Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 941

Tell Me More: Black Voters Rethinking Gay Marriage?

Alicia Keys Discusses Her Storytelling App for Children

BEMultiMedia  Loosely based on her relationship with her Nana, singer-songwriter Alicia Keys unveils an interactive storybook app, "The Journals of Mama Mae and LeeLee."

Global Enablers: How to Rob Africa

AlJazeeraEnglish  The world's wealthy countries often criticise African nations for corruption -- especially that perpetrated by those among the continent's government and business leaders who abuse their positions by looting tens of billions of dollars in national assets or the profits from state-owned enterprises that could otherwise be use to relieve the plight of some of the world's poorest peoples.

Live Symposium: Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia with Marlon Ross, J. Jack Halberstam, and Kathryn Bond Stockton

Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia:  A Symposium on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality.   November 8, 2012   1 pm to 4 pm A provocative, scholarly, and lively event, "Everyday Racism, Everyday Homophobia:  A Symposium on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” will take place on November 8, 2012, from 1-4 p.m. at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University.   Bringing together some of the nation's most urgent thinkers on race theory and gender and sexuality studies, the Symposium is free and open to faculty, students, and the general public.  A reception will follow.  
PARTICIPANTS: 
Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and four other books including The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2012). Halberstam writes and lectures widely on issues of gender, cultural production, popular music and sexuality and blogs at both bullybloggers.wordpress.com and www.jackhalberstam.com. 
Marlon B. Ross is Professor of English and of African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on British romanticism, African American literature, race, gender, and queer theory, and the cultural theory of space. He is currently completing his second book, The Color of Manhood: Remaking Black Masculinities within and beyond the Civil Rights Era, which examines the figuration of masculine competence as a racialized phenomenon in the domains of labor, political protest, and sexuality across the second half of the twentieth century. He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lilly Endowment Fellowship.
Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.  Her most recent books, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, are published by Duke University Press, and both were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies.
RESPONSE: 
Participating and responding to this discussion, and honored in this symposium for her key contribution to this debate, will be Sharon Holland of Duke University, whose searing, controversial, and prescient new book, The Erotic Life of Racism, is a key document helping to define and understand these typically unspoken interconnections between what she terms “everyday racism” and “everyday homophobia,” including the intertwined histories of racial eugenics and reproductive rights.  These recurrent strains in American society also form much of the discourse of critical race theory, transnational studies, American studies, gender theory, queer theory, and sexuality studies.   

MODERATOR : 
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. Neal is engaged in interdisciplinary scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies that draws upon modes of inquiry informed by the fields of literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and most notably popular culture. His books include New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (Routledge). Neal hosts a weekly webcast, Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

