#morgan jerkins

[thechanelmuse]

My Book Review

Morgan Jerkins was trending during the release of Kendrick Lamar's Drake hit diss record, "Not Like Us," after culture vulture DJ Vlad attempted to get her fired from her teaching position at Princeton University for telling him to mind his mf business. Black folks digitally hemmed him up for his spiteful retaliation, and he began backpedaling only after he discovered Morgan is the niece of legendary producer Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins.

Seeing her name trend quickly made me recall her memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. It was one of my favorite reads of 2022. I headed to this site to reblog my review. Lo and behold I never posted one on here 🙃. So here we are.

From the moment I read the title, I knew this book would feel familiar, taking me back to the my early days of deep curiosity, personal discovery, and documented confirmation while uncovering the long paper trail of my ancestry and land. (For info on lineage tracing, refer to my post here.) 

Morgan Jerkins' familial journey through Georgia, Lowcountry South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California made me think of my own as a granddaughter of grandparents who headed to New York during the Great Migration by way of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina extending to Louisa County, Virginia and Boley, Oklahoma. Morgan's memoir, which is divided into four sections, is engrossing, detailed, and reels you into a seat next to her on her journey.

Here's the book's blurb:

Between 1916 and 1970, six million Black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took. Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of Black people she met along the way—the tissue of Black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history.

Genealogy is a never-ending process of search and discovery for Black Americans that's met with hidden documents and some areas paper genocide, due to destroyed documents, misclassification, and several stages of racial/ethnic reclassification for our ethnic group implemented by the US government since the 1790 census. I'm pretty sure even after concluding this book Morgan continued her search, working back through her long lines. It's layered like an onion. I've been working on mine for almost two decades reaching the 1600s for a few. It gives you a sense of awakening that's an everyday feeling. It'll never dissipate, especially being able to pull black the veil and unearth the identity of ancestors whose names haven't been said for hundreds of years.

[boricuacherry-blog]

Darkchild's daughter is aggy af. Especially for someone who used to be a professor at Princeton. Girl stfu..

[hiphopvibe1]

DJ Vlad threatens a Black woman's job over Kendrick-Drake beef

DJ Vlad threatens a Black woman’s job over Kendrick-Drake beef Continue reading DJ Vlad threatens a Black woman’s job over Kendrick-Drake beef

[the-final-sentence]

But when I need a salve, a space to remind myself that there need not be any limits to my interrogation when it comes to my safety, I turn to Citizen to remember to keep on living and to document those interruptions and gaps in said living as storytelling to be passed on to another black woman and then another.

Morgan Jerkins, from "To Be a Citizen"

[blackgirlslivingwell]

DJ Vlad & The History of White People Getting Black People Fired From Their Jobs In America

[themoshow]

Vlad: The V is for Vulture

I've been telling my community to stop supporting Vlad. He has been problematic from the start. It is not a coincidence that some rappers that have appeared on his YouTube channel ended up in prison. His recent attempt to get a black female professor at Princeton fired should tell you all you need to know about him. Vlad took to his “X” account to comment on Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” and was told by Professor Morgan Jerkins to sit this conversation out because it's a "black folks affair" and in true white privilege fashion, he tagged her job and threatened to get her fired. I was once in a heated discussion about a racial issue with some white people on social media and their first response was also to try to get me fired. They also tagged my employer and immediately resorted to racial epitaphs, insults about my hair length and my appearance. Because they did not have the intellect, range or bandwidth to debate me on the subject, they resorted to petty, ignorant tactics. Little did they know, I worked for a black owned company and a very pro black boss who had my back. You wouldn't believe the lengths they went to to try and stop my livelihood simply because they disagreed with me. I never even once had to call them out of their names or use any racial epitaphs towards them. I could have justifiably tagged their jobs to get them fired, but I simply stated facts and had logical rebuttals that they could not handle.

      After seeing the amount of support for the professor and black people threatening to cancel Vlad, he walked back his comments.. Vlad, you are formally disinvited to the cookout.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Jerkins at Mother Jones:

Last year, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily long and needlessly difficult meal. These trad wives, short for traditional wives, are women who post online content showing themselves adhering to patriarchal gender roles while keeping house and raising children—and making it look easy.

