NBM Saturday Edition: The 'Essence' of Our Blackness?

NBM Saturday Edition
The ‘Essence’ of Our Blackness?
by Mark Anthony Neal

I first started reading Essence Magazine as a 16-year-old living in the Bronx. Of course I was initially drawn to the magazine because of the pretty black women within its pages, but the magazine, then under the direction of Susan Taylor, offered so much more for my burgeoning political sensibilities. Building on an editorial foundation laid out by Marcia Ann Gillespie—who would later edit Ms. Magazine--the Essence Magazine that existed in the early 1980s was where I would be first introduced to Audre Lorde, via a published conversation between Lorde and James Baldwin. It was in the pages of that Essence that I got updated on the political exploits of Kwame Toure (Stokley Carmichael) and provided a portrait of Louis Farrakhan before the controversies associated with Jessie Jackson’s first presidential campaign in 1984. I came of age thinking that Essence Magazine in contrast to Ebony magazine, was my magazine—Black America’s magazine. That the magazine was black owned and black directed only added to its allure. That Essence magazine hasn’t existed for a long, long time.

Essence Magazine has been in the news recently because of its decision to hire the magazine’s first white fashion editor. Former Essence fashion editor Michaela angela Davis perhaps captured initial emotions best, telling Clutch Magazine “I feel like a girlfriend has died.” But beyond this sense of loss, what really is at stake when a “black” magazine, no longer black owned, but still critically representative to our communities’ sense of themselves, simply becomes another periodical. Is there a response beyond simply decrying an editorial decision, that more or less is fully in-line with the magazine’s general editorial direction for the last decade?

One of the by-products of the Obama era is that there has been added pressure on black institutions to show that they are as progressive as the whites, who broke racial ranks to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election. Part of the initial response to the Shirley Sherrod controversy was rooted in this idea that Black America was to hold themselves as accountable for racist behavior as they hold whites accountable. It is in this context that CNN and TVOne contributor Roland Martin has suggested that Essence Magazine’s decision to hire Ellianna Placas as fashion editor is evidence of their “progressive” racial politics.



But there is nothing progressive about whites directing or overseeing black intellectual and cultural production. Historically, as journalist Esther Armah has suggested, whites have always been in position to sign off on how Blackness would enter the marketplaces of consumption and public opinion. Indeed what generated pride within Black America when Essence Magazine was launched in 1971 was the idea that this it offered an opportunity for black control of black imagery. As such the idea of a white fashion editor at Essence or a black themed magazine owned by a white owned global corporation seems too much like a long established status-quo, as opposed to anything that needs to be celebrated or worse still, labeled as progressive.

But the decision by Essence Magazine also speaks volumes about a general trend that challenges the professional capabilities of black women. When Honoree Fanonne Jeffers laments that “Essence started using any excuse to erode Black women’s sense of strength” she captures the sense of betrayal that black women have experienced, in relation to their partnerships with black men and the broader professional world. In the backdrop of a solitary white woman serving as fashion editor for a formerly black owned magazine, is the fact that black women are marginalized in the editorial leadership of mainstream journals and magazines, a state that is far more deserving of public outrage than the hiring of said solitary white woman at Essence Magazine.

To echo Jeffers’s point, in the decade since Time Warner acquired 49% of Essence Magazine, purchasing the remaining 51% in 2005, the magazine’s editorial direction seems intent on damaging the emotional psyches of black women and girls, if only present itself as the self-help haven for those same black women and girls, in an attempt to increase the magazine’s circulation. This is a time tested strategy in magazine culture, which in concert with the advertising industry, have actively sought to sell magazines to women by highlighting their imperfections—literally from the highlights in their hair to the shade of their toe-nails. All magazines have concerns about circulation, but what made Essence Magazine so special is that it was always above simply selling magazines.

Now Essence is just another magazine (like BET is just another television network) and our response to its on-going editorial direction, should reflect just that. The glossy colorful print gems that so many of us read, even a decade ago, reflect an industry trying to hold on to its past. The future has long been in social media and the blogosphere, where black women have been able—more than in any historical period—to fashion a view of themselves that they can take ownership of. This a point that commentator Felicia Pride recently made at theLoop21.com where she wrote, “I turned to the Internet and found online publications like Clutch…the online magazine is focused on ‘ushering in the new era for young, contemporary women of color.’ Visually appealing. Wide-ranging. Multicultural. Forward-moving. Me. And so many others like me.” 



“Girlfriend” has died—we can mourn her, lament her passing, but now we must move on.

Charlie Rangel Begat Ed Towns

from the Huffington Post

Charlie Rangel Begat Ed Towns: Something Is Broken In Brooklyn, Too
by Kevin Powell

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
--Abraham Lincoln

And the drama of Congressman Charlie Rangel continues to unfold with 13 charges of misconduct, even as I type this essay: Mr. Rangel faces a range of accusations stemming from accepting four rent-stabilized apartments and misusing his office to preserve a tax loophole worth half a billion dollars for an oil executive who pledged a donation for an educational center being built in Mr. Rangel's honor. In short, Mr. Rangel, one of the most powerful Democrats in the United States House of Representatives, has given his Republican foes much fodder to attack Dems as the November mid-term elections quickly approach.

While this saga continues, two questions dangle in the air: First, where did it all go so terribly wrong? And, second, did Mr. Rangel begat the lack of ethics also present in the career of his colleague, friend, and staunch ally Congressman Edolphus "Ed" Towns of Brooklyn, New York?

To answer these questions I think we must go back to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement's waning days. Dr. King was still alive, but his popularity had plummeted, which explains why, to this day, many people do not know his writings or sermons from those latter years. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of Harlem (Mr. Rangel's predecessor) was clinging to his seat amidst ethics battles of his own. The streets of Black America were on fire, as urban unrest became the language of the unheard ghetto masses. And in majority Black communities like Harlem and Brooklyn, Black leaders, emboldened by Civil Rights victories, chants of "Black Power," and a once-in-a-century opportunity for power, rushed through the kicked-in doors, into politics, into business, into film and television, into book publishing and magazines (or started their own), and into colleges and universities heretofore shuttered. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. The best because many really believed "change" was on the horizon. The worst because some Black movers and shakers were so happy to get inside that they came with no vision or a plan whatsoever for their followers.

Clearly very few even bothered to read Dr. King's landmark essay "Black Power Redefined," which sought to push Black leaders toward a programmatic agenda that included the poor and economically disenfranchised.

