Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 647

Warriors of Africa--A Mix from DJ KamauMau

A mix of African flavored deep house from DJ KamauMau. Warriors of Africa by Kamaumau on Mixcloud

With New Album Kirk Franklin Wants To Help You Lose Your Religion

'Kirk Franklin is known for merging hip-hop and gospel. His new album has a controversial title; he says he hopes it will help make God famous.' 

How Genetic Testing Might Influence Race Relations--A Conversation with Alondra Nelson

'How genetic testing is affecting Americans and American life, and how it might influence race relations in the U.S., leading possibly to what our guest calls racial reconciliation. One day genetic science might be useful in supporting legal claims for reparations for slavery. Our guest is Alondra Nelson, dean of social science and professor of sociology at Columbia University, and author of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome .' -- Roughly Speaking | The Baltimore Sun

Oddities of the Family: Toward an Intellectual Legacy by Mark Anthony Neal

Oddities of the Family: Toward an Intellectual Legacyby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
My parents were not "intellectuals" in any traditional sense and they were not “movement” folk; just one high school degree (from night school) between them, when I was born. I often measure my parents’ intellectual impact on me in the oddities that found their way into our home--Nikki Giovanni's first album Truth is on The Way; the 45 of Nina Simone's "Young, Gifted & Black" (the only Simone record my parents owned); H. Rap. Brown's memoir Die, Nigger, Die and the most random of the oddities, an 8-Track copy of Miriam Makeba’s Keep Me in Mind (1970).
Admittedly I was never inclined to ask either of my parents about some of the shit that was in our apartment--the series of small paintings that seemed to depict my Bronx neighborhood in the late 19th century, the large owl wall clock, and at least at the time, the junior and “adult” volumes The Britannica Encyclopedia; I still remember the day the “white man” came to the door selling what would become my analog search engine.  
I was initially drawn to Nikki Giovanni’s Truth is on the Way, because of the babbling brown baby that adorns its cover; I at least had clues in what it held for my mother, a huge Aretha Franklin fan, who likely heard Giovanni’s recorded version of “Poem for Aretha”.  It was one of the few albums that my parents played that I didn’t try drown out with that Jackson Five Third Album.
I remember those Nikki Giovanni poems-- “Great Pax Whitey”, “Nikki Rosa”, “Poem for a Lady of Leisure Now Retired” and of course “Ego Tripping”-- as easily as I remember the Gospel muisc standards that the New York Community Choir performed behind Giovanni.  To this day, when I hear “Peace be Still” I’m thinking Giovanni’s “Great Pax Whitey” and not the Reverend James Cleveland’s original.  To this end, when I was  in my 12th Grade English Regents exam in 1983, and the exam requested that students analyze a poem, I chose Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping,” to the likely confusion of the graders, who did not teach Giovanni’s work.
And if I understood why my mother found Giovanni’s Truth is on the Way, I was also always clear about the intent of Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted, and Black”, well before I knew or could appreciate who Nina Simone was.  Before I could recognize the physical stature of Simone, I could hear the stately nature of her presence in simply how she uttered “to be Young, Gifted, and BLACK.”  Years later, as an adult doing radio in Western New York, my wife would tease me for the way I uttered the word “BLACK”  on air during my program Soul Expressions, me realizing that it was Nina Simone--whose music was prominently featured every Sunday--who taught me to say it that way.
More tellingly, as part of the first cohorts that experienced the Head Start Program--and the very cohort that Sesame Street was developed for, “Young, Gifted, and Black” was seemingly in every Black parent’s parenting tool kit.  There really is no way to truly index how powerful those three word sung by the regal Ms. Simone were for a generation, whose parents imagined so much for the futures of their children.
When I began college in the early 1980s, and was immediately politicized on campus, courtesy of a fully engaged Black Student Union, which was led by a student from Buffalo, who was in the midst of joining the Nation of Islam; he is now the head minister in the city of Buffalo.  As I was introduced to figures like Haki Madhubuti, John Henrik Clarke, Sonia Sanchez, Nathan and Julie Hare, Kwame Toure, Amiri Baraka, Yosef ben-Jochannan (Dr. Ben), and Gil Noble, who all visited my campus, I went back to the small bookshelf in my parent's bedroom, where I remembered that copy of H. Rap Brown’s Die, Nigger, Die.
The book was literally the only inkling that my parents ever provided that they were even aware of the Black Power Movement--we never talked about the Black Panthers, SNCC, or King for that matter, and it was understandable; they were working class Black folk who were simply imagining the best future for the only child.  All they knew was the grind, hoping that grind would provide their son with opportunities that couldn’t imagine for themselves, like private schooling at the local all-Black Seventh Day Adventist school.  
Ironically it was that same small book shelf where I would later find my mother’s copy of Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class--the product of her own grind in the 1980s earning her college degree at the College of New Rochelle’s Bronx campus in Co-Op City.  
My mother’s copy of Women, Race and Class, which I liberated from her shelf during my graduate years working with Alexis De Veaux and later gifted to the hand-picked BFF my mother chose for me when I was a child, remains one of my most treasured connections to a women, who never made it easy to be connected.  Tellingly her ownership of the book--her own signature in the opening pages to mark ownership--tells me more about my mother, than she ever told me.
I was in college learning about Anti-colonial movements--courtesy of Joe Gallagher, the White Professor who  taught the only class in African History--when I was introduced to  Patrice Lumumba and the CIA’s role in his murder.  And yet when I heard that name, I immediately remembered the rhythms of a song that my mother played when I was a child.  Unlike the books that I could liberate, my mother’s copy of Miriam Makeba Keep Me in Mind  was an 8-track, and at that time was unplayable.  Long out of print, it would be well in my adulthood when I would finally rip a copy of the song from the soundtrack of a Mario Van Peebles film.  Again there was little clue as to why that album found its way into my parents’ record collection.
To be sure there were other--more regular, if you will--artifacts of my parents that fed a young Black child’s imagination, including the bevy of Al Green and Luther Ingram records that were on regular rotation, The Essence Magazines (when I was a little older), where I first encountered Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Alexis De Veaux, who would later become my graduate advisor. 
Having spent a lifetime bearing witness to my mother’s impulsive buying habits, I can’t be sure that these oddities were the byproduct of that impulsiveness or something more intentional. Nevertheless for a Black boy from the South Bronx, these oddities provided important connections and landscapes for a budding scholar’s imagination, that were as important as any gleaned from the public square or the narrow rows of E185.

“Troubled Waters in Flint: No Hashtags” by Stephane Dunn

Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press“Troubled Waters in Flint: No Hashtags”by Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Trouble in my way, I have to cry sometimeI lay awake at night, but that’s alright;Jesus will fix it after awhile --“Trouble in My Way” Clifton Jones                                                                                            I’ve been worrying over this mortgage and how to keep this roof over our heads and keep the rest going – light, heat, phone and now “unavailable” keeps calling weekends, mornings and days about a bill I already said I’d certainly pay when I can and this doctor said you need to manage the negative stress levels. It’s busy, busy, days working, tending, solving work problems, worrying and thinking and crying --quietly as kept -- cause I have not paused, have not helped, have not spoken, cause right now, big enough words won’t come out of my mouth, and written words kept refusing to fill the blank screen about Flint, Michigan, a place so close to my Midwestern town roots.
Trouble’s in my way at home. Big trouble in everybody’s way in Flint, dirty water and people's faces I don’t know holding poisoned water in regular looking bottles. Once a few years ago when I moved into my just built townhome, a first time home-buyer, the water got turned off unannounced  - morning time before my shower. I waited, it seemed like hours but really about three and half hours and when I turned on the kitchen faucet, brown water came out disturbing my expectation and I called the HOA who said just temporary after some pipe work done.
In Flint, there’s nothing but time, been nothing but time, every hour, every minute, and any second, cooking and body cleaning, and house cleaning and drinking, measured drinking – in a city of poisoned water. Bottled water is good, helps, and God know necessary when you can’t get clean water period. But it is not clean water running out of the tap down your body.    
It plays in pieces at night when I am still at last, not sleeping and worrying about keeping this house and the water in Flint and wondering how the hell this crime of humanity in the so called USA could happen, like it has before, and why it’s the poor and the overwhelmingly brown who always gotta catch the most hell.
But then my son, six now, who still simplifies the big life stuff into bad or good and struggles to understand the greys I present sometimes, and who has become, through no conscious effort of his, or choice of mine, my own muse and inspiration, unplugs me again and at least there’s this rambling.
I’m home from work finally, on a Tuesday I think, returned to worrying full on about this mortgage and the bills and figuring out what to put together about dinner, and watching the news for that three minutes on the down low while he’s upstairs playing and temporarily not checking to see what’s going on every two seconds downstairs. I’m listening, finding out who’s donated a million bottles now and if the governor has finally done right and stepped down along with his posse of water killing-people poisoning decision makers, and what kind of troubles the lead water will cause the people long after the news headlines, as they always do, turn to the next big scandalous thing.
I don’t hear my son on the steps. I am engrossed listening to this Mama in Flint take her two seconds on the news to speak on living with dirty water and suddenly my son is right in front of the TV and listening and reading the tags across the screen about Flint, bad water and people being sick before I grab the remote and tap and the screen pops to Steve Harvey and Family Feud.
“Nobody can drink the water in Flint, Michigan?” He finds it on his USA map right there on the living room floor. “Who made it dirty, Mommy, bad people? The lady said children are sick from the water. Can they get new water Mommy?
That’s right son, they can’t drink the water; it’s poisoned cause some people took a cheap shortcut. Some people who are in charge in Michigan absolutely committed a crime against humanity. “What’s a ‘crime against humanity’?”
And that’s why the news watching on the sly mostly and after hours and online, cause if not, it's like when the news was really shining some attention on those still kidnapped Nigerian girls and my son caught that snippet.
“How come the police don’t go and get them back Mommy?”
And then I tried to figure out some kind of impossible simple, less scarier than hell answer, a 099 child’s version of human rights, US foreign politics, and the ways of differing countries  -- that didn’t make any sense to him even if he was able to comprehend foreign policy and country domains and such because when three hundred some defenseless girls of any race in any country can just be kidnapped in a moment – all bets should be off and the global community should just go unapologetically crazy for them, for as long as they’re gone, and fight for those girls and their families living it every day and every minute endlessly in a hell we don’t let ourselves imagine. And my son woke up in the middle of the night a couple of nights after, scared and talking about those girls, and he asks out of nowhere sometimes, ‘Did they find those girls?”
And I cannot ever answer with any sense because it makes as much sense as explaining to him the possibility of a next president being that rich guy named Trump who could in his words, ‘shoot’ somebody and keep all the world’s Muslims out of America and still be beloved by his fans and evidently get many real votes.
I’m worrying over this mortgage and keeping my son in the school that didn’t make me fear for him when I went to work, but there is a crime against humanity in Flint and I do not have the money for a hundred bottles of water, and one twenty dollar case seems so paltry for a city full of people that’s sick in mind and body and a state government that’s corrupt. I know, every little bit helps but a lot helps and everything  -- moral government, pure water filtration, long term medical services, economic health -- is needed.  
When I finish these last rambling words, I will go upstairs, and turn the shower dial to just a tap below the super hot mark. I will stand there under water that looks clear and doesn’t burn, and it will wash the tears on my face, and pour down my back. For a very few minutes, the water warming and soothing my body will bring prayers and songs to mind, and keep slightly at bay my home and Flint and world troubles. Trouble in my way, I have to cry sometime. I lay awake at night . . . 
But there is no escaping it, shouldn't be, for me either, until there’s resolution and justice and in the meantime agitation, and some long pausing like I have been needing to do -- just pause, everyday, and pray and be with Flint, cause through all this worrying about the roof over my head, there are the Flint mothers, fathers, grandparents, my Flint folk, some unwell themselves, watching, finally, the US media watching them, watching their children play, getting them ready for school, and tending to their illnesses from the winter cold, and the lead, thankful for bottles of water from P. Diddy and the like, but praying long hours of the day and night and wondering and worrying if, when, and how their children and the troubled water, will truly ever be well again.
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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

Behind the News: Adolph Reed on Bernie Sanders + Ta-Nehisi Coates + Reparations

On this episode of Behind the News , host Doug Henwood talks with Political Scientist Adolph Reed about Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent critique of Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for his unwillingness to publicly support Black Reparations. According to Reed, "The charitable or benign interpretation of what [Coates] and others imagine the power of this rhetoric to be, is that there is something cathartic about it like Black Power.'

 

'The Dot Stands For Detail' -- An Interview with Anderson .Paak

"I feel that people take you as serious as you take yourself," says artist Anderson.Paak, whose new album Malibu is garnering deserved attention, after .Paak's stellar contributions to  Dr. Dre's Compton. -- +NPR Music 

Angelique Kidjo Talks Power + Politics + Music with Al Jazeera

Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter and activist Angelique Kidjo sits down with +Al Jazeera America  to discusses the importance as educating young girls in the continent of Africa.  Kidjo's’s latest album Eve is inspired by the suffering she’s seen on her continent, in Darfur’s refugee camps.

Compton Gonna Be "Alright": Kendrick Lamar's Tribute to Home

Kendrick Lamar takes a moment to share the spotlight with the folk of Compton.

Between the Lines: Sherie M. Randolph & Gloria Steinem in Conversation at the Schomburg

'Sherie Randolph, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, chronicles the life and activism of Florynce "Flo'"Kennedy in a new biography titled Florynce 'Flo' Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical. Randolph and Gloria Steinam, founder of Ms. Magazine and author of the new memoir, My Life on the Road, discussed their new books, black feminism and more. Nikol Alexander-Floyd, Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, moderated the discussion.'