Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 588

The Other Olympic Rio: A Conversation with Favela Activist Theresa Williamson

'In the run-up to Brazil’s year of mega-events, Theresa Williamson made her website RioOnWatch.org into an essential independent news source. In our final Olympics podcast, Theresa Williamson joins Dave Zirin for a wide-ranging and insightful talk about the Rio not captured by corporate media.'-- Edge of Sports  

Darnell Moore: "Donald Trump is a Racist, Misogynist + Xenophobe" -- and It's Up to The Media to Call Him Out

'In a video op-ed, Mic's Darnell Moore argues that Donald Trump's campaign is built on explicit and implicit racism — and that it's up to the media to call it what it is.' 

Short Shot: Art Historian Richard J. Powell -- "Freedom is Knowledge"

'In this Short Shot, Scholar, Writer and noted Art Historian  Richard J. Powell sits down with filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris and discuss the connection between Freedom and the power of Knowledge.' 

Virginia Heffernan : Augmented Reality -- Pokémon GO Is Only the Beginning

'Could Pokémon GO be considered art? Journalist Virginia Heffernan believes the game bears the hallmarks of great art — exploration, movement (of the soul or the soles), and a call to instinct. Heffernan's latest book is book is Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art .' 

#BackChannel: Politics on The Olympic Podium

'The Olympics are heralded as an international event rooted in intense competition, national pride and athletic successes. But the Olympic Games can often reveal complex race issues and overzealous displays of nationalism. During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, athletes of color like U.S. swimmer Simone Manuel and U.S. gymnast Gabrielle Douglas have been in the spotlight. WUNC host Frank Stasio talks with popular culture experts Natalie Bullock Brown, professor of film and broadcast media at St. Augustine's University, and Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African & African American studies at Duke University, about the legacy of athletes and politics at the Olympics.​'
 

'Nobody’s Black 'White Girl': Gabby Douglas’s Olympics by Stephane Dunn

'Nobody’s Black 'White Girl': Gabby Douglas’s Olympicsby Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I had hoped that first annoying media nitpicking of Gabby Douglas wouldn’t spin into what it has – an all out absurd race and gender politics injected assault on a young woman who has already earned and deserves the respect of the country she represented so well in 2012 and continues to in 2016. Yet, between Yahoo, MSN and the numerous other national web and local news competitors interrupting real Olympic latest happenings to hype up controversy where there didn’t have to be any, Gabby Douglas become easy fodder for folks looking to the Olympics more for gossip and scandal than inspiration or patriotic fandom. She deserved better and that’s respect mixed in with some damn compassion.
A history maker pre-the 2016 Simones (Manuel and Biles) and post-Olympian Dominique Dawes’s historic career, Douglas is the first black American woman to win that coveted all-around gold in Olympic gymnastics history and a team gold in the same Olympic games.
Even then the cultural politics of representation disturbed that triumphant 2012 London moment. It wasn’t just the mainstream press digging into her family backstory, the mother’s financial struggles and so forth in a way that wasn’t the usual tear jerking spin of the rise up from personal struggle to Olympic glory. The coverage smacked a little like investigative reporting of someone who might be unmasked as a little counterfeit, dysfunctional, or both. It was an unattractive national and international grappling with the unfamiliar rarity of a black American girl occupying a very sacredly regarded Olympic space unused to being disturbed by the dominating prominence of a girl who was not white American or European and in an era of 24-7 media.
It wasn’t only mainstream American culture that tainted the reception of Gabby’s hard earned 2012 Olympic glory. Black folk, especially black American women got in the mix too watching and cringing then cackling on social media about loose hair strands and imperfect ponytails, enacting some deep seated, white supremacist bred, hair angst and fear of how we look before the world – too nappy? Hair too wild?? Black girl roots showing through the edges too much? It was not a new kind of censure to be sure. Four years or so earlier when Michelle Obama was First Lady candidate and then the first black First Lady, there was all this public chatter and at home fretting about her hair and whether it was proper for her to be showing her arms so much.
The lead in media word on this year’s summer Olympics helped set the stage for the mess we’ve witnessed over the course of the gymnastics competition. The scripts were written. How Simone Biles was the new best ever and a lock for proving it, how Aly Raisman had heroically worked her butt off to return to the Olympics and stand as an undisputed individual Olympic champion, how the USA Final Five were sure to win team gold, how Gabby Douglas was not demonstrating 2012 Olympic form, struggling, and unlikely to stand out if she made the team at all.
The story of her feisty refusal to quit, the clenched jaw determination to get there and compete, to block out the naysayers – as she had done most of her life to win that coveted all around gymnastic gold in August 2012 was never allowed to be the story, as Olympic narrative worthy as it is. Still, after the team competition, Gabby stood on that podium, gold medal around her neck having done what she needed to do to help ensure that team USA accomplished the expected goal.
Instead of attention and praise for not letting her team or herself down by performing well enough under pressure for team gold, the media censure of Douglas exploded. She didn’t have her hand over her heart during the playing of the national anthem. She was slouching instead of standing tall like her teammates. She didn’t have the proper expression on her face. Maybe she was standing there in a surreal state, not yet able to fully process being back on that podium for the same special team gold as four years before. Perhaps she was standing there merely relieved that she hadn’t in anyway torpedoed that outcome or maybe she was a little lost in hopefulness that her follow up Olympic experience wasn’t going to be the wash out that the media seemed to have predicted as inevitable. None of those possibilities or others mattered; she was unpatriotic, disrespectful.
From there, Gabby couldn’t even sit in the audience right watching the all-around gymnastic competition. She supposedly didn’t look properly enthusiastic enough for her teammates Aly and Simone’s successes. There was no sunny, breezy girl, trained smile plastered on her face at all times, nor enough clapping and looking perpetually excited. So she was jealous, hatin’ on her teammates. Could she have been sitting there absolutely wishing she was competing for the all around gold as any fierce competitor and reigning Olympic champ of an event would, thinking about what she might have or could have done differently while at the same time hoping her teammates victorious? It didn’t matter.
Or maybe Gabby was wearing the weight of the Gabby bashing on that big world stage and sitting there ill at ease, hyper-conscious of how a nod or turn of her head could explode into a headlining news tag about how she was offending a mass of anonymous people.
If the headlines about her lack of patriotism, jealousy, and improper standing, weren’t enough, Douglas then had to address it, offering half-hearted apologies for whatever the media reported were her offenses according to everybody else. She knew there was something terribly wrong about apologizing because people thought you to be offensive and guilty rather than being that. Because she really is a young woman with some fight and pride and one of her country’s winning Olympians, she let the pain, confusion, and even a bit of the anger show in her tempered words about the unfair criticism. Most of all, it was all over her face, bravely unmasked, no Wheaties box smile.
Simone Biles owes Gabby a debt she's probably never ever thought about. Because Gabby ventured where no black girl had exactly been before in Olympic gymnastic history in the advanced social media era and suffered having focus on her hair, background, looks - her unabashed black American girlness, instead of only on her hard earned work and unique self shattering that glass vault, we got to see how foul that was.
Biles is getting the right kind of attention, for the most part, for her excellence, and if there are a legion of black women out there noticing stray strands or wishing her hair was different, they sure aren't saying it loudly. Yet, even this arguably best gymnast of all time has had her own headline fraught with some underlying nasty racial implications. At least she didn’t have to apologize for it, the journalist did. Besides there’s Douglas, an easy target for the flip side of praise and acceptance, Heaven forbid that all these black women Olympians making history in sports not typically dominated by the likes of them present no opportunity for drama, no something sinister or improper for the American popular media to throw any shade over.
Actress-comedian Leslie Jones, a recent veteran of the vicious public treatment that black women's looks and non-passive demeanors can receive has called for the folk who countered the social media hate she received to wrap the same around Gabby. A hashtag emerged with that sentiment in mind: #Love4GabbyUSA. But it is extremely sad and unworthy of a country dominating the Olympics with gold to have such intrinsically rooted anxieties, disregard, denial and disdain for black American women, permeating social media and serious reporting alike on the sacred games. #Love4GABBYusa is more appropriate.
Gabrielle Douglas doesn’t have any shame she should feel pressed to bear. The shame isn’t on her. It’s on her country and the ‘respectable’ media outlets and anonymous ‘everyones’ on social media practicing and reporting the hate.
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Stephane Dunn is a writer and professor at Morehouse College. 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.

[Trailer] 'Do Not Resist' -- Craig Atkinson's Documentary on Policing in the US

'Starting on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, as the community grapples with the death of Michael Brown, DO NOT RESIST – the directorial debut of DETROPIA cinematographer Craig Atkinson – offers a stunning look at the current state of policing in America and a glimpse into the future. The Tribeca Film Festival winner for Best Documentary puts viewers in the center of the action – from a ride-along with a South Carolina SWAT team and inside a police training seminar that teaches the importance of “righteous violence” to the floor of a congressional hearing on the proliferation of military equipment in small-town police departments – before exploring where controversial new technologies including predictive policing algorithms could lead the field next.'
Do Not Resist -Trailer from VANISH Films on Vimeo.

Bobby Hutcherson Tribute Mix [Part One] by Gilles Peterson

Gilles Peterson pays tribute to the late vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson in part one of this tribute mix.  Playlist includes: 
Bobby Hutcherson - Montara
Bobby Hutcherson - Bedouin
Bobby Hutcherson - Les Noirs Marchant
Bobby Hutcherson - Prints Tie
Bobby Hutcherson - Color Scheme
Bobby Hutcherson - My Joy
Bobby Hutcherson - Little B’s Poem
Bobby Hutcherson - Ntu
Bobby Hutcherson - Hello To The Wind
Bobby Hutcherson - Houston St, Thursday Afternoon
Bobby Hutcherson - Ankara
Bobby Hutcherson - Visions
Bobby Hutcherson - Equinox
Bobby Hutcherson - Verse
Bobby Hutcherson - Same Shame
Bobby Hutcherson - Zuri Dance

The Inherent Violence of Policing -- Conversation with Christina Heatherton & Jordan T. Camp

'Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp address the inherent violence of policing, as well as its specific politics in the United States through the “broken windows” doctrine and the character of William Bratton for instance. Christina Heatherton is an American studies scholar and historian of antiracist social movements; She is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. Jordan T. Camp is is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on the relationships between race, class, culture, political economy, social movements, and social theory; He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Race and Ethnicity and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.' -- Archipelago is the podcast of The Funambulist Magazine . 

Tiny Desk Concert: Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals

'Watch the invigorating, genre-busting bandleader, drummer, singer and rapper Anderson .Paak perform four songs — three from this year's Malibu, plus one surprising audience request.'