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Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies | Duke University, April 6-7 2012

Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies
April 6-7,2012DukeUniversityThe John HopeFranklin Center
Black Thought 2.0 willfocus on the roles of digital technology and social media in furthering themission of Black Studies. The conference will specifically explore how scholarsare using technologies to further their research, do collaborative forms of scholarshipand activism, and to reach broader audiences.*All panels will be streamed and tweeted live

Friday April 6, 2012
Reception—5:30pmJohn HopeFranklin Center Gallery Space
Keynote Address—7:00 pm
BlackFutures: Doing Black Studies in a Connected World
S. Craig Watkins (Universityof Texas at Austin, author The Young& the Digital)
Introduced by Wahneema Lubiano (Associate Chair ofAfrican & African American Studies, Duke University)  
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Panel #1 9-10:15 amThe Chocolate Supa Highway: Precursors to Black Social Media
Abdul Alkalimat (University of Illinois)Michelle Ferrier (ElonUniversity)Lynne d Johnson (Director ofStrategy & Engagement at Whisprgroup)Lee D. Baker (Moderator, DukeUniversity)
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Panel #2 10:30-11:45On the Grid: Teaching and Researching in the DigitalAge 
Allison Clark (FounderAMedia1/HASTAC)Kim Pearson (College of NewJersey)Simone Browne (Universityof Texas at Austin)Howard Rambsy II (SouthernIllinois University at Edwardsville)Thomas F. DeFrantz (Moderator,Duke University)
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Noon-1:15 | Working Lunch—Social Media Demonstration
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Panel #3 1:30-2:45 pmFrom Jena Louisiana to Tahrir Square: Activism in the Age ofSocial Media
Jasiri X (Pittsburg basedartist & activist)Alexis Pauline Gumbs (BrokenBeautiful Press/Mobile Homecoming Project)Moya Bailey (EmoryUniversity/Crunk Feminist Collective)Kimberly Ellis aka Dr.Goddess (artist, activist, historian)Salamishah Tillett (Universityof Pennsylvania)Treva Lindsey (Moderator,University of Missouri)
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Panel #4 3:00-4:30The Twitterati and Twitter-gentsia: Social Media and PublicIntellectuals
Marc Lamont Hill (ColumbiaUniversity/Our World with BlackEnterprise)Jay Smooth (Editor of IllDoctrine)Blair LM Kelley (NorthCarolina State University)Latoya Peterson (Editor ofRacialicious)Imani Perry (PrincetonUniversity)Mark Anthony Neal (Moderator,Duke University)
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore: "Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex" [video]

Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV):
Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses her Critique of mass incarceration and outlines some strategies to reduce the over-reliance on incarceration and to build alternative pathways to safety and justice. This Program was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television(CAN TV). To purchase a DVD, contact CAN TV's Community Partners at (312) 738-1400 or at communitypartners@cantv.org [image error]

Goldman Sachs' 'Muppets' and Mitt Romney: James Braxton Peterson on MSNBC

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lehigh Professor James Braxton Peterson and Ken Vogel of Politico on Martin Bashir | MSNBC

