White People and the Culture of Exclusion

 I saw a tweet yesterday where a white girl posted her pic and said something like, "Twenty-one weeks pregnant. Trannies could never."

I stared at the tweet, and stared some more, trying to decipher what could possibly be the purpose of it. A whole-ass pregnant woman infecting her child with poisonous toxic vibes even before they have a chance to leave the womb. What chance does it have?

But then, it keeps hitting me in the face that this is a trend with the mayonnaise people. A black boy knocks on your door, and you shoot him. Kids are playing in a field NEAR your house, you chase them away and then shoot their mother dead when she comes to collect an iPad you essentially stole from them. Ajike Owens' children are left motherless because the white lady didn't like the black kids playing near her house.

Transphobia.

Like, I'm old enough to remember when the only transphobia I saw was men killing black trans women. It was an epidemic. Everyone agreed it was bad. Suddenly, the tide turned led by white women - trans women were stealing their identities...and stuff. Or something. I don't know. But now its a whole thing. Just another way they have to exclude people.

It's not just racial, this exclusion. Yesterday I saw a tweet where a white mother was complaining that her white kid had been barred from eating cake at a birthday party because the mom of the birthday kid did not count them as 'a friend'. They were playing in the same park. It was this one kid and a birthday party. Naturally, she was playing with the birthday party kids. But god forbid, she eat their cake. She wasn't one of them.

Don't get me wrong, people are within their rights to be mean. To be small-minded. To be all these things. But because they also feel that they are the default, the main character, the only ones who matter, they do try and make lives difficult for anyone else. And that is the problem.

The worst part though, is that the other white people who consider themselves to not be full of hate, do nothing to stop it. In fact, they'll tell you how the bigots just need love and understanding and they'll stop. 

Throw the entire race away.

Now watch this post be taken down or put behind a "sensitive" tag.

The Art Verzuz The Artist

Hello, happy new month.

How are you doing?

I've been in an 'I wish a nigga would' mood otherwise known as 'four-five seconds from wilin' almost all July. Let's see how August goes. 

Anyway today I'm here with some confessions.No justifications, just admitting my transgressions and willing to take my punishment. 

This is how it began. I was watching - okay objectifying - Freedom Williams as I ate my supper, really enjoying the fact that for all their videos, C+C Music Factory had Freedom shirtless but the girlies were fully dressed. Such a refreshing change. Also, the nineties had much less of a problem with colourism in their music videos. Really Freedom was the only light-skin in Gonna Make You Sweat.

It was beautiful. 

I love his voice and his way of moving and just well...everything.

Of course, once I was done, YouTube suggested other videos to watch and the King of Pop was right there. It's been a while since I listened to Dirty Diana so I hit the play button. 

Now the way that video is set up, it just really makes you realize that Michael Jackson was a rock star. I was sitting there wondering if I might have fallen on the ground and cried and fainted the way that people used to do for him. And I cannot say that I would not have. His charisma is quite compelling. The thing with Rock Stars though, is that they had a lifestyle which did not include going home to the wife and kids after the curtain fell. No, it involved sex, drugs and rock n' roll. Everyone had their own tastes but nobody was a boy scout. There were no innocents in the rock star culture.

Michael Jackson just happened to be caught. 

Now I am not saying I don't believe his victims. If there was a way I personally could help them come to terms with what happened to them, of course I would. But I cannot so I ask myself, what does it help anybody if I cut myself off from this music? His music isn't just an earworm, it's part of my formative years. It's evocative of times and places that I hold dear in my heart. Am I to throw it all away because the artist was not well-behaved?

There's a thread going around twitter comparing Ludacris to 18th-century German composers like Bach nem. And it's clear that even those guys had their major flaws. But nobody 'cancels' their art because the artist was problematic.

So yeah, Dirty Diana is one of my all-time favourite songs. It stays on my playlist.

