Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Jamilah King
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Posts by Jamilah King
Why Black Union Workers Matter In This Year’s Super Bowl Showdown
02 days ago
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was not supposed to be among this year’s Super Bowl story lines. This year’s contenders, the New England Patriots and the New York Giants, should instead be taking center stage. Yet less than a week before America’s biggest sporting event of the year kicks off in Indianapolis, Gov. Daniels’ fight with the state’s unionized workers over legislation that could curtail the power of their collective bargaining rights has given a new national platform to the right wing’s bitter, decades-old war against unions.
Yet the NFL’s Player’s Association, which is the union that represents the league’s athletes, has also jumped onto the national stage and come out in opposition to the proposed Right to Work legislation. In doing so, the league’s union is taking an important, albeit symbolic, step to publicly bridge the gap that exists between the NFL’s multibillion dollar teams and its increasingly marginalized fan base. And it’s proof that sports is a powerful cultural art form that can help elevate some of today’s most controversial political issues.
On January 6, 2012, the NFLPA released a damning letter in opposition to the Indiana’s bill, which has since moved quickly through the state’s legislature.
“‘Right-to-work’ is a political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights. It’s not about jobs or rights, and it’s the wrong priority for Indiana,” the statement read. “It is important to keep in mind the plight of the average Indiana worker and not let them get lost in the ceremony and spectacle” of the Super Bowl.
The statement was hugely important, considering what’s at stake for Indiana’s workers, particularly black ones. Black workers are disproportionately union members. They’re more likely than whites, Asians, and Latinos to be in public-unions, and make up 15 percent of total membership, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Historically, unions have been crucial gateways for black workers to earn higher wages and break into the middle class.
While supporters of Right to Work argue that the laws are needed to foster a “pro-business” atmosphere that helps generate desperately needed jobs, research has shown that the laws can have disastrous effects on workers. The Economic Policy Institute released a report in January showing that workers employed in Right to Work states makes less money and are less likely to be offered health care.
DeMaurice F. Smith, executive director of the player’s union, pressed the point even further in an op-ed published a week later in one of Indiana’s most widely read newspapers. ” An indisputable lesson of our American history is that none of those workplace protections came as a gift from corporations,” wrote Smith, who’d previously made a name for him self as a hard-nosed litigator. “Rather, all of them resulted from the ability of workers to stand united and demand change when it would have been easy to fire or silence the voice of a single worker.”
There are currently 22 states in the country that have the law, mostly in the South and in western states like Wyoming and Utah. Indiana’s bill, which the state Senate passed this week and Gov. Daniels has already vowed to sign into law, is unique because it will be the first the law that’s been put into action in an industrialized area with a large, unionized workforce.
“I don’t think it was surprising, but I think it’s important,” said Washington State University professor David Leonard about the NFLPA’s statement.
And for some observers, the reason why it’s important is because there’s been an growing divide between the league and its average fans, many of whom are people of color.
Professional football in America gained popularity as a uniquely working class sport in which teams (think the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers) were named after regional manufacturing economies. These days, as ticket prices have risen to the tune of hundreds of dollars for a single game, the game has become an exaggerated expression of wealth in America when many fans are struggling financially.
Larry Solomon is a longtime professor at San Francisco State University. He’s also a lifelong football fan, and has noticed that biggest enclaves of football fans are often in the most historically disenfranchised communities.
“They’re not cheering for the owners,” Salomon says of most fans. “They’re cheering for their cities, they’re cheering their friends and for people like them who identify around that team.”
For Salomon, that sort of ferver carries with it the potential for raising people’s political awareness. “When I go home and watch the Super Bowl with my family this weekend, I hope the NFLPA and the Indiana stuff comes up, but last year we talked about abortion during the Super Bowl because of Tim Tebow and his ad.
“You have these moments where sports intersects with politics, intersects with race, and you can have conversations with people who might not normally have those conversations.”
And this year is certainly one of those moments.
“The Super Bowl is a staging ground for American Exceptionalism,” said Leonard, the professor at Washington State, noting that the Navy spends millions of dollars to do fly-overs before the game. “It’s a celebration and festival for the wealthy that’s done because of the labor of disproportionately men of color.”
That, Leonard suggests, is a macrocosm for how other industries work.
“Yes, the money is different and the stage is different, but that doesn’t mean that the lessons that we can learn aren’t there.”
