La Chola

found out about Lady Bitch Ray from Axes of Empowerment.

Lady Bitch Ray is a Turkish immigrant to Germany. She considers her rapping to be a sex-positive feminist response to male sexism in hip/hop. She is an academic and from what I can see, media justice activist. Erica is correct, it’s really hard to find too much information about her that is in English–so when I say “from what I can see”–what I mean is that I have been hitting the google translator everywhere and coming up with some really poorly translated websites!

An interesting bit found here at Wikipedia (again, google translator accounts for the shitty translation), asserts that (from what I can see), she’s taken plenty of shit on all fronts for her open sexuality, being called tasteless and that she is “a disgrace to all Turkish women.” Read more »

via the FUCKING ANGRY BLACK WOMAN

And when you’re done reading here, GO OVER THERE and give ABW something positive and amazing to read in her comments moderation.

GO GO GO GO!!!!!

Being linked to from a White Supremacist website. Happy Monday!

ETA: Wow, if you all could see my moderation queue right now.

This is the kind of thing that makes people leave the Internet. It really is. I went through a good chunk of my early life never encountering any blatant racism. I’m sure there was some, but my young, naiveté, and probably my parents shielded me from most of it. No one ever called me a Nigger, or said I couldn’t do something because I was black, or anything like that.

I got to wait until I was all grown up for things like that to happen.

But even still, I don’t think I ever encountered the kind of raw, ignorant, stupid, dangerous, and hurtful hate due specifically to my heritage and skin color until I started this blog. I have been called a Nigger 47 times today. TODAY. And it’s not fucking over yet.

This is the kind of thing that turns people militant.

This is the kind of thing that makes people scared for their well being.

This is the kind of thing that silences voices, and I cannot lay any blame on anyone who chooses silence in the face of this.

This is the kind of thing that makes me a FUCKING ANGRY BLACK WOMAN MORE.

I have extremely dry skin along with very dry (to the point of crunchy almost) kinky hair. I have ALWAYS struggled with my hair/skin (during season changes, my skin can get so dry it cracks)–but the past few months have been really bad for some reason.

Then to top it off, my hair is longer these days, and it has been tangling so horrifically from underneath (as in, the hair that is closest to the nape of my neck), I almost shaved it all off the other day because the knots were so massive.

There are many days when I don’t even wash/untangle it–just pull it all back into a pony tail. Which does really well except that I get tired of always looking like a frazzled English teacher (haha).

So, the other day I found something called Jojoba oil. Out of pure desperation, I pored half the bottle over my hair/scalp last night. Today–voila! My scalp feels more like a scalp rather than a slab of cooking skin–my curls are actually soft rather than frizzy (although there’s still a problem with the tangles).

Now, clearly I can’t continue to slather myself in Jojoba oil every night–but this has made me wonder–what do people with kinky hair and dry skin do to maintain unfrizzy/untangled hair and skin that doesn’t need to be itched all night?

And I hate to be a products snob, I really really do–but I have tried pretty much every conditioner, dandruff shampoo, restoring, nourishing, love your curls hair product out there and they don’t work. So I’m looking for all natural type products like bees wax or jojoba oil or whatever.

Also, black women–my hair is not tight kink–when it is short and directly after I wash it (before it goes into super frizz), I have curls that are just a bit tighter than this. But then my hair dries and BAM, it’s super frizz (as in the bottom of my hair remains kinked, the top of my hair goes to frizz and usually the two wind up mixing creating a rats nest). When my hair is longer (like now) the same frizzy/rats nest thing happens–but with a bit loser curl–more like the woman in the picture. Having said all that–do you recommend any products at all?

I’m kind of irritated at myself right now, because my whole life I could have been trying out these products–and there were a few times when I even walked through the “ethnic hair” area at the store looking for something for Latina women–but of course, Latina hair isn’t different than white hair (rolls eyes) and all I ever saw was product for black women–which translated in my mind as “not black=not for me’.

I don’t know what to think about the way hair product is segregated on the shelves like that. Seems good and bad at the same time. I’m irritated that I never really thought about it until I discovered that wow, pouring bean oil in my hair helps better than the thirty three years worth of hair product I’ve been trying.

Anyway. Please help if you can–I’ll love you forever.