ebogjonson.com's garchival archive
previously published writings by Gary DauphinJuly 31, 2006
blaxploitation, part I
This article originally appeared in the Village Voice on June 27, 1995.
Nobody showed for my blaxploitation viewing party except for one woman who wanted "Chocolate" as a pseudonym.
Village Voice, June 27, 1995
Blaxploitation, Part I
Nobody showed for my blaxploitation viewing party except for one woman who wanted "Chocolate" as a pseudonym. Cole had gotten green around the gills he night before and taken to a sick bed, while W. called me from a friend's place to explain that they were making "barbecue" and wouldn't be over until later. (That must have been some good barbecue, because they didn't show either.)
I think Chocolate was a little annoyed by the lack of attendance ("You mean it's just me?"), but I knew she wouldn't let me down. In college, we were the kind of overly ironic black people who did recreational drugs and watched cult films and were therefore considered liabilities to the race. These days, reminders of that time tend to fill Chocolate with a nervous nostalgia. I didn't have any weed to take the edge off (it was with the "barbecue," unfortunately), so I just popped a tape in and hoped for the best.
Chocolate had already seen Superfly so we started with Foxy Brown. As the trailers spooled by she asked who was going to be at "the conference."
"What conference?"
"The conference that they're showing all these movies for."
I told her Film Forum was having a retrospective of blaxploitation flicks and these were the first two being screened. She rolled her eyes at me. I wondered out loud if the genre maybe embarrassed her.
"No, I just want to know why they're showing them. White people run the Film Forum, right?"
"As far as I can tell."
"So why are they having it? 'Cause it's the summer so it's time for everybody to get loose or something?"
"I guess."
For a long while Chocolate only comments on Pam Grier's breasts. "Look at her boobs," she says. "They're nice and big and she has this old fashioned black woman's body. She'd have to be harder now to be a star, like she worked out, but she has a really flat stomach even though she's pretty curvy."
"Do you feel affirmed by that?"
"Only when she's not getting beat up and raped."
Chocolate decided near the middle of Foxy Brown that she didn't really like it. "Does Pam Grier always play a prostitute?"
I told her that I had seen her play a nurse, a voodoo priestess, and a magazine photographer, but Chocolate wasn't impressed: "She gets tied up and raped by those rednecks. How come that all goes on forever but the scenes with her [black] boyfriend are so short? I thought these were supposed to be for black audiences. Why would a black audience want to watch a black woman tied up getting raped by some fat rednecks?"
"'Cause it's summertime and everybody wants to get loose?"
"No, seriously."
"What do you expect? American International Pictures was always into the exploitation end of things, like biker flicks and low-budget horror." I knew something about this from when sex was the main event in blaxploitation flicks for me, a neat way to pass off more prurient interests as film connoisseurship and race consciousness. In college, all three melded into endlessly loopy discussions of theory. A room full of my friends (high as kites to the last lit/cinema major) could sit and spin meditations on intentionality and "low" art, on black masculine posturing, on hustling as a functional metaphor for the black intellectual classes and the cut of Pam Grier's bell-bottom pants, as one of us rewound over the same two minutes of Scream Blacula Scream like it was some wigged out Zapruder film.
This wasn't quite happening with Foxy Brown today, though.
"I thought this was supposed to be really funky and crazy," says Chocolate, a little sad. "This is just crazy and trashy."
"Don't you like her clothes and her Afro?"
"The Afro's cool and I like what she's wearing now [black leather pants with a short black leather jacket, a black and white blouse cut on a low horizontal line across her breast] but I don't know..."
"So you don't like it."
"I don't think they should be discarded. I mean, they're like those black collectibles, like those porcelain Mammies and little lawn jockey salt shakers. I don't think they should be destroyed, but I wouldn't want to own one."
Things had gotten a little grim so I ask Chocolate if she thought Foxy Brown's rape is where Quentin Tarantino got the idea for the rape scene in Pulp Fiction.
"Huh?"
"Well, the rapists are rednecks in both movies and the ropes are very s/m, hence the Gimp."
Chocolate finishes the last of the beer off, mulling that one over. "I can see Sam Jackson being Priest from Superfly...."
"Right. They're both trying to get-out-the-game."
"...but you're saying Ving Rhames is really Pam Grier."
"Exactly. He's Foxy and Bruce Willis is a young Tarantino watching this movie, only he's so twistedly into the black charisma thing that he can't decide whether to identify with Pam Grier or just get in line to fuck her."
"But if that were the case, then Quentin-slash-Bruce Willis would want to get with Ving Rhames."
"True, but Quentin doesn't run deep that way, so he compartmentalizes his desires so that his Bruce Willis stand-in can rescue Foxy-slash-Ving Rhames..."
"Acting out his black-hero identification."
"Right--while he also gets to fuck another Pam Grier stand-in himself because he's married to a black nurse in Pulp Fiction. And Pam Grier plays a nurse in Coffy."
"But that's a whole other movie!"
I smile big, white, triumphant teeth at her. "Your point being?"
Another friend comes over during Foxy Brown's last five minutes. When he chides me for not having enough beer, Chocolate takes to calling him Ripple, O-Dog, Forty-Dog, et cetera. I tell him he'll just be Forty in my piece.
"That's cool. Hey-this is Foxy Brown, right? The thing about this movie is that you're like six minutes in and--Breasts."
"It is," says Chocolate.
"That or she's about to go down on this white guy. Or is that Coffy?"
Chocolate suddenly gasps. One of Foxy's compatriots is about to cut the white drug dealer's penis off.
"Aw shit," says Forty. "This is the best part."
It happens off-screen but Chocolate can't watch anyway.
"Curiously enough," opines Forty, "a lot of these movies were written by white people. That's deep: white guys writing about getting their dicks cut off by black women with big tits."
"This is good too." Foxy is taking the penis to the guy's evil boss-cum-girlfriend and Forty is breaking the scene down for us. "Now boss lady's gone through so much in this movie, right? Business all fucked up, probably going to jail, but what really fucks her up is when her boyfriend gets his dick chopped off. She's like: 'Shoot me!' Like she goes through a whole bunch of shit but she can't live without the dick."
Forty and I go on a beer run and then pop Superfly in. Chocolate gets all excited, clapping her hands together and getting all churchy. Curtis Mayfield had Forty humming and lip-synching.
"Yo! Is that James Baldwin?"
It's the opening credits and two junkies are making plans to rob Priest of his drug money.
"What?"
"Rewind that. That dude looks just like James Baldwin."
We've had enough to drink to give the possibility that James Baldwin had a heretofore undiscovered cameo in Superfly gets a good deal of discussion. This goes on until all of a sudden Priest is in bed with one of his white women.
"She's just a trick." says Forty. "Priest loves his black woman."
"How so?" I ask.
"He's just using those white women. Not like Shaft who was into that whole Greenwich Village bohemia thing."
"Shaft had a white woman?" asks Chocolate.
"That's ALL he had. That's what always trips me out about it. Shaft has this natural but sleeps with white woman in Greenwich Village, and Priest has this crazy perm [VV editor's note: actually, that was Ron O'Neal's unprocessed hair] but loves his black woman."
As if by divine intervention we find ourselves a the scene where someone yells at Priest, "Look at me, you white lookin'--!"
"Priest is the tragic mulatto," says Forty with mock sadness. "But, damn: he's sure got all the dark-skinned brothers out working for him."
"Chocolate: "And sleeping with all the white women for tricks."
Superfly slides by in fits and spurts, even though we think we're watching it very closely. I ask Chocolate and Forty if they noticed any weird slippage effect.
"It's like there's a hidden movie inside," says Chocolate. "Like that long part with all the photographs in the middle about cutting and selling the coke. I've seen this before but I was really surprised by that, like we were watching the director's cut or something."
Forty agrees. I ask him if he was stoned the last time he saw Superfly, "Yeah?" Forty says.
"Well, about now your first buzz would be wearing off," I explain, "and you'd be getting sleepy, so unless you fire up another joint you aren't really concentrating, whereas you were smoked out for the beginning, so it's all vivid."
"Yeah," says Chocolate. "I thought it was just because the ending was kind of anticlimactic, like the third act wasn't written properly."
"That means you fucked up, Bro," says Forty. "How are you gonna set something up like this and not have any weed? It's like, unscientific."
Posted by ebogjonson at 10:28 AM | Permalink
July 28, 2006
they came before the matrix
This article originally appeared on Africana.com on May 15, 2003
They Came Before the Matrix: Black People and Science Fiction
The Matrix is hardly the first big screen franchise to go black to the future. In no particular order, here are ten key moments and storylines from the big screen history of black people and science fiction.
They Came Before the Matrix: Black People and Science Fiction
By Gary Dauphin
Among the many mysteries of the Matrix is the unexpected yen writer-director siblings Larry and Andy Wachowski have for putting color into science fiction's usually all-white, big-screen frame. The original Matrix was a tantalizingly multicultural affair, from Laurence Fishburne's laconic Morpheus, to Gloria Foster's wryly luminous Oracle, to the eternal question of Keanu's non-descript racial cipher, while the overarching themes at the core of the franchise -- maroonage and slave rebellion -- can't help but speak suggestively to black sci-fi heads. (It'll be a thousand years or more before an American artist can make work about "slaves" without automatically evoking some portion of black life and history.)
That afrofuturistic parade continues in The Matrix Reloaded with the addition to the cast of Jada Pinkett-Smith, Harold Perrineau, Jr, and, of all people, academic (and occasional MC) Cornel West. The Matrix, though, is hardly the first big screen franchise to go black to the future. In no particular order, here are ten key moments and storylines from the big screen history of black people and science fiction:
1. Black Magic in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
It's no coincidence that some of the earliest mixings of blackness and science fiction took place on movie visits to fictionalized versions of the first black republic, Haiti. Long an object of white fascination and vilification, Haiti's folk religion voudoun was alternately represented as a primitive superstition and as an arcane, crypto-Masonic secret society in dozens of B, C and D-movies from the pre-straight-to-video golden ages of Hollywood exploitation. Flicks like Drums O' Voodoo (1934) titillated and terrorized white audiences with visions of white women under the mind control of black "witch doctors," some of the spells apparently so powerful they required breaking by none other than the extraterrestrial Superman, who made visits to the island in both big screen serials and on TV episodes like Superman #18: Drums of Death (1957). In the movie fictionalization of Harvard ethno-botanist Wade Davis' book The Serpent and The Rainbow, horror director Wes Craven squared the circle of science and mysticism by imagining a pharmacological nightmareland where both the "divine horsemen" (as the gods of Haiti are known) and the Duvalier regime were the products of scary native drugs and freaky native bio-chemistry, thereby giving Haitian religion the "magic mushroom" treatment that the Amazon's indigenous people get in the fantasies of the National Geographic set.
2. Fear of a Black Planet
The entire Planet of the Apes cycle took racist anxieties about African nationalism, civil rights and Black Power and did what science fiction does best -- recast the unconscious fears of audiences in forms that were similar enough to the real deal to get a rise, while different enough to pass without a ripple into the popular culture. The Apes series benefited from the placement of the then-liberal Charlton Heston in the opening installment and from there ran roughshod through the political anxieties of white Americans until Conquest of the Planet of the Apes made it plain by depicting a political revolution of ape slaves aided and abetted by, you guessed it, a black man.
3. Fear of the Black Hat: All too often, the only African American face in a science fiction will belong to the villain. George Lucas' black armor-clad Darth Vader was evil incarnate while voiced by African American actor James Earl Jones, his transition away from the Dark Side of the Force (right) signaled by his transformation into a kindly white Brit. In flicks like Total Recall betrayal wore a black mutant face, while in Terminator 2 the end of the world was caused by an over-eager black scientist mucking about with mysterious technology. (Let that be a lesson to every black engineer!)
4. Back in The DayWhile comedy franchises like Martin Lawrence's Black Knight used time-travel to produce easy fish-out-the-ghetto yucks, Haile Gerima's indie masterpiece Sankofa imagined a time travel scenario with a little more bite, when an African American woman finds herself back in days of slavery. The lyrical, quasi-non-linear feature had an art house feel, but re-enacted a basic science fictional question just about every modern-day black person has asked at some point or another: What would I do if I found myself living "back then?" In Brother from Another Planet an escaped alien slave made the trip not across time but space, bringing him into a black neighborhood where the locals band together to protect him.
5. The White Negro -- Literally
Black essayist and conservative George Schulyer imagined a scientific process whereby black men could be made white and vice versa in 1931's groundbreaking black sci-fi novel Black No More, a conceit that has made it into the movies dozens of times. From spoofs like the Denzel Washington vehicle Heart Condition, to political satires like Watermelon Man and Black Like Me, the transformation of black bodies into white ones and white bodies into black has created endless one-liners about black male endowment and countless opportunities to draw easy conclusions about the similarities and differences between the races. Flicks that focused on actually changing the physical structure of the body, like Black Like Me tended to be both the most lurid and the most interesting, as modifying the racial hardware always raises bigger questions about the software: What's it look like? Who wrote it? Who owns the copyright? And: When is the next version coming out?
6. Angela Bassett's Superpower
Immediately after Kirk and Uhura were forced into TV's first interracial kiss in the classic Star Trek episode "Plato's Step-Children," the verb of interracial love gained a new tense -- call it the "future-perfect-freaky" -- and no one uses it better on screen than Angela Bassett. In Supernova and, more notably, Strange Days, Bassett played black-women-of-the-future responding to what must be (by then) a heinously advanced black-man-shortage by bedding down their white male co-stars. While Bassett savaged Halle Berry in the press for her black-on-white love scene in Monster's Ball, in a temporal inversion of "statute of limitations" she was completely comfortable taking roles that not only featured miscegenation, but treated it as a kind of evolutionary advance. Her romance with Ralph Fiennes not only ends Strange Days, but marks the entire world's official entrance into the future, their kiss setting off the fireworks that announce the arrival of the new millennium.
7. What is B.O.G.? Racial Purity and the Coming Beige Apocalypse
In the sci-fi worlds of the "future-perfect-freaky," mixed race, bi-racial people stride the earth, a scarily perfect super-race purportedly mixing the best of black and white. While writers like Octavia Butler regularly re-imagine the encounter between Europe and Africa in the Americas as a regenerative genetic apocalypse where both roots are transformed by their offspring, the theme had no big screen analog until Wesley Snipes brought the brooding Daywalker named Blade to the multiplexes. The big-screen version of the comic book Blade brought the image of the tragic mulatto into the bio-molecular age, the half-vampire, half-human played by Snipes not just trapped between two warring tribes but forced to live in a battleground-body. The product of pregnant (black) human mother raped by a (white) vampire father, Blade faced an identity crisis that also gave the "one drop rule" a creepy age-of-AIDS spin, turning vampire creation into a question of post-coital viral infection. Unlike Butler's vision of a transcendent middle race, which in books like the Xenogenesis trilogy and Clay's Ark takes giddy satisfaction in the survival of the fitter, new-fangled hybrids, the less radical Blade only wants to maintain the status quo, defending the humans in the first picture, and then discovering the nobility of his pure-blooded vampire antagonists in the second, as embodied by fangy-hottie Leonor Varela.
8. Esoterics in the Land of Cotton
Although not always understood as visions of science fiction, there are always strange doings afoot whenever the moist lands south of the Mason-Dixon line are depicted on screen. From Eve's Bayou to Beloved, the American South has always been a big screen haunted house where the sins of the white racist fathers swap spit with Hollywood fantasies of black spiritual resistance, aka rootwork and hoodoo. Black spiritual technologies -- charms, dream books, candles, mojos -- have been so severed from their original contexts by LaLaLand that they could seamlessly provide a tagline for a franchise like Austin Powers, while in the work of Stephen King, most notably The Shining and the The Stand, wise southern black folk warm King's chilly New England nightmares by acting as walking repositories for strange, unexplained energies. Although much, much richer, even the late Gloria Foster's Oracle in the Matrix movies is a play on the image of the aged Negro as spiritual antenna, a trope as old as Harriet Beecher Stowe's god-fearing Uncle Tom beatifically soaking up the good Lord's shine.
9. Substance D: Imaginary Drugs for Imaginary Ghettoes
In 1977, Philip K. Dick imagined a "Substance D" in A Scanner Darkly a drug so powerful it split the novel's undercover narc protagonist into two personalities, one belonging to the cop, the other to his prey. Dick and his readers didn't have to wait long for the lab-cooked super-drugs of the future; a scant half decade after A Scanner Darkly was published, America was in the grip of a crack epidemic. Ghetto real thrillers like Deep Cover, Ricochet and Belly might not seem like science fiction, but their storylines all revolve around black folks hard at work on the high tech creation of heretofore unknown new narcotics, next generation cracks and methamphetamines. Deep Cover imagines a black and white team looking to create an ecstasy-like pill with no side effects, while in Belly DMX learns (from MTV News of course) of a perfected heroin. In Ricochet Ice-T isn't just Denzel's bad seed pal from back in the day, he's a high tech entrepreneur whose inner-city lab is a futuristic playground straight out of Tom Clancy, the street obviously finding new uses for technology long before the newest-latest reaches the suburbs.
10. Michael Jackson
What's there to say about MJ that hasn't been said? The "Thriller" video and the "Black or White" video (not to mention their associated games) are epic parts of the black science fictional canon, Michael's racial anxieties turning to the power of special effects to allow him to transform his black body in ways far more radical than the puny tools of plastic surgery allow. Few remember, though, that Michael also created a full-length feature called Moonwalker where the King of Pop enacted a slew of Afro-futuristic fantasies, culminating with his climactic transformation not into a white man, but a 400 foot tall Transformer.
About the Author: Gary Dauphin is Editor in Chief of Africana.
Posted by ebogjonson at 2:07 PM | Permalink
July 27, 2006
The Africana A-List: June 6, 2003
This article was first published on Africana.com on June 6, 2003
The A-List is a compendium of the most important things African America discussed this week. This week on the A-List: Eunice: Blame it on the U-Rain!
The A-List: 06.06.03
Compiled by Africana Staff
This week on the A-List:
1. Eunice: Blame it On the U-RAIN!
The A-List has many penpals -- Kola Boof, Howell Raines, Mr. Marcus, several UN Under-Secretaries for African Grain Bio-Diversity -- but our favorite is Eunice, an 82-year-old, retired A&T history-and-civics professor now residing in Missouri. "I have difficulty finding much redeeming historical, educational or racial significance in many of the items presented in this column," Eunice writes in like clockwork every other week. "It seems as if the authors take their greatest pleasure in either making smug reference to obscurities of little interest to most American Negroes, or in shocking the very audience they claim to represent. Matters of great import are either ignored or treated flippantly and great heroes are disrespected, while gossip, bizarre coincidence, and negative reporting is enshrined as the collected opinion of Negroes everywhere. Also, the manner in which the column is written leaves much to be desired. Fiction seems intermingled willy-nilly with factual information, while items are invariably prefaced by lengthy, showy prologues with no discernable relation to the story purportedly being presented. Also sentences in the A-List tend to run-on, veering wildly from subject to subject on the slimmest verbal pretext. Du Bois, whose image is cynically made use of repeatedly by the Africana website, and who dreamt of meaningfully connecting the disparate threads of Negro life in his great encyclopedia, would be disgusted."
The A-List, of course, doesn't believe a word of the above. First off, what's an 82-year-old, retired A&T history-and-civics professor named "Eunice" doing surfing this great, charnel house that is the Web? Does anyone surf these days for anything except pornography, EBay auction updates, bottomed-out stock prices, weather, or to see if their name showed up in their best friend's blog? Getting a letter like that from a regular A-List reader is a bit like getting caught out at the strip club by your great grandmother. ("Well. This is certainly embarrassing, Nana. For you.") Still, on the off chance that Eunice is a real person, with perhaps nothing to live for except writing letters to the editor, the A-List always makes a point of finding an item just for her, something in particularly -- nay, outrageously -- poor taste that satisfies the full range of A-List-specific criterions (linkable, about, or involving black people) while also constituting a special, almost private, back-channel shout-out the woman we have come to think of as "our Eunice."
Speaking of poor taste, this week's "the Eunice bit," as we like to call it, comes from her very Missouri, where a white jail guard, Justin K. Hastings, has been accused of regularly urinating on his jail's black inmates from a grate in the roof of a covered recreation area. While some inmates seem to have instinctively understood that the warm, yellow liquid dripping down from the rafters was to be avoided, others did not. One recent, rainy afternoon, a group of thirsty inmates, fresh from playing a hard game of prison basketball, went so far as to enthusiastically thrust their faces into the downward flowing stream, only to discover that the leaking "rainwater" smelled and tasted remarkably like you-know-what. Equally remarkably, the incident went to trial, CO Hastings facing a 15-day prison term for abusing his charges. Things nearly unraveled when inmate Zewayne "Winkie" Durley called his jailhouse golden shower "racist," a charge apparently so incendiary in Missou that a mistrial was almost declared, but after a brief recess the proceedings turned to the not-so difficult question of positively identifying Hastings. While it's impossible to see anyone through the grate, and no one actually saw 21 year-old CO commit the dirty deed, DNA tests presented at the trial positively linked Hastings to urine samples taken from the grate.
What the A-List wants to know, of course, is how anyone knew to perform DNA tests on Hastings in the first place. It's not as if prosecutors went and collected samples from every guard or even two. Obviously something about that racist urine, some quality or aspect of it, reminded Durley and the other inmates of Hastings, but what could it be, what could it be?
Until next time, Eunice!
[Ebog note: As you likely guessed, there was no Eunice. At the time this particular column was written me and the Africana team were engaged in a bit of a turf war with another with another African American programming team stationed on the AOL mothership in Dulles. That team in Dulles often cited the A-List as why the Africana team was unfit to manage AOL's black business, what with how unruly, inappropriate and all un-around un-DST-like we were. They lost the battle but the forces of mediocrity eventually won the war.]
2. Say it Ain't So, Serena!
A far sadder sports story came from France this week, where Serena Williams was foiled in her shot at Grand Slam history-making, losing in the French Open semifinal to Belgian Justine Henin-Hardenne. It's not that Serena lost &151 though that makes the A-List sad, of course -- but that she was brought down by, in addition to Henin-Hardenne's commendably gutsy comeback, a jeeringly hostile crowd and her own rattled nerves. (The A-List loves the French when they're jeering Imposter Presidents, but not when they jeer Serena!) We've always seen the strong, in-control Serena; yesterday's match revealed another side, one more in keeping with the fact that she is only 21 years old. After the match ended, a tearful Serena admitted the crowd got to her: "It was just a tough crowd out there today, really very tough. It's the story of my life. It's a little difficult. All my life I have had to fight."
Any time Venus or Serena Williams steps onto the court, she is the automatic odds-on favorite. Some crowd love winners and some cheer for the underdog (especially if she's local, or from a neighboring country, as was the Belgian Henin-Hardenne). That's just sports, but it doesn't make it pretty. It gets uglier in the case of the Williams sisters, who have endured racist taunts from crowds at home and abroad, no doubt making it at times difficult for the pair to tell the difference between run-of-the-mill stadium boorishness and malicious, mass abuse. Here's to hoping Serena gets to take a few weeks off and comes back and smokes the competition in Wimbledon!
3. Faster than a Speeding Bullet, Charles Taylor Thwarts Coup Plotters
Like the malevolent, African super-villain he sometimes resembles, Liberian president Charles Taylor this week flew back -- whoosh! -- from peace talks in Ghana to quell an uprising that might have sent him to prison -- or worse. Responding to reports that he'd been indicted on war crimes charges by a UN-sponsored court, Taylor invoked the supernatural ("To call the president of Liberia a war criminal? God himself will not permit it") and made sure his thuggish government not only put down the rebel advances, but also turned back the thousands of refugees rushing into Monrovia in hopes of escaping the violent countryside. The world's attention rarely rests for long on West Africa -- troubles there seem too hard to confront, too endlessly circular, too local, too complex. But the nature of Taylor's evil isn't hard to grasp at all. Too bad "regime change" is only the West's stated policy when there's oil at stake.
4. Finally, A Token White Male on Reality TV!
Hooked up to two croaking, used speakers, the television in the A-List's first college apartment doubled as a stereo that stayed tuned to music-vid stations most days and nights. We still clearly remember the surround-sound splash MTV's first Real World season made when it landed into our lives in 1992, the shouting about race, the partying and the primitive sexual innuendo (oh, how innocent the antics of Andre, Becky, Eric, Heather, Julie, #%^@^Kevin and Norman were! Looking at it today is almost like watching The Brady Bunch episode with the tri-racial Musketeers ï¿1⁄2 only with alcohol poisoning) spawning an ongoing obsession with reality TV. Of course, we were most obsessed with "the black guy." Besides the fact that we felt that we should have been on that first series instead of Kevin Powell, or perhaps precisely because we felt we should have been on, the A-list was annoyed and embarrassed by Powell on a nearly weekly basis and by every token reality black man that followed in his footsteps on MTV. Did the Real World only choose bordeline crazy black men, we wondered? Was it a requirement? There was the mellow, be-dredded Muhammad of the San Francisco show, but like all gentle, holistic, spoken-word Negroes, he was just too tofutti, too nice. It just seemed that reality television was doomed to never get the black man right.
