Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1065

Why do the Koch Brothers Want to End Public Education?

Brave New Foundation


Why do the Koch Brothers Want to End Public Education?

This film and investigation connects the dots and reveals why the Koch brothers are trying to end public education and how their wealth winds up in the hands of Jim Crow.

Tea Party Tar Babies

Tea Party Tar Babies by James Braxton Peterson | HuffPo BlackVoices
I do not accept Rep. Lamborn's apology for referring to the president of the United States as a tar baby. According to his spokesperson, what he had meant to say was that the president's policies are a quagmire. I don't accept this backtracked admission/apology, either. This "tar baby" epithet is just the latest in an intermittent string of racialized stunts, deployed in dog-whistle fashion -- usually by folks on the right, to inject culturally divisive sentiments into an already vitriolic public discourse. Rep. Joe Wilson called the president a liar in the midst of a presidential address to Congress. Mr. Pat Buchanan referred to the president as "your boy" in an on-air discussion with Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC. Fox News referred to the president's 50th birthday party as a "Hip-Hop BBQ." Many people (white and black) will not pay much attention to these veiled, high-pitched racial insults. As a nation, most Americans are more interested in economic stability and progress than this type of trite but not insignificant race baiting. Amongst the ironies operable in this quagmire is the fact that we are very much in need of centering race and ethnicity in our public discourse on economic recovery -- that is, if we can get black and brown folks back to work (especially if this effort can take the form of jobs to develop infrastructure), we can get a handle on our unemployment woes.
Recently it has become trendy for political pundits to pronounce the end of the Obama era. On the Aug. 3 "Ed Show," with guest host Michael Eric Dyson, Bill Maher, the left's Limbaugh, suggested that he had lost faith in Obama and that he was imminently beatable by the current, competency-challenged crop of Republican presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine being entangled with a Bachmann or Perry presidential administration for four years. In the wake of the Tea Party's attempt to stifle the American economy through the manipulation of our political system, folks would rather not face the ways in which race underwrites too much of the negative sentiment directed at this president, not to mention our willful dismissal of the inherited economic challenges of this moment in American history. I suppose the president's administration could and should tell a better story. Maybe they need a little bit of Uncle Remus up in the white house.
By S&P's own explanation, it was the political "brinksmanship" of the recent debt-ceiling debacle that informed their decision to downgrade the United States' credit rating, a decision that has had an exacerbating effect on an already vulnerable global economy. Surely the "conciliator-in-chief" cannot be accused of engaging in political brinksmanship. He has been the portrait of compromise, and in fact, the president has demonstrated a subtle understanding of what America is up against as long as the Tea Party Tar Babies continue their minority manipulation of the political process.
In the bit of chatter that surfaced in response to Rep. Lamborn's "tar baby" comment, most folks highlighted the conventional definition of the term as a doll covered in tar used to entrap Br'er Rabbit (that's shorthand vernacular for Brother Rabbit), a trickster figure made popular in the pages of the Uncle Remus stories. Some acknowledged the fact that the term has also been used as a racial epithet in reference to African Americans. One conservative writer disrespected the comedic legacy of the late Bernie Mac by suggesting that he was an "ignorant racist" for referring to himself as a "tar baby." No one has ventured to describe the history of slavery and lynching that directly inform the full meaning of the word "tar" for black folk in these United States. In Frederick Douglass' slave narrative he tells the parable of a garden on a plantation that was protected by a tarred fence. Enslaved black folk were barred from the fruits of their own labor by this fence. They were severely beaten if even a spec of tar was discovered on their person. Thus they came to "fear the tar as much as they did the lash." During the heyday of lynching, mobs of white Americans would tar, burn and dismember their black victims as public spectacle and/or communal entertainment. Bernic Mac's "tar baby" bit is a tragic/comic exploration into this dark history, an attempt to recover the collective humanity of those people who were cast as tar babies in the real fires of racist America.
Rep. Boehner, the leader of the House Republicans, bragged that he "got 98 percent of what [he] wanted" out of the debt ceiling deliberations. That being the case, the credit downgrade must assuredly be included in that boast; ditto for the downward spiral of U.S. and global stock markets. And herein lies the Machiavellian strategy to defeat the president: hamstring the U.S. economy, entangle the public discourse in the ignorant discourse of spending cuts sans revenue generation, and ignore the collateral damage visited upon America's working poor, the elderly and the rapidly diminishing middle class. For the rabbit in the Uncle Remus story, the tar baby was an extremely effective decoy, a mute distraction that entangled him and prevented him from continuing on his appointed course of rectitude. Make no mistake about it: the president is the rabbit in our current political narrative, and the role of the tar baby is being well-played by Rep. Boehner and his Tea Party compatriots.
***
James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is also the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC, an association of Hip Hop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of Hip Hop, urban, and youth cultures. Peterson has appeared on Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, ABC News, ESPN, and various local television networks as an expert on race, politics, and popular culture.

