Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 976

'Black Folk Don't': Commit Suicide

Black Folk Dont:  Suicide usually isn't an option for black folks, especially since there is a whole host of reasons why our mortality rate is so high, but is this always true? Given some recent high profile suicides and apparent suicides in the black community, is there more room to have this discussion now?

#ThisIsWhatALesbianLooksLike: An Open Letter to Florida Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll

Open Letter to Florida Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll  by Doria Roberts | HuffPost GayVoices
"The roots of sexism and homophobia are found in the same economic and political institutions that serve as the foundation of racism in this country."
-Professor Angela Y. Davis (Women, Culture and Politics)

" You don't have to live next to me!
Just give me my equality!"
-Nina Simone ("Mississippi Goddam")

Hi Lt. Governor Carroll,

It's been a long week, yes? Wow.

Well, I'm sure you've heard by now what's been going on but let me introduce myself. My name is Doria Roberts and I'm the person who started the activist hashtag #ThisIsWhatALesbianLooksLike in response to your comment about what black lesbians don't look like -- namely you.

First, I want to say that it was not my intention to shame you and that I want (very badly) to give you the benefit of the doubt. I can't imagine having to defend myself against charges of adultery when I knew myself to be innocent. My wife is my life and anything challenging or questioning my commitment to her or the foundation of our marriage would send me grasping for any and all lifeboats to assure her that I value our union above all.

Now, I'm generally a forgiving person and I know I don't have access to my best self every minute of every day, so I can understand how some of the things you said may have been said under duress as opposed to a deep-seated, polarizing and misguided hate for a group of people you don't even know. I mean, Peter denied Jesus three times. And that was Jesus!

But as I've said, I could only understand some of the things you said.

Please do not confuse my compassion with acceptance.

When I heard the quote "Black women who look like me don't usually engage in those type of relationships (meaning lesbian relationships)" attributed to you as a defense, my first and only thought was "No." Really, just that. No. I wasn't going to allow yet another public figure to offer my life up as a whipping post to absorb their public flogging -- especially one who looked like me.

Yes, despite what you think, Lt. Gov. Carroll, you do look like me.
But more on that later...

When the hashtag started to pick up some steam, I reached out to my own fan base to contribute to the dialogue but implored them not to bash you. I asked them to use their activism and channel their outrage as a "teachable" moment for you and others like you who now will (hopefully) think twice before throwing others in the line of fire to advance their political and/or professional agendas.

After awhile though, I stopped thinking about you (and others like you) and I began to focus instead on the hundreds of smiling faces I was being introduced to through this entirely serendipitous post. All beautiful, all happy.

I started thinking about me and my wife and how, as an interracial lesbian couple living in the southeastern United States, we face the unknowable every day. And, though we are nowhere near the top of the social food chain, we manage to run a successful business together. I'm also musician who travels internationally so there is no option for us to stay inside and hide when things get rough.

We do this, as much as we can, with smiles on our faces. Some days those smiles are hard won, sometimes they don't come at all and some days they come as easy as sunrise despite the fact that we live in a world where it is thought to be a risk to be who we are and an act of courage to simply claim it.

Okay.

That said, let's get to the real talk...

First, a little quiz.

Of the following four names, which one(s) do you recognize and what is the link between them?

Sakia Gunn
Shani Baraka
Rayshon Holmes
Matthew Shepard
Take your time. I'll wait.

Alright, that's silly because I can't really know your answer, right? But I'm going to venture a guess and suppose that you are an average person with average access to and consumption of popular media. If I were to guess your answers based on that criteria, I would project that you didn't know the first three names and probably knew the last one.

The first three names belong to African-American lesbian and bisexual women who were murdered because of their sexuality, gender and/or non-conformity to binary gender stereotypes. The fourth name belongs to a white, young male who was also a murder victim targeted because of his sexuality.

So, if you guessed that they are all members of the LGBT community and all victims of hate crimes you would be correct.

The similarities, however, pretty much end there. According to Lexis/Nexis reports, Sakia's murder generated only 21 stories as opposed to the 659 generated by Matthew's. That is a staggering difference of 638 stories or 30 times more...or less. However you want to look at it.

The point I'm trying to make is that, statistically speaking, hate crimes against lesbians of color are less likely to be covered by major media outlets even when the crime is murder and is provoked by our sexuality.

Put another way:

We (i.e. lesbians of color, queer women of color and black lesbians in particular) are already shouldering epically disproportionate concerns about our visibility without folks like you adding to the load. We are living in a society that almost pathologically refuses to acknowledge our existence... that is, until our existence is perceived as a threat.

Well, I am here to tell you that we are not a threat. Furthermore, we are not your problem. We are your sisters and your belief that we do not look like you has no bearing on the irrefutable fact that you do indeed look like us, whether that "look" is butch, femme, stud, punk, prep or otherwise.


When you say or do things that dehumanize me, you dehumanize yourself. Know that. And, we both know how easily dehumanization leads to invisibility which breeds intolerance which can, in some cases, as evidenced by the headlines pouring out of Colorado this weekend, justify senseless acts of violence.

--------

The quote I used to open this letter is a quote by Sister Angela Davis (no introduction necessary here, I hope) and is one I use in a song of mine called "Because." I use the quote to invoke and inspire a call to multi-issue activism because I often see in my divergent communities a lack of "cross-pollination." I want to see more LGBT outlets and organizations reporting on and standing in solidarity with the black community for cases like Trayvon Martin without having to be reminded. Conversely, I want to see black publications giving Sakia, Shani and Rayshon their due. And on and on and on...

I've thought a lot about you and me this week and how possibly, at the intersection of our struggles, we could find some common ground. I thought about the paths of Professor Davis and Condoleeza Rice Rice. Did you know that they grew up approximately 15 miles apart in Alabama and both cite the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church as the impetus for their respective activist efforts. (Yeeesss, Condi is an activist too. Don't get it twisted, folks.) While they are on opposite ends of the spectrum, they are still part of the same sorority and that is one that cannot afford to be fractured just so that you can save face.

I can only imagine what it would take for a black woman to make it to where you are now, one of the highest ranking officials in Florida. Florida!

But, you know, I don't have to imagine it. I'm living it. I know what it's like to tirelessly search for your own voice and, after finding it, having to then find an audience for it. What I've learned is that sometimes you don't look like your audience and they don't look like you. And that's okay. Never take for granted the potential of your reach. While diversity can make this land we live in hard to bear, it's also what makes it... brilliant.

What an amazing opportunity and time we have and live in. We should be celebrating that as allies -- not senselessly sparring as adversaries.

Ultimately, what I'd like for you to take away from this experience is an understanding of how easily words, both yours and mine (28 total. Yes, I counted. I'm a Virgo. What's your sign?), can change the landscape of visibility for people who are not only surviving but living full lives on the so-called "fringes of society".

Remember that only four or so years ago, people would have said that men who look like President Obama (with names like Barack, Barack!) don't become President of the United States. They would have been wrong. Like, really wrong.

Remember these names: Sakia, Shani, Rayshon, Matthew and the thousands of names that go unaccounted for. Mourn the loss of their potential, their youth and the loss of their "becoming."

Remember the faces of the hundreds (hundreds!) of women who stood up to be counted after you unceremoniously discounted them. Commit them to memory.

Remember how small thinking and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes can get in the way of our progress. Dare I say, even perhaps our very evolutionary process?

Most importantly, remember that you are, in the end, a public servant and that because you have used my life as a punching bag your legacy is in danger of becoming a punch line.

Okay, then. I'm going to go now. We both have work to do.

I just wanted to let you know that (as my grandmother would say) "Imma be alright" because the fringes can be fabulous and the water is just fine....

Yours in sisterhood,
Doria
***
Doria Roberts is a singer/songwriter who  has shared the stage with folk and blues legends The Holmes Brothers, Janis Ian and the late and June Carter Cash, world music darling Angelique Kidjo, Pulizter Prize winning author Alice Walker and Oscar winning actress Jane Fonda (as a featured performer in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues) as well as pop/R&B favorites Me'shell N'degeocello, John Mayer and many others. Roberts was also recently chosen for an artist residency sponsored by The Chateauvallon Artist Complex in Ollioules, France which culminated in a five city performance tour in the country’s most revered theaters and art houses.

The Privilege to Murder?

