After an entire season of patiently sitting through a storyline of a white power group, mistakenly formed by Piper, I was already spent. But the gross and cheap use of Poussey’s death to make a white pacifist point was it for me. I have thought about what the writer’s room of this show looks like: how they gather together devoid of a single Black face and decide, that a Nazi symbol tacked on the white middle class girl’s arm by the angry Latina’s is meaningful. I try to understand at what point they agreed amongst themselves that this white power group will be “ironic” and “extreme” so that the covert racism we are often expected to sweep under the rug can be quietly shoveled to us as harmless. The show often comes across as tone deaf and trying to clamor to the people of colour who probably make up a majority of its audience. I would put money on the references and colloquialisms in this show either being taken from the actresses on set or mined from spaces like Black Twitter. This bothered me but my desperation for representation allowed me to overlook it for much longer than I probably should have.

The death of Poussey was the final strike for me. I want to see representations of myself and the people I love on screen so desperately I can’t put it clearly into words. But I will never be so desperate that I take whatever is lazily handed to me as good enough. I want media representations of us to be created by us and for us and not just used as vehicles to continue to cater to white people. We are so much more than that. After two seasons of straight up nonsense and folly, I see OITNB does not believe the same. As I always do when I run into representations I believe are deeply damaging (think: Django Unchained, SNL & their Black skits, Nina, &c.) I am no longer supporting. Let it be a one woman boycott of sorts but there is and can be better for us. Better representation and manifestations of who we truly are and OITNB is no longer it and I’m not sure it ever was.

That’s right: the doek/headwrap/gele/headscarf, one of the most iconic symbols of Africanness was deemed unfit for an Africa Day broadcast about African artists. Sibisi, unhappy with the decision, emailed her team expressing her position. In the leaked email she writes, “I find this no doek’ guide line really fails to apply itself to the context and the cultural diversity of this country – i.e. an African story, on Africa Day, during Africa Month.”

While eNCA’s news editor-in-chief, Anton Harber, maintains that he found nothing offensive about her doek, the lack of consistency in enforcing company policy is glaring. According to sources at the station, that was not the reason the story was pulled, but the policy is under review.

In the meantime, South Africans have taken to twitter in solidarity with Sibisi, posting pictures of themselves wearing doek along with the hashtag #RespekTheDoek. Too many of us know how it feels to be punished for a part of ourselves that isn’t mainstream, whether it’s our very professional afros, braids, or other hairstyles, the way we talk, the way we smile (or don’t).

So, here’s mine, Nontobeko. I stand with you!

Her Donors Choose campaign is $847 away from her $984 goal, just enough to purchase five Chromebooks so her students can “conduct research, learn how to write a five-paragraph essay, thoroughly, read non-fiction,” and more. Since, like me as a student, her students don’t have computer or Internet access at home, these Chromebooks will go a long way to help them achieve their goals.

Aganga-Williams praised her students as, “incredibly funny, smart and creative. Most importantly, though, they’re resilient, and as corny as it sounds, they’ve taught me to keep going even when I don’t want to. It’s that resilience – amongst other things – that’s led to their a academic success.”

You can be a part of their success, too. If you have a few dollars to spare this month, please consider donating to the college-bound high school students at Thurgood Marshall Academy. Click through to learn more about their needs.

Providentially, I came across Liz Femi Wilson’s tweet of this interview between Aisha Tyler and Viola Davis on Aisha Tyler’s Guy on Girl podcast. Both Black women actors, their interview is more of a conversation around Viola Davis’ multiple moments of transformation. Aisha is audibly humbled by Viola’s clarity and presence, as one should be. Viola Davis has put in work, despite her childhood and she give me hope that this point in my own life is not all there is. There is absolutely, definitely and unquestionably more.

I hope this interview inspires you to keep moving forward, to keep doing the work, as it has for me.

Enjoy.

Most remarkable is how accessible narratives of Black American lived experiences have become. Elle published Dr Linda Chavers’ piece on her reservations with the term “Black Girl Magic” where she revealed very intimate details about her health and interior life. In my years of consuming media as an avid reader, I’ve rarely seen Black people, especially Black women, have opportunities to write so closely about their lives in white-facing publications. It’s an important shift, one that I’m watching warily because, if history serves as a reminder, these moments are tenuous, fraught, and short.

Dr Chavers is not the only one who has been creating work, neither is Elle the only magazine that’s hiring and centering Black women’s stories. Nylon, Refinery 29, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and most recently, Teen Vogue, have all brought on Black women to write and edit for their publications, and it shows. I enjoy following writers such as Evette Dionne, Bim Adewumi, Sydney Gore, Taylor Bryant, and more as they put in work for these publications and I look forward to their long and established careers.

With this increase visibility comes an increased sense of being watched. The impact of Black women’s knowledge and cultural production is everywhere and everyone wants a piece of it. The term ‘fleek’ blazed from obscurity to corporate tweets in record time and Black Girl Magic can still be brought to trend given the right impetus like, say, a Beyoncé video. In nearly every aspect of popular culture there is an underlying cadence of Black American womanness that goes unheralded, taken for granted, and eventually removed from the creators.

As this Black girl moment balloons, I wonder about how we archive the trends, the tweets, the snaps, the videos, the images, the writing, especially when it’s distributed across multiple media platforms. How does one record Black girl magic and make sure that future Black girls remember our early 21st century potions and spells? How do we engage the global Black girl genius that’s happening everyday even when no one snaps it? It certainly won’t be done by these platforms, at least not in a way that centers Black *women and *girls.

This is work that we, Black *women and *girls, must do. I’ve long been a champion of ownership, particularly owning one’s stories. In the past I thought that this meant owning your own domain, purchasing hosting, and broadcasting from your digital home base. In recent months, however, I’ve come to understand that ownership model is insufficient. The work we do is in community and thrives in community, and so the ownership of it must also be a communal effort. It must be one where we archive each other even as we do the work of creating.

To that end, I’m proposing a Black Girl Time Working Group comprised of intergenerational and international Black *women and *girls who are committed to taking care of the work that we’re producing across platforms both on and offline with the express goal of marking ownership and preserving artifacts of our cultural production for generations to come.

If you are interested in joining me and a few others, please sign up below and I’ll get you all the information you need to join the conversation.

Onward!

Suicide bombers took to Beirut earlier that week, killing over 50 people in the Lebanon capital. The pictures were not nearly as devastating as the stories that came out, or that many people only learned about Beirut after the Paris attacks.

On the other side of the world, in Thailand’s southern Pattani, another bomb killed four people in what Al Jazeera calls the “restive south”. And Burundi’s escalating violence and violent state rhetoric is leading some news outlets to warn of an impending genocide in the East African nation.

If it seems like the world is burning, it is. With every moment, the Internet expands our knowledge of world events by an unprecedented scale of amplification, one that the human race has only just begun to see. And, with only two major social media platforms able to facilitate communications across the internet – Facebook and Twitter – we’re left with slim options when it comes to disseminating news, participating in conversation, and expressing the range of human emotion that comes in reaction to these events.

The Social Media Burden

In some ways, we’re left to the whim of engineers who may or may not have sufficient cultural context to help build better products that help humans communicate. Shortly after the Paris attacks, for example, Facebook publicised its feature to help its users confirm the safety of their loved ones, a feature, that although live, was visibly lacking in the wake of similar attacks in the Middle East and the Africas earlier this year.

One should not be surprised at this; Facebook is a publicly traded American institution, and therefore moves with an American worldview, a worldview that can be navel-gazing amd reductive when it comes to global geopolitical phenomena.

Twitter and Facebook have been critical to civilian communications during human and natural disasters, but we’re quickly approaching a tipping point where neither platform will be able to sustain the human burden in a useful way.

Twitter, which is also an publicly traded American company, moves differently from Facebook in that it is most susceptible to the virulent spread of misinformation and misdirection, making it difficult to uncover truth and communicate important warnings and institutional advisory messages amid the raw and unfiltered outpouring of human emotion. The fear and anger of Twitter users, coupled with the human need to be heard and seen make for a very difficult atmosphere in which to spread important information.

As the Internet and its applications become more and more sophisticated, our very human existences will seem to become louder and more violent. Twitter and Facebook have been critical to civilian communications during human and natural disasters, but we’re quickly approaching a tipping point where neither platform will be able to sustain the human burden in a useful way. While messaging platforms like Whatsapp, WeChat and Hangouts, where users in a community can access each other without the noise of the manstream, are bearing more of this load, the problem of spreading information to the masses still remains.

Decentralise Social Media

It isn’t fair that Parisians get a massive social, new, and traditional media responses while people with loved ones in other attack sites like Garissa, the site of the April 2015 terrorist attack in Kenya, Beirut and Thailand, have to navigate the difficult global communications landscape. It isn’t fair, but it is predictable.

When we depend on these social media platforms as our sole communications platforms as well, we place a lot of trust in teams of humans who don’t have to be aware of our particular needs because it isn’t cost effective to provide solutions on a niche-by-niche basis. The need for our own platforms isn’t just one of telling our own stories to combat stereotype, as we often like to position it. It is a critical communications need that can be the difference between life or death. Just as we can’t count on Western media sources to cover stories important to us, we can’t count on Western social media sources to communicate our needs.

The internet was designed to be decentralised and redundant, but our social media networks are not. How do we build platforms scale into the global communications infrastructure while centering our different cultural contexts so we don’t depend on only two or three platforms to spread information?

There’s your standard feminism-is-anti-African camp, and then your cynical, trollerish lol-feminists-lol camp, your gaslighting, nice-guy camp, and, of course, your not-everything-is-about-feminism-gosh, camp. And they all stand planted in their views, taking no prisoners, leaving no ground for reason, rationality, or, at the very least, a difference of opinion in this war.

