January 2008 Archives
Wanted! Smart Negroes
Tags: Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Root
With the Illinois Senator confounding pundit expectations about the legitimacy of his candidacy and the perceived capacity for non-blacks to support his campaign, there's suddenly a need for highly articulate Negroes, who are actually armed with some quantitative and qualitative data. So unlike the Don Imus, Michael Richards or even the Jena 6 controversies--where the clear desire seemed to be to create spectacles around racist transgressions and Negroes who love to agitate--the Barack moment actually demands some sophisticated political analysis (read: Civil Rights Leaders need not apply). For example, in recent weeks political scientists such as Melissa Harris Lacewell and Paula McClain have weighed in thoughtfully on the issues of race, gender and white supremacy with regards to the barbed exchanges between the Clinton and Obama camps, in venues as diverse as Democracy Now! and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees. Such opportunities did not consistently exist prior to the Barack moment.
The Root offers Gates the opportunity to trade on his true gatekeeper status, by delivering smart Negroes to mainstream corporate news platforms. This is not a new hustle for Gates. A decade ago, Gates was the intellectual and marketing force behind Africana.com, an on-line journal that provided a regular and critical forum for thinkers such as Amy Alexander, William Jelani Cobb, Lester Spence, Jimi Izrael, and Bethany Allen. At the time the site was essentially an on-line vehicle to promote Gates's Encarta Africana. Africana.com soon became part of a necessary intervention into public discourse during the early years of the Bush II presidency, when smart Negroes--excepting Secretaries Powell and Rice--were no longer in vogue and ThugNiggas (50 Cent, Allen Iverson, etc.) were concretized in the popular imagination. Africana.com was shut down in 2004, after it was purchased a few years earlier by Time Warner (AOL)--and the latter came to the realization, that "critical interventions" scare off advertisers and upscale chat rooms don't.
As such one has to wonder if the shelf life of The Root will outlive Gates' current vanity project, the whims of corporate media entities and the general skittishness of too many smart Negroes strolling the promenade with well-packaged critical analyses in hand. In any regard there is competition in the way; According to sources "Cathy Hughes and Radio One are about to initiate an online venture."
Notes from a Soul Jazz Summit
Tags: David "Fathead" Newman, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Duke Performances, Houston Person, Lou Donaldson, Soul Jazz
Historically Soul Jazz--a species of the Jazz tradition that is actively in conversation with Soul and Rhythm & Blues music--has been given short shrift by jazz traditionalists. Often thought of as the precursor to jazz fusion--and thus the end of all civilization for some--Soul Jazz and its most popular practitioners, including organists Jimmy Smith and "Big" John Patton, guitarist Grant Green, and alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley are rarely mentioned alongside more traditional jazz elites. Recently Duke Performances, under the direction of Aaron Greenwald, paid tribute to Soul Jazz and its legacy with A Soul Jazz Summit, featuring the Dr. Lonnie Smith Trio and saxophonists Houston Person, David "Fathead" Newman, and North Carolina native Lou Donaldson. The concert was the kick-off event for Duke Performances' six week series Soul Power! From Gospel to the Godfather.
For some, Soul Jazz wasn't art, but simply good time music that anybody could play. I have all too vivid a memory of a clerk at the old Lincoln Center/66th street Tower Records in NYC deriding the music of The Crusaders and Grover Washington, Jr. while giving advice to novice Jazz fans as to what "real" and "good" Jazz music was. Ironically many of the most popular Soul Jazz musicians of the late 1950s and 1960s came of age cutting their teeth playing Be-Bop--the so-called Holy Grail of all jazz genres. These musicians though, perhaps more than any other generation of jazz performers, were ever aware of the ways that the music was losing connection with the very communities that birthed it. Organ trios, like the one that Dr. Lonnie Smith led, which simply featured a drummer, guitarist and a Hammond B-3 player, were staples of black clubs in the 1950s and 1960s, if only because they demanded so little space.
