Shift in race discussion needed for our kids and our media

Stock photo (© John Steel - Fotolia.com)

"Everyone's a little bit racist sometimes."

So goes the line from hit Broadway show Avenue Q.

The findings of a book entitled "NurtureShock" about racially discriminating infants and toddlers seems to add some scientific credibility to the possibility that even the youngest among us recognize and realize the utility in making racial distinctions. Should we be concerned? If so, by what exactly?

That the very young recognize skin color variation is not shocking. The fact that youngsters even make attributions about others based on skin distinctions is also not as scandalous as it seems at first thought. What should really give us pause is parents' (white parents of white children in particular) inability to help their children understand the significance and meaning of skin color differences. This radically reinforces the oldest of racial fallacies: the notion that birds of a feather rightly flock together, that our deepest loyalties lie with our own kind.

So what is it about today's white parents - who can't muster a conversation about race with their children, according to the book - that unintentionally links them to centuries-old slave owners, yesterday's segregationists and present-day opponents of everything from trans-racial adoption to school integration? Quite simply, parents' silence about the color differences their children recognize very early on communicates a very clear signal: not only are skin color differences natural, but the way we act around and react to those clothed in different skin is natural. It's natural that everybody that lives in my neighborhood looks like me. It's natural that most of the kids in my school don't look like them. It's natural that the people I pray with at church don't look like them, and it's natural that everybody mom and dad invite over for dinner looks like us. That's how it is supposed to be. Without a clear, explicit voice clarifying how our color-coded society resulted from explicit choices we made, the racial world we now live in appears to the infant eye as the world that always was and always should be - naturally.

Will we ever be able to exorcise the myth of natural selection based on skin color from our collective American consciousness? The twenty-somethings of Generation Next provide some hope that we can. These young men and women are apparently more racially tolerant than previous generations, are less xenophobic, and not as hamstrung by the kind of hollow religious dogma that often curtails racial sensitivity.

More importantly, however, members of this generation interact more closely with individuals from different racial groups. More than half of them frequently talk about racial issues in their school classrooms, and significant numbers of them allow their discussions to impact the way they think about important racial issues. Their ability to openly and honestly discuss race will be important as Generations Next start families of their own and confront racial issues with their children.

But along with the next generation's optimism, must come a change in the images with which we surround ourselves. If we are to shift thinking away from a naturalized, to-each-his-own approach to racial diversity, our media must reflect the belief that everyone is included in the kinds of "us," "we," "our," forms of racial language and images we use to signal acceptable forms of racial interaction and relationships.

When we look at prime time television for instance, we not only find a continued lack of racial diversity in general, we find few images that convey the reality that diverse forms of configurations even exist, let alone are normal. Shows like Different Strokes or Webster featuring racially blended families are a thing of the past, while those led by interracial couples never were. Reality dating shows feature all-white beauty queens chasing after great white kings, and the scant few interracial friendships work only because those involved resist seeing and certainly discussing race.

Like our real world where purportedly colorblind parents evade racial discussion with their children, our fictitious world of moving images underscores - consciously or unconsciously - a belief in a racially defined natural order. Both must change if we ever hope to loosen the stranglehold the myth of natural - and therefore compulsory - racial separation has on our society.

Charlton McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture & Communication at New York University. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Race Appeal: The Prevalence, Purposes, and Political Implications of Racial Discourse in American Politics (Temple, 2010), and is the co-director of the Project on Race in Political Communication (RaceProject.org). Professor McIlwain has provided expert commentary on a wide range of racial issues for state, national and international media such as CNN, the New York Times, NPR, Associated Press, Reuters TV, O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), CTV (Canada) and many others.

Cosby Redux: 25 Years Later

The root of hip-hop generation displeasure with The Cosby Show was not simply that the show wasn't 'political', but rather the show did in fact serve the political function of diverting attention away from the harsh realities of Reagan-era social policies.


Cosby Redux
by Mark Anthony Neal

“Look daddy, it’s the Cosby man!” My then three-year-old daughter kind of caught me off guard with that one. She had only seen The Cosby Show a few times up to that point, but was familiar with Cosby’s face because of the Little Bill cartoon that Cosby created and executive produces for Nick Jr.. When my daughter got old enough (around two) to have distinct taste in her television viewing, my wife and I began the struggle to find programming that more reflected the brown skin that my daughter marveled at in the mirror.

While we enjoyed animal-based fare like Arthur (which, while centered around animals, has managed to address issues like class, ethnicity, and single parent-hood), and The Powerpuff Girls, with its veiled feminist critique, increasingly we craved visual stimulation (other than what we found in her books) where my daughter could see her “chocolateness” (we live in a “chocolate,” “vanilla,” “banana,” and “graham cracker” world) animated. Little Bill (with the most “finely” drawn black women in the history of television animation) and the now defunct Gullah, Gullah Island (which was way before its time) helped broaden my daughter’s perspective.

Coming from the proverbial middle-class professional “flies in the buttermilk” type family, my daughter has had very little interaction with folks who look like her, save during extended family and trips to New York City. It was perhaps out of that dilemma that we began to introduce her to The Cosby Show on weekend evenings, when the program began to air regularly on Nick at Night in January of this year. It was in the context of watching The Cosby Show from the perspective of a parent, that I began to re-evaluate my — and my generation’s — ambivalence about what remains one of the most successful television sitcoms ever.

It’s not that I had never appreciated The Cosby Show. I was a sophomore in college when the series premiered in September of 1984. The series first aired five years after the cancellation of the highly influential Good Times. With the exception of the often buffoonish The Jeffersons, examples of screen “blackness” had been few and far between save folks like Roger Moseley (Magnum P.I.), Robert Guilliume (Benson), Alphonse Ribiero (Silver Spoons) and Tim Reid as WKRP in Cincinnati’s “Venus Flytrap.”

As bell hooks and others have discussed, black audiences greeted The Cosby Show with a certain amount of euphoria, simply because it was regular opportunity to see “black” life portrayed in a “responsible” manner. For some of us, that euphoria lasted only a year or so, as the distinctly upper middle-class world that Cosby and his writers constructed for the show’s audiences often clashed with our emerging hip-hop generation nationalism. If the “conscious” members of the hip-hop generation were looking towards the booming bass of Chuck D and the stinging anti-white supremacist rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan for vision, then The Cosby Show was often viewed as being out of touch with urban realities.

Truth be told, though I watched the show virtually every week, I often did so out of the chance I’d get to peep that “fine-ass” Lisa Bonet — a desire no doubt shared by a generation of young men aged 13-30, including a young musician by the name of “Romeo Bleu.” Even Bill Cosby himself sensed this rift within some of his black audiences and he offered the Lisa Bonet vehicle A Different World (which followed Bonet’s character “Denise” to a fictional historically black college). Though The Cosby Show always outperformed A Different World in Nielson ratings, the later was more widely watched in black households.

The root of hip-hop generation displeasure with The Cosby Show was not simply that the show wasn’t “political”, but rather the show did in fact serve the political function of diverting attention away from the harsh realities of Reagan-era social policies. In effect, the Huxtable family was posited as the “model” black family, overriding the legitimate criticisms of Reagan’s attacks on social policies that were enacted a decade earlier to address the very inequities that The Cosby Show‘s commercial success helped obscure.

In the minds of many mainstream audiences, the Huxtables were antithetical to the images of welfare queens, “Willie Hortons”, and the unruly, uncontrollable black youth that fueled the rage and noise of rap music. As Ron Daniels notes, “the critical subtext of Reaganism and Reaganomics was race . . . [Reagan] persuaded the American people at a time of crisis, of stagflation and insecurity, that the burden of government had to be lifted off the backs of the American people. Translation: All of those Black people and people of color who are on welfare, food stamps, all these social programs, and burgeoning entitlements, are really the cause of the crisis in American society…” (Race and Resistance: African American in the 21st Century, 14).

In other words the image of an upper middle class black family being piped into the living rooms of “white America” helped validate Reagan et al’s scapegoating efforts. For example, conservative pundit William Buckley was quoted as suggesting that it was not accurate that “race prejudice is increasing in America. How does one know this? Simple: by the ratings of Bill Cosby’s television show and the sales of his books. “A nation simply does not idolize members of a race which that nation despises.” (quoted in Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics, 98). What Buckley didn’t understand was that those audiences who adored Cosby, did not necessarily see him as “black” — he had in fact, in their minds, transcended race, an issue that Spike Lee brilliantly addressed in Do the Right Thing.

Many of these divergent opinions about The Cosby Show were due to the fact that many saw the show not simply as entertainment but as an ideological tool — largely for the political right. A sampling of some of the scholarly writing devoted to The Cosby Show accentuates this reality. In his book Am I Black Enough For You?: Popular Culture from the ‘Hood’ and Beyond, Todd Boyd argues, “Cosby represents an assimilated world where the persistent issues of race and upper-class existence have been normalized. These issues are no longer in need of discussion as they have been transformed into more universal, thus humanistic causes,” adding that “Cosby assumed a great deal of importance . . . almost to the point of denying any other form of popular American imagery.” (23). Of course part of the appeal of The Cosby Show to older black audiences was the fact that it allowed for the presence of a stable and successful black middle class on television, but as Boyd suggest, it was often at the expense of working class and poor blacks.

Michael Eric Dyson lauds Cosby for shattering “narrow conceptions of African-American identity and culture,” but notes that the program had a “responsibility to address these issues [race, sex, and class] precisely because he has created a cultural space for the legitimate existence of upper-middle-class blacks on television.” (Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism, 84) In yet another example, John Fiske took issue with what he called the “Anita-Clair-Murphy” configuration. Juxtaposing the fictional characters “Clair Huxtable” and “Murphy Brown” with the real-life Anita Hill, Fiske writes “this configuration . . . carries hot issues in the debate around family values, single motherhood and race: Murphy the white single mother, Anita the hypersexual Black woman or oppressed raceless one, and Clair the black opposite of both, the embodiment of every possible family value.” (Media Matters, 105)

Of course, Bill Cosby wasn’t beyond seeing the show in an ideological manner himself, though his motivations were very different from those of the political right. In a Los Angeles Times piece in 1989, Cosby compares his show to past examples: “You had Amos and Andy . . . but who ever went to college? Who tried for better things? In Good Times, J.J. Walker played a definite underachiever. In Sanford and Son, you have a junk dealer living a few thousand dollars above the welfare level.”

In his seminal book on post-Civil Rights television and race, Herman Gray suggests that “positioning The Cosby Show in relation to the previous history of programs about blacks helps explain its upper-middle-class focus . . . the show’s discursive relationship to television’s historical treatment of African-Americans and contemporary social and cultural debates (about the black underclass, the black family, and black moral character) helps explain its insistent recuperation of African American social equality (and competence) . . . ” (Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, 80) Addressing his own ambivalence about staking out a position on the show, Gray admits “this unwillingness, I am increasingly convinced, is part of the show’s appeal, its complexity in an age of racial and cultural politics where the sign of blackness labors in the service of many different interests at once.” (Watching Race, 84)

Gray’s comments reflect my own sense of The Cosby Show as I now view it as a 30-something parent. In my opinion the ideological readings of the show have obscured the more potent cultural influence of the show, as Cosby used The Cosby Show to broaden the cultural palate of the mainstream public, by creating space where the rich and diverse legacy of black culture could be made visible. Cosby often achieved this in subtle ways, as he regularly wore the sweatshirts of HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities) and had two of the Huxtable children (Denise and later Vanessa) attend the fictional HBCU Hillman and the real Lincoln University, respectively. (The oldest daughter, Sondra, was a Princeton graduate and the son, Theo, earned a degree from NYU).

During several episodes, Cosby used the music of his youth as a backdrop to story lines. Ray Charles’s “The Night Time is the right time” was mimed by the Huxtable family in celebration of Cliff’s parents, the brilliant stage actors Earle Hyman and Clarice Taylor, who likely would not have had a television presence save the Cosby Show. I for one hit the record bins the day after viewing episodes during the original run that featured the music of Jimmy Scott and Big Maybelle (“Candy”) that I was unaware of before. And of course there was the Ellis Wilson painting that adorned the family’s living room.

In more direct ways, Cosby used the show to showcase “classic” American artists. The late vocalist Joe Williams had a recurring role as Claire’s father. The late Betty Carter appeared as Vanessa’s music teacher, making Carter visible to mainstream audiences in ways that she never sought. Indeed, the day after Carter’s death a few years ago, I cited The Cosby Show for students in my African-American Studies course who didn’t know who she was (“oh yeah, I remember that episode”). Legendary song-stylist Nancy Wilson appeared several times, including one occasion where she and Phylicia Rashad (Claire) performed “Moody’s Mood for Love” together. A virtual “who’s who” of American music graced the Cosby set as Dizzy Gillespie, Mario Bazu, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tito Puente, B.B. King , Celia Cruz, Lena Horne, Mongo Santamaria, Art Blakey, Max Roach Stevie Wonder (and even Special Ed) put in their time. `

Cosby gave a shout out to both the old guard of black actors and actresses (many of whom had links with the famed Negro Ensemble) and both the “new-jacks ” of the era. Moses Gunn, Roscoe Lee Brown, Al Freeman Jr., legendary film-maker Bill Gunn (the underground classic Ganja and Hess), Pam Grier, Joe Seneca, Gloria Foster, Ted Ross (The Wiz’s Lion,), Denise Nicholas (who played opposite Cosby in Let’s Do It Again and A Piece of the Action), Roselind Cash (who like Ross and Brown would have a recurring role on A Different World and Minnie Gentry all appeared on the program. Gentry, then 75, appeared as “Aunt Gramtee” in one of the series’ most moving episodes as the entire Huxtable clan attended a special church in honor of their visiting aunt. “Aunt Gramtee” was serenaded by Mavis Staples, who performed a stirring rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “Wholy Holy.” The episode, which first aired in May of 1990, was a striking reminder of the wondrous things that could only occur in what Gray has called the “Cosby moment.”

Actors such as Allen Payne (“Lance”), Karen Malina White, Deon Richmond (Kenny aka “Bud!”), Carl Anthony Payne (Cockroach and later Martin’s Cole), Merlin Santana (later The Steve Harvey Show’s Romeo), Erika Alexander (later Living Single’s Maxine) and Dondre Whitfield (Vanessa’s first love Robert) all had their first recurring roles on The Cosby Show. In addition, folks like Kadeem Hardison, Sinbad (both became leads on A Different World), Stacy Dash (Clueless), Robin Given, Tico Wells, Kristoff St. John, Blair Underwood, Mario Van Peebles, Naomi Campbell, Tatyana Ali, the late Michelle Thomas (Steve Urkle’s love Myra on Family Matters) and even a four-year-old Alicia Keys made guest appearances on the show.

Cosby also took aim at the conventions of television sitcoms. In the very first episode, most of which was jacked from Cosby’s concert film Bill Cosby: Himself (1982), Cliff deals with his underperforming son, Theo, who we find out later in the series suffered from dyslexia. In the episode, Theo makes a weepy speech about his “successful’” parents loving him for “who he is”. The scene has been played out hundreds of time on sitcom television, as the characters were expected to embrace and the after 20 minutes of crisis, all would be resolved. But Cosby trumped those conventions and responded by telling Theo his comments were “the stupidest thing that he had ever heard” before admonishing his son for not working hard enough. In one swift flip Cosby literally changed the face of television sitcoms and introduced the nation to the tradition of “black parenting”. Indeed, shows like Family Ties and Growing Pains had to retool after the success of Cosby, and a middling show like Family Matters ran for seven years, largely as a less ambitious version of The Cosby Show. Probably the best example of the show’s success was the emergence of anti-Cosby shows like Rosanne, The Simpsons, and most notably Married With Children which ran an unfathomable 11 seasons.

My daughter now regularly ask for Cosby, The Smart Guy and “Will” (meaning the Fresh Prince of Bel Air). She is often oblivious to the humor of the shows, but seemingly relishes the brown bodies she sees on the screen. These were subtleties that I would have missed a decade ago when The Cosby Show was still in production. Perhaps I take for granted that I was one of the first generation of young black and brown shorties who got to peep ourselves on screen on groundbreaking PBS programs like Sesame Street, (the original Gordon, Matt Robinson, was a regular writer on Cosby), Zoom, and The Electric Company (hey was that Morgan Freeman?). And damn if I don’t seem to recall a Saturday morning children’s program hosted by “the Cosby man”. Bill Cosby is never gonna be mistaken for the radical race man, but as a card carrying member of the hip-hop generation, it’s about time I give Dr. William H. Cosby, Jr., Ed. his propers.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. He is a professor of African-American Studies at Duke

Tavis, You Got Some 'Splainin' to Do...

Uh oh.

A suit filed by the attorney general of Illinois claims Tavis Smiley and others were used to okey doke folks into high-risk Wells Fargo loans. From the Washington Independent:

As the housing market began booming in mid-2000, Wells Fargo & Co. teamed up with prominent African American commentator and PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley and financial author Kelvin Boston, the host of “Moneywise,” a multicultural financial affairs show, to host something called “Wealth Building” seminars in black neighborhoods.

Smiley was the keynote speaker, and the big draw, according to Boston and Keith Corbett, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, who attended two of the seminars. Smiley would charge up the audience — and rattle the Wells Fargo executives in attendance — by launching into a story about how he hated banks, and how they used to refuse to lend him money for his real estate projects in Compton, Calif., and elsewhere. After Hurricane Katrina, Smiley also emphasized the importance of building assets and wealth, saying those who had done so were able to leave New Orleans, while people with nothing had to stay behind, Boston said.

“My spiel was the financial planning process, how you want to be able to save and invest for the future, and to have a plan of action,” Boston said. “Then Tavis talked about his experiences with the banks, and how people should be thinking about some real estate.”

The seminars in some cities drew standing room only crowds, with numerous Wells Fargo representatives on hand, seated at carrels to meet one-on-one with potential borrowers who lined up after the speeches, which were usually held in hotels. The free, day-long events were heavily advertised in the black media, and launched in eight cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Richmond, Va., and San Francisco.

But what appeared on the surface as a way to help black borrowers build wealth was actually just the opposite, according to a little-noticed explanation of the “Wealth Building” seminar strategy, contained in a lawsuit recently filed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Source: TheRoot.com

Staging Impropriety: Jes Grew at the VMAs

Staging Impropriety: Jes Grew at the VMAs
by Mark Anthony Neal

Twitter and Facebook were aglow, seconds after Kanye West’s most recent flare-up, this time snatching the microphone from a bewildered Taylor Swift, who had just won the “Best Female Video” award at MTV’s VMAs. West was ostensibly “protesting” Swift’s victory over fellow nominee Beyonce Knowles. West’s behavior at such events has become something of a cliché and as such it was almost to be expected. But this time was a bit different, in that West was not protesting on behalf of his usual favorite charity—himself. Something was afoot.

In a weekend that was in part defined by black impropriety—Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame acceptance speech and Serena Williams vitriolic verbal attack on a line judge at the US Open—West’s moment seemed like staged Jes Grew, as Ishmael Reed might refer to it, in response to what has been several months of improprieties liberally taken at the expense of black bodies, be it the late “King of Pop” or the current President of the United States. It is part of a script that West has carefully crafted, in the best (post-modern) spirit of P.T. Barnum. The boos that appeared whenever West’s name was mentioned throughout the evening were also part of that script and we all sat enraptured wondering how Knowles might respond to West’s misguided attempt to “speak” on her behalf. After a stirring performance of “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” all eyes were on Knowles when she received the award for “Video of the Year” and called Swift to the stage to recover her interrupted moment.

What immediately stuck me about Knowles’ gesture, were the cynics who suggested that Knowles did so at the behest of MTV and that Knowles’ kindness was essentially staged by the network. Plausible indeed, but if that is plausible, why isn’t is also plausible that the whole experience was in fact staged, to generate the kind of buzz on social networking sites that translates into increased viewership and traffic at MTV.com? Now in its 25th year, the VMAs are an aging and fatigued brand. As such the “drama” of the awards—remember Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley’s staged kiss—has become more integral to the success of the awards than its performances.

There was no risk in having Kanye West act a fool, because it is what we have come to expect from him and fair amount of people will grant him his eccentricities, because of his genius. As for Taylor Swift, she now has increased visibility because she was the victim of black impropriety, something she shares with Kim Clijsters, winner of the US Open. Beyonce Knowles is now granted a level of gravitas for her public graciousness or what critic Leonard Feather once termed “a rare noblesse oblige gesture” in response to Aretha Franklin giving her 1973 Grammy Award to fellow nominee Esther Phillips. And finally for MTV, they have produced the most talked about VMAs since that Jackson and Presley kiss.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. He is a professor of African-American Studies at Duke

Why Tyler Perry Matters...And Why We Should Be Concerned

Why Tyler Perry Matters—and Why We Should Be Concerned
by Mark Anthony Neal

With seven theatrical releases, beginning with 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, that have grossed nearly $400 million and two syndicated television series, Tyler Perry is easily the most successful black filmmaker and producer in a generation. Perry has rode the house-dress of his most popular character, Aunt Madea—a chain-smoking, gun-toting and cussing doppelganger of everybody’s favorite auntie—to become a phenomenon. Perry’s most recent film Madea Goes to Jail, for example, had an opening weekend gross of $41 million ultimately grossing more than $90 million. To place these numbers in perspective, of the films off Spike Lee and John Singleton, the two most visible black directors of the last generation, only Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious has made more money. Lee’s most successful film, Inside Man (2006) made $88 million, while his most recent theatrical release Miracle at St Anna barely made $10 Million. All eyes are again on Tyler Perry with the release of I Can Do Bad All By Myself and the announcement that he will do a screen version of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff.

