Our World with Marc Lamont Hill: Gender Justice

Marc Lamont Hill is joined by Salamishah Tillet, Byron Hurt and Akiba Solomon.

'Left of Black': Episode #12 featuring Marc Lamont Hill and Salamishah Tillet

Left of Black Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal discusses the crisis of Black Males and schooling, the de-skilling of the American Work-force and Social Media with Columbia University Professor Marc Lamont Hill. Neal is also joined by University of Pennsylvania Professor Salamishah Tillet as they discuss the career of Kanye West, the impact of Nicki Minaj and definitions of musical genius.

→Marc Lamont Hill is Associate Professor of Education at Columbia University. A regular contributor to Fox News and CNN, Hill is the author of Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity.

→Salamishah Tillet is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the forthcoming Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press). Tillet is also Founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit organization and a regular contributor to The Root.com.

The Root Review: 'Night Catches Us'

Starring Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, Tanya Hamilton's moving debut takes us back to 1976, when Jimmy Carter was about to be president, funk was king and the Black Panthers were trying to pick up the pieces.

The Root Review: 'Night Catches Us'
by Salamishah Tillet|The Root

The Black Panther Party in its twilight, circa 1976. Gone are the breakfast programs, dashikis, megaphones and big Afros, as well as the gun-toting, black-leather-clad militants. In the wake of the formidable black nationalist movement are both ruin and rumination. Single black mothers trying to save a community, former Black Panther members turned vigilantes, and fatherless daughters haunted by the legendary leaders of the past.

Set in Philadelphia, Tanya Hamilton's moving debut feature, Night Catches Us, is neither nostalgic nor sentimental. Her attention to period details is focused, meticulous and unswerving. Within the first few minutes of the film, the viewer is caught up in a faraway past: When Jimmy Carter was on the verge of becoming president, plaid pants and pageboy caps were in style, and Cadillacs rested on every corner. Most remarkably, it was still a time when black people held bail parties for those wrongly incarcerated and refused a "stop and frisk" by cops because it denied their constitutional rights.

Anthony Mackie plays Marcus Washington, a former Panther leader who mysteriously returns to Philadelphia to attend his father's funeral. Where has he been all these years? In prison for his Panther activities? Or laying low because he was secretly an FBI informant? The ambiguity surrounding his recent past is a tension that drives much of the plot.

But the true mystery that Hamilton tries to unravel is far more ambitious. Moving past the grand narratives of Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Hamilton turns her camera to the everyday lives of Panther members, people who valiantly fought for racial freedom but who now are plagued by the reality that they may have won certain battles, but ultimately they lost the war.

Read the Full Review @ The Root

Mad at 'Mad Men'

The creators of Mad Men get so many things right in this period television series. Too bad they get black women so wrong.

Mad at 'Mad Men'
by Salamishah Tillet

In Mad Men, AMC's seminal series on the 1960s advertising scene, all the women are white, all the blacks are men and, well, the rest of us non-male colored folks are housekeepers and Playboy bunnies. At least, that's what one would think watching the show lauded by The Washington Post as "TV's most feminist show."

Mad Men is all about progressive gender politics -- as long as it comes wrapped in white skin. For female viewers who both enjoy Mad Men and come wrapped in brown skin, watching the show can be a frustrating experience.

For the fourth season, Mad Men, which comes to a close on Sunday, the civil rights movement serves as little more than a decorative backdrop. Now set between 1964 and 1965, the show continues to wonderfully detail the fall and the failures of its patriarch, Don Draper, while also exploring the limited gender roles that stifle white suburban housewives, like Betty Draper-turned-Francis, and the sexual harassment and gender discrimination that plague working women, like Peggy Olson and Joan Harris.

In fact, the show's creative representations of white male chauvinism and a budding white feminist movement is best captured in the ninth episode of this season, "Beautiful Girls," which oddly pits the fomenting civil rights movement against the budding feminist movement. When Abe, a white male hipster, sits down with Peggy and waxes philosophic about revolution -- particularly the upheaval in Greece and the civil rights movement in America -- Peggy quickly interrupts, "Most of the things that Negroes can't do, I can't do, and no one seems to care." Abe chides: "All right, Peggy, we'll have a civil rights march for women."

The civil rights movement, it seems, was for black men only.

Part of the reason the show gets away with such a reductionist version of the civil rights era is that for the past two seasons, there have been few references to the major battles and gains of this significant social movement. Significant moments of the '60s, from the March on Washington to the Birmingham Bombing to President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act, are either mentioned in passing or show up as grainy news footage on TV.

Black male historical figures like Malcolm X, Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte are mentioned only briefly by the show's white characters. Or they're strangely used as the shadowy metaphor for the societal oppression of white women, like Betty Draper dreaming about Medgar Evers when she is heavily sedated for her third child's birth, or when the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston fight serves as a backdrop for Peggy Olsen's duel with her family.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

'Left of Black': Episode #3 featuring Salamishah Tillet and David Ikard

Host Mark Anthony Neal Discusses Sexual Predators with University of Pennsylvania Professor Salamishah Tillet & Florida State University Professor David Ikard.

Professor Tillet is Founder of A Long Walk Home, a non-profit organization that uses art therapy and the visual and performance arts to document, to educate and to bring about social change.

Professor Ikard is the author of Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism.

Ethiopian Jazz: Thrilling Music That You Should Hear

Contemporary Ethiopian musicians reinvigorate traditional jazz stylings for new audiences in America and Addis Ababa.

Ethiopian Jazz: Thrilling Music That You Should Hear
by Salamishah Tillet |The Root

During the second half of the 20th century, cosmopolitan Ethiopians were delighted to see jazz giant Duke Ellington receive their country's Medal of Honor from Emperor Haile Selassie. At the same time, by contrast, a Berklee College of Music-trained Ethiopian jazz legend, Mulatu Astatke, who fused jazz and funk with his country's folk and Coptic Church melodies, was unknown in the United States.

In the 1960s, as the tastes of American jazz fans shifted from bebop to avant-garde, Ethiopian musicians were establishing a tradition whose compositions are just reaching American ears. Why did it take so long for this riveting, emotionally charged music to arrive?

Ethiopian musicians like Astatke, singer Alemayehu Eshete, and guitarist and arranger Girma Beyene have devoted their lives to blending Ethiopia's traditional five tones per octave, or pentatonic scale, with Western chords. Listening to the music they have produced shows the variety of influences on their approach to jazz.

Astatke traveled to London, Boston and New York in the 1960s, where he heard African-American and Latin jazz to which he added pentatonic scales. This spawned "Ethio Jazz."

Eshete and Beyene created a subgenre called swinging Addis by combining the songs they learned from the Ethiopian Police Band and the Haile Selassie I Theatre Orchestra with the rhythms they heard on the records of Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole and James Brown, brought to Ethiopia by Peace Corps volunteers. As Ethiopian musicologist Simeneh Betreyohannes says, "Most Ethiopian jazz artists did not go abroad; music was their way of traveling."

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Teens Learn Sexual Violence Prevention Via Art Therapy

from WBEZ--Chicago Public Radio

Teens Learn Sexual Violence Prevention Via Art Therapy
Produced by Natalie Y. Moore

This summer a group of teenage girls on Chicago’s West Side is learning about sexual violence prevention while they draw. The idea is to get the girls talking about and confronting sexual violence through yoga, dance and painting.

In a classroom at North Lawndale College Prep High School, 15 girls mix paint for their latest art project.

Each teen has a pair of white canvas gym shoes in front of her - literally a blank canvas. One of their instructors explains:

ambi: How can you use dress for communication. We’re using shoes. What are some of the things we talked about?

Hope, respect, the girls say. The program is called Girl/Friends and it’s designed to shore up hope and respect in these students and help them pass the message on to other girls.

