Critical Noir

Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"

Wed, 07 May 2008 14:06:02 -0500

Yesterday was the Democratic Primary for President in North Carolina; It was also the 73rd anniversary of my father's birth. The alignment of the two events seemed logical to me as it was my remembrance of the first time that my father voted--for fellow Georgia native Jimmy Carter in 1976--that forced me off the political fence. As a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow south, my father had little expectation that he would ever be able to vote, let alone vote for someone who looked vaguely like him. I can remember the look of pride on his face when he cast his first ballot and it was that look that I specifically recalled when I decided to support Obama back in January. And it wasn't so much about Obama--there wasn't anything inherently progressive about his politics--but that his candidacy inspired a level of investment in the political process--or "the franchise" as the old-timers liked to call it, hence the term disenfranchisement--that I had not witnessed in my life. I celebrated the anniversary my father's birth by walking into my local polling spot, holding the hands of my two daughters, so that they could get a first hand view of participating in "the franchise". Indeed I was a little older than my 9-year-old is now when I was introduced to the political process working phone banks in the Bronx for Jimmy Carter's campaign. It was something that my 5-year-old said to me a few days ago though, that really forced me to think about what participating in the process really meant. Watching yet another round of political ads on TV, my youngest daughter asked "daddy, are we voting for [Ba]Rock Obama?" and I immediately recalled historian Elsa Barkley Brown's classic essay "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom." In the essay, Barkley Brown examines the voting practices of black communities in Richmond, VA after the Civil War. Though only black men had the legal right to vote at the time, Barkley Brown explains that the black community viewed "the vote as a collective, not an individual possession; and furthermore , that African American women, unable to cast a separate vote, viewed African-American men's vote as equally theirs. They believed that [the] franchise should be cast in the best interests of both." What Barkley Brown identifies is one of the most progressive concepts of democracy. As I walked into the voting booth on Tuesday, I was clear that I was not simply voting for myself, but voting for my father--who passed two weeks after the February 5th round of primaries--and my two daughters, who both anxiously await their opportunities to fully participate in the franchise. And it is this sense of community and investment in something bigger than ourselves that marks so much of the energy around Obama's candidacy as reflected in the recent DipDive production "We Are the One". Like its predecessor "Yes, We Can" this new Will.I.Am production speaks to a generational vision of "freedom" and citizenship--a vision that my two daughters already have a down-payment on. Mark Anthony Neal

And the Winner Is...Donny Hathaway, Mr. Soul

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:54:09 -0500

I've spent better part of that last 20-years--what seems like a lifetime--trying to write about Donny Hathaway. It's not as though I haven't written about Hathaway, but Hathaway's music, his Soul really, demands a level of emotional commitment that, frankly, overwhelms the logic of my vocations as writer and critic. I mean, after listening to Donny Hathaway sing and moan and hum and caress that piano/Fender Rhodes, what the hell else is there to write about?

Take for instance Hathaway's "Giving Up"--a song written by the late great arranger Van McCoy (he of "The Hustle"). Beginning, something like a dirge--and with Hathaway that always seemed his way, the pace and timing of his ballads akin to some centuries old funeral hymn--the song's second verse takes on a second musical life (or is it that a second sight) as Hathaway and his rhythm section, in seeming double-time, against the real-time of Hathaway's voice, narrate the heart palpitations of a man on the brink of losing his mind. And you know he's on the brink when he admits in the third verse, "whether she knows or not, she really needs me too," only to bellow a sinister laugh in admission that he's on the other side of his sanity. And then the song literally collapses into the familiarity of a fully-blown Blues groove.

"Giving Up" is a signature example Of Hathaway's ability to summon the well-spring of black musical idioms and bring them in conversation with emotional darkness of his Soul. And it is perhaps that darkness that has led so many writers to take their own (critical) lives, in an attempt to capture the emotional depth of Hathaway's art. This is what, in part, Ed Pavlic suggests in his brilliant and moving prose poem, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press).

Lacking the kind of archival material (beyond the music, of course) that has helped many a critic to bring Soul Men past alive on the pages of books and magazines, Pavlic, an award winning poet and scholar, was forced to use traces of Hathaway's emotional DNA (provided by the music, of course). As Pavlic writes in the acknowledgments, "Much of this book is a kind of dance between what I needed to know and not know about Donny Hathaway in order to find out what I had to say...the basic truth of the book is what I've made from the sound of Hathaway's voice, the rhythm of his work."

