A Meeting of Walkers: Rebecca and Kara

The Root's Rebecca Walker hangs out with renowned artist Kara Walker in Turin, Italy, and on Facebook, where they talk about everything from salty dark chocolate to their kids to why Kara's no apologist for anti-black racism.

The Italian Job

by Rebecca Walker | The Root

Kara Walker is tall, fashionable and reserved when I meet her in the lobby of the chic Residence Du Parc, a brutalist landmark of poured concrete adorned with iconic examples of modernist and postmodern art. Outside huge windows, Turin is celebrating itself: Italian flags drip from every window, flutter along every boulevard.

Kara wears flat leather oxfords, tights and a paper-thin leather jacket. She eyes me somewhat warily as I extend my arms for an embrace and launch into small talk, which I normally detest. Luckily, my bags have been lost and I indulged in a truly remarkable spa treatment the night before, so I have plenty to talk about.

Kara says little. She's been working on the installation of her show we're both here in Italy to support. The necessary projectors have not arrived. The show is to open in five days, and today we have to teach a class to art students. I sense she'd like to get back to the gallery, and the class is a distraction. She twirls her hair as we wait for the taxi.

At the class, the students are on fire. They've studied our work and want to know about memory and myth, the creative process and its demands. Kara and I sit behind a paint-splattered table and do our best. I'm jet-lagged but exuberant, thanks to a piping-hot cappuccino; Kara is laconic and soft-spoken. But then I see it -- a gentle smile, then a big laugh followed by a series of confident assessments of student work.

As the day wears on, we find a groove. We tag-team it, develop a rapport, give everything we can in the time allotted. Driving back to the Du Parc to recover and prepare for dinner, we talk about our kids. Hers is starting high school, into fashion, gorgeous. Mine is 6, getting ready for soccer camp, and I miss him with an ache I can't begin to put into words.

The next five days are a whirlwind of activity. We teach the students, I present my memoir Baby Love at Il Circolo dei Lettori on the same night that Jonathan Franzen reads from Freedom. I introduce Kara's show, A Negress of Noteworthy Talent, to a full gallery, and Melissa Harris-Perry and Jennifer Richeson follow up with talks about the black body and the neurological workings of prejudice. The press descends and recommends.

Later, I steal away to the Egyptian Museum. We dine at the home of Olga Gambari, the show's remarkable curator, and shop the Ballon, one of Europe's largest open-air markets, where I snag a fabulous Prada-esque red coat for five euros and a dress made of African wax cloth for 10, while Kara snaps pics of me on her iPhone.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend

Kobe Bryant's recent use of an anti-gay slur is a prime example of how we need to directly address homophobia -- by re-examining what it means to be a man.

Homophobic Slurs Are Always Meant to Offend
by Mychal Denzel Smith | The Root

A few years ago, during an awkward attempt at father-son bonding, I found out my father was a homophobe. It was right after the Academy Awards, and there was a lot of discussion about the film Brokeback Mountain being snubbed for best picture. My father and I were watching television together, and he said to me, with a chuckle, "I've watched Westerns all my life, and never once did I think cowboys were faggots."

I don't know that he recognized how visibly uncomfortable I was with his word choice, because he used it again before I left the room. I never thought my father had particularly warm feelings about gays before that moment, but the open-air homophobia was jarring.

It's a big part of the heterosexual-male bonding experience: In an effort to prove a sense of collective manhood, some heterosexual men trade homophobic barbs with one another, denounce and deride being gay and vehemently defend their own heterosexual credentials. It starts pretty early in the socialization process, with "gay" being used as a derogatory term on the playground before most even know what "gay" means, and eventually it makes its way into other spaces that tend to be perceived as havens for heterosexual manhood (e.g., locker rooms, basketball courts, rap music).

This is what Kobe Bryant was doing when he shouted "f---ing faggot" at a referee during Tuesday's Los Angeles Lakers-San Antonio Spurs game. Bryant says his use of the homophobic slur was not intended to offend anyone, which hardly seems plausible.

He is well aware that "faggot" is a homophobic slur, or else he would have felt no need to apologize for his comments; he would have claimed ignorance. Given that he was visibly angry when he blurted out the slur, any comment that he made toward the referee at that point was clearly intended to offend him. But the use of this particular word reveals something deeper.

