SomeOthaShip: Production By Georgia Anne Muldrow

Georgia Anne Muldrow and Declaime: SomeOthaShip
Review by David Amidon

Once referred to as the female Madlib, the past year has seen Georgia Anne Muldrow embrace more than just Otis Jackson’s off-kilter style. She is beginning to embrace his qualities of prolificness and diversity as well. Fans and newcomers alike best be prepared for SomeOthaShip sonically, if nothing else, as the Radiohead circa-Amnesiac synths of “WhatCh’allKnowAboutThis?” signal yet another step forward for Muldrow and Declaime’s ever-evolving empire of hip-hop funk. But it’s not just Georgia who’s on a roll here, though she does have plenty of other highlights, like the instrumental “Pad Kontrol”, the faux-symphonics of “fOnk w/ an O”, and “Endure”, or Holy Smokes transplant “Boogie”.

What initially puts this release in a different position than Muldrow and Declaime’s last few projects is the heavy amount of collaboration. There are predictable allegiances on display, like Stones Throw’s MED and Roc ‘C’, as well as fellow soulful rappers Kazi and LMNO. But there are also left field inclusions like Kool G Rap (though his verse is one of the weaker available on the disc) and Prince Po that lend a bit of golden era credibility to music that is largely considered an outsider’s scene.

Read the Full Essay @ Popmatters

Imani Perry on Hip Hop Politics and Poetics

A New “YGRT” Podcast:
Imani Perry on Hip Hop Politics and Poetics

Listen HERE

Who You Calling A BIT*H?

Who You Calling A BIT*H?
A Discussion On Female Roles In Hip-Hop

In every good man's crew, there's at least one good woman bringing balance. Lauryn did so with The Fugees, Bahamadia with Gangstarr Foundation, and Kim with Junior Mafia.

To get a sense of today's Hip-Hop woman and in honor of Women's History month, Hip-Hop Wired facilitated a philosophical breakdown with Rapsody, the first lady of Grammy Award-winning producer 9th Wonder's new label, Jamla, and Treva B. Lindsey, a self-proclaimed “diva feminist” and a Ph.D. candidate in the History and African and African American Studies Department at Duke University where she is assisting a “Sampling Soul” course co-taught by 9th this semester.

Read the Full Interview @ HipHopWired

The Myth of Black Male Privilege?

The Myth of Black Male Privilege?

by Mark Anthony Neal

The question of Black Male Privilege has again resurfaced, seemingly as a counter narrative to annual celebrations of Women’s History Month. Though likely coincidental, the current debate about Black Male Privilege was inspired by a recent lecture by R. L’Heureux Lewis at the Founder’s Day Symposium at his alma mater, Morehouse College. Lewis offered a more streamlined version of his address to NPR’s Michael Martin describing Black Male Privilege as “built-in and often overlooked systematic advantages that center the experience and the concerns of black males while minimizing the power that black males hold.”

This is not a new conversation. In his book Whose Gonna Take the Weight? (2003), Kevin Powell’s critiques of black male sexism, misogyny and violence against black women are largely informed by his realizations of his own gender privilege as a black man. As I wrote in New Black Man (2005), “just because Black men are under siege, in White America, doesn’t mean they don’t exhibit behaviors that do real damage to others, particularly within black communities. What many [folk] want to do is excuse the behavior of black men because of the extenuating circumstances under which black manhood is lived in our society.” In his study of African-American literature, David Ikard highlights the ways that the fiction of Toni Morrison, for example, reveals “the extent to which black men exploit their gender privilege over black women,” often to their own detriment. Indeed, Lewis’s own formulation of Black Male Privilege is deeply indebted to Jewel Woods’s exhaustive and widely circulated “The Black Male Privileges Checklist.”

Nevertheless that idea that black men possess any privilege, is contested. As one commentator on Facebook argued, “the vast majority of African men in America do not exercise ANY privilege over Black women. Black women control THEIR households, and THEIR churches, and refuse to relinquish any of the control in either, clearly exercising their prerogative in both. If a man cannot exercise privilege in the larger society, or in his own home, where would he exercise real privilege and prerogative anywhere? This concept applies to such a very small coterie of Black men that its impact is not even worth discussing.”

In his response to Lewis, Lester Spence, half jokes, “How the hell can black men have privilege if there are more of them in jail than any other population, fewer in school than damn near any other population, and work as the poster child that drives black and non-black political attitudes rightward?” But Spence goes on to offer a recalibration of the debate acknowledging that “The very fact that the "black male crisis" is synonymous with the "black crisis" is a testimony to the way that black male privilege constructs what we think of as "black politics," what we think of as important enough to convene symposiums, to have boycotts and marches, to urge legislation for.”

Push back against the idea of Black Male Privilege is not surprising, particularly in the current economic environment. High rates of unemployment and other economic indices depict the lives of working class and working poor black men as nothing short of dire; the realities of black male incarceration (often premised on hustling) only exacerbate the situation. Indeed charging black men with any kind of gender privilege seems dangerously close to blaming the victim for their conditions. But the height of gender privilege is the refusal or inability to recognize, despite your predicament, that there are others in the black community who are struggling and suffering just as much as you are--and in the context domestic and sexual violence, often at the very hands of the very black men who are decrying their lack of privilege.

