A CBS Houston blogger was fired just days after being criticized for calling NBA cheerleader Kelsey Williams “too chunky.” The blogger, Anna-Megan Raley, who used the pen name Claire Crawford, questioned the cheerleader’s weight as the Oklahoma City Thunder team played against the Houston rockets in the NBA playoffs on April 22. “The Rockets looked terrible in Game 1, but some say they weren’t the only bad-looking people on the court,” Crawford said.
MrMary Weighs in
Uhm seriously, this cheerleader is a size 4 ? I don’t see anything wrong with her to warrant the comment she deserved on the blog post. Reading about this for me brings up two important points:
Should a blogger be fired for writing controversial material ?
I don’t blog under my real name because I want to find new jobs. I don’t think most employer would appreciate my free thinking here and compromising pictures of myself on the toilet or in other weird places. In this case I believe the blogger worked for a radio station that provide commentary on sports games. But there have been many bloggers who have lost their day jobs. There is no more anonymity on the net, assuming a different name and typing with only your left hand wont protect your secret identity. I dunno….. privacy anonymity freedom, these are being redefined in our times and I wonder what will happen as the years go by and governments continue to side with corporation to gradually erode choice, privacy and personal freedoms, but anyway that’s not the main question.
The Main Question
I read a lovely account about two Chinese women that were close friends who were married off and had to undergo the torturous practice of foot binding. It was extremely painful and they hated everything about it, but they still made their daughters do it. I think how women treat each other is based upon a few template that has been firmly entrenched in society. How women treat other women are dictates by these templates. Self acceptance and body image is a crippling issue for many women, and it will be wrong to think that just men themselves continue to add fuel to the growing epidemic of body dismorphia.
How you treat your own in many cases reinforces these social templates and gives license for the practices to continue. And a key concept here is that there is not one homogeneous group of women and there are many unique subsets when we look at religion, language, culture, race, economic status, immigration etc. A lot of times one has to be willing to part with privilege for the betterment of an entire group and I don’t see it. I’m still optimistic though
Let me give you a quote from a Malcolm X speech that really moved me when I was younger. It called into question how I saw my neighbour, how I saw myself and how I was able to be made aware of some social templates that shaped how I saw life and to an extent governed my actions. I realized a lot of things about my community though that’s a topic for another post I still think this speech here is valid. It came to mind when I read this article about the “fat” size 4 cheerleader
You have to understand it. Until 1959, the image of the African continent was created by the enemies of Africa. Africa was a land dominated by outside powers. A land dominated by Europeans. And as these Europeans dominated the continent of Africa, it was they who created the image of Africa that was projected abroad. And they projected Africa and the people of Africa in a negative image, a hateful image.
They made us think that Africa was a land of jungles, a land of animals, a land of cannibals and savages. It was a hateful image.
And because they were so successful in projecting this negative image of Africa, those of us here in the West of African ancestry, the Afro-American, we looked upon Africa as a hateful place. We looked upon the African as the hateful person. And if you referred to us as an African it was like putting us as a servant, or playing house, or talking about us in the way we didn’t want to be talked.
Why? Because those who oppress know that you can’t make a person hate the root without making them hate the tree. You can’t hate your own and not end up hating yourself. And since we all originated in Africa, you can’t make us hate Africa without making us hate ourselves. And they did this very skillfully.
You have to understand it. Until 1959, the image of the African continent was created by the enemies of Africa. Africa was a land dominated by outside powers. A land dominated by Europeans. And as these Europeans dominated the continent of Africa, it was they who created the image of Africa that was projected abroad. And they projected Africa and the people of Africa in a negative image, a hateful image.
And what was the result? They ended up with 22 million Black people here in America who hated everything about us that was African. .. We hated the African characteristics. We hated our hair… We hated our nose, the shape of our nose, and the shape of our lips, the color of our skin. Yes we did. And it was you who taught us to hate ourselves simply by shrewdly maneuvering us into hating the land of our forefathers and the people on that continent.
As long as we hated those people, we hated ourselves. As long as we hated what we thought they looked like, we hated what we actually looked like. And you call me a hate teacher. Why, you taught us to hate ourselves. You taught the world to hate a whole race of people and have the audacity now to blame us for hating you simply because we don’t like the rope that you put around our necks.
When you teach a man to hate his lips, the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the skin that God gave him, you’ve committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit. And this is the crime that you’ve committed.
Our color became a chain, a psychological chain. Our blood — African blood — became a psychological chain, a prison, because we were ashamed of it. We believe — they would tell it to your face, and say they weren’t; they were! We felt trapped because our skin was black. We felt trapped because we had African blood in our veins.
This is how you imprisoned us. Not just bringing us over here and making us slaves. But the image that you created of our motherland and the image that you created of our people on that continent was a trap, was a prison, was a chain, was the worst form of slavery that has ever been invented by a so-called civilized race and a civilized nation since the beginning of the world.
Talal al Rouki, the Saudi student who was questioned by FBI agents in his home after neighbour saw him carrying a pressure cooker to a friend’s house
A pressure cooker bomb, similar to the ones used by the Boston bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev
