Syllabus: Sampling Soul 2.0

9th Wonder

Sampling Soul 2.0

Department of African & African American Studies

AAAS 132/VMS 104-C-01

Fall 2011

Tuesday 6:00pm – 8:30pm

White Lecture Hall, 107

Instructors:

Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. | 

Twitter:@NewBlackMan                                                                                                                                                     

9^th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) | 

Twitter: @9thWonderMusic

Teaching Assistants:

Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell, ABD  

Kesha Lee

Course Description

Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s and became the secular soundtrack of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists such as Aretha Franklin and James Brown and record companies such as Motown and Stax, as well as the term “Soul” became symbols of black aspiration and black political engagement.  In the decades since the rise of “Soul,” the music and its icons are continuously referenced in contemporary popular culture via movie trailers, commercials, television sitcoms and of course music.  In the process “Soul” has become a significant and lucrative cultural archive. Co-taught with Grammy Award winning producer 9^th Wonder  and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, “Sampling Soul” will examine how the concept of “Soul” has functioned as raw data for contemporary forms of cultural expression. In addition the course will consider the broader cultural implications of sampling, in the practices of parody and collage, and the legal ramifications of sampling within the context of intellectual property law.  The course also offers the opportunity to rethink the concept of archival material in the digital age.

Books

Parodies of Ownership: Hip-HopAesthetics and Intellectual Property Law | Richard L. Schur

Creative License: The Law and Cultureof Digital Sampling | Kembrew McLeod & Peter Dicola

Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture& the Post-Soul Aesthetic | Mark Anthony Neal

The Death of Rhythm & Blues | Nelson George

Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves andDemons of Marvin Gaye | Michael Eric Dyson

Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop’s PhilosopherKing | edited by Julius Bailey

Five Days of Bleeding | Ricardo Cortez Cruz

***

Week 1—Sampling Sampling

The Art and Aesthetics of Sampling

August 30, 2011

Introduction to sampling as a practice. Is sampling a recent phenomenon? What are the historical and artistic context for sampling practices. How do terms like appropriation, borrowing, parody, pastiche, collage and “theft” factor into our understandings of sampling practices. How has sampling practices impacted contemporary art?

Week 2—Sampling A Blues People

Dark Voices and Blue Movements Against the Night

September 6, 2011

In line with Amiri Baraka’s classic claim that the “spirits do not descend without music,” music serves as a primary resource for Black Americans to articulate notions of pain, resistance, pleasure, pride, faith and aspiration.  This week we’ll examine the music of the pre-Soul era.

Readings: George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues | Chap 1: Philosophy, Money, and Music; Chap 2: Dark Voices in the Night; Chap 3: The New Negro

Discussion Question (Beta)

Week 3—Sampling Soul

The Cultural and Historical Legacy of Soul

September 13, 2011

Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s, combining the drive of rhythm and blues, with the flourishes of the black gospel tradition.  By the 1960s it was part of a broader social movement articulate politically in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, philosophically in the concept of Black Nationalism and the Black Arts Movement and stylistically in the flourishing of Afros.   This week we will look Soul music and its impact on American culture.

Readings: George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues | Chap 4: Black Beauty, Black Confusion; Chap 5: Redemption Songs in the Age of Corporations; Chap 6: Crossover: The Death of Rhythm and Blues; Chap 7: Assimilation Triumphs, Retronuevo Rises

Discussion Question (# 1)

Week 4—Sampling Blackness

Black Culture as Intellectual Property

September 20, 2011

Though various forms of black culture have circulated freely in the United States and across the globe, they have often done so as the property of corporate entities. What is the relationship between black bodies as chattel and black culture as property?  What happens when the cultural expressions of a formerly enslaved peoples becomes intellectual property?

Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership  | Chap 1: From Chattel to Intellectual Property; Chap 2: Critical Race Theory, Signifyin’ and Cultural Ownership;  Chap 3: Defining Hip-Hop Aesthetics; Chap 4: Claiming Ownership in the Post-Civil Rights Era; Alkon, Alison Hope. "Growing Resistance: Food, Culture, and the Mo'Better Foods Farmers' Market" Gastronomica, Volume 7, No. 3 (summer 2007), pp. 93-99; Chavis, Shaun. “Is There a Difference Between Southern and Soul?” in Reed, Dale Volberg, John Shelton Reed, and John T. Edge, eds. Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Pps. 237-244;  Nettles, Kimberly D. "'Saving' Soul Food." Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Volume 7, No. 3 (summer 2007), pp. 106- 113; Zafar, Rafia. "The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women's Cookbooks." Feminist Studies, Volume 25, No. 2 (summer 1999), pp. 449-469.

Discussion Question (# 2)

Week 5—Sampling Hip-Hop Aesthetics

Transformative Uses: Parody, Memory, Community

September 27, 2011

How have the aesthetics of Hip-Hop challenged the legitimacy of Intellectual Property Law and in the process transformed how we think about intellectual property and its value?

Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership  | Chap 5: “Fair Use” and the Circulation of Racialized Texts; Chap 6: “Transformative Uses”: Parody and Memory;  Chap 7: From Invisibility to Erasure? The Consequences of Hip-hop Aesthetics

Discussion Question (# 3)

Week 6—Sampling Sampling

The Culture of Digital Sampling

October 4, 2011

Is sampling beats “stealing” music and evidence of a lazy, uncreative impulse in contemporary art? In Making Beats, ethnomusicologist Joe Schloss argues that sample-based hip-hop is a legitimate art form unto itself.

Readings: McLeod & DiCola, Creative License

Screening:  Copyright Criminals (dir. Benjamin Franzen, 2009)

Discussion Question (# 4)

Mid-term Examination Distributed

*Week 7—Sampling Soul Divas

Black Femininity as Intellectual Property

October 18, 2011

This week we will focus on “gendering” soul.  We will explore a black women’s tradition within soul aesthetics and cultural forms.  Using gender, class, and sexuality as critical lenses, we will examine the interplay of gender and sexual politics, black musical traditions, and sampling. We will also  consider the relationship between soul expressions and black womanhood. 

Readings: “‘All That You Can't Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe” by Daphne Brooks, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 8.1 (2008) 180-204; “Toni Braxton, Disney, and Thermodynamics by Jason King, TDR Fall 2002, Vol. 46, No. 3 (T175), Pages 54-81; “The "Batty" Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body,” Janell Hobson, Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4, Women, Art, and Aesthetics (Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp. 87-105

Discussion Question (# 4)

Midterm Examination Due

Week 8—Sampling The Post-Soul (The R. Kelly re-mix)

Toward a Post-Soul Aesthetic

October 25, 2011

Well before sampling became the lingua franca of cultural appropriation, a generation of Black artists and thinkers—the so-called Post-Soul Generation—began to appropriate Soul Culture and remake it to fit the demands of the post-Civil Rights era.

Readings: Neal, Soul Babies | Chap 1: “You Remind Me of Something: Towards a Post-Soul Aesthetic; Chap 2: “Sweetback’s Revenge: Gangsters, Blaxploitation, and Black Middle-Class Identity; Chap 3: Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Gender Politics

Discussion Question (# 5)

Week 9—Sampling Black Thought

Voices of the Post-Soul Intelligentsia

November 1, 2011

Armed with access to new and innovative technologies and an affinity for popular culture, the post-Soul generation began to articulate a view of the world that samples, appropriated, remixed, mashed, parodied, etc existing black thought.

Readings: Neal, Soul Babies | Chap 4: The Post-Soul Intelligentsia: Mass Media, Popular Culture, and Social Praxis; Chap 5: Native Tongues: Voices of the Post-Soul Intelligentsia

Discussion Question (# 6)

Week 10—Sampling Queer

Queer Sounds, Queer Samples

November 8, 2011

Although African American musical forms like hip hop are now accepted forms of mainstream popular music, not all of the music produced within these  genres are accepted.  Sampling Queer offers a critical way of thinking about how various sonic tropes that are sampled are often rendered queer by virtue of not adhering to conventional understandings of soul, hip hop, and R&B.

Readings: “Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no”: Grace Jones and the performance of Strange in the Post-Soul Moment, ”Francesca Royster, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 19, Number 1, March 2009 , pp. 77-94(18); “Any Love: Silence, Theft, and Rumor in the Work of Luther Vandross,” Jason King , Callaloo, Vol. 23, No. 1, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender: Literature and Culture (Winter, 2000), pp. 422-447

Discussion Question (# 7)

Week 11—Sampling Marvin

The Art, Loves & Demons of a Soul Man

November 15, 2011

As the “Crown Prince” of Motown Records, Marvin Gaye as an example of the quintessential “Soul Man,” a secular figure who often carried a much cultural weight as his “Race Man,” counterparts.  In this session we will examine the career and influence of Gaye and the way he has been sampled.

Readings: Dyson, Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye

Discussion Question (# 8)

Week 12—Sampling Hypertext

Hypertext/Hypermedia as Sampling

November 29, 2011

Ricardo Cortez Cruz’s 1995 novel Five Days of Bleeding offers a brilliant entry into the sampling of everyday life, using hypertext, in a historical moment when hypertext was just becoming available to many via the internet.

Readings: Cruz, Five Days of Bleeding.

Discussion Question (#9)

Week 13—Sampling Shawn Carter

Sampling and Cosmopolitan Identity in Hip-Hop

December 6, 2011

Jay Z offers an interesting “text” to examine how sampling might be manifested in performance, musical production, identity politics and notions of black masculinity.

Readings: Bailey, ed., Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King

Discussion Question (#10)

Final Examination Distributed

Access to the Tower: Conferences as Examples of Academia’s Exclusionary Practices

Access to the Tower:

Conferences as Examples of Academia’s Exclusionary Practices

by John (J.D.) Roberts | Special to NewBlackMan

As an academic at a major university in the U.S., my university email inbox is frequently bombarded with opportunities for grants, scholarships, fellowships, and the occasional invitation to attend or submit to an academic conference. While many might view these emails as inbox clutter, my curiosity usually gets the best of me, so I end up reading them all (at least a little bit). This past fall, I received an email that quite by accident made me rethink the entire mission statement of what it is to be in academia.

An email announced a conference exploring the *Popular Topic* on campus. Intrigued, I then saw the sticker price to attend: $60 for graduate students. While interested, that was a bit much in my opinion to attend. This was not the heart of the story though. My eye then went to the price for the general public to attend: $100. In an era where public suspicion against the supposed Marxist and socialist agendas of academics reigns (do not forget our secret Muslim socialist terrorist President Obama too!), I found it disheartening to see such a large price tag for the public to attend. I believe there are many people in the community that might have attended a conference such as this if they A) knew about it and B) could comfortably afford it. Pricing the average citizen out who might want to listen and/or participate in the conference is exclusionary and counterproductive. The exclusion of the public from academic events is an important issue for numerous reasons, one of which is the current state of politics and public debate.

The current sociopolitical climate in America has created a highly contentious atmosphere, particularly in public debates involving the humanities. In academic fields where “facts” are often debated and disputed as part of the fields’ very structures, public utilization of knowledge from these fields has always been and remains a tricky endeavor. Witness the recent factual distortions and errors regarding Revolutionary-era American history by Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, as well as the callous and ridiculous discussions of Progressive-era America by Glenn Beck to see how “facts” are utilized for debate by public figures. Why does this matter to academics? These very public and outspoken public figures are often one of the main sources of history/politics/economics/sociology for an American public that does not have the time, patience, desire or energy to read. More people rely on TV news montages on the Civil War or the Ken Burns documentary than on texts by famous historians such as David Blight or Eric Foner.

While public figures such as Beck and Palin speak directly to an audience on TV and in public events, academics often cloister themselves behind university doors, speaking primarily to other academics in forums and conferences, and writing highly specialized and impenetrable texts that sell heavily to university libraries instead of the general public. What they know and discuss often does not get disseminated to the general public in a palatable manner with the proper context and evidence. However, this piece is not an indictment of academia, but rather a rallying cry. Simply stated, we can do better. 

Filmmaker Julie Dash to Speak at Duke on 20th Anniversary of 'Daughters of the Dust'

Durham, NC - On the 20th anniversary of its release, Julie Dash will discuss her film "Daughters of the Dust" following the film's screening at Duke University on Thursday, Sept. 8.

The film, which kicks off the Duke African and African American Studies department film series, will be shown at 6 p.m. at the Nasher Museum of Art.  A discussion with Dash and art history professor Richard Powell will follow the screening. The event is free and open to the public.

"With the spirited public conversations about films like 'Precious,' 'For Colored Girls' and, most recently, 'The Help,' it's clear that the moving image continues to be one of the critical sites of interests about the preservation and dissemination of images of black humanity," said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke and the event organizer. "With our film series, we are hoping to intervene in these conversations by highlighting the expansive range of films that reflect black experiences."

"Daughters of the Dust," released in 1991, was the first feature by an African-American woman to gain national theatrical release and was named to the National Film Registry, a collection of films deemed by the Library of Congress to be national treasures.

The film draws on Dash's South Carolina heritage and focuses on three generations of women with roots in the Sea Islands and Gullah culture. Set in 1902, "Daughters of the Dust" grapples with slavery's legacy, migration, sexual abuse and sexual freedom, and maintaining tradition amid modern pressures.

