NewBlackMan

Reviewed: James Hannaham's God Says No

2009-07-16T09:17:00.004-04:00

Big, Gay and Christian
by Walter Biggins

James Hannaham's novel "God Says No" (McSweeney's, 2009, $22) chronicles the coming-of-age of Gary Gray, a man who loves Jesus and Disney World in almost equal measures. But he loves his college roommate, Russ, almost as much as he loves Christ, and not at all in the same way. For an overweight black man dreaming of the Christian life in Orlando, that dormant homosexuality is a lit firecracker ready to go off in his hands.

The novel works both as a wicked satire of conservative Christianity and as a sensitive portrait of a struggling Christian. Hannaham's contemporary South is a complicated place, where lust makes people strange, and love comes in more varieties than man-woman couplings. Through Gray's example, Hannaham shows how God might say "no" to Christians' rejection of homosexuality. The novel's so good, though, that God might just say "yes" to it.

Read the Full Review @ The Jackson Free Press

The Music of Spike Lee

2009-07-15T18:56:00.004-04:00

WUNC - The State of Things with Frank Stasio

The Music of Spike Lee

From “Do the Right Thing” to “Get on the Bus,” director Spike Lee’s movies are rife with social and political commentary. So it’s no wonder a college professor would mine the director’s repertoire for class discussion. But this fall, Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal is looking beyond the scripts. His class, “Spike Lee and the New Black Aesthetic,” will examine the messages in Lee’s work and the impact his films had on black cultural arts. Today, Neal joins host Frank Stasio to give us a course preview and talk about the powerful music in Lee's movies.

Listen @ The State of Things

Read "The Music in Spike Message" @ The Root.com

Vibe Magazine and the "Death" of Criticism?

2009-07-15T16:58:00.005-04:00

With diminishing resources available for thoughtful and accessible criticism, mainstream black cultural critics exists as little more than commentators on the Obama White House and complainers about Black Entertainment Television. Blackness has been reduced to a news cycle.

The Demise of Vibe Magazine and the Future of Criticism
by Mark Anthony Neal

There’s no small irony to the fact that the announcement of the folding of Vibe Magazine occurred the day after the death of Michael Jackson. Though Jackson’s career was on the downside in the United States when Vibe Magazine published its first issue in September of 1993, the magazine was the product of a cultural landscape that Jackson had a large hand in crafting. Presenting a glossy and urbane view of urban culture, Vibe Magazine became a preeminent site for journalists and scholars chronicling contemporary black popular culture. The lists of writers who can claim a Vibe Magazine by-line represent the cutting edge of a critical intelligentsia, many of them black writers who would have had few other legitimate options to hone their craft. As such the death of Vibe Magazine raises questions about the future of popular criticism at a moment when few print or on-line journals see the value of paying for such content.

Vibe Magazine was launched just as rap music and hip-hop culture were gaining mainstream credibility in terms of delivering a substantial buying audience to advertisers. The galvanizing of that audience was set in motion years earlier when MTV embraced rap music in the form of Yo MTV Raps—an embrace that was made possible, in large part, due to the efforts of Michael Jackson, CBS Records head Walter Yentikoff and Vibe founder Quincy Jones to force MTV to open up its playlists to Jackson, and by extension, other popular black recording artists in the early 1980s. As scholar Todd Boyd recently opined, “In the early ‘90s, hip-hop had made the successful transition from Sedgwick and Cedar through Compton on its way to global dominance. Along the way, as the music grew more and more pervasive, its influence had started to become evident in multiple cultural arenas.” Vibe Magazine was a blatant attempt by Jones and publisher Len Burnett to trade on hip-hop’s increasing commercial and cultural influence. In the process the magazine helped establish a generation of black writers and critics as tastemakers for an American—and increasingly global—public desiring to consume the best of blackness.

Figures like Joan Morgan, Kevin Powell, Toure, Karen Good, Danyel Smith, Michael Gonzalez, and Scott Poulson Bryant—what I’ll call the Vibe Magazine generation—along with seasoned critics like Harry Allen, Greg Tate, Barry Michael Cooper and Nelson George (all veterans of the Village Voice in the 1980s) were among the writers that graced the pages of Vibe Magazine, contributing to what became a late 20th century renaissance of black thought and thinkers. The best of those writers brought contemporary black popular culture in conversation with the rich traditions that came before. At its best the Vibe Magazine generation helped establish the criteria for high-end popular cultural criticism and perhaps the first sustained critical view of black youth culture that was informed by black youth culture.

But Vibe’s success would undermine its very role as a critical arbiter of urban culture and ultimately the legitimacy of accessible mainstream cultural criticism. Many will point to the magazine’s role in the bi-coastal tensions that arose between the Death Row and Bad Boy record label camps, personified in the war of words between the late Tupac Shakur and the late Christopher Wallace. As Boyd suggests, “Vibe’s place as a nexus in this bi-coastal war cemented the magazine’s status as a relevant chronicle of hip-hop’s rapidly expanding evolution from sub-cultural status to mass cultural behemoth. Vibe, like the Washington Post during Watergate, no longer simply reported on the story; the magazine had at this point become an integral part of the very story that it was supposed to be reporting on.”

Equipped with a new sense of gravitas, Vibe became a part of the promotional machine that fueled hip-hop’s invasion of the American mainstream. Vibe Magazine was not alone in this regard; the Source Magazine, particularly after Bakari Kitwana’s editorship, was in many ways far more egregious in this matter, though it never professed the kind of mainstream appeal that Vibe Magazine garnered at its circulation peak. Many of the so called urban journals of the late 1990s and early 21st century had become little more than enablers of hip-hop’s most distasteful excesses instead of providing the kind of critical scrutiny that many expected the magazine to maintain. In the process the very criticism that the magazine was founded on became devalued in a marketplace more interested in access to celebrity lifestyles. Magazines like Vibe were all too aware of the price that was to be paid if they didn’t toe the line. Such was the case when Damon Dash, then of Roc-A-Fella records pulled advertising from the magazine after Elizabeth Mendez Berry’s expose on domestic abuse among hip-hop figures placed the mogul in an unfavorable light.

Though many will cite the current recession as the primary force in Vibe’s demise, the magazine’s closing is just confirmation of a trend that began earlier in the decade when print media became challenged by free Internet content. With a wealth of cultural criticism available, print journals have been hard pressed to justify paying for content such as book reviews, film criticism and music journalism. The use of in-house bloggers has been one of the responses by print journals, though writers are paid a fraction of what they were paid even three years ago. The Internet has been an important component in bringing so many more voices to light—voices that were largely ignored a generation ago—but the democratization of criticism has undermined the value of cultural and critical expertise. Thus figures like Stanley Crouch and John McWhorter can be pitched as credible critics of hip-hop culture, though neither man has expertise on the subject.

With diminishing resources available for thoughtful and accessible cultural criticism (the academy remains a viable option for inaccessible criticism), contemporary mainstream black cultural criticism exists as little more than commentary on the Obama White House and complaints about Black Entertainment Television. Blackness, however more visible, has been reduced to a news cycle. Longtime critic and author Nelson George alluded as much in a recent interview on the Michael Eric Dyson Show when he lamented that with a lack of available venues for black criticism to be nurtured, very often audiences and consumers are unable to discern what is essentially “product” and what is “art.” Increasingly many black critics have taken to publishing their criticism on self-contained blogs and websites, without remuneration, simply to make sure that the story of black culture gets told right. Still others, confronting a public less interested in reading, have begun to produce video blogs and podcast in an effort to maintain a critical public voice. The best critics have been able to adapt to the limitations placed on their writing and I have faith that this generation of black critics will do the same.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. He is a professor of African-American Studies at Duke University.

Nationals Men's 50 Meter Free Swim-Off: Cullen Jones Sets New American Record

2009-07-14T15:06:00.003-04:00

Jay-Z on His iPod

2009-07-14T09:28:00.005-04:00

special to NewBlackMan

Jay-Z on His iPod:
Barack Obama as a Hip-Hop Generation Pop Icon
by Halifu Osumare

There is little doubt that President Barack Obama has brought a new style---a new panache, if you will---to the White House and the US Presidency. But what are the sources of this new style and approach in his handling of everything from international relations to his cabinet choices, and from his cool demeanor dealing with one of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to taking Michele out on a date night in a trendy DC restaurant? Besides his obvious intelligence and political savvy, Barack Obama has swagger! Barack Obama is hip! Barack Obama is cool! This style that he has brought to the highest office of the land is grounded in what black popular culture scholar Mark Anthony Neal calls the “post-soul generation”---the hip-hop generation.

