Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1084

Fans Gather to Watch Oprah Series Finale in Raleigh, NC

Making Waves: Black Swimmers Convene for 9th Annual Black Heritage Swim Meet

Making Waves: Black Swimmers Convene for 9th  Black Heritage Swim Meet by Mark Anthony Neal | Black Voices (AOL/Huffington Post)
We've all read the statistics; the drowning rates of black children far exceed those of their white peers. In addition, the swimming proficiency of black children, accordingly, also lacks in comparison to their white peers; purportedly nearly 70 percent of black teens and children possess little or no swimming skills. Thanks to organizations like USA Swimming (the governing body of competitive swimming in the United States), the Make A Splash Foundation and the YMCA, there have been sustained efforts to increase swimming instruction among black children.
Yet in the backdrop of this seeming crisis, a generation of black swimmers have been making waves in competitive swimming and many of them will convene this Memorial Day weekend for the 9th Annual National Black Heritage Championship Swim Meet, at the Triangle Aquatic Center in Cary, North Carolina.
The Black Heritage Meet was founded in 2003 by Kathy Cooper who coaches the North Carolina Aquablazers. Cooper's daughter's Candace (now a swimmer at UNC-Chapel Hill) was a year-round competitive swimmer and Cooper was frustrated by the lack of diversity she witnessed at competitive meets. Blacks make up roughly 1 percent of all competitive swimmers, a number that only gets smaller among elite competitors.
With the Black Heritage Meet, Cooper hoped to provide a forum where young black swimmers and their parents could network. That first meet, held in Charlotte, NC attracted 104 swimmers; this year's meet will feature 896 athletes of all races, from forty-seven teams and 12 states.
The image of competitive swimming has been given a boost in black communities in recent years because of the success and visibility of Cullen Jones (pictured above), who won a gold medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, as part of the US Men's 200M Freestyle Relay. Jones, who nearly drowned as a child and who was a collegiate swimmer at North Carolina State University, has used his relative celebrity to get the word out about swimming safety.
Less well known are swimmers like Maritza Correia (pictured directly above), a 2004 Olympic Silver medalist and 16-year-old Lia Neal, who is the Junior National champion in the 100M Freestyle. In 2008 as a 13-year-old, Neal (along with Missy Franklin) became one of the youngest swimmers to ever qualify for the Olympic Trials.
What makes the Black Heritage Meet such an experience is not simply the opportunity to come together with other black swimmers. Cooper describes the event as more of a family reunion, where extended family often travel hundreds of miles to see their kin compete against some of the best swimmers in the country. Indeed the sights and sounds of the meet, more resemble those found any Saturday afternoon in the autumn at an HBCU football game as opposed to most swim meet which can be dry events.
As part of the weekend-long festivities, the organizers sponsor a community breakfast, which fetes black swimming pioneers, not just in competitive swimming and diving, but also in the military. Competitors are also given the chance to swim with some of their idols. Last year, both Jones and Correia were in attendance and held swim exhibitions with swimmers. This year, Sabir Muhammad (pictured below), who was a member of the U.S. National Team in the late 1990s, will be on hand.
Competitive swimming also provides great discipline of black youth, while also providing other opportunities such as working as life guards and swimming instructors. As parent Joe Artis, whose children attended last year's National Black Heritage Championship observed, "It's another opportunity besides football and basketball that swimming gives us ... you're not gonna get rich swimming, but you can get a college degree."
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Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the author of five books including the forthcoming 'Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities.' Neal is also a "Black Swim Parent," who resides in Durham, NC with his family, where his daughters swim for the YMCA of the Triangle Area (YOTA).

