A Social Disaster : Voices from Durham--Mark Anthony Neal

(White) Male Privilege, Black Respectability, and Black Women’s Bodies
by Mark Anthony Neal


“As a black female, you go to a party, you're expected to dance, you're expected to be sexually provocative. You [are expected to] want to be touched, to be grabbed, to be fondled…As if they're re-enacting a rap video or something. As if we're there to be their video ho, basically. We can't just be regular students here. We can't just go to a party and enjoy ourselves.”—Audrey Christopher and Danielle Terrazas Williams (The Independent Weekly, 3.29.06)

“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
—Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”


When a young black women was allegedly raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten by members of the Duke University Lacrosse team of March 13th of this year, it was initially treated as little more than another case of “(privileged) boys gone wild”. As word began to spread about the specifics of the case, various communities mobilized to lay claim to its significance. These groups include Durham residents with long-standing grievances against the University, activists rightfully protesting yet another incident of alleged sexual violence related to a college campus, members of various black communities who wanted to highlight the racist implications of the alleged assault and of course those who felt that too many people were rushing to judgment about the alleged rapists, well before the true facts of the case were established. At the center of all of these claims and allegiances is the body of a young black woman, who in many ways has been continually assaulted, by the inability of the various narratives surrounding the case to take serious the realities of racialized sexual violence against women of color.

To date no charges have been filed in the so called “Duke lacrosse rape case”. The results of a DNA analysis taken after the alleged attack suggest that the members of the Duke lacrosse team were not involved in the attack, though the local district attorney will continue to pursue the case. As such I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case, but rather interested in illuminating the various perceptions that have been and will continue to be projected onto the body of the black woman who is the focal point of this case. As has been reported so far, the accuser is a full-time student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and a single mother of two. The young woman and a friend were purportedly hired to dance at a bachelor party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in Durham—a residence shared by several of the lacrosse team players.

Though some have downplayed the significance of race in this case—violence against women is violence against women—the intersections and race and gender are palpable. As Greg Garber notes in his fine coverage of the case for ESPN.com, the default request for exotic dancers at mainstream escort agencies is often white women (preferably blonde and big-breasted). Thus in all likelihood, regardless of what happened inside of 610 N. Buchanan Blvd, the young men were hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed. If these young men did in fact rape, sodomize, rob, and beat this young women, it wasn’t simply because she was a women, but because she was a black woman.

UCLA and Columbia University Law professor and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw explains the uniqueness of discrimination against black women in her seminal essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”. According to Crenshaw: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction , and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them.” Using the traffic intersection as a metaphor, Crenshaw argues that black women often “experience double discrimination—the combined efforts of practices which discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as black women.”

Of course there are historic discourses that have constructed black women as hypersexual insatiable, and exotic—such discourses have often been employed as the rationale for racialized sexual and rhetorical violence against black women. Contemporary examples of such discourses can be found in the flippant and hateful on-air comments by national radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz, who described the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, respectively, as a “ho” and a “ghetto slut”. Though it is often the music videos of hip-hop artists that are targeted for the degradation of black women’s bodies, these videos—like the syndicated shows of Boortz and Limbaugh, television networks like BET and MTV, and recording labels—are simply the vehicles for the corporately controlled circulation of black women’s bodies as such . The message is clear: black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them. Thus it should not be surprising that a generation of young white men, for whom the consumption of hip-hop has been second nature, would find a black exotic dancer desirable or in the worse case scenario, sexually available to them, even if she resist their advances. But the Duke lacrosse rape case is not simply about centuries old dramas across the color line—It also about the tensions within black communities about which black bodies deserve protection and defense

As the “identity” of the young black woman in the case began to be constructed in the media, it was revealed that she was an “exotic dancer” and un-wed mother of two. These facts should be irrelevant in a sexual assault case, but as is well known, defense attorneys often seek to demonize rape victims—in the courts and in the media—so that the integrity of the victim is called into question. The goal is to have the public and juries to believe that rape victims bear the burden of responsibility in their assaults. As scholar Wahneema Lubiano recently opined, this is part of the tenuous status of being a women in American society; If you are not “at home” under the “supervision” of a father or a husband, it is open season on your body. Already there have been attempts to portray the young woman who was raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten as immoral on the basis that she was a “stripper” and an unfit mother, who left her two children home while she performed.

But such demonization takes on another dynamic within the world of “black respectability.” It was clear from the outset, that for some black communities in Durham, NC, the young women was not a “respectable” victim. The concept of “black respectability” can be traced back to the struggles of African-Americans in the early days following “emancipation”, where so many of the former enslaved sought to find common ground—a shared humanity—with the white citizenry. The strategy behind “black respectability”—exemplified in the late 19th and early 20th century by the Black Women’s Club Movement and the New Negro Movement and much later by the NAACP Image Awards—was to put the “best face” of the race forward. Accordingly, it also meant that less savory black bodies and antics had to be reduced to so-called “dirty laundry”—never to see the light of day. It was a logical strategy, given the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the century after emancipation and the desire of many black leaders to fight racism, disenfranchisement and racist violence on moral grounds. But it also created the context where those black bodies and practices that were not thought to be respectable enough were jettisoned to the margins of black life and culture.

Ultimately the desire was to find the most “respectable” victims to help animate black communities to struggle against racism, segregationist practices and disenfranchisement. The late Rosa Parks embodied such a “victim”. As noted scholar Aldon Morris notes in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Parks galvanized blacks in Montgomery, AL and nationally, in part, because she was a “quiet, dignified woman of high morals”. (52) The same could not be said for fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, who more than 8 months _before_ Rosa Parks’s historic act, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Unlike Ms. Parks, Ms. Colvin loudly protested the request that she move from her seat and was eventually charged with assault and battery on the bus driver who made the request and the police officers who were called in to intervene. When it was eventually revealed that Ms. Colvin was an un-wed, pregnant teen, black activists in Montgomery backed off of her case, waiting for a more respectable candidate—Ms. Parks—to emerge. Though the Duke Lacrosse case occurs in a different historical context than the Montgomery bus boycott, the silence and ambiguity emitting from some in black communities in Durham and elsewhere resembles the efforts of Montgomery’s black leaders to distance themselves from Colvin.

Even more profound are those who would distance themselves from the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case, because she was involved in “immoral” behavior. Such a point was made by Herald-Sun columnist John McCann—in many ways the “voice” of Black Durham—who suggested that the case was about the “consequences of violating moral laws.” (3.29.06) He later added in a subsequent column that the young woman was at 512 Buchanan Blvd. to “arouse and titillate young men who allegedly stumbled the same way she did—inappropriately using the body and mind.” (4.04.06) In McCann’s world a “thin line separates the criminal”—rape—and the “immoral”—exotic dancing. McCann’s comments are reflective of a deep social conservatism that offers little protection those who are thought to be immoral. Thus had the alleged victim in this case had been a gay black man or a black lesbian—such as the late Sakia Gunn (and far too many like her)—who was randomly assaulted, their assaults would likely be met with the same level of silence and moral scrutiny (as compared to your run-of-the-mill gang-banger, who gets shot by a law enforcement officer).

The real immorality here is the way that “silence” makes so many black folk complicit in sexual attacks against black women and girls. For every media spectacle, which highlights sexual violence across the color line, there are numerous black women who are assaulted in their own communities and even homes by black men. This is the point that Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s poignant documentary NO! makes throughout. Black male sexual violence against black women and girls is more often than not, met with blatant silence and denial or in the case of black celebrities, what University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown calls “black protectionism”. In her book Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African-Americans (Rowman & Littlefield) defines black protectionism as “what happens when the African-American community rallies around its fallen heroes—those prominent blacks who have been accused of wrongdoing.” Black protectionism figures prominently in issues of rape and sexual abuse in the black community given the number of highly visible black men, to name a few, who have been accused (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), convicted (heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and former congressman Mel Reynolds) and recorded (R. Kelly) of/in acts of sexual abuse and harassment against black women and girls. In each case, to varying degrees, these men benefited from black protectionism. As Russell-Brown notes, “black protectionism splits the Black community by gender. It treats prominent black men as a unique class.”

The Duke lacrosse rape case has generated so much attention and media coverage because it traffics in the time tested spectacles of race relations and white privilege gone awry. Regardless of whether or not anyone is indicted and convicted in the case, the reality is that women will continue to be raped and those sexual assaults will continue to be met with silence and a degree of dismissiveness that holds the victims accountable for attacks on their bodies. If anything should come of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Durham, NC, it should be to challenge us as a nation to take very seriously the incidences of sexual assault—in all of its forms—and to construct responses to those crimes that are reflective of a society concerned with all assaults on our humanity.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity.

1231 Fulton Avenue

So here’s the backstory: Joan Morgan and I have known each other for about 35 years. We grew up together in the same South Bronx tenement—1231 Fulton Avenue—and went to “Head Start” and Kindergarten together. Our parents, especially our not-so-feminist-feminist mommies, always knew we’d be South Bronx success stories, but neither Joan nor I thought we’d ever become part of the chorus of “voices” that would help define a generation. In many ways New Black Man is a response to When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost—the kind of cross-gender conversation that hip-hop needs to be about now. Recently Joan and I have been fortunate to take our show on the road. We were both in the room when KRS-One imploded at Stanford a few weeks ago, but we won’t be discussing that here. More recently Joan and I spent a few days at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where we were hosted by professors David Ikard (a fellow black male feminist) and George White. The video links to our conversations are below:

Understanding Chickheads, Pimps, Golddiggas, and Gangsta Rappers: A conversation with Hip Hop Feminist Joan Morgan and Mark Anthony Neal

Hip Hop Culture in the Academy: A panel discussion
Panelists: David Ikard (Moderator), Joan Morgan, Mark Anthony Neal, George White, and RaMonda Horton Ikard

Book Review--Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
By Alexander G. Weheliye
Duke University Press (2005), 304 pages

Reviewed by Matthew Somoroff

“No Western modernity without (sonic) blackness and no blackness in the absence of modernity” (45)—in a nutshell, this is the big idea in Alexander Weheliye’s new book, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Crucial to his project are a wide definition of “the sonic” within black cultural production and a belief in the centrality of aurality (and/or orality) to twentieth-century black culture. Weheliye’s engagement with the sounds of black cultural production (sonic Afro-modernity) owes a significant debt to Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003), in which Moten privileges the sonic and aural within black performance and propounds a theory of black culture as inherently performative and black performance as inherently radical.

Weheliye departs from Moten in his meditation on the intrinsically technological nature of sonic Afro-Modernity. In the exciting introduction to this volume, Weheliye notes how the sound technologies and listening practices associated with black music have not received enough critical attention. My interest was piqued when I read that Weheliye proposes to “establish a dialogue between literary texts and current popular culture to conjecture how sonic technologies and black cultural production have fruitfully contaminated each other” (8). This is a book about the agency of black cultural producers as practitioners and innovators of Western modernity.

This is also a book about the nonlinguistic power of sound, about the ability of sound to act as both “writing” (in the sense that it signifies in an abstract and systematic way) and something beyond “writing”—something more embodied and sensual. In his first chapter, Weheliye posits the phonograph as a site where the ostensibly separate categories and writing and sounding were collapsed, thus challenging the prevailing Western discursive bias towards the visual and the written.

Weheliye approaches his subject matter from the perspective of a literary or cultural critic; that is, his ideas and theoretical stances mostly build off of his close readings of cultural texts. A benefit of this volume is Weheliye’s refreshingly eclectic choice of texts and their juxtapositions. Weheliye not only positions readings of texts by canonical authors such as Du Bois and Ralph Ellison beside the practices of DJs and a recent Hollywood film, respectively, but he also structures his arguments to highlight the merits of reading these pieces of black cultural production in tandem.

Weheliye juxtaposes Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk with the artistic practices of DJs in Chapter Three. Just as DJs create rupture by fragmenting musical materials while forming new musical wholes through the juxtaposition and/or combination of erstwhile separate recordings, Du Bois’ text can be seen as one of the first “mixes” in twentieth-century black culture in its use of contrasting literary forms and modes, and its inclusion of fragments of spirituals in musical notation. Reading this chapter, I detected Weheliye’s satisfaction with his own feat of DJing in his “mixing” of Du Bois with contemporary DJing practices. The conception of Du Bois as proto-DJ and of contemporary DJs as Du Boisian sound-smiths struck me as one of Weheliye’s more successful expositions of how sonic Afro-modernity is “a series of compounded materiodiscursive echoes in and around black sounds in the West” (8), or put differently, an aurally centered cultural mode traversing the boundaries of supposedly discrete historical periods.

Yet for all Weheliye’s talk about exploring “sonic Afro-Modernity,” I found a strange dearth of sound in the book, or at least a dearth of close engagement with the kind of materiality of sound he seems to celebrate. Weheliye analyzes the recordings of the Haitian/American rap group the Fugees, the Afro-/Italian-German rap group Advanced Chemistry, and the black UK musician Tricky to show how all three articulate what Weheliye terms “diasporic citizenship” with the aid of sound technologies (see Chapter 5). When he thinks about the Fugees, he thinks more about their lyrics and the visual content of their music videos than the sound of their music (though he observes certain notable musical features: the use of acoustic guitar, the combination of rapped and sung lyrics). When he discusses Ralph Ellison’s essay “Living with Music” (Chapter 3) and Darnell Martin’s film I Like It Like That, Weheliye shows the reader how an important African-American writer and the first African-American woman to direct a Hollywood film both conceive of sound recordings in the construction of urban spaces (Ellison plays his LPs louder to drown out annoying singing from a next-door neighbor; Lisette, the protagonist of I Like It, uses technologies such as the Walkman to create a sonic space of privacy).

These analyses show how sound technologies either facilitate the dissemination of black music (in the case of the Fugees) or appear within the daily lives of musical black people (in the case of Ellison and I Like It). However, they do not really seem to theorize exactly how sound technologies figure in the experiencing of black music (at least not the way the book’s opening rumination on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody” suggests Weheliye is capable), or explain how “these [sound] technologies have been significantly shaped by black music” (20).

In his chapter on sonically constructed “Afro-modern” spaces, Weheliye mentions the paucity of “studies that analyze how sound articulates space” (108). While he cites the work of Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past) in his discussion of the early years of the phonograph (Chapter 1), Weheliye’s thoughts on sonically constructed spaces could have been informed by Sterne’s 1997 article “Sounds Like the Mall of America.” This article explores how “Muzak” is used to structure of the spaces of a large US shopping mall; different styles of music delineate boundaries between various stores and hallways, much in the same way Ellison and Lisette create bounded spaces for themselves with music of their choosing.

Weheliye’s vision of “sonic Afro-modernity” is an idea, a frame in which to think about black cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond, that is full of potential because of its recognition of the importance of technology in the aurality of black culture. His call to consider “(sonic) blackness” and modernity in symbiotic proximity deserves our attention. If Phonographies only lays out the groundwork for Weheliye’s ambitious conceptualization of black modernity, it has still served a valuable purpose. Hopefully future work (by Weheliye or others) will extend these theories into new practices for the study of the African diaspora.

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Matthew Somoroff is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Music Department at Duke University

“Truth Chappelle Style” -- Stephane Dunn on Dave Chapelle

“Truth Chappelle Style” by Stephane Dunn

The truth is permanent; everything else’ll fall by the wayside.

Twenty years from now when young black comedians speak of their comedic models and pay tribute to the legends who came before, Dave Chappelle will probably be one of them. Chappelle’s famous walk away from his reported fifty million dollar show on Comedy Central cast him into the glare of superstar celebrity, but it is his public comedic dialogue since his return from finding rest and peace in Africa that may define his place in comedy history.

Chappelle has gone from becoming the latest black comedian to rise to public stardom to stepping into an unlikely role-comedic seer of his generation. From the beginning Chappelle’s show positioned race, class, and the social conventions that they defined at the center of his satirically sharp sketches. Most assuredly, characters like Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, the blind black racist who doesn’t know he’s black, highlight the comedian’s no holds barred approach to comedy. Some viewers and critics believed he went too far and a great many of the mixed audience that made it one of the most successful variety shows ever simply loved it. Yet, at the height of the show’s success, Dave Chappelle began to question the politics of stardom and Hollywood. He also questioned the power and responsibility that went along with his talent for highlighting and making people laugh at the often hidden racial taboos that underline cultural differences.

He “bounced” in his words to Africa where he escaped the machinery that came with newly found American stardom. Since his return, Chappelle’s first public dialogues about why he left with Oprah Winfrey and then on Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton, showcase a man whose thinking seriously about the art of his comedy and how to negotiate being true to himself while avoiding becoming another tragic star who falls just as he’s risen to the top. The radical aspect of these dialogues is the way that Chappelle’s appearances on the shows transformed those platforms into spaces where we get to witness perhaps the most revealing and certainly funniest discussion about race than we’ve seen in a long time. Chappelle emphasized that despite media stories to the contrary he was never crazy and fame wasn’t too much for him to handle. It was all the superficial stuff that accompanies mega success. As he told his student listeners and Lipton, “You can become famous but you can’t become unfamous. You can become infamous but not unfamous.”

On the Oprah Show, Chappelle’s profound simplicity and vulnerability brought out the protective big sister who knows the challenges of fame in Winfrey. He struggled to articulate his experience trying to navigate Hollywood celebrityhood. With all of its many intensive dialogues with actors, Chappelle’s gritty conversation on Inside the Actor’s Studio was historical in of itself. The always formal and distinguished Lipton actually got up and danced a little ballet to Chappelle and the audience’s delight. Several times Lipton attempted to speak in the vernacular, his enunciation of words like “honky” adding to the most intense yet hilarious Inside the Actor’s Studio discussion thus far. Chappelle sat chain smoking and working hard at remaining himself and honest at all times. He volleyed back and forth playfully with Lipton, who carefully described Chappelle’s comedy as a medium that revealed black people to whites in ways they missed. Every black American is bilingual Chappelle informed him.

Chappelle says he’s waiting to see how Dave Chappelle is going to turn out. So are a lot of us given the public way his professional and personal life has played out so far. It may be that the torch has been passed to him as his model the legendary Richard Pryor said. In the meantime, Chappelle is interjecting a significant critical dialogue into the public sphere. He admits that he doesn’t know if he’s right or wrong or when his comedic wit goes too far. Yet, he’s making us laugh and think while daring to make mistakes and care about being on the right side of history. The comedian with the very educated parents who didn’t like school says that he might’ve liked to be a teacher. Ironically, he gave the listening students a lesson or two Chappelle style: It’s important to cross the lines. You don’t know if you’ve gone too far until you cross the line.

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Stephane Dunn is the author of the forthcoming Baad ‘Bitches’ and Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies (University of Illinois Press)

Homophobia and The Civil Rights Movement? MLK Jr's Legacy is Up for Grabs

In the backdrop of Coretta Scott King's funeralization is a battle for Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as a humanitarian. Though Mrs. King vociferously denounced homophobia in her latter years, her daughter Bernice and Bishop Eddie Long (whose church served as the literal site of Mrs. King's funeral) have been equally vocal their concerns that same-sex relations are damaging to the black family. What would Martin Luther King Jr.'s position have been on the subject of same-sex relations in the black community? Guest essayist Erica Edwards offers some insight.

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The Aesthetics of Charisma in the New ‘King’dom;
Or, Tomb-Raiding and the Legacy of Civil Rights
by Erica Edwards

On December 11, 2004, an estimated 25,000 people participated in a march called “Reigniting the Legacy,” a procession from Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change to the city’s Turner Field in support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The story of this march, led by Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of a mega-church outside of Atlanta, and Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and an elder in the church, illustrates how the charismatic political aesthetic is put to use to police African American sexuality, to align black religious groups with the ‘family’ or ‘moral values’ agenda of the right, and to keep ideas of manhood tied to or tangled up with a model of religious and political leadership that relies on unyielding categories of sexuality and gender.

Charisma, most clearly defined by the sociologist Max Weber, refers to “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which [a leader] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” In the political context, it is a mixture of sacred and secular impulses—it is a structure of group relationship centering around one exceptional man (usually) perceived to be gifted with a privileged connection to God. This individual’s right to rule is always held to be the function of divine ordination. For Weber, charisma represents a revolutionary force that opposes old, sedimented forms of rule. Notwithstanding the potential of charisma to ‘do a new thing,’ I want to question this identification of charisma with the new and examine its implementation of a revolutionary conservatism, a radical return to an older, putatively stable order. What I’m calling the charismatic aesthetic here is the assemblage of performative and symbolic elements that produce the charismatic scene, things like spectacular oratory, the masculine (or masculinized) body, and the positioning of the leader in front of or above his followers.

For black Americans, charisma as a form of political authority has become an organizing myth for ideas of political mobilization. While social historians have distanced their scholarship from “Great Man” theories of history, the history of black social movements as the byproduct of charismatic leadership continue to circulate widely in popular culture. Clayborne Carson’s essay on Martin Luther King’s charisma suggests that in popular civil rights history, “a Great Man is seen as the decisive factor in the process of social change, and the unique qualities of a leader are used to explain major historical events” (Carson 448). The leader is history’s indispensable protagonist: without him, history (what is believed to have happened) and historical narrative (what is said to have happened) are impossible. Carson goes on to suggest that King has functioned as the necessary protagonist in the public narrative of civil rights and is seen as the exemplary political spokesperson and miraculous history-maker. He embodies, for post-civil rights black culture, the quintessential charismatic leader and Great Man—the king, as it were, of black history and black politics.

King’s role as charismatic exemplar was at the center of the “Reigniting the Legacy” march’s claim to social authority. The use of the King Memorial as the starting place at which the leader lit a torch from the memorial’s eternal flame, the circulation of King’s rhetoric in quotes included in publicity and speeches, and the location of the march in King’s childhood home, Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, all exemplify the organizers’ deliberate alignment with the cultural memory of King. The march made a bold investment in the political capital associated with King’s idealized status in the nation’s imagination.

The march’s goal was reportedly to “get back into the conversation of the nation,” to introduce black Christians as vocal participants in the national discourse on marriage and sexuality. Quoting King’s warning against the “appalling silence of good people,” the march’s publicity describes its goal as the “protection of marriage,” including “strategic policy direction for a constitutional amendment to fully protect marriage between one man and one woman.” The march being framed, ironically enough, as a coming out story, participants in news photographs wear shirts reading “Stop the Silence” and the event is touted in news stories as an opportunity to speak in “one voice,” to articulate “a unified vision of righteousness and justice.” In a moment less than a month after voters in 11 U.S. states, including Georgia, approved of state constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and in a state that had passed a Defense of Marriage Act nine years prior to the march, the march’s leader, ostensibly alarmed by the suppression of anti-homosexual sentiment, told reporters, “This is our coming out day. We are here to stay and will be heard.” Passing a counter-demonstration of 50 gay rights activists, the march proceeded from the King Center to Turner field, where a recorded speech by Bishop Long played over the loudspeakers to greet the marchers entering the stadium. In her introduction to Long, Bernice King said, “I believe this day will go down in the history books as the greatest showing of Christ and his kingdom in this century” and designated Long “the prophet appointed by God to speak the mind, heart, and gospel of God.”

The march’s primary message was a call to crystallize rigid categories of sexual and gender identity, to buttress conservative family values in the name of historical ‘legacy’ and civil rights. As a literary critic, I’m as concerned with the form of the march—its architecture—as I am with its content or message. I’d like to draw our attention to the aesthetics of this religious, political event, that is, to the various symbolic ingredients that produce the performance of charismatic authority. To raise the question of the aesthetic is to ask: What makes a thing good, true and beautiful; what makes it appeal to the senses? Charismatic authority is, at its heart, is a question of aesthetic value: Ann Ruth Willner’s extensive research on the subject suggests that “it is not what the leader is but what people see the leader as that counts in generating the charismatic relationship” (Willner 15). Charisma is constituted by a cycle or dynamic of perception and performance, a relay of symbols between leaders, followers, and observers.

As far as I can gauge by journalists’ reports, The “Reigniting the Legacy” march made use of at least four powerful symbols in its production of the charismatic scene. First, the site of departure, King’s burial site, indexed a primal source of mourning for African American leadership. The march tapped into what Willner calls “postmortem charismatic authority,” authorizing its social claims by making the memory of King do necessary political work in the present. Indeed the march can be read as a tomb-raiding mission that dug up the remains of King’s authority for its own use, hence Keith Boykin’s assessment that the march “hijacked” King’s dream. The fact that the march was a raising of the dead dressed up as a ritual of mourning was shored up by the all-black attire of the majority of the marchers.

Next, Bishop Long’s own physical presence added to the symbolic tying of charismatic authority to the male body. The domain of charismatic authority, particularly in the civil rights tradition, is most often a masculinist sphere of influence—Steve Estes suggests as much in his recent book on manhood and civil rights when he argues that the masculinist rhetoric of political speakers “rallies supporters by urging them to be manly or to support traditional ideas of manhood” (Estes 12). In this instance, charismatic performance—the acting out of a privileged connection to the divine—plays out as a bourgeois, heteronormative family romance: Bernice King gestures to Long as her deceased father’s substitute and successor, and in the drama, Bishop Long plays father not only to her but to all. As much at is purported to “reignite” the legacy of civil rights, the march represented an Oedipal performance that demanded the slaying of King’s dream of egalitarian social life and the coronation of Bishop Long as father figure or new king for the race. The public family drama fortified the march’s homophobic appeal to the union between one man and one woman as the prime marker of “righteousness” and “justice.”

Finally, the torch and the march forward, like the tomb and the bishop’s physical positioning, functioned symbolically to attach charismatic leadership to a rigid, masculinist, heterosexist conception of black Christian identity. The torch is a common emblem of enlightenment and tradition that signifies the transferability of power—the Olympic torch, for example, is carried along from one location to the next to signify the passing on of unquestioned eternal values (like unity and tolerance). In this scene, King’s power is kept alive eternally in the memorial flame; Long accesses it in order to possess King’s authority. The march, in the end, ignited the bishop’s own power, his position as new spokesperson for the ‘good people.’ Further, the historical function of the march for blacks in America, Eddie Glaude has suggested, is to perform or “to continuously retell the story of bondage, the march toward liberation, and the discipline necessary to remain free.” The torch confers the power to free and to discipline, to liberate and to police the criteria for living freedom out.

A strange mixture of funeral procession, soldier march, Olympic opening ceremony, worship service and political rally, the “Reigniting the Legacy” march placed charismatic authority on center stage. It showed how charismatic leadership, often masking itself as a ‘natural’ expression of black religiosity and political consciousness, actually produces itself through self-conscious performances of authority that are tied to a narrow, patriarchal and homophobic conception of manhood. The question, perhaps, for those of us interested in engaging the church in a radical critique of heteronormative masculinity is: is charismatic authority an acceptable means or the only basis for the creation of an egalitarian religious body? If Kelly Brown Douglas is correct that “the change in attitude toward sexuality within the Black church and wider community must begin not at the top with Black church leadership…but at the bottom with the people who sit in the pews,” it also seems right to call into question of the church’s social architecture and what appears to be a patriarchal investment in the metaphysical distinction between leaders and followers.

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Professor Edwards specializes in African American literature, gender studies, and black political culture. She is currently at work on a book project under the working title Contesting Charisma: Fictions of Political Leadership in Contemporary African American Culture (forthcoming in 2011 on the University of Minnesota Press). Her work, published in Women & Performance, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Transforming Anthropology, shows how contemporary African American literature challenges us to think in new ways about the relationships between African American narrative, American popular culture, and the contemporary history of black politics and black social movements.

Rosa Clemente on Jesus, Hip Hop and Kanye West

WHAT DOES JESUS LOOK LIKE?
by Rosa Clemente

I was raised in the Catholic Church. From the moment I was placed under this religious institution, I was put in a situation where my savior would never look like me. For me Jesus Christ was a white men with blond hair and blue eyes. Much of my high-school years were spent going to church and confessing my teenage sins to a white man who would absolve me of those sins and tell me to pray to a white women(virgin mary) who in turn would save my soul. By the time I was 14 I thought all white men and women did was save people, the only man of color I saw in an position of authority was my dad, and papi did not look like Jesus and neither did mami.

While for many our spiritual path gives us strength the Catholic Church robbed me of my strength; it made me question why Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit(also known as the trinity) did not look like me. One day after school I went to my best friend’s house and noticed a picture on the wall; a picture of Jesus Christ, but unlike in my house, Jesus in this picture was Black. I stared at the picture and that image seared into my consciousness, that sunday when I went to church I was so conflicted, it didn't make sense, when you are brainwashed by a religious institution and contradictions arise that conflict with your spirituality its hard to see the truth. That sunday would be my last as a member of the catholic religion. Although this decision caused some family schisms I realize now that it was one of the best personal decisions i could have ever made to save my spirit, my soul, the essence of who I am.

As a search for spiritual lessons for my daughter, I have committed myself to focus on the readings of different religions. While reading the teachings of Jesus Christ, not the King James version of the Bible, I have learned what I believe is the truth of this person. and understand the fullness of him as a man in a specific historical time. An African revolutionary, whom walked with the dispossessed.

So today when, a spokersperson for the Catholic League condemned Kanye West for portraying Jesus Christ on the cover of Rolling Stone, and preceded to call him and the magazine “moronic” I ask him, was it wrong for Jesus to be portrayed by Charlton Heston, a gun-touting member of the National Rifle Association, or what about the hoopla surrounding the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ, I do not recall similar outrage from the Catholic League when the actor, Jim Caviezel was on every cover of every major magazine and what about the many 1000s of white men portray Jesus Christ in the last 100 years of cinema and television.

But I am not naive, it is not about seeing Jesus in a contemporary light, renderings of what people believe to be Jesus Christ have been around forever, the problem for the Catholic League and many white christians whom will start coming out of the woodwork to also condemn Kanye and begin to attack Hip Hop is that Kanye West as a Black man does not represent their revisionist history of whom Jesus was. This week the South African Film "Son of man" which premiered at the Sundance Film festival this week portrays Christ as a modern African revolutionary. I am hoping that we as a Hip Hop community will support this movie, Hip Hop as a tool of cultural resistance has the power to not only fight the images and words of those who would seek to oppress us but also has the power to use imagery to liberate million of minds who everyday see the lord and savior as a white boy, here and internationally.

So once again brother Kanye West has used the mainstream media to shake up white America, score 2 for Hip-Hop culture. It may seem small and insignificant to many folks but as someone who believed for years that white men were my spiritual saviors, seeing the cover of Rolling Stone was a reaffirmation of my decision when I was a teenager, so late last night as I was walking in my 'hood Flatbush, I was singing in my head, “To the hustlers, killers, murderers, drug dealers even the strippers, (Jesus walks with them), To the victims of welfare feel we living in hell here, hell yea(Jesus walks with them)(Jesus Walks)God show me the way because the Devil try to break me down(Jesus Walks with me)” when I walked into my house and picked up my baby girl Alicia, I showed her the picture of Kanye on the cover of Rolling Stone, she looked and smiled, I laid her down in her crib and she stared at the picture of Kanye that I just put above her crib, she fell asleep knowing that not only does Jesus walk with her but Jesus looks like her too.


Rosa Clemente is a Hip Jop Activist, member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and a journalist with Pacifica Radio, WBAI 99.5FM NYC and Air America Radio.

"A PILLAR"

IN MEMORIAM: NELLIE MCKAY