James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University.
Showing posts with label Race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race. Show all posts
Friday, June 17, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The Big Loser: Racism and the Unfight against Health Disparities
The Big Loser:
Racism and the Unfight against Health Disparities
by David J. Leonard | special to NewBlackMan
Having just completed its 11th season, The Biggest Loser is changing the national landscape. The question, however, is how is the show transforming society. According to JD Roth, one of producer of The Biggest Loser and one of the newest weight loss shows – Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition – argues that these shows are on the frontlines of the battle against systemic obesity: “The first step to changing some systemic problem in society is awareness and I think (weight) awareness is at an all-time high.”
While unsuccessful in initiating a weight loss revolution, the show has been successful in revolutionizing television. The success and cultural capital afford to The Biggest Loser (its not just a show but a public service trope) has generated several copycat shows including The Biggest Loser in twenty-one countries. Each of these shows universalize the issue of obesity erasing fissures, divisions, and inequalities. More importantly, these shows reduce the issue of weight and health to a matter of choice. “All borrow a basic set of assumptions from “The Biggest Loser” writes Aaron Barnhart. “Obesity is largely a product of inertia, of spending too much time sitting around eating terrible food. The cure, therefore, is activity — lots of it, with occasional breaks to make healthy meals and visits to the confession-cam.” David Grazian, in “Neoliberalism and the Realities of Reality Television,” describes The Biggest Loser as yet another reality-based show that pivots on the tenets of neoliberalism:
Although the very design of competitive reality programs . . . guarantees that nearly all players must lose, such shows inevitably emphasize the moral failings of each contestant just before they are deposed. In such instances, the contributions of neoliberal federal policy to increased health disparities in the U.S.— notably the continued lack of affordable and universal health care, and cutbacks in welfare payments to indigent mothers and their children—are ignored in favor of arguments that blame the victims of poverty for own misfortune.
Writing about another reality show, Master Chef, Evan Shartwen argues that reality shows and the economic philosophy of neoliberalism (defined by its promotion of “free markets, economic liberalisation, efficiency, consumer choice and individual autonomy”) share a mutual “emphasis on personal development and learning new skills.”
The popularity and interest in The Biggest Loser, as a non-state capitalist intervention against a national health crisis, reflects the extent of America’s collective weight issues. The numbers are telling. 34% of adults are obese with another 34% in the overweight category. For kids, things are equally troubling with 18% of kids ages 12-19 and 20% of those ages 6-11 defined as overweight.
This issue is particularly acute within the black and Latino communities. Nationally, 38.2 and 35.9 percent of African American and Latino youth, ages 2-19, are obese and overweight, compared to 29.3 percent of whites within this same age group. In nine states, adult obesity for African Americans exceeds 40 percent with that number between 35-39.99% for 34 states.
“Strikingly, the link between race, poverty and obesity is most acute in the South, our nation’s most impoverished region” writes Angela Glover Blackwell. “In Mississippi, which has an African American population of more than 37 percent and is the poorest state in the country, the obesity rate is the highest of any state, as is the proportion of obese children ages 10-17.” Worse yet, despite attention and a national discourse, the obesity issue doesn’t seem to be getting better, especially when we look within (poor) communities of color. Between 1986 and 1998, childhood obesity rates within the African American and Latino communities increased by almost 120 percent, whereas whites only saw an increase of 50 percent over this same period. According to the NAACP, “these rates have roughly doubled since 1980.” It has been estimated that roughly 60 percent of Native Americans living in urban communities are overweight or obese.
While often erasing the inequalities and disparities evident in America’s obesity epidemic, the limited focus on differences in obesity rates tends to individualize and pathologize the issue within communities of color. Often times, commentators focus on cultural differences, food choices, and varied definitions of body image to explain differential rates of obesity. For example, in a recently released study from the Boston Public Health Commission, the issue of obesity amongst youth is directly tied to soda consumption. It found that greatest levels of consumption of sugary, sweetened drinks are amongst poor black and Latino youth. While certainly an issue (and one that reflects a myriad of issues from availability, advertisements, school reliance on soda monies), the hyper focus on food and drink consumption in relationship to personal choices limits our understanding of this issue.
Similarly, another ubiquitous theme has been how high rates television watching and video game play amongst youth of color contribute to high obesity rates. “Research suggests that low-income and ethnic minority youth are disproportionately exposed to marketing activities,” writes Shiriki Kumanyika. “A Kaiser Foundation report found that among children eight to eighteen years old, ethnic minorities use entertainment media more heavily than majority youth do. African Americans and Hispanics spend significantly more time watching TV and movies and playing video games than do white youth.” A complex issue, the nature of the discourse pathologizes and restricts our focus to individual choices and experiences.
The Biggest Loser is no different evident in the narrative focus on cultural acceptance of larger body types within certain Pacific Islander communities or even its linking of Tiger Moms to weight gain among a single contestant. Yet, at a larger level the issues are presented as that of individuals who have made bad choices. While rarely explicitly acknowledged, the show seems to have a disproportionate number of working-class white contestants, with a handful of people of color each season. As such, the backdrop for the show is a white racial frame that tends to demonize the poor, particularly poor people of color. The Biggest Loser, as with much of the discourse surrounding America’s obesity epidemic, tends to erase structural inequalities and segregation; it ignores how obesity rates and related health problems are a form of racial state violence.
In erasing history, institutional (environmental) racism, segregation, and persistent inequality policy discussions, popular culture representations and the public debate at large continues to blame poor communities for the issue of obesity by focusing on bad choices, parenting, and other factors that can be easily corrected. As long as one follows the instructions of The Biggest Loser trainers to workout harder, eat better food (including their endless products placed within the show) and otherwise change their ways, people have the potential to be healthy. That is the lesson of the show. Not in reality.
According to Silja Talvi in “Bearing the Burden: Why are communities of color facing obesity and diabetes at epidemic levels”: “Over 60 percent of all Americans are now overweight, and experts agree that fast food, television, office jobs, lack of fresh fruits and vegetables in school lunches, and genetic factors have all conspired to make Americans of all ages fatter. But for people of color and poor people, the issues are even more complex and far-reaching.” Studies have consistently illustrated that when accounting for class and circumstances, the discrepancies in rates of obesity between whites and blacks and Latinos are virtually nonexistent. The Washington State Department of health found that racial discrepancies here are lessened when controlling for income, education, age, and gender, although inequalities remain a reality. Yet, the inequalities exist, demonstrating the ways in which segregation, history, privilege, and a myriad of other factors operate in the context of these health issues. “Some of the intervening factors that affect obesity rates in Hispanic and black communities include eating patterns and accessibility to healthy food options, notes Sonia Sekhar in “The Significance of Childhood Obesity in Communities of Color.”
Studies ubiquitously illustrate the segregation has effectively cut off poor communities of color from affordable healthy food. Scholars in Australia found individuals living in poor communities have 2.5 times more contact with fast food restaurants than those living in upper-class communities. Equally important, the report highlighted that these stores sell a very limited amount of fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, providing ample processed food. According to John Robbins, people of color are more likely to find foods that are high in fat, salt, refined carbohydrates and sugar compared to whole grains, fresh vegetables and fruits, and organic foods which are difficult if not impossible to procure within many poor urban communities. A North Carolina study concluded that only 8 percent of black residents lived in close proximity to a supermarket compared to 31 percent of whites. Another study in North Carolina found that the mere presence of at least one supermarket within black neighborhoods had a positive influence on the reducing fat intake (25 increase versus 10 percent for white neighborhoods). And it isn’t just about the type of foods, but the cost as well.
The Healthy Foods Healthy Communities report found that on average those smaller convenience stores/gas stations/corner markets that are commonplace within America’s urban centers charge between 10-49 percent higher than chain supermarkets. A study in Great Britain from Food Magazine found that eating healthier costs at least 50% more, a number that increases to 60% when looking at poor communities.
Food insecurity and the lack of access to quality and healthy foods are not the only evidence of how racial inequality contributes to and is evident in America’s obesity epidemic. It is equally visible in thinking about recreation, leisure, and play. Research has shown that people of color and particularly lower-income communities have fewer opportunities for physical activity. For example, several studies published within the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM) found “that unsafe neighborhoods, poor design and a lack of open spaces and well constructed parks make it difficult for children and families in low-income and minority communities to be physically active.” Likewise, citing the study from Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) entitled “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2010” Blackwell focuses on the structural impediments to a healthy lifestyle that includes exercise. “As the report illustrates, where we live, learn, work and play has absolutely everything to do with how we live. Low-income families of color are too often disconnected from the very amenities conducive to leading healthier lives, such as clean air, safe parks, grocery stores with fresh fruits and vegetables, and affordable, reliable transportation options that offer access to those parks and supermarkets.”
