Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 430

Charles White: A Retrospective |

"Art must be an integral part of the struggle,” Charles White insisted. “It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. … It must ally itself with the forces of liberation.” Over the course of his four-decade career, White’s commitment to creating powerful images of African Americans—what his gallerist and, later, White himself described as “images of dignity”—was unwavering. Charles White: A Retrospective is the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in over 30 years. The exhibition charts White’s full career—from the 1930s through his premature death in 1979—with over 100 works, including drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, illustrated books, record covers and archival materials." -- The Museum of Modern Art

Lena Waithe on Her Biggest Influences and Saving Young LGBTQ Lives

'Lena Waithe supports her LGBTQ family through her work with the Trevor Project. He shares her biggest influences from Oprah to Mary Tyler Moore and talks about how she chooses which projects to pout herself into.' -- Variety

Light in Darkness by David Palumbo-Liu

Light in Darkness by David Palumbo-Liu | @palumboliu | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
It’s actually a very small gesture, but it was one that I thought made a lot of sense and that would carry me through the days, and years to come.  I decided to get a tattoo a few days before the Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Kavanaugh, as I saw hopes of justice fade.  So now, on my left forearm, there is a tattoo that reads “Fiat Lux,” which means, “Let There Be Light.”  It comes from the Bible, Genesis 1:3—“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.  And God seeing that light was good, God separated the light from the darkness.”  It is also the motto of the University of California, where I was educated.  In that context it refers to something like an Enlightenment principle—that education can illuminate the world for us and lend us understanding.  It is also an expression that supporters of victims of sexual violence have used.   Kavanaugh’s confirmation—despite credible testimony of his sexual violence and numerous cases of perjury—ushers in an extremely dark period in US history.  The FBI investigation—that was supposed to shed light on the accusations and rebuttals of two individuals with diametrically opposed versions of the truth--was rushed, constrained, and made extremely narrow by the White House.  Key people who said they had close knowledge of the candidate and evidence to prove it were not interviewed by the FBI.  In an effort to reach the eyes and ears of the senators who would decide on Kavanaugh’s fitness for office, thousands of lawyers, the American Law Association, church groups, survivors’ rights groups, Yale graduates, the Dean of the Yale Law School, and even a former Supreme Court Justice nominated by a Republican president advised against Kavanaugh’s confirmation.  Their reasons went far beyond the alleged sexual violence—they focused on Kavanaugh’s behavior and his evasions upon even being questioned.  This evidence was plain to see for anyone who had access to the Internet or a television.  His partisan bias, his contempt for due process, and his antagonism toward women were all patently clear, as was his inability to control his temper, even to save his own cause.  Yet all that was plain to see was buried under a deeply flawed process and spun into lies.  Darkness, darkness, darkness.  Not light.  And the darkness is spreading. Donald Trump has adopted Ronald Reagan’s tactic of infusing our core institutions with people who bear animus toward those very institutions. Trump seeks to destroy from within.  Regulatory agencies are now led by people who despise regulation.  The protection of the environment has been given over to someone who hates the environment—he sees it simply as something else to be monetized. The Secretary of the Department of Education is a for-profit “educator” who likewise sees students as customers and teachers as workers to be bullied and intimidated into teaching the lesson plans she decrees to be “useful.”   And now the scales of justice will be balanced by an intemperate perjurer and an alleged sexual harasser. The rot starts at the core and works its way out. Any attempt to shine a light into those depths—to cut through the obfuscation and sophistry--is met with violence and contempt.  When confronted by protesters who screamed to be heard, demanded to remind senators that Kavanaugh had lied to them and to the world sequentially, they were told to “grow up” by Senator Orin Hatch. What he means of course is that they, and we, accept the bitter and cynical and dark version of the world that this administration has produced and maintained.  To give up “youthful” idealism.  But in his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment,” Immanuel Kant had a very different notion of youth and maturity.  He told people to stop being children, youths, in following the marching orders of authority—the church and the state.  Kant believed that “adulthood” meant exerting one’s own critical and rational capacities to ascertain for oneself what was true.  In this case, Enlightenment means standing up for oneself and not bowing to power.  Not accepting the idea that darkness is light, that there are “alternate facts,” and that, according to the President’s lawyer, there is no such thing as the truth. My greatest fear is that children growing up today will accept the horrible dark, un-Enlightened frame that is now in place as the norm. This norm says that mendacity from the mouths of some people is excusable, that cruelty at the expense of others is comic, that critical thinking itself is inconsequential. The fact that thousands protested, agitated, and led the way in civil disobedience, and lent their voices of rage and indignation to each other gives me hope.  But the most important kind of hope lies not in sporadic marches and protests.  It comes back to the idea that we carry goodness and the hunger for justice inside us, and that in so doing--in acting as if decency, goodness, empathy, mattered to us--we give support to those who feel the same.  We need to embody, especially in times of crisis but also and importantly in every day encounters and instances, those things that are part of the world we wish to retain and nurture, and not let be submerged in darkness. In that we repudiate the inevitability of darkness and carry light with us. Aidan Hill writes in UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, The Daily Cal, a passage worth quoting at length:  …now more than ever we must take to the streets and demand justice for all survivors regardless of how they identify. As the founder of the #MeToo movement Tarana Burke states, it’s time for us to show up “in person with our feet to the streets to say we won’t be treated this way and we won’t stand for another survivor to be treated this way.” The time is now to declare that we, especially students, are not put on this earth for anyone’s consumption, entertainment or impregnation; we are here to learn how to love ourselves. Fellow students of UC Berkeley, please do not forget that while they have guns, we have flowers — and through the concrete, we will bloom. Our greatest strength is our community. From People’s Park to the Lawrence Hall of Science, for 150 years Berkeley has pioneered a way forward, bringing the hard light of knowledge and resistance to our world. Citizens of Berkeley, the time is now to remember our history and resistance. We must remember that the fight for free speech was a fight for silence breakers demanding to be heard. And we are not going back into the silence. Fiat Lux. ***
 David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford University

Alice Walker Is For Oakland, Human Imperfection And The Children

'Alice Walker has a new collection of poems about issues of the world, and those in her own backyard. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of the The Color Purple, The Temple of my Familiar and many other beloved works has now issued Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart. The book gathers 69 of her poems in both English and Spanish, the latter courtesy of translator Manuel García Verdecia. Walker spoke to NPR about her adopted homes, the root of her poetry and human imperfection.'