Case in point: 27-year old Jon Favreau , the valedictorian for the class of 2003 at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, is Obama’s chief speech-writer, the second youngest to ever hold that position. The young Favreau was responsible for Obama’s now famous inaugural speech that arguably rivals some of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, which was exactly the intention. Favreau is said to carry around a copy of Dreams from My Father, Obama’s first autobiography, as his holy grail, and Obama, himself has said that he thinks Favreau “reads his mind.” The point is that Obama has tapped into a youth current that was partially responsible for electing him as the 44th President of the U.S., and this youth-factor is constituent of his style that appeals to the current hip-hop generation. As LA Times journalist Sam Fulwood III analyzes, “Young is to hip as old is to fogey . . . Obama has modern instincts and attitudes that appeal to younger people, and more than any other president in recent memory, that makes him a role model. He is green, open, athletic, tech-savvy, healthy. And his hip image certainly isn’t hurt by his wife,” Michele Obama, who has captured the world’s imagination in her own right.

Even the statistics show how sophisticated his presidential campaign was. According to Gwen Ifill, PBS-TV moderator, managing editor of Washington Week, and senior correspondent of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, “In the general election, Obama improved on 2004 nominee John Kerry’s performance with voters under thirty by 12 percent,” and there was “a little over thirteen million new voters jumping into the process,” . . . and among those new voters Barack Obama won close to 70 % of them. Part of his strategy from the beginning was [to] change the face of the electorate.” Changing of the face of the electorate is the primary factor that won him the election; this change had a lot to do with the number of youths who got engaged in electoral politics for the first time.

As a great communicator, known for his oratory, President Obama is also a cultural code switcher—one who can use language, mannerism, and symbols to communication with various audiences---a black audience, a youth audience, and a hip-hop audience. He is very aware of his popularity with the hip-hop generation and has directly addressed his penchant for some rap music and artists.

This youth factor responsible for electing President Obama is not simply lodged in the positive aspects of generational politics, but has also generated negative aspects that challenged the old-guard black leaders of the Civil Rights Generation, preceding the post-soul generation or the contemporary hip-hop generation born in the 1980 and 90s. As Ifill accurately opines in her The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, “Obama did not argue that he was not a black candidate, but the generational split did in some ways transcend race,” with many seasoned white politicians being brought into the Obama camp by pressure from their own children. At the same time, to the old-guard civil rights activists like Andrew Young, Congressman John Lewis, former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, the Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, all of whom endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, Obama represented a black upstart candidate who had not come through their dues-paying ranks.

Yet a few of the old guard did make the generational transition: Roger Wilkins, assistant attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, has said, “I love this transition, because my generation has done its work. Whatever one thinks of the result of that work, it was consequential work, and it did help change the nation. But now we’re old. And there are people whose path we made possible who see the country very, very differently than we did.” Though Obama is steeped in this different vision, he is definitely grounded in the past efforts of the Civil Rights generation. This was evident in his November 4th acceptance speech when he called the nation’s attention to the 106-year old African American Mrs. Ann Cooper, who voted for him in Atlanta. However, he created breakthrough politics with his ability to change the face of the electorate in a way that previous black leaders had not been able to accomplish. The generational divide worked in Obama’s favor, along with his intelligence, emphasis on transparency in government, and most of all his “cool pose” that appealed to the younger generation.

This generational meaning of Obama has shown itself also in the plethora of pop iconic images that proliferate magazine covers, street posters, and, of course, the Internet. During the campaign the famous red, white, and blue “HOPE” print created by street artist Shepard Fairey emerged as a veritable sign that signifies Obama the Man. This iconic image later got Fairey arrested for graffiti (a direct attack on hip-hop as a suspect subculture) for papering the now famous poster throughout the city of Boston. In cyberspace, there is even a “Obamaicon.Me.com” website where you can now upload your own photo, choose your own message, and they will make you a similar “Hope” poster for your own 20-minutes of fame in this era of reality television and the cult of personality. As the Obamaicon website says, “Here’s your chance to sound off.” Barack Obama has inspired various pop culture cottage industries that were initially meant to commercialize his image, but have now generated numerous spin-offs that are stretching our definition of democracy and the place of the populist everyman/everywoman’s voice (and now image) in the process.

This youthful Obama design rage has infinite ramifications. Journalist art designer Don Button reveals the effect of Obama’s original use of design and the internet in his campaign: “Never before had a presidential candidate utilized design aesthetics and brand-image marketing in such a comprehensive and effective way---and the designers around the world took notice immediately.” Since Obama first started campaigning and developing his tech-savvy and design–savvy branding, like Spike Lee’s Joint, it became a “Barack Obama Joint” that “Did the Right Thing” to get elected, including having a seasoned older generation politician as his running mate in Joe Biden. All of this showed political know-how, capturing the younger generation that changed the electorate in the 2008 presidential election.

But none of these unprecedented generational socio-cultural dynamics around Obama can be understood without the lens of hip-hop. One of the main tenets of this in-your-face rebellious youth sub-culture is “flippin’ the script,” a cultural directive that is responsible for the best of rap music as a counter-narrative to mainstream ideologies. As Neal has accurately analyzed, rap music is often the initial reply to topical news stories affecting black people. “Whether it’s Katrina four years ago, the LA riots in 1993, or Jesse Jackson’s run for President in 1984 . . ., hip-hop was seen as black American’s first response.” This statement becomes an addendum to Chuck D’s famous adage: “Rap is black people’s CNN.” So it is no wonder that many famous and infamous rap stars got on the Obama campaign bandwagon: Young Jeezy’s “My President” was an early anthem during the campaign, Nas released “Election Night” the day before the November 4 election, and it got major Internet play the day of the election; Brother Ali released “Mr. President (You’re the Man)”, and Lil Wayne reworked his previous song “A Mili” renaming it “Obama Obama.” And not only did they rap about Obama as a new hope for young, struggling black people, but they all voted for the first time. Young Jeezy represented for all first-time voting rappers with: “ Yeah, Yeah, I got to vote. It felt like I went and bought my first car without a co-sign; it felt good.” Because of Obama’s new voice, his new message, young Black America stood on its own for the first time in the electoral process because they had hope.

Neal assesses that Candidate Obama had to walk a thin line between accepting these young rappers’ endorsements while maintaining the dignity of his legitimate candidacy with the socio-political mainstream, both black and white. Neal articulates the proverbial special constituency vs. mainstream quagmire when he gives voice to Obama’s strategy regarding his hip-hop supporters: “[He was saying] I really can’t acknowledge you in the mainstream, but understand that I’m hearing what your critique is, I’m hearing what your concerns are, and you now have a wide-open space in the so-called underground . . .to talk about why my candidacy is important.” However, now that he is President, he has become bolder in hinting that he may utilize hip-hop in his administration. When asked by a Vibe magazine journalist about “a place in your administration” to explore the use of hip-hop’s potential to deal with “young people that you have to deal with around education and incarceration,” Obama became emphatically clear:

Absolutely, I don’t think there can be any doubt that it can be. And I have met with Jay-Z, with Kanye, and with other artists to see how potentially to bridge that gap. It’s incredible--- the potential for them to deliver a message to get people thinking. The thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart. It’s insightful. The way that they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable. A lot of these kids are not going to be reading The New York Times. That’s not how they’re getting their information. So the question then is what’s the content? What’s the message? And I always say hip-hop is not only a reflection of what is; but it should be a reflection of what can be.

No only does Obama understand how rap music has been used as a vehicle for information delivery, but he is thinking about its potential for the kinds of messages that he wants to convey to the young people of urban America.

Neal further reveals that mainstream cross-over emcees, like Queen Latifah who has hosted the Academy Awards Ceremony, and Snoop Dogg who appeared on the Larry King Show to talk about the Obama candidacy, utilize similar strategies in negotiating their own mainstream celebrity with their underground hip-hop cult following. These are ostensibly what I call “power moves” in The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves. I contend that there has been a virtual “cultural shift in power induced by hip-hop’s privileged place in the marketplace,” even as there continues to be what Keith Negus calls “regimes of containment” that limit young black hip-hop males. This dynamic of containment of black males in US society has existed historically and continues even in this era of the ghetto as a central trope regarding how youth of all races identify themselves through hip hop. Linda Tucker explores this dynamic in her recent book Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture. She analyzes:

Black men function within a prison writ large structured by various technologies of containment ranging from actual prisons to representational practices. Black men are subject to techniques of containment that criminalize their images and render them silent, depending on the context, either threatening or comic, hypervisible or invisible. Despite their heterogeneity and pervasive presence, however, such technologies do not function absolutely, as they are constantly subjected to equally heterogeneous and pervasive responses, reversals, and forms of resistance enacted by black men.

