Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 599

Black Father in Letter to His Son: "I Thought of You When I Saw the Son of Alton Sterling Weeping"

'After the fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude sat down and wrote a letter to his son. It began: "Dear Langston, I thought of you when I saw the son of Alton Sterling weeping at a press conference. It was the latest of a string of haunting public rituals of grief. The police had killed another black person. His cries made me think of you." His son later wrote back, and the two went on to publish their exchange publicly in Time magazine. We speak with both father and son: Princeton professor Eddie Glaude and Langston Glaude, a Brown University undergraduate student.'

A Story Still Untold: 'Doc & Darryl' Misses the Point by Mark Anthony Neal

Doc + Straw + Iron MikeA Story Still Untold: Doc & Darryl Misses the Pointby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Few casual fans of baseball will remember Cleon Jones, who from 1969-1975, was arguably the best everyday position player for the New York Mets. Jones’s batting average of .340 in 1969 was the best season average for almost 30 years.  Jones was also the team’s most recognizable African-American player in that era, save Hall of Famer Willie Mays, who with his significantly diminished skills, played his last two seasons with The Mets before retiring in 1973. The oft-injured Jones was exiled from the team to the Chicago White Sox in the Spring of 1975, after he was arrested for indecent exposure in Florida (the charges were dropped), and forced to publicly apologize by then New York Mets Chairman M. Donald Grant, in what amounted to a symbolic flogging, that would have never happened to any of the team’s White ballplayers.
It was this then fairly recent racial history that 19-year-old Dwight “Doc” Gooden and  21-year-old Darryl Strawberry walked into when they joined the Mets in April of 1984 and  May of 1983 respectively, and immediately became the biggest Black baseball stars that the team had ever produced.  Strawberry and Gooden’s spectacular  ascent and equally spectacular crashes are the subject of a new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Doc & Darryl, directed by 30 for 30 veteran Michael Bonfiglio and Judd Apatow, most known for his adult frat boy films.
The stories of the two black boys from Tampa and Crenshaw (Los Angeles), who became as famous for what they did inside the white white lines, as they did with white lines, is well documented. The centerpiece of Doc & Darryl is a sit-down in the Maspeth diner made famous in Goodfellas, where Gooden and Strawberry talk honestly about their complicity in their downfalls.   The dramatic setting begs for an honesty about the forces that produced the tragic circumstances that produced the sit-down in the first place.
Yet, beginning with the film’s grounding of Gooden and Strawberry lives in the so-called dysfunction of alcoholic, abusive and, of course, absent Black fathers, that serve as inspiration for both players’ out-of-the-hood ambitions and the assumed context for their inability to survive their own success, the film quickly devolves into addiction porn.  Celebrity “addict whisperer” Bob Forrest spends so much time on screen, that he should have just been the third guest at that Maspeth diner table.
This particular framing of Gooden and Strawberry is fair-game; both readily admit to their addictions and the careers they squandered, pitfalls that some of their Black generational peers, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Barry Bonds (PEDs notwithstanding in this latter example), who both had early access to baseball’s professional ranks because of their all-star caliber fathers, managed to escape.  Yet that is only part of the story, the film fails in its ability to accurately portray what it meant for the team’s Young Money, coming of age in New York City during the 1980s, in comparison to Griffey and Bonds, who began their careers in Seattle and Pittsburgh.
The New York Mets have been historically been a conservative operation, as was the case when the team was bought by a group led by publisher Nelson Doubleday and Bernie Madoff’s future bud Fred Wilpon in 1980, and their choice of bow-tie wearing Frank Cashen as the new general manager.  While Cashen knew quite a bit about baseball -- he helped the Baltimore Orioles become a perennial power in the 1970s -- he obviously knew very little about young black men.  Strawberry jokes in the film about Cashen suggesting that he shoot a commercial for the American Dairy Association -- at a time when the player  was bingeing on six-packs before games -- to serve as a role-model for young men, unbeknownst to Cashen, were more interested in bumping Run-DMC.
