#WhatDigitalHumanitiesLookLike: "You Can't Win" (for #TrayvonMartin)

#WhatDigitalHumanitiesLookLike: "You Can't Win" (for #TrayvonMartin)

Writing about the song “You Can’t Win” in his autobiography Moon Walk Michael Jackson recalls “My character had plenty to say and to learn. I was propped up on my pole with a bunch of crows laughing at me, while I sang “You Can't Win,” The song was about humiliation and helplessness—something that so many people have felt at one time or another. "(140)

With “You Can’t Win” as backdrop students in the Michael Jackson and the Black Performance Archive course at Duke University re-staged the final minutes of Trayvon Martin’s life highlighting the deeper connections between Jackson’s music, the vulnerability of Black youth and the political moment defined, in part, by the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.Shoutouts to Archana Gowda, who served as curriculum consultant and Duke Librarian Karen Jean Hunt, Duke Professor and Dance Historian Tommy DeFrantz, Universal Music Enterprises’s Harry Weinger, and artist Pierre Bennu, whose presentations to the class provided the students with disparate examples of the Archive(s).