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Your regular source of fierce female chat. Hosted by Adwoa Aboah and featuring different guests, as they talk, share, listen and take control of their lives.

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Spots, cysts, acne, bright-red-tomato-face with skin flaking off. Whatever your breakout, we know how much of a confidence-kill troubled skin can be. I have battles with my own skin, but I hide it quite well - I say no to jobs, I don't go to events, I wear a hoodie.

We're so used to retreating to the shadows...

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Spots, cysts, acne, bright-red-tomato-face with skin flaking off. Whatever your breakout, we know how much of a confidence-kill troubled skin can be. I have battles with my own skin, but I hide it quite well - I say no to jobs, I don't go to events, I wear a hoodie.

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How The 25 Black Women In Beauty Collective Is Providing A Literal Seat At The Table For Beauty Executives And Mavens

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How The 25 Black Women In Beauty Collective Is Providing A Literal Seat At The Table For Beauty Executives And Mavens

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominiquefluker/2019/09/24/25bwb/#1cc58bfe1dd5

Related to the reading

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https://www.legallyblack.space/

"We are four Advocates of Social Justice from South West London and we have come together to combat the way black people are portrayed in the media.  We have all been affected by the issue directly and indirectly and can see first hand the damage it causes. With your support we can make a stand to increase fair representation of black people… for good.

The aim of the project is to increase awareness surrounding the lack of black representation in the media and furthermore create dialogue and discussion around the often inaccurate and harmful depictions that do occur.

First Project:

By replacing characters from famous white dominant TV programmes with black people we believe we can do so locally and maybe with media influence nationally. We have chosen famous British films and series to alter, in order to make it recognisable to the British public, however we have featured some popular foreign movies.

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Key point:  how these activists have manifested Black feminist impulses through social media and beyond, and suggest it is the responsibility of those invested in (re)imagining a more democratic process to closely consider the radically intersectional lessons of the current movement.

"Yet I suggest it is twenty-first-century activists, as exemplified by the Black lives matter movement, who have finally succeeded in making intersectional issues of racial oppression visible to mainstream America. "

"The hashtags that have arisen alongside and in collusion with #BlackLivesMatter are similarly reflective of this unrepentantly intersectional Black liberation politic." - discuss this from critical perspective. Are BLM that inclusive?
#GirlIGuessImWithHer

What about
#sayhername hashtags?
What about
My brother's keeper project during Obama's administration?

hashtags and other forms of situated knowledge arising from networked counterpublics and embraced by a new generation of Black activists should be treated as important contributions to the democratic process. They are a call to include nuanced issues of identity in activist spaces and in national political conversations. They are a call to recognize the value of political thought that arises from the margins and that just might transform our democracy, if we let it.

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The Lyons family gather in 2019, unaware that their future holds many surprises.
- Futuristic approach
- Discusses migration, sexuality, austerity, racial and gender roles (it could be better) and new possibilities of Othering/ identities.

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The Lyons family gather in 2019, unaware that their future holds many surprises. Absent sister Edith brings news from abroad that will change their lives forever.

One night in 2019, politician Vivienne Rook causes a scandal on live TV. At the same time, the Lyons family comes together as Rosie gives birth to a son. Brothers Stephen and Daniel gather at her bedside with grandmother Muriel, all wondering what life will be like for little Lincoln.

Five years in the future, in the London of 2024, Stephen and Celeste worry about their daughter, Bethany, who declares herself a transhuman. Back in Manchester, Daniel is now married to Ralph but is falling for a Ukrainian refugee, Viktor. When the Lyons gather for Muriel's birthday, they're interrupted by a call from their missing sister, Edith. She brings extraordinary news, and life for the Lyons is about to change forever.

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BBC One - Years and Years, Series 1, Episode 1

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The Lyons family gather in 2019, unaware that their future holds many surprises. Absent sister Edith brings news from abroad that will change their lives forever. One night in 2019, politician Vivienne Rook causes a scandal on live TV. At the same time, the Lyons family comes together as Rosie gives birth to a son.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7825208/
Facing a violent military dictatorship and an intimidated opposition, writer-turned-politician Carlos Marighella articulates a resistance all the while ousting heinous crimes of torture and the infamous censorship instituted by the regime.

