After serving sixteen years and their young adult lives behind bars, the Scott sisters are finally good headline news; Governor Barbour’s pardon of the Mississippi sisters and the stipulation – the gift of one sister’s kidney to the other is the feel good story of the moment; in truth it remains a tragic commentary about unjust justice.
Jamie and Gladys Scott, now 36 and 38, committed a crime, armed robbery which netted them 11 bucks, but then they were victimized by the system. The three black men involved pointed to the sisters for orchestrating the crime and served little time, while the Scotts were given an absurdly severe penalty: a life sentence. More than just another example of how the legal system has been unjust to black folk and women, the Scott case also speaks specifically to black women's historical experience with the judicial process. While black male persecution under the law has generated more publicity, ( for example the newsmaking 1931 Scottsboro Boys case) black females have shared a similar reality.
In the South, from slavery through the present, black women have had a long history of brutal mistreatment by racist criminal legal systems. Time and time again courts have famously denied black women their humanity and ignored the underlining racial politics that determined their fates.
"Did He just Say ‘Nigger’?--PBS KIds Sprout Responds
This is Jenni Glenn, posting on behalf of Sprout. Our quotes have been taken out of context in the above post by Dr. Dunn, and we feel it is important for you and your readers to see our complete response to her:
"Dear Dr. Dunn and Mr. Muhammad,
We have taken your concern very seriously, reviewed the episode in question, and thoroughly researched the issue. Included below is a direct response from Jocelyn Stevenson, the producer of What’s Your News?. Ms. Stevenson is a respected professional who has worked in children’s television for over thirty years as a writer, producer and creator of programming for young children. Her credits include Sesame Street, Barney & Friends, Bob the Builder, The Magic Schoolbus and many more.
As you will see below, the word in question that the child used in this episode is “never.” However, we do acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to understand children’s speech patterns. Therefore, in an effort to prevent any potential for future misinterpretation of the word “never” in this episode, we will edit this segment accordingly.
Following is the response from Ms. Stevenson:
“In response to the query from the viewer who says that she heard one of the children in the “Broken Ankle” episode of What's Your News? use an offensive, racially-charged word, the word the child used was "never." The exchange, which happened during a behind-the-sofa puppet show that the boy Michael was putting on with his friend Liam in order to cheer up his sister Claire (who has a broken ankle), went like this:
(Michael is playing the part of Mad Snake and Liam is Monster Moose. We don't see the boys because they're behind the sofa, but do see the stuffed toys - a snake and a moose with home-made fangs - they are using as puppets.)
LIAM (OS): Don't you hiss at me, Mad Snake! MICHAEL (OS): I can if I want to! Hssssssss! LIAM (OS): This is your last chance to give up! MICHAEL (OS): Never! LIAM (OS): Roar!
Michael clearly says the word "never." What's Your News? is designed to connect young children around the world with their stories, their news. Four to six year old children are emerging from the family environment into the big, wide world. And that world can feel scary and overwhelming. What's Your News? was created to help children make the home-to-world transition with a feeling of connection – an understanding that there are other children out there who are doing what they do, feeling what they feel. It celebrates and honors a child’s experience of just being a kid.
Not only is the misinterpretation of the word used in this episode a complete antithesis of our vision, but it is also impossible that such repellant and offensive language would get past all the experienced professionals who watch the footage and listen to the sound for each and every episode of the series we make for children, including and especially Sprout’s Standards and Practices Department. " --Jocelyn Stevenson
We hope that you can now rest assured knowing that such an offensive word would never be uttered on any of Sprout’s respected, gold-standard programming. We thank you for being a loyal and engaged Sprout viewer and hope that we have answered all of your concerns.
Sincerely,
Jenni Glenn VP, Communications and Marketing Sprout
I’d huddle under the covers, literally reading by flashlight after I’d worn out Mama’s indulgence and she ordered the light off and me to sleep. There was always some book I couldn’t let go of easily. Mama and my father helped create my reading addictions; there were always books – all the Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney fairytales, children’s encyclopedias and so forth, and I tagged along to the library with my big sister who remembers taking me to there for my first library card.
Between fifth and seventh grades, there were the Nancy Drew and Judy Blume books, Walter Dean Myers, and the 'Little House on the Prairie' series. In middle school, I fell upon 'Little Women' and 'The Grapes of Wrath,' John Steinbeck’s beautiful tragic tale of the Joads, a displaced family of poor white sharecroppers in the depression era that drew me again and again.