Dash's visit also will include screenings of her short film "Praise House," a collaboration with the founder and choreographer of Urban Bush Women.

The 2011-12 African and African American Studies film series, curated by Neal and history graduate student Cynthia Greenlee-Donnell, will continue in October with "Handsworth Songs" (1986), an experimental film documenting the 1985 racial unrest in Britain.

For more information, visit Duke's African and African American Studies website.

Historians Respond: Who Needs The Help?

Historians Respond: Who Needs The Help?

by Jim Downs & Thavolia Glymph | HuffingtonPost

The Help has stirred up a controversy.

On the one side are the faithful fans of the book-turned-film who have enthusiastically praised its moral lessons, believable characters and insider's view into the lives of black women domestics in the mid-20th century South, an interpretation author Kathryn Stockett leaves room for. "The Help is fiction, by and large," she writes, positing an implicit claim about the reality of black and white women's lives during the 1960s.

On the other side stand the mostly black writers, intellectuals and historians who have challenged the problematic and often inaccurate portrayal of black women in the film and the troubling way that the civil rights movement is treated. As Martha Southgate incisively stated, "within the civil rights movement, white people were the help."

Indeed, the fantasy life of the Old South is given new life in the book through the story of Fay Belle. The elderly woman remembers hiding from the dreaded Yankees in a steam trunk with her young mistress during the Civil War and cradling her former mistress in her old age. They were "best friends" to the end. Amazingly, the elderly black woman would have been at least 100 years old when Skeeter interviewed her. But, no matter. This is "fiction, by and large."

If fans placed themselves in the position of Rachel, the very minor black character in the film, they might have a better understanding of the plight of black women domestics.

Melissa Harris Perry on the 6th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry marked the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a searing monologue about what she saw as the country's failure to learn from the disaster on Monday's "Rachel Maddow Show."

“It Doesn’t Get Any More Real Than Perry”?: The Right’s Stake in Real Americaness

 
“It Doesn’t Get Any More Real Than Perry”?: 

The Right’s Stake in Real Americaness 
by Theresa Runstedtler | special to NewBlackMan

“People of all persuasions are sick, sick, SICK of mollycoddling, pandering and Edwardian (as in John Edwards) phoniness . . . . It doesn’t get any more real than Perry. The elite may call it ‘swagger’; I call it a real man with real convictions and the courage to stand up for them, which happen to comport with the majority of Americans. Or as they say in Texas, he is had and cattle. And the coupe de gras, he is a spiritually anchored and philosophically happy warrior.”

– Republican strategist Mary Matalin on presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas)

Since when did the Right (and more specifically white Republican men from Texas) become the arbiters of what it means to be a “real American man”?

As a Canadian transplant, I’ve always found the theatrics of the U.S. political scene fascinating, where big money campaigns seem interminable and public spectacle usually trumps any in-depth discussion of policy. American politics is a virtual blood-sport with all its sound bite and bombastic fury. Texas Governor Rick Perry is just the latest Republican to enter the pissing contest that is the 2012 presidential campaign, ready to show the “real America” that he has the balls to lead the nation.

Of course, Perry is simply following in the well-worn footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush, with his self-righteous swagger, Texas drawl, and rugged, frontier persona. He prefers cowboy boots to dress shoes and proudly recounts shooting a coyote with his .380 Ruger (it had a laser sight). He wears his Christianity on his sleeve, most recently playing the patriarchal prophet at his Houston prayer rally. Even though Bush’s people reportedly disdain Perry, he seems to have taken many of his moves right out of their campaign playbook.

Mark Anthony Neal Reflects on the Life of Nickolas Ashford

The Michael Eric Dyson Show

Monday August 29, 2011

Mark Anthony Neal Reflects on the Life of Nickolas Ashford

Last week, Motown singer and songwriter Nick Ashford died in New York City from throat cancer at the age of 70. He was half of the Motown duo Ashford & Simpson and, along with his wife, Valerie Simpson, penned such hits as “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “You’re All I Need To Get By,” and “Reach Out And Touch Somebody’s Hand,” in addition to their own tunes like “It Seems to Hang On.” As a singing duo, they were probably best known for their hit song “Solid.” Music historian and Duke University Professor Dr. Mark Anthony Neal remembers Ashford’s music and legacy.

