A Plea on behalf of a Beautiful Woman
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
We are witnessing history.
Serena Williams is holding court. She, in my humble opinion, is not only the greatest female tennis player ever (she would have obliterated Chrissy Evert, Martina Navratilova, and Steffi Graf), but she is arguably the best female athlete of all time.
Serena Williams is so ridiculously good at tennis that she’s now won as many grand slam titles as the rest of the women’s tour. Combined.
You'd think, then, that she'd be the toast of the town, wouldn't you? You'd think that people would be focused on her accomplishments and waiting eagerly for the US Open, right? Not so fast. The media has something more interesting to discuss. There's a raging debate going on about...Serena's body image!
Did you hear any discussion about body image after those beautiful women of diverse shapes and sizes won the FIFA Women's World Cup? Have you heard any rumors about the body types of softball players? Of course not!
I was watching Serena play Maria Sharapova in the Wimbledon semi-final game and my ears pricked up when I heard Chrissy Evert stage whisper (paraphrasing as best as I can remember): Maria and Serena are equally matched in every way except for physicality. They are equally matched in intensity, in desire, in knowledge of the game, mentally, but Serena is more physical than Maria.
WTH, I thought. To the black ear, that word "physical" is a loaded term. And how in heaven's name can two people be equally matched in any area when one has beaten the other 17 out of 18 times?
Serena crushed Maria Sharapova in the semi-finals of Wimbledon on Thursday. The 6-2, 6-4 thrashing was Williams’ seventeenth straight victory over Sharapova.
Don't fall for Chrissy Evert's apparent fulsome praise for Serena that she has been singing of late.
It was Evert who suggested that Serena should be drug tested. There is an effort afoot to delegitimize Serena's accomplishments. O, it's not new. They have been saying some of the same things since The Sisters started beating up on Hingis, who was supposedly the "most intelligent" tennis player ever. But now that Serena looks set to smash all the prestigious records, the hatefest has picked up steam with talk about steroids and musculature.
Research shows that negative body-image is associated with eating disorders, sexual dysfunctions, social anxiety, and depression. And yet so-called responsible public personalities have taken to the media to openly criticize Serena's body type even as they accuse her of cheating. We know what they are saying about the black body. Michelle Obama has had to deal with the same crap since her husband had the audacity to become President of these United States. But think of the damage that is being done to young girls - of every race and creed - who have the curves and strength of a Serena.
Serena's beautiful body is suddenly something that she ought to be ashamed of.
Williams “has large biceps and a mold-breaking muscular frame, which packs the power and athleticism that have dominated women’s tennis for years. Her rivals could try to emulate her physique, but most of them choose not to,” the report says.
(My bold).
They compared the bodies of Serena and Maria and found Serena's wanting.
Williams, 33, is the more physically powerful, with a ferocious temper and the mindset of a battling champion. However, she cannot compete with Sharapova’s media-friendly combination of blonde Siberian beauty and sponsor-friendly image control — which has meant Sharapova, 28, has waltzed away with a fortune of £125 million and counting.
They compared the on-court grunts and found Maria's grunt to be a "climactic shriek of the blue movie variety." In other words, her grunt reminds them of hot sex; Serena's, however, was described as:
Serena Williams’ grunt is a more macho ‘hur-wuff’ although she has been known to top it up with a shout of ‘Come on’ — or something far ruder
What is being done to Serena is not happening in a vacuum. We do know how the black body is viewed in this country and elsewhere;
generations ago and still to this day.
But my goodness, this is 2015! We deserve better! Serena deserves better. She deserves to be treated with respect. She deserves the loudest cheers when she steps on her home court and not the lackluster, anemic applause they could barely afford to give her at Wimbledon while she had to stand there and watch the person whom she had just defeated get longer and more enthusiastic support than she got.
Serena Williams has her eyes on New York, not always the most welcoming landscape for her but now a destination where she is desperate to make history and friends...Williams’s home audience has not always been kind to her in the cavernous Arthur Ashe Stadium
.
What a damn shame.