An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigm

An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigmby David Leonard | NewBlackMan
When my daughter was about 3-years old, while on a vacation, we ventured into a Disney store where we purchased a set of princess figurines (I still feel compromise about our collective relationship with the world of princesses some 4+ years later).  We quickly returned to my parents' hotel so that she could play with them.  When it was time to leave and return to where we were staying, I noticed that three of the princesses were missing.  Pocahontas, Mulan, and Jasmine were all nowhere to be found while Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and Cinderella were in plain sight ready to go with us.  Determined, I searched high and low for her newly purchased toys.  After a few minutes, I realized that the three figurines of color were strategically placed under the bed.  It was not as if she was playing with them and accidentally placed them under the bed; they were far back, to the point that they were almost out of reach.  Not to worry, super-Dad rescued them, only to be told by my 3-year old that she didn't want them.  The horror.  Overcoming my sense of failure and dismay, I asked her:
Why don't you want them?
Her: I just don't
Me: But why?
Her: Because they don't have sparkly shoes
She was correct; whereas the 4 figurines of white characters had dresses and sparkly shoes (even though you couldn't actually see the shoes on all of them), the 3 figurines of color lacked all of the traditional markers of princessdom. 
However, much more was at work because in this instance, the daily lessons she had learned about beauty, race, gender, and desirability came into clear view.  As a scholar of race, an anti-racist advocate, and someone committed to media literacy, I was immediately distraught, wondering how I had failed to convey these fallacies within contemporary culture.  As a parent of a mixed-race daughter, this moment also concretized the powerful messages being delivered about beauty and racial identity.  Notwithstanding the immense problems with the princess trope (and happiness coming from being saved by a prince), it was clear that my daughter was learning the incompatibility of beautiful glamorous princesses and girls of color.  
"In American society, many women strive to attain mainstream, Western standards of beauty, which are derived from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon influence," writes Peggy Chin Evans and Allen McConnell with "Do Racial Minorities Respond in the Same Way to Mainstream Beauty Standards? Social Comparison Processes in Asian, Black, and WhiteWomen." "In fact, physical appearance seems to be the most important predictor of overall self-evaluation in female college and high school students." Given the dominance of Disney within children's lives, it is not surprising how much impact this "magical world" has on children telling them that without fair skin, blonde hair, a skinny physique, and a prince on their arm the world wouldn't be as magical.  
"Most, if not all children, including children of color, see 'white' as good, living happily ever after and pretty," notes Dorothy L. Hurley in "Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy Tale Princess." "The problem of pervasive, internalized privileging of Whiteness has been intensified by the Disney representation of fairy tale princesses which consistently reinforces an ideology of White supremacy." By the age of 3 my daughter had already learned the lessons about whiteness and the difficult path for girls of color in securing the idealized dream of marrying a prince: living happily ever after.  As such, she wanted nothing to do with those OTHER princesses who could not live this fairy tell existence since without the right clothes and physical features they would surely never get the right prince.
At one level, I wanted to respond by telling her that Mulan and Pocahontas could be a princess just like Belle and Cinderella – their costumes and skin color did not preclude them from being princesses.  Yet, given the extremely problematic narratives, the focus on physical beauty, and the overall message associated with the princess trope, I didn't want to elevate the princess as ideal and desirable.  This points to a quandary of wanting to challenge the white/western standards of beauty that emanate from Disney and other mainstream media sources while at the same time challenging the ways in which beauty, glamorous clothes, and other traditional markers are used to mark desirable femininity. 
Then and now I try to tell her that she (and girls of color) can be beautiful and desirable (princesses) yet there is no reason to need or want to garner acceptance through beauty/appealing to males. Maxine Leeds Craig, in "Race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty," describes the complexity and contradiction in the following way
The difficulty of theorizing beauty is that any body which might possibly be characterized as beautiful exists at a congested crossroads of forces. Bodies provide us with a principal means of expression, yet our bodies are read in ways that defy our intentions. We act on others through our bodies, but nonetheless our bodies are the sites of the embodiment of social controls (p. 160 ). . . . Beauty is a resource used by collectivities and individuals to claim worth, yet it is an unstable good, whose association with women and with sex, and its dependence upon ever-changing systems of representation, put its bearer at constant risk of seeing the value of her inherent beauty or beauty work evaporate. If beauty is ever capital, it is a somewhat stigmatized capital. It must appear unearned if it is to be authentic, as opposed to purchased, beauty. Nonetheless it is a suspect form of capital because it is unearned. It is bodily amid a culture that places the body below the mind (p. 174).
The complexity was further illustrated as I tried in that instant to celebrate Pocahontas, to challenge her white-definition of beauty and appeal, even in spite of the stereotypes and anti-indigenous narratives embodied by this character (for years thereafter she always reminded me that Pocahontas was my favorite a fact that always struck me given my critical discussion of the film in class).  The intervention is tough because I didn't want to subscribe to the ideological underpinnings of sexism in debunking those associated with white supremacy. 
The impact of the media's pedagogy of beauty is obvious from the various doll test studies (see Kiri Davis' wonderful video – "A Girl like Me" on this subject) to skin lightening  & body alteration.  It is also evident in the idolization of whiteness (a particular construct of femininity).   To my daughter, those white princesses not only embodied beauty, glamour, grace, and desirability but were also the only true and authentic kinds of princesses.  Because those other princesses were faux-princesses she did not want them.   
My only hope is that our intervention against these messages about beauty, race, femininity, and materialism take hold because the power was evident when my three-year old daughter tossed away the three "princesses" that she concluded were not undesirable making me wonder if the larger consequence is that she is being told daily that she is just as undesirable. 
***
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.

