Adventures in Emmieland

I’m often left baffled by this obsession with demonizing little girls who don’t have a hundred hair bobs and braids. Is this a western thing, an American thing, a black thing? Today’s wtf moment was brought on looking at FB (always good to get your blood pressure up)  I’m in a group ostensibly about vintage black American pictures but there seems to be plenty of contemporary photos posted. Someone posted a pit picture of two elementary school aged black girls with the girl on the left wearing a ruffled dress with hair in multiple pigtails and adorned ponytail holders, the girl on the right was wearing jeans and at shirt with her waist length hair falling straight down her back. The y posted the pic with the comment little girls back in my day vs little girls now. Everyone knows the secret to enjoying anything on the web is to not read the comments, advice I all too often don’t take. There were over a hundred comments and while I didn’t read them all the overwhelming trend was to ...

I’m not sure why but tonight a few incidences I had in my teens/early twenties came to mind. Now people will tell you 5hat North Carolina is the south south like say Georgia or Alabama which I suppose is true but it’s certainly not a multicultural haven either. I grew up on and around a military base which means I was exposed to people of different ethnicities and cultures regularly. You might think this hodgepodge of folks would be a buffer against racism but nope. My best friend had parents who were immigrants, one from Poland and one from Japan. They were always sweet and welcoming to me and I never head them say anything nasty about any person or group. But when the Polish relatives were visiting I was forbidden to come over due to their racism. Another incident comes to mind my first year of college. My second roommate was a sweet girl from a small town. She needed to make a quick trip home and asked me to ride with her, I love riding so of course I went. When we got there her p...

Facebook strikes again, I was minding my own business lazily scanning my feed when I came across an anti bullying video. There was a demonstration of bullying with the bullied person reacting then there was a demonstration with the bullied person replying to insults with either agreement or a compliment to the bully. The idea being that such reactions take the steam out of the wood be bully and the bullied person has all the confidence in the world. My first thought when it finished was well that’s all well and good so when do we get to the part about accountability for the bully? Of course telling kids to have confidence to love themselves to not let their people get to them is nice. In a perfect world or scripted stage it works too but the reality is that while that approach may well deter some of the not dedicated to making your life miserable the serious bullies won’t bat an eye. And once again the onus is on the receptor to extinguish behaviours they are not exhibiting we seem t...