Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 803

"I'll Fly Away"--The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (for Mike Brown)

Leo & Diane Dillon | Virginia Hamilton

After Ferguson, Do African Immigrants See Themselves as Simply Black?

Credit: Lucas Jackson/Reuters PRI
Much of the national discussion prompted by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown has centered around how the police — and Americans as a whole — treat black citizens. But what about African immigrants to the United States? Do they see themselves as part of that same discussion?

For Parents Of Young Black Men With Autism, Extra Fear About Police

Gil Scott-Heron: "Lady Day and John Coltrane" (Trotters Inc House remix)

©2014 ThinkStrange

Memories Still Burn in Bensonhurst Over the Death of Yusuf Hawkins

For many of us, the murder of  Yusuf Hawkins —a 16-year-old Black kid shot to death while a surrounded by a mob of young Whites, who were not much older—was a defining moment in our developing political consciousness. The image of Hawkins's father Moses Stewart—and the grace and integrity that he carried himself with in the aftermath of his son's death, stays with me. Public Enemy's "Fight the Power"—already one of the anthems of another summer ("sound of the funky drummer") became even more so.  The organizing energy of that moment helped elect New York City's first Black mayor and made many of us want to tell the truth of our stories as artists, journalists and scholars.
WNYC's Jim O'Grady remembers.

In New York And #Ferguson, Two Police Killings, Two Different Responses from Officials

ohn Minchillo/AP

Actress & Playwright Anna Deavere Smith of "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992' Reflects on #Ferguson

Credit: Mike Segar/ReutersPRI | The Takeaway
The events following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri reflect a familiar narrative — a story that revolves around race, law enforcement and protest in America.

Nuyorican Soul--"Runaway" (feat India)

‘A Time to Kill: If Kajieme had been White . . .’ by Stephane Dunn

‘A Time to Kill: If Kajieme had been White . . .’ by Stephane Dunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Remember that film adaptation of A Time to Kill based on the book by bestselling author John Grisham? Matthew McConaughey plays Jake Tyler Brigance, the white Southern lawyer who ends up defending Carl Lee Hailey, [Samuel Jackson].
Carl Lee has shot dead the white men who brutally rape and beat his little daughter Tonya. One of the most memorable moments in the film is Jake’s summation at the close of the trial:
I set out to prove a black man could receive a fair trial in the South, that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. That's not the truth 'cause the eyes of the law are humanized, yours and mine, and until we can see each other as equals, justice is never going to be even-handed. 
Jake decides to tell the jury a story. ‘Close your eyes,’ he instructs and then unfolds the details of the brutal attack on the innocent little girl:
They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. . . Then they urinate on her . . . They have a rope. Imagine the noose going tight around her neck and with a sudden blinding jerk, she's pulled into the air. . . . It snaps and she falls back to the earth. So they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge . . .Can you see her . . . I want you to picture that little girl.
 Now imagine she's white.
True, it’s a dramatic scene from a movie, but it’s instructive and not just in the case of the most infamous killing in the US these past ten days, Michael Brown, but for the one and the ones that don’t and won’t make twenty-four hour news headlines. In the shadow of the traumatized streets of Ferguson, another young man, Kajieme Powell, was shot and killed by two officers.
Imagine you are the mama or daddy, or the sister, or the grandmother of this twenty-five year old, ‘mentally troubled’ Kajieme, going about identifying the body, picking out a good suit to bury him in while gathering the money for a decent home-going. Your tears punctuate the funeral plans. You lie awake heart-heavy through the night and wake to way back when pictures on the wall of a smiling, snaggle-toothed boy whom you referred to then as my ‘My baby’ and ‘Son’.  
On the television and in the streets, reporters are hardly bothering to call him by name; he’s merely ‘a man’ or “an African American man” or 'the twenty-five year old African American man with a knife.' There is dismissal in it. Kajieme falling dead to the sidewalk by professionals trained to diffuse potential violence and shoot professionally is not too shocking. You stop watching – who can endure watching a video of this boy you’ve loved everyday for twenty-five years being shot over and over?
Quietly, while folk concentrate on the unjustness of the more famous killing, you talk to God on your knees and wonder, what were Kajieme’s chances against two guns and two cops oriented to fear him even without a weapon and any mental issues?
Why, you wonder just between you and God, couldn’t they have cared enough to want to reason with Kajieme a few more minutes? Couldn't they have shot him in the ankle or a leg then arrested him and taken him to a psych ward? You wonder, just from your heart to the good Lord’s, what if there could have been a little more patience and restraint from those authorized to kill when deemed necessary?
Given the years and years of bubbling despair dodging the lives of black Ferguson that exploded with the bullet-ridden body of Michael Brown, couldn’t those cops have seen Kajieme, paused, and actually decided not to shoot to kill?
Imagine you must accept it, must swallow the public justification of this grandson’s killing, that it is merely a sidebar, an endnote, in the background of the really big story in Ferguson?
You must simply go about the business of burying him, asking that the funeral folk make sure he resembles the boy you raised, and that the suit he will lie in forever in the casket is decent, and that there is a service with praying and good preaching and the right church songs. But all the while, in your troubled soul, you wonder, you imagine . . .
What if Kajieme had been white? What if Michael, what if all those good, troubled, brilliant, foolish, naïve, hopeful young black men over all these years had been white? 
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Stephane Dunn, PhD is a writer and professor at Morehouse College where she is the director of the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press). Her writings have appeared in Ms., The Chronicle of Higher Education, TheRoot.com, AJC, CNN.com, Ebony.com,  and Best African American Essays, among others. Follow her on Twitter:  @DrStephaneDunn 

Digital Narratives and the Future of Social Movements: A 'Left of Black' Special

Digital Narratives and  the Future of Social Movements: A 'Left of Black' Special
What can we expect in the future from young folk fluent in digital culture with regards to political organizing and social movements?
Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) is joined by:
Sofia Campos, Board Chair or United We Dream (@campoSOFIA)Phillip Agnew, Executive Director of Dream Defenders (@PhilofDreams_)Meredith Clark, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of North Texas (@meredithclark)Micah Gilmer, Senior Partner, Frontline Solutions (@Micah_Gilmer)This special episode of Left of Black was produced with help from Frontline Solutions http://www.frontlinesol.com.
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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center and the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship at Duke University.
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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U
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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack