Black in America w/ Marc Lamont Hill, Imani Perry, Eddie Glaude & Toure

BEMultiMedia

 

Black Enterprise talks being Black In America on the Our World TV show with Marc Lamont Hill, and special guests Toure, Imani Perry, and Eddie Glaude.

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. 

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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.

Imani Perry on the Significance of the MLK Memorial

The Michael Eric Dyson Show

Friday August 26, 2011

 

Imani Perry on the Significance of the MLK Memorial

Despite the threat from Hurricane Irene, visitors are beginning to gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the opening of the new memorial dedicated to fallen Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King Jr. But how diverse is this group? A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed that seven out of 10 Americans are interested in visiting the new MLK memorial, but that number has some huge racial disparities. We talk to Dr. Imani Perry, professor in the Center for African-American Studies at Princeton University, to help us make sense of those numbers and to explore the larger significance of the MLK memorial.

Listen Now: Dr. Imani Perry

Imani Perry Reviews 'Malcolm X: A Life of Re-Invention'

'Malcolm X,' by Manning Marable

Review by Imani Perry | Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, April 24, 2011

In the early 1990s, it was popular for African American teenagers and young adults to wear T-shirts with images of Malcolm X that read, "Our own black shining prince," a reference to Ossie Davis' poignant eulogy of the slain leader. At that time, the embrace of Malcolm X, particularly by young hip-hop fans, seemed a deliberate counterpoint to the sanitized, mainstream and universally celebrated image of Martin Luther King Jr.

Malcolm X was, in our iconic rendering, the unapologetic black radical voice for freedom and justice. He served an important symbolic role for a post-civil rights generation of African Americans who faced the devastating long-term effects of deindustrialization, poverty, educational inequality and mass incarceration.

Now, some 20 years later, with the publication of Manning Marable's "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," the public is being challenged to dismantle the iconography of the "black shining prince" and confront Malcolm X as an incredibly complex and at times deeply conflicted figure.

Impassioned conflicts have arisen over the content of the biography. Salacious interest in whether Malcolm had homosexual encounters; whether he and his wife, Betty, were unfaithful to each other; whether he and Alex Haley misrepresented his story in "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"; and whether the convicted parties were actually the ones responsible for his murder have been matched with outrage at the manner in which Marable unflinchingly presents Malcolm X as a fallible human being.

Marable's death, just a few days before his book's release, feels like a last gasp of herculean effort, a final, noble offering from a path-breaking historian and political scientist. While the author's absence facilitates some of the melodramatic reaction to his magnum opus, we are forced to defend or decry without his input.

But in truth, although the conflict over the content has probably driven sales and attention to the book, the brilliance of this biography has little if anything to do with its apparently shocking revelations. Marable has crafted an extraordinary portrait of a man and his time. Malcolm moves through the social and intellectual history of mid-20th century black America, and his periods of growth and stagnation mirror the tides of black life.

Read the Full Review @ The San Francisco Chronicle

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Imani Perry is a professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.

Transcending Racial Inequality: Imani Perry on the Brian Lehrer Show

from WNYC

Transcending Racial Inequality | Monday, April 11, 2011

Imani Perry, professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and author of the new book More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States , discusses persistent racial inequality in the U.S. and the way forward.

New Book! More Beautiful and More Terrible The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States

More Beautiful and More Terrible
The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States
by Imani Perry

272 pages
February, 2011
ISBN: 9780814767375

For a nation that often optimistically claims to be post-racial, we are still mired in the practices of racial inequality that plays out in law, policy, and in our local communities. One of two explanations is often given for this persistent phenomenon: On the one hand, we might be hypocritical—saying one thing, and doing or believing another; on the other, it might have little to do with us individually but rather be inherent to the structure of American society.

More Beautiful and More Terrible compels us to think beyond this insufficient dichotomy in order to see how racial inequality is perpetuated. Imani Perry asserts that the U.S. is in a new and distinct phase of racism that is “post-intentional”: neither based on the intentional discrimination of the past, nor drawing upon biological concepts of race. Drawing upon the insights and tools of critical race theory, social policy, law, sociology and cultural studies, she demonstrates how post-intentional racism works and maintains that it cannot be addressed solely through the kinds of structural solutions of the Left or the values arguments of the Right. Rather, the author identifies a place in the middle—a space of “righteous hope”—and articulates a notion of ethics and human agency that will allow us to expand and amplify that hope.

To paraphrase James Baldwin, when talking about race, it is both more terrible than most think, but also more beautiful than most can imagine, with limitless and open-ended possibility. Perry leads readers down the path of imagining the possible and points to the way forward.

Reviews

“Imani Perry has done it again. With an uncanny ability to merge art, law, social science, and cultural studies, she weaves a powerful analysis of race in contemporary America.” -- Patricia Hill Collins, author Another Kind of Public Education

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Imani Perry is a professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization and a J.D. both from Harvard and is the author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop.

Black Women and Advertising--Imani Perry on the Pepsi "Love Hurts" commercial

'Left of Black': Episode #18 featuring Randall Robinson and Imani Perry

Left of Black #18—January 24, 2011
w/Mark Anthony Neal

In this episode of Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by activist and author Randall Robinson in a conversation about the legacy of Black activism, reparations for African-Americans and growing up in Richmond, VA with his bother, the late television journalist Max Robinson. Neal also talks with Princeton University Professor Imani Perry, author of the new book More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (NYU Press)

→Randall Robinson is the author of An Unbroken Agony and the national bestsellers The Debt, The Reckoning, and Defending the Spirit. He is also founder and past president of TransAfrica, the African-American organization he established to promote enlightened, constructive U.S. policies toward Africa and the Caribbean.

→Imani Perry is is a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of More Terrible, More Beautiful, The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the U.S. and Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke Press)

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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.