Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 854

The African Americans: 'Afros, Soul Train & Self-Love'--#ManyRiversPBS

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (episode 6)
“Black is Beautiful” came out of the Black Power movement. But it quickly permeated the American cultural mainstream in the adoption of the Afro hairstyle and Afro-centric fashion. Blackness, or “soul,” became the epitome of cool in popular films, music and advertising. By 1969 there were black characters on 21 prime time TV shows.

'Best Man Holiday': A Black-Black Film by Simone Drake

Best Man Holiday : A Black-Black Filmby Simone Drake | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
After anxiously awaiting the opening, I saw Best Man Holiday the Sunday afternoon opening weekend. Upon walking into the large, stadium-style theater, my husband looked at the mismatched, small audience of viewers and said, “I guess they were expecting a larger crowd.”  I glanced at two white women in the row behind us and scoped out an additional cluster a few rows in front of us, replying, “I wonder why white people watch a film like this.”  My husband asked why wouldn’t they, and without putting on my intellectual-professorial hat, I quickly proclaimed, “Because this is a black-black film.”  My husband’s dubious expression prompted me to break down my essentialist assertion.                 Best Man Holiday is not a Tyler Perryesque-style film that white people watch to laugh at rather than with black people; it also is not a slave film or some other black oppression film that white liberals flock to in order to feel guilt and receive penance.  BMH, like its 1999 precursor, Best Man, is a film about black people for black people.  Here’s what I mean by that loaded declaration.               Many “black films”—meaning black-casted and typically therefore also black-directed—often are trying to reach a racially and ethnically diverse audience, because that is how money is made. It was director Malcolm D. Lee’s goal when writing the script for BMH.  In a Washington Post interview, Lee responds to a USA Today tweet describing his film as “black-themed,” insisting black film is not a genre and his mission has been to make movies starring African American actors and about African American experiences, situating them in the mainstream by telling very “universal” stories.  His goal is to humanize African Americans and demonstrate they possess all of the same human qualities as all other human beings—a “shared human experience.” 
I am not convinced that a shared human experience allows a film to transcend a particular raced experience.  When Lee insists the film is not about race, he misses the point.  The film does not have to engage the social construction of race and its lived realities to engage racialization.  In fact, when he denounces race, he contradicts himself when explaining what draws the high turnout of black moviegoers who undid the underperformance prediction of critics.  Lee suggests familiarity draws his black audience—the ability to see themselves in the characters. 
When I told my husband this is a black-black film means it is a film that black people relate to, he asked if that meant I could not relate to white-casted films.  I said, of course I can relate, but the relational aspect of BMH is different.  This film is nostalgic of some specifically black experiences from high school, college, and graduate school. I’ve never seen a white quartet dance to New Edition, and I don’t remember any white, female classmates swooning over the group; in fact, white people had not discovered black popular culture at New Edition’s prime.  
I have not attended a white-casted film in which the black audience freely and vocally talks back to the film, as they did when I viewed the film (I’m glad someone—turns out it was my cousin, LaQuan, who I didn’t realize was there—shouted for me during the shirtless Morris Chestnut scene). And, as a Black Greek, my experience has been that white people know very little about Black Pan-Hellenic Organizations, and the fact that the film incorporated the values, culture, and even fraternal language of those organizations into the film without footnote suggests Lee is not being completely honest with himself.
If Lee must say he is humanizing African Americans, then this is a film about what it means to be raced, because white film directors do not have to humanize white characters; they do not have to demonstrate how white characters are no different when it comes to human affect and sentimentality than any other humans.  This is why black audiences flocked to Best Man in 1999 and returned in 2013.  There has not been much on the silver screen between those years to make black people feel human—to make us feel good, deep down on the inside.  Sure, black people enjoyed Steve Harvey’s Think Like a Man(2012) and continue to support the Tyler Perry enterprise in spite of its less than humanizing qualities, but those films do not portray the interior lives of the characters in a manner that complicates the very need to universalize the black experience. 
How many “black-themed” films have foregrounded, or even included, children in the storyline?  BMH did not foreground them, but they were present and an important element of the storyline.  I dare say it might have been as far back as Kasi Lemmons’s masterful depiction of the interior lives of a black, southern family in Eve’s Bayou (1997) since a depiction of the interiority of black children had been represented on screen.  
How often do white filmmakers create a film with a predominantly or exclusively black cast and present them in ways that defy the stereotypes of the limited imagination of a dominant society that benefits from their social and political subordination?  Unless I missed something, the answer is, not often.  The fact that both Lee and journalists/bloggers insist upon the universality of the film disturbs me.  It means that only very particular types of experiences can be claimed by black people as their own, which means I must address a different type of black film: the slave narrative.
Released earlier this autumn, British film director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave was also an instant hit.  In some very clear ways, 12 Years is a black film.  Slavery in the United States was not a universal experience—it was a deliberately raced experience.  Bloggers and the posts by my FB friends about this film perplex me.  The resounding sentiment is that this film finally got slavery right; this is a film that finally fully and accurately depicted the brutality and dehumanization of slavery, and without white saviors being foregrounded. I deliberately have not seen this film.  I decided if I am going to spend $10 to see a film, it will be one that makes me feel good—really, really good.  I will see 12 Yearswhen it comes to Red Box. 
I have not yet seen any commentary suggesting 12 Years has made black people, or anyone else, feel really, really good.  Instead, I hear it makes black people feel angry.  Angry yet so pleased with the accuracy of the brutality and dehumanization.  Why is it that trauma and pain can be claimed as the quintessential black experience, while the experiences of Black Greek life, R&B, and the college experience of “all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria,” and therefore forming exclusively black social groups and bonds, not be a black experience?  
Does this mean that the deep-rooted shame and pain of a slave past has so warped the black psyche that notions of poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s “black interior” must be rejected in the twenty-first century and replaced by insistence upon a generic, universality that strips African Americans of the really, really real aspects of being “black” in a nation that has never recognized their interior lives in the first place? Wow.
***

