Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1014

The Soul of Black Comix: John Jennings

The Soul of Black Comix by Ann Whitcher-Gentzke  | University of Buffalo
John Jennings centers his life on provocative questions: How canwe show the work of underrepresented artists, especially those whodo comics? How can we go beyond the racial stereotypes oftraditional comic art to show the rich expression of black artists,past and present? And how can we help UB students see that creatingart is a possibility for them, to recognize that "art iseverywhere" and acquire what Jennings calls "visualliteracy?"
Since arriving at UB this past fall, Jennings, associateprofessor of visual studies, has impressed students and colleaguesalike with a sparkling resume of interests and accomplishments. Heis at once a nationally recognized cartoonist, designer and graphicnovelist. A researcher intent on explaining and"disrupting" black stereotypes in popular media,Jennings disseminates his insights via books, exhibits and lecturesthat prod people to think about under-recognized voices in Americangraphic arts. Laced with humor and satire, these are richexpressions of women, gays and others who may have felt themselvesinvisible in the larger society, but who nonetheless createpowerful images of dissent, or moving depictions of their diverseexperiences in America.
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Terence Trent Darby: "As Yet Untitled" | Live @ Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute (1990)

Terence Trent D'Arby performs "As Yet Untitled," at the Nelson Mandela:An International Tribute to Free South Africa concert, in Wembley stadium, London on 16.4.1990.