Tyler Perry got his start in the entertainment industry, writing, directing and producing a string of Gospel plays in the late 1990s. Some of those plays, which are available on DVD, were later made in films. I Can Do Bad All By Myself was Perry’s second play and marked the first appearance of Aunt Madea. With the plays, Perry tapped into a burgeoning self-styled black theater movement that cropped up in the post-Civil Rights era as an offshoot of the Negro Ensemble Company, which was founded in 1967 by director Douglas Turner Ward and actor Robert Hooks. Shange’s For Colored Girls…, initially produced in 1974, is a great exemplar of that moment as was the work of Charles Fuller, whose Award-winning A Soldier’s Play was produced by the Negro Ensemble in 1981 and made into a film that featured Academy Award winner Denzil Washington and Academy Award nominees Adolph Caesar and Howard E. Rollins.

It was Vy Higginson’s successful Mama I Want to Sing franchise from the 1980s, that was a direct inspiration for a generation of popular urban theater with plays like Checkmates (which starred Washington), Diary of a Black Man and Beauty Shop. Perry and contemporary David E. Talbert represented the next generation of these plays, which were always popular with Black Church audiences. Taken as a whole the these plays harked back to the days of the Chitlin Circuit, the network of theaters and clubs that catered to black audiences in segregated cities. Though the term “chitlin circuit” has become bit of a pejorative, the circuit was critical to the development of black artists from Bert Williams and Bessie Smith to James Brown and Tina Turner. Without access to formal film schools, like the programs at New York University and USC, where Lee and Singleton attended respectively, Perry plays allowed him opportunity hone his skills as a writer and director. But what Perry likely most learned from that experience was that there was an audience that was underserved by mainstream entertainment industry.

Perry in particularly infused his plays with the gospel of the “Black Bible Belt”—so much so that it was not unusual to attend one of Perry plays and not be greeting with dozens of buses filled with folk who just left morning services. I use the term “Black Bible Belt” as a metaphor for a bloc within Black America that has come to social, economic and, increasingly, political prominence in the last two decades. With his plays, Perry tapped into a demographic that had been largely forgotten and ignored by major advertisers.

Perry rise occurs roughly with the increased fortunes of this generation of black televangelists like Bishop T.D. Jakes, Pastor Creflo Dollar and Bishop Eddie L. Long. As Jonathan Walton suggest in his book Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism, the aforementioned church leaders were part of a generation willing to embrace popular culture in order to reach their audience. Tyler Perry and his “neo-blaxploitation genre” as Walton describes it, was a logical extension of those efforts. The stage production of Jakes’ novel-turned-movie Woman Thou Art Loosed, for instance, was a collaboration between the minster and Perry. When Perry’s Dairy of a Mad Black Woman, which he didn’t direct, generated box office of $50 million, while being made on a budget of $5 million, Hollywood took notice. When Perry’s directorial debut, Madea’s Family Reunion, made even more money, $63 million on roughly the same budget, it was clear that the numbers didn’t lie. Perry had delivered an audience to Hollywood and advertisers that that had not been able to reach for decades.

By the summer of 2007, Perry was rolling out his first syndicated television series, House of Payne. Perry’s strategy for producing the series was brilliant; House of Payne was introduced a year earlier as a ten-episode package that appeared in ten television markets. Perry produced the episodes with his own money, reportedly $500,00 per episodes and shopped the episodes to TBS, who after the successful initial run, signed on for future seasons of House of Payne and later Meet the Browns, based on one of Perry popular characters from his plays. Perry’s initial risk taking allowed him total creative control of his product, in ways that were unprecedented for black television producers. The Tyler Perry brand was born.

But it’s some the core messages of that brand that have raised eyebrows about Perry’s work. The most obvious criticism has come from those uncomfortable with Perry's drag performance of Madea, arguing that the boisterous and decidedly “ghetto” Madea was little more than a contemporary riff on the blackface minstrelsy of the early 20th-century, where black performers “blackened up”—literally and figuratively—for the delight of white audiences. But to truly understand why Madea is so troublesome is to fully understand what Perry’s core audience really looks like. As Walton suggest, Perry’s films are primarily directed at black women and revolve around “Strong Black Man protagonists who are able to redeem the black woman, black family, and larger community by virtue of their strong character and testicular fortitude.” In this regard Perry’s audience mirrors that of the congregations of many black church were black women parishioners often outnumber male members, significantly. Perry films, as such often reinforce very traditional and even conservative notions of gender in black communities and Madea, as a supposed female character, simply represent patriarchy in drag.

Increasingly though, Perry films have publicaly admonished black women, particularly educated and middle class women, who dared to be too ambitious. As Courtney Young recently wrote in The Nation, “Each of his films advances nearly the same message to his audience. Be demure. Be strong but not too strong. Too much ambition is a detriment to your ability to find a partner and spiritual health. Female beauty can be dangerous. Let a man be a ‘man’.” Letting a be a man often entails the use of violence, as was the case in Perry’s The Family that Preys, that featured a cast headed by A-Listers and Academy Award winner Kathy Bates and nominee Alfre Woodard. In the film Sanaa Latham and Rockmond Dunbar play a young married couple. She’s an Ivy-League graduate and he’s a construction worker and as she become more successful in her career—and begins to flaunt it--there is obvious tension. The situation comes to a head when Dunbar’s character confronts his wife about her affair with her white boss (a white boss who has fathered a child, Dunbar’s character thought was his own) and proceeds to slap his wife across a lunch counter. The scene alone was troubling, but more troubling was the audiences reaction when I screened the film, many of whom stood up and applauded the man’s act of violence.