And if there were any communities in Black America to test Dr. King's vision, they were Harlem and Brooklyn. Brooklyn has Black America's largest concentration of people of African descent. But Harlem, in particular, was the symbolic capital of Black America, and it was there that the now famous Gang of Four--Percy Sutton, Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins, and Basil Paterson--planned and plotted a course for their community, and themselves. Rangel replaced Powell in Congress and became the dean of New York politics. Sutton would first be a successful politician himself, then eventually start Inner City Broadcasting, a major person of color owned media enterprise; Basil Paterson would be, among other things, New York State Senator, Deputy Mayor of New York City, and New York Secretary of State; and David Dinkins, of course, became the first Black mayor of New York City.

Truth be told Mr. Rangel and his colleagues had an incredible vision and really did nothing differently than their White predecessors had been doing for decades in America: they saw an opportunity for a taste of power and they took it. (And at least the Gang of Four brought an economic empowerment zone to Harlem, something Congressman Towns pretended to want to do in the mid-1990s for Brooklyn, then mysteriously backed away from, instead endorsing then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's re-election bid, with Brooklyn never hearing about that zone again.)

Indeed, as I was coming of age as a student and youth activist in the 1980s, and as a then-reporter with various Black newspapers in the New York City area, I remember well hearing their names mentioned often. And, to a lesser extent, the names of their Black political peers in Brooklyn like Al Vann, Major Owens, and Sonny Carson. It was awe-inspiring, because I did not know that Black folks were leaders in this way. The pinnacle of this Black political ascension in New York City, without question, was the election of David Dinkins in 1989. For New York was the last of the major American cities to produce a Black mayor.

But something stopped during Dinkins' years in City Hall. Black New York was unable to shake off the catastrophic effects of the 1980s crack cocaine scourge, or Reagan-era social policies. Meanwhile, Black leadership in New York, rather than nurture and prepare the next generation of Black voices to succeed them, did exactly what their White forerunners had done: they dug their heels deeper into the sands of power and have instead become leaders of what I call "a ghetto monarchy." In other words, the community-first values of the Civil Rights era have been replaced by the post-Civil Rights era values of me-first, career first, and control and domination of my building, my block, my housing projects, my district, my part of the community (if not all of it), my church, my community center, or my organization, by any means necessary. For as long as possible. And often for as much money, privilege, and access to power as one can get with a "career" as a Black leader or figurehead.

And that, my friends, is what leads us, again, to the sad spectacles of the two senior most Congresspersons in New York State: Charlie Rangel of Harlem, and my representative in Brooklyn, Congressman Edolphus "Ed" Towns.

For it is so clear that the leadership path of Congressman Rangel begat the leadership path of Congressman Towns. Both may have been well intentioned at the beginning of their careers. Both may very well believe in the goodness, as I do, of public service for the people. But something has gone terribly wrong, the longer they have stayed in office (40 years now, for Mr. Rangel, and 27 long years for Mr. Towns); something that, I believe, has sapped them of their ability to serve effectively. That has sapped them of sound moral, political and ethical judgment. That has led both to be disconnected from the very people they claim to serve, both younger and older people alike.

And you see this pattern with old school Black political leaders nationwide. For ghettos exist wherever you see Black city council or alderpersons. Ghettos exist wherever you see Black state senators and assemblypersons. And ghettos exist for most of the Congressional districts, too, represented by Black House members. 40-plus long years of Black political representation, in record numbers, in fact, but it seems our communities are worse off than even before the Civil Rights Movement.

Now I am very clear that systemic racism has done a number on these communities from coast to coast, from how financial institutions have treated urban areas, to the deterioration of our public schools when White flight became real in the 1960s and 1970s, to loss of factories, and other job incubators, to the often combative relationship between our communities and local police. And let us not begin to talk about the effects of gentrification on urban areas across America the past decade and a half.

But if a leader really has any vision, she or he figures out some way to help the people to help themselves. You simply do not retreat to what is safe, secure, and predictable in terms of your actions, or lack thereof. Doing that means you simply have given up. Or, worse, you just do not care.

For me, no clearer evidence than the other day when I was campaigning for Congress in the Marcy Projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the Marcy Projects made famous in the lyrics of hip-hop superstar and Brooklyn native son Jay-Z. The 60-year-old Marcy Projects is so huge a housing complex that it swallows whole Myrtle and Park and Flushing Avenues between Nostrand and Marcy. It consists of 27 buildings, over 1,700 apartments, and approximately 5,000 residents. And except for areas like Fort Greene (excluding its own projects), Clinton Hill, Boerum Hill, and parts of Dumbo, Bed-Stuy, East Flatbush, and Canarsie, most of Mr. Towns' district is as impoverished, under-served, and as forgotten as Marcy Projects.

There is the sight of several elderly women sitting on benches in the middle of this aging complex, frustrated with the state of their lives, their meager incomes, the bags of garbage strewn about them, and the rats that have created dirt holes so big around each building that a small human head could fit through most of them. When I ask these women where the nearest senior citizen center is, so they could have some measure of relief, they say, in unison, "Right here, outside, where we are sitting now, these benches. This is the safest place we got."

There is the sight of children, pre-teens and teens, running, jumping, over piss-stained asphalt, scraping their knees on the ground filled with broken bottles and broken promises. There also is no community center open in Marcy any longer. Why that is the case, no Marcy resident can tell me. What they do tell me is that Marcy Playground is being renovated. And indeed it is. But the residents feel it is not for them, that it is for "the new White people coming into the area, and the new Black people who have some money."

There is the sight of all those Black and Latino males standing on this or that corner, in front of this or that building, the hands of their lives shoved deep into their pockets, their hunger for something better fed by a Newport cigarette, a taste of malt liquor or Hennessey, a pull on a marijuana stick. And then the ritual happens: a police car shows up, males and females of all ages are asked for identification, are thrown up against a wall, against the squad car, or to the ground, asked where they live, where they are going, why are they standing there, what is in their shoes, in their underwear. Or they are accused of trespassing for going from one building to another, even if they are simply visiting a relative or friend.

This is not just life in Marcy Projects, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. This is what ghetto monarchs like Congressman Towns and Congressman Rangel preside over in Black communities nationwide. Perhaps, once more, they really cared at one point--maybe they really did. But circa 2010, Charlie Rangel's problems are Ed Towns' problems because the apple does not fall very far from the tree. Yes, cite Mr. Rangel's litany of indiscretions, but let us not forget Mr. Towns' own timeline of indiscretions while overseeing his district (see the timeline below for Mr. Towns), for nearly three decades, with, among other things, some of the bloodiest violence in America, the highest HIV/AIDS rates in America, the most under-achieving schools (with a few notable exceptions), and vast disparities between the haves and the have-nots. Right here in Brooklyn, New York.

Is it little wonder that as I travel this Congressional district, meeting with Jewish folks in Boerum HIill, Chinese folks in Williamsburg, West Indian folks in East Flatbush and Canarsie, or African American and Puerto Rican folks in East New York, I hear the same things time and again: "We never see Mr. Towns except maybe when he needs our vote," or, "I have never seen Mr. Towns in my life," or, "I have called Mr. Towns' office many times and never gotten the help I need," or, "I just do not trust any of these politicians at all. They all lie."

This is why voter turnout is perpetually low. This is why incumbents get to stay in office decade after decade. The formula is very simple for electeds like Congressman Ed Towns: Identify the loyal voters and only cater to them (helping them get election poll jobs, or regular jobs, helping their children get into schools, paying for trips out of town to some casino or amusement park or cookout). Stay out of sight of all the other registered Democratic voters, banking on them simply pulling the lever for "Democrats" every election cycle without any fuss or questions. Never debate an insurgent opponent for fear of being exposed for who you really are, and for what you have not done for the community. Turn your political seat into a business, one where your family member and circle of friends and colleagues benefit from the powerful reach of your position.

So why would you want to give that up? Why would you even bother to do more than is absolutely necessary when you are able to enjoy the perks of a long political career without much effort, without much sweat equity at all? Why would you even think that taking on the values of political corruption are unethical at all, if there has been no one to hold you accountable for so very long?

And why would you see that Brooklyn, and the Brooklyns of America, are broken, so very terribly broken, even though it is clear as day to the people in your community?

***

Kevin Powell is a 2010 Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Brooklyn, New York's 10th Congressional district. You can contact him at kevinpowell.net.

Brooklyn! Who is Your Congressman?

Kevin Powell for Congress!

"Will I Die Before They Get To Know Me?" On Oscar Grant

Politics and Activism
"Will I Die Before They Get To Know Me?" From J. Cole to Oscar Grant III
by Michael Ralph

"Will I live or will I die before they get to know me? If I go, I know the ones that's pourin' liquor for me ... "
-J. Cole, "Can I Live?" The Warm Up

While rappers from Kanye West to Jay Z have celebrated Obama's ascent to the US Presidency as a victory for black people and for the prospect of democracy in the US, more broadly, J. Cole remains unconvinced that we have entered the age of Hope, as he makes clear on "I Get Up," the sixth track from his standout mixtape, The Warm Up:

"We raisin' babies in Hades, where it ain't no Hope...Politicians hollerin' 'bout problems, but I ain't gon' vote. Keep talkin' 'bout Change, we floatin' in the same ol' boat."

Like the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas before him, J. Cole's lyricism centers on the unlikely prospect of individual success in a gothic underworld defined by corrupt social institutions ("like a corpse six feet, shit's deep," "Grown Simba"; "My mind's elsewhere: my mom's health care. To get out this hell, here," "I Get Up"). J. Cole specializes in elaborating an unruly cityscape where death is familiar, making fantasies of bling desirable (where social reproduction lies in the slim possibility that some of the "seeds" he and members of his cohort manage to help produce might survive to see a brighter tomorrow; where he and his peers might live on in legends told by the women they too often reduce to accessories and vehicles for sexual satisfaction, despite the longing they routinely express for a partner who could appreciate the social and psychological suffering that defines their plight). Precisely because J. Cole doesn't consider himself to be much interested in electoral competition or protest politics, I was struck by a single line from, "Can I Live," that echoes ominously in the aftermath of Oscar Grant III's tragic death: "He didn't even get a chance to run before the bullet hit his lung."

In the first few hours of 2009, Johannes Mehserle stood over, shot and killed, Grant, as the twenty-two year-old father lay face down on Oakland's Bay Area Transit platform, while another officer kneeled on the young man's neck. The bullet passed through Grant's torso and hit the ground before bouncing back into his lung, ending his life some hours later. In courtroom testimony, Mehserle maintained that he meant to reach for his taser but mistakenly drew his semi-automatic handgun, although he was wearing his taser on the left side and his .40 caliber on the right side of his body, and despite the fact that the former weighs about half as much as the latter.

On July 8, 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, marking the first time in the history of the state of California that a police officer has been convicted for shooting and killing an unarmed African American man, although it happens at an alarming rate. What some onlookers view as a just conviction was met with widespread disappointment and diverse methods of protest. Supporters of Grant, legal experts, and grassroots activists hoped the jury would return a verdict of second-degree murder or, perhaps, voluntary manslaughter. But then, Mehserle's defense team had insisted in pretrial correspondence, apparently with far-reaching effects, that the presiding judge should instruct the jury to limit its deliberations to either second-degree murder or acquittal. Even more unsettling, Michael Rains, counsel for the defense, managed to have each potential African American juror removed from consideration for the trial based on the dubious rationale that Oakland's black residents cannot be expected to deliver an unbiased verdict in a criminal trial involving a police officer suspected of violent conduct. The kind of shooting J. Cole writes about (involving miscellaneous "niggas" and rival drug crews) would seem wholly different from police violence wielded by a state employee, except that we are too often discussing "accidental shootings," in either case.

Read the Full Essay @ Social Text

***

Michael Ralph teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His scholarship on crime, economics, political transformation and urban youth culture has been published in Public Culture, Social Text, Souls, Transforming Anthropology, Afrique et Développement and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Teens Learn Sexual Violence Prevention Via Art Therapy

from WBEZ--Chicago Public Radio

Teens Learn Sexual Violence Prevention Via Art Therapy
Produced by Natalie Y. Moore

This summer a group of teenage girls on Chicago’s West Side is learning about sexual violence prevention while they draw. The idea is to get the girls talking about and confronting sexual violence through yoga, dance and painting.

In a classroom at North Lawndale College Prep High School, 15 girls mix paint for their latest art project.

Each teen has a pair of white canvas gym shoes in front of her - literally a blank canvas. One of their instructors explains:

ambi: How can you use dress for communication. We’re using shoes. What are some of the things we talked about?

Hope, respect, the girls say. The program is called Girl/Friends and it’s designed to shore up hope and respect in these students and help them pass the message on to other girls.

There are many reasons girls can become victims of sexual assault, and it cuts across racial and class lines. Nationally, one in four girls is sexually abused before the age of 18.

But Chicago police statistics put North Lawndale eighth in the city for criminal sexual assaults in the past year. Their neighborhood faces a lot of factors that contribute: lack of parenting skills, domestic violence and the stresses of unemployment.

Listen HERE

Grooves of Consciousness?: The ‘Myths’ of Political Music

Grooves of Consciousness?: The ‘Myths’ of Political Music
by Mark Anthony Neal

The recent debate between critic Mychal Smith and rapper Talib Kweli, brought into focus long-standing contentions about the responsibilities of artists who have been marked as political. Among this generation of so-called conscious rappers, Kweli has been among the most honest about the pitfalls and constraints of being labeled a “political” rapper. Kweli’s point was borne out on the track “The Beautiful Struggle” where he raps emphatically “I speak at schools a lot cause they say I'm intelligent/No, it's cause I'm dope, if I was wack I'd be irrelevant.” Yet Smith’s point is well taken; communities have a right and should be expected to hold artists accountable for the work they produce—work that ostensibly represents the communities that produced the artist and offer the most loving support of their art.

To be sure this is not a new debate; early 20th century thinkers W.E.B. DuBois (“Criteria for Negro Art”), George Schuyler (“Negro Art Hokum”) and Langston Hughes (“Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain”) had spirited exchanges in 1926 in the pages of The Nation and The Crisis where DuBois argued for an art that served the race, Schuyler rejected the notion that “Black” American art even existed, while Hughes carried the blood-stained banner artistic freedom. DuBois’s critique, in particular anticipated the emergence of a younger generation of artists including Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent and Aaron Douglass, who coalesced around the short-term publication Fire!, who offered a fuller view of black life, that some Harlem Renaissance figures found offensive.

At the crux of Hughes’s argument and ultimately Kweli’s is that the artistic process is fluid. Artists may have specific political commitments and passions, but good artists are also expected to portray the fullest range of human emotions—the revolution might be digitized or pitched to a 24-hour news cycle if you will, but people do not sustain themselves on revolution alone; neither do so-called political artists. Ultimately are we holding artists up to criteria that doesn’t fully recognize how the “political” functions in everyday life?

There is no denying that there is such a thing as political music. The music of folk artist Woody Guthrie or black bluesman Josh White are among those whose legacies stand out in this regard. In their day though, no one referred to Guthrie (best known for “This Land is Your Land”) or White, (who like DuBois and Paul Robeson testified in front of the House Un-American Committee in 1950), as a “conscious” folk artist or blues musician. The fluidity of their lives and their politics was reflected in their art, where they passionately expressed resistance, patriotism, and a full range of civic, spiritual, secular and even carnal emotions. The notion of a “conscious” artists speaks less about the reality of politics, but more so the imposition of market forces on art. Calling somebody a “conscious rapper” is about reaching a buying demographic.

Because we often take a limited view of how politics function in the everyday or how political resistance plays out on a daily basis—as the late Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall might describe it—we often miss the more nuanced links between politics and art. In his classic text Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, historian Robin D.G. Kelley highlights the significance of what anthropologist James C. Scott calls “infrapolitics.” According to Kelley, “the political history of oppressed people cannot be understood without reference to infrapolitics, for these daily acts have a cumulative effect on power relations.” These infrapolitics also inform what Clyde Woods, in his book Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, calls a “blues epistemology…a longstanding African-American tradition of explaining reality and change.” Critical to understanding Kelley and Woods's concepts are notions of politics as organic, as opposed to contrived; informal in contrast to formal.

Let me be clear, political art and artists have always existed, but our investments in so-called conscious rapper strikes me as one of the first times that we’ve held artists accountable and responsible for providing political commentary and agitation in the absence of the kinds of broad-based political movements that previous artists felt compelled to contribute to regardless of their political orientation. Our desire for political rappers or celebration of the political gestures of R&B artists like Raheem DeVaughn or even Jill Scott is borne out of a frustration with the lack of visible broad based political movements in our era and a nostalgia for the historical moment that hosted the most important social and political movements of the 20th century, in the struggle for Black civil and human rights.

The labor movement of the 1930s, the struggles against segregation in the south, anti-lynching activism, resistance to anti-Communist blacklisting and the pursuit of voting rights offered black artists myriad ways to imagine themselves, without simply being defined as “political”—they were artists, not "technicians" taking direction from the NAACP, The Black Panther Power or the Politburo, even if their political beliefs might have been aligned with such organizations. A cursory glance at the careers of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley is instructive in this regard.

Though Billie Holiday was one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th Century (you hear Holiday in artists as diverse as Abbey Lincoln, Frank Sinatra and Erykah Badu), she is perhaps most remembered for the drug addiction that ultimately led to her premature death at the age 44 in July of 1959. Few though ever think of Holiday as a political artist, though her recording of the Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allan) composition “Strange Fruit” is likely the most important anti-lynching song ever recorded. Holiday’s recording of the song and the song’s proximity to leftist politics in this country (Meeropol would later adopt the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed in 1953 spying for the Soviet Union), likely caught the attention of the FBI, who by the end of 1949s maintained a dossier on Holiday, primarily concerned with her narcotics consumption.

In contrast Nina Simone is generally thought of as the epitome of a political artist, largely on the strength of her work during the 1960s with recordings like “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” and the scathing “Mississippi Goddamn,” a song that she wrote in response to the bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham in September of 1963.

On the one hand, Simone’s willingness to actively contribute to the movement via her songs and performances is unmatched—Simone was brought into the movement her friend the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who she later eulogized with the anthem “Young, Gifted and Black”—but to only read her career through that lens is to misrepresent her artistry. Simone was one of the great song interpreters of the 20th century, whether putting her spin on The Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy,” The Bee Gee’s early hit “To Love Somebody,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” or “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” Simone’s PG version of Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” The “politics” of Simone’s music was implicit, in her willingness to view the world via a distinct womanist lens, both before and after her singular contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.

Marvin Gaye is another artist who complicates our sense of what a political artist is. With the release of What Going On in 1971, Marvin Gaye created one of the most cohesive and timeless collections of protest songs. Indeed songs like “What’s Going On?” which critiqued the war in Vietnam, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” which anticipated the Green energy movement and the self-explanatory “Inner City Blues” are as relevant today, as they were in 1971. Gaye recorded What’s Going On, more than a decade into his career as Motown’s most bankable male solo artist. Label founder Berry Gordy initially rejected the album, famously telling Gaye that it would kill his career (and presumably Gordy’s bottom-line). Gordy only relented, when the single, “What’s Going On?” became a pop hit.

Gaye was a deeply impressionable artist and What’s Going On was produced in what was a perfect storm of personal and political crises in his life including the premature death of singing partner Tammi Terrell in 1970, the riots that ripped through Detroit in 1967 and instigated Gordy’s relocation of Motown to Los Angeles, Frankie Gaye’s (Marvin’s brother) tour of duty in Vietnam, Gaye’s drug addiction and the general malaise found in his hometown of Washington DC and his adopted city of Detroit. After the release of What Going On, Gaye quickly transitioned to a more carnal concerns, releasing Let’s Get It On in 1973. With the exception of the single “Who’s the Man?,” Gaye would never again recorded explicitly political work. The lead single from Gaye’s final studio album, recorded before his murder in 1984, was initially titled “Sanctified Pussy.” One wonders how critics might have viewed the trajectory of Gaye’s career if he was a “conscious” contemporary artist?