Indeed, the 2011 NFL season was mired in political discussions from the start. It began with a protracted labor dispute between owners and players which lead to a lockout that lasted well into training camp. The NFLPA repeatedly emphasized how damaging a prolonged lockout could be not just to players and coaches, but also for the concession stand workers and ticket agents who work at the league’s stadiums and whose livelihoods often depend on fans showing up and spending money at games.
Another key issue that was brought up by players during the lockout is one with which many workers in other industries can relate: occupational safety.
While professional football is an admittedly physical sport and the allure of big hits has drawn in many fans over the years, the eventual price of that brutality has recently become apparent. New research has shown that players who suffer multiple concussions stand at far greater risk of developing severe depression and early onset dementia.
“I’m not sure players overall have really ‘gotten it’ with respect to the extent to which the money they make can be fleeting, but I think they’re beginning to get the idea that their health, their vibrancy can be fleeting,” said N. Jeremi Duru, a professor at Temple University and author of the forthcoming book “Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL.” He maintains that players’ increased awareness has made them more willing to protect their physically interests, and thus has created a climate in which their union’s support of other worker’s struggles isn’t all that surprising.
“The unanswered question is whether any of the players participating in the Super Bowl will say anything,” says Dave Zirin, a columnist at The Nation and author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love.” Though Zirin cautions that it’s not something fans should expect, he also thinks that if players do participate, the issue of worker’s rights in Indiana would get attention that’s “out of this stratosphere.”
Why Microsoft’s So-Called ‘Avoid Ghetto’ App Is Really American
04 days ago
Microsoft has recently been at the center of a whirlwind of controversy over a new app that critics allege is downright racist. On January 3, the company was granted a patent for technology related to its “Pedestrian Route Production” application, a tool that that the company says would navigate the user “safely through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold.”
While the patent makes no explicit references to race, the project has been unofficially dubbed the “Avoid Ghetto App” by various online news sites. Microsoft, for its part, has been silent throughout the ordeal, and declined to comment on the matter to Colorlines.com. But intentions aside, the fact that the app was so quickly racialized begs the larger question of how and why technology perpetuates systemic racism, and why consumers should care.
“Almost the moment this patent got granted, [this app] got racialized so that ‘violent crime’ became ‘mugging’, which became ‘black and Latino people’, which became ‘ghetto,’ ” says Sarah Chinn, a professor of English at the City University of New York and author of the book “Technology and the Logic of American Racism.” Chinn has been among Microsoft’s most vocal critics.
Microsoft’s app has stirred so much discussion, Chinn says, because the United States is a “very racist country. When you say the words ‘violent crime’, in the public imagination that turns into ‘dangerous urban black man or Latino man.’ “
Others disagree. Industry analyst Rob Enderline told NPR last week that Microsoft’s project is just a matter of technology trying to make life easier for users. “It’s part of an overall effort to make navigation systems more intelligent so they keep you out of danger, whether you’re driving or you’re on foot,” Enderle told NPR.
Yet even if that’s the case, it’s based on the widely held misconception that violent crime is more likely to hit random strangers. In fact, the opposite is true. The vast majority of violent crime happens to people who know each other. For instance, 75 percent of rapes are committed by someone the survivor already knows, according to statistics provided by San Francisco Women Against Rape. The majority of murders are committed by members of ones own racial group. Missouri has the nation’s highest black homicide rate, and when the Violent Prevention Center looked at statistics from 2009, it found that–whenever the relationship could be identified–76 percent of black murder victims were killed by someone they knew.
In Washington, D.C. and New York City, robberies are on the decline.
Huffington Post’s Black Voices points out that the FBI’s 2010 crime report revealed that whites were arrested more often for violent crimes that year than any other race.
But, according to Chinn, the myth that black men in particular are more likely to perpetrate violent crime against white strangers resonates so strongly because it’s become an indelible part of America’s racial identity.
“This is a myth that’s been with us since the days of Reconstruction,” Chinn told Colorlines.com, calling the period an era of “terrorism against black people.” Chinn noted that whites unconsciously knew that they were the perpetrators of violence against black people, particularly sexual violence against black women. Thus the myth of dangerous black men evolved as way to justify racist violence against black communities.
The logic, Chinn says, was “you’re violent so we have to criminalize you, we have to put you in jail, we have to stop-and-frisk you, and we have to move out of your neighborhoods.”
Microsoft’s new technology is just the latest in a series of scientific parallels with the past.
The problem isn’t the technology itself, but what people imagine the technology will do. So while DNA and finger printing may on the surface be seemingly race-neutral technologies that only offer specific information about someone’s body, they’re quickly used to reinforce people’s preconceived ideas about race. “Once they enter the public discourse in the United States it’s all about how can we identify [people of color] and prove that they are not as good as white people, or prove that segregation is justified,” says Chinn.
