Why I Hate Chris Brown’s Song “Loyal”

When a rich nigga want you

And your nigga can’t do nothing for ya

These hoes ain’t loyal

By Chris Brown

“These hoes ain’t loyal.” I wake up too many mornings with the hook playing in my head. Here’s the kicker: I hate this song! And yet I can’t get it out of my head right now because it’s stuck on repeat. This happens every time I’m somewhere the song plays. I like the beat and I don’t want to because I can’t stand songs with misogynistic lyrics. So, the fact that this song won’t leave me alone, means that I need to write about it. I need to explain why I detest this and similar songs that treat women as things. A hoe is a thing; it’s an object. It is a tool to be used. It is easily discarded and replaced. So, when we sing along to the catchy beat, we subconsciously accept that women and girls are things. We accept that they are disposable.  And we don’t recognize their humanity.

When we sing along, we can go along with Jamal Bryant, pastor of Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, MD who was speaking to his congregation back in June about cheating men, and talked about the other woman and said, “These hoes ain’t loyal.”I listened to the entire sermon so as not to be sucked into a sensationalized news story because I know how things can be taken out of context. But this was not the case. His sexist, homophobic, misogynistic sermon made references to “sanctified sissies” and “baby mamas”, too. So the song lyrics fit right in with the rest of the foolishness. 

When we sing along, we are not offended by the pastor’s remarks. We are members of the congregation clapping and standing up in agreement.  We are mostly African-American women being bamboozled and hoodwinked by the words of a charismatic preacher who is once again blaming women for the downfall of men. What’s even more interesting in this scenario is Bryant chose to use this particular song to chastise women for not being loyal when his marriage ended due to his infidelity in 2013. He was calling women out in the sermon when he was the one who stepped out on his wife. 

When we sing along, we can accept that three professional African-American women hanging out at a hotel in Manhattan couldn’t have been anything other than professional hookers. On August 28, three friends: Kanataki Washington, Cydney Madlock and J. Lyn Thomas were seated in a restaurant in the Standard Hotel in Manhattan when an African-American man introduced himself and offered to buy the women drinks. But before they could take him up on his offer, a security guard whispered in the man’s ear and ushered him away. Washington said the security guard told them, “Come on ladies. You can buy a drink, but you can’t be soliciting.” 

The security guard insisted that the women were soliciting sex. And when the women reported the security officer, they were met with indifference, and told that security personnel were hire through an outside agency. But a few weeks later, Washington says she received an email from a staff member of the hotel inviting Washington and her friends back for a dinner (valued at $400) and a bottle of champagne. None of the emails addressed the women’s prostitution claim, but the hotel was willing to pay them to come back which was a slap in the face. The hotel was okay with paying the women for being insulted, but wouldn’t acknowledge the insult. 

When we sing along, we accept two teens found dead and bound together along a road in Duval County, Florida as par for the course. Angela Mangum and Tjhisha Ball were best friends according to their family members, and both the girls had been working as strippers at the time of their deaths. Law enforcement officers in Jacksonville, Florida are looking for tips, but the story has gotten little media attention. In the few news outlets that I’ve seen the story reported, the pictures that are shown are mug shots of the women who were arrested but never convicted of any crime. 

When we sing along, we see these pictures as confirmation that “these hoes ain’t loyal” and deserved to die. We don’t see them as victims because we like our victims clean; we like them White; we like them right according to a strict code of conduct that says bad girls can’t do good, and good girls aren’t bad. So, that there is a killer(s) on the loose, does not hold our attention. We flip the page or scroll onto the next news story if we have even seen this news story at all.

When we sing along, we don’t raise an eyebrow when we learn that a police officer targeted African-American women and sexually assaulted them. Daniel Holtzclaw, a 27 year-old officer with the Oklahoma police department preyed on middle-aged Black women. Eight women have come forth since February of this year complaining that they were pulled over during traffic stops and fondled, ordered to perform oral sex and even one women accused Holtzclaw of rape. He was arrested August 20. His bond, originally set at $5 million dollars was reduced to $500,000 and Holtzclaw has been released from jail and placed under house arrest. Across the nation we are protesting police brutality and excessive force. And yet we are quiet around this decades old issue of police officers abusing their power and assaulting Black women. 

When we sing along, we are not outraged that a mother of three lost her life just this month for not responding to a man trying to get her phone number. Mary “Unique” Spears was leaving the repast of a family member, when a man started harassing her. He wanted to know if she was single, and if he could get her number. He was persistent, and when Spears’ boyfriend tried to intercede on her behalf, the man took out a gun and began shooting. He shot Spears once, and when she tried to run he shot her twice more.

