Soul Food is Plantation Food: You Is What You Eat

Published on Oct 23, 2013

This 10-minute video is an excerpt from a talk given by Milton Mills MD at the Meals For Health graduation, which we ran at Progressive Missionary Baptist Church in East Berkeley, California this past June.

In this excerpt, Dr. Mills discusses the troubling connection between slavery and soul food.For more info about Meals For Health, visit http://www.EarthSave.org

HipHop Goes Green With Environmental Justice Video

Global WarNing - Earth Amplified featuring stic.man from Dead Prez 

Starring Seasunz and J. Bless from Earth Amplified, feat. Stic.Man from Dead Prez

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After world leaders met in Rio to talk about sustainable development and the global green economy, we want to make sure there is continued pressure to discuss what a real green economy looks like. "Global WarNing" exposes greenwashing by corporate polluters—and calls for an end to handouts for the fossil fuel industry. Want to help? Join the world's largest twitter storm: Tweet #endfossilfuelsubsidies and go to http://endfossilfuelsubsidies.org/twi... to find out more.

The Free Download of Earth Amplified Mixtape Vol 1http://earthamplified.bandcamp.com/ was mixed by DMC Bay Area Regional Champion, DJ Sol Rising, and features political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, Stic.man from Dead Prez, Zumbi from Zion I, Wisdom, DJ Max Powa, Vandana Shiva, and Earth Amplified members, Travis De Leon Porter, Seneca Schachter, Ambessa Cantave, J.Bless, DJ Tuffist, and AshEL Seasunz.

Lyrics -

Seasunz: 

where's the bailout for this?
 swim out the metropolis cuz ice get melt like sun kissed icarus when lake chad is drier than bagdhad
your numbers don't add just the greenhouse gas appalachian coalminer fisherman from bangladesh
uncle sam making bets write his name by the ex-xon valdeez
probably asthma's next little johnny got a funny knob in his neck
so what the problem with that?

you just a corporate exec who extract that oil from the backs of nigerians
gimme that pass out techs like refs do to mavericks offset politrix copenhagen
no debating need the reparations

and while you waiting another 600 acres gone in the congo and amazon by the end of this song

Chorus: 

On it, on it, we're so on it Gotta be on it if we ain't on it we're a goner
Who?
Me, you, everyone and their mama

It's our world, so defending it with honor On it, on it, we're so on it
If you ain't on it, this a warning Take a look at the world around Cuz the temperature is rising, the time is now

stic.man: 

Look... Look..Look..

Go green, Go solar, Go agriculture,
fya burn Mac Donalds and Coca Cola

All corporate vultures should burn in the toxic sulfur they emit for every dollar the get
They exploit the culture
And take resources
control the media
and censor the voice of the voiceless
sitting back fat in they office

they dont see people, just profits and losses
the seed wanna grow, but its deep in darkness

the hood gotta learn how to turn the garbage into healthy soil
we could help the world, but we running out of time, like they running out oil

Chorus... 

On it, on it, we're so on it Gotta be on it if we ain't on it we're a goner
Who?
Me, you, everyone and their mama

It's our world, so defending it with honor On it, on it, we're so on it
If you ain't on it, this a warning Take a look at the world around Cuz the temperature is rising, the time is now

J.Bless: 

it's hotter than july, right?
feel the sunlight but it's only april
somethin don't feel right and yeah it's true we all live under the sun but what we doin got us all living under the gun cuz the science is real
but the politics are dominant without action the outlook is ominous

but on the nuts of the governments
the lobbyists and they get dat dough to keep the stat quo
freeze that cash flow and scorch the natural pale white horse coming directly at you

took a whole lot of troops to topple a statue
but just one katrina put a tree in your bathroom

cuz we don't live in a vacuum things you put out in the world will come back and get at you like a boomerang don't care who threw it how you gon' explain to a hurricane that you didn't do it

NEW FILM REVIEW: 12 Years a Slave

A Story Of Liberation And Survival: Review Of ’12 Years A Slave’

Oct 23, 2013

By Pearl Duncan

For the first time, a movie about slavery, prominently and unapologetically, highlights not only how American whites enslaved their own children, grandchildren and relatives who were biracial and multiracial, but how the enslaved people tried to escape. Enslaved people in America resisted. How that resistance is perceived depends on who is viewing.

This ain’t no “Gone With the Wind.” The cast of the movie, “12 Years a Slave,” appeared at the preview I saw at the New York Film Festival. Steve McQueen, the filmmaker, shook hands and greeted us as we stood online to enter the theater. His film showcases the spiritual side of freedom, hard work and struggle, which are captured beautifully in the musical soundtrack of Negro spirituals, hymns and colonial work songs. There is no question that there is a new approach in how the history of this American colonial era is captured in art.

This singular classic creation of a movie opened in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago and Toronto on October 18; in other cities over the weekend; will open nationwide on November 1, and in the U.K. on January 24.

There is a new pulse to the history in this movie about slavery in America. The powerful actors in a movie, produced by Brad Pitt’s production company, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as the hero, Solomon Northup; Michael Fassbender as Edwin Epps, a sadistic slaveowner villain; Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, an abused young woman; Brad Pitt as Samuel Bass, a Canadian abolitionist and carpenter; Alfre Woodard as the black common-law wife of a slaveowner, mistress of the house who has made her choice, and Sarah Paulson as Mrs. Epps, the white wife of slaveowner who let her emotions reach the boiling evil level, elevate the true history. The performances are so powerful and the theme so dynamic, the question is, Will we leave this movie feeling uplifted and inspired? When Solomon Northup looks the audience in the eyes in a gaze that lingers on the screen, his eyes ask, What do you do now? Is this the true history you knew?

McQueen and his film won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival; attendees voted the director and film into first place, and movie critics have said this is an Oscar contender. Here, I review the memoir on which the film is based and simply say, go see this movie. The filmmaker captures the spirit of freedom, so here, I also review the yearning for freedom and escape, as described in the book, the hero’s personal memoir from 1853.

In the book, the lead character in this story, born a free man, knows his own genealogy, and he recounts the genealogy of other enslaved men, women and children. But as the story progresses, we see that this story is more personal, because it is an inside view from the fibers of the minds and hearts of those who lived it, of practices historians deemed, “the peculiar institution,” but practices which were beyond peculiar. Ancestry is something some enslaved African Americans did not know, or were too haunted by violence to discuss. In this story, the hero, Solomon Northup, names names. He shows that the violence in the slavery era, something he calls, demonic, was up-close and personal.

The book’s full title is “12 Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana.” The work and now the powerful film confront the contradictions of bondage as lived by a nation, slaveowners and enslaved people.

A "free" Solomon Northrup.

As a person who researches and writes, not only as a historian but as a genealogist, I am drawn to the work, as I was to Lee Daniels’ “The Butler” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” as I was to “Roots” and “The Biography of Miss Jane Pitman” and so many of the movies that preceded the present ones. Art informs history. This is a story of large themes. Kidnapped. Name changed. Transported to different places by different means. Sold and resold to different owners. Struggled to survive in a desolate, haunting landscape among people with sociopathic sensibilities. As readers and viewers, we know, if a person’s family and friends could not find their loved ones in colonial times, how can a modern genealogist. For me, the most haunting scene was when Solomon was free and the others were left behind. Their lost and untold stories must be told.

In the years of colonial America, abolitionist authors influenced opinions about slavery, freedom and liberty, and stirred the debate of whether enslaved African Americans cherished freedom. Art influences history, but some historical realities are not well-known.

This movie portrays the personal nature of slavery, and the maroon spirit of the enslaved, even those who were trapped on plantations. I’ve said we have to view this history from the point-of-view of specific Maroon groups, whose names are noted with a capital M, who liberated themselves, as well as the maroons, the people trapped on plantations, for they too sought freedom. The hero, Solomon Northup, says “There was not a day throughout the ten years I belonged to Epps [a drunken, sadistic owner who whipped his slaves incessantly] that I did not consult with myself upon the prospect of escape.”

Like the Maroons, Northrop and the others viewed slavery from the perspective of free people. He describes what they tried to escape. In his memoir, he describes the demonic obstacles mounted against anyone trying to escaping: “Every white man’s hand is raised against him – the patrollers [mounted and armed] are watching for him – the hounds are ready to follow on his track, and the nature of the country is such as renders it impossible to pass through it with any safety.” Filmmaker Steve McQueen said he wanted the movie based on the true story to feel like science fiction as much as history.

I am interested in hearing from and knowing if the Blacks and whites descended from the range of characters portrayed know who these ancestors were, these people who were our ancestors: African Americans who resisted and rebelled; enslaved people who defied, resisted and ran away; greedy people who profited from human bondage; abolitionist whites who assisted slaves to escape to freedom, sadistic and opportunistic whites who battered enslaved black people; abolitionists and enslavers who had children with the enslaved. I wondered about these ancestors and whether any of their DNA or their spirit survives in us now.

I read “12 Years a Slave” with the thoughts of a genealogist running through my head. Solomon Northup, a family man, farmer, homeowner and talented violinist in upstate New York who was tricked, lured from his home, kidnapped, beaten and enslaved, who wrote the memoir in 1853, about whose life, struggles, triumph, and freedom the movie is based, thought like a genealogist too. The filmmaker Steve McQueen is also a genealogist; he too, of England, descended from enslaved people in the Caribbean island in Trinidad, traced his ancestors to slaves and slaveowners.

After Northup’s 12-year ordeal, being beaten and tortured as a slave, he said, “Hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.” There were thousands of free people who were kidnapped and chained, millions of their African ancestors who were kidnapped, bought, sold and enslaved. I wonder if their descendants know specifically who they are.

These books and movies are a call, a spiritual beacon, for anyone who hasn’t done genealogy to review the new information in this art and start to find the ancestors. In Saratoga, New York, Solomon Northup’s descendants meet every year to celebrate the Solomon Northup Freedom Day. (On Monday, October 21st, after a premiere of the movie in Northup’s hometown region, the Underground Railroad History Project of the New York Capital Region in Albany hosted a discussion by Northup’s descendant, his great-great-great-grandson, Jamie Adams.)

Genealogists, readers and historian know that enslaved people were skilled craftsmen and women who brought various skills to their slavery experiences. In Northup’s era, he was referred to Northup as a talented violinist, as he refers to himself, but I noticed that reviewers of the era also referred to him as a fiddler. He referred to his instrument as a violin or a fiddle. He described his life as a farmer, a free man, in upstate New York. He says “In the winter season I had numerous calls to play the violin. Wherever the young people assembled to dance, I was almost invariably there. Throughout the surrounding villages my fiddle was notorious.” African American fiddlers were prevalent in Colonial America. I capture them in my upcoming book about the 18th-century merchant cargo ship discovered under the World Trade Center in 2010.

It warms the heart to read Northup who says of the freemen who were fiddlers, “We always returned home from the performances of these services with money in our pockets; so that, with fiddling, cooking, and farming, we soon found ourselves in the possession of abundance, and, in fact, leading a happy and prosperous life.” The movie’s soundtrack will capture the African American musical experience: John Legend, Alicia Keys, Hans Zimmer, Alabama Shakes and others will add to a soundtrack, which will be released in mid-November.

Music provided solace, emotional escape and sounded resistance for slaves and free people. As a descendant of Maroons, I focused on Northrup’s and the others’ resistance. The writer of the introduction to the edition of Northup’s book, historian Philip S. Foner, observed that, “Like Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup whipped his overseer and was involved in two near-rebellions.” Northup said the woods and swamps of Louisiana were “continually filled with runaways.” Slaves and free people clung to whatever defined them as human, as citizens.

New books and movies are adding a new narrative to the mainstream narratives. It is important that the ancestors and the narratives that have been left out of history be acknowledged. One story that has been hard to portray, although it is encrypted in the DNA of Americans is how much slavery was a coming together of violent beatings and sexuality. This movie, personal and up close, lays bare that narrative in the story of the relationship between Patsey and the slaveowner, Edwin Epps.

“12 Years a Slave” is not only a movie about a free African American and his enduring experience as a slave, it is also about whites who enslaved their own children, and knew that their own children and relatives were enslaved.

It is also a story about the maroon-thinking of freedom and escape of the slaves and their awareness of their genealogy, despite their silence in the torturous environment. That is what the book and the movie portray, when viewed from the perspective of a genealogist. In the book and the movie, the lead character, Solomon, says his father’s paternal ancestors were African slaves; he does not say what his father’s maternal ancestors were, but we know they were African. He says his mother was a quadroon, which means she had one black grandparent and three white ones.

His wife, he says, in her origins was red, white and black, “she cannot properly be styled a quadroon.” His father was a slave who was freed in his owner’s will when his owner died. The whites who were his father’s and his mother’s relatives and his wife’s relatives knew they had relatives who were slaves. But freedom was not guaranteed even when an owner on his deathbed emancipated his slave. Northup recounted the story of Eliza, who was emancipated in her owner’s will, who has a biracial child by her owner, but the owner’s white daughter sent her to Washington in the guise of registering her freedom papers, but instead sold her into slavery. That daughter sold her own relative, her own half-sister into slavery. Northup was born a free man.

The memoir was a personal tour-de-force, because Northup reflected philosophically on what he had experienced. I recap that experience and philosophy by reviewing the history as it was reflected in his memoir, according to its full title: “12 Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana”

If anything in this review moves you, you must see the movie, which opens, directed by filmmaker Steve McQueen, produced by Brad Pitt’s company, with Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon Northup as the leading hero, and Michael Fassbender’s Edwin Epps as the leading villain. Northup’s epic memoir was edited by David Wilson of New York in 1853 and adapted for the screen by John Ridley. His account was supported by documentary evidence. His narrative is as dramatic as that of a master cultural observer and narrator, because he describes his experiences and reflects on the institution of slavery, reflecting on the practices historian call, “the peculiar institution.”

Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841: Northup’s portrayal of his experiences is so personal, in his memoir when he is taken to Washington, drugged and realized he is kidnapped, he says, “I felt there was no trust or mercy in unfeeling men.” He handed himself to “the God to the oppressed.” He describes the isolation and psychological loneliness the slaves felt not only in the country but in the universe. He also paints a picture of what the slaves felt about the men and women and the country that allowed such inhumanity, describing the men who kidnapped and enslaved him as “subtle and inhuman monsters in the shape of men.”

Enslaved, confronted by a slavetrader, in a slave pen in the cellar of a residential building in Washington, in a “slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!” confined, he said the pen was “like a farmer’s barnyard.”

within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled.

In the cellar, in the barnyard, as he declared that he was a free man, not a slave, he was beaten into submission, whipped repeatedly with “instruments of torture,” with a hardwood paddle board, a cat-o’ninetails, a larger roped board, “bored with a small auger in numerous places,” with “many strands – the strands unraveled, and a knot tied at the extremity of each. Feet fastened to the floor, he was stripped of his clothing, draped facedown over a bench, his wrists tied, and whipped by two simultaneously different henchmen. McQueen brings these scenes to life in dramatic sequences.

The up-close and personal view is what gives the narrative its dramatic power. There will be more narratives in the future, because as powerful as his account is, he names some villains but not all, for he says he does not know all his kidnappers and enslavers, “whoever they might be, as unmitigated villains.” From the other slaves, he learned that the place where he was bore the name, William’s Slave Pen. Of the beatings he said, “My sufferings I compare to nothing else than the burning agonies of hell.”