Chinn does not expect that Microsoft will market the app as it is now, but will fold it into its next generation of mapping technology. ”It’s really about why we should be afraid of certain neighborhoods and certain kinds of people. People take these technologies and they use them to ‘prove’ things that they actually already believe about people of various racialized groups.”
2012′s Predictably (Mostly) White Oscar Nominees
01 week ago
Oscar nominations are out and there aren’t many surprises. Certainly, there’s the good–a meaningful uptick in nods for Latino actors and filmmakers, and one for the civil rights era documentary “Barber of Birmingham.” But it’s more of the same in which Hollywood’s biggest awards show recognizes and perpetuates stories that it feels are important–and generally ignores nuanced stories by and about people of color.
Michael Cieply, writing at the New York Times’ Carpetbagger blog, called the list “conventional.”
“As for the directors behind those nominees, all are male, all are white, and most have been a presence at the Oscars before,” Cieply wrote. “Their average age is somewhere in the vicinity of 57, nearly matching the average age, around 60, of members of the Academy’s governing board.”
“The Help” is among this year’s favorites. It’s received a nomination for best picture, and two of its supporting actresses–Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer–were also nominated for best supporting actress awards. While the performances have been praised, the film itself has been widely criticized for its happy-go-lucky portrayal of black women’s lives in the Jim Crow South. The Association of Black Women Historians has twice come out publicly to condemn the film. (Though the Oscar nods have helped buoy modern-day domestic workers’ lobbying efforts in California).
For some who work in the film industry, this year’s nominations list was a mixed bag. While most of the films were made by and for whites, there’s still hope that the actors of color who were nominated will be recognized for their work. “I’d love to see Viola Davis win,” says Tambay Obenson, chief editor and writer at IndieWire, a collective of black filmmakers. “Even though I didn’t particularly care for ['The Help'], I’d be happy for her.”
It’s a small, but symbolic hope that actors and filmmakers of color will be recognized for their work in an overwhelmingly white industry that values packaged stories and historically inaccurate blindspots over nuanced dramas centered in communities of color.
Hollywood’s audiences are becoming more racially diverse, and it’s increasingly their buying power that drives box office success.
So which films should have also been included on the nominations list?
“Pariah,” the coming of age story of a young black lesbian growing up in Brooklyn, was considered a long shot but deserved more attention, according to Obensen. The film’s star, Adepero Oduye, gave a critically acclaimed performance, one that was even acknowledged by Oscar nominee Meryl Streep in her speech at the Golden Globe Awards.
But Dee Rees, “Pariah’s” director, says she isn’t worried about winning awards.
“My work is on the screen,” Rees told The Grio. “Being nominated or mentioned for things doesn’t make the film any better. Not being nominated or mentioned doesn’t make the film any worst. The film still is what it is and nothing can take away from that and make it better. The biggest affirmation is having people come see it on screen.”
Quietly Radical Mission at Sundance: Supporting Native Filmmakers
02 weeks ago
It’s days before the Sundance Film Festival and Aurora Guerrero is busy. The 40-year-old filmmaker is set to debut her first feature-length project “Mosquita y Mari” at the festival in Park City, Utah, on Saturday, but it’s Wednesday and she finds herself in Los Angeles preparing to get in front of the camera for a television spot on up-and-coming filmmakers to watch.
It’s not exactly a standard Hollywood story. Her independent film is a teenage love story between two Chicana best friends who grow up in South East Los Angeles’ vibrant immigrant community. It relied largely on a grassroots funding campaign to raise money for production. But those facts have helped to lock in her place on the year’s indy film radar. When asked if there’s any one person who helped make all of it happen, she doesn’t hesitate.
“Bird,” Guerrero says. “Bird Runningwater.”
Bird, it turns out, is the director of Native American and Indigenous Programs at the Sundance Institute. In that capacity, and along with program manager Owl Johnson, Bird oversees NativeLabs, an innovative fellowship program that works with indigenous screenwriters and directors to help produce and show work that isn’t easy to see elsewhere.
Guerrero recounts Bird’s steady and persistent guidance. He helped mentor her through re-writing drafts of her script, which was over a decade in the making. And when it was time to go into post-production, it was Bird who nominated her for a prestigious TimeWarner fellowship to help carry the film across the finish line.
“He’s been behind a lot of indigenous filmmakers of color who are saying something different through contemporary cinema,” Guerrero says about Bird.
