Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1052

Left of Black to Feature Exhibit 'Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection'

Left of Black to Feature Exhibit Becoming: Photographs from the WedgeCollection
On the October 17th episode of Left of Black, Dr. Kenneth Montague, a Toronto-based dentist and the curator of Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection, joins  host Mark Anthony Neal at the Nasher Museum in Durham, Carolina. TheWindsor, Ontario born Montague has collected contemporary art since the 1990s,and was influenced by African American culture from across the Detroit River. Nealand Montague discuss some of the featured artists in the collection includingJamel Shabazz, Carrie Mae Weems, Malick Sidibé, and James VanDerZee, and theimportance of collecting Black Art.
Laterin the episode, Neal is joined via Skype© by Columbia University Art Historian Kellie Jones, author of the new book Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art .   Neal andJones discuss her famous parents, HettieJones and Amiri Baraka, and herwork as curator of the new exhibit, Now Digthis! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
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Leftof Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on Duke's Ustream channel: ustream.tv/dukeuniversity.Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal andfeatured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or#dukelive. 
Left of Black is recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and InterdisciplinaryStudies at Duke University.
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FollowLeft of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlackFollowMark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackManFollowKellie Jones on Twitter: @DrKellieJonesFollowThe Wedge Collection: @Wedge_Toronto
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"None of These Guys Are Main Street Guys"--James Braxton Peterson on Herman Cain

Dr. James Braxton Peterson, Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University, discusses the candidacy of Herman Cain on The Ed Show  

They Ain't Wealthy, They Are Rich: Economic Lessons from the NBA Lockout

Shaq is rich; the white man that signshis check is wealthy.  Here you goShaq, go buy yourself a bouncing car. Bling-Bling . . . . I ain't talking boutOprah, I'm talking about Bill Gates. OK!. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he would jump out a…window.  I'm not talking aboutrich, I'm talking about wealthy—Chris Rock

