NewBlackMan

Some fo' real, fo' real from Raheem DeVaughn

2009-11-25T00:47:00.001-05:00

With a nod the the Trouble Man and Superfly Soundtracks.

New York, New York, Big City of Dreams...

2009-11-22T15:11:00.001-05:00

Post-Modern Mammy?: The Oprah Legacy

2009-11-22T14:26:00.006-05:00

Oprah Winfrey announced that she will be ending her popular talk show in 2011, after 25 years on the air. Though the program made Winfrey one of the most visible and wealthy women in the world, some thought her little more than a post-modern “mammy.”

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Post-Modern Mammy?: The Oprah Legacy
By Mark Anthony Neal

Talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey announced that she will end her long running daytime talk show in September of 2011 at the end of its 25th season. As host of the talk show, Winfrey helped transform the daytime television format, inspiring a generation knock-offs and in the process becoming one of the most recognizable icons in the world. For all of her accomplishments though, some Black viewers were ambivalent about her success.

For much of her career, it was believed that Winfrey’s success was rooted in her ability to deftly cater to middle-class white women—a significant segment of her viewing audience. Given the popularity of her show—it’s been the highest rated program of its type for two decades—there was an expectation that Winfrey would weigh in more forcefully on issues that directly affected African-Americans. Though Winfrey played an important role in championing African-American fiction (with varying degrees of success), producing cinematic and television adaptations of works by Dorothy West (The Wedding), Toni Morrison (Beloved), Zora Neale Hurston (There Eyes Are watching God) and most recently Sapphire (Push/Precious), she eschewed taking public stances on issues that affected Black Americans, unless they intersected with those of her, arguably, more important white viewers.

While it’s easy to think of those “more important” viewers as privileged white women in the most simplistic terms, it was Winfrey’s ability to turn those viewers—and many others—into consumers of the high end products, high brow art and lifestyle choices that she hawked during the show’s run. While Winfrey never herself shilled for D-Con Roach Spray, Hertz Rent-a-Car, or Rayovac like some of her equally famous black male peers, she was arguably the most effective pitch-person of the last generation, ultimately becoming one of most respected arbiters of style and culture in the country. Part of Winfrey’s winning strategy was in her ability to connect with her audiences, often using her own personal struggles—with her weight for instance—to build a more personal relationship with her fans and viewers. Like virtually all of the black icons who defined black crossover in the 1980s—Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy—it’s easy reduce Winfrey’s rise and popularity to simple dynamics, like charges that she made herself palatable to white audiences.

It was in this context that Winfrey was thought to function as little more than a post-modern mammy. The term “mammy” resonates as a pejorative to many, in large part because of the girth and dark skin attributed to historical depictions of the figure. Often missing in references to mammy, was her legitimate function within the plantation household. While the exploitation of black women domestic workers in the South was critical plantation economies, a point that historian Thavolia Glymph makes throughout in her recent book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, there was an element to the relationship that often gets glossed over. Given the role that black women played in these households—cooking meals, suckling children and other fairly intimate tasks—the white women they served had to possess significant levels of trust in those women.

In the eyes of many White Americans Oprah Winfrey represents one of the most trust-worthy Black Americans ever, a level of trust that may have been unprecedented. Unpacking what exactly Winfrey could be trusted with though, gives a real inkling into the nature of her relationship with White America. Winfrey could be trusted with their bodies, their hair, their faces, their homes, their reading material, their dinner tables, their disposable income—often through the deployment of Oprah approved proxies such as Dr. Phil. Audiences finally drew a line, though, when it came to trusting Winfrey with their votes, as was the case when she broke with the status quo and publically embraced the candidacy of Barack Obama in early 2008.

Winfrey’s endorsement of Obama and subsequent proxy for him during the South Carolina primary (a state in which black women were in the majority of registered Democratic voters) began a tumultuous year in Winfrey’s show. As the campaign wore one, Winfrey’s program lost viewership and her O Magazine, experienced a dip in circulation. While there were myriad reasons for these losses, including the economic downturn and the aging of the Oprah franchise, there’s also little doubt that some audiences were turned off by Winfrey’s decision to jump into national politics. Towards the end of Obama's successful run for the presidency, there was wide-spread speculation that Winfrey would accept some kind of cabinet appointment.

As such, Winfrey’s decision to say farewell to daytime audiences doesn’t seem much a surprise, indeed she likely went out on a limb with regards to Obama’s campaign, because she had already decided to wind down at the end of 25 years. Like Aresnio Hall, who booked controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on his nighttime show when it was clear that the show was going to be canceled months later, Winfrey's knowledge the that she might end the show, likely freed her in some ways. That freedom has been expressed throughout the current season, where she broke from the previous practice of not booking rap artists, and opened up her studio chair to Shawn Carter (Jay Z). Winfrey also received widespread applause for her interview with former Heavyweight boxing champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson—despite an on-air gaffe that seemed to make light of Tyson’s violence against ex-wife Robin Givens—and her recent chat with former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

With her time on-camera seemingly coming to the end, Winfrey seems poised, through her planned cable network, to create the context for the next generation of women and Black Americans to bring something unique to the airwaves. Ultimately this will stand in as Winfrey’s most important legacy.

Morehouse on His Mind

2009-11-22T14:11:00.003-05:00

Morehouse College represents the “perfect storm” of homophobia —racial and class anxieties of “exceptional Negroes,” masculine gender trouble, class conflict and fundamentalist religious baggage [or as some might say, "heritage" or "tradition."] Homophobia at Morehouse is therefore instructive, dramatic and sad, but not rare in our world.

Truth/Reconciliation: Morehouse on My Mind
by Jafari Sinclaire Allen

Congratulations, Michael Brewer.

I have never walked across the stage on the Morehouse College campus green to receive my degree. On the first day of our indoctrination in 1986, who would have thought I would end up as one of those missing in action four years later? The upperclassman speaking prophesized: “Look to your left and your right. Four years later, one of these brothers will not be here,” and in 1990 one of those brothers was me. I was an “out” gay man at Morehouse College. On my would-be graduation day, I contemplated what looked like a dismal future, by Morehouse standards—no Morehouse degree and no respect from the men that made up my peer group.

A recent article in the Los Angles Times, by Richard Fausset, bookends the recent history of homophobia and gay awakening at Morehouse with the heinous 2002 baseball-bat beating of a Morehouse student, Greg Love, by a dormitory mate, Aaron Price, and the historic “No More ‘No Homo’ ” events organized by Michael Brewer and members of the campus organization, Safe Space, in April 2008. For me, this recalls memories that I had put away, but which provide the foundations of my life as a scholar and activist. The fact that homophobia at Morehouse is not unique or unusual with respect to heterosexism and homophobia in society at large should be obvious. The institution represents rather, the “perfect storm” of homophobia —racial and class anxieties of “exceptional Negroes,” masculine gender trouble, class conflict and fundamentalist religious baggage [or as some might say, "heritage" or "tradition."] These seas roil and skies open up in an international climate of heterosexism and misogyny. Homophobia at Morehouse is therefore instructive, dramatic and sad, but not rare in our world.

In return for the “crown,” which we are told Morehouse holds over the head of its sons who endeavor to grow tall enough to wear it, we are asked to buy a bill of goods that include fidelity to image and representation. But what—and whom– does this respectability betray?

Who pays the price for this shoddy mimicry- the picture in which the Black man takes up his “rightful” place at the head of a family with a dutiful longsuffering well-educated but decidedly under-employed light-skinned wife, and children with good hair?

[To each, her and his own, of course. My point here is not to point a finger, but to shine a light.]

How do these images and longings for certain types of lives, mates and relationships get shaped? To whom do we look for examples and for approval? My point here is that Black angst over appearing freaky, weird, less-than, or too Black shape our decisions and the ways we treat each other. Perhaps—the logic goes—if I speak, act and embody the White middle class heterosexual standard, or at least closely approximate it, I will finally be accepted as levelly human, as worthy, employable and loved.

But what violence takes place outside the picture’s pose, in order to frame this ‘just so’ story, in which Black men get to borrow the crumbling crown of the White patriarch? We rarely call into question the concept of “leadership,” or the assumption that an elite college education and middle class status qualify us to take the reins of a community putatively deemed “out of control.” And where do we turn, but to places like Morehouse, where suited and well-spoken men stand poised to do so?

Read the Full Essay at Racialicious

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Jafari Sinclaire Allen as Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2003) at Yale University and the author of the forthcoming ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press].

A 'Precious' Debate

2009-11-22T13:53:00.005-05:00

“Precious,” about a disadvantaged young woman played by Gabourey Sidibe, left, has sparked controversy over its meaning.