But Soul Jazz was also music that was rooted in the everyday lives of black folk, particularly poor and working class folk, who wanted to spend their money, above all, to have a good time. Longtime Jazz Crusader and pianist Joe Sample (whose "In My Wildest Dreams" provides the sample for Tupac's "Dear Momma") once recalled the Crusaders opening for some Rhythm and Blues acts in a Texas barn during the late 1950s and customers, who had paid their "hard earned quarters" to "have a good time," admonishing them (with threats of violence) about playing Hard Bop Jazz. And while some Jazz musicians indeed recorded some of their most popular tracks in the Soul Jazz idiom, to simply see their choices as catering to the marketplace, misses the point of it all. Additionally, this is not to say, that black audiences weren't interested in Be-Bop or the Free Jazz of Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor or Pharaoh Sanders, but like many a "conscious" rapper will tell you, folk ain't all that interested in "thinking" about their music, when they are trying to "escape" the world.
It was more than a decade ago that I sat down by phone and talked with Lou Donaldson about Soul Jazz. Songs like Donaldson's version of Johnny Taylor's "Who's Making Love" and originals like "Hot Dog" and especially "Pot Belly" have long been favorites of crate diggers. At the time of our conversation, Donaldson was appreciative of the way hip-hop keep his music relevant and most importantly, keep his music connected to the folk. In Donaldson's mind, the funk of George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic and the Ohio Players was closer to the jazz tradition that he recognized than the fusion and conservatory jazz of the contemporary moment--Jazz was music that was suppose to live on the dancefloor. As host of A Soul Jazz Summit, Donaldson was just as outspoken regularly referencing Curtis Jackson and his music as being "not worth a quarter," and pointedly asserting that "this music," as in real Jazz, would "kill Kenny G." Donaldson's longtime mantra, "Everything I Play Gonna be Funky" (borrowing more than a riff from Lee Dorsey) was the defining aspect of A Soul Jazz Summit. In an era when Jazz has fully transitioned from the Chitlin' Circuit and into the Conservatory--and the "big head" concert hall-- the A Soul Jazz Summit demanded that folk get up off their asses.
The concert opened with Dr. Lonnie Smith, who is currently experiencing a critical renaissance some 40-plus years into his career. Smith's trio featured longtime collaborator Peter Bernstein and drummer Herlin Riley--on loan from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Riley was consistently the best performer throughout the night, seemingly relishing being freed--for just one night--from the constraints of the Lincoln Center scene. Houston Person, who is perhaps most known for his decades long professional relationship with the late vocalist Etta Jones ("Don't go to Strangers"), was the first tenor-man to hit the stage. With jokes about Viagra and his bad feet in tow, Donaldson was next, playing a set that included "I Almost Lost My Mind," and his best known track "Alligator Boogaloo." Now 81 years-old, Donaldson's was in remarkable form. David "Fathead" Newman, whose visibility has increased in the aftermath of Bokeem Woodbine's portrayal of him in the film Ray, was also in great form.
To the close the show, all three saxophonists joined on stage together for the first time ever and it is telling that when they had to choose a song that they all could play together it was Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A Train." The song, in part a tribute to the vitality of black life in Harlem, USA was a fitting end to the evening--and a fitting beginning to the Soul Power! From Gospel to the Godfather series.
What Would Shirley Chisholm Say?
Tags: Barack Obama, Bed-Stuy, Hillary Clinton, NOW, Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm was born Shirley St. Hill in Brooklyn in 1924 to Guyanese and Barbadian parents. Until her parents were more financially stable, Chisholm and her sisters were sent to Barbados to live with their grandmother; Chisholm returned to Brooklyn at age 10 and later earned a degree from Brooklyn College graduating cum laude. Important to Chisholm's later political views is the fact that her mother was a domestic worker, her father a union man and her early career was spent working in and around the child care profession. Chisholm never wavered politically in her concerns for workers, poor women, particularly mothers, and children. Ms. Chisholm's initial grassroots activism led her to like-minded activists in organizations like the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League (BSPL) and the Unity Democratic Club (UDC), both of which she helped to elect black candidates to local offices in New York State, including the State Assembly, which she herself was elected to in 1964.
Despite Chisholm's successful election to the New York State assembly in 1964, she was viewed with some with suspicion and derision, largely based on her gender and her Caribbean heritage. In a recent essay on Chisholm published in the Journal of African-American History, Julie Gallagher notes that "One male constituent sarcastically inquired whether [Chisholm] has fixed her husband's breakfast before campaigning." The New York Times suggests that there were "whispers" in relation to Chisholm's heritage. Though some of Chisholm's Brooklyn constituents might have felt that she was not "African-American" or "church" enough for their taste, such thinking was more likely related to the discomfort produced by the public presence of a self-assured, broadly focused and articulate black woman.
