Black men dream
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Black men live and dream. Have emotions, feelings, hopes and fears. At a time when black men, especially younger ones are being vilified, de-humanized, incarcerated in massive numbers, and yes—shot dead in the streets, with an outcry and nationwide demonstrations as a result and reaction, I hope people will share the following film by a young black artist.
About Shikeith (SHī/KEETH )
Shikeith born Jan. 3, 1989 makes photos, media art and films. He lives, and works in Philadelphia, PA. His first solo exhibition ‘Ode to Black’ was held at the Paul Robeson Cultural Center at The Pennsylvania State University, where he studied art and received several awards including The Leslie P. Greenhill scholarship for Photography. He has also shown his work at Crane Art’s Ice Box in Philadelphia, PA. In 2014, Shikeith received a Heinz Endowment grant , through the Pittsburgh Advancing Black Arts initiative.
Photo of Shikeith, "Working in Pittsburgh, on my solo exhibition "Somewhere Over The __" --October 2014 , at Bunker Projects
Sheikeith describes the project and the questions asked of the men whose faces you will not see.
This work expresses my, and our apprehension to be. #Blackmendream (2014) is a social practice art film that utilizes social media to provide contemporary black men an outlet for open emotional expression often denied through racial, and black masculinity taboos.
To contribute viewers are encouraged to respond to the set of questions below that investigate the individual black male experience with emotionality.
Watch the film here.
1.When did you become a black man? When did you become a man?
2.How would you describe your interaction with other black males in your youth? Adulthood?
3.What makes you angry? sad? happy?
4.Have you ever dealt with emotional stress directly related to being a black man?
5.Have you ever been depressed? What caused it?
6.Were you able to express your depression to the people around you? If yes, how did they respond--if no, what stopped you?
7.What has stopped you from expressing yourself emotionally?
8.How were you raised to deal with your emotions?
9.How do you feel you're perceived by other black men?
10.Do you cry? When was the last time you cried and why?
11.What has your mother/father told you about expressing your emotions,and when?
12. What's the hardest thing about being a male? a black male?
13. Whats a repetitive happy dream/day dream you can remember?
15. What's a repetitive nightmare you can remember?
The film opens with a black screen and we hear the voice and words of James Baldwin being interviewed by conservative white reporter R.H.Darden, in Los Angeles (
Pacifica Archives, KPFK, 1968) after his piece,
James Baldwin on Stokely: From Dreams of Love to Dreams of Terror, was published in the Los Angeles Free Press. In this powerful piece—not often cited, Baldwin
had written:
America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of the black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's sleep. So it was not in the least surprising for me to encounter (one more time) the American surprise when Stokely -- as Americans allow themselves the luxury of supposing -- coined the phrase, Black Power. He didn't coin it. He simply dug it up again from where it's been lying since the first slaves hit the gangplank. I have never known a Negro in all my life who was not obsessed with Black Power.
Those representatives of White Power who are not too hopelessly brain-washed or eviscerated will understand that the only way for a black man in America not to be obsessed with the problem of how to control his destiny and protect his house, his women and his children, is for that black man to become in his own mind the something less than a man which this Republic, alas, has always considered him to be. And when a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given him by others, he is talking revolution. In point of sober fact, he cannot possibly be talking anything else, and nothing is more revelatory of the American hypocrisy than their swift perception of this fact. The "white backlash" is meaningless 20th-century jargon designed at once to hide and to justify the fact that most white Americans are still unable to believe that the black man is a man -- in the same way that we speak of a "credibility gap" because we are too cowardly to face the fact that our leaders have been lying to us for years. Perhaps we suspect that we deserve the contempt with which we allow ourselves to be treated.
The government would like to be able to indict Stokely, and many others like him, of incitement to riot; but I accuse the government of this crime. It is, briefly, an insult to my intelligence, and to the intelligence of any black person, to ask me to believe that the most powerful nation in the world is unable to do anything to make the lives of its black citizens less appalling.
Darden, of course, had a strong, negative response to Baldwin's vision of what it means to be black, and a black man in America.
We hear him ask Baldwin "in a nutshell..what is happening?
Baldwin responds "Rage is happening, that's what's happening, it's been happening for a very long time...Ralph Ellison told you a long time ago, long before I did, what it is like to be an invisible man..."
#Blackmendream from Shikeith on Vimeo.
You can see more of his work on his instagram page.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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“This has to become a movement and not just a moment.” The Root: ‘A Movement, Not Just a Moment’: Thousands March to Call for an End to Police Violence.
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Armed with posters and a camera, Delores and Shannon King made the three-hour trek from Portsmouth, Va., to the nation's capital on Saturday to join thousands of people gathered for the "Justice for All" demonstration protesting the recent deaths of several unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers.
“We are here to support the cause,” said Delores King, who has an 18-year-old son. “This has to become a movement and not just a moment.”
The Kings and a sea of protesters marched east on Pennsylvania Avenue chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” After the march, the Rev. Al Sharpton called on Congress and the U.S. Justice Department to intervene on behalf of protecting black men from law enforcement.
“State grand juries have suspended the right of due process,” said Sharpton, founder and president of National Action Network, the civil rights organization he founded in 1991. “We need national intervention.”
Protesters came from across the globe to demand an end to police violence and a change in the justice system. Interracial and intergenerational crowds gathered on a brisk winter afternoon—soccer moms next to union members, who were sandwiched between activists and such celebrities as filmmaker Spike Lee and television judge Greg Mathis, all connected through the tragic deaths of unarmed black men.
Crowds gathered Saturday in downtown Washington, D.C., to protest the deaths of unarmed black men by white police officers.
TWITTER
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A Supreme Court justice denounced police chokeholds 30 years ago. Why are we still having the same conversation? Color Lines: Thurgood Marshall Condemned Chokeholds in 1983.
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More than three decades ago, the Supreme Court confronted whether the police violate a person’s constitutional rights when they use chokeholds in routine encounters with the public—precisely the dynamic we recently witnessed in the killing of Eric Garner. A lower court had banned their casual use, but in Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983) a five-four majority of the Court overturned that ruling. In effect, they allowed the police to continue using life-threatening chokeholds even against persons who pose no threat of violence.
A blistering dissent came from Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to sit on the nation’s highest court. Marshall aimed much of his ire at the majority’s tortured legal reasoning, which held that even if the commonplace application of chokeholds raised constitutional issues, plaintiff Adolph Lyons—choked unconscious seemingly for driving while black—was not the right person to sue, since he couldn’t be sure he would be choked again.
Before wading into the arcane legal fight, however, Marshall emphasized the human dimension of what happened:
When Lyons regained consciousness, he was lying face down on the ground, choking, gasping for air, and spitting up blood and dirt. He had urinated and defecated. He was issued a traffic citation and released.
Lyons’ extreme physical reaction to being choked—loss of consciousness and bowel control—were not exceptional, Marshall carefully showed, but typical of the harrowing physiological consequences that come with choking persons into submission.
Thurgood Marshall
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New investigation sheds light on how digital surveillance affects teens in similar neighborhoods. The Verge: How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars.
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Teens living in high-crime areas have a new concern: cops tracking them through their Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and other social media posts. A new Verge investigation uses Harlem as a case study to look at how police have been using social media’s strength—cataloguing friends and friends of friends—to catch violent perpetrators and their innocent friends and siblings, too. As noted here and here, high crime neighborhoods are already highly surveilled, i.e. foot patrols, cameras (street corners, public housing, shops, laundromats), eye-in-the-sky surveillance towers, helicopters overhead and perhaps more. For teens in these neighborhoods, the Internet is no reprieve.
Over the last five years, the New York City police department and Manhattan prosecutors office have ramped up their efforts to understand, oversee, and infiltrate the digital lives of teenagers from crime-prone neighborhoods like Harlem. They track the activity of kids through services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, going so far as to create fake accounts and spark online friendships to sidestep privacy settings. A recent indictment discusses activity of crew members as young as 10, and arrested several 15-year-olds following a four and half year investigation.
Jelani Henry, who says Facebook likes landed him in Rikers
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After her mother died of Ebola, a girl in Sierra Leone was left an orphan when nobody in her village wanted her. New York Times: An Ebola Orphan’s Plea in Africa: ‘Do You Want Me?’.
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Sweetie Sweetie had no choice.
Her father had just died of Ebola. So had her sister. Her mother was vomiting blood and fading fast.
When the ambulance arrived and her mother climbed in, Sweetie Sweetie climbed in, too. Ebola had been like a pox on her entire house, and even though the young girl looked fine, with no symptoms, nobody in her village, even relatives, wanted to take her. With nowhere else to go, she followed her mother all the way into the red zone of an Ebola clinic and spent more than two weeks in a biohazard area where the only other healthy people were wearing moon suits.
As her mother grew sicker, Sweetie Sweetie urged her to take her pills. She tried to feed her. She washed her mother’s soiled clothes, not especially well, but nurses said they were moved by the effort. After all, they think Sweetie Sweetie is only 4. Health care workers did not even know her real name, which is why they called her Sweetie Sweetie.
After her mother died, the young girl stood outside the clinic’s gates looking around with enormous brown eyes. There was no one to pick her up. She was put on the back of a motorbike and taken to a group home, whose bare, dim hallways she now wanders alone. Social workers are trying to find someone to adopt her, and Sweetie Sweetie seems to know she is up for grabs.
On a recent day she asked a visitor: “Do you want me?”
Sweetie Sweetie, center, with other Ebola orphans at a group home in Sierra Leone. She is seen by neighbors as a potential carrier. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
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Chris Rock Is Right. BusinessWeek: Hollywood Isn't Fair to Black Films.
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Black films account for a tiny fraction of big studios’ output. Budgets tend to be small, and distribution is limited largely to domestic theaters. Rock’s new film, Top Five, which opens in wide release this weekend, features a mostly black cast and isn’t mainly about race. Those kinds of films are rarely made by large Hollywood studios. Top Five was produced by Barry Diller’s IAC Films.
As white as the film industry remains today, black films play a more significant economic role in Hollywood than they did 30 years ago. To get a handle on the numbers, Bloomberg Businessweek sifted through the 100 top-grossing movies in the domestic market for each year since 1980 and identified films we could comfortably categorize as African American. This is, as we readily admit, a fraught and inexact sorting, since there’s no simple consensus among scholars and critics as to what constitutes an African American movie.
We chose to focus on films primarily concerned with African American culture and identity. Again, it’s a subjective list: A buddy flicks such as Lethal Weapon didn’t make our list of African American films, but Beverly Hills Cop was included on the basis of its black hero. The 2012 film Flight, which stars Denzel Washington, was excluded because race doesn’t inform the story to the same extent.
There’s room for debate, yet by nearly any reckoning more African American films are represented in the top 100 today than in the 1980s.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
In the economic warfare that has been raging for decades, the divisions of the economic classes have widened. The rich, though a small number, hold the majority of the wealth, the middle class is shrinking, the poor are increasing in numbers and are being kicked in the gut for it.
But the Holidays are upon us and the bright twinkling lights on the 100 foot Douglas Fir in the town square draws us to the business district. Canned Holiday Music wafts from the warm interiors of department stores as shoppers look for that perfect gift. Not last year's model, of course; and certainly not some nostalgic, lead-painted toy from their youth.
The 130 inch televisions draw the shoppers near. News of the torture report, drones and racial strife seemingly hypnotizes the throng, as neon arrows point to the gun and ammo section and scantily clad Santa helpers model the newest model of automatic take you to the cleaners and wring you out before you know what happened to you, buddy.
Quietly, a small, almost angelic woman pushes a push broom nearby.
A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary
If Mary came would Mary
Forgive, as Mothers may,
And sad and second Saviour
Furnish us today?
She would not shake her head and leave
This military air,
But ratify a modern hay,
And put her Baby there.
Mary would not punish men—
If Mary came again.
-- Gwendolyn Brooks
Which then brought to mind other mothers with other sons and daughters gunned down in the bright sun and darkened stairwells of a gun shack, lynching tree America. Of other mothers crying with other mothers newly admitted to the club of dead sons and dead husbands and dead brothers and dead fathers and dead uncles and dead cousins, aunts, sisters and mothers dead dead dead by the hands of a Law that allows the perverse mistake of murder at the hands of authorities and the banal just doing the job and don't talk back or you'll regret it society we find ourselves trapped in.
But the smell of fresh pine and the sharp chill of a chilly night can also conjure other visions and memories. Memories of other rooms and other voices.
Memories of a...
Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
My mother was not impressed with her beauty;
once a year she put it on like a costume,
plaited her black hair, slick as cornsilk, down past her hips,
in one rope-thick braid, turned it, carefully, hand over hand,
and fixed it at the nape of her neck, stiff and elegant as a crown,
with tortoise pins, like huge insects,
some belonging to her dead mother,
some to my living grandmother.
Sitting on the stool at the mirror,
she applied a peachy foundation that seemed to hold her down, to trap her,
as if we never would have noticed what flew among us unless it was weighted and bound in its mask.
Vaseline shined her eyebrows,
mascara blackened her lashes until they swept down like feathers;
her eyes deepened until they shone from far away.
Now I remember her hands, her poor hands, which, even then were old from scrubbing,
whiter on the inside than they should have been,
and hard, the first joints of her fingers, little fattened pads,
the nails filed to sharp points like old-fashioned ink pens,
painted a jolly color.
Her hands stood next to her face and wanted to be put away, prayed
for the scrub bucket and brush to make them useful.
And, as I write, I forget the years I watched her
pull hairs like a witch from her chin, magnify
every blotch—as if acid were thrown from the inside.
But once a year my mother
rose in her white silk slip,
not the slave of the house, the woman,
took the ironed dress from the hanger—
allowing me to stand on the bed, so that
my face looked directly into her face,
and hold the garment away from her
as she pulled it down.
-- Toi Derricotte
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