Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 769

18-Year-Old Activist Emma EuBanks on Why #BlackLivesMatter Protests Give Her Hope

Fusion

The first protest Emma EuBanks attended was shortly after the announcement that a grand jury would not be seeking an indictment of Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michel Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Since then, the 18-year-old St. Paul, Minn. resident, has been at several rallies, including one held Saturday at the Mall of America. She spoke to Fusion about why she attended the event, and how protesting had changed her.

Do Celebrities Deserve Criticism for Social Justice Inaction?

The Root
In a preview of the next Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Liana and Jabari Asim to talk about the current protests in response to police shootings and the role of celebrities and artists. Liana Asim is a playwright and a librettist. Jabari Asim is an author, poet, and playwright and Editor-in-Chief of The Crisis Magazine.

Kidz Bop is the Death of Civilization (from the Car Chronicles)

Kidz Bop is the Death of Civilization (from the Car Chronicles)by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Damn this satellite radio; Damn this Kidz Bop station.  Damn the fact that this little girl is now old enough to have programmed the Kidz Bop station on the satellite radio.  Kidz Bop--where inane pop songs are performed inanely by prepubescent tykes, some of whom will likely be a finalist on some iteration of a reality vocal show in the near future.  Everytime I hear the Kidz Bop version of “Happy” I’m looking for a sword to throw myself on (had I not already done that listening to Pharrell's original for the 1700th time.); Civilization dies a little more with every warble.

And I know this daughter of mine knows better.  This, a child whose musical tastes at 6-years-old ran the gamut of her requesting to hear Dru Hill (“Tell Me”), Corinne Bailey Rae (“Like a Star”), Diana Ross (“Ain’t No Mountain high Enough”--the full 6-minute version), and Sammy Davis, Jr. (“Candy Man”).

None of this was random; I hated talking “baby” to children, as much as I hate listening to “baby.” The plan from the time I spent that first day at home with this daughter’s older sister--us sitting at home listening to Tammi and Marvin trade versus--was to make sure they knew those classic Motown backbeats, like they knew the backs of their hands (and they do).

The car was always going to be the working laboratory--as my parent’s living room and my dad’s Fisher Stereo was his laboratory, where he trained me to hear the Mighty Clouds of Joy, The Soul Stirrers, Jimmy Smith and Bobby “Blue” Bland (and I still do).  Still remember this daughter’s older sister at barely two-years of age cooing “grits” along with Jill’s “The Way.”

Even as I had to cede air time to some “children’s music”-- for this daughter’s older sister it was VeggieTales; for this daughter, it was The Backyardigans, with production qualities that seemed to take seriously the music in children’s music (“Buffalo Girls and Boys”). 

Then came streaming music services--the birth 0f choice, yet the death of autonomy (but that’s for another conversation in the far off future).

That this daughter’s older sister is now out of my car, and in her own, was without doubt a setback. The increased time in the car with this daughter was the opportunity to double down, to push back against the coming onslaught of people now named Iggy (who will be named some other ridiculous shit in five years, and that’s not even to begin to address the “culture bandit” issue).

Now I’m sitting here listening to some inane version of an inane song like “Happy” for the 1701st time.  I know that this daughter, knows better.  But I get it.  On the crux of for real teenage-ness, this is her attempt at independence; an opportunity to lay claim to her own taste.  At least she didn’t put on that Gospel-pablum coming from the “Urban” gospel station.

And grant this daughter some slack for being observant enough to know, that had we been listening to that pop station and Iggy came on, there would be an unbearable lecture in the works. That lecture await another day.  

Oh, wait, what inane shit is this daughter watching on NetFlix?
***

Author and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, writes and teaches extensively on race, gender and sexuality in popular culture and Digital Humanities; he is lamenting the fact that his daughters are growing up.

How Black Women are Leading the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

Al Jazeera America
While recent protests have focused on the deaths of black men, it's black women who are leading the chargeProducer Jihan Hafiz followed young black women in Washington, D.C., as they organize and build their movement. And while their targets are police brutality and racism, if they see people in their own communities block out the voices they care about, their response is the same: "Shut it down."

