excerpted from The Perverted Negress:

Mo: It has to do with kinky imagery and taboos.
Mo: it is an easy hook.
Mo: videos are commercials.
Mo: and commercials HAVE to get at you.
Mo: because BDSM is still edgy, it is an easy cheat
Andrea Plaid: hmmmm…good point.
Mo: But as to really accurately reflecting kink?
Mo: No.
Andrea Plaid: why not?
Andrea Plaid: (I know, totally non-kinkcentric question to ask, but I’m asking.)
Mo: Hm…
Mo: First off.
Mo: it is all about display and visual impact.
Mo: which IS an aspect of BDSM, so, sure.
Mo: there is fetishwear, provocative poses.
Andrea Plaid: I hear a “buuuuut” rearing up…
Mo: yeah here it comes
Mo: it doesn’t do anything else.
Mo: and for some people, that is enough.
Mo: A shoe fetishist would masturbate to any video with feet in it.
Mo: God bless them.
Mo: to say a man having a woman on a collar is automatically BDSM is false
Mo: this video has little to do with BDSM. It has to do with what looks sexy.
Mo: the one thing
Mo: the ONLY THING
Mo: that separates BDSM from abuse is consent.
Mo: now, there is implied consent.
Mo: HOWEVER at no point is she not in control.
Mo: Never.
Andrea Plaid: see, you beat to the question…
Mo: so if you want to pull it apart that way, guess what.
Mo: FAIL.
Mo: I am not going to meta-discuss her lack of control in the white dominated machine of the music industry.
Mo: Sister is doing it for herself. she has a marginal talent a stellar physique, she is making money, end of story.
Andrea Plaid: so, in order to for the vid to show a representation of BDSM, there would have been a 3-sec moment of consent?
Mo: *lol*
Mo: in order for the video to comply with Mollena’s BDSM Bible
Mo: we’d see a moment of emotional connection.
Mo: That is theater.
Mo: Not passion.
Andrea Plaid: right.
Mo: Not that theater isn’t passionate.
Mo: But BDSM for theatrical purposes
Mo: (which I love!)
Mo: is different from a reflection of what BDSM is for me

……………………………………..

Andrea Plaid: can another read be that Ciara is coming at it from a dom position, too?
Andrea Plaid: a “top” position?
Mo: of course.
Mo: If the whole video is her fantasy, she is of necessity running the show.
Mo: Dominants can wear what they want and do what they want. The idea of teasing with the body can have a dominant tone.
Mo: what bugs me is that it is “OK of the black person is dominant but “NOT UPLIFTING THE RACE!!” if she’s submissive.
Andrea Plaid: aaaahhhaaaaaa.
Mo: lol
Andrea Plaid: dig.
Mo: Oo now you get to decide which ROLE is OK for me?!
Mo: Fuck you, buddy.
Mo: I have gotten shit from black dominants about race play.
Mo: even as they top white submissives.
Andrea Plaid: really?
Mo: but that is OK, see, because it bucks the paradigm.
Mo: Seriously. Fuck you.
Mo: Yah really.
Mo: not for play play.
Mo: It gets deep, yo.
Mo: I’ve had people who I know for a FACT do race play fuck me over in public for doing it in public.
Mo: But it is OK for them to do it, just not OK for people to know about it.
Andrea Plaid: Jeez…even in race play there the “We gotta be strong–in this case, top white folks?

………………………………………….

Mo: Look, I have never lived in the South on a plantation and felt the terror of my life every moment at the hands and whims of an owner or of another slave with an agenda
Mo: HOWEVER! I can pretend.
Mo: and in a very real emotional sense, I have tasted what that is like.
Mo: and it is a screaming band of pain that still resonates in this country, on this fucking planet, you know.
Mo: But it is just under the radar.
Mo: I can hear it when I play there. I experience it. It is a terror that I can’t completely understand.
Mo: But one thing I learned in this play: resistance is harder than it looks.
Andrea Plaid: Then the question comes back: “But *why* would you want to do that? Can’t you just look at lynching pix and get the damn point?”
Andrea Plaid: (I’m being facetious…and to some folks, quite blasphemous. But I’m going there….)

