Suicide usually isn't an option for black folks, especially since there is a whole host of reasons why our mortality rate is so high, but is this always true? Given some recent high profile suicides and apparent suicides in the black community, is there more room to have this discussion now?
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Selasa, 24 Juli 2012
Rabu, 02 Mei 2012
The NFL or The Hunger Games? Some Thoughts on the Death of Junior Seau
The NFL or The Hunger Games? Some Thoughts on the Death of Junior Seau
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Last weekend I saw The Hunger Games. When I walked into the theater, I could not have told you one thing about the film, and if not for the uber publicity, I likely would have thought it was a show on the Food Network. While there is much to say about the film, I was left thinking about how it merely recycled the common Hollywood Gladiator trope. Mirroring films like The Running Man and The Gladiator, The Hunger Games highlights the ways that elite members of society make sport and find pleasure out of the pain and suffering of others. That is, they find arousal and visceral excitement in watching people battle until death. Within such a narrative trope is always a class (and at times racial) dimension where those with power and wealth (the tenets of civilization?) enjoy the spectacle of those literally and symbolically beneath them fighting until death. The cinematic representation of the panopticon, whether within the past or in futuristic terms, allows for commentary about the lack of civility, morals, and respect for humanity amongst the elite outside of our present reality. As these morality tales take place in the past (and or future), they exists a commentary about our present condition, statements about how far we have evolved and/or the danger of the future.
Yet, what about The Hunger Games in our midst? What about the NFL, a billionaire enterprise that profits off the brutality, physical degradation, and pain of other people? What about a sport that celebrates the spectacle of violence? Unlike The Hunger Games or Gladiator, films that depict a world where people bear witness to death, hungrily waiting the next kill, football and hockey fans sit on the edge of their seat waiting for the knock out hit, the fight, and bone crushing collision. The game doesn’t end with death but death results from the game. Out of sight, out of mind, yet our hunger for games that kill are no different.
Junior Seau committed suicide today; he shot himself in chest. While his death certificate will surely say “self inflicted gun shot wound,” it might as well say death by football. He, like so many former NFL players, have fallen victim to football-induced death. The links between suicides and concussions, between obesity and heart disease, and between drug abuse and post-NFL physical pain, are quite clear. The NFL Games are killing men before our eyes; yes, death is not taking place on-the-field with fans screaming from the rafters or the comfort of their couches, but make no mistake about, death is knocking on every player’s door. “Suicide, drugs, alcohol, obesity—are ailments the National Football League is getting to know all too well,” writes Dave Zirin. To him, Seau is yet another reminder of the brutality of the NFL and the callousness to this epidemic. He continues:
These are issues NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the various team owners are loathe to discuss, but with Seau, they won’t have a choice. In Seau, a larger than life Hall of Fame player, we have someone with friends throughout the ranks of the league and especially in the media. It will be incredibly difficult to keep this under wraps. People will want answers. Over the summer, former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson took his own life with a gunshot to the chest so his brain could be studied for the effects of concussive injuries. Junior Seau now joins him, a gunshot to the chest. There is a discussion that the NFL is going to have to have with a team of doctors, players and the public. Right now, this is not a league safe for human involvement. I have no idea how to make it safer. But I do know that the status quo is absolutely unacceptable.
Lester Spence also pushes us to think about suicide as a potential consequence of NFL/NHL careers.
The first thing we should do is think about Wade Belak, Rick Rypien, and Derek Boogaard. They were three NHL enforcers (people who made their hockey careers through their fists rather than through their sticks), who committed suicide over the past year. Each of them had a history of concussions. Boogaard made the courageous decision to offer up his brain to science. The results suggest his suicide may have been the result of brain damage.
It is only after thinking about Belak, Rypien, and Boogaard, that we have the medical context to understand Seau. Not so much to understand why he committed suicide–if there were a simple relationship between concussions and suicides the suicide rate of former NFL/NHL players would be far higher than it is. BUT to understand how his suicide may be at least a partial function of his NFL career.
