"Left of Black' LIVE at the Beyu Caffe on Monday December 13th

Join LEFT OF BLACK Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal for a live taping of Left of Black, Monday December 13, 2010 at 7:00pm, featuring author and activist, Zelda Lockhart, composer T.J. Anderson, Queer media activist and writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs and pastor and novelist Carl Kenney.

Zelda Lockhart is the author of the recently published Fifth Born II: The One Hundredth Turtle, a sequel to her first novel Fifth Born and Cold Running Creek. As the 2010 Piedmont Laureate, Lockhart has been instrumental in raising HIV/AIDS awareness in Black communities.

T.J. Anderson is one of the leading composers of his generation. Born in 1928 Anderson received a Ph.D in Composition from the University of Iowa. After serving as Chairman of the Department of Music at Tufts University for eight years, Thomas Jefferson Anderson became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music and in 1990 became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he devotes full time to writing music.

A Self-Described "Queer Black Trouble Maker" Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and is the founder of Broken Beautiuful Press. Gumbs is also editor of the blog Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

Pastor Carl Kenney is the founding Pastor of Compassion Ministries in Durham, NC and former pastor at Orange Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, NC, Kenney is also the author of Preacha Man and the just published sequel Backslide.

Beyu Caffe
335 West Main Street
Durham, NC 27701-3215
(919) 683-1058

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Are African Americans Interested in Visual Art?

American People #: The Cocktail Party (1964) by Faith RInggold. 42 x24 inches. Oil on Canvas. All rights reserved. Faith RInggold Copyright. Private Collection. http://www.faithringgold.com http://www.faithringgoldsociety.org

Special to NewBlackMan

African Americans: Are We Interested in Visual Art II
by Michele Wallace

Aside from my oldest niece Faith (who seems to really love all kinds of art and photography and is an avid photographer and museum goer herself ), and my sister whose interest has become great (although it was not always), I have become (I haven't been into the Faith Ringgold Society thing most of my life) the one who is most determined to absolutely bend the space around me to conform to my notions of what black beauty is and should be.

I have now put that craving for physical and visual beauty together with the opportunity to write about and study my Mom's work at close range. When I moved out of Manhattan (living in Ithaca for awhile), I had an enormous library of visual art and photography books, which I gave to her Any One Can Fly Foundation (whose mission is the education of adults and children concerning the Masters of African American Art who were born before 1925--or in other words the artists born before Faith). I use the resources of this collection along with the massive personal and professional archive Faith has of her career at her home.

I did not come into the world, nor did I become a person who thought these matters were essential until I guess in the last decade or two. Even then for a long time I thought I could get around the whole issue of the place of painting within the canon, and/or my Mom's painting. But the thing is about this is I felt I needed to seize the particular opportunity I had as her daughter. Whether you are aware of the precise issues of this or not, everybody doesn't have equal access to the images.

(Try the following experiment. Do an image search on google, whatever you particularly like, and try things you really crave versus pictures of celebrities you are hearing about all the time, and then filter for free copyright use, and also take note of the size of the jpg you've found. When you've gotten rid of everything that is copyright restricted, you're looking at the images you are free to download, reproduce, post, print out whatever without violating anybody's copyright. Then print some of them out. Notice the size of the jpg. For the most part you will find yourself with a series of postage stamp size images, okay for posting on your wall but you can't really see them. They are not of exhibition quality and that is deliberate. You will notice this happening more and more.))

I am the only person on the planet that I know who enjoys full and unlimited access to Faith Ringgold's extensive archive of family images and photographs, as well as images of all her thousands of works of art--sculpture, painting, dolls, soft sculpture, performances, costumes, paintings, drawings, sketches and so forth. And unlike a lot of artists, Faith's work is all photographed, catalogued, inventoried with computer images of various sizes prepared for use by her nimble full time assistant (Grace Matthews). And I don't expect it to go on forever. It is a strategic access, which I am attempting to use to promote interest in the history of the development (in the course of the 20th century) of African American art and artists in general. Especially among other African Americans but everybody else as well. Just as an experiment, to see whether it is actually possible to change the public perception of something simply by the power of persuasion and good will.

So none of what I am doing follows naturally from anything, including my membership in this family or the fact that Faith is my mother and has been my mother for all 58 years of my life.

Many people who are closely related to artists decide to become artists themselves. Indeed, most people who write or have written about African American artists were either artists themselves or wanted to be artists. Sometimes people spend an entire career writing about and promoting the work of others and then retire in order to finally pursue their own art. Such a career was that of the artist and prominent African American art historian David Driscoll. Some work a day job until they retire, and then become full time artists. Such was Romare Bearden's story. Some spent a lifetime making art and were always well known in the art world and yet never made any really substantial wealth from it because their works were small and quickly grabbed up by collectors on easy terms. Such would be the case with the great master Jacob Lawrence. And for every African American artist you can name from the canon, there's a story to go with it. A reason that their children don't know their name or their images are in the public domain, their works in public collections, those that survived. This all relates to the fact that even if African Americans love African American art, they've got a great many more pressing priorities. Priorities which invariably take precedence over their interest in African American art. In general, African American art is not expensive so it can't be that. As my Mom says, back in the 60s she couldn't give the American Collection away. Nobody wanted it. Of course, she's not giving it away today. But who is out there trying to give their work away? Hope it isn't somebody in your very own family.

Although I always loved art, can't recall not loving it, It never occured to me to become an artist. Even though mother always had us painting and drawing when we were little, I was only too willing to stop when it got time to get serious. I didn't want to be an artist. I was too busy writing and nobody else in my family was doing that. God only knows where it came from but there it was almost from as early as I can remember. My sister also writes a great deal, journals mostly.

Who knows why? But my father was a musicians, and both he and his father were brilliant and prolific readers and kept notebooks, although the relationship between Mom and Dad ended early and abruptly. None of their natural abilities ever came to much--maybe because of the racism black men faced then, or maybe they just didn't have the necessary ambition but this need to communicate about ideas seems to come by some fashion from the genetic combination of my mother's abilities in the visual arts and my father and grandfather's talent for music (classical and jazz) and for intellectual investigation (they were from Jamaica). Genetics combined with opportunity for a superb education provided by the financial support of my stepfather Burdette (half tuition at New Lincoln was still a lot of money for us!) as well as all the trips to the Cape and to Europe, which he also funded.

Other than that, my particular approach to the visual (which is strategic and theoretical) has emerged over years and years of the study of questions related to visual culture (photography, film, architecture, museums and so forth, intellectual stuff generally). As you get older you start to think about, how can I make a contribution in this messed up world? And quite naturally you look to make a contribution where there is a greater necessity because there are fewer people working on it.

This is what strikes me about the lack of awareness of the extended ramifications of visual culture among AFrican Americans, particularly as regards the visual arts, particularly painting. It's pretty bad when it comes to photography too. I've been teaching photography--particularly photographs in which black people are present as photographers or subjects at Cornell and at the CUNY colleges and its been a real eye opener. It is very difficult for people to question that which they have never questioned. And they don't question what they see for the most part, especially if has the least little patina of nostalgia, or slickness or officialdom or whatever. In my experience, black folk notice stereotypes, (images they feel are designed to demean them) and nothing else. Since stereotypes are the only thing that get a serious rise out us, I am afraid they are here for the duration.

I am just saying. I don't have the problem with stereotypes that some people claim to have with them. I think they are just part of the menu of visual options in representations of the human figure but when you can't even see anything else, then you are geared to a life full of negativity.

I am going to treat you all to yet another master work from the American People Series since I know you have never or have rarely seen them. I hope you enjoy. Look to my Faith Ringgold Society Group Page or to my Facebook or to my website http://www.michelefewallace.com/ for more links and images from African American art and photography, and a range of other things bearing up the culture.

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Michele Wallace is a Professor of English at The City College and in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center and the author of several books including the classic Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman and Invisibility Blues: From Popular Culture to Theory.

James "Moody's Mood for Love" Moody Goes Home

from the Los Angeles Times

Moody's improvised solo on 'I'm in the Mood for Love' became a jazz classic. A version with lyrics added became a cross-genre hit and has been recorded by Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse and others.

James Moody dies at 85; jazz saxophonist and flutist
by Don Heckman, Special to The Times

James Moody, a jazz saxophonist and flutist whose improvised solo on a recording of the song "I'm in the Mood for Love" became a jazz classic, died Thursday in San Diego, where he had lived in recent years. He was 85 and had pancreatic cancer.

His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for the San Diego Hospice.

The recording, made in Stockholm in 1949, became a rare jazz hit as an instrumental. When singer King Pleasure recorded Eddie Jefferson's lyrics for Moody's improvisation in 1954, it became a cross-genre hit, subsequently recorded by singers ranging from Van Morrison, George Benson and Aretha Franklin to Tito Puente and Amy Winehouse. Moody, himself, frequently sang the version with lyrics in his live performances.

The original improvisation was recorded on alto saxophone, an instrument Moody had not been playing at the time.

"Up to this point, I had been playing strictly tenor saxophone," he told Times jazz writer Leonard Feather in 1988. "At one session, I noticed that Lars Gullin, the Swedish saxophonist, had an alto sax lying around. I said, 'Do you mind if I try it out?' "

Moody did not initially expect to record with the alto, however, and the song came to life only as a spontaneous, last-minute addition to the session.

"The producer decided we needed an extra tune," he recalled. "But [he] didn't have any music prepared. I suggested making 'I'm in the Mood for Love,' and we went ahead and did it, in one take, with me playing this beat-up alto saxophone. Well, you know what happened."

Universally called by his last name by friends and fans alike, Moody was warm and amiable, invariably greeting acquaintances with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The same qualities were present in his instrumental playing, as well, which matured in sync with the arrival of bebop in the mid-'40s. Quickly grasping the complexities of the new style, with its extended harmonies and shifting rhythms, Moody added an appealing melodic flow to his improvised solos, expressed in instrumental timbres approaching the qualities of the human voice.

"Over the years, Moody has become so free — not in a random fashion, but a scientific freedom — that he can do anything he wants with the saxophone," Moody's contemporary, saxophonist Jimmy Heath, told Down Beat magazine's Ted Panken. "He has true knowledge. He is in complete control."

Feather, reviewing a Moody performance for The Times in 1972, agreed. "Moody brings to his tenor saxophone an immense sound," he wrote. "Relying on the natural tone quality....he offers hard-hitting, stimulating jazz, rooted in the idiom fathered by [ Charlie] Parker and [ Dizzy] Gillespie."

Like his lifelong friend and mentor, trumpeter Gillespie, Moody was able to find a convincing balance between entertainment and art — a balance that eluded many of his contemporaries. In any given set, he would frequently juxtapose long, inventive improvisations against his witty vocal renderings of "Moody's Mood For Love," then switch to a humorous paraphrase of "Pennies From Heaven" titled "Benny's From Heaven," topped off with another briskly exploratory solo.

Moody's easygoing manner, wry humor and musical versatility served him well in a career in which he moved deftly from alto and tenor saxophones to clarinet and flute. His rich resume included — in addition to his continuing jazz performances with small groups and big bands — stints in which he backed the likes of Elvis Presley, Redd Foxx, Liberace and the Osmonds.

In 2005, he added an unusual sidebar to his busy career when he made a cameo appearance in the Clint Eastwood-directed film, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," as a porter in a law office who walks an imaginary dog. Moody frequently joked about the fact that he only had one line to say: "Yessir. Patrick do like his morning walk."

The affection with which Moody was viewed by musicians, celebrities and fans was on full display in several musical parties celebrating his milestone birthdays. His 75th anniversary, which took place at New York City's Blue Note jazz club, was released as a live recording titled "Moody's Birthday."

"I think you're looking at a man who knows love and knows how to accept it and give it without hiding, without treating it as if it was some sort of weakness," Bill Cosby, who hosted Moody's 80th birthday celebration concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, said in an interview with the Copley News Service. Moody "has taught me integrity, how to express love for your fellow human beings, and how to combine and contain manhood and maturity."

James Moody was born March 26, 1925, in Savannah, Ga., and was raised in Reading, Pa., and Newark, N.J. His father was a trumpeter, his mother a dedicated jazz fan.

"My mother loved jazz," he told Calvin Wilson in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. "She had records by Chick Webb, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and Jimmy Lunceford, and I heard those records playing at home. I'm thankful for that, because she could've been a doo-wop person, and that would have been a drag."

Moody was born with a hearing defect in his left ear. Initially undiagnosed, it made it difficult for him to hear questions in class. Because of his poor grades, he was sent to a school for retarded children. The malady was properly treated when he entered high school in Newark, where his grades improved and he began to play the alto saxophone, a gift from an uncle.

After serving in the Army Air Forces from 1943 to '46, Moody joined Gillespie's band and made his own first recording, "James Moody and His Bebop Men." He moved to Europe in the late '40s, remaining there until 1951, performing with Miles Davis and others, and recording "I'm in the Mood for Love."

Settling in New York City in the early '50s, he led various ensembles — including a septet that played jazz-influenced rhythm & blues — made a series of recordings for Argo, and worked with Gillespie, an association that would continue intermittently until Gillespie's death in 1993. A brief period working with Las Vegas show bands in the '70s was followed by a return to jazz and the leadership of his numerous ensembles. In the late '80s, he was a founding member of Dizzy Gillespie's United Nation Orchestra.

Moody, a multiple Grammy nominee, was chosen an NEA Jazz Master in 1998.

Survivors include his wife of 21 years, Linda; a brother, Lou Watters; a daughter, Michelle Bagdanove; sons Patrick, Regan and Danny McGowan; four grandchildren and one great grandson.

Filmmaker Tanya Hamilton 'Catches' Up With Ex-Black Panthers

In Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, ex-Black Panthers confront the ways in which their former radicalism has since shaped their lives, years after they cut ties with the organization.

Set in 1976, the movie tells the story of Marcus, a former Black Panther who returns to Philadelphia for the first time in several years for his father's funeral. Before he left home, his cohort Neil was killed in a police shootout; several other Panthers accused Marcus of telling the cops where to find him.

Upon returning to town, Marcus encounters Neil's widow, Patricia, now a civil-rights lawyer who is raising a daughter alone. He also encounters Patricia's cousin Jimmy, who grew up seeing the Panthers and idolizes everything about them — and appears to be headed for his own violent confrontation with the cops.

"I think Jimmy is my favorite character," filmmaker Hamilton tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "He's the most flawed character in the film. Jimmy is someone who borrows someone else's history without understanding where it comes from and how it's being fought."

Hamilton's film traces the ways Marcus deals with these complicated relationships he left behind — and the ways in which his fellow ex-revolutionaries have struggled with understanding their own radical pasts.

"I often try to say that there's something both tragic and very romantic in that period, during the civil rights [struggles] and the transition into black power," Hamilton says. "I felt like the film not only needed to talk about the waning days [of the Black Panthers], but also about what ultimately destroyed the Panthers and the complexity of that destruction."

Hamilton, who wrote and directed the film, explains that she titled the film after a common saying in Jamaica: "Don't let night catch you."

"That simply means come back at a decent hour," she says. "I felt like the film is about these people who are all running in various directions. And it spoke in a way of their history and how it was going to catch up with them, and they were going to have to contend with it."

Call of Duty? Kobe and Virtual Warfare

special to NewBlackMan

Call of Duty? Kobe and Virtual Warfare
by David Leonard

Kobe Bryant has done it again. He has supplanted LeBron James. Whereas James’ decision to “take his talents to South Beach,” ESPN’s “The Decision,” his appearance on Larry King, and his recent Nike advertisement have elicited widespread debate, discussion, and consternation, Kobe Bryant, despite winning his second straight title with the NBA has been out of the spotlight. Yet, his appearance in a commercial for Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops has not only surely allowed for the commercial to naturally appear on ESPN and during NBA games but also has resulted in ample discussion about the meaning and appropriateness of his appearance within the advertisement.

The commercial, like other games in the genre, imagines war as a space of play, as a space of excitement, as space of harmless fun, and one without consequence. It likewise imagines a warzone as a space of unity, where irrespective class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, or celebrity, people can and need to come together to defeat a common enemy. Promoting the game with the tag line, “There’s a solider in all of us,” Kobe Bryant makes an appearance as to illustrate that war, and the game is a place where superstar basketball stars can play alongside of waiters, Jimmy Kimmel, and others.

Not surprisingly, his appearance in the commercial prompted ample chatter. Mark Medina, on The LA Times blog who noted that he didn’t find the commercial “enjoyable,” wrote “I think the commercial featuring a happy-go lucky vibe with ordinary citizens pretending to be in combat downplays the seriousness that real combat entails.” Similarly, Sam Machkovech commented on The Atlantic.com that the "troubling mélange of gun, grenade, and rocket combat acted out by blue-collar workers, children, and celebs like Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel" resulted in a “disappointing game-related ad" . . .that equips people with real guns and simulates real-life, no-CGI combat . . .. The only things missing are the dead bodies on the receiving ends of each bullet and blast.” Others took the debate, given Kobe Bryant’s celebrity, and cultural meaning in a different direction.

In his blog post “In the crosshairs,” Paul Jones links Bryant’s decision to his responsibility as a role model, one who shouldn’t be promoting violence: “Like it or not, Bryant is a role model. Maybe I'm old fashioned but anything that promotes or glorifies that kind of violence doesn't float my boat. I know it's just a video game but it's not my cup of tea.” Likewise, Tim Keown uses the commercial as a way to talk about gun violence in Berkeley, California, linking the deaths and murders of young (African American – the article doesn’t say but also the rhetoric, images, and narrative leads one to belief as such) boys to Kobe’s appearance in this commercial.

Writing through Todd Walker, a football coach and funeral home worker in Northern California, Keown focuses on the destruction facing Walker’s community and how the glorification of violence within this advertisement is part of the problem. He describes Walker’s reaction to the commercial in the following way:

He was already disgusted, but about halfway through the spot, Walker did a double take: Wait! Wasn't that Kobe Bryant? Seriously, is that really Kobe Bryant carrying an assault weapon with the word "MAMBA" on the barrel? Did Kobe Bryant, the highest-paid player in the NBA, take money not only to advertise a shooting game but actually shoot -- or simulate shooting -- an automatic weapon while doing it? None of his people, not his wife or his agent or someone in the NBA offices, advised him against this?

"I couldn't believe it was him," Walker says. "What's wrong with him?"

Walker gives funeral-home tours to every team he coaches. He tries to hammer home the reality of death by putting kids in cardboard cremation boxes. He shows them the tools he uses to drain bodily fluids and the chemicals he uses to prepare bodies. It probably wouldn't play in the suburbs, but Walker's trying to fight a culture that glamorizes death with tattoos, airbrushed T-shirts and roadside memorials. He's fighting a culture that has desensitized death to the point where fantasy has overtaken reality. In the process, the permanence of death -- "That person is gone," Walker tells the kids when he closes someone inside the box -- is often lost.

Beyond the scapegoating, and the ways in which the article rehashes culture of poverty arguments alongside those that blame violence on choice and decision-making amongst those victimized by state violence, Keown does little to distinguish between the types of violence being displayed within virtual warfare (as glorious; as justifiable) with those images and narratives that consistently use the violence associated with and attached to the ghettocentric imagination to rationalize, justify, and otherwise imprison black bodies. The efforts to link virtual warfare and urban violence through Kobe Bryant, one of the more recognizable black bodies, demonstrates how blackness is circulated as threat, danger, and object of derision. Others, however, used Bryant’s presence, and the NBA’s non-response as evidence for the acceptability of virtual warfare.

On the “Grumpy Sociologist” Dave Mayeda asks the following about the commercial: “Should society be glamorizing war to make money, and turning to celebrities to peddle these products?” He further argues that these games (and by extension their commercials that promote and encourage play in/of these games) naturalize a war culture, erasing the cost and consequence of war. This argument merely echoes longstanding questions about the significance of war games. “What I find really frightening is that in our playtime – in our leisure time, we’re engaging in fictional conflicts that are based on a terrorist threat and never asking questions,” notes Nina Huntemann. Richard King and myself argued similarly in “Wargames as a New Frontier Securing American Empire in Virtual Space” (from Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne):

“US efforts to establish neoliberal policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and throughout the globe, coupled with the overall movement to legitimize US global hegemony, have come through much ideological work from television and Hollywood, to news media and virtual reality. In fact, in a post 9/11 America, video games have become a crucial space of articulating American empire, providing a vehicle of interactive dissemination that allows for the transportation of citizen bodies from their homes onto battle fields, into political struggles, and into a global theater where US efforts to secure power is normalized and justified. We must therefore understand virtual warfare and the popularity of war games by developing a spatial understanding or a critical pedagogy that illustrates the connections, dialectics of warfare, and violence within virtual and real-time spaces.

Mayda’s and others discussion of the commercial as an entry point into the larger issue of the militarization of everyday life is important, especially as the defense of the commercial deployed the clichéd argument, “It is just game” and “a commercial.” Given the ways in which these games have proliferated over the last ten years, the ways in which militarization is evident in all forms of popular culture (and in toy stores), and how sports, from its language to its efforts to put military hardware on display during pregame festivities, and its ideological offerings, one has to wonder why a commercial featuring Kobe Bryant offers the only moment of intervention.

The specificity of race, Kobe, the NBA, and the commercial are evident as Mayeda goes on to argue, in response to the debate between Skip Bayless and Bomani Jones on ESPN’s First Take.

“Bomani Jones hits the nail on the head. With approximately 1 minute left in the video, Jones points out that if Bryant was re-enacting what's portrayed in the video game, Grand Theft Auto (e.g., murder, assaults, prostitution), he would be reprimanded by Commissioner Stern. However, because Bryant, Kimmel and the other actors are re-enacting war against each other, and presumably against American enemies in the game, the portrayed violence is at the very least permissible, and more likely glorified as a kind of American patriotism.

Jones, who uses the moment to talk about NBA "hypocrisy" given the league’s reticence notwithstanding David Stern’s propensity to control player image, arguing that had Kobe Bryant appeared in a commercial for Grand Theft Auto 57, it "would have [been] pulled [...] off the air” because the violence associated with war “doesn't scare people. Street violence scares the NBA's fanbase, or the ones that David Stern is trying to appease by stopping guys from arguing with refs."

In other words, Kobe, as a black NBA star, can exist inside the virtual theater of overseas warfare, but his presence in another context would elicit a far different reaction because his blackness, as signifier, as cultural symbol, and as cultural frame is inherently disruptive and problematic. In another context, his visible blackness would function as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy.” Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). The fact that Kobe appears in a war game ad and not a ghettocentric commercial says nothing about the relative acceptability or contempt for particular types of violence but rather where and how blackness can enter into the white imagination.

Having written extensively about video games, both international and domestic war games (Grand Theft Auto and other ghettocentric games exist in imagining domestic warfare), I am struck by Dave Mayeda’s analysis of the game and Bomani Jones’ analysis. Jones isn’t simply pointing to the acceptability of “ghettocentric violence,” that violence against a foreign other is more acceptable and permissible than games that imagine gang and inner city violence. Rather, both forms of violence, evidence in the popularity of games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, war films and those concerned with “Boyz” and “Menaces,” and the ubiquity of war and violence on the nightly news and in public discourse at large.

Violence, when directed at a foreign other, and when reifying dominant white racial framing about violent, dangerous youth of color, is quite permissible and acceptable within American media culture. Given the criticism directed at Bryant, Mayeda’s argument about “permissibility” leaves some pause. Kobe’s visibility within the commercial, his presence as a “role model,” as a black man enjoying warfare, and as a member of “Us” results in a commercial less permissible and thus more susceptible to critique. Moreover, Jones’ point doesn’t seem to be that displays of militaristic warfare are more acceptable than “ghetto violence.” Rather he is arguing that in the context of the NBA, given the constant fears about the blackness of the league, Bryant’s presence in a commercial reifying his blackness and the stereotypes associated with the white racial framing of hip-hop/urbanness, would prompt far greater outrage and likely intervention from the league office. In fact, the commercial with its emphasis on “shared nationalism,” and shared identity as “soldiers” within a larger war effort, irrespective of class, race, gender, celebrity, and physicality mirrors the efforts of the NBA to deemphasize the racial identities of its players, promoting a neoliberal, market-driven notion of identity.

Moreover, it is crucial to understand how fear plays out within the context of this commercial and how Bryant’s presence in a militarized zone doesn’t elicit the same sort of fears as his presence might in another context. Within war games, and in the commercial, there is an effort to emphasize the multiracialness of the nation as to imagine a national body coming together to battle, wage war, and otherwise destroy a foreign other. In other words, video games, whether set in the old West, the new Iraq, or the post-civil rights ghetto, offers a space to rehearse the central tenets of American imperialism, law and order, manifest destiny, and the benevolence of (white masculine) American Democracy.

Call of Duty: Black Ops, as evident by the commercial, replicates this mission. It assuages fear. However, Kobe’s hypothetical presence in Grand Theft Auto commercial would aggravate fear as a black body within a post-civil rights ghetto context. Beyond abstract connections and the links of fear, the surrounding discourse of reception -- the celebration of violence within war games (one manifesting through state powers) and demonization of violence when performed by state enemies (criminals and terrorists), Jones points to the ways in which symbolic (virtual) violence and these games in general distort, reify, and dehumanize, bodies of color in justification of state violence.

These games turn on dehumanizing racialized violence directed at bodies of color, pivot around a rhetoric of danger on insecure frontiers, and encourage a reworking of the contours of fear and victimization so that white consumers can occupy them. It isn’t that one violence is more permissible than the Other, it is that black bodies (evident by Kobe Bryant) can be visible as a cog within a larger state power but cannot exist inside a space where blackness is defined as a threat to domestic safety.

Moreover, the reaction demonstrates the limitations of redemption for bodies rendered as inherently suspect and dangerous. The fact that Skip Bayless offered the following illustrates the limited possibilities for redemptive black bodies: “He was smiling while holding an assault rifle in combat while we have troops overseas at this moment doing the same thing for real in combat.

It's completely out of bounds for Kobe Bryant, who I thought had completely rehabilitated his image after Eagle, Colo., but even the great Kobe Bryant is not that, so to speak, bulletproof.” The reaction to this commercial demonstrates that no matter how many successful years Kobe Bryant has on the court and no matter what he does off the court, he will always be viewed with skepticism and derision.

The media and commentary, discourse irrespective of the argument (condemnation/celebration of Bryant), focused much of discussion about the commercial on the NBA’s star and not the issue of virtual warfare. Just last year, I wrote about controversy surrounding a NIKE advertisement featuring Kobe Bryant with the tagline “Prepared for Combat” in Journal of Sport of Social Issues, amid the arrest and suspension of Gilbert Arenas:

The backlash and the legislating by the NBA, when read alongside those scholars who have argued that the structural and culture locality experienced by blacks renders them to be noncitizens in the national imagination, the encouraged and supported denial of their rights as citizens, whether in terms of guns, the right to earn a living straight out of high school, or the right of free speech/expression, fits their perpetual place outside the American citizenry. The centrality of black NBA ballers as dangerous criminals—abject noncitizens—is clear through the discursive logic: Criminals shouldn’t have access to guns. If Stern is discouraging players from carrying guns, it must because they are dangerous, irresponsible, pathological, criminal noncitizens.

This is made clear by this commercial and the various commentaries that Bryant’s presence as a “soldier” within a U.S. military context is acceptable because the location is one of control and disciplinarity, whereas blackness in other contexts continues to exist as Other, object, scapegoat, and abject noncitizen. It is all matter of what combat is being prepared for and who the imagined victim might be that determines whether or not violence, real or virtual, is acceptable.

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David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.

An Era’s Injustices Fuel an Artist’s Activist Works: On Faith Ringgold

from The New York Times

Art Review
An Era’s Injustices Fuel an Artist’s Activist Works
By Holland Cotter

PURCHASE, N.Y. — The American artist Faith Ringgold, who turned 80 this year, is best known for the vivacious story quilts about African-American life that she’s made over the past three decades. But if all that survived from her career were her paintings and prints from the 1960s and early ’70s, she’d still be in the history books. An inspired and incisive exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art here shows why.

Ms. Ringgold was born in Harlem to an art-encouraging family — her mother was a fashion designer — and earned an M.F.A. from City College in 1959. By that point she had been married and divorced, had two daughters (one of them is the art historian Michele Wallace), and was teaching in public schools. She painted only late at night and on vacations, doing mostly, by her own account, Impressionist-style landscapes.

At the same time she had also been reading James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) and watching the world around her change as the civil rights struggle shifted emphasis to black power from pacifism. By 1963 her art had changed, too, becoming topical and figurative and incorporating African textile patterns in a group of paintings she titled the American People Series.

Unusual for that era, Ms. Ringgold’s works showed middle-class blacks and whites together in power situations, however unequal the power actually was. In one picture, “The Civil Rights Triangle” (1963), three men in business suits, two black and one white, form a pyramid, with the white man on top, suggesting that to the extent the civil rights movement was white-approved, it was also white-controlled. In “The Cocktail Party,” from the next year, a crowd of white faces presses together in conversation, while a single black figure, squeezed down into a corner, stares out mutely.

It was probably no coincidence that these pictures came at a time when Ms. Ringgold was trying to break into the New York gallery scene and was running into resistance from both the white and the black art establishment. Meanwhile, her confidence and political commitments were deepening. The last few pictures were history-painting size and vehement in content.

In “The Flag Is Bleeding,” from 1967, three ambiguously related figures — a white couple and a black man with a knife — stand behind the dripping red stripes of an American flag. The potential violence implied explodes into full-out war in “Die” (1967), and the war is beyond racial. In an accurate gauge of the mood of the day, all the participants, black and white, look baffled and terrorized by the bloodbath they’re part of.

For Ms. Ringgold, much of the rest of that decade and the beginning of the next were devoted to hands-on activism and formal experimentation. In 1968 she initiated a demonstration against the Whitney Museum’s near-exclusion of black artists, and helped organize another at the Museum of Modern Art. For a series of paintings called Black Light, she eliminated white from her palette and added black pigment to colors in a group of African-American portraits.

By 1969 she was making extensive use of words in paintings and in eye-grabbing posters designed to drum up support for the Black Panthers, the inmates at Attica and the imprisoned Angela Davis. By then Ms. Ringgold considered racial politics and feminism inseparable, and threw her energy into gaining visibility for women.

Then, in what turned out to be the last oil-on-stretched-canvas painting she’d do for years, she made a portable mural for the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, consulting with the inmates first, asking them what they wanted to see. When, years later, the institution was converted to a men’s prison, the painting narrowly escaped being lost. Rescued and conserved, it is appearing away from a prison setting for the first time.

It’s the culminating work in an exhibition, organized by Tracy Fitzpatrick, a Neuberger curator, that could hardly be better. Cleanly laid out, with some pictures accompanied by excerpts from the artist’s autobiography, “We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold” (Bulfinch Press, 1995), it’s a potent visual experience and an important piece of American art history. That Ms. Ringgold went on to do so much else is, of course, phenomenal. That the Neuberger did this show is a gift.

“American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s” is on view through Dec. 19 at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase; (914) 251-6100, neuberger.org.

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