Why We Are Still Cooning in the 21st Century

"I don't give a fuck what they think, they got to pay me booooooooooyyyyy! --Katt Williams quoting Flava Flav after his roast

In Katt Williams' recent stand-up dvd, "It's Pimpin' Pimpin,'' he recalls his frustration over the racist script he was paid handsomely to follow as the host of William Drayton's (aka Flava Flav) roast. Though Williams tries to keep the narrative comedic--with

his signature brand of foulmouthed Richard Pryoresque storytelling--, his anger over the event is so transparent and raw that it overwhelms the comedy.

As far as his narrative goes, Williams explains that he arrived several days early on the Comedy Central set to get a jump on the event and rehearse his script. Upon arriving, however, he was informed by the producers that he was to write his own script and that they would write the scripts of all the other participants. Yet, the day before the event he and all of the black participants were called in for a dress rehearsal. When Williams asked why the white participants were not at the dress rehearsal the producers told him that the others didn't need to attend because they were "professionals."

Oddly enough, nobody was presented with scripts at the rehearsal but rather told that one would be forthcoming the next day. Smelling a rat, Williams implored one of his assistants to try to get their hands on the script. When the assistant returned with the script, Williams was appalled by the transparently racist jokes and references.

The entire script, Williams snarled, read "like a 1946