What I thought was an isolated experience was repeated to me by colleagues and friends who also saw the film. Perhaps most troubling is that Perry’s take on black gender politics—not much different than the everyday rapper we are so willing to label as misogynistic—is not something marginal to the black community, but seems to reflect mainstream opinion in black communities, particularly in light of the current economic crisis. It seems that Perry has placed a mirror up to our collective image and if we don’t like what we see, we need to move beyond simply complaining about what Perry is doing.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. He is a professor of African-American Studies at Duke University.

Is Conservative Obama Backlash the New Racism?

The decision by parents across the country to keep their children home from school today rather than have students listen to the president's stay in school address follows an ugly pattern that began to emerge in the months since the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Conservative opposition to Obama in elite political and media circles in recent weeks has turned into routine disgruntled post-election partisan bickering to vile anti-American and racist rhetoric.

From opposition to President Obama's push for an economic stimulus bill in February, and disdain for his selection of Sonia Sotomayor to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, to contempt for his current campaign for health care reform, this voice of unreason has grown louder and more belligerent. The decision by conservative leaders to encourage parents to keep their children home from school today under the auspices that the president's message is hellbent on socialist indoctrination, as Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer claimed, is the latest manifestation.

The National Keep Your Child at Home Day follows a trend that most notably included the anti- Obama barbs thrown by former US Vice President Dick Cheney back in April. A vice president of an immediately previous administration speaking out within months of the transition of power is something unheard of in recent US history. (Former VP Al Gore waited for eight months before criticizing President George H.W. Bush).

Cheney's departure from tradition was just the beginning. Since the new presidential administration has been underway, conservative leaders seem to have flipped from advocacy to derision on similar positions they supported under Republican presidents. The $700 billion Wall Street bailout was a necessary evil. But, for them, the $787 billion economic stimulus marked the end of capitalism. Support for the war in Iraq under President Bush was pro-American. Under Obama, the idea of not criticizing a war president has been entirely abandoned.

Conservatives fought against Democratic Party attacks on President Ronald Reagan's school address in 1988. Three year later, they similarly supported President George H.W. Bush's school address. With President Obama in the White House, a president speaking to the nation's students, instead summons up a return to the cold war -- this time within our own borders.

Certainly conservative media is stoking the flames. Fox News' Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Laura Ingraham, for example, have for months been ratcheting up the racist and cold war sentiment on their programs, suggesting that the president and his supporters vacillate between hating white people and fomenting socialist revolution.

Even as President Obama tries to strike a middle ground on health care and the high school address, conservative talk show hosts, bloggers and some elected officials continue to escalate the antagonism, hostility and name calling (demonizing the president as Hitler and his team as communists, socialists, and Marxists).

These voices daily are helping to nurture an atmosphere of racial confrontation and in the process bring the hatred above ground. According to the February 2009 report of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the United States, the number of active hate groups (926 vs. 888 in 2007) in the US has grown by 54 percent since 2000. SPLC contributes this rise to immigration fears, a failing economy and the election of Barack Obama.

Likewise, the findings of a recent Pew Research Center poll suggest that the ways that racial opposition has been subtly, and not so subtly, infused in these debates is taking a toll on white Obama supporters as well. The survey found that among white Democrats, Obama's approval rating has dropped 11 points since April. Among white independents it's dropped 9 points, and among white women it's dropped 12 percentage points.

Barack Obama's loss of white supporters may bode well for a GOP win in 2012. However, is breeding racial hostility in the best interest of a nation increasingly diverse, racially, culturally and in terms of political perspectives?

During the height of the 2008 election when a similar trend emerged, Newt Gingrich made a public call for conservatives to turn down the anti-American and racist rhetoric. The country needs his or like leadership now.

At a bare minimum, such leadership should remind conservatives across the board that ideological differences with the new commander in chief is no excuse to abandon core principles of our Democratic Republic -- especially when your opinions and beliefs represent the minority.

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law -based think tank The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. He also blogs for NewsOne.com.

We Needed Van Jones on the Inside

In March, I wrote here on The Notion in celebration of the appointment of Van Jones . I am both politically committed to and academically interested in issues of environmental justice. Jones' appointment was a clear victory for the EJ movement.

The modern environmental justice movement emerged more than three decades ago. Its fight has been centered on two important issues: the disproportionate impact of local decisions that site polluting industries and undesirable land uses in poor and minority communities, and the damaging health effects of urban pollution on black and brown citizens.

Distinct from the earlier conservation movement, EJ linked environmental injustice to racial injustice. It opened a new era of civil rights activism in many localities and created new Latino, African American, and Native American leaders who became important, if largely unknown, actors in green activism. EJ organizing was often done by ordinary men and women in Southern rural and Northern urban areas. These were not middle-class "race leaders" dictating a particular political agenda, instead these were truly grassroots organizing efforts focused around immediate concerns and readily identifiable problems.

Still, these decentralized movements have not been understood as central to green politics. Conservation and climate-change environmentalism has dominated both federal policy and the national imagination. The local movements were often effective in blocking specific land use decisions, but largely ineffective in creating coherent national policy agendas.

