This interview by Farai Chideya of Ericka Blount Danois reminded me of an experience I had this weekend watching (for the zillionth time?) In the Heat of the Night. The dvd I bought had some awesome bonus material that included a critical discussion of movie-making and Hollywood in the sixties as it impacted the actors, score composer (Quincy Jones) and production of this film. I realized how much I enjoy deeper/expanded discussions of the social order in which my favorite movies were made. Farai Chideya makes this point about Danois' book, Love, Peace and Soul -- which makes me think I'd like to read the book:
In her new book, Love, Peace and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America's Favorite Dance Show, Soul Train, author Ericka Blount Danois does more than a pop-chronology or even a look behind the scenes. She gets deeply into the history and sociology of a man and a media movement that reshaped how America looked at race, self-expression, and culture.
Soul Train's impresario Don Cornelius committed suicide in 2012. Today (September 27th, 2013) would have been his 77th birthday.
I got a chance to ask author Ericka Blount Danois how and why she so deeply explored Soul Train and Cornelius' life.
Here's my pop culture pick of the week...an interview by Amy Goodman (Democracy NOW) of Ryan Coogler about his film "Fruitvale"...I think I want to see this. Grant was murdered early New Year's Day in 2009...4 years ago this month.
Transcript was not up when I visited the interview page at Democracy NOW, but you can check back for it here.
Oh, yay...just found out this starts in Knoxville at Downtown West on July 27...I think this will be my 2012 real-theater birthday movie! See trailer below the clip.
For all our celebration of the Underground Railroad, it’s important to acknowledge that not every African who ran away ran North. Some merely ran into the woods. There they were free from the clutches of their oppressors and free to form communities of their own. If you think of the people of the Bathtub as having formed that kind of maroon culture, then you see that — appearances notwithstanding—Hushpuppy is nobody’s little pickaninny. She’s the heroine of the film, an itty bitty warrior girl fighting to maintain her way of life. That hair isn’t a sign of neglect, but a mighty display of her power.
Jorge Rivas at Colorlines has a great video interview of Dee Rees, director of "Pariah" and actress Kim Wayans. The video brings out many aspects of racial injustice in the entertainment industry. I really resonated with both Dees and Wayans when they spoke about their desire for gretaer diversity in stories and storytelling. Here's an excerpt from the short article, and the video on YouTube:
It’s no secret that films that tell stories about people of color have a hard time getting made. Seasoned Oscar-nominated directors like John Singleton, Spike Lee and Gregory Nava have a hard enough time finding investors to back their films, so when Dee Rees decided she wanted to tell a coming of age story about a young, black lesbian, she couldn’t go the traditional route and went as far selling her Brooklyn apartment to raise funds.
“We knew that if we could just get the film done, that regardless of sexuality, race and identity, people would be able to see themselves in different parts of the story,” Rees told Colorlines.com last month, as she awaited the release of her feature directorial debut “Pariah.”
“We’d go to pitch meetings and the moment we said ‘black, lesbian, coming of age,’ they would turn around, validate our parking and hand us a bottle of water.”
I am really looking forward to watching this documentary. I've checked out the trailer and several other video clips, and I've read an introductory issue of The 99. This project has great heart resonance for me. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I have no doubt that The 99 came from the heart of Naif Al-Mutawa, the Kuwaiti psychologist who created it.
The story is grounded in principles that may be identified with specific religious teachings, but these principles also are universal ones, and ones that are especially useful today. The heroes are 99 young people from around the world, each of whom has a access to a specific superpower, but they must work together to bring the full potential of those powers to bear on problems they face. If they are to succeed, they must cooperate rather than compete.
This is a truth that is so fundamental to continuation of life that it is even embedded in nature itself: when natural systems come under stress and can no longer sustain themselves, species evolve toward cooperation with one another. There is no aspect of life on Earth right now in which this challenge isn't pretty much in our face.
If we look, listen and feel our way into the chaos of modern life, we may get a glimpse of what is trying to be born from the suffering: a new life for all based on unconditional love and cooperative, co-creative, conscious evolution.
I hope people will use heartful projects like The 99 to stimulate discussions on how we can evolve humanity in a way that allows for a planetary going-on-being.
Daniel Diaz
An image from “Wham! Bam! Islam!” to be shown on PBS's “Independent Lens” series beginning Thursday.
WHAM! BAM! ISLAM! tells the story of Naif Al-Mutawa and his venture to create the first team of superheroes from the Muslim world called THE 99. Following the tumultuous journey of THE 99 from concept to reality, from international acclaim to censure by cultural gatekeepers, Al-Mutawa pursues his vision to bring new heroes to Muslim children while re-introducing Islam to the West.
This documentary by Isaac Solotaroff airs on PBS's Independent Lens on October 13th. WHAM! BAM! ISLAM!
Naif Al-Mutawa has an undergraduate degree from Tufts University (with a triple major in clinical psychology, English literature and history), and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University. In addition, he holds a Masters in Organizational Psychology from Teacher’s College, Columbia University and an MBA, also from Columbia University.
Dr. Al-Mutawa has worked with former prisoners of war in Kuwait and the Survivors of Political Torture unit of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Having witnessed the trauma of people who have been tortured because of their religious and political beliefs, he decided to write a children's story that won a UNESCO prize for literature in the service of tolerance.
Here are some other links if you'd like to learn more about Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa and his work:
The people who live on the Gulf of Mexico are no doubt taking a huge hit from the BP oil disaster, but this film aired on Al Jazeera English pulls the lens back to a wider view of the oil industry in the Gulf over time.
I was especially moved by the stories of folks at the end of the piece who speak very clearly about the toll this industry has taken on their lives and communities. One woman in particular calls out the use of the term "resilient" to describe the historical battering of coastal citizens.
I am really grateful to this woman. I think she's absolutely right that it's a way of denying the actual suffering so that the industry can keep on doing what it's doing, or so the rest of us can sleep at night as we go along with continued use of fossil fuels without protest. It's a term often applied in other situations -- the ability of kids to heal from horrific abuse, of the mountains of Appalachia to recover from the assaults of surface mining, or of Indigenous people of the world surviving genocidal colonial occupations of their homelands.
"Stop calling me resilient!" she said. "I'm not resilient!"
I found a very disturbing story at the Race-Talk blog at AlterNet today. It was written byValerie Taliman, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and president of Three Sisters Media in Albuquerque. She wrote about a hateful ad that has several First Nations groups calling for action:
Last week the Web site UsedWinnipeg.com ran an advertisement headlined “Native Extraction Service” with a photograph of three young Native boys. The service offered to round up and remove First Nations youth like wild animals, and “relocate them to their habitat.”
This online classified ad offered the free removal and relocation of aboriginal youth from parts of Winnipeg. CBC News has blurred the faces in the picture. The ad has since been pulled down. (UsedWinnipeg.com/CBC)
The text of the ad read: “Have you ever had the experience of getting home to find those pesky little buggers hanging outside your home, in the back alley or on the corner??? Well fear no more, with my service I will simply do a harmless relocation. With one phone call I will arrive and net the pest, load them in the containment unit (pickup truck) and then relocate them to their habit.”
As Taliman observes further:
The message is clear: Native people are like pests or vermin, and
can be disposed of by simply calling a free service to have them
“extracted.”
It was the cyberspace equivalent of a “Wanted” poster, reminiscent of
bounties once paid for Indian scalps in the old West. And in my view,
it’s a classic hate crime, carried out for the sole purpose of inciting
racism and hate against indigenous peoples.
Who are the kids in the picture that was stolen from Longhouse Media? They are three young Swinomish film makers whose documentary, March Point, was released in 2007. They had wanted to make a gangster movie or rap video, but instead were persuaded to investigate how two oil refineries impacted their community. Here's the trailer:
Do these guys look like kids who should be "wanted" for anything besides inspiring their peers and inheriting the Earth from corporate land barons and other clueless adults who perpetuate exploitation of people and nature?
In following some links in Taliman's article, I also found a press release from Longhouse that condemns the ad as a hate crime. A statement on their home page says:
We hope this advertisement was taken down before any violent crimes
occurred; in any case damage was inflicted on indigenous youth in the
form of threat and intimidation. The Criminal Code of Canada says, “a
hate crime is committed to intimidate, harm or terrify not only a
person, but an entire group of people to which the victim belongs. The
victims are targeted for who they are, not because of anything they have
done. Hate crimes involve intimidation, harassment, physical force or
threat of physical force against a person, a family or a property.” --
Section 319(1): Public Incitement of Hatred, Criminal Code of Canada
Longhouse, along with others, is calling for the perpetrators to be found and brought to justice.
When stories like this pop into my life -- stories that induce such a wide range of thoughts and feelings -- I like to widen my view a little to the background of my day. What was up before I found this article?
I spent this past weekend with a bunch of white and black folks who are trying to dismantle racism in their communities. Within that context I especially connected with a man who was sharing his experience of being young and black in America. This exchange stayed with me all the way back home and into this week. I decided, as my colleague had suggested, to spend some time listening to several young, black, male poets sharing their take on life via YouTube.
This morning -- just before I found Taliman's article -- I had listened to the crew on Morning Joe talking about America's school systems and the inspiring success of Geoffrey Canada's charter school and neighborhood project, Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ). I found myself a little irritated with their conversation. I was glad to hear the recognition that something amazing has happened in Harlem, but I didn't hear much discussion about what the HCZ team had done and why it worked. Not just surface stuff, but some depth about their work in relation to larger issues of poverty, racism, family and community.
After I saw Morning Joe, I fished out my copy of Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough's book on Geoff Canada and HCZ. I decided to read it again and maybe do some blogging on it. When I then found Taliman's article on the racist attack on the Swinomish teens, it kind of brought my whole past week of thinking about racism in America into more coherent connection. It has left me inspired to dig deeper into what's happening here, and to reflect more on how and why we, as a national village, need to come together as one heart on behalf of our children.
Racist hatred directed toward anyone is ugly, but -- at the moment, for me -- hatred directed at the youngest of Earth's citizens feels like the ugliest and most heartbreaking.