It is hard not to think about the consequences of sporting violence. It is hard to deny the implications here when NFL players commit suicide at a rate six times the national average; it is hard not to think about a rotten system when 65 percent of NFL players retire with permanent and debilitating injuries. It is hard not to think of the NFL and NHL as a modern-day gladiator ring where our out-of-sight childhood heroes are dying because of the game, because of sport, because we cheered and celebrated brutality and violence. It is hard not to think of the NFL as nothing more than the real-life hunger games, our version of death as sport, when we look at reports following suicide of Dave Duerson:
This intent, strongly implied by text messages Duerson sent to family members soon before his death, has injected a new degree of fear in the minds of many football players and their families, according to interviews with them Sunday. To this point, the roughly 20 N.F.L.veterans found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy — several of whom committed suicide — died unaware of the disease clawing at their brains, how the protein deposits and damaged neurons contributed to their condition.
How much data do we need; how much proof; how many suicides, how many twenty-something football stars need to die with chronic traumatic encephalopathy before we see a problem; how many ex-players need to die, only to find out that football had left their brain “consistent with that of an 85-year-old man” until we demand change? How many more deaths before we realize that the hunger games aren’t in the future but it is are our current national pastime. How many families need to lose a father and brother, son and husband, before we stand-up and walk away because death should never be sport. That seems to be the message of The Hunger Games; one can only hope we can catch up to the future.
***
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.
Senin, 04 Oktober 2010
Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides
Do schools care more about racism than homophobia?
Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides
by Keli Goff
There’s a famous story in the Goff household about my mom’s first week back in school shortly after it was integrated. There was a boy who apparently wasn’t a fan of the progress our country was making and decided to take it out on my mom by shouting the N-word at her repeatedly, every single day. For days mom turned the other cheek, so to speak, but on the fifth day she declared loud enough for everyone to hear, that she was going to beat the stuffing out of the guy. Now anyone who knows my mother knows that she would have, had the principal, who was white, not stepped in and warned Mr. Bully that if he didn’t leave her alone she would have the principal’s permission to hit him and would also be kicked out of school.
That was the end of Mr. Bully.
Most of us believe that the kind of prejudice my mom faced is a thing of the past. The thinking goes, “sure prejudice exists but it’s more subtle” or as an older family friend once said, “people no longer spit in your face but in your food.”
But in recent days we’ve all been reminded that this is not true and that the kind of prejudice and open hostility my mom faced fifty years ago is still alive and well in America’s schools.
In recent weeks Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi and Raymond Chase killed themselves. While we are still awaiting key details in some of the cases, we do know this: All of the boys either self-identified as gay or their classmates believed that they were. Billy Lucas was 15 years old, while Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were just thirteen years old yet they faced constantly bullying, ranging from verbal to physical, at the hands of classmates for their perceived sexual orientation. In the case of Tyler Clementi, the college freshman is believed to have jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate allegedly tweeted, then recorded and broadcast an intimate encounter Tyler had with another man.
Sadly these are not the first instances of this type of bullying resulting in death. Last year the suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker made national headlines when he hung himself after being teased relentlessly by classmates who accused him of being gay.
Let me ask you a question. If a young student was called the N-word every day for weeks or months on end, and after repeated cries for help finally took his own life, how quickly do you think citizens of all races would take to the streets to protest? Or better yet how quickly would Al Sharpton and co. demand accountability from the school, and elected officials under the threat of casting the kind of media spotlight that people like Don Imus have nightmares about?
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
***
Keli Goff is a political blogger for TheLoop21.com. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic Books, March 2008).
Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides
by Keli Goff
There’s a famous story in the Goff household about my mom’s first week back in school shortly after it was integrated. There was a boy who apparently wasn’t a fan of the progress our country was making and decided to take it out on my mom by shouting the N-word at her repeatedly, every single day. For days mom turned the other cheek, so to speak, but on the fifth day she declared loud enough for everyone to hear, that she was going to beat the stuffing out of the guy. Now anyone who knows my mother knows that she would have, had the principal, who was white, not stepped in and warned Mr. Bully that if he didn’t leave her alone she would have the principal’s permission to hit him and would also be kicked out of school.