The Privilege to Murder? by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
During a discussion about James Holmes and the Aurora, Colorado shooting, Touré asked,“how can someone so young be so depraved?” Citing a “festering rage from that stems from feeling marginalized and powerless,” a feeling “that leads to them to try to get back at the world, ” Touré feeds the public’s insatiable desire to understand Holmes and his alleged crimes.   He goes to great lengths to explain why Holmes – a white male who grew up in San Diego, a white male who has been identified as “nice,” “easy-going,” “smart” and “quiet” within the media; a white male who we are now learning was nothing more than a very shy, well-mannered young man who was heavily involved in their local Presbyterian church” – allegedly committed this heinous crime. 
The efforts to describe Holmes as “otherwise normal” who must have gone crazy, who must have lost it, who must have faced something to make him go into a movie theater and shoot 70 people, speaks to the ways that the (il)logics of race and gender operate in the context of America. 
“The freedom to kill, maim, commit wanton acts of violence, and to be anti-social (as well as pathological) without having your actions reflect on your own racial group, is one of the ultimate, if not in fact most potent, examples of White Privilege in post civil rights era America,” writes Chauncey DeVega in “What James and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell us about While (male) Privilege.” “Instead of a national conversation where we reflect on what has gone wrong with young white men in our society--a group which apparently possesses a high propensity for committing acts of mass violence – James  Holmes will be framed as an outlier.” In fact the media narrative has gone to great lengths to him as “mentally unstable and as a loner,” and as a “good kid who happened to shoot up a movie theater” all speaks to the efforts to define him through an outlier narrative.
In “White Privilege and Mass Murders in America,” the blogger Three Sonorans, highlights how race runs through the center of the media discourse here:
You already know that if it was a Muslim that did the crime, the news would be speaking right now about the threat of “Muslim” terrorism.
This Batman shooting will never be referred to as “White” terrorism or “American” terrorism. Everyone knows that American and terrorism are exact opposites! ….
What if the shooter was not white? The Virginia Tech shooter was not white, and we all know thanks to the news that he was an immigrant from South Korea. They chose only the best pictures with a smiling face to let Americans know what that killer looked like.
Now just imagine if the mass shooter was a former Mexican American Studies student! You know that news would be all over that!
Likewise, “The Dark Knight, Terrorism, Big Gulps and White Privilege” points to the double standards and the ways that race continues to define the media coverage: 
Regardless, this is a significant story, and the media has responded accordingly.  Go ahead and do a Google news search.  Myriad articles will pop up, titles all containing such words as “shooter” and “gunman.”  Of course, if this guy was brown, I guaran-fucking-tee you he’d be a terrorist.  But don’t worry.  James Holmes is white, and it’s all good according to the Obama Administration, who “…do not believe at this point there was an apparent nexus to terrorism.”  Whew, thank goodness!  The last thing I need is to have to walk past more of these assholes:
In just a few short days, the media has gone to great lengths to explain what we are told over and over again is unexplainable (and impossible): a white criminal, a white murderer, a white “thug,” a white “pariah” and a “white terrorist.”  That is, in the dominant white imagination, a white terrorist, a white thug, and a savage white man are all contradictions in terms.  The national whisper is clear: “a dangerous middle-class suburban white criminal isn’t possible. How could this happen?”  Whiteness is innocence, goodness, and normalcy within the national imagination. 
Invoking the words of neighbors, people he met in a bar, and others who have little intimate knowledge about Holmes as a person, the media discourse has feasted on a public desire to EXPLAIN what happened and HOW it could happen with James Holmes.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to hear Elaine Brown speak at Washington State University.  During her talk, she spoke about the case of Michael Lewis, a 13-year-old Black boy charged with murder in 1997,  comparing the media narrative and public reaction in his case to that of Kip Kinkel, a 17-year-old Oregon teen who killed his parents and several classmates a year after Lewis. Brown’s appearance at Brown University was described as follows: 
Brown used the tale of "Little B," Michael Lewis, a 13-year-old boy from Atlanta who was charged with murder in 1997 and tried as an adult, to illustrate the concept of "new age racism. . . .” Lewis was called a “thug” and “super-predator” and associated with a growing movement to identify the "black criminal" as the scapegoat for problems with black America today, Brown said. “The notion of the black criminal is part of the racist view we have begun to embrace and accept,” said Brown. “Children should not be tried as adults, and the United States is the only country which does this.” She contrasted Lewis' case with that of Kip Kinkel, a 17-year-old Oregon student who killed both of his parents and three classmates in 1998. Instead of typifying young white adolescents as “thugs” and “criminals,” community members tried to understand why he had committed the crime, hanging a sign in front of the school reading, “Why Kill?” He was just “a kid who went bad that day,” she said. 
Whereas the media continues to ask “why James?” just like it asked, “Why Kip?”,  “Why Dylan?”, and “Why Eric?”,  the power of racial stereotypes, of a history of American racism, and of white racial framing never leads those questions to be asked for people of color. 
Given the power of racial stereotypes, and given the persistence of racial prejudices, is this national determination to explain “why” or “how” is not all surprising.   According to Michelle Alexander, “what it means to be criminal in our collective consciousness to what it means to be Black.”  In other words, “the term Black criminal is nearly redundant . . . . To be a Black man is to be thought of as a criminal, and to be a Black criminal is to be despicable – a social pariah” (Alexander 2010, p. 193). 
Vijay Prashad concurs, noting that, “the international Muslim terrorist and the domestic black criminal stand as alibis for revanchism.  Race free criminals (read white) are free from extra detection or from pious fulminations of the political class” (Prashad 2003, p. 75).  These entrenched stereotypes and the power of white racial framing leads to a desperate media and public trying to “make sense” of this tragedy in absence of an accepted narrative; it is through these narratives that Holmes and white male violence gets reimagine as aberration rather than indicative of a cultural or cultural failure.  
Whereas black or brown and criminal are interchangeable, and whereas Muslim and terrorist are imagined as inseparable, a white person accused of shooting into a crowded movie theater, a white person who allegedly killed 12 and wounded 58 more, a white person who purportedly bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition, who planted bombs at his apartment necessitates explanation.
According to Riché Richardson, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, “It is so unsettling that the word “terrorist” continues to be associated by implication with who is perceived as ‘foreign.’ Words like ‘gunman’ obscure the larger implications of mass shootings. This kind of violence functions as a form of domestic terrorism.” Yes, “he was a good person, but . . . .”   That sure isn’t the headline we see with alleged crimes involving blacks, Latinos, and Muslims.   It’s more like “he was a bad person (thug/terrorist) who did bad things.”  But in America, white is right, even when you shoot up an entire movie theater.  
***
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 just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

