Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 895

Lecture: Angela Davis at the University of Chicago (May 2013)

CSRPCUofC
CSRPC Annual Public Lecture and CSGS Classics in Feminist Theory Series present Angela Y. Davis: Feminism and Abolition: Theories and Practices for the 21st Century.
This event is a collaboration between the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS). Davis' lecture culminates a year-long series on the theory and praxis of her work and re-inaugurates the CSRPC Annual Public Lecture.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

Star Trek's Best Sulu: George Takei or John Cho?

National Film Society
Actor George Takei starred in the original Star Trek series and movies as Mr. Sulu, a role that John Cho is now playing. Which Sulu is better? 

Killing Americans: Jeremy Scahill on Obama Admin's Admission 4 U.S. Citizens Died in Drone Strikes

Democracy Now
The Obama administration has admitted for the first time to killing four U.S. citizens in drone strikes overseas. Three died in Yemen: the Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. A fourth, Jude Kenan Mohammed -- whose death was not previously reported -- was killed in Pakistan. In a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder suggested that all but the attack on the elder al-Awlaki were accidental, saying the other three "were not specifically targeted." The admission came on the eve of a major address in which President Obama is expected to defend the secret targeted killing program and announce modified guidelines for carrying it out. We're joined by Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield," and co-producer of the upcoming documentary film by the same name. 

Let Dre Have His Day by Natanya Duncan

Let Dre Have His Day by Natanya Duncan | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
After we have spent all this time on multiculturalism, and advocating for  the presence of African Americans and "others"  to not only have a foot in the door, but a seat at the table,  we now want folk to buy and spend black?   
In response to Andre Young’s aka Dr. Dre’s decision to give a sizable gift to the University of Southern California, Dr. Walter Kimbrough, the President Dillard University, an HBCU located in New Orleans, writes "But as the president of a black college, it pains me as well. I can't help but wish that Dre's wealth, generated as it was by his largely black hip-hop fans, was coming back to support that community." 
Let us be reminded that HBCUs (with some exceptions such as Bill & Camille, Oprah, Puffy, and Spike using their money for their alma maters and other HBCUs) are supported by the alumnae, some corporate foundations, student loan monies, Title Three, maverick research grants, and community folks.  In fact, most of the HBCUs that remain open today were started or maintained through the benevolence of a select few.  (I know you're gonna hit me with the land grant conversation, but the schools did not stay open because of the grants alone). 
So here is my pro-Garvey question, do we as a community have the collective change (nickels, dimes, four quarters) that would add up to even more than what Dr. Dre gave USC (located in his 'hood)?  It is easy to empathize with the disappointment Dr. Kimbrough expressed, but remember when you point the finger, there are three pointing back at you.  
It would have been great for Dr. Dre to give that money to say a crippled Morris Brown, a Morgan, a Dillard or even my beloved Clark Atlanta University.  In weighing Dr. Dre’s decision not give my alma mater Clark Atlanta University that money when our Mass Communications Department could have used it, I had to ask myself another question; do we have the infrastructure to best use the money for the kind of specific program it is intended?  Can we ensure that student retention and graduation, not to mention specialization in the field Dr. Dre is targeting, will drastically improve in, lets say, a four year period?  Or would we end up moving the money from one line item to another in order to "catch back" what we didn't move on or complete say, 10 years ago?   
I am happy Dr. Dre had the bread to give and will be able to get a nice tax write-off.  The brother is giving USC his "clean" money.  While the money he is giving to USC is getting media attention today, we may never know just how much money—clean or otherwise—he has actually spent in his hood, on his peeps.  Had this been his one and only move of this nature, then maybe I would be less understanding.  Those earphones he put out are a bit pricy (If one of you want to sponsor a pair for me, feel free), but it’s good that he is sharing the "ends".  
I am perfectly willing to also consider that there may be some other forces at work or motives for the donation.  Dr. Dre may have some fine print in a contract with one or more of his corporate alignments.  But this simply brings me back to the pro-Garvey ideal.  If we are willing to find ways to fund and keep funding ourselves, we can select our bed partners and dictate terms. (Please don't spank me Sis. Imani Perry, but the ideals can be lived even more so now than during Garvey's era.)
Let Dre have his day!  Let Hip Hop show some clout.  Let us as a community take heed and begin to gather our collective forces and support our institutions so we can say "Mine for Yours" (Shout out Modern Free) and not "give me yours so I can have mine."
***
Natanya Duncan is an Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University. Her research focuses on female activism in the Garvey Movement.