Now MJ is the King of Pop and people might excuse me for still listening to his music because well, y'all get it right? But this next guy...I have no excuse, except to say that he made some great music and he was always the problematic fave. You got used to thinking of him as a troubled man who alternately sang about his sexual perversions and his mother. Kind of like a crooning Tupac but without the social justice messages.

In my defence, that was until I saw the documentary. Then I stopped cold turkey. Still do miss singing 'So Hot We On Fire' though.

As an honourable mention, Black is King just came out and one thing to be said about Beyonce, she's an excellent mimic when it comes to dancing. When she performs African dances, she gets it exactly right. Of course, you can see that it's very precisely done, very choreographed, which is not at all how Africans dance. The smoothness is missing. Nevertheless, it's the closest I've ever seen an African American come to doing it right. There is nothing that truly separates Africans and African Americans like how they move their bodies. Still, Beyonce comes very close almost. She's a savant when it comes to dancing.

Speaking of Dancing Savants, I also very very occasionally watch Chris Brown videos - not Chris Breezy let's be very clear - Chris Brown. Mostly from his album Fortune (had to look up the name because my brain doesn't hold space for CB trivia anymore) because it reminds me of the days when twitter and tumblr were wild for entirely different and more interesting reasons. The glory days are behind us indeed. We've all grown up now.

All of this to say that perhaps we should stop putting artists on a pedestal because their art is exceptional. We're all human. J.K Rowling is brilliant but apparently, she believes Trans Women shouldn't exist. Not even in a live and let live kind of way. I mean considering the subliminal messages in the Harry Potter series about oppression, it's really quite surprising. But we all have our blind spots. For some it's trans women, for others it's sexual deviance. 

For some, it's just being mean, while preaching kindness like Ellen. When we don't let people be who they are, they're forced to build personas and then we feel betrayed when 2020 exposes the real person. Having decided that everyone's problematic, me included, I'm going to enjoy what I enjoy without imposing moral imperatives on the artist.

Kanye excluded that is. Such selfish jerkery is apparently where I draw the line.

Opportunity Seems to Come Out of Nowhere but Nah...

Wow, guys.

The world is changing before our eyes, is it not? When George Floyd's daughter said, "My daddy changed the world" she had NO idea.

We're seeing the domino effect of Black Lives Matter because hey let's face it, not all of us value even our own lives as much as we do white lives or white adjacent lives. Hell, I hear the police in Kenya are harassing black protestors in front of the US embassy and leaving the white protestors alone. 

But let's go back to the genesis of this - Colonialism and the myth of White Supremacy.

Our history has been erased. Who we were, what we are capable of...even now it continues to be erased. The lack of COVID in New Zealand celebrated. But what about Mauritius? Also have eliminated COVID. Nobody is celebrating it. No, the press is waiting for African bodies to start dropping in the streets to train their cameras and say "You see! Africans are dying of COVID in droves."

But here we are, continuing to defy expectations. 

Nobody is talking about it. Yesterday I was thinking about how in other ways, everybody is erased from history except for white men. According to history books, they did everything. But think about it. Marilyn Monroe offered to sit in the front row of a club so that they would let Ella Fitzgerald perform. That's the only evidence of activism I have of the people around JFK. What if, as his sidechick, Marilyn did some whispering in his ear about civil rights? But she's never mentioned in his history aside from anecdotally so we'll never know. The women are never mentioned. But who is leading Black Lives Matter protests on the streets right now?

Living through 'interesting times' as they say really brings home so many revelations to me. Do you think K-Pop stans will be mentioned in the official history books? How they drowned out the voices of racists with fan cam videos? How they flooded Dallas police snitch sites with fan cam videos? How they matched BTS one million dollar donation to Black Lives Matter with a million dollars of their own?

No, I expect that will be buried in favour of whatever speech Al Sharpton will eventually make.

But what has brought us here? I blame food.

You see I write a lot of historical romance for a living and in my research on what a regency household served for dinner or what Scots ate in the 1500s, what jumps out at me is the sheer blandness of the food. So they travelled around the world and found that not everyone was living with boiled apples and roasted venison. They discovered places which had tea, tobacco, and spices. They discovered silk. They discovered precious stones. They coveted.

But they had nothing to trade. Nothing these people would want anyway, so they decided to take. And the way to take would be to use the one skill that they have honed better than anyone else. Manipulation and lying. They turned Christianity into a weapon. They used guns as a tool of power and fear. They decided to use the colour of their skin as a status symbol. They wrote the history books and so they turned myth into fact.

 Centuries of conditioning later, and most people didn't even question it. Not white people, not black people, not Asian people. 

Very many people still don't.

Every day though, those people grow less blind. Thank you, Cheeto Satan, for showing everyone white supremacy's ass.

So here's where opportunity comes in.

A man named George Floyd was killed by four policemen. His funeral, in fact, was yesterday. In the face of the protests, it was easy to forget that at the centre of this latest uprising is a dead man. Yesterday's funeral brought it home to me with a bang. Man, I hate funerals.

Anyway, so.

A man was killed, the four policemen who killed him were fired. And then it looked like that would be the end of that. Except...a video of a man being chased by two white men and subsequently killed had just been doing the rounds. Ahmaud Abery's killers were yet to be tried and convicted. Breonna Taylor was shot in her bed by police, as she slept when they raided the wrong house. George Floyd's death, captured in HD and lasting eight minutes and forty-six seconds was just that last straw. 

It was too much really.

So 1+1+1 made infinity. First locally, then regionally, then countrywide, then international; the cry for justice spread like wildfire. Now it wasn't just justice for George Floyd although that remains the kindling. No, it's justice for everyone who has ever been unjustly killed or hurt by police brutality. It's a cry for an end to that particular scourge.

People are finally seeing the biggest gang in the world for what it is. A racket. A tool of imperialism designed to oppress and suppress rather than to serve and protect. Or rather, they serve and protect the authors of imperialism. They make sure you and I, stay in line. 

And now people are saying NO.

It seems to have come out of nowhere, this opportunity to change the world but it's actually the result of slow attrition. Starting with Trayvon Martin and that jury which set George Zimmerman free and birthed the Black Lives Matter movement. George Zimmerman showing his ass so that anyone with half a brain cell KNOWS that the jury made the wrong decision. Watching Philando Castile die on Facebook live, knowing that Tamir Rice's killers were still working like they did not kill a twelve-year-old boy. Then When They See Us came out and showed how police obtain convictions. And every day, the tide turned a little more. Let's not forget eight years of an Obama white house meant that the generation that is responsible for a lot of change, the K-Pop stans, the Parkland students, the little girl in Flint, the white girls challenging their parents, grew up knowing that a black president is just a thing that happens. And it all came to a head with this one death. Opportunity looks like it just sprang up and yet, every little thing contributed to it. 

Speaking of which, I saw this account on twitter complaining about how libraries always claim they don't have books by black authors in their roster and she knows they lying. So I replied that my books are available on Scribd, Overdrive. 

An hour later she got back to me about one of my books. Like fastest sale, read and book review I've ever had. So because she was looking for black authors, I had my books in online libraries, and I'm black, but had I not answered her post, the opportunity would not have come to the good end it did. 

So in order to take advantage of fate, there must be action. Positive, deliberate action that is met with appropriate REaction.

On Research and Writing

You remember the post I did on BDSM? The client came back for a third time asking for more articles. Now the amount of stuff I know about BDSM not gleaned from fanfiction can be written on the back of a postage stamp. Like, I know not a single soul who is in the lifestyle; at least not that they've informed me. In fact, apart from seeing dominatrix(es?) portrayed in movies, I had no concept of what that kink entails.
Now here I am writing how-to manuals for people interested in getting into the lifestyle. And doing such a good job of it, they keep coming back for more articles. It's like, the very definition of irony innit?

So how am I doing so well you might ask? How am I so convincing? It's easy really; research. Lots of it. The FBI agent who monitors my computer must be very confused about my browsing history. Where I started was personal blogs. The focus of the book and articles I wrote was submissives. So I found some blogs on submissives and read their 'dear diary' posts. What they did, what they liked, how they liked it...
Lucky for me, I have a hard-on for knowledge; I love learning new stuff so that process is very enjoyable for me. If you're an aspiring writer and you don't enjoy research you're in for some very bad times my fren. Very very bad. Don't do it unless you're ready to spend hours READING.
After reading the innermost thoughts of submissives, I went to the guru articles. The ones that start with phrases like 'What You Need to Know About...' which give me a lot of background for the how this all comes about.
Other interesting places to look are shopping sites. Yeah, I know. What?
But BDSM wear is very distinctive and sometimes the shoppers give a very comprehensive description of how certain things can be used. Not just whips and chains but also crotchless leather shorts and such. It's very eye-opening.

I belong to this facebook group called Writers Assembled and some writes post things like, 'What's a good disease to give a character so they die slowly?'
Now I love being asked stuff that people don't know but questions like the one above are just lazy. Especially since Google exists. And WebMd. and Mayo Clinic website. If you want to get more technical there's the NHS site. I mean...seriously if you want to give a character a disease, you're gonna need to know more than just the name of the disease.
So on one such post, being totally and completely fed up I wrote, GIYF.
(If you don't know what that means, Google it.)
Of course, Classic White Woman© enters my comments to tell me how she's sure that the poster must have searched google already and not found what she wanted blah blah blah. Well, six days later when I had time I gave her a short tutorial about how anyone who wants to bear the label 'writer' needs to be able to do research. Of course, I got some White Woman Victimhood© in response, about my attitude being bad and we agree on things and she doesn't know why she's being attacked blah blah blah. I could write the post for them at this point, it's pretty standard, script does not vary. White woman tears not included.

I'm not trying to hate on white women by the way. I have good friends who are white women. But there is a cohort that is Super Tiresome and I'm tired.
Speaking of feelings and emotions, I've decided to use my Tumblr for the more personal not really bloggy thoughts that I have. When I started it, I was writing Chrianna fanfic and then Aubrih fanfic. That was before the discovery of AO3. I still cross-post fics on Tumblr but it can get confusing since updates of different fics don't follow each other. I wrote my first piece last week. It got real personal but I am consoled by the fact that nobody reads my Tumblr anyway.
So why write you ask?
Two reasons.
It's how I do self-care. I take thoughts from my head and throw them on paper (paper is a metaphor here for any writing material) and then they're not in my head anymore. I've seen a lot of post on all forms of media of people talking to strangers about their inability to stand their lives because of one thing or another - anxiety, depression, lack of being seen, self-hatred. And my foremost thought right now is that I'm glad I can't relate.
The reasons I can't relate is the second reason I write. If knowing that You Are Not Alone is something that helps someone else,  without them having to go through the process of getting out, because I already did, and they can learn from me...well. Why not?
So I leave it to Fate, God or the Universe. If you need to find it, you will.
Also, I just want to say that it bothers me that Janet Jackson isn't mentioned when people are talking about All Round Entertainers of All Time. Have you seen her Pleasure Principle video where she keeps us watching with no one on the screen but her and a dance studio?
ICONIC.
Meanwhile, I want you to know that my books are available in more places than just Amazon in case you're boycotting them over the NRA or the fact that they are dodgy as fuck. Click on any of the links at the top of the page to take you to each book's landing page. Remember that before you buy, you can always download a sample. So download them ALL.
And leave reviews people. Reviews are the lifeblood by which we live.

How BDSM isn't as Bad as You Think

This is very likely my last post of 2017.
Very likely but not definitely.
I'm trying to be a better planner but the truth is that I live and write by the seat of my pants and God's will so I can't say for sure. That said, I want to talk about something I recently learned about because I like to share my knowledge and opinions.
But y'all know that right?

Recently, I was tricked into writing a 12,000-word book on being a submissive in BDSM.
Tricked how you ask?
Well, it's simple really. I am registered on this site as a writer, filed under 'fiction'. Which means that on my work page, I can only see work available in the fiction category. But then one of the managers emailed me and said, "I have this piece of work that nobody has chosen and you're not doing anything - on the site - as far as I can see. Can I give it to you?"
Now, this site has filed me under fiction meaning that I can only access the work posted under stories on there. However, most of the work they get is non-fiction, and so they essentially lock me out of the larger portion of work available...until no one else is willing to do a certain job. Then suddenly they all up in my DMs like, "Hey Bighead."
It's cool.
It's alright.
People will use you if you let them.
I learned that lesson long ago.
So I only let them use me if it's to my benefit. And I figured I could do the 12k assignment and I'd get paid right about the middle of my holiday which means...

Yep.
I'd be rolling in it.
So I said yes.
And THAT'S when they told me the topic.
Now I'm not your typical judgemental whatever. But I don't hold with pain. And the fanfic I've read featuring BDSM is equal parts painful and just no. So I was not exactly happy.
However, I took it as an opportunity to learn something new, hopefully, and who knows? I'll probably be asked to write a BDSM romance sooner or later.
Right?
So, learning opportunity...
And boy did I learn!

First of all boys and girls, BDSM is not just about whips and chains. It's an entire lifestyle and personality type. As soon as I began learning more and more about what it takes and what it looks like to be in a dom/sub relationship I started looking at everyone around me differently. I noticed who had a tendency toward dominance, others towards submissiveness...Believe it or not, that was new information to me.

Take these two ladies in the lovely gif above for example. One hundred percent uncut, pure doms. Rob and Chyna's relationship might have worked out if Rob didn't bring a third dom into their relationship; his mama, Kris Jenner.
You notice that Rob and Chyna were fine and happy until he kind of reconciled with his family and was calling his mother every two minutes to ask for permission for this and that...Two cocks cannot exist in the same roost. One dom had to go and in this case, it was Chyna who stepped and got herself another sub.
Nicki also is such a dom, leading her men publicly around by the nose...remember how Safaree used to walk behind her? Dragged on stage at every award show to basically be her entourage? And Meek, so happy to have snagged those boobs and that butt. Just counting his blessings to be in the same room with her. Until they disobeyed. And then it was bye bye miss American pie...
You always know who wore the pants in her relationships. Probably why she and Drake have never quite gotten it together. He doesn't strike me as the submissive type...in spite of his softness.

Another obvious dom/sub couple is Rob's sister Kim and her husband Kanye. He literally tells her what to wear, goes so far as to dress her, basically, he runs her life. From what I've read of the dom/sub life, the first thing you need for success is a lot of trust in each other, because the sub completely hands her life over into the dom's hands.
Without trust, the dynamic can't work. With that in mind, I'd say that the Kimye relationship has the tools to last a lifetime what with her throwing away her sleuthing abilities because 'she doesn't need them with him', and he only having her number in his phone...they clearly need no one else.
Writing this book was not just beneficial in allowing me to see y'all in a new light. It also showed me things that I didn't know, I didn't know about myself.
I love when that happens.
When you discover something about yourself you didn't even think to imagine might be something to wonder about. It's the best. It's increasing self-awareness without angst and effort.
Shall I tell you what I discovered about me?

...
...
Bye Felicia, we not that close.
I will marvel with you at the marvelous possibilities of accessing knowledge and wisdom about absolutely any topic from the pages of a book. You might be reading it for entirely different purposes but then you come across something that makes you go like, "Hmmm...I did not know, I needed to know that."

I'm sure some of you would like to read the finished product on BDSM. Unfortunately, I have no idea where it will be published.
Hello, Annemarie, ghostwriter, pleased to meet you.
I will tell you where you can find a whole bunch of books I wrote...
Here.
Y'all come back and visit in the New Year y'hear?