I stare out on California Street in San Francisco as cable cars pass up and down the slanted thoroughfare with distant memories swirling around inside my head. Memories of a young Andrea, just 19 years old, moving to the big city to take a huge bite out of it.
Flatland Diva
Flatland Diva is a look at an indigenous black woman's journey through the Bay Area (Oakland, San Francisco, Silicon Valley) of Northern California and beyond. I am The Flatland Diva at your service as a voice of the community in which I live and thrive despite the societal struggles that present themselves in vivid Technicolor. This revolution is both physical and metaphysical. While The Flatland Diva is on the case, the elite will see defeat! Vive le peuple!
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Momma and The City
I stare out on California Street in San Francisco as cable cars pass up and down the slanted thoroughfare with distant memories swirling around inside my head. Memories of a young Andrea, just 19 years old, moving to the big city to take a huge bite out of it.
Friday, June 30, 2017
Chris Rock, Call Me: Why I Need To Date A Baller
Last night I dreamt I was dating Chris Rock and it was nothing short of magical. I woke up to the revelation that for the most part I've spent 25 years dating the wrong kind of brothers. Not only have these black men been spiritually broke but they've all been financially strapped, making under 100K a year while living beyond their means.
Enter Chris Rock. He's a white hot talent who is solidly in the black financially. A black man like him, a shot caller, isn't looking for a woman to match him dollar for dollar because like Jamie Foxx says, he's got his own.
into this black man...
So, I'll keep hope alive that a true baller, shot caller, will cross my path to make a beautiful life with me and not my pocketbook.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
When Giving Jill Scott Is Not Enough
I honestly can't tell you when we friended one another, however, I recall when he appeared on my radar. It was May 2011 on my birthday. Yes, I fell pry to a friggin' Facebook birthday comment.
At first, I thought nothing of his likes. After all, I had taken myself out of the singles' scene a few months prior. I was tired of the ritual dance of dating.
Once we made our way into the infamous inbox, it was on and poppin. Fast forward to December when we meet in the flesh. The love displayed and felt was both mutual and monumental. I'd never felt that way before.
I don't feel like your average American broad. I am an abyss of consciousness. I feel a little more gifted than a typical middle age woman. I am a queen. People confirmed my crown and scepter are really real all the time. Grace isn't something I have to practice nor is it about anything I was taught. It's just a deeply rooted confidence in the superior quality of my genes and what exactly they can do.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
A 90's Throwback: Gucci Braids, Shirley Temple Curls and a Complicated Freedom
Editor's Note: I wrote this piece in the 1990's for the San Francisco Chronicle. It is a piece near and dear to my heart as it looks at the intersections between mine and my grandmother's lives with black hair. Enjoy!
"WHAT WOULD YOU like done today?" the receptionist asks me as I stand in a daze before her counter.
It's been 10 years since I've set foot in a beauty college, and the question of what style to choose means more than the receptionist could know.
I can't even contemplate the question without thinking of my grandmother. Before I was born, Louise Russell, a graduate of The Madame CJ Walker School of Beauty Culrure in Chicago, was famous for the hairstyles she'd fabricate in the back of her home in San Bernardino. I heard stories of women traveling the 60 miles from L.A. to have my grandmother make them glamorous. I'd sit in her back room and imagine the scene: The pressing comb in its tiny stove, Grandma swinging her Marcels (metal curling utensils) around like Bill Pickett while managing to maintain a slippery patch of pink pressing wax on the back of her hand. These women of the '40s and '50s would ride back toward Hollywood like poised divas - hair silked, curled or waved.
By the time my baby-soft hair had grown into a thick, bushy mane, my grandmother was too old and tired to mess with so much hair. She preferred to take me downtown to the beauty college and let the "girls" deal with me. I'd sit while Grandma made arrangements with the receptionist for two
"colored girls" - a sophomore for her and a senior for me.
Heads would turn as my stylist and I crossed the room, and I'd grin back, not caring whether the women were marveling at my cuteness or at the discombobulated state of my woolly ponytails.
