A Look Back

Dyan Cannon on phone in the '60's

Sophia Loren in a breeze.

Helen Mirren, actress "Woman In Gold" 

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Beautiful and stunningly beautiful white women from days gone by formed and support the opinions about what was the standard for this and the last century.

Look at this gallery. It is more of a tribute. Women like Kim Novak and Sophia Loren featured in this gallery of poses, who set standards today's woman glances at in their mirrors for glimpses. Yes, this is a tribute to the influence of white women in our sensibilities. This gallery of comparative photographs skips through the mid-twentieth century with darlings like Caroline de Maigret and Lucille Baugh! Audrey Hepburn set the standard of elegant poise and the long forgotten Isabel Jewell!

If you look close and beneath the assumptions they are all white women, whose influence framed the network of thought and esteem Black women from then until now hold as mirrors. In the strive for freedom Black American's struggle for identity begins with images framing their perception of themselves.


Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
October 14, 2017

pretty legs of Ginger Rogers.

Anna Q. Nillson in 1920. 

Mae Busch's exquisite beauty in 1922. 

Hedy Lamar in the style of the 1940's.

singer, Crystal GAYLE

Long hair of singer, Crystal Gayle held me captive from the first time I saw her singing. It moved, or swayed as a body animated by the sensuous quality of her voice. the song in her hair, the look in her eyes justified being moved by her beauty. Back in those years racial pride was raw in the Black community, and there was no justification for yearning for a white woman, if you weren't white! You could admire, but long for, and worse pursue a white woman in the 1970's was to banish yourself from your people.

A lot of thought went into messing with white women. There were repercussions to weigh against the immediate disapproval from all who mattered. Being glib about it was naïve. It sounded foolish coming out of anyone's mouth. Very simple minded people believing they are hip, in today's climate, like to whine about how they've gotten beyond race! The notion is insulting. Black Americans can't blink an eye, or make a dismissive comment and the stench of our Ancestor's outrage fade! Those who've made the journey from the deepest levels of a commitment to honor their true self have done the spiritual work engaging their rage in the social climate of the States, and its history with a skill set unadorned by the pretense of political correctness. Over time this endeavor rewards the spirit, liberates the mind, and eases the pain of the Ancestors.

Who would dare do such a thing? - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories (May 5, 2018)

Crystal Gayle, country singer, onstage...

He Who Controls the Images. . .

Dove ad released October 2017.

Did Dove Just Call Me Dirty?

The actress Danielle Brooks responds to the company's offensive ad. 

By Danielle Brooks

October 9, 2017

"Scrub your knees. Don't forget your elbows. Use more soap," my mother would say as she checked in on my six-year-old self in the bathtub. She knew my body was dirty from all the sticky germs I'd gathered on the playground or at gymnastics practice. Yet even as she ordered me and my brother to use more soap, she never once made us feel that our skin color was dirty.

You might be thinking to yourself, Well, of course she didn't. What kind of mother would make her children feel that way? But the sad fact is that no matter how much adults like my mom built us up and made us feel pride in who we were and what we looked like, there was always a sneaky, vicious monster out there, determined to knock us right back down. That same monster has been whispering in the ears of little brown and black children since before my great-grandmother's time, telling us that the color of our skin makes us dirty.

As much as I've worked to armor myself, to defang that monster and keep it at bay, it ambushed me again yesterday morning, as if to remind me of my vulnerability.

I was scrolling Twitter, as I do every morning during my rise-and-grind routine — catching up on the latest news from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter; scanning to see what funny video has gone viral in the middle of the night, what crazy rant 45 is on now — when something disturbing caught my eye. An advertisement. Four images. Two women: one black, one white. The black woman happily peels off her brown top, which is the exact same color as her skin, to reveal a smiling white woman in a white top. In the bottom right corner of each image is a bottle of Dove body wash.

I pause. Scratch my head. Think for a minute. Wait. Dove, you want me to believe that using your soap will turn my skin into that of a white woman? No — that can't be it. You want me to believe being black isn't clean? You want me to believe that black = dirt and white = purity and using your soap will make me clean? Got it. You're telling me my skin, the deep, rich melanin that I was born with and cannot change, is filthy. Got it.

That's painful.

That stings.

And Dove, I understand that you've apologized for your racist, "missed the mark" ad. Good for you; we should apologize when we offend others. But do you even know what you are apologizing for? I appreciate your expression of "deep regret," but what is it exactly that you regret?

