Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 639

Sy Ari Da Kid: "5 Minutes Ago" (Video)

"5 Minutes Ago" -- Lead single from Sy Ari Da Kid's B4 The Heartbreak. (Directed by Dontell Antonio; Produced by Ikey Boy)

Why I’m Ready for President Obama to Leave the White House by Law Ware

Why I’m Ready for President Obama to Leave the White Houseby Law Ware | @Law_Ware | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Barack Obama must be the most disrespected president in American history. First there were the questions about his birth certificate. Birthers, unaware that Hawaii joined the union in 1959, were in the streets asking to see the certificate like a disgruntled man on the Maury Show.  
Then, during an address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, Representative Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted ‘You Lie!’ as President Obama tried to explain the details of the Affordable Care Act. Wilson was later unapologetic and used his heckling as an opportunity to raise money for reelection.
When he travelled to Arizona in 2012, Governor Jen Brewer pointed a finger in Obama’s face as soon as he arrived at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport.  The only thing she didn’t do was refer to him as ‘boy.’  Gov. Brewer treated Obama like a ni**er without having to say it.
When he visited Oklahoma in 2015, not long after the massacre of 9 black men and women in Mother Emmanuel AME Church by a Confederate Flag waving racist  young man, he was met by a few good ol’ boys waving the Stars and Bars.
But, of course, it was all about states’ rights.  
I could go on. There is the heckling by a reporter from the Daily Caller in the Rose Garden. The chair lecture he received at the hands of Bill O’Reilly. The former Mayor of New York City saying of Obama, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America…He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” 

The list is seemingly endless, but as we reach the end of his presidency, Senate Republicans are setting precedent with the level of disrespect they’re directing at President Obama.
Now members of the all Republican Senate Judiciary Committee said they would neither hold confirmation hearings nor vote on the person President Obama nominates to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
It is a matter of professional courtesy for Senators on the Judiciary Committee to meet with nominees named by the president, but, when asked if he would adhere to that historical precedent, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he would not. “I don’t know the purpose of such a visit. I would not be inclined to take that myself.” When asked the same, Senator John Cornyn of Texas agreed. “I don’t see the point of going through the motions if we know what the outcome is going to be.”
Many on social media have voiced sadness about the fact that Obama will soon leave the presidency. While I understand the symbolic power of black folks in general, and black kids in particular, seeing a family in the White House that looks like them, I’m ready to see this president’s final year in office come to an end.  
When Obama was elected, many thought we were being ushered into a new era—certainly not a post-racial milieu, but, perhaps, a less overt one. The fact that a black man could rise so high was shocking. It made many think that things were getting better. It gave us hope. Now, that hope is gone.
It is clear that no matter how high you rise, no matter what office you hold, no matter how hard you work, if you are black, many will view and treat you like a second-class citizen. No, they won’t use racial epithets. They will not burn a cross in your yard. They may not spit in your face. But the undeniable fact is that white supremacy is here to stay, and no election will cure that ill.
 
I’m ready for Obama to leave office. I don’t care how many times he says pop-off. I don’t care how often he daps up Kevin Durant. I’m not swayed by the number of black women from the civil rights generation that dance in the White House when they meet him.
I’m tired of seeing President Obama blatantly disrespected, and my soul is weary from having to see him grin and bear it. I’m ready for President Obama to be free from the burden of having to perform for white supremacy—and I’m ready to be free from the burden of having to watch him do it.
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Lawrence Ware is an Oklahoma State University Division of Institutional Diversity Fellow. He teaches in OSU's philosophy department and is the Diversity Coordinator for its Ethics Center. A frequent contributor to the publication The Democratic Left and contributing editor of the progressive publication RS: The Religious Left, he has also been a commentator on race and politics for the Huffington Post Live, NPR's Talk of the Nation, and PRI’s Flashpoint. Follow him on Twitter: @law_ware

#BKLive: Photographer Jamel Shabazz's Coney Island 'Tribute to the Ancestors'

Photography by Jamel Shabazz'Photographer Jamel Shabazz's latest book documents "Tribute to the Ancestors," a day in June where hundreds gather at Coney Island to commemorate the millions of lives lost when Coney Island was a recognized dock for slave trade ships.' -- +BRIC TV  

Hip-Hop + the Hypocrisy of White Liberalism: A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

In this segment of Left of Black on The Root , Mark Anthony Neal interviews author Adam Mansbach, the author Angry Black White Boy, The End of the Jews, and Rage is Back.  The conversation was recorded with a live audience at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University.