The torture on the plantations was worse.

He describes them in detail and names their names when he is sold at an auction block in New Orleans, and sold and traded to various slaveowners. These names are not fictional, they are historical. Describing the torture in the cellar in Washington, he said, “he plied the lash without stint upon my poor body, until it seemed that the lacerated flesh was stripped from my bones at every stroke.”

Director Steve McQueen with actor Michael Fassbender at 2013 Toronto Film Festival.

His rescue was as dramatic as his enslavement was historic. When he was kidnapped and transported from upstate New York to Washington, D.C., his kidnappers deceivingly but historically accurate suggested that he obtain free papers from the Custom House and clerk’s office because he was traveling from a free state to a slave one. The reverse trip, after 12 years, from a slave state to a free one held much trepidation. He was totally dependent on his own rebellious spirit, his desire for the freedom he knew long ago, and the kindness of others.

Northup’s narrative of his ordeal is dramatic, even before he reaches the auction block and the plantations in Bayou Boœuf, Louisiana. It was no illusion he said.

Thought was busy in my brain. Could it be possible that I was thousands of miles from home – that I had been driven through the streets like a dumb beast – that I had been chained and beaten without mercy – that I was even then herded with a drove of slaves, a slave myself? Were the events of the last few weeks realities indeed?

The movie answers these questions. From the beginning of his ordeal, his thinking and actions were like a maroon. The movie depicts slavery but it also has all the elements of maroon thinking and actions. First, what Toni Morrison calls rememory. He was lucky enough to know who his ancestors were, and he remembered. Many slaves were children who had no knowledge of their parents. He remembered that his father “endeavored to imbue our minds with sentiments of morality, and to teach us to place our trust and confidence in Him who regards the humblest as well as the highest of his creatures. . . . How often since that time has the recollection of his paternal counsels occurred to me.” When he rebelled, he was driven by this memory.

Escape was always on his mind and he made several escape attempts. “I was almost resolved to attempt to break away. Had I not been hand-cuffed, the attempt would certainly have been made.” He was handcuffed to Eliza, a mother and her children and a small boy as they left Washington, D.C. under the cloud of darkness. The slave auction scenes and the breaking up of families, the separation of Eliza from her children Randall and Emily are heart-wrenching. Solomon Northup, now renamed Platt, was purchased by a minister slaveowner. The movie is a study in character.

These were people who showed that they brought special skills to the plantations; they brought the knowledge from the places where they had lived, where they had been stolen. Northup on the first plantation showed his knowledge of building river rafts, a skill he had learned as a free man earning a living working on the canals of Lake Champlain in New York. He and other skilled laves plotted their escape, before they were absorbed deeper into the slavery institution, away from civilization. With instincts like this to be free, that is why my Maroon ancestors rebelled on slave ships and as soon as they landed.

Trust was crucial, because the slaves had to sort through the vile enslavers and the trusting fellow travelers through life to determine who, to trust. Enslaved, he trusted a sailor on the ship Orleans en route to New Orleans and entrusted him with a letter to the lawyer, Henry B. Northup, about his kidnapping, because, “The tone and manner of the man assured me.” The benevolent sailor was John Manning, an Englishman who lived in Boston. Henry B. Northup, upon receiving the letter, could not determine specifically where Solomon Northup was.

Rescue was also a crucial emotion and action, but it was not as easy. They strategized their rebellions and escape. He was always thinking of escape, and planning. He spoke of “my right to freedom” and of escaping to “the soil of freedom.”

Dangerous as it was, resistance was common. When his second owner, whom he called a “blasphemous tyrant” demanded that he stripped to be whipped, he told us, “I had made up my mind fully not to be whipped, let the result be life or death.” He responded to his owner, whom the law said could do anything to his flesh: “Master Tibeats, said I, looking at him boldly in the face, ‘I will not.’”

And finally, names were crucial, and he remembered his given name when he was renamed Platt by the slavetraders. We too need to remember the renaming of these ancestors when we do genealogy. Solomon Northup, a supplicant, begged for strength and mercy “on high to bear up against the burden of my troubles.” They mustered their strength and survived and be maroons. Eliza’s name was changed to Dradey in the slave records of the office of the New Orleans recorder. Ancestors who preserved their names as nicknames resisted; anyone who finds ancestors who preserved their names under these conditions must be very grateful.

These ancestors, Solomon Northup and others who were enslaved were maroons who plotted to survive, whether they escaped or endured. The book’s factual scenes of demonic torture made me wonder how a director handles such scenes in a movie. All I could think is there are more books and films to come. Revenge. Retaliation. Rebellion. Reconciliation. Redemption. The torture scenes will be interrupted by a militia of armed Maroons who descend on the plantation to rescue the tortured, as they did in reality in some parts of the Americas, where the terrain allowed them cover.

His description of the terrain in relation to escape and plans remind us that place and terrain made such a difference in escape plots, resistance and rebellions.

The fictional “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a fictional antislavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852), became a standard on our reading lists and in our school curriculum, and the factual memoir, “12 Years a Slave,” by Solomon Northup (1853), dropped from view and memory. Both were bestsellers in pre-Civil War years. I revisited Northup’s memoir, because his book should be replaced on our reading lists.

