Courage to be a BLACK WOMAN

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, was a washerwoman who had given up her dreams of becoming a music-hall dancer. Her father, Eddie Carson, was a vaudeville drummer. He abandoned Carrie and Josephine shortly after her birth. Carrie remarried soon thereafter and would have several more children in the coming years.

To help support her growing family, at age 8 Josephine cleaned houses and babysat for wealthy white families, often being poorly treated. She briefly returned to school two years later before running away from home at age 13 and finding work as a waitress at a club. While working there, she married a man named Willie Wells, from whom she divorced only weeks later.

It was also around this time that Josephine first took up dancing, honing her skills both in clubs and in street performances, and by 1919 she was touring the United States with the Jones Family Band and the Dixie Steppers performing comedic skits. In 1921, Josephine married a man named Willie Baker, whose name she would keep for the rest of her life despite their divorce years later. In 1923, Baker landed a role in the musical Shuffle Along as a member of the chorus, and the comic touch that she brought to the part made her popular with audiences. Looking to parlay these early successes, Baker moved to New York City and was soon performing in Chocolate Dandies and, along with Ethel Waters, in the floor show of the Plantation Club, where again she quickly became a crowd favorite.

In 1925, at the peak of France's obsession with American jazz and all things exotic, Baker traveled to Paris to perform in La Revue NËgre at the Theatre des Champs-ElysÈes. She made an immediate impression on French audiences when, with dance partner Joe Alex, she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt.

However, it was the following year, at the Folies BergËre music hall, one of the most popular of the era, that Baker's career would reach a major turning point. In a performance called La Folie du Jour, Baker danced wearing little more than a skirt made of 16 bananas. The show was wildly popular with Parisian audiences and Baker was soon among the most popular and highest-paid performers in Europe, having the admiration of cultural figures like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings and earning herself nicknames like Black Venus and Black Pearl. She also received more than 1,000 marriage proposals.

Capitalizing on this success, Baker sang professionally for the first time in 1930, and several years later landed film roles as a singer in Zou-Zou and Princesse Tam-Tam. The money she earned from her performances soon allowed her to purchase an estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, in the southwest of France. She named the estate Les Milandes, and soon paid to move her family there from St. Louis.

In 1936, riding the wave of popularity she was enjoying in France, Baker returned to the United States to perform in the Ziegfield Follies, hoping to establish herself as a performer in her home country as well. However, she was met with a generally hostile, racist reaction and quickly returned to France, crestfallen at her mistreatment. Upon her return, Baker married French industrialist Jean Lion and obtained citizenship from the country that had embraced her as one of its own.

When World War II erupted later that year, Baker worked for the Red Cross during the occupation of France. As a member of the Free French Forces she also entertained troops in both Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps most importantly, however, Baker did work for the French Resistance, at times smuggling messages hidden in her sheet music and even in her underwear. For these efforts, at the wars end, Baker was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Resistance, two of France s highest military honors.

Following the war, Baker spent most of her time at Les Milandes with her family. In 1947, she married French orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, and beginning in 1950 began to adopt babies from around the world. She adopted 12 children in all, creating what she referred to as her rainbow tribe and her experiment in brotherhood. She often invited people to the estate to see these children, to demonstrate that people of different races could in fact live together harmoniously.

During the 1950's, Baker frequently returned to the United States to lend her support to the Civil Rights Movement, participating in demonstrations and boycotting segregated clubs and concert venues. In 1963, Baker participated, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., in the March on Washington, and was among the many notable speakers that day. In honor of her efforts, the NAACP eventually named May 20th, Josephine Baker Day.

After decades of rejection by her countrymen and a lifetime spent dealing with racism, in 1973 Baker performed at Carnegie Hall in New York and was greeted with a standing ovation. She was so moved by her reception that she wept openly before her audience. The show was a huge success and marked Baker s comeback to the stage.

Read more here:

Josephine Baker in her heyday!

VIEWED from Above

View from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, FRANCE
October 21, 2012

Self viewed from above, within & below the surface.

