KKK Child and African American State Trooper (1992 Photo)

Poynter has the background on the photo HERE. [click to enlarge]

Oliver Wang on the Lin-Sanity of Jeremy Lin

A great guest post by scholar and DJ Oliver Wang at T.N. Coates' blog at the Atlantic. Coates' page is also recommended for its great commentary. check it out.

Fung Brothers: Stuff Peple Say About Jeremy Lin

Cherokee Want to Oust Black Claimants

Reuters
Cherokee Indians: We are free to oust blacks
US government wants second-largest Indian tribe to recognize as citizens 2,800 descendants of slaves that were held by Cherokees

updated 9/14/2011 9:00:20 AM ET

The nation's second-largest Indian tribe said on Tuesday that it would not be dictated to by the U.S. government over its move to banish 2,800 African Americans from its citizenship rolls.

"The Cherokee Nation will not be governed by the BIA," Joe Crittenden, the tribe's acting principal chief, said in a statement responding to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Crittenden, who leads the tribe until a new principal chief is elected, went on to complain about unnamed congressmen meddling in the tribe's self-governance.

The reaction follows a letter the tribe received on Monday from BIA Assistant Secretary Larry Echo Hawk, who warned that the results of the September 24 Cherokee election for principal chief will not be recognized by the U.S. government if the ousted members, known to some as "Cherokee Freedmen," are not allowed to vote.

The dispute stems from the fact that some wealthy Cherokee owned black slaves who worked on their plantations in the South. By the 1830s, most of the tribe was forced to relocate to present-day Oklahoma, and many took their slaves with them. The so-called Freedmen are descendants of those slaves. After the Civil War, in which the Cherokee fought for the South, a treaty was signed in 1866 guaranteeing tribal citizenship for the freed slaves. The U.S. government said that the 1866 treaty between the Cherokee tribe and the U.S. government guaranteed that the slaves were tribal citizens, whether or not they had a Cherokee blood relation.

The African Americans lost their citizenship last month when the Cherokee Supreme Court voted to support the right of tribal members to change the tribe's constitution on citizenship matters.

Read the full story HERE.

Does the Anti-Jewish Foreskin Man Comic Cover Contain Neo-Nazi Code?

The Anti-Defamation League has a post HERE regarding the anti-Jewish/racist comic book published by supporters of the anti-circumcision ballot initiative in San Francisco. (There is also a move to get it on the ballot in Santa Monica.) For background on the ballot initiative, check some of the major California newspaper sites. What I want to talk about is a comic book put out in support of this initiative that portrays Jews as vile monsters, like this: [click to enlarge]

To be clear, I am not claiming that all supporters of the anti-circumcision ballot are anti-Semitic, racist, or whatever. I am specifically addressing the comic book put out by a prominent supporter of the initiative. The publishers claim that the comic is pro-human rights and not anti-Jewish, but that seems a stretch when you have a blond superhero (called Foreskin Man) fighting grotesque Jewish characters that tap into the very old stereotype of depicting Jews as sub-human, bloodthirsty barbarians/vermin/creatures. When one recalls the European myths of Jews sacrificing Christian children for blood rituals, you've got some serious historical tropes at work. And of course, more recently we have the examples of the 1900s Elders of Zion crap and 1930s Nazi Germany propaganda. And look at the Jewish characters. How the hell could this not be offensive?

Here are some more panels from the first issue, which is apparently set in San Diego [facepalm + sigh]:

The Jewish characters are a combination of evil thugs or monsters. If you think I'm exaggerating about the monster part, the gang leader is named Monster Mohel:

In these comics, doctors and thugs tie up unwilling beautiful big-breasted mothers so they can circumcise their sons against their will (but with the father's permission), an act they anticipate with almost sexual/sadistic pleasure. Granted, one has to get past the ridiculousness of a hero called Foreskin Man whose costume has a uncircumcised phallus tip as a logo he wears on his chest. This is so ridiculous it's almost a parody that one would find in The Onion or a bad SNL skit. But all this ridiculousness aside, this is some vile stuff. I mean check out the eyes and dripping teeth of Monster Mohel:

When I saw the cover for issue 2, the thing that really jumped out at me was the fact that Foreskin Man is visibly holding an 8-ball in the very weird setting for a circumcision, a pool table (plus you get a good look at that logo):

So, if one is going to set a circumcision as taking place on a pool table, why out of all the things the superhero (who is able to fly through the air) would do be to pick up a pool ball? Weird, but okay, so maybe he does. Well, out of all fifteen pool balls, he just happens to pick up the 8-ball? Chance, coincidence? Given the fact that 88 serves as a dog whistle for Neo-Nazis (Neo-Nazi code for "Heil Hitler," derived from Heil Hitler = HH = 88, "H" being the eighth letter of the alphabet) is seems too much of a stretch to me. Comic book images in general and covers in particular are very deliberate, and this seems like a subtle little signal put out there for "the right people" to get.