When we sing along, the seeds of misogyny take root in our mind and become entangled with rational thought. So even when we clean up the lyrics and sing, “these girls ain’t loyal”, we know that the girls in this and songs like it are still tools of a trade designed to degrade and devalue females in general but  African-American women and girls in particular who society consistently classifies as hoes and treats as such.

So, think about that the next time you find yourself bobbing and singing to Loyal.

Why the Fascination with Big Booty White Girls Give Me a Wedgie

Booty, booty, booty, booty, booty everywhere—and I’m over it. I am sick of the fascination with big booty White girls. And no, I am not a hater.  I have a bodacious backside of my own. But what gives this big booty girl a wedgie the size of an extra-small thong is the current media saturation of protruding posteriors of White girls as if it’s the best thing since peanut butter found jelly. Big booties ain’t new!  Big booty Black girls have been holding it down since the beginning of time.

Women of African descent have always had backsides that didn’t conform to the norm, and outside of our communities we have been ridiculed and scorned and encouraged to cover and camouflage our butts. Growing up, our mothers and grandmothers sang the praises of the Almighty Girdle as the fix-all to control and contain our God-given bottoms. They knew what we had, and they knew the trouble it could cause so they encouraged us to bind our behinds while the men folk encouraged us to strut our stuff. I think the art of switching (walking while swaying the hips) originated and was perfected in the Black community by a Black woman with a basketball booty who wanted to make sure its grace and movement was appreciated by those lucky enough to behold it.

In the days before music videos and social media, many of us reveled in our bootylisciousness.  I’m not bragging when I say, the booty songs back in the day, Da Butt, Baby Got Back and Bootyliscious to name a few were definitely Black girl anthems. We had one asset that we could call our own. We may not have had White girls bouncing and behaving hair, or their any-other-color-than-brown eyes, but we definitely had more junk in the trunk. And any Black girl worth her ethnicity did not want to hear the words, “You got a White girl (aka pancake flat) booty!”

And we reigned booty supreme, until the 90s when a Latina by the name of Jennifer Lopez strolled on the scene, and all eyes were on this petite dynamo’s terrific tush. It was a terrible day for Black women because once again some other non-Black woman was getting credit denied to us. Yes, JLo is a woman of color which should have lessened the blow, but it didn’t really because for as long as we know, we’ve been made to feel bad about our otherness—the differences that set us apart from the dominant culture--and then along comes a Latina who could easily pass for White and gets credit for an asset that was once black.

Jennifer was rear ended by Beyonce who has made a name for herself in the derrière department. And if that isn’t enough to let you know who’s on top in the best bottom category, there is one of our own seated in the White House, and as ridiculous as it may seem, First Lady Michelle Obama’s booty has been deemed newsworthy (like everything else about the Obama family) a few times. We could finally have pride in our backsides! But. . . not really. When Salon writer Erin Aubre praised the attributes of Michelle’s gluteus maximus, it stirred up quite a debate. So, much in fact that the Huffington Post posed the question if was appropriate to talk about Michelle’s butt.  Readers weighed in on the taboo topic of the First Lady’s tush.

We couldn’t talk about Michelle’s booty, but hey, we had Bey. Things were going well until Beyonce was butted by none other than Kim Kardashian who has one of the most admired and envied celebrity backsides. Every time I turned around there was someone talking about Kim’s butt. When Kim came on the scene, big booties, moved mainstream. Then Nicki Minaj took over Kim’s number one spot. There are Top 10 celebrity lists for everything, and when I looked up best booties, Nicki and Kim are holding the number 1 and number 2 spots respectively. But what got my panties in a bunch is that Black women, the originator of the ba dunka dunk, the junk in the mid-sized to large trunk only had two spots out of ten.  Really?  We had been robbed—again.

 First it was Bo Derek who made braids all the rage. Hello? How long have we been wearing our hair braided? Some of us have even been terminated for wearing braids branded as “too ethnic”. Then it was Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips. Full lips were so much in vogue, that women started getting injections to make their lips bigger—oops!—I mean fuller. Because big lips were what Black women had before luscious lips became popular and then “big lips” became “full lips” (because full sounds better than big) and then Black women were able to stop using make-up tricks we had been taught to minimize the size of our lips.

Hip-hip music videos brought the booty into the spotlight, but it was still not socially acceptable. Women who chose to flaunt their fabulous fannies were judged harshly—until now! What music videos fetishized and objectified, society has now normalized—if the booty in question happens to be alabaster in complexion.  Nicki was recently criticized for her Anaconda album cover. But Kim, the married mother of a young daughter and the queen of bootie selfies gets a pass? I haven’t seen any open letters to Kim about showing her ass.  