Chisholm's emergence as a national political figure occurs in an historical moment where black women were still largely viewed as incapable of fulfilling the expectations of the "race man." As such, Gallagher is right in stating that Chisholm "helped fashion ideas about African-American women in the public sphere by taking bold stands and encouraging the media attention." "Fighting Shirley Chisholm-- Unbought and Unbossed" was one of those bold statements and the one that she employed during her campaign to be elected to the US House of Representatives in 1968. Chisholm's candidacy bought to the forefront debates about gender within the black community as she found herself running against James Farmer, Jr. (yes, that James Farmer). Chisholm's subsequent victory, as Yvonne Bynoe suggests, "stomped on the idea that leadership was the sole prerogative of black men."
In the her first years in congress, Chisholm demanded the repeal of anti-abortion laws (this in the years before Roe v. Wade), supported the right for workers to unionize, introduced legislation to address urban poverty and was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War. That Chisholm found so little traction on these issues within congress, was, perhaps, the major stimulus for her decision to run for President in 1972. The idea of Chisholm's candidacy germinated with her involvement in the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) which she founded with prominent feminists Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem and follow New York congresswomen Bella Abzug. When Chisholm formally announced her candidacy on January 25, 1972, the expectation was that she could garner support from the black political establishment as well as feminist activists. Instead Chisholm was reminded of the perceived lack of political gravitas held by black women.
With the exception of the Black Panther Party, few major black institutions supported Chisholm's candidacy (and many of those institutions pressured Chisholm to renounce the Panthers' support). A telling aspect of Chisholm's candidacy with regards to the black political establishment is that when black leaders gathered in Gary, Indiana for the oft-celebrated National Black Political Convention, Chisholm wasn't invited to participate. There's little doubt that some distanced themselves from Chisholm because of her mercurial nature and the symbolic nature of her candidacy. It's hard to imagine though that the Gary gathering, which was in part premised buttressing the role of black patriarchy in formal political circles, would have ever closed ranks around Chisholm--particularly given her desire to remain "unbought and unbossed," even to the expectations of her race.
More telling about Chisholm's candidacy was the reaction of professional feminists like Freidan and Steinem (who never mentions her "friend" Chisholm is her recent New York Times op-ed), who while offering tepid acknowledgement of the importance of Chisholm's campaign, never forcefully came out in support of it. A few years later when Chisholm's congressional colleague Bella Abzug ran for the Senate against Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chisholm chose to support Moynihan. When asked about her decision, Chisholm responded "Where was Abzug when I ran for President? Why didn't reporters ask why a lot of women didn't support me for the Presidency?" Chisholm recounts the difficulties of her presidential campaign in her second memoir The Good Fight (1973). As Gallagher admits in her essay "Waging the 'Good Fight': the Political Career of Shirley Chisholm," politicians were "more willing to accommodate the status quo in exchange for gradual, but tangible victories for African Americans and women. Full endorsement of Chisholm's presidential campaign would have been a risky political move for mainstream civil rights and feminist organizations."
Chisholm's political career, which ended in 1982, resonates in the current political environment. Upon leaving congress in 1982, Chisholm, for example, chided black politicians for "always putting their eggs in one basket." As she told The New York Times in October of 1982, "[black politicians] are not politically sophisticated enough to understand the pragmatic reasons behind my moves." Chisholm's wisdom is echoed in the decision of some mainstream black leaders to lend support to both the Clinton and Obama campaigns, though the racial litmus test that some apply to Obama's candidacy bespeaks the lack of recognition of his political pragmatism.
Chisholm's political career is also reminder of the difficulties of managing race and gender in a society that rarely seeks to address sexism, racism and misogyny with the seriousness that it deserves. While NOW founder Steinem can weigh in on the side of gender, at the expense of race, and Clinton can legitimately celebrate the historic aspects of her campaign--the first woman candidate to win a primary--both could be more sensitive to the positions of the black women voters that they are so desperately trying to attract to Clinton's campaign. As Yvonne Bynoe argued at the time of Chisholm's death, the "prospects for white women...are distinguished from those of black women by the fact that there are several white female senators and governors in the pipeline, but not one black women similarly positioned." Bynoe's comments, like Chisholm's career in general, is a reminder of the claim that a group of black feminist made a generation ago--"All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave."
