Michel Martin: What's Hair Got To Do With It?

Cullen Jones Gives Tamron Hall a Swimming Lesson

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#BlackFolkSwimFast: Cullen Jones and Lia Neal Are Headed to London

Two young Olympians are poised to change "what they say" about African-Americans and swimming

#BlackFolkSwimFast: 

Cullen Jones and Lia Neal Are Headed to London

by Mark Anthony Neal | Ebony.com

Swimming has been both a source of humor and trepidation within Black communities.  While the high drowning rates of Black youth are reaching epidemic proportions, according to Talia Mark of USA Swimming, the other-side of the spectrum finds punchlines associated with the disbelief that Black folk, do in fact swim. This disbelief was brilliantly illustrated in the second season premiere of the web series Black Folk Don’t. Yet between the tragedy and the guffaws, are two swimmers—one, an American record holder in the 50 Meter Freestyle and the other a 17-year-old teenager from Brooklyn—who not only swim, but swim fast enough to represent the United States in the upcoming London Olympics.

For Cullen Jones, earning a berth on the 2012 United State Olympic Team, is déjà vu; Jones won a Gold Medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing for his role on the 4x100 Freestyle relay that also included Michael Phelps.  2012 represents a different scenario for Jones as his first place finish in the 50m Freestyle and second place finish in the 100m Freestyle at the Olympic Trials in Omaha, Nebraska offer his first chances to win a medal in an individual event at the Olympics.  Anthony Ervin, who was the first American swimmer of African descent (he is part Jewish, Native American and Black) to win a Gold Medal in Swimming in 2000, also made the Olympic team finishing second in the 50m Freestyle.

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Left of Black S2:E29 | Creating S.T.E.M. Researchers in the “Hood” and Combating Obesity in Black Communities

Left of Black S2:E29 | April 23, 2012

Creating S.T.E.M. Researchers in the “Hood” and Combating Obesity in Black Communities

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined via Skype by Professor Christopher Emdin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology at Teachers College—Columbia University, where he also serves as Director of Secondary School Initiatives at the Urban Science Education Center.  The author of Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation, Emdin and Neal discuss pedagogical strategies for making S.T.E.M. Research interesting and attractive for urban students,  and the role of urban environments in inspiring such research.

Later, Neal is joined in the Left of Blackstudios by Professor Gary Bennett, a clinical psychologist and social epidemiologist. Bennett is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University where he is Director of the Duke Obesity Prevention Program(DOPP) & member of the Duke Global Health Initiative.  Bennett and Neal discuss the obesity epidemic in Black communities and its impact on health disparities.  Also, Bennett and Neal converse about the increased importance of mobile technology in allowing patients to have better outcomes with regards to their health. Finally Bennett addresses the importance of HBCUs in creating a pipeline for the next generation of S.T.E.M. researchers.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for free download in HD @ iTunes U

Seven Minutes of 'Red Tails'

RT Clip from Tambay Obenson on Vimeo.

Thabiti Lewis: Ballers of the New School [video]

from Projection HBW

Professor Thabiti Lewis came to the University of Kansas on October 24 and discussed his book Ballers of the New School. In his lecture he urged the audience to consider the role of race in the sweaty as well as the sweat-free zones of sport. He argues that American sport culture performs and propagates rituals, symbols and expressions of fear and difference that sustain racism and notions of racial supremacy. He explains the continuation of these symbols and notions blocks bridges to racial progress.

Video Design Credit: Brandon Hill--University Kansas Student of Film and Media Studies

Black Athletes and the Racial Politics of Sickle Cell

Black Athletes and the Racial Politics of Sickle Cell

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

With the Raiders losing on Sunday, the Denver Broncos backpedaled their way into the 2012 NFL playoffs.  Although guaranteeing one more week of conversations about Tim Tebow, a fact that no one should wish for, their playoff birth is dramatically impacting the Pittsburgh Steelers and more specifically their safety Ryan Clark.   On Monday, Tomlin announced that Clark would be unable to play with the team because he has a sickle-cell trait, which can cause problems in high altitude situations.  During a 2007 game in Denver, Clark became terribly ill.  Doctors had to remove his spleen and gallbladder; as a result of his organs being deprived of oxygen, Clark lost an astounding 30 pounds.