New Book! That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd edition)

That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd EditionEdited by Murray Forman , Mark Anthony Neal August 2, 2011 by Routledge – 764 pages
This newly expanded and revised second edition of That's the Joint! brings together the most important and up-to-date hip-hop scholarship in one comprehensive volume. Presented thematically, the selections address the history of hip-hop, identity politics of the "hip-hop nation," debates of "street authenticity," social movements and activism, aesthetics, technologies of production, hip-hop as a cultural industry, and much more. Further, this new edition also includes greater coverage of gender, racial diversity in hip-hop, hip-hop's global influences, and examines hip-hop's role in contemporary politics.
With pedagogical features including author biographies, headnotes summarizing key points of articles, and discussion questions, That's the Joint! is essential reading for anyone seeking deeper understanding of the profound impact of hip-hop as an intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural movement.
Praise
"Hip-hop, like all living artistic expression, constantly regenerates, turning innovation into convention, 'datcourse' into discourse, vernacularisms into commodity or the precious art object. As this second edition of the groundbreaking That's the Joint! shows, hip-hop scholarship has done the same: moving, grooving, breaking, and sampling the best ideas from an interdisciplinary community theater of writers whose insights chart a vibrant sector of the American musical landscape."—Guthrie  P. Ramsey, Jr., Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania
"A standard bearer text in Hip Hop Studies. Sweeping in scope and rigorous in analyses."—T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American Diaspora Studies and French, Vanderbilt University