Here is what Serena is asking:
“Hopefully people will be cheering me on to, like, push me over the edge, give me that extra strength I need to go for this historic moment. That would be great. And I think in a way it also makes things easier for me because I feel like I have nothing to lose. I feel like I can go in there, do the best I can and just hope for the best.”
Is that too much to ask? The US Open will be on
August 31 through to September 13. Can we turn the Arthur Ashe Stadium into Serena's home court? Can we do that for her? She deserves nothing less.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Does the President have enough power to do this? Slate: Obama Wants to End Mass Incarceration.
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t’s criminal justice reform week at the Obama White House. On Tuesday, the president gave a major speech outlining the moral and economic case for shrinking the prison population, rehabilitating inmates instead of merely locking them up, and addressing the disproportionate impact of policing and criminal prosecution on poor black communities. Earlier in the week, Obama ordered 46 nonviolent drug offenders to be freed from federal prison, saying that the long sentences they were given at the height of the war on drugs did not fit their crimes. On Thursday, Obama will become the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, when he makes a trip to Oklahoma to meet with inmates and talk about the squalid conditions in which they live.
Meanwhile, Congress has been holding hearings on criminal justice reform, with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hosting a parade of legislators—including Senate Democrat Cory Booker and House Republican Jim Sensenbrenner—who have put forth bills of varying ambition that would change the way the federal government punishes large categories of offenders. Predictions that Congress will pass some kind of legislation before the end of the current session are growing louder and more assured.
Taken together, it looks like momentum. And it undoubtedly is. But the political progress belies a troubling, substantive fact: The federal prison system, which is what all these national lawmakers are talking about when they talk about reform, is relatively small, and fixing it would not have any direct effect on the state and local systems in which the vast majority of American inmates are incarcerated. As Obama underscored in yesterday’s speech, there are more than 2.2 million people currently behind bars in the United States, including about 700,000 in local jails. According to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, just 215,866 of them are serving in federal prison.
President Obama signing letters to the 46 prisoners who had their sentences commuted
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Natural resources are often as much as a curse as they are a blessing for developing countries. The Economist: Wild, ancient and oil-rich lake Turkana shows how fast the continent is changing.
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The region around Lake Turkana, the world’s largest desert lake, is known as the cradle of mankind. Over the past century many remains of man’s ancestors have been found well preserved in windswept scrubland far from paved roads and modern interference. Life in Turkana remained unchanged for as long as anyone could remember. Even today residents in remote parts live off the land and only a tiny fraction are literate. But in the past few years things have begun to change dramatically.
A turning point came with the discovery of oil in 2012. Kenya joined the increasingly non-exclusive club of countries exploring for hydrocarbons (90% of African nations now do). Turkana saw an influx of rigs, roads and burly foreigners with big wallets. Tullow and Africa Oil, based in London and Vancouver respectively, found evidence of enough crude oil to make production commercially viable. At the government’s insistence, they hired thousands of locals as labourers, filling empty pockets in Kenya’s poorest region and erecting Turkana’s tallest building, a two-storey house.
Some towns grew by 500% in two years. Itinerant families started building permanent homes. Elijah Kodoh, a local official, says “people are moving very quickly to a sedentary life.” Shops have opened where none had ever been. The town of Lokichar got its first mall, the South Gate Business Centre. At lunchtime in the newly opened Yassin Hotel nearby—built with wages from Tullow—a live goat is led through the dining room to be slaughtered in the backyard.
From the beginning, however, relations were fraught. The two nomadic communities, oil engineers and bush pastoralists, distrusted each other. Locals had inflated expectations and suspected they were being cheated. They complained of environmental damage and that outsiders were getting the best jobs. The companies said it was hard to find skilled local people for drilling and seismic work.
In 2013 violent protests erupted; roads were blocked and angry crowds stormed rigs and looted them. Work was suspended for a while. Then the oil price crashed in 2014 and the companies cut their budgets drastically. Jobs were lost—upsetting locals who had not understood the lay-off clauses in their contracts. The economy around Lokichar slumped. Yet rather than inflaming tensions it seems to have eased them. Mutual dependency became an accepted fact. “We are not going to drive away investors,” says Peter Ekai Lokoel, Turkana’s deputy governor and a former activist. “We need them.”
