Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 871

Jay Z ft Justin Timberlake - "Holy Grail" [Official Visual]

 The official visual for "Holy Grail" by Jay Z featuring Justin Timberlake. Directed by Anthony Mandler. 

An Open Letter to Our Sister, CeCe McDonald by Brothers Writing to Live

An Open Letter to Our Sister, CeCe McDonald by Brothers Writing to Live | NewBlackMan (in Exile) | The Feminist Wire
Dear CeCe,
This letter to you, sister, is past due. We are late to the struggle. And for that we are sorry.
But like so many other moments of solidarity–especially those that come after crises have already ripped apart the lives of would-be comrades–we now show up as allies in your struggle against a system that abhors you as much as it does each of us and so many other black and brown cis, trans, straight, and LGB people.
We write to let you know, first and foremost, we love you and we value your life. Your life is a crossing–an intersection where your youthful black trans female body endures the sting of others’ hatred and rejection…a four-way corner where the state moves about suspiciously looking for a reason to police black bodies, evidencing its failure to make due on its promise to protect and serve those whose lives exceed the bounds of its racist and transphobic gaze.
CeCe, we are late, but we are here now standing with you armed with the willingness to fight during a moment when the nation has been attempting to reckon with its character fifty years after the March on Washington. The workers, writers, lovers, and dreamers who came before us are partially why we are here today, but we must also accept that we are working to build a world where it is safe for women, all women, to walk outside without fear of harassment because we have never made that a substantial part of our American dream. Indeed, the dream has often been a nightmare in the lives of black women. We need new dreams that include your face, your voice. And we need the end of nightmares like the one you are presently enduring behind the confines of rigid metal bars that are still too weak to limit your dignity and freedom.
We dream a new world with you. And we want to create a new world beside you. What are your dreams, CeCe?
We are working on building a world where trans women are respected and valued and not imagined as sex objects, abnormal, sinful, wrong, and anything else other than human gifts. You are a gift. Please remember that when correction officers refer to you as “he” instead of “she” and when the state will tell the story of a heartless murder as opposed to the truth of self-defense on the part of a victim seeking to protect herself.
Indeed, we understand that you had to fight to save your life.
We understand that you were punished for defending your life and now you sit behind bars for refusing to be destroyed. We have to ask ourselves, what would have happened had Trayvon Martin been able to save his life? What would Hadiya Pendleton’s life been like if she was able to save herself? In what state would America be if she failed to fight to protect her borders?
What if Islan Nettles had survived her brutal assault? What kind of world would she be waking up in? Today? Tomorrow? Next week? What about the lives of The Jersey 4? Women who protect themselves against men are often criminalized. Your story is one that women of color, queer, trans, and straight, have to experience too often. And we refuse to allow others’ dreams to become your nightmare. When we fight to save our own lives, we say to a system that has continuously tried to keep us in our place, “More room! I need more room to breathe, to develop. I need freedom from a suffocating system obsessed with death and destruction.” And today, we proclaim your need to breathe, to develop, to live.
We end by summoning the spirit of brother James Baldwin who, in November 1970, wrote a letter of love to another black woman freedom fighter, Angela Y. Davis, when she was similarly imprisoned by the state. He wrote, “…we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”Sister, our apology needs to be met with action. This is our first step, and we ask you and your allies to hold us accountable to our promise. But until such time that we write again, please know that we support and love you.
What do you need us to do to help?
In solidarity,
Brothers Writing to Live_________________________________
Brothers Writing to Live is a group of black cis and trans-men who hail from spaces across the United States. We come from myriad neighborhoods, diverse familial backgrounds, and different life worlds. We are different, indeed. And yet, in so many ways we are the same. We are black male identified writers whose notions of blackness, manhood, and writing are as assorted as our multifaceted lives. Whether we have come from the red clay roads of Mississippi or the cement paved streets of New York City, through our writings we have mapped out similarities regarding the ways that racism, gender restrictions, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, economic disenfranchisement, heteronormativity, criminal (in)justice systems, and so much else has shaped the men that we have become and yet to be. This campaign has united the following black male writers:
Kiese Laymon, Writer & Professor at Vassar CollegeMychal Denzel Smith, Writer, Mental Health Advocate, & Cultural CriticKai M. Green, Writer, Filmmaker, & Ph.D Candidate at USCMarlon 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 Player
Darnell L. Moore, Writer & Activist

Rep. John Lewis with Striking Fast Food Workers in Atlanta

On 8/29/13 fast food workers in Atlanta and 49 other cities around the country went on strike. Atlanta Jobs with Justice turned people out to fight for the right to a living wage, and a union for fast food workers. Representative John Lewis joined workers the day after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

Charter School Chain 'Success Academy' Suspends Special Needs Students to Raise Test Scores?