CONTRASTS

I've been to Paris, twice, and I don't remember this view. Perhaps its one reserved for lovers.
Playboy

There is a lifestyle that obscures base elements of a society.

The first time I went to Paris I was 18 years old. We went as a family, and stayed in a nice hotel I remember with fondness because, first of all, the ride by taxi from the airport to the hotel scared the shit out of us all. Daddy hired a few cabs because we had a lot of luggage between seven people, most pieces weighing 70 lbs. My cab driver was a gruff mannish looking woman with enviable size to her arms and girth to her midsection. She didn't say much. She grumbled in French jargon saying words like, 'merde'.  She intimidated us throwing 70 lbs. bags around like they were made of air and feathers, and then ordered us in the car, more by gesture and threat, and sped off at high rates of speed through insane traffic patterns.  My brothers and I, squeezed in the back, held on tight to the brown leather seats for dear life frantic a bit; scared she'd get lost, or we'd turn over, or run over some poor pedestrian playing roulette with their lives trying to cross a street!

When we got there at the speed of sound she repeated herself mumbling under breath, and throwing our bags around like they were spools of toilet paper. Finished she stood impatiently staring at us, but not really staring, just scaring the hell out of us until Daddy finally paid her and the other cabbies.

Our rooms were right out of a 1940's film: elegant, opulent, spacious. We pretended we were stars used to this life. The bathrooms were odd. There was a wash basin, a toilet, a tub and a tiny miniature tub in the bathroom. The tiled floors and high ceiling made us feel expansive, and silly with glee. We started making fun of the tiny toilet and gloating a bit for some reason that makes no sense in retrospect, until I pressed a knob on the tiny toilet and water shot straight up into the air. We jumped out of our skins, shouted and screamed in dismay. By the time we stopped laughing and figured how to shut the thing off we were wet and slipping on the floor. It was so funny, but we still didn't know what it was and couldn't stop making up things to laugh about.

One night, after everyone was asleep, I slipped out of the room and the hotel and wandered the streets of Paris. I knew enough about ants to know how to navigate. I wandered the streets like the child I was. So many things I am sure Parisians take for granted loomed larger than life for me. They were countless. I made myself invisible sometimes to observe people and events because I didn't speak the language, and I didn't know anyone. When I saw the false dawn the mood of the city changed. I could sense it. It was a movement, a taste of transition. Walking I was drawn forward until I peeped around a corner and saw, arising out of the sidewalks from behind whatever they'd slept under, whatever hid them, homeless men stretching the sleep out of their bodies!

I was aghast.

They started clawing for territory and food. They were fighting over trash cans and tearing at each other with guttural sounds and no language, no French curse words; just looks over their shoulders. Their bodies guarded food sources. Their eyes warned each other away. This was gutter warfare. This was the tear in the illusion of the city of love. It was the opening wound to an understanding of an underworld of existence and survival previously closed to me by the privilege afforded me by my parents.

My awakening was in Paris. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories (1.11.13 a new moon)

Saeeda

Pakistan:

Saeeda 14, is a victim of an acid attack. A man named Waheed who owned a school where Saeeda’s mother worked asked for Saeeda’s mother’s consent to marry her daughter. Saeeda and her mother rejected the proposal; but after pressure from her brother Saeeda, she eventually agreed.

Shortly after nikkah (the matrimonial contract between bride and bride groom in Islamic marriage), Saeeda was accused of adultery and having a loose character. Waheed started abusing Saeeda, then she discovered that Waheed and her brother’s wife were having an affair. Saeeda who was pregnant at the time confronted Waheed and he pushed her down the stairs, resulting in a miscarriage. Waheed demanded dissolution of the marriage in order to avoid compensation: 100,000 rupees. Saeeda refused and was beaten, poisoned, and thrown in front of a car. Waheed then gave her sleeping pills claiming they were painkillers.

One day Saeeda allegedly took too many pills and fell unconscious. Waheed called Saeeda’s brother and told him that Saeeda attempted suicide. After Saeeda recovered, Waheed sent her back to her family. Saeeda’s mother begged Waheed to either divorce Saeeda, or take her back and live like a respectable couple.

