Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1091

'Emotional Migration'--Latest mix from DJ Lynnee Denise

Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend

Kobe Bryant's recent use of an anti-gay slur is a prime example of how we need to directly address homophobia -- by re-examining what it means to be a man.

Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend
by Mychal Denzel Smith | The Root

A few years ago, during an awkward attempt at father-son bonding, I found out my father was a homophobe. It was right after the Academy Awards, and there was a lot of discussion about the film Brokeback Mountain being snubbed for best picture. My father and I were watching television together, and he said to me, with a chuckle, "I've watched Westerns all my life, and never once did I think cowboys were faggots."

I don't know that he recognized how visibly uncomfortable I was with his word choice, because he used it again before I left the room. I never thought my father had particularly warm feelings about gays before that moment, but the open-air homophobia was jarring.

It's a big part of the heterosexual-male bonding experience: In an effort to prove a sense of collective manhood, some heterosexual men trade homophobic barbs with one another, denounce and deride being gay and vehemently defend their own heterosexual credentials. It starts pretty early in the socialization process, with "gay" being used as a derogatory term on the playground before most even know what "gay" means, and eventually it makes its way into other spaces that tend to be perceived as havens for heterosexual manhood (e.g., locker rooms, basketball courts, rap music).

This is what Kobe Bryant was doing when he shouted "f---ing faggot" at a referee during Tuesday's Los Angeles Lakers-San Antonio Spurs game. Bryant says his use of the homophobic slur was not intended to offend anyone, which hardly seems plausible.

He is well aware that "faggot" is a homophobic slur, or else he would have felt no need to apologize for his comments; he would have claimed ignorance. Given that he was visibly angry when he blurted out the slur, any comment that he made toward the referee at that point was clearly intended to offend him. But the use of this particular word reveals something deeper.

It's the belief that homosexuality is inherently inferior and an undesirable trait; therefore, to refer to someone with slurs usually reserved for gays is an attempt to belittle that person further. The quickest and most efficient way to insult a man has become to call into question his sexual orientation, and the easiest way to bond with one another comes through sharing a mutual homophobia (regrettably, these are things that I have personally done in the past but now recognize their idiocy).

And no one questions this. Sure, Bryant had to pay a fine and meet with LGBT activists, but apologists for his behavior abound. Society teaches us that manhood, in part, is defined by an ability to impregnate a woman and subsequently provide for the mother and child financially, while exercising control over their livelihoods through the threat of physical domination. For some, gay men and women represent a threat, an attack on the very concept of manhood.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

MURS & 9TH WONDER - "I USED TO LOVE HER (AGAIN")

Directed by JON MAZYCK. From the Murs & 9th Wonder album FORNEVER, available at http://mursworld.com.

'Lectures to Beats': "Government Loves Me…Government Loves Me Not"

Lectures to Beats - Episode 1: "Government Loves Me...Government Loves Me Not" from Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele on Vimeo.

In the series premiere, "Government Loves Me…Government Loves Me Not" examines the complex and seemingly dysfunctional relationship between black Americans and the government.

Ph.D. History Candidate Paul Adler uses the critically acclaimed HBO series, "The Wire," to describe the U.S. labor movement and the hardships communities endured as a result of technological developments in the manufacturing industry.

Government Professor Bruce Douglass and History Professor Adam Rothman share their thoughts about the dominant U.S. political groups and the contradictions and tensions that exist in both the liberal and conservative ideologies.

History Professor Maurice Jackson takes viewers through a series of anecdotes and quotes that speak to the significance of black Americans and race relations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Gerald A. Lawson, (Black) Video Games Pioneer Goes Home

from the New York Times

Gerald A. Lawson, a Pioneer in Video Games, Dies at 70
by Bruce Webber

Gerald A. Lawson, a largely self-taught engineer who became a pioneer in electronic video entertainment, creating the first home video game system with interchangeable game cartridges, died on Saturday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Santa Clara, Calif.

The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Catherine.

