Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.
August 24th, 2009 — Black Music, Controversy, Education, Pop Culture, Race, Satire
You all get Fs: Mixed Company sets Asians back thousands of years
Adam Clayton Powell was fond of noting that Harvard University had “ruined more Negroes than bad whiskey.” Well, perhaps his Korean counterpart is somewhere saying the same thing about Asians at Yale.
That was my first random thought when I saw this bit, today, on YouTube: Purported members of the Mixed Company of Yale University chorale, above, shuffling to their reworked version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”: “Single Asians.”
August 20th, 2009 — Advertising, Africa, Animation, Humor, Pop Culture, Race, TV
The Simpsons is America’s longest-running sitcom, with 441 episodes shown since 1989. (Their 20th season begins next month.)
But for their upcoming debut on Africa’s digital satellite television service, DStv, an Angolan ad agency decided to give the saffron-colored family a “makeover.”
Those are the results, above, says the UK’s Telegraph: “Brown skin instead of their usual yellow,” right.
As the publication details:
To make them appear more like a typical Angolan family, Marge has also been given a black Afro hairstyle instead of normal blue bouffant, while Lisa’s hair is stood up on end in short braids.
The image also shows the family dressed in clothes bearing traditional African designs and they are all wearing flip flops.
To be clear, this change was not made to the actual animation, but to print advertising being shown in the broadcast area.
Will Angolans be offended? Actor Kirstie Alley once told me that African-Americans…are “more free and fun and light hearted” than white people. Did she mean Africans, too?
Let’s hope so, and let’s trust they won’t be put off, here, by dumb, cloying marketing at its worst, and, in so doing, avoid what’s still a very funny show.
China: You’re next.
[via alltop.com]
August 19th, 2009 — Humor, Pop Culture, Race, TV
VIBE’s 1997-1998 syndicated TV show was an utter mess, as the dates of its miniscule timeline suggest. For some reason, its creators didn’t see, and were completely unable to translate from print, the dynamic and sparkly juxtapositions that made the magazine, at its peak, an unusually incandescent hit. (The periodical was completely uninvolved with the TV broadcast.)
The program always felt sluggish and old. (Hiring Sinbad, right, as the second host, after comic Chris Spencer’s anemic few months, did little to correct this.) It was as if someone had found a tattered, bled-through copy of the magazine in a trash heap, saw the name, liked it, and decided to make a program with it out of whatever stage props they had on hand. When it debuted, I watched it at a nearby bar with others from our office, but almost never after that. It’s not a high point in the magazine’s hallowed history.
There’s one moment from VIBE I remember, however, and it’s the only bit I ever saw there that not only still cracks me up, but that, to me, hinted at the show’s possibilities.
July 31st, 2009 — Art, Black Music, Books, Education, NONFICTION, Race
Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni is not just one of the world’s greatest poets, with a legacy of profound and funky work, but a scholar with deep community interests and focuses. As a Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg VA since 1987, she trains future leaders in the literature of the mother tongue. As the author of over 30 books, she shares the beauty of poetic language with readers far and wide, having done so for over four decades. The above photo is drawn from the session for her first volume of work, Black Feeling, Black Talk, published in 1968, the year she turned twenty-five.
Unlike many poets, however, Giovanni, right, has long had an interest in reaching children. Her first book of verse for them, Spin a Soft Black Song, was published a mere three years after her first volume, in 1971, two short years after giving birth to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni.
Her latest work, which she edited, continues her aim of making poetry come alive for young listeners and readers, albeit in a contemporary way. Hip-Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat presents compositions by rap artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, the Sugarhill Gang, and Stetsasonic along with classics by Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Maya Angelou, and, of course, Nikki Giovanni. Children can read along in the profusely illustrated text while an accompanying CD presents most of the pieces in audio form, some of them read by the original poet. For me, the highlight had to be hearing Langston Hughes, performing his own poems, like “Dream Boogie” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Nikki Giovanni has had a long and varied career, appropriately honored with accolades from admirers as diverse as TV host Oprah Winfrey, whose hailed her as one of twenty-five “Living Legends”; to singer Teena Marie, who name-checked Giovanni on her 1981 hit, “Square Biz”; to biologist Robert Baker who, in 2004—no joke—named a West Ecuadoran bat he discovered, three years earlier, after her. Micronycteris giovanniae, which means meaning “Giovanni’s small night flyer,”looks much like the cuddly fellow above. “I enjoy reading her poetry and I come from the Deep South, so I really can appreciate what she has done for race relations and equality,” the professor explains.
Nikki Giovanni is the guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 31st, at 2 pm ET.
You can hear her ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
July 27th, 2009 — Language, Politics, Race
When Barack Obama spoke last week, above, on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., the president observed that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly.”
That quote quickly became the one most widely reproduced, as I knew it would, eclipsing the visibility of almost anything he’d said in his preceding press conference, ostensibly about health care reform.
