Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 654

Against All Odds: Education + Race + Chess by Adisa Banjoko & Arash Daneshzadeh

RZA playing International Master the late EmoryTate, Jr. Photo: Eric ArnoldAgainst All Odds: Education, Race, and Chess
by Adisa Banjoko and Arash Daneshzadeh | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Teaching students, “The World Is Yours”
A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a high school for Black History Month in San Francisco, CA. Their original speaker had bailed on them, at the last minute. Rather than open my talk with a lamentation of US slavery, I focused on Dogon discoveries in Astronomy, and Moorish science contributions that served as the foundation of the European Renaissance. After citing the role of the African Islamic influence of Europe's’ rise out of the Dark Ages, I asked the students how many enjoyed what they heard.  Almost all the hands went up. I said, now ask yourselves this question: How is that you have been in school for at least 9 years and this is the first time you are hearing it? It is against all political, social, and economic odds that Black children are expected to excel.
As we approach Black History Month in 2016, I’m already torn between my genuine love in celebrating Black achievement, and the sad circus many schools turn the opportunity into. American schools have a long way to go in sharing the more dynamic aspects of African contributions to global civilization. For me, I tend to do my best teaching on a chessboard. It is almost impossible to talk about chess in America and not have race come up. I’m doubtful that this happens in China, for example. As Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF) and an educator for more than a decade now (mostly in inner cities) I’ve watched kids argue about who gets to be white, who gets to be black and why. African American kids, often as young as 9 years old, out of what appears to be a loyalty to their team (race) often chose to be Black irrespective of the known reality-- that it is harder to play as black in chess. It takes time to learn how to be black and expect to win.
In the medieval times, apparently white did not always start first. Historically speaking. The first chess books were written by Muslims. As Moorish sovereignty in Europe grew, Christians and Jews began to play and write about the game. One of the European authors said white went first (without explanation of why) and the idea seems to have stuck. The high polarization of racial issues in America seems to inherently make our kids consider that black starts from a place of weakness. This is not the game itself that does this. It is their experience as African American children, not chess players, that puts this feeling upon them.
It is what they observe in their lives, in the news, and in their history classes. It is the greatness of Black history that is deliberately left out- that ends up making them feel this way.  I can’t prove it, but I believe that this inherent feeling that Black is at a disadvantage in chess is connected to racial disadvantages in life.
Dr. Frances Cress-Welsing touched on this topic of race and chess in her groundbreaking 1989 book, The Isis Papers. “White always makes the opening (aggressive) move in chess” she writes, “The black king and queen must move in tactical and strategic harmony with one another if they are to counter the white assaut successfully and defend their side of the chessboard effectively.”
The HHCF has always worked to use chess as a tool for racial and cultural transcendence.
Nevertheless, even some of the best things about chess seem to slip through our hands. On October 17, 2015, one of the greatest minds, a Black man, in modern chess passed away. His name was Emory Tate and he died doing what he loved best, playing chess in the San Francisco Bay Area. Black American mainstream press didn’t report it. Nevermind that as an International Master he battered Grandmasters with seamless regularity. Despite the fact that  the brilliance he displayed in countless games gave a slight sketch of the elite expressions of his cognitive function- his passing was ignored by Black media outlets. I personally watched Tate beat RZA of Wu-Tang Clan in 2009 in San Francisco at John O’Connell High School. Emory Tate and RZA spoke together to kids at length about the intellectual and moral benefits of chess for them. Emory Tate’s name struck fear in the hearts of his opponents around the world. Unfortunately, Emory Tate died in a time where what qualifies as modern Black “news” is often relegated to mostly Worldstar fight clips and Love and Hip Hop style gossip. These “news” outlets have largely erased genuine young adoration for Black intellectual and entrepreneurial achievement beyond the arena of entertainment. 
Today, most Americans think of chess as an upper echelon “White” game. In fact, the game only made it to America after the Moors (African Muslim scholars) conquered Spain from 700 AD until 1400 AD and brought their books and chessboards with them. After teaching the game of chess to the Christians and Jews, it spread across Europe. The English loved chess and when some rebelled and settled in America, so too did the game. Colonial Americans such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with the game.Thomas Jefferson's Chess piece at World Chess Hall of Fame. Photo: Mike RelmTheophilus Thompson of Frederick, Maryland is one of the first African American chess players known by name. Despite being raised in the violence of the Civil War era he authored a book of chess positions that were respected by all the players of his day. You can even see one of his brilliant games played in 1874 at The Chess Drum, the world’s best site for Black chess news around the globe. Even the most remedial chess player can see Thompson's style unleashed a horrific series of psychological landmines and traps, forcing his opponent to resign. Sadly, he was rumored to have died at the hands of the KKK who held big numbers in Frederick at the time. America has never been a safe place for intelligent Black men daring enough to display critical insight publicly. It is in the spirit of Thompson’s bravery that this piece is written.
One of the amazing things about chess is that it is a proven tool in raising scores in IQ testing and academic exams. Additionally, in 1979, Chinese University in Hong Kong shared a study by Dr. Yee Wang Fung. It reported that chess players showed a 15% improvement in math and science scores. Five years before that a study in Zaire by Dr. Albert Frank of 19 students aged 16-18 stated that chess players showed significant advancement in spatial, numerical and administrative-directional abilities. These improvements held true regardless of the skill level attained. Simply stated, your child doesn't need to be a Grandmaster in chess to benefit greatly from the impact it can have on your mind. In a country professing to be so STEM and STEAM obsessed the recalcitrance of the American school system in making chess a daily class (just like English or Math) borders criminality- not mere hypocrisy.
Democracy and illiteracy are not synonymous. To ensure that the future of our democracy is sustained and elevated, literacy has to be its indestructible root. If chess was good enough to enlighten George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Jay Z and Tupac it is good enough for the American student- irrespective of their grade level.