He had the strength to fight, yet remain moral in a place in America’s age of inhumanity and immorality — and write about his experiences. He built allies. The question is, What are we doing? Have we evolved as freedom fighters?

Pearl Duncan, writer and historian, is completing a book about the 18th-century merchant cargo ship discovered below the streets of New York in the foundations of the World Trade Center in 2010, and another about the worldwide uniqueness of African American DNA and ancestry.

A Critique/Exposé of Michelle Rhee’s reform plans on school teacher performance.

ABSTRACT

Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance. The evidence available to date has been mixed at best. This study presents novel evidence on this topic based on IMPACT, the controversial teacher-evaluation system introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools by then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. IMPACT implemented uniquely high-powered incentives linked to multiple measures of teacher performance (i.e., several structured observational measures as well as test performance). We present regression-discontinuity (RD) estimates that compare the retention and performance outcomes among low-performing teachers whose ratings placed them near the threshold that implied a strong dismissal threat. We also compare outcomes among high-performing teachers whose rating placed them near a threshold that implied an unusually large financial incentive. Our RD results indicate that dismissal threats increased the voluntary attrition of low-performing teachers by 11 percentage points (i.e., more than 50 percent) and improved the performance of teachers who remained by 0.27 of a teacher-level standard deviation. We also find evidence that financial incentives further improved the performance of high-performing teachers (effect size = 0.24).

Kara Walker's art: shadows of slavery

Kara Walker's racially charged art provokes strong feelings – not least from other black American artists. On the eve of her first major UK show, she tells Laura Barnett why that's good

• 
• Laura Barnett
• The Guardian, Wednesday 9 October 2013

'I don't want to do what's expected of me as a black artist' … 

Kara Walker at the Camden Arts Centre. 

Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

 

Two years ago, Kara Walker came across a news story in an edition of the 19th-century Atlanta newspaper the Daily Constitution. The year was 1878; the piece described, in excruciating detail, the recent lynching of a black woman. The mob had tugged down the branch of a blackjack tree, tied the woman's neck to it, and then released the branch, flinging her body high into the air.

This terrible fragment of the past has made its way into a large graphite drawing, now hanging inside the Camden Arts Centre, London, where Walker is about to have her first major UK solo show. Like much of her work, the drawing is both beautiful and disturbing: here, in grotesque, cartoonish monochrome, is the blackjack tree, the lynched woman spilling blood, her assailants laughing as she dies. As I stand and stare, Walker tells me why she was so drawn to the story. "It's this completely absurd, extreme, violent situation that required so much perverse ingenuity."

Her London show is not large – just three rooms, with 11 recent works – but it is significant and overdue. Walker is one of the most uncompromising contemporary American artists, not just for the quality of her work – which comprises drawing, film, and her signature medium, silhouettes – but for the fact that her art engages with what many would rather forget: the appalling violence meted out to the black population before and after the American civil war and the abolition of slavery, and the legacy of racism that still shapes the US political agenda.
Another drawing, Urban Relocator, shows a hooded, Klan-like figure next to a bare cotton tree: this is, Walker says, partly inspired by the boll weevil cotton plague that – along with the violence many freed slaves endured – led many black families, including Walker's, to abandon their land in the south for a better life in the northern states. "My own family were once given a piece of land," she says. "I started thinking about what happened to that land; about what made so many people leave the south, whether it was social violence, or domestic terrorism, or economic strife."
 

The Daily Constitution 1878 (2011), by Kara Walker. 

Photograph: courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins, NY 

  Walker is at her most provocative when interrogating the stereotyping that defined race relations in the antebellum south, and still exists today. The largest room in her show is lined with "wall samplers": the cut-out silhouettes that show figures engaged in violent or exaggerated acts: a man bending down to fellate an oversized phallus; a woman in a wide-skirted dress holding a severed head. The effect is to make us question not only the cultural representations of black people (there is, as Walker points out, a whiff of "minstrels and blackface" about some of the figures) but also our assumptions about how skin colour defines anyone's physical characteristics and behaviour.

Walker has exhibited widely in the US, and at 27 (she's now 43) became the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" scholarship. But she has also caused controversy. Exhibitions of her work often provoke strong feelings: staff at a library in Newark, New Jersey, recently reacted with outrage when one of her drawings was displayed there, prompting the head librarian to cover it up. And back when she received the MacArthur grant, she was lambasted by several older African-American artists, including Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell. "There were two strains of criticism," Walker says. "One was about the work, and who was looking at it, and me feeding into the viewing audience's preconceived ideas about black people. And the other was that I was just some highfalutin so-and-so."

Her father, the artist Larry Walker, published a letter in her defence. It was under his tutelage that she had first decided to become an artist: she started drawing and painting when she was three. She says neither of her parents has ever felt completely comfortable with her work – her mother walked out of a screening of Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale, a sexually explicit shadow-puppet film that features in the London show – but her father argued that his generation of black artists had fought to give future generations the right to make art of any sort. "He was saying, basically, that I should be able to do whatever the hell I want. I think that's what I'm always battling against with my work – part of me wants to resist the pull to be doing what's expected of me as a black artist."

It was while studying art as an undergraduate in Atlanta that Walker first felt this pull: an expectation, from her professors and fellow students alike, that as a black artist she should be striving to represent the "black experience" positively. "I was making big paintings, with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side'. These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with."

A key moment came when Walker discovered Adrian Piper, the conceptual artist and philosopher who, in the 1970s, made a series of performance works featuring herself as an androgynous, racially indeterminate young man. "It was the first voice that resonated with me, in talking about race with objectivity and sternness," she says. "Until then, I only knew 'black art' in the romantic sense – that it was only about positive representations of African American life."

Walker began to think about what she really wanted to say. She was born in Stockton, California, and moved to an Atlanta suburb at the age of 13, when her father took a job there. After liberal California, the racial tensions of the south came as a shock. "I just didn't get the rules," she says.

"I didn't know what the story was that made people behave in very particular ways that I thought were prescripted and unnatural. I started looking for my own point of origin: maybe the point of origin was being American, or being black, or being a woman. I thought, 'I'll start with the foundation of this idea of a place, of America, and then work my way forward.'"

Walker sees a direct line between the racist historical attitudes she examines in her work and current events. She took a road trip last year with her daughter from Brooklyn, where she lives, to the southern states. They visited diners where the heads of old white men turned to give them "the 20-second stare". They swam in a motel pool, watching the other (white) bathers suddenly vanish; Walker heard a small girl say to her father: "I thought there were no niggers here."

Then there is the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the distasteful obsession with Barack Obama's skin colour. "There's so much suspicion around having a biracial president," she says, "around Obama's presence on the world stage – the fact that the Tea Party gets coverage as anything other than a fringe group. There's nothing Obama can say or do as a black man that they're [willing] to hear."

Walker is by now used to viewers being discomfited not only by the fact that her work dares to speak openly about race and identity, but that it may even be making fun of such viewers. "It makes people queasy," she says. "And I like that queasy feeling."

Black Woman Scientist Gets a Racist/Sexist Diss at a Scientific American Blogsite

   
When Does a Scientist Get Called a Whore?
October 14, 2013
By Scott Jaschik

Before this weekend, the top discussion topics on the forum of Biology-Online -- which describes itself as the "world's largest and most comprehensive biology discussion board," were on mutations and body temperature. But the topic attracting the most contributions now is a bit different, with readers weighing in on the question: "When is it O.K. to call a scientist a whore?"

The question reflects the way an editor of Biology-Online responded to a scientist who declined to write for the site without pay. But the discussion has broadened to bias and disrespect faced by female and minority scientists. And when Scientific American took down a blog post about the incident, the anger grew more intense, as a respected publication was accused of refusing to permit discussion about the treatment of a minority woman -- even when that woman was one of the magazine's bloggers. When the magazine took down her post, other bloggers leaped in and published what she had written, and Twitter is now full of the hashtag #IstandwithDNLee -- referring to the woman whose treatment set off the controversy.

Danielle N. Lee is a postdoctoral fellow in zoology at Oklahoma State  University, and will be moving to Cornell University, with her lab, next semester. She also writes "The Urban Scientist," a blog at Scientific American that she describes this way: "A hip hop maven blogs on urban ecology, evolutionary biology and diversity in the sciences." Her blog there is popular, and Biology-Online sought her out.

Lee shared her e-mail exchanges online and several appear online through Scientific American (even after her blog post was removed). Someone identified as "Ofek," writing from Biology-Online, introduced himself as the blog editor and asked if Lee would be willing to contribute posts there. Lee wrote back, asking for details, including "payment rates." Ofek then wrote back and said that Biology-Online does not pay bloggers. Lee responded: "Thank you very much for your reply. But I will have to decline your offer. Have a great day."

Ofek's reply: "Because we don't pay for blog entries? Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore?"

The staff list of Biology-Online does not include Ofek. But in the discussion of the incident on the website, a site administrator promises to investigate what happened. She also says that Ofek is a new employee on the site, and that the site does not encourage "derogatory and discriminatory" remarks. Ofek did not respond to e-mail from Inside Higher Ed, nor did the site Biology-Online. Early Monday morning, a site administrator posted a comment saying that one of the owners of Biology-Online had sent an apology to Lee and that a screenshot of the apology would be posted later.

Lee responded to the experience -- before any comment was made by Biology-Online -- by posting about what had happened on her blog on Scientific American. Word started to spread, but the magazine took down the post.

On Twitter, Mariette DiChristina, editor in chief of Scientific American, wrote: "Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed."

A review of recent blog posts on the Scientific American website, however, suggests that bloggers other than Lee have been given some leeway in defining appropriate topics. There were posts in recent weeks on Lady Gaga, International Octopus Day and a comparison of science-related policy in Texas and North Carolina -- in other words plenty of content beyond just explanation of new science.

A Scientific American blogger, Hannah Waters, noted that the blog post the magazine removed was critical of Biology-Online, which happens to be a "partner" of Scientific American. Waters wrote on Twitter: "Hoped @SciAm was different - but it chose business (network partner) over its own bloggers. For shame." DiChristina responded on Twitter: " 'Partner' connection not a factor."

