The stabbing of Dr. King: New documentary delves into Izola Curry mystery l the Grio

March 4, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

The stabbing of Dr. King: New documentary delves into Izola Curry mystery

by Brittany Tom | March 4, 2013 the Grio

In September 1958, Dr. King was an emerging activist who was hosting a book signing for his book, “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story” at Blumstein Department Store in Harlem, New York. While signing books, Dr. King was approached by a 42-year-old black woman, Izola Ware Curry, who asked if he was really Martin Luther King Jr. After responding yes, witnesses say Curry promptly took a letter opener out of her purse, closed her eyes and plunged it into Dr. King’s chest.

With the help of local police officers, first responders and the Harlem Hospital surgical team, Dr. King fortunately survived the stabbing, but doctors said because the opener grazed the surface of his aorta, if she had stabbed harder or if someone removed the object improperly, he probably would have drowned in his own blood.

“If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Selma, Alabama to see the great movement there,” Dr. King famously said ten years after the incident in his last speech, ”I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

While local media reported Dr. King’s attempted assassination in the following weeks, the story did not become national news because he was not a prominent public figure at the time.

But mystery remains surrounding attacker Izola Curry. Who was she? What happened to her? And why did this woman attempt to kill one of the greatest civil rights leaders?

Two filmmakers claim that their upcoming documentary, When Harlem Saved A King, will answer all of these questions and also shed light into Curry’s life, who has remained, as of now, virtually unknown to the public.

“Everybody is fascinated with this story about Dr. Martin Luther King. Everything you hear about him is from history books, but this puts a different spin on Dr. Martin Luther King’s rise to fame and it’s absolutely true,” says executive producer Wayne Davis in an interview with theGrio.

While the mystery behind Curry is alluring to historians and the public alike, both the director, Al Cohen, and Davis, say their film will also pay homage to the “unsung heroes” from the Harlem community who helped save Dr. King’s life.

“Harlem was never given a badge of honor as it relates assisting in the Civil Rights Movement. This particular project that we’re doing helps bring that shade to the Harlem community. We can stand up tall and realize that we had a very major impact in the Civil Rights Movement,” said director Al Cohen in the interview.

The two Harlem natives have spent the past several years researching and tracking down firsthand sources and information to figure out what happened to Curry and community members who played a role in saving Dr. King.

“The objective of When Harlem Saved a King is to unravel mysteries, expose secrets and misconceptions; and answer unanswered questions. The pieces of this untold story will be woven into a compelling 60 minutes through the creative integration of eye-opening interviews [with firsthand witnesses],” according to the documentary’s website.

After the stabbing incident, Curry was taken into custody and was found to be incompetent to stand trial for assault charges. She was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.

Although the media portrayed Curry as a deranged woman with no real motive to kill Dr. King, both Cohen and Davis say that they have compelling evidence that Curry may have been part of a larger conspiracy to thwart the impending Civil Rights Movement.

“I think people will find an ironic twist about [the story]. Many said she was deranged woman, but it could possibly something bigger than that, a bigger conspiracy,” says Cohen. “It’s not just a crazy woman who got in an argument against [Dr. King] and just wanted to defend herself. It was more calculated than that.”

“For a deranged woman who acted solo, why was a lot of money in the south raised for her defense?” adds Davis. “That’s all I want to say. You will find out in the documentary what happened to her.”

Additionally, there are no records indicating Curry died at the mental institution and if she is still alive, she would be 96 years old today. Cohen and Davis say that the documentary will be groundbreaking because it will reveal what happened to Curry and if they were able to locate her.

“Nobody was ever able to get to [Izola Curry]. We have no information or any interviews or any leads about this woman, [except] the things we have found,” explains Cohen. “There is nobody out there that anybody has spoken to her outside of what we have found.”

The two filmmakers promoted their documentary throughout Black History Month to shed light onto a part of African-American history that has almost been forgotten. Just last week, the two hosted a screening of the trailer at Harlem Hospital.

“If Dr. King had died, would we be here talking with you today? We don’t know!” says Davis. “Maybe [the Civil Rights Movement] wouldn’t have progressed as soon as it did. Maybe it wouldn’t have progressed at all.”

The two filmmakers say that they are currently finishing the film’s production and they hope to premiere the documentary at the end of July.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Follow Brittany Tom on Twitter @brittanyrtom

The Oscars, Quvenzhané & The C-Word

March 1, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

The Oscars, Quvenzhané & The C-Word

UPTOWN on Feb 26, 2013

By Tracy Clayton

I watched every piece of the Oscars Sunday night, from pre-shows to the very end, which means that I was in front of my television for roughly 23 hours. My viewing experience began in anger and fury, and it ended the very same way. And thanks to some despicable behavior from the internet, that anger and fury is persisting hours after the show has ended.

It began when I heard Ryan Seacrest say that “they” (meaning, I assume, he and his E! red carpet cohorts) had decided to call Quvenzhané Wallis, the 9-year-old dynamo nominated for her role in Beasts of the Southern Wild, “Little Q” instead of her actual name. Here’s a quick breakdown of the problems with this:

1. That isn’t her name.
2. To my knowledge, neither Quvenzhané nor her family OK’d this nickname.
3. That nickname wasn’t given to her out of love or adoration; it was given out of discomfort and a need to control what they deemed as “other” in society.

Naming and names are important because they are entwined in our identities and the ownership of us and our bodies. We name things that belong to us. We name our children. We name our pets. We name our cars and our plants and our stuffed animals and even our hair. The act of naming and/or re-naming something is absolutely about power and control, and this is something that slave owners knew very well–a standard practice in “seasoning” and “breaking” a slave was assigning them Anglo-Saxon names. This established that those men and women were, without a doubt, property of their purchasers, and completely severed them from the identities they knew. Further, the names that were assigned to enslaved black men and women were often diminutive versions of common names–Billy instead of William; Donnie instead of Donald. These were verbal reminders that you were not a whole man or a whole woman, that you were not fully human. And when that wasn’t enough, they were stripped of those names and called “boy” or “gal,” because acknowledging a person’s self-approved name is to acknowledge the humanity in someone.

This is still the function of naming, and precisely why the insistence on not learning how to prounounce Quvenzhané’s name is so problematic and outright offensive.

The erasure of Quvenzhané’s name is an attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to step around and contain her blackness. Yes, sometimes black people have names that are difficult to pronounce. There aren’t many people of European descent named Shaniqua or Jamal. Names are as big a cultural marker as brown skin and kinky hair, and there has long been routine backlash against both of those things (see: perms, skin bleaching creams, etc.). This insistence on not using Quvenzhané’s name is an extension of that “why aren’t you white?” backlash.

Calling Quvenzhané “Little Q” is a lazy way to keep from having to deal with the discomfort that race causes. It is easier to be colorblind, to simply turn a blind eye to the differences that have torn this nation apart for centuries than it is to wade through those choppy waters. And Quvenzhané’s very existence is enough to make the societal majority uncomfortable. She is talented, successful, beautiful, happy, loved, and adored–all things that many people don’t figure that little black girls with “black” names could, or should, be. Their answer? Let’s make her more palatable. If she insists on not fitting the mold of the ghetto hoodrat associated with women with “urban” names, let’s take her own urban name away from her.

Refusing to learn how to pronounce Quvenzhané’s name says, pointedly, you are not worth the effort. The problem is not that she has an unpronounceable name, because she doesn’t. The problem is that white Hollywood, from Ryan Seacrest to the AP reporter who decided to call her “Annie” rather than her real name, doesn’t deem her as important as, say, Renee Zellwegger, or Zach Galifinakis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of whom have names that are difficult to pronounce–but they manage. The message sent is this: you, young, black, female child, are not worth the time and energy it will take me to learn to spell and pronounce your name. You will be who and what I want you to be; you be be who and what makes me more comfortable. I will allow you to exist and acknowledge that existence, but only on my terms.

CONTINUE

– See more at: http://uptownmagazine.com/2013/02/the-oscars-quvenzhane-the-c-word/#sthash.VMIh9xPr.dpuf

The Limitations of Rebellion in “Django Unchained” l

February 24, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

The Limitations of Rebellion in “Django Unchained”

by Jennifer Epps | February 24, 2013

The spirited antebellum western Django Unchained is nominated for five Oscars including Best Picture, and it could win for Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay and for Christoph Waltz’s supporting performance as bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz. (It has won in these categories at the Golden Globes and at the BAFTAs.) Indeed, the script is clever and compelling, with moments that induce giddy delight – like the fact that a notorious, lethal plantation is ironically named “Candieland”, and like the way Django makes known that “the ‘d’ is silent” in his name. These are interwoven with scenes of gripping, slowly-mounting tension. Also, it is true that Waltz is endlessly enjoyable as a wryly articulate, understated assassin. Though not nominated, Jamie Foxx also adds a great deal to the film’s strengths, being undeniably charismatic as the proud, sharp-shooting titular slave who turns the tables on his oppressors, while Leonardo DiCaprio steps outside his normal range of positive role models and portrays cruel, wrathful plantation owner Calvin Candie with surprising gusto. And in a classic, inspired bit of Tarantino casting, Don Johnson puts in a cameo as a genteel, paternalistic slave-owner (whose minions carry out the brutal side of slave-owning while he dresses in white).

There is much that the movie does very well. Most importantly, the fact that Django single-handedly takes on the apparatus of slavery feels thrillingly subversive. Django’s resourcefulness, strength, and sense of dignity are immensely appealing. Though there has been much controversy over Tarantino’s prolific use of the n-word (110 times during the movie, it is reported) the iconography of a heroic, brooding Django who simmers with moral outrage until the time is right to boil over is ultimately much stronger than the word is. We are all encouraged to identify with the iconic, brave Django, to want to be like him, to leave the theater thinking “I am Django” — to paraphrase the famous “I am Spartacus” line in Dalton Trumbo’s 1960 slave revolt epic.

But as political philosophy, Django Unchained is the opposite of Spartacus. Tarantino is fully committed to the Western movie trope of the stoic lone gunfighter. His hero, like the Western archetype, faces down a horde of villains, dispenses justice, and then, ever self-sufficient, rides off into the picturesque sunset. In this case, he takes his beloved (Kerry Washington), but it is still likely that they are going to live on the edge of society. For one thing, Django’s going to have to go into hiding after all he has done.

Though Tarantino shows plenty of horrors in the system of slavery, making it clear that power over other human beings was maintained by savage violence, he celebrates the rugged individualist principles of the Western genre above all; when Django and his lady ride off together, it doesn’t seem to matter to them that, in the larger world, that system is still in place and slaves all over the South are still suffering.

Tarantino really has no interest in the collective action that forms the backbone of the slave revolt in the sword-and-sandal epic Spartacus. None of the slaves inDjango are inspired by the titular character to throw off their own chains. (An astonished chain-gang at the beginning of Django does decide to gain freedom by killing the slave-trader transporting them, but it is white Dr. Schultz who gives them that option.) Instead, pampered house slaves continue business as usual even after their master is gone; when they do eventually flee, it is because Django forces them to – and they look just as foolish running in their layers of petticoats as the landed gentry would. The slave women of Candieland are almost all depicted as courtesans – they dislike seeing male slaves murdered in front of them, but like gangsters’ molls, they accept it with an averted glance. Even the talented Washington is in the movie just to motivate Django with her beauty and fragility; her dialogue consists almost entirely of shrieking and crying over her abuses by whites. Though she is described as willful, we never get to see her will in action. She just waits passively and admiringly while Django wages his “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” alone.

Understandably, Django cares more about his wife than he does about other slaves. His romantic quest to rescue her provides an urgent throughline to the movie, and is overtly likened to the German legend of Siegfried and Brunhild. But this mission also brings out a kind of selfishness in Django. His first use of his new freedom is to strike back against wicked plantation overseers who are whipping a young female slave, but Schultz warns him that his wrath isn’t strategic. If he’s going to save his Brunhild, he has to play it cool and make sure he doesn’t cause trouble, no matter what he sees done to his brethren in front of him. In essence: to get what he wants for himself and his wife, Django has to betray his race. (It is worth noting that Schultz the reserved diplomat isn’t constrained by the same caution. When he explodes in moral indignation, Django and Broomhilda are on the threshold of freedom, and he recklessly destroys their chances.)

Spike Lee took issue with Django Unchained sight unseen because he didn’t think Tarantino could present slavery with sufficient gravitas. In my opinion, the fact that Tarantino tackled such a serious subject actually ought to be applauded, since it shows some personal growth, but it’s true that all that Tarantino panache and effervescence really ends up just in the service of entertainment, of mere diversion. And this is not too much of a surprise considering who made the film.

It was during Pulp Fiction that I began to suspect that Tarantino was not going to be the kind of director he seemed to be in Reservoir Dogs. When hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson were talking and a loose gesture with a pistol accidentally killed their back-seat passenger – and the audience guffawed – it occurred to me that Tarantino might not be interested in using his gifts, which are obviously prodigious, for a very serious purpose. And I realized that I couldn’t relate to the way he found movie violence so supremely amusing. Little did I know how high the body count would climb as his career went on.

The complexity and intensity of the bond between the Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth characters in Reservoir Dogs had been deeply moving – at the time, it seemed like Tarantino was going to make movies about human beings. It’s true that Pulp Fiction also had some of those strong relationships between characters – its assets weren’t only its boldness, wit, sense of fun, and structural ingenuity. By Kill Bill,however, he seemed to lose interest in genuine characters and in the human condition. He seemed more intrigued by aerodynamics (of bullets, swords, etc.) than by psychodynamics.

And so he ends up with Django Unchained, a film about an enduring American shame – and a film that frequently lacks insight. The bounty-hunter subplot aligns the picture early on with the Western genre; conveniently hooks Dr. Schultz up with Django; and provides a slave, who would otherwise have no marksmanship opportunities, with the training he needs to become an avenger. It also lets Tarantino have scenes of violence in the pre-plantation half of the movie without alienating audience sympathy from Schultz. This erudite German calmly announces himself as “an officer of the court” and assures us and whoever on-screen will listen that the people he kills deserve to die because it has been so decreed. Schultz comes across as a good guy, an enlightened free-thinker – he abhors slavery, he is willing to share Django’s quest to liberate Broomhilda from bondage, and he knows that novelist Alexandre Dumas’ grandmother was an Afro-Caribbean slave. But he also seems to have absolute trust in law and order, far beyond his appreciation of the money he collects from bounties. The movie doesn’t contradict this faith, either; while being trained as a sniper, Django dispatches, from a great distance, a farmer peacefully sowing his fields — because he is a ‘wanted man’. It looks not unlike a drone strike, but neither Django nor Schultz have any misgivings about whether the ‘intelligence’ on him is accurate.

This is odd, since Tarantino otherwise shows the society to be fundamentally corrupt and unjust. Not only did the society consider some human beings property, it was also rife with many other examples of oppression — unmentioned in the film — such as a centuries-long genocide against Native Americans; the disenfranchisement of women, slaves, and wage laborers; and a system that abused the workforce while it bucked up the railroad and mining companies. It is unlikely that those laws which Schultz prosecutes with such reasonableness and deadly aim were only used to target legitimate criminals like stagecoach robbers. Considering how much of the process was conducted behind closed doors – and how unequal the criminal justice system is even now, when it operates in relative sunlight – one can assume those ‘dead or alive’ warrants were issued, at least occasionally, in order to entrench the existing power structure. But credulity in the bounty-hunter’s legitimacy helps mark the film as a Western. The fact that the genre may have really been propaganda for the U.S.’ westward expansion, for the overpowering of those people who stood in the way (such as Native Americans and Mexicans) and the subjugation of the wilderness, doesn’t seem to bother Tarantino. He loves movies so much, he is tickled by them in such a pure, fan-like way, that it would actually be hard to imagine him coming from a more critical theoretical perspective.

But this issue is nothing compared to Candie’s right-hand man Stephen, a shuffling, obsequious ‘Uncle Tom’ played by Samuel L. Jackson, and a character criticized by many in the blogosphere as an offensive stereotype. I’m not sure that ‘stereotype’ is the right word, however, since Stephen is far from servile underneath his bent-over posture; he in fact turns out to be a power-hungry manipulator who relishes sitting in Candie’s armchair, calmly warming brandy in a glass for himself while he reveals to Candie what he has discovered about Django. He’s not one-dimensional, he’s actually deceptive; he’s a collaborator or colluder who loves to be on the winning side. Moreover, as the story proceeds, he becomes more and more eager to inflict pain on the powerless. His obsession seems to be to beat down anyone who dares raise their head.

Tarantino never asks why Stephen is like this. Is he so molded by his enmeshed relationship with his owner that he has developed a kind of Stockholm Syndrome emotional dependency? It’s hard to believe that, no matter how emotional he seems over Candie, since we’ve already seen him swiftly and slyly change tones. Is he so circumscribed in his own life that he has become an unthinking rule-enforcer? Again, there’s a sadistic gleam in his eye which belies this; he doesn’t seem panicked by Django’s liberated attitude, but merely full of hate. Is Stephen so proud and committed to doing his job well that he’ll vigilantly protect Candie from all blows, even threats which emanate from his own people? (A precedent for a character like that exists in Alec Guinness’ British colonel, a prisoner-of-war who loses perspective in The Bridge on the River Kwai.) But if he were delusional that way, you’d think that he’d whole-heartedly embrace the decisions of his Mr. and Mrs., not be disappointed when they interfere with his agenda of black-on-black violence.

Fundamentally, Tarantino doesn’t care what makes the head house slave tick. Stephen shows up because a villain is needed in Act 3 and he needs to be worse than the villains who came before; Django needs to go from the frying pain into the fire. Maybe there’s racism behind the portrait of Stephen (it’s worrying that the character’s name has some similarities to a famous black buffoon of early 1930’s films, the persona of ‘Stepin Fetchit’) or maybe Stephen is just a plot contrivance. It’s hard to know, because Django isn’t really about slavery or racism, it’s about Tarantino’s one abiding subject: movies.

He has certainly made no secret of his adoration of the blaxploitation genre. Since he’s such an expert on it, however, one would think he might be more concerned about the arguments that were made at the time against the blaxploitation tidal wave. 50 movies in the genre came out between 1971, when the success of the legitimately revolutionary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song inspired Hollywood to cash in with a slew of imitations, and the fad’s end in 1975 – and this glut of cheap and quickly made flicks aimed at black audiences led the NAACP, National Urban League, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference to join forces in protest. When Junius Griffin, the head of the Hollywood NAACP, coined the term ‘black exploitation’ in a 1973 article, he called it a “form of cultural genocide.” He lamented the black community’s children being “exposed to a steady diet of so-called black movies that glorify black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters and super males with vast physical powers but no cognitive skills.” Perhaps in part because these movies operated outside the mainstream, however, Tarantino the former video store clerk has long been fascinated with them, as if he has discovered a secret. He differs from some other directors – like Peter Bogdonavich and the French New Wave filmmakers who started out by writing forCahiers du Cinéma – artists who embraced what they regarded as old cinematic treasures too, because he is really not a theorist. He doesn’t seem particularly adept at evaluating what the flicks he loves actually mean, or how they fit into a social context; he just gets excited about them. If he were not a director, perhaps he would be a film programmer. In fact, when Django Unchained screened at the repertory cinema he owns in L.A., the New Beverly, it was preceded by an assemblage of trailers for 1970s exploitation movies which he had hand-selected to show the audience some of his influences for the film.

If Tarantino actually was more of a theorist, perhaps he would pay more attention to the fact that for much of the film, Django has to squelch his impulses and allow other slaves to be horrifically murdered in front of him. Though these and similar moments do highlight the barbarism of slavery, at the end of Tarantino’s Grand Guignol opus, the code seems to be: successful revenge cancels out suffering experienced by victims. One can’t help wondering if the violent atrocities against slaves that are included in the film do really exist to condemn the brutality of the culture, or if they serve mainly as strong motivators for the climactic, massively bloody revenge sequence that may be Tarantino’s real aim.

As a paradigm of how to overcome oppression, Django happens to give the worst possible advice, and in an age where our real world is beset by a great many senseless shootings, some of it clearly influenced by on-screen mayhem, one wishes Tarantino had more awareness of what he’s doing. Django runs the danger of encouraging people like Chris Dorner – who, incidentally, saw the film — to believe that a) murder is justified as a response to injustice; b) it is not self-destructive to try to fight on its own terms a historically violent and richly well-equipped power structure; and c) it is nobler to go out in an attention-getting blaze of glory than to actually do painstaking and largely invisible work on the grassroots level.

Django only speaks to whites; he is never seen forming relationships with other slaves (he barely even has one with Broomhilda, despite all the self-conscious romanticism). He may be a rebel, but he’s no revolutionary — he doesn’t bond with others who are oppressed. Though a film about a slave rising up would seem on its face like a left-wing enterprise, Django could just as easily be seen to perpetuate the right-wing mantra that has spread so widely in America: that we are each on our own, that it’s only individual action that is a source of pride, that none of us should identify with any particular caste but should see ourselves as having gotten to where we are purely on our own merits.

Tarantino is in an unusual position because even if all he really wants to do is make movies celebrating B-movies, he is too creative a director and too captivating a writer to operate in counter-culture obscurity. He is instead very much a part of the mainstream – everyone knows his name, more so than they know the names of filmmakers of blandly formulaic fare – and what he puts out there is going to get analyzed. Whether he likes it or not, his films become part of the national conversation. Even if he is constantly signaling that it’s ‘just a movie’, he’s going to fall under fire, sometimes, precisely because he has made ‘just a movie.’
_______

Original Creator of Matrix & Terminator Wins $2.5 Billion In Lawsuit

January 28, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

NOVEMBER 17, 2009

Original Creator of Matrix & Terminator Wins $2.5 Billion In Lawsuit

After a six year dispute, prolific writer and profound spiritualist, Sophia Stewart has received justice for copyright infringement and racketeering and will finally recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels. Yes, you heard that correctly – the entire Matrix & Terminator franchises, and her suspected pay off is expected to be the highest in history – an estimated 2.5 billion.

Her case is a true landmark, and far too uncommon as countless creatives are exploited by the snake-like dealings of the movie industry. Here’s a recap of her triumphant journey by way of George2.0:

“Stewart filed her case in 1999, after viewing the Matrix, which she felt had been based on her manuscript, ‘The Third Eye,’ copyrighted in 1981. In the mid-eighties Stewart had submitted her manuscript to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works.

According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in an attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that ‘credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers.’ These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart’s original work and that it had been ‘often used during preparation of the motion pictures.’ The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart’s case dismissed, without success.

Stewart has confronted skepticism on all sides, much of which comes from Matrix fans, who are strangely loyal to the Wachowski Brothers. One on-line forum, entitled Matrix Explained has an entire section devoted to Stewart. Some who have researched her history and writings are open to her story.”

Although it’s long overdue, and buried in large part by the media machine, Stewart has finally received official credit (and hopefully financial settlement by 2009) for her prodigious contributions to both Hollywood, and the world for her ground breaking sagas, both the Matrix & Terminator franchises. Let us hope that this landmark ruling provides a measure of hope for other ripped off screenwriters seeking justice even if only by way of public recognition.

To echo her 2004 victorious press release:

‘The Matrix & Terminator movie franchises have made world history and have ultimately changed the way people view movies and how Hollywood does business, yet the real truth about the creator and creation of these films continue to elude the masses because the hidden secret of the matter is that these films were created and written by a Black woman…a Black woman named Sophia Stewart. But Hollywood does not want you to know this fact simply because it would change history. Also it would encourage our Black children to realize a dream and that is…nothing is impossible for them to achieve!’

We’d like to believe that the justice she received was not in name only, and she is able to reap the benefits of her enormous creative contributions.

“EYES ON THE PRIZE” l A Special Presentation of American Experience PBS

January 20, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

EYES ON THE PRIZE

America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985

Series Description

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is welcomed with a kiss by his wife Coretta Scott King after leaving court in Montgomery, Alabama, March 22, 1956.
A teenager and adult protest against school integration in Montgomery, Alabama in 1963. Produced by Blackside, Eyes on the Prize tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today. Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Award, and a Television Critics Association Award, Eyes on the Prize is the most critically acclaimed documentary on civil rights in America.

Eyes on the Prize recounts the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It is the story of the people — young and old, male and female, northern and southern — who, compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election, or participate equally in society. It was a world in which peaceful demonstrators were met with resistance and brutality — in short, a reality that is now nearly incomprehensible to many young Americans.

Through contemporary interviews and historical footage, Eyes on the Prize traces the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act; from early acts of individual courage through the flowering of a mass movement and its eventual split into factions. Julian Bond, political leader and civil rights activist, narrates.

The driving force behind Eyes on the Prize and Blackside, Henry Hampton (1940-1998) won numerous awards for this landmark series including the duPont-Columbia Gold Baton, the Peabody Award, and Academy Award nominations. He set out to share his vision of what he called “the remarkable human drama that was the Civil Rights Movement” through the Eyes on the Prize documentary and a book of the same title by Juan Williams. In recent years, a number of key figures who appear in the films (including the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott; Coretta Scott King, wife of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and an activist in her own right; Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, leader of theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and George Wallace, the 1960s Alabama governor who resisted integration) have died, making this record of their testimony all the more valuable.

Programs in the series:

Awakenings (1954-1956)
Individual acts of courage inspire black Southerners to fight for their rights: Mose Wright testifies against the white men who murdered young Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

Fighting Back (1957-1962)
States’ rights loyalists and federal authorities collide in the 1957 battle to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, and again in James Meredith’s 1962 challenge to segregation at the University of Mississippi. Both times, a Southern governor squares off with a U.S. president, violence erupts — and integration is carried out.

Ain’t Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)
Black college students take a leadership role in the civil rights movement as lunch counter sit-ins spread across the South. “Freedom Riders” also try to desegregate interstate buses, but they are brutally attacked as they travel.

No Easy Walk (1961-1963)
The civil rights movement discovers the power of mass demonstrations as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges as its most visible leader. Some demonstrations succeed; others fail. But the triumphant March on Washington, D.C., under King’s leadership, shows a mounting national support for civil rights. President John F. Kennedy proposes the Civil Rights Act.

Mississippi: Is This America? (1963-1964)
Mississippi’s grass-roots civil rights movement becomes an American concern when college students travel south to help register black voters and three activists are murdered. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

Bridge to Freedom (1965)
A decade of lessons is applied in the climactic and bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A major victory is won when the federal Voting Rights Bill passes, but civil rights leaders know they have new challenges ahead.

The Time Has Come (1964-66)
After a decade-long cry for justice, a new sound is heard in the civil rights movement: the insistent call for power. Malcolm X takes an eloquent nationalism to urban streets as a younger generation of black leaders listens. In the South, Stokely Carmichael and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) move from “Freedom Now!” to “Black Power!” as the fabric of the traditional movement changes.

Two Societies (1965-68)
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) come north to help Chicago’s civil rights leaders in their nonviolent struggle against segregated housing. Their efforts pit them against Chicago’s powerful mayor, Richard Daley. When a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods draws violence, King and Daley negotiate with mixed results. In Detroit, a police raid in a black neighborhood sparks an urban uprising that lasts five days, leaving 43 people dead. The Kerner Commission finds that America is becoming “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission, ignores the report.

Power! (1966-68)
The call for Black Power takes various forms across communities in black America. In Cleveland, Carl Stokes wins election as the first black mayor of a major American city. The Black Panther Party, armed with law books, breakfast programs, and guns, is born in Oakland. Substandard teaching practices prompt parents to gain educational control of a Brooklyn school district but then lead them to a showdown with New York City’s teachers’ union.

The Promised Land (1967-68)
Martin Luther King stakes out new ground for himself and the rapidly fragmenting civil rights movement. One year before his death, he publicly opposes the war in Vietnam. His Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) embarks on an ambitious Poor People’s Campaign. In the midst of political organizing, King detours to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he is assassinated. King’s death and the failure of his final campaign mark the end of a major stream of the movement.

Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-72)
A call to pride and a renewed push for unity galvanize black America. World heavyweight champion Cassius Clay challenges America to accept him as Muhammad Ali, a minister of Islam who refuses to fight in Vietnam. Students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., fight to bring the growing black consciousness movement and their African heritage inside the walls of this prominent black institution. Black elected officials and community activists organize theNational Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in an attempt to create a unified black response to growing repression against the movement.

A Nation of Law? (1968-71)
Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon’s call to “law and order,” stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York’s Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public’s attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-80)
In the 1970s, antidiscrimination legal rights gained in past decades by the civil rights movement are put to the test. In Boston, some whites violently resist a federal court school desegregationorder. Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, proves that affirmative action can work, but the Bakke Supreme Court case challenges that policy.

Back to the Movement (1979-mid 80s)
Power and powerlessness. Miami’s black community — pummeled by urban renewal, a lack of jobs, and police harassment — explodes in rioting. But in Chicago, an unprecedentedgrassroots movement triumphs. Frustrated by decades of unfulfilled promises made by the city’s Democratic political machine, reformers install Harold Washington as Chicago’s first black mayor.

More at PBS.org

A Theory of Obama Cinema? “Killing Them Softly” is the Defining Movie for the Age of Obama

January 16, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, 2013

A Theory of Obama Cinema? “Killing Them Softly” is the Defining Movie for the Age of Obama

I am suspicious of unifying theories which try to explain the relationship between popular culture and politics. However, A.O. Scott’s piece in the New York Times on the defining Hollywood films of the Obama era is pretty compelling:

Last year in The New York Review of Books the critic J. Hoberman wondered when we would see an “Obama-inflected Hollywood cinema.” “The longing for Obama (or an Obama),” he wrote, “can be found in two prescient 2008 movies,” citing “Wall-E” and “Milk” as releases about creative community organizers, with Harvey Milk also a political symbol of hope. It may be too soon to identify an Obama Cinema, but the president’s second inauguration seems like an appropriate time to try.

Film is one of the sites where societies negotiate meaning, develop and challenge their own mythologies, and express the hopes, anxieties, and feelings of the collective subconscious. Films talk to us, talk to each other, all the while revealing the “spirit of the age.” In total, popular culture is an informal type of public opinion, a barometer for the attitudes of a given society.

Obama’s election in 2004 was supposed to usher in postracial America. It did not. Hope and change was met by the twin realities of a coordinated assault on the legitimacy of the country’s first black President, as well as how practical governance is an exercise in realpolitik. As such, hope and change had to be surrendered to practical realities–here Obama’s right-leaning centrism was greeted by upset on the part of Progressives, and recast as treason and Socialist-Communist-anti-white tyranny by Conservatives.

How do the films in the Age of Obama reflect these dynamics?

