Russel Simmons Makes Harriet Tubman into a Video Ho

Hi folks long time no write. It took a disgusting offense to black womanhood get back on my blog hustle. A few days ago I was defending Russell Simmons on twitter against the racist tatulogy of Don Lemon and sexual harassment king Bill O’Reilly. Both of whom sited lascivious single black mothers and their naturally criminal male spawn for Trayvon Martin’s death. Simmons wrote a piece calling out Lemon’s  sophistry.  I thought he words were powerful. While I was defending his good name, Simmons was preparing for the debut of his youtube channel called All Def Digital. The channel’s first video called Harriet Tubman Sextape” in which Harriet Tubman conspires with another enslaved person to blackmail their way into freedom by producing a sex tape. While the other slave hides in the closet with a video camera,  Tubman aggressively pursues sex with her master. But before doing so, she refers to being raped in the past by saying. “All these years, I’ve been actin’ like I didn’t love our special time together. But tonight that’s all gonna be different.” See Harriet didn’t mind being raped at all!

Russell Simmons prides him self on his Buddhist practice. He has called for compassion for Donald Trump, Roger Ailes and Mayor Michael Bloomberg despite their deeply racist stances. His Foundation for Ethnic Understanding aims “to promote understanding and cooperation between and among ethnic groups and to reduce the existing tensions among diverse racial and ethnic communities.” Yet on the 100th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s death, Russell made her into an angry, aggressive, black whore who used her vagina for liberation.

Let’s just list some the facts of Tubman’s life to get the bitter taste of Simmon’s misogyny out of our mouths:

1. Harriet Tubman born Araminta Harriet Ross was born in Dorchester County, Maryland around 1820. She began working at the age of five. She was beaten by masters to whom she was hired out and suffered a severe head wound when she was hit by a heavy metal weight. The injury caused disabling seizures, narcoleptic attacks, headaches, and powerful visions and revelatory dreams.

2 – In 1849, Tubman escaped  to Philadelphia and immediately began risking her own life by making 19 trips to the south to recover hundreds of enslaved Blacks.

3 – At the height of her campaign $40,000 bounty was placed on her head. At one point, she overheard some men reading a wanted poster, which stated she was illiterate she read from a newspaper to fool the men into thinking she was not the fugitive they were looking foe. In case any of the slaves she was leading to freedom had second thoughts, she carried a gun which she threatened to use on anyone who wanted to return to the plantation.

4- When the American Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. She was first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 slaves in South Carolina.

5- After the war, she retired to the family home in Auburn, New York, and became active in the state’s women’s suffrage movement. Near the end of her life, she lived in a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped found years earlier.

Does this sound like a woman who would Kim Karsdashian her way to freedom? For the past few decades too many black men have taken over the mantle of defaming, evaluating and dehumanizing black men from white men.  After over 350 years of legalized sexual assault black women worked together to finally made the rape of black women a crime, yet many black men began calling us bitches and whores. Today we work to end the violence in our communities, stop and frisk and the school to prison pipeline that overwhelmingly effects black men, too many black rappers, athletes and actors praise non-black women and defame us. Simmons’ flippant apology  and tweets illustrate how little thought he gave to how this work would affect his mother, sister-in-law and nieces and the other black women in his life. Is this how he wants his daughters to learn about this great American hero or does their mixed race ancestry render them immune from this dehumanization of black womanhood? The video was taken off All Def Digital but not before it was posted all over the internet.  Google it if you want to see it, I will not link to it. If Russell had paid attention to other black internet content providers he would would know that a wonderful series of videos called Black Moses Barbie already exists. It is hilarious and celebrates her courage. Please check it out.

ABWW Heroine of the Day: Shirley Chisholm

One of first memories of seeing a black person on TV outside of a situation comedy was a dignified, straightforward African American woman campaigning for President. I remember thinking if she could so that, I could do anything. In 1968, she became the first black woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, of immigrant parents. Her father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was born in British Guiana and her mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church, Barbados. Born in Brooklyn, New York and at the age three, Chisholm was sent to Barbados to live with her maternal grandmother and did not return to New York City until roughly seven years later. In her 1970 autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, she wrote: “Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.”

In 1964, Chisholm ran for and was elected to the New York State Legislature. In 1968, she ran as the Democratic candidate for New York’s 12th District congressional seat and was elected to the House of Representatives. Defeating Republican candidate James Farmer, Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. Chisholm joined the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969 as one of its founding members. From 1977 to 1981, during the 95th Congress and 96th Congress, Chisholm was elected to a position in the House Democratic leadership, as Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus. By the time she retired from Congress she was the third highest-ranking member of the prestigious Education and Labor Committee. Throughout her tenure in Congress, Chisholm worked to improve opportunities for inner-city residents. She was a vocal opponent of the draft and supported spending increases for education, health care and other social services, and reductions in military spending.

All those Chisholm hired for her office were women, half of them black. Chisholm said that during her New York legislative career, she had faced much more discrimination because she was a woman than because she was black. In the 1972 U.S. presidential election, she made a bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. George McGovern won the nomination in a hotly contested set of primary elections, with Chisholm campaigning in 12 states and winning 28 delegates during the primary process.At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, as a symbolic gesture, McGovern opponent Hubert H. Humphrey released his black delegates to Chisholm] giving her a total of 152 first-ballot votes for the nomination. Chisholm’s base of support was ethnically diverse and included the National Organization for Women. Chisholm said she ran for the office “in spite of hopeless odds… to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” Among the volunteers who were inspired by her campaign was Barbara Lee, who continued to be politically active and was elected as a congresswoman 25 years later.

She announced her retirement from Congress in 1982. Her seat was won by a fellow Democrat, Major Owens, in 1983. After leaving Congress, Chisholm was named to the Purington Chair at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She taught there for four years. She also lectured frequently as a public speaker. Chisholm was married to Conrad Chisholm, a Jamaican private investigator from 1949 to 1977. Upon their divorce, she married Arthur Hardwick Jr., a Buffalo businessman who died in 1986. Check out the wonderful documentary of her extraordinary life at veoh.com