Unfortunately, Waheed had other plans; he arrived one night to the house and threw acid on Saeeda. 

MODELS form study

Parisian woman on a Paris street
by the Sartorialist

Paris

DREAMS

Black beautiful Keli J. 

Black beautiful Juliette Deu Paris
is a musician & singer living
and working in Paris, France.

Davana Medina

Darla Serafina, fb

FASHION: an African story

Carine Roitfeld

Carine Roitfeld's Style Secrets


12 May 2009

French Vogue editor (and Anna Wintour's rumoured successor) Carine Roitfeld has revealed her style secrets in an interview with Acne Paper and insists she barely ever wears jeans.


Carine said: "I only wear jeans and flat shoes when I am on holiday, never for work. Jeans suit me very well but it's not for me anymore. It's horrible to say but it has something to do with age."

She added: "Jeans are for my assistants..."

Carine said on her own style: "If people ask me to describe my look I always say: quite classic with an edge. Look at my dress. It doesn't look like I have on anything special, it’s more the way you mix the clothes and how you move, how you open your bag, how you cross your legs - just little things that make a difference. "

The editor also put paid to rumours she weighs members of staff in her office: "People think I weigh my girls in the office but I do not. We have a scale in the office because we travel a lot and sometimes you can't bring more than 25 kilos a case. It’s just to weigh my luggage, not to weigh my editors."

Is it wrong we sort of hoped this rumour was true?!

Carine Roitfeld
"It's a new kind of project for me."

Carine Roitfeld to style for Barneys


24 March 2011

Former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld is to become US store Barneys guest editor and stylist for fall/winter 2011-12.


Carine Roitfeld is to become Barneys guest editor and stylist for fall/winter 2011-12.


The former French Vogue editor - who left her position at the prestigious magazine in January - has teamed up with the US store to style and edit their Mario Sorrenti-shot advertising campaign, catalogue, newsletters, as well as the windows in their New York store, which will be unveiled in September.


Speaking about her new role, Carine told WWD: "It's very exciting. It's a new kind of project for me. It's good to have a new life, because now I can do projects that I never dreamed of before. For me, Barneys has always been the biggest name in luxury department stores, so to be able to participate in this project with them, and be visible during the next fashion week in New York, is my dream come true. To a French girl, it's a big, big dream."


Carine says she was drawn to the offer from Barneys because it gives her the opportunity to try something new.


She said: "To be on the other side with the retailers and buyers is new for me, and I always like new opportunities in my life. When I was doing my styling, most of the time I was thinking about a real woman who was going to wear the clothes. Sometimes I was thinking about myself, sometimes about a woman who really inspired me, but it was always about the woman. Working with Barneys, and choosing the looks, I was thinking about whether a real woman would buy this outfit and feel beautiful and comfortable."

Carrie Roitfeld

Carine Roitfeld prefers curvy models

18 October 2011


Carine Roitfeld always preferred using ''curvy'' models to skinny females when editing French Vogue.

Carine Roitfeld prefers using "curvy" models.


The former French vogue editor insists she never used models she thought were too thin in the magazine as she felt a responsibility to her readers, in particular because she knew her children would see the images.


She said: "In my 10 years, I never put a girl that was too skinny in French Vogue. I think readers can be very impressionable and you have to pay attention to what you tell them and put in the magazine.


And I tell myself that my kids are going to read the magazine and I don't want them to feel bad.


"I prefer to use curvy girls like Lara Stone."


Carine believes none of the women depicted in the magazine were ever objectified and she always tried to give the impression of "strong" females.


She added in an interview with the Independent newspaper: "I don't think the woman in French Vogue was an object. She was always a real woman.


"Even if there was a lot of bondage around her, I don't think she looks like she is suffering. If she wears high heels and a garter belt, it's because it's what she wants. She's a strong woman."

