Premature Autopsies for the Race Man

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

"Premature Autopsies" for the Unrepentant Race Man (ver. 1.0)
by Mark Anthony Neal

On his 1989 recording, Majesty of the Blues, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis paid tribute to the legacy of New Orleans Jazz. The centerpiece of the recording was a three-part suite called "The New Orleans Function." Arranged as a traditional New Orleans funeral on the occasion of "The Death of Jazz," the suite features a 16-minute sermon aptly titled "Premature Autopsies." Though "Premature Autopsies" was written by noted Jazz critic and curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, it is none other than the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who delivers the sermon on the recording. While Reverend Wright was largely unknown to most in America only two months ago, at the time he recorded "Premature Autopsies" he was already regarded among the black cultural vanguard as one of Black America's--if not America's--greatest preachers.

Like the music that Marsalis "recreated" for Majesty of the Blues, Reverend Wright's preaching was the embodiment of what some might call "classical" Black American Culture--easily recalling examples like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Louis Armstrong, Mahailia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, the latter whom serves as the primary referent throughout "Premature Autopsies." Crouch composed "Premature Autopsies," in response the sense that classical Black American Culture was under assault in the marketplace and by a dismissive generation of young Americans. The sermon gives the strongest inkling to what drives Crouch's very public criticisms of rap music and hip-hop culture. But I also submit that the passion with which Reverend Wright delivers the sermon also explains the sense of indignity that was on display during the Q&A portion of Wright's recent talk at the National Press Club.

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Zillah Eisenstein: "Hillary is White"

Published on Sunday, May 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Hillary Is White
by Zillah Eisenstein

It seems clear that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president this fall. Nevertheless, it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.

None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.

And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.

Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.

Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.

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Zillah Eisenstein is professor of politics at Ithaca College, a feminist anti-racist activist, and author of ten books in feminisms and feminist theories across the globe. Her most recent book is Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2007).

Thinking Out Loud: BET Struggles for An Audience

from NPR

BET Struggles to Relate with Black Viewers
by Neda Ulaby

Morning Edition, May 16, 2008 · The Black Entertainment Television Network was created to bring authentic representations of African-Americans to cable television. After a couple of decades, however, it finds itself under intense criticism for pandering to the lowest possible tastes. A lot of African-Americans have given up on BET and are turning to other channels that have black shows.

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OP-ED: Shame on R Kelly? Shame on Us

From NewsOne.com

OP-ED

Shame on R. Kelly? Shame on Us
by Mark Anthony Neal

While we all can criticize the shamelessness of mainstream media and celebrity culture in the coverage of "events" like the R. Kelly trial, we should all feel a little shameful that the incident depicted in that much-downloaded videotape, did not incite our anger and vigilance--regardless of whether Robert Kelly was in the room.

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Thinking Out Loud: The R. Kelly Trial Begins

from Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ)

R. Kelly Trial Brings Up Broader Issues
Produced by Natalie Moore on Friday, May 09, 2008

Today, the R. Kelly child pornography trial finally gets underway. Six years ago police arrested the R&B star after a videotape surfaced of a man having sex with a girl, allegedly underage girl. Prosecutors say that man is Kelly. Kelly is pleading not guilty. Despite his legal travails, Kelly remains a multi-platinum-selling artist. And there will undoubtedly be a lot of hoopla as the case unfolds. But it’s more than mere celebrity obsession. For some, Kelly’s trial raises complicated issues around race and gender.

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from the London Times

Pied Piper of R&B, R. Kelly, goes on trial over 'child sex' video
by James Bone (New York)

...After many delays, including the presiding judge falling off a ladder, the singer suffering a burst appendix and the lead prosecutor giving birth, the allegation is finally being put to a trial. Jury selection began yesterday to pick a panel that could put the self-styled “Pied Piper of R&B” behind bars for up to 15 years if he is found guilty.

As R. Kelly arrived at court yesterday, fans cheered, but critics waved signs and called him a pedophile. Inside, Judge Vincent Gaughan outlined the indictment to potential jurors, while the defense lawyer Marc Martin told the court that the jury pool had been “irrevocably poisoned” by an article in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday citing sources talking about a potential witness.

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Philly Po-Po Beatdown--About Race?

from NewsOne.com

Philly-Beatdown Was All About Race
by James Braxton Peterson

It is somewhat disingenuous for Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, a black man, to suggest that Monday night's beat-down of three black men by about half-dozen uniformed officers was not about race. Of course it was about race (and class). Could this 'traffic stop' beating have possibly happened to three white men? I can't even imagine it.

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James Braxton Peterson, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC.

Steal This Election? Bakari Kitwana on Media Coverage of Obama

from NewsOne.com

Steal this Election
by Bakari Kitwana

If the year 2000 belongs to the Supreme Court, then 2008 belongs to the media. This year will go down as the one when the mainstream media worked over time to sabotage the Democratic primary.

For months, Senator Barack Obama has been the undisputed frontrunner. Even before this week’s decisive primary races in Guam, North Carolina and Indiana, he was ahead in the delegates count (1748 as compared to Clinton’s 1609, according to realclearpolitics.com).

He’s been ahead by a comfortable margin in the popular vote. He’s raised more money than anyone, with no sign of letting up. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s ignited record youth voter turnouts in one state after another all year.

By now, in any other election, the Democratic Party would have strongly encouraged the losing candidate to concede. The only logical reason why they haven’t—especially since Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning—is because Party leaders don’t want to accept Obama as their candidate. The party’s failure to accept the front-runner has created an opening for the media to take him down.

Because of decisions made in elite newsrooms, for six weeks the nation’s attention has been focused on the pastor of the frontrunner. The magnitude of coverage for someone on the periphery of a major election, such as Wright, is unprecedented.

Let’s be clear: the media gave Jeremiah Wright national coverage for a speech at the NAACP convention the day after a heavily publicized PBS appearance. In recent history, I don’t ever recall the media giving ‘breaking news’ live coverage to any Black Civil Rights organization. Even President Bill Clinton’s 1992 chastisement of Sista Souljah at the Rainbow Coalition gathering was witnessed via played back sound bites.

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Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"
by Mark Anthony Neal

Yesterday was the Democratic Primary for President in North Carolina; It was also the 73rd anniversary of my father's birth. The alignment of the two events seemed logical to me as it was my remembrance of the first time that my father voted--for fellow Georgia native Jimmy Carter in 1976--that forced me off the political fence. As a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow south, my father had little expectation that he would ever be able to vote, let alone vote for someone who looked vaguely like him. I can remember the look of pride on his face when he cast his first ballot and it was that look that I specifically recalled when I decided to support Obama back in January. And it wasn't so much about Obama--there wasn't anything inherently progressive about his politics--but that his candidacy inspired a level of investment in the political process--or "the franchise" as the old-timers liked to call it, hence the term disenfranchisement--that I had not witnessed in my life.

I celebrated the anniversary my father's birth by walking into my local polling spot, holding the hands of my two daughters, so that they could get a first hand view of participating in "the franchise". Indeed I was a little older than my 9-year-old is now when I was introduced to the political process working phone banks in the Bronx for Jimmy Carter's campaign. It was something that my 5-year-old said to me a few days ago though, that really forced me to think about what participating in the process really meant.

Watching yet another round of political ads on TV, my youngest daughter asked "daddy, are we voting for [Ba]Rock Obama?" and I immediately recalled historian Elsa Barkley Brown's classic essay "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom." In the essay, Barkley Brown examines the voting practices of black communities in Richmond, VA after the Civil War.

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John L. Jackson, Jr.: Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright

The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated May 16, 2008

Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright
By JOHN L. JACKSON JR.

In the 1950s and 1960s, "consensus historians" such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a "paranoid style" of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That "sick" style was concerned with "the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content." Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on the African-American community by the U.S. government exemplifies the extent to which paranoia —racial paranoia, in particular — continues to play a powerful role in our politics.

The civil-rights movement succeeded in outlawing legal discrimination and driving explicit racism to the margins of society. But in many respects, racism has simply gone underground. Today it is usually subtle, making it more difficult to identify. Of course, recent studies demonstrate that black people still have a harder time than white people (even with identical credentials) when it comes to buying new homes or cars or landing lucrative jobs. According to some social scientists, those differences aren't just about white prejudice. They are also related to institutional and structural realities like housing patterns and the reliance on market forces in hiring that perpetuate racial differences as a byproduct of seemingly colorblind social policies.

When racism was explicit and legal, there was less need for African-Americans to be paranoid about it. For the most part, what they saw was what they got. Racists could be unabashed about their feelings, and politicians could blatantly vow, like George Wallace, to fight for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

With the social advances of the 1960s, African-Americans have become increasingly secure in their legal citizenship, but they are less confident about determining when they are being victimized by silent and undeclared racism. Racial paranoia characterizes the post-civil-rights generation of "affirmative-action babies." They are young black people for whom legal segregation is a glimpse at black-and-white images in a PBS documentary. But they also have a sneaking suspicion that somehow the smallest slights and the most trivial of gestures may be a telltale sign of what has been called "two-faced racism" — hidden racial animus dressed up to look politically correct. Such uncertainty gives rise to paranoia, especially if we stubbornly fail to discuss racism's newfangled subtleties.

What do I mean by racial paranoia? It describes the suspicions black people have whenever, say, an idle white salesperson at their local drugstore sees them beckoning with a question but ignores them anyway. Or when that salesperson takes a few seconds longer than needed to sigh himself into an unenthusiastic response. Insignificant, I know — petty, even. More hollow bourgeois angst. But when talking about race and racism, we shouldn't underestimate the potential significance of seemingly inconsequential acts.

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John L. Jackson Jr. is an associate professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, was published this spring by Basic Civitas. He blogs as Anthroman