Sugarshorti/Sargaco- am feeling your flo', so let me look at this whole 'Elevation or Annihilation thing' from another angle. The standard for Black women is not defined by what is on the outside, but what is (in) the inside. If the standard were on the outside there would be a magic pill to allow us to look like a genetically mutative race of people who have come from us but because of a genetic deficiency. eg (lack of melanin) look nothing like us.

The issue (is) as you have both rightly put across, how we as Black women view ourselves and where we take that. Truth Sojourner, the original eve (proper name, lucy) Maya Angelou,Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Ella Fitzgerald, Cleopatra,Sheba, and many more beautiful Black sistah's like these set a benchmark for us to follow, for their beauty lay in their appreciation and uncerstanding of their place of worth, and how this place of worth had the potential to mould and shape a race of people.

They were looking to the future as all Black mother's, teacher's (as we are the primary teacher's for our race) and entrepreneur's must now do. In her monumental work. 'The Issis (Yssis) Papers- The Keys To The Colors' the great Dr Frances Cress Welsing says. " Before specifically defining our present period of crisis and our response to it, we must contemplate our (identity), the self-image that we carry in our brain-computers. For all that we can imagine doing, and all that we (will) do or (fail) to do is a result of that picture of (self) derived from our total experiences from birth onward. That picture becomes the basis for all our behavioural patterns"

So then the collective premise for change must be. How do we as Black women in the 21st century define ourselves?