Trouble in Nerdland: A Blow to Progress on Diversity + Inclusivity on TV News--and An Opportunity

Trouble in Nerdland: A Blow to Progress on Diversity + Inclusivity on TV News--and An Opportunityby RaeAnn Pickett | @RaeRoca | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The trouble in #Nerdland isn’t going away anytime soon because the many diverse voices MSNBC’s The Melissa Harris Perry Show allowed to be heard won’t shut up — not now, not ever.
Over the past two weeks, the show has repeatedly been pre-empted by election coverage, and host Melissa Harris-Perry, for one, is mad and won’t take it anymore, so she walked off the set. An email from Dr. Harris-Perry was posted on Medium Friday providing answers for an audience that has noticed the very-obvious absence.
Social media trending shows how disheartening fans and people with a stake in critical issues of the day find this development. The show has been a refreshing antidote to tone-deaf talking-head news shows featuring people who don’t look and sound at all like much of America. The implication of repeatedly seeing a row of exclusively white, male heads bobbing on the screen Sunday mornings is that they are the unabashed experts on those topics, and no other credible sources must exist because year after year after year, the same people representing the same narrow sliver of society has dominated those airwaves.
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show has been an integral part of the weekend lineup of issues-based national programming for the past four years: In large part, it is successful because fostered a safe and credible environment for people of color, women and other diverse experts to analyze issues that haven’t made their way into the mainstream, 24-hour news cycle — even though they represent the way we live 24/7.
Harris-Perry, was one of the first voices to discuss the unarmed shooting death of Michael Brown in a small town called Ferguson and called the killing what it was: murder of an unarmed, black teenager by a white police officer. She nimbly excavated the American foreclosure crisis, elevating the best minds to help affected audiences understand what happened, what to expect and what to demand from our leaders.
Called #Nerdland on Twitter, the community Harris-Perry created is celebrated because fans see themselves reflected in the diverse array of guest analysts and care about the issues being discussed for four hours every weekend. To say this shift in the demographic and topic areas for even a brief time on cable news is refreshing would be an understatement. Seeing a woman of color with a Ph.D. in political science go back and forth with other experts for deep, analytical segments about race, politics, culture and democracy was nearly unheard of before Harris-Perry’s show began.
In fact, Media Matters for America released an analysis of Sunday show demographics of guests, issues and hosts. Despite being a panel-style show, with multiple guests engaging on a variety of pressing, newsworthy issues and also airing on Sunday, The Melissa Harris-Perry Show wasn’t included in the original analysis as compared with the top five Sunday Shows. Nonetheless, of guests who appeared on those shows (“Face The Nation,” “Fox News Sunday,” “Meet The Press,” “This Week,” and “State of the Union”) were made up of 61 percent white males. At the time of the analysis, the host of CNN’s “State of The Union” was Candy Crowley. Today, the show is hosted by Jake Tapper.
Moreover, Media Matters also looked at Harris-Perry’s show and discovered it ”offered viewers by far the most ethnic and gender diversity among its guests, and was the only program to feature guests of color in greater proportion to both white guests and to their representation in the general population.”
As a communications professional for the last nine years in Washington, D.C., I see how hard it is to get diverse viewpoints across on broadcast television, especially when you are a woman, particularly a woman of color, or are talking about divisive issues like abortion. The truth is women are not heard from nearly enough in news coverage, according to the Global Media Monitoring Project.
In 2010, the project found women made up only 24 percent of the people heard, read about or seen in the news, a number that remain unchanged well into 2015. And a 2014 Women’s Media Center report foundthat “64 percent of bylines and on-camera appearances went to men at the nation’s top 20 TV networks, newspapers, online news sites and news.” As a proud citizen of # Nerdland, I am loath to go back to the days when I felt I didn’t have a place at the nerd table of controversial topics and intellectual nourishment.
Dr. Harris-Perry gave us all a seat at her table every weekend, but I am not asking her to return to a network that does not respect her point of view or mine. It is my hope that this hiccup does not deter her quest for inclusivity and diversity nor the necessity of networks to reckon with the fact that it’s their business to make this happen, too.
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RaeAnn Pickett, a Ms. Foundation Public Voices Fellow, is senior director of communications and public affairs at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

Vijay Prashad: Palestine + the Global South + Reacting to the Neoliberal Present

'Vijay Prashad, author of 17 books including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and The Karma of Brown Folk, speaks about subjects related to his latest edited work, Letters to Palestine .' -- +WilliamsCollege  

Left of Black S6:E19: When Author Meets Critic--James Baldwin + Black Music + Black Lives

Left of Black S6:E19:  When Author Meets Critic--James Baldwin + Black Music + Black Lives
On this episode of Left of Black, guest host and Duke University professor Tsitsi Ella Jaji talks with poet and professor Ed Pavlic about his new book Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners. Professor Jaji reviewed Professor Pavlic’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and their conversation represents a unique opportunity for the author to meet the critic.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  

Where's The Color In Children's Lit? Ask The Black Girl With 1,000 Books (And Counting)

'Eleven-year-old Marley Dias went on a quest to collect and donate 1,000 books with a Black girl as the main character. Spoiler alert: She did really well.'

The Loss of Sanctuary; The Loss of Community: Climate Change in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Bible in the rubble of the St. John's Baptist Church in Tappahannock, VAReflections on the Tornado that Destroyed St. John’s Baptist Church on February 23, 2016by J.T. Roane | @JTRoane | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On the evening of February 23, 2016, a violent storm struck Essex, Richmond, and Westmoreland Counties in Virginia. More than a dozen homes along the cell’s path were destroyed leaving twenty-five or more people seriously injured and many more without their homes or operable vehicles.
One of the most devastating losses was the one-hundred-and-forty-five year old St. John’s Baptist Church and the larger community surrounding it, which is predominantly but not exclusively Black.
I am particularly hurt by the loss of St. John’s Baptist Church because it was a central institution for my father’s family and for my affirmative sense of community and belonging. This building is where all of us came into the church, where we sang on the youth choirs, where we played in the bathrooms and got in trouble, where we made vows, and where we went to honor the dead before their bodies returned to earth.
This church was central to who we are.
Us Roane’s do not share a common home place—a plot where we can return regularly and remember ourselves together. I remember distinctly this recognition of placeless-ness as part of my inheritance after my great aunt Mary Lou died. She was the eldest who played some part in raising her siblings and many of my generation directly or indirectly. I had grown accustomed to us all clustering around her at her house. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had no claim to the house that I knew as a sort of home place beyond her passing.
I have not gone back inside her home since a year after her death but I still pass by there every now and again to honor and remember and reflect on what was. I have interviewed my father and come to recognize that the ghosts in the landscape are really the only sites that my constantly displaced forbearers and my own generation can call on to remember who we are. This attests to our plight as the serially displaced and also our radical capacity to hold onto the intangible in order to make meaning, to mourn, and to joy.
My father can remember, just in his lifetime, a host of Black people’s houses, juke joints, baseball diamonds, luxury socializing spots, that are gone but which his generation hasn’t forgotten. Indeed, most of the landmarks that people leave you with to direct you through the dark woods of Virginia Tidewater, are not functionally there any more. They are sources of sadness but as often happiness, pride, and affirmative identification. And so it will be with the church until the congregation erects another building.
But there is something in this displacement that I need to linger at. It seems like a cruel joke to have a stable Black institution destroyed by a turn of nature and I could read the story as a dark tale if it were a novel. As my father’s memories portray, however, displacement of black social spaces is not new in the twentieth century. But the legacy of displacement here has a much deeper history as well, back to the eighteenth century when the district emerged as part of the original plantation ecology of North America.
Black history began in this district, the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, in the aftermath of dislocation from the various rhythms of place, belonging, and social life in various African contexts. Black communities in the district began recombining various cultural practices synthesized for survival and thriving, in hulls of ships across the ocean, up the brackish water of Chesapeake Bay, and into the fresh riverine systems of the Potomac and the Rappahannock.  
This was also an ecological disaster and Black communities faced the brunt of the consequences of clearing the forests, exploiting indigenous place making practices, and making earth into sellable land. In the process of tobacco cultivation, the land was quickly exhausted, deforestation began the process of extensive silt run off into the rivers, and over fishing on the part of colonists nearly destroyed a delicate web of life.
What most people now recognize as climate change didn’t originate in the era of smoke stacks. On the contrary, plantations and manors caused a great deal of disruption along with imported species, diseases, and mono-culture. The radical continuity in my community’s and my family’s vulnerability suggests to me that in the era of Black Lives Matter, the Flint water crisis, and the erasure of homes and St. John’s Baptist in the tornadoes of Feb. 23, it is imperative that we chart environmental issues as always having been central to Black life. We need to seriously address climate change and the ecological destruction which will be the most lasting impact of this social order and threatens our collective future.
What St. John’s teaches us as well, is that marginality and vulnerability have prompted Black ingenuity and imagination around how to build a collective and responsible social world since we were orphaned into social death. These will undoubtedly remain key resources as we plot a future free and clear of the conditions that put our communities at greatest risk for risk.
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J.T. Roane is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Columbia University. His scholarly interests center on the intersections between the history of science, medicine, public health and the broader social history of the late 20th Century United States, with specific focus on Black communities. He is currently working on a project on the politics of health and vitality in Philadelphia in the mid-twentieth century.

Meet Carla Hayden--President Obama’s Nominee For 14th Librarian Of Congress

'Obama has nominated Carla Hayden to be the 14th librarian of congress. Dr.  Hayden is the current CEO of Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, and was president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004.' -- +Blavity