Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 811

Choking Us to Death by Brothers Writing to Live

Choking Us to Death by Brothers Writing to Live | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
"I can’t breathe,” onlookers heard Eric Garner say as he took his final breaths. 43 years old, black, and the father of six, Garner was placed in a chokehold and suffocated to death by NYPD officers in Staten Island this past Thursday. While it is important to note that the chokehold was banned as a police practice in NYC more than 20 years ago, it is imperative to name the fact that Garner's killing can be added to the growing list of black and brown people who have been shot or beat to death by police in the US. As the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s 2012 annual report revealed: “every 28 hours a black male, woman, or child is killed by someone employed or protected by the US government.”
A couple weeks before Garner was slain, a short distance from where his body laid lifeless, Spike Lee and his supporters celebrated the 25th anniversary of his hit film Do the Right Thing. In this film, Lee, among other things, dramatizes the plague of police brutality pervasive in urban black and brown America. In the film’s climax, a burly black male colloquially known as “Radio Raheem” is fatally choked by a white NY police officer. A fictionalized depiction of a concrete reality, Lee’s Radio Raheem is a symbol of the tension between police and black America, and the relationship between whiteness and black life.
Whiteness, as we use it here, is not a nonspecific term meant to serve as a general reference for white people, but rather it is an ideology of racial supremacy manifested through anti-black state practices, economic systems, laws, and behaviors. Since the purposeful creation of race in the modern world the system of racial supremacy has had a chokehold on the politically vulnerable. Like Garner, and like the fictionalized "Radio Raheem," too many of us non-white people in the US and abroad, cannot breathe.
From the institution of slavery and the colonization of indigenous land to prison proliferation and immigrant repression, white racial supremacy has systematically suffocated the lives of its victims across the globe. Consider the ways black and brown people have historically been rendered fugitive bodies and fungible commodities around the world. Consider the ways that criminalization, control and discipline have been the de jure practices used to curtail the freedom and mobility of black and brown bodies from the auction block to jail cells, from checkpoints to borders. These ills are the manifestations of white racial supremacy's pervasive grip that has limited America's ability to develop a collective social consciousness and true sense of justice-for-all.
And now, this past week, we have witnessed the results of a world suffering from a drought (of righteous laws, of equitable economies, of loving communities) because of the lust for asymmetrical power that racial supremacy breeds—from increased US-backed Zionist calls for the bombing of civilians in Gaza and government offices willfully failing to ensure residents of Detroit are allowed access to water and civilian death by police strangulation in Staten Island and the dehumanizing deportation and criminalizing practices used to "protect" the US-Mexican border. As we look across the world today we see the autocratic arm of white racial supremacy  wrapping its political muscle and economic strength around the collective neck of the oppressed. To be sure, the same metaphorical arm that choked Garner is the same criminalizing force that suffocates the political and social possibilities of our Mexican brothers and sisters on the border. The physical muscle of the NYPD police officer ending Garner’s life is merely an extension of the political muscle of a global form of racialized supremacy motivating the extermination of hundreds of Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Perhaps “the arc of moral universe is long, bending towards justice”—as Dr. King opined—but the arm of white racial supremacy is lethal, flexing towards violence, and ending in death. More than physical death, structural racism suffocates the soul of democracy, it ceases the work of justice, it strangles the dream of a more beloved community. If we are to ever live fully and freely, as a people, as a nation, and as a world, white racial supremacy, and its various manifestations, must die. Indeed, it is our moral obligation to do justice and liberate ourselves from its death grip. 
Kiese Laymon, Writer & Professor at Vassar CollegeMychal Denzel Smith, Writer, Mental Health Advocate, & Cultural CriticKai M. Green, Writer, Filmmaker, & Ph.D Candidate at USCNyle Fort, Minister, Writer, and Community Organizer Marlon Peterson., Writer & Youth & Community AdvocateMark Anthony Neal, Writer, Cultural Critic, & Professor at Duke UniversityHashim Pipkin, Writer, Cultural Critic, Ph.D. Candidate at Vanderbilt UniversityWade Davis, II, Writer, LGBTQ Advocate, & Former NFL PlayerDarnell L. Moore, Writer & Activist