According to Pavlic, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced started as an attempt to write a biography about Hathaway, but as Hathaway's spirit seemed to stonewall attempts to get the story right/write, he gave in to the calling of the music. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced traffics in all of the rumor and innuendo surrounding Hathaway's life and tragic death (including his bouts with mental illness), but rather than read like a speculative fiction about the man, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced instead animates the traces of truth that Hathaway's music revels in.

In one particularly compelling section called "Interview: Graveyard Shift: Carr Square Projects: July 20, 1980: St. Louis, MO," Pavlic imagines a reporter traveling to the place where Hathaway grew up, querying residents about Hathaway's legacy the year after his death. One resident recalls seeing Hathaway in concert:

Women in the audience would call out to him when he'd pause/Other Women would answer them/Men didn't say a word/I know I didn't/The women'd have themselves a ball, a party, almost like they're watching themselves on stage/Not the men/He'd take your life like you knew he took his own life/He'd wrap it around his fist and lay it up side your head

Here Pavlic recalls those fabulous live recordings of Hathaway, in which the voices of the women in the crowd were always so audible--continuous "call and response" moments--and yet rarely do we hear the voices of the men. It is this attention to seemingly matter-less detail--what were these men thinking about, as Hathaway probed the very essence of their existence?--that provides Winners Have Yet to Be Announced so much of its--and I hate to use this word--authenticity or rather sincerity to borrow a thought from John L. Jackson, Jr.

Donny Hathaway remains an enigma among popular music audiences as his most well known songs, "Where is the Love?" and "The Closer I Get to You" are award-winning duets recorded with Roberta Flack. While those songs are brilliant in their own right, they capture little of the emotional and spiritual depth of Hathaway's own recordings. Hathaway's full length recordings like Everything is Everything (1969), Extensions of a Man (1972), and in particular Donny Hathaway (1970) demand a level of musical commitment, that there was little chance that he was going to earn a popular following, even as giants such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Jerry Butler sang his praises.

Ed Pavlic's Winners Have Yet to Be Announced shines a bright light on the legacy of a man, whose music has unfortunately been long removed to darkened corners of Soul's yesteryear. The book's title is taken from an obituary for Hathaway that appeared in the Washington Post: "the door to the room was locked and there was no evidence of foul play...He was nominated for a second Grammy in 1978. Winners have yet to be announced."

Obama Elitist? I'm Hearing Something Else

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:51:03 -0500

So in a recent conversation, Barack Obama tried a little too hard to make that connection between the disaffection of the white working class and the white poor, and their proclivity to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" as a way to make meaning of the diminishing returns of their lives. Guns and religion and "the other," the Senator from Illinois argued were the comfort foods of choice for many. The fact that Obama suggested that some folk in these communities might be tad bitter, should not in and of itself raise any eyebrows, but the speed and derision that the presumptive (I'm sick of this word) Republican nominee John McCain and New York Senator Hillary Clinton asserted that Obama's comments were "demeaning" and Obama, himself, out of touch, suggests that there is something else at play. There's no small irony that two of the wealthiest members of the Senate would describe a former community organizer as out of touch. But McCain and Clinton's responses have nothing to do with the black and brown urban poor that Obama broke bread with in Illinois, but rather the white working poor and working class in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where high-wage jobs are scarce and hope, increasingly even scarcer. I would argue that none of the candidates, including Senator Obama, are really in touch with what's happening in small town America. For instance, look how middle-class Philadelphia suburbanites have suddenly become the charmed constituency in the forthcoming Pennsylvania primary. Indeed Senator McCain as recently as at three weeks ago argued vehemently that the Federal Government should not alleviate the financial woes of those in the very communities that Obama talked about, who are losing their homes in record numbers. Bitter? I bet more than few in those communities are bitter in response to the Federal Government's essential bailout of Bear Sterns. In a country where God and the flag are held in the highest esteem and any bitterness expressed toward the government--particularly in the post 9/11 era--is viewed with suspicion by some, if not an outright act of treason (think about reaction to Michelle Obama's comments earlier this year.), it has often been easy for marginalized communities of all backgrounds, to identify scapegoats, be it in the form of racial conspiracy theories, anti-Black racism and the kind of xenophobia expressed in response to illegal, and likely legal immigration. In any other Presidential campaign and in any other historical moment, the depiction of an opposition candidate as "elitist" and "out of touch" is slick and potentially effective politicking; it's the reason why Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, dumbed-himself-down in 1992. But the assertion that Barack Obama--an highly educated, upper-middle-class and articulate black man--is an "elitist," is really code for "uppity nigger." In terms of instigating anti-Black racism and violence in this country, few things were more potent than the perception that black people, and black men in particular, did not know their place--whether it be an act of "reckless eyeballing" or too prideful of a demeanor. What McCain and Clinton are essentially signaling to the white underclass and working poor is that "this nigger thinks he's better than you." But these attempts are part of a dated racial politics that is increasingly giving way to what Ellen McGirt of Fast Company Magazine calls a "postboomer society" where Obama is reflective of an attempt to move "beyond traditional identity politics." Still, it's hard to imagine that there won't be a symbolic "lynching" in Senator Obama's future.