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In the country with the 3rd highest number of people of African decent in the Americas; poverty, class, and race clash. New York Times: Colombian City’s New Face and Violent Underbelly Collide.
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This has been called one of South America’s most violent cities, infamous for its “chop-up houses,” where victims are murdered and dismembered, their bodies later found on the streets or washed up in the stilt-house slums that line the shores of the polluted bay.
And yet, in recent weeks, workers were busily laying pink and gray flagstones for a pedestrian mall in front of a newly built hotel and condominium complex meant to attract the international executives who are investing billions of dollars to expand this city’s busy port.
People here often talk of the two Colombias. One is the country of a sophisticated elite, growing rich off international trade and jetting between Bogotá and other world capitals. The other is a country of crushing poverty and violence where lawlessness reigns.
In this Pacific port city, these two Colombias come face to face with raw impact.
Buenaventura is the country’s main Pacific port and the centerpiece of a government strategy to focus on increasing trade with Asia and Western Hemisphere countries on the Pacific, including Chile, Mexico, Peru and the United States.
Members of the Colombian Coast Guard searched for drugs in the waters off the coast of Buenaventura, an important exit point for cocaine and other drugs heading up the Pacific Coast toward the United States. Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
At the same time, it is plagued by intractable poverty and violence, a place where vicious gangs hold sway, long isolated from the central government in Bogotá.
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Harper Lee’s complicated new novel wrestles with race and loses. Slate: Ghost Story from a Haunted Conscience.
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Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award–winning role. It has since gone on to sell more than 40 million copies in umpteen editions, and has become obligatory on high school reading lists (which also means it is widely banned). The copy I picked up recently references the original cover art but the flap copy no longer describes it as a novel—instead, it is “one of the best-loved stories of all time,” for once not an exaggeration. The very idea of its being a “story” preserves Mockingbird’s Southernness—a tale told, and well—while transforming it safely into a kind of universally known folklore.
Or was it always just a coming-of-age book? Despite the book’s success, or perhaps because of it, Lee’s fellow Southern writer Flannery O’Connor saw it as kid’s stuff; in her archives at Emory University, where I am the curator of literary collections, O’Connor dismisses Mockingbird as “children’s literature.” In his groundbreaking Love and Death in the American Novel, critic Leslie Fiedler argues that classic American novels—from Huckleberry Finn to the Leatherstocking Tales—are “notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library, their level of sentimentality precisely that of a pre-adolescent.” He means that there’s a certain prepubescent innocence in American literature, once devoid of women except as puritan ideals, but that this innocence married to Gothic horror created the power and paradox of our literature. I would go further: like Huck Finn, children’s literature speaks not just to a book’s young characters and readers but a relatively young country wrestling with a tangled history of race and caste.
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This week’s release of Go Set a Watchman, Lee’s second book—a story written first but with its action taking place decades after, shelved for years and only recently uncovered—is more anticipated and dreaded than Boo Radley’s emergence from his haunted house. How does one provide a sequel to a ghost story?
One way is to say it’s just a story, nothing to be scared of. Tales about Watchman abound, including the rather unconvincing and convoluted one from Lee’s camp—or at least her lawyer—of only finding the manuscript last year and putting it out now. Anyone who works in an archive as I do knows that most of the archive’s ghosts are well known; how could a semi-sequel to the most beloved book of our time, once submitted to a publisher who convinced her to tell its backstory first, remain completely unknown? It would seem books and biographies of Lee, like Charles J. Shields’s 2006 biography Mockingbird, regarded Watchman not so much as an early draft but a working title, much like the lawyers and the Sotheby’s appraiser did. (The lawyer has just this week changed the story again, making mention of a possible third book!) No matter the timing, the rediscovery (let’s call it) certainly shouldn’t be met with fire.
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.