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February 5, 2004
Political Animal
Hollywood Rap 
“It’s okay if people pop up once in a while,” Pressey continues, “but Busta Rhymes in Finding Forrester, Busta Rhymes in Narc? I mean, I love his music and all, but he’s not a qualified actor. If it were an actor working off Sean Connery, it would have been a different feel. The work is being compromised. It’s an insult. You put 20 years of training into this, and [the rappers] just walk in. If they’re brilliant and don’t need to go to class, fine, but they’re not. They suck.” L.A. Weekly
February 4, 2004
The Stacks
Against All Odds To fully grasp how momentous was what began at 2 George Yard, picture the world as it existed in 1787. Well over three-quarters of the people on earth are in bondage of one land or another. In parts of the Americas, slaves far outnumber free people. African slaves are also scattered widely through much of the Islamic world. Slavery is routine in most of Africa itself. In India and other parts of Asia, some people are outright slaves, others in debt bondage that ties them to a particular landlord as harshly as any slave to a Southern plantation owner. In Russia the majority of the population are serfs. Nowhere is slavery more firmly rooted than in Britain's overseas empire, where some half-million slaves are being systematically worked to an early death growing West Indian sugar. Caribbean slave-plantation fortunes underlie many a powerful dynasty, from the ancestors of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the family of the fabulously wealthy William Beckford, lord mayor of London, who hired Mozart to give his son piano lessons. One of the most prosperous sugar plantations on Barbados is owned by the Church of England. Furthermore, Britain's ships dominate the slave trade, delivering tens of thousands of chained captives each year to French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies as well as to its own. Mother Jones
The Stacks
Growing up X: ‘I was completely unprepared to play the role people expected me to play as the daughter of an African-American hero.’ But I also think she wanted me to go there because she was worried I’d be lost if she sent me south to a historically Black college or some big university. I was young and sheltered, largely innocent of racial politics. I was completely unprepared to play the role people would want me to play as the daughter of an African-American hero. I had not a clue who I was, either as the daughter of Malcolm X or even as simply myself, Ilyasah Shabazz. Mommy probably worried that if I enrolled at a historically Black college, the expectations she had so carefully and thoroughly shielded me from my entire life would rise up like a tidal wave and swallow me whole.
Of course, it happened anyway. Almost. Essence via LookSmart.com
Review
“Is Race a Trope?”: Anna Deavere Smith and the question of racial performativity Anna Deavere Smith is an African American performance artist known for her technique of interviewing subjects, particularly on matters of race, and then recreating her subjects’ responses with a difference on-stage. She has recently gained tremendous popularity for her work Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, part of her larger project “On the Road: A Search for American Character.” The question in my title, “Is Race a Trope?”, comes, however, not from me or from Anna Deavere Smith per se but from a performance of Smith’s in which she recreates an interview she conducted with academic and critical theorist Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. (1) Early in the development of her technique of interviewing and then performing people of diverse races, ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions, Anna Deavere Smith performed an edited interview she’d conducted with Smith-Rosenberg, who asks and explores the question “Is race a trope?” The answer to this question for Smith-Rosenberg is complex, and Anna Deavere Smith’s performance of Smith-Rosenberg’s answer is even more complex. Not only do both social theorists say that identity, in this case racial identity, is experienced as both a fact and as a trope, but Anna Deavere Smith incorporates this post-structuralist model of racial identity into her acting approach. The question “Is race a trope?” is all the more interesting when it is asked in the context of a black woman (Smith), playing a white woman (Smith-Rosenberg), asking the question of the black woman who is now playing her. African American Review
February 3, 2004
Political Animal
No Escape for an O.G. Scott is sitting with his wife at the Olive Garden in Bakersfield last Wednesday, having just been released from Lerdo. After paying a fee of $400, he has been assigned to a maintenance job at Cerro Coso Community College in Ridgecrest for the next four months. He cannot say exactly why his release was granted. “Kern County is a money machine,” Vanessa says. “They will take all your money, put you in jail, then for a little more money you can get out and work for the county, for free.”
Vanessa rests her head on Scott’s shoulder as the two describe some of the more hapless inmates they met while at Lerdo — people with worse stories and perhaps less resilience and luck than they. There’s Miss Helen, a 65-year-old woman with Crohn’s disease who had never been convicted of a crime in her life, but who was serving a year for Section 8 housing fraud after failing to notify authorities that she got married. And there is a woman named Lopez, who is also serving a year for welfare fraud. Authorities went all the way down to Florida to get her, Vanessa says, but never charged her husband, as they did Scott. L.A. Weekly