Bakari Kitwana on the Obama/Wright Generational Divide

from NewsOne.com

Wright-Obama Locked in Generational Conflict (Op-Ed)
by Bakari Kitwana

Jeremiah Wright's apparent undermining of Barack Obama's campaign gets to the heart of an ongoing battle that has been heating up in the Black community since Obama first announced his candidacy. By entertaining the mainstream media that has been quick to pull down Obama, Wright is displaying a dangerous disregard for Obama's historic candidacy. But he's not doing it on purpose. Jeremiah Wright, like others of his generation, is only treating Barack Obama's candidacy like the youthful pipe dream that he always thought it was.

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Keira Knightley - Golden Globes Photo Shoot

Keira Knightley Profile

Name: Keira Knightley

Height: 5' 7"

Sex: F

Nationality: British

Birth Date: March 22, 1983

Birth Place: Teddington, London, England, UK

Profession: Actress

Relationship: Rupert Friend (actor; began dating on January 2006), Kaz James (Aussie DJ), Jamie Dornan (Irish model; broke up in 2005)

Father: Will Knightley (actor; born on April 23, 1946)

Mother: Sharman Macdonald (writer; born in 1951)

Brother: Caleb Knightley (born in 1979)

Claim to fame: Soccer-playing tomboy Juliette Paxton in Bend it Like Beckham (2003)

Keira Knightley Biography

Keira Christina Knightley (born 26 March 1985) is an English film and television actress. She began her career as a child actress, and came to international prominence in 2003, after co-starring in the films Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Knightley has since become a notable lead actress, having appeared in several Hollywood films and earning an Academy Award nomination for her role as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Knightley was born in Teddington, Middlesex, England to Sharman Macdonald, a Scottish actress turned award-winning playwright, and Will Knightley, an English theatre and television actor. She has an elder brother, Caleb, who was born in 1979. Knightley lived most of her life in Richmond, attending Teddington School and Esher College. Knightley has dyslexia, but nevertheless was successful in school and was thus permitted to acquire a talent agent and pursue an acting career. Knightley has noted that she was "single-minded about acting" during her childhood. She performed in a number of local amateur productions including After Juliet (written by her mother) and United States (written by her then drama teacher, Ian McShane).

Knightley began acting at age seven in her television debut in Ballykissangel (1993). She appeared in several made-for-television films in the mid to late 1990s, before being cast as Sabé, Padmé Amidala's decoy, in the 1999 science fiction blockbuster Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. Knightley was cast in the role due to her close resemblance to Natalie Portman, who played Padmé; the two actresses' mothers had difficulty telling their daughters apart when the girls were in full makeup. Knightley's first starring role followed in 2001, when she played the daughter of Robin Hood in a made-for-television Walt Disney Productions feature, Princess of Thieves. During this time, Knightley also appeared in The Hole, a thriller that received a direct-to-video release in the United States. She also appeared in a mini-series adaptation of Doctor Zhivago that first aired in 2002 to mixed reviews but high ratings.

Rachel Bilson : Wallpapers

Rachel Bilson Profile

Name: Rachel Bilson

Birth Name: Rachel Jade Bilson

Height: 5' 2''

Sex: F

Nationality: American

Birth Date: August 25, 1981

Birth Place: Los Angeles, California, USA

Profession: Actress, Model

Education: Notre Dame High School in California (graduated in 1999)

Relationship: Adam Brody (actor; born on December 15, 1979; dating since 2003; split in December 2006)

Father: Danny Bilson (writer; married in August 1997)

Grand Father: Bruce Bilson (director; born on May 19, 1928)

Step Mother: Heather Medway (actress)

Aunt: Julie Bilson Ahlberg (producer)

Claim to fame: As Summer Roberts on Fox's TV series The O.C. (2003)

Rachel Bilson Biography

Rachel Sarah Bilson (born August 25, 1981) is an American actress. After growing up in a California show business family, she made her television debut in 2003 and subsequently became well-known for playing Summer Roberts on the prime time dramedy series The O.C. Bilson made her film debut in the 2006 film The Last Kiss, appeared as "Lou" on the NBC show Chuck, and will star in the 2008 thriller Jumper.

Bilson was born in LA, California to a Jewish American father, writer/director/producer Danny Bilson, and a Philadelphia-born Italian American mother, sex therapist Janice Stango. Her father comes from a show business family; her great-grandfather, George Bilson, was the head of the trailer department at RKO Pictures, while her Brooklyn-born great-grandmother, Hattie Bilson, was a screenwriter and her grandfather, Bruce Bilson, is a film director. Bilson's parents divorced during her childhood, and in 1997, her father remarried Heather Medway, an actress and the mother of Bilson's half-sister Hattie (born December 19, 2001).

Bilson has been noted as having a "self-destructive, rebellious period" during her teen years. When she was thirteen, she and a group of her brother's friends were involved in a car accident, a head-on collision with another car. As a result, Bilson was unconscious for a few days, had a scar above her right eye, and sometimes suffers from migraines and memory loss; she has stated that the experience "changed" her, encouraging her to "stop... getting into trouble" and stopping her from "going down that road".

Bilson graduated from Walter Reed Middle School in 1996 and from Notre Dame High School in 1999. During her time at Notre Dame, she appeared in productions of Bye Bye Birdie, Once Upon a Mattress and The Crucible, and appeared on stage together with Katharine McPhee, who attended the same school and would later be a finalist on American Idol.

Bilson attended Grossmont College in San Diego, but dropped out after one year, taking her father's advice to pursue a professional acting career and making several appearances in commercials, including advertisements for Raisin Bran and Pepto-Bismol. She made her screen acting debut in early 2003, appearing in episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and in the short film, Unbroken. Bilson was subsequently cast in The O.C., which debuted in August of 2003. Her character, Summer Roberts, was initially intended to appear in only a few episodes, but became a series regular after a successful run, as Bilson's on-screen romance with Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) became a noted aspect of the series.