Before disc-based systems like PlayStation, Xbox and Wii transformed the video game industry, before techno-diversions like Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL and even before Pac-Man and Donkey Kong became the obsession of millions of electronic gamers, it was Mr. Lawson who first made it possible to play a variety of video games at home.

In the mid-1970s, he was director of engineering and marketing for the newly formed video game division of Fairchild Semiconductor, and it was under his direction that the division brought to market in 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, a home console that allowed users to play different games contained on removable cartridges. Until then, home video game systems could play only games that were built into the machines themselves. Mr. Lawson's ideas anticipated — if they did not entirely enable — a colossal international business.

In March, Mr. Lawson was honored for his innovative work by the International Game Developers Association, an overdue acknowledgment for an unfamiliar contributor to the technological transformation that has changed how people live.

"He's absolutely a pioneer," Allan Alcorn, a creator of the granddaddy of video games, Pong, said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News in March. "When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy."

Mr. Alcorn was the first design engineer at Atari, whose own cartridge console eventually dominated the home video game market.

At 6 feet 6 inches and well over 250 pounds, Mr. Lawson cut an imposing figure. A modest man but a straight talker who was known to one and all as Jerry, he was among only a handful of black engineers in the world of electronics in general and electronic gaming in particular.

Gerald Anderson Lawson was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1940, and grew up mostly in Queens. His parents encouraged his intellectual pursuits. His father, Blanton, was a longshoreman by profession and a voracious reader of science books by inclination; his mother, Mannings, was a city employee who was also president of the PTA at the nearly all-white school Jerry attended. There he had a first-grade teacher who changed his life.

"I had a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk," he said in a 2009 interview with the publication Vintage Computing and Gaming. "And she said, 'This could be you.' " He went on: "This kind of influence led me to feel, 'I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.' "

As a boy he pursued a number of scientific interests, ham radio and chemistry among them. As a teenager he earned money repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and the City College of New York, but never received a degree. In the early 1970s, he started at Fairchild in Silicon Valley as a roving design consultant. While he was there he invented an early coin-operated arcade game, Demolition Derby. Along with other Silicon Valley innovators, he belonged to a hobbyists' group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. Two of its other members were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, later the founders of Apple.

"I was not impressed with them — either one of them, actually," Mr. Lawson said in the 2009 interview, and though he didn't say why, he declined to hire Mr. Wozniak for a job at Fairchild.

After inventing Demolition Derby, Mr. Lawson was put in charge of the company's video game division. He and his team came up with cartridges that could be loaded with different game programs and then inserted into the console one at a time. This allowed the company to sell individual games separately from the console itself, a business model that remains the cornerstone of the video game industry.

A crucial element of the invention was the use of a new processor, the Fairchild 8; another was a mechanism that allowed for repeated insertion and removal of cartridges without damaging the machine's semiconductors. Video hockey and tennis were programmed into the F Channel console; additional games available on cartridge included Shooting Gallery, Video Blackjack and Alien Invasion.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1965, Mr. Lawson is survived by a brother, Michael, of Queens, and two children, Karen and Marc, both of Smyrna, Ga.

After he left Fairchild in 1980, Mr. Lawson founded a company, Videosoft, that created games, and worked as a consultant.

"I don't play video games that often; I really don't," he said in the 2009 interview. "First of all, most of the games that are out now — I'm appalled by them." Most are concerned with "shooting somebody and killing somebody," he said.

"To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop — if you play this game, you walk away with something of value."

Atelier@Duke: Intellectuals and Activism

Atelier@Duke: Intellectuals and Activism
February 25, 2011

Panelists at the Atelier@Duke symposium discuss "Intellectuals and Activism," the third of five panels at the Atelier@Duke, an event marking the 15th anniversary of the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke University Libraries.

Panelists include Joanne Braxton (William & Mary), Paula Giddings (Smith College), Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Harvard), Tim Tyson (Duke), and moderator William H. Chafe (Duke).

Ain't Mad at Prince Doing D-Train

African American Males Transcending Urban Disadvantage

African American Males Transcending Urban Disadvantage

Researchers studying African American boys and men living in urban contexts typically default to deficit models. While few would dispute the need to understand the factors that contribute to urban disadvantage, scholars are increasingly exploring "what works" – the social resources, conditions, practices, and policies that yield more encouraging outcomes for African American males in the city.