The point is that politics and arts is not as seamless as some critics would have us to believe; even a figure like Bob Marley, whose art clearly was informed by his politics and his spirituality, recorded an album dedicated to “ganja” with Kaya (1978). The album’s first song, “Easy Skanking” begins with the unforgettable line, “Excuse me while I light my spliff,” which provides another vantage to consider a recording like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992) a generation later. Despite the highly problematic nature of Dr. Dre’s work in the era, The Chronic also contains tracks like “The Day the Niggaz Took Over” and “Lil Ghetto Boy” (sampling the Donny Hathaway classic) that provide some context for the Los Angeles riots that broke out months before The Chronic’s release.

Though no one would ever equate Dr. Dre’s political sensibilities with Bob Marley’s, the fact is you’d be hard-pressed to find a political song that resonated among the masses of black folk (and quite a few whites) more than NWA’s Dr. Dre produced “Fuck tha Police.” For example, it was NWA’s track that raised the ire of law enforcement and the FBI, not any of the politically sophisticated music produced by Public Enemy in the same moment. While the scholars and the activists highlight the legitimate political impact that Public Enemy had a generation ago, it is basic everyday concerns expressed in black music that often resonates most. Arguably the most meaningful reference to everyday life in Public Enemy’s catalogue (“Fight the Power” notwithstanding) is the Flava Flav led “911 is a Joke” a song in which Chuck D’s voice is notably absent.

While many of us seek political commentary from our conscious rappers and more often than not, express disappointment when those rappers don’t live up to the, perhaps unrealistic, expectations we have for them, artist we would never consider “conscious” can provide the kind of insightful commentary that we desire. The recent release by Rick Ross, provides such an example. While much of the discourse around Ross’s recent Teflon Don centers on his seeming celebration of professional thugs Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory and Larry Hoover, the recording also includes the track “Tears a Joy” which features a minute long snippet of Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale. The song makes implicit and explicit connections between the kind of political agitation that the Black Panther Party was famous for and the so-called black proletariat and black lumpenproletariat that filled the ranks of the organization at it’s peak.

This is not to say that Teflon Don isn’t problematic on a number of levels, but if we are going to be honest about conscious music, the masses of folk will more likely to be introduced to the politics of the Black Panther Party via Rick Ross, than they are the music of so-called “conscious” rappers. Clyde Woods argues that by definition all black music is conscious, “that is they still must explicitly, or, implicitly address African-American consciousness of this period and the intellectual/performance traditions that emerged during it. They are popular in the true sense of the word: generated by and for an evolved community of consciousness and memory.” Under this definition, virtually all black artists are responding to the material conditions that produced them and in many ways there’s not much more that we can ask of them.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). Neal is also the co-editor with Murray Forman of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2nd Edition) which will be published by Routledge in January of 2011.

How Long Has the Essence Train Been Gone

Tell Me, How Long Has the Essence Train Been Gone?
by phillisremastered

Yesterday, I found out from cultural critic Michaela Angela Davis (a Facebook friend) that Essence Magazine has hired Fashion Director Elliana Placas. The issue, of course, is that Placas is White, and Essence is a magazine that has been focused on Black women since 1968.

Davis is very upset, and since she is also a writer, I can understand her concern; Essence is one of the few places that has consistently provided employment to Black female journalists–and Black stylists and designers. Davis was quote in Clutch Magazine as saying that “I feel like a girlfriend died.” (Click on this to read the article.)

However, I have to tell you that what has made me so sad was not Essence’s hiring of a White Fashion Director, but that I really don’t care in the least anymore what happens to Essence magazine and I haven’t for a long, long time.

Like all of the African American women I know– and also, all the biracial women of African descent that I know, too—I grew up on Essence. It was lovely seeing all those super-fine, super-bad Sisters in cute, fly outfits, faces beat to perfection, and hair that was natural yet impeccably coifed. “You don’t need chemicals and you don’t need to be light-skinned to be pretty, either, though our beauty comes in all shades and hair textures”—this is what Essence said to Sisters each month.

The only other magazine that featured Black women on such a scale was Ebony, but let’s face it, Ebony wasn’t slick like Essence, which was just as classy as Glamour, Elle, or Vogue—magazines that might have a Sister on the cover every two or three years. Ebony, on the other hand, featured staged and sometimes, well, cheesy photo essays.

And Ebony clearly wasn’t about a Black woman’s point of view. It was invested in a traditional view of the Black family: Brother in the front, Sister and children to the side or the back, looking up at The Black Man adoringly and always deferring to him. Which is the way it was ‘sposed to be, right?

Always, Ebony let Sisters know that if they would just get on board the Patriarchal Man-As-Head train, everything would be great in the Black community. Meanwhile, there was a woman’s liberation movement going on with White Women AND Black Women. But, Ebony implicitly stated each month, this movement was for lesbians, straight man-haters who didn’t have daddies, and ugly women with buck-teeth who couldn’t get no man in the first place.

Essence, on the other hand, started off as a publication supporting “Strong Black Women.” In fact, Marcia Ann Gillespie was editor-in-chief of Essence for nine years. Gillespie used to be editor of Ms. Magazine, a mainstream “official” feminist magazine.

So, in the beginning, Essence was about putting black women first. Then, came the nineties.

Read the Full Essay @ Phillis Remastered

Damn that Rap, Snoop Stole My Music

A discussion on intellectual property and the future of Black expression

Damn that Rap, Snoop Stole My Music
by Mark Anthony Neal

Most rap music fans are probably unaware of Michael Henderson and his rather formidable musical career. Henderson recently filed separate complaints against Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus) and producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, charging both with copyright infringement.

In layperson’s terms, he’s accusing them of stealing his music.

The cases continue what has been a more than two decade struggle over hip-hop’s aesthetic principles and intellectual property law. At stake in these skirmishes is the future of Black cultural expression.

A Little History

At his peak, bassist Michael Henderson, was most known for his work as a sideman with Miles Davis during Davis’s electric funk period in the early 1970s appearing on albums like Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). An in demand session musician, Henderson also worked with and recorded with Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. Like his peers Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke, Henderson was of a generation of electric bassists that were redefining the sound of the instrument in the early 1970s, furthering the funk revolution that James Brown initiated in the 1960s.

It was with James Brown in mind that Davis recorded On the Corner (1972), an album in which Henderson’s bass is prominently featured. The genius of On the Corner, was that even as Davis and his musicians liberally borrowed from the musical impulses of Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendix and others, there’s little doubt that On the Corner offers singular evidence of Davis’s creativity and musical genius.

