Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 987

"Dear White People...": Satire about being a Black Face in a White Place

DearWhitePeople: Concept Trailer
A satire about being a Black face in a white place.
 Click here to help get this film made for real: http://bit.ly/DWPYoTu

Sly Stone and the Sanctified Church

Sly Stone and the Sanctified Church by Mark Anthony Neal | SeeingBlack.com
Much has been made about the role of Soul artists like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke in the mainstreaming of the black church aesthetic. Surely when The Edwin Hawkins singers logged a major cross-over hit with “Oh Happy Day” in 1969, they could point to the aforementioned artists as well as Mahalia Jackson’s historic appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival as laying the groundwork for their success.
Less talked about is the role of Sly & the Family Stone in introducing the Black church aesthetic to pop music audiences. When the group debuted in 1967 with A Whole New Thing, the title could have been a reference to range of things, including the interracial and cross-gendered makeup of the band. But I’d like to suggest that Sly and the Family Stone not only helped introduce the world to the power of the Black church, but that the group more specifically, introduced American audiences to what the legendary James Cleveland, once called the “sanctified church." Sly & the Family Stone: The Collectionprovides an opportunity to revisit the era when Sly Stone might have been the most popular Black Pentecostal mystic in the country.
As children, Sylvester Stewart and his siblings, Rose and Freddie, were part of a post-World-War II migration that brought masses of Black folk from Texas and Louisiana out west to California. Sly Stone, as Stewart would come to be known, came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area, just as the Civil Right Movement began raging in the American South. The spirituals and work songs that provided the soundtrack for many of the Civil Rights marches in the South were far removed from the burgeoning “free love” scene developing in Haight-Ashbury and other parts of Northern California. The Stewart family though, was not unlike many Black migrants from the South, who simply reproduced Southern comforts in anyplace they chose to lay their heads. Often those comforts were related to the music of the churches and after-hours spaces that formed part of the social network—the chitlin’ circuit, if you will—that helped sustain folk during the Jim Crow era. As the leading riffs of the Psychedelic sound began to waft in the streets, Sly Stone—a church boy if there ever was one—had little choice but to allow those riffs to coexist with the Blues and Gospel that he had always heard in his head. Sly & the Family Stone was the embodiment of a music that critic Rickey Vincent describes as “too hot and too black to be rock, too positive to be the blues, and too wild to be soul.” (Funk, 94).
Sly Stone initially made his mark as a popular deejay at KSOL and KDIA in the Bay Area. It was in this capacity that Stone brought together the group of musicians that ultimately became Sly & the Family Stone, including soon-to-be legendary bassist Larry Graham, trumpeter Cynthia Robinson and White session musicians Jerry Martini and Greg Errico. The Family Stone was among a number of groups that were breaking down racial barriers in the late 1960s with Booker T and the MGs, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers and Rotary Connection being among them. Unlike the aforementioned groups, Sly and company had the support of a major label in Epic, who literally willed into public consciousness the idea that the band’s makeup was revolutionary. More revolutionary though was the way that Sly & the Family Stone featured women musicians like Robinson and keyboardist Rose Stone, who didn’t simply function as background-singing eye candy or fronting female leads as was the case with contemporaries Minnie Riperton (Rotary Connection) and Chaka Khan (Rufus).

