Still a Nation of Cowards: Parenting in An Age of Violence

This isn't the better world we hoped our children would be born into.

Still a Nation of Cowards
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

I was with my two daughters a few nights ago—my wife within an earshot—as my oldest, now 12, worked on a school project. She was supposed to develop a family timeline from 1910-2010, in which family events coincided with historical events. Of course, unlike some of my daughter’s classmates, there is no shared immigrant narrative that begins with a view of the Statue of Liberty and a visit to Ellis Island.

My daughter seemed genuinely perturbed at having to recount the role that racial discrimination, segregation and violence played in her family’s development and those of so many African Americans. When I explained that her grandmother and grandfather were not allowed on the beach that we now vacation at every year, my youngest daughter, eight, simply chimed in “lame.” Lame indeed, but this seemingly jovial recognition of how far we have come was dampened a bit, when I shared that their other grandparents, my parents, were married the same year that President John Kennedy was assassinated and that that their daddy was born the same year that El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) was murdered.

I’ve often had these kind of conversations with my oldest daughter—the 20 minutes we spend in the car in the morning is my version of a daily freedom school—and it perhaps informs some of her rants at the fact that we’ve never had a woman president or that it matters to some people what somebody’s sexual orientation is while they are defending the country. Though she’s never said as much, I suspect she thinks that the world was brutish, boorish, and barbaric in the years before she was born. She would, of course, be right.

Yet, part of the faith that we all have as parents, is the belief that our children are born into a world that is far better than the one we were born in. The stress that we experience as parents, in part, is often the product of the reality that we are never quite sure that’s the case.

The recent shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, along with the shooting deaths of six others including Federal Judge John Roll and a nine-year-old girl, as well as the wounding of 13 others in front of a Tucson, Ariz., supermarket, is yet another reminder that we’ve not come as far as we’ve thought.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com

'Left of Black': Episode #16 featuring Byron Hurt and Blair L. M. Kelley

Left of Black #16—January 10, 2011
w/Mark Anthony Neal

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by filmmaker and activist Byron Hurt in a discussion of his recent film Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and his in-progress film Soul Food Junkies. Neal is also joined in-studio by North Carolina State University historian and critic Blair L.M. Kelley in a wide ranging conversation about social protest in the early 20th Century, social media and contemporary Hip-Hop.

Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, a published writer, and an anti-sexist activist. His films include the award-winning Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes and I AM A MAN: Black Masculinity in America. Hurt is currently completing his next film Soul Food Junkies, which explores the health advantages and disadvantages of Soul Food.

Blair L. M. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (UNC Press, 2010) and is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University.

Return of 'The Game'

Paul Abell/PictureGroup

‘Game’ on: More Real Than Reality TV
by Jon Caramanica

During its first three seasons “The Game,” the dramedy about professional football players and the women who barely tolerate them, overflowed with cameos by black celebrities. There were singers like Musiq, rappers like Soulja Boy, athletes like Chad Ochocinco and more. Robin Givens and Rick Fox played themselves in recurring roles. These appearances added verisimilitude to a series already steeped in it. Few shows on television were as specific to their moment as “The Game.”

In the Season 4 premiere, Tuesday on BET, the surrounding culture has changed a bit. Near the end of the episode Tasha Mack (Wendy Raquel Robinson), gets a shock when meeting one of her boyfriend’s exes: Sheree Whitfield of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” playing herself.

It’s timely casting, and also a bit of a wink. “The Game,” which had its premiere in 2006 — before the “Housewives” explosion, before every other football player and 1990s R&B star had dating shows — was, until its cancellation by the CW network in 2009, an inadvertent precursor to the boom in reality television about the semi-famous. Its demi-monde was the behind-the-scenes universe of modern celebrities, and its best material about the embarrassments that lay therein, giving the show a ripped-from-the-headlines quality. Now, 20 months after its Season 3 finale was broadcast on CW, “The Game” is returning to a world that, in a sense, it set the stage for.

Read the Full Article @ The New York Times

Kevin Powell: "Arizona is America"

Arizona is America
by Kevin Powell

I say this because Arizona is not the problem. We the people are the problem.

That is, we Americans who think it is cool to engage in rhetoric, political or otherwise, that encourages division, ugliness, hatred, and violence, directly or indirectly.

Over the past several years, we've witnessed this madness via certain television networks, tv and radio talk shows, the internet, and various rallies and protests: a climate of hatred and, yes, violence, which has been boiling, with a quickness, in our America.

This is not about left versus right political philosophies, nor Democrats versus Republicans, or progressives versus Tea Party followers, or about the wackness of Arizona, a state that once, aided by one of its senators, John McCain, refused to celebrate the Dr. King holiday after it was made a federal law (to be fair, Mr. McCain eventually backed away from that position).

Not per se.

But it is about any of us who are so politically, emotionally, and spiritually immature that the only way we know how to participate in dialogue on any issue is to scream, curse, or otherwise threaten and dehumanize each other. Or move to murder each other. Quite literally.

Add to this cruel reality show the new world order our technological revolution has birthed in the form of the social networks, and you suddenly have these spaces where an angry and misguided individual or groups of angry and misguided people can post the most anti-social pronouncements imaginable, grow an audience, and prepare, right in front of our very eyes, to unleash their rage on unsuspecting and innocent persons.

So, yes, it pains me that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at point-blank range by 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner in Arizona. Painful, too, that 19 others were wounded and 6 are dead, including John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona, and a 9-year-old girl named Christina Green.

According to Christina's mother Roxanna Green, mother and daughter were there at that Tucson, Arizona area Safeway parking lot because her daughter was interested in government and wanted to learn how to give back to the community. A little girl full of life's possibilities blown away by a young man mentally unstable enough to believe he could change the course of history, with a gun I am sure he was able to purchase rather easily.

As a result there will be no giving back for little Christina ever again because no one can give that child another breath. But what we can do is heed the words of Clarence Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff at a press conference:

"The anger, the hatred, the, uh, bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona has sort of become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Well, yes, indeed, when you review, say, the horrible anti-immigration sentiments there. Plus the fact that the late Judge Roll had to accept protection from the Federal Marshals Service in 2009. This was in response to his allowing to proceed a civil rights lawsuit by a group of Mexicans against an Arizona rancher who thought it his right to stop people at gunpoint as they crossed his land, then turn them over to the Border Patrol.

Regardless of where you may fall on the issue of immigration, pointing guns at other human beings, or outright shooting them (which has occurred often in those parts), is simply not the way. Nor is threatening the life of a federal judge because you do not agree with his decision. Says that we are not quite the fair and egalitarian civilization we claim to be, at best. Says some of us are barbaric, at worst.

Beyond Arizona, nor is it acceptable for the flames of anger and venom to be blown, mightily, at those Summer 2009 townhall meetings on the pending healthcare legislation.

Nor has it been acceptable the barely masked threats against President Barack Obama, a constant stream of verbal aggression so nasty that you wonder if someone wants to do total harm to his presidency, just because-

Nor is it acceptable for Sarah Palin's website to not merely list 20 vulnerable Democrats to target in 2010, but to have the picture of a gun crosshair displayed for each of the 20, including Congresswoman Giffords.

Nor is it acceptable for The Tea Party to condemn the Tucson shooting (while scrambling fast to state Jared Lee Loughner is not one of them) but still not have the moral courage, nor outrage, to condemn, once and for all, its own oratory, these many months of its movement, that dance right at the doorstep of political anarchy and, yes, violence.

For when we use the words and images of violence, be we on the left or those of us on the right, we invite violence right into our lives, even if it is a moderate Congressional member simply hosting an outdoor gathering to meet her voters on a weekend trip back to her district. Because once you've fostered, egged on, and actually kick-started a violent atmosphere and a violent mindset, there is no sacred ground in our America, and you will not be free from violence and tragedies, be it in the ghettos or in the suburbs.

And as long as there is an incredible addiction to violence in America-ranging from averting our eyes from the regular practice of domestic violence against women to our acquiescence in unnecessary wars overseas, to our love affair with violent blockbuster films and video games, to this twisted need to define our culture (especially we men and boys) through the barrel of a gun, you come to the clear-eyed conclusion that violence, as one 1960s activist put it matter of factly, is as American as apple pie.

But it does not have to be. But only if we Americans are collectively willing to be morally responsible enough, and mature enough, to engage in conversations that do not seek to hurt or destroy others, just because you may not like them or their views. In our American journey we've witnessed violence against Native Americans, Blacks, poor and ethnic Whites, women and girls, the handicapped and the disabled, gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals, Latino and Asian immigrants, Arabs and Muslims, Jews (it is not lost on me that Representative Giffords is the first Jewish Congressional member from the state of Arizona), and more members of the human family than we could list in this blog.

It is seemingly the preferred way, to resort to violence when we believe everything else has failed, when we feel alienated, angry, and confused, as evidenced by Jared Lee Loughner's internet postings (as was the case with the Columbine shooters in Colorado back in the day). Or when we feel our way of life, our way of viewing the world, is threatened.

For example, when I hear some Americans say they want their country back, that they want things the way they once were, I as an African American often wonder, Want your country back for whom? And, The way things once were for whom? If we followed that logic I would be, say, my long-dead grandfather: not able to look White males or females in the eyes for fear of violent punishment; having to jump off the curb if a White person were walking in my direction; and my life reduced to work in someone else's cotton or tobacco field, or as a source of cheap, service-oriented labor, and my life permanently imprisoned by poverty and no hope whatsoever. If that or any other brand of social injustice is not a form of violence, then I do not know what it is.

So part of this unraveling of violence in our society, too, has to do with all of us, of every race and culture and gender and faith and class and sexual orientation, having the chutzpah to talk shop about our country, mountaintops of mistakes included, both past and present. In other words, in order for us to have a future not completely defined by violence, anger, and finger-pointing, I am essentially calling for a very necessary kind of soul-searching that America needs to do before what happened to Congresswoman Giffords becomes as routine as the too-many-to-count assassinations and assassination attempts we witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s.

In our America-

***

Kevin Powell is an activist, writer, and public speaker. He is the author or editor of 10 books, including Open Letters to America (Soft Skull). He is based in Brooklyn, New York, and can be emailed at kevin@kevinpowell.net

(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

Dueling Covers: Tammi Terrell & Brenda Holloway on Early Versions of Stevie's "All I Do"

Tammi Terrell: Remembering Motown's Lost Star

Tammi Terrell: Remembering Motown's Lost Star
by Oliver Wang | NPR.org

When a brain tumor claimed the life of Motown artist Tammi Terrell in 1970, she was only 24. Yet by 1967, Terrell was a star, thanks to her duets with Marvin Gaye, including "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Your Precious Love" and "You're All I Need to Get By." But Terrell also had a promising solo career before and during her collaboration with Gaye. For the first time, all of her solo recordings have been collected into a new anthology, called Come On and See Me.