Films can be considered political in a number of ways. They can deal with explicitly political matters of public policy or public concern as plot devices. Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty fit this mold.

[Question: Am I the only person who thought both movies were exercises in tedium? Am I the only person who thought that Cloud Atlas was one of the year’s best movies and should have been nominated for an Oscar?]

Films can also be implicitly political as they reflect changing attitudes, beliefs, anxieties, or social relationships in society without offering explicit commentary on “politics” per se. Likewise, films can tell us something about politics and society by how they reflect unstated cultural values and tropes–the lies and stories we tell to make sense of ourselves as a nation and community:

Some of the connections between politics and movies are obvious, but we wanted to go beyond the topical resonance of films like “Zero Dark Thirty” and enter into the realms of allegory and national mythology.

What these period pictures have in common is a sense that righting our wrongs is a shared burden. Or, as Nick Fury, in describing another battle between good and evil, puts it: “There came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat.”

“Marvel’s The Avengers” might have been called “Team of Rivals” — the title of the book, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, that was one of the sources for “Lincoln.” And Joss Whedon’s Marvel costume party is, like Mr. Spielberg’s historical costume drama, largely about an urgent response to a political crisis. It is also about community organizing, as Fury mobilizes a fractious group of individuals whom he must persuade to pursue a set of common interests.

As such, “The Avengers” may be the exemplary Obama Era superhero movie, replacing the figure of the solitary, shadowy paladin with a motley assortment of oddballs and, despite the title, focusing less on vengeance than on interplanetary peacekeeping. A similar ethic informs “X-Men: First Class,” which takes place around the time of Mr. Obama’s birth (at the height of the cold war and the civil rights movement) and which shows how the idealistic pursuit of justice and tolerance can end up tragically divided between radical and conciliatory impulses…

A.O. Scott omitted the movie Killing Them Softly from his theory of Obama Cinema. This is unfortunate. I would suggest that no other movie has captured the cynicism, anxiety, fear, and liminal moment between the end of Bush’s tenure and Obama’s election in 2008 with such clarity and insight.

The Great Recession is in almost every frame of Killing Them Softly. The disappointments of how easily Hope and Change became more of the same–where the banksters win, and the drones keep killing innocent people, while the 1% laughs all the way to the bank–lingers over the final scene of the movie as an ending note on what is a 90 minutes or so meditation on life in the Bush era and how it did (or did not) transition into “Obama’s America.”

Watching the hope embodied by 2008 election of Barack Obama in 2012, four years after we have seen the realities of his tenure, in a film about how even hitmen and gangsters are impacted by a failed economy is a profound comment on the American dream, and the realities of “austerity” and neoliberalism/hyper-conservatism.

Killing Them Softly came and went in the theater during the course of a few weeks. Maybe it spoke too much truth to power to be popular among the masses.

What do you make of A.O. Scott’s list? Are there any movies which you think speak to the Age of Obama with a particularly sharp amount of clarity and insight, and which should have been included in his theory of Obama Cinema?

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POSTED BY CHAUNCEYDEVEGA AT 4:01 PM

Chauncey DeVega is an OUR COMMON GROUND Voice

Independent Lens | Byron Hurts’ ‘Soul Food Junkies’ – Premieres January 14th

January 12, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Independent Lens | ‘Soul Food Junkies’ – Premieres January 14th

Premiering January 14, 2013 (check local listings):

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/broadcast.html

A Film by Byron Hurt

In this excerpt from the Independent Lens documentary, Soul Food Junkies, filmmaker Byron Hurt visits Jackson, Mississippi to learn more about soul food cooking and describes some of the health concerns related to traditional Southern cuisine.

About the Film

Baffled by his dad’s reluctance to change his traditional soul food diet in the face of a health crisis, filmmaker Byron Hurt sets out to learn more about this rich culinary tradition and it’s relevance to black cultural identity. He discovers that the love affair that his dad and his community have with soul food is deep-rooted, complex, and in some tragic cases, deadly. Through candid interviews with soul food cooks, historians and scholars, as well as doctors, family members, and everyday people, Soul Food Junkies puts this culinary tradition under the microscope to examine both its benefits and consequences. Hurt looks at the socioeconomics of predominantly black neighborhoods, where it can be difficult to find healthy options, and wonders if soul food has become an addiction in his community.

Posted by Mark Anthony Neal at 10:30 PM

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Byron Hurt is an OUR COMMON GROUND Voice

Tarantino flunks American history l Kimberly Ellis l Alternet

January 12, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

SATURDAY, JAN 12, 2013 10:00 AM EST

Tarantino flunks American history

Even by its own pulp standards, “Django Unchained” is grossly inaccurate — and perpetuates dangerous stereotypes

BY KIMBERLY ELLIS, ALTERNET

Scene still from “Django Unchained”

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

Black abolitionists. Black outlaws. Black gunslingers of the west, south, east or north. These are the three groups of people that truly scare white Americans. And they rarely, if ever, appear on a Hollywood screen. They don’t appear in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, either.

So what do we get? A violently entertaining, rugged individualist and shallow “abolitionist” by the name of Django, a bounty hunter whose killing spree is sanctioned by the U.S. government. That would be the same government which, in 1858, maintains “the peculiar institution” of slavery as a legal entity in many states. The same government that in most circumstances would have considered Django as bounty to be captured, not the bounty hunter. But this is Tarantino’s playground.

Watch Tarantino in interviews. He’s rather cocky about the history he thinks he’s relating to Americans (which is sad, actually), so while Django is not a documentary, it’s not “just a movie,” either. Unfortunately, much critical history is lost or completely skewed in Tarantino’s telling, even when totally unnecessary. This is a major flaw in a film that is supposed to be about a black superhero turning the tables on history. The problem is, you have to know the history first.

Let’s start with the history of the way blacks have been stereotypically portrayed on the silver screen. In the film, Monsieur Candie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), the French-speaking owner of the plantation Candyland tells Django that he is “one in 10,000.” In his interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Root, Quentin Tarantino states, ”The fact is, Django is an exceptional human being. That’s why he is able to rise to this occasion.”

This fascination with “the exceptional negro” is an old stereotype born of white supremacy. It’s another form of what we might think of as the “model minority” — the exception that proves the rule. It implies that most blacks are something very far from laudable.

There’s also a problem of white characters “teaching” black characters about their own historical circumstances. Pondering slavery, Candie asks Django, “Why don’t they rise up?”

It”s supremely offensive, as if African people had never seen, dreamt of or participated in killing a white slavemaster, overseer or other plantation worker. Perhaps Tarantino has forgotten the many enslaved people who mastered “accidents” involving the burning of crops, sheds and houses, and the house slaves who, among other things, poisoned “Big Daddy” and “Miss Ann” with their culinary marksmanship.

In the first scene, when a German dentist known as Dr. King Schultz (oh, come on) tells the others enslaved on Django’s chain gang what their options are to get free, he points out the North Star for them. You’ve got to be kidding me. What slave, captive, runaway or free, would not know about the role of the North Star in African liberation? Ask Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth or any of the Maroons who used the star to guide their way. Ask the Africans who fled amongst the Native Americans and the ones who escaped to Mexico and later fought in the Spanish-American War, on the Spanish side.

In Django Unchained, Tarantino suggests that whites led the way for blacks to free themselves. But black abolitionists spearheaded the movement for their own freedom. It’s true that they were, thankfully, aided by conscientious whites who assisted them in various ways. But the violent revolts, the mutinies, the secret societies, the machete wielders, the forgers, the runaways, the spies, the fakers, the poseurs, the Underground Railroad leaders were overwhelming black. Let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of blacks who joined the Union Army to “live free or die” for themselves and their loved ones.

Tarantino also doesn’t seem to understand that gunslinging alone was not going to defeat the monstrosity of inhumanity that was slavery. Has the self-described film buff ever seen Sankofa, Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima’s tale of resistance?

Sadly, the ultimate showdown in Django Unchained – the Armageddon between Django and Samuel Jackson’s Uncle Tom – turns out to be not much of a climax at all. In the end, Uncle Tom is still a slave with largely truncated choices. A true Western outlaw would not treat the lackey as the ultimate villain. He would know the truest villains were the slavemasters and the laws that supported them. That’s why he would be an outlaw. That’s what makes the Western work. For white Americans, anyway.

The gore and violence of slavery in Django, it must be said, were actually pretty well-depicted and at least two of the whippings could have been taken directly out of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and other slave narratives. But even in the 19th century, some whites had begun treating the sexualized violence in these narratives as pornography. They were high on the masochism. Such is the case with Django, except we are all high on the violence, now.

In a Daily Beast interview, Tarantino expresses amazement that Westerns “could get away with not dealing with slavery at all.” Why the surprise? The American West is North America’s grand mythological narrative and Tarantino is wondering why the genre never dealt with America’s greatest contradiction and unresolved racial conflict? Is he unaware that when it comes to black Americans, in particular, and our right and responsibility to be either “the law” (as buffalo soldiers, American militia, the sheriff or President Obama as Commander-in-Chief) or “outlaws” of American injustice (as practitioners of civil disobedience from Martin Luther King Jr. to Fannie Lou Hamer, Deacons of Defense or the Black Panther Party), we have more often been what Walter Mosley calls, “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.” Has he never heard of the Houston Race Riot of 1917? Or Tulsa, 1921?

“Negroes with Guns” has always scared a particular set of Americans committed to maintaining the structural inequality from slavery. It’s natural, then, that Hollywood would find it hard to promote a black outlaw with his/her “own set of rules.” Indeed, black, radical political groups embracing Second Amendment rights to bear arms caused the U.S. government and then-governor Ronald Reagan (and Western movie star) to consider them America’s “public enemy number one.” Enter gun control laws, not Django.

But at least we are entertained. I love that Hollywood’s vast historical inaccuracies are all being highlighted, simultaneously. The CIA is pissed at Zero Dark Thirty, American historian Eric Foner, has frowned upon the lack of facts in Lincoln (but still told people to “enjoy the movie, then read a book”) and now we get Django, living as the only African in America who wanted to be free from chattel slavery and did something about it. I was certainly entertained. But an alternate history? Child, please. Hollywood isn’t ready; but maybe Tarantino’s efforts (and huge box office sales) will pave the way for something entirely new: a black hero with ancestral memory and community accountability who can be accepted by the mainstream. Now, that would be something. Yippie ki-yay.

MORE KIMBERLY ELLIS.