20th Century Strategy for a 21st Century Nation: Whiteness as Mass Appeal

20thCentury Strategy for a 21st  Century Nation: Whiteness as Mass Appeal by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The 2012 election, like every election before it, has been defined by race. This is America, and race always matters. Death, taxes, and race. While 2008-2012 has prompted more explicit racial assault on then candidate and ultimately President Obama, race, racism, and white supremacy defines the history of American politics. Sister Souljah, Willie Horton, anti-Muslim appeals, demonization of undocumented immigrants, "the welfare queen," the southern strategy, and countless other examples point to the ways that race defines American political campaigns. And these are just examples since the late 1960s from national presidential campaigns.
Yet the vitriol, the explicit racial appeals, and the ubiquitous racial rhetoric has been a noteworthy outcome of the 2012 election. Adele M. Stan, in "Romney Pushed Boundaries of 'Acceptable Racism' to Extremes" aptly describes the campaign as a long and winding campaign of racism, one that irrespective of the outcome has had its consequences:
If asked what one thing about the 2012 campaign most impacted everyday American life, one answer stands out above all others: racism. The wink-wink racial coding Romney uses, combined with the unabashed racism of such surrogates as former Bush administration chief of staff John Sununu, adds up to quite a wash of race-baited waters over the campaign. Then add to that the steady stream of racist rhetoric that characterized the Republican presidential primary campaign, and the wash looks more like a stew set on simmer for the better part of a year.
Since the early months of 2011, our politics have been marinating in the language of racial hatred, whether in former U.S. senator Rick Santorum's "blah people" moment, or former House speaker Newt Gingrich's tarring of Barack Obama as "the food stamp president."
The consequences and context of a campaign based in racism, based in a thirty-year racial assault on the civil rights movement is fully visible in AP's recent poll, which found that both explicit and implicit racial bias against African Americans and Latinos is on the rise. According to the AP, "51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes," which was a 3 percent rise since 2008. When examining implicit bias, "the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election." Should we be surprised?
The likes of John Sununu and Donald Trump, the sight of racist t-shirts and posters at GOP rallies and elsewhere, and the explicitly racist discourse point to the strategy of racist appeals and the consequences of such appeals. The impact of racism isn't simply voters picking Mitt Romney because of their anti-black racism, or even the ways that the accusations against President Obama as a "food stamp president," as "lazy" as a "socialist" and as "anti-White" resonate because of an entrenched white racial frame, but in the yearning and appeal of a white male leader. Race doesn't just matter in why whites are voting against President Obama but also why they are voting for Mitt Romney. Tom Scocca, in "Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be President?" argues that anti-black racism, dog "whistles" and prejudice isn't the only reason why white males are casting their vote for Romney-Ryan but because they are white and because white masculinity is associated with toughness, leadership, intelligence, and countless other racial stereotypes. "White people -- white men in particular -- are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney's candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him."
Chauncey DeVega describes the centrality of whiteness, of the sense of loss resulting from a black president, and therefore explicit appeal of a white president.
Despite their great advantages in wealth, income, power, social mobility, resources, and all other socioeconomic measures, many white people-- especially white male conservatives --are terrified and upset by the symbolic power of a black man who happens to be President of the United States. Ultimately, White Masculinity is imperiled by the idea of Barack Obama. White men rule this country; ironically, no group of people, especially on the Right are as insecure," he notes. "In the Age of Obama, White Masculinity imagines itself as at risk and obsolete. Because of their authoritarian streak, white conservative men must have control of women and the Other. White Conservative Masculinity's overreaction to the Age of Obama, and the social and political gains of people who are not white, male, and straight, are a function of this standing decision rule.
The cultural imagination of the white savior; the historic elevation of white men as shining knights, as war heroes, as protectors, as problem-solvers, and as leaders is on full display within this election. It is the same ideology that governed the founding principles of republicanism, which saw white men as the one and only capable of self-governance. It is the same ideology that under-girds American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and "white man's burden." In 1899, Rudyard Kipling penned, the White Man's Burden:
Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead.
It is that "burden"; it is that arrogance, it is that belief that only white mean can save civilization, can save America, can bring people together, can change the economy, that unifies the Romney campaign. It is the same racist and sexist logic that justified segregation in the military and positional segregation in sports. The appeal of Mitt Romney mirrors the appeal of white quarterbacks within the white imagination. The privileging of white male as quarterbacks and the exclusion of African Americans from this position "has implications off the football field. The discrimination dynamic that surrounds the issue of Black leadership on the turf reflects the greater racism that shapes our entire society," writes Dave Zirin. Racism, which questions black intelligence, which imagines leadership as incongruous to racial Otherness, to women, is foundational to American racial ideology. The 2012 election is just another piece of evidence of how far we haven't come. I don't know the outcome in terms of vote tallies and the next president, but I do know this: the 2012 campaign proved that like the twentieth, the nineteenth, the and the 18th centuries ... the "problem of the twenty-first century will be the color line" although it is a color line created, maintained, and for the sake of white men.
***
David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of the just released After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and Racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris.

Young People Fight Back Against Voter Suppression in Ohio

1HoodMedia  One Hood Media reports live from Cleveland, Ohio as early voting brings long lines and high energy and witness first hand voter suppression tactics and a group of youth that won't be denied. Jesse Jackson, Angela Woodson and Hip-Hop author/activist Bakari Kitwana were also present to protect the rights of Ohio voters.

For more info on Vote Mob go to www.votemob.org

Scar Stories: On White Dudes and Rape Culture

Scar Stories: On White Dudes and Rape Culture by Esther Armah | HuffPost Politics
White men need to stop talking about rape. Specifically, Republican senators and congressmen, whose claims provoke national firestorms, should cease rape-talk. Such comments spark cable news punditry and panels and prompt gleeful hand rubbing by Democrats, but essentially cloud the larger and far more toxic issue of a societal rape culture in which so few prosecutions of rapists are successful. It makes sense why so few victims come forward, because in our present rape culture, survivors carry the stigma and trauma of the sexual violence for years and those who rape walk away -- potentially to commit another crime -- bolstered by justice and media systems that re-traumatize rape survivors.
Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock is the latest to feel the wrath of public opinion in response to his comments during a live Tuesday night debate in which he said: "I... came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." One day before Mourdock made that comment Governor Mitt Romney endorsed him in an ad. Following the awful remarks, the Democratic Party created its own ad where they spliced Mourdock's comments with Governor Romney's endorsement the visual resulted in a damning indictment of a Republican Party and leader out of step with a deeply sensitive issue.
Mourdock's remarks follow those of his fellow Republican, six-term Tea Party backed Missouri Congressman Todd Akin who, during a live television interview, when asked about his views on rape and abortion said: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." In The Guardian, Jill Filipovic details other extraordinarily dangerous statements by other white Republican men around rape including:

• Wisconsin state representative Roger Rivard who asserted: "Some girls rape easy."
• Douglas Henry, a Tennessee state senator, who told his colleagues: "Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse."
• When asked a few years back about what kind of rape victim should be allowed to have an abortion, South Dakota Republican Bill Napoli answered: "A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life."
Can someone please explain the tendency for those caught with feet firmly rammed into mouths to dismiss that as "mis-speaking" -- is there a definition for that? What exactly does it mean? Post Akin's comments articles were written that showed such remarks were part of a wider and deep-rooted Republican ideology. Michelle Goldberg in The Daily Beast revealed Akin's record on abortion, tied it to the GOP VP hopeful Paul Ryan and acknowledged it as a fairly common reality in today's GOP. Goldberg wrote of Akin: "his policy position -- that abortion should be banned even in cases of rape and incest -- is quite common in today's GOP." References were made to John Wilke, the godfather of anti-abortion rhetoric whose philosophy peddled positions articulated by Akin. Michelle Goldberg noted the following in The Daily Beast:
... a 1999 article by John C. Willke, former president of the National Right to Life Committee, headlined, "Assault Rape Pregnancies Are Rare." First, Willke argues that rape statistics are uncertain, because while some women don't report rapes, others "pregnant from consensual intercourse, have later claimed rape." Secondly, he continues, when women are actually raped, the trauma upsets their endocrine system in a way that prevents pregnancy. "To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape."
Political gain made from the ludicrous remarks around rape by Republicans keeps distracting from the key issue: legislating the shaming of women and continuing to allow the devastating tools of silence and judgment to dominate society's reaction to a woman's articulation of rape -- both of which perpetuate rape culture. I then think of how little focus there is on the consequences of a pregnancy via rape and how society supports and deals with the woman and the child who was conceived.
On CNN back in August 2012, Shauna R. Prewitt a lawyer in Chicago and the author of Giving Birth to a 'Rapist's Child': A Discussion and Analysis of the Limited Legal Protections Afforded to Women Who Become Mothers Through Rape, was interviewed about a letter she had written. In it she describes being raped at 21 and then discovering she was pregnant, dealing with the conflicting emotions due to the pregnancy and finally giving birth to a baby girl who is now 7. In the letter, Prewitt reveals her rapist: " ... filed for sole custody." Prewitt adds she learned:
... in the vast majority of states -- 31 -- men who father through rape are able to assert the same custody and visitation rights to their children that other fathers enjoy. When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child.
In other words, a woman may trade justice for herself as a rape survivor as a means to guard against access to the child on the part of the rapist. Is that choice? It is the consequence of a society that seeks to legislate and interfere with a woman's body but has given far less thought to the behaviors, actions and reactions of men. So, the choice for women in those 31 states becomes this: justice or access? Plus, of the 19 states that do have laws dealing with the custody of children conceived by rape, 13 require proof of rape conviction in order to waive the alleged rapist's parental rights. Only 9 out of every 100 rapes are prosecuted and only 5 of those lead to a felony conviction.
And here's the thing, black and brown men need not feel they can stand comfortably and throw shade at the statements from now Mourdock and Akin that sparked such outrage. Rape culture encompasses conventional masculinity, which means it specifically makes violence an intimate and acceptable fabric of society that prompts the shaming and silencing of women who are victims of sexual violence. That is not a function of party politics or color, it is one of culture -- so liberals or progressives need not crow too loudly -- rape culture has no allegiance to any party. And of course, neither liberals nor progressives are seeking to legislate against women's bodies, rape culture needs no such sanction, it is already ripe, real, active.
We may be smarter about the language we choose, but rape culture is about ideology -- and that is all too present within our society. Indeed, while we stand in a place of outrage, it is no less important to note that women, too, are complicit in the silencing, shaming, judging of women who cry sexual violence. That silencing occurs on multiple levels by both genders: individual, familial, communal, cultural, institutional and societal. In a round table on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes post the Akin comments on August 25, featuring Michelle Goldberg, Katha Pollitt of TheNation.com, comedian and host of Totally Biased W. Kamau Bell and myself, I argued that Akin's comments reflected our cultural sensibility of suspicion when women make rape accusations, that statistics and research reflect that most rapists are known to their victims, reminding us of the cancer around notions such as 'perfect victims' where women's character and sexual behavior is put on trial before calculation that rape could be a legitimate conclusion.
To rid our society of the rape culture that invades it, we need 'Emotional Justice.' Emotional justice is a call to deal with our legacy of untreated trauma. That means having larger, more profound, provocative and difficult conversations about how that legacy of untreated trauma has become an inheritance passed down generation to generation. Silence as a response to sexual violence is common due to all the ways society's rape culture blames women, shames them, tries and convicts them with almost no equal focus on the accused. Women carry scars from that sexual violence and its trauma, from a journey to justice and being put on trial, and the consequence of being judged, shamed, blamed and convicted while -- as the evidence shows -- so many alleged rapists walk free. What if we changed that narrative, actually held the larger conversation about society's rape culture and how that needs to be challenged and changed?
***
Esther Armah is the creator of ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’, the multi platform, multi media intimate public arts and conversation series. She’s a New York Radio Host for WBAI99.5FM, a regular on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes and an international journalist, Playwright and National best-selling author. Follow her on twitter @estherarmah For Emotional Justice, go to:www.facebook.com/emotionaljustice.