On Sunday afternoon, DiChristina posted a statement online in which she gave another reason for removing Lee's blog: "Dr. Lee’s post pertained to personal correspondence between her and an editor at Biology-Online about a possible assignment for that network. Unfortunately, we could not quickly verify the facts of the blog post and consequently for legal reasons we had to remove the post." The statement stressed that Scientific American does consider issues related to the treatment of female and minority scientists to be important topics for bloggers to discuss. And she said that in her desire to say something quickly about the controversy, she turned to Twitter and that this approach did not convey her thinking.

DiChristina's statement also said that "We are investigating what links we currently have with Biology-Online. We intend to take further action, but due to the timing of this situation and our need to investigate the facts further, we cannot provide additional information at this point." A spokeswoman characterized the Scientific American relationship with Biology-Online as "limited" and said that it previously involved "recipricol advertising."

By Sunday, prior to the release of the statement, the web commentary seemed to be as much about Scientific American as about Biology-Online (and the commentary was scathing in talking about both entities). A new trending hashtag: #boycottSciAm.

The blogger Isis the Scientist, who frequently addresses issues of sexism in science, wrote that she is endorsing the boycott of Scientific American. In an open letter to the magazine, she noted that it partners with a website (Biology-Online) where an editor called a scientist a whore, and the magazine then removed that scientist's thoughts on what happened. "What you’ve taught me today is that you do not share my values. You may post glossy, sexy pictures of science, but you are not interested in discovery. You do not value truth, honesty and integrity – the core values that I hold most dear as a scientist.  Most importantly, you did not empower my friend.  You shut her down when she shared that she had not been respected. You put the dollar before the scientist," wrote Isis. "I can’t read you anymore, Scientific American because there is truly nothing scientific about you."

Tressie McMillan Cottom, a Ph.D. student in sociology at Emory University, wrote on her blog that the incident reflects serious problems in the way academe treats minority women and too frequently ignores their issues.

"Into all of these problems academics like Danielle Lee arrive. They exist at the intersection of two major problems in academia: sexism and racism. They believe in the public trust and they want the public to trust the work we do. So they travel to public conferences and translate science into English for general audiences. They see the bridges that brought them across divides that swallowed many of their peers on the way to an elite degree at an elite institution and they want to reinforce that bridge. So they use hip-hop music and culture like a Rosetta stone to bring poor kids, black kids, Hispanic kids into the scientific discourse," Cottom wrote.

"When we consider the demographic projections in this country in relation to our clamor to lead the world in scientific discovery, scholars like Danielle are providing a national service. We can’t win the future of STEM without winning it through black and brown girls and boys.... Scholars like Danielle are usually doing this with fewer resources, institutional authority and support than white male scholars often enjoy....  Many are taking on debt and delaying income hoping the investment pays off with a job, of which there are fewer every year."

And that's why it's so offensive, Cottom wrote, that Lee was called a terrible name for simply asking for compensation for her time. "So when Danielle decided that she could not afford to write for Biology-Online for free at that point in time, she did so within a context of many of academia’s most pressing and vexing problems," Cottom wrote. "If she is a whore for doing that then so are many of us doing the work we believe in without the assumed authority of being white and male.  I am that kind of whore and trust me, if you think it's hard out there for a pimp wait until you hear from a woman working the tracks."

In an interview Sunday, Lee said that she felt that she had been treated unfairly by both Biology-Online and Scientific American. She said she couldn't believe that the magazine had taken down her blog post and assumed at first that it was a technical error. She said that "for a woman of color to say no" clearly isn't accepted by everyone in academe, and that this results in the kind of treatment she received. "Micro-aggressions are a sad constant reality when there are not many people who look like us or sound like us," she said.

Lee has posted her reflections on the controversy on YouTube. In the video that follows, she says that she was "really surprised" that Biology-Online expected her to work for free, and that the editor there responded "so rudely" when she turned the website down. She said that it was important for scholars who are asked to contribute to various organizations to "do so on your own terms," and to make sure that they receive compensation or visibility or whatever they value to help their careers advance.

Minority and female scholars have a particular challenge, she said. "For far too long the presumption has been that if you are a woman, a person of color, or from a low socioeconomic status, folks think they can get you, your talent, your expertise and your energy for free," she said. "That's not available."
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Published Online: October 9, 2013

Upending Stereotypes 

About Black Students

By Leslie T. Fenwick

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There's a troubling undercurrent to the national conversation about the black-white gap in student achievement. The (mostly) unspoken belief about black students is tied to broader perceptions about black people. So, let's just say it: Some believe the gap is a function of weak family and community structures, male joblessness, drug use, and permissive cultural values—which they assert predominate in the black community.

Others believe that blacks constitute a community that is largely beyond intervention and that no amount of funding or special programs can fix what ails the perpetually troubled. An attendant assertion is that blacks who do achieve have outsmarted stereotype vulnerability and are outliers. Some say these blacks are exceptions and are successful because they embrace and actualize a white cultural-value system.

These erroneous and insulting beliefs persist because they are buoyed by a constant recitation of negative statistics about blacks in the research literature and unrelentingly circulated in news accounts. Such wrongheaded assertions negate accurate and meaningful portrayals of black people. Mostly, they misdirect formulation of educational and social policy and skew funding priorities in education and elsewhere.

Regrettably, Americans have been socialized by the scholarly and journalism communities to accept at face value negative data about blacks and been trained to be skeptical about and question any positive information about black people. This is so because little positive information of consequence about blacks is disseminated.

