Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 157

Tiny Desk (Home) Concert: Melanie Charles

'Within the warm walls of Williamsburg Music Center, one of Brooklyn's last surviving Black-owned jazz venues, Melanie Charles takes NPR Music on a journey that embodies the soul of jazz: exploration. A Brooklynite proud of her rich Haitian heritage, Charles is conscious of the giant shoulders upon which she stands and takes steps to both honor and advance this music. Behind her, smiling pictures of her guardian angels, Mary Lou Williams and Billie Holiday, encourage Charles while she and her musicians blend the mystique of Haitian folk music with the sorrowful optimism of negro spirituals and the free space for elevation that jazz improvisation allows.'

Afropop Worldwide: Toronto's African Scene

'Toronto is Canada’s most cosmopolitan city—“like New York but mellower” in the words of Kofi Ackah, son of the Ghanaian highlife legend Jewel Ackah. Kofi is one of many superb African artists who have made Toronto their home over the years. That list is long, and it has included highlife star Pat Thomas, South Sudanese rapper Emmanuel Jal, rising Congolese star Blandine, Malagasy guitarist Donné Roberts, and a hidden treasure of Ethiopian music, Fantahun Shewankochew. In this program, we take the pulse of Toronto’s African scene through music and interviews with Kofi, Emmanuel, Blandine, Fantahun and others.'

Afropop Worldwide · Toronto's African Scene

Tracking the Health Impacts of Grief: 'People suffer when they lose someone'

'Grief, whether it's caused by COVID-19 or other deaths, has a medical cost: It’s linked to higher blood pressure, shorter lives, depression and sleeping problems. And when we consider that 700,000 people have died of the coronavirus alone in the U.S., the number of those grieving is now easily in the millions. Toni Miles, professor at University of Georgia’s College of Public Health, tells Here & Now it's high time for a collective response. She and a friend had a conversation in 2012 about the public health consequences of losing a loved one and realized the impacts of bereavement were vastly understudied.'

Ben Jealous: Why I Went to Jail on October 5

Why I Went to Jail on October 5

by Ben Jealous | @BenJealous | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

 

Sometimes friends have to hold friends accountable. That’s why I got arrested outside the White House on Oct. 5. I was there with other civil rights and religious leaders to call on President Joe Biden to do more to protect voting rights that are under attack.

 

We know that President Biden supports voting rights. He has called anti-voting laws being passed by Republican state legislators the biggest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. We need him to act like he truly believes those words.

 

We need a federal voting rights law passed this year. More states are enacting voter suppression. They are abusing the redistricting process to rig future elections and give Republicans more power than they would win in a fair system. They want to shut Democrats out of power in 2022 and 2024. They want to stop progress that millions of Americans voted for when we put President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the White House—and mobilized to elect Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

 

We have seen this before. When Black people and their allies won political power after the Civil War, white supremacists used violence and illegitimate power to reverse that progress. State-level voter suppression was a core tactic of Jim Crow. The solution then, and the solution today, is strong federal voting rights legislation that will override those state laws and prevent new ones from taking effect.

 

The good news is that the legislation has been written. It has passed the House of Representatives and it has the support of every Democratic senator. If it gets to the White House, President Biden will sign it.

 

That bad news is that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues are using Senate filibuster rules to keep voting rights from coming up for a vote. This is 2021, not 1921. President Biden and Senate Democrats cannot let McConnell have the final word on voting rights in this country.

 

In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson did not choose between civil rights and his anti-poverty agenda.

 

He knew the country needed both and he used his mastery of the Senate to get both passed. That’s what we need from President Biden, who has more experience in the Senate than any president since Johnson. The infrastructure bill is vitally important. So is the Build Back Better agenda. But we need the White House to devote the same level of urgency to the infrastructure of our democracy. President Biden must lead Senate Democrats in passing voting rights this year—and getting rid of the filibuster if it stands in the way.

