Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1053

Floyd Mayweather and the Demonization of Black Athletes

A Questionable Victory? Floyd Mayweather and theDemonization of Black Athletesby TheresaRunstedtler and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
The ongoing efforts to control, manage, and demonizeblack athletes, especially black boxers, once again came to a head a few weeksago when Floyd Mayweather, Jr. beat Victor Ortiz with a "controversial"knockout punch to win the world welterweight title. Thefight promised to be a battle of two diametrical opposites. The self-assured 34-year-old black tactician with adefensive strategy was set to take on an earnest, up-and-coming 24-year-old Latinowith an iron chin and aggressive style. Mayweather's scenes in the pre-fight HBOproduction of 24/7 – talking into astack of money as if it were a phone, buying a new luxury car on a whim, andfighting with his father in front of a crowd of fans – were wildly colorful,sometimes surreal, sometimes stomach-turning, and entirely bombastic. But allthe while, Mayweather kept training; he kept honing his craft and conditioninghis body, even pulling his entourage out of bed (and out of the club) for 2:00am workout sessions.Inthe meantime, 24/7 fashioned Ortizinto a paragon of ascetic virtue. His scenes revolved around a triumphant andrighteous tale of social uplift – the quintessential good immigrant story. Hecame from nothing. His parents abandoned him and he still managed to pullhimself up by his own bootstraps to become a successful, but humble fighter.Unlike Mayweather with his large entourage and celebrity friends, Ortiz mostlykept to himself with his truck-driving trainer and loyal brother.Thefirst few rounds were tight with Mayweather grabbing the early lead. In thefourth round, in what was probably Ortiz's most effective moments in the fight,the wheels came off his attempt to defeat Mayweather. Launching at Mayweather,Ortiz landed a vicious head butt, leading Referee Joe Cortez to step in topenalize Ortiz.  After severalapologies from Ortiz, a few hugs, a kiss or two, and the tapping of the gloves,the fight resumed; although it appears that Ortiz didn't get the memo leavinghim vulnerable to a classic Mayweather combo that ended as many have before:with his opponent on the ground. Replays clearly illustrate that Ortiz was not paying attention and notfollowing the creed "to protect oneself at all time," ending the fight in whatwas both one of the more climatic and anti-climatic moments in boxing history.Beforethe fighters even exited the ring, commentators had already denied Mayweatherthe victory.  Described as a "questionable"win, a "marginallylegal" knockout, and as one that resulted from a "cheapshot" and a "sucker punch" the victory was not simply hallow butpurportedly a window into Mayweather's dubious character.  "Like the Tyson ear biting incident ofyesteryear, Floyd Mayweather proved to be dirty fighter this evening whohit a man when the action had not officially commenced by the referee," notedJet Fan on The Bleacher Report. "To a chorus of boos, Mayweather thenimploded in a post-fight interview with HBO's Larry Merchant as he questionedMerchant's boxing resume and then proceeded to terminate the dialogue in aprofanity laced tirade. To Merchant's credit, he stood toe-to-toe with anobvious bully who seems to relish in antagonizing men twice his age, includinghis own father!" A commentary on TheStatesmen encapsulates the demonization directed at Mayweather that usedthe fight to lament Floyd's character, pathologies and otherwise undesirabletraits:Congratulations, Floyd Mayweather. You are now themost despised athlete on the planet, non-O.J. division.  Mayweather is sullying his legacy asone of the greatest fighters of our generation. His latest classless misstepscame last Saturday night with a one-two punch. First, he cold-cocked VictorOrtiz in the closing seconds of the fourth round of their welterweightchampionship fight while Ortiz was apologizing for an intentional head butt.Yes, what Ortiz did was idiotic — first the head butt and then letting hisguard down while referee Joe Cortez had his back turned toward the fighters.But what Mayweather did — perfectly legit under strict interpretation of therules — was a punk move. But he was just getting started.  Mayweather then went after HBO analystLarry Merchant in a post-fight interview, spewing profanities before Merchantgrew tired of it and yelled, "I wish I was 50 years younger and I wouldkick your (butt).Apparent from the media response was both a lack of respect and adismissal of the specifics of what happened in the ring. Rather than simplycomment on the fight, the media reasserted "common sense" understandings ofblack athletes, reiterating the narrative of Mayweather as an immature, greedy,and petulant child who represents everything that is wrong with modern professionalsports culture.  The media responsein this regard reflects the longstanding project of constructing black athletesas "bad boys," which in the end "worksto reinforce efforts to tame their 'out of control' nature" (Ferber 2007, p. 20).  Whetherdepicting the fight as indicative of a lack of sportsmanship or a win-at-allcosts mentality; whether representing Mayweather as so violent and despicablethat he would attack an old man like Larry Merchant; or whether focusing on histrash-talking, extravagance, bravado, and material flash, the demonization ofMayweather illustrates how his body (and his body of work) functions as acontested sight about the social significance of black athletes in thetwenty-first century. The post-fight criticisms are not simply about Mayweatherbut rather they evoke the contested history of black athletes and their placein white-run sporting industries geared at largely white consumers. As noted byImani Perry, in Prophets of the Hood, popular culture (including sports)exists not only as a site for the construction and dissemination ofstereotypical representations, but also as a space where "the isolation ofblack bodies as the culprits for widespread multiracial social ills" becomescommonplace (Perry2005, p 27).  Indeed,what gets left out of the discussion is the calculated nature of Mayweather'spublic persona. He knows his audience and giventhe financial structure of the match, he had a lot to gain from stirring uppublicity for the fight. Whether you call him "Pretty Boy" or "Money," Mayweatheris arguably following in the footsteps of a long tradition of black fightersthat the public (especially the white public) has loved to hate. Like otherblack boxers who came before him, he has used his infamy as a clever marketingtool. At the post-fight press conference, Mayweather admitted to reporters thathe and his team worked from the premise that boxing was about more than justmoney; above all, it was about entertaining the crowd.Theline between performance and sport has always been blurred in the pugilisticrealm. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century many boxers (both whiteand black) made far more money off of their theatrical exhibitions than theydid from their actual prizefights. They were also self-conscious style houndsand brash trash-talkers who realized that how they "staged" their masculinebravado outside the ring often influenced their financial rewards from thering. Instead of trying to get white fans to love them (which would have been afeat given the racial politics of the time), some black fighters positionedthemselves as men that spectators could love to hate.Takefor instance, John Perry, "The Black Sailor." The son of a white mother and ablack British father in Nova Scotia, Perry won Australia's heavyweight title in1849 where his opulent clothing and confident demeanor unnerved many of thelocal white sportswriters. Bythe late 1900s, being a more "respectable" and deferential black fighter didnot guarantee that one could skirt boxing's increasingly rigid color line. Theblack Australian pugilist Peter Jackson, who came to be known as a gentlemanand an honorary white man, still never managed to coax the white Americanchampion John L. Sullivan into the ring for a world heavyweight championshipmatch.Otherfighters simply chose to flout "proper" racial and class etiquette, such asFrank Craig, "The Harlem Coffee Cooler," a black American expatriateprizefighter in turn-of-the-century Britain and France. In addition to winningboxing matches, Craig became a smash hit in British music halls, helping topopularize the cakewalk. With the money earned from his fights and exhibitions,he bought several London taverns. He even enjoyed flaunting his wealth and wasknown to drive around with his white wife in an open carriage, wearingexpensive clothes and diamond jewelry. Withthe rise of sports pages and specialty boxing magazines, which closely followedfighters' exploits in and out of the ring, the performative aspects of thesport helped to expand the boxing industry's profitability. Yet, as much asmoney was a key consideration for black boxers as they fashioned their publicpersonas, many chose to be deliberately unruly and pompous as a kind ofpersonal political statement. For them, it was about speaking back toprevailing stereotypes of doltish, hapless, weak, subservient, and backward blackmen.Perhapsthe most infamous ring dandy of all was Jack Johnson.With his defeat of Tommy Burns in Sydney in 1908, Johnson became the firstblack heavyweight champion of the world. Like Perry and Craig, Johnson embodieda bold vision of black masculinity that spoke directly to the hopes and dreamsof a black working class desperate for a break in the racial oppression andback-breaking labor that characterized their lives. In the ring he beat upwhite men physically and verbally, while outside the ring he flaunted hisconspicuous consumption, his love of fast cars, his quick wit, and his affairswith white women. He was also known for performing elaborate grooming rituals,usually with the help of white servants, and for openly exhibiting his physiquein front of sportswriters. Through these performances Johnson not onlycontested longstanding tenets of black inferiority but he also challenged conventionalnarratives of restraint as the route to racial uplift forwarded by the blackmiddle class. (Sound familiar?)Let'snot forget that prizefighting emerged from the underground world of vice. Earlypugilists were hardly considered epitomes of respectability, and many black boxerslike Johnson simply refused to relinquish their connection to the motleycollection of gangsters, pimps, prostitutes, and vagabonds who inhabited thesporting world.Still,by the early twentieth century social reformers were trying to pry the sportloose from its moorings in the underworld. They hoped to make boxing an amateursport untainted by pecuniary motives, and therefore more legitimate in the eyesof mainstream society. They sought to turn fighters into silent technicians inthe ring and middle-class role models beyond the ring. Yet boxing has neverlost its edge or fully moved away from its underground roots. Just as with Johnsonand later Muhammad Ali, Mayweather has chosen to embrace the persona of theracial villain, even as sportswriters have imagined him as a threat to society's(and boxing's) morals and values. Althoughwe certainly acknowledge the ways in which Mayweather challenges the expectedand sanctioned identities available to the modern black athlete, his effortsare not inherently transgressive. While Mayweather is undoubtedly building on atradition that comes out of a longer history of racial and class oppression, hisvarious efforts to construct his public image do not necessarily bespeak aprogressive, anti-racist politics. After all, his useof homophobic rhetoric and his embrace of material opulence do notchallenge the heterosexist and capitalist power structure. Even thoughMayweather challenges the accepted roles and identities of young black men asset out by white sports fans, in other respects he perpetuates a brand of blackmasculinity that does little to inspire a more inclusive and transformativevision of black politics. Movingbeyond simple questions of likability and respectability, there is much more atstake with the recent demonization of Mayweather given the larger history andracial landscape. We should not just criticize folks like Mayweather who are simplytrying to negotiate their way in the boxing world. Rather we need tointerrogate the increasingly central role of narratives of the humble,obedient, and ascetic black athlete in today's sports industrial complex. Afterall this multi-billion-dollar, transnational industry relies not only oncolonial narratives of race, but also on a large pool of docile and disposableblack bodies to drive its phenomenal profitability.***TheresaRunstedtler is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University atBuffalo and, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's PennHumanities Forum for the 2011-2012 academic year.  Her book, tentativelytitled, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner:Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of CaliforniaPress) drops in Spring 2012.DavidJ. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Genderand Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary AfricanAmerican Cinema and the forthcoming AfterArtest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regularcontributor to NewBlackMan andblogs @ No Tsuris.

