A little bit of everything.
Leilani Fu’Qua and Foluke Salami dive into all things pandemic, online schooling, relationships, employment, entertainment, and more as they wrap up 2020 in today’s episode. Listen here!
This week’s podcast features Nommo staff members, Leilani Fu’Qua and Foluke Salami, and special student guests, Jack Angel and Sarah Isen, as they dive into queer representation in television and provide juicy commentary on the “Slag Wars: The Next Destroyer” premiere. “Slag Wars” is a new reality TV style competition where internet personalities and adult film actresses Rebecca Moore and Sophie Anderson scout the British countryside for the next queer adult film sensation. This podcast episode discusses Black representation in LGBTQ+ media, the unique approach Moore and Anderson took to reality TV, and building a brand and following from viral internet content. Tune in to our podcast here!
*This content is for mature audiences only.*
**Content Warning: sex, use of profanity**
Hundreds of UCLA students convened in front of Kerckhoff Hall on November 10 to protest Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. Rally participants expressed deep fear and anger over the hatred of the new president and his followers, validated marginalized identities who are in particularly increased physical and emotional danger, and attempted to prepare supporters for four years of sustained resistance.
Photo by Crissonna Tennison
The rally began at 11am with comments from representatives from Young Progressives Demanding Action at UCLA, who organized the rally: “They don’t win until we become complacent…for the next four years, use civil disobedience, phone bank, canvas, vote. This is really in our hands.” After the opening remarks, UCLA students, faculty, and local community members took turns talking to the crowd, alternating between talking about their own feelings and experiences and energizing the crowd for future action.
Comparative Literature Professor Gil Hochberg, along with three other professors, informed the crowd that they created a new committee dedicated to providing intellectual and emotional support to students resisting Trump. “We are gonna work together. It’s not gonna be easy, but you can’t let that go. You can’t work for a little bit and be disturbed a little bit and let it go.” Information science professors Sarah Roberts and Safiya Noble energized the crowd by pointing out the United States’ long history of oppression. According to Roberts, “This is the end game of over forty years of neoliberal control and oppression from the United States of America on other peoples, on other countries. This is 200 years plus of oppression in the United States of black people and indigenous people in this country.” Noble added, “We’ve got everything at stake right now…this is happening on our watch. This is the future we will inherit.”
At noon, the rally turned into a march that looped around campus past Powell Library, Perloff Hall, and Schoenberg Hall before ending up back at Kerckhoff. Students chanted phrases such as “F*** Donald Trump!” “Hey, hey, listen clear, immigrants are welcome here!” “Not our president!” and “The people united will never be divided!” At the end of march, attendees gathered for final words of encouragement.
Photo via poets.org
Recently, UCLA’s library archive celebrated the organizational efforts and arrival of works by Afrikan American writer Wanda Coleman, including her poetry and TV/Film screenplays. The campaign to bring Coleman’s work to UCLA was spearheaded by English PhD candidate Kim Calder. The intimate celebration featured anecdotes and readings of selected pieces by many of the event’s attendees. Guests included Tisa Bryant, Sesshu Foster, Harryette Mullen, Douglas Kearney and Coleman’s husband Austin Strauss. Tisa Bryant described Coleman as a woman of “candor” who didn’t shy away from the brashness of truth in depicting the grit of life in Los Angeles or, the Deep West, as she called it. Bryant added that this honesty “iced her dreams” towards LA’s glossy appearance of glamour coming to age.
Wanda Coleman grew up in Watts with a love for the written word and was considered Los Angeles’s unofficial poet laureate until her death in 2013. Her works won her many accolades including a National Book Award finalist and an Emmy. As a community activist, one of her commitments was to work with and instill in younger poets a departure from the shackling concept of political correctedness. This demonstrates Coleman’s heart in seeking the freedom of others, achieved beyond binaries that don’t sit well with their truest selves. Of those that she influenced is Annakai Geshlider, a fourth year world arts and culture major, who attended and comments, “I was excited by how she identified as a performance artist and a performance poet…and how it was inspiring for my own writing”.
Giving her words a life of their own, Coleman successfully wielded the power behind her rhetoric. Known for never whispering, she embodied the urgency of her words needing to be heard.
Imagine her shouting this excerpt from her poem Busted on My Watch, and what emotions it could evoke if its author performed the agony and innocence and helplessness within the poem.
trapped in the prison of recriminations
sputtering to the broke syntax of imaginary crime
you will rat yourself out daily
to those invisible keepers who declared you
incorrigible at your moment of conception
yes. i did it. i was black. and thus-and so…
Coleman’s work explored themes of racism, eroticism, womanhood,and poverty, something she was very familiar with as indicated by the multiple jobs she took on to support her family.
When asked why Coleman did not receive as much acclaim as her counterparts i.e. Maya Angelou, Calder reasons that the existence of inequality afforded by certain combinations of race, class, and gender, along with her more radical approach, placed her among the predominately white punk scene and fashioned her genreless. This lack of definitiveness presented a challenge to Calder in organizing Coleman’s papers. Why is there such a need for art to be categorized when the expression of form relies heavily on creativity and one’s ability to craft something that has not been done before? It advances the false perception of the idea of diversity. Coleman’s pursuit of her own agenda allows her works to be relevant beyond the timeframe in which she wrote, because of her way of tapping into the human condition that renders itself universal. The following poem reflects a 1982/2016 experience of racial discrimination.
Part 1 of South Central Los Angeles Deathtrip 1982
jes another X marking it
dangling gold chains & pinky rings
nineteen. done in black leather & defiance
teeth white as halogen lamps, skin dark as a threat
they spotted him taking in the night
made for the roust
arrested him of “suspicion of”
they say he became violent
they say he became combative in the rear seat of
that sleek zebra maria. they say
it took a chokehold to restrain him
and then they say he died of asphyxiation
on the spot
summarized in the coroner’s report
as the demise of one
more nondescript dustbunny
ripped on phencyclidine
(which justified their need to
leave his hands cuffed behind his back
long after rigor mortis set in)
Photo via Pixabay
On Wednesday, November 9, UCLA students were obliged to attend classes amid the emotional aftermath of one of the most traumatizing events in recent U.S. history. On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump will become the President of the United States of America. Dear God help us all.
It feels like a waste of time to parse, yet again, all of the views and actions that make this man unfit to lead; to list, yet again, all of the people he has plowed through, stepped on, and threatened in his horrific ascent. We already know that a Trump presidency threatens undocumented immigrants, people of color, women, those who practice Islam, and the LGBTQ community. Everybody knows it. Those who voted for him did so either because of his hatred, or despite it. It’s hard to know which is worse.
Fourth year African-American Studies major Taylor Alford and fifth-year Civil Engineering major Winston Boyce reflected the views of many black students on campus today when they expressed “outrage, surprise, disappointment, and shock” at the election results. Boyce elaborated, “People treated it as business as usual. But shit ain’t the same.”
First year student Princess Amugo expressed fear. “I’m just so afraid for our people of color and our intersections. I just wish for everyone to stick together. We have to go against everything that man stands for.”
Afrikan Student Union Representative Alicia Frison highlighted the larger issue of institutional anti-black racism while emphasizing the need for energy and engagement moving forward:
“I was not dependent upon the election’s outcome, because regardless of who was elected, our oppressor would be the same…Though this appears to be a dark, hopeless moment, it is merely just that, a moment here to remind us of our goal: liberation, not an election…before we consume ourselves in rage and mobilize, lets refocus that energy towards our goal. I look forward to coming together and unifying as a community. For now, let’s heal and get ready to continue the work.”
For now, the only way we can move is against: against racism, nativism, sexism, all the other “isms” that liberals can no longer pretend exist only in the shadowy periphery of this nation’s collective identity. It may be difficult to know right now what that movement looks like, but we must lean on each other to fight discouragement and fulfill our collective responsibility to defy and eventually dismantle the systems of hatred that have enabled Trump’s victory.
“We use Assatta Shakur’s chant often in organizing spaces,” Frison explained, “but I think understanding its meaning is vital in coping with the election results. ‘It is our duty to fight, it is our duty to win, we have nothing to lose but our chains.’ Our goal is liberation, and that comes through empowerment.”
Photo by Geralt via Pixabay
We all know what trolling is. It’s when anonymous people on the internet, most of whom seem to be profoundly unhappy, post negative, unhelpful comments on forums and comments sections of websites. Often, they are so nonsensical and persistent that one can only assume their sole purpose in perusing the internet is to upset people. Indeed, this is how Urban Dictionary defines trolling: “Being a prick on the internet because you can. Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent by-stander, because it’s the internet and, hey, you can.”
The effects of trolling range from annoying to downright damaging. This is especially the case when trolling veers into hate speech, specifically racism. SNL and Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones experienced this firsthand over the summer, when she was bombarded with racial slurs and pictures of apes. The abuse was so strong that Jones “felt numb” and had to remove herself from Twitter. The next day, Twitter responded by banning Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, the man who allegedly started the abuse, from Twitter, saying, “‘People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter…But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online.’” Yiannopoulos responded by claiming that Twitter “‘has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives.’”
The Twitter incident is a perfect example of the role that website moderators play in determining the environment of their website. But this is a role many moderators take up reluctantly, if at all. Moderators fear, not just angry backlash, but the Bill of Rights. Trolls love citing the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, and unfortunately, the amendment does little to stave off hate speech. According to First Amendment Scholar David L. Hudson Jr., “Unless online hate speech crosses the line into incitement to imminent lawless action or true threats, the speech receives protection under the First Amendment.” (In other words: when it comes to emotional or mental safety, you’re on your own.)
This hasn’t stopped some websites, like Twitter and Google, from setting up filters that block posts that contain certain inflammatory words. However, trolls have found a way to get around this by coming up with code words.
Unfortunately, it appears racist trolling will be around as long as racists are around. So how can members of the black community reap the benefits of being on the internet while minimizing the emotional damage we sustain?
The simplest answer is to just ignore the trolls. Like the Urban Dictionary says, trolls want to get a rise out of people. Most of the fun is engaging with people and making them increasingly upset. If they have no proof that their abuse is working, they are more likely to go elsewhere.
There are a few exceptions to this. Feminist writer Roxane Gay occasionally responds to trolls on her Twitter account. (Her Twitter bio includes the phrase “If you clap, I clap back.”) Social justice writer Ijeoma Oluo used Martin Luther King quotes to respond to one troll, who eventually broke down and admitted that he was a fourteen-year-old who had lost his mother in the previous year. While Oluo’s experience is heartening, black people should not feel that every time we go on the internet we should have to “educate” somebody. And honestly, most trolls can’t be worn down the way Oluo’s was.
One can always go through and block/remove comments personally, as many POC activists do, but that entails reading the comments to know they are harmful in the first place, so it’s not a perfect solution. If the abuse is persistent or especially strong, one could report the person to the moderator of the website. The moderator then may be willing to ban the offender. If they are not, it’s probably not be worthwhile to spend time on that site.
We can create and support safe spaces online. As Lyz Lenz of New York Magazine reports, newsletters published on platforms such as TinyLetter are an alternative form of blogging where writers can make their work available specifically to subscribers. This less public forum can be a great place to put express oneself on the internet without having to deal with the wider, angrier world.
While the internet is an important, and sometimes wonderful, place to be, it’s never a bad idea to walk away from the screen occasionally. Goodness knows the physical world has plenty of its own problems, but it can also aid in putting internet interactions in perspective.
Photo via Flickr
Students at Dillard University protested former KKK leader David Duke’s appearance at a senatorial debate held on the historically black campus in New Orleans Wednesday night. Police responded by pepper spraying the protesters and arresting six, one of them a student, for blocking traffic.
The protests were led by Socially Engaged Dillard University Students. When their formal request to deny Duke access to the campus was denied, they released a statement saying, “His presence on our campus is not welcome, and overtly subjects the entire student body to safety risks and social ridicule.” Duke is running to be a Louisiana state senator.
During Wednesday’s debate, he made disparaging comments about Jews and blasted the Black Lives Matter movement, referring to it as a radical movement focused on killing cops. Although Duke supports Trump, going so far as to credit him for his “return to politics,” Trump and the rest of the GOP have distanced themselves from him. The debate was broadcast on local television, and journalists had a special room to watch, but no spectators were allowed in the debate.
Singer Sevyn Streeter, who was scheduled to perform the National Anthem at the Philadelphia 76ers game opener against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday, was denied the chance to perform because she was wearing a jersey with the words “We Matter” on the front.
“We Matter” is a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, and reflects the struggles many African-Americans face to honor their country while acknowledging their serious on-going persecution by police officers and other public officials.
Sources close to the 76ers claim that performers are required to sign a contract banning political statements, and that Sevyn refused an opportunity to change her outfit.
In an official statement, the Sixers explained that they are “mov[ing] from symbolic gestures to action.” This sentiment reflects earlier comments made by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who claims that the time has come for “substantive actions,” specifically on the part of high-profile players such as LeBron James and Chris Paul, who have already “put themselves in a leadership position.” No comments were made on what this “action” would entail, or why it is mutually exclusive from political statements.
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