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 (forthcoming, LSU Press) and her second book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making  is under contract with University of Chicago Press. 

Shopping While Black...on Black Friday

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Jessica Williams learns that it's hard to take advantage of all the Black Friday steals when you are being accused of stealing.The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Traumatic Return of Michael Moses Ward by Michael Awkward

The Traumatic Return of Michael Moses Ward                                by Michael Awkward | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
My wife and I will go see Let the Fire Burn this evening, the only timetheaters in or near Ann Arbor are scheduled to show this acclaimed documentary about the disputatious back-to-Nature group, MOVE.  Oddly, although I am very interested in seeing the film, directed by George Washington University professor Jason Osder, because it occurred just prior to this film’s limited national release and because the reviewers mention it only parenthetically, I am just as curious about the September 20th death of one of the film’s central figures, Michael Moses Ward, a truck driver and part-time barber who survived of the massive fire of May 13, 1985 that ignited when a bomb was dropped by the Philadelphia police on the roof of MOVE’s row house.  While the autopsy performed on his body has not yet been released, I can’t shake the feeling that the 41 year old man’s death was another tragic result of the 40 year battle between MOVE and my native city.   At the very least, the unhappy irony that Ward, who was taught as a child that modern technology and life were physically and spiritually pernicious, died on vacation aboard the Carnival Dream, a cruise ship that is a floating signifier of lavish modern excess, is indisputable. 
Christened “Birdie Africa” as a toddler soon after his mother joined MOVE, Ward was separated from the group permanently when the world he knew was destroyed.  After enduring hours of sustained terror as tear gas, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, a small pond’s quantity of water, bomb blasts, and the threatening pronouncements of a police commissioner claiming to represent America, the dazed, ravenous 13 year old Birdie was burned severely as he escaped the group’s blazing home.  He then nearly drowned in a large puddle of water that had been discharged from fire hoses whose emissions failed to dislodge either the group or its rooftop bunker.  (At dusk, the police and fire commissioners decided against using these hoses to extinguish the fire while it was eminently manageable, hoping it would destroy the bunker that afforded MOVE a tactical advantage over the heavily armed police force.  This horrendous mistake, along with the menacing presence of police whom the home’s residents had every reason to distrust, helped to cause the deaths of eleven MOVE members, including Birdie’s mother, and the destruction of sixty one houses owned by black working class neighbors whose rights the city was endeavoring to protest against MOVE’s escalating acts of verbal and physical harassment.) 
After Birdie’s escape – and despite the terror he experienced during the siege as well as the deaths of his mother and other people whom he loved, he insisted he was grateful that the fire had freed him from MOVE’s tyranny – he pursued a mainstream American life as Michael Moses Ward, a life that included bicycles, television, video games, football, marriage, parenthood, divorce, military service, and, in his last days, a family vacation aboard the ornate technological marvel, the Carnival Dream.  Still, his traumatic past intervened with regularity: nightmares of being trapped in a house engulfed by flames; scars imprinted upon his flesh that no surgery could wholly erase; an abiding fear that he would be harmed by or forced to rejoin MOVE; memories of abuse so distressing that he refused to detail its precise nature except to his father, whose earlier efforts to liberate him ended when members of the group threatened to kill Birdie if he persisted; and, judging from widely distributed photographs of his somber visage, painfully uncomfortable interviews with local and national media that sought his input for stories marking major anniversaries of the bombing. 