At the Visual Crossroads: Blackness and the Matter of Life or Death

Photograph Credit:  Koran Addo/ St. Louis TodayAt the Visual Crossroads: Blackness and the Matter of Life or Deathby LaCharles Ward | @LaCharles88 | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The violent killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, John Crawford in Ohio, Aiyana Jones in Detroit, and Tamir Rice also in Ohio and countless others, all at the hands of White police officers, has reignited conversations regarding race and gender, the hypermilitarization of police, and more importantly, the value of Black life in the United States. These horrific acts of deadly violence sadly represent, again and again, the precarious nature of Blackness and its relationship to the police in the United States.
Photographs of the protests in Ferguson and St. Louis, MO bombarded us. The images that circulated illuminated the power of photographs, especially in their ability to solicit affective and physical reactions. Certainly, one such image, which will be the focus here, captured in a frame, the state of Black life in the United States. This is the photo of 3-year-old Nigel Jones-Mack standing in an almost innocent-like manner looking as the marchers and police inched toward him. It almost brought me to my knees. Some have already hailed this as an “iconic” photo that will define the Ferguson protests (1). In fact, the image reminded me of the iconic Tiananmen Square photograph, though different, because it visually indexes the people in ways, I think, that Tiananmen did not.
However, bracketing questions and debates about iconicity, I want to suggest that this photograph beckons us to see and grapple with effects of a dangerously racist police state and the continued disregard for the Black body.  
The photo, literally and figuratively, forces us to see through the lens of race. That is to say, drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell, Nigel’s looking as a raced Black body serves as a lens or, as a medium, for understanding the lived realities of Black folk across the United States who look like me, Renisha McBride, or Nigel (2). Specifically, we might think of Nigel’s looking as being an ocular vehicle for which to make sense of ways in which, on a quotidian level, Black bodies are not only victims of the deleterious effects of black criminalization but, more importantly, victims of physical and horrific deaths at the hands of, to echo Africana Studies professor, C. Riley Snorton, the State and its apparatuses (i.e., the police) (3).
For example, we might say that Nigel’s short distance (a few blocks) from the police car figuratively and visually represents the structural conditions that have historically constructed Black bodies, especially Black men, as on the run from the Police and/or always in relation to the law. Or, we might say that Nigel’s body position and his looking can be interpreted as a moment of interpellation.
The moment where he realizes his location within a racist Police state. Alternatively, we might say that Nigel is innocently-thought as we know, Black bodies are often rendered illegible to innocence—standing in the middle of the streets unaware of the lethal danger that is approaching him, as indicative of the approaching police squad car. Whatever interpretation you/we choose, what is important is that, at some level, young Nigel—a kid with a future and the embodiment of potentiality—is becoming aware of the ways in which society perceives him or, at the very least, perceives people who look like him.
Nigel is more than an icon and more than just a kid who stands in a liminal space of innocence due to his blackness; but, whether he knows it or not, his corporeal presence and visual positioning in the photograph serves as a heuristic for understanding the fragility of Black lives in America (4).
The presence of the police car as it precedes the large crowd of marchers is also visually striking for several reasons. On an uncritical level, we might see the somewhat normal routine of a police squad car “protecting” the peaceful protesters as they march through the downtown streets of St. Louis, MO. It is not uncommon to see police walking, riding ahead of, or sometimes walking behind a large crowd of people who are in public spaces engaging in dissent. Certainly, depending on the situation and the people protesting, one might desire police presence. This is not and, well, is nothing new.
