“America Has Never Been America”: Whiteness, Nostalgia and HBO’s The Newsroom

“America Has Never Been America”: 

Whiteness, Nostalgia and HBO’s The Newsroom

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

There is a speech making its rounds in the blogosphere and on social media that seems to galvanizing (parts of liberal) America.  Unfortunately, it isn’t Malcolm’s “Ballot or the Bullet,” Fannie Lou Hamer’s brilliance at the 1968 Democratic Convention, King’s “Beyond Vietnam” or Fred Hampton’s inspiring language, but rather Jeff Daniels’ monologue at the beginning of HBO’s Newsroom.  Capturing Aaron Sorkin’s propensity for sappy dialogue that is drunk on optimism, this speech also reflects his propensity to see the world through binaries, often erasing the complexities, divisions, and inequalities that define culture, politics, and society.  It also embodies a disturbing level of nostalgia that seems commonplace within televisual culture.  From Mad Men(more discussion here) to Pan-AM, contemporary TV (and film – The Help) is rooted in nostalgia for the past, one that fails to account for the less than idyllic world for people of color, women, the GLBT community, and others whose dreams remain deferred.  

In responding to a young woman’s question about America’s greatness (American Exceptionalism), Will (Daniels) launched into a lengthy monologue:

Will: It's not the greatest country in the world, professor, 

that's my answer.

Moderator [pause]: You're saying—

Will: Yes.

Moderator: Let's talk about—

Will: Fine. [to the liberal panelist] Sharon, the NEA is a loser. Yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paychecks, but he [gesturing to the conservative panelist] gets to hit you with it anytime he wants. It doesn't cost money, it costs votes. It costs airtime and column inches. You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fuckin' smart, how come they lose so GODDAM ALWAYS!

And [to the conservative panelist] with a straight face, you're going to tell students that America's so starspangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. Two hundred seven sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.

And you—sorority girl—yeah—just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies. None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about?! Yosemite?!!!

As I initially watched this Olberman-esque sermon, I was intrigued, although I didn’t find the information or the argument particularly powerful – it was unusual for mainstream TV.  It also did speak to how whiteness operates, whereupon Will or Sorkin can challenge American Exceptionalism without their patriotism or citizenship being questioned; yet people of color cannot offer these same arguments without denunciation and demonization. My interest quickly turned from frustration to annoyance to disgust to outrage as he continued with his myopic and white-colored lecture:

We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn't belittle it; it didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

In a blink of an eye, Sorkin transports viewers from the problems of today to a time worthy of celebration and memory.  In erasing the violence, inequality, segregation, dehumanization, and denied rights, the monologue nostalgically imagines an exceptional time in American history.  It offers evidence of and potential for the American Dream; it sees the past as time for meritocracy.  America’s greatness rests with the hard work and perseverance of previous generation.  It exists with a time when anyone could live out his or her dream. At the same time, the show imagined a time where people struggled and triumphed, overcoming obstacles through personal responsibility, hard work, and community.

What a crock; clearly we need to crack open a history book in Hollywood. Ernest Hardy offered his assessment of the clip in a Facebook post:

Ugh. I really, really, really hate this ahistorical bullshit paean to an America that never existed. Every time I watch this clip, I think of Black GI's who were denied the same loans as their white brothers-in-arms when they returned from WWII; of the Black men used as lab rats in Tuskegee to help America reach those dizzying heights of medical breakthroughs; of the Black women who endured all sorts of emotional/sexual/psychological horrors that ‘The Help’ would never have the balls to really detail; I see Medgar Evers' assassinated in his driveway in a warm-up to the murders of Dr. King and Malcolm X. Fuck this angry white dude rewrite and whitewash of history.

His comments and the scene itself made me think of a spoken word piece I wrote a few years ago regarding “the greatest generation” and this commonplace racial amnesia:

The greatest generation

You mean the Jim Crow generation

White only signs, lynchings, and the Klan

You mean the Scottsboro generation

One of many incarcerated from the generations of blacks in American

You mean the sharecropper generation

Debt servitude, enslavement, and no protections

You mean the Tom, Coon and mammy generation

Hollywood representations: Amos, Andy, and Mammy

You mean the Emmett Till generation

Murder a boy for whistling, like so many others

You mean the Japanese internment generation

“No Japs allowed,” excepted in Hawaii and in the military

You mean the atom-bomb generation

Killin 1000s, but none It Italy or Germany

You mean the segregated military generation

German prisoners first, freedom and democracy not for you

You mean the St. Louis generation

A war to save the Jews, just not those on the St. Louis or 1000s others

You mean the McCarthyism generation

Red scares, loyalty oaths, and the absence of dissent

You mean the Zoot Suit Riot generation

Soldiers attacking all who are Mexican

You mean the Bracero program generation

Give us your tired, your exploitable, your cheap

You mean the operation wetback generation

Don’t give your brown, black and yellow

You mean the bordering school generation

‘Speak English,” not the savage tongue of your inferior generations

You mean the white affirmative action generation

GI Bills, suburban homes and white American Dreams

Dreams made for a white generation

You mean the restrictive covenant generation

“Whites only,” America’s ghettos become black and brown

The greatest generation

The greatest generation

1960s youth who stood face to face with Exceptional violence

Who stood toe to toe with police dogs, fire hoses, and COINTELPRO

The greatest generation

Malcolm, Martin, Cesar, Shirley, Cha Cha, Fred

The greatest generation

Fredrick Douglas, David Walker, Sojourner Truth

The greatest generation

Ida B. Wells, Clarence Darrow and Zapata

The greatest generation

Curt Flood, Tommie Smith and Muhammad Ali

The greatest generation

Amzie Moore, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer

The greatest generation

BPP, Young Lords, TWLF, AIM

The greatest generation

Alcatraz, blowouts, Palante Siempre Palante

The greatest generation

“Serve the people,” “power to the people”