[...] I wanted nothing to do with her or any self-identifying trad wife in my own small piece of digital real estate, but their immense popularity (and algorithmic dexterity) had allowed them to trespass, and I find myself unable to turn away. Chances are, neither can you. But while it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play—henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.

To fully understand the rise of the trad wife phenomenon, it helps to look at its origins. In some ways, trad wives resemble the mommy bloggers of the mid-aughts to early 2010s. Back then, momfluencers like Dooce’s Heather Armstrong and Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mother commanded massive audiences through confessional posts about breast pumps and postpartum depression. As writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton pointed out in a 2020 New York Times piece, mommy branding was different back then: These bloggers were messy; they did not hold back in revealing all of the stickiness and ugliness in their matrescence. But then the vibe shifted. In 2016 and 2017, when Seyward Darby was doing research for her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, she noticed an ominous subculture gaining prominence, one in which women were performing this highly curated image of wife- and motherhood. “It was aggressively anti-feminist, anti-diversity; some of it was proudly pro-white,” Darby says. Trump’s rise helped give these women a larger megaphone.

Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists, but, as Darby points out, “it is a slippery slope—and sometimes there’s no slope at all—between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.” Watching trad wife content can pull viewers into territory they didn’t expect. “What’s scary is that there is a subtext in all these videos,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tells me. For example, a trad wife might advocate for “natural living” or homeschooling, and then veer into anti–birth control rhetoric or religious indoctrination. “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of ­extremism.”

Not all trad wives have direct links to the far right. But what unites them is a romanticized vision of domesticity, or, as Darby calls it, “June Cleaver 1950s cosplaying.” As self-proclaimed trad wife Estee Williams, who rejects any associations with white supremacy, declared in a 2022 TikTok video, “We believe our purpose is to be homemakers.” It’s not simply about looking pretty. Their aestheticizing of housework is a throwback to the mid-20th century, when women weren’t even allowed to get a credit card or a loan. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal were responsible for promoting a certain kind of wife as a way to reestablish social order after World War II, when many women had entered the labor force. As Ann Oakley puts it in her 1974 book, Housewife, “a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient ­homemaker­…Women’s expected role in society is to strive after perfection in all three roles.” Most trad wife content is marked with this desire for perfection.

[...]

So why are many millennial and Gen Z women an eager part of the trad wife audience? Here’s my theory: We’ve given up. The popularity of the trad wife content is demonstrative of a psychological resignation. In the past several years, we’ve experienced a pandemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the end of the Girlboss­­ Era. The rise of the trad wives marks what Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of the 2024 book The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, believes is “a response to the failures of a neoliberal workplace feminism” stretching from the 1960s to the present day—one that focuses on individuality. “What women fought for was an entry into the workplace,”­ Mukhopadhyay explains, but “being a mother in the workplace was almost untenable.” Even after decades of supposed progress, she points out, “we’re still not paid equally, and most women still don’t have resources commensurate with how hard they work and how they contribute to their families.” According to a 2023 report from the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress, women were 5 to 8 times more likely than men to work part time or not at all because of caregiving responsibilities. Maya Kosoff, a content strategist and writer who admits to me that she has become obsessed with trad wives herself, says their popularity is “a reaction to perceived systemic failures” that seem like they “can be easily solved by turning to the simpler life of homesteading.”

And look, escapism isn’t anything new. When life gets harder, it’s only natural that one would daydream about a different time. But fantasies are dangerous when the stakes are so high for American women right now. We have only started to feel the effects of the Dobbs decision. “We have not seen how bad it’s going to get as women are pushed out of public life over the coming years,” journalist and MeToo activist Moira Donegan tells me. “Our main educational institutions, our workplaces, our elected officials are going to start to look more male.” Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom similarly argues that attacks on reproductive rights represent an erosion of women’s place in a democracy. “Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies,” she says. “When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men. I think this reclaiming of being the traditional wife is here so long as there’s a threat.”

