Undaunted by the Fight: Six Years After Spelman Students Took On Nelly
May 6, 2010 by spelmancollege
Filed under Departments, Inside Voice, May 2010
I was sitting in a restaurant in Atlanta several years ago when a waiter approached me and instead of taking my order, asked me if I was the one who taught “Images of Women in the Media” at Spelman. I looked at the young man for a moment and responded, “The answer depends on what will happen to my food if I am.”
It turned out the waiter was an Atlanta University Center student and wanted to chat about my class. He’d had several friends at Spelman who’d taken my course and several others that deal with how women of color are represented by mass media. He said his Spelman friends were constantly challenging him on his music, his speech, and his overall behavior where women were concerned. I ended the conversation by asking him to challenge them right back.
I thought about the young man recently when my “Images” class had “bring-your-friends-to-class night,” when students are allowed to invite whomever they wish to have a dialogue about female representations. I was surprised that the class had nearly doubled in size for the visit. We had to find extra chairs, and everybody seemed really excited to have a mediated and safe space to continue their conversations.
I felt prepared to facilitate the discussion. After all, I have been at Spelman for a decade and there isn’t any subject that hasn’t come up in this class at some point. We were nearing the end of class, and I was feeling really pleased because of the level of intellectual discourse and engagement. I was about to chalk this class up to one of the best when a young person said something about it being “a shame the way ya’ll did Nelly.”
It had been six years since the moment when rapper Nelly cancelled a bone marrow drive at Spelman because some students wanted to engage him in a dialogue about misogynistic rap music and videos. I should have been prepared, but the blood rushed to my head as I tried to control myself. All the panels and conferences I had attended with innumerable rappers justifying their treatment of Black women flashed before my eyes.
I slowly began to explain the whole story, which still isn’t out there concerning the Spelman protest. I asked the young man why it would surprise him that Black women would question their treatment in music videos. I asked him if he didn’t find it particularly fitting that these young women would want to require, and didn’t they at the very least, deserve an explanation of the same man who was asking them for the blood out of their veins.
I don’t think the students could see that I was struggling during this part of the conversation. I was trying to assess how much, if any, progress had been made in the last six years regarding the struggle against the wholesale denigration of Black women in the media.
Later in my office, I took out my journal and drew a line down the center of the page. On one side I wrote the word progress. My first entry was Michelle Obama. Then, I began to list things like the letter to BET from a 15-year-old female that is making its way around the Internet. In it, she asks the company to take some responsibility for producing detrimental popular culture. I recalled how Spelman students created a similar letter-writing campaign five years ago. I wrote down the fact that with their community service alone, Spelman women helped to reshape popular ideas of what it means to be a young Black woman in our society.
I could have gone on to list their awards, fellowships, jobs and graduate school admissions. I wrote down all the courses at Spelman, and all the teachers, that are dedicated to creating a critical, social and political dialogue around one-dimensional images and their effects on young women.
By this time I had written on both sides of my paper, and I was feeling quite excited. I was even glad my young guests in the class had made their statements about Nelly. It gave me an opportunity to help them consider another way of thinking about the impact of media. They were upset that they had not gotten the whole story about the protest. They had been reared on rumor and hearsay that denigrated Spelman women rather than celebrating them for taking on such a controversial, but necessary, battle. They got to see firsthand how the media often handles the stories of Black women.
While we still have plenty of work to do, the level of consciousness has been raised in our society. We are making headway, and we are choosing to change this world, even if it’s one student, one friend, one waiter, and one rapper at a time.
– An associate professor of English at Spelman College, Tarshia Stanley. Ph.D., is founder of the annual Mothering Our Daughters conference held at Spelman, and the author of the forthcoming, “Mothering Our Daughters: Mediating the Messages.”
Dr. Stanley,
do black women play a part in our own detriment ?
