Little Girls: Put A Leotard On It

I've been following the dust-up in the news about the 7 year-olds dancing to Beyonce's "Single Ladies" during a dance competition clothed in, well, "costumes," to put it politely. First, everyone was disgusted at the inappropriate clothing and too-adult dance moves. Then, the dance moms fired back and, with an assist from Whoopi Goldberg on "The View," took viewers to task to question themselves if they saw something that was inappropriate -- this was a dance competition, after all, so if they read more into it, well, shame on them.

Hmmm. So, in the interest of trying to inform myself, I viewed the video on YouTube as well as Beyonce's video for "Single Ladies." I think the little girls' dance moves were better than Beyonce's -- I don't think Beyonce can do a pirouette. But I don't think this was age-appropriate dancing for girls their age.

Therein lies the problem. Little girls shouldn't be dancing like grown women, or dressing like them for that matter, even in a dance competition. Here's why, or at least one man's take on this.

I spoke to a trusted male friend of mine, Trevor, who just shook his head when discussing the video of the little girls dancing. Trevor is absolutely certain that the choreographer of the girls' dance had to be a woman. No man, especially a man with daughters, would have allowed his little girls to dress and dance in that matter, in his opinion.

Now, what I'm going to paraphrase from Trevor's remarks is controversial, so don't blame the messenger.

"Women don't understand how men think, otherwise they wouldn't let their daughters dress and act in certain ways." Trevor went on to state that men are "hard wired" to think sexually and are visual beings. "A normal guy can look at those little girls and take a step back, remember they're little girls, and treat them accordingly. The problem is that a lot of guys aren't normal. For them, if you act like a grown and sexy woman, they're going to treat you like a grown and sexy woman -- like an equally sexual being. And that's okay if you're a grown woman and you make that choice knowing there's a chance that someone will treat you in that manner. Little girls don't understand that and don't understand the consequences of dressing and acting in a sexually suggestive manner. That's why parents have to step in and draw the boundaries for what's age appropriate for their young girls." Trevor's concern was for how those little girls might be treated off the dance floor for what they did on the dance floor.

Now, Trevor isn't one of those guys who think that women "deserve what they get" when the dress and act in a sexually suggestive manner. He believes that ""no" means "no"." But, he cautions, "That's the way it should be. That's not the way it always is. And grown women understand that and understand the risk they take when they dress and act in a sexually suggestive manner. It's unfair to little girls to make them think that dancing in that manner is just "dancing" and is without consequences. It's unfair to sexualize them without them being able to understand the consequences."

So there you have it. One guy's opinion.

Quite frankly, I thought the girls could have demonstrated their excellent dance abilities in a dance that was age-appropriate. And, if you compare what they were wearing -- bikini tops, short shorts, and knee-high stockings -- to what Beyonce wore in her video -- a one-sleeved leotard and panty hose -- it's Beyonce who actually looks more like she's dressed like a dancer. And more modest, too.

Maybe I'm just getting old. I thought little girls still danced in leotards.

And therein lies the problem. They should.

What Professor Gates Was Really Guilty Of

My friend Trevor in Oakland always tells me, "Tell the truth and shame the devil." So I'm going to tell the truth, as I see it, about Professor Gates' arrest for disorderly conduct: He was arrested because he lacked humility. He was guilty of being uppity.

Now the media wants to make more of this by questioning President Obama's choice of adverb to describe how the police in the situation acted: Stupidly. Quite frankly, this is about as far as I've seen President Obama step into a American racial issue.

And he's right.

Once the police were satisfied that Professor Gates actually lived in the home, there was no cause to arrest him unless he posed a threat to the police or some other person. From press accounts, which are not necessarily reliable, Professor Gates had the temerity to birddog his inquisitor and ask for his name and badge number. Now, if the reports are true that this officer followed Professor Gates through his house to his kitchen to wait for him to produce ID and proof of residence instead of waiting at the front porch, is it unreasonable for Professor Gates to think that, given the situation -- him, a middle-aged, gray-haired, bespectacled, nerdy-look guy with a limp on the phone to the Harvard Real Estate office from a house in a faculty ghetto -- didn't merit the level of intrusion the officer is reported to have engaged in?

In criminal law, we had it drummed into our heads that a police officer's superior judgment is to be taken into account when evaluating the legality of him or her doing a "Terry" type of stop -- that they are better able to assess the "totality of the circumstances" in deciding whether someone should be stopped, asked for ID, etc. Because they encounter crime all the time, even when they don't have a warrant or exigent circumstances, they are better able to evaluate whether an intrusion into someone's liberty is warranted for the greater good.

