Breaking the browngurl code

sabistan:

syriaslyradical:

This goes out to the circle of daughters of immigrants, beautiful muslim women in my friend group who feel like the fuck ups and weirdos of our fams, the sluts, dykes and partiers who wear abayas at the mosque and hit a bong together after
Who sneak out in tunics but wear booty shorts to the club
Who want so badly to be the women their families want them to be but keep falling short

There is an unspoken brown gurl code between us that is vital to our survival. We know:

-thou shalt not reveal your sisters’ “sins” to aunties, mosque goers, MSA officials, haraam policers, and most of all parents! Under no circumstances is it ok for you to approach xy’s mama in the masjid and tell her, “You know, I used to be friends with your daughter until I discovered some of her life choices” as a way to get at her. So manipulative and it will most likely fuck up her life bigtime. Just don’t.
-deny all evidence. For example, my dad told me he saw one of my Good Muslim friends holding hands with a b o y on campus the other day. “Does this mean she has a boyfriend? I should tell her parents, no?” I immediately respond “Nope impossible no such thing never would she ever.” Regardless.if she did or not. You never reveal crushes or relationships because even though we are in our late teens and early twenties, we are still monitored by our communities. Once my sister was turned in by a Mormon neighbor who saw her holding hands with a boy in the mall and the next two years of her life were hell. Her secret rendezvous were revealed to the community, she was shamed and humilated, grounded for two months and broke bonds of trust in our family that still haven’t healed. Which later led my parents to control my teenage years with an iron fist as result. It’s not just gossip-it can be hugely triggering and harmful if you rat out your friends partners. Or tag them on Facebook in posts that say they’re queer and with so-and-so. Then act like it’s their fault for not complying to western rituals of “coming out” and living a fractured life. Fractured life can kiss my ass.
-More on social networking: don’t explicitly post those ratch photos of your fellow brown gurls gittin it when we already know you are friends with aunties or your parents watch your fb page. We all know privacy settings dont do shit.
-if you have a secret safe house for one of your girls to get away from parents who are tracking her do not fucking reveal the location to her parents because you think it’s in the best interest of her safety! What’s in the best interest of her safety is protecting her from manipulative parents who guilt her into coming back into an abusive home time after time and publically shame her for being in “deviant relationships.” I know this is oddly specific but this has happened MULTIPLE times with my sister’s friends by people they thought they trusted in the community
-if you get caught do NOT point to your friends as the reason for your partying/queerness/immodesty/smoking pot. Turning in a laundry list of their misdeeds to make yours seem small in comparison is fucked up and selfish
-dont “out” your friends to people. Ever. Or criticize them for being “hypocritical muslims” just because they exist in conventially deviant ways. Low blow. That’s not up to you to judge in the end. You can still be an amazing person-a trustworthy, humble, honest muslim and do all those things listed above. You can also be a conventionally “good” practicing muslim and be an all around horrible person too. Just a reminder.
-don’t assume, but always watch out. Meaning if you know your fellow brown gurl is drunk out of her mind and being led to the bathroom by that creepy guy who grabbed her ass earlier, tell him you have to tell her something important asap and casually pull the situation away. Or if your friend who you know is in a long term loving relationship and is gonna hookup with that stoner dude because she’s lost it, its ok to remind her of her girlfriends name just once or twice. There’s a difference between judging your gurls’ choices and encouraging them to steer away from the shit that may harm them hugely in the long run
-love each other, unconditionally. There will be drama. There will be turn-ins and turnt up fuckery but it in the end you gotta love each other, keep each other in check, don’t blame each other for the depression and the self destructive behavior but seek help. Don’t make fun of your sister for not being able to put in a tampon even though she’s 22 cos she was socialized to think tampons are for whores. Respect where you come from but don’t give into that Western individualism bullshit either. You are a tribe, a village, a community. You maybe frustrated and exhausted but your complexities are what make you so fucking beautiful. Plus everyone knows that when we brown gurls enter the room we freak up the dance floor like no other, laughing at the people who think they’re holding our asses in place, whispering “Grind baby grind,” while we twerk and bellydance with each other,
shaking our asses for the institutions tryna keep us chained down, for the times we’re called exotic or ghetto or too white or too smart or treated like ethnic commodities, at the parents, cultures, and religious practices we know and love, for the humble beginnings, for speaking Urdu, Turkish, Wolof, Arabic, Bengali, Kurdish, Hindi at home but still being able to communicate, for the times we’ve hit rock bottom, for the times when we’ve held each other in our arms and sobbed like children, we shake our asses knowing,
Fuck that. I’m not even doing this for them. I’m doing this for my girls. I’m doing this for me.

Whoa. Yeah.

Okay.

