Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 584

Apollo Live Wire -- Bad/Dangerous/Invincible: Michael Jackson's Epic Years

'From Off the Wall to Invincible, Michael Jackson’s recordings on Epic Records chronicle the artist’s evolution to become one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Author and Duke University Professor, Mark Anthony Neal,went behind the music for a look at Jackson’s resounding impact on music, culture and entertainment and his place in a longstanding tradition of Black performance. Panelists included Tanisha C. Ford, Emily J. Lordi, and Irvin Mayfield. This podcast was recorded on June 16, 2016.'

Race and Perceptual Segregation by Law Ware

Race and Perceptual Segregation by Law Ware | @Law_Ware | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Since the very beginning of this democratic experiment, there have been at least two Americas—one white and one black.
Perceptual segregation is a psychological phenomenon that influences the way we see the world. Sherri Irvin, Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma, says of the phenomenon:
Perceptual segregation, as defined by law professor Russell K. Robinson, is the tendency of members of two groups occupying different social positions to draw starkly different conclusions about cases of possible discrimination. “Insiders” (e.g., whites or men) will often assess a situation and deny that any discrimination against an outsider occurred, while “outsiders” (e.g., Blacks or women) perceive discrimination in the same circumstances.  
This means that when people from different backgrounds experience the same phenomena, they can come to very different conclusions about what they have seen.
When Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, MO, many thought, ‘if only we had video—then we would be able to clear up this mess.’ Then came Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Alton Sterling. What we have discovered is that video of these incidents can be just as controversial as hearing eyewitness testimony. The lived experience of black and brown people differs so much from that of those who inhabit white bodies that when two individuals look at the same video, they can come to radically different conclusions. Observations are grounded in a tendency to attribute more favorable character traits and motivations to those who belong to our in-group—but also grounded in the socialization we receive.
When you are raised in a culture that communicates hostile messages about people who are black and brown—that categorizes a young black man who makes a mistake as a thug, but considers a grown white man who engages in vandalism in a foreign country merely as a kid who needs guidance—it is unthinkable to suggest that one is not impacted by those stereotypes.
Part of what we must do is be honest about the fact that we do not live in a unified country; that calls for unity when they leave the lips of those who live in relative comfort and privilege afforded to them by their white skin rings hollow if we are not willing to confront the myriad of ways that racism still divides us.
Black folks remain at the top of almost every bad statistical measure and at the bottom of most of the good ones.  We have, for generations, been taught that we were inferior. Black women have been taught they were born with the wrong lips, hips and skin pigmentation. Black men are considered violent and up to no good. These messages color our view of this country, and until those in power take seriously our calls for equity and listen with humility to our existential truths, there will never be peace.
I do not condone violence as a means to achieve justice. While I stop short of pacifism, I find violence untenable as a means to resist state sponsored violence. The actions of the men who engaged in terroristic acts as a means to push back against the killing of unarmed black people at the hands of the police are lamentable, but hardly surprising. History shows us that when you lead oppressed people down the path of nihilism, violence can be the result. Therefore, while these actions are lamentable, they are hardly surprising.
James Baldwin warned us. He said, "People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they cast upon the water comes floating back to them poisoned." He is right to echo Bob Marley who sang,  “until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned--everywhere is war.”
We are far from a united country. Honestly, I do not think we will ever reach that utopian state. We are to find meaning in the struggle against injustice—without any real expectation that we will reach our goal. We must struggle, but, as Talib Kweli tried to tell us, that does not mean the struggle cannot be beautiful.
A portion of this article was originally published at The Root
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Lawrence Ware is an Oklahoma State University Division of Institutional Diversity fellow. He teaches in OSU’s philosophy department and is the diversity coordinator for its Ethics Center. A frequent contributor to Counterpunch and Dissent magazine, he is also a contributing editor of NewBlackMan (in Exile) and the Democratic Left. He has been a commentator on race and politics for HuffPost Live, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and PRI’s Flashpoint. Follow him on Twitter.

