Why Black Female Characters (and Authors) Matter

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We Need Diverse BooksI read this delightful story recently about a young girl in New Jersey who is collecting 1,000 books featuring a black female protagonist. Marley Dias, an 11-year-old black student, said she was “sick of reading books about white boys and dogs.”

“I was frustrated … in fifth grade where I wasn’t reading [books with] a character that I could connect with,” she said.

The sixth grader started her own social media campaign #1000BlackGirlBooks, with the hope that she can donate the books to a school in Jamaica and help other young black girls relate better to the books they read and the characters in them.

What a great idea!  I only wish I was half as thoughtful as she was when I was 11.

This made me think about the books I read when I was younger.  Unfortunately, I really couldn’t think of that many books by black female authors, let alone books with black female protagonists, at least not in elementary or middle schools.  When I finally started reading books by or about black females in high school and college, the subject was a bit intense for my liking at first.  I remember reading:

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

These ground-breaking books were written by dynamic writers, but the subject matter in all of them can be hard to deal with.  All of these books have either been banned or censored by some school districts around the country at one point.The themes ranged from rape, incest, teen pregnancy, colorism, harsh depictions of racism and domestic violence.   

When I first read these books as a teenager, I was especially horrified and saddened, but then amazed and excited, mainly because they were talking about issues I could relate to as a black female in America.  It makes a world of a difference when you can empathize with the protagonist in a book, and this is especially true when the protagonist looks like you. 

I met up with a black female friend who is the mother of a tenth grader the other day, and we were talking about this very subject.  She said she didn’t want her daughter reading any of the above books because she felt they were too vulgar.  “These books make us [black people] look dysfunctional,” she said.  “This is unfortunate because any of these books may be the first book a student of any color will read about women of color during their school years that can set the wrong kinds of assumptions and tones about black women.”

Okay, I can see where she is coming from.  I know there are a lot of other black people who feel the same way.  Maybe this issue of diversity in the protagonist skin tone should also include diversity in subject matter as well.  Statistically, it is still hard to find books in schools with black female or male protagonists on any subject.  According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, out of 3,500 children’s books in schools surveyed in 2014, only 180 were about black people.  The numbers are even worse for books about Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans.  This is especially troubling as America will soon become a minority-majority country.

Now, I am not suggesting that we get rid of the white guy authors altogether!  William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are all wonderful authors, who made significant contributions to literature, and kids should still read their books.  But it is time to add more books to school reading lists that better reflect our world today.  

The first step in doing this is to start identifying and putting together book lists that can be used as recommendations to schools and public libraries.  Getting involved with your local school or public library also makes a difference.  Below I put together a list of my recommendations for books by and/or about black females.  I think in the following weeks and months I will also pull together more book lists showcasing many different types of underrepresented groups.  I think if more people did this, there would be more discussion and, thus, more change in the type of literature our kids read.  There is strength in numbers!

However, this is not meant to be a complete list because there are so many books.  While most of them are adult books, many of them can be read by young adults, depending on their maturity level and reading comprehension. I draw this list from my personal experience working in a multicultural book store once and doing advocacy for my local library.  The top ten books on this list are definitely for young adult readers. These are just ones that I thought of off the top of my head.  Please email me if you have any other suggestions for this list or future lists, especially titles for elementary and middle school kids.

The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson

Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

The Chaos By Nalo Hopkinson

Fly Girl by Sherri L. Smith

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

Push by Sapphire

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Wedding by Dorothy West

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy

Never Far From Nowhere by Andrea Levy

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

China: The Neo-Colonialist?

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Zimbabwe arms shipment returns to ChinaA few weeks ago it was announced that Zimbabwe will use the Chinese yuan as an official currency.  In exchange, China will cancel the southern African country’s $40 billion debt. Mind you, the US dollar and the South African rand are also de facto currencies in Zimbabwe.  Many economists may argue that using the yuan is a good idea to getting around American sanctions.

This is just the latest maneuver by China to further penetrate the African continent through trade and development.  According to the International Monetary Fund, of the 20 countries worldwide projected to grow the fastest by next year, 10 of them are in Africa.  Africa’s population is also expected to double to 3.5 billion by the 2050.