From squats to injections, to articles and videos galore, there is a surplus of information on how to get a bigger butt. And now big booties are not only acceptable, they’re coveted. I guess we should thank White girls for giving our derrières their due just as we have Miley Cyrus to thank for legitimatizing twerking. Side eye. I’m so over this latest episode of cultural appropriation. There is even a documentary, Bottoms Up—Rise of the Backside, that traces how booties have moved from cult fetish to main stream acceptability.  There’s a tan booty on the poster for the film that does not look like it belongs to the originator and creator of Big Booties—Black girls! So, yea, I’m sick of the whole big booty White girl obsession. It makes me feel like I’m wearing a dental floss thong. A friend of mine said there's a thin line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. And the line has been crossed-again!

An Act of Betrayal: Watching the Ray and Janay Rice Video

I watched the Ray and Janay Rice video and I wish I hadn’t.

 I was only vaguely familiar with the elevator incident and the subsequent uproar over the measly two-day suspension because I don’t follow football. But it was a trending topic in my news feed, so I clicked on the video. 

Shocked and horrified by what I saw, did not make me stop watching. I viewed the video in its entirety. As I followed the story, it hit me that I had actively participated in the re-victimization of Janay. I was what Sandra Hawkins Diaz described as a “voyeuristic bystander “to Janay’s abuse. And I didn’t have to be. I didn’t gain anything from clicking on the video. I’ve witnessed intimate partner violence a few times in my life, and each time I was sickened by what I saw. I always called the police. 

Once a young woman was trying to run away, and I allowed her to seek refuge in my house until the police arrived. It was a harrowing experience because her boyfriend was a gang banger, and they were standing outside of my apartment building trying to figure out which apartment she went into. A week later, I saw her with her abuser at the movies. I looked at her, shook my head, but didn’t say anything. I was mad that I had allowed her drama to cross my doorstep, and she was back with him. I would later learn that it takes an average of 6 or 7 times before the abused can leave their abuser.

I’m not in a position to question why anyone stays in a relationship. What the final straw is for me is not the final straw for someone else and vice-versa. Years ago, I was reading a book about he down low, and the author explained that women can be financially bound to accept certain things that other women who are no financially dependent don’t have to accept. It was a an eye opener for me because prior to him breaking down the role that finances play in domestic situations, I just didn’t understand why women stayed with men who were not good for them. I control my purse strings, so I have more leverage than a woman who does not.

Age and experience are teaching me to seek understanding more, and to judge less. I still have work to do, but I am moving in the right direction. It’s challenging to be in the world, but not of the world, but it’s not impossible. Because everybody else does it, is never a reason to take part in something that is morally wrong to me. Regardless of what goes on around me, I have to draw my own line in the sand that I won’t cross. And clicking on violent videos of assaults, fights etc. are not something that I need to see.

In her article, Why You Shouldn’t Watch the Ray Rice Video, Diaz raises the question: “Why would we want to watch a woman be violated, humiliated, devalued, brutalized and abused?”  It wasn’t necessary for me to view the video to understand what took place. But like so many others, I allowed a morbid sense of curiosity to cloud my better judgment. Hannah Giorgis, writing for The Guardian said, “That we feel entitled (and excited) to be entranced by the looks of domestic violence speaks not only about the man who battered her, but also about we who engage in parasitic rapture. We click and consume and carry on.”

As an African-American woman in America, I understand public consumption. Our bodies have never been ours to own. From day one, we have been disrespected and disregarded in every way possible. We are not recognized as valued members of the human race. Our culture favors rich and powerful men, and this case is no different. It’s money, not morals that makes the world turn. The NFL’s actions were more about damage control than genuine concern for its player or his wife. It’s disturbing how many people have judged this situation on money. There are those who feel that the penalty of being fired and banned is too steep a price to pay especially since his “gold digging” fiancé at the time married him a month later. It’s always about the money, and that’s pretty damn sad. 

The spotlight maybe on the NFL and its mishandling of the incident, but this is bigger than the black-eye on the NFL for which it will recover. This is a gut-wrenching punch to our collective consciousness and the way we handle intimate partner violence. Our moral compass is awry. Too often we are willing to overlook certain things involving money and/or celebrities, and we are just lacking in our basic compassion for humanity. We are gawkers and vultures of all things displayed in a public stage. We don’t even pretend to look away when we know that by looking we don’t have anything to gain.

According to statistics, 1.3 million women are victims of domestic violence every year and a disportinate number of them are African-American women. One in four women will be a victim in her life time, so these means that most of us have been touched by intimate partner violence in some way: we are the abused; we know the abused; we know the abusers. And yet we stand in a glass house and throw stones in this situation.

What happened in the elevator was terrible, and what’s even more terrifying is that too many of believe that we have a right to watch how things went down. I am owning up to my wrong doing, and I deeply regret that I participated in an act of disrespect of a battered woman’s body especially a woman of color who has no rights that the world respects. There is no excuse for that.

Before Homosexuals Were Gay

When I was growing up “gay” meant happy, and homosexual people were dykes and sissies. Though they were described as “funny” there was no humor in the plight of people on the wrong side of the sexual track. We live in a world of binaries—Black or White, Gay or Straight etc. with no room for anything in between. And what I’ve also learned over the years is that these divisions also denote the degree of acceptability and define what is considered the norm. 

I confess: I didn't know much about gay people. There were no struggling or openly gay people in my family, and if I had any gay friends, I didn’t know it. So, what I knew about homosexuality was from a distance. There was my childhood friend's flamboyant uncle with the blonde Afro who taught us how to really twirl a sparkler on the 4^th of July holiday. He would grab a lighted sparkler and twirl it while gyrating his hips, and he would tell us, “You twist it this way and you twist it that way.” He was funny—really! Then there were the whispered rumors of the gay boys in high school. Homosexuals existed on the fringes of my heterosexual life, so I never really gave much thought to what it meant to be anything other than straight in a culture steeped in homophobia. 

In college, all of that changed. The head of the journalism department at my school was gay. I remember snickering at the scarves that he tied around his neck and speculating about his sexuality. It had nothing to do with him as a person, but everything to do with my narrow perspective. One day he invited some speakers to one of our classes to talk to us about gay and lesbian rights. I remember this young White woman sharing her story with us. She said that when she came out to her parents they disowned her. This woman--who I didn’t know—changed my life. I am from a close-knit family, and I could not imagine cutting myself off from any of them because of their sexuality.

As long as gay people stay in the closet, straight people don’t care. But as soon as the door opens and they step out or are forced out, we have a problem. Straight people's problem with gay people is what they do sexually. Straight people want to be voyeurs in the lives of gay people, but we want to believe there’s something wrong with them; I’m confused. When it is revealed that a famous person is gay, it’s still news. And when a gay person does something for the first time, it’s news. Why? Gay people have been around since the beginning of time, and we’re still acting like any sexuality other than heterosexuality is brand new. 

Lately, I keep finding myself engaging in conversations about homosexuality that are getting under my skin. I met a guy online and we were talking about youth, and the conversation meandered its way around to their sexuality, and he said he would not accept his child telling him he or she was gay. I told him that in my experience as a teacher of adolescents, I didn’t see as a choice. He, a student of theology, told me that he could show it to me in scripture, and I told him not to bother. We never made it out on a date because he said I was feisty—a trait that men find undesirable.  (That’s another post!)

The family of a gay man in Tampa, Florida had his funeral abruptly canceled when the minister of the hosting church found out that the man was gay. The minister of the church preaches against homosexuality. The recent hoopla around, Michael Sam, the NFL’s first openly gay football player is ridiculous. The stories of rampant homophobia still exist in the 21^st century, and that’s our shame.

I’m tired of Christians trying to prove to me that gay people are on the express elevator to hell. From my limited understanding of the Bible, if it’s sin that sends us to hell, I know a whole bunch a people waiting for the same elevator, and they’re not gay. Gay people did not fall out of the sky; they were not created in a lab experiment. They are our family and friends. They are our co-workers and neighbors. They belong to us.

 In the book Sexual Healing one of the characters is trying to explain his changing sexuality to his ex-wife, and he says sexuality is fluid. That has stayed with me over the years. We evolve as people, but we think sexuality is stagnant. How is that? I’ve never had so sex so good that it would make me turn away from my family or my church or anything else of major importance in my life.  So, when that woman talked about being disowned by her family, I knew that sexuality is so much bigger than sex! 

I don’t know why people are gay any more than I know why they’re Black or brown or tall or short. It’s just a part of who they are. I knew then that if I ever learned that someone I loved was gay, I wouldn’t love them any less. And I don’t. Gay people are no longer on the fringes of my life, but an integral part of my circle of life. Being straight doesn’t give me the right to tell anyone who to love or how to love. Heterosexism and privilege are real, so to help me keep mine in check, I try and remember these five points:

1. What two consenting adults do is none of my business. 

2. I don't need to speculate on anyone's sexuality. If I don't wonder who's straight, why do I need to know who’s gay?

3. Gay and pedophiles are not one in the same. There are plenty of heterosexual perverts harming children.

4. Gay people are not people who were hurt in straight relationships. If that were the case, there wouldn't be in heteretosexual people left in the world.

5. If homosexuality is a flaw of some sort, who among us is flawless?

 Religious conviction is not a justification for the mistreatment of anyone. Treating people with dignity and respect is ALWAYS the right thing to do.