It's the belief that homosexuality is inherently inferior and an undesirable trait; therefore, to refer to someone with slurs usually reserved for gays is an attempt to belittle that person further. The quickest and most efficient way to insult a man has become to call into question his sexual orientation, and the easiest way to bond with one another comes through sharing a mutual homophobia (regrettably, these are things that I have personally done in the past but now recognize their idiocy).

And no one questions this. Sure, Bryant had to pay a fine and meet with LGBT activists, but apologists for his behavior abound. Society teaches us that manhood, in part, is defined by an ability to impregnate a woman and subsequently provide for the mother and child financially, while exercising control over their livelihoods through the threat of physical domination. For some, gay men and women represent a threat, an attack on the very concept of manhood.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Byron Hurt: Why I Am a Male Feminist

The word turns off a lot of men (insert snarky comment about man-hating feminazis here) -- and women. But here's why black men should be embracing the "f" word.

Why I Am a Male Feminist
by Byron Hurt

When I was a little boy, my mother and father used to argue a lot. Some mornings, I would wake up to the alarming sound of my parents arguing loudly. The disagreement would continue until my father would yell with finality, "That is it! I'm not talking about this anymore!" The dispute would end right there. My mother never got the last word.

My dad's yelling made me shrink in fear; I wanted to do something to make him stop raging against my mother. In those moments, I felt powerless because I was too small to confront my father. I learned early that he had an unfair advantage because of his gender. His size, strength and power intimidated my mother. I never saw my father hit her, but I did witness how injurious his verbal jabs could be when they landed on my mom's psyche.

My father didn't always mistreat my mother, but when he did, I identified with her pain, not his bullying. When he hurt her, he hurt me, too. My mother and I had a special bond. She was funny, smart, loving and beautiful. She was a great listener who made me feel special and important. And whenever the going got tough, she was my rock and my foundation.

One morning, after my father yelled at my mom during an argument, she and I stood in the bathroom together, alone, getting ready for the day ahead of us. The tension in the house was as thick as a cloud of dark smoke. I could tell that my mother was upset. "I love you, Ma, but I just wish that you had a little more spunk when you argue with Daddy," I said, low enough so my father couldn't hear me. She looked at me, rubbed my back and forced a smile.

I so badly wanted my mother to stand up for herself. I didn't understand why she had to submit to him whenever they fought. Who was he to lay down the law in the household? What made him so special?

I grew to resent my father's dominance in the household, even though I loved him as dearly as I loved my mother. His anger and intimidation shut down my mother, sister and me from freely expressing our opinions whenever they didn't sit well with his own. Something about the inequity in their relationship felt unjust to me, but at that young age, I couldn't articulate why.

One day, as we sat at the kitchen table after another of their many spats, my mother told me, "Byron, don't ever treat a woman the way your father treats me." I wish I had listened to her advice.

As I grew older and got into my own relationships with girls and women, I sometimes behaved as I saw my father behave. I, too, became defensive and verbally abusive whenever the girl or woman I was dating criticized or challenged me. I would belittle my girlfriends by scrutinizing their weight or their choices in clothes. In one particular college relationship, I often used my physical size to intimidate my petite girlfriend, standing over her and yelling to get my point across during arguments.

I had internalized what I had seen in my home and was slowly becoming what I had disdained as a young boy. Although my mother attempted to teach me better, I, like a lot of boys and men, felt entitled to mistreat the female gender when it benefited me to do so.

After graduating from college, I needed a job. I learned about a new outreach program that was set to launch. It was called the Mentors in Violence Prevention Project. As a student-athlete, I had done community outreach, and the MVP Project seemed like a good gig until I got a real job in my field: journalism.

Founded by Jackson Katz, the MVP Project was designed to use the status of athletes to make gender violence socially unacceptable. When I met with Katz, I didn't realize that the project was a domestic violence prevention program. Had I known that, I wouldn't have gone in for the job interview.

So when Katz explained that they were looking to hire a man to help institutionalize curricula about preventing gender violence at high schools and colleges around the country, I almost walked out the door. But during my interview, Katz asked me an interesting question. "Byron, how does African-American men's violence against African-American women uplift the African-American community?"

No one had ever asked me that question before. As an African-American man who was deeply concerned about race issues, I had never given much thought about how emotional abuse, battering, sexual assault, street harassment and rape could affect an entire community, just as racism does.

