Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 783

Howard Fuller’s Activism at Duke and Beyond: A Conversation with Mark Anthony Neal

Forum for Scholars and Publics
On Thursday, Oct. 16, activist and author Howard Fuller joined Mark Anthony Neal at Duke's Forum for Scholars and Publics for a discussion on Fuller's new book, No Struggle, No Progress: A Warrior's Life from Black Power to Education Reform . Professor Fuller discusses his experiences working for racial justice and radical social change, from his days as a young activist in North Carolina in the 1960s to his current engagement with the school choice movement.

Finding Creative Ways to Fund and Distribute Black Films

The Root
In this preview of the next episode of Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by writer and filmmaker Felicia Pride to talk about the challenges involved with funding and distributing black media, and her new project, Openended .

Tiny Desk Concert: T-Pain sans Auto-Tune

NPR Tiny Desk Concert

T-Pain minus Auto-Tune

The Colorization of America: Jeff Chang in conversation with Adam Mansbach

FilmaticProductions
The Colorization of America: Jeff Chang in conversation with Adam Mansbach at Uncharted: The Berkeley Festival of Ideas -- Oct. 24th, 2014Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He is Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. His latest book is Who We Be: The Colorization of America (St. Martin's).
Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep is a #1 New York Times bestseller. Mansbach’s novel, Rage is Back, was published in January, 2013. Mansbach’s debut thriller, The Dead Run, was published by HarperCollins in October, 2013.

St. Louis Teachers Address Ferguson With Lessons On Race

Do #BlackLivesMatter? Which Ones?

Do #BlackLivesMatter? Which Ones?by Kali Nicole Gross | The OpEd Project | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Black men are the public face of black suffering with good reason: African-American men suffer in America. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their all-too-familiar experiences with the prison system:One in three black men can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime, for Latinos it’s one in six, for whites it’s one in 17Felony convictions have robbed 13 percent of African-American men of the right to voteOne black man is killed every 28 hours by police or vigilantes in AmericaLesser known is the fact that black women experience intimate partner violence at a rate 35 percent higher than white women. The No. 2 cause of death black women and girls is homicide resulting primarily from intra-racial partner violence, double that of white women. Currently, 64,000 black women are missing in America, and one of every 100 black women is in prison. And in New York, nearly, 70 percent of women imprisoned for killing someone had been abused by their victims.

Yet the subject of black women’s gender oppression is often met with the call for caution so raising the issue does not victimize black men. This response is usually well-intentioned yet parallels charges many whites level against blacks when calling attention to racism. This response carries the idea that black women might be invoking the subject of gender violence under false pretenses to somehow play the victim for the spoils such a position supposedly affords.  

These notions undermine efforts to reduce the disproportionate number of both black women and black men locked up (and out) in the United States.

Activists, scholars and policymakers have done tremendous work in pointing out how biased drug laws and bigoted enforcement have created criminal inequities, such as the fact that even though African-Americans represent 14 percent of drug users, they account for nearly 40 percent of drug arrests. We cannot stop there because drug offenses account for roughly 25 percent of those doing time in state prison; half are there for violent crime.
Given what we know about intra-racial gender violence, confronting the disproportionate imprisonment of black people means aggressively addressing the relationship between gender violence in our communities and mass incarceration.

We should heed the call of progressive activists who rightly point out that criminalizing intimate partner violence has not solved the problem. This approach has especially harmed black women and Latinas, many of whom have been arrested for resisting batterers. We need to consider whether mandating counseling and other therapeutic responses to intimate partner violence would be more effective. These alternatives to criminalization must be evaluated alongside ways to keep black women and other survivors of intimate partner violence safe in the meantime.

These kinds of approaches would employ a both/and kind of logic that does not pit black women and black men against each other. Rather it recognizes the ways battered black women and battered prisoners represent an intersection of state and interpersonal violence that can be successfully addressed right now.

Not only would this help to reduce the numbers of black women and black men in prison, it would be life-saving for black women and give truth to the ethos behind #blackslivesmatter.

***

Kali Nicole Gross, Ph.D., a Public Voices Fellow, is associate professor and associate chairwoman of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and author of Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910.  Follow her @KaliGrossPhD.

Change to PLUS Loan Program Hits HBCUs Hard

Marketplace
Several U.S. colleges have seen declining enrollment since the recession began. But changes to a federal loan program in 2011 have hit some historically black colleges and universities especially hard.

Left of Black S5:E6: A Conversation with Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III

Left of Black S5:E6: A Conversation with Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in-studio by Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III, Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in the City of New York, President of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury and Chairman and founder of the Abyssinian Development Corporation.

Visiting Duke University recently to deliver the annual Gardner C. Taylor Lecture , who Butts describes as “the best preacher I ever heard in the English language,” Neal and Butts cover a range of topics including the State of the Black Church, the death of Eric Garner, the political legacy of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and the “Harlem Gang of Four,” and what’s on his current playlist.
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).*** Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U*** Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlackFollow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackManFollow Abyssinian Baptist Church  on Twitter: @AbyssinianBC
Follow SUNY-Old Westbury on Twitter: @SUNYOldWestbury

“If I Were Earth”--Henry Dumas (1934-1968) | "Harlem Fashion Show, 1963" -- Leonard Freed