Mother Jones does a solid report on the explosion of tradwife culture in the wake of the Dobbs decision, in which abortion bans serve as a tool to drive women out of the workforce.

Tradwife influencers romanticize the 1950s aesthetic, and most of them tend to have far-right political views (especially on gender roles).

Read the full story at Mother Jones.

[reasoningdaily]

Hopefully, Vlad will one day understand that he is a guest of the culture and not a fixture – that man has gotten way too comfortable in his position.

The Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef is the most exciting moment in music right now: On Saturday, K. Dot once again dragged Drake for utter filth with his latest diss track “Not Like Us.”

The battle has led to a nonstop flow of social media commentary, including by culture vulture DJ Vlad, who was better off keeping his opinion to himself.

On “Not Like Us” – which is an absolute club banger – Kendrick calls Drizzy a pedophile and an outsider to Black culture. “You run to Atlanta when you need a few dollars/No, you not a colleague, you f**kin’ colonizer,” Kendrick ruthlessly rapped.

Though DJ Mustard’s production was impeccable on “Not Like Us,” DJ Vlad, a white man who has profited from Black culture for years, chimed in to give his unwanted view on it. “Kendrick’s ‘Not Like Us’ needed a better mix. It takes away from the song,” he wrote on X.

Many responded to Vlad’s asinine tweet, including author and Princeton University professor Morgan Jerkins. “You are WHITE. This is a BLACK FOLK AFFAIR,” she wrote in a reply that went viral on X.

It took no time for DJ Vlad to channel his inner Karen and tag Jerkins’ university to snitch on her for hurting his feelings. “Wait, so a professor at @Princeton is telling me that a white person shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinion about Hip-Hop? Is that how you interact with your students,” Vlad wrote.

Jerkins quickly responded: “What I’m saying is that you put your opinion in a discussion that’s not needed. This conversation is and should center Black people, not you.”

Of course, Vlad refused to take the hint or the L: He threatened to contact Jerkins’ place of employment.

“Don’t try to change your words now. I’ll be reaching out to @princeton about this on Monday.” Jerkins – who is the niece of music titan Rodney Jerkins –clarified that her semester was over and that her contract had been completed, prompting Vlad to say his complaint would be placed on “her permanent record” and that Jerkins had a “typical victim mentality.”

Vlad was immediately called out for threatening a Black woman for no reason other than telling him to mind his business. Ultimately, the Kendrick-Drake feud has sparked a larger conversation on Black culture and who authentically represents it.

On Monday, Vlad—who created VladTV to use Hip-Hop and Black culture to line his pockets for almost two decades—tried to backtrack. “I never had any intention of filing a complaint to Princeton for former professor Morgan Jerkins saying that white people aren’t allowed to comment on Kendrick Lamar’s music,” he wrote on X.

“She trolled me and I trolled back. At the end of the day, it created an interesting discussion about race relations in America. I will be discussing it further in my future interviews.” Obviously, this is a lie as he tagged Princeton in his replies to Jerkins.

Also, he has continuously misconstrued her words to make himself look like the victim—in typical Karen fashion. It’s not shocking for him to center himself in this complex topic in order to stay relevant, but going after a Black woman who rightfully embarrassed you is just embarrassing.

Hopefully, Vlad will one day understand that he is a guest of the culture and not a fixture – that man has gotten way too comfortable in his position.

[the-local-library-witch]

Book of the day! “Wandering In Strange Lands” by Morgan Jerkins. The author traces her roots back through the great migration of African Americans from the south, up North in search of opportunity. She ties together historical documentation with the oral stories of her family to paint a wide picture of this period of American history.

[krenenbaker]

Yo Kren

Since you're an expert enthusiast in historical fashion lend a fellow a hand.

I really wanna design renaissance characters rn, you know where I can look that up? Like a book with pictures online with lots of interesting designs for inspiration

hiya!!

okay, it's been a little bit since I've been really looking into historical fashion, but I'll do my best to help out!

first, it depends on when in the Renaissance you're looking at, as well as where, and who. the fashions differed from place-to-place, differed based on social class, and were fairly different from decade-to-decade, let alone from the beginning of the Renaissance (14th century) to the end (17th century). I'm most familiar with fashions of the English Renaissance, mostly the period of the Tudor and Elizabethan eras (late 1400s to late 1500s), so I'd mostly be able to help with things from that time period.

Fashion History Timeline is a handy website (which I may have told you about?) made by the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, which gives an overview of common fashions in different decades. this is where I tend to start, and look deeper into the different aspects I find interesting or are important to the construction, shape, etc. of different pieces and outfits.

From there, I tend to look at either my local library, on Google Scholar, JSTOR (which you may be able to access either through a personal account, a school library, or a public library), Project Gutenburg or the Internet Archive (those are good for older sources), or on the general internet for the aspects I may be wanting to learn more about. Generally, I look into:

the fabrics that would have been used,

the common patterns of the time,

the different garments that would have been worn (shirts/shifts, hose, tunics, jerkins, overcoats, kirtles, dresses, pockets, etc, depending on whose clothing you're looking at)

the specific layers and their order,

any techniques that may have been used in that specific time / place,

and any other things that stand out

If you are looking for specifically Tudor fashions, the Tudor Tailor is a FANTASTIC source. There are a few different Tudor Tailor books, though they can be a little hard to find, but they also have a few visual sources on their YouTube channel, which are great!

Morgan Donner also has some good sources for Medieval and Renaissance dress, which I'd also recommend looking into a bit! Samantha Bullat also has some GREAT videos and tutorials on mostly 15th-17th century dress. and there are some other tutorials and such on YouTube, which can usually be found by searching for the specific garment and period (though not always)

I hope this was at least a bit helpful. and I hope you have fun!

[idontknowwhatiwantworld]

This is a photo of books I've read so far in April!

I enjoyed each book thoroughly!

I often think that I'm not an "actual" reader since I'm not constantly reading classic novels but then i think of all the women that came before me that weren't allowed the privilege of learning to read or the privilege of enjoying different genres! I'll continue reading whatever I want <3

This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins - 4.5 stars

Beach Read - 5 Stars

Ninth House - 4.5 Stars

I'm thrilled that I'm enjoying everything that I'm reading !!!

Love always

[pumpumdemsugah]

Morgan Jerkins is an example of some woc being actively misogynistic but being praised as "intersectional feminists" for it. She really said she got off on white women being raped and "punished" and people ate that up. She also had a revenge fantasy about a black woman who was mean to her experiencing police brutality. Very disturbing. Has the same energy as the fandom adult on here, but she had the grace to call herself and Egalitarian.

Omg you just reminded me that this weirdo exists

The fact none of these whites were like ???what the fuck But these people also don't think Andrea Long Chu's mind wasn't hollowed out by porn. They love disturbed pathetic individuals. The more you're willing to publicly humiliate yourself and reframe concerning revolting behaviour as completely normal, the more they love you.

They think WOC are obsessed mad women because who the fuck does that then writes a book about it ? That's not normal. These people think obviously misogynist WOC are real Feminist and avoids all the feminist scholarship by WOC that's challenging.

The best way for these internet whites to like you is to be an extremely pathetic WOC they can pity because they will say, omg you're being so vulnerable and it's completely fake. They love women like this because it makes them feel better.

When we feel insecure, WOC might want to look like other, lighter or ideally shaped WOC, not white and this was with some MOC comparing us to white women, not even then did our insecurity take us there but socially media is creating and pushing types of women we have never seen before.

[piratefalls]

Top 5 non fiction books ? (i liked your last book rec post!)

Top 5 animals you wish you could cuddle/pet ? (if there was absolutely no risk of being mauled in the process ofc lol)

I LOVE TALKING ABOUT BOOKS LET'S GOOOOO. I knew my English degree would come in handy at some point. I've read a decent amount of non-fiction, so I'll try to cover a number of topic bases here:

5 non-fiction books

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. I'll admit I didn't know much about apartheid going into it and I found it to be a decent primer. It's been a while since I've read it, but I remember not being able to put I down. It is as heartbreaking as it is humorous as it is enlightening.

Hunter: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. This may no be for everybody as it deals with the trauma of rape and also living in this world in a fat body. As someone who has had body issues pretty much her whole life, this book really made me feel understood. But like I said, heed the warnings. (If you can't find it in yourself to read this book, Bad Feminist is an excellent essay collection from her.)

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins. A++, the chapter on Michelle Obama made me cry.

Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies by Michael Ausiello. Pop culture fans know Ausiello, but this is a book about the love he and his husband shared that was cut short by a severe form of cancer. It is incredibly sad - the tittle really doesn't leave anything to the imagination - but at its core this is a story about love. I cried through the last 50 pages so, you know, fair warning. (They just turned this into a movie too.)

Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality by Sarah McBride. Once again, someone dies, but her story is pretty remarkable. I picked up a few trans-centric memoirs after reading this and while I still haven't read them (it's been a bad reading year for me) I did find this, like Born a Crime, to be a pretty good primer about the legal side of existing as a trans person.

Bonus: Life Will Be the Death of Me...And You Too! by Chelsea Handler. Explores privilege, dealing with grief, and what we can do to make the world and ourselves better with her usual amount of humor and a big heaping of heart.

General nonfiction authors I enjoy for essay collections: Michael Arceneaux, Samantha Irby, Sarah Colonna (comedian, very funny stories),

5 animals I'd cuddle or pet:

I'd cuddle a fennec fox in a heartbeat. I love their big ears and tiny bodies. I saw a TikTok once where someone described them as Versace chihuahua and I died.

I'd love to pet a great white shark. I've loved sharks since I was 8 and I just think they're equal parts terrifying and majestic.

Cuddle an otter. I'm obsessed with their tiny hands.

Also cuddle a lion cub. Tthey're just really fucking cute.

I'd also love to pet a rhino. They're just so cool and what's been done to their populations is so sad and they're also just very very cool animals.

put “top 5” anything in my ask

[rebeleden]

DJ Vlad Tried To Get Black Woman Princeton Professor Morgan Jerkins Fire...

[dnaamericaapp]

DJ Vlad Pulls A Ken On A Black Woman Princeton Professor Over Kendrick-Drake Beef

On “Not Like Us”Kendrick calls Drizzy a pedophile and an outsider to Black culture.

Though DJ Mustard’s production was impeccable on “Not Like Us,” DJ Vlad, a white man who has profited from Black culture for years, chimed in to give his unwanted view on it. “Kendrick’s ‘Not Like Us’ needed a better mix. It takes away from the song,” he wrote on X.

Many responded to Vlad’s asinine tweet, including author and Princeton University professor Morgan Jerkins, the niece of music super producer, songwriter, Rodney Jerkins who tweeted, “You are WHITE... This is a BLACK FOLK AFFAIR.”

It took no time for DJ Vlad to channel his inner Karen and tag Jerkins’ university to snitch on her for hurting his feelings. “Wait, so a professor at @Princeton is telling me that a white person shouldn’t be allowed to voice their opinion about Hip-Hop? Is that how you interact with your students,” Vlad wrote.

Jerkins quickly responded: “What I’m saying is that you put your opinion in a discussion that’s not needed. This conversation is and should center Black people, not you.”

“Don’t try to change your words now. I’ll be reaching out to @princeton about this on Monday.”

Vlad was immediately called out for threatening a Black woman for no reason other than telling him to mind his business.

On Monday, Vlad tried to backtrack. “I never had any intention of filing a complaint to Princeton for former professor Morgan Jerkins. Obviously, this is a lie as he tagged Princeton in his replies to Jerkins. -(source: the root)

DNA America

“It’s what we know, not what you want us to believe.”

#dna #dnaamerica #news #politics

[blackgirlslivingwell]

Alleged Culture Vulture DJ Vlad Tried To Get Black Woman Princeton Professor Morgan Jerkins Fired?

Alleged Culture vulture, DJ Vlad, is facing backlash on Twitter for threatening to get a Black college professor fired from her job at Princeton University for not allowing him to be a culture vulture.