IT’S OFFICIAL!

The Black Snob is officially at blacksnob.com! If you saved the old address, no worries, I still haven’t figured out how to make the new address the main address. For now, they’re both sharing.

It’s confusing. I’m not an internet superstar over here. So if the site goes down over the weekend, that’s just me trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.

Also, I’m returning the airwaves at NPR for their News and Notes segment. I will be jacking it up noonish on May 28th.

And I totally want to thank all the people who have donated to the “Keep me from eating Top Ramen” fund. I don’t know if you all realize how much this really means to me.

1) It means I don’t suck as a writer. After not being able to get a job as a writer for two years I was starting to think that I sucked. Thank you for fixing that.

2) I’m not completely destitute, because my parents help me out, but, dude … I’m poor.

I used to be ashamed of saying I was poor because I have degrees and such and come from an upper middle class background. Even as my phone was being cut off in California and my credit cards were being cut up and I was bargaining/lying to my landlord to keep him from evicting me I would still tell people I was middle class when really the only thing “middle class” about me was that I graduated from Hazelwood Central High School in St. Louis County a decade ago.

Eventually I accepted that I was broke. And there was a lot of “poor, pitiful me” (and I still do that sometimes), but I decided to keep slugging away even though I was sewing patches on my favorite jeans (which have now completely disintegrated. I still wear them around the house, but … they’re dead, man.)

When I returned to St. Louis last year, sans job, I returned with a grand total of two pairs of shoes, only one wearable. The wearable pair, some four-year-old brown European-style tennis shoes, started to die before I moved home so I bought a pair of black flats for job interviews and a pair of tennis shoes.

Then, this February, the black shoes completely fell apart, both soles cracking then falling off at the same time causing me to fall while trying to cross a brick-laid street in downtown.

So I had one pair of brown shoes where the leather was cracking and separating from the sole and another pair that was in a landfill somewhere. Most of my freelance money goes for bills and divorce/credit card debt so … you folks totally bought me two new pairs of shoes!

Really. You are really, really awesome. I can not say that enough. YOU ARE AWESOME. I didn’t think I’d get so many people so soon who were willing to help me out just because they enjoy my rants, satire, analysis and columns. I’m glad you like the content so much that you’re willing to spare some dollars for the world’s most educated quasi homeless poor person.

So the donors’ names, and their new Snob aliases, are all on the left side bar underneath my official panhandling statement. I can’t really give you anything to return the favor, but you’re all stars in my show. And thanks for the shoes!

(They’re very nice and durable.)

Yours truly,

The Snob.

PS. The picture is of Baby Sis, the “littlest” Snob in the Snob Family. Even when clowning, she was and is ever the diva.

daniellebelton

2 responses to “IT’S OFFICIAL!”

  1. Urban Thought Avatar
    Urban Thought

    Congratulations!!!

    Reply
  2. Andrea Avatar
    Andrea

    Girl…when I was doing Uppity Negro I had to post on my website that I needed money for maxi-pads. I was sitting in the Auburn Avenue Library in Atlanta typing sitting next to mostly homeless people that found the confines of the library through the day much nicer than the streets.Across the street was Citizen’s Trust Bank (the rich Black Bank in ATL…check the irony of their history), next door was “100 Black Men” and the Atlanta Daily World Newspaper. Most times I had inventory on me and I was trying to set up opportunities to subsidize my basics since I was sleeping on a friend’s bean bag chair but washing at the Centennial Park Y because his bathroom as a guy was too nasty for me, a girl. I was a still a choosy beggar when it came to wear I would wash being homeless.And most people did not know I was homeless because I was clean, had a website, was doing interviews, and would show up at events. I was loosing it all holding it together for them as a STRONG BLACK WOMAN when I literally was telling people how bad I had it. They all were in denial because they saw me so calm as if being in despair meant I was was supposed to be acting that action out in front of them. Instead I would challenge them to help me and they could not mesh that concept because to them I was not worthy of help since I was being folkloric is living out to them the narrative of being strong. It was the pits and I was bitter.So one day in between wondering whether I would use the last money I had on gas (I had stopped paying my car not long ago trying to keep going and this was before I lost the car). When I saw the blood in my panties I had to figure out whether to ask for money for maxi-pads, buy maxi-pads with the gas money and not be able to travel and set up at schools were I could find a cheap vending fee.My friend, BJ, was feeding me but I could not tell him about my period. I could tell the world but I didn’t him carrying my period too as his responsibility for he was carrying enough as a person that got that he wanted to help. It was like he was the only one that wanted to help. You just don’t want to overburn the few that “get it”.So I wrote that I was debating on going to Spelman and asking for pads and really forcing them to acknowledge what an activist is and that all that time of them seeing me, I was not bullshitting them that I was an activist. But still that was a drive eating up (I think) almost $2.68 gas that season. So in the library sitting next to my fellow homeless peers, I saw the irony that I was facing hate mail and death threats for the love of my people to create a fresh socio-political concept to have no one want to help me when they were being task of the simplest, small things in taking care of one of their servants.Your post about Strong Black Women hit on this anger I have inside. I carried everyone else’s shame because they were forcing me too. They wanted me to provide the visuals that if I was so smart and so ingenius I should not have to depend on them. They could not factor the concepts that that is why nothing productive and industrious created by our own is sustainable. We have the ideas that if you are good then you automatically will survive and flourish. We don’t get the math in that it requires the people to sustain you and build you up. You can’t do it alone.So I was battling understanding the blatant ignorance and the systematic ignorance of all of our own educated people that would rather shift some superficial reasoning to find a way to not empathize while they watched me like they were watching a movie. They were spectators watching me decline and knew they could help. They would offer empty platitudes and feel righteous that that was enough and if any, plenty.So I was forced to refrain a lot because we I showed anger and frustration, people shamed me that I offered myself as a sacrifice to help them. It was arrogant taunting that I was not what they wanted even though they kept saying they wanted more. The only ones to understand the backwards behavior of our own were Whites and they knew that this was a “Black Thing” that I created just to disprove that we were backwards and would manifest just as they were doing. Of me and what I was doing, we were proving scientifically that we disdained sustainability. I knew that it should not keep proving empirical. I’ve been mad for years now with my multi-millionaire cousin in Atlanta knowing how hard I was having of a time while he put $100 in strippers panties and had people telling him I was onto something bigger than he could grasp. It was infuriating. Going to the AUC and seeing fake scholars and jealous professors wanting to see me crumble. That is why I want to see you succeed. I wants some get-back via you.I want our Black People to stop negating the ingeniuty of the Post Civil Rights generation as just fleeting, frivolous art when some of us have vision and the language of Joshua.I understand what Zora and Langston was going through in Harlem needing their own to support them but only having Whites want to. Blacks could have if only with pennies back then. But that is how hardened our hearts are. Maybe not here though.I want to see you go further than Zora would get stucked and this thing called the internet is something Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes could have benefited from. Timing is everything.I think you have created a community and you are offering a lot of us VOICE. So much about what you write about we all have experienced or know a lot of. It’s just not mainstream. Radio DJ’s, the gatekeepers, and Essence, the gatekeeper, are too linear to talk about things you tackle.Maybe with the nickles and dimes and $100 we amass for you, it will soon create contributions even bigger from people with bigger pockets than ours.I am fighting for you because you are fighting for us. Through you, we may prove SUSTAINABILITY for once breaking several paradigms (Black women not supporting Black women, women not supporting women, and Blacks not supporting Blacks)I can see when Divine Intervention graces us, the peers, with one of own who has something special only they can give and only they are supposed to give. We are supposed to recognized. We are cognitive. If only our people knew how and when to move in place and places to see our gifts (given by others) and when to protect them (by supporting them while we have them).It only seems that we do it backwards and try to get substance of nonethingness to extract extraordinary when we usually rebuke extraordinary and question why we have nothing special and spectacular. It’s symptomatic of our regression.Lift us out, Danielle. I know what I am supposed to do. I am supposed to read the signs: I support you!Zora and Langston wants us to. They want us to do for you and others that others failed of not doing for them. We have to break those paradigms. Your honest submissions are break-through innovation.

    Reply

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