“This is why there’s no need to pit the Rihannas against the Janelles. Both can represent a healthy sexuality. While Janet, Rihanna, and Beyonce show us that black women can choose to employ their desires. Janelle demonstrates how black women can also opt out — that our actions and work need not be governed by the overt sexualization that has become the norm. Janelle critiques the dialogue that often surrounds a woman’s choice to bare all. Her statement: increased sexualization does not necessarily accompany an increase in sexual agency. In fact, stripping down in a culture in which women are valued by their sexual desirability often reinscribes their marginalization.
Janelle Monae may never become a mass cultural icon. There’s something about her defiance I can’t see catching on. She will, however, be a pivotal figure for young, black women. We flock to her. While Beyonce and Rihanna are fantasies, Janelle is your home girl; a reflection of your fly best friend; a young woman who sets her own rules in a way few of us have seen before. That’s Janelle Monae’s revolution.”
Diana Ross on the July 1973 cover of Ebony with daughters Tracee and Rhonda.
Look at baby Tracee!
(Source: blackculture, via lesniko)
Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)-eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children-when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of Rebellion, in stone or clay?
How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our “crazy,” “Sainted” mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them.
"— In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South (1974)
Who would you add to the list?