-the low rate on IMDB reflects on the way dictatorship in Brazil has been boycotting the film.
- This film has been prohibited in many schools and the screening in Brazil has been cancelled in many cinemas.

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Bacurau

After the death of her grandmother, Teresa comes home to her matriarchal village in a near-future Brazil to find a succession of sinister events that mobilizes all of its residents.
- Discusses collective organisation
- Mobilisation
- Metaphor of the political situation
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2762506/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1

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This is America - Childish Gambino - TRIGGER WARNING GUN VIOLENCE, SWEARING 

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This is America - Childish Gambino - TRIGGER WARNING GUN VIOLENCE, SWEARING 

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A entire song and music video full of symbolism as a form of political resistance such as:
-  a man being shot in the back of the head with a handgun, while Gambino assumes a comical stance similar to a Jim Crow caricature.
- children using their cell phones to record the chaos happening in the video, while Gambino sings the lyrics "This a celly / That's a tool". Martha Tesema, writer for website Mashable, stated that "cell phones have been used as tools to broadcast police shooting, rioting against, or choking black people in this country".

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Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)

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"Resistance is not exterior to power but an inherent aspect of it."

Do not forget: the norm is the measure of difference. Creating resistance, creates other ways to (re)produce norms. There is a need for a constant negotiation of positionality in power. (Shirley Tate, 2015)

The hieroglyphics of the flesh still textures our/their beauty/ugliness as much as it does a feminist theory on beauty norms and white iconicity which still needs to be decolonized. This decolonization is necessary because of its focus on that colonial myth that ‘all the women want to be white’ (Tate 2010).

"We can only attempt the decolonization of beauty norms by going beyond the oppositional logic of colonialism which has given rise to marginalization and subalternity within Black feminist
politics and by recognizing the importance of the intersections we
inhabit as Black women for Black decolonial feminist politics."

"Normalization represses beauty difference and dissenting looks by asserting body values in relation to its bodily rules."

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Terrible representation of Brazilian slum culture and Black people.
- political resistance in conversation with this film.
After this film was released, people from City of God had trouble in finding jobs if their address was on their CVs.

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City of God (2002) Official Trailer - Crime Drama HD

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Raising cultural, political, historical elements in the film involving intersectional aspects: sexuality, class, nationality, langugage and ethnicity.

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“SELMA” is the story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic struggle to secure voting rights for all people – a dangerous and terrifying campaign that culminated with the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and led to President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Selma Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Oprah Winfrey, Cuba Gooding Jr. Movie HD

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Ava DuVernay - Keynote Address | 2013 Film Independent Forum

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Ava DuVernay - Keynote Address | 2013 Film Independent Forum

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Producing films with political approaches

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Ava DuVernay - Keynote Address | 2013 Film Independent Forum

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Series about the history of slavery, Jim Crow's laws, mass incarceration of Black people, in the contemporary USA.
The topics raise key political issues using intersectional approaches in terms of drug addiction, fatherhood, women's liberations, children sexuality, domestic violence, intergenerational topics within the Black community.
The series is places in New Orleans, with a great selection of music and created by Ava DuVernay

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Spike Lee film about the first true story of an African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Problems in the film:
- police is the saviour
- portray of Black Panther women
- representation of Black and white women as fragile/ dependant/ back stage performativity
- bad representation of white racist people joining KKK (class, education and intellectual ability: making jokes as if KKK people were only uneducated white people who did not know how to spell, for example).
- white women's fragility

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BLACKkKLANSMAN - Official Trailer [HD] - In Theaters August 10

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Cecile Emeke - filmmaker brings political issues in her productions

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Cecile Emeke - filmmaker brings political issues in her productions

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Strolling USA - Bande Annonce VOSTFR - Afrostream

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Why activists brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the UK (2016)

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Why activists brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the UK (2016)

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‘Deaths are not just happening in the US’: how a protest movement first launched in America made its mark in Britain

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On the same day last week as protesters lay down in front of traffic on roads around England, a video of the shooting of an unarmed teenager by police in Chicago was released in the United States.

Shock and anger greeted the death of 18-year-old Paul O'Neal and sympathy poured in for his family. Some 4,000 miles away, the peaceful protest being played out on the asphalt, the first ever day of action by Black Lives Matter UK, met with disbelief and irritation and a handful of arrests. Why were motorists being inconvenienced over a racism that was America's problem? There lay the British complacency, said Natalie Jeffers, co-founder of Black Lives Matter UK. There might be fewer guns used in the UK, she said, "but there is a war going on against black people".

Her words are supported by statistics showing an alarming gulf between the experiences of black and white people in Britain - in education, in the justice and prison systems, and in employment. Stop and search is heavily targeted at young black men - who are four times more likely to be stopped by police than young white men - while people from black and ethnic minorities are far more likely to go to prison than a white person committing a similar offence.

In 2014 black people made up 10% of the total prison population, while making up 3.5% of the UK's total population, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. There is a greater disparity between the proportion of black people in prison and in the general population than there is in the US.

Research by the campaign group Inquest shows a disproportionate number of those who have died as a result of the use of force in police custody were black or from minority ethnic groups. Despite numerous scandals over abuse at immigration detention centres and allegations of brutality used during deportations, no criminal charges have ever been brought against anyone.

It suggested a radically different picture, said Jeffers, of the kind of equality in British society than many like to paint.

"We have dozens of British families left fighting for justice over their loved ones suffering state violence, so we know there's a problem in the UK, and that's before the Brexit debate that we're now seeing reflected in the rise in racism at street level," said Jeffers.

It was no coincidence that Friday was the fifth anniversary of the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old north Londoner whose death sparked riots that spread across Britain in the summer of 2011, and whose inquest verdict of lawful killing is now being challenged by his family. Campaigners chose Heathrow for one of their sit-downs as a nod to both the proximity of two immigration detention centres and as an act of remembrance for Jimmy Mubenga, the 46-year-old who suffocated while being forcibly restrained by three G4S security guards on a deportation flight to Angola. The three were acquitted of manslaughter, and the judge in the case refused to accept that streams of racist texts on phones of two of the men were relevant.

"We really are focused on sharing the British narrative," said Jeffers. "It might have taken the shocking images from deaths in the US to awaken young people, but they're aware of oppression at an individual household level, they see what happens within our communities.

"After Brexit, people are seeing the direct change in language online, aware of being seen as another in your own country. People of colour even being told to 'go home'. There were vans bearing racist slogans being driven round British streets. We know there's a direct link between street racism and state racism.

"When you are walking around the streets of the UK as a black or brown person you're seeing this, you're feeling this. It's an everyday occurrence. It's been too often silenced by the national narrative of where the UK is at.

"But we know the black and ethnic minority community was hit twice as hard by austerity as everyone else, we know a black woman is more likely to be unemployed than a white woman. We know black women and queer women are facing extreme levels of oppression. All the statistics that affect families here every day.

"We need to look at high levels of violence in impoverished communities in the UK. I grew up in a mixed community. I saw black people, Asian people and white people facing the same sorts of oppression and difficulties. That is the way the white liberal left like to paint it. But the impact is enlarged when black people are involved.

"In Britain somebody dies every six days in police custody, not just black people. But black people are over-represented in these cases. As is mental health - if a black man has a mental health episode, police are more likely to see that as a show of aggression than if a white person has the same episode."

Jeffers, from Birmingham, lost her brother, Luke, a 42-year-old schizophrenic, under tragic circumstances when his condition worsened after he lost his benefits. It is not clear how he died.

