"I feel Pretty... Oh so pretty"
"I feel pretty and headed for jail!"
At this month’s prom, Mika Castro is going to be the bling of the ball. The 18-year-old chose removable gold teeth covers, or “grills,” to make fashion history at Westmoor High in Daly City.
“I like the way they shine,” said Castro, showing off a row of eight gilded teeth
“At first, all my customers were young black men, and once they bought their teeth, they really don’t need to buy more,” he said. “Now, all kinds of people come in, college students from UC Berkeley, grandparents ... but lately I’ve been getting a lot of teenage girls — of all races.”
Gold teeth are also peeking out of the mouths of the Hollywood mainstream: Movie star Johnny Depp wore gold teeth to the Oscars, and Madonna ...Master P, Nelly and Snoop Dogg
Options include custom fangs:
More options available:
...for those whose ‘friends’ have a tendency to forget their name. Hey! Bein’ on crack requires a lot of one’s attention.
Or might there be some dots to be connected with this: Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? , by “hip hop intellectual,” Michael Eric Dyson
“hip hop intellectual,” Dyson: Cosby’s overemphasis on personal responsibility, not structural features, wrongly locates the source of poor black suffering — and by implication its remedy — in the lives of the poor. When you think the problems are personal, you think the solutions are the same. If only the poor were willing to work harder, act better, get educated, stay out of jail and parent more effectively, their problems would go away. It’s hard to argue against any of these things in the abstract; in principle such suggestions sound just fine. But one could do all of these things and still be in bad shape at home, work or school. For instance, Cosby completely ignores shifts in the economy that give value to some work while other work, in the words of William Julius Wilson, “disappears.” In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won’t create better jobs with more pay. And without such support, all the goals that Cosby expresses for the black poor are not likely to become reality. If the rigidly segregated educational system continues to miserably fail poor blacks by failing to prepare their children for the world of work, then admonitions to “stay in school” may ring hollow.
In this light, the imprisonment of black people takes on political consequence. Cosby may be right that most black folk in jail are not “political prisoners,” but it doesn’t mean that their imprisonment has not been politicized. Given the vicious way blacks have been targeted for incarceration, Cosby’s comments about poor blacks who end up in jail are dangerously naïve and empirically wrong.
...Cosby also slights the economic, social, political and other structural barriers that poor black parents are up against: welfare reform, dwindling resources, export of jobs and ongoing racial stigma. And then there are the problems of the working poor: folk who rise up early every day and often work more than forty hours a week, and yet barely, if ever, make it above the poverty level. We must acknowledge the plight of both poor black (single) mothers and poor black fathers, and the lack of social support they confront. Hence, it is incredibly difficult to spend as much time with children as poor black parents might like, especially since they will be demonized if they fail to provide for their children’s basic needs. But doing so deflects critical attention and time from child-rearing duties — duties that are difficult enough for two-parent, two-income, intact middle-class families.
And Cosby’s mean-spirited characterizations of the black poor as licentious, sexually promiscuous, materialistic and wantonly irresponsible can be made of all classes in the nation. (Paris Hilton, after all, is a huge star for just these reasons.)
...or maybe it’s just me.
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