TheyAin't Wealthy, They Are Rich: Economic Lessons from the NBA Lockout  byDavid J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Inheadline after headline, in commentary after commentary, the NBA lockout hasbeen described as a battle between "millionaires" and "billionaires."  Reductionist in many ways, the effortto construct the lockout as a struggle between two different yet similarparties (the owners are not part 99% although some of the players surely are)reflects a problematic conflation of two distinct groups.  In "Why We Can't Dismiss The NBA LaborDispute As 'Millionaires Versus Billionaires,'" ScottKeyes warns against the tendency to link and otherwise obliteratesubstantive differences between players and owners: "Conflating the two groupsas similarly-placed economic royalists, neither of whom deserve sympathy froman American public grappling with a depressed economy, is understandable. Butto create an equivalency between millionaire players and billionaire ownersobscures a scarier picture regarding the players' long-term economicprospects."  Discussing the verydifferent long term economic prospects between owners and players, Keyes pointsto several larger issues at work: the differences between workers and owners,the differences between a salary and an investment, and the very differenteconomic futures of each group.
Yet,one of the more striking aspects of the media coverage and public discussionsof the NBA lockout is a continued inability to distinguish between income andwealth.  This isn't surprisinggiven shows Cribs and media focus onplayer salaries. The danger, however, is quite evident.  In a society where, according to arecent study from BrandeisUniversity, black and white wealth inequality has dramatically increased inthe 23 years from 1984 to 2007, the failures to distinguish between the wealthof players and owners has a larger context.  Accordingly,
The gapbetween Black and white households ballooned during the 23-year study period,as white families went from a median of about $22,000 in wealth to $100,000 – again of $78,000. In the same period, Black household wealth inched up from abase of $2,000 per family to only $5,000. The sweat and toil of an entiregeneration had netted Black families only $3,000 additional dollars, whilewhite families emerged from the period with a net worth of 100 grand that canbe used to send a couple of kids to college, make investments, help out otherfamily members, or contribute to the larger (white) community.
Inother words, despite the accumulated income (some wealth) by a handful ofAfrican American athletes and entertainers, and a growing black middle-class,black-white wealth disparities have increased and that was before the economicdownturn.  The NBA lockout offers awindow into the larger issues of wealth disparity and power differentials andthe ways in which race-based wealth disparities operate in myriad of Americaninstitutions.  The efforts by theowners to further the disparity in income and wealth, while very differentgiven the salaries of scale, illustrates the level of disparity that definesclass and racial inequality in the twenty-first century.
Toillustrate this point, lets look at the NBA's top owners. 
·     MikhailProkhorov, who is worth a cool 13.4 billion, owns the New Jersey Nets·     Rich DeVos, ofAlticor and Amway fame, is worth 4.3 billion; he owns the Magic ·     Lester Crown,who is worth 4.9 billion, owns a major stake in the Chicago Bulls·     Mickey Arison,owner of the Heat is worth roughly 4.1 billion·     Paul Allen, with13 billion in net wealth, owns the Trailblazers·     Glenn Taylor,owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves is worth 2.2 billion·     Michael Heisley,who owns the Memphis Grisley, is worth 2.1 billion·     The Los AngelesLakers are owned by Philip Anschutz, who is worth 7 billion, and Jerry Buss,who as of 2005 was worth 380 million·     James Dolan, thefearless leader of the Knicks, made 15.33 million in 2010, making him only the55th highest paid CEO in America·     Mark Cuban  = 2.3 billion·     Ted Leonsis,owner of Washington Wizards, is worth 1 billion ·     Not be left out,Herb Simon (Pacers) 1 billion, and E. Stanley Kroenke (Denver Nuggets) 1.8billion. 
Comparethis to the NBA's top players: Kobe Bryant (140 million), Shaquille O'Neal(140) LeBron James (120 million); even Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, bothlong retired and focused on various business ventures, aren't part of thebillionaire club, worth an estimated 500 million each.  In other words, to paraphrase ChrisRock, if any NBA billionaire owners woke up with Kobe or LeBron's net wealth,they would not be happy.
Thebillionaire owners, along with its other owners, mere high millionaires, all possesshuge amounts of assets and wealth.  Yet, this only tells part of the picture given the amassed wealth of theteams themselves.  For example, theMickey Arison purchased the Miami Heat in 1988 for a mere 33 million dollar;today the team is worth 425 million dollars. Similarly the Lakers andMavericks, which were purchased 20 million (1978) and 280 million (2000), arerespectfully worth 643 million and 438 million.  Even the Knicks, who haven't won much of anything of late,has seen its value increase 300 million (1997) to 655 million. 
Whatis striking about the overlap between NBA owners and Forbes richest people inthe world is the level of wealth and capital possessed by many of theseowners.  DaveZirin describes Ted Leonsis wealth as transcending the numbers of zerosnext to his name:
