CNN has delved into a conversation that many of us have had with only our closest friends. Most personal discussions may reflect on the first time someone called you a nigger or the first time you realized you were different.
The CNN network has launched a series of videos featuring celebrities like Wendy Williams and Doug E. Fresh; CNN anchors like Don Lemon and Van Jones, and other well known and not-so well known faces. In this series, they discuss the first time they realized they were black and that being black mattered. They also dive into the conversation about the first time some of them experienced racism.
Some of these stories many of us can relate to; and others are simply disturbing.
The power of Twitter is real, but the power of Black Twitter is simply something from another realm of realness. Many have learned that you DON’T come for black women on social media; no exceptions. Charleston, S.C.’s very own, Woody McClain is still learning this the hard way. Woody McClain became popular from a series of “Wood The Great” videos on social media. The success of these videos put McClain on a national platform that launched him all the way to BET.
We all watched the BET biopic and we all agree; it was awesome! McClain played Bobby Brown, and killed the performance and the dance moves. Face it, Woody McClain channeled Bobby Brown while Brown is still living and mastered this performance. However, in the tradition of the internet, with fame comes curiosity; and with curiosity comes exposure.
Some sleuth on the internet decided to go back into time and look through Woody McClain’s tweets – all the back to 2011 (who has time, right?). What they found however, sent Black Twitter into a tizzy. Some of the tweets said things like, “when i’m famous, i’m dating white women only” and “if it ain’t white, it ain’t right”. Check out some of the tweets below:
Now that these tweets have come to back to bite McClain, he has been on a mission to explain that they were merely jokes. He has even gone as far as to tweet pictures of his black girlfriend, who he says he has been dating for the past ten years. In a recent interview with Essence Magazine, here is more of what McClain had to say regarding those tweets.
“Listen, before New Edition came out. I do comedy. Woody does comedy. So it was a tweet that was taken out content what I said—the tweet that I wrote was ‘If it ain’t white it ain’t right.’ Me growing up through comedy, that’s a comedy reference. ‘Once you go Black, you never go back.’ That’s a comedy reference. So I feel like somebody took that tweet, added more Tweets, photoshopped it, undefeated. You will not beat Photoshop. And they’re adding more to my tweets, I love Black women. I always push for Black women. When I shoot my videos—go to follow me @woody_thegreat, you will see all my content. I promote Black love. If I was going to switch up, I would have did it three years ago when I started social media. You feel me? So there is no switching up for it. My mother is Black. My sister is Black. I love my Black queens. I push for positivity every time I do my comedy videos. I’m doing it to put us in a positive light. So I’m not even mad that this happened. I’m actually happy. So I want my little African-American brothers, listen Y’all gotta understand this is not a joke. It’s not sensitive, it’s not funny no more.”
Again the power of Black Twitter and social media as a whole is split on the sincerity of McClain’s explanations. Many say having a black girl friend doesn’t automatically mean you have respect for black women; it’s no different from racists who claim to have black friends. Others say the tweets were drafted almost five years ago and it doesn’t matter.
One thing that can be said from McClain’s comments is that although he claims the tweets were jokes, the tweets were Photoshopped, he was hurt by the backlash, and the tweets were taken out of context; he never actually apologizes for tweeting these things. He said in his statement to Essence that he is happy all of this has happened. These are confusing statements coming from someone who also says that all of this ‘isn’t funny anymore‘.
Of course, being the sweet, nice, southern people we are down here in Charleston, S.C. where McClain was born, we are all bout forgiveness and redemption – right? However, our research team has scoured the internet for an actual apology from Woody McClain for the disparaging tweets…and we couldn’t find an actual apology.
If there is ever a time when you can find some kind of good stemming from the violence ravaging this country, then it is a must for the story to be told. The gun violence in inner cities across the country has been devastating communities for decades. For the past few years, the focus has been on the city of Chicago, a city that had over 700 homicides, a twenty year record, in 2016.
The story of Takiya Holmes left many readers disturbed, although Takiya is not the first child to lose her life due to the gun violence in Chicago. However, though still sad, there is a glimmer of hope that still shines from a silver lining caused by the death of this 11-yr-old girl.
