Remembering Duke Ellington

reprinted from Popmatters (1999)

A Duke Ellington Primer

by Mark Anthony Neal

Duke Ellington

The Duke: The Essential Collection, 1927-1961

(Sony/Legacy)

It is only now that we are seriously beginning to explore the complexities of African-American performance. For years it has been so easy to interpret the great Louis Armstrong as a cooning, shuffling sycophant, who was way past his musical prime by the time "Hello Dolly" became his most requested tune. We now know that Armstrong, like so many of his generation, fell victim to a racist society in which he felt compelled to embody America's worst racial fantasies in order to continue to perform his craft. No doubt the experiences of Canada Lee and Paul Robeson, were constant reminders that America would never reward, and would blatantly punish, (Nina, Abbey -- holla if ya hear me) those African Americans who resisted the small spaces they were required to inhabit.

These examples are what make Duke Ellington's legacy even more astounding. Yeah, brother could floss with the best of them (Puffy should take some lessons), but bruh was also all business. For more than 50 years, Ellington used his music to examine the complexities of black life (the shuffling, the hustling, the loving, the scheming and the being) and to challenge the contradictions of American Democracy, contradictions that have, until recently, denied "Duke" his rightful place among other American geniuses. Columbia/Legacy's new box set The Duke attempts to put Ellington's musical legacy into some kind of fitting context. Spanning from 1927-1961, The Duke compiles over 60 Ellington recordings from his most formidable years.

The Duke is one of many products associated with the celebration of the centennial of Ellington's birth. Given the pervading racism of American society and 20th century cultural criticisms, specifically, Ellington was often denied the broad accolades bestowed upon other American composers and musicians like George Gershwin or Benny Goodman, during his lifetime. As Harold Cruse suggests in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, his fire and brimstone study of black intellectuals, "Ellington could be denied this kind of recognition only because of the undemocratic way the cultural machine in America is run." The irony of Cruse's charges are that Ellington, in many ways, embodied the tenets of American democracy. As Stanley Crouch has asserted, Ellington was "inspired by the majesty he heard coming from musicians of all hues and from all level of training...whenever they said the music was dead, Duke was out there, writing music and performing the meaning of his democratic birthright..." Examples of this practice include the prominent role women vocalists like Ivie Anderson and the great in her own right Mahailia Jackson played in his recordings, his willingness to explore music with African and East Indian influences, and of course his well known and highly prolific musical collaboration with composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, who was incidentally an "out" homosexual. For Ellington, the big band was a metaphor for Democracy and he composed and arranged songs that took advantage of the myriad of talents and styles contained within his bands

While Ellington is clearly one of the most recognizable black artists of the 20th century, he emerged within a society, industry, and critical establishment that was at best condescending and contentious. The racist social science theories of the likes of John Wesley Powell and Lewis Henry Morgan were widely circulated and legitimized within popular culture (ya gotta check out Lee Baker's brilliant From Savage to Negro), thus powerfully impacting upon public perceptions of African-Americans and their roles within the larger society. Such perceptions were furthered by the presence of the minstrel stage, which fixed an image of African-Americans and their purported antics in the popular imagination.

Unfortunately this occurred at the expense of the real humanity of African-Americans caricatured via those minstrel traditions and those who found humor, including blacks, in those caricatures. The subsequent careers of Ernest T. Hogan, composer of the classic "All Coons Look Alike to Me," the aforementioned Louis Armstrong and Stepin' Fechit, whose cinematic performances became the measurement of "cooning" for many African-American audiences, are better understood when examined within this context. The willingness to describe artists like Miles Davis, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone or say Lloyd Price as "angry," was partly related to their refusing to embrace the type coon antics of previous generations of black performers. Somehow, Ellington, through his grace and public humility, was able to find middle ground where he resisted the type performance personas that many of his peers were saddled with, while still articulating a powerful social conscience.

The Duke consist of three discs, the first of which chronicles the years 1927-1940, the second and most potent of the disc captures Ellington recordings from the post-war years of 1947-1952, and the last disc features recordings from 1956-1961. Ellington's restless and boundless creativity allowed him to constantly rework earlier themes and this SONY/Legacy collection exposes some of those efforts. The first disc features tracks like "Black and Tan Fantasy" and an early arrangement of "In a Sentimental Mood," which was given it's most popular treatment in the early '60s when Ellington collaborated with fellow jazz giant John Coltrane. The disc also includes "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" and an early version of "Caravan." Both songs allude to the changing dynamics of African-American life, where the unprecedented migration of blacks from the deep south forced musicians like Ellington to be cognizant of the different regional tastes that could be contained in an singular audience. The most well known song on the disc and perhaps Ellington's most recognizable song is the classic "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got that Swing)" with lead vocals by Ivie Anderson. That "swing" has evolved as an ever changing metaphor for energy and change within African-American culture. Who could forget Malcolm X's admonishment to Civil Rights leaders that it was time to "stop singing and start swinging" or Barry Michael Cooper coining the term "New Jack Swing" to describe the hip-hop/R&B hybrid that Teddy Riley advanced in the late '80s.

The second disc presents the Ellington sound as it is being challenged by the emergence of Be-Bop and Rhythm and Blues. Tracks like the rollicking "Antidisestablishmentarianismist," "Creole Love Call," and "Brown Betty" find Ellington holding on to, if not furthering his vision of the big band. The best testament to Duke's genius was that his popularity did not wane, despite the fact that the big band sound, was for all intents, dead. The jewel of the second disc is the more than seven minute version of "Take the A Train." which features the brilliant vocals of Betty Roche. The song was a reminder that throughout the 20th century, Harlem, remained the Mecca of African-American life. And while other cities clearly influenced what we acknowledge as African-American culture (see Suzanne Smith's Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit), Harlem became, and too some extent still is, the fictive capitol of "Black America." Seemingly every black migrant who stepped off a train at Penn Station or a bus at Port Authority, were told that the quickest way to Harlem was via the "A" train.