Kimberly Ellis is a former Sr. Producer of OUR COMMON GROUND Media & Communications. She is affectionately known throughout the ‘Net community and the twitterzone as Dr. Goddess.

Who is Dr. Goddess?

http://drgoddess.com

Kimberly C. Ellis, Ph.D., is affectionately known as Dr. Goddess,” and a true Renaissance Woman. She is a writer, an entertainer, an entrepreneur, a scholar (of American and Africana Studies), and an activist. Dr. Goddess engages social media to promote a new age liberation ideology undergirded by revolutionary love and uses art, humor, scholarship and politics to do it. Her slogan is “Meet Dr. Goddess. Become a Believer.”—a believer in empowerment, in Womanism, in freedom, justice, equality, citizenship and in the fullness of our humanity.

Publications

Dr. Goddess is a writer for TheLoop21.com and her own“Revelations” blog, a former columnist for the Pittsburgh City Paper and is published in the Special Inaugural Edition of Ebony Magazine about the “Real Love” of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. She is also the first full-time columnist and dance expert for BuddyTV.com, where she covered the popular show, “So You Think You Can Dance?”

In addition to her online column work and blogging, Dr. Goddess is a published author and scholar, whose works include poetry, essays, and a chapter (“Enemies, Both Foreign and Domestic: The Tulsa Race Riot, War and Massacre of 1921”) in the book, The Paradox of Loyalty: An African American Response to the War on Terror edited by Julianne Malveaux and Reginna Green, as well as a forthcoming publication, “A Tale of Two Cities: Teaching August Wilson in Pittsburgh” Approaches to Teaching August Wilson, by the Modern Language Association, edited by Sandra D. Shannon. Dr. Goddess is also an award-winning poet, playwright and performing artist, who is presently on tour with, “Dr. Goddess!: A One Woman Show” and screenings of its sequel, the ensemble production of “Dr. Goddess Goes to Jail: A Spoken Word, Musical Comedy (Unfortunately) Based on a True Story,” now on DVD.

Social Media

Named one of the “Most Influential Black Women on Twitter” by “For Harriet” Digital Magazine and profiled as one of the “Exquisite Women” by The Black Man Can, Dr. Goddess is known for her “Twectures” (Lectures on Twitter) on American and Black History, Popular Culture and Activism. She has also created some of the most memorable trending topics to date, including #FoodiesUnite (for people who like to eat mostly healthy but delicious food), #GradChat (for people of color who want to learn more about graduate school), #BlkNat (for discussions and critiques about Black Nationalism and its cousin, Pan-Africanism), #BlkTheater (to promote and discuss Black Theater) and the humorous, cult-favorite, #BaracksFlagPin (providing hilariously irreverent translations of President Obama’s speeches as information and inspiration for the masses).

Dr. Goddess’ knowledge of and love for technology and keen sense of the media are quickly making her one of the most recognizable and influential personalities online. Her commentary has been referenced onNPR Radio, KDKA, WQED, WTAE, KQV News Radio, WAMO, “Blackademics” in Washington, D.C. and numerous other radio stations and news media outlets.

Activism and Social Media

Dr. Goddess is the Creative Organizer and Media Director for the “Are You for Fannie Lou?” Campaign on behalf of the Fannie Lou Hamer Statue Fund and Consultant for the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. In addition, she organized and moderated the “Tweeting the Revolution: How Hip Hop Transformed 140 into 360″ panel for Netroots Nation 2010 in Las Vegas as well as discussed taking online activism offline at Blogalicious Bloggers Conference 2010 in Miami. Dr. Goddess was the Lead Organizer for Pennsylvania’s Statewide, progressive, “RootsCamp” with 32 other states for the New Organizing Institute.

A veteran of lecture performances, workshops, and master classes, Dr. Goddess has lectured and taught throughout the United States and abroad, including Jamaica, Ghana, China, Dubai, and UAE. She also engages in local artist residencies for young people, lending her expertise and leadership to such places as the Urban League Charter School, the Hill House Summer Arts Camp, the Hill Dance Academy Theater and the Lighthouse Project at Westinghouse High School.

Education and Scholarship

As a graduate student in American Studies at Purdue University, she launched the “All Eyes on Tulsa” Campaign in order to secure reparations on behalf of survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot, War and Massacre of 1921; and worked with a “dream team” of lawyers (including the late Johnnie Cochran, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, #1 Washington, D.C. Lawyer, Michelle Roberts, former TransAfrica Forum’s Randall Robinson and Al Brophy) to file a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court. Dr. Ellis testified at aCongressional Black Caucus Hearing in May 2005.

Currently

Dr. Goddess completed an artist residency at the Banff International Center in Alberta, Canada, where she focused on her upcoming works, “She Put a Hammer in My Hand”, a one woman performance about women and home improvement and “Community Meeting” an ensemble cast, spoken word, musical comedy about, well, a community, meeting.

Dr. Goddess is presently working on her scholarly manuscript and memoir, “The Way We Fought and Why: The Tulsa Race Riot, War and Massacre of 1921”. To order Books, CDs, DVDs or to Book the Show or Speaking Engagements, please contact Dr. Goddess Arts, Education and Management Co.

Keep up with Dr. Goddess via her Mailing List, on Twitter and Facebook.

‘Django Unchained’ Action Figure Stokes Debate l Richard Prince

January 9, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

Richard Prince

‘Django Unchained’ Action Figure Stokes Debate

Among journalists, reactions to the toys were mostly a version of “Oh, no, they didn’t!”

Django Unchained action figures (blackyouthproject.com)

Some Editors Failed to See No-Brainer Story

The controversy over Quentin Tarantino‘s “Django Unchained,” in which slavery is the backdrop for a spaghetti Western, ratcheted up a notch over the weekend when freelance entertainment journalist Karu F. Daniels, writing in the Daily Beast, reported that the movie characters — slaves and slavemaster — are being marketed as action figures.

“Little White kids can play Calvin J. Candie and make Django and Stephen ‘Mandingo fight’ or they act like they’re selling Broomhilda or just call them ‘nigger’ all day long. The possibilities are endless,” Columbus, Ohio, blogger Jeff Winbush wrote on Facebook when he heard the news.

On amazon.com Monday, a customer reviewer identified as E. Tucker wrote:

“I have to say, I never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that, unlike myself, my kids would someday have the opportunity to re-enact America’s slave trade the way my great-grandfather did! How exciting for them! Never mind those silly dolls showing racial equality and putting “black americans” (hah! is that the word we want to really use here?) in a positive light — no! With this, my kids can experience first-hand what it might have been like to own their very own slave! . . . ”

By Monday, Hassan Hartley of Chicago had started a petition on change.org asking Tarantino to “Stop the sale and distribution of ‘slave’ action figures.” And in Los Angeles, “A coalition of civil rights and African-American community leaders,” led by Najee Ali of Project Islamic Hope, planned a news conference for Tuesday calling for a national boycott of the action figures, EURWeb.com reported.

As news, the story was a no-brainer, right? Wrong, Daniels told Journal-isms. “This story shouldn’t have been ignored — especially by editors at mainstream outlets,” he said by email. “i was even shocked. I pitched this two weeks ago to prominent ‘news’ outlets. so happy the Daily Beast editor (who’s British) GOT IT.” The British editor was Gabe Doppelt; Daniels wouldn’t identify those who turned it down, saying he still does business with them.

Asked for comment, the Daily Beast provided this statement from Allison Samuels, the senior writer who edited the piece:

“An action figure made of a black man, real or fictitious is not something that happens every day so we felt it was well worth discussing. Given the controversy already swirling around ‘Django’ taking a deeper look at a doll based on a freed slave has certainly been of great interest to our readers on The Daily Beast.”

Here’s how the story made it online, as Daniels explained it in an email:

“I got a press release about the product line/partnership a few months before the movie came out, but seeing the actual images of them later on took it to another level. I didn’t see the movie until after it opened. I’m noSpike Lee, but something about it didn’t sit too right with me,” Daniels said.

“And I like some of Tarantino’s stuff and love the actors’ works. But the idea of dolls — which were put on sale a week before — stirred something inside of me. Granted, there’s an ‘action figure’ of the Brad Pitt character from ‘Inglourious Basterds.’ I saw that was selling for $700. But he wasn’t a slave. Certain types of people can try to rationalize it how they want to, but the fact remains: none of those characters in Tarantino’s other movies were slaves.

“If you want take [a] light and lively approach to the ‘idea of these dolls,’ Django could work (he was free, kicking ass and taking names throughout most of the movie. But Stephen and Broomhilda weren’t. And that’s not funny.)

“The radio silence about the dolls was quite jarring, to say the least. I’m always encouraged to pitch pieces that are ‘broad’ and ‘timely’ to editors. And you can’t get no more broad and timely than this piece. Hollywood and the entertainment media have had a romantic love affair with this movie. People can form their own opinions why. So it’s pretty obvious why some outlets wouldn’t touch it. And The Weinstein Company spent a lot of dollars in advertising. But the facts are the facts. The dolls were made and marketed in tandem with a controversial movie about slavery.”

In his Daily Beast story, Daniels wrote, “. . . Last fall, the National Entertainment Collectibles Association, Inc. (NECA), in tandem with the Weinstein Company, announced a full line of consumer products based on characters from the movie. . . . After repeated attempts to get someone to go on record about the collection, NECA spokesperson Leonardo Saraceni declined to make anyone available, would not comment and referred all queries to the Weinstein Company. No one at the Weinstein Company was available for comment by deadline and no one responded to questions posed.”

Daniels continued for Journal-isms, “In a sense, I understand why publicists from the movie studio and toy company wouldn’t speak, but getting some of our folks to talk was another ball of wax. I reached out to many talking heads, pundits and self-styled image experts, who I thought would’ve been perfect for the piece. All silent.

“At first I thought it was the holiday weekend. But it’s 2013. People are more accessible than ever before. How do you think I corralled an Academy Award winner (Louis Gossett, Jr.) and a real, legendary image activist (Bethann Hardison). I was told by a black film expert that they couldn’t talk to me for the piece because they didn’t want to infuriate Harvey Weinstein.

“Another told me, ‘oh, it’s just a movie. It’s just toys.’ Contrast always makes a great story and I was really hoping for more of a reaction from some but it’s like what Nick Charles (a former boss) used to say to me, ‘everyone is always waiting for the shoe to drop.’ And once the story finally went live on Sunday, the social networks were ablaze.”