Critic Greg Tate has suggested that On the Corner’s production values were a prototype for later rap production. Indeed Davis’s last studio album before his death in 1992 was the hip-hop influenced Doo-Bop which was produced by Easy Mo Be (Ready to Die). In bringing suit against Snoop and 9th Wonder, Michael Henderson is ironically suing the children and grandchildren of On the Corner.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

***

Editor's Note: This past spring Neal co-taught the class “Sampling Soul” with producer 9th Wonder at Duke University.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy. He teaches Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Email Mark at mark@theloop21.com. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Jabari Asim Review's Stepto's 'A Home Elsewhere' and William's Losing My Cool

from The Washington Post

"A Home Elsewhere," by Robert Stepto, & "Losing My Cool," by Thomas Williams
Reviewed by Jabari Asim
Sunday, July 25, 2010; B06

A HOME ELSEWHERE
Reading African American Classics In the Age of Obama
By Robert B. Stepto
Harvard Univ.
179 pp. $22.95

LOSING MY COOL
How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Penguin Press.
225 pp. $24.95

In these two slender, provocative volumes, a pair of African American thinkers confront questions of art, life and culture in a society in which "the vistas of circumstance have opened up . . . dramatically" for blacks in the United States. That phrase comes from Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose "Losing My Cool" starts out as an explicit argument about "loss of discipline and spirit in the hip-hop era" and shape-shifts into an engaging, well-written memoir.

Robert B. Stepto, a literary scholar at Yale, sets out to discover a new cultural context in which books by African American authors might be viewed. He writes that he wants to pay attention to "how we read African-American literature at the present moment." Expanded from a series of lectures, "A Home Elsewhere" is directed at a very select "we." Essays such as "Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony" aren't for the lay reader, and some of them touch only briefly on "the age of Obama" as a launching pad to other academic explorations. Still, Stepto discusses literature about as well as anyone, and it's a genuine pleasure to follow his joyful excursions through Douglass, Du Bois, Morrison and others.

Like Obama, Thomas Chatterton Williams has a white mother and a black father. Obama described his adolescent tussling with blackness as a "fitful interior struggle," but Williams, whose parents gave him a copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" when he was 7, approached blackness with ease. "I didn't ever wish to be white," he writes early in his memoir, which had its seed in an essay he wrote for The Washington Post. But both Williams and Obama sought hints from the larger culture regarding how to pull off what each considered a convincing black pose. Williams, who was born in 1981, paid attention to other black boys who frequented the barbershop where he got his hair cut. "These boys became like models to me. I studied their postures and their screwfaces, the unlaced purple and turquoise Filas on their feet, their mannerisms, the way they slapped hands in the street." Although a dutiful son and a reliable student, Williams found himself torn between the "florid second tongue" spoken on Black Entertainment Television and the "staid and familiar language" that his father favored.

Stepto took the title of his book from Frederick Douglass who, when his family failed to shelter him, "looked for home elsewhere." It's an archetypal journey, according to Stepto, in which "the created self attaches to community, and is in a real sense fully created through that attachment." Williams, on the other hand, despite growing up in what seems like a model household, looked for a home in the tumult of hip-hop. His memoir details his struggles with the self that emerged. As Williams tells it, his neighborhood celebrated ignorance and disdained courtesy and scholarship. "Coming up," he recalls, "I hadn't had the courage or the imagination to go against my neighborhood's grain, to be that kid who says: Screw it. I'm different." Despite his conformity -- and perhaps because of his parents' careful attention -- he still performed well enough in high school to gain acceptance to several of the best colleges in the country.

He chose Georgetown, where he struggled at first and skipped many of his classes. "Plenty of mornings degenerated into afternoons and then early evenings as I lamped in bed, BET thumping, the Big Tymers popping yellow bottles of Cristal and flashing iced-out grimaces, glaring at the camera lens, imploring all the young black men tuning in across the nation not to get to class but to get our roll on." For Williams, the worst of hip-hop philosophy was hugely influential on Georgetown's black ruling caste, some of whom, he says, "could freestyle at house parties but could not read at grade level."

After a childish prank backfired, Williams found himself exiled from the black cliques on campus. He "started hanging with armchair philosophers and intellectual showoffs" who laughed in your face if you revealed a weak vocabulary or lack of familiarity with Pynchon or Descartes. His perspective expands through these newfound friendships, drawing him into a deep study of Western philosophy and travel and away from what he eventually regards as the excesses of hip-hop. Williams finds a home in the world, and in the process stumbles, happily, toward his true self.

Stepto would probably agree that Williams's intellectual coming of age fits neatly into the tradition initiated by Douglass and sustained recently by Obama. Like Douglass, Williams was liberated not only by embracing new things but also by leaving things behind. He writes: "Concepts such as time and independence and freedom began to strike me on an intuitive level as more luxurious and precise than foreign cars and necklaces of gold. The thought that I could make a living reading or thinking was inspiring and even humbling."

We now have multiple generations of writers who have written supportively and critically of hip-hop's influence on black masculinity, including Bakari Kitwana, Joan Morgan and Adam Bradley. Williams comes down firmly as a naysayer. Two things save his impassioned denunciation from predictable ranting. One, he writes not as a distant scholar who has spent little actual time in "the field" but as a man who has spent much of his young life eagerly immersed in the rhythms and trends of hip-hop. Two, he reserves his harshest criticism for himself. Williams makes clear that no one forced him to absorb hip-hop's most destructive values. After a run-in with a classmate, he reflects, "I was in college, not in the street. Why was I fronting like I was in the street? Why did I always front like I was in the street?" This leads him ultimately to ask a larger question: "Are we bound to keep this culture that was born in negativity running in perpetuity?"

It would be a shame if Williams's thoughtful comments about hip-hop, which deserve and undoubtedly will receive articulate response, detract attention from other equally engaging portions of "Losing My Cool." For example, his portrait of his dad, an intensely private man, contains some of the most compelling writing about black fathers in recent literature on the subject. There is much to admire in "Losing My Cool," and more to anticipate from Williams.

***

Jabari Asim's most recent book is "A Taste Of Honey: Stories."

Carl Gordon aka Roc's 'Andrew Emerson' Goes Home

from the New York Times

Carl Gordon, a Late-Blooming Actor, Dies at 78
By MARGALIT FOX

Carl Gordon, who four decades ago, nearing midlife and feeling trapped in a series of dispiriting jobs, heeded a surprising call and became a successful character actor on television and the stage, died on Tuesday at his home in Jetersville, Va. He was 78.

The cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his family said.

To television viewers, Mr. Gordon was best known as the patriarch on “Roc,” a situation comedy about a working-class black family in Baltimore, broadcast on the Fox network for three seasons starting in 1991. In a highly unusual move, Seasons 2 and 3 were televised live, an approach to sitcoms that had been attempted rarely if at all since the 1950s.

The show starred Charles S. Dutton as Roc Emerson, a sanitation worker, and Mr. Gordon as his proud, irascible father, Andrew. So proud was Andrew Emerson that he seeded the family home with pictures of Malcolm X and maintained that a certain member of the Boston Celtics was far too good a basketball player to be a white man:

“Larry Bird was born and bred in Harlem,” Andrew declared in one episode. “His real name is Abdul Mustafa.”

On Broadway, Mr. Gordon originated the part of Doaker, the upright uncle in “The Piano Lesson” (1990), by August Wilson, one of two Pulitzer Prize-winning installments in the playwright’s 10-part cycle about black life. He reprised the role in the television adaptation, broadcast on CBS in 1995.

Rufus Carl Gordon Jr. was born on Jan. 20, 1932, in Goochland, Va.; he later jettisoned the “Rufus.” When he was a child his family moved to Brooklyn, where he grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. As a young man he spent four years in the Air Force, serving as an airplane mechanic during the Korean War.

Afterward, Mr. Gordon attended Brooklyn College but left to work before graduating. By his late 30s he had reached a low point. He was twice divorced and seemed consigned to unfulfilling jobs, including sheet-metal worker and department store stockroom clerk.

One night, as he recounted in interviews afterward, Mr. Gordon fell to his knees, weeping. “Lord, tell me what I need to do,” he said. From somewhere within him, an answer arose: “Try acting.”

To Mr. Gordon, the idea seemed preposterous: he had never considered acting and had barely been to the theater. But who was he to question the Lord? Before long, he had enrolled in the Gene Frankel Theater Workshop.

There, as The New York Times later wrote, Mr. Gordon was the oldest student, the only African-American and the only one without a college degree. But little by little, audition by audition, he built a career.

Mr. Gordon’s other screen work includes the film “The Brother From Another Planet” (1984), directed by John Sayles, and guest roles on “Law & Order” and “ER.”

Among his other Broadway credits are the musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” (1971), with book, music and lyrics by Melvin Van Peebles, and a 2003 revival of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” by Mr. Wilson, starring Mr. Dutton and Whoopi Goldberg. He also appeared in many productions by the Negro Ensemble Company.

Mr. Gordon is survived by his third wife, Jacqueline Alston-Gordon; a son, Rufus Carl III; five daughters, Gloria Gurley and Candise, Demethress, Yvette and Jasmine Gordon; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

When “Roc” went live, interviewers asked Mr. Gordon and his cast mates if they were daunted by the prospect. Not at all, they said, for most, like him, were veterans of the stage.

“It feels good,” Mr. Gordon told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1992. “It’s like going back to Broadway.”

Is the Far-Right Paranoid about Race?

Michael Eric Dyson, Abigail Thernstrom and Cornel West weigh in on the Shirley Sherrod controversy with Bob Schieffer on CBS's Face the Nation.

More Wedding Memories: The Sound of Blackness - Optimistic

Marriage Memories: BeBe & CeCe Winans - Addictive Love - Music Video

Sissy Bounce in Naw'Lins

The Real Story of Racism at the USDA

The Real Story of Racism at the USDA
by Chris Kromm

Right now, if you do a web search of the words "racism" and "USDA," the majority of links will steer you to coverage of this week's Shirley Sherrod affair, in which the African-American U.S. Department of Agriculture staffer based in Georgia resigned after a conservative website reversed the meaning of a speech she gave last year to imply she would deny farm loans to whites.

It's an astonishing development given the history of race relations at the USDA, an agency whose own Commission on Small Farms admitted in 1998 that "the history of discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture ... is well-documented" -- not against white farmers, but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially-biased laws and practices.

It's also a black eye for President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who signaled a desire to atone for the USDA's checkered past, including pushing for funding of a historic $1.15 billion settlement that would help thousands of African American farmers but now faces bitter resistance from Senate Republicans.

FORCED OFF THE LAND

Any discussion about race and the USDA has to start with the crisis of black land loss. Although the U.S. government never followed through on its promise to freed slaves of "40 acres and a mule," African-Americans were able to establish a foothold in Southern agriculture. Black land ownership peaked in 1910, when 218,000 African-American farmers had an ownership stake in 15 million acres of land.

By 1992, those numbers had dwindled to 2.3 million acres held by 18,000 black farmers. And that wasn't just because farming was declining as a way of life: Blacks were being pushed off the land in vastly disproportionate numbers. In 1920, one of out seven U.S. farms were black-run; by 1992, African-Americans operated one out of 100 farms.

The USDA isn't to blame for all of that decline, but the agency created by President Lincoln in 1862 as the "people's department" did little to stem the tide -- and in many cases, made the situation worse.

After decades of criticism and an upsurge in activism by African-American farmers, the USDA hosted a series of "listening sessions" in the 1990s, which added to a growing body of evidence of systematic discrimination:

Black farmers tell stories of USDA officials -- especially local loan authorities in all-white county committees in the South -- spitting on them, throwing their loan applications in the trash and illegally denying them loans. This happened for decades, through at least the 1990s. When the USDA's local offices did approve loans to Black farmers, they were often supervised (farmers couldn't spend the borrowed money without receiving item-by-item authorization from the USDA) or late (and in farming, timing is everything). Meanwhile, white farmers were receiving unsupervised, on-time loans. Many say egregious discrimination by local loan officials persists today.

Among those concluding that such racial bias persisted were the USDA's own researchers: In the mid-1990s, they released a report [pdf] which, analyzing data from 1990 to 1995, found "minorities received less than their fair share of USDA money for crop payments, disaster payments, and loans."

Adding insult to injury, when African-American and other minority farmers filed complaints, the USDA did little to address them. In 1983, President Reagan pushed through budget cuts that eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights -- and officials admitted they "simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them" until 1996, when the office re-opened. Even when there were findings of discrimination, they often went unpaid -- and those that did often came too late, since the farm had already been foreclosed.

Read the Full Essay @ Facing South

Elaine Richardson aka Dr. E: From P.H.D. to Ph.D.

Sweet Redemption:
OSU professor's jazz CD celebrates triumph over drug addiction and more
by Kevin Joy

Elaine Richardson still tears up at the memory of calling the ambulance.

So high on cocaine at nine months' pregnant that she assumed the fetus inside her 27-year-old body had no chance, she had reached the point of wishing to go to jail for the umpteenth time to save herself - and her unborn baby - from destruction.

She remembers the warning issued by the emergency-room doctor in Cleveland: If we find any drugs in your infant, we can press charges and take away the child.

"I was almost dead," said Richardson, now 50. "I was disgusted with myself. I wanted to get out, but I didn't know how."

Amazingly, her baby girl - her second child - was born healthy, providing motivation enough for her to ditch drugs and alcohol for good and to abandon a turbulent past littered with abusive men and scores of jail stints for prostitution.

Richardson did more than get clean.

At 36, she earned a doctorate in English from Michigan State University. She later wrote two books, and co-edited three others, on academic studies of American black-language patterns. She taught for nine years at Penn State University, taking a tenured position in 2007 to teach literacy studies in the College of Education at Ohio State University.

"She had a spark, ... (and was) imaginative, funny - a leader," said Ted Lardner, an English professor at Cleveland State University who served as Richardson's thesis adviser during her graduate studies in the early 1990s. "If Zora Neale Hurston had a goddaughter, she could be Elaine - a deep student of life, studying it up close and unguarded."

In between academics, Richardson escaped into music, singing with various ensembles and composing jazzy original fare, including some that was later featured on All My Children and Dharma & Greg.

On Sunday, she will perform in the Far North Side venue Vonn Jazz to celebrate the release of her first full-length solo effort, a culmination of two years spent crafting motivational tunes inspired by her metamorphosis.

Onstage, she uses the name Dr. E - a nod to hard-earned redemption and the fruits of a better life.

The album's title: Elevated.

Read the Full Article @ The Columbus Dispatch

The 'Big Meech' Syndrome

A gangsta-inspired double-consciousness?

Rick Ross, educated brothers and The Big Meech syndrome
by Felicia Pride | TheLoop21

I think I'm Big Meech/Larry Hoover

Whipping work/hallelujah

One nation/under god 

Real n*ggas getting money from the fu*king start

--B.M.F (Blowin Money Fast) by Rick Ross featuring Styles P



Earlier this month, Casey Gane-McCalla, a journalist, rapper, comedian and Facebook friend, declared on his FB status: “I am an Ivy league college educated journalist with no criminal background…still when I hear this song...I think I'm Big Meech.”

The song that Gane-McCalla refers to is B.M.F, a single from Rick Ross’s fourth album, Teflon Don which dropped Tuesday. The song’s considered a heater. The summer’s hip-hop anthem.

His admission came as I started to notice more and more black male friends and associates like Gane-McCalla embrace Rick Ross with fingers thrown in the air. These are: college graduates who own all of the rapper’s albums, recite his lyrics passionately, and wear dress shirts and ties to work daily even though it’s not required. These are: corporate ladder-climbers who admit that Ross is growing on them and wonder why I don’t agree. These are: straight-laced brothers who turn up the radio and head nod hard to gangster stories attached to thumping beats. These are: Ivy-leaguers who, even just for the length of the song, feel like they’re Big Meech.


Read a critique of how the hip-hop industry thrives on our demise.

Some context: Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory, cofounded the notorious, drug cartel BMF (Black Mafia Family). It’s been estimated that the organization, led by he and his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory, pulled in more than $250 million during its reign.



Big Meech lived the lifestyle so many rappers claim and celebrate. Cases of champagne at the club. Host of luxury cars. He beamed money-green and really did blow money fast. Women swooned and brothers bowed. His crew was air-tight; zero tolerance for disrespect.



The hypermasculine dream. Until the inevitable fall in 2008, when Big Meech received a thirty-year prison sentence for running a criminal enterprise.



So why would black men, who possess the legitimized American dream credentials: good education, better job, nicer salary, property in their own name, sometimes feel, as Ross has termed, “meechy”?

Read the Full Essay @ theloop21

***

Felicia Pride is the founder of BackList and the author of The Message. Follow her on Twitter or email her at felicia@theloop21.com.

'Down Low' Politics, the Politics of 'Down Low'

Only Black men have their sexual practices policed and framed in pathological terms.

Down Low discourse is a matter of race and public health
by Marc Lamont Hill | TheLoop21.com

A few weeks ago, comedians DL Hughley and Sherri Shepherd came under fire for comments that they made on an episode of The View. While discussing the FDA’s ban on blood donation for gays and bisexual men, the two matter-of-factly mentioned that HIV was prevalent in the Black community because of the “Down Low,” or the sexual practices of bisexual men who identify to their partners (and themselves) as heterosexual. The comments sparked firestorm from gay advocacy and public health organizations, both of which rightly regarded the comments as bigoted and untrue.

My interest is not in criticizing Hughley and Shepherd, whose comments merely echoed the sentiments of many people in the Black community. Rather, my frustration is with the very notion of the Down Low, which rests upon a set of problematic assumptions and dangerous claims that undermine the physical and mental health of the community.

Despite what countless magazines, news outlets, and everyday people have reported as “fact,” there is no evidence that Down Low men are responsible for the spike in the HIV infection rates of African American women. To the contrary, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, high-risk heterosexual sex and injection drug use are actually the leading causes of infection for Black women. In fact, according to experts, incidents of female infection from bisexual male partners are relatively low. While more research needs to be done—particularly studies that deploy more complex methodologies for tracking the sexual practices and identities of bisexual men who don’t identify as such—there is absolutely no scientific basis for blaming HIV infection on DL men.

In addition to being empirically baseless, the current Down Low panic follows a long and deep history of framing Black males as immoral, diseased, and dangerous. Do “DL brothers” really exist? Of course. But they exist among every race and culture throughout history. (For evidence of this, check out the critically acclaimed movie Brokeback Mountain, which tells the story of a secret gay romance between two men in the American west from 1963 to 1983. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the film was not referred to as a “DL movie.”) Despite this reality, only Black men seem to have their sexual practices policed and framed in pathological terms.

Read the Full Essay @ theloop21

To Forge a Better NAACP

To Forge a Better NAACP
by Blair L. M. Kelley

What happened to the NAACP? It’s odd to think that the venerable and historic National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been reduced to a talking point in the national media cycle this week.

They received national attention in June when the Los Angeles chapter lodged a protest against a Hallmark card with a recorded message that they thought somehow insulted black women. Then in July, the national meeting of the NAACP issued a statement calling on the conservative Tea Party movement to “repudiate racist factions” in their midst, one year after many in the media and blogosphere had already pointed out evidence of racism during the health care reform protests. Then NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said they were “snookered” by a video posted by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart that purported to show civil rights veteran and USDA official Shirley Sherrod “revealing her past racism.” Sherrod was really telling a story about her own transformation, from a person who wanted to aid poor black farmers, to a person who wanted to assist poor farmers no matter their race. The NAACP of today should be celebrating the work of people like Sherrod, not misunderstanding who she is.

Students frequently ask me questions about today’s NAACP. They ask if I think the NAACP is still necessary in today’s “post-civil rights” world. They ask what work the NAACP should be doing now. Many students dismiss the NAACP as old and ineffectual, out of touch with their generation. These incidents seem to reinforce this notion that the NAACP is spinning its wheels, late to point out injustice, or failing to address real crises while targeting the wrong people or imagined problems.

Part of the problem is that in contemporary conversation it seems like the NAACP has been painted into a racialized corner as an all-black organization that is somehow “reverse racist,” selfish, and self-interested. Many accuse the NAACP of lacking new ideas and new energy that can address what social justice should be in the 21st century. It might be a good time for the NAACP to remember its own history.

Read the Full Essay @ UNCPressBlog

***

Blair L. M. Kelley is associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson.