Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1037

What's in a Name? The 'Plantation' Metaphor and the NBA

What's in aName?    The 'Plantation' Metaphorand the NBA byDavid J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Severalweeks back, at the conclusion of HBO's RealSports, Bryant Gumbeltook David Stern to task for his arrogance, "ego-centric approach" andeagerness "to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treatingNBA men, as if they were his boys."  Highlighting the power imbalances andthe systematic effort to treat the greatest basketball players on earth aslittle more than "thehelp," Gumbel invoked a historic frame to illustrate his argument.
If the NBA lockout is going to be resolved anytime soon, itseems likely to be done in spite of David Stern, not because of him. I say thatbecause the NBA's infamously ego-centric commissioner seems more hell-bentlately on demeaning the players than resolving his league's labor impasse.
How else to explain Stern's rants in recent days? To any andeveryone who would listen, he has alternately knocked union leader BillyHunter, said the players were getting inaccurate information, and startedsounding Chicken Little claims about what games might be lost, if playersdidn't soon see things his way.
Stern's version of what's been going on behind closed doorshas of course been disputed. But his efforts were typical of a commissionerthat has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantationoverseer, treating NBA men, as if they were his boys.
It's part of Stern's M.O. Like his past self-serving edictson dress code or the questioning of officials, his moves were intended to dolittle more than show how he's the one keeping the hired hands in place. Somewill of course cringe at that characterization, but Stern's disdain for theplayers is as palpable and pathetic as his motives are transparent. Yes theNBA's business model is broken. But to fix it, maybe the league's commissionershould concern himself most with a solution, and stop being part of theproblem.
Notsurprisingly, his comments have evoked widespread criticism and scorn: see Example #1, Example#2, Example#3 and Example#4).  Even less surprising,commentators have chastised Gumbel for inserting race into the discussions, asif race isn't central to the lockout, the media coverage, and fanreaction.  As evidence, the response to Gumbel, and the ubiquitousefforts to blame the lockout and the labor situation on the players throughracialized language (see here for example– h/t @resisting_spec),illustrates the ways in which race and hegemonic ideas of blackness operates inthis context. 
Alsorevealing has been the response to Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer for the NBAplayers Association, who similarly described David Stern's treatment of theplayers.  He told the Washington Post: "To present that in thecontext of 'take it or leave it,' in our view, that is not good faith. Insteadof treating the players like partners, they're treating them like plantationworkers."  While his commentelicited some backlash alongwith an apology, the vitriol and the level of indignation didn't match thereaction to Gumbel. 
Beyondthe power of white privilege in this regard, what has been striking has been thereferences to history by the anti-Gumbel/Kessler crowd; much of the criticismat Gumbel and Kessler has focused on their historic amnesia.  That is, their comments, while beinginaccurate, unfair, and infusing race into otherwise colorblind situation, aredisrespectful towards the history of slavery in America.  References to slavery in this contextbetray the violent history of American slavery.  In "Occupythe NBA: A Plea from an Avid Basketball Fan" Timothy Jones takes Gumbel totask for the historic slight here:
I'm appalled that anyonewould compare this situation to slavery. I have great respect for BryantGumbel, but his quotethat David Stern sees himself as a modern day plantation overseer is not onlydisrespectful to our ancestors, but it also did nothing to help this situation.Stern may not be handling this situation well, he may not have the best interestof the players in mind, he may be a mean person (I really have no clue), but Ido know that brothers making millions of dollars are nothing like slaves on aplantation.
CharlesBarkley agreed, referring to Gumbel's comments as "stupid" and"disrespectful to black people who went through slavery. When (you're talkingabout) guys who make $5 million a year." Likewise, ScottReid questioned the use of such an analogy given history: "The point isthat too many people inappropriately use slavery and enslaved people to make pointsabout things that are nowhere close to comparison. All of these casual slaveryanalogies do nothing but diminish one of the worst crimes against humanity inhuman history. Comparing enslaved Africans, or anyone else for that mattersince slavery still exists for many enslaved people, is not only absurd, it isjust plain disrespectful to the memory of the millions who perished under theworst kind of injustice."
Whileseemingly representing a different set of politics, blogger DavidFriedman also noted the historic disrespect in Gumbel's comments:
