This poem is about a different kind of giving thanks. Don't say I didn't warn you.
A Long Week of Thanksgiving
By Nordette N. Adams
We sank onto the couch with Miles,
Kinda Blue, into brown leaves of autumn.
I am the muse who fell with you
into this bruised evening, purple
with blues.
Each day I've pulled on a sunny poem,
but it flees. Each night, I stroke
the fuzzy hairs of your broad chest,
wondering, Where will midnight send us?
He's sleeping.
With the rise and fall of his breath I float
to a calm ocean's center, deep blue
'til a shy sun threads dawn with pink.
Our legs wrap around guilty pleasure,
sighs of sparrows greeting day.
We are golden.
(c) 2009 Nordette N. Adams
Read comments at AuthorsDen.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
A Long Week of Thanksgiving, Poem
Google Apologizes Over Racist Michelle Obama Image, but What's Up With the Chinese Sorry at Hot Girls?
What to say, what to say. I just learned about the Google image search flap over an offensive Michelle Obama image coming from a blog called Hot Girls. The blog has removed the offensive image and posted an apology in Chinese (don't know if the blog owner is Chinese or making another statement, but here's the screenshot.), and Google has apologized. In the meantime, the Hot Girls Blog has more than 1300 comments where the monkey photo was first posted.
This is not the first time this Michelle Obama monkey image has been on the Web. I'm pretty sure I saw it or one similar to it during the campaign and also when the South Carolina dummy Rusty Depass said Michelle Obama descended from gorillas and then defended himself with statements about evolution in education, and possibly again when that New York Post published the offensive Obama cartoon after that chimp nearly beat that woman to death, and so, I figured the monkey imagery would just be par for the course from racist idiots while Obama is in office. I believe in confronting this stuff, but a black person will make him or herself crazy addressing every single instance of it.
Bottom line is Google has issued an apology because it refused to remove the picture from its search results. After all, it's a computer algorithm that pushes those images to the top of Google depending on how many people are searching for it and linking to it. No person at Google places images in order, but try using the word algorithm in a conversation with the average American.
Anyway, I didn't learn of the caricature's infamous rise on the search engine through a blog or Twitter but was tipped off by my own blog's stats. I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly getting so many hits via Google image search for Michelle Obama, and then I realized a controversy must be underfoot because somebody searched specifically for "Michelle Obamba bad."
If you've missed this story the way I have, here's the gist in article excerpts but to make the recap ending clear, the photo has been removed by the blog owner, Google has issued an apology while an expert says you can't regulate free speech.
From USA Today's story, November 25, with updates.
Update at 10 a.m. ET: The blog site that hosted the photo has now taken it down. The operator of the Hot Girls site where the image had appeared has now posted a message in Chinese under the title "Michelle Obama," with this statement in awkward English below it:I am very sorry for this article, and that this is the program automatically issued a document from the article. Do not the subject of race and politics make the discussion too radical and sincere hope that the world is very peaceful.
Earlier posting: Google is apologizing over a racially offensive picture of Michelle Obama that pops up when users search for images of the First Lady -- but refuses to take it down. (USA Today)
A November 24 post at Computerworld:
IDG News Service - The top-ranked result for U.S. first lady Michelle Obama on Google's image search engine is a racist caricature that depicted her with the face of a chimpanzee, just below a link to a suggested Google search for the terms "Michelle Obama Monkey."
The same image of Obama, which is currently hosted on Google's Blogger service, has appeared among the top image results on Google for at least two weeks, according to user complaints on Google's help forum.
The Obama caricature does not appear among the top image results for "Michelle Obama" on Microsoft's rival Bing search engine.
The image also does not appear among image results when users search for "Michelle Obama" on its main search engine, only on the results produced by the image search engine.
"Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it," a Google employee named Jem wrote on the forum last week. (Computerworld)
From MichelleObamaWatch.com today, which started poking this story last week.
Google has removed the racist image of First Lady Michelle Obama from their images search.Is it free speech?
Google employee Jem left this comment in the Google Web Search help forum…
“If you recently used Google Images to search for the term [ Michelle Obama ], you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the image in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google.
