'Left of Black': Episode #24 featuring Pierre & Jamyla Bennu and Rebecca Walker

Left of Black Episode # 24

w/Pierre & Jamyla Bennu & Rebecca Walker

March 7, 2011

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Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by filmmaker and conceptual artist Pierre Bennu and his partner Jamyla Bennu. Latter writer Rebecca Walker joins Neal, also via Skype, from her home in Hawaii.

→Pierre Bennu is a filmmaker and conceptual artist. Among his work is the full length film Red Bone Guerillas (2003) and film shorts including “Sun Moon Child” (2007) and the “Black Moses Barbie” (2011) series. Bennu is also the author of BS or Fertilizer. Bennu runs the small business, Oyin Handmade, making natural skin and hair care products and the production company ExittheApple.com with his wife and partner Jamyla Bennu.

→Rebecca Walker is an award-winning speaker, teacher, and bestselling author. She presents ideas about race, class, culture, gender, and the evolution of the human family that challenge ideological rigidity and encourage fresh approaches to enduring conflicts. Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential leaders of her generation. Walker is the author of two memoirs, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of the Shifting Self (2002) and Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (2008).


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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.

GSH: The Revolution Has Been Sampled, Remixed and Televised

The scope and relevance of Scott-Heron's work is nearly unparalleled. There isn't much his music & poetry hasn't covered and their aren't many artists who haven't covered him.

Gil Scott-Heron:
The Revolution Has Been Sampled, Remixed and Televised
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is easily the best known of Gil Scott Heron’s compositions. Written and recorded just as the most militant energy of the Civil Rights and Black Power era seemed to be waning, the song was a sharp and prescient view of the commodities of struggle and resistance—the place where revolutionary acts give way to market forces and prime time ratings.

In 1970, Scott-Heron couldn’t have imagined 24-hour news programming like CNN, let alone Al Jazeera, though it is fitting that as the revolution is indeed being televised from Tahrir Square in Egypt, that he is as healthy and as relevant as he has been in nearly two decades.

To be sure, Gil Scott Heron has paid a price for his truth-telling and his willingness to make politically relevant music accessible to all that would have it. Perhaps we’ll never fully know if the drug-addiction and other dependencies that have so often derailed his vision was part of some COINTELPRO inspired conspiracy to deny our most gifted and passionate, access to the thing that matters the most—their right minds (surely cheaper and neater than assassination).

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

On an NFL Lockout and Inspiration From Egypt

DeMaurice Smith: On an NFL Lockout and Inspiration From Egypt
by Dave Zirin

There is no form of entertainment in this country more popular than football, and there is no one, save Barack Obama, being scrutinized more closely these days than DeMaurice Smith. Smith heads the National Football League's Players Association—a union that’s being threatened with being locked out unless players give back substantial amounts in wages and agree to lengthen the season to eighteen games. NFL players make large sums of money but risk a lifetime of physical debilitation and the average career lasts only three and a half years. Owners are banking on the fact that players, with their short window to make money, will cave to every demand. Smith is banking on something bigger: a sense of history, sacrifice and community that's greater than sports.

I spoke with Smith last Friday, the day after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell walked away from the table during negotiations. I asked Smith, on a scale of one to ten, whether he felt there would be a lockout. “On a scale of one to ten, it's still fourteen," he said. "We’re preparing our guys for the worst, we’re hoping for the best. I’m going to keep negotiating. We’ve got our guys on standby right now to be virtually anywhere in the country whenever they want to talk. That’s the way we’re going to roll. I’ve told them that we’re going to negotiate day and night until we get it done, but it takes two.”

Smith is negotiating with—or trying to negotiate with—some of the most powerful, politically connected corporate actors in the United States. Their reach truly inspires awe. When the NFLPA produced a television ad in an effort to garner fan support, the networks first agreed and then refused to air it, presumably after pressure exerted by the league. DeMaurice Smith deemed the censorship “stunning.”

You might think, faced with such power, this would make him pessimistic about the prospects for players, but Smith finds himself inspired by events far removed from the world of football.

“You know,” he said, “we watched things unfold in a far-off country where a lot of the discussion preceding the protests was purely social media, people connecting. We have an ability to get our ‘let us play’ ad out. We know that anybody listening can type in ‘let us play’ and that ad will pop up and, frankly, if networks want to make a decision to boycott us, keep us off, those are the kind of things that get me fired up and let me know that I’m on the right side of right.”

Read the Full Essay @ The Nation

'Left of Black': Episode #20 featuring Bakari Kitwana and Kyra Gaunt

Left of Black #20
w/Bakari Kitwana & Kyra Gaunt
February 7, 2011

In this 20th installment of Left of Black, host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by author, political analyst and activist Bakari Kitwana in a conversation about the current media landscape. Neal also talks with Baruch College Professor and 2009 TED Fellow Kyra D. Gaunt whose recent essay Black Twitter, Combating the New Jim Crow & the Power of Social Networking examines the social justice potential of Social Media.

→Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst. He’s currently senior editor of newsone.com, the internet news presence of Radio One. He’s also the CEO of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which conducts town hall meetings around the country on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop generation. Kitwana is the author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (2002) and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabees and the New Reality of Race in America (2005).

→Kyra D. Gaunt is a trained ethnomusicologist and classical singer who teaches the study of African American music, cultural anthropology, hip-hop, race and gender studies. A 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Fellow, Gaunt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College. She is the author of The Games Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (NYU Press, 2007)

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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.

It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public

It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public
by Dave Parry

Last night Gladwell published this short piece for the New Yorker. Gladwell revisits his earlier essay which argued that the ties produced by social media (weak ties) are not as important as social ties produced by face to face iteration (strong ties), and thus social media is not a particularly advantageous platform for fermenting social change. While I disagree with much of that essay, it seems worth investigating/considering, the degree to which social ties produced by social media are substantially different from those which develop from relationships not mediated thru social media. Bizarrely though, his most recent post actually suggests something quite different. Rather than argue that social media has effects on social organization (replacing strong ties with weak ones), Gladwell argues that social media is of little to no-consequence:

“But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

The point for Gladwell is that asking how the revolution happens is the “least interesting” question one can ask. Again bizarrely this seems to contradict his earlier piece which argued that “how” a revolution happened was of crucial importance for understanding the nature of the ties people develop. It would seem that the only consistency between these pieces is an attempt to downplay the significance social media plays in social movements, indeed arguing that it either doesn’t help, or is of no relevance. The first Gladwell is worth considering, the second less so.

But where Gladwell misses in this second article is realizing that the discourse has shifted, moved beyond does social media cause a revolution, to how does the existence of social media change the warp and the woof of a social movement. This question is far more interesting, and far more important. The “Twitter Caused the Revolution” headlines have been more or less replaced by more nuanced accounts of “what role did social media play in these protests.” Few have been willing to argue that social media is not part of the equation here, or that social media’s role is not worth investigating. This strikes me as a fairly substantial shift from the “Iran = Twitter Revolution” headlines of a year and a half ago. Indeed, I have even detected a subtle shift from the Tunisia analysis, whereby understanding of social media’s role has become more nuanced and refined. I have spent the better part of two days now reading thoughts and blog posts from various places around the web attempting to learn what others have to say about these events and I see little evidence from academics and leading thinkers in the field that Twitter = democracy arguments are still alive. (Even CNET argued that there is no such thing as a social

To be sure “cyber-utopism” as a discourse is still a dangerous and prevalent myth. Indeed all one has to to is see recent comments by Iranian activist and noble prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who said, “So, I can tell you that thanks to technology dictators can’t get a good nights sleep,” to realize that the belief that social media = social justice is alive and well. Clinton’s 21st century statecraft ideology is alive and well.

I think it is also important to distinguish here between the analysis of social media and the Egypt uprising, I and you, are likely reading, and the one that still circulates amongst people who are not particularly and specifically invested in the matter. That is I think if you asked people who do not spend hours a day on Twitter, or reading articles on the web written by experts on the subject, the impression might be distinctly different. I have had numerous conversations (four in the airport alone on Sunday) with people who all articulated the belief that social media was largely responsible for the uprising, and that do to social media we are likely to see all of Africa revolt, and demand democracy, a cascade effect produced by the internet. Which is to say, that although the debate has for the large part moved past cyber-utopism, the effects of that debate still linger. And in this respect it is not the internet that matters so much as how we talk about the internet (see Thesis One of Morozov’s book).

But that doesn’t account for the most recent article by Gladwell, indeed it makes said article even more academically irresponsible by recasting and repeating a debate that most (all) experts have moved past. Gladwell misses an opportunity to help develop questions about the role of social media in pursuit of social justice, instead choosing to play the “nothing new here, move along” card. One doesn’t correct for the cyber-utopic discourse that still exists by utterly dismissing the effects of the medium under discussion. This just creates the “yes it is,” “no it isn’t” debate which has proved not only inadequate, but at least partly responsible for the less than effective social media foreign policy. We need better.

Read the Full Essay @ Profound Heterogeneity

A New Test of Islam and Democracy

Duke University professor Ebrahim Moosa says the role of Islam in the Arab uprisings is still being worked out.

What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter?

The use of social media in support of Kelley Williams-Bolar recalls the spirit of the Greensboro sit-ins 51 years ago.

What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

February 1st marks the anniversary of what I like to refer to as one of the greatest days in American History. On that day in 1960, four young Black men—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond—all first year students at HBCU North Carolina A&T, sat at a Whites only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, N.C.

This protest—formally known as a sit-in—began weeks of similar protests, that went viral throughout the American South in ways that mirror the functions of today’s social media. The Greensboro sit-ins are widely remembered as the moment of activism that gave renewed energy and vigor to a Civil Rights Movement that was sputtering after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The Greensboro Four, of course, did not have access to social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but nevertheless utilized what would have been the accessible technology of the days like land-lines and good-old fashion word of mouth. For those young folk, who would months after Greensboro, go on to create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the watchful eye of Ella Jo Baker, understood technology, including television, as simply one of the tools they employed to make their case.

Civil Rights activists brilliantly exploited television cameras, helping to bring the marches in the streets straight into the living rooms of average Americans, whether they wanted to see it or not. Many activists from the era point to the role that televised footage of young Black Americans being hosed down and attacked by police dogs played in generating sympathy for a nation that had been largely indifferent.

The spirit of the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s and the role that technology played during that time have been recalled in recent weeks with regards to the Georgia Prison Strike, the senseless conviction of Kelley Williams-Bolar, and the widespread protests taking place in Tunisia and Egypt.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21