Sunday, March 22, 2009

Point Three: Explanation & Protest Action

Why I am doing this:

There is a lot of power within and amongst Black women. However, because “we’ve been conditioned from an early age by advertising, pop culture, and the news media… [and] surrounded 24/7 by images steeped in racial stereotypes, … there’s simply no way for [black women] not to be influenced by them.” These images have served as weights and chains that have restricted Black women’s movement and ability to exist as whole entities in open and personal spaces within American society. I believe that working to remove the weights and chains and to heal the scars left behind on Black women, their families and their communities is a means of and goal of social change in the Black Freedom Struggle in my generation.

Explanation:

I am focusing and expanding on Point Three: WE WANT DIVERSIFIED, COMPLEX AND NON-MONOLITHIC PORTRAYALS OF BLACK WOMEN.

We believe that the images of Black women constructed by our oppressors have been used to further develop a capitalist and racist agenda historically rooted in the enslavement of African people. We believe that these images have and continue to oppress Black women and their communities beyond the end of chattel slavery and the present day. We believe diversified, complex and non-monolithic portrayals of Black women in the media will break America's psychosis of Black women and free them from the mental and psychological bondages that racist and sexist imageries have entrapped Black women, their communities and America in since before the fruition of this nation.

Protest Action:

I will interviewing various people (academics, artists, students, mothers, etc.), where I will ask them to look at various images and representations of Black womyn, define and interpret them as they understand them and how the work that they do helps them define their own Black womanhood on their own terms.

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