Mark Anthony Neal Talks Civil Rights Icons & Local Politics on The Michael Eric Dyson Show

The Michael Eric Dyson ShowFriday, October 7, 2011

Discussing the Importance of Several Iconic Civil Rights FiguresThis week has been a monumental–if sad–and noteworthy one: in addition to the passing of Steve Jobs, it marked the passing of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the great Civil Rights activist in Birmingham, Ala., at age 89; and the death of 80-year-old Derrick Bell, one of the architects of critical race theory and a law professor at Harvard who refused to return to his teachings until the university hired a woman of color. However, the month holds happier occasions as well, including the birthday of Joseph Lowery, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr., and the upcoming 70th birthday of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In light of these milestones, Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University, discusses the importance of the Civil Rights movement and its icons, among a generation of youth that has been accused of having forgotten the struggle of the times before them.[image error]Listen Now: Marc Anthony Neal
 

[video] South Bronx Rising

South Bronx Rising The South Bronx is being revitalized. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times, tours the area with Amanda Burden, the director of the department of city planning.

William Jelani Cobb: "The GOP's Cynical Embrace of Herman Cain"

The GOP's cynical embrace of Herman Cainby William Jelani Cobb | Washington Post
Some weeks ago, as I was conducting research for a book on anti-communism, I happened upon a political ad for the 1952 presidential election. The ad was notable for two reasons: It appeared in an African American newspaper, and it said in bold letters, "Let's face it — a vote for the Democrats is a vote for Jim Crow." This was followed by an explanation of why blacks should support the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket.
In 1952 the Democratic Party suffered from a kind of split-personality disorder, vying for votes among Northern blacks who favored desegregation and Southern whites who strongly opposed it. Its presidential ticket reflected that tension, pairing the liberal Adlai Stevenson with Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama, whose record of opposition to civil rights was well known (and listed in the GOP ad for any who might have forgotten it). 
The ad was a cynical ma­nipu­la­tion — Eisenhower was no civil rights advocate — but that's nearly beside the point. What is most notable is that the Republican Party was sincere in its cynicism. This was a bona fide effort, if not to win over black voters, then to at least dampen their enthusiasm for the Democrats. It's a stark contrast to the Grand Old Party's current non-approach to African American voters. And this makes Herman Cain's recent surge in the GOP polls all the more notable. 
Cain's poll numbers are improving, he finished first in a Florida straw poll, and he seems to be an early front-runner in a handful of states that will hold primaries after the nominee has probably been already decided. But the most telling element of this rise is what his candidacy says — or doesn't say — about the state of race in this country. 
Three years ago, Barack Obama's emergence as the front-runner in the Democratic primaries was widely understood as a barometer for race in the United States. His election spawned furious speculation that we had become a "post-racial" society. Yet his approach to governing highlights the ways in which these ideas were premature, or at least far more complicated than was generally acknowledged at the zenith of Obamamania. 
The administration has been loath to address race directly, leading to tensions with some African Americans who think the president is either less willing or less able to address our specific needs than a white Democrat would be. Thus it became easy to believe that the white liberals who voted for Obama did so, in part, as a means of achieving cheap absolution for the nation's racial sins. 
That Cain's campaign is so studiously scrubbed free of race is a commentary on the very racialization he eschews. His Web site features his stances on immigration, national security, taxation, energy and health care. There is no reference to civil rights concerns, disproportionate incarceration or what is, at this point, a racialized unemployment crisis. This is curious only because, unlike the other Republican candidates, Cain believes that he can win a solid third of the black vote. Late last month he said blacks have been "brainwashed" into voting for Democrats (always a smart move to insult the intelligence of people whose votes you're seeking). But it would require a specific kind of brainwashing — the doctrine that epidermal allegiance should trump actual political interests — for Cain to win a third of an electorate whose key issues don't even crack the top 10 on his Web site. 
There are 40 million African Americans in this country. We are as diverse as any group of citizens. And we certainly have a stake in the issues of energy, security and health care. But electorates are selfish, and realistically, a candidate who doesn't engage the specific interests of a group, however they're defined, doesn't usually win much of that group's support. This is, significantly, the most frustrating aspect of Obama's attempts to placate African Americans by highlighting what he has done for the country at large. The irony, of course, is that Obama is most likely wary of addressing black issues head-on because of the criticism he would receive from the kinds of white voters who are increasingly supporting Cain.
In any case, it became clear that something more than "brainwashing" was at play in recent days when Texas Gov. Rick Perry provided Cain with his own Jeremiah Wright moment — a point when race unavoidably injects itself into an otherwise raceless campaign. Recognizing the damning implications of applying the most radioactive epithet in the language to, of all things, Indignant conservatives took to blogs and online discussions, denouncing Cain for "playing the race card" (while we're on the subject of banned language, that cliche should've been outlawed long ago) and, unbelievably, defending Perry's sign as not racist.
All this suggests that another, more curious kind of absolution is at work on the right this election season. It's not one in which the country's racial sins are forgiven, but one where blacks seek absolution for ever suspecting that there had been sins in the first place. At least that's what it appeared to be when Cain played down his comments — the insensitivity of calling a slur insensitive.
At its most cynical, Cain's campaign doesn't offer redemption for the party associated with the Willie Horton ads, the terms "welfare queen" and "high-tech lynching," and now "Niggerhead" so much as it suggests that there was never anything to be redeemed. Cain himself joined this mad parade of racial non-bigotry months earlier, saying he would ban Muslims from his Cabinet, or at least force them to sign special loyalty oaths. How can that be bigotry? A black guy said it.
The racial insurance policy that Cain's candidacy offers to tea party conservatives who have been criticized as bigoted by some quarters is certainly not the entirety of his appeal. Nor was absolution the majority of Obama's appeal to whites in 2008. But it is certainly part of it, and it works in the way that race most commonly does in this era, in subtle, inscrutable ways, maddeningly opaque, the exact extent of its influence difficult to determine. 
Thus Cain's ascent in the polls presents us with the tantalizing prospect, no matter how unlikely, that our next election will feature two African American men, neither of them post-racial but both somehow committed to publicly behaving as if we are. Cynicism, not racism, is now our foremost national sin. I plan to print up T-shirts reading "Election 2012: Vote for the Black Guy." I expect to make a mint.
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William Jelani Cobb is the author of "The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress" and an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Rutgers University.