"Are you tender-headed?" my stylist would ask, fingering through my hair, and I'd stoically contend that I wasn't. I'd suffer through minor tugging and pulling and leave the school with bright colored bands around my neatly twisted hair and the scent of cherry shampoo and coconut hair grease in my nose.
One student with nearly 1,600 hours under her belt - almost enough to graduate - is calling out her sister-in-law for phoning in and asking if "someone at the college" could do her hair.
"I was like, "I can do your hair,"" recounts the irate stylist. She's proud of her skills, as she should be: She's hooked herself up with the same wispy golden curls that hip-hop balladeer Mary J. Blige probably pays big money for.
My student dresser, Yvette, is round and beautiful with long Gucci braids (thick twisted plaits), and reminds me of the young women dressers who used to look so old to me.
"I always did my friends' hair," she tells me as she wraps a shiny metallic smock around me. "When I started this I just fell in love with it and started dreaming about having my own shop."
Yvette takes my hair down from the loose bun I wrapped it up in this morning and fingers through it. "My hair is the same length as yours under my braids," she tells me.
"Maybe a little shorter." I confess that I've been using Mane 'n Tail, a lengthening conditioner which is all the rage. The product was originally marketed for horses and I used to have to get it in pet stores until it caught on. Now I buy it at Walgreen's. Yvette tells me she uses it, too.
We move over to the sink and Yvette opens the five-gallon bottle of cherry shampoo. She works up a cool lather with her massage and that ambrosial scent emanates from it. I scan the room, watching young women indulging other women, and listening to the harmonic chatter that could easily be confused with gossip. Sometimes the students misinterpret the talk, Yvette tells me, and feuds begin. But for the most part they get along.
Yvette tells me something else that makes me think about how much has changed since the days when Grandma did hair. Just two weeks ago, a student who was about to graduate was shot at a party. "Candy had 1,600 hours and was really good," Yvette tells me as she delicately towel blots my hair. Classes were suspended for two days. A couple of the students did her hair and make-up for the burial.
Back at her station, Yvette gives me a generous dose of brown gel to cast the wet set of my choosing. I decide on fat Shirley curls all overflowing from my crown and into my face. But just as Yvette is emptying out the bag of plastic rollers, I spot a young hairdresser with large sculpted fingerwaves and become inspired. Yvette adds enough gel to hook up some fingerwaves in the front, leaving enough hair free at the crown to make my fat curls successful.
I look in the mirror and my own face takes me back a generation or two. Back in the day, young black women's creativity might have been restricted on the job or in daily life, but they let loose with their hair, their one pliable appendage. Fingerwaves added to pincurls added to a slick roll at the back with fat curls falling from it.
But the young women of Grandma's generation didn't face the conflicts today's young women do every time we straighten our hair. Rebelling against Eurocentric beauty standards, our mothers fought for and won the right to 'fro, braid and dread their daughters' hair to reassert our African heritage and beauty. The result for a lot of us daughters is that we question our consciousness every six weeks: Am I perming for my man, my boss or me? Can I love myself with my natural hair texture?
Hair for Grandma had an entirely different meaning. She spent her childhood during the Depression caring for her six younger brothers and sisters, and her teens fighting courts and social workers to keep them. She kept them exceptionally groomed to avoid any false charges of neglect, and discovered her love for self-expression through hair in the process. By the time I came around she'd gotten quite modest about her own appearance, and went to the school not to get her hair whipped up but to be pampered. She went to be rubbed, massaged and cared for at her crown - to receive a little service for all she'd put in over the years.
By the time I get out from under the beehive drier I'm one of the last clients in the shop. Yvette removes the last moldings of a 1930s hairstyle, one Grandma might have worn in her youth. I'd gone back to the beauty college out of nostalgia for my girlhood, but when I look in the mirror I'm surprised to see a grown woman - one who makes her own choices and manages her complicated freedom. I think Grandma might have recognized her.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Stacey Dash and Television's Sassy Band of Black Pundits
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Forever Punany, With Love: The Myth of Men
I think it's kind of funny the way men and women relate to one another once the idea of sex between the two comes into play. Titalating animal energy is tempered by coy, coquettishness. The Ying and yang of masculine/feminine desire go 'round and 'round in a dance which casts a spell on them both.
