What are we doing wrong?

I will warn you, before you watch this video, that the song contains profanity. The girls have been described as "strippers in training" by a local radio personality.



My first reaction on watching this video was to look at it from the girls' point of view. We already discussed the importance of having a father in the home, and how that influence shapes you as a woman. So I thought about what life is like for a 15-18 yr old girl with no dad around. You are constantly shown that your body is what's important, not your mind. You are constantly shown that models, dancers, video 'vixens' and actresses (how many of us look like Halle Berry, Sanaa Lathan or Gabrielle Union?) are the ones who are 'successful'. The Condis, Michelle Obamas and Oprahs seem like far away and far between icons. So when you're that 15-18 year old girl, this is how you show that you are valuable. This is the type of action that gets rewarded in the black community, not 'talking white', being a nerd or any intellectual achievement regularly strived for by majority society.

When I was around this age, my play-cousin and I would spend hours practicing dance routines from videos: Shaba Ranks' "Flex" video (can you imagine, I was scandalized that he said "Time to have sex"!), making up dance routines to our favorite songs, and just dancing and daydreaming about boys. That was about 15 years ago. We did not have Youtube, Myspace, Facebook or any internet medium to seek attention. We did not have cell phones to make videos of ourselves and share with our friends. It was just us 3. We didn't dare perform our dance routines outside, and our mothers were usually around somewhere close. We could not listen to music with curse words, dress a certain way to go outside or any of a myriad of things that I see girls nowadays get away with.

So before I shook my head at this video, thought "these little strippers in training" or any general condemnation of the girls, my first thought was "where are their mothers?" No, I didn't say where are their fathers, because with 70% (or whatever it is) of black children being born out of wedlock, the sad assumption is that their fathers are not present. And its not to heap all the blame on the mothers, but clearly, where are you when your girls are doing the Stanky Leg on Youtube? Where are you when the girl in white is practicing juggling her booty? They are missing that barrier with the world that filters out immature, unwise and uncouth behavior and training that shows them how to be ladies.

When this video was discussed on the radio, one caller stated that she'd break her daughters in half if they danced like this. She also lamented, "and they wonder why these men look at them! They're advertising their services!" Well, my digression, and reaction to that is -- no I'm not a man. But how nasty are you to look at these girls, and as a MAN, have some kind of reaction? I don't care what their butts look like but you know they're young, they have no business doing what they're doing and that to give them sexual attention is condoning one of the worst types of crimes in society. So blaming the girls, instead of grown-ass MEN, or resorting to violence instead of just teaching the girls what their value truly is, does not solve or prevent this type of problem.

So instead of shaking my head at the girls, I shake my head at parents who don't monitor their children. Its one thing to let your kids dance, have fun, etc. Its another to let them cross the line and broadcast themselves over the internet, to let them seek the wrong kind of attention or believe that their value lies in what mainstream media says it is. If we're gonna fix this, we need to stop using our index fingers to wag at them and instead use them to point to the right path. But most unfortunatley, we as a people are too preoccupied by other things to keep our girls from falling into the cracks.