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March 18, 2002
Beef-a-Real
The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery 
Human suffering comes in various guises, yet slavery has a distinctive horror that is evident to those of us who have seen it in the flesh. Even when it does not involve beating or other physical torture, it brings about a psychological degradation that often renders victims unable to function in the outside world. 'I've worked in prisons and with cases of domestic violence,' says Sydney Lytton, an American psychiatrist who has counseled freed slaves. 'This is worse.'" Scientific American
Beef-a-Real
Tar Baby and Womanist Theology "In Tar Baby, Morrison reenvisions the African origins of the Southern folk tale of Br'er Rabbit. She explores the wealth of black women's spiritual and creative heritage. According to Morrison, the "tar baby" of Southern folklore originates from a myth of a "tar lady" in ancient Africa. She was originally a powerful symbol of black womanhood. For Morrison, the tar lady is a black woman who holds things together; she is a builder and cohesive force. If a mythological, pre-Christian ancestor of black women was a "tar lady," what is the meaning of such mythology for black womanhood? Morrison suggests that myths that are African in origin have been reinvented from one period of history to the next by blacks and whites, so that we must uncover the original meaning of myths to consider seriously possible meanings for today's world." Watch out for the literal placement of the footnotes at the bottom of each page. Theology Today
March 13, 2002
Political Animal
Tokyo Breakfast "Despite the global appropriation of hip-hop culture, the questions that 'Tokyo Breakfast' raises are whether the performance was an attempt to exploit, denigrate, or romanticize black American culture. In many ways, the video is reminiscent of performances in which non-black performers put on blackface to portray stereotypical black characters; but in this case, invisible blackface is used. 'We already know that the Internet has enabled globalization-a process that sounds international, but is in actuality the worldwide expansion of American culture. So it's not surprising, as the video suggests, that these same technologies have fostered the circulation of American racial stereotypes,' says Alondra Nelson, co-editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life and founder of Afrofuturism, a listserv that discusses sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and technological innovation in the African diaspora." The article above has no link to the video. You can view Tokyo Breakfast at Hypnotic.com , here or here. You have to see it and hear it to believe it. Requires Windows Media Player. The Hypnotic.com site requires registration to view the video. Hypnotic.com
March 12, 2002
Fnord
Criminal lineups use drivers' photos "Teck and other opponents said they were troubled by the fact that if someone other than the suspect is picked from the lineup, police run a background check, contact the person in the photo and sometimes contact the person's employer to ensure that he or she was at work when the crime occurred, according to testimony from Denver police Sgt. Tony Lombard." This article is truly frightening. Denver Post.com
March 10, 2002
Fnord
Whites Remember Jim Crow "Memories of Jim Crow naturally depend on who's doing the remembering. Southern whites who lived in the segregation era sometimes offer startlingly different recollections to those of African Americans, much the way a black and white film negative looks directly opposite the final print. In the southwestern Louisiana town of New Iberia, older whites tend to remember segregation as a benign social system. They say race relations were more peaceful during Jim Crow than they are now because blacks and whites understood their place within the social order. Some whites remember blacks getting unfair treatment under segregation, but few feel responsible or express remorse for black suffering. To most whites in Iberia Parish, Jim Crow operated beyond their control. Virtually all say their town's Jim Crow history is irrelevant to contemporary race relations." A comprehensive mixture of text, slideshows and audio files, this site provides insight into Jim Crow. A fascinating site to explore and an opportunity to learn more an issue that figures in the reparations debate. Other sections in the site include "Communities 'Behind the Veil' and "Resistance". Produced by Minnesota Public Radio. RadioWorks.org
Fnord
From Slavery to Mass Incarceration "The fourth, I contend here, is the novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus with which it has become joined by a linked relationship of structural symbiosis and functional surrogacy. This suggests that slavery and mass imprisonment are genealogically linked and that one cannot understand the latter?its timing, composition, and smooth onset as well as the quiet ignorance or acceptance of its deleterious effects on those it affects?without returning to the former as historic starting point and functional analogue." Read the footnotes too. They are very informative. New Left Review
