RAP IS SOMETHING YOU DO...

...AND HIP HOP IS SOMETHING YOU LIVE

I do wish I was more clear in what I have been trying to say about the culture change from a hierarchy to where women are in roles of power and how I can envision a time in the not so distant future where we have a woman president and there are women CEO's in charge of large multinational corporations. This was always inevitable, and with Obama's presidency, I think it looms like a tidal wave over a small island.

Going back to the civil rights movement and the sweeping changes of the Equal Rights Amendment, the group that benefitted from those laws and policies the most were white women. That is just a fact and I do think that was a portend of things to come. The reason that the people who the changes were ostensibly meant to help the most, African Americans, have not benefitted more from them is that as a group, they have not taken advantage of the opportunities that legislation opened up and provided for a discriminated group (yeah, I think I may have opened up a can of worms... markonit@aol.com is the address and if you wanna REALLY get squirrely, I will call you and we can talk over the phone!!). So I have always had a quiet laugh whenever I see brainwashed white women upset about civil rights and what not, because so much of the EEO helps them out, were they to take advantage EEO's rules.

Now the use of 'white' is hopefully to provide context. I think that women in general, have slipped in under the radar and are simply 'doing work'. Unlike other groups, women, save for the sufferage movement in the early part of last century and then again with ERA in the 70's have simply gone about their business and 'done work'. I think that is due to the entrenched white male power structure that exists and women, simply do their work with the tools in hand, much like the unamed cat in the Kipling poem. Women have since the dawn of time worked with what they had and dealt with the system, no matter how unfair it was, and thrived.

BUT THIS IS THE STYLE, YO...(a link just in case you want to 'hear' the difference between 'Hip Hop and Rap')

Women have been patient for their opportunity to be given a full share of influnece at the seat of power ever since goofy ol' Adam fell for the sucker move and ate the apple. Wiley, in one of his longer Sunday comics, ran a weekly segment explaining an alternate interpretation of the Garden of Eden scene, with Adam being an infantile simpleton and Eve being curiously cunning... and of course it was an exaggeration, but like with stereotypes, there is a grain of truth to them.

I think, with my limited means, that men have benefitted from a society that valued what did not demand as much thinking as it once did. Now that intelligence, communication and understand means more, men are finding themselves ill-equipped to deal with the evoluntionary changes. Not only that, it stretches across all class and economic lines. Could be a slow burn of those who are not willing to adapt and Charles Darwin has pretty much proven what happens to those who can not cope with changes in their environment.

BASING MY APPROACH ON MY EXPERIENCE AND OBSERVATION

Not only was I hoping to have been more patient as I learned about myself and began to build the infrastructure to my life, but also on the 'inevitability' of a woman's rise in society. I had estimated that by the time I would have graduated college and started my career, that the women I date would at least be intellectually my equal and have the same earning potential as I had hoped to have.

In the African American social diaspora the concern is that few 'combine invitees' (as in the NFL scouting combine where potential top picks are tested and measured and judged for their league prospects) are being swept up by non-black women and leaving the scraps for them and even then, there is always the fear that a freaky 'She Devil' can swoop in with their blond hair or oriental submissiveness or whatever worry that a sister could have, because they were not about to be ANY of those things if that was what 'Mr. Man' was looking for(which contradicted, in my mind, the purpose of their worrying) in his woman. Hell, that is a WHOLE 'nother thread, so getting back on point...

While I am not discriminatory, I think I have a limited appeal to women outside of my ethnic group. Simply one of those things and I work with what I have. The non-black total of people I have been with represent less than 3 percent of my total (and even where someone to make guess at 'my number', I would never acknowledge a correct answer) and very few times have I ever 'felt' someone that was not black. Que sera...

A major factor in what made Tee Jay stick in my heart so was what she said early in our dating, before we became a couple. I have never held back much about me and since I was seeing more of my girls, between going to Carolina to see KT and hosting Lexxie from Georgia as well as hanging out with Skye, whoever was going to be a part of my life would simply have to deal... and not only with that... I gave as honest an accounting of my history as well. Thatk, I filed under 'pretty is as pretty does', but that I was not trying to be that any longer.

NEXT: WHAT AM I TRYING TO BE!!