No More Excuses?: The Myth of Black Uplift by David J. Leonard

No More Excuses?: The Myth of Black Uplift By David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
From Jimmy Iovine to Cory Booker, America’s cultural, educational and political elite is gracing the halls of academy to celebrate the nation’s education successes (along with their movement back to their parent’s couches).  President Obama offered the following at the Morehouse Commencement:
We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. Growing up, I made a few myself. And I have to confess, sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. But one of the things you've learned over the last four years is that there's no longer any room for excuses. I understand that there's a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: "excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness."
We've got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven't. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that's still out there. It's just that in today's hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven't earned. And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and overcame.
Excuses, really?  He might have as well told black America to stop “playing the race card.” If only he went to Ohio State and told white America to stop playing “the race denial card.”
Didn’t he tell the nation that he wasn’t the president of black America, but the United States of America?  Or does that not count at HBCU graduations and NAACP meetings? Beyond the double standards, President Obama would never remind white America that we don’t have time for our excuses. He would never note that less than 1% of scholarships are reserved for students of color. He would never remind white audiences that affirmative action or minority scholarships have nothing to do with why Greg or Jan did not get into their desired school.
Nor would he go and tell white America that we will need to work harder since the era of unearned advantages of getting call backs for jobs because of one’s name or ones place in the old boy’s network is coming to end. Neither President Obama nor a white president would call out White America demanding that the excuses of video games or movies, hip-hop or anything else would be used to explanation away mass shootings committed by white men (70% of them). Tim Wise makes all this clear when he writes:
Needless to say, Barack Obama will never tell white people at a traditionally white college or university to stop blaming affirmative action for every job we didn’t get, or every law school we didn’t get into, though we’ve been known to use both of these excuses on more than a few occasions.
Yet beyond the hypocrisy here and in speeches about gun violence (parents matter in Chicago but not in Newtown), the tone of American Exceptionalism wrapped up in bootstraps, culture, choices, and admonishments to “do better”—in the absence of any discussion of policy or institutions—is troubling.
The adulation for the American Dream and the celebration of education as the great equalizer was nothing new for President Obama, who campaigned with this message.  Emphasizing the failures of the black community to take advantage of opportunities, then-Senator Obamaperpetuated the myth that there are more black men in prison than in college: “We have more black men in prison than we have in our colleges.”   
Terrible except it isn’t true.  As of 2013, there are 1.4 million black men in college compared to 840,000 in prison.  Over 5.5% of all college students in 2010 were black males, which is proportional to population.  Ivory Toldson, associate professor at Howard University, recently highlighted the fallacy and the danger in the perpetuation of misinformation based in racial stereotypes: “We will not sufficiently support black male college students – nor college-bound students – if we simply keep perpetuating the myth that juxtaposes their needs with those of black males in the criminal-justice system.” In other words, in President Obama’s utterance of this myth, as with Ms. Obama’s commencement speech, facts remain an inconvenient truth.
