Lifeisannoying’s Weblog

 for a while now,  the image of what an african american is  cultrally, spritually and physically has been controlled by viacom ( dusty old white men in suits completely insulated from  african americans) viacom are a multi- million pound company, surely they’d do they research right? WRONG! Viacom, bet, mtv, vh1 will never look out for your interests, for crying out loud did you see the travesty that is flavour of love.

Now over the past 20 years or so that i have been alive i have watched from england and seen the misrepresentation of a whole comunity. All you ever see are the talk show were  one feckless woman brings on a whole host of men to test  them to find out who has fathered her child, men who are represented  by crooks fiend and criminals, women who if they are not loud, brash, abrasive , ugly and rude, are comparitively sexy but nothing but  a gyrating machine with breasts and rounded buttocks.

I as an outsider  think it’s unfair, that isn’t even even-handed. America in itself is a massive place, and diversity to be found in all of its populus. Are the companies trying to tell me that  black people in mississippi are the same and  have the same culture as say black folks in  new york state? people in geogia have the same  ways and customs as the folks in new orleans? black people have to stand up and reclaim their image from the media, and recognise their unique cultural values. How many black men are sick of being stereotyped by the images they see on television, i bet there are absolutely thousands. they are not feckless baby-daddies, crooks and shiesters, i bet there are a good proportion of good men who just get by and are sick of walking around  with store detectives trailing them or unessecary police searches. there are many black women who are tired of the condescention the face when they take their young children out only for many of them to scream inside of themselves “yes they are mine, yes i have a man/husband/ yes i am capable/ i am in a stable relationship Damn you”.

i was chatting to some friend from across the pond, and they were have a very vocal arguement about what contituted Creole, one argued that to be creole you had to have ancestry in louisiana speak a french derived  language and be racially mixed, another argued that you had to be  an octoroon  and come from  the deep south and then it all started to fly.  Black people were not creoles they were just  “n1773rs who speak french” (btw i strongly disapprove of this term, it’s so bad) and i wanted to  know why Black people as i would recognise them  could not be creole  i would have said that yes cultrally they were.  after some talking it seemed to me that the trem “creole” had some social status in the African american society ate large and they were very careful to preserve the  special cache that the term had.   Well they were quite horrified to discover  that in my part of the caribbean (english speaking) creole is applied to  most of the population,  even though we are all black, we take it’s meaning to be  mixed and born  over in the west indies. there is also a link to being able to speak a french derived pidgin but that’s dying out.

But my point is you should cherish what is your own, never let bet inform the world of what you are, know yourselves. It’s not only a creole heritage you should cherish,  it’s the folk tales in your area, the dance you do, your local music, your communities history and all of those things you might take for granted. So when you meet someone who perhaps is not from you area, who wants to look down on you because they think that they know all about you because they watched a simple 3 minute akon video, you can always turn up your nose and tell them what your community is really like.

never undersell yourselves!