The Real Bob Ross: Meet The Meticulous Artist Behind Those Happy Trees

'Don't be fooled by his mild PBS persona; the late Bob Ross, the beloved painter, was actually an exacting artist and businessman with — brace yourself — naturally straight hair.'

Dave Zirin + the NFLPA's DeMaurice Smith Talk Kaepernick + The First Amendment

'San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick decided to sit during the national anthem because he is "not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color." In a special edition of Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin talks with DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association, on what the union can, and cannot do, to protect Kaepernick, and why the NFLPA - and not the NFL - is his "family" at this moment in time.'

That Time When a Chicago Bull Asked the President for Reparations

That Time When a Chicago Bull Asked the President for Reparationsby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick is just the latest in a tradition of athletes using the relative visibility to make important political statements.  As the #BlackLivesMatter generation finds voice and purpose, there was much nostalgia -- in this Olympic year -- for the now famous protest by American track & field sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the 1968 Olympics, which produced a now iconic photograph. Smith and Carlos were sent home by the the United States Olympic Committee.
The bar on what some Americans might deem as unpatriotic acts by athletes was considerably lower when Gabrielle Douglas chose not to put her hand on her heart during the National Anthem in Rio, and perhaps even more so as Kaepernick -- who by most accounts will be the backup quarterback for the 49ers -- chose to not stand for the National Anthem at a recent preseason game, protesting the very conditions that #BlackLivesMatter have brought national and international attention to. Kaepernick’s protest occurs twenty-years after retired NBA player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended one-game by NBA commissioner David Stern for also refusing to stand during the anthem, in what was a vastly different world.
Given the impact of social media and its capacity to naturalize State surveillance, via celebrity and fandom, one can only imagine how Abdul-Rauf -- or his league-mate Craig Hodges, would have fared when the latter joined his Chicago Bulls teammates at the White House in 1991 after the first of the Jordan-era championships -- with a letter addressed to then President George Bush, demanding reparations for Black people.
To be sure, most of the attention at that gathering was on the absence of Michael Jordan, the most popular athlete in the world at the time, who chose not to accompany his teammates to the White House. Though few remember or cared that John Paxson was also not in attendance, everyone was aware that Michael Jordan chose to skip the event, to vacation with his family.  Could you imagine if Lebron James had done that, even during the Obama Presidency?
The subsequent criticisms of Jordan for missing the event, were the first sustained criticism that he faced during his emergence as the quintessential sports brand s. Michael Wilbon wrote at the time, Jordan “had an obligation to his team, and as the world’s most famous basketball player, to his sport.”  Even Jordan’s teammates were critical, notably Horace Grant who admitted, “there’s been a double standard the four years I played here.”
For the record, Jordan only remarked, “I’ve seen George Bush, so it wasn’t like I was missing out on another big opportunity,” bringing attention to the fact that President Bush probably needed Jordan’s presence to boost his sagging popularity a year before a presidential election. The criticism directed at Jordan had a racist tinge, given that Larry Bird had also skipped a White House visit in the 1980s, without the same level of criticism.  Bird reportedly remarked that the president knew where to find him. Again imagine if Lebron James had said that?
As Wilbon remarked, Jordan “didn’t have to go there to show respect, not when the president has, in my view, a record on Civil Rights that disrespects people of Jordan’s color.” While such of principled stance would have made a great story, the reality is that Jordan was not motivated by such issues.  Only a year earlier, Jordan famously refused to endorse Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, the first African-American to hold the office, in his attempt to un-seat Senator Jesse Helms, in a campaign noted for Helms’ deliberate attempts to scare Whites into voting for him.
While of this was playing out, Craig Hodges was laying in the cut; there were many in the NBA front office who probably wished that it was Hodges who stayed home that day. Hodges was a nine-year league veteran and three-point shooting specialist — the reigning champion of the Three-Point Shooting Contest held at the NBA All-star game — when he joined his teammates in the White House rose garden.  Whereas his teammates came adorned in suits and ties, Hodges joined the festivities wearing a Dashiki and possessing the letter demanding that more attention be paid to the plight of Black Americans.
Hodges brashness went virtually unnoticed in all the concern about Jordan’s absence, until a year later, when he was released by the Bulls and none of the remaining teams in the league showed any interest in him, despite being able to sign him for half of his salary the previous year.  Hodges, who was very active in Chicago’s Black communities and was a vocal supporter  of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, felt as though he was being blackballed from the league for his political views.  Hodges eventually filed a lawsuit against the league, saying as much.  
Craig Hodges’s experience is a reminder that at the intersections of politics and sports, the only politics that matter are the politics of image and symbolism, and Hodges like Smith and Carlos before him, and Kaepernick after him, represent a politics, whose image and symbolism have always been at odds with the American status quo -- with or without, the selfie stick.

