Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 906

Michael Bloomberg and the Benevolent White Daddy Syndrome

Michael Bloomberg and the Benevolent White Daddy Syndrome by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Hypocrisy is nothing new for America’s politicians.  It is one of the few postures that remains bipartisan. 
This is certainly evident as Michael Bloomberg pushes forward his assault on big sodas alongside his assault on constitutional rights and human dignity with his harmful stop and frisk policy. 
“For someone who wants to make sure people don’t smoke, waste energy, shoot each other with military-style firearms, or eat a bagel that’s way too big, you don’t express similar urgency when it comes to Black and Latino youth being violated on the streets of New York City,” writes Michael Arceneaux. 
Stop and Frisk “has done absolutely nothing to make the city's streets safer, and instead, fuels the fires of the already tense relationship between people of color and the police? Why focus on all off that when you can walk around telling people what not to eat and drink? Meanwhile, the heads of minority youth are buried into the concrete," Acreneaux continues.
When defending big soda bans or cigarette concealment Bloomberg consistently notes health and safety, yet as Arceneaux notes, where is the concern for health, safety, dignity, life, and humanity with stop and frisk.  Hypocrisy indeed.  
Yet, on another level the soda ban and stop and frisk policy operate through the same racist ideologies: white paternalism. In both instances, Bloomberg and others claim discipline and punishment as necessary for the sake of safety, order, and protecting. They both are thought to be "preventative;" they are considered as policies thought to protect the law-abiding from poor choices, from dangerous values, and harmful things. They are considered interventions for bodies of color who obviously need to be controlled by the state.
Bloomberg defends his march on soda by invoking the kids, “I’ve got to defend my children, and yours, and do what’s right to save lives...Obesity kills. There’s no question—it kills...We believe that the judge’s decision was clearly in error, and we believe we will win on appeal.”
Given soda industries targeting of black and Latino youth, and the lack of concern for the turnstile refills at America’s finest restaurants, Bloomberg’s crusade against cola is wrapped up in the logics of race and class.  You have to look no further than the exemption of coffee drinks; a massive mocha offers a whopping 360 calories, 19 g of fat, and more than a little bit of sugar.  A blended version nets almost 500 calories, yet because it has milk, not to worry, all is supposedly good.  The hipsters of Williamsburg have little to worry about as Bloomsberg’s Pepsi police are on the case at 7-11, making sure that sugar + coffee + milk remains the breakfast of (Wall-Street) champions.  
Bloomsberg’s class and race-based logic of paternalism and protection, of saving black and brown youth from purported pathologies and dangers isn’t reserved for the soda fountain but also guides his policing policy.  
“We are not going to walk away from a strategy that we know saves lives,” noted Mayor Bloomberg. He went on to say, “At the same time, we owe it to New Yorkers to ensure that stops are properly conducted and carried out in a respectful way.” 
Scoffing at suggestions that stops should mirror population numbers in the city, he added, “If we stopped people based on census numbers, we would stop many fewer criminals, recover many fewer weapons and allow many more violent crimes to take place.  We will not do that. We will not bury our heads in the sand.” 
As with the city’s soda ban, the policies of stop and frisk are imagined as a necessary intervention against the dangerous behavior that pollutes black and Latino communities.  From obesity to gun violence, from packets of sugar to dime bags of marijuana, the threat to public safety is located in the choices and behaviors of black and brown bodies, particularly poor youth of color.  As the benevolent white father, Mayor Bloomberg refashions a ban on soda and draconian racial profiling as a necessary tool of safety, as a mechanism of disciplinarity.
Michel Foucault describes the dialectic between state institutionalized power and calls/demands for discipline in the following way: “Discipline produces subjected and practiced, ‘docile’ bodies.  Discipline increases the force of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminished these same forces of the body (in political terms of obedience)” (Quoted in Parenti 2001, p 136).  
The systemic effort to discipline bodies imagined as deviant and pathological, to shame through policy, abusive policing, or billboardsIf we think about NYC's public shaming of single mothers, we can understand the shared racial logic that guides the Bloomberg administration: in the absence of “desired” and “productive” parents, Bloomberg and his crew have elevated themselves as the benevolent parents, empowered to restrict soda, discipline, and punish if necessary.
***
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 book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was recently published by SUNY Press.