Do you regret that your ad has caused controversy, that people were offended by the ad? Do you regret the negative publicity? The potential damage to your bottom line?

Or do you regret that you put this racist piece of nonsense out into the world? That, apparently, not one person in your organization even questioned its insidious message before approving it for release? That you put it onto Facebook with its platform of two billion users? That you fed that monster of my childhood and gave it the strength to whisper into the ears of another generation of children born a rainbow of shades? Do you own it?

Do you regret that you've labeled one of your products a "nourishing lotion for normal to dark skin"? Do you even have black people on your marketing and advertising team?

Do you regret becoming the most recent addition to the historical legacy of detergent companies using racist images to sell their soap?

In the past, you have shown your commitment to "thoughtfully representing women of color." I even participated in one of those ad campaigns myself, and I was proud to be a part of it. Do you regret taking that feeling from me?

You were disrespectful, Dove. Thank you for the apology, because I was hurt by this. Thank you for reminding me that it's not only about seeing more representation. The way in which we see representation is what truly matters. And thank you for reminding me that the whispering monster still lives, that it has not been vanquished. Thank you for reminding me that the "Black Girl Magic" and "My Melanin Is Poppin" T-shirts and jewelry I rock aren't just statements of pride. They are armor, armor against the sneak attacks like the one I experienced over my breakfast yesterday.

Danielle Brooks is an actress, singer, activist, and designer.

Elegant lady, Danielle Brooks. photo by Matt Sayles.

BOOK PROMOTION: A LUMBEE GERSHOM

Anita Jo Shifflet reading her book,

A Lumbee Gershom. (2018) 

alumbeegershom.com

Lonely and tired, the lovely young Indian woman with the white father and Lumbee mother embraced courage and chased truth as she looked into the angry eyes of a crowd that judged her. She knew she was the evidence her parents had broken the law by loving and marrying one another. She also knew her existence was evidence that racism exists in people of varying shades of color. Her two worlds melted into one as she looked directly into the eyes of her critics and began to speak.
"For I have been a stranger and have dwelt in a strange land...I am A LUMBEE GERSHOM." 

Anita Jo Shifflett, Lumbee author and lawyer promoting her book in November of 2016.

🌻 A LUMBEE GERSHOM🌻


Where Do You Dwell? Are you prepared for a journey into my world? A world where my skin deceived those that did not know the true me? A world where I grew up playing with the children of great writers, doctors, attorneys, United States Generals, and even United States Senators. Or would my real world interest you more? The world of my brown skinned mother and my people, the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina. A community filled with clapboard houses, mobile homes standing a top of exposed cinder blocks, old pick up trucks with strong brown arms propped upon doors making their way down old dirtroads, mule pulled tobbaca’ crates, the sweaty faces of the tobacco croppers with barefoot Indian children freely running through flat fields of sand and old Indian women sitting on front porches shelling field peas faster than any machine could possibly imitate.

Such scenes came from my hidden world…the world of A Lumbee Gershom.
Or does my secret world interest you more? A place where words like “miscegenation”, "mixed marraiges”, "Eugenics” and "forbidden love affairs” shaped my young adult life.
And the best part?
Every word is true…. Take the journey with me, JoJo…the original Lumbee Gershom.

ON SALE NOW $15.00 SIGNED TO YOU BY JOJO. BUY YOUR COPY NOW AT
alumbeegershom.com

a boy, a man struggle

a boy 

"In America I was free only in battle, never free to rest. And he who finds nowhere to rest, cannot long survive the battle." ~ James Baldwin 

drawing of James Baldwin.

"And the young white revolutionary remains in general far more romantic than a black one. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state. But black people have not been so lucky. A black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot but a raving maniac. The truth is, that this country does not know what to do with its black population, dreaming of anything like the Final Solution." ~ James Baldwin 

Cultural Pattern

First Nigger in the White House



Sarah Palin is "Fine as can be...", but that and being vapid are not good traits to honor at the national and the international level. But, we do, as a country, like to employ low standards to overcome high expectations specifically when it comes to race, and as a tactic against the usual high commitment Black Americans have always been committed to, and practiced, at major junctures of our roads!

Conservative, and liberal white Americans, consistent to the bone, are steeped in the racial politics of this country embraced by a history they wish no one would bring up anymore; yet the story comes up. It is too well known, and always expecting its return on the value of supremacy and its importance in this culture and white folk's place in history!

Donald Trump was boosted to leadership because he came from and represented the low end capacity to engage in truth with no moral compass to direct him to the sophisticated level of manhood a nation needs to be better. White America needs that. It supports the illusion that our contradictions, and our past can disappear if they say the words. Same holds true for morality. High moral standards and highly developed intellectually capacity, among white political elite and the rank and file, were despised in former President Obama by this class of people on both sides of the political persuasion. History supported their actions of sabotage that followed his election into the high office!

This is the pattern.

As a child, we had to recognize it, prepare for it, and be better than it! It is white Americans pretending their ideologies are void of what is odious to the rest of the thinking world! Alone this dichotomy will, and is undermining the country! This is the American way!


Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
January 14, 2018

Sarah Palin attends SNL 40th Anniversary Celebration at Rockefeller Plaza on

February 15, 2015 in New York City.

Sarah Palin brings to the fore a major contradiction in America's intellectual culture. There is an insistence on the reinstatement of mediocrity, and the disregard for profound historical introspection is fundamental to a large segment of American society. I like Sarah Palin. She is gorgeous and easy on the eyes but we cannot be swayed by beauty. We need to establish an intellectual, and spiritual stance indicative of a super power responsible for more than conquest.

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
January 14, 2010 

Sarah Palin taking questions from audience !!!!

Color Politics, Passing, and dem White folks!

actress Fredi Washington, remembered for her compelling role in the 1934 film, Imitation of Life.

The Complexities of Passing for White ● "Though Washington was cast as a mixed race character more than once, she identified strongly as a black woman, and was outspoken in renouncing racism." 

_________________



"When African American actress Fredi Washington played a black girl passing for white in the 1934 film Imitation of Life, she was accused by critics of denying her own heritage. In fact, Washington never hid her roots, and went on to become an activist for African Americans in the performing arts. As she later told Hue magazine, “I’m honest and…you don’t have to be white to be good.”

The young, black starlet posed a challenge for a Hollywood used to seeing in black and white. Washington was so light-skinned that she reportedly had to wear makeup to play black characters. According to Washington’s friend Jean-Claude Baker, a restaurateur and author, many who saw her thought she was white and she was able to frequent whites-only establishments all her life without problems. “She did pass for white when she was traveling in the South with Duke Ellington,” Baker is quoted as saying in Washington’s New York Times 1994 obituary. “They could not go into ice-cream parlors, so she would go in and buy the ice cream, then go outside and give it to Ellington and the band. Whites screamed at her, ‘Nigger lover!’”

At the height of her career, Washington was cast as a number of mixed-race characters. Even though she was representing a reality as American as apple pie, Washington was also bringing to the fore the gnarled predicament of race and the many shadows it casts on everyday life...

Fredericka Carolyn Washington was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1903, the second of five children...[The family] moved north as part of the Great Migration, settling in Harlem, a place teeming with culture that would come to be known as the pounding heart of black America.

Washington was a dancer before she became an actress. Her first role was as a chorus girl alongside Josephine Baker in Shuffle Along, a popular 1921 Broadway revue..."

https://timeline.com/the-complexities-of-passing-for-white-4c8cf23c3754 

Fredi Washington, actress born December 23, 1903.

Black FACE!

Amara La Negra Shuts Down Trolls Saying She’s In Blackface

"Amara La Negra is both black and Latina, a concept many online trolls can’t quite seem to grasp.

The Miami-born Dominican singer first addressed social media comments that she is donning blackface during a live interview with The Shade Room...

But it seems the issue didn’t end there. On Thursday, the singer once again addressed accusations that she wears blackface by posting an adorable throwback video of herself participating in a beauty pageant when she was a child.

“Well Yea I guess I was Born in a ‘Black Face Body!,’” Amara wrote in the Instagram caption for the video. “Its funny that I even have to go through this and show you baby pictures or videos to prove to blogs and people on social media that my skin color is not airbrushed or spray tanned nor do I take melanin shots to be black!”' 

Amara La Negra is a Miami-born Dominican singer.

"Being an Afro-Latina in the Latin market is particularly difficult, because you essentially have to work twice as hard to prove yourself. As much as people want to say that racism is over and it doesn’t exist, it does, especially in the Latin market. When they talk about a Latina, they talk about Sofia Vergara or Jennifer Lopez, Shakira even. But not anyone who looks like me, and I’m 100 percent Latina.

I’ve been in novelas, but the roles that are carved out for us are more often than not stereotypical. You’re a slave, a drug addict, a gangster, or a murderer — those kind of roles. It’s tough to land a serious role. And anytime I say stuff like this, people are in shock. Like they can’t believe I just said racism is alive or something. Listen, I can only speak from my own personal experience.

