Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 994

James Braxton Peterson on The Attack on Arts Funding in Public Schools

Dr. James Braxton Peterson talks about the effect budget cuts are having on the arts in public schools and the impact it is making in children's overall development on EBRU Today.

Immortal Technique: US Ignorance Affects the World

RTAmerica:
Hip-hop artist Immortal Technique is a self-described social guerrilla. Felipe Coronel is the real name of the Peruvian-born, Harlem-raised political activist who raps about politics, religion and racism. Since the genesis of the OWS movement, Tech has been an active voice for the cause, and on July 10 a documentary will be released showing his everyday life. He now joins us with more on his beliefs and his work.

Van Jones Talks with Jasiri X About Recalling Scott Walker and Putting Pressure on POTUS

1HoodMedia:  At Rebuild Wisconsin, One Hood Media (Jasiri X and Paradise Gray) spoke with Van Jones about why Rebuild the Dream got involved in the Recall of Governor Scott Walker, and what we need to do before and after the Presidential election.

Jay Smooth: "Cory Booker and the Young Money Clique"

illdoc1

Explaining why Cory Booker, who's usually the smoothest Mayor around, took a major L on Meet The Press last week. For background info see here: http://www.salon.com/2012/05/20/cory_booker_surrogate_from_hell/singleton/

NOTE: I've started a partnership with my people at Animal New York to make videos for you more often, and from now on my new videos premiere at http://animalnewyork.com/ I'll still be putting all my videos up here too, but only a week or so after they premiere over there (this video was originally posted on Animal last week)

Black in the 80s: Jesse Jackson's "David & Goliath" Speech (January 1984)

Tendley Baptist Church, Philadelphia, PA, January 16, 1984.

Otis Moss III: Understanding Faith through Jazz

OdysseyNetworks:
The showcasing of distinctive instruments in a jazz ensemble illustrates how each faith brings a valuable perspective to our common life, says the Rev. Otis Moss III, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The piety of Islam, the sense of sacred history of Judaism, the Sikh commitment to equal rights -- these traditions and more are something we should engage with. Learn More about Otis Moss III at http://odysseynetworks.org

Media Portrayals of Black Youths Contribute to Racial Tension

Media Portrayals of Black Youths Contribute to Racial Tension by Joshunda Sanders | Maynard Media Center
Mainstream media often portray African-American youths, especially black men and boys, as criminals, crime victims and predators. These stereotypes, according to social justice advocates, can create a racially charged atmosphere that results in violence such as the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin.

U.S. popular culture has become increasingly desensitized to one-dimensional portrayals of black youths. Perpetuation of them as dangerous has been embedded in American society not only by words and images projected by journalists but also by a wide variety of other media and entertainment sources, including the Internet, movies and video games.

Clearly, the perception of African-Americans and other people of color as inferior to whites is rooted in the nation’s legacy of racial hierarchy, a system of stratification based on belief that skin color makes whites superior. Also contributing to embedding these stereotypes is that even as U.S. Census data show a growing number of nonwhites in America, fewer people of color are in decision-making positions at daily newspapers, television and radio stations, and online news organizations. Media coverage of the February shooting of Martin, 17, in Sanford, Fla., by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, exemplifies negative treatment of black youths in the media. After a controversial delay, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the unarmed teenager’s death.

At the center of the case are issues related to race, gun rights and whether Zimmerman was acting in self-defense.

In most media stories last week, autopsy results showing that Martin’s blood had traces of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, overshadowed other new evidence. An Associated Press report from Orlando, Fla., began: “Trayvon Martin had marijuana in his system. He was shot through the heart at close range.”

Many of these stories were published with photographs showing cuts and scratches on Zimmerman’s face and head. A police report said he “appeared to have a broken and a bloody nose and swelling of his face.”

In the same week, an all-white, six-person jury in Houston acquitted Andrew Blomberg, 29, a white police officer, in the alleged beating of 15-year-old Chad Holley after Holley was arrested for burglary in March 2010.
In video footage from a security camera, which jurors were shown in court, Holley was seen falling to the ground after trying to hurdle a police squad car, the AP reported, and was “surrounded by at least five officers, some who appear to kick and hit his head, abdomen and legs.”

Blomberg testified that he didn’t kick or stomp Holley. Community activists decried the verdict and the racial makeup of the jury.

The presumption of guilt can also apply to young black women. When Rekia Boyd, 22, was fatally shot by an off-duty Chicago police detective in March, her death was overshadowed in mainstream media by the Martin case.

Boyd was with friends on a street near the detective’s home when words were apparently exchanged and he fired several shots, one of which struck Boyd in the head. No charges have been filed in the incident. Boyd’s family has filed a civil lawsuit against the detective and the city.

In its report on the shooting, one Chicago television station noted that Boyd was hanging out with a group “at 1 in the morning.”

Stories about black youths that don’t reinforce stereotypes, don’t involve celebrities and that tell narratives about everyday lives of black people haven’t been a priority in news coverage, says author Bakari Kitwana, executive director of Rap Sessions in Westlake, Ohio. Through Rap Sessions, Kitwana leads discussions on college and high school campuses nationwide to counter mainstream media narratives about the hip-hop generation.

In addition to being stereotyped in media, Kitwana says, black youths are also criminalized by three other circumstances.

“Job options are limited, especially if you’re working class, which is different from previous generations,” he says. “The military doesn’t have a draft so, ultimately, it’s composed of people who are so pushed out of other life options. The military becomes a way of not being totally impoverished. Add to that limited education because of the cost of a college degree.”

Publishers, editors and producers who decide which news stories are important often don’t choose ones that humanize or contextualize lives of black youths. In journalism, decision makers are largely white.

A 2011 study by the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hofstra University showed that while the percentage of people of color in the U.S. population had risen since 1990 from 25.9 percent to a projected 35.4 percent, the number in television rose 2.7 percent and fell in radio. TV news diversity, it noted, “remains far ahead of the newspaper.”

“The way that journalism is currently practiced and structured doesn’t allow for the telling of stories of underrepresented people,” says Malkia Cyril, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice in Oakland, Calif. Privatization of corporate media is one reason that continues to be true, she says.

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled U.S. media, according to “The Media Monopoly” by Ben Bagdikian, a longtime journalist and media critic. By 2004, in his revised and expanded “The New Media Monopoly,” Bagdikian wrote that the number was five — Time Warner, Disney, News Corp., Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom, with NBC a close sixth.

“The way that journalism is on the open market means that stories are for sale, and what sells is stereotypes,” Cyril says. “Market-produced coverage will tend to misrepresent youth.”

The implications of “this charged environment can result in the dehumanization of black life and regressive political decisions that can lead to violence, as the Stand Your Ground Laws resulted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin,” she added in a follow-up email. “Otherwise, the story gets framed as coverage leads to bad individual behavior, and the systemic piece gets lost.”

When media producers in journalism and popular culture media like movies, television series and video games are mostly white, chances that young people will be humanized and fully represented are slim, says Eleni Delimpaltadaki Janis, public opinion and media research coordinator for The Opportunity Agenda in New York.

 “You see few images of black men and boys being good students or being good fathers,” she says. “They’re really fewer images of men in those roles compared to reality. It’s not just the news coverage. It’s also every type of media, but also in entertainment media, including video games. They all do a good job at using negative images of black boys and men for entertainment.”

Solutions include reporters intentionally incorporating black youths into everyday or evergreen stories like those about Christmas shopping, Janis says. Kitwana adds that it’s also important for journalists to remember that their profession carries the weight of social responsibility since democracy can’t function properly if journalism doesn’t function properly.

Eileen Espejo, director of media and health policy at Children Now in Oakland, says producers across the media spectrum should seek ways to avoid stereotypes. “We don’t want there to be a quota,” she says. “But we want you to think more creatively about the roles that people of color can play, and break out of the traditional mold.”
***
 Joshunda Sanders writes media critiques for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Her stories and other media critiques are available at www.mije.org/mmcsi and can be republished free of charge. For more information, please contact Elisabeth Pinio at epinio@mije.org or 510-891-9202.

Jay Smooth: Mitt Romney Scares The Crap Out Of Me

[image error]

Alice Smith Covers Cee Lo's "Fool for You"

Playing Dead: The Trayvoning Meme & the Mocking of Black Death

Playing Dead: The Trayvoning Meme & the Mocking of Black Death by Lisa Guerrero and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
The more things change, the more they stay the same.  While new media and social networking is “transforming” our society, in certain ways, bringing people closer together, if only seemingly so, its “newness” seems only relative to its potential as a new frontier in which to deploy and recycle the same old narratives and tropes, to continue a history of injustices that define the American experience.  As the technologies of communication appear new, the technologies of oppression are anything but.  However, as we see with “Trayvoning,” the trend that has White youth posting pictures of themselves as if they were part of the Trayvon crime scene, the marriage of communication innovation with racist stagnation does constitute something new, though not improved, in the history of the system of racism in the United States.
“’Trayvoning’ is when you get a hoodie, Skittles and Arizona iced tea, and pose like you've been shot in the chest.”  The Facebook page instructs participants in go through the following steps:
1. Get hoodie
2. Get skittles
3. Get Arizona
4. Wear hoodie
5. Go to Florida
6. Get shot :)
Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old African American male who was unarmed and got shot by a raciest [sic] Mexican American.
During Step 7, participants are instructed to post their pictures on the Internet, which has led to widespread circulation of these disgusting and dehumanizing images.
In response to reports about “Trayvoning,” Jasiri X asked on Twitter: “Trayvoning? Really? Why is our pain, suffering & death, always mocked for laughs?” This question gets to the heart of not only the efforts to recreate and  disseminate representations of the Trayvon case, but it is also a means to communicate pleasure in the murder of Trayvon. “Trayvoning” recasts and performs injustice by turning someone’s pain and suffering  into a spectacle of white pleasure that further denies the humanity of black people.  This is reflected not just in “Trayvoning” but with the Orlando businessman who has sought to capitalize by selling Trayvon shooting targets, the media that continues to criminalize and blame Trayvon, and those who have disparaged, mocked(see here for picture of someone who donned blackface), and made light of a dead young man. 
The disregard for Black life, and the disparagement of Black death is nothing new; the pleasure and joy garnered from Black suffering and dreams deferred has been central to White supremacy throughout United States history.  Evident in minstrel shows, the history of lynching, and jokes about racial profiling or the war on drugs, whites have always found joy in the violence experienced by African Americans.
The history of American public discourse is one marred with both the erasure of black and sufferingSuch joy  isn’t simply an outgrowth of the denied humanity of Black people or the refusal to witness and see Black pain, but it is also a celebration of, or at least the solidification of, White humanity, White power, and the protective armor that whiteness provides each and every day.   This is the story of race in America, from lynchings to Katrina, from slavery to Trayvon Martin.
But the examples of racialized disregard that have surrounded Trayvon Martin’s death, most recently exemplified in the commodification and “meme-ification” of the tragedy by various White people.  This marks a startling new mechanization of racism wherein there has been a complete evacuation of humanity…on both sides, that of people of color and other marginalized groups, the dehumanization of which is, sadly, no longer surprising, but also that of dominant groups who willfully participate in acts of oppression like “Trayvoning” whose humanity becomes increasingly and insidiously taken over by consumption and performance.  The joy historically, as well as contemporaneously, taken by many Whites in the violence against and suffering of African Americans has become nearly indistinguishable from the joy of consuming. 
The consumer market has overtaken all facets of social interaction, the good, the bad, and the very bad.  We are witnessing a descent into a “society of the spectacle” that perhaps Guy DeBord himself could scarcely imagine.  The spectacularizing of racialized events and tragedies within the 21stcentury, while still largely constructed through sociocultural lenses of White supremacy, racialized inferiority, and histories of racial injustices and violences, allows for their translation to be conveniently dislocated from these racial phenomena and displaced onto the assumed “neutral” projects of commodity and consumption.  As DeBord stated regarding the nature of the society of the spectacle, “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images…It is a world vision which has become objectified.”
Writing about the practice of whites collecting body parts as souvenirs during lynchings, Harvey Young, in “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” highlights the spectacle of white-on-black violence and the pleasure derived from Black suffering and death.  He describes the lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, where, “the assembled crowd descended upon his body and collected various parts of it assouvenirs.”  Seeking to explain the unexplainable, to provide meaning to the unthinkable, Young identifies this history in the following way: “lynched black body in the aftermath of the lynching event and variously read it in terms of the souvenir, the fetish, and the performance remain.”  He argues, “that the lynching keepsake not only can be defined by, but also can exceed, each of these three terms. Containing within itself the various features of the souvenir, the fetish, and the remain, the body part recalls and remembers the performance of which it is a part. It not only gestures toward the beliefs that motivated its theft, but also renders visible the body from which it was taken.”  It would seem that the efforts to recreate Trayvon’s death, to trivialize his death by including skittles and ice tea, and then disseminate this image within the new media sphere continues the history of rendering Black death as souvenir.  In this historical example we see the explicit rendering of White supremacy.  The White supremacy and racism of the act, purposefully done as the dual act of White superiority and Black inferiority, as well as of the racist and violent talisman provided by the souvenir, was never obfuscated.  It was seen as a right.  It was claimed.  In the new millennium, a time heavily invested in the belief in its own racial progress, while remaining heavily mired in colorblind racism and reimagined racial violences, the rampant consumer society, fortified incalculably by new media, makes the claims to White supremacy, (for all but the most extreme), almost completely deniable.  The claims become subsumed beneath the “logic” of the spectacle wherein “the spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.” (DeBord)  This is the sociocultural state in which “Trayvoning” exists, the state of the self-referential spectacle.
Thus “Trayvoning” creates a community bound by whiteness and the ability to “become” Trayvon through the dehumanizing ritual, through the spectacle of Black death, and through recasting his murder apart from white supremacy and whiteness.  While his murder, his death, and the circumstances that surround the injustice are understood as a site of White ritual and pleasure, a space of White pleasure resulting from Black pain, they are not transparently claimed (by and large) as such.  While the trend can be interpreted as a new technology of lynching, its character remains separate from lynchings of the past whose act, and the dissemination of lynching photographs highlighted White power and White supremacy.
The ability to “act” like a dead Trayvon Martin only to get up and head back into White suburbia is illustrative of this same feeling of power and privilege, but invisibly so.  White people don’t take part in “Trayvoning” to “declare” White supremacy; they take part in it because the declaration has been rendered unnecessary by various sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic forces.  In fact, the absence of the explicit claims to it emphasizes the power and privilege even more.  It reflects an unstated joy at the lack of possibility of getting suspected as a criminal for merely walking to a convenience store; it reflects an unacknowledged level of pleasure in knowing that being stopped for walking while White is less likely than a visit to Newt’s moon colony; it reflects a flaunting of the power and privilege that grants Whiteness protection from armed security guards, an unwilling/reluctant criminal justice system, and a media culture more concerned with convicted Trayvon Martin than George Zimmerman.  The ability to stand up and walk away after the photo indicates the power of whiteness.
“Trayvoning” is thus akin to a history of racial cross-dressing and minstrelsy, practices that, according to Much of the media discourse has likened “Trayvoning” to planking or “Tebowing,” emphasizing the phenomena as a spectacle, as yet another example of youth culture, the ease that pictures are disseminated on the Internet, or how trends come about.  Yet, while “Trayvoning” is certainly a disturbing phenomenon of spectacle, these comparisons are absurd at so many levels because neither “planking” nor “Tebowing” rely on, perpetuate, and relish in Black death; these practices don’t find recreation in the re-creation of black suffering nor do they produce souvenirs to remember the death of Trayvon Martin. 
“Trayvoning” is but another moment in a larger history of racial violence, and white efforts to establish a segregated community based on power and pleasure, commodification and deniability.  One can only hope, based on the resistance and condemnation these pictures have elicited, that those thinking about “Trayvoning” will simply skip steps 1-6 and go right to step #8: humanize death, ANY death, instead of spectacularizing it; and continue to protest racial injustice in this form…and in all its forms. 
***
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 co-author of  African Americans in Television, co-authored with David J. Leonard. (Praeger Publishing, 2009).

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.