Black Manhood and the Racist Imagination

Black Manhood and the Racist Imagination: On Trayvon Martin and the two Un-named Black Men Attacked inTexas by DarnellMoore | special to NewBlackMan
Trayvon Martin has suffered multiplemurders. His character was annihilated by the racialized mistrust of GeorgeZimmerman, a 28-year old White gunman. His life was, subsequently, terminatedby a bullet from Zimmerman's 9mm handgun shortly after. In fact, the continuedreferences to his suspension from school andsuspicion surrounding his character, as scholar David J. Leonard hasrightly pointed out, are but another type of assassination.
Trayvon's tragic death has set afirea portion of the translucent veil that has only partially protected us fromtruly "seeing" others and ourselves in racialized America. And with his taking,we are being summoned, yet again, to deeply examine our conscience and the waysthat racialization shapes our thinking and behavior.
Robert Zimmerman, the 64-year oldfather of the gunman, has identified his son as "Hispanic,"as someone who grew up in a "multiracial family." In his mind, Zimmerman'sracial and ethnic identities are significant points of consideration because itauthenticates his father's argument that the murder has nothing to do withrace.
According to Zimmerman's father,"[George] would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever." Hewent on to say that "[t]he media portrayal of George as a racist could notbe further from the truth."
His father seems to be arguing thatthe brutal murder of a blameless young Black male by another "multiracial"(read, non-white) body disallows even the remotest possibility of racistmotivation. But let's consider some other possibilities.
The multiracial perpetrator (though,it should be noted here that the term "Hispanic" is not a racial signifier butan ethnic category) stared upon the 17–year old black male victim and perceivedhim to be "suspicious," which is another way of reading the victim as apotential threat.
"This guy looks like he's up to nogood or he's on drugs or something," Zimmerman can be heard voicing on a recordedconversation with police during a 911-call.
It could be argued that Zimmermaninterpreted Trayvon's comportment, affect, body frame, clothes, style, skincolor, and gender presentation (i.e. the extent to which he acted out senses ofmasculinity or femininity) as signs that conspired to produce an image ofdistrust and terror in his mind. Trayvon's black male body became the object ofZimmerman's "multiracial" gaze.
Zimmerman imaged a "suspicious" guyand not a "typical kid who loved sports and music."Zimmerman interpreted Trayvon to be someone who "looks like he's up to no good"and not the adoring son who saved his father from a fire. According toZimmerman, Trayvon had to be "on drugs or something" and not someone's teenageson who has been described by a teacher "as an A and B student who majored incheerfulness," who just happened to be armed with skittles and a can of icedtea as opposed to heroin or crack, when he was slain.
What prevented Zimmerman from seeing Trayvonas anything other than treacherous? What forces impact our seeing sothat our images of others are distorted?
A turn to another recent,under-reported incident that occurred in Texas might provide another way toassess the problematics of White racism and the ways that it shapes ourunderstandings of Black manhood. The Texas incident is grounded in a differentset of circumstances than Trayvon's murder. In fact, the Texas case does notinvolve differently raced perpetrators and victims and is not centered on amurder; yet, there are some similarities that should be seriously considered.
Two unnamed Black men, 20 and 27,were brutally beaten, left unconscious in the northeast section of Dallas onMarch 13th. According to police reports, a group of five or soBlack men yelled the dehumanizing epithets "fag and sissy" from their vehicle,exited with two baseball bats, and began to beat the victims. The incident hassince been identified by police as a hate crime though the sexual orientationsof the victims have not been identified out of respect for the victims'privacy.
In the Dallas case, the victims werealso the objects of the perpetrators' gaze. Might they have similarlyinterpreted the victims' comportments, affect, body frames, clothes, style, skincolor, and gender presentations as signs? Is it possible that the group readthe two victims as the antithesis (i.e. fag and sissy) of a certain constructof Black manhood?
Like Trayvon, the two Dallas victimsare also cast in the imagination of the perpetrators as "suspicious" bodies. Inboth cases, the bodies of the victims (Trayvon and the two unnamed men) areread as "suspicious" bodies because they are Black men. In both cases, theperpetrators' perceptions precede the actual materializing of the Black malesthat they subsequently victimize. In other words, the perpetrators' set ofbeliefs about Black boys and men, which shaped their seeing ofthe victims, also influenced their acts of violence. Trayvon was shot, first,by Zimmerman's skewed perception of a "suspicious" Black teen male. The bulletfollowed. The two men in Dallas were beat, first, bythe perpetrator's skewed perceptions of the two suspiciously imagined Blackmen. The bats followed.
In both tragic cases, theperpetrators read Black male bodies through a particular racialized genderedlens. In the case of Trayvon, he was interpreted by a "multiracial" perpetratoras a hyper-masculinized Black male subject and, therefore, a site of terror,(sexual?) power, criminality, heterosexuality, of suspicion. In the case of thetwo Black men in Texas, they were interpreted as having failed to achieve thisarchetypal (racist) construction of Black manhood (in other words, they mayhave been read as non-masculine,, perceived as weak, non-heterosexual, andhelpless) and were surveilled, policed, and beaten because of their suspiciousgendered, and, therefore, racialized, appearance. In both instances, therepresentations imagined are re-configurations of White racist cultural tropeslike the "Big Black Buck." The internalization ofthe ideas associated with these tropes is a phenomenon that affects even thosewho are cast as the objectified other in the White racistimaginary.
We (Black men) are at once the objectof others' myopic gazes and the ones who might very well objectify other Blackmen by freezing them in constructions of Black manhood that were never meant toheal us, free us. Our reliance and internalizing of White racist prescriptionsof Black manhood and masculinity will further the brutalization of Black boysand men like Trayvon and the two hate crime victims. In this regard, CleoManago, the founder of The Black Men's Xchange and the AmASSI National Health& Cultural Centers, offers the following considerations in an opinion piecein the LA Sentinel:
A very doableremedy to this American cultural and institutional phenomenon would requireexplicit and active resistance to conditioning to be in denial about theproblem of Black internalized [White] racism. Blacks have to actively commit tounlearning and acknowledging their high likelihood of having "White biases"themselves. These are essential to breaking out of this often unconscious,anti-Black trance.
The unconscious buying into of aproject that seeks our demise allows racist ideas to be insinuated in the mindsof folk like Zimmerman, the group of men in Dallas, and in all of our minds.Such internalizations result in the type of violations that kill spirits andbodies like Trayvon and the two unnamed Black men in Dallas. But how can wereverse this trend and bring about justice?
Many of us want justice now. We want Zimmermanjailed. And Zimmerman will be jailed, we hope. And justice will seem to havebeen served. His gun will, alas, be stripped from his person. Yet, it is verypossible that his perceptions of Black men will remain. We want the group ofmen who beat the two Dallas victims into unconsciousness imprisoned. Andthe group of men will be jailed, most likely. The prison cell will hold theirbodies, but it may not transform their minds or those of society at large.
But many of us also desire other endslike transformation of the mind. We desire violences of all types, especiallythose forged in the belly of racism, to never be imagined or enacted. We desirean end to the premature deaths of black men by others' hands and our own. Thisis not the time—and it never is—for untimely deaths.
In these times—and all times—dailyliving is a radical act of resistance if you happen to exist in theworld as a suspicious boy, fag and sissy, threat, as a Black man. The onlydemise that we should now desire is that of the racist imaginary that has andcontinues to construct and constrict us.
***
Darnell L. Moore is a writer and activist who livesin Brooklyn, N.Y. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for theStudy of Gender and Sexuality at New York University.