One of the reasons I’m so rebellious and I wear my hair from my head attached to my body, is because for many years I was told this bullshit lie that in order to be beautiful, I had to have straight hair, because my hair was too “unmanageable.” Hello! I’m black. Yes, I’m going to have nappy and kinky hair. But that’s part of what makes me beautiful. And it took me years to know and realize that. I’m straightening and burning my hair for what? To please who? I was doing it to try and fit into society." ~ Amara La Negra 

Facing a New Year!

1st Lady Michelle Obama. 

There are choices to be made in the 18th year of this century. Among them is one of style, not in the frivolous sense of dress, but of survival in a tumultuous time period when the ingredients of what makes the U.S. a terror are raging, tugging at the seams of pretense. Do Black women have choices to be made? 

Sure do. 

The wrong one is to die. One is a choice between what Michelle Obama embodies, and life in the streets dictate. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories [December 29, 2017]

Gun pose.

Roxsi Iris by Roland Dawson shot at Keith Snead's studio in Newport News, Virginia.

Body paint by Hand Paintedd Bud. (2017)

fear in Marketing: a history lesson

On this day Nov. 5, 1956 The Nat King Cole Show debuted on NBC.

[[ Nat King Cole, the internationally celebrated singer and pianist... was the first African-American man to have a television show. It started as a 15-minute program on NBC and expanded to a half-hour in July 1957.

The show was seen as controversial for giving such national exposure to an African-American artist. Many of Cole’s fellow artists, from Ella Fitzgerald and Eartha Kitt to Mel Torme and Peggy Lee, performed for union scale or even for no pay, in order to help the show to save money.

Nonetheless, the Nat King Cole Show was forever hampered by a lack of national sponsorship... The show continued until Dec. 17, 1959… [Cole] once spoke about the lack of sponsors of his show by saying, “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.” ]]

Nate King Cole singing with his daughters.

Between the Weak and the Strong: distance

NEWS

Work Place Discrimination: "In one of the latest incidents, GRAND RAPIDS, MI has reported a case in which a black nurse has sued Spectrum Health System as she claimed that officials had accepted a white patient’s request for no black caregivers.

Michelle Acklen, who was working for Spectrum Health through Cross Country Staffing, said she was re-assigned to patients on numerous occasions until her ...assignment ended in July.

In a lawsuit which was filed in the U.S. District Court, attorney Julie Gafkay said that Acklen felt harassed and humiliated because of the segregation of her duties and discriminated against as she was unable to perform her nursing responsibilities because of her race. Furthermore, her reputation has suffered damage.

According to Gafkay, Acklen, who lives in Tennessee, worked at Spectrum Health Rehab and Nursing Centre on Fuller Avenue NE and had been placed by the staffing agency in early October 2016. Having been assigned to Spectrum Health, Acklen was required to follow its practices and to report to Spectrum Health supervisors, and as such, she was treated as a Spectrum Health worker.

The debacle had started in March when a supervisor told Acklen that a certain patient no longer wanted black caregivers or nurses. According to Acklen, the patient’s request was granted. It was noted in the lawsuit that when she was assigned to the patient’s floor, she had to change patients with a white nurse." - author unknown 

Response

She needs stronger skin. Suing, I feel, is a weak reaction. It is not unreasonable this request. It is better to be clear with what you and your person in the hospital wants and needs to recover and ask for it. Everything is negotiable.

I asked for my mother to be treated like a white woman when she was in the hospital in her last months. I demanded it in such a way the head nurse had to adjust herself and meet my command. I had to make similar demands for my Grandfather-teacher when he was in a hospital. He did not want Nigerian nurses with skills in the dark arts over his body. I demand and insist upon being cared for exclusively by Black women physicians and Black nurses with a healing touch. Being offended and suing is weak, and not my concern in the serious business of caring for a loved one in the hospital.

It is very much like a person in a hospital insisting upon his sacred items be present in his or her room.

One needs to be able to negotiate. Sometimes those requests cannot be met and adjustments have to be made on everybody's part. I finally had to have two white doctors, both of whom were instrumental in keeping me alive. The first one became close to me as a friend for a lot of years.

In a country rooted in slavery, bondage of the soul, the axiom of war and the contradictions of racial superiority favored by white Americans a person of color needs a better thinking process! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 10/31/17