My distress at the news of his passing is heightened, perhaps, by my regret for deciding against discussing Ward in the brief examination of MOVE that appears in Philadelphia Freedoms, a new book that explores traumatic black American experiences in the post-civil rights era.  Curious to consider what I might have written, I reread newspaper articles and books on MOVE, along with digesting from the first time the Special Investigation Commission’s Report on the bombing.  Despite my thorough investigation, I’m still unsure that examining the child survivor would have proven a better choice than discussing, as I did, the still-traumatized city’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, who, on the 25th anniversary of the bombing, assumes responsibility for the highly destructive raid while absolving himself of responsibility in the same breath.   
In the Report’s Foreword, its chair, William H. Brown III, insists that “the process of the work of the Commission and its involvement with the public was absolutely necessary if Philadelphians are to work through their collective pain of May 13th.  It is necessary if our community is to heal the scars that remain from the tragedy that occurred on Osage Avenue” (272).  Brown’s concern with communal healing is echoed in an addendum where, in the section entitled “The Blood of Children,” Commission member Charles Bowser argues that “at the heart of this tragedy is the indelible stain made by the blood of innocent children,” a stain that “also marks the lives of every person who accepted a role in their death from the highest office to the Osage asphalt street.”  The city officials whom Bowser criticizes include Goode, its police and fire commissioners, and its head of Health and Human Services (who was a third cousin of mine), all of whom displayed “a wanton and callous disregard for the lives and the safety of the children” affiliated with MOVE.  
Taken together, these acts of atonement implore us to recommit ourselves to fulfilling civil responsibilities by attempting to: 1), make sense of the MOVE bombing, an unparalleled example of the sometimes-destructive clash between our ideals and our sometimes-irrepressible human frailties; 2), attend to its traumatic effects on survivors such as Ward and millions of others; and 3), approach local and national tragedies in general in a manner that ultimately enhances our efforts – in the nation’s First City and elsewhere – to achieve the American ideal of e pluribus Unum.   The pain Ward suffered and the obstacles he sought to overcome obligate us to consider the entirety of his life along with the circumstances of his death. 
By all accounts, Let the Fire Burn compels its viewers to look closely at the complex causes of the MOVE bombing.  Unfortunately, however, in his published comments about Ward’s death, Osder speaks only about his role as a survivor of the MOVE siege. “In a strange way,” Osder claims, this death “has reminded us of the nature of the event itself: it’s tragic that he died young, but it serves as a reminder of the other five children that didn’t even live to age 41.”  I feel strongly that we owe it to the young man who suffered through outrages not of his own making to assess his life in broader terms than the filmmaker does in assessing the possible meanings of Ward’s death.  But no matter how strong my compunction to do so, the best I can muster is a list of what are, for me, provocative questions for which I have no confirmable answers. 
How difficult was it for the former Birdie, while in the midst of working to remake his life, to rehash aspects of his troubled life and to offer psychological progress reports on each occasion reporters deemed important?   Had he fully embraced all aspects of modernity, a condition that John Africa taught his followers was evil and wholly destructive?  How anguished might he have been as he vacationed on the Carnival Dream, knowing that, because of the acclaim earned by Osder’s documentary, upon his return to suburban Philadelphia, he would be asked to undergo yet another round of public scrutiny of the damage that had been done to him and of the current state of his wounds?   Could he have appeared, as his father describes, to have “put the past behind him,” to be “doing well” and “very joyful” as he swam “with the dolphins” during a family vacation on the Carnival Dream, a floating symbol of modern excess, yet remained inescapably within the throes of childhood trauma?  How disconcerting might it have been for him to know that the videotaped testimony of his former self and identity, the 13 year old Birdie Africa who, according to a film reviewer for The Nation, “seems more like a shy 6-year-old in the deposition, answering the gently coaxing interrogator so guilelessly that you adopt his viewpoint as the simple truth,” was used as a crucial narrative device in Let the Fire Burn?  How fearful might he have been if and when he learned that, in this documentary, “the people, places and things on-screen seem uncommonly immediate,” that no significant effort was made by the filmmaker “to distance the images, which come before you with the air of something irreducible, as if they were not representations of the past but solid pieces of it”? 