The last disc finds Ellington engaging in projects that represented both his broad artistic interests and his willingness to challenge the status quo in the recording industry. "Star-Crossed Lovers' is taken from his 1957 recording Such Sweet Thunder which explored many of the themes prominent in the Shakespearean works, Othello, Henry the Fifth, and A Midsummer's Night Dream. "Come Sunday" is, of course, from his great work Black, Brown, and Beige, which Ellington debuted in 1943. The version contained on disc three of The Duke features the vocals of the legendary gospel singer Mahailia Jackson. Their collaboration on that track and throughout the 1957 recording of Black, Brown, and Beige is perhaps one of the greatest collaborations in all of American popular music. As Wynton Marsalis stated during one of the many events that celebrated Ellington's legacy during the past year, "Duke Ellington is America's most prolific composerof the 20th century, in both number of pieces (almost 2,000) and variety of forms. His artistic development and sustained achievement are among the most spectacular in the history of music." The Duke is a great introduction to Ellington's artistry and achievement.

Since We're Talking About Single, Black, Professional Women...again

Womanism is Not My Problem!

by Nicole Moore

Going through my blog I just realized that lately I’ve been largely writing in response to the shenanigans and ignorance that plays out on the Web and in the media. I’ve been playing defense and anyone who knows me, knows I appreciate the tackle, but personally I prefer to run the ball in. As a woman of color it’s so easy for us to find ourselves constantly defending our style, our politics, our culture, and our bodies, but as of today I’m officially over it! I’m tired of having to articulate my reasons for living a certain way, for having to defend the specific choices I’ve made about my career, about my hair and my love life. I have to reclaim my blog and myself from this insanity.

So starting right now I’m going to make a concerted effort to write more from an offensive point of view. I want to create spaces so tight, so authentically defined by my own womanness and Blackness, that only power, respect, and love can enter and reside. My body is a site of resistance, no doubt and that whole Nightline, CNN, Economist debacle reminded me just how much that it, along with my psyche, is still under siege. Furthermore I was stunned to see how I and other women, mostly women (and some men) of color fall into the trap of complaining, defending, venting and SMH’ing, and in turn we in a way become that “problematic” that the media makes us out to be.

Read the Full Essay @ theHotness

Since We're Talking About Single, Black, Professional Women...

How Does It Feel to Be a Black, Female, Single Problem?

by Farai Chideya

It’s open season on black womanhood. Nightline became the latest media outlet to tackle the issue of why black women aren’t married. The problem is not the topic, but the approach. Like a recent series of articles, books, and television segments (and one Nightline did last year), the show’s focus was on the purportedly low value of black women in the dating marketplace and the wisdom of black women’s choice to stay single versus marrying men who don’t fit their criteria.

Let’s get real for a minute here. Yes, black women are sometimes taken for granted by black men, and men of other races. (I’m thinking here of musician John Mayer saying he had a “David Duke c**k,” because it only responded to white woman. Black womens’ response, for the most part: awesome, dude! Less disfunction for us!) Black women also get oddly, back-handedly criticized for being too functional — for being the majority of black college graduates and growing old alone. In reality, black women with college degrees are more likely to have married by age 40 than those with high school degrees (70 to 60 percent). For white women, high school educated women are slightly more likely to have married than college-educated ones (88 to 86 percent).

Read the Full Essay @ FaraiChideya.com

Walking Home

This is an experimental piece about women ritually facing street harassment as they walk home. Shot in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, it mixes 16mm film, video, poetry and music in an effort to honor and reclaim our voice, name and humanity in the public sphere. This is for the walkers, talkers and those who say nothing.

A Third World Newsreel Workshop Production
in collaboration with Messages in Motion
Directed by Nuala Cabral

NFL or "A Life of the Mind?" Why Does Myron Rolle Have to Choose?

How Dare NFL Teams Question Myron Rolle's Commitment to Football?
by Clay Travis

On Saturday, the Tennessee Titans drafted Florida State safety Myron Rolle in the sixth round of the NFL Draft with the 207th overall pick.

Rolle, whom you previously knew as the Rhodes Scholar who spent his past season in Oxford studying for a graduate degree in medical anthropology, graduated in 2 1/2 years from Florida State, where he played safety for three years. Then he chose to skip his senior year to take advantage of the Rhodes Scholarship, an honor that only 32 men and women garner every year.

You've probably heard of a few of the alums from the Rhodes, guys like President Bill Clinton and former NBA great Bill Bradley.

What you may have heard and brushed off was this: Multiple NFL teams, scouts and executives questioned Rolle's commitment to football because he made this decision.

Why?

Because the thinking goes -- and we're defining "thinking" broadly here since many of the scouts, coaches and executives making these comments would be pumping gas for a living without football -- that Rolle is too smart, that his priorities in life don't revolve entirely around a pigskin bouncing on a field.

Welcome to the 21st century NFL, where your commitment to the game doesn't get questioned if you fail multiple drug tests, drive drunk or rape a woman. But woe unto you if you have the audacity to graduate early from college and take a year off to pursue a Rhodes Scholarship. Then you're a smart guy, the NFL's own version of the untouchable caste in India. That's why the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, including head coach Raheem Morris, could ask Rolle at the Senior Bowl how it felt to desert his teammates for his senior season.

Rolle's "desertion"?

Accepting the Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford.

If only we could all be so lucky to be deserted by our teammates for this.

Read the Full Essay @ NFL.Fanhouse

Byron Hurt Pays Tribute to Guru

Byron Hurt Tribute to Guru

by Byron Hurt

April 27, 2010 — On Monday, April, 19, 2010, Hip-Hop lost one of its legendary rap artists, Guru. I was saddened to learn of his death. Guru was one of my favorite rappers, and the rap group he founded with DJ Premier, Gang Starr, was one of Hip-Hop's iconic rap groups.

On March 26, 2003, I interviewed Gang Starr for my film "Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes" on the set of his music video, "Rite Where U Stand" in Brooklyn, NY.

What you see here are never seen before clips from that interview. This is my personal tribute to Keith Elam, better known worldwide as Guru.

Ken Lewis: A Different Kind of Senator

special to NewBlackMan

Op-ed

A Different Kind of Senator
By Carol Moseley Braun

I don’t usually get involved in Democratic primary contests, but this race was too important to stay on the sidelines. In North Carolina we have three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, but one stands out above the rest. That candidate is Ken Lewis.

I have been impressed with Ken’s ability to connect with young voters, progressives, and African Americans, the same groups that drove Barack Obama to victory in North Carolina in 2008. In an off-year election where Democratic voters are not showing high levels of engagement, Ken is the best candidate to inspire and turn out the coalition of voters that will be necessary to defeat Senator Burr in November.

But this primary election is about more than political calculation.

Ken Lewis represents a significant opportunity for the State of North Carolina and our country: The opportunity to change the U.S. Senate by changing the kind of Senators we send there.

Ken Lewis’ background is not like that of most U.S. Senators. He worked as a janitor, bus driver and fast food employee to put himself through Duke University and then Harvard Law School.

In this down economy he would bring a unique set of skills to the Senate, having spent two decades helping businesses create jobs in nearly every industry in North Carolina.

At a time when Americans feel forgotten by political insiders, Ken would bring a unique set of experiences, deeply rooted in the community organizations and non-profit associations he has served.

As Senator, Ken will be responsive to the needs of North Carolinians. He’ll serve the people of North Carolina because that’s what he’s done all his life.

But there is another factor as well that many are quick to dismiss.

When I first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1991, the Senate did not include any African-Americans. The South has not elected an African-American to the U.S. Senate since 1874. Today, there is only one sitting African-American Senator, and he will not return to the Senate next year.

How can we reach our full promise as Americans with a Senate that only reflects a narrow slice of our country—a Senate that does not include one single African-American Senator?

If we are serious about making the Senate a deliberative body that makes well-informed policy for the 21st century, then we must strive to include in the U.S. Senate a range of experiences and backgrounds that encompass those found in our country. No one could look at the U.S. Senate today and believe these requirements to be satisfied.

Ken Lewis will bring a unique background, a vital set of skills, and a fresh and optimistic perspective to the U.S. Senate. He also offers an historic opportunity to make our U.S. Senate a more representative, well-informed, and inclusive place.

Now is not the time to sit on the sidelines. We have a chance to make history in North Carolina just as I made history in Illinois two decades ago. This is our time. Ken is our candidate. He’ll be our Senator, if we all do our part.

Please show your support by making a contribution to Ken’s campaign today.

Carol Moseley Braun is the first and only African-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate. She served as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand from 1999-2001.

Remembering the Deacons for Defense

Robert Hicks, Leader in Armed Rights Group, Dies at 81
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Someone had called to say the Ku Klux Klan was coming to bomb Robert Hicks’s house. The police said there was nothing they could do. It was the night of Feb. 1, 1965, in Bogalusa, La.

The Klan was furious that Mr. Hicks, a black paper mill worker, was putting up two white civil rights workers in his home. It was just six months after three young civil rights workers had been murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

Mr. Hicks and his wife, Valeria, made some phone calls. They found neighbors to take in their children, and they reached out to friends for protection. Soon, armed black men materialized. Nothing happened.

Less than three weeks later, the leaders of a secretive, paramilitary organization of blacks called the Deacons for Defense and Justice visited Bogalusa. It had been formed in Jonesboro, La., in 1964 mainly to protect unarmed civil rights demonstrators from the Klan. After listening to the Deacons, Mr. Hicks took the lead in forming a Bogalusa chapter, recruiting many of the men who had gone to his house to protect his family and guests.

Mr. Hicks died of cancer at his home in Bogalusa on April 13 at the age of 81, his wife said. He was one of the last surviving Deacon leaders.

But his role in the civil rights movement went beyond armed defense in a corner of the Jim Crow South. He led daily protests month after month in Bogalusa — then a town of 23,000, of whom 9,000 were black — to demand rights guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And he filed suits that integrated schools and businesses, reformed hiring practices at the mill and put the local police under a federal judge’s control.

It was his leadership role with the Deacons that drew widest note, however. The Deacons, who grew to have chapters in more than two dozen Southern communities, veered sharply from the nonviolence preached by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They carried guns, with the mission to protect against white aggression, citing the Second Amendment.

Read the Full Article @ The New York Times

The Shrinking of the Black American Dream

We Just Wanna Be Successful:
The Shrinking of the Black American Dream
by Kim Pearson

Consider two songs from two generations. One, Drake’s ”Successful, ” was one of the most popular songs of 2009, making an international rap star out of the unsigned Canadian former child actor. The other, “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” was a signature hit for the songwriting producing duo of McFadden and Whitehead. Both employ narratives of aspiration and determination in the face of obstacles. But Drake’s song, produced in collaboration with singer Trey Songz is fraught with ambivalence and alienation, while McFadden and Whitehead’s anthem brims with optimism.

The Grio’s Hillary Crosley aptly called “Successful”, a “melancholy plea for international acclaim and financial achievement.”

A close reading of the lyrics invites all sorts of questions and commentary. The refrain is “I just wanna be successful,” but is that measured by the traditional success markers of the music industry – “money, clothes and hos” [sic]? “Yeah, I suppose,” his collaborator Trey Songz sings in the hook. Drake’s rap tells a story of a young man who is confident of his talent and destiny but thwarted in his personal relationships. As “the young spitter that everybody in rap fear” [sic], he navigates a competitive minefield. He is on the verge of breaking his girlfriend; his mother “tried to run away from home.” He knows fame and fortune are coming, but he is not sure he’ll live long enough to see it. “Inside, I’m treading waters, steady trying to swim to shore.”

Although written in 2006, “Successful” dropped in the middle of a bewildering economic crisis that’s been called the worst since the great Depression. Yet the narrator of the song expresses faith in his ability to overcome economic obstacles. The lyrics suggest the need for a larger sense of purpose and meaning – marriage, family, community.

If the 22-year-old Drake’s “Successful,” can be seen as a reflection of the zeitgeist of a “post-racial” generation of African American hip-hop enthusiasts, it stands in stark contrast to the anthem that their parents danced to -1979’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, ” by Gene McFadden and John Whitehead.

Read the Full Essay @ KimPearson.net

Mary J. Blige, American Voice

Mary J. Blige, American Voice

by Mark Anthony Neal

Recently Mary J. Blige appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, to perform her interpretation of Led Zepplin’s, “Stairway to Heaven.” It is perhaps easy to think that as the founding, and still reigning, Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, Blige has no business covering a classic rock recording—a song that for all intents, was initially recorded during the last stand of white male hegemony on the pop charts. But I’d like to suggest that there is more at work with Blige’s willingness to tackle “Stairway to Heaven;” that she is acting on a long articulated claim that she—and by extension Black women vocalists—be read as a quintessential American Voice.

Nineteen years after Mary J. Blige’s “You Remind Me” appeared on the soundtrack of the Buppie romance Strictly Business, she is often referred to as the “Aretha Franklin” of the hip-hop generation. The comparison is less about Blige’s technical skill, but rather her emotional connection to the generations that have come of age in the aftermath of the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement—a connection that Franklin had with the Civil Rights Generation. Specifically, Mary J. Blige tapped into the emotional center of a generation for which loss and betrayal were always the first and foremost expectations, whether in romance or public policy. Hence a song like “Real Love” resonates powerfully, in part, because it captured the hip-hop generation’s utter fixation with delineating “the real”—their existential quest for authenticity.

Unlike the Civil Rights generation which was often consumed with defending their legitimacy in the face of an all-too-present White gaze, the hip-hop generation rejected the significance of the White gaze, instead defining “the real” within the context of community. What is at stake in this quest for “the real” is the very real possibility of rejection and censure from community—a product of the apprehensions and ambivalence associated with coming of age in an era where you are “free to be” whatever. In other words while the hip-hop generation has the “freedom” to explore notions of identity beyond that which was defined within the contexts of Jim Crow segregation, there are very real concerns that such freedoms can undermine the value of community, both fictive and real.

In viscerally representing hip-hop generation anxieties, Blige has also vocally reproduced the dissonance that has come to define the period. Blige’s penchant for singing out of tune, replicates the ways the hip-hop generation has been deemed as out of tune with black tradition and bourgeois notions of black progress and respectability. Such dissonance though is not simply the product of bad training (vocally), but a response to the ways that post-Civil Rights era generations hear the world. Issues like the crack cocaine epidemic, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement, wage depression, lack of access to quality and affordable healthcare and housing, black-on-black crime, sexism and misogyny, sexual violence, the failing infrastructure of public schooling, and homophobia, have often left post-Civil Rights era generations grasping for straws, much the way some many of its vocalist frantically grasp for the right pitch.

With the weight of these contexts, Blige has successfully transformed herself from the proverbial round-the-way girl (from Yonkers, NY) into one of the most singular American voices of the last two decades. Blige’s choice to cover “Stairway to Heaven” is not some attempt to remake herself to a more diverse audience, but an effort to render more explicit her claim as an American voice. As one of the first and most successful stars of sampled based R&B, Blige’s music has always been in conversation with great American pop. Tracks like “Be Happy,” and “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By” liberally sampled from the music of Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Though Blige’s music has often made use of classic Soul samples and hip-hop beats, she and her producers have also ventured beyond the block, if you will. The most famous examples are “No More Drama,” which sampled the theme from popular soap opera The Young and The Restless and “Deep Inside” which featured a classic riff from Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.”

Throughout her career, Blige has also carefully chosen to cover African-American female vocalists. As her reputation as the voice of the hip-hop generation was being cemented, Blige covered the Carole King penned, Aretha Franklin classic “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” Though purists might have cried foul, Blige’s rendition of the song allowed her to embrace a femininity that had been missing in her earlier performances. As witnessed in the video shot for the song, which originally appeared on the soundtrack of the series New York Undercover (1995), the Mary J. Blige that performs “Natural Woman” evinces a glamour that allowed her to be read within the trajectory of black female performers like Diana Ross, Chaka Khan and Anita Baker.

A year later, Blige would tackle Natalie Cole’s “Our Love,” on the recording Share My World (1996). In the mid-1970s, Cole was the first female vocalist to significantly challenge Franklin’s supremacy on the charts and the popular imagination. As Cole was an iteration of the “real” for a generation of Black overachievers ambivalent about their success, she was also an ideal model for Blige who was struggling with self-esteem issues and addiction in the full view of a demanding public. Those struggles can be heard in Blige’s voice on her 1998 live recording The Tour, where she records a stellar version of Dorothy Moore’s “Misty Blue,” a top-five pop song from 1976. Though Moore, Franklin and Cole were standard bearers of the Soul tradition, they also recorded the kind of crossover pop that Blige would have heard growing up in Yonkers in the 1970s on Top-40 Pop stations like New York City’s WABC or WXLO (the precursor to the legendary 98.7 KISS)—tracks that on any given night might have been in regular rotation with Led Zepplin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me,” which Blige covered (likely inspired by the Isley Brother cover) on her 2007 recording Growing Pains.

As Blige grew, so did the capacity of fickle audiences to see her as more than simply a Black woman R&B singer. Blige’s well publicized emotional and personal struggles, including her experiences with domestic violence, and her willingness to share them in her music made her an inspiration to millions. This is perhaps why it was fitting that Blige was paired with U2 frontman Bono, in a performance of U2’s classic “One” during Shelter from the Storm, one of the many live telethons broadcast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levee system in New Orleans. In her essay “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Daphne Brooks writes of the collaboration, “the transformation of [U2’s] most recognizable anthems, ‘One,’ into a duet with Yonkers’s hard-scrabble, hard-singing, sometimes-hard-on-the-ears Mary J. Blige, opened up a space to make rich, powerful, multi-layered references to the complex intersections of race, gender, and class embedded in the Katrina catastrophe.” (Meridians vol 8, no 1, 189)

Brooks forwards an even more provocative thesis about the post-Katarina performance, arguing that “Blige’s surplus performance highlights the unheralded position of black women in rock, the unheralded position of black women in America, the violence of white patriarchal political neglect and discrimination, the violence of white patriarchal sexuality in rock—all of this comes to the surface in her performance. Off key,” adding that “Never before (nor perhaps since) have Mary J. Blige’s tonal eccentricities been put to more powerful use.” (190).