"Digging" the Music of HipHop: These Are the Standards with Pete Rock, 9th Wonder & DJ Premier

MHP Show: The Dance Theater of Harlem -- Then and Now

Tell Me More: Jada Pinkett Smith -- Respect For Angela Davis' Turmoil ... And Hair

Promo: The Legacy of Angela Davis with Film Director Shola Lynch on April 8th 'Left of Black'

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal sits down with film director Shola Lynch to talk about her new film Free Angela and All Politics Prisoners which opened in selected cities on April 5, 2013.  The film was executive produced by Overbrook Entertainment and Roc Nation.
Lynch's credits include the award winning Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004).

Left of Black airs Monday April 8, 2013 at 1:30 pm est.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edyIAsPPfzs 

Rape Is Rape! Paradise Gray Responds To Rick Ross

Secret Recording Reveal Racial Biases & Arrest Quotas in NYC Stop-&-Frisk Trial

Democracy Now
A historic trial is underway challenging the New York City Police Department's controversial "stop-and-frisk" policy as unconstitutional and unfairly targeting people of color. Recent data shows the vast majority of the five million people stopped-and-frisked by the NYPD over the past decade are African American or Latino, with nearly 90 percent neither ticketed nor arrested. We play secretly recorded police tapes heard in the courtroom and speak to three guests: Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-counsel on the stop & Frisk federal class action lawsuit; Nicholas Peart, a Harlem resident who testified last month about his multiple experiences being stopped-and-frisked; and Ryan Devereaux, a journalist covering the trial for The Guardian and The Nation.

HuffPost Live: The Power of Words

HuffPost Live
From Rick Ross to Lil Wayne, rappers are catching flack about their socially insensitive lyrics. But when do words cross the line and should lyrics be policed? with Rosa Clemente, Rahiel Tesfamarian,  Jamilah Lemieux, and Talib Kweli; Hosted by Marc Lamont Hill.

Were You There? Thinking Black Death

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Thinking Black Death</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Times;"> </span></span><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">by Mark Anthony Neal | <i>NewBlackMan (in Exile)</i> </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson’s book <i>April 4, 1968</i>reads: “You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death,” to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be.  There’s  a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death.    </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">I mean, more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death—the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments—all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it’s been in the province of black creative expression—Black Genius more broadly—that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea of death, as a process, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right.  </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">When JC White of the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 “Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?” it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle.    </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">“Were You There” was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang it’s words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">“Were You There?” was featured on a brilliant recording by the Max Roach called <i>Lift</i> <i>Every Voice and Sing</i>, which paired the legendary drummers regular jazz band with the JC White Singers. “Were You There?” begins as a dirge—a literal death march—musically transporting listeners to the horse-driven carriage that so many boldly walked behind on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in April of 1968.    </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">But just as you could imagine the collective black body kneeling at yet another grave, for yet another murdered soul and succumbing to an unfathomable despair, the song’s tone changes.  Like the  phoenix, the collective black body musically rises and when the JC White Singers ask the subsequent question, “Were You There, When They rolled away the stone?,” as in the Resurrection—the place and space of death, the physical and psychic—transformed into something like a freedom, a freedom not explicitly in the traditional sense of the world, but something more philosophical as simply represented in a phrase like “I’m—We’re still here.”</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Roach’s <i>Life Every Voice and Sing</i> was among the many recordings released in the aftermath of King’s murder.  Nina Simone’s “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)” is perhaps the most popular and one that was written explicitly with King’s murder as inspiration.  In the middle of Simone’s live 12-minute version of the song, she directly addresses the crowd, recalling the then recent deaths of John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, and Otis Redding.  Simone then asks aloud, “Do you realize how many we have lost?”—reinforcing the idea that at the time of King’s murder, Black Death was literally in the air.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">The power of these songs—cultivated in the darkest and most dire moments of Black life in the Americas—is that they are so easily recalled at a moment of great distress. These songs were not simply emotional responses to loss, but really an important intellectual response—the way that Blackness thinks death.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">***</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Originally published in April of 2008 at <i>Critical Noir (Vibe.com)</i>, on the occasion of the 40^th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder and six weeks after the death of my father.</span></span></div>

