Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 586

Do Black Women’s Lives Matter To Social Work?: A Gender Analysis Of Racialized State-Sanctioned Police Violence

Do Black Women’s Lives Matter To Social Work?: A Gender Analysis Of Racialized State-Sanctioned Police Violenceby Crystal Hayes | @MotherJustice | HuffPost BlackVoices
Understanding the risks and adversity facing women of color in our culture, particularly Black women and girls, in the era of social movements like Black Lives Matter, remains a constant and very painful struggle. In 2016 alone according to the Washington Post database tracking fatal police shootings in the US, nine Black women have already been tragically killed by the police. In 2015 there were ten. We’re poised to exceed those numbers. Yet, collectively, we’ve paid very little to no attention to the nine women that we’ve already lost by police violence this year or the impact it has on their families and communities.
The deaths of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, and Michael Brown have helped us galvanize support for social movements like Black Lives Matter and a call to end systemic police brutality. Unfortunately, we have not done the same work when it comes to the experiences of Black and Brown women and racialized police violence in our culture, and the distinct gendered ways that they and their children are victimized, targeted, and killed by police. Our silence should no longer be an option.
As a social worker, I am calling specifically on us to do better as a profession when it comes to our commitments to promoting social justice and anti-racism in the world and culture seeped in persistent anti-Black racism, hetrosexism, patriarchal violence and misogyny, and anti-queer antagonism and violence. Social workers have a responsibility to intensively examine the ways that gender intersects and shapes police violence against Black and Brown women so that we can do the work to interrupt it and intervene wherever we find it and so that we do not unintentionally reenact, mimic, or perpetuate violence against vulnerable populations while we try to help them.
Our past tells us that when we don’t do this work, we reproduce violence in the world, just as we did during the height of the Eugenics movement when social workers helped the North Carolina Eugenics Board sterilize the poor and disabled, disproportionately targeting poor Black and Brown women (Murdock, 2013; NPR, 2011). With the help of social workers, North Carolina aggressively targeted and sterilized Black women: “...65 percent of all sterilizations were performed on Black women even though 25 percent of the state’s female population is Black” (Krase, 2014). It took decades before North Carolina finally acknowledged the pain it caused those families, but as a profession, we have yet to fully acknowledge what part we played in that pain and harm and how to never let that happen again. California just recently banned the illegal sterilization practices of incarcerated women - overwhelmingly Black and Brown women reminding us that the past is prologue (Law, 2014). As former NASW President Jeane Anastas said in her 2012 NASW News article on social work and eugenics, “it is only by facing and reflecting on this history that we can avoid similar mistakes now and in the future”.
We must reflect on our present moment as it relates to Black Lives Matter as another opportunity for us to decide who we truly are when it comes to the identity of our profession as one committed to social justice in our culture, particularly on issues where Black cis and trans women and girls are being killed and victimized while their suffering is marginalized, erased, and rendered invisible to us. Systemic racialized police brutality is a critical moment for us to reexamine our work, practices, and interventions as a profession so that our flawed messy past is not reproduced.
Instead, we become strengthened by our vision for a more anti-racist equitable culture that is deeply rooted in a commitment to anti-oppression. Towards this end, I have come up with a list of five suggested actions that social workers, as social justice advocates, scholars, and practitioners, can immediately take up in support of an anti-racist social work practice that puts the Black Lives Matter movement at the center of our work with a particular lens on the gendered experiences of women and girls of color.
1. Become a member of the Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research on Women and Girls of Color through the White House Equity in Research Initiative.
The initiative invites colleges and universities to voluntarily join the collaborative in an effort to encourage students to use research to make policy recommendations that improves the lives of women and girls of color. The link to join can be found here.
2. Set as priority moving into 2017, at the national level, an explicit gender inclusive Black Lives Matter policy platform.
Lift up the work of the movement to embrace all Black lives by examining the patterns of police violence against Black and Brown women and gender-nonconforming people, that’s rarely visible in our culture. Use the platform as a reminder that police reform must be framed to include the experiences of women and girls of color. See here for their policy platform. NASW could use its platform “Social Work Speaks” to set a policy position on this issue.
3. Specifically advocate for mental health services that, positions social workers, not the police, as the first responders when there is a mental health crisis.
Join divestment movements to pressure banks like Wells Fargo to sever ties with mass incarceration businesses like The Geo Group Inc. We can instead urge financial institutions to invest in mental health companies and non-profits with track records for caring for vulnerable groups.
4. Offer social work trainings, courses, and or workshops beyond “cultural competence...”
to foster social justice trauma-informed clinical techniques that address racial trauma with a critique and focus on the historical trauma that communities have experienced that make them fearful of police, and skeptical of the medical and mental health communities.
5. Social work continues to be a profession dominated by white women.
This is unacceptable for a profession that promotes itself as being social justice and socially conscious centered. In an increasingly multiracial United States, social work must do more to recruit, retain, and train professionals that reflect the communities it serves. It must do this at every level, from our undergraduate programs to our doctoral programs, leadership within NASW, and the agencies where social workers work every day. There are many ways to do this, but we could begin with a national level conference about recruiting and training social work professionals that are more reflective of the communities we serve. The conference would invite social workers from around the country to put together a policy and best practice document led by an interracial multi-ethnic coalition of social workers. This effort would include those who have already set this as an important goal for their programs and institutions with successful outcomes.
These are but a few suggestions, and I encourage all of us to continue adding to this list, because our silence is no longer acceptable when it comes to addressing police violence against Black and Brown cis and trans women and girls. Within a 48 hour-period alone, three Black women, one of them includes a Black transwoman, was murdered (Korryn Gaines, Joyce Quaweay, and Sky Mockabee) early August 2016.
On August 1, 2016, Korryn Gaines, a twenty-three year old mother of two small children, was shot and killed by Baltimore police after an hours-long standoff over an arrest warrant for traffic tickets that left her five year-old son shot and hospitalized (Lowery, 2016). On July 29, 2016, Joyce Quaweay, a twenty-two year old mother of two, was beaten to death by her boyfriend, a former Temple University police officer, and his best friend, also a police officer, because she refused to be “submissive” (Wells, 2016). On July 30, Sky Mockabee, a Black transwoman, was found dead in a Cleveland parking lot. Police and media misgendered her, making it difficult to investigate her case (Brighe, 2016). Mockabee is the seventeenth trans person to be killed in 2016, so it is not hard to believe that her gender identity might have something to do with her death.
Yet, the call for justice for the loss of their lives is barely audible. In fact, at least in Korryn Gaines’ case, many have swiftly stepped forward to argue against any such consideration on her behalf in an interesting departure from past demands for justice in similar cases involving Black men. Here, people have opted to instead accept the initial accounts of police and media that she was armed and pointed her gun at the police leaving them no choice but to kill her and shoot her 5-year-old son. This case is still developing; details will emerge about the circumstances and context that led to the shooting, but we know that Korryn is dead and her five year-old son injured. We also know that she was vulnerable despite media portrayals of her as a gun-blazing angry Black woman.
There are reports that she suffered from lead poisoning, which is typically the result of gross systemic inequality and poverty disproportionately impacting Black and Brown families in the United States. She was a victim of domestic violence by a boyfriend twice her age who left the apartment, abandoning her after police arrived. She did not own her home, which made it easier for police to gain access to her apartment by asking the landlord for the keys, further compromising her sense of safety and protection. When the door chain presented a barrier to police entry even with the keys, they kicked it down. One of these things alone would make Korryn vulnerable, but the combination of them presents a situation that is unacceptably tragic and emotionally devastating.
Again, we are already set to exceed 2015 in the number of Black women killed by police with at least four more months left in the year; this is a brutal reality of our culture. Social work, as profession, cannot be absent any longer from meaningfully contributing to a gender inclusive analysis of racialized police brutality in our culture that disproportionately impacts cis and trans Black and Brown women. Given our social justice advocacy values and mental health training, social work has a powerful voice that can speak directly to the vulnerabilities of Black women in a culture that continues to need convincing that Black lives matter. As a “values-based” profession, social work is called to advocate for greater police accountability and policy reform in these cases, but it will require a willingness to say that Black women’s lives matter without qualification or equivocation.
I feel haunted by the ghosts of Black women and girls who have been stolen from us by violence, particularly state sanctioned violence. Up to this point, I have been especially affected by one story in particular. Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a 7-year-old Black girl from Detroit, haunted me from the moment I first learned of her. She was killed in her sleep during a 2010 raid on her home by a Detroit SWAT team. They were there looking for her uncle. While her case received local attention from activists, and John Conyers, a Detroit US Representative, helped to get some national coverage by asking the Department of Justice, and then Attorney General, Eric Holder, to intervene, the police officers who killed her were officially cleared of all charges in 2015.
Today, little Aiyana is barely remembered in the conversation to end police brutality, except by those of us (primarily feminist activists and scholars) actively engaged in remembering stories like hers. While all of these deaths are incredibly tragic and deeply disturbing, Aiyana’s story continues to resonate with me, and now it includes Korryn and her son, Kodi. It is extremely troubling that police shot and killed Korryn Gaines in front of her 5-year-old; Kodi was injured that day too by police who shot him in the arm. While his physical wounds will heal, the psychological and emotional trauma of watching his mother killed by police is not something he will soon forget or ever get over.
No one should die over traffic tickets, especially a young mother holding her child. We must remember all of these stories and connect them to an emphasis on policy level reforms informed by an intersectional analysis of institutional racism and misogyny, police brutality, and white supremacy, which has arranged society to accept the marginalization and erasure of Black women’s lives.
Civil rights scholar and attorney, Kimberlé Crenshaw, reminds us that we must sharpen our lens when it comes to racialized police violence that is intersectional to include the lives of Black women and girls. Toward this end, the hashtag Say Her Name, a sub-movement of the Black Lives Matter movement, was coined by Crenshaw’s advocacy think tank, the African American Policy Forum, in an effort to demarginalize the experiences of Black women felled by police violence.
This is a state of emergency. While social work has done much to acknowledge and address structural racism in our culture from joining national calls to end police brutality to specifically working at the local level like the NASW-NYC chapter that joined a coalition of institutions and individuals working to close the Riker’s Island prison, we can always do better. I became a social worker because I believe in our social justice values. I believe in the transformative work that we do. I know that if we take this up too, we can help our country heal, end state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, and transform itself into a society where Black women’s lives matter.
I believe there is no Black Lives Matter without the humanity of Black women’s lives at the center of all of our work. Towards this end, I would like to invite you to share your ideas with me about how to move forward. I would love it if you could share your thoughts on any of the ideas offered in this article, whether it is to convene a national social work conference and or social work journal completely dedicated to considering the nuances of Black women at the dangerous intersections between race, gender, and state sanctioned violence. Please feel free to share new ideas not mentioned here as well.
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Crystal M. Hayes is an intersectional feminist and social work PhD student who writes about dismantling race and gender oppression, but is often considered a troublemaker who refuses to be silent in the face of oppression. She can be reached via Twitter @motherjustice