Scarlett Johansson : Wallpapers

Scarlett Johansson Profile

Name: Scarlett Johansson

Height: 5' 4"

Sex: F

Nationality: American

Birth Date: November 22, 1984

Birth Place: New York, New York, USA

Profession: actress

Education: Professional Children's School, New York City, New York (graduated in 2002)

Relationship: Josh Hartnett (actor; born on July 21, 1978; dated since shooting The
Black Dahlia), Jared Leto (actor; born on December 26, 1971; dating since spring 2004), Benicio Del Toro (actor; born on February 19, 1967; dated in 2004)

Father: Karsten Johansson

Mother: Melanie Johansson (born in 1951)

Sister: Vanessa Johansson (older; actress)

Brother: Adrian (older), twin brother Hunter Johansson (born on November 22, 1984)

Half Brother: Christian

Grand Father: Ejner Johansson (writer; born in 1922; died in 2001)

Claim to fame: as Grace MacLean in Robert Redford's Horse Whisperer (1998)

Scarlett Johansson Biography

Scarlett I. Johansson (born November 22, 1984) is an actress and singer, of dual American and Danish citizenship. Johansson rose to fame with her role in 1998's The Horse Whisperer and subsequently gained critical acclaim for her roles in Ghost World, Lost in Translation (for which she won a BAFTA), and Girl with a Pearl Earring, the latter two earning her Golden Globe Award nominations in 2003. On May 20, 2008, Johansson will debut as a vocalist on her first album Anywhere I Lay My Head, with cover versions of Tom Waits songs featuring vocals from David Bowie.

Johansson was born in New York City. Her father, Karsten Johansson, is a Danish-born architect, and her paternal grandfather, Ejner Johansson, was a screenwriter and director (Scarlett Johansson holds Danish citizenship). Scarlett Johansson's mother, Melanie Sloan, a producer, comes from an Ashkenazi Jewish family from the Bronx. Johansson's parents met in Denmark, where her mother lived with Johansson's maternal grandmother, Dorothy, a former bookkeeper and schoolteacher. Johansson has an older sister, Vanessa, who is also an actress; an older brother, Adrian; a twin brother, Hunter, also an actor; and a half-brother, Christian, from her father's re-marriage.

Johansson grew up in a household with "little money" with a mother who was a "film buff". Johansson began her theater training by attending and graduating from Professional Children's School in Manhattan in 2002.

Johansson began acting during childhood, after her mother began taking her to auditions. She made her film debut in 1994's North. After appearing in several films during the late 1990s, Johansson garnered praise and widespread attention for her performance in 1998's The Horse Whisperer and 2001's Ghost World.

She won the "Upstream Prize" for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her performance in 2003's Lost in Translation. The same year, she was nominated for two Best Actress awards at the Golden Globes, one for drama (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and one for comedy (Lost in Translation). She was also nominated for Best Actress for both films at the BAFTAs, and won Best Actress for Lost in Translation.

Johansson was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in June 2004. In the same year, she starred in the films The Perfect Score, In Good Company and A Love Song for Bobby Long, the last of which earned her a third Golden Globe Award nomination. Johansson was involved for a short time with the film Mission: Impossible III, but was not officially cast because of scheduling conflicts, although a falling out with the film's star, Tom Cruise, had been both widely reported and publicly denied. She was replaced by Keri Russell.

Tara Reid : Wallpapers

Tara Reid Profile

Name: Tara Reid

Height: 5' 5"

Sex: F

Nationality: American

Birth Date: November 8, 1975

Birth Place: Wyckoff, New Jersey, USA

Profession: actress

Education: Professional Children's School in New York City.
Barnstable Academy

Relationship: Wayne Boich, Carson Daly (VJ MTV; b. June 22, 1973; engaged in
October 2000; broke up in June 2001), Jason Ader (financial analyst; dated 2001), JC Chasez (singer; b. August 8, 1976; dated 2002), Tom Brady (quarterback New England Patriots; dated 2002)

Father: Tom Reid (teacher)

Mother: Donna Reid (teacher)

Sister: Colleen Reid (born in 1982; twin of Patrick)

Brother: Patrick Reid (born in 1982; twin of Colleen)

Claim to fame: as Victoria 'Vicky' Lathum in American Pie (1999)

Tara Reid Biography

Tara Reid (born November 8, 1975) is an American actress. She is known for her roles in the films The Big Lebowski (1998), American Pie (1999), American Pie 2 (2001), National Lampoon's Van Wilder (2002), My Boss's Daughter (2003), and Alone in the Dark (2005).

Reid was born in Wyckoff, New Jersey, the daughter of Donna and Tom Reid, both of whom are teachers and day care center owners. Reid has Irish, Italian, French, Hungarian, and English heritage. She attended Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School, then went to Ramapo High School and graduated while attending Barnstable Academy, a performing arts-centric school. Both high schools were in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey (Barnstable is now in Oakland, N.J.).

She has a younger sister, Colleen, and two brothers, Tom and Patrick (who is a twin of Colleen). Reid grew up in New Jersey.