I’d like to hang a bit on Brooks’ “nor perhaps since.” Blige was one of the many artists that was transformed by the campaign and eventual election of Barack Obama. Blige, like contemporaries, Beyonce Knowles, Sean Combs, Hill Harper, and Shawn Carter, functioned as a surrogate for Obama in the waning moments of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Additionally, Blige was featured on Big Boi of Outkast’s “Sumthin’s Gotta Give,” which was released during the summer of 2008 and helped circulate pro-Obama sentiment among hip-hop generation voters. In the years since her performance of “One,” Blige’s public profile has been marked by her own recognition of her increased gravitas. It was that gravitates that she utilized during the Obama campaign and perhaps most stunningly, during her performance on Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief, that was broadcast nearly two-weeks after the Haitian earthquake in January of 2010.

Hope for Haiti Now was produced by MTV Networks and hosted by actor and humanitarian George Clooney. Performers included current chart-toppers like Alicia Keys, Shakira, Coldplay, Keith Urban and Beyonce, alongside classic pop artists such as Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, Sting and Madonna who sang “Like a Prayer.” Of the songs performed that evening, there was a particular focus on the American Song Book. Springsteen, for example, sang the Civil Rights-era anthem “We Shall Overcome,” Urban, Crow and Kid Rock performed a dutiful version of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me,” Wonder revived Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Jennifer Hudson (backed by the Roots) put a cosmopolitan spin on classic American pop with Lennon and McCartney’s “Let It Be.”

“Hard Times No More,” the song that Blige sang during Hope for Haiti Now, was likely not immediately recognizable to many viewers, but during a tribute that was, in part, a celebration of the power and elegance of the American Song Book, it might have been the most apropos choice. Written by Stephen Foster, the literal father of the American Song Book, in 1854, the song has been recorded in recent years by Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, and notably Mavis Staples, who weathered voice takes the song to new depths. Staples might be the most relevant precursor to Blige. While Franklin might have been the voice of the Civil Rights Generation, women like Staples and Nina Simone (who Blige digitally duets with on "About You") were the voices of the movement that propelled that generation. In transitioning from the personal trauma that informed so much of her earlier music to interpreting music that speaks to the trauma of nations, Blige has reached a new plateau in her life and career.”

Indeed Brooks might have been thinking about Blige’s performance of “Hard Times Come No More” or Blige's duet a nine days later with Andrea Bocelli on the aforementioned “Bridge Over the Troubled Water,” when she writes that “Blige’s performance reminds of the ways that the black singing voice is not confined to the ethereal netherworld…her rendition of this song gives living voice to the mythically-driven, over-determined, under-theorized scapegoat figure, allowing instead to enter in the flesh into public conversations to which she had been denied access.” (190)

“In the flesh” was how Blige appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, prepared to sing a song that many fans of AOR (album oriented rock) music consider sacred. And yes the decision to debut the song on the Queen-of-all-media’s daily show on the very day that the song was made available on ITunes bespeaks a calculating commercial move on Blige’s part. But no one who saw her performance, regardless of how one might feel about the song itself, could deny that she transformed it into an anthem of anguish, trauma, and ultimately spiritual catharsis. And again, it is useful to take a riff from Daphne Brooks, who will have the last word here: “Blige steps into the rock pantheon here in a moment that musically resonates with exposed erasures and absences—the erasure of black female artists from rock genealogies, the erasure of black female sexual exploitation in rock memory, and most critically and urgently, the absence co-joined with the spectacular presence of black female suffering in America.” (189)

We are not your weapons – we are women

We Are Not Your Weapons – We Are Women

by Amanda Kijera, civic journalist and activist in Haiti

Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for.

It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night.

Accepting the helplessness of my situation, I chucked aside the Haiti bracelet I had worn so proudly for over a year, along with it, my dreams of human liberation. Someone, I told myself, would always be bigger and stronger than me. As a woman, my place in life had been ascribed from birth. A Chinese proverb says that “women are like the grass, meant to be stepped on.” The thought comforted me at the same time that it made me cringe.

A dangerous thought. Others like it have derailed movements, discouraged consciousness and retarded progress for centuries. To accept it as truth signals the beginning of the end of a person–or community’s–life and ability to self-love. Resignation means inertia, and for the past two weeks I have inhabited its innards. My neighbors here include women from all over the world, but it’s the women of African descent, and particularly Haitian women, who move me to write now.

Truly, I have witnessed as a journalist and human rights advocate the many injustices inflicted upon Black men in this world. The pain, trauma and rage born of exploitation are terrors that I have grappled with every day of my life. They make one want to strike back, to fight rabidly for what is left of their personal dignity in the wake of such things. Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected.

Read the Full Essay @ Race-Talk

Brother to Brother: Harry Elam, Jr. on His Brother Guru

My Brother, Gang Starr’s Guru

By Harry J. Elam Jr.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Boston-born Keith Elam, who rose to fame as Guru, founder of the rap group Gang Starr and a person who sought to merge rap and jazz, died earlier this week. His brother, Harry, a distinguished professor of drama at Stanford, has written this remembrance).

“Positivity, that’s how I’m livin..’” So goes the lyric from my brother’s early hip-hop song, “Positivity.” My brother Keith Elam, the hip-hop artist known as GURU—Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal—died this week at the too-young age of 48 because of complications from cancer. ‘Positivity’ was what he sought to bring to the music and to his life, and for me that will be a large part of his legacy.

