Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 460

The MusiQology Podcast Episode 4 – V. Shayne Frederick

'On this episode The MusiQology Podcast, multi-talented Philadelphia vocalist V. Shayne Frederick joins host Dr. Guthrie Ramsey in the studio for a podcast discussion on finding his voice. The two discuss the influence of his mother, the virtues of liner notes, performers' relationships to jazz standards, and curating the perfect musical moment.'

Left of Black S8:E22: Filmmaker John Akomfrah and the ‘Precarity’ of Black Genius

Left of Black S8:E22: Filmmaker John Akomfrah and the ‘Precarity’ of Black Genius
Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined in the studio by filmmaker John Akomfrah, a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside his longtime collaborators David Lawson and Lina Gopaul; the trio later founded Smoking Dogs Films . Akomfrah’s groundbreaking film The Last Angel in History (1996) is recognized as a seminal and foundational text of the AfroFuturism movement.
Akomfrah discusses his film Precarity , a new three-channel video installation and meditation on the life of Jazz artist Buddy Bolden, which debuted at Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp in New Orleans in November of 2017 and  later installed at the  Nasher Museum (Duke University). The film offers a meditation on the genius of Bolden, generally recognized as one of the most important founding voices of American Jazz, who was institutionalized at the height of his powers as an instrumentalist.
Akomfrah’s most recent works also include the three-screen installation The Unfinished Conversation(2012), a moving portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s life and work. Akomfrah was at Duke University to deliver the Annual Rothschild Lecture at the Nasher Museum.

How Millennials Became the Selfie Generation

'We look at how society became fascinated with its own image, and try to find the truth behind selfie-taking.' -- The New Yorker

Bryan Stevenson on Understanding Our Legacy of Racial Injustice

'Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, discusses EJI's new project The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. He explains how the museum is the product of years of extensive research into the history of racial injustice. He’ll also discuss the significance of the exhibits and why it was built on the site of a former warehouse in Montgomery, Alabama, where enslaved black people were imprisoned. This segment is guest hosted by Jonathan Capehart'
         
        

The Eights | 1948 and the Start of the Civil Rights Movement

'Richard Rothstein, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the winner of this year’s Sidney Hillman prize for journalism for The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America  (Liveright, 2017), now in paperback, and Jelani Cobb, a historian, professor of journalism at Columbia University and staff writer for The New Yorker, talk about how the government explicitly sanctioned racial segregation in the post-World War Two era, which we’re still feeling today, plus the status of the civil rights movement -- and the backlash to it -- in 1948.' -- The Brian Lehrer Show
         
        

Ijeoma Oluo and Rebecca Carroll on Race and Representation in Journalism

'Ijeoma Oluo and Rebecca Carroll discuss the ethics of representation in Sally Kohn’s book, The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity. Oluo and Aminatou Sow take issue with how they were quoted in Kohn's book, which sets up what they say is an inaccurate dichotomy between their positions. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair about the controversy, Oluo said the real focus should be that “we need to talk about the work that people of privilege should be doing, not how many more ways we can harm ourselves so that our humanity will be seen.”' -- Midday on WNYC
         
        

Why Are Police Called on People of Color Who Haven't Committed a Crime?

'The public witnessed yet another incident of a white person calling the police on a person of color when no crime had been committed. A White Yale student called 911 on a fellow student, who was taking a nap in the campus lounge. It’s just the latest in a string of similar incidents where the police have been called for discriminatory reasons, or for no reason at all. Dr. Jason Johnson, professor at Morgan State University and politics editor for The Root, has been writing about this issue extensively. Johnson joins the program to look at the context around this behavior — why white people rely on and trust the cops to intervene — and what the consequences are for people of color.' --The Takeaway

Blackness as Public Nuisance by Mark Anthony Neal

Blackness as Public Nuisance  
by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile) 

It was not lost on me, that as the so-called “Baristas Fired at Duke for playing rap music” story began to circulate on social media, and my employer was about to be summarily dragged (again), that I personally had no idea who “Young Dolph” was.  Then I listened to “Get Paid” the song that inspired the firing – at least I tried to listen to it – and quite honestly under similar circumstances, I might have asked the baristas to turn it down or move on to the next track on the playlist.  For me it would have been a simple courtesy, and we’d be done with it once I got my Joe Van Gogh “Stout” and my muffin.

As a Black man, I would never presume to get anybody fired for playing music that I didn’t like -- which in my mind is more of an offense to my aesthetic tastes than my moral grounding; at least not in a country in which the Commander-in-Chief gleefully recalls grabbing “pussies,” and on a campus, that as recently as three years ago, a noose was hung in a public area. Not in this body, and not in this country would I ever presume such privilege, especially where we can witness law enforcement officers beat, harass and kill innocent and unarmed  American citizens – more often than not Black and Brown – and never fear losing their jobs.