To Blacks, Precious Is ‘Demeaned’ or ‘Angelic’
by FELICIA R. LEE
Published: November 20, 2009

A reinforcement of noxious stereotypes or a realistic and therapeutic portrayal of a black family in America?

“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” the new film about an obese, poor, illiterate, young black woman who is sexually and emotionally abused, has sparked this heartfelt and at times heated debate about its meaning in the two weeks since its limited release.

Now, as it opens nationwide in 100 markets this weekend, the conversation about which black stories are told, and how, is bound to intensify, thanks to post-screening discussion groups; the cultural influence of two of the movie’s executive producers, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry; and the Oscar buzz the critically acclaimed film has already begun generating.

“In some ways, it’s ‘The Color Purple’ all over again, with people writing and talking about what this film represents,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor who teaches black popular culture at Duke University. He was referring to the 1985 film based on the novel by Alice Walker, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Ms. Winfrey.

Read full article @ The New York Times

Yinka Shonibare MBE @ the Smithsonian

2009-11-19T12:31:00.002-05:00

Yinka Shonibare MBE’s career retrospective at the Smithsonian just goes to show how strange things get when the empire strikes black.

The (Not So) New World Order
by Natalie Hopkinson

How “explicit” could the images be? Queen Elizabeth II herself proclaimed the artist The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Yinka Shonibare MBE, the Brit-Nigerian art world star, toast of two continents, was having a mid-career retrospective at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

So my kindergartener and I sailed past the warning signs, past the objections of the concerned security guard, turned a corner and immediately understood:

One headless female mannequin, bathed in classic Victorian crinoline dress rendered in an African textile print, stood bent over, rear end raised doggy-style to meet the groin of another headless male. Behind him, another headless man penetrated him. Steps away, another crinoline-clad woman kneeled, her head tucked beneath a swatch of African cloth as she pleasured another headless woman. Still another headless woman sat on a wooden bench, legs spread-eagled, shoulders thrown back in the throes of passion.

The art installation, “Gallery and Criminal Conversation,” was a play on the Victorian morality, norms, manners and social structures that have come to define the British Empire. The orgiastic scene was the London-born/Lagos-reared artist’s way of throwing all this supposed order into chaos. Kind of like the time he arrived at his London art opening trailed by two white slaves.

These days, life is indeed stranger than art. The Eurocentric world order has been turned upside down. This little show by the Yoruba trickster-artist is just another picture of what happens when the empire strikes black.

Read Full Essay @ The ROOT

A (Nearly) Flawless Masculinity?: Barack Obama

2009-11-17T10:20:00.009-05:00

Presented at the Annual American Studies Association Meeting in Washington, DC and the The Fifth African-American Literature Symposium at North Carolina Central University.

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A (Nearly) Flawless Masculinity?: Barack Obama
by Mark Anthony Neal

In the aftermath of his victory last November, even Barack Obama’s most strident detractors had to admit that he ran a nearly flawless campaign. Election campaigns are steeped in science and indeed the Obama campaign came as close to perfecting that science as any presidential candidate has in the television era.

But there was another remarkable science at play, a science that is often given short shrift, if acknowledged at all. Barack Obama had many challenges in his 20-month campaign for the presidency, but I would argue that none was more daunting than making the nation-at-large comfortable with the very idea of a black man as Commander-in-Chief.

As such Obama, particularly in the closing moments of his presidential campaign, performed a nearly flawless (black) masculinity, that raised critical questions about the meanings of American masculinity and black masculinity, in particular, as the new President transitioned from campaigning to governing. As a black man and US President, Barack Obama’s body is the literal terrain in which the always already competing logics of black masculinity and presidential masculinity (an under-interrogated site of masculine construction)—both bound to popular mythology—have inevitably collided. Obama’s ability to negotiate this space—and truthfully he has little choice in the matter—only heightens the reality of his status as the most exceptional “Negro” to have ever graced the stage—“Barack Obama” is a performance that was surely meant for a holiday release starring Will Smith.

If such a (nearly) flawless performance of masculinity is the context in which this nation elected its first President of African descent, such a reality does not bode well for the idea of a so-called post-Race society. Indeed real parity in this regard, borrowing a logic Dwight McBride fashions in his book Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch, would be to elect a Black American candidate as nominally mediocre as the forty-three men who preceded Obama in the oval office and I’ll willingly concede that Obama’s immediate predecessor, number forty-three, might taint the sample.

In a provocative essay published three years before Obama’s election, writer Thomas Glave imagines the criteria for a first black President. I cite Glave at length here:

“that if the president were black, he would of course have to be a “good” black—light skinned, surely thus skirting associations with the darkness of evil, ugliness, and licentiousness; serious appearing (as opposed to feckless); not too young appearing, young black men equaling in the skewed popular imagination danger, frenzied sexual appetites, general depravity, and so on. The black president would greatly benefit from “legitimization” of a preferably elite education…He would also have to be remorselessly capable of spelling his own name and that of his cabinet members: a combination, say of Colin Powell, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond, but subtly deracialized out of the dangerousness of blackness and inducted…into the approved realm of tacitly “honorary” whiteness.” (Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent)

Glave’s essay, which could have served as a cursory blueprint for then Senator Obama’s Presidential desires, captures both the high ends and low ends of national expectation on what might qualify a black man to be President. Obama had to run against the very blackness that made his candidacy legible in the first place, raising the concern that had Obama simply been a talented first term Senator from Illinois who happened to be white and male, would we have even bothered to pay attention?—would he even had been legible to us in the way that Obama was not only legible—but knowable to African-American voters, if not mainstream on the American electorate?

President Obama’s initial struggles with African-American voters are well documented with many citing the role that many African-American icons, notably Oprah Winfrey, played in laying a claim on the value of his blackness, that his name, African heritage and “fatherless” status was unable to articulate. As journalist Joan Morgan observes in her essay “Black Like Barack” there is a “proprietary tendency off native born Americans to use “black” and “African-American” interchangeably—as if to be black in America is necessarily to be descended from this ancestry.” (The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union”) Obama could be black, but for African-American voters—the the most visible arbiters of contemporary blackness—he could not be African-American in the idiosyncratic way that “blackness” is filtered through the prism of the African-American experience.

Literary scholar Robert Reid-Pharr explains it this way: “blackness is perhaps the most tradition-bound product that [the] country manufactures,” adding that the “Black American is not produced at the location at which the African was dehumanized, at the point at which he becomes a nigger…Instead the Black American is produced at precisely that moment at which the attempt to dehumanize the African is met by the equally bold attempt to resist that dehumanization.” (Once You Go Black: Choice Desire and the Black American Intellectual) Indeed it was an explicit appeal to black woman voters in South Carolina, with Winfrey and Michele Obama functioning as proxies, that helped Obama sway the black political mainstream, in large part because of former President Bill Clinton’s unwitting assist in the effort by reproducing demeaning references to black achievement and black aspiration that black voters—particularly strivers—were particularly sensitive to. Overnight, Obama had been made black though, his “fatherlessness” would put a fine point on that fact.

The Obama campaign tried throughout the presidential election season to downplay the significance of his race to mainstream voters, but Obama stood as such a dramatic counterpoint to long-held stereotypes about African-American men as fathers and husbands. In this regard, his ascendency challenged myths not only about the capacity of African-Americans to serve as commander-in-chief, but myths about black men as fathers. In his bestselling memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama provides a heart-wrenching account of the impact that not having his father in his life had on him. Obama’s parents divorced when he was a child and he had little contact with his father, who died in 1982. Obama literally had to conjure a father, who he saw only once after his parent’s divorce, recalling “I would meet him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams.”

There’s a veritable cottage industry associated with so-called black fatherlessness, as many books and studies make the link between under-achieving black boys and the lack of father figures in their lives. The very idea of the shiftless, lazy, irresponsible black male has reached such mythical proportions that when black men show evidence of even the most basic of parenting skills, it’s cause for celebration. Indeed, much of Obama’s personal appeal lies in the fact that he has overcome the limitations of his black father—an absent black father, who nevertheless powerfully marks Obama as “black” within many American discourses.