Hillary vs. Barack? A Black (Male) Feminist Considers
I have to admit, that I haven't thought much about the gender question as it relates to the contest between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That is until Gloria Steinem shot a bow across the collective dome of so many folk who claim a progressive gender (and sexual) politics. Writing recently in the New York Times, Steinem asks aloud: what if it was "Achola Obama" and not Barack Obama who was running for president? According to Steinem, "nether [Achola Obama] nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama's public style--or Bill Clinton's either--without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits." And while I'm with my colleague Salamishah Tillet, who suggested that Steinem didn't have to create "Achola Obama"--the example of Carol Moseley Braun's 2004 Presidential run would have sufficed--Steinem is on point when she asks "why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?"
This is why South Carolina is such critical terrain for both Obama and Clinton, with black voters representing more than 40% of registered democrats in the state. Black women voters are the primary reason why Senator Obama employed Oprah Winfrey's celebrity in his stumps in the state; those black women are the reason why Reverend Marcia L. Dyson has been traveling throughout the state on behalf of Senator Clinton. Ironically Black women represent a segment of the American electorate that has rarely had their concerns addressed or even acknowledged. Think, for example, about the collective silence of John Edwards and Dick Cheney when Gwen Ifill asked them about high HIV rates among black women in the 2004 Vice-Presidential debate. Nearly four years later, like some surreal remix of The Children of Men, black women may dictate the future of the democratic party and thus the future of this country.
A Sunday Kind of Love: Romancing Barack
"I want a Sunday kind of love, a love to last past Saturday night.."--Sunday Kind of Love (as performed by Etta James)
When the legendary Etta James bought the music and lyrics of "Sunday Kind of Love" to life, she could have been singing to the fragile state of African-American psyches at the time. "Sunday Kind of Love" was recorded by James in 1961, at a moment that was increasingly defined by the demands for social and racial justice that were emanating from the American South. Indeed the song, which is credited Barbara Belle and Louis Prima (among others), is little more than an innocuous love song about desiring a love, that transcends a one night (or one primary) stand. For some African-Americans, such songs could mean so much more, often framing the critical issues in their live in a language that was easily understood. At the root of Etta James's performance of "Sunday Kind of Love" were fears of rejection and betrayal, that resonated throughout black communities even as the most visible tenets of legal discrimination began to buckle. Was this an America that could offer African-Americans and others a "Sunday Kind of Love"? I thought about that question last Thursday night as Senator Barack Obama addressed supporters--and the nation--after his historic win in the Democratic Caucus in Iowa.
Indeed Obama's warm tone and fluttery diction fit as comfortably as a warm blanket last Thursday night--America seems to be in love with the man. Ironically though, the love is not as profound in the very communities that should naturally call Obama their favorite son. The failure of established African-American leadership (broadly defined) to close ranks around Obama has been widely documented and the ocean of non-black faces that engulfed Obama in the aftermath of his victory in Iowa, easily adds to the notion that Obama's candidacy is not reflective of the concerns of everyday black folk.
But I suspect that underneath the strident calls that Obama be subjected to some sort of "black conscious" litmus test (largely by those gatekeepers who stand to lose the most by a successful Obama candidacy) lies more complex realities related to issues of betrayal, mistrust and abandonment. If we give our love unconditionally to this man, in this context, and at this moment, will our hearts be broken once again? Will our continued investment in "black faces in high places" (an admittedly old-school notion) lead us to follow a man who will sell out our dreams--and our souls? Will our unwillingness to ride the "Obama Wave" leaves us out in the cold, in the event he does win?
There are no illusions here. Barack Obama is a politician--one with the capacity to inspire the masses--but nevertheless, a politician, just as the vaunted Jack Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and even Harold Washington were essentially politicians. In other words, when pressed to assure his political survival--in spite of his idealism--I expect Barack Obama to be the pragmatist that the best politicians are. That pragmatism will likely, at times, be in opposition to black expectations. There are also no illusions about our current environment with regards to racial and social justice; Whatever hope some of us can conjure in support of Obama's candidacy is regularly met by the realities of police brutality, a criminally faulty criminal justice system, the benign and conscious neglect of urban and rural public schools, and a range of other issues that rarely get any play during the candidates' debates. Given the realities of race, class and gender, as it is lived on the ground, is this actually a country that could realistically elect a black man--no matter how comfortable he makes a white majority feel about him--as its president?
Many of these questions will be answered soon enough, but until then, I'll hold off in putting on Etta James's "At Last".