That was the end of Mr. Bully.
Most of us believe that the kind of prejudice my mom faced is a thing of the past. The thinking goes, “sure prejudice exists but it’s more subtle” or as an older family friend once said, “people no longer spit in your face but in your food.”
But in recent days we’ve all been reminded that this is not true and that the kind of prejudice and open hostility my mom faced fifty years ago is still alive and well in America’s schools.
In recent weeks Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi and Raymond Chase killed themselves. While we are still awaiting key details in some of the cases, we do know this: All of the boys either self-identified as gay or their classmates believed that they were. Billy Lucas was 15 years old, while Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were just thirteen years old yet they faced constantly bullying, ranging from verbal to physical, at the hands of classmates for their perceived sexual orientation. In the case of Tyler Clementi, the college freshman is believed to have jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate allegedly tweeted, then recorded and broadcast an intimate encounter Tyler had with another man.
Sadly these are not the first instances of this type of bullying resulting in death. Last year the suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker made national headlines when he hung himself after being teased relentlessly by classmates who accused him of being gay.
Let me ask you a question. If a young student was called the N-word every day for weeks or months on end, and after repeated cries for help finally took his own life, how quickly do you think citizens of all races would take to the streets to protest? Or better yet how quickly would Al Sharpton and co. demand accountability from the school, and elected officials under the threat of casting the kind of media spotlight that people like Don Imus have nightmares about?
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21
***
Keli Goff is a political blogger for TheLoop21.com. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic Books, March 2008).
Jumat, 17 September 2010
No Longer Banned: "Ropes" by Invincible
Back in early 2009, Invincible sent mtvU her video for the song featuring Tiombe Lockhart, “Ropes,” off her debut LP ShapeShifters. The song was written to help bring awareness to issues regarding depression and mental health, and the accompanying music video directed by Mr. Complex is a strong cinematic statement that should have made “Ropes” a shoo-in for getting placement on mtvU. Shortly after submitting a final version of the video, the folks at MTV let Invincible know that her video was approved to air. Unfortunately, MTV's Standards Department stepped in and rejected the video at the last minute on the basis that the video was "problematic" and had "suicidal undertones."
Invincible responded to this rejection, quickly shooting a viral video outside of the MTV's Times Square headquarters, asking viewers what they thought of the video being censored and whether they believed it was "problematic" to speak openly about depression, mental health, and suicide.
The video went on to garner tens of thousands of views on online video-sharing websites. The mtvU rejection became a story in itself as media outlets such as Salon, True/Slant, and All Hip Hop blasted MTV for their decision and Invincible's supporters sent personal letters to MTV demanding that the video be played. It's taken some time, but nearly a year and a half later, "Ropes" is premiering on mtvU. The video found supporters at Half Of Us, a project housed within MTV that confronts issues of mental health on college campuses. Half Of Us joined the chorus of people championing "Ropes," leading to a resolution with MTV: the Standards Department lifted their ban and cleared the video for airtime, and now "Ropes" is airing on mtvU and mtvU.com as part of the Half Of Us campaign.
Read More @ EmergenceMedia
Invincible responded to this rejection, quickly shooting a viral video outside of the MTV's Times Square headquarters, asking viewers what they thought of the video being censored and whether they believed it was "problematic" to speak openly about depression, mental health, and suicide.
The video went on to garner tens of thousands of views on online video-sharing websites. The mtvU rejection became a story in itself as media outlets such as Salon, True/Slant, and All Hip Hop blasted MTV for their decision and Invincible's supporters sent personal letters to MTV demanding that the video be played. It's taken some time, but nearly a year and a half later, "Ropes" is premiering on mtvU. The video found supporters at Half Of Us, a project housed within MTV that confronts issues of mental health on college campuses. Half Of Us joined the chorus of people championing "Ropes," leading to a resolution with MTV: the Standards Department lifted their ban and cleared the video for airtime, and now "Ropes" is airing on mtvU and mtvU.com as part of the Half Of Us campaign.
Read More @ EmergenceMedia
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