Here's the panel after he hits "Monster Mohel" with the 8-ball. Notice how the hand is now claw-like. This is typical propaganda art that demonizes one's enemy as non-human, a monster. (Remember, it's not anti-Jewish!)

Apparently in Foreskin Man's world, circumcision is so bad that it is better to kidnap a child from his parents than to let them circumcise him.

...and apparently there are sexy hippie chicks (also with large breasts) that will raise kidnapped children "their way"; certainly with their foreskins but probably also raised to hate Jews as well. (For you San Diegans, the foreskin-loving hippies choose Ocean Beach near the pier for their meeting place, which considering the freak factor of OB, makes sense, doesn't it?)

Check out the kid: in all the illustrations the babies' faces are drawn to look like little men instead of newborns, and they react like very alert kids instead of little babies. Anyway, so while I might be off on the 8-ball symbolism, it seems rather clear that the work is clearly anti-Jewish, but really, this is so far off the WTF scale... I never dreamed I would write a blog post about [sigh] FORESKIN MAN.

In the linked story, the comic's creator hints at creating a different kind of story. I anticipate a subsequent edition with a Muslim storyline involving Foreskin Man to deflect charges of anti-Semitism. It will be interesting to see what happens to the ballot measure.

Final note; I obviously do not own the copyright to these images, which are made freely available on the Internet by the creators. I report them here in the spirit of criticism as permitted by copyright law.

UPDATE: Ah hell, there is a Foreskin Man card set too. Check out this SF Gate post HERE.

T-N Coates on the Racism in Kanye West's Latest Album

The Atlantic

On White She-Devils
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Jan 3 2011, 5:45 PM ET 121

I like the beats on Kanye West's new album. I love the inversion of that famous line about Malcolm X--"That's too much power for one man to have." I think he's an improved MC. But I'm a little amazed that no one's disturbed by "Champagne wishes/30 white bitches" as a hook. I'm more amazed at his empty employment of white women as objects. I'm less amazed, but pretty depressed, that colorism is back--"Rolling with some light-skin chicks and some Kelly Rowlands," is little more than "you're pretty for a dark-skin girl" in this postracial era.

All told, the album strikes me as incredibly, almost casually, racist. On some level, I wonder what would have become of John Mayer, had he cut a video with dead black women strewn about and invoked black women throughout his lyrics in the manner Kanye does. But moralism misses the point here. The problem isn't simply racism or sexism, but boring racism, boring sexism that hearkens back to the black power macho of Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver at their worst. It's the work of a failed provocateur boorishly brandishing his ancient affects. The obvious defense is that this is an exploration of West's psyche, of his fantasy. But actually it isn't. This is an aggressively external album obsessed with dismissing haters, slut-shaming women (black and white), and ultimately, not with Kanye or his fantasy, but with what you will surely say about his fantasy.

Read the full posts HERE, and as always, check out the comments at his blog.

New book on "Black National anthem"

CNN
Professor at historically black college questions 'black national anthem'
By Liane Membis, CNN

(CNN) -- "Lift Every Voice and Sing" is an uplifting spiritual, one that's often heard in churches and popularly recognized as the black national anthem. Timothy Askew grew up with its rhythms, but now the song holds a contentious place in his mind.

"I love the song," said Askew, an associate professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college. "But it's not the song that is the problem. It's the label of the song as a 'black national anthem' that creates a lot of confusion and tension."

The song and its message of struggle and hope have long been attached to the African-American community. It lives on as a religious hymn for several protestant and African-American denominations and was quoted by the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery at Barack Obama's presidential inauguration.

After studying the music and lyrics of the song and its history for more than two decades, Askew decided the song was intentionally written with no specific reference to any race or ethnicity.

Askew explains his position in the new book, "Cultural Hegemony and African American Patriotism: An Analysis of the Song, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,'" which was released by Linus Publications in June. The book explores the literary and musical traditions of the song, but also says that a national anthem for African-Americans can be construed as racially separatist and divisive.

"To sing the 'black national anthem' suggests that black people are separatist and want to have their own nation," Askew said. "This means that everything Martin Luther King Jr. believed about being one nation gets thrown out the window."

Askew first became intrigued with "Lift Every Voice and Sing" while working on his master's degree at Yale University. He was a Morehouse College music graduate, young, passionate and hungry for knowledge about African-American culture. A fellow classmate suggested Askew explore Yale's collection on James Weldon Johnson, an early civil rights activist who wrote the song decades earlier.

Johnson first wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as a poem in 1900. Hundreds of African-American students performed it at a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday at Jacksonville, Florida's Stanton School, where Johnson was principal. Johnson's brother, John Rosamond Johnson, later set the poem to music. By 1920, the NAACP had proclaimed the song the "Negro National Anthem."