These reversals, or flippin’ the script, have been a part of the Africanist aesthetic in our rhetorical, musical, and dance traditions for centuries, and they show themselves in unique ways in hip-hop that has captured the imagination of today’s generation. It is this cultural shift, created by hip-hop’s cultural, economic, and now political, power moves that have aided Obama in the era of 21st century late capitalist politics.

There is no doubt that we are in the era of the Hip-Hop Generation when the President of the United States has admitted to having arguably the most influential rapper, Jay-Z, on his iPod. Furthermore, during his North Carolina come-back speech, after the April 16, 2008 debate between Candidate Obama and his opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama showed his acuity with hip-hop style by executing Jay-Z’s brush the dirt off your shoulders, creating a wild audience reaction with a standing ovation. Hip-hop semiotics, such as the Dirt-off-my Shoulder move, are significations that communicate to a large number of young U.S. citizens, and can be successful exploited to win in electoral politics. As Teresa Wiltz says in a Washington Post article on Obama’s North Carolina hip-hop gesture, “Talk about a major Jay-Z move. People, we’re talking about a seminal movement in the campaign, the merging of politics and pop culture: in which a presidential candidate---a self-confessed hip-hop head and Jay-Z fan--references a rap hit and a dance move.” The gesture is a direct quotation from the rap and video “Dirt off Your Shoulder” on Jay-Z’s 2003 Black Album. The meaning is clear: Obama is the proverbial duck, from whose back water just rolls right off. In politics one must brush off the negative jabs that one’s opponents (“playa haters”) might inflict. Obama had to frequently do just that during the Democratic Primary Campaign with Clinton in order to debate the real issues facing the U.S.

Of course these challenges have only intensified for Obama as President. He will have to continue to navigate his course between mainstream America and the hip-hop generation in increasingly savvy ways that keep all constituencies in his boat. One huge task is the creation of a living wage for young black men, when some black communities are reeling from 31% unemployment. As hip-hop activist and 2008 vice- presidential candidate for the Green Party, Rosa Clemente said, “just because you brush off your shoulders, fist bump the First Lady, or play a mean game of street ball, doesn’t make you Hip Hop.” Youth who live hip-hop want him to “keep it real” in terms of their needs on the street, and to do this he has his job cut out for him. He has to somehow blend his youthful coolness with the dignity and seriousness that the office demands, while making real changes happen in people’s lives economically. But if he follows the age-old pervasive adage that has permeated the African American community for generations—“You can’t be just as good; you have to be twice as good to get ahead in this world”—he’ll do just fine.

***

Halifu Osumare is Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis and the author of The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves.

Even So-Called "Conscious" Rappers Cross the Line

2009-07-13T19:27:00.006-04:00

"Make Her Say (Poke Her Face)”:
Un-conscious Hip Hop, Oral Rape and the Silencing of Women
by Jennifer McLune

Author’s Note: The following essay represents my attempt at articulating a response to Kid Cudi’s “Make Her Say (Poke Her Face),” featuring Common and Kanye West. I’d like to be honest in stating upfront that, during the process of writing this piece I only listened to the song and read over its lyrics on an absolutely-as-needed basis. The words & the images these contempt-ridden lyrics created in my mind left me feeling physically sick and emotionally depleted, even at times to the point of being traumatized.

As a female listener, one willing to allow herself to really hear this song’s words and take them to heart, the message was painfully clear: women like dick; we like it violently shoved in our faces, and, according to Common at least, we want oral sex forced upon us, however brutally men see fit to give it. We even enjoy having a man’s penis shoved down our throats, pushed up our mouths, literally rammed through our faces so far and with so much force that a penetration of the internal matter of our skulls occurs, i.e. the man hits “brain” with his dick. According to Common, Kanye and Kid Cudi, some women enjoy this kind of brutal, body punishing oral sex; they can learn how to beg, not only to be used as receptacles for men’s semen, but to be violated to the point of physical injury. Having to deal with this type of pure, unmitigated misogyny, and needing to think about it for an extended period of time in order to write about it made the completion of this piece extremely difficult. I enlisted the help of another radical feminist, Stephanie Cleveland, whose support and contributions in editing and writing spared me the ordeal of having to complete this essay all alone.

When the song “I Poke Her Face” was first brought to my attention, I thought that, if nothing else, at least Common’s “consciousness pimping” would finally being exposed. I imagined the singer would no longer be able to hide behind what we his listening public have so long pretended he’s about; this songs lyrics seemed to make it painfully clear who Common really is, and has in fact always been: a consciousness pimp who likes and expects to get my dick sucked by “stripper bitches,” just like any other woman-hating guy. Common seemed to be indisputably articulating that sentiment in the song, but leave it to one of his male fans, DC area poet and activist Kenneth Carroll, to dissent with a comment that is not only unoriginal, but also does exactly what Common and Kanye must have banked on—it demonstrates how their fans will dismiss any song, even one this overtly hateful, as a mere “inconsistency” in their struggle to be better men, certainly not an overt manifestations of the sadistic, full-blown misogynist these men really and truly are. Carroll writes:

I like Common, but this song reminds me of the Gil Scott Heron admonition to rappers on his album Spirits, when he told rappers "You can't be progressive on every other song. She's your queen on one song and your bitch on the other." Inconsistency is an issue for all of us however, that's part of the struggle to live to our highest ideals.

Why did the above statement make me feel almost as nauseated as the actual song itself? For starters, Carroll's response demonstrates no mere inconsistency, but rather, a particularly dangerous form of hypocrisy with respect to violence against women. He purports to care about honoring black women, but then proceeds to mask the sexual abuse of his sisters in callous euphemisms. "Inconsistency" is way too mild a term to use for inflicting the kind of sexual abuse on a woman Common sings about. Often times, I have noticed that most men, who won’t actually bring themselves to defend a song like “Poke Her Face,” but will instead use vague excuses in order to avoiding critiquing its message, may be doing so in order to continue living vicariously through these kinds of misogynist lyrics. Common creates a fantasy with these songs that many men can relate to, a fantasy world where men can be sexually dominant over a woman, and, at least in their own minds, put her back in her place.

Read the Full Essay @ Celie's Revenge

Book Review: Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism

2009-07-09T14:35:00.003-04:00

special to New Black Man

Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism
Louisiana State University Press, 2007.
by David Ikard

Review by Kinohi Nishikawa

A pivotal moment in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) sees the churchman and patriarch Gabriel being confronted by his sister Florence over a devastating past infidelity. Upon fathering a child with his mistress Esther, Gabriel stole the savings of his first wife Deborah and gave it to Esther to hush up the matter. Deborah wrote a letter to Florence testifying to Gabriel’s ruinous behavior, which left her neglected, isolated, and economically dependent on him. When Florence musters up the courage to confront Gabriel, ten years after having received the letter, the effect on his psyche is profound: “It had lived in [Deborah’s] silence, then, all of those years? He could not believe it…And yet, this letter, her witness, spoke, breaking her long silence, now that she was beyond his reach forever” (212). Confronted with the suffering wrought by his patriarchal authority, Gabriel reels from the memory of Deborah as it is framed by Florence’s criticism of his actions. As if to underscore the power of speech in these women’s intertwined voices, Baldwin has Florence rebut Gabriel’s power over her by uttering, “When I go, brother, you better tremble, cause I ain’t going to go in silence” (215).

In Breaking the Silence David Ikard references Florence’s incitement to speak out against Gabriel’s power as a means of “expos[ing] and explod[ing] the victim status upon which black patriarchy is premised” (4). Following the example set by Michael Awkward’s black male feminist literary criticism, in which “critical perspective, not gender [identity], [is] the measuring stick of a black feminist methodology” (29), Ikard presents readings of Go Tell It on the Mountain and five other twentieth-century African American fictional works that stake out new terrain in thinking about black gender relations. Unlike Awkward’s body of criticism, however, Ikard is interested in parsing discourses of race and gender in not only black women’s writing (Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara) but also black men’s writing (Chester Himes, Baldwin, Walter Mosley). Broadening the scope of black male feminist literary criticism to include works by men addresses a lacuna in Awkward’s thought: the notion that “only black women deal with issues of gender” in literary fiction (29). Ikard wants to show how black men too have advanced complex responses to patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia as these bear on so-called “race matters.” In this way, Breaking the Silence sketches a new direction for black male feminist critique. By staging an intergender dialogue about black gender relations, Ikard suggests that the discursive silence surrounding African American patriarchy must be undone by men and women alike.

One of the interpretive consequences of Ikard’s focus on black male literary texts is that he is able to deconstruct the ideology of black male victimization “from within.” In his analysis of Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Ikard understands the protagonist Bob Jones as someone whose sense of racial oppression is decidedly gendered. Ikard’s argument is that Jones’s desire for different female characters indexes his struggle to overcome racism through a calculus of patriarchal privilege: “The tension between Jones’s need to be nurtured by black women and his desire to be recognized as a dominant patriarch contributes to his ‘crisis’ of masculine identity” (33). When Jones intuits that his needs are not being met by a black woman, Ella Mae, he pursues a near-white woman, Alice, in order to increase his social capital among whites. Yet when Alice attempts to pass in white society on her own terms, without Jones in tow, her behavior is read as a betrayal of the race. Drawing from Deborah King’s inquiry into the “monism” of black male political posturing, Ikard reads Jones’s relationships with Ella Mae and Alice as a reinscription of “phallocentric notions of power and control,” whereby “Black male oppression…masquerades as the oppression of all black people” (46, 40). Ikard begins here, with Himes’s sympathetic portrait of Jones, in order to foreground the harms done to black women in the name of racial resistance. By attending to female voices in Himes’s text which were largely ignored by previous critics, Ikard highlights the limited political vision of discourses of black male victimization.

In subsequent chapters of Breaking the Silence, Ikard is concerned to illuminate how authors since the male-dominated “protest school” of the 1940s have rendered the crisis of black masculinity in arguably more critical ways. Ikard’s chapter on Go Tell It on the Mountain is exemplary in this regard because it introduces the idea that both men and women have a stake in black patriarchy—a dynamic that underscores the need for genuine intergender dialogue (rather than, say, a feminist critique of male oppression as “only” an issue of men dominating women). On the one hand, Ikard shows how the novel’s patriarch, Gabriel, consistently shores up his sense of masculine identity by compelling the black women in his life to submit to his religious and familial authority. When his mistress Esther is left on her own with their unborn child, she is “virtually at Gabriel’s mercy” because she is a “poor pregnant woman of disreputable social standing” (64). Esther might reveal Gabriel’s infidelity to the church, but Ikard understands this as an impossible choice, given the practices of community policing which downplay such infidelity in the name of securing strong black male leaders. In this way, Gabriel’s sense of himself as “the chief victim of white oppression and the burden-bearer of his family” continues to justify his ill treatment of black women.

Yet in his chapter on Baldwin, Ikard is also keen to show how the novel “disrupts the victimization discourse that allows black men like Jones and Gabriel to explain away their subjection of black women” (50). Crucial to this narrative disruption, according to Ikard, is black women’s recognition of and rebellion against their complicity with black patriarchy. In the figures of Elizabeth (Gabriel’s current wife) and Gabriel’s mother, Ikard identifies how “women unknowingly support patriarchy in their relationships with men,” particularly through the “internalized…expectation of black female self-sacrifice” (50, 67). Elizabeth buttresses Gabriel’s authority by assuming guilt for being a “bad mother” and having had sex prior to their marriage. Gabriel’s mother is a more resonant example of black female patriarchy in that she “rears him to believe that as a man he should expect black women to cater to his every emotional, physical, and material desire” (55). In both cases, Ikard outlines a convincing case to extend the study of black patriarchy to women who support its ideological and institutional viability. Importantly, this perspective does not cast judgment on black women for supporting patriarchy but instead seeks to understand 1) how their stake in it is conditioned by white supremacy, and 2) how a more inclusive politics of resistance would overturn both racists and gendered structures of oppression. Ikard’s perspective is echoed in the character of Florence, who emerges as the novel’s privileged witness to the range of patriarchy’s harms precisely because she has also suffered from black women’s (her mother’s) investment in patriarchy.

The idea of complicity organizes Ikard’s readings of works by Morrison, Bambara, and Mosley. As Baldwin does with Gabriel’s mother, these authors represent black men and women who draw from victimizing discourses in order to justify violent and impoverishing acts of community policing. Among these interpretations, Ikard’s treatment of Mosley’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999) is especially notable, given the fact that Mosley is rarely, if ever, mentioned in black feminist discourse. Yet in these two works from Mosley’s Socrates Fortlow cycle, Ikard brings his analysis full circle to identify ways in which black men reflexively deconstruct their investment in patriarchy and white supremacy. Socrates’s hardened criminal past informs his ability to mentor young urban black men who are trapped, Mosley wagers, between poverty and a racist criminal-justice system, on the one hand, and a community discourse of perpetual victimization, on the other. In his bravura readings from the Socrates cycle, Ikard shows how black men suffer from an “implosive victimization,” whereby “rage and despair are systematically turned against the victimized” (142). Like Florence, Socrates emerges as a voice warning against the internalization of racist and patriarchal ideals as a matter of securing short-term, small-scale privileges. That Socrates counsels mainly young men in these works illuminates Ikard’s point that intragender dialogue about resisting racism and patriarchy is not only productive for black gender relations but a way for black men to reclaim social agency over and against victimizing discourses.

It may well be Ikard’s identification as a black male feminist—a necessarily identity-transitive critical perspective—that allows him to analyze black complicity with racism and patriarchy in such a compelling fashion. Ikard’s critical voice allies itself with characters—both men and women—in the African American literary tradition that have challenged black patriarchy (and its concomitant dependency on white supremacy) from within. His Breaking the Silence exemplifies the spirit of a black male feminist criticism whose power comes from a mediating critical perspective rather than an essential gender identity. The inter- and intragender insights the book presents through African American fiction pave the way for a more robust practice of studying race and gender relations through literary interpretation. More broadly, in divesting black patriarchy of its ideological coherence—its harmful and self-replicating victimization (which often takes place through and at the expense of black women)—Ikard challenges African Americans to reconceptualize their social identities around new racial and gender possibilities.

***

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.

Bakari Kitwana on "New Muslim Cool"

2009-07-03T10:01:00.003-04:00

New Muslim Cool Forges Path for New America
by Bakari Kitwana

New Muslim Cool comes at a time when daily we observe in our national culture old-guard gatekeepers (can you say Dick Cheney?) who work tirelessly to impose on the younger generation a shared American identity that is dated, simple, and in white and black. The magic of Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's important new film, which recently aired on PBS, is found in its ability to provide a bird's eye view of a freshly minted generation of Americans. Fighting against being defined by America's bygone eras, New Muslim Cool points us toward a more complicated future.

It's a journey full of collisions -- mainly because the very act of shining a spotlight on the ways race, politics, religion and generational rifts have evolved, something that Taylor does quite well, is a process that slowly gleans viewers from the self-identity America has for decades projected as status quo to the world. Welcome to a nation at the crossroads between old and new.

Thank goodness, this is the story of the new America that is unfolding -- the one that young Americans across traditional divides are claiming every day as their own.

Enter Hamza Perez. The film traces the ups and downs in the life of this northeastern seaboard urban native who is transplanted to post-industrial Pittsburgh for a new start, just as the US is on the verge of the most significant economic decline since the Great Depression. Perez, a Puerto Rican American hip-hop artist, is also Muslim. His conversion from Catholicism brings him face-to-face with what freedom of religion looks like in the throes of the war on terror. (One of the film's high points is an unprovoked and unjustified FBI raid on Perez's mosque.)

Absent of his other identities, Perez's story is incomplete: A street hustler turned anti-drug counselor; a father embarking on a second marriage; a young man struggling to find a workable definition of masculinity; an unsigned hip-hop artist for whom hip-hop culture provides both the foundation for his anti-drug advocacy and a medium through which he projects his new faith.

The film is most powerful when it meets all of these varying and sometimes overlapping identities head-on. It does this best when embracing the complexities of the three-part axis on which New Muslim Cool turns.

Read the Full Essay @ THE HUFFINGTON POST

***

Bakari Kitwana is a journalist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on major media outlets including CNN, FOX News and NPR. Kitwana is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the author of several books including, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.

Dear Michael: Love Letters from Cyberspece

2009-06-26T19:02:00.003-04:00

Michael Jackson: Morning's End
by Jeff Chang

Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past. Think of the songs that the hip-hop generation adored so much: “I’ll Be There”, “I Wanna Be Where You Are”, “Who’s Loving You”, “Maybe Tomorrow”, “All I Do Is Think Of You”, “Ready Or Not”. On these songs, Michael’s “knowingness” sounds more like fragility.

Read the Full Article @ Zentronix

***

Chasing Michael Jackson
by Teresa Wiltz

I remember covering Michael in 2004 as an arts writer for the Washington Post. He was making a tour through Capitol Hill, making nice with the Congressional Black Caucus and talking about AIDS in Africa and philanthropy, etc., etc. Not that the public was privy to any of this. “Covering” Michael Jackson on the Hill amounted to standing around and waiting for hours, and hours, and hours on end, interviewing fans who used to love him but were no longer sure he was a good role model. Keeping an eye trained on the door, lest the Altered One jet before you could get next to him. Feeling just a little foolish.

Read the Full Article @ The Root

Chatting Up Michael Joseph Jackson

2009-06-26T18:20:00.003-04:00

CBCRadio
Q with John Ghomeshi

June 26: Michael Jackson Remembered. We'll talk to several cultural thinkers and musical figures about the life and legacy of the King of Pop. Plus, Friday LIVE guest, Homecookin', featuring four of Canada's top jazz and blues musicians.

Listen to Q

***

NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin

The King of Pop is Gone

Tell Me More, June 26, 2009 - The world is mourning the loss of a music icon. Michael Jackson died yesterday at the age of 50. Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal and Journalist Bryan Monroe, former Editorial Director of Ebony Magazine, share their thoughts about Michael Jackson, his influence and his legacy.

Listen to Tell Me More

Jackson's Musical Peers Remember His Genius

Tell Me More, June 26, 2009 - Behind the scenes in the music industry, Michael Jackson was more than a star. He was a genius.

Record producer Kenny Gamble and Howard Hewett, lead singer of the 70s R&B group Shalamar, both worked closely with Jackson. They remember what it was like to share a studio with the 'King of Pop.'

Listen to Tell Me More

***

The Michael Eric Dyson Show
WEAA-FM Baltimore

The Life and Legacy of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Professor James Braxton Peterson, Music Critic Ann Powers, BET Founder Robert Johnson, and Professor Mark Anthony Neal

Listen to the Michael Eric Dyson Show

***

Soundcheck with John Schaefer
WNYC-FM New York

Death of Thriller

Michael Jackson was one of the most successful and influential entertainers of the 20th Century. He won 13 Grammys and sold 50 million copies of his 1982 masterpiece, Thriller. But his fame and reputation declined starting in the 1990s. When he died yesterday at age 50, Jackson was attempting a comeback with 50 sold-out concert dates in London. Today, we look back at Jackson's career. Guests include: music critic Jody Rosen of Slate.com; Los Angeles Times chief pop music critic Ann Powers; Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture at Duke University and contributor to TheRoot.com; Susan Blond, founder and president of Susan Blond Inc. and a former Jackson publicist; Details magazine editor at large Jeff Gordinier; and Bruce Swedien, the recording engineer behind Thriller among other Jackson albums.

Conjuring Michael (the “uncut-before-u-git-the-academic-ish” mix)

2009-06-25T23:51:00.002-04:00

Conjuring Michael (the “uncut-before-u-git-the-academic-ish” mix)
by Mark Anthony Neal

“Schumaw”—like some ancient African dialect that only he, James Brown, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Macy Gray, and quiet as it’s kept, Lil’ Wayne quite understand. Random utterings like “Mama-ko, mama-sa, ma-ka-ma-ko-ssa” and even Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango can’t quite claim it. The point is that this was some deep knowledge and there was never any explanation for it—like that riff in the middle of “Remember the Time” that can’t even be transcribed. Much the same with the infamous audition tape—the grainy black & white one, where the lil’ boy is singing JB and moving through an archive of masculine movements known only to Mr. Brown, Mr. Wilson—and quiet as it’s kept, Mr. Presley. Mr. Gordy was hooked, not quite knowing what he had and misreading the lil boy as some kind of novelty, like that lil blind boy, who asked for his freedom only to return with Music On My Mind under one arm and genius under the other. But that boy had almost a decade of seasoning before the breakthrough; this other cat was 10-years old, singing about stuff he ain’t supposed to know about.

Aks him who he dug and the boy say “William Hart.” What? Yeah, William Hart. Like what this 10-year-old know about The Delphonics, and then you listen to “Can You Remember?” from that first Jackson 5 joint and it’s like damn—this boy ain’t real. Smokey must have thought the same thing listening to the playback of “Who’s Lovin’ You?”—the b-side of the original hot ish, “I Want You Back.” Naw, Smokey, flip that ish over. I mean damn, you did write this joint right—and you did record this joint right? But damn if that ain’t yo’ song no mo’. And the rest was history.

My story with the boy started just a bit after that. Call it a serious boy crush and who could blame me, he was like the prettiest M’fer we’d ever seen, especially with the Apple Jack on his head. I talking from the beginning, like I listened to that ABC album on 8-Track—years before I figured out what the actual album sequencing was like. Years later I danced with my mother to that album’s “I Found that Girl” at my wedding. The boy was my first muse—literally. Used to copy lyrics from those early albums—“Darling Dear,” “Wings of Love,” “In Our Small Way”—and sent them in secret notes to the first shortie who really caught my eyes. Got the idea peeping an old episode of the ABC Afterschool Special where the boy’s “We’ve Got a Good Thing Going” played in the background and I got that queasy first love thing in my stomach. The song that’s on the album with the rat. Boy was on some queer ish even them. Shame the boy wasn’t free to be on some Ziggy Stardust ish, but what’s a little black boy to do in the mid-1970s.

Boy tried to get his own freedom in the late 1970s frequenting dance clubs like 54, checking the scene, watching cats like Gamble and Huff work the boards and when he and them other boys took control over their own music and that young boy hooked up with Q, all was magic. Young boy found his own muse in the scarecrow, easing on down the road to the Emerald City—“can you, feel it, brand day?”—and damn if those early videos for “Rock With You”, “Don’t Stop ‘Till You Get Enough” and “Can You Feel It” don’t feel inspired by The Wiz. Truth be told, Off the Wall was the crown jewel—ish was still innocent, earnest, organic. Thriller seemed contrived—like that young boy was trying to sell 20 million records. Find the boy’s true fans by asking “Thiller” or “Off the Wall”? If they say the former, than you know that were on some Johnny/Janie come-lately ish when that young boy took claim to the world.

The rest was a blur, like if you drop like 26 millions sales, what exactly do you do next? The young boy never figured that out and the less it was about the music, the more surreal the ish got. Then it became about young boys, ‘cept he was now a grown ass-man, though true be told, if I’m to believe that this grown ass man was fondling young boys, I also got to believe the ass whumpings that occurred at the hands of that once young boy’s daddy. That boy spent a lifetime seeking a meaningful freedom, perhaps from the tyranny of family, but later from the tyranny of celebrity. And yeah perhaps Mr. Presley, Ms. Monroe and those four British mop-tops could relate, but when that young boy was hitting his half half of them were dead—and they never had to deal with MTV and 24-hour cable networks in their prime.

I will shed a tear sometime soon, not for the man who breathed his last breath today, but for that young boy that helped to define the me that I be. That young boy was special and it’s that young boy that I choose to remember today.

Loving Michael

2009-06-25T22:18:00.003-04:00

special to NewBlackMan

Loving Michael
by Stephane Dunn

The calls came fast – Michael Jackson was dead. The words flashed across the screen in typical pop news form – sensational and impersonal. I muted the television and stopped taking calls. It was not hot, shocking news to me. It was heartbreaking.

I want you back

Michael was my first crush. There were the posters on my wall and the journal entries about meeting and marrying him and protecting him all that might wound him.

Abc, 123

As a little girl, my cousins and I lip synced, kicked, and spun, trying to follow the studded bell bottoms of Michael and his brothers. In secret I wrote him letters by the dozens and sat in my room, daydreaming of our fairytale love story.

Just call my name and I’ll be there

Later, I ‘shook my body to the ground’ and grew into adolescence as Michael, the wide eyed cutie with the magical voice, eased out of the Afro on his way to the jheri curl and a solo career.

Keep on, don’t Stop ‘till you get enough

I moved beyond posters on the walls and accepted that he was a star flung too far for me to marry – though I hung on to the prayer that at least we’d meet. He was still my Michael and I stood applauding telling him to go on with his bad self as he moon-walked onto MTV and further into pop performance history.

Reaching out to touch a stranger

The lighter his skin got, the more that nose changed, the more I worried about him. But still the voice, the feet, and something of that little boy of long ago remained in the eyes. The awards, the glove, the sparkling sock, and the imitators came and went and the stories grew.

Just call my name and I’ll be there

Weird, bizarre, - the king of pop branded child molester, masked freak, wanna-be-white recluse, bad father. And he retreated even, from that beloved stage that had so long been home and went further in search, I believe, of a wonder-world fit for the child the spotlight and fame had stolen him from too early. And there he was – the barred topic, the disgraced has-been pop star, fallen prey to the world’s amnesia.

You’ve got a friend in me

They will say, are saying, he was a musical genius, a pop icon. They will catalog his ‘bizarre behavior’, trot long anonymous fans across the television screen, show images of flower tributes against the back drop of his pale face and ‘Michael Jackson 1958-2009.’ They will debate the sequence of his death, calculate his emotional state, review his achievements and cultural importance, and surmise on the future of his children.

I’ve been a victim of a selfish kind of love

None of it will mean much to me – not the images, the talk, and debates. I’ll be mourning my Michael, my first crush, the boy with James Brown and Jackie Wilson in his feet, the man with the sweetness and the haunted soul in his voice . . .

Oh I never can say good-bye . . .

***

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).

The Persecution of Progressive Black Scholars

2009-06-24T22:46:00.002-04:00

St. Clair Drake/Special to NewBlackMan

The Persecution of Progressive Black Scholars
by Christopher J. Metzler
Georgetown University

Institutions of higher education are supposed to be the place where the free market place of ideas takes hold. In fact, the basis for tenure has always been that academics should not be punished for speaking out. The theory is that such speaking out is protected even when university administration does not agree with the content of that speech. However, these same institutions are also political fiefdoms where tenure has been used and will continue to be used to punish those with whom the members of the promotion and tenure committee do not agree. In other words, academic freedom is only free when one agrees with those in power. All junior faculty understand very quickly that the definition of “scholarship” is a moving target and that if they wish tenure, they better move with the target. The hypocrisy of the promotion and tenure process (and I use the word process lightly) is that too many faculty are more about politics and less about scholarship. So, they play the game to get tenure and then when some of them get it, they punish the ideas of others they find unpopular by denying them tenure.

Progressive Black scholars find ourselves in a particular pickle. On the one hand, we want to advance ideas that look critically at the academy and simply not accept the status quo. On the other, if we are too progressive, then we will be Boyced. That is, we will be fired from predominately white institutions that will reduce our entire scholarly career to a warm bucket of spit. Of course I am not suggesting that all predominately white institutions will Boyce progressive Black scholars. I am suggesting that too many can and do.

First, regardless of whether one agrees with Dr. Watkins’ views or not, one cannot in good faith question his credential or his scholarship. One can disagree with it, one can dislike it, one can criticize but one cannot question its rigor, funny, I thought that this is what academic freedom is about. In fact, Syracuse University believed him to be of sufficient scholastic heft to hire him on tenure track in the first place. So, did he suddenly become a less than mediocre scholar after he joined the faculty? Of course not, in fact, an objective reading of his work suggests that he is a scholar who pushes his knowledge to a public that is very much outside “the ivory tower.” Perhaps the problem is that those judging scholarship should realize that scholarship as well as its consumption is evolving and that progressive black scholars such as Dr. Watkins must, if we are to be true to our mission, bring the scholarship to many who may never step foot on our campuses.

Second, it is not an understatement to say that Black male scholars do not dominate the ranks of predominately white institutions. It is also not an understatement to say that progressive Black scholars are in the numerical and scholastic minority at these same institutions. Thus, perhaps promotion and tenure committees should stop trying to pretend that they value our contributions and admit that far too many of them are more interested in visual representation (diversity for diversity sake) than diversity of thought, diversity of scholarship, diversity of methodology and diversity of thought. A reading of that which is considered “scholarly” by many of these committees reveals a common theme: protection of the status quo of ideas by a limited number of elite intellectuals. To be sure, one can argue that there is nothing wrong with this approach. I would argue that in the interest of transparency that promotion and tenure committees should not shrink from stating this since many of them believe it to be true. This way, progressive Black scholars will simply need not apply.

Third, for Black scholars, the reality of being Boyced stifles academic freedom and suffocates scholarship. Many of us will be loathe to publish anti-establishment scholarship for fear that ultra-right wing bloggers and T.V. entertainers can influence whether we are promoted or fired. We will also question whether the entertainers of whom I write are adjunct members of the committee with whom we should vet our scholarship before we publish it. Of course, some of them do not have the educational or scholarship credentials to judge our work in the first instance.

But, I digress.

The losers here will be students who will not be exposed to a panoply of ideas and approach to teaching and learning but to educational malnutrition in the form of anti-intellectual mediocrity. It will also be academic freedom which in too many of these institutions is simply not free.

How can institutions of higher learning justify living in a state of educational humdrum? Just ask the institutions that Boyce black progressive Black scholars.

***

Christopher J. Metzler, PhD is Associate Dean of Human Resources for the Masters of Professional Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Georgetown University, he was on the faculty at Cornell University's ILR School where he directed the EEO and Diversity Studies program.

Mark Anthony Neal on the Michael Eric Dyson Show

2009-06-24T17:32:00.005-04:00

from The Michael Eric Dyson Show (WEAA-FM--Baltimore)

The New Black Man:
Mark Anthony Neal’s “Overlooked Genius”

Throughout this month – - Black Music Month - – we’ve been hearing from some of the most influential artists in popular music, jazz, and Gospel.

We’ve heard Lalah Hathaway, Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson, Chuck D., Leela James, Sonny Rollins, CeCe Winans, and Jody Watley….

We’ve also dissected the use of AutoTune technology and talked with the Rev. Jesse Jackson about the reach of Tupac Shakur.

But we’re not done yet.

We haven’t hit on Black Radio for example.

On today’s show, Dyson talks to the New Black Man, which is the online blogging moniker of Mark Anthony Neal.

Professor Neal is also a student, and teacher, of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University.

He wants to talk about one old-school artist in particular this month…. whom he calls “an overlooked genius.” And it’s not me.

Listen @ The Michael Eric Dyson Show

A "Fatherless" Debate?

2009-06-23T17:26:00.004-04:00

(Traditional) Fathers Don’t Always Know Best
by Kai Wright

The notion that kids can’t develop properly without a biological father was a lie when Dan Quayle asserted it in 1992, and it’s a lie when Barack Obama says it now.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

New Muslim Cool

2009-06-23T17:13:00.005-04:00

An Intimate Look at Hip-Hop’s Jihad
by Suad Abdul Khabeer

Real hip-hop heads know that Islam and hip-hop have been longtime friends, feeding off each other’s energy. Muslim ideals of self-respect and social change have inspired some of the greatest emcees, and hip-hop is giving voice to the dreams and daily struggles of a generation of Muslims. This cross-pollination between Islam and hip-hop is vividly illustrated in a new documentary, New Muslim Cool, which premieres tonight on PBS.

Directed by veteran filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, New Muslim Cool chronicles three years in the life of Hamza "Jason" Perez, a Puerto Rican Muslim, family man, emcee, interfaith prison chaplain and social activist.

So why is Hamza’s story called the New Muslim Cool? Because he is part of a generation of young Muslims who are coming of age in a post-9/11 America. They are tackling questions of race, faith, freedom and even, as Hamza does, questionable intrusions by the FBI. They unapologetically choose God and country; they are doing American Islam with style.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Chatting Up Black Radio, the Music Industry and Facebook with Michael Fordham on Blog Talk Radio

2009-06-22T11:29:00.004-04:00

Blog Talk Radio
Michael Fordham's A Measure of Truth

A Daughter's Reflection...

2009-06-22T11:15:00.003-04:00

special to NewBlackMan

Oatmeal
by Stephane Dunn

My father (daddy) dies. He is in bed with his girlfriend and he wakes, says her name, gasps, and that’s it. He is gone. Heart attack. It’s March and three weeks after we’ve buried gramps, my mother’s daddy. And that’s the last time I spoke to my father. The day of that funeral. We chatted a few minutes about how it was time for a little reunion, maybe a barbeque in Fort Wayne where he lived and maybe May 22, his birthday and the birthday of his granddaughter, my sister’s then two year old. I tell him that anytime I listen to James Cleveland, I think of him and Sundays, getting ready for church and leaving, all except he, who always remained at home with Albertina Walker, James, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, cooking up some good smelling roast or stew. He laughed a little, kind of sad, and that was it. He was dead three weeks later.

Don’t remember who called. Mama, I think, with that voice that said somebody died before the “I got some bad news” comes out. Still, I am surprised, too surprised to say much or think much. My older sister has to be told; my younger sister, daddy’s best thing, knows. She is crushed - two little kids of her own but now a little girl missing what she’d already lost and the chance that somehow that perfect arc of daddy and little girl love will return whole. My older sister is dry but full of stuff, a good deal held back and in; it comes out in funeral planning drama days later in Indiana when she ticks the girlfriend off and we have to pay for the burial instead of using money he’d supposedly put aside for that.

At the funeral, I sit in the front row - my brother, younger sister, then me and the older sister. The younger sister is beside herself, the coffin, the church, us in the front row, hits hard. Her father is really gone. She wails one line, ‘I’m not ready.” I take my place in front of the pulpit, off to one side of the coffin and stand beside the brother and older sister and pay homage. I come last or maybe next to last and talk about oatmeal. I think it is a poem, kind of, but really some words trying to say something about someone I’ve missed for years, someone I’ll keep missing. I could only eat daddy’s oatmeal. Only he made it perfectly, not too thick or thin and so pretty with just the right mix of cinnamon and butter and just a bit of sugar, so good I did not need toast or milk. I say that I haven’t eaten it, oatmeal, for years, not anybody’s even my own.

