Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1062

The "Selling of Candace Parker" and the Diminishment of Women's Sports

The "Selling of Candace Parker"and the Diminishment of Women's Sports by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Breaking News: The WNBA is about to complete its 14th season.  If you watched ESPN regularly, read a myriad of sports pages, or surfed the virtual sport world, the fact that the WNBA season was actually going on might be breaking news.   In what could have been an exciting season—given  the parity between teams and the influx of new talent, which could have resulted in increased cultural and sporting significance—the WNBA experienced yet another summer of alienation. 
In a recently published piece in The Nation, entitled "Sex sells Sex, Not Women's Sports," Mary Jo Kane explains this marginalization, debunking the idea that sex is able to sell women's sports.  Rather, she notes that, "Sex sells sex, not women's sports" leaving little doubt why women's sports continues to struggle within the marketplace.  "Millions of fans around the globe just witnessed such media images and narratives during coverage of the Women's World Cup in Germany. Perhaps such coverage will start a trend whereby those who cover women's sports will simply turn on the camera and let us see the reality—not the sexualized caricature—of today's female athletes. If and when that happens, sportswomen will receive the respect and admiration they so richly deserve."  To reflect on these dynamics and the continued struggles of the WNBA to transcend (or even undermine) the sexist grips of American sports, I want to discuss an almost three-old year feature on Candace Parker. 
In 2009, ESPN: The Magazine , as part of its women in sports issue, featured an article on Candace Parker.  This one story encapsulates the persistent sexism that detracts from and inhibits the development of women's sports within American culture.  Reducing women athletes to sexual objects and potentially profitable spokeswomen, the article, entitled "The Selling of Candace Parker" does little to introduce and celebrate the contributions of women's sports, but rather elucidates the systemic problems of American sports culture.
The emphasis on selling sex, rather than athletics and sport, is evident from moment one of the piece.  "Candace Parker is beautiful. Breathtaking, really, with flawless skin, endless legs and a C cup she is proud of but never flaunts," writes Alison Glock. "She is also the best at what she does, a record-setter, a rule-breaker, a redefiner."  Eliciting some criticism about the references to her body, and the reduction of her body to its sexualized parts, ESPN: The Magazine brushed off accusations of sexism, identifying the article as sensible given the demographics of the magazine.  According to Gary Belsky, editor-in-chief, "It's not the worst thing in the world in a men's magazine to talk about things like that." 
The sexualization of Parker and the focus on her body, at the expense of a narrative highlighting her athletic talents, doesn't end with this initial introduction of readers to her physical attributes.  Glock continues this treatise on Parker's body before moving to a discussion of her "feminine charm":
She is a woman who plays like a man, one of the boys, if the boys had C cups and flawless skin. She's nice, too. Sweet, even. Kind to animals and children, she is the sort of woman who worries about others more than about herself, a saint in high-tops.
It is this unprecedented combination of game, generosity and gorgeous that has Team Parker seeing miracles. They believe with all their collective heart that their 22-year-old, 6'4" stunner with the easy smile and perfect, white teeth will soon be the most recognized woman in American sports.  In other words, Parker represents an ideal femininity – nurturing, sexy, and heterosexual (the article make this clear though various rhetorical phrases, references to her husband, basketball player Sheldon Williams, and of course its discussion/visual presentation of Parker's pregnancy); she is the perfect woman who happens to play basketball.  In this regard, ESPN is selling Parker as a sexy and attractive woman whose job is to play basketball, a professional choice that in no way comprises her role as mother, wife, and sexual object to be consumed by male fans.
Yet, Glock doesn't seem to limit Parker's immense potential as the Michael Jordan of women's sports because of her "flawless skin" and breast size (despite multiple references to her bust size), rather arguing that Parker can transcend women's sports, breaking down commercial barriers to become "a one namer" because she isn't like so many of today's (black) athletes, whose brash and hyper-masculine demeanor alienates fans.  She is "nice," humble, and likable.  She "is the total package, an advertiser's dream: attractive yet benign enough to reflect any fantasy projected upon her. Like Jordan before her, Parker is a cipher of sorts, nothing outsize or off-putting. Nothing edgy. Nothing Iverson. Aside from being an athletic freak, she's normal. You could imagine her hanging out at your family barbecue. This matters; if Parker seems like a down-home gal, a possible friend, then it's a short step to trust, and with trust comes a willingness to buy what Team Parker is selling."   
The racial text here is very interesting and revealing in that Parker is positioned not only against the longstanding stereotype of the sexually undesirable (and likely lesbian) female athlete, but as a point of departure from the modern black male athlete.  Parker, like Woods (in 2009), is "characterized as "a breath of fresh air." Her appeal is thus based "an American public "tired of trash-talking, spit-hurling, head-butting sports millionaires . . ." (Stodghill quoted in Cole and Andrews).  She can be both a sexual and post-racial fantasy. 
Yet Glock undercuts the commercial and iconic possibilities for Parker because she is a woman who chose to get pregnant.   And choice is key here as the article positions Parker as someone who made a choice, likely against the will and advice of those inside of Team Parker, within the WNBA, and elsewhere.  Following the opening paragraphs, all of which highlight the profit potential resulting from her identity and sex appeal, Glock seems to walk back this same argument, noting that getting pregnant was not part of the plan.  Parker's pregnancy "was a shock to her, her sponsors, and her WNBA team" because it would put the plans of so many counting on her on hold.  Two years later, with Parker yet to fulfill this potential as WNBA star and marketing sensation, in part because of the time taken off with her pregnancy and then an injury, you can almost hear the skeptics saying, "We told you so."
The implications of the article are striking it that it leaves readers with a troubling message that Parker's appeal and her Achilles heal emanate from her female sexuality.  That is had she used her feminine appeal to attract male sports fans, otherwise disillusioned by "thug" black males athletes and sexually undesirable female athletes, the sky was limitless.  Yet, her decision to put "family first," to fulfill the hegemonic patriarchal expectations of society, undermines her sporting appeal.
Interestingly Glock, in an effort to highlight both the marketing strategies embraced by Team Parker and her commercial appeal, reflects on the sexualizing demands placed upon contemporary female athletes.  Noting that, "there are avenues available to women athletes … that involve waxing," Glock laments that the once class-acts of sports are now "nuding it up" in Playboy.  Candace Parker is thus presented as a throwback within women's sports, more like "Michael Phelps" and "Yao Ming" (interesting choices to highlight the ideal athlete), embodying something different from those morally objectionable women. 
"Women athletes are more likely to be marketed as sexy than as competent," notes Mary Jo Kane, who is quoted in the article. "And many women go for it. These athletes are smart. They know what sponsors want . . ..  It is the best and the worst of times. People like Candace are getting more coverage. But they are also forced to be sexy babes."  The feature article on Candace Parker is in fact exhibit A (and B, C, & D) for Kane's argument in that the visibility afforded to her and women's sport is delivered by an article about her body, beauty, bust, femininity, and sex appeal.  Inclusion in mainstream sports culture is the result of this sexualizing process.  ESPN, like the broader sports culture, isn't selling women's sports but sex.  In this instance, as with the public recognition afforded to skier Lindsey Vonn, soccer star Hope Solo, race-car driver Danica Patrick, and tennis-phenom Serena Williams (check out this commercial featuring Williams), sex and sexuality are the primary vehicles for both the commodification and consumption of contemporary female athletes. 
In a summer that has seen lockouts in the NBA and NFL (not too mention labor strife within some European Soccer leagues), that has seen waning interest in MLB and dissipating support for professional golf given the struggles of Tiger Woods, and that hasn't had to compete with international competitions such as the Olympics, the WNBA had a chance to increase its cultural and market share.  With only a slight increase in attendance, the cultural relevance and broader appeal of the game has seen little movement during a virtually sports-free summer.  It has missed an "opportunity" because of the continue efforts to sell women's sports through sex and sexual appeal rather than the beauty and brilliance of the game.    As noted by Dave Zirin, "Every scrap of academic research shows that conditioning viewers to see women athletes as sex symbols comes at the expense of interest in the games themselves." Or as Mary Jo Kane notes in this same article "For a female athlete, stripping down might sell magazines, but it won't sell your sport."  The peripheral place of the WNBA, a fact evident and perpetuated by the sports media, the WNBA itself, and fans alike, demonstrates that the visibility afforded to women's today (minimal at best) isn't evidence of progress.  Just ask Candace Parker.
***
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the 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.

