Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 898

Are the FBI and IRS Secretly Reading Your Email Without a Warrant?

Democracy Now
The American Civil Liberties Union has obtained documents revealing that the FBI and IRS may be reading emails and other electronic communications of U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant. This comes just as reports have emerged that the Obama administration is considering approving an overhaul of government surveillance of the Internet. The New York Times reported the new rules would make it easier to wiretap users of web services such as instant messaging. "The FBI wants to be able to intercept every kind of possible communication," says attorney Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project. "The FBI basically wants to require all of these companies to rewrite their code in order to enable more government surveillance. ... And in order to accomplish that, they would make the whole internet less secure."

Legendary DJ Kid Capri on The Round Up with Shaheem Reid

Jay Z's LIfe & Times

On this episode of The Round Up, the world's greatest DJ, Kid Capri and Shaheem Reid stop by Scratch DJ Academy to talk mixtape game, favorite moments in his career and new endeavors.

Duke University Historian, "Why I Got Arrested" | Dr. William H. Chafe

William J. Barber, II
May 6th, 2013 - Just moments after his release, Dr. William H. Chafe, a historian and the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University, explains why he was arrested for civil disobedience at the North Carolina General assembly along with 29 of his fellow citizens.

the feminist wire: Feminists We Love: Brittney Cooper (Video)

the feminist wire with Tamura A. Lomax

Brittney C. Cooper is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is a proud graduate of Howard University with her bachelors degrees in English and Political Science.
Dr. Cooper is also co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a Hip Hop Generation feminist blogging crew that runs a highly successful blog. The CFC blog was named one of the top “lady blogs” by New York Magazine in 2011, a top Black blog by The Root.com in 2012, and the CFC was nominated for a Ms. Foundation People’s Choice Award in 2013. The women of the CFC were also designated as a group of “Young, Black, and Amazing” Women under age 35 by Essence Magazine in August 2012.

Shola Lynch - The Struggle to Make Free Angela

ReelBlack
RBTV caught up with filmmaker SHOLA LYNCH (Chisholm 72) at the Montclair Film Festival to discuss her latest project, FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. An 8 year odyssey to get made, it tells the true story of how a UCLA college professor became a civil rights icon.

Cleveland Kidnappings and Military Rapes: When Will We Take on the Pandemic of Sexual Violence?

Democracy Now
Horrific details of the Cleveland kidnapping victims' brutal physical and sexual abuse are emerging just as the military has acknowledged rampant sexual abuse within its ranks, with some 26,000 assaults occurring in 2012. Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women, Action and the Media and editor of the anthology, "Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape," comments: "If we prioritized women's safety as a culture, if we prioritized ending sexual violence, we would be pouring massive resources into this. We do into the drone program. Where are the resources being poured into solving this problem?"

Why ‘Race to the Top’ Has Done Nothing to Reduce Poverty and Inequality by Mark Naison

Why ‘Race to the Top’ Has Done Nothing to Reduce Poverty and Inequality by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The Obama Administration's signature education program, Race to the Top, is promoted as an ambitious effort to increase the nation's global competitiveness by insuring its young people are "college and career ready," and to produce greater equity by narrowing "the achievement gap"  between poor and middle class students. Whether it achieves either of those goals is open to question, but one thing it has definitely not done is reduced child poverty, the Black/White, Black/Latino wealth gap, or the concentration of wealth and income among the top 5 percent of earners—all of which have increased during the Obama presidency.
Why is this the case. Why has this ambitious education reform effort promoted income distribution UPWARD, rather than downward.
Let's look at how the money is spent. Race to the Top requires for receipt of federal education grants, that teachers be evaluated on the basis of students’ test scores, that schools be closed when they are judged to be failing—largely  on the basis of student tests scores—and that restrictions on charter schools be removed and charter schools given preference in replacing failing schools
If break down the testing component of the act, and look at what kind of jobs it generates, you will see why this legislation has been an economic engine in reverse for poor and working class communities, actually taking jobs and income out of these communities.
The tests themselves are a huge expense, largely produced by private companies by Pearson and McGraw Hill.  Few if any of the people who work for these companies in the test divisions live in the Bronx, or Newark's Central Ward, or the East Side of Buffalo or North Philadelphia. Then you have to purchase software to evaluate the tests, from companies like Microsoft.  And last, you need "accountability officers" in Departments of Education to evaluate the data and determine its impact on schools and individual teachers.   What you have here is a huge multi-billion dollar jobs program for upper middle class Americans, often from the nation's most expensive elite colleges.
And this huge expense is not a zero sum game. In a time of Recession and Fiscal Austerity, school budgets have to be cut to pay for the testing.  And that means elimination of large numbers of positions—of school aides, librarians, guidance counselors, teachers, even cleaners and custodians.   Although some of the job loss affects people who live in middle class communities, a good portion affect people who live in working class neighborhoods Race to the Top is allegedly designed to help. The result—while schools in low income neighborhoods are allegedly made more competitive by these policies, the neighborhoods around them suffer a significant income loss.
Charter school preference has a similar result. In every city where charter schools have replaced public schools, veteran unionized teachers have been replaced by young, non-union teachers straight out of college, some of them from Teach For America. This also produces an income drain, as teachers who come from a similar background as their students, are replaced by young sojourners who rarely  if eve become long term residents of the neighborhoods they live in.
The Obama Administration continues to promote Race to the Top as a great egalitarian initiative, even proclaiming "Teacher Appreciation Week" to be "National Charter School Week," but when you  look at income streams RTTT creates, directly and indirectly, you are forced to conclude that it results in jobs and income LEAVING poor and working class communities rather than coming into it.
Bluntly put, in strictly economic terms, Race to the Top represents a huge subsidy for test and software companies while serving as a jobs program for the upper middle class
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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.

Jay Smooth: T-Paining Too Much: The Meme-ification of Charles Ramsey

Jay Smooth:
Some quick thoughts on the Charles Ramsey thing. I filmed this before the reports came out about his own history of domestic violence, but I don't think that changes the message here, since I wasn't citing him as perfect or even a "hero" necessarily (I think the courage and resilience of Amanda Berry herself, and the other two women, is still the heart of the story) just saying he deserves to be treated as a 3-dimensional person who did good on that day.

Was Rapper Danny Brown Sexually Assaulted?

Mark Anthony Neal and Hank Willis Thomas Discuss Contemporary Black Masculinity

The State of Things with Frank Stasio
WUNC-91.5

The Complex Identities Of Some Of America's Most Famous Black Menby Nicole Campbell and Frank Stasio

Have you ever thought of Jay-Z having multiple personalities? There's Jay-Z, Sean Carter, Hova, and Jigga. And they're all wrapped up inside one black man. In Mark Anthony Neal's latest book "Looking For Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities," he explores the complex identities of figures like Jay-Z, Avery Brooks and Luther Vandross (NYU Press; 2013). Neal's work helps us take a second look at celebrities and entertainers, and complicates how we understand these black men.Listen48:55Professor and author Mark Anthony Neal and artist and photographer Hank Willis Thomas discuss the breadth and depth of black masculinityMark Anthony Neal, professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, and the host of the webcast "Left of Black," uses the concepts of “legibility” and “illegibility” to look at the ways these black men are understood.Neal explains the legibility of black men to State of Things host Frank Stasio as “the ways that we can read black masculinity, or that it’s recognizable to us. If you see a black man with a basketball you don’t even have to process it.”And Neal compares this to illegibility: “But if we see an image of former North Carolina State swimmer Cullen Jones, and you realize he’s an American record holder…You immediately have all kind of questions. Where’d he learn to swim? Who taught him how to swim?”One of the characters Neal takes a hard look at in “Looking for Leroy,” is Idris Elba as Stringer Bell in the HBO series “The Wire.” Neal critiques the relegation of knowledge that has Stringer Bell to “street smarts.” To Neal, book smarts and street smarts are inseparable in the minds of characters like Stringer Bell. “He’s a thinker, and he’s managing business practices of this drug crew, and taking classes at the local community college in microeconomics,” says Neal. “He’s taking these classes for the front operation, but for the drug operation as well.”
Host Frank Stasio and guest Mark Anthony Neal, were later joined by visual artist and photographer, Hank Willis Thomas. Neal chose a piece from Thomas’ 2011 series, Strange Fruit, as the cover art for “Looking for Leroy.”
Hank Willis Thomas is also involved in the project “Question Bridge: Black Males,” a video log of black men asking and answering questions from other black men.
“We use video as a format to empower African-American men to be the researchers and the experts in redefining black masculinity through our diversity,” says Hank Willis Thomas. “What surprised us most about the project was the questions…myself and other collaborators of the project are black men, and we ourselves couldn’t rightly judge an African-American man spoke to the power of implicit bias.”