Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 628

"He's No Outlier"--Duke University Religion Professor Joseph Winters on the Trump Phenomenon

'Donald Trump is "saying things in public that often people say in private spaces," says Joseph Winters. Rather than writing him off, we'd be wise to pay attention to what Trump's candidacy says about America's unresolved conflicts. Winters is an assistant professor of religion and African and African American studies at Duke and author of the forthcoming  Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press)'.

Rachel Robinson on Her Husband Jackie Robinson and the New Ken Burns Documentary About Him

Rachel Robinson remembers her husband, Jackie Robinson, in advance of the PBS premiere of the Ken Burns documentary about the ground-breaking athlete and civil rights icon.

“It’s called a hustle, sweetheart”: Watch Out or Zootopia Might Pull Some Wool Over Your Eyes

“It’s called a hustle, sweetheart”: Watch Out or Zootopia Might Pull Some Wool Over Your Eyes by Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Disney’s latest film, Zootopia, raked in more than $75 million during its opening weekend making it the biggest open for Disney’s animation studio to date surpassing even Frozen.  To date the film has generated more than $750 Millions in ticket sales, globally.
With a solid 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes coupled with a constant stream of moviegoers of all ages, the film is being heralded as Disney’s most provocative and insightful commentary on racial prejudices, policing, and fear mongering. While this is not Disney’s first film to dabble with issues of race – Song of the South, Pocahontas, and The Princess and the Frog all raise questions about Hollywood’s commitment or lack thereof to matters of diversity – if people really honed in on how Zootopia was marketed they might not actually realize that a relatively racially conscious film was what awaited them in cinemas across the country.  
The trailer, my first introduction to Zootopia, depicts the movie’s protagonists – rabbit officer, Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and the ever so sly fox, Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) – en route to the DMV to glean critical information for a police case of high importance only to find that this institution is quite literally staffed by sloths. Humorous indeed the trailer gestures to the all too familiar cleverness and witticisms that mark and even sustain the Disney empire; that keep this enterprise incessantly relevant.   
Yet the trailer also obscures the politics that undergird the dynamic and complicated interactions that make the film so compelling. Nowhere in the trailer do the animators gesture towards the tense familial relationships in the Hopps family that concern the politics of respectability and what rabbits can and cannot aspire towards. Not once do we suspect the strained relationship between Judy and Nick or the long history of cultural stereotypes that they negotiate as they establish a friendship. Whether intentionally or not, the trailer does not actually sell what it leads with. This is either Disney’s most ingenious marketing strategy or as David Leonard put it recently, “a missed opportunity” of grave consequence; it is likely both.
In tracking the story of one rabbit’s dream to enlist in the police force and reside in Zootopia – a place where predators and prey exist in perfect harmony with one another – Zootopia addresses the anxieties that surface when one abandons what is familiar, aspires towards previously unimaginable goals, and combats incapacitating feelings of inadequacy daily. Moreover, it tracks these realities in a character who perpetuates widespread stereotypes and cannot fully escape her own constructions of the Other.
Such complications position the film squarely to promote Disney’s most prized themes – uplift, resilience, grit, responsibility, and triumph – all while showing how Hopps overcomes her own prejudices or so we are led to believe. While Disney unsurprisingly succeeds in championing the abovementioned moral pillars, they handle Hopps and the pervasive systems of injustice she encounters with much less tact and courage.  
Graduating first in her class, Hopps beats the odds to become a police officer. Believing herself worthy of more than distributing parking tickets, she secures to the dismay of her supervisor a case of supreme importance. Together with Nick, she identifies not one but all fourteen missing animals. To the impressionable viewers – young and old – Hopps “try everything” attitude coupled with her “never give up” mantra creates the circumstances that render her ultimately successful.
