Transition: Zina Saro-Wiwa on Returning to Natural Hair

The filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa presents an Op-Doc on black women’s decision to embrace their naturally kinky hair, rather than use chemical straighteners.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad: "Playing the Violence Card"

Hank Willis Thomas--"Absolute POwer" (2003)

Playing the Violence Card

by Khalil Gibran Muhammad | The New York Times

EVER since the culture wars of the 1980s, Americans have been familiar with “the race card” — an epithet used to discredit real and imagined cries of racism. Less familiar, however, is an equally cynical rhetorical tactic that I call “the violence card.”

Here’s how it works. When confronted with an instance of racially charged violence against a black person, a commentator draws attention to the fact that there is much more black-on-black violence than white-on-black violence. To play the violence card — as many criminal-justice advocates have done since the Rodney King police brutality case of the early 1990s — is to suggest that black people should worry more about the harm they do to themselves and less about how victimized they are by others.

The national outrage over the Trayvon Martin case has prompted some recent examples. Last week, the journalist Juan Williams wrote in The Wall Street Journal of the “tragedy” of Trayvon’s death but wondered “what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people.” During a debate about the case on Sunday on an ABC News program, the commentator George F. Will argued that the “root fact” is that “about 150 black men are killed every week in this country — and 94 percent of them by other black men.”

For Mr. Williams, Mr. Will and countless others playing the violence card, the real issue has little to do with racist fears or police practices — even though those would seem to be the very issues at hand.

It’s true that black-on-black violence is an exceptionally grave problem. But this does not explain the allure of the violence card, which perpetuates the reassuring notion that violence against black people is not society’s concern but rather a problem for black people to fix on their own. The implication is that the violence that afflicts black America reflects a failure of lower-class black culture, a breakdown of personal responsibility, a pathological trait of a criminally inclined subgroup — not a problem with social and institutional roots that needs to be addressed through collective effort well beyond the boundaries of black communities.

But perhaps the large scale of black-on-black violence justifies playing the violence card? Not if you recall how Americans responded to high levels of white-on-white violence in the past.

Consider the crime waves of 1890 to 1930, when millions of poor European immigrants came to America only to be trapped in inner-city slums, suffering the effects of severe economic inequality and social marginalization. Around the turn of the century, the Harvard economist William Ripley described the national scene: “The horde now descending upon our shores is densely ignorant, yet dull and superstitious withal; lawless, with a disposition to criminality.” But the solution, Ripley argued, was not stigma, isolation and the promotion of fear. “They are fellow passengers on our ship of state,” he wrote, “and the health of the nation depends upon the preservation of the vitality of the lower classes.”

As a spokesman for saving white immigrant communities from the violence within, Ripley was part of a national progressive movement led by Jane Addams, the influential social worker of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the face of grisly, gang-related youth shootings — “duplicated almost every morning,” Addams wrote — she insisted that everyone from the elite to community organizers to police officers had a part to play.

She and other progressives mobilized institutional resources to save killers and the future victims of killers. Violent white neighborhoods were flooded with social workers, police reformers and labor activists committed to creating better jobs and building a social welfare net. White-on-white violence fell slowly but steadily in proportion to economic development and crime prevention.

In almost every way the opposite situation applied to black Americans. Instead of provoking a steady dose of compassionate progressivism, crime and violence in black communities fueled the racist belief that, as numerous contemporaries stated, blacks were their “own worst enemies” — an early version of the violence card. Black people were “criminalized” through various institutions and practices, whether Southern chain gangs, prison farms, convict lease camps and lynching bees or Northern anti-black neighborhood violence and race riots.

Racial criminalization has continued to this day, stigmatizing black people as dangerous, legitimizing or excusing white-on-black violence, conflating crime and poverty with blackness, and perpetuating punitive notions of “justice” — vigilante violence, stop-and-frisk racial profiling and mass incarceration — as the only legitimate responses.

But the past does not have to be the future. The violence card is a cynical ploy that will only contribute to more fear, more black alienation and more violence. Rejecting its skewed logic and embracing a compassionate progressive solution for black crime is our best hope for saving lives and ensuring that young men like Trayvon Martin do not die in vain.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

Black Boys Master the Chess Board

November 12, 2011

Masters of the Game and Leaders by Example

by Dylan Loeb McClain | The New York Times

Fewer than 2 percent of the 47,000 members of the United States Chess Federation are masters — and just 13 of them are under the age of 14.

