Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 899

Who Is Assata Shakur? Alondra Nelson on 'Tell Me More'

The Queering of Jason Collins at the Expense of Brittney Griner by Arthur Banton

The Queering of Jason Collins at the Expense of Brittney Griner by Arthur Banton | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
In the past few weeks, two players in the high-profile sport of basketball publicly revealed their sexualities but the responses have been diametric opposites. Jason Collins, an NBA journeyman, who played on six different teams during his twelve-years in the league and perhaps in the twilight of his career, receives phone calls from President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Conversely Brittney Griner, the number-one overall pick in 2013 WNBA draft, considered one of the best players to ever play the game, gets little of nothing.
This speaks to the perceptions in our society about gender, sport, and queerness. The undercurrent narrative also communicates to the impact these revelations may have on our acceptance of other gay athletes, which in my estimation teeters somewhere between little or nothing. 
Brittney Griner, who at 6’8” concluded her stellar college career as a three-time Big 12 conference player of the year scoring 3,383 points, an NCAA record 748 block shots, a barrage of slam dunks, all while leading her team to a 135-15 win-loss record. This includes an undefeated season (40-0) during her junior year culminating in an NCAA championship. A testament to her popularity lies in the decision of ESPN for the first time to televise the WNBA draft in prime-time. The next day during an interview Griner revealed that she was a Lesbian.
Unfortunately for Griner and other female athletes participating in sports like basketball—historically deemed as not gender appropriate for women—the lack of response reinforces the double standard. A few media outlets reported her disclosure but little response on sports blogs and certainly no phone calls from former or sitting heads of state.
The perception that basketball is an uncontested terrain of masculinity isn’t the only issue. The truth lies in aesthetics and society’s beauty ideal. Griner offered words of encouragement like “just be who you are.” Unfortunately, Griner’s platform is undermined by a division of press coverage between her and the third pick in the WNBA draft, Skylar Diggins, a mainstay in the media and blogs throughout her college career at Notre Dame.  In the case Diggins, she is lauded because of her ‘beauty’ and embracement of behavior perceived as feminine appropriate outside of basketball.
If Diggins were to disclose her sexuality (and assuming it’s in opposition to perceptions as her ‘beauty’ warrants) there might be more considerable press coverage and responses similar to the reactions of Collins, for the fact that our expectations of compartmentalization, as it relates to identity, went unfulfilled. Diggins, who signed with Jay-Z’s roc-nation sports agency, used her platform as the ‘beauty ideal’ to support Griner and others who have been ostracized for “being different.” Ironically, it is Diggins’ platform that may resonate louder than Griner’s.
In 2005, when Sheryl Swoopes, revealed she was gay and was “miserable” for hiding her feelings, the general response was of astonishment then betrayal. Swoopes embodied this heterosexual ideal of gender expectations balancing motherhood, wife, and professional athlete. In 1997, she missed the first six weeks of her WNBA career because she was expecting the birth of her son, Jordan. Upon her return, images circulated of her then husband, Eric Jackson tending to their baby, on the sideline while Swoopes resumed her professional career.
In 2001, Lisa Harrison a player for the Phoenix Mercury considered posing for playboy. Team management and league personnel nixed the idea stating it would be a poor example for the league. In truth, what might have been unfavorable for the league would have been deemed a positive for women in professional basketball. This would send a message that beauty standards are extended and can be challenged by professional athletes who compete in athletic endeavors that have historically faced resistance.
Last November, Chamique Holdsclaw, one of 25 greatest female players ever, revealed her sexuality by allegedly shooting at her ex-girlfriend who just happens to be a basketball player. The response to this unofficial testimony was tragic but relatively muted because the gatekeepers perhaps felt homosexuality in women’s basketball is normative.
Basketball is a staple of African American urban culture and where women fit into that space have always been marginalized. Women are supposed to cheer for the men but don’t dare compete. Sadly, historically Black colleges and universities were some of the last institutions to sponsor team sports for women. Contrary to that ideology, there are women on both sides of the aisle challenging those perceptions as a team. Jason Collins, who will become a free agent on July 1, needs a platform in the vein of an NBA contract if his revelation will alter the culture and its heterosexual expectations.
Brittney Griner, in the infancy of her professional career wants to use her enormous platform to sift through the arduous task of bringing awareness and taking an active role in the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community. Playing basketball in many respects does have its benefits. The question is whether the hyper-masculine culture of professional basketball will allow Collins to do the same.
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Arthur Banton is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Purdue University and graduate lecturer in the African American Studies and Research Center. His dissertation Running for Integration: CCNY, and the promise of interracial cooperation through Basketball, tells the story of the first racially integrated intercollegiate basketball team to win the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and National Invitational Tournament (NIT) championships in the same season.

RuPaul Revealed: 'Drag Race' Host Talks Gay Rights [video]

The New York Times
The world's most famous drag queen tells The Times's Marcus Mabry that despite progress on gay rights, the pendulum could swing the other way.

How Women are Shaping the Gun Control Debate

with Esther Armah of WBAI

YouTube's Uneasy Relationship With Television

New York Times
The Times's Brian Stelter decodes a YouTube event designed to showcase offerings to advertisers, which highlighted the company's uneasy relationship with television.

Assata Shakur in Her Own Words: Rare Recording of Activist Named to FBI Most Wanted Terrorist List

Democracy Now
The FBI has added the former Black Panther Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist List 40 years after the killing for which she was convicted. Born Joanne Chesimard, Shakur was found guilty of shooting dead a New Jersey state trooper during a gunfight in 1973. Shakur has long proclaimed her innocence and accused federal authorities of political persecution. She escaped from prison in 1979 and received political asylum in Cuba. On Thursday, she became the first woman added to the FBI's terrorist list and the reward for her capture was doubled to $2 million. We begin our coverage by airing Shakur's reading of an open letter she wrote to Pope John Paul II during his trip to Cuba in 1998 after the FBI asked him to urge her extradition. "As a result of being targeted by [the FBI program] COINTELPRO, I was faced with the threat of prison, underground, exile or death," Shakur said at the time. "I am not the first, nor the last, person to be victimized by the New Jersey system of 'justice.' The New Jersey State Police are infamous for their racism and brutality."

Beat Making Lab: Making 'Prison' Beats in Panama

Beat Making Lab | PBS Digital Studios

In this video we make a beat in a prison, in the rain forests of Gamboa, Panama with Professor Angel Sound (an incarcerated DJ who was blackmailed into muling cocaine for the Nigerian mafia) and his fellow inmate, who loves Macaroni and Cheese. 
The Architects: Stephen Levitin (aka Apple Juice Kid) and Pierce Freelon
Mastermind of Videography and Editing: Saleem Reshamwala (aka Kid Ethnic)
Musical Poetry: Professor Angel Sound, Apple Juice Kid and RAM artists
Special thanks: Lorena and the wonderful staff at Centro de Rehabilitacion El Renacer
Show Wrapper Magicians: Josh Souter (stop motion/logo), Emily Forsberg (photography), Kelly Mertestdorf (producer)
Kin folk: Dana McMahan, Elliette Johnson, Ryan Levin, Pat Levitin, Dr. Mark Katz, Judith Cone, GOOD, Global Giving, Dave Mello, New Kind; Panama kin folk: Rui Dinis, Aurora Fierro, Sandra Eleta, Oronike Odeleye, Renee Alexander Craft, Barrio Fino, Yomira John, The Beast, Professor Angel Sound, Taller Portobelo Norte, La Escuelita Del Ritmo, Centro de Rehabilitacion El Renacer.

Angela Davis on the "Racialization" of Terrorism, From Assata Shakur to Boston Marathon Bombings

Democracy Now
The legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis tells Democracy Now! that the FBI's adding of former Black Panther Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorists List exemplifies a longstanding "racialization" of terrorism in the United States, and an effort to deter the young activists Shakur has inspired today. "When the grandchildren of those who were active in the late '60s and early '70s are becoming involved in similar movements today, there is this effort to again terrorize young people by representing such an important figure as Assata Shakur as a terrorist," Davis says. "Before the Tsarnev brothers were discovered to be the alleged perpetrators [of the Boston Marathon bombings], there was an attempt to present the person who planted the bomb as either a black man or a dark skinned man with a hoodie. This racialization of what is represented as terrorism is an attempt to bring the old-style racism into the conversation with modes of repression in the 21st century."

A Letter of Love to Brittney Griner and Jason Collins

A Letter of Love to Brittney Griner and Jason Collins
Dear Brittney and Jason,We are a small collective of black male writers, activists, cultural critics, artists, scholars and athletes. We are straight, gay, cis and transgender men who love other black men intentionally in the best way. We are black men in community with black women, and, indeed, all women. We are black men who are committed to standing against sexism, homophobia, classism, violence, and rape culture. We are black men who move positively, productively and peacefully in this world. And we are black men writing this letter of love in open community to publicly affirm you, Brittney and Jason. 
We live in a culture that takes pride in its support of dissension and in its antagonism towards difference. And considering such a climate, for one to disclose publicly one’s sexual identity in it does, in fact, matter. Make no mistake, Brittney and Jason you did not “come out” of someone’s imagined closet of self-degradation. You, instead, offered an invitation to the wider public to enter the personal spaces of your already abundant lives.
You’ve reminded us of a too often forgotten elementary school lesson in respect: no one is allowed to control the personal spaces of another person’s life. That’s perverted democracy. And more important than that is the fact that no one is endowed with the right to barter another human’s dignity for his or her marketability. What we are challenged by you both to do is unapologetically bear witness to the human right of personal agency and choice. That charge is power-full. And for that we say, thank you.
We should never feel forced to “come out” for the sake of entering another rigid box designed by a heteronormative fear impulse. We should not have to wait to share our truths because of what may await them on the other side: violence, hatred, disregard, or death.
You’ve committed to your truths and that is the strongest assault to fear. We recognize that your identification as lesbian and gay athletes in this country—a country whose legal mechanisms still serve as proofs that we have yet to accept the fullness of your humanity—was a courageous act. And for that, again, we thank you.
It is no secret that we live in a society that is deeply fascinated with the sexual lives of others even though the same society makes it often impossible for non-straight people to express freely their sexualities. Indeed, the sexual lives of black folk, however we’ve identified or expressed ourselves sexually, have always been targets of a fetishized preoccupation with the black body. That you are both black and lesbian and gay is not your problem. The brilliant James Baldwin states it in this way, after all, “Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.” Your journey to your truth is no problem or solution, for that matter. It is just that – your journey. And we celebrate this journey as that which belongs to you.
Both of you have not only encouraged us, but moved us closer to the work of justice in a society that operates on a somewhat self-inflicted limited knowledge of race and sexual politics. And·        Jason: corporations, movements, and the like will quickly want to turn you into a commodity. They will want to sell your understanding of desire. They will want to anoint you the face of the LGBTQ sports movement. You made history and should very well be lifted up. But remember that there are black gay men (some of them athletes) whose lives and stories will never register among the very people who will praise you. Some other feminine-performing black man will still be someone’s “fag.” Some other non-athlete, non-celebrity, non-college educated, and non-wealthy black gay man may not receive support, let alone acknowledgement. Given that social fact, we ask that you please remember those black gay men and help those who will turn to you to do the same.  
·        Brittney: that we have yet to make a lot of noise about your story says something about the way that we undervalue women and women athletes, especially black women athletes who defy rigid gender restrictions. We recognize that you have been on the receiving end of vitriolic homophobic, sexist and transphobic remarks and, yet, you refuse to allow ignorance to still your success and contentment. You exist in an intersection where your race, gender expression, and sexual identity opens you up to multiple forms of oppression and because of that we believe strongly that you would understand the plights of so many black LGBTQ people. Please remember the depth of their struggles when the movements and corporations knock at your door.
·        Brittney and Jason: you have every right to disregard points 1 and 2. You didn’t elect to be the spokespersons for a presumed movement. Yet, we are sure that you also are aware that others will soon render you as such. The tempo of the LGBTQ movement for equal rights is orchestrated by the financially privileged and the middle aged. In this movement, the most marginalized are far too often ignored and neglected. We have yet to consider how we can make sports environments safer for our young people, and we have yet to consider so much else (e.g. increasing rates of homelessness among LGBTQ youth, the criminalization of black and brown LGBTQ youth, the alarming HIV prevalence rates among young men who have sex with men, LGBTQ senior citizens, public safety for LGBTQ people, et cetera). Your stories hold the pens for these unwritten narratives. Who will speak for the least of these among us? We hope that you will join us in doing so.
In Fierce Community,Black Men Writing to Live: A Literacy, Love, and Life Campaign   Darnell L. Moore, Writer, Educator & ActivistHashim Pipkin, Writer, Critic, Ph.D. Candidate (Vanderbilt University) Mark Anthony Neal, Writer, Cultural Critic & Professor (Duke University) Kai M. Green, Writer, Filmmaker & Ph.D. Candidate (University of Sothern California)Mychal Denzel Smith, Writer, Social Commentary & Knobler Fellow at the Nation InstituteKiese Laymon, Writer, Editor & Professor at Vassar University Marlon Peterson, Writer, Community Organizer & Youth Advocate Wade Davis, II, Writer, LGBTQ Advocate & Former NFL Player

Janelle Monae: "Q.U.E.E.N." featuring Erykah Badu

Directed by Alan Ferguson

"Q.U.E.E.N." featuring Erykah Badu  -- From The Upcoming Album, The Electric Lady.