While the threat to his life is significant, and the decision to skip the game would seem to be a no-brainer, Clark had planned to play.  “I mean, everybody knows I want to play and I would have played,” Clark told ESPN. “I talked to my doctors and we actually had a plan in place for me to play. All things pointed to me going until (Tomlin) told me I can't. He said he wouldn't have let his son play and so I'm not playing either.”  It would be easy to dismiss Clark’s comments, assuming that his plans to play were never realistic or possible.  Yet, it is not hard to imagine an NFL player risking life and limb to play “on any given Sunday.” 

In an Associated Press story on San Diego Charges offensive Lineman, Kris Dielman, acknowledged a willingness to risk his health in his pursuit to win a Super Bowl title.  Dielman, who missed 10 games as a result of a concussion, had a seizure during a post-game team flight, resulting in him being rushed to the hospital.  “This was definitely a scare.  Waking up in the hospital with my wife standing over me, that was pretty scary. I don’t scare easy, but that was something different.” Neither this scare nor his 2 kids at home changed his approach to the game.  He is not alone.  Two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that half of the players (23/44) of the players they interviewed admitted that, “they would try to conceal a possible concussion rather than pull themselves out of a game.”  So it should surprise no one that Clark wants to play.  

In a sport and a culture that defines masculinity through toughness, invincibility, and competitive fire. In a world of sports that values “winning at all costs” and “a never quit attitude,” Clark’s response reflects the masculinist orientation of sports culture.  This is why Coach Mike Tomlin’s decision to hold Clark out of the game, and his unwillingness to ask his players to do anything he wouldn’t feel comfortable asking his children to do, is one worth celebrating.  It challenges the culture of masculinity and the ways in which a football culture puts victories and a particular vision of masculinity ahead of everything else.

What has also been striking in the media coverage of Clark’s situation is the absence of any discussion of sickle cell/sickle cell trait in relationship to African Americans.  There is a missed opportunity here to differentiate between the trait and disease; Clark has the trait and not the disease.  While some articles discussed the medical science related to sickle-cell and how it put him at risk in high altitude settings, with most treating his inability to play as another sports-related “injury story,” there is bigger story here as it relates to sickle cell and African Americans.  

This erasure fits with a larger history whereupon the health issues faced by people of color are rendered invisible.   Writing about the Black Panther Party and its efforts “to raise public consciousness about sickle cell anemia,”  Alondra Nelson states in Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. “The condition became a rallying cry for other representatives of the black community.”    The media missed an opportunity to highlight how this disease disproportionately impacts African Americans.  In the United States, 1 in 12 African Americans carries the sickle cell trait (1 in 500 have the disease). 

The missed opportunity reflects an overall failure to acknowledge the ways in which sickle cell disproportionately impacts African Americans.  As Imani Perry told me, “Being at higher risk, because one belongs to a particular ethnic group, has to be distinguished from the idea that the disease is actually a consequence of race, which is a social construct” notes the Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, “Some diseases are more likely to be found in particular ethnic or racial groups, but that may be a product of environmental conditions or history rather than some genetics that correlate to what we call race.” 

While race is a social construction, with zero biological imperative, this disease effects African Americans in devastating ways.  In “Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health,” Keith Wailoo argues that “history of sickle cell anemia in the United States,” is a story of “transformation from an ‘invisible’ malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering.”

Ryan Clark’s situation was an opportunity to highlight and encourage public awareness in an effort to address this inequality.  Likewise, it provided an opportunity to illustrate the ways in which race is a social and political construction while elucidating the relationship between sickle cell and African Americans.  As with the 1970s that saw not only an increased awareness regarding the impact of sickle cell on African Americans but financial support for targeted treatment of health disparities, instances like Ryan Clark highlight such opportunities. 

According to James Braxton Peterson, associate professor and director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University:

Clark's presentation of the sickle cell trait is a painful reminder of the ways in which genetic predisposition to disease (and broader distinctions in health and health care along racial lines) continue to remain absent from health care discourses. The subject has become taboo because it runs counter to post-racial fantasies of colorblindness or what I like to call - just plain old blindness. That Clark's condition is manifest on the "level" playing field of a football stadium puts into bold relief the ways in which blindness in health care - whether its the gender lag that attaches to breast cancer research resources or the racial/class lag of diseases like sickle cell anemia -- results in the same diminished care as a direct result of social ignorance and the biased distribution of health care resources.

The NFL should take a lesson from Tomlin and Clark, putting the health of the PEOPLE who play the game ahead of anything else.  Likewise, the nation should take a lesson from Tomlin and Clark, putting the health of PEOPLE ahead of anything else, addressing the issue of sickle cell with greater concern and attention. 

***

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.  Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness will be published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

Why Black Media Needs to Succeed In Digital to Accelerate Innovation

Why Black Media Needs to Succeed In Digital to Accelerate Innovation

by Navarrow Wright | HuffPost BlackVoices

African Americans Are Trendsetters

We have always been trendsetters whether it's fashion, gadgets, music, or businesses African Americans have been pioneers in most cases. As I think about my early days growing up I realize that it was because of black media that I always known how we impacted the world. This in turn gave me the confidence to realize that I to could to one day help set trends as well. In times when it was almost impossible to find black images for us to emulate, we found them on black media outlets. Whether is was the Jet and Ebony on your dining room table, The black radio stations that Cathy Hughes created for us with Radio One or Bob Johnson giving us images on the TV with BET. We always had these outlets to help us understand we were making an impact in the world.

The other things that these companies showed us was that there were opportunities for innovation for African Americans in their respective industries. If there was no Jet or Ebony would there have been a Vibe, Source, Giant or Black Enterprise? If not for Radio One we would not have the powerful black music that motivates us today or the strong syndicated voices like Tom Joyner, or Yolanda Adams. And with TV there are too many examples to begin to mention. The point is that the success of these media businesses created an ecosystem of success for African Americans in those areas.

The Digital Problem

So now we are faced with a new wave of innovation, the digital age, which presents it's own set of challenges for African Americans and it's own set of opportunities for black media. We have not had as strong of a showing in black media on the digital front as we have had in more traditional forms of media. I ask you to name 5 products (Not Sites) that exist for African Americans (Web or Mobile) right now. I believe you will be hard pressed to so do so. In the age of Facebook and Twitter these product platforms create opportunities for content to have life of it's own and for the users to become tastemakers and curators. Even the most active content communities recognize that they need these platforms to create the type of engagement and the viral reach needed to make their digital platforms successful. Even mainstream media companies like Conde Nast have seen the need in a product platform to create growth in this age, which explains their purchase of Reddit.

While there is currently no shortage of content sites for African Americans there are currently few product options that cater to African Americans even though sites like twitter have proven we can and will engage in these products in mass. Our users currently get that engagement in these products but still desire for those products to allow the items and topics that are culturally relevant to be front and center. Something those products will never give them due to their mainstream focus.

Multicultural is Not the Same as Black

Part of the reason why these products do not exist is because certain perceptions have been created that have devalued the focus on the African American audience. People now use catch all phrases like "hip hop demographic" or "urban" to encapsulate the black audience. While books like Steve Stoute's Tanning of America have done a great job showing how these subcultures have influenced mainstream America but I would contend that the "tanning" piece of this is due to the innovations coming from African Americans and those terms don't speak to the breadth and needs of African-American culture. Latino focused media companies are currently much more successful at this in the digital space in their ability to create offerings that are both culturally relevant and engaging while also showing the value of their audience's diversity to mainstream consumers and the advertising community.

Why We Need Black Media To Succeed In Digital

With the lack of digital products catering to our audience and the dilution of our audience's unique value proposition, where should we look for that ecosystem to be created? Where we have always looked, Black media. As black media companies are successful in the digital space creating products for this audience they will once again be able to create iconic examples of what success looks in the digital space so that we can encourage other entrepreneurs to model that behavior as they have on other media platforms. This is not a new problem. I've personally been working on this for over a decade during my time at BET and in co-founding Globalgrind.com. But in both of those experiences I've realized that a media company that has both and strong product and a strong media platform is key to accelerating this growth. This is one of the reason I'm excited to be at Interactive One. We have the ability to reach African Americans across three mediums (Radio, TV and Online). We also understand the value and having products to anchor those experiences are in the process of developing a new version of Blackplanet . I am personally spearheading this project and am excited to help revitalize this brand for a new generation. There also needs to be an effort to create a digital entrepreneurship pipeline within our audience as well. Interactive One was sponsor of the NewME Accelerator program, which was featured on CNN's Black in America but that was just one example of the many things we can do and other media companies can do. I believe it's important for us all to push for Black media to be successful in digital. It's important for their future as well as ours.

Follow Navarrow Wright on Twitter: www.twitter.com/navarrowwright

***

Navarrow Wright is the CTO of Interactive One. Interactive One is a digital and print media company focusing on the African-American and urban market. As CTO Wright is responsible for the technical strategy of all the Interactive One online properties which include Hellobeautiful, The UrbanDaily, NewsOne, Elev8 and BlackPlanet. He is also responsible for the technical management of the Radio One Network’s radio sites.

Google GlobalHue on the Black Digital Presence [video]

Google and GlobalHue teamed up with OTX to understand what role search and other digital advertising technologies play in African Americans' purchasing decisions. The research compared their receptivity to ads and explored how they use digital in their everyday lives.

Read then Google GlobalHue Digital African-American Dynamic Whitepaper:

'The Black List' Opens at the National Portrait Gallery

Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Presents 


“The Black List: Photographs by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders”

Historically, the term “blacklist” referred to a group of people marginalized and denied work or social approval. Created out of the inspiration to change the meaning of the term to become that of a roll call of distinction, “The Black List: Photographs by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders,” will open at the National Portrait Gallery Oct. 28. The exhibition includes all 50 of the photographic portraits that Greenfield-Sanders created and a small theater with a continuous loop of the three volume film The Black List. The exhibition will be at the museum through April 22, 2012.

The idea for this project grew out of a conversation Greenfield-Sanders had with author Toni Morrison in which they discussed a book of photographs that would document the many talented performers Morrison had auditioned for her opera, Margaret Garner. The idea to create a book percolated with Greenfield-Sander, who began to think about all the African Americans he knew and had photographed. He made a list of people whose talents reached into the worlds of arts, politics and beyond. Working with the idea to create something around African American achievement, he contacted his friend, NPR correspondent and former New York Times film critic, Elvis Mitchell, to discuss the project. Together they expanded the list and Mitchell suggested that they call it “The Black List.”

Greenfield-Sanders created large-format fine-art photographs and directed the film; Mitchell interviewed the subjects, documenting the experiences of the individuals selected for “The Black List.” Together they created a visual “who’s who” of African Americans.

“‘The Black List,’ stands at the intersection of American history, biography and portraiture by reclaiming a historically negative term and presenting a nuanced recognition of struggles, joys, troubles and triumph,” said Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “The people who are featured in this important project are representative of the diverse experiences of African Americans today.”

The photographs and video depict all 50 subjects, including actor and comedian Whoopi Goldberg, musician John Legend, chairman and CEO of the United Negro College Fund Michael Lomax, Morrison, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, comedian Chris Rock, the Rev. Al Sharpton, artist Kara Walker and athlete Serena Williams.