However, on a more critical level, there are several ways in which we can read the presence of the police squad car with its flashing lights. First and foremost, particularly if you are person of color, you might view the squad car as creating an illusion of protection and, quite frankly, as a damn joke, especially considering the circumstances in Ferguson, New York, Ohio and many other geo-spatial locations that are stratified along race and class lines. As such, the police are not really there to protect (despite the deceptive nature of the flashing blue/red lights) the mostly Black crowd rather they are there to contain the crowd in a specified route as to prevent the crowd from causing disruption to the everyday lives of other residents (read: White folk) of St. Louis (i.e., major highway).
I would also suggest that the presence of the police squad car in this image represents, as Carolyn Davis observes in her essay in The Feminist Wire, “the predominantly White police force” that we saw “dressed for combat and armed to the teeth, facing off against predominantly black citizens and protesters” in Ferguson (5). In that moment, though long before it, there is sense that police are not (and, I would say, never were) invested in the protection of Black citizens. Lest we think otherwise, we need only look at the video that captures one White officer yelling, “Bring it, all you fucking animals! Bring it!” at the protesters. Or, read for example, The Condemnation of Blackness (2011) by Khalil Gibran Muhammad.
According to professor and TV host, Melissa Harris-Perry, from 2006 to 2012, a Black person lost their life to the Police twice a week in the United States (6). Put differently, a study done by ProPublica, note that Black men are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than young White men (7). Thus, the presence of the police squad car is remarkable in that it represents how in theory, the police are charged with protecting citizens, including Black citizens, yet, in practice, they dispose of Black bodies as if they are valueless. I find the work by Alexander Weheliye particularly instructive in illuminating this contradiction when he writes, “suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality” (8).
This treatment of Black bodies, then, represents what social theorist, Henry Giroux, calls a biopolitics of disposability where people of color are not only rendered utterly invisible but left to “fend for themselves” against state-sanctioned violence because the state has failed to protect (9). In other words, the collision between “law and death,” (10) has been so catastrophic that to say Black bodies are “collateral damage” would be inaccurate. Semantically, “collateral damage” would imply that Black bodies were incidental to the intended target; however, as we know, they are the very targets of law and death—of a hypermilitarized force that is bequeathed power by the State—to physically let live or let die.
More explicitly, as a whole, this photograph, as one person mentioned in a comment, captures a beautiful young child “with his whole life ahead of him, but with the police car heading toward him” we can feel the weight “of injustice bearing down on him” (10). Yet, at the same time, this photograph also represents, a community who are beyond fed up with the constant disregard for Black bodies, as indicated by the marching protesters, who we might read as marching to protect the innocence and value of young Nigel’s life.
At a mundane level, historical witnessing is happening by Nigel. Though he appears to be standing alone, he is not. Nigel, along with other Black men and women around the world, are standing at the crossroads of life or death, and we can only hope that it is the former. As spectators, we, too, are at a crossroads. Perhaps, just perhaps, we can all just pause to see what Nigel is seeing and grapple with what he is revealing about the precarity (11) of Black lives. Let’s stand and continue to stand with Nigel.
***
LaCharles Ward  is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric and Public Culture program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Broadly, his research interests lie at the junctures of critical theories of race and racism and visual culture studies. He is currently working on several, though interconnected projects, which considers how Black bodies are rendered de minimis and unworthy of life via media, legal, and state institutions.