Hearing (Thinking) Black Death

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:06:28 -0500

The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson's new book April 4, 1968 reads: "You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death," to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There's a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death. Perhaps more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death--the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments--all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it's been in the province of black creative expression--Black Genius more broadly--that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea death, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right. When the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 "Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?" it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle. "Were You There?" was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang its words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible. "Were You There?" was featured on a brilliant recording by the late Max Roach called Lift Every Voice and Sing, which paired the legendary drummer's regular jazz band with the JC White Singers. "Were You There?" begins as a dirge--a literal death march--musically transporting listeners to the horse-driven carriage that so many boldly walked behind on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in April of 1968. But just as you could imagine the collective black body politic kneeling at yet another grave, for yet another murdered soul and succumbing to an unfathomable despair, the song's tone changes. Like the phoenix, the collective black body politic musically rises and when the JC White Singers ask the subsequent question, "Were You There, When They Rode away the Storm?" the place and space of death--the physical and psychic--had been transformed into something like a freedom--a freedom not explicitly in the traditional sense of the world, but something more philosophical as simply represented in a phrase like "I'm--We're still here." Roach's Lift Every Voice and Sing was among the many recordings released in the aftermath of King's murder. Nina Simone's "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)" is perhaps the most popular and one that was written explicitly with King's murder as inspiration. In the middle of Simone's live 12-minute version of the song, she directly addresses the crowd, recalling the then recent deaths of John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, and Otis Redding. Simone then asks aloud, "Do you realize how many we have lost?"--reinforcing the idea that at the time of King's murder, Black Death was literally in the air. The power of these songs--cultivated in the darkest and most dire moments of black life in the Americas--is that they are so easily recalled at moments of great distress. These songs were not simply emotional responses to loss, but really an important intellectual response--the way that Blackness thinks death.