Read the Full Essay @ theRoot.com

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Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and anti-sexist activist.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform

Lofty plans for overhauling the education system are all very well and good. But parents have to be ready to take advantage of change.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform
by Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele

As a member of the burgeoning movement to improve public education, I believe that for education reform to happen, advocates need to focus their efforts on equipping parents with the appropriate mind-set to succeed in the rapidly changing school landscape.

Many parents will need help transitioning to and operating under the new paradigms proposed by school-choice advocates, primarily because -- well, public education has never been viewed as a commodity. Not all parents are aware of their options, and if they are, not all parents have the time to commit themselves to take full advantage of a sudden abundance of choice.

A few months ago, I attended a media-training seminar for school-choice advocates. There, one of the attendees described his laissez-faire ideal for America's schools: The public education system would function as a shopping mall, with parents picking and choosing from an array of public schools. As he saw it, parents wouldn't be forced to send their children to a school based on geographic zoning restrictions. Instead, mothers and fathers would be the consumers; school leaders would be the vendors. The vendors would be motivated to increase their products' efficiency to attract customers, thereby increasing the quality of all goods (think schools) sold -- and so on and so forth as the Business 101 supply-and-demand principles go.

While that proposed model is not bad or ill-intentioned, it is drastically different from the way that parents, particularly mothers, have traditionally gone about securing -- if that is even the appropriate term -- public education for their children.

Read the More @ The Root.com

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Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a multimedia journalist specializing in political thought and introspective narratives. She works in education reform. Follow her on Twitter.

(Still) Waiting for Lauryn Hill

Fans have been waiting for Lauryn Hill to return in true form. Now that her national tour has begun, it's painfully clear that the wait is not over.

Waiting for Lauryn Hill
by Bassey Ikpi | The Root.com

For a decade, we have held our collective breaths waiting for the return of the Lauryn Hill. For many of us, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill served as both Greek chorus and sound track to our young adulthoods. Now she's back with a national tour ahead of her, and adoring fans at the ready. But she's not the Lauryn we once knew.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

The McEducation of the Negro

Franchising is an outstanding model for selling Big Macs. But it can be toxic to classrooms.

The McEducation of the Negro
by Natalie Hopkinson | The Root

Something wasn't right at the high school that Darwin Bridgers' son attends, so he sat in on the class to see for himself. All morning long, the instructor at the Washington, D.C., charter school pointed to a list of ground rules, a detailed list of rewards and punishments posted on a wall near the front of the class filled with black and Latino students.

Then the students filled out worksheets. That's how it went: rewards and punishments, then worksheets. No instruction, just worksheets. At the end of the class, Bridgers, who works as an exterminator, pulled aside the teacher, a young white male and recent graduate.

"I wanted to know when he was going to do some, you know, teaching," Bridgers explained to me recently. "You know, like, how we used to have in school? She would stand in front of the class … "

I nodded my head. I attended K-12 at schools in Canada, Indiana and Florida in the '80s and '90s, but I knew exactly what he meant. There would be assignments to read from textbooks. A teacher would give a lecture and randomly call on students. Students would ask questions and write things down. Then there would be some sort of written exam to see what you'd learned.

Of course, today the "reformers" say that that way of teaching is old school. It was fine before the days of social media and the "information revolution" and the global economy. But now, as the argument goes in films like Waiting for Superman, no self-respecting parent would ever send his or her child to a "failing" public school like the one that generations of Bridgers' family attended in their neighborhood in Northeast Washington.

For Bridgers' son and a disproportionate number of black students around the country, charter schools have become the preferred choice. The idea is that charters can find a model that produces results -- measured in test scores -- then apply it to different campuses. They can raise and spend money independently. They can have management consultants, and they can compete -- just like a business. As the charter school movement picks up steam nationwide, the District of Columbia may provide a glimpse of the future of "choice": Roughly 40 percent of children enrolled in District of Columbia public schools attend charters.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Interview with William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Black Leadership

The historian and author of an important meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic talks to The Root about the meaning of President Obama's 2008 election, the problems of black leadership and black self-definition.

The Root Interview: William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Black Leadership
by Abdul Ali

Dr. William Jelani Cobb, one of the country's most visible African-American intellectuals, is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta. His meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic, To the Break of Dawn, is one of the most important texts on this cultural phenomenon.

In his latest book, The Substance of Hope, Cobb turns his attention to the 2008 election, the political climate preceding the election and his own involvement as a delegate for the state of Georgia. (He blogged for The Root from the Democratic National Convention in 2008.) His training as a historian comes to bear as he asks, What does this all mean? And where do we go from here?

The interview was conducted via Google Chat.

The Root: In The Substance of Hope, you play both historian and participant as a delegate in the 2008 election. How did these distinct roles help shape your book?

William Jelani Cobb: Initially they made it more difficult because I'm accustomed to writing about things that are more static. This was an attempt to place the election into a context in terms of history, and in some ways in terms of irony. But this was also a rapidly changing subject. The result was that I wrote about three-quarters of the book and then threw it all out and started again from scratch. It was much more difficult to decide what story I wanted to tell.

Read the Full Interview @ The Root.com

Remembering Manute Bol

The Sudan-born player's 7-foot-7-inch frame and shot-blocking prowess weren't the only things that made him stand out from his NBA peers.

Manute Bol's Gigantic Heart

by Deron Snyder

Saying that Manute Bol stood out in the NBA is an understatement, like saying Gulliver stood out among the Lilliputians. Bol, who died Saturday at the age of 47 at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, definitely made a distinct impression during his 10-season NBA career (1985-95). But it wasn't just his rail-thin frame, prodigious wingspan and towering height. Although those physical characteristics made him an unusual player, they alone didn't make him different from others in basketball.

It was more than being a spindly 7 feet, 7 inches tall, with the ability to extend his hand above the rim while standing flat-footed. It was more than weighing a measly 190 pounds, with an arms-stretched-wide width measuring 8 feet, 6 inches from fingertip to fingertip. And it was more than his unique background as a Sudanese cattle-herder who once killed a lion with a spear, going from never playing basketball until his late teens, to setting the NBA rookie record for blocked shots in only 26 minutes per game.

What really separated Bol from his NBA peers -- and for that matter, most professional athletes -- was his humanitarian efforts, his willingness to spend his money and risk his life for the sake of others. He was among the rare athletes, such as Arthur Ashe and Dikembe Mutombo, who absolutely dedicate themselves to something bigger than sports and their personal well-being. In Bol's case, it was the plight of the people in his native Sudan, where civil war, poverty, sickness, crime and a lack of educational opportunities was the status quo.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Hip--Hop, Homophobia and Wale

Wale Rhymes With Gay:

Is hip-hop finally being held accountable for its homophobia?

by Natalie Hopkinson

By any objective measure--moral, legal, ethical, the eyes of his horrified mother--the hip-hopper Wale screwed up. Management for the gifted artist best known for his duet with Lady Gaga contracted him to perform at D.C. Black Pride, a 20-year-old festival--for 45 minutes and $18,000. At the last minute, his team backed out, claiming they did not realize Pride was a gay and lesbian event.

Whooops!

Furious Pride organizers put him on blast in the local media, vowed to explore their legal options, and quickly arranged for another artist, the tatted-out R&B crooner J. Holiday to take his place. In the middle of J. Holiday's Memorial Day Weekend performance, I watched Wale make an unpaid appearance to do a little damage control. He said once his mother informed him of the controversy which aired on local TV, he immediately came back from his trip to Miami to make things right.

''One thing I stand for is hip-hop music,'' Wale, the son of Nigerian immigrants, told the crowd. ''Hip-hop music knows no race, no color, no age, no gender, no sexuality, none of that .... But I will say, in this business, sometimes you get aligned with people who don't understand that, or who don't necessarily have the same belief system as you do. And I apologize for not putting my best foot forward and not understanding the people I'm in business with. And I'm gonna do better--as we all do. People, every day we gotta get better.''

So what exactly did we just witness? Was it a step forward for compassionate understanding of our friends in ''the life''? Did Wale just avert a boycott/lawsuit or discrimination charges? Is this the beginning of the end of folks tolerating homophobia? Could it be signs of actual--*gasp*--maturity in popular hip-hop?

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Beyond the Blame for Aiyana's Death

The Detroit police's shooting of the 7-year-old calls for a closer look at the militarization of the police, the impact of reality shows on our own perceptions of crime and the harsh economic realities behind it all.

Beyond the Blame for Aiyana's Death

by Lester K. Spence

Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy for 7-year-old Aiyana Jones last Saturday. On the previous Sunday, May 16, 2010, Jones was killed by Detroit police officers during a raid of a home harboring a 34-year-old suspected of the murder of a 17-year-old high school student. While the police allege that Aiyana was killed when an officer's weapon accidentally discharged during a struggle with her grandmother, members of the family allege police officers fired into the house before entering. An A&E film crew was present, shooting video for the show The First 48 (the police officer who allegedly fired the shot that killed Aiyana was a show regular) that will undoubtedly shed light on what really happened.

Sharpton's eulogy excoriated black-on-black violence and police misconduct. ''I'd rather tell you to start looking at the man in the mirror,'' Sharpton said. ''We've all done something that contributed to this.'' ''This is it,'' he added. ''This child is the breaking point.'' Using this frame allows Sharpton to point the finger at black cultural dysfunction and police misconduct at the same time.

In as much as Aiyana's death occurred while the police were trying to detain a murder suspect, I understand this. Common sense would suggest that there is blame to go around in this instance, right? If the police story is correct, then perhaps young Aiyana's grandmother shouldn't have struggled with police, perhaps she shouldn't have allowed the murder suspect into the house in the first place. Even if the family of the victim is right, the family still bears some responsibility because the murder suspect was able to stay in the house in the first place.

Again, this is the common-sense narrative. It comes to mind without even thinking about it. But I suggest we broaden the perspective to ask another set of questions, a set of more critical questions. Why was a reality TV show on the premise? We now take real-life crime shows like The First 48 and Cops for granted. But these shows not only bring ''real life'' into our homes, but they also sensationalize crime, arguably even more than shows like the recently canceled Law and Order, because they are real life.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

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Lester K. Spence is an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted?

Does this mean the beginning of the end of journalism as we know it? Or the start of a new revolution?

Twitter’s DIY Journalism
by Natalie Hopkinson

I first realized that our democracy had kicked into another gear last September, when in the middle of President Barack Obama’s speech rallying Congress to pass a health care bill, someone in the U.S. Capitol chamber screamed, “YOU LIE!”

Even Obama looked a bit shaken, as I was, sitting in my living room, one eye on CNN, and the other eye on my Twitter feed.

On Twitter, within seconds, someone had produced a name of the heckler. Just as quickly, someone else listed his office phone number and Web site, which quickly crashed. Minutes later, a link was produced to a site raising money for the alleged heckler’s political opponent. Then came the links to old articles of the alleged heckler dissing the black daughter of Sen. Strom Thurmond. By the end of the night, thousands of dollars were raised in a South Carolina congressional race.

At the end of the speech, a CNN anchor announced she believed they could identify the heckler, but they were double-checking to make sure before airing his name.

Watching it all unfold, I felt both hopelessly uninformed and over-informed at the same time. What if it wasn’t actually Rep. Joe Wilson, but someone else, who made the rude break in decorum? And what if Joe Wilson’s Congressional opponent turned out to be a moron of the Blago ilk? What do any of those people donating money on the Net know about the politics of Aiken County, S.C., anyways?

This is a picture of our democracy at work at Twitter speed. Max Fisher at The Atlantic Wire recently did a great roundup of the recent debate over what is the best medium to convey information; a pair of The New Yorker essays scoffing at Twitter had launched the debate. No, Steve Coll, there is no moral judgment to be made about Twitter’s characteristics. And no, George Packer, I am not “uncritically cheerleading Twitter,” leading to my own destruction as a journalist.

In our clumsy forays into Twitter, many of us are desperately trying to find out: Who are the true gatekeepers of information these days? As a friend observed recently, the debate typically boils down to: Old Guy insisting that journalism has gone to hell versus Young Guy insisting that New Media is going to save us.

I think part of the crisis of confidence in the field of journalism is that neither one gets to decide. Both are just going to have to evolve.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Still Got a 'Love Jones'

There hasn’t been a great film about black romance since Love Jones.

Thirteen Years Later and Still Got the Jones

by Abdul Ali

Forget that it was released thirteen years ago. Forget the striking cinematography, the star cast, and the bomb-ass soundtrack. Forget that this was an artsy film that was accessible. Forget memorable scenes like when Darius tells Nina, “I just want to come up and talk.” Even if you forget all that, you still have to admit that no film in recent memory has come close to showcasing the struggles of black love – a film that’s unsentimental and breathtaking all the same.

So much is right with this movie. The chemistry of Nia Long and Lorentz Tate is remarkable. So much that we watch this film and begrudge the fact that this film represented the zenith of her career (and Lorentz Tate’s for that matter). We even forgive the fact that Lorentz Tate needs a haircut in this film. The characters hang out in smoky airy spots where men and women dress up and wear nice clothes. Not one gun in the entire film.

And when was the last time you saw a black film where the main characters quote George Bernard Shaw, invoke Gordon Parks, and play Charlie Parker? And whether you liked the poetry or not, you have to admit, it was sexy: ”Who am I? It doesn’t matter. I’m the blues in your left thigh, trying to be the funk in your right.”

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

June Jordan Speaks

In this 1995 interview culled from BOMB Magazine’s digital archives, poet June Jordan talks about race in Los Angeles, crime television and how she ended up making an opera. HT to The Root.com.

BOMB THE ROOT: The June Jordan Interview
by John Kun

“I still do not recognize a necessary conflict between the sonnet and the bow and arrow,” wrote June Jordan in 1986, “I do not accept that immersion into our collective quest for things beautiful will cripple our own ability to honor the right of all human beings to survive.” Through a dazzling range of poems, essays, articles, lectures, speeches, and reviews, June Jordan stands at the interstice of beauty and politics. Her work demonstrates a rare and unceasing commitment to the realization of social justice, political equality, and to the unseen possibilities of true human coalitions across race, sex, and class.

Currently a professor of African American studies at The University of California at Berkeley and a regular columnist for The Progressive, Jordan is the award-winning author of 21 books, including 1992’s collection of essays Technical Difficulties (Vintage) and the recently published book of poems Haruko Love Poems (Serpent’s Tail/High Risk). Poetry for the People, a book project with her students, will be published by Routledge this fall. Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan’s work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress. But sitting in her light-filled living room in Berkeley, Jordan was most eager to discuss her libretto for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (Scribner’s), an experimental contemporary opera created in collaboration with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars. Featuring sets painted by California graffiti artists and music by a jazz, funk, and rock fusion ensemble, the story in songs of this “earthquake-romance” centers on the young lives of men and women in Los Angeles struggling to find and articulate love in the midst of moral and physical devastation, tragedy, and upheaval. Like all of her work, the opera strives to bear witness to the human ability to survive nightmares of injustice and embrace visions of a more hopeful future.

Read the Full Interview @ BOMB

Vlogging While Black

Vlogging While Black
by Aymar Jean Christian
(from The Root.com)

For every breakout YouTube star such as Souljah Boy and Susan Boyle, there are thousands of would-be-video diarists, or vloggers, uploading away in obscurity. The lucky vloggers, such as “Fred,” gain more than 1 million followers. Played by 15-year-old Lucas Cruikshank, “Fred” banks six figures from major product placements and revenue from ads on his videos—short zany pieces with Cruikshank acting out his character, an ADD-afflicted 6-year-old too often left to his own devices. Ditto for Michael Buckley, another top user

A few black vloggers are beginning to make a splash on the scene. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy. “YouTube is very, very white,” explained Tonya, the blogger from TonyaTKO, who has 22,000 subscribers. With so many videos being uploaded, vloggers vie for prime placement on YouTube’s home page. “It’s very hard for black people to get seen on YouTube.” Like the many types of media that came before YouTube, the black vloggers who get noticed can often fit a stereotype. From the bizarre to the hilarious to the inspirational, here’s a sampling of some of the up-and-coming black vloggers and their winning formula:

Read the Full Article @

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.

Wanted! Smart Negroes

From CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Critical Noir: Wanted! Smart Negroes
By Mark Anthony Neal

Washington PostNewsweek Interactive recently launched the interactive site The Root. Ostensibly a partnership with Henry Louis "Skip" Gates to promote the latest incarnation of his black "celebrity DNA" project, the site features a virtual cavalcade (literally) of smart Negroes. We can thank our man Barack for this.

With the Illinois Senator confounding pundit expectations about the legitimacy of his candidacy and the perceived capacity for non-blacks to support his campaign, there's suddenly a need for highly articulate Negroes, who are actually armed with some quantitative and qualitative data. So unlike the Don Imus, Michael Richards or even the Jena 6 controversies--where the clear desire seemed to be to create spectacles around racist transgressions and Negroes who love to agitate--the Barack moment actually demands some sophisticated political analysis (read: Civil Rights Leaders need not apply). For example, in recent weeks political scientists such as Melissa Harris Lacewell and Paula McClain have weighed in thoughtfully on the issues of race, gender and white supremacy with regards to the barbed exchanges between the Clinton and Obama camps, in venues as diverse as Democracy Now! and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees. Such opportunities did not consistently exist prior to the Barack moment.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com