Bryant Gumbel's ludicrous,poorly thought-out (and anti-Semitic) rant against Stern: comparing Stern to a"plantation overseer" is offensive, a falsehood that simultaneouslydiminishes the true suffering of Black slaves in the American South while alsoslurring a Commissioner whose league has consistently been at the forefront interms of hiring Black executives and coaches. Gumbel's attack against Sterncomes straight out of the Louis Farrakhan playbook--portraying Jews asexploiters of Blacks--and Gumbel's consistent track record of expressing suchbigoted attitudes would have terminated his career a long time ago if his chosentarget were any group other than Jews (just imagine a White commentatorspeaking similarly about a Black person or anyone saying anything remotelyderogatory regarding homosexuals).
At one level, I find such criticisms to besimplistic.  The references toslavery are not literal comparisons, but rhetorical devices that seek toemphasis power, race, and the control of black bodies within modern sportingcontext.  The rhetoricalcomparison/analogy isn't simply about physical control but ideological and mentalpower differentials.  Moreover, ina society that routinely devalues, ignores, sanitizes, and erasesthe horrors ofAmerican slavery, I think the selective resistance by many raises questions.
Yet, questions and criticisms about aslavery analogy (and it is an analogy) are important because it demonstratesthe power of language.  There is adanger in comparisons as differences or the specificity of history are erased,flattened, and otherwise stripped because of the varied realities at work. 
Yet, the critics of the "40-million dollarslave metaphor" are often as guilty as those deploying (myself included) theseanalogies through their frame of history. In other words, in imagining slavery as a historic institution, as somethingexclusively in the past, these critics perpetuate the false understanding ofslavery in our contemporary moment. The danger and difficulty of this rhetorical comparison is not simplyabout betraying or disrespecting history (how can two so different experiencesbe described through the same word/historic frames), but in perpetuating theidea that slavery exists ONLY in the past.  These critics lament Gumbel, Rhoden, and others by arguingthat the NBA, in the contemporary, has nothing to do with slavery, which existsin the past. 
Slavery exists in our present and in ourpresence.  From Brazil to Ivory Coast, from India to Nepal, from Florida to North Carolina, slavery exists in ourcontemporary world.  It remains aviolent scourge on our society. Understanding both history and the contemporarymanifestations of slavery must inform rather than obscure, complicate ratherthan simplify, and provide depth rather than flatten the rhetorical usage ofslavery metaphors, whether it be with the NBA, sports, or otherwise. PhillipLamar Cunningham, in "TowardAn Appropriate Analogy,"illustrates the complexity here, reflecting on a shared and divergent history,one that points to the dialects of race, power, body, control and economicprofits:
That said, today's NBAplayer's situation is not wholly unlike that of the post-Civil War freedman.Free of literal shackles, the former slave is free to fend for himself now thathe is no longer bound to the plantation. While he was free to go anywhere hechose, he faced the choice of living in a volatile South or a disdainful Norththat merited him no semblance of equality. Some fled North and carved somethingout of nothing; many stayed behind as sharecroppers.
To drive the analogyfurther, one must also consider the position in which league owners findthemselves, which is not unlike that of the former slaveowner. With his hold onthe slave relinquished, the slaveowner still held the same need for labor. Withhis primary source of labor now having a semblance of independence, theplantation owner had to negotiate labor costs. Theoretically, he could lookelsewhere for labor, but of course the former slave was best suited for thework. This is not unlike today's NBA, a league in which its primarily blacktalent is best suited for the job and without whom it is likely to fail or atleast face a great deal of hardship in returning to prominence (as did theNational Hockey League after its 2004 lockout).
Consider the following quoteregarding sharecropping from Alan Conway's controversial The Reconstruction of Georgia (1966):"[S]harecropping was to a degree the least of all evils, a yoke of compromisewhich chafed both parties but strangled neither. The owner was able to retain afair amount of supervision of his land and the Negro cropper took his half loafof independence as better than none at all" (116). Sadly, the same easily couldbe paraphrased and applied to today's NBA lockout.
While NBA players are neither slaves on 19thcentury cotton fields nor those who pick tomatoes, harvest cocoa in the IvoryCoast, or work in the sex, soy and soccer ball industries, the "40 milliondollar slave" is part of that history.  
***
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 subtextual analysis.He is the author of Screens Fade toBlack: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

