Change Starts Here

Last week, I went to the midnight showing of Tyler Perry’s film adaptation For Colored Girls, which is based on Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf. I had been skeptical, but my fears were quickly put aside by the stellar cast.

The only problem were these women in the audience. They laughed and laughed. And laughed. There were a couple of comical parts of the film, but they laughed during the emotional parts, too.

Their actions are a bad sign in a string of bad signs I see all the time. It’s the reason my popular culture blog gets three times as many views as this one. It’s the reason more people will call Nicki Minaj a role model before India.Arie. It’s the reason films like For Colored Girls will get much less at the box office than one featuring Madea. It’s the reason roles like these for women of color only come around once every decade.

We’re afraid of facing the hard stuff. The harsh realities of existence as a woman of color. The fact that are bodies are often objectified. That our skin color sparks stereotypes in the minds of others. The fact that most of us, if only for a second, will think of how much easier it would be if we were another race.

We just laugh it off or change the subject because until it happens to us, we’d rather pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Maybe the women in the theater didn’t know anything about Shange. Maybe they never read Black feminist literature. Their loud comments made it clear that they probably didn’t understand the metaphors presented in the dialogue. That’s one of those hard problems—ill-education on social problems. Obviously, you don’t need to read every piece of feminist literature or dramatic work ever produced, but you should be educating yourself enough to understand common problems when they are represented.

I hate to rain on your parade, but there are problems. The world is full of problems. If we laugh at them and ignore them, they don’t get better. They get worse. It’s scary when I talk to women of color in college who don’t know about female genital mutilation or The Virgin Cure and who don’t care. They just shrug it off and say they don’t follow the news; it’s depressing.

It’s like we think ignoring bad things will make them go away, but it won’t.

The headline for this post, somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff, is about someone taking something of no value to anyone but the owner. Things like self-respect, self-love and dignity are only worth something to the person who owns these feelings. They are taken away from a woman when she is raped, beaten, teased and broken by so many other things.

If we don’t acknowledge the hard things, even in a movie theater as we watch fictional characters portrayed in a way that women of the color rarely get the opportunity to be, then we can’t fix them. We cannot help find ways to protect ourselves and our sisters from having things taken from them that are almost impossible to get back.

Yeah, bad stuff happens, but it won’t stop unless we are educated about it and unless we move forward together to find solutions.

I’ve kept you waiting on the big news, but I’m ready to announce it informally now. Change Starts Here is branching out into self-esteem workshops for young women of color from pre-teens to college students and motivational speaking. If you’re interested, e-mail confidencehappens@gmail.com. I’ve been a self-esteem workshop facilitator and motivational speaker for the past four years, so I have a lot of experience in the subject. After taking a sabbatical for almost a year, I’m diving back into it because it’s one of the most gratifying things I have ever done with my life. Just like this blog. I’ve also got more big new coming in late December and in March of next year. I hope you guys will stick with this blog as it continues to grow. -Brianti