Richard Iton’s In Search of the Black Fantastic is one of the most important book written about popular culture and politics ever written. Iton (who also passed way far too early—I wish he could’ve been here to write this piece) quoted Davis above to drive home the deep connection between popular culture and politics in black life. And Davis’ quote works as kind of a truism in black spaces. Of course all black music is political.
Of course.

But this explains everything and nothing. That is to say if black art (and by extension popular culture) is and has always been political, if we can simply lump together John Coltrane’s Alabama and I don’t know….Ace Hood’s Hustle Hard as both being statements about the black condition—then we’re still left unable to either explain the nature of that condition or to prescribe the precise solution to that condition.

Prince is dead. Fuck.

Because it’s hard for me to imagine Prince in the past tense, much less take all 39 studio albums (this counts none of the albums he produced under pseudonyms much less the thousands of records in the Vault), over 100 singles, and more than a dozen EPs, in a single post, I’m not going to spend a great deal of time talking about Prince’s politics. Now that the embargo he imposed on his friends has been lifted, we know that Prince routinely spent resources on progressive causes including but not limited to Black Lives Matter. And it doesn’t take that much digging to find evidence of progressive stances on war (Dirty Mind’s “Partyup”, Controversy’s “Ronnie Talk to Russia” , 1999’s “1999”) corruption (Controversy’s “Annie Christian” contains a reference to Abscam) the environment (Planet Earth’s “Planet Earth”) liberation (Controversy’s “Sexuality”, 1999’s “Free”, Emancipation’s “Emancipation”) and sex (INSERT ANY TRACK HERE). Further we don’t have to look hard to find evidence that he stood for artist’s rights against corporate extortion and expropriation (he was a union member for almost forty years, he went so far as to change his name in an attempt to get out of his contract with Warner Bros).

So instead of doing that what I want to do is take a different approach.

One of the questions people have asked of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street before them can be boiled down to this: The odds are dead against you. Why do you try?

Answering this question the right way has obvious political import. In as much as the two movements have done more to not only bring our attention to anti-black police brutality on the one hand and rampant income inequality on the other, it’s worth figuring out why people did what they did, and why they continued in the face of long odds.

I think the people asking this question misunderstand the role of public action. It’s likely some of the people involved with both movements believed they could win, not all did. In fact I think it’s likely most of the people involved didn’t have “winning” in their calculus. That is to say, they didn’t fight because they thought they could win.

So why did they fight?

While they fought for as many reasons as there were people, I think many of them fought because they understood the power of public action. They knew if they fought in a way that was visible and public, they would do two things. First they would increase the likelihood that other people in the same time and space would join them. Second they would increase the likelihood that other people in different times and different spaces would join them. These two actions would increase the possibility of resistance in other spaces and other times, and would increase the nature of resistance in that time.

What does this have to do with Prince?

If we’d have conducted a survey in 1977 or so, just asking one simple question: where are you most likely to find the center of 1985 black culture….you’d probably get four or five answers, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and then maybe some would say either Atlanta or Detroit. If you’d have asked that same group of people to tell you the most important pop culture figure of black masculinity you’d have likely either gotten Isaac Hayes, Teddy Pendergrass, or Jim Brown. There’s no way in hell even a significant number of folk would’ve located the center of black pop culture life in Minneapolis. And definitely no way that we’d have thought that the person who’d do more to change and reify our understanding of what black masculinity was and could be would stand 5’6 in heels, would appear so effeminate it’d at first be hard to tell whether he was a boy or a girl.

Here’s another take on it. If you’d have asked Prince himself when and where he’d have garnered his most support…he’d probably have said either NYC (before hip-hop made it hard for his more fluid concept of black masculinity) or L.A. (who was seemingly more open to fluidity, sexuality, and racial integration). Perhaps one of the last places he’d have mentioned would’ve been Detroit. Trying to think through his perspective I imagine he’d have thought it too “black power black” and not cosmopolitan enough. He wouldn’t have known that a local DJ by the name of Charles Johnson (stage name: Electrifying Mojo—you think Prince was mysterious, Mojo was so mysterious most of the thousands of listeners never knew what he looked like) with an eclectic listening palette would be drawn to Prince’s music. And among those listeners would be the mother of a little boy who’d fall so in love with his music that when Purple Rain was finally released in theaters he walked 4.9 miles to see it with his best friend.

In 1941 Richard Wright published 12 million Black Voices. The book documented the lives of black people during the Depression using a combination of photography and text. There hasn’t been a lot written on it (in fact one of my grad students hipped me to it), but I think one of the things he was trying to do with it was drive home how heterogeneous black life was even in the presence of back breaking poverty. In the contemporary moment there are a number of things to take from Prince’s life. And one of them is the fact that black life is far richer, far more powerful, far more beautiful, than any of us can possibly imagine.

But for someone with my politics, with our politics? My takeaway is pretty simple.

Prince is dead.

Fuck.

And organize, and plot, and plan, and think, and strategize, and dissent.

Not so we can win.

But because sooner or later someone will come along who can.

And they’ll need us.

Reading it a day after I talked about black popular culture in my second semester Black Politics class, I’m reminded of the early 2001 furor over then Harvard President Larry Summers’ critique of West when West was at Harvard [foot]Summers argued that West should spend much more time on real scholarship and less time on the lecture circuit and non-academic projects like the 2001 spoken word project Sketches of My Culture. West left for Princeton soon after the dispute.[/foot], and much more recent discussions over whether Beyonce was a feminist, whether a New York Times article on Shonda Rhimes was racist, and whether Ava Duvernay should’ve received an Oscar for her movie Selma. Some might argue that I shouldn’t be so reminded. This is much more politically motivated than the others and should be read not just as an attack on West but as an attack on the anti-Obama tendency (such as it exists) among black intellectuals in general.

I don’t believe this piece was politically motivated. There are politics to consider–it isn’t a coincidence that one of the co-editors responsible for the piece used to work on The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, and of course there’s Dyson’s own political history with West to consider. But the politics at play here are not the politics of Obama’s War Room.

However, let’s say that it was. Would the stakes increase if Dyson’s piece weren’t written against West as much as written against the anti-Obama tendency (again, such as it exists)?

No.

In the early nineties, when Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, bell hooks, Skip Gates, and Houston Baker became so well-known outside of the academy that the term “black public intellectual” was coined to describe them, Adolph Reed penned two insightful critiques of West and the black public intellectual phenomenon in general. The first (“What Are the Drums Saying, Booker?”) is here, written twenty years ago this month. The second (part of a broader discussion about the first piece) appeared in New Politics Vol 5, Issue 4.

Reed made a few claims.

He argued that scholars like West, Dyson, hooks, and Robin Kelley, were responsible for reproducing a deeply problematic conception of politics that in effect, found politics not only in “real politics” (that is, in voting, in running for office, in political movements, in legislative activity) but also in everyday life and popular culture. For Reed this was both empirically and politically problematic. It was empirically problematic in as much as it placed very very different activities (fast food workers spitting on food, labor unions attempting to organize those same workers) under the same broad general category. It was politically problematic because their conception of politics made the work of political organizing–work was mundane, painstaking, hard, and in some instances, dangerous–so much harder.

Second, he argued that West, Dyson, and hooks, were neither scholars nor activists, but were playing at both. One of the unique dynamics of this moment was that their increased access to public audiences enabled them to shuffle between them and their more academic audiences, enabling them to front like activists when they were around academics, and front like academics when they were in the broader public. This enabled them to basically dodge the fairly hard requirements of being a card-carrying scholar on the one hand, and being a card-carry organizer/activists on the other. Certainly we’ve seen both West and Dyson do this over the past two decades.

Third he argued that their work on black life was not only flat but often times deeply conservative. In Race Matters for instance, Cornel West argued that the most pressing problem black people faced was neither institutional racism nor structural economic dislocation, but rather black nihilism–a term that, when unpacked, functions a lot like the concept of a uniquely black “culture of poverty” in that it places the fault and burden of the black contemporary condition squarely on the shoulders of black folk. Because intellectuals like West were not only phenotypically black but embodied a certain type of black performance, these claims were far easier for them to make, particularly to the white audiences they generally spoke to.

People critiqued Reed’s piece for being acerbic, mean-spirited, and wrong on the facts. But even with the rise of something like #blacklivesmatter I think that over the past several decades we have lost our grip on the function of politics, the number of real political organizers in cities like Baltimore are dwindling, and the progeny of the first generation of black public intellectuals haven’t significantly contributed to our understanding of our contemporary condition, even as some of them claim to engage in politics (often looking to West as a mentor). Reed may have been an ass. But that ass was right.

Indeed reading Reed’s piece brings home to me how little something like Dyson’s attack on West should matter in the grand scheme of things. When West and Tavis Smiley were more prominent I used to routinely defend their attacks on Obama from my friends. I did so more to defend the idea that Obama should be critiqued than to defend West and Smiley per se.

But here?

While I applaud some of West’s activity (his support of Steven Salaita for instance), I think Reed’s critique is even more applicable today than it was twenty years ago. West’s understanding of what politics is, of how politics functions, of when, where, and how we should politically resist, is woefully inadequate, and his understanding pretty much dominates our contemporary intellectual landscape. While some might point to his participation in the #blacklivesmatter movement as positive proof of West’s relevancy, I see it as negative proof. Here are the most important facts about Ferguson:

• Ferguson uses their police force to collect revenue from black citizens through punitive enforcement.
• Black citizens constitute a strong majority of Ferguson residents.
• The vast majority of Ferguson’s elected officials are white.
• Black citizens don’t turn out in local elections.

Focusing on this last fact, it’s important to note that the reason black citizens don’t turn out is not because they are apathetic and aren’t registered. They are, as evidenced by their (enthusiastic) turnout for Obama. The reason black citizens don’t turn out is because Ferguson local elections are held during off-years–that is, they aren’t held the same year as presidential elections. This institutional rule dampens turnout in general, and in this case reinforces white political rule.

But this didn’t have to be the case this time around. That is to say that while Ferguson’s off-elections rule usually dampened turnout across the board, given that black people were already registered to vote, and massive energy was directed at Ferguson through #blacklivesmatter, it didn’t have to do so this time. Indeed because Ferguson was relatively small–meaning that running for office there probably didn’t require significant cash or labor–the entire city’s governing structure could drastically shift.

On April 7, Ferguson held elections for three seats–two contested by African Americans, one contested by a white Michael Brown supporter. The two seats ended up going to African Americans, but the white Brown supporter lost (to the former mayor responsible for the controversial “I Love Ferguson” counter-movement).

This suggests that at least some of the energy of #blacklivesmatter was directed to transforming local politics. But not enough. And while it’s unfair to suggest that West had something to do with this, it is fair to suggest that the idea that local politics matters, that mundane political organizing matters, might not be dead in black communities if black public intellectuals like West and Dyson hadn’t helped to kill it off.

So even if we were to think that Dyson’s piece was primarily inspired by West’s politics, I think we’d be better off focusing our energies elsewhere. Let The New Republic get its clicks from some other population. But particularly given the fact that Dyson’s piece is not primarily driven by politics I’m even more firm in my suggestion that we leave the dispute between Dyson and West to Dyson, West, and others who routinely speak for four or five figure checks, and that those of us with the capacity to do so, help to rebuild a more robust politics within black communities. As Reed suggests:

In a perverse revision of the old norm of labor solidarity, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” now it’s the black (haute) bourgeoisie that suffers injustice on behalf of the black masses. It’s prominent black individuals’ interests and aspirations that are asserted—under the flag of positive images, role models, equivalent vulnerability to racism, and other such class-inflected bullshit—as crucial concerns for the race as a whole.

The sooner we move away from the tendency of defending the relatively powerful black professional managerial class no matter what they suggest their politics are the better.

This recent top-10 clip shows Scott doing what he’s done for more than twenty years, remixing black popular culture while delivering sports commentary. There’s well over a dozen catchphrases Scott brought to ESPN straight from North Carolina, catchphrases you’d routinely hear in one way or another if you’d gone to school with, hung out with, lived with, loved, black people, with people who played with language like kids play with Lego bricks.

If Wulf had the space, I’m thinking he probably would’ve started off with Ralph Wiley, who passed away (also at a relatively young age of heart failure) in 2004. Wiley, three years older than Scott, was the best sportswriter of his era. Take for instance this passage, written about Derek Jeter back in 2000 when he was at the top of his powers:

See, Jeet’s mom Dorothy is “white,” and his dad Charles is “black,” in the unfortunate shorthand by which Americans are accustomed to describing ourselves. These are unforgiving aliases, and they can and do often color who we root for — and against — and how we root for them. Whether this is sad or not, I don’t know.

But with Jeet, everybody gets some. He has that easy glide, that knowing gait afield that people often take for “black” style and athletic grace. But it’s actually the grace of the trained performer who possesses high abilities, and knows it. Cal Ripken Jr. had it. R. Alomar has it. DiMaggio had it. Mays, goes without saying. Andruw and Chipper Jones have it. A-Rod. Barry Bonds, Junior Griffey have it. Whatever color wrappers they come in, whatever attitudes that might come along with that, damn few have it afield like they do. With Jeet, the wrapper looks like his mother, at least in the face — the light eyes, the keen features … everybody gets a slice of some Jeet.

 Or this, about Tracy McGrady:

It’s not disaffection, or laziness, or anything negative. It’s merely his habit, or his style, or his lack of style, which, actually, can be said to be the best style, for the long haul. For years people told me Rickey Henderson didn’t bust his butt. Now he has more of everything than anybody who ever played baseball, and people are begging him to please stop already. It’s how and where Frazier, Aaron, Henderson and McGrady were born and raised, and it’s effective over the long haul. So cool it seems to be effortless. In most trades, it is hard work, making something look effortless. Very hard work indeed. I don’t see why hoop would be any different.

Well, looks aside, T-Muad’Dib ended up leading the league in scoring this season, at over 32 points a game. He led the league despite what we saw Kobe Bryant do last February, averaging 40 for a month. In a league of Shaqs and Kobes, of Iverson’s Total Green Light, of Nowitzki-At-Will-From-Deep-Over-the-Top, of Duncan, of Garnett the Big Ticket, it is Tracy McGrady, T-Mac, T-Maud’dib, the Kwisatz Shaderac, who led the league in scoring, and now leads a No. 8 seed by a No. 1 for just the third time ever, and for the first time in four games, if it ends Wednesday night.

It’s simple. They can’t stop him. And he can stop them.

What’s his spice?

Or take this, about a world class little league team from Harlem condemned for “hot-dogging”:

Revel in your time. If you want to hate, hate, don’t hide about the skirts of “the right way” or “integrity of the game,” trying to be all moral about your fear disguised as good taste. I’ve watched Rickey Henderson. I watched the Harlem Little Leaguers. And after covering a thousand or so big-league games, having the Baseball Writers Association of America card for three or four years, after having done ball covers for the Illy, done books about it, coached in the county leagues, observed the Babe Ruth leagues, and seen the issue of the minor-leaguers, I recognize the game of baseball when I see it (and the foul racial delineation that goes down in the game, I see that too, and I’ve seen plenty along these lines), and, all jerks aside, the game they were all playing, from Harlem Little Leaguers to Reggie to Rickey Henderson, I’m pretty sure, was baseball. If you didn’t like it in the big leagues, then let Carlton Fisk handle it.

See, if you want to complain about “hot dogging,” you make a play. That’s the only reply to any on-field conduct. Make a play, unless our play-making days are over, if we ever had any. It’s no different than from any on-field action or celebration. The opposing player takes note, and if he doesn’t like it, if it inspires him to greater heights, somehow. That’s the answer. The looks on the Harlem Little Leaguers faces after Ryan’s three-run walk-off homer — that’s what all the “hot-dog” callers were after, isn’t it?

In piece about Jeter, Wiley transforms what is a sexist article about Jeter (read the beginning of the piece) into a modern day Ellisonian commentary on race and sports.

The piece about McGrady?

Frank Herbert’s Dune series is one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written. The series revolves around one Paul Atreides (also known as Paul Muad’dib, also known as the Kwisatz Haderach), who over the course of three novels ends up becoming a demi-god in large part because of melange or “spice”–the most important mineral in Herbert’s universe. The comparison to McGrady worked so well because of the combination of McGrady’s sleepy eyes[foot]Wiley titles the piece “The Sleeper has Awakened” in reference to a key Dune quote, which represents the moment Atreides awakens a giant spice-generating worm as part of a rite of passage that establishes his status as the Kwitsatz Haderach.[/foot], his game [foot]McGrady was able to defend and generate offense effortlessly, as if he saw the game before it happened, the same way spice-addicted space farers were able to navigate the dangers of faster-than-light space travel by seeing the dangers before they appeared in real-time.[/foot]and Wiley’s ability to make such an outrageous comparison appear commonsensical.

And then, understanding the racial politics of sports, he writes what is perhaps the definitive piece on race, sports, and sportsmanship.

Wiley did things with the sports essay that I didn’t think think were possible. Who comes up with nicknames for a basketball player who didn’t even go to college based on a series of science fiction novels about charisma, interstellar political intrigue, and institutional decay? Who does that? A bibliophile–someone who reads broadly and deeply. Someone who lives in books. But who then comes up with these comparisons and then effectively communicates on the written page? A logophile–someone who loves words and writing. But not just a logophile, but someone who also loves being around people–to be excellent at writing the types of essays Wiley did you have to somehow be conversant enough with everyday people to write essays they read and say damn. There aren’t that many of these folk, truth be told. There are people who love books, but don’t love writing. There are people who love writing, but don’t really love reading. And then there are people who love writing, love reading, but don’t really love people.

This puts Wiley in rare air.

But then, what made Wiley even more special is that Wiley didn’t just love people. He loved black people. He loved the way black people talked, the way black people wrote, the way black people performed on the court.

And then…on top of ALL that…Wiley was willing to put all of that on the page. All of that. Without self-censorship, or rather, without the extra self-censorship black[foot]And female. And gay. And Latino. And…you get the point.[/foot] writers are consistently expected to exert if they want to make sure that the “universal” (read: white, heterosexual, middle–sometimes working–class male) reader can understand and connect with them.

In an arena that relies heavily on black excellence[foot]The National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball between 1955-1995 or so, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association make billions off of black players, coaches, trainers, and World Wide Wes-type handlers[/foot], Wiley was perhaps the first modern black sportswriter to integrate sports journalism. And by this I don’t mean to imply that Wiley was the first black sportswriter–he wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination. But I think Wiley was the first to be black on the page, so to speak. You read Wiley, you know you’re either reading the work of someone who is black, or you’re reading the work of someone who spends most of his time imbibing black life and culture. Unrepentantly.

Wiley paved the way for Jason Whitlock, Scoop Jackson, Bomani Jones, and a range of other black male sportswriters.

What Wiley did on the written page, Scott did on the television screen.

Scott begins at Sportscenter when ESPN is a strong cable network, but nothing like the behemoth it is now. [foot]They’d just started broadcasting Major League Baseball the year before, and National Hockey League games that year, but were decades away from broadcasting NBA and NFL games. Similarly neither ESPN2 nor ESPN Classic existed at the time, and it’d be almost two decades before series like 30 for 3 aired.[/foot] He arrives two years after the Fab Five[foot]Here I refer to the University of Michigan’s storied 1991 basketball recruiting class of Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose–now himself an ESPN analyst, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson.[/foot] arrive in Ann Arbor, two years after NWA releases Efil4zaggin.[foot]NWA’s last album, it was by far their most successful.[/foot] Like Wiley, Scott had mastered his craft, as had dozens of black television journalists before him. However unlike all those other black television journalists before him, Scott chose to employ black idioms in his sports reporting. What the various journalists interviewed for ESPN’s tribute aren’t explicit enough about in their praise of Scott is racism. It wasn’t just that Scott was reporting the news in a way that didn’t quite reflect the king’s english, it was that he chose to report the news in a way that reflected black popular culture. And they weren’t explicit enough in talking about the convictions Scott displayed in fighting attempts to edit him.

To quote Wiley, it wasn’t “hot-dog” it was “black dog”.

After Ferguson, someone, I don’t remember who, asked me whether it made any sense to get a PhD and to try to be a professor post-Ferguson. I understood the question, kind of. I’ve a friend who still hasn’t really put pen to paper in the wake of 9/11, because living in Brooklyn at the time and witnessing (and responding to) the horror first hand took the writing life out of him. So I get that.

But I want you to take a look at this.

“When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and in the manner in which you live.”

I do believe we lose something when we see politics everywhere. And I also believe we lose something when we see a range of rebellious acts as forms of political resistance. We lose something intellectually, we lose something politically. With that said though I also believe we gain something when we see people like Ralph Wiley and Stuart Scott be black in public. That decision to act black publicly, as Bomani Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brittney Cooper, and Kirsten West Savali and other contemporary black writers can attest, can change lives.

Can give life.

As did the internets. 

I think flashpoint events like this are useful in at least two ways. For websites like TMZ, such events drive traffic–and again for the web traffic is almost everything. For people interested in racial politics both analytically and politically, instances like this go a long way into showing that things aren't really all that different. 

But when something like this happens we tend to forego rich political analyses for simple ones that shed more heat than light, analytically and politically. 

With that said here are ten thoughts, written in no particular order:

1. Almost as soon as the tapes became public people began to compare the NBA Players to slaves. Of course there's a textual precedent here, and some evidence to support the claim. But NBA players are most decidedly not slaves. They have some control over their labor. They receive renumeration for their labor. In fact they even have a players union–which as someone I follow on social media noted, automatically gives them better labor politics than 88% of the American population. Now they are constrained in unique ways, but these constraints don't rise to slavery. I get the use of hyperbole to make a point, or to sell books. But particularly when we want players themselves to act with a certain type of political agency, such comparisons politically hurt our cause.
2. Along the same lines (and I know I said there is no particular order here, but whatever) there's a type of disdain for labor when we suggest that all people like Chris Paul do is shoot a ball in a hoop, compared perhaps to people working low wage jobs in McDonalds, or to adjunct faculty members, or to any number of people who have to work to provide for themselves. In fact I'd go one step further and say there's a type of disdain for black labor here. To say that the only thing people like Paul do is "put a ball in a hoop" both ignores the work Paul put in at putting that ball in the hoop–work that's made Paul better at that act than more than 99% of us are at what we get paid to do–and ignores the fact that in contemporary society most of us do work that is, in effect, superfluous.   
3. The Clippers had two days to make a decision about how to respond to the tape. Two days. I tried to think of an example where some type of protest that had real life consequences for the people engaging in that protest, occurred with only two days preparation. I couldn't. Such examples likely exist…but I'm betting that each example we come up with came as the result of weeks, months, and in some cases years of political preparation. The Clippers didn't have that. 
4. Sterling's example does suggest that racism hasn't gone away–although we didn't really need to know this. But I'm so glad that people like Bomani Jones and other journalists wrote articles about Sterling's racism years before this event occurred. None of them knew when they wrote these articles that this would happen…but because of their groundwork it was relatively simple for people to link Sterling's current behavior to his past behavior. And then it was relatively simple for the players and contemporary journalists to ask the NBA why they hadn't acted on Sterling in the past. The seeds for future change are consistently planted in the present.
5. I'm not surprised the Clippers lost…and although I haven't really been paying attention to the series (this year's playoffs have been compelling but I knew I wouldn't really be watching until the semi-finals at best) I don't think they're going to make it past the Warriors. Players like Paul and Blake Griffin have played in pressure packed situations before, but the pressure is usually driven by the game itself. I'm pretty sure their home-court advantage is going to be nullified, meaning that the three games they have remaining (if they get that far) are all going to be played as "away" games. Hard to overcome that.
6. Particularly with the explosion of the internet I think there are a number of quality sports columnists out there. But, and I haven't said this in a while, I really wish Ralph Wiley were alive.
7. Times like this provide an opportunity for rupture. But note what possibilities are still foreclosed. The "solution" for example is to remove Sterling as an ownwer, and to replace him with a coalition of minority owners–Magic Johnson for example. Putting aside how weird it would be to have Johnson associated with the Clippers given his long standing relationship with the L.A. Lakers, note how we're still taking the structure of ownership for granted. If the City of Los Angeles for example, owned the Clippers, what would that look like? 
8. I appreciate Jeff Van Gundy. Broadcasters are in a unique situation economically and politically. It's a lot easier to swap them out if they "go out of bounds" so to speak, because people don't really watch the game for the announcers (maybe baseball fans do but not basketball fans). And although they make money, they don't make nearly as much money as they do when they used to either play or coach. Even though one could argue that Van Gundy didn't go far enough in his stance against racism and in his critique of the league, he didn't have to, for example, suggest that the players owed it to themselves, to their children, to their family members, and to their communities, to stand up against racism. 
9. I also appreciate LeBron James, who didn't hesitate to suggest that the league doesn't have room for Sterling. James gets a bad rap for any  number of reasons, but if I had to start a ball club with one player of any generation, he might not be my first (I'd probably go with a center like Bill Russell) but he'd be my second. He plays the game the right way, and he behaves the right way. If he can get four in a row I'm willing to make the case for him as the greatest non-center to ever play. 
10. Another take on the labor question. Every moment like this works as kind of a micro-crisis of sorts. We've got to take advantage of these micro-crises to put new ideas out there, and then to think through how the new tactical responses (no team in modern sports history has ever taken even the minor step the Clippers did) can be applied in other contexts.   
11. I know I said ten but sue me. Going back to the two days thing, this represents an excellent opportunity to think about how interests work, against a simplistic morality approach. Let's say that every player on the team AND the coach, wanted to "do something". Players like Paul and Griffin have job security…but players like Turkoglu (who may not even be an American citizen) don't. On the other hand players like Paul and Griffin are arguably going to be defined by the number of rings they get, while someone like Jamal Crawford (go blue) will not. And then while the black players have a direct interest in contesting what happened, someone like J J Redick might not. So even if we concede the possibility that they ALL wanted to "do something" what that "something" ends up being, are going to be shaped by their interests far more than their racial morality. 

There’s a slight romantic theme present in the interviews above. Placing that aside for a second though what I hear is a discussion about the political economy of music. We lose something when we move from a moment where it took a number of people to produce a record (at the very least we lose jobs) to a moment where it only takes one (plus a vocalist if the record required one). What I also hear is a discussion about creativity and tradition–in the first interview Knuckles talks about hearing a variety of different sounds that kind of percolate until they make their way “onto the page”, and then in the second interview he talks about having a distinctive sound that he didn’t even know he had until he heard his own catalog.

I had the opportunity to talk about Frankie Knuckles and about house music on Marc Steiner with Neal Conway.

And I created a mix, which I include below. Hopefully we’ll have a longer feature on Marc Steiner about house music in the future. I owe more to it than words or a single mix can possibly describe.

RIP by Lester Spence on Mixcloud

And one more for the road

House Call by Lester Spence on Mixcloud

[mixcloud]https://x.mixcloud.com/lesterspence/in-search-of-iton-remix/[/mixcloud]

On Thursday, April 21, 2013, Richard Iton, Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, passed away after a long bout with leukemia. In honor of his work, Mark Anthony Neal and I are co-editing a special issue of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. The Call is below:

Iton was also well known for his scholarly generosity with his students and colleagues. It is in this spirit that SOULS is announcing a special issue that is generative of that life and that work. We invite papers that wrestle with, address and engage some of the themes and dilemmas that defined Richard Iton’s career. Topics may include issues related to the African diaspora, performance, the black left, black imagination, or gender and sexuality. Papers should address these topics with some reference, at least indirectly, to Iton’s work, influence and legacy.

I would add that we are also looking for works that examine the interplay between the explicitly cultural and the explicitly political (campaigns and elections, political development, public opinion, political ideologies, state bureaucracies, issues of political economy).

The final submission deadline is Midnight February 28, 2014.

I happened to be blessed to have come of age in the eighties and the nineties, and to have witnessed the birth of modern day black cinema "first hand". I'm going to get to Boyz in the Hood…but Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing attempts to examine some of the same themes as Fruitvale Station. In fact I recall more than a few pundits arguing that Do The Right Thing (itself a response to Bensonhurst and to a lesser extent Howard Beach) would lead to race riots. As an aside if by chance you haven't seen Do The Right Thing yet, and don't want spoilers, stop reading NOW.

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Although Do The Right Thing's Radio Raheem was NOT the central male character, he was arguably its moral center. His death sparks the rebellion at the end. But Raheem's two most prominent scenes featured below are the Love/Hate and D Battery scenes featured below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShgXC62a09o[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMNvYJ6O_Ks[/youtube]

From these two scenes we know Raheem has a strong moral compass, is literate, but has disdain for foreigners. 

But what don't we know? We don't know where he lives. We don't know how many brothers and sisters he has. We don't know his hopes and dreams. We don't know whether he has a job. We don't know whether he likes girls or boys. 

Spike Lee's character Mookie is one of the two other important black male characters. Here's his first scene girlfriend Tina (played by Rosie Perez).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_EtgFZCpfE[/youtube]

We never see Spike interact with his son. We never see Spike interact with his parents–does he even HAVE parents? Like Raheem we don't know what his hopes and dreams are. We don't know what he wants to do after Sal's pizzeria.

Here's the scene where he sparks the rebellion.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G7TTDEHl5o[/youtube]

I can do the same thing with Giancarlo Esposito's character Buggin Out.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbA1YOueC_A[/youtube]

We know his racial politics. But that's about it. 