Over the years, our convictions about the ignoble yet central role of "the black guy" on reality TV have only been confirmed by the hard evidence gleaned through literal couch years spent mainlining reality crud directly through the optic nerve -- Springer in the morning, videos hosted by reality contestants and game shows all day, reality TV at night. The genre has evolved -- Survivor, Road Rules, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, The Osbournes -- but "the black guy" has not. Trapped between the Klieg lights of celebrity and the cave walls of racism, he casts a pantomime shadow across America's television screens that is interpreted by most as "black maleness," but that bears no resemblance to the genuine article as experience by the A-List and our friends and family. It would take nothing less than a philosopher-king to break through this play of forms and shadows, and since all royal black people are from Africa (or are assassinated Civil Rights leaders, making it hard for them to appear on new shows) our black princes have arrived in the form of -- you guessed it -- an African reality TV show! According to the BBC, the latest craze sweeping the Continent is a show called Big Brother: Africa. Core premise? Eleven young black people from all around Africa trapped in a house with one token white guy. Produced by a South African pay-TV company, the show has been warmly received in the 40-plus African television markets where it is aired, but it seems that the predominantly black cast has not caught on with White South Africans, still the big-get of the African TV ad market. It is as yet unavailable here in the States unless you have one of those crazy, old-skool satellite hook-ups. At which point, the A-List is going to come after you and your TV the way Kevin came after Becky -- only friendly-like!
5. That Lot Is Poison
Click the "Full Story" link below. Go ahead. We promise it's not nasty. You've probably already seen it (you know how these things circulate) and anyway, we would lose our job if we direct-liked to something nasty, or to something that met any legal or corporate definition of "obscene." A good deal of Africana readers log-in from work and we would never do anything to get them in trouble. (This is basic Internet etiquette: Thou Shalt Not Abuse the End-User By Unexpectedly Direct-Linking to Web Pages That May Offend.) So it's not nasty in the slightest. It's more funny, and not even funny really, because there's nothing funny about earning an honest living, nothing amusing at all about diversifying one's professional portfolio in the interests of keeping that income coming in. It's just curious to us, having his face just pop up like that, and the way his palm is holding and pointing at the text, and that suit. The tag-line is pretty great, too -- "A 'New Edition' to Re/Max." He was always the funny looking one, wasn't he? Skinny and aloof with that Zeta Reticulan, Grey alien head. He always seemed vestigial, like the other guys were letting him hang around for obscure reasons buried in the past -- or so you thought until some weird girl you were scheming on confessed in the middle of a basement dance party that he was her "favorite," which would always mess with your head. (Why pick him? What did it mean about us, the A-list, that he was her favorite?) Besides the odd, inverse diminution that afflicts young stars that have grown into men in obscurity, he looks none the worse for wear. Bobbie, of course, we all know what he's been up to and he looks it, while Michael Bivens has the healthy heft that befits the run he's had producing groups like Boyz II Men, but Ronald DeVoe? Have you spent a moment in the last ten years wondering what he's been up to? We haven't, which is why the link is funny to us, but, that could just be us.
6. Say it Ain't So, Sammy!
News this week that Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa had been caught using a corked bat in a game sparked a conflicted, multilayered response. From Sosa himself: a quick admission of guilt, albeit accidental guilt -- he says the bat was one he routinely used in batting practice, in hopes of pleasing homer-hunger fans. From Chicago-area fans: fervent defense and protestations of endless devotion to "Sammy," a figure of one-name-status popularity there. From the yahoo-talk/sports radio-contingent: self-righteous censure, rantings about highly paid athletes dogging it, blah blah blah. Missing so far has been an overtly racial angle to the Sosa affair, though it's certainly a covert factor in the mix.
Ever since the 1998 home run race between Sosa and St. Louis's Mark McGwire, the exuberant Dominican has been cast in the role of lovable furriner, his broken English and blown kisses endearing as hell -- provided he didn't outshine the laconic redhead who won out in the end. For his part, Sosa has been a proud crowd-pleaser, a role the bat incident indicates he may have taken a bit too far. A Major League Baseball official review of Sosa's other 76 bats (the A-List is semi-astounded that even a major slugger like Sosa owns this many bats!) reveals no other corked specimens; after Thursday's interview with the MLB investigator, Sosa awaits a verdict. If it goes down anything like the handful of other "corking" incidents over the past two decades, Sosa can expect to be suspended for 5-10 games.
So is the incident going to hurt Sosa's legacy? Is it a "say it ain't so" moment to rival that of Shoeless Joe Jackson, forever kept out of the Hall of Fame for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series? It doesn't seem like it. A lot of the ink being spilled over Sosa's transgression seems appropriately focused on just how frequent this kind of thing is, from several recent bat-corking incidents to spit-ball throwing to various other rule-bending that's just part of the game. Unlike football, with its corporate/militaristic soul, or basketball, which is all about style and grace, baseball is at its heart a humbler, more forgiving sport, a game of flaws and quirks, a field of uneven dimensions. The A-List hopes and believes that this whole episode is almost certainly going to blow over fairly quickly, and if it doesn't, it'll only convince us yet again that what this country needs is more, not less, moral relativism, which is to say, the ability to distinguish between a small crime and a large one. Let Sammy do his time, but then let him get on with the game.
7. He's Gotta Have It --
-- the rights to his name, that is. Filmmaker and kid's book author Spike Lee filed a lawsuit against media giant Viacom over the company's recent decision to change the name of the TNN cable network to "Spike TV" in hopes of attracting more male viewers. Viacom plans to achieve this demographic feat by playing reruns of Bay Watch and introducing new cartoons like Stripperella . (Created by Stan Lee and voiced by Pamela Anderson, Stripperella follows the exploits of exotic dancer Erotica Jones, who fights crime in the near future as a secret agent.) Um, we guess that'll work. Since they can't call it the "T&A Channel" or "The Softer-than-Spice, Spice channel" -- sure, why the hell not "Spike"? It's manly, it's pointy, it's hard. That's why when the A-List first heard about the name change back in April, it never occurred to us to associate it with a Spike Lee joint. In fact, quite a few other Spikes came to mind. There was, for instance, that girl named Spike from Degrassi Junior High who got pregnant and couldn't hang out with the gang anymore cause of her kid. (Damn, we miss that show. Now that was some telly.) Then there's the blond, undead Brit, Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike from Cowboy Bebop, director Spike Jonze, Spike from underground cult film animation duo Spike and Mike, and only the good lord above knows how many cartoon bulldogs have been (and ever shall be) named Spike. You can see where we're going with this. Maybe if all the Spikes united and filed a class action suit could take this one more seriously. So while we still got love for Spike (Lee) -- after all, he is the reason we owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in film school debt and also maxed out all our credit cards to make the best black independent film you've never seen -- we think Spike, (Lee that is), is really reaching with this one. Sometimes a spike is just a spike, Spike.
8. Legal Team Not So Supreme
News came down from up high this week that alleged NY drug kingpin and famed, alleged, hip hop label financier Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff would be sentenced to 37 months in the Federal pen for violating probation. As the A-List understands it, McGriff was just at ye olde shooting range doing what reputed drug lords do at such establishments after serving lengthy sentences and coming out to a few million -- namely cocking, loading and letting off. You know, just trying to keep the skills behind the nine-mill up. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz saw things a mite different, telling McGriff (and we're quoting): "There's no reason for you to keep your skills up." (Now ain't that a grimly wry thing for a judge to say during a sentencing! "No reason for you to keep your skills up!") If the A-List were ever to find ourselves in McGriff's position -- and we won't, but let's pretend -- we would jump up, spit a verse, and tell Judge Motz that, to coin a phrase, "It's Murdaaaahhhhhhh!" True, perhaps shooting is not be the best recreational activity for a man recently released from a ten year bid for drug trafficking and violent crime, but rap and it's associated social arenas can be dangerous for alleged players. This year alone rapper Freaky Zeaky, a member from Camron's Diplomat crew was shot in an altercation, while Murder Inc. CEO Irv Gotti -- McGriff's "son" in the eyes of many -- saw his brother and a close associates shot in separate incidents. If he's under some kind of threat, McGriff is not the type who would seek out police protection (do police protect convicted drug dealers who aren't in witness protection?) making the safest place for him, oddly enough, either jail or the shooting range that landed him there.
9. Summer Jammies
In case you haven't received any of the A-List's up close and personal snaps from HOT 97 FM's Summer Jam at New Jersey's Giants Stadium, it's also safe to assume that you haven't seen Lil' Kim's fake breasts. "The girls", as she likes to call them, bumped and grinded their way through her bikini top last week to reveal their surgically-enhanced and surgically-scarred "brown eyes" (the A-List would rather not say the "N-word" in front of Eunice) to the whole world, or, at least, to the entire Summer Jam audience. While the crowd was more than happy to see the dirty diva doing her thing, the A-List couldn't help but think that these were not the perky, pastie-assisted fake breasts Kim had bared over and over (and over) the last few years. These were older, wiser, more withdrawn fake breasts. Sadder fake breasts. Which prompts us to ask: is something wrong, Kim? Something wrong with your fake breasts, we mean. Because if there is, you can tell us about it. Over the last year, the A-List has been privileged to offer counseling to a number of black female celebrities facing various types of crises -- - Beyonce, Frenchie, the Williams Sisters -- and we can help you too, if only you'll let us.
Will you let us?
The A-List would provide our gentle readers with a link to images of Kim, but we won't, because that wouldn't be in keeping with (TRY) our (ALL) high (HIPHOP) journalistic (DOTCOM) standards. We can provide you with links to this story, though: Nas fans will remember that last year the radio station stopped Nas from hanging Jay Z in effigy on stage, saying that Summer Jam was all about the music, and not about airing grudges. While the A-List is categorically against hanging, it seems that the warnings to play nice only extend to God's son, as this year HOT 97 let Eminem bash The Source by bashing his 2000 "Lyricist Of The Year" Source Award to bits on stage. The A-List will be the first to admit that it has been interesting to see Marshall take on someone other than bubble gum groups and Moby, but it's becoming clear that both sides of this beef are only interested in the financial benefits of maximum street cred. As for Em, most of this madface business started around the time a certain, got-shot-in-the-face, certified thug from Queens joined his ranks. Curiously, Em also started to weight train around that time. Hmmmmm. Although the A-List is a firm believer that you don't have to be a piano player to know a bad rendition of "Chopsticks" when you hear it, we do guess having a potentially violent hip hop feud comes in handy when you're managing a reformed hardcase.
10. That's all this week, folks!
Come back next Friday, same A-List time, same A-List channel!
About the Author: The low-pro column gets cut like an Afro.
Posted by ebogjonson at 7:55 PM | Permalink
The Africana A-List: October 10, 2003
This article was first published on Africana.com on October 10, 2003
Every Friday, the A-List compiles a listing of the most important topics African America discussed the previous week. This week on the A-List: Tiger Terror in Harlem?
The A-List: 10.10.03
Compiled by Africana Staff
This week on the A-List:
1. Amazing Animals: Harlem Man Raises Tiger in the PJs
Sung to the tune of Michael Jackson's "Ben":
Ming, the two of us need look no more
We've both found what we were looking for
With this cat to call my own
My croc won't be alone
And you, my friend, will be
Star of Yates menagerie
(Star of Yates menagerie)
Ming, you're always hiding here and there
(Here and there)
Harlem don't want no tigers anywhere
(Anywhere)
If you're loose out on the street
And don't like what folks you meet
There's one thing you should know
You've got a place to go
(You've got a place to go)
I used to say "house" and "me"
Now it's "zoo", now it's "we"
I used to say "house" and "me"
Now it's "zoo", now it's "we"
Ming, most folks they would a'euthanize
Me, I don't look out with their frightened eyes
They don't see you as I do
I wish they would try to
I'm sure they'd not fear a thing
If they had a friend like Ming
(a friend) Like Ming
(like Ming)
Like Ming
The A-List, as regular readers can attest, is what you would call a real bunch of cynical sonofableep(s), but our black hearts were tickled -- tickled, we tell you! -- by the urban myth come-to-life that is Antoine Yates and his pet tiger, Ming. While Vegas illusionist Roy Horn was living through a showbiz tragedy that echoed Houdini and the Flying Wallendas -- i.e., the life-threatening, on-stage mishap -- away from the bright lights 37-year-old Antoine Yates, who neighbors have alternately described as "slow" and "different," was re-enacting another kind of legend as he recovered this week from his own set of less severe tiger-inflicted injuries. At once addled and amorous, Yates channeled borderline insane and iconic black manchildren from Michael Jackson, to, well Michael Jackson, as he pledged undying love for his misunderstood pet, calling the animal that had almost bitten his arm off "my brother, my best friend, my only friend, really."
Really!
Reporters, cops, and prosecutors scrambled for days trying to figure out exactly how Yates managed to obtain a pet tiger in the first place (not to mention the alligator that was also found in the apartment), leaving the A-List with little to do except salivate, animal-like, at the prospect of some curious and hopefully illegal goings-on, this until a more banal explanation surfaced: Yates had just gone out and bought his tiger. What's more bizarre, we wonder: That a dim bulb like Yates could have kept a tiger in a Harlem apartment for three-to-four years, or that he had just hopped onto the Internet bought himself a tiger, and then kept it in a Harlem apartment for three-to-four years? The answer, of course, is: "both." While initial reports tried to paint the picture of a man hiding a dangerous animal in the depths of the urban jungle, Yates' neighbors at 2430 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd laconically told the media a different story, one where everyone in five-block radius (except uniformed police and civil servants, of course) knew about the open case of man-cub love going down at the Yates apartment. (Harlem's drug dealers must all be keeping tigers as well.) The story of Antoine 'N' Ming 4Ever did have one tragic undertone: for at least two of the years that Yates shared his apartment with his tiger and alligator, he also shared it with his mother, Martha Yates and several of her foster children. While Mother Yates had the sense to eventually flee the apartment for Philly (seriously!) one has to wonder exactly what broke the proverbial camel's back and exactly how New York City places foster children in a house with a tiger in it.
2. Music: Did Diddy Do The Dirt?
Sean Combs (we'll use his gov'ment name in order to avoid any confusion) was right when he said "Mo Money Mo' Problems." In what could very well be a classic case of sour grapes, Kirk Burrowes, former president of Bad Boy Records, has been making the media rounds alleging Combs was behind the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Jai "Big Jake" Hassan, friend and bodyguard of Death Row CEO Suge Knight. Burrowes (who signed away an early 25% stake in Bad Boy under what he claims was duress) has reportedly sworn out a statement that Combs directly ordered the homicides, which were carried out by an elite group of bad boys known as, er, "The Enterprise." Burrowes' high-ranking position at Bad Boy may well have made him privy to incriminating info about Combs and assassination supergroups with corny-sounding R&B names, but so far he hasn't done much besides repeat well-known (and discredited) hearsay for New York press. Conspiracies linking Puff and Biggie to Tupac's murder have been floating around forever, while published reports from here to Haiti have fingered Combs crony Anthony "Wolf" Jones as Hassan's alleged (and long un-charged and unconvicted) killer. Unless Burrowes can come up with a smoking gun -- literally -- he's looking at a mighty nice defamation suit. The A-List just hopes that this doesn't affect Combs' ability to run the New York Marathon for charity next month; babies in Brooklyn need that money!
3. New York: African Burial Ground Homecoming
The A-List remembers quite clearly when we first heard the news in 1991 that the remains of an estimated 20,000 free and enslaved Africans and African Americans had been found in NYC's Wall Street area. While we were arguably a pretty jaded collective even back then during the flower of our professional youth, we would not have imagined in our most cynical nightmare that it would be more than a decade before the uncovered bones of those ancestors were properly re-laid to rest.
Over the last twelve years it has taken the efforts of countless activists and civic organizations to prevent the site from being completely desecrated and built over, proof positive that the devaluing of black life doesn't end with death. 419 skeletons (a great many of which belonged to children) and over 1.5 million artifacts were taken to Howard University for study, and the resulting data challenges the misperception that slavery in the North was somehow less inhumane and severe than slavery in the South. Many of the men, women and children died from malnutrition, disease and exhaustion, while the sheer numbers buried at the site repositions New York as the second largest slave-owning city in the 18th Century. When the Howard study was complete, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture organized a Rites of Ancestral Return to return the 300 of the deceased to the Burial Ground in New York City. Thousands turned out in New York to honor the ancestors, and we hope the ceremony brought a little bit of peace to a part of the city that has seen its fair share of death both then and now.
4. Branding: Beyonce's Name is on Your Behind
Hold tight girls and boys-who-like-to-dress-like-girls: pretty soon you'll be able to look just like Beyonce!
Okay, we lied. You will never, EVER look just like Beyonce. But besides treating your hair to a whole bottle of Feria and mainlining Pepsi, you will soon be able to lip sync to "Crazy in Love" in clothes purportedly designed by Miss B (or at least purportedly designed by her mama). How can this be, you ask? Well, in hopes of ascending ever higher up the peaks of brand name superstardom, Beyonce recently announced plans to launch two clothing lines with mom, Tina Knowles. The 22-year-old Star Search alumnus is, of course, far from being the first pop tart with a startup clothing line. Fashion world darling and blond bombshell rapper Eve's recently launched Fetish label appears off to a good start, while the Olson Twins have gone beyond day-into-evening wear into the murky land of jailbait-into-barely-legal with a line of their very own. Savvy clothing companies have obtained permi$$ion to use the names of everyone from Jenny from the Block, to Jay-Z and to even Venus and Serena, with Puffy the only celeb to date to go beyond the cynical licensing game and create an actual couture line. Since she's gonna go ahead and follow suite -- this despite the fact that clothing is difficult biz where margins can fit on the head of a pin -- all the A-List can do is pray Ms. B doesn't pull a Kathy Lee or Michael Jordan and get in bed the sort of company that violates the human and labor rights of young brown or yellow girls in Third World countries by paying them pennies a day to play with dangerous machinery and toxic chemicals.
5. Games: Monopolizing Cliches in Ghettopoly
The A-List's inbox has filled to capacity with complaints about a new game called Ghettopoly. In this rip-off of the board-game favorite, Monopoly, ghetto iconography -- street corner drug dealers, graffiti-covered subways, and crack houses -- replaces the street repairs, railroads and hotels of yore, the standard money-earning gameplay turned inside out by inane stereotypes and caricatures of black icons like "Malcum X Blvd" and "Martin Luthor King, Jr." (The get-out-of jail-free cards are, naturally, retained.)
When asked about the game, Michael Chang, the Asian American creator of Ghettopoly, protests that when it comes to racism, we're all in the same gang in 2003: "Should I boycott every single black comedian who makes jokes about Asian Americans?" he asks. "Is Jay Leno a racist because he made a comment about Asian people eating dogs? How about Dave Chappelle, is he a racist too? Do you think the puppets they use on Crank Yankers are stereotypical too? How about Snoop dog, is his show on MTV racist?"
Very post-modern defense of your business, Mr. Chang, but while the A-List can't help but feel that marshalling the civil rights troops to protest a board-game is a bit, well, wasteful in a time of illegal war, official malfeasance, imposter presidencies, economic collapse and the election of cartoon characters to major offices, we do understand where the critics are coming from. No matter how you flip it, frame it or even try to forget it, the urban ghetto of 20th and 21st Century America is strongly associated with black people and our experiences in such neighborhoods, making any game (or art, for that matter) about said neighborhoods about us in profound and usually troubling ways. For younger African Americans who came of age around racial categories that are significantly more fluid than those our parents faced and inhabited, balancing free-and-easy post-black cultural cosmopolitanism with wariness at the persistence of stubborn, undying negative images is difficult work, and our own complicated relationships to some of these images (Pimp nostalgia: Harmless fun or dangerous stereotype?) makes it easier for outsiders to appropriate and recombine them in ways we might not appreciate
At its core, the whole Ghettopoly fracaso is less about a deliberate insult to African America and more about how easily a calculating commercial scheme can use the heat from the still boiling racial pot to produce quick profits. While we may not exactly share the outrage of some of our elders, we do feel a more matter-of-fact version of the sentiment conveyed by Naughty By Nature's 1991 "Ghetto Bastard:"
If you ain't never been to the ghetto
Don't ever come to the ghetto
Because you wouldn't understand the ghetto.
So stay the f_ _ _ out of the ghetto.
6. South Africa: Steve Biko's Alleged Killers To Get Off
Sometimes justice is just denied, denied, denied, and you may as well not even hope for it. Such is the case when it comes to the murder of South African activist and writer Steven Biko. Killed in 1977 during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Biko became a potent symbol of that freedom fight - he was immortalized in Hollywood's Cry Freedom by Denzel Washington - but hero status means little when it comes to the South African justice system. Sadly enough so do truth and accountability. News comes this week that the five men who killed Biko are going to continue to elude justice for their acts. Biko died after being tortured and interrogated for his acts against the apartheid state - acts that primarily consisted of writing and publishing essays about freedom - and his death was a serious public, as well as personal, loss. All of which makes it unforgivable that his killers still walk free.
7. Politics: Bugs Found in Philly Mayor John Street's Office
The A-List has been feeling echoes of the '70s lately, and they're only getting stronger. High unemployment, daily body count numbers from overseas, and an unsettling sense that the government scandals we hear about are only the tip of a conspiracy-filled iceberg - yep, freaky days are here again. The news out of Philly reminds us how when paranoia strikes deep, it strikes deeper when you're black. And you know what they say: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. In the case of Philadelphia's African American mayor, John Street, it would appear he's got reason to feel suspicious. Not only is he locked in a close electoral race with Republican challenger Sam Katz, but aides found bugs in his office this week, the FBI confirmed that they placed the bugs there as part of an investigation. Who are they investigating, and why? The Feds aren't saying, but Street's people suspect the bug and inquiry are related to either a Black Muslim Street supporter, Imam Shamsud-din Ali (whose allegedly no-show adult ed classes have already been a target of investigation), or to Street's involvement in a big contract for airport renovation (which is already under grand jury investigation). Hey, big city politics are complex - few are the major urban mayors who haven't been under some kind of investigation at one point - and we have no idea how this'll play out. But the news of the bugging, the whole gritty, shaky, The Conversation-esque vibe to it, has us feeling itchy, man.
8. Racism: An All-White Delivery for Racist Parents
Despite the evidence of Butterfly McQueen, as Sissy in Gone With the Wind, fluttering her hands, rolling her eyes, and declaring she " know nothin' about birthin' babies," countless thousands of white folks have relied upon black domestic help to assist in the birth of their young'uns. We're not talking just during slave days, when the circuit-riding country doctor arrived just in time to share a congratulatory cigar after some longsuffering housemaid did the real work, but even today, in big hospitals whose staffs are stacked with black and brown help at the scut-work level (while white doctors and executives serenely preside). It's not usually inconsistent with white racist values to let a black woman help you push one out - which is why we're so surprised by the news this week of a hardcore racist couple in Pennsylvania who requested that no black workers assist in the birth of their own little Damien. What upset us even more was the hospital's willingness to go along with this request. We guess good help ain't that hard to find, in today's crappy economy - but the hospital that alienates its black nurses is gonna have a hell of a time functioning efficiently, because in the hospitals we've seen, that's who gets things done. We hope the local NAACP protest, which extracted promises of changes (including diversity training), has the desired effect of changing, if not hearts and minds, at least policies.
9. Hollywood: Ice Cube Replaces Vin Diesel in XXX Sequel
Black folk in Hollywood sure love them some Vin Diesel leftovers! First Tyrese took Diesel's place as minority man-of-the-minute in 2 Fast 2 Furious, and now Ice Cube replacing Diesel as furloughed-convict turned super-agent in the sequel to XXX. The A-List is happy to see Ice Cube getting that raptor money, but anyone who saw Ghosts of Mars already knows where this film is headed if it's not seen early carefully: straight to video. (Has Ice Cube ever been in a successful action flick, anyway? Three Kings doesn't count because he was following Clooney and Wahlburg's lead, and Boyz 'N'The Hood is more properly understood as a drama. But we digress. ) More important is why Cube was picked for this movie at all. The A-List is almost positive that posters and old CDs of Cube's mean muggin' days as a Nigga With Attitude are prized accessories in the smoke rooms of half the male exec under 40 in Hollywood, which means that when they get to thinking of black men to cast as tough guys they're gonna be looking further and further away from acting schools and closer to Billboard. Thespians beware.
