#but I'm forwarding on emails as proof that yes this is happening and no it is not my fault

[beauty-grace-outer-space]

People sure do be testing my patience today. 

[jerseydeanne]

Meghan's moment of truth - CAROLE MALONE

SO, AFTER a string of emphatic denials that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the sycophantic biography, Finding Freedom, it turns out Meghan Markle DID brief the book's authors via her then PR, Jason Knauf.

Knauf has now produced a tranche of texts and emails to prove the book was discussed directly with the Duchess multiple times in person and by email. And having been caught bang to rights and faced with indisputable proof, Meghan now says: "Oh, yes, I forgot about that."

What? She "forgot" multiple emails she sent over many months to help with an explosive book that made her look like a saint and the Royal Family look like a cruel, nasty bunch who sabotaged her and Harry's efforts to save the world?

That's kinda like forgetting your own name, and the fact that night follows day. How can you forget instructing someone to trash your in-laws, to slate a family that welcomed you with open arms? How can you forget feeding damaging stories to the book's lickspittle authors knowing it was going to make global headlines and damage the Royal Family?

The Duchess has now had to apologise to the Court of Appeal for her catastrophic loss of memory. But actually, if her memory's so bad maybe she needs help. Because what else might she have forgotten? That she didn't, as she told Oprah, get married three days before the Windsor ceremony (oh hang on, she's already had to admit she didn't).

What about all those snide stories about Kate upsetting her? Did she forget the truth about those? And that hellishly damaging accusation that the Royal Family are racists and that one member questioned what colour Archie's skin might be? Could she have forgotten what happened there, too?

It also turns out that a letter she wrote to "Daddy" which she says devastated her when he made it public, was written by her knowing itWAS likely to be published, which totally disproves her claims she never suspected it would.

Texts from her to Knauf were submitted to the Appeal Court where a newspaper is seeking to overturn a legal ruling that it breached Meghan's privacy by publishing a "deeply personal" letter to her father Thomas.

In those texts she said she'd chosen words that would "pull at people's heartstrings" if it was published. "Everything I have drafted is with the understanding it could be leaked. I have been meticulous in my choice of words. Please let me know if anything stands out as a liability, " she told Knauf in an email. How damning and manipulative is that?

How can we ever again trust a word this woman says? Her credibility is shot. Yet still her supporters rally to her defence, claiming it's a media witch-hunt, it's racist, it's lies, we're all out to get her. But the truth is Ms Markle appears to have damned herself with her own words in these emails and texts.

These are her words - not the media's - and they undermine much of what she has claimed about the lies that have been told about her and the pain that's been inflicted on her.

But with manipulators like Meghan the truth will eventually out, as it has this week. And it's by her own hand.

I'm wondering if any more of her aggrieved Palace staff (remember the bullying allegations?) will now come forward, emboldened by Knauf's testimony. If I were Meghan I'd be worried. But then maybe she isn't - because she's forgotten everything!

[rndyounghowze]

Black Noses And My Personal History With White Supremacy

I finally got the courage to talk about something that Dana has been challenging me to post about for a while. #blm #stopwhiteterrorism

By Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Mays Landing, NJ

Venmo: @rndyounghowze

I have a very vivid memory of being teased on the school bus in elementary school for having “a black nose and lips”. Until I got glasses and was diagnosed with Tourettes it was the common theme of my playground bullying. My biggest role model at the time was our bus driver Mr. Garland (I think that was his name) because he defended me. I remember trying to make up some story about how I got plastic surgery and they messed up my nose. He looked me dead in the eye and said “we have to be proud of what we look like. We are beautiful inside and out. They’re ugly on the inside. That’s what makes us better”.

I lived with my grandmother during the week and my parents on the weekends. My mom and dad lived in one of the first “projects” in the US and at that time they were one of two white families living there. I would be playing with the kids in the playground and a Black mom who would be watching us would tell me to come up to them and she would hold my chin in her hand and turn my head for inspection to the other mothers sitting there smoking cigarettes. She would tell me “I don’t care what your mom and dad told you” and would let me go back and play. I never really knew what she meant.

Flash forward to high school. I decided that I wanted to dive into my family history. I was in a play about the Confederate Flag and I remembered that I had family on both sides of the war. I had enough info about my family to join the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I also knew that my family up In Kentucky had fought in the Union. I was proud to have “heritage” on both sides.

I was rooting through photo albums in my Dad’s mom’s house. I came upon a family bible that was really old. It had to be old enough to be owned by the parts of the family that lived in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1800’s. Family bibles used to have these front pages that listed weddings and births. Listed in the middle is a marriage between a woman with the last name Jung and a man named Richard with no last name. This would not have meant anything except that after his name they took the time to list him as “a n*****r”. They then spent a paragraph talking about how he fought in the Civil War and saved lives in a battle by shooting a superior officer and allowing the company to retreat. So he was a n*****r but he was a “good n*****r”.