Black Lives Matter Builds on History of Black Organizing: Convo with Barbara Ransby + Charlene Carruthers

'In an interview with Kalyn Belsha, Historian Barbara Ransby and organizer Charlene Carruthers speak about the evolution of civil rights activism. Ransby, director of the UIC Social Justice Initiative and a professor of history, African-American studies and gender and women’s studies at the university, is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement . Carruthers is the national director of the Black Youth Project 100, a membership-based activist organization' -- The Chicago Reporter

#BirthOfANation: What Nate Parker’s Controversial Nat Turner History & His Own Offer US

"Nat Turner" -- Kyle Baker (2006)Birth of a Nation: What Nate Parker’s Controversial Nat Turner History & His Own Offer US by Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
This is not the review of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation that I was planning to offer right after seeing the Sundance Festival history making film several months ago. That was before the good news surrounding Birth of a Nation had a competing storyline in its director’s past coming back to haunt him. The documented account of Parkers Penn State College rape case is readily accessible with a click. So are the headlines about Birth now being a “tainted” product. However, the rush to forecast the death of a promising film that deserves to be seen should provoke a deeper question: How can we celebrate Nate Parker’s dramatization of Nat Turner’s history while grappling with Parker’s?
I saw the film months ago in an intimate setting in an Atlanta theatre with a deeply emotional crowd. We were all moved. I sat in my seat bursting with pride and relief as the credits rolled. Like a lot of folk for whom Nat Turner is a sacred, yet unjustly neglected, historical figure, I had hoped for a major motion picture about him but feared for the outcome all the same. After all, white society in 1831 deemed Turner a crazy ‘nigger’ who terrorized the white Southampton Virginia community when he and nearly seventy-five other enslaved comrades killed between fifty-five and sixty-five whites.
While many mainstream historians acknowledge that black enslavement spurred Turner’s actions, they nonetheless contend that Turner engaged in unjustifiable murder. In sharp contrast, many black people, including my family and folk I grew up with and went to college and graduate school with, revered Turner as a legend who inspired John Brown, as a warrior for black liberation, and, to paraphrase Ossie Davis, as our shining black manhood long before the rise of Malcolm X.
Parker’s Birth of a Nation – brilliantly titled to signify on the racist history D.W Griffith spins in his troubled 1915 masterpiece, Birth of a Nation - made history at Sundance when it became the highest selling film ever previewed there and won the grand jury prize and the audience award. Now the rape case involving Parker and his college roommate, and Birth co-writer Jean Celestin, when they were wrestling students at Penn, is taking center stage, overshadowing Parker’s remarkable directorial debut. It is not that the charges against Parker – and the conviction of Celestin, before an appeal and a second trial being dismissed because the accuser opted not to testify – were a secret until now. But his bigger fame has brought far more intense public scrutiny.
The film’s distributor Fox Searchlight reportedly knew his past history. Obviously no director or public figure, including Parker, can be spared rigorous critique and interrogation, no matter their race, gender or cultural privilege. Still, film directors like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski have enjoyed enormous success despite the taint of their morally vexing behavior with women. Other artists have endured in the public eye despite behavior such as domestic violence. How would the legendary Charlie Chaplin, with his headlining propensity for turbulent affairs, and marriages to sixteen-year old girls, have fared had twenty-four-hour news and social media existed in the 1920s through 1940s?
Parker’s treatment of Turner’s controversial history, and his own volatile past, offer the opportunity to wade into difficult, ugly, psychically disturbing territory bounded by a double taboo. Birth of a Nation is a brave, beautiful effort. It honors the Turner that I and so many have dared to claim as the real Turner, real to us, that is, in the meaning of his fight against the inhumanity of slavery. Parker manages several layers that make the film a worthy effort, starting, simply enough, with the point of view. Hollywood films about American slavery or set in the antebellum period have too often highlighted white agency and proclaimed white heroism. They have all too rarely amplified the voices, and privileged the gaze of black characters. Parker embraces the black gaze and speaks and looks from Turner’s point of view. He shows the sensitivity of a director who not only appreciates the weight of the sacred history he’s retelling, but who personally regards it as perhaps the most important story he’ll ever tell. Birth does that something rare: it takes a black figure at his word and narrates events within his moral trajectory.
The revolt in Birth is not treated as a mad spree or a mindless, bloodthirsty quest. Turner saw himself as led by God, through a series of intense and increasingly vivid visions, to take up arms against the evil of enslavement. If this meant the shedding of white blood too, that had to be accepted as part of the divine plan for black freedom and redemption. His visions reveal the evolution of his consciousness about the inherent spiritual wrongness of slavery.
