A couple of weeks ago I wrote a sort of homage to Izzy Stone, and argued in Stonian (Stone-like? Stony?) fashion for the importance of reading between the lines of the mainstream news. Stone was right about this, I think, and importantly so, especially during the doldrums of campaign season. But following his lead in this means reading the mainstream news, or listening to it, or whatever; and that means subjecting oneself to a great deal of foolishness. Wading through all of that in search of real news is an exercise in what is, in a slightly different context, called tedium management. Everyone has a foolishness/doldrums/tedium threshold. I think I've reached mine.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
This Is Only a Test or The Hostage Situation (anybody else feel like The Gimp?)
Every 2-4 years if one is a member of a marginalized group in the US (person of color, LGBT, living below the poverty line, women) one gets a view behind the curtain and is shown what is the real situation regarding power in this society. The Real Situation regarding power in this country is that to be a member of a marginalized group is to be held in a hostage situation. Electoral year politics reminds you of how you are held captive by the at times idiotic whims of the majority (those with the guns and the explosives). Headlines like this and this and this remind you that your life in this society can at times have the consistency and logic of a leaf on the breeze. WTF is "legitimate rape", every woman and most men on the planet want to know! How the hell in 2012 can you believe slavery was a good thing? Jim Crow was not much pf a party! And how can 90 minutes of lying so maniacal, The Joker would not be amused, make a majority of US citizens forget the previous 2 year's worth of gafftastic assholery on the part of the sweaty plutocrat from Massachusetts and put him back in contention in national polls?! Yes Obama blew it! Yes he sucked! Yes he should have prepped better or whatever reason there was for him to stagger in the home stretch. But damn really? Romney remains Romney and how does one forget that fact in a night? When did A=A stop being true? So this is the hostage situation, where fairly reasonable people are held in thrall to a majority population wherein more people recognize Michael Jackson as the composer of Billie Jean than recognize the Bill of Rights as a part of The Constitution of the US. Oh for the sweet release of Stockholm Syndrome!
Hostages to "Democracy"
I return you now to your regularly scheduled blog.
Update: Ill Doctrine nails it.. His eyes feel like my soul.
Hostages to "Democracy"
I return you now to your regularly scheduled blog.
Update: Ill Doctrine nails it.. His eyes feel like my soul.
Monday, October 8, 2012
Zandria Robinson on the remake of "Steel Magnolias"
Negresses of Steel and
The Obfuscation of
Black Women
By Zandria Robinson
I knew we would be served Steel Magnolias in blackface, but I didn’t care. The idea of representations of black (southern) women on television was enough reason to tune in to Lifetime’s star-studded remake of the classic southern white women’s tear factory. With Alfre Woodard, Phylicia Rashad, Jill Scott, Queen Latifah, and Adepero Oduye leading, if the whole thing went to hell, at least the ladies would shepherd it in a badass actress basket. Right?
Ahem. Newwwoooh.
While I am generally forgiving of terrible southern accents—I know y’all can’t talk like us—I was struck by Jill Scott’s imitation of a white southern woman’s accent to play a black southern woman. Jilly from Philly, who once sang, “fatback taffy sho’ is good to me/fatback taffy knocks me off my feet,” turned into Paula Deen. Jill’s Tropic Thunder whitetalk-blacktalk-whitetalk accent, though, is symptomatic of a broader issue: our continued inability to imagine black women as southern and/or middle class beyond church hats and fans.