Conservatives, Hip-Hop and 2012

Conservatives, Hip-Hop and 2012 by Bakari Kitwana | Huffington Post
As the 2012 presidential election ramps up, expect conservatives to keep gunning for black youth, in general, and hip-hop, specifically. Black youth showed significant gains in 2008, and now represent the group of 18- to 29-year-old who vote the most. Their ability via popular to inspire young voters -- who in 2008 voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by a ratio of 2-to-1 -- poses one of the most viable threats to Republicans' aspirations to retake the Ppesidency. The recent national discussion surrounding the rapper Common's appearance at the White House is perhaps the first salvo.
What was quickly summed up as either an attempt to defend law enforcement or as an attack on the value of the arts does not get to the heart of what conservatives were really communicating to voters in the Common dust-up. That is, is there a place in mainstream American political life for young blacks, whose political views don't always fall within traditional mainstream conservative/liberal lines?
Black youth, particularly those who are poor and often ignored by politicians and lawmakers, are the men and women that the rapper-actor Common gave voice to in his 2007 poem ("A Letter to the Law") highlighted throughout the controversy. Conservative critics take issue with Common's tendency in the poem to represent their issues. Further, they feign outrage at the fact that Common presumes innocent several high profile Black Panthers convicted of police killings -- Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jama l-- notwithstanding Common's suspicion is shared by international supporters, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. 
So much of conservative media maneuvering since the 2008 election has been about creating illusions. This focus on Common is no different. In fact, the point of highlighting these associations is to encourage the casual observer to infer that like-minded Black youth are equally un-American and should not be welcome at the White House. Hence, the suggestion goes, it is not only logical, but also patriotic to dismiss their issues.
Such reasoning fails to consider that many of these young Americans embrace their citizenship with as much passion as conservative Republicans advance their own interpretation of what the founding fathers envisioned for the nation. Rightly so. Many have fought in American wars of the last decade, as African-Americans in the military outdistance their representation in the general population. Many were forced outside of the mainstream economy years before the Great Recession of 2007-2009. By 2009, for example, unemployment for black 16- to 24-year-olds reached Depression-era levels. 
Many others, with hip-hop as the unifying theme, vote and engage in grassroots community change efforts in neighborhoods abandoned long ago by government job programs and major corporations. They belong to national, multi-racial organizations like The Hip-Hop Caucus, the League of Young Voters, Green For All or similar local organizations. They also, like their fellow citizens, believe their issues should take center stage on the nation's agenda -- that they should be no more or less important than America's super rich, its senior citizens, its fed up Tea Partiers or its mega corporations.
Unfortunately, as the nation gears up for election 2012, they are among those that conservative spin brings to mind with phrases like "take back America." For self-appointed defenders of American values (who these days take their cues from House Speaker John Boehner, presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann and talking heads like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, to name a few), hearing the voices of fellow citizens at a White House poetry reading signals not the diversity of the nation, but, rather, a country that has lost its way. 
As a hip-hop advocate and critic who has shared the stage with Common, I can unequivocally vouch for the value he adds to the nation. He's both a thoughtful lyricist and a hip-hop star committed to using his celebrity to improve the lives of forgotten Americans. He does not routinely traffic in misogyny or gratuitous violence. Yes, there are those rare moments where he could go further to distance himself from hip-hop's gender stereotypes. However, to focus on Common's lyrics is to miss the point.
And missing the point in this case means entering a very calculated debate in which Common, and by extension hip-hop culture, is cast as a villain worthy of our collective disdain. This demonizing comes at a time when conservatives, especially over the last two and half years, have firmly demonstrated their ability to set the tone for national media and popular discourse, replete with what has become customary double-talk, innuendo and outright distortion of the facts. 
Problem is, the idea that young blacks and hip-hop culture are by definition un-American is a message that defies reality. 
Voter participation for 18- to 29-year-olds enjoyed an eleven percent increase between 2000 and 2008. Cross-racial hip-hop organizing jump-started many of these mobilizing efforts. In 2008, fifty-one percent of eligible 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the presidential election. Fifty-eight percent of black youth 18-29 voted, the highest participation of any racial group. (Fifty-two percent of white youth voted in the same age group.) Instead of rebuking young blacks and hip-hop culture that speaks to multiracial audiences for their forays in civic engagement -- including symbolic representation at the White House -- one would think that defenders of the American way would embrace them. 
But this is divide-and-conquer political theater. And the focus for conservatives who lost the presidential election by a landslide in 2008 (in part because of a cross-racial youth vote) is to win in 2012 -- at any cost. To that end, driving a wedge between this emerging, vibrant youth voting bloc is crucial. However, attempting to do so by relying on racial stereotyping, rather than the facts, is a tactic Americans concerned about the future of our democracy should not tolerate this election season.
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Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2011) Follow Bakari Kitwana on Twitter: www.twitter.com/therealbakari

New Book: Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art by Kellie Jones

A daughter of the poets Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and writers in Manhattan's East Village and absorbed in black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and social justice across the river in Newark. The activist vision of art and culture that she learned in those two communities, and especially from her family, has shaped her life and work as an art critic and curator. Featuring selections of her writings from the past twenty years, EyeMinded reveals Jones's role in bringing attention to the work of African American, African, Latin American, and women artists who have challenged established art practices. 
Interviews that she conducted with the painter Howardena Pindell, the installation and performance artist David Hammons, and the Cuban sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the photographers Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, and Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist Betye Saar; and the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat, Norman Lewis, and Al Loving. 
Reflecting Jones's curatorial sensibility, this collection is structured as a dialogue between her writings and works by her parents, her sister Lisa Jones, and her husband Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones, insight into the development of her critical and curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most important figures in contemporary art.
About
Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is the author of several books and exhibition catalogues, including Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980; Basquiat; and (with Thelma Golden and Chrissie Iles) Lorna Simpson.
Praise
"Kellie Jones, supported by a remarkable family of artists and intellectuals, has provided a plethora of razor-sharp insights and creative testimonials to the greater arts and scholarly communities for years. As this important book makes amber clear, Professor Jones' astute observations and in-depth analyses of African American art are invaluable resources to contemporary studies and, arguably, equivalent to the notable essays of art history's earlier, admired critics and chroniclers."—Richard J. Powell, author of Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture
"EyeMinded is an impressive collection of essays by Kellie Jones, a much sought after scholar, prolific writer, and extraordinary curator whose works I have admired for many years. She began her career in the mid-1980s, uncovering and recovering African and African American artists by organizing exhibitions, writing essays, and lecturing on some of the then lesser-known artists. I believe that she was instrumental in introducing to a larger and contemporary public the works of black artists of the African diaspora, including some of the most noted artists working today."—Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present
"This extraordinary collection reveals Kellie Jones as a discerning architect of the multicultural art landscape of the last few decades. Informed by her keen eye and incisive intellect, Jones's definitive takes on artists, including Lorna Simpson, Martin Puryear, and David Hammons, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in American art from the 1980s forward. And then, on top of Jones's own shimmering intellectual accomplishment in these pages, EyeMinded is something else as well: a conversation between an American family of arts and letters as illustrious as the Lowells or the Jameses. This book will stand apart for that reason alone, for few American families have contributed so richly to the arts, letters, and sounds of their generations as the Joneses. Here comes Dr. Kellie Jones, 'eye-minded,' and she's bringing her people with her."—Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University

Soul Cinema Film of the Day: 'Cotton Comes to Harlem'

"In its novelistic form, Cotton Comes to Harlem both anticipated and helped to create several important trends in the articulation of African American popular culture during the Black Power Era, especially as it was translated through the idioms of visual culture."--Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic .

Trailer of the 1970 movie starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Redd Foxx & Calvin Lockhart, directed by Ossie Davis and based on a novel by Chester Himes.

Our World with Marc Lamont Hill: Love & Relationships

Our World with Marc Lamont Hill | Black Enterprise

Love & Relationships featuring Mona Scott Young, Jimmy Briggs, and Esther Armah.

Vijay Prashad, Author The Darker Nations on PressTV

The Autograph | PressTV
A 25 min weekly interview with academics, authors, politicians and dignitaries encompassing a whole range of different topics from cultural to highly political issues featuring Vijay Prashad of Trinity College and author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, paperback 2008).

'Left of Black': Episode #35 featuring Cornel West

Left of Black #35
w/ Cornel West
May 16, 2011

On the season finale of Left of Black, Princeton Professor Cornel West joins host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal in a conversation about the "Image of Black Males in the Age of Obama."  The discussion was recorded at the Baptist Grove Church in Raleigh, NC and sponsored by the Cornel West Academy for Excellence.

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→Cornel West is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. West has recorded three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One and the late Gerald Levert.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Most in Need

Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Most in Need by Mark Naison | Fordham Universityspecial to NewBlackMan
In the last ten years, tens of billions of dollars have been spent to reform America's schools—some of it coming from the Federal Department of Education, some of it from state legislatures, some of it from private foundations. This money has gone to fund research on Common Core Standards, to close failing schools and open up new ones, to create new protocols for assessing schools and teachers, to create new batteries of tests to evaluate students learning, to bring management consultants into school systems and in some cases into individual school and to fund charter schools and educational maintenance organizations.
In New York City, Education Reform funding has spawned a variety of new public sector careers, ranging from "accountability officers" in the Department of Education, to the heads of charter school companies making multiple six figure salaries, to management consultants on the payroll of the DOE, to scores of new principals whose jobs have created in small schools created when large, allegedly "failing" ones have been broken up. When you add this the tens of millions of dollars spent to create new computer systems for the DOE, and the hundreds of millions of dollars given to publishing companies like Mc Graw Hill to create new tests for almost every subject and every grade, you can see the opportunity for profit making and career building this movement has inspired among aspiring professionals.
But how much of this funding has gone directly to the people this reform movement was supposedly created to help, working class and minority students and their families? How many jobs for students, or their parents, have Education Reform funds created, either in school programs or after school centers. Has this money helped keep families in their apartments, allowed them to secure medical care or access better sports, arts and recreation programs?

The answer to this is a resounding no! In New York City and around the nation, the funds have created a whole new layer of middle class professionals in the schools, most of them white and helped create opportunities for profit to a number of private corporations, but have done nothing to ease the burden of poverty on the nation's working class and minorities.
As of 2011, the child poverty rate in the United States had reached 25 percent, the highest level since the Depression, and Black Unemployment had reached 16 percent. Given this, how can the supporters of test driven education reform, whether they are in Washington, state houses, city halls, or the offices of major foundations, justify spending tens of billions of dollars to ( allegedly) improve schools without one cent of it going into the pockets of poor people.
While people are losing their homes, their jobs, their medical care, their recreational opportunities, and are experiencing daily fear and stress, new school professionals are flooding their communities with programs that to date have offered no return on their investment to the people they were allegedly designed to benefit.
What we have in America, put forward by those who claim to put "Children First," is a cynical round of profit taking and career building reminiscent of the Gilded Age. It's time that people serious about ending poverty in America take a serious look at the Education Reform movement and FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL!
From what I can see, it leads directly into more profits for the haves, and more hardship for the have nots.
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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930's to the 1960's.

Classic Material: 'She Said' by The Pharcyde