5 Un-PC Things

I’ve Been Dying to Say

About the

Steubenville Rape Case

March 20, 2013

by Demetria L. Lucas

I didn’t follow the Steubenville rape case. I heard the early details, knew there was so much more than what was being said, hoped the system would throw “the book” at the guys if for no other reason than to “make an example” of the guys, assumed (correctly) that wouldn’t happen, and then tuned out.

Forgive me, I have a personal history with this subject.

On Monday, as Clutch already covered here, high school football players Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’lik Richmond, 16, were found ”delinquent beyond a reasonable doubt” —the juvenile equivalent of guilty— of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. Both boys were sentenced to at least one year in a juvenile detention facility, with Mays earning an extra year for posting pictures of the naked girl online.

The guys, teens, were tried as juveniles, which is the only reason I can assume CNN anchors practically offered them condolences on their sentence, and also that so much of the writing on this case has been incredibly PC, at least by my meter.

Forgive me if I’m habitually line-stepping, or even crossing here, by writing what I’m really thinking, but there are a few things I need to get off my chest:

1. Ma’lik Richmond is the Luckiest Black Boy Alive

This 1) Black kid—football player or not— in a 2) small, middle of nowhere white town who 3) was charged with raping a 16-year-old 4) white girl got tried as a juvenile and THEN when found “delinquent beyond a reasonable doubt” received the lesser time than his white co-defendant?!

A year for raping a white girl? Are we still in America?! ‘Cause a guilty Black man ain’t been this lucky since OJ (and really, that was luck, money, and Johnny Cochran’s skill as an attorney).

I watched Young Ma’lik’s courtroom sobbing about his life being over, which CNN found so heartbreaking (I keep mentioning it because I”m just that appalled by it.) Ma’lik needs a perspective check. He got off way easier than some people expected him to, or really, wanted him to.

2. Steubenville is Everywhere USA

It’s too convenient to look a Steubenville and deduce, “small town, sports-hero worship, nothing better to do, that would never happen in [insert bigger city here].” I’m reading so much finger-pointing at their little town, like it’s any different from anywhere else. Puh-lease. It’s a  travesty what was done to the victim. But this isn’t an unfamiliar story. (I’m sure, if challenged, the comments section could be filled with them.)

Over a decade ago, I graduated from a D1 university where four football players and a “groupie” allegedly filmed “sexual acts” on video. According to legend, the girl was on her knees, surrounded by four erect penises that she was uh, pleasuring. At some point she stopped to tell the camera, “I support my team” or some such, then went back to business. It was never clear whether she was drunk, high (both?), or sober when this happened.

Anyway, everytime she was spotted on campus, someone would go “slurp, slurp, go [name of team] we support our team!” which is how I heard about the tape. The only reason that didn’t turn into a huge scandal was mobile phones only made calls then, and everyone didn’t have one. Everyone who lived on campus knew about the tape, and lots of people saw it (think of how O-Dog showed off his tape in Menace II Society). I did not, nor did I want to.

Let’s reach further back. My Mom was in high school in the early 70s. She recalls going to a graduation party where a woman got drunk and/or high, had sex with… Well, the woman never could remember who or how many. But she did get pregnant. With twins.

I’m sure if I started asking around to women my deceased grandmother’s age, stories would pour from them too. Like I said, this isn’t new. And unfortunately…

3. This Will Happen Again (And Again, and Again)

I had an interesting Twitter conversation yesterday with a friend, a guy, whose opinion I respect. During our discussion, he made a point– twice– to say that the boys weren’t depraved “in context.” He certainly didn’t think what the guys did was “okay”, but he pointed out that boys are more or less “taught” that having sex with girls and women who are drunk, despite it meeting the legal definition of rape, isn’t a problem. Liquor is largely perceived as a method of getting a woman to relax/ release inhibitions, i.e. make her more likely to agree to sex or even just less likely to protest (notable difference).

Also, culturally, when it comes to rape, the onus is on women to magically figure out a way to avoid it, not on teaching boys and men not to do it. At the mere reasonable suggestion that men carry some responsibility by being taught not to rape, which Zerlina Maxwell did on Fox last week, some men went  batsh– —and suggested Maxwell be raped. It’s a sign of how far we have to go– and how many more girls and women will be raped– before this mindset changes.

4. The Victim Needed Better “Friends”

The night of the party, the victim’s female “friends” were present. They testified in court that she was super drunk to the point that she was rolling around on the floor, and that she had a habit of drinking heavily. Ok. If your friend can’t hold her liquor, you leave her home. I knew that as a 17-year-old college freshman and I learned it the FIRST time I went out with someone who got wasted. In the event, that I was out and my girl got drunk or was drunk, I looked after her. It was annoying to leave early.  I resented baby sitting someone in the corner, until whoever else we were with went to find the driver. No, really, I hated it. But I did it anyway, because my being annoyed for a night and wasting an outfit was way less important than a woman potentially being raped.

When I was the drunk girl, someone always looked after me. There was a never a discussion about it, an agreement to look out, it was just what was done because that’s what decent people do– take care of people who can’t take care of themselves, especially when you know them and remotely care about them, and even when you don’t.

5. In Context or Out, These Boys Are Depraved

I don’t like to throw kids under the bus, because you know they are kids, but I’ll break my own rule and do it today anyway. Something is really, seriously and truly wrong with the two boys found “delinquent” in this case. Ma’lik was living with his foster family, so who knows what he encountered in his early life. Mays family is less transparent, but he may be even more screwy. On Monday, he apologized to the victim, her family, his own family and the community for taking the photos of her and sending them around. Not a peep about, you know, raping her. (Perhaps that was skipped over for legal reasons, but in that case, I’d rather he just saved the half-*ss apology.)