Further, save for the wobbling at the wedding reception (which has become popular even at white folks’ nuptial celebrations) the unaltered script with black faces produced a bizarro-world in which a group of black women could meet in a beauty shop week after week and never talk about race or black womanhood. In attempting to imagine black women as southerners, region obliterated race, offering that same old color-blind racist yoke that produces empathic blacks by, well, erasing their blackness. The most promising moments in the film were those where blackness threatened to interrupt and intersect with the narrative. In the iconic scene where M’Lynn, played by Queen Latifah, finally lets her emotions loose in the shop, I saw glimpses of Set It Off’s Cleo, and half-hoped the ladies would all ride out and rob a bank. Talk about wheelz of steel.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about Negresses of Steel is that black women’s femininity—or specifically their (perceived, constructed) lack thereof—makes possible the varied archetypes of white southern womanhood, from sundress-wearing belles to infallible magnolias. White southern womanhood in particular is predicated on black southern womanhood, not the other way around, which is what a blackface Steel Magnolias gets us. We still know painfully little about black southern womanhood, and even less about the contemporary black southern womanhood Steel Magnolias attempts to offer us.For all of their ratchetness, Real Housewives of Atlanta, Love and Hip-Hop Atlanta, and Tyler Perry’s corpus give us that glimpse into an originary black womanhood for which we are all guilty of seeking out. Sometimes Zora and Ida B. ain’t enough to make it through the week.
I recognize that we really can’t talk about black women as a differentiated group such that the notion of wanting a particular group of black women—in this case, southern black women—to be represented with any nuance is absurd. However, that there are regional variations in black women’s experiences is undeniable, from incarceration to marriage to infant mortality rates. The cyclical nature of black migration notwithstanding, there are key cultural differences, too, that deserve attention, beyond church hats, diabetes-sweet tea, and backyard collard greens. Because (and in spite) of the film’s shortcomings and what those failures highlight about the invisibility of black women writ large, Negresses of Steel compels us to imagine (because they ain’t there) the intersections of race, class, gender, and region in black southern women’s lives and to endeavor to make the perspectives of actual black women central to the multitude of discourses about black women.
*****
Zandria Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Memphis.
The Problem of Voting and The Politics of Strategic Expression or Why Being Very Right Can Be a Little Wrong
Recently there have been published two very dramatic considerations on the use of the ballot. At The Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf argues in Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama that the president's foreign policies have set unprecedented examples of presidential abuse of powers and undermine the very fabric of the Constitution and thus the Republic. These actions in short are
1) The continued use of drones to assassinate Al Qaeda operatives and the resulting damamge done to Pakistani civilians.
2) The President's decision to assassinate US citizens that have affiliated with terrorist organizations without due process and
3) The commitment of US forces to the Lybian uprising against Qaddafi without congressional approval.
These are valid points and as Friedersdorf states his refusal to vote for Obama is a clear statement of his political and moral conscience.
In an unrelated but relevant piece Joel Bleifus in In These Times argues that the Left should avoid thinking of voting as an act of "self expression" and adopt John Sanbonmatsu's Gramscian idea of strategic voting. Carl Davidson, former member of the Student's for a Democratic Society said about Sanbonmmatsu's work, “In the long run you need both self-expression and strategy. You need the inspiration that can be provided by self-expression, but you need a smart strategy that enables you to win.” These are not new ideas regarding the path to power. The most notable recent exponent of this idea is Saul Alinsky who wrote, "The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action."
However the two articles ask a deeper question for me which is what is the nature of the vote? Friederdorf's view seems to be that the vote is a personal decision wherein ones personal views are expressed in their purest form. Sanbonmatsu and Bleifus encourage us to think about the vote as a strategic positioning in a war of maneuver. I like to think of voting as a rare thing in US society, that is, one of the last remaining secular rituals where someone is not making cash and that can express regard for the entire nation. What neither Friedersdorf nor Bleifus ask is, "What does my vote mean for someone else?" Every single vote is a drop in an ocean whose wave hits some distant shore. The effects of that wave, like any other, are what determine its force. What we must think about, and especially the Left, is where my vote (or lack of voting) will push that wave. Who will benefit, who will suffer, who will get needed support and who will not if I do not vote? The "problem" that Alinsky refers to has to be more than the problem of efficacy. It has to be the problem of the vision of the community and its relationship to power and ideology. It has to be a consideration of the problem of the one and the many, the problem of I and Thou, the problem of the pebble in the pond. Moral and political purity along with strategic visioning are noble qualities to have but ones vote has to be an expression of something broader, deeper and a re-affirmation of a commitment to our fellow citizens.
1) The continued use of drones to assassinate Al Qaeda operatives and the resulting damamge done to Pakistani civilians.
2) The President's decision to assassinate US citizens that have affiliated with terrorist organizations without due process and
3) The commitment of US forces to the Lybian uprising against Qaddafi without congressional approval.
These are valid points and as Friedersdorf states his refusal to vote for Obama is a clear statement of his political and moral conscience.
In an unrelated but relevant piece Joel Bleifus in In These Times argues that the Left should avoid thinking of voting as an act of "self expression" and adopt John Sanbonmatsu's Gramscian idea of strategic voting. Carl Davidson, former member of the Student's for a Democratic Society said about Sanbonmmatsu's work, “In the long run you need both self-expression and strategy. You need the inspiration that can be provided by self-expression, but you need a smart strategy that enables you to win.” These are not new ideas regarding the path to power. The most notable recent exponent of this idea is Saul Alinsky who wrote, "The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action."
However the two articles ask a deeper question for me which is what is the nature of the vote? Friederdorf's view seems to be that the vote is a personal decision wherein ones personal views are expressed in their purest form. Sanbonmatsu and Bleifus encourage us to think about the vote as a strategic positioning in a war of maneuver. I like to think of voting as a rare thing in US society, that is, one of the last remaining secular rituals where someone is not making cash and that can express regard for the entire nation. What neither Friedersdorf nor Bleifus ask is, "What does my vote mean for someone else?" Every single vote is a drop in an ocean whose wave hits some distant shore. The effects of that wave, like any other, are what determine its force. What we must think about, and especially the Left, is where my vote (or lack of voting) will push that wave. Who will benefit, who will suffer, who will get needed support and who will not if I do not vote? The "problem" that Alinsky refers to has to be more than the problem of efficacy. It has to be the problem of the vision of the community and its relationship to power and ideology. It has to be a consideration of the problem of the one and the many, the problem of I and Thou, the problem of the pebble in the pond. Moral and political purity along with strategic visioning are noble qualities to have but ones vote has to be an expression of something broader, deeper and a re-affirmation of a commitment to our fellow citizens.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar on the Shenanigans at the BET Awards
Children Dressed as Men in Hip-Hop: BET Hip-Hop Awards and Violence
By Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
I hope Rick Ross and Young Jeezy read this letter. But it’s broader than these two rappers who were allegedly involved in a violent clash at the BET Hip-Hop Awards show to be aired October 9th. On September 29th Atlanta was abuzz with a wide range of events, notably the Atlanta Football Classic and two hip-hop-related events: the Tupac Amaru Shakur Collections Conference, and the BET Hip-Hop Awards. I spoke at the Tupac conference where people arrived from around the country to present papers on the meaning, and legacy of the world’s most successful rapper, and one of the most significant figures in music from the last quarter of the 20th century. I looked forward to seeing friends, scholars, and colleagues. I did not consider anyone getting shot, stabbed, beaten with a bottle of Moët, or stomped out in the lobby of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Disagreements over the interpretations of Tupac would likely not lead to people running to “pop the trunk.” True to expectations, it was a fun, engaging, thoroughly rewarding violence-free event. Across town another hip-hop gathering was unfolding; and fools and thugs were infiltrating it.
