Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 361

Actress Da'Vine Joy Randolph On Her Role In 'Dolemite Is My Name'

'Da'Vine Joy Randolph plays a comedian in the new movie Dolemite Is My Name. The actress plays a strong, curvy, funny, black single mother who subverts stereotypes of the Blaxploitation era.' -- All Things Considered

Black Girl Genius Week

Black Girl Genius Weekby Ruth Nicole Brown | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile) 
You can’t celebrate Black girls if you don’t listen. They have plenty of stories to tell if, in so many ways, we would stop silencing their thoughtfully beautiful noise — their voices, their music and their movement.
Black girls are surrounded by a cacophony of noise and sensation, entirely of their own making, but they are often punished for it. As Black Girl Genius Week kicks off in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, I am reflecting on my black girlhood and ways I can tap into the frequencies of today’s black girls to amplify them.
When we fail to see the magic of black girlness, we miss a world. So many stereotypes of Black girls are shaped by volume with sound weaponized against them. They are either policed for being too loud or victimized by unreasonable expectations about how they should or shouldn’t show up in the world.
I remember black girlhood vividly: I am from suburban Chicago, from towns called Park Forest and Chicago Heights. I remember lively basketball courts, the neighborhood candy store and going outside to play with friends. I am from beaches with no water.
I am from many places that are “not.” Not the city. Not the suburb you saw on TV. Not the place you aspire to move when you graduate from college. I am from one of many unheard of places where unknown brilliance thrives.
I am from artists. I remember learning form and aesthetics from how Aldi, the low-cost grocery chain, stocked shelves and shelves of generic brands. I am from scholars, Black women educators who taught me how to read, think and question as if their lives depended on it.
Because of them, I am.
During Black Girl Genius Week, my organization, Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, will pay it forward by celebrating the spirit of black girls and mobilizing them in an imaginary, expansive creative movement that embraces their exquisite noise. In afterschool sessions, film talkbacks, day parties, museum exhibits, orchestrated walks in public parks and mall meetups, we will play, conduct physics experiments, makes arts and architecture, and grapple with big theories of social change. Black girl aesthetics, and Black feminist politics — all of which there is no Black life without.
In this critical Black arts-inspired movement, we will meet with Black girls face to face, to listen to their stories about where they are from, and cherish how they name themselves. We will create music from the sounds we carry deep in our bodies and step to the mic. We will surprise ourselves with truths we’ve maybe whispered to the trees but decided in that moment, are needed to be heard, recorded, and played back, and uploaded.
We will write songs.
Often marginalized by institutions, policies, categories and identities assumed pure and concrete, Black girl genius resides in the in-between. In creating an affirmative home-space, Black Girl Genius Week won’t take our girls’ homegrown knowledge and expertise for granted. We won’t show up without first acknowledging who and how some Black women and non-binary persons transformed an entire institution, changed the entire set design for a Black girl’s laughter to echo into oblivion.
During Black Girl Genius Week, the fifth event of its kind, we will think with our hearts and act in love: This is not the kind of thing they teach in school, so we must teach it for ourselves.
In our space, Black girls are not tone policed, shushed to submit, or otherwise told that however it sounds, is inappropriate. We will create or find a beat. We will sing, spit, rap, breathe, hum or whatever it is we feel like doing on the mic. We will experiment, and learn how to trust one another enough to ask, how do we sound now?
Black girls deserve spaces where they can hear themselves in the echoes. It’s just possible we may hear joy.
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Ruth Nicole Brown, founder of Black Girl Genius Week, is an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.

Diahann Carroll Talks Of Love, Life And Those Legs

'For more than 50 years, actress and singer Diahann Carroll broke down barriers. She was the first black woman to win a Tony for best actress, and the first black woman to star in her own TV show — while not playing a maid. As the title character in that sitcom, Julia, Carroll became the model for one of the first black Barbie dolls. "I'm going to admit I'm very proud of them," Carroll says of her illustrious legs, laughing, in a conversation with NPR's Michele Norris from 2008, on the occasion of the publication of her memoir, The Legs Are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way.' -- All Things Considered