I don’t know what happened to them or what basic lesson in humanity and decency these young men missed, or who told them that an ability to run fast and/or throw a ball well-meant they could act amoral and that’s just fine, but anybody who carts around a drunk girl to rape her in different locations and then is so nonchalant about it that they do it in front of other people, not even trying to hide like they have no clue is wrong, and THEN allows their depravity to be filmed and photographed is seriously f***ed up in the head. This is an #epicfail of parenting.

As they are both still boys, my hope is that their time served in juvenile detentions is spent with aggressive counseling and rehabilitation to fix their warped mindset, not just learning how to be better predators.

Demetria L. Lucas is the author of “A Belle in Brooklyn: The Go-to Girl for Advice on Living Your Best Single Life” (Atria), in stores now. Follow her on Twitter @abelleinbk.

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On Steubenville, Guns, and

Healthy Echo Chambers

Unconditional lovers of this column (hey, mom and Asali!) may have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. That I haven’t offered an intersectional analysis of, say, Black History Month 2013, International Women’s Day 2013, or even Black Twitter “Scandal” Appreciation Week. I do have an excuse, though. I got a jobby job. 

>via: http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/03/on_steubenville_guns_and_healthy_echo_...

__________________________

Ending rape culture:

Now an international movement

Opinion

A black women thinking. © bst2012 - Fotolia.com

Follow Kirsten West Savali on Twitter at @KWestSavali.

 >via:  http://thegrio.com/2013/03/20/ending-rape-culture-now-an-international-movement/

Colonization and

White Nativism

in the Swamps,

on the day after St. Joseph’s

some critical-race-anti-imperialism-deep-personal thoughts, in process

 

by Catherine Michna

The other day, over a few drinks at a gentrifying hotspot in the Bywater, a few of my non-native New Orleans friends started talking about going bird watching in the swamps. I made a few comments about how I could show them some real swamp tours if they wanted to join me on one of my near-daily treks to visit family in Slidell. Then I turned to join another conversation. I continued to half-listen, however, as they talked about the beauty of the Louisiana wilderness and how camping and birdwatching here compare to that in other places. It was an innocent conversation by caring, respectful new New Orleanians who are deeply invested in social justice work here. But as I listened to my friends talk, something in me snapped–

I pounded the table and interrupted them loudly–”There’s some colonizing going on here and I’m going to stop this conversation right now,” I told them. “The swamps are the new thing. The swamps are THE new thing,” I told them. “First they took the city, now they’re taking the swamps? No. That’s one working-class space I’m not going to let ya’ll take.” I snorted a bit in derision before pulling back, embarrassed with myself for this unwarranted outburst.

Now, I am neither working class, nor am I from rural Louisiana. My friends who were having the swamp-loving conversation identify more with those backgrounds than I do. They weren’t both white either–one fits that mold, racially, but her politics and life practices are deeply anti-racist and she’s taught me more about the new-racism/colonizing mentality sweeping New Orleans than anyone else I know. The other identifies both as a first-generation American from a decolonized country and as African American. Why did their conversation cause me to accuse these two, well meaning friends of wanting to colonize South Louisiana? How did my friends suddenly become, in my mind, part the “they” who is taking over New Orleans? And how did I, a white professional woman who lives Uptown suddenly become part of the “us” whose land and identity is being colonized?

Almost every day since I’ve moved home last August (and before that, during visits home), I’ve encountered someone who is surprised to discover that I am “from here.” Because of my race and profession, strangers, neighbors, colleagues, and new friends regularly take me for a new New Orleanian. I am never okay with this. Each such encounter creates a wound inside me, and I find that I’m increasingly walking around the city angry at cultural imperialism and gentrification, even as my class and race background identify me more with the gentrifiers than with the working-class African American residents who have been most injured by the city’s uneven recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

(my dog Jaylen in Slidell last week)

What does it mean to be a white New Orleanian, like me, who claims to be “from here” but who arrived back home as part of the latest post-post Katrina influx of young, predominately white professionals? Like my white friends who were born here and never left, I am struggling to define myself apart from new settlers in the city without contradicting myself in really ridiculous, privilege-blind ways.

Increasingly, I am desperate to find a way to WEAR my Louisiana heritage on my body. My husband does this flawlessly. Somehow he always just speaks and looks like an original South Louisiana Saints fan no matter what he wears. But I don’t have an accent or any physical way to let all the people I encounter know that my mom lives around the corner, that my father is buried down the road, that I grew up singing jackamo fi ya yay before I had any idea what it meant, and that my earliest memories are of eating crawfish in my grandparents’ back yard, catching the little critters as they tried to escape out the pot. Sometimes I manage to stay quiet and not over-emphasize my Louisiana roots, but lately, I find myself making rude outbursts or TMI assertions about my background anytime someone even so much as hints that they’re not respecting the ground which I feel I need to claim.

All this, and I’m not even really a native. I was born in Baton Rouge and didn’t move to New Orleans till high school. Still, Mardi Gras, Mr Bingle on Canal Street, and all of our unique South Louisiana traditions are at the core of my childhood memories. I douse my breakfasts with Crystal; my gumbo tastes good; I can pronounce Tchoupitoulas and Burgundy; and my redbeans have just the right amount of ham hock. My family has lived in Louisiana for generations. My husband grew up here too. We were teenagers in New Orleans; we got married here; we had our first, second, and third apartments here. From the time when we moved away in our early/mid-twenties until we moved back, last August, I felt like I was only half-alive when I was not home (JBK, ya’ hear me??). So I spent every bit of time here that I could–2, 3, 4 months a year. We rebuilt our relatives’ homes after the storm. We watched my husband’s father die as a result of the polluted, stressful process of doing that. We came home every Mardi Gras. And we struggled for 14 years to find a way to permanently return home–because until you social innovators arrived here, there were very few decent paying jobs for local college graduates, and there still aren’t–unless you went to college or graduate school someplace else. Which I did. And when I graduated, my Boston-based degree is, ironically, what finally allowed us to move home.

