Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I sometimes think we live on that rumored planet on the other side of the sun, where everything is the opposite of what it should be. We seem to live on a world where Cops act more like gangsters than gangsters do. A world where public service is dismissed as not being self-centered enough to make the big bucks. A world where lies and subterfuge have more currency than just doing the right thing.
It all reminded me of the illusion of negative and positive space in art; where figure-ground reversal will show a vase in the positive space and the silhouetted profile of two faces in the negative. The Danish psychologist, Edgar Rubin, used this and many other examples to...
... state as a fundamental principle: When two fields have a common border, and one is seen as figure and the other as ground, the immediate perceptual experience is characterized by a shaping effect which emerges from the common border of the fields and which operates only on one field or operates more strongly on one than on the other.
Arguments abound whether Race remains an issue in the post-Obama world; one posited, mostly by bigots and their racist apologists, is that the very fact a black man is President is example enough that America's sordid racial past has been refuted; sort of like seeing only the figure, or only the ground.
A countervailing argument might be that the sheer numbers of people of color who are stopped and killed by the police as opposed to population averages is a pretty damn good example that Race is and will continue to be an issue; that would be perceiving the ground and the figure shifting back and forth.
Maybe we really do live on that rumored planet on the other side of the sun. Maybe figure-ground reversal really does explain these tragic dynamics. Maybe it really is just how we view things.
From one angle, life may seem to be a hell hole, from another, life may seem to be simply...
Negative
Wake to find everything black what was white, all the vice versa—white maids on TV, black
sitcoms that star white dwarfs cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents, Black Houses. White horse
candidates. All bleach burns clothes black. Drive roads white as you are, white songs
on the radio stolen by black bands like secret pancake recipes, white back-up singers, ball-players & boxers all
white as tar. Feathers on chickens dark as everything, boiling in the pot that called the kettle honky. Even
whites of the eye turn dark, pupils clear & changing as a cat's. Is this what we've wanted
& waited for? to see snow covering everything black as Christmas, dark pages written
white upon? All our eclipses bright, dark stars shooting across pale sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower
every skin. Only money keeps green, still grows & burns like grass under dark daylight.
-- Kevin Young
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American Girl has been teaching girls about their history through the lens of its beautifully made, lavishly accessorized dolls since 1986. Or, at least, it’s been teaching certain girls about their history. For all of the inspiring, fascinating looks into what life was like for white girls growing up, the company has only had two black dolls in its historical “BeForever” doll line—the original, Addy, is a slave who escaped to freedom, and the second, Cécile Rey, was discontinued only three years after her release in 2014. In other words, for most of the time American Girl has been around, its only offering for black girls was to envision themselves as former slaves. However, in 2016, American Girl will add another black character to its roster as part of its 30th anniversary celebration. Meet Melody Ellison, a 9-year-old girl growing up in the Motown scene in mid-1960s Detroit.
That American Girl has managed to go this long without addressing the Civil Rights movement is as baffling as it is telling, but considering the increasingly influential dialogue sparked by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Melody could not have arrived at a better time. (The doll will hit stores later this summer.) In a video released by American Girl, Denise Lewis Patrick, who penned the two Melody books, emphasized the importance of music for Melody’s character and also divulged that her story will deal at length with Melody’s growing understanding of fairness and equality as larger societal issues.
According to the Detroit News, the Melody doll had a six-person advisory panel working on its development. Included in the panel were late civil rights activist Julian Bond, former Detroit City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, and Juanita Moore, the president and CEO of the Charles W. Wright Museum.
It’s great that American Girl has finally given one of the most important eras of American history its due attention, but this is just the first step in what needs to be a continued effort to better represent the diversity of American girls’ history. Within their BeForever line, we’ve had 14 dolls to represent white history. To compare, we’re on our third black doll, and there’s only ever been one Hispanic doll (Josefina Montoya), one Native American doll (Kaya), and one Asian doll (Ivy Ling). It’s worth noting that in addition to Cécile, Ivy was also discontinued in 2014—7 years after her release.
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Hayden’s nomination is significant on multiple levels. As president of the American Library Association, she fought against provisions in the Patriot Act that allowed the government to access library patron records. She has also embraced the role technology can play in improving library systems, a quality that was severely lackingin the previous librarian, James H. Billington. He was criticized bymultiple federal reports for failing to get the library’s computer systems in order, and for dragging his feet about hiring a chief information officer. (David S. Mao, the interim librarian, finally did.)
All past librarians have been men. This is at odds with the gender breakdown of librarians in the nation at large, who are overwhelmingly women. An ALA report from 2015 stated that “over eight out of every ten librarians are women,” even if only about 60 percent of library directors are women. Hayden’s appointment is a big step towards shattering that glass ceiling.