Race and The Republicans: James Braxton Peterson Responds to Ron Paul

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


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Protecting the (White Male) Gaze: Homophobia of Sports Talk Radio Goes Unchallenged

Protecting the (White Male) Gaze: Homophobia ofSports Talk Radio Goes UnchallengedbyDavid C. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Duringhis ESPN show on Tuesday, BruceJacobs described the Los Angeles Sparks and the Phoenix Mercury as "the "Los Angeles Lesbians"and the "Phoenix Dyke-ury."  Hereturned to the air the following day to offer the following "apology": "My comments yesterdaywere ridiculous, stupid and amateurish. I apologize for even uttering the comments, whether you heard them ornot, whether you were offended or not." 
To date, little has been made about either hiscomments or his half-hearted apology that neither apologizes for the spirit ofhis remarks nor the ideological underpinnings that led to such comments.  His apology does not repudiate his own homophobicstereotypes nor does it challenge the ideological assumptions evident here, butinstead apologizes for vocalizing them. It isn't the homophobia that warrants the apology, but expressing it onhis show.
While Mr. Jacobs needs to be held accountable for hisremarks, along with ESPN, which has failed to publicly condemn the comments, itwould be a mistake to isolate this rhetoric as that of a "bad apple."  The homophobia and sexism on displayhere is reflective of sport talks radio. As with talk radio in general, sports talk radio emerged as a movementto "restore" the hegemony of white male heterosexism.  The homophobic remarks of Bruce Jacobs represents a systemicand longstanding effort to restore the normalized vision of sports as a spaceof male dominance. 
Media coverage of sports reinforces traditional masculinityin at least three ways. It privileges the masculine over the feminine orhomosexual image by linking it to a sense of positive cultural values. Itdepicts the masculine image as "natural" or conventional, while showing alternativeimages as unconventional or deviant. And it personalizes traditionalmasculinity by elevating its representatives to places of heroism anddenigrating strong females orhomosexuals. (p. 97)
His comments, thus, embody the efforts to silence,surveil, demonize, and ultimately discipline and punish any challenges to thewhite male heterosexuality of sporting cultures. Those perceived threats tothis hegemony are met with efforts to reclaim the sporting space as one ofmasculinity.  From the ubiquity ofimages of hypersexual female athletes on various sports websites to thecommonality of homophobic, sexist, and racist rhetoric, we see that despite theincreased levels of diversity, the hegemony of white male heterosexualityremains a central facet within to contemporary sports culture.
The relative silence about this instance ofhomophobia (as of writing there has been only 9 articles about Jacobs'comments) and the culture of homophobia within the sports media is especiallytelling given the widespread condemnation of various players for homophobicslurs during the 2011.  Others maycite the varied levels of celebrity and the divergent platforms as reasons forwhy the comments of Kobe Bryant, Joakim Noah, and Wayne Simmonds received ample mediaattention.  Yet, the comparativesilence here reflects a level of comfort in isolating homophobia as a symptomof athlete culture, hip-hop culture and blackness. 
Writing about the politics surrounding Kobe Bryant'suse of an anti-gay slur during the 2010-2011 season, I previously focused on the ways in which a hyper focus onthe homophobic utterances of black athletes provided a comforting narrativethat reaffirmed white civility (as tolerant and accepting) and black pathology:
Theculture and the blackness of the league became a subtextual source of inquiryfor the debate about homophobia within the NBA, ultimately exoneratingwhiteness/American through a scapegoating discourse.  While writing aboutDon Imus, MichaelAwkward is particularly instructive in this case:"Put Simply," Kobe Bryant "was made to stand in for millions of well-known andfaceless" homophobes and other who tacitly protect their heterosexual privilegewho GLBT communities and their allies "want desperately to identity, put ontrial, and excoriate because of incontrovertible – but to this point ofteneasily dismissed – 'evidence' of centuries of anti-gay violence, heterosexism,and homophobia.  With Kobe Bryant, we get a similar reductionist formula,where Bryant and all of his past experiences provide a supposed explanation forhis use of this slur. 
The ease towhich Bryant was condemned and the perceived self-righteousness reflect thehegemony of the white racial frame.  Bryant's homophobic slur, hisperceived homophobia, his emotional outbursts, and his evidence "childishness"here fit a larger script about black male bodies.  This instance and theclaims about uber homophobia within sports culture (usually linked tobasketball and football and not say hockeyand baseball) and homophobia within the black community thus fit a largernarrative about black dysfunction, pathology and otherness.  "The casualsexism and homophobia reproduce the oppression of straight black men, providinga justification for 'the denial of manhood to black men within a racializedsociety," writes Michael Kimmel in "Towarda Pedagogy of the Oppressor."  "'You see,' one can almost hear theestablishment saying 'those black men are like animals.  Look at how theytreat their women!  They don't deserve to be treated with respect." In other words, "the very mechanism that black men thought would restoremanhood" – demonizing homosexuals, using anti-gay slurs, asserting anddemonstrating traditional male values – "ends up being the pretext on which itis denied." 
Whereas the media spectacle that ensues in momentsinvolving black athletes legitimizes dominant narratives, the comments from Mr.Jacobs, and the commonplace homophobia of sports talk and talk radio in generaldoes little to substantiate dominant narratives.  Whereas those momentsthat purportedly provide "evidence of 'deviance' for a mainstream publicconditioned to think of black people and black men in particular assuch"   (Neal,2005, p. 81), the comments from Mr. Jacobs are rendered invisible as hishomophobia and uber masculinity has both normalized within whiteness.  It has been imagined as little more thanboys being boys. 
Seenas neither deviance nor a sign of a larger cultural failure, the homophobiathat emanates through the radio is acceptable, left without condemnation, assuch outrage is saved for the next moment involving a black athlete.
***
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 subtextual analysis.He is the author of Screens Fade toBlack: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.[image error]