The early months of the Obama administration seemed likely to change that reality. Van Jones embodied a new civil rights agenda combining concerns of racial equality with labor fairness and environmental sustainability. Along with the appointment of Lisa Jackson to head the EPA, it appeared the Obama administration was prepared to elevate environmental justice concerns to equal billing along with climate change environmentalism. It seemed one outcome of this presidency was that black politics was turning green.

There are likely to be real political consequences for the Obama administration as a result of Jones' exit. John Nichols calls it "an unnecessary and unwise surrender." Baratunde Thurston likens it to "negotiating with terrorists." They identify Jones' resignation was hasty, unnecessary, and ultimately more distracting than useful.

But it is not the politics of this episode that trouble me most. I am most concerned with the substantive consequences. The EJ movement was just beginning to gain a foothold in national politics, just beginning to develop a more cohesive and identifiable national platform, and Jones' position within the White House was important to those efforts.

With all due respect to Arianna Huffington who thanks Glenn Beck and welcomes Jones back to the "outside" where his voice will somehow be more effective, I believe this resignation is a kick in the gut to the EJ movement.

Huffington seems to believe Jones will be more effective lobbying for progressive environmental interests from some place other than the West Wing. While I appreciate that Jones is now unfettered from the overly conciliatory Obama administration, this perspective strikes me as hopelessly naïve and stunningly uninformed about the history of environmental justice.

Activism, community organizing, expression of local interests, and development of indigenous leadership has always been where EJ is at its best. In fact, Jones is a latecomer to that activism, not the leader of it. The limitation of the environmental justice movement has been its decentralization, limited policy agenda, and lack of access of government power. EJ critic Christopher Foreman even asserts that grassroots advocacy is the movement's only real accomplishment, claiming it has made no significant policy contributions.

Jones was an important ambassador of EJ to the White House. Not only did his position bring a particular kind of beltway legitimacy to EJ claims, but his presence might have helped close the "green gap" between black American concerns with pollution, land use, and health issues and the broader green movement concerns with global climate change. Linking those initiatives is critical to truly fair and comprehensive policies of sustainability.

Environmental justice advocates have already perfected outsider strategies, we needed Jones on the inside.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.

Glenn Beck up, left down and Van Jones defiant

The resignation early Sunday of “green jobs” adviser Van Jones says as much about the Obama White House as it does about Jones – marking the latest sacrifice to the political gods after a long summer of compromises and surrenders highlighted the limits of White House power.

The departure – nominally the choice of a still-defiant Jones, who said he feared distracting from important business – confirmed Obama’s choice of pragmatism over confrontation and a belief that controversies sometimes are better solved by capitulation, a view that infuriates Obama’s allies on the left.

It confirmed that the real opposition party to Obama right now is the conservative grassroots that draws its energy from Fox News, talk radio and the Drudge Report, and often leaves Republican elected officials scrambling to catch up.

And it was a fresh reminder that the White House’s vetting process didn’t fall down only on high-profile nominees like Tom Daschle. It barely touched the lower reaches of the administration – a White House official conceded Sunday that Jones’ past statements weren’t as thoroughly scrubbed due to his relatively low rank. Jones’ selection also was propelled by powerful patrons, who included the first lady and the vice president.

In his statement, Jones was defiant. "On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” he said. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs cast the move the same way.

“What Van Jones decided was that the agenda of this president was bigger than any one individual,” Gibbs said, agreeing with the show’s host, George Stephanopoulos that Obama “doesn’t endorse” Jones’s remarks on race and politics, his apparent flirtation with the “9/11 Truth” movement, and his advocacy for the convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The logic of the departure was clear: A hope of keeping the national conversation where Obama wanted it this week ahead of his health reform speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday.

“Between Cambridge cops; whether administration officials are or are not for the public option; right wing mobbing at town halls; and the back to school welcome contretemps, the White House has been forced to play defense and loose-ball control over [the summer],” said the former Clinton White House aide Chris Lehane, who noted that a “very important week” could have been consumed by “ a discussion related to an obscure staffer who no one has ever really heard of.”

Jones’s departure resonated sharply, however, with the other topic on Sunday’s television rotation: The public insurance option in the health care debate. There, too, the White House has responded to conservative opposition by pointing first to the outright distortions – and then running the other way.

To the outrage of the House Progressive Caucus, MoveOn, and other liberal voices, Gibbs and senior advisor David Axelrod said Obama this week will continue to advocate for a government-run plan to compete with private plans, but won’t insist on it, as some foes have cast the option, inaccurately, as equivalent to a government takeover of all health care delivery.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26813.html#ixzz0QRNCOkiz

When Will This White House Learn You Cannot Negotiate With Terrorists?

I spent the past several months away from politics. It was an involuntary hiatus made necessary by personal and professional commitments that demanded my utmost attention. When I left, we had a stimulus bill in place, a president with high approval ratings and some remaining afterglow from election night and inauguration day.

When I returned in mid August, it was to a country that had clearly lost its damn mind. I turned on one cable station to hear people demanding President Obama prove he’s an American citizen, an insane movement led by an Israeli citizen. I switched channels to see another group screeching in fear that Obama’s health care proposal would institute death panels to kill grandma. On yet another station, Glenn Beck accuses this president of having a deep-seated hatred for half of himself. Flip again to find parents removing their children from school because they don’t want their kids exposed to Obama’s socialist indoctrination. And yesterday, Green Jobs Czar Van Jones resigned after extreme pressure from right wing groups and extreme tepidness from the White House that hired him to do his very important work.