So it would make sense for China and other countries to make a move on potentially big economic opportunities related to the continent’s rich resources and minerals.  Approximately over a million Chinese people have moved to Africa in the last 10 years alone as part of a new scramble for Africa.  However, many feel that China is doing more harm than good.

Journalist Howard French wrote a book a couple of years called China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa.  He traveled to half a dozen African countries to meet with these Chinese migrants about their motivations.  They work in a wide variety of occupations, including factory owners, farmers and even prostitutes.  Many of them come to Africa because they are either tired of the competitiveness, lack of freedoms and/or lack of economic mobility back in China.    

The book left a really bad taste in my mouth and a fear for the worst.  Many of the Chinese interviewees sounded the same way European colonizers did during the original Scramble for Africa over a one hundred years ago.  Most of the interviewees speak of Africans in a very racist manner, commonly calling them the derogative hei ren.  

The biggest gripe with the Chinese businesses is that they hire other Chinese workers – not African workers – to construct big development projects in Africa.  The Chinese businesses say they do this because they feel the Africans are not smart enough, childish, and don’t eat bitter, or work as hard as the Chinese.  Then when Africans are hired for jobs, they are paid low wages with very limited benefits and in dangerous environments. But many of these problems stem from African governments allowing Chinese business to come into their countries while ignoring their labor laws.

It seems like China is setting up these African countries to be totally dependent on them by just hiring only Chinese workers.  It would be more valuable for the continent to practice capacity building, where they train Africans to build and maintain their own infrastructure.  Sure, American aid and development projects in Africa have also been known to have shady, ulterior motives in the past as well, including most recently with PEPFAR, but at least Americans mostly hires Africans to work on African projects.  Even when I work on any media development projects in Africa, we make a conscious effort to hire locals because the whole point of development is all about, in my opinion, “ teaching someone how to fish.”

There is also a Chinese presence throughout the Caribbean.  In Jamaica, where my family is from, there have been similar complaints about Chinese development projects, mostly in the tourism sector with resorts.  Recently I was in Kingston and I noticed that the Chinese community self-segregates themselves from other Jamaicans and don’t usually hire locals in their businesses.  Jamaicans that are hired are treated poorly.  Because of this there is growing hostility towards the Chinese migrant community.  A Jamaican friend once told me, “We have replaced British colonization and exploitation with the Chinese.  They are only here to exploit us.”

What is most interesting about the Zimbabwe situation is that introducing Chinese currency into the country’s economy takes the Chinese neo-colonialist agenda to a whole new level.  China, a country that has a long rap sheet of human rights abuses, is hooking up with Zimbabwe, another country with serious human rights problems. Furthermore, despite the fact that he has been an egomaniacal despot in recent years, Mugabe was originally a freedom fighter 40 years ago who helped Zimbabwe become a free country.  Now it feels it feels like the country is moving back into colonialism.   

Ghanaian business executive Ed Brown said the best quote in French’s book:

“This [relationship] is going to be determine Africa’s future for the next fifty years.  This big question is whether African countries are dynamic enough to take advantage, or whether they’ll end up being the appendage of somebody else all over again.”  

Design That Matters: Tibor Kalman

Tibor KalmanThe purpose of graphic design is to communicate ideas.  Effective design can also change the world.  This is why I am a big fan of the work of Hungarian designer and editor Tibor Kalman.  He is best known for using the artform for communicating social justice issues.  Most of his work from the 1980s and 1990s have influenced many younger designers like myself in communications design.

Kalman once said that “graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances – accents, punctuation and so on – that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to.  I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are.”

Kalman actually went to school to learn journalism, but dropped out to work in a bookstore that would eventually become Barnes & Noble, where he became the company’s first creative director.  He went on to start his own design firm and created corporate brands, but quickly grew tired of it and refocused on innovative design.

His newly-found focus could be first found in the fourth studio album by the punk rock band Talking Heads, which featured four digitally manipulated photographs of the group members – a technique that was done long before Photoshop was ever even invented.

Kalman moved on to working for magazines like Interview and Artform, but he is best known for being the editor-in-chief of Colors, the in-house magazine for Benetton.   He used the platform to explore controversial issues, such as religion, war, sex, crime, abortion, racism, greed and AIDS.  My favorite piece by him is the recreation of Ronald Reagan as a AIDS patient.  It is a disturbing, but effective image of a sickly Reagan to represent his “ill” manner towards HIV/AIDS policy during his presidency.