Nothing But a Man: Remembering Ivan Dixon

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:44:25 -0500

It would be easy to think of Ivan Dixon, who died recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, as just another brilliant black actor or actress who never received the recognition that they deserved. Indeed if you placed Dixon's career alongside those such as Rosalind Cash, Roscoe Lee Brown, Gloria Foster and Calvin Lockhart, you'd have just an inkling of a level of genius that was tragically underutilized and overlooked. But Dixon, distinguished himself even among those stellar talents, by playing critical roles--as an actor and director--in two films that will forever serve as the most evocative examples of black masculinity and black radicalism in mainstream American cinema. For many, Ivan Dixon was simply the black guy on the 1960's sitcom Hogan Heroes. Set in a Nazi POW camp, the show poked fun at the very idea of Nazi imperialism at a historical moment, the 1960s, when the United States was the most resonant example of such imperialism. A critique of America's own imperialistic desire, was the not-so-deep meaning beyond the clowning of Colonel Klink--the hapless face of Hitler's ambition. Dixon's Sgt. James Kinchloe, though, offered the only so-called "black" perspective on Nazi imperialism that could be easily accessed in mainstream American culture in the 1960s. It's not like Band of Brothers gave any inkling of what the brothers were doing in Europe during World War II. For better or worse, Dixon's Kinchloe also presented one of the first African-American television characters who was defined by a more global perspective, an aspect of his career that frames his early success as the Nigerian exchange student Joseph Asagai in the original stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun. Dixon's most stirring role though, would be much closer to home, geographically and politically. Nothing But a Man (1964) directed by then 35-year-old German-born director Michael Roemer, depicts the life of Duff Anderson (portrayed by Dixon), a wandering day laborer, seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood in the poverty stricken American south. Dixon's wife in the film was portrayed by the legendary jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Critic John Nickel suggests that Roemer's film anticipated the infamous Moynihan Report on the black family, which argues that black families needed to embrace mainstream patriarchy in order be fully integrated into American society. In essence, future US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that black communities were hamstrung by the overarching influence of black women. Nothing But a Man's power come from also locating the impact of joblessness on the lives of black men (Roemer used NAACP field workers to help do research for the film), who felt as though they couldn't be men in their own households, if they weren't the primary financial providers in those households. Dixon brought a depth of humanity to this situation, particularly as he seeks out his own absentee father. Though Nothing But a Man lacks much of the nuance that three decades of black feminist scholarship has brought to bear on the dynamics of black gender relationships, the film remains a visual testament to the struggles of black men in the south, just as the Black Power Movement was about to erupt. The Black Power Movement is full blown, by the time Ivan Dixon made the move to work behind the camera instead of in front of it. Though Dixon had begun to direct television episodes, including The Bill Cosby Show (1970), his first job directing a full-length feature was the little regarded blaxploitation flick Trouble Man (1972), which starred Robert Hooks and featured a now-timeless soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. For his next film, Dixon partnered with novelist Sam Greenlee for a cinematic version of Greenlee's novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which told the fictional tale of the first black FBI agent. In the film, the mild-mannered college-educated Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook), spends five years working at the FBI, essentially making photocopies. When he decides the leave after five years, he uses the expertise he learned in the FBI to equip black and Latino street gangs with the tools to mount insurrections in American cities. Freeman's mild-mannered radicalism is likely--along with Huey Newton--an inspiration behind Aaron McGruder's "Huey Freeman." The Spook Who Sat by the Door opened in 1973 and was gone from theaters within a week--the film's distributors United Artists perhaps a little too concerned about Spook's incendiary message. On the occasion of the DVD release of the film in 2003, Dixon, who also produced the film (raising nearly all of its $1million budget from black investors) told The Crisis that he was blacklisted for about a year after the film's release--he would later direct several episodes of The Waltons, which in 1974 was akin to Obama winning the Iowa caucus. But he added that the film, "expressed everything that I felt about race." According to Tim Reid, who with his partner Daphne Maxwell Reid procured the DVD rights to Spook, "we felt this movie was ahead of its time and deserved a wider audience. Even now, it stands out from the crowd in Black cinema." Though far too many people will only remember Ivan Dixon for his role on Hogan's Heroes, Nothing But a Man and The Spook Who Sat by the Door will remain as testaments to Dixon's critical role in two of the signature moments in African-American cinema.

of (Black) Men and Song (ver. 1.0)