What to Me is Election Day 2012?

What to Me is Election Day 2012?by Lisa Guerrero | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I remember the overwhelming excitement and feeling of sanctified purpose that the 2008 election had.  I, like all other Obama supporters in 2008, was swept up in the historical meaning of his potential win.  And when he did win, it felt like both the inevitable and astonishing event that it was.  Yes We Can.  Of course, his win didn’t bring with it the end of racism and the significance of race, no matter how many people naively, ignorantly, or deliberately clung, (and still cling) to the notion that an Obama presidency equaled a “post-racial” nation.  Neither did his election to the White House transform Barack Obama into the superhero we all desperately wanted him to be.  He remained a man; one who has had remarkable moments as Commander-in-Chief, and has also had regrettable moments as Commander-in-Chief.  He is fallible and flawed, as all humans are, but our disappointments in him seem to resonate much deeper because of the unprecedented hope he and his campaign allowed us to indulge in a manner that many of us had not dared to imagine before. 
It is four years later, and though I haven’t bought multiple t-shirts to commemorate it this time, I still have hope…in him, in my fellow citizens, and in my vote.  I still, and always will feel, that my vote is a profound privilege and responsibility.
This has been a long, arduous election season; the most taxing one I’ve experienced since I have been old enough to vote.  And throughout this seemingly endless election season there's been a lot of talk about how there isn't the same enthusiasm, the same "being on the cusp of history" feeling for people, especially those who supported Obama in 2008. And that is certainly true.  But elections like that come around once in a lifetime…if you’re lucky.  And while I am happy to have been a part of that rare moment four years ago, for me, and many others, this election in 2012 is more important in many ways than the historic election in 2008.
To me this election is about women's equality, my equality; it is about keeping safe women's ability, my ability, to be able to give voice to our experiences, to determine what we do with our own bodies, and to have access to safe and affordable healthcare when we make those choices; it is about affordable healthcare for everyone; it is about supporting the right for people to love whoever they want, and to have that love be recognized as "valid" and "equal," as if those words should ever have anything to do with love; it is about saving, improving, and believing in the promise of exemplary public education and future generations' chances at having access to it; it is about taking climate change seriously; it is about being our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. It's about the people I love…my grandmother, my disabled mother, my friends whose weddings I want to attend, my fellow teachers who are constantly being told to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, my students who are given less and less each year while paying more and more, my goddaughter, my best friends, and the people who struggle to live a good life amidst daily challenges whose names I will never know.  All of that is worth my vote.
My vote also says, “Obama, you must do more.” Drones, immigration, mandatory minimums, mass incarceration, gun violence, voter suppression, systemic poverty.  “You can do better.  We want you to do better….we alldeserve better.”
But even if I didn't care about any of these things I would vote anyway...because while I recognize many things in our system are flawed, and will likely continue to be flawed after this and many other elections, I’m not convinced that the flaw is yet fatal.  Who am I, in all of my privilege, to stop believing, when so many with so fewer reasons to believe than I, did not stop, have not stopped?   People have fought, been jailed and beaten, died, and still die, for the singular right to check a box and say: "My voice counts too;" their battles mean that I am lucky enough today to sit in the comfort of my house, unmolested, unchallenged, fill out a ballot, and drop it in a mailbox, even as people are still being suppressed TODAY just for trying to exercise this singular right. 
As James Baldwin once said, “Words like ‘freedom,’ ‘justice,’ ‘democracy’ are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.”Part of that individual effort is to vote. I will alwaysvote because my vote is not mine alone, but also belongs to those I love, to those who need help, to those who, like me, still have faith that we can love our neighbors like we love ourselves. I will always vote because it is the very least I can do to say thank you to those who came before me losing battles and winning wars, and those who continue to fight many of those same battles today both here and around the world.  I will always vote because it is also the most I can do to say I will always believe we can be better tomorrow than we are today.  Yes We Can…be bold. Be hopeful.  Be unwilling to give up fighting for change.  I’m one voice among many, and I approve this message.
***
Lisa Guerrero is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University Pullman, editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century: College Professors Talk About Their Fears, Risks, and Rewards (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and author of  the forthcoming Satiric Subjectivities: Double Conscious Satire in Contemporary Black Culture (Temple University Press).

