To the First Students Who Registered for My Classes...
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The course that inspired this website has now officially ended; the campus dorms are now empty; and the graduating seniors have walked across the commencement stage. As soon as that happens, it is officially summertime. Happy summertime. Let your livin be easy! Thank you to all of you for a wonderful semester!
Thank you for your honesty about suggestions for this class and for your candidness about your experiences. You told me that the website has met your needs so far in the class. Many of you are also seeing what you are reading and writing in this class as life-work rather than just as school-work. And you are serious about publishing or going digitally public with your ideas about black women's rhetoric. As I hope you can tell, I am moved.
So you want more music on this site, huh? I gotchu! From this point forward, there will be music on the different pages, even if the topic does not focus on musicians. If there is a key year for a rhetor, the most prominent back female songstress/composer or speaker/poet will be featured on the page. Remember you can click the little box in the song roll to turn the music off (there is also information in the song roll). For Shirley Chisholm, you will will hear Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers in the background. The Staple Singers's "I'll Take You There" was the most popular song in 1972 featuring a black woman's voice. It was the same year as Chisholm's campaign trail... it seems appropriate! In the background for Barbara Jordan, you will hear Deniece Williams from her first album in 1976, This is Niecy. 1976 is the same year that Jordan delivered a keynote at the Democratic National Convention, the first time a black woman ever keynoted at a national convention! Just keep the ways we have been talking about black women's music in mind here, especially the coded messages behind romantic lyrics. In "Free," the song playing in the background to the page on Barbara Jordan, Deniece Williams sings about the love she wants from a man. BUT... Williams seems to interrupt herself with her chorus: "BUT (emphasis mine) I want to be free and I just got to be me." Now that's a BIG "but"! Keep framing these songs in the ways you have been doing... when a black woman says she wants to be free, we mean more than heterosexual relationships here!
AND... it amuses some of y'all when I talk about myself in the third person on this site! LOL! Y'all deadwrong for that! Ima do that more too... might even signify on Carmen a little here and there. I mean, hey, whyyyy not?!!
Here's my one concern: I asked what you are doing to re-charge. Only one person talked about slowing down and taking a walk from time to time to decompress, reflect, and rejuvenate. The rest of y'all either ignored me altogether or started talkin about coffee and sugary drinks. Know what I call that? A HOT MESS! Some of you are only 21 and about to give yourself triple bypass surgery because you are SO stressed about money, balancing work-school-money-family-friends-leadership, and jobs or school after graduation. You can barely calm your mind and nerves to even sleep and yet you are too sleepy to stay awake. A MESS! You cannot just keep going and going and going without taking the time to nurture your spirit and minds and bodies. I get it, trust, I do (though I know some of you are thinking--well, maybe she should stop givin us all this work and we COULD sleep.) Yes, I see my contradictions. Still, we have got to somehow turn the tide on this world that keeps us running like machines until we break down.
I'll miss you all dearly and treasure the time we had. Thank you for . . . "no smilin faces up in here lyin to the races" . . . and for takin me there!
Peace and Blessings to you all... Carmen
Thank you for your honesty about suggestions for this class and for your candidness about your experiences. You told me that the website has met your needs so far in the class. Many of you are also seeing what you are reading and writing in this class as life-work rather than just as school-work. And you are serious about publishing or going digitally public with your ideas about black women's rhetoric. As I hope you can tell, I am moved.
So you want more music on this site, huh? I gotchu! From this point forward, there will be music on the different pages, even if the topic does not focus on musicians. If there is a key year for a rhetor, the most prominent back female songstress/composer or speaker/poet will be featured on the page. Remember you can click the little box in the song roll to turn the music off (there is also information in the song roll). For Shirley Chisholm, you will will hear Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers in the background. The Staple Singers's "I'll Take You There" was the most popular song in 1972 featuring a black woman's voice. It was the same year as Chisholm's campaign trail... it seems appropriate! In the background for Barbara Jordan, you will hear Deniece Williams from her first album in 1976, This is Niecy. 1976 is the same year that Jordan delivered a keynote at the Democratic National Convention, the first time a black woman ever keynoted at a national convention! Just keep the ways we have been talking about black women's music in mind here, especially the coded messages behind romantic lyrics. In "Free," the song playing in the background to the page on Barbara Jordan, Deniece Williams sings about the love she wants from a man. BUT... Williams seems to interrupt herself with her chorus: "BUT (emphasis mine) I want to be free and I just got to be me." Now that's a BIG "but"! Keep framing these songs in the ways you have been doing... when a black woman says she wants to be free, we mean more than heterosexual relationships here!
AND... it amuses some of y'all when I talk about myself in the third person on this site! LOL! Y'all deadwrong for that! Ima do that more too... might even signify on Carmen a little here and there. I mean, hey, whyyyy not?!!
Here's my one concern: I asked what you are doing to re-charge. Only one person talked about slowing down and taking a walk from time to time to decompress, reflect, and rejuvenate. The rest of y'all either ignored me altogether or started talkin about coffee and sugary drinks. Know what I call that? A HOT MESS! Some of you are only 21 and about to give yourself triple bypass surgery because you are SO stressed about money, balancing work-school-money-family-friends-leadership, and jobs or school after graduation. You can barely calm your mind and nerves to even sleep and yet you are too sleepy to stay awake. A MESS! You cannot just keep going and going and going without taking the time to nurture your spirit and minds and bodies. I get it, trust, I do (though I know some of you are thinking--well, maybe she should stop givin us all this work and we COULD sleep.) Yes, I see my contradictions. Still, we have got to somehow turn the tide on this world that keeps us running like machines until we break down.
I'll miss you all dearly and treasure the time we had. Thank you for . . . "no smilin faces up in here lyin to the races" . . . and for takin me there!
Peace and Blessings to you all... Carmen
