Welcome to the brave new world of cleaning up after yourself and no longer burdening black women with the unpaid labor and invisible upkeep of taking care of your personal hygiene and sanitation. Get used to cleaning up after your own damn self because we’re all nursemaids now.
Neither race, gender, class, nor your professional status will protect you from having to pitch in and handle your share of the dirty work. Wipe down that counter and polish away those smears. Not only will your work be invisible, but you’ll have to try and look good while performing it since, now, your life probably depends on it. It’s only what black women have been doing for free for the last four centuries.
So hop to it! There’s plenty of unseen, undervalued work for everybody to do.
Today while I was opening up old media files and preparing for the launch of CONJUREjournal, a new undergraduate digital publishing platform that I’m helping develop for our HBCU students, I came across this essay montage video that I made as a doctoral student almost 11 years ago.
It was 2009. The iPhone was the hottest, must-have gadget on the market and the now, all-but-defunct iPod was still new. Despite the literally dozens of generations of iOS and Android mobile devices that have come and gone in the last decade, sadly—though not surprisingly—generate many of the same debates surrounding technological access and what we’ve come to recognize as “algorithmic oppression.”
Remember?
In those days, a cacophony of voices had declared it a “post-racial” era. To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, the president was black and Obama was about to be “eight years in power.” Fast forward to 2016 and it’s easy to understand why people might feel some nostalgia.
Also during that time, it was the boom years of what continues to be an offshoot field of English programs: digital rhetoric. We were still trying to figure out how to attribute authorial citations for on-screen projects and as one who was bearing witness to new idioms of expression, I decided to split the difference with a “SPECIAL THANKS” title card in the closing credits.
Another thing that strikes me about housing this and similar projects here on this very blog site is how much it looks like some kind of crazy time capsule. (I mean, can you say Tumblr gURLs?) The display and aesthetic layout right here appear less “cute” by today’s design standards—more kitsch—almost, in fact, quaint.
Quick warning: there’s nude content with images from a couple of VanessaBeecroft’s conceptual art installations between the 1:05 and 1:22 time marks.
Today I have a guest post from my eldest child, Khembara. For longtime followers of CircuitouslyCute.com, you should already know, one reason for this blog is because of my kids. So, Dear Reader, without further ado and to spare you from yet more of my gushing… Enjoy!
I am a 23 year old black male. When I lived in Savannah, Georgia I lived in fear because overseer’s, the term for officer’s during slavery, would routinely stop me and harass me when I walked in the streets due to lack of government funding for sidewalks. They would say each time “there have been a lot of car break-ins in this area…” This also happened to me in Clemson, South Carolina where I was even more terrified. They would then proceed to frisk me and check for warrants, all while shining bright flashlights into my eyes. This happened on almost a weekly basis. An NPR broadcast stated that one of police officers’ favorite weapons to use is the flashlight. Their first choice unfortunately is the gun.If there were sidewalks in Savannah, there were no street lights for me to see them, so I had to walk in the road. This caused me to always live in fear of bodily harm from police, cars, or street-level predators. There have been hundreds of thousands of police killings in America since slavery. I feel, as a young black man, this targeting of black people by institutional racist gangs of cops should be stopped. From my perspective, it’s the cops who act like domestic terrorists. Many cops are mentally unstable and need better evaluation to be held accountable for their careless actions. Too many police are a poison to the black community.
CircuitouslyCute 
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