Yet it was also implicitly understood, as suggested by Glave’s comments above that Obama represented an exceptional blackness, one that the culture at large—in conversations about dress codes on HBCU campuses, for example—has sought to make reproducible. As Reid-Pharr observes, despite mythologies attached to race in the United States, “blackness marks a site of becoming rather than a locus of fixed tradition.” Obama’s cosmopolitan identity, or what Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s describes as Afro-politan identity—those Africans who live in the world—resonates within the discourses of so-called post-Race America, precisely because it is a moving target, perfectly pitched to audiences who all desired different meanings from the text that “Obama” represents and that they so willingly consume. But with that positionality Obama derives a critical power; Reid-Pharr argues, “The moment at which the Black American becomes a cosmopolitan subject, the moment he is seen, heard, sampled in locations far from the red clay of North Carolina or the red brick of Baltimore, is the very moment at which he witnesses, or perhaps produces, the dismantling of the logic o Black American innocence.” According to Reid Pharr, appeals to black specificity, even as the cosmopolitan nature of blackness is self-evident is, “importantly a means by which to maintain a rather potent ethical position in this country and on the planet.”

As such the Obama candidacy served a national desire, a fiction designed to satiate what historian Nikhil Singh might describe as the incessant need by the American body politic for the comforts of Nation, where “race is the provenance of an unjust, irrational ascription and prejudice, while nation is the necessary horizon of our hope for color-blind justice, equality, and fair play.” In other words, Obama had to be to be a black man who won the presidency—not the honorary white man that Glave and many others, including running mate Joe Biden, suggested—so that the nation could again “move on” from the threats that so-called “diversity” poses to the sanctity of the Nation.

As Singh astutely observes in his book Black Is A Country, “In this dynamic, African—and later Negro, black, and African-American struggles against civil death, economic marginalization, and political disenfranchisement accrued the paradoxical power to code all normative (and putatively universal) redefinitions of US national subjectivity and citizenship.” The first black president might be thought, within such a discourse as the logical culmination of those struggles. Much like the Civil Rights Movement provided cover 50 years ago for charges that White supremacy undermined US national claims on democracy in the global arena, the first black president shields contemporary charges of American imperialism abroad and national anxieties masked as debates about illegal immigration. Obama as first black President needed to literally service the needs of the nation, but his (nearly) flawless performance had to take into account age old tropes associated with well worn notions of black masculinity including negative presumptions of black male fitness for positions of leadership and of interracial desire.

The Thug and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity

One of the prevailing theses of last year’s election season was that Barack Hussein Obama was not the round-way-brand of black man. Such a premise is palpable only to the extent that one chooses to read Obama against the image of marketplace confections of black masculinity, particularly those that legibly erect centuries’ old tropes of danger, bestial behavior, and sinister eroticism. The idea that we should distinguish between the candidate and the thug(s) is one of the defining truisms of contemporary polite society—less a measure of the candidate’s humanity and more so an index of the tolerance within said polite society. But black men do not live in polite society—however effectively they earn their keep within those spaces—and even the candidate’s wife understood this, telling CBS News in April of last year about her fears that her husband might get shot at a gas station in Chicago as opposed to being assassinated on the campaign trial by some desperate political actor yelling “traitor” or “liar.”

As Chris Rock surmised some time ago, niggas don’t get assassinated, they get shot—and there always been more of a chance that the Barack Obama’s fate would be decided by a bullet intended for a nigga, as opposed to that intended for the President, because quiet as it’s kept—Harvard pedigree notwithstanding—Obama never stops being a black man. And this is perhaps the implicit message of Byron Hurt’s film short Barack & Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect. The film is a brilliant and thoughtful intervention on the subject of black masculinity at a moment when Barack Obama is poised to redefine black manhood for much of the world.

There is a telling sequence early in Hurt’s Barack & Curtis, where radio journalist Esther Armah, states that “Barack equaled Harvard, someone like 50 Cent equaled hood; hood equaled virility, Harvard equaled impotence.” That Armah’s compelling observation is rarely disturbed speaks to the extent that many of our perceptions about black masculinity have been finely shaped by a market culture that makes it easier for us to go to sleep at night, because we can so effectively distinguish the niggas from the black men. Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are little more than brands, in a highly volatile and fabulously lucrative, politicized marketplace.

As Singh observes, “If the ideal inhabitants of the nation-state are citizen subjects, abstract, homogeneous, and formally equivalent participants in a common civic enterprise, than the ideal inhabitants of the market are private individuals endowed with a knowable range of different attributes and engaged in competition and personal advancement.” The concept of 50 Cent—Curtis Jackson—as brand is a no-brainer, as a commodity who implores us to believe that he is a highly dangerous and highly sexualized (to all comers, I might add) embodiment of contemporary black masculinity. Barack Obama-as-brand (as historian William Jelani Cobb suggest we think of him in the film) is less-pronounced, presumably as running for political office doesn’t immediately translate into the salaries associated with being a highly compensated “gangsta” rapper—or a professional social menace. But Obama’s political success was largely premised on his ability to brand himself as a beacon of hope, as an alternative to the Clinton aristocracy and as a black man that we don’t have to fear Branding helps make these men legible to very diverse and often competing constituencies. In widely circulated cover story in Fast Company Magazine, a veteran advertising executive matter-of-factly stated that “Barack Obama is three things you want in a brand…new, different and attractive.”

What branding doesn’t help illuminate is to the extent that the candidate and the thug(s) are dependent upon each other to lay claim to that which their brand doesn’t—and quite frankly, can’t—allow. This is the point that literacy expert Vershawn Ashanti Young makes when he suggest “That black men who display hypermasculine characteristics fetishize—that is, simultaneously love and loathe—those considered less masculine or, to be explicit, that niggas covet faggots has been unmasked in insightful criticism. That faggots desire to be niggas has occasioned less critique…” Mr. Jackson’s ability to wear $2,000 suits establishes a mainstream upper-middle-class identity that G-Unit clothing largely undermines. Mr. Obama’s feigned performance of “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” pivots on hypermasculine tropes easily accessed by those who would think otherwise.

Where the candidate and the thug(s) find common ground is perhaps more nuanced and to be observed in the “I don’t give a fuck” look that Obama so brilliantly deployed in the waning months of the presidential campaign or in response to Joe Wilson’s recent outburst during an Obama address to both houses. As Young notes in his book Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, “What the phrase ‘I don’t give a fuck’ really does is convert racial and gender anxiety into a mask on nonchalance…That niggas carry it off so well, however is exactly why [black middle class professionals] are drawn to them.” Young adds that “whereas rappers exaggerate their blackness and masculinity, [black middle class professionals] are required to underplay ours.” Both Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are fictions that are the products of the larger culture’s inability to imagine anything but radical dichotomies, for black men.

I Love that (White) Girl: Post-Race Nostalgia in the Age of Obama and Palin

As last year’s election season was coming to a close, R&B artist Raphael Saadiq released the video for the song “Love that Girl.” Retro-fitted with a sound heisted from the Brunswick label’s rhythm section—and imaging packaged with a giddy 1960s innocence reminiscent of The Wonder Years, “Love that Girl” is perfectly pitched for the so-called post-Race moment. The video for Raphael Saadiq’s “Love That Girl” succeeds, in part, because it trafficks in the very anxieties of this moment, by inverting the cynicism (born of the same anxieties) that informs much of the political discourse emanating from media pundits. That Saadiq can celebrate his affection for a lily-white white women in the video—a dead ringer for former lover Joss Stone (who half his age) with little repercussion is not the point—Teena Marie and Rick James cut that ground more than 25-years ago with “Fire & Desire,” thumbing their noses, as it were, at Reagan-era attempts to turn back the race clock.

Indeed Saadiq’s own nuanced performance of black masculinity mutes traditional readings of inter-racial desire. The video though, does risk undermining our memories of what the music Saadiq sings actually meant for folks whose political concerns were invested with more than an unfettered affection for the white girl who lived in the next town. As Daphne Brooks reminds readers is her brilliant essay last year in The Nation, much of the black music in the 1960s, particularly among the girl groups, “was about affirming black dignity and humanity amid the battle to end American apartheid.” More to the point, Saadiq’s amorous (reckless) eyeballing would have likely been met by Klansmen and torches if “Love that Girl” was in true synchronicity with the historical era that informs it. And yet this is beauty of the Obama-moment—the freedom to forget the country’s not-so-far-fetched racial history—and the very reason why so many of the old-race guard remained unswayed by the obvious possibilities of the moment.

For example, on the morning of August 29, 2008, another white girl entered the frame and the so-called post-race moment became little more than a nostalgic longing, sequenced as it was, to the pace of an unrelenting news cycle. And it really had nothing to do with who Governor Sarah Palin actually was, but everything to do with the white women-hood that she embodies. Call it a post-convention bounce or the re-invigoration of McCain’s masculinity (the MILF effect) if you want, but the reality is that Obama always loses in opposition to pure, unsullied white women-hood (a positionality that Hillary Clinton’s own political career has never allowed her to truly occupy). Overnight Barack Obama became the contemporary default representation of OJ Simpson, The Scottsboro Boys, Nushawn Williams, and Jack Johnson for many white women—his campaign a contagion that needed to be contained, if you were to measure the disdain that Today Show co-host Meredith Veira barely masked at the mention of Obama’s name. Another victory for gender in the gender vs. race debate, though in this instance Obama’s gendered identity—as a black man—trumps his identity as simply an African American.