Look at the numbers. According to the National Center for Education Statistics: “From 1976 to 2010, the percentage of Hispanic students rose from 3 percent to 13 percent, the percentage of Asian/Pacific Islander students rose from 2 percent to 6 percent, and the percentage of Black students rose from 9 percent to 14 percent. During the same period, the percentage of White students fell from 83 percent to 61 percent.”  In the era of hip-hop and growing visibility of sports, black educational success has been on the rise; whites educational attainment, on the other hand, has been in steady decline.  “Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re clearly fantasizing about becoming reality TV stars and extreme sports champions.
The inequalities within higher education rests not with separate aspirations and unequal dreams but with the failures of colleges and universities to produce diverse graduates.  According to a new report from the American Council on Education, “the pool of students leaving with a bachelor’s degree is less diverse than the pool entering or remaining in college.”  A recent report from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and several scholars, entitled "Challenging the Status Quo," only 16 percent of African American men complete degrees after enrolling compared to 32 percent of white men (& 20 percent of black women).  Whether because of financial difficulties, rising tuition costs, the lack of mentors, isolation, or campus climate, universities are failing black students.  The dreams and aspirations are clear; the problem is with the mechanism to turn them into reality.
Instead of addressing the obstacles that lead black youth to dropout from colleges and universities, the Obamas have recycled the tried and tested narrative that blames the black community for its own problems. Instead of curtailing school closures and combating the impact of high-stakes testing that fuels dropouts, the Obamas offer a remix that sees poor values and choices as the true problem.  Instead of challenging the daily message sent to black youth that their education isn’t a societal priority, the Obamas have taken aim at black parents. 
Clearly erasing facts and research is clearly a bipartisan affair.
According to Douglas S. Massey, Camille Z. Charles, Garvey Lundy and Mary J. Fischer, black parents are more likely than their white counterparts to check on homework completion; 60-75% of black youth report that their parents regularly read to them.  Black parents are also more likely to assist their children with homework; they are equally as likely to attend parent-teacher conferences.  Yet, the myth of black disinterest in school persists.  Despite the fact that black 12 graders are twice as likely to have perfect attendance records and are less likely to have missed more than 7 days of school in a semester compared to their white peers, the blame game persists.  The commitment to education and the value placed upon learning has been on full display with students walking out in Newark and Chicago demanding better schools.   
It would have been nice if the Obamas had celebrated these students who are standing up and demanding a better education; it would have been great had their speeches highlighted the students in Seattle and NY saying no to testing and yes to learning.  Even better, can you imagine a speech that said “no more excuses America, no more talking points about debts and austerity,” all children deserve a chance, a reasonable chance to go to college without mortgaging their futures. 
Maybe, no more excuses that blame immigrants for rising costs of health care and instead says, “everyone has a fundamental right to Life and that requires health care.”  How about no more excuses for drones and Guantanamo Bay. 
If not a speech pushing the nation to move beyond excuses for unjust wars and destructive foreign policies, how about one that connects history, persistent excuses, white denial, and the policy of the future.  It could start with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Morehouse Man, who wrote,
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries…Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.