Table of Contents
Introduction: Murray Forman
I. Hip-Hop Ya Don't Stop: Hip-Hop History and Historiography
1. The Politics of Graffiti | Craig Castleman 2. Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown | Jeff Chang 3. B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something With Older R&B Disks and Jive Talking NY DJs Rapping Away in Black Discos | Robert Ford, Jr. 4. Hip-Hop's Founding Fathers Speak the Truth | Nelson George 5. Physical Graffiti: The History of Hip-Hop Dance | Jorge "Fabel" Pabon 6. Hip-Hop Turns 30: Watcha Celebratin' For? | Greg Tate
II. No Time For Fake Niggas: Hip-Hop Culture and the Authenticity Debates
7. Puerto Rocks: Rap, Roots, and Amnesia | Juan Flores 8. It's a Family Affair | Paul Gilroy 9. On the Question of Nigga Authenticity | R.A.T. Judy 10. Arabic Hip-Hop: Claims of Authenticity and Identity of a New Genre | Usama Kahf 11. Lookin' for the Real Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto | Robin D.G. Kelley 12. Hip-Hop Chicano: A Separate but Parallel Story | Reagan Kelly 13. Authenticity Within Hip-Hop and Other Cultures Threatened With Assimilation | Kembrew McLeod 14. Race…and Other Four-Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity | Gilbert Rodman 15. Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity and the Asian American | Oliver Wang
III. Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City: Hip-Hop, Space and Place
16. Black Empires, White Desires: the Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop | Davarian Baldwin 17. 'Represent': Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music | Murray Forman 18. Rap's Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture | Matt Miller 19. Global Black Self-Fashionings: Hip-Hop as Diasporic Space | Marc D. Perry 20. Hooligans and Heroes: Youth Identity and Hip-Hop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania | Alex Perullo 21. Native Tongues: A Roundtable on Hip-Hop's Global Indigenous Movement | Cristina Verán with Darryl DLT Thompson, Litefoot, Grant Leigh Saunders, Mohammed Yunus Rafiq, and JAAS
 IV. I'll be Nina Simone Defecating on Your Microphone: Hip-Hop and Gender
22. I Used to be Scared of the Dick: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity | Andreana Clay 23. Cover Your Eyes as I Describe a Scene so Violent: Violence, Machismo, Sexism, and Homophobia | Michael Eric Dyson and Byron Hurt 24. 'The King of the Streets': Hip Hop and the Reclaiming of Masculinity in Jerusalem's Shu'afat Refugee Camp | Ela Greenberg 25. Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness | Marc Lamont Hill 26. Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance | Cheryl L. Keyes 27. Hip-Hop Feminist | Joan Morgan 28. Butta Pecan Mamis | Raquel Rivera
V. The Message: Rap, Politics and Resistance
29. Intergenerational Culture Wars: Civil Rights vs. Hip Hop | Todd Boyd and Yusuf Nuruddin 30. The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement to Political Power | Bakari Kitwana 31. Voyeurism and Resistance in Rap Music Videos | Jennifer C. Lena 32. Postindustrial Soul: Black Popular Music at the Crossroads | Mark Anthony Neal 33. My Mic Sound Nice: Art, Community and Consciousness | Imani Perry 34. Rise Up Hip-Hop Nation: From Deconstructing Racial Politics to Building Positive Solutions | Kristine Wright
 VI. Looking for the Perfect Beat: Hip-Hop, Technology and Rap's Lyrical Arts
35. Bring It to the Cypher: Hip Hop Nation Language | H. Samy Alim 36. Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip-Hop Sample | Andrew Bartlett 37. Hip-Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative | Greg Dimitriadis 38. Dead Prezence: Money and Mortal Themes in Hip-Hop Culture | James Peterson 39. Sampling Ethics | Joseph Schloss
VII. I Used to Love H.E.R.: Hip-Hop in/and the Culture Industries
40. The Rap Career | Mickey Hess 41. The Business of Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite | Keith Negus 42. 'I Don't Like to Dream About Getting Paid': Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul | Christopher Holmes Smith 43. Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism | S. Craig Watkins 44. An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity | Eric K. Watts
***
Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press, 2012). He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), all published by Routledge. Neal hosts the weekly webcast, "Left of Black" in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal maintains a blog at NewBlackMan (http://newblackman.blogspot.com). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Trailer | My Brooklyn: The Battle for the Soul of A City

