Category Archives: Popular Culture Musings

NewBlackMan: Black Sambo 2.0? New Media Technology and the Persistence of Racist Representations

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Black Sambo 2.0?

New Media Technology and the Persistence of Racist Representations

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

New media technology is changing the landscape of television. At one level, the emergence of web-based television, along with platforms like YouTube, provides a space for historically ignored themes and silenced voices within popular culture. I previously wrote about the potential during a discussion of The LeBrons, which “highlights how new media technologies provide modern black athletes (among others) tools to define their own image and message, partially apart from those ‘restrictive script,’ yet bound by the dominant discourse and accepted images.”

Reflecting on this cultural and technological shift, Aymar Christen Jean argues that the golden age of black television has ended. He notes further that the potential afforded by new media technologies are significant in challenging the white hegemony of American television culture: “In this early stage, the writing and production values are uneven. But when you throw in social-networking possibilities online, the emergence of original Web programming can only be good news for black art and expression.” Writing about the brilliant and rightly celebrated The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl, Britni Danielle highlights the transformative potential residing in Web 2.0. “It’s official, the best shows featuring Black people are not on BET, TVOne, NBC, or any other TV channel. The best shows featuring interesting Black characters are on the web,” writes Danielle. “In times like these, when TV shows and films featuring interesting Black characters are missing from most mainstream outlets, it’s nice to see that many (and I do mean many) are taking matters into their own hands and making their own way.”

While clear, from The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl, The New 20s, The LeBrons, Kindred, and Road to the Alter, that the web is emerging as the promise land for the production of black-themed shows and the dissemination of counter-narratives and representations, the frontier of new media technology is also littered with dehumanizing shows as well.

The advance of new media technology, whether on YouTube, I-Tunes, or the totality of the Internet provides a space for the dissemination of racist shows of yesterday, narratives, stereotypes, and episodes that artists fought long and hard to remove from public consumption. William Van De Burg, in New Day in Babylon, documents the ways in which organizations, like the National Black Media Coalition and Black Citizens for Fair Media, fought the continued dissemination of racist imagery. They, along with Asian Americans for Fair Media and others, worked hard to counter those racial images that represented “an explosive psychological force that warps human relationships and wreaks havoc on one’s personal dignity” (Wei, 1993; 51). While movements of the 1960s and 1970s were successful in challenging the presence of dehumanizing representations within network television, the advance of new media has proven to given life to many shows of past generations.

On YouTube, you can find a number of cartoons from the mid-20th century, some of which are explicitly labeled as racist (or banned/censored) cartoons, while others lack specific marking. These cartoons bring into wide circulation the otherwise put into the grave racist televisual moments of yesteryear. For example, on YouTube, “Southern Fried Rabbit” where bugs sings, “I wish I was in Dixie,” also depicts the South as a beautiful oasis in juxtaposition to the barren wasteland of the North. In this episode, Bugs Bunny is presented in blackface, ultimately impersonating a happy slave. At one level, this particular episode is keeping “past” images and narratives alive (the happy slave is clear in circulation as evidence by “pledge”); at another level, it facilitates a space where commentators can rehash and deploy their own racial narratives and ideologies. Claims about permissibility of racist images back then, that it was just entertainment, and simply kid’s stuff are commonplace on YouTube. Likewise, in this episode and in countless others found on YouTube, the history of blackface, of imagining and depicting blackness through dehumanizing imagery is evident.

Continue reading at NewBlackMan: Black Sambo 2.0? New Media Technology and the Persistence of Racist Representations.

Dave Zirin: DON’T Give the Miami Hurricanes the Death Penalty: Give it to the NCAA | The Nation

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DON’T Give the Miami Hurricanes the Death Penalty: Give it to the NCAA

Dave Zirin

August 18, 2011

Thursday morning’s cover of USA Today blared the two words on everyone’s lips: “the death penalty.” No, this isn’t because Texas Governor Rick Perry – who just loves executin’ innocent and guilty alike – is now running for President. It’s the fate that most people believe awaits the storied football team at the University of Miami. The death penalty means that the NCAA will for an indeterminate time shut down the entire Hurricanes program. It’s a brutal, financially crippling fate that many believe Miami has more than earned, following a Yahoo Sports expose by Charles Robinson which detailed eight years of amateur violations that would make Dennis Rodman blush. A mini-Madoff financial criminal named Nevin Shapiro, currently serving 20 years behind bars, offered prostitutes, payola, jewelry, yacht parties and every possible South Beach excess for the Hurricane players. While corrupting the athletic program, he was simultaneously being feted by school President, former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala and Hurricanes athletic director Paul Dee. They even let him on two occasions lead the team out of the tunnel on game day.

This bombshell has the moral majority of sports journalists in full froth, rushing to the barricades to defend amateur sports. We have people like Sporting News columnist David Whitley, to use merely one example, writing, “The only way to make Miami behave is a long timeout. No more football, smoke and parties for a couple of years. Nothing else has a chance of ending the culture of corruption that is The U.” He even calls Miami “the Ben Tre of college football”, writing, “American forces wiped out the village to get rid of the Viet Cong, prompting a timeless explanation from the U.S. commander: ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.’ The only way to save Miami is to destroy it, stripper pole and all.” But like the war in Vietnam, not to mention the actual death penalty, the call for the NCAA to shut down the program is dead wrong. As with capital punishment, eliminating the Hurricanes is an exercise in hypocrisy that does nothing but ensure these scandals will happen again and again.

What this scandal should produce, instead of the isolation and destruction of one program, is a serious reflection on the gutter economy that is college athletics. Players cannot be paid openly and legally so instead we get the amoral wampum of “amateur sports.” Reading the Yahoo Sports story, it’s difficult to not be chilled by the casual misogyny detailed as strippers, “escorts” and hookers were purchased and handed to players like party favors. You wonder why over 80% of NFL players get divorced after retirement. It’s because as teenagers, they are mentored by parasites like Nevin Shapiro who show them that women are the exchange value for their lucrative labor. This kind of gutter economy also has an ugly echo in old slave plantations, as the prized sports specimens in the antebellum South were handed women by the masters in return for their athletic prowess. Or as David Steele wrote earlier this week, ”Of course, America’s tender little feelings will be bruised if this is equated to slavery, or a plantation economy, or a plantation mentality. Fine. Maybe it can live with a metaphor like sharecropping. You do all the work, we take all the profits, we compensate you with the bare necessities of life, and tough break if you don’t like it.”

The metaphor works because once you wave away the smoke and hot air, this is about jock sniffing criminals and corrupted college Presidents taking advantage of primarily poor African Americans from the South, who see everyone getting paid but them. One anonymous University of Miami player told Yahoo Sports about University running back Tyrone Moss, who took $1,000 from Shapiro. “The guy had a kid while he was in college, a little Tyrone Jr.,” the player said. “He comes in poor as [expletive] from Pompano and he’s got a little kid to feed. I could barely feed myself. I can’t imagine having to feed a kid, too. Of course he’s going to take it when someone offers him $1,000. Who wouldn’t in that situation?”

via/continue reading at DON’T Give the Miami Hurricanes the Death Penalty: Give it to the NCAA | The Nation.

David Steele: College athletes used, abused by NCAA system – NCAA Football – Sporting News

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College athletes used, abused by NCAA system

David Steele

Are you happy, Nevin Shapiro? You, University of Miami athletic department? You, NCAA? You, College Football Nation?You’ve made Luther Campbell look like a paragon of virtue in comparison.Much of the allegations of impropriety happened while Paul Dee was the AD at Miami.

You all had various obligations and responsibilities to the welfare and progress of the members of the Miami football and basketball teams. All of you abandoned them.

Those young men – actually, boys in some cases, since the actions described in that damning Yahoo! report Tuesday were sometimes initiated with high school recruits – should have been able to use you for guidance to help them move to the next stage of their lives. Instead, you all used them. You bought, sold and traded those human beings, calculated the costs and benefits of your expenditures and raked in the profits.

In short, you all displayed scruples and values that are somewhere beneath those of the guy who wrote and performed “Me So Horny.’’

Uncle Luke did get a previous version of “The U’’ in trouble, for sure, with allegations of bounties and cash payouts. But, as he pointed out Wednesday in his own blog for the Miami New Times, he was not a booster for the school when he did it, didn’t have direct access to the halls of power as he did it. His connection was lower on the ladder. On the bottom rung, as far as the sport is concerned.

Laugh if you want at his claim that he “dedicated part of his life to helping kids in Miami’s inner city neighborhoods get a college education.’’ He sure gave more of a damn about the welfare of those players than Shapiro did. Or, for that matter, anyone else connected to the Miami program. Or anyone else in college football, or anyone else who follows the sport.