The Ella Baker Center: Celebrating 15 Years of People-Powered Change

Celebrating one of the lasting legacies of the amazing Ella Jo Baker.

ArcLight Cinemas Interview with 'Pariah' Director Dee Rees

ArcLight Cinemas sits down director Dee Rees and actresses Kim Wayans and Adepero Oduye from Focus Features Pariah , to discuss the making of the film.

Christmas with a Twist of Soul

What If We Occupied Language?

Dread Scott and Kyle Goen




























What If We Occupied Language? by H. Samy Alim | New York Times | The Stone
When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.
Occupy.
It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.
Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: "occupy, " he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year.
It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like "debt-ceiling" and "budget crisis" out of the limelight and putting terms like "inequality" and "greed" squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to obscure the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.

To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term "occupy" to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation —  a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land
Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, "occupy" signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It's no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It's no longer about simply occupying a space; it's about transforming that space.
In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made "occupy" its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.
As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers "occupied" factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that "occupy" once meant "to have sexual intercourse with." One could imagine what a phrase like "Occupy Wall Street" might have meant back then.
In October, Zimmer, who is also the chair of the American Dialect Society's New Word Committee, noted on NPR's "On the Media" that the meaning of occupy has changed  dramatically since its arrival into the English language in the 14th century. "It's almost always been used as a transitive verb," Zimmer said. "That's a verb that takes an object, so you occupy a place or a space. But then it became used as a rallying cry, without an object, just to mean to take part in what are now called the Occupy protests. It's being used as a modifier — Occupy protest, Occupy movement. So it's this very flexible word now that's filling many grammatical slots in the language."
What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed "masters" look like?  We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.
Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of "occupy," which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.
For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to "'decolonise Wall Street"' to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it's all about who and how and why. When  white colonizers occupy land, they don't just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.
Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word "illegal" to refer to "undocumented" immigrants. From the campaign's perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of "illegals" to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like "illegal alien" and "undocumented," but says nothing about "illegals." Yet The Times' standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term "illegals" has an "unnecessarily pejorative tone" and that "it's wise to steer clear."
Pejorative, discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case, activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term "illegals" and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.'s annual Hate Crime Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent action.
But Occupy Language should concern itself with more than just the words we use; it should also work towards eliminating language-based racism and discrimination. In the legal system, CNN recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arizona's infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other offenses, has discriminated against "Latino inmates with limited English by punishing them and denying critical services." In education, as linguistic anthropologist Ana Celia Zentella notes, hostility towards those who speak "English with an accent" (Asians, Latinos, and African Americans) continues to be a problem. In housing, The National Fair Housing Alliance has long recognized "accents" as playing a significant role in housing discrimination. On the job market, language-based discrimination intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class and national origin to make it more difficult for well-qualified applicants with an "accent" to receive equal opportunities.
In the face of such widespread language-based discrimination, Occupy Language can be a critical, progressive linguistic movement that exposes how language is used as a means of social, political and economic control. By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.
As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.

The illustrations for this post are part of a collection of Occupy movement posters at the site Occuprint .
***
H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. His forthcoming book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S., written with Geneva Smitherman, examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through a linguistic lens.

Rapsody: 'All Black Everything'

Video for Rapsody's "All Black Everything" (For Everything), directed by Kenneth Price.

Be Like June...

Be Like June . . .by Mark Anthony Neal | Popmatters[25 June 2002]
"And I Got toThinking about the moral meaning of memory . . . [A]nd what it means to forget,what it means to fail to find and preserve the connections with the dead whoselives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own."— June Jordan
It was a meanderingSaturday afternoon—babygirl just finally down for her all-too-short afternoonnap—when I downloaded my latest batch of e-mail. Weekend e-mail is usuallymeaningless, no notes from editors, good words from respected colleagues, orqueries from ambitious grad students—the stuff that always gets me excited—justthe usual banter from the various listservs that rarely hold my attention. Itwas on one of those listservs that the news of June Jordan's death wasforwarded to me.
Diagnosed withbreast cancer in 1992, Jordan was given a 40% prognosis of surviving more thanfive years. She lived for more than a decade after her diagnosis, becoming anadvocate—on the real she had been an advocatefor the voiceless, the nameless, the faceless, and the despised for more than30 years—for other women afflicted with the disease. The author of 28 books ofpoetry, fiction, and social criticism, Jordan was one of the most prolificintellectuals of her generation.
But I am surethere are many, of all races, who perused newspaper accounts of her death, withno knowledge of who this woman was . . . is.In a society that believes that inane dictums embraced by American youth like"Be Like Mike" or "I Am Tiger Woods" are evidence of a color-blind, classless,genderless, and discrimination-free America, June Jordan worked as an activisttirelessly in the very trenches that Nike, Gatorade, McDonalds, Viacom and twonational political parties claim in the name of commercial products even moreinane than pop slogans for the miraculously athletic black men that we know ona first name basis. We are unlikely to hear any slogans in mainstream media . .. Ever . . . that proclaim we should"be like June."
In anotherexample, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelrecently ran a story about the disappearance of Alexis Patterson, who wasapparently kidnapped a month beforeElizabeth Smart's disappearance in Salt Lake City, but there has been little ifany mainstream media coverage of Patterson's kidnapping. NBC, ABC and othershave devoted more than 30 minutes of coverage to the Utah kidnapping. Theintensity of the coverage of Smart immediately struck me as an effort to divertattention away from Bush Jr.'s attempt to transform the American Government viathe creation of a Dept. of Homeland Defense—black folks were of course divertedby the arrest of an accused child sex offender and R&B singer, who appearsin a widely-circulated bootlegged copy of child pornography that has probablybeen seen by more people than those who have read at least one June Jordanbook—but I digress.
If June Jordanhas been invisible to the mainstream in her death, it was not simply becauseshe was black, but because she was a black woman, who chose to be an activistand a intellectual, in a society that seemingly has little value for blackwomen who aren't taking off their clothes, while celebrating their"bootilicious" reality on a Viacom-owned video channel or an HBO "sex" series.
How ironic isit that there is little graphic sex on the channel's Sex in the City which has no significant black female characters,yet black women are graphically featured on shows like Real Sex, the "hooker trilogy" of Hookers on the Point, PimpsUp, Hoes Down, Hookers at the Point:Five Years Later, and G-String Divas.Not surprisingly, HBO, which specializes in "groundbreaking" documentaries,passed on NO! , Aishah ShahidahSimmons' brilliantly brave and important documentary about black-on-blacksexual violence (some of those folks who have trafficked in child pornographyvia the R. Kelly video, need to spend a few hours with Simmons's film), on thebasis that it didn't have mainstream appeal.