As leaders of the Penn Institute for Urban Research Faculty Forum, Penn GSE Professor Shaun Harper and Annenberg Professor John Jackson have brought together leading scholars who are addressing these issues.

Titled African American Men Transcending Urban Disadvantage, the Forum will feature:

David Wall Rice, Morehouse College:
Reimagining Black Male Identities and Expectancy, 4/18

Elijah Anderson, Yale University:
A Discussion of Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male, 4/19

Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University:
Beyond Pathological Media Misrepresentation, 4/20

All lectures will be held from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. in Huntsman Hall (University of Pennsylvania), Room 250, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia.

This forum is free and open to the public.

Transcending Racial Inequality: Imani Perry on the Brian Lehrer Show

from WNYC

Transcending Racial Inequality | Monday, April 11, 2011

Imani Perry, professor at the

Scripting King James: The LeBrons and a Discourse of Blackness

Scripting King James:
'The LeBrons' and a Discourse of Blackness
by David J. Leonard

Before the initial episode of LeBron James' new web show – The LeBrons – begins viewers get a clear glimpse of the show's purpose: advertizing. However, it isn't the typical web commercial but one that has a character from the show – Biz LeBron – using the newest HP tablet from to coordinate his fashion style. The efforts to blur the line between commercials and the show itself are revealing. This would of course not be the only instance of product placement. Within this short almost seven minute web show, NIKE, whose commercial The LeBrons is the basis for the show, is visible, as are Dr. Dres' Beat headphones, interesting given that the show is suppose to be about LeBron's childhood.

More centrally, the show is selling LeBron, a "brand" that has certainly faced criticism in recent months. By focusing on a young man growing up in Akron, the show not only tries to reestablish his roots in Ohio, but to humanize LeBron by highlighting his background, where he came from and the trials and tribulations he faced growing up before stardom. This is made clear in the show's catchy opening theme song :

You see the lights, the fame, you see the bling, but you should meet LeBron before he came king. Yeah, this is a story kind like then; my little homie kid growing up in Akron, trying to be an athlete. W e can all witness, hoping he can grow up right, handle business. Gotta show love to his friends and fam, world on his back, like an old man. 'cause if you think he's just a ball player, you got it wrong, player. For real. Life isn't fun and games. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, LeBron James. It ain't easy . . . .

Promising viewers a behind-the-scenes narrative of a less than glamorous childhood, The LeBrons works to reconstruct LeBron – through Kid LeBron – as a normal, average, kid working hard to live the American Dream. While imagining LeBron as 4 distinct personalities, the primary vehicle for moral lessons and engagement is Kid LeBron.

Yet, the show isn't a crass infomercial for LeBron and his corporate sponsors. It is a commercial with a narrative and a lot of moral lessons (isn't this true of all commercial popular culture). The initial show – " The Lion " – in fact begins with James asking viewers (with a nod to Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids), "Ever heard the saying two wrongs don't make a right." Providing pedagogical context for both the episode and the show itself, we initially meet Kid LeBron and his neighborhood friend as they ride their bikes, only to be chased by a vicious pit bull owned by Ray Johnson.

Terrorized and fearful of this blood thirty dog, the kids enlist the help from Biz LeBron. Athlete LeBron who is seen shooting baskets cannot be bothered to protect the boys because he is too focused on perfecting his game. Biz, describing the dog as a "gangsta," a "punk" and a "thug," leaving me to wonder if this dog represents not a Cleveland Cavaliers ticket holder as one blogger postulated, but a criminal element threatening an otherwise tranquil community. The use of racialized and racializing terms are revealing in this instance. To describe a dog as "thug" and a "gansta" plays on accepted racial language of black criminality. It reflects a process that not only contributes to "black social death" but "is characterized by the seemingly instantaneous social alienation of a delineated category of racially pathologized people" (D. Rodriguez, 2007, p. 134, from "The meaning of 'disaster' under the dominance of white life" in What lies beneath: Katrina, race, and the state of the nation ).

