Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 233

Journalist Investigates Amazon Warehouse Life And The Pitfalls Of 'One-Click America'

"Alec MacGillis writes about Amazon's growing impact on American life in his new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. He notes that the pandemic has been very good for the company's bottom line: Amazon's sales jumped 40% last year, and company founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is estimated at around $180 billion, is now the richest person on the planet. "The fact is that the company grew so much over the past year because Americans, in much greater numbers than before, really embraced the sort of 'one-click' approach to our daily life," MacGillis tells Fresh Air."

Kirk Franklin: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

"For nearly 30 years, Kirk Franklin has been widely regarded for revolutionizing gospel. He incorporated secular music, particularly hip-hop, while preserving the message and integrity of traditional gospel. Here, he and his powerhouse choir pace through a decades-long, sixteen Grammy award winning discography of faith, praise and encouragement while cracking plenty of jokes."

A Blueprint for Bail Reform

"Duke University School of Law professor and Wilson Center Director Brandon Garrett and Sandra Guerra Thompson, professor of law and director of the Criminal Justice Institute at the University of Houston Law Center, discuss their work as independent monitors for a landmark bail reform settlement in Texas. This settlement could become a national model for cash bail reform."

Alfred L. Martin Jr. on The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom

"Drawing from 20 interviews with credited episode writers, key show-runners, and Black gay men, The Generic Closet situates Black-cast sitcoms as a unique genre that uses Black gay characters in service of the series' heterosexual main cast. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., argues that the Black community is considered to be antigay due to misrepresentation by shows that aired during the family viewing hour and that were written for the imagined, "traditional" Black family."

Conversations in Black Freedom Studies – Black and Red: Socialism and Black Liberation

"Throughout the twentieth century, the Black freedom movement intersected in various ways with the communist and socialist movements. The first Black woman to run for president of the United States was Charlene Mitchell, who ran on the Communist Party ticket in 1968. From Hubert Harrison, W..E.B. Du Bois, and Claudia Jones, to Esther Cooper Jackson and Angela Davis, many of the leading lights of the Black movement have also been communists or socialists. Join this conversation to discuss this often overlooked red thread through Black radical history. The discussion at Schomburg Center features authors Barbara Smith (Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forth Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith), Robin D.G. Kelley (Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times), and Charisse Burden-Stelly (co-author with Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History)."

Jessica Marie Johnson: Keywords and Dark Fiilaments in Digital Time

"Presented as part of the Digital Storytelling Colloquium at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities. Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020)."

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom – MoMA FILM Q&A with the Cast and Director

"Viola Davis, Glynn Turman, Colman Domingo, Michael Potts, and director George C. Wolfe discuss their Oscar-nominated film Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020), working with late cast member Chadwick Boseman, and the meaning of Blues music with The Museum of Modern Art's Chief Curator of Film Rajendra Roy."

Left of Black S11 · E21 | Karla F.C. Holloway on Black Detective Novels

What does it mean to write in the literary traditions of such giants as Chester Himes and Walter Mosley who wrote iconic stories about Black detectives in crime fiction? In this very special episode of Left of Black, host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by long-time colleague and Duke Emerita Professor Karla F.C. Holloway as they discuss her latest novel, Gone Missing in Harlem, which has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as, "...a page-turner and a portrait of a vanished era." This is Professor Holloway's second  novel to date, which followed A Death in Harlem, a mystery set in the moment of the Harlem Renaissance.

Racism and Its Deadly Cousins by Ben Jealous

Racism and Its Deadly Cousins 

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

 

What does it say about our country when we don’t have time to absorb the impact of one mass shooting before news of the next one comes across our phones and TV screens? 

 

Grief upon grief. 

 

This column is not about gun culture or laws that make it easier to buy an assault rifle than to register to vote. We need to talk about those things. 

 

But we also need to pay attention to one response to the Atlanta spa killings: the way some conservatives rushed to insist that race and racism had nothing to do with the murders. 

 

It is true that the man who confessed to the Atlanta killings said they were not racially motivated. He reportedly told police that he was struggling with a “sex addiction” and the killings were a way to “eliminate temptation.” 

 

There’s a lot in that statement to unpack, and a lot of smart people have been unpacking it over the past two weeks. 

 

Marcela Howell, who leads In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Agenda, was among the Black women who spoke in solidarity after the killings. “While law enforcement officials have announced that the shooter’s motivation was ‘sex addiction,’ we know that sexual violence and racism are often intertwined when it comes to violence against women,” she said in a statement. 

 

“As Black women, we know that our Asian-American sisters are disparately impacted at the intersections of racism, sexism, and xenophobia,” Howell said. 

 

There is a long history of bigotry and legal discrimination that directly targeted Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. Over the past year, that hostility was inflamed by bigoted rhetoric from former President Donald Trump describing COVID-19 as the “Kung flu” and warning that if he weren’t reelected Americans would have to learn Chinese. 

 

As Howell and many other activists and scholars have pointed out since the killings, racism in this country is deeply connected to sexism directed at women of color. And racism and misogyny are both intertwined with the history and culture of conservative white evangelicalism in which the Atlanta shooter was apparently steeped. 

 

Kathryn Gin Lum, an associate professor of American religion at Stanford University, said the killings reflected “a toxic brew” of racism, sexism, and religion. That toxic brew has been used to justify anti-Asian laws and stoked anti-Asian violence going back to the 19th Century. 

 

Religion scholar Bradley Onishi and others point out that Jim Crow apartheid and anti-race-mixing laws were not only defended as necessary to protect the sexual purity of individual white women, but also the racial and religious purity of White Christian America. Black women and Asian women have often been both fetishized and demonized as hypersexual temptresses threatening the innocence of and purity of white Christian men. Young people raised in churches that emphasize “purity culture” are taught to have deep shame about their sexual feelings, and girls’ and young women’s bodies portrayed as threats to boys and young men. 

 

We don’t yet know, and may never fully understand, just how all these influences combined in the mind of this particular young man who chose to commit multiple murders. 

 

But we can and should push back against law enforcement officials, conservative pundits and religious leaders who dismiss the reality of systemic racism or refuse to recognize the ways that women of color are particularly harmed by the mixture of racism and sexism that plagues our culture. 

 

***

Ben Jealous serves as president of People For the American Way and People For the American Way Foundation. 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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Robin D.G. Kelley: Amazon Union Drive Builds on Decades of Black Radical Labor Activism in Alabama

"As thousands of Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, decide whether to form the company’s first union, historian Robin D.G. Kelley says it could be a watershed moment for labor organizing in the United States. “This is definitely the most significant labor struggle of the 21st century, no doubt,” he says. “The South has been the epicenter of the country’s most radical democratic movements, which is why it’s completely unsurprising that Bessemer, Alabama, would be the place where you’d have a renewed labor movement.”