The Color of Colombiana

The Color of Colombiana by Tukufu Zuberi | HuffPost BlackVoices
Classes are about to begin here at the University of Pennsylvania, so I took my lunch break to watch CoIombiana at a nearby theater. I justified this act by claiming I was going to look at the film using my sociological imagination. In truth, I went to see this movie because I like action flicks, and what is better than an action movie about a beautiful girl with a grudge on a summer afternoon.
Spoiler Alert! You should not read the rest of what I have to say if you do not want to know the plot of the movie Colombiana.
Cataleya, played by Zoë Saldana, is the beautiful, sexy, cold-blooded, acrobatic, master assassin and she is out for revenge served cold. In the spirit of Hannah and Salt the viewer is asked to believe that this beautiful, sensual, woman could be a .50 caliber, sniper rifle, toting murderer taking down the toughest man with a kick or well placed punch. Zoë does a credible, some might say heroic job of making this look possible. I halfway believe it is possible.

As the camera focuses on young Cataleya, we see what appears to be a shy smart child. Marco reminds her of when they meet for the first time and begins to comment on her intelligence, and even says that he and her father (who he just killed) used to be friends. In a flash before our eyes, Cataleya transforms into a super kid, and in her first act of revenge she stabs Marco in the hand with a hunting knife before jumping out the window and escaping to the U.S. This is where she convinces her Colombian gangster uncle, Emilio (Cliff Curtis), to teach her to be a professional killer!
After about fifteen minutes my sociological imagination was screaming that every Colombian in this film was a drug dealer, murderer, or some type of criminal. Even baby girl was in training to be a murderer.
Given that I know more than a few Colombians, I thought this film distorted the truth about Colombian peoples. There is a certain ignorance about Colombians that is very prominent in the United States in which an entire people are once again seen as violent, crime prone members of drug cartels. Or maybe this is just another cliché about non-white people.
I know this movie was pretending to be raceless. This would be consistent with the old myth about the racelessness of Colombia and other areas of Latin America. Come to think about it, this is pretty consistent with the current ideological move in the U.S. to be post-racial unlike the other box office hit with major black characters, The Help, which is a film about a white woman who writes a book about black housekeepers in the U.S. before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Here, Cataleya's race is not a subject of Colombiana.
However, the sociological sub-text of the film is Cataleya's race. Cataleya is black. Her mother is black.
Therefore being born of a Colombian assassin father and trained by a Colombian assassin uncle, she does not share the same racial space as either man. Both of whom could have passed for white in the Colombian context. I have been to Colombia more than a few times, so this seemed odd to me, but maybe that is because when I visit Colombia the Afro-Colombian community hosts me (with the one exception when the government of Colombia was my gracious host).
So this racial dimension in the film may not be obvious to the audience but anyone aware of the rising consciousness of the Afro-Colombian community will probably be a little taken aback. And, if the viewer has a sociological imagination, they would see that racial dimension as something missing from the film.
Let me end by saying something a little more sociological. Colombiana does in fact present a stereotype of the Colombian people. However, the biggest stereotype is of the filmmakers. The stereotype is of a film full of racial clichés and a lack of depth, but man that lady sure can kick high! 
***
Tukufu Zuberi is Chair and Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania and  host of the PBS Series  History Detectives

Syllabus: Sampling Soul 2.0

9th Wonder



























Sampling Soul 2.0 Department of African & African American StudiesAAAS 132/VMS 104-C-01Fall 2011Tuesday 6:00pm – 8:30pmWhite Lecture Hall, 107
Instructors:
Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. | Twitter:@NewBlackMan                                                                                                                                                      9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) | Twitter: @9thWonderMusic
Teaching Assistants:
Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell, ABD   Kesha Lee
Course Description Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s and became the secular soundtrack of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists such as Aretha Franklin and James Brown and record companies such as Motown and Stax, as well as the term "Soul" became symbols of black aspiration and black political engagement.  In the decades since the rise of "Soul," the music and its icons are continuously referenced in contemporary popular culture via movie trailers, commercials, television sitcoms and of course music.  In the process "Soul" has become a significant and lucrative cultural archive. Co-taught with Grammy Award winning producer 9th Wonder  and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, "Sampling Soul" will examine how the concept of "Soul" has functioned as raw data for contemporary forms of cultural expression. In addition the course will consider the broader cultural implications of sampling, in the practices of parody and collage, and the legal ramifications of sampling within the context of intellectual property law.  The course also offers the opportunity to rethink the concept of archival material in the digital age.

Books
Parodies of Ownership: Hip-HopAesthetics and Intellectual Property Law | Richard L. Schur Creative License: The Law and Cultureof Digital Sampling | Kembrew McLeod & Peter Dicola Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture& the Post-Soul Aesthetic | Mark Anthony Neal The Death of Rhythm & Blues | Nelson George Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves andDemons of Marvin Gaye | Michael Eric Dyson Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop's PhilosopherKing | edited by Julius Bailey Five Days of Bleeding | Ricardo Cortez Cruz***
Week 1—Sampling Sampling The Art and Aesthetics of SamplingAugust 30, 2011
Introduction to sampling as a practice. Is sampling a recent phenomenon? What are the historical and artistic context for sampling practices. How do terms like appropriation, borrowing, parody, pastiche, collage and "theft" factor into our understandings of sampling practices. How has sampling practices impacted contemporary art?
Week 2—Sampling A Blues PeopleDark Voices and Blue Movements Against the Night September 6, 2011
In line with Amiri Baraka's classic claim that the "spirits do not descend without music," music serves as a primary resource for Black Americans to articulate notions of pain, resistance, pleasure, pride, faith and aspiration.  This week we'll examine the music of the pre-Soul era.
Readings: George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues | Chap 1: Philosophy, Money, and Music; Chap 2: Dark Voices in the Night; Chap 3: The New Negro
Discussion Question (Beta)
Week 3—Sampling SoulThe Cultural and Historical Legacy of SoulSeptember 13, 2011
Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s, combining the drive of rhythm and blues, with the flourishes of the black gospel tradition.  By the 1960s it was part of a broader social movement articulate politically in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, philosophically in the concept of Black Nationalism and the Black Arts Movement and stylistically in the flourishing of Afros.   This week we will look Soul music and its impact on American culture.
Readings: George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues | Chap 4: Black Beauty, Black Confusion; Chap 5: Redemption Songs in the Age of Corporations; Chap 6: Crossover: The Death of Rhythm and Blues; Chap 7: Assimilation Triumphs, Retronuevo Rises
Discussion Question (# 1)
Week 4—Sampling BlacknessBlack Culture as Intellectual PropertySeptember 20, 2011
Though various forms of black culture have circulated freely in the United States and across the globe, they have often done so as the property of corporate entities. What is the relationship between black bodies as chattel and black culture as property?  What happens when the cultural expressions of a formerly enslaved peoples becomes intellectual property?
Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership  | Chap 1: From Chattel to Intellectual Property; Chap 2: Critical Race Theory, Signifyin' and Cultural Ownership;  Chap 3: Defining Hip-Hop Aesthetics; Chap 4: Claiming Ownership in the Post-Civil Rights Era; Alkon, Alison Hope. "Growing Resistance: Food, Culture, and the Mo'Better Foods Farmers' Market" Gastronomica, Volume 7, No. 3 (summer 2007), pp. 93-99; Chavis, Shaun. "Is There a Difference Between Southern and Soul?" in Reed, Dale Volberg, John Shelton Reed, and John T. Edge, eds. Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Pps. 237-244;  Nettles, Kimberly D. "'Saving' Soul Food." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Volume 7, No. 3 (summer 2007), pp. 106- 113; Zafar, Rafia. "The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women's Cookbooks." Feminist Studies, Volume 25, No. 2 (summer 1999), pp. 449-469.
Discussion Question (# 2)
Week 5—Sampling Hip-Hop AestheticsTransformative Uses: Parody, Memory, CommunitySeptember 27, 2011
How have the aesthetics of Hip-Hop challenged the legitimacy of Intellectual Property Law and in the process transformed how we think about intellectual property and its value?
Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership  | Chap 5: "Fair Use" and the Circulation of Racialized Texts; Chap 6: "Transformative Uses": Parody and Memory;  Chap 7: From Invisibility to Erasure? The Consequences of Hip-hop Aesthetics
Discussion Question (# 3)
Week 6—Sampling SamplingThe Culture of Digital SamplingOctober 4, 2011
Is sampling beats "stealing" music and evidence of a lazy, uncreative impulse in contemporary art? In Making Beats, ethnomusicologist Joe Schloss argues that sample-based hip-hop is a legitimate art form unto itself.
Readings: McLeod & DiCola, Creative LicenseScreening:  Copyright Criminals (dir. Benjamin Franzen, 2009)Discussion Question (# 4)Mid-term Examination Distributed
*Week 7—Sampling Soul DivasBlack Femininity as Intellectual PropertyOctober 18, 2011
This week we will focus on "gendering" soul.  We will explore a black women's tradition within soul aesthetics and cultural forms.  Using gender, class, and sexuality as critical lenses, we will examine the interplay of gender and sexual politics, black musical traditions, and sampling. We will also  consider the relationship between soul expressions and black womanhood. 
Readings: "'All That You Can't Leave Behind': Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe" by Daphne Brooks, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 8.1 (2008) 180-204; "Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics by Jason King, TDR Fall 2002, Vol. 46, No. 3 (T175), Pages 54-81; "The "Batty" Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body," Janell Hobson, Hypatia , Vol. 18, No. 4, Women, Art, and Aesthetics (Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp. 87-105
Discussion Question (# 4)Midterm Examination Due
Week 8—Sampling The Post-Soul (The R. Kelly re-mix)Toward a Post-Soul AestheticOctober 25, 2011
Well before sampling became the lingua franca of cultural appropriation, a generation of Black artists and thinkers—the so-called Post-Soul Generation—began to appropriate Soul Culture and remake it to fit the demands of the post-Civil Rights era.
Readings: Neal, Soul Babies | Chap 1: "You Remind Me of Something: Towards a Post-Soul Aesthetic; Chap 2: "Sweetback's Revenge: Gangsters, Blaxploitation, and Black Middle-Class Identity; Chap 3: Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Gender Politics
Discussion Question (# 5)
Week 9—Sampling Black ThoughtVoices of the Post-Soul IntelligentsiaNovember 1, 2011
Armed with access to new and innovative technologies and an affinity for popular culture, the post-Soul generation began to articulate a view of the world that samples, appropriated, remixed, mashed, parodied, etc existing black thought.
Readings: Neal, Soul Babies | Chap 4: The Post-Soul Intelligentsia: Mass Media, Popular Culture, and Social Praxis; Chap 5: Native Tongues: Voices of the Post-Soul Intelligentsia
Discussion Question (# 6)
Week 10—Sampling QueerQueer Sounds, Queer SamplesNovember 8, 2011
Although African American musical forms like hip hop are now accepted forms of mainstream popular music, not all of the music produced within these  genres are accepted.  Sampling Queer offers a critical way of thinking about how various sonic tropes that are sampled are often rendered queer by virtue of not adhering to conventional understandings of soul, hip hop, and R&B.
Readings: "Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no": Grace Jones and the performance of Strange in the Post-Soul Moment, "Francesca Royster, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory , Volume 19, Number 1, March 2009 , pp. 77-94(18); "Any Love: Silence, Theft, and Rumor in the Work of Luther Vandross," Jason King , Callaloo, Vol. 23, No. 1, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender: Literature and Culture (Winter, 2000), pp. 422-447Discussion Question (# 7)
Week 11—Sampling MarvinThe Art, Loves & Demons of a Soul ManNovember 15, 2011
As the "Crown Prince" of Motown Records, Marvin Gaye as an example of the quintessential "Soul Man," a secular figure who often carried a much cultural weight as his "Race Man," counterparts.  In this session we will examine the career and influence of Gaye and the way he has been sampled.
Readings: Dyson, Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin GayeDiscussion Question (# 8)
Week 12—Sampling HypertextHypertext/Hypermedia as SamplingNovember 29, 2011
Ricardo Cortez Cruz's 1995 novel Five Days of Bleeding offers a brilliant entry into the sampling of everyday life, using hypertext, in a historical moment when hypertext was just becoming available to many via the internet.
Readings: Cruz, Five Days of Bleeding.
Discussion Question (#9)
Week 13—Sampling Shawn CarterSampling and Cosmopolitan Identity in Hip-HopDecember 6, 2011
Jay Z offers an interesting "text" to examine how sampling might be manifested in performance, musical production, identity politics and notions of black masculinity.
Readings: Bailey, ed., Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop's Philosopher KingDiscussion Question (#10)Final Examination Distributed

Access to the Tower: Conferences as Examples of Academia's Exclusionary Practices

Access to the Tower: Conferences as Examples of Academia's Exclusionary Practices by John (J.D.) Roberts | Special to NewBlackMan
As an academic at a major university in the U.S., my university email inbox is frequently bombarded with opportunities for grants, scholarships, fellowships, and the occasional invitation to attend or submit to an academic conference. While many might view these emails as inbox clutter, my curiosity usually gets the best of me, so I end up reading them all (at least a little bit). This past fall, I received an email that quite by accident made me rethink the entire mission statement of what it is to be in academia. An email announced a conference exploring the *Popular Topic* on campus. Intrigued, I then saw the sticker price to attend: $60 for graduate students. While interested, that was a bit much in my opinion to attend. This was not the heart of the story though. My eye then went to the price for the general public to attend: $100. In an era where public suspicion against the supposed Marxist and socialist agendas of academics reigns (do not forget our secret Muslim socialist terrorist President Obama too!), I found it disheartening to see such a large price tag for the public to attend. I believe there are many people in the community that might have attended a conference such as this if they A) knew about it and B) could comfortably afford it. Pricing the average citizen out who might want to listen and/or participate in the conference is exclusionary and counterproductive. The exclusion of the public from academic events is an important issue for numerous reasons, one of which is the current state of politics and public debate. The current sociopolitical climate in America has created a highly contentious atmosphere, particularly in public debates involving the humanities. In academic fields where "facts" are often debated and disputed as part of the fields' very structures, public utilization of knowledge from these fields has always been and remains a tricky endeavor. Witness the recent factual distortions and errors regarding Revolutionary-era American history by Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, as well as the callous and ridiculous discussions of Progressive-era America by Glenn Beck to see how "facts" are utilized for debate by public figures. Why does this matter to academics? These very public and outspoken public figures are often one of the main sources of history/politics/economics/sociology for an American public that does not have the time, patience, desire or energy to read. More people rely on TV news montages on the Civil War or the Ken Burns documentary than on texts by famous historians such as David Blight or Eric Foner. While public figures such as Beck and Palin speak directly to an audience on TV and in public events, academics often cloister themselves behind university doors, speaking primarily to other academics in forums and conferences, and writing highly specialized and impenetrable texts that sell heavily to university libraries instead of the general public. What they know and discuss often does not get disseminated to the general public in a palatable manner with the proper context and evidence. However, this piece is not an indictment of academia, but rather a rallying cry. Simply stated, we can do better. Maintaining imagined walls between academia and the surrounding communities alienates the community from everyday academic streams of discourse and keeps the public unfamiliar with academia and academics. In addition, creating boundaries between academia and the surrounding community disallows the growth and development of Antonio Gramsci's conceptualization of the organic intellectual that is in tune with the community and its problems. So many fields in the humanities like to quote and interpret the writings of Gramsci, but few seem to follow his advice. Most importantly though, by maintaining imagined walls between academia and the surrounding community, academics unnecessarily construct and replicate the conditions for some of their own failures. By maintaining rigid divides between inside and outside academia to differentiate spaces, academics have missed the chance to hear, consider and absorb different and diverse outside perspectives, thoughts and opinions that could enrich their own research. Moreover, this differentiation of space has created public suspicion over what goes on inside those imagined walls, due to the public's lack of access to these exclusive interior spaces. This suspicion has bred distrust of academics and bled into high stakes debates on issues such as climate change and the economic effects of health care reform in America. Perhaps the most immediate condition the divide has created is missed opportunities for academics. In an America currently riddled with colossal debt, bad university investments and tightening state/school budgets, the academy (especially the humanities) needs to find new ways to make money and increase visibility and self-sustainability. With an academic landscape hardwired to favor science, engineering, and business due to their profit generating activities, the humanities need to follow suit in an increasingly hypercompetitive playing field. By eschewing public participation and consumption in events such as forums and conferences, humanities academics miss out on incredible opportunities to take advantage of university/public networking, business linkages and joint partnerships in business, marketing, promotion and revenue generation. I will use my example of the *Popular Topic* conference as a template. If the conference heads had marketed and promoted in the community and charged a lower conference fee instead of posting fliers primarily on campus and sending out university emails, they might have been able to generate more outside interest and more revenue at "the gate." More heads of many different stripes walking through that conference door to listen and participate in the debate on the *Popular Topic* could have generated its own interest in the outside community through word of mouth. Through dissemination of knowledge, content, and active discussion from the public participant going back into the community, the conference could build word of mouth and interest in the surrounding community over time. By charging hefty amounts to attend the conference and promoting the conference in limited fashion, the academics involved reaffirmed their commitment to space differentiation, adherence to old methodology, exclusion, and disconnection from the surrounding public. We as academics are better than this. We are in a privileged position in higher education, and we should share the wealth of knowledge, resources and experiences we have with our surrounding communities as much as possible to form bridges of understanding, communication, and business opportunities. Acting as gatekeepers or bouncers outside an exclusive club creates a public suspicious of our intentions, hostile to our aims and uncooperative in helping to achieve our shared goals. The problem is particularly acute in increasingly underfunded/defunded humanities departments throughout the United States. Grants and endowments across the United States have simply dried up. The humanities need the public's support whether they realize it or not. The hard sciences and engineering have routinely shown the public their utility. Now, humanities departments nationwide need to publicly display their utility instead of hiding their light under a basket.    ***John (J.D.) Roberts is a PhD student in the History Dept at UMass-Amherst. He focuses on drug trafficking history in Latin America, but has researched and written on a wide array of issues globally, particularly globalization and illegality.

Filmmaker Julie Dash to Speak at Duke on 20th Anniversary of 'Daughters of the Dust'

Durham, NC - On the 20th anniversary of its release, Julie Dash will discuss her film " Daughters of the Dust " following the film's screening at Duke University on Thursday, Sept. 8.
The film, which kicks off the Duke African and African American Studies department film series, will be shown at 6 p.m. at the Nasher Museum of Art.  A discussion with Dash and art history professor Richard Powell will follow the screening. The event is free and open to the public.
"With the spirited public conversations about films like 'Precious,' 'For Colored Girls' and, most recently, 'The Help,' it's clear that the moving image continues to be one of the critical sites of interests about the preservation and dissemination of images of black humanity," said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke and the event organizer. "With our film series, we are hoping to intervene in these conversations by highlighting the expansive range of films that reflect black experiences."
"Daughters of the Dust," released in 1991, was the first feature by an African-American woman to gain national theatrical release and was named to the National Film Registry, a collection of films deemed by the Library of Congress to be national treasures.
The film draws on Dash's South Carolina heritage and focuses on three generations of women with roots in the Sea Islands and Gullah culture. Set in 1902, "Daughters of the Dust" grapples with slavery's legacy, migration, sexual abuse and sexual freedom, and maintaining tradition amid modern pressures.
Dash's visit also will include screenings of her short film "Praise House," a collaboration with the founder and choreographer of Urban Bush Women.
The 2011-12 African and African American Studies film series, curated by Neal and history graduate student Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell, will continue in October with "Handsworth Songs" (1986), an experimental film documenting the 1985 racial unrest in Britain.
For more information, visit Duke's African and African American Studies website.

Historians Respond: Who Needs The Help?

Historians Respond: Who Needs The Help? by Jim Downs & Thavolia Glymph | HuffingtonPost
The Help has stirred up a controversy.

On the one side are the faithful fans of the book-turned-film who have enthusiastically praised its moral lessons, believable characters and insider's view into the lives of black women domestics in the mid-20th century South, an interpretation author Kathryn Stockett leaves room for. "The Help is fiction, by and large," she writes, positing an implicit claim about the reality of black and white women's lives during the 1960s.

On the other side stand the mostly black writers, intellectuals and historians who have challenged the problematic and often inaccurate portrayal of black women in the film and the troubling way that the civil rights movement is treated. As Martha Southgate incisively stated, "within the civil rights movement, white people were the help."

Indeed, the fantasy life of the Old South is given new life in the book through the story of Fay Belle. The elderly woman remembers hiding from the dreaded Yankees in a steam trunk with her young mistress during the Civil War and cradling her former mistress in her old age. They were "best friends" to the end. Amazingly, the elderly black woman would have been at least 100 years old when Skeeter interviewed her. But, no matter. This is "fiction, by and large."

If fans placed themselves in the position of Rachel, the very minor black character in the film, they might have a better understanding of the plight of black women domestics.

Rachel is the daughter of Constantine, who is subsequently fired simply because Rachel makes an unexpected early visit to see her mother. We learn that Rachel and Constantine then move to Chicago, because Constantine cannot survive on her own in Mississippi once she is without employment, but ironically when she makes it to the North, she dies.

From Rachel's perspective, Skeeter is essentially irrelevant. Yet, according to the logic of the film, Skeeter is a hero because she exposes the rotten reasons why Constantine got fired and, most of all, she reveals the evilness of Hilly Holbrook, the film's leading antagonist. But that's not the point. The point is that black women had no choice but to work as domestics. Once Constantine was fired, she lost everything; there were no other options available to her. Racism is structural, not the result of a white character's personality or a black character's indefatigable work ethic. It does not matter how sassy Minnie was or how scrumptious her pies were, the systematic economic forces that produced racism forced her to pull her daughter out of school so that she could work as a maid to help pay the bills.

The problem with The Help, therefore, is that it tells the story of black oppression as a story of a good versus evil in the way Sunday school lessons are taught to 5-year-olds. As long as Aibileen can muster up the courage to call Hilly a "godless" woman, then she is redeemed and Hilly is punished. Yet, racism is not defined by how sharp Hilly can squint her eyes or broadcast an accusation. Rather, racism is the result of economic forces that separated blacks from whites, rich from poor, and made it downright impossible for black people to escape abject poverty, no matter how much they shined the silver or how well they cared for the white children whom they raised.

Domestic work is a job. It is a job that historically has devolved to people all over the world who are prevented -- by race, class and ethnic proscriptions -- from holding any other kind of job. Domestic workers do not love their employers and their employers do not love them, which does not rule out the capacity for sympathy or empathy on either side.

If black women employed to take care of white children did that job well, that need not be translated as "inexplicable love." Fans of the book-turned-film might well ponder why employers of domestic workers needed to feel loved by people they hired and expected to work under the most degrading circumstances.

The intimacy embedded in the very nature of the household work and the supposed privacy of the site in which it is carried out may mimic family relations but can neither create nor sustain them. The fictional white employers of the fictional Jackson, Miss., came from a long line of women who had organized to fight for separate restrooms, drinking fountains and accommodations for their "help" and all black people.

Just because you want to provide the black women's perspective does not mean that you did. Just because you think you are embarking on a social justice crusade does not mean you have not redefined stereotypes in the process. Just because the civil rights movement happened does not entitle you to write about it without understanding it -- even if a black woman raised you.
***
Jim Downs is an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College and author of "Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction" (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Thavolia Glymph is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Duke University and author of "Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household" (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

First published in The Durham News, Sunday, August 28, 2011.

Melissa Harris Perry on the 6th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry marked the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a searing monologue about what she saw as the country's failure to learn from the disaster on Monday's "Rachel Maddow Show."

"It Doesn't Get Any More Real Than Perry"?: The Right's Stake in Real Americaness