My entire life has revolved around a love for this state and a desire to build a permanent life here, not a temporary one. So, when people mistake me for a new settler, it hurts. I walk around in the contradictions and hypocrisies of it all: I am white, I am middle class, my kid goes to Lusher, I pay post-Katrina high rent rates without blinking (or without blinking much), yet I feel like I am part of a multi-faceted oppressed group that is rapidly losing access to my own “authentic” cultural place-based identity because of how it is being romanticized, commodified, and OCCUPIED by others.

I know that I am not alone in these complicated feelings. I see my New Orleans native friends on a regular basis separately from our new New Orleanian companions. When we’re together–black or white–we complain and bitch about all that’s changed–neighborhood names, neighborhood identities, how people dance, what people eat. When we’re employed, we do our best to use up the assets that the whiter, wealthier city presents to us, but we understand ourselves to often be outsiders to the profits that those assets generate. It’s as if all the new restaurants and parks and “renewed” neighborhoods are part of a new city–NOLA–where we don’t admit to live, but which we love to visit. We bitterly relish the memories of pre-storm New Orleans that no one else in our professional lives seems to have anymore. Sometimes we look up and realize we’re sitting in the same restaurants as the people we’re complaining about. But often, we aren’t. We know what places to avoid when we want to feel, really, at home. CC’s or PJs, not Orange Couch. DBA or the Maple Leaf, not Bacchanal. Carrollton or Esplanade, certainly not St. Claude. Metairie. Church. Our mothers’ front porches.

The contradictions in such conversations are deeper for white natives than non-white natives. We grew UP in the knowledge that in other U.S. cities, white folks can’t access the benefits of white privilege unless they assimilate out of their own ethnic and linguistic cultures. Maybe sometimes they celebrate their cultural and religious roots, but with few exceptions, such celebrations are limited to holidays and family gatherings, and not part of a daily way of life as culture is in white families in South Louisiana. In the U.S., it is exceedingly rare to be able to hold onto white privilege at the same time as one holds onto what one imagines as one’s native/ethnic culture. We–I–am afraid of losing this. What does that mean? It means that I am afraid of losing my white privilege and my native culture at the same time. A double loss. Doubly complicated.

In New Orleans, white residents have always had both racism and our city’s rich African American heritage to reckon with. Somehow, again, we never traded culture for white privilege: through racial romanticization and Creolization, we managed to keep both. I’m not saying this process was ethical or just–it was certainly NOT. Still, it is a fact of life in New Orleans that white identities here have always been as much about negotiating Creoleisms as black identities have been. So, as much as there is that divides us by race, New Orleanians of all racial backgrounds continue to share (albeit often unequally) cultural elements ranging from food, to speech, to music, to the different parades that are at the core of who we are.

I think white native New Orleanians often have a deeper understanding than newcomers of that which divides and connects people across race here. I don’t, for instance, know any native white New Orleans resident who would go to take photos at the Mardi Gras Indian St. Joseph’s Night celebrations. I was thinking about this last night as I watched on Facebook as many of my white new New Orleanian friends posted picture after picture of St. Joseph’s Night in Central City and the Seventh Ward. There’s a sacredness to the separateness of black/African diasporic/Afro-Creole culture in New Orleans, and as much as white New Orleanians have helped to create and have benefited from that separateness, we’re often more able than newcomers to respect the boundaries of the sacred collectivities that have resulted from it. By contrast, my new New Orleans friends jump into just about any parade they can find. They also assume they can move into any neighborhood they please. They act first and think later. It’s the opposite with people who were raised here. We take culture and neighborhood spaces more seriously. This approach can nurture stratification and stagnation. But it also helps to generate dignity and more grounded spaces from which one can, perhaps, better attune to our city’s problems as well as its fragmented social relationships.

Back to the swamps. I think my friends’ excitement about taking a trip to Bayou Sauvage or Jean Lafitte Park rubbed me the wrong way because it cut right to the race and class complications and contradictions that make up our Louisiana home culture. The Louisiana swamps dually signify maroon/outlaw black masculinities — the diverging Bras Coupe/Juan Malo mythologies that threaten, excite, and correct public memories of race and power in this city–and “authentic,” Cajun/white working-classness. Either way, the swamps abound with signification of authenticity and cultural resistance that resists assimilation and refuses to be bound by hegemonic power systems and social constructs of race. The swamps always already exceed their meaning–they’re always already understood as more OUTSIDE than they can possibly truly be. This mythologizing of the swamps-as-excessive-outsideness is partly what has caused them to be both victimized and neglected by economic interests in the cities. Through their imagined outsideness, the swamps and wetlands also create a mythology of New Orleans as a kind of urban borderland, one where we native residents walk a fine line between being culture bearers for the nation and being outside of the nation’s bounds. White New Orleanians, I think, feel empowered by this positionality, and so we cling to it. Newcomers covet it. Thus, we cling to it even more.

The swamps and wetlands also represent that which we, in South Louisiana, are always on the verge of losing, not only culturally but geographically and environmentally–especially today with the threat of global warming and the growing impact of the oil companies multi-generational rape of our land. This was the narrative of Beasts of the Southern Wild, right? We can retreat into our “bathtub,” our nativeness–our imagined swamp outsideness–when we embrace our creolecrawfishalligatorsnakevoodoojockamo childhoods. It’s safe space for us. If we imagine our culture, wrongly, as something that was once wholly sacred and safe, we don’t care. This imagining is us. And we don’t want THEM to take it. They can build their pop up restaurants and their charter schools, they can photograph and sell our city, but they will never have what the swamps represent to us.

But what happens if rural South Louisiana becomes a cultural hunting ground, like Super Sunday or St. Joseph’s Night? It would serve white Louisianians right, I guess. After hundreds of years of participating in the structural oppression of others, we deserve to lose a big cultural something. Not that the bayous are a white place–their endangered realities impact people from myriad, complex racial and ethnic backgrounds. That’s why the Bathtub community in Beasts could be–and HAD TO BE–so multi-racial.

For city dwellers, whose images of wetland communities are often mythologized, inaccurate, and wrapped up in racism and classism, the food, music, culture and history of the South Louisiana swamps and bayous somehow still get to the heart of who we are as a people, and what we share. Thus us-ness is complicated and sometimes it is violent and oppressive. But in this capitalist world, there’s a rare humanity in it, something we’ve preserved together, and it would be tragic if it disappeared.

In New Orleans I feel colonized even as, because of my race and privilege, I am a colonizer. Life here is more of a contradiction than ever. Next weekend, I think I’ll take my new NOLA friends with me into the swamps.

++++++++++++++

 

Catherine Michna

My name is Catherine Michna, and I’m a Louisiana native. I was nurtured in New Orleans and educated in New York, California, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. This year, after 14 years living away, I finally moved home.

Right now, I’m working as an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University. At Tulane, I’m teaching American Literature classes and finishing the research for my first book. My book is about writers and artists in New Orleans who’ve drawn on the aesthetics and ethics of local African American parading and performance traditions to create art forms and institutions that strengthen democracy and nurture collective social justice movements.

My research for this book began after Hurricane Katrina in the high school classrooms of Students at the Center, a writing and digital media program in the New Orleans Public Schools. It’s evolved, in the years since, as a practice of conversation and deep listening with New Orleans educators, theatre artists, writers, and residents.

I’ve published articles about New Orleans culture in American Quarterly, TDR: The Drama Review,Theatre Forum, and The Journal of Ethnic American Literature. In the past, I’ve taught at the University of Rhode Island, Boston College, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Fremont High School in Oakland, CA. The classes I most love to teach focus on urban literature, critical geography, African American literature and theatre, performance studies, social movement histories, and, of course, New Orleans.

 

ancestral-voices:

 Africa: A Voyage of Discovery with Basil Davidson Ep 5

- The Bible and The Gun

‘We wonder why in the 21st Century the continent of Africa remains such a troubled area of the world. We can attribute many of the problems to not only European and American colonialism, but also to the long shadow of identity, language and cultural destruction caused by religious missionaries’. 

 

In this documentary Basil Davidson discusses the Eurocentric Christianization of African which was  inexplicably linked to European colonialism. 

Below is commentary from a review of this documentary episode 

Waves of Christian missionaries came to Africa. Most missionaries felt that they were serving an elevated race, trying to help a downtrodden race. They came to Africa expecting to help horrible people. Most missionaries were biased and discriminatory before they left their homes. There were a few that disagreed. Bishop Toser of the University’s mission questioned the idea that the differences between the European and African civilizations. He said that whether a culture is civilized or not is not dependent on their outward circumstance. The number of railroads and phonographs does not measure the superiority of a civilization, according to this Bishop.

The missionaries did not have easy acceptance in Africa. Many died of disease contrary to the popular belief that tribes boiled missionaries in large pots over fires. The practices of some missionaries, like their discrimination, is horrible. Some missionaries used force to get converts. Some had people flogged or threatened flogging in order to convert them. There were missionaries strongly for and against flogging in the conversion of Africans to the Christian beliefs. The missionaries saw that some spiritual beliefs had to be destroyed before the Africans would believe any of the Christian doctrines. Missionaries generalized this and thought that they had to destroy all African spiritual beliefs and culture. Missionaries insulted the African traditions frequently, in an effort to instill the Christian ideas in Africans. Davidson included a portion of a missionary video from the 1960’s. The juju, a person who is looked to much like a priest, is openly insulted and humiliated is the video. This hostility is much like the original method of destroying the old culture to replace it with the new ideas of Europe. The reaction of Africans is that some rejoice in renouncing their beliefs and some question their identity. To many missionaries, this mission of converting an inferior race is the climax of all Christian missions. It is sad that these people believed that they were doing the right thing.

I’m still trying to understand how and why he called those that were not captured into slavery as ‘the lucky ones’. Lucky? Are we really going to divide West African populations on either side of the Atlantic into terms that disgustingly over-simplify the impact of slavery - both during and after this portion of history?

And then he called Livingstone ‘remarkable’ and ‘the best-loved European’ to ever set foot on the continent. That’s taking things way too far.

Nevertheless, despite the sometimes disturbing Eurocentric and Westernized bias in this documentary, it contains a lot of crucial information on the pivotal roles missionaries played in destroying subduing the minds and behaviors of African societies into adopting lifestyles set out by European colonists.

(via diasporicroots)

__________________________

Racism and Slavery

    Africa has had a long, troublesome history with European powers. The greatest calamity that Africans have faced is the Atlantic slave trade beginning around the 16th century. An estimated 15 million Africans were taken from their homes to serve as slaves to Europeans. Africa was looked to for slave labor for a few reasons. The first: Europeans were unwilling to have European slaves. They did not want to have their own people serving them. The second reason for African slavery: There were not enough people resources in the Americas. The major European powers in the Americas, Britain, France, and Spain, could not find enough labor there. The lack of great quantities of Native Americans forced Europeans to look for slaves elsewhere. This does not mean, however, that the Native Americans were not coerced into slavery. The third: Africans were convenient and inferior. The idea of an inferior race of humans suited slavery well. Europeans felt that they were helping a lower race become more civilized when they took African slaves. The Europeans removed tens of thousands of skilled African workers from their homes. The location of Africans did not stop Europe. Slave traders searched far inland for skilled slaves. They shipped slaves to coastal prisons. Davidson's video showed a church with a prison underneath. Many of the Africans were waiting in captive underneath the church in the prison. At any given time, there were up to ten thousand slaves there. Many clergymen knew of the slave warehouse beneath their place of worship. Some even participated in the trade. According to Basil Davidson, "... racism grew out of slavery." The Europeans treated their slaves as subhuman. Other Europeans then assumed that slave, hence Africans, were an inferior race of people. Africans were almost a different species, somehow closer to apes than the fair skinned people of Europe.

The Explorers

    After the initial atrocities of slavery, the European explorers arrived in Africa. They had the purpose of unblocking the rich geographical mysteries of the continent. Unlike previous Europeans, they wanted land, gold, and breathtaking view, not people for slave labor. One of the most famous explorers is David Livingston, an Englishman. He began his journey in Africa as a missionary, but had strong interests in exploring. His goal was to navigate and chart the Zambezi River. David Livingston was the first white man to set eyes on the beautiful Victoria Falls in 1855. He had heard of beautiful lakes and waterfalls back in England; it was one of the many goals of the explorers to find such waterfalls. Livingston heard of these specific waterfalls from some of the villagers nearby. He knew that the young men enjoyed the waterfalls, and had them take him to the falls. Upon seeing the waterfall, he named it Victoria Falls for his country. Basil Davidson makes a comment on the naming of the falls. There is even a statue near the falls in honor of David Livingston. Davidson brings up the point that whoever created the statue must have thought that the falls could only be named by a European.

The Missionaries

    Waves of Christian missionaries came to Africa. Most missionaries felt that they were serving an elevated race, trying to help a downtrodden race. They came to Africa expecting to help horrible people. Most missionaries were biased and discriminatory before they left their homes. There were a few that disagreed. Bishop Toser of the University's mission questioned the idea that the differences between the European and African civilizations. He said that whether a culture is civilized or not is not dependent on their outward circumstance. The number of railroads and phonographs does not measure the superiority of a civilization, according to this Bishop.

    The missionaries did not have easy acceptance in Africa. Many died of disease contrary to the popular belief that tribes boiled missionaries in large pots over fires. The practices of some missionaries, like their discrimination, is horrible. Some missionaries used force to get converts. Some had people flogged or threatened flogging in order to convert them. There were missionaries strongly for and against flogging is the conversion of Africans to the Christian beliefs. The missionaries saw that some spiritual beliefs had to be destroyed before the Africans would believe any of the Christian doctrines. Missionaries generalized this and thought that they had to destroy all African spiritual beliefs and culture. Missionaries insulted the African traditions frequently, in an effort to instill the Christian ideas in Africans. Davidson included a portion of a missionary video from the 1960's. The juju, a person who is looked to much like a priest, is openly insulted and humiliated is the video. This hostility is much like the original method of destroying the old culture to replace it with the new ideas of Europe. The reaction of Africans is that some rejoice in renouncing their beliefs and some question their identity. To many missionaries, this mission of converting an inferior race is the climax of all Christian missions. It is sad that these people believed that they were doing the right thing.

Methodist Training School

    Basil Davidson paid a visit to a Methodist Training School. He spoke with a former graduate and observed the students. Many interesting points were brought up in a discussion between Davidson and the alumnus. They spoke about the link between Colonialism, which took over Africa, and Christianity, which brought the school. "The contempt for African humanity outweighs Christian commitment to the brotherhood of man." Many Christians, such as the founders of the school, had a distaste for the African people, contrary to their beliefs about equality. Christianity proceeded Colonialism, but now it is just as inseparable from the political and social structure. Missionaries journeyed to Africa before the Colonizing nations, but later, the missionaries became essential parts to the colonial power. They provided necessary education and medical treatment. After the discussion, Basil Davidson observed the children playing in the school. They were dressed just like private school students of America. A mixed group of children combined the old and new ways in a dance that they performed. The kids used traditional beats and movements with new words. A second group of children were more ritualistic. One girl acted out the trancelike state involved in many spiritual dances. Davidson admired their abilities to try both old and new things and not care about any historical implications. Despite some of the seemingly oppressive results of the mission school, nine out of ten leaders in Africa were educated at a mission school. This has its negative affect in sharpening the many contradictions in African society. Christianity brought its benefits, but took the high price of African tradition.

The British Conquest of Africa

    The story that Davidson tells about the British conquest of Africa begins with southern Africa. In the 1870's, Europeans found the rich mineral deposits in southern Africa. There was a scramble for land near Kimberly, a town. This region had especially rich deposits of diamonds. At 17 years old, Cecil Rose tried to take advantage of this. When people were in trouble, he bought their land for a fair price. He sought after power by attaining great wealth. Cecil Rose's feelings of Africans is as follows: "... just fancy those parts of the world that are inhabited by the most despicable of humans. What an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence." The British had no trouble in conquering the area until they met the Zulu. The Zulu were an African warrior tribe with about 25,000 people. The Zulu king wanted to have peace with the British, but the British wanted war. They wanted to take land and destroy the former inhabitants, rather than be given land. War was unavoidable. The British press reported on the war as the public wanted it. The Zulu were depicted as brutal savages, who would kill Britons even in peacetime. In the first battle, the Zulu hit the British Army before it could react. An estimated 800 British were killed that day. After that battle, Britain sent in more modern ammunition, such as large guns and gatling guns. One regiment of British was recorded as killing over 5,000 Zulu. The Zulu were conquered.

   An Englishman by the name of Cecil Rhodes had the idea of taking Africa "from Cairo to Capetown." Rhodes' first problem was an offshoot of the Zulu tribe, the Matabele. The Matabele were known to kill missionaries, as the missionaries encroached on their land. Over a period of time, Rhodes wore away at the Matabele power, which was also what the missionaries wanted. They "needed" the Matabele way of life to be broken before they replaced it with European ideals. In 1890, Rhodes moved North through to the land of the Shona, avoiding the Matabele. He founded Fort Salisbury, which became Salisbury and is today Harani. Rhodes chose his friend, Dr. Starr Jameson, to administer the territory. In 1892, Jameson decided to finish the Matabele. His method of justification was that the Matabele were stealing from the Shona, who were under his jurisdiction. However, the Matabele had been stealing from the Shona since before the British arrived. The Matabele were shattered and Rhodes was congratulated by the London Missionary Society. Rhodes continued Northward. In 1896, a group of surviving Matabele attacked the British, killing farmers as well as the military. The Shona then revolted, starting a guerilla war. In 1897, both uprisings were suppressed. The rebels were jailed and many were hanged. Rhodes later died and was buried at a place called World's View. Concluding, Davidson remarks that the British brought material progress, such as technology, and deprived Africans of freedom.

>via: http://dickinsg.intrasun.tcnj.edu/films/basil/video5.html

Herbie Hancock and

the Headhunters (1974)

 

66 minutes of live Herbie and the Headhunters from 1974 in the German "Musik Laden" TV studios .... happy weekend everyone!

Tracklist 
Palm Grease
Sly
Butterfly
Spank a Lee
Chameleon

Thanks to Art Simon of Post Miles for this.

 

Indiana Review Poetry Prize

Deadline:

April 1, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$20

Website: 

http://indianareview.org

E-mail address: 

inreview@indiana.edu

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Indiana Review is given annually for a poem. Nikky Finney will judge. Submit up to three poems with a $20 entry fee, which includes a subscription to Indiana Review, by April 1. Send an SASE, e-mail, or visit the website for complete guidelines.

Indiana Review, Poetry Prize, Ballantine Hall 465, 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-7103. Jennifer Luebbers, Editor.

 

Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest

Deadline:

April 2, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$24

Website: 

http://pshares.org

E-mail address: 

pshares@emerson.edu

Three prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Ploughshares are given annually for a poem or group of poems, a short story, and an essay. Writers who have not published a book or chapbook are eligible. Submit three to five poems or up to 5,000 words of prose with a $24 entry fee (there is no entry fee for current subscribers), which includes a subscription to Ploughshares, by April 2. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Ploughshares, Emerging Writer’s Contest, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116. (617) 824-3757. Andrea Martucci, Managing Editor. 

Oberon Poetry Prize

Deadline:

April 1, 2013

Entry Fee: 

$15

Website: 

http://www.oberonpoetry.com

E-mail address: 

oberonmag@optonline.net

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Oberon is given annually for a poem. George Wallace will judge. Submit up to three poems with a $15 entry fee, which includes a copy of Oberon, by April 1. Call or e-mail for complete guidelines.

Oberon, Poetry Prize, P.O. Box 2754, Setauket, NY 11733. (631) 584-5736. Jan La Roche, Editor.

Payton's Starting

a Thunderclap

On March 13, his campaign calling for the recognition of "Black American Music" takes a dramatic step forward.

March 12, 2013

I don't get usually involved in genre-definition conversations, partly because when asked what they make, most musicians will say "music" instead of identifying a genre. Ultimately, it becomes a question of values as people decide what characteristics are crucial to a genre. When I was at OffBeat and Gambit, genre decisions got heated when it came time to decide what artist belongs in what category. What's Bonerama? Where does Anders belong?

I've always found the definition of "Americana" sketchy, even though I like a lot of the artists considered to be Americana as well as the people who defend the use of the title. It seemed to me that the most genre-defying artists (Lucinda, Steve Earle) were used to suggest that a new musical umbrella was needed for many artists who could easily be considered blues, country, folk or bluegrass.

Still, genres matter. At the simplest level, many aesthetics are genre-specific, and if someone considered an album to be punk because of its antisocial attitude instead of its intensity and aggression, many who bought the album because it was called "punk" would be pissed off. Genre can also have an economic impact. When record stores existed, where you were slotted affected how you sold. Since the Rock section was the most shopped, being there led to more sales than being in the Blues or Oldies sections. Chris Thomas King recently pointed out at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art that Eric Clapton plays the blues but is classified as Rock and sells at one level, while the great African-American blues guitarists' releases are filed under Blues and sell very differently. The same dynamic still plays out today at iTunes and other online stores, he contends.

King contends that New Orleans should be thought of as the home of the blues, and that jazz is a form of the blues, not something independent. Nicholas Payton is similarly swearing off "jazz," instead advocating that it be called not blues but Black American Music, or BAM. He is in the process of orchestrating a call for the adoption of BAM via a Thunderclap - an online petition that will allow him to send out a message advocating BAM on March 13 through the social media of those who signed up.

Payton has been a polarizing online figure in general, and certainly in his critique of what jazz has become. His blog post, "On Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore," began, "Jazz died in 1959" and went from there. Later in the piece, he wrote:

Definitions are retrospective.

And if you find yourself getting mad, it’s probably because you know Jazz is dead.

Why get upset if what I’m saying doesn’t ring true?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t play Jazz.

I play Postmodern New Orleans music.

Louis Armstrong and Danny Barker play Traditional New Orleans Music.

Ellis Marsalis and James Black play Modern New Orleans music.

Kidd Jordan and Clyde Kerr play Avant-garde New Orleans music.

Donald Harrison plays Neoclassical New Orleans music.

I play Postmodern New Orleans music.

I am a part of a lineage.

I am a part of a blood line.

My ancestors didn’t play Jazz, they played Traditional, Modern and Avant-garde New Orleans Music.

I don’t play Jazz.

I don’t let others define who I am.  

#BAM is part of Payton's campaign for self-definition. Needless to say, his position sparked controversy from those who don't share his assessment of jazz's health, and from those who feel alienated by genre definitions that exclude them. In his "#BAM for Dummies" post, he writes: 

I’m Not Black, Where Do I Fit In Black American Music?

You should feel no more disconnected from Black American music than non-Cubans feel about playing Cuban music or non-Brazilians about Brazilian music. The term Black American Music just acknowledges the culture from which it sprung forth. You don’t have to be Black to appreciate and play it anymore than you have to be Chinese to cook and eat noodles.

For Those Who are Black and/or Jazz Lovers . . .

The Black American Music Movement doesn’t seek to take Jazz away from you. It’s your choice. There are certainly artists and musics that deserve the JAZZ title, but there is a growing number of artists who wish to shake the stigma of cultural colonialism.

“By and large, jazz always has been like the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with. The word ‘jazz’ has been part of the problem. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing ‘Negromusic.’ But it’s too late for that now. This music has become so integrated you can’t tell one part from the other so far as color is concerned.” - Duke Ellington

As the Ellington quote illustrates, Payton's idea is one that has been in the air for decades. Rahsaan Roland Kirk adopted the related position that jazz should be considered Black Classical Music. 

If Payton's Thunderclap has any lasting impact on how we talk about music, that will be gravy. To my mind, he has already succeeded by doing two things. He has got people not just talking but arguing passionately about jazz again, and he has done his part to keep the conversations about race, culture and authority from getting too settled or cozy. Whatever racial progress we make societally comes with conversation, even when it's heated. Silence is the sound of positions calcifying, retrenching, and settling into bad places.   

Participate in Nicholas Payton's Thunderclap by registering here. 

by Alex Rawls

 

Touré Talks About

His New Prince Book,

“I Would Die 4 U”

03.19.2013

 

 

 

Author
Quinn Peterson

 

Prince is one of the music’s most talented and revered artists, and at the same time, also one of its greatest mysteries. In his new book, I Would Die 4 U: How Prince Became An Icon, popular author, journalist, TV personality and culture critic Touré digs into what allowed Prince to emerge as a revolutionary pop artist transcending race and all other boundaries to become the voice of a generation. Based on three lectures he gave at Harvard a year ago, Touré discusses how and why Prince is an icon for Generation X in particular, a product of his times – namely MTV’s launch, growing sexual awareness and porn chic in the mainstream and improved racial equality – and the constant allusions to religion in his music.

Ultimately he argues that, “by virtue of his reach, his seductive appeal, and his artful archness, Prince is not only a master many times over of pop, soul, and rock music, but also one of history’s most significant religious artists.” I Would Die 4 U contains Touré’s personal anecdotes from his own experience interviewing Prince years ago, as well as interviews with Paisley Park Records president Alan Leeds, Revolution Guitarist Dex Dickerson, Purple Rain sound engineer Susan Rogers, Questlove and others.

Life+Times got a chance to talk with Touré about his latest book and The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

Life+Times: Talk about going from your lectures at Harvard to making this a full-blown book, and why you decided to do that.
Touré: Well, I wrote the lectures with an eye toward making it become a book. That was always my plan. I didn’t want to spend a year digging into a really interesting subject then not go all the way and make it a book. Skip Gates invited me to these lectures and I wanted to do something that I thought was really interesting and that I’d be happy spending a year focusing on. After I did the lectures, as a writer, it just took a little shaping in terms of a couple of things that would change from a spoken document to a written document. The lectures were one lecture per day over three days, so you end the lecture saying things to try to make sure people will come back tomorrow. In terms of writing, you don’t to do that, so I sort cleaned up the end of chapters like that. And, given a little more time, I had the opportunity to get more people on the phone, find more people and interview more folks. So I was able to broaden my discussion by finding new people.

L+T: The book brings everything together by saying Prince’s talk about sex is a way to lure people into a greater message. Did you know that going in, or did you find that out as you researched?
Touré: That was definitely a sort of revelation that came about as I was researching. It’s something that I figured out out as I was reading through, looking at the amount of religion and sexuality in his work. There’s a number of things that I discovered about him as I was researching. I knew a lot but I learned a lot, and it’s always exciting as a writer when you can learn as you’re researching a subject.

L+T: What were some other new revelations that you had?
Touré: I had not really understood “Purple Rain.” Like everybody, I looked at it as this great song, [but] I really didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. Talking to Questlove, Bible scholars and some other people, they started pointing to baptism and water as a baptism symbol. It’s sort of oblique, but if you read really hard, there’s a present story of a person who wants redemption because this relationship is breaking up, but they still love that person. They did everything right in the relationship but the relationship has to end. You want to be sort of blessed in that moment, redeemed in that moment, like, “Hey, you’re not a bad person, it’s ashamed it had to end, but it had to.” Then that third verse is so crucial, where Prince is kind of saying, “follow me, I am a messiah figure.” It’s extremely powerful and important in trying to understand who he is.

L+T: One of the most fascinating parts is when you talk about him “passing” as biracial. Can you expand on that?
Touré: Sure. His mother is Black. I don’t have a photograph of her, but several people who met her or spoke to her told me she was Black. Think about it ethnographically: Mattie Shaw, from Louisiana, grew up in the projects, known for playing basketball very well, moves to Minneapolis, becomes a jazz singer in her early 20s, and falls in love with a marries a much older Black band leader who already had a family. It sounds like a sister to me. If that was the only thing I had, that would be circumstantial. There were no miscegenation laws in Minneapolis that I could find at that time but it was not usual. Minneapolis is one of the places I’m told that was ahead of the curve on those issues for a long time, but still, if we apply occam’s razor, it appears most likely that his mother was Black. And there’s no conversation that his father was not Black. Obviously, [he's] very light and mixed at some level, but generally, when we’re talking about mixed or biracial, we’re talking about one parent is a different race, and that is, from all the evidence we have, not the case. But, Prince very much wanted to have the largest possible audience that he could have. So, he tells a few of the first reporters who interview him that his mother is white, Italian. The way journalism goes, [if] the first three people interview somebody, report a certain fact, you may not keep asking; so if you’re the sixth, seventh, eighth person to interview him and several articles have said this is a fact – “he’s mixed, his mother’s white” – you wouldn’t keep asking that question. That’s just how we are. You might ask about being mixed, and now you’re helping him live the fantasy. Putting a white woman as his mother in Purple Rain helped push that further. What he was trying to do was not run away from being Black, he very much loved being Black and his music is unquestionably Black; but he wanted access to the larger mass culture and he also wanted to not be tied by the expectations of what being a Black recording artist would be. He wanted to break out of those boundaries. To want that in the late ’70s-early ’80s was very revolutionary, unusual and unexpected. For him to be able to break out, he had to be demanding of the right to do rock-and-roll as well as funk and soul. Part of the sell within that was saying, “I’m mixed,” or, “Don’t put me in the box.” [He would] not do certain tours that would have him on the undercard for certain artists who would pigeonhole him. He would do tours where he would do a sort of white venue, then do a traditionally Black venue, so he’s hitting both sides. Record businesses would have a sort of segregation where there would be a Black music department which would market you to Black media, try to get you on the urban charts, etc., that would typically have smaller staffs and smaller budgets as opposed to the pop [departments], which would be larger budgets, larger staffs, larger potential to become a superstar which was always his goal. He’s passing for mixed as an attempt to gain some white-skin privilege or mixed-skin privilege – but that’s not a thing, you wouldn’t benefit from being mixed, you’d benefit from being partially white. But in no way is he rejecting or running from Blackness. I think some of us are rightly suspicious, nervous, anxious, upset about people who pass, but I think a lot of the time, they are not hateful or rejecting Blackness. They see a loophole in the social construct of race and they say, well, “If I rewrite myself (which is a typical American thing), then I can have access to white-skin privilege and see how far I can go in this world. There’s no boundaries in this world as opposed to dealing with the boundaries that have been imposed on us living with white supremacy and the expectations of us.”

L+T: Was there any backlash from Black audiences or Black radio for that?
Touré: Not that I know of. I think there were definitely some Black people who might have been like, “It’s a little too rock-and-roll for my taste,” especially in the era of “Purple Rain,” which is a tad bit silly in that we created rock-and-roll. If you look at Controversy and 1999, they’re very soulful, funky albums, Around The World In A Day had some ’60s-inflected soul, then you get back to LoveSexy, Sign O’ The Times, there sort of albums, it’s very, very souful. Some funk, but lots of soul. But that piece, I don’t think we realized it, because a lot of people thought he was mixed. I think it took a while for people to realize, “Oh, he was teasing us.” But what he was really doing was trying to escape the boundaries of demographics, of the sayings, “you’re Black, ergo X, Y, Z, or you’re female, ergo X, Y, Z.” He wanted to be free and you see that in [his questions] like, “Am I straight or gay? Male or female? Black or white?” He’s really messed with you. That’s sort of an ’80s thing, “I’m not going to let the demographics determine who I am and how I’m perceived.”

L+T: How important was it for him to be from Minnesota and how did that shape his outlook?
Touré: It definitely shaped him in several ways. It’s a place where there was a lot of connection between Black and white cultures. A lot of mixed relationships, so that was very natural in his experience. He was not part of a big city, so in a way he’s able to be part of this music culture, but in a way, he’s able to fly under the radar as opposed to growing up in L.A., New York, what have you. He was also exposed to a lot a great radio stations, but they’re pop radio stations. They didn’t have all the stations that we have in New York or L.A., so a lot of people talked about the impact that the pop stations had on him and how the records that he heard – these pop records – influenced who he became.

L+T: A couple of times in the book you reference Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and the importance of timing. If Prince hits five years earlier or five years later, are we having this conversation?
Touré: I think so. It’s impossible to know, but I think so because the talent would still be there. But what I’m talking about is definitely affected and influenced by [him] growing up at a time when gospel is becoming secular music and is played seven days a week, and he’s able to interact with Rick James, George Clinton, Al Green and those sort of people. Then, when he emerges, he’s able to interact with the highly sexualized culture of the ’80s and be a natural progression from James, Clinton, James Brown, etc. It’s impossible to know. I think yes, we’d still be talking about him because the level of talent was such that he would still be famous, but would he be the same level of icon, well that’s un-knowable.

I Would Die 4 U: How Prince Became An Icon by Touré is available March 19th on Amazon.

__________________________

Now Read This:

Touré Hits The Courts

With Prince

Touré plays basketball with The Purple One. Read an excerpt from his new book 'I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became An Icon.'

 

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 

By Gretta Cohn : Associate Producer, Soundcheck

Dave Chappelle as Prince on the basketball court (video still)

>via: http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/blogs/soundcheck-blog/2013/mar/19/toure-i-would-di...