I cannot remember them all, but I know my words were all about oatmeal - the best oatmeal ever. I returned to my seat and held my wailing sister. Maybe I did not, could not wail or cry because I was there and I wasn’t. I’m in the black dress, the coffin, silver, a few feet away and my sister cries on my shoulder but I’m looking down high above the choir stand and the preachers, including my step dad pastor and I’m looking down, noting the too empty pews and the few familiar faces dotting benches. I see we four sitting on that front pew and my mother and some aunts a ways behind us and the little singing and organ playing going on. When it’s over and a cousin has preached his subject, about what I cannot recall, we walk down the aisle to the preacher’s ‘ashes to ashes’ and I greet a boyfriend from back in the day and an old high school friend and then there is the cemetery. The coffin goes down, down, down and too soon we’re back at the church where people eat chicken and exchange numbers. And that’s it.

A few months later on a Sunday summer morning, my off and on again poet boyfriend rises early and says come on. For some reason I don’t ask where or why just throw on sweats, a t-shirt, and some tennis shoes and mask my fast beating heart when he pulls the four-wheel out of the drive. We don’t go far from the beige subdivision but it seems miles away, the hidden little woods behind a school where we stop. There are trees undisturbed reaching up past the clouds and a little brook in the center of the tree clump. We sit on a fallen trunk, under another tree where the bright morning sun warms up and filters down through the leaves. We don’t speak. I feel something that’s been too far from me, quiet, calm. I raise my t-shirt, baring a breast and raise my chest and ask the sun to warm me all the way through. The poet leans over softly and kisses the breast then rises and walks off. I cover my breast and rise too but do not follow him. I head towards a tree frozen in convulsions and lean against the bewitched body and look up.

I imagine the trees really do go on and on as far away as daddy and gramps and grandmamma and further, maybe to where there actually is a heaven. I stretch against the bewitched one and stretch my neck trying to see that far. Without warning, there’s a wetness on my cheeks and a low sound. My Poet stays away and I cry and look up until it comes again - calm and quiet. Minutes later, we get back on the four-wheel but this time, I hop on the front and take that wheel. I forget to worry about going too fast or getting hit in the face with a branch or flying off the thing if we hit a curve too fast. I don’t know it then, but I will learn to make oatmeal that I like.

***

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).

Rethinking Juneteenth

2009-06-22T11:00:00.005-04:00

The Truth About Juneteenth
by Thavolia Glymph

Juneteenth, widely celebrated throughout the United States, is now a commemorative holiday in 31 states. On Thursday the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and the long century of segregation and discrimination that followed its end. This, for some, long-awaited, and for others, disappointing, resolution appears to have been deliberately timed to pass on the eve of Juneteenth. It is unsurprising given the popular history of Juneteenth. And it is also troubling.

Juneteenth has in popular renderings come to be understood as the date Union Gen. Gordon Granger, arriving in Galveston on June 19, 1865, brought the news of emancipation and set Texas slaves free. From a strictly historical point of view one might think January 1, 1863, the date the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, or December 6, 1865, the date the 13th Amendment was ratified, would be more appropriate dates to commemorate.

Today, Juneteenth is celebrated as something even grander, a "holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States" or as the state of Virginia's 'Juneteenth State Holiday Observance Resolution of 2007,' put it, Juneteenth represents the day Gordon notified "the last enslaved Americans of their new status almost two and one-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation." Other state, senate and congressional resolutions and media accounts all offer up similar narratives. Strictly speaking, Juneteenth does not represent any of these things.

Read the Full Essay @ THE GRIO

***

Thavolia Glymph is a professor of history and African and African American Studies at Duke University, specializing in Southern History. Her most recently published work is Out Of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize.

Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)

2009-06-20T22:23:00.003-04:00

Fathers and Sons; Black Men and Baseball (for Byron Hurt)
by Mark Anthony Neal

My father had gone home to glory, months before the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president. In the difficult days before his death, there was little opportunity even to talk about such a possibility, but I have vivid memories of my father’s reaction to another "Black first." It was the fall of 1974 when the Cleveland Indians, broke one of the last racial barriers in professional sports, by naming Frank Robinson their manager. My father’s joy was palpable—one of the lasting memories that I have of him.

It was only two years before Frank Robinson was named the Cleveland manager, that another Robinson, the legendary Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before a world series game between the Cincinnati Reds and Oakland Athletics. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s infamous color barrier in 1947, becoming the first black to play in the league since Moses Fleetwood Walker was effectively banned from the American Association and National Leagues (precursors the current league) in 1889. Robinson took the opportunity that day in October of 1972 to announce his hope that one day he could attend such a game and see a black manager in one of the dugouts. It would be Jackie Robinson’s last public appearance; He died on October 24, 1972 at the young age of 53. I can remember my father, trying to get his 6-year-old son—oblivious to the Jim Crow segregation that defined his father’s existence—to understand the significance of Jackie Robinson’s life and death.

My father was never much of a race man, but his sense of racial accomplishment was intimately tied to the black men he watched play professional baseball. Born in 1935, my father was of a generation of black men who clearly smelled of freedom in ways that their fathers could never imagine, but were still reigned in by very real social constraints. In men like Frank Robinson, Jackie Robinson, Juan Marachial, Henry Aaron, Elston Howard, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente and especially Willie Mays—the first generation of Black superstars in baseball—my father saw the possibilities of that freedom, even if it could only then be realized on the playing field. Indeed Mays’s boyish swagger—the way he loped to the batter’s box, the casual style in which he employed his signature basket catch, the way his cap always came off as he ran the bases—was an inspiration for many a boy, regardless of race.

It was my father’s love of Mays that essentially made me a baseball fan. My father could barely contain himself when Mays was traded from the San Francisco Giants to the New York Mets in May of 1972. If I was gonna be a baseball fan, I had little choice but to be a New York Met fan, despite the fact that Yankee Stadium was less than 10 minutes away from our Bronx tenement building. In the early 1970s, the New York Mets had few black ball players and none that could be called major stars, but the names of Cleon Jones, John Milner and Tommy Agee, became part of my everyday vocabulary. Though Mays was well past his prime when he was traded to the Mets, he was still a marquee name for a team that would never quite escape the shadow of their cross-town rivals, The Yankees. Until George Steinbrenner took over the Yankees in 1973, the team seemed to relish in the whiteness of their legacy.

It was during this time that my father and I began our Sunday ritual; a morning spent listening to the music of Gospel groups like the Mighty Clouds of Joy and the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers and an afternoon of watching Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner announce Met games. The most memorable times though were the Sundays when we could head out to Flushing, NY and to see the team play in person. At the time I couldn’t fully appreciate what it meant to see Willie Mays in the flesh, despite his diminished talents. It was much the same way at a 1973 game between the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, where Hank Aaron hit two-home runs during his last push towards Babe Ruth’s career total of 714 homeruns. It was with my father that I watched Mays’s last hurrah, during the 1973 World Series, when the great player’s age finally betrayed him in ways that could no longer be ignored.

Though I have remained a baseball fan for much of my life, girls and hip-hop would capture my attention in the decade after Mays’s retirement. There were few games that my father and I watched together as time progressed, though we excitedly discussed the emergence of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Godden as the New York Mets first homegrown black superstars in the mid-1980s. There was a silence between my father and I, when both of those men succumbed to the pitfalls of being young, black and famous in New York City; my father all too aware of the brutal ways that dreams were deferred for black men of his generation and I all too aware of the young black men of my generation, who lived tragic lives, far from the back pages of the New York Daily News.

I lament that my father and I never attended a baseball game together as adults—as men who could reflect on the beauty of the game along with the challenges that we faced as black men, fathers and loving husbands. My father’s absence hit home months ago, as I watched the opening of the New York Mets' new stadium Citi Field. On hand for the opening festivities was Rachel Robinson, the 87-year-old widow of Jackie Robinson. In tribute to Robinson, Citi Field features the Jackie Robinson Rotunda where visitors can view memorabilia and video presentations of Robinson during his playing days. Sometime this summer I hope to visit Citi Field with my own children and though my father will not be there, I know that he will be there in spirit, as I tell my daughters about this game of baseball and its importance to their grand-father.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press. He is Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University in Durham, NC.

Chatting Up (Black) Fatherhood

2009-06-19T09:01:00.007-04:00

"Fatherhood" (2000) by Ruth Bloch/Weinstein Gallery

REINVENTING DAD

Pacifica Radio 99.5 FM WBAI
Women, Body & Soul
Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe

Interview with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man), as the discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.

Listen to the Interview @
WOMAN, BODY & SOUL

***

HOW DID YOU LEARN TO BE A FATHER?

NPR's Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

Talk of the Nation, June 18, 2009 · Men who become fathers learn quite suddenly that the learning curve is steep and kids don't come with a user's manual. The curve can be more dramatic for men who grew up without dads.

Author Abdul Ali and Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal talk about how they learned fatherhood.

Listen to the Interview @

TALK OF THE NATION

ON-THE-AIR: Re-inventing Fatherhood

2009-06-17T22:59:00.010-04:00

Woman, Body and Soul

Hosted by Nathalie Thandiwe.
WBAI-FM--NYC--Pacifica Radio (99.5)
Thursday June 18, 2009
12:00 noon - 1:00pm
Live Stream @ WBAI.ORG

***

THE FATHERLESS DAUGHTER

with guest Jonetta Rose Barras, author of Whatever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl?
author, columnist and DC Politics radio host (WPFW, Tuesdays @ 11 am)

Jonetta Rose Barras speaks about the Impact of Fatherlessness.

What happens to girls who grow up without their father?
How does it shape their growth, life choices and relationships?
For those who mourn or rage at this loss, where is the healing?

REINVENTING DAD

with guests Professor Mark Anthony Neal, father and author of New Black Man, along with hip hop musician, educator and father, Bomani Armah (Peek-a-Boo, Read a Book, Grown Ass Man).

Mark Anthony Neal and Bomani Armah discuss how men and families can benefit from the reinvention of fatherhood.

How does our concept of masculinity inform fatherhood and how does it confine fathers?
What role is there for fathers who cannot provide materially for their children/ families?
How does feminism fit into fatherhood?

Live Stream @ WBAI.ORG

Book Review: Ain't I a Feminist?: African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom

2009-06-17T16:44:00.005-04:00

special to NewBlackMan

Ain’t I a Feminist?:
African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom
by Aaronette White
(State University of New York Press, 2008)
Reviewed by Chantel K. Liggett

***

In Ain’t I a Feminist, Aaronette White proves that progressive feminist thought and action is not foreign to present-day African American men. Even more important, however, is the way in which she helps to “demystify the process” leading these men to, and sustaining their investments in, various forms of lived feminism (199). While brilliantly organizing the narratives of the twenty self-identified feminist, profeminist, or anti-sexist men she studied into seven thematic chapters, providing helpful contextualizations and frameworks within which to understand their experiences, the evaluation she does is so fluid and congruent with the men’s experiences, it undeniably gives their words and thought processes precedence over any theory or analysis thereof. As she puts it, “how men learn to confront patriarchy and become feminists can be understood through the narratives of those who are living the experience”(193). In permitting her subjects to lead by example, White provides what can be thought of as a blueprint for the cultivation of black male feminism.

The key ingredients of lived black male feminism are “humility, emotional openness, empathy, nurturing, dialog, accountability, mutuality, power sharing, and nonviolence,” offers White, focusing on the way feminist values are internalized and continually practiced on a day-to-day basis by the men in her study (199). Beyond questioning societal structures and practices like marriage, monogamy, religion, Black Power nationalist movements, violence, workplace gender dynamics, female domesticity, homophobia/heterosexism, and authoritative or removed fatherhood, these men reflect critically on their humanity, personal development, and relationships; White centers these processes as providing a wealth of knowledge about the implementation of feminist thought. Quoting James Baldwin as saying, “Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master,” she points to the importance of feminist men striving to occupy social positions more meaningful than those of dominators (59).

More than once White uses the phrase “vigilant practices” to describe the behavioral work of feminist men. Giving credit where credit is due, she does not overlook negative bouts in the men’s feminist development, which she calls “contamination” experiences, and outlines the difficultly with which men maintain feminist lifestyles. As one of her participants says, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing one has “already made it” as a feminist, when feminism is really a continual process of revaluation and renewal (122). Another participant offers that Black male feminists also sometimes (accidentally or purposely) revert to the “male thing” (104). Elaborating on this, White states, “Feminist Black men’s use of male dominant behaviors can be subtle, unconscious, and used as a coping device when they feel threatened” (101). Given that feminism requires a radical resocialization of males, she stresses that male feminists need not be flawless, and that it would be unrealistic to expect them to. “Egalitarianism requires not perfection but effort mixed with humility,” she says, demonstrating the importance of willingness in feminist development (96). A large portion of such willingness takes the form of speaking about, listening to, and being perceptive of both ‘larger’ issues and everyday occurrences regarding gender; what White chronicles the power of in Ain’t I a Feminist is the recurrence of such seemingly simply acts. Furthermore, in “directing attention to these practices,” White “counters the popular tendency to view a person’s gender identity as fixed or as developed primarily through childhood socialization,” instead naming it an ongoing, conscious process that individuals have a large degree of control over(84).

Aaronette White further commits to detailing and addressing the patterns of specific environments and resources that have had the biggest influence on her subjects’ feminist development. Demonstrating that becoming a feminist is not something one does alone, White seeks to pinpoint what has led these men in that direction, coming to the solid conclusion that intimate friendships or romances with feminist women and institutional settings that support feminist thinking are the key portals through which they gain access and further their development. Speaking of the importance of his romantic and sexual attraction to a feminist woman in aiding his feminist development, one subject says, “I don’t believe many men will put much effort into trying to correct themselves if the person who is trying to correct them is not someone who they are committed to and who is important to them” (89). As White highlights, many of the men in her study posited feminist-thinking women as strong, firm, and challenging, prompting, if not forcing, them to reevaluate patriarchal beliefs and practices. In this way, White emphasizes the importance of female feminist thinkers opening up to and working with men, and vice versa, as opposed to having separatist movements. Friendships with feminist women offer men “insider perspectives” (112), she says, and such relationships frequently provide “constructive criticism,” “practicing ground,” “safe spaces” for feminist growth (116). Furthermore, simply being around other feminists helped her subjects legitimate or free their potential male feminist identities, in providing a “mutually understood and shared relational reality that affirms another’s identity” (121).

The men’s reliance on institutional encouragement and support of feminist thought is most evident in Chapter Four, titled “Turning Points,” in which White charts the men’s substantial shifts in their thoughts about or relationship to feminism. “Their exposure to open-minded and radical, social justice-oriented institutions,” most often universities, “and their active participation to support racial and economic injustice often provided the foundation for subsequent feminist views and practices,” she observes (87). White utilizes these findings by challenging black feminists and their communities to recreate such environments where they are lacking, to facilitate the development of feminist consciousnesses in willing boys and men who would not otherwise have access. She boldly recommends the development women’s studies curricula in elementary and high schools and calls for a multiplicity of community campaigns that would allow black men to develop feminist consciousness in settings closer to home, providing her readers a lasting challenge.

Notably, aside from chronicling the paths of twenty black men to feminism, White’s groundbreaking work demonstrates effortlessly that “when one is pressured to view one’s humanity in terms of ‘being a man’ or ‘being a woman,’ what it means to be human is lost, truncated, stereotyped, and taken less seriously” (120). What these men gain from their commitment to feminism is indefinable but shines through their stories, impossible to ignore. In giving public voice to these men in the way she has, White sets forth a compelling model for other present-day as well as future men to grab on to.

***

Chantel K. Liggett is an undergraduate at Duke University pursuing a Women's Studies Major and Study of Sexualities Certificate. She is currently conducting research on 'queer' resistance to concrete categories of identity by Dutch nationals and Surinamese migrants in Amsterdam

Black Music Month 2009--The Genius of Rev. James Cleveland

2009-06-17T16:07:00.001-04:00

Cleveland never achieved the crossover success of some contemporary Gospel artists, but in his day he was a leading light.

Black Music Month Classics: Songs of the Sad Minstrel

2009-06-15T17:26:00.006-04:00

BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS

Songs of the Sad Minstrel
by Mark Anthony Neal

There’s rarely a moment when John Smith aka Lil’ Jon flashes across the television screen that the “coon” meter lodged deep within my consciousness begins to vibrate. It’s not that Smith’s antics offend me—I’ve long argued that there’s often an untapped complexity attached to even the most lurid of stereotypical racial images, particularly those created by blacks themselves. Indeed Smith is part of a tradition that has produced Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Butterfly McQueen, Mantan Moreland, or any shuckin’ and jivin’ plantation “darky” that understood that their ability to sing and dance (or break tackles or finish line tapes) went a long way towards self-preservation. If such antics spared you the rod two centuries ago, it can surely earn you seven-figure salaries in this era of global digitized blackness.

Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.

Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”

What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.

What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.

Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.

William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”

*Originally Published in January 2005