Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 171

Black Like Me – Gay, Free and Happy!: In Memoriam—Carl Bean: May 26, 1944 – September 8, 2021 by Johari Jabir

Black Like Me – Gay, Free and Happy!: 

In Memoriam—Carl Bean: May 26, 1944 – September 8, 2021 

by Johari Jabir | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

 

It is an old story. Some ultra-talented Black singer leaves the church in order to pursue a career in a more lucrative career in secular music. Never mind the fact that the binary divisions between the sacred and secular have never really worked when it comes to Black music, Carl Bean is one of those many examples of Black gospel talent who may have momentarily left the building but took the spirit of the church with him.  Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Carl Bean grew up attending Providence Baptist Church where Rev. Marcus Garvey Good was pastor. In his autobiography, I Was Born This Way: A Gay Preacher’s Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ, Bean describes his childhood church as a community of, “strivers, those looking to advance themselves in not only the intellectual and spiritual realm but the economic as well” (49). The music at Providence was very proper, but Bean was drawn to the more “rootsy” music played in his household and in the storefronts he visited. Bean’s own church preached acceptance, but the churches he visited were the first spaces he heard anti-gay theologies.

 

Bean left Baltimore in 1960 and moved to New York where he worked with the famed gospel artist, Alex Bradford. Bean left New York in 1972 for Los Angeles, California where THE major break in his musical career happened in 1977 when Bean released his testimonial hit, I Was Born This Way on Motown Records. Bean delivered I Was Born This Way as if he were “preaching the blues.” The song was not only a disco hit, but it held special significance for those of us within the Black Queer community. It is not surprising that Bean’s version of I Was Born This Way was available to Lady Gaga, (a fact she acknowledges, thankfully), as Black music has emerged out of the particular conditions of the Black experience, while also holding the capacity to bear witness to the fullness of humanity. 

 

The success of Bean’s anthem was short lived, and Bean never wavered from his Christian roots. Like a prophet, Bean saw what was on the horizon for Black queer people at the start of the 1980s. He perceived how the combination of HIV/AIDS denial in Black communities, and violent anti-gay theology on the part of some Black Churches would have dire consequences for Black queers. Bean founded the Unity Fellowship Church (Los Angeles) in 1982, and several churches were added across the nation under the Unity Fellowship umbrella. True to his vision of religion and “intersectionality,” Bean soon led the Unity Fellowship church movement to establish the Minority AIDS Project, one of the first HIV/AIDS organizations in the nation founded to serve Black people and other persons of color. For Bean, founding the Minority AIDS Project was reflective of his practical application of Black liberation theology and “intersectionality.”

 

A deep thinker and independent intellectual, Bean’s ministry took theoretical frameworks but blended them with African spirituality as a source of healing and transformation. When I attended a Unity Fellowship Conference some years back, everything felt so Candomble`; The market place outside the hotel ballroom was filled with African oils, shea butter, various cloths, and the smells in incense. Inside the ballroom, where the worship service was held, everything and everyone was draped in white. A sense of the metaphysical, the miraculous, and the mystical were emphasized in the many incantations, songs, and sermon. The ancestors were invoked and welcome to facilitate a collective healing from racial traumas and homophobic violence enacted against us, often by our very own. Bean was the high priest in our Black queer ceremony of affirmation. He drew upon gospel music from the migration as therapeutic memory, a medicine of hope and radical possibility.

 

Bean had help from the elders in learning how to turn his struggles into a vehicle by which to serve others. As a young person Bean was mentored by the esteemed Black clergy, Rev. Dr. Samuel Dewitt Proctor, whose messages of radical love and justice took root in Bean’s spirit. During his stint in New York Bean was influenced by Rev. William Morris O’Neill’s Christian Tabernacle Church, a spiritual church that grew out of the ministry of Rev. Clarence “Preacher” Cobbs’ First Church of Deliverance, Chicago, IL. 

 

Bean was not alone in the attempt to provide fugitive sanctuaries for queer people, specifically Black queers. His comrades in the work include figures such as Bishop Troy Perry and Bishop Yvette Flunder. Even as he was such a strong Black Gay man with great feelings of love for his people Bean had his flaws. He could be prideful in ways that some people found alienating. While he chose a righteous freedom of exile, he could sometimes isolate himself from resources that would have served his vision. Nevertheless, Bean was a valiant soldier in the battle to pray with those he was called to serve. His message was simple, even as it cut deep to the core: God’s unconditional care and concern for his people’s love, their bodies, and their souls was for EVERYONE.  