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Teaching "The Wire" and Remembering the Founding of Vibe Magazine on the October 10th Episode of Left of Black

Teaching "The Wire" and Remembering the Founding of Vibe Magazine on  the October 10th Episode of Left of Black
On the October 10th episode of Left of Black, host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Anne-Marie Makhulu, professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African-American Studies at Duke University.  Professor Makhulu is currently teaching a class on the HBO series 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 African cities.  Makhulu talks about getting into the show after its final season and deciding to teach it to Duke students because of the story it tells about the decline of the American city.  She also looks at how the American dream portrayed in the series impacts public policy. Makhulu reveals her favorite characters, discusses her experiences teaching the show, and lastly keeps the audience up-to-date on her current projects regarding informal settlements in South Africa.  
Later, host Neal is joined by Scott Poulson Bryant, one of the founding editors of Vibe Magazine and author of the 2005 book Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America and the just published new novel The VIPs.  The two scholars speak to the book's setting in Sag Harbor, a black elite leisure space in Long Island, New York comparable to Martha's Vineyard.  The fiction writer talks about who he would cast in a movie version of The VIPs and what he was intending to offer his readers.   The Long Island bred author and journalist , who is currently enrolled in Harvard's doctoral program in American Civilization, talks about the people and publications who influence his work.  Bryant, who crowned the name Vibe Magazine tells Left of Black about the impact of hip-hop and black popular culture on contemporary journalism.  
Left of 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 and featured 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 Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.
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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlackFollow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackManFollow Scott Poulson-Bryant on Twitter: @SPBVIP
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Office Hours with Duke Professor Wahneema Lubiano [video]

Duke University Professor Wahneema Lubiano, one of the founding voices of Black Cultural Studies in the United States, answers questions about using literary tools to understand images in the media and objects in everyday life during a live "Office Hours" conversation October 6, 2011.

Learn more at http://www.dukeofficehours.com.

@OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street

@OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street from adele pham on Vimeo.

