Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 748

Interview with Painter Beverly McIver

Painter Beverly McIver discusses growing up in the projects of Greensboro, NC, her career as a painter, and the HBO documentary, Raising Renee , that chronicles six years of her life as caregiver to her developmentally disabled sister.

Ursula Burns on Being the First Black Woman CEO of Xerox

Ursula Burns explains to Makers the noteworthiness her historic appointment as Xerox CEO. 

Remember When New York City Had Housing Police?

"Relations between the NYPD and residents were smoother several decades back, when public housing complexes had their own police force. Many of the housing police officers were people of color. Until the late 1980s, 20 percent of the force lived in public housing themselves. And their beats tended to be small, and in many cases they patrolled a single complex. That allowed them to forge relationships with residents." -- All Things Considered

Malcolm X, #BlackLivesMatter & the Middle East

Maytha Alhassen discusses Malcolm X, #BlackLivesMatter and her recent trip to Palestine with the Dream Defenders delegation.  Alhassen, a University of Southern California (USC) Provost Ph.D. Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity, was interviewed ahead of a national conference held at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill on The Legacy of Malcolm X: Afro-American Visionary, Muslim Activist.

African-American Representation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Remix's Dr. James Peterson explores the notion of identity and representation on a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition Represent: 200 Years of African American Art with John Vick, its organizing curator. The exhibition celebrates more than 160 works from some 100 American artists of African descent pooled from the museum's present holdings.

Boris Gardiner--"Every N*gger is a Star" (1973) h/t Kendrick Lamar

Ntozake Shange on Inspiration and Harlem

"The New York Public Library Podcast welcomes the great American playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, creator of the Obie-Award-winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf . At the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shange celebrates the 40th anniversary of her landmark work with a panel discussion about its inspiration, Harlem, and her enduring legacy."

Superman was an Undocumented Immigrant.

Henry Jenkins on Superman's Immigrant past: "Superman was created by two Jewish high school students, both immigrants from Eastern Europe, in the 1930s; he has become a key vehicle by which another generation of immigrants seeks to understand their place in American society. If ever there was an illegal alien, it is Kal-El from the planet Krypton whose parents sent him away from his native world in search of a better life, who slipped across the border (via spaceship) in the middle of the night, got adopted by an Anglo family, has had to hide his true identity, but has been deeply dedicated to promoting and defending American values."-- Fusion

In Detroit's Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Exhibit, A Portrait Of A Resilient City

Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry

The first exhibit to focus on the time Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo spent in Detroit is a big step for the Detroit Institute of Arts as it recovers from the tumult of the city's bankruptcy. -- NPR 

Some Windows Should Stay Broken: Time to Stop Marijuana Arrests in New York City

Some Windows Should Stay Broken: Time to Stop Marijuana Arrests in New York Cityby Mark Naison | @MCFireDogg | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I just finished two weeks of Grand Jury service in Brooklyn. In some respects, the experience was quite positive. I was very impressed by my fellow Grand Jurors, who took their responsibilities quite seriously, and were no rubber stamp for the prosecutors; thought many of the Assistant DA's were  capable and was positively impressed  by the racial diversity  of the police officers who testified  before us.
However, one very negative aspect of the experience will remain with me a very long time and that is the number of marijuana arrests and prosecutions still taking place in Brooklyn, almost all of them occurring in communities of color and involving people who were working class and poor.
My fellow Grand Jurors and I thought that marijuana had been decriminalized in New York City. Apparently not. Fully one fifth of the cases that came before were  marijuana arrests, some of them involving buy and bust operations requiring large number of police officers; all of them involving defendants who were Black, Latino, and Middle-Eastern; none of them involving large enough quantities of the drug to make their possessor a major distributor.
Given that large numbers of college students and  middle class and wealthy residents of New York possess marijuana in the quantities that came before us, the discriminatory nature of these arrests and prosecutions leaped out at me and my fellow Grand Jurors. Not only did this seem to be a significant and expensive waste of police manpower, it clearly placed an unfair burden on young people living in Black and Latino neighborhoods, who are going to be arrested, prosecuted and possibly roughed up for actions that are left entirely alone on white middle class and upper class communities.
Nothing could do more to exacerbate tensions between police and community residents, especially youth, than marijuana arrests requiring large scale police operations, especially since everyone knows they never take place in other sections of the city. They leave people who have no history of violence with criminal records; put some behind bars, and undermine a much needed source of income in communities where wages are low.
It is hard to see who gains from these arrests and prosecutions, other than developers seeking to invest in once poor communities, or cynical law enforcement officials who think that young people of color should be intimidated and contained.
Defenders of Police Commissioner Bratton will say that marijuana arrests are a logical extension of the "Broken Windows" theory of policing, which argues that arresting people for petty offenses--such as turnstile jumping or selling pot--will deter them from more serious and violent crimes.

But the price of this kind of policing in terms of giving large number of young people criminal records, exacerbating police/ community tensions and providing a living example of discriminatory law enforcement is far too high to pay.
Some windows should stay broken. It is time to end marijuana arrests in New York City.
***Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.