Robin D.G. Kelley described this predicament in “Playing for Keeps,” as part of structural adjustment programs and deindustrialization, processes that plague poor communities of color beginning in the 1970s. “Play areas -- like much of the inner city -- have become increasingly fortified by steel fences, wrought-iron gates, padlocks, and razor sharp ribbon wire” (1998, p. 196). Noting that in cities like Cleveland and New York City, which each saw closure of between 40 and 50 million dollars worth of recreation facilities in the late 1970s, Kelley argues that play and spaces of recreation have increasingly only been accessible within middle-class (white) suburban communities.
We have witness a growing number of semipublic private spaces like 'people's parks' that require a key . . . and highly sophisticated indoor play area that charge admission. The growth of these privatized spaces has reinforced a class segregated play world and created yet another opportunity for investors to profit from the general fear of crime and violence. This, in the shadows of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsed's great urban vision of class integration and public socialability, high-tech indoor playgrounds such as Wondercamp, Discovery Zone and Playspace, charge admission to eager middle- and upper-class children whose parents want a safe play environment . . . . While these play areas are occasionally patronized by poor and working-class black children, the fact that most of these indoor playgrounds are built in well-to-do neighborhoods and charge an admission fee ranging between $5 and $9 dollars prohibits poor families from making frequent visits (1998, p. 202).
A study in Great Britain found not only that neighborhoods that are a majority white are 11 times more likely to have “green space” but also “that people's level of physical activity and health was directly related to affluence and the quality of green space.”
The consequences of restricting play to the well-to-do communities, of limiting access to recreation, and otherwise maintaining a system of de facto segregation when it comes to physical activity, are evident in the health disparities. The consequences a system of food access determined by race, class, and geography is evident in the shameful health inequalities. The consequences of a national conversation and policy about obesity guided by a neoliberal fantasy based on choice, values, and priorities are evident in not only disparities in weight numbers, but diabetes, hypertension and countless other diseases. According to Grazian, “On reality weight-loss programs, there are no collective solutions to rampant inequalities in wellness and health—say, an organized boycott of inner-city supermarkets that do not sell fresh yet inexpensive pro-duce—only individual moral failures that can be repaired by a belligerent drill sergeant, breaking down the souls of his charges in a televised theater of cruelty that lasts until the season finale.”
The celebration of corporate interventions and the racially-charged backlash against Michelle Obama’s efforts to transform societal views on nutrition and exercise is an assault on “personal choice and responsibility” illustrate the power of shows like The Biggest Loser. Profit generated and corporate driven programs to address the obesity epidemic, notwithstanding the lack of substantive results (improvement) are a fixture of a neoliberal society. It is no wonder that The Biggest Loser is imagined as revolutionary. The obesity epidemic and the structural inequalities that are particularly threatening youth of color mandate structural changes not individual transformations fostered by the marketplace.
***
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).
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
'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.
***
>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.
***
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.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Ebru TV's Footnote: Thabiti Lewis, Ballers of the New School
from Ebru TV
On this episode of Footnote, we discuss the book Ballers of the New School – Race and Sports in America. Author Dr. Thabiti Lewis uses American sports culture to challenge and explore notions of race in America.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Call of Duty? Kobe and Virtual Warfare
special to NewBlackMan
Call of Duty? Kobe and Virtual Warfare
by David Leonard
Kobe Bryant has done it again. He has supplanted LeBron James. Whereas James’ decision to “take his talents to South Beach,” ESPN’s “The Decision,” his appearance on Larry King, and his recent Nike advertisement have elicited widespread debate, discussion, and consternation, Kobe Bryant, despite winning his second straight title with the NBA has been out of the spotlight. Yet, his appearance in a commercial for Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops has not only surely allowed for the commercial to naturally appear on ESPN and during NBA games but also has resulted in ample discussion about the meaning and appropriateness of his appearance within the advertisement.
The commercial, like other games in the genre, imagines war as a space of play, as a space of excitement, as space of harmless fun, and one without consequence. It likewise imagines a warzone as a space of unity, where irrespective class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, or celebrity, people can and need to come together to defeat a common enemy. Promoting the game with the tag line, “There’s a solider in all of us,” Kobe Bryant makes an appearance as to illustrate that war, and the game is a place where superstar basketball stars can play alongside of waiters, Jimmy Kimmel, and others.
Not surprisingly, his appearance in the commercial prompted ample chatter. Mark Medina, on The LA Times blog who noted that he didn’t find the commercial “enjoyable,” wrote “I think the commercial featuring a happy-go lucky vibe with ordinary citizens pretending to be in combat downplays the seriousness that real combat entails.” Similarly, Sam Machkovech commented on The Atlantic.com that the "troubling mélange of gun, grenade, and rocket combat acted out by blue-collar workers, children, and celebs like Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel" resulted in a “disappointing game-related ad" . . .that equips people with real guns and simulates real-life, no-CGI combat . . .. The only things missing are the dead bodies on the receiving ends of each bullet and blast.” Others took the debate, given Kobe Bryant’s celebrity, and cultural meaning in a different direction.
In his blog post “In the crosshairs,” Paul Jones links Bryant’s decision to his responsibility as a role model, one who shouldn’t be promoting violence: “Like it or not, Bryant is a role model. Maybe I'm old fashioned but anything that promotes or glorifies that kind of violence doesn't float my boat. I know it's just a video game but it's not my cup of tea.” Likewise, Tim Keown uses the commercial as a way to talk about gun violence in Berkeley, California, linking the deaths and murders of young (African American – the article doesn’t say but also the rhetoric, images, and narrative leads one to belief as such) boys to Kobe’s appearance in this commercial.
Writing through Todd Walker, a football coach and funeral home worker in Northern California, Keown focuses on the destruction facing Walker’s community and how the glorification of violence within this advertisement is part of the problem. He describes Walker’s reaction to the commercial in the following way:
On the “Grumpy Sociologist” Dave Mayeda asks the following about the commercial: “Should society be glamorizing war to make money, and turning to celebrities to peddle these products?” He further argues that these games (and by extension their commercials that promote and encourage play in/of these games) naturalize a war culture, erasing the cost and consequence of war. This argument merely echoes longstanding questions about the significance of war games. “What I find really frightening is that in our playtime – in our leisure time, we’re engaging in fictional conflicts that are based on a terrorist threat and never asking questions,” notes Nina Huntemann. Richard King and myself argued similarly in “Wargames as a New Frontier Securing American Empire in Virtual Space” (from Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne):
The specificity of race, Kobe, the NBA, and the commercial are evident as Mayeda goes on to argue, in response to the debate between Skip Bayless and Bomani Jones on ESPN’s First Take.
In other words, Kobe, as a black NBA star, can exist inside the virtual theater of overseas warfare, but his presence in another context would elicit a far different reaction because his blackness, as signifier, as cultural symbol, and as cultural frame is inherently disruptive and problematic. In another context, his visible blackness would function as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy.” Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). The fact that Kobe appears in a war game ad and not a ghettocentric commercial says nothing about the relative acceptability or contempt for particular types of violence but rather where and how blackness can enter into the white imagination.
Having written extensively about video games, both international and domestic war games (Grand Theft Auto and other ghettocentric games exist in imagining domestic warfare), I am struck by Dave Mayeda’s analysis of the game and Bomani Jones’ analysis. Jones isn’t simply pointing to the acceptability of “ghettocentric violence,” that violence against a foreign other is more acceptable and permissible than games that imagine gang and inner city violence. Rather, both forms of violence, evidence in the popularity of games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, war films and those concerned with “Boyz” and “Menaces,” and the ubiquity of war and violence on the nightly news and in public discourse at large.
Violence, when directed at a foreign other, and when reifying dominant white racial framing about violent, dangerous youth of color, is quite permissible and acceptable within American media culture. Given the criticism directed at Bryant, Mayeda’s argument about “permissibility” leaves some pause. Kobe’s visibility within the commercial, his presence as a “role model,” as a black man enjoying warfare, and as a member of “Us” results in a commercial less permissible and thus more susceptible to critique. Moreover, Jones’ point doesn’t seem to be that displays of militaristic warfare are more acceptable than “ghetto violence.” Rather he is arguing that in the context of the NBA, given the constant fears about the blackness of the league, Bryant’s presence in a commercial reifying his blackness and the stereotypes associated with the white racial framing of hip-hop/urbanness, would prompt far greater outrage and likely intervention from the league office. In fact, the commercial with its emphasis on “shared nationalism,” and shared identity as “soldiers” within a larger war effort, irrespective of class, race, gender, celebrity, and physicality mirrors the efforts of the NBA to deemphasize the racial identities of its players, promoting a neoliberal, market-driven notion of identity.