. . . Movie’s Critics Say, “Oh, No, They Didn’t!”

Among journalists, the most common reaction to the news of the “Django Unchained” action figures was a version of “oh, no, they didn’t!”

Journal-isms asked some who had written or otherwise opined about director Quentin Tarantino’s so-called “revenge fantasy” whether the existence of the action figures should change one’s opinion about the movie and/or the phenomenon. They replied by email:

Amy Alexander, media writer

News of the “Django Unchained” ‘action figures’ creates a bad taste, doesn’t it? Even if it is the case that the studio marketing division cooked up this ‘tie in,’ it still ultimately circles back to the creative team behind the film itself, in particular Tarantino. At the very least, it is in poor taste, considering the fact that the bondage of blacks is the main theme of the story. It does make you wonder who officially ‘green-lit’ such a dubious and insulting marketing strategy. And correctly or not, it feeds the escalating criticism of Tarantino as an out of control hipster who thinks he gets ‘the Black Thing’ but doesn’t really.

Amy Alexander website: Three Ways of Considering Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”

Jelani Cobb, associate professor of history and director of the Institute of African American Studies, University of Connecticut

It doesn’t change my opinion of the movie since I thought the film was exploitative of slavery in the first place. I do think this adds a new level of distaste. It should be fairly obvious that making slave action figures is problematic. That the studio didn’t recognize this supports my belief that this director lacked the sensitivity to handle a project like this.

Jelani Cobb, the New Yorker: Tarantino Unchained (Jan. 2)

Jarvis DeBerry, columnist, NOLA.com | the Times-Picayune, New Orleans

In his book “Why Black People Tend to Shout,” Ralph Wiley talks about taking a field trip from school — I think it was to the circus — and being sold a Confederate battle flag that he proudly waved all the way back home. When he walked into the house, his mother took a match and incinerated it.

I wish I had a story as dramatic, but I don’t. I seem to recall a Hot Wheels car in my house — OK, in my room — that had the Confederate flag logo on it. It was the General Lee of “Dukes of Hazard” fame. I bring that up to say that I guess there’s a history of regrettable images fashioned into toys.

I’m going to link to this email a column I wrote a while back not about toys but about play, and how even that can be fraught for black children.

I wouldn’t necessarily mind the figure of Django being sold as an action figure, but if you sell Django, it would seem to me, you’d have to sell his nemeses. And in that, you’re going to run into problems. Who’s going to buy the white action figures? White children? And do we really want them to play the role of little budding slave owners? And if black children buy the white slave owner figures, then we got a whole ‘nother problem on our hands.

I don’t know that this information changes my mind about the movie itself. There’s enough reason already to raise eyebrows at Tarantino. But it does make me shake my head and wish somebody had — to borrow a line from Blazing Saddles — cut this off at the pass.

Jarvis DeBerry, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune: ‘Django’ expresses an anger not every filmmaker can show(Dec. 31)

Tony Norman, columnist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I think I dislike the film even more, now . . . LOL! Action figures? Really? A Stephen doll? I know there’s an unseemly nostalgia in some quarters for Jim Crow and slavery-related collectibles, but this is ridiculous. This is either a very elaborate joke or a sign that we’re on the verge of losing our collective minds. This is what happens when we go out of our way not to talk about race. The conversation we should be having gets sublimated into soul sucking nonsense like this. Who will buy this? Irony-drenched white hipsters? Blacks with non-existent self-esteem? Clueless movie nerds? If nothing else avails itself, I’ll write a parody column for Friday. Tomorrow’s column is already written.

Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: ‘Django’ tells tale missing real slave history (Dec. 25)

Ishmael Reed, poet, novelist, cultural critic

It’s like a virtual slave auction and shows that Weinstein and Co. will go to any length to make money from this vile film, which, like “Amistad,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” has blacks as onlookers, while whites debate their fate, when, without black direct action, there would have been no Emancipation. My idea for an action figure would be one showing [Jamie] Foxx carrying [Leonardo] Di Caprio and [Christoph] Waltz on his back, because they’re getting all of the nominations, while, so far, Foxx and Kerry Washington are receiving none. This latest racist travesty is not unique in Hollywood, which makes you wonder why there has been no outcry about segregated Hollywood’s receiving over $400 million in tax write-offs, while the latest figures show $10 billion in earnings.

Finally, the spin from Weinstein Co. is that this movie is similar to Tarantino’s other mess, “Inglorious Basterds.” Not so. In “Django Unchained,” the leader of the state, “Hitler,” is murdered. Foxx does not get to murder the prospective confederate president Jefferson Davis. That would have turned off southern audiences, who have had a veto over Hollywood content for decades. [W.E.B.] Du Bois, [Marcus] Garvey and Walter White would turn over in their graves to see this thing nominated for awards by the NAACP.

Ishmael Reed, Wall Street Journal: Black Audiences, White Stars and ‘Django Unchained’ (Dec. 28)

Touré, co-host, “The Cycle,” MSNBC; contributor, Time magazine

I will never understand how Django action figures are somehow over the line for some people.

Touré, blog: Django Unchained is a heroic love story (Dec. 24)

Touré, “The Cycle,” MSNBC: America is ready for ‘Django Unchained’ (video)

Jeff Winbush, blogger, Columbus, Ohio:

I broke down, woke up Saturday morning, grabbed my son and went off to catch a screening of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino‘s mash-up of spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation films and revenge fantasies. I came out two hours and 45 minutes later feeling it wasn’t Tarantino’s best and it wasn’t his worst. It was okay. Nothing more. It certainly never rose above pure escapist fare. I have no problem with junk food movies, but let’s not pretend like Tarantino has anything new, fresh or original to say about race or slavery. He just knows how to kill the maximum number of cartoon bigots in the most graphic way possible.

However, the Django action figures go far beyond bad taste. It’s not kitsch. It’s not memorabilia. It’s not a gag. It’s making a buck off the backs of Black people and it’s insensitive as hell at best and borderline racist at worst.

Tarantino’s status as a White Hipster who is down with the brothers and sisters has been reaffirmed by the enthusiastic support of African-American audiences for Django Unchained. Goody-goody gumdrops for him. But he has no ghetto pass to profiteer from America’s original Holocaust and even if it means I won’t be considered one of the cool kids, I refuse to join the stampede to anoint Tarantino as some great thinker on the Original Sin.

He’s not. He’s just another race hustler.

Jeff Winbush blog: “Django” Is Solid Entertainment, But Lousy History (Jan. 6)

Jeff Winbush blog: Quentin Tarantino: Slave Profiteer (Jan. 7)

There’s more:

Charles M. Blow, New York Times: Escaping Slavery

Rembert Browne, Grantland: Django, the N-Word, and How We Talk About Race in 2013

Kenya N. Byrd, BlackAmericaWeb.com: Django: More Than Just Another Slavery Movie

Rebecca Carroll, Good: ‘Django Unchained’: Quentin Tarantino’s Misappropriation of the N-Word (Dec. 18)

Courtney Garcia, the Grio: Hollywood Unchained: Will the success of ‘Django’ spawn more slave epics?

Sherry Howard blog: The error of asking “Django” to save black people

Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Slavery as fantasy in ‘Django’

Daniella Gibbs Léger, Essence: ‘Django’: What If a Black Director Had Pitched It?

Newsweek: Tavis Smiley on Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained

Rashod Ollison, Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.: All the n-word outrage over ‘Django’ misses the point (Jan. 8)

Allison Samuels, Daily Beast: Spike Lee’s Dissing of ‘Django Unchained’ Earns Both Ire and Indifference

Adam Serwer, Mother Jones: In Defense of Django

Freed Slaves Died by Thousands From Diseases

The commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation got underway around the nation on Jan. 1, but the humanitarian crisis created when the slaves were liberated escaped most accounts.

“As former slaves left their places of servitude behind, they entered a world of freedom, but also a war zone devastated by disease, poverty and death,” Jim Downs, an associate professor of history at Connecticut College, wrote Sunday in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times.

“More soldiers, as Ric Burns’s recent documentary, ‘Death and the Civil War,’ reveals, died of disease than from battle. Slaves became exposed to the same outbreaks of dysentery, smallpox and fever that decimated Union and Confederate ranks, and they died by the thousands: an estimated 60,000 former slaves died from a smallpox epidemic from 1863 to 1865.

“There were no protections, no refugee programs or public health services, in place to help freed slaves ward off the disease that plagued the Confederate South. As one 19th-century reformer observed, ‘You may see a child well and hearty this morning, and in the evening you will hear of its death.’ . . . ”

Downs is author of “Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic blog: The Myth of Harriet Tubman

Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Slavery is key part of riveting U.S. history

Darryl E. Owens, Orlando Sentinel: 150 years after emancipation, blacks are bound by their own chains

RTDNA’s Foundation to Honor Twitter as News Source

The Radio Television Digital News Foundation plans to honor the online micro-blogging service Twitter with its First Amendment Award at the 23rd Annual First Amendment Awards Dinner on March 14 in Washington, the foundation announced on Monday.

“The award honors an individual or organization that has played a significant role in dissemination of news and information. Notable examples of Twitter’s growing role include natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, tragedies like the Connecticut and Colorado mass killings, as well as coverage of major world events like the Arab Spring revolts. Social media has added a new and important dimension to information dissemination and Twitter has been in the forefront of those efforts,” the announcement said.

Mike Cavender, RTDNF executive director, said in the announcement, “It’s difficult to quantify the impact that Twitter has on news dissemination not only here, but all around the world. Millions of people turn to Twitter as an instant source of information, especially in times of crisis. We’re proud to honor this organization for its support and defense of our First Amendment freedoms.”

Twitter has a special appeal to African Americans. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported last year, “More than one quarter of online African-Americans (28%) use Twitter, with 13% doing so on a typical day.”

However, a survey released Monday by Technorati Media found that only 15 percent of the consumers it polled ranked Twitter among its “most trusted information sources.”

The rankings were:

Online news sites (New York Times, CNN), 51%

Facebook, 32%

Retail sites (Amazon, Walmart), 31%

YouTube, 29%

Blogs, 29%

Google+, 26%

Groups/Forums, 24%

Online magazines (People, Motor Trend), 22%

Brand websites (Honda, Nike), 21%

Twitter, 15%

Fox Nation, Fox News Latino Play to Different Bases

“Fox Nation and Fox News Latino are once again selling different versions of the same story to pander to conservative audiences while simultaneously attempting to court Latino readers,” Hilary Tone reported Thursday for Media Matters for America.

“As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the Obama administration announced Wednesday that it would create an easier process for undocumented immigrants who are relatives of American citizens to apply for permanent residency in the United States. . . .”

Fox News Latino: Obama Plans to Push Immigration Reform By End of January

Ruben Navarrette Jr., Washington Post News Media Services: Scholarships for illegal immigrants (Dec. 30)

Ruben Navarrette Jr., CNN.com: If I offended demanding DREAMers, I’m not sorry (Dec. 28)

N.Y. Times Public Editor Takes Up “Objectivity”

Within a few days of becoming Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, Jodi Rudoren “. . . sent some Twitter messages that brought criticism, and had people evaluating her politics before she had dug into the reporting work before her,” Margaret Sullivan, New York Times public editor, wrote on Nov. 28.

“Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The Atlantic, summarized them: ‘She shmoozed-up Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian activist who argues for Israel’s destruction; she also praised Peter Beinart’s upcoming book (‘The Crisis of Zionism’) as, ‘terrific: provocative, readable, full of reporting and reflection.’ She also linked without comment to an article in a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper.” The headline on Mr. Goldberg’s article was, ‘Twitterverse to New NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief: Stop Tweeting!’ ”

“. . . Now The Times is taking steps to make sure that Ms. Rudoren’s further social media efforts go more smoothly. The foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, is assigning an editor on the foreign desk in New York to work closely with Ms. Rudoren on her social media posts.”

The issue of how neutral to appear is one that has long separated the black and alternative presses, which stress advocacy journalism, from the mainstream media. But it is an issue for the mainstream media as well, andSullivan returned to the subject in her Sunday column.

“Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, believes that traditional notions about impartial reporting are fundamentally flawed,” Sullivan wrote. “For starters, he thinks journalists should just come out and tell readers more about their beliefs.

” ‘The grounds for trust are slowly shifting,’ he told me recently. ‘The View from Nowhere is slowly getting harder to trust, and “Here’s where I’m coming from” is more likely to be trusted.’

“Pushing back are editors like Philip B. Corbett, The Times’s associate managing editor for standards. ‘I flatly reject the notion that there is no such thing as impartial, objective journalism — that it’s some kind of pretense or charade, and we should just give it up, come clean and lay out our biases,’ he said. ‘We expect professionals in all sorts of fields to put their personal opinions aside, or keep them to themselves, when they do their work — judges, police officers, scientists, teachers. Why would we expect less of journalists?’

“Neither of these thoughtful journalists, though, is black-and-white on the subject. . . . ”

Short Takes

“The Sports Journalism Institute is set to welcome its 20th anniversary class this summer in Columbia, Mo.,” the institute annnounced on Monday. “A group of six men and six women (four African-Americans, four Latinos, three white females and one Asian-American) make up the Class of 2013, which will be in residence at the University of Missouri School of Journalism from May 31-June 8, after which students will move on to internships around the country. . . . ”

Hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China on Monday, intensifying a battle over media censorship that poses a test of the willingness of China’s new leadership to tolerate calls for change,” Edward Wong reported for the New York Times. “The demonstration was an outpouring of support for journalists at the relatively liberal Southern Weekend newspaper, who erupted in fury late last week over what they called overbearing interference by local propaganda officials.”

“A paparazzo who took photographs of the daughters of President Barack Obama walking along a Hawaiian beach last week made a big mistake — at least, in the eyes of the Oval Office,” Celebuzz reported on Monday. “Because as soon as the images of Sasha and Malia were sent out to news outlets around the world, the photographer received an official letter from the White House telling him to immediately stop their release, Celebuzz has exclusively learned.”

As Inauguration Day approaches, the editors of Essence magazine have produced a commemorative book, “A Salute to Michelle Obama” (Time Home Entertainment, Inc.), the magazine announced on Monday. The soft-cover version is on newsstands; the hardcover is to be available Tuesday. The book, edited by Patrik Henry Bass, editorial projects director, features an introduction by Editor-in-Chief Constance C.R. White and tributes from author Dr. Maya Angelou, life coach Iyanla Vanzant and “First Grandmother” Marian Robinson.

“The Pittsburgh Police Department on Sunday put out a press release that included two Post-Gazette reporters’ email to the department with several questions for a story they were working on,” Jim Romenesko reported Monday on his media blog. “Diane Richard, the department’s public information officer, tipped other news organizations off to the P-G’s investigation when she sent the release to about 200 journalists.”

Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion writer who learned last month she was being laid off from Newsweek and the Daily Beast, has the lead piece in the Washington Post Style section on Tuesday, a lengthy one on inaugural gowns. While the online version does not identify Givhan as a freelancer, the print-edition version says “special to the Washington Post,’ Post spokeswoman Kris Koratti told Betsy Rothstein of FishbowlDC. [Added Jan. 8]

“. . . Word on the Street is believed to be Baltimore’s first street newspaper,” Yvonne Wenger reported Sunday in the Baltimore Sun. “Attempts have been made in the past to circulate news about homelessness and poverty, but the previous efforts came in the form of newsletters in the 1980s.”

“Comcast executive VP David Cohen will receive the Champion of Digital Equality award at the upcoming Minority Media and Telecommunications Council Broadband and Social Justice Summit on Jan. 16 in Washington,” John Eggerton reported for Broadcasting & Cable. “Cohen, who heads up policy for Comcast, is being cited for ‘visionary leadership in promoting minority entrepreneurship; universal broadband access, adoption and informed use; diversity; and success in America’s most influential and important industries.’ . . . ”

Marianna Kay Siblani, executive editor of the Arab American News for the last 28 years, died on New Year’s Day after a long struggle with breast cancer, Oralandar Brand-Williams reported from Dearborn, Mich., for the Detroit News. “During her time at The Arab American News, she was a powerful voice and an advocate for Arab and Muslim Americans on local and national issues,” the Arab American News added.

” ‘2013 starting off with a bang! Newsweek printed its last issue and with that came layoffs and buyouts. I took a buyout, What’s next? Who knows. But it’s exciting,’ wrote María Elena Fernández on her Facebook page,”Veronica Villafañe reported Monday in her Media Moves column. “Her departure from The Daily Beast comes less than 2 years since she was hired as senior entertainment reporter. Prior to joining the now struggling publication, María Elena spent 12 years as an entertainment reporter at the L.A. Times.”

In Miami, “WPLG reporter Johanna Gomez has switched broadcast mediums,” South Florida TV News reported on Monday. “As of today she’s part of the DJ Laz Morning Show on 106.7FM, which is also heard [throughout] the country. You’ll be able to hear her weekdays from 6am to 10am. In a Facebook and Twitter post late last night Gomez announced her move . . . ”

“The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in India to refrain from pressing charges against a media group that televised an interview with the companion of the Delhi rape victim who died last week,” the committee said Friday. “The December 16 case has garnered global attention. . . . New Delhi police said they would charge the broadcaster under section 228(A) of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with the disclosure of identity of victims of certain crimes, including rape, according to The New York Times. . . .”

“. . . Mexico is one of the most dangerous places to commit journalism, due to the impunity of drug syndicates,”Judith Matloff reported for Columbia Journalism Review. “More than 80 journalists have been killed and 16 kidnapped over the past dozen years, because they wrote about the activities of warring gangs. Many reporters have gone into hiding, and still more have been silenced by fear. Desperate for help, a loose network called Journalists On Foot (PDP) began to reach out to Colombia colleagues for tips, and over the past couple of years, seasoned experts . . . have flown over to meet with reporters across Mexico. . . .”

“Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly has drawn the ire of at least one member of Hawaii’s congressional delegation,” the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Friday. “U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa says the conservative talk show host owes Hawaii and all Asian-Americans an apology for his characterization of the isles’ population. . . . ‘You know what’s shocking?’ O’Reilly said. ‘Thirty-five percent of the Hawaiian population is Asian, and Asian people are not liberal by nature, they’re usually more industrious and hard-working.’ ”

“South Sudan has arrested two state broadcast journalists for failing to ensure coverage of a crucial speech by President Salva Kiir, a government official said on Sunday, prompting an outcry from an international media watchdog,” Reuters reported.

“Every year, the American Dialect Society nominates and then votes on a word of the year, and for 2012 it’s ‘hashtag,’ ” Dieter Bohn reported Saturday for theverge.com. “It beat out other nominated words like ‘YOLO,’ ‘Fiscal cliff,’ and ‘Gangnam style.’ The ADS’ chair of the New Words Committee, Ben Zimmer, said that the word was a ‘ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk’ in 2012. . . .”

Gene Demby, a black journalist who has just joined NPR as a reporter covering ethnicity and race, made his first on-air appearance last week in a “Morning Edition” segment last week on the decline of Kwanzaa. “I think you’re supposed to say the name of the principle of the last day of Kwanzaa,” Demby told host David Greene. “I’m not sure what that Kwanzaa principle is. But I think Happy Kwanzaa is a sufficient response for a salutation.” NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos wrote Monday, “There is nothing wrong with a journalist not knowing something. But in a two-way with a reporter, that unknown is usually about a fact that is not public or is unconfirmed. In this case, however, Demby was presented not just as a reporter, but also as an expert and — crucially here — a personal example.” The lack of knowledge offended some listeners.

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Journal-isms is published on the site of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education (www.mije.org). Reprinted on The Root by permission.

Three Ways to Consider Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” l Amy Alexander

January 7, 2013 by OUR COMMON GROUND

SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2013

Three Ways to Consider Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”

Two weeks after it opened, “Django Unchained”continues kicking up a windstorm of commentary, critiques and rants. It has also earned more than$100 million at the domestic box office, not exactly small change for a spectacularly complicated film that opened at the height of the Christmas season.

I’d read the reviews in The New York Times and other outlets and sat it out, opting for a Christmas holiday free of blood-splatters. During the film’s first week, I followed and sometimes chimed in on the discussions that clogged my social media channels. Many of the writers, academics and media folks who are the core of my network expressed — sometimes in heated language — widely diverging opinions about the movie. Insummary:

— Tarantino foolishly makes light of the horrors of slavery. (Susan Fales Hill.)
— Tarantino delivered a liberating revenge fantasy, disturbing but legitimate (TaRessa Stovall.)
— Tarantino wrongly suggests that an eye-for-an-eye philosophy would have been an acceptable antidote to slavery, i.e., slaves or former slaves killing whites in retribution. (William Jelani Cobb)
— Tarantino is talented but woefully immature. (Me.)

Now that I’ve watched it, here are two points on the film, brief analysis on the buzz surrounding the film, and observations on the filmmaker’s comments about how and why he made it.

1) Story
“Django Unchained” is a love story wrapped in an action-packed revenge fantasy set against the backdrop of slavery in the Deep South and in the Southwest.

Or is it?

As a postmodern, edgy action movie, it is wildly successful. As a love story it is weakened by excesses that Tarantino either didn’t notice, failed to reign in, or willfully created. As a revenge fantasy-cum-commentary on racism, it succeeds moderately. There are strained metaphors and over-long scenes that hamper the action (Fales Hill, for example, quite astutely noted the ‘hamfisted’ inclusion a reference to Wagner’s “The Ring Cycle,” within the plot). But the biggest story deficit is that the film’s spine — it’s core meaning — isn’t clear. Is it foremost a love story? A revenge fantasy? A buddy film? Tarantino’s reputation as an enfant terrible of modern film auteurs springs from his ability to produce jarring, swift acts of violence, unexpected moments of tenderness, and black humor laced with creative explosions of colorfully profane language.

All are present here, but given the incendiary frame (slavery, the ultimate third-rail in American cultural politics), identifying the genuine point of the story is difficult. Tarantino’s biggest weakness as a filmmaker (in my book) has long been his inability or unwillingness to honor the tradition of linear cinematic storytelling, i.e., plots that have clearly defined beginnings, mid-sections, and endings. His elliptical style, in which flashbacks and future developments pop up randomly, swing around and double back on each other, sometimes at a dizzying pace (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction”) is used, I believe, as something of a dodge: He may indeed be capable of writing a linear narrative and simply elects not to. But as I view his catalog, Tarantino is more interested in encouraging incipient ADHD in the audience than in steadily building our investment in the characters, in cultivating a gradual, creeping tension as plot developments logically unfold. (No, I am neither inflexible or inherently opposed to ‘non-traditional’ storytelling tactics, I merely prefer the former method and Tarantino has yet to produce a film that has this flow.) The story within “Django Unchained” is obscured; it takes a back seat to the main theme that Tarantino is promoting — blacks avenging the cruelties of slavery. That is not a ‘story,’ it is a political statement.

2) Artistry

Other reviewers — film scholars and smart movie-goers alike — have correctly identified the film’s obvious homage to the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone. Unmentioned, though, is its liberal borrowing of motifs from a host of other films and filmmakers, including Hitchcock, John Ford, Gordon Parks, Mel Brooks, and in a fleeting reference, David O. Selznick. Taken individually, the references to Leone, Hitchcock, Parks, and to Brooks are not problematic. Collectively though, they diminish the opportunity for a truly original film that might have been enhanced by deploying fewer (or by a more subtle deployment) of references to past films or other genres. As it is, the driving artistic feature of “Django’ is that it is a mash-up, however slick, visceral and humorously drawn the total sum of its parts.

There are liberal doses of Peckinpah in the grisly images of spurting blood and rending limbs; reminders of Parks in the many shots of Django’s quick-draw skills and bad-ass lines of dialog; hints of Ford in the back-lit, sillhouettes or heroic shots of Jamie Foxx’s Django swaggering away from the camera framed by looming mountain ranges; big splashes of Hitchock in Django’s intense, tunnel vision focus on rescuing Kerry Washington’s Brunhilda, a character who serves as the proverbial ‘McGuffin’ — that item or person identified by the Master of Suspense as the driving momentum of a plot (really, Brunhilda in “Django’ may as well have been a mysterious uranium formula, a la Cary Grant’s and Ingrid Bergman’s ‘McGuffin’ in ‘Notorious”). The scene in which the Klansmen — led by Don Johnson’s character — disagree over their hoods is an updating of the bandit’s ‘beans for dinner’ scene in “Blazing Saddles” — unexpected, hilarious and decidedly un-PC.

And the appearance, mid-way through the second reel, of the word “Mississippi” in all-caps, slowly crawling (or is it ‘wiping?’) majestically across the screen from right-frame to left-frame, indicatingthe protagonist’s traveling into the Deep South is clearly a reference to Selznick’s “Gone With the Wind.” Much has been made of the possibility that Tarantino is attempting with “Django’ to reap a kind of cinematic payback upon that epic film and presumably other ‘Golden Age of Hollywood” tales of the Old South in which blacks were portrayed as simpletons and victims. This may be the case and Tarantino and modern directors are of course welcome to update that hoary genre at will. Yet, while “Django” is indeed a ‘fun,’ moderately cathartic revenge fantasy-take on slavery, it is also ultimately a fairly cold-hearted film, unlike “Gone with the Wind.” Tarantino istremendously talented, and I enjoy his films — within limits. I do though eagerly await the moment when his output begins to show signs of genuine maturity, artistically and in the ability to explore the human condition with a stronger emphasis on compassion rather than cynicism. At least in “Django,’ Tarantino has improved on a basic skill of mainstream film auteurs — constructing mis en scene that is visually arresting, if ultimately in need of editing.

3) Buzz, Criticism, Tarantino’s Comments

As I said up top, lots of very smart people are chattering about “Django Unchained,” with most of the heat apparently arising from Tarantino’s decision to take on slavery. Part of the challenge — and I say this with all due respect to my peers! — is that academic experts in black studies are not necessarily experts on film, while film scholars are not usually known for their expertise on black American history. Thus, we’ve had a huge amount of teeth-gnashing in the media ecosystem about “Django Unchained,” but not very much in the way of genuinely useful analysis.

Even so, a common point of contention is the violence and surfeit of images showing Washington’s character being whipped and of another slave character being ripped apart by dogs after attempting to escape. These scenes are upsetting, although, yes, they are meant to be and they should be. What is objectionable is Tarantino’s decision to return to them gratuitously in the second and in the final reel. The fact that the characters use the word ‘nigger’ with abandon does not bother me — it is, after all, a story that unfolds in a era when that word was widely used. What does rankle me is what appears to be the author’s insistence that he deserves a pass on his continued appropriation on black pain (as we have endured it throughout the brutal physical abuse of the antebellum era and in the deep psychological and emotional scarring that has accumulated in the decades since thanks to Jim Crow laws, and more recently, persistent, low-grade racism that permeates American institutions including corporations, the law, and education.) Also, Tarantino does not get a ‘ghetto-pass,’ just because he grew up among blacks in Southern California, or because his mom ‘dated Wilt Chamberlain,” as he recently disclosed in an interview. I don’t abide anyone using the word ‘nigger’ in conversation in my presence; and while Tarantino’s film characters are obviously fictional, it is not acceptable that he apparently believes that he has earned a license to continuously deploy that word and that he seems to have the impression that by doing so he is diminishing its power. I argued nearly a decade ago that there was something sick about the proliferation of the phrase ‘ghetto-fabulous’ in popular media and culture and this appropriation of the word ‘nigger’ by Tarantino or other artists — black and white, truth be told — is in the same category of outsized entitlement and general Dumb Assery.

Moreover, I find Tarantino’s insistence that the gleeful depictions of over the top violence that he often highlights in his film are ‘fun’ to be terribly ill-considered. Even Clint Eastwood — who rightly caught lots of hell for the splatter-fests that distinguished his “Dirty Harry’ films of the ’70s and ’80s — eventually gave up the argument that such violence didn’t have any negative impact on our national consciousness. Eastwood grew out of such displays, likely in no small part because as he matured to fatherhood and grandfather-hood he could no longer justify producing films with the potential to negatively inform the behavior of individuals within his off-spring’s cohort.

On January 2, Terry Gross, the veteran host of NPR’s “Fresh Air” published a riveting interview with Tarantino. I am always rooting for artists, even those who produce high profile work that garners lots of press, generates high heat but which is often stubbornly flawed. Tarantino, as I’ve said, is genuinely talented, and I root for his success. Yet his response to one of Gross’s questions was very troubling: Gross asked if Tarantino ever considers the the possibility that the violence and brutality in his films may have any connection to or influence over the mass shootings that have increased in the U.S. in the past decade, in particular, the recent horror of 20 dead children and six dead teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Tarantino replies that he is ‘annoyed’ by such a question, and that even asking it is, ‘insulting to the memory’ of those who died at Sandy Hook Elementary.

If I were writing a script about a public figure who produces mass media designed to resonate with millions of viewers…..but who also denies that his product has lasting influence on any audience members, I would include a version of this interview. It would take place in the beginning of the third reel, at the crucial moment when the protagonist finally receives profound enlightenment, matures, and finds the strength and maturity needed to infuse his mission with clarity of vision, the bright light of hope, and the beauty of compassion.

POSTED BY AMY ALEXANDER AT 5:10 PM


AMY ALEXANDER: Content Producer. Formerly known as Journalist.; Visit her Website; OUR COMMON GROUND Voice

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"Compromise & Capitulation: Starring Harry Potter and the StormTroopers" ::: In Conversation with Dr. James Lance Taylor :::

September 25, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

“The Attica Massacre 50 Years Later: America’s Human Rights Crisis Continues" ::: Max Parthas and Yusuf Hassan, Co-Hosts, Abolition Today" - Abolitionist Radio

::: September 18, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

“The Glitch in the Matrix” OPEN MIC

::: September 11, 2021

"As America Fails: Finding Solidarity” with Dr. Djene Rhys Bajalan

This Week in Black America :: OPEN MIC ::: August 7, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

"Tribute to Glen Ford, Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report” ::: A Pioneering Black Truth Warrior

::: July 31, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

"Rest for the Justice Seeking Soul" :: Rev. Dr. Susan K. Williams Smith

::: July 17, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

"Trumping Black: The Lost Tribe" :: Haiti Politics :: Pascal Robert, Co-Host, This Is Revolution

::: July 10, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

"Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting”
03-19-09 LIVE Conversation with Dr. Terrie M. Williams, Ph.D.:::

"Rest for the Justice Seeking Soul" ::
Rev. Dr. Susan K. Williams Smith

"Trumping Black: The Lost Tribe" :: Haiti Politics ::
Pascal Robert, Co-Host, This Is Revolution