Because, you see, that’s what this is. War. War, etymologically speaking, is simply an effort to confuse, struggle, combat, and dispute your way to the upper hand, whatever that looks like for you.

At the end of it all, the feminist war is well fought and there are no clear winners.

Entrenched in the debates about feminism are self-identified feminists who also form their own camps. There are those who respond to the anti-feminist rhetoric with violent words to gain some kind of power, those who respond with amused distance (like myself), those who log in and log off, and those who valiantly compose well-written treatises on What Feminism Really Is. There are well-intentioned men who chain tweetstorms to explain feminism to other men, and some women, too. There are women who point and laugh at the carcasses of arguments left in the wake of that one really sharp and clever writer in the public sphere.

People who take to social media to bash feminism will not be changed by clever tweets, a flood of Tumblr reblogs, an Instagram or Facebook comment dogpile, or hard facts.

At the end of it all, the feminist war is well fought and there are no clear winners; in fact, there are no winners at all because the purpose of war is to bring confusion, not clarity, in the struggle for domination.

Nobody ever wins. Not the non-feminists, not the almost-feminists, not even the actual-feminists. Nobody wins. People who take to social media to bash feminism will not be changed by clever tweets, a flood of Tumblr reblogs, an Instagram or Facebook comment dogpile, or hard facts. People who take to social media to write long tomes about what feminism is and what isn’t won’t be changed by the anti-feminist camps, either. These people are broken, lonely, and hurt, like you and me. They’re human beings first using these platforms to amplify their humanity.

These feminist wars are distractions from the spirit-first work, the work that happens word-to-word or person-to-person.

Have you been fighting in these feminist wars? I urge you to lay down your words there and use them get free. Feminism, as with most human-made theories, is still a theory in motion, so when people come out against in violent ways, you can’t rely on logic to change them. Only love can transform someone, and in order to do true love, you have to accept people as they wholly are. If someone hates women or queer/trans people or all Black people and their intersections, then you can be sure their issues run much deeper than you could ever know. You have to decide if you can love that entire package.

If someone truly wants to change, they will do their own work. Tweet this.

Maybe you can’t. That’s fine. Just know that you will never logic your way into transformation. If someone truly wants to change, they will do their own work. And this is where you get free. You don’t have to spend your precious words trying to convince someone of the logic of your lifestyle, or the veracity of your humanity. You can merely choose to accept people or move on.

There’s an order to these things, and the Internet is always at the end. It goes spirit first, then physical, then digital. These feminist wars are distractions from the spirit-first work, the work that happens word-to-word or person-to-person. The Internet merely amplifies what’s happening in our physical and material lives, and our physical and material lives amplify what’s happening in our spirit lives.

Usually, the spirit that needs to be loved and transformed first is yours. But love is hard, heartbreaking work, life-changing, and deadly work. I know this because I am broken, lonely, and hurt. Everyday I realize this more and more in myself and the people I meet. But I know that I can’t afford to fight these feminist wars without doing my own love-work, and I encourage you, wherever you fall on the feminist spectrum, to do that work first.

You are surrounded by love. Get free.

Onwards!

Right now I’m at the point where if I wanted to cut it, I wouldn’t think twice about it. It’s just hair, it’ll grow back. Not that I don’t care, it’s just that it doesn’t define who I am anymore.

I eventually stopped going to the same salon as them. When I was in high school I relaxed my hair like most girls who had my type of hair. Three years ago, I decided to stop relaxing and transitioned into natural hair. Throughout the time I had relaxed my hair, the comments never stopped. It was either too thin, not long enough, too hard, or not Swahili enough. One of my favorites was when non-Swahili people commented on how sure they were that my hair was awesome under my hijab and how they wished that they had hair like mine.

My decision to go back to my natural hair was informed in part by social media, having seen the natural hair movement by African-American women where they reclaimed the meaning of beautiful hair. The other reason was that I wanted to do this thing that was unheard of in my community for my type of hair: to keep it as it grew. I wanted to prove that it could grow long, even though its texture and type was not the kind associated with long hair. Eventually, I got over that and I have learned to love and enjoy it as it is. Right now I’m at the point where if I wanted to cut it, I wouldn’t think twice about it. It’s just hair, it’ll grow back. Not that I don’t care, it’s just that it doesn’t define who I am anymore.

Biles won the All Around gold world title, her third consecutive win, while Douglas took the silver. That makes Simone Biles a three-time world champion.

During team finals earlier this week, Biles positively flew across the floor, and we congratulate her for a well-earned title.

And, reigning Olympian Gabrielle Douglas bodies the uneven bars also earlier this week.

Black girl magic is conjured from hard work and certainty. As Gabrielle Douglas’s twitter bio says, “NEVER doubt… only BELIEVE.”

Congratulations to them both!