Moreover, it is crucial to understand how fear plays out within the context of this commercial and how Bryant’s presence in a militarized zone doesn’t elicit the same sort of fears as his presence might in another context. Within war games, and in the commercial, there is an effort to emphasize the multiracialness of the nation as to imagine a national body coming together to battle, wage war, and otherwise destroy a foreign other. In other words, video games, whether set in the old West, the new Iraq, or the post-civil rights ghetto, offers a space to rehearse the central tenets of American imperialism, law and order, manifest destiny, and the benevolence of (white masculine) American Democracy.
Call of Duty: Black Ops, as evident by the commercial, replicates this mission. It assuages fear. However, Kobe’s hypothetical presence in Grand Theft Auto commercial would aggravate fear as a black body within a post-civil rights ghetto context. Beyond abstract connections and the links of fear, the surrounding discourse of reception -- the celebration of violence within war games (one manifesting through state powers) and demonization of violence when performed by state enemies (criminals and terrorists), Jones points to the ways in which symbolic (virtual) violence and these games in general distort, reify, and dehumanize, bodies of color in justification of state violence.
These games turn on dehumanizing racialized violence directed at bodies of color, pivot around a rhetoric of danger on insecure frontiers, and encourage a reworking of the contours of fear and victimization so that white consumers can occupy them. It isn’t that one violence is more permissible than the Other, it is that black bodies (evident by Kobe Bryant) can be visible as a cog within a larger state power but cannot exist inside a space where blackness is defined as a threat to domestic safety.
Moreover, the reaction demonstrates the limitations of redemption for bodies rendered as inherently suspect and dangerous. The fact that Skip Bayless offered the following illustrates the limited possibilities for redemptive black bodies: “He was smiling while holding an assault rifle in combat while we have troops overseas at this moment doing the same thing for real in combat.
It's completely out of bounds for Kobe Bryant, who I thought had completely rehabilitated his image after Eagle, Colo., but even the great Kobe Bryant is not that, so to speak, bulletproof.” The reaction to this commercial demonstrates that no matter how many successful years Kobe Bryant has on the court and no matter what he does off the court, he will always be viewed with skepticism and derision.
The media and commentary, discourse irrespective of the argument (condemnation/celebration of Bryant), focused much of discussion about the commercial on the NBA’s star and not the issue of virtual warfare. Just last year, I wrote about controversy surrounding a NIKE advertisement featuring Kobe Bryant with the tagline “Prepared for Combat” in Journal of Sport of Social Issues, amid the arrest and suspension of Gilbert Arenas:
***
David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.
by David Leonard
Kobe Bryant has done it again. He has supplanted LeBron James. Whereas James’ decision to “take his talents to South Beach,” ESPN’s “The Decision,” his appearance on Larry King, and his recent Nike advertisement have elicited widespread debate, discussion, and consternation, Kobe Bryant, despite winning his second straight title with the NBA has been out of the spotlight. Yet, his appearance in a commercial for Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops has not only surely allowed for the commercial to naturally appear on ESPN and during NBA games but also has resulted in ample discussion about the meaning and appropriateness of his appearance within the advertisement.
The commercial, like other games in the genre, imagines war as a space of play, as a space of excitement, as space of harmless fun, and one without consequence. It likewise imagines a warzone as a space of unity, where irrespective class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, or celebrity, people can and need to come together to defeat a common enemy. Promoting the game with the tag line, “There’s a solider in all of us,” Kobe Bryant makes an appearance as to illustrate that war, and the game is a place where superstar basketball stars can play alongside of waiters, Jimmy Kimmel, and others.
Not surprisingly, his appearance in the commercial prompted ample chatter. Mark Medina, on The LA Times blog who noted that he didn’t find the commercial “enjoyable,” wrote “I think the commercial featuring a happy-go lucky vibe with ordinary citizens pretending to be in combat downplays the seriousness that real combat entails.” Similarly, Sam Machkovech commented on The Atlantic.com that the "troubling mélange of gun, grenade, and rocket combat acted out by blue-collar workers, children, and celebs like Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel" resulted in a “disappointing game-related ad" . . .that equips people with real guns and simulates real-life, no-CGI combat . . .. The only things missing are the dead bodies on the receiving ends of each bullet and blast.” Others took the debate, given Kobe Bryant’s celebrity, and cultural meaning in a different direction.
In his blog post “In the crosshairs,” Paul Jones links Bryant’s decision to his responsibility as a role model, one who shouldn’t be promoting violence: “Like it or not, Bryant is a role model. Maybe I'm old fashioned but anything that promotes or glorifies that kind of violence doesn't float my boat. I know it's just a video game but it's not my cup of tea.” Likewise, Tim Keown uses the commercial as a way to talk about gun violence in Berkeley, California, linking the deaths and murders of young (African American – the article doesn’t say but also the rhetoric, images, and narrative leads one to belief as such) boys to Kobe’s appearance in this commercial.
Writing through Todd Walker, a football coach and funeral home worker in Northern California, Keown focuses on the destruction facing Walker’s community and how the glorification of violence within this advertisement is part of the problem. He describes Walker’s reaction to the commercial in the following way:
He was already disgusted, but about halfway through the spot, Walker did a double take: Wait! Wasn't that Kobe Bryant? Seriously, is that really Kobe Bryant carrying an assault weapon with the word "MAMBA" on the barrel? Did Kobe Bryant, the highest-paid player in the NBA, take money not only to advertise a shooting game but actually shoot -- or simulate shooting -- an automatic weapon while doing it? None of his people, not his wife or his agent or someone in the NBA offices, advised him against this?Beyond the scapegoating, and the ways in which the article rehashes culture of poverty arguments alongside those that blame violence on choice and decision-making amongst those victimized by state violence, Keown does little to distinguish between the types of violence being displayed within virtual warfare (as glorious; as justifiable) with those images and narratives that consistently use the violence associated with and attached to the ghettocentric imagination to rationalize, justify, and otherwise imprison black bodies. The efforts to link virtual warfare and urban violence through Kobe Bryant, one of the more recognizable black bodies, demonstrates how blackness is circulated as threat, danger, and object of derision. Others, however, used Bryant’s presence, and the NBA’s non-response as evidence for the acceptability of virtual warfare.
"I couldn't believe it was him," Walker says. "What's wrong with him?"
Walker gives funeral-home tours to every team he coaches. He tries to hammer home the reality of death by putting kids in cardboard cremation boxes. He shows them the tools he uses to drain bodily fluids and the chemicals he uses to prepare bodies. It probably wouldn't play in the suburbs, but Walker's trying to fight a culture that glamorizes death with tattoos, airbrushed T-shirts and roadside memorials. He's fighting a culture that has desensitized death to the point where fantasy has overtaken reality. In the process, the permanence of death -- "That person is gone," Walker tells the kids when he closes someone inside the box -- is often lost.
On the “Grumpy Sociologist” Dave Mayeda asks the following about the commercial: “Should society be glamorizing war to make money, and turning to celebrities to peddle these products?” He further argues that these games (and by extension their commercials that promote and encourage play in/of these games) naturalize a war culture, erasing the cost and consequence of war. This argument merely echoes longstanding questions about the significance of war games. “What I find really frightening is that in our playtime – in our leisure time, we’re engaging in fictional conflicts that are based on a terrorist threat and never asking questions,” notes Nina Huntemann. Richard King and myself argued similarly in “Wargames as a New Frontier Securing American Empire in Virtual Space” (from Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne):
“US efforts to establish neoliberal policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout the globe, coupled with the overall movement to legitimize US global hegemony, have come through much ideological work from television and Hollywood, to news media and virtual reality. In fact, in a post 9/11 America, video games have become a crucial space of articulating American empire, providing a vehicle of interactive dissemination that allows for the transportation of citizen bodies from their homes onto battle fields, into political struggles, and into a global theater where US efforts to secure power is normalized and justified. We must therefore understand virtual warfare and the popularity of war games by developing a spatial understanding or a critical pedagogy that illustrates the connections, dialectics of warfare, and violence within virtual and real-time spaces.Mayda’s and others discussion of the commercial as an entry point into the larger issue of the militarization of everyday life is important, especially as the defense of the commercial deployed the clichéd argument, “It is just game” and “a commercial.” Given the ways in which these games have proliferated over the last ten years, the ways in which militarization is evident in all forms of popular culture (and in toy stores), and how sports, from its language to its efforts to put military hardware on display during pregame festivities, and its ideological offerings, one has to wonder why a commercial featuring Kobe Bryant offers the only moment of intervention.