Mo: Why is because I live viscerally.
Mo: I obtain a profound benefit to living the reality as deeply as I can emotionally.

Mo: In the race play scenes I have done that involved black / white dynamics, do you know what the scariest thing was? That I ultimately gave up.
Mo: I am NOT of the resistant blood.
Mo: I’m a quitter. I was afraid, I gave in.
Mo: That is a lot to have about your nature revealed.

Andrea Plaid: what did it reveal?
Mo: That I am, at heart, obedient.

Andrea Plaid: Hmmm…I think I’m getting to what you’re saying.
Mo: even in a scene where I had disassociated and genuinely feared for my life, I gave up.

Mo: I’m genuinely, at the core, submissive in a way I am CERTAIN does not translate to my present-day self!
Mo: I hoped it would be quick and over fast.
Andrea Plaid: Obedient…to whom?
Mo: Obedient to authority.

excerpted from Diary of an Anxious Black Woman:

My problem with “Race Play” arguments is that, in the privacy of your bedroom or in the privacy of your little group orgies, I don’t care what you’re doing with others as long as nobody is getting hurt. If you’re white and you want to enslave somebody black because it gets you off (and there is consent), or if you’re black and you want to be enslaved for the same reason (and again, there is consent), or if you want to do some role reversal, whatever! But, outside of the little BDSM role play thing, in mainstream pop acts, these bodies get read in the most conventional sense. More importantly, in mainstream arenas, certain bodies get penalized more than others. These realities, at least to me, are some reasons why I can’t “fantasize” some kind of “race play” where I’m in the subordinate position in an interracial relationship. I live that reality all the time!

And while the Perverted Negress might acknowledge that “my vagina isn’t interested in uplifting the race,” such self-gratifying expressions that whatever gets you off is all good ignores the many ways that, historically and even today, black vaginas have been used to oppress the race all the time. (i.e. - institutional rape used to produce a free labor supply of slaves, or Sara Baartman’s genitalia floating in a jar of formaldehyde fluid at a scientific museum, used to confirm African people’s inferiority, or the forced sterilization of black women to control populations of undesired black children - I could go on). Which isn’t to say that our vaginas must engage in the flip side of such oppression - the repression of our sexualities to serve some ideal of racial uplift - but can we please acknowledge that our bodies are political, that the personal is political, and in a larger context, certain performances get read through the lens of unequal power relations (such as a white man spanking the butt of a black woman, which would elicit a very different response from a black man spanking the butt of a white woman, or if the spectacle were intra-racial)? I mean, somewhere in all our fantasies, can we grasp what freedom really means and whether or not freedom can exist when we internalize oppressive thought and behavior? In this climate of economic oppression, we clearly don’t think it’s okay for greedy capitalists to subjugate many into poverty. Yet, if we go by a BDSM/”race play” ideology, this type of behavior is “all good,” as long as it gets you off and as long as the impoverished person consented (and many did through misguided attempts at aspiring to wealth, thanks to internalized classism). See what I mean?

excerpted from Tuskegee Experiment

Bottom-line: Justin did not purchase Ciara, then shove her ass in that catsuit and into that cage. This is what talentless girls with good looks do to sell records. It may be a type of prostitution, but it isn’t slavery. There is a difference. And while it may promote the objectification of black women, the person that needs it brought to ‘em about that shit is not Justin. It’s Ciara. Because when it’s all said and done, she’s the one with the responsibility to the race.

When have you ever known Massa to shoo a slave from the field?

The title of this post is 1,2 Step. It implies a certain predictability–it is a perfect metaphor for the imagery in this video. Same shit, different day. If yanking it from Youtube would change the world, then Sum-n-Saf would be all for it, but we all know there’ll be another version up before you can say (jigga)boo.

So let them make their money, “dirty” as it may be.