“The Love You Save”: Remembering Jackson 5-Mania

“The Love You Save”: Remembering Jackson 5-Maniaby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
As we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Michael Jackson, we can look back on the Jackson Five’s first full-blown national tour as the signature act of the legendary Motown label -- and  the beginnings of a phenomenon known as Jackson 5-Mania.  
The five brothers from Gary, Indiana known as the Jackson 5, were no strangers to touring—their father Joe Jackson had the boys toiling on the chitlin’ circuit since 1967, earning themselves a solid  reputation in the Midwest. The group’s fortunes began to change when they caught the attention of Motown artist Gladys Knight at a Amateur Night performance at the Apollo theater.  When the group opened for Gladys Knight and the Pips and fellow Motown act Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers months later during the summer of 1968 at Chicago’s Regal Theater, Taylor, who would become their first producer at the label, arranged for an audition for the group at Motown’s Detroit offices.  The rest is history.  
The Jackson 5’s first Motown single “I Want You Back” was released in late 1969 and was at the top of the pop charts by the beginning of the of the new decade.  Despite the fact that Gordy wasn’t initially enamored with the group — he didn’t trust the long range potential  of child acts — the group’s second single and title track from their forthcoming second album ABC also hit number one on the pop charts in late April of 1970.  The single garnered attention because it knocked The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” (the title track from their farewell album) from the top spot.  In fact, the brothers from Gary, Indiana would do it again months later, when their third single, “The Love You Save” displaced the Beatles’ last number one-single, “The Long and Winding Road.”
Despite the popularity of the group, no one was quite prepared for the response that the group would get when they embarked on a national tour in May of 1970.  For example, when the group landed in Philadelphia for their opening date at the Philadelphia Civic Center, they were met by more than 3500 screaming fans; the group had to be escorted to and from their hotel by the Philadelphia police department.
By the time the group did back to back dates in San Francisco and Los Angeles in June, they had  appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show (the most popular variety show of its time) and “The Love You Save” was riding up the charts. In some ways it was a perfect storm and despite his initial hesitancy, Gordy was ready to ride the wave with The Jackson 5.
Ike & Tina Turner opened for the group in San Francisco and veteran balladeer Jerry Butler and the Rare Earth (one of Motown’s most popular white groups) were the opening acts in Los Angeles.  Armed with their three hit records, The Jackson 5 performed for their new hometown fans at the then three-year-old Los Angeles Forum.   A decade before the Los Angeles Lakers would set records on the Forum’s basketball court, the Jackson Five’s one-night stand at the forum would attract nearly 19,000 fans and gross more than $105,000, which was a record at the time. Thousands of more fans were turned away.  The black daily, The Los Angeles Sentinel perhaps captured the essence of all of the excitement running an article days before the concert about a group of black youth who sold lemonade in order to make enough money to go to the concert (“Buy Our Lemonade and Help Us See The Jackson 5”).
The Forum concert is featured on Live at the Forum, a release by Hip-O-Select that includes the June 1970 concert and the Jackson 5’s return engagement at the Forum in August of 1972.  The concerts provide neat bookends to a period of unprecedented popularity for a Black recording group.  Though it did not have the lasting effect of Beatlemania, the two year period that marked the peak of popularity of the Jackson 5 would set a tone for the music industry for years to come.
