Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 464

Specters of Attica: Reflections from Inside a Michigan Prison Strike

'On September 9, 2016, prisoners across the U.S. went on strike. In Michigan’s low security Kinross prison, workers assigned to kitchen duties refused to report to their shifts. Hundreds gathered to protest in the prison yard. The strike spread like a prairie fire. Nationally, 24,000 prisoners participated, making it the largest prisoner labor strike in U.S. history. In this episode of Making Contact, four men who were imprisoned at Kinross report on the unlivable conditions, the moments in which the strike took shape, and the retaliation that rained down on them in its wake. We also hear from outside organizers on why it’s important to learn from prison rebellions, and how a persistent force organizing in the spirit of Abolition is rattling walls and cages to make prisons obsolete.' -- Making Contact    

#BackChannel: Starbucks, Waffle House & Implicit Bias + Kendrick's Pulitzer & Beychella

The arrest of two 23-year-old Black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks earlier this month has sparked a national conversation about implicit bias. Natalie Bullock Brown and Mark Anthony Neal join WUNC's State of Things host Frank Stasio for another episode of #BackChannel, in a conversation about implicit bias in the Starbucks case and another at an Alabama Waffle House involving a Black Women, Chikesia Clemons. In addition Bullock Brown and Neal discuss Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize and Beyoncé’s marathon Coachella performance, the new HBO documentary King in the Wilderness , which traces the last three years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, and they review the new TBS comedy The Last O.G. starring Tracy Morgan and Rapture, a new Netflix docuseries about eight hip-hop artists, including North Carolina’s Rapsody.

Bill Cosby, Meek Mill and a City of ‘Brotherly” Love by Mark Anthony Neal

Bill Cosby, Meek Mill and a City of ‘Brotherly” Love by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
During a week in which the Philadelphia 76ers confirmed that “The Process” was working, by winning their first playoff series in seven years, two of the City of "Brotherly Love's" favorite “brothers”, were entangled within the tentacles of America’s Criminal Justice system. There is no small irony that Robert Rihmeek Williams – known publicly as rap artist Meek Mill -- and William Henry Cosby Jr., once known as America’s “Favorite Father”,  contradict common assumptions about the social trajectory of men of their ilk; one a rapper who captured the gritty realities of urban Philadelphia, and the other successful entertainer and philanthropist who embodied Respectable Blackness.
Meek Mill was released from prison, having been incarcerated for five months on a parole violation, only days before Bill Cosby was convicted on all three counts of aggravated indecent assault, buttressed by accusations of rape and sexual assault by more than 50 women.  Mill was released, in large part because of the “FreeMeekMill” campaign, which shed light on unfair sentencing and probation practices; New England Patriot owner Robert Kraft and Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z were among Mill’s public supporters. In contrast, Cosby was convicted, a year after a similar trial ended in a hung jury, in large part because of  the #MeToo movement, though it’s important to note, as Treva Lindsey did that “years of black women’s anti-rape and anti-sexual assault activism have helped produce our current robust national conversation about sexual violence.”
While some will celebrate Mill’s release as a victory against a racist criminal justice system, some of those same folk will decry the failure of that same criminal justice system in the case of Cosby. This is not a contradiction given the long history of collaborative malfeasance on behalf of law enforcement and the criminal justice system with relation to Black Americans, yet it also bespeaks the kinds of investments that Black communities make with regard towards men like Meek Mill and Bill Cosby.
In many ways Mill’s release is inconsequential; there are literally thousands of cases of unfair sentencing and incarceration of Black men in this country. Cosby on the other hand is viewed as a singular example of a take down of a “powerful” Black man, as the many conspiracy theories  about Cosby’s downfall seem to suggest.
Both Mill and Cosby benefitted from communal desires to protect “Brothers”. While neither man might be “innocent” in a pure sense – Mill was convicted of gun possession and assaulting a police officer as a teen. Mill’s original charge  was largely inconsequential in the larger scope of things. Compare that to Cosby who has been convicted on the basis of a case involving Andrea Constand, but the sheer number of additional accusations against him suggest that he is a predator and serial rapist. This “Brother” is literally one of the faces of  toxic masculinity and sexual violence against women; Bill Cosby is no Brother, and certainly not deserving of our protections, despite his legacy.
Cosby’s status as an exceptional “Brother” – his success in business and entertainment notwithstanding – is what compels many to support him, though that status was largely erected by a White Supremacist structure that literally used his image, and later his own words, via the infamous “pound cake” speech, to bludgeon young Black Americans, the Black poor, and the Hip-Hop generation, into social, cultural, political submission.
As so-called “Brothers” go, Cosby’s trial and conviction will be compared to the trial and acquittal of another so-called “Brother,” O.J. Simpson.  As Simpson once opined “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” perhaps Cosby’s retorts should be “I’m not a Brother, I’m a Rapist.”
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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University.  He is the author of several books including New Black Man and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities .  The host of the video podcast Left of Black , you can follow Neal on Twitter at @NewBlackMan

Left of Black S8:E19: "No News Is Good News" – A Conversation with Phonte Coleman

Left of Black S8:E19:  "No News Is Good News" – A Conversation with Phonte Coleman
A founding member of Little Brother, the lead vocalist of Foreign Exchange and an artists in his own right, Phonte Coleman aka @Phontigallo joins Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal in the Left of Black Studio.  Phonte discusses his new album No New is Good News, which address issues of aging and mortality, and talks about the challenges of the music industry and touring.

Alain Locke, Father of the Harlem Renaissance

'Jeffrey Stewart discusses his new book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke , a new biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance. Based on Locke’s own writings and on interviews with those who knew him, Stewart details how Locke became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earned a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University and became a professor at Howard University. He also looks at how Locke came to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jacob Lawrence.'
         
        

Cry, T’Challa, You Are a King: The Remaking of the Sovereign by Wahneema Lubiano

Cry, T’Challa, You Are a King: The Remaking of the Sovereign by Wahneema Lubiano | @Wahneema | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
This post is the last section of a three-part reflection on “Black Panther” that considers various elements of the story it tells (rather than a different story that some might wish it had told) because I’m interested in what possibilities for varying kinds of pleasure might be perceivable in this moment]. I want to reflect on how this movie, a remarkable achievement on the director’s part (Ryan Coogler) and the writers’ part (RC and Joe Robert Cole), beckons to so many of us. The extended version of the essay focuses on how that pleasure is tied into the movie’s genre mix and its usefulness as an occasion for conversation. 
My reflection in this section results from my choice to “see” the movie against my guesses about its re-presentation of the place of the CIA. If my guess is inaccurate, then I am seeing with the narrative and that would be a delightful surprise given the tendency of U.S. superheroes to affirm the essential decency of state entities even if particular actors within those entities as presented as flawed characters.
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The work of women in raising Wakanda, instead of the white West, to the level of world-changing entity, is the kind of story choices that prompt and have prompted me to think more about what it means to have that different struggle played out as a civil war within a black state, to consider what Wakanda’s internal struggle might mean. That struggle leads me to the transformation of the king, of T’Challa, and the pedagogy of that transformation, and from that to Nakia’s role vis-à-vis his transformation.
The genre mix, especially the nationalist family narrative, offers a way to see T’Challa’s re-making as a story of a new Wakandan head of state via his emotional and governmental instruction. “Cry, T’Challa”—language which, of course, appears nowhere in the story—is offered here to signal the importance of T’Challa’s second visit to the ancestral plane where he confronts T’Chaka and charges him with his abandonment of Eric. T’Challa’s admonition against his father is generalized into an admonition against all of the ancestors gathered with his father: he tells them that they were all wrong for keeping Wakanda apart from the world.
The pedagogy of the prince-becoming-king is also pedagogy of the state. To teach the hero/king, T’Challa, is to teach the world via Wakanda’s intervention in it signaled by the end of the movie. Chadwick Boseman addresses this necessary pedagogy when he asks in an interview, “How do I become the hero . . . I had to reconnect with what I lose.”
While T’Challa first seeks help from T’Chaka as he ascends to the throne, in his second encounter with his father, he ends up chiding him (and the other ancestors), tutored by the bad history they’ve made and by Eric’s usurpation, a usurpation powered both by big social history and by his personal history—his father’s death. It is by way of having to manage the problem of Eric and at the same time recognizing the “hand” of Wakanda’s “tradition” at play in Eric’s life that T’Challa’s instruction beckons to us. In other words, it is our emotional investment in the re-presentation of Eric’s history, our history, that is evoked by T’Challa’s emotional breakdown in front of his father on the ancestral plane, a breakdown that instructs T’Challa, while the audience observes his transformation.
Eric “deserves” T’Challa’s tears, our tears, even as we contend with the horror in our minds of what Eric has done, and T’Challa “deserves” our recognition for his response to what was done to Eric, and by extrapolation to all of diasporan black people. All of this is especially moving in a reality, for example, when even innocent/non-criminals are the objects of narrative versions that argue the victim was “no angel” threaded through news accounts of cop killings of black people. We are interpolated as a small child with Eric, both awed and injured; the family’s tragedy organizes our sensibility.
To what end might the course of T’Challa’s instruction be intended? The most obvious is that it is there to burnish his genre role as a worthy king, a special form of being. And it would be easy enough for me to sketch out affective responses to that burnishing. But—and here is where I am most direct in describing what use one might make of the narrative materials of this movie—to ask, what might one do with the text that evokes the pleasure of seeing the story deployed for a reading that uses the specifics of a nationalist family narrative to see the making of an incipient internationalism motivating Wakanda? What might come  of using the text against a widely-held U.S. investment in its surveillance mechanisms? Or, written more directly, what might I be able to see against the grain of the movie’s positioning of the CIA as a force for good?
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T’Challa is in love with one of the sources of his undoing, his instruction: Nakia, And in his struggle to win back the mantle of the king is harrowed by the suffering of the abandoned child who was Eric as well as Eric’s presentation of diasporic suffering. Together Nakia and Eric constitute the means of T’Challa’s remaking.
It is in the mid-credits scene wherein T’Challa, accompanied by General Okoyo, Nakia, and Ayo that the remade T’Challa is made manifest. That scene ends with a shot of Everett Ross that suggests a tantalizing opening: Are we looking at the CIA as the means by which we know that we’re really on earth? Are we looking at the CIA’s recognition of a possible new making into which it will need to deal itself or to which it will need, at least, to make some accommodation? Or something(s) else entirely? (What rough beast slouches toward . . .) The fact that the screenplay, the director, the producers, the genre, the aesthetics of the objects, and the complexities of audience consumption and critique are in play is yet more reason to consider how the camera both makes and unmakes in the same gesture depending upon far more than the clichés of genre and ownership.
Here T’Challa, the sovereign, the sharer, the bridge builder, offers a kind of internationalism. He tells the UN that we have to act as though we are one single tribe—an invitation to a different set of possibilities, different from Eric’s view, articulated in W’Kabi’s words, of the necessity to join the struggle of the conqueror and the conquered as a conqueror. How does this come about?
My response began with multiple questions, but there are only two that I am focusing on right now: how does the presence of love both via and versus nationalism drive our engagement with the movie, and what is the work of the CIA operative, Everett Ross, as a functional, representation of power; deliverer of exposition from point of view of the commonsense of the West, and the object of Shuri’s power and instruction?
Love first: T’Chaka, the flawed king (as we learn later), offers this advice to his son who is seeking wisdom as he moves into being king: “You need to surround yourself with people you trust.” It turns out that among the people who surround him, it is Nakia, whose good trustworthiness has long preceded the beginning of the story that we are watching, who is the herald of new possibilities. T’Chaka’s advice to his son thus turns out to be prophetic regardless of the father’s own compromised moral standing.
Nakia’s idea of the proper course of the nation is a longer running and slower thread implicitly developed over the time prior to the plot we see but to which she and T’Challa refer in their conversations, juxtaposed to Eric’s ideas—a difference of time and rumination compared to Eric’s direct pedagogy of battle and then immediate enacted change in state policy once he achieves the throne. Nakia by contrast presses for T’Challa, and by extrapolation, Wakanda, to act as a responsible, non-conquering elite.
So, to the final question of the movie—asked by the youngster in present day Oakland—“Who are you?— the proper answer might well be: “I’m Nakia’s trainee.” I argue this not to diminish the importance of the figure of the hero king, but to pay tribute to the screenplay’s and the director’s overturning of the conventions of the superhero genre.
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Given that, as I note earlier, in the beginning of this movie was colonial theft, genocide, slavery, and mass incarceration, the film’s interdiction of the present moment is represented by the museum, the history embedded in it, and the CIA’s trade in stolen resources. “Stolen” is a nexus of the narrative’s problem because if Eric and his father before him were trading in resources to which they could right claim partial ownership as expatriate Wakandans, is the vibranium obtained for Klaue and to be traded to the CIA for diamonds stolen or is it something to which Eric has a rightful claim?
Is vibranium a Wakandan communal resource or a resource whose stewardship rests in a legitimate or legitimized King? If, as Eric asserts, all of the world originates in African, does all of the world have the right to obtain vibranium? No, the payment for the history made by the conquerors is that the new conqueror in town (or on the planet), Eric, has a plan for distribution that means a new and undefeatable larger African diasporan hegemony. Eric’s plan is not the only possibility for a revolution, for an over-turning (as I get to later), but I’m staying within the movie’s foregrounded narrative logic.
None of this, prompted by my pleasure in the complexities of this narrative, depends upon insisting that the movie carries only what is articulated in words precisely because of what any one of us carries with us into the film’s trade in both fantasy and history. The core of my pleasure can accommodate being provoked beyond the conventional superhero neatnesses that generally more forthrightly adjudicate narrative closure. The bodily embrace of Eric as he lies dying by T’Challa, for example, at the end of the fight and in the death scene offers both the possibility of some form of metaphysical joining precisely because it cuts off a trial and punishment that would strain the momentary accord between the two men.
The multiple endings show us movement beyond those conventions. T’Challa’s emergence as the beneficiary of old and new knowledge, knowledge that Nakia has long tried to “teach” him, and his encounters with Eric, who adds new knowledge of the effect of Wakanda’s isolation, all prompt us to consider how the coming together of T’Challa and Nakia offers a vision of an alternative even while set within the frame of a nationalist family narrative. What Eric is dragging through this family is the history that has made the world from which Wakanda has isolated itself but which is virtually carried in the king’s family bloodline. But Nakia has the remedy, is the remedy for that fault.
Thus, the nationalist family narrative is knitted together both through Nakia’s caring and through her re-presentation as the savior of T’Challa, the family, and the nation. And the re-entry of Wakanda into Oakland and black America, its investment there on that site offers a different version of history, a counter to Eric’s belief that it is only in his ascension to the throne that the engine for history can start over. That re-entry is an overturning.
But my particular interest in a complex story that is particularly attuned to T’Challa as Nakia’s trainee focuses on the presence of the CIA operative, Everett Ross, who embodies the presence of the U.S. state specifically and national state actors generally—a thread that not only reminds us of the reality of the machinations of the powerful but presents us with an opportunity to see parallel structures of knowledge and interventions at work. The CIA—functional, representation of power, deliverer of exposition from point of view of the commonsense of the West, is also the object of Shuri’s power and instruction.
The CIA, as a producer of knowledge, operationalized and deployed via war dogs and “black ops” is connected to the making of Eric and thus stains what he brings into the Wakandan family—the history of black Americans both destroyed and vulnerable to state exploitation on its own behalf. But if Eric’s ‘s body is a recitation of his ties to U.S. state violence in the larger world, then T’Chaka’s killing of Eric’s father stands for the detritus T’Challa has inherited along with the throne of Wakanda. Where there is great power, there also rests its defiled deployments. If each scar on Eric’s body represents his enmeshment in the U.S.’s violent being in the world, T’Chaka’s murder of his actual brother is what the Black Aesthetic critics called a mascon—a massive concentration of black American meaning and history. In this movie, that murder is a shorthand that places on Wakanda’s king’s shoulder responsibility for not averting or helping to avert the hideous result of white supremacy’s effects—a way to equalize the violence of both strands of this family’s tapestry. The fact that Eric also shots and kills his romantic and crime partner is indirectly juxtaposed to the old king’s fratricide.
The CIA figure, Ross, however, not only connects Eric and the Wakandan throne, that connection’s representation is fascinatingly multi-faced. The CIA’s trade in weapons, its bankrolling of Klaue’s and Eric’s joint venture, and its distribution of weapons to anyone or anyplace of its choosing is temporarily at least halted—in a display of lovely irony—when Ross, literally talked through his function by Shuri, shoots down the ships carrying those weapons. It is a moment of pleasure even if tempered by Ross’s presence as T’Challa and Wakanda emerge at the UN. What will be the world remade by Wakanda and its might, yet haunted by the CIA?
But if the CIA as an intelligence-gathering machine along with its violence in the making and molding of Eric is directly shown, so is another kind of intelligence-gathering and continuing attempts at intervening in the world differently from the de-stabilization and wiping out of resistance taught to Eric: Nakia is a spy, a gatherer of intelligence for the purpose of her intervention, her missions to do on her own what she thinks Wakanda should do: offer assistance to those on Wakanda’s borders who need help. If Killmonger and other war dogs and black ops operatives were sent out as the secret advance agents of the West, Nakia exists as a re-presentation of something different from dividing and maintaining a world binary of the conquerors and the conquered—a re-presentation well served both by the pleasure of the aesthetics of Wakanda as well as the power resting behind the words “textiles and cool outfits” so casually and erroneously tossed out in Ross’s estimation of Wakanda.
If T’Challa has to deal with the monster created by T’Chaka’s family violence and Wakanda’s tradition of isolation, Nakia is the body and intelligence of what T’Challa ends up articulating in front of the UN.
The remade world that T’Challa (as Nakia’s trainee) offers, is being stared at by the CIA and the gathered international assemblage and is the mystery left before us at the end. And while the CIA is smiling, the smiles of the Wakandan delegation suggests that everyone in the audience, including the representation of the CIA and the power of the West, is once again underestimating Wakanda.
Or so I want to see it.
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Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Literature (Ph.D., Stanford, 1987). Before coming to Duke she taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Williams College. Her essays and articles have been published in Social Text, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, American Literary History, Callaloo, New England Quarterly, among other publications. She is author of the forthcoming books Messing With the Machine: Politics, Form and African-American Fiction and Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: "Deep Cover" and Other "Black" Fictions, and editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (1996). Her current research interests include African-American literature, African-American popular culture and film, womens' studies, black intellectual history, and nationalism.

REFERENCES   (in the order in which they appear in the full text)
Sincere Thunder was one of my undergrad professors at Howard University and the one most responsible for introducing me to Marxist analysis and socialism.
Stuart Hall, “Introducing NLR, NLR 1/1, January – February 1960.
Carvel Wallace, “Why ‘Black Panther’ Is a Defining Moment for Black America,” NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/magazine/why-black-panther-is-a-defining-moment-for-black-america.html
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Apollo Theater interview with Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o was live-streamed on 27 February 2018. I found it on YouTube and watched the entirety of the show; however, a quick search recently showed that the YouTube video has been removed. Here’s a link to what I quoted which was included in a listing of some of what he said published in Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-things-we-learned-ta-nehisi-coates-black-panther-w517210   Additional quotes from that event are available in Shannon Liao’s commentary posted at The Verge:  https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/28/17063218/chadwick-boseman-tchalla-enemy-black-panther
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Being Black in Public” in Slate: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/a-conversation-about-starbucks-white-fear-and-being-black-in-public.html
Eve Fairbanks, “Dry, the Beloved Country” in Highline: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/cape-town-drought/
Brian Joseph, Pitchfork review of Ludwig Göransson’s “Black Panther” score: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ludwig-goransson-black-panther-original-score/
Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes.<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 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:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; 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:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; 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 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> -->

Three Generations of Apartheid Schooling

'Noliwe Rooks is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by civic culture, social history and political life in the United States. She is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Cutting School: Privitization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (New Press, 2017). Rooks is currently the Director of American Studies at Cornell University where she is also a Professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.' --  TheRealNews

Meet Ellis Haizlip, America's First Black Television Host

'Before there was Oprah, there was Ellis Haizlip. From 1968 to 1973, Haizlip hosted the public-television variety show SOUL!, which celebrated Black arts and politics in a time when broadcast media was almost entirely White. Haizlip's niece, filmmaker Melissa Haizlip, pulls from archival footage and interviews in her new documentary Mr. SOUL! to examines the story of her uncle, America's first black TV host.  Mr. SOUL! is premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.' -- Midday on WNYC
         
        

An Operatic Take on Black Lives Matter

'Internationally acclaimed bel canto tenor Lawrence Brownlee  discusses his Black Lives Matter-inspired song cycle called Cycles of My Being. Brownlee collaborated with two other black artists, composer Tyshawn Sorey and poet Terrance Hayes to create the piece. Brownlee is touring the song cycle across the U.S. in the coming weeks, including a performance at Carnegie Hall' -- Midday on WNYC
         
        

Art of the MOOC: Mark Anthony Neal on "Sounds of Blackness"

Pedro Lasch of Art of the MOOC talks with Mark Anthony Neal about typically non-musical sounds of Black culture. -- Art of the MOOC