Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 923

The Stream—Beyond a Black History Month

Al Jazeera—The Stream
Every February the US celebrates African American heritage during what is known as Black History Month. While many take the opportunity to highlight important contributions of African Americans, some within the black community oppose the idea of a dedicated month suggesting it trivializes their history. So how important is Black History Month? And has it been effective in promoting racial equality?

In this episode of The Stream, we speak to:

Mark Anthony Neal, @newblackman
Professor, Duke University
leftofblack.tumblr.com

Shukree Hassan Tilghman, @morethanamonth
Filmmaker, More than a Month
morethanamonth.org/2012

Kai Wright, @kai_wright
Editorial Director, Colorlines
colorlines.com

Akilah Hughes, @kiwirabbitfru
Blogger, itsakilahobviously.com

Keir Bristol, @andthenkeirsaid
Blogger, andthenkeirsaid.com

Jamelle Bouie, @jbouie
Staff writer, The American Prospect
prospect.org

Post Super Bowl Blues

Post Super Bowl Blues by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I woke up this morning with a profound sense of sadness and ambivalence about yesterday's Super Bowl, an event which exposed powerful cracks in the facade of power and invulnerability which we like to project to the rest of the world—and to ourselves. Between the incredibly moving performance of the chorus from Sandy Hook elementary school, and the blackout, which brought the game to a halt for 35 minutes, no one could mistake this event for an arrogant celebration of American immunity from tragedy. That no one planning the event, or announcing it, ever mentioned the thousands of people who had sought refuge in the Super Dome following Hurricane Katrina, and turned it into a symbol of American indifference and cruelty to its poor only added to the Bad Karma. If you were a person with a taste for metaphor, you could even regard the blackout "Katrina's Revenge."
As for the game itself, I loved it—the drama, the passion, the incredible athleticism displayed by the receivers and the kick returners, and the arm strength of both quarterbacks. But there were some hits during the game that were so hard and violent that I was forced to examine my own immersion in the contest and ask "should anyone really be playing this game?" Each year, the players get bigger and faster and the full speed collisions get more damaging. Should our entire culture be organized around a sport that subjects its participants to permanent physical and mental damage?
The experience forced me to interrogate the sources of my own addiction to the sport, an addiction rooted deep in my childhood From the age of 8 on, football was one of the ways I marked my passage into sometimes cruel and demanding world of working class masculinity. Whether it was watching the Giants on Sundays with my uncle Mac, dodging cars to play touch in the street, or dragging five kids down the field during pickup games in the local park, football became one of my chosen vehicles to win respect in a tough neighborhood even though I wore glasses and skipped third grade. Although I was marked off for difference by ambitious parents and academic success, football was a space where I could erase those differences and become an initiate in the church of heteronormative masculinity.
The skills I learned from playing and watching the games could bond me instantly with tough, socially dominant men and boys wherever I met them. it gave me immunity from the victimization that was the fate of many of my male peers who loved books, loved school, loved learning as much as I did. Through playing it, watching it and talking about it, I could instantly bond with people who might otherwise be predisposed to attack me, ridicule me, or ignore me.
This immersion in the game continued through college and young adulthood, where I played football constantly even though tennis was my varsity sport. Being able to throw a football sixty yards and smash through blocks when playing linebacker produced instant acceptance, whether it was in Columbia intramurals, schoolyard games in Harlem, a rough touch league in then Irish Inwood, or a lawyers league in Central Park.
My immersion in this profoundly male space continued, virtually unchecked, through my radicalization through the Civil Rights movement, and even my exposure to, and ultimate embrace, of radical feminism. Although I became acutely aware of and uncomfortable with, racist and sexist dimensions of football in both its institutional forms and its grass roots local manifestations- I couldn't give up what I had gotten, and continued to get from the game- a feeling of power and competence validated by camaraderie with the country's toughest men, a group of which I considered myself a part.
I cannot say that my experience with the game reflects that of many other men, much less that of women. But it does suggest how powerfully embedded football is in the shaping of gender identities in this society, and how difficult it will be to wean people away from it even when they see it's destructive power.
***
Mark Naisonis 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.

Hip Hop is Not Dead: Mary Nichols at TEDxOrlando

TEDx Talks
Mary Nichols (a.k.a. DJ Fusion) is a radio, mixtape & club dj, independent music industry consultant, and writer with a passion for both independent and mainstream music of the African diaspora. In 1998, she founded the syndicated Fuse Box Radio Broadcast, a clean, radio friendly mix that has gone global, spreading to over 25 national and international FM and internet radio stations.

Love in the Stacks: Some Thoughts on Black History Month

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Woodson, also the founder of the </span><span class="text"><span style="font-family: Times;">Association for the Study of African American (Negro) Life and History (<a href="http://www.asalh.org/index.html"...).  Eighty-seven years after that first commemoration—Woodson chose February as way to acknowledge the birthdays of the “great emancipator” Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass—there are some who decry that there is no longer a need for such an observation as Black History Month effectively self-segregates the Black experience from the larger American story.</span></span></span></div><a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="text"><span style="font-family: Times;">When I entered college thirty-years ago, I was unaware of Cater G. Woodson, let alone “Negro History Month.”  Like many of my peers, who did not benefit from multicultural curricul<span style="font-size: small;">a</span>, even in public schools in a cosmopolitan metropolis like New York City, my sense of Black History was limited to Martin Luther King, Jr. (this in the years before his birthday became a national holiday) and the head shots of “great black leaders” that were regularly stapled on classroom bulletin boards around President Lincoln’s birthday (then still celebrated as a separate holiday before, his and George Washington’s birthday were collapsed into one “President’s Day” holiday).  </span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="text"><span style="font-family: Times;">I still have vivid memories of my first Black History Month in 1984, which was highlighted by speeches from Chicago educator Marva Collins and writer, poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti, who had just published his collection<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Earthquakes-Sun... </a></span></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Earthquakes-Sun... style="font-family: Times;">Earthquakes and sunrise Missions:Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973 – 1983</span></i></a><span style="font-family: Times;"> (Third World Press).  That book became a constant companion; decades later there are still cadences of Madhubuti’s writing in my own.  My immediate response to meeting and reading Madhubuti (the former Don L. Lee) was to track down his earlier works like </span><i><span style="font-family: Times;">Don't Cry, Scream! </span></i><span style="font-family: Times;">(1969) and <i>We Walk the Way of the New World </i>(1970),m many of which I found in the E 185 section of the library.  It was then that I began a life long love affair with E 185, which within the Library of Congress’s call system is the “Black” section.  </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">It was not unusual in those days to find me on lazy Sunday or Saturday afternoons on the floor in the stacks—the E 185 section of my campus library—literally pulling books from the shelf onto the floor, as if I was pulling pieces together of some giant puzzle—and indeed I was;  In the absence of a Black Studies curriculum and even Black professors, E 185 was my Black Studies Department.  Years before Google and Youtube, E 185 was my search engine, and sitting on the floor in that space, Black History Month was indeed every month, everyday.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">During subsequent Black History Month celebrations during my college years, I always had great excitement about the chance to meet and exchange with many of the figures who were initially introduced to me while sitting in the E 185 section.  I still carry with me the times I sat with Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Toure (the former Stokely Carmichael), Gwendolyn Brooks, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. </span><span style="font-family: Times;">Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Amiri Baraka, who later when I was a graduate student sat with me for two hours  working through the nuances of Black cultural history.  That all of these exchanges occurred in the context of Black History Month events, has never been lost on me.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">In our contemporary moment, Black History Month has become little more than a cottage industry, that allows mainstream institutions like corporate media and public schools to continue to segregate the Black experience from the national narrative. For many of the giants (and not so giants) of Black Arts and Letters, it is the opportunity to gain some financial recognition for the work that they’ve done and continue to do.  For far too many young Blacks, their connection to Black History is far too often gained from documentary footage on Youtube and searches on Wikipedia.  Even amongst the privileged few who have the opportunity to take Black Studies courses on college campuses, the work in those courses are deemed secondary to academic offerings that some view as more “legitimate” or “relevant” to their post-collegiate careers.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times;">In a perfect world, the experience of the Black world would be fully integrated into the national American narrative, particularly in our school curricul<span style="font-size: small;">a</span>, yet that is not the case—even with a Black President, who has shown little desire to use his bully pulpit to reflect on the full scope of the national narrative. Black History Month will be needed as long as Black Americans experience what Salamishah Tillet refers to as “civic estrangement” in her new book <a href="http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/Vie... style="font-family: Times; font-style: normal;">Sites of Slavery</span></i></a><span class="st"><a href="http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/Vie... Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination</i></a> (Duke University Press).</span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="st"><span style="font-family: Times;">For me, Black History Month will always remain the context in which I fell in love with living a life of the mind—a love and life that is as timeless and as relevant as the occasions that inspired them.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>

Tricia Rose on "Hip Hop, Mass Media and Racial Storytelling in the Age of Obama"

Social Justice Now:
Tricia Rose, professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, discusses hip hop's retreat from politics and the potential for that music to help tell the stories of the dispossessed today. Rose is author of the ground-breaking 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy, and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters.
The event is sponsored by Senior Fellows, the honors program of the UT College of Communication. For more information contact Dave Junker, junker@austin.utexas.edu.
Location: University of Texas, Belo Center for New Media (BMC 5.208), Austin
 Video produced and edited for Austin Indymedia by Jeff Zavala.
 A ZGraphix production.

MHP: The Rosa Parks You Don't Know

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

with Jeanne Theoharis, author The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Remembering Filmmaker Marlon Riggs

Watch From the Archives: Filmmaker Marlon Riggs (1992) on PBS. See more from POV.


PBS | POV
Episode: From the Archives: Filmmaker Marlon Riggs (1992)

In "Color Adjustment," Marlon Riggs (Feb 3, 1957 - April 5, 1994)  weaves together television clips and commentary from producers, actors, and scholars in order to display how race relations has played out on television. In this interview, Riggs discusses his inspiration for making the film. Riggs's films include Ethnic Notions (1986), Tongues Untied (1989), Color Adjustment (1992), and Black is Black Ain't (1994).

Marlon Riggs: The Complete Edition is available at California Newsreel .

Paying Tribute To Funk's 'Sugarfoot' Bonner

The Life and Death of Magazines

The New York Times
A.O. Scott and David Carr talk about the transformation of our favorite magazines, who runs them, and why they're succeeding and failing.

Inside Story Americas - Guns in America's Inner Cities

Al Jazeera English
The Newtown shooting in December, which left 20 school children and six teachers dead, has dragged the issue of gun control back into the national agenda. For the first time in years, US politicians are discussing serious gun control measures. But millions of people in the country's inner cities live with the threat of gun violence on a daily basis. In Baltimore, one of the most dangerous cities in the US, the police have reframed their 'war on drugs' as a 'war on guns'. In the third episode of our special series on guns in the US, Inside Story Americas travels to Baltimore to meet those trying to stop gun crime and others who say owning a gun is sometimes a matter of survival.