We actually know more about the Italian family (Sal, Vito, and Pino) than we do about the black characters we are supposed to have some sentiment for. We know what their hopes and dreams are. We know how they interact with each other as family because they ARE a family. 

I directly contrasted Fruitvale Station to Boyz in the Hood. But the problems I saw in Boyz in the Hood has its "roots" in Do the Right Thing. We only care about the black characters in Spike's movies because we see ourselves in the characters and then fill in the gaps. We care about Radio Raheem because we remember that kid in the neighborhood that used to have the big ass boom box and the patent leather Adidas Top Tens.[foot]The shoe of choice in eighties Detroit.[/foot] We care about Mookie because we all knew the kid who wasn't quite hard enough to sell drugs, wasn't quite a hustler enough to even sell WEED, and wasn't quite smart enough to really do well in school. But we don't care about them because of Spike's choices as a director/writer. It's clear from his depiction of Sal's family that he knows how to create relatively well-rounded characters. But he doesn't do it with the black characters in Do The Right Thing. 

Similarly we don't care about Doughboy and Ricky in Boyz in the Hood because they were well rounded. We care about them because we projected traits from kids we grew up with ONTO them.

This isn't what Coogler does at all.

And again, he should be applauded for it.  

I'd heard they'd made a movie of the incident starring Michael B. Jordan, reconstructing his last 24 hours.

I hadn't planned to see it–I prefer my movies larger than life, full of robots, super-heroes, and massive explosions.[foot]I can’t be serious ALL the time…[/foot] But I decided to go, taking my oldest son with me.

My impressions?

Fruitvale Station (directed by Ryan Coogler) mines some of the same critical terrain John Singleton did twenty years ago with Boyz in the Hood. In fact, Coogler and Singleton have similar backgrounds. However, Fruitvale is head and shoulders above Boyz. Boyz had no real three-dimensional characters. It reproduced many of the same arguments conservatives made (and still make) about black communities, blaming their failure on the lack of two-parent households. Indeed viewers could predict the lives of Boyz' characters with one single piece of information–what type of relationship did they have with their father?

Even though Fruitvale is barely 90 minutes long, we see Grant interact with a number of different characters in his last 24 hours. Through these interactions we see him impulsive and rash, loving, angry, violent, restrained, thoughtful, calculating, scared, intimidating. We see him as father, as lover, as friend, as son, as nephew, as hustler, as prisoner, as banger. We see the consequences of his choices (he gets fired from his job because he's late), we see the constraints on his choices (he can't get a new job in part because of his record).

Grant interacts with five women onscreen–his mother, his girlfriend Sophina, his grandmother, Sophina's mother, and Sophina's sister. Sophina is neither the stereotypical hood-rat (think Regina King's character in Boyz) nor the fiery Latina (think Rosie Perez' character in Do The Right Thing). Through interactions with Grant, their daughter, and his mother, we see her loving, angry, hustling, diligent, responsible, fearful, anxious. Grant's mother is depicted in similar ways. We see the toll Grant's incarceration took on his mother. We see the everyday struggle she undergoes trying to make ends meet. But even when she brings everyone together to pray after Grant's been shot–black mothers are often depicted as being prayerful Christians on film–she doesn't feel like a type. The other three female characters get much less screentime but I felt each were relatively well-rounded.

Grant's male friends get the same treatment the three minor female (adult) characters receive. Going back to Boyz again, Ice Cube's Doughboy gets a significant amount of screentime, but he's not fully developed. Grant's friends get far less screentime than Cube…but somehow are rendered far more human. They, like Grant, are constrained. And this has an effect on their choices. But we see them engage in enough activity to understand who they are and to sympathize with them.

Finally, even though it's clear Coogler sympathizes with Grant, he even humanizes the BART cops responsible for Grant's death.  

When we talk and write about the desire to see people like us (in my case, black, working/middle class) on film, this is what we're talking about. Recently there's been talk of having a "national conversation on race". We didn't need a "conversation" on race fifteen years ago when Bill Clinton had John Hope Franklin convene it….we don't need it now. 

With that said though, we do need films, and tv shows, that depict the lives of young black, latino, and asian-american, men and women, in all of their complexity. In the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, Fruitvale Station should be required viewing.