From the vantage of 40 years later, Sly & the Family Stone’s debut A Whole New Thing (1967) is more oddity than compelling. Created by a young band still finding their sound and honing their ability to communicate with each other (and Sly),  A Whole New Thing is interesting, though forgettable late 60s pop. It is arguable that if Dance to the Music(1968) hadn’t provided the group with that breakthrough single (the title track), Sly & the Family Stone would have remained as part of Bay Area music lore. As critic Greg Tate notes in the liner notes that accompany the collection, Dance to the Music “makes abundantly clear that yes, Sly had a dynamic, well versed and unflaggingly rehearsed band…but, what he didn’t yet have was the body of definitive songs that would shortly render him and his group household names.” Those songs would finally appear, not on the follow-up Life(1968), but on Stand, which was recorded in late 1968 and early 1969.
“Everyday People” was a perfect pop confection that coyly captured the burgeoning multiculturalist vision that would come to define notions of race in the Post-Civil Rights era. “Everyday People” was also the song that pushed Sly & the Family Stone to the top of the pop charts. The B-side “Sing a Simple Song” was an unreconstructed piece of funk that broke through on the R&B charts, which combined with the follow-up two-sided hit “Stand”/”I Want to Take You Higher” and the straight-talk of “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” provided America with one-half of the Sly Stone canon. As Rickey Vincent suggests, Stand “seemed to encompass the entire landscape of the Black experience. It was broad in scope, yet intimate. It was joyous, but it had a dead serious sensibility to it….Sly had given birth to the Funk album.
Recorded during the height of Vietnam protest and the escalation of the Black Power Movement, political implications associated with “Stand” are obvious (“Stand! For the things that you know are right/It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight”). Writer Miles Marshall Lewis suggests that, musically, “Stand” was the “most sophisticated arrangement Sly had laid on the public as a single up to that point.” (There’s a Riot Goin’ On, 59) But I believe that Stand was also a metaphor for the act of testifyin’, as in that which is integral to the “praise and worship” portion of Black Pentecostal services. Stand frames a moment when Sly Stone had his largest stage (or pulpit, really), including his singular performance at Woodstock in 1969, and, in many ways, he functioned during this period much like a sanctified preacher. As New York Times critic Barbara Campbell wrote on the eve of the band’s first appearance at Madison Square Garden in February of 1970, “Sly—sometimes working himself into a gyrating frenzy—uses his early Pentecostal church-singing style to work his audience into frenzied participation into what resembles a revival meeting.”
Writer Dalton Anthony Jones provides some depth to Campbell’s observations noting that Sly Stone grew up as a member of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). “At the heart of [COGIC’s] theological foundation was an emphasis on achieving direct access to the divine spirit through the communal and ecstatic production of sound,” Dalton writes. According the Dalton “members of the church believed the Holy Ghost first made its presence known to the disciples of Christ by way of ear. As a result, creating sound became a libratory act, and they went about making noise as if not only their lives but also their very souls depended on it.” (Rip it Up: The Black Experience in Rock ‘n’ Roll, 41-42). Nowhere is Stone’s embrace of the sanctified church more pronounced than on Sly & the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher”. To hear the band’s performance of the song on Stand! (and live) is to bear witness to the power of the sanctified church—“I Want to Take You Higher” is seemingly taken directly from the Holy Ghost’s most cherished songbook, especially during the song’s final two minutes, which were not surprisingly cut from the single version of the song. As Cynthia Robinson recalled of Stone’s performance of “I Want to Take You Higher” at Woodstock, “It was pouring rain. Freddie (Stone) got shocked. The equipment was crackling. But Sly was like a preacher. He had half-a-million people in the palm of his hand.” (People Weekly, June 1996).
Stand would mark a transitional moment in Stone’s career. It would be another two years before a new Family Stone studio album would appear as Stone battled with drug addition and paranoia. Stone’s label released a greatest hits compilation in the interim which included the definitive singles “Hot Fun in the Summertime”, “Thank You (Fallettineme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Everybody Is a Star.” The muted title track of There’s a Riot Going On (1971), given Stone’s Pentecostal beliefs, suggests that the Holy Spirit had left him Stone’s natural instincts were to turn inward and to embrace his inner demons which were requited with the cocaine that swirled freely. Stone’s role as sanctified mystic took him to the crossroads of not only a Black liberation movement being torn asunder by ideological clashes and state surveillance, but to the crossroads of his own soul. Given the political realities of the time, when then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program COINTELPRO was in full swing, it is not far-fetched to believe that there was some connection between Stone addictive behaviors, and blatant and documented attempts to silence the political progressives of the era.
Ironically, as the collection makes apparent, Stone’s move from popular public consciousness fueled some of the most compelling and introspective music of his career. Both Fresh (1974) and Small Talk (1975) are gems of minimalist Funk that are deserving of a wider hearing.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Actor J.D. Williams—The Wire's Bodie—on the NYPD "Stop & Frisk" Policy

Democracy Now 
J.D. Williams, an actor who played drug dealer Preston "Bodie" Broadus on the hit HBO series, The Wire, took part in Sunday's New York City march against the NYP'D's stop-and-frisk policy. "It's a sad thing that becomes kind of natural with young black men," Williams says. "It becomes second nature with us, in a way that we expect to be stopped or we expect to be bothered or we expect to be harassed."

Ill Doctrine: Ugly Shoes and Good Intentions

Ill Doctrine: Ugly Shoes and Good Intentions from ANIMALNewYork.com on Vimeo.


