Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 909

March 25, 2013

Rosa Clemente Responds to Rick Ross' "rape lyric"

Rosa Alicia Clemente is a community organizer, journalist Hip Hop activist and the 2008 Vice-Presidential candidate with the Green Party. She has been a featured keynote speaker, panelist, and political commentator all over the United States. In 1995, she developed Know Thy Self Productions, a speaker’s bureau for young people of color.. Clemente is currently working on her first book, When A Puerto Rican Woman Ran For Vice-President and Nobody Knew Her Name. She is a doctoral candidate in African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts--Amherst.

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Published on March 25, 2013 19:07

Capitalism in Crisis: Richard Wolff Urges End to Austerity, New Jobs Program, Democratizing Work

Democracy Now As Washington lawmakers pushes new austerity measures, economist Richard Wolff calls for a radical restructuring of the U.S. economic and financial systems. We talk about the $85 billion budget cuts as part of the sequester, banks too big to fail, Congress' failure to learn the lessons of the 2008 economic collapse and his new book, "Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism." Wolff also gives FOX news host Bill O'Reilly a lesson in economics 101.

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Published on March 25, 2013 18:45

Left of Black S3:E23 | Dave Zirin on the Intersections of Sports, Labor and Sexuality

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} p {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Times; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Times; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} </style></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">Left of Black S3:E23 | Dave Zirin on the Intersections of Sports, Labor and Sexuality Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined, via Skype, by sports commentator and social critic Dave Zirin, author of the new book <a href="http://thenewpress.com/index.php?opti... Over: How Politics has Turned the Sports World Upside Down</a> (The Free Press).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"> Zirin, who is a regular contributor to The Nation, is the author of several books including <a href="http://bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org... style="color: windowtext;">A People’s History of Sports in the United States</a>, <a href="http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commer... style="color: windowtext;">Not Just A Game: Power, Politics and American Sports</a>, and <a href="http://bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org... style="color: windowtext;">Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports</a>. Zirin is also the co-author of the John Carlos Story (2011). *** <a href="http://leftofblack.tumblr.com/"&... of Black</a> is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the <a href="http://jhfc.duke.edu/">John Hope Franklin Center</a> at Duke University. *** Episodes of Left of Blackare also available for free download in @ <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/l... style="color: blue; font-family: Times;">iTunes U</a></div> <div style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"> </div>

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Published on March 25, 2013 14:29

Left of Black S2:E23 | Dave Zirin on the Intersections of Sports, Labor and Sexuality

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Published on March 25, 2013 14:29

A People's Revolt in Cyprus: Richard Wolff on Protests Against EU Plan To Seize Bank Savings

Democracy Now
The eyes of the financial world are on the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus today. The government of Cyprus has brokered a last-ditch $13 billion bailout deal with European officials to stave off the collapse of its banking sector. Under the deal, all bank deposits above approximately $130,000 will be frozen and used to help pay off the banking sector's debts. An earlier version of the deal collapsed last week when Cypriots took to the streets to protest paying a tax of up to 10 percent on their life savings. The plan led to mass demonstrations as well as panicked bank withdrawals as Cypriots rushed to protect their savings.
"It's a demonstration of people power in this little corner of the world that's very impressive and the basis, I think, for some optimism about opposition," says Richard Wolff, economics professor emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and visiting professor at New School University. He is the author of several books including most recently, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.

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Published on March 25, 2013 13:59

Rally in Support of Black Studies at Temple University

via Paul Gibson

RALLY TO SAVE BLACK STUDIES at Temple University held on March 20, 2013 by the Organization of African American Studies Graduate Students of Temple University. Various speakers including Dr. Molefi K. Asante, Dr. Anthony Monteiro, former graduate students and community activists.
from: The Organization of African-American Studies Graduate Students & Department of African American Studies at Temple University
Supporters of African American Studies

In Temple’s 25th anniversary year of the doctoral program, the Department of African American Studies is currently in receivership. Previous faculty nominations for a Chair have been dismissed and an external Chair search has been denied by Dean Soufas of the College of Liberal Arts. We are asking your support in maintaining the agency of our program and the respect of professors in this discipline. Discrepancies over the department being able to elect their own Chair/ leadership has been an ongoing struggle since spring 2012. Ultimately the Dean is disrespecting our faculty's rights, our department's intent to have a qualified Chair of its choosing, the black students of Temple, and the larger Philly black community.

We are asking for your support in: (1) demanding the dean acknowledge the will of the faculty during this chair selection period or (2) grant the department an external Chair search and hire.

Here is the link to sign the petition https://www.change.org/petitions/supporters-of-black-studies-support-african-american-studies-at-temple-university#

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Published on March 25, 2013 08:56

March 24, 2013

It's Just a Song? Guthrie Ramsey on the Context(s) of Beyonce's "Bow Down"

It’s Just a Song? by Guthrie Ramsey | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
A while back I had my undies knotted up about all the social and print media coverage that the film Django was getting from the critics. I asked publicly and honestly why a project that many found so fraught was getting all of that digital ink. In my view, there were so many other cultural expressions to engage. The critic and scholar David Leonard provided a satisfying response when he said that mass mediated work of that magnitude provided him—someone who lived outside of a major cultural center—a way to speak about the issues he cared about to a large audience, knowing that many had also seen/heard a work in question. In social media years, the Django controversy seems like about a decade ago. Although the Chinese calendar says it’s the year of the snake, we, in the Western hemisphere know that it’s clearly the year of Mrs. Beyoncé Carter, whose energy, marketing muscle, talent, female pulchritude and every rump shake creates its own bibliography and outcry. Her literal behind is famous and probably has an insurance policy. As a historian, I resist following the crowd for topics to think about, but as a professor with a group of undergraduate scholars to teach in my American Musical Life course, her ubiquity allows facile connections with large issues of social, musical, and historical analysis. Beyoncé-course and its discontents provide a great platform to introduce music production and meaning of the 20th and 21stcenturies. I was minding my own business when a young scholar Regina Bradley sent me her blog “I Been on (Ratchet): Conceptualizing a Sonic Ratchet Aesthetic in Beyoncé’s “Bow Down,” which takes up Beyoncé’s new recording with the provocative hook “Bow Down, Bitches.” Bradley’s piece and its embedded links gave me a primer in ratchet discourse and introduced me other scholars who have discussed it. Regina does an admirable job analyzing the intertextualities and prior texts of the lyrical, instrumental and discursive aspects of the recording. Shortly thereafter, another young scholar, Maco Faniel sent me his highly contextualized blog “I am from that H-Town, I am Coming Down: Bow Down (Respect Us and Understand us in Context.” Faniel writes ethnographically about Houston’s early 1990s hip hop scene (which was a backdrop for Beyonce’s formative years), offering an informed window into this recording as it references site specific personalities, sonic conventions, and social attitudes from a vibrant historical moment. I appreciate this reading as it resonates with my own work on music and migration in the mid-20th century. Black southerners have never believed that northern media-scapes were superior to their own—just different. And there was much more written. Judging from the amount and intensity of the Twitter feeds, blogs, Facebook posts, and email exchanges, we’ve got a live one here. Concerns about “Bow Down” have run the gamut. Was it appropriate feminism? Were her distracters simply “hating,” in predictable, garden-variety ways? Were her defenders standing up for feminist complexity? Shouldn’t we celebrate a very visible and obviously quite busy sistah’s moment to get her ratchet and nostalgic on in peace (and in front of a global audience base)? Were her critics dissing her black southern hip-hop roots, a tendency found in much pop music criticism? Shouldn’t she be allowed to speak back to her relentless critics--why did she lip synch?--why did she have to call it the “Mrs. Carter” tour?--why did her documentary have that infomercial feel?--why did she dress so scantily and gyrate so, so . . . during the Super Bowl? Add up all this constant pestering to that pile of dishes and diapers she probably has to wash in Mr. Carter’s house /and/ mix in the expectation to look glamorous even at the corner bodega together with the pressures of running a global pop music empire designed to keep her every artistic utterance before the masses while at the same time being fiercely private? You’d probably want to call out a few bitches, too. Plus, isn’t this “just a song” anyway, as one of her defenders claimed in a post? Well, songs are important, and here’s why. I define a song as a collision of structure, circumstance, and experience. They are incredibly powerful things, particularly when they are mass mediated. They do meaningful cultural work, and that’s why we care. The musicologist Carolyn Abbate wrote that “musical sounds are very bad at contradicting or resisting what is ascribed to them . . . . they shed associations and hence connotations so very easily, and absorb them, too.” In Race Music: Black Culture from Bebop to Hip-Hop I wrote that musical styles and social identities are a lot alike in that they are both processes that signify in the social world. And further, social identities share an important attribute ascribed to musical sounds: connotations and associations about identities are “very easily absorbed.” It’s part of the magic. For these reasons, and in the tradition of Grimm’s fairy tales, “Bow Down” for me is both gift and poison. I’m curious about the structure of the track, its mode of production, the maker of the beat, its chop and screw elements, its three modes of timbral address in the vocals. On the formal elements of this song, both Bradley and Faniel have more than sufficiently described the “circumstance” of this song—its historical and geographic identity. At the same time, I find the sentiment of the lyrics—the emotional focal point of a song for a majority of listeners—are sophomoric, unfortunate, and, perhaps, even worse. But, really—it’s just a song, one might still insist. Structures (lyrics, melody, harmony, timbres, rhythms, textures, technologies) are merely abstract principles. And, true: circumstances (the historical and geographic location where these structures form can always be appreciated as insider, local knowledge. We’ll always have to work diligently to discover and “hear” those meanings. Yet my third element of what constitutes a song—experience—allows, and, in fact—insists on thinking about how many other ways songs are made in and, indeed, make other contexts, other social worlds. Here’s another context for why this song, circulated by one of the most mass-mediated pop platforms on planet Earth is lost on this listener. I learned about and experienced our inauguration singer’s latest installment in the following context. I never like to see news trucks in my neighborhood unless they’re documenting some special performance in our modest band shell in the park. This morning on my way to catch the G train hustling to my favorite local café, I see the trucks, the unwelcome visitors. “What happened?” I asked the old dude with the toothless, weary face standing at the subway entrance. “A little girl got raped on the bottom floor,” deadpanning without changing his expressionless expression. “Where was the police?” he muttered as I dashed underground in the neighborhood now memorialized as the one that produced the talented Jay-Z. This terrible news was through serendipity collapsed with my experience of this song. It had been a couple of weeks of ups and downs. Major news networks empathized and even sympathized with a sixteen-year-old girl’s attackers in Steubenville, Ohio. Two of the girl’s female classmates are arrested for threatening the victim for having the courage to testify after her motionless image was circulated on social media, her rapists holding her by the limbs like a slain calf. Part of their defense was that it was all just a joke. The week prior had plunged me in other art worlds outside of the one in which this song circulated. I got to perform with the icon Amiri Baraka as he admonished the crowd of young poets and activists on the importance of establishing their own media platforms in order to keep their messages uncompromised. Got to see my colleague and friend the scholar and activist Salamishah Tillet, with whom I co-taught a course titled “Jazz is a Woman,” on MSNBC teaching America about rape culture and the importance of empowering girls as well as teaching our boys that they have a part to play as well. Got to participate in a book event about the South African singer and activist Sathima Bea Benjamin and her struggle to locate her freedom as a woman in music during the Apartheid era. Got invited by Darnell Moore, fervent activist for gender equalities, to comment on musical masculinities for The Feminist Wire, a site that I admire for its straight forward and radical message that women are human. (This might be greeted as news for some). At any rate, I was experiencing some enlightenment and hope when I confronted “Bow Down, Bitches” on a YouTube video with thousands of views. One of the issues that I’m working through here is that, I believe in artistic