Fear of a Black Planet
“If you want to understand any problem, focus on who profits from that problem, not who suffers from that problem.”--Dr. Amos Wilson 
There is a relationship between the literary stories that represent “triumph” and historical accounts of oppression. Who tells the story, how they tell it, what details are selectively removed, which others are emphasized or outright falsified, determines how one interprets history.  In the enduring words of Hip Hop artist, Inspectah Deck, “life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough”. American schools have played a prominent role in manufacturing an image of Black youth as “other” than human—destitute, needy, unruly, savages. There’s something troublingly ironic about an education system that perpetuates the myth of a normative achievement gap, while minimizing the role that COINTELPRO had on normalizing Black pain. The criminality of Black youth in the United States education system is proportional to the perceived danger of Black resistance, self-definition, and independence. These three variables are forged in the mantle of critical storytelling.
In the wake of Black History month, we revisit a discussion as timeless as Dr. Amos Wilson’s hallowed words above. That this, power and privilege determine the relationship between teaching and learning. Who gets to tell the story is just as important as who plays the role of hero in an epic saga. Students internalize perceptions of their learning ability with their existential power. Storytelling, with the hopes of transmitting parables to youth, has been a common vehicle for teaching historical literacy since time immemorial. Historical literacy, of course, is paramount to unpacking the truth about where we come from. Particularly, in any society that blurs the atrocities of transatlantic slavery and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. You may recall a recent case in Texas, in which a textbook manufacturer referred to enslaved Africans as “workers”.
It is important to remind administrators, teachers, and students that teaching historical accounts and positional power in the classroom are not mutually exclusive, but symbiotically paired like the effect of location upon real estate prices. If you are teaching Black youth from a space of intersecting privilege (example: White, heterosexual, upper-middle class, male), it becomes important to center students in the texts so that your unearned privilege does not derail a potentially uplifting moment of historical literacy. Too often, individual icons such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are superimposed onto Black students as passive and inanimate props for White integration stories.
But what about the communities that inspired King and Parks? Their political nuances, critical development, and vast ocean of community influences are filtered through a netting that removes all texture--replaced with carefully curated aesthetic. An aesthetic which appreciates Martin Luther King for his eloquent rhetoric, and Rosa Parks for her searing opposition to a bus driver—rather than the radical story of how the community mobilized, despite painful opposition from the United States government in the form of COINTELPRO, prior to the bus boycotts and union walkouts.  
While teachers often misappropriate Dr. Martin Luther King as an inter-racial sympathizer, the facts surrounding his death are often manufactured by an ideology, which seeks to destroy any implication that American imperialism was responsible for his demise and for the overall declaration of war upon the Black community. The irony behind this academic tampering: In 1999, the King family won a civil trial against the United States government for conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. Why is this history lesson not as readily accessible to youth, particularly Black children, whose historical points of reference are still grounded in respectability and obedience?
Any remote association with Black resistance is engulfed, chewed up, and spit out as a breach of decorum and personal responsibility. Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Tupac Shakur and even rap artist KRS-One are prime examples of luminaries whose images were quickly vanquished from critical teachings in school. In January 2015, the Huffington Post reported on a teacher who was publicly attacked in Tucson, Arizona for incorporating what was deemed as “inflammatory” and “threatening” lyrics by KRS-One into their curriculum for an African American history course. The teacher attempted to unpack generations of systemic oppression through “artistic response”. This example of historical cherry picking presents a sterilized image of classrooms as neutral factories of compliance. Any inquiry, particularly from students well versed in historical literacy or anti-racist artistic expression, poses a threat to the fabric of reproducing society in its current image. 
The truth is, our classrooms are political spaces where battles for representation (beyond the symbolic) are waged. Nonetheless, stories of organized Black revolutionaries are swept up like doll houses during a tornado, splintered, and dissipated like dust across a child’s consciousness. Education policy makers must examine whose power is squarely positioned at the center of our historical textbooks, and privileged as the aspirational goal for students. When discussing student learning, power reprises its role as inseparably married to the privileges wrought by being a teacher."No matter what the name, we're all the same pieces in one big chess game"--Public Enemy The chessboard serves as a microcosm for community. It also represents the fallacy in quotidian education that your success is inspired by becoming King. An allegory lauding the merits of social isolation is a direct contradiction from the revolutionary bedrock of liberatory education, which invokes the collective power of community pieces, against a common enemy. This self-aggrandizing portrait of success is buttressed by the capitalistic notion encouraging students to surmount their cultural literacies, because achievement cannot be shared among peers. In the interest of this article, literacies is defined as the historical definitions of self, rooted in understanding race, gender, class, and other normative identities as constructed within a cultural ecology of synchronized domination and oppression.
