Panel Discussion on Racial Profiling @ NCSU

Racial Profiling: The Effects of Distrust
Panel Discussion

Tuesday September 1, 2009 @ 7pm

North Carolina State University
African American Cultural Center
126 Witherspoon Student Center
Washington Sankofa Room


Panelists

Mark Anthony Neal, Duke Professor of African & African American Studies
Steve Carlton, NCSU Crime Prevention Officer
Rick DellaFave, NCSU Professor of Sociology
Derrick Harris, NCSU Public Safety Officer
Richard Potts, NCSU Police Officer
Melvin Thomas, NCSU Associate Professor of Sociology
Marquis McCullough, NCSU senior in Science Education
Moderator, Traciel Reid, NCSU Associate Professor of Public International Affairs


Co-sponsors

Student Government, University Scholars Program, The Office for Equal Opportunity, Campus Police, and the Office for Diversity and Inclusion


Questions?
Contact: Marcia Gumpertz at gumpertz@ncsu.edu or (919) 515-7826

www.ncsu.edu/diversity

A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and Political Will in the Post-Katrina Era

Lower 9th Ward (October 2008)



Originally Delivered as the W.E.B. DuBois Lecture @ George Mason University in February of 2009

Haunting the (Political) Waters:

A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and Political Will in the Post-Katrina Era

by Mark Anthony



"Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more”

—Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues



Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, four years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests access to certain economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. Such terms, ironically did little to provide media commentators pundits any more insight into the complexities of the moment or the literal landscape in which the moment evolved. As Darwin Bond Graham writes in his essay, “The New Orleans that Race Built,” despite efforts to shorthand New Orleans, the city “remains an assemblage of terrains imbued with so much meaning, nesting so much struggle and power, history and community.” (Graham)



And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. (Tuakli-Wosornu) What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world? What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed four years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.



When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. (Mosley) And why would they? The everyday realities of New Orleans citizens prior to Hurricane Katrina stood in stark contrast to America’s view of itself, particualry before the recent finacial crisis. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, nearly 20% of the city’s 450,000 residents live below the so-called poverty line. Within the black community in the city, about 30% of that popular was below the poverty threshold, though the national average for Black Americans was abouy 25%. (Durant) The national poverty levels for all Americans was 12.7% in the year before Hurricane Katrina. (Leonhardt) In otherwords, the black poor in New Orleans–based on a statistical map that captures little of the challegnes faced by those just above the poverty line—represented nearly three times the rate experienced by the average poor American.



For those in which there was a regular, if not fully livable wage, tourism was the city’s primary industry, much of it related to the activities of The French Quarter and seasonal events like Mardi Gras, the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the occasional Super Bowl. The livelihoods of many of the city’s working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry. In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States. As Lynell Thomas writes, the city’s tourist industry “invites white visitors to participate in a glorified Southern past. Black residents, if they appear at all in this narrative, appear as secondary characters who are either servile or exotic—always inferior to whites and never possessing agency over their own lives.” (Thomas) Thus perceptions of of the black poor on display at the the New Orleans Convention Center or in the Louisana Superdome were framed by a national imagination that had historically viewed them as service workers or at best, entertainers. In many ways, the coverage of Hurricane Katrina survivors functioned as little more than a national travelogue.



The role of New Orleans’s black citizens in the tourism economy of the city prior to Hurricane Katrina, helps better frame the emotional distance and lack of empathy that seemed palpable in much of the early media coverage of storm. Political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell observes that the regular coverage of Hurricane Katrina was only matched by the real time coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks in allowing a shared national experience of trauma. As Harris-Lacewell writes, “Rather than a single, terrible moment replayed for the media, the horror of New Orleans increased daily, produced new images of agony and death, and generated increasingly awful narratives of suffering.” Yet as Harris-Lacewell argues, there was a discernable distance between how white and black citizens viewed the effects of the tragedy and the extent that white citizens were willing to empathize with their black counterparts (Harris-Lacewell) I’d like to argue that this disconnect, while fueled by the realities racially biased structures, including the national media, was also the product of the inability for many audiences, including African-Americans, to fully invest in the idea that the black poor in New Orleans were truly citizens. This dynamic became critically clear, as Katrina survivors were dispersed throughout the country, desiring sanctuary to often disparate locales.



What the Black Katrina poor represented was a segment of the national population that had been largely isolated—politically, and otherwise. Stephanie Houston Grey suggest that the that very infrastructure in cities like New Orleans was “designed to isolate both ethnic and economic from one another by creating a protective membrane around the privileged to shield them from those less desirable. Thus the federal response was not simply an aberration of administrative policy, but a logical extension of existing urban rationality.” Issues of containment became palapable in national media coverage as black hurricane Katrina survivors became the embodiment,according to Houston Grey, of a “moral panic…leading to media hyperbole that feeds fear and hysteria, provoking a police response that is out of proportion to the actual threat that may or may not be posed.” (Houston Grey) Thus the human misery that crusted and festered over in the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center was not viewed in the popular realm as a failure on the part of the State (at least at the time), but the failure of the infrastructure to keep such black bodies contained.



In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State—via active political isolation—are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects. Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Nwankwo argues that “the denial of access for people of African descent to cosmopolitan subjectivity coexisted with a denial of access for that same population to both national subjectivity and human subjectivity…effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent.” (Nwankwo) Thus the naming and misnaming of black Katrina survivors was as much an effort to deny them relief—as relevant in a natural disaster as it has been historically in relation to pursuing of legal recourse for racial and gender discrimination—as it was an attempt to dictate from above how those particular black bodies and all the black bodies who were forced to account for the images those black bodies projected, would be interpreted as political subjects.



Nwankwo’s notion that the collapsing of cosmopolitan possibilities is related to efforts to limit the breadth and diversity of black identity is particularly compelling in an era where black identities are intensely wedded to racial truisms, that while often legitimized by some of the most visible (and highly compensated) “celebrities”—Michael Vick, R. Kelly, Whitney Houston, O.J. Simpson and William “Flava Flav” Drayton to name a few and indeed the images that were transmitted from New Orleans—often distort the realities of contemporary black identity. For example, like most major urban areas, New Orleans contained sizable immigrant communities made up of African nationals and Afro-Caribbeans, which were reflective of the historic ethnic diversity of the city. Most media outlets glossed over the complexity of black identity in those days and weeks after Katrina’s landing, in part because such complexities challenge corporate media’s desires to manage evolving news stories. More broadly though, the mainstream press and the mainstream public at large, has rarely been willing to grant black bodies such complexity, choosing instead to embrace “exceptional” blacks, often at the expense of the black masses. For example, President Barack Obama’s success in the Presidential election, might be viewed within the context of his own status as an “exceptional” black.



In his memoir We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, Malian scholar film scholar Manthia Diawara tells the story of spending a recent sabbatical in Paris. Concerned about the historic treatment of Africans in the city, Diawara wore his Black American Intellectual status on his sleeve, but when stopped by a pair of law enforcement officers who rifled through his bag only to find his Malian passport, he was symbolically undressed. The passport was evidence in the minds of the officers that Diawara was just another African—another nigga—and thus not deserving of the common courtesies extended to citizens or visitors for that matter. Diawara’s exchange with the police was prefaced by a conversation with the cab driver, also an African, whose cab he was in when Diawara were stopped by the police. “Where are you originally from?” the driver queried Diawara in response to Diawara’s earlier claim that he was from the United States.” (Diawara)Seemingly an innocent question, in many ways it was meant to demean Diawara’s site of origin and to undermine any privilege associated with his cosmopolitan identity. If a major Black American Intellectual can undressed in such a fashion, what can be said of those whose cosmopolitanism isn’t clothed in class and ethnic privilege.



Indeed, I can’t imagine that there isn’t a day when the Katrina Generation, as it is dispersed throughout the country and denied access to its “homeland,” is not faced with the like-minded query: “Where are you really from?” For all of the good will offered to Katrina transplants and in light of Barbara Bush’s ridiculous claim that they had bettered their fortunes, the reality is that many municipalities viewed Katrina survivors as a further burden on already overtaxed resources. But the Katrina-Politians are citizens of the world, by the vestige of their humanity, and they have every right to make claims on that citizenship, wherever they choose or are forced to lay their heads. Clyde Woods makes a finer point here, “In the blink of an eye, African Americans, and identity fraught with ambiguity, were transformed into black people, a highly politicized identity.” (Woods)





Haunting the Waters, Troubling National Memory



There’s a certain haunting presence about Trouble the Water, the award winning and Academy Award nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina. It’s a presence that is immediately felt by anybody who has had the chance to journey across the city of New Orleans in the past few years. While tourists travel about downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter blandly commenting on the limited hours of some of the city’s more authentic haunts, and the Lower 9th Ward continues to serve as the most lasting monument of the destruction, portions of the city remain a decidedly barren reminder of the vibrant living cultures that once existed in the city. Of course where there is no people, there is no culture and the slow pace of recovery in the city suggest that something more sinister might be in play. Nevertheless, if Hurricane Katrina offered the rationale for what might be the only most contemporary example of ethnic cleansing in the United States, then the power of Trouble the Water comes from its brazen ability to summon the voices and spirits of those—who by force or choice—have not returned. As such Trouble the Water is a striking intervention, for a city that lacks the bodies—and the political wills that such bodies possess.



Trouble the Water tells the story of Kim Roberts, a 24-year-old New Orleans resident and aspiring rapper and her husband Scott, as Roberts documents their experiences before and after the hurricane on a hand-held video camera. Produced in collaboration with Tai Leeson and Carl Deal, the very fact that the film exists speaks to the economic realities of so many Katrina Survivors. As Rivers told the Brooklyn Rail, “We’d run out of money. We had about a hundred dollars left, and we was like, “We ought to try to see what we could do with this tape; we might find somebody we could give this tape to; well not give it, but either sell it, or license…you know, see what it’s worth.” (Cole) Robert’s comments capture the DIY ethic that has informed hip-hop geneartion expression, but also taps into more traditional African-American sensibilities that can be best captured in the notion of “make a way out of no way.” (Neal) If we think about survival as distinctly improvisational mode of navigating in the world, Trouble the Water finds it grounding by harnessing the rhythms of black improvisation via Robert’s audio and visual narration.



There’s a telling scene early in the film, when Roberts travels the streets of New Orleans alone shortly before the storm and sings to herself “On My Own” in reference to the Patti LaBelle recording. Seemingly a random utterance, the reference would have a particular resonance to African-American audiences familiar with Labelle, who possesses iconographical stature in many black communities. Mirroring the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop, the film is littered with such references, offering audiences the possibility of gaining greater literacy in Black New Orleans culture and African-American culture more broadly. In another example the Roberts’s family dog is named “Kizzy” in reference to a popular character from the groundbreaking miniseries Roots. Within black vernacular expression, the term has been utilized as a metaphor for overburdened black women. In fact, Robert’s deployment of African-American vernacular culture as part of the metaphorical shelter that she and her comrades construct in response to Hurricane Katrina helps establish Roberts as the most credible intellectual agent in the film, despite her claim early in the film that she was the “only stupid nigga who stayed.” Robert’s use of black vernacular culture is akin to what Woods more formally describes as the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation.” According to Woods, “the blues began as a unique intellectual movement that emerged among desperate African-American communities in the midst of the ashes of the Civil War, Emancipation, and the overthrow of Reconstruction.” More specifically in the context of Roberts’s narration, Trouble the Water, “draws on African-American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working class communities facing severe fragmentation.” (Woods)



Roberts’s narration of Trouble the Water is also notable because it illuminates the gendered realities of Katrina survivors. That Roberts is an aspiring hip-hop artist, using rap music—a decidedly male centered cultural space—as a vehicle to express the specificity of her life as a black women, speaks to the extent that Trouble the Water succeeds in disturbing “official” readings of black urban life. Though Roberts does not openly discuss some of the specific challenges faced by women survivors of Katrina, her visibility in the film’s narrative allows for productive speculation about what exactly those challenges were. In a city in which more than half of the adult female population were single mothers, black women were particularly vulnerable to the economic and physical displacement experienced by many Katrina survivors. In addition issues of child care and parenting, for a population typically overburdened by such, were made tragically more difficult. Kathleen Bergin, suggest though, that it was the submergence of sexualized violence disproportionately experienced by black women that particularly highlights the gendered dynamics of the storm. Ironically the circulation of false rumors about bands of black male rapists—directly related to the production of Katrina survivors as “moral panic”—undermined what were legitimate cases of sexual violence and rape against black women. According to Bergin, “To deny the violently sexualized reality of Katrina on account of previous false reporting only compounds the horror of the storm for both black men and black women.” Ultimately Bergin holds the State at fault for its failure to anticipate a well known phenomenon: “The reality of gender specific violence, particularly sexual assault, is so predictable during times of catastrophic upheaval that major human rights instruments that address the needs of refugees and displaced persons…presume a heightened risk to women.” (Bergin)



When queried as to why she decided to carry a hand-held video during the storm, Roberts told the Brooklyn Rail, “I decided to film because I realized we weren’t going to be able to leave—that was the fact. And just in case it happened like how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to film it, just in case we died. I didn’t want to go out like that. With all I had been through my whole life, I always felt to some degree that my life was meaningful and that I was put here for a reason. If I died, people gonna know how I died. So to some degree, I was feeling like my legacy should live on and people would know what had happened to us. “ Though Roberts and her husband survive the hurricane, Trouble the Water still serves as tribute to those who were lost in the storm and I’d like to suggest the film serves as a kind of “second line” performance—the parade of dancing, shuffling bodies that occurs, often after a funeral. According to musician Michael White, “at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community an euphoric transformation into a temporary world characterized by free open participation and self expression through sound, movement and symbolic visual statements.” White adds that “impositions and limitations of ‘second class’ social status could be replaced by a democratic existence in which one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the normal world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic.” (White) As such Trouble the Water serves as a critical intervention into a national memory that would rather ignore the cultural gifts that New Orleans gave the young country, the dead bodies that were sacrificed in the midst of catastrophic circumstances, as well as the possibility of rebirth that the Katrina-Politians embody.

Works Cited



Bergin, Kathleen. "Witness: The Racialized Gender Implications of Katrina." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 173-190.



Cole, Williams. "Rising Above the Flood." September 2008. The Brooklyn Rail. 26 January 2009.



Diawara, Manthia. We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003.



Durant, Thomas J. and Sultan, Dawood. "The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Race and Class Divide in America." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000. 193-194.



Graham, Darwin Bond. "The New Orleans that Race Built." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and Public Policy Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 18.



Harris-Lacewell, Melissa. "Do You Know What It Means...?: Mapping Emotion in the Aftermath of Katrina." Marable, Mannning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 153-171.



Houston Grey, Stephanie. "(Re) Imagining Ethnicity in the City of New Orleans." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 131.



Leonhardt, David. "U.S. Poverty Rate Was Up Last Year ." The New York Times 31 August 2005.



Mosley, Walter. "Shouting Underwater." The Nation 23 August 2007.



Neal, Mark Anthony Neal. ""...A Way Out of No Way": Jazz, Hip-Hop and Black Social Improvisation." Fischlin, Daniel and Heble, Ajay. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Wesleyan Press, 2004. 195-223.



Nwankwo, Ifeoma. Black Cosmopolitan: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.



Thomas, Lynell. "The City I Used to...Visit." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Plagrave, 2008. 256.



Tuakli-Wosornu, Taiye. "The New Africans Called Afro-Politans." 30th August 2007. The Zeleza Post. 25 January 2009 .



White, Michael. "New Orleans African American Musical Traditions." Marable, Manning and Clarke, Kristen. Seeking Higher Ground. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. 87-106.



Woods, Clyde. "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues." American Quarterly (December 2005): 1005.

Office Hours Now Open!

Channeling Womack

Channeling Womack
by Mark Anthony Neal

Facts of Life: The Soul of Bobby Womack, finds R&B crooner Calvin Richardson at a career crossroads. A decade into his recording career, Richardson has not quite lived up to the glimpses of promise exhibited on his stellar, if uneven debut Country Boy (1999) and it’s follow-up, 2:35 PM which was released on Disney’s Hollywood Label in 2003. On the surface, covering the songs of Bobby Womack, a newly minted member of the Rock & Roll Hall Fame, might not seem like the best strategy for a 30-something R&B singer trying to find his footing in the world Auto-tune.

Mentored by brothers and former Jodeci lead singers KC and Jo-Jo Hailey early in his career, Richardson and his decidedly down-home sound never quite found an audience—he was dropped from Universal after the release of Country Boy, as was the case with 2:35 PM. Richardson’s best chance at a mainstream following occurred with his cameo on Angie Stone’s “More Than a Woman” which appeared on Stone’s Mahogany Soul (2001). When the song was released as a single and subsequently nominated for a Grammy Award, Richardson’s vocals were inexplicably replaced by Joe’s, the by-product of the break-up of a long rumored romance between Richardson and Stone. When Richardson released his third project When Love Calls on the independent Shanachie label last year, he was worse than an afterthought; he had been forgotten.

Like Johnny Gill more than two decades ago Calvin Richardson’s sound consistently undermines his appeal to the age demographic that record labels think he should be pitched to. Simply put, Richardson sounds like an old man—more Bobby “Blue” Bland and Sam Cooke, than Akon or Usher. And yet despite the same limitations, Richardson’s contemporary Anthony Hamilton has managed to survive and even thrive because his label has allowed him to write songs that highlight his strengths as an artist. I suspect that Richardson was drawn to Womack, because he has lost some faith in his own songwriting skills—one of the clear strengths of his first two releases, despite their meager sales figures.

Within the history of Soul music, Womack is one of the more compelling figures. Mentored by the greatest of all Soul singers Sam Cooke, Womack’s longevity, like that of Ronald Isley, is remarkable. Womack has sustained himself , in part, because of his skills as a songwriter; Womack’s music has been recorded by artists as diverse as the Rolling Stones, George Benson, the J. Geils Bands, KC Hailey, the New Birth (whose version of “I Can Understand It" might trump Womack’s) and most recently Leela James, who offers a brilliant cover of Womack’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” on her latest Let’s Do It Again. Perhaps more important than Womack’s songwriting, is the fact that he is simply a fabulous storyteller—peerless within the tradition of Soul music save the example of Bill Withers. Not quite there yet himself, Facts of Life allows Richardson to find a muse—a musical mentor if you will—that gives his voice meaning.

Richardson is no stranger to Womack’s music covering his “I Wish You Didn’t Trust Me So Much” on Country Boy. The title track, “Fact of Life/He’ll Be There When the Sun Goes” is a somewhat obscure track from Womack that gets to the essence of heartbreak and disappointment (and shame) that fuels his best music. The song presents a first-person narrative of Womack’s experiences on the road, away from his family and seeking company from a female fan. In the story Womack is offended when the woman mistakes his desire for companionship, for an attempt to simply have sex with her. Given the mythology surrounding performers and so-called “groupies”, “Fact of Life/He’ll Be There When the Sun is Gone” offers a unique point of view that highlights the vulnerability experienced by many popular performers. It the kind of vulnerability that is often missing in contemporary R&B, particularly among male vocalists—Maxwell notwithstanding—but that Richardson own vocal prowess consistently evokes. Richardson wears Womack’s vulnerabilities well and manages to make them his own.

On most of the cuts, Facts of Life’s production and arrangements hold on to the integrity of Womack’s original recordings. As such, Richardson’s choices are fairly conservative—tracks like “That’s the Way I Feel About Cha,” “Across 110th Street,” “Harry Hippie” and “I Can Understand It” would be on any introductory collection of Womack’s music. Richardson finds more interesting material from Womack’s often neglected later period (at least by mainstream Rock critics), recording a version Womack and Patti Labelle’s sweet balled “Love Has Finally Come at Last” with Ann Nesby and “American Dream,” Womack’s homage to Martin Luther King, Jr. Both tracks appeared on Womack’s Poet II (1984) recording. Still Richardson manages to stay away from what is perhaps Womack’s most well known tune “If You Think You’re Lonely Now” and that's probably a good thing.

Facts of Life: The Soul of Bobby Womack, breaks no new ground, but it is a deserving tribute to one of the most distinctive Soul voices of the last 50 years—and it just might make a forgotten R&B crooner from this generation, matter again.

Mark Anthony Neal Holds Online "Office Hours"

Mark Anthony Neal to Discuss Musical and Cultural Legacy of Michael Jackson in Online 'Office Hours'

The conversation takes place at noon Friday, Aug. 28, on the Duke University Ustream channel.

Pop icon Michael Jackson, diversity in baseball and why this is an exciting time for scholars of black culture will be among the topics discussed during a live webcast with Mark Anthony Neal, a Duke professor of African and African American Studies. This latest installment of Duke’s new online "office hours” series will begin at noon EDT Friday, Aug. 28.

Neal is the author of the book “New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity” and wrote the main essay for “Hello World - The Complete Motown Solo Collection,” a 3-CD box collection of Michael Jackson solo recordings released between 1971 and 1975. He is currently writing album notes for a collection of unreleased Jackson 5 master recordings. (Jackson would have celebrated his 51st birthday on Aug. 29.)

Viewers can submit questions in advance or during the session by email to live@duke.edu, on the Duke University Live Ustream page on Facebook or via Twitter with the tag #dukelive. The program will run live on Duke’s Ustream channel.

In recent months, Neal has addressed such issues as the lack of black players in Major League Baseball and how President Obama’s election provides ample opportunities to advance discussions around issues of race.

“The Obama presidency is akin, for some, to having the first black family move into an all-white neighborhood,” Neal wrote in Duke Magazine last spring. “… this bodes well for those of us who make meaning in both the mundane and the exceptional in African-American life and culture. There's little doubt in my mind that Obama's presidency -- and its long-term influence and implications -- will usher in an exciting period in the study of black popular culture. It also promises to provide an unprecedented opportunity, and inspiration, for black artists and entertainers, as they scout and interpret new cultural terrain.”

Neal is the author of four books, including “Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation” (2003), and co-edited, with Murray Forman, “That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader” (2004). His essay, “Music: Bodies in Pain,” on the music of R&B artists Linda Jones and Keyshia Cole, was published in the collection “Best African American Essays 2009”.

He was also a frequent commentator for NPR and contributes to several online media outlets, including NewsOne.com, TheRoot.com and TheGrio.com. He regularly updates his own blog with essays written by other scholars and himself.

Duke’s Office of News and Communications launched Online Office Hours series on July 31 with economist Dan Ariely, the best-selling author of “Predictably Irrational.” Last Friday’s guest was David Goldstein, director of the Center for Human Genome Variation at Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.

Protecting Caster Semenya's Humanity

Results of the gender investigation aside, Caster Semenya’s humanity has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.

Semenya's Race and Sex Struggle
by Kai Wright

What stood out most as Caster Semenya faced reporters at last week’s track and field world championships was that she’s just a kid. Baby-faced and leery, she parceled out answers to ostensibly innocuous questions. “What was your running background before this year?” But a more insidious query lurked for the teen: What kind of freak are you, anyway? That’s the real question the world wants South Africa’s new star athlete to answer.

The International Association of Athletics Federations has demanded Semenya, who won the 800-meter gold last week, submit to a sex test; bookies are taking bets on the results. But whatever the IAAF’s shameless doctors conclude, the verdict about Semenya is already in—she’s a monster. What remains is to determine what type of monster we’re gawking at. A hermaphrodite? An intersexual? A genetic boy whose parents raised him as a girl? Or just a mannish woman, after all?

If “science” concludes the latter, Semenya can keep her medal. Her humanity, however, has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Generation Next and Campus Activism

Free speech "zones," police crackdowns threaten to muzzle debate
by Sam Wardle

Haley Koch is a senior at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a Morehead-Cain scholar and a graduate of Sidwell Friends, a northeastern high school that counts Chelsea Clinton and Gore Vidal among its alumni. Koch has received numerous UNC-CH awards for her work as an LGBT activist and community organizer. In mid-April, she accepted the Engaged Scholarship Award on behalf of UNC-NOW, a grassroots student group Koch works with.

A few days later, on April 23, she garnered another distinction: She was arrested by campus police outside of a classroom.

Koch is charged with disorderly conduct in connection with the now-infamous April 18 protest of a speech by former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo in UNC-CH's Bingham Hall. That night, left-leaning students protested Tancredo's anti-immigrant positions with a "dance party for diversity" that devolved into a raucous rally. Campus police used pepper spray and waved a crackling Taser to disperse a crowd of protesters from the building, and, after a student outside Bingham Hall shattered a window, Tancredo fled campus with a ragtag band of protesters running behind him, shouting insults. He barely had a chance to speak.

The incident report filed by Koch's arresting officer is riveting. Officer Michael Davis wrote of being ordered to wait outside the Frederick Brooks building where Koch's class was in session and then to proceed with the arrest when she left early. Incidentally, the lieutenant who ordered Davis to make the arrest is the same officer Koch has accused of throwing her to the ground at the protest. "For her comfort, I allowed KOCH to remove her backpack before placing her in handcuffs," Davis wrote. Koch was taken to the Orange County Jail in Hillsborough and later freed on $1,000 bond. She goes to court in September.

Koch's predicament wasn't entirely unpredictable, given North Carolina's complicated history of free speech on campus. In the summer of 1963, the General Assembly pushed through the Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers, a nasty piece of Cold War censorship that effectively banned any communist or communist-leaning speakers from state campuses. That law was struck down by the courts five years later, but more recent events at UNC, North Carolina State University and other colleges and universities illustrate that free speech is not as free as it should be.

Read the Full Article @ The Independent Weekly

Race and Housing in Post-Katrina NOLA

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, affordable public housing still isn’t available for many New Orleans residents. How white residents in St. Bernard Parish are keeping blacks out.

Keeping St. Bernard Parish White
by Brentin Mock

St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans, has the distinction in Louisiana of taking the most direct hit from Hurricane Katrina four years ago this week.

In the slow, painful rebuilding that followed, the parish has gone out of its way to keep low-income, working black families from living there. A federal court ruled twice this year—once in March and again last week—that St. Bernard’s attempts at deciding who could move in and who had to stay out were violations of the Fair Housing Act. According to the ruling, the parish’s ordinances were shown to have both a disparate racial impact and discriminatory intent. They wanted to keep black people from living there. A federal judge described the parish’s efforts as “camouflaged racial expressions.”

The St. Bernard debate has resurrected housing segregation concerns and highlighted the ongoing difficulty of trying to implement and prove the benefits of integration in terms of race and class. One commenter on the New Orleans Times-Picayune Web site recently wrote of the St. Bernard court ruling: “Everybody knows that St. Bernard is a white community. I just don’t understand why African Americans would want to move there.”

In the 2000 census, St. Bernard Parish was listed as being 88.29 percent white and only 7.62 percent black. The direct hit from Hurricane Katrina destroyed virtually all of the houses, buildings and other structures in the parish. Among the destruction was Village Square, a cluster of over 100 buildings inhabited mostly by low-income, African-American renters. Parish officials would like to keep Village Square, or anything that resembles it, from ever being built again.

Since Katrina, many residents and the elected leadership of St. Bernard have fought to exclude development of rental properties and multi-family housing units in the parish. After the storm, Craig Taffaro Jr., president of the St. Bernard Parish Council, introduced a “blood-relative ordinance,” which decreed that only immediate family members of local landowners could rent property there—and only from their relatives. With an 88 percent white population which owned 93 percent of the housing stock before the storm, it was pretty clear at whom that ordinance targeted: black people, particularly those dislocated from their homes, and especially those who lived in the demolished public housing projects.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Heritage. Renewal.

Heritage. Renewal. (for my parents)
by Mark Anthony Neal

The night before my father died in February of 2008, I sat in the auditorium at the Nasher Museum in Durham, NC listening to a head-banging public conversation between critic Greg Tate and filmmaker and artist Arthur Jaffa. I went home with many cerebral gifts that evening, not the least of which was an introduction to the music of Imani Uzuri and the brilliant Pierre Bennu produced video for her track “Sun Moon Child.” At the time I couldn’t quite grasp why the song and video were so magical to me.

When I returned back to Durham and my classroom at Duke University 10 days later, I began my class on “The Cultural Politics of Soul” with a screening of the video and nearly collapsed in an emotional release. Still processing, if not yet fully grieving my father’s death, “Sun Moon Child” provided me with the philosophical logic to place his death and his impact on me in proper context.

It’s about the rhythm of the thing and the rhythm is timeless and renewable like the Sun and the Moon. What I understood is that my father’s rhythms—his walk, his southern drawl, his deliberate speed, that damn slewfoot dance of his—we’re all part of my rhythms, in my writing, my public speech patterns, the way I move my body when my daughters tell me that I can’t dance—and it’s their rhythm too; in the baby gurl’s own unique approach to time and the quirkiness that marks my oldest daughter’s curiosity, something like molasses in a cup of rooibos.

It had been sometime since I listened to “Sun Moon Child”—a daily affair last autumn—when I prepared to bury my mother some 18-plus months after my father. My mother didn’t live amongst my rhythms—that was my dad’s province. Her province was the ambition and independence that took her from her momma’s house in Baltimore’s MD in 1958 at age 17 and led her to New York City. That ambition and independence became mine. My mother was neither surprised nor shy about my achievements. Nevertheless, I struggled to find the rhythms--the music to get me through the passing of another parent.

That music came early in the afternoon on August 7th 2009 at a Baltimore going home ceremony presided over by an uncle, auntie and cousin who all ply their trade as men and women of the cloth. The cousin who was there with his children and grandchildren, all products of a once blended family that after two divorces he still claims as one. The second cousins—beautiful songbirds in their own right—who reminded us, as Baraka always does, that the “spirits do not descend until there is music.” The now grown God-sister, whose momma was one of my momma’s best friends, the God-sister who taught me how listen to my own daughters because of what she taught me when she was a toddler. The cousin and uncle—my daddy’s people—who traveled from New York, as in the uncle who taught my daddy how to navigate the streets of New York and the cousin whose momma introduced my momma to my daddy. The aunties and the uncles, all dressed in white, who represent the remaining 6 of the 8. The best friend, who has been either to my left or my right (literally and metaphorically) since we met in 2nd grade some 37 years ago. The wife, who 18 years into this thing, knew everything I felt without me uttering a word. The grandmother—who we funeralized in the same space 19 months earlier, when the four generations of us remaining stood to say goodbye to her singing “I’ll Fly Away” in unison.

11 years earlier, in August of 1998, my mother’s family celebrated the 85th birthday of my grandmother. It was two weeks before the birth of my first daughter, who we adopted a month later. For the occasion I wrote original verse, which was mixed with the lyrics of Duke Ellington’s “Heritage (My Mother, My Father)” Of note were the lyrics to Ellington’s song, which was originally recorded with Jimmy McPhail, though I was introduced to the song some 16 years ago when Nnenna Freelon recorded it. My favorite version was recorded by the late Joe Williams. Anyway, this is Duke:

My mother, the greatest and the prettiest.
My father, just handsome, but the wittiest.

My grand-daddy, natural born proud.
Grandma, so gentle, so fine.
The men before them worked hard and sang loud
About the beautiful women, in this family of mine.

Our homestead, the warmest hospitality.
In me you see, the least of the, family tree personality.
I was raised in the palm of the hand of the very best people in the land.

From sun to sun, their hearts beat as one.
My mother, my father. And Love.

As we left the funeral home that afternoon, and I looked out at all the family and friends in the audience and thought about the many who eloquently sent their condolences (a big up to Facebook). I thought about the families who helped raise me on Fulton avenue in the Bronx, including mama Morgan and that daughter of hers, the famous feminist scribe, who was my first friend. I thought about the teachers at that Seventh Day Adventist school on Forest Avenue, my daddy’s people in Georgia and Connecticut, the men, who I knew would check in on me in a few days, to make sure their boy was ok. And yes, there was music, Ellington’s “Heritage” ringing in my head as if the great bandleader was himself, reminding me about how this thing’s supposed to work.

There’s always a rhythm to this thing. Call it heritage and it's renewable.

Say My Name: Women in Hip-Hop

'Say My Name': Women MCs Tell Their Stories
by Mark Anthony Neal

Say “women in hip-hop” and the conversation is quickly reduced to what is widely known as the genre’s “woman problem.” In the edited collection, Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, co-editor and filmmaker Rachel Raimist writes, “Many of hip-hop’s ‘women problems” come in the monolithic and repetitious representation of hip-hop as simply a sexist male rapper surrounded by an entourage of nameless and faceless gyrating bodies in video after video.” Issues of representations, as expressed by Raimist are at the heart of Say My Name (Women Make Movies) , the Nirit Peled documentary about women and hip-hop.

The film’s opening montage features a cascade of women’s voices, highlighting the lack of available space—sonic and otherwise—allotted to women within the genre. The lives, desires, and struggles of women are literally obliterated in the resulting cacophony as the montage serves as a metaphor for hip-hop’s relationship with women. Raimist cautions that “We must resist and counter the limited views of women in hip-hop… there are many agents of hip-hop and it is the sum of all of our parts to make this a living, breathing, and active culture.”

This limited view of women in hip-hop dates back to the culture’s origins in the Bronx, more than 35 years ago. While much of the culture’s early mythology was driven by larger than life male figures like Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), Afrika Baambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, there were always women involved, even if, for some, only at the level of mimicking performances with hair brushes in front of the mirror as female rap veteran Monie Love recalls in the film. By the early 1980s, there were several visible women rappers including the group Sequence, Sha-Rock (a founding member of the Funky Four Plus One) and Sparky D, though these women were largely on the periphery of mainstream perceptions of rap music and largely treated as little more than novelties within the industry. Accordingly it was a novelty track—a “diss” song—by 14-year-old Lolita Shante Gooden that proved the first significant breakthrough for female rappers. “Roxanne’s Revenge,” by Roxanne Shante (Gooden), was a response to UTFO’s popular “Roxanne, Roxanne” and instigated a string of response records.

In the film, Roxanne Shante recalls popular DJ and producer Marley Marl reaching out to her to record the track and having to tell him that she had to do it quickly, so that she could get back to her laundry chores. It’s a humorous moment in the film, but one that gets at the heart of many of the struggles that women rappers face, trying to balance the demands of the industry and the domestic expectations that society places on them. Roxanne Shante, for example, was a teen-age mother at the height of her popularity in the late 1980s. In this regard, hip-hop is reflection the challenges that many women face in the workforce. The sad irony is that these tensions are ripe for exploration as lyrical content, though few, if any, mainstream female rappers have been able to mine this subject matter with any success.

There was a relative critical mass of female rappers in the late 1980s including MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, and Monie Love. When Queen Latifah and Monie Love collaborated on the popular “Ladies First” and joined forces as the Native Tongues with The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest on “Buddy” expectations were high for female rappers. Unfortunately when hip-hop became the business of “big business” in the early 1990s, the range of images and voices within hip-hop became limited. For female rappers (as well as male rappers) that meant much less focus on their technical skill and more of a focus on the “package.” In this environment, it became a struggle to maintain commercial viability for many female rappers. As MC Lyte notes in Say My Name, “female MCs’s names have always been larger than their record sales.”

In the film, Rah Digga laments that “everybody in the world that I meet, calls me their favorite female MC, but I haven’t been able to drop an album since 2000.” Indeed, at the beginning of the 21st century the so-called video-vixens far outnumbered female rappers in mainstream hip-hop culture. When commentators and activists began to police hip-hop culture on the basis of its sexism and misogyny, women rappers were ironically left out of the fray, excepting the vitriol directed at Lil Kim. Say May Name offers one of the few opportunities for female rappers to weigh in on this particular aspect of the culture. Erykah Badu, for example complains in the film, “I really get tired of people shaking their ass on camera.” Remy Ma takes a contrarian view: “I’d rather see a girl at the end of a video shoot at the trailer [waiting for] her check, than to see her butt-ass naked in strip club counting singles.” The debate aside, one of the strengths of Say My Name is that it does not foreclose views that cut against the film’s more progressive aims.

Of the more compelling stories throughout Say My Name are those of Detroit based rapper Miz Korona and one-time MTV sensation Mystic. Miz Korona recounts being beat down by a male member of her hip-hop crew as she began to generate more attention among local industry types. She was 15 at the time. In the case of Mystic, she recalls using rap to record a track about raped in high school. It was only after recording the track that Mystic finally discussed the attack with her mother—years after the fact. According to Mystic she had a responsibility to tell that story in an effort to show many of hip-hop’s female fans that they have the strength to persevere. As Jean Grae suggest during Say My Name’s closing montage, “The most beautiful music comes from pain and struggles.” Too bad mainstream commercial culture has chosen to ignore much of this music for so long.

