By Arturo R. García

The only surprise was how long it took CNN to suspend contributor Roland S. Martin after the uproar he instigated during the Super Bowl this past Sunday. What’s not surprising is who hasn’t gotten the same punishment for similar offenses.

Which is not to excuse Martin for any of the poorly thought-out joke he threw out on Twitter during the game about this (NSFWish) underwear ad.

Martin would later defend the joke against charges of homophobia by saying he and CNN colleague Piers Morgan joke with each other about soccer, which might have been easier for him to do had it not been preceded by this tweet:

The backlash began almost immediately, and Martin did himself no favors later by telling author Kola Boof “reading is fundamental,” or responding to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation by calling them “out of touch and clueless.”

This must also be noted: some of those who accused Martin of homophobia did so while calling him “an ape” or tossing the vilest of slurs at him:

It happened again Wednesday night after a college basketball game. And it was encouraging to read that GLAAD condemned those attacks while agreeing to meet with Martin in the near future.

Hopefully, such a meeting will also help Martin recognize that, even if he was joking, these were horrible jokes. Saying “Americans are into football, not soccer” is about as insightful as 1980s sports-talk radio. It’s one thing to argue that soccer will never be as big as the NFL or Major League Baseball; it’s another when your first defense is saying you sort-of meant soccer fans should be “smacked.”

And talking about “real bruhs” when you’re also making jokes about people to “smack the ish out” of somebody over a pair of underwear and ”about men being “defective” if they don’t like sports and hashtagging cracks about a guy in a pink suit “teamwhipthatass” paints a picture of a disturbing brand of humor. Especially when the guy making the jokes has compared homosexuality to alcoholism. “Just joking” doesn’t represent a just cause – Martin can ask Tracy Morgan about that.

In short, it’s not too much to hope that Martin makes some updates to “Roland’s Rules” soon. But it’s also not too much to ask that CNN show some consistency in enforcing its own.

A call to CNN Wednesday seeking content was not returned. Until then, it’s unclear why the network would suspend him and issue a somber press release mentioning “values and culture” while dismissing fellow contributor Dana Loesch’s telling a radio audience she would “drop trou” and urinate on enemy combatants less than a month ago. When Loesch’s remarks became public, all the network saw fit to tell Mediaite was, “CNN contributors are commentators who express a wide range of viewpoints — on and off of CNN — that often provoke strong agreement or disagreement. Their viewpoints are their own.”

Or maybe the difference is clear; Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenberg rightly points out that Martin’s remarks were caught by an organized group with a history of tracking and responding to such instances. But the result of such selective policing is ultimately detrimental to CNN:

Taken together, the way CNN handled Martin’s and Loesch’s comments makes it look like CNN has no consistent internal values, and no internal standard for how to respond when it commenters express sentiments that are an anathema to those values. I’m glad to know, per CNN’s statement, that “Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated.” But why should it take several days of consideration for CNN to arrive at that conclusion? If the network’s truly committed to the proposition that violence against gay people is no joking matter, that’s something it should know in advance, and CNN should have a personnel policy in place to determine what the appropriate penalty is when someone violates their standards.

Without an explanation of such a policy, it also becomes harder to reconcile CNN’s relatively quick action against Martin with not only Loesch’s comments, but the wide berth given to Lou Dobbs’ “birther” notions and anti-immigrant rhetoric before he finally resigned in 2009. Even then, network president Jonathan Klein practically sent him off with a serenade, saying a man who referred to critics as “limp-minded, lily-livered lefty lemmings” was carrying “the banner of advocacy journalism.”

Martin has publicly apologized and stated his willingness to talk to members of the community he offended. Hopefully that dialogue will lead to something truly constructive. In the meantime, maybe it’s now time for CNN to better explain why it hasn’t been as vigilant when it comes to some of his co-workers.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty defies categorization, in all the best ways possible.

The first thing to know is that the film isn’t a linear story. It’s a complex and complicated exploration of modern love, an intriguing dance between two characters circling the possibility of a relationship, born out of mutual infatuation. Avant-guarde storytelling in the key of noir, Oversimplification blends animation, live action, and narration to tell the tale of Terence falling in love with Namik. The characters are real people, based on their own lives. Nance earned his spot in the New Frontier section of Sundance – in addition to the innovative, movie-within-a-movie style of storytelling, animation also plays a key role. Exploring his inner emotions through stop-motion figure dolls and beautifully rendered scenes, Nance essentially uses this film as therapy, working out the complicated tangle of his messy romantic life.

Refreshingly, black women are Nance’s muses. Often in cinematic depictions of black love, the relationship is construed as adversarial. Here, as Nance documents the many loves that fit his archetype of “brown, maternal, well read, well traveled,” black women take center stage, his love for each of them palpable through the screen.

But is what he feels for them really love? Nance believes so, and spends most of the film trying to articulate what he loves about Namik, and how his past relationship history lead him to this point of nearly breathless anticipation. The film is ripe with themes for exploration but I will have to leave most of those paths untouched. Nance has created a work so complex, it is almost like recorded performance art. Thus, I agree with Tambay – it needs to be experienced. Hopefully, it finds a distributor because it deserves to be seen and experienced by as many people as possible. Nance’s story is both familiar and strange, and tends to provoke a lot of self-reflection in the audience. Who are we, when we are in love? I’m still mulling over my own answer.

To be clear, Rosa Parks left us a deliberate legacy of activism, not an accidental activist moment. Furthermore, she, like many other Black women, should not be remembered in the shadows of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or any other Black male civil rights activist, but rather right alongside of them. We must realize and teach that when Rosa Parks was helping lay the foundation for the civil rights movement, Dr. King was still in high school.

- From “Black Herstory: Rosa Parks Did Much More than Sit on a Bus,” in Ms. Magazine

When I looked at “Soul Train” host Don Cornelius back in the ‘70s, I didn’t see a pro-black entrepreneur who would become the “African American” Dick Clark.

I saw my dad. And his entire generation.
- Eric Deggans, Tampa Bay Times

“‘Soul Train’ created an outlet for black artists that never would have been if it hadn’t been for Cornelius,” said Kenny Gamble, who with his partner, Leon Huff, created the Philly soul sound and wrote the theme song for the show. “It was a tremendous export from America to the world, that showed African-American life and the joy of music and dance, and it brought people together.”

News of Mr. Cornelius’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from civil rights leaders, musicians, entrepreneurs, academics and writers. “He was able to provide the country a window into black youth culture and black music,” said Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “For young black teenagers like myself, it gave a sense of pride and a sense that the culture we loved could be shared and appreciated nationally.”
- James C. McKinley Jr. New York Times

The genius of it all was THIS was the first time that black people were proud to be called AFRICAN.

Psssh. Before 1971? — I mean on the real – ’til like the early 80s on some schoolyard insult game ish? If someone called you “african” that was the most insulting degrading lower than low, “I’m finna f**k you up” type of insult.

I know right? Why?

To control our mentality during the slave period we were taught we were the lowest of low.

To control us AFTER slavery during the Jim Crow era we were taught we were the lowest of low.

The first introduction to entertainment (of which we were allowed to participate) was minstrel entertainment an over exaggerated buffoon display of shame and ugliness that we STILL CARRY TO THIS DAY (minus the makeup) (hello hip-hop….but that is another piece altogether).

To say with a straight, dignified face that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL was the RISKIEST radical life-changing move that america has seen. and amazingly enough for one hour for one saturday out the week, if you were watching soul train….it became contagious. next thing you know you are actually believing you have some sort of worth.
- Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, from The Roots, on OKPlayer

The ’70s and ’80s were just the period during which the best soul music was created and the best records were done. Whenever I walk into a store or any kind of environment, these kinds of songs from that period still play and I wonder if it’s a “Soul Train” tape. Because during those two decades, we were on top of them all in one way or another, either presenting the guests or playing the records. We were just flat out in love with the music.
- Don Cornelius, as quoted in The Los Angeles Times

Cornelius’ reported suicide, alas, tells us something about the nature of American success. All the man’s equity, affluence and well-deserved public acclaim were not, in the end, of enough comfort to salve his private pain — a struggle with illness, a nasty divorce.

To the people who make up the community that Cornelius created, the man is nearly a saint. We can see it now: the double line of dancers forming just beyond the pearly gates, awaiting the ingress of soul’s earthly impresario.
- Dan Charnas, NPR

By Arturo R. García

He was both the host and the ambassador for generations of artists, dancers, and music lovers. He was a journalist and an activist. And he was the conductor of “the hippest trip in America.”

Wednesday, everyone who ever listened to him wish viewers “love, peace, and soul” mourned the death of Don Cornelius, who was found in his home by police after apparently committing suicide.

Cornelius developed and hosted Soul Train, the kind of show that makes words like “influential” seem small. Soul Train ran for 35 years, making it the longest first-run syndicated show in history. But the show almost didn’t grow out of being a successful local program on WCIU-TV in Chicago.

As Christopher P. Lehman wrote in his book A Critical History of Soul Train On Television, however, Cornelius set out to show broadcasters the best the show had to offer:

When Cornelius decided to take “Soul Train” into nationwide syndication in 1971, he made a very savvy choice of which Chicago episode to pitch to broadcasters. he took to California the episode that featured the Dells, the Staple Singers, Tyrone Davis, and the Chi-Lites. At the time all four acts were very popular on urban radio. Moreover, three of them had crossover hits in the 1970-71 season. The Chi-Lites’ “(For Gods Sake) Give More Power To The People” was among the top thirty songs for at least one week. The Staples Singers scored with “Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha Na Boom Boom).” Davis had the biggest hit with “Turn Back The Hands Of Time.” Cornelius contacted all the group leaders to inform them of his decision to use their appearances in order to try to sell the show on the West Coast.

Cornelius’ canniness paid off: production on the national version of Soul Train, based out of Los Angeles, began that summer. However, for the next two years, he continued to host the local version of the show alongside the national one. But as the syndicated version of the show grew, so did its importance–not just to an audience that Cornelius correctly predicted was looking for what he called “a black American Bandstand,” but for the performers; as Lehman noted, in the days before Black Entertainment Television, black acts had to choose between playing to the all-white audiences on Bandstand or rely strictly on radio exposure.

The show’s platform went beyond the artistic: early acts brought with them feminist and anti-Vietnam War messages that wouldn’t have flown on other shows. And as The Roots’ Questlove wrote on OkPlayer, the presentation that Cornelius introduced to American television made him, “The MOST crucial non political figure to emerge from the Civil Rights era post [19]68″:

To say with a straight, dignified face that BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL was the RISKIEST radical life-changing move that America has seen. And amazingly enough for one hour for one Saturday out the week, if you were watching soul train….it became contagious. Next thing you know you are actually believing you have some sort of worth.

The whole idea of Afrocentrism in my opinion manifested and spread with “Soul Train” in its first 6 years.

Besides the performers, fans also found a new platform on Soul Train: young people of color got the chance–the first chance, for many–to see their peers on-screen, showcasing their own moves. As Lehman writes, the show’s exposure also yielded benefits for the Chicago-area dancers on the WCIU version of the show, where Clinton Ghent took over as host after Cornelius moved west. For one dancer, Crescendo Ward, his turn in the spotlight literally saved his life:

He once had to take home a girlfriend who lived in the Cabrini Green projects, which the Vice Lords gang claimed as their territory. After he had parted from her, some of the gang members approached him and demanded, “Represent!”

He responded, “No love,” which meant that he did not belong to a gang.

They proceeded to pat him down and take his money until one of them yelled, “Yo, wait a minute – that’s that “Soul Train” motherf-cker!” As the others recognized him, they stopped the mugging and began taking a collection for his bus fare home.

By contrast, interactions between fans and performers on the L.A. version of the show were tamer, but in at least one instance, more pivotal: an oft-told story mentions that, after one appearance on the show, Michael Jackson–by that point already a longtime friend of Cornelius’–spent time with several of the show’s better dancers, so that he could learn some of their moves.

In his book, Lehman points out that Train outlasted many of the shows it influenced, like Club MTV, Yo! MTV Raps, BET’s Video Soul and Fox’s In Living Color. But the changing musical landscape wrought by his successors led him to step down from his signature role in 1993. The show carried on with rotating guest hosts thru 2006, with MadVision Entertainment buying the property two years later.

“I took myself off because I just felt that 22 years was enough,” he told The New York Times two years after switching to an off-camera role. “The audience was changing and I wasn’t.”

The audience might have changed, but it never forgot him: last July, the show’s set and memorabilia was enshrined in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Felecia Young remembered the day she walked into the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. with her 11-year-old son, 9-year-old daughter, and mother on August 17, 1998.

The streets were barricaded. Buildings and streets showed the faces of police officers who were on site in case of a riot. An Aryan organization had threatened to demonstrate. But Young was determined to bear witness.

She and her children found seats in the balcony of the humid, packed courthouse.

“We sat in the balcony area, way up high,” Young said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that area open, but they had to open it because there were so many people coming that there wasn’t any where to sit downstairs.”

Young is a black woman, born and raised in Hattiesburg. She attended high school there and graduated from the local college, the University of Southern Mississippi.

After serving six years in the Air Force, during which she visited or lived in 13 countries and earned the rank of captain before her commitment was fulfilled, she returned home, where she and her husband decided to raise their family. It was there where she became familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its acts of violence. And the charismatic leader of the Klan’s Mississippi White Knights, Sam Bowers, was perhaps the most hateful person of them all.

At the courthouse, Young felt anxious, anticipatory, and inquisitive at beginnings of Bowers’ trial – his fifth trial, in fact, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr. 22 years earlier. She wanted to take in the moment. Most of all, she wanted her children to see Bowers and to remember people like him are real. They exist.

“I wanted (my children) to have that historical perspective,” Young said. “A lot of people have sacrificed their lives so that you could have a better life than they had had.”

Bowers’ hate of all colors and creeds not his own was well known in the South.

“Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans,” Vernon Dahmer Jr. told the New York Times in 2006. “He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. During his life, he never apologized or asked for forgiveness for his actions.”

For Young, the Klan was not an urban legend but very real, frightful terrorist organization. She recalled the terrifying moment when it became real to her as a child.

“At some point, we had some people come by, some white people drive by our house,” she said. “My grandfather was sitting on the front porch with his walking cane in his lap. And they stopped. They slowed down and stopped like they were going to do something. We think they thought he had a shotgun or some kind of gun in his lap, and they drove off real fast.”

Dahmer was a grocery store owner and a known civil rights activist, allowing blacks to pay their poll tax in his grocery store, paying for the right to vote. Bower had threatened to punish the elder Dahmer if he didn’t put a stop to his efforts. Like others in Hattiesburg, Dahmer refused. Others like Peggy Jean Connor.

Connor is Young’s mother. She also allowed Hattiesburg’s black citizens to pay their poll tax at her business, Jean’s Beauty Shop at 510 Mobile Street, and knew of Dahmer’s work in the community.

Connor, who turns 80 years old in October, became a licensed beautician at 14. She began another career after her salon went out of business, as a nurse technician at Forrest General Hospital, and held it down for 27 years.

She was secretary treasurer for the Council of Federated Organization in 1963, while teaching citizenship classes for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at True Light Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. She was executive secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was arrested for picketing in front of the Forrest County Courthouse in 1964. She sued the governor of Mississippi – and, on May 31, 1977, she won. Two years later, she received the Carter G. Woodson Award for Courage in Civil Rights.

And, at the time of Bower’s threats, she paid the poll tax.

(l-r) Marie Blalock, Peggy Jean Connor and Vassie Patton. Courtesy of RJ Young

“During that time, you had to pay poll tax to register to vote before you could vote,” Connor said; the tax had to be paid for two consecutive years in order to qualify for registration. “So we were trying to collect poll tax from people who were afraid to go to the courthouse to pay their poll tax.”