Among that select group of prodigies are three black players from the New York City area — Justus Williams, Joshua Colas and James Black Jr. — who each became masters before their 13th birthdays.

“Masters don’t happen every day, and African-American masters who are 12 never happen,” said Maurice Ashley, 45, the only African-American to earn the top title of grandmaster. “To have three young players do what they have done is something of an amazing curiosity. You normally wouldn’t get something like that in any city of any race.”

The chess federation, the game’s governing body, does not keep records on the ethnicity of its members. But a Web site called the Chess Drum — which chronicles the achievements of black chess players and is run by Daaim Shabazz, an associate professor of business at Florida A&M University — lists 85 African-American masters. Shabazz said many of them no longer compete regularly.

Ashley, who became a master at age 20 and a grandmaster 14 years later, said the rarity was not surprising. “Chess just isn’t that big in the African-American community,” he said.

The chess federation uses a rating system to measure ability based on the results of matches in officially sanctioned events; a player must reach a rating of 2,200 to qualify for master.

In September last year, Justus, who is now 13 and lives in the Bronx, was the first of the three boys to get to 2,200, becoming the youngest black player to obtain the master rank. Joshua, 13, of White Plains, was a few months younger than Justus when he became a master last December. James, 12, of Brooklyn, became a master in July.

(Samuel Sevian of Santa Clara, Calif., is the youngest master in United States history, earning the title last December, 20 days before his 10th birthday.)

The three New Yorkers met several years ago during competitions. Justus has an edge over James, mostly because he won many of their early games, before James caught up. Head to head, James and Joshua each have several wins against the other. Justus and Joshua have rarely competed against each other.

Although they are rivals, the boys are also friends and share a sense that they are role models.

“I think of Justus, me and Josh as pioneers for African-American kids who want to take up chess,” James said.

James’s father, James Black, said he and Justus’s and Joshua’s parents were aware of what their sons represent and “talk about it a great deal,” but tried not to pressure them too much.

Black said his son “knows that the pressure comes along with the territory. What is going to happen is going to happen. As long he plays, we’re sure that things will work out for the best.”

The three boys approach the game differently. Justus and Joshua say that James studies the most, and Joshua admits he would rather play than practice. “I like the competition,” he said. “And I like that chess is an art.”

Justus said he is the most aggressive of the three, and he and James agree that Joshua is the most unpredictable. “Joshua likes to change up his openings during tournaments,” Justus said.

Supporting the boys’ interest is not easy financially. Though there are many tournaments in the New York City area, the boys must travel to play in more prestigious competitions, sometimes overseas. This week, they are set to play in the World Youth Chess Championship in Brazil.

They study the game with professional coaches who are grandmasters. The lessons are expensive — $100 an hour is not unusual — and the boys’ families have either found sponsors or have paid for the instruction themselves.

The boys aspire to be a grandmaster by the time they graduate from high school, something that only a few dozen players in the world have done. Ashley, who has met the boys but does not know any of them well, says the obstacles are substantial.

He said several children that he had coached to the junior high school national championships in the early 1990s went on to enroll at elite colleges and then to have successful careers. Along the way, he said, playing chess became less of a priority for them. It is difficult to make a living as a player, he said, adding, “I’ve seen many talented kids go by the wayside.”

Ashley said he could not predict whether the success of Justus, Joshua and James would encourage other young African-Americans to play. Another black teenager, Jehron Bryant, 15, of Valley Stream, N.Y., became a master in September.

“Masters will never be epidemics,” Ashley said. He said the rise of the young masters was a “phenomenon” that was “ worth noting.”

“It is special,” he said, “and that we know for a fact.”

Justus, Joshua and James all played in the Marshall Chess Club Championship in Manhattan last month. Justus and Joshua finished with disappointing results — a common problem for young players, who often lack consistency. But James tied for fifth. In the last round, he beat Yefim Treger, a strong veteran master who is in his 50s.

Treger is a tough opponent because he uses unorthodox openings. James kept his head, however, patiently seizing space and building up his attack until he was able to force through a passed pawn. He wrapped up the game by cornering and checkmating Treger’s king.

[video] South Bronx Rising

South Bronx Rising

The South Bronx is being revitalized. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times, tours the area with Amanda Burden, the director of the department of city planning.