#BigThink: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science and Politics

BigThink

The astrophysicist says the President Obama understands the issues related to global warming or the energy crisis, but it wasn't as bad as we think it was under Bush.

Pop Music and the Spatialization of Race in the 1990s

The Music and History of Our Times
Pop Music and the Spatialization of Race in the 1990s by Mark Anthony Neal | History Now
In September 1990, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuted on NBC. The show starred Will Smith, also known as the Fresh Prince, of the rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, portraying a character, “Will Smith,” who relocates from a working-class community in Philadelphia to live with wealthy relatives in Bel Air. The series was loosely based on the life of music industry executive Benny Medina and was executive produced by Quincy Jones. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was significant for several reasons. It anticipated the emergence of recognizable rap stars as mainstream American pop icons; two decades later Smith, O’Shea Jackson (Ice Cube), James Todd Smith (LL Cool J), Dana Owens (Queen Latifah), and Tracy Marrow (Ice-T), to name just a few, are all major stars who have found success in both film and television. The series was also a broad metaphor for demographic shifts that were occurring in various American institutions. Will Smith was a cool, street-wise, mischievous black kid moving into suburban America. Such a reality was rendered comical and even innocuous as Smith’s so-called street edge undercut the stiff morality and pretensions of elite America as represented by Smith’s relatives, the Banks family.
At the time of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s debut, these demographic shifts were depicted in more menacing ways in other sectors of American popular culture. “Gangsta rap,” as epitomized by the lyrics of Ice Cube, was emerging as an expression of anger and violence among black youth. In his first solo album, which came out just a few months before Fresh Prince debuted, Ice Cube rapped: “It’s time to take a trip to the suburbs . . . I think back when I was robbin my own kind | The police didn’t pay it no mind | But when I start robbin the white folks | Now I’m in the pen.”Ice Cube’s lyrics captured some of the rage later associated with the violence that exploded in Los Angeles in 1992. The acquittal of four LAPD officers for the beating of unarmed motorist Rodney King became ground zero for a national debate about police brutality and racial profiling. Ice Cube’s skill as a lyricist was rooted in his ability to combine both the realist sensibilities of some black art and the metaphorical expressions of a more universal message. The metaphorical aspect of his work was often obscured given the way gangsta rap was tethered to black urban violence, instead of being read as a metaphoric response to the unchecked powers of law enforcement in those communities.
Beyond the realist view of early 1990s rap music, Ice Cube’s lyrics represent another kind of invasion, where black youth culture—this again is where The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air resonates—invades the airwaves, strip malls, and bedroom walls of suburban America. For young rap artists of the era, it was a recognition of the commercial possibilities of rap music beyond its traditional listener and consumer demographic. This, of course, was not a new narrative in mainstream commercial appeal; black rhythm-and-blues artists in the 1950s such as Little Richard, Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, and Sam Cooke all experienced great popularity among mainstream audiences. A few, like Charles, were able to sustain that popularity over the full course of their careers. So cognizant was Motown founder Berry Gordy of the crossover possibilities of black artists in the 1960s that he famously described the label’s music as “The Sound of Young America” to make explicit his desire to break down racial boundaries in popular music. Even rap music experienced such moments, notably when the genre’s signature group in the 1980s, Run-DMC, crossed over to young white audiences with a calculated collaboration with the rock group Aerosmith on a remake of the latter’s “Walk This Way” in 1986.
Read the Full Essay @ History Now