 

It will be difficult in the coming days, to resist the temptation to reduce Carl Bean to a footnote in Lady Gaga’s hit, Born This Way. For so many of us Bean was more than one song – even though the song is our everything; the horrific story of how we got here, of “how we got over,” and how now, one of our priests, Carl Bean has “moved on up a little higher.”

 

Bishop John Selders, founder and pastor of Amistad United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut, conducted an extensive interview with Arch-Bishop Bean in the years leading up to his death. Selders reflected on the range of Bean’s life, “from being a student of The Rev. Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, to his connections to the black urban spiritual church and his musical opus from gospel to disco, Archbishop's status as a spiritual giant who lived and served among us will not be forgotten.”

 

Arch-Bishop Carl Bean was one of those rarest of Black men who was born free—knew it, and was determined to live from that place of knowing.

 

***

Johari Jabir is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army”

 

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The Downside to Surveilling Your Neighbors byTodd Feathers

  The Downside to Surveilling Your Neighbors by Todd Feathers | @ToddFeathers | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
 In one town, police say products like Nextdoor and Ring are helping fight crime. But racism and vigilantism are pervasive on safety platforms

In late August, a resident of Mobile, Ala., posted a video on Nextdoor, a social media app that advertises itself as a place for neighbors to connect. The clip, from a home security camera, showed a man—”Race- black Age- teenager or early 20s”—taking a leaf blower from the poster’s property.

“Let’s set up a sting and I will have my AK-47 ready for the next one,” a neighbor responded.

In the days before and after that post, Mobile residents discussed other suspicious activity on Nextdoor and similar apps. Some posters used barely coded racist language, others mentioned obtaining pistol permits in response to petty thefts or suggested firing warning shots at potential troublemakers.

In one post to Nextdoor, a Mobile resident said there were “dogs” going around ripping wiring out of trucks. “You mean like Snoop Dog?” a neighbor responded. “I think it was supposed to say dawgs,” a second said.

“They’ve never owned anything, never worked for their own money, have no home training and are just lowdown.… [S]care them by firing outside when they’re seen,” a third wrote.

Neighbors have always peered out their windows at each other and discussed passersby. But new surveillance technologies like Nextdoor, Ring cameras, civilian license plate readers, and crime reporting apps—which have quickly attracted police admiration—are fundamentally changing the dynamics of snooping on neighbors. And not necessarily for the best. 

In Mobile, for instance, the police department has a full-time employee who spends a significant amount of time monitoring Nextdoor posts, Commander Kevin Levy told The Markup. 

MPD has also entered a special law enforcement partnership with Amazon’s Ring and uses the associated Neighbors app to request footage. 

“There’s so much more evidence that’s out there, digital evidence, that detectives have at their fingers,” Levy said. “As an agency, we encourage apps like that even though we know we’re going to get a bunch of false positives. That’s the risk you take, but I think otherwise you’re ignoring a really good resource.”

Mobile residents can get a discount on Ring surveillance cameras in exchange for registering their cameras with police. The MPD’s list of registered cameras—which includes many Ring devices but is not exclusive to them—has grown from just several hundred cameras when the program started in 2015 to more than 12,000 today, Levy said.

But the crowd-sourced safety platforms can also be rife with racism and threats of vigilantism. 

Recently on Neighbors—an Amazon Ring–owned app similar to Nextdoor that can be directly connected to Ring security cameras—a Mobile resident posted a video of a Black man, whose face is barely visible, picking up a cardboard box from a front porch. 

The post, titled “Theft,” includes a case ID and phone number for the Mobile Police Department. In the comments, Neighbors app users speculated about who the man was and where he lived. “I think he lives in the section of apartments in the rear on the right,” one user wrote. Another said, “I will be looking for him.”

Another Neighbors post from Mobile includes a video from a Ring camera showing a Black man walking across a piece of the poster’s front lawn. “Trespassing,” is all the poster wrote.