There are many reasons girls can become victims of sexual assault, and it cuts across racial and class lines. Nationally, one in four girls is sexually abused before the age of 18.

But Chicago police statistics put North Lawndale eighth in the city for criminal sexual assaults in the past year. Their neighborhood faces a lot of factors that contribute: lack of parenting skills, domestic violence and the stresses of unemployment.

Listen HERE

Black Girls Are Still Enslaved

The sexual trafficking of our young females is happening at an alarming rate. Who will free them?

Black Girls Are Still Enslaved

by Salamishah Tillet |

This Saturday, mogul Russell Simmons and civil rights leader Al Sharpton are expected to deliver speeches at the "Stop the Violence" rally in Trenton, N.J. This rally is a direct response to the revolting news that seven men, ranging in age from 13 to 20 years old sexually assaulted a 7-year-old girl in Trenton's Rowan Towers apartment complex last weekend.

According to the police reports, the girl attended a party with her 15-year-old stepsister, who then sold herself and her younger sister to a group of men for an undisclosed amount of money. While the proverbial Bush-speak of "shock and awe" come to mind, this alleged incident is yet another stark reminder that the sex trafficking of younger and younger African-American girls is not only on the rise in the United States, but is fast becoming the forgotten slavery of our times.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Requiem for Martin Luther King Jr.

The slain civil rights leader’s legacy in African-American music.

Requiem for Martin Luther King Jr.
Salamishah Tillet |

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has rightfully been celebrated as one of the most important political leaders of the 20th century, but he doesn’t get the credit for his significant influence on African-American music.

Most music lovers and civil-rights-history buffs know that James Brown, the “Godfather of Soul,” headlined an unforgettable concert in Boston on the night of April 4, 1968, immediately after King was assassinated in Memphis. Memorialized in David Leaf’s documentary, The Night James Brown Saved Boston, James Brown’s riveting performance transfixed his television and live audience to such a degree that a riot was averted in Boston and a (temporary) interracial mourning period resulted.

This mourning shaped more than James Brown’s concert that night. It led artists like Nina Simone and Bill Cosby to record original compositions about King’s death. Nina Simone first performed “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” written by her bassist Gene Taylor, at the Westbury Musical Festival in Long Island, N.Y., three days after King’s assassination. Unlike the up-tempo beat of her 1963 political anthem “Mississippi Goddamn,” written in response to the Birmingham church bombing, Simone’s eulogy to King was a sonic mélange that opened with the simple chords of the protestant hymn and ended in a preach song. This shift in musical rhetoric was never arbitrary, but signaled a transformation in American politics as well. Similar to James Brown, Simone appeared before an interracial audience and her simple tribute futilely asked the question “why” King had to die, but also substituted the irony and impatience of her earlier protest music with a paean to national mourning.

While Simone’s elegy conveyed what King himself once called the “disappointment” of the black power movement, Bill Cosby’s 1971 jazz-funk composition, “Martin’s Funeral” is an even more radical. Recorded with the Badfoot Brown & the Bunions Bradford Funeral Marching Band, Cosby’s album features only two songs, the first is a jazz-funk instrumental tribute to Martin on which Cosby plays electronic piano. Music critic Thomas Jurek describes the song as “building for 20 minutes from sad reverence and mournful marching into stomping rage, and finally, into release and acceptance.” In both his 2,000-word liner notes and the intense complexity of the music itself, Cosby admits his song was inspired by his attendance of King’s funeral service. When Cosby’s song, which features percussionist Big Black on bass drum, merged jazz and funk, it served as a musical metaphor for a generation that fought optimistically for civil rights, but now turned inward to create a new sound and beat, for their black power ideologies.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

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Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

Marion Jones Takes Up the Cause of Women in Sports

from The Root

The disgraced Olympian is back on the public speaking circuit. But what she’s asking forgiveness for now has nothing to do with her prison stint.