Left of Black: S10: E3: Maimouna Youssef aka Mumu Fresh

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined in the studio by Maimouna Youssef (@maimounayoussef) aka Mumu Fresh, whose “regal combination of Black power and Native American pride” (NPR Music) became most apparent on 2017’s pliant Vintage Babies LP, which captured her and collaborator DJ Dummy dreamweaving in and out of upbeat Soul jams and activist-inspired dirges. As “a divine music healer” (Rolling Out), Youssef, or Mumu Fresh, grew up pivoting between genres and styles — singing gospel, jazz, and African-inspired songs with her mother in an African-American Muslim household in Baltimore, and gleaning religious practices and songs from her Choctaw and Muscogee grandparents. By age 11, Youssef was transcribing and memorizing Wu-Tang Clan and Black Star lyrics — a practice that would inform her development as both an emcee and vocalist. Following a GRAMMY nomination for her vocal work with The Roots, and recording as the featured artist on the DJ Jazzy Jeff-produced Chasing Goosebumps II, Youssef has blossomed into a well-respected musical force. 

The American Right, the Future of Law and the Constitutional Disintegration Project

'Law scholar Jack Jackson explains how the American right seized power beyond law -- as conservatives advance a multi-decade agenda attacking constitutional principles with constitution power, the liberal class's retreat from politics leave them at best bystanders to an apocalyptic political project with no future beyond brutality. Jackson is author of the book Law Without Future: Anti-Constitutional Politics and the American Right from University of Pennsylvania Press.' -- This is Hell!

How Libraries Are Bridging the Digital Divide

'There are about 5 million households in rural areas without broadband internet. According to a Pew Research Center report, only two-thirds of rural Americans have access to broadband. This gap has been called the digital divide, and policymakers are increasingly making efforts to get the majority of Americans access to high-speed internet, focusing primarily on rural areas.  But these efforts overlook the fact that there are 15 million households outside of rural America where people don’t have broadband internet. When people don’t have the internet at home or are unsure how to use digital tools, they turn to their local library. Librarians are at the forefront of understanding our digital divide, and they know it’s far more complicated than having, or not having, internet. Lauren Comito is the Neighborhood Library Supervisor at the Leonard Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and editor of the book Tech for All – Moving beyond the Digital Divide.  Jessamyn West is a librarian and researcher in one of those rural communities, Randolph, Vermont, which has a population of 5,000.' -- The Takeaway

Dr. Elizabeth Wayne on Why Seeing a Role Model Who Looks Like You Is So Powerful

'"I’ve always thought that seeing is believing,” said Dr. Elizabeth Wayne, a biomedical engineer. In her career, that’s meant innovating new ways of showing people what happens in the body, but also, as a black woman in the sciences, the importance of representation and being a role model. Dr. Wayne gives her Brief but Spectacular take on the power of images in science and life.' -- PBS NewsHour

There Was 'No Chance Of Me Going Into The Arts,' Says Comedian Gina Yashere

'When a teacher suggested comedian Gina Yashere become an actor, her mom said: "Actor? No, no, no. You can act like a doctor when you become a doctor." Yashere is now a co-creator of the sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola.' -- All Things Considered

Antwaun Sargent Wants to Shift the Visual Narrative on Beauty

Dana Scruggs, Nyadhour, Elevated, Death Valley, California, 2019, from The New Black Vanguard (Aperture, 2019) 'The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion by curator and critic Antwaun Sargent , and published by Aperture, features 15 black photographers, among them Nadine Ijewere , Dana Scruggs and Stephen Tayo , who have formed an informal movement to convey images of black beauty and identity as a form of social justice. "We think about identity as being fixed," Sargent told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll. "And that's because we've naturalized these narratives surrounding beauty, surrounding what is conventional. So I think that the images in the book help to problematize those kinds of notions.' -- WNYC News          
       

Not Allies, But Comrades: Political Theorist Jodi Deanon on Winning a World, Together

'Political theorist Jodi Dean explains what it means to call one another 'comrade' - as a bond deeper and more permanent than liberal conceptions of allyship, and as a commitment to a shared fight against the domination of capitalism, and toward winning liberation for all people. Dean is author of the book Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging from Verso.' -- This is Hell!