freedom just like I believe in academic freedom. And I experience life in a variety of subject positions that demand I hear texts in a variety of ways. I don’t think it’s appropriate, on a lot of levels, for me to police what some women find empowering. But I also think its my right and responsibility—as a man who has a measure of influence in shaping young minds and building a safer world for my granddaughters through action and discourse—to contribute to the debate. I deal professionally in four political economies: academia, mass media, social media, and the “art world.” I should also mention that I have a wife, a mother, sisters, daughters, granddaughters and other women I respect, love and from whom I learn. In the academy, the idea of “objectivity” has, thankfully, been revealed as a faulty construct to invisibly enforce one’s political agenda. We can now explain things from our various subject positions as well as connect the ideas and texts we study with our own lived experiences. We can now, thanks to the field of cultural studies, write about pop culture and build substantial and well-respected careers doing so. In the world of social media we can circulate our ideas quickly, test-run our theories, and build supportive communities of knowledge sharing—our carefully cultivated circles being our judge and jury. And in the art world we can question, conceptualize, and circulate our ideas about the social world through visual and sonic modes in ways that don’t have to be didactic, formulaic, nor immediately understood to have an impact. As a result of a confluence of experiences I’ve had lately and the various spaces I occupy as a man, scholar, musician and critic, I’m going to continue to wrestle with corporate sponsored music that has such visceral impact and shock value. The sheer ubiquity of pop music expressions force us to have conversations with kids with whom you’d rather be talking about times tables, geography and why they are /not/ bitches. You know the old adage—if you have to explain a joke… Again, this music is not tucked away in some avant-garde museum exhibition: the same person being paraded around by POTUS and FLOTUS to middle school kids as a role model released it proudly. Maybe its time for a Jeremiah Wright moment and create a little distance? Just last month we—the community of people who understand that public language and discourse matter—were flummoxed when a writer at the institution The Onion tweeted to thousands of followers a vulgar slur about Quvenzhane Wallis. Matt Kirshen, a comedian and writer, responded on Huff Post Comedy how we had all missed the nuance of the joke. Right. Maybe I should only respond as a dispassionate academic who works on mass-mediated texts, sometimes on social media, and as one who loves uncovering the subliminal messages in artistic work. (Maybe she doesn’t mean “literal” bitches here, and even if she does, it’s not our job to require a rich, influential woman to adhere to a politics of respectability, which is yet another way to police the inner-ratchet she has every right to express). Or maybe despite my efforts to keep my ears open and not “age out” of the cultural critic game, I’m out of place, behind the times and am, in fact, one of the bitches this lady is singing to. For now I’m going to wonder, holding fear for the women I love, if the dude (or dudes) who was raping that baby three blocks from my house and where my wife takes public transportation was told something like “bow down bitch,” was called a c@#$ like that cute little self-possessed actress—this is just a complicated joke that you’ll understand better one day when you’re old enough to get ratchet. You’ll remember this as one of the things that made you complicated. Those who don’t agree with my critique are welcome to their own. But as a man who has lost a sister to domestic violence, I think I’ll stay in my lane and stick with my belief that demeaning language circulated widely by powerful corporations is one of the places where bad things start. It doesn’t work for me no matter how fine the pitchwoman or tight the melisma, particularly in today’s climate in which vulnerable women are under seize. Oh, well Bubba, just funin’. Maybe Gramps just needs to go sit down somewhere, stop trying to police peoples and let mass-mediated millionaires do they thing on the internets. Let these folk make dey money. Maybe put on some nice jazz. Like trumpeter Nicholas Payton’s recent release, a CD titled Bitches… LOL and SMH @ Bow Down Bitches [insert perfunctory colon]#HUHandWTF? *** Guthrie Ramseyis the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow him on Twitter at @DrGuyMusiqology and Musiqology.com