In terms of structural realities, Insight: The Center for Community Economic Development’s recent report, “Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future” offers concrete data on the ways that gender privilege manifest itself in the accumulation of wealth on a daily basis. While many think of wealth as in issue that only applies to elites, Insight describes wealth as fundamental to economic security and stability. There has been much attention to the study, written by researcher Mariko Chang, which suggest that single black women have a median wealth of $100, compared to single white women who have a median wealth of over $41,000. To be sure, single black men do not fair much better in comparison to their white male counterparts, but their median wealth of $7,900 is still dramatically greater than that of single black women. Indeed, a few thousand dollars in savings can help stave off the immediate crisis of joblessness, while $100 might get you a week’s worth of groceries.

Perhaps more telling is the comparison between single black women and men with children. According to the Insight report, the median wealth for single black male fathers is $26,000, while for single black women that amount is still only $100. More alarming is that when we take into account the parents of young children—those under the age of 18—the median wealth of single black mothers is $0. Even under those conditions black men fare significantly better than their black women peers, with median wealth just short of $11,000. It should be noted that across the board, single mothers are disadvantaged in comparison to men, regardless of race. These numbers, in particular, highlight one of the ways that gender privilege functions in our society. Whereas single fathers often have access to greater resources—financial, professional and even emotional—for performing what society views as exceptional parenting behavior, single mothers face a world in which the resources they need are often under siege by fiscal and social conservatives who often depict such women—particularly women of color—as lazy, over-sexed and slovenly.

Even the default argument, offered by some black men, that suggest that black women are more present in the professional workforce, doesn’t hold up in the Insight report. Though black women outnumber black men in professional and managerial positions (less than one-percent in the latter case), those numbers are undercut by an across the board income gap where black women make about 87% of what black men do. But as the Insight report cautions, “Earnings are no doubt important for building wealth, but they are converted into wealth at a much faster pace if they are linked with the wealth escalator—fringe benefits, favorable tax codes, and valuable government benefits—that are tied to employment, income and marital status” and women of color, “do not benefit from the wealth escalator to the same extent as men or white women.” As the report explains, “women of color experience a pay gap that is affected not just by the pay gap between men and women, but also between whites and minorities.”

Gender privilege is no myth and despite the structural crisis that black men face in American society, they often function with significantly more advantages than black women. The quicker black men come to terms with this reality and let go of their privileged victim status, the quicker black men and women can talk about strategies to increase the wealth and stability of all within our communities.

What the Black Agenda is Not

What the Black Agenda Is Not

By Tara Bynum, Ph.D.

“What is the ‘black agenda’?” It is the question that opens Tavis Smiley’s latest summit, “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda,” to hold an elected official—namely, President Barack Obama—accountable to the needs of the Black community. In asking it, Smiley attempts to define the terms of the conversation that will proceed among his 12 highly esteemed guests, including Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Dr. Cornel West, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, Angela Glover Blackwell, and Dorothy Wright Tillman. Even as his panelists wrestled with the terms of their engagement, the question remained largely unanswered over the course of the four-hour program.

What became clearer rather was the converse of the question—“what is not the Black agenda?” With only 4 women at a table of 12, it was clear that the “Black agenda” is not one that has room for women to participate equally in the discussion. Even the idea of the “Black agenda” assumes that race exists separate and distinct from the experience of gender. Implicit in the idea of a “Black agenda”—a plan of action that addresses a singular, homogenous collective—is a gender neutrality that does not actually exist in the everyday lives of Black women and men. The “Black agenda” is not one that confronts the sexism that overlooks women’s issues like rape, domestic violence, or the increased rates of incarceration and infant mortality among Black women. To do so would admit that which is not spoken—sexism exists even within the Black community.

The “Black agenda” is not yet ready to confront the gendered privilege that allows Minister Farrakhan to describe chutzpah as a “testicular fortitude” and permits Dr. Michael Eric Dyson to respond mockingly with the seemingly more gender friendly definition, “ovarian audacity.” Even as Dr. Malveaux admonished Minister Farrakhan for using “genderized” language, the awkward chuckles of the panelists and audience members masked the curious ways in which women’s issues—particularly those related to issues of reproduction—seemed shut out of the conversation.

Just as Tavis Smiley calls upon us to hold our elected officials accountable, it is time to hold our non-elected leaders, those public intellectuals, accountable as well. We cannot continue to imagine the Black community as a one of men with a singular history and political agenda. Our leaders do us a grave disservice when they create opportunities for and participate in discussions that do not speak to the very diversity that is Black America. Though I commend Tavis Smiley for organizing this roundtable, I am nonetheless dismayed that Black women remain marginal to the conversation despite the varied ways in which our concerns have been downplayed against those of Black men. I am disheartened by the lack of younger scholars, activists and students at the table.

Though there is still much to be done, it is time to recognize the ways in which this new generation has used the technology of this age to advance its political agendas and organize its peer groups. It’s time for intergenerational conversations that build bridges within our community rather than point the blame. It’s time recognize that the Black agenda is comprised of many agendas that reflect the complexity that is so much a part of our various lived experiences. It’s time to admit, as Zora Neale Hurston does, that we are not “tragically colored” women and men, but instead we bear a legacy that allows us to dream and achieve on a grand scale—without which there would be no clear agendas for the Black women and men that strive daily to change their communities.

***

Tara Bynum, Ph.D is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at Towson University.

"Sampling Soul": The Mid-Term Exam

9th Wonder and I intended the course "Sampling Soul" to be accessible to a wider audience than that contained in the classroom. In that spirit, we are making the mid-term exam available to the public and encouraging readers to respond to the prompt. The best responses will be published @ NewBlackMan.

***

Sampling Soul

Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. (e-mail: man9@duke.edu)

9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit)

Midterm Examination

Answer the essay question as comprehensively as possible.

Response should be typed and double-spaced. (minimum 1500 words; 4-6 pages)

Throughout McLeod’s Freedoms of Expression and Schur’s Parodies of Ownership, both authors make claims about black communal practices (and examples of non-black oral cultures) that embraced informal notions of borrowing, revision, and sharing; practices which became critical to musical and performance practices amongst black performers. In his video treatment of Imani Uzuri’s “Sun Moon Child,” visual artist Pierre Bennu makes an even more explicit claim on this culture of borrowing, revision and sharing, by literally linking various performance movements across time and space (diaspora). Bennu produced his treatment using fair use doctrine, to protect his use of Uzuri’s music, as well as the imagery of noted black performers such as Nina Simone, James Brown, Alvin Ailey, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Judith Jamison, The Jackson 5, Rita Moreno and countless others. Youtube recently removed Bennu’s video, which had been posted on the site for three years, claiming that it was copyright infringement.

Sun Moon Child from pierre bennu on Vimeo.

Using Bennu’s work as a backdrop, discuss the ways that black artists have employed formal and informal modes of borrowing, revision and sharing in musical, literary and visual arts. What is hip-hop’s relationship to these practices? How has the practice of contemporary musical sampling, largely influenced by hip-hop production, altered the viability of these communal practices? Given the emergence of intellectual property law in the last decade, what are the implications for communal art practices and “black” art in general? In that Soul and Funk music have been used as raw material in hip-hop sampling practices, how has sampling impacted the legacy and commercial value of these musical genres and the artists that produce them? From the standpoint of intellectual property law, how would you defend or reject Bennu’s claim that “Sun Moon Child” is fair use?

BLACK MALE PRIVILEGE? A CONTRADICTION, AN ILLUSION OR A REALITY?

BLACK MALE PRIVILEGE? A CONTRADICTION, AN ILLUSION OR A REALITY?

Define Black Male Privilege? That is exactly what Dr L'Hereux Lewis, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at CUNY says he can do. His work is part of a new segment on Wake Up Call on masculinity called: *'Between Peril & Privilege'.*

The recession has been dubbed a 'man'-cession' due its disproportionate impact on men; blue collar white men, middle class white men, Hispanics and African Americans. With destroyed industries and upward spiraling unemployment; the rise and rise of Rush Limbaugh who takes white middle class male sense of failure and turns it into rage, the ascent of a black man as president and a new generation of scholars - black and white - arguing we must re-define masculinity, Wake Up Call brings you this new segment. For social justice black men are so often in peril; in so many other elements of society white men enjoy privilege.

'Between Peril & Privilege' is the segment where Wake Up Call brings you provocative, critical analysis on masculinity. BYRON HURT, award winning film-maker, essayist and gender activist and MARK ANTHONY NEAL, a professor at Duke University and the author of New Black Man: Re-thinking Black Masculinity join Wake Up Call host, Esther Armah.

Listen Here (Segment begins at 46:00)

Goodell's Slippery Roethlisberger Slope

Why Hasn't he acted against Big Ben when he moved so quickly on Vick and Pacman?

Goodell's Slippery Roethlisberger Slope

by Jemele Hill

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said this week at the NFL owners meeting in Orlando that he'll meet with Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who is currently under investigation for sexual assault, at the "appropriate time."

What's he waiting for? Nightly updates from Nancy Grace's show?

Certainly, I'm not making light of Roethlisberger's situation or the complicated position that Goodell finds himself in now that the quarterback for one of the NFL's most storied franchises is facing a sexual assault accusation for the second time in less than a year.

Goodell's first public comments about Roethlisberger indicate the NFL is watching the developments in the case closely. But the commissioner's words weren't as strong as they need to be. Instead of bringing the Roethlisberger controversy down to a simmer, it remains at a boil.

In truth, Goodell should already have met with Roethlisberger, even though the investigation into whether Roethlisberger should be charged with sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman in a Milledgeville, Ga., bar remains ongoing. And once he and Big Ben are in a room alone together, Goodell should absolutely castigate the two-time Super Bowl winner for bringing such bad publicity to his lucrative league.

I'm aware Roethlisberger hasn't been charged with any crime and -- everyone say it with me -- is innocent until proven guilty. He has the right to defend himself against his accusers. We have no idea what Georgia investigators will uncover, or what will become of the civil suit filed against him last summer by a Lake Tahoe woman who accused him of raping her in 2008.

In a perfect world, there would be no pressure for the commissioner to act until Roethlisberger's situation plays out completely. But in the real world, perception is what matters.

And surely the commissioner has noticed that Roethlisberger's case is becoming a racial litmus test. Fair or not, the perception is that Goodell has been eager to punish black athletes regardless of the status of their criminal investigations; and now that a white superstar quarterback is under police investigation, a lot of people -- especially African-Americans -- are noting how patiently Goodell is behaving.

Read the Full Essay @ ESPN

Celebrating Toni Cade Bambara

photo credit: ©1994, Susan J. Ross

From Broken Beautiful Press

Happy Birthday Toni Cade Bambara!: New Podcast :)

Today in honor of Toni Cade Bambara’s 71st Birthday we present a podcast full of reflections, laughter, poetry, music and LOVE for the brilliant sister warrior mother writer, dancer, filmmaker, screenplay transformer, community organizer Toni Cade Bambara!

I create this podcast with much inspiration from Cheryll Y. Greene and with the priceless collaboration and words of Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Cara Page, Linda Janet Holmes, Kai Lumumba Barrow and Nikky Finney. Contextualize your day with the brilliant insights of these women and listen to music from Sarah Vaughn, King Pleasure, Erykah Badu, Amel Laurrieux, Cassandra Wilson, Abbey Lincoln and some of my favorite producers.

Listen Here

The Charmed Lives of Aurelia Whittington Franklin and John Hope Franklin

A year after the death of John Hope Franklin, a reflection on the ‘Going Home’ Ceremony of the Historian and his wife Aurelia Whittington Franklin.

The Charmed Lives of Aurelia Whittington Franklin and John Hope Franklin

By Mark Anthony Neal

When John Hope Franklin died on March 25, 2009, there were many tributes to his activism and his scholarship. On June 11, 2009 Franklin’s family and friends including some of the Black Social and Intellectual elite and former United State President Bill Clinton, gathered at Duke University’s Chapel for going-home ceremony fitting for a man that long-time friend Vernon Jordan called, quoting former US Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, “one of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century.”

According to Franklin’s son, John Wittington Franklin, the day of the celebration was chosen because it marked what would have been the 69th a wedding anniversary of his mother and father. His mother, Aurelia Whittington Franklin died in 1999 and the celebration was as much a celebration of her life as it was a celebration of their life together. As Franklin’s son put it, they were a “powerful team.” Franklin remarked many times in his life, his wife, a librarian by training, was often by his side helping him navigate the library stacks. A charter member of the Triangle Park Chapter of The Links, Inc, Aurelia Franklin’s decades of service to Black communities across the globe, put a fine point on the Franklins’ shared service and quiet activism.

Franklin is, of course, most well known as one of the leading American historians of the 20th century and many of his peers and students were on hand to attest to the power of his intellect including Harvard Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who is the co-author of the recently published 9th edition of Franklin’s classic From Slavery to Freedom, and Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering Lewis who noted that Franklin possessed “perfect historiographic pitch.” Thavolia Glymph, a noted historian in Duke University’s African and African-American Studies Department reflected that Franklin possessed a “moral poise that was as exquisite as his intellectual armor.”

It is on such personal notes, that many of the speakers captured the very reason why so many gathered to celebrate the lives of John Hope and Aurelia Whittington Franklin. Virtually all of the speakers remarked on the couple’s love of entertaining and Franklin’s particular affection for cooking, Louisiana style gumbo being among his favorites. Franklin’s niece, Cynthia Gibbs Wilson, recalled “uncle John’s” unwillingness to divulge the secret ingredient in his corn bread dressing, though he had recently admitted to her that there was no secret ingredient, but that he believed that his dressing simply never tasted as good as his own mother’s.

Noted playwright and longtime Franklin family friend Emily Mann recalled growing up with John Wittington Franklin and being privy to weekly intellectual discussion with Dr. Franklin, her father, the historian Dr. Arthur Mann, her mother and Aurelia Franklin. It was those discussions that informed her later work, including her Tony Award nominated adaptation of The Delaney Sisters’ memoir Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years. Mann’s recollections got one the biggest responses from the standing-room-only audience when she recounted someone asking Franklin where the late United States Senator Jesse Helms was from, and Franklin, without missing a beat, simply said “from hell.” Mann’s story came in the backdrop the North Carolina General Assembly’s resolution last year resolution to honor Helms, a very public opponent of racial integration.

Franklin himself, often joked about many of the sleights directed at him and his family. As a survivor of the Tulsa Race riots, that was of course his right, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t take such sleights to heart. Several speakers recalled the story of the Duke University Professor, who in the 1940s when Franklin was based at HBCU North Carolina Central University, couldn’t understand why Franklin would support integration. According to the Duke professor’s logic, integration would translate into the closing of historically black schools, thus Franklin would be out of a job. Franklin’s response was typical, as he joked that he would simply come after said Professor’s job at Duke. It was that spirit that former President Bill Clinton described Dr. Franklin as a “a genius in being a passionate rationalist, an angry happy man, a happy angry man.” Clinton awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 and later tapped him to head a Presidential initiative on Race in 1997. Though Clinton admitted that the initiative’s impact wasn’t fully realized he took some credit for the multiracial landscape that produced President Barack Obama’s victory.

Clinton comments, capped by a festive morning that featured performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (from the Franklins’ alma mater) and two original compositions from noted black composer and conductor T.J. Anderson, were preceded by his close friend Vernon Jordan. Clinton jokingly suggested that Jordan did everything, “but pass the plate,” during his stirring tribute to Franklin. Much like Franklin, Jordan has spent a career making his mark outside of the public eye and he alluded to Franklin’s influence in that regard. Noting that though he never had a formal classroom experience with Dr. Franklin, the late historian often counseled him over meals, phone calls and one time, over friend chicken at Paschal’s in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. According to Jordan, Franklin was “a teacher who taught us to believe in the shield of justice and the sword of truth.”

Mark Anthony Neal to Address American Men's Studies Association

AMSA XVIII – Professor Mark Anthony Neal to Address Conference
by Mark Justad

Scholar and Teacher Mark Anthony Neal will deliver the luncheon address at the 2010 AMSA conference on Saturday, March 27th. His address is entitled “Coming Apart at the Seams: Black Masculinity and the Performance of Obama-Era Respectability.”

Professor Neal is the author of four books: What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005).

Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including SeeingBlack.com, The Root.com and theGrio.com.

Regarding his research interests, Professor Neal comments: “I am engaged in interdisciplinary scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies that draws upon modes of inquiry informed by the fields of literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and most notably popular culture. My broad project is to interrogate popular culture — music, television, film, and literature — produced within the context of Afro-diasporic expressive cultures. It is my belief that popular culture represents an arena of knowledge that has a profound impact on societal and cultural norms in the United States and globally, but one that has been largely underscrutinized as a “serious” site of scholarly and theoretical study. It is also my belief that commercial popular culture represents a distinct site of ideological production, thus my own work aims to engage the ideological undercurrents within commercial popular culture particularly within the context of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity.”

Where Have All the Black Women Gone?

special to NewBlackMan

A Divinity School Student Wonders Aloud About the Absence of Black Women's Voices at an Elite Divinity School

Where Have All The Black Women Gone?: Just A Reflection

by Sean Palmer

Let me begin with the caveats: I have had a wonderful time in the Duke Divinity School, and have enjoyed my interaction with professors, staff, and students in the main. I say this because what I’m about to say is going to make people more uncomfortable than they might already be. And, this will probably have people thinking for quite some time. Another caveat: I write not to impress anybody, and not on behalf of an organization. I write on behalf of me…noticing a challenging reality to the Duke Divinity experience.

As I was meandering through the new course listing bulletin, and as I was reflecting on the recent comments on Facebook about “white men” feeling “spurned” in classes like Ethics and Black Church Studies, I noticed an interesting development. What I noticed is that only one black woman will be teaching next semester, Dr. Joy Moore, who also does double duty as the Director of the Black Church Studies department…working with alumni, students, and administration. Now I know that we are in a period of lean times…but does this mean that reduction is being done at the expense of diversity? This has me asking…what happened to the other black female voices? And maybe as a black man I shouldn’t be pushing the question, but I feel a strong Womanist stance in my “ruah” that is ecclesial, not subversive, that wants to know where are all the black women professors going (or have gone)? Does anybody care…is anybody noticing? And how can we justify this when there are over 40 black women enrolled in classes throughout the Divinity school? This means that black women represent more than 50% of the black population in the Duke Divinity School…and no one is scrambling, rushing to ensure that “sister-scholars” are a part of the dynamic theological environment which Duke asserts!

Are the other black faculty aware of this? Are they helping administration make decisions that don’t roll back Duke’s longstanding Black faculty initiative? Are we, as students giving voice and support to administrators and faculty who need to know that we are thinking? And, do we recognize that beyond a physical diversity presence, black faculty, and black female faculty in particular, help to deconstruct paradigms that cause white women and men to feel “spurned” without taking into consideration the entire church. Black female faculty make it possible for both black men and women at Duke to attend to their work, rather than attending to teaching their classmates, which ultimately assumes a level of education around critical black theological perspectives. Black students are here to learn too! Black women faculty ensure that all students are taught from more than a white and/or male perspective, and that students can identify research, professional, and personal mentors commensurate with interests and cultural perspective.

Moreover, I am uncomfortable about the kind of silence that permeates black student culture at Duke Divinity, which quietly says, “put your head down and graduate.” But, my peers, too much is at stake. We are here because somebody paid a heavy cost for our admission. We are here because our children need us to be here. The doors must continue to be open for black faculty, administration, and students. We stand on the shoulders of too many, and too many need us to keep the doors open! While many of us are challenged by a notion of violent overthrow…we should also be challenged by biting silent acquiescence. If the black women faculty are first, who shall be next? At what cost? It is my prayer that all of the sister-scholars haven’t been strategically slowly herded out of here. I pray that our institution has (and continues) to be supportive to sister-scholars who choose to make Duke their academic headquarters. I pray that preachers and prophets will walk into their calling not just to pass tests, but to be a beacon of hope for those who cannot speak. Today, I speak hoping somebody will hear me…and thanking God for the future harvest! Amen!

"Can We Talk?" Bridges Between the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Duke Conference Aims to Integrate Social Sciences and Humanities

Two-day conference to be held March 25-26

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- A two-day conference at Duke University will address what some say is a quarrelsome relationship between two fields of research – the humanities and social sciences.