Great. After a brief respite, the most accessible American political discourse has returned to fearful, hate-filled, ignorant rants of a high-volume, low-intellect minority.

In such an environment, how does one govern? Does one try to “balance” such concepts as contradictory as a “public option” on one hand and “fear of death panels” on the other? Or does one realize that this is a false spectrum and to try to find a center in such a sea is a worthless and foolhardy expedition?

Too often, this White House has sent the signal that it seeks common ground and conciliation with parties interested in its total destruction. From my point of view, negotiating with ignorance, fear, hate and irrationality is insane. For example, when a major Republican figure in the health care negotiations spreads the death panel lie (Grassley), you see him for what he is, realize you’re dealing with a group of psychopaths, and reset the objectives. “Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be? Cool. Good to know what we’re dealing with. Thanks for your time. We won’t be needing your services anymore. We’re taking our ball and playing somewhere else.” Negotiations require trust and trust assumes that all parties are not completely batshit crazy.

I realize I’m lumping a variety of “opposition” camps together: birthers, deathers, those who accuse the president of racism and those who accuse him of socialism. I’m grouping them because to me they all come from the same place. They’re engaging in a form of terrorism. They are using psychological violence (and occasionally the threat of real violence) to pursue a political objective, and in so doing, inflicting harm upon non-combatants.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the movies, it’s that “The United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists.” Yet this White House is willing to let these psychological terrorists set the terms of the debate and negotiate from their insane positions. One group of people is trying to talk about co-pays. The other thinks the president is a secret Kenyan. One group of people sees the creation of domestic, sustainable jobs as a cornerstone of the 21st century economy. The other thinks the president is going to murder your grandmother. This is not legitimate political discourse and to make decisions acknowledging terms so far apart in their reality is just plain stupid.

Van Jones was one of the good guys. A really, really good guy. He used his education and his passion to combat police brutality and the massive, wasteful incarceration of so many of this nation’s young, brown people. Having fought in the trenches for so long, he saw an opportunity to build hope and jobs and tangible communities as the world responds to the climate crisis. He connected the dots and inspired action and had a vision. He was the rare outsider who got a chance to move inside, and move he did.

Van was the kind of guy that gave me real confidence in this administration’s seriousness. President Obama meets with generals every day and sees scary reports and wants to get re-elected. I can always make some politics-based allowances for his underwhelming actions. Van, however, was truly one of us. He got it. And to give someone like him power gave me more faith in the president. So when the lynch mob came after Van, it was a test. The same test so many Democratic administrations have failed time and time again. When the going gets tough, do you back your people, or do you fall back on excuses.

This White House, this administration and this president failed Van, failed its supporters and failed to honor the efforts of millions that got them into office in the first place. What’s the point of having power if you don’t use it? When will this White House realize that nothing it does will ever be acceptable to the loud-mouthed, ignorant minority? When will it learn that you cannot negotiate with terrorists??

I’m heartbroken over Van’s departure because it’s these little meaningless concessions that undermine people’s faith in the system. You get folks all riled up about change. You empower a man who embodies that change. And they you let him be run out of office by fucking Glenn Beck? So Glenn Beck is running the White House now? Is that how it’s gonna be? Just tell me that I knocked on all those doors for nothing, and I can start the grieving process, but don’t pretend this will solve anything.

I can’t help but look at this spineless response and see it in contrast to the previous administration. You know how gangsta they are? DICK CHENEY IS STILL TALKING SMACK! You don’t see anyone of prominence telling him to shut up. The man who has been wrong about everything gets the full support of his party, yet President Obama can’t find enough audacity to stick up for a true change agent?

How do you expect folks to continue to go to the mat for your agenda, when you so easily sacrifice our best and brightest at the whim of an illegitimate lynch mob? How do you expect the next generation to invest themselves in the political process when they see that despite their good works, they can be taken out over nonsense, especially when the double standard is so abundantly clear? How can you ask from us what you won’t do for us? And when will you realize that you cannot negotiate with terrorists?

Baratunde Thurston is a comedian and vigilante pundit. He was nominated for the Bill Hicks Award for Thought Provoking Comedy, declared a Champion of the First Amendment by Iowa State, and called “someone I need to know” by Barack Obama. He has appeared on ABC, NPR, the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and ComedyCentral.com. Baratunde is the co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics and performs regularly in New York City, where he works by day as Web Editor and politics czar for The Onion. He hosts Popular Science’s Future Of on the Science Channel, and he lives in Twitter.

So, "Dr. Roxanne Shante"...is not a Doctor after all...

So, I am sure you all recall the recent blogs, tweets, articles on the whole Roxanne Shante story; PhD from Cornell University, well that was false.

I was sitting around at work foraging for articles to blog about; of course, I have to blog about the Roxanne Shante article. Recently, I posted an article on her, what seemed to be honest and legit accomplishment; yesterday, I was dismayed to find out that they were false. She didn't attend Cornell University, nor did she get her PhD. My question is, why lie about something as such? To be frank, I believed what seemed to be "very pleasing" news... so, I went on telling people how proud I was.

And, if this "it was a hoax" is de facto; I will be a bit upset with myself. I fell into the "gotcha" trap; which is very unusual for me, I am meticulous when it comes down to believing what some journalist write. However, I do believe that Roxanne Shante obscured the truth for some press attention. As they say, "it was a great story while it lasted"