Shapiro bared his tainted soul in a series of jailhouse interviews for Yahoo, detailing how he indulged his deepest jock-sniffing desires for nearly a decade by throwing money at Miami players, utterly unconcerned about whether school officials knew. Oh, and how he funded it by robbing investors in a $930 million Ponzi scheme.

via College athletes used, abused by NCAA system – NCAA Football – Sporting News.

NewBlackMan: The Tweening of America: The Disappearance of Age-Appropriate Television

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Tweening of America: The Disappearance of Age-Appropriate Television

 

 

The Tweening of America: The Disappearance of Age-Appropriate Television

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

What started as an ordinary conversation about marriage between my partner and our 7 ½ year old daughter (Rea) concretized our ongoing frustrations and precarious relationship with popular culture. Following a role-playing game that ended in a pretend marriage between Rea and Sam (our son, who will be four next month), my partner asked Sam if he knew what marriage meant. Unsure, Rea intervened with a very elaborate description that went something like this: it is when two people meet and then start to date. If they like each other, they continue to date for a while until they are ready to get married. At the wedding, the promise to follow the rules for married people. While her description actually encompassed a few more details, it was clear that she not only understands dating, relationships, and courting rituals, but the institution of marriage and the associated vows. At the age of 7 ½ , she is well versed in both the fairy-tale and happily-ever-after narratives of marriage.

Over the last year, my partner and I have struggled to help Rea find age-appropriate, and most importantly, empowering television shows. In her mind, she is too mature and grown-up for those preschool/kindergarten shows. You know that ones that emphasize language skills, inter-personal skill development, symbolic reason, and cultural literacy: Sesame Street, Arthur, Sid the Science Kid, Word Girl, and Martha Speaks. In her estimation, these shows are neither cool nor sophisticated enough for her; her brother yes, but definitely not for a 2nd grader. Simply put, those shows are boring and, worse, beneath her. Instead, she would much rather watch shows like ICarly, Victorious, Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, Good Luck Charlie, or countless other tween shows.

According to Gary Marsh, a top executive at Disney Channels Worldwide: “It’s always been presumed that animation is the gravy train. Nobody quite understood you could create lifestyle franchises out of live-action tween shows.” Similarly, Peter Larsen, in “TV’s Tween Scene,” describes this cultural shift as not only economically significant but culturally important as well: “What they discovered was that kids in that age range didn’t want to watch shows for little kids, and didn’t want to watch their parents’ shows. Instead, they wanted to see themselves and their stories on TV.”

While trying to attract the 9-14 age consumers (25 million in the United States, representing a 50 billion dollar industry), tween shows universally tell stories of TEENAGERS. ICarly chronicles the trials and tribulations of Carly Shay and friends, now in high school, who have their own webcast. One Nickelodeon executive identified the show as one about “relationships and humor” a fact that illustrated by a list of Carly’s “boyfriends, dates and crushes” on one website. Victorious similarly follows high school kids at a performing art school in Hollywood, CA. It, like just about every other show, explores the issues of relationships, getting-in-trouble, boyfriends and girlfriends. While focusing on the experiences and stories of 13-16 year olds, the dearth of shows dealing with the experiences of 6-10 year old kids, along with marketing efforts directed at these younger consumers, results in gravitation to shows that are more teen than tween.

Our discomfort with her watching shows that focus on dating, boys and materialism, looking beautiful and being cool isn’t simply about age appropriateness and our desire for her to define her identity and otherwise imagine her own childhood outside of teenager themes and issues. The focus on dating sends a message that coolness and acceptance comes for girls who have a boyfriend, who guys think are attractive, and who has been kissed. Likewise, too much of these shows chronicle the struggles of girls to be accepted, to feel good about themselves, and part of this comes from the struggles to get a boyfriend.

According to a 2009 study from True Child, school-age television shows lag significantly behind preschool shows in terms of offering representation of confident and self-aware girls. Compared to 94% of preschool shows, only 42% of shows geared toward school-age kids like my daughter exhibit characteristics like confidence, assertiveness, and high-self esteem. Similarly, the report found that “49% of shows feature at “82% of shows feature girls primarily with long hair”; “60% of the shows feature girls who are underweight with skinner than average waists.”

The questionable messages about consumerism, gendered-identity, and appearance-determined coolness run against the presented image of the Disney and Nickelodeon shows about girl power. As example, True Child celebrated several tween girl shows for “breaking through gender stereotypes.” Similarly, David Bushman argues the importance these shows in giving girls something to watch that indeed is about confident girls:

I think Nickelodeon has empowered kids in a lot of ways … but I think they’ve specifically empowered young girls, and that’s a really important thing that Nickelodeon deserves a lot of credit for. This whole idea that you could not make girl-centric shows because boys wouldn’t watch them, they disproved that theory (in Banet-Weiser).