And people did. They trusted people like Connor and Dahmer to go in their stead to the courthouse to pay their poll tax for them. But the Klan didn’t choose to come after Connor and her family; it chose to go after Dahmer and his.

The poll tax was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. Mississippi was one of five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia, that upheld the poll tax. The twenty-fourth amendment, which sought to outlaw the poll tax, was submitted to the states for ratification on Sept. 24, 1962. The amendment’s ratification came on Jan. 23, 1964, outlawing the poll tax in federal elections.

Of the 50 states, Mississippi is the only one to reject the twenty-fourth amendment. The Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional in all state elections with a 6-3 vote in 1966, but that decision came a few months too late for Dahmer.

On Jan. 10 of that year, two cars full of white men in white hoods spilled 12 gallons of gasoline on his home under the cover of night. His wife, Ellie, and two small children awoke to the sound of gunfire and the sight of black smoke. Inhaling smoke and badly burned, Dahmer defended his family against the hooded attackers and did his best to extinguish the flames, but there was too much damage. Both his home and his store burned to the ground.

The next morning, Connor said, she went to see the remains.

“It was still smoking,” she said. “I went to the hospital to visit him and he and his daughter were in the room together. He was in one bed and she was in another. And he was talking. I was just shocked when I heard that he had died. It hadn’t been an hour when I left the hospital and heard that he was dead. I couldn’t believe that.”

Dahmer died the next. He was 57. President Lyndon B. Johnson later sent a telegram to his wife, Ellie, expressing “deep concern and shock” over the attack.

“His work was in the best tradition of a democracy,” the President wrote. “His family can be justly proud as his work was a fine example of good citizenship.”

Young heard about the crime from her grandfather, John Henry Gould. She was eight years old.

“I was really small,” she said. “But I was really aware of the Civil Rights Movement and what my mama and my granddaddy where trying to accomplish. I remember somebody coming by to tell my grandfather that Vernon Dahmer had been killed and burnt out.”

Bowers was convicted of murder by a jury that consisted of six minority jurors and sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after his crime. He died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 82.

In the wake of Dahmer’s death, the Civil Rights Movement came into its own and permanently adjusted the lens through which race and class are viewed. It has ushered in much needed legislation and forced elected officials to become more transparent and vigilant while in office.

Hattiesburg elected its first black mayor, Johnny DuPree, in 2001. After achieving reelection twice, he is still in office. Last year, DuPree became the first black person to win a major party nomination to run for governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction, and he, like Connor, has urged young people to vote. But Connor is worried that the right to vote has become so impressed upon young people that they have become numb to it.

“It worries me that right here in Hattiesburg (young people) don’t think it’s necessary for them to do that,” she said. “You have to just plead with them to go and register. And then after registering, you have to beg them to go and vote.  A lot of people don’t think it was as bad as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties.”

But perhaps there is hope for this generation:  Circle, the center for information and research on civic learning and engagement, reported 23 million Americans under the age of 30 turned out to vote in 2008. The Times reported young black voters led all ethnic groups in voter turnout for the first time ever.

The socioeconomic results of the Civil Rights Movement could be best depicted in the lives of Connor’s two grandchildren. Both attended a predominantly white elementary school, Presbyterian Christian School, in that same Hattiesburg.

The 11-year-old son, this writer, has graduated from the University of Tulsa and is beginning his last semester of coursework in route to his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. The 9-year-old daughter is now majoring in biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University.

Neither child has ever been convicted of a crime. Both are registered voters. Both exercise that right.

By Arturo R. García

As Black History Month gets underway, a particular piece of history has attracted attention after being posted online.

The letter, dated Aug. 7 1865, was originally published in the New York Daily Tribune before being reprinted last month in The Freedmen’s Book, a free collection of letters produced as part of Project Gutenberg for public consumption. The Tribune, of course, was also the newspaper that first published Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents of A Slave Girl in serialized form, including this entry from 1963:

My mother was held as property by a maiden lady; when she marries, my younger sister was in her fourteenth year, whom they took into the family. She was as gentle as she was beautiful. Innocent and guileless child, the light of our desolate hearth! But oh, my heart bleeds to tell you of the misery and degradation she was forced to suffer in slavery. The monster who owned her had no humanity in his soul. The most sincere affection that his heart was capable of, could not make him faithful to his beautiful and wealthy bride the short time of three months, but every stratagem was used to seduce my sister. Mortified and tormented beyond endurance, this child came and threw herself on her mother’s bosom, the only place where she could seek refuge from her persecutor; and yet she could not protect her child that she bore into the world. On that bosom with bitter tears she told her troubles, and entreated her mother to save her.

And oh, Christian mothers! you that have daughters of your own, can you think of your sable sisters without offering a prayer to that God who created all in their behalf! My poor mother, naturally high-spirited, smarting under what she considered as the wrongs and outrages which her child had to bear, sought her master, entreating him to spare her child. Nothing could exceed his rage at this what he called impertinence. My mother was dragged to jail, there remained twenty-five days, with Negro traders to come in as they liked to examine her, as she was offered for sale. My sister was told that she must yield, or never expect to see her mother again.

Anderson’s letter to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, resurfaced again Monday when it was posted on Letters of Note, an archival site that had already garnered attention from the likes of GQ Magazine in the past. And in the past 48 hours, the letter’s been mentioned on Yahoo, BoingBoing–which reported that both the Colonel and Jourdan’s existences had been confirmed–and other outlets.

Courtesy of The Freedmen’s Book, Jourdon Anderson’s letter is under the cut, in its entirety.

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

The piece above is called Planetary Alignment, and it’s one of several of Dillon’s works getting the spotlight over at the Racialicious Tumblr, curated with love by Andrea. Hop on over sometime for more day-to-day R-style goodness.

What is wrong with this picture?

1.)   He is the President. She is being disrespectful. As hell.  Period. Point Blank. End of Discussion.

2.)   White privilege conditions white people not to see white rage. However, it makes them hyper-aware of Black threat.   Newt Gingrich is white rage personified. And for it, he gets loads of applause.  So is Jan Brewer, but usually we think of white rage in masculine terms. Gender stereotypes condition us not to see white women as being capable of this kind of dangerous emotional output. We reserve our notions of female anger for Black women. Such hidden race-gender logics allow Brewer to assert that she “felt threatened,” even though she was trying to handle the situation “with grace.”

Now look back at the picture: who is threatening whom? Couple white rage with white women’s access to the protections that have been afforded to their gender, and you have something that looks ironically like white female privilege. Yes (yes, yes), the discourse of protection is based upon problematic and sexist stereotypes of white women as dainty and unable to care for themselves, and yes, these stereotypes have caused white women to be oppressed by white men. But remember, gender does not exist in a racial vacuum. It is performed in highly racialized contexts, and history proves that what constitutes oppression for white women in relation to white men, dually constitutes privilege for white women in relation to Black men. (I’m not spoiling for a fight today, so anybody who feels uncomfortable with such assertions should probably go read some Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics and then try again.)

What I know is this: 100 years ago (less than, actually) a Black man even standing that close to a white woman would’ve gotten him lynched.  (Seriously, I just discovered that even accommodationist Booker T. Washington was beaten in New York in 1911 for talking to a white woman.) And I know that if a Black woman had wagged her finger at Bush II or even Bill Clinton, we would have seen her faced down, handcuffed, with Secret Service swarming. When your race and gender grant you opportunities to be treated with dignities that others don’t have or conversely, to heap indignities on those people, that is what we call privilege. Deal with it.

3.)   Unchecked white rage has always been dangerous for Brown and Black folk in America. Jan Brewer’s Arizona is not safe for Brown people and by implication, not safe for Black people (Presidents included). Not only has she terrorized and racially profiled immigrant communities, but she has gutted one of the model Ethnic Studies programs for high school students in this country.  If there were ever a time for Black and Brown solidarity, it is now. And hell, lest we forget, Arizona is not even safe for white women. It is the vitriolic racial climate that Brewer’s anti-immigrant, anti-Latino policies have helped to foment that led to the violence against Gabby Giffords.

(It’s amazing what different stories these two pictures tell.)

4.)   This picture demonstrates something important. The logic of racial supremacy dictates that white people are most comfortable when people of color do the affective labor involved in maintaining white supremacy. (No disrespect to Gabby Giffords: of course, I don’t think this hug shared between colleagues supports white supremacy. But this kind of bodily connection is important for humanizing Black public figures, and it is the logic of that which I’m getting at.)

Historically, it was not enough to be placed in positions of servitude; affecting an attitude of subservience was also critically important.  Failure to be deferential could get you killed, even if you were doing the tasks at hand. The term “uppity Negro” hasn’t always been a slogan to rock proudly on a t-shirt.  Something happens when Black and Brown folks decide that we do not exist in the world to make white people comfortable. And white folks feel it.

This is why a movie like The Help so powerfully resonates with White America, and with countless facets of Black America as well.  The affective labor of white supremacy prefers Black people in certain postures, like for instance dishing out hugs and words of affirmation to  little white girls who will become white women that they, indeed, “is smart, is kind, is important.”

As if the world would ever teach anything different. The effect of such labor is powerful: white America feels more comfortable with the disturbing realities of racism, and Black people can convince ourselves that our humanity, and indeed, our struggle is being acknowledged.  Even her well-deserved Oscar nomination has not convinced Viola Davis of such ridiculousness. (And um, would someone help Charlize Theron get a clue?)

5.)   Finally, I just have to say it: If Jan Brewer and any other bad-ass wants to leave here with the fingers and toes they came here with, I would suggest they keep their hands to themselves. Because frankly, I wish a*&%$# would wag a finger in my face… Kudos to the President for keeping his cool.

By Arturo R. García

Film critic Kartina Richardson sent us a link to the picture above, taken at a McDonald’s restaurant during a recent visit.

“We’re not as race conscious as we think,” she wrote. In fact, it demonstrates that neither Barbie nor McDonald’s has learned much in the wake of other race-related rows.

To be fair, McDonald’s wasn’t responsible for its most recent imbroglio: Last summer, a fake sign asking African-American customers to pay extra fees because of “a recent string of robberies” went viral, spawning the #seriouslymcdonalds hashtag and putting the company on the defensive before the hoax was discovered.

But, for a company that maintains a site called 365Black, McD’s has made other missteps. Like the infamous “Southern Style” sandwich commercials, which touched off such a furor that not only were they pulled from the air, but they’re nigh-impossible to find online. Even on YouTube. But, as AdSavvy recalled in calling it one of its “25 Most Racist Advertisements,” the commercial showed two black women waxing rhapsodic over “Grandma’s fried chicken.” Apparently it got worse from there. Also problematic: the unusually high number of commercials showing black people dancing, jumping, singing, etc.

As for Barbie, longtime readers will recall its S.I.S. black doll line of 2009, which didn’t pass muster with guest contributor Seattle Slim:

The message is clear to little girls, and it’s saddening because they will go on to feel this more acutely as they get older. The message is unless you are “exotic” or multi-racial, you are simply and utterly unremarkable, unworthy and unimportant. They may make a doll with more Afrocentric features, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Little girls will then inevitably draw conclusions that they are not good enough, because they are not pretty enough. You must be multi-racial (or have some indication that you have some “white” or “Cherokee” in your family), with light eyes and long flowing, loose-curly (3A) hair as a minimum.

And most pointedly, the image itself–a black girl dreaming she could be not just Barbie, but the white Barbie specifically–revisits some uncomfortable territory, as Tami Winfrey Harris wrote:

Do black children even want dolls that look like them? That is really the rub. You can give a girl Barbie’s best, urban, black friend, Grace, but even little black girls will recognize that Grace isn’t the star of this show. The coveted one, the truly beautiful one, the worthy one is blonde, blue-eyed, narrow-featured, skinny Barbie. If the black version of Barbie was so damned great, then the little white girls on the commercial would be playing with her, too.

Those of us who are familiar with the heart-breaking “doll test” know that even when given a doll that obstensibly looks more like them, black children are inclined to want and favor the white doll. Black children who are still young enough to play with dolls have already absorbed the larger society’s notions about what is good and what is beautiful–and they know people (and dolls) who look like them are not part of those notions. Mattel’s new Barbie’s won’t fix this problem–the real problem–I think.

And neither will this new campaign. Has anybody else seen this sign at their local McDonald’s?

By Fashion Correspondent Joseph Lamour

Thanks to the Obamas are in order, fellow African Americans! Black people–like me!–can look in a closet and not immediately reach for the saggy jeans and other “street wear codes.”

At least, according to Elle France.

For the first time, the chic has become a plausible option for a community so far pegged [only] to its street wear codes…

-Nathalie Dolivo, in French Elle
Tendance [Trend] – Black Fashion Power

Nathalie Dolivo, a writer for the magazine’s blog, seems to think that since the Obamas are so fashion-forward, they serve as a public forum to inspire African Americans to dress more fashionably in 2012. First of all, lady, this is the fourth year of Barack’s term. You’re a little late with this intensely racist idea, aren’t you?

That’s not even the worst of it. Dolivo goes so far as to coin the term, and this hurts me to type it, “black-geoisie”.  Now, we really should institute a “Sh-t Fashion Magazines Say” to add to the hundreds of others on YouTube. We have a wealth of material to work from. First we had Slave Earrings. Then we had the whole Rihanna, N*ggabitch debacle. To which Rihanna herself replied with a heartfelt “F*CK YOU”. And now this. It seems like American magazines are on their best behavior! Good work.

Dolivo uses a picture of Janelle Monae in the post to show how far we’ve come from over-sized pants, but Monae is a musician who’s particular style existed since her music was first released in 2003, well before this “black fashion renaissance” (Dolivo’s words, not mine) was to have taken place. And of course, much before public consumption as well.

The post has since been removed from Elle France’s website. Without an apology, I believe the magazine is hoping they can deny the post was published–or published in error, at least , if caught (too late for that!). Elle, you can’t un-ring a bell.

Latoya will have more Sundance Film Festival coverage over the course of the week, but we’d be remiss in not extending congratulations to Ava DuVernay on winning the festival’s Best Director award this past Saturday for her second feature, Middle of Nowhere.

DuVernay made a well-received debut last year with I Will Follow, which she wrote and directed.

Nowhere, which DuVernay also wrote and directed, stars Emayatzy Corinealdias (Akira’s Hip-Hop Shop) a woman trying to keep herself up in the wake of her husband (Omari Hardwick) going to jail, with the emphasis on her own struggles in the outside world, rather than her husband’s jail time.

“It touches the prison wife’s tale,” DuVernay told It’sOnTheGrid’s Jason Scoggins “But really it’s a story about a woman who’s living within a relationship that’s imbalanced, which is something that a lot of women – and a lot of people – know a lot about.”

Like her last film, Nowhere was picked up for distribution by Participant Media and AFFRM (African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement), which DuVernay founded to help African-American independent films get increased limited engagements, so her latest effort should be hitting some more film festivals later this year.

We’ve posted DuVernay’s chat with Scoggins, in which she talks about making Nowhere without telling her clients at her other job (she worked as a publicist before becoming a filmmaker), among other subjects, under the cut.

By Guest Contributor Kendra James

[Note: The version of the film I saw was a screener in NYC about two weeks ago, and I'm writing this having not seen the final Jan 20th release. If anything has drastically changed (like –I hope-- the horrid opening credits sequence in bold, unevenly placed red text) I invite notes about that via comments!]

Based on this weekend’s box-office totals, a fair number of you might already have seen Red Tails, but for those who want to proceed without major spoilers, the basics:

• The summary, as provided by IMDB: “A crew of African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program, having faced segregation while kept mostly on the ground during World War II, are called into duty under the guidance of Col. A.J. Bullard,” is fairly accurate.
• There hasn’t been a movie screaming, “GEORGE LUCAS MADE ME!” this loudly since Attack of the Clones. Sometimes, it isn’t a bad thing. (And since Lucas, the film’s executive producer, recently claimed this is as close to Episode VII as we’ll ever get, maybe that’s what he was aiming for.)
• Red Tails features a wonderful young cast of black actors who should be on all our radars. You’ll feel better for having a little Nate Parker in your life– and don’t be ashamed if you have flashbacks to the first time you saw Will Smith in Air Force gear in Independence Day. It’s okay, you’re not alone.

For all the red tape and controversy surrounding its release, Red Tails doesn’t explicitly touch upon race as much as it could. Yes, there are the requisite scenes where older, white members of the army tell Bullard (Terrance Howard) that negro pilots can’t ever be expected to fly proper cover for his white bomber pilots; a scene where one of the Tuskegee crew, Joe “Lightning” (David Oyelowo) Little, gets into a fight with white airmen inside their Whites Only soldiers’ bar; and be sure to listen for any and all references of “Black Jesus.” Race is certainly mentioned, and important part of the film. But given the time period, are there other racial issues they could have given a platform? And should the film be chastised for silencing the experience of all African-Americans of the era – specifically women?

More detailed SPOILERS are under the cut.

There’s a scene where Bullard is giving another one of his airmen, Easy (Parker) a lecture on self-pity and how easy could have it in life, after a mission gone wrong. Major Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) stands behind him as the lecture continues, and when all three are framed together in the shot you begin to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, the movie is about to touch on not only black/White racism, but the dynamics of colorism within the black community and the advantages/disadvantages of having lighter skin. The shot frames it perfectly. You have two light skinned men lecturing a dark skinned man about the advantages he has and should take in life, yet it’s never mentioned that perhaps Stance and Bullard’s perceptions on life have been shaped by the lighter color of their skin.

The scene isn’t totally contrived – the actual commanding officer of the Tuskegee Airmen, Benjamin O. Davis, was similar in complexion to both Gooding and Howard, who seem to play dual stand-ins for him. But it represents a missed opportunity to touch on colorism, a topic that isn’t addressed enough in a public forum (until a magazine lightens Beyonce’s image, or Brian Stokes Mitchell is cast as -Gasp! – a black man on Glee, that is …). It wouldn’t have been expected for Easy to backtalk his commanding officers, but it would have been nice to see him bring it up later, perhaps with one of the other pilots. It’s not a nuance one might expect Lucas to grasp (does he even know the definition of the word?), but one would think the film’s co-writers, Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder and novelist/ media critic John Ridley, might have. Roger Ebert makes another suggestion in his review of the film, noting, “[Red Tails] could have done more than that, by more firmly establishing the atmosphere of the Jim Crow South that surrounded most of the airmen in their childhoods.” Had this background been established, perhaps the door would have been open for a discussion on what it meant to be a light-skinned African-American in 1944.

The movie’s one romantic subplot, an interracial relationship between Lightning and a white Italian, Sofia (Portuguese-American Daniela Ruah), also blows a chance to do something different. It would have been nice to see a young Black actress snag a role in this movie. A large group of men get a great platform here, why not a woman? (Easy scenario: one of the pilots is injured and is nursed back to health by a beautiful woman at an army hospital and they fall in love.) But, fine, the writers have other ideas, and as Lucas said during his Daily Show appearance, he was already having a hard enough time selling this film staring a bunch of Black actors, so he’s hesitant to also include a Black love story as well. So they decide that Lightning will woo Sofia, yet say nothing about the implications or realities (negative or positive) of an interracial relationship in this time. It shouldn’t not be in the film, and similarly shouldn’t be disregarded as a thing that would simply never happen in the time period . However, omitting any mention of it at all seems disingenuous for a film that is about the African-American experience.

Clutch Magazine recently asked if black women should boycott the film because of the lack of a black female love interest, in response to this post from What About Our Daughters? The African-American woman’s experience is often whitewashed and written out television and films. More often than not we’re sidelined to best friends and supportive sidekicks who don’t have backgrounds of our own that aren’t directly connected to the white star’s. Cinematically, we’ve been fairly silenced, and that makes the choice to eliminate the female voice from a movie centering around an African-American struggle to be all the more troubling. Some would say in its defense that this is a “war movie” and not a “chick flick,” and as such it didn’t need another love story (or any love story) in the script. Of course when this is said they’re conveniently forgetting films like Pearl Harbor, war films with predominantly white casts where a romantic subplot is common place and even expected.

The film could have benefited from a tighter script, and perhaps that would have involved cutting any and all romance from the plot. However, that they chose an interracial romance – no matter how poorly examined it is – is no reason to boycott the film. Red Tails is still a movie starring our own. While Howard and Gooding Jr. are already established in Hollywood, they’re still not offered the array of roles that their contemporaries are (let’s consider the widely diverging career paths of Gooding and fellow Jerry Maguire star Tom Cruise, shall we?). And Parker, Tristan Wilds, Elijah Kelly, Michael B. Jordan, and Marcus T. Paulk aren’t going to be given the same big-screen exposure as the heartthrob white actors their own ages. Personally, I left the theatre wondering when I’ll get to see Parker, Jordan, and Anthony Mackie (of The Adjustment Bureau and Man On A Ledge) all starring in a movie where they just get to be dapper as hell – you know, the same thing actors like Brad Pitt and George Clooney get to do in every other movie they’re in (that’s the point of the Ocean’s Eleven series, right?).

Having once worked in talent management, allow me to speak from professional experience: When you represent a black actor who isn’t a Denzel Washington or a Will Smith, you spend a lot of time scouring casting breakdowns looking for roles in television and film that fit. Normally an age and body type description is given and if a race isn’t specified it reads “Open Ethnicity.” But here’s the thing: a lot of times that means “anything but Black,” which you find out quickly when you call the casting office before submitting your client and ask if the role could go African-American. There’s almost always a pause and hesitation before the assistant on the other end of the line finally says, “… not exactly what we’re looking for, but you can submit anyway.” The reality is that dapper, good looking black folks are not something Hollywood assumes the American public wants, and if we boycott the one mainstream film out this year with an almost entirely black cast we’re doing a disservice and making it harder for any black actor/ress to find starring work.

When it comes down to it, Red Tails is a film with a story that deserved to be told back in1988 when Lucas first had the idea (though time only helped when it came to the superb special effects). It needed some editing, maybe a third or forth pass at the script, and a little polish, but it was an enjoyable film no better or worse than the equivalent white staring action movies that come out during the industry’s dead winter months. The only difference between this and other winter action films like Gina Carano’s Haywire or Denzel’s Safehouse is a predominantly black cast and 20 years of being kicked around Hollywood because no one wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole. And that’s the rub, isn’t it?

The film has its problems when it comes to race, and Lucas has put a potentially hurtful spin on its press while doing his best to promote it (talking more about the negatives of how difficult it was to make the film, rather than the things his already loyal fans would want to hear: He’s not making any more Star Wars films and this is the closest thing they’re going to get). It’s also in an interesting place in the general release market, in that it’s a film with an all-black cast that’s not a Tyler Perry film (or the like). It doesn’t get that built in Perry/Black film audience because it’s not your “typical” black movie, but it also doesn’t necessarily get the white male audience that makes up the majority of a war movie box office. Red Tails is something of a novelty in the mainstream box office, but the more of us who go out to support it, the less of a novelty all black casts become. That’s why I say this: Read this review and any others you want, but definitely go out and see the film.

Compiled by Arturo R. García

The live performance is brutal, a storm of laidback blues and thunderous notes, and as raw as if the song’s betrayal had happened just earlier that evening. James punishes that microphone until you pity it. At one point she begins to pounce on the word “baby,’’ booming its syllables like they’re meant to sound like gunfire.

Dr. John eventually saunters over from his piano, looking like a dog that’s just peed on the rug. He’s supposed to appease James for stepping out on her – “It wasn’t nothin’ serious / I guess I was just a little delirious’’ – but even he knows it’s in vain. Hell hath no fury like this particular woman scorned.

At the end of the performance, James embraces Dr. John, her head resting on his shoulder, and I like to imagine James is thinking what I’m thinking: Where the hell did that just come from?

In just six minutes, that, to me, is the essence of Etta James. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
- James Reed, The Boston Globe

She was an accident, born to a fourteen-year-old black girl in Depression-era Los Angeles. She never knew her father, but thought that he might have been the famous white pool player, Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, whom she met in the nineteen-eighties. Like Marilyn Monroe, that other famous blonde Los Angeleno, James was more or less an orphan, spiritually anyway, abandoned by her mother who ran off to chase men (as a child James called her “the Mystery Lady”) and handed over to a number of caretakers in the meantime. And, again like Monroe, by the time James was a teen-ager, she was filled with ambition and confusion. One played off the other. A foster father would beat her until the girl with the powerful voice sang for his friends. Afterwards, she’d return to her cold, wet bed; James was a bed wetter.

By the time she was a teen-ager, James was reunited, if that is the word, with her mother, who took her to San Francisco, where James’s love of R.&B. saved her, to some extent—but is talent enough if one has been continually unloved by those unreliable specimens, other people? That was what her big sound was about—a deafening cry in the wilderness of her unconquerable loneliness. She was fat: with drugs, food, incredible technical skill. But nothing could fill her up. All she could do was try to expel—shake off—some of the evening’s exertions (looking for dope on a more or less daily basis amounts to a job in itself) in the recording studio, where she sang a kind of speeded up blues, which I do not associate with R.&B. so much as it being just James’s singing, a variation of a sound I’ve heard all my life: black mothers calling down from various tenement windows for their children to come on in and eat their supper, or take some kind of nourishment, emotional and otherwise.
- Hilton Als, The New Yorker

I used to go to Baltimore at least two or three times a year, at the Royal Theatre. Remember that theater? Now that was a bum theater. Everybody that ever went there would be terrified to go. ‘Where are you working?’ ‘Oh, I’m working at the Royal Theatre in Baltimore. And then I’d go to the Howard Theatre in Washington.’ There was one more — we called them the funky three.

They were the funkiest theaters because people would come in there with pickles, with olives, with boiled eggs and get ready to throw all kinds of stuff at you. And the thing is, they used to throw the stuff. It wasn’t heartbreaking to people like me or Sam Cooke. It was the older entertainers that didn’t understand. ‘Why are they going to be throwing popcorn at me?’

Everybody knew, ‘Oh boy, here’s Baltimore.’ When I pulled up, I knew the vegetable stores were going to make a little money that week. Tomatoes — it didn’t matter. If they’d get you really good, like, get you in the face, or on your body, I would just laugh about it.

Baltimore was always a really raunchy city, compared to Washington D.C. But in Baltimore, I would just be waiting for ‘em. I’d say, ‘Well my hair’s blonde but tonight it’s going to be tomato red when we leave here.’
- Etta James, interview with The Baltimore Sun, published 2012

I had a real nice figure and I was tall. And I remember this singer Joyce Bryant … She wore fishtail gowns, sequined fishtail gowns, and she was black, and she had the nerve to wear platinum hair. And then I also loved Jayne Mansfield, because Jayne Mansfield had the blond hair and had like the poochie lips and the mole and all this. So I think what I did, it was kind of combine [them]. … I wanted to look grown, you know; I wanted to wear tall high-heeled shoes, and fishtail gowns, and big, long rhinestone earrings.
- Etta James, interview with NPR, 1994

James has a Grammy, a string of classic hits and a 1993 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame under her ever-shrinking belt (James recently lost 100 pounds; her doctor wants her to shed 50 more). But she’s also had her share of broken hearts, broken men, and thankfully, a broken two-decade addiction to heroin. This is one woman who has seen it all.

Her eyes cloud over, and her voice softens. “I can only go there, go there again, be there, do that again – some things I just won’t do again,” she says. “But the other things, I will.”

Maybe that’s why she sings what she sings in that unmistakable manner. Maybe that’s why she dances. James herself doesn’t even know for sure. But this she knows: She’ll always be happiest singing the blues.

“I can’t be talking about the moon and the stars. It has to be something heavy. Something heavy that I can say, ‘That’s right,’ “she says, touching her hand to her head. “That is right!”
- Denise Quan, CNN, 2002

Is “overweight underachiever with an endless arsenal of clever one-liners” a euphemism for sassy fat black girl? Why yes it is. Enter Sidibe, or Andrea, a student who cuts class, uses foul language, and proudly does not exercise. She is all attitude and doesn’t give a flying expletive what you think of it. When she was first introduced, I audibly expelled air – seriously? This again? Don’t we already have series’ with a largely white-cast flanked by sassy black tropes? Hiya, Mercedes from Glee, Donna from Parks & Recreation, Ava on Up All Night, Raineesha on the now defunct Reno 911!, Miranda on Grey’s Anatomy!

And please don’t say “quit hating”, I am a loyal fan of all of these shows, The Big C included. It is beautiful in its poignant portrayal of a woman living with cancer, yet deeply flawed in its characterization of a young black woman. To critique is to love, it comes from setting a higher standard of expectation, from a desire to push boundaries or at the very least, allow flexibility within tightly constrained norms. Alas, the overweight black, testy, unhealthy, irritated black woman archetype is far too normalized to even be given a second thought. Of course, the fact that actresses like Sidibe are given supporting roles in shows about confident, capable women is vital, but it too often comes at a cost: The show’s writers bestow upon Andrea qualities that have potential to give her depth, but ultimately she is more trope than fully realized.

Andrea’s tepid story arc in season 1 is almost unbearable to watch at times: she has to attend Cathy’s summer school class because she’s failed it already, she’s hopelessly overweight, and she’s openly defiant to the one person who shows her kindness. Andrea is a supporting role, but there are three major tenets of the Sassy Fat Black woman trope that she personifies: her issues with weight, her hyper-awareness of race and “playing the race card”, and her rather antagonistic attitude toward everyone.

Andrea is fat: The underscoring of Andrea’s obesity is a central theme of her personhood in season 1. From the viewer’s perspective, her unhappiness with her body leaves her wrought with melancholy. In the pilot it’s established that Andrea is overweight, hates it, and Cathy wants to help her slim down; Cathy even offers to pay her $100 for each pound that she loses when she catches Andrea smoking to curb her appetite. “I’d rather be skinny and die young than be fat forever,” she declares. I wonder what it was like for Sidibe to recite this line even though she has openly declared her body-positive self image.
- From “‘The Big C’s’ Big Black Problem,” in Clutch Magazine

By Guest Contributor Kendra James

The bias in reporting the stories of missing children and people of color is nothing new. The names Elizabeth Smart, Shondra Levey, Kaley Anthony, Adam Walsh, Jaycee Dugard, and even the Lindbergh Baby roll off my tongue easily, but how many Pam Butlers, Hassani Campbells, or Jakadrien Turners can I name?

Two weeks ago on The Today Show, Ann Curry sat with the mother and sister of George Smith, a white Connecticut man who vanished on a cruise during his honeymoon in 2005. The same morning, I was following the story of Jakadrien, the 15-year-old runaway from Texas who went missing for eight months, before being found recently in the country of Colombia where she had been mistakenly deported.

After being featured on Today, Smith’s story was covered by Dateline NBC that evening. Turner’s, I read about on Tumblr and, later, Gawker. A search for the girl’s name that day revealed no articles on the New York Times website, and nothing on the Today Show site. Maybe the saddest part about that is my Tumblr dashboard regularly features pictures, signs, and descriptions for missing children of color who aren’t getting any attention at all aside from a few thousand reblogs via the site’s social justice blogs.

It’s thanks to TVOne’s new news magazine show, Find Our Missing, that I can add Campbell and Butler to my list.

Like other news magazines, the show, which debuted this week, focuses on the unsolved mysteries of missing persons that any crime junkie will find thrilling. The only difference between the cases featured on this show and programs like Dateline and 20/20 is the color of the victims’ skin. Host S. Epatha Merkerson (of Law and Order) focuses solely on the oft-ignored ignored cases of missing people of color. Aside from the victims, it’s important to point out that there is absolutely nothing about Find Our Missing that codes it as a ‘Black Show’. Yes, the cases are about our own [African-American] missing, but there is nothing about them that should prevent them from getting the same attention from the network programs.

As a viewer, you become infuriated while watching the show if you’re not from the areas where Butler and Campbell lived, because it’s likely you’ve never heard their names, and each story leaves you wondering why. Butler, a Washington DC native, has an intricate video surveillance system surrounding her home, yet she vanishes almost into thin air in 2009, possibly through the one window not covered by a camera. Her boyfriend is caught on surveillance leaving the home with a bulging, black garbage bag a few days later.

In California, Hassani, a five year old with cerebral palsy and braces on his legs, is supposedly driven to meet his aunt at work by her fiance, who claims to have left the child in the back parking lot while he visits her at work. But when they return five minutes later he’s vanished. Later, after finding a series of text messages from his aunt’s fiance, authorities suspect that the boy had been missing even before the drive. Like Butler, Hassani has been missing since August 2009, and despite living in a country that seems to devour media stories about missing children, his plight never caught the national media’s attention.

The show’s production value looks no different than an episode of NBC’s Dateline. The format is the same, the investigation is no less thorough, the cases are just as baffling to solve, and the production values are just as good. It could be featured on any network, not just a ‘niche’ channel like TVOne. But would my fellow MSNBC junkies of the American public be interested? They should be.

I don’t begrudge anyone getting their due attention and diligence when they go missing. The coverage they receive more often than not helps in their eventual recovery, or at least leads to finding the parties responsible, and by no means is that a bad thing. More troubling is the lack of that kind of attention leveled on the missing African Americans. After all, we make up a a third of all missing persons cases in the United States, while being only 12 percent of the population.

The stories Find Our Missing features don’t make for less compelling television — can you imagine the uproar America would be in if the media caught wind of a kidnapped, disabled, white five year old? — and they don’t lack substance or quality. Why isn’t Ann Curry talking about Hassani or Pamela? Are we still seen as such an Other in this country that the heartstrings that tug at Elizabeth Smart’s name won’t also tug for Hassani Campbell? Or is it that kidnapping and mysterious disappearances simply aren’t seen as crimes that happens to Black people? Gang, drug, sexual, and domestic violence are ‘our’ crimes, and the media struggles to break away from that mold when giving coverage to stories of the missing.

It’s almost as if they’re confused when a comfortable, middle class black woman goes missing with no hints of the average ‘Black crime’ elements involved. (The common perception that there are ‘no black serial killers’ certainly helps explain the difference in the amount of national coverage Anthony Sowell received in comparison to other recent serial killers like Dennis Rader in yet another case involving several missing Black women in the Cleveland area.)

When it comes to shows profiling crimes and criminals, you’re more likely to see a person of color starring on Lock Up than you are on Dateline, and that’s one of the reasons I’ll be watching Find Our Missing every week. If given a platform and the exposure it deserves, I firmly believe that the program can help solve some of the cases it features.

Even if the cases aren’t solved, at least they’ll get people thinking and remembering that there aren’t just the white women disappearing in Aruba to worry about. If there’s 20 minutes of a telecast to devote to Natalee Holloway and Robyn Gardner, then there should be twenty minutes to dedicate to Pamela Butler and Jakadrien Turner. Hassani Campbell should have received the same amount of coverage as Elizabeth Smart. In a perfect world Find Our Missing wouldn’t need to exist, but until we’re there and a tumblr dashboard is no longer the prime resource for information about missing Black children*. I encourage you to tune in to TV One on Wednesdays at 10pm EST and check out new episodes.

[*By which I do not mean to discount the importance of any signal boosting that the tumblr dashboard does do. As it stands now, Tumblr is one of my number one stops for news of the missing and that’s not something to be taken lightly. If you have any interest in the plight of missing African-Americans and other people of Color who aren’t catching the attention of the local or national news and don’t get TVOne at home, I encourage you to check out this post. In some cases, Tumblr is the only tool these people and families have working for them.]

By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said

Black women don’t need to be taught how to love. Despite what the common narrative may tell you, we are loving beings–no more or less so than any other group. You don’t see it, though. Too much of popular culture–even the movies, TV shows and books targeted to our community–presents black women as bitter and emasculating bitches, misguided in our independence and incapable of appreciating a good man. Don’t trust that.

For more than a month, I’ve been conducting preliminary interviews for my black women and marriage project. When I began this project, I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy hearing other black women talk about how much they love their partners. This process has highlighted for me, how rarely I get to hear that. Oh, I experience it in real life, but sometimes pop culture can feel stronger and more encompassing than real life.

One interviewee, upon being asked what she loves most about her man, said: “You don’t have the time…” Another giddily talked about how she and her mate discovered their mutual interest in Greek mythology, prompting his family to exclaim, “Oh my God! There’s two of them!” Yet another woman proudly talked about how her husband could talk about philosophy and rewire a house. Another woman said that she was “stupid in love with her husband.” I can relate, as a stupidly in love woman myself.

Of course, as these women love, they are also loved back with the same vehemence and fullness. I’ve been talking to sisters who are experiencing an everything sort of love. That’s what I call it, anyway. There’s this song by Alanis Morisette that I love called “Everything.” In it, she sings about someone loving her for herself–all the good parts, the weird parts and, yes, the bad parts, too.

An everything kind of love is a love where someone actually sees you in all your complication and loves the hell out of you anyway. That kind of love feels soooo good.

That’s why I so hate all the “advice” directed at heterosexual black women searching for life partners. You may get a man by trying to act and think like someone else, but you won’t get an everything kind of love. And that’s the best love of all–the kind of love every man and woman deserves.

Juan Williams, Fox News: Speaker Gingrich, the suggestion that you made was about a lack of work ethic and I’ve gotta tell you my email account and my Twitter account has been inundated by people of all races who are asking if your comment was not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities … you saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina by a woman who asked why you refer to Barack Obama as a “food stamp president.” it sounds like you’re trying to belittle people.

Newt Gingrich: first of all Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by barack obama than by any president in americanhistory. I know that among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable. Second, you’re the one who, earlier, raised a key point: the area that oughta be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a “corridor of shame” because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built a road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. One last thing … so here’s my point: I believe every American, of every background, has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.”
- Video via The Grio

The growth partly reflects an increase in need, as millions of Americans have lost income and lost jobs or remain out of work. In addition, food prices have increased, eligibility has been expanded, and the 2009 economic stimulus law temporarily increased benefits.

Before Mr. Obama took office, food stamp participation was rising, in part because of federal policies that encouraged low-income people to seek aid for which they were eligible.

Nearly half of food stamp recipients are under age 18. Nearly 30 percent of food stamp households have earned income. Only 15 percent of such households have income above the poverty level ($18,500 for a family of three in 2011).

– Robert Pear, New York Times

“Do you see how these remarks might offend people?” Williams asked.

Newt replied, “No, I don’t see that.” He then defended his position, citing anecdotal accounts of young people who prospered as janitors, or as doughnut deliverers. Gingrich went on to say that he got the idea from a Joe Klein article about New York City schools, which is true.

“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich said. But as Benjy Sarlin points out, if you hired 30 kids for one janitor contract, those kids wouldn’t be able to form an emotional attachment to earning money, because they wouldn’t earn very much.
- Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post

- Video via Buzzfeed

The audience at the South Carolina GOP debate interrupted a question to Mitt Romney that referenced his family’s ties to Mexico with an audible boo from what sounded like several people as the question was asked.

Romney’s father was born in Mexico, where his parents were part of a Mormon enclave that had moved temporarily from the United States.
- Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo

In New Hampshire last Sunday, Romney mentioned that his father, George, was born in Mexico and came to the United States at age five. On Wednesday he took to the airwaves in Florida with a new Spanish-language ad entitled “Nosotros,” meaning “us.” The Republican National Committee got in on the act, too, announcing a beefed-up outreach effort to Hispanic voters.

But it may be too little, too late. Even before his DREAM Act comments, Romney faced an uphill battle with Latinos. A poll conducted by Latino Decisions for Univision in November found that among registered Hispanic voters in the 21 most Hispanic-heavy states, Obama held a whopping 67 percent to 24 percent lead over Romney.

While Romney could make up some ground among Latinos by selecting someone like Cuban-American Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as his eventual running mate, the GOP may have missed a golden opportunity to swing the 2012 election by earning the backing of Latino voters.
- Matthew Jaffe, ABC News

From the TV cutaways they seemed clean, well-dressed, and drug-free. And yet their reactions would scare off any sane, sensible person. In previous debates the right-wing GOP audiences booed a gay soldier. Someone shouted “Let him die!” in response to a question about an uninsured person.

But in South Carolina they took the cake. The crowd booed the mere mention of the name of the country of Mexico. Just the name. I might understand it if they booed, say, North Korea or Iran or Texas A&M—centers of evil. But Mexico? Good luck with that Latino vote in November, guys.

Then, when Ron Paul said the Golden Rule should guide our foreign policy, the crowd booed. They booed the Golden Rule. Apparently nobody told them that Jesus wrote the Golden Rule. On second thought, they’d have booed Jesus.
- Paul Begala, The Daily Beast

It’s time for a true celebration of Martin Luther King Day. This week, Americans everywhere will remember the selfless and historic contributions made by one of the most important figures of the 21st century. Rebuild the Dream members are hosting MLK Day Movement Meet-ups to celebrate Dr. King and link the Civil Rights Movement with today’s struggle for an economy that works for all. We will come together to reflect on the struggles of our past, and unite to secure our future.

This is a chance to touch base with people who are passionate about fighting for Dr. King’s dream. Neighbors and friends will gather in schools, libraries, community centers, and living rooms to watch a short video and open up a discussion on how we can strengthen our movement in 2012.

MLK day is a chance to look back and look ahead — let’s reflect on one of the most important movements of our past as a springboard for the ongoing fight for justice. There is a lot left to fight for, and every day people are continuing Dr. King’s struggle. With a powerful movement sweeping the country, we must gather together and ask: What would Dr. King and other civil rights leaders do today? How can we continue their legacy in 2012 and beyond?

• Reflection for MLK Day: N.J. is failing African Americans (The New Jersey Star-Ledger)

Any honest assessment of New Jersey would show that we have much to do. The recession has exacerbated economic disparities between ethnic groups and genders. As of December, one in six black men were unemployed and looking for work. Among white men, one in 13 were in the same position. And according to the latest data, 27.4 percent of African-Americans live in poverty.

Unfortunately, our state’s current policies are failing the African-American community. Tax cuts and incentives for big business have failed to bring the jobs we need. Meanwhile, devastating budget cuts have burdened struggling families. Over the past two years, New Jersey has taken money out of the pockets of the working poor by cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit, slashed property tax rebates for homeowners and tenants, raised bus and train fares and made the dream of a college education more expensive and less attainable. Cuts to municipal aid have led to crime spikes in urban centers such as Newark, Camden and Trenton, and it took the state Supreme Court to guarantee the constitutional rights of students in New Jersey’s cities to a thorough and efficient education.

Meanwhile, cuts to the public sector have had a disproportionate impact on the African-American community. The labor movement has been the pathway to the middle class for people of color and minorities throughout the 20th century, and minorities continue to be the fastest growing part of today’s labor force. With the decline in industrial employment, more than one-fifth of African-Americans now work in a public sector that is facing widespread layoffs and the loss of basic collective bargaining rights for pensions and health benefits.

• Martin Luther King in the Era of Occupy(Religion Dispatches)

King’s insights could very well be “mic checked” at any Occupy rally across our nation. They are even more important in this 2012 election, where the Republican candidates, in their desperation to be on top, have not hesitated to play the Willie Horton race card—whether it is Newt Gingrich’s ridiculous racist statement that President Obama is the Food Stamp President, or Rick Santorum’s declaration that he doesn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

The fact of the matter is, not so much has changed since 1967. African Americans under the first African American President have watched the bottom fall out of the black middle class. What will the 2012 election change about this situation?

Perhaps it is time for the churches to begin to “Mic Check” MLK’s words on poverty, in addressing all of our branches of government in order to bring about Kings’s Beloved Community.

• OWS Prepares to Occupy Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Daily Finance)

[Monday,] OWS plans a march from New York’s African Burial Ground to the city’s Federal Reserve Bank, which is located mere blocks from Wall Street. The event, called “Occupy the Federal Reserve,” will be one of thirteen linked protests taking place in every city that has a Federal Reserve Bank, as well as Los Angeles (which doesn’t have a Federal Reserve Bank, but is pretty important anyway).

Asked why OWS has taken aim at the Fed, Holder argues that the institution has become a key driver of economic injustice in America: “The Federal Reserve undermines our democracy. It’s filled with bankers who are pushing for a deflated currency that will help inflate their pockets.”

But ultimately, she notes, Sunday and Monday’s protests will focus on honoring Dr. King’s legacy of social engagement — and making sure that it continues: “We’re hoping to help inspire a new generation of activists and visionaries.”

• Inequality in 2012 by the Numbers (Center for American Progress)

• 46.2 million: The number of Americans in poverty in 2010.
• 76.7 million: Number of people in families who were living below $44,000 for a family of four (two times the federal poverty line).
• 27.4: Percentage of African Americans in poverty.
• 26.6: Percentage of Hispanics in poverty.
• 9.9: Percentage of non-Hispanic whites in poverty.
• 45.3: Percentage of young adults facing poverty, when they are considered independently of their parents.
• 5.9 million: Number of young adults living with their parents. Those who aren’t saw a 9 percent decrease in their income.
• 39.1: Percentage of African American children less than 18 years old in poverty.
• 12.4: Percentage of white children less than 18 years old in poverty.

To start fixing this problem, it’s important that we grow the country’s number of low-skill jobs, so that those in poverty can begin to find a way out. We also need to maintain a solid safety net for those who can’t work, such as the elderly and the disabled.

So, you may wonder why I still care about abortion when my story isn’t statistically reflected.

Though I’m not in the numbers, I’m in the reasons why some Black [child-bearing people] seek the procedure, and why quite a few cis women — in solidarity with [some] trans men, trans women and non-binary people of many races and ethnicities — fight so hard to keep it legal.

My mother did an excellent job of both encouraging me to get my education and discouraging me from having children while I was a teenager. My mom failed to convince me in my 20s and 30s to “have children.” My co-workers failed, too. The rare co-worker nowadays still tries to talk me into it — and yes, even my mom still tries — appealing to some notion of an impending spinsterhood if I don’t essentially create my future caregiver and “someone who’ll love me.” As I had to remind Mom, having children is, essentially, a crap shoot as far as their “loving you” and you “loving them”: how many stories have we heard of people who give birth but who don’t form that “nurturing instinct” with their newborns? How many stories have we heard about children disowning and getting disowned by parents, let alone loving you enough to want to take care of you in your old age? (The resentment and burnout of grown children taking care of elderly parents are real.)

My long-held reason, I tell them all, is that I simply do not like children enough to gestate or adopt and rear one (or two or more). I don’t have the patience to provide that long-term emotional support and don’t wish to share my material resources with a child. This is very much in line with a study cited by the Guttmacher Institute in August, 2011: “The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.”

Now that I’m entering the middle part of my life, a colleague summed up my new viewpoint about [having] children: “She’s not just running down her biological clock. She’s taking the clock and throwing off the Empire State Building.”

–Excerpted from “Heading Toward Menopause, Still Caring About Abortion,” On The Issues 

Photo Credit: caribdirect.com