When the Violence of Freedom Summer Came to New York City

Illusory Protection: Education & The Prison Industrial Complex

Photo Credit: HHCF


Illusory Protection: Education & The Prison Industrial Complex by Adisa Banjoko and Arash Daneshzadeh | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
“He confused science fiction with science facts, He couldn’t separate the block, from recorded tracks” – GZA, Illusory Protection
In 2006, I created the Hip-Hop Chess Federation to teach kids chess and correlating life skills. A few years ago, a young Black female student tried to sneak past me in the lobby at John O’Connell High School where I worked as a security guard. She was late. Being the ever inquisitive security guard, I slipped into stealth mode. It was a hot morning. As she tried to skip through the lobby entrance I playfully popped outta the shadows and said “What time is it?!”
The girl grabbed her phone from her front pocket and glanced at her phone—it was off. “ I dunno what time it is!” Half startled and irritated from my AM kung-fu moves.
For a soundless second her eyes blinked between my face and the face on the clock. Her shoulders sagged—her chin dropped like a scolded toddler. “I can’t tell time” she confessed. “Please don’t tell anybody, it’s  embarrassing. Nobody knows.”
I shook my head  “I won’t tell anybody, but you better learn to tell time. It’s not cool. That is a fundamental life skill. Get to class.”
I spent the next few weeks just looking at misgivings in the academic and emotional maturity of a lot of Black and Latino high school students. Gaps in basic math and English are present among these populations and according to NPR, “a new report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education says that only 58 percent of Latino male ninth graders graduate high school in four years. Only 52 percent of black males graduate in that length of time and that's compared to 78 percent of white non-Latino ninth graders.” Beyond that, we are witnessing what appears to be a near total collapse in past cultural standards, such as eye contact when meeting and proper etiquette when speaking with teachers and administrators, which have almost vanished from youth culture.
In chess there is a positional situation called “Illusory Protection.” Essentially your opponent puts you in a position where you are in a threatening situation, and in your counter move, your think you are protected—but you are not; You are still vulnerable to attack and being checkmated.
We get up every morning, kiss our kids on the head and go into work. Most of us feel like they are getting an education that will give them an edge. The truth is, that is not happening. These schools are giving parents and children a sense of illusory protection, simply because they attend. With the dropout rates as high as they are, it’s clearly not a safe move to keep on the path we now stand. The structural imbalance between communities and school personnel is reflected in broken relationships that, at times, fester into symptoms related to the school-to-prison pipeline. And students are blamed for resisting curriculum that fails to acknowledge their autonomy and their cultural loam. In short, “school norming” is a euphemism for cultural erasure and student defiance amounts to self-defense.
Enter: The intersections between conscious resistance, hip hop as an echo chamber of historically marginalized communities, and martial arts as defiance of oppressive indoctrination. There’s a contradiction in terms that schools give “voice” or “protection,” and by extension—power–to  students. Students have voice and power, their narratives and voices simply need to be heard and their identities acknowledged through a compendium of channels. The illusory protection is borne from this false binary that students, children, are empty receptacles who require development, rather than space to develop and be their own protectors—with elastic guidance, of course.
I recently saw a quote that said “Violence is Black children going to school for twelve years, but only getting a sixth grade education.” That used to apply mainly to Black people, but now it’s pretty much a nationwide theme. My friend Cheo Coker once referred to it as “the niggerization of America.” What was once reserved just for us, is now an American standard.
As a parent, this is more than just flipping the coin between public schools vs. charters. This is about what appears to be a collapse of the American Education system itself—across the board. This is about an intellectual avalanche of underfunded districts, broken families, out of touch administrators, and ill equipped teachers. We are currently squandering the cornerstone of America’s most precious resource- our children.
In the HHCF we have a life strategy concept called “The Three C’s: College, Career and Crime.” The first C teaches kids that college is a proven path to greatness and sustaining a good life. The second C guides those who are not fans of college to focus on a trade like computer coding, construction or mechanics. If an individual neglects to do either of the first two, crime is the predictable outcome. This crime will happen not because of a bad moral core, but from a fundamental need to survive. This helps HHCF kids learn the value of staying focused on their life path with a sense of purpose.   
Today everyone is talking about the reality of The New Jim Crow. Yet we fail to understand that the failing American Education system is the breeding ground for The New Jim Crow to thrive. These undereducated, unemployable boys and girls are lost in a rap video fantasy so far from reality—it’s terrifying.
Walking into the four-storied concrete building that houses John O’Connell High School in San Francisco’s Mission District, I notice the flyer that my partner—Adisa Banjoko with Hip Hop Chess Federation—has taped on the inside of the front door. It reads, “Parents come support your students tonight!
