An African American Woman's Perspective on the Miley Twerking Thing

Miley’s twerking has been way over-exposed. I didn’t write a post about it because I couldn’t give a crap. She just seemed like she was either pulling an Andy Kaufman on us by looking absolutely ridiculous or she was doing a Bieber and losing her marbles.

However, I came across this p retty awesome post written by an African American woman sociologist on how the performance looked to her. These are the types of posts that make me happy that blogs exist. I learned about an experience I couldn’t begin to fathom since I’m neither racially black nor a woman. I didn’t read all the comments on the post, but there were some disagreements from other black women. I’d say you should probably give her more weight than the average blog, considering her PhD, but also remember that not everyone has the same experience - even people of the same race/sex.

As for the white guys telling her she was imagining everything - as someone who strives to be empathetic, I know enough about myself to know that it is impossible to put myself into the headspace of someone who had such a different life as me. Heck, I even got into arguments with other Hispanics at Cornell over perceived racism/isolation/etc because growing up in Florida - I was actually in a majority minority. So don’t presume you know about others’ experiences, which, of course, are crucial to the way their brain interprets the world. It is, I am positive, the reason for 99% of the disagreements over what’s racist, sexist, etc

• Miley-Cyrus
• Race
• Twerking
• Vmas