Democracy Now
Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his reports for the New York Daily News about how one of the New York City's fastest growing chains of charter schools, Success Academy, has far higher suspension rates than other public elementary schools.
"More than two dozen parents have come to me complaining about their children -- who are special needs, special education children, or children with behavior problems," González reports. "They feel are being pushed out or forced out by the charter school in an effort to to improve the test scores." Success Academy uses its high test scores to attract funding, and just secured a $5 million grant it will use to expand from 20 to 100 schools. González obtained a copy of secretly recorded meetings in which school administrators pressed one parent to transfer her special education kindergarten student back into the public school system.

DJ Premier on the 'Future of Hip-Hop'

PBSBlackCulture
"I think hip-hop's getting better in the next 40 years..." Check out PBS' exclusive interview with DJ Premier as we celebrate 40 Years of Hip-hop! #PBSLovesHipHop 

'Marching' in the Digital Age?

GOODIE MOB (feat. Janelle Monáe): "Special Education" (Official Music Video)

From the album Age Against The Machine 
Director: John Colombo

Goodie Mob is: CeeLo Green, Big Gipp, Khujo, T-Mo

"Maintain, Don't Gain": Duke Study on Black Women and Obesity

Duke University

Programs aimed at helping obese black women lose weight have not had the same success as programs for black men and white men and women.
But new research from Duke University has found that a successful alternative could be a "maintain, don't gain" approach.


The study, which appears in the Aug. 26 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, compared changes in weight and risk for diabetes, heart disease or stroke among 194 premenopausal black women, aged 25-44. They were recruited from Piedmont Health's six nonprofit community health centers in a multi-county area of central North Carolina, which serves predominantly poor patients. 
For the study, half of the participants -- 97 women -- were randomly placed in a primary care-based intervention program called Shape, while the other 97 received usual care from their physicians, generally weight-loss counseling. 
The intervention program used software built by Duke researchers that personalized the intervention for each woman. Each woman received an individualized set of behavior-change goals for diet and physical activity. They tracked how well they were doing each week via automated phone calls, and had a personal health coach and a gym membership.
After 12 months, the intervention group stabilized their weight, while participants in the usual care group continued to gain weight. Sixty-two percent of intervention participants were at or below their weight at the onset of the program, compared to 45 percent of usual-care participants. After 18 months, intervention participants still maintained their weight while the usual care group continued to gain weight.

Civil Rights Pioneer Gloria Richardson, 91, on How Women Were Silenced at 1963 March on Washington

Democracy Now
Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, A Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and other civil rights leaders spoke at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But where were the female civil rights activists? At the historic march, only one woman spoke for just more than a minute -- Daisy Bates of the NAACP. Today we are joined by civil rights pioneer Gloria Richardson, the co-founder of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in Maryland, which fought to desegregate public institutions like schools and hospitals. While Richardson was on the program for the March on Washington, when she stood to speak she only had a chance to say hello before the microphone was seized. 
Richardson is the subject of a pending biography by Joseph R. Fitzgerald, "The Struggle is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation." Richardson, 91, joins us to discuss the 1963 March on Washington and the censorship of women speakers; the Cambridge Movement to desegregate Maryland; her friendship with Malcolm X; and her assessment of President Obama and the civil rights struggle today.

The 'Left of Black' Back to School Special: Black Women & the Academy

The Left of Black 'Back to School' Special | Black Women & the Academy with Alondra Nelson and Tami Navarro

Recorded in the Left of Black Studios in April of 2013, host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal sits down with Tami Navarro and Alondra Nelson to to discuss  the new article "Sitting at the Kitchen Table:  Field notes from Women of Color in Anthropology" just published  by Navarro, Bianca Williams and Attiya Ahmed in the August 2013 issue of Cultural Anthropology .
Alondra Nelson is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University.  Professor Nelson is the author of  Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination  (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Her next book, The Social Life of DNA: Race and Reconciliation after the Genome (forthcoming from Beacon Press), traces how claims about ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures. Nelson is also co-editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee; Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh N. Tu; New York University Press, 2001).
Tami Navarro is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Dr. Navarro’s research interests include the relationship between race and globalization, gender, and Caribbean studies.  Her current project traces an economic development initiative known as the Economic Development Commission (EDC) that offers dramatic taxincentives to businesses, primarily American financial management firms, willing to relocate to the island of St. Croix.
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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 at Duke University.
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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @  iTunes U