I knew that the story was that our family had changed our last name from Jung to Young to avoid discrimination. My Dad’s side of the family has an outstanding military history and I know they were worried about appearing to have German ties in the war. I eventually went across the street and asked my great grandfather about this. The only thing he ever told me was “marry a girl with the Irish in her. It’s the best thing you could do.” My great grandfather passed away while I was in Highschool. My grandfather passed away in college. After the funeral I went to the house and looked for the family Bible. I had held it in my hand four times in three years. It was gone. I have never found it again. My Dad has special needs, his mom has dementia. The rest of my Dad’s family has never spoken to me after the funeral. It may be because I married a Black person. Maybe not. I will never know.

One time while driving through my mom’s side of the family’s hometown I saw a church sign that had the family name on it. I asked why we never went there and she just casually said “that must belong to the Black families that live here that share our last name”. I was floored by this. We had a black side of the family? What!? She was quick to tell me that they were in no way related. It was just that the family was as old as we were and had lived in that town as long as we had. My family has lived there and owned land there since before the Civil War. I have been digging into the genealogy based on what she has told me and after two or three generations the family line with our last name seems to disappear. Two white branches of the family go back eight or so generations and seem to have married into the family three generations or so back but there don’t seem to be any birth or death records in their town that support her story that the family had been there for a very long time. There is no not-slave-owning explanation for this. To this day my grandmother refuses to talk about it. She leans into the Scots-Irish side of the story.

In grad school when I first met Dana they made sure to do two things: Tell a very wrong Obama joke and then ask me what I was mixed with. The joke was to see if I reacted to the joke in a ”white way” (their words). If I did they would never feel comfortable being alone with me ever much less date me. The second question is because they saw what every other Black person I know saw. I told them what I knew about the probable Black man on my Dad’s side and my theory about my Mom's side. They kinda looked flabbergasted. Like they were surprised I admitted it.

Dana and I fell hard in love and spent three years trying to do the long-distance relationship thing. We had very long talks about race and whiteness. We had to have massive discussions about privilege and culture. I had reading lists and albums and homework that I had to do and Dana readily admits that in a lot of ways I already ”got it”. However, it was never enough. They wanted me to make a conscious decision to marry into a black family and know what I was getting into.

In August of 2014, I had just gotten back from spending a summer with Dana and I was using my hour before work to buy an engagement ring. I had two months to move to NJ so that we could start a job together. I heard on the news that Michael Brown was shot by a white cop in Ferguson. It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the first time that the weight of what I was doing rang home in the deepest parts of me. I was marrying a Black person. At the time I wanted to bring children into this world. It finally dawned on me that those children were going to be Black. Just as the math in my childhood was Black nose+white skin=white guy the calculus done in a cop’s head was not going to add up well for our children. I worked at a church so I went to the altar and prayed. I prayed for a whole hour. I got the ring and moved to NJ. Dana and I were married five months later. I never looked back.

Why am I saying this now? Because white supremacy is the scourge of American Theatre. It's the reason why our Asian American artists are afraid to walk the streets at night. It's the reason why our Black artists are having to stand up and form their coalitions to get work done without a ”white yes”. It's the reason why even though I have photographic proof that the Cis males in my family have slowly gotten paler with every generation and that I know with absolute certainty that there is a Black contribution to my heritage somewhere that they locked it down and hid it from me like it was a crime (and it was until Loving V. Virginia, the very state my Dad's side of the family hails from). They appear to have bred as much of it out of me as possible by marrying women with ”Irish” in them. I feel like I was force-fed the blue pill and sidelined from my culture. I will never be black. I’m not even trying to be. I am just sickened that something that every Black person I’ve met can see may or may not come from a heritage that was stolen from me and hidden so well I can probably only prove it with a DNA test.

Whiteness is not a culture, it is an allergic reaction to the existence of BIPOC contributions to American life. It is cancer in our American Theatre and we have predominantly white institutions that are standing out like tumors in our cultural landscape. I am singularly focused on rooting them out not just because I'm married to a BIPOC artist. I'm rooting them out so that I can claim all of my cultures so that I can make reparations for the harm that has happened in my personal history. To create me BIPOC heritage may have had to be bred out and hidden and I may never be able to prove it. The sheer insinuation is enough to sicken me. I will uncover it and amplify my ancestors’ stories if I can find them. I will create a culture where this doesn't have to happen again. It ends with me.

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