Ted Leonsisalso claims to be losing money by the boatload. The problem is that it's all anartfully crafted lie. Leonsis and other NBA owners might be losing money on theteam, as bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell recently explained, but that'sjust one part of the story. It doesn't take into account the mammoth taxbreaks, the publicly funded arena, and the immediate real estate that surroundstheir home base.
Factor thosein and, well, there's a reason why Ted Leonsis is a billionaire. To create theVerizon Center in the heart of DC's Chinatown, residential housing was razed,businesses were shuttered and families were priced out of the neighborhood. Nowinstead of Chinese families, we have Starbucks and Chipotle with Chineselettering above their blaring signage. As for "carrying the country" on hisback, Leonsis might want to thank his army of minimum wage Verizon Centerworkers for keeping his ample frame in fancy suits.
Hesimilarly documents the political and economic power amassed by Magicowner, Ted DeVos:
Asco-founder of Amway, the 83-year-old DeVos has amassed a fortune of more than$4.4 billion. Through Amway, he popularized the concept of what is known asnetwork marketing, where salespeople attempt to lure their friends andneighbors into buying products. Sixty percent of what Amway salespeople trafficare health and beauty products. The rest of their merchandise is a veritable pupu platter of homecare products, jewelry, electronics and even insurance. Toput it mildly, DeVos doesn't do his political business off company time. Amwayhas been investigated for violating campaign finance laws by seamlesslyshifting from network marketing to network politicking.
DeVos hasused not only his company but his own epic fortune at the service of hispolitics. He could be described as the architect, underwriter and top chef ofevery religious-right cause on Pat Robertson's buffet table. The former financechair of the Republican National Committee, DeVos is far more than just a loyalparty man. For more than four decades he has been the funder in chief of theright-wing fringe of the Christian fundamentalist movement. Before the 1994"Republican Revolution" made Newt Gingrich a household name, Amwaycontributed what the Washington Post called "a record sum in recentAmerican politics," $2.5 million. In the 2004 election cycle Amway and theDeVos family helped donate more than $4 million to campaigns pumping propagandafor Bush and company, with around $2 million coming out of Devos's own pocket.
TheNBA's ownership group exists in a world apart from the players, and mostcertainly the many workers who make the NBA experience happen.  The exist apart because of the wealththey have amassed (on the backs of the players and many others) and how thatwealth translates into cultural capital and political power that not onlyimpacts the NBA but illustrates their reach into all walks of life. 
Ina brilliant article about the NBA, economics, and the New Jersey Nets, MalcolmGladwell summarized the larger issues at stake here:
We havemoved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gapbetween rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The richhave gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything theycan get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regardto logic or shame. In the end, this is the lesson of the NBA lockout. A manbuys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips thefranchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as bothparties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw? Theplayers are greedy.            Yetas evident in the NBA, the process of blaming, scapegoating, and constructingthe players as greedy emanates from a white racial frame just as public policydebates about welfare and the housing bubble have sought to demonize andidentify blackness as the source of larger problems.  The nature of that inequality is in many ways cut alongracial lines.  According to arecent PewResearch Study, white families have amassed wealth rates 20 and 18 times ofblack and Latino families.  The NBAlockout doesn't merely point to wealth inequality and the failures of publicdiscourse to move beyond individualize narratives that blame the other 99% fornot being part of the 1% but highlights the ways in which anti-black racism andthe structures of racial inequality operate within and through these realities.
Overthis past summer, MichaelTillery masterfully laid out the plans for the formation of the NationalPlayers Association, which would turn "Kobe and his peers would go from 40 MillionDollar Slaves to billionaire owners." Tillery provides a roadmap to forming a league that "will undoubtedlyrevolutionize sports."  Yet, morethan providing a plan to bring basketball back, one that would change thesporting landscape, Tillery elucidates the larger potential in convertingmillions of dollars into wealth, power that transcends the game.  As Chris Rock reminds us, "wealth willset us … free.  Wealth isempowerment; wealth will uplift communities from poverty."  The lessons of the lockout are not onlythe disparities of wealth, but the power differentials that exists betweenthose with wealth and those without. The NBA lockout is not battle betweenbillionaires and millionaires but one where the wealthy are trying to exert itswill and power against not only its rich players but the thousands of workerswho are neither rich or wealthy.  "Nottalking about rich, but wealth"
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of CriticalCulture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He isthe author of Screens Fade to Black: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.