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:07:59 -0500

Listening to Andy Bey is like dreaming about what you've never been. And perhaps this is what fueled Bey in the first place--the opportunity to imagine in sound, in phrase, and in melody a world yet to be inhabited by those singers male and black. It is all too easy to suggest that a vocalist like Bey might have been listening to Bobby Blue Bland, Solomon Burke or even Ira Tucker--as they all were--but there's something about Bey's delivery that suggest something more original and dare I say substantive--at least on the level of style. Bey is one of a kind--something you could only conjure in a dream, really. *** I often think about this notion of originality. A colleague of mine, an art historian of some stature, has suggested that no artist is influenced (inspired maybe?), but it's all about an active appropriation of something else(s) in route to something of their own. Ok, so Sinatra had Billie Holiday in his head and Marvin Gaye had Sinatra in his ("...in the wee small hours of the morning...) and Ronald Isley and Bobby Womack--peers and contemporaries of Sam Cooke--no doubt recalibrated because of Cooke (like Ms. Dinah did for Aretha and Nancy Wilson), though Cooke himself found the road to Damascus (that Norman is a funny Mfer) trying to sound like R. H. Harris. And nobody would say that any of these folk weren't American originals, so that's not my point. But sometimes there is simply little that can qualify or quantify talents that just seem to drop from space. Either these singular forces change the whole endeavor--like James "on the 1" or Ms. Billie's subdued, though still sublime field moans--or they go unrecognized simply because there's little logic behind their very presence. And indeed there are any number of women folk who I'm thinking of here--Linda Jones, Betty Davis, and Bettye LaVette to name a few, but I'm also thinking about men folk like Donald Smith (brother of Lonnie Liston), Terry Callier, Jon Lucien, (even) Will Downing and of course Bey, who are almost always an afterthought when we talk about the those singers male and black, who have been charged with moving mountains and parting seas with just the turning of phrase (call it black music's Moses complex). *** I dream men like Dwight Trible--these singers black, these singers men--even as they tug at those baritone and tenor strings that so embody the very idea of some pristine, immaculate dark masculinity. Their willingness to explore the full range of their expressiveness--emotiveness gone awry--simply undermines the comfort that the deepness of their voices presupposes. And it's not like this is a new phenomenon--figures like Jimmy Scott, Ronnie Dyson, Eddie Kendricks, and Rahsaan Patterson are standard bearers of sort for this thing, but because they live(d) in a register up-above, it has always been easy to dismiss their presence--and their art--as being less than something fully masculine (as if there was such a thing). And this is where men like Trible and Jose James (like Bey and Johnny Hartman) who force us to re-imagine our investments in masculinities that don't bend and don't break.. Dwight Trible--who can make you cry--has filled a void left by the great Leon Thomas (the only vocalist other than the late Phyllis Hyman to successfully match wits with saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders). A mainstay of the Build An Ark (let it rain, let rain) collective and Trible even has a foot in the hip-hop world via his work with The Life Force Trio (something like Archie Shepp unleashed on a Primo soundscape). But to understand Trible is to acknowledge those he's...ahem...appropriated. When asked about his "influences" Trible responds "Do you know Linda Jones?... She opened up the spirit and let it all out, you know I mean, Oh God she was something special and if you listen to a record by her, you'll probably hear her influences on me in there." And of course the notion that Trible was "influenced" by Jones, belies the fact that Linda Jones is one of those obscure geniuses that one would have to actively seek out; Linda Jones doesn't just fall out of the sky into your lap. The Living Water, Trible's grand opus (to date), is at once a tribute to the giants whose wells he replenishes from--Coltrane, Malcolm, Wayne Shorter, Abbey Lincoln, Freddie Hubbard, and the aforementioned Andy Bey--but also a measure of an art that literally flows, taking with it elements of all it comes in contact with. As such it's difficult to listen to Trible's breathtaking reimagining of Bey's "Celestial Blues" and not feel as though the full weight of this culture and this music ("this" as a signifier of "that" which we still struggle to adequately qualify and quantify as the force of blackness--a black hole if you will, which gives life and light) is coming through in every phrase and every note. And yet, this gets us back to this notion of originality--and thinking that perhaps artistic originality is ultimately about the willingness of an artist to speak back to that which she so thoroughly takes from.

(Covering) Strange

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:35:13 -0500

Location, location, location, as in when Fred Moten theorizes about the tropes and aesthetics of escape and fugitivity that power certain black expressive cultures, it is always almost understood this also about a devotion or incarceration (take your pick) to place. Simply put, there's nothing never to escape to or escape from if without this fidelity to someplace, somewhere. So when Stuart Gorrell got to thinking about "Georgia on My Mind" it was the sister of Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote the music) and we'll accept that the feminine can be a metaphor for place, but when Ray Charles sings "Georgia on My Mind" it can never be nothing but place. Lizz Wright's most recent recordings, Dreams Wide Awake and The Orchard, evoke the beauty of the pastoral south, which for African-Americans of southern heritage, animates the irony of loving (even aesthetically) the very Southern plantations that were the literal sites of our brutality; so desired because of that very beauty (amidst the betrayal) and the capacity of these places to generate a generational wealth that we hungered for. It's no surprise that many of the institutions in Black America have appropriated some aspects of the political economy of the plantation--including aesthetically--in order function as legible subjects in an American contexts. I can't help thinking about what's on Lizz Wright's mind. In publicity photos, Wright often possesses a sly look of bemusement, like someone whose very being is linked to a fated incarceration to the images that propel her into a relative celebrity among jazz contemporary aficionados. Wright's smile--something like an offhanded joke played out only in her mind or an all too secret shiver in her coital region--is less about the boredom of doing yet another photo-shoot where Verve can exploit her own pastoral beauty (in direct opposition in the girlish android-noids found in contemporary R&B), but an artful act that itself represents an engagement (not a masking) of the full weight of having to be in this place. To think this "Strange" place, to turn a phrase on Wright's cover of Patsy Cline's country classic, or to consider Chocolate Genius's invocation to chase said Strangeness (duly amen-ed by Wright), is to engage in an almost remembered mythology about how race and music are supposed to be imagined. And even as we hear the strains of Craig Street, with ample assistance from Toshi Reagon, order the very logic of The Orchard, it resists being an event; instead drawing from the everyday strangeness of the those who have struggled to make sense of our devotion to that which we should (and do) ostensibly hate. I mean, imagine Lizz Wright walking into a country bar in Macon in 1962 singing somebody's Patsy Cline. And yet, how many black folk might have shed a tear when Cline's voice was silenced, as they might have shed a tear for Hank Williams, Sr. a few years before? As such Wright's choice of covers--easily the strongest performances on The Orchard--give pause; demons (Ike Turner) and royalty (Sweet Honey in the Rock) and curiosities (Cline and Led Zeppelin) among them--the cynic in me wants to think that Wright (or likely her record company)was picking covers like one might pick peaches from an orchard in the month of June, but yet the execution of these covers suggest much more. Lizz Wright is not Norah Jones. Wright's performance of the Ike & Tina Turner's "I Idolize You" is rife with all of the dramatic irony that was wholly missing in Tina Turner and Beyonce's recent Grammy performance of "Proud Mary"; Ms. Turner and Ms. Knowles index the considerable distances between the worlds that they and Ms. Wright inhabit, where Ms. Wright finds a freedom--laying in the [strangeness]--to critique, speak back to, argue with, and even embrace the music that was produced in collaboration with one of the most volatile and violent relationships that pop music has ever known. With our second sight firmly recalled, "I Idolize You" gives more inkling to the unhealthy obsession that Ike Turner had for the woman who served as his idol, his inspiration, and his meal ticket. Wright's version, which forces us to taste everyone of those lyrics, manages to find something there needing our care, asking us to consider how Ike Turner might have been betrayed by that place and the people trying to make sense of the absurdity of that place. Got forward a few years and listen to how Ms. Turner screams "Nutbush." And if you've ever heard Robert Plant scream, it is perhaps apropos to ask what terror(s) he gives voice to. Plant's plaintive vocals on the original version "Thank You" sanction an emotiveness--and we can write Jeff Buckley into this also--that spoke to the boundary collapsing--politically, socially, aesthetically--of the late 1960s; boundary collapsing that was immediately policed (in some spheres they called it busing). We should read Wright's cover in that same light--of course a young black woman from rural Georgia should feel compelled to cover Led Zeppelin. Ask any black kid, who was bussed to a largely white school district (and this is my man Jon Caramanica's argument, by the way), and damned if they weren't fully present in that experience, if they tell you that they were never forced to listen to Led Zeppelin or some other version of Jesus Rock ("yes, I've seen the great guitar god!"). Perhaps ask Bettye LaVette what it means to speak back to that, though the same kids who claim to love Janis Joplin, ain't never heard of Bettye LaVette and that's the very reason why Lizz Wright has every right to sing Led Zeppelin or anybody else she so pleases to cover.

Generous Brilliance

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:36:45 -0500

Ralph Ellison probably would have never admitted it, but he was a better thinker and writer (a prolific and brilliant essayist even after the novel) because of the letters he exchanged with Albert Murray. For all of his prodding and poking Albert Murray might have been a tad jealous of his friend, but probably understood that Ellison's work represented the level to which he aspired. The relationship between black women scholars like historian Nell Irvin Painter and the late literary scholar Nellie McKay was less competitive, as they helped each other and many other black women of their generation navigate the difficulties of an Academy not quite ready for women and black folk, let alone black women folk. In both cases, these relationships furthered the genius of black writers, thinkers and artists, in part, because all involved, we're generous with their time and their opinions--a generosity that is at times missing among the generation of hip-hop and post-Hip-hop (not anti) thinkers. The full possibilities of such generosity were recently displayed at the Nasher Museum in Durham, NC as Critic Greg Tate and cinematographer Arthur Jafa sat down (armed with laptops and I-Tunes ) to continue a "conversation" that apparently began one day nearly 30 years ago when the two confronted each other on the Howard University campus. Tate, a longtime contributor to the Village Voice and shaman behind the Burnt Sugar collective, has for decades been the poster child for a "PomoAfroNigeratti". Although his writing these days is more refined, though no less wily, Tate remains one of the best examples of a non-fiction writer whose conceptual brilliance is buttressed by an equally brilliant prose--what some might think of as an aesthetics of black criticism--perhaps only matched in the past few decades by the examples the late June Jordan, Ernest Hardy and Fred Moten. Jafa is a well respected, if somewhat obscure (by mainstream standards) director and cinematographer, who helped enhance the visions of Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Spike Lee (Crooklyn) and even Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut). Jafa's brilliance though, transcends his devotion to cinema. There's an argument that suggest that the genius of black expressive culture in the "West" centers on the ability of its purveyors to tell stories, regardless of the genre, physical medium or abstractions that said stories animate; And Arthur Jafa above all is a storyteller. Writing about his school-days growing up in the Mississippi Delta in the Tate edited Everything But the Burden, Jafa observes the cathartic effect of the Delta as offering "An exposure to the transfixing, and for me unprecedented, blackness of its inhabitants, their arresting beauty and dense corporeal being, the inescapable duality of absence and presence, the inevitable embrace, as a nascent black man of temperamental cool, simply put, the dark matter of being." And while many others might argue (including myself) the political potency of those field hollers that might have served as our first response to the violence of our experience in the Delta, Jafa ultimately offers a story as to why those field hollers should matter to us centuries later. What was apparent as Tate and Jafa exchanged fragments of "feedback loops" long cultivated in the midnight hours of their friendship, is that they love and respect each other enough to challenge each other's thinking, but are secure enough in their own intellects to not feel threatened when one of them might get the cerebral upper hand--because even in those cases it raises the bar. Tate and Jafa's relationship highlights that genius for genius's sake matters little if not enveloped in a committed generosity. Understandably such generosity is difficult in an era where there is a marketplace for smart negroes--and certainly for those whose prose (if not ideas) play to certain mainstream notions of accessibility (i.e. Can an oblivious so-called white literate NPR listening public understand it?). Far too many of us I think, are unwilling to publically acknowledge when one of our peers produces something that really forces us to go back to the lab. All too often our measure of what matters is connected to cover story bylines and $2.00 a word gigs and our desire to protect our individual proximities to that kind of marketplace prestige. And this is not to suggest that Ellison, Murray, Painter, McKay, Tate, Jafa, and so many others did not have to create to live--but that ultimately the it was the quality of the exchange of ideas that mattered more than a "mess of pottage."

Opening Barkley

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:49:12 -0500

Birth of Cool, a retrospective exhibition on the life and work of artist Barkley L. Hendricks recently opened at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Conceived by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum and Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Birth of Cool is the first such retrospective of the Philadelphia native's work. According to Powell, the foremost scholar of Hendricks's work, the idea of a Hendricks retrospective was "beguiling, with the idea to encounter old friends, audacious strangers, and engrossing paintings, it seems, for the very first time." The exhibition's opening night was reflective of Powell's observations bringing together an eclectic group of people for a discussion between Hendricks and Powell, which was followed by an after-party that featured Grammy-award winning producer and DJ 9th Wonder. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts and Yale University, Hendricks emerges in the late 1960s just as "Black Power" became synonymous with black vernacular culture via the agitprop of Black Arts Movement figures like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Hendricks was primarily interested in figurative and life sized portraiture, thus his subjects, more often than not, were simply the bodies of everyday black folk. Hendricks's aesthetic commitment to the "folk" likely helped keep him beyond the radar of the mainstream art world. As Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mencil Collection in Houston, "these are black people who are rarely glimpsed outside their community (not art galleries), but within these communities they can easily be seen just as easily as symbols of vibrant everyday life." As such, over the past few decades, Hendricks has helped establish black bodies as sites vernacular culture--his influence seen in the work of younger artists such as Kehinde Wiley and even Iona Rozeal Brown. In the spirit of the iconoclasm that marks the work of Hendricks, he chose not to play to the visual politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s; a politics that often demanded that black artists choose between the aesthetics of black rage and those defined of black middle-class uplift, even as both impulses pivoted on some notion of Black pride. Powell writes in Birth of Cool (Duke University Press), the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, that Hendricks was "Neither content with an Ebony Magazine-styled black man and woman whose dress-for-success look approximated the corporate mainstream, nor completely at ease with the Afro-centric vogue of black cultural nationalism." Hendricks's choices, in this regard, seemed more attuned to the "queerness"--broadly defined here as that which pushed the boundaries of mainstream visual blackness--of his subject matters. It was perhaps this "queerness" that attracted exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker to Hendricks's work. According to Schoonmaker he found Hendricks as a subject compelling, much the way he found another iconoclast of Hendricks's generation, compelling. In Barkley L. Hendricks and the late Nigerian musicians and activist Fela Kuti, Schoonmaker, who curated the Fela Kuti exhibition "Black President" a few years ago, found two men who were "stanchly independent, rugged individualists who followed their respective visions to create innovative new artistic expressions, despite lack of commercial success." Schoonmaker adds, Fela and Hendricks "called attention to and even championed people in society who had been underserved and otherwise rendered invisible." Birth of Cool runs at the Nasher Museum until July. In an effort to put Hendricks's art into broader contexts, a series of accompanying events have also been planned including a discussion with critic and musician Greg Tate and cinematographer Arthur Jaffa , public conversation featuring Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson of The Roots and 9th Wonder about hip-hop sampling and Soul music and a lecture by Thelma Golden, of the Studio Museum of Harlem.

Wanted! Smart Negroes

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:26:48 -0500

Washington PostNewsweek Interactive recently launched the interactive site The Root. Ostensibly a partnership with Henry Louis "Skip" Gates to promote the latest incarnation of his black "celebrity DNA" project, the site features a virtual cavalcade (literally) of smart Negroes. We can thank our man Barack for this. 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

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:49:24 -0500

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?

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:58:37 -0500

"Hello Brooklyn!" I imagine that Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy, do or die...) native Shirley Chisholm might have said that when she addressed a crowd of hundreds, as she stood in front of a Brooklyn Church 36 years ago this January, to announce her candidacy for President of the United States. Ms. Chisholm, was the first black women elected to Congress in 1968 and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)--her announcement in January of 1972 was historic. That Ms. Chisholm is not more often recalled in our current political season is a reflection of a corporate media structure that possesses a criminally short memory (particularly in relation to black folk). Shirley Chisholm was a political maverick who held both the black political establishment and professional feminists accountable as she toiled on behalf of the poor, Black and Latino/a constituents that she represented for 14 years. I wonder what Ms. Chisholm, who died in 2005, would have said about the current debates about race and gender in the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama 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

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:27:38 -0500

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?"

Again, I hadn't thought much about the gender barrier, in large part, because I never assumed that Hillary Clinton's gender, could easily translate into a feminist politics beyond its symbolic value. Like Geraldine Ferraro, the democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1984, Ms. Clinton has a political style that easily disassociates itself with stereotypical notions of femininity--a style that is largely dictated by the masculine sensibilities of electoral politics in our country. Ironically, Clinton's willingness to play the game on patriarchy's terms has been, until recently, used against her. That Ms. Clinton is still married to a man involved in the most visible sexual harassment case in American history, also does little to enhance her viability as the candidate that could more adequately address gender inequality in our society. Where was Ms. Clinton when her husband rode workfare programs--the premise being that women who are home taking care of young children are not really working--to his reelection in 1996?

In contrast to Senator Clinton though, what has Mr. Obama done, really, to justify the large number of women supporters that he has drawn to his campaign--other than be a tall, handsome, articulate and not particularly threatening version of black masculinity? Yes, I applaud the prominent role that Michelle Obama has played in his candidacy--she is one of the Senator's best assets. And I'm not discounting Mr. Obama's propensity for creating unity (or Ms. Clinton's propensity for the opposite), but what has Mr. Obama offered with regard to a progressive gender politics other than seem like a likable guy?

Steinem is at pains to make sure that readers don't see her critique of the role of gender in the democratic race as an attempt to pit gender against race, in some hierarchy of oppressions. But even Ms. Steinem misses the point that for a significant amount of black folk, separating gender and race out of the equation is not possible. Much has been made about the increased significance of the black vote in the democratic primaries, but black women make up more than a majority of registered black voters--some numbers suggest that they make up nearly two-thirds of registered black voters. Thus this process is not about winning the hearts of black voters, but more specifically, about winning the hearts of black women voters. 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

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:42:58 -0500

"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

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:09:47 -0500

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.