Even as he admits to being baffled about how his “extremely fit” son, a “41-year old man with the body of a 17-year old” who “worked out every day and was very particular about what he put in his body,” had died on the final day of their vacation, Andino Ward expresses profound gratitude for having had the privilege of nurturing the son to whom MOVE had denied him access.  His equally grateful son spent the last 27 years of his life recreating himself as someone whose identity was no longer subsumed by MOVE, efforts which, like all attempts to overcome trauma, seemed daunting, halting, and likely not wholly successful.  (It is impossible to read of the fastidiousness of Ward’s diet and exercise regime without surmising that they were healthy responses to the perverse extremes of MOVE practices.)  As he insisted during the Commission hearings and in newspaper interviews, though he continued to have terrible nightmares about his past victimization and found it difficult to trust people, he was committed, with his father’s help, to overcoming both his life with MOVE and a day of unimaginable terror when Philadelphia used what its mayor acknowledged was “any means necessary” to evict the city’s most disruptive residents.  
It takes roughly 6 weeks for toxicology reports to be completed, so we still do not know the general condition of Ward’s internal organs and the precise cause of his death.  However, the other survivor of the Philadelphia fire, the still-active spokesperson, Ramona Africa, is sure that he died because he’d been separated from MOVE and was immersed in the corrupt modern world against which the group’s leader had warned his followers: “if he was still with MOVE and hadn't been snatched from MOVE, he would not have drowned on no cruise ship. We don't go on cruise ships. It just shows you how protective MOVE's belief is. John Africa taught us that it is dangerous to be out in a body of water like that."
Unlike Ramona Africa, I cannot pretend to know why the young man she knew as Birdie died. (Given what I’ve learned of MOVE’s violent treatment of members who rejected or expressed serious doubts about its teachings, however, I am skeptical of her claim that MOVE would have been “protective” of Ward had he been left alone with its embittered members either as a child “snatched” away by Philadelphia authorities or as a thoroughly modern adult.)  I suspect, however, that on the eve of his return to Philadelphia, his presence on the Carnival Dream felt disharmonious with “MOVE belief” he imbibed until he was on the eve of adolescence that, like the benefits of careful diet and strenuous daily exercise, continued to shape aspects of his being.  Unlike Osder, I feel strongly that, in his death, we must honor his efforts to transcend his MOVE origins and his status as a (perhaps guilt-filled) child survivor.  I want – and, in a not fully rational way, need – Ward’s post-MOVE life, his hard-fought battles for normalcy and psychic peace, his triumphs, large and small, and his painfully inevitable setbacks, to matter. 
Saved from drowning by a white policeman who refused to see the malnourished boy as a terroristic combatant, nurtured back to health by a father who encouraged him to rename himself, Ward made choices as an adult – to join the military to defend values that John Africa et al despised; to drive products along the East Coast, perhaps as a curative to a claustrophobic childhood existence; to cut others’ hair to keep it from forming into dreadlocks that MOVE members believed properly symbolized their antagonistically natural lifestyle; and to exalt publicly in the fact, because of the otherwise lethal fire, he “got out” – that fly boldly in the face of the precepts of the group that, long before the siege, he wanted desperately to escape.  I doubt, however, that he ever completely threw off the effects of his childhood existence in that long-incinerated MOVE home in which he had been trapped both by his putative family and, finally, by representatives of the city of Philadelphia. 
Our sporadic attempts to revisit moments of collective trauma that might otherwise be misunderstood or unremembered kept pulling Ward figuratively back into a burning house of horrors.  We need newspaper articles, Action News reports, and widescreen spectacles to link our present circumstances to the nightmarish pain that Ward recalled too clearly.  But, unlike the rest of us, Ward desperately needed to block those fiery images, to silence blood-curdling screams we could only imagine – to overcome that fateful day – in order to live a productive life.  The edification, morality, and civil responsibility of the rest of us require that we have access in perpetuity to images of him escaping the Osage Avenue inferno.  No matter what the autopsy concludes, because our collective needs and Ward’s needs diverged so dramatically, I suspect that, aboard the Carnival Dream, his return to Philadelphia, to his starring role as Birdie Afric***