This is a lot more - I don’t know the word, explicit? Direct? Sexual? - than I would choose to put the issue, but it is certainly a courageous piece of writing that addresses something that a rather lot of women I know must go through. More power to syriaslyradical for her opinion, cuz she’s telling it like it is.

I remember talking to A about something like this - and also to my MSA girls at home (Tufts). I can’t stand it when people judge a fellow Muslimah for her life choices. So she wears shorts? Is in a committed, loving relationship with someone? Is in an uncommitted, sort of dating relationship with anyone? Likes to party? Drinks champagne? And she goes to Jummah prayers every Friday? And she fasts every day of Ramadan?

That does not scream “hypocrite” to me. That’s someone strong enough to know what she wants and to know her relationship with Allah (SWT) and to love her Islam - which, even if it’s not the same as yours, is still divine and sacred and true. That’s someone strong enough to accept herself even when no one else in her community or her family does. That’s someone going through a hell of a lot right there - something that will leave (and probably already has left) indelible scars on her personality and her mental state and her beautiful, soulful heart. That is someone who needs love but can’t get it, someone who is so incredibly fragile and yet so superhumanly strong at the same time.

That girl - the “slut” who’s in a committed relationship and beat herself up for half a year about it, the “slut” who wears shorts over her swimsuit to the beach because that’s modest enough for her, the “slut” (really, I feel like all Muslim girls who deviate are just labeled the “slut”) who just wants to take one dance class (these are all real life examples, by the way) - that girl is not hypocritical. What is hypocritical? The tattlers, the judges, the backbiters, the people who can’t open their minds enough to accept a girl who’s struggling and trying to find her own way, and choose instead to screw with her already tentative state (mind you, many young women find themselves in various states of depression and anxiety from this). 

A lot of people like to belittle the struggle of “that girl” because it seems, to them, like stupid hormonal shit. But this shit is real, and it hurts those who are going through it - most of the time, “that girl” is a young woman grappling with the near possibility of being alienated by her own family, her own people, everything she cares about most in the world. Do you know what that feels like? Yes, you - the tattler, the judger, the snide-remark-er, the holier-than-thou-er. No? I thought so.

So please. Keep your nose, your ears, your mouth, your everything - out of her business.

certifieddimepiece:

It’s really amazing to me how my mom is in a different country, different time zone, different content, but she never fails to piss me the hell off.

My mum … uuuggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh

ten pounds of maraschino cherries

james-bliss:

African-American familial forms and gender relations have been regarded as perversions of the American family ideal. To resituate the authority of those ideals, questions concerning material exclusion - as they pertain to African-Americans - have historically been displaced onto African-American sexual and familial practices, conceptualizing African-American racial difference as a violation of the heteronormative demands that underlie liberal values. As figures of nonheteronormative perversions, straight African-Americans were reproductive rather than productive, heterosexual but never heteronormative. This construction of African-American sexuality as wild, unstable, and undomesticated locates African-American sexuality within the irrational and therefore outside the bounds of the citizenship machinery. Though African-American homosexuality, unlike its heterosexual counterpart, symbolized a rejection of heterosexuality, neither could claim heteronormativity. (‘Nightmares of the Heteronormative,’ Roderick Ferguson,The Journal for Cultural Research vol. 4 no. 4 [Oct 2000]: p. 423.)

I remember reading this in the early months of 2010, and Jared Sexton was leveling a critique against it that I couldn’t quite understand. Clearly, the key line is ‘As figures of nonheteronormative perversions, straight African-Americans were reproductive rather than productive, heterosexual but never heteronormative.’ But Sexton’s argument was that, yes, this is true, but it is not a ‘material exclusion’ of Blacks from the American family/sexual ideal, it is an ontological exclusion from the sphere of family and sexuality. 

And this is precisely the point that Hortense Spillers makes in 1982 in ‘Interstices: A Small Drama of Words’ when she writes:

‘From the point of view of the dominant mythology, it seems that sexual experience among black people (or sex between black and any other) is so boundlessly imagined that is loses meaning and becomes, quite simple, a medium in which the individual is suspended. From this angle, the act of sex has no occasional moments of inauguration, transition, and termination; it does not belong to human or social process, embedded in time, pledged to time and to notions of mortality. It is, on the contrary, a state, of vicious, routinized entanglement, whose passions are pure, direct, and untrammeled by consciousness. Under these conditions of seeing, we lose all nuance, subjects are divested of their names, and, oddly enough, the female has so much sexual potential that she has none at all that anybody is ready and able to recognize at thelevel of culture. Thus, the unsexed black female and the supersexed black female embody the very same vice, cast the very same shadow, since both are an exaggeration of the uses to which sex might be put.’ (inBlack, White, and In Color, p. 164.)

And that is the paradox that functions as the condition of possibility for something called ‘Black sexuality.’ That is, that is how Blackness short circuits the discourse of sexuality (the project of a latter-day Foucault) before it gets off the ground.

(via guerrillamamamedicine)

jcoleknowsbest:

johncollege:

daniellemertina:

johncollege:

daniellemertina:

johncollege:

daniellemertina:

johncollege:

daniellemertina:

i’m *convinced* that when black males assert the idea that black women are not loyal to them that what they really mean is

that some black women are not loyal to patriarchy… the idea that black men are more important than themselves

that’s the only way it makes sense.

esp since ain’t nobody talk about black men not being loyal to black women every time they’re colorist or mock our womanhood publicly in the media/ compare us to white women

hm.

i see ya’ll.

And whats wrong with a patriarchal system of family? Its been that way for human existence and works out just fine. My parents are married and my dad is the head of the house hold. He loves and cherishes my mother and they have traditional roles and it fucking works. I want that for myself…so what am I bad person or a chauvinist?

What do you want? Do you want to be the head of the household? What man would release that role without a fight? Which mean we would fight and why would I want to come home to that negativity. I’m hated on the out side world and the one place I’m suppose to get peace I have to fight with you no thank you.

Kick rocks!

if patriarchy works for you go head. definitely don’t know you and would never be with anyone like you but *some* black women as the original post explicitly said are not interested… i would be one of them.

i actually advocate for equality in households. but that’s a concept that obviously alludes you as a patriarchal man.

i come from a very patriarchal normative family as well & i do not want that for myself.

also, roles within a heterosexual relationship do not go hand in hand with patriarchy. i can want to stay at home with my children and not want patriarchy at the same time. patriarchy is a system that privileges men above women. whereas wanting to stay home may just be my personality. but i’d still consider myself to be equal to my partner

Anyone like me wow. You say that with such negative connotation its rather funny. It dosen’t elude me I can grasp that concept just fine. Your idea of equality in a relationship is flawed. Some one will instinctively always take the lead depending on the couples personality. Your approach to the use of patriarchy in terms of relationship is way to broad. The way you use it is more attune to government than a small nuclear family. Since you keep defining it for me the part you keep over looking is that when talking about family the term is used as head of the household. Which is what I’m speaking to.

it is perfectly possible to have equality in a relationship. it is perfectly possible to exist in a household where no one “leads” generally speaking but rather the man & woman cooperate and accomplish things in that manner

with 2 people there are obviously going to be some areas where 1 person is weak and another strong but to generalize and say that the man i guess would be the strong one in all areas and therefore should be the official leader makes no sense … to me anyway.

which is why i say some black women, not all, are opposed to patriarchy.

i am not misusing the term. institutional patriarchy is one thing. patriarchy within a household is another. i’m currently speaking of the latter. i grew up in a household where a man led and a woman followed. this arrangement is not good for anyone … not even really the man… because it just causes stress on the marriage since if 1 person isn’t happy nobody really can be. plus, it’s just awkward when a man thinks he’s entitled to make the decisions on everything… even stuff he’s not qualified to make the decisions on or stuff he’s less qualified to decide on than his wife

that impacts the WHOLE family unit.

and lol why get offended at me saying i wouldn’t date anyone like you? you wouldn’t date anybody like me! you need a black woman you can stomp on and control so you can have “peace” in your house. and i’m not about that life. it is what it is.

When did this become about us dating? You seem to be emotional about this subject. Obviously you have daddy issues, and can’t distinguish me from your father. Stomp and control wow, You can seek help for that. I took no offense to anything you’ve typed, like your first statement you don’t know me so…..yeah. I just like intellegent discussions and thought we would have one but alas it was not to be. Your idea and experience of a patriarcal household is diffrent from the one I grew up in, so lets just let by gones be by gones.

Be easy sister

daddy issues? dating?

“Anyone like me wow. You say that with such negative connotation its rather funny.” <— that’s what i was responding too.

you sounded pressed. so i responded. but i mean if you don’t think equality is a possibility in a romantic relationship then it would take a special type of woman to invest anything in you.

in the first instance you took the OP and turned it into a “patriarchy is great!” conversation when it’s not great for anyone. not even men. if you understood the true reality of patriarchy. patriarchy is oppressive to all people.

i’ve used the words ‘equality’ i don’t even know how many times but you seem to insist that i’m pro-matriarchy for some reason and i don’t understand that

but it’s much easier to blame it on daddy issues & emotionality … which is what men always do when they don’t have any of actual substance to say a woman.

i do not need help. but you do. you can be happy in a relationship without “leading” a woman. get help for that. you have a problem called sexism.

i’m good. because not all men think like you. thank goodness!

and why do men assume that just because i critique patriarchy that it’s because i have personal problems? personally, i am quite happy in a relationship with guess what… a black man.

don’t act brand new brotha. you need to calm down. just because i’m in love doesn’t mean i don’t have a need to understand sexist oppression anymore.

Its work’s for me so I’m going to continue to be “sexist”.

All brothers actually do think like me. 

It’s okay to throw verbal barbs at me but If I just repeat what you’ve said to me I’m the bad guy

I can only see your argument as intellectual masterbation, and I got tired of it so I ended it before it got long and drawn out.

Thank god all woman don’t think like you are the human race would decay and go extinct.

Head of the family is a bad thing I guess. It’s coo

*Face Palms*….. What this tells me is that you don’t understand how social systems (i.e. PATRIARCHY) works..  Patriarchy is a system under which men hold the “moral authority”, leadership and ownership over anything but most importantly women..

under this system, women are subjugated and objectified. When you objectify someone, you don’t seem them as human.. This makes it easy for people like you to not see their humanity; seeing them as objects in constant need of instruction and direction by a male figure. This way of thinking if fucked up and gives justification to harm done to women. Think about rape. Men aren’t being raped at the numbers that women are.. Why? Because woman are objectified and dehumanized because of this patriarchy that you hold so dear to your poor little heart. They are seen as objects placed here to be used at the discretion of men who are apparently above reproach. This is a real fucked up way to think about other human beings..

And then when women say they don’t like the shit they have to deal with from sexist prick assholes they are told that

You seem to be emotional about this subject. Obviously you have daddy issues, and can’t distinguish me from your father. 

What kind of disgusting ass bullshit is this to say to someone.. You dismiss her feelings about her oppression because it cements who you are as a man. That’s just it… MEN SEEM TO THINK THAT THEY CAN’T BE MEN WITHOUT THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN.. That’s fucked up… Men that think like this aren’t men at all.. They beasts who need taming. Unable to think and function without oppressing others..

You did in this thread what I see men do all the time.. Men think by default that they are right and women are being emotional when they disagree with them. That’s a backhanded ass way to dismiss them and to insult them by deducing their WHOLE FUCKIN LIFE EXPERIENCE TO BEING EMOTIONAL which is seen by “men” like you as irrational, knee-jerk, uninformed, unprovoked responses to nothing..

This is why patriarchy is dangerous.. You can’t even listen to them because they are little emotional objects. This gives justification for all the violence that is thrust upon them by a society of egotistical little boys who like to feel big and bad by making women subordinate..

THIS IS DISGUSTING..

I have a mother, sister, friends, cousins, aunts, grandparents who are all women.. and I’ll be damned if they have to cower in the presence of patriarchal assholes.. They are fuckin human beings are to be treated as such…

sourcedumal:

LOL at this dude. Patriarchy was NOT the standard for black families. It actually was EGALITARIAN until black men decided the only way to get right is to be more like the white man and adopt his ways.

Patriarchy demands that the MAN be the DEFAULT HUMAN BEING while the woman is some outside, lesser valued humanoid creature that mimics being a person.

Patriarchy demands that the woman sacrifice her well being to sustain it’s own hurtful cycle.

Patriarchy demands compulsive cisheteronormativity, working to eliminate any sort of queer identities and relationships, deeming them deviant and lesser than the so called “norm” of the man-woman relationship.

Patriarchy demands that all men act within the rigid spheres of hypermasculinity, stomping out and even KILLING men who do not wish to be that caricature.

Patriarchy demands that a relationship be based in power, where the male is valued over the woman in any and all spheres.

Fuck the patriarchy. It is an oppressive system that should have never been adopted by the black community.

digestivepyrotechnics:

“WHITE MEN GET BLACK PEOPLE AND WOMEN AS THEIR SUBORDINATES IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD?! IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK THAT A MY WOMAN BE MY SUBORDINATE AT HOME?! Wai… Wait. Yes? It is too much? You want to be considered my equal? In that case, KICK ROCKS!”

If your safe place away from racism is your home, where is the safe place for your wife from racism and sexism? Nowhere, because apparently your comfort is a priority because you’re the “man”. There’s nothing wrong with traditional roles (mom WANTS to stay at home and raise the kids), but there’s a lot wrong with patriarchy. Don’t tell women to fuck off when they want to be treated as equals. 

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

“What do you want? Do you want to be the head of the household? What man would release that role without a fight? Which mean we would fight and why would I want to come home to that negativity. I’m hated on the out side world and the one place I’m suppose to get peace I have to fight with you no thank you.”

I stared at this conversation for half an hour and I still can’t believe that there are black men who genuinely think that because they are oppressed within white supremacy, It is their given right to oppress black women at home, as a way to find …  ’peace’ ??

O_O

“What man would release that role without a fight?”

Well a man who is not needy, insecure and who doesn’t need to assert his self-worth and self-confidence through the subjugation of women