Although this was beyond a "Terry" stop, with that in mind, even if the police received a call about a breaking and entering, what about the "totality of the circumstances" would lead them to believe that Professor Gates, in all his disabled, nerdy, intellectual, bespectacled glory, broke into someone else's home or that, once he produced ID and proof of residence, that his conduct was such that he merited arrest? Did they not see "African American Lives" on PBS?

Oh, I get it. He had the temerity to be uppity with the police in his own home. I can't use the term "assertive" because that's reserved for white folks.

But being uppity isn't a crime. It might get you killed, however. But it isn't a crime.

But therein lies the problem: If a white, middle-aged, bespectacled, nerdy professor had birddogged his inquisitor similarly, would he have been arrested for disorderly conduct or simply told, "Sorry, sir, for the intrusion. We'll be on our way now." Gotta wonder. Having lived in Cambridge and attended Harvard Law School, my money's on the latter outcome.

That a black police officer was present at Professor Gates' arrest is of no moment to me. It doesn't make it any less racist or any more right. Here's a dirty little race secret: Sometimes black police officers racially profile black people, too. Sometimes they are more incensed when we act uppity than white police officers are. Sorry, I'm just telling the truth and shaming the devil.

I understand how Professor Gates felt. I lived in Cambridge, and I was not at all surprised that his neighbors, who should know him by now since he's been chair of the African American studies department at Harvard since Jesus was a baby, would call the police on him. I now live in a small town in Placer County, California. When my husband and I moved here as one of the few black couples in our neighborhood, I told him, "Don't get too comfortable. You know it's coming." He didn't get what I was talking about. "You know," I smiled wryly. "Our 'nigger' moment. Sooner or later, someone is going to call us 'nigger.' It's inevitable." Now, it's sad that I think that way, but when you're brought up by a black father who grew up in the Jim Crow South, in the Depression, no less, you are never allowed to get too comfortable being black in America because assuming your own equality and humanity might get you killed like Emmett Till. In fact, I'm sure my father saw it as his parental duty to make sure we never let our race guard down, that we never got "too comfortable" so that we could assume we would be treated equally to whites and could behave as whites and get away with it. Call it incarceration prevention.

But why should we be inconvenienced, why should we not be allowed to be comfortable in our own neighborhoods and homes, because of someone else's racism?

Six months went by. "It hasn't happened yet," BMNB remarked. "Just you wait and see," I shot back.

Well, last month, it happened. From a child, no less. My husband was coming up the walk after a long day at work, and some neighborhood kid blurted out, "FUCKING NIGGERS!" My husband stopped, did a double take, and yelled, "HEY! THAT WORD I DON'T LIKE." To the credit of our neighborhood, one of our other next-door neighbors, who is from Guam, said to the kid, "Hey, that's not cool. That's extremely disrespectful." The friend of the child apologized, but the child never did. His foster father, our next-door neighbor, then wanted my husband to come and speak to his kids about what happened and how wrong it was. Problem is, my husband was scheduled to take our own great-nephews and great-niece, as he does every Wednesday, to his church's Manhood (and Womanhood) Development program to learn, of all things, values and respect. He came by the next day to speak with the kids, but the offending child was not at home -- he was "in therapy." I told him he had discharged his duty -- it wasn't his job to teach other people's kids how not to be racist. He had been inconvenienced enough.

And that's what Professor Gates' arrest represented to me -- being tired of being inconvenienced by someone else's racism, whether it was his neighbor's or the police officer's. I desperately wanted to see him take this to trial because when Professor Gates stood up for himself on the steps of his house, he was standing up for all of us black folks who are tired of being inconvenienced by other people's racism. He was standing up for my husband's predominantly black fraternity at Stanford when, during a fraternity outing, they were forced up against their cars, hands behind their heads, with drawn shotguns aimed at them by Palo Alto police officers for no other reason than they were black men riding in a caravan of cars late at night. He was standing up for a tired, black woman Harvard law student who slumped down in the back seat of a cab riding through Charlestown trying to catch a plane home for Christmas break. He was standing up for my Harvard law school roommate who was called "nigger" walking on her way to class from Somerville. He was standing up for my husband's pastor who was recently stopped by the police for no other reason than being a well-dressed black man driving a Mercedes-Benz. He was standing up for every black father who, when teaching his son to drive, has to also teach him to keep his hands in sight and his tongue in check if he's ever stopped by the police, since speaking one's mind or reaching for one's ID in the glove compartment could mean certain death for a young black man stopped by the police. He was standing up for all of us.