As with Google Web Search, ranking in Google Images results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.
Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the image, page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the image.
We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google Images and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it. We will continue to improve the product based on your feedback to make sure that users find the most useful, relevant images through Google Images.” (MichelleObamaWatch.com)
David Vise, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author of The Google Story, told the BBC the search engine's results get to the top based on popularity, not because of any ranking system by people.Yes, it's free speech. Racist free speech, hate speech, but free. However, free or not, we must be accountable to what comes out of our mouths and the images we create, so there's no such thing as free speech in the pure sense of freedom.
He added: "If Google got a call from the White House telling them it's against the law to have an offensive image of this kind which portrays the first lady in a racist manner as a monkey or an ape, then they would be obliged to take it down and I'm sure they would do so immediately."
But he said it would be a "very slippery slope" if Google were to try to police the limits of free speech.
"Once you begin to block images, who is to say. It's like the Supreme Court of the United States once said, 'what is pornography?' Well we can't define it, but we know it when we see it." (BBC, November 25)
Almost as dumb as this monkey picture are the people who await a response from the White House on this nonsense. Hah!
Back to the Hot Girls apology in Chinese, I don't know if the blog owner is Chinese and therefore due to cultural ignorance didn't know how angry this picture would make people or if the blog owner is not Chinese but knows that some Chinese are racists and have been in the news lately for attacking a biracial, Chinese/black singer and so he/she is making a statement of another sort with the response in Chinese on the Hot Girls blog. I don't even know whether Hot Girls is a real blog with words and commentary or just some kind of image and video posts aggregator. All I know is there must be something more important that I should be doing right now than following up the ignorant, and so I'm off to do that.
Lagniappe: Earlier this year PPR_Scribe at My So-Called Post-Post-Racial Life examined the African-American as monkey, Obamas as monkeys issue.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Lisa Durden: Black Men Dating White Women is a Bad Deal for Black Women
Lisa Durden is a New Jersey talk-show host. I met her when I lived there and interviewed her once. I plan to get that interview back online at some point. It dealt with black men on the down low. I decided to post this clip of her talking about interracial dating because I may be writing on this topic later at the African-American Books Examiner.
She is outrageously funny at times, and in this 2008 video clip below she's on the M&J Show sharing some words for white women dating black men.
Part of the transcript as I heard the conversation
Host: Lisa Durden says "When black men date outside their race, black women pay a price."
Lisa: I think interracial dating ... is a bad deal (for black women) black women because we don't have enough good black men for us to go around. (laughter) Hello!
Host: So marry a good white man!
Lisa: I think that if we had more good black men for us, we'd be fine. Listen, I'm very generous. If I had a whole loaf of bread, I'll give you two slices. If I have two slices, I want the sandwich for me!
Donna Carboni, a white female who dates black men: I want the whole loaf.
Then the discussion moves on to how black skin turns Donna on and Heidi Klum on Oprah telling why she was attracted to Seal, how white women are portrayed as the "vision of beauty."
Lisa takes issue with white women like Donna and Klum reducing black men to sex objects. Klum told Oprah that she saw Seal in bicycle shorts and was attracted to "the package."
Howard University Professor Kellina Craig Henderson is on as well saying that twice as many black men are involved in interracial relationships as black women.
O.K., Lisa is dominating this conversation, but that's Lisa. She's got some zingers for everybody and she's definitely not concerned about being politically correct on anything.
In closing, the white male host tells Donna that if she keeps tanning, she'll be black. And then he says he's just kidding her.
When I was a young woman in the late 70s and early 80s, I was only disturbed when I saw fine black men, who'd rate an 8 to 10 on attractiveness, with white women who were average to below average in the looks department. I felt like, "Yeah. Slap some black skin over that face and extra gut, and you know you'd pass it by."
Later on, black men earning more money as athletes and rap stars or business executives started appearing in the news more with white trophy wife material. And with the rise of HipHop, I saw more white men trying to imitate black rappers for their gangsta bravado and swagger that seemed to attract women in droves. So, times change. Possibly the stereotype of the black male as misogynistic gansta perpetuated by black rappers disturbed me at that point more than anything else.