"For him it was bureaucratic violence," she said. "It's not all about deaths. Look at Julian Cole, [a young black man] left in an unresponsive state in Bedfordshire, left with a broken neck. They said he was drunk, then back came the toxicology and he wasn't. The family has no answers. Sean Rigg [who] died in 2008, his family [is] left to fight at a time when they are traumatised. It's happening time and time again. Of 1,563 deaths in police custody since 1990, we have zero convictions."

Rigg's sister Marcia has said the Black Lives Matter movement is an "absolutely vital" platform. An IPCC investigation into Rigg's death identified no police misconduct, but in 2012 an inquest jury found that police had used "unsuitable" force.

"Families like mine have been suffering for a long time and there has been an injustice," she said. "Deaths are not just happening in the US, they are happening in the UK too, and so it's the perfect platform to highlight those deaths in Britain because people are not aware of them."

Another case which was highlighted in Friday's protest was the death of Sheku Bayoh, 31, who died after being restrained by officers in Fife in May last year. His cousin, Kadija Sesay, said: "People need to realise that this happens in the UK all of the time, in state institutions - it happens."

Jeffers said the gun-driven brutality in the US was obviously not being replicated on the streets of Britain, but inequality and discrimination existed at alarming levels. Black Lives Matter in the US began initially as a hashtag on social media in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. Co-founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi said they wanted to rebuild a black liberation movement, but one led by the most marginalised, giving a voice to women, to gay and transgender people. That, said Jeffers, was the same principle for the UK movement.

"BLM UK gives us a new framework. Nobody is excluded from the room. But we have learned it's important not to see the movement go the way a lot of anti-racist movements do, led by white people, middle-class white people. We welcome white allies, we want participation, but please do not take over from people who are directly affected by the oppression and acknowledge your privilege. Listen, but don't dilute or devolve what is being said. Silence, white silence, is complicity and there is room for everyone to engage in change. We can be a powerful force.

"It's about how we can educate and inform our youth, the traumas that they are experiencing and the outlets for these traumas. The war on black people, these statistics for stop and search - disproportionate amount of police divested in ethnic poor areas and the lack of investment in educating and empowering black communities, working class communities.

"A lot of people have lost their voice, they feel powerless. We want to give them their voice back."

* The University of Sussex podcast series The Glass Bead Game features an episode featuring Natalie Jeffers by Will Hood at www.theglassbeadgame.co.uk/episode/blacklivesmatter/

How it began

The case that proved to be the catalyst in launching Black Lives Matter was the killing of Trayvon Martin, 17, in 2012.

Martin, who President Barack Obama said "could have been my son, could have been me 35 years ago", was shot dead inside the gated community in Florida where he had been visiting his father's fiancee. The man who killed him, George Zimmerman, was a neighbourhood watch coordinator.

Martin had gone out to buy a drink from a store and was 70 yards from home when an altercation with Zimmerman took place. Zimmerman's claim he acted in self-defence was accepted during what was a flawed police investigation into Martin's death. Initially no charges were brought against Zimmerman but, when he went to court, a jury found him not guilty.

A survey by the Washington Post found 90% of African Americans called the shooting unjustified, compared with 33% of white Americans.

After Zimmerman's acquittal on a charge of second-degree murder in 2013, a widely distributed Facebook post used the phrase "black lives matter", which quickly became the country's newest black civil rights movement. The US group spawned a British offshoot and groups are being set up in Canada, Brazil, France and South Africa.

In May this year, Zimmerman sold the pistol he had used to shoot Martin online for $250,000.
Topics

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Why activists brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the UK

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On the same day last week as protesters lay down in front of traffic on roads around England, a video of the shooting of an unarmed teenager by police in Chicago was released in the United States. Shock and anger greeted the death of 18-year-old Paul O'Neal and sympathy poured in for his family.

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Nigerian painter who reimagines Blackness in the Eurocentric Art World

form of political resistance

Rejecting stereotypes

Incorporating elements of blackness into a white dominant art sphere.

For example, placing black representation into paintings which were originally only for the white sphere. This is evident from the set of paintings with black people on the saddle of a horse. This motif was common for white royalty, therefore Wiley redefines this to recreate representation of Blackness.

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Artist Kehinde Wiley is known for his colorful portraits of everyday African-Americans in the style of classical European paintings. Raised in South Central Los Angeles and educated at the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University, Wiley has lived and worked around the world.

His paintings, sculptures and stained glass windows depict people of color in a tradition that has historically rejected them or reduced them to stereotypes.

A two-year traveling exhibition of Wiley's work, called "A New Republic," is making its final stop at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. It opens on June 17 and closes in September. KGOU's Nomin Ujiyediin spoke with Wiley during his first visit to Oklahoma City on Wednesday.
TRANSCRIPT:
Ujiyediin: I met Kehinde Wiley in a gallery on the first floor of the museum, surrounded by his paintings and sculptures. Almost all of them feature black men and women on elaborate floral backgrounds, reclining or standing regally. Wiley says he wants to create portraits that depict real life, and bring together the past and the present.

Wiley: What you see in my work is a celebration, not only of young black and brown Americans, but increasingly a global conversation. Is it about America or is it about the culture that America beams out into the rest of the world? I think that's what you'll find here at the exhibition is as a stab at understanding the cultural temperature of an increasingly vibrant global youth culture that's shot through the rubric of American hip hop.

Ujiyediin: You've said that your work now is a form of self-portraiture in a way. So what pieces of yourself do you put into your work?

Wiley: Well, so much of the work that you'll see here has a sensibility, a style, a type of brash American bravado. But if you look a little closer at a lot of these paintings, you'll see little sperm cells that are silver, gilded, little nods towards human sexuality, my own sense of desire and these paintings. It's the only time that you'll see me in these images.

Ujiyediin: Who do you make your art for?

Wiley: Well, there's several audiences when you're thinking about art. You have to think about the ivory-tower-educated white elite who basically run the art business internationally. But you also have to think about what turns you on as a creator and what you want to spend the rest of your life on this on this earth doing. A much more sort of fluid and a dynamic urban sensibility is something that informs my work tremendously. So there is no singular audience, it kind of bounces around.

Ujiyediin: What does it feel like to combine those worlds?

Wiley: I think that many people of color understand what it's like to have your own unique culture but also have to interface the culture of a dominant group. It's called code switching and it's something that we do without thinking. In this show what you'll see is a great amount of code switching in terms of what the expectations are, even for an artist like myself, for my career, for my gender and for my race.

Much of the way that we look at black men specifically in America has to do with a very fixed notion of hypersexuality, propensities towards sports and anti-social behaviors. And I think that there's a there's a there's a dissonance between the received culture and the body that I happen to inhabit. And there's a strange bifurcation that happens in the minds of many people of color and it's not just an American question but one that has to do with the interface between your reality and the one that's being presented to the world as true when you know it's not true. The opportunity for an artist has to do with being able to communicate human subtlety, to be able to communicate a level of complexity of identity that exists outside of these sort of binaries that we're oftentimes presented with.

Ujiyediin: How would you like to see the American art world change in terms of whose bodies are depicted and also who gets to depict those bodies?

Wiley: I'd like to be able to see a lot more permission given to everyone involved. I'd like to be able to see a lot less self-consciousness when it comes to the polite depiction of what's acceptable to a politically correct set of assumptions. Our culture needs to get a little bit more intellectually perverse and challenge its notions of what the acceptable is.

As a community-supported news organization, KGOU relies on contributions from readers and listeners to fulfill its mission of public service to Oklahoma and beyond. Donate online, or by contacting our Membership department.

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Kehinde Wiley Reimagines Blackness In A Eurocentric Art World

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Artist Kehinde Wiley is known for his colorful portraits of everyday African-Americans in the style of classical European paintings. Raised in South Central Los Angeles and educated at the San Francisco Art Institute and Yale University, Wiley has lived and worked around the world.