TimesCast
The Times's William C. Rhoden discusses the coming out of Jason Collins and how the N.B.A. player's decision could ripple through the world of sports.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Franklin Humanities Institute
Sidney Mintz, who has profoundly shaped Caribbean Studies, reflects here on his intellectual trajectory, his life and his fieldwork.
Other participants in this conversation include Eric Mintz (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Laurent Dubois (Romance Studies and History; Haiti Lab), and Deborah Jenson (Romance Studies; Haiti Lab).
“I’m Black and I’m Gay”: The Everydayness of Jason Collins (the Remix)
by Mark Anthony Neal | from the Square
As a lifetime New York Mets fan, I rarely need to be reminded that spring training signaled the beginning of a new baseball season. Yet, for a few years, I could have been reminded by the seemingly annual press conferences from Mets catcher Mike Piazza in which he announced to the world that he was not gay. That Piazza felt compelled to hold a press conference to announce such non-matters, speaks both to the proverbial stakes for male professional athletes (particularly in the so-called four “major” sports), and the absurdity of the national discourse regarding sexual identity.
There was no such press conference for Jason Collins, a twelve-year journey man in the National Basketball Association—just a Sports Illustrated cover story in which he admitted that he was “Black” and “Gay.” Indeed there was a mundane quality to Collins’ admission—it’s not like Collins is the first Black and Gay person to walk the earth. Perhaps, far more remarkable is that Collins has survived the last few seasons as a Black athlete who sits on the end of the bench, in a position that long served as the NBA’s quota program for a league that is still to visibly “Black” for some.
This is not to say that Collins’ “coming out”—a term that really just reproduces the very marginalization that homophobia constructs in the first place—was not brave and that the kudos that he’s received from Team Obama and high-profile colleagues like Kobe Bryant (only a few years removed from his own courtside use of a pejorative directed at Gays) and the always-already surreal Metta World Peace, were not thoughtful. It stands to reason, though, that President Obama will not be making a call to every Black man or women who will admit to a friend, family member, clergy leader or employer that he or she is gay—or more importantly, he won’t be calling those who will be shunned from the comforts of family and community because they did.
But what exactly are we really celebrating in highlighting the decision of one Black and Gay man to tell the world how he has lived everyday for much of his mature life?
As is too often the case in these matters, the attention that Jason Collins is getting is really about the need of our society to pat ourselves on the collective back for being open and tolerant enough to allow a veteran basketball player, close to the end of his career, to tell us that he is Black and Gay. In this regard, I’m not impressed. Nevada State Senator Keith Atkinson recently also admitted that he was “Black” and “Gay” to his legislative colleagues during a debate on Same-Sex marriage, which apparently doesn’t make us feel as good.
The everydayness of Jason Collins' life as a Black and Gay man does not match the spectacle of the larger culture’s response to it. As Sharon Patricia Holland notes in her recent book The Erotic Life of Racism, “quotidian racism”—or for our purposes, quotidian homophobia—“can seem rather unremarkable.” Embedded in this disconnect is the way that the spectacle of this particular “coming out” scene is a by-product of the everydayness of the homophobia, racism and sexism that the spectacle labors hard to obscure.
To be sure, Jason Collins represents an important moment in professional sport in the United States. As he symbolically raised his hand, hopefully he will find others willing to raise their hands alongside him and encourage a generation of younger athletes to be comfortable enough in their own skins to feel free to express whoever “they be.” Until then I’m just waiting for the press conference or cover story that announces that such things no longer matter.
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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books, including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press, 2013), and the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Forgotten Women of the War on Terror: Author Victoria Brittain on the Wives and Families Left Behind
Democracy Now
As pressure grows for President Obama to close the Guantánamo military prison, we speak with British journalist Victoria Brittain who has closely covered the military prison for years. Her latest book is Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror. "Some of the women that I've written about are the wives of Guantánamo prisoners. One, in particular, who is like chapter one of the book, is one of my closest friends, and I kind of lived alongside her and her children through a very long period when her husband was in Guantánamo. And she had absolutely no information about why he was there, when he might come back, no contact with him whatsoever," Brittain says.
ReelBlack
Artist & Activist HARRY BELAFONTE discusses the idea of Post-Racial America in this excerpt from the Montclair Film Festival's Q&A for SING YOUR SONG, the documentary of his life. Photographed on 4.28.2013 by Mike D. for Reelblack, Inc. The 2nd annual Montclair Film Festival runs April 29- May 5, 2013. For more information, visit www.montclairfilmfest.org.