Kevin Powell: #OccupyWallStreet: The Revolution Will Be Multiplied

#Occupy Wall Street: The Revolution Will Be Multipliedby Kevin Powell | special to NewBlackMan
I wasn't sure what to expect on the sunny and gusty afternoon ofWednesday, October 5, 2011, when I left a lunch meeting in the Wall Street areaof Lower Manhattan, New York City. I purposely scheduled the get-together thereso I could easily move from the restaurant to Zuccotti Park, on Broadwaybetween Liberty and Cedar near Ground Zero, where protesters have been campedout for three weeks. No, they are not actually occupying Wall Street (the cityand the police are making sure of that), but they are close enough, right smackin the middle of America's largest and most powerful financial district. Thisbegan this past summer when the anti-capitalist magazine AdBusters putout a call for Americans to occupy Wall Street on September 17th. With people'srebellions in places like Egypt, Spain, and the American state of Wisconsinstill fresh in some folks' minds, seems it was only a matter of time that protestswould begin to spread, like wildfire, throughout America, regardless of who isin the White House at this very moment.
I came because I am in support of the protesters, of the Occupy WallStreet movement in New York and elsewhere, for two basic reasons. One, I toohave been profoundly affected, financially, by The Great Recession, and I grewup in poverty, my single mother and I, so it troubles me to the highest degreeto see anyone in America suffering hardships, economic or otherwise. Secondly,I have been a political and community activist and organizer for 27 long years,since I was a teenage student and youth leader, and I've worked in all sorts ofmovements and mini-movements. I've organized or participated in more buildingtakeovers, sit-ins, marches, rallies, conferences, benefits, disaster reliefefforts, concerts, and political and community interventions and negotiationsthan I can even recall at this point. This is my life work, to help people tohelp themselves. Thus any time I see or hear of a critical social cause, if Iam able to do so, I am going to jump right in.
It is this spirit I carried into Zuccotti Park. And what an amazingspiritual and political vibe there: People on laptops and hand-held devicestyping or texting nonstop. People napping on blankets, sleeping bags, or thegrass. People plucking guitar strings, blowing horns, and banging on drums andgarbage cans. People having random but passionate conversations here and thereabout "capitalism," "democracy," "PresidentObama," or "the police." People sitting peacefully, in a circle,as they meditate amidst all the compelling, organic, and chaotic magic aroundthem. People serving food to the regular protesters in the community kitchen,while other people are painting demonstration signs on strips of cardboard withcaptions like "Poor people did not crash the economy" or "Giveme back my future." People borrowing, returning, or thumbing through booksfrom the makeshift lending library. Everyday people, mostly younger, butcertainly a number of elders, some of whom, I am sure, have in their activistresumes Civil Rights or anti-Vietnam work, or a fond memory of Woodstock. Mostof the people here are White, although there is some people of color present,too. Also very clear that there are straight folks and gay folks, persons withdisabilities, and persons who are war veterans, with a few wearing theircamouflage-green uniforms.
As I walked slowly through Zuccotti, from the Broadway entrance to theTrinity Place side, I thought it strangely ironic that the park's northwestcorner is across the street from the old World Trade Center site. In factZuccotti Park was covered in debris immediately after the September 11, 2001attacks, and subsequently was used as a staging area for recovery efforts.Kissing the sky high above Zuccotti now is the Freedom Tower, the 105-storyedifice with a price tag of about $3 billion and counting, which will finallybe opened some time in 2013.
I also thought of the fact that Lower Manhattan had once been thestaging area for significant parts of the American slave trade, the importationof Africans, my people, literally creating the concept of Wall Street and theNew York Stock Exchange because, well, the first stocks ever exchanged and thefirst global economy were enslaved Black people. As proof, not far from theOccupy Wall Street protest is the African Burial Ground, where bones of some ofthese Africans were discovered several years back. And before the Africans, andthe European settlers, slaveholders, and colonizers, were the original ownersof this land, the Native Americans. Manhattan as a word is of the Lenapelanguage, and it means "island of many hills."
Not that any of the above would be known to the average person, orperhaps even the average protester here, but I think it important for those ofus who call ourselves Americans, or human beings, or both, to be clear thatnothing we do, with a structure or not, is without a context, or is everdisconnected from the history of who we are. We literally walk atop the spiritsand the graves of the good and the bad that has led us to these days of protestand occupation.
We the people, that is. Therefore, this infant movement is absolutelycorrect in stating, loudly, "We are the 99 percent." We the Americanpeople, of diverse backgrounds, while the wealthiest 1 percent in America ownsand controls 42 percent of America's wealth. You see it with thecompletely-out-of-control unemployment numbers and rapid freefall of America'smiddle class, as well as the horrific reality of America's underclass. You seeit with the tax breaks and in-your-face salaries for corporations and theirexecutives. You see it with the soaring crime rates in our communities, thosecrimes directly tied to financial desperation, especially in ghettocommunities. You see it with students either dropping out of college due totuition hikes and a decrease in student loans, and you see it with studentswith degrees on various levels that simply cannot find a job, any job. And yousee it with the people sitting in court fighting foreclosure on their homes, orbattling landpersons to hold onto apartments they rent.
Why this very week of the mass Occupy Wall Street protest my office hasbeen inundated with calls, emails, and social network messages from people,everyday people, searching for work, or an apartment they can afford. Onewoman, a 74-year-old Brooklyn resident, is on the ledge, about to be evicted,but can only spare $800-$850 per month for rent. Her monthly social security checkis $931. So she will have just $80-$130 per month to cover things likegroceries, public transportation, and her prescription drugs. In the richestnation on earth it is completely inhuman and obscene that there are so manypeople suffering, surviving, barely, day-to-day, as images of wealth, power,and privilege are routinely thrown in our faces via our mass media culture.
So Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and throughout Americais for those of us who feel our voices and misery have been ignored. It is forthose of us who believed, way down in our guts, that Barack Obama, the 2008presidential candidate, was the change, finally, America had been waiting for.But I knew even then that that was not the case, that the best Mr. Obama could possiblybe was a symbol of what was possible, but that real change only happens fromthe bottom up, from the people, never from the top down. That was the case withslavery and the abolitionist movement. That was the case for women and thefeminist movement. That has been the case for the lesbian, bisexual, gay, andtransgender community, and the gay rights movement. And that was certainly thecase for Black folks and the Civil Rights Movement.
So it must be the case, now. And that is precisely why this people's"revolution" has multiplied. If you visit www.occupytogether.org, you see meet-up andactions on many levels presently happening in nearly 500 American cities. Ifyou visit http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/I... youget personal testimonies from everyday people describing how tough their livesare during these times. Some mainstream media tried to ignore, distort, or evenmock this movement initially, but no more. Not when celebrities like SusanSarandon and Russell Simmons have come aboard to support, and not when 700protesters were arrested attempting to cross the Brooklyn Bridge the other day.And not when you are dealing with a generation of young people so tech-savvythey are very clear that they are the media themselves, fully stocked withvideo cameras, informational websites, and even their own newspaper, "TheOccupied Wall Street Journal." This is a movement everyone, and you needto get a late pass if you are missing what is happening here. For this ishistoric.
At least labor unions in cities like New York and Boston get it. Whatmade October 5th so special is that workers were present in a massive wayfor the first time. Some 20,000 protesters showed up, many of them belonging tomy city's largest labor unions, led by their union presidents. At Foley Square,a stone's throw from the Manhattan exit of the Brooklyn Bridge, and where thelong-running tv drama "Law & Order" was often filmed, nurses,teachers, and other organized labor folks swarmed to a rally and march insolidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. What was most memorable isthe fact that one union leader after another admitted they were simplyfollowing the lead of "these young leaders." Unions definitely remainimportant in New York City politics, as evidenced by the assembly line ofelected officials who showed up hoping to get the obligatory photo opportunityand microphone moment. But, to me, if we are to have a truly progressive,multicultural movement in America, it Is going to demand a different kind of coalitionfor these times, one led by a new configuration of progressive voices, and notoverwhelmed by union leaders, not overwhelmed by politicians, not overwhelmedby religious leaders, and certainly not overwhelmed by the funding ofcorporations or foundations (I duly noted what leaders and organizations werenot in attendance because of who clearly funds their work).