Singer Julie Dexter Interview w/ When We Speak TV

Ketch A Vibe artist Julie Dexter sits down with When We Speak for an interview about her music, the music industry, and her album New Again.

Julie Dexter Website: http://www.juliedexter.com
Julie Dexter Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/juliedexter

Left of Black S2:E24 | Black Masculinity in the Documentary Frame

Left of Black S2:E24 | March 19, 2012
Black Masculinity in the Documentary Frame
Hostand Duke University Professor MarkAnthony Neal is joined via Skype© by filmmaker Ron Chepesiuk, who discusses his new film The Frank Matthews Story: The Rise andDisappearance of America's Biggest Kingpin . The film will be screened March 23, 2012 at the HaytiHeritage Center in Durham, NC.  Chepesiuk talksabout the 1970s drug trade, describes why Matthews is one of America's lesserknown gangsters, despite his successful and brilliant operation, and sharessome of the D.B. Cooper-like details of Matthews' disappearance in 1974.
Later,Neal is joined via Skype© by JonathanGayles, professor of African American Studiesat Georgia State University and writer, director, and producer of the film WhiteScripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in American Comic Books (CaliforniaNewsreel).  Gayles discusses reactionsto his movie, which won best documentary feature at the 2010 Urban MediaMakers Film Festival and remembers the impact of the late Dwayne McDuffie,founder of Milestone Media. Neal and Gayles also discuss Black EntertainmentTelevision's ill-fated attempt to bring the animated series BlackPanther to television.
***Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced incollaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
***
Episodes of Left of Blackare also available for free download in HD @ iTunes U

Music for Our Times: Aden--"Post Racial America"

twitter: @_aden_
DOWNLOAD: aden.bandcamp.com

"We Almost Lost Detroit": Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Remake of Gil Scott-Heron Classic

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. | "We Almost Lost Detroit" by Gil Scott Heron

"Trayvon" by Jasiri X

from Jasiri X :
Demand Justice for Trayvon Martin http://colorofchange.org/campaign/trayvon/

Free Audio Download http://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/trayvon

Jasiri X tells the heartbreaking story of Trayvon Martin, a unarmed 17 yr old boy, who was shot and killed by Neighborhood Block Captain George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012. George Zimmerman has to this date never been arrested or charged for the Murder of Trayvon.