Reid began her career at the age of six in 1982 on the game show, Child's Play. As a child, she had roles in a number of commercials for McDonald's, Crayola, and Jell-O. She grew up in New York City, and attended the Professional Children's School alongside such celebrities as Christina Ricci, Ben Taylor, Jerry O'Connell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Macaulay Culkin. Although her breakthrough role was in American Pie in 1999, followers of the 1998 cult film The Big Lebowski already knew her as Bunny Lebowski. Reid spent the late 1990s appearing more often on the cover of tabloid magazines than on screen. Her extroverted social life soon gave her a reputation as a party girl; in fact, U.S. magazine In Touch Weekly, recently voted Reid "top party animal". She spoofed that image with her role on the NBC sitcom Scrubs as Danni Sullivan, main character J.D.'s promiscuous girlfriend.

Taradise, her half-hour television show on the E! network, premiered in September 2005; it was canceled the following month. The show was an updated incarnation of E!'s popular series Wild On, where a celebrity host or model traveled to exotic locations to party with locals. Previously during summer 2005, she was busy shooting Incubus in Romania at an assortment of clubs with Bucharest's local socialites. In January 2007, Reid filmed a commercial with Daniel Conn for Dodo, an Australian budget phone and Internet provider. Reid appeared in the September 2007 issue of FHM magazine.

Sasha Alexander : Wallpapers

Sasha Alexander Profile

Name: Sasha Alexander

Birth Name: Suzana Drobnjakovic

Height: 5' 7"

Sex: F

Nationality: American

Birth Date: May 17, 1975

Birth Place: Los Angeles, California, USA

Profession: actress, producer

Education: School of Cinema & Television at University Of Southern California

Husband/Wife: Luka Pecel (married September 18, 1999; annulled)

Daughter: Lucia Sofia Ponti (was born in Geneva, Switzerland on May 12th, 2006)

Claim to fame: played Gretchen Witter, sister of Pacey Witter, on TV hits Dawson's Creek

Sasha Alexander Biography

Sasha Alexander (born May 17, 1973) is an American actress. She is well known for her role as Caitlin Todd in the CBS television drama NCIS.

Alexander was born Suzana S. Drobnjaković in Los Angeles, California of Serbian and Italian descent. She began acting in school productions at the seventh grade. She was also an ice skater, but had to stop due to an injury to her knee. She continued acting through high school and college, and then moved to New York to act in summer stock and Shakespeare festivals. She graduated from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television.

Alexander was a regular on two short-lived series, the medical drama Presidio Med and ABC's twenty-something drama Wasteland. She appeared on the fourth season of Dawson's Creek as Gretchen Witter, dating the title character, and in an episode of the short-lived Fox comedy series Greg the Bunny, playing the part of a lesbian TV Guide reporter and shared a memorable onscreen kiss with Sarah Silverman. Alexander has also appeared in the films Lucky 13, and All Over the Guy. Her role on NCIS ended in May 2005 and she had a small role in 2006's Mission Impossible III. She joined the cast of The Nine in the role of Nick's ex-wife. She also did one episode of Friends ("The One with Joey's Interview"), playing a Soap Opera Digest reporter who interviewed Joey.

On August 11, 2007 Sasha married director Edoardo Ponti in Geneva, Switzerland, son of actress Sophia Loren and film producer Carlo Ponti. The two have a child, Lucia Sofia, born May 12, 2006.

James Peterson on the Sean Bell Verdict

You Know How We Do
By James Braxton Peterson | TheRoot.com

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part II)

"Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him" - John Donne

Part one of this essay appeared as a blog on Blackprof during the fall of 2007. At that time, the 'Bell' in the title referred specifically to Mychal Bell of the Jena Six. I serialize the title here not because of my love for Hemingway (or Donne for that matter), but to revisit the theme of death and valueless black life in the criminal justice system. Sean Bell, like Michael Bell before him, did not receive fair treatment under the law. The Bells' lives are seen as less than that of their white counterparts, whether those counterparts be racist high hchool bullies or racially indoctrinated officers of the law. It is interesting that of the officers involved in the shooting, the black cop shot the least, (4 bullets); the mixed-race cop shot 11 times, and the cop of Lebanese decent shot 31 times. I read this sliding scale as corollary to the effects of the racial and social indoctrination or our nation's police forces.

But the deadly confrontation between Sean Bell and his friends with those undercover detectives was not just about race. This confrontation had as much to do with the manifestation of black masculinity in the public sphere as it did racism - institutional or personal. It had as much to do with gender and gender roles as it did with race.

Read the Full Essay @


***

James Braxton Peterson is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University and the Founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC .

Kevin Powell on the Sean Bell Verdict

The Sean Bell Tragedy
by Kevin Powell

April 25, 2008

I am sick to my stomach and I really do not know what to say right this second. My cell and office phones have been blowing up all day, and people have been emailing me nonstop, to let me know that Detectives Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora, and Marc Cooper, the three New York City police officers accused of shooting 50 times and murdering Sean Bell, were found not guilty on all counts: Oliver, who fired 31 times and reloaded once, and Isnora, who fired 11 times, had been charged with manslaughter, felony assault and reckless endangerment. They faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted on all charges. Cooper, who fired four times, faced up to a year in jail if convicted of reckless endangerment.

And that’s it: Sean Bell, a mere 23 years of age, out partying the morning before the wedding to the mother of his two small children, dead, gone, forever. Sean Bell and his two friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, all unarmed, ambushed by New York’s finest. His last day, November 25, 2006, is marked as another tragic one in New York City history. How many more? I once heard in a protest song. How many more?

But I knew this verdict was coming. I have lived in New York City for nearly two decades and, before that, worked as a news reporter for several publications throughout the city’s five boroughs, and I cannot begin to tell you how many cases of police brutality and police misconduct I covered or witnessed, more often than not a person of color on the receiving end: Eleanor Bumpurs. Michael Stewart…Amadou Diallo…Sean Bell.

This is not to suggest that all police officers are trigger-happy and inhumane, because I do not believe that. They have a difficult and important job, and many of them do that job well, and maintain outstanding relationships with our communities. I know officers like that. But what I am saying is that New York, America, this society as a whole, still views the lives of Black people, of Latino people, of people of color, of women, of poor or working-class people, as less than valuable. It does not matter that two of the three officers charged in the Sean Bell case were officers of color and one White. What matters is the mindset of racism that permeates the New York Police Department, and far too many police departments across America. Shooting in self-defense is one thing, but it is never okay to shoot first and ask questions later, not even if a police officer “feels” threatened, not even if the source of that “feeling” is a Black or Latino person.

That is a twisted logic deeply rooted in the America social fabric, dating back to the founding fathers and their crazy calculations about slaves being three-fifths of a human being. And in spite of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and other successful Black individuals, by and large the masses of Black people, and Latino people, are perpetually viewed through this lens of not being quite human. William Kristol of the New York Times wrote what I felt was an incredibly ignorant and myopic March 24th column implying, strongly, that we should not have conversations about race in America, that such talk was dated. This piece was in response to Barack Obama’s now famous meditation on race. But Kristol, like many in denial, had this to say: “The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race… Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the ‘racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years’— because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate... This is all for the best. With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.” Well, Mr. Kristol, what, precisely, do you think Black New Yorkers are feeling this very moment as we absorb the Sean Bell verdict? Or do our thoughts, our feelings, our wounds, not matter?

“Black male lives are meaningless in America,” a female friend just texted me, and what can I say to that? Who’s going to help Nicole Paultre Bell, Sean Bell’s grieving fiancé, explain to their two young daughters that the men who killed their daddy are not going to be punished?

I remember that November 2006 day so vividly, when word spread of the Sean Bell killing. And I remember the hastily assembled meetings by New York City’s de facto Black leadership—the ministers, the elected officials, the grassroots activists—at Local 1199 in midtown Manhattan where it was stated, with great earnestness and finality, that after all these years, we were going to put together a comprehensive response to police brutality and misconduct. There were to be three levels of response: governmentally (local, state, and federal bills were going to be proposed, and task forces recommended); systemically within the police department (comprehensive proposals were called for to challenge police practices or to enforce ones already in place); and via the United States Justice Department, since any form of police brutality or misconduct is a violation of basic American civil rights. We met for a few months after the Sean Bell murder, divided into committees, then the entire thing died—again. There was a lot of research done, many hearings that were transcribed, much talk of a united front, then nothing, not even an email to say the plan was no longer being planned.

Anyhow, in the interim I spent a great deal of time, more time than I’ve spent in my entire New York life, in Queens, mainly in Jamaica, Queens, getting to know Sean Bell’s family. I was particularly struck by Sean Bell’s mother, Valerie Bell, and his father, William Bell. Two very decent and well-intentioned working-class New Yorkers, who had raised their children the best they could, who were now, suddenly, activists thrust into a spotlight they had never sought. The parents are what we the Black community calls “God-fearing, church-going folk.” Indeed, what was so incredible was how much Mr. and Mrs. Bell believed in and referenced God. But that is our sojourn in America: when everything else fails us, we still have the Lord. And there they were, holding a 50-day vigil directly across from the 103rd precinct, on 168th Street, right off Jamaica Avenue and 91st Avenuein Jamaica, Queens, in the dead-cold winter air. They and their family members and close friends taking turns monitoring the makeshift altar of candles, cards, and photos. And I remember how we had to shame local leaders a few times into supporting Mr. and Mrs. Bell with donations of money, food, or other material needs. While much of the media and support flocked to Nicole Paultre Bell, Sean Bell’s fiancé, and the sexiness of her being represented by the Reverend Al Sharpton and his lawyer pals Sanford Rubenstein and Michael Hardy, the media did not pay much attention to Sean Bell’s parents and their kinfolk at all.

What was especially striking was the fact that Mrs. Bell got up every single morning, made her way to the vigil area, then to work in a local hospital all day, then to her church every single evening. She reminded me so much of my own mother, of any Black mother in America who has had to be the backbone of the family, often sacrificing her own health, her own wants and needs, her own hurt and pain, to be there for others in their time of need.

Mrs. Bell always told me that she truly believed justice would be done in this case. She really did. I never had the heart to tell her that it is rare for a police officer to be found guilty of murdering a civilian, no matter how glaring the evidence. Nor did I have the heart to tell Mrs. Bell that the media and the defense would seek to destroy her son’s image and reputation, that Sean Bell would be reduced to a thug, as an unsavory character, to somehow justify the police shooting. Nor did I have the heart to tell Mrs. Bell that this pain of losing her son would be with her the remainder of her life. I did not share my suspicion that the parade of Black leaders, Black protests, media hype—all of it—was all part of someone’s carefully concocted script, brushed off and brought to the parade every single time a case like this occurred. I have seen it before, and as long as we live in a city, a nation, that does not value all people as human, there will be more Sean Bells.

“I am Sean Bell,” many of us chanted in the days and weeks immediately following his death. Yet very few of us showed up to the hearings after, and even fewer had the courage to question the vision, or lack thereof, of our own Black leadership who accomplished, ultimately, little to nothing at all. And very few of us realized that the powers-that-be in New York City have come to anticipate our reactions to matters like the Sean Bell tragedy: we get upset and become very emotional; we scream “No Justice! No Peace!”; we march, rally, and protest; we call the police and mayor all kinds of names and demand their resignations; we vow that this killing will be the last; and we will wait until the next tragedy hits, then this whole horrible cycle begins anew.

Plain and simple, racism creates abusive relationships. It does not matter if the perpetrator is a White sister or brother, or a person of color, because the most vulnerable in our society feel the heat of it. Real talk: this tragedy would have never gone down on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan or in Brooklyn Heights. I am not just speaking about the judge’s decision, but the police officer’s actions. Those shots would have never been fired at unarmed White people sitting in a car. Until we understand that racism is not just about who pulled the trigger in a police misconduct case, but is also about the geography of racism, and the psychology of racism, we are forever stuck having the same endless dialogue with no solution in sight.

And until America recognizes the civil and human rights of all its citizens, systemic racism and police misconduct, joined at the hip, will never end. That is, until White sisters and brothers realize they, too, are Sean Bell, this will never end. Save for a few committed souls, most White folks sit on the sidelines (as many did when we marched down Fifth Avenue in protest of Sean Bell’s murder in December 2006), feel empathy, but fail to grasp that our struggle for justice is their struggle for justice. They, alas, are Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo, and all those anonymous Black and Brown heads and bodies who’ve been victimized, whether they want to accept that reality or not. And the reality is that until police officers are forced to live in the communities they police, forced to learn the language, the culture, the mores of the communities they police, forced to change how they handle undercover assignments, this systemic racism, this police misconduct, will never end. And until Black and Latino people, the two communities most likely to suffer at the hands of police brutality and misconduct, refuse to accept the half-baked leadership we’ve been given for nearly forty years now, and start to question what is really going on behind the scenes with the handshakes, the eyewinks, the head nods, and the backroom deals at the expense of our lives, this systemic racism, this police misconduct, these kinds of miscarriages of justice, will never end.

Our current leadership needs us to believe all we can ever be are victims, doomed to one recurring tragedy or another. It keeps these leaders gainfully employed, and it keeps us feeling completely helpless and powerless. Well, I am not helpless nor powerless, and neither are you. To prevent Sean Bell’s memory from fading like dust into the air, the question is put to you, now: What are you going to do to change this picture once and for all? Mayor Bloomberg said this in a statement:

"There are no winners in a trial like this. An innocent man lost his life, a bride lost her groom, two daughters lost their father, and a mother and a father lost their son. No verdict could ever end the grief that those who knew and loved Sean Bell suffer."

No, the grief will never end, not for Sean Bell’s parents and family, for his fiancé and children. But Mayor Bloomberg, you, me, we the people, can step up our games, make a commitment to real social justice in our city, in our nation, and, for once, penalize people, including police officers, who just randomly blow away lives. Sean Bell is never coming back, but we are here, and the biggest tragedy will be if we keep going about our lives, as if this never happened in the first place.

And a long as we have leadership, White leadership and Black leadership, mainstream leadership and grassroots leadership, that can do nothing more than exacerbate folks’ very natural emotions in a tragedy like this, we will never progress as a human race. Instead a true leader needs to harness those emotions and turn them into action, as Dr. King did, as Gandhi did. In the absence of such action, so many of us, especially us Black and Latino males, will continue to have a very nervous relationship with the police, even the police of color, for fear that any of one of us could be the next Sean Bell.

***

Kevin Powell is a Brooklyn, New York-based writer, community activist, and author of 8 books. He can be reached at kevin@kevinpowell.net.

Barack and Curtis [Barry and 50]: Forthcoming Short from Byron Hurt

from The Masculinity Project:

What does it mean to be a man? The Masculinity Project will gather multi-generational voices to explore this question, with a focus on the black community in the 21st century. This project addresses the critical topic of masculinity in the African American community by exploring how young men are represented and perceived, investigating the obstacles they encounter, and celebrating the contributions they make.

Lamenting the Loss of Tavis

from NewsOne.com

Tavis Pays Price for Criticizing Barack Obama
by Mark Anthony Neal

Last week Tavis Smiley officially announced his departure from the Tom Joyner Morning Show, where he has offered twice-weekly commentaries for the past 12-years. Joyner leaked Smiley's departure to the public amid rampant speculation that Smiley was running for cover from the increased criticism over his very public spat with Senator Barack Obama. (This was the second year in a row that Obama decided not to attend Smiley's annual State of Black America gathering.) However, regardless of how many feel about his relationship with Obama, Smiley's departure from the Tom Joyner Morning Show represents a real loss for Black America.

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And the Winner is....Donny Hathaway

And the Winner is...Donny Hathaway
by Mark Anthony Neal

I’ve spent better part of that last 20-years—what seems like a lifetime—trying to write about Donny Hathaway. It’s not as though I haven’t written about Hathaway, but Hathaway’s music, his Soul really, demands a level of emotional commitment that, frankly, overwhelms the logic of my vocation as a writer. I mean, after listening to Donny Hathaway sing and moan and hum and caress that piano/Fender Rhodes, what the hell else is there to write about?

Take for instance Hathaway’s “Giving Up”—a song written by the late great arranger Van McCoy (he of “The Hustle”). Beginning, something like a dirge—and with Hathaway that always seemed his way, the pace and timing of his ballads akin to some centuries old funeral hymn—the song’s second verse takes on s second musical life (or is it that a second sight) as Hathaway and his rhythm section, in seeming double-time, against the real-time of Hathaway’s voice, narrate the heart palpitations of a man on the brink of losing his mind. And you know he’s on the brink when he admits in the third verse, “whether she knows or not, she really needs me too,” only to bellow a sinister laugh in admission that he’s on the other side of his sanity. And then the song literally collapses into the familiarity of a fully-blown Blues groove.

“Giving Up” is a signature example Of Hathaway’s ability to summon the well-spring of black musical idioms and bring them in conversation with emotional darkness of his Soul. And it is perhaps that darkness that has led so many writers to take their own (critical) lives, in an attempt to capture the emotional depth of Hathaway’s art. This is what, in part, Ed Pavlic suggest in his brilliant and moving prose poem, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press).

Lacking the kind of archival material (beyond the music, of course) that has helped many a critic to bring Soul Men past alive on the pages of books and magazines, Pavlic, an award winning poet and scholar, was forced to use traces of Hathaway’s emotional DNA (provided by the music, of course) As Pavlic writes in the acknowledgments, “Much of this book is a kind of dance between what I needed to know and not know about Donny Hathaway in order to find out what I had to say...the basic truth of the book is what I’ve made from the sound of Hathaway’s voice, the rhythm of his work.”

According to Pavlic, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced started as an attempt to write a biography about Hathaway, but as Hathaway’s spirit seemed to stonewall attempts to get the story right/write, he gave in to the calling of the music. Winners Have Yet to be Announced traffics in all of the rumor and innuendo surrounding Hathaway’s life and tragic death (including his bouts with mental illness), but rather than read like a speculative fiction about the man, Winners have Yet to be Announced instead animates the traces of truth that Hathaway’s music revels in.

In one particularly compelling section called “Interview: Graveyard Shift: Carr Square Projects: July 20, 1980: St. Louis, MO”, Pavlic imagines a reporter traveling to the place where Hathaway grew up, querying residents about Hathaway’s legacy the year after his death. One resident recalls seeing Hathaway in concert:

“Women in the audience would call out to him when he’d pause/Other Women would answer them/Men didn’t say a word/I know I didn’t/The women’d have themselves a ball, a party, almost like they’re watching themselves on stage/Not the men/He’d take your life like you knew he took his own life/He’d wrap it around his fist and lay it up side your head”

Here Pavlic recalls those fabulous live recordings of Hathaway, in which the voices of the women in the crowd were always so audible—continuous “call and response” moments—and yet rarely do we hear the voices of the men. It is this attention to seemingly matter-less detail—what were these me thinking about, as Hathaway probed the very essence of their existence?—that provides Winners Have Yet to Be Announced so much of its—and I hate to use this word—authenticity or rather sincerity to borrow a thought from John L. Jackson, Jr.

Donny Hathaway remains an enigma among popular music audiences. His most well known songs, “Where is the Love?” and “The Closer I Get to You” are award-winning duets recorded with Roberta Flack. While those songs are brilliant in their own right, they capture little of the emotional and spiritual depth of Hathaway’s own recordings. Hathaway’s full length recordings like Everything is Everything (1969), Extensions of a Man (1972), and in particular Donny Hathaway (1970) demand a level of musical commitment, that there was little chance that he was gonna earned a popular following, even as giants such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Jerry Butler sang his praises.

Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet to Be Announced shines a bright light on the legacy of a man, whose music has unfortunately been long removed to darkened corners of Soul’s yesteryear. The book’s title is taken from an obituary for Hathaway that appeared in the Washington Post: “the door to the room was locked and there was no evidence of foul play…He was nominated for a second Grammy in 1978. Winners have yet to be announced.”

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting "doin' the thang" on Basic Black

Basic Black
A Conversation with Author Tracy Sharpley-Whiting

1920 brought women's suffrage. The 1960s gave rise to a new wave of women's liberation and civil rights. Today, a new black gender politics is being shaped by hip-hop, according author and scholar Tracy Sharpley-Whiting. And the results are not necessarily progressive, she says.

In her 2007 book, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip-Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, Sharpley-Whiting, a professor of African American studies at Vanderbilt University in [Nashville], Tenn., writes that the new black gender politics is defined, in some cases, by hip-hop's commercial reliance on images of overexposed young black women.

A Hat-Tip to Echidine of the Snakes

THE CUNY ADDRESS: Fragments of a Feedback Loop (continued)

Mark Anthony Neal speaking at the "Theorizing Blackness Conference" in NYC, April 4th, 2008. Sponsored by the Africana Studies Group, CUNY
(Part 3): R. Kelly and the Soul Man Tradition

THE CUNY ADDRESS: Fragments of a Feedback Loop (continued)

Music-cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal speaking at the "Theorizing Blackness" Conference, April 4th, 2008. Sponsored by the Africana Studies Department of CUNY

"What is Blackness?" (Part 2)

THE CUNY ADDRESS Fragments of Feedback Loop: Blackness in Conversation

The Theorizing Blackness Conference
CUNY Graduate Center
April 4, 2008
(part one)

Kate Beckinsale - 16th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Viewing Party

Kate Beckinsale Profile

Name: Kate Beckinsale

Birth Name: Kate Beckinsale

Height: 5' 8''

Sex: F

Nationality: British

Birth Date: July 26, 1973

Birth Place: London, England, UK

Profession: Actress

Education: Godolphin and Latymer School in London, England
New College, Oxford University in Oxford, England (majored in French and Russian Literature; dropped out after third year)

Husband/Wife: Len Wiseman (director; met while filming Underworld; engaged on June 14, 2003; married on May 9, 2004)

Relationship: Michael Sheen (actor; born on February 5, 1969; together 1995-2003), Edmund Moriarty (dated while at Oxford)

Father: Richard Beckinsale (actor; born on July 6, 1947; married in 1977; died on March 19, 1979 of a heart attack)

Mother: Judy Loe (actress; born on March 6, 1947)

Half Sister: Samantha Beckinsale (actress; born on July 23, 1966; mother: Margaret Bradley)

Step Mother: Margaret Bradley (married in 1965; divorced in 1971)

Daughter: Lily Sheen (born on January 31, 1999; father: Michael Sheen)

Claim to fame: Feature film debut as a heroin in Kenneth Branagh's film version of Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Kate Beckinsale Biography

Kathryn Bailey Beckinsale (born 26 July 1973) is an English actress, known for her roles in the films Pearl Harbor (2001), Van Helsing (2004), and Underworld (2003).