I remember the exact moment I heard Obama utter those words. It was as though someone had played a horrible chord. While the statement was the closest he apparently went to expressing any sort of a feeling about the Gates incident, I immediately knew those words wouldn’t go down well at the police station. As most certainly realize by now, they didn’t, and Obama had to subsequently retract them. “I could’ve calibrated those words differently,” he said, right.
Two aspects of this, however, are absolutely fascinating to me:
July 24th, 2009 — Education, NONFICTION, Race
Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, above, holds a unique, negative distinction in the history of NONFICTION, the hour-long radio show I’ve been doing every week at WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM since 2003: He was, when he appeared on the broadcast in January 2004, and still is, the tardiest guest to ever actually get on air, strolling in literally about five minutes before I opened my mic. (I typically ask guests to be an hour early for our live show.)
Of course, these days, Dr. Gates has notoriety of a wholly different magnitude, as a result of being arrested, a little over a week ago, Thursday, July 16, 12:44 pm, by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge MA police department, inside Dr. Gates own home. (By the Blackest of coincidences, it was the same day President Obama would address the NAACP, in celebration of their 100th anniversary.) After a passerby saw Gates trying to break into his own yellow, clapboard house—the front door was damaged and stuck—the woman called the police and, after a verbal confrontation in Gates’ home, he was led out of his own door, above, and off of his own porch, in handcuffs.
Supposed the conflict had escalated, and Gates had been beaten, wounded, shot, or killed? How would this have then played out? Would it have been just another parade of somber white faces and furious, stunned Black ones? How would the story of what had happened have been told, and by whom?
I wonder how that Black cop, in the foreground, above, feels. Bet it’s not a party for him, either.
Did you know that Black cops are nine times more likely to be shot by a fellow white officer than a white cop is?
When Gates and I met to talk about his then latest book and documentary, America Behind The Color Line: Dialogues with African-Americans, those questions were certainly as far away from his mind as Cambridge is from China, that being the country from which he’d just returned that fateful day.
He was late to my interview. But better late than never.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates is the guest today on this repeat edition of my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 24th, at 2 pm ET.
You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, dig into our archives for up to 90 days after broadcast.
July 23rd, 2009 — Controversy, Crime, Politics, Race
How I spent my summer vacation: Dr. Henry Louis Gates’ mugshot
As the final questioner at last night’s press conference in support of Barack Obama’s health care plan, The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Lynn Sweet asked the President for his thoughts on the recent arrest of Harvard University’s Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, above. As certainly anyone at all knows by now, Dr. Gates, a few days earlier, had suffered the indignity of being arrested for the crime of being in his own home, in a case now widely being seen as one of so-called “racial profiling.”
President Obama, right, gave a nice, reasonable answer, of the kind at which he is, arguably, flawless. He cracked a joke or two. He appealed to a sense of fairness that the blindingly white press pool, no doubt, possesses as fair and balanced journalists. He said he didn’t know “what role race played” in Gates’ mistreatment, but then cited “a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” adding, for certainty. “That’s just a fact.”
He said that “the Cambridge Police acted stupidly,” that quote being the one which, subsequently, was the most widely reproduced, and, to this writer, the one that came the closest to expressing any sort of a feeling or passion about the incident on his part.
What he did not say, however, or speak to, was the irony of what I had immediately noticed, soon as word of Gates’ arrest hit the wires: The scholar’s detainment had occurred mere hours before Obama gave his address, right, at the NAACP’s 100th anniversary convention. There, in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in New york City, the nation’s first Black president had hailed the organization’s history and astounding struggle, efforts which, in his own words, had directly led to his being “here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America.”
July 16th, 2009 — Advertising, Media, Pop Culture, Race, TV
Is this series of billboards, above, coupled to a complementary set of commercials by the same company, below, racist?
July 9th, 2009 — Blogs, Internet, Race, Technology, TV
I honestly did not expect this.
After I posted “Black Like @KirstieAlley: Twittering About Race with the Fat Actress” yesterday, I manually sent out one tweet, at 5:55 pm ET, announcing the posting. (My blog automatically sent out another one 45 minutes later.) I then left the house to take care of some business, getting back a little over two hours later. I went to my computer, and logged on to Twitter.
Big mistake.
July 8th, 2009 — Entertainment, Internet, Race, TV
Two-and-half weeks ago, actor Kirstie Alley, famed of ’80s TV sitcom Cheers, Jenny Craig weight loss ads, and sashaying in her hosiery on Oprah, told me, on Twitter, that African-Americans and Italians are “more free and fun and light hearted” than, I guess, people who aren’t African-American or Italian.
When she said this, I was actually dumbfounded. Twice, it turned out. Figuring out what to say, however, became my own mini-education in talking about race.
First, background….
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