True to the most cynical expectations, the BET Hip-Hop Award show was tarnished by violence. According to police reports and eye witnesses, a brawl erupted backstage between the camps of rappers Rick Ross and Young Jeezy. It spilled into the parking lot at the Atlantic Civic Center where police pepper sprayed grown men fighting. A friend of mine, a conventionally-cynical “old head” remarked that commercial hip-hop, in its current state, is simply burdened by idiots, and idiocy. Many are no longer shocked that adult millionaires, some of whom are fathers and husbands in their 30s and older, would fight like school children settling disagreements with escalating taunts and violence. The ridiculous behavior is embarrassing, distressing to the wider hip-hop community and, simply put, stupid. This was more than a classic case of keeping-it-real-going-wrong. It is emblematic of a sordid culture of impulsive, irresponsible, and reckless behavior celebrated in verse and life. It is a blurring of the lines between studio and street for the artists. Incredibly talented artists, gifted with wit, charisma, business acumen and passion have allowed themselves to risk it all for foolish bravado and immature antics that they misinterpret as cool, courageous, and brave. I hope 50 Cent’s people read this.
Critics who are outside and inside of the Hip-Hop Generation have alleged that hip-hop has devolved into a mockery of itself. Rappers celebrate the joys of selling crack, killing black people and degrading black women. There is no adult male rapper who has gone platinum in the last decade who has not embraced at least one of these themes. Some allege that commercial hip-hop is a modern Minstrel Show: “Step right up! Not only can you listen to the songs about these fools assaulting each other, you can actually watch them do it in real life!” If you know The Game and 40 Glocc, please forward this note to them.
A few miles away from the violence at the BET Awards, the Tupac conference covered a wide range of topics related to his short, but impactful life. Like us all, Tupac was flawed, even in his brilliance. He loved his people, community and world. He wanted more for himself and those around him, even as he struggled to reconcile his hurt, trauma and conflict with others. In the end, conflict with others took his life. Part of his life story is, in some respects, a cautionary tale.
While the prison industrial complex wreaks unprecedented havoc on black communities, while black youth are killed by the thousands in cities across the country, those who are at the center of [black] youth popular culture often herald prison like a rites-of-passage, and the drug trade like Pop Warner football. The murders of Tupac, Biggie, Jam Master Jay, Big L, and others in hip-hop are lamented, yet a tired, child-like cycle of beefs only inspire and provoke future possibilities of death and misery. It would be outrageous to even imagine Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson cliqued up at a national academic conference and being pepper sprayed by police for trying to stomp out Henry Skip Gates and his boys. I hope for the day that it will be as unexpected and outlandish to imagine a scenario of violence at a hip-hop award show. Until that time, the wider hip-hop community remains a poster child of crass, crude stereotypes and infantile behavior, a miserable mockery of itself, with declining sales, narrowing of artistic creativity and an unabashed culture of self-destruction. I hope someone forwards this to Chief Keef, because this is what we don’t need or like.
*****
Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is Vice Provost for Diversity and Professor of History at The University of Connecticut. He is the author of Hip Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap and Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity.
By Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
I hope Rick Ross and Young Jeezy read this letter. But it’s broader than these two rappers who were allegedly involved in a violent clash at the BET Hip-Hop Awards show to be aired October 9th. On September 29th Atlanta was abuzz with a wide range of events, notably the Atlanta Football Classic and two hip-hop-related events: the Tupac Amaru Shakur Collections Conference, and the BET Hip-Hop Awards. I spoke at the Tupac conference where people arrived from around the country to present papers on the meaning, and legacy of the world’s most successful rapper, and one of the most significant figures in music from the last quarter of the 20th century. I looked forward to seeing friends, scholars, and colleagues. I did not consider anyone getting shot, stabbed, beaten with a bottle of Moët, or stomped out in the lobby of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Disagreements over the interpretations of Tupac would likely not lead to people running to “pop the trunk.” True to expectations, it was a fun, engaging, thoroughly rewarding violence-free event. Across town another hip-hop gathering was unfolding; and fools and thugs were infiltrating it.