My Brooklyn trailer - Watch First please from Kelly Anderson on Vimeo.


This is the trailer for My Brooklyn, a documentary in progress by Kelly Anderson and Allison Lirish Dean. It gives a sense of the perspective of the documentary My Brooklyn and the companion mobile game Brooklyn: The Game.

For more info go to mybrooklynmovie.com and brooklynthegame.com

Happy Birthday to Elsie Eleanor Neal | Shirley Caesar: "No Charge"

Michael Eric Dyson: Déjà Vu All Over Again in Britain

 The United Kingdom has endured civil unrest before. This time, multiculturalism is the scapegoat.
Déjà Vu All Over Again in Britain by Michael Eric Dyson | The Root
The peaceful protest against the police killing of a black citizen that led to violence and looting in the United Kingdom seems like déjà vu all over again. Trouble has been brewing for decades between the police and black communities in North London. It is the scene of the most recent riots in Tottenham, and the site as well of previous unrest, including the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985, sparked by the stroke-related death of a black woman after conflict erupted between her family members and the police as they searched her home. And the Brixton riots of 1981, 1985 and 1995 -- after protests over unwarranted lethal force by police -- are an ugly reminder that South London also hasn't been spared its share of convulsive disputes between cops and citizens.
Like their American offspring, our British kin simply haven't come to grips with inflamed racial and economic tensions that are ready to ignite at the slightest social provocation. In 1981, Brixton was ravaged by high unemployment and poor housing during a national recession that fed a beastly crime rate. In 2011, during an even more crippling recession, the same factors hold sway, exacerbated by spiraling black unemployment, huge economic inequality and the lowest social mobility of developed countries.
Predictably, few of these factors color the pronouncements of most British politicians and pundits about the riots. Prime Minister David Cameron assailed "the culture of fear" promoted in the street by "thugs" and threatened to curtail social media in the propagation of "violence, disorder and criminality." Conservative journalist Damian Thompson blamed multiculturalism for the belief among educational elites that gang culture is an "authentic expression of Afro-Caribbean and Asian identity," saying that his fellow Brits are "seeing a lot of black faces on our screens tonight; it's a shame that the spotlight can't also fall on those white multiculturalists who made this outrage possible."
But neither Thompson nor Cameron, who earlier this year blamed multiculturalism for the rise of Islamic extremism in the U.K., bother to account for why multiculturalism became such a demand of minorities to begin with: the oppressive exclusion of people of color from the economic and societal fruits of their labor in a European culture that drips with fear of "the other" in its teahouses, think tanks, parlors and Parliament. When black folk and other people of color aren't featured nightly on the "telly" looting local businesses, they don't routinely show up in more ennobling roles.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Shana Tucker 'Shines' on WUNC's The State of Things

WUNC-91.5The State of Things w/Frank Stasio
Shana Tucker
College exposed cellist Shana Tucker to a world of musical possibilities. Before enrolling at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Tucker had only been trained to play classical music. But during her time as an undergrad in the nation's capital, she was introduced to jazz and the magic that can be created with improvisation. Tucker, a singer-songwriter, now lives in North Carolina where she is fast becoming a staple of the music scene in the Triangle. Her debut solo CD, "Shine" was released this year. Tucker joins host Frank Stasio to play live in the studio and talk about how she makes chamber music sound soulful.

Listen HERE

America's Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller

Saturday Edition America's Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
While the NBA players remained locked out by the owners, they continue to be subjected to what Alice Walker describes as "a prison of image, whereby stereotypes function not as errors, but rather forms of social control."  The media reports resulting from two separate altercations invoking Matt Barnes and Michael Beasley, and efforts to connect them to the NBA lockout, the culture of the NBA, and blackness demonstrates the power and threats inherent in these imprisoning images.
Trying to wax sociological, Chris Haynes, in "Overseas Not Problem, Pickup Games Are NBAers will continue to get into trouble if they keep playing streetball, "uses Beasley and Barnes to point to the bigger dangers of the NBA lockout: the NBA player.  "The NBA just like any other professional league, is also comprised of young, immature, volatile, emotional players who need structure in their lives 365 days out of the year. Unable to workout and have contact with their individual teams, players may be left searching for a good pickup game to stay in shape."  In other words, the NBA lockout will lead these immature and volatile to be free on the streets (playing street ball), just waiting to attack the nearest fan or competitor. 
Celebrating the "grounded players such as Steve Nash, Derek Fisher, Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki" (the good ones) Haynes is concerned about the behavior of the OTHER (the bad ones) NBA star during the lockout.  He goes on to argue that the danger stems not only from the lack of structure experienced during the lockout, but the backgrounds of the players themselves:
Several players come from poverty-stricken backgrounds and still have some form of street mentality embedded in them. In the heat of the moment, competing against amateurs who are disrespecting and derogating athletes in their face, is a bad recipe for something potentially to pop off. Beasley and Barnes are lucky, it could have escalated to firearms.
The efforts to link "poverty" to criminality is problematic at many levels.  At one level, it demonstrates the power of stereotypes and racial narratives relative to black bodies given the backgrounds of both Barnes and Beasley.  Barnes, who was born in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in Sacramento, is the son of Ann and Henry Barnes.  His mother, who died of cancer is 2007, was an elementary school teacher that worked with mentally challenged kids.  His biography (like so many in the NBA – over half of NBA players grew up in Suburban neighborhoods) doesn't mesh with the stereotypical discussion of inner-city ballers that Haynes works through in this piece.  Likewise, Beasley, who was home-schooled and raised by his mother, Fatima Smith, exists on a different plane.   
At another level, the media discourse evident here reflects a larger history of white racial framing and white supremacy.  Playing on a myriad of racial narratives and tropes, Haynes uses the Beasley and Barnes incident, as well as the assumptions about streetball, the rhetoric here reflects a larger history of race in America. 
For Elizabeth Alexander, the nature of racism within the United States is defined by practices wherein black bodies are systematically displayed "for public consumption," both in the form of  "public rapes, beatings, and lynchings" and "the gladiatorial arenas of basketball and boxing" (1994, p 92).  Jonathan Markovitz similarly locates the criminalization of the black body within the narratives of the sports media: "The bodies of African American athletes from a variety of sports have been at the center of a number of mass media spectacles in recent years, most notably involving Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson, but NBA players have been particularly likely to occupy center stage in American racial discourse."  
Amid the NBA lockout, the narrative space available for NBA players is increasingly limited to the projects of demonization and criminalization that are central to white supremacy.   The coverage afforded to these instances, the efforts to spotlight their missed-steps as evidence of a larger problem facing the NBA, the narrative prison that links them to larger frames regarding black criminality, and the rhetorical devices offered demonstrates the process of criminalization central to the history of black America. 