“Can We Talk?: Bridges Between the Humanities and the Social Sciences” will be held Thursday and Friday, March 25 and 26, in the Friedl Building on Duke’s East Campus. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The conference aims to bring scholars from the two worlds together in a conversation about how they can mutually benefit each other. Organizers believe collaboration between researchers in these fields can improve our knowledge of race, inequality and social difference.

“We’re hoping the conference will give attendees a foundation about how we might alter the curricula to a more integrated approach for the humanist and the social scientist,” said conference organizer William Darity, a professor of public policy and director of Duke’s Research Network on Race and Ethnic Inequality, a co-sponsor of the event.

Chairs from three African American studies departments -- J. Lorand Matory of Duke, Julius Nyang’Oro of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Greg Carr of Howard University -- will participate in the discussion.

On Thursday evening excerpts from films meant to stimulate discussion about racial inequality, such as “Precious” and “Akeelah and the Bee” will be shown. “The Doll,” a film by Duke artist-in-residence Dante James and based on a novel by Charles Chestnutt, will be shown in its entirety. Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Charlene Regester will lead Thursday’s film discussion.

The following evening professors Wahneema Lubiano of Duke and John Renfrio of the College of William and Mary will lead a discussion of the CNN series “Black in America” and “Latinos in America.”

The conference is co-sponsored by several Duke units, including the John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American Research; the Franklin Humanities Institute; the departments of African and African American Studies, cultural anthropology and sociology; and the Mary Lou Williams Center.

Panelists:
Mark Anthony Neal, J. Lorand Matory, Vivian Gadsden, Satya Mohanty, Michael Hardt, Wahneema Lubiano, Nikhil Singh, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva...

Thursday, March 25th
• Welcome and Introduction, 9:00 a.m.
• Social Theory and Literature, 9:30 a.m.
• Educational Policy, 10:30 a.m.
• Lunch and Student Presentations
• Growth and Globalization, 1:00 p.m.
• Race and Identity, 2:00 p.m.
• Dinner
• Film Screening, 7:45 p.m.
• Panel Discussion on Film

Friday, March 26th
• Introduction, 9:00 a.m.
• Statistics, Statistics, and more Statistics, 9:15 a.m.
• Going Above, Below and Beyond Surveys, 10:30 a.m.
• Lunch
• CNN Black in America, Latino in America, 12:25 p.m.
• Spanning the Diaspora, 1:00 p.m.
• Department Heads Panel, 2:30 p.m.

For more information and to register, go to http://thenetwork.ssri.duke.edu/newsevents.php.

© 2010 Office of News & Communications

What Does Five Dollars Mean to Black Women?

What Does Five Dollars Mean to Black Women?

by Renee Martin

What can you buy for five dollars? What if five dollars was all that stood between you and hunger and homelessness? Five dollars is not a safety net; it’s barely a bag of chips. Yet according to a study reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it is the median net worth of single Black women.

Single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600. That’s still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts, but married or cohabiting Black women are lower still, with a net worth of $31,500.

In other words, Black women continue to exist in a perilous economic state whether they are cohabitating or single. Instead of fixating on the marital status of Black women–a common media topic–we need to focus on the way that sexism and racism combine to form the basis of oppression.

Black men have a history of suggesting gender conformity, in the guise of racial uplift, that serves to oppress Black women. For example, comedian Steve Harvey wrote Act like a Lady and Think like a Man last year in the hopes of teaching Black women how to repair and hold onto relationships. The book is dependent upon many essentialist notions regarding gender to sell its point.

Following in Harvey’s footsteps, Jimi Izrael, a columnist for The Root, released his book The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find a Good Black Man this February. At The Root, Izrael wrote the following:

Eligible Black men, we think, can have their pick of educated Black women (assuming they even date Black women), as if merely having a job, an education and a pulse makes a woman ‘wife material.’ While there may be a lot of women available to Black men, MOST are not women you would want to spend your life with. I’m twice divorced, currently single and not taking applications because no qualified applicants have come down the pike. They are mostly variations on a few themes.

Responding to the report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Black Lunatic had this to say:

There is a notation that the median income for a married woman, or co-habitating woman, is about $31,000, so that’s proof that stable relationships improve finances. All I can offer is the idea that first step has to be increasing the number of folks getting and staying married.

It is hardly surprising that Black men would use this study as yet another excuse to inform Black women that marriage is what’s best, when they have invested so much time and effort in publicly supporting the institution in their recent writings. Of course, the fact that marriage increases the work load of women is not factored into their benevolent suggestions. This is hardly an unbiased suggestion. If we were to settle and be understanding, in the manner that Black men have suggested, we would be in an even more precarious position.

Read the Full Essay @ Ms. Blog

'Sampling Illmatic' Draws 10,000 Viewers

Webcast of 'Sampling Soul' session attracts 10,000 online viewers

The World Listens In to Class

By Camille Jackson

Thursday, March 18, 2010

On Tuesday evening heads were nodding in a lecture hall on East Campus. But this time, people around the world could tune in and share the class's energy.

A special webcast of the popular spring course, “Sampling Soul,” set a record Tuesday for live streaming video at Duke with an audience of more than 10,000 viewers.