As I loaded my Spelman web page, I was totally shocked when I saw Dr. Stanley’s picture on the home screen. I had no idea what the article was about, but knowing Dr. Stanley and her greatness I knew that I was certainly in for a treat. I was one of the students in the classroom during the Nelly discussion that Dr. Stanley mentioned in the article above. From day one before I even crossed the gates of Spelman College I was told a completely different story about the Nelly controversy and to hear what ACTUALLY happened was amazing to me. The media has a way of twisting stories and depicting them in a way that degrades and bashes women. As Dr. Stanley told our class the true account of what occurred, I was shocked and intrigued the entire time. What I had come to learn about the entire situation was no where near the actual truth. We really have to beware of the effects that the media has on our lives. We as a people can’t be so quick to accept everything that is given to us by a system that desires to focus on certain aspects and steer from others.
I definitely think that we do, commenting on the question, “do we play a part of our own detriment?” Black women as a whole have to stand up and say it’s not okay that we are talked to in such a way or looked at in such a light. If there are women out there willing to be vulgar and inappropriate it is easily assumable that we all are the same exact way because we represent each other and the black community. To be old fashion, “I am my sister’s keeper,” and we should uphold that to the strongest degree in order to promote the change and respect we deserve.
We absolutely do play a part. We have not stood together and demanded the respect we deserve. We have not boycotted any of the media outlets that continually promote the images! I salute the women of spelman that rejected the nelly concert for the sake of raising the level of awareness of what this type imagery has done to the psyche of our young daughters.
This forum caught my attention when I saw the name Nelly and the first post asked if we (women) are responsible for our own detriment. After reading other responses I still think we miss her point. I must admit I do not know the rap video industry to speak on their hiring practices; but it seems to me the women in the videos are willing participants. We as women need to ask ourselves do we want to be treated like we have our own minds and the right to make our own judgments (good or bad) about our lives; or do we constantly need big brother or sister to always speak up on our behalf and protect us for the sake of our image. I have to demand the former. The videos showing women being degraded would not be an issue if women who were in them did not allow themselves to be depicted as such. The thirst for fame and fortune in this society has pushed more and more young and old people to do all kinds of things in order to get noticed. The reality shows are constant reminders of the ridiculous things people will do for attention. I am just saying let us explore both sides of the coin. Most of all let us teach our sons and daughters to love themselve and not judge who they are based on what others are doing. Be the change you seek; be careful in telling others their need to change.
Not to be a bother, but I went to Spelman the year after the Nelly campaign and apparently I did not get the “real” story on what happened. If anyone is willing to share this information with me. Please do!
Hmmm. I wrestle with the misogyny that is urban music, that is urban media-hell most media, often. Yes, we (Black women) have contributed to the images and subsequent treatment of women of color in media. There is a long painful history behind the hypersexualized Black Jezebel. It is a grave mistake to think that we have come so far, lest we forget. The brief spot in a salacious video just to have a piece of the American beauty standards pie hardly justifies the means and is an affront the sensibilities of all women.Perhaps, I’d be more supportive, understanding of these “choices” if they weren’t steeped in consumerist propaganda and years of bling culture indoctrination, but there seems an interesting similarity in the socio-economics and eductaional levels of the target audience for the music and the madness that leads me to believe otherwise.
I was teaching adjunct at Spelman when Nelly came to campus, working on my Ph.D. in anthropology and Women’s Studies at Emory and teaching soc/anthro and ADW and I remember that there were a lot of Spelman students who were not in agreement with the actions of Spelman women who wanted Nelly to account for what he was portraying in the media. In fact, as professor Stanley says, the campus as a whole has come a long way since the Nelly controversy. I am now a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, also a women’s college and I teach Afro-American studies, women’s studies and anthropology. What strikes me is that in my black feminist theories course and others with similar themes the issue of black women’s “choices” always comes up. I am developing the idea of constrained choice. These are “choices,” because we are all free thinking individuals, that are influenced by situations and realities that are not of our own design. It is similar to the way that institutional racism operates in our society, present, but mostly invisible. I encourage us all to continue these dialogs and question our perceptions and complicity in the ways in which we, our daughters, sisters, etc. are depicted through the media and treated, often because of the media. –rjdbarnes C’95