The D’Angelo Cycle

The D’Angelo Cycleby I. Augustus Durham | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Preface: 1) I vividly remember preparing for school, sixth grade to be exact, when “Brown Sugar” came on my parents’ analog radio—that was probably the first time in my short-lived life I underwent sonic hypnosis; and 2) a Facebook “friend” some years ago suggested an album release by Justin Timberlake could save R&B . . .
As an English PhD candidate, my lens on the world is mediated through a “trained” reading, albeit close. Hence, when contemplating D’Angelo’s discography, culminating contemporarily in Black Messiah, I cannot help but think of his work as the construal of a trilogy on par with Sophocles’s Oedipus Cycle. Although the overarching premise of this Greek tragedy and these albums are not similar, the fact that Black Messiah, in the recorded chronology, aligns with Antigone—the eponymous shero who bucks empire, even as its “criminal”, retrieving her brother’s body to give him a proper burial, thus disallowing him to be the delicacy of carrion—appears quite an arresting analogy. But enough about the literary. For now.
Black Messiah is an intriguingly paradigmatic project partly because one wonders when the album was finished; the liner notes referencing Ferguson, Egypt and the Occupy Movement signify that the album may have been in the laboratory until, at the earliest, mid-August 2014. Though “true” fans “knew” “Really Love”, “Sugah Daddy” and “The Charade” from YouTube clips of various performances throughout the quasi-15-year hiatus, my interrogation, and likely that of others, is: did you record material post-August 9, and if so, what? Likewise, why now? Being a PK, like D’Angelo, I could conjecture that the liturgical calendar may have offered some level of time management even though that apparently did not #matter.
The coming of the Messiah—Jesus—connotes the season of Advent, the ubiquitous waiting for the coming of a salvific other to break in to the world humbly: amidst a political project to kill all the two-year-old and under male children as an edict of Herod, the savior arrives in a manger, which is a generous way of saying the Prince of Peace, whose parents seek refuge due to the King of War’s dictum, is born amongst animals and their excrement, a generous word for shit. Therefore, peculiarly, the only other time this album could have been released, in my opinion, would have been the morning of April 5, 2015.
If Black Messiah confirms the law of threes, this trilogy is quite generative because we stand as witness to how a hallucinogen transports us to a space where people stage the fantastical around practices they do not comprehend, only to come down from said high and recognize there is work to do. The album’s vinyl promo gives us insight into how the Messiah works: the A-Side is prototypical R&B—it gives life in the lushest of manners, reminiscent of D’Angelo’s meticulous homework a la Prince (“The Charade”) or the church (“1000 Deaths”)—while the B-Side is the work of a mad scientist who, borrowing from a banal Dreamgirls theme, invests in creating a “new sound”, whether through whistling (“The Door”) or polyrhythms (“Betray My Heart”). But I think the vinyl ordering gets it wrong: there is a C-Side—“Another Life”. In fact, I believe the two most important tracks on the album are the Messiah’s stigmata: “1000 Deaths” and “Another Life”.
Though we should be grateful to METROLYRICS, D’Angelo’s glossolalia—“speaking in tongues”—is not a foreign concept to the attuned ear because that very tongue-tying is characteristic of black music insofar as he joins a dialectic pantheon from Nina Simone to Marvin Gaye to Michael Jackson! In fact, we embrace such speech because we ostensibly become the interpreter the tongue needs to edify the universal body. This conjuration is effectually the momentous occasion of what I call ghostolalia: a call to the spirits to come sit in the lushness. Therefore, lyrically, these two tracks are perhaps the most difficult to understand because the music itself, the arrangement, is doing as much work as the listener’s discernment. There are moments in “1000 Deaths” and “Another Life”—the vocal transition from the chorus to the second verse (2:30-3:25) and the background vocals on the bridge (2:55-3:55), respectively—that are, in no uncertain terms, genius!
As someone who sang extensively once, I realize D’Angelo makes completely counterintuitive moves but in so doing, he provides room for ecstasy, Big Boi’s eargasm. The in-breaking of music humbly. What these two tracks exhibit, via Mark Anthony Neal remixed, is the newness produced by a(n) (old) black man emerging from exile. And is this not what Khalid Abdul Muhammad recounts regarding Jesus’s temptation by Satan, or what Kendrick proposes the “white man” says: the road to success is easy but usually, that path is the compromise of your “calling”? And so while there is still a sermonic preoccupation that the white messiah, in as (non-)essential a way possible (?!), can “save” “us”, s/he may not make “us” “free”, and D’Angelo already concedes that Yehushua don’t want no cowards.
And that’s just the music! When compounding the lyrics—the hearing eye—with the music—the seeing ear—we are stunned. “Another Life” signals this in the most self-effacing way because it gestures to promised (un)fulfillment: in this life, maybe I love you enough that we should not risk a life together for fear that I will let you down or that forces outside of us will always seek to end we. So then let us manufacture another life, in the now, where I can only imagine the potential that you might take a gamble on the risk that is me. The lyrics are apropos for today because those recently outlined in chalk could have been someone’s boy or girl in a life yet to come—D’Angelo, when did you record these songs?
And maybe that is it—in all the ways people do not “understand” him, perhaps the mad scientist is calling us, no longer to arms but bodies, for the sake of literacy: in a world where everyone “reads” others, often for filth, few acknowledge that we have discarded as “trash” the criminality once placed on some of us for our ability to read as a revolutionary act.
Therefore, coming full circle, Black Messiah may be declaring to the empire, whether the music industry or some deity,  I am retrieving the body of my (he)art so that I may properly bury it with the hope that such a ritualized homegoing, or better still homecoming, can be resurrective. Let me embalm and dress and lay it to rest among others in that cloud called Elsewhere. A soldier only dies just once. “Another Life”, what I have called in another space the lovechild of Brown Sugar and Voodoo, is the hope of a music to come recalling a music of yesterday, not unlike the whistling in “The Door” winking at Otis Redding, or “Till It’s Done (Tutu)” as the millennial truncation of What’s Going On in one track—what is new was old and vice versa.
Welcome back D’Angelo! How was the wilderness?
***
I. Augustus Durham is a third-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on blackness, melancholy and genius.

#BlackEkphrasis: "I Have the Feeling I've Been Here Before" -- Carmen McRae (1975)

actor Tyrese Gibson

"CPR": Ali Shaheed Muhammad feat. JaPoet, David Luke, and Merna (fka Ayah).