Marion Jones, Role Model?
by Salamishah Tillet

The silences in Marion Jones first public speech since she was released from prison last fall were as percussive as the words she actually spoke. Since serving six months for perjury after being convicted of fraud and the use of performance enhancing drugs, the disgraced Olympian has been interviewed by Oprah and Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts. But she has shied away from her once adoring public. Until now. At an annual “Race and Sports” lecture series at the University of Pennsylvania late last month, Jones spoke to an audience of roughly 200, to commemorate the 37th anniversary of Title IX.

Never in the 90-minute moderated discussion did Jones mention steroids or in any way reference the doping cover-up or check forgery that led her to prison. Yet the issues Jones did speak about—gender, race, sports—seemed to resonate with her mostly African-American audience of runners, students and parents.

Five months pregnant and standing brilliantly tall in a brown flower-print dress, she deftly impressed her audience by focusing not on her personal drama but rather on what she called another “crisis” within sports—the still limited opportunities for female athletes, particularly black female athletes, at both the collegiate and professional levels.

Read the Full Essay @

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Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

Gov. Sarah Palin: A Double Take

from The Root

From Clarence Thomas to Sarah Palin, nobody plays cynical identity politics like the GOP.

The Grand Old Bait and Switch
By Salamishah Tillet | TheRoot.com

Sept. 3, 2008--John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as the GOP vice presidential nominee has re-inserted the "woman" question into the presidential debate.

By choosing the second white female vice presidential candidate, McCain is trying to fashion himself, Sarah Palin, and, by extension, the entire Republican Party as more committed feminists than the Democrats.

But what is being called a "maverick" decision by McCain, is in fact just another version of the old Republican game of bait and switch with identity politics. Starting with George H. W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the GOP has been trying to convince Americans that any "woman," "African American" or "candidate of color" will do. And while the argument can be made that any diversity is better than no diversity, this Republican version is especially egregious because it often appoints minority candidates who vote against public legislation that insure that other members of their group have the same opportunities, choices and paths to success as they did. In effect, diversity, which dismantles affirmative action programs and women's reproductive rights, is the worse form of political fraud.

Read the Full Essay @

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Salamishah Tillet is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the non-profit organization, A Long Walk Home, Inc., which uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to document and to end violence against underserved women and children.

ALSO

When did single parenthood and teen pregnancy stop being important to the family values party?

All in the Family
By Stephane Dunn | TheRoot.com

September 3, 2008--The Internet was buzzing with rumors that Gov. Sarah Palin's 4-month-old son is actually the child of her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. To silence these rumors, Camp McCain-Palin released this bombshell: Bristol couldn't have had the infant because she is five months pregnant.

Whew! This is the stuff of Access Hollywood.

McCain claimed he knew about the pregnancy, but the timing was suspect. The announcement, squeezed in-between a pared-down Republican Convention and Hurricane Gustav's impact on New Orleans, allowed the bomb to fall more like a leaf.

Now, the storm has subsided, and the political one is roaring back up. The Republicans are in defense mode with some arguing that it is in poor taste to make Palin's family situation a campaign issue.

Really? When one considers the high-wattage criticism surrounding the year's most-famous pregnant teen, Jamie Lynn Spears, and all the talk about how the actress's high-profile glorified teenage pregnancy and the news reports of a teenage pregnancy pact that followed, it's hard to pass off Bristol's pregnancy as a kind of private family affair.

But even worse, some Republicans are spinning Bristol as a poignant example of the-right-to-life and an opportunity for the potential second family to relate to regular folk.

This is the same Republican Party of the mid- to late 20th century that solidified a careful ideology of "family values" with emphasis on traditional mores and thinking. Cracked-face or not, the rightist swing of Republican politics doesn't neatly allow for such "mistakes" as teenage pregnancy for a candidate, especially during a major election year.

Read the Full Essay@

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Stephane Dunn is a writer and author of Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (August 2008). She is also an assistant professor at Morehouse College.