In this society, we are trained to believe that academic “success” can be only hoarded, as our education system intentionally triages for patent winners and losers. One consequence of this reductionist view of collective solidarity is the normalization of divestment. Divesting from community.  Sloughing entire layers of historical understanding is actually seen as a strategy towards success. We center Whiteness and settler capitalism by telling students that they were admitted into a college, “despite growing up in the ghetto”, which is pathologized as a proxy for Blackness.  Similarly, in chess, students are told to count the most valuable pieces in accordance with a rubric of settler colonialism; rendering pawns as merely disposable players who make the occasional cameo during protracted matches.  A Western framework that problematizes pawns, and makes Queens a transactional gambit to sustain the longevity of the King, barters with identity.
To perceive pieces as inextricably linked with achieving victory, one must frame chess pieces as more than individuals but an ecologically sustained community. When students, particularly children of color, in my classroom discuss chess, their initial impulse veers towards “becoming” King. As a result, they forsake the importance of other pieces, whose quantifiable values mirror the “desirability” as competing members of a chess community. This value system parallels a market-based society, whose racialized underpinnings, commodify Blackness as space to be charitably leveraged by or platform White sensibilities. In chess, White moves first and pawns are worth “less” points than Queens.
Conversely, students must forgo an appreciation of community in order to position themselves at the mantle of dominance. As well, domination is advertised as a political dividend that requires a divestment of cultural literacy, because our communities are problematized as anchors to our long-term prospects. And our success is propagandized as a marker of innate worth. In chess terms: If you became King, you achieved it despite the distractions and convoluted machinations of other (read: less important) pieces on your side of the board. This raises the question of education as a tool for inculcating societal value systems that may actively oppose indigenous and Black diasporic foundations.
Taking a more critical lens, we must peel from the layers of historical rust that stifles a student’s social mobility. Miring students in the minutia of political and social competition, moves the illusion that they are individuals first, and communities are merely instruments for self-marketing. Black history is hijacked, reconstructed, and expelled as a finite canon of individual transcendence. Black excellence is merely a reflection of individuals who demonstrated personal “grit” or perseverance, despite overwhelming odds. As a result of the grit narrative, individual successes throughout Black history fails to consider the manner in which oppressive ideology overly determines policy that shapes community outcomes. 
Teaching Black history as more than a positivist and towering beacon of more-to-less stakeholders, flies in direct opposition to the perception that power and privilege are independent of one another in the classroom. “Ubuntu” is a Zulu word that means “I am because we are”, and captures a liberatory strand of teaching. This model posits that our position as individuals is gained by our appreciation of the stories and critical understandings of our ancestors. Without exercising liberating and critical literacies, students tacitly amputate a political connection to their cultures. A connection, that renders them as powerful partners within an intergenerational war for the redistribution of provisional wealth. In his groundbreaking work, Developmental Psychology of the Black Child, Dr. Amos Wilson distinguishes between schools that subsidize a highly educated servant (to Capitalism) and those that seek to promote Black mobilization. He writes that the Black child is taught to have a sense of dependency on her historical storytellers (i.e., schools) and thus, can only exercise enough power to perpetuate the desires of those who center an image of Black domination and youth control. 
A note about Pan-African teaching. Look at how many miles separate Greece and England. English universities have no problem teaching students that Plato and Socrates are their intellectual ancestors, yet Anglo-Saxons didn't directly descend from Greece. Thus, it shouldn't be absurd for Black children to learn about Pan-African philosophy, history, and contemporary intellectual inspiration. The Book of the Dead, Kingdoms of the Nile, Kush, Nubia, the Mandingo Empire, Senegambia, Duse Mohamed Ali, and Henry Sylvester Williams. I could go on, but the battle for Pan-African narratives, is to cobble a direct conduit to intellectual ancestry for Black youth. In Whistling Vivaldi (2010), eminent social psychologist, Dr. Claude Steele explains that the threats to Black student identity are external albeit internalized. He adds, that if people on the street heard someone whistling classical musician, Vivaldi, that the violence prone, “unrefined” Black youth image would not reflexively come to mind. What’s more, even other Black youth are less inclined to assume a Black peer is the whistler. Our values and images of “high white society” will always emerge in the classroom.  Black children are 18 times more likely than White children to be incarcerated as adults and comprise 58% of all children sentenced to prison as adults in the United States (Poe-Yamagata & Jones, 2007). Black students are "personally responsible" for their actions at an age when white students still benefit from assumptions of their innocence. A school environment that conditions Black youth for perpetual "fight or flight" mode, cannot offer time for reflection.  As a result, we must not think of Vivaldi as the metric for what distinguishes an academically “successful” Black child from her peers. Instead, it is incumbent upon educators and radical scholars to wean from the phantom value systems that commercially, and socially, distinguish between Vivaldi and J. Cole. Until then, pawns will never live to be Queens.
+++
Adisa Banjoko is the Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF) and author of Bobby, Bruce & Bam: The Secrets of Hip-Hop Chess releasing Feb 2016 on Young Lions Press. Arash Daneshzadeh is an HHCF Chess Instructor and Doctoral Candidate at UC Davis. Learn more about HHCF.

