Always Supreme: Diana Ross

from the News & Observer

Always Supreme
by Mark Anthony Neal
Friday, March 11, 2011

Diana Ross was never the prettiest girl in the room. She was never the sexiest women on the screen. Ross was never the best singer on stage.

Yet for nearly 50 years, Diana Ross has been the epitome of American glamour and a role model for generations of R&B and pop divas trying to negotiate the pitfalls of celebrity and ever fickle audiences.

Ross brings her singular presence to a sold-out show at the Durham Performing Arts Center tonight.

Born Diane Ross in 1944, the singer grew up in the housing projects of Detroit. While still in high school, Ross joined a group called the Primettes (later renamed the Supremes) with Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson. The group was a sister group of the Primes, whose members would later become the legendary Temptations.

Ross' career was nurtured by Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, where the images of black racial uplift were as much required as the fine tunes that Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland produced in the 1960s. Gordy called his label the "Sound of Young America." The Supremes, with Diana Ross singing lead, was Motown's flagship product.

Ross' legacy as one of the most important vocalists of the era would have been cemented had her career ended with her last hit recording with the Supremes ("Someday We'll Be Together") in 1969 and the group's 12 No. 1 Billboard 100 songs. But Ross and Gordy had greater designs. Ross' solo career, which began with the signature hits "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (both written by Ashford and Simpson) set the standard for pop divas.

Ross set her sights on Hollywood, earning Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for the biopic "Lady Sings the Blues," and later starred in "Mahogany" and a film adaptation of the musical "The Wiz."

In 1980, with her recording career treading water, she collaborated with producers Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic to produce one of her greatest albums as a solo artist. Titled "Diana," the album produced hits including "I'm Coming Out," which became an anthem for gay and lesbian audiences.

Ross soon left Motown Records, signing with RCA, with one of the most lucrative contracts in the music industry at the time. She continued her success with a remake of Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" and the song "Muscles," which was written by her close confidante, the late Michael Jackson.

One enduring image of Ross from that period was her performing in New York's Central Park in 1983 during a torrential rainstorm - the perfect representation of the old adage that the show must go on (though Ross did cut the show short, and returned to do a show the next day).

Over the past 20 years, Ross continued to record and tour, though her legacy is perhaps best represented by the success of her children. Daughter Tracee Ellis-Ross starred in the popular sitcom "Girlfriends" (2000-2008), and her son Evan, is earning rave reviews for his role in the film "Mooz-lum."

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Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of black popular culture in the department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University.

What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?

A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class.

What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?
by Charlie LeDuff

IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, 25, was pacing, unable to sleep.

His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team—Detroit's version of SWAT—were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E [4] crew filming an episode of The First 48 [5], its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have 48 hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je'Rean Blake Nobles [6], 17, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID'd a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.

The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked [7]. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando—who'd been featured before on another A&E show, Detroit SWAT [8]—burst into the house. His weapon fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

"They had time," a Detroit police detective told me. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done."

But the SWAT team didn't wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death.

Police first floated [9] the story that Aiyana's grandmother had grabbed Weekley's gun. Then, realizing that sounded implausible, they said she'd brushed the gun as she ran past the door. But the grandmother says she was lying on the far side of the couch, away from the door.

Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the police threw the grenade into the wrong apartment. The suspect fingered for Blake's murder, Chauncey Owens, lived in the upstairs flat, with Charles Jones' sister.

Plus, grenades are rarely used when rounding up suspects, even murder suspects. But it was dark. And TV may have needed some pyrotechnics.

"I'm worried they went Hollywood," said a high-ranking Detroit police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation and simmering resentment in the streets. "It is not protocol. And I've got to say in all my years in the department, I've never used a flash-bang in a case like this."

The official went on to say that the SWAT team was not briefed about the presence of children in the house, although the neighborhood informant who led homicide detectives to the Lillibridge address told them that children lived there. There were even toys [10] on the lawn.

Read the Full Essay @ Mother Jones

No Longer Banned: "Ropes" by Invincible

Back in early 2009, Invincible sent mtvU her video for the song featuring Tiombe Lockhart, “Ropes,” off her debut LP ShapeShifters. The song was written to help bring awareness to issues regarding depression and mental health, and the accompanying music video directed by Mr. Complex is a strong cinematic statement that should have made “Ropes” a shoo-in for getting placement on mtvU. Shortly after submitting a final version of the video, the folks at MTV let Invincible know that her video was approved to air. Unfortunately, MTV's Standards Department stepped in and rejected the video at the last minute on the basis that the video was "problematic" and had "suicidal undertones."

Invincible responded to this rejection, quickly shooting a viral video outside of the MTV's Times Square headquarters, asking viewers what they thought of the video being censored and whether they believed it was "problematic" to speak openly about depression, mental health, and suicide.

The video went on to garner tens of thousands of views on online video-sharing websites. The mtvU rejection became a story in itself as media outlets such as Salon, True/Slant, and All Hip Hop blasted MTV for their decision and Invincible's supporters sent personal letters to MTV demanding that the video be played. It's taken some time, but nearly a year and a half later, "Ropes" is premiering on mtvU. The video found supporters at Half Of Us, a project housed within MTV that confronts issues of mental health on college campuses. Half Of Us joined the chorus of people championing "Ropes," leading to a resolution with MTV: the Standards Department lifted their ban and cleared the video for airtime, and now "Ropes" is airing on mtvU and mtvU.com as part of the Half Of Us campaign.

Read More @ EmergenceMedia

Invincible and Waajeed: The Making of 'Detroit Summer'

Invincible + Waajeed - The Making of the Detroit Summer Video from Waajeed on Vimeo.

As anticipation boils over for the release of Detroit Summer/Emergence, the collaborative 7” project by Invincible + Waajeed dropping on August 10, the duo have once again created more video work to accompany the release.

The full music video for "Detroit Summer/Emergence" by EMERGENCE in-house director, El Iqaa, is coming next week. In the meantime, check out exclusive behind the scenes footage shot, directed, and edited entirely by Waajeed himself. The forthcoming music video is on the serious side, lyrically and visually showcasing the vibrancy of Detroit that most people don't see. But Waajeed's behind-the-scenes footage balances that out with plenty of humor and hijinks, and also shows the process of what it is like to make a video in Detroit.

“I think I was able to capture the obstacles that we went through just making the video,” Waajeed says, “from being harassed by the cops, almost drowning in a boat, etc., but despite the adversities – just like the city of Detroit itself – regardless of what we face, we keep going.”

The behind-the-scenes video is also the first time we get to see video guru El-Iqaa on the other side of the camera. Once the "Detroit Summer/Emergence" music video is released next week, his directorial skills should get the nationwide attention they deserve. Keep this in mind: Invincible + Waajeed decided to make one powerful video for the single's title track "Detroit Summer" and the B-side single, “Emergence.” That's not an easy task, but Iqaa collected iconic images of Detroit in the summertime – in the midst of the historic Allied Media Conference and U.S. Social Forum – and then pieced together critical cameos from Detroit activists and music figures to create a video that truly is Hip-Hop art.

And stay tuned for the full music video and Detroit Summer/Emergence in both limited edition 7" vinyl and digital format dropping August 10. All vinyl purchases come with a digital download code as well.

Detroit Summer/Emergence is a prequel to the full length album from Invincible + Waajeed dropping in 2011. Neither of these songs will be on that album so get yours now. Stay plugged in to EMERGENCEmedia.org for updates and to pre-order the 7″.

Support the work of the organization DetroitSummer.org featured in the video.

Abandon Detroit, Abandon Black America

Opinion: Abandon Detroit, Abandon Black America

by R. L’Heureux Lewis

Detroit: The city that represents the prospects and failures of American industry.The city that is the punch line of a million jokes. The city that is Blacker than nearly any other in this country. Detroit is under intense scrutiny as of late and the flashing lights of attention may have served to take the life of seven year old Aiyana Jones as a TV crew filmed a home-raid by the Detroit SWAT.

With all the fascination with Detroit around the nation we get the problems of the city beamed into our homes via satellite, but it makes me wonder, is there more there than what we normally see? What responsibility do we bear to Detroit? And what opportunities are there for us to contribute?

Detroit is a microcosm of Black America. I believe if you cannot love Detroit, you cannot fully love Black people. The Detroit Metropolitan area represents the best and the worst that Black folks in this country have to offer. The Black middle class was solidified in and around Detroit with steady unionized blue collar labor in the auto industry.

The middle class expanded as more Black folks with college educations occupied managerial positions. Detroiters experienced and vigilantly fought the racisms of housing redlining, riots, as well as White and Black flight. Detroit has benefited and suffered at the hands of White and Black leadership. If there is a city that tells us about the promise and perils of Blackness, it’s Detroit. I’m so interested in what happens in Detroit because if we can turn it around, we can turn around the rest of our cities.

Read the Full Essay @ The Atlanta Post

“A Grievable Death”: Karla F. C. Holloway on Aiyana Stanley-Jones

“A Grievable Death”

by Karla F. C. Holloway

The phrase is not mine. University of California, Berkeley, literature professor Judith Butler explains the precariousness of life – its ontological vulnerability. Some lives are known well enough and valued highly enough to be grievable. And others are only accidentally noticeable. These differential values are familiar terrain to cultural studies and bioethics scholars where the idea of excess mortality – deaths that exceed the predictive statistics for certain populations – are as familiar as a funeral refrain, “soon one morning death will come a calling.”

For 7-year-old Aiyana Stephens-Jones of Detroit, it was an evening death call when the launch of a flash grenade burned her delicate body just before a policeman’s fatal bullet entered her neck. The circumstances were violent and fleetingly public. A television crew was filming this police raid, as they had been filming others, for “public” programming. Some bodies are more public than others. It is a bit more difficult to imagine that film crew following a police raid into Bloomfield Hills rather than into urban Detroit.

The circumstances of this child’s death are, not surprisingly, under dispute. Was the gunshot intentional, accidental, or careless? Ironically, it will be helpful to the resolution of this question that a film crew was onsite. It does not, however, mitigate against the public invasion of private lives that vulnerable bodies – citizens who are poor or who are minorities or who are children – experience.

It does not change the familiar procession before the open casket of a child, where other little girls and boys will peer into its recesses and see a body that looks like their own and perhaps even marvel at the pretty pink dress she wore, the carefully placed rosary, and the spray of flowers and loving notes and prayers that surrounded her tiny body. It may be one of the loveliest if not most tragic images of their young lives. It may well be the one they romanticize and recall and even imagine for themselves instead of a prom or wedding dress, or a graduation gown or a carefully chosen tuxedo with matching vest and tie.

They will look down at Aiyana and wonder if they will be as pretty and as loved as she was on this day of her obsequies. They will not remember her life. This was not the value displayed at the moment and circumstances, and that made her vulnerable to a killing. Instead, they will recall her funeralizing and imagine the words spoken about them will be as passionate and emotive as those pronounced over the stilled body of this child, whose pitiful death brought her to our notice, albeit briefly.

Read the Full Essay @ the Bioethics Forum

Beyond the Blame for Aiyana's Death

The Detroit police's shooting of the 7-year-old calls for a closer look at the militarization of the police, the impact of reality shows on our own perceptions of crime and the harsh economic realities behind it all.

Beyond the Blame for Aiyana's Death

by Lester K. Spence

Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy for 7-year-old Aiyana Jones last Saturday. On the previous Sunday, May 16, 2010, Jones was killed by Detroit police officers during a raid of a home harboring a 34-year-old suspected of the murder of a 17-year-old high school student. While the police allege that Aiyana was killed when an officer's weapon accidentally discharged during a struggle with her grandmother, members of the family allege police officers fired into the house before entering. An A&E film crew was present, shooting video for the show The First 48 (the police officer who allegedly fired the shot that killed Aiyana was a show regular) that will undoubtedly shed light on what really happened.

Sharpton's eulogy excoriated black-on-black violence and police misconduct. ''I'd rather tell you to start looking at the man in the mirror,'' Sharpton said. ''We've all done something that contributed to this.'' ''This is it,'' he added. ''This child is the breaking point.'' Using this frame allows Sharpton to point the finger at black cultural dysfunction and police misconduct at the same time.

In as much as Aiyana's death occurred while the police were trying to detain a murder suspect, I understand this. Common sense would suggest that there is blame to go around in this instance, right? If the police story is correct, then perhaps young Aiyana's grandmother shouldn't have struggled with police, perhaps she shouldn't have allowed the murder suspect into the house in the first place. Even if the family of the victim is right, the family still bears some responsibility because the murder suspect was able to stay in the house in the first place.

Again, this is the common-sense narrative. It comes to mind without even thinking about it. But I suggest we broaden the perspective to ask another set of questions, a set of more critical questions. Why was a reality TV show on the premise? We now take real-life crime shows like The First 48 and Cops for granted. But these shows not only bring ''real life'' into our homes, but they also sensationalize crime, arguably even more than shows like the recently canceled Law and Order, because they are real life.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

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Lester K. Spence is an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Justice for Aiyana Stanley Jones?

Where Is the Justice for Aiyana Stanley Jones?

by Brittany Shoot

Anyone reading this blog likely knows a bit about the nauseating, disproportionate violence against women and children in this world. If you have empathic traits and tendencies like I do, it never really gets easier to process and absorb the ways innocent people are abused and destroyed. For me, the question is what you do, how you cope, in the face of unjustifiable violence, when the victim is a seven-year-old girl.

This weekend, Detroit police shot and killed a little girl named Aiyana Stanley Jones. At the little girl's home to execute a search warrant in a homicide investigation, they threw a flash bang — also known as a stun grenade — through the front window of the crowded apartment ... onto the couch where Aiyana was sleeping. Aiyana caught fire. As her grandmother tried to put out the flames, police entered, and a gun went off. Aiyana was shot in the neck and pronounced dead at the hospital. Her father, Charles Jones, told the AP that he had to wait several hours to find out what had happened to his daughter.

The police entered Aiyana's home searching for a suspect in the shooting death of Jerean Blake, 17, who was gunned down in front of his girlfriend on Friday. Blake's story is also a tale of senseless brutality, a painful reminder of the domino effect this kind of violence can have in a community.

There's nothing about this story that isn't horrific. It also raises important questions: why are military-type weapons being used in civilian homes? How do we hold law enforcement accountable while remembering their fallibility as humans? What does it mean that these types of crimes disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income communities? How does a family, a community, ever heal from such tragedies? How do we honor memory?

Read the Full Article @ womensrights.change.org

Would the Huxtables Survive the Economic Crisis?

Stop the Next American Nightmare
by Seth Freed Wessler

This weekend the New York Times reported that middle class families of color have been most hurt by the subprime crisis in New York City. The article confirms previous findings that show middle and upper income borrowers of color across the country are more likely to receive predatory, high cost loans than whites--even low-income whites. As a result Black, Latino, Asian and American Indian families are burdened with the heaviest weight of foreclosures.

I met many such families earlier this year while traveling the country to conduct research for "Race and Recession," a report released today by the Applied Research Center. In Detroit, I talked with 55-year-old Sandra Hines, who fell irreparably behind on her ballooning subprime refinancing payments (at the peak of the subprime frenzy, the majority of high cost loans were for refinancing). Through foreclosure, Hines lost the house where she and her two sisters grew up. It was the house that held 40 years of her family's wealth and memories.

The losses didn't end there.

A few months later, Hines and her family were renting a home that also went into foreclosure (its owner was also Black). Hines was evicted again.

Hines's story illustrates the fundamental way in which racism works today - through rules and policies rather than through blatant individual discrimination. This new form of discrimination didn't come from an individual banker who hated Black people. Rather, it resulted from financial deregulation that didn't explicitly target people of color, but that nevertheless produced a racialized impact because it was blindly laid on top of decades of blatant housing segregation.

Read the Full Essay @ The Huffington Post