Like Professor Gates, we're sick and tired of being inconvenienced by other people's racism.

Divide Over Values Splitting Black Identity -- Ethnicity, Anyone?

From the Washington Post:


Conventional wisdom about black America is being turned on its head. Nearly two out of five black people (37 percent) surveyed in a new Pew poll, done in association with NPR, said that blacks "can no longer be thought of as a single race."

Only half of all black people in the country (53 percent) say it is possible to think of blacks as one race. And young black Americans -- ages 18 to 29 -- are more likely than older blacks to say that blacks are no longer a single race.

The growing perception of two races is really a divide over values.

More than half of all Americans -- people of all colors -- believe that the values of poor and middle class blacks are becoming more different. When the question is limited to black people, the answer is even more definitive: 61 percent say values are now more different between middle-class and poor blacks. The perception of a class divide in black America has increased nearly 20 points since a similar question was asked of black people in 1986.


This poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center in consultation with NPR political analyst Juan Williams, as reported in the mainstream media, doesn't address one significant variable: ethnicity.

Black america does not share one ethnicity. And with differences in ethnicity come differences in values.

The idea that all American blacks are descendants of slaves imported to the American south no longer holds. In large cities and in the east, American blacks are very likely to have roots in Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas, Cape Verde, Panama, Guyana, Nigeria, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Cuba, The Dominican Republic, you name it. Since I am not a demographer, I can only speak anecdotally. Perhaps what the poll captured as middle-class values are in fact recent immigrant values?

In order to maintain the privacy and anonymity of my friends, for purposes of this blog, I will refer to all my male friends as "Trevor" and all my female friends as "Sheila." (Thank you, Jill Connor Browne, for this literary device).

I have a friend, Trevor, whose parents are from Jamaica. He doesn't consider himself Jamaican because he wasn't born there, but he does consider himself West Indian. My friend Sheila considers herself Bahamian because her father was born there and her mother's family is from there.

When Trevor and I were young, just-out-of-law-school attorneys in the Bay Area, one thing I noticed was that Trevor took great pride in being West Indian, and he would always point out to me which African Americans, dead or alive, had Jamaican roots. Colin Powell -- Jamaican. Patrick Ewing -- Jamaican. Biggie -- Jamaican. Marcus Garvey -- Jamaican. I think he once tried to claim Michael Jordan as Jamaican, but I had to put my foot down. And when he would introduce me to one of his friends, if the friend was Jamaican, he would say, "He's good people. He's a Yardie."

A Yardie?

Basically, a Jamaican homeboy.

Trevor was sent to the U.S. to be educated, and he succeeded wildly. But to this day I can't say he considers himself African American as we think of the term. He often said that one of the worst things you could say about a Jamaican was to call him or her "lazy." Hard work and self-sufficiency were their ethic, and Trevor despises laziness.

A value difference based on ethnicity instead of class? Perhaps.

Then there's Sheila. Her father was born in the Bahamas, and he worked four jobs -- yes, four -- to put his three children through private k-12 schools and private universities. Despite his successes, Sheila said that, in the Bahamas, her father would not have been considered successful because he didn't own his own business. Entrepreneurship was the hallmark of success among Bahamians, not how many jobs you worked to educate your children.

A value difference based on ethnicity instead of class? Perhaps.

It took me a while after I arrived at college to realize that not all of my black friends were rooted in the South as I am (on one side of my family; my mother's people go back four generations in California, but that's an entry for another day). Many were only one to two generations removed from -- you guessed it -- Jamaica or the Bahamas. But you wouldn't have know it from looking at them. They wore the same jeans (Jordache -- it was 1981, y'all), the same hair styles, etc. Unless you got to know them, you wouldn't have known. And I would have never met black people like them but for leaving the California Central Valley for college. I can attest to never having attended elementary, junior or high school with blacks whose family had recent roots in the West Indies, Cape Verde, Africa, or South America. But my experience isn't the experience of most blacks my age who grew up in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, D.C. or Philly. IMHO, at my college, blacks with recent roots in other countries were probably overrepresented relative to their numbers among all blacks and, if I may be so bold as to hypothesize, they may be overrepresented now in the black American middle class. Again, I'm not a demographer, but that's my hunch.

It would have been nice if the Pew/NPR folks had addressed whether ethnicity played any role in the values difference. And I would have expected a little more analysis of ethnicity from a black man whose first name is Juan.