Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 624

Left of Black S6:E26: Religion + Policing + The Fear of the Black Body

Left of Black S6:E26:  Religion + Policing + The Fear of the Black Body
Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined in-studio by Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman (@EboniThoughts), Director of Black Church Studies at Duke University and the author of Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (Palgrave Macmillan). Neal and Professor Marshall Turman discuss the Black Body as a Theological problem and the role of Public Theologians in the contemporary moment of Anti-Black Violence.  She joins the faculty at Yale Divinity School in the Fall.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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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack
 

A Love Letter to Student Organizers At Clemson University

A Love Letter to Student Organizers At Clemson UniversityFrom Duke Students & Workers in Solidarity | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Beloved comrades,
One of the popular chants during our sit-in at Duke University was simple. “We love you, we see you,” the crowd of supporters would chant as sit-in participants appeared on the balcony of the Allen building, their fists up in the air. Today, we are writing to those who courageously held ‪#‎SikesSitIn‬ at Clemson University to say just that—we love you, and we see you.
We love you, and we see your struggle. We see your indignation, your courage, and your dedication. We know intimately the psychological, emotional, and physical weight you all have been carrying in service of justice, and we honor the sacrifices you had to make in choosing to put your bodies on the line, to speak the truth, and to stand by it.
We salute those who refused to leave Sikes Hall last week, and we unequivocally condemn Clemson administrators for intimidating students and eventually arresting ‪#‎Clemson5‬ on April 14. We demand that Clemson University immediately drop trespassing charges against these students, cease suppressing student dissent, and promptly address the list of grievances and demands concerning the climate of racial violence, exclusion, and hostility at Clemson issued to the administration by See The Stripes: Clemson University on April 13.
We have seen similar repressive tactics employed by our own administration. And, if we have learned anything at all, it is that we are most powerful when we stand together united in struggle. As mass student movement grows across universities nationwide, we know they fear us—and so they should. To quote #SikesSitIn Statement, “we do not plan to sit silently and endure injustice with bowed heads and slumped shoulders." We know we have a duty to fight.
Most importantly, we recognize that what we are up against is about much‪#‎MoreThanBananas‬ hung by the African-American history banner at Clemson, or the administrative cover-up of a hit-and-run assault of a Black worker at Duke. Administrators, both at Duke and Clemson, would like us to believe that those are “isolated incidents.” They would like us to believe that task forces and diversity committees are adequate responses to a culture of racism and anti-Blackness that plagues our campuses. We know better. We know that what we collectively struggle against is institutional racism that is foundational to these institutions, that underpins their very fabric—here at Duke, at Clemson, and across the South. We know our struggles are connected, and there’s so much power in that realization alone.
A sit-in is only one tactic of resistance. As you begin to move your movement forward away from Sikes Hall, we wish to say: Clemson, we love you. We see you. We’re with you.
From Durham, NC to Clemson, SC—‪#‎DismantleDukePlantation‬ stands in love and solidarity with #SikesSitIn and ‪#‎SeeTheStripes‬ movement.
In revolutionary love and struggle,
Duke Students & Workers in Solidarity