Yet that unchecked willfulness – what might even be described as a type of naivety – is part of the film’s problem. Inasmuch as Zootopia cautions against meritocracy and even subtly troubles what success looks like, the theme song suggests that making “new mistakes” and never “giving up” can alleviate systematic oppression or at least make it more tolerable. Implicit in Shakira’s “Try Everything” – embraced by officers Bogo and Clawhauser of the ZPD – is the notion that people can and do work their way out from under deep-seated racial, structural, and economic inequities.
When Hopps remorsefully remarks she may have broken the world although her intention was to fix it, we understand how she has been conditioned to believe that through hard work and perseverance she can alter circumstances entirely beyond her control. Moreover, we recognize the danger inherent in such thinking.
However, Zootopia still attaches a high import to “Try Everything” even while it stands in direct contrast to Hopps and Mayor Bellwether’s (voice by Jenny Slate) lived experiences thereby unveiling some of the contradictory narratives that underpin this movie. The close adherence to the song prevents potentially more productive discourses concerning the police system namely who belongs to it, hierarchies of power that exist within such operations, and how crimes are identified and resolved.
Speaking of hierarchies, Zootopia not only presents empty correctives for institutional racism and systematic oppression, but it also does not effectively comment on the complexities of stereotyping. Given that all of the animals encounter prejudices in Zootopia, stereotyping is regularized and regimented. But by normalizing prejudices – a move that recalls Avenue Q’s “everyone’s a little bit racist” – Disney refuses to acknowledge systems of hegemony that have long targeted and created marginalized groups. Disney does not want to take responsibility for explaining how all discrimination is unequal and normalizing the system means that they don’t have to no matter how dissatisfying to viewers who know better.
Perhaps the most effective but also the most starling aspect of Zootopia is Disney’s decision to cast this narrative by employing the tropes “predator” and “prey.” Not only do these terms invoke histories of empire and conquest not unfamiliar to America, but they also, along with more explicit discussions of biological influences, recall discussions of scientific racism whereby evolutionary theories and natural selection were used to generate arguments about racial superiority.
Inasmuch as the film’s use of “predator” and “prey” speaks to Hillary Clinton’s most recent invocation of super predators as Charles Pulliam-Moore notes, it also may reflect an ongoing anxiety still operative today. Said differently, as political candidates vie for the presidency and people speculated who might be named the next Supreme Court Justice, there is still some anxiety about who is fit to rule. Disney might be consciously aloof but to say they do not know what they are doing when they invoke terms like “predator” and “prey” is to underestimate their abilities; it is to risk being hustled.
To be clear, while I take parts of Zootopia to be problematic, I do not deny that it raises very real and pertinent questions about surveillance, inequity, and cultural racism. I do, however, believe it raises those questions within a carefully constructed domain whereby only certain answers are available or even conceivable. It raises those questions on Disney’s terms not our own, which means that we should continue to be alert as movie consumers.  
Yes, Zootopia is not a “cartoon musical where you sing a little song and all your insipid dreams magically come true” to recall Officer Bogo. The film deals with matters of substance and raises the stakes as Disney initiates a form of cultural commentary new even for them. But Zootopia only begins to scratch the surface of those very necessary conversations, because the filmmakers haven’t quite “let it go” or given the film space to fully venture into that new territory. Taking a lesson from Disney, if we really care about carrying forward the discussions Zootopia ignites we, too, must not “let it go.”
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Sasha Panaram is Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. A Georgetown University alumna, her scholarly interests are in black diasporic literature, black feminisms, and visual cultures.

