Basic Black: A Conversation on Black Theater and "NEIGHBORS"

On this episode of Basic Black, a conversation about the Company One production of NEIGHBORS, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The play is probably most noted for its minstrel characters (black actors in blackface) but it's primary focus is on issues of racism, classism, and identity.

Our panel: Latoyia Edwards, anchor, New England Cable News; Kim McLarin, assistant professor, writing, literature, and publishing, Emerson College; Phillip Martin, senior investigative reporter, 89.7 WGBH Radio; Summer Williams, director of NEIGHBORS; and Lisa Thompson, playwright and currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting "doin' the thang" on Basic Black

Basic Black
A Conversation with Author Tracy Sharpley-Whiting

1920 brought women's suffrage. The 1960s gave rise to a new wave of women's liberation and civil rights. Today, a new black gender politics is being shaped by hip-hop, according author and scholar Tracy Sharpley-Whiting. And the results are not necessarily progressive, she says.

In her 2007 book, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip-Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, Sharpley-Whiting, a professor of African American studies at Vanderbilt University in [Nashville], Tenn., writes that the new black gender politics is defined, in some cases, by hip-hop's commercial reliance on images of overexposed young black women.

A Hat-Tip to Echidine of the Snakes