"Harlem Fashion Show, 1963" -- Leonard Freed “If I Were Earth” 
by Henry Dumas

Each tear that fell
from the crushed
moons of your face,
stabbed me,
broke and split
into a thousand pains.
But I held out my arms
and no not one did I miss,
No, not one pain.
And if I don’t let
you soak into me
and bring me up,
if I don’t let you seep
deep into me
and teach me,
then you can cry in
the morning to the sun,
and tell him to rise up
and burn me away.
—copyright by Loretta Dumas and Eugene B. Redmond

“Don’t You Know About Ferguson?!”: Making Sense of Police Training

“Don’t You Know About Ferguson?!”: Making Sense of Police Trainingby Simone Drake | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile) Having a spouse who is a police officer does not worry me as much as most people think it would.  I tend to agonize more over figuring out how to juggle a career while prioritizing the needs of my three sons when my husband is at work nights and weekends.  I thought it a wise move, however, when he switched from being a regular patrol officer to working on the local police department’s bike patrol unit that collaborates with bike patrol at the university I work at.  In this position, he rarely is dispatched on the high-risk “runs” that regular patrol units pick up. Instead, he spends a lot of time responding to cell phone thefts at 2:00a.m. when the victims are walking down alleys, underage drinking citations, and various misdemeanor disturbances in the residential areas surrounding campus.  
A recent event, however, made me think about the complicated relationship that exists between the critical race studies scholarship I produce and my marriage to a cop.
My husband casually—too casually, in my opinion—told me that someone tried to take his partner’s gun. I exclaimed, “What?!” and demanded more details.  It was almost midnight on a weekend and he and his partner were riding at a walking pace as they answered questions about their bikes and duties for several pedestrians walking down the main retail street and thoroughfare of campus.  My husband was startled to attention when his partner, who was riding behind him, hollered, “Get off my gun!”  My husband turned to see an African American male attempting to remove the officer’s gun from his holster.  
Before my husband got to his partner, his partner had subdued the assailant; these incidences happen lightening fast. Surely high on adrenaline, upon arriving at the scene, my husband blurted out, “Don’t you know about Ferguson—I could’ve shot you!”  Hearing that, I immediately asked, “Would you have really shot him?” Looking at me with bewilderment, he instantly replied, “Yes, he was wrestling with my partner for his gun; the only thing that stopped me was not having a clean shot.”
That was a sobering moment for two reasons.  First, I really do not spend much time worrying about his safety; of course, freak accidents can happen, but he is well trained and smart.  Hearing about that moment, however, and the necessity of him drawing his weapon and potentially firing it, created a sense of anxiety about the work he does.  The second sobering aspect of the event is how one bad decision can ruin, and in this case ought to have ended, someone’s life.  The assailant was, as my husband described it, “very high on marijuana,” and the officers had numerous resistance problems with him even after he was handcuffed.  Because of his actions, he now has a felony charge against him.  
My husband’s explanation of police protocol makes sense to me now.  Thus, if the positions were reversed between him and his partner, I would have expected my husband’s partner to look for a clean shot to shoot whomever was attempting to take my husband’s gun at the very same time that I wish he did not have to do that because it meant someone else’s life would end, either figuratively (in a cell) or literally (in a coffin).
I know police violence toward people of African descent and especially African American men is a sensitive issue.  It is one that does not go away because so many unarmed black men, women, and children are victims of police violence.  It is for this reason that many social justice advocates are quick to dismiss any defense of the police or police training.  I occupy a complex space then as someone who is often suspicious of police, generally speaking, but who lives with an officer and, consequently, am learning that police work is complicated and therefore standardized to protect both the officer and the civilian.
What I mean by complicated is that, like many civilians, I have asked my husband questions like, “Why didn’t he [the officer] shoot him [the suspect] in the leg or somewhere non-fatal?” (Relatives of the deceased always ask this on the local news). What I have learned is real life and movies share little in common.  
Very early in his career my husband explained to me that at the point that you need to discharge your fire arm, your training is not to injure the assailant, you are trained to stop or neutralize the threat.  The manner in which he was trained to shoot makes that clear: you aim center mass and you shoot at an angle in which the shot will go through and through.  This means that shooting, or neutralizing the threat, in the aforementioned incident or, for example, when encountering an active rape, is a facially neutral safety protocol for police working in my husband’s department.  Again, this makes sense—I would rather shoot you then you shoot me—but I still struggled with the reality of having to make these decisions.
An easier topic for me to understand, but one also associated with police violence, is jaywalking.  Work in the off-campus area of one of the largest universities in the United States results in my husband issuing hundreds of jaywalking citations.  I have always known jaywalking is “illegal,” but I do it regularly because I figure I know how to cross the street without getting hit by a car.  During the 2012-2013 academic year at my university, however, an alarming rate of students were struck by motor vehicles when walking in non-pedestrian roadways on campus.  In fact, the university allocated an obscene amount of money to a task force created to figure out how to keep pedestrians safe.  
So the jaywalking laws have a function; they are not culturally or racially insensitive on their face.  The insidious ways in which racism and law enforcement become entangled, however, make it difficult to parse out the racism from common sense police safety measures—measures that protect both the officer and the civilian.   The entanglement is a most tragic legacy this nation inherited from its forefathers and that is now deeply ingrained in every facet of society.  Thus, the reality of police departments nationwide increasingly making sure their protocols are race neutral (to avoid lawsuits) is complicated by the continuing problem of unarmed black people being shot or otherwise caused physical harm by police officers who sometimes are following protocol and other times are dead wrong. This reality creates an ambivalence for me about both law enforcement agencies and protests against them.
***
Simone Drake is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University.  She is the author of Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (LSU Press) and her second book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making  is under contract with University of Chicago Press.