Then there was a turning point in my reading life somewhere around the summer before eighth grade. I combed the library shelves looking for something different – actually some more books by black writers - and discovered an autobiography I’ve never forgotten and reread many time. 'Coming of Age in Mississippi' by Anne Moody brought the Civil Rights movement alive for a post Civil-rights young girl like me, growing up in the Midwest, far removed from my Mom’s adolescence spent picking cotton in the South. I could imagine what it was like being a black girl, surviving despite being preyed upon by white and black men and fighting white supremacy amidst the constant threat of violence and death.
I was starved then for other stories by black voices and I found many – Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Mildred Taylor, Walter Mosley, Gloria Naylor, Charles Johnson, Malcolm X, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and too many more to list them all. I was helped along from the tenth to twelfth grade when Mrs. Poe, my white English teacher, saw my passion for books, and opened up her considerable private collection of books by black authors to me. By senior year, I’d cried over Morrison’s Pecola, Alice Walker’s Celie, and Anne Petry’s (pre-'Coldest Winter Ever' and 'Push') urban black girl tale – 'The Street.' I was an average student by high school standards (somewhere between a low B and C range), but little did I know, my reading habit formed a foundation that would help me be successful in college. I was a disciplined reader and I loved it.
We all know the name of the game is winning for as much exposure, money, and prestige as possible. It’s the same in competitive sports on the professional and college level and particularly so for prominent sports like football. However, the winning orientation on the college front should be different because there, the operative term is student athlete.
Winning games and competing at national title standards should be balanced by another required winning demand: superior graduation rates and program integrity.
This past week, we again witness how little winning off the field – producing academically sound college graduates and developing socially responsible young men means in the bowl heavy, top dog race mentality that dominates college football.
The University of Miami, one of the former football powerhouses in the nation, dumped Randy Shannon after a recent four year contract extension and four seasons of striving to do as he was charged to do: turn the football program around towards a more positive and of course winning direction. Winning as many games as possible is a desired even admirable goal of competition.
A coach’s position, particularly with major sports programs such as Miami’s football Hurricanes, is automatically in jeopardy for not winning enough games and competing for division and national titles. The problem is that a game winning, national title status coach can be a dismal failure at superior leadership off the field and lead teams with embarrassing student graduation rates.
'Left of Black' w/Mark Anthony Neal Monday, September 13, 2010
Guests:
Author Zelda Lockhart joins 'Left of Black' to discuss her new book 'Fifth Born II: The One Hundredth Turtle' and how the issues of homosexuality, violence and shame affect Black communities. Lockhart also discusses her decision to publish independently.
Morehouse University professor Stephane Dunn shares her opinion on the limitations of megachurches. She is the author of Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008) and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms., TheRoot, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Best African American Essays.
Some things are just too horrific to think about or hold to a discussion over the daily take of national news. Such is the case of the second South Carolina woman to kill her small children and try to cover it up with a clumsy lie.
In 1994, Susan Smith, a poor white woman, wasn't so clumsy; she was astute enough to blame it on a black man and have the police trolling for some fictional black guy. It worked for a minute because the racial mythologies about black male criminality and white female victimization at the hands of the imagined black brute are so deeply rooted in the nation's consciousness.
This time the mother is black.
According to breaking news reports, Shaquan Duley admitted to suffocating her two young boys by covering their mouths with her hands. She reportedly put the bodies in her car and rolled it into the Edisto River to make it look like a terrible accident. Even writing the bare details makes my hands shake.
I think about the innocent children and their terror and pain and don't want to imagine the last seconds of their lives. I think about their little boy laughs and those grins they all seem to come equipped with and I mourn their present and their future.
But I think about Shaquan too. Disgust, anger, rage - they're the easiest emotions to reach for when we think of what is probably considered to be the most terrible crime against nature or act of violence anyone can commit. Some laws appear irrevocable; mothers love their children above else and sacrifice their own lives to protect them. Real mothers, our laws of nature say, do not hurt or kill their children. Period.