My Purple Rain: Love Story Notes for Prince Rogers Nelson by Stephane Dunn

My Purple Rain: Love Story Notes for Prince Rogers Nelsonby Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
True Story. Fifteen or sixteen and I am in love. Heart rushing,‘I would die for you’ kind of I’d spend every night ‘rapping ‘til the sun came up’ to you on the phone if Mama wouldn’t keep catching me kind of all encompassing first real deal love. I spend the weekend at my favorite cousin’s house and we go on a group date to the movies, really just my cousin - my ally and supporter of real true love, and the tall, handsome, gentle, smart poet-passionate boy my heart says I will love forever.
We walk the several blocks to the mall but something said along the way or not said by the boy I will love forever stirs my heart rate and my angst prone teen hormones, and I stomp ahead ignoring the beautiful boy’s pleas, his for real, I’m sorry. By the time we’re headed down the theatre aisle I’m whipped up into all out furious and refuse to sit with him. I say nothing to my cousin but she knows where her allegiance must lie and she sits with me while my boyfriend gets lost in rows out of sight with strangers.
The movie begins. Prince fills the screen so surreally mysterious yet intimate, black shiny hair, coltish eyes, in leather and purple magic and stacks and Apollonia picture pretty and there’s a love story and songs, soul teasing beautiful poems telling a story, unfolding, a little, Prince’s mysterious soul. I sit there beside my cousin instead of the beautiful also soulful boy who is beautiful like Prince and I half hold my breath, heart breaking for Prince and Apollonia, willing true love to live up to the purple magic.
By the time Prince is wailing with his soul out in that song, my cousin and I are clutching each other’s arms, tears rolling down our faces. And we just sit there like that, my heart hurting so bad thinking of my love sitting rows behind me, feeling pain, while Prince is making us cry singing “Purple Rain.” And just like a movie, when it’s over, I literally stand and practically run down that aisle around the few lingering strangers and outside and find the boy I’ll love forever heading down the street but he turns to me, tears in his eyes, and opens his arms, welcoming me still and I go.
True story. Me and my best friend in middle school listening to Prince on the sneak during babysitting two cousins of mine away from our devotedly church going, praying mothers who would’ve blessed us with olive oil and a belt if they’d heard us lip syncing to ‘Controversy’ or ‘Do Me Baby’ years and years before, honestly, either of us would experience anything of the sensual sexual merging with another Prince captured. But still he called to our burgeoning longing, our dreams of a love that would be as profound as he made it sound.
First two tears of college, I’m in a real live crossed lovers sort of drama, falling for this young man I don’t want to fall for while clinging to the boyfriend I have. One night, at one of those house parties in the basement of one of those popular people on campus, I’m not with the boyfriend and with sister-friends. The lights darken and the first notes of a song, Prince’s “Adore You” gets people quiet and pulling each other close.
Me and forbidden boy are almost directly across from each other, grinding couples and a little space between us and without asking one another we wind our way around the other bodies and meet in the center and dance, slowly, lost in the voice singing about feeling somebody so deep, he would give anything to her, do anything for her. True story.
A week ago sad about missing Prince at what I didn’t know would be his last concert in Atlanta, I put on my Prince cd, and introduce my six year old son to “Little Red Corvette” He likes it since it’s about a car, and he doesn’t mind dancing a little with Mommy even though I say a little gruffly, indignant, “Boy’ like how you gonna not know who when he asks, "Mommy who is Prince?”  MJ soundtrack to my young childhood. Prince soundtrack to my becoming grown. True story.
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Writer and professor Stephane Dunn, PhD, is the director of the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She teaches film, creative writing, and literature. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press). Follow her on Twitter: @DrStephaneDunn