Born in London, Beckinsale was the daughter of actors Judy Loe and Richard Beckinsale, who died from heart attack in 1979. She has a paternal half-sister, Samantha, who is also an actress. Beckinsale's paternal great-grandfather was Burmese, and Beckinsale has said that she was "very oriental-looking" as a child.

Beckinsale attended the private Godolphin and Latymer School, an all-girls independent school in London. In her teens, Beckinsale twice won the W. H. Smith Young Writers' competition — once for three short stories and once for three poems. After a rebellious adolescence, including a period of anorexia and starting a smoking habit, she followed in the footsteps of her parents and began her acting career. Her first role was in One Against the Wind, a television film about World War II that was first aired in 1991. Having gained three language A levels, Beckinsale studied French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford, though she did not finish her degree. She thought that having an academic background studying foreign language and literature would broaden her range of acting roles.

During her first year at Oxford, Beckinsale was offered a part in Kenneth Branagh's big-screen film, Much Ado About Nothing, adapted from the Shakespeare play. She spent her last year of studies in Paris, after which she decided to quit the university and concentrate on her acting career. Kate starred in a 1996 TV film adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. She subsequently appeared in a few low-profile films, including Shooting Fish and The Last Days of Disco (both in 1998). During this time, Beckinsale also appeared in television films and in stage roles, including the well-received Cold Comfort Farm, opposite British silver and small screen notables Rufus Sewell, Eileen Atkins, Joanna Lumley and Stephen Fry.

Her first major American film, Brokedown Palace (1999), was not a commercial success. Soon after, Beckinsale was cast in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor as the female lead, after actress Charlize Theron turned down the part. The film was one of the highest grossing films of its year. In the years following, she appeared in a series of American films that were high-profile, but were given a somewhat poor critical reception, including Serendipity (2001), Underworld (2003) and Van Helsing (2004). Notably, she appeared as Ava Gardner in The Aviator, a role for which she gained 20 pounds.

In Conversation: Stephane Dunn, Author of BAAD BITCHES AND SASSY SUPERMAMAS

In Conversation: Stephane Dunn
Author of Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Fantasies
(University of Illinois Press, The New Black Studies Series, edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight McBride)

Wednesday April 16, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
at the John Hope Franklin Center

Duke University

2204 Erwin Road
Room 240


About BAAD BITCHES AND SASSY SUPERMAMAS

This lively study unpacks the intersecting racial, sexual, and gender politics underlying the representations of racialized bodies, masculinities, and femininities in early 1970s black action films, with particular focus on the representation of black femininity. Stephane Dunn explores the typical, sexualized, subordinate positioning of women in low-budget blaxploitation action narratives as well as more seriously radical films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and The Spook Who Sat by the Door, in which black women are typically portrayed as trifling "bitches" compared to the supermacho black male heroes. The terms "baad bitches" and "sassy supermamas" signal the reversal of this positioning with the emergence of supermama heroines in the few black action films in the early 1970s that featured self-assured, empowered, and tough (or "baad") black women as protagonists: Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, and Foxy Brown.

Dunn offers close examination of a distinct moment in the history of African American representation in popular cinema, tracing its emergence out of a radical political era, influenced especially by the Black Power movement and feminism. "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas also engages blaxploitation's impact and lingering aura in contemporary hip-hop culture as suggested by its disturbing gender politics and the "baad bitch daughters" of Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones, rappers Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown.

About STEPHANE DUNN

Stephane Dunn is a visiting assistant professor of English at Morehouse College.

***

Sponsored by the "Center for the Study of Black Popular Culture" and the Program in Study of Sexualities

Who You Calling Uppity?: A View on "Bitter-gate"

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

Obama Elitist? I'm Hearing Something Else
by Mark Anthony Neal

So in a recent conversation, Barack Obama tried a little too hard to make that connection between the disaffection of the white working class and the white poor, and their proclivity to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" as a way to make meaning of the diminishing returns of their lives. Guns and religion and "the other," the Senator from Illinois argued were the comfort foods of choice for many. The fact that Obama suggested that some folk in these communities might be tad bitter, should not in and of itself raise any eyebrows, but the speed and derision that the presumptive (I'm sick of this word) Republican nominee John McCain and New York Senator Hillary Clinton asserted that Obama's comments were "demeaning" and Obama, himself, out of touch, suggests that there is something else at play.

There's no small irony that two of the wealthiest members of the Senate would describe a former community organizer as out of touch. But McCain and Clinton's responses have nothing to do with the black and brown urban poor that Obama broke bread with in Illinois, but rather the white working poor and working class in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where high-wage jobs are scarce and hope, increasingly even scarcer. I would argue that none of the candidates, including Senator Obama, are really in touch with what's happening in small town America.

For instance, look how middle-class Philadelphia suburbanites have suddenly become the charmed constituency in the forthcoming Pennsylvania primary. Indeed Senator McCain as recently as at three weeks ago argued vehemently that the Federal Government should not alleviate the financial woes of those in the very communities that Obama talked about, who are losing their homes in record numbers. Bitter? I bet more than few in those communities are bitter in response to the Federal Government's essential bailout of Bear Sterns.

Read the Full Essay

Hearing (Thinking) Black Death

from CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Hearing (Thinking) Black Death
by Mark Anthony Neal

The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson's new book April 4, 1968 reads: "You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death," to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There's a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death. Perhaps more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death--the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments--all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it's been in the province of black creative expression--Black Genius more broadly--that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea death, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right.

When the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 "Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?" it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle. "Were You There?" was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang its words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible.