The "Reasonable Fear" of a Black Male: The Trayvon Martin Tragedy

The "ReasonableFear" of a Black Male:  The Trayvon Martin Tragedy byDavid J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
In2008, 20/20conducted an experiment to examine how people would respond to criminalactivity.  Inside a New Jerseypark, three white youths gleefully vandalized a car. Without concern for thepeople walking throughout the park, they destroy the car with a bat and spraypaint.  In the course of theexperiment, only a few individuals call the police or even challenge the kids,with some even joking around with them. When 20/20 swapped out the three white youth for three black youth, thepublic response was drastically changed, with many more calls to thepolice.  Highlighting the ways raceand criminality interact through stereotypes and daily behavior, the mosttelling aspect of the experiment resulted from an unplanned development.  As the white youths wreaked havoc onthe car, three black youth waited in another car.  These boys, relatives of one of the black actors who weretaking part in the experiment, were asleep.  In the first instance, the caller suggests that the boyslooked like they were going to rob someone.  In a case of 'sleeping while black' there were two 911 calls(compared to one 911 call about the white youth).   
Givenpersistent stereotypes, news mediaand popular culture, and a culture of dehumanization, it is no wonder thatthe 20/20 experiment found that irrespective of behavior black youth conveyfear and animosity driven by their presumed criminality, an experiencedramatically different from that of white youth.  Writing about research on imagery and criminalization, JoeFeagin, in The White Racial Frame,highlights the profound issues at work here.  "These researchers conclude that the visual and verbaldehumanization of black Americans as apelike assist in the process by whichsome groups become targets of societal 'cruelty, social degradation, andstate-sanctioned violence" (p. 105). From a history of slavery and lynching, up through the persistentrealities of racial profiling, mass incarceration, and daily instances ofviolence, the connection between dehumanization and criminalization has beencentral to white supremacy. 
Ithought about this experiment when I first heard about the murder of TrayvonMartin.  The connection becameespecially powerful after continually hearing references to "reasonable fear," thefact that George Zimmerman called 911 because he saw a suspicious person in hisgated community, and the purported "perceived threat"; all of this led me backto this study and the countless amount of research that illustrates the powerand saturation of the "criminalblackman."  As evident here, it is hard, if not disingenuous, not connectthis case and the ideas of fear, suspicion, and threat (and whiteness asinnocence), to dominant ideologies of race.
Similarly,the news media has emphasized that Zimmerman had a bloody nose, that the backof his t-shirt was wet, and that reports indicate an argument all as potentialexplanation for what happen.  Wecan see an emerging narrative that explains (rationalizes/justifies) thesituation as if an argument or even a "fight" justifies the use of a gun on anunarmed teenager.   
Atthe same time, likely responding to this growing anger about this injustice,the media coverage has increasingly emphasized the legal context.  In Florida, because of the "stand yourground law," which Jeb Bush signed into law in 2005, individuals who believethey are under attack can use deadly force.  If a person feels in danger and if a person has "reasonablefear" they are legally allowed to use deadly force.  According JoëlleAnne Moreno, "under the new law, if youare not engaged in an illegal activity, you can stand your ground by 'meetingforce with force, including deadly force' if you 'reasonably believe it isnecessary' to prevent death, great bodily harm, or the commission of a forciblefelony."  In other words, if youreasonably believe you or others are in danger you are entitled and empoweredto use force irrespective of the actual threat.  It is about belief and perception.
Yet,this same media that cites this law, that uses terms like "reasonable fear," "danger"and "suspicion" has found limited space to talk about how race, stereotypes,and racism impact perceptions of fear, danger, and suspicion.   NatalieJackson, the family's attorney, makes this clear when she notes, "I don'tknow if the whole thing was a racial issue, it may have been a 'Zimmerman wantsto be a hero' issue. It becomes racial because Zimmerman thought that blackmales with hoodies are criminals."  In other words, how does, given ample research about thecriminalization of black bodies, race impact what constitutes fear andsuspicion?  Within the whitesupremacist imagination isn't any fear of blackness reasonable given the sedimentationof criminalization and dehumanization?  
MichelleAlexander, in New Jim Crow, arguesthat the institutionalization and saturation of mass incarceration has createda society where the "prison label" and the stigma of criminality "existswhether or not one has been formally branded a criminal: "In this way, thestigma of race has become the stigma of criminality.  Throughout the criminal justice system, as well as in ourschools and public spaces, young + black + male is equated with reasonablesuspicion, justifying arrest, interrogation, search and detention of thousands ofAfrican Americans every year" (p. 194). Trayvon Martin is clearly evidence of this reality not only in hismurder but also in the handling of the struggle for justice in his name.  From SeanBell to OscarGrant, from Emmett Till to Robbie Tolan, itis all too familiar story, one that hopefully offers a different ending:JUSTICE.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Genderand Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written onsport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular andacademic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture,examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popularrepresentations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. Leonard's latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will bepublished by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

Ebru Today - Dr. David Leonard on Kony 2012 Viral Video, Clicktivism & Beyond

from Ebru Today :
Professor David Leonard (Washington State, Pullman) comments on the recent Kony 2012 video that went viral. He calls attention to the the power and appeal of "clicktivism" and how Kony 2012 plays upon longstanding narratives of white saviors while evil destroying the world. He argues that awareness is not necessarily transformative in itself; and asks where that awareness would lead us individually or collectively.

James Braxton Peterson on Mitt Romney's Image & Cash Problems

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Martin Bashir | March 13, 2012

Left of Black S2:E23 | Politics and the Prophetic Vision of the Black Church

Left of Black S2:E23 | March 12, 2012
Politics and the Prophetic Vision of the  Black Church
Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype©by Professor Obery M. Hendricks,author of TheUniverse Bends Towards Justice (Orbis Books)and visiting scholar at The Institute of Research and African American Studiesin the department of Religion at Columbia University.  Hendricks shareshis recent experience at singer Whitney Houston's home going ceremony, andexplains how it gave people access to traditions in the Black church. Neal and Hendricks discuss why gospel music does not get the same kind ofcriticism as contemporary R&B and hip-hop for not being conscious andengaged in the world.  Lastly, Hendricks discusses the biblical vision ofeconomic society. 
Later, Neal is joined via Skype© by Rev. Osagyefo UhuruSekou who is a documentary filmmaker, publicintellectual, organizer, pastor, theologian, and author of the book Gods,Gays, and Guns: Essays on Religion and the Future of Democracy (Campbell & Cannon Press).  Rev. Sekou discusses the PropheticTradition of the Black Church  and its role in holding President BarackObama accountable. Rev. Sekou also addresses homophobia and hip-hop in thecontext of the Black church.
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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced incollaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
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Episodes of Left of Blackare also available for free download in HD @ iTunes U [image error]