Debating the Great Debaters
I recently weighed in on the significance of Denzel Washington's performances as Frank Lucas in American Gangster and Melvin B. Tolson in The Great Debaters. There are many who want to make critical distinctions between a Harlem drug lord--or dope dealer as Bomani Jones so eloquently asserts--and a celebrated modernist poet who happened to coach one of the most accomplished college debate teams in the 1930s. I argue though that both men, and the worlds they inhabited, provide a rich entrée into the nuanced and complicated lives that everyday black folk lead--lives that rarely get depicted via Hollywood Cinema. That said, The Great Debaters takes liberties with historical realities, often solely for the effect of creating a classic Hollywood tale. In this regard the film--despite the earnest intents of the director (Washington) and the film's producer Oprah Winfrey--does a disservice, by being dismissive of the real political struggles engaged by those depicted in the film.
In his own right Melvin B. Tolson is a figure deserving closer examination. Throughout The Great Debaters though, Tolson's story was too often dwarfed by the need for his character to power the "little engine that could." Thus in the name of adhering to "feel good movie of year" clichés, The Great Debaters offers little with regards to Tolson's significant reputation as a black modernist poet. More alarming was the way Tolson's involvement with southern tenant farmers was employed in the film to elevate his--and by extension Washington's--race man status, providing little detail to how deadly and under-appreciated labor and farmer organizing was in the South, particularly when such organizing aimed to bring together farmers and workers across the color-line. Tolson's truly engaged political work wasn't simply about instructing black college students (largely drawn from the middle class) in the fine art of debate or in producing a body of literature that ranked with the best of his more celebrated Harlem Renaissance peers, but rather the more concrete, roll-up-your-sleeves, labor that he did on behalf of the tenant farming movement. But of course the reality of that struggle is not as exciting as a group of students from a tiny historically black college in Texas successfully competing against students from the very paragon of American higher education, Harvard University.
And yet the film's signature moment is another example of where the film takes liberties, as the presumed debate with Harvard actually took place against the University of Southern California (USC). Understandably having Wiley slay the mighty Harvard is a more compelling story, particularly for a black period film trying to compete for holiday dollars. Wiley's real defeat of the USC debate team is no-less a significant achievement at a historical moment (and some say contemporary moment) when the very concept that blacks possessed intellectual capabilities on par with whites was under assault. The tweaking of history in Hollywood cinema is of course a time tested practice, where the sanctity of the narrative is often privileged at the expense of real historical events and people. It is not surprising then, that the characters of Henry Lowe (Nate Parker) and Jurnee Smollett's Samantha Booke ("with an e") were composite characters. The fact that the film's producers needed audiences to invest in the lives and futures of these characters led to their decision to create biographies for "fictional" characters after test audiences reacted negatively to vague descriptions of Lowe's future.
Ironically the story of James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), one of the real historical figures in the film and arguably the most compelling on the debate team, was often a backdrop to the steamy relationship between Lowe and Booke. Highlighting the on-screen sexual tension between Smolett and Parker (think about the bare-chested Parker in last year's feel-good-movie, Pride) obviously helps make the film more accessible to hip-hop generation audiences, but Farmer's own story as a teen who was drawn into the critical political movement of his era should have been equally attractive to the film's producers. Farmer, who was a frequent debater of Malcolm X in the 1960s, became an important figure in his own right as a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Figures like Farmer are often footnotes to the "magic" Negro narratives that mainstream audiences find so damn fascinating--those stories of black folk who with their superior talents or superhuman capacity for forgiveness help whites salve their guilt about this country's racist past.
The Great Debaters makes little effort to connect the future political engagement of Farmer--CORE organized some of the first southern "freedom" rides nearly two decades before the more well-known freedom rides of the 1960s--with the visceral struggles that he witnessed following Tolson to a meeting with black and white tenant farmers. Instead that experience with Tolson and the dramatic lynching scene that serves as the film's emotional turning point, are used simply as inspiration for Farmer's anecdotal usage in his debate with the fictional Harvard debate team. That the film's producers make little effort to connect the historical dots here, is particularly egregious at a contemporary moment that demands that American youth imagine themselves as potential agents of social justice. Films like The Great Debaters often relish in the ability of blacks to transcend racist realities and their own moral deficiencies, but provide little inkling of the real political struggles that create the victories and successes that these films celebrate.