Left of Black S3:E28 | On the Season Finale of ‘Left of Black’ Guest Host Alondra Nelson Talks with Mark Anthony Neal about His New Book ‘Looking for Leroy’
Guest host and Columbia University Professor Alondra Nelson sits down in the Left of Black studios with Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal to discuss his new book Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press).
Nelson is associate professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University and the author of the award winning Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination(University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and the forthcoming The Social Life of DNA: Race and Reconciliation after the Genome (Beacon Press). Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man (2005) and Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, and the host of Left of Black.
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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
A Conversation with Mark Anthony Neal
Moderated by Barbara Ransby, Professor Gender and Women's Studies, African American Studies & History at The University of Illinois at Chicago
Date & Time
Wednesday, May 1 | 6—7:30 pm, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum 800 S. Halsted, Chicago, IL.
Admission Free.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, the history of popular music, and Black digital humanities.
He is the author of five books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture(1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, which will be published in April of 2013 by New York University Press. Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition (2011).
Neal hosts the weekly video webcast, Left of Black in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and is the founder and managing editor of the blog NewBlackMan (in Exile).
You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
Co-sponsored by The Public Square, Young Chicago Authors, UIC School of Art and Art History, Social Justice Initiative, IRRPP and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.
TimesTalks
Ken Burns, co-director and author Sarah Burns, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer, who covered the case and is interviewed in the film, and the exonerated, including Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The panel engages in a conversation about the issues raised by "The Central Park Five," the award-winning documentary about the horrific crime that occurred in Central Park in 1989, the rush to judgment and the lives of those wrongly convicted.
Al Jazeera English
There are conflicting reports coming out of Nigeria surrounding the death toll following a gun battle between the army and the armed group Boko Haram.
A Nigerian senator says more than 200 people were killed in last week's conflict, while the army puts the figure at just 37.
There are reports that the army prevented aid groups from entering the town of Baga, in Borno state, where the battle took place, for several days after the confrontation.
Witnesses say thousands of homes were destroyed during the fighting.
Al Jazeera's Yvonne Ndege reports from Maiduguri, Nigeria.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
ReelBlack
RBTV's LYRISPECT sat down with artist TERENCE NANCE to discuss is debut feature, AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY. In this exclusive clip, he discusses his intentions, inspirations and finding an audience for his singular work, which opens in NYC on April 26.
You've just arrived home after a bad day. You're broke and lonely, even though you live in the biggest and busiest city in America. You do, however, have one cause for mild optimism: you seem to have captured the attention of an intriguing young lady. You've rushed home to clean your apartment before she comes over. In your haste, you see that you've missed a call. There's a voice mail; she tells you that she won't be seeing you tonight.
With arresting insight, vulnerability, and a delightful sense of humor, Terence Nance's explosively creative debut feature, AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY, documents the relationship between Terence and a lovely young woman (Namik Minter) as it teeters on the divide between platonic and romantic. Utilizing a tapestry of live action and various styles of animation, Terence explores the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through his mind during a singular moment in time.http://oversimplification.mvmt.com/
Executive producers Jay-Z, Dream Hampton, and Wyatt Cenac present Terence Nance's explosively creative debut feature, AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY. With arresting insight, vulnerability, and a delightful sense of humor, the film utilizes a tapestry of live action and multiple styles of animation as it documents the relationship between Terence (Nance) and a lovely young woman (Namik Minter) as it teeters on the divide between platonic and romantic. Blurring the line between narrative, documentary, and experimental film, the film explores the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through Terence's mind as he examines and re-examines a singular moment in time.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
TEDxLehighRiver
Dr. James Braxton Peterson, Associate Professor of English and Director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University, explains All Black Everything as an idea he has been developing about the relationship between black exceptionalism and success and the way in which that success obscures the pain and suffering of the black community.
Al Jazeera English
More than three years after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti, tens of thousands of people are facing a new crisis. Amnesty International says already displaced residents are being forced from the capital's tent cities. The Rights Group says the evictions are a violation of human rights and that the government is doing little to stop them. Caroline Malone reports.
Democracy Now
To mark the passing of legendary protest singer Richie Havens, Democracy Now! has posted video of his performance of "Freedom" at the massive demonstration against the Iraq War, which took place in New York City as millions filled the streets around the world on Feb. 15, 2003. You may recall the song from Havens' performance at Woodstock, where he was the first act to take the stage, and did so quite dramatically. After a nearly 50-year career, Havens died Monday, April 22, 2013, at age 72 in his New Jersey home after a sudden heart attack.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Left of Black S3:E27 |
Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined, via Skype, by DePaul University Professor Francesca Royster, the author of the new book Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press).
With Black eccentricity as a frame, Neal and Royster discuss the careers and legacies of the late Eartha Kitt, Parliament-Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder's Secret Life of Plants, Grace Jones and the late Michael Jackson.
Royster is also the author of Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon.
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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in @ iTunes U
SuliBreezy
I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate - Suli Breaks
Purchase on Itunes:https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/i-w...
"I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate" picks up on the education topic but takes a different stance and angle from "Why I Hate School But Love Education". This poem talks about how we have been made to think about how education and getting university degrees can give us opportunities to have a better chance in making our dream careers a reality. It also touches on how as individuals we are judged and tested by how well we perform on exams, but not all people perform well in exams so why are they made out to feel like they're dumb? The inconsistencies of the education system are really peeled open to reveal a deep problem that needs to be addressed and how society's needs have changed to make this even more apparent.
When it boils down to it, why are we misled into thinking that education is the only way forward for successful means in our work and career lives? We need to open our minds and educate ourselves that exam results aren't the barometer of success and that we can't let them decide our fate. We are in charge of our own destinies!
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Follow: @sulibreaks
Facebook: Suli Breaks
universityofsulibreaks.tumblr.com
The Hip-Hop Manifesto
by Adia “Dr. Dia” Winfrey, Psy.D. | special to NewBlackMan
For months, our timelines, statuses, and inboxes have been overflowing with responses, opinions, and petitions related to Hip Hop Culture. Every week there seems to be a new story resulting in outrage or support for a particular artist. To add to this, we are watching events unfold nationally that have us at our wit’s end. Like many of you, I too am questioning what is going on socially, culturally, and politically. And similar to a family affected by alcoholism that ignores the addiction and focuses on “the problem child,” members of Hip Hop Culture are overlooking the big picture.
Lately we’ve put pressure on major corporations and have seen results. Now what? We raised our voices until the President of the United States made a speech about gun violence in Chicago. Okay. The scholars debated and weighed in. Facebook and Twitter were on fire. But where do we go from here? Many outside the Culture recognize Hip Hop’s positive attributes. But how do we view ourselves? We are what Hip Hop looks like when it’s grown for real, and now it’s time for us to realize our full potential.
The seventh principle of the Hip Hop Declaration of Peace, accepted by the United Nations May 16, 2001, states:
The elements of Hiphop Kulture may be traded for money, honor, power, respect, food, shelter, information, and other resources; however, Hiphop and its culture cannot be bought, nor is it for sale. It cannot be transferred or exchanged by or to anyone for any compensation at any time or at any place. Hiphop is the priceless principle of our self-empowerment. Hiphop is not a product.
We must let go of the weightless clichés limiting our progression. “Hip Hop” is not an exclusionary label, and rap will always be part of Hip Hop Culture. Women have been a constant presence in the Culture since its inception. From the outset, adults have never understood the Street Fashion element of Hip Hop. Southern artists have shaped the Culture for decades. And rap music has always included a wide array of subjects from the entertaining to the enlightening. Too often we are focusing our “debates” around what’s missing or different with Hip Hop. Our dialogue is sounding more and more like those who are outside of the Culture. Enough is enough. It’s time to shift our focal point to what’s right.
Hip Hop, as we know it, evolved into existence as the result of young people finding their voices. It is critical we remember our power has been present since the beginning. Hip Hop Culture was created by us and we still call the shots. It is time to reclaim our voices and elevate our impact within the Culture.
As members of Hip Hop Culture we must be proactive, and not reactionary. According to the ninth principle of the Hip Hop Declaration of Peace, May 3rd is Rap Music Day, the 3rdweek of May is Hip Hop Appreciation Week, and November is Hip Hop History Month. At these times, let us celebrate with intention, while working on behalf of our Culture teaching lessons that will propel Hip Hop forward. Whether it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, or 00s, let us remember why we fell in love with Hip Hop.
We must trade alibis and judgment for authenticity and purpose so our greatest impact can be realized. Now is the time!
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Adia “Dr. Dia” Winfrey, Psy.D, is the author of H.Y.P.E.: Healing Young People thru Empowerment (African-American Images, 2009) and has been featured on NPR, in JET Magazine, and endorsed by syndicated radio personalities Tom Joyner and Michael Baisden. Learn more at letsgethype.com.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Has The War on Teachers Morphed Into a War on Children?
by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
When I first got involved in education activism four years ago, with the publication of a piece "In Defense of Public School Teachers" I did so because the elected officials in New York and around the nation, under the mantle of "school reform," were blaming public school teachers for problems in the society that were not of their making; These officials were trying to subject teachers to numbers based "accountability" protocols that would squeeze the life out of teaching. I saw the best teachers I knew, those who were my former students, and those I worked with in Bronx community history projects, feel as though they had become demonized and marginalized by people who had little real life understanding of what their job entailed. Since they lacked the power to speak freely about what was happening to them, I felt it was my duty to speak in their behalf.
Four years later, there is still just as much pain and rage among the nation's teachers. Now that I am publicly identified as a "teachers advocate' I probably get 4 or 5 emails or Facebook messages a week from teachers around the nation describing the fear, stress, humiliation and erosion of professional autonomy they experience as student test scores have become the major indicator of judging teacher effectiveness. It is because of such experiences that I have launched, with the support of United Opt Out, a Teachers Oral History Project that will allow teachers viewpoints on current education policies to be recorded and preserved.
But this past week, as I have become involved with an Opt Out movement in New York State that has inspired thousands of families to demand that their children be allowed to sit out state tests, I have become even more appalled by what current school policies are doing to children. The stories I have heard from parents about their children's school experiences have been even more heartbreaking than those I hear from teachers. The flood of high stakes tests into the schools of New York State has not only turned instruction into test prep, making once eager youngsters hate going to school. It has produced anxiety attacks and stress related disorders on a massive scale among students as young as 8 in schools around the state.
And these stories are not confined to one demographic group. I have gotten them parents in small towns inner cities, middle class urban neighborhoods and in suburbs. Children are traumatized by the length of the tests, by steadily growing difficulty of the material they contain and by the fact that their teachers jobs depend on how well they perform.
And God forbid a student or a family should decide not to take the test! In more than few school districts, children who have chosen to opt out have been have been browbeaten, insulted, threatened with loss of extracurricular activities and access to honors programs, told they will never get into college, told they are jeopardizing their teachers jobs, told they will be responsible for lowering real estate values in their neighborhood, even in a few instances, told they are unpatriotic and giving aid and comfort to terrorists!
Given what I have seen and heard this week from the parents of New York State, I respectfully suggest that we, as a nation, need a long period of soul searching to examine whether the test driven policies that are being imposed in the public schools of the nation with breakneck speed are good for children. The two weeks of testing that the children of New York State are currently enduring comes perilously close reaching abusive proportions. A society that loves and values its children would not accept this as the norm.
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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
by Akinyele Omowale Umoja
New York University Press
April 22, 2013
The notion that the civil rights movement in the southern United States was a nonviolent movement remains a dominant theme of civil rights memory and representation in popular culture. Yet in dozens of southern communities, Black people picked up arms to defend their leaders, communities, and lives. In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to safeguard activists and supporters from the violence of racists and segregationists, who were often supported by local law enforcement.
In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturning fear and intimidation and developing different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.
This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism, segregation, and fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950s through the late 1970s.
Reviews
"Akinyele Umoja’s marvelously rich and exhaustive study of Mississippi will radically transform the debate about the role of nonviolence within the civil rights movement, proving that armed self-defense actually saved lives, reduced terrorist attacks on African American communities, and laid the foundation for unparalleled community solidarity. We Will Shoot Back is decidedly not a romantic celebration of gun culture, but a sometimes sobering, sometimes beautiful story of self-reliance and self-determination and a people’s capacity to sustain a movement against all odds."
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Ranging from Reconstruction to the Black Power period, this thoroughly and creatively researched book effectively challenges long-held beliefs about the Black Freedom Struggle. It should make it abundantly clear that the violence/nonviolence dichotomy is too simple to capture the thinking of Black Southerners about the forms of effective resistance."
—Charles M. Payne, Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
"Timely and timeless. . . . Expands our understanding of the hidden narratives of Mississippi's black armed resistance groups scattered through generations."
—Kathleen Cleaver, Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow, Emory Law School
About the Author
Akinyele Omowale Umoja is an educator and scholar-activist. He is an associate professor and chair of the department of African-American studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses on the history of the civil rights and Black Power movements and other social movements. He has been a community activist for over 40 years.
Friday, April 19, 2013
DePaul University Professor Francesa Royster joins host Mark Anthony Neal on the Monday, April 22nd episode of Left of Black. Royster is the author of the new book Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press).
The stream url for Monday's Left of Black is:
Rap Sessions with Bakari Kitwana
Toward meaningful dialogue between the police and the Black community. Here is a clip of our discussion last week in Dayton, OH with Jasiri Xtra, MC Lyte, Dr. Dana Murray Patterson and Dayton community activist Derrick Malone on the role hip-hop can play in reducing gun violence. Thanks again to Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl for joining this important discussion.
On Boston & Violence: An Intimate Relationship
by Esther Armah | HuffPost Black Voices
Boston. Remote in hand, I channel surf, pausing from one horror to another. I've just heard the president's message of unity, swift justice for the perpetrators, and recognition that on this day we are all Americans – not members of different parties, but of one nation.
National horrors like Boston, or Newtown, bring us together in our grief, unite us in our condemnation, stun us, and momentarily silence us because we agree on the brutality. We draw on a collective comfort. When the violence is the kind that is collectively mourned, no focus will rest on the shortness of the women's running shorts. No one will say because the women voluntarily went to Boston and ran in the marathon they were asking to be blown up. Here's the thing. We have a contradictory and intimate relationship with violence.
There is the type of violence we mourn and are horrified by, there's also the type we sanction, sanitize, justify -- in life, love, work, sports. We separate that violence according to who the victims are and who perpetrates it in specific ways. We unite in our mourning for the victims of some violence, but we tend to be divided, hostile and accusatory in the face of others. For most of us, violence is relative. Who gets to be the victim? Who is accused of being the perpetrator?
Violence occupies an emotional space; it is at once familiar and horrifying and sanguine. It is individual and institutional. We don't respond to sexual violence the way we do with the violence of Boston or Newtown, for example. We are not all Americans when a woman or girl is raped or sexually assaulted; we are good girls and bad ones. We will not collectively mourn the shock to her body, the distress, the trauma, and its potential legacy. We will engage in insisting on knowing her potential role in that violence, we will defend the individual perpetrator of that violence, and we will be divided. But the act of violence in Boston produces different responses. We won't question any of the women's rights to be in that public space dressed in shorts or in any way suggest that their clothing or presence might arguably be interpreted as an invitation for an act of domestic terrorism. We will agree the perpetrator deserves to face consequences, the full weight of the law. We will not defend the perpetrators right of free and peaceful assembly, we will agree that his freedom should be curtailed.
We will defend the 1st Amendment right of a newspaper when it spews emotional violence masquerading as comedy about an Oscar-nominated brown girl reducing her to a "cunt" -- a body part as The Onion did with Quvenzhane Wallis. We will not collectively condemn this emotional violence but engage in 140-character defenses of the 1st Amendment and mockingly Tweet to the constituency of the outraged to pipe down and chill – it’s only comedy. We will, in no way, defend the violence that occurred in Boston, however.
We will mourn the black bodies who came from far and wide to take part in a marathon that goes back to 1897 -- provincial and global -- as part of an institutional space to be celebrated, respected and revered. The humanity of the black marathon runner will be counted, not disregarded. In this moment, those black bodies morph into our national identity; they are momentarily American bodies with shared goals, ambitions, and dreams. Yet, we are never all American when a black man falls victim to the institutional violence of the state; we are prosecutors, interrogators of his behavior, questioning him, his actions, his words, his intentions, defending the institution. We are divided. We are accusatory. We are hostile. We are defensive when the state enacts violence upon black bodies.
Our horror post-Newtown or Boston is tangible; we can taste it, feel it, and relate to it. Our dismissal of the violence suffered by children on the streets of the south side of Chicago and other urban (and mostly black, brown, and working poor) neighborhoods across the country is equally tangible. We are not all American when it comes to the violence of poverty. We measure, judge, label individuals and communities marked by the violence of economic disenfranchisement. We do not collectively raise our voices against the institutions that contribute to maintaining poverty and inequity in our country.
Our relationship with violence is exactly that, a relationship. We are married to our version of violent events; we are divorced from certain folk's experiences of violent events. We negotiate what we believe, whom we believe, of whom we are skeptical and who is a liar. We have wakes and obits and sadness in 140 characters on Twitter or FB threads. We may be outraged that this piece would even be written, dismissing it as inappropriate. You maybe right. The real tragedy? So am I.
Our relationship with violence needs 'emotional justice' -- the untangling of a societal and generational inheritance of untreated trauma, this space where we are handed the job of teasing out which violence is which and navigating institutions, systems, individuals and society accordingly. This is our world. What are we willing to do to change our relationship with violence?
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Esther Armah is the creator of ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’, the multi platform, multi media intimate public arts and conversation series. She’s a New York Radio Host for WBAI99.5FM, a regular on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes and an international journalist, Playwright and National best-selling author. For Emotional Justice, go to: http://www.facebook.com/emotionaljustice.
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