True to the most cynical expectations, the BET Hip-Hop Award show was tarnished by violence. According to police reports and eye witnesses, a brawl erupted backstage between the camps of rappers Rick Ross and Young Jeezy. It spilled into the parking lot at the Atlantic Civic Center where police pepper sprayed grown men fighting. A friend of mine, a conventionally-cynical “old head” remarked that commercial hip-hop, in its current state, is simply burdened by idiots, and idiocy. Many are no longer shocked that adult millionaires, some of whom are fathers and husbands in their 30s and older, would fight like school children settling disagreements with escalating taunts and violence. The ridiculous behavior is embarrassing, distressing to the wider hip-hop community and, simply put, stupid. This was more than a classic case of keeping-it-real-going-wrong. It is emblematic of a sordid culture of impulsive, irresponsible, and reckless behavior celebrated in verse and life. It is a blurring of the lines between studio and street for the artists. Incredibly talented artists, gifted with wit, charisma, business acumen and passion have allowed themselves to risk it all for foolish bravado and immature antics that they misinterpret as cool, courageous, and brave. I hope 50 Cent’s people read this.
Critics who are outside and inside of the Hip-Hop Generation have alleged that hip-hop has devolved into a mockery of itself. Rappers celebrate the joys of selling crack, killing black people and degrading black women. There is no adult male rapper who has gone platinum in the last decade who has not embraced at least one of these themes. Some allege that commercial hip-hop is a modern Minstrel Show: “Step right up! Not only can you listen to the songs about these fools assaulting each other, you can actually watch them do it in real life!” If you know The Game and 40 Glocc, please forward this note to them.
A few miles away from the violence at the BET Awards, the Tupac conference covered a wide range of topics related to his short, but impactful life. Like us all, Tupac was flawed, even in his brilliance. He loved his people, community and world. He wanted more for himself and those around him, even as he struggled to reconcile his hurt, trauma and conflict with others. In the end, conflict with others took his life. Part of his life story is, in some respects, a cautionary tale.
While the prison industrial complex wreaks unprecedented havoc on black communities, while black youth are killed by the thousands in cities across the country, those who are at the center of [black] youth popular culture often herald prison like a rites-of-passage, and the drug trade like Pop Warner football. The murders of Tupac, Biggie, Jam Master Jay, Big L, and others in hip-hop are lamented, yet a tired, child-like cycle of beefs only inspire and provoke future possibilities of death and misery. It would be outrageous to even imagine Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson cliqued up at a national academic conference and being pepper sprayed by police for trying to stomp out Henry Skip Gates and his boys. I hope for the day that it will be as unexpected and outlandish to imagine a scenario of violence at a hip-hop award show. Until that time, the wider hip-hop community remains a poster child of crass, crude stereotypes and infantile behavior, a miserable mockery of itself, with declining sales, narrowing of artistic creativity and an unabashed culture of self-destruction. I hope someone forwards this to Chief Keef, because this is what we don’t need or like.
*****
Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is Vice Provost for Diversity and Professor of History at The University of Connecticut. He is the author of Hip Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap and Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity.
Top 5 reasons I'm glad I didn't watch the Obomney debate
- Princess Bride alert - I think that word does not mean what you think it means: I have a friend who was on debate teams in high school and college. He won awards, teaches debate technique to kids now - he's serious about the art of debate, and has been for over a decade. Having caught some of last night's festivities, he declared, 'I feel dumber now than I was an hour ago, just from watching that.' And: 'My students would eat these guys alive.' And: 'If that's a debate, then I spent 13 years learning something very different.'
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Why policing and infotainment don't mix; or, Giving noble work a bad name, the October 2 edition
I hardly know where to begin with this one. The short version: very early in the morning on May 16, 2010, a SWAT-type police team, shadowed by a reality tv video crew, invade a Detroit home in search of a murder suspect. But they invade like they're trying to take an enemy bunker, and one flash-bang grenade and one gunshot later, a 7-year old girl is dead, shot in the head. They later find the murder suspect in a separate apartment upstairs.
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