Stephane Dunn, Ph.D., a writer and assistant professor at Morehouse College, specializes in film, popular culture, and African American Studies, and creative writing. She is the author of Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008) and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms., TheRoot, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Best African American Essays. She can be reached at stephane@theloop21.com
Growing up, I lived in church – or so it seemed. Between a devoted Pentecostal grandmother and later a saved, sanctified Mama, there was no such thing as just Sunday church going. Since there was bible study, summer revival, summer bible camp, district meetings, pastor anniversaries, Easter and Christmas programs and just-because-the-spirit-told-the-pastor spontaneous shut-ins, there were many weeks when we went to church Sunday through Friday nights [the ones I hated the most].
My mom married into a church as my father, a self-avowed non-churchgoer, was the brother of the first lady. Everybody seemed to know everybody. In our church of about hundred [on say a good Easter Sunday] many of the members were either some distant cousin or great aunt of the Pastor’s or his wife’s nephew or such a long time member of the church, they remembered when the then middle-aged preacher was a slightly wayward teen.
Even if you weren’t kin to the preacher or his wife or married into the church family in some way, no one was a stranger for too long; this was also true in the larger, more bourgeoisified churches with anywhere from 300 to 1,000 members. The term ‘mega church’ wasn’t a term folks used commonly.
Of course, there were drawbacks to these somewhat small congregations. As a child, it was burdensome to have all-eyes-on you. If old Mother whomever saw you doing wrong or looking like you were thinking about it or you got too grown and sassy with Sister so and so, you might as well go on and tell on yourself because your mother or father or grandma would hear about it which meant you’d be feeling it at home after church.
Every church – whether it be Baptist, non-denominational or Pentecostal—was a potential breeding ground for busy bodies and gossipers. It never mattered how brave a teacher got to preach on it; folks were never shamed enough to stop talking ‘under folks clothes’ including and especially the preacher and first lady. Good business, bad business – the seventy-year-old Deacon’s gambling backsliding, the preacher’s son’s out of wedlock baby, some longtime member’s pregnant teen grandchild – it all became front pew news. And there were also those annoying cliques which were predicated on how well you were connected and to whom. You could be an insider but still outside the circle of the truly favored church elite.
National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta Celebrates the 'Radical Soul' of Curtis Mayfield
Quiet Legend: The Radical Soul of Curtis Mayfield by Stephane Dunn
This ain't no time for segregatin' (we people who are darker than blue) I'm talking 'bout brown and yellow two High yellow girl, can't you tell You're just the surface of our dark deep well
Some musicians – not many – just have it - a timelessness that means whenever you hear their music you are moved to sing along or rock or in the case of Chicago native Curtis Mayfield, to go to church and say uh huh, alright now. He was a soft-spoken gentleman with an instantly recognizable vocal sound – at once soulful and mellow but tinged with that gut-wrenching emotion definitive of black gospel music. This wasn’t surprising since Mayfield was a church boy who taught himself the guitar and dropped out of school and turned professional musician at the very young age of fifteen.
Pianist Dr. Guthrie Ramsey, a professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, says Mayfield’s “unforced, persuasive falsetto” offered a “dose of gospel-blues.” Mayfield proved to be an old soul and ahead of his generation. By the time his group The Impressions reached soul music fame with such albums as It’s All Right (1963) and the hit Keep On Pushin 1964, Mayfield had come to define the group’s sound, writing and producing many of their songs. While Mayfield is a name that any soul music lover or American music aficionado will know, he remains a sort of quiet legend and this despite the sampling of his music and tributes, both compilations of his music and concerts.
The most recent tribute by Atlanta’s National Black Arts Festival saluted Mayfield in song with legendary O’ Jay Eddie Levert, Joi, Dion Farris, Van Hunt and at night’s end, the Impressions leading the crowd in “Movin’ on Up.” It was particularly apropos that on the heels of Black Music Month, the 2010 festival chose to highlight Mayfield’s music both because of the sheer velocity of his work as well as his consistent musical investment in social introspection that unabashedly spoke to the black American experience in the 60’s and early-70’s. While Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, What’s Goin’ On and the single by the same name are deservedly designated one of the top best of twentieth century pop music and revisited during times when the national consciousness is shaken (September 11th, the Hurricane Katrina aftermath), the socially radical musical genius of Curtis Mayfield is not referenced nearly enough . Perhaps this is in part because there is no singular song that sort of stands as his iconic socio-political critique – there was a whole catalog of such songs in the Mayfield repertoire. “People Get Ready”; “Keep On Pushin’’; We’re a Winner”, “This Is My Country” and “Choice of Colors” are just a few.