 
"It Doesn't Get Any More Real Than Perry"?:  The Right's Stake in Real Americaness  
by Theresa Runstedtler | special to NewBlackMan
"People of all persuasions are sick, sick, SICK of mollycoddling, pandering and Edwardian (as in John Edwards) phoniness . . . . It doesn't get any more real than Perry. The elite may call it 'swagger'; I call it a real man with real convictions and the courage to stand up for them, which happen to comport with the majority of Americans. Or as they say in Texas, he is had and cattle. And the coupe de gras, he is a spiritually anchored and philosophically happy warrior." – Republican strategist Mary Matalin on presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas)
Since when did the Right (and more specifically white Republican men from Texas) become the arbiters of what it means to be a "real American man"?
As a Canadian transplant, I've always found the theatrics of the U.S. political scene fascinating, where big money campaigns seem interminable and public spectacle usually trumps any in-depth discussion of policy. American politics is a virtual blood-sport with all its sound bite and bombastic fury. Texas Governor Rick Perry is just the latest Republican to enter the pissing contest that is the 2012 presidential campaign, ready to show the "real America" that he has the balls to lead the nation.
Of course, Perry is simply following in the well-worn footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush, with his self-righteous swagger, Texas drawl, and rugged, frontier persona. He prefers cowboy boots to dress shoes and proudly recounts shooting a coyote with his .380 Ruger (it had a laser sight). He wears his Christianity on his sleeve, most recently playing the patriarchal prophet at his Houston prayer rally. Even though Bush's people reportedly disdain Perry, he seems to have taken many of his moves right out of their campaign playbook.
While Bush had to manufacture a frontier persona to cover up his elite, northeastern roots (much like President Theodore Roosevelt back in the early 1900s), Perry actually has a real connection to rural Texas. As his campaign website triumphantly claims, "A fifth generation Texan, Governor Rick Perry has taken an extraordinary Texas journey, from a tenant farm in the rolling West Texas plains to the governor's office of our nation's second largest state." Perry and his people would clearly like us to think that he made it to his current political station by pure, hard-scrabble individualism (with a little help from the Man upstairs), but even a cursory look at his record suggests otherwise.
As his website extols, "Rick Perry has led a life of public service, starting in the United States Air Force and continuing over two decades in elected office." Thanks to a clever, rhetorical twist, his work for one of the largest wings of the federal government – the military – can be touted as admirable public service, in contrast to the other government services he so desperately wants to cut. As the wife of a former Marine, I also know that serving in the military makes one eligible for government-backed housing loans and educational funding, but Perry would argue that unlike other handouts these are appropriate entitlements for deserving people. Perhaps most ironic of all, he boasts two decades as an elected official, even as he calls for the shrinking of government. (I'm pretty sure that he won't be handing back his tax-payer-provided pension or healthcare.)
Perry claims credit for "creating a Texas of unlimited opportunity and prosperity by improving education, securing the border and increasing economic development through classic conservative values." However, his real record and the real-life conditions in his state tell a different story. Despite his vociferous condemnation of the federal stimulus bill, Perry has a long history of fighting for federal money to help fund state projects. Even members of his own party have decried his blatant "corporate cronyism." He has used handouts from the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) to pad the pockets of his friends in big business, who in turn have helped to fill his campaign coffers. The free market's hand is not so invisible in the Lone Star state.
Misery and misfortune have also accompanied Perry's "Texas Miracle." While the state boasts a low unemployment rate, it is tied with Mississippi for having the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the nation and bears the unique distinction of having the highest percentage of residents without medical insurance (many of whom are children). Evidently, the governor's narrative of the white Christian patriarch who pulls himself (and his frontier state) up by his own bootstraps is just that – a narrative.
Still, I don't want to use Perry as a simple straw man, since many Republicans share both his basic campaign tactics and political worldview – the most extreme example being the so-called Tea Party (which is incidentally bank-rolled by the uber-rich Koch brothers and conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch). Indeed, the most notorious peddlers of this racially-inflected, Alpha-male individualism are not what they seem; many of them have effectively consolidated their power and wealth on the backs of "real Americans."
So, after the disastrous Bush years and subsequent economic crash, how is it that this narrative remains so seductive to voters, particularly (white) working people? Arguably, this fake populist narrative has become all the more seductive for many struggling to make it through the Great Recession, even as the chasm between blue-collar (especially male) laborers and the super-rich continues to widen. So again, why in the heck are people continuing to support the Right's line about the need to scale back/privatize public services, bust any remaining unions, and keep all industry free of regulation – things that have not proven to be in their (or their families') interest over the past thirty years?
One thing is certain: the Republicans are great communicators steeped in the art of storytelling. Over the decades, the party has masterfully manipulated a reactionary tale of race, gender, and class, which it consistently invokes to fire up the anger, fear, and prejudice of its base, pushing them to the polls. Underlying its message of constitutional purity, individual rights, lower taxes, and small government is the specter of nefarious collusion between the corrupt and wasteful plutocrats in Washington, DC and the masses of undeserving (read: black and brown) poor.
In short, more taxes paid to the federal government somehow translates into more handouts for the supposedly lazy/criminal/promiscuous/spend-thrift/illegal-immigrant poor and therefore less money in the pockets of hard-working/family-oriented/God-fearing, real (read: white) Americans. The election of the United States' first black president, Barack Obama, has only made this convoluted logic more convincing. And, the recent debt downgrade certainly didn't help matters. Republican pundits could barely contain their glee that a black president presided over the nation's first slide into "bad credit."
The resounding calls to "take our country back" are just the latest iteration of the Right's recycled story of virtuous white victims bravely battling to reinstate patriarchal law and order – a frontier tale for the twenty-first century. Of course, the real question is "back from whom and back to when"? One only needs to look at the Tea Party's deification of the founding fathers, its revisionist history of the revolutionary war and constitution, its sanitizing of American slavery, its elision of Native American genocide and dispossession, and its refusal to acknowledge the nation's imperial past (and present) to get an idea of the answer.
They are effectively channeling the rage of their target audience – disgruntled white working- and middle-class people who feel increasingly wedged between America's soulless elite and the pathological poor. Two of the main pillars of the "Taking Our Country Back Tour," the call to lower taxes (read: tax breaks for the super-rich and corporate giants) and shrink government (read: further cutbacks to social programs and entitlements), can only appeal to this target audience if cloaked in a siege mentality.
On the one hand, the tour's website links to a Fox News feature on country singer John Rich's anthem decrying government bailouts and Wall Street bonuses. Yet lurking beneath the surface of this populist rhetoric is an even more pernicious disdain for the black and brown people who have supposedly plunged this great democracy into moral depravity and economic decline, from "affirmative action" elites, to illegal aliens, to violent gangbangers, to drug addicts, and welfare moms. To make matters worse, the 2010 census confirmed that America's nonwhite population is booming. Even though white wealth still dwarfs that of nonwhites and the logic of white supremacy still permeates U.S. institutions, Tea Partiers somehow feel they're being pushed aside.
In some respects, white working- and middle-class Americans are right to feel their privilege and stability melting away, but not because of any great government gift to the undeserving poor. Instead, thanks to the Republicans, Warren Buffet and other billionaires are now taxed at a lower rate than the average American. Still, to sell its fiscal agenda, the conservative elite urges its rank-and-file to cling to the romantic frontier images of the family farmer and the independent shopkeeper desperately in need of relief from taxes and regulation – images of declining significance in an age of corporate consolidation, globalization, and financialization. In reality, their economic fates are more closely tied to those of the very people Republican leaders encourage them to despise. This is truly "class warfare" at its best – except, the "haves" have unleashed the "have-nots" to fight amongst themselves.
The recent "Marriage Vow" is yet another example of how conservative class warfare relies on well-honed stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality. In July there was a smattering of reactions to Tea Party candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) signing of this so-called "declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY." In particular, commentators criticized two of the vow's most egregious points: 1) it suggests black marriages and black children were better off under slavery than they are today; and 2) it endorses the idea that homosexuality is simply a deviant lifestyle choice. While both these points are undoubtedly inaccurate and inflammatory, I want to dig deeper into the underlying logic of this conservative pledge.
In a nutshell, it attributes most of the nation's problems (whether social, moral, or economic) to the supposed breakdown of the heterosexual, patriarchal family. According to its line of reasoning, single (read: black) mothers are the causal link to "poverty, pathology and prison." Moreover, the vow blames "family fragmentation" and its "costs to the justice system" for the expansion of government services and higher taxes, and for the resulting rise of the federal deficit and public debt burden. All of this has put undue pressure on American (read: white, nuclear) families.
The declaration even suggests that the status of U.S. women and children is declining because of the nation's collective "debasement" of marriage through quickie divorce, premarital sex and cohabitation, and its growing acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, it couches these evils as the root cause of "human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, [and] abortion." According to the vow, restoring Christian, heterosexual patriarchy (while also reducing taxes and shrinking government) is the only out of our current moral and economic dilemmas.
Poor black people are the obvious bogeymen haunting the text of this treatise on societal decay, with its invocation of slavery and the Moynihan Report of 1965 (which blamed the black out-of-wedlock birthrate for black poverty). Gays are also used for rhetorical flourish, as deviant foils to "real American men" (and their real families). These are the racial and sexual demons that foreclose any real discussion of how the U.S. neo-imperial wars, in tandem with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have contributed to the deficit. They turn the public's attention away from how financial deregulation fostered the mortgage crisis, which led to the economic crash, and then to the government's bailout of Wall Street and to the passage of the federal stimulus bill to help get Main Street back to work.
Curiously missing from the vow is any mention of the very real obstacles facing poor, especially black and brown families, over the past few decades. Deindustrialization has changed the face of the U.S. job market, leaving those without access to high-quality education with few opportunities to thrive in the mainstream economy. Yet, under No Child Left Behind, little other than high-stakes testing has been implemented to improve public schools and to help outfit inner-city youth for the rapidly shifting information economy.                  Not coincidentally, this has taken place right alongside the breathtaking expansion of the prison industrial complex, which disproportionately incarcerates black and brown people (many of them fathers and mothers) for non-violent, drug-related offenses. The prison system happens to be one area of the government that both conservative and liberal leaders are not so eager to downsize, particularly because of the huge profits to be made from servicing this captive market.
What Michelle Alexander has called The New Jim Crow , and in the case of California what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has dubbed The Golden Gulag , has done nothing to alleviate the interconnected problems of poverty, instability, hopelessness, and addiction in the United States. Instead, this fiscally irresponsible and morally reprehensible system cages and dehumanizes disadvantaged black and brown people who have been essentially left behind by the new economy. (And, it doesn't help that once you're a felon, you face employment and housing discrimination, disfranchisement, and the denial of public benefits and services.)
It is a wonder that anyone can sustain a happy, healthy, and successful family under such conditions. Things have only worsened with the recession, which has slammed black and brown people with disproportionate ferocity. Regardless of these realities, the Republican myth-making machine has somehow managed to sell a political story of white victimhood. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad speculate, "When you're going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it's all too easy to imagine that it's because someone else is climbing up over your back."
Predictably, (white) "frontier" men like Perry and "traditional" (white) women like Bachmann have emerged as the heroes of the conservative's recycled tale of redemption. In one fell swoop, they will stamp out moral pathology and bring back economic prosperity in the name of "real America." (While Bachmann might "submit" to her husband, this "hombre-ette" claims she has the balls to take on Washington.)
In contrast, the "sissies" of this story are labor organizers, community activists, professors, and basically anyone left of center (or arguably, centrist). Workers' grievances, intellectual analysis, and anything smacking of "wealth redistribution" or "social justice" are marked as effeminate, effete, even queer. After all, real American men suck it up at all cost. Real men (and their faithful women) don't protest about working conditions, or the poor state of public education, or the lack of affordable healthcare. Unfortunately, these calls for (white) men to stand up and be men, and for (white) women to stand by their men, come at the expense of building progressive coalitions for change across racial, gender, class, and other differences.
Middle-class liberals and leftists are by no means blameless for the current state of affairs. We have largely sat back and watched all of this happen, throwing up our hands in dismay while living smugly in our supposedly "post-racial" bourgeois enclaves. Some even naively hoped that voting Barack Obama ("the Magic Negro") into the White House would suddenly change the political and economic trajectory of the United States. (But that's just not how change happens.)
At the same time that liberals have allowed the Right to hijack popular definitions of masculinity, family, and the "real America," they have also played into the general erasure of class from political discussions. The democrats' (especially President Obama's) hesitancy to call the debt-ceiling crisis for what it was – a means to preserve the privilege of the wealthy at the expense of the rest of America – is just another example of the reticence of many U.S. liberals to acknowledge and discuss the persistence of gaping wealth disparities.
In a recent episode of the Real Housewives of New York, Alex McCord declared that she would rather say "see you next Tuesday" (read: c-u-n-t) than ever utter the other c-word, "class." The implication being that class is not something for polite conversation; it's a dirty word. Before the recession, many middle-class liberals assumed that "class" didn't apply to them, turning a blind eye to the nation's increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Now that the same issues that first hit those at the bottom of the economic ladder are making their way upward, they suddenly want action.
The solution for liberals and leftists is not to become more ruggedly Alpha-male or to invest their energies in upholding patriarchy. This is no time to throw our collective "dicks" on the table – we will never win that pissing contest, nor should we want to. Instead, we need to be more forceful in calling the Right out on its clever, yet perverse manipulation of racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes. We need to call them out on their fake populism.
We also need to develop strong and inclusive coalitions, in ways that don't involve the proverbial chest-thumping and demonization of those who aren't like us or those who don't fit prevailing definitions of "normal." We need to foster movements for change that go beyond a narrow focus on individual rights and "family" in the most narrowly constructed ways.
The "real America" is already standing up, but not always in ways that are palatable to our bourgeois sensibilities. We need to take seriously the voices of prisoners on hunger strikes, of student and community activists working in the inner cities, and even of flash mobs expressing their frustration at the unequal state of the affairs. They have something to teach us, if we will just listen.
***
Theresa Runstedtler is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo and, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum for the 2011-2012 academic year.  Her book, tentatively titled, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of California Press) drops in Spring 2012.

"It's Doesn't Get Any More Real Than Perry"?: The Right's Stake in Real Americaness

"It's Doesn't Get Any More Real Than Perry"?:  The Right's Stake in Real Americaness by Theresa Runstedtler | special to NewBlackMan
"People of all persuasions are sick, sick, SICK of mollycoddling, pandering and Edwardian (as in John Edwards) phoniness . . . . It doesn't get any more real than Perry. The elite may call it 'swagger'; I call it a real man with real convictions and the courage to stand up for them, which happen to comport with the majority of Americans. Or as they say in Texas, he is had and cattle. And the coupe de gras, he is a spiritually anchored and philosophically happy warrior." – Republican strategist Mary Matalin on presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas)
Since when did the Right (and more specifically white Republican men from Texas) become the arbiters of what it means to be a "real American man"?
As a Canadian transplant, I've always found the theatrics of the U.S. political scene fascinating, where big money campaigns seem interminable and public spectacle usually trumps any in-depth discussion of policy. American politics is a virtual blood-sport with all its sound bite and bombastic fury. Texas Governor Rick Perry is just the latest Republican to enter the pissing contest that is the 2012 presidential campaign, ready to show the "real America" that he has the balls to lead the nation.
Of course, Perry is simply following in the well-worn footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush, with his self-righteous swagger, Texas drawl, and rugged, frontier persona. He prefers cowboy boots to dress shoes and proudly recounts shooting a coyote with his .380 Ruger (it had a laser sight). He wears his Christianity on his sleeve, most recently playing the patriarchal prophet at his Houston prayer rally. Even though Bush's people reportedly disdain Perry, he seems to have taken many of his moves right out of their campaign playbook.
While Bush had to manufacture a frontier persona to cover up his elite, northeastern roots (much like President Theodore Roosevelt back in the early 1900s), Perry actually has a real connection to rural Texas. As his campaign website triumphantly claims, "A fifth generation Texan, Governor Rick Perry has taken an extraordinary Texas journey, from a tenant farm in the rolling West Texas plains to the governor's office of our nation's second largest state." Perry and his people would clearly like us to think that he made it to his current political station by pure, hard-scrabble individualism (with a little help from the Man upstairs), but even a cursory look at his record suggests otherwise.
As his website extols, "Rick Perry has led a life of public service, starting in the United States Air Force and continuing over two decades in elected office." Thanks to a clever, rhetorical twist, his work for one of the largest wings of the federal government – the military – can be touted as admirable public service, in contrast to the other government services he so desperately wants to cut. As the wife of a former Marine, I also know that serving in the military makes one eligible for government-backed housing loans and educational funding, but Perry would argue that unlike other handouts these are appropriate entitlements for deserving people. Perhaps most ironic of all, he boasts two decades as an elected official, even as he calls for the shrinking of government. (I'm pretty sure that he won't be handing back his tax-payer-provided pension or healthcare.)
Perry claims credit for "creating a Texas of unlimited opportunity and prosperity by improving education, securing the border and increasing economic development through classic conservative values." However, his real record and the real-life conditions in his state tell a different story. Despite his vociferous condemnation of the federal stimulus bill, Perry has a long history of fighting for federal money to help fund state projects. Even members of his own party have decried his blatant "corporate cronyism." He has used handouts from the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) to pad the pockets of his friends in big business, who in turn have helped to fill his campaign coffers. The free market's hand is not so invisible in the Lone Star state.
Misery and misfortune have also accompanied Perry's "Texas Miracle." While the state boasts a low unemployment rate, it is tied with Mississippi for having the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the nation and bears the unique distinction of having the highest percentage of residents without medical insurance (many of whom are children). Evidently, the governor's narrative of the white Christian patriarch who pulls himself (and his frontier state) up by his own bootstraps is just that – a narrative.
Still, I don't want to use Perry as a simple straw man, since many Republicans share both his basic campaign tactics and political worldview – the most extreme example being the so-called Tea Party (which is incidentally bank-rolled by the uber-rich Koch brothers and conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch). Indeed, the most notorious peddlers of this racially-inflected, Alpha-male individualism are not what they seem; many of them have effectively consolidated their power and wealth on the backs of "real Americans."
So, after the disastrous Bush years and subsequent economic crash, how is it that this narrative remains so seductive to voters, particularly (white) working people? Arguably, this fake populist narrative has become all the more seductive for many struggling to make it through the Great Recession, even as the chasm between blue-collar (especially male) laborers and the super-rich continues to widen. So again, why in the heck are people continuing to support the Right's line about the need to scale back/privatize public services, bust any remaining unions, and keep all industry free of regulation – things that have not proven to be in their (or their families') interest over the past thirty years?
One thing is certain: the Republicans are great communicators steeped in the art of storytelling. Over the decades, the party has masterfully manipulated a reactionary tale of race, gender, and class, which it consistently invokes to fire up the anger, fear, and prejudice of its base, pushing them to the polls. Underlying its message of constitutional purity, individual rights, lower taxes, and small government is the specter of nefarious collusion between the corrupt and wasteful plutocrats in Washington, DC and the masses of undeserving (read: black and brown) poor.
In short, more taxes paid to the federal government somehow translates into more handouts for the supposedly lazy/criminal/promiscuous/spend-thrift/illegal-immigrant poor and therefore less money in the pockets of hard-working/family-oriented/God-fearing, real (read: white) Americans. The election of the United States' first black president, Barack Obama, has only made this convoluted logic more convincing. And, the recent debt downgrade certainly didn't help matters. Republican pundits could barely contain their glee that a black president presided over the nation's first slide into "bad credit."
The resounding calls to "take our country back" are just the latest iteration of the Right's recycled story of virtuous white victims bravely battling to reinstate patriarchal law and order – a frontier tale for the twenty-first century. Of course, the real question is "back from whom and back to when"? One only needs to look at the Tea Party's deification of the founding fathers, its revisionist history of the revolutionary war and constitution, its sanitizing of American slavery, its elision of Native American genocide and dispossession, and its refusal to acknowledge the nation's imperial past (and present) to get an idea of the answer.
They are effectively channeling the rage of their target audience – disgruntled white working- and middle-class people who feel increasingly wedged between America's soulless elite and the pathological poor. Two of the main pillars of the "Taking Our Country Back Tour," the call to lower taxes (read: tax breaks for the super-rich and corporate giants) and shrink government (read: further cutbacks to social programs and entitlements), can only appeal to this target audience if cloaked in a siege mentality.
On the one hand, the tour's website links to a Fox News feature on country singer John Rich's anthem decrying government bailouts and Wall Street bonuses. Yet lurking beneath the surface of this populist rhetoric is an even more pernicious disdain for the black and brown people who have supposedly plunged this great democracy into moral depravity and economic decline, from "affirmative action" elites, to illegal aliens, to violent gangbangers, to drug addicts, and welfare moms. To make matters worse, the 2010 census confirmed that America's nonwhite population is booming. Even though white wealth still dwarfs that of nonwhites and the logic of white supremacy still permeates U.S. institutions, Tea Partiers somehow feel they're being pushed aside.
In some respects, white working- and middle-class Americans are right to feel their privilege and stability melting away, but not because of any great government gift to the undeserving poor. Instead, thanks to the Republicans, Warren Buffet and other billionaires are now taxed at a lower rate than the average American. Still, to sell its fiscal agenda, the conservative elite urges its rank-and-file to cling to the romantic frontier images of the family farmer and the independent shopkeeper desperately in need of relief from taxes and regulation – images of declining significance in an age of corporate consolidation, globalization, and financialization. In reality, their economic fates are more closely tied to those of the very people Republican leaders encourage them to despise. This is truly "class warfare" at its best – except, the "haves" have unleashed the "have-nots" to fight amongst themselves.
The recent "Marriage Vow" is yet another example of how conservative class warfare relies on well-honed stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality. In July there was a smattering of reactions to Tea Party candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) signing of this so-called "declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY." In particular, commentators criticized two of the vow's most egregious points: 1) it suggests black marriages and black children were better off under slavery than they are today; and 2) it endorses the idea that homosexuality is simply a deviant lifestyle choice. While both these points are undoubtedly inaccurate and inflammatory, I want to dig deeper into the underlying logic of this conservative pledge.
In a nutshell, it attributes most of the nation's problems (whether social, moral, or economic) to the supposed breakdown of the heterosexual, patriarchal family. According to its line of reasoning, single (read: black) mothers are the causal link to "poverty, pathology and prison." Moreover, the vow blames "family fragmentation" and its "costs to the justice system" for the expansion of government services and higher taxes, and for the resulting rise of the federal deficit and public debt burden. All of this has put undue pressure on American (read: white, nuclear) families.
The declaration even suggests that the status of U.S. women and children is declining because of the nation's collective "debasement" of marriage through quickie divorce, premarital sex and cohabitation, and its growing acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, it couches these evils as the root cause of "human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, [and] abortion." According to the vow, restoring Christian, heterosexual patriarchy (while also reducing taxes and shrinking government) is the only out of our current moral and economic dilemmas.
Poor black people are the obvious bogeymen haunting the text of this treatise on societal decay, with its invocation of slavery and the Moynihan Report of 1965 (which blamed the black out-of-wedlock birthrate for black poverty). Gays are also used for rhetorical flourish, as deviant foils to "real American men" (and their real families). These are the racial and sexual demons that foreclose any real discussion of how the U.S. neo-imperial wars, in tandem with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have contributed to the deficit. They turn the public's attention away from how financial deregulation fostered the mortgage crisis, which led to the economic crash, and then to the government's bailout of Wall Street and to the passage of the federal stimulus bill to help get Main Street back to work.
Curiously missing from the vow is any mention of the very real obstacles facing poor, especially black and brown families, over the past few decades. Deindustrialization has changed the face of the U.S. job market, leaving those without access to high-quality education with few opportunities to thrive in the mainstream economy. Yet, under No Child Left Behind, little other than high-stakes testing has been implemented to improve public schools and to help outfit inner-city youth for the rapidly shifting information economy.                  Not coincidentally, this has taken place right alongside the breathtaking expansion of the prison industrial complex, which disproportionately incarcerates black and brown people (many of them fathers and mothers) for non-violent, drug-related offenses. The prison system happens to be one area of the government that both conservative and liberal leaders are not so eager to downsize, particularly because of the huge profits to be made from servicing this captive market.
What Michelle Alexander has called The New Jim Crow , and in the case of California what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has dubbed The Golden Gulag , has done nothing to alleviate the interconnected problems of poverty, instability, hopelessness, and addiction in the United States. Instead, this fiscally irresponsible and morally reprehensible system cages and dehumanizes disadvantaged black and brown people who have been essentially left behind by the new economy. (And, it doesn't help that once you're a felon, you face employment and housing discrimination, disfranchisement, and the denial of public benefits and services.)
It is a wonder that anyone can sustain a happy, healthy, and successful family under such conditions. Things have only worsened with the recession, which has slammed black and brown people with disproportionate ferocity. Regardless of these realities, the Republican myth-making machine has somehow managed to sell a political story of white victimhood. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad speculate, "When you're going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it's all too easy to imagine that it's because someone else is climbing up over your back."
Predictably, (white) "frontier" men like Perry and "traditional" (white) women like Bachmann have emerged as the heroes of the conservative's recycled tale of redemption. In one fell swoop, they will stamp out moral pathology and bring back economic prosperity in the name of "real America." (While Bachmann might "submit" to her husband, this "hombre-ette" claims she has the balls to take on Washington.)
In contrast, the "sissies" of this story are labor organizers, community activists, professors, and basically anyone left of center (or arguably, centrist). Workers' grievances, intellectual analysis, and anything smacking of "wealth redistribution" or "social justice" are marked as effeminate, effete, even queer. After all, real American men suck it up at all cost. Real men (and their faithful women) don't protest about working conditions, or the poor state of public education, or the lack of affordable healthcare. Unfortunately, these calls for (white) men to stand up and be men, and for (white) women to stand by their men, come at the expense of building progressive coalitions for change across racial, gender, class, and other differences.
Middle-class liberals and leftists are by no means blameless for the current state of affairs. We have largely sat back and watched all of this happen, throwing up our hands in dismay while living smugly in our supposedly "post-racial" bourgeois enclaves. Some even naively hoped that voting Barack Obama ("the Magic Negro") into the White House would suddenly change the political and economic trajectory of the United States. (But that's just not how change happens.)
At the same time that liberals have allowed the Right to hijack popular definitions of masculinity, family, and the "real America," they have also played into the general erasure of class from political discussions. The democrats' (especially President Obama's) hesitancy to call the debt-ceiling crisis for what it was – a means to preserve the privilege of the wealthy at the expense of the rest of America – is just another example of the reticence of many U.S. liberals to acknowledge and discuss the persistence of gaping wealth disparities.
In a recent episode of the Real Housewives of New York, Alex McCord declared that she would rather say "see you next Tuesday" (read: c-u-n-t) than ever utter the other c-word, "class." The implication being that class is not something for polite conversation; it's a dirty word. Before the recession, many middle-class liberals assumed that "class" didn't apply to them, turning a blind eye to the nation's increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Now that the same issues that first hit those at the bottom of the economic ladder are making their way upward, they suddenly want action.
The solution for liberals and leftists is not to become more ruggedly Alpha-male or to invest their energies in upholding patriarchy. This is no time to throw our collective "dicks" on the table – we will never win that pissing contest, nor should we want to. Instead, we need to be more forceful in calling the Right out on its clever, yet perverse manipulation of racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes. We need to call them out on their fake populism.
We also need to develop strong and inclusive coalitions, in ways that don't involve the proverbial chest-thumping and demonization of those who aren't like us or those who don't fit prevailing definitions of "normal." We need to foster movements for change that go beyond a narrow focus on individual rights and "family" in the most narrowly constructed ways.
The "real America" is already standing up, but not always in ways that are palatable to our bourgeois sensibilities. We need to take seriously the voices of prisoners on hunger strikes, of student and community activists working in the inner cities, and even of flash mobs expressing their frustration at the unequal state of the affairs. They have something to teach us, if we will just listen.
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Theresa Runstedtler is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo and, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum for the 2011-2012 academic year.  Her book, tentatively titled, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of California Press) drops in Spring 2012.

Mark Anthony Neal Reflects on the Life of Nickolas Ashford

The Michael Eric Dyson Show Monday August 29, 2011

Mark Anthony Neal Reflects on the Life of Nickolas Ashford
Last week, Motown singer and songwriter Nick Ashford died in New York City from throat cancer at the age of 70. He was half of the Motown duo Ashford & Simpson and, along with his wife, Valerie Simpson, penned such hits as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "You're All I Need To Get By," and "Reach Out And Touch Somebody's Hand," in addition to their own tunes like "It Seems to Hang On." As a singing duo, they were probably best known for their hit song "Solid." Music historian and Duke University Professor Dr. Mark Anthony Neal remembers Ashford's music and legacy.
[image error]Listen Now: Dr. Mark Anthony Neal