Listen Now: Dr. Mark Anthony Neal

“Where Dey At?”: Bounce and the ‘Sanctified Swing’ in Post-Katrina New Orleans

“Where Dey At?”: 

Bounce and the ‘Sanctified Swing’ in Post-Katrina New Orleans

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levees in New Orleans, there were many high profiles efforts to raise awareness about the cultural legacy of New Orleans.  Many of those efforts centered on the exaltation of New Orleans Jazz, with many events aimed at providing shelter and support for Jazz musicians dispersed by the tragedy. New Orleans Jazz seemed the most important resource to be protected in the months after Katrina, more so than the people who made the city such a vital and important, ever evolving cultural outpost. Lost in the focus on New Orleans Jazz—arguably one of the nation’s most important cultural exports—are other forms of musical expression that were and continue to be crucial to the survival and spirituality of New Orleans and its citizens, including those who have yet to return.

Though Jazz was a critical component of Black political discourse and intellectual development throughout the 20^th century—jazz musicians like John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln are some of the most resonate examples of creative intellectuals—New Orleans Jazz is often depicted as being tethered to some imagined past, in which race relations and the power dynamics embedded in them were far more simplistic. 

Indeed recent films like The Princess and the Frog and The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons the television series Treme (despite it’s progressive political critiques) contribute to a nostalgic view that New Orleans Jazz as a dated, static musical form that offers an “authentic” alternative to more commercially viable forms of popular music like rap and R&B music.  Much of this has to do with the relationship between New Orleans Jazz and the leisure and tourist industries that were so vital to the city’s economy.  In this context, mainstreams desires to save New Orleans Jazz and to protect its musicians are less about strengthening the links between Jazz and Black cultural resistance—a resistance that historically fermented in New Orleans—but maintaining the economic vitality of what Johari Jabir calls the “theater of tourism” in which Black bodies are rarely thought of as citizens but laborers, servants and performers.

In the introduction to the  book, In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions, scholar Clyde Woods places New Orleans Jazz in a much broader context, as part of what Woods has famously described as a “Blues tradition of investigation.”  As Woods notes in his essay, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon and the Return to the Source,” historically the city of New Orleans and the region was “latticed with resistance networks that linked enslaved and free blacks with maroon colonies established in the city’s cypress forests swamps.” 

Michael Eric Dyson: In the Name of King

In the Name of King

by Michael Eric Dyson | Time.com

A year ago, as my interview wrapped with President Obama in the Oval Office, he led me to the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Charles Alston that he had installed near a bust of Abraham Lincoln. Obama's gaunt visage creased in delight as we gazed in silent awe on the face of a man the two of us baby boomers have acknowledged as a great inspiration. In the near future Obama will participate in a far more public recognition of the martyr's meaning when he speaks at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall. King becomes the first individual African American to occupy the sacred civic space dominated by beloved Presidents like George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. King's image on the Mall is a sturdy reminder that his story, and the story of the people for whom he died, helped to rescue American democracy and make justice a living creed. King's memorial is even more impressive because his statue rises 30 ft. high on a direct line between the likenesses of Jefferson and Lincoln, dwarfing those memorials by 11 ft. — it is one of the tallest on the Mall. Even in death, King is still breaking barriers.

Obama's words on the Mall will be framed by a bitter dispute over King's legacy in black America and its revelation, or distortion, in leaders like Al Sharpton and Obama himself. Sharpton has emerged as an improbable leader of black America and a more improbable defender of Obama, a status that challenges his prophetic credentials in some quarters. Sharpton tangled on radio in 2010 with television host Tavis Smiley over Sharpton's contention that Obama shouldn't "ballyhoo 'a black agenda.' " Earlier this year on cable television, Princeton professor Cornel West shouted at Sharpton that the voluble minister could be "easily manipulated by ... the White House" to become the "public face" of entrenched Wall Street and corporate interests.

If Smiley and West fear that Sharpton has become Obama's pal and not his prophet, they seek to take up the slack and press Obama about his neglect of blacks and the poor at every chance. Their relentless criticism has earned them rebukes from many black folk and the enmity of radio host Tom Joyner, who once championed the duo, while Joyner's colleague Steve Harvey derided the pair as "Uncle Toms." These vicious attacks didn't stop Smiley and West from hitting the road recently for a 16-city "poverty tour" to spotlight the invisible poor in the name of King. Unfortunately, the political and racial circumstances that gripped their crusade drew more press to them than to the poor. Obama, Smiley and West and Sharpton all claim King's example. Who makes the most of it is a complicated story.

Emmett Till and Dr. King's Memorial

Emmett Till & Mamie Till Mobley

Emmett Till and Dr. King's Memorial

by Eddie Glaude, Jr. | HuffPost BlackVoices

Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. They found his body horribly mangled at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Till had dared to break one of the sacred rules of the Jim Crow South. He "flirted" with a white woman. He was only fourteen years old.