In February of this year, my brother went into a coma, and I traveled across the country from my home in California to see him. At his bedside, I stood and stared at his overly frail frame, his head that he had kept clean-shaven for the last 20 years uncommonly covered with hair, his body connected to a sea of tubes and wires. I listened to the whirl of machines around us and took his hand. As I did, my mind flashed back to now-distant times, so many memories. And I saw us as teenagers at the beach on Cape Cod playing in the water together. And I saw us as boys, driving to school. My brother was five years younger than me, so we attended the same school only for one year -- my senior year, his seventh-grade year -- at Noble and Greenough School, and I would often drive us both to school. Invariably, I made us late, yet my brother, never as stressed as me, was always impressively calm. At school he endured the jests and teasing from the other boys about being my “little brother.” I was president of the school and had charted a certain path at Nobles. But my brother found his own creative route at school, as he would throughout his life. His journey was never easy, never direct, but inventive. Through it all he remained fiercely determined with a clear and strong sense of self.

Read the Full Essay @ The Boston Globe

ESPN’s No Crossover and the Criminalization of Allen Iverson

special to NewBlackMan

“We’re Talking about Practice”?

ESPN’s No Crossover and the Criminalization of Allen Iverson

by David J. Leonard

Before there was the Jena six, Marcus Dixon, and Genarlow Wilson, there was Allen Iverson. In 1993, then the top-rated basketball player in the nation, Iverson, along with three other black teenagers, was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison (3 concurrent sentences of 5 years) as a result of his alleged involvement in an interracial fight at a bowling alley on. Charged with “maiming by mob,” a statue in Virginia enacted in the 19th century in an effort to combat lynching, Iverson was convicted of merely being present during the fight; whether or not he participated was superfluous. Seventeen years later, Steve James (Hoop Dreams) documents how the arrest and trial impacted Hampton, Virginia with No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, which originally on ESPN April 13, 2010. “Ultimately, I want to revisit what happened sixteen years ago so I can learn what the lasting legacy of it is for the city’s black and white communities, and for Allen Iverson himself,” writes James, who grew up in Hampton. “I hope this film can have something to say, not just about race and sports, but race and American society at this particularly crucial moment in our country’s history.”

At a narrative level, No Crossover explores the ways in which racial identity and the varied experiences (the degrees of privilege) impacted communal reaction to both the arrest and trial of Iverson. Specifically, the film illustrates the predominance of a dominant white racial frame and how it guided media coverage and white communal views about the case. Noting the ways in which colorblindness and the idea of “equality-and-justice”(p. viii) are central to post-1960s American racial discourse, Picca and Feagin, with Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage, argue that “the white racial frame is deeply held and extensive, with many stored ‘bits,’ including stereotyped knowledge, racial understandings, and racial interpretations.” Accordingly the dominant white racial frame is invoked “to interpret society” and in doing so contributes to the formation of a “common cultural currency” (p. 9)

Likewise, the film focuses on why the black working class (as opposed to the black middle class, whose adherence to a politics of respectability limited their willingness to join this struggle) rallied around Iverson because of their daily experiences with injustice, mistreatment, and systemic demonization.

The film is quite successful in illustrating how varied levels of privilege and how desperate relationships to injustice fostered very different interpretations of the Iverson case. It is a powerful commentary on the powers of whiteness and blackness and how those racial signifiers and the lived experienced of those signifiers influence thoughts about particular racial spectacles. It illustrates in powerful ways how, as argued by Bob Blauner, “blacks and whites often talk past one another.” Arguing the existence of “two languages of race in America,” Blauner, in “Talking Past Each Other: Black and White Languages of Race,” concludes that “racial languages incorporate different views of American society itself, especially the question of how central race and racism are to America's very existence, past and present. Blacks believe in this centrality, while most whites, except for the more race-conscious extremists, see race as a peripheral reality.” No Crossover brings to life this disconnect, giving voice to the myriad of ways in which blacks and whites in Hampton viewed the Iverson case in opposing ways. These divisions and the alienation fostered by economic, residential and political inequality world worsen as a result of the case. No Crossover makes clear that while Iverson may have moved on, the City of Hampton has yet to recover. Just as slavery and the city’s history of Jim Crow has left an indelible mark on the city’s racial landscape, so did the case against Allen Iverson.

Although No Crossover tries to be a film about race relations in Hampton, merely using the Iverson case as a window into a broader racial history, its narrative choices ultimately tell a different story one that further criminalizes Allen Iverson and by extension the black body.

No Crossover begins with writer and director Steve James articulating several questions, providing viewers with a clear narrative point of entry to Allen Iverson’s life. Using images of Iverson as a backdrop, he asks if AI is “Inch for Inch the most talented player ever” or “uncoachable,” “as selfish a star as there ever was;” “is he an icon who stayed true to himself” or a “thug in basketball shorts.” With a clip of AI’s legendary “talking bout practice” moment, a coach describing him as great on the court but someone who will cause grey hairs for the other 22 hours and comments about his attitude, his arrogance, and his cussing out a coach during high school, the film emphasizes questions about AI’s character and value.

Establishing a trajectory for the film, its introduction demonstrates how it too will weigh in on the questions about Iverson and not the American justice system, its media coverage of black athletes, or the history of race relations inside or outside the South. Despite being a film about the trial, its narrative focus rests with his “priors” -- his history of bad acts, bad behavior, and troubling attitude. In starting the film with this representation of Iverson, No Crossover once again marks Iverson and his blackness as essentially a disruptive and uncontrollable source of “cultural degeneracy.” Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140), simultaneously rendering the trial as of secondary importance (it is an example of a lager story) all while convicting him within the viewer’s imagination because of his purported history and the meaning of the black athlete within the modern racial landscape. Irrespective of its intent and the other elements of the film, some of which point to the history of racism within the criminal justice system, the positioning of Iverson through the dominant white racial frame further criminalizes him alongside of blackness.

The film conclusion further criminalizes and demonizes Iverson, with references to recent troubles as a member of the Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, and Philadelphia 76ers; it makes references to his reputation and a feeling that he doesn’t care about the community. In the end, viewers are left with a negative picture, or as mentioned in the film “a sad story with an unwritten ending”; “a troubled life.”