Dutch model Lara Stone
http://www.listal.com/lara-stone_ii 



Lara Stone



Black model

 Fashion professionals have taken the definition of big and large, and ample outside of its definitions, and applied meanings initially designed to assuage the insecurities of European women who paled in attributes African women were born with. In the centuries past when European men first gasped in astonishment at African women’s extraordinary figures, and collapsed from taking in the enormity of their breasts and thighs, and behinds their minds muddied with lust, and they began campaigns of conquest into the continent. White men long subordinate to oppressive, and conservative views around sexuality and obsessed with fulfilling raging lust for women, children, other men, and animals were presented with a challenge by African women. Faced with a social structure deemed superior by its legacy and the depths of its spirituality, education and insights into Nature, the universe and the mysterious natures of Water, Earth and Sky African women, the African continent, and its cultures intellectually assaulted French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Portuguese men standing on the dark soil of Africa.


Today that legacy of reaction and thought is publicly flaunted in fashion statements and comments made by fashion professionals, and critics like former French Vogue editor, Carine Roitfeld’s claim: “I prefer to use curvy girls like Lara Stone.” – Gregory E. Woods

Black Unity & her sister in a club !!!!

brown sista's collage !!!

 
 

reparations: White America has already paid the Bill

Paris Hilton in a white top, thick gold necklace

In matters of race, it is the one itch we cannot scratch; the stone in our shoe that does not go away, no matter how much we shake it.



Slavery. And the debt it brings Black people from white people. I’m not one of those who shrugs off the value of apologies — even for social injustice…


Anyone who has betrayed a loved one knows why. No one can really move on until the betrayal is admitted, explained and atoned for. It’s why a jilted girlfriend or cuckolded husband insists on hearing the reason why — even when they already know.


But when it comes to slavery, I think white America has already paid that bill as much as it ever will. And insisting on more seems less about healing and progress and more about Black people basking in white folks’ guilt and shame.


Will a slavery apology pull more young Black men from prison, or get more of them through high school and college? Will it curb the alarming tide of AIDS in Black communities or bring Black fathers back into their children’s lives?


Will it pull an ounce of trash from a rundown Black neighborhood or create a single, well paying, working class job?


We have seen institutions apologize for past inequities connected to slavery and Jim Crow…


Did any of these apologies bring new initiatives for covering people of color or insuring underinsured Black neighborhoods? Of course not. Because in America action often stops at apology.


… I suggest we simply look at some institutions that have already apologized for their part in the centuries-long enslavement of Black people.


… No doubt these apology initiatives were undertaken with the best of intentions. But these apologies, passed without a substantial discussion of the White privilege or Black poverty they enabled, were incomplete — like a thief apologizing for stealing your wallet while using your cash to buy his next meal.


Unless an apology for slavery comes with a comprehensive agenda of initiatives aimed at erasing the historic inequities it created, White America can keep it. As any cuckolded husband will tell you, an apology doesn’t mean much if you don’t right the wrong you caused in the first place. ~ Eric Deggans, excerpt from EBONY magazine august 2007

Parisian woman in streets of Paris by the Sartorialist

black woman in Paris le Jardin des Tuileries by The Sartorialist

HAITI, FRANCE & AMERICA

This was sent to me from Abena Disroe.

THE HATE AND THE QUAKE

BY SIR HILARY BECKLES

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES is in the process of conceiving how best to deliver a major conference on the theme Rethinking And Rebuilding Haiti. I am very keen to provide an input into this exercise because for too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption. Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence which shows that Haiti's independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.

The evidence is striking, especially in the context of France. The Haitians fought for their freedom and won, as did the Americans fifty years earlier. The Americans declared their independence and crafted an extraordinary constitution that set out a clear message about the value of humanity and the right to freedom, justice, and liberty. In the midst of this brilliant discourse, they chose to retain slavery as the basis of the new nation state. The founding fathers therefore could not see beyond race, as the free state was built on a slavery foundation. The water was poisoned in the well; the Americans went back to the battlefield a century later to resolve the fact that slavery and freedom could not comfortably co-exist in the same place. The French, also, declared "freedom, fraternity and equality" as the new philosophies of their national transformation and gave the modern world a tremendous progressive boost by so doing.

They abolished slavery, but Napoleon Bonaparte could not imagine the republic without slavery and targeted the Haitians for a new, more intense regime of slavery. The British agreed, as did the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. All were linked in communion over the 500 000 Blacks in Haiti, the most populous and prosperous Caribbean colony. As the jewel of the Caribbean, they all wanted to get their hands on it. With a massive slave base, the English, French and Dutch salivated over owning it - and the people.

The people won a ten-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery. Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic. For the first time since slavery had commenced, Blacks were the subjects of mass freedom and citizenship in a nation.

The French refused to recognize Haiti's independence and declared it an illegal pariah state. The Americans, whom the Haitians looked to in solidarity as their mentor in independence, refused to recognize them, and offered solidarity instead to the French. The British, who were negotiating with the French to obtain the ownership title to Haiti, also moved in solidarity, as did every other nation-state the Western world.

Haiti was isolated at birth - ostracized and denied access to world trade, finance, and institutional development. It was the most vicious example of national strangulation recorded in modern history. The Cubans, at least, have had Russia, China, and Vietnam. The Haitians were alone from inception. The crumbling began. Then came 1825; the moment of full truth. The republic is celebrating its 21st anniversary. There is national euphoria in the streets of Port-au-Prince. The economy is bankrupt; the political leadership isolated. The cabinet took the decision that the state of affairs could not continue.

The country had to find a way to be inserted back into the world economy. The French government was invited to a summit. Officials arrived and told the Haitian government that they were willing to recognize the country as a sovereign nation but it would have to pay compensation and reparation in exchange. The Haitians, with backs to the wall, agreed to pay the French. The French government sent a team of accountants and actuaries into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands, all physical assets, the 500 000 citizens were who formerly enslaved, animals, and all other commercial properties and services. The sums amounted to 150 million gold francs. Haiti was told to pay this reparation to France in return for national recognition. The Haitian government agreed; payments began immediately. Members of the Cabinet were also valued because they had been enslaved people before independence. Thus began the systematic destruction of the Republic of Haiti. The French government bled the nation and rendered it a failed state. It was a merciless exploitation that was designed and guaranteed to collapse the Haitian economy and society. Haiti was forced to pay this sum until 1922 when the last installment was made. During the long 19th century, the payment to France amounted to up to 70 per cent of the country's foreign exchange earnings. Jamaica today pays up to 70 per cent in order to service its international and domestic debt. Haiti was crushed by this debt payment. It descended into financial and social chaos.

The republic did not stand a chance. France was enriched and it took pleasure from the fact that having been defeated by Haitians on the battlefield, it had won on the field of finance. In the years when the coffee crops failed, or the sugar yield was down, the Haitian government borrowed on the French money market at double the going interest rate in order to repay the French government.

When the Americans invaded the country in the early 20th century, one of the reasons offered was to assist the French in collecting its reparations. The collapse of the Haitian nation resides at the feet of France and America, especially. These two nations betrayed, failed, and destroyed the dream that was Haiti; crushed to dust in an effort to destroy the flower of freedom and the seed of justice. Haiti did not fail. It was destroyed by two of the most powerful nations on earth, both of which continue to have a primary interest in its current condition. The sudden quake has come in the aftermath of summers of hate. In many ways the quake has been less destructive than the hate.Human life was snuffed out by the quake, while the hate has been a long and inhumane suffocation - a crime against humanity.

During the 2001 UN Conference on Race in Durban, South Africa, strong representation was made to the French government to repay the 150 million francs. The value of this amount was estimated by financial actuaries as US$21 billion. This sum of capital could rebuild Haiti and place it in a position to re-engage the modern world. It was illegally extracted from the Haitian people and should be repaid. It is stolen wealth. In so doing, France could discharge its moral obligation to the Haitian people. For a nation that prides itself in the celebration of modern diplomacy, France, in order to exist with the moral authority of this diplomacy in this post-modern world, should do the just and legal thing. Such an act at the outset of this century would open the door for a sophisticated interface of past and present, and set the Haitian nation free at last.

Sir Hilary Beckles is Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the Cave Hill Campus, University of West Indies