Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 337

Daina Ramey Berry on the Courageous and Complex Contributions of Black Women

'On this episode of  National Podcast of Texas, Daina Ramey Berry discusses Texas’s role in black women’s history, how understanding black women’s history adds to our larger understanding of American history, and how black women’s history might inform the way we look at the 2020 election. Professor Berry is coauthor, with Kali Nicole Gross, of A Black Women’s History of the United States.'
 

Nina’s Anthem: “Young, Gifted and Black”

Nina’s Anthem: “Young, Gifted and Black” by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
For many, Tryon, NC native Nina Simone was the voice of the Civil Rights Movement. A playlist of the most significant songs of the 1960s protest movement would have to include Simone’s “Four Women” (1966), “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free”, (composed and initially recorded by fellow North Carolinian Dr. Billy Taylor), and  “Mississippi Goddam” (1964), a song for which Simone was “blacklisted” in ways that the Dixie Chicks would appreciate four decades later.  “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free” was every bit a defining anthem of the period, as was Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind” and Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come.” Yet the song that perhaps most resonates fifty years later, is a song that Simone recorded just as she began to recede from public view, and after many of the watershed moments of the Black Freedom movement had passed.
I first heard “Young, Gifted and Black”  as a four-year-old sitting in my parents’ Bronx apartment, and have vivid memories of rehearsing the song with classmates in preparation for our Head Start graduation.  I most remember our emphasis on the refrain “that’s where it’s at” and we were not alone. In her book Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone, Nadine Cohodas writes that Simone first debuted the song at a Jazz festival at Morgan State College, an HBCU in Baltimore, and that upon hearing the song, “the students leapt to their feet, applauding the last line: ‘To be young, gifted and black—that’s where it’s at’.”  (228)
‘Young, Gifted and Black” was inspired by Simone’s late friend, the playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry, who is often credited with bringing Simone into the Civil Rights Movement. In May of 1964, several months before her death, Hansberry addressed a group of high school creative writers, and in her remarks implored them to be “Young, Gifted, and Black”. After her death, Hansberry’s ex-husband collected some of Hansberry’s unpublished writings and adapted them into the stage play To Be Young, Gifted and Black: The World of Lorraine Hansberry, which ran on Broadway during the 1968-1969 season. 
Inspired by her friend’s words, Simone collaborated with her longtime musical director Weldon Irvine to create the song. Released as a single in late 1969, and later included on Simone’s live album Black Gold(recorded at the Philharmonic Hall), “Young, Gifted and Black” was Simone’s most successful single in a decade and her last single to reach the Pop and Soul/R&B charts.   When Simone performed the song on Sesame Street in 1972 “Young, Gifted and Black” was destined to become an interesting footnote to an impactful public life.
Yet, for the generations of folk who did not grow up at a time when Simone was a public presence and her music was no longer in vogue on Black radio, “Young, Gifted and Black” was a lifeline to her genius. The song’s brilliance is in its ability to speak across generations. As Shana Redmond notes in her book Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, “‘Young, Gifted and Black’ acknowledged the past even as it forecast the promises of the future.” (192)  The affirmation was immediate, starting with some of Simone’s younger contemporaries like Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin, who recorded versions of the song in 1969 and 1972 respectively, and a string of Reggae styled versions of the song by Bob Andy and Marcia Griffiths (a future member of Bob Marley’s I-Threes), The Heptones and a young relatively unknown vocalist named Elton John, all recorded in 1970.
Hathaway incorporated his version of the song in his live shows, and a version of the song that he performed at The Troubadour in 1972, that later appears on the posthumously released In Performance (1980), is a testament to how  the song lived among Black audiences at witnessed by the call-and-response that Hathaway’s performance inspires. Franklin was reticent to record the song at first, and asked Simone for her blessing to record it. Like so many of Franklin’s covers, she brought a new spirit to the song, contributing a Gospel-styled introduction that featured her distinct piano playing.  
Franklin’s version has resonated, particularly, with the Hip-hop Generation as it was featured prominently in a scene from the late John Singleton’s Higher Learning (1994), and has been sampled by the late Heavy D (“Yes, Yes, Y’all) and North Carolina rapper Rapsody, who features Franklin’s version on the title track of her Grammy nominated album Laila’s Wisdom. But as recent North Carolina Music Hall Of Fame inductee Big Daddy Kane suggests with his 1989 song “Young, Gifted and Black”, later covered by Jay Z, it was the very idea of being “Young Gifted and Black” that inspired so many generations.   
As bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, told the Los Angeles Times, on the occasion of Simone’s death, “There is no telling how many lives she touched with the simple affirmation of the beauty of being 'Young, Gifted and Black.' I know she touched mine.” Shana Redmond adds, “By 1971, Black men and women had an anthem to reflect their circumstances and announce a new era of cultural pride and political determination.” (192) In a career that was marked by so many sacrifices, Simone’s final, and perhaps most significant gift, was a simple reminder to the generations that came behind her “to be young, gifted, and Black.”
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Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University, where he is Chair of the Department of African & African-American Studies. Neal is the author of several books including Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and hosts the weekly video podcast Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. Follow Neal on Twitter at @NewBlackMan and Instagram at @BookerBBBrown.<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Helvetica; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1342208091 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}</style>

