'Left of Black': Episode #25 featuring Guy Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem

Left of Black #25
w/Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey, Jr. and Esther Iverem
March 14, 2011

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by musician, author, professor and curator Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.. Later Black indie digital media pioneer and SeeingBlack.com founder Esther Iverem, joins Neal, also via Skype.

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→Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania and co-curator of Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, currently exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop ( University of California Press, 2003) and the forthcoming In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud ” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge.

→Esther Iverem is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. A journalist, poet and author, Iverem’s most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press). A former staff writer for several newspapers, including The Washington Post and New York Newsday, she is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship and an artist’s fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association and the Alliance of Women Film 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.

Dancing With The Devil? Media Coverage of the Arizona Shootings

Dancing With The Devil
by Esther Iverem

Many of us are shocked by the shootings this weekend in Arizona that left six dead and 14 wounded, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat of Arizona, who is fighting for her life. Just as alarming, I think, is the fact that voices throughout the mass media refuse to acknowledge the truth about the backdrop to this tragedy and have been lulled into substituting to group think and talking points for facts.

Much of the media coverage has focused on the need for so-called cooler political rhetoric, offering the flash analysis that the right-wing and the left-wing in this country are equally to blame for the heightened atmosphere of guns and violence in politics. My question is this: In what world are these purveyors of false equivalency living? Why this rush toward equal opportunity blame at a time when right-wing politicians, commentators and hate groups are the ones lighting and tending the fires of violence? By denying their complicity, aren’t we dancing with the devil?

By now, we might all know about the graphic on the page of Sarah Palin’s Web site, using crosshairs to mark a bulls-eye on Democratic congressional districts around the country, including Gifford’s Arizona district. Maybe we will remember Congressman Giffords own warning about the graphic.

Maybe we remember hearing about Palin’s famous tweet: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" (reload in all capital letters) on the day last March that President Obama signed the heath care reform bill into law. During the vitriolic health care debate, members of Congress, including Giffords, had their district offices vandalized. Many also received death threats. During the same debate, right-wing protesters showed up at town meetings and rallies with guns. On August 17th of 2009, a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, were among the protesters outside a Phoenix, Arizona Convention center where President Obama was giving a speech.

This was only one incident that summer during the health care debate in which protesters openly displayed firearms near the president. (In contrast, during the presidency of George W. Bush, protesters simply wearing anti-war slogans on their t-shirts were arrested because they were near the president or vice president.)

Maybe this might be the best time to mention that since President Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 percent, from 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President's Secret Service. In the months right after he took office, there was a spike in violent rhetoric as well as acts. In March 2009, the controversial Representative Michelle Bachman, Republican of Minnesota, said that she wanted her constituents to be “armed and dangerous” over President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce global warming.

In May of 2009, Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions in Kansas, repeatedly dubbed by Fox News Show Host Bill O’Reilly as ‘Tiller the baby killer,’ was shot to death on Sunday morning while attending church services. Less than two weeks later, Stephen T. Johns, an African-American security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, was killed by James von Brunn, an anti-government White supremacist. This might also be the best time to mention that Giffords is the first Jewish woman elected from Arizona.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

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Esther Iverem is a journalist, poet and author whose most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press).

SeeingBlack.com: Can We Cheer Our Heroes?

Can We Cheer Our Heroes?

By Esther Iverem--SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

In “The Book of Eli,” Denzel Washington walks the road of a post-apocalyptic United States with crude but effective weapons, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes on his iPod and the perfect shades on his face. He is the ultimate Hollywood action hero with a serious edge and twist—a righteous man who only resorts to violence when provoked and in self-defense.

So why no Internet buzz about this Black film hero? I admit it, part of my query has to do with the over-the-top analysis in some quarters of “Avatar” as racist, typical colonialist narrative, one post even referred to it as “Orientalist fantasy” because of the elevation of the White hero. While I understood these critiques, I thought that the film’s over-riding narrative was about a triumph created by and for a “people of color” and about a triumph of nature and spirit over death machines and destruction.

I did see commentary by many who shared my view but I stayed out of the fray. I had written my short review of the film and I stood by it. But, still, a question lingered in my mind—are we Black filmgoers conditioned to not see our heroes? Or conditioned to see and cheer only Black stereotypical heroes—ghetto superstars, musicians, athletes etc.—and mainly men? If Neytiri of the Navi (played by Zoe Saldana) in “Avatar” was not a hero, then I don’t know what a hero is.

Then it took me a long time to write about “The Book of Eli,” which with its strong Christian underpinnings, seems like the perfect answer for all those like the Pope who considered Avatar’s spiritual message pagan-like and sacrilegious. Not since Morpheus kicked some serous ass in “The Matrix” have I seen a Black film star get the better of so many serious fight scenes. Not since Will Smith in “I Am Legend,” have I seen a Black hero, framed by a superior intellect, slay those who dare threaten what is left of humanity.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

SeeingBlack: The Year in Film

SB's Best 2009 Films
by Esther Iverem—SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

In terms of the directors and producers included, this is surely the “whitest” best Black film list ever created by SeeingBlack.com. Because even fewer Black filmmakers are finding opportunities to have their work produced and distributed, there are fewer movies by us or about us on the big screen in 2009. But here are my bright spots, with excerpts from my reviews. Here’s to better prospects in 2010!

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

Bombing Capitalism

Bombing Capitalism
by Esther Iverem, editor SeeingBlack.com

On a throwback vibe, you could say that “Capitalism: A Love Story” is the bomb.

By exploring the economic system of capitalism as an evil, Moore fires a salvo into the heart of America’s social machine. Along the way, he explodes some serious myths: Myth #1: that the economic system of capitalism is the same as or tied to the political system of democracy. Myth #2: That to be an American is to be a capitalist and that to be anti-capitalist is to be anti-American. Myth #3: That people of color with bad credit, who bought houses that they couldn’t afford, caused the financial meltdown in the United States. Myth #4: That mainly Blacks and Hispanics are losing their homes to foreclosure.

He also drops other bombshells, such as the internal Citigroup memo declaring that the United States is no longer a democracy but is, rather, a plutocracy, where the richest 1 percent of the country is in charge of the rest of us peasants, and where government has been warped in the past 30 years to serve the rich. Then there is the relatively unknown Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur from Ohio—not one of the usual suspects on talking head news shows—calling the bailout of Wall Street a financial coup d’etat and telling Americans who have lost their homes to become squatters in their homes and not leave. There is the laundry list of Washington insiders who received sweet V.I.P. mortgages from Countrywide, which was a leader in dispensing high-interest “sub prime” loans to homeowners. The explosions go on and on.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

Beyond Hallie & Whoopi: Black Women and American Cinema--A Conversation

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2204 Erwin Road
Room 240

WEDNESDAY AT THE CENTER:
BEYOND HALLIE AND WHOOPI: BLACK WOMEN AND AMERICAN CINEMA-A CONVERSATION

With a figure like Michele Obama poised to challenge America's perceptions of black women, journalist ESTHER IVEREM will discuss the ways that black women have been portrayed in recent cinema. Expanding on her recent book WE GOTTA HAVE IT: 20 YEARS OF SEEING BLACK AT THE MOVIES, 1986-2006, Iverem will discuss with activist and poet ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, the tensions associated with black female performances in mainstream cinema in a moment when black women's bodies are particularly marked as dangerous, oppositional, and non-traditional.

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Esther Iverem is a cultural critic, essayist and poet based in Washington D.C. Her most recent book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder's Mouth Press), featuring more than 400 of her reviews, interviews and essays on the "new wave" of Black film. She is founder and editor of SeeingBlack.com, an award-winning Web site for Black critical voices on arts, media and politics. She is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, New York Newsday and The New York Times and is a contributing critic for BET.com and Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, a National Arts Journalism Fellowship funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and an artist's fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She is also the author of two books of poems and a member of the Washington Area Film Critics Association.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a 25 year old queer black trouble-maker. She is currently a doctoral candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies at Duke University Alexis is also a member of UBUNTU and the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press.

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Sponsored by "Center for the Study of Black Popular Culture" (CSBPC)