The class is co-taught by Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African American Studies, and Grammy-winning music producer, 9th Wonder. Bucknell English professor James Braxton Peterson, Duke ’93, joined them Tuesday for a discussion of rapper Nas’ 1994 album, Illmatic.

While Neal’s students filtered into Richard White Lecture Hall, students of hip hop gathered online to take in the lecture and offer real-time commentary on Twitter. Minutes before the event started, hundreds of online viewers had announced their anticipation on Twitter.

By the end of the night, the number of Twitter postings for the session almost reached 500. Others emailed dozens of questions ranging from the academic to the absurd.

Neal said the webcast showed the reach university intellectual discussions can have.

“I have always envisioned the study of popular culture and music as the study of public cultures, so it just seemed a natural fit to make a course like ‘Sampling Soul’ available to a broader public,” said Neal, who moderated the discussion.

“Additionally, I take the concept of being a public intellectual seriously, and the work that Professor Peterson, 9th Wonder and myself did during the webcast is the kind of work that public intellectuals should be doing,” he said.

Many viewers wanted to know if Nas himself was watching. Others were drawn by the celebrity of 9th Wonder. The most passionate online audience members debated the merits of “Illmatic” and Nas’ lyricism on Twitter among themselves.

Using Ustream as an online host, Duke’s Office of News & Communications (ONC) has produced webcasts for the past year in the form of online “Office Hours.” The program is usually held on Friday afternoons and encourages viewers to informally submit questions on a particular topic to a featured faculty member. History professor Laurent Dubois’ Office Hours on politics and the World Cup held the previous record for viewership, with 7,900 unique visits.

Tuesday’s class was perhaps the first time a classroom discussion at Duke has been publicly webcast with interaction from viewers through social media. The event demonstrates Duke’s commitment to sharing faculty expertise with a broad audience, an idea that Duke alum Neil Williams, Duke ‘06 appreciates.

“I think these live lectures are awesome and a great way to spread knowledge and the Duke brand to the global community,” said Williams who watched the webcast and tweeted comments. “I think alums would love to see more lectures broadcast on the net, as long as the subject matter is interesting.”

Williams found out about the webcast through 9th Wonder’s Twitter page, which has 30,000 followers.

“He's a trusted name in hip-hop so it would make sense for people to tune in based on his recommendation alone,” Williams said. Both ‘Sampling Soul’ instructors have large followings on the Internet. Neal has a blog, New Black Man, and is also an active Facebook user. He uses these platforms to “help break down some of the boundaries between the so-called Ivory Tower and the rest of the world.”

Adds Neal, “I'm thankful that there are folk at Duke who see the immense possibilities of these kind of experiences.”

© 2010 Office of News & Communications

Women's History Month Classics: 'Say My Name'

Say My Name: Women MCs Tell Their Stories

by Mark Anthony Neal

The early “Destiny Child’s” single, “Say My Name” seemed to mark a rupture in black popular culture, demanding that audiences take note of the presence of women. But this particular musical claim for an ownership stake in the enterprise of public blackness narrowed the influence of women to the limited physical value that women possess for some men, as in “say my name” when “ I’m pleasuring you.” While the Destiny Child song is not directly referenced in Say My Name, Nirit Peled’s film about women and hip-hop, the film serves as a corrective response, offering women artists the opportunity assert their historical influence on what has become a global industry and culture of influence.

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.

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 21^st 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.

Imani Perry: Embracing Precious

We . . . yearn for the stories of those who sustain humanity and decency in the face of devastating poverty and marginalization . . . for those stories . . . are, after all, far more representative of Black life than the wreck that is Precious’ life.

Embracing Precious:
The nuances and truths in the individual and collective stories we tell
by Imani Perry

These are strange days indeed. We are firmly into the 21st century, and yet the 80s are haunting us. For African Americans it is yet again a decade of dream and deferral.

Back in the ‘80s, for the young Black and college educated, the doors of corporate America and other professions opened up and broadened the spectrum of the Black middle class like never before. But also, back in the ‘80s, crack cocaine and the aftermath of deindustrialization crippled areas of concentrated blackness in major urban centers.

Now in the 21st century, a new Black elite floods the popular imagination as Capitol Hill, the president and his administration become more and more colorful. But also now, in the 21st century, the recession hits Black communities hardest, and at the intersection of devastating rates of imprisonment, joblessness, and inadequate education lie a critical, hurting, mass of Black Americans.

Then came Precious.

The film, released in the Fall of 2009 elicited a flurry of responses. The debates over the film were complex, nuanced, impassioned. In fact, among the Black intelligentsia there seemed to be more discussion about Precious than there was about President Obama’s education agenda, the stimulus package, or rising unemployment and imprisonment. That was troubling. But then again, it is easier to fire off a blog post or provide a commentary about a movie than it is to write a concise response to a complicated web of policy, law, and economics. However, I believe the film elicited so much engaged response precisely because it highlighted the challenge of this moment when it comes to race in America.

The film tells an individual story, a poignant one, about an abused young woman in Harlem in the 1980s. If we attend to the individual story, fictional though it may be, our hearts go out to Precious. We see in her story personal resilience, possibility, healing. Those are good things.