Poetry
Audre Lorde "Audre Lorde, poet, essayist, novelist and teacher was born in New York City on February 18, 1934. She grew up in Manhattan where she attended Catholic school. She loved to read poetry, often reciting whole poems or individual lines to communicate with people. When she could no longer find poems that expressed her feelings, she started writing her own poetry. Her first poem to be published appeared in Seventeen magazine when she was still in high school." A concise bio with three of her poems. New York State Writers Institute
Political Animal
Masters and Tools: Thoughts Inspired by Audre Lourde "It's strange, though perhaps somewhat predictable, that I've read little of Audre Lourde's poetry. I was introduced to her book of essays, Sister Outsider, in a graduate seminar on Feminist Ethics/Theory and used chapters from it in my own undergraduate teaching. I did get hold of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which is absolutely wonderful. I knew I wanted to write about 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House' again (especially given Appiah's use of the term), but I was a little surprised by how strongly I'm reacting to it. Damn, but Lourde is really good, and I've now set myself the goal of reading through her corpus. Black History Month strikes again." MonkeyFist.com
Fiction
Zora Neale Hurston "Zora Neale Hurston is one of the greatest writers/ anthropologists of the 20th century. She could write about the most ordinary things and make them infinitely gorgeous. in Zora Neale Hurston's books, the reader empathizes, loves, hates, and mourns, because Zora makes her characters so real and human it is impossible not to. she has the rare power to write fiction that is timeless and vibrant. the relationships, the glory, the trauma, the power struggles; everything just sears itself into your consciousness." A fairly comprehensive site about all things Zora. Has a few photos I've never seen of her. Check it out. I Am Zora
March 7, 2002
Political Animal
Malcolm X Family Fights Auction of Papers "With the documents about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, the family and scholars fear they may now never have a chance to examine them. Many research institutions can't afford to go head to head with wealthy Internet bidders, they say, and the fact that the material is being offered in 21 separate lots rather than as a single unit means it is bound to be widely dispersed and difficult to track. Reports of the scholars' concerns first appeared in The Library Journal Academic Newswire, a biweekly e-mail newsletter, last month." New York Times
March 4, 2002
Beef-a-Real
Image Awards: Fame Is the Benchmark "I'll confess, I've been suspect of these awards for a long time, going back to the day when teenage WB stars Tia and Tamera Mowry were nominated, and won, for best actress in a comedy series. Yes, they're twins, and they play twins on TV. But they're also two individual people and should be nominated and awarded individually." LA Times
March 3, 2002
Political Animal
The Case for Reparations "The imprecision and neo-racialist overtones in The Debt evidently caused Robinson some second thoughts. He recently wrote in The Nation that 'individual Americans need not feel defensive or under attack' as a result of the call for reparations. 'No one holds any living person responsible' for slavery or its successor regime of Jim Crow. We must all, 'as a nation,' address reparations, he writes. That is the right focus." Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
Site Seeing
Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club "Zulus were not without their controversies, either. In the 1960's during the height of Black awareness, it was unpopular to be a Zulu. Dressing in a grass skirt and donning a black face were seen as being demeaning. Large numbers of black organizations protested against the Zulu organization, and its membership dwindled to approximately 16 men. James Russell, a long-time member, served as president in this period, and is credited with holding the organization together and slowly bringing Zulu back to the forefront." I was looking for Mardi Gras photos and came across one with people in black face and labeled as Zulu. Not being from New Orleans nor having ever witnessed Mardi Gras, you will forgive me for not knowing about the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club
Review
Color Crosses Over "The star power is obviously key to the success of the shows, but they have also taken up the mantle of traditional parenting that white sitcoms have shed. For years, TV's white parents have been crass (Roseanne), dumb (The Simpsons), even abusive (Titus). On My Wife and Bernie Mac, black dads don Ward Cleaver's authority-figure sweater. Wayans' grouchy suburban dad Michael Kyle is firm and in control--though, Wayans says, 'a bit of a Neanderthal.' Creatively, My Wife is one of TV's most nondescript sitcoms, from its familiar suburban-family premise to its plain-as-macaroni title, but its very blandness makes TV's skittishness about black comedy seem all the sillier." Time.com