Then as in now, Obama can barely risk even a cursory critical response to Palin’s criticism of his administration without reproducing centuries old narratives about bestial black masculinities and the purity of white femininity in the face of black male sexual desire and presumed physical endowment. Obscured in the reproduction of this historical fiction is the fact that American electoral politics had never witnessed the presence on the national stage of a black man and white woman, so highly sexualized and attractive in conventional and not so conventional ways, who were at political odds in the way that Palin and Obama were.

The sexual tensions between Obama and Palin were palpable, if only for a nation that had come to desire the presence of such spectacle in popular culture as some measure of the very reconstitution of nation that Singh identifies above. The anxieties produced in the midst of these performed tensions were borne out in the sexualized gaze placed on Michele Obama’s body—as expressed in black masculine celebration of the First Lady’s ass—I’m thinking immediately of my friend Michael Eric Dyson’s televised commentary—as if such celebration asserts that Barack Obama is obviously satisfied with the well endowed Michele Obama in the ways that heterosexual black men are satisfied and presumably enamored with such things (I stand accused). Never before has a First Lady's body been subject to the amount of scrutiny and surveillance as is the case with Michelle Obama; she has been rhetorically poked, prodded and groped. Many would have found such a line of coverage unfathomable and even offensive if applied to women like Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, or Roselyn Carter, as was rightfully the case with depictions of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential "MILF."

In this context, John McCain’s on-going campaign to seek a posthumous presidential pardon from Obama on behalf of Jack Johnson, the late black heavyweight boxer who was convicted in 1913 for violating the Mann Act, which ostensibly prohibited the transportation of women—white women--across state lines for "immoral purposes"—seems destined to make explicit the threats posed by interracial desire and miscegenation within the national culture that Obama, as a mixed raced citizen, has little choice but to embody.

Barack Obama had little room to maneuver culturally or politically, having to be willing to be queered in both traditional and non-traditional ways in opposition to performing even a healthy black male sexual desire as anxieties about such desire became palpable for the American public. Obama, then as now, had to perform a tightly choreographed form of restraint. Descriptions of Obama as “Obambi”—in relation to his foreign affairs strategies—are the most obvious expressions of that queering process as are expressions of Michele Obama as alternately the kind of domineering black woman that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about in his infamous critique of the black family and some contemporary iteration of the Hottentot Venus that Obama is sexually and politically flaccid in the face of. At the crux of the many meanings placed on the body of Obama—itself marking a kind of conceptual queerness as John Erni might describe it, where there are just far too many meanings associated with Obama to ever read him as conceptually straight—are fundamental questions about his fitness as commander-in-chief.

In closing I’ll returning to Glave for a moment, who in the aforementioned essay titled “Regarding a Black Male Monica Lewinsky,” argues that American presidents are “sacred godhead (and, by extension, guardian of the nation, the national body, and the kingdom/empire) created by people—those who hold the most power and privilege—in their desired image: whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, Christianity, perceived virility, relative good looks according to culturally sanctioned standards of beauty, et cetera.” It is in the context of this particular definition of Presidential masculinity, that Glave imagines—with his undergraduate students at the overwhelmingly white State University of New York at Binghamton—what the implications would had been if Bill Clinton had been involved in an illicit sexual affair with a black man instead of a young white woman named Monica Lewinsky.

Specifically Glave imagines, “A black male sexually interacting with the President’s white publically heterosexual body, perhaps penetrating the anally (and/or orally) receptive white presidential body and receiving penetration in return.” Such contact, Glave argues, would “not only fatally endanger the mythic-symbolic ideology surrounding the scared presidential body’s white/racial and heterosexual purity but also seriously undermine, to say the least, the ‘real man’ masculine power and force the only a homosexually unpenetrated male body can possess and claim.” Glave’s observations are useful, because it captures exactly what happened in November of last year as a “queered” black male body penetrated the office of the US President, reproducing politically, socially, and culturally all of the anxieties that Glave and presumably many other imagined years before Obama’s presidency.

Book Review: “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films

2009-11-15T23:44:00.004-05:00

special to NewBlackMan

Stephane Dunn
“Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Review by Kinohi Nishikawa

In the early 1970s, blaxploitation films popularized images of black masculine brawn and bravado that American audiences had never seen before. The protagonists of these films violated a number of cultural taboos in the way they embodied the “badman” ethos—a mode of self-presentation (derived from folklore and updated for the urban scene) that reveled in black male cunning and strength. In 1971 Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback used his sexual prowess and street smarts to outrun law enforcement “by any means necessary.” The same year Richard Roundtree’s John Shaft stood tall as Harlem’s homegrown black private detective, a leather-clad avenger primed to protect his community by taking on the mob. And in 1973, in the highest grossing blaxploitation film of its time, Max Julien starred in The Mack as Goldie, the pimp whose wide-brimmed hats and sweet-talking raps transformed the ghetto anti-hero into a mainstream icon. Although blaxploitation films reached the height of their popularity in the early 1970s, their larger-than-life male protagonists inspired a generation of hip hop artists and continue to incite debates about African American gender politics.

Given this familiar narrative of the rise of blaxploitation cinema, Stephane Dunn’s “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas offers a refreshing counterpoint to what scholars and critics have long assumed to be an exclusively male-oriented genre of filmmaking. By focusing on the less-recognized subgenre of the black female action movie, Dunn is able to illuminate some surprising features of blaxploitation’s investment in “fantasies” of black womanhood. Specifically, in her analyses of Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974), Dunn identifies a tradition of black heroines who call into question their status as passive objects of male heterosexual desire. The protagonists of these films express their sexual agency in problematic but also deeply political ways, and Dunn is interested in recovering the meaning behind their widespread popularity during the Black Power era. “Baad Bitches” is thus notable for being the first book-length, black feminist response to the cultural assumptions about gender that subtend “masculine criticism” of the genre (3).

Dunn’s reading of Cleopatra Jones is particularly effective in challenging the prevailing consensus that black women occupied a static position in blaxploitation cinema. In the film, Tamara Dobson plays a sexy and streetwise federal agent charged with foiling domestic and global drug-trafficking networks. Sporting a Black Power afro and wielding a shotgun (a resonant symbol of phallic authority, if there ever was one), Jones tackles her assignment with stereotypically “masculine” bravado but in a style that is self-consciously “feminine.” Dunn makes it clear that Dobson’s embodiment of sexual agency courts the kind of heterosexual male gaze that would delight in her beauty and voluptuous physique. At the same time, Dunn shows how that gaze itself is interrogated within the film’s narrative. Jones’s desirability, for example, provokes white male anxiety when she approaches her colleagues with “cool professionalism” (97). These men are forced to tarry with the fact that Jones intends to both wear her desire on her sleeve and remain professionally distanced from their advances. Equally revealing is how this expression of feminine cool inflects representations of black manhood in the film. In one case, that ballyhooed icon of streetwise masculinity, the pimp, is undone by Jones’s cinematic presence. The wannabe badman Doodleburg, played by Antonio Fargas with sashaying verve, is feminized not only in light of the righteousness of Jones’s cause but also against the backdrop of the “phallic” agency of her character.

Dunn’s analyses of the Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown reveal the more problematic ways in which blaxploitation cinema appropriated female sexual agency to serve patriarchal ends. Unlike Cleopatra Jones, Grier’s protagonists reflect “the pornographic treatment of their star, a tendency that the prostitute guise motif in both films dramatizes” (111). According to Dunn, something of value is lost in Grier’s having to masquerade as a prostitute in order for her characters to infiltrate organized crime syndicates. Dunn expands on this point by emphasizing that in both films the trajectory of the heroine’s actions is framed as a revenge narrative. If Cleopatra Jones’s feminine cool is expressed in relatively autonomous terms, Coffy’s and Foxy Brown’s vigilantism stokes the fantasy that black women’s sexual agency can only be called forth through its violation by an external force. This reinscription of feminine passivity is what Dunn finds most objectionable about Grier’s oeuvre, in which “[her] body functions as a narrow image of ghettoized black female sexuality” (115). The logic of passivity is taken to the extreme in Foxy Brown, when in a disturbing sequence the heroine’s experience of having been raped is glossed over in the narrative’s drive to represent Foxy “avenging her man’s murder” (127). By not dwelling on the “physical or emotional signs of Foxy’s ordeal” (127), the film manages to deprive the heroine of any characterological complexity. Dunn observes that the resulting vacuum in Foxy’s consciousness effectively subordinates her desire to patriarchal authority.