The specificity of race, Kobe, the NBA, and the commercial are evident as Mayeda goes on to argue, in response to the debate between Skip Bayless and Bomani Jones on ESPN’s First Take.
“Bomani Jones hits the nail on the head. With approximately 1 minute left in the video, Jones points out that if Bryant was re-enacting what's portrayed in the video game, Grand Theft Auto (e.g., murder, assaults, prostitution), he would be reprimanded by Commissioner Stern. However, because Bryant, Kimmel and the other actors are re-enacting war against each other, and presumably against American enemies in the game, the portrayed violence is at the very least permissible, and more likely glorified as a kind of American patriotism.Jones, who uses the moment to talk about NBA "hypocrisy" given the league’s reticence notwithstanding David Stern’s propensity to control player image, arguing that had Kobe Bryant appeared in a commercial for Grand Theft Auto 57, it "would have [been] pulled [...] off the air” because the violence associated with war “doesn't scare people. Street violence scares the NBA's fanbase, or the ones that David Stern is trying to appease by stopping guys from arguing with refs."
In other words, Kobe, as a black NBA star, can exist inside the virtual theater of overseas warfare, but his presence in another context would elicit a far different reaction because his blackness, as signifier, as cultural symbol, and as cultural frame is inherently disruptive and problematic. In another context, his visible blackness would function as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy.” Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). The fact that Kobe appears in a war game ad and not a ghettocentric commercial says nothing about the relative acceptability or contempt for particular types of violence but rather where and how blackness can enter into the white imagination.
Having written extensively about video games, both international and domestic war games (Grand Theft Auto and other ghettocentric games exist in imagining domestic warfare), I am struck by Dave Mayeda’s analysis of the game and Bomani Jones’ analysis. Jones isn’t simply pointing to the acceptability of “ghettocentric violence,” that violence against a foreign other is more acceptable and permissible than games that imagine gang and inner city violence. Rather, both forms of violence, evidence in the popularity of games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, war films and those concerned with “Boyz” and “Menaces,” and the ubiquity of war and violence on the nightly news and in public discourse at large.
Violence, when directed at a foreign other, and when reifying dominant white racial framing about violent, dangerous youth of color, is quite permissible and acceptable within American media culture. Given the criticism directed at Bryant, Mayeda’s argument about “permissibility” leaves some pause. Kobe’s visibility within the commercial, his presence as a “role model,” as a black man enjoying warfare, and as a member of “Us” results in a commercial less permissible and thus more susceptible to critique. Moreover, Jones’ point doesn’t seem to be that displays of militaristic warfare are more acceptable than “ghetto violence.” Rather he is arguing that in the context of the NBA, given the constant fears about the blackness of the league, Bryant’s presence in a commercial reifying his blackness and the stereotypes associated with the white racial framing of hip-hop/urbanness, would prompt far greater outrage and likely intervention from the league office. In fact, the commercial with its emphasis on “shared nationalism,” and shared identity as “soldiers” within a larger war effort, irrespective of class, race, gender, celebrity, and physicality mirrors the efforts of the NBA to deemphasize the racial identities of its players, promoting a neoliberal, market-driven notion of identity.
Moreover, it is crucial to understand how fear plays out within the context of this commercial and how Bryant’s presence in a militarized zone doesn’t elicit the same sort of fears as his presence might in another context. Within war games, and in the commercial, there is an effort to emphasize the multiracialness of the nation as to imagine a national body coming together to battle, wage war, and otherwise destroy a foreign other. In other words, video games, whether set in the old West, the new Iraq, or the post-civil rights ghetto, offers a space to rehearse the central tenets of American imperialism, law and order, manifest destiny, and the benevolence of (white masculine) American Democracy.
Call of Duty: Black Ops, as evident by the commercial, replicates this mission. It assuages fear. However, Kobe’s hypothetical presence in Grand Theft Auto commercial would aggravate fear as a black body within a post-civil rights ghetto context. Beyond abstract connections and the links of fear, the surrounding discourse of reception -- the celebration of violence within war games (one manifesting through state powers) and demonization of violence when performed by state enemies (criminals and terrorists), Jones points to the ways in which symbolic (virtual) violence and these games in general distort, reify, and dehumanize, bodies of color in justification of state violence.
These games turn on dehumanizing racialized violence directed at bodies of color, pivot around a rhetoric of danger on insecure frontiers, and encourage a reworking of the contours of fear and victimization so that white consumers can occupy them. It isn’t that one violence is more permissible than the Other, it is that black bodies (evident by Kobe Bryant) can be visible as a cog within a larger state power but cannot exist inside a space where blackness is defined as a threat to domestic safety.
Moreover, the reaction demonstrates the limitations of redemption for bodies rendered as inherently suspect and dangerous. The fact that Skip Bayless offered the following illustrates the limited possibilities for redemptive black bodies: “He was smiling while holding an assault rifle in combat while we have troops overseas at this moment doing the same thing for real in combat.
It's completely out of bounds for Kobe Bryant, who I thought had completely rehabilitated his image after Eagle, Colo., but even the great Kobe Bryant is not that, so to speak, bulletproof.” The reaction to this commercial demonstrates that no matter how many successful years Kobe Bryant has on the court and no matter what he does off the court, he will always be viewed with skepticism and derision.
The media and commentary, discourse irrespective of the argument (condemnation/celebration of Bryant), focused much of discussion about the commercial on the NBA’s star and not the issue of virtual warfare. Just last year, I wrote about controversy surrounding a NIKE advertisement featuring Kobe Bryant with the tagline “Prepared for Combat” in Journal of Sport of Social Issues, amid the arrest and suspension of Gilbert Arenas:
This is made clear by this commercial and the various commentaries that Bryant’s presence as a “soldier” within a U.S. military context is acceptable because the location is one of control and disciplinarity, whereas blackness in other contexts continues to exist as Other, object, scapegoat, and abject noncitizen. It is all matter of what combat is being prepared for and who the imagined victim might be that determines whether or not violence, real or virtual, is acceptable.
The backlash and the legislating by the NBA, when read alongside those scholars who have argued that the structural and culture locality experienced by blacks renders them to be noncitizens in the national imagination, the encouraged and supported denial of their rights as citizens, whether in terms of guns, the right to earn a living straight out of high school, or the right of free speech/expression, fits their perpetual place outside the American citizenry. The centrality of black NBA ballers as dangerous criminals—abject noncitizens—is clear through the discursive logic: Criminals shouldn’t have access to guns. If Stern is discouraging players from carrying guns, it must because they are dangerous, irresponsible, pathological, criminal noncitizens.
***
David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Jeff Chang: It’s Bigger Than Politics, the Real Shift is Cultural
Jeff Chang: It’s Bigger Than Politics, the Real Shift is Cultural
by Jamilah King
In the wake of this week’s election, we talked to scholar and ColorLines co-founder Jeff Chang about what to make of the country’s big shifts and shakedowns. The author of “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation” and “Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop”, Chang’s used to looking at the bigger picture. He’s got two new books due out next year, one of which, “Who We Be: The Colorization of America” takes a look at how culture impacts, and often precedes, political change. Here, he sheds some much needed light on what’s happening politically, and where we’re headed in the future.
First, let’s get some historical context. What makes this political moment so potentially galvanizing for young voters of color? Aren’t we supposed to be “post-racial”?
The culture wars are back, and they have targeted a new generation. To me, Sharron Angle’s “you look Asian to me” moment was a perfect example. Pundits and bloggers focused on the stupidity of her comment, but the discussion was prompted by a Chicano student who was calling her out on her anti-immigration commercials that featured criminalized brown youths. Angle’s defense—I’m so colorblind, I can’t even tell what race you are—was not just hilarious, it was brutal in its dishonesty. The ads that the students objected to were far from colorblind.
For the right, this election proved—from Rand Paul to Jan Brewer—that racialized appeals to older white voters still mobilize, that the culture wars still work. The upside is that in Nevada, Chicano and Latino voters and young voters flipped the race for Reid, who had been several points down in the days leading up to the election.
Young voters, particularly those of color, really rallied behind Obama in 2008. There’s been a lot of talk of how that support is quickly eroding. What needs to be done to once again strengthen that electoral base?
Obama did fairly well by youth. He passed an outstanding student loan overhaul package that will immediately help access to higher education, especially in this era of skyrocketing public school tuition. Perhaps he could have sold it better. But his communications failure was a sign of a larger failure. Going on MTV was good. Barnstorming college campuses was good. Sending a message of “Vote or die” in 2010 was not good. What Obama failed to do for young people was what he failed to do for his base, because youths are now definitively seen as his base: offer a positive progressive vision for the next 2 years.