Michael Awkward, Gayl A. Jones Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan, is the author, most recently, of Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat and Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity. Professor Awkward’s latest book, Philadelphia Freedoms: Black American Trauma, Memory, and Culture after King , was published by Temple University Press in October.

Jesus Huerta: A Child Killed in Durham Police Custody [Opinion]

Jesus Huerta: A Child Killed in Durham Police Custody [Opinion] by Lamont Lilly | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Another Durham resident has now died in a controversial encounter with the Durham Police Department.
This time it was teenager and local Riverside High School student, Jesus Huerta. An official response from Durham police chief, Jose Lopez states that 17 year old, Jesus Huerta died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while placed under arrest in the back seat of a police squad car. 
After Durham police officer, Samuel Duncan arrested Huerta, reports state that Officer Duncan heard a loud noise from the vehicle’s rear seat and jumped out of his moving patrol cruiser. Duncan’s squad car then slammed into a parked van, leaving Huerta shot and killed in the process. This incident occurred right outside of the Durham Police Department’s headquarters parking lot.
Personally, I don’t believe one word of what the Durham Police Department has stated. It seems to me, and many others throughout the city, Durham police officers are simply covering their tracks with a concocted story that makes no physical or logical sense whatsoever. Judging from the city’s buzz of conversations, many residents believe Officer Duncan was directly responsible for Huerta’s death. It is also quite disturbing how the first thing Durham police chose to highlight in this controversy was Huerta’s past juvenile offenses. Trespassing and misdemeanor possession of cannabis was not the cause of Jesus Huerta’s death.
Such sheer lack of accountability on behalf of the Durham Police Department is not only disrespectful, it’s outright despicable. Entertaining such ploy is merely a distraction from gathering the truth of what actually happened, here. Maybe someone should pull up the Durham Police Department’s criminal Unfortunately, Jesus Huerta became the third Durham resident killed by or in Durham police custody over the last five months. Thirty-three year old, Jose Ocampo was killed July 27th, shot four times in the chest for possessing a knife. Twenty-six year old, Derek Deandre Walker was executed September 17th by a Durham police sniper for publicly threatening to commit suicide.
Personally, I’m not worried about the “Bloods and Crips” in Durham. I’m worried about our local thugs in pressed blue uniforms. I’m worried about gang members who carry badges, tasers, steel batons and handguns, “law enforcers” who are paid with public tax money to terrorize people. 
Jesus Huerta deserves more than blanket apologies from city officials. Phony condolences are of no use, here. Huerta’s family members deserve justice; local Durham residents deserve the truth. A child has been killed, and we need answers. We need answers and Officer Samuel Duncan arrested. Now!
***

Lamont Lilly is a contributing editor with the Triangle Free Press, Human Rights Delegate with Witness for Peace and organizer with Workers World Party. He resides in Durham, NC.

'Why is Science so White?': Achieving Diversity In Science & Tech

HuffPost Live: Achieving Diversity In Science & Tech
According to a recent study by the National Science Foundation, black men and women made up only 5% of scientists and engineers working in their fields in 2010. Why is this and how can we diversify science?

Originally aired on November 18, 2013Hosted by: Josh ZeppsGuests:Chris Emdin @chrisemdin (New York, NY) Associate Professor of Science Education at Columbia UniversityDr. Danielle Lee @DNLee5 (Stillwater, OK) Outreach ScientistNicholas St. Fleur @scifleur (Santa Cruz, CA) Science Journalist

Jasiri X: "Strange Fruit (Class of 2013)"

Dedicated to the memories of Renisha McBride, Jonathan Ferrell and Kendrick Johnson, "Strange Fruit (Class of 2013)" was produced by Religion and directed by Haute Muslim. 



Free Download at http://jasirix.bandcamp.com/
Follow Jasiri X at https://twitter.com/jasiri_x

LYRICS

They say Jasiri X you preach too much
I'm like Black people we asleep too much
A Black President but he doesn't speak for us
Another Black body lynched is not unique to us
Meanwhile Kanye's rocking confederate flags
Jay Z and Barneys going half on sweaters and bags
It's not their fault it's ours all we measure is swag
They getting money get money what's better than cash
Forever in last riding in Berratas and Jags but don't crash
If you do and need help don't ask
Cause all Renisha got was a shotgun blast
Just for knocking on the door left rotting on the floor
Half her face gone but no one was locked up like Akon
Black life comes with no insurance like State Farm
Race wrong black people better put ya brakes on
End up on a strange porch ended up as stained corpse
Different city same sport
It's not a accident if you hit the witness you aimed for
Bullets left her face torn
Victim in a race war make a nigga hate more
Show up at that same door let that 38 roar
What will be my fate Lord death by an officer?
Who I ran to thinking help he would offer up
10 shot to the chest stretched now they chalking
Another black man looking fresh in that coffin or
Beaten to my ribs cracked rolled up in a gym mat
Blood on my kicks match police say I did that
No crime the kids black cased closed casket shut
But take his organs fill em with newspaper and patch em up
Now tell me if that bullshit is matching up
I know you just wanna see her twerking then back it up
But that's what happens when we make our rappers leaders
And our most intelligent just wanna be on TV speaking
And they give reality TV shows to preachers
and we think activism is Facebooking and Tweeting
12 years a slave we still fighting for freedom
Just look at the headlines seeing is believing

HuffPost Live: Former Spelman College Students Respond To Nelly

HuffPost Live: Former Spelman College Students Respond To Nelly
This past Tuesday, hip-hop artist Nelly appeared on HuffPost Live and commented on the controversy of a bone marrow drive turned protest of his 'Tip Drill' video at Spelman College in 2004. Former Spelman College students involved join us to respond.
Hosted by: 
Marc Lamont HillGuests:

Asha Jennings @AshaCamille (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) Former Member of Spelman Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance; Attorney at the Coca-Cola CompanyJelani Cobb @jelani9 (Hartford, CT) Director of the Institute of African American Studies at the University of Connecticut; Former Professor at Spelman CollegeLeana Cabral @faanmail (Philadelphia, PA) Former Member of Spelman Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance; Contributor to FAAN Mail blogMoya Bailey @moyazb (State College, PA) Post Doctoral Fellow at Penn State University; Former Member of Spelman Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance

Hutchins Center Colloquium feat. Mark Anthony Neal: What if the Greensboro Four had Twitter? (11/20)

Hutchins Center Colloquium feat. Mark Anthony Neal: What if the Greensboro Four had Twitter? (11/20)
Location: 
Harvard UniversityHiphop Archive & Research Institute, Hutchins Center, 104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R, Cambridge, MA
Date/Time: 
November 20, 2013 - 12:00pm
What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter? Social Justice in the Age of Social Media and Hip-Hop  
With the Greensboro Sit-ins of 1960 as a jump-off, Neal’s talk will examine the use of “social media” historically in Black social justice movements and examine examples of how social media has been used in contemporary social justice activities.  Neal argues that dating back to the Black experience on southern plantations, and including hip-hop in the 1980s, forms of social media have existed as code—“Black Code”—that served the needs of Black communities that were public and dispersed. Additionally Neal will look at organizations like One Hood Media Academy in Pittsburgh, Digital Youth Network in Chicago and Black Girls Code in San Francisco, that are using digital technology and social media to address communities in crisis. Finally Neal will discuss the concept of the “mobile” Diaspora.
Mark Anthony NealHiphop Archive Fellow; Professor, African & African-American Studies, Duke University
Introduction by Marcyliena Morgan, Director, Hiphop Archive & Research Institute at the Hutchins Center
NOTE SPECIAL LOCATION:
Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, Hutchins Center, 104 Mount Auburn Street, 3R, Cambridge, MA
Lecture is free and open to the public. There will be a Q&A session following each talk.
Food and drink are not allowed within the Hiphop Archive & Research Institute.

‘Mr. Moms’ the Funniest Woman in the World: Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley

"I was on my way down to Miami...I mean They-ami. I was ridin' along in my Cadillac, you know, goin' through one of them little towns in South Carolina. Pass through a red light. One of them big cops come runnin' over to me, say, 'Hey woman, don't you know you went through a red light?' I say, 'Yeah I know I went through a red light.' 'Well, what did you do that for?' I said, 'Cause I seen all you white folks goin' on the green ligh .I thought the red light was for us!'" —Jackie “Moms” Mabley
When one of the most legendary comedic shows ever, Saturday Night Live, made recent headlines for a reason other than its iconic lampoons of famous figures, SNL being SNL of course quickly capitalized on the negative attention about its historic lack of black women cast members and mocked the heat they were receiving in a skit. And of course, the show didn’t utilize say a brand new black woman cast member but instead further swatted the criticism by featuring the hottest black actress of the moment, Kerry Washington [of Scandal fame in case you’ve really been under a rock somewhere or close your eyes in the grocery store or do not search for anything on the net]. One of SNL’s two black male cast members, Kenan Thompson, elevated the well-deserved criticism of SNL by making one declaration that could be applauded (he would not do anymore drag performances as a stand in for real black women) and one that should earn him a broom sweep off the stage of the legendary Apollo Theatre. He basically said there was a vacuum in black female comedic talent and effectively dismissed the racist-sexist implications of SNL’s parade of skits that benefit from public black women despite its stubborn continuing diss of black female talent on the show.
It’s deliciously ironic that Thomson has often done a drag performance of Whoopi Goldberg because right on cue comes Whoopi Goldberg’s directorial debut, Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley , an exclusive HBO premiere. Consider it a smack down of SNL with the ‘funniest woman in the world’ answering back from the grave with her perfect timing reminding all – whether recognized or not by the mainstream or their own, black women have always been funny and have dared to show it a long time now from the Chitlin’ Circuit to television. The documentary delivers the most captivating element – the voice of Moms Mabley.
Should I happen to bump into Whoopi on the street or at The View, I will take her up on the invitation she gave to viewers of a special screening at the BronzeLens Film festival in Atlanta and tell her what I thought. If I avoid being uncharacteristically struck by the fact that I’m saying it to Whoopi Goldberg, it will be short and simple: Thank-you for shining the spotlight once again on this brilliant performer.
Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley does not try to masquerade as a biographical examination of a life and attempt to fill in the many gaps in details about Moms Mabley’s life. Goldberg makes this clear up front. At one point early on, Arsenio Hall wonders aloud to Goldberg about a key tidbit they’ve heard about her  – was she raped or not?
The film does not linger on such subjects. There is a merely a peak into the childhood of the Loretta Mary Aiken who became Jackie “Moms” Mabley and that mostly focuses on the early tutelage she received from popular vaudeville act Butterbeans and Susie. Though there is hardly a scrap about the more intimate details of her adolescence through young adult life, there is some essential though precious address that hints at the further radical implications of her genius and the distance between the Moms Mabley she performed and her off stage social and sexual identity.
The striking visual contrasts between her appearance in full Moms costume and off stage chilling with the guys or in Duke Ellington-like gentleman finery complete with top hat amid a bevy of feminine young women suggest both radical transgression and a complicated negotiation of identities. A then younger Apollo performer notes in the documentary that off stage, they respectfully called her ‘Mr. Moms.’ A little more address of these dynamics by writers who have undertaken this work could have served very well to tease out these intriguing dynamics a bit more. [Search out Elsie A. Williams’s 1995 book The Humor of Jackie Moms Mabley: An African-American Comedic Tradition for a lot more].
Goldberg instead offers a heartfelt tribute to an inspirational comedic genius and an exploration that highlights the cultural impact and breadth of that genius – one that received too little due late in her own lifetime. Goldberg concentrates more on the persona Mabley originated and honed to perfection, including that brilliant sense of comedic timing and that sexually and politically smart wit which Mabley wielded so deceptively easily. At once bawdy and sharply insightful as hell, Moms Mabley was able to use her drag performance of a seemingly innocuous figure – a black maternal figure in a droopy house dress, the rolled socks, toothless grin, and that parade of odd hats – and insert her distinctive raspy voice into the public sphere and a medium dominated by men where female comics, regardless of their race, couldn’t be, to paraphrase Joan Collins, sexy or good looking.
Yet, Moms Mabley was anything but safe and containable, as the documentary highlights again and again. Even as an elder, she made the white male hosts on shows like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour Showliterally squirm as they realized she was more in control of that on air moment than they and way ahead of them with that killer quick wit. Moms Mabley understood the patriarchal, racial, and heterosexual politics of American culture and she learned to navigate these expertly through the Moms Mobley character and tender a critique so sly, she left folks laughing, shaking their heads, and going ‘uh huh” in the afterglow of the joke. 
Those who remember Jackie Mom’s Mabley from secretly listening to her as a kid or eavesdropping on parents doing the same and those who have never heard of her before will certainly be inspired to go in search of some Moms Mabley on eBay or Amazon.com or go browsing through that vintage store that sells the old vinyl albums. After the last Moms Mabley joke makes you laugh to the point of tears or fall out of your recliner chair, and the credits roll way too soon, you’ll get the same late realization the mainstream public did over forty years ago before her death in ’75, you haven’t gotten nearly enough Jackie “Moms” Mabley.
Premiere’s Monday night, November 18, 2013 on HBO Features Arsenio Hall, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Joan Collins, Kathy Griffin, Jerry Stiller, Anna Meara
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Stephane Dunn, PhD, is a writer who directs the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She teaches film, creative writing, and literature. 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, and Best African American Essays, among others. Her recent work includes the Bronze Lens-Georgia Lottery Lights, Camera Georgia winning short film Fight for Hope and book chapters exploring representation in Tyler Perry's films.