Ali Shaheed Muhammad
Ali Shaheed Muhammad delivers a stirring song, entitled "CPR", and accompanying visual, in response to the growing worldwide concern over police brutality and murder particularly in the United States. Produced by New York native, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, CPR features Tennessee visual artist/rapper, JaPoet, Georgia co-producer/rapper, David Luke, and recent collaborator, Palestinian/Canadian singer/songwriter, Merna (fka Ayah).This is one for the people. #BlackLivesMatter
Video edited by Merna and @bloowoods

"A Better Tomorrow": Where Wu-Tang Meets Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes and #BlackLivesMatter

Where the Wu-Tang Clan Meet Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes and #BlackLivesMatter

Dear Chief Lopez: Protesters Are Not The Problem

Dear Chief Lopez: Protesters Are Not The Problemby Lamont Lilly | @LamontLilly | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
According to Chief Jose Lopez of the Durham Police Department, “outside agitators” have now penetrated Durham’s local protest and social justice movement.  According to Chief Lopez, out-of-towners are the culprits causing trouble and influencing our city’s peaceful protesters to block traffic and storm shopping malls. Unfortunately, Chief Jose Lopez could not be more wrong.  Most of us are not outsiders.  We reside right here in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, better known as The Triangle.  And as far as we’re concerned, our acts of civil disobedience are not the problem; they’re effects of the problem.
The real problem, Chief, is the repressive occupation of modern day slave patrols in Black and Brown communities – police officers who are direct descendants of slave catchers, paddyrollers and state militia who reinforced our ancestors’ captivity.  The problem is your department’s excessive use of force, its blatant brutality and well documented racial profiling.  
The problem is the state sponsored beating of Stephanie Nickerson and John G. Hill, the deaths of Jesus Huerta, Derek Walker and Jose Ocampo.  The problem, Chief, is the militarization of police departments nationwide – the manifestation of a police state that values profit more than people.  And a very big problem is a judicial system that always seems to justify such savagery.
The problem at hand is not the various tactics of local protesters, but the continued perpetuation of political, social and economic inequality for the masses of non-white males.  Blocking traffic and interrupting profit margins is not the problem here, Chief.
What has angered a great mass of people, both locally and nationally, is the preponderance of mass poverty and the school-to-prison pipeline – voter suppression and the presence of armed police in public schools.  Our collective frustration is the lack of concern for and daily indignities of Black life in this country.  We are angered that private prisons are no different than the Convict Lease System during Reconstruction.  We are pissed off that advocating for justice equals state surveillance and undercover police officers attending our organizing meetings.
What has truly enraged us is that throughout this country’s history every journalists, labor or civic leader who stands up and speaks out for the poor and oppressed has been targeted by the FBI.  Every artists, musician or organizer who dares speak truth to power has been imprisoned, unjustly harassed or simply assassinated by some form of state and federal law enforcement.
These factors combined are the real reasons we’re protesting, Chief.  The connections of oppression are much deeper than Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and they’re much more meaningful than your obvious attempt to “red bait” local Socialists and Anarchists.  Do we always agree on best practices and perspectives?  No.  But anyone who stands up for Black folks’ right to breathe is a comrade to me; your personal philosophy is irrelevant.  So please, Chief, stop trying to divide the movement.  Stop trying redirect the focus from injustice to those who resist it.  And please, stop demonizing us with your cast-off labels and outdated political #hashtags.
We are not “trouble makers” and “outside agitators.”  What we are is a new generation who are no longer standing down to the repressive tactics of fascist police departments.  What we are, are descendants of the Abolitionist, Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.  We are truth speakers and justice seekers.  We are students, workers and parents.  We are sons and daughters, neighbors and teachers.  We are one people, one movement, one resistance.  We are freedom fighters who clearly realize that body cameras and better police training are merely band aids to a broken system.  What we are is a new voice of promise and hope – fearless visionaries who have reimagined a just society for all and not just a few.  And you know what, Chief, we do believe that we will win.
~Power to the People
***
Lamont Lilly is a contributing editor with the Triangle Free Press and organizer with Workers World Party.  He has contributed to The Root, Truthout, CounterPunch and Black Youth Project, among others.  He resides in Durham, NC.  Follow him on Twitter @LamontLilly.