Trailer: Esperanza Spaulding -- Radio Music Society

Two Visions of 'Black' Evil, One White Gaze: Reading Kony 2012 and the Murder of Trayvon Martin

TwoVisions of 'Black' Evil, One White Gaze:   Reading Kony 2012 and the Murder of Trayvon Martin byDavid C. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Inthe wake of 9/11 and the ongoing war on terror, the United States hasincreasingly relied on national narratives that offer certainty, comfort, andsecurity. In catchphrases and sound bites, pundits and politicians remindAmericans of the importance of protecting the homeland, the role of allAmericans in safeguarding national space and American democratic values, theneed to guard against the enemies of freedom and civilization, and the promiseof spreading democracy throughout the world. As countless bodies fell, injuredand dying, shattering families and communities over here and over there, multinationalcorporations have profited on an increased militarism, diminishing naturalresources, and public panics. Within this climate, many in the United States have sought refuge incomforting narratives of good versus evil, civilization versus savagery.  The power and cultural importance ofthese narratives has been evident with the murder of Trayvon Martin and in thespectacle of Kony 2012.
Ina world where African Americans, particularly black male youth, areconsistently represented as threats, to the security, peace, culture, calm, andorder, how can "threat" be seen outside of the context of race? In a worldwhere racial profiling is routine and where explicit and implicit bias hascreated thecriminalblackman, is it even possible to think about the confrontation andultimate death of Martin outside of the paradigm of a criminalized of blackbody?  The 911 call, theconfrontation, and the ultimate death fits a larger pattern whereupon blacknessis consistently imagined as threat, as danger, and as EVIL; as a cultural andsocial pariah blackness needs to be controlled, discipline, and ultimatelypunished.  According to MichelleAlexander, "Just as African Americans in the North were stigmatized by the JimCrow system even if they were not subject to its formal control.  Black men today are stigmatized by massincarceration and the social construction of the 'criminalblackman' whetherthey have ever been to prison or not" (p. 194).  In a review of Alexander's The New Jim Crow, Max Kanter describes the specterof criminalization as follows:
This is evidenced in part by dominant media andcultural narratives, institutionalized (and legalized) racial profiling, andpolice efforts to build mass databases of "suspected criminals" whichcontain information almost exclusively on racial minorities who have often donenothing criminal at all aside from having been born to black and brown parents.In addition to the numerous studies showing that most white Americans see crimein racial (nonwhite) terms, studies conducted by Princeton University alsoreveal that white felons fresh out of prison are more likely to get hired forjobs than equally qualified black men with no criminal record. African Americanmen without criminal records are more ostracized and widely perceived as beingmore criminal than white men who have actually been convicted of felony crimes.That is how deeply black people have been stigmatized as criminals and socialpariahs in our society.  
Thisis the context that we need to understand what happened to Trayvon Martin notonly on the fateful evening, but also in terms of police response and that ofthe media and general public. 
Thedeath of a child under suspicious circumstances would have thought to have ledto Zimmerman's arrest, yet no charges have levied against him to date. Itrepresents another reminder of whose life really matters.  Tracy Martin, Trayvon's mother, told theHuffington Post that the police basically saw Zimmerman as a good guygiving them reason not to arrest him at this point:
They respected [Zimmerman's] background, that hestudied criminal justice for four years and that he was squeaky clean." Hecontinued: "My question to them was, did they run my child's backgroundcheck? They said yes. I asked them what they came up with, and they saidnothing. So I asked if Zimmerman had a clean record, did that give him theright to shoot and kill an unarmed kid?"
WhileTrayvon Martin is not trending on twitter nor eliciting 500,000 views onYouTube, much less 70 million, Kony 2012 has captured the national (global)imagination.  With millions ofviews on YouTube and Vimeo, with ample donations directed toward the film'sproducer – Invisible Children – and a national conversation about Joseph Konyand his crimes against humanity, Kony 2012 has elicited an outpouring from allcorners of society. 
Noneof this is surprising given its racial and national tropes and narratives.  The video itself, and the subsequentdiscourse surrounding Uganda, constructs Kony as evil, as the source of allpain and suffering for the people in the region.  Whereas (white) Westerners are imagined as saviors, asbeacons of hope, change, and peace, Kony is a despicable criminal who is thesource of all problems. 