To understand what I mean, take this true-false test. How would you score?

—Jeff Dekal

1. Black parents are not invested in their children's education and do not engage in school-affirming behaviors.

False. The National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2008 that 94 percent of African-American parents said their children did homework outside of school. The same percentage of parents reported setting aside a special time and place for their children to complete homework and having an adult in the household check it. This is the highest percentage of any subgroup of U.S. parents engaged in this critical school-affirming behavior.

2. A much higher percentage of white parents than black parents attend PTA meetings and parent-teacher conferences.

False. Comparable percentages of black and white parents reported attending school meetings, according to the same 2008 NCES study. Specifically, 90 percent of white parents and 87 percent of black parents said they attended PTA meetings. Seventy-eight percent of white parents and 77 percent of black parents reported attending parent-teacher conferences.

3. Black parents are satisfied with permissive academic and discipline standards in the schools their children attend.

“Let’s dump the litany of negativity and see where more accurate and nuanced research and reporting about black students and adults take the nation’s schools.”

False. NCES data show that fewer black parents than white parents report being very satisfied with the academic standards, order, and discipline in their children's schools.

4. Most urban and center-city teachers and principals are black.

False. According to surveys of schools and staffing conducted by the NCES, in 2003-04, nearly 90 percent of urban school teachers were white, and almost 71 percent of center-city school teachers were white.In the same academic year, approximately 88 percent of urban school principals and 62 percent of center-city school principals were white.

5. White educators are more qualified than black educators.

False. For decades, research has shown that African-American educators are the nation's most credentialed and experienced subgroup of educators. As I wrote inEducation Week in 2000, they are more likely than their white peers to hold a master's or doctoral degree in education and possess more years of experience as a classroom teacher when they ascend to the principalship and more years as a principal when they ascend to the superintendency.

6. There are more black men in prison than in college.

False. In fact, Ivory Toldson, of the Howard University School of Education, hasconducted research that shows that there are more black men in college than in prison. His research indicated that, in 2009, 1.4 million black men attended college, and 840,000 black men were in prison.

7. Black kids use more alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs than white kids.

False. White 12th graders use more alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs than black 12th graders. According to reports from the National Institute for Drug Abuse and the Washington-based think tank Education Sector, use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs has consistently been found to be less prevalent among African-American high school seniors than their white peers. This finding also is true among African-American students in lower grades, according to a 2011 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

8. Most black men don't work.

False. Although unemployment rates are higher for black men than for white men, theU.S. Department of Labor reports (as an employment-to-population ratio) that nearly 60 percent of black men and almost 70 percent of white men were employed in January 2012.

9. More black people than white people attend church.

True. According to the 2010 Gallup Poll of Americans' Church Attendance, 55 percent of African-Americans reported attending church weekly. That represented the highest percentage of any U.S. racial or ethnic subgroup.

Well, how did you score? The question-and-answer sets above are not meant to be a "Jeopardy!" game of sorts ("Alex, I'll take African-Americans for $600"). Nor are they about advancing a strengths-based or asset-based research perspective and good-news fantasy about blacks.

Rather, these data sets (and numerous oters like them) urge a deep interrogation and interruption of the defamation of black people in research and media accounts. Such data should encourage educational practitioners, researchers, policymakers, journalists, funders, and everyday citizens to question the negative statistics we hear almost every day about black boys and girls, black men and women, black families, and black communities.

So, what can educators, researchers, and policymakers do about all this? Here are a few recommendations:

• For principals and teachers. The worst images of black culture have been manufactured and placed in broad circulation. As an antidote, educators must find, consciously elevate, and celebrate the best of black culture in schools and classroom. When schools put the best of black culture in broad circulation (through serious and ubiquitous curricular content andinstructional materials), black students experience identity restoration, and all students learn meaningful cultural appreciation.

• For researchers. The hallmark of science is replication—replication of what works. Yet too much of the research about the black community is a litany of negativity. Researchers can counter this litany by publishing empowering research. For instance, rather than adding to the copious studies about black men in prison, why not examine the lives of black men who work and have intact families? The latter body of research is almost nonexistent—not because these men don't exist, but because researchers have seen little value in examining their lives. With these types of studies, researchers will push beyond the veil of negative statistics and arrive at more accurate and stereotype-shattering data.

• For policymakers. Direct policy formulation and funding initiatives at empowering research and programs. For instance, historically black colleges and universities make up just 3 percent of the nation's colleges and universities. Yet, HBCUs like Howard University, where I serve as a dean, prepare the majority of black physicians, engineers, and other STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) PhDs, and more than 50 percent of the nation's black teachers. These irreplaceable institutions should be viewed by policymakers as engines of innovation worthy of deeper investment by federal, state, and philanthropic agencies.

Let's dump the litany of negativity and see where more accurate and nuanced research and reporting about black students and adults take the nation's schools and even the nation itself.

Leslie T. Fenwick is the dean and a professor of education policy at the Howard University School of Education. Portions of this essay are excerpted from the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture, which she delivered at the American Educational Research Association's April 2013 conference. The writer is a former urban school administrator, teacher, and legislative aide in the Ohio Senate.