By the time "it" goes down, if they've been able to put doing the deed off for some time, the passion can be explosive. I'm talking, break out the fire extinguisher because the heat might erupt into full on combustion. And, don't be a talker. Men fall in love with what they see, while women, we fall for what we hear. There is a popular meme circulating social media that states this fact and goes on to state that this explains why women wear makeup and men, well, they lie.
When presented with the opportunity to have carnal knowledge of a woman, I've been told by a very reliable, worldly man, that men will say anything to gain it. They'll whisper sweet nothings you take to mean everything. He'll wrap you in a bubble of "You are mines-This is mines." And if you are just fool hardy enough, you'll start to believe him.
It's been months, but I still keep those texts. Being Latina, she went so far as to mock my blackness She sent a text to him ("So, you're with a black woman? Ew.") which proves a long standing theory I have that many Latinas think they are superior to black women because black men allow them to believe this. I've got some news for you-- limp hair and pale skin doesn't make for superior genes and most certainly not for a superior human being. She didn't know what I looked like, how many degrees I might have or languages I spoke. The mere fact that I was a Sister made her feel better than me. Brothers act like they got their Yoko Ono in exotic girls, but more often than not they've got a closet racist on their hands.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Why I Walked Outta "Straight Outta Compton"
I found that the movie missed the mark on setting the cultural context of the situation of blacks in south central Los Angeles, where the notorious city of Compton is located. Instead of exploring the national, even global, implications of their message of resistance against police brutality and the abuses of the system of racism/white supremacy on the black community, they instead dedicate a good majority of the movie reharshing the old beefs all their real fans and true hip hop heads already knew about.
Everyone knows that the music industry is one of the most corrupt businesses to ever operate. Even cottage labels, like Priority Records, have turned into artist farms where both the artists' musical product and integrity are siphoned off for pennies on thousands of product units, making the industry attractive to exploitive, old money interests, gangsters and thugs, like the infamous Suge Knigt. Knight is probably as gang related as Al Caponre.
Its been reported in major news outlets that the members of N.W.A. were said to be regulars on the movie's set and were insistent Grey recapture exact details when depicting their lives.
Funny thing is they left out a couple of big chunks of N.W.A. history-- their social impact on the black community's resistance to police brutality and, well, what I would call the rise of gangster rap. Gangsta rap is a genre of Hip-Hop many black music historian believe was ushered in at the height of the conscious rap movement in order to kill the empowering unity being expressed and felt in the community. Gangster rap propagated not only a view of the police as enemey number 1, but of the next black man, one not in your so called gang set, as a close second. Murder rings out in this genre first explored by Rap forefather Ice-T as an valuable means of exacting revenge on "a nigga."
I will find a bootlegger on purpose to cringe through the end of this movie. Dr. Dre and O'Shea have gotten enough of my money the past 25 years. And for what? So Dre can hand out millions to a white school and Ice Cube can be family-friendly? These opportunist have done nothing for the community they come from. Reportedly, Dre is offering the Compton community the royalties from his latest album entitled "Compton: A Soundtrack" to a cultural center there. Who-hoo! He didn't make USC, a extremely wealthy private California university that has among the lowest black enrollment (despite being in an area where more black Californians live per capita than anywhere else in the state) in Southern California, wait to get his coin.
So, there is a buzz. We're talking Oscars now. I've heard it time and again with "Straight Outta Compton." How can I put this? Um, I don't think so. While Gray is a talented director, the film could never be a contender. If by some miracle, it does receive a nod or two, the motives of Hollywood in acknowledging this black film would be "show business" business as usual, dubious at best. In other words, this film has no shot in hell of receiving any Golden statues shaped as the Egyptian God Ptah. Nonetheless, its filmmakers are no doubt taking a que from that Earth, Wind & Fire track and dancing in September as the film has grossed nearly $200 billion dollars. The film cost a mere $28 million to produce. Can you say winning?