Read the Full Essay @ Colorlines
by Jamilah King
In the wake of this week’s election, we talked to scholar and ColorLines co-founder Jeff Chang about what to make of the country’s big shifts and shakedowns. The author of “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation” and “Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop”, Chang’s used to looking at the bigger picture. He’s got two new books due out next year, one of which, “Who We Be: The Colorization of America” takes a look at how culture impacts, and often precedes, political change. Here, he sheds some much needed light on what’s happening politically, and where we’re headed in the future.
First, let’s get some historical context. What makes this political moment so potentially galvanizing for young voters of color? Aren’t we supposed to be “post-racial”?
The culture wars are back, and they have targeted a new generation. To me, Sharron Angle’s “you look Asian to me” moment was a perfect example. Pundits and bloggers focused on the stupidity of her comment, but the discussion was prompted by a Chicano student who was calling her out on her anti-immigration commercials that featured criminalized brown youths. Angle’s defense—I’m so colorblind, I can’t even tell what race you are—was not just hilarious, it was brutal in its dishonesty. The ads that the students objected to were far from colorblind.
For the right, this election proved—from Rand Paul to Jan Brewer—that racialized appeals to older white voters still mobilize, that the culture wars still work. The upside is that in Nevada, Chicano and Latino voters and young voters flipped the race for Reid, who had been several points down in the days leading up to the election.
Young voters, particularly those of color, really rallied behind Obama in 2008. There’s been a lot of talk of how that support is quickly eroding. What needs to be done to once again strengthen that electoral base?
Obama did fairly well by youth. He passed an outstanding student loan overhaul package that will immediately help access to higher education, especially in this era of skyrocketing public school tuition. Perhaps he could have sold it better. But his communications failure was a sign of a larger failure. Going on MTV was good. Barnstorming college campuses was good. Sending a message of “Vote or die” in 2010 was not good. What Obama failed to do for young people was what he failed to do for his base, because youths are now definitively seen as his base: offer a positive progressive vision for the next 2 years.
Read the Full Essay @ Colorlines
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Do Black kids still like baseball?
Do Black Kids Still Like Baseball?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
It was one of the most memorable times I spent with my dad. Summer of 1973 and Hank Aaron was running down Babe Ruth’s career homerun record. The Atlanta Braves were in New York City for a weekend series with the New York Mets and my day surprised me with tickets. Hammerin’ Hank didn’t disappoint—he hit two homers that day. By the season’s end, Aaron had 713 homerun, two short of breaking Ruth’s record.
My dad couldn’t afford to take me to games often. Though we lived in the Bronx, literally minutes from Yankee Stadium, my dad was a Mets fan—a holdover National League fan from the 1950s before the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco and took my dad’s favorite player, Willie Mays. For my dad’s generation of Black men, Black baseball players, led by Jackie Robinson, Mays, Aaron and Frank Robinson, who would later become Major League Baseball’s first Black manager, were the realization of a world undergoing change.
When I first started watching baseball during the 1971 World Series, the sport was dominated by young Black ballplayers. The 1971 Pirates, who won the series that year, were the Blackest team in the league, in both style and substance, featuring future hall- of-famers Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente (whose running style everybody wanted to imitate), Dock Ellis, who the year before pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD, Al Oliver and Rennie Stennent. Not interested in political issues, the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates were my dad’s version of Black Power and he made sure I understood the significance of their ascendance as champions.
I was hooked, as many of my peers were, this in the era before the NBA had become an international brand and the New York Knicks were derisively described as the New York “N----r-bockers.” Part of the appeal was that many of the best baseball players in the 1970s and early 1980s were Black, and they were fundamentally changing the way the game was being played, whether talking about Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson on the base paths, Rod Carew, whose .388 batting average in 1977 was the highest in thirty years and Reggie Jackson, who became Mr. October.
Black dominance in professional baseball made sense in the 1970s, as the era marked the high-water mark of the percentage of Black players in the Major Leagues. For many kids in the hood, baseball was still a sport that could get you out of the hood, into college, the minor leagues and possible the majors. But something has happened along the way.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21
It was one of the most memorable times I spent with my dad. Summer of 1973 and Hank Aaron was running down Babe Ruth’s career homerun record. The Atlanta Braves were in New York City for a weekend series with the New York Mets and my day surprised me with tickets. Hammerin’ Hank didn’t disappoint—he hit two homers that day. By the season’s end, Aaron had 713 homerun, two short of breaking Ruth’s record.
My dad couldn’t afford to take me to games often. Though we lived in the Bronx, literally minutes from Yankee Stadium, my dad was a Mets fan—a holdover National League fan from the 1950s before the New York Giants relocated to San Francisco and took my dad’s favorite player, Willie Mays. For my dad’s generation of Black men, Black baseball players, led by Jackie Robinson, Mays, Aaron and Frank Robinson, who would later become Major League Baseball’s first Black manager, were the realization of a world undergoing change.
When I first started watching baseball during the 1971 World Series, the sport was dominated by young Black ballplayers. The 1971 Pirates, who won the series that year, were the Blackest team in the league, in both style and substance, featuring future hall- of-famers Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente (whose running style everybody wanted to imitate), Dock Ellis, who the year before pitched a no-hitter while high on LSD, Al Oliver and Rennie Stennent. Not interested in political issues, the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates were my dad’s version of Black Power and he made sure I understood the significance of their ascendance as champions.
I was hooked, as many of my peers were, this in the era before the NBA had become an international brand and the New York Knicks were derisively described as the New York “N----r-bockers.” Part of the appeal was that many of the best baseball players in the 1970s and early 1980s were Black, and they were fundamentally changing the way the game was being played, whether talking about Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson on the base paths, Rod Carew, whose .388 batting average in 1977 was the highest in thirty years and Reggie Jackson, who became Mr. October.
Black dominance in professional baseball made sense in the 1970s, as the era marked the high-water mark of the percentage of Black players in the Major Leagues. For many kids in the hood, baseball was still a sport that could get you out of the hood, into college, the minor leagues and possible the majors. But something has happened along the way.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Race, Rage, and Reconciliation
from Pop & Politics
Race, Rage, and Reconciliation
Pop & Politics Radio Special
Farai Chideya and team go to Florida to talk about the ways the American Dream is colliding with reality, and what it means in the voting booth. Chideya speaks with Colonel Allen West, a black Tea Party candidate; residents of a historic black community, where the land has been contaminated by industrial toxins, who say business and politicians have abandoned them; Muslim-Americans in Gainesville; and victors and victims of the foreclosure crisis.
Listen HERE
Pop & Politics Radio Special
Farai Chideya and team go to Florida to talk about the ways the American Dream is colliding with reality, and what it means in the voting booth. Chideya speaks with Colonel Allen West, a black Tea Party candidate; residents of a historic black community, where the land has been contaminated by industrial toxins, who say business and politicians have abandoned them; Muslim-Americans in Gainesville; and victors and victims of the foreclosure crisis.
Listen HERE
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Religion (and Race) of the President:Obama as National Scapegoat
from the Huffington Post
The Religion (and Race) of the President:
Obama as National Scapegoat
by Eddie Glaude, Jr.
"There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state....And it is the corruptors of religion who are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion." -- Kenneth Burke
I have not been able, until now, to understand fully the debate about President Obama's religious commitments. How some Americans move seamlessly from questioning Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright to accusations that he is Muslim genuinely baffles me. The fact that he is our first black president offers a bit of an explanation. But something deeper is going on here -- and something quite familiar.
President Obama has become our national scapegoat. He leads the nation in a moment in which economic and political upheavals threaten our social order -- where the very myth of American progress has fallen on bad times. Many Americans have selected him to represent all that is wrong and irresolvable about our current malaise and to transfer their iniquities onto his body and into his policies. In doing so, Obama as scapegoat becomes the occasion to give voice to an alternative vision of social life. Glenn Beck happily offered his version. Other Republicans will do so as we approach November.
Of course, Obama isn't alone in this regard. As Linton Weeks noted "hating on the president is a great American pastime." We need only recall the Bush and Clinton years. But the response to Obama is different. The fact of his blackness, whether we acknowledge it or not, links this ritual to the complex histories of race that shadow our democratic form of life. And the rites of renunciation that have characterized so much of our politics today -- by the "Republican party of no" and by the Tea Party, an ironic iteration of the mask of American beginnings (after all, they did dress up as "Indians" in Boston) -- make possible a new sense of unity, a new social order among some "white folks."