Enter exhibit B.  Challenging the narrative that the players have gained the upper-hand, Ken Berger, in "Sadly, it's players behaving badly," reduces NBA players to criminals incapable of controlling themselves.
And oh, we now bring you the widely anticipated and sadly inevitable news of Michael Beasley shoving a fan in the face and Matt Barnes punching an opponent during pro-am games on either coast.
We don't even want to get into the escapades of three former NBA players in the news this week -- Darius Miles, who was arrested for trying to bring a loaded gun through airport security, Rafer Alston, who was sued over his alleged role in a strip club fight, and Samaki Walker, who allegedly tried to dine on eight grams of marijuana during a traffic stop in Arizona, during which police also confiscated prescription drugs and liquid steroids.
Guns, strip clubs and weed – the trifecta of ammunition for those quick to stereotype NBA players as outlaws, lawbreakers and menaces to society. Great job, guys.
It's a lockout, so NBA players must be behaving badly. And they are.
While acknowledging the existence of a stereotype ,  while still blaming players for reinforcing such stereotype, rather than those instances of reporting that have the same effect, Berger paints a broad brush here.  Like Haynes, he connects these instances to the lockout, thereby constructing the NBA's primarily black players as essentially criminals who in the absence of structure and surveillance will invariably resort to pathological behavior – "It's a lockout, so NBA players must be behaving badly."  At the same time, he links together Barnes, who got into an altercation during a game (a practice that is celebrated as evidence of manhood when done in a bar or on a hockey rink) and Beasley who got into a verbal spat (and ultimately pushed a guy) with a fan with three FORMER NBA players.  The rhetorical slight of hand that gives readers an impression about the culture of the NBA (and plays on and into racial stereotypes) and the criminal activity taking place during the NBA lockout. 
In a brilliant piece about the Palace Brawl and Ron Artest, Grant Farred identifies the resistance inherent to a restive black body – publicly consumed black bodies at rest are inherently a challenge to the restrictive scripts that demand activity (entertainment; performance) that are central to American racial history.
In several moments, therefore, the problematic of how black athletic bodies occupy public space is privileged in order to read how these bodies move in that space and the limitations and possibilities that attach to that mobility. Of equal interest is how Artest's momentary im-mobility-the demand of perpetual black athletic motion-triggers the release of an enigmatic voice. By being still and speechless on the scorer's table, Artest becomes, momentarily, an enigma. The tough, skillful, uncompromising, and often mouthy defender (the defender who is always talking "smack"), Artest was transformed, in that moment, into the voice of rest. At rest, but not restful, at rest and still restive, provocative in his restfulness, Artest became the black body that was temporarily prone, not moving, the body that for a momentous second or two refuses the perpetual motion that is inveterately expected of the NBA athlete.
Farred's discussion of the Palace Brawl in that NBA players in the context of the lockout are instructive as players are imagined as being at rest (this is why efforts to play in summer league games, overseas, and anywhere is an important space of resistance).  No longer useful commodities for public consumption, they are "rest" and therefore not useful.  The utility of blackness within public space is erased within the white imagination leaving those at rest subjected to discourses of fear and demonization. 
According to Abby Ferber "Black men have been defined as a threat throughout American history while being accepted in roles that serve and entertain White people, where they can ostensibly be controlled and made to appear nonthreatening."  Facing a historically long lockout, both the instruments of control and value (commodification and entertainment) are in flux explaining the fears and criminalization that have penetrated the public discourse. By this logic, if there is a lockout black men are a restive as commodities and therefore potentially active as criminals.  America's New Menace: The locked-out baller.
***
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.