Despite their problematic gendering of Grier’s characters, black female action movies give Dunn access to a new way of historicizing Black Power’s relationship with blaxploitation cinema. She proposes that even the avowedly political valences of blaxploitation were premised on the subordination of black women to a male fantasy of revolutionary vitality. In her readings of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)—arguably the touchstones of Black Power-inspired cinema—Dunn contends that popular representations of “black political and social empowerment” relied on “conservative models of gender” to achieve their radical import (84). Yet the problem of gender in these two films was not only a matter of affirming black patriarchy under the sign of revolution. It was also, more profoundly, a matter of negotiating black men’s increasingly precarious socioeconomic realities in the post-civil rights era. In this regard, Dunn’s assessment of “political” blaxploitation outlines the unnerving degree to which competing forms of masculinity were projected onto a figure like Sweetback. Presented with the option of either “liv[ing] the castrated existence of a sexual ‘freak’” or realizing “the potential for revolt” (69), Sweetback was, in this account, a fraught hero—as much a product of male anxiety as he was an expression of revolutionary desire.

In addition to resituating our understanding of male-centered blaxploitation, Dunn’s analysis of black female action movies has the salutary effect of shedding light on contemporary embodiments of sexual agency among female hip hop artists. As many scholars have noted, hip hop culture is the natural heir to blaxploitation’s heady mixture of radical politics, vernacular flair, and representations of racial pride. Yet as with her readings of blaxploitation heroines, Dunn is careful to point out how black women occupy a tenuous position in hip hop’s gendered imaginary. Even when they are not being explicitly objectified as “video vixens” or backstage groupies, women in hip hop, like Pam Grier before them, sometimes have to hew to gendered stereotypes in order to get ahead in the culture industry. Artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown (a stage persona taken up as an homage to Grier’s iconic heroine) have wielded their sexual agency with feckless daring, and their music challenges certain male artists’ constant valorization of the phallus. At the same time, Kim’s troublesome devotion to the late Notorious B.I.G., her well-known legal troubles, and her array of cosmetic enhancements give pause to the notion that her persona constitutes a radical departure from the patriarchal script. Coupled with Brown’s “excessive sexualization of her body onstage and off” (31), Kim’s travails leave Dunn wondering whether these female rappers can be seen as “icons of true empowerment” (34).

The question of exactly what a black female icon of empowerment would look like in popular culture today is left invitingly open at the end of “Baad Bitches.” Dunn recognizes that popular expressions of female sexual agency, whether in blaxploitation or in hip hop, are bound up with the culture industry’s historical denigration of black women’s bodies. The hypervisibility of heroines’ and rappers’ bodies may defy stereotypes of passive femininity, but they may also play into deep-seated, racist assumptions about black women’s hypersexuality. This complex double-bind is captured in Dunn’s description of blaxploitation as offering “radical and conservative fantasies of the status quo” (xiv).

In attempting to move beyond this double-bind, Dunn speculates on how black women’s bodies might serve as radical sites of pleasure for black female identification. Throughout “Baad Bitches,” Dunn recounts watching black female action movies with friends, students, and family members. In the spirited conversations that follow the screenings, Dunn notices how Dobson’s and Grier’s characters are as much appreciated for their beauty and toughness as they are critiqued for their gendered stereotyping. According to Dunn, the way spectators, and particularly black women, relate to these characters allows them to make strides toward realizing “an autonomous public sexual imaginary” of black female desire (xiv). This poignant insight may be the first step in imagining how black women can claim sexual agency for themselves without needing to apologize for it.

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Kinohi Nishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Programs in Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University. His dissertation analyzes the pulp fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the context of the black urban experience during the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Holding Back the Years: Doc Gooden 25 Years Later

2009-11-15T23:30:00.003-05:00

Twenty-five years after his phenomenal rookie season, Dwight Gooden takes aim at his demons
by Wayne Coffey
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Saturday, November 14th 2009, 6:45 PM

Nobody hangs up Ks for Dwight Gooden anymore. A mural of him - in mid-windup - no longer occupies the whole side of a building in Times Square.

More than half his life has passed since the spectacle of Gooden in his No. 16 Mets uniform, so young and strong and utterly gifted, fueled a frenzy the likes of which this town may never see again - a frenzy that reached everywhere, even to Mickey Mantle, underaged icon of another generation, and another borough.

"If I could pick somebody to be, that's who I'd be - Dwight Gooden," Mantle said.

Of course Dwight Gooden thinks about those days sometimes, but he's in no rush to go back there, even if he could, nor to revisit a fall that was almost as rapid as his rise. His focus, he says, is on today. He has a new bride, Monique. They have a five-year-old boy, Dylan and a baby girl - Dwight's seventh child - on the way. Gooden has a new job, as a senior VP with the Newark Bears of the Atlantic League. He has a new-found Christian faith and new plans to open a Dwight Gooden Baseball Academy in northern New Jersey next year.

Sitting in the dining room of the north Jersey house the family is leasing, Gooden speaks openly about the wildly careening, self-destructive course his life has taken, even as Dylan scampers around with his father's baseball glove on his hand. He talks about how nice it is to have a semblance of order and direction, to be doing outreach work with kids, after two-plus decades that have included five trips to rehab, multiple brushes with the law, one trip to prison and a family and financial life fractured by a demon called cocaine.

He still owes $300,000 in back alimony and child support to his first wife, Monica, according to an affidavit filed in May in Hillsborough County Circuit Court.

"I've had my pitfalls, and I have to accept them," Gooden says. "Everything that's happened, it's nobody's fault but my own. Between the ages of 19 and 41, there was a big cloud, a dark cloud. Some days the sun would come out, but a lot of days it would pour down rain. Now every day is a great day."

Gooden understands there may be skepticism about his three and a half years of sobriety, about reading of another fresh start for the former Doctor K. Haven't we heard this before, after all?

Read the Full Article @ The Daily News

Real Talk from Uncle Charlie: “Get a Prostate Exam”

2009-11-13T14:46:00.006-05:00

Real Talk from Uncle Charlie: “Get a Prostate Exam”
by Mark Anthony Neal

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Charlie Wilson, lead singer of the Gap Band was one of the most recognizable voices in R&B. Wilson’s influence was easily witnessed in the music of artists like Aaron Hall, (of Guy) Keith Sweat and R. Kelly, whose vocal stylings were heavily indebted to Wilson. With the help of a new generation of fans, including Kelly and Snoop, “Uncle Charlie,” has made a return to the R&B charts with tracks like “Charlie, Last Name Wilson” , “There Goes My Baby,” and “Can’t Live Without You.” In the midst of his remarkable comeback, Wilson was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After successful treatment, Wilson now serves as a national spokesperson for the Prostate Cancer Foundation. He talked with NewBlackMan about his struggles with the disease and the importance of black men staying on top of their health.

NBM: I read some information that said that before the age of 40, most men have a 1-in-10,000 chance of being diagnosed with Prostate cancer, but that that numbers increase to 1 in 38 between the ages of 40 and 59. In your case, was this something that you were thinking about? Were you getting exams? Or were you just doing “Charlie Wilson”?

Uncle Charlie: Naw, I wasn’t getting exams, although when I was a teenager I used to get those exams and I remember I used to hate it. As an adult I wouldn’t go to the doctor for those exams and I knew nothing about prostate cancer at all. All I knew is the exam shied me away from getting checked for anything.

NBM: That’s real, I imagine in the times that you’ve had to talk about prostate cancer have you had to deal with men who were a little skittish about having the exam because of previous experiences with it or fears of what it might be like?

Uncle Charlie: Yeah, I sit in on community panels and groups and a brother was like “tell us what really going on with it” and I really didn’t understand where he was coming from and I was like “dude it hurts like hell” and everybody started laughing. I got a chance to talk to a lot of guys and tell them “just got get a checkup” and one homeboy was like “man I don’t know…exit only, exit only” (laughter). But seriously, I found out last month about a case that was 27 years-old, that’s crazy.

NBM: How did you get diagnosed? Was it just a regular checkup?

Uncle Charlie: Yeah. My wife, of course talked me into going. (laughter) Before I got married 15 years ago, I was scarcely visiting doctors on a regular basis, as all men just about do—my whole family was like “we gonna die of something.” Buy my wife made me go to the doctor, it was her insistence that made me go get a regular checkup and then she insisted that I get a PSA test.

NBM: What was your initial reaction?