#Occupy Your City [video]

People young and old are taking the streets to let our government and corporations know that we are a democracy that's not for sale. Take action:http://bravenewfoundation.org/occupy

James Braxton Peterson Weighs in on Latest GOP Debate

Herman Cain claims he can make it simple, save the economy, and he's not letting facts get in the way. Ed Schultz gets reaction from tonight's GOP debate from writer Jim Moore, Lehigh University's Dr. James Peterson, and MSNBC political analyst Joe Watkins.

#Occupying Abandoned Commercial Space Next Phase of the Civil Rights Struggle

#Occupying Abandoned Commercial SpaceNext Phase of the Civil Rights StrugglebyMark Naison | special to NewBlackMan
Whetheror not auto bailout legislation passes, the US economy is about to experiencean abandonment cycle, comparable to what took place in the South Bronx in the1970's and in rustbelt cities throughout the 1980's.. Beginning in January,,the US retail sector,, which is desperately trying to get rid of inventoryduring the holiday season, will suffer a wave of closings, bankruptcies and foreclosuresthe like of which has never been seen in modern US history. All over thenation, as layoffs and the credit freeze take their toll on consumers (who arehaving their last "splurge" between Thanksgiving and New Years),thousands of stores and restaurants will be closing their doors, turningcommercial districts into ghost towns and forcing many malls and commercialbuildings to the edge of bankruptcy. When you add to this all the auto dealerships that will be closing, and all the new office buildings and luxuryapartment complexes that will remain empty because they can't attract tenants,Americans will confront an extraordinarily demoralizing, visual evidence oftheir economy's failure to prepare for a devastating and possibly permanentdecline in consumer demand. 
Assomeone who witnessed the effect of a devastating abandonment cycle on theSouth Bronx and parts of Brooklyn in the 1970's, I am acutely aware of how atragedy of this kind can produce demoralization, division and paralysis. It tooknearly ten years for community organizations to begin rebuilding devastatedneighborhoods of the South Bronx and nearly thirty years for thoseneighborhoods to approach their previous levels of population growth andeconomic vitality. But we have two big advantages over the residents of theSouth Bronx and Brownsville in the 1970's—first, we know this tragedy iscoming, even though it's probably unavoidable, and second, it will affect theentire nation not just the poorest neighborhoods in a single Northeastern city.
Butwhat should we do about this?
Thestrategy that I would recommend, following the model created by activists inBerlin after the fall of the Berlin wall is "temporary occupancy." WhenBerlin became one city after reunification, an enormous number of state ownedenterprises failed when forced to compete in the private marketplace, leavingin their wake a huge number of abandoned factories, warehouses, apartmenthouses and storefronts. Into the breach stepped thousands of political activists,artists, students and ordinary citizens, who without legal sanction tookpossession of abandoned spaces and set up living cooperatives, art and musicstudios and community owned clubs, bars and restaurants, doing their ownconstruction work and taking electricity and water from the street or adjoiningbuildings. So large was this movement (soon fueled by participants from allover Germany and all over Europe,) that the police were powerless to evict theoccupiers. But more the point, the movement began generating successful newenterprises and began to revive decaying portions of the city. Within severalyears, the Berlin city government actually gave legal recognition to themovement by allowing groups to occupy buildings free of charge for up to threeyears provided they could fund the costs of making buildings habitable. 
Thismodel, I suggest, is well suited to the abandonment cycle that is about to hitlarge sections of the nation. If community organizations, artists cooperatives,trade unions, and student organizations start preparing now, they can beginoccupying abandoned stores, warehouses, car dealerships and luxury apartmentbuildings en masse when the economic crisis hits. From the very day they seizeabandoned space, these groups should be demanding legal recognition of theirefforts, whether they be using the space to create youth centers, housing forhomeless families, art and music studios, food cooperatives, research centersfor green technology or health center using alternative medicine. Initially,some of the groups seizing space may risk eviction or arrest, but onceauthorities see the benefits of such occupancy in terms of safety and economicvitality for the communities they are taking place in ( nothing contributesmore to crime and vandalism than permanently abandoned structures!),authorities well follow the model of Berlin and give such efforts legalsanction.
Givenwhat is happening in our economy, we have little to lose in trying such astrategy. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, millions more have losttheir homes, or apartments and a generation of students will be leaving collegeand graduate school without meaningful job prospects. To wait till creditmarkets expand enough, and consumption revives enough for the market to restoreabandoned space to commercial use, may involve waiting for ten years. Why notcircumvent this process and create our own enterprises outside the conventionalcredit system and force markets to adapt to us? In the process, we will energizea generation of young people who face idleness and demoralization, createliving space for the homeless, turn abandoned commercial strips into centersof activity and quite possibly, spawn a musical and artistic renaissance. 
Wecan't remain passive in the face of the worst economic crisis to hit us sincethe Great Depression. Let's start organizing now to turn tragedy intoopportunity. Occupying abandoned space can be the Civil Rights—and  Human Rights—cause of this era.
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Mark Naisonis a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham Universityand Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books,Communists in Harlem During theDepression and White Boy: A Memoir.Naison is also co-director of the BronxAfrican American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will bepublished in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the1930's to the 1960's.

Left of Black Presents: A Conversation with Steve Stoute

Left of Black Presents: A Conversation with Steve Stoute
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 6:30 PMJOHN HOPE FRANKLIN CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Please join us on the set of Left of Black in room 240 of the John Hope Franklin Center for a live, streamed, conversation with Steve Stoute, author of The Tanning of America - How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy and founder and chief creative officer of Translation Consultation + Brand Imaging .
When Fortune 500 companies need to reenergize or reinvent a lagging brand, they call Steve Stoute. In addition to marrying cultural icons with blue-chip marketers (Beyoncé for Tommy Hilfiger's True Star fragrance, and Justin Timberlake for "Lovin' It" at McDonald's), Stoute has helped identify and activate a new generation of consumers. He traces how the "tanning" phenomenon raised a generation of black, Hispanic, white, and Asian consumers who have the same "mental complexion" based on shared experiences and values. 
This consumer is a mindset-not a race or age-that responds to shared values and experiences, rather than the increasingly irrelevant demographic boxes that have been used to a fault by corporate America. And Stoute believes there is a language gap that must be bridged in order to engage the most powerful market force in the history of commerce.
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Viewers can participate in this live-streamed event via Twitter using the hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive.
Left of Black is hosted by Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal and recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

#OccupyWallStreet as a Fight for "Real Democracy"

Occupy Wall Street as a Fight for "Real Democracy" by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri | CNN
Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political grievances and aspirations.
As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack - or failure - of political representation.
It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic constituent process.
The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside the other "encampments" of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square earlier last spring.

In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was obvious. The demand that "Mubarak must go" proved powerful enough to encompass all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid's Puerta del Sol and Barcelona's Plaça Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more complex.
The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic complaints - regarding debt, housing, and education, among others - but their "indignation," which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans, "Democracia real ya," or "Real democracy now."
Occupy Wall Street should be understood, then, as a further development or permutation of these political demands. One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world).
A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians and political parties charged with representing the people's interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis - that is, the entirety of social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become subservient to economic and financial interests.
By insisting on the political nature of the Occupy Wall Street protests we do not mean to cast them merely in terms of the quarrels between Republicans and Democrats, or the fortunes of the Obama administration. If the movement does continue and grow, of course, it may force the White House or Congress to take new action, and it may even become a significant point of contention during the next presidential election cycle. But the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations are both authors of the bank bailouts; the lack of representation highlighted by the protests applies to both parties. In this context, the Spanish call for "real democracy now" sounds both urgent and challenging.
If together these different protest encampments - from Cairo and Tel Aviv to Athens, Madison, Madrid, and now New York - express a dissatisfaction with the existing structures of political representation, then what do they offer as an alternative? What is the "real democracy" they propose?
The clearest clues lie in the internal organization of the movements themselves - specifically, the way the encampments experiment with new democratic practices. These movements have all developed according to what we call a "multitude form" and are characterized by frequent assemblies and participatory decision-making structures. (And it is worth recognizing in this regard that Occupy Wall Street and many of these other demonstrations also have deep roots in the globalization protest movements that stretched at least from Seattle in 1999 to Genoa in 2001.)
Much has been made of the way social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been employed in these encampments. Such network instruments do not create the movements, of course, but they are convenient tools, because they correspond in some sense to the horizontal network structure and democratic experiments of the movements themselves. Twitter, in other words, is useful not only for announcing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific decision in real time.
Do not wait for the encampments, then, to develop leaders or political representatives. No Martin Luther King, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of Wall Street and beyond. For better or worse - and we are certainly among those who find this a promising development - this emerging cycle of movements will express itself through horizontal participatory structures, without representatives. Such small-scale experiments in democratic organizing would have to be developed much further, of course, before they could articulate effective models for a social alternative, but they are already powerfully expressing the aspiration for a "real democracy."
Confronting the crisis and seeing clearly the way it is being managed by the current political system, young people populating the various encampments are, with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question: If democracy - that is, the democracy we have been given - is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?
If the forces of wealth and finance have come to dominate supposedly democratic constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution, is it not possible and even necessary today to propose and construct new constitutional figures that can open avenues to again take up the project of the pursuit of collective happiness? With such reasoning and such demands, which were already very alive in the Mediterranean and European encampments, the protests spreading from Wall Street across the United States pose the need for a new democratic constituent process.
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Michael Hardt is Professor of Literature at Duke University. Antonio Negri is former Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua and the University of Paris 8. They are the authors of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.

#OccupyWallStreet Hip-Hop Anthem

The Grounded TV Network teamed up with Hon. George Martinez of Ground Zero and The Global Block Collective to produce this music video. Please share and help this go viral!

http://www.globalblock.org/

The Global Block harnesses the spirit of innovation, creativity and activism at the core of the Hip-Hop movement to empower youth and transform communities across the globe. Through its leadership, expertise and financial support it aims to inspire individuals to become agents of change in their communities.

Developmental Action Areas:
Cultural DiplomacySocial Enterprise/ Economic Development Youth Development
Sustainable Community Building:

We believe that building sustainable communities is possible through holistic, creative and non-paternalistic approaches that incorporate Green Technologies, Social Programming, Accountability, and Research and Development.

'Left of Black' S2:E5 with Scott Poulson Bryant and Anne-Maria Makhulu

Left of Black S2:E5w/Scott Poulson Bryant and Anne-Maria MakhuluOctober10, 2011
Left ofBlack,host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Scott Poulson Bryant, one of thefounding editors of Vibe Magazine andauthor of the 2005 book Hung: AMeditation on the Measure of Black Men in America and the just published novelThe VIPs.  The two scholarsspeak to the book's setting in Sag Harbor, a black elite leisure space in LongIsland, New York comparable to Martha's Vineyard.  The Long Island bredauthor and journalist, who is currently enrolled in Harvard University's doctoral program in American Civilization, crownedthe name Vibe Magazine tells and Left of Black about the impact ofhip-hop and black popular culture on contemporary journalism.  
Neal is later joined by Anne-MarieMakhulu, professor of Cultural Anthropology and African &African-American Studies at Duke University.  Professor Makhulu is currently teaching a class on the HBOseries The Wire.  An expert on economics in South Africa,Makhulu compares and contrasts the urban American inner-city portrayed in The Wire with that of South Africancities.  Makhulu talks about the series' depiction of  the decline of the American city and  howthe series, a favorite of President Obama, might impact public policy.   ***
Left of Black is a weekly Webcasthosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
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Episodesof Left of Black are also available for download @ iTunes U