Read Full Essay

O-Dub and NewBlackMan Live Blogged!

courtesy of Cat in the Stack @ HASTAC

Oliver Wang and Mark Anthony Neal:
CULTURAL CRITICISM 2.0
“How Do You Filter the Infinite?”

MAN opens the conversation by asking "What would Oliver be doing in 2008 if not for the internet?" OW says "I can't even imagine what the world would look like without the internet."

OW's music journalism began in the 1990s, including in the pre-internet era, on the early UseNet usergroups. (For non-geeks who don't know what that was, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet).
"Growing up Asian American, there was no organic musical tradition I could identify with. My dad listened to Simon and Garfunkel . . . My friends and I latched on to New Wave. And then Hip Hop, through the Alternative Rock station (which would be anathema today). I went out and bought Three Feet High and Rising."

The mobile Filipino mobile dj culture in the Bay Area really takes off in the 1990s. What did it mean? What was it about? It's the subject of the book OW is doing for Duke U Press.

MAN asks what is the reaction of these dj's to being studied? OW says no one had ever really studied them before, no one had documented this history, no one had ever bothered to ask them about their experiences . . . esp the relationship between their dj'ing and being Filipino. They hadn't really thought about race and ethnicity and their music, and his questions made the dj's think about that. The younger dj's now are very aware of these issues, the issues are much more a part of their culture today.

MAN: At one time, people went to the Village Voice for cultural critidism, now, in the very competitive internet scene of music journalism, what kind of questions are you being asked to explain?

OW says that in his experience he hasn't really had to account for being Asian writing on soul and hip hop because of the multicultural nature of the Bay Area (and forerunners like Jeff Chang).

Read More

Poet Ed Pavlic Reads from Winners Are Not Yet Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 @ 7pm
@ the John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2204 Erwin Road

Poetry Reading and Discussion








Award-Winning Poet Ed Pavlic reads from his new collection of poetry
Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway


About Winners Have Yet to be Announced

This moving collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway's life.

Among mainstream audiences Hathaway is perhaps best known either as the syrupy voice singing with Roberta Flack in "Where Is the Love" or for his shocking death-he was found dead beneath the open thirteenth-story window of his New York hotel room in 1979 at the age of thirty-three. Less well known are the depth of his classical and gospel training, his wide-ranging intellectual interests, and the respect his musical knowledge, talent, and versatility commanded from collaborators like Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin. Meanwhile, among listeners with special affinity for soul music of the 1970s, even almost thirty years after his death, no voice burns with the intensity of Hathaway's own in the great solo ballads and freedom songs such as "A Song for You," "Giving Up," "Someday We'll All Be Free," and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."

Winners Have Yet to Be Announced pushes poetry toward the rich characterization and depth of a novel. Yet it is the capacity of poetic language that allows the book to examine Donny Hathaway's vivid and remarkable life without attempting to resolve the mysteries within which he lived and created and sang.

Praise for Winners Are Not Yet Announced

"Ed Pavlic shapes the ineffable (some call it Duende, some call it Soul) into a language haunting the borders of the sayable and unsayable, the sung and unsung. He casts Hathaway as Orpheus searching 'for an opening between need and can't have and have and can't need.' Winners Have Yet to Be Announced is a meditation on our own between-ness: our wish to be rooted pulling against our wish to transcend. It is a visionary book."
—Terrance Hayes, author of Wind in a Box

"To capture the monumental paradoxes and prismatic genius of Donny Hathaway, one must have an epic imagination and a sense of language that flames in poetry toward transcendent truth. Ed Pavlic rises to the task admirably. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced is a book of breathtaking literary and intellectual invention, a searing, soulful exploration of the songs and silences 'and the unforgiving pains and desperations, and the demons and disharmonies too' that tracked Hathaway into sonic immortality. Finally Hathaway's musical and moral legacy is matched with a metaphoric intensity that honors the master's splendidly unique creativity." —Michael Eric Dyson, author of April 4, 1968

"Donny Hathaway traced the lonely line between gospel and the blues and tried to tell us that 'Someday We'll All Be Free,' though in the end he was perhaps unable to believe it himself. Pavlic's compelling meditation on Hathaway allows us to see how grace can grow in the cracks of city sidewalks and redemption may catch us even when we leap from its grasp."--Timothy B. Tyson, author of Blood Done Sign My Name

About Ed Pavlic

Ed Pavlic is associate professor of English and director of the MFA/PhD program in creative writing at the University of Georgia. His previous books of poems are Labors Lost Left Unfinished and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, which was selected by Adrienne Rich for the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. He has also published a scholarly work, Crossroads Modernism, on African American literary culture.

Sponsored by the “Center for the Study of Black Popular Culture” and the Department of English

Kirsten Dunst Photo Shoot Pics

Kirsten Dunst Profile

Birth Name - Kirsten Caroline Dunst

Born - April 30, 1982, Point Pleasant, New Jersey, USA

Height - 5' 7

Education - Notre Dame High School, a private Catholic high school, in Los Angeles (graduated in May 2000)

Nationality - American

Profession - Actress

Claim to fame - as Claudia in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)

Years active 1989 - present

Kirsten Dunst Biography

Kirsten Caroline Dunst (born April 30, 1982) is an American actress, known for her roles in Interview with the Vampire (for which she received a Golden Globe nomination), The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and Bring It On, as well as for her portrayal of Mary Jane Watson in the Spider-Man film series.

Dunst was born in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, to Inez and Klaus Dunst, who are separated. Her father, a German medical services executive from Hamburg, remained in New Jersey but now lives in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, a Swedish former art gallery owner, also moved to California. Dunst has a younger brother, Christian.

Dunst attended the Ranney School in New Jersey, and graduated in 2000 from Notre Dame High School, a private Catholic high school in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles.