After Sandy, Occupy Movement Re-Emerges as Relief Hub for Residents in Need

Democracy Now

In addition to the National Guard and FEMA, one of the more active relief efforts in New York City has been a volunteer effort organized by alumnae of Occupy Wall Street called Occupy Sandy Relief. Along with groups like 350.org and Recovers.org, Occupy activists quickly mobilized hundreds, and then thousands, of people to help affected areas of New York City. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke speaks with Occupy organizer Catherine Yeager in the Rockaways about Occupy Wall Street's transformation into Occupy Sandy Relief.

Poverty, Youth Violence and the Anniversary of The Occupy Movement on October 1st Left of Black

Poverty, Youth Violence and the Anniversary of The Occupy Movement on October 1st Left of Black

As the 2012 Presidential Election season went into high gear, several issues, notably the poverty rate in the United States and the apparent rise of youth violence in American cities like Chicago, were nowhere to be found on the agendas and talking points of either Presidential candidate.

With the anniversary of the Occupy Movement as backdrop, journalists Rahiel Tesfamariam and Mychal Denzel Smithjoin Left of Black via Skype, to discuss these and other issues, including Jay Z’s dismissive remarks about the goals of The Occupy Movement and Mitt Romney’s now infamous comments about the so-called “47%.”

Tesfamariam is founder & Editorial Director of the on-line magazine Urban Cusp and a blogger and columnist for The Washington Post and The Root DC, and Smith is a freelance writer, social commentator, and mental health advocate whose work has been seen at The Atlantic, The Nation, The Guardian, Ebony, Huffington Post, The Root and The Grio.

***

Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on the Ustream channel: http://tinyurl.com/LeftofBlackhttp://tinyurl.com/LeftofBlack. Viewers are invited to participate in a Twitter conversation with Neal and featured guests while the show airs using hash tags #LeftofBlack or #dukelive. 

Left of Black is recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

***

Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Follow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackMan

Follow Rahiel Tesfamariam on Twitter: @RahielT

Follow Mychal Denzel Smith on Twitter: @mychalsmith

Roundtable: After 1 Year, OWS Gives Voice to Resistance of Mass Debt and Widening Inequality

Democracy Now 

The Occupy Wall Street movement is largely credited for reframing the national dialogue on economic inequality and popularizing the phrase: "We are the 99 percent." We host a roundtable with Frances Fox Piven, an author and professor at City University of New York who has studied social movements for decades; Nathan Schneider, editor of the blog Waging Nonviolence, which has extensively covered the Occupy movement; and Suzanne Collado, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street since its inception and member of the group "Strike Debt," an effort to organize a mass upsurge of debt resistance.

Vijay Prashad Asseses The Occupy Movement and the Presidential Election

NewsClickin 

In conversation with Newsclick, Vijay Prashad analyzes the American Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party movement.

Noam Chomsky: Occupy Movement "Has Created Something That Didn't Really Exist" in US

DemocracyNow.org

Noam Chomsky says the Occupy movement has helped rebuild class solidarity and communities of mutual support on a level unseen since the time of the Great Depression. "The Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn't really exist in the country: Communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion ... people doing things and helping each other," Chomsky says. "That's very much missing. There [has been] massive propaganda going on for a century, that you really shouldn't care about anyone else, just yourself ... To rebuild [class solidarity] -- even in small pieces of society -- can become very important, can change the conception of how society ought to function." Chomsky also gives his assessment of President Obama, whom he says has attacked civil liberties in a way that "goes beyond George W. Bush."

#Occupy Movement Targets Wells Fargo Meeting in San Francisco

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Occupy movement targets Wells Fargo meeting in San Francisco

by Kari Huus | msnbc.com

Several hundred protesters marched to the Wells Fargo Bank headquarters Tuesday in San Francisco and about 30 managed to gain access to the company's annual shareholder meeting and disrupt proceedings, San Francisco Gate reported. About a dozen were escorted out of the 15th floor meeting by police.

Police in riot gear arrested six people involved in the protest, which focused anger on foreclosures, high executive compensation and low corporate taxes, Reuters reported.

Demonstrators carried a huge inflated rat with dollar bills coming from side pockets, and held signs that read: "99 percent take over, topple the 1 percent" — referring to the majority of the U.S. population and the 1 percent who make up the wealthiest Americans.

Read More

My Barack Obama Problem

My Barack Obama Problem

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Like many people on the Left, I have become disillusioned with the Obama Presidency.  As one of those people who devoted huge amounts of time, money and energy to getting Obama elected, and who cried on election night when his victory was assured, I found myself hoping against hope that there was some redemptive quality to his leadership amidst expansion of foreign wars,  attacks on public school teachers, bailouts of banks unaccompanied by serious controls, and a host of other policies that appeared to contradict everything he stood for during his campaign.

Although my heart wasn’t in it, I tried to justify his policies as the result of a powerful congressional opposition that refused to support policies that brought the full power of the federal government behind job creation and income policies designed to ease the pain of the  nation’s  struggling working class and middle class, along with those long trapped in poverty.

But recently, I have started to think that the “real” Barack Obama is not the community organizer pictured in Dreams from My Father or the fierce defender of the middle class that emerged on the campaign trail, but a cynical, ambitious, politician who loves spending time with the rich and the powerful and who has tied his administration’s and his own future to gaining their support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, after many disappointments, was the image of the President regaling a $2,500 a plate dinner in San Francisco while Occupy Oakland was being attacked by an army of police using tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and bulldozers.  The Obama of Dreams from My Father would have rushed across the Bay to stand with the Occupiers, but this Obama didn’t so much as give the protesters a second thought. 

The President was totally relaxed and in his element with the hedge fund and dot com executives, and media moguls, supporting his campaign. THEY, not the Occupiers, were now his real constituency. Not only were they the ones funding his presidential campaign, they were the ones who were going to be employing him after he left the Presidency, assuring that he, and his family would be part of the 1 Percent for the foreseeable future.

As a young man, who like the President, grew up in a lower middle class family and went to an Ivy League college and graduate school, I can understand the lure of great wealth and power to someone who grew up with neither.  When you are a talented person from a family of modest means, it can be very heady to be courted by and praised by some of the nation’s smartest, wealthiest and most powerful people.   And if you are so talented and charismatic that these people decide to groom you to become one of them, it can definitely persuade you to make compromises that end up affecting your conscience and your social consciousness.

For very personal reasons, I never enjoyed hanging out in the clubs and restaurants and vacation houses of the wealthy as much as the times I spent in neighborhood ball fields, schoolyards, and community centers interacting with working class and middle class people. I keep my feet in both worlds but I consider “the hood” to be my moral compass, the place where I have to go to find out if my life’s mission has any real traction, any real meaning.

But I fear the President is different.  The people who come to the White House, whether the professional basketball players who show up at his birthday parties, the talented musicians who come to entertain, or the CEO’s and political kingmakers who come to discuss policy, are always a cross session of the most successful people in whatever field they are in. The President never tries to bring in ordinary people to talk to him privately and find out what is going on in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Those are not the people he trust, those are not the people he is comfortable with; those are not the people he wants to spend time with when he leaves the Presidency.

A real cue to the President’s character came when he decided to host an Education Summit. To this event, he invited CEO’s of the nation’s largest corporations, and executives in some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations, but not one teacher.   This is the real Barack Obama—someone who has left the world he grew up in, and the communities in Chicago he organized in, and who craves the company and advice of people, like himself, who have accomplished great things or accumulated great wealth.

In some ways, he is the perfect President for a country where ambition is honored above loyalty, generosity, and concern for those who have fallen in hard times and where we honor those who have overcome great obstacles to “rise to the top.”

But whether he is the right President to lead us through the worst economic crisis in seventy years and stand up for all the people who have lost jobs and homes and hope is another matter entirely.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

"It Refuses to be Dismantled": Angela Davis at #Occupy Oakland

From truthpeaceful:

 

Angela Davis speaks to the Occupy Oakland rally on the day of the West Coast Port Shutdown. Barbara Becknell (representative of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams) and Angela Davis propose a national day of action in solidarity with the 2.5 million prisoners incarcerated and 3,500 on death row in the U.S. She proposes occupy mobilizations at every major prison in this country to act against the prison-industrial complex plaguing the nation and cannibalizing our education system.

FILM THE POLICE - B. Dolan feat. Toki Wright, Jasiri X, Buddy Peace, Sage Francis

DOWNLOAD THIS MP3 FOR FREE on the homepage of http://StrangeFamousRecords.com right now!

B. DOLAN's "FILM THE POLICE" pays tribute to N.W.A.'s infamous "F*ck the Police," serving as a call to action for the digitized media movement while responding to the recent explosion of police brutality all across the world.

This free MP3, courtesy of STRANGE FAMOUS RECORDS, features a reconstruction of Dr. Dre's original beat, brilliantly reanimated by UK producer BUDDY PEACE. Label CEO, SAGE FRANCIS, opens the song by picking up the gavel where Dr. Dre left it 23 years ago, introducing a blistering, true-to-style flip of Ice Cube's original verse by SFR cornerstone, B. Dolan. TOKI WRIGHT (Rhymesayers Entertainment) follows up by stepping into the shoes of MC Ren, penning the people's struggle against cops as a case of "Goliath Vs. a bigger giant." Finally, Jasiri X (Pittsburgh rapper/activist) rounds out the track by filling in for Eazy-E, reminding us that police brutality disproportionately affects poor people of color.

With the Occupy Movement bringing various forms of injustice to the forefront of people's consciousness, "Film the Police" is a reminder that cops have been a continued and increasingly militarized presence in public streets. Thanks to the widespread use of smartphones and video cameras, along with the popularity of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, the power of the media has been put back into the people's hands as they document the injustices perpetrated by those who have sworn to serve and protect them.

The lyrics are available at: http://bdolan.net/film-the-police-lyrics/
http://facebook.com/BDolanSFR
http://twitter.com/BDolanSFR
http://facebook.com/StrangeFamousRecords
http://twitter.com/SFRupdates

This video was directed by Mason Johnson (Klepticenter Productions) and edited by Weston Woodbury.

"Film the Police" will be included on B. DOLAN and BUDDY PEACE's "HOUSE OF BEES VOL. II" mixtape at http://StrangeFamousRecords.com

Jay Z Talks About Poverty and #Occupy with CNN Money

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

Politics as Usual: Decoding the Attacks on a Liberal Education

by David J. Leonard, Mark Anthony Neal and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan

Few university courses generate much attention from mainstream media, but Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson’s course “The Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z” has drawn national attention from NBC’s Today Show, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today, and Forbes.com among many others.  To be sure such attention is not unusual for Dyson, who is one of the most visible academics in the United States and has offered courses dealing with hip-hop culture, sociology, and Black religious and vernacular expression for more than twenty-years.  Yet, such attention seems odd; hundreds of university courses containing a significant amount of content related to Hip-hop culture and Black youth are taught every year—and have been so, for more than a decade.  In addition, there are dozens of scholarly studies of Hip-hop published each year—Julius Bailey’s edited volume Jay-Z: Essays of Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King, among those published just this year—and two Ivy League universities, Harvardand Cornell, boast scholarly archives devoted to the subject of Hip-Hop.

Any course focused on a figure like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter), given his contemporary Horatio Algernarrative, and his reputation as an urban tastemaker, was bound to generate considerable attention, but the nature of the attention that Dyson’s class has received and some of the attendant criticism, suggest that much more is at play.

In early November, The Washington Post offered some of the first national coverage of the class, largely to coincide with the arrival of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne tour to Washington DC’s Verizon Center.  Jay-Z dutifully complied with the attention by giving Professor Dyson a shout-out from the stage. The largely favorable article about the class, did make note, as have many subsequent stories, about the cost of tuition at Georgetown; as if somehow the cost of that tuition is devalued by kids taking classes about hip-hop culture.

Other profiles of the course and Dyson have gone out of their way to make the point that the course had mid-term and final exams, as if that wouldn’t be standard procedure for any nationally recognized senior scholar at a top-tier research university in this country.  Such narrative slippages speak volumes about the widespread belief that courses that focus on some racial and cultural groups, are created in slipshod fashion and lack rigor; it is a critique that is well worn, and that various academic disciplines, such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies and even Sociology have long had to confront.

As ethnomusicologist Joe Schoss, author of Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, recently suggested on Facebook, courses constructed around the mythology of “great men” are often the vehicle in which outlier disciplines are made legible within traditional academic settings. Indeed Dyson’s career has been marked by such studies, where he’s examined figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marvin Gaye, hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur and Nas (Nasir Jones).  He is also teaching a class on the legacy of Jesse Jackson this semester, to commemorate the Civil Rights leader’s 70^thbirthday. 

Figures like Dyson, and Brown University Professor Tricia Rose, who authored the landmark Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America in 1994, were at the forefront of establishing Hip-Hop studies as a viable—and yes popular—academic discipline for nearly two decades. 