Though it is not achieved without some narrative roughness, Parker also invokes ancestral linkages to the enslaved black community. He also showcases those ancestral ties as the roots of Turner’s worldview and spirituality. It harkens back to Julie Dash’s aesthetic and visual strategy in her pioneering film, Daughters of the Dust where she reclaims and reiterates African ancestral ties to the present. Parker thus evokes Nat’s visions and the evolution of his calling by deploying the symbolism and abstraction that contemporary Hollywood filmmaking frowns on, especially when it emerges in a black film. Parker reveals another essential layer of Birth in his treatment of the black women in Turner’s life, most notably his grandmother, mother, and wife. No, black enslaved women do not altogether escape marginalization in the actual development, and execution of the revolt; their abuses by whites stir up, and strike at, the indignity and manhood of their men, making them activators of the rebellion, a common role in black male oriented stories about the black freedom struggle. Nevertheless, Birth makes an effort to humanize these women as not merely passive emotional anchors and protective caretakers in Turner’s life, but as resisting women who want their liberation too, and who support his calling as part of their resistance.
The narrative falters a bit as the film moves towards its resolution. The ending [no spoilers here] seems to be a little in search of itself before settling into a direction. Turner’s incredible survival out in the wilderness for weeks alone before his capture is regrettably neglected, and Parker shies away from the sheer brutality of Turner’s death. Instead he reassures us that despite Turner’s and his comrades’ grizzly deaths, the rebellion was still significant and strangely generative, birthing a new generation of rebels to come. Birth of a Nation is timely, and in fact, the story behind it always has been, especially now with the rise of Black Lives Matter and renewed focus on the legacy of racism and white supremacy and our unfinished agenda of racial justice.
The film can stand on its own and need not be carelessly grouped with other cinematic efforts at addressing slavery like the very different Twelve Years a Slave. The two films are united, however, in declaring the need to stop running from American slavery and to end our lightweight confrontation with America’s original sin. We must challenge Hollywood’s absurdly restrained, marginal, and simplistic representation of slavery.
The merits of the film, and the value of Turner’s story in American history, does not mean we need be torn about scrutinizing the story of Parker’s College case twelve years ago. It is timely as well, and offers us further opportunity to confront the gender and power dynamics that have too often been taboo in our cultural discussions. Parker’s public response to the case thus far has consisted of pointing out that he had consensual sex, that he was acquitted, that it was a painful episode in his life which he regrets, and that his life since has been about conducting himself well, being a good husband, father of five daughters, and so on. Emphasizing that he had consensual sex, was acquitted, and has striven since to be a good man is understandable but inadequate.
This is a time of heightened public attention on campus rape though the problem continues in epidemic proportions. Parker is now part of that attention. His status as an actor-turned-director of this significant Nat Turner film means that he carries a heavier weight and expectation. Yes, there is certainly vast space between rape and consensual sex. Yet even “consensual” sex is fraught with gendered social codes that sanction degrees of problematic and harmful behavior by men. Consensual sex does not relieve one of responsibility, excuse irresponsibility, or harmful actions toward others, or excuse poor decisions. There are different types of pressure that one can impose upon another human being, including emotional and social pressures. These must count as part of the calculus of moral behavior.
Parker should use his magnified presence and amplified voice to help dispel the myth that sexual conquest is proof of manhood or a normal part of college life. The problematic culturally sanctioned horniness of “boys will be boys” is no excuse for hatefulness, or the violent exercise of power. Parker should remind young men that although they may later forge successful careers and family lives, these don't erase any abuse of power that demeans women or themselves. 
Nat Turner was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Parker was accused of rape and acquitted. We need not ignore either of these facts, nor Parker’s film. We should embrace the discomfort we feel and grapple with Turner’s and Parker’s histories as part of the complicated, ongoing national conversations we need to have about race and gender and the work we need to do change our culture. We should neither impulsively sanitize nor demonize either, but instead, confront the horrors of slavery and of sexual abuse and rape culture as well. There is great value in seeing and wrestling with Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation. If we can still acknowledge that D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is, arguably the most famous instance of racist propaganda celebrated as great filmmaking, indeed, the very foundation of 20th century American cinema, we can surely wrestle our way through the troubling and fraught circumstances surrounding its 21stcentury answer.
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S​tephane Dunn is a writer and professor at Morehouse College and the director of its Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program​. Her ​publications include the 2008 book Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois) and a number of articles in mediums such as Ebony.com, The Atlantic, The Root.com, the AJC, and others.