Uncle Charlie: Man, cancer. Just cancer, that word. The doctor told me there was good news and bad news and my wife said “what’s the bad news first” and he tell us it prostate cancer. I immediately couldn’t find my face—it was someplace on the floor. I just felt that everything that I had worked for and all my accomplishments were going to be buried. I just figured that this was the end of it all. And I was looking at this doctor and I just couldn’t hardly hear anything—he was moving his mouth and I was just stunned.

NBM: When were you diagnosed?

Uncle Charlie: July of 2008.

NBM: So you’re in the midst of this amazing comeback and another generation folk are getting the opportunity to hear Uncle Charlie and then all of a sudden you get hit with this news.

Uncle Charlie: It was crazy for me, I couldn’t believe it. I was more hurt than anything . For the last 10 years maybe 12 years I really been praying, just giving God thanks and praise and all of this. And it seems like here come the Devil and just blindsides me, like he just won’t leave me alone, is this him again? This evilness, the darkside or something, just keep on toying with me. That’s the only thing I could think of.

NBM: What was the treatment like? That kinds of things did you have to go through for the treatment.

Uncle Charlie: I went through radiation seed planting. What they do is they go to the prostate with these radiation seeds and they attack the cancer right there at the spot, unlike chemo therapy and things like that.

NBM: How did you get involved with the Prostate Cancer Foundation?

Uncle Charlie: Well Karen Lee and Juanita Stephens (publicists), thought it would be a great opportunity for me to team up with foundation to help spread the word to African-Americans. When I started doing research and found out all these statistics, it was crazy. 1-in-3 African-Americans will develop prostate cancer, that we were dying every 18 minutes—the numbers are staggering, the number of men we lost the last year and the year before, it was just staggering. I couldn’t believe the numbers and I was like “I have to start talking.” I do a lot of performing so I need to start informing brothers about this disease. And people were like “Charlie Wilson, why you telling all your business?” And I’m like, “this is really not about me, it’s about you, I’ve done something about me.” (laughter)

NBM: You mentioned the spirituality that you gained the past few years, do you feel as though God had a plan for you?

Uncle Charlie: Yeah—that’s the only thing I could think of. Me doing everything myself and me calling all the shots, I lead myself to nowhere. Drugs and alcohol were a factor in my day and God gave me a second chance at life and another chance at the music business, which I prayed and asked him for. I know I can sing, if I can just do this one more time. For ten years, after I got sober, looked for a record deal and everybody turned me down. All the majors, they were closing the door so fast, like dude, c’mon.

NBM: How does it feel to get the love you get from some of the younger cats, like the Snoops and R. Kellys of the world?

Uncle Charlie: It a great feeling. First it was Snoop who embraced me the first time and Snoop made sure in the hip-hop community, that I was branded with him. Then it was R. Kelly, who was like “let me do you—let me produce you”. That “Charlie Last Name, Wilson” went through the roof with them youngsters. Kelly said “we need to reintroduce you to the world” and what better way to do it. I knew I could sing and knew all I needed was a record. It’s great to see so many generations of kids just flock to the music, knowing who I am from my voice and my songs. It’s a great opportunity to be one of the only ones who was able to connect the dots.

NBM: How is it different from those early days with The Gap Band?

Uncle Charlie: One, I’m sober. I wake and know where exactly I am all the time. And I can count my own money (laughter). And enjoying living and not existing. And then be able to change, people places and things. That is just wonderful.

Psst! Morehouse men — pull your pants up!

2009-11-13T10:37:00.004-05:00

Psst! Morehouse men — pull your pants up!
by Stephane Dunn

I must admit, I had lofty expectations of Morehouse College when I began teaching here two years ago. After all, this was the house that such social and intellectual giants as Benjamin Davis and James Brawley built and that superstar students like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. solidified. The college’s mystique — as the only historically black male college — made me darn near skip into my interview and later into those first few classes.

I had visions of suits, bow ties, yes ma’ams and staggering displays of intellectual brilliance dancing in my head. Before too long, however, reality tempered the mystique, and I was forced to see that a legacy of social and cultural distinction and intellectual achievement is merely a sleeping history unless it continues to thrive in a contemporary version.

The newly implemented “no sagging” dress code with respect to men’s pants is an attempt to do just that.

The code raises obvious questions about individual freedom. Its inclusion of a very traditional script for male style — like no pumps and purses for men — will inevitably elevate the debate and criticism both inside and outside Morehouse. As I’ve walked to and from classes, I’ve often laughed aloud over how much my students resemble the public high school kids that I’d decided might be too much to deal with every day. Rather than being both disciplinarian and etiquette teacher, I thought I’d be a professor primarily engaged in my students’ academic and professional potential.

Instead, there is rarely a day when I’m not reluctantly forced to view the backside of students and worry for the millionth time that I will not make it up the stairway before the loose, bright red shorts shouting out from pants already bound for the floor completely fall off the oblivious student in front of me. It’s like being forced to peep when you absolutely don’t want to.

Usually, after mustering a reluctant, “Excuse me,” I implore the young man to “pull them up please” or jokingly say, “I’m sure you’re not trying to flash anybody.” In class, teaching is punctuated by commands to “pull those pants up, Mr. So-and-So — can’t you feel those pants falling lower and lower?” and trying to wheedle some sleeping or shy student out from his hiding place under a cap. Even if the written rules of the class include no hats in class, I’m inevitably forced to admonish, “Hat, please.”

During these moments of playing dress etiquette police, I’m uneasy and resentful. I’m forced to be their “mama” instead of an accepted and serious sister-professor.

Read the Full Essay @ the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Stephane Dunn, an assistant professor in the English Department at Morehouse College, is the author of “Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.”

'The Color Purple' vs. 'Precious'

2009-11-12T18:04:00.004-05:00

These two commercially successful, much-hyped films both explore incest, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and colorism within the black community. So why has “Precious” not gotten “The Color Purple” treatment?

The Color Precious
by Salamishah Tillet

Given its celebrity fanfare and feminist themes, is Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, a 21st-century The Color Purple? Or is it Native Son in drag?

Lee Daniels’ second film, Precious, fared quite well last weekend. Despite its soft release in only 18 theaters, Precious pulled in a remarkable $1.8 million, suggesting that on average, each theater made $100,000 off its showing. Even my brazen attempt to see the film in Times Square on Sunday night resulted in my having to purchase a ticket for Monday morning, because all four of the remaining shows were sold out in Harlem and Union Square.

With its mostly positive critical reviews and its popularity among African-American audiences, Precious, for all appearances, has struck gold. In many ways, the cultural phenomenon that has become Precious harkens back to the financial success of The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel of the same name. A year after its original release date, The Color Purple, which also boasted a strong opening had made almost $100 million.

However, unlike the favorable reception that has greeted Precious, The Color Purple sparked great controversy about its negative portrayals of African-American families, and, in particular, African-American men. Given their explorations of the similar themes of incest, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and colorism within the African-American community, why has Precious received so little backlash?

Read the Full Essay @ THE ROOT

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Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

5th African-American Literature Symposium @ NCCU

2009-11-11T08:26:00.002-05:00

Fifth African-American Literature Symposium

The Fifth African-American Literature Symposium, “It’s A New Day: The Vicissitude of African American Autobiography from Briton Hammon to President Barack Obama,” is a symposium is sponsored by the Department of English and Mass Communication and the NCCU Lyceum Series.

This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African-American Studies at Duke University. His keynote address, “A (Nearly) Flawless Masculinity: Barack Obama’s Performance of Cosmopolitan Blackness,” will begin at 10:45 a.m. Dr. Neal is a renowned scholar whose works include Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and New Black Man (2005). He has appeared on National Public Radio and in the Los Angeles Times.

Additionally, panelists from universities such as Hampton University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Maryland at Eastern Shore, and University of North Carolina at Wilmington will give paper presentations throughout the day.

Contact Name: Dr. Wendy Rountree

Contact Phone: 919-530-7105

Location: On Campus, Farrison-Newton Communications Building, Theatre

A Silky Soul Tribute

2009-11-10T18:10:00.002-05:00

Silky Soul Tribute
by Mark Anthony Neal

In a room filled with mixed-company, mention the group Frankie Beverly and Maze and watch hundreds of years of racial segregation reproduce itself right before your eyes. In a world where many whites are still coming to terms with the insular realities of black life and culture, Frankie Beverly and Maze may be one of the biggest secrets of all. Virtually unknown to white audiences, save the summer barbeque at a black colleagues house, Frankie Beverly is the closest thing that Black America has to the Grateful Dead. But whereas “Dead Heads”—the traveling band of fans who follow the group around the country—were seeming only looking for music to accompany their purple haze, most of Frankie Beverly’s fans are simply looking for good times and community. It is in that spirit that several contemporary R&B and Gospel stars, including Mary J. Blige, Joe and J. Moss, came together to pay tribute to Black America’s favorite band.

Frankie Beverly and Maze was founded in 1969, when Philadelphia native Beverly, formed a jazz-rock band known as Frankie Beverly’s Raw Soul. Though the band had some minor regional success in the City of Brotherly Love—a city that was teeming with Soul music at the time—Beverly and members of the band packed up in 1972 and moved across the country to the Bay area. Perhaps hoping to take advantage of the popularity of Psychedelic Soul in the area, as best represented by the high visibility of Sly and the Family Stone, the band struggled for few years until Marvin Gaye called on the band to back him when he was touring in the Bay Area.

Gaye was impressed by the musicians and their lead singer and brought a copy of their demo tape to his friend Larkin Arnold, who was then an executive at Capital Records, also label home to Natalie Cole. Changing their name to Frankie Beverly and Maze, the band released their self-titled debut in 1977. The band would pay tribute to Gaye’s guiding hand a decade later with their classic “Silky Soul Singer” which serves as inspiration for the title of Silky Soul Music: An All-Star Tribute to Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly.

The new tribute recording comes on the heels of Interpretations: Celebrating the Music of Earth Wind Fire (2007), but whereas Earth, Wind, and Fire had many crossover hits, Frankie Beverly and Maze’s success has been comparatively limited by most commercial standards. What helped the band build such a huge following though was their amazing and energetic live shows, where Beverley is dressed in his requisite all-white attire, embodying the sex symbol status of his mentor, even today, a few years past his 60th birthday. Though the group hasn’t released any new material since 1993, have been without a recording contract for more than a decade, and have never had a single break into the top-20 pop charts—to put in perspective “Laffy Taffy” once topped the charts—Frankie Beverly and Maze continue to sell out arenas, often headlining festivals like the Essence Music Festival where they are a yearly highlight.

Ultimately what keeps people coming back to Frankie Beverly and Maze is the timeless quality of the music. While no one will ever mistake their music for the funky intricacies of artists such as Prince or even the aforementioned Earth, Wind and Fire, there was always an accessible and infectious quality about the music of Frankie Beverly and Maze. The group’s music is rooted in a belief of family and the beloved community as expressed on tracks like “We Are One,” here covered by Raheem DeVaughn or “I Wanna Thank you” the decidedly obscure b-side of the 1980 release “Southern Girl” which is given a fine treatment by The Clark Sisters, Kiki Sheard and J. Moss on the tribute recording.

Of course Frankie Beverly and Maze has recorded a veritable mix tape of barbeque and graduation party classics beginning with classics such as “Joy and Pain” and “Back in Stride.” Though Avant’s version of “Joy in Pain” will not make anybody to forget the original or Rob Base’s remake for that matter, he captures the general spirit of the song. More successful is Mint Condition’s version of “Back in Stride.” The two bands toured together in the summer of 2007 and no doubt the younger band learned a few things about longevity.

Two of the bands most well known songs, “Can’t Get Over You” (the band’s most successful single) and “Before I Let Go” are reserved for two of the best known acts on the collection. Joe is in fine form on “Can’t Get Over You,” the project’s first single. Though Mary J. Blige’s version of “Before I Let Go” never quite gets you free like the original, her hip-hop Soul swagger captures why the song might be the only R&B song recorded in the last thirty years that resonates across generations. Some of the other highlights include Ledisi’s take on “Happy Feelings” and Kevon Edmonds’ return on the 1983 single “Never Let You Down.” In the end Silky Soul Music: An All-Star Tribute to Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly stands as a solid celebration of the only band, perhaps, capable of getting all of Black America on its feet at the same time.

Nation of Cowards: "Watch Your Mouth (Uncle) Tom"

2009-11-10T10:36:00.004-05:00

Watch Your Mouth (Uncle) Tom:
How Our Black Pride in the President Works Against Us
by David Ikard

The morning after the Democrats were trounced in two significant gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Tom Joyner remarked on "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" that a large part of the blame rested squarely on Barack Obama’s shoulders. The Democrats lost, Joyner argued pointedly, because black people stayed home. And they stayed home because Barack Obama has basically ignored them since he’s become president. Noting sardonically that Obama was “around all the time” on the show during his historic run to the presidency but had yet to appear on his show after being elected, Joyner issued a warning to Obama. If he expected to get elected again in 2012, he’d better not forget about black America.

When Joyner went to the phone lines, allowing his listeners to weight in on the topic, he was roundly lampooned. Recalling the heat that Tavis Smiley—a longtime commentator on Joyner’s show—took from the black community after admonishing then Democrat candidate Obama for failing to address black social concerns in his political agenda, Joyner found himself in the proverbial hot seat. One caller went so far as to label Joyner an “Uncle Tom” for his criticism of the president. The message that was coming across the lines was loud and clear. Criticizing Barack Obama—especially if you are black—is off-limits. Politics be damned.

The salient problem with this posture is that it confuses strategic political agitation with betraying the African American community’s best socioeconomic interest. It is not, in fact, a contradiction for one to be both proud of Barack Obama’s accomplishments from a cultural perspective and fiercely demanding of him on a political front. Maintaining such a posture is not only healthy for the democratic process, but necessary if one expects the black community’s concerns to get aired and taken seriously in the public domain.

The uncontested king of the sound bite Al Sharpton put it best on Joyner’s show when he quipped, “We elected a president not a Messiah.” Unlike Joyner, however, Sharpton hoisted the blame for the gubernatorial losses onto the black community, arguing that blacks at the grassroots level need to become more active in the political process—namely, by supporting the president’s initiatives such as healthcare—if they expect their circumstances on the ground to change. And, perhaps on some level Sharpton and Joyner are both right. However it shakes out, the cold, hard truth is that the black community is in serious trouble economically and socially and nobody seems to notice.

Read the Full Essay @ Nation of Cowards

David Ikard is an assistant professor of African American Literature at Florida State University. His research interests include black gender studies, cultural criticism, hip hop culture, and post-racial politics. His book, Breaking the Silence: Toward A Black Male Feminist Criticism (2007), considers the role of black men in black feminist politics via the lens of African American Literature and theory.

Book Review: Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton by Duchess Harris

2009-11-04T15:11:00.003-05:00

Reigniting Black Feminist Power
Review by Christine E. Hutchins

Duchess Harris, Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, opens her important new book, Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, with a problem. In Paula Giddings's 1996 book When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, Giddings asks, "Who has presented the political agenda for Black women?

Harris and Giddings show that the 1963 March on Washington represented an overwhelmingly male Black consciousness and Betty Friedan's 1966 Feminist Mystique an essentially middle-class and white feminist movement. Harris begins, "Since Giddings did not answer her own question, this is where I enter. I wrote this book because I wanted to take up the analysis of Black women's involvement in American political life where Giddings left off."

Harris's analysis is both hopeful and disheartening. On the one hand, Harris provides oral, archival and literary histories of Black women without whom neither the Black Power nor the feminist movements would have progressed. On the other hand, Harris demonstrates that these movements, so beholden to Black women, have never adequately or fairly represented their needs and desires. Worse, they have too often asked Black women to choose between identities, prioritizing one over others.

The insistence that they choose may be Black women's worst dilemma, pressured as they are under the combined weight of racism, sexism and homophobia. The Black Power movement often asks Black women to set aside concerns over unequal status; feminist organizations often have difficulty recognizing the ways that race factors into equations of gender and power.

Harris shows through examination of media, Congressional records and survey data that in situations in which they feel they must choose, Black women overwhelming concede gender to race. Harris demonstrates that Black women strongly backed O.J. Simpson, accused of murdering his former wife, a white woman. In the hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, testimony by Anita Hill about his sexual improprieties required Black women to balance the possibility of a Black Supreme Court appointment or a gender-troubled appointment. Black women generally excused Thomas, Harris argues, "considering it more important to take a Black hero where one could be found, however flawed he might be."

Read the Full Review @ On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine

Now On YouTube--William "Sandy" Darity Chats Up the African-American Economy

2009-11-04T15:01:00.002-05:00

Duke University Professor William "Sandy" Darity discusses the state of the African-American economy.

Also

NPR's Tell Me More with Michael Martin
Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Economists who follow the economic outlook for African-Americans began warning more than a year ago that a recession would hit blacks particularly hard, which has proven to be true. Unemployment among African-Americans stands at 15 percent, while the national jobless rate is just below 10 percent. Some of the nation's leading black economists are gathering this week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University to address the disparity. William Darity, an organizer of the summit, explains the economic climate for African-Americans and ways it can be strengthened.