Several months before Gaye dropped his What’s Goin’ On (1971), Curtis Mayfield released his solo debut album, CURTIS in September of 1970 . Mayfield interrogated racial oppression, challenged the status quo, and inspired the young with a number of powerfully poetic songs - “Miss Black America,” “Moving on Up; “Don’t Worry if There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go” and “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue” – which Peter Burns describes as on “par” with Billie Holiday’s “strange Fruit.” Even before this solo point in his career, Mayfield had already built an extraordinary cache of politicized music with Impressions albums like People Get Ready (1965) and We’re A Winner (1967). Taken together, the Mayfield songbook is a powerful narrative record of the struggles for black liberation in the 60s to early 70s. CURTIS reached the top of the charts where it was unseated by Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On.
Mayfield’s movie soundtrack work further demonstrated his socially insightful voice and emphasized that part of his lyrical genius was his ability to capture the beauty, pleasures, and pain of black ghetto life. For Claudine (1974), starring James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll as a struggling single mother raising six children in Harlem, he penned such critically sharp tracks as “Mr. Welfare Man.” Despite its controversial cultural legacy, the music for the drug themed Superfly, Mayfield’s most enduring soundtrack score, was more than a narrative accompaniment. It humanized and dramatized one of the most serious problems plaguing the black urban community with the memorable “Pusherman” and “Freddy’s Dead.” Like Superfly, The Bill Cosby and Sydney Poitier film, Let’s Do It Again (1974), continued to showcase Mayfield’s genius with creating sultry, magnetic songs like the hit title track. He offered up more of this in Sparkle, a 1977 movie starring Irene Cara, which included such sexy, alluring singles as the much performed “Giving Him Something He Can Feel.” He teamed up with the reigning Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin to do the re-cut version of the Sparkle soundtrack; it revitalized Franklin’s career and they went on to do her album Almighty Fire in 1978.
Mayfield’s collaborations with the likes of Franklin, Donnie Hathaway, and the Staple singers provide an impressive body of work on it’s on and is further distinguishable because much of it occurred on Mayfield’s successful Chicago based label, Curtom. The ownership Mayfield took over his work when the Impressions finished their ABC contract in 1968 further signals his radicalism. On the surface, it is perhaps easy to reach for familiar terms like “message music” to characterize Mayfield’s 1960s-70s body of work. Such a tag might obscure the profound thematic depth, lyrical genius, and musical artistry of Curtis Mayfield who could captivate us with achingly, beautiful songs [“The Makings of You”] or get us moving and flirting [Let’s Do It Again”] or call us to action [“People Get Ready.”] Dr. Ramsey notes that Mayfield’s “understated personality” countered “the massive influence his musicianship held over the music industry for years.”
In August 1990, a freak accident at an outdoor concert paralyzed Mayfield from the neck down. He recorded a little again from his bed as renewed interest and tributes to his work appeared in the ‘90s. In December 1999, the quiet legend passed away. Tributes have a greater use than just providing feel-good sing along evenings and technology assists mightily. Pop culture memory is notoriously short-lived; recovering the great ones who offer a compelling window into a historical period and high artistry is ongoing work. Curtis Mayfield offers one of the loudest, most deft nods to the marriage of musical profundity and thematic consciousness; in that his radical soul is timeless.
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Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008). She can be reached at musesd@netzero.com.
Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there. Sorry, but that's simply not how it works. This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown "chosen one" sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And "who" we would want them to grow-up to become. But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called "curse" on Cleveland, Ohio. The self-declared former "King" will be taking the "curse" with him down south.
When ESPN first flashed excerpts of Cleveland Cavalier majority Dan Gilbert’s “letter” on the heels of Lebron’s much anticipated announcement, the giddy, nervous, analysts seemed unsure. Was the letter for real? Did somebody confiscate Dan Gilbert’s identity, hack into his account, and go stark raving mad? Nope. It was Gilbert demonstrating that good sportsmanship and mad love only goes as far as getting your way.
It’s obviously painful for Cleveland to lose Lebron James to Miami. For seven years, he revitalized the franchise, brought the fans to the stadium, and made the world become Lebron watchers and believers Cavalier fan or not. He got paid and so did the city and the fans. Lebron lived up to the hype and his contract but there was no lifelong commitment clause in it. While we can wax nostalgic about back in the day when it was quite common for a player to retire from a franchise rather than hop scotch from one to the other, what we’ve witnessed is the beauty and some say the curse of free agency. Even an indentured servant had a period when his tenure was over and he was free to decide his own fate and benefit more fully from the value of his labor.