While Cashen might be excused for the gaps in his knowledge about young Black men, Doc & Darryl reproduces those gaps in its ability to provide any real context for the reality of race, as it might have been experienced by the two subjects, save the run-of-the-mill racism Strawberry faced playing in front of minor league crowds in Tennessee.  Indeed, other than Gooden and Strawberry, the only other Black voices featured in the film are Gooden’s mother (who spends half of her moment on screen lining a hymn), and Ron Dock, one of George Steinbrenner's hired guns who essentially babysat the duo when they played for the Yankees in the 1990s.
In the era before ESPN became a Black barbershop, admittedly the sports press corp in the 1980s was as White as a Donald Trump rally; Doc & Darryl uncritically replicates this very White gaze, that was part-and-parcel of how the duo were covered at a time when Michael Jordan was a shooting guard who took too many shots and Lebron James was an infant. Save veteran journalist Bob Klapisch, most of the press corp assembled as experts, simply re-registered the very gripes they offered about Strawberry and Gooden wasting their talents, oblivious then, as now, to the high expectations placed on both -- Strawberry was supposed to be the next Ted Williams.
In a film that is based on the experiences of two of the youngest and most famous Black New York sports stars -- Reggie Jackson was a grown man when he owned New York in the late 1970s -- there is no mention of the world that many young Black people confronted, such as the police killings of Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs, or the White mobs that led to the deaths of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins -- all of which occurred when Strawberry and Gooden were at the peak of their fame.  As Donald Earl Collins writes “White Americans treated Black lives cheaper than manure in ’85.” Perhaps if the voices in the film had been more diverse such framing might have been presented.
In a press screening for the film, Apatow admitted that they had asked Chris Rock to appear in the film, but his schedule didn’t allow (putting out that Oscar fire); Jon Stewart appears instead, though one wonders what New York Times sports writer William C. Rhoden or Public Enemy’s Chuck D were doing -- hell even Mike Tyson, whose own experience in the 1980s largely mirrored that of Strawberry and Gooden  At the very least, a Black contemporary of Gooden and Strawberry would have echoed the sentiment, that Gooden stopped being a dominant pitcher when he got that jheri curl.
More telling was one of the voices that was included.  Retired New York Mets first baseman and Jerry Seinfeld bud Keith Hernandez, has long carried himself as Strawberry and Gooden’s older brother -- as the film shows, he was hitting the clubs with them.  But like Mark Fuhrman’s role in the stellar 30 for 30 mini-series OJ: Made in America, Hernandez is provided a position prominence and prestige that is problematic. While Hernandez pontificates about Strawberry and Gooden’s drug use, most viewers are unaware that Hernandez was involved in a cocaine scandal that rocked Major League baseball in the early 1980s, that included all-stars such like Dave Parker and Dale Berra, son of Yogi Berra.  Indeed Hernandez, testified in federal court that he used cocaine for three years; rumors of his use of cocaine was likely the reason the St. Louis Cardinals traded him to the New York Mets in 1983. Hernandez was in no position to talk about Strawberry and Gooden’s failings.
In the film’s most poignant moment, Gooden confronts Strawberry about his long-held belief that it was Strawberry who outed him as a cocaine user to teammate Ray Knight.  As the story goes, then baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth made  Knight aware of  rumors that “one of your Black stars” is using cocaine -- the exchange, itself a metaphor for the functions of White social networks.  When Knight confronted Strawberry, Gooden always believed that it was “Straw” who told Knight that it was “Doc,” though at the Maspeth diner, Strawberry emphatically asserts that he simply said, per Eddie Murphy, “it wasn’t me.”  The exchange highlights the extent that the duo’s celebrity served as a form of surveillance -- would anybody have really cared if it was Tim Teufel doing lines? -- but also to the extent that despite their shared legacies, Gooden and Strawberry might not have been that close.
Doc & Darryl  feels like something that was “fun” for Apatow + Bonfiglio to do, but for many Black Americans who watched in awe at Strawberry and Gooden’s  rise,  which coincided with that of other Black male icons from the era like Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Michael Jordan, and Magic Johnson, many with roots to the New York  Metropolitan area, their descent was as predictable as the police shooting deaths that happen with alarming regularity.
That is the story that remains to be told.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press, 2016).  He is the host of the weekly video podcast Left of Black and curator of NewBlackMan (In Exile).  Neal is Professor of African + African-American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University.

23 Ways You Could Be Killed If You Are Black in America

'Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Jennifer Hudson, Pink, Bono, and others explain why it's time to take action to heal the long history of systemic racism in America. #23Ways. In collaboration with Alicia Keys and the We Are Here Movement , with original reporting from Mic's Jamilah King.'   

Our Stories, Your Legacy: A Dialogue with SNCC Veterans

'SNCC Veterans Charlie Cobb, Maria Varela, and Judy Richardson discussed their experiences working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as well documenting the Movement. The event also served as an introduction of the SNCC Digital Gateway , a forthcoming “documentary website” containing written, visual and oral historical materials. The Gateway is a collaboration between the CDS and Duke University Libraries and will become available to the public in December 2016.' -- +Duke Franklin Humanities Institute   

Historian Gerald Horne: 'You Can't Disconnect History of the 2nd Amendment From the History of White Supremacy'

'President Obama warned that the easy access to guns nationwide has exacerbated divisions between the police and local communities. +Democracy Now! speaks to Gerald Horne, an expert on the Second Amendment from the founding of the Ku Klux Klan to the Black Panthers, who complicates President Obama's sentiments. Horne is a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.'

The Complexities of Skin Color

'Inspired by the casting of Latina actress Zoe Saldana to play Nina Simone, the performer and activist known for her pride in her dark skin, Black Issues Forum host Deborah Holt Noel chats with professor and author Dr. Yaba Blay, filmmaker Eric Barstow, and undergraduate student Ayana Thompson to delve into why so many people still knowingly and unknowingly participate in colorism - the assertion that light skin is better.' -- UNC-TV

Keith Knight: Producing Social Commentary Through Comics

'Keith Knight has considered himself a cartoonist since he was in diapers, doodling on the walls of his family home near Boston. While that spirit of creativity has not changed, the content of Knights's work has taken on more profound issues. Knight is known for drawing a weekly political cartoon called "(Th)ink" that often provides commentary on police brutality, racial profiling, and the black experience in America.' -- WUNC's The State of Things

"Hillary, Black Women Aren’t All in Yet" by Stephane Dunn

"Hillary, Black Women Aren’t All in Yet" by Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
History is Made. Hillary Rodham Clinton, you are going to be our first bona fide female presidential candidate for one of our two major US political parties. We're right to honor this moment with you and highlight the humongous historical significance as we remember the sheroes before you, like Shirley Chisholm, who blazed the trails so this inevitable day could actually become reality.
However, we celebrate with some reticence. We understand that it being overdue time for a female president doesn’t mean the woman in question will be anymore down for black women than the slew of men before for her, including, to some degree and surprise, our beloved first black president, Barack Obama.
Sure Trump, for me and many other African American women is the easy no way in hell, under no circumstances choice. But what about you, Hilary? Here’s where things with you and me and a lot of black women gets murky. It has nothing to do with your hairstyle or how warm and fuzzy you come across on TV or not. We’re not mad cause you wore the mask and stayed with your husband during all that humiliation. But you take us back - not to how cool Bill was with black folk but some very uncool stuff. You magnify how feminism and its big moments have been for black women tangibly significant, problematic, and exclusionary.
We’ve done our share of the heavy lifting from some early days. Sojourner Truth’s 1851 ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ speech at a white women’s rights convention gives dramatic evidence of this and how prevalent the face of feminism has been white female and middle class.
We go back with you to the Clinton administration years.  You weren’t merely a voice whispering in your husband’s ear [thank goodness] but working. Remember Lani Guinier? You and Bill’s friend, his nominee to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division? She got tagged one of his ‘Quota Queens’ then left out there, dumped. There was ‘92 when Bill attacked Sister Souljah and placed her in the same company as David Duke and the Klan. No disrespect, but how many times have you publicly, privately, steadfastly, and passionately spoken up for us and fought in defense of us? 
Under your first lady feet, the ground was plowed for the prison industrial complex with three strikes laws sealing in class and racial discrepancies that exploded the incarceration of young black and brown men and women for generations. There were the zero tolerance policing in public schools that hurt poor children. Yeah, you acknowledge this some since you’ve been campaigning. You say it’s time to revise policies, direct money towards decreasing mass incarceration and supporting rehabilitation and addressing police violence. “Black lives matter” you say; we have to go beyond “talking.”
But I don’t know. How much do they and black women’s lives here and around the world really matter to you? Will this be a priority post the election if you win? Got a plan for getting a House and Senate to support new policies? We don’t need throwback political ad pics of your activist self pre-Bill. We want to know your true social justice spirit is still strong in you or has it been driven out over these years sitting on corporate boards and doing intricate political tangos?
President Obama is right. You have politics down from foreign affairs and domestic policy fluency to understanding government inner workings where cred is earned through navigating, mediating, surviving, manipulating where necessary. Gender has nothing to do with it. Keepin’ it real  - you’re fitter than a lot of presidents were when they took office. But you’re only as good as what you privilege and what you accomplish if you win. African American women have been peculiarly invisible or demonized and hypervisible but our smarts, talents, labor, and dollars helped build and enrich this country. We’ve been necessary voters but not ever a priority. 
The air went out of some of us when President Obama didn’t select or seriously vet a black woman for his Supreme Court choice and nominated instead a “uniformly qualified smart guy” with “impeccable credentials” and a “good temperament.” Valerie Jarrett came to us in the media to defend the diss. Neither she nor the President would say it, but we’ve been reading through political lines since slavery when we couldn’t read. An “impeccable” white male candidate was the more digestible choice. Would you ever select an impeccable black woman as your Supreme Court nominee?  We were overjoyed to have a first black president but wouldn’t have elected any black man– who it was and his vision mattered. Now we know wanting better and liking the vision isn’t enough. Having our backs, substance, and follow up is what counts. We’ll require more visible progressive change than what we’ve gotten under Obama and other presidents. Our vote is not automatically inheritable. Historically, we often had to vote for the lesser of two evils and for candidates unenthusiastic about huge issues that disproportionately affect our communities and us.
Hilary, answer clearly and convincingly, to paraphrases Ms. Janet J: What have you done for us lately? What can we count on you to do for us if you win? Don’t offer the insulting,  ‘I’m not the president of women or the president of black folk but of everybody.’ That’s a given. And a ps. Don't think we just forgot how nasty and ‘white’ you and Bill got trying to take Obama out in 2008. 
Truthfully, I hate I gotta be conflicted like this about you Hilary, but I must. Too much is at stake - always has been - to endure and accept ongoing invisibility and such low status in the political hierarchy of more privileged constituents. So, don't  let the polls declaring the anonymous block of black Democratic voters yours lull you into thinking we are, to use Ohio senator Nina Turner’s word some sure “firewall.” Don't rest and rely on Trump being boss bogeyman enough to win you the White House by driving us to the polls in Obama-like numbers. President Obama is with you.
Hell you got Oprah, and some staunch Republicans, and it looks like that email scandal thing isn't going to torpedo the whole thing before you actually make it on the ballot. But you, me, and more than few black women folk - we got some ways to go to be down like that. You have some serious, authentic attention to pay and some good work to do Hilary. Don't sleep.
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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.

Of Black Shootings by Police Poet Ed Pavlic Asks: "When Will It Stop"?​

Photo by REUTERS/Adam Bettcher'Two years ago, Ed Pavlic’s book, “Visiting Hours at the Color Line,” was nominated for an award that is given to writers of color. After realizing their error that he is not a writer of color, the nomination was withdrawn, but the incident spurred Pavlic to write a new series of poems. The result was “All Along It Was A Fever,” a lengthy meditation on race in America. Much of it deals with the violence that Black America experiences.' -- +PBS NewsHour 

Joseph R. Winters Talks 'Race + Melancholy + the Agony of Progress' in Black America

Religion Scholar and Duke University Professor Joseph R. Winters discusses his new book Hope Draped in Black: Race + Melancholy + the Agony of Progress with Frank Stasio, host of The State of Things . In the book, Winters examines the ambivalence, agony and contradictions of Black Progress in the age of so-called Obama inspired "Hope."