The product of a single mother, a drug inflicted and dangerous community, and hip-hop culture, Iverson is reduced to a symbol of “of pathology, fear, madness, and degeneration,” whose mere existence as a racial Other “warrants its very annihilation because it [he] is seen as impure, evil, and inferior” (Giroux, 1994, p. 75). In focusing on Iverson’s identity and behavior, in making No Crossover a cinematic trial of Iverson, the film replicates the patterns of new racism in focusing on culture, values, and individual choices. It misses an opportunity to offer historic context and to otherwise highlight the ways in which a dominant white racial frame operated in the context of Iverson and for all too many youth of color.

Vijay Prashad, in Keeping up with the Dow Joneses, highlights the fact that 56 percent of juveniles detained in correction facilities are black, with an additional 21 percent being Latino. In total, half of 700,000 youth sentenced to juvenile facility arrive as a result of a first-time drug or property offenses (p. 90). Brooks Berndt further highlights the centrality of race in looking at the juvenile “justice” system

Black youth, for example, were 15% of the youth population in Illinois in 1999. However, in Illinois that year, black youth were 50% of the youth arrested, 55.2% of the youth in detention, and 85.5% of the youth sent directly to adult court. For drug crimes in Illinois, black youth were 59% of the youth arrested and 88% of the youth sentenced to prison. This contrasts sharply with national statistics suggesting that white youth in Illinois would likely use and sell drugs at the same or a higher rate than black youth (Berndt 2003).

According to a report authored by Xochitl Bervera, of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, similar inequalities defined the experiences of youth of color there. Although only a third of the state’s population, black youth account for 78% of those youth confined to the state’s correction facilities. “For Black youth, this is not the time of rising expectation—these are the days of mass incarceration, ugly demonization, and full-out criminalization” (“Katrina, Jena, and the Whole Damn System” 2007).

Beginning in the 1980s, amid the demands for law and order and truth-in-sentencing, states began to enact laws that led to the practice of trying youth as adults. By the mid to late 1990s, forty-three states had enacted laws facilitating the transfer of children into the adult criminal justice system, ostensibly eroding the juvenile justice system. Currently, all 50 states have laws on the books allowing juveniles to be tried as adults. According to a 2008 report from the Equal Justice Initiative, roughly “2,225 children under the age of 18 are serving life sentences in US. Prisons; almost two-thirds are children of color” (Jung 2008). “African-American youth are 62% of the youth prosecuted in the adult criminal system, and are nine times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence” notes Ayra and Augarten in “Critical Condition: African American Youth in the Justice System.” “The overwhelming majority of cases (83%) that were filed in adult courts involved youth of color. African-American youth constituted 62% of the youth, and Latino youth were 19%. With the exception of two counties in the study, youth of color constituted between 60% and 100% of all youth prosecuted as adults in the 40 counties included in the study”.

Notwithstanding the narrative of the film, one that focuses on Allen Iverson’s life and personality, the economic and cultural landscape of Hampton, Virginia, and even its racial context, the arrest, prosecution and trials of Michael Simmons, Samuel Wynn, Melvin Stephen, and Allen Iverson was/is not a unique story insomuch as it reveals a broader trend of injustice, especially in the last thirty years. No Crossover misses an opportunity to highlight the ways in which the story of Allen Iverson is representative of a larger pattern even though most black youth trapped in the web of racism, law-and-order, and state power don’t experience the media frenzy that Iverson’s trial elicited nor do most youth ultimately get pardoned by the governor. Instead of providing this needed context, No Crossover focuses on the ways in which the case/Allen Iverson divided the city of Hampton along racial lines. Reflecting James’ effort to tell a story about his hometown and to look at the ways in which racial tensions impacted and were affected by the trial of Allen Iverson, No Crossover fails to provide the necessary context to fully understand this history.

It is not simply a history of Iverson, Hampton, Virginia, racial conflict, and even the intersections of race, sports, and the criminal justice system, but a history that is all too familiar throughout the country. To understand Iverson’s story and to highlight its importance required greater attention to the systematic efforts to demonize, pathologize and ultimately incarcerate youth of color over the last three decades. In erasing this history, in ignoring the problems behind and replicating the existence of the dominant white racial frame, and further criminalizing Iverson, No Crossover reduces the issue of racial injustice to individuals, competing perceptions, and communal conflicts. It tells part of the story, one that contributes to, rather than repels the dominant racial narrative, one that criminalizes Iverson, who in the process becomes representative blackness “needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silencing” (Morrison, 1997, p. XXVIII).

***

David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.

Meet Lee D. Baker

WUNC

The State of Things w/Frank Stasio

Meet Lee Baker

Monday, April 19 2010

Duke anthropology professor Lee Baker grew up grappling with provocative questions about race and culture. His adoptive parents were white while he was African-American, and the physical differences between him and his siblings led to plenty of schoolyard discussions. He decided to spend his career examining issues of identity, race and culture after he lived as a high school exchange student with an Aboriginal family in Australia. Baker chronicles his own journey in the preface to his new book Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. Host Frank Stasio talks with Baker about his book and his formative life story.

Listen HERE

HomeFree: An Interview with Nneena Freelon

Silencing Sexual Violence

Silencing Sexual Assault

by R. L’Heureux Lewis

The internet is a funny thing and Twitter is a funny place. I find myself on there getting all sorts of information, as do many Black folks given that the Pew center says that 26% of Twitter users identify as African-American. At best, it is a fast paced way to share information and at worst a fast paced way to spread pain. One Friday night, comedian Lil Duval decided to get a subject going called “it aint rape.” He started out with “It ain’t rape if you order from the entrée side of the menu.” Essentially, it was a fill-in-the-blank festival that, for some, led to laughs and that, for many others, led to pain. Lil Duval’s tweeting falls squarely during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, demonstrating that too many in our community take sexual assault as a joke.

