Brian Spranger gave me a LOL when he sent along this cartoon addressing the way in which technological change changes our lives:
Found uncredited at FunnyJunk. If anyone knows who made this, I’d much prefer to link to the cartoonist.
UPDATE: Thanks so much to Daniel for offering some information about authorship! He writes:
This comic is an example of a “rage comic” and there isn’t a single author that makes all of these. They originated on 4chan and then spread to and were further developed on other social websites. This particular comic appears to be made by one “Gordondel” of reddit.com. You can see the original posting and comments here.
This video, made as part of a marketing campaign for a new shopping center in East London, is a fun overview of a century of some trends in clothing, music, and dance styles, all in 100 seconds. Enjoy!
So it’s racist, right, to say that the presence of a handful of black people makes a BBQ a “hip-hop BBQ”? Yes. And yet that is exactly what the folks at Fox Nation, a Fox-affiliated content-aggregator, did on Friday.
So… let’s see… Obama has a birthday party and invites a whole lotta people — mostly white people but, like, some black people too – and Fox Nation calls it a “hip hop BBQ.” As Salon put it: “Black people! Hip-hop!” They listened to MUSIC! From, like, the United States Marine Band and Stevie Wonder.
In addition to the bold-faced racism (“err, it’s so weird to have black people there; I bet they’re doin’ scary black stuff!”), this tactic is outright deceptive. Back in 2009, Media Matters’ John Delicath wrote that Fox Nation “craft[s] inflammatory and widely misleading headlines for links to articles by news organizations whose content contradicts the Fox headline.” Indeed. None of the stories that are linked to in this post — from Politico, the Chicago Sun Times, and ABC– are stories about how Obama’s party was over-run by blackness. But by linking to these sources with an invented headline, Fox Nation attempts to borrow their authoritativeness for its own nefarious project. If nothing else, it suggests a degree of contempt for their readers, who they either think are just as racist as they are, or aren’t smart enough to read past the picture.
Essence Music Festival, the “party with a purpose,” is a three-day event in New Orleans, featuring speakers during the day and musical performances at night. It also caters to an almost exclusively black audience, bringing 400,000 people to the Crescent City each year. Their sheer presence challenges informal systems of segregation in New Orleans.
After the show, I walked through the French Quarter with a few friends and noted how unusual it is to see so many black people in this part of town. Despite losing 118,000 black residents after Katrina, New Orleans is still a majority-black city, but highly segregated and even more so after Katrina. Formal and informal “policing” generally keeps black locals out of the touristy French Quarter, with the exception of Black residents who work/entertain there.
You can see just how segregated in this map by Eric Fischer (each dot is 25 people; red = White residents, blue = Black residents, and Green = Asian residents):
I first learned about this informal segregation a few years ago when I convinced my reluctant friend, Earl, to go to the Cat’s Meow on Bourbon Street for karaoke. A few blocks from our destination, Earl lagged behind for a moment, distracted by a cat painting, and a group of white locals “warned” me that I was about to “get jumped” by the black guy behind me. Once on Bourbon, we were there for less than a minute before a police officer approached us, questioned Earl’s reason for being there, and told us both to leave.
Policing also occurs in “black neighborhoods” in New Orleans. Working and living in the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wards, my white students and I have been stopped more times than I can count by NOPD, other law enforcement, and “friendly” white people who question why we are in these neighborhoods (or as one member of the National Guard called the Seventh Ward, “Ghettoville USA”).
With the Essence Festival in town, it was refreshing to see many black faces around the French Quarter over the weekend, enjoying the most enriching nightlife in the country. But not everyone saw it this way.
An acquaintance told me her white roommate stayed in all weekend because the Essence Festival was in town and she didn’t want to “get shot.” A white friend who works as a server in the French Quarter told me she was happy when the Essence Festival was over because she wouldn’t have to hear all the racist comments from her fellow servers and her boss. While these white residents live in a majority-black city, they feel threatened when black people come from out of town and don’t follow the rules that keep local blacks in “black neighborhoods.”
Then came the news that a New Orleans Police Department Commander was reassigned pending an investigation of instructions he gave to officers on Friday night when deploying them into areas catering to Essence Festival visitors. He allegedly instructed them to single out young, black men, although the exact language he used has not been released. It’s worth mentioning that Essence has never had an incident of violent crime during its seventeen years, and (now former) Mayor Ray Nagin reported that there is less crime in the city during the festival.
The presence of hundreds of thousands of black people from other parts of the county who don’t know the unspoken rules of racial segregation in New Orleans exposes both these rules and the pernicious racism that undergirds them.
Lindy hopper Jerry Almonte sent along a clip of the first place-winning routine in a division at the European Swing Dance Championships. Lindy hop is a partner dance invented by African American youth in Harlem dancing to swing music in the early 1930s. It’s near and dear to my heart; I’ve been a lindy hopper for 13 years (minus that year with a broken leg).
Modern day lindy hop raises difficult questions. In a post I wrote when the beloved Frankie Manning died, titled Race, Entertainment, and Historical Borrowing, I tried to capture the conundrum. I’m going to quote myself extensively, only because this is a tricky issue that deserves real discussion:
Though lindy hop was invented by African Americans, lindy hoppers today are primarily white. These contemporary dancers look to old movie clips of famous black dancers as inspiration. And this is where things get interesting: The old clips feature profoundly talented black dancers, but the context in which they are dancing is important. Professional black musicians, choreographers, and dancers had to make the same concessions that other black entertainers at the time made. That is, they were required to capitulate to white producers and directors who presented black people to white audiences. These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.
So what we see in the old clips that contemporary lindy hoppers idolize is not a pure manifestation of lindy hop, but a manifestation of the dance infused by racism. While lindy hoppers today look at those old clips with nothing short of reverance, they are mostly naive to the fact that the dancing they are emulating was a product made to confirm white people’s beliefs about black people.
…
So we have a set of (mostly) white dancers who (mostly) naively and (always) wholeheartedly emulate a set of black dancers whose performances, now 70 to 80 years old, were produced for mostly white audiences and adjusted according to the racial ethos of the time. On the one hand, it’s neat that the dance is still alive; it’s wonderful to see it embodied, and with so much enthusiasm, so many years later. And certainly no ill will can be fairly attributed to today’s dancers. On the other hand, it’s troubling that the dance was appropriated then (for white audiences) and that it is that appropriation that lives on (for mostly white dancers). Then again, without those dancers, there would likely be no revival at all. And without those clips, however imperfect, the dance might have remained in obscurity, lost with the bodies of the original dancers.
It is this paradox that stirred Jerry to send along the clip of Dax Hock and Sarah Breck performing a routine that was an homage to a famous clip from the movie Day at the Races, featuring Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. Here’s the original clip from 1937:
And here’s Dax and Sarah’s routine (Dax, btw, is in a fat suit; an entirely different and equally troublesome issue):
To be as clear as possible, I do believe 100% that Dax and Sarah have no intention to mock and, as essentially professional lindy hoppers, I doubt very much that they’ve never considered the ideas I’ve explained above.
Dax and Sarah are not my target here and, besides, they’re just two people. All conscious lindy hoppers struggle with these issues. My target, and my own personal struggle, is the entire endeavor.
I leave this as an open question for discussion, and one that extends far beyond lindy hop to jazz, blues, rap, and hip hop music; other forms of dance, like break dancing and pop and locking; and even the American obsession with spectating sports that are currently dominated by black athletes. It also extends far past the relationship between blacks and whites, as Adrienne Keene well illustrates in her blog, Native Appropriations.
How do white people, especially when they’re more or less on their racial own, honor art forms invented by oppressed racial groups without “stealing” them from those that invented them, misrepresenting them, or honoring them in ways that reproduce racism? You tell me… ’cause I’d like to know.
Also worth considering is this beautiful music video (Slow Club, Two Cousins) featuring lindy hoppers Ryan Francoise and Remy Kouakou Kouame performing vintage jazz movement. Is it different? What makes it so (other than production value and the race of the dancers)? Can you articulate it? Or is it tacit knowledge?
Renée Yoxon sent along a performance by Patina Miller singing Random Black Girl. It’s about how new musicals all just so happen to include a soulful, sassy, big-voiced, big-bottomed black girl in the ensemble (I’m looking at you, Glee).
Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron died Friday. I thought you might enjoy this video, sent to me by my friend Pete, of clips from YouTube set to Scott-Heron’s most famous piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”:
NOTE: For the record, reader Azizi believes that this video, and my posting of it, trivializes Scott-Heron’s point. Azizi points us to an interview with Scott-Herson posted at Racialicious.
Andrew Slater sent in an interesting example of the mocking of rap music. The mocking occurs in a re-make of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” about the excitement of going on out Friday night. Black’s low-budget music video went viral, shooting her into stardom, or at least celebrity. The song is a standard teeny-bop pop song, complete with rap interlude.
The re-make, produced by the Community Christian Church, features a so-called “Sadie Black” singing about “Sunday” instead of Friday, and extolling the pleasures of worship. Slater noticed, however, that the entire re-make is more-or-less truthful to the original, except for the rap section. In the re-make, “BP” and “Master E” appear to make fun of rappers. It’s a very different effect when compared to the straightforward mimickry of Sadie B.
Screen shots (original and re-make respectively):
Videos (rap sections starts at 2:30 and, um, 2:30 respectively):
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