Holding It Down!

What Katrina Taught Us About Race

Talk of the Nation, August 29, 2006 · As Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, it exposed a raw nerve of racial tensions in a city that had long prided itself on tolerance. A year later, much of the bitterness remains unresolved, and New Orleans is shaping up as a much different city. Featuring Jed Horne, Juan Williams and Michael Eric Dyson .

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Race, class and Hurricane Katrina
‘The people who suffered there were failed by their government’

NEW ORLEANS - Brian Williams discusses Hurricane Katrina, race and class with Michael Eric Dyson, an author, minister and humanities professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Real" Black Men Dance!

Manly men can wear cleats and dance shoes
By Annette John-Hall
Columnist, Philadelphia Inquirer

Who's the man?

Come fall, he is certainly the gridiron god, the fleet-footed playmaker or the bone-crushing hit man whose respect quotient rises in proportion to just how badly he can jack up his opponent.

Football players are manly men, all right, at least in a conventional military sense. The team forms the platoon; the athletes march onto the field like soldiers, led by their field-general quarterback.

With the image of a menacing, padded footballer as a masculine ideal, you can imagine my intrigue with what has become an unlikely showcase for some notable manly men - ABC's reality hit Dancing With the Stars.

First, it was boxer Evander Holyfield gamely stepping on the dance floor in Season One, flat-footed and gawky, but unafraid to try. Then last season there was Jerry Rice. Yes, the Jerry Rice, the shoo-in first-ballot Hall of Famer, recently retired, arguably the greatest receiver in NFL history, shimmying in tight polyester slacks, Afro wig, and platform shoes, shaking his groove thang all the way to runner-up.

And this season, Emmitt Smith, the former Dallas Cowboys great, will lace up his dancing shoes as part of a Stars lineup that premieres Sept 12.

MORE...

The African American community, in particular, is desperately in need of redefining macho. For many young black males living in the nation's urban centers, macho means maintaining an image, no matter what the cost.

For some of the men cut off from life's promises, it's a self-made image. In their world, demonstrating sensitivity and emotion is frowned upon. Speaking proper English, a sign of weakness. Going to school, not cool.

It's about adopting what sociologists refer to as the "cool-pose culture," a rigid lifestyle that focuses on the latest clothes and shoes, sexual conquests, hip-hop music, and which, above all, demands the respect of peers.

The cool pose may be an enormous moneymaker in pop culture, admired and even copied by white youth, but it's leading to the slaughter of black youth. African Americans are killing each other at nine times the rate of white youth, often over beefs stemming from nothing more than a perceived slight.

"If you back down, you're a punk," says Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal, who lays out a new, less burdensome model of black masculinity in his book New Black Man. "To negotiate is to be weak. Everything has to be a confrontation."

The message is reinforced widely - from the words and imagery of hip-hop, to the reproachful taunting in sports, even from the White House, Neal tells me.

"Say what you want about [White House] policies, one of Bush's successes was getting across the message that a real man never wavers. You attack first; attack before they attack you. So it's coming from the top."

Read the full joint here.

Someday We'll All Be Free: New Words from Kevin Powell

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Kristin Pulkkinen
Publicity Director, Soft Skull Press
718.643.1599
kristin@softskull.com


SOMEDAY WE'LL ALL BE FREE
BY KEVIN POWELL

Acclaimed writer and political activist KEVIN POWELL publishes his 7th book, a bold and passionate collection of three new essays on freedom, democracy, and justice in America, as inspired by the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and September 11th, and the 2004 presidential election.

PRAISE for Kevin Powell

"As a charismatic speaker, leader, and a very good writer, Kevin Powell has the courage...to be fully human, and this will bring the deepest revolution of all."
-GLORIA STEINEM

“When you consider the intelligence and breadth of Kevin Powell's writing and activism, you come to the conclusion that there may be no better spokesperson and representative for a generation that has too long been counted out.”
-ASHA BANDELE


When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast region of the United States in late August 2005, writer and activist Kevin Powell knew he had to do something. He personally traveled to New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Houston to interview and help survivors. He organized large truck shipments to the affected region by staging two major New York City benefits in the span of three months. He co-created Katrina on the Ground, which sent over 700 young people, mostly college students, to the devastated area as an alternative Spring Break in March 2006. And Powell wrote the bulk of his seventh book, SOMEDAY WE'LL ALL BE FREE, in the midst of this national tragedy, including the third and final essay, “A Psalm for New Orleans.”

“This is the hardest book I've ever written,” Powell says, “because it was born in the midst of a great catastrophe, and in the aftermath of that catastrophe, with little time for me to deal with my own trauma, pain, and sadness around what happened in New Orleans. But I felt compelled to write because we have to document this episode in the American journey honestly, with the hope and determination that it will never happen again.”

Using the Katrina calamity as his inspiration for truth-telling, Powell decided to add a previously unpublished essay about the 2004 presidential election (“Looking for America”) and a long meditation on September 11th (“September 11th”) to SOMEDAY WE'LL ALL BE FREE (the book title comes from the classic Donny Hathaway song). The result is Powell's most distinguished work to date, three literary sermons that bring to mind the raw brilliance of James Baldwin, the iconoclastic musings of Norman Mailer, and the stinging political sobriety of Joan Didion. While SOMEDAY WE'LL ALL BE FREE is about specific times and specific situations in American history, these pieces transcend these times and situations and become a virtual townhall meeting on the enduring quest for freedom and democracy in America, and on this planet, in these early days of the 21st century. Indeed, these coolly observant essays-essays that tackle difficult topics like war, terrorism, poverty, the American identity, leadership, religion, patriotism, and the cooptation of hiphop-firmly establish why Powell is widely considered one of America's brightest leaders and thinkers.


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An award-winning writer, Kevin Powell is the author or editor of six previous books. He is also a public speaker, social activist, entrepreneur, and hiphop historian. Powell is routinely featured in the media with his provocative insights on political and cultural issues, and he has published and lectured extensively, in America, and abroad. Powell resides in New York City, the borough of Brooklyn.


SOMEDAY WE'LL ALL BE FREE
By Kevin Powell
Soft Skull Press
Publication date: August 29, 2006
www.softskull.com

When They Reminisce Over You...My Gawd!

WNYC's SOUNDCHECK

The Old School Comes of Age
Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Today, a look at the re-emergence of rappers from the hip-hop heyday of the late '80s and early '90s. Did the industry leave them behind? Or have they been shaking up the underground all these years? Joining us is the rapper C.L. Smooth, whose new album "American Me" arrives in September, and Mark Anthony Neal, author and Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University.

40 Million Dollar Slaves?

I first met William C. Rhoden a decade ago when I was a new Ph.D. teaching at Xavier University in Naw'Lins. Rhoden was flying down to the Big Easy to shoot The Sport Reporters (ESPN) and I was making my twice monthly sojourn back to the city from Worcester, Mass where my wife lived. Recognizing Rhoden, I struck up a conversation on the flight to New Orleans. He was finishing up the proposal that would eventually become his new book 40 Million Dollars Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. Rhoden's thesis that black athletes were little more than highly paid slaves struck a chord in me at the time and there are literally 100s of times that I've referenced Rhoden's metaphor in conversation and in the classroom.

I wish that Rhoden had done more with the metaphor of well paid slaves. Clyde Woods, for example, in his beast of a book development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta , makes the point that while "slavery" may have died, the political economy of the plantation lives on. Nevertheless, Rhoden's combination of wit, respect for those who came before him, his autobiographical musings on playing football at Morgan State and his righteous indignation at the contemporary black athlete, makes 40 Million Dollar Slaves a major offering. My man David Leonard agrees. Here's an excerpt from his Washington Post review of Rhoden's book:

Presenting a history that is neither an "inspirational reel" nor an indictment of today's black athletes, Rhoden offers a "complicated tale of continuous struggle, a narrative of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, the story of an inspiring rise, an unnecessary fall, and uncertain future." He rightly challenges the conventional American notion of sports as a model of integration and meritocracy, where talent and athleticism trump bigotry. For example, Rhoden examines the distinctive styles that Willie Mays and R.C. Owens brought to baseball and basketball, respectively. He reveals how fans and media alike demonized them for violating the values of the game and for merely "having attitude." Persuasively, he finds echoes of their harsh treatment in the condemnation of flashy modern competitors such as the University of Miami football team of the '90s. Through each historic step, forward and back, Rhoden argues that black athletes, like blacks in general, have always been "largely feared and despised," relegated to the "periphery of true power" despite their talents and contributions to sporting life in America.

Forty Million Dollar Slaves is a beautifully written, complex and rich narrative. Rhoden offers a wonderful balance between the often-forgotten histories of great black athletes, such as bicyclist Major Taylor, Negro League entrepreneur Rube Foster and college football great Sam Cunningham, and nuanced social commentaries on the commercial exploitation of blackness, white control of the sporting world, and the devastating effects of integration on the Negro Leagues and the sports teams at historically black colleges and universities.

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Read Leonard's full review: Golden Shackles--A veteran journalist finds little racial progress in the world of pro sports.

New Magazine Launched

THE COUP MAGAZINE (Black Girls Rule the World!)

This new magazine was founded by Wayetu Moore and Ashleigh Staton and features an advisory board of Asha Bandele, Yannick Rice-Lamb and Alexis Gumbs (A Dukie in the house!). The debut issue features poetry from Audre Lorde as well as articles on Black Men and HIV, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and a review of Meshell Ndegeocello's Dance of the Infidel.

Check out all at http://www.thecoupmagazine.com/