Birth of a Nation: What Nate Parker’s Controversial Nat Turner History & His Own Offer US

"Nat Turner" -- Kyle Baker (2006)Birth of a Nation: What Nate Parker’s Controversial Nat Turner History & His Own Offer US by Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
This is not the review of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation that I was planning to offer right after seeing the Sundance Festival history making film, several months ago.  That was before the Birth of a Nation good news had a competing storyline in its director’s past coming back to haunt. The documented account of Parker's Penn State College rape case is readily accessible with a click along with the headlines about Birth now being a “tainted” product.
However, the rush to forecast the death of a promisingly successful film, a deserving one, should provoke a question for deeper pondering: How can we receive this Nate Parker dramatization of the Nat Turner’s history and at the same time grapple with Parker’s?
The night I saw the film amid an emotionally moved, intimate crowd in an Atlanta theatre, I sat in my seat, bursting with something like pride and relief as the credits rolled. Like a lot of folk for whom Nat Turner is a sacred, famous yet under treated figure, I had hoped for a major motion picture about him with anticipation tinged with trepidation. White supremacist American society in 1831 of course deemed Turner a crazy ‘nigger’, a vicious killer of the worst kind who terrorized the white Southampton Virginia community when he and around seventy-five other enslaved comrades killed about fifty white people. Mainstream American culture to follow, including a good many historians, hardly deviated from that view at worst or at best settled on an uneasy portraiture of Turner, on the one hand, discussing the reality of slavery motivating Turner while careful to read his actions as still unjustifiable murder.
Yet, Nat Turner had never been that crazy ‘nigger’ murderer of August, 1831 to me, my family, and a great many of the black women and men I grew up and played with and studied with in college and graduate school. Instead, he was legend, inspirer of John Brown, a warrior for black liberation and shining black manhood long before Malcolm X.
In the fall of 2014, I asked Parker what he was working on next when he visited campus with director Gina Prince-Bythewood to discuss the film Beyond the Lights. He revealed that he was devoting himself to a passion project, a film about Nat Turner. Making the movie happen was a mission worth sacrificing time, money, and his acting career. It seemed kind of fitting. His name “Nate” carried Nat’s within it; he was from the same area where Nat Turner was enslaved and carried out his crusade.
Parker's Birth of a Nation – smartly titled to signify on the racist history D.W Griffith spins in the 1915 Birth of a Nation - made history at Sundance, becoming the highest selling film ever previewed there and winning the grand jury prize and audience award.
Now the twelve-year old case involving Parker and his college roommate when they were wrestling students at Penn, is taking center stage overshadow Parker’s directorial debut. It hasn’t been a secret so much as Parker’s measured fame as an actor had not yet brought him under such intense public scrutiny. The film’s distributor Fox Searchlight reportedly already knew.
Neither Parker nor any director should be beyond interrogation regardless of racial, gender, and cultural privilege. Yet, famous film directors with “tainted” histories due to their behavior with women are not new, and they include Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. How would the legendary Charlie Chaplin, with his headlining propensity for turbulent affairs and marriages with sixteen-year old girls, have fared had a faster, mass social communication network existed in the 1920s through 1930s?
Parker’s treatment of the Nat Turner history and his own offer opportunity to wade into difficult, ugly, real psychically disturbing, double taboo territory. Birth of a Nation is a brave, beautiful effort. It honors the Turner that I and so many have dared to claim as the real Turner, real, that is, in the meaning of his fight against the inhumanity of slavery to us. Parker manages several layers that make the film a worthy starting with the point of view.
The subjectivity that dominates Hollywood films about American slavery or which are set in slavery have too often centered and been driven by the perspective and voices of white characters with directors not privileging the gaze and point of view of black characters. Parker privileges that gaze and Turner’s point of view. He shows the careful sensitivity of a director who not only gets the weight of the sacred history he’s retelling but who personally regards it as perhaps the most important one he’ll ever tell.
Birth treats seriously, legitimizes really, what has come down as Turner’s version of his actions - that he was divinely led, God called to free his people through attempting to visualize Turner’s visions, showing them as a progression of Turner’s innate moral sensitivity, authentic religious faith, and growing critical insight into the evil and moral wrongness of slavery. The revolt is not a mad spree or mindless blood thirsty quest in Birth.
Though not achieved without some narrative roughness Parker also invokes ancestral linkages to the enslaved black community, and, more pointedly, as the roots of Turner’s worldview and spirituality in a Daughters-of-the-Dust reminiscent reclamation of African ancestral ties to the present. Parker thus risks a bit of that symbolism and abstraction that popular Hollywood filmmaking does not favor to treat seriously Nat’s visions and suggest the evolution of his calling. Another essential layer of Birth lies in Parker’s attempted treatment of the black women in Turner’s life, most notably his grandmother, mother, and wife. No, black enslaved women do not altogether escape marginalization in the actual development, and execution of the revolt; their abuses by whites stir up and strike at the indignity and manhood of their men making them activators of the rebellion, a common role in black male oriented stories about the black freedom struggle.
Nevertheless, Birth makes an effort to humanize these women as not merely passive emotional anchors and protective caretakers in Turner’s life but as resisting women who want their liberation too and support his calling as part of their resistance.
The narrative falters a bit as it moves towards resolution. The ending [no spoilers here] seems to be a little in search of itself before settling into a direction. Turner’s incredible survival out in the wilderness for weeks alone before his capture is regrettably neglected and Parker shied away some from the brutality of Turner’s death and body after and settles on reassuring us that despite Turner and his comrades’ resistance meant something and will birth a new generation of others. Birth of a Nation is timely, always has been, particularly so now when this Black Lives Matter time highlights just how much the country has not dealt progressively enough with the legacy of racism and slavery.
The film can stand on it’s own. It is not “another” Twelve Years a Slave as some may lump these couple of cinematic slave narratives together as. They are two entirely different films though they both underline that we need to stop running from American slavery, from the truth of our lightweight confrontation of it, including Hollywood’s absurdly restrained, marginal, and simplistic representation of slavery overall.   
The merits of the film and the value of Turner’s story in American history does not mean we need be torn about scrutinizing the story of Parker’s College case twelve years ago. It is timely too and offers opportunity for confronting something else that has not been comfortably or successfully engaged though it has defined American culture too –gender and power. Parker was acquitted of the rape charges. He is responding to the coverage of the case thus far by pointing out that he had consensual sex and was acquitted. It was a painful episode in his life, which he regrets. His life since then has been about conducting himself well, being a good husband, father of five daughters, and good professional.
Emphasizing that he had consensual sex, was acquitted, and has striven since to be a good man, is understandable but inadequate. This is a time of heightened public attention on campus rape thankfully though the problem continues in epidemic proportions. Parker is now apart of that attention and because he is an actor-turned-director of this significant Nat Turner film, his involvement carries a heavier weight and expectation. There is a lot of space between rape and consensual sex certainly, but a lot of times it's fraught with problematic gendered social codes that sanction degrees of problematic and harmful behavior by men. Consensual sex does not relieve one of responsibility, excuse irresponsibility or harmful actions and poor decisions.
There are different types of pressure that one can impose upon someone, emotional and social included. Parker should use his magnified voice and past to help dispel the cultural thinking that sexual conquest at any opportunity and under almost any circumstance is some kind of normal part of the college years for young adults or the right of “naturally” horny young men just being “boys” and that they get a pass on making bad choices or taking advantage of situations and women [or anyone] if they can. He should remind young men that they may later forge successful careers and family lives, but these don't erase any abuse of power that demeans someone else as well as themselves.
Turner was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Parker was accused of rape and acquitted. We need not ignore either the scandal or the film. We should embrace the discomfort and grapple with Turner's and Parker's histories as part of the complicated, ongoing national narratives about race and gender, neither sanitizing or demonizing either to the extreme as primary responses nor abandoning the value of the 2016 Birth of a Nation. After all, we have not done so with its predecessor, The Birth of a Nation (1915), the most racist but arguably most important early motion picture.
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S​tephane Dunn is a writer and professor at Morehouse College and the director of its Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program​. Her ​publications include the 2008 book Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois) and a number of articles in mediums such as Ebony.com, The Atlantic, The Root.com, the AJC, and others.