Rockaway Blues

Rockaway Blues by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The destruction and isolation that has plagued the Rockaways in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, compounded by government neglect and the absence of official aid organizations, is not the first time that section of the city has been overcome with violence and fear. The wave of arson and disinvestment that swept through the Bronx, Harlem and large portions of Brooklyn during the early and mid 1970’s also took a terrible toll on the Rockaways, though I never saw it mentioned at the time, or for that matter in the historical literature about those difficult years in New York’s History.
I experienced this first hand in 1979 when I drove out to Rockaway to interview a former NYC school teacher and union activist, named Alice Citron, for my book Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Her address put her in a section of Rockaway, Edgemere, where I had spent many summers as a child staying in the bungalow of my grandfather, who was a garment worker. Although the bungalows were wooden, and in retrospect, extremely modest, I remember magical days and nights in that area in the early 50’s, running into the surf, playing ski-ball on the boardwalk, eating delicious knishes, and listening to the adults political arguments. The area had been packed with people, almost all of them Jewish, who had survived the Depression and were enjoying a first taste of prosperity and security. It was a joyous place.
Now, in 1979, it had the atmosphere of a ghost town. Alice Citron’s house stood on a beach block where 90 percent of the land consisted of vacant lots, with only three houses standing. Across the el tracks, near the bay side, stood a large public housing project. When I rang the door bell, Alice and her husband came to the door, accompanied by two huge dogs. Before we started her interview, which focused on the role Communist teachers played in fighting for better schools in Harlem and the teaching of Black history, she told me what the neighborhood was like today.
Rockaway had become the land that God , and the city of New York, had forgotten. In the housing projects across the street, senior citizens, most of them Black, were trapped in their apartments by fear of crime. The Citrons with their huge dogs, and their car, sometimes shopped for them, and brought them to the doctor when they were sick. The neighborhood had become a kind of urban concentration camp for the poor,, a place where the beauty of the surroundings was little compensation for fear, neglect, and the absence of basic neighborhood amenities. The Citrons, who had lost their jobs during the McCarthy area didn’t have the money to move out so they stayed and helped their neighbors cope. They were in their 70’s then, and had no where else to go.
For years after, I was haunted by what I saw that day, and what it told me about class and race in New York City. Ten years later, when I was coaching CYO basketball, I returned with a team from Park Slope play a game at a Catholic parish not far from the Citron home, St Rose of Lima, but I didn’t have the time to drive around. I never found out of the neighborhood had been rebuilt, or whether life had gotten better in the projects of the Rockaway Peninsula.
Now, with reports of residents living without power, food, and water, surrounded by piles of debris the storm had scattered, terrified of crime, the memories of that visit came rushing back , and along with it, the rage and frustration I had felt at the time.
Once again, the people of Rockaway were being neglected. Once again, they were reminded because of their color and economic status, they were not really “citizens.”And once again, they were living in the land that God, and the City of New York had forgotten.
***
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.

New Video: Imani Uzuri—“Dream Child" (dir. Stacey Muhammad)

Imani Uzuri "DREAM CHILD" Directed by: Stacey Muhammad
Featuring Dancer / Choreographer Camille A. Brown

from The Gypsy Diaries