That Duke University’s current Vice-President of Student Affairs Larry Moneta, acted with a level of privilege and hubris that is beyond my grasp – and this after the workers had in fact complied with his demand that the music be turned off (and that compliance thing don’t ever seem to work for Black folk; see Philando Castile) – seems beyond the point. One can easily surmise that Dr. Moneta might have felt that the music was a form of public nuisance, and the workers should have been fired for the source of that nuisance.

A “Public Nuisance” is defined as “an act, condition, or thing that is illegal because it interferes with the rights of the public generally.” As historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad and LaShawn Harris noted in their respective book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America and Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy there has been a long history in this country of Black bodies and Blackness writ large framed as public nuisance, hence the litany of laws that policed Black folk from congregating in large numbers or that sought to curtail the potential of public nuisance among Blacks by criminalizing leisure.

Unspoken, but assuredly understood, is that the “public generally” is generally a White public.  Indeed in a recent article in The New Republic ,  Georgetown Law Professor Peter Edelman links public nuisance to the criminalization of poverty, noting “Today in the United States, the poor are often punished simply because they are poor, and especially if they are people of color.”

The noise that Dr. Moneta perceived that day in a campus coffee shop which generally services 18-25 year olds, for which songs like “Get Paid” are literally millennial muzak, finds resonance in the Black Yale graduate student who was interrogated by campus police for #NappingWhileBlack, the University of Florida students who were damn-near horse collared on stage for #GraduatingWhileBlack, Chikesia Clemons, who was assaulted by law enforcement for #AskingWhileBlackat The Waffle House,  and of course the two Philadelphia Black men who were arrested for #SittingInStarbucksWhileBlack.

As such Dr. Moneta’s hubris is not isolated, but reflective of a larger culture that always already assumes Blackness as vagrancy, for which there is not too fine a line between illegality and criminalization, where the burden is always on Blackness and Black people to prove innocence – and an innocence that has to be validated by the State and other such institutions, like the campus registrar, in the case of Yale graduate student Lolade Siyonbola.

Ironies, of course, abound.

For the last eight years, I’ve co-taught a course on The History of Hip-Hop with Grammy Award Winning Producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit), and there are many occasions when we find ourselves offended by what the students consider  “Hip-Hop” and worse still, what they consider “good” Hip-Hop. In one of the more brilliant moments of season two of the FX series Atlanta, the writers capture the surreal position that Hip-Hop holds in our culture, as the fictional White Frat-boy – the kinda dude that helped Hip-Hop crossover with the Beastie Boys and RUN-DMC 30 years ago – talks about the genius of the fictional Trap artist Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and Post-Malone who has been legitimately dragged for being a “culture vulture”.

Even at the same Duke University where those baristas were fired, the campus’s legendary LDOC event (Last Day of Classes), which is sanctioned by the office that Dr. Moneta oversees, has featured artists like Travis Porter – whose song “Pussy Real Good,” might make Young Dolph blush. In 2013, Travis Porter performed, despiteprotest from students regarding the sexist and misogynistic lyrics of their songs. One wonders if Dr. Moneta would have responded the same way if R. Kelly’s  “If I Believe I Can Fly” was playing in the coffee shop, given decades of charges that Mr. Kelly is a serial underage sex-offender.

Regardless of the specific circumstances of the incident involving the former baristas – contract workers who are not accorded the same labor protections of other Duke employees – part  of the public dragging of Duke University has to do with how out of touch Dr. Moneta and the university seem to be. It was only a month earlier that Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize for his album Damn, which quiet as it's kept, is not any less profane than Young Dolph.  

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University, where he is Chair of the Department of African & African-American Studies.  The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press), Neal is the host of the video podcast Left of Black , now in its 8th season.

Alex Wagner Talks New Book 'Futureface' with Ta-Nehisi Coates:

'Alex Wagner, journalist and author of the gripping new book Futureface, is joined by National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates for a profound discussion on the American experience of race, immigration, exile and identity. The conversation was recorded on April 26, 2018 in front of a live audience at New York's 92nd Street Y.'

Langston Hughes, Religious Thinker: A Conversation with Wallace Best

'In this episode of the AAS 21 podcast, Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. spoke with Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American Studies about his book, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem. In the book, Professor Best encourages readers to read Langston Hughes religiously, and as a humanist in the tradition of American Religious Liberalism. Though Hughes was criticized, censored and even humiliated by other writers, and federal investigators, because of some of his more radical work like the poem ‘Goodbye Christ,’ Best contends that even through imagining a critical discourse with God, Hughes demonstrates an acknowledgement as to the existence of God. In fact, Hughes was a lover of gospel music and an avid churchgoer, never belonging to one church, but present in his own way in many, reflecting Hughes’ evasive way of being, a style Best describes as influenced by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Best’s new work is the result of 12 years of archival research and “communing with Langston.”'