 

We need strong, effective moral leadership both inside and outside the White House at this moment. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a moral movement. It called on Americans to live up to their own ideals as well as to the promises in our founding documents. It brought the public pressure that compelled LBJ to use the powers of his office to pass civil rights and voting rights legislation.

 

I was proud to stand outside the White House with so many religious leaders: a Catholic nun representing thousands of her sisters; a Jewish rabbi in whose organization’s office the original Voting Rights Act was drafted; Black Baptist and AME clergy taking their place in the Black church’s long legacy of working for justice. We were joined by representatives of secular social justice and voting rights organizations.

 

Rev. Timothy McDonald, who pastored in Martin Luther King’s church and who serves as the co-chair of People For the American Way, the organization I lead, led us in singing and prayer and brought powerful words of truth.

 

I choked up a bit with gratitude for their leadership, and with gratitude for all the members of the movement, including members of my own family, who risked their lives over the years to secure the right to vote for all Americans.

 

Before I was arrested and spent the night in jail, I delivered a message to President Biden: When the president of the League of Women Voters is willing to risk arrest, when pastors in Dr. King’s lineage are willing to risk arrest, when Catholic nuns are willing to risk arrest to call you to fulfill your promise to make voting rights a top priority, it is time to examine your moral conscience.

 

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Ben Jealous serves as president of People For the American Way. Jealous has decades of experience as a leader, coalition builder, campaigner for social justice and seasoned nonprofit executive. In 2008, he was chosen as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the NAACP. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he has taught at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.

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Billy Porter on Juggling the Demands of Stardom

'Actor-dancer-singer-director Billy Porter has won Tony, Emmy and Grammy Awards, and is author of a new memoir, Unprotected. He talks with CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Seth Doane about a childhood filled with years of rejection, doubt and abuse – and about how he survived and triumphed.'

The Art of Leadership with John Hope Bryant

'What does it take to build and excel as an executive of color, while also building wealth? John Hope Bryant, the conscious capitalist, has chartered an envious business journey as a serial entrepreneur, real estate investor, author, philanthropist, and prominent thought leader on financial inclusion, economic empowerment and financial dignity. His nonprofit organization Operation Hope has helped over 4M individuals and directed just under $4B in private capital to low income communities. John Hope Bryant joins Black Enterprise's Tea Time to share how we can develop the mindset to be great leaders, and do well while also doing good.'

A Black Family Got Their Beach Back — and Inspired Others to Fight Against Land Theft

'The beachfront land — known as Bruce's Beach in Manhattan Beach, Calif. — is being returned to the descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce 97 years after it was taken from them. The historic Bruce's Beach case is inspiring social justice leaders and reparations activists to fight for other Black families whose ancestors were also victims of land theft in the United States.'

On Disability and Work Under Capitalism, and the Abolitionist Horizon

'Writer Keith Rosenthal joins This is Hell! to discuss the lives and labor of people with disabilities under (and beyond) the capitalist state, and his article "Carceral Histories of Disability: An Abolitionist Analysis" for Spectre Journal.'

This is Hell! · On disability and work under capitalism, and the abolitionist horizon.

Black & Highly Flavored: Black Farmers, Black Roasters, Black Coffee with Gail & Uche Azodo

'SoulPhoodies Tamara Celeste and Derek Kirk speak with husband-and-wife duo Gail and Uche Azodo about how a passion for coffee began with utility, later grew into the love of the bean, and the rise of SIPS—a café and coffee roasting business.'

Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: "Capacity for Capacious & Expansive Imagination” Ashon Crawley on Queerness, Blackpentecostalism and Otherwise Worlds

'In this episode of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, an interview with Ashon Crawley,  Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility and The Lonely Letters. Crawley delves into the context in which both works were created. Along the way Ashon shares reflections on religion, doctrine, on spirituality, theology, sense capacity, aesthetics, Blackness, Queerness and the crises, breakdowns and breakthroughs created through incommensurability.'