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided to have an open-casket funeral. She wanted everyone to see what they had done to "her baby." The Chicago Defender reported that over "250,000 people viewed and passed by the bier of little Emmett Till ... All were shocked, some horrified and appalled. Many prayed, scores fainted and practically all, men, women and children wept."

On September 15th, 1955 Jet Magazine published, unedited, the images of Emmett Till. Black America was stunned. For some, this was the first visual image of the brutality of American racism. For others, the dead body of Till only confirmed the disease at the heart of the United States. America was sick. And Emmett Till was to become the sacrificial lamb, which sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement that sought to heal the nation.

What did Mamie Till Mobley want us to see when she decided to leave open her baby's coffin? What was she memorializing at that moment? Obviously, her decision called attention to the brutality of American racism. But I am convinced that she wanted to make visible all of those victims of American hatred who remained invisible. The nameless black bodies that lined the bottom of the Tallahatchie River and the spirits that were defeated daily by the systemic and dehumanizing experience of white supremacy were all captured in the brutally disfigured face of a murdered fourteen-year old boy. Perhaps she wanted that image to haunt the nation -- to force us to remember those who reside in the shadows. Those images defined a generation. And they, at least for me, continue to haunt.

On the exact same day, eight years later, an estimated 250,000 people engaged in an historic demonstration before the Lincoln Memorial for civil rights and economic justice. And it was here that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. In some ways, that speech stands as a third "founding" of the nation. Just as President Lincoln's second inaugural offered a revision of the revolutionary beginnings of America, Dr. King's words expanded the very idea of American democracy in which the promises of freedom and justice would be extended to its entire people.

We have now honored Dr. King with a national memorial. But what are we to see and to remember when we visit this place? How are we to understand its connection to the death of Emmett Till?

Imani Perry on the Significance of the MLK Memorial

The Michael Eric Dyson Show

Friday August 26, 2011

 

Imani Perry on the Significance of the MLK Memorial

Despite the threat from Hurricane Irene, visitors are beginning to gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the opening of the new memorial dedicated to fallen Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr. But how diverse is this group? A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed that seven out of 10 Americans are interested in visiting the new MLK memorial, but that number has some huge racial disparities. We talk to Dr. Imani Perry, professor in the Center for African-American Studies at Princeton University, to help us make sense of those numbers and to explore the larger significance of the MLK memorial.

Listen Now: Dr. Imani Perry

What Happened to Post-Blackness? Touré, Michael Vick and the Politics of Cultural Racism

What Happened to Post-Blackness?

Touré, Michael Vick and the Politics of Cultural Racism

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

In the current issue of ESPN: The Magazine, Touré, author of the forthcoming Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, jumps into the discourse about race, Michael Vick, and his larger significance as we enter the 2011 football season.   In “What if Michael Vick were white?”, which includes the requisite and troubling picture of Vick “in whiteface” (“Touré says that picture is both inappropriate and undermines his entire premise”) Touré explores how different Vick’s life on and off the field might have been if he wasn’t black.   

While acknowledging the advantages of whiteness and the privileges that are generated because of the structures of American racism, Touré decides to focus on how a hypothetical racial transformation would change Vick’s life in other ways. “The problem with the ‘switch the subject's race to determine if it's racism’ test runs much deeper than that. It fails to take into account that switching someone's race changes his entire existence.,” notes Touré. Among others things, he asks “Would a white kid have been introduced to dogfighting at a young age and have it become normalized?”  The answer that Touré seems to come up with is no, seemingly arguing that his participation in dog fighting results from his upbringing “in the projects of Newport News, VA” without a father (he also argues that his ability to bankroll a dogfighting enterprise came about because of his class status that resulted from his NFL career, an opportunity that came about because he like “many young black men see sports as the only way out”).

Here, Touré plays into the dominant discourse that links blackness, a culture poverty and presumably hip-hop culture to dogfighting, thereby erasing the larger history of dogfighting.   According to Evans, Gauthier and Forsyth (1998) in “Dogfighting: Symbolic expression and validation of masculinity,” dogfighting “represents a symbolic attempts at attaining and maintaining honor and status, which in the (predominantly white, male, working-class) dogfighting subculture, are equated with masculine identity.”  Although the popularity of dogfighting has increased within urban communities, particularly amongst young African Americans, over the last fifteen years it remains a sport tied to and emanating from rural white America.