"I remember methodically going into the Yale library every day and sitting there on the floor, rummaging through 700 boxes of James Johnson's work," Askew said. "I became so fascinated in his life and letters, that I wanted to know more about the creation of the song and how it related to our modern understanding of it."

He found letters of appreciation to Johnson from individuals of all different ethnic backgrounds. At that moment, Askew had a revelation: The song he'd known as the "black national anthem" was for everybody.

Some will call his perspective on the song a contradiction, Askew said, especially because he works at a historically black college. But he argues that universities like Clark Atlanta accept students of many races and ethnicities; a national anthem for one race excludes others, and ignores an existing national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key.

"Some people argue lines like 'We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,' signify a tie to slavery and the black power struggle," Askew said. "But in all essence there is no specific reference to black people in this song. It lends itself to any people who have struggled."

He's not the only one who sees fault in a national anthem just for African-Americans.

Kenneth Durden, an African-American conservative blogger, responded to Askew's claims on his blog, "A Free Man, Thinking Freely." He said in an interview that Askew is right to make connections to King's view of one America.

"King always appealed to the American dream for all," Durden said. "He was a patriot and he never wanted blacks to deny or separate themselves from being American. I think claiming an anthem for ourselves as black people is doing just that."

What troubles Askew more is that the song became an identity marker for African-Americans.

"Who has the right to decide for all black people what racial symbol they should have?" Askew said. "Identity should be developed by the individual himself, not a group of people who think they know what is best for you."

Hilary O. Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy for the NAACP, said Askew's ideas might be far-fetched.

"I don't see anything that is racially exclusive or discriminatory about the song," Shelton said. "The negro national anthem was adopted and welcomed by a very interracial group, and it speaks of hope in being full first-class citizens in our society."

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" isn't meant to cloud national identity or persuade African-Americans to be separatists, Shelton said. It's often sung in conjunction with "The Star-Spangled Banner," or with the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance at NAACP events.

"His presumption is that this song is sung instead of our national anthem -- that we are less American and we are not as committed to America because we take pride in the Negro national anthem," Shelton said. "It is evident in our actions as an organization and here in America that we are about inclusion, not exclusion. To claim that we as African-Americans want to form a confederation or separate ourselves from white people because of one song is baffling to me."

Read the full post HERE.

Teaching African American Studies in Russia

Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog has some guest bloggers this week, and I have really enjoyed a couple of posts by Jelani Cobb (who has a blog HERE) on the experience of teaching African American history in Russia. Here are some excerpts:


From "A View From the East":

Jun 17 2010, 1:15 PM ET | Comment
[Jelani Cobb]

Some years back I made a resolution to ignore the second half of any sentence that began with the words "We are the only people who..." Almost always the next clause featured some shortcoming of the race and after years spent drenched in the backwaters of Afrocentrism (the patchouli era), I'd had my fill of black specificity.

"We are the only people," came to be an advance warning that I was talking to someone who probably didn't know much about any people other than (a small segment of) black ones. More subtly, an expression of the speaker's fixation on the values of a wider world they both rejected and envied.

I spent the past spring semester teaching African American history at Moscow State University. People tend to toward a common reaction when I mention this. "What was that like?" The inflection hinting that two decades after the end of the Cold War, Russia -- at least in the minds of Americans -- remains foreign in a way that few other places are. There's a lot I could say about that experience but the shorthand version is the we are not the only people.

.............

In the thirteen years I've been teaching African American history, the common theme has been the way in which the black experience has stood outside of, and therefore defined, American democracy. But from the first day in my classroom at Moscow State University, the unintentional theme was the common threads of the past and its weight in the present. Paul Robeson once said that of all the places he'd visited, Russians reminded him the most of Negroes. He had a point.

Russia's serfs were freed just two years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
.....

During World War II somewhere between 20-25 million Soviet citizens were killed, meaning on its most basic terms, that they lost more people in four years than died in the entire course of the Transatlantic slave trade.
.........

I traveled 7000 miles and found myself immersed in a culture that was defined, but not destroyed by brutal history, whose people bore the mark of that past even as they took pride in the fact that other people might not have survived such trials. Familiar.

.......... I was reminded of that blues truth that suffering doesn't recede into the past, it gets handed down through history like an inheritance. What one chooses to do with that inheritance is ultimately the only thing that matters.

So no, we aren't the only people. And the only problem comes with needing to be.

It's great stuff, please read the full post HERE.


And a post "That Russian for 'Hope'":

Jun 18 2010, 12:41 PM ET | Comment
[Jelani Cobb]

If you are a black man teaching African American history in Russia in 2010 you will be asked about Barack Obama. A lot. I began my class by projecting an image of black slaves picking cotton on a plantation alongside a picture of the Obama inauguration and explained that my goal for the semester was to explain how we moved from the picture on the left to the picture on the right.