Mentoring Black Students in the Sciences

'In this episode of Left of Black on The Root host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with Dr. Valerie Ashby, Dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University, to talk about her career path through chemistry to become a senior level academic administrator at an elite research institution.' 

Changing the Face of Medicine: Black Women in Medicine--A Panel with Crystal Emery

' +The New School hosted a panel discussion about Changing the Face of Medicine: Black Women in Medicine, a one-hour documentary film by Crystal Emery, author of Against All Odds: Celebrating Black Women in Medicine. Panelists Include Dr. Doris Chang, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies, The New School for Social Research and Dr. Aletha Maybank, Associate Commissioner, NYC Dept of Health and Mental Hygiene - ‎Center for Health Equity.'

From the Schomburg Collections: Poet Claude McKay Writes to the NAACP's Walter White

'Jamaican-American Harlem Renaissance poet, Claude McKay, writes to civil rights activist, Walter White , who who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century. The voiceover is provided by scholar and curator Rich Blint, co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin. Blint is currently completing his book project, Trembling on the Edge of Confession: James Baldwin and Racial Iconicity in Modern American Culture.' -- +Schomburg Center 

 

Hank Aaron’s Home Run Record Meant Everything Years Ago; It Still Does

Hank Aaron’s Home Run Record Meant Everything Years Ago; It Still Doesby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
April 8 marks the anniversary of Henry Aaron passing Babe Ruth as the major league’s career leader in home runs. It was one of the most significant sports feats of the 20th century, and like many others—heavyweight Joe Louis’ defeat of Max Schmeling in 1938 and Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, to name just a couple—it was deeply connected with the history of race in the United States. My own memories of the night Aaron hit home run No. 715 against the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Al Downing are still quite vivid. But the story began for me nearly a year earlier, when my father took me to see Aaron in person.
Baseball, gospel quartets and fried eggs largely defined the parameters of my relationship with my dad for the 43 years we shared the earth. My dad was a Willie Mays man—and when the aging superstar was traded to the New York Mets, it dictated that I would become not only a Mays man but also a Mets fan, despite growing up minutes away from Yankee Stadium.
As a Georgia boy, my father had a deep respect for Aaron, whose Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966. Though many assumed that it would be Mays who would ultimately pass Ruth as the all-time home run king, by the early 1970s it was clear that the remarkably consistent and low-key Aaron (whom some sportswriters often referred to as slow or lazy) was going to make the most serious run. Indeed, my father’s own demeanor was much like Aaron’s, in contrast with the flashy Mays.
When Aaron’s Braves visited New York in July 1973, my dad made sure we were in the stands, catching the finale on Sunday, July 8. Understand, 1973 was a pretty amazing year for a young New York sports fan: In the spring of that year, the Knicks won the last of their NBA championships and the Mets made an improbable run to the World Series that autumn. O.J. Simpson, playing for the Buffalo Bills, would break the single-season rushing record on a snowy December day at the same Shea Stadium where my dad and I sat that day in July. Yet what I remember most about that year was watching Aaron hit two home runs against my beloved Mets.
I not only became a “Hammerin’ Hank” fan that day—checking the box scores daily, from then on, to see how close Aaron was to Ruth’s elusive 714—but it also marked the beginnings of my consciousness as a race man.
Aaron finished the 1973 season two homers short of Ruth’s record. I was in elementary school during opening day 1974 when the Braves played the Reds in Cincinnati. The game was played on what was the sixth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and the young activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson famously implored Aaron to request a moment of silence for King before the game. The Reds declined.
Perhaps the best measure of Aaron was that so few knew about the hate mail he received ad nauseam throughout his pursuit of the mark. Though Roger Maris also faced such hate when he was making his move on Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961, it was clear that race—and, more specifically, a changing racial order—also motivated much of the hate directed at Aaron. As Tom Stanton notes in his book Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, many of Aaron’s younger black teammates, notably Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker, cite Aaron’s handling of the pressure associated with his drive to the record as a model for how they went on to comport themselves as black men in professional sports.
My dad was working the afternoon Aaron hit 714; it was my job to fill him in the next morning. We would have a similar conversation about such achievements a year later when Frank Robinson, one of Aaron’s peers, became the first black manager in Major League Baseball in 1975—almost 30 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line. And there was yet another conversation nearly 20 years after that, when Cito Gaston, who played against Aaron and Frank Robinson, became the first black manager to win a World Series, managing the Toronto Blue Jays to back-to-back crowns in 1992 and 1993. 
Such memories of the achievements of black baseball players seem almost quaint in an era when the sitting president of the United States is of African descent, and some of the most visible and highly compensated performers and athletes are African American. But for my 8-year-old self, that home run Hank Aaron hit meant everything. It still does.
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Originally published at The Root.com.

Open Plan: Cecil Taylor at the Whitney Museum of American Art

'In this video, curator and curator of performance Jay Sanders and artistic director of Blank Forms Lawrence Kumpf discuss how jazz musician Cecil Taylor creates original compositional work that responds to the Whitney's fifth-floor as part of the experimental five-part exhibition Open Plan.' -- +Whitney Museum of American Art  

Edge of Sports: Ken Burns on his Documentary About Jackie Robinson

'On this episode of Edge of Sport hosted by Dave Zirin, acclaimed historical documentary filmmaker  Ken Burns talks about his  new two-part PBS documentary Jackie Robinson . Burns connects Robinson's struggle to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Trump, and the warmed over racism that infuses the modern Republican Party.' 

"Never Catch Me": A Sound Collage -- A Mix by DJ KamauMau