Listen Here

Now Available on YouTube: "Office Hours with Mark Anthony Neal"

2009-11-02T14:30:00.002-05:00

The Cutting Edge of 'Kamaal the Abstract'

2009-10-30T15:55:00.005-04:00

Q-Tip's Return to Grace
by John Murph

This decade, many a rap and R&B artist, from Missy Elliott to Mya, have seen their albums stalled or put on permanent hold. But Q-Tip’s Kamaal/The Abstract has the dubious distinction of being one of the most delayed hip-hop records in the history of rap, nearly done under by seven long years of corporate hemming and hawing.

The story of Kamaal/The Abstract is an epic battle of creative artistic control against an increasingly homogenized and claustrophobic mainstream market.

The album, which was released last month, was originally scheduled to hit the streets in early 2002 as the follow-up to Q-Tip’s first solo, and highly controversial, album, Amplified (Arista, 1999). With Kamaal/The Abstract, there was much at stake. Longtime fans felt that for his solo debut, Q-Tip had abandoned the thoughtful verses he waxed with A Tribe Called Quest, for a decidedly more glamorous, blinged-out approach. Kamaal/The Abstract was to be Q-Tip’s return to grace

Kamaal/The Abstract was a move to show both Q-Tip returning to the more experimental approach of Tribe as well as delving deeper into the group’s jazz aesthetic, an aesthetic that made ’90s discs such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders enduring classics for both hip-hop and jazz heads. On Kamaal/The Abstract, Q-Tip recruited the heavyweight talents of saxophonist/flutist Gary Thomas, alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, giving them plenty of room to shine. And instead of balancing the jazz equation with high-profile, hip-hop guest artists, he explored more conventional instrumentation and many times opted to sing rather than rap.

While pre-release media coverage was mixed, the underground buzz about the record generated a lot of excitement in the music world. Unfortunately, that exhilaration didn’t touch the powers that be at Arista Records, who initially kept postponing the release date. And then label execs put Kamaal on ice, arguing that it didn’t have a single hit on it.

After that, Q-Tip’s career floated, in limbo; another disc, Open (Hollywood) also stalled. It wasn’t until he pulled a Rocky Balboa last year with The Renaissance (Motown Records), that his recording career landed back on solid ground. So the thawing and release of Kamaal/The Abstract is a long time coming.

It must have been incredibly frustrating for Q-Tip to watch Kamaal/The Abstract held back while other risk-taking albums recorded later—Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (ironically also on Arista), Common’s Electric Circus, Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak—became critical and commercial successes. With Kamaal/The Abstract, Q-Tip proved himself to beprescient in challenging the status quo of what a hip-hop artist could do.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

New York State of Mind? Alicia Keys and Shawn Carter @ the World Series

2009-10-30T10:43:00.002-04:00

Ne-Yo Sings the Theme to 'The Princess & the Frog'

2009-10-29T12:36:00.002-04:00

"Never Knew I Needed" will be featured during the The Princess & the Frog's ending credits. The soundtrack album will be available November 23rd, and the movie, whose action takes place in New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou, will open in theatres on December 11th. In addition to Ne-Yo's contribution, The Princess and the Frog Soundtrack boosts a colorful collection of original songs and a lively orchestral score, both composed and conducted by Randy Newman.

Sapphire Chats Up 'Push' and 'Precious' with Katie Couric

2009-10-28T13:30:00.003-04:00

Author Sapphire talks about the new movie "Precious" inspired by her novel "Push," the process of casting the lead actress Gabourey Sidibe, and the inspirational message of the story.

Why No One Talks Back to Cathy Hughes

2009-10-28T13:18:00.003-04:00

The empress of black radio is using public airwaves to personally attack her enemies in Congress in the name of black progress. Who's going to put her in check?

Why No One Talks Back to Cathy Hughes
by Natalie Hopkinson

If you’ve tuned in to black radio in the past few months, chances are you’ve heard “Reality Radio,” a series of announcements in which radio pioneer Cathy Hughes asks the black community to fight a new law in Congress that she claims would “murder black-owned radio.”

Her definition of homicide? Performance Rights Act (HR 848), a bill that would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists for playing their music. The potential winners and losers in the bill being considered by Congress has been a source of heated debate. But it clearly would dim the already free-falling profits of Hughes’ company Radio One, the nation’s largest chain of black radio stations.

Now, your average multimillionaire business mogul might respond to a congressional threat by heading directly to K Street to hire the most powerful lobbyist money can buy. But we are talking about Cathy Hughes, BLACK multimillionaire business mogul, someone who has a long track record of using the airwaves to throw her weight around on behalf of the Darker Nation.

Thus Hughes’ calculus for the “Reality Radio” spots goes something like this: I am a black person + my business is under threat = black people are under threat.

“This bill is not in the interest of black people!” Hughes tells the 12 million listeners who tune in to Radio One stations each week, in spots that air as many as a dozen times a day. In one episode, Hughes publicly scolds bill co-sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston for assuring radio execs that HR 848 would not put them out of business. “She has never worked at, managed nor owned a radio station in her life,” Hughes says. “So how could she possibly know anything about what it takes or doesn’t take to operate a broadcasting facility?”

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Crisis in the Village? The Morehouse Dress Code

2009-10-26T16:52:00.004-04:00

Crisis in the Village? The Morehouse College Dress Code

Mark Anthony Neal of NewBlackMan is joined by David Ikard (Florida State University), Simone Drake (Ohio State University) and Jeffrey McCune (University of Maryland) in a discussion of the Morehouse College Dress Code.

Listen HERE

The Unmasking of Mike Tyson

2009-10-26T09:31:00.002-04:00

The Unmasking of Iron Mike
By Stephane Dunn

Oprah’s show has rarely attempted to provide a platform where intimate portraits of black men and radical dialogue about black masculinity with black men take place nor of course, do we see this often enough in popular culture and mass media. But two recent shows-dialogues with former infamous heavyweight Mike Tyson do a lot towards making up this deficit.

On the first show, Mike and Oprah sat and talked-Oprah in typical form anticipating some answers, but the allure of the show weren’t in the answers to burning questions like why Mike bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear or quintessential philosophical Oprah guru questions: ‘what have you learned’ from this or that. No, it was simply the unadorned humanity of Mike Tyson. Like the recent documentary Tyson (2008), in essence a long commentary on his life by Mike, it was almost too uncomfortable to watch, a former symbol of tough American and especially black American masculinity naked to the world in a way that supposedly true men are not supposed to be. With his powerful punch and that seemingly unwavering scary demeanor, Mike was the last true American heavyweight celebrity when he became the youngest heavyweight ever at age twenty.

After his fall from being a three hundred million dollar media darling, including that marriage debacle with actress Robin Givens, a rape conviction and three year prison sentence, divorces, and that ear biting episode, Mike seemed bound to be written off as yet another former great performer turned into a tragic black male, social monster-public joke. But Mike is having his most raw public showing yet. Without his gloves and that menacing mask, “iron” Mike’s words and tears, his obvious confusion and that painful desire to be free of suffering and his accompanying demons (drugs, womanizing, anger . . .) has the potential to earn him a new audience and a new public role. Ironically, as Mike made clear on the second show with Evander Holyfield, fame is the least thing he seeks.

Most striking was Mike’s inability to fully articulate his pain and the demons he does battle with daily including at that very moment. His ‘I don’t knows’ in response to such topics as the recent death of his young daughter highlighted his struggle not only with words but within himself. That continuous break in his voice suggested the telling tears that seemed to threaten to overtake Mike at any second. He was so extraordinarily stripped of any subterfuge, of the willingness to lie or seemingly of knowing that most men, indeed many women and men would have clung to the mask rather than sit their fully clothed but soul naked on a show that has become sort of an ultimate way that men jokingly [and seriously] distinguish men and masculinity from the so-called soap opera-like feminine emotionality that they equate with Oprah’s female dominated viewership and show style.

Mike humanized not only himself but the emotional vulnerability that we are not often privy to viewing through the prism of America’s heterosexual tough guy masculine ethos. In admitting that he is a hurting, struggling, but feeling human being and man, Mike provides a more powerful entryway into deconstructing narrow images and narratives of masculinity than any academic theory ever could. Furthermore, Mike, ironically, is actually a useful model for the black masculine street codes that require young black men to adapt a cool, dangerous posturing that’s wreaking havoc on themselves and their community.

With Mike so obviously involved in the greatest fight for his life, one can’t help but to hope that this broken brother can be rebuilt into the new man, the new being that he so desperately wants to become. For Mike’s sake, here’s hoping he gets enough rounds to truly, in his words, “win.”

***

Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).