Sports
NFL scams "The National Football League Players Association estimates that at least 78 players have been defrauded of $42 million in the past three years. Gene Upshaw, the union's executive director, calls that figure 'the tip of the iceberg ... There are many cases out there where players are too embarrassed to report the fraud.'" U.S. News
Political Animal
White America Misuses MLK Day "King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. He is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be ridiculed as a relic or buffoon." AlterNet
Political Animal
Tanna "John Frum is the son of God, but he's not Jesus. He's a black Melanesian, but sometimes a white man - or, according to others, a black American GI. He's a kastom messiah, come to turn the people of Tanna back to their old ways before the missionaries - but he's also a universal avatar of change, a successor to Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed." The Mighty Organ
Political Animal
Fingerprint evidence "This is the first ruling of its kind in the American courts, although fingerprinting evidence has been open to such a challenge for years. In the 1990s America's Supreme Court deemed it the responsibility of federal judges to insist that expert witnesses testify about the reliability of a forensic-scientific method only if the method in question has been tested so that the range of its error rate is known. Fingerprinting experts have long claimed that their error rate in matching prints is zero?but without any supporting evidence." Economist
Political Animal
Glenn Loury's About Face "'No, Shelby and I didn't agree,' Loury says now. 'I was always aware that, whatever I thought about race, I'm still black. Shelby's position. . . .' Loury starts to laugh. 'I was about to say, Shelby's position was that we had to completely transcend race, though I can imagine saying those words, too. But my heart wasn't in them, whereas he really meant it. How could it have been otherwise? His mother was a white woman. His wife is a white woman. When he looked at his own children's racial identity and wondered about an oppressive world that would say to those children, "Choose sides" -- a dilemma I'd never faced -- Shelby's angle of vision was really quite different from my own. So in all honesty, it was I who betrayed him, not he who betrayed me.' The two men have not spoken since that conversation. (Steele declined to be interviewed for this article.)" Free registration required. New York Times
Political Animal
A Judge's Past "Judge Pickering, a close friend of Senator Trent Lott, is a right-winger whose views over many decades have been insensitive, and frequently hostile, to the rights of minorities, the disenfranchised, the poor and women. Mr. Pickering is to appear today before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss his record. Civil rights and abortion rights groups are mobilizing to block his confirmation." Free registration required. New York Times
Political Animal
The price of milk (and sex) in Cuba "Even five decades after the Revolution, color lines largely equal economic lines in Cuba. Though the gross inequities of pre-Revolutionary days had been eliminated, blacks clearly occupied a lower economic rung. I'd never seen a casa particular, or pension, run by a black family, or a paladar, an informal restaurant, with black owners. I'd never seen a black driver of an official cab. These were three of the best legal ways to acquire foreign currency in Cuba and blacks didn't seem to have access to them. (The houses people had at the time of the Revolution were largely the houses they had now, which is why white people were the owners of the big places that made good pensions.)" Salon.com
Political Animal
Mirror of Race "The working thesis of the project is that these images from 1839-1876 demonstrate that race in this period (spanning approximately forty years; before, during, and after the Civil War) was a much more fluid and ambiguous concept than we may now assume. The project's aim would be in part to discern and address how these images from the past dislocate our own present presumptions about the representation of race. Of course, some images may seem only to confirm our expectations of that era's depictions. This tension is what 'The Mirror of Race' intends to explore." Burrows Web
Political Animal
True Pictures "As Frederick Douglass saw it, Morse and Daguerre were two facets of the same democratizing revolution, a revolution that was fast uniting the world in communication (Morse) and in image (Daguerre). For Douglass, this universalizing and democratizing revolution involved more than a breaking down of class divisions; it also meant attacking what we might call the optics of racism, that is, how white Europeans had come to see black Africans as a nearly separate species, a view which corrupted painted portraits: 'Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.'" Take some time to explore the site. There are quite a few photos and some are inexplicably vivid, especially the ones where the servant looks directly into the camera. So alive. Common Place
Political Animal