Dawoud Bey on Visualizing History

'Photographer Dawoud Bey’s work grapples with history. The artist asks, “How can one visualize African American history and make that history resonate in the contemporary moment?” Here he discusses several series, sited from Harlem to Birmingham to the Underground Railroad routes of northeastern Ohio, each of which works to make histories visible.' -- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
 

What Makes Black Gospel Musicians So Skilled? (feat. Donald Lawrence and Tye Tribbett)

'Sound Field host LA and Nahre travel to Chicago, the birthplace of gospel music. There they meet gospel artist, Donald Lawrence and LA introduces Nahre to drum shed culture at a shed session on the south side. Later LA travels to Orlando to meet singer Tye Tribbett at his church. They talk about the shared exchange between secular and non secular music.'

'Ghost' DNA In West Africans Complicates Story Of Human Origins

'Modern genomes from Nigeria and Sierra Leone show signals that scientists call "ghost" DNA — from an unknown human ancestor. That means that prehistoric humans likely procreated with an unknown group.' -- Morning Edition

#BackChannel: ‘Hair Love,’ Remembering Kobe Bryant & Michael Vick’s Road To Redemption

In this edition of #BackChannel , State of Things contributors Natalie Bullock Brown and Mark Anthony Neal join host Frank Stasio to discuss the Academy Award winning animated short Hair Love, the legacy of Kobe Bryant, and later are joined by award winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson, whose latest project is Vick from ESPN 30 for 30 series.

Earl Sweatshirt x MOCA: in Conversation with Cheryl I. Harris

'In/between us: a conversation on art, music, and life with Thebe Kgositsile (Earl Sweatshirt) and Cheryl I. Harris at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.'

Rappers are ‘Products Made to Crumble’: A Review of Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics and Guilt in America