Yet, visibility and even challenging stereotypes isn’t the only issue to consider when examining these shows. Visibility doe

Continue reading at NewBlackMan: The Tweening of America: The Disappearance of Age-Appropriate Television.

NewBlackMan: An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigm

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Monday, August 15, 2011

An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigm

by David Leonard | NewBlackMan

When my daughter was about 3-years old, while on a vacation, we ventured into a Disney store where we purchased a set of princess figurines (I still feel compromise about our collective relationship with the world of princesses some 4+ years later). We quickly returned to my parents’ hotel so that she could play with them. When it was time to leave and return to where we were staying, I noticed that three of the princesses were missing. Pocahontas, Mulan, and Jasmine were all nowhere to be found while Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, and Cinderella were in plain sight ready to go with us. Determined, I searched high and low for her newly purchased toys. After a few minutes, I realized that the three figurines of color were strategically placed under the bed. It was not as if she was playing with them and accidentally placed them under the bed; they were far back, to the point that they were almost out of reach. Not to worry, super-Dad rescued them, only to be told by my 3-year old that she didn’t want them. The horror. Overcoming my sense of failure and dismay, I asked her:

Why don’t you want them?

Her: I just don’t

Me: But why?

Her: Because they don’t have sparkly shoes

She was correct; whereas the 4 figurines of white characters had dresses and sparkly shoes (even though you couldn’t actually see the shoes on all of them), the 3 figurines of color lacked all of the traditional markers of princessdom.

However, much more was at work because in this instance, the daily lessons she had learned about beauty, race, gender, and desirability came into clear view. As a scholar of race, an anti-racist advocate, and someone committed to media literacy, I was immediately distraught, wondering how I had failed to convey these fallacies within contemporary culture. As a parent of a mixed-race daughter (I am white and my wife is Chinese), this moment also concretized the powerful messages being delivered about beauty and racial identity.  Notwithstanding the immense problems with the princess trope (and happiness coming from being saved by a prince), it was clear that my daughter was learning the incompatibility of beautiful glamorous princesses and girls of color.

Continue reading at NewBlackMan: An Unmagical World: Challenging the Princess Paradigm.

NewBlackMan: America’s Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller

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Saturday, August 13, 2011

America’s Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller

Saturday Edition

America’s Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

While the NBA players remained locked out by the owners, they continue to be subjected to what Alice Walker describes as “a prison of image, whereby stereotypes function not as errors, but rather forms of social control.” The media reports resulting from two separate altercations invoking Matt Barnes and Michael Beasley, and efforts to connect them to the NBA lockout, the culture of the NBA, and blackness demonstrates the power and threats inherent in these imprisoning images.

Trying to wax sociological, Chris Haynes, in “Overseas Not Problem, Pickup Games Are NBAers will continue to get into trouble if they keep playing streetball, ”uses Beasley and Barnes to point to the bigger dangers of the NBA lockout: the NBA player. “The NBA just like any other professional league, is also comprised of young, immature, volatile, emotional players who need structure in their lives 365 days out of the year. Unable to workout and have contact with their individual teams, players may be left searching for a good pickup game to stay in shape.” In other words, the NBA lockout will lead these immature and volatile to be free on the streets (playing street ball), just waiting to attack the nearest fan or competitor.

Celebrating the “grounded players such as Steve Nash, Derek Fisher, Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki” (the good ones) Haynes is concerned about the behavior of the OTHER (the bad ones) NBA star during the lockout. He goes on to argue that the danger stems not only from the lack of structure experienced during the lockout, but the backgrounds of the players themselves:

Several players come from poverty-stricken backgrounds and still have some form of street mentality embedded in them. In the heat of the moment, competing against amateurs who are disrespecting and derogating athletes in their face, is a bad recipe for something potentially to pop off. Beasley and Barnes are lucky, it could have escalated to firearms.

The efforts to link “poverty” to criminality is problematic at many levels. At one level, it demonstrates the power of stereotypes and racial narratives relative to black bodies given the backgrounds of both Barnes and Beasley. Barnes, who was born in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in Sacramento, is the son of Ann and Henry Barnes. His mother, who died of cancer is 2007, was an elementary school teacher that worked with mentally challenged kids. His biography (like so many in the NBA – over half of NBA players grew up in Suburban neighborhoods) doesn’t mesh with the stereotypical discussion of inner-city ballers that Haynes works through in this piece. Likewise, Beasley, who was home-schooled and raised by his mother, Fatima Smith, exists on a different plane.

