Write What I Like is not a space to mock white people. For that sort of business, I turn to The Onion for Bro, You're A God Among Bros:
I've long admired your absolute broficiency in all things bro-related, and the way you've always carried yourself in a brofessional manner. I consider you a brole model. When I was new in this town, you took me under your wing and showed me the bropes. And I will always preesh that. Not only did you school me in proper brotocol, but you were a spiritual leader, a confidant, and, more importantly, a bro.
There's a story here:
This week I started my new job in DC (the office is there but I'm still based in NYC). I told my friend I wanted to go to the Pharmacy Bar in Adams Morgan; I used to go there when I lived in that exceedingly dull tract of khaki country. After an unbelievable respectable amount of drinks, I ventured to the facilities and returned to see a white patron reading this article aloud to the bartender, his friend and the remaining Rx patient (my friend). In the morning I looked it up to see if the humor remained -- you have here been subject to my final judgement.
But don't worry... this will not be the bro-totype for future posts.
This nice lady is Oprah. She is a billionairess. The ladies love her, and when she tells them what to purchase, they get it, and a lot of it. But the question of the day is, will they buy a Barack, the latest luxury item attached to the O brand?
CNN reports that Oprah and Obama are combining forces. This shouldn't be a huge surprise (she told the man she'd campaign for him on her show - I was watching - and in May announced her formal endorsement on Larry King). O is making her promise real this weekend by throwing the other O a fundraiser at her lovely California ranch that's expected to net between $2-3 million.
People with good sense struggle with Oprah. And I challenge anyone who would dismiss her outright. (Did you see her coverage in New Orleans just after Katrina?) But for every moment that Oprah uses her global brand to do good, there are 100 other disparaging, salacious remarks made at gay guests, hours spent selling people things they don't need and endless episodes reinforcing bizarre myths (Secret, swinging, S&M couples babysitting YOUR kids - next week's Oprah!) that aid the culture of fear plaguing America and driving the ugliest part of the culture wars.
But the thing that really gets me about Oprah - the brand - is that its construction has been consciously and comprehensively a-political. Everything in Oprah-land is about the
individual; their ability to triumph over adversity; their personal victimhood; their need for stainless steel appliances and meticulously arched eyebrows. This connection to people's personal stories is what has made Oprah - the woman - a star, an icon, a billionaire and the authority that the Obama camp wants to draw on to gain support, particularly among women.
But while Oprah is allowed to leave politics to the professionals, Obama does not have that luxury. My major criticism of his candidacy has not been his "lack of experience" but that he has substituted the "audacity of hope" or "fervor for courage" or whatever it is for a rigorous, attention-grabbing denunciation of the policies that have left people in this country hopeless and afraid. He gives me "every child should be healthy" when I want "the scandal of private health care that leaves 40+ million vulnerable is on its way out".
I am perfectly happy to know that Miss Sophia Winfrey, won't spend any time this camapaign season being kissed on by Republican democracy-killers,
but if the new campaign slogan is to be O + O for National Self-Help, I'm going to call Michelle Obama (cause she has good sense) and tell her just what I think.
Old But, Good. This piece was origninally published on 23 February 2007.
Just ahead of Sunday night's ceremony, I've been doing some thinking about this "historic" year for Black people at the Oscar's. With a record 5 nominations, a chorus of voices (including Newsweek) are arguing, again, that barriers are being broken.
I wrote Race for the Oscars, posted over at COLORLINES, to argue that getting behind the glam of the red carpet and symbolism historic firsts, we see a Hollywood still fractured along the color line. A preview:
And I am Telling You, I Don’t Buy It.
It’s true; Oscar night does play an important symbolic role. Awarding Black actors allows Hollywood a moment to exhale. A brief period to release the nasty burden of criticism surrounding a highly inequitable film industry while rehearsing popular stereotypes and congratulating roles that comfort anxieties held by the larger society.
Black people, in turn, look to one of our own receiving the award as a mark of progress; if we are accepted and applauded on the red carpet, why not off? The gleam of Oscar is a welcome distraction from the truth that life for Black folks in Hollywood and beyond is cause for more rage than rejoicing.
Old, But Good - A piece from January 2006
Kehinde Wiley Paints Black Masculinity Anew
Kehinde Wiley talks about passing and posing -- the themes of his critically acclaimed paintings -- with an infectious excitement. Surrounded by the giant canvasses that line the walls of his studio, the artist is earnest and modest; his inspirations are as playful and original as his art work about black masculinity.
For his Passing/Posing series, Wiley says he wanted to explore whether black masculinity is “defined by hypersexuality, anti social behavior and a propensity towards sports, or is it something that is more authentic and elusive?”
The artist approached black men in Harlem and had them pose to emulate the iconography of classical European painting. The paintings, which now go for at least $ 20.000, have graced the cover of the prestigious Art in America magazine and won praise for Wiley, who has completed a residency at Harlem’s Studio Museum, and exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and Deitch Projects in New York.
In his Passing/Posing paintings, Wiley reshapes and plays with popular constructions of black masculinity, giving new meaning to old poses and historical context to contemporary style. The artist was driven by several provocative questions: “How is it that they arrived in these poses? What are they passing for? What is this universe that’s being created?”
the immediacy of the pose
The path to success for Wiley started at the age of 11 when his mother enrolled him in a free arts program funded by the city of Los Angeles. Kehinde went on to attend the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. “I always felt this was going to be a life for me,” he says on a summer afternoon at his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I always felt like this would be something that I would do – whether I was a professional artist full-time or an artist who had a day job supporting my art habit.”
His love of art and desire for advanced formal training took him to the San Francisco Art Institute and then East to pursue an MFA at Yale University. After graduating, he accepted an offer to serve as artist-in-residence at the prestigious Studio Museum in New York City’s Harlem, a move that would have a significant impact on both his career and methodology.
Describing himself as “ignorant of [the Studio Museum’s] stature,” he focused his early time there experimenting with the bustling Harlem community, similar yet very different to his home of South Central L.A. “In the space of 5 blocks you get the chance to shop, eat, peacock, parade and be seen, "says the artist. "It’s violent in the shocking immediacy of people’s presence. For me, its incredibly engaging…something I wanted to somehow grapple with in my work.”
This desire to connect his new community and his work led to the early stages of creating the Passing/Posing series. Wiley walked those five blocks in Harlem showing men photos of his portraits and urging them to become a subject themselves. The approach initially yielded traditional studies of what he calls “alpha-male types. People who had this sort of energy surrounding them.” From those works, Wiley began discussing art history with these models, eventually having them thumb through his art books and choose poses to recreate. It was an important turn that, along with the motivation to challenge the viewer’s ability to step into the still image, led to the creation of the ongoing series.
It is exactly this freeness to question and confuse that define Wiley’s work. Though even the most surface examination of his work would identify the political questions raised around issues of race, gender, sexuality and the distance between subject and artist, Wiley doesn’t identify his painting as a political act.
In fact, his methodology is based on “a very radical association with play, as opposed to any sort of political or moral corrective. I came out of art school at a time when people where questioning the role of the black artist….but we are bound by time, bound by history, bound by circumstance and bound by meaning…And so there is no sense in which post-black can ever free itself from blackness. It is a function of blackness.”
From War To VH-1
For his new show, Rumors of War, Wiley moves into a firm discussion of the power of men and of war, using the iconography of old military portraits. To create the poses, Wiley hired what he calls “Hollywood horses,” horses trained to pose in studio settings and body doubles in addition to models recruited from Harlem and Brooklyn to stage the massive portraits. Wiley is working double time to finish the show, which is set to premiere at Deitch Projects in November.
" Over time there evolves a language involving white male agency," says Wiley about what inspired his new work …" It becomes a set pattern not only surrounding the portrayal of their power but also the story of their deaths and how they live their lives…I’ve been thinking about how I can manipulate that vocabulary.”
This summer, Wiley was also preparing for the VH-1 Hip Honors which were premiered in September. He was commissioned to paint the portraits of this year’s honorees, including L.L. Cool J, Ice T, Big Daddy Kane, and hip hop duo Salt N’ Pepa with their DJ Spinderella.
Wiley’s eyes light up as he describes L.L. Cool J coming to his studio and posing in the chair that he’s currently sitting in. Then, he unveils the completed 8 foot painting of Ice T posed in a near perfect reproduction of a painting of Napoleon on a throne along with the original image in the book that the rapper chose it from. Laughing, he describes the project: “It’s playful fun stuff. I took [my work] outside this high art vernacular, though it’s nothing I really consider part of my oeuvre (laughs)”. Despite his modesty, these paintings have the power to affect. Thanks to his rendering, Ice-T seems every bit as at home on a throne as Napoleon.
Wiley is already at work on more traditional painting along with works in several other mediums and continues to take it all in stride. “My life has changed radically," he says. "From sleeping on the floor of the Studio Museum and trading paintings for cigarettes to arranging to meet with magazines and working in television…things change. But in the end, I’m applying colored paste with hairy sticks to pieces of fabric, something I’ve been doing from the get go…there’s no fuss in that.”
American Vigilantes: To Catch a Predator
Watching NBC's smash hit To Catch a Predator, I'm struck by how easy it is to make us feel comfortable breaking the law to trap a criminal we love to hate. The show thrives on the logic of vigilantism - breaking all the rules to exact vicious justice against those it becomes popular to place below the law - an American tradition with it's deepest roots in the criminalization of Black people.
Esquire has a great piece up by Luke Dittrich, Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, that meticulously covers a recent ill-fated episode of the show that ended in an untimely death for Bill Conradt, a Texas Assistant D.A.
The article gives an inside look at Dateline's Hollywood version of justice - how its producers bully small-town law enforcement into
catchingentrapping the most salacious group of sex predators (the rabbi wants teen sex in whipped cream!) for the best production values. After reading the piece, it is hard to argue that getting sex predators off the street is of any concern compared to producing a true-crime reality show with the juice to turn Dateline into the Survivor of prime time newsmagazines :And if you don't like Esquire you can get another take. As Douglas McCollam points out in a piece over at the Columbia Journalism Review, despite To Catch a Predator's dubious-at-best commitment to putting away potential predators, it's a huge ratings winner because, like all the most popular reality TV, it taps the keg of public humiliation - and America is all too ready to get drunk.
But what both pieces miss, while highlighting the pitfalls of an ends-justify-means approach to law enforcement, is what happens when that logic is applied more broadly. How can the Jena 6 face 20+ year jail sentences for a playground fight with a noose-hanging schoolmate? How can Kenneth Foster end up on Texas death row for a crime no one, including the state, argued he committed? The answer, perhaps obviously, is that the misapplication of laws along the color line still put Black people in prison at record numbers.
What isn't so obvious: it is a vigilante culture that allows us to accept a brutally unjust criminal justice system because, though the rules are being broken, they are working against Black people who too often turn out to be the witches in America's hunt. The show reminds me why I don't want justice in the unchecked hands of any American - Chris Hansen, the local sheriff or a Supreme Court Justice.
To Catch a Predator teaches us that the law is in the hands of the most powerful and (self) righteous. It seems like a bad lesson, but looking around, it may just be the sad, enraging truth.
09 September 2007 at 08:48 PM in commentary, RealityTV, Talk Shows | Permalink | Comments (0)
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