Aden Darity: "Post Racial America"

<p><p><a href="http://aden.bandcamp.com/track/post-r... Racial America by aden</a></p></p>

Post Racial America

vocals: m. terrenoire, l. herrera
harmonica: s. darity
guitar: w. darity
horns: m. meyer, t. hsieh, n. hsieh, m. brown
keys: j. darnielle


words and arrangement: a. darity, p. bonzani for third shift entertainment

lyrics

chorus:
i'm gon' spread my wings
lift off the ground
don't worry 'bout a thing
won't never come down
i'll fly
i'm gon' lace my boots
and take my time
face my truth
and take my climb
and fly


(the civil rights movement continues)
nope, it's over
race no longer exists, praise jehovah
no more race cards
if you just pray hard
you can be anything you wanna be,
thank God
and if you still ain't got no money on your bank card
or if your whip is still waiting for a paint job
black children grow up,
you can be whatever you want
the world is your oyster
just gotta pull yourself up
i feel so relieved
martin luther king's dream achieved
post racial if you don't believe you've been deceived
sag your pants, rock your cornrows and fros
you can get a job now, race don't matter no more
sister if your name ends in "isha" nice to meet ya
go get a great job, be a doctor or a teacher
bootstraps poster boy in the office, ode to joy
this ain't no media ploy, racism truly is no more
oh boy


chorus


no more equal but separated
schools no longer segregated
it's on you whether you fail or pass
no more real estate steering
no more down low dealing
and no more stupid ass movies like "crash"
(but blacks ain't athletic)
and whites ain't just smart
(blacks ain't horses and studs)
and whites don't work hard
came through dense fog
whites don't smell like wet dog
no more need to press hard
just let go and let God
no affirmative action
for greedy lazy black ones
meritocracy separates the strong from the slack ones
richard wright's a boy
ralph ellison's visible
the klan's just a club
one nation indivisible
taking it further, angie stone just sings "brother"
james weldon johnson really is no longer colored
life became less complicated with our hero nominated
never underestimated, degraded, denigrated, or hated
man we made it
celebrate it
we all so progressive, so liberal, so elevated
teens don't worry about going to separate proms
ain't no more jungle fever but we still hear the drums
that ain't black on black no more, it's just crime
join the n double a p, 'cause it's about time
everybody's feeling fine, everybody's feeling friendly
no more woolworth's counter, let's get a grand slam at denny's


chorus


republicans insulted women
photoshops of palin swimming
bikini and rifle
threw the election, got an eyeful
and an earful
black people oh so tearful
he inherits the mess, no more struggle no stress
so what's left?
gender? sexuality? creed?
(but can we still point out racism?)
no indeed
pull tar babies out the briar patch, out of the thicket
but you talk about gay marriage all you gonna hear is crickets
(one thing at a time, we just talking about color
this ain't post sex, and we ain't all brothers)
women earning 75 cents on the dollar
but we got rid of race and that makes me wanna holler
promise black voters nada they gon' vote for him regardless
he talks the same garbage about the youth and black fathers
it's a gaffle, a disgrace,
spread across all fifty states
the idea that in this country we no longer notice race?
get out my face


chorus


if i offend then so be it
post racial society?
i don't intend to see it
we will never be it
(in my lifetime)
but i might find
the right rhyme
at the right time
ignite minds in my sight line to fight crime in this night time
til then i got my iris focused on that papyrus
never shut my eyelids
gotta shout through the silence
bigotry's a virus
contagious and violent
intolerance is subtle
but erewhere you can find it
in your music
in your job
in your TV in your heart
in the thoughts that you lob
in the words that are darts
BULLSEYE
turn on the tv hear the fools lie
they all blowing smokey smoke
don't fall for the okey doke
he had to run the perfect election
to get y'all to respect him
and still barely squeaked in at the end but God bless him
(you say you ain't racist?)
you ain't too too honest
(you think race is dead?)
look at youtube comments
in your brain in your veins in your pain
it's ingrained
in the way you look at the world, your peers, who you blame
it's behind closed doors
on the web and in ya head
it's on dance floors, in ya pores and in ya bed
clubs, schools, and churches are still segregated
as ever—everything but the military and jail
but y'all think only blacks in there so what the hell
with more blacks on welfare with no health care, fail
fabricated stats about incarcerated blacks
and numbers of black men in college all pushed as common knowledge
black people—race racism class victims
blame each other for their conditions listen it's all a system
and the half black pres
ain't helping when i'm getting told to get on my knees and put myhands behind my head
ain't helping if i'm dead, gotta go and do for self
and if race ever disappeared we'd replace it with something else, come on