AT&T is the sponsor of “The Black List: Photographs by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.” The filmed interviews in the exhibition are made available courtesy of TV One.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
           

Greenfield-Sanders is an internationally know photographer and Grammy Award-winning filmmaker. His portraits of political leaders and cultural icons have earned him a place in more than 25 museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery tells the history of America through the individuals who have shaped its culture. Through the visual arts, performing arts and new media, the Portrait Gallery portrays poets and presidents, visionaries and villains, actors and activists whose lives tell the American story.

The National Portrait Gallery is part of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture at Eighth and F streets N.W., Washington, D.C. Website: npg.si.edu. Smithsonian information: (202) 633-1000; (202) 633-5285 (TTY).

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Film Teaser: Byron Hurt's 'Soul Food Junkies'

Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the health advantages and disadvantages of Soul Food, a quintessential American cuisine. Soul food will also be used as the lens to investigate the dark side of the food industry and the growing food justice movement that has been born in its wake.

Foreclosure Crisis Intensified Among Blacks: Study

from The Huffington Post

Foreclosure Crisis Intensified Among Blacks: Study
by William Alden

African Americans have suffered disproportionately from foreclosures due to racially discriminatory lending practices, a new study shows.

The study, authored by Douglas Massey and Jacob Rugh of Princeton, looks at racially segregated neighborhoods, where the percentage of minorities (particularly blacks, Hispanics and Asians) is higher than in the country as a whole. Using a black "dissimilarity index" to measure how a region's African-American makeup differs from the national percentage, the authors found that one standard deviation increase in this index -- when a community is slightly blacker than the nation as a whole -- increases the number of foreclosures by 15,028 and the foreclosure rate by 1.68 percentage points. As Salmon points out, that's quite high, given that the nation's foreclosure rate is 4.14 percent.

Before the housing bubble burst, blacks were more likely than their white counterparts to be given "subprime" loans, with high (or increasing) interest rates and hidden fees. It's a practice often referred to as "predatory lending." As Reuters notes, blacks with similar credit scores to whites were given worse deals on their loans, suggesting that race played a role in the way some lenders structured these deals.

Among lenders that went bankrupt in 2007, blacks were three times more likely than whites to receive subprime loans, according to a previous study that the authors cite in their report. Among lenders that did not go bankrupt, blacks were equally as likely as whites to receive "predatory" treatment.

The structures of these subprime mortgages made default especially likely, contributing in large part to the housing market meltdown that led to the financial crisis. But lenders didn't have to worry about the risk of default: With the rise of mortgage securitization in the 1980s, lenders could originate loans and sell them off to banks, which repackaged them and sold them to investors. The popularity of mortgage-backed derivatives, especially collateralized debt obligations, in the years leading up to the crisis created a huge demand for subprime, high-yield bonds -- which in turn encouraged some lenders to engage in ever riskier practices.

Racial segregation concentrated and intensified the fallout from racially motivated lending practices, the study says. It also facilitated the lending in the first place, since lenders could target communities that they knew to be disproportionately black or Hispanic.

"Hispanic and black home owners, not to mention entire Hispanic and black neighborhoods, bore the brunt of the foreclosure crisis," the study says. The authors say the nation's civil rights legislation must be amended to include more effective mechanisms for enforcement.

Read Study Here

The Religion (and Race) of the President:Obama as National Scapegoat

from the Huffington Post

The Religion (and Race) of the President:
Obama as National Scapegoat
by Eddie Glaude, Jr.

"There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state....And it is the corruptors of religion who are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion." -- Kenneth Burke

I have not been able, until now, to understand fully the debate about President Obama's religious commitments. How some Americans move seamlessly from questioning Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright to accusations that he is Muslim genuinely baffles me. The fact that he is our first black president offers a bit of an explanation. But something deeper is going on here -- and something quite familiar.

President Obama has become our national scapegoat. He leads the nation in a moment in which economic and political upheavals threaten our social order -- where the very myth of American progress has fallen on bad times. Many Americans have selected him to represent all that is wrong and irresolvable about our current malaise and to transfer their iniquities onto his body and into his policies. In doing so, Obama as scapegoat becomes the occasion to give voice to an alternative vision of social life. Glenn Beck happily offered his version. Other Republicans will do so as we approach November.