While sitting in a family van with her 3-yr-old brother, gang member Antwan Jones, opened fire on rival gang members across a Chicago street. Antwan missed all of his rival targets, but managed to shoot Takiya Holmes directly in her temple, killing her instantly.
Takiya was placed on life support, but shortly after she was removed from life support; at this point, her family made the most difficult and most selfless decision a family could make. The family made the decision to donate Takiya’s organs to 6 people in need; one of these people was a distant relative of the family and the other five were strangers.
Takiya’s heart, pancreas, lungs, and kidneys were given to six recipients. While this does not ease the family’s pain of their loss of a precious 11-yr-old girl; they are grateful for the joy that others have received due to their loss.
“It brings us peace to know that she’s living in someone else, the fact that she extended another person’s life and helped give them quality of life, we can live with that,” explain the Holmes family.
African Americans receive twenty percent of all transplants, while only sixteen percent of African Americans are transplant donors. An large majority of these operations are kidney transplants, due to the epidemic of diabetes in the black community. Even though there is a need in the African American community, stigmas and fear have made people hesitant when it comes to organ donations.
We are thankful for Takiya and the Holmes family for overcoming the stigmas, and taking their loss to create hope and happiness for other families.
On Tuesday night, Senator Elizabeth Warren was stopped from sharing a letter written by Coretta Scott King addressed to Strom Thurmond in 1986. In the letter, King discussed what Jeff Session, our new Attorney General for the United States, had done while he was the U.S. Attorney in Alabama.
In the letter she details his blatant prosecution of civil rights workers, she discussed how he attempted to “chill” the black vote and keep African Americans away from the polls. In this historical and moving letter, King was able to convince a Republican controlled senate in 1986, to prevent Sessions from becoming a federal judge.
However, fast-forward to 2017, when Warren attempted to read the letter written by Coretta Scott King, on the Senate floor, where nominations are to be debated, she was told she was in violation of Rule 19.
Here are 7 Crucial Statements Coretta Scott King Made Regarding Jeff Sessions and his fight to suppress the black vote in Alabama.
Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen.
From His Politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgement to be a federal judge.
A person who has exhibited so much hostility to the enforcement of those laws, and thus, to the exercise of those rights by Black people should not be elevated to the federal bench.
The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods.
No group has had access to the ballow box denied so presistently and intently. over the past century, a broad array of schemes have been used in attempts to block the Black vote…. from straightforward application of brutality against black citizens who tried to vote to such legalized frauds as “grandfather clause” exclusion and rigged literacy tests. The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the 1984 voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique used to intimidate black voters and thus deny them this most precious franchise.
Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisors and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the ’60s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among blacks, had learned to use the process within the bbunds of legality and had taught others to do the same.
The scope and character of the investigation conducted by Mr. Sessions also warrant grave concern. Witnesses were selectively chosen in accordance with the favorability of their testimony….prosecution illegally withheld critical statements made by witnesses. Many elderlly blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in Mobile when they could more easily have testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, have announced they are now never going to vote again.
The Oscar-Nominated autobiography, “I Am Not Your Negro” opened this past weekend; the critically acclaimed work honor’s James Baldwin, one of the greatest writers in American history and an outspoken pillar of the civil rights movement.
Director Raoul Peck had this to say about the film: “I had no choice but to make the movie, an autobiographical sketch of literary icon James Baldwin. It’s not a game, this is the future of the country. The film is a sort of last call, or we’re going down the drain like everybody else – including everyone in power.”
The irony of listening to Baldwin as we go back in time in this film, or while viewing online footage, often feels as if he’s speaking to us today! All that Baldwin has given the world can be applied to what’s going on right now in our country.
In the first 60 seconds of the clip below Baldwin proclaims:
“If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be anymore like him.”
This statement rings true of how many white Americans have labeled the Black Lives Matter movement as a racists and terrorist organization, comparing it to the KKK – although BLM has never had a violent history of murdering, hanging or harming anyone.
Peck believes this movie is for people of all color and says he wants people to understand the “country’s racial backstory” in order for everyone to have an honest conversation. Peck says, “You can’t be innocent anymore, nobody can go out this movie and say they didn’t understand this world. I didn’t understand what America was. I didn’t understand that the American Dream was a myth.”
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