Consequently, I got over my crumb of concern about who dates whom across ethnic groups. People have all kinds of issues about skin color. Perhaps they always will, and yes some people are dating outside their race for all the wrong reasons, but I no longer care, probably because I'm not in the dating pool at the moment. Furthermore, life is short.
Still, Lisa's appearance on the show was entertaining.
On the Run With Erykah Badu
Other Side Of The Game - Erykah Badu
And then, Danger. Telling the story in order. Somebody should do a movie of these just to use the music.
Danger - Erykah Badu
New Orleans Literary Events for Thanksgiving Week
Here are New Orleans literary events (book signings, writers' groups meetings, poetry readings, book sales, book discussions) for Tuesday, November 24, through Saturday, November 28. ... Read the list at the New Orleans Literature Examiner.
The Power of Pine Sol, Baby: New Sexy Ad
When I heard about Pine Sol's new ad direction, to dress up its African-American spokesperson, Diane Amos (you know, the heavyset black woman with braids), in a couture gown and to be seen coming home to sexy, muscled chocolate man mopping the floor, I had to post it. (See New York Time article: Selling a Household Cleaning Product on Its ... Sex Appeal?)
And then I recalled this article that my daughter saw via David Letterman, I think, or it could have been Jay Leno (She doesn't ever know who she's really watching) that's up at the UK Daily Mail saying men who vacuum and use a microwave have lower sperm counts. I don't which is funnier, the study or the commercial. See Pine Sol commercial from YouTube video below.
All right, you know how we like to pick at Madison Avenue. Who will be the first one to ask this question, "Is Pine Sol saying that in order for a black woman to be sexy she has to have straight hair and ditch the braids?" Maybe I'm the first. Hmm. I'll google it.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Colored Things, A Poem by Nordette Adams
Colored Things
By Nordette N. Adams
Keep the color of onyx in your heart,
every color almost but you might need 2
add blue and mix it with blood
for purple needs red like passion,
like salvation.
Color don't hurt nothing,
don't cut nobody nor spill blood.
The color phobic do.
The colored afraid slice up a rainbow
like a nasty shade thinking it can gnaw
off the bottom of a shoe
with stench of cancer,
expelling waste on a human sea.
Cleansed of our loathings, this dung
psychoremediates our tainted field,
feeds our land until it grows lilacs
and with lavender harmony's reborn,
the blues kissed with red, life.
Cleansed of our loathings, we
reflect the resplendent prism, making God
shout "Oh, how beautiful!
How these children have grown."
(c) 2009 Nordette N. Adams
Melissa Harris-Lacewell Says Democrats Owe New Orleans on Morning Joe
As I said just moments ago on Twitter, er, maybe it was 30 minutes ago:
Finally get 2 watch @harrislacewell on @MorningJoe. Better late than never. She's 1 great advocate 4 New Orleans. http://bit.ly/8JFpXb (Nordette's tweet)She tells Joe and Mika that New Orleans has always been about rebirth and that not only does President Barack Obama owe a debt to New Orleans but the entire Democratic Party owes New Orleans a debt because the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina illustrated the failure and incompetence of former President George W. Bush’s administration.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, the Princeton professor, who calls New Orleans her second home, tells at Daily Kos, how she ended up on Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough. She shares the story under "Time for some %$#% Change in New Orleans," a post about James Perry's controversial campaign ad (he's running for mayor of the city).
I hope that some of you caught me on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning. ... The show was filming in my second home, New Orleans, at a high school just around the corner from where I live. If you follow me on Twitter, (@harrislacewell) then you know that I snagged a spot on the show after sharing a flight to NOLA with Joe and Mika. Although I often (almost always) disagree with the political views on Morning Joe, I am grateful that they chose to come to New Orleans, and bring much needed national attention to the continuing challenges of recovery here in the city. (Melissa Harris-Lacewell)Her appearance was probably a win-win for her and Scarborough. He's got a TV Show, but she's got more Twitter followers than he has on Twitter.
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