The reality of the presence of Hip-Hop Studies at virtually every major college and University, unveils the “oh my, golly gee” discovery mode of so much of the reporting and controversy surrounding the Jay Z class, as more manufactured, than anything else.  More to the point, the attack on the validity of a class focused on a prominent and highly influential cultural figure, who happens to be a young Black man who has trafficked in outlier sub-cultures, seems more emblematic of an assault on the value of a liberal education. This assault comes at a historical moment when the products of a liberal education, are literally raising critical questions about the nature of inequality in American society.

There are other critics, some of whom throw darts from within the realm of Hip Hop Studies.  They disparage Jay-Z as merely a misogynist, a hustler who promotes consumerism and other poisonous messages to young minds that mindlessly follow him.  Some of these same critics have also questioned Dyson’s knowledge of Hip Hop culture, his cultural bona fides on the discourses of the subject matter and his ability to choose the appropriate subjects.  So at the same time that conservative critics question the validity of Hip Hop studies vis a vis Shakespeare or *yawn* classical music, other critics (the one’s we’d assume might appreciate the value of such a course in the broader context of Africana, Popular culture, and Hip Hop studies) are quick to cast Dyson as an outsider; to proffer Dead Prez or Mos Def as more appropriate subject matter for this kind of course. 

Well, “we don’t believe you/You need more people.” “Do you dudes listen to music?/Or do you just skim through it?”   Yes Jay-Z’s music has many limitations, faults, and critical flaws – some of which he is poignantly aware.  But that is exactly why his life and lyrics make substantive subject matter for sociological inquiry.  His influence and impact – or what some may deem popularity or sell-out-status – are more grist for the sociological mill.  In the end, the critique of the course that suggests that Hip Hop Studies has no place in the academy is eerily connected to those critiques that question Dyson’s authenticity as either an elite scholar or a ‘real’ Hip Hop Head.   And we LOVE Dead Prez, but the “mainstream” media ain’t checking for a Dead Prez class and in order to stave off the onslaught against area studies, interdisciplinary studies, Hip Hop studies, and more broadly but directly, the Humanities, we are going to need some of that mainstream attention.  Folks hate to hear this, but part of the reason why we have access to so much of the ‘underground’ Hip Hop that we know and love is because there exists a healthy amount of popular attention (and dollars) directed at the drivel we (love to) hate.

In a recent article that was less than optimistic about the future of the humanities within American higher education, Dr. Frank Donoghue wrote, "When we claim to wonder whether the humanities will survive the twenty first century, we're really asking, 'Will the humanities have a place in the standard higher-education curriculum in the United States?' (2010).  The answer appears to be no from a myriad of places.   “But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up,” writes Nancy Cook in “The Death of Liberal Arts.”  “For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend.” Peddling the often-cited binaries between “cerebral” and “the practical,” the intellectual and the useful, Cook highlights the ubiquitous attack on academic enterprises that seemingly don’t produce tangible results or profits.

While commentators tend to focus on the declining interest and place of a liberal arts education that has resulted from the increased costs of higher education, the focus on securing a good job upon graduation, and the professionalization of higher education, the waning place of liberal arts and humanities is not simply an organic process.  It reflects a direct assault from conservative factions within the American political landscape.  In Texas, Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation called for substantial changes in the delivery of higher education, proposing greater emphasis on teaching and research that benefits the state and its economic needs.  Defending the call for reform, Ronald L. Trowbridge, “The Case for Higher Ed Accountability” described his views on educational reform in the following way:

What is the value of any research endeavor to students or to wider societal needs? Some process of evaluation must be established. If researchers wish to pursue matters that do not serve students or wider societal needs, they are certainly free to do so, but such should be so without release time from the classroom.

Texas is not alone.  In Florida, Governor Rick Scott recently announced his desire to remake public universities with greater emphasis on programs that stimulate the economy and produce future workers in key industries.  “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott noted “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.”  The divestment of public investment in the arts, human inquiry, and humanistic endeavors has been central to the conservative movement.  Opposition to intellectual pursuits and the neoliberal emphasis on professionalism has had profound influence on contemporary culture.

Describing a friend who wanted to study comparative literature, Andrew Bast notes his initial reaction as one of “bewilderment” and “fascination,” asking himself, “What in the world would be the value in that?” Capturing the hegemonic of the assault and systemic devaluing of the humanities within contemporary culture, he makes “The Case for a Useless Degree:”

I later learned that there's actually a huge value in it. Computer science, accounting, marketing—the purpose of many majors is self-evident. They lead to well-paid jobs and clear-cut career paths. (One hopes, at least.) But comparative literature, classics, and philosophy—according to the new conventional wisdom—offer no clear trajectory.

The recent spectacle and media frenzy surrounding Michael Eric Dyson’s “Sociology of Hip-Hop” course points to the powerful ways that “useless degrees” and “useless” knowledge are under attack.  It also exposes the critical discourses that exist within Hip Hop studies – who can teach it/who is authentic enough to teach it.  The media frenzy and the debate about this class reflect a well-organized attack on the humanities, liberal arts education and individual academic FREEDOM.

Strangely enough, the internecine squabbles about whether or not Jay-Z is fit to be taught or if Dyson is fit to teach similarly swirl in the discursive diatribes against certain “less practical” disciplines.  What reflects back at us is an ideology that demonizes critical thought, demonizes intellectual inquiry, and silences conversations about race, gender, inequality and other issues of social injustice.  A focus here on Jay-Z or Michael Eric Dyson misses the point because the class is becoming a stand-in for a larger assault on education, intellectualism, and critical thinking.  The media coverage and the ensuing debates about it—on social media—reflect  an overall effort to demonize those who teach, those who educate, and those who articulate "freedom dreams."  The culture wars are back and it’s us against them and us against us. 

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press) and Professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University.  He is founder and managing editor of NewBlackMan and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.  Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

James Braxton Peterson is Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University  and the author of the forthcoming Major Figures: Critical Essays on Hip Hop Music(Mississippi University Press). Follow him at @DrJamesPeterson.

#Occupy Post-Blackness?

"negro sunshine"--Glenn Ligon

Occupy Post-Blackness?

by Wahneema Lubiano | special to NewBlackman

As some of the contributors articulated in Toure’s Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness, others in numerous pieces of scholarship produced over the past decades, and still others in public discussion in various places, Blackness is both a form of chosen identity and, at the same time, is an imposition from the larger social order.  Under some circumstances that imposition has coercive power and pressure behind it; we don’t live solely within the terms of our own imaginations, not even in our own drama around that identity.  That external imposition often interrupts our identity reveries and speaks a pathology narrative about us and does so sometimes with and sometimes without our own consent.  It is that understanding of the imposition of coercive history in the present moment that makes “post-blackness” inadequate as a rubric for accurately describing the effects of structural racism, of white supremacy in the present.  And Toure takes note of that fact in his book. 

But “post-blackness” is also situational—or, as Michael Eric Dyson asserts in the introduction: “. . . Blackness bends to the tongue it tumbles from at any given moment of time” (xii).  And it is in this regard that I’m interested to some great extent in specific situational elements of the phrase’s use: its use as a means to describe a moment in cultural, artistic, or emotional self-understanding – yes, there indeed I can see its usefulness and it is that usefulness that I’m addressing when I’m quoted in the book talking about why Dave Chapelle’s show prompted me away from any simple dismissal of the phrase when Toure first brought it up in our conversation.  I thought that the phrase was a useful way to describe what I saw as a kind of pre-figurative existence in Chapelle’s work—he was performing possibilities of art—of humor and wit—that were not completely captured by the imposition of social blackness both across our history and in the present moment.

Yet, the phrase itself is redolent of past decades of anxiety about black art, black cultural production—an anxiety exemplified in the 1926 fight, in the pages of The Nation magazine, between Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) and George Schuyler (“The Negro Art Hokum”) around the burden of representation (as Stuart Hall has described it) for Negro artists.  “Post-blackness” is a rubric that reminds me that cultural producers are continually caught in the dilemma in the West of a pressure to define themselves, to distinguish themselves, as mythic individuals—that’s the ur-narrative of U.S. individuality writ large; so, of course, artists, other cultural producers, cultural critics, and we ourselves continually produce narratives of “generational shift”—it’s a handy way to make individual space, to posit a conversational imperative, and have that imperative recognized. And it doesn’t much matter, when that posture is assumed, that space claimed, whether it is a new moment in fact or a seemingly new moment—the gesture is meant to establish a possibility here and now.  I find those repeated moments sociologically rich and interesting.