Lil Duval’s quickly took a step back and said, “Rape ain’t funny but women putting theyselves [sic] in [expletive] up positions is.” By saying rape doesn’t exist and that rape is based on poor decisions, Duval joined a line of Black comedians who have found humor and sadly greater acceptance in our community.

The first time I ever heard my mother disagreeing with my father in front of me was when my father was arguing that Chris Rock was hilarious. My mother stopped, stared at him and said, “I do not think Chris Rock is funny. Rape is not funny.” My mother continued to express her pain and frustration while my father remained oblivious to her hurt. Chris Rock had gone on Arsenio Hall and told a “date rape” joke which polarized the audience, causing Hall to apologize the next day. Later Rock admitted telling the joke helped, not hurt his career. We, as a community, are in a strange place when our community embraces someone more for joking about heinous crimes than when we repudiate the joke and seek healing for the survivors.

The reality is that sexual violence is one of those issues that ends up being so wrapped up in our families and communities that dealing with it necessitates an investment in others lives that many of us have grown accustomed to not having. Off the stage, when issues of rape come up in our community, I often hear, “we don’t know all the facts”, “I wasn’t there, so I don’t know,” or the most dangerous of them all, “well what if she wasn’t a victim.” Despite this disavowal of ability to judge, we are able to maintain a level of comedic commentary. That’s part of the problem. It’s easier to laugh at something than to deal with it. The lengths we go to laugh at and justify sexual assault, particularly violence again women, is painful, disheartening, and does a disservice to providing the space for our community to heal.

Read the Full Essay @ The Atlanta Post

R. L’Heureux Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the City College of New York – CUNY. His research concentrates on issues of educational inequality, the role of race in contemporary society, and mental health well-being.

Dorothy Height Goes Home

Dr. Dorothy Height: Extraordinary Leader, Lantern, and Role Model

by Marian Wright Edelman

“We African American Women seldom do just what we want to do, but always what we have to do. I am grateful to have been in a time and place where I could be a part of what was needed.”

This is the quote inscribed on Dr. Dorothy Height’s Congressional Gold Medal, just one of the many dozens of awards Dr. Height received over her extraordinary life, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The brilliant Dr. Height was a lantern and role model for millions of women and a long haul social change agent blessed with uncommon commitment and talent.

Her fingerprints are quietly embedded in many of the transforming events of the last seven decades as Blacks, women, and children pushed open and walked through previously closed doors of opportunity. To me she was a dearest friend, mentor, and role model, and the Children’s Defense Fund was blessed to have her serve on our board for over 30 years. When she passed away on April 20 at age 98, we all lost a treasure, a wise counselor, and a rock we could always lean against for support in tough times.

Even as a young girl her speaking skills stood out. She attended New York University in part with a $1,000 scholarship from a national oratorical contest sponsored by the Elks (after being turned away by Barnard, which had already reached its quota of two Negro students for the year).

On November 7, 1937, which Dr. Height remembers as the day that changed her life, she was the 25-year-old assistant director of the Harlem YWCA and had been chosen to escort First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to a National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) meeting, and there she met NCNW’s founder and president, the legendary Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. Mrs. Bethune was immediately impressed with Dr. Height. She became Dr. Height’s close friend and mentor, and in 1957, two years after Mrs. Bethune’s death, Dr. Height became NCNW’s president—a position she held until 1998, when she became Chair and President Emerita.

During the Civil Rights Movement, while so many women were playing vital roles that weren’t featured in the spotlight, Dr. Height was always up front with a seat at the table. She was often the only woman in the room with Dr. King and the rest of the “Big Six” group of male leaders as they planned many of the Civil Rights Movement’s key strategies, and she was sitting on the stage—she should have been a speaker—at the historic March on Washington.

She led the NCNW membership as active participants in the movement and reminded us that women were its backbone—unseen but strong. One of the cornerstones of NCNW’s civil rights strategies was Wednesdays in Mississippi, which brought together White and Black northern women to travel to Mississippi to develop relationships with Black and White southern women, educate themselves and each other, and create bridges of understanding between the North and South and across racial and class lines.

Read the Full Essay @ Black Star News

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund

Soundcheck Smackdown: Highs vs. Lows

WNYC
Soundcheck w/John Schaefer

Smackdown: High Voices vs. Low Voices

Which do you prefer -- the high-pitched wails of Mariah Carey, Prince, and Brian Wilson? Or the throaty roars of Barry White, Leonard Cohen, and Nina Simone? In this week's Soundcheck Smackdown, high voices face off against low ones to determine which makes for better music.

Joining us are Mark Anthony Neal, professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University; and Jaime Lowe, a music writer and author of the book Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB.

Trenton, Irresponsible Black Girls, and Savior Russell Simmons

Trenton, Irresponsible Black Girls, and Savior Russell Simmons
by Fallon

My heart grieves not only for the seven year old black girl who was gang raped, but also for her 15 year old sister who sold her body and her sister’s body for money. Yes, my heart grieves even though many people are angry with the older sister for not protecting her little sister calling for “the book to be thrown at her.” To say the least, the big sister is going to jail for a very long time. But yet, my heart weeps for her as it wept for Precious’ mother, Mary. It weeps because it says something about the level of sexual abuse she herself must have experienced to make the idea of being complicit in her sister’s rape plausible. My heart moans because she like other girls knows that they can make a living by selling their bodies. It wails and weeps because no one stepped in to stop her first sexual abuse. My heart grieves.

The question is: Can we really be angry with the 15 year old sister for what she did? And I am having a hard time answering this question because a part of me wants to be angry at her for not protecting her little sister. However, I have to assess how much of my sadness and anger is in response to the crime of rape and how much of it is in response to her not being a good big sister. You know the type of big sister my older sister was forced to be completely responsible for raising me when she was only a girl herself because . . . momma had to work late . . . momma did not like being tied down . . . daycare is expensive . . . momma had a second job . . . momma was gone . . . momma had to party . . . daddy was gone . . . so she became responsible for raising and protecting “us” her younger siblings.

Read the Full Essay @ The Black Youth Project