Ebony Elizabeth Thomas Profile picture
Sep 29, 2018 12 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Thread. (Those of us who came of age in the 1990s had better language & definitions, but the culture was the same as described in the 1980s. Assault was viewed as your own fault. The Internet -- and especially the social Web -- changed everything.)
(Trigger and content warnings, pls mute) The vast majority of women who came of age before 1990 did not have adequate terminology or definitions for sexual violence. *My cohort was the first to have them, but there were violent sanctions & even social death for women who dared.*
We came of age in the 1990s.

1990s sitcoms and the culture in general gave us the language. But you risked social death if it wasn't a stranger. You risked being retraumatized. #DesireeWashington
And speaking just about poor & working class Black US folk, you risked sparking a wave of retaliatory violence if you reported.

I knew my daddy and several uncles *would have ridden down there, shot first, and asked questions later.* (We Black, but we also Southern.)
I can narrate so many stories. The mainstream culture labels incidents as "Black-on-Black violence" that were really vigilante justice. One of my uncles is living with a bullet from confronting a violent ex of my auntie's.

(The world tells you our menfolk don't love us, but.)
On top of a culture that maddeningly labeled Black women/girls/femmes as being existentially invulnerable to that kind of assault, on top of not being believed if you knew your attacker even when those legal definitions began to emerge, some of us KNEW we couldn't say anything.
My folks almost put two & two together. I made like a heroine in a medieval romance novel & fled so deep into the church that my mother, grandmother & aunties were thrown off the scent of my pain... and wouldn't tell my father & uncles that I was lying & *something was wrong.*
In short, I did the Black Southern evangelical equivalent of "taking the veil" so that I didn't contribute to more Black death & interference from the racist CJ system. I also didn't want the social death of that narrative on campus and/or back home.
Violent men shatter our lifeworlds, altering our tomorrows forever. We each have different strategies of selfhood afterward. I did what I had to do in the spacetime I found myself in, with the knowledge that I had at the time. No regrets.
(He did stalk & fill my answering machine with death threats 2 years later. In some ways, that was more traumatizing than the initial incident. But that wasn't the last time I was stalked... and those are both other stories, not for Twitter.)
You feel sorry for me because I've never married? Honey. I am *good.* I've survived and thrived, clothed and (at least somewhat) of sound mind. I have friends and family. I'm not embittered. That, to me, is being victorious.

But I want better for the next generation of women.
I don't want the magic of our young people's coming-of-age moments to be stolen from them the way that so many of ours were.

(Holding my breath for my Gen-Z niblings. Maybe I thought I'd avoid such fears by not having kids. As it turns out, that's not how any of this works.)

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More from @Ebonyteach

Oct 7, 2018
Coffee & proofreading! Copyedits for #TheDarkFantastic are due in 48 hours.

Press suggested "Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games" as a subtitle. Why not "from Harry Potter to Black Panther?"

Because I'm writing another book about the Black fantastic.
One of the things my mentors told me is that it's one thing to write a lot of books. Quite another to write a book people wanna read.

The final version of #TheDarkFantastic was approved back in March. I'm not a supergenius like some of you -- my writing & thinking takes time.
I wanted Black Panther to land, have its impact, and read its aftermath & re-evaluation. I wanted to read what my colleagues in comics studies had to say about it.

I also wanted to watch the Year of YA Black Girl Fantasy, to see how audiences & critics reacted.
Read 10 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
This. (That's why I'm not holding my breath for the "blue wave," which is assuredly a myth. Around 50% won't give up their pedestal. Never have, never will.)
Here's a truth that's as American as apple pie: You're going to have a hard time convincing ~50% of WW to give up their promixity to the most powerful group in the nation.

The half that are already voting blue aren't economically or socially dependent upon conservative WM.
Every single gain in this country was hard won. Few of those gains were made by pleading with that 50%. In fact, they're the ones who transmit White supremacist ideology to each successive generation.

Don't believe me? Here's a quick video.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
Also, for those talking about Black mythology "beyond" or "outside of" slavery & Jim Crow -- there is no beyond, or outside of. Those experiences were the crucible. Our myths and folklore were created back then, because our ancestors were fully human, and humans create culture.
Why is it so difficult for us to look at our enslaved ancestors fully in the face & see them as not only completely human, but extraordinary?

Why do we reduce their lives to mere survival? Flight? Suffering?

What about their dreams? Hopes? Stories? Imagination?
If we don't understand them and their lives better, who will?
Read 6 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
I'm not sure if Octavia Butler was Black American or if her folks were from the Caribbean, but KINDRED is sort of Shakespeare for anyone wanting to build a Black North American fantastic world. She dealt with the problem of slavery way back in the 70s.
Plenty of challenges for building a North American Black fantastic:
1) Slavery, of course. How can you build SFF while incorporating that?
2) Also, it's not North America after all. This place is Turtle Island & belongs to 100s of Native nations -- have to take that into account.
3) What do you do about language? Naming people and places? Naming magical phenomena? Sounds cooler when it's not just plain old English.
4) What about religion? Many (not all) Black US folk are Christian & Muslim, and much of our history & folklore -- & myth -- involves faith.
Read 9 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
This was a follow-worthy Tweet. (Lots of thoughts about this.)
Honestly, this is why I spent time in #TheDarkFantastic examining the construction of race in the Western speculative imagination, and left Afrofuturism -- which I do value as a Black American, and a Diasporan -- alone.
There's been a lot of heat for (a few) African immigrants to the US for critiquing Black Panther, but I think that it's important for us to read what continental Africans have to say about it.

(And we have to listen to their refusal to be labeled with our constructs, too.)
Read 11 tweets
Aug 22, 2018
There were layers to what happened last week, though. I've supported the person who sparked it, bought her book, and just skimmed her response post over lunch. And... when I went to her talk, she definitely emphasized her home & community culture as a factor in her success.
Beyond a particular digital celebrity's ego, I think that these conversations deserves more nuance. Goes deeper than folk "wanting it both ways" -- they are both in a sense. Folks are from one culture; they're steeped in another. That's hard.
My upbringing wasn't bicultural. With the exception of 1-2 lines, I have zero known non-Black American ancestry post-1865.

But I did grow up bi-regional, lol, if that's a thing. Southern father & grandmother, Northern mother & grandfather. Helps me imagine the immigrant dilemma.
Read 16 tweets

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