No more excuses
National health care
No more excuses
End to war on drugs
No more excuses
End the closure of schools
No more excuses
Fair wages
No more excuses
A just tax system
No more excuses
A speech that doesn’t blame individuals but demands we all be better, starting with the very institutions that govern the nation
Cruel indeed.
***
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis.  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.

"Malcolm X: Redefining The Myths, Reality & Challenge Of Power"--A Lecture by Professor Errol Henderson

A lecture by Professor Errol Henderson, Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn State University at the Charles H. Wright Museum for African American History in Detroit.

Editor of The Progressive Calls For Eric Holder to Resign Over Spying on Press, Occupy Protesters

Democracy Now
As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department's spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012. Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists' online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. We're joined by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, who tackles the surveillance in his latest article, "Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street."

AfroEats Dakar 2013: First Gastronomic Safari to Dakar, Senegal

Marco Polo Hernández CuevasVideomentary of the first gastronomic safari to Dakar, Senegal, West Africa led by culinary Chef Pierre Thiam. The occasion was the First International Festival of Local Products and of African Cuisine under the label of AfroEats. Chef Thiam's guest friends included chefs from various countries. They delighted the festival's patrons and merchants with a plethora of African, African Diaspora and Novel Global Cuisine produced with local products.

SoundCheck: What's the Difference Between "Rap" and "Hip Hop"? with Mark Anthony Neal

WNYC's SoundcheckWhat's the Difference Between "Rap" and "Hip Hop"?Contributor Faith Salie volunteers to get to the bottom of your unanswered musical questions.In this second installment of our musical mysteries series, Soundcheck contributor Faith Salie attempts to discern rap from hip hop. She talks with Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal about the difference between the two terms -- which, as it turns out, is fairly complex. "When we talk about hip hop, we're talking about a larger cultural experience," says Neal. "Rap music is part of that larger aspect of hip hop culture, but it's also the part of the culture that's perhaps most visible and most well known to the average person."Salie and Neal discuss the origins of the terms and how they've evolved over time. And, Neal tells us which categories artists like Will Smith, KRS-One, Nas and Eminem fall into. 

Don't Underestimate Young People's Ability to Surprise the World—A Hip Hop Story by Mark Naison

Don't Underestimate Young People's Ability to Surprise the World—A  Hip Hop Story by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Today in the United States, a soul crushing regime of testing and zero tolerance discipline policies is descending on the nation's public schools. Students from pre-K and up are being tested and evaluated with great regularity to make them "college and career ready," at the expense of things they love like art and music and school trips; Their natural impulses to play and dream and rebel are being met with extreme punitive measures ranging from docking kindergartners from  shaking their butt at a fellow student to arresting a high school student for wearing a hat in the hall.  
The people developing these policies claim they are doing this to turn America's youth into a globally competitive labor force, but whether or not that is their goal ( some think this is just a profit grab for test and technology companies!) the result is that America's young people are increasingly facing schools that are turning into grim and joyless places where disciplining students and breaking their spirits seem to be more important than inspiring them with a love of learning.
Parents and teachers are legitimately fearful that a whole generation of the nation's youth will be crushed by these measures. And they are right to be both indignant and alarmed. But the students who are the targets of these policies may be less malleable than the powers that be think,  The students’ test boycotts and marches currently taking place in Chicago and Philadelphia are a sign of emerging student resistance, but if history is any guide that resistance is likely to get much broader and take forms that no one could predict.
I want to tell a little story that illustrates why it is never wise to underestimate young people's creativity. It might have a few lessons for us today.
The scene is the Bronx in the early and mid 1970's. Young people there are living in communities that have been abandoned by government and private capital. Landlords are abandoning their buildings and torching them for the insurance money Fire houses are closing while neighborhoods are burning. The parks budget has been cut in half, and the great after school programs that were once the pride of NYC public schools have been shut down. 
But one of the worst things that happening was the shutting down of the great music programs in NYC middle schools and high schools. For two generations, young people who made the band or orchestra in junior high could take home musical instruments to practice, and got instruction from teachers who were themselves great musicians. Now those instruments were locked in school basements, and the music teachers fired or reassigned to other jobs. Young people in the Bronx whose parents or older siblings had become great jazz, or salsa, or rhythm and blues musicians  were now denied the same training. There were fears that the music might shut down entirely.
But the young people of the Bronx surprised the world. Denied the opportunity to learn to play instruments, they created a new form of music using two turn tables and a mixer that would revolutionize the world. Starting in community centers of housing projects DJ's, many of them from West Indian origins, figured out how to take the most percussive instrumental sections of records and have them blend seamlessly into one another for 10-15 straight minutes, creating hyper-danceable tracks that droves Bronx young people wild.
Then, taking advantage of  over taxed police forces, they took their parties into parks and schoolyards getting electricity from the bottom of lamp posts. Soon, there were competing parties all over the Bronx and DJ's launched another innovation—getting  poetically gifted young people to rhyme over the beats.  Before you knew it the sheer brilliance of these young people had spawned new dance styles representing a mixture of martial arts, and the moves of great Latin dancers and James Brown. The word soon spread to Harlem and Brooklyn and the punk scene in Lower Manhattan and that global phenomenon known as Hip Hop was born.
Created by young people who the rest of the world had abandoned and written off.
Today, things may seem grim in our schools today. but be prepared to be surprised again. Young people will not be silenced and their natural creativity will NOT be erased.
***
Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.