The film tells a collective story. The story it tells is about the devastation that the 80s wrought on Black communities, and the failure of the public school system to provide a path out for “the underclass.”

In both the collective story and the individual story, there is truth. There is a real Precious out there. The story is fictional, but it is human. The problem is that fictional stories, especially ones on film, don’t just stand as individual stories, but they do “representative work.” They become part of the way we make sense of the world in which we live. The story of one novelist or filmmaker’s imagination becomes the story of entire groups of people or “types” of people. This is especially true when the kind of social location depicted in the story is remote from the experience of the majority of the viewers.

Read the Full Essay @ Afro-Netzien

The Benefits of White Privilege?

It takes a special kind of talent to take a civil rights novel about black maids to Hollywood. But do you also have to be Caucasian?

It 'Helps' To Be White
by Natalie Hopkinson

In one scene in the best-selling novel The Help, a spirited black woman has second thoughts about sharing the gory details of her life as a Mississippi domestic with a white writer who is part of the town's bridge-and-tennis-playing aristocracy.

"What am I doing?" Minny says, in an uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt. "I must be crazy, giving the sworn secrets a the colored race to a white lady." Later, she justifies speaking out in 1960s Jackson, even though she faces violence and never getting work again. "I ... just want things to be better for the kids. But it's a sorry fact that it's a white woman doing this."

I am kind of with Minny. I absolutely loved The Help, Kathryn Stockett's wonderful book-within-a-book about segregation in her native, Mississippi. Here was a novel that tells the heroic story of black women who nursed white children and cleaned white homes while never missing a church tithing on Sunday. These women did the literal and figurative dirty work of the civil rights movement, sitting silently in the pews while the men in front of the pulpit made the magazine covers.

But with the movie version of The Help coming soon via Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks and the book making best-seller lists from Biloxi to Boston, Minny's troublesome observation about white privilege is still relevant 50 years later. In the world of publishing and Hollywood, it helps to be talented, as Stockett clearly is. But it also helps to be white. The book's title referred to 1960s maids, but the "sorry fact" is that in 2010 if colored people want to have a voice--and more importantly one that carries far and wide--you still need white help.

Read the Full Review @ The Root

Reimagining Latino Hip-Hop in the 21st Century

Dislocated Performances:
Reimagining Latino Hip-Hop in the 21st Century

March 19, 2010

East Campus Union, Upper East Side
Duke University

9:30 am-5:00 pm

Free and open to the public.

How does Hip Hop speak to the day-to-day existence of Latinos in the present age of multiculturalism, globalization, and Obama? How might we read Hip Hop in different ways now, examining how it also dislocates and recalibrates Latinidad? As older and newer generations of U.S. Latinos together redefine the stakes of political action, they elucidate the margins, borders, and crossroads that U.S. Latinos inhabit. These "interstitial spaces" leave room for broader notions of Latino identities, incorporating those “others” who are also always dislocated and "out of place." This one-day workshop will engage the work of activists and prominent scholars in performance and cultural studies, examining the performances of race, gender, sexuality and Latinidad within Hip Hop and the political possibilities of "dislocation."

Featuring:

Rosa Clemente, 2008 Green Party VP Candidate, Hip Hop activist, journalist and radio host (WBAI 99.5 Fm, NYC)

Pancho McFarland, author of Chicano Rap: gender and violence in the postindustrial barrio (2008)

Jose Munoz, author of Disidentifications (1999) and Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

Mark Anthony Neal, co-editor of That’s the joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader (2004) and author of New Black Man (2005)

Raquel Z. Rivera, author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003) and co-editor of Reggaeton (2009)

Alexandra T. Vazquez, author of the forthcoming Instrumental Migrations: The Critical Turns of Cuban Music, and co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on La Lupe (Duke University Press).


Program:

9:30 am Continental breakfast

10:15-12:00 pm

Panel I: Over Turn-ing Tables:
Sex, Gender,and Trespassing in Latino Hip-Hop

* Pancho McFarland: “Quien es Mas Macho? Quien es Mas Mexicano?:Chicano Identities in Rap”
* Jose Munoz: “Browness, Aesthetics and Contagion”
* Alexandra T. Vazquez: “We Don’t Live for Latino Studies, (Latino Studies) It Lives For Us”

12:00-1:15 pm Music and Lunch

1:15-3:00 pm

Panel II: Los suenos de los fantasmas que marchan:
The Liberation Dreams of an Un-seen Army

* Rosa Clemente: “when a black puerto rican woman ran for vice president and nobody knew her name"
* Mark Anthony Neal: “History of Hip-Hop Before Hip-Hop”
* Raquel Z. Rivera: “Liberation Mythologies: Art, Spirit and Justice”


3:00 pm-5:00 pm Music and Reception featuring DJ Miraculous

Location: Duke University, East Campus Union, Upper East Side. (See map: http://maps.oit.duke.edu/building/136. Building is labeled in Red as “Marketplace.”)

Parking reserved on East Campus quad for conference attendees. Turn onto Campus Drive from Main Street and follow traffic to move straight forward, past the bus stop, to the long, oval grassy area in between buildings. Look for signs and a parking attendant.

Presented by the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South, Duke University