10. And that's all for this week, folks!
If you like what you read here, forward it. If you think the A-List is a hater, forward it to all your friends and tell them to complain. If you don't understand our sense of humor, send it to every civil rights org in America and demand that they PUT A STOP TO US
But:
If you want more A-List, come back to www.Africana.com, same A-List time (Friday), same A-List channel! If you want the A-List stopped, come back to Africana, same A-List time (Friday), same A-List channel so that you can collect more information for your anti-A-List prayer circle. No matter what you do, just keep coming back and forwarding those links!
About the Author: The A-List loves our kitty, and we hug him and love him and kiss him all day long, we do!
Posted by ebogjonson at 7:08 PM | Permalink
The Africana A-List: June 13, 2003
This article was first published on Africana.com on June 13, 2003
The A-List is a compendium of the most important things African America discussed this week. This week on the A-List: Item 1: The NBA Finals are nothing but net! (and sippy cups).
The A-List: 06.13.03
Compiled by Africana Staff
This week on the A-List:
1. Nothing but net (and sippy cups!)
The A-List contains multitudes, as you know, and some of us like the Lakers and some of us loathe the Lakers, but even Lakers-loathers have to admit: the NBA Finals this year truly suck. It's enough to make us yearn for Shaq and Kobe! How can we care about games in which neither team shoots more than 35% from the floor; where the big men are the supremely charisma-lacking Kenyon Martin, Tim Duncan and David Robinson; and the most exciting drama came weeks ago, when a Boston-based sportswriter admitted he wanted to smack Jason Kidd's wife? Between the false hype over lackluster play and the lackluster news this week that BET's Bob Johnson just named his newly-acquired franchise the Charlotte Bobcats (get it? Bob...cats?) we were yet again instructed in the deep, cynical, all-consuming narcissism that accompanies all corporate mediocrity. (Although, let's face it, the Charlotte story made us glad Colin Powell didn't buy himself a sports franchise.)
If you think you're suffering, consider the lot of Mark Walker, Jr.. First of all, if this league gets any staler or more pathetic, by the time he's ready to lace up (at age 15?) the NBA will be just about as exciting as Bowling for Dollars. Don't recognize his name? Perhaps then you've
The exploitation of children is a story with a long history and a shifting center -- one century it's hard labor, the next it's premature celebrity -- but nobody except the professional moralists can be very surprised by Reebok's decision to run with the cute kid during this season of snore-inducing parity. (Jason Kidd and Tim Duncan vying for a title?! What's next, a ring for Allen Iverson? Chris Webber!?) Little Mark's freak-of-nature moments aside, (and let's be honest: watching a blank-faced child drain 18 shots in a row on video is cute; being alone in the room with him when he does it is some Damien-type stuff) he is pretty adorable, and it sounds like it would be hard to resist the full-bore publicity machine that is his mother. A former high school athlete herself, Mom reportedly initiated the kid's 90-minute training sessions a couple of years ago, which is to say when he was one, and after BET and ESPN carried clips of Mark some KC television stations claim they had to rebuff her lobbying for local human interest coverage. Why? Mom was "too pushy." (Under normal circumstances we would interpret that "too pushy" as the all-to-common white misreading of focused blackwoman energy, but stage-mothers are a race unto themselves.) Between Mom and the sneaker campaign, some Mark-watchers have been carping that the shoe companies are out of control, that they pander to and hook black kids like the neighborhood pusher, but that's old hat and misses the point: for every kid out there who does something crazy for a pair of sneaks, there are six mowing lawns in order to save up for them -- and 20 pining away until something else comes along to catch their consumerist fancy. And for every Mark Walker, Jr. who is exploited by Reebok, well, there are ten thousand more laboring for chump change stitching Nikes in Asian sweatshops. So: which kid do you wanna save?
The Nets win on Wednesday, BTW.
2. Looking for a Cover-Up?
The New York tabs are reporting that police-shooting victim Ousmane Zongo had not been dead for a day when the NYPD raided his apartment, emptying drawers and overturning tables. His roommate, another immigrant, reports ransacking and terror, while the cops report a routine attempt to "confirm Zongo's identity" -- that is to say, a routine attempt to confirm that the deceased was a drug user who deserved to die. The cops deny it, but stealth eyeball reconnaissance of apartments is common after fatal weapon discharges, searches that are usually conducted with a little more subtlety than in Zongo's case, or, for that matter, Amadou Diallo's. (His apartment went topsy-turvy during a posthumous police visit, likely in search of something to render Diallo's wallet more threatening-seeming.)
Since the A-List, like any collective black news log, faces the possibility of random police violence every day, we've decided to pre-publish an inventory of things in our apartment that could potentially be used to assassinate our characters in the event of their untimely, police-related demise:
Item: Year-old bottle of Vicadin
Explanation: Prescribed after extraction of wisdom teeth
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Narcotic addict / dealer
Item: .mp3 collection
Explanation: We like beats
What it makes us according to the NYPD: CD piracy ring ringleader
Item: Stray cat
Explanation: We love that cat!
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Animal rights terrorist. (If mispronounced "chat" during police briefing, we can also be identified as a "drug user" and/or "Somali warlord.")
Item: Snapshots from yearly Africana office trip to Paint Ball range
Explanation: Yearly Africana office trip to Paint Ball range
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Gun enthusiast and loner
Item: Marijuana cigarette
Explanation: Uh, Rastafarian religious sacrament
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Drug addict / dealer
Item: Bootleg The Matrix Reloaded DVD
Explanation: Feeling that the movie would not be worth 10 dollars
What it makes us according to the NYPD: DVD piracy ring ringleader
Item: Porno collection
Explanation: Downtime between significant others; kinky significant (and not-so-significant) others
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Sex offender and loner
Item: Paperback copy of Edward Said's Orientalism
Explanation: Unfinished masters degree
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Al Qaeda member
Is there something innocent in your apartment that you don't want the NYPD (or John Ashcroft) to use against you? If so, email the A-List and if your list is innocent enough, we will document it here for all posterity!
3. Remembrance of Monkey Dog Pox Past
You can tell the A-List the truth: when you first heard about "monkey pox" you thought about monkeys, right? Monkeys from the country-of-Africa, yes? Don't be ashamed. Your Pavlovian conditioning by the news has been total and complete for many years, so no one is that surprised that the media's never ending game of subliminal word-association took you in one fell, frisson-filled swoop from 50 or so sick Midwestern prairie dog enthusiasts to Africa. Like SARS and West Nile Virus, diseases that cull the 2% of the population that was literally born yesterday or lives in an iron lung while giving everyone else the flu, monkey pox is a mostly conceptual, low-mortality epidemic designed to keep Americans in front of their televisions and away from foreigners, what with their foreign germs and ways and ideas. Since the A-List is a higher form of life evolved past the control of matrix tricknology, we, of course, didn't think of Africa when we heard about the monkey pox, but of our beloved Kansas.
You see, back when the A-List was a small child growing up in Kansas, we were fascinated by prairie dogs, the collectivist critters implicated in the current pox outbreak. We even wanted to be one the pocket-sized, yellowish rodents, standing attentive on their hind legs like impish little Stalinists. This was back before we were assimilated into the anonymous collective that is the A-List, but even then the notion of being part of a mammalian hive-mind seemed tantalizing and attractive. We never saw a live prairie dog, of course, but there were rumors and simulacra. For example, the Natural History Museum had the animatronic prairie dog that would pop its head out of its diorama hole every 60 seconds or so, fiendishly confounding impatient grade-schoolers, who would invariably tire of waiting and turn away just before -- pop! -- he did it. Then there were the schoolyard reports in third grade about someone's uncle having a real-life prairie dog farm, with prairie dog barns and everything! And then there was the roadside attraction advertised on old-school wooden billboards along I-70, promising visitors a chance to see "The World's Largest Prairie Dog," a hoax if you wanted your dog made of meat, blood and fur instead of concrete. Yes, for many years we pondered the nature, inner life and divine purpose of these creatures, bur when we left Kansas we didn't think we'd have much occasion to marvel at them again.
That all changed this week, sending us down memory lane to the American heartland while the media sent everyone else packing to a more Conradian heart of darkness via screaming headlines about THE FIRST OUTBREAK OF MONKEY POX IN WESTERN HEMISHPERE! (As Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show quipped: "Hell-lo Monkey Pox! Welcome to the White Folk Buffet!") Still, despite the Kansas connection, Africa ended up being (place)name-checked more explicitly as the story unfolded, with reports that the pox was passed on to the prairie dogs by a continental cousin: the more prosaically named Gambian giant rat.
That's right, America. Blame the African relative.
4. Original Men Found Even More Original
Unlike Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, skeletons identifying Africa as the birthplace of the human species just keep getting found and found and found! The latest find: three 160,000 year-old skulls in Ethiopia. For non-believers, the skulls are three more proofs of humanity's African heritage to ignore, but the A-List knows that someday the truth will run free and wild in the streets. The only potential negative to this story is the added impetus it provides white hippies and white-identified black folks to silkscreen even more of thise corny "Race: Human" t-shirts.
5. The Negation of the Negation
Check it, we've seen it before: white entertainer attaches self to black style star power only to reap success beyond measure. Usually this is a matter of borrowing culture or energy -- Elvis and blues, all of rock-n-roll and blues, Madonna and black gayness, Quentin Tarentino and the n-word -- but in this, our sensation-starved age, the latest appropriation craze might just involve bringing back an old favorite from the days of Jim Crow: black death. No, lynching's not making a comeback, but it does seem Sly "Yo! Adrian" Stallone is all set to write, direct, and star in, no less, a film about the slayings of hip hop immortals Biggie and 2Pac. Don't worry, he hasn't proposed to play one of the fallen rappers on the screen, but is instead planning to portray renegade LAPD Detective Russell Poole. Poole, long a staple of WH1's Behind the Music, believes that Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur were the victims of a conspiracy planned by a nasty menage-a-trio of dirty cops, rap moguls and gangsters. Yah think? Either way, what we cram to understand is why Stallone has asked Suge Knight of Death Row Records to play himself, who we all know has been implicated a number of times by Poole in both murders. Suge has a reputation, for, shall we say, being touchy, and while he was recently cleared of the Radar Magazine smeared feces prank (it seems the editors of the new monthly got a letter smeared with poop signed "Suge" after they named him one of media's "monsters") we don't necessarily advise getting on his bad side. At best, the casting proves Sly ain't so sly, and at worst it proves this movie isn't about heart, but cash money and multi-media cross marketing. Rest easy, Christopher Wallace and Tupac Amaru Shakur; we know that can be hard at times like these, but still.
6. Help Liberia Help Itself
Only a week after we complained that the international media wouldn't touch the troubles of Liberia with a ten-foot pole, the West African country has started showing up all over the headlines. While we're gratified that the collective attention of the media has focused -- like the dread Eye of Sauron! -- on the A-List, the mo' news coming out of the country is still depressing. President Charles Taylor announced yesterday that there will be no peace in the country, where more than 300,000 people have died since 1990, if a UN-backed court does not drop war crimes charges it has leveled against him. Meanwhile, two different rebel groups are closing in on Monrovia, the country's capital, where a longstanding humanitarian crisis -- no electricity or running water for more than a decade -- has been worsened by the recent tribulations. Other West African nations are making a final bid for peace, but these are grim days for Africa's oldest modern nation, one founded in 1846 by freed black slaves from the United States.
7. Impeach the Imposter President, part 2
If the Dubya knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction -- notice in recent appearances he has taken to talking about the search for WMD programs as opposed to the actual, you know, weapons -- then he can and should be impeached.
Now, the A-List isn't a fancy policy expert or a constitutional lawyer, we just know what we believe. And what we believe is that Bush needs to go. We've said it a few times already -- the "part 1" to this item is, for convenience's sake, an aggregate of all the times we've used the words "impeach" or "imposter" previously -- and we have since started to observe the sparks, pockets and bubbles of similar opinion. As the months drag on without discovered WMD's, and once the Blair administration in the UK falls over its decision to wage an illegal war on the basis of deliberate lies, those sparks, pockets and bubbles will grow into a consensus -- we have been lied to -- at which point all bets are off.
So will leave the fancy analysis to the experts, and instead plan to do what we do best, which is repeat ourselves. We will keep repeating ourselves here until either Bush is voted out or WMD's are found. So: Impeach the Imposter President!
8. Bush To Apologize for Slavery Next Month in Africa!
Sike! However, the White House did confirm this week that Dubya is making a weeklong visit to Africa next month that will sweep through Senegal, Nigeria and South Africa. Bush staffers like to boast that this President has met more African heads of state than any other in history and his $15 billion pledge to fight AIDS on the continent has just been approved on Capitol Hill. That may be the case, but what we'd like to see is the Imposter President touring the slave dungeons at Goree Island in Senegal.
About the Author: The A-List will break you down with a quickness.
Posted by ebogjonson at 6:53 PM | Permalink
The Africana A-List: May 16, 2003
This article was first published on Africana.com on May 16, 2003
The A-List is a compendium of the most important things African America discussed this week. This week on the A-List: Item #1: The Blair Smear Project.
The A-List: 05.16.03
Compiled by Africana Staff
This week on the A-List:
1. Jayson Vs ...?
Since the Jayson Blair affair broke like a rotten egg against the back of the A-List's various screens last week, at least six of our acquaintances have commented that what young Master Blair needs most at this point is not therapy but a good, old fashioned ass-whipping. Three have wondered whether the "troubled" young man will commit suicide, two expressing worry, while the third (a pal, but one with a fondness for shocking utterances) offered to help him. Seen from the standpoint of community self-policing, all these suggestions have a certain cathartic seductiveness to them, especially when made by reasonable professional folk without a violent bone in their body. Everyone feels a little dirty now and is looking for ways to get clean ASAP, and there's nothing like a little imagined violence to soothe a troubled collective soul, especially when the object of that violence is a universally vilified hustler with few defenders beyond his folks, lawyers, shrink and (eventually) book agent.
The awful feeling that needs out breathing, this anxiety about guilt-by-association (even as the vast majority of us are practically -- heck, wholly -- unassociated), might be a psychic disorder created by endured racism, but that doesn't mean it isn't common. Moreover, the feeling of implication in Blair's misdeeds isn't just a feature of this story, it's also its whole reason for being. If this one man's fraud didn't offer an opportunity to shame an entire race it wouldn't be half the story it is now. It would wax and wane in the familiar rhythm of a normal news cycle, as opposed to the current hyperventilating frenzy. The firestorm that has erupted around newsroom diversity, the attacks on The New York Times' "liberal" editorial page, the immediate appearance of reverse racism ambulance chasers like the odious Jim Sleeper -- all these things are signs of a story that jumped several quantum states to become of greater value to one or another constituency than the sum of its parts might indicate. The Times is a fit news organization even at its worst, so it will root around in its own muck and identify the organizational whys-and-hows that allowed this to happen, but for the rest of us Jayson Blair has transitioned from news subject to national symbol, a magic mirror who will reflect whatever the observer's needs and biases are at any given moment.
The reflections so far have run the gamut, ranging from predictable white whining to its black opposite number. (As The Black Commentator website richly intoned: "Blair's alleged transgressions are proof only that The New York Times is a bad judge of Black people -- as is normal among racists.") The A-List's reaction has been that while this story does not necessarily prove anything about hiring, it is proof that peculiar, shady things go on between white and black people in purportedly "liberal" work environments. Racist work environments have an awful clarity to them where white disdain structures everything, but shops where white people have explicitly taken up the challenge of doing the Lord's racial work (or been told to by their managers) can have freakish racial cross-currents, pockets of self-consciousness, blindness, over-analysis and back again where racism's traditional playing field has been re-drawn by the emergence of new playing pieces and new strategies. The new peculiarities of the board allow for a pathological personality like Blair to subvert the system to be sure, but it also allows closet racists to carry on business as usual, their actions camouflaged by the new backdrop. These new kinds of familiarity also breed new kinds of contempt. The great secret of environments like a New York Times' newsroom isn't that black people working there are coddled by weak white liberals, but that the vast majority of black and white co-workers don't socialize and don't really like each other much for reasons having very much to do with race. Everyone still manages to get their respective jobs done most of the time anyway. The old, idealized mythology of integration required that we all hold hands and get along, but today all you really need do is produce. Ironically, Jayson Blair produced alright, but just not what anyone wanted or expected.
As for Jayson himself, if he isn't beyond caring about such details, he will be soon. A book agent recently speculated that a Jayson Blair tell-all would be worth seven figures, as if this young man who reportedly just moved out of a ruined, dirty shamble of an apartment and into a hospital, as if hecould get it together to finish a book proposal, let alone the actual book. (To suggest that he would have the agility to profit form his current notoriety is both cynical and cruel, while the other possibility -- that an agent will put the whole deal together for him and hold his hand while he signs the contract -- is equally unpleasant.) In any case, Jayson is about to enter that rarified zone of infamy where he doesn't really need a book deal. Like OJ, all he'll needs to do is just walk the earth while everyone around him stops and stares and marvels that he'd have the nerve to show his face, keep breathing, whatever. The A-List once literally ran into OJ in a revolving door in Vegas and what struck us about him was his awful invulnerability to our shock at bumping into a double murderer. Men like OJ are invulnerable to libel, slander and public opinion; call him guilty and he'll head to the craps table with the same equanimity as if you'd high-fived him. Jayson Blair is going to have to develop that kind of disconnected toughness if he's going to survive, which might be the ultimate shame. After all, it's not like he killed anyone.
2. To Be Young, Black, Gay, and A Morehouse Man
Homosexuality on black college campuses has always existed but usually in invisible networks deep, deep underground. Only the most scandalous gay rumors made the gossip on the HBCU yard -- like the occasional frat boy whose roommate caught him messing around with the quarterback or the evergreen rumors that some of the guys in the choir sleep with, well, some of the other guys in the choir. So, last week when we heard that Morehouse College had sent out a e-mail survey designed to take the temperature of student's attitudes about homosexuality, we gasped, "Lord, how things are changing!" Our excitement was short lived, dying down after we heard that Morehouse's gay students were uhappy with the survey, calling the questions on it insensitive and homophobic. The A-List agrees that activists have an imperative to play watchdog, especially since the school's policies in the future would rest on results from a survey like this. Although we're probably being naive, we think everyone should wait to see what conclusions Morehouse administrators reach in June before tearing their effort apart. Morehouse and Howard are the only HBCUs with any kind of pro-active effort in place to address the needs of homosexual students and we should applaud, encourage and counsel those initiatives -- not protest them.
3. Aww Shucks, Hush That Fuss
When we were kids we remember laughing at the way our grandparents dismissed hip hop as that "bumpity-bump music" that was bringing black folks down, mostly it seems, by popularizing "hoodlum hairdos" like locks and cornrows. Those criticisms seemed pretty flimsy even to our third-grade sensibilities, since their elders probably said the same thing about jazz, conks and zoot suits. Sure, maybe they had a right to be appalled by NWA fringe of the culture, but most of the rappers we listened to were about uplifting the race one way or another, a message we're quite sure our grandparents would have connected with had they bothered to look past the ruffian surface. That's exactly why Rosa Park's continuing legal fight with Outkast is so maddening. What should have been an opportunity for some cross-generational alliance-building between a Civil Rights icon and a progressive, popular rap group is now a costly, messy lawsuit. Someone should have been able to explain to Ms. Parks and her attorneys that Outkast was trying pay creative tribute, not smear her name. Or if she really, really just wanted a royalty check, she should have been up front about that. It's hard to imagine Outkast saying no to a reasonable, private negotiation. But now, with the case being kicked around Midwest appeals courts, it's too late for anyone to back down.
4. The Thieves of Baghdad Hit Nigeria
Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, the oil services company Halliburton, is in the news again this week -- well, sort of, since the story didn't make the American news media. A Nigerian newspaper, The Vanguard, reports that officials from Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton (already criticized for winning a closed bid postwar contract in Iraq), bribed a Nigerian tax official with multi-million dollar payola. But the deception doesn't end there. Last week Senate Democrats in Washington also questioned the military about Halliburton's Iraq contract, which was originally supposed to be for fighting fires but now includes the operation of oil wells and the distribution of oil. Hmmm. Take the most corrupt cohort of businesspeople/politicians America has seen in its recent history and mix them with Africa's most corrupt politicians/business people (Nigerians) -- what else could you possibly get?
5. Russell Simmons, Susan Sarandon, Coalition of Hip Hop Artists Fight Rockefeller Drug Laws
It's easy to be cynical about Russell Simmons' evolving persona as hip hop's political guru/(pied piper?), but he's fighting some good fights lately. Maybe there is a hidden bottom line agenda in play, but so far it seems like he's just accepting his responsibility as a rich, powerful black man and putting his executive skills to good use. First he organized a well-attended emergency rally in protest of proposed budget cuts in the New York City school system (last spring?). Not only did thousands of students, parents and teacher mobilize at Simmons' behest, but some of his friends in the rap community did as well, giving the protest enough media-savvy celebrity polish to freeze the planned cuts. Now he's joining the motley coalition organizing around the fight to repeal New York's Rockefeller drug laws. (The laws impose long, mandatory sentences on non-violent drug offenders, most of whom are black or Latino.) The fact that Dr. Ben Chavis, Andrew Cuomo and Al Sharpton are among the strange bedfellows leading this charge gives us a moment's pause, but the issue is important enough that we'll take comfort in their collective naked ambition. Those guys wouldn't sit at the same dinner table unless they smelled victory cooking.
6. Dennis Rodman Marries Girlfriend But Won't Live With Her
Remember how your mom always said, "Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?" (Remember how seriously you took her, as you frantically hid all signs of cohabitation -- including that boyfriend or girlfriend you somehow let move in -- before each of her visits, pretending you were pretty much a virgin?) If it's a well-known fact that living together before marriage is, if more or less accepted among certain age groups, still considered scandalous by Mom and her crowd, what on earth do you think she'd make of its opposite: marriage without cohabitation? Ever breaking new lifestyle ground, former NBA star/embarrassment Dennis Rodman recently announced that he and longtime girlfriend Michelle Moyer (with whom he shares two children) will not be living together once they are married next month. She can come over on weekends, he says -- unless it's poker night, we guess -- but as far as Rodman's concerned, we're guessing he feels like, why drink all that milk just because you own the cow? And hey, what if you don't want to have to drink the same milk from the same damn cow for the rest of your life?! We're not sure, but somehow we think Mom wouldn't approve of this arrangement either.
7. What's Your PSA?
The A-List wants, just for a moment, to get serious. We are inspired by reading that the Howard University Medical Center has launched a new center focusing on prostate health, and that Louis Farrakhan has lent it his name and blessing at an event last Sunday night. Prostate cancer is a leading cause of death in African American men, who are disproportionately at risk for dying of the disease. Among the rolls of black men who have faced prostate cancer are Cornel West, Andrew Young, Boston-area newscaster Charles Austin and Africana's own health columnist, Dr. Ben Carson. It's a killer that takes far too many men far too long before we are ready to lose them. Guys, we know you don't like strangers messing around down there but hey: talk to your doctor about prostate health. If you are 40 or over, get yourself tested. Do it for us -- your sisters, brothers, parents, children, lovers and friends. Live long enough, and who knows? Maybe they'll name something after you.
About the Author: Defending the free city of Zion against the machines to our last gasp.
Posted by ebogjonson at 6:17 PM | Permalink
The Africana A-List: March 14, 2003
This article was first published on Africana.com on March 14, 2003
The A-List is a compendium of the most important things African America discussed this week. This week on the A-List: Item #1: In Praise of Black Mediocrity!
The A List: 03.14.03
Compiled by Africana Staff
This week on the A-List:
1. God Bless Black Hollywood Mediocrity!
The A-List wants to be a little less negative, seen? So we've been trying hard not to attack Queen Latifah for making a huge pile of loot by starring in and executive producing a single bad film. The way we see it, that the eye of history has captured (now indelible) images of the Queen of Self Respecting Hip Hop ("Who you callin' a sell-out?!") shucking, jiving, singing and carrying-on for white folks in the box office record-breaking Bringing Down the House is hardly an injury to the race. If anything, those images are racial advances. After all, the true measure of equality for black people in places like Hollywood (or your average corporation) isn't the freedom to succeed, it's the freedom to fail and still get paid the same way white people do.
The burden of blackness has always been the burden of having to be better than the white counterpart in order to succeed, but in Hollywood the rules of the playing field are perverted and then inverted by the fact that words like "success" and "better" have no functional relationship in the entertainment biz. In order to succeed, black Hollywood rarely needs to be better, but it usually needs to be worse on the daily: more craven, more desperate, more willing to prostitute itself, more eager to win at the dirty Hollywood game -- more, more, more, and all of it adding up to less, less, less in terms of enduring black film culture. Consider how many rich black people there are in the film business and how few great artists. Consider how the awfulness of House becomes an asset in Latifah's Oscar quest for Chicago, Latifah's willingness to fall on her racial sword in order to protect Hollywood capital during troubled economic times an indication of her "seriousness," "staying power" and mogul-potential. With the exception of maybe Spike Lee and a few independent directors you'll likely not heard of, the mission in life of every black worker/player in Hollywood is to fall on that sword over and over again, and the ones who survive then proceed to chop each other to bits in hopes of being the one anointed to serve black audiences (and white executives) their next helping of the re-hashed, warmed-over movie mediocrity that fills black screens small and large every hour of every day -- chiltlin' circuit comedy, Arabesque-esque romantic comedies, fake ghetto realness straight outta 1989, feature-length music videos replete with vide-hoes, stupor-inducing black history docu-dramas destined for Lifetime and other cable burial grounds, de-sexed and emasculated black buddies, hyper-sexed inter-racial love interests, manipulative tear-jerkers and so on, not a frame of it worth the celluloid it's been exposed on and yet still able to support vast infrastructures of self-congratulation from here to the NAACP Images Awards.
In such an environment the true heroes aren't the innovators but the one-hit wonders and the persistent hangers on, the folks who day in and day out do nothing more than earn a living. (And we all know there's no sin, no form of cultural suicide or self-degradation that black folks won't forgive as long as the offender ambles up and swears up and down that they were just trying to earn a living, like there's something special about doing what everyone else has to do, only with much better looking people and for millions of dollars.) From Jaleel White, to Halle Berry, to Cuba Gooding, Jr., black Hollywood is a kind of moral and creative swamp of such low standing that its only possible analogue could be the cesspool that is white Hollywood, making dream factories of LA ironically enough the only places in the country where black and white are in the end, truly equal. So, we're not mad at you Latifah; in fact kudos for bringing us one step closer to Dr. King's dream of a colorblind America!
(Next week, the A-List will present: "God Bless Black Hollywood Mediocrity, Part 2: The fall of Cuba Gooding, Jr." Keep an eye out!)
2. Wubacked ubout pubedubophubile
Haven't read, seen or heard enough bizarre stories about Michael Jackson? Us neither! That's why we quite literally ran out to buy the April issue of Vanity Fair which, besides dissing Denzel, (see A-List item #3), also contains a lengthy expose on the alleged precariousness of MJ's finances, sanity and nasal organ. Among the article's many, many WTF?! moments, the one that particularly struck us was the revelation that little Michael Jackson regularly denigrates other black people using his own personal racial slur -- "spabooks." Now, maybe it was the recent passing of Mr. Rogers, or maybe it's the particular brand of spring fever that sets fire to the A-List's collective brain each year about now and leaves us as antsy as a schoolgirl (44 days and counting!), but for some reason that one-word window into Wacko Jacko's complex matrix of internalized racism/self-loathing tickled something in the part of the A-List's brain that stores memories of kiddie TV. Last week the A-List asked, "what the hell exactly is the derivation of spabook?" a question that rattled around in our heads all week along with the word itself -- spabook, schwa sound, roughly rhyming with "cahoot" -- until out popped the time-misted memory of a younger, more innocent A-List lying on a shag rug with our siblings, soaking up television rays while watching PBS's Zoom. And then it hit us: "spabooks" is none other than the curiously retro slur "spook" rendered in Ubbi Dubbi, the Zoomers' native tongue! For those of you too young, old, or unlucky to have been edutained by the kid-produced public television show, Ubbi Dubbi is like a post-hippie Pig Latin, a lingua franca for Zoom fans looking to talk over, under or past their parents' comprehension. Translating English into Ubbi Dubbi is easy -- you just insert the syllable "ub" before each new vowel sound in a word. For example, "Michael Jackson" becomes "Mubichubael Jubacksubon," whereas "spook" becomes "spubook," or, in the case of Vanity Fair's hearsay transcription "spabook!" Another pressing cultural mystery solved by the A-List! (And you better believe it: Michael would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for us meddling kids!)
But, in the way of all Jacksonia, our new understanding of yet another completely bugged aspect of Michael's life only opens the door to more troubling questions: Why use a kids language to transmit racial slurs unless you're cracking wise with Macaulay Culkin about the cuboluborubeds? Did a young Emmanuel Lewis ever hear Michael use the word during sleep-overs? And what of Bubbles -- or, as we now know him post-Ubbi Dubbi decryption, "Bbles" -- was he silenced to prevent him from sharing what exactly he knew about Michael and when? Rest assured the A-List is on the case, and as for "prubomubise nubot tubo tubell thube pubolubice whubat hubappubened uband Ubi'll gubive yubour pubarubents uba nubew hubouse uband uba mubillubiubon dubollubars!"
You're smart; you can translate that one all by your lonesome.
3. Vanity No Fair
Wanna know the longstanding conventional wisdom that drives the covers of your favorite mainstream magazine? Put a black man on the cover and stand back as newsstand sales plummet, what with all the myopic, middle-aged white folks mistaking the title for Essence or Vibe. (Black women fare marginally better on non-black magazines, although the statistics are likely being queered by the phenomenal success of the all-Oprah-all-the-time O Magazine.) As a cynical old media whore, the A-List knows the score, but we were still truly disappointed by Vanity Fair's April cover. Hollywood heavyweights Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Jack Nicholson and Harrison Ford mug for the camera, but reigning Best Actor Denzel Washington is conspicuously absent. The cover is a triptych fold-out and while Sam Jackson and Don Cheadle hold it down on the middle panel, the whole thing is just too damned white for words. Rumor has it the magazine offered Denzel a spot in the middle panel, but the Academy Award winner and director declined. This is not the first time Vanity Fair has done Denzel wrong. Back when he and Halle won Oscars last year, neither made the cover, and the last time Denzel graced it was in the '80s. Curiously, Denzel is also absent from the April Essence cover dubbed "Box Office Chocolates" which features Don Cheadle, again, as well as Omar Epps, Morris Chestnut, Mos Def and other black luminaries. Whubat's ubup wubith thubat?
4. Welcome to the US of A! Would you like freedom fries with that?
It's not enough, we guess, that we have had to endure, lo these past months, our unelected president's endless posturing in pursuit of illegal oil war. Nor that prior to this year's saber-rattling we had to watch as our Oilman-in-Chief snubbed our global neighbors in the matter of the Kyoto accord. No, America wasn't quite an embarrassing enough place to live, world-community-wise. Not yet, at least. Like a burger sitting alone and bun-less on a plate, our deepening depression needed the perfect side dish to make it complete, and this side dish arrived right on cue this week with the bizarre decision by Capitol Hill eateries to angrily rename French-fried potatoes something more...stupid in protest of France's refusal to play ball on the American overthrow of Saddam. That's right, we want some "freedom fries" with those massacred Iraqi babies and disgustingly bloated oil profits! Like Soviet communists airbrushing out the photos of the discredited (and deceased) from group shots of the Politburo, the Congressional cafeterias (with the help of two idiot Republican congressmen) have plunged us all into an Orwellian nightmare by deciding to "ix" the French out of their greatest cultural partnership with America: the burger and fries. Now dubbed "freedom fries" by morons everywhere, the new form of politico-gastro-intestinal distress is by far the craziest thing the A-List has ever heard of this side of, well, Mubichubael Jubacksubon!
5. Theft is the sincerest form of flattery, we swear!
The other day the A-List was walking down the street, past our local Crate and Barrel store. As our gaze lingered on the overstuffed chairs, the leather ottomans, and sleek bookcases, we indulged our favorite fantasies of home-ownership (we often think about home-ownership as we make our daily journey from cramped, cluttered apartment to cramped, cluttered cubicle, and back again). Our eyes then fell on this -- the "harvest" rug from the store's new collection of floor coverings. The colors were so interesting, the pattern so inviting, it was all somehow familiar --then it hit us. Those concentric squares, set just slightly off-kilter, eerily mimic the "housetop" quilt pattern seen recently in the glorious "Quilters of Gee's Bend" show at the Whitney Museum (and the accompanying coffee-table book) which detailed the stunningly beautiful work of African American quilt makers. We of all people know good ideas come from everywhere -- shoot, every story in the A-List is ripped-off from somewhere; what did you think? That we're reporters or something? -- but then again, the A-List isn't a hugely profitable purveyor of middle-class comfort and style. (Yet.) We also aren't ripping-off the idiosyncratic yet communal aesthetic products of a historically powerless community in order to sell them to Dockers-wearing, Wall Street Journal-reading urbanites (...yet), people who, for just $899, can enjoy a knockoff of a folk art that distills centuries of poverty, isolation and pain without ever having to confront the historical context that makes the whole thing possible. Now, that, friends, is progress!
6. Racist domestic terrorists moonlighting as cops in Georgia
What's a black person in Georgia to do when the Klan comes a knockin'? Can't help you there (we live in Boston). But we can tell you the answer to that question is absolutely not "run to the cops!" The FBI is charging that a 42-year-old Georgia dad and poh-poh Chester James Doles, along with a whole rack of his fellow local law enforcement officers, are proud members of the -- yes, you guessed it! -- Ku Klux Klan. That's not so surprising considering the history of the South, but it is hard to explain how a felon with convictions for burglary and assault on an interracial couple manages to serve in law enforcement in post-9/11-background-check America. While the men, described by the arraigning judge as "domestic terrorists," sound nothing like the fine southern police officers the A-List is familiar with -- Carroll O'Conner's William "Bill" Gillespie, for example, as well as Enos and Roscoe; maybe Boss Hogg -- our soft, televisual side was genuinely touched when Doles, being led out in handcuffs, barked to his wife and two young sons, "You know what's on trial here! Step up to the plate! You boys got to!" (Which roughly translates as a message to the boys to grow up fast and kubill lubots ubof bluback pubeopuble. His wife, God bless her, responded, "they will!"
7. Give me Your UN Votes -- and maybe I'll give your hungry, huddled masses (yearning to eat free!) some grub
As voting members on the United Nations Security Council, the African nations Angola, Cameroon and Guinea probably got more western press this last week than they've gotten since the end of their various civil wars and wars of independence. With the Bush administration in need of Security Council votes in order to legitimate its Iraq attack, the trio of very poor countries find themselves in a precarious situation between the dueling Americans and French, both of whom provide them with foreign aid. Not above buying votes (witness the aid promised Turkey if only their legislators would allow US forces to use their country as a giant staging area) the United States has made it clear that it will be very grateful for any assistance the countries may offer.
8. Supreme Court Stays Texecution
Delma Banks had just ten more minutes to live -- literally, just enough time for one hand of Texas Hold'em -- when the US Supreme Court ruled late Wednesday night to stay his pending execution. His lawyers had argued that Banks, who is black, didn't get a fair trial after being charged with the 1980 murder of his coworker Richard Whitehead, who was white. Given the blatantly racist machinations of Texas-style justice over the years, the Court has had its docket full lately just trying to correct injustices (another black inmate, Thomas Miller-El, was taking off death row just last month after the Court found he had been convicted by a racially skewed jury). File this all under "things we are not surprised by," although the Court's willingness to reprieve Banks makes us hopeful that we as a nation may be moving away from the barbarous, unjust and morally bankrupt system that persists in places like Texas. Pass the freedom fries, Tex, and free that man before you fry him!
9. R. Kelly's Bedtime Story Book
Back in 1998, the R. joined a growing list of entertainers who have -- to varying degrees of success, been involved in the publication of children's books. The list includes Will Smith, Doug E. Fresh, L.L. Cool J and Spike Lee. Hell, even Michael "spabook" Jackson penned a Moonwalker Coloring Book. Well, amazingly enough, Fuzzy-Feelings Books saw fit to re-release I Can Fly: The R. Kelly Story -- due to popular, sex-scandal driven demand. Appropriate for 4-8 year olds, the hardcover book tells the life of R. Kelly in rhyming verse from his humble beginnings as an impoverished shortie crooning songs into a broomstick for an audience of imaginary invisible little girls to a bigtyme star. The book tells kids to believe in themselves and make their dreams come true. Now the A-list is all for telling kids to believe in themselves but this is just too much! Suspected child molesters should not be allowed to have children's books written about them unless they are cautionary tales.
10. Youssou Crazy!
If you didn't know, the A-List is international, mama. When Miss Dynamite and George Michael remixed "Faith" with an anti-war angle at the Brit Awards last month the A-List was there running recon for the American Grammys. Confident we would use the week in between the two shows to prepare a proper AMERICAN comeback, the A-List was positive that our former colonial masters wouldn't be able to out-do the home of rock and rap in terms of outspokenness. But after the only stateside artist brave enough to even mention the you-know-what was Limp Bizkit front-man Fred Durst, well you can imagine the A-List's disappointment.
Last weekend, though, our faith was restored when Youssou N'Dour, Africa's best-selling musician, cancelled his US tour in protest of the nation's -- sorry -- the president's planned you-know-what against Iraq. The A-List would like to take this moment to salute Youssou for choosing courage over currency. If Youssou can sacrifice the funds from 38 scheduled tour dates, then the A-List thinks a few American acts can do the same. These acts abuse drugs, make music about their awful mothers, and even get caught on tape sexing children and the records still sell. Protesting the war N'Dour style would/can only help their careers.
That's it for the A-List, so check back next week for more. (And if you liked what you read, make sure to forward it to 10 people, or else our voodoo priest will get you!)
About the Author: Feelin' on the booties of consenting adults!
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The Africana A-List: March 7, 2003
This article was first published on Africana.com on March 7, 2003
The A-List is a compendium of the most important things African America discussed this week. This week on the A-List: Item #1: R. Kelly's on top of the charts... and your daughters!
The A List: 03.07.03
Compiled by Africana Staff
This week on the A-List:
1. R. Kelly's on top of the charts (and your daughters)
In its ongoing effort to remain true to the hallowed mandate to be your Gateway to Black World, Africana.com has over the last year-and-a-half seen fit to throw quite a few pixels at the various scandals occasioned by the alleged pervy predilections of singer R. Kelly. This coverage has run the expected gamut--pro-R, anti-R, sad-and-confused-about-R--but, surprisingly, the numerous articles produced a mini-flood of email, not attacking Kelly, but professing staunch support for the R. Our reaction to these letters was, as you'd imagine, negative. Constant exposure to everything from amateur psychologists suggesting Kelly was emulating a child-marrying Elvis, to Cochran-like cautions "not to rush to judgment," to poorly-written screeds instructing us to "be real and stop fronting" because sex between young girls and rich and famous R&B stars must be, by definition, consensual as "all those girls watching him on BET are dreaming of getting with him sexually anyway," to the literally dozens of maddening, rote and ultimately inane one-line missives opining that "I guess age really ain't nothing but a number after all!" --well, you'll understand if those letters had the A-List just a little convinced that black folks must really be the most screwed-up, self-hating, in-denial population in all god's creation. After all, here was a vaguely unattractive singer with a so-so vocal range and a lazy eye, a songwriter whose great professional innovation has been the idiot savant-like ability to reduce the complicated realties of black intimacy to chintzy, lyrical prime-numbers along the lines of "you remind me of my jeep" or "let's go half on a baby," a grown man who definitely married (and presumably had sex with) at least one underage girl and allegedly videotaped himself having sex with and urinating on another, and yet, not only was there no universal outcry against him, but dozens of morons were writing in to Africana every day demanding that we stop defaming their favorite (alleged) child molester. Shameful and sad was the only way to describe it.
After receding into blissful remission for almost a year with the ebb of R. Kelly-related headlines, our depression came back full bore when we learned that his latest loveman oeuvre, The Chocolate Factory had debuted at number one on the album charts last week. The A-List isn't in the demographics business, but we've got a strong, sad feeling that most of the over 500K consumers who ran to stores last week to buy were likely grown black women (who at some point or another were girls) or the genuine article itself: black girls exactly like the ones for which Kelly is accused of having an unhealthy yen. This means that, perversely enough, the same population that has been at greatest risk from Kelly is in large part helping pay for his still forthcoming legal defense, a defense that could quite likely leave him free to, as he so eloquently puts it in his latest hit "Ignition," "stick my key in" more underage girls. Kelly has denied any wrong doing (on The Chocolate Factory he croons ''It's all because I'm famous, you know what I'm sayin' I mean, if I wasn't famous, then all this wouldn't be happening'') and only with a few notable exceptions, the success of his latest album has been greeted with a kind of shrugging "go figure" cynicism by a groggy celebrity/music press still suffering from Michael Jackson insulin shock. What's clear to the A-List, though, is that the non-reaction to Kelly's alleged transgressions is par for the course in a culture that de-values black girls as completely as does ours. Had Kelly been accused of molesting boys a la Michael Jackson he'd be under hot lights crying for Barbara Walters faster than you can say "20/20." And if there was a video circulating with images that may or may not be Kelly having sex with a girl that looked like one of the Olson Twins, you'd better believe he'd be in a CO's office begging not to be put back in general population faster than you can say "protective custody."
But hey, what do we know, right? We don't have children the age of Kelly's alleged victims and except for the cuts featuring Ronald Isley, we don't really like his music. That's why the A-List wants to hear from you. Are you the African American parent of a girl aged 13-16 who went out and bought The Chocolate Factory with your own money in the first week of its release? If so, we'd like you to write and send us a short essay (<500 words) explaining "Why I can look my daughter in the eye." The best essay will be published on Africana.com, and the winner will receive a copy of Sapphire's Push appropriately inscribed with a personal message from the A-List.
2. MSNBC = "Mighty Stupid Network Broadcasting Crap"
In a desperate bid to out-fox the right-wing Fox News, low rated cable network MSNBC has hired the lunatic fringe's favorite author and radio commentator Michael Savage as a talking head. Known for racist, homophobic and sexist nonsense rants along the lines of " [Latino]'s breed like rabbits... The white people don't breed as often for whatever reason. I guess many homosexuals are involved," as well for calling non-white countries parts of the "turd-world," Savage is a bottom feeding shock-jock whose hateful antics are beyond the pale even in the increasingly extreme world of talk TV. MSNBC's black, Latino and gay staffers are organizing in hopes that they can mount an internal campaign to keep Savage's show from airing, and the A-List plans to support our fellow media workers by writing network honchos and informing them of our intention to boycott the channel until they publicly disavow Savage and cancel plans to put him on air. (If you write in, make sure you let them know the Africana A-List made you do it!)
MSNBC Feedback
feedback@msnbc.com
Erik Sorenson, MSNBC President
Erik.Sorenson@MSNBC.com
Neal Shapiro, NBC News President
Neal.Shapiro@nbc.com
3. Reparations lawsuit lays groundwork for future justice
Just as Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund followed a careful, step-by-step plan to lay precedent for the overturning of legal segregation, so now has Harvard law prof Charles Ogletree's Committee on Reparations begun the groundwork for a legal revolution that could overturn centuries of uncompensated neglect. The A-List finds this a healthy, exciting development - and unlike some of the more, uhm, fanciful reparations demands (Indian casino-like dispensation to print money, say, or a lifetime discount on all cotton goods), this is a case we can all get behind. Even those white "friends" who get a little nervous when we start talking armed revol - we mean, reparations, seem to relax when we point out that the Tulsa Race Riots, for which Ogletree et al are now seeking redress, happened just 80 years ago and left behind specific identifiable victims (and their descendants). Surviving records even finger specific individual rioters who can be held accountable (seeking redress for the government's improper encouragement of the rioting, which left at least 300 victims, the suit has Oklahoma's current governor standing in for the man who held the office in 1921). We don't know enough about the law to handicap this case's chance to make history, but we admire the approach and applaud the lawyers for their crafty strategy of incremental dues-settling.
4. Black Girls Rule! All by their lonesomes :`(
Last week Newsweek magazine featured a trinity of black women on the cover. Can you guess why? Story about three member girl groups like Destiny's Child? Nope, even though A-List fave and futurebabymama, Beyonce Knowles is the one smiling on the left. (And you need to be real and stop frontin' and just call us, seeing how because you remind us of our Jeep. Let's go half on a baby, Beyonce! We can touch the sky, baby if only we believe!) Was it an an expose on --choose one --single mothers, poverty, AIDS, or public assistance? Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! (Although if you picked "single mother" you were half right.) The cover story, titled "The Black Gender Gap," frames the increasing gains black American women are making professionally as a marriage liability, mainstreaming the conventional wisdom of black female consumer mags like Essence that well educated black women are statistically doomed to live alone for lack of equally educated or monied black male partners. The standard set of options is outlined as solutions: A) date and marry other races, B) negotiate a relationship with a black male partner who is not intimidated by our superior intellect, vast wealth, and our mysterious alien technology, or C) pull a Celie-n-Shug and start kissing up on other women. (Okay, the article didn't mention that last option, but it makes a pretty mental picture and we wanted to put a plug in for our lesbian sisthren, who go unmentioned in the article.) While all this is hardly news --and it's nice that the story for once wasn't about prostitutes, poverty, AIDS, welfare queens or three member girl groups --the A-List is kind of tired of reading about the can't find/get/keep'a'man blues.
5. Air National Guard leader dismissed for racism, plus a mess of other violations
We're not quite sure whether this is a happy story or a sad one, as it can play either as "oh, how long we've come, that a roughneck Mississippi soldier is actually getting terminated for allowing racism to flourish under his watch!" or as "when will said Mississippi outgrow the racist impulse?" At any rate, with war looming, the A-List for one is glad that Col. David Weaver won't be representing the USA overseas. (Nothing undermines your respect for your enemy like being bombed by a racist.( According to published reports, Weaver not only undertook a systematic campaign to drum out his unit's only black flyer, he also ran an illegal liquor store on his base, cheated on exams and plagiarized papers. Now that's what we call one crazy southern boy!
6. Oprah says reading is fun-damental, revives book club. (Turns out she's hecka rich, too!)
A year after putting her phenomenally successful Oprah Book Club on hiatus, the talented Ms. Winfrey has just announced its imminent return. This time, however, Oprah says she'll eschew modern literature to focus on the classics: papers report she's been boning up on Shakespeare and Faulkner lately, and as a result, pretty soon so will you. The A-List loves reading as much as the next collective news blog, and even has harbored some fond hopes of writing something memorable someday, so --predictably --we're a tad conflicted about the new iteration of the OBC. Trading a multicultural stable of living authors for a wax museum comprising mostly dead white men could feel like backward progress. On the other hand, can Ms. Winfrey and her recently announced billion little friends be so wrong? If some extra money finds its way into the pockets of those kooky Hemingway survivors, so be it. The rich getting richer --Hemingway kids, Winfrey--just plain makes sense to us, in a way the lightening strike starmaking power of OBC never quite did. And we ain't worrying; we figure that novel will be done by the time the third OBC is unveiled.
7. Michael Jackson gets hit by (hit by!) a smooth voodoo priest!
There are always two sides to every story. And for Michael Jackson, one side is typically nutty and the other, much, much nuttier. Even the A-List's old eyes, scaled by cynicism, desensitized and lidded, were dazzled by the sheer craziness packed into the latest MJ narrative being offered up in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. If the mag and its sources are to believed, three well-worn Jacksonisms are now proven as unequivocally true. First, the vitiligo-defense of his whitened skin is really B.S. (he really has been bleaching); second, his features are as fake as they look (he wears a pageboy wig and a prosthesis on the tip of his nose); and, third, his blackness spooks the hell out of him (he disparagingly calls black people "spabooks" --whatever the heck that means. This cat is so weird he even has his own private ethnic slurs! Seriously, what in sweet Jesus' holy name is the derivation of "spabook?") What really had the A-List going, though, is the allegation that Jackson paid what is described as an "African voodoo priest" $150,000 for a ritual intended to cast death spells on director Steven Spielberg, music mogul David Geffen and 23 others on his personal blacklist. Apparently salty after not getting the Peter Pan role in Spielberg's 1991 movie, Hook, Jackson ordered the voodoo ceremony in Switzerland, which included a "blood bath" and the slaughtering of 42 cows. Crazy, you say? Yeah, and that's our Michael!
8. Shame!
The A-List is simply horrified by this next item. Back when the A-List was a girl growing up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, we remember many a snowball fight on Adelphi Street with the bigger kids from Rothschild JHS --aka Ruffchile --who would fire off iceballs at us and the other kids at our elementary school, P.S. 20 (and yes, nosey, we were in the same class with Kimberley Jones aka Lil' Kim, only she wasn't so beautiful and famous and perfect like she is now.). Fortunately for us, their aim was pretty bad and they drew a few tears at worst and a hail of return snowballs at best. Which is how snowball fights should be. This tender upbringing of ours leaves us wholly unprepared to process or understand the dementia of adults like Cynthia Powell, 36 and Joseph Best, 32, who --after Sunday church service no less --drove up to a group of school-aged girls and opened fire with guns to avenge their daughter being hit in the face by a snowball. One of the five bullets fired hit 10-year-old Ebony Smith in the head, who, as if this matters, was not even involved in the snowball fight. The common-law husband and wife have both been charged with attempted murder while Ebony lies in a hospital bed in Philadelphia fighting for her life. We're praying for you, Ebony and may your assaulters rot in hell.
9. Friends Jumps Shark and Finally