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Published on March 24, 2013 18:55

Bilal Performs Live Acoustic Version of "Never Be the Same"

ReelBlack
BILAL performing an acoustic version of "Never Be The Same" from his 2013 CD A Love Surreal live at Sound of Market Street Records on 3.9.2013.
Camera by Craig Carpenter and Mike D. Audio: Soulfussion Media. Special thanks Sound of Market Street and Hans Elder.

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Published on March 24, 2013 11:19

Boundaries Without Walls—the Atrophied Conscience of Apartheid America

Boundaries Without Walls—the Atrophied Conscience of Apartheid America by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Little by little, we have created an apartheid nation—a place where profound spatial and moral divisions separate the lives of the privileged and the unfortunate. The boundaries are not strictly racial, though those on the lower side of the divide are overwhelmingly people of color, nor are they marked by gates, and walls and fences. Rather, they are enforced by a complex set of codes followed by law enforcement authorities who have acquired immense power to assure public safety since the imposition of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, powers which have effectively prevented the poor from doing anything to prevent their marginalization and immiseration, and which have given wealthy elites virtually immunity from threats to their well being coming either from political action, mass protest or street crime.
You can see this in New York City where you can shop in a newly wealthy neighborhood, like Park Slope, go to an Arts destination in Manhattan, or go to one of those boroughs great universities, like Columbia, NYU or Fordham, without seeing groups of young people from one of the outer boroughs’ poor neighborhoods congregating in a group. Police practices have made it clear to them that they are not welcome there—that their very presence constitutes a virtual threat, a "crime waiting to happen."
But youth of color cleansing, and spatial controls are not just imposed in already established centers of wealth. In Bedford Stuyvesant and Red Hook, both gentrifying areas, police practices keep young people penned into neighborhood housing projects, wary of walking streets, in a group, where middle class residents have moved or hip cafes have opened. Very quickly, young people with certain race and class markers learn that they are subject to being stopped and questioned and frisked in almost all spaces out of the neighborhoods, and in a growing number of spaces where they actually live.
But worse yet, what is daily life for young people of color who are poor, is quite literally out of sight and out of mind, and thereby unimaginable, not only for middle class and wealthy residents of cities, but for the Mayors of those cities. Because they never talk to young people who are on the receiving end of these spatial controls, and ever see them in action; they can pretend these young folk don't exist. Their conscience has atrophied when it comes to the fundamental realities of life for the young and the poor.
Two recent events dramatize this for me—the police murder of Kimani Gray in East Flatbush Brooklyn, and the school closing order given by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago. Never has New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg reached out to the grieving mother of a 16-year-old boy who was killed for doing nothing more than walking home from a neighborhood party. Instead, he hides behind a "narrative of criminality" used to hide the ugly facts of Kimani Gray’s death, which is that this was an outgrowth of a "stop and frisk" procedure initiated by plainclothes police that will NEVER happen to young people in the Mayor's family or social circle. Kimani Gray was one of New York City's legion of "disposable youth" that must be policed and contained in every aspect of their lives to make the city's engines of economic growth secure. He could be snuffed out without anyone in power losing a moment of sleep
Similarly, the lives of tens of thousands of young people of color to be disrupted by the school closings ordered by Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago could be conveniently erased from his thoughts by a ski trip because his own children, safely enrolled in Chicago Lab School, would never experience the disruptions, nor would their friends. The impact of these policies would be felt by "Other People's Children"—the same people who live in fear of gun violence, gang violence, and police containment, who feel alternately penned into poor neighborhoods or pushed out of the city altogether
A leadership which can inflict this kind of containment and moral erasure on a large portion of their city's population can only be described as profoundly corrupt- but we are all complicit insofar as we have allowed our own security to be built on an edifice of other people's suffering.
***
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.

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Published on March 24, 2013 08:19