To combat the gangsta/thug threat, Biz gets a lion from the pet store to protect Kid and the other innocence within the community. Lion confronts the dog (we see the Lion in what appears to be an interrogation room), protecting the kids from future harm. Yet, Kid expresses discomfort upon learning from Wise LeBron that Lion (a natural predator) will likely kill the dog. He and his friend wonder if this is just as wrong as the dog inflicting violence on the kids in the neighborhood: "two wrongs don't make a right." Whether a message about gang violence, war, or a jab at Dan Gilbert (the Cavs owner who infamously publicly denounced LeBron for "taking his talents to South Beach"), it forms the crux of the moral message in the show about turning the other cheek and doing what is right irrespective of the behavior of others. Sandwiched in between advertizing, it encompasses the purported agenda behind the show: "to show youths of all ages how to be a good person."

More subtlety, The LeBrons, with its deployment of 4 distinct identities – Wise LeBron, Kid LeBron, Biz LeBron, and Athlete LeBron – attempts to challenge the hegemonic process that reduces and flattens black identity. In introducing the show, LeBron notes "It goes back to the four characters who I feel like I am on a day-to-day basis." It represents LeBron as encompassing multiple identities in an attempt to elucidate the diversity of blackness and challenge what constitutes an authentic black identity. Greg Tate encapsulates the context here:

Perhaps the supreme irony of black American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny us the complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation. If Afro-Americans have never settled for the racist reductions imposed upon them – from chattel slaves to cinematic stereotype to sociological myth – it's because the black collective conscious not only knew better but also knew more than enough ethnic diversity to subsume these fictions" (Quoted in R.D.G. Kelley, "Looking for the 'real' nigga: Social scientists construct the ghetto," 2005, p. 119)

At a certain level, the representations available stand in dialog with a hegemonic paradigm of racial authenticity, which as argued by John L. Jackson in Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity functions as a "restrictive script" that "limit[s]" an "individual's social options" (2005, p. 13). At another level, the narrative choice to construct LeBron as four distinct identities constitutes a certain level of fragmentation, whereupon individual identities are compartmentalized and treated in isolation. Imagining Athlete LeBron apart from Biz and Wise LeBron reifies hegemonic stereotypes about blackness by maintaining the binary between intelligence and athleticism. More importantly, it undermines his own humanity by erasing his complexity and assigning individual identities to individual bodies.

Like Nike's commercial, the 2011 web show is hyper commercial. Like its predecessor, it gives viewers a lot to think about in terms of black identity, commodified and otherwise. "The Nike series shows the LeBrons in a characteristically "black" behavior from signifying stories, or 'baldheaded lies' as they're called, at the dinner table, to macking in the mirror, to dancing to Rick James's "Superfreak," including the requisite performance of the robot by the older LeBron brother," writes Lisa Guerrero from Leonard and King's Criminalized and Commodified . "It represents LeBron as not only "hardwood maestro"; he's also funny, entertaining, and can dance well; the unstated implication being, 'just like all black people.'" Yet, "He remains 'safe' because he exists in an immovable racialized space created by the public and the market culture that manages racial panics by locating blackness in confined performative geographies like athletics and entertainment, in other words, in a world of blackness that is understandable because it is the one that exists in the national imagination."

While challenging hegemonic ideas, LeBron, as child, as moral, as just an average kid, reifies dominant ideas about a pathological underclass as well. He is imagined as the same – like many idealized white suburban kids, he once played in the neighborhood, dreamed of a better life, and worked hard as he in spite of moral challenges to make it. Yet, he is also different from both a white normative ideal, as a fragmented, hyper-black body, and the pathological black other, represented by the pit bull.

The Lebrons thus highlights how new media technologies provide modern black athletes (among others) tools to define their own image and message, partially apart from those "restrictive script" yet bound by the dominant discourse and accepted images. In the coming episodes it will be interesting to see how the show further deals with the complexities and dialects that exist between those restrictive stereotypes and the freedom afforded by this space.

***

David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.