Of course, Obama isn't alone in this regard. As Linton Weeks noted "hating on the president is a great American pastime." We need only recall the Bush and Clinton years. But the response to Obama is different. The fact of his blackness, whether we acknowledge it or not, links this ritual to the complex histories of race that shadow our democratic form of life. And the rites of renunciation that have characterized so much of our politics today -- by the "Republican party of no" and by the Tea Party, an ironic iteration of the mask of American beginnings (after all, they did dress up as "Indians" in Boston) -- make possible a new sense of unity, a new social order among some "white folks."

Threats, real or imagined, to the social order in the US have occasioned historically ritual acts to consolidate "white identity" and the idea of community that gives it life. For example, during the era of Jim Crow, lynchings became an important tool not only to defend segregation but, through the ritual act itself, enabled a collective disavowal of the obvious ways segregation contradicted our professed democratic commitments. Christianity often played a key role.

In June of 1903, a mob gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, determined to sacrifice George White, a black man accused of rape and murder. Speaking to the angry crowd was Reverend Robert Elwood of Olivet Presbyterian Church. He took his text from Corinthians 5:13, "to expel the wicked man from among you," and he urged the courts to determine White's guilt immediately so that justice could be administered. Here the language of religion sacralized the violence that would offer the community an exit from their guilt.

George White was transfigured into that symbol which contained all of the anxieties of a group. Like most black victims of lynching, he was the rapist and murderer. The realities of their lives, lives haunted by violence, were emptied as they were transformed into a dangerous threat to the social order. And the endless repetition of the stereotype came to stand in for the actual human beings; black folk would become the anti-social deviants who threatened the social order and were in need of vigilant policing.

African-American participation in the public domain would require, and still does, constant negotiation of the stereotype. Either we have to become Bigger Thomas or Biggie Smalls, or we have to become, as James Baldwin noted, blank -- raceless.

Black scapegoats then trade in stereotypes, and Obama has not been able to escape their scandalous work. It began with the unsettling idea that Obama was not who he claimed to be -- that he was of foreign birth, that lurking beneath his cool exterior was an angry black man waiting, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted, to exact revenge. Subsequently, Obama has been transposed as a militant black Christian, as a sympathizer with the New Black Panther Party, or believed to be a Muslim, the latest standard representation of threat to social order.

His ritual sacrifice enables those who have robbed the national coffers in the name of security and who have lined the pockets of the rich at the expense of everyone else to collectively disavow the contradiction of their practices with our stated democratic ideals.

I want to be clear. I am not referring here to intentional acts of racism or expressions of racial hatred. That's too easy. Moreover, such accusations too often downplay the real and deeply-felt sense among many Americans that they are losing ground. What I am noting is a ritual practice that reproduces certain meanings about race, undermine our democratic commitments, and block the path to a new imagining of the nation. Americans are really good at exorcising demons, especially our racial ones, in order to affirm our inherent goodness, but we find it terribly difficult to look directly at ourselves in the mirror.

Obama's role in this scapegoat ritual only deepens our evasion of the reality of American life. Many refuse to see him. They rather deal with endlessly repeated lies of who he is; and religious talk like Beck's that shade too easily into troublesome patriotic calls can sanctify these ideas. But Obama also engages in what can be called self-scapegoating. In his evasion of the issues of race, in his insistence on occupying a version of the stereotype (a "blank man" of sorts), he has enabled the ritual to tighten its grip on our national psyches. What other options does he have?

Much more is required of us all. But, first, and it is a necessity upon which our destiny depends, we must look ourselves squarely in the face and confront who we truly are if we are to be release into a new future.

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Eddie Glaude is a founding member and Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project. Dr. Glaude is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. Hes is the author of Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and the editor of Is it Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and, with Cornel West, of African American Religious Studies: An Anthology (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003). Follow Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. on Twitter.