Can Media Survive? Page One: Inside the New York Times

Can Media Survive?

by Esther Iverem | SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

There is a serious media war going on—and it’s not the war over who secures risqué photos of former Congressman Anthony Weiner or even over how the Libya invasion is reported. This is the war chronicled by “Page One: Inside the New York Times,” a new documentary that gives us an up-close view of news gathering—in an era when newspapers, including the Times, are fighting for survival.

There has been a dramatic decrease in advertising revenue for newspapers, particularly from bread-and-butter classified ads, which have gone online to Web sites like Monster.com and Craigslist. This decrease, combined with a decentralization of the ability of publish and distribute news content on the Internet, have posed serious challenges for the Times, which, two years ago, borrowed $250 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu, took out a mortgage on its new Manhattan office building and decreased its news staff by 100 positions.

Of course, this financial emergency followed a crisis in newsgathering ethics when it was rocked by the reporting scandals of Jason Blair in 2003 and then Judith Miller. Miller’s false stories about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq virtually led the U.S. into a costly and deadly war, which we still have not exited ten years later.

But “Page One” does not offer a dry recitation of business factoids. Instead, though it, much of this new reality of the media unfolds before our eyes. It follows editors and reporters on a newly created media desk, charged with covering this new and constantly evolving world of media. The star, of sorts, is David Carr, a salty and eccentric veteran reporter who has achieved notoriety for his no- excuses reporting on media and for being a former drug addict.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack

The New York Times and the Language of Rape

The New York Times and the Language of Rape
by Mark Anthony Neal

The story of an 11-year-old girl, who was purportedly raped by nearly two dozen men and boys is beyond heartbreaking. As the father of two girls and the friend and “brother” of far too many rape survivors, I can’t even begin to imagine the trauma that the girl and her family are experiencing. But the New York Times’ coverage of case directs another round of violence at the girl, embracing a narrative of the story that places the onus on the very victim of the rape.

18 men and boys have been officially charged in the rape the 11-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer home. The police investigation of the case was aided by the fact that some of the accused boys and men took pictures and videotaped the attack on the girl with their cell phones.

The case seems clear cut; there is no legal context in which an 11-year-old child can have consensual sex. If any of those boys or men penetrated the girl with their penises, a gang rape occurred. Yet New York Times reporter James C. McKinley, Jr. , who is the Houston bureau chief for the newspaper, chose to present a narrative that consistently suggested some culpability by the girl in the attacks on her.

McKinley’s mistake was to invest in community narratives, largely constructed around protecting the reputation of the town, Cleveland, TX and the images of the accused boys and men—virtually all African-American. How else can you explain why early in the article McKinley paraphrases town residents who wonder “how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?” as if the victim was some kind of professional sex worker.

Throughout, McKinley quotes residents lamenting how the charges will affect the future prospects of the suspects and devotes an entire paragraph to a resident who questions where the girl’s parents were. In other portions of the article McKinley gives voice—credence really—to residents who claimed that the girl “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s” and that “she would hang out with teenage boys at a playground” as if either point is justification for rape. That McKinley, the New York Times and those town residents that were quoted should know better, seems beyond the point.

I suspect that McKinley was trying to be racially sensitive to the African-American community in Cleveland, Texas particularly given historical narratives that depict Black men as habitual rapists—the Scottsboro Boys immediately come to mind. But in his haste to be politically correct, the integrity of the 11-year-old girl was sacrificed. In the hierarchies of race and ethnicity that this nation continues to reproduce, an 11-year-old Hispanic girl was deemed expendable, as is often the case with young Black girls in such cases.

The politics of race and ethnicity will likely obscure the real issue at hand in the New York Times' coverage of the case: we continue to live in a nation that encourages rape, even sanctions it—what some rightly call a rape culture—because we are fundamentally unwilling to invoke the language that correctly captures the brutality of such acts. A rape is a rape—not an act of sexual violence, not a forced sex act, not a misunderstanding. If our major corporate media outlets are unwilling to call rape by its name, than how can we expect our children to know what rape is?

On the way home this evening, I had a difficult conversation with my 12-year-old daughter about this case, and like so many of these conversations, much of it centered on the responsibility she will have to take to protect herself in a rape culture. Sadly, I suspect that if she has children of her own, the conversation will not have changed much.