Gilbert’s blazing rant about betrayal and curses goes beyond pain over the loss of a team – a city’s – heart. The majority “owner” bolsters critiques like those put forth in William Rhoden’s Forty Million Dollar Slaves. Well-paid or not, if an athlete dares to defy the romantic expectations and the presumed ownership of a franchise then fans and even more unfortunate a person in leadership like Gilbert feel quite justified to ‘tar and feather’ the athlete.
NBA players like NFL and Major League Baseball athletes are bred to have a major goal – the ultimate accomplishment: win championships. Though some great ones have retired without that elusive ring, we all know that not one wanted that footnote: but he never won a championship. Bill Russell won eleven as a player, Jordan six, and Kobe Bryant and Magic have five. Save for Russell and Magic who won in their Rookie Year, history shows that it takes time – as Gilbert implied with his distorted use of heaven – to get to the promise land. It took Jordan seven years. Imagine Kobe Bryant staying with the Lakers without a ring and no real confidence that the franchise will get there anytime soon or Jordan staying with the Bulls in the same situation. We can’t.
Lebron James gave it seven years and then he did what any super competitive, talented athlete who knows his value does; he weighed the odds, reminded himself of his goal and at twenty-five made the biggest, hardest decision of his young professional life: leave home. Despite the spectacle it became, it’s obvious that Lebron struggled with making the decision. Gilbert’s ungentlemanly reaction underscores what he accuses James of and sets a poor standard for Cleveland fan behavior. Seven years of heart, thrills, and money for James, the franchise owners, and the city should not be dismissed in such a 'cavalier' manner. If players and coaches are bound to verbally respect referees and players each other, owners should be required demonstrate some sportsmanship in loss too.
So Dear Dan, play nice or get off the court.
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Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films(University of Illinois Press 2008).
WASHINGTON-Pam Grier let out a hearty chuckle when asked to assess her impact on the 1970s, action-packed, "they-have-a-plan-to-stick-it-to-The-Man" film genre known as blaxploitation.
"There were quite a few formulaic films before mine with male leads from Jim Brown to Fred Williamson and Issac Hayes with the same formula of fighting crime, thugs and pimps," she said. "As soon as a woman does it, it's blaxploitation, but it wasn't blaxploitation when men were doing it."
Such is the straight talk Grier delivers in conversation and in her new memoir, "Foxy, My Life in Three Acts," a recount of her rise to fame as the queen of B-movies that were geared towards black audiences, the setbacks in her romantic, and her career resurrection through director Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," a 1997 blaxploitation homage he wrote specifically for her.
In addition to her book, she has a role in Queen Latifah's new romantic comedy "Just Wright" and is shooting another movie with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.
She played straight club owner Kit Porter on Showtime's lesbian-themed series "The L Word" and was a cast member in the CW's Superman series "Smallville."
All of this from a shy girl from Colorado, who didn't set out to be an actress, let alone a pinup queen, and marvels at the staying power of her popularity today.
"Every day I go: 'What, really?' I was surprised, I was amazed, I was taken aback by so much interest in what I did," Grier said during a telephone interview from her Colorado ranch. "Too bad it wasn't any rich or historical work ..."
Still, blaxploitation films were revered by audiences who were hungry to see black actors in leading roles taking on wrong-doing blacks and evil whites.
The genre was reviled by some in the black community as overly-simplistic tales from the 'hood that played into stereotypes of blacks as violent pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers.
On screen, Grier was a two-fisted woman in a man's world. In films like "Coffy," "Foxy Brown" and "Sheba Baby," she was the buxom, butt-kicking action hero who could karate-chop, jump out of airplanes and into the sack as good as the guys. Oh, and the nude scenes didn't hurt, either.
"She was the reigning black female sex symbol of the 1970s," said Mark Anthony Neal, a Duke University African and African-American studies professor who specializes in black popular culture. "Had she been able to have film opportunities in the white mainstream in the 1970s, her contemporaries would have been Raquel Welch and Farah Fawcett."
Stephane Dunn, an English professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, said Grier was the right package that arrived in Hollywood at the right time culturally.
“Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
Review by Kinohi Nishikawa
In the early 1970s, blaxploitation films popularized images of black masculine brawn and bravado that American audiences had never seen before. The protagonists of these films violated a number of cultural taboos in the way they embodied the “badman” ethos—a mode of self-presentation (derived from folklore and updated for the urban scene) that reveled in black male cunning and strength. In 1971 Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback used his sexual prowess and street smarts to outrun law enforcement “by any means necessary.” The same year Richard Roundtree’s John Shaft stood tall as Harlem’s homegrown black private detective, a leather-clad avenger primed to protect his community by taking on the mob. And in 1973, in the highest grossing blaxploitation film of its time, Max Julien starred in The Mack as Goldie, the pimp whose wide-brimmed hats and sweet-talking raps transformed the ghetto anti-hero into a mainstream icon. Although blaxploitation films reached the height of their popularity in the early 1970s, their larger-than-life male protagonists inspired a generation of hip hop artists and continue to incite debates about African American gender politics.
Given this familiar narrative of the rise of blaxploitation cinema, Stephane Dunn’s “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas offers a refreshing counterpoint to what scholars and critics have long assumed to be an exclusively male-oriented genre of filmmaking. By focusing on the less-recognized subgenre of the black female action movie, Dunn is able to illuminate some surprising features of blaxploitation’s investment in “fantasies” of black womanhood. Specifically, in her analyses of Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974), Dunn identifies a tradition of black heroines who call into question their status as passive objects of male heterosexual desire. The protagonists of these films express their sexual agency in problematic but also deeply political ways, and Dunn is interested in recovering the meaning behind their widespread popularity during the Black Power era. “Baad Bitches” is thus notable for being the first book-length, black feminist response to the cultural assumptions about gender that subtend “masculine criticism” of the genre (3).
Dunn’s reading of Cleopatra Jones is particularly effective in challenging the prevailing consensus that black women occupied a static position in blaxploitation cinema. In the film, Tamara Dobson plays a sexy and streetwise federal agent charged with foiling domestic and global drug-trafficking networks. Sporting a Black Power afro and wielding a shotgun (a resonant symbol of phallic authority, if there ever was one), Jones tackles her assignment with stereotypically “masculine” bravado but in a style that is self-consciously “feminine.” Dunn makes it clear that Dobson’s embodiment of sexual agency courts the kind of heterosexual male gaze that would delight in her beauty and voluptuous physique. At the same time, Dunn shows how that gaze itself is interrogated within the film’s narrative. Jones’s desirability, for example, provokes white male anxiety when she approaches her colleagues with “cool professionalism” (97). These men are forced to tarry with the fact that Jones intends to both wear her desire on her sleeve and remain professionally distanced from their advances. Equally revealing is how this expression of feminine cool inflects representations of black manhood in the film. In one case, that ballyhooed icon of streetwise masculinity, the pimp, is undone by Jones’s cinematic presence. The wannabe badman Doodleburg, played by Antonio Fargas with sashaying verve, is feminized not only in light of the righteousness of Jones’s cause but also against the backdrop of the “phallic” agency of her character.
Dunn’s analyses of the Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown reveal the more problematic ways in which blaxploitation cinema appropriated female sexual agency to serve patriarchal ends. Unlike Cleopatra Jones, Grier’s protagonists reflect “the pornographic treatment of their star, a tendency that the prostitute guise motif in both films dramatizes” (111). According to Dunn, something of value is lost in Grier’s having to masquerade as a prostitute in order for her characters to infiltrate organized crime syndicates. Dunn expands on this point by emphasizing that in both films the trajectory of the heroine’s actions is framed as a revenge narrative. If Cleopatra Jones’s feminine cool is expressed in relatively autonomous terms, Coffy’s and Foxy Brown’s vigilantism stokes the fantasy that black women’s sexual agency can only be called forth through its violation by an external force. This reinscription of feminine passivity is what Dunn finds most objectionable about Grier’s oeuvre, in which “[her] body functions as a narrow image of ghettoized black female sexuality” (115). The logic of passivity is taken to the extreme in Foxy Brown, when in a disturbing sequence the heroine’s experience of having been raped is glossed over in the narrative’s drive to represent Foxy “avenging her man’s murder” (127). By not dwelling on the “physical or emotional signs of Foxy’s ordeal” (127), the film manages to deprive the heroine of any characterological complexity. Dunn observes that the resulting vacuum in Foxy’s consciousness effectively subordinates her desire to patriarchal authority.