Immediately a windfall of concentric community issues raid the recesses of my mind like autumn leaves in an abandoned park. As the former Director of Community Programs at John O’Connell and Director of Educational Programming at HHCF, I am responsible for forging the intersections of play and learning central to after school programming. Behind me, the disruptive cacophony of traffic whistles urge motorists to skirt the emerging condominium construction sites incrementally placed like wildfire across the crevasses of the urban enclave, no doubt a hallmark of the city’s decades-on wrest with gentrification’s unrelenting grapple. I think about the parents, and where they’ll possibly park on this displaced road. Subsequently, I think about the administrators and sundry supervisors who will –like clockwork—blame the parents for their lack of imagination and will for “failing” to show up for their children during our Hip Hop Chess event.
The implications of under-employment, misrepresented public policy, elusive health care, trapping poverty, and other human-made malaise span broadly across our social milieus. In the case of gentrification, and it’s corollary symptoms upon infrastructure, one can reasonably forecast the cycle of community persecution that will ensue at the next staff meeting, if parents are scantily represented at yet another event at the school whose only parking lot is actually the outdoor basketball court which shares a space with the neighborhood Garden Project and is only open during after school hours, if not usurped exclusively for school board personnel. Nonetheless, the opportunity to connect competition to opportunity for institutional protection looms large for students, many of whom bashfully admit to Adisa and I that they are novices at the table and will need a refresher course of identifying their rooks, pawns, and queens.
Leading a short orientation on the illusory protection of one’s king via specific and sequential moves involving the knight and bishop, Adisa demonstrates the futility of sovereignty in chess, if one does not have a larger understanding of how the entire dynamic of power interplays. One student, Donzel whom we fondly refer to as “Zelly”, whispers in no uncertain terms that he’s just happy to be out of his group home. A sophisticated analysis of Donzel’s comment may unfurl layers of context to find intersections of racial isolation and poverty that bend into a lens of marginalization. Nonetheless, the ownership that Donzel, no longer a fledgling at chess, feels for his school manifests into the leadership he demonstrates during the event.
On this day, Donzel who is a senior, sits at a chess table with a freshman student, playing with only half the pieces whilst several students carefully exchange words of allegiance, encouragement, and friendly competition behind them in an oblong crowd. It is at this moment that I realize that Donzel has fomented his own impromptu learning opportunity. One that rests on the fundamental understanding that leadership is learning: the willingness to learn from others and share—not hoard—knowledge in order to refine what understanding was pre-existing. Asymmetrically, the principal asks how many students showed up for our event the next day, I say about 40, and he makes a hollow attempt to placate my assumed disappointment by saying “well, you’ll do better next time,” adding, “hopefully they show up with their homework done today”.
With dispiriting regularity, educational successes and failures are measured by outcomes easily corrupted by context such as language barriers and circumstances germane to poverty and our racialized economic model. It is the illusory protection of social fractures which cajoles the citizenry to participate in its civic obligation to pay taxes in a market-based society. This daft protection is a promise fraught with distortions that suggest poor students, particularly those of color, are only validated by their economic contributions whose vestiges start in the form of appraised value in the classroom. This idea, by my estimation is bankrupt as an intellectual design.
As demonstrated by Donzel, whose appetite for teaching (even unbeknownst to him) resonates with his peers given that his leadership was borne of mutualistic understanding. He is still learning. He is still a student—just like them, and vows to never stop being a student. That is the pillar upon which his bold attempt to facilitate a learning opportunity rests. Leadership is not subpoenaed by destiny, but rather a close juxtaposition of teacher and learner, inclined by parity to enjoy the process itself, of understanding another’s opponent. Of course, in this model, it is incumbent that the chess player assumes the opponent as a mentor and thereby a worthy adversary deserving of meticulous preparation.
The disparities in educational opportunities can be redressed. The underlying question is, what is the purpose of education? To endorse the economic model of subservience or to subvert hegemony by encouraging creative action and igniting agency. The former often amounts to a purpose far below the lofty expectations arranged for students from wealthier whiter areas of San Francisco. In those communities after school chess is an expectation that does not need to be validated through test scores or retroactive attendance strips. However, student leadership (no less potent as that of adults) is rendered dormant through paternalistic expectations. It will only come to the light of curricular norm when we channel the perspectives of the very students we’ve written off as disposable, rather than emerging leaders. Inoculating these leaders in academic vectors, requires more than a promise to protect them through security guards and stringent class schedules, but rather, a space like after school chess, in which electrified curiosities can cast light over the grim shadow of shallow purpose.
***
Adisa Banjoko is Founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation . Arash Daneshzadeh is Director of Education Programs at Hip-Hop Chess Federation and a Doctoral Candidate in Educational Leadership at the University of California, Davis. For more information follow @realhiphopchess on Instagram. 

Want More Stress In Your Life? Try Parenting A Teenager

POV to Broadcast '15 to Life: Kenneth's Story'--Film Addresses Juvenile Life Sentences

PBS | POV
Does sentencing a teenager to life without parole serve our society well? The United States is the only country in the world that routinely condemns children to die in prison. This is the story of one of those children, now a young man, seeking a second chance in Florida.  15 TO LIFE Kenneth's Story - Trailer from HitPlay Productions on Vimeo.At age 15, Kenneth Young received four consecutive life sentences for a series of armed robberies. Imprisoned for more than a decade, he believed he would die behind bars. Now a U.S. Supreme Court decision could set him free. 15 to Life: Kenneth’s Story follows Young’s struggle for redemption, revealing a justice system with thousands of young people serving sentences intended for society’s most dangerous criminals.

Pharoahe Monch: "Broken Again" (dir. aaronisnotcool)

Another stellar visual from Pharoahe Monch for "Broken Again" from his latest PTSD.  Directed by aaronisnotcool . 
Pharoahe Monch - Broken Again from aaronisnotcool on Vimeo.
Starring: Pharoahe Monch & Desiree Godsell
Production: BKLYN1834
Director’s Assistant: Erik Groszyk
Production Assistant: Elizabeth Godley
Wardrobe: Elizabeth Godley & Shireen Rahimi
Production Manager: Kate Pritchard & Femi “shamz” Obasaju
Location: 229w43 & The Club Casa
Writing & Direction: aaronisnotcool

Farai Chideya Talks with Veteran Actor Delroy Lindo

One with Farai | PRI
Delroy Lindo speaks of his Jamaican-British ancestry as well as his craft.
Farai Chideya speaks with actor , who's played everything from a gangster in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" to an animated character in the Disney film, "Up." He just completed a masters degree thesis on the Windrush generation -- post-WWII Jamaican immigrants to England, including his mother.

Out of the Mouth of Babes: When the Baubles of Diaspora are Up for Sale

On Subtlety, or Out of the Mouth of Babesby Simone Drake | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I made a last-minute decision that my family and I would travel to Brooklyn to see Kara Walker’s art installation, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby…,” at the now defunct Domino Sugar Refinery.  I decided I needed to see the installation in person, because I have published on Walker’s antebellum silhouettes, and I was intrigued by Facebook posts of numerous fellow academic-friends and the general controversy that surrounds much, but interestingly not all, of Walker’s art. The lines to see the installation were famously long, and on the second to last day, which is when I went, the line trailed further than the eye could see.  When my family finally entered the factory, I cannot say the experience lived up to the hype.  Yes, being there in person allowed me to see the carbon and carmelized sugar coating on the factory walls as a living memory of the troubling production process Walker signifies upon in the installation’s title.  And, yes, being there allowed me the first-hand experience of observing how others experienced the exhibit—both those in awe, as well as those who elected to pose in front of the ultra white, upward turned buttocks and vulva of the mammie-sphinx.  But the installation itself simply did not elicit for me what the hype proposed it ought to, and in the end, I found two other observations during my stay in NYC to be more interesting than Sugar Baby.My husband and I could have—and as we felt on a number of occasions during our six-day visit, probably should have—left our three sons (age 3.5, 8, and 10.5) with grandparents and enjoyed an always-needed getaway by ourselves.  Our investment in our children experiencing as many different places and people as possible, however, compels us to take them nearly everywhere with us, even when they are not always appreciative of the experiences.  My children were not appreciative of the long walk from the subway station to the factory, and then to the end of the seemingly endless entry line.  Upon entering the plant, they seemed unimpressed by the Sugar Baby.  Or perhaps her grandiosity was minimized by the sensorial experience of walking through the threshold and being struck by the stench of rotting sugar. As my children observed the dim and dank space and repeatedly said, “What’s that smell—it stinks in here,” the oldest asked the middle brother: “Would you ever want to work in a sugar factory?”  The immediate response was, “No!”  Their youthful innocence did not obstruct an ability to register the living history of the inhumanity of both the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that produced the sugarcane production labor initially or the exploitative labor of the largely immigrant population who refined it into the early twenty-first century.My husband and I took a lot of pictures of both Sugar Baby and the plant that housed her, while our children also took pictures; their pictures were almost entirely of one another and of the molasses-resin black boys that were strewn throughout the space, carrying baskets and bananas.  Perhaps because the molasses-boys were boys like themselves, or perhaps because they were close to their height and were not roped off, allowing close observation of the boys and the contents of the baskets, our sons directed most of their attention to the mammie-sphinx’s attendants and not the mammie-sphinx herself; they did not seem to register the risqué details of Sugar Baby.  Their disinterest in what was intended as spectacle, and interest in the more ironic symbolism of the byproduct of refining sugarcane in many ways seems to capture a greater nuance of the subtleties of Walker’s work than the Sugar Baby in all her grandiose and perspicuous glory.Their nuanced observations and attentiveness to what Walker reduced to tchotchkes­—a Yiddish word for trinket or bauble that is used to describe the boys—resonated with two other experiences during our visit: Brooklyn’s International African Arts Festival (IAAF) and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).  Marketed as “an outdoor African cultural oasis,” there were two things that struck me about the fair.  Nearly every “art” vendor was selling the same mass-produced “trinkets.”  The other thing I could not help but notice was the food vendors were primarily selling Caribbean cuisine; I only saw one West African food vendor (much different than my experience at Chicago’s African Festival of the Arts).  There is nothing wrong with a Diasporic infusion, but I could not help but feel a commodification and consumption of culture that resonates with Walker’s critique of the sugar trade.  Africa—the vast continent—seemed more to be up for sale than to be a set of diverse cultures to experience creatively.At the AMNH, the zoological and anthropological collections at the museum are at once fascinating and disturbing.  It is fascinating to see species of animals one is not likely to see in person.  It is also fascinating to learn about other cultures and time periods.  It is, however, a disturbing observance to note the curatorial politics of the exhibits in the “Cultural Halls.”  The cultural halls examine the cultures of Asia, Africa, North and South America, and the Pacific.  The non-Western focus of the cultural halls could seem refreshing given Georg Hegel’s positioning of Africa outside of culture, declaring it to be without history and with “no movement or development to exhibit […] still involved in the conditions of mere nature.”  The culture presented nonetheless positions non-Western cultures as pre-modern through its focus on ancient civilizations.  The focus on antiquity would not emphasize Hegel’s scientific racism if Europe was not conspicuously absent from the cultural halls.  By failing to include an exhibit featuring Europe’s ancient civilizations, it is implied that Europe was always modern—always at the pinnacle of the “great chain of being,” just as popular race science at the time of the museum’s founding insisted.  The conspicuous cultural absence of Europe is compounded by its only reference being in the Hall of Human Origins, inserting Europe, again, at the pinnacle of humanity; and surely the omnipotent presence of Theodore Roosevelt throughout the museum—through both a $40 million dollar renovation of the Rotunda and Memorial Hall in his honor, as well as the statue of Roosevelt on a horse, flanked by a partially clothed Native American and African man at the museum’s main entrance—contrast “civilized” whiteness to the fixed state of nature non-white cultures exist in and depicted in the museum halls.Although embracing different missions, the IAAF and the AMNH reduced Africa and its cultures to trinkets to be bought and consumed, making me, again, think about the molasses boys more than the Sugar Baby.  Rain and hot temperatures resulted in some of the molasses boys “not making it.”  Several molasses boys were pushed off to the side against the plant walls. They lay there in shattered pieces, victims of the climate and no longer useful.  While I see their brokenness as symbolic of the history Walker uses them to critique, their brokenness seemingly rendered them unusable by those maintaining the exhibit. The discarding of the molasses boys speaks to a global phenomenon of treating blackness as a commodity whose value is elevated only when it serves the interest of a public whose greatest interest is in profit rather than cultural appreciation. I am glad my children’s critical thinking skills registered this phenomenon.***
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 (2014).

When Languages Die, Ecosystems Often Die with Them

PRI
When a language goes extinct, it takes a wealth of knowledge about its local environment along with it. A new reports says that may be why languages and biodiversity are declining at similar rates around the world.

The Hip-Hop Fellow Outtakes: Young Guru on the Rise of Kanye West

Producer and engineer Young Guru discusses the rise of Kanye West in this outtake from the Ken Price film The Hip-Hop Fellow.

The Hip-Hop Fellow is a feature length documentary following Grammy Award winning producer 9th Wonder's tenure at Harvard University.Interviewees include Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Kendrick Lamar, Young Guru, Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Phonte, Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Ab-Soul, Rapper Big Pooh & DJ Premier.