Stokely & Power! An Interview with Playwright, Actor, and Activist Meshaun Lebone

'Lawrence Brown interviews actor Meshaun Lebron about his play 'Power! Stokely Carmichael', the meaning of Black Power, and its connection to the rallying cry of 'Black Lives Matter'.' -- +The Real News Network 

Ana Tijoux: Hip-Hop and Politics in Chile

'French-Chilean MC Ana Tijoux spoke with David Garcia, Associate Professor of Music at UNC-Chapel Hill, about the politics and realities of contemporary Latin America, including her native Chile, and how they inform her work as a hip-hop artist. Co-sponsored by Duke Performances.' -- +Scholars and Publics 

Kamasi Washington Talks To Pimp A Butterfly + His 'The Epic' with GQ

'Saxophonist Kamasi Washington is the most exciting new figure in jazz in decades. Here, he breaks down his work on Kendrick Lamar's opus and talks about making his own breakthrough album, "The Epic"--all while playing a ferocious trio version of his composition "Final Thought".

David Bowie: On Abandoning Characters And Embracing 'Reality' (2003 | 2013)

In an interview first produced in 2003 the late David Bowie talks with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about his career.

Getting a Hip-Hop Civics Lesson with Dr. Bettina Love

On this episode of Left of Black on The Root host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with Bettina Love to discuss her new project, Get Free: Hip Hop Civics Education. Love is an Associate Professor of Education Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia and a 2016 Nasir Jones Fellow at the HipHop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University.  

The Complicated History of Race + Gun Control + The NRA

'Why the NRA wasn't always fighting for the right of all Americans to bear arms.' -- +AJ+  

How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Black Politics with Lester Spence

On this episode of The Global African , host Bill Fletcher, Jr. is joined by Johns Hopkins's Political Scientist Lester Spence, who discusses his new book Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics .   

“Hard to Choose”: A Year of Living with The Music by Mark Anthony Neal

“Hard to Choose”: A Year of Living with The Music by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I’ve come to despise end-of-the-year music list.
Conglomerates using their record labels to maximize fourth-quarter profits flood the market with music (and mediocre in most cases), usually rushed to consumers, and expected to adorn the “best of” lists from noted arbiters of culture. Doesn’t quite make sense to laud recordings that maybe you’ve spent three weeks with; the beauty of the music, is when you can live with it, and more importantly, it lives with you, in the day-to-day of our lives.
Below is the music lived with most this past year, drawn mostly from songs released in the calendar year, with a few exceptions.
Kamasi Washington -- Leroy and Lanisha
Kamasi Washington, a LA-based, thirtysomething saxophonist benefitted from what could be called the Kendrick effect, in the spirit of the many fabulous musicians that came to the forefront because of their participation in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.  I personally have to go back at least twenty-years to that moment of another generation of Young Lions like Marc Cary, Mark Whitfield, Antonio Hart, Joshua Redman and Roy Hargrove to think of the last time I was so enamoured a young jazz musician playing in the relative straight-ahead tradition.  
Washington's three-disc, thirty-song opus The Epic, curated from the work with the collective West Coast Get Down.  “Leroy and Lanisha” was among the standouts for me, hearing echoes of the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “My Little Drum,” which of course places the song in close proximity with Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy,” and suddenly the references are made clear. Yet in the moment of #BlackLivesmatter Leroy and Lanisha’s playtime is fraught with the on-going threat of sudden death at various hands--a point that Flying Lotus, another Kendrick collaborator made the year before (with Lamar’s help), with “Never Catch Me.”  The seamless, improvisational cacophony that marks “Leroy and Lanisha” three-minutes into the nine-minute deluge, speaks profoundly to the stakes of Black childhood in America: Bold, Creative, Dangerous, and Under Siege.
Robert Glaspar -- Got Over w/ Harry Belafonte
“I’m not dead...yet”--Mr. Belafonte here dropping a deadpan humor that both acknowledges how we fail to honor those who stay on the battlefield--while they are still on the battlefield--and the reality that he still has shit to do.  What you learn in this brilliant, though oh-too-short musical collaboration between the Robert Glaspar Trio and the legendary Harry Belafonte, from the trio’s stellar Covered project, is that Mr. Belafonte achieved against all the odds that so many might feel are insurmountable now.  That a high school dropout and dyslexic son of early 20th century Black immigrants, would go on to earn 34 honorary degrees is only part of the story.  It is a boast to be sure, but one couched with the humility of one who also acknowledges that he’s “one of the ones that the bullets missed.” Eighty-Eight years, Mr. Belafonte might the most hopeful among us.
Kendrick Lamar -- “Alright”
Maybe my favorite moment of 2015: a hella bunch Afropolitans up in the hills over Firenze celebrating the birthday of a Jamerican Princess--and it is the Brother Fanon, who rolls up with two visual artists of some note, with the Pill in hand, bumping Kendrick’s “Alright” just in time for the #turnup.  Look marching music don’t work if you can’t march to it, and if you can march to it, damn sure you might shake your ass to it a few times (put on PE”s Fight the Power or JB’s “Say It Loud…” for the ass test).   The movement needed a theme song, and Kendrick delivered, not so much out of a need for it to be a theme song, but out the realities that define lives on the margins, and run over by those who dictate those margins.  Didn’t need a #hashtag to remind you that your kids might be hungry tonight if you don’t get that money, and that shit might be the biggest obstacle,  even before the (not-so) rogue cop walks minus an indictment.
Twinkie Clark -- “There is a Word” (2013)
The homie Guthrie Ramsey has been chatting up Twinkie Clark for a bit, and it wasn’t until Ramsey and his collective performed a rendition of the song at the close of Everybody’s Protest Music,  that fell under the sway of Clark.  Featured on 2013’s Live & Unplugged, Clark’s “There is a Word” (with nephew Larry) has become a staple; not unusual for me to hit repeat 3-4 times in row, before I pull out the driveway. We need to be armed with something, and Twinkie Clark works just fine.  At its core, “There is a Word” is a “get over” song--as in getting over a bad day, a bad moment, a bad loss, that kind of “make a way out of no way” music that remains timeless, at least in the tradition I feed on.
Drake “Legend”
So the oldest Dawta and I share a Google Play Music account, the move I had to make with F.P.’s advice, after the last ipod classic crashed (#5, long story), and I realized that Apple wasn’t making the shits no more. So it was the Dawta who told me about the surprise Drake album, and since the joint was technically already paid for, gave it the rhetorical spin. A year later, I ain’t really stopped playing the opening track, “Legend,”  cause the joint is what I call a “put in work song,” like if I’m a writer, I can’t really be in the game if I don’t believe, like Drake, that “I'm too good with these words, watch a nigga backtrack.’ If you passing by the shed and you hear Drake singing “If I die, all I know is I'm a mothafuckin' legend,” rest assured that’s me inside.
James Blake --”The Wilhelm Scream”
So my two guilty television pleasures this past year were Showtime’s The Affair and Happyish-- two very different views of married people trying to figure shit out. It was on Happyish that I heard James Blake “The Wilhelm Scream.”  I confess, I had never heard of Blake and had to consult the 21st Century British Soul archivist I. Augustus Durham, and I’m still wondering how the White British bloke is doing Black male interiority as well as any Black men in this part of the earth.  Sam Smith who?  And it’s hard not to be reflective these days--I’m a 50-year-old man approaching the killing grounds (50-60), going on year 28 of a long term relationship (forever, ever), with two daughters who already got their own lives; I find myself coming back to Blake often.
Victor Taiwo -- “Digital Kids”
This is the one about the the Nigerian Wedding Photographer, who gave up one form of expression (perhaps) for another. Came across Vicktor Taiwò after the good folk at OkayPlayer posted his cover of Badu’s  “On and On,” and I frankly, couldn’t remember how the song was supposed to sound. “Digital Kids” is like the future of the form.  When dude quivers “You know kids like you / Ain't supposed to feel / Like the earth is caving /And the world ain't spinning for you, you, you” you realize that he’s singing a metaphor for a generation trying to find a voice--and who don’t know what the hell love looks like (on any level), while  connected to the spider, as Umar Bin Hassan might say.
Rapsody -- “Hard to Choose”
“Loyal to all, but when I look at these Black girls faces / I understand why I chose to be better, not basic / So it's not, not (hard to choose)”--and I’m pointing the Dawtas to the mac air screen, ‘cause they ain’t really seen nobody like Rapsody before.  Proud that I knew Sis before To Pimp a Butterfly and that she, like the Tall Slim Homie, just calls me “Neal.”  Criminal that more ain’t feeling this heat, but as Rap says, “Cause I know the scale tipped ain't in no black girl's favor.”
Jazmine Sullivan “Forever Don’t Last”
Let me just be straight wit’ it, Ms. Sullivan got that thickness that I kinda favor. That the voice of an angel goes with it…well, look I just want to give Sis a hug, and let her know that She and her music are loved.  And I hate to get all essential with the tradition, and I don’t quite know what the hell these awards shows be talking about when they talking this “Traditional” R&B category shit, but I know that for a sometimey purist--cause we got to acknowledge the foundational before the abstract, or else the swerve don’t make no damn sense--it don’t get much better than Ms. Sullivan singing “Forever Don’t Last.”
Jodeci -- “Those Things”
That second Jodeci album--Diary of a Mad Band, the most ambitious of their efforts remains on the digital shortlist. I would have been fine never hearing a new Jodeci song again, and then I heard that DeVante-bop playing on the XM station, and a nigga is thirty-again, taking a break from the dissertation, and playing a little two-guard for the championship intramural team, and Biggie and Pac still alive, and their ain’t a Dawta in sight, and me and the Woman are....well, doing those things. Whatever, Jodeci wins with a little nostalgic turn called “Those Things.”
D’Angelo -- “Another Life”
If you remember waiting for that second D’Angelo album, than you can be excused if you thought that “In Another Life” might have been in reference to when you might hear another D’Angelo. The carefully curated mess that was Black Messiah (reflective of so many of our messes, perhaps?) was a gift, not because it changed any games, but because it highlighted the stakes of the game, where it’s all too easy to lose your soul and lose your mind. “Another Life” was just some afrofuturistic shit, that gave us the permission to dream and imagine the best for that Soul and that Mind.

TateShots: John Akomfrah Talks the Practice of Making Film

'John Akomfrah talks to TateShots about his practice as a filmmaker. The artist discusses how he navigates between the gallery and cinema, what compelled him to make his 2015 work Vertigo Sea, and the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky.' -- TateShots