June Jordan was committed to exposing herself—herpassions, convictions, and fears in her words, which she willfully gave to theworld with the libretto I Was Looking atthe Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and books such as Civil Wars, Selected Essays 1963-1980 (1996), and most recently hermemoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood(1999). In her essay "Besting a Worse Case Scenario" (from Affirmative Action, 1998), Jordan wrote defiantly about herillness: "I want my story to help to raise red flags, public temperatures, holyhell, public consciousness, blood pressure, andmorale—activist/research/victim/morale so that this soft-spoken emergencybecomes the number-one-of-the-tip-of-the-tongue issue all kinds of people jointo eradicate, this afternoon/tonight/Monday morning." For a decade, Jordan usedher own trauma to raise question as to why nearly 50,000 woman succumb toBreast Cancer per year.
Jordan was anavowed feminist, but like Joy James's notion of black feminist "Shadow Boxers,"Jordan eschewed the "feminism as simply identity politics" that so-calledfeminists have been able to soft-pedal in the New York Times or on the best-sellers list. Jordan instead sought"analyses of the world-wide absurdity of endangered female existence" (from theintroduction to the forthcoming collection Someof Us Did Not Die). She openly challenges women, asking "when will werevolt against our marginalized, pseudo-maverick status and assert ourmajority, our indispensable-to-the-species' power—and I do mean power: ourverifiable ability to change things inside our own lives and in the lives ofother folks, as well."
At the time ofher death, an advanced copy of Some of UsDid Not Die: New and Selected Essay of June Jordan (scheduled for releasein September of this year) sat in my bag, unread for close to a month. It wasgonna be part of my "summer reading." Jordan of course couldn't afford simplepleasures like planning her summer reading. In a poignant moment in "Besting aWorse case Scenario" Jordan wrote:
I do everything Ipossibly can every day,
I postpone nothing
I no longer procrastinate.
I give whatever I undertake all that I've got
I pay closer attention to incredible,
surrounding reasons for celebration and faith
I watch for good news.
I become hourly more aware
Of the privileges conveyed by human life . . .
It has been aprivilege for all those who have read Jordan's work or have known and workedwith her, to have shared some part of her humanity. Jordan was of course right,when she suggested that "some of us did not die." The essay was written weeksafter the 9-11 attacks, as Jordan struggled with the implications of theattacks and American response to them. Ultimately, she asserted (borrowing fromAuschwitz survivor Elly Gross) that "We're Still Here / I Guess It Was OurDestiny To Live / So Let's get on with it!" For those us still in the world, itwould do us well to "Be Like June Jordan."
Published at: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/020625-jordanjune/

Native Son: A Short Film

Native Sun is a short film that features all new music from Blitz the Ambassador's second studio album of the same name. Directed by Terence Nance and Blitz the Ambassador, the film follows Mumin, a precocious young boy who makes the long trip to Accra from his home in the Ghana's rural northern region. He leaves having just experienced his mothers death, her last words to him a directive to travel to Accra and find the father he has never met. Along the journey he experience's Ghana as only a child can and in so doing expands our view of what the continent is and what it will be.