Ring declined to answer questions on the record. Nextdoor removed the posts mentioned in this story after The Markup inquired about them.

“Vigilantism and racism are not allowed on Nextdoor, and we rely on a combination of human and technological moderation capabilities to search for, identify and remove content and neighbors in violation of our community guidelines,” Jenny Mayfield, a spokesperson for the company, wrote in an email.

Jelani Drew-Davi, a campaign director at Kairos Fellowship, which is leading the Tech is not Neutral campaign against neighborhood surveillance tools, said the danger of community racism is compounded by the fact that Nextdoor, Ring, and similar services partner with police departments. Speculation about the identity of a person in a video or an accusation of trespassing might previously have been contained to a conversation among neighbors. Now, such comments are monitored by police.

In June 2020, Nextdoor removed a feature that allowed Nextdoor users to flag posts and send them directly to police. Government agencies are also now not allowed to scroll community news feeds from their official accounts, but police using private accounts can still monitor posts on the platform.

Amazon has aggressively marketed Ring with the help of law enforcement agencies and, as of January 2021, had partnerships with more than 1,700 departments. But the company recently changed its policies so that police must now request footage in public posts.

“These companies are actively going after police partnerships,” Drew-Davi said. “In the world that we live in, police are not good to marginalized communities.… Surveillance is not safety. Reports around suspicious neighbors or crime is oftentimes just a proxy for a Black or brown citizen.” 

But even as concerns grow, so does the availability of new public safety technologies. Recently, neighborhood-owned automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have become more common.

Flock Safety, one of the leaders in this area, claims that thousands of homeowners associations have purchased its systems to “automate their neighborhood watch.” Such scanners read license plates and check them against police and private databases, sending automatic alerts to police if a wanted car passes by. They can also upload license plates to police databases, creating a powerful tool for tracking drivers’ movements.

Flock markets its products specifically to homeowners associations, organizations rooted in segregation, that are still disproportionately White.

“It will make it a lot easier for homeowners and [homeowners associations] to track and harass BIPOC visitors and constantly treat anyone who looks different as a threat and to really ramp up the technology of exclusion,” said Albert Fox Cahn, director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “These tools that are sold as supposedly creating safety: For millions of Americans, they’re viewed as creating a threat.”

Flock told The Markup that its system “is not intended to block anyone from entering a neighborhood.”

“Flock reduces the need for random traffic stops, by ensuring that officers will be notified if a vehicle is associated with a known wanted suspect or that vehicle is stolen,” Josh Thomas, Flock’s vice president of marketing, wrote in an emailed statement. “We send a near real-time alert to the nearest officer, a picture verifying the image of the vehicle, and the officer is expected to double-verify the data before making a stop.”

And then there’s the Citizen app, present in about 60 U.S. cities.

Citizen originally launched under the name Vigilante but rebranded after being banned from the Apple App Store for seemingly encouraging citizens to intervene in crimes. Its actions since then have not entirely assuaged fears that it is designed to encourage crowd-served justice.

Earlier this year, Citizen launched an internet manhunt by offering a $30,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of a man suspected of starting a brush fire in California, but Citizen employees and users accused and publicly identified the wrong man, prompting the company to issue an apology.

“Citizen has strict validation protocols to limit the spread of misinformation and ensure safety. This was the first and only instance where these protocols were not followed and, unfortunately, an on-the-ground tip from an LAPD Sergeant was used in place of official confirmation from public safety agencies,” Citizen spokesperson Ebony Bowden wrote in an email to The Markup. She added that the company has “no plans to offer additional rewards to share at this time.”

In May, Citizen proposed starting a private police force. (It has since abandoned the plan.) And on Aug. 3 it launched Citizen Protect, a $19.99-per-month service that offers 24/7 access to “highly trained Protect Agents” who, among other functions, can send alerts about an incident involving a Protect customer to nearby Citizen users. 

Bowden did not directly respond to a question asking whether Citizen encourages its users to respond to alerts generated by “Protect Agents.”

“The wisdom of the crowd becomes the tyranny of the crowd, and it’s enabled by technology,” Wayne Logan, a Florida State University law professor who has studied the effects of public safety technology, said. “One hundred years ago, if I put a finger on somebody and the pitchforks came out, it was limited. But now you’ve got the whole internet.”

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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