Not only did the Jackson 5's success suggest that youth culture could sustain a band in the marketplace — as Rolling Stone’s Vince Aletti noted in November of 1970, the average age of the group’s fans, 15, was roughly the same as that of the group — but they proved without a doubt that a Black act could inspire such other-worldly excitement.  Jackson 5-Mania, very much laid the groundwork for Michael Jackson’s unparalleled success in the 1980s.
When The Jackson 5 resumed their national tour in the autumn of 1970, setting box office records in Boston, Cincinnati and Memphis, before setting down at New York’s Madison Square Garden, their song “I’ll Be There” from their appropriately titled Third Album (released a month before the tour resumed), was rising to the top of the charts. By that point the Motown promotional machine was in full attack mode.  By year’s end the group earned four straight number one singles (at the time unprecedented for a “new” group) and released four albums between December of 1969 and December of 1970.  To put Jackson 5-Mania into some perspective, their fourth album release, the (just-in-time for) Jackson 5 Christmas Album, topped the album pop charts and sold 3.5 million copies.
Motown used the label’s formidable brand to establish a Jackson 5 brand.  While the group toured profusely during 1971, releasing their fourth studio album Maybe Tomorrow in April of that year, Motown was busy planning  the next phase of their commercial assault. Just as the new school-year began in the fall of 1971, Motown produced a live television special, Goin’ Back to Indiana, which featured appearances by Bill Cosby, Diana Ross and Bobby Darin. The soundtrack from the show was released in late September of 1971 and featured a re-working of Isaac Hayes’s version of “Walk On By” (one of the tour’s staples) that was later sampled on Jay Z’s S. Carter Mixtape.  (Hayes returned the favor by recording a version of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye”).  
A week after the broadcast of Goin’ Back to Indiana, The Jackson 5ive cartoon debuted on ABC.  Jackson 5-Mania was in full-effect.  The group closed the year with the holiday release of their Greatest Hits, which included the new single “Sugar Daddy” which peaked at #10 on the pop charts.
The Jackson Five brand was beginning to show fatigue in 1972 and Motown was already planning its exit strategy.  Even as The Jackson 5ive cartoon hit the airwaves, the label was preparing Michael’s solo debut Got to Be There, which was released in January of 1972.  Though Michael was clearly the star of the group, it was also apparent that the teen-age Jermaine was the group’s sex symbol.  A fine singer in his own right, Jermaine’s cover of Shep and the Limelite’s Doo-Wop classic “Daddy’s Home” was a top-10 pop single in the spring of 1972.  
With Jackson 5-Mania on the wane, the Jackson 5 released only Looking Through the Windows in 1972 and followed up with Skywriter and Get It Together in 1973.  None of the recordings captured any of the urgency and bubblegum pop genius of their early recordings, many of which were written and produced by The Corporation, a collective of young songwriters and producers including Freddie Perren, who would later produce “I Will Survive” for Gloria Gaynor  and Alphonso Mizell, who would pair with his brother Larry and produce several Jazz fusion classics for Donald Byrd (“Think Twice”) and Bobbi Humphrey.  
The Jackson 5'’s last top-10 single for Motown was largely an accident.  When DJs began playing the Get It Together album cut “Dancing Machine,” Motown quickly released a streamlined version of the song that was the title track of their 1974 album.  The song peaked at #2 on the pop charts and with the popularity of The Robot dance craze, it gave an early inkling of the kind of success that Michael would have as an all-around entertainer in the next decade. 
Though Michael’s success with Thriller, dwarfed many of the achievements of the Jackson 5-Mania era, the reality is that the Jackson 5’s success inspired many copy cats, like the “One Bad Apple” era Osmond Brothers, and became the template for establishing several generations of boy bands including New Edition, New Kids on the Black, Boyz II Men, The Backstreet Boys and N’Sync.

Remembering the Old Man

Remembering the Old Manby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
W. E. B. Du Bois died quietly in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95; he had been living in Ghana for several years at the invitation of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. Du Bois’s death marked not simply the end of an era and but closure on the life of a figure who remains unprecedented in African-American life and culture. For more than 60 years Du Bois remained at the center of much of the political and social discourse that examined the life of the “Negro” in America.  
Beginning with the publication of Du Bois’s groundbreaking sociological study The Philadelphia Negro, his status as a founding member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), his stewardship of the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, his break with the organization he founded over its fear of radicalism, his run for the US Senate (New York) in 1950, his subsequent indictment as a foreign agent (the charges were later dropped) to his death in Ghana—the day before the March on Washington— his illustrates Du Bois’s “Forrest Gump”-like presence in African-American Life.
Born in February of 1868 in Great Barrington, MA, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in 1888.  He later attended Harvard University and after extensive travel in Europe, where he attended the University of Berlin, Du Bois earned a Ph.D from Harvard in 1895, becoming the first African-American to do so.  With the publication The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, Du Bois quickly became the preeminent black intellectual in the United States and a figure who is arguably peerless in that regard, John Hope Franklin, notwithstanding.
Though trained as a social scientist, Du Bois possessed an intellect that aimed to broaden the location where knowledge could be produced and disseminated.  His most well known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) provides the perfect example of Du Bois intellectual sensibilities as the books coalesces the disparate genres of music criticism, autobiography, eulogy, sociology, arts criticism and history in order to tell the story of the “Negro” only 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.  
The Souls of Black Folk, in its time, very much functioned like a mixtape, using literary collage to capture the everyday concerns of communities who defined hybridity—this is what Du Bois’s celebrated thesis of “double consciousness” is really about—a century before Barack Obama’s name could be conjured as evidence of some post-racial reality.
Published when Du Bois was only 35-years The Souls of Black Folk is often treated as the highpoint of Du Bois’s public life and his most important contribution to American Arts and Letters. The book understandably remains a staple of African-American Studies, but Du Bois would publish thousands of essays and books during the remaining sixty years of his  life (with a Tupac-like work ethic) including several novels like The Dark Princess (1928) and The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1911) three autobiographies and the massive Black Reconstruction (1935) which remains his most stellar intellectual achievement.   
Not one to mince distinctions between the role of the public intellectual and the activist, Du Bois found a middle ground that continues to influence contemporary Black intellectuals.  More than 50 years after his death and as the first presidency of an African-American comes to a close -- a figure who Du Bois surely would have been critical of -- the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois continues to reverberate in American life.

# TheRemix The Nightly Show's Felonious Munk on Larry Wilmore and the N-word

'We are still grieving the cancellation of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore - so we're gonna need a moment. While we debate the "unblackening" we are revisiting our episode with 'Nightly Show' contributor Felonious Munk. We spoke with Munk shortly after Wilmore dropped the "N-bomb" at the White House Correspondents Dinner back in April.' -- #TheRemix with James Braxton Peterson    

Racism, Misogyny & Tech -- What We Learned from the Leslie Jones Hack

'Leslie Jones — an African-American actress and comedian who's best known for her work in Saturday Night Live and the 2016 Ghostbusters film — has been the target of an aggressive online harassment campaign and subsequent hack, and now the Department of Homeland Security is getting involved.  Cherrell Brown, community engagement director for the African American Policy Forum, discusses the racially-charged onslaught that Jones has endured.' -- The Takeaway  

Rudy Van Gelder -- Helped Defined the Sound of Jazz for More Than 40 Years

'Rudy Van Gelder -- The man who captured hundreds of jazz's greatest recordings — by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock — died Thursday at his home studio. He was 91.'-- +NPR