Rappers are ‘Products Made to Crumble’: 
A Review of Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics and Guilt in Americaby Tyler Bunzey |@t_bunzey | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Hip-hop has changed quite a bit since its early years as a small cultural movement in the South Bronx. Almost half a century old, hip-hop is now a massive international cultural force with multiple subgenres, a force that informs the layout of the recording industry, fashion, marketing, the American vernacular, and, hell, even U.S. diplomatic relations. Other major musical genres like country (see the trap drums and 808s in Jason Aldean’s “Burnin’ It Down”) and pop (see the trap drums, flow, rhyme scheme, videography, lyrical content, and just about everything else in Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings”) pull heavily from hip-hop’s style, phrasing, and choreography, wrapping themselves in the aural contours of rap music. Hip-hop shows no signs of slowing down, and its adaptability to just about any subject matter, form, or cultural content enables it to be repeatedly reborn for each of its successive generations of practitioners and fans. 
However, according to Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis in their new monograph Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, one thing that hasn’t changed since hip-hop’s inception—its association with criminality. In its earliest years, graf writers took the brunt of the law’s distaste for hip-hop’s wild styles (Interestingly the NYC Police Benevolent Association recently tweeted a beautiful graf mural on a subway car while resurrecting the 1970s language that labels graffiti as “evidence of decay,” just weeks after the MTA decried a 8-car piece dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased graf writer PHASE 2 in December of 2019. And it don’t stop!). 
Since those early years, rappers have continually come under the ire of the law. N.W.A. famously ran into trouble with the Detroit police over the lyrics of “Fuck Tha Police.” 2Pac was the target of brutality from the Oakland Police for jaywalking. Jay-Z’s caught a controversial stabbing case in 1999. More recently, Tekashi 6ix9ine has become rap’s most famous snitch, and Da Baby has faced targeting by police in both Charlotte and Miami. Rap’s long antagonism with the law taps into a longer history of the black performers being targeted by America’s legal system, from the Slave Codes that barred enslaved people from drumming to the Cabaret Laws that disproportionately impacted black performers in the 1920s to the “Red Scare” that targeted black literary artists like Langston Hughes in the 1940s and 1950s to the now-infamous COINTELPRO FBI program in the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, the law’s antagonism toward rap music is historically consistent. The tradition of wielding the law as a weapon of racial control is as American as apple pie. Nielson and Dennis’ monograph—half scholarly legal project and half an activist call to action—focuses on a particular aspect of rap and criminality’s storied relationship: the use of rap lyrics as courtroom evidence. Contextualizing lyrical evidence within hip-hop history, Rap on Trial argues that rap’s treatment in the courtroom is exemplary, and the consequences are life threatening for those of hip-hop’s practitioners that fall victim to this dangerous legal trend. 
While Rap on Trialcertainly falls in line with Critical Race Theory and other legal scholarship concerning race and hip-hop—like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness or Paul Butler’s Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice—Nielson and Dennis are careful to couch their discussion in aesthetics to supplement their legal case studies. The authors suggest that the courts’ abuse of lyrical evidence as autobiographical record comes from a racial misreading of hip-hop’s lyrics as evidence of crimes committed rather than narrative creativity. In an exploration of the history of hip-hop’s development (Chapter 1), the authors continually return to hip-hop’s own definition of its aesthetics to demonstrate how woefully wrong so-called experts, prosecutors, and witnesses often are. This insistence on respecting hip-hop’s racialized aesthetics does more than simply decry the abominable process of locking up artists for their creative output. It also makes a case for the role that creative arts education can play in legal doctrine. Put simply, critical theorizations hip-hop’s aesthetics have direct import on the lives of artists. Their discussion of rap on trial is more aesthetics in praxis than an academic theory of hip-hop, as the misunderstanding of rap’s lyricism literally determines the freedom of these practitioners. Artistic ignorance may seem insignificant to some, but it costs the freedom of others.  
The rest of the monograph traces this theme of aesthetic illegality through rap’s entrance into the courtroom (Chapter 2) and the pitfalls that meet lyrical evidence as soon as it’s presented (Chapter 3). Rap on Trial suggests that lyrical evidence ought to be ethically inadmissible because it is wielded as a colorblind legal mechanism to place black and brown men in prison. The study only has one instance of a white practitioner being jailed for her lyrics because, unsurprisingly, this colorblind mechanism disproportionately impacts black, low-profile artists. 
In Chapter 4, Nielson and Dennis eschew a traditional First Amendment argument on behalf of artists. Building off the theoretical scaffolding of the preceding chapters, the authors suggest that the First Amendment defense—“it’s all free speech”—is a cop out because “rap on trial is not a first Amendment issue with racial implications. It’s a racial issue with First Amendment implications” (25). In other words, rap lyrics’ use in the courtroom will not equally impact all genres, and country fans don’t exactly need to be concerned about rap’s treatment in the courtroom because it won’t extend to their preferred genre. Chapters 5 and 6 push this argument for rap’s racialized treatment further, intertwining rap on trial with the rise of gang units, ignorant or malicious prosecutors, and untrained experts. 
Although Rap on Trial is comprehensive, groundbreaking, and fundamental to understanding how the justice system targets black artistry, most remarkable is its repeated insistence on praxis as analysis. Both the conclusion and epilogue to the study provide comprehensive directives for concerned citizens, scholars, and legal workers to work against this prosecutorial trend. Additionally, the chapters are peppered with personal vignettes about expert testifying that Nielson has done in service of eliminating this practice, including cases that he has won and lost. Rap on Trial refuses to over-intellectualize the issue. Real lives are at stake. Thus, the authors include real methods for change, however large or small. 
This laudatory dedication to praxis, however, perhaps prevented Nielson and Dennis from connecting their work more explicitly to the history of Critical Race Theory scholarship that could be useful in theorizing this dangerous courtroom practice. Aside from a brief invocation of Michelle Alexander, the authors generally avoid over-intellectualizing rap on trial, an understandable impulse for a book with such high stakes, to be sure. However, stronger explicit connections to Critical Race Theory may have bolstered the study’s ability to be transposed into other legal and racial contexts. 
For example, the discussion of “thug” as colorblind dogwhistle would meld beautifully with Eduardo Bonilla Silva’s mapping of colorblind discourse in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. The disparity among the treatment of rap versus other genres coded as white (e.g. country, pop, etc.) could easily be supplemented with Cheryl Harris’ foundational essay “Whiteness as Property.” The manner in which the courts racialize rappers with the use of their lyrics demonstrates how whiteness and non-whiteness are encoded into law, and thus could benefit from framing with Ian Haney-Lopez’s White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. Without sacrificing the fundamentally important practical nature of the study, the Rap on Trial could benefit from a touch more theoretical disposition in order to make the book as useful to those outside of hip-hop studies as it is useful to those within. 
Theoretical quibbles aside, Nielson and Dennis’ study is fundamental in understanding how racial inequality is able to thrive in the colorblind era of American legal discourse. Ariana Grande sure as hell isn’t being audited by the IRS for the likely deficit spending she describes in “7 Rings.” But likewise, a high-profile rapper like Future isn’t being investigated by the FBI for the death-inducing amount of drugs he describes taking in “Mask Off.” Rather it is the Black working class artist, the same artist who has been repeatedly targeted by American penal codes through Jim Crow and into the Era of Mass Incarceration, who suffers from America’s aesthetic refusal of hip-hop. As 2Pac so brilliantly put it in “Hail Mary,” black artists are “institutionalized, products made to crumble,” especially in the courtroom. America’s willful ignorance of hip-hop culture is much more than a racial rejection of aesthetics. It has life-altering, insidious consequences for those Black artists caught in the crosshairs of the courts’ racial subjugation. And it don’t stop. <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Helvetica; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1342208091 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}</style><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">+++</span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: x-small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.newblackmaninexile.net/?q... style="background: white; color: #1155cc;">Tyler Bunzey</span></b></a><span style="background: white; color: black;"> is a  Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Student in the Department of English and </span></span></span></span></span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: x-small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background: white; color: black;">Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.  Follow him on Twitter: @tbunz3</span></span> </span></span></span></div>

Actor-Comedian Tommy Davidson Dives Into His New Memoir, 'Living In Color: What's Funny About Me'

'In his new memoir, Tommy Davidson shares his unique perspective on making it in Hollywood, being an integral part of TV history with the pioneering sketch show, In Living Color, and on living a life that has never been black and white. Told with humor and hard-won honesty by a singular voice whose family and friendships help him navigate a life of personal and professional highs and lows, Living In Color: What's Funny About Me is a bracing, illuminating and remarkable success story.' -- BUILD Series  

Class Incarceration: A New Understanding of Prison and the American Population

'Sociologist Adaner Usmani advances a new explanation for mass incarceration in America - not as an elite-driven tool of racialized social control, but as a wide-scale punitive response to the growing crime and violence of an unequal society with no social democratic push for redistributive policies. Usmani wrote the article "The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration" with John Clegg for Catalyst.' -- This is Hell!