In an industry that struggles to include even more visible communities of color, like black actors and directors, indigenous artists often find it difficult to get support for their work. But Bird represents someone within an established institution who’s making it happen. Forget the status quo. There are indigenous stories to tell and there are people already telling them. It all goes to show that with the right support, our media landscape can be as forthcoming and representative as the people it purports to serve.
“I think that some of the most exciting films down the road are going to come from native filmmakers,” Bird says. “Our job is to help find those filmmakers and help them make their stories the strongest they can be.”
The Sundance Institute has maintained a commitment to native filmmakers since its inception in 1981. But that mission was bumped up a notch in the late 90s when it held a series of workshops for native filmmakers at UCLA. In 2008, NativeLabs became more intentional about its outreach and process by instituting a two-pronged approach: immersion in a native community and exposure to Sundance itself. Each year, a group of native filmmakers work on their craft at the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico and then screen their work at the Sundance Film Festival. Bird estimates that a total of 70 filmmakers have gone through the program.
“I really believe in the ability and talent of our native people,” Bird says, noting that the process of filmmaking has become much more accessible in recent years with advancements in technology.
Sterlin Harjo is another indigenous filmmaker who’s gone through NativeLabs. He premiered his feature, “Barking Water,” at Sundance in 2008 and calls Bird “the unsung hero of indigenous film.”
“There’s a lot of institutions out there that try to promote native films and native filmmakers,” Harjo says. “But they do it from the outside-in. It’s approached in this very institutionalized way.”
Sundance, he says, is different in that it relies on native filmmakers to support other native filmmakers. “There’s no museum-type feel to it,” Hardjo continues. “It’s not like there’s people looking at your work and trying to analyze it,” Harjo says, alluding to the popular ways in which indigenous filmmakers have their lives and work scrutinized.
That’s an important selling point for many native filmmakers, who do their creative work in the face of decades of racist caricatures promoted by Hollywood.
“It’s taken Hollywood a long time to realize that you can have a narrative fiction film that just happens to have native characters in it,” says Elise Marrubio, an associate professor of American Indian Studies at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Marrubio also directs the college’s Native American Film Series. “There’s a cultural perception of what a film with native people should look like, and that stereotype has been very hard to break down.”
And then there’s the business of filmmaking. When the economic crisis hit in 2009, Guerrero needed to find a new producer for her film. Bird helped her land Chad Burris, who grew up in Oklahoma before setting out for law school in Los Angeles.
“It’s crazy difficult,” Burris said about securing funding for the film. “You don’t have any big name actors, you don’t have a very recognizable audience, you don’t have a lot of the things that you need to get financed.” But he says he was motivated by the project’s bigger goals. “It’s allowed someone that’s got a fresh voice to tell a story that otherwise may not get told.”
The message is having an impact.
“We are now in a moment in our world where native people are saying ‘no longer do we want people making films about us as if they know us,’” Marrubio says. “We’re going to decide what stories we want to tell, how they want to tell them, and we’re going to make the movies.”
The FCC Is Trying to Close the Digital Divide–Sort Of
03 weeks ago
The Federal Communications Commission doesn’t always communicate very well. This much became obvious earlier this week when Chair Julius Genachowski announced important changes to the country’s Lifeline program, a service that’s historically offered low-cost phone service to poor and working class households.
The underlying principle of the Lifeline program is that phone service is a necessity, and that the government should ensure that everyone has access to it. Genachowski said on Monday that the same principle should apply to broadband Internet, since about 40 percent of the country remains without it, mostly because it’s too expensive. That doesn’t change the fact that important parts of broadband Internet are still not classified as essential communication services–which makes it hard for the FCC to fully regulate it. Still, the FCC is launching a new pilot programs to offer low-cost service, help teach people about the Internet and connect them to it. That’s big.
Funny thing is, though, this new pilot program isn’t the first time the FCC has tried to offer low-cost alternatives to help bridge the digital divide. A handful of programs already exist and have had varying amounts of success. And it’s very likely that you’ve never heard of them.
The reality is that the digital divide still exists. Only about 60 percent of users in America have access to home-based broadband connections, and many low-income, black and Latino households lack access. While many black and Latino users have used smartphones to help bridge the digital divide, the wireless market is rife with dangerous deregulation. And in any case, home-based broadband connections allow users to more fully participate in democracy, particularly as more jobs, classes and government services move online.
“Part of the problem is that anything that’s related to technology is cushioned in this narrative of business,” says Amalia Deloney, policy director at the Center for Media Justice. “Ninety percent of the stories–if there are any stories–show up in the business or commerce section of the paper. It creates this other challenge: that people don’t see this as a humanitarian issue, they don’t see it as a social justice issue. It reinforces the belief that tech isn’t for the average person.”
We’ve tried to change that at Colorlines.com. So, in that spirit, here are a few of the FCC’s efforts to deal with the digital divide–the good and the bad of each:
Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP)
This was a part of President Obama’s 2009 Stimulus bill and, thus, the administration’s first big statement on how seriously it planned to take the problem of the digital divide. The program set aside $4.7 billion to offer grants to people with good ideas to expand home broadband. Those efforts have been needed in many rural and low-income communities dense with people of color, which are still struggling to find affordable ways to connect.
The program was expected to create jobs in technology and help boost the economy. Yet three years later, the economy remains sluggish and the digital divide remains strong.
Connect to Compete
Launched in May of 2011, this was FCC Chair Genachowski’s public-private partnership to offer discounted broadband rates and computers to low-income users. Through the program, cable providers offer service for as low as $9.95 a month for two years. Corporate partners included companies like Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Comcast and Time Warner.
In order to qualify for the program, applicants are required to have a child enrolled in the national school lunch program and have an overdue bill from a participating cable provider. Some advocates have argued that the program’s entry guidelines are too restrictive, and that not enough people even know that it exists.
New Lifeline pilot programs
Genachowski’s announcement on Monday signaled that change is coming to the country’s Lifeline program, but it’ll be slow. The agency will modernize Lifeline to include broadband Internet, but Genachowski also recommended putting a cap on the number of people who can qualify for the program in order to prevent ”fraud.” That assertion rubbed many civil rights groups the wrong way, particularly given the FCC’s own estimates of how many eligible participants are currently left out of the Lifeline program.
The Commission notes that the program has about 10 million participants, and only reaches about 32 percent of eligible households. That’s not a good sign for the nearly 100 million people in the U.S. who currently don’t have broadband Internet at home. In a press release from earlier this week, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said the following:
The Lifeline program is the only program that can address this problem by systematically addressing the cost of modern telecommunications for low-income people. Limiting a program that only reaches one-third of its eligible participants before the FCC can fully assess the changes it announced today to eliminate fraud would seem counterproductive.
The FCC’s new pilot programs are expected to be launched later this year.
What’s Not to Love About Tim Tebow? Start With His Anti-Abortion Ad
03 weeks ago
Denver Broncos second year quarterback Tim Tebow may not actually be Jesus, but he is capable of performing miracles. That’s according to the logic of one of the most captivating NFL story lines this season. And it was reinforced last Sunday, when Tebow led his underdog Denver Broncos to a surprise overtime victory against the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Wildcard playoff game. The game turned out to be CBS’s most highly rated NFL Wildcard game in 25 years.
But the fervor surrounding Tebow has little to do with his actual playing ability. He’s an evangelical Christian who proudly and publicly backs conservative causes. That, of course, is not an anomaly in professional sports, nor should it be all that controversial. Yet it’s a prominent part of the narrative being written about Tebow as sports’ supposedly most endangered species: the underrated “good guy.” Or, through another lens: the white, God-fearing athlete who believes in so-called “traditional” family values.
Through that latter lens, Tebow’s narrative represents an enduring double standard in sports, one in which athletes are free to endorse conservative causes, while others are hounded as bad apples for progressive political stances, particularly those involving race. “Tim Tebow is just a window into how certain politics are not only respected, but they’re valued,” says David Leonard, a professor at Washington State University.
There’s no denying that Tim Tebow is a world class athlete. Before entering the NFL, he won a Heisman trophy and two national championships at the University of Florida on his way to becoming arguably the most celebrated player ever to take a college football field.
The Broncos drafted him in the first round of the 2010 NFL Draft. While his second season has seen some serious lows–including a humiliating loss to the Buffalo Bills in which he threw three interceptions, two of which were returned for touchdowns–they’ve by and large been the understandable pitfalls of a young quarterback who’s learning his way in the league.
But it’s Tebow’s devout Christianity that’s drawn the most attention. He was born in the Philippines to Baptist missionaries. In college, he made headlines when he wrote his favorite Bible verse, John 3:16 (about God’s salvation), under his eye in black. His tradition of bowing down on one knee and praying after each touchdown, now known as “Tebowing,” has been adopted by school kids and was even taken up this season by the U.S. Marines, when they made an appearance on the field before a Broncos game against the New York Jets.
More prominently, Tebow and his mother, Pam, were featured in a 2010 Super Bowl ad for Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian anti-abortion group that’s based in Colorado. In the 30-second spot that aired on CBS, Pam Tebow recounts Tim’s traumatic birth, in which doctors recommended that she abort her fetus because of potentially deadly complications. “I call him my miracle baby,” Tebow’s mother says in the ad. “There were so many times when I almost lost him.”
“The impact of the ad campaign was $37 million worth of media attention,” Focus on the Family spokesperson Gary Schneeberger told USA Today. But Tebow did it for free.
The group provides grants and medical training to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” where women must have ultrasounds before receiving an abortion–a fast-growing and widely criticized practice that reproductive rights advocates consider cruel.
In addition to its anti-abortion stances, Focus on the Family opposes LGBT rights and same-sex marriage. In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center called the group one of a “dozen major groups [which] help drive the religious right’s anti-gay crusade.” The group also threw its support behind the Federal Marriage Amendment, a law that would have defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
CBS was widely criticized by reproductive health providers like Planned Parenthood, especially because it had declined to run ads by left-leaning groups like the United Church of Christ, MoveOn.org, and PETA.
While Tebow has been celebrated for his devotion to his ideals, athletes who take up progressive causes are often widely criticized–particularly when they’re black.
When news hit that U.S. special forces had killed Osama Bin Laden, Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall, who’s black, spoke out. “What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…” he tweeted. Later, he added: “We’ll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.” The tweets caused such an uproar that team president Art Rooney had to issue a statement to the press reinforcing the organization’s pride in the military.
Tebow’s defenders argue that it’s unfair to criticize him for his religious beliefs, and that they shouldn’t be mixed up with discussions about politics. But his critics contend that there’s no getting around the fact that he’s explicitly endorsing a conservative political agenda.
“It’s not about bigotry against an abstract Christianity,” says Dave Zirin of the criticism facing Tebow. Zirin is a sports columnist at The Nation and the author of several books. “It’s actually about political opposition to Focus on the Family and to a whole set of ideas that the media’s giving him a pass for.”
There’s a double standard for black athletes throughout the history of sports, Zirin says. “African American athletes who take political stands are vilified and even lose their livelihood.”
Perhaps the most widely known example of this was the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, where John Carlos and Tommie Smith each gave black power salutes after their performance in the 200 meter race. Both men were immediately suspended from the U.S. team and banned from the Olympic village, where athletes usually stay while competing in the games.
In 1996, NBA basketball player Craig Hodges sued the league, claiming that it blackballed him for his political activism. After Hodges helped the Chicago Bulls win the 1992 NBA Championship, he showed up to the team’s visit to the White House in a dashiki and delivered a hand written letter to then-president George H.W. Bush expressing his critical views of the administration’s policies toward poor and African Americans. That same year, he criticized mega star Michael Jordan for not being more politically active. The team waived him after the ’92 season and he didn’t receive a single offer try out for another team.
Cases like Hodges’ are unfortunate, but they’re all too often the reality in pro sports, according to Leonard.
“When people say that politics have no place in sports, what they’re saying is that progressive politics, oppositional politics, counter narratives have no place in sports.”
Pepsi to Pay $3.13 Million for Hiring Discrimination Against Black Workers
03 weeks ago
Big changes are in order at Pepsi Beverages after the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that hundreds of black workers were unfairly impacted by the company’s use of criminal background checks:
Here’s what happened, according to a press release:
The EEOC’s investigation revealed that more than 300 African Americans were adversely affected when Pepsi applied a criminal background check policy that disproportionately excluded black applicants from permanent employment. Under Pepsi’s former policy, job applicants who had been arrested were not hired for a permanent job even if they had never been convicted of any offense.
The investigation found that the criminal background check policy used by Pepsi was in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In addition to the multimillion dollar payout, the company has also agreed to jobs offers and training.
Today’s Love: Felix Chang, 6-Year-Old Wrestling Champ
04 weeks ago
This week, Angry Asian Man showed us an adorable picture (above) of Felix Chang. He’s Fall’s Church, Virginia’s 2011 Crown Dixie National’s Wrestling Champ. Not only is little Felix adorable tough-looking, he also comes from a talented family. On December 22, 2011 — the same day he took the crown — his older brother Tommy won first place in the Pee Wee Heavyweight division.
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We’re ending the day as often as possible by celebrating love. We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to submissions@colorlines.com, and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we’ll find you. Be sure to let us know you’ve got the rights to share any media you send.
