Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 839

Left of Black S4:E19: Urban Bush Women Celebrate 30 Years of Art & Struggle

Left of Black S4:E19:  Urban Bush Women Celebrate 30 Years of Art & StruggleLeft of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder and artistic director of Urban Bush Woman.  On stage at Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater, Zollar discusses the history of the group, the importance of community engagement and its current stage works.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.*** 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 Urban Bush Women on Twitter: @UBWDance

Reel Black: Melvin Van Peebles Interview on WRTI-FM

Reel Black
J. Michael Harrison interviews Melvin Van Peebles and Jared Michael Nickerson about their new musical collaboration Laxative on his show The Bridge  on WRTI-FM. The band performs two songs and Van Peebles  talks about his filmmaking career. 
A Reelblack Exclusive. Camera: Wissahickon Media and Mike D. Edit: Mike D.

Archibald Motley: A Stroll [video]

Nasher Museum
The Nasher Museum's marketing team traveled to Chicago in October 2013 to film this short documentary, "Archibald Motley: A Stroll, Part I," which complements the original, traveling exhibition "Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist" with Richard J. Powell,  Davarian Baldwin, Kerry James Marshall and Dawoud Bey. 

Jerry Moise Rosembert: Portrait of a Haitian Graffiti Artist

Nomadic Wax

To commemorate the 4th anniversary of the Haitian earthquake, Nomadic Wax is releasing a new short on the Port-au-Prince-based graffiti artist, Jerry Moise Rosembert, as part of their Democracy in Haiti series. 
Jerry, 29, is Haiti's most prolific graffiti artist. In the video short, he discusses his transition to more socially conscious work after the earthquake and his vision to bring about change through his art. 

Mizzou Football Star Comes Out: The Michael Sam Interview [extended video]

The New York Times
Michael Sam, a defensive lineman from the University of Missouri (Mizzou Tigers), spoke publicly about his sexual orientation and could become the first openly gay player in the National Football League. 

Wahneema Lubiano on Stuart Hall

On Stuart Hall by Wahneema Lubiano | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I discovered his work in graduate school at Stanford in the same period of time that Sandra Drake and Sylvia Wynter were offering me whole new worlds of thought in literature. Stuart helped me imagine a bigger and more complicated understanding of how to think the world than I had ever imagined, how thought itself could become a worthy goal that could take me past the limits of what an academic future might promise in service to a complicated social world. 
When I met him, years after my first encounter with his writing and years after I entered the profession, his presence at the Race Matters conference pushed everyone present to think about critique as pleasure and service both to political thought and to building fellowship among activists, not by reducing our goals for the sake of intellectual or strategic efficiency, but by enlarging them in order to bring more people along with us.  
Considering that more than 30 years have passed since I first encountered him on the page, and more than 20 years since I first met him face to face, I don’t know how I could have thought that he would live forever, but I did.  And he does.
***
Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African & African-American Studies at Duke University. She is the editor of the acclaimed The House that Race Built.

I Believe Marcus Smart! by David J. Leonard

I Believe Marcus Smart! by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Irrespective of denials and excuses, the existence of supposed video evidence, press conferences, or explanatory apologies from Jeff Orr, I believe Marcus Smart. I believe him because according Oklahoma State announcers, “OSU radio said immediately after the incident that Smart told the OSU coaches that the fan said THE word.”
I believe Smart because that word is hurled at African Americans daily. According to Howard J. Ehrlich, director of The Prejudice Institute, between 850,000 and one million students (roughly 25 percent of students of color and five percent of white students-experience racially and ethnically-based violence (name calling, verbal aggression, harassing phone calls and “other forms of psychological intimidation”) each year. And this only reflects what is reported and what is seen. 
As Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin have discovered with Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage, white students use the n-word and tell racist jokes with great frequency, a reality that impacts the culture and environment of America’s colleges and universities.   To deny his truth is to ignore the daily violence experienced by all African American students.
Ibelieve Marcus Smart because of the history of American sports, a history marred by white fans subjecting black athletes to virulent racism.  The history of integration is a history of racist slurs and violence.  The history of American sports from boxing to golf, from collegiate to professional, is one of racial violence.
Despite a yearning to imagine fan racism as a European soccer problem, fan racism is a reality of contemporary sports. Last year, fans at a University of Minnesota at Duluth mocked the visiting University of North Dakota hockey team, jeering “Small Pox Blankets” – a chant that belittles the school and Native Americans through a reference to its mascot, which converts the reality of genocide into a sporting smack down.  In 2012, members of the pep band from the University of Southern Mississippi yelled, “Where’s your green card?” at Kansas State University freshman Angel Rodriguez (who was born in Puerto Rico) as he took foul shots.
In Pittsburgh (PA), fans and players from Brentwood High hurled racial epithets at Monessen High basketball players.  During this game, three fans also dressed in banana costumes surrounding the primarily black Monessen team, as they left for the locker at halftime, yelling epithets while making monkey noises.  Some parents reported that members of the Brentwood squad joined in, calling its opponent, “monkeys and cotton pickers.”  These are not isolated incidences. As Dave Zirin noted,
I have over the years spoken to a ton of former college basketball players who have stories about having racial slurs tossed at them by fans. They are conditioned before games to never go into the stands, and just keep their anger in check, no matter the cost to their mental and physical health. They are also pressured not speak about it to the media after games, to keep up the illusion of college athletics as some kind of innocent, wholesome endeavor. This dynamic, as much as anything, speaks to the utter powerlessness of so-called student-athletes.
Shortly after Saturday’s night game, Desmond Mason tweeted “I was called the N word EVERY game I played in Lubbock!” He noted a similar level of racial hostility when playing in College Station.  Racism and harassment is as part of college (and professional) sports as tailgating, cheerleaders, and corporate dollars.   Just yesterday, Arizona State fans spit on players from University of Oregon as the left the floor.  
Smart’s truth resonates with so many other truths, so many other testimonies, so many other voices.  
In the face of widespread criticism, denials, and illegibility of black anger, I stand with Marcus Smart because he had every right to be furious.  Who knows how often he has to deal with racism, taunting, and workplace violence?  I cannot imagine. 
It is unacceptable how many pundits have concluded, “Whatever that fan said, Marcus Smart was wrong to react.”  Such logic erases anti-black racism and Smart’s own humanity.  It makes clear that no matter what was said, Marcus Smart has no right to react, no right to be angry, and no right to show the world his emotions.  I stand with Marcus because I refuse to stand with those who taunted him and those who aid and abet a culture that normalizes this violence. 
Whether we believe reports that the “N Word” was hurled at Smart or the claims that he just called him “piece of crap” his muted rage is understandable.  His restraint should be noted; the restraint of countless other athletes should be celebrated.
I stand with Marcus because neither the “N word” nor calling a person a "piece of crap" is acceptable.  Each of these terms is dehumanizing and disrespectful; each is violent and part of a larger history of racism.  Clearly, given the history of white supremacy, the “N word” and “piece of crap” are not the same, yet “piece of crap” in this context is encoded with racism.
And what does it say about sports and its racial contours that yelling "piece of crap" has somehow become normalized and part of the “fan experience.”  It’s about time we said no to this sort of behavior; it’s about time we said no to the hostility, violence, and racism which has no place in collegiate sports (or elsewhere). 
I stand with Marcus because the hostility undermines both his educational experience and his work environment. Just as we must oppose all forms of workplace harassment, we must oppose a culture of hostility that traffics in racism, sexism, homophobia, and dehumanizing rhetoric.
I am disgusted by the seeming acceptance of Mr. Orr’s story from Oklahoma State, from the media, and from all too many within the public discourse.  The failure to hear Marcus is yet another instance where black life, and the truths uttered by African Americans is denied. 
I stand with Marcus Smart because despite being 19 he isn’t afforded the innocence and youthfulness that is deployed daily in explanation of actual bad behavior from countless white youth. That innocence has been reserved for a man who has a history of bad behavior; for a booster, who “represents” his university by harassing and berating college students. 
I stand with Marcus Smart because no matter what Mr. Orr said, he was going to be treated the same way: with demonization, discipline and punishment. Had a fan held up a sign with the "N Word,” eliciting a reaction from an African American player, do we really think the media, the coach, the university and others would be like "We support you; we you’re your anger; we understand why you pushed him.” Clearly not. 
I am sick of the endless efforts to protect whiteness all while criminalizing black bodies.  Marcus Smart has been subjected to an array of instruments of disciplinarity and As noted by Albert Camus, “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” Marcus Smart refused to be a victim; and I refuse to stand with anyone but Marcus Smart.
***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman.  Leonard’s latest books include  After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness   (SUNY Press) and African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings (Praeger Press) co-edited with Lisa Guerrero. He is currently working on a book Presumed Innocence: White Mass Shooters in the Era of Trayvon about gun violence in America.

Op-Doc--When Loud Music Turned Deadly: the Case of Jordan Davis (dir. Orlando Bagwell)

New York Times--Op-Doc
This video tells the story of a black teenager in Florida who was killed by a white man after an argument over loud music. The slain youth's father shares his loss.

Empire of Necessity: Historian Greg Grandin on Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World

Democracy Now
In his new book, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin examines how the transnational slave trade transformed the world, causing mass economic, social and political upheaval in ways that continue to reverberate today. 

Jane M. Saks and Project present 'Sweet Tea Black Gay Men of the South' | Feb 12-22 in Durham, NC

Based on his award-winning book, E. Patrick Johnson stars in this new one-man exploration of southern Black Gay communities.  A fascinating, validating oral history inspired by the author’s personal journey, Sweet Tea explores the perceptions, angst, triumphs and vulnerabilities of this minority within a minority. With passion and insight, Johnson reinforces the spoken-word tradition while challenging stereotypes – and finding humor, humanity and hope within.

Performances
Wednesday, Feb 12 at 7:30pm | Pay-What-You-Can Preview Thursday, Feb 13 at 7:30pm | Opening Night with After-Party at Alley Twenty-Six Friday, Feb 14 at 7:30pm | Talkback with Mark Anthony Neal | Saturday, Feb 15 at 7:30pm Sunday, Feb 16 at 2:00pm Thursday, Feb 20 at 7:30pm | With post-show conversation Friday, Feb 21 at 7:30pm Saturday, Feb 22 at 7:30pm


Location
PSI TheatreDurham Arts Council120 Morris Street, Durham$20 General Admission$10 StudentsGroup rates available, email for info.
How to order
Online: Click herePhone: Call 866-811-4111In Person: At the theater up t0 45 minutes prior to performance