The Prince and the Black Girl by Lisa B. Thompson

The Prince and the Black Girlby Lisa B. Thompson | @PlayProf | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
When I was a precocious junior high school girl Prince saved my life.
I recall feeling deeply frustrated because all the fine boys at Colma Junior High School ignored me. Who could blame them? In 1978 I was bespectacled 8th grader with the uninspiring body of a much younger girl. Little did those brown skinned, cornrowed, hoop playing pubescent brothas know that the studious mind of this honor roll girl, sometimes took time off from writing poetry and homework to think about grown woman business.
While the boys ignored me it was Prince who understood the duality of nappy nerdy black girls. Prince rode into my imagination on that Pegasus (is really he naked?) and delivered a symphony of sensuality that gave me license to explore my inner freak.
Prince’s early career coincides with my sexual awakening as a teen during the 1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area and later with my sexual adventures as a coed in LA. Despite a righteous upbringing by my mother, a proper and respectable Baptist southern transplant, I was intrigued by badness, by funk, by nastiness.
Yes, I was enamored with raucous sensuality and loved the thought of rocking and rolling. I decided to dance on the edge of proper girlhood and Prince provided the soundtrack. His Royal Badness, the Purple Playah granted me license to feel all the things I wasn’t suppose to feel and want all the things I wasn’t suppose to want—in the dark and in the light too. All the things. He celebrated the black body in song with lyrics that rang out with a witty ecstasy that spoke to both my intellect and passion.
My memories of Prince’s music neatly map onto my personal discoveries about relationships, sex and love. When his first album came out Prince made me and my friends giggle as we sang “soft and wet—you are soft and wet.” When I entered high school his “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Sexy Dancer” played from boom boxes as San Francisco fog rolled in at the park. A year later his album Dirty Mind sealed the deal. We were his. Forever.
I recall nights when me and my friends danced to “PartyUp” and “Controversy” in the basement of house parties. I also recall learning how to slow dance to “Do Me Baby” and kiss the boys who no longer ignored me. More than a few nights I bopped alone in my room in front of the mirror to “When You Were Mine” and dreamed of the inevitable heartbreak that was to come. My college boyfriend drove a motorcycle and we thought we were a dark skinned Prince and Apollonia in our own passionate and volatile Purple Rain movie. The year I graduated from college I recall Prince insisting that I “try a new position, something that will make it alright” and I did just that.
I am blessed to have come of age in the Prince era. His music helped shape my sense of self and sexuality. Theatrically bold and often poetic in his musical representations of sexuality and sensuality, Prince celebrated the drama, joy and play that is part of sex.
Songs such as “Head”, “Darling Nikki,” “Sister,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” “Sugar Walls,” “Little Red Corvette,” and one of my personal favorites “Erotic City” all capture the bold, courageousness performativity of getting down both sexually and on the dance floor. His music called out the yearning for sex and love as much as it evoked sexual satisfaction. Becoming an adult is tied deeply to coming to understand yourself as a sexual being and Prince’s songs played in the background as I figured that out.
I’m a grown woman now but I’m still aware of the simplistic stereotypes about black sexuality—particularly black female sexuality. Prince’s claiming his sexuality in all his audacious glory, even as he matured, continues to help me do the same. When he died I couldn’t play his music – not because I don’t own it, but because my versions of his recordings are on cassette or vinyl. That’s how far back the love affair goes.
While I no longer have the technology to listen to most of my Prince recordings I discovered something more important. If I lean back far enough in the backseat of my car I can still hear Prince—every guitar lick, every bass thump, every synthesizer scream and falsetto squeal—and I’m a 18 year old black girl again basking in the California sun learning how to be a sexy dancer.
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Lisa B. Thompson is the author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class and the play Single Black Female. She is an associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin. Follow her on Twitter @playprof.

A Tribute to Prince from the cast of The Color Purple

A touching tribute to Prince Rogers Nelson from the cast of the Broadway musical The Color Purple, led by Jennifer Hudson. 

"At Last I am Free"--Chic + "Still Life"--Richard Iton

Nathan Jalani Taylor

'One aspect of this willingness to accommodate the death drive embedded within the archive of "modern" black politics—its teleological, antireflexive casting marked by a cascade of "posts"—is the decreasing capacity for certain forms of irony associated with a fear of undecidability and a sublative impulse that requires that certain forms of transgressive politics be stigmatized, closed down, and/or rendered inaccessible and irretrievable.

A Year After Freddie Gray: Baltimore Activist J.C. Faulk Says City Hasn't Changed Much

'In April 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department and later died of spinal injuries sustained in a police van. His death sparked riots and calls for change in both the police department and the political arena. A year later, Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson takes a look at what has and hasn’t changed in Baltimore with community activist J.C. Faulk.' 

Library of Congress: Interview with Pulitzer Prize Composer Henry Threadgill (2014)

'Larry Appelbaum interviews composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill about his musical upbringing in Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the story of his life-changing experience in Vietnam, his groups Air and Zooid, and his approach to composition and improvisation. Threadgill was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition In for a Penny, In for a Pound.'  

#WUNCBackChannel: 'Dog Whistle Politics' + HBO's Confirmation

On this episode of #WUNCBackChannel with host Frank Stasio, regular contributors Natalie Bullock Brown (@NatalieBB2) and Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) discuss the history of "Dog Whistle Politics--where  politicians have used coded language to talk about race without addressing it explicitly--and the HBO film Confirmation which re-visits the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Senate Hearings. They are joined by Ian Haney-Lopez, law professor at the University of California and author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked The Middle Class . (University of Oxford Press/2014).

The Digital Analog Files: Julie Dash interviews Octavia Butler (1995)

A lost interview (1995) with award-winning Speculative Fiction writer Octavia Butler and filmmaker Julie Dash at her home in Los Angeles.
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