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• Friday, February 3, 2006 09:28 AM

  I don't like spiders and snakes (either) and that ain't what it takes to love me.

  >>The only question I have is why a black woman's being afraid of a spider makes her like a white woman. I am black; and I, and my female black friends, would freak if a spider were in our hair.<<

  ...oh, and we're also afraid of snakes. A lot of us sistahs are girly-girls, just like you, Steph.

  See, this is why I think movies like "Something New" can be the start of something good.

  This society may actually have to SEE black woman as just that: women. The same loves and fears and hopes and dreams and crazy thoughts and weaknesses that the white girls have. And this just in: we can be quiet and boring with the best of 'em!

  Debra Dickerson touched on this a few months back in her lament over the "Wedding Crashers" not coming to her soiree and dancing with her 'nana. And I am always quietly disturbed when I hear Ricky Nelson's "Traveling Man". Everywhere on the planet but Africa. Or the Carribean. Or Harlem.

  Black women are the last American sexual frontier, and some of it can be squarely blamed on ourselves as we've internalized and regurgitated a lot of dangerous and inaccurate crap. Somehow, in the battle to fight the stereotype of being hypersexed-yet castrating battleaxes, we got erased from the "on-being-female" section in the public psyche, and in our own psyches. Oh, and the O.J.'s and Reggie Jacksons didn't help the black female image by publicly saying that we just didn't measure up like the white girls.

  So here's to "Something New". May that truely be the case...

  —alizoom Read alizoom's other letters
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