#BlackHairMatters -- A Conversation with Author Bert Ashe + Filmmaker Natalie Bullock Brown

#BlackHairMatters -- A Conversation with Author Bert Ashe + Filmmaker Natalie Bullock Brown
In this special episode of Left of Black, recorded with a live audience at Letters Bookshop in Durham, NC, author Bert Ashe (@OneBertAshe) and Filmmaker Natalie Bullock Brown (@NatalieBB2) join host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) in a conversation about the politics of Black Hair and Beauty..
Ashe is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond and the author of Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles (Agate, 2015).  Bullock Brown is an award-winning and Emmy-nominated producer and an assistant professor in the Department of Film & Interactive Media at Saint Augustine's University. Her current project is the documentary Baartman, Beyoncé and Me.Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and in conjunction with the Center for Arts, Digital Culture & Entrepreneurship (CADCE).#
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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U
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Publishers Weekly Radio: Historian Heather Ann Thompson on the Attica Uprising

'Historian Heather Ann Thompson discusses her new book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. She tells PW Radio, "There was a great deal of important civil rights activism in the 1970s," adding, "The state knew the retaking of Attica was going to be a bloodbath." The Attica uprising in New York State, according to Thompson, "is a David and Goliath story...Attica's prisoners became political because of the state's brutality."' -- PW Radio  

On the Media: The Subversive History of Adult Coloring Books

'Three of Amazon’s top 10 bestselling books of 2015 were coloring books for grown-ups. But while today’s coloring books are marketed as therapeutic outlets for creativity, the coloring books of the 1960s were decidedly more subversive. New Republic associate editor Laura Marsh talks about her recent deep dive into the political history of adult coloring books.' 

On Light Pollution: The End of Darkness

'In our increasingly light-polluted world, what does it take to glimpse a truly dark night sky?' -- +The New Yorker

Competing While Black: Rio 2016 Olympics and Racism

'Dr. Sheri Parks talks with Kwame Rose of The Real News about the media’s depiction of black female athletes and the social issues raised during the games in Brazil.' 

The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power -- A Conversation with Art Historian Susan Cahan

'On this episode of Urban Talk Radio, host Shafiq Abdussabur speaks with Art Historian Susan Cahan, associate dean for the arts at Yale College about her new book, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power .'