Leaderboard

Amaru, interestingly this page attracts a lot of visitors through search. Oh Clarence is Black, but as Cynique inferred above, he is chose a different path. If has worked out well for him, but has not served his people very well. But then again this is the American Way isn't it?

Sara I don't think we disagree. I think we're just placing our individual emphasis on different aspects of the solution. However I will say that encouraging our people to get more college education is like encouraging people to put more icing/frosting on the plate but there's no cake to go under it. Higher education was meant to refine and expand upon a foundation that already exists; but Black people in America barely have a foundation in social and civil matters with which to BUILD that higher education up on. How you gonna go to school to be a doctor when you haven't even mastered the basics of what diet is best for Black people? Or your administering medicine that not only doesn't work for your people but may make them worse? How you gonna be an engineer and help others build tall sky scrapers downtown when YOUR neighborhood is falling apart and you can't even build a house from the ground up? You have a doctorate in bio-engineering and want to run off and work for Monsanto, but don't even own land and if you did don't have sense enough to farm it to feed yourself and your family. See what I mean? There's a BASE that needs to be focused on first before we push our children off to help another man build up HIS world. 　 Troy I think social media is actually making people socially weaker....more shy and self-centered in their own little world. When I was a teenager, if me or my boys wanted to meet girls we met them on the bus, in the mall, at school, on the street, around the block, anywhere. Now, a lot of people have gotten so shy and self centered that they are afraid to start a conversation with the person sitting next to them. I can't remember when I last saw a young man try to strike up a conversation with a female out of the blue. If you see it, it's usually a man over 40. It's hard to get next to them today because even when they're alone, as soon as these girls sit down by themselves they whip out their celly and start texting and their eyes light up. The older generation of Black men used to tell us they felt sorry for us and I didn't understand what they meant, but now I feel sorry for the younger generation of Black men coming up. This "virtual world" of social media is in my opinion disrupting the natural order of things and giving people false courage on-line while making them more cowardly when it comes to social situations in real life. Those same people attacking Leslie on social media probably would NEVER say those things to her face to face. 　 　 Mr Burns Again, the crux of my argument is NOT how Leslie looks but how she behaves. It really doesn't matter than she is from Memphis because you'll find her type all over America. Big, loud, brash, shameless women who are angry because society in general doesn't accept them with their unnatural behavior. But let them tell it, THEY aren't the problem. They'll claim this society can't accept a "strong Black woman". When I lived in New Orleans I heard them say the same thing about New Orleans women, I grew up hearing the same thing about Detroit women, in Atlanta they say them "Georgia Peaches" will cut you to the bone if get out of line, the same in Chicago, Los Angeles, ect....... The fact is, all over the United States too many Black women in urban areas have gotten a reputation for being loud and vulgar and actresses like Leslie helps to perpetuate that image whether she's like that in REAL LIFE or not. We should be ASHAMED of that image, not glorify it or try to defend it as some sort of "defense". You say Leslie's brash and masculine behavior is a defense mechanism for men acting shitty and disrespectful? Look at places like Pakistan and Iraq where the women are thoroughly oppressed and abused by men. These are environments where girls grow up being beaten, abused, killed, see their entire families killed in front of them. They've experieced and observed extreme trauma far beyond anything we have imagined in the inner cities of the United States yet when they come to America how many of them do you see acting like Leslie Jones? How many do you see fighting eachother in the street, or walking up and down the street cussing and threating people to fights or getting up in peoples faces wobbling their heads and bucking their eyes? You probably have NEVER seen any of these women do this. They, like Asian, African and other women come right over and fit in with other NORMAL women who carry themselves like ladies. They keep their voices mild and maintain a shyness about them. If growing up in a violent and sexist environment makes women violent and obnoxious, why aren't THOSE women behaving like some of the women you see in our uban communities? I say it's the opposite. I say because so many Black men HAVEN'T checked their daughters and sisters for their loud and obnoxious...un-lady like.....behavior, it's actually encouraged more of it. It appears that the Black community has lost much of it's "standards" of behavior and what it will tolerate. People are using the fact that Black people shouldn't imitate White people or hold their standards up as ideal...which is legitimate because we need to be ourselves.....as an excuse not to have ANY standards at all and just allow our women and men to behave any kind of way and accept it. No, I don't expect Black or Asian or Latina women to LOOK or ACT like White women, but I do expect them to look and act like WOMEN and stop using excuses for such demeaning and obnoxious...and yes MASCULINE (loud, aggressive, boisterous, in your face, confrontational, cussing, ect...) behavior. Finally, the only reason we're talking about women is because this THREAD is about Leslie. But best believe the Black man is in worse shape and is more deserving of criticism than the Black woman. But let us not make the mistake that many in the Black consciousness community do of believing that the Black woman is somehow santimonious and beyond reproach. No one is above criticism.

@Pioneer1 Smoking is not so popular anymore, not since the American Cancer Society and AMA bad mouthed it over 25 years ago. And it doesn't get a lot of media exposure or ad space. Nowadays nicotine addicts are not considered cool, they're considered defiant, and die-hard (pun intended) smokers complain about being ostracized. @Troy I am not promoting or defending FaceBook. It is a pass time that is a waste of time. Yet, not only is it a facet of social media, it is also a sociological phenomenon that lends itself to being observed because it has permeated our culture, and exerted a lot of influence on Society. It is a force to be reckoned with and can't just be relegated to being frivolous. And for the black masses being clueless about the surreptitious media, back in the day black TV viewers complained about not seeing people who looked like them on their screens, so producers came up with a lot of low brow black comedies, and black viewers complained at the way they were portrayed by buffoons like Jimmy Walker on "Good Times", so they came up with the Cosby show and black viewers complained that the Huckstables were super negroes who were nothing more than carbon copies of the white middle class. Before this, was the era of the Blaxploitation movies with pimps and 'hos, feisty black sistas and cool black dudes who black audiences soon recognized as caricatures. Then movies about the trials and tribulations of slavery started appearing, and folks complained about these depressing narratives being turn-offs because they always depicted black folks a victims. The latest media breakout is "Empire", an overnight success that's all about the bling and black folks controlling there own show biz turf. Still, a lot of blacks feel because its producer Lee Daniels is gay, that he is using this series to send silent messages about the normalcy of gayness. I continue to believe black folks do experience gut feelings about the ulterior motives of what they view but they just accept it for what it is. Who wants to go through life full of suspicion and paranoia, restricting your viewing to PBS, when you can find an escape from your humdrum existence by watching things that entertain and engage you? @CDBurns Sistas, like all women, do maintain facades, showing different sides of themselves on different occasions. This is how women roll. They reserve their sweet, coy sides for when they are in a seductive mode. As you imply, men need to polish their images, and realize that they have a lot of nerve demanding certain behavior from a woman if they, themselves, don't look like Denzel or have their act together, - not to mention that element of black men who have no problem hooking up with goofy, fat, white cast-offs.