Fashionably Black? Not in Africa.

  I have no idea why but recently I have been spending time with more and more fashion models. I never would have consciously chose this as a chubby black woman. In fact I would have imagined it the third circle of hell in Dante's schema; where I would be forever punished for my gluttony and over consumption of food by listening to vain women who eat ice all day. But Cape Town is crawling with beautiful tall skinny women of every ethnic background, and low cost locations; so it is here many global brands do photo shoots. In fact I have come to realize many brands that seem to play on a sense of Americana or Britishness actually have their brand identity produced in Africa where it is easier and cheaper. The result can make some photo shoots look pretty comical. Out of nowhere in the middle of Africa, a group of freakishly tall white women appear. Mostly blonds. One could wonder why brand producers came to Cape Town to find models who clearly look like they came from Copenhagen.
  There is some local "talent" (to the extent that smiling in front of a camera can be called talent) in modelling. Overall in the industry these women are viewed as inferior. The one I have spent the most time with comes from another African country. She is 6 feet tall, a beautiful ebony color and has thighs about the size of my arms. Whenever she runs into people in her industry they chastise her for being too fat this season. "I'm the fattest model in Africa!" this woman has told me. By comparison I am a hippopotamus, and mind you I'm still inside what is medically considered a normal, not overweight range of BMI. Another black African model has told me that she is considered ugly, but that is good because at least it's interesting. I was fascinated by the trials and tribulations of these "ugly" models. I asked a lot of questions. Basically what I figured out pretty quickly was that any model who didn't look like an Aryan was of questionable beauty.
   None of this nonsense of whites being projected onto our collective imagination as superior is particularly new or unusual except that it happens in Africa. Local tastes are pretty varied, but big girls walk with a lot of pride. I often see obviously overweight women coming down the street dressed and walking with such obvious and attractive confidence it surprises me.  Africans remind me of middle Eastern people in their taste for women. There is a certain combination of nostalgia and sexual attraction for the chubby woman with black hair. I was able to do much better as a belly dancer in the middle east than I ever could have in the USA, and not because I changed in talent level.
  In Africa where all kinds of beauty are appreciated one very foreign mold has come to be seen as the ultimate model in advertising. Fashion and ads are about fantasy. And who would ever fantasize of looking like me and by extension having a totally banal life? A woman who looks like me works and struggles. Theoretically a woman who is skinny and blond plays on her family estate all day ordering around darker servants.
  South Africa has some kind of racial hiring quota system but it has skipped right over fashion and more broadly advertising somehow. But advertising dictates the psychological fantasies and dreams of the masses. If you walk into any local African store selling soap here you will notice lightening soap on sale, as if lightening one skin will deeply alter one's life. Perhaps it will. But it is deeply ironic that in RSA, a country ruled by those ostensibly dedicated to black empowerment in terms of economic reality, has no stance on black empowerment in terms of group psychology. The compromise seems to be that although black and brown people are now allowed to enter any profession outside of those about projecting an image; the image of whites as ideal will never be seriously challenged.

 In a funny ironic note, those who work most closely with projecting images of fashionable whiteness may be the most tired of it. Several local photographers here have taken pictures of me as if I'm some sort of muse...and in ways that emphasize my 'ethnicness' and em, substantially full body...go figure!

Cops and Blacks: Mirror Images?

  "Shoter tov tzhe shoter met!שוטר טוב זה שוטר מת"  said a good pale friend of mine with several degrees and full ownership of a nice apartment. He was making an angry statement about both Israeli racism and police brutality because he was playing with an unfortunate saying of racists about Arabs (Arav tov hu arav met). I used to live in Hadar, Haifa where some fairly genteel folks (along with the rest of us ) had a serious beef with the police. But as my friend went on to describe his opinion on the police he paradoxically revealed why we must search for solidarity with these people.
   "I am some majority guy who is a lowlife unemployed and has no money and no hope and can not find a normal job, I have no education at all....I know I'll become a police officer. I'm good at being violent." said my friend mockingly in his broken English. He drew the obvious tie between who the police are in Israel, and who they are in the USA. Unfortunately this cruel stereotype comes from somewhere. Joining the police is one of the few ways a working class guy can make a living nowadays. And, yes, we the working class are violent. We aren't the only violent ones, but our community bleeds violence in a way wealthy ones do not. Take child abuse. Rich people can abuse their kids. Child abuse is happening in Beverly Hills and the Upper East side. But statistically, in spite of the system's underservice of the poor, we see their kids as abused children more often. Poverty leads to crises, and poor people can not cope in the ways rich people can. Destressing through a weekend at a resort-spa may not be available to the borderline homeless.
   The real revolution will happen when we -those who live in ghettoes- begin to understand how difficult it is to be a good cop. When our compassion takes into account how miserable it is to interact with us. As a doctor I saw my share of prisoners, and thugs. They are not an easy crowd. To this day I talk about one gangbanger so proud to have killed multiple people that he got commemorative tatooes for each murder who complained to the hospital staff that I lacked compassionate bedside manner with him. We must understand not every cop is a killer; and they must understand not every black person is gangbanger like my whiney mass murdering patient. We must understand how the system is working to break our natural solidarity as working class people. We must honor those lawkeepers who walk into dangerous situations to protect us. We must not forget that at the scene of accidents, including shoot outs it is them that are tasked with not only catching criminals, but administering life saving CPR sometimes before any more specifically trained personel show up. The media almost never highlights the everyday heroism of law enforcers who happen to use their basic life support skills and save someone. The media seems caught in some kind of imaginary soccer match between blacks and the police. On the most illogical side is Fox news. Shortly after a recent decision they put up an article about how the police live in fear. Seriously? They are rolling into our communities with guns and now tanks; and they should be the ones afraid? What about me and my family?...we don't have any guns or tanks let alone a state legal apparatus behind us. Obviously the outpouring of protests are because people like myself, unarmed black people are both scared and fed up. Only in the distorted reality of the mainstream American media does this situation get turned on it's head. But this is a bit of a distraction from the underlying problems and questions. Why don't police come from communities they police? Why are police not trained better to diminish violence in confrontations as opposed to escalating it? How can we come to reasonable police community partnerships where law enforcement has serious buy-in from the community? How can we get out law enforcers better training? To what extent can we give communities autonomy in policing themselves and yet avoid more Zimmermans?
   And finally, who will dare extend the red roses of solidarity to our brothers in blue?
 

Abortion, AIDS and Feminism

   All over the inside of third class trains in south Africa are signs and stickers for abortion. They outnumber every other kind of sign, although signs for penis enlargement are a close second. There are huge numbers of babies aborted, and babies born and abandoned. Obviously the reasons for this are complex. People generally know where babies come from in the modern world, so this probably is less about condum availability than anyone would guess. After all in South Africa you can get free condums all over the main cities. I would venture to guess that what this is partly about is the economy and how it effects genders differently.
  Many men here would get a woman pregnant and run. Paradoxically, that seems to make women all the more eager to engage with them. These women want these men not because they are 'bad boys' (a pereinnial turn on for a certain percentage of the population, pun intended) but because they are even boys. The lack of decent men seems to turn some women into push-over sluts willing to do anything to accommodate one. Sadly I was reminded of African-American women. I remember years ago, in medical school, I asked my little sister an epidemiology student why black women were the new epicenter of the HIV epidemic. She replied quite simply "Less condum usage. If you wanted to get a man in those communities you would probably have to sleep with him without a condum." The idea being of course, if you would not, there is some other woman who will, and then pay for her own abortion on top of that.
  Issues like this make a mockery of the idiotic debate ongoing about whether feminism is anti-male. The world would be a lot better place if we had more condum usage because it would mean less HIV , unwanted AIDS babies and abortions for starters. Even after everything my calloused eyes have seen, looking at hospital ward after hospital ward of abandoned AIDS babies in Africa was overwhelming. Is this the world either sex wants to live in? Empowering one sex or gender isn't about disempowering the other one.