That old guard coalition has been happening since the Civil RightsMovement of the 1950s and 1960s and it has run its course and we must let itdie a natural death. While I was certainly glad and honored to be at thisunion-led rally (my own mother was a long-time member of 1199SEIU in JerseyCity, where I was born and raised), my heart and mind were with the people inthe crowd, and back at Zuccotti Park. Later for power or ego trips, photo opps,or who can and cannot speak at a rally. This is about the people, like that74-year-old woman my team and I are desperately trying to find an apartment shecan afford. And not for nothing, we've got to support the leaders, visible ornot, who are actually the voices for the people and have their pulse on theveins of the people.
For when we in leadership positions, whether we call ourselves leadersor not, and begin to think in those terms, and not in terms of our careers orour prestige or our individual or organizational agendas, then and only then dowe begin to do what the Tea Party begat in 2009: a natural-birth movement ledby the people, then nurtured into a full-fledged political dynamo. Part of thatnurturing-and the unions made this abundantly real just by their sheernumbers-has to be the inclusion of people of color into the Occupy Wall Streetmovement. Until yesterday, at least in New York City, the scene was, again,mostly White sisters and brothers (yes, we all are sisters and brothers, noquestion). Well-meaning, yes, but good intentions do not mean you are trulyprogressive. Can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" but thereis not a consistent and daily picture of the rainbow coalition of America fromcity to city. Can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" and yourleaderless leadership (which is untrue, because someone is clearly calling theshots here, at least some of the time) is mostly White males, and not inclusiveas it could be of women, of people of color, of gay sisters and brothers, andof other marginalized people as equal partners in the leadership, visible ornot. Can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" and not understandthe importance of history, of our shared history of protest, of movements, andhow it is going to take younger people and older people, and new activists andseasoned activists like myself, to make this into the powerful movement it cantruly be, not just for a few weeks, or a few months, but for the next severalyears, and as needed.
And you can't continue to say "We are the 99 percent" if,eventually, there is no real agenda for the people other than a lashing outabout Wall Street, about the need for jobs, or to end all wars, and on and on.Where influential Tea Party backers were both brilliant and strategic is thatthey saw this spontaneous thing happening and they got behind it and blew windinto the sails. So much so that there are now Tea Party political candidateswithin the Republican Party. And certainly Republican presidential nomineecontenders who feel compelled to respond to the Tea Party national agenda.
(And, to be fair to my White sisters and brothers, Black folks andLatino folks in America in particular, two of the most in-need communities,economically, need to get off our collective behinds and fully join and co-leadthe Occupy Wall Street movement. As the saying goes, either you are a part ofthe solution or you are a part of the problem....)
That is what we on the left, we so-called progressives or liberals orwhatever we call ourselves, must do. Drive the national conversations on issuesof the day in a new direction. And not as a reaction to Republicans, or the TeaParty, or right-wing conservatives, but because we understand, as a people whoknow change is in our hands, truly, that movements only last if you areproactive, and have a vision for what needs to happen, even while maintaining avery loose and democratic leadership structure where different voices are heardand honored.
I thought of this and more as we 20,000 strong marched down Broadway toZuccotti Park. It was organized and disorganized, it was fast and it was slow,and it was empowering and it was frustrating. And I loved every second of themarch, of the people spilling into the park, of the sense of love and peaceeverywhere, of the heightened intensity of the drummers, at once whipping thecrowds into a frenzy, and by the same token those drums a call, spiritually,for protection of these fearless protesters. And God knows that protection wasneeded, because as day shook loose its clothes and became night, more New Yorkpolice, on horses, on motorcycles, on foot, and in the wagons, were dispatchedto the area. A security guard at a local building even told me that someplainclothes officers had come in a few times this week to go to the highestfloor possible, to do surveillance on the protesters.
As Russell Simmons called them, these are mostly "sweet kids."They are participating in civil disobedience, one of the grand traditions ofworld democracy, as taught by giants like Gandhi and Dr. King, two figuresthose in power love to quote when convenient. But that does not matter when thepower structure of any country, be it Egypt or America, feels threatened. Orembarrassed. So when about 1000 of these protesters decided, at nightfall, tomarch down Broadway, to literally occupy Wall Street, they were met with thefull force of the New York Police Department. About 30 were arrested and rumorsimmediately shot through the protest, like the stink of fresh urine on a sidestreet wall, that a number of protesters had been beaten or maced by thepolice. Even a local tv crew was maced, it was said. (See http://occupywallst.org/ for more details) Nomatter, even more police barricades were brought out, even more police showedup, and before you knew it we were contained, like pigs in a pen, to aone-block radius on Broadway, right in front of the park. Warning sent loud andclear: you can protest, but the moment you dare to journey beyond theseboundaries, we are going to stop you and arrest you.
One of my favorite chants of the movement is "Show me whatdemocracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like." But when we beatand mace our young people for exercising their democratic rights to speak theirminds and to assemble peacefully, what message are we sending to them, toourselves, and to the world? And how are we any different, then, than BullConnor, that infamous police chief of Birmingham Alabama, as he water-hosed andunleashed vicious barking dogs on young people during the Civil Rights era? Orleaders in foreign countries who attack their protesters for demandingdemocratic reform as we are doing here in the streets of America? And was it notNew York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself, a few weeks back in a radiointerview, who said there would be unrest, soon, in America, if we did not getAmericans jobs? Word for word, Mr. Bloomberg stated "We have a lot of kidsgraduating college can't find jobs. That's what happened in Cairo. That's whathappened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."
Neither do I, Mr. Bloomberg. But, like the protesters, what I do want tosee, in our nation, is economic opportunities and justice for all Americans,not just for the privileged few. And I am clear that you cannot tease peopleabout the unlimited possibilities of America then when they decide they want tohave it, tell them no, we were not being serious. Where this movement goes fromhere is anyone's guess. Maybe it is simply suppose to be a space where thedisillusioned and disgusted can finally make their voices heard. Or maybe itwill be the progressive, multicultural movement I want to see, that I feelAmerica so badly needs, in this 21st century. No matter what happens, nomatter where this goes, it is so evident, more than ever and as was said duringthe Civil Rights Movement, that the leadership we've been waiting for is us....
***
Kevin Powell is a nationally acclaimed political activist,public speaker, and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. The author or editor of10 books, Kevin's 11th, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and The Ghost of Dr.King: And Other Blogs and Essays, will be published January 2012 by lulu.com. Emailhim at kevin@kevinpowell.net, or followhim on Twitter @kevin_powell

John Carlos and Dave Zirin Discuss 'The John Carlos Story'

The Michael Eric Dyson ShowFriday October 7, 2011
John Carlos and Dave Zirin Bring Us The John Carlos Story
It's one of the most lasting images in Olympic and Civil Rights History: after winning the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised an arm in salute to Black Power to the sound of the Star Spangled Banner. This week, some 43 years after that courageous act, one of those men publishes his life story in The John Carlos Story . Carlos joins us to discuss the book along with Dave Zirin, a renowned author, sports journalist, and host of the Edge of Sports on Sirius|XM radio. Zirin writes a popular weekly online sports column of the same name and helped write the book.
[image error]Listen Now: John Carlos and Dave Zirin

Fordham University Professor Mark Naison Explains #OccupyWallStreet on ABC News

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NewBlackMan contributor and Fordham University Professor Mark Naison Discusses #OccupyWallStreet on ABC News.