From Animal New York: Jay Smooth's  quick thoughts on the controversy over the Adidas "shackle sneakers"

Black Male Achievement Fellows Making a Difference in African-American Communities

Black Male Achievement Fellows Making a Difference in African-American Communities by Joshunda Sanders | America’s Wire  NEW YORK —By fall, an organization known as BlocPower will be helping minority churches, nonprofits and small businesses nationwide reduce their energy bills with retrofit construction projects that also create jobs in communities of color.
Another organization, Visible Men Inc.,in Sarasota, Fla., is working with schools and community agencies to spread stories of successful African-American men, exposing black youths and their parents to inspirational images of “real-life” successful black men.Visible Men officials say they focus on what is working for black men and youths, rather than what is failing.
These programs and six others are run by social entrepreneurs who are the inaugural Black Male Achievement fellows. In partnership with Echoing Green, an organization in New York that has provided entrepreneur fellowships for 25 years, Open Society Foundations in New York has launched a special fellowship program designed to improve communities of color and life outcomes for African-American males.
Donnel Baird, of BlocPower, and Neil Phillips, of Visible Men, are two of the nine entrepreneurs making a difference in their communities.
“We are creating opportunities for innovative thinkers and doers to give birth to ideas and solutions that address the most entrenched problems facing black men and boys in America,” says Shawn Dove, manager of Open Society Foundations’ Campaign for Black Male Achievement. “We are encouraging African-American males to play significant roles in their communities and providing resources to support their efforts.”
Cheryl L. Dorsey, president of Echoing Green, said the organization is excited to partner with the Open Society Foundations to identify and support social entrepreneurs who deliver positive outcomes for black men and youths in America. “As a pioneer in identifying and mobilizing next generation talent, we believe this partnership with the Open Society Foundations will begin to create a pipeline of best-in-class new leadership for the field,” she says.
Rashid Shabazz, a program officer for the Open Society Foundations, says fellows receive $70,000 in startup capital and support through exclusive training, consulting opportunities, mentorship and access to the broad network of Echoing Green and the Open Society Foundations.
“We want the fellowships to support individuals who don't just see problems in their communities but can think big and bold, and see ways to address the problems,” Shabazz says. “The status quo has not worked for black males. We want the fellowship to further the people willing to try new approaches and take risks. We need to overcome the legacy of structural and institutional racism that has trapped black males at the bottom of American society.”
Shabazz says the fellowship has successfully discovered social entrepreneurs committed to innovative approaches that will obtain results.
African Immigrant Diaspora Alliance
As immigration has become a hot political and policy topic, one of the fastest growing groups of immigrants and refugees in America —those from Africa —has been largely neglected in big organizations.
Amaha Kassa, a first-generation American whose family immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia as refugees, hopes to fill that void through development of the African Immigrant Diaspora Alliance. With support awarded to Black Male Achievement fellows, Kassa plans to launch the alliance in New York in the fall and expand its scope to incorporate communities of African immigrants in other major U.S. cities.
Kassa, who attended Brown University, recently completed a J.D. degree in law at the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University. His work has won awards that include the Harvard Public Service Fellowship and the Berkeley Law Dean’s Fellowship. His academic pursuits are entrenched in a long history of union and grassroots organizing.
Kassa has organized nursing home workers in Detroit and poultry workers in Alabama. In 2001, as part of his work with the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides, he says, “I was surprised to see how few organizations were working with that constituency. The result was that African immigrant voices weren’t really represented in major policy initiatives.”
Absence of real influence among members of the African diaspora in the United States was striking, Kassa says, because Africans who voluntarily migrated here are a large part of the black community. “The African immigrant community is 40 times bigger today than it was in 1970,” he says. “It’s four times bigger than it was in 1990. Something like 20 percent of the growth over the last couple of decades in the black community has come from immigration.”
Earning the Black Male Achievement Fellowship has been a huge asset for launching what will be one of few African-led organizations geared toward the growing African diaspora community in the United States. “There aren’t a lot of organizations willing to be the first to take a gamble on a big undertaking like this one,” Kassa says, adding that the fellowship is “providing the first step on the ladder, and that first step is killer, so it’s critical to have that foundation.”
Fight for Light
In Atlanta, Markese Bryant and John Jordan are launching Fight for Light, a modern social justice movement designed to engage black youths in environmental justice projects in African-American communities.
As students at Morehouse College, Bryant and Jordan met in a class on foundations of leadership. Bryant was pursuing African-American studies, and Jordan was aiming for a career on Wall Street. Both were inspired to think deeply about the role of black youths in addressing environmental and sustainability concerns.
Bryant began working with Green for All, a national organization based in Oakland, Calif., and Washington that seeks to build a green economy to lift people out of poverty. The two worked together on a 2010 pilot retrofitting project at Morehouse to replace fluorescent light bulbs with energy-efficient LED bulbs in some classrooms. They then developed a model for Fight for Light, a “SNCC for the Green Economy,” as Bryant calls it.
Bryant and Jordan were concerned that the Green Economy movement wasn’t engaging students in America’s 105 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, in particular. So they started Fight for Light to begin educating them.
“As students, we’ll have to put a lot of effort forth to work against darkness, and this mentality of not knowing about our community, with regards to our food and other environmental issues,” Bryant says.
The two Black Male Achievement fellows plan initially to target HBCU students, offering classes on green living. Eventually, Bryant and Jordan want to extend Fight for Light’s work to Latino and Native American communities to further “bolster the representation of young people of color in the emerging Green Economy.”
Coaching for Change, Inc.
Few role models for young black men are more alluring than basketball stars, though the odds of becoming one are not in their favor. Marquis Taylor, a Los Angeles native, grew up with the same hoop dreams as some youths he mentors with Coaching for Change, Inc. A 6-foot-5 forward, Taylor was named athlete of the year at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., in 2006, the year he graduated. “Sports had a huge impact on my life,” Taylor says. “But I didn’t have that many positive male role models growing up on a consistent basis. No one really stayed with me over time, and I never developed a valuable relationship outside of my sports and coaches.”
After graduating, Taylor earned a master’s degree in education at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. While studying there, he developed Coaching for Change. He had noticed a disconnect between expectations of varsity high school athletes he coached in Brockton, Mass., and endless career possibilities they weren’t considering because they focused on becoming basketball legends.
“It’s easy for kids to say, ‘I want to be a doctor, a lawyer or an NBA player,’ because that’s all they see,” Taylor says. Youths in urban communities are in dire need of pathways that employ them and help them develop leadership skills to rebuild their communities through sports, he says.“They lack exposure to the myriad of opportunities available to them,” he says.
Coaching for Change inspires and empowers teens in urban communities to create change in their neighborhoods.The program trains high school students to coach youth sports before they are employed to create sporting events such as after-school programs, clinics, camps and tournaments for youths in grades one to six. The process exposes youths to marketing, financial literacy and other challenging aspects of life beyond the violence and drugs they frequently see in their communities.
The apprenticeship model also instructs them to work on developing relationships.“Instead of being a dream killer and telling them their dreams are statistically unrealistic, I can help them use those dreams as an avenue” to explore a number of career options, Taylor says.
Further Projects
Other Black Male Achievement fellows are also contributing to their communities. B. Cole runs the Brown Boi Project in Oakland, which helps to empower straight, gay and transgender black men under 35 to do work associated with gender justice.
Khalil Fuller, a student at Brown University, is creator and CEO of NBA Math Hoops,a gamethat harnesses the power and influence of National Basketball Association and Women’s National Basketball Association stars to inspire students to be excited about building math skills.
Jessica Johnson runs the Scholarship Academy in Atlanta, which helps black high school students learn how to earn scholarships to fund their college educations.
“This first class of Black Male Achievement fellows is a truly remarkable group of pioneers who will now have the space and support they need to tackle the most complicated and entrenched problems facing the black community today,” Dove says.
America’s Wire is an independent, nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and funded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Our stories can be republished free of charge by newspapers, websites and other media sources. For more information, visit www.americaswire.org or contact Michael K. Frisby at mike@frisbyassociates.com.

Jasiri X: "Snacks Kill" (dir. Ruff Bone)

from ShiftDemand.org
SHIFT is a NEW initiative that is specifically designed to be led by teens. SHIFT is in place to push back on the heavy marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages directed to teens and particularly black teens. In today’s world, marketing shapes what we like, what we can afford, and what products are available, and food is no exception. Marketing bad health by overselling unhealthy foods and beverages can affect the health of communities over time.

Killer Mike: On Ronald Reagan And Raising Daughters

Rumble Young Man, Rumble: Talking About Responsible Fatherhood and Mentoring

Open Society Institute (OSI)
This footage was filmed during the "Rumble Young Man, Rumble" mentoring and responsible fatherhood convening at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, KY, in September 2011. The gathering was sponsored by Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement for leaders from the mentoring and responsible fatherhood fields to create collaborations in communities across the country. During the gathering, leaders shared their expertise, passion, and lessons learned to formulate a strategy to get more communities and organizations involved in mentoring adolescent black males. 

Ill Doctrine: All These Sexist Gamer Dudes Are Some Shook Ones

Ill Doctrine: All These Sexist Gamer Dudes Are Some Shook Ones from ANIMALNewYork.com on Vimeo.


ANIMALNewYork.com

Why dudes need to tell other dudes to stop making asses of themselves on the internet.[image error]

Dick Gregory Speaks on Why He Marched to End Stop and Frisk

1HoodMedia:  One Hood Media's Paradise Gray asked legendary activist/comedian Dick Gregory why he chose to participate in the silent march to end stop and frisk.