Kalman devoted one issue to the topic of racism and re-imagined famous people with different skin tones and features, like a black Queen Elizabeth and Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Asian Pope John Paul II and a white Spike Lee.  He also recreated Michael Jackson as a white person, which is not too different from how he actually looked later in his life… but I digress.

Kalman also encouraged other designers to lead by example in other areas of their work, like being more responsible to the environment with their design work.

Unfortunately, Kalman died in 1999 from cancer, but his legacy still lives on through his work and the work of other designers.  If you want to read more about him, check out Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist and Tibor Kalman: Design and Undesign

Here are some of his designs:

tibor kalman collage

Reading Amazing Grace Jones

grace jonesOne of the things I want to do more of this new year is read and review books here.  I get so many books for free to read from publishers and publicists, that maybe I should take more advantage of these opportunities.

A great way to kick this off is with Grace Jones’ new memoir ironically titled I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.  I was first introduced to Jones by way of the 1990s film Boomerang, where she plays an crazed supermodel who throws her panties around and says p*ssy a lot.  She also had a few hit songs back in the day, notably Slave to the Rhythm, My Jamaican Guy and La Vie En Rose – all songs I have currently on my iPod.

She is best known for her androgynous look and wild antics, but I didn’t much much about her beyond that.  With David Bowie’s tragic death this week, it is easy to say that she is his female equivalent. She popped up last summer at AfroPunk in all her glory.  I think her performance was amazing.  So I was happy to hear that she was finally releasing her memoirs a few weeks afterwards.

Her book really gave me a chance to get to know her better.  She is a little before my time, but she is still very relevant. There wouldn’t a Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj or even Madonna if there wasn’t a Grace Jones.  But as she says in the book, unlike many of the today’s singers, she wasn’t putting on an act, she really is a unique wild child.  

She has always been out there long before she became famous; she not putting on an act.  Jones is an original, and not, as she calls Kim Kardashian, a “basic commercial product.” “I cannot be like them, except to the extent that they are already being like me,” Jones says in her book.

So how did Grace Jones become Grace Jones?  The author goes back to her humble beginnings in Jamaica, where she was raised in a strict family of Pentecostal ministers.  When her family moved to Syracuse, New York in the 1960s, it was an opportunity to break away from her religious upbringing.  The book goes into her hippie years doing theater in Philadelphia and living in a commune.  She then moves onto Paris via New York, where her modelling and music careers take off.  She also talks about the many lovers she had over the years, including her on-and-off relationship with Jean Paul Goude, the father of her only child, Paulo, actor Dolph Lundgren, and her brief marriage to a Muslim man who is half her age.

There is also so much name dropping in the book that you start to wonder what famous people Jones doesn’t know!

grace jones

What I was really disappointed in was that there wasn’t much discussion in the book about her androgyny, from the vantage point of what people at that time thought of her look, since it was still pretty taboo in the 1970s and 1980s for a masculine looking, black woman wearing a suit.  

I was specifically hoping that would have addressed the accusation of racism in her image that was created by Goude, who said in 1979 “I had jungle fever… Blacks are the premise of my work.” I get from the book that she was equally responsible for her image, and most of it draws from exploring her Jamaican upbringing and cross gender feelings.  She also says that she connects more with men, or really gay men, who tended to collaborate with her the most throughout her storied career.

But I am looking at her from a more nuanced perspective. She comes from a different era where a lot of her racial imagery wouldn’t be scrutinized like it would be today.  She was asked in a recent interview about how young people today might feel uncomfortable about her image.  In true Grace Jones fashion, she essentially said she really didn’t give a …  “Somebody feels uncomfortable with a certain type of art,” she said. ” But it is an art form to me.”

Despite her public image as a wild child, she lives a pretty normal life as a tennis fan and jigsaw player in between being a grandmother.

As a veteran of the entertainment world, Jones gives sage advice, like don’t live in superficial Hollywood and eat pumpkins to stay young instead of Botox.  That is probably why she looks so young and fabulous on her book cover!

“In the end, I am quite normal,” Jones says.  “I don’t have odd habits.  I might dramatize things a bit, but only because I take things seriously, or sometimes not seriously enough.”

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