race

 

I am living in Toronto for the summer, where the press is going wild over a local case of sympathy-fraud:

Ashley Anne Kirilow, a 23-year-old Burlington native, admits she faked cancer, ran a bogus charity and collected thousands of dollars from hundreds of people. She shaved her head and eyebrows, plucked her eyelashes and starved herself to look like a chemotherapy patient.

... When I first saw this news case, I thought to myself (yes, rather cynically): there is no way that anyone other than a young, attractive, normative person could have pulled this off. If Kirilow had been—for example—fat, in her 30s, plain-looking and homeless, few would've given her the time of day. Much of Kirilow's success seems attributed to the fact that she easily roused pity with her little lost girl story and her brave smile. Kirilow embodied a version of white womanhood that we want to believe in (or at least we've been socially conditioned to embrace it): pretty, plucky, determined, and in need of rescue.

Kirilow is a prime example of a sympathy grifter: a grifter who uses racist/sexist/classist/etc beliefs in their favour, to get money, affection and attention, or to (literally) get away with murder. 

Spoiler Alert! Don't say we didn't warn you...



Image: Sayid, wearing a beret, looks down.

In the first post in this series, I looked at how white and nonwhite characters in representation and death on the Island at the center of Lost. While the Island is the focus of Lost, flashbacks and other off-island plots are the main way in which the show develops individual characters, and these stories deserve individual analysis.In this post, I’ll be looking at the other narrative side of this complex show: off-island action, in flashbacks, flashforwards, and sideways flashes, with help from my friend and fellow Lost fan, Renee Martin of Womanist Musings.

For the first time ever, the winner of the Miss England pageant is a Black female athlete. What does this say about feminism and beauty?

Read on for 5 things I don't want to read about anymore:

Women are making their entrance into cricket as players, team owners, and purveyors of sexism and White privilege?

In January, New Jersey-based business executive Neenah Picket, 43, rang in the New Year with a resolution: She would find a husband in 52 weeks with the help of six of her closest friends...and pretty much anyone who stops by her website, 52Weeks2FindHim.com. Now that much of the media hoopla around Neenah's experiment has died down, I thought I'd check in and see if she's found Him...or at the very least, if the trolls on her discussion board have stopped giving her unsolicited diet and exercise tips, calling her boring, and insulting her hairdo.

So...I'm reading Little Bee by Chris Cleave, but why am I thinking about Wally Lamb and Arthur Golden?

While studying the Civil Rights Movement during college, somewhere along the way I heard about a young woman who, as one prof put it, "sat before Rosa Parks sat." However, this nameless woman was ultimately deemed "unfit" to serve as the test case to trigger the Montgomery boycott, which would precipitate the Movement. Why was she considered unfit? Well, as the story went, the young woman (actually a 15-year-old girl) became pregnant by an older, married man, and so the more reputable Rosa Parks took center stage. Read on to find out more about Claudette Colvin's "forgotten contribution."

Let’s open up the ol’ cyber-mailbag, shall we? This week, two Friends of Jock Bitch (FoJB? FoJobs? That sounds weird.) were kind enough to send in a couple of links to articles of interest.

There are three books about black women and motherhood that rocked my world when I read them: Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood; I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work; and a novel, Jump at the Sun.  Lucky me, I also got to interview the authors, Cecelie S. Berry, Lonnae O'Neal Parker, and Kim McLarin, respectively.  Read on for those interviews and my reviews of the books...