Inone of the film's most disturbing scenes, its director shows a picture of Konyto his son so that he can see "evil" and what a "bad guy" looks like.  In what feels like a postmodern twistof Kenneth Clark's famous doll test (h/t to Usame Tungur for making thispoint), where black children were asked to describe black and white dolls (badversus good) as evidence of the consequences of white supremacy.  In this case, a white child and hisfather locates evil in the body of an African man with whiteness remaining asgoodness since he (we) are saving the many African children suffering becauseof Kony.  With "theSoft Bigotry of Kony 2012," Max Fisher highlights the racially comfortingnarrative offered by the documentary. 
The much-circulated campaign subtly reinforces anidea that has been one of Africa's biggest disasters: that well-meaningWesterners need to come in and fix it. Africans, in this telling, are helplessvictims, and Westerners are the heroes. It's part of a long tradition ofWestern advocacy that has, for centuries, adopted some form of white man'sburden, treating African people as cared for only to the extent that Westernerscare, their problems solvable only to the extent that Westerners solve them,and surely damned unless we can save them. First it was with missionaries, then"civilizing" missions, and finally the ultimate end of whitepaternalism, which was placing Africans under the direct Western control of imperialism.And while imperialism may have collapsed 50 years ago, that mentality persists,because it is rewarding and ennobling to feel needed and to believe you aredoing something good.
Similarly,Natasha Jackson (@NatashaTheory) focuseson benevolent racism with her discussion of Kony 2012: "White liberals whohave dedicated their lives to "helping" people of color have a hard timeseeing, let alone addressing, the benevolent racism that can undermine eventheir best intentions. How can they be racist when they want to help so badly?"
Akinto a Rambo, Invisible Children/theWest is reimagined as white savior, as a source of peace and tranquility forthe despair facing Uganda.  As withRambo, the potential violence inflicted above Kony or others is justifiable inthe eradication of evil.  As notedby Susan Jeffords and by RichardManson, in his dissertation on white masculinity, the white savior has beencentral to a national reconstructive project since the 1980s:
Led by the Ronald Reagan cowboy image, thedecade saw the appearance of He-Man, Rambo, and the Terminator, one powerfullyover-muscled white male image after another which relocate the white male atthe center of power in the imagined American community. To this day, the "normativebody that enveloped strength, labor, determination"3 which is "like Reagan's own,male and white"34 has retained if not increased its potency, likely as a result of"winning" the Cold War.
Ina twitter conversation about Ramboand ultimately Kony 12, Sarah Jackson (@sjjphd) rightfully identified the filmas an example of how "white violence is framed as necessary to save humanity,but the black violence...its downfall." The representation of blackness as evil, as threats to humanity andpeace, as unredeemable and perpetually dangerous, especially in comparison to akind, gentle and benevolent white body, not only justifies the mythical Rambofigure or the Kony campaign, but mass incarceration and daily forms of violence.  The white savior complex imagines blackviolence as a threat to civilization and thus any form of state violence,whether international war or the prison industrial complex is repositioned as"saving" and "civilizing." 
Thisleads me back to Trayvon Martin, whose death can be tied to an ideological andrepresentational reality that imagines blackness as a threat to peace,tranquility, and civilization.  Hispresumed unlawful entry into a white-gated community raised suspicion.  His criminalized body, as opposed tothe innocence and bravery afforded to Zimmerman's white body in the nationalimagination, is suspect, helping explain both the media and police response todate.   While Trayvon Martin is the farthest thing from Joseph Kony,the fear they cause, the criminality within the dominant imagination, and theirpresumed threats to civilization leads to similar treatment irrespective oftheir polar existences.  If thiswasn't the case, maybe we could see a nationwide push to bring about justice forMartin.  In this transformativeworld, financial contributions would be directed not to an organization thatseems intent on supporting military intervention in Uganda; instead money wouldflow to groups committed to challenging the criminalization of blackness withinthe United States and throughout the globe.  How about a Justice for Trayvon 2012 movement?  What about a movement committed toeradicating AIDS or infant mortality throughout Africa?  What about one that listens to andworks alongside of those already engaged in these fights for justice? Underthese circumstances we may actually see accountability, justice, and peace formillions of people.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of CriticalCulture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. Hehas written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing inboth popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy ofpopular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, andpopular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextualanalysis.  Leonard's latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be publishedby SUNY Press in May of 2012.

#ClassicMaterial: "When I Grow Up"--Michael Jackson & Roberta Flack [video]

Free to be...You and Me (produced by Marlo Thomas, 1974)