'Left of Black': Episode #34 featuring David J. Leonard and Natalie Y. Moore

Left of Black #34

w/ David J. Leonard and Natalie Y. Moore

May 16, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by Washington State University Professor David J. Leonard, co-editor of Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African-Americans in Contemporary Sports.  Later he is joined by Chicago Public Radio reporter Natalie Y. Moore, who is also the co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of An American Gang.

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>David J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.  His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press).

>Natalie Y. Moore is a reporter for Chicago Public Radio’s South Side bureau. Prior to joining the Chicago Public Radio staff in May 2007, Natalie was a city hall reporter for the Detroit News. As a freelance journalist, Natalie’s work has been published in Essence, Black Enterprise, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. She is co-author of the book Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation (Cleis Press, 2006) and The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of An American Gang. She is an adjunct instructor at Columbia College Chicago and is the former program chair for the Association for Women Journalists.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Rapper Rhymefest in Runoff Race for Alderman

 

Closing Cabrini-Green

photo courtesy of Ronitfilms.com


When the last tenant moved out of Chicago's notorious housing project, it signaled the end of an era and raised questions about the future of displaced tenants -- and public housing itself.

Closing Cabrini-Green
by Sylvester Monroe | The Root.com

When the last tenant moved out of Chicago's notorious housing project, it signaled the end of an era and raised questions about the future of displaced tenants -- and public housing itself.

Sometimes, moving is a happy event. Sometimes it's not. Last week, when Annie Ricks and five of her children left the 11th-floor apartment in the dilapidated, 15-story high-rise complex where she has lived for the past 22 years, it was a media event. And Ricks, the last tenant in Chicago's notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project, was not happy.

"I didn't want to leave, but I didn't have a choice," she said in an interview with The Root, while sitting among a sea of boxes in the kitchen of her newly renovated Chicago Housing Authority apartment on the other side of the city. Indeed, the 54-year-old mother of eight from Alabama didn't have a choice about leaving Cabrini. The building where she lived is scheduled to be demolished early next year. She moved there about a year ago, after another Cabrini building, where she had lived for 21 years, was also torn down.

Ricks successfully challenged the housing authority's order to evacuate the building by the end of November. She wanted to move to a rehabbed apartment in a low-rise building, but it was not ready. When Ricks was finally forced to vacate last week after CHA officials decreed that the high-rise building was no longer inhabitable, she was first offered a home in a Cabrini rowhouse apartment. But Ricks was concerned about gun battles between "the reds," residents of the red brick apartments, and "the whites," who live in Cabrini's high-rise towers, an ongoing rivalry fueled by gang and drug violence. "That would have put my kids in jeopardy," she said.

Instead, she was forced to choose between two low-rise CHA properties on the South Side. She also has the option of returning to Cabrini next year when more units are rehabbed. "It was the Dearborn Homes or Wentworth Gardens," she said. "I settled for this one [in Wentworth] because it was not a high-rise." But she said the new apartment is too small.

Though it is completely renovated, with new kitchen appliances and bath fixtures, it has only three bedrooms, compared with the five she had in Cabrini. As a result, Ricks' oldest daughter and her baby son, who lived with Ricks in Cabrini, had to move to their own apartment in a different complex. Ricks also said that the low-rise building hallways are too narrow to get her queen-size bed into the apartment. "I just feel like they didn't try hard enough to accommodate me," she said.

Annie Ricks' frustration and unhappiness are not unusual as the CHA and others struggle to improve the physical living conditions of hundreds of thousands of poor and low-income families stuck in substandard public housing across the country. At one point, 15,000 people lived in Cabrini-Green before deteriorating conditions, gang and drug violence, and other crime earned the 58-year-old complex a reputation as the most notorious of Chicago's dangerous housing projects and transformed it into a national symbol of inner-city warehousing of America's largely black and brown urban underclass.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root.com

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Sylvester Monroe is a native of Chicago and frequent contributor to The Root.

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

Gun Violence and American Masculinity

Gun Violence and American Masculinity

by Mark Anthony Neal

The numbers are simply breathtaking; during a 60-hour period, over the weekend beginning June 18, 2010, more than fifty people were shot in the city of Chicago, seven of them fatally. Not coincidentally, two of those shootings occurred when shots were fired randomly at a crowd gathered for a Pride Weekend event in the city. More than 25 people were victims of shooting violence the following weekend, at least three of them fatally, adding to the city’s increasing homicide rate (more than 200 by mid June). Ironically, Chicago has had a handgun ban in place for nearly three decades. The ban was successfully challenged, in a Supreme Court decision that was handed down this week. Clearly something is not working in Chicago, as is the case in many American cities, towns and hamlets.

That a significant portion of the violence was gang-related and involved young black men, should surprise no one. Let’s not pretend, though, that this is a problem endemic only to large urban centers like Chicago or black youth for that matter; The level of violence we’ve witnessed has become all too ordinary in America, particularly as the nation wages two wars abroad (wars that Chicago based Barack Obama has expanded) and Tea-baggers casually insinuate the use of violence to reclaim “freedoms” they supposedly lost in the last Presidential election.

That we live in a culture of violence, notwithstanding, we do have to look starkly at the realities of that shape violence in the lives of black youth, particularly black males. According to recent Department of Justice figures (2008), black males aged 18-29 have the highest homicide rates in the country. Additionally this same age group of black males is the most likely to commit homicide—with their black male peers, accordingly being the most likely targets. These statistics give us some insight into the on-the-ground issues instigate such violence.

There are of course the usual suspects; the crippling effect of the erosion of the traditional nuclear family, and the absence of male adults—fathers—in the lives of these young men and boys. Still others will cites the usual scapegoat, rap music, as a primary culprit, as two of the genres most visible icons, T.I. and Little Wayne have been incarcerated on gun related charges. These are legitimate concerns to consider, but neither theory, gets at the everyday aspects of the black male experience where, respect creates hard-earned social capital and hypermasculine performance is a valuable commodity.

Hypermasculinity can best be described as behaviors or performances that amplify the already masculine aspects of male identity. Thus elevated forms of aggression and risk taking are part of the hypermasculine performance. In that manhood is often the only tangible source of power and respect available to young black men, particularly those in impoverished environments, hypermasculinity can be more palpable to their lives than their white male peers.

In the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, researchers Elaine F. Cassidy and Howard C. Stevenson, Jr. have argued that hypermasculinity among young black men really masks the hypervulnerability of their lives. In other words, there might be a direct correlation between the vulnerability felt by young black men within the realms of their schooling, economic status and safety that manifest itself in the image of the “hard” black man and forms of depression.

It would be easy to identify how public policy has failed to protect many of these young men from feeling vulnerable, or marginalized to cite the work of sociologist Alford Young, Jr., but I submit that it is the very idea of American masculinity that has failed them. Many men in this country have been sold a fake bill of goods regarding the concept of manhood, believing that maleness is the embodiment of power and domination.

Personal attributes such as vulnerability and thoughtfulness are seen as less than masculine or too women-like. As such young black men often respond to threats of violence or even simple acts of disrespect, by responding in kind because to negotiate or back-down is viewed as weakness. Within the political economy of masculinity in the United States, it’s either punk or get punked and even the current United States President understands that dynamic.

We absolutely need to be more vigilant about violence, particularly gun violence, in our communities and we need to hold law enforcement more accountable for incompetent and murderous behavior, like the shooting of Oscar Grant. We also need to develop more on-the-ground strategies to equip young black men to make better and life affirming choices in their lives. But, until we fundamentally dismantle the ways we think about manhood in this country, we will continually have to deal with levels of violence that we have, unfortunately, become insensitive to.

The Black Youth Project on the Murder of Fred Hampton

The Lies History Tells Part 2:
Black Panthers & A Murdered Revolutionary
by Jonathan

“I’m going to die for the people because I’m going to live for the people.” They said, “Right on.” He said, “I’m going to live for the people because I love the people.” And they’d say, “Right on.” And he’d say, “I love the people, why?” And they’d say, “Because we’re high on the people, because we’re high on the people.” And that was Fred Hampton. When you saw this 21 year old, it was unbelievable. You had no choice, but to be moved by Fred Hampton.” (Eyes on the prize documentary)

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Fred Hampton’s assassination. Hampton was the rising leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. On December 4th 1969, in the middle of the night, Chicago Police officers raided Hampton’s house. His pregnant fiancée gives these words:

“The police pulled me from the room as Fred lay unconscious on the bed. I heard one officer say, He’s still alive. Then I heard two shots and another officer said, He’s good and dead now.”

The picture I was given of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers in grade school was an unfair and incomplete image of what actually happened. I was lied to. I’m not sure who to blame. It could be the Civil Rights sections of the History books that only wanted to praise Martin Luther King Jr., Demonize Malcolm X, and pretend all other possible negative details were non-existent. Or it could be a few of my teachers who chose to believe and regurgitate a type of history that is at least, insufficient and at most, well crafted fallacies written by people in power who benefited from the oppression and marginalization of others. It was not until I began to read for myself and go into more depth in my college classes that I realized the misguided stories I was being fed in my juvenile years.

Read the Full Essay @ The Black Youth Project

The Black Youth Project was a national research project launched in 2003 that examined the attitudes, resources, and culture of African American youth ages 15 to 25, exploring how these factors and others influence their decision-making, norms, and behavior in critical domains such as sex, health, and politics. Understanding the need to make this data available to a wider constituency beyond the academy Professor Cathy Cohen, the Black Youth Project’s principle investigator, decided to create an online hub for Black youth where scholars, educators, community activist, youth allies, and youth could access the study’s research summaries as well as have access to a plethora of resources concerning the empowerment and development of black youth.

The Black Youth Project’s website is a cyber-resource center for black youth and all those who are committed to enriching the lives of black youth.

Blood in Our Streets

special to NewBlackMan

Nothing but a ‘G Thang?: Blood in Our Streets
by Stephane Dunn

I nicknamed him Psycho because he reminded of a young guy whose actual street name was Psycho. Actually, he reminded me of a thousand such young black men. Psycho and I met one evening as I sat on the front porch step of a friend’s store on the fringes of the projects. I was on a rare return trip home to little Elkhart, IN and an old high school friend was filling me in – a long list of who was in jail, on the way to jail, newly released from jail, strung out, selling drugs, and dead. Psycho wandered by for a hair net. He rocked several gold chains around his neck, but otherwise he looked, at twenty-five, almost school boyish in neat cornrows, a white t-shirt with Tupac on the front, and black jeans that didn’t quite sag so much they’d fall down without the blinged out belt he wore.

Somehow we got to talking –Tupac, music and Psycho’s life. He had a beautiful three year old daughter and an estranged girlfriend-baby mama whom he’d struck more than once. I questioned him about his daughter; would it be okay if some day a man hit her because she didn’t obey him or she took his car keys or mouthed off at him? He looked at me, black eyes deadly earnest, ’I’d kill that nigga’. No question.’ He was out there – as we like to say- living that thug life, a drug dealer extraordinaire with high plans for life after he left the game. He was going to do real estate, maybe open a barber shop, or another store, invest . . . I asked him again and again when ‘after’ was going to come. Soon he kept saying, soon.

We talked into the evening, the warm summer evening fading into late night; he ignored his beeper and both of us barely noticed the cars slow crawling by with the pumped up wheels and the Psycho looking imitators honking and hollering out. We were old friends by the time we hugged goodbye and I said to him last, Don’t stay out there too long. I don’t want to hear about you getting killed or going to prison.’ Nine months later Psycho was shot to death trying to flee his killers--three other young black men. They murdered him on the steps of his apartment building practically in front of his new girlfriend and their child, whom thank God the killers spared.

Right now, in Chicago, the murder of a sixteen year old honor student by three other young black men is making headline news. Usually, it doesn’t though it happens every day in small towns like Elkhart and big cities like Chicago. Despite it being an epidemic, we remain in denial, the proof of which lies in the distorted language used to characterize the perpetrators. The words ‘gang’ and ‘gang violence’ like ‘thugs’ are thrown around a lot so much so that they are merely vague euphemisms for something we want to believe can be chalked up to wayward, ‘bad’ ‘black’ and violent seeds and familiar violent groups (gangs) on the margins of society and our communities.

The only answer has been, as one CNN reporter echoed, to lock them up if they can be discovered especially when they dare kill other ‘respectable’ young people like the sixteen year old Chicagoan. Perhaps it’s too difficult to confront that we are up against a cultural psyche, a consciousness that has a generation of children bred to disvalue life – their own and others and to see going to court and prison as a rite of passage. Unfortunately, this nihilistic worldview does not just belong to some anonymous mass of gang members. The ‘thugs’ come from families with grandmas and aunts and folks whose hearts will break when they see that mug shot on the news. Too many are potentially productive young people who give in to the thug life so prevalent around them. Given the numbers of young folk in prisons across the nation, it’s clear that locking them up is merely the only resolution we’ve got, not the one that’s preventing others from going or staying out and it is not, obviously, keeping the blood from running in the streets of the President’s adopted city or my hometown.

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Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).