This is a question asked in W.E.B. Dubois’ treatise The Souls of Black Folk. The question doesn’t ask how does it feel to have problems or have the kinds of problems that some people can’t or won’t understand. The question directly asks how does it feel like to actually be a problem. This question is also the title of a book by Moustafa Bayoumi who gives an indepth look as to what it’s like to live in a time where being a young Arab or Muslim American is often judged as being the enemy. A threat. A terrorist.

Being a member of the “other”, especially if you’re black, you are not granted the privilege of being individuals, especially if a crime occurs. When a black person is so much as suspected of any crime, the whole race is suspect. If a black person was the suspect and there are white victims, the whole race is looked upon with disdain and mistrust, seen as the potential enemy of white folks who will seek another innocent white person to get back at them for slavery. It seems like it’s always slavery that’s the underlying reason white people believe is the reason for any black-on-white crime. But I digress.

I remember a few years ago back in 2008. A UNC Student named Eve Carson who had a potentially bright future ahead of her was robbed and murdered by two young black males. It was a major news story. A white woman was killed by not one, but two black men. I also remembered two words in one article I read. Racial tension. I hear and see those words often whenever there’s a story about an interracial crime. Usually when it’s black-on-white, that’s when a feeling of dread hits me, because I fear of repercussions for that area against the black community. When a black person commits a crime against white people, black people, not just those responsible, must be held accountable.

Most people still can’t, or won’t, grasp the racism that reeks whenever black people are seen as a collective problem that must always pay whenever a few of their own fuck up. A lot of people avoid being called the r-word by excusing it with statistics, so-called “facts” that they’ve found most likely at a racist conservative website that exaggerates numbers to prove their point. After all is said and done Whiteness is nuanced, blackness is not

On the other hand, white people are granted the privilege of individuality no matter how often or how heinous a crime is. Whether it’s a school shooting, a bombing, serial rape or even mass shootings, white people are given the third degree and had their culture questioned, nor are they given stern lectures to “do better” by those who unofficially appoint themselves as guidance counselors for the whole race.

It has been a few days since the Biker shootout in Waco Texas that claimed nine lives, injured over a dozen more and led to the arrest of over a hundred bikers. The media treated the bloodbath with kid gloves, turning it into a singular incident where it was an isolated tragedy and not part of a string of white-on-white crime where more than a few lives are usually taken.

However, the same media treated the protests in Baltimore and Ferguson as if it was a warzone. Protests themselves became riots. Protestors became looters. Animals. Thugs. The peaceful anger and uprising vanished within the news media’s sensationalism and racism and became an outbreak of black pathology unfolding before America’s eyes.

No matter what, black people are constantly seen as the problem in America. It’s safe to say that no matter what we do, our faults end up overshadowing our accomplishments as well as overall humanity and individuality though the eyes of the white racist mindframe that continuously sees itself as innocent and normal while it sees blackness as criminal, pathologic and something to be feared and taken care of mostly by imprisonment or brute force.

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“A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair.  … Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute).  …  Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me.

Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.

I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me…”

While the above passage may read like a contrived scenario devised by Andy Cohen and Bravo producers, it’s an excerpt from one of the most self-aggrandizing, presumptuous, anti-Black woman, quasi-think pieces drenched in white women’s tears, I’ve read this year; and it comes courtesy of XOJane.

Written by a woman, who promptly changed her byline to Jen Caron, following the collective outcry of  ‘Girl, bye!’ in the comments section, Jen recounted the shock and dismay she felt at having her fair, thin, white womanhood subjected to the presence of a ‘heavyset Black woman’ in the predominantly white yoga class she attends. And while I suspect Jen may have over-exaggerated the woman’s body type, since many people tend to think all Black women are fat and lumbering, when juxtaposed against the European female aesthetic, that’s just the tip of the iceberg in a myriad of reasons why her essay was problematic, and it serves as a glaring example of why discussions like the #solidarityisforwhitewomen Twitter hashtag initiated by Mikki Kendall, take place across social media platforms.

#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, because only within the comfortable confines of white privilege and pedestaled white beauty standards, can a woman compose and get published, a 900+ word screed discussing the ways she mentally dissected a Black woman’s body – while said Black woman was in a yoga class minding her own damn business, looking after her health and wellness – and assume the Black woman is seething with rage over not being white and thin.

Never mind the fact that Jen Caron had no idea whether or not that was the Black woman’s first attempt at yoga, or whether her perceived discomfort could have stemmed from being the sole Black person in a predominantly white space – because, to be frank, white people have a way of ‘othering’ and being exclusionary in spaces in which they are accustomed to being in like company. It can be discomfiting… being the ‘only one’ and not knowing how our presence will be received. It also probably never occurred to Jen Caron, that the woman may (or may not have) been growing annoyed at being under the scrutiny of her searing and judgmental white gaze.

One of the primary things Jen did in her sniveling essay was compare her white womanhood to a Black female body, and project her own issues onto a Black woman who said or did nothing to her, and who she knew nothing about, but listed off egregious assumptions anyway. She seemed to suggest that, not only did the Black woman’s presence at her yoga class offend her white hipster sensibilities, but that the woman in question should have felt inadequate in her full, Black female body; and that she should have felt shame for trying to contort it in yoga positions she apparently believes aren’t  meant for any of us.

It’s attitudes like Jen’s that prevent us from having nice things and cause Black women to look at solidarity and extended attempts at ally-ship with leeriness and trepidation because, more often than not, it comes back to bite us… and it comes at the expense of our own visibility and humanity. Even if the woman in Jen Caron’s class was uncomfortable, Jen made it about herself and centered herself in the midst of the woman’s distress. And to the few (now deleted?) apologists in XOJane’s comments section who jumped to Jen’s defense, and suggested she was trying to start an honest  dialogue about race: um, begging for cookies and listing the ways in which she thought her comfort superseded the Black woman’s, is not a defensible way to encourage a discussion about racial inequality. Try again. If Jen Caron was really being genuine and ‘bout it, she would have left her real name and bio picture listed with the article, instead of removing them. Only an oppressively entitled person, who’s come to realize their racially insensitive behavior is problematic, backtracks.

Contrary to popular belief, everything Black women do doesn’t revolve around or require the approval of white women speaking all over our personal experiences. We’re just trying to live. Can ya’ll let us live, be great, and do yoga without sullying the experience for us?

 [Update:  XOJane’s managing editor accepted responsibility for Jen Caron’s Polachek’s yoga confessional]

The post So, Apparently Black Women Aren’t Supposed to Do Yoga appeared first on Madness & Reality.

Where both movements fail(ed) to acknowledge the intersection of gender oppression and race, the documentary explores the ways in which Black women galvanized to raise awareness about and seek solutions for those issues that often left us out of the overall framework: reproductive rights, dependable daycare for working mothers, government resources, employment and fair wages. That mobilization essentially inspired other women of color to project their voices about the same issues, which were also framed around immigration policies.

Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights features useful commentary from Black feminist scholars who were former activists and members of groups like the National Black Feminist Organization and most notably, controversial Womanist and novelist Kola Boof who, according to Nev Nnaji—who I had the opportunity to speak with after the screening—inspired the documentary and Nnaji’s own awareness about the various aspects of the Black feminist experience, which isn’t always rooted in the Black Nationalist movement or shaped by the language of academe.

After a couple of minor setbacks—during the post-screening discussion Nev was vocal about the exorbitant costs of gaining access to old film footage pertinent to her film… resources that seem readily available to White male filmmakers—Nnaji was fortunately able to get the resources necessary to complete her film, and has been screening it at colleges and universities to growing acclaim and interest.

Most recently, the documentary screened in Glasgow, Scotland and was accepted into the 2013 African Diaspora International Film Festival in NYC (beginning November 29^th and running through December 15^th).

I highly recommend Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights if you’re able to catch a screening near you. As many young Black women begin to explore feminist works by noted women of color, it’s definitely a valuable and important narrative that’s been added to the discourse. Particularly since people are of the opinion that the Black female (read: feminist) voice is inconsequential, irrelevant, and that it somehow ‘destroys’ the Black community… all erroneous myths that further cause division, subverts the lives and work of women like Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and Sojourner Truth, and only serve to keep Black women in a perpetual mulish state.

For a schedule of screenings and other information, visit Nev Nnaji’s website and Facebook page.

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