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Tyler Perry More Dangerous Than (bad) Rap Music?

Tyler Perry's Gender Problem
by Courtney Young

Tyler Perry has rapidly become the most bankable African-American moviemaking brand in Hollywood and an entrepreneurial heavyweight. The seven feature films he has conceived and produced have earned more than $300 million at the box office, with an average opening-weekend gross of $25 million--no small feat for films with predominately black casts. He credits his creative inspiration for these films, in part, to African-American women. So far, so good--that is, until you see the films.

Perry's films typically follow the same timeworn narrative: a woman experiences abandonment and/or abuse at the hands of a "bad" man; she takes umbrage, lashing out at those closest to her, most notably a "good" man in her life; she experiences a revelatory moment of change; and she ends the film settled down with the good man who promises her a better life.

Though Perry repeatedly references his admiration for and allegiance to African-American women as a foundation of his work, his portrayal of women of color undermines the complexity of their experience through his reductionist approach to his characters and his dependence on disquieting gender politics. Perry may see himself as creating modern-day fairy tales for black women, but what he may not realize is that fairy tales, in general, have never been kind to women.

The crux of Perry's gender problem lies in his reliance on conservative gender politics that eschew a more progressive, inclusive agenda. Each of his films advances nearly the same message to his audience (which is overwhelmingly African-American, female, devoutly Christian and over 30). Be demure. Be strong but not too strong. Too much ambition is a detriment to your ability to find a partner and spiritual health. Female beauty can be dangerous. Let a man be a "man." True female fulfillment is found in the role of wife and/or mother. To this effect, the black church plays a central role in Perry's vision. While the church championed equality during the civil rights movement and was instrumental in fighting for the advancement of African-Americans along the lines of race, it has routinely adopted a more conservative agenda along the lines of gender. In using a traditional religious paradigm as the linchpin for his work and by investing in prevailing gender politics, Perry is proposing an agenda that reinforces rather than revolutionizes the marginalized way that black womanhood has been portrayed in popular culture.

Read the Full Essay @ The Nation

The Soul of Woodstock

As America celebrates Woodstock—that historic counterculture movement—exactly what does it mean for black folks?

Why We Should Celebrate Woodstock
by John Murph

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. Hundreds of thousands of folks journeyed to Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm to hear 32 rock acts, withstanding interminable traffic jams, monsoon-like thunderstorms, mud for days, sub-par sanitary conditions and a dwindling food supply—without resorting to anarchy.

It was—as is evidenced by the plethora of newly released CDs, DVDs, books and movies commemorating that weekend—a seminal moment in rock history. But as we celebrate that historic counterculture movement, exactly what does it mean to black America? For all the post-politicizing of the event, even though it occurred at such a pivotal point in America’s socio-political time (and even more eerie, a week after the Manson murders), Woodstock was a mostly apolitical, escapist affair, save for the implied gestures from Richie Haven’s performance “Freedom/Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” Joan Baez’s introductory story about the Federal Marshals taking her husband, David Harris, into custody for “draft evasion.”

The most overt, if seismic political statement occurred Monday morning, coincidentally as most of the attendees had left. Rocking a white, fringed and beaded leather shirt and a red headscarf, Jimi Hendrix launched into his epochal rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His face expressed a calmness as if he was meditating on his memories of his one-year stint in the Army, the fallen soldiers in the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—all at once. After initially squalling out the melody with cathartic release of a Pentecostal gospel singer, Hendrix infused the National Anthem with an improvisatory explosion, marked by fast-fingered runs, whammy-bar-inducing howls, shrieks; he created sonic missiles as if they were dropped from warplanes above. The two-minute rendering became one of the most defining moments in black American music, if not, popular music, worldwide, as Hendrix manipulated dissonance and consonance.

If the underlying message of the festival was “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music,” surely that would have extended to the legions of black Americans, who were routinely beaten, killed and jailed as they strived for equal rights.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Debating Michael Vick's Return to the NFL

Debt Paid, but No Forgiveness
by Vernon Mitchell

Forgiveness--It is a word that many of us loosely throw around like “love.” We say it, often want and need it at some point in our lives, but do we really mean it or even know what it means? How do we define forgiveness? In the book of Matthew (18:21-22) the disciple Peter asks Christ about forgiveness, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Until seven times?” Christ’s reply was that you should forgive your brother seventy times seven.

That’s a lot.

Michael Vick seems to test some our collective ability to forgive and also to judge one’s actions. Vick was signed by the Philadelphia Eagles yesterday and it has been the top news story across sports media outlets around the country. Moments ago an official press conference was held to publicly announce him as part of the team. Vick, surrounded by Coach Andy Reid and former NFL coach and now mentor, Tony Dungy, made yet another series of apologies for his actions and it still seems to some that is not enough. Nor was the once famed quarterback’s twenty-three months in prison enough. Earlier this morning on ESPN Radio’s “Mike and Mike In the Morning”, they took calls from around the nation and asked people about their thoughts on Vick. The response was overwhelmingly negative if not outright hostile.

Read the Full Essay @ Nat Turner in Bryant Gumbel's Clothing