Saggin' on the Down Low?

The Bryant Park Project
October 26, 2007

A new campaign by the city of Dallas targets the hip-hop style of wearing your pants low enough that your boxers are showin — and part of your posterior, too.

The campaign has a signature song, "Pull Your Pants Up," by Dooney Da' Priest, that links so-called saggin' with being gay. After the BPP blogged NPR's original report on the public service announcement, listeners objected to lyrics they consider homophobic.

Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture in the Department of African American Studies at Duke University, parses the lyrics and explains why they'll hit some young men hard.

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Doubting Thomas

from Critical Noir @ Vibe

Doubting Thomas
by Mark Anthony Neal

When Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace published their respective manifestos for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman in the 1970s they sparked public debates about the state of relations between black men and women. Waged largely in artistic and intellectual circles—Ms. Magazine, for example published early excerpts of Wallace’s book—the debates were beyond the gaze of most White Americans. Mainstream America fully confronted the gender tensions within Black America in the autumn of 1991 as Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexual harassment in the workplace in the midst of his confirmation hearings.

As political conservatives who were presumed marginal to the political views of large segments of Black America, Thomas and his accuser Anita Hill, were unlikely characters in the on-going dramas between black women and men. With the confirmation hearings being broadcast in real-time, the debates seemed to project stigmas of deviance on relations between black men and women as if these dynamics were unique to black people. This sense of deviance was underwritten by centuries old racist truisms about black male sexuality—Thomas’s apparent sexual appetite—and black female culpability via Hill’s presumed political (gold-digging) ambitions.

Thomas, sensing the new technological terrain in which the drama unfolded, famously bore witness to the uniqueness of the moment with his claim that so-called “left wing” attacks on him were representative of a high-tech lynching. While Thomas’s language, with its clear reference to Jim Crow-era justice, helped congeal the now popular notion of “playing the race card,” his move came at the expense of the real issues that women—and black women in particular—have faced in the workplace. Thus it is ironic that 16 years later, Thomas revisits the drama of those hearings, just as another Thomas—Isiah—is found guilty of sexual harassment of another black woman.

Read the Full Essay at Critical Noir @ Vibe

For Your Consideration: Keyshia Cole

from Critical Noir @ Vibe

Waiting for Keyshia
by Mark Anthony Neal

The lack of experience by producers and vocalists often adds to the dissonance that resonates in the vocal quality of figures like Mary J. Blige or Faith Evans, who have become easy targets for a generation that is regularly thought to be out of tune—musically, morally, and politically—with the Soul singers of the 1960s and 1970s. But I’d like to suggest that such dissonance is not simply the product of a generation of singers who are out of pitch—and lacking the training to know so—but a response to the ways that post-Civil Rights generations hear the world. The nostalgic harmonies of the Civil Rights Generation (and their parents, many of whom are in the 80s) strikes discord in the lives of post-Civil Rights generations, notably Generation Hip-Hop, which have never had a tangible relationship to concepts such as “freedom” and “liberation” that some in the old guard presumed was transferable. Issues like the crack cocaine epidemic, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement (largely based on race and class), depressed wages, lack of access to quality and affordable healthcare, misogyny, the failing infrastructure of public schooling, homophobia, as well as a populism of common sense (which by definition is stridently conservative and anti-intellectual), have often left post-Civil Rights generations grasping for straws, much the way Keyshia Cole—who I offer for your consideration—seems to frantically grasp for notes in virtually every song that she sings.

Read the Full Essay

from the Files of Bakari Kitwana

from New York Newsday

Imus returning, and war against hip-hop sexism grows
BY BAKARI KITWANA

Bakari Kitwana is artist-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago and the executive director of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop.

October 14, 2007

It's been six months since Don Imus' hateful comments about Rutgers University's black female basketball players caused a national backlash against the shock jock and against hip-hop's representation of women. What has been the result?

Imus lost his job, scored a huge settlement with his former employer and is soon to begin another cushy job behind the microphone (at ABC Radio). No love lost for Imus.

Black community leaders and grassroots activists who felt he was out of line continue to wage a moral civil war against the entertainment industry's demeaning representations of black women. It is a battle that began long before Imus helped shine a spotlight on hip-hop's gender problem.

The first salvos were fired in the early 1990s by the National Political Congress of Black Women's C. Delores Tucker and the Abyssinian Baptist Church's Rev. Calvin Butts. Former U.S. Education secretary William Bennett joined arms with Tucker, and in 1994 congressional hearings followed on the impact of so-called "gangsta rap" music.

Also pre-Imus was the 2005 Essence magazine "Take Back the Music" campaign and the months-earlier protests by women at Sarah Lawrence and Spelman colleges. Grassroots efforts like these, as well as those from groups like Hip-Hop Congress and the Hip-Hop Association, never wavered from the call for media reform and balance within the mainstream hip-hop industry: more radio play, video rotation and recording contracts for artists who don't peddle in one-dimensional representation of black women and men.

Imus' idiotic and hateful comments helped raised the level of ire, leading many within the hip-hop community and beyond to conclude that enough is enough. Master P started a profanity-free label called Take a Stand Records. Houston-based rapper Chamillionaire said he'd stop using profanity and racial slurs in his rhymes. The Wonda Women Project, headed by Chicago-based Ang13 and Unmuvabo Vendetta, toured 20 Midwest cities last spring, challenging hip-hop spaces to give way to female MCs.

In the mainstream limelight, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton met pressure from supporters and detractors to return $800,000 raised for her campaign by hip-hop producer Timbaland. The Oprah Winfrey Show devoted two days to town hall meetings on misogyny and hip-hop, but let corporate bigwigs off the hook - instead circling the wagons around the usual suspects. Russell Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network called on corporate record labels to ban three offensive words. The Rev. Al Sharpton led a March for Decency. The Rev. Delman Coates and his Enough is Enough campaign protested outside the home of BET executive Debra Lee. And in the past few weeks, BET broadcast a town hall meeting, "Hip-Hop vs. America," which aired days after congressional hearings, titled "From Imus to Industry: The Business of Stereotypes and Degradation," convened on hip-hop's representation of black women.

When the smoke clears, Imus may be remembered as nothing more than the catalyst that any good movement needs. But grandstanding, posturing and hot air aside, what substantial improvements have the latest volleys in the hip-hop gender wars produced? I believe that Master P's comments during last week's congressional hearings point us in the right direction.

"Just like the NBA ... we have to form a union that we can control ... that can hit these [rap artists] in their pockets, by saying if you put out this type of music and don't change or think about what you say, we are going to hurt you in your pockets. Then people are going to change because most of these guys are in it for the money."

Though this is a great start, we must go a step further and put gender training at the forefront. Of course, as the revelations of the sexual harassment lawsuit against Madison Square Garden and Knicks' coach Isiah Thomas revealed, this is bigger than hip-hop and than the hip-hop generation. Much like our culture as a whole, the NBA needs gender training as badly as hip-hop does - from the playing court to the boardrooms.

Almost a decade ago, to the chagrin of feminists, pioneering hip-hop journalist Joan Morgan said of her book "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost": "Hip-Hop made me a better feminist." If hip-hop artists and the fans who emulate them can ever begin to understand what she meant, there still will be hope.

Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.

How Do "We" Keep a Social Movement Alive?

from Document the Silence
October 6, 2007

On October 31st, Women of color from around the country will be gathering in spaces where acts of violence against women of color occurred to reclaim that space and take a stand against continued gender and or racially motivated violence. Stop the Violence, End the Silence participants will wear red and transform the space with red objects as a sign of reclamation. Events will commence at 9 pm EST all across the country. Participants are encouraged to read a solidarity litany at the close of their self designed program.

This call to action was sparked by University of Chicago Political Science graduate student Fallon Wilson and activist Izetta Mobley. After seeing very little media attention given to the plight of Megan Williams, a black woman brutally raped and tortured by 6 people for a week, and that of a Haitian woman in Dunbar Village, Florida who was also raped and forced to perform oral sex on her son, they created a short film How Do We Keep a Social Movement Alive?, asking those who mobilized on behalf of the Jena 6 to not neglect these instances of violence against women of color. As more and more web viewers saw the short film, they learned of other stories two of which are now in the documentary and countless others that have made their way onto the website Document the Silence.

Women of color from across the country will also be organizing Town Hall meetings in their homes, places of worship, and work places in the weeks leading up to the 31st . These meetings are designed to document the silences surrounding women of color stories of violence by creating a "safe space" for both women and men to share their stories. Participants are encouraged to outline ways that people can stay engaged and make a difference within their own communities. Wilson's and Mobley's short documentary, How Do We Keep a Social Movement Alive?, will be the starting point for these discussions. Confirmed sites of participation include Atlanta, Chicago, and New York.

To contact organizers please email: beboldbered@gmail.com

Additional resources available @ Document the Silence

Little Man Isiah

Little Man Isiah
by Mark Anthony Neal

As a collegiate athlete and NBA professional, Isiah Thomas was a deft and compelling figure, proving both elusive and crafty, in a sport in which he was more often than not, the shortest figure on the court. Thomas was the quintessential “little man” in a big man’s game. Thomas’s “little man” aesthetic translated into two world championships for the Detroit Pistons and his elevation as one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players. But in retirement Thomas reputation as the “little engine that could” has been severely challenged by difficult and at times inept performances as the coach and general manager of several NBA teams and as the one-time owner of the Continental Basketball Association (CBA). No doubt when he tried to succeed on the corporate side of the National Basketball Association, Thomas’s status as an African-American complicated the “little man” issues he had faced throughout his career; Thomas simply wanted to be one of the boys. But as so many black athletes have found out—Michael Jordan’s tenure as general manager of the Washington Wizards being the most visible example—no amount of celebrity and wealth, will allow them to be one of the boys; Unless of course if it is in the sharing of the everyday privilege that comes so easily at the expense of women.

Read the Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com