"Trayvon" was directed by Paradise Gray and co directed and engineered by Mirage

LYRICS
It's Sunday the God's day a day of rest
The Nba all stars are playing next
But right outside that same city
The celebratory atmosphere would change quickly
Who watching the game with me you know lil Trayvon
Was reppin his home town D Wade and LeBron
He had just came up from Miami to see his daddy
Who knew such a great weekend would end so badly
In a place where you move because it's safe for your family
But some people got a ingrown hate for your family
Halftime just a short brake from the slammin
Bout to go to the store lil cuz you want some candy?
Bet I grab you some skittles kid
I'll be right back in a little bit

Paid for lil cuz's skittles and a ice t
walked out the store and felt the chill of the night breeze
it seemed a little colder than before
he didn't know it was a boy like a soldier in a war
that was watching him clocking him thinking about stopping him
nine milly cocking them who's this nigga walking in my neighborhood
he fits all the specifics of criminal statistics he looks suspicious
911, what's your emergency
A black man's walking through my hood purposely
stay clam, it's just little Trayvon but he wanna be the hero so he put's his cape on
George Zimmerman neighborhood block captain
loaded glock strapped in fake cop has been
got out the car ignoring what the cops asked him
They always get away this time that will not happin

George Zimmerman didn't take his Ritalin
drunk off adrenaline says he making a citizens arrest
Trayvon looks at him vexxed
I just walked to the store nothing more nothing less
Just steps from his home he ignored his request
George grabs him, Trayvon swings and connects
Starts screaming out for help but Zimmerman see a threat
so he pulls out his gun and he points it at his chest
He fires but he misses Trayvon pleads for forgiveness
I didn't do nothing this is senseless
but George Zimmerman was so vicious
he made sure the second shot hit em no survivor no witness
Trayvon never gave his cousin his skittles
missed the all star game didn't see another dribble
And George Zimmerman wasn't even arrested
the message is only white lives are protected
In America

Hearing Trayvon Die

HearingTrayvon Die byMark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan
Thereis dramatic moment in the film CadillacRecords, when musician Muddy Waters, portrayed by Jeffrey Wright, has justwatched the body of fellow musician Little Walter (Columbus Short) taken away tothe morgue.  Little Walter was morethan Waters' wingman—he was critical to how Waters literally heard himself in the world.  Trying to come to terms with LittleWalter's death, Waters walks upstairs into a bathroom, off-screen, and utters aseries of bone-chilling howls that sound like death itself.  It is simply the most arresting momentin the film, and tellingly a moment in which the sounds of death aredisembodied from the Black man who is so tortured by the loss of a brother.
Iimmediately thought about that scene in the film, hearing the 911-tapes thatcapture—unquestionably in my mind—the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, atthe hands of George Zimmerman.  Ina world in which Blackness is visually over-determined—both as hyper-visibleand invisible—there is no ocular meme more pervasive in American society thanthat of the so-called violent and dangerous Black male, who is always alreadyin need of pursuit, capture, incarceration and inevitably extermination. 
Sopowerful is this script, that the fact that such levels of surveillance—fromthe classroom to the interstate—is un-American, is rarely disturbed in theminds of most Americans, including far too many Blacks.  That more than a few corporations,often with direct input from Black men themselves,  have turned the image of the menacing Black male into acottage industry (dating back Birth of aNation's "Gus") only speaks to how normative such an image has become.
Thisis the a point made recently by The Opportunity Agenda in theirreport "MediaRepresentations and the Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys," whichsuggest correlations between media depictions of Black males and lowered lifechances.  Specifically the reportssuggest casual links between media portrays of Black males and public attitudesdirected towards them including  "generalantagonisms," "exaggerated  viewsrelated to criminality and violence," "lack of identification with or sympathyfor black males," and "public support for punitive approaches to problems"related to Black males—all dynamics that have played out in the corporate mediacoverage of Trayvon Martin's murder.
Noneof these observations are surprising to anyone who lives in the body of a Blackmale, but the report's highlighting of the casualness of these links suggeststhat most Americans have no other way to view Black men.  In their most benign forms, such viewsfind older White women clutching their bags in elevators; in its everyday formsBlack males are harassed by law enforcement and denied access to equalopportunity; in its most tragic forms, a 17-year-old boy is shot dead by a neighborhoodwatch captain—and his death is reduced to, if we are to believe Today Show host Matt Lauer, a disputebetween two men, as opposed to anadult male pursuing and killing a child because he "looked" dangerous.
Asthe images of Black males have literally filled the whole frame—in ourimaginations and on our iPad screens—their humanity is exponentially squeezedout.  Part of the reason thatJeffrey Wright's howling had to be experienced off-screen is that we have solittle understanding of Black males, as vulnerable, in pain, under duress, interror and confronting death.  Associal scientist Richard Majors acknowledged twenty years ago in his book Cool Pose : The Dilemmas of Black Manhood inAmerica, so many of the visual and physical cues performed by Black malesare simply masking their vulnerabilities.
Thepursuit of justice aside, in his dying moments, Trayvon Martin gave voice toall of the Black men,  women and children whose humanity continues to be denied in asociety that has long chosen to not listen to us.
***
MarkAnthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible BlackMasculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black PopularCulture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at DukeUniversity and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz | A Multimedia Concert Performance of Langston Hughes' Poetry

from the Langston Hughes Project
Jazz Montage: A Multimedia Concert Performance of Langston Hughes' Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz

The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes's kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite. Ask Your Mama is Hughes's homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. It is a twelve-part epic poem which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin "cha cha" and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming -- a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death.

Jazz was a cosmopolitan metaphor for Langston Hughes, a force for cultural convergence beyond the reach of words, or the limits of any one language. It called up visual analogues for him as well, most pointedly the surrealistic techniques of painterly collage and of the film editing developed in this country in the 1930s and 40s, which condensed time and space, conveyed to the viewer a great array of information in short compass, and which offered the possibility of suggesting expanded states of consciousness, chaotic remembrances of past events or dreams -- through montage. "To me," Hughes wrote, "jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream -- yet to come -- and always yet to become ultimately and finally true."

By way of videography, this concert performance links the words and music of Hughes' poetry to topical images of Ask Your Mama's people, places, and events, and to the works of the visual artists Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with most closely over the course of his career -- the African-inspired mural designs and cubist geometries of Aaron Douglas, the blues and jazz-inspired collages of Romare Bearden, the macabre grotesques of Meta Warrick Fuller and the rhythmic sculptural figurines and heads and bas reliefs of Richmond Barthe, the color blocked cityscapes and black history series of Palmer Hayden and Jacob Lawrence. Together the words, sounds, and images recreate a magical moment in our cultural history, which bridges the Harlem Renaissance, the post World War II Beat writers' coffeehouse jazz poetry world, and the looming Black Arts performance explosion of the 1960s.

Ask Your Mama was dedicated to Louis Armstrong, "the greatest horn blower of them all," and to those of whatever hue or culture of origin who welcomed being immersed in the mysteries, rituals, names, and nuances of black life not just in America but in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Europe and Africa during the years of anti-colonial upheaval abroad and the rising Freedom Movement here at home. Not only the youthful Martin Luther King, Jr. but the independence leaders of Guinea and Nigeria and Ghana and Kenya and the Congo fill the chants and refrains of Hughes's epic poem.

Originally, Langston Hughes created Ask Your Mama in the aftermath of his participation as an official for the five-day Newport Jazz Festival of July 1960, where he shared the stage with such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, Dakota Staton, Oscar Peterson, Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross, Otis Spann, Ray Charles, and Muddy Waters. The musical scoring of the poem was designed to serve not as mere background for the words but to forge a conversation and a commentary with the music. Though Hughes originally intended to collaborate with Charles Mingus, and then Randy Weston, on the full performance of his masterwork, it remained only in the planning stages when Langston Hughes died in 1967. Its recovery now in word, music, and image provides a galvanizing experience for audiences everywhere.

For further information, please contact:
Ronald McCurdy P.O. Box 3612, So. Pasadena, CA 91031
(818) 429-2494
E-mail: ronmccbop@aol.com