The greatest generation

Hip Hop

The greatest generation

Anti Apartheid

The greatest generation

Carlos Delgado, Etan Thomas, Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul Rauf

The greatest generation

Books not prisons, Books not Bombs

The greatest generation

Walkouts and blowouts,

The greatest generation

Down with 187, 209, 227

The greatest generation?

Ain’t never been THE GREATEST GENERATION TO ME

In other words, despite the nostalgia and the historic amnesia of Newsroom, one that reflects its social location and the refusal to interrogate privilege, America’s exceptionalism isn’t a waning reality in that as noted by Langston Hughes “America has never been America” for countless generations.

***

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 was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.

A Daughter and Father Address Violence Against Women and the Legacy of Jazz Poetry on the April 2nd Left of Black

A Daughter and Father Address Violence Against Women and the Legacy of Jazz Poetry  on the April 2nd Left of Black

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined in studio by AfroLez®femcentric Cultural Worker Aishah Shahidah Simmonsand her father, Human Rights Activist Michael Simmons.  The director of the groundbreaking film No! The Rape Documentary, Simmons and her father discuss her coming-out process, the critical importance of fathers in the lives of their daughters and the impact of their shared work addressing Violence Against Women.

Later Neal is joined via Skype© by Meta DuEwa Jones, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of  The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word(University of Illinois Press).   She discusses the influence of Jazz on the poetry of  Langston Hughes and how jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, would later inspire generations of poets.  Lastly, Jones touches on Spoken Word’s relevance to other art forms.

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Left of Black airs at 1:30 p.m. (EST) on Mondays on the Ustream channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/left-of-black. 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 Blackis recorded and produced at the John Hope Franklin Center of International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.

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Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Follow Mark Anthony Neal on Twitter: @NewBlackMan

Follow Aishah Shahidah Simmons on Twitter: @AfroLez

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Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz | A Multimedia Concert Performance of Langston Hughes' Poetry

from the Langston Hughes Project

Jazz Montage: A Multimedia Concert Performance of Langston Hughes' Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz

The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes's kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite. Ask Your Mama is Hughes's homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. It is a twelve-part epic poem which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin "cha cha" and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming -- a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death.

Jazz was a cosmopolitan metaphor for Langston Hughes, a force for cultural convergence beyond the reach of words, or the limits of any one language. It called up visual analogues for him as well, most pointedly the surrealistic techniques of painterly collage and of the film editing developed in this country in the 1930s and 40s, which condensed time and space, conveyed to the viewer a great array of information in short compass, and which offered the possibility of suggesting expanded states of consciousness, chaotic remembrances of past events or dreams -- through montage. "To me," Hughes wrote, "jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream -- yet to come -- and always yet to become ultimately and finally true."

By way of videography, this concert performance links the words and music of Hughes' poetry to topical images of Ask Your Mama's people, places, and events, and to the works of the visual artists Langston Hughes admired or collaborated with most closely over the course of his career -- the African-inspired mural designs and cubist geometries of Aaron Douglas, the blues and jazz-inspired collages of Romare Bearden, the macabre grotesques of Meta Warrick Fuller and the rhythmic sculptural figurines and heads and bas reliefs of Richmond Barthe, the color blocked cityscapes and black history series of Palmer Hayden and Jacob Lawrence. Together the words, sounds, and images recreate a magical moment in our cultural history, which bridges the Harlem Renaissance, the post World War II Beat writers' coffeehouse jazz poetry world, and the looming Black Arts performance explosion of the 1960s.

Ask Your Mama was dedicated to Louis Armstrong, "the greatest horn blower of them all," and to those of whatever hue or culture of origin who welcomed being immersed in the mysteries, rituals, names, and nuances of black life not just in America but in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in Europe and Africa during the years of anti-colonial upheaval abroad and the rising Freedom Movement here at home. Not only the youthful Martin Luther King, Jr. but the independence leaders of Guinea and Nigeria and Ghana and Kenya and the Congo fill the chants and refrains of Hughes's epic poem.

Originally, Langston Hughes created Ask Your Mama in the aftermath of his participation as an official for the five-day Newport Jazz Festival of July 1960, where he shared the stage with such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, Dakota Staton, Oscar Peterson, Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross, Otis Spann, Ray Charles, and Muddy Waters. The musical scoring of the poem was designed to serve not as mere background for the words but to forge a conversation and a commentary with the music. Though Hughes originally intended to collaborate with Charles Mingus, and then Randy Weston, on the full performance of his masterwork, it remained only in the planning stages when Langston Hughes died in 1967. Its recovery now in word, music, and image provides a galvanizing experience for audiences everywhere.

For further information, please contact:
Ronald McCurdy
P.O. Box 3612, So. Pasadena, CA 91031
(818) 429-2494
E-mail: ronmccbop@aol.com

#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