Playwright Dominique Morisseau Calls for a Collective Shift in the Theater World

'Dominique Morisseau is among the 25 winners of the 2018 MacArthur “genius” grant. Morisseau has already carved out an impressive career for herself, writing the Broadway bound musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” about The Temptations, and serving in the writers room for the Showtime series, “Shameless.” She sat down with The Takeaway to talk about those projects as well as the more personal plays she's written, including a series of works set in her hometown of Detroit.'

Eric Reid’s Simple Gesture by Mark Anthony Neal

Eric Reid’s Simple Gesture by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
As players, coaches, and fans stood for the national anthem at Bank of America Stadium, prior to the game between the Carolina Panthers and New York Giants, free safety Eric Reid did exactly what many expected he would: he took a knee.  Reid, had been unemployed since the end of the 2017 season and was recently signed by the Carolina Panthers. Given that Reid was the first player to join Colin Kaepernick in taking a knee on the sideline to protest the police killings of unarmed American citizens, it was no surprise that he continued his civic duty before the game.  The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that more players didn’t take a cue from the headlines and join him.
In the days leading up to the Sunday NFL slate, hundreds of protesters, many of them women, had been arrested during a week of demonstrations directed at the confirmation process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by the United States Senate, despite the fact he had been accused of sexual assault by several women; charges that were largely under-investigated by the FBI.
The protests in Washington D.C., along with the ongoing protests around police brutality (days after Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting Black teen Laquan McDonald 16 times), voter disenfranchisement, and draconian immigration policies, offered yet another moment of alignment, particularly among youth organizers, trying to imagine a better future for themselves in opposition to what Daniel Bessner and David Austin Walsh call a “gerontocracy.”
Since the initial Kaepernick protest, the NFL has been flummoxed in its efforts to make sure their players – the product – remain  above the fray with regards of controversial political issues. The NFL has been largely undermined, not by the players, but by President Trump, who has taken every opportunity available to incite his base by misrepresenting the players’ gesture during the National Anthem as a protest against the American flag (a constitutionally protected act).  
The NFL, is perhaps so sensitive to taking overtly political stances, that they have shifted their traditional support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – where players often wore pink cleats and gloves in a dramatic show of support – to #CrucialCatch, a year-round effort to bring awareness to all forms of cancer. While #CrucialCatch is a laudable effort it obscures that fact that the NFL’s previous support of Breast Cancer Awareness was specially tied to making their male fans more aware of the potential impact of the disease on the women in their lives.
After the game, Reid was quotedas saying “Everybody in this [locker room], everybody who watches this game [and] everybody in this country knows what we’re talking about. It’s the truth. You can’t deny it. We’ve just got to do more to make this better.” On this particular Sunday, “make this better” had resonances well beyond the football stadiums where so much animus has been directed at so called “ungrateful” and unpatriotic” players.  It would have been a powerful gesture if more NFL players had joined Eric Reid, and took a knee to show solidarity with survivors of rape and sexual assault, and the protesters in Washington DC.
And here’s the irony, Reid was likely only signed by the Carolina Panthers, because the team has new leadership; David Tepper purchased the team from original owner and team founder Jerry Richardson, who was forced to sell the team by the NFL because of his own sexual misconduct in the workplace.  Richardson is of the ilk of powerful, wealthy older white men, whose interests Justice Kavanaugh is expected to protect. That Richardson was “punished” by receiving more than $2 Billion for the sale of the Panthers speaks to the limits of real accountability for many of these men.
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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 and Director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE). 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 co-editor, with Murray Forman, of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (now in its 2nd edition).  Neal is host of 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:"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;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:#954F72; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .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;} @page WordSection1 {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> -->

Constructing a Threat: On Prison Repression of Black Politics

'Sociologist Brittany Friedman surveys the carceral state punishment of Black militant and Nation of Islam prisoners - as a mechanism of segregation with its origins in the 1950s, and system of political suppression and retaliation in service of maintaining White supremacy and its institutions of dominance and exclusion. Friedman is co-author of the article "Solitary Confinement and the Nation of Islam" for The Immanent Frame.' -- This is Hell! Radio

Camille A. Brown: The 'New Second Line'

'Inspired by the events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Camille A. Brown choreographed "New Second Line," a celebration of the culture of New Orleans and the perseverance of Black people in the midst of devastation. The performance borrows its name from the energetic, spirited people who follow the traditional brass band parades for weddings, social events and, most notably, funerals in New Orleans. "It honors our ability to rise and keep rising," Brown says.' -- TED

Left of Black S9:E2: “Butch Queens Up in Pumps” – Marlon Bailey on Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined in the studio by Marlon Bailey, Associate Professor of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Professor Bailey is the author of Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013). 

‘The Hate U Give’ star Amandla Stenberg is Redefining Celebrity for a New Generation

'Amandla Stenberg the 19-year-old breakout star of The Hate U Give is redefining fame for a time when the personal, the professional and the political have never been more fused.'