To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.
How ‘Sh*t White Girls Say to Black Girls’ Blew Up the Internet
04 weeks ago
It’s been a whirlwind 48 hours for Franchesca Ramsey. The 28-year-old New York-based graphic designer and comedian posted her hit video parody “Shit White Girls Say…to Black Girls” on Jan. 4, and in less than a day it got over 1.5 million views, thousands of Facebook shares and even generated a spat with celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. By Thursday, it beat out Justin Bieber for the coveted slot of the most watched video on YouTube.
Ramsey has become the star and creator of one of 2012′s first viral sensations. Of the dozens of videos that took up the “Shit People Say” meme, Ramsey’s was the first one to a offer a popular and critical examination of race. But why are these videos so popular? And as cultural critiques, can videos like Ramsey’s open meaningful conversations about race and racial justice?
The goal, Ramsey wrote earlier this week, had been simple: to make people laugh while, hopefully, opening some eyes. The video features Ramsey in an outlandish blonde wig, tossing around stereotypically offensive statements like “not to sound racist, but…” and “that’s so ghetto!” It is one of a string of parodies to hit the Internet since late 2011, starting with “Shit Girls Say.” In them, the protagonists–usually men–dress up as women and poke fun at mundane comments they assert to be most often said by women. Some, which rely solely on exaggerated insults, have been complete duds, like “Shit Black Girls Say” and “Shit Latina Girls Say.” But others, like Ramsey’s, have touched an online nerve and become enormously popular.
“People love to see themselves in media,” Ramsey told Colorlines.com. “The fact that you can watch the first one and say, ‘Oh my gosh! I say that!’ made it funny and made it something that you wanted to share.”
There’s no step-by-step manual on how to make a video go viral, but “Sh*t White Girls Say to Black Girls” shares a simple set of characteristics with other successful independently produced Internet comedies (think Awkward Black Girl): it looks good, and it uses humor to say something smart and discomforting about race.
“Usually the only way people talk about race in their lives is when they’re feeling defensive about it,” says W. Kamau Bell, an Oakland, Calif.-based comedian and a board member of the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com. Bell noted that comedy is a great way to get around that defensiveness.
Ramsey’s parody also turned the existing meme on its head.
“There’s a flip [in the narrative], which is part of why I think it’s so effective and powerful,” says Doyle Canning, a strategist at SmartMeme, a progressive group that helps craft political messaging. “The framing of the story is from the perspective of the black girl. That’s rarely the case in popular culture.
“I think there’s an opportunity for racial justice activists to intervene in those stories, and contribute a kind of meaningful critique that’s riding the momentum of an existing meme in the popular culture.”
People of color rarely see representations of themselves in mainstream media. A survey conducted by the Directors Guild of America found that of more than 2,600 television episodes in the 2010-2011 TV season, 77 percent were directed by white men. People of color are underrepresented in nearly every aspect of the filmmaking industry as well. Last May, researchers at Indiana University released a study, “The Role of Actors’ Race in White Audiences’ Selective Exposure to Movies,” that found white audiences don’t usually like films that aren’t about white people.
Others who study the media think that while the Internet has become an important tool for artists of color to create racially diverse content, it’s only a small drop in the bucket.
“The Internet’s become very popular, but people are still spending a lot of time watching television,” said Lisa Nakamura, professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and author of the book “Digitizing Race.”
“You can’t really see representations of your own race in a very specific way unless you look at something like [Ramsey's video],” Nakamura continued, noting that the representations of people of color that do exist are often deeply flawed. “For African American people, there’s Tyler Perry in film and every so often Spike Lee will make a film. Rarely is there an Asian American film or a Latino film.”
Even when characters of color do appear on mainstream television or in film, Nakamura says that their racial identities are often exaggerated. ”They’re always a little too packaged; you can tell it’s a cynical attempt to make money within a kind of broad and non-specific message.”
While Ramsey’s video has gotten its share of criticism for poking fun at white girls, Bell notes that it’s doing precisely what it was intended to do. “People have to remember that comedy isn’t the solution. Comedy is something that highlights the problem. The rest of us who are out in the world are supposed to try to solve the problem.”
Meanwhile, Ramsey has been inundated with hundreds of emails and messages since her video’s release, and thinks that the little changes do matter. A day after her video went viral, she posted a letter on her blog from a white woman who was moved by the video and asked herself, “Have I ever said anything like that?”