But while I don’t want to cast aspersions on that gesture, I do want to move onto something else that came up as we explored the gesture of Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon, something that I’d love to talk about more, if people care to, and it’s this: the social utility, the currency, of post-blackness. Let me make what I’m saying more concrete.

When Toure asked me about the most racist thing that ever happened to me, my first response (along with many of the other contributors he quoted) was to say that structural racism enacted itself in such a way that I wasn’t personally confronted with the most racist things that had ever happened to me.  But Toure pushed back on this; he pushed me to think about my earlier and younger understandings of racism: the moment prior to my arrival at an analysis of structural racism.  He wanted me to speak about something that hurt way back when.  So, I told a story from my high school years and a bad encounter with a guidance counselor bigot because that story gave me a chance to talk about Howard University; being a student at Howard was a moment of a kind of pre-figurative post-blackness for me.  The most powerful take-away of that story was not the incident with the guidance counselor.  What transformed my life was my discovery of a rich and complex existence within the terms of blackness (a situated blackness) at Howard University.  I found ordinary life at Howard. (That was the saving grace.)

My imagination’s earned currency of post-blackness in turn contributed to a moment of real tension at the end of my interview with Toure when we were talking about Barack Obama, and he asked “How do we create more Barack Obamas?”  In my response, I remember telling Toure that while Obama is certainly exceptional in that sense that he’s the U.S. head of state, he is also ordinary; he is the matter-of-fact product of his class origins and his elite education.  I know thousands of people who are proudly Black and intellectual, as Toure described him, but Obama’s existence, like theirs, like ours, was largely a matter of chance and the specifics of history.  An elite education produces a Barack Obama or any number of other specific kinds of black—or other—intellectuals. 

              

It is the constraint of capitalism that restricts those numbers.  My last sentence of that exchange was “And I think capitalism is a really bad idea.”  I remember that Toure responded with “Wow, we’ll really have to talk about that sometime.” 

              

This then might be a great time for all of us to talk about the currency of post-blackness within the terms of late capitalism in this moment of occupy everywhere.

***

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African & African American Studies at Duke University.  Lubiano is the editor of The House That Race Built:  Black Americans, US Terrain

This is What Democracy Looks Like: The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

This is What Democracy Looks Like:   

The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

by Mark Naison | NewBlackMan

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared.  Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants--, that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets.

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity.

First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated; one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish.  The young people in this movement—part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt—discovered  they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them. 

But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance.  

When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge—that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top.  What the Occupy movement created was a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another.  Do such free zones exist in our schools,  universities and workplaces?  If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did!  There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal-distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens.  To immigrants, and to people living in minority and working class communities, particularly young men, this insight is nothing new—they have experienced intimidation by police forces and other government authorities on an almost daily basis, not only in their neighborhoods, but in prisons and detention centers. But until the Occupy movement, most middle class Americans including college educated youth, could ignore abuses of police power or pretend that the most extreme examples (the police murder of an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens NY) were more the exception than the rule.

But now, for three months, the people of the United States have been exposed to a steady array of images of police forces using helicopters, bulldozers, sound cannons, tear gas and pepper spray not only against protesters peacefully assembling in universities and public parks, but against representatives of the press covering these events, and doing so with the collusion of the federal office of Homeland Security.  Not only were such police tactics borrowed from the playbook used by police in gentrifying cities to intimidate and contain minority youth, they drew upon post 9/11 National Security protocols used to combat terrorism such as closing bridges and subways and placing limits on what photographs might appear in the press.

In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers  in Birmingham in 1963.

If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like.”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But the given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative critics.

And that is a very good thing for the country.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depressionand White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Why Occupy Movements Unattached to Any Political Party Are The Only Hope for Real Change

Why Occupy Movements Unattached to Any Political Party Are The Only Hope for Real Change

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackman

Now that Occupy Movements are being evicted from public parks in cities throughout the country, almost invariably by Democratic mayors, many Democratic Party organizes and some labor activists are hoping the movement will fade away and concentrate its energies on electing progressive candidates for office and putting forth a progressive political agenda.

In my opinion, that would be a grave mistake.  There are a bevy of important issues that given current political alignments, and the power of money in American politics,  cannot be translated into a viable legislative agenda. It will take years of disruptive protest- strikes, boycotts, walkouts, sit ins and occupations- to place them on the national agenda and the only force in American society capable of  employing those tactics for a sustained period is the Occupy movement.