Despite their problematic gendering of Grier’s characters, black female action movies give Dunn access to a new way of historicizing Black Power’s relationship with blaxploitation cinema. She proposes that even the avowedly political valences of blaxploitation were premised on the subordination of black women to a male fantasy of revolutionary vitality. In her readings of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)—arguably the touchstones of Black Power-inspired cinema—Dunn contends that popular representations of “black political and social empowerment” relied on “conservative models of gender” to achieve their radical import (84). Yet the problem of gender in these two films was not only a matter of affirming black patriarchy under the sign of revolution. It was also, more profoundly, a matter of negotiating black men’s increasingly precarious socioeconomic realities in the post-civil rights era. In this regard, Dunn’s assessment of “political” blaxploitation outlines the unnerving degree to which competing forms of masculinity were projected onto a figure like Sweetback. Presented with the option of either “liv[ing] the castrated existence of a sexual ‘freak’” or realizing “the potential for revolt” (69), Sweetback was, in this account, a fraught hero—as much a product of male anxiety as he was an expression of revolutionary desire.
In addition to resituating our understanding of male-centered blaxploitation, Dunn’s analysis of black female action movies has the salutary effect of shedding light on contemporary embodiments of sexual agency among female hip hop artists. As many scholars have noted, hip hop culture is the natural heir to blaxploitation’s heady mixture of radical politics, vernacular flair, and representations of racial pride. Yet as with her readings of blaxploitation heroines, Dunn is careful to point out how black women occupy a tenuous position in hip hop’s gendered imaginary. Even when they are not being explicitly objectified as “video vixens” or backstage groupies, women in hip hop, like Pam Grier before them, sometimes have to hew to gendered stereotypes in order to get ahead in the culture industry. Artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown (a stage persona taken up as an homage to Grier’s iconic heroine) have wielded their sexual agency with feckless daring, and their music challenges certain male artists’ constant valorization of the phallus. At the same time, Kim’s troublesome devotion to the late Notorious B.I.G., her well-known legal troubles, and her array of cosmetic enhancements give pause to the notion that her persona constitutes a radical departure from the patriarchal script. Coupled with Brown’s “excessive sexualization of her body onstage and off” (31), Kim’s travails leave Dunn wondering whether these female rappers can be seen as “icons of true empowerment” (34).
The question of exactly what a black female icon of empowerment would look like in popular culture today is left invitingly open at the end of “Baad Bitches.” Dunn recognizes that popular expressions of female sexual agency, whether in blaxploitation or in hip hop, are bound up with the culture industry’s historical denigration of black women’s bodies. The hypervisibility of heroines’ and rappers’ bodies may defy stereotypes of passive femininity, but they may also play into deep-seated, racist assumptions about black women’s hypersexuality. This complex double-bind is captured in Dunn’s description of blaxploitation as offering “radical and conservative fantasies of the status quo” (xiv).
In attempting to move beyond this double-bind, Dunn speculates on how black women’s bodies might serve as radical sites of pleasure for black female identification. Throughout “Baad Bitches,” Dunn recounts watching black female action movies with friends, students, and family members. In the spirited conversations that follow the screenings, Dunn notices how Dobson’s and Grier’s characters are as much appreciated for their beauty and toughness as they are critiqued for their gendered stereotyping. According to Dunn, the way spectators, and particularly black women, relate to these characters allows them to make strides toward realizing “an autonomous public sexual imaginary” of black female desire (xiv). This poignant insight may be the first step in imagining how black women can claim sexual agency for themselves without needing to apologize for it.
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Kinohi Nishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Programs in Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University. His dissertation analyzes the pulp fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the context of the black urban experience during the civil rights and Black Power movements.
I must admit, I had lofty expectations of Morehouse College when I began teaching here two years ago. After all, this was the house that such social and intellectual giants as Benjamin Davis and James Brawley built and that superstar students like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. solidified. The college’s mystique — as the only historically black male college — made me darn near skip into my interview and later into those first few classes.
I had visions of suits, bow ties, yes ma’ams and staggering displays of intellectual brilliance dancing in my head. Before too long, however, reality tempered the mystique, and I was forced to see that a legacy of social and cultural distinction and intellectual achievement is merely a sleeping history unless it continues to thrive in a contemporary version.
The newly implemented “no sagging” dress code with respect to men’s pants is an attempt to do just that.