“That’s exactly what I wanted,” Ramsey said of the woman’s response. “There’s tons of people who don’t get it and are never gonna get it. But even if just one person thinks twice when they say something–and not just to a black person, but to anyone–then I think I did my job.”
‘Pariah’ Proves There’s an Audience–and a Hunger–for Real Stories
01 month ago
There’s a scene in Dee Rees’s debut feature film “Pariah” to which almost anyone who’s survived an awkward adolescence can relate. Alike, the film’s 17-year-old protagonist, sits in her high school’s hallway within earshot of a group of pretty, popular girls talking about the things that pretty, popular girls tend to talk about: who kicked it with whom at what party. The conversation creeps around to “AGs” (a slang term, for lesbians who identify as “aggressive”–think butch, but more black). One of the girls casually mentions that some AGs, like Alike, are cute–if only she’d be harder.
Moments like these help bring home one of the Rees’s biggest achievements with the critically acclaimed film: turning what was once taboo (openly gay teens) into something that’s painfully ordinary (kids struggling to fit in). “Pariah,” which opened with an impressive limited release this past weekend, is Rees’s semi-autobiographic tale of a shy but determined teenage poet growing up in middle class Brooklyn. Alike is comfortable enough with her sexuality, but she’s still uncertain of how to wear it. Tougher still is the work that must be done to bring her family and closest friends into the fold, especially when they’re already waging battles against their own personal demons. The film hinges on the belief that there’s no one way to be young, or black, or queer. And while it’s a struggle to come into any identity, those fights are always punctuated by moments of resilience and triumph.
What’s special about “Pariah” is that it, for the most part, successfully tells many stories at once. Alike’s struggle to live openly with her family is the most prominent. But there’s also her socially isolated mother and her bitter, but protective father. And there are the stories that turn on the underreported brutality hundreds of thousands of queer youth of color face each year.
Take Alike’s relationship with her best friend, Laura. More club hopper than bookworm, Laura’s living a hard scrabble life with an older sister after being disowned by her mother. She’s working a low-wage job, studying to earn her GED and spends her weekends on the Greenwich Village piers, which have been a popular hang out spot for queer youth of color for generations. The film’s pier scenes are tinged by melancholy. And rightfully so. A 2007 study found that 20 percent to 40 percent of the nation’s homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. In New York City, that rate has remained a steady 40 percent. Too many of those young people count on the piers to find both emotional and physical homes. And even there, they have had to organize and fight for their basic right to space.
These aren’t happy-go-lucky tales of gay assimilation. They aren’t the cute, openly gay assistant on a TV sitcom, or the mischievous, two-timing boyfriend vilified by Oprah Winfrey. These are ordinary people leading extraordinary lives amid brutal and highly racialized realities: harassment, violence, chronic unemployment; the frustration that comes with clinging onto a shaky black middle class life, and the sometimes debilitating effort to climb out of poverty. They aren’t the prettiest of tales, but they exist and need to be told.
“Pariah” is one of a handful of recent independent black films that tells them. But it does so in an endearing way that’s filled with jokes and embarrassingly awkward moments. There’s a lighthearted innocence that permeates the film, one that emanates more hope than hardship. In a multimedia piece for the New York Times, cultural critic Nelson George put it this way:
“Pariah” is important, not simply as a promising directorial debut, but also as the most visible example of the mini-movement of young black filmmakers telling stories that complicate assumptions about what “black film” can be by embracing thorny issues of identity, alienation and sexuality.
What’s most exciting about this mini-movement is that it’s been pushed along by a groundswell of community support. Folks who’ve long been marginalized in media are stepping behind and in front of the camera, or putting their hard earned money together to help pay for it.
After ditching a career in corporate marketing, Rees enrolled in New York University’s filmmaking program and studied under Spike Lee. “Pariah” first got attention back in 2007, when it debuted as a 30-minute short film. Focus Features picked it up early last year right after it had an enormously successful debut at the Sundance Film Festival. The big names signing on helped it along, but it was on-the-ground work that gave the film its real momentum. Over 200 people donated a total of over $11,000 to the film’s Kickstarter campaign last January. It’s a relatively paltry sum when compared to Hollywood’s annual multi-million dollar blockbusters. But it’s proof that hundreds of people are willing to pay for something different.
Rees summed up the importance of that in George’s Times piece: “There are different ways to be,” she said. “There is no monolithic black identity. My film is less about coming out than who you are and how to be that person. I think we want an extreme diversity of images and voices. And it is not enough to have a lot of films in one year, but to have an ongoing supply of films.”