Yesterday the NYT ran a story on a Pew study of Obama's impact on foreign perceptions of the U.S. abroad. Given the previous administration's antagonism toward the UN and references to "old Europe" it's not exactly surprising that the country's popularity in Western Europe surged post-Bush.

But it was worth noting that Russia was one of the two countries that showed the largest increase in positive sentiment toward the United States since Obama's election.

...........

For it's own reasons, the Soviet Union highlighted the history of slavery, lynching, disfranchisement and Jim Crow. As a consequence, even now the Russian students had more base knowledge of African American history than many students I've taught in the United States.) That said, the election of a black president might have been farther outside their expectations than many other places.

The question I encountered most often was whether or not Obama was actually calling the shots. I initially took that as a matter of racial skepticism—surely the black guy was some sort of racial PR stunt. But at some point I realized that the question also had to be understood in context of who was asking it. Many of the Russians I talked to didn't believe their own president was calling the shots. It wasn't cynical, it was raw experience that made it reasonable to doubt whether Barack Obama was actually in charge.

Read the full post HERE.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Civil Rights and Rand Paul discussion

Civil rights sit-in by John Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Anne Moody at Woolworth's lunch counter, Jackson Mississippi, 1963. A crowd of people taunts them and pours sugar, ketchup, and mustard on them in protest.
[edit: in reading a bit more, John Salter is not only covered in condiments but also his own blood, a result of being hit by both brass knuckles and a broken glass sugar container]


Joan Trumpauer's mugshot. She was held in a Mississippi jail for two months for her civil rights actions (seen in the above photo), at times held on death row (I'm assuming that was for her protection). That's right, they sent a young White woman to a Mississippi State Penitentiary for two months because she protested segregation in a non-violent manner. She says she was motivated to act and sustained by her Christian faith. It's pretty damn humbling reading about these folks.

As I seem to recommend every month, you have got to check out Ta-Nehisi's blog at the Atlantic. His responses (and his commenters') to Rand Paul's opposition to the Civil Rights Act are well worth the read. Check HERE and HERE.

In Living Color on Arizona Racism (Tom and Tom, The Brothers Brothers)

This skit was originally run on In Living Color (a comedy show that ran from 1990-94) twenty years ago to ridicule Arizona's resistance to the Federal Martin Luther King holiday. (It itself was a play on the earlier Smothers Brothers show from the late 1960s, hence the name of the act as the Brothers Brothers and their performance on guitar and bass.) Seems rather appropriate again, and a good reminder that border issues weren't involved in this dispute; it was about ethnicity/race, pretty much like it is now.

A.N.C. and South African Song Controversy

NYT

pril 7, 2010
A.N.C. Issues Caution in Singing Polarizing Songs
By BARRY BEARAK

JOHANNESBURG — The governing African National Congress on Wednesday told its members to be “circumspect” in singing songs from the anti-apartheid struggle, retreating from its earlier defense of a contentious song — “Shoot the Boer” — that in recent days has become associated with the killing of a white supremacist leader.

The song has enjoyed a resurgence since it became a part of the public appearances of Julius Malema, the president of the A.N.C. Youth League.

Boer means farmer in Afrikaans, the language spoken by the descendants of Dutch settlers. It is sometimes used as a term for Afrikaners. The lyrics include the words “shoot the Boer” and “shoot them with a gun.”

Last week, two judges, in independent proceedings, banned the song. The A.N.C. called these decisions unreasonable, contending that the lyrics were metaphorical and needed to be viewed in a historical context. It said it would try to get the rulings reversed.

For his part, Mr. Malema, an extremely difficult man to silence, vowed to continue his renditions of “Shoot the Boer.” This persistence took on new meaning when the white supremacist leader, Eugene TerreBlanche, was killed on Saturday. The police attributed the crime to a dispute with two farmhands over pay. But some of Mr. TerreBlanche’s followers blamed the song.

There were calls for revenge, but these have been retracted.

Mr. TerreBlanche, 69, the leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, was a prominent newsmaker in the early 1990s. But his influence had waned since then.

On Tuesday, there was a confrontation when the accused first appeared in court. People mourning Mr. TerreBlanche waved flags that signified white rule and sang a racist song. Meanwhile, blacks chanted “hero, hero, hero” as the accused passed by.

The shouting between the groups ended in a standoff. Indeed, though passions run high in Ventersdorp, where Mr. TerreBlanche lived, the events seem merely a matter of conversation around the rest of the nation.

Nevertheless, the statement of the A.N.C. leadership, citing “the environment currently prevailing in our country,” asked its members to “restrain themselves” lest they be used as scapegoats by right-wing troublemakers.

That especially applied to “liberation songs” that can be seen as “contributing to racial polarization of society,” it said.

The statement said the A.N.C.’s executive committee would discuss the appropriate use of liberation songs at a meeting in May.

No mention was made of “Shoot the Boer,” just the euphemism “the song that is hotly debated currently.” Nor was there mention of the song used at rallies by President Jacob Zuma, “Bring Me My Machine Gun.”

See original story of many additional links to previous parts of the story.

Virginia Postrel on Race and (In)Conspicuous Consumption

This story is a couple of years old but interesting. h/t to TN Coates at the Atlantic.

The Atlantic
July/August 2008
Inconspicuous Consumption

A new theory of the leisure class
By Virginia Postrel

About seven years ago, University of Chicago economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst were researching the “wealth gap” between black and white Americans when they noticed something striking. African Americans not only had less wealth than whites with similar incomes, they also had significantly more of their assets tied up in cars. The statistic fit a stereotype reinforced by countless bling-filled hip-hop videos: that African Americans spend a lot on cars, clothes, and jewelry—highly visible goods that tell the world the owner has money.

But do they really? And, if so, why?

The two economists, along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania, have now attacked those questions. What they found not only provides insight into the economic differences between racial groups, it challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes.

On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

Of course, different ethnic groups could simply have different tastes. Maybe blacks just enjoy jewelry more than whites do. Maybe they buy costlier clothes to deter slights from racist salesclerks. Maybe they spend more on cars for historical reasons, because of the freedom auto travel gave African Americans during the days of segregated trains and buses. Maybe they just aren’t that interested in private colleges or big-screen TVs. Or maybe not. Economists hate unfalsifiable tautologies about differing tastes. They want stories that could apply to anyone.

So the researchers went back to Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term conspicuous consumption. Writing in the much poorer world of 1899, Veblen argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous. “The motive is emulation—the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves,” he wrote. Along these lines, the economists hypothesized that visible consumption lets individuals show strangers they aren’t poor. Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.

To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states—say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.

The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households—about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove.

So this research has implications beyond race. It ought to apply to any peer group perceived by strangers. It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today—and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor. Veblen was right.

But he was also wrong. Or at least his theory is out of date. Given that the richer your group, the less flashy spending you’ll do, conspicuous consumption isn’t a universal phenomenon. It’s a development phase. It declines as countries, regions, or distinct groups get richer. “Bling rules in emerging economies still eager to travel the status-through-product consumption road,” the market-research group Euromonitor recently noted, but luxury businesses “are becoming aware that bling isn’t enough for growing numbers of consumers in developed economies.” At some point, luxury becomes less a tool of public status competition and more a means to private pleasure.

...........

Read the entire original post HERE.

Ganguro Girls: Japan's Teenage Brownface Valley Girl Wannabees

Think of Japanese teens trying to emulate stereotypical tanned American Valley Girls, and this is what you get. Check out the post at the very well named blog WTF Japan Seriously. And I'm sure this was a narrow little over-hyped trend (though not a single case for sure) but seriously, WTF?

Cartoon: Gansta Rap As Modern Day Minstrelsy

I don't know the original publication source of Bill Bramhill's 2005 cartoon:




You might also be interested in this 2007 story on the minstrelization of hip-hop.

White Sorority Wins (African American) Stepping Contest (via The Root)

Can We At Least Keep Stepping to Ourselves?
Nope. We've got to share our traditions. Just like white sorority Zeta Tau Alpha will share their win with Alpha Kappa Alpha.

By: Lawrence C. Ross Jr. | Posted: February 26, 2010 at 6:35 AM

The Root

It’s the closest thing to Armageddon that many Black Greeks have seen since Laurence Fishburne’s character, Dap, ran around the fictitious Mission College campus yelling, “Wake Up!” in the classic movie, School Daze. Stepping, a bastion of black Greek life, has just undergone a revolution, and some black folks are pretty ticked off about it.

It all started on Feb. 20 when Zeta Tau Alpha Sorority, a predominantly white sorority, entered the Sprite Step Off National Step Competition in Atlanta, and beat three National Pan-Hellenic Council sororities: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta and Zeta Phi Beta, winning the $100,000 first prize. While many black Greeks gave the ZTAs their due, the blowback was immediate from a lot of angry black Greeks who couldn’t believe a white sorority could honestly beat black sororities.

.....

And while the nine African-American fraternities and sororities signed a licensing agreement with Sprite, earning an estimated $75,000 per organization, there was nothing in their agreement that prevented a non-African-American fraternity or sorority from competing. Enter Zeta Tau Alpha Sorority from the University of Arkansas.

Immediately after word got out that Zeta Tau Alpha had won, Twitter and Facebook blew up with accusations that Sprite was biased in favor of the white sorority. Others claimed that it was a stunt for MTV2, which broadcasted the contest.

Some postings even said white organizations shouldn’t be allowed to participate in stepping competitions in the first place, since stepping is a black Greek cultural tradition. Others accused Zeta Tau Alpha of being the equivalent of modern-day minstrels, debasing the art form by their very presence.

Then on Feb. 25, Sprite announced on Facebook that they had discovered "a scoring discrepancy" that they could not resolve. They decided to make ZTA and AKA co-winners of the competition, giving each organization $100,000 in prize money.

But in the grand scheme of things, that outcome is a minor detail. There's a bigger principle at stake here. In 25 years as an Alpha, I've helped judge countless stepping contests. And although judging is subjective, there's no way anyone can objectively state that the ZTAs didn't perform to a standard which would merit getting first prize in the Step Off. (See the videos below of the winners and runners-up, and tell me if I’m wrong.)

Zeta Tau Alpha:


And here is Alpha Kappa Alpha:


[M&C note: IMO, with the exception of that leg-on-back-of-neighbor move, which was great, ZTA looked and sounded better in the unaccompanied sections--I say they deserve the win]

The problem with the arguments presented by the critics is that they tend to gloss over the question of whether the Zeta Tau Alpha steppers were actually better than their competition. Instead, most of the criticism has been reactionary and sought to deny Zeta Tau Alpha the opportunity to compete based solely on their skin color.

By doing that, black Greeks do a disservice to our historic legacy. African-American fraternities and sororities were born in circumstances that sought to combat judgments based on race. And to do the same as those who would deny us opportunity, based on the notion that we’re somehow protecting our black cultural integrity, is morally bankrupt.

he founders of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity were denied access to the campus library at Indiana University because they were black. The founders of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority protested when white women ordered them to the back of a women’s suffrage march in Washington, D.C.

Too often, black Greeks place too much significance on stepping, and overemphasize its historical weight. We claim that the stepping tradition was passed down from some ancient African traditions. (It wasn’t.) We claim that we’ve been doing it for nearly a century. (We haven’t.)

According to Philander Smith College president Dr. Walter Kimbrough, author of Black Greek 101 and the person who has done the most research on the origins of stepping, stepping is a relatively recent tradition, growing out of probate shows of the 1970s.

Black cultural traditions like stepping are always nurtured within our community, exposed to the outside world as an artistic gift, and then adapted and adopted by others who want to participate. The idea that our traditions can remain purely “black” is folly.

......

Read the entire post HERE.

The same author also did an op-ed on this for CNN. Check it out.

Aborigines offended by ice dance routine

I have to include the photo with this one:



SI

Posted: Sunday January 24, 2010 1:58PM; Updated: Sunday January 24, 2010 2:10PM
Aborigines offended by ice dance

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- An Aboriginal-themed routine by two Russian ice dancers has stirred up a pre-Olympic controversy, with some indigenous Australians blasting the "rip off" of their culture and Canadian native leaders worrying about the insensitivity of the skaters.

World champions Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin are doing an Aboriginal routine for their original dance -- complete with brown-toned costumes adorned with leaves and white Aboriginal-style markings. Their music includes a didgeridoo riff.

In the original dance, couples can create any kind of dance that falls within an assigned theme. This year's theme is country/folk, and skaters are doing routines to everything from Indian music to country western to Moldovian folk songs.

"It's appalling," Bev Manton, chairperson of the Aboriginal Land Council in New South Wales state, said of Domnina and Shabalin's choice. "The whole thing was a poor effort. They could have provided more respect to our culture by doing more research."

Domnina, who won the European dance title with Shabalin last week, has said that they researched their dance by watching online videos of Aboriginal dances.

Read the full story HERE.

T-N Coates goes off on the category "negro" in the census

Classic Coates pretending to embrace the old term while shredding it in The Atlantic

A taste:

...I want that old time effect. I'm talking about tweed and sepia, sonnets which trade in words like "inglorious" and phrases like "O kinsmen." A bow-tie and handkerchief is a plus. I'm talking narratives of high yallers passing. I'm talking about books with hoary titles like Oak and Ivy, Darkwater and Ethiopia Unbound ...

I am going to be glorious. I demand that my every utterance be force-fed to ghetto kids in public schools every February. I demand that white people not read a word I've written, but adopt a solemn, reverent look at the mere mention of my name.

I demand my inclusion in various Norton Anthologies with the following bio--Esteemed Negro writer. First to grace The Atlantic's masthead since other Negro, Frederick Douglass. Overlooked in his time. Consumed no purple stuff.

Read the post HERE.

Wynton Marsalis Interview with CNN

From CNN (click HERE for full story)

Marsalis: Racism and greed put blues at the back of the bus
October 24, 2009 7:14 a.m. EDT

CNN: You have a DVD out called "Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis Play the Music of Ray Charles." That's jazz, country and R&B. What do those styles have in common?

WYNTON MARSALIS: The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

The other is the down-home sensibility that's sophisticated. That's why Louis Armstrong could play with Jimmy Rogers. Ray Charles is actually the embodiment. He and Willie Nelson came 'round in young manhood at a time in the late '40s early 1950s when all of the American music, root music, was all combined. It became segregated in the mid- to late-'50s.

Carl Perkins had a hit in 1955 -- "Blue Suede Shoes." It was on the R&B charts, it was on the country charts, it was No. 1 on the rock and roll charts. [It was] basically the same music, so there was an intersection point. It's like in cuisine, that would be like fried chicken and red beans and rice, it would be like potato salad and barbecued ribs. Someone in Texas not going to eat barbecued ribs?

CNN: What led to the compartmentalization of these kinds of music, that came from the same roots?

MARSALIS: Money and racism. I don't know which one came first.

CNN: Why was blues not regarded as something of value in this country?

MARSALIS: It came from who we didn't like. That's what it was -- it wasn't that we couldn't see it. Who it came from, we did not like them.

CNN: So do you include African-Americans in that? So black people didn't appreciate it?

MARSALIS: They didn't appreciate it. They don't now. That's part of the whole kind of self-hatred that comes from that type of slavery that the black American still labors under. That racism was heavy.

The legacy of it -- it wasn't just 50 years. It was seven generations, and if a generation is 33 years, ... seven or eight [generations]. That's a long time. And to recover from it has proven to be very difficult.

CNN: So is that what's going on with rap?

MARSALIS: No question. Rap is the repetition of the minstrel show.

But it's not going to go away, it was too many people. If it had been 100,000 people, it can go away. ... But it can't be millions of people and their descendants. [Slavery] was a very powerful and successful system. And it went on for a long time.

In the aftermath of slavery ... there was a retrenching, and [it turned into] the type of racism that was experienced by people who came to the North.

That consciousness has begun to shift, in the last 30 years. And that's 20 or 30 years of just thawing and shifting that's attached to 330 years [of slavery], and the thought you can get up and you will be better ... that's just asinine, it's absurd.

CNN: But didn't the blues come from this, being marginalized?

MARSALIS: The blues was like a solution to that, an antidote to it. But the blues is not only Afro-American music.

CNN: So, you've written that it's not just African, it's American. What about America gave rise to the blues?

MARSALIS: It is America. It's that combination, those tensions, the east-west tensions, the kind of tension of being a slave in the land of freedom, and the land of freedom itself, the Western mind, the concept of soloing across time, the call-and-response of democracy, direct call and response, the kind of optimism that is American in nature, is in the blues.

There are elements in it that are African and there are elements of the American take on Europeanism. It's integrated, it's like a person whose DNA is integrated. You start to try to figure it out -- but you can't. That's how the blues is, that's why it fits with everything, country-western, bluegrass -- everybody's playing the same music.

CNN: You write that jazz leaves room for individual creativity, but you have to listen and allow the other musicians to participate equally. So what's the lesson for the nation?

MARSALIS: We have to have an overall cultural objective, which we don't have. ... We then fight under the flag of a position, the left or the right, black or white, old or young. It's very simplistic. We don't know our cultural history, we don't know we are together, and because we don't know we are together we can't act in that way. And that's the main thing our music, and the history of our music, can teach us as a nation.

The one concept that has to be at the heart of the American experiment is integrity. The integrity of the process is very important. If you come up on the bandstand you have to be at least trying to swing. If you don't really want to swing or play with the musicians, there's nothing they can do, because you have the freedom to destroy it.

CNN: Your father set an example. It sounds like you got a lot of your ideas about integrity from him.

MARSALIS: Yes, he sure did. From him. He wasn't segregated about any music, he didn't care, you could play pop music, funk, he'd say "right, great man." He was a jazz musician. He wasn't uptight and always railing about somebody. What he did was very clear, and what he thought about being a man, he didn't look at a boy like that.

I remember he sat in with our funk band one time. ... We'd go to his gig, there'd be six people. We'd go to our gig, there'd be thousands of people, dancing having a good time. We were playing a dance at a high school, he didn't know any of the music, but he played all of the music we had.

We were laughing, we said, my daddy didn't know any of the music and he didn't know any of the tunes but he was playing better than us.

CNN: When you were playing in a funk band in high school, did you look at your jazz musician dad as old school?

MARSALIS: No, no, never, I never suffered from that misconception, because he was so much hipper than the people I was around. Philosophically, he knew more than we did. I'd bring people to see him. He never tried to act like a child, like a kid. I never thought I knew more than him, he was on the case.

CNN: What are the components of jazz?

MARSALIS: The main three components are the blues, improvisation -- which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up -- and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody. Sometimes you get in a good coordinated groove, and it just continues to happen.