"Adama," a documentary scheduled to air on World Channel tonight, shows what happens when several issues—racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia among them—intersected to disrupt the life of Adama Bah.
The documentary profiles Bah, a hijab-wearing Guinean immigrant who endured the brunt of American Islamophobia and paranoia when armed federal agents raided her family's Harlem apartment in 2005. Bah, then 16 years old, was accused of being a possible suicide bomber. The FBI leaked the suspicion to the press, and she was held in a Pennsylvania detention center. The subsequent fallout included her undocumented father's arrest and the threat of her family's deportation—all without Bah ever being charged for terrorism.
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From the very beginning, Black-ish announced itself, with its provocative name, as a show that was going to explicitly examine what it is like to be an upper-middle-class black family in a so-called “post-racial” society. Nearly every installment opens with narration from Dre (Anthony Anderson), the family patriarch, presenting a tongue-in-cheek thesis for the topic that will unfold that day (often with an accompanying newsreel-style montage): The kids are too spoiled; is corporal punishment OK?; my daughter’s dating a white dude!; what’s our policy on our kids and the N-word; the politics of code-switching.
Every episode of the show feels like a Very Special Episode. This is not a dig. It applies only to the series’ unabashed choice of hot-button topics, not the way in which it approaches them, which is with smart humor and unfailing nuance, the very things your typical VSE is not. There is always a counterargument to an argument, and a counter-counterargument to be made, as Dre and his family of very different and wacky personalities clash and bond and, yes, come to an understanding about any given topic.
And so last night’s “Hope” was the Very, Very Special Episode of Black-ish, taking on its most fraught and contemporary social issue yet: police brutality against people of color. Nearly all of it takes place in the Johnsons’ living room, with the entire family, including recurring characters Pops (Laurence Fishburne) and Ruby (Jenifer Lewis), gathered around the television to await a grand jury’s decision as to whether or not to indict a police officer involved in the latest unarmed black person encounter. (This victim was tased 37 times, apparently for selling bootleg DVDs.) What unravels is a series of deft, fiercely smart observations about what the rise of high-profile police incidents has done to people in the black community—how it unites them and angers them; how it forces some of us to shut down and tune out, or encourages others to cling wildly to a false sense of comfort.
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There are many theories to explain the absence of non-white acting nominees for this year’s Academy Awards: maybe the Academy members are racist; maybe they aren’t racist but are simply too white overall; maybe there just weren’t enough non-white performers this year. The debate goes on and on.
But what if it wasn’t just the biases of the anonymous membership? What if studios got exactly what they paid for?
The studios, after all, invest heavily in advertising and promotional campaigns for their films and actors, hoping to influence the Academy members who vote on Oscar nominations and wins. They buy splashy ads in the industry press, give out free tickets and DVDs to voting members andthrow parties with famous people. And those efforts create narratives. Face it — nobody left “Creed” muttering, “My god, Sylvester Stallone is truly America’s best supporting actor.” And most people who talk about how much Leonardo DiCaprio deserves an Oscar this year probably1 didn’t see “The Revenant.”
I wanted to figure out how to quantify those nomination campaigns, and since there’s no way I’m getting into an Oscar party or a studio screening, I went to a library2 and inventoried every “For Your Consideration” advertisement3 appearing in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the Oscar nomination voting deadline. I went through each issue released from November through Jan. 8, when nominations voting closed, found 363 “For Your Consideration” ads, wrote down the size and page of each ad, and photographed it. (You can download all this data at the bottom of this piece.)
|
FILM |
AGGREGATE AD SPACE |
NO. OF ADS |
NOMINEE |
1 |
The Danish Girl |
2049 sq.in. |
13 |
✓ |
2 |
Bridge of Spies |
1926 |
9 |
✓ |
3 |
Steve Jobs |
1855 |
8 |
✓ |
4 |
Straight Outta Compton |
1731 |
10 |
|
5 |
Beasts of No Nation |
1614 |
12 |
|
6 |
The Martian |
1447 |
8 |
✓ |
7 |
Love & Mercy |
1125 |
9 |
|
8 |
Inside Out |
1069 |
6 |
✓ |
9 |
Joy |
1063 |
7 |
✓ |
10 |
Trainwreck |
939 |
7 |
|
11 |
Black Mass |
916 |
5 |
|
12 |
Anomalisa |
712 |
2 |
✓ |
13 |
The Revenant |
679 |
4 |
✓ |
14 |
Legend |
662 |
5 |
|
14 |
The Good Dinosaur |
662 |
3 |
|
16 |
Mr. Holmes |
532 |
4 |
|
16 |
Suffragette |
532 |
4 |
|
18 |
Room |
526 |
4 |
✓ |
18 |
Trumbo |
526 |
4 |
✓ |
18 |
Truth |
526 |
5 |
|
21 |
99 Homes |
467 |
4 |
|
22 |
Star Wars: The Force Awakens |
407 |
2 |
|
23 |
Concussion |
402 |
2 |
|
23 |
Creed |
402 |
3 |
✓ |
25 |
Minions |
396 |
2 |
|
25 |
Sicario |
396 |
3 |
|
25 |
The Big Short |
396 |
2 |
✓ |
25 |
What Happened, Miss Simone? |
396 |
2 |
✓ |
29 |
Grandma |
364 |
10 |
|
30 |
I Smile Back |
333 |
4 |
|
Did films with non-white actors and directors get the same investment from nomination ad campaigns?
In Nollywood, as the Nigerian movie business is known, there are no actual studios. Filmmakers usually rent an abandoned or empty mansion and transform it into a set. But Taylaur hadn’t found one yet. Then a friend came through. He owned a derelict house with servants’ quarters in Ebute Metta, a congested neighborhood in one of the oldest parts of Lagos with faded, peeling apartment buildings, pastel-colored two-level bungalows, and a sprawl of open-air markets. Taylaur could use it if he wanted, for free. He’d just have to clean it up first. The street outside might present a problem, though. It was loud: generators rumbling, people shouting, horns blaring from vehicles languishing in traffic. No, Taylaur said, that sounded perfect.
When he showed up at the house two days later, Taylaur had to cut the padlock off the gate (his friend had lost the key). Inside, he found rooms knee-deep in trash; it took several hours—and dumpsters—to get rid of it all. He and the crew gutted, cleaned, and painted one space to use as a greenroom, adding fans, lights, tables, and mattresses for soundproofing. They also built sets that passed for an office and a hospital suite. When they began filming, they left the street noise in.
Taylaur shot the movie on digital video for less than 10 million naira, or about $53,000, over 18 days in January 2015. “There’s a lot of freedom, and you can make anything happen, and people do,” Taylaur says of Nollywood. It’s a “do-or-die” trade, where productions shoot anywhere they want, provided they have the right fixer, and turn logistical challenges into plot twists.
Gbomo Gbomo Express came out in theaters last October, and then—a first for Taylaur—on an Internet streaming service called IrokoTV in January. Founded in 2011 by Jason Njoku, a 35-year-old Nigerian-British entrepreneur, Iroko Partners operates the service and has amassed a catalog of several thousand Nollywood films, most in English, but some in Yoruba. Starting in 2013, Iroko began producing its own original content, making it the West African answer to Netflix. It offers Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, a way to watch Nollywood fare wherever they find themselves. After India’s Bollywood, Nollywood is now the world’s second-busiest movie industry, cranking out 1,000 titles per year. Other hits on Iroko include Mrs. Somebody, House of Gold, and 30 Days in Atlanta, a comedy in which the protagonist wins an all-expenses-paid holiday to America and brings his cousin.
Celeste Beatty says she expects her Harlem Brewing Co.’s profits to rise more than 20 percent after going into the mega retailer. Plus, she’s all hopped up with plans for 2016. The Root: Black-Owned Craft Beer Company Gets Premium Placement in Wal-Mart.
Harlem has a special place in the American imagination when it comes to culture, art and music. But would you also imagine small-batch beer? Well. The Harlem Brewing Co. is a 15-year-old microbrewery founded in its namesake New York community. In March the company will be stocking its wares front and center in 39 Wal-Mart stores across the state.
“I hope it turns into a Patti-pies situation,” Celeste Beatty, owner of Harlem Brewing, said, laughing, during a phone call with The Root.
Beatty got onto Wal-Mart’s radar after an exec saw her on an MSNBC segment with Tamron Hall. She says that people were also calling the retailer and asking for the brand—which currently includes Sugar Hill Golden Ale, Harlem Renaissance Wit and Strawberry Hard Cider—by name. With the Wal-Mart deal, Beatty says she expects sales to increase by as much as 20 percent.
“I didn’t really know that Wal-Mart was really a crafty retail place, but I’ve had a chance to talk to them, and I have noticed, not only with the beer, [that] a lot of their produce and other products come from local markets. So it was encouraging to see that, because ... what I hear is so much of their stuff comes from China,” she says.
Beatty’s yeast-fermented quest began a lifetime ago when she started brewing 5-gallon batches of craft beer around the corner from her Harlem apartment. These days, she is growing her own hops both in her backyard and on a farm in upstate New York. “I’m actually getting pretty deep into it,” she says, noting that after nine years, growing the annuals is like phoning it in.
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