Here are some key issues that neither party is willing to take on that the Occupy movement can influence if it keeps growing and becoming more diverse in the next five years.

1. The student loan crisis and the escalating cost of a college education. There is no way, without major disruptions of university life, and pressure on the banks, that student loan debt can be erased, or significantly reduced, and tuition at public colleges frozen or lowered.  Until universities cannot carry on their normal business without making dramatic changes in loan collections and tuition charges, you can be sure elected officials won’t touch these issues with a ten foot pole.

2. The legalization of drugs and the release of non-violent drug offenders from the nation’s prisons. Given the powerful interests fighting any dismantling of the prison industrial complex-ranging from prison guards unions, to elected officials in communities where prisons are located, to corporations who benefit from cheap prison labor, it will require massive social movements, to force states, localities, and eventually the federal government, to end the irrational arrest and imprisonment of people who sell drugs no more dangerous than alcohol or prescription medications.

3. The dismantling of a domestic police state apparatus which uses advanced weaponry and intrusive surveillance technology to suppress dissent and control and intimidate minority and working class youth.  The weapons that were used against Occupy demonstrators in Oakland, at Zuccotti Park and at UC Davis have been used for many years against minority youth to prevent them from inhibiting the gentrification and re-segregation of American societies and to assure order in schools and communities stripped of resources.  Libertarians, civil rights organizations, and a growing Occupy movement can  create an alliance to  undermine the domestic police state. The two major parties will never do it without immense outside pressure.

4.  A moratorium on foreclosures and the passage of legislation to allow arts groups, youth groups,  affordable housing organizations and advocates for the homeless to occupy abandoned commercial and residential space in America’s towns and cities. Such actions will only be taken if Occupy groups and their allies make foreclosures difficult, and begin occupying abovementioned properties in such numbers that it will be counterproductive for authorities to evict them. There is no way elected officials will take such steps without being presented with a “fait accompli” by protesters.

5. A radical reformation of the tax system that places the burden of taxation on the 1 Percent and reduces taxes on individuals and small businesses.  There is no way, given current political alignments, and the vast power of  corporate and Wall Street lobbies, that that such a revolution in the tax code could be legislated. But five more years of disruptive protest could change that Occupy movements have to create a scenario where the only path to restoring social order would be a revision of the tax burden to benefit ordinary citizens

These five policy areas are hardly the only ones which would require years of protest to attain-I am sure people reading this could identify issues in education, environmental protection, job creation and US military policy that would require movements of equal force to implement

But I have identified these five areas to show how far away we are from any real political change in this country through the two major parties  We need grass roots social movements of such force that it will reinvent what is possible in mainstream American politics. The Occupy movements have started such a process. It would be a shame if they prematurely embraced the electoral process rather than pushing protests activity to much higher levels.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Social Media, Occupy, & Hip Hop in the Academy

Exceptional Brutality: Police Violence on Campus

Exceptional Brutality

by David J. Leonard and James Braxton Peterson | NewBlackMan

Like many, we have been outraged by recent episodes of police violence at UC Berkeley and UC Davis in recent weeks.  The sight of police officers brutalizing men and women with batons and pepper spray is antithetical to justice.  Yet, we have also become increasingly uncomfortable with the public discourse, one that has given an inordinate amount of attention to these instances, treating them as unique and exceptional rather than indicative of systemic state-sanctioned violence.  The overall tone of shock works from an idea that police violence should not happen on American college campuses. But in the absence of a similar level of outrage resulting from police violence in urban communities throughout the United States we are left wondering about the dangers in this exceptional discourse.  For example, in her otherwise powerful call for leadership, Cathy Davidson asks, “How could this be happening at Davis—and at other campuses too? Why are students who are peaceably protesting being treated like criminals?”  Rather than asking how could this happen at college campuses, shouldn’t we be asking how could this happen anywhere? How can any person be subjected to repression, violence, and instruments of dehumanization? A discourse that imagines police violence, whether bully-club justice or pepper spray, as proper when dealing with criminals rather than students gives us pause because of its inability to advance justice for all. 

Similarly Bob Ostertag, in “Militarization Of Campus Police,” furthers the denunciation of the violence at UC Davis through the systematic juxtaposition of students from real-criminals.

And regulations prohibit the use of pepper spray on inmates in all circumstances other than the immediate threat of violence. If a prisoner is seated, by definition the use of pepper spray is prohibited. Any prison guard who used pepper spray on a seated prisoner would face immediate disciplinary review for the use of excessive force. Even in the case of a prison riot in which inmates use extreme violence, once a prisoner sits down he or she is not considered to be an imminent threat. And if prison guards go into a situation where the use of pepper spray is considered likely, they are required to have medical personnel nearby to treat the victims of the chemical agent.

Apparently, in the state of California felons incarcerated for violent crimes have rights that students at public universities do not. 

Beyond the establishment of a binary that situates students in an oppositional relationship to felons, the logic here leads one to conclude that students are subjected to more state violence than those subjected to incarceration within the Prison Industrial Complex.  Worse yet, if anyone should be subjected to pepper stray, it should be felons who within the national imagination are both undesirable and dangerous, unworthy and suspect.   In yet another layer of news media irony, these recent displays of brutal and inhumane police force reaffirm the reluctance of black, brown, and poor folk to enter into the Occupy movement in the first place.  The specter of police brutality haunts poor, black, and brown communities.  Students’ experiences – with this commonly experienced interface between citizens and those charged with protecting citizens – garner lead-story status while daily victims struggle to find any modicum of public support, or media coverage, much less - justice.

The sentiment of exceptionalism is not limited to the public reaction to police violence at UC Davis.  It was equally evident in the wake of police brutally attacking members of Occupy Berkeley as part of their efforts to disperse the group and remove tents.  Prompting widespread condemnation from the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild, from various national commentators including Stephen Colbert, the police violence against Berkeley students elicited a disproportionate level of attention.  In our estimation, the attention and the rhetorical tone reflects the presumed exceptionalism of these instances and the presumed innocence and humanity reserved for students. 

We wonder also how these peaceful demonstrations – violently policed – compare to those violent ‘demonstrations’ moderately policed at Penn State University.  Somehow students violently demonstrating in support of a football program in an academic institution that is allegedly complicit in the rape and sexual abuse of children, warrant greater consideration than students peaceably demonstrating in solidarity with OWS and in support of their own challenges with the rising costs of college tuition.  Something simply is not right here.  The police acting on behalf of the state/institution is now commonplace praxis in the 21^st century.  But the synthesis of these recent actions with certain ideological positions and the media’s depiction and coverage of these events paints a sinister portrait of police institutions.  KRS ONE’s critical question,– “Who Protects Us from You?” – directed at the boys in blue circa 1989  – remains eerily unanswered.

The media coverage and the outrage, while warranted, illustrates how police violence against students – middle-class and overwhelmingly white – prompts outrage while eliciting accountability, whereas the daily violence against the poor, against communities of color, often goes unnoticed and unchecked.  “Not to diminish what happened at UC Davis, but it's worth considering what happens in poor neighborhoods and prisons, far from the cameras. I'm not saying that to diminish this video in anyway,” writes Ta-Nishi Coates in “The Cops we deserve.” “But I'd like people to see this as part of a broad systemic attitude we've adopted as a country toward law enforcement. There's a direct line from this officer invoking his privilege to brutalize these students, and an officer invoking his privilege to detain Henry Louis Gates for sassing him.”

In treating violence on college campuses, and that directed at student protestors as exceptional and therefore deserving national attention, the conversation inadvertently normalizes and erases the much more commonplace violence experienced by black and brown youth in communities throughout the United States.  Worse yet, the emphasis on the students as undeserving in comparison to those “real criminals” advances a Jim Crow system of justice where the systemic level of state violence besieging America’s poor and communities of color is rendered as justifiable.  “Bridging communities is difficult, writes Erinn Carter. Yet “Connecting the day-to-day struggles of communities of color to the immediate violence of police brutality is something that groups must do if they are going to garner the support of the community.”  What happened at Davis and Berkeley is what happens in communities across America, where black and brown youth, where America’s poor, are subjected to the power of the state, a militarized police that holds in check those populations that are deemed surplus, undesirable, and suspect in the national imagination.

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackManand blogs @ No Tsuris.

James Braxton Peterson is director of Africana Studies and associate professor of English, Lehigh University. Peterson’s academic work focuses on Africana studies, narrative, graphic novels, and hip-hop culture. He is the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC, an association of hip-hop generational scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip-hop, urban, and youth cultures. Peterson is a regular contributor to The Root.com and he has appeared on Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, ABC News, ESPN, and various local television networks as an expert on hip-hop culture, popular culture, urban youth, and politics.