Scartoons: Racial Satire and the Civil War "The structural transformation of American society wrought by the Civil War dramatically outpaced the changes in Americans' racial attitudes. In many ways, the promise of emancipation would not be legally realized until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. To the current day, of course, the tensions of racial coexistence continue to perplex and frustrate the culture. In this light, it is important to understand the ways in which popular media contributed to the nation's social and political climate." This is an interesting article with quite a few illustrations. Nice read. University of Virginia American Studies Program
Political Animal
The Miscegenation Hoax "The pamphlet opened with an explanation of its title. 'Miscegenation' was a word that the author of the pamphlet had coined, and so he explained that he had invented it by combining two latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus (race). He intended the term to describe a blending, or mixing of different races, thus replacing the word 'amalgamation' which was used at that time to describe interracial unions, but which he felt did not sound scientific enough." Museum of Hoaxes
Political Animal
African American Lawmen in Oklahoma "Many years later, a little wiser to the ways of the world, I decided to conduct some research on the 'Wild West.' My area of concentration was African-American outlaws and lawmen. My research revealed the reality that there were, indeed, Black outlaws and lawmen throughout the West in the last century. Black outlaws fought with Billy the Kid in New Mexico and rode with the 'Hole in the Wall' gang in Wyoming and Colorado. The largest concentration of African-American outlaws and lawmen could be found in the Indian Territory now known as the state of Oklahoma. Many Blacks had come to the Indian Territory as slaves of the Native Americans known as the 'Five Civilized Tribes.' These Native Americans were relocated from the South prior to the Civil War, beginning in the late 1830's." Oklahombres.org
Political Animal
Harlem Renaissance: African-American Literature, From Hughes, McKay and Cullen to Today "The site is devoted to a few experimental literary movements that tried to uncover some deeper truths about life. In studying the life stories of the writers as well as their works, there are sometimes even more interesting truths to be revealed than are found in the works themselves." This site has some interesting articles and seeks contributions. All you aspiring writers of literature are welcome here, I think. Literary Kicks
Political Animal
Once You Go Black "The question then becomes, why it is that this fictional body, the body that is obviously produced through, if not entirely of, language, the body that speaks the horrors of the middle passage, continues as such an appealing draw for American intellectuals, black, white and otherwise. ..." George Mason University Cultural Studies
Site Seeing
Josephine Baker A nice website tribute to Josephine Baker. CMG Worldwide
Political Animal
Fade to White "This fashion craze can be seen in various parts of Ghana, but most notably in the capital, Accra. Salons offering beauty to Ghanaians use light women with long straight hair in their advertisements. Although the majority of these pictures don't represent the average Ghanaian woman, they seem to represent what some Africans deem beautiful. 'I started bleaching because I wanted to get a new face,' says 25-year-old Cecilia Animahh. 'I wanted to look attractive.'" Village Voice
Site Seeing
Reflections in Black "Early photographic business practices varied. Some photographers owned and operated studios in small towns and major cities, while others worked as itinerants. They photographed people from all walks of life--the prosperous, laborers, and the poor. Many focused on the free black communities around the country, especially in the North. Significantly, African-American photographers documented the activities of nineteenth-century abolitionists, and thus their work took on a political and historical meaning early on. The artistic legacy of this work reflects the dominant techniques of nineteenth-century American photography, that is, daguerreotypes and the early negative process, including ambrotypes, tintypes, and the popular stereographs, as well as composite printing and hand tinting." George Mason University Cultural Studies Program
Fiction
Langston Hughes: Father and Son "The tall mulatto boy stood before his father, the Colonel. The old white man felt the steel of him standing there, like the steel of himself forty years ago. Steel of the Norwoods darkened now by Africa. The old man got up, straight and tall, too, and suddenly shook his fist in the face of the boy." PBS.org
Fiction
Langston Hughes: Cora Unashamed "The Studevants thought they owned her, and they were perfectly right: they did. There was something about the teeth in the trap of economic circumstance that kept her in their power practically all her life -- in the Studevant kitchen, cooking; in the Studevant parlor, sweeping; in the Studevant backyard, hanging clothes." PBS.org