Threats, real or imagined, to the social order in the US have occasioned historically ritual acts to consolidate "white identity" and the idea of community that gives it life. For example, during the era of Jim Crow, lynchings became an important tool not only to defend segregation but, through the ritual act itself, enabled a collective disavowal of the obvious ways segregation contradicted our professed democratic commitments. Christianity often played a key role.
In June of 1903, a mob gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, determined to sacrifice George White, a black man accused of rape and murder. Speaking to the angry crowd was Reverend Robert Elwood of Olivet Presbyterian Church. He took his text from Corinthians 5:13, "to expel the wicked man from among you," and he urged the courts to determine White's guilt immediately so that justice could be administered. Here the language of religion sacralized the violence that would offer the community an exit from their guilt.
George White was transfigured into that symbol which contained all of the anxieties of a group. Like most black victims of lynching, he was the rapist and murderer. The realities of their lives, lives haunted by violence, were emptied as they were transformed into a dangerous threat to the social order. And the endless repetition of the stereotype came to stand in for the actual human beings; black folk would become the anti-social deviants who threatened the social order and were in need of vigilant policing.
African-American participation in the public domain would require, and still does, constant negotiation of the stereotype. Either we have to become Bigger Thomas or Biggie Smalls, or we have to become, as James Baldwin noted, blank -- raceless.
Black scapegoats then trade in stereotypes, and Obama has not been able to escape their scandalous work. It began with the unsettling idea that Obama was not who he claimed to be -- that he was of foreign birth, that lurking beneath his cool exterior was an angry black man waiting, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted, to exact revenge. Subsequently, Obama has been transposed as a militant black Christian, as a sympathizer with the New Black Panther Party, or believed to be a Muslim, the latest standard representation of threat to social order.
His ritual sacrifice enables those who have robbed the national coffers in the name of security and who have lined the pockets of the rich at the expense of everyone else to collectively disavow the contradiction of their practices with our stated democratic ideals.
I want to be clear. I am not referring here to intentional acts of racism or expressions of racial hatred. That's too easy. Moreover, such accusations too often downplay the real and deeply-felt sense among many Americans that they are losing ground. What I am noting is a ritual practice that reproduces certain meanings about race, undermine our democratic commitments, and block the path to a new imagining of the nation. Americans are really good at exorcising demons, especially our racial ones, in order to affirm our inherent goodness, but we find it terribly difficult to look directly at ourselves in the mirror.
Obama's role in this scapegoat ritual only deepens our evasion of the reality of American life. Many refuse to see him. They rather deal with endlessly repeated lies of who he is; and religious talk like Beck's that shade too easily into troublesome patriotic calls can sanctify these ideas. But Obama also engages in what can be called self-scapegoating. In his evasion of the issues of race, in his insistence on occupying a version of the stereotype (a "blank man" of sorts), he has enabled the ritual to tighten its grip on our national psyches. What other options does he have?
Much more is required of us all. But, first, and it is a necessity upon which our destiny depends, we must look ourselves squarely in the face and confront who we truly are if we are to be release into a new future.
***
Eddie Glaude is a founding member and Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project. Dr. Glaude is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. Hes is the author of Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and the editor of Is it Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and, with Cornel West, of African American Religious Studies: An Anthology (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003). Follow Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. on Twitter.
Obama as National Scapegoat
by Eddie Glaude, Jr.
"There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state....And it is the corruptors of religion who are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion." -- Kenneth Burke
I have not been able, until now, to understand fully the debate about President Obama's religious commitments. How some Americans move seamlessly from questioning Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright to accusations that he is Muslim genuinely baffles me. The fact that he is our first black president offers a bit of an explanation. But something deeper is going on here -- and something quite familiar.
President Obama has become our national scapegoat. He leads the nation in a moment in which economic and political upheavals threaten our social order -- where the very myth of American progress has fallen on bad times. Many Americans have selected him to represent all that is wrong and irresolvable about our current malaise and to transfer their iniquities onto his body and into his policies. In doing so, Obama as scapegoat becomes the occasion to give voice to an alternative vision of social life. Glenn Beck happily offered his version. Other Republicans will do so as we approach November.
Of course, Obama isn't alone in this regard. As Linton Weeks noted "hating on the president is a great American pastime." We need only recall the Bush and Clinton years. But the response to Obama is different. The fact of his blackness, whether we acknowledge it or not, links this ritual to the complex histories of race that shadow our democratic form of life. And the rites of renunciation that have characterized so much of our politics today -- by the "Republican party of no" and by the Tea Party, an ironic iteration of the mask of American beginnings (after all, they did dress up as "Indians" in Boston) -- make possible a new sense of unity, a new social order among some "white folks."
Threats, real or imagined, to the social order in the US have occasioned historically ritual acts to consolidate "white identity" and the idea of community that gives it life. For example, during the era of Jim Crow, lynchings became an important tool not only to defend segregation but, through the ritual act itself, enabled a collective disavowal of the obvious ways segregation contradicted our professed democratic commitments. Christianity often played a key role.
In June of 1903, a mob gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, determined to sacrifice George White, a black man accused of rape and murder. Speaking to the angry crowd was Reverend Robert Elwood of Olivet Presbyterian Church. He took his text from Corinthians 5:13, "to expel the wicked man from among you," and he urged the courts to determine White's guilt immediately so that justice could be administered. Here the language of religion sacralized the violence that would offer the community an exit from their guilt.
George White was transfigured into that symbol which contained all of the anxieties of a group. Like most black victims of lynching, he was the rapist and murderer. The realities of their lives, lives haunted by violence, were emptied as they were transformed into a dangerous threat to the social order. And the endless repetition of the stereotype came to stand in for the actual human beings; black folk would become the anti-social deviants who threatened the social order and were in need of vigilant policing.
African-American participation in the public domain would require, and still does, constant negotiation of the stereotype. Either we have to become Bigger Thomas or Biggie Smalls, or we have to become, as James Baldwin noted, blank -- raceless.
Black scapegoats then trade in stereotypes, and Obama has not been able to escape their scandalous work. It began with the unsettling idea that Obama was not who he claimed to be -- that he was of foreign birth, that lurking beneath his cool exterior was an angry black man waiting, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted, to exact revenge. Subsequently, Obama has been transposed as a militant black Christian, as a sympathizer with the New Black Panther Party, or believed to be a Muslim, the latest standard representation of threat to social order.
His ritual sacrifice enables those who have robbed the national coffers in the name of security and who have lined the pockets of the rich at the expense of everyone else to collectively disavow the contradiction of their practices with our stated democratic ideals.
I want to be clear. I am not referring here to intentional acts of racism or expressions of racial hatred. That's too easy. Moreover, such accusations too often downplay the real and deeply-felt sense among many Americans that they are losing ground. What I am noting is a ritual practice that reproduces certain meanings about race, undermine our democratic commitments, and block the path to a new imagining of the nation. Americans are really good at exorcising demons, especially our racial ones, in order to affirm our inherent goodness, but we find it terribly difficult to look directly at ourselves in the mirror.
Obama's role in this scapegoat ritual only deepens our evasion of the reality of American life. Many refuse to see him. They rather deal with endlessly repeated lies of who he is; and religious talk like Beck's that shade too easily into troublesome patriotic calls can sanctify these ideas. But Obama also engages in what can be called self-scapegoating. In his evasion of the issues of race, in his insistence on occupying a version of the stereotype (a "blank man" of sorts), he has enabled the ritual to tighten its grip on our national psyches. What other options does he have?
Much more is required of us all. But, first, and it is a necessity upon which our destiny depends, we must look ourselves squarely in the face and confront who we truly are if we are to be release into a new future.
***
Eddie Glaude is a founding member and Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project. Dr. Glaude is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. Hes is the author of Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and the editor of Is it Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and, with Cornel West, of African American Religious Studies: An Anthology (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003). Follow Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. on Twitter.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Playing The Racial Card: The Politics Of Race In America Today
Playing The Racial Card: The Politics Of Race In America Today
by David Theo Goldberg
Many thought, perhaps over-optimistically, that Barack Obama’s election to the US Presidency would signal that racism was now an historical relic in America. The Shirley Sherrod case makes palpably evident, however, a profound shift that has materialized in the politics of race in America since the 1980s. Sherrod, a government official, was excoriated by right-wing pundits for appearing in a pubic address to be endorsing discrimination against white farmers and privileging black farmers in government provision of aid. Within a few days of publication of her views, she was forced out of her job.
Politically active conservatives, overwhelmingly white, have seized on any racial reference by more liberal political figures to charge that the latter are perpetuating racism. Institutional racism is deemed mere anomaly rather than any longer a structural condition. When occurring at all, it is supposedly the expression of wrongheaded individuals. Conservative insistence on a literal colorblindness has undercut any attempts to invoke racial considerations to redress the negative effects of past discrimination.
As a consequence, racism has become less the social exclusion and humiliation of those taken to be racially different than invocation of or reference to race for social and especially governmental purpose. Any political or governmental invocation of race, for conservatives, amounts to racism, especially if designed to produce ameliorative or corrective outcomes in response to the pernicious burdens of past or continuing racisms.
More liberal proponents, by contrast, at least implicitly insist on a distinction between invoking race and expressions of racism. Underlying this distinction is the sense that to address the more pernicious and continuing legacy of racism requires racial identification of those continuing to suffer discrimination. After all, there is compelling evidence that especially African Americans, Latinos, Muslim Americans but also to some degree Asian Americans continue to face discriminatory conditions today, most notably in employment, housing access in renting and mortgages, and loans for large order purchases like automobiles, even after disaggregating for wealth and income differentials. To document such discrimination requires racial reference.
These differences regarding race and racism have been exacerbated since Obama’s election. Conservative white commentators have latched on to the use of racial expression by liberal or progressive politicians to charge racism. When President Obama chided Cambridge, Massachussets police for acting too quickly in the Henry Louis Gates arrest he was quickly accused of favoring a black man because black, and accused of racism. When National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) President Benjamin Jealous recently appealed to the Tea Party leaders to disown racist individuals in the movement, he was summarily denounced as racist for even raising the possibility. And when radical conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart released part of a videotape showing State of Georgia Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, recounting that she had once discriminated against white farmers in providing assistance to save their land, she was strongly condemned by conservatives and liberals alike, including the NCAAP’s Jealous.
Part of the conservative strategy has been to place liberal political figures on the defensive regarding race. They have sought to undercut any advantage liberals might gather by revealing ongoing evidence of racial discrimination. After all, if a black man has ascended to the highest political office in the country, what further racial barriers can there be? So the politics of race has turned to end what has been perceived as the advantages for liberals of a past politics of race. Race has always had a political register in America, and today is different only in the ring that register now assumes.
So what then the prevailing politics of race in America today?
Read the Full Essay @ the JWTC Blog
by David Theo Goldberg
Many thought, perhaps over-optimistically, that Barack Obama’s election to the US Presidency would signal that racism was now an historical relic in America. The Shirley Sherrod case makes palpably evident, however, a profound shift that has materialized in the politics of race in America since the 1980s. Sherrod, a government official, was excoriated by right-wing pundits for appearing in a pubic address to be endorsing discrimination against white farmers and privileging black farmers in government provision of aid. Within a few days of publication of her views, she was forced out of her job.
Politically active conservatives, overwhelmingly white, have seized on any racial reference by more liberal political figures to charge that the latter are perpetuating racism. Institutional racism is deemed mere anomaly rather than any longer a structural condition. When occurring at all, it is supposedly the expression of wrongheaded individuals. Conservative insistence on a literal colorblindness has undercut any attempts to invoke racial considerations to redress the negative effects of past discrimination.
As a consequence, racism has become less the social exclusion and humiliation of those taken to be racially different than invocation of or reference to race for social and especially governmental purpose. Any political or governmental invocation of race, for conservatives, amounts to racism, especially if designed to produce ameliorative or corrective outcomes in response to the pernicious burdens of past or continuing racisms.
More liberal proponents, by contrast, at least implicitly insist on a distinction between invoking race and expressions of racism. Underlying this distinction is the sense that to address the more pernicious and continuing legacy of racism requires racial identification of those continuing to suffer discrimination. After all, there is compelling evidence that especially African Americans, Latinos, Muslim Americans but also to some degree Asian Americans continue to face discriminatory conditions today, most notably in employment, housing access in renting and mortgages, and loans for large order purchases like automobiles, even after disaggregating for wealth and income differentials. To document such discrimination requires racial reference.
These differences regarding race and racism have been exacerbated since Obama’s election. Conservative white commentators have latched on to the use of racial expression by liberal or progressive politicians to charge racism. When President Obama chided Cambridge, Massachussets police for acting too quickly in the Henry Louis Gates arrest he was quickly accused of favoring a black man because black, and accused of racism. When National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) President Benjamin Jealous recently appealed to the Tea Party leaders to disown racist individuals in the movement, he was summarily denounced as racist for even raising the possibility. And when radical conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart released part of a videotape showing State of Georgia Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, recounting that she had once discriminated against white farmers in providing assistance to save their land, she was strongly condemned by conservatives and liberals alike, including the NCAAP’s Jealous.
Part of the conservative strategy has been to place liberal political figures on the defensive regarding race. They have sought to undercut any advantage liberals might gather by revealing ongoing evidence of racial discrimination. After all, if a black man has ascended to the highest political office in the country, what further racial barriers can there be? So the politics of race has turned to end what has been perceived as the advantages for liberals of a past politics of race. Race has always had a political register in America, and today is different only in the ring that register now assumes.
So what then the prevailing politics of race in America today?
Read the Full Essay @ the JWTC Blog
***
David Theo Goldberg directs the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute, and is Professor of Comparative Literature and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine. He has written extensively on race and racism, most recently in The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Race and Presidential Politics
from the Huffington Post
Who's Afraid of the Big Black Wolf? Race and Presidential Politics
by Imani Perry and Eddie Glaude, Jr.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."-Theodore Roosevelt
We would do well to heed President's Roosevelt's words today. They assume a robust conception of democratic life - that the sentiments of Americans are not so easily manipulated; that our responsibility for our way of life extends beyond our own selfish concerns. That with rights come responsibilities, and with freedom comes duty.
The history of African American struggle has added to this view that everyday, ordinary folk can transform the order of things; that a gathering of committed persons can make a real difference and meaningfully extend the body of rights and the scope of freedom for all of us.
If we take seriously this democratic ideal, how must we evaluate this administration's stance on issues of race?
To be honest, President Obama is scared. He refuses to substantively engage the bare fact that race continues to haunt our society, even when pushed to do so by racial incidents or manufactured news stories. He appears to believe that his own race can serve as a proxy for genuine concern. But the truth needs to be told.
In his Urban League address, Obama dismissed the idea of a national dialogue about race (commissions, academic symposia, etc. are cast aside as ineffective). He suggested instead that genuine conversations about race should take place around water coolers at work and at dining room tables. While it is true this sort of talk is meaningful and needed, we must also publicly address the persistence of racial inequality. Refusing to do so renders the subject, to a certain extent at least, a private matter - a matter of our hearts instead of policy.
But to think about our "racial habits of the heart" as a private matter is to lose sight of how those habits - and the dispositions and distributions that follow from them -- impact policy. In dismissing a national response to the persistence of racial inequality, President Obama neglects to address a persistent failing in the promise of American democracy. Our loyalty to the American public, and our obligations as citizens, should lead us to hold him to account for this neglect. Civic virtue demands as much.
Some suggest that the racially tinged attacks on the President from the right, and the mere fact of his blackness should protect him from any critiques on issues of race. Such claims are absurd. As the President of the United States, Obama is entrusted with the responsibility to navigate us through all of our national challenges. Of course, we should be sensitive to his particular challenge as the first African American president, but we must be responsive to the millions of Americans whose fates are also highly determined by their racial group membership. Silence, to echo President Roosevelt, would be "morally treasonous."
Race continues to matter, and reveals its manipulations in employment, housing, health, education and criminal justice. African Americans have an unemployment rate that is double that of the national average.
African Americans can expect to live 6 years fewer than other Americans and there are nearly one million incarcerated Black people in the United States. The force of racial inequality is heightened further in the impact of this economic downturn. We might all be on a sinking ship, but for those under the deck, the water engulfs more quickly.
President Obama and those in his administration seem to have made the political calculation that any serious talk about racial inequality would doom his presidency. If he does talk about race, his method has been one of indirection: a "lifting all boats" strategy.
Such an approach renders invisible the way race continues to impact the life chances of fellow citizens and deepens our national neurosis. If we follow this path, Americans, irrespective of whether they or racist or not, will continue to make the choices that result in racial inequalities.
President Obama is not unique in this approach. In general, the ideal of democratic life is being held captive by triangulating politicians in the White House and the relentless pursuit of greed throughout the rest of the country. But who would have thought that under our first African American president, race matters would be worse?
So what is required of us in this moment?
The burden lies on us to refuse political calculation when it stands in the stead of honest dialogue and political responsibility -- whether it comes from Republicans or Democrats, tea partiers, or our President. The words of Walt Whitman come to mind: "a nation like ours...is not served by the best men only but sometimes more by those that provoke it--by the combat they arouse." We must address directly racial inequality in this country. And such an effort would not amount to a call for reparations, as John McWhorter suggests rather, it would be a genuine effort to usher in a new era for our nation.
Who's Afraid of the Big Black Wolf? Race and Presidential Politics
by Imani Perry and Eddie Glaude, Jr.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."-Theodore Roosevelt
We would do well to heed President's Roosevelt's words today. They assume a robust conception of democratic life - that the sentiments of Americans are not so easily manipulated; that our responsibility for our way of life extends beyond our own selfish concerns. That with rights come responsibilities, and with freedom comes duty.
The history of African American struggle has added to this view that everyday, ordinary folk can transform the order of things; that a gathering of committed persons can make a real difference and meaningfully extend the body of rights and the scope of freedom for all of us.
If we take seriously this democratic ideal, how must we evaluate this administration's stance on issues of race?
To be honest, President Obama is scared. He refuses to substantively engage the bare fact that race continues to haunt our society, even when pushed to do so by racial incidents or manufactured news stories. He appears to believe that his own race can serve as a proxy for genuine concern. But the truth needs to be told.
In his Urban League address, Obama dismissed the idea of a national dialogue about race (commissions, academic symposia, etc. are cast aside as ineffective). He suggested instead that genuine conversations about race should take place around water coolers at work and at dining room tables. While it is true this sort of talk is meaningful and needed, we must also publicly address the persistence of racial inequality. Refusing to do so renders the subject, to a certain extent at least, a private matter - a matter of our hearts instead of policy.
But to think about our "racial habits of the heart" as a private matter is to lose sight of how those habits - and the dispositions and distributions that follow from them -- impact policy. In dismissing a national response to the persistence of racial inequality, President Obama neglects to address a persistent failing in the promise of American democracy. Our loyalty to the American public, and our obligations as citizens, should lead us to hold him to account for this neglect. Civic virtue demands as much.
Some suggest that the racially tinged attacks on the President from the right, and the mere fact of his blackness should protect him from any critiques on issues of race. Such claims are absurd. As the President of the United States, Obama is entrusted with the responsibility to navigate us through all of our national challenges. Of course, we should be sensitive to his particular challenge as the first African American president, but we must be responsive to the millions of Americans whose fates are also highly determined by their racial group membership. Silence, to echo President Roosevelt, would be "morally treasonous."
Race continues to matter, and reveals its manipulations in employment, housing, health, education and criminal justice. African Americans have an unemployment rate that is double that of the national average.
African Americans can expect to live 6 years fewer than other Americans and there are nearly one million incarcerated Black people in the United States. The force of racial inequality is heightened further in the impact of this economic downturn. We might all be on a sinking ship, but for those under the deck, the water engulfs more quickly.
President Obama and those in his administration seem to have made the political calculation that any serious talk about racial inequality would doom his presidency. If he does talk about race, his method has been one of indirection: a "lifting all boats" strategy.
Such an approach renders invisible the way race continues to impact the life chances of fellow citizens and deepens our national neurosis. If we follow this path, Americans, irrespective of whether they or racist or not, will continue to make the choices that result in racial inequalities.
President Obama is not unique in this approach. In general, the ideal of democratic life is being held captive by triangulating politicians in the White House and the relentless pursuit of greed throughout the rest of the country. But who would have thought that under our first African American president, race matters would be worse?
So what is required of us in this moment?
The burden lies on us to refuse political calculation when it stands in the stead of honest dialogue and political responsibility -- whether it comes from Republicans or Democrats, tea partiers, or our President. The words of Walt Whitman come to mind: "a nation like ours...is not served by the best men only but sometimes more by those that provoke it--by the combat they arouse." We must address directly racial inequality in this country. And such an effort would not amount to a call for reparations, as John McWhorter suggests rather, it would be a genuine effort to usher in a new era for our nation.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Confessions of a Black Swim Parent
You Don't Have to Compete, Just Learn How to Swim
Confessions of a BSP: A Black Swim Parent
by Mark Anthony Neal
The Mecklenburg Aquatic Center, site of the North Carolina 14-and-under Swimming Championships is located on the east end of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Charlotte, NC. More than a mile away, on the west end of the boulevard, sits Johnson C. Smith College, a historically Black college.
The distance between the two institutions, both located on a thoroughfare named after a figure who personified the collapsing of racial boundaries in this country, is an apt metaphor for the lack of visibility of Blacks in the sport of swimming. With the exception of events like the National Black Heritage Championships Meet, the lack of a significant presence of black swimmers at competitive swim meets is a regular occurrence; a reality that is not surprising, given a recent report sponsored by USA Swimming that nearly 70 percent of Black teen and children surveyed possess little or no swimming skills—a number that was nearly twice the amount of their White peers.
Some of the reasons Black swimming rates are thought to be low are obvious. Finances and access to facilities remain primary concerns, though organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs, The Y and Make A Splash, an organization funded by USA Swimming, have made herculean efforts to make swim lessons affordable (free in some cases). Even the issue of access was ultimately deemed less of an issue in the USA Swimming report as many of the respondents reported having access to local pools, including public ones.
What was far more of a concern as related to access was the issue of physical safety—some public facilities draw the presence of a criminal element, particularly in poor neighborhoods (the same element that one might find at a local basketball court, though that doesn’t keep folk from the courts). Many Black children and young teens are simply afraid to go to public facilities by themselves, preferring to be accompanied by a parent or another adult.
Not surprisingly parents hold the biggest key as to whether black youth will learn to swim or decide to take on the sport competitively. According to USA Swimming’s report parental fear of their children drowning outweighs even monetary concerns about swimming. As one parent surveyed states, “you’re already uncomfortable and scared. You’re like ‘I’m paying them so I can have heart palpitations on the side lines’…why should I have to pay money to be afraid.”
Read the Full Essay @ theloop21.com
Confessions of a BSP: A Black Swim Parent
by Mark Anthony Neal
The Mecklenburg Aquatic Center, site of the North Carolina 14-and-under Swimming Championships is located on the east end of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Charlotte, NC. More than a mile away, on the west end of the boulevard, sits Johnson C. Smith College, a historically Black college.
The distance between the two institutions, both located on a thoroughfare named after a figure who personified the collapsing of racial boundaries in this country, is an apt metaphor for the lack of visibility of Blacks in the sport of swimming. With the exception of events like the National Black Heritage Championships Meet, the lack of a significant presence of black swimmers at competitive swim meets is a regular occurrence; a reality that is not surprising, given a recent report sponsored by USA Swimming that nearly 70 percent of Black teen and children surveyed possess little or no swimming skills—a number that was nearly twice the amount of their White peers.
Some of the reasons Black swimming rates are thought to be low are obvious. Finances and access to facilities remain primary concerns, though organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs, The Y and Make A Splash, an organization funded by USA Swimming, have made herculean efforts to make swim lessons affordable (free in some cases). Even the issue of access was ultimately deemed less of an issue in the USA Swimming report as many of the respondents reported having access to local pools, including public ones.
What was far more of a concern as related to access was the issue of physical safety—some public facilities draw the presence of a criminal element, particularly in poor neighborhoods (the same element that one might find at a local basketball court, though that doesn’t keep folk from the courts). Many Black children and young teens are simply afraid to go to public facilities by themselves, preferring to be accompanied by a parent or another adult.
Not surprisingly parents hold the biggest key as to whether black youth will learn to swim or decide to take on the sport competitively. According to USA Swimming’s report parental fear of their children drowning outweighs even monetary concerns about swimming. As one parent surveyed states, “you’re already uncomfortable and scared. You’re like ‘I’m paying them so I can have heart palpitations on the side lines’…why should I have to pay money to be afraid.”
Read the Full Essay @ theloop21.com
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Jimmy Carter, Rep. Joe Wilson and the Race Conversation
from The Takeaway (WNYC-FM)
Rep. Joe Wilson and the Race Conversation
by Todd Zwillich, Hsi-Chang Lin
Guests: Joe Hicks, Mark Anthony Neal
Thursday, September 17 2009
Despite hopes that electing our first black president would usher in a "post-racial" era, race has become a prominent issue in the Obama presidency. From overt cases – the Henry Louis Gates incident – to more coded and/or ambiguous examples – the "birther" movement, Representative Joe Wilson's outburst on the House floor – racial flare-ups have featured prominently in the first seven months of this, our first African-American-led administration. Now, the conversation about Wilson's yell last week has increasingly turned to its racial implications. Earlier this week, former President Jimmy Carter said Wilson's outburst was racist. (The White House disagreed.) For two perspectives on the way this conversation is playing out, we speak to Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African American Studies at Duke University, and Joe Hicks, talk show host for KFI Radio in Los Angeles, California.
Listen HERE
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