Scar Story: On Success and Family

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They told her I wasn’t her ‘real child’, they asked her why did she care, they told her to leave me there.  I was 16.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Re-wind for a minute. I was placed in foster home when I was about two weeks and later adopted by my foster parents. I never knew my mother, but she was known very well. My mother did a lot of heavy drugs, as a result she made bad decisions. She started taking drugs after my oldest sister was born.  She ran away when my sister was only five claiming she was going to get pencils so they could finish up my sister’s homework. My mother was known as an addict and a person who would not be successful.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When I was 11 my adopted mother pulled me and my biological sister to one side and told us we were adopted. I was very rebellious after that. I would fight because I felt I needed to claim my own. I felt everyone was feeling sorry for me because they knew I was different. At family functions I would distance myself and go in a corner and write letters to my real mother asking her to come back for me. Knowing they would never be sent I crumpled them up and suppressed the feelings.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I always felt different. I felt weird going with my adopted mother to family functions. Everyone looked so much different compared to me, but my adopted mother would resemble them. I always felt that the blood running through my body was not the same as my family and it scared me. There was other stuff. Health issues. My adopted mother would take me to the doctor and when they asked questions in connection to family history and past health issues, there was always a blank. The doctor would have to do extra tests. </span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I would ask my friends if they felt the same, but they couldn't quite grasp what I was feeling. They couldn't feel the empty space in my heart, my desire to want to be ‘normal’.  ‘Normal’ meant going to family functions and my aunt grabbing me and telling me “you know you look just like your uncle”. ‘Normal’ would have meant knowing my past health and my history. In junior high school I had a fight with my best friend because she didn’t give me the reaction I needed after I told her I was adopted I punched her in her face.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Growing up a map of success is drawn out for you. But who's success is it - yours or the person that drew it? As an adopted child I’m  given a second chance; because of that I’m supposed to change expectations. I’m not supposed to become my mother’s  child. Expectations are positive and negative. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If you break the cycle of drugs and bad choices, you were seen as a survivor,  someone with a strong interior and exterior. If not,  you were "your mothers child". My oldest sister was the only one who was not adopted and who knew my mother. She told me my mother got caught up, and couldn’t find her way back. She started becoming dependent on drugs. My mother was known as an addict and a person who would not be successful.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fast forward  to 16.  I still couldn't shake the feeling and I was still acting out. I was kicked out of my first high school because I jumped in a friend’s fight, ended up fighting the school safety officer, who pressed charges. I got kicked out my second school because once again I jumped in a friend’s fight and broke a girls nose. My last school I got kicked out because my friends and I gave the school a bad reputation after we did a Craigslist scam, where we placed a false ad selling an item. It resulted in a bail for $150,000 and my name all over the news and papers. I was terrified and alone. </span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">While incarcerated, my adopted mother would come and see me. That brings me right back to the beginning of this piece. She would tell me the hurtful things "my family" her family were saying. They worked to convince my mother to leave me there. One example of what they said was how I started this ‘Scar Story’: </span></span><span class="style4"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"she not your real child, why do you care what happens to her"  </span></span><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another? </span></span><span class="style4"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"Leave her there Barbara she needs to rot, why should you be going through this pain". </span></span><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When my mother shared the comments, it wasn't a shock. I knew I wasn't a part of a family from birth. My past crept up on me. Now I was in trouble, I was my ‘mother’s child.’  I was an adopted female who would turn out just like her mother. </span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But was that me? It didn’t matter because that was the label. The blessing? My adopted mother never left my side. Despite all the remarks and ridicule she still stood by me. My mother put our house up to get me out and never told a soul. When I came out I ran to her, she pulled me close, held me tight and told me in my ear “you are my child, don’t ever let anyone tell you different”.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I finally felt a part of a family. After 16 years, I felt loved. After the whole</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"> </span><span class="style2"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ordeal me and my Mama’s bond grew closer. She is now my best friend and hero. I always wonder though -- what if my biological mother was placed in the same situation, would she have done the same thing? My mother passed away when I was four years old. She died of A.I.D.S.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style4"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">#Triumph: Knowing you are not alone.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style4"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">#FlyTakeAway: Suppressed feelings need a remedy of communication and</span></span><span style="font-family: Times;"></span><span class="style4"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #0000ee;"> </span>love.</span></span> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="style4"><span style="font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">***</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-family: Times;">SCAR STORY is part of intlFLYGIRLSday, a campaign launched this year by Emotional Justice Unplugged founder Esther Armah to encourage, inspire, create sisterhood among young women. The multi-media campaign called 30 Dayz Of Fly invites young women to self id their fly: that's their brilliance, beauty, power, smartness and to id that in their girl. For more:- <a href="http://www.yasmag.com/YAS_MAG/Fly_Girls_Day.html">http://www.yasmag.com/YAS_MAG/Fly_Girls_Day.html</a></span></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--UAWe3Y4WEw/UV2MeZXFtjI/AAAAAAAAH48/70K7sTkc1Jk/s1600/_BLP9138.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><br />