Project iPad

Project iPad by Courtney Baker | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On July 17, 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a photograph depicting an eight-year-old black child named Michael Smith, Jr. holding an iPad as he sat on the stoop of the housing project where he lives. The photograph was printed to illustrate an article about the destruction of a public housing project and the attendant concerns that community members had about possible health dangers. One of the most disturbing circumstances, as highlighted by the article, was that many of the residents of Smith’s neighborhood had not been informed of the pending implosion by the city housing authority, but instead learned of it through news reports.
One resident, Lanetter Dorsey, drew her own conclusions as to the significance of this oversight:  “"I keep saying, 'When are they going to come tell us something?'" said Lanetter Dorsey, 54, who is in poor health and doesn't feel comfortable staying inside her Iberville apartment during the implosion. "I guess they've decided we need to fend for ourselves," she said.”
For the black working class, fending for one’s self is a dangerous game. The project of “making do” that is a gold-star achievement under an ethos of austerity is frequently reconfigured in the public visual sphere as looting, stealing, or recklessly indulging when it is undertaken by poor black folks.
At the heart of the photograph of Smith with an (his?) iPad is the loaded question of what the poor deserve. A follow-up article reports that the initial coverage resulted in some state movement. Sort of. “Concerns about airborne particles prompted state officials to offer hotel rooms for residents who live within a 600-foot radius of the demolition site, but the Pallas Hotel and Iberville are separated by 725 feet.” Call it bad math or bad faith, but even the state seems unsure of whether or not the black poor deserve to have their health protected.
To the surprise of the newspaper’s editors, many of its readers were quite certain that Smith did not deserve an iPad. Wrote one reader, “I hope this is nothing more than someone gave him the iPad as a gift ... I hope I am not over thinking this. I am not prejudice [sic] – this  just did not look right.” Clearly, there is a preferred narrative that this person wishes was attached to the image—a narrative that “looks right” in the context of the ‘hood.
The author of the follow-up piece responded laudably here, calling into question the “rightness” of the narrative sought and in so doing spoke to that underlying question of what the poor of color deserve: “The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad doesn't offend me. Actually it gives me hope. So many poor people have no access to the digital world. They fall behind in school because of it. They miss the opportunity to apply for certain jobs. Yes an iPad is an expensive gadget, but we can't deny its usefulness. As computers go, an iPad comes cheaper than most laptops and desktops.”
All of these points seem right on—both as factually correct and as an insightful way of perceiving the eradication of poverty. The mention of the technology’s utility functions as an especially effective way to defuse the righteous and exclusive claims of the anonymous reader.
But more is at stake when we question what the African-American poor deserve. Particularly when we are speaking about government subsidized income and housing, especially in the United States, we are also speaking about a sense of ownership of the black working class. The rhetoric of deserving employs the toxic language of capitalist individualism that disavows the idea of collective reserves and resources. It is that same language—and that same logic—that spawned the image of the welfare queen and that continues to underwrite the dismissal of a national health care system. It is a language and logic system that treats the poor in general and the black poor especially as effective tenant farmers, as guests in a land who are not pulling their weight and have overstayed their welcome.
This thinking, however, is a trap, for it mistakes education and technology as solely the domain of the entitled. Per this logic, the black poor do not deserve to have anything but their own dispossession—no Air Jordans, no foreign language skills, no “free” food, no safe housing, and certainly no effective and reliable access to the digital tools of their self-enfranchisement. If we dare to think of Michael Smith as entitled to his iPad, we must also consider seriou***
Courtney Baker is Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. A graduate of Harvard and Duke universities, she researches and writes on African-American visual culture and literature, death, and ethics. Her book, entitled Human Insight: Looking at Images of Black Death and Suffering, is forthcoming.

In Focus: Dominique Dawes Talks with Olympian Cullen Jones

FoxSports:  Dominique Dawes sits down with Olympic swimmer Cullen Jones. Find out what inspires him in and out of the pool.

The Melissa Harris Perry Show: Activism in the Olympics w/ John Carlos

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

1968 Olympic Bronze Medalist in Track & Field, John Carlos; 1964 Olympic Gold Medalist in Swimming, Donna de Varona; Jemele Hill; Dave Zirin[image error]

i am OTHER Presents 'Stereotypes: Typical Hip-Hop'

iamOTHER:
Saggy pants... Gangstas... Bitches... Hoes... The "N" Word... All the stereotypes about hip hop and more.[image error]

'Inside the Studio' with Kenny Gamble & Dyana Williams

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