Another Racist Message Made Public

It seems like every other day we read about someone who creates or forwards racist emails, mostly about African Americans. In the political arena, the messages are mostly about President Obama (recent examples include politicians and political operative, as well as a doctor active in the health care reform debate). Today it's a policeman in Boston who calls Henry Louis Gates a "banana-eating jungle monkey." He uses the term "jungle monkey" at least three times. And, predictably, he declares that he is not a racist. He was relieved of his duties and may be terminated. Not singling out that case specifically, but looking at all of the recent cases overall, there seems to be a real ignorance on the part of these people that not only do a lot of people of all colors find this offensive, but also that not everyone does this kind of stuff. The main line of defense tends to be, "I didn't make it up, I just forwarded it" or "everybody does it." What these people don't understand is that, no, everybody does not do it. While this defense does not apply to the policeman's case (he wrote the email with the intent to publish), these weekly incidents serve as reminder of the disconnect between sectors of our society on race. A lot of people just don't get it that these things are not cool, not everybody does them or likes them. There is an evolution of attitudes regarding race (particularly among the youngest adults in this country), but as these stories remind me, evolution is awfully slow.

Henry Louis Gates arrest a signpost on racial road

AP

Analysis: Gates arrest a signpost on racial road
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer 25 mins ago

It took less than a day for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates to become racial lore. When one of America's most prominent black intellectuals winds up in handcuffs, it's not just another episode of profiling — it's a signpost on the nation's bumpy road to equality.

The news was parsed and Tweeted, rued and debated. This was, after all Henry "Skip" Gates: Summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale. MacArthur "genius grant" recipient. Acclaimed historian, Harvard professor and PBS documentarian. One of Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" in 1997. Holder of 50 honorary degrees.

If this man can be taken away by police officers from the porch of his own home, what does it say about the treatment that average blacks can expect in 2009?

Earl Graves Jr., CEO of the company that publishes Black Enterprise magazine, was once stopped by police during his train commute to work, dressed in a suit and tie.

"My case took place back in 1995, and here we are 14 years later dealing with the same madness," he said Tuesday. "Barack Obama being the president has meant absolutely nothing to white law enforcement officers. Zero. So I have zero confidence that (Gates' case) will lead to any change whatsoever."

The 58-year-old professor had returned from a trip to China last Thursday afternoon and found the front door of his Cambridge, Mass., home stuck shut. Gates entered the back door, forced open the front door with help from a car service driver, and was on the phone with the Harvard leasing company when a white police sergeant arrived.

Gates and the sergeant gave differing accounts of what happened next. But for many people, that doesn't matter.

They don't care that Gates was charged not with breaking and entering, but with disorderly conduct after repeatedly demanding the sergeant's name and badge number. It doesn't matter whether Gates was yelling, or accused Sgt. James Crowley of being racist, or that all charges were dropped Tuesday.

All they see is pure, naked racial profiling.

"Under any account ... all of it is totally uncalled for," said Graves.

"It never would have happened — imagine a white professor, a distinguished white professor at Harvard, walking around with a cane, going into his own house, being harassed or stopped by the police. It would never happen."

Racial profiling became a national issue in the 1990s, when highway police on major drug delivery routes were accused of stopping drivers simply for being black. Lawsuits were filed, studies were commissioned, data was analyzed. "It is wrong, and we will end it in America," President George W. Bush said in 2001.

Yet for every study that concluded police disproportionately stop, search and arrest minorities, another expert came to a different conclusion. "That's always going to be the case," Greg Ridgeway, who has a Ph.D in statistics and studies racial profiling for the RAND research group, said on Monday. "You're never going to be able to (statistically) prove racial profiling. ... There's always a plausible explanation."

Federal legislation to ban racial profiling has languished since being introduced in 2007 by a dozen Democratic senators, including then-Sen. Barack Obama.

U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., said that was partly because "when you look at statistics, and you're trying to prove the extent, the information comes back that there's not nearly as much (profiling) as we continue to experience."

But Davis has no doubt that profiling is real: He says he was stopped while driving in Chicago in 2007 for no reason other than the fact he is black. Police gave him a ticket for swerving over the center line; a judge said the ticket didn't make sense and dismissed it.

"Trying to reach this balance of equity, equal treatment, equal protection under the law, equal understanding, equal opportunity, is something that we will always be confronted with. We may as well be prepared for it," he said.

Amid the indignation over Gates' case, a few people pointed out that he may have violated the cardinal rule of avoiding arrest: Do not antagonize the cops.

The police report said that Gates yelled at the officer, refused to calm down and behaved in a "tumultuous" manner. Gates said he simply asked for the officer's identification, followed him into his porch when the information was not forthcoming, and was arrested for no reason. But something about being asked to prove that you live in your own home clearly struck a nerve — both for Gates and his defenders.

"You feel violated, embarrassed, not sure what is taking place, especially when you haven't done anything," said Graves of his own experience, when police made him face the wall and frisked him in Grand Central Station in New York City. "You feel shocked, then you realize what's happening, and then you feel it's a violation of everything you stand for."

And that this should happen to "Skip" Gates — the unblemished embodiment of President Obama's recent admonition to black America not to search for handouts or favors, but to "seize our own future, each and every day" — shook many people to the core.

Wrote Lawrence Bobo, Gates' Harvard colleague, who picked his friend up from jail: "Ain't nothing post-racial about the United States of America."

___

Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press.