At another level, the media discourse evident here reflects a larger history of white racial framing and white supremacy. Playing on a myriad of racial narratives and tropes, Haynes uses the Beasley and Barnes incident, as well as the assumptions about streetball, the rhetoric here reflects a larger history of race in America.

For Elizabeth Alexander, the nature of racism within the United States is defined by practices wherein black bodies are systematically displayed “for public consumption,” both in the form of “public rapes, beatings, and lynchings” and “the gladiatorial arenas of basketball and boxing” (1994, p 92). Jonathan Markovitz similarly locates the criminalization of the black body within the narratives of the sports media: “The bodies of African American athletes from a variety of sports have been at the center of a number of mass media spectacles in recent years, most notably involving Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson, but NBA players have been particularly likely to occupy center stage in American racial discourse.”

Amid the NBA lockout, the narrative space available for NBA players is increasingly limited to the projects of demonization and criminalization that are central to white supremacy. The coverage afforded to these instances, the efforts to spotlight their missed-steps as evidence of a larger problem facing the NBA, the narrative prison that links them to larger frames regarding black criminality, and the rhetorical devices offered demonstrates the process of criminalization central to the history of black America.

TO CONTINUE READING GO NewBlackMan: America’s Most Wanted? The Locked Out NBA Baller.

NewBlackMan: Taking Their Talents to the Rucker, Watts and Manila: What Lockout?

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Taking Their Talents to the Rucker, Watts and Manila: What Lockout?

Taking Their Talents to the Rucker, Watts and Manila: What Lockout?

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

In recent weeks, LeBron James decided to take his talents to a high school gym in Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul and a number of other NBA players decided to take their talents to the Philippines and Kevin Durant took his talents to Rucker Park. On, August 2, Kevin Durant dropped 66 during a Rucker Park game. For the footage I was able to watch, it wasn’t an average 66 but a performance that included several thrilling dunks, smooth drives to the basket, and a sick number of three pointers over at times three “defenders.” His performance wowed an excited crowd and has mesmerized fans on YouTube (almost 600,000 views for one video of his performance). Marc Berman describes the scene as a reminder of how “how much the hardcore fans still love this game, why it matters, why an NBA season can not be lost so billionaires can get a sweetheart deal.” Emphasizing the context of the lockout, Berman illustrates how this was not just another July game at the Rucker.

It was quite a basketball doubleheader on Monday – covering the lockout labor talks at a ritzy midtown hotel on 52nd Street and Park Avenue, then cabbing it 100 blocks uptown to Harlem for Kevin Durant.

More than 2,500 fans jammed into Rucker Park – standing room only on 155th street and 8th Avenue. The 6-11 OKC superstar played for free and the fans of the EBC Rucker League watched for free, but what they saw was priceless.

Going from the disillusioning labor talks and the dour David Stern bashing the Players Association to Monday night’s basketball bedlam in Harlem was a shot in the arm for this basketball scribe.

The game was living and breathing and still pure, with fans screaming their lungs out, jumping up and down in their metal bleacher seats, almost every time Durant brought the ball up court. Durant, wearing the orange of DC Power, dumped a near EBC Rucker record 66 points on the Sean Bell All-Stars . . ..

Durant was not done. For his encore, he scored a mere 41 in a pro-Am game at Baruch College once again reminding fans around the globe of the amazing talents of NBA stars. Yet, this performance was overshadowed by the efforts of John Lucas III, who netted 60 in that game.

Durant has not been the only one ballin’ this summer. LeBron James played at in the Drew Summer League dropping 33 points at the Leon H. Washington Park gym, which is located in the heart of Watts, California. Casper Ware described the situation as “a great experience.” Challenging the media demonization of LeBron, the senior guard from Long Beach State was immensely complementary of James: “He was still passing even though he was LeBron. He just wanted me to play my game. He told me, ‘Don’t stand around and just throw me the ball. Play your game. I can get mine. Play your game and don’t change for me.’ He was very cool and down to earth. You could talk to him like any other player.” From coast to coast, NBA basketball fans have been treated to the greatness of the league.

Continue reading at NewBlackMan: Taking Their Talents to the Rucker, Watts and Manila: What Lockout?.