The code raises obvious questions about individual freedom. Its inclusion of a very traditional script for male style — like no pumps and purses for men — will inevitably elevate the debate and criticism both inside and outside Morehouse. As I’ve walked to and from classes, I’ve often laughed aloud over how much my students resemble the public high school kids that I’d decided might be too much to deal with every day. Rather than being both disciplinarian and etiquette teacher, I thought I’d be a professor primarily engaged in my students’ academic and professional potential.
Instead, there is rarely a day when I’m not reluctantly forced to view the backside of students and worry for the millionth time that I will not make it up the stairway before the loose, bright red shorts shouting out from pants already bound for the floor completely fall off the oblivious student in front of me. It’s like being forced to peep when you absolutely don’t want to.
Usually, after mustering a reluctant, “Excuse me,” I implore the young man to “pull them up please” or jokingly say, “I’m sure you’re not trying to flash anybody.” In class, teaching is punctuated by commands to “pull those pants up, Mr. So-and-So — can’t you feel those pants falling lower and lower?” and trying to wheedle some sleeping or shy student out from his hiding place under a cap. Even if the written rules of the class include no hats in class, I’m inevitably forced to admonish, “Hat, please.”
During these moments of playing dress etiquette police, I’m uneasy and resentful. I’m forced to be their “mama” instead of an accepted and serious sister-professor.
*** Stephane Dunn, an assistant professor in the English Department at Morehouse College, is the author of “Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.”
Oprah’s show has rarely attempted to provide a platform where intimate portraits of black men and radical dialogue about black masculinity with black men take place nor of course, do we see this often enough in popular culture and mass media. But two recent shows-dialogues with former infamous heavyweight Mike Tyson do a lot towards making up this deficit.
On the first show, Mike and Oprah sat and talked-Oprah in typical form anticipating some answers, but the allure of the show weren’t in the answers to burning questions like why Mike bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear or quintessential philosophical Oprah guru questions: ‘what have you learned’ from this or that. No, it was simply the unadorned humanity of Mike Tyson. Like the recent documentary Tyson (2008), in essence a long commentary on his life by Mike, it was almost too uncomfortable to watch, a former symbol of tough American and especially black American masculinity naked to the world in a way that supposedly true men are not supposed to be. With his powerful punch and that seemingly unwavering scary demeanor, Mike was the last true American heavyweight celebrity when he became the youngest heavyweight ever at age twenty.
After his fall from being a three hundred million dollar media darling, including that marriage debacle with actress Robin Givens, a rape conviction and three year prison sentence, divorces, and that ear biting episode, Mike seemed bound to be written off as yet another former great performer turned into a tragic black male, social monster-public joke. But Mike is having his most raw public showing yet. Without his gloves and that menacing mask, “iron” Mike’s words and tears, his obvious confusion and that painful desire to be free of suffering and his accompanying demons (drugs, womanizing, anger . . .) has the potential to earn him a new audience and a new public role. Ironically, as Mike made clear on the second show with Evander Holyfield, fame is the least thing he seeks.
Most striking was Mike’s inability to fully articulate his pain and the demons he does battle with daily including at that very moment. His ‘I don’t knows’ in response to such topics as the recent death of his young daughter highlighted his struggle not only with words but within himself. That continuous break in his voice suggested the telling tears that seemed to threaten to overtake Mike at any second. He was so extraordinarily stripped of any subterfuge, of the willingness to lie or seemingly of knowing that most men, indeed many women and men would have clung to the mask rather than sit their fully clothed but soul naked on a show that has become sort of an ultimate way that men jokingly [and seriously] distinguish men and masculinity from the so-called soap opera-like feminine emotionality that they equate with Oprah’s female dominated viewership and show style.
Mike humanized not only himself but the emotional vulnerability that we are not often privy to viewing through the prism of America’s heterosexual tough guy masculine ethos. In admitting that he is a hurting, struggling, but feeling human being and man, Mike provides a more powerful entryway into deconstructing narrow images and narratives of masculinity than any academic theory ever could. Furthermore, Mike, ironically, is actually a useful model for the black masculine street codes that require young black men to adapt a cool, dangerous posturing that’s wreaking havoc on themselves and their community.
With Mike so obviously involved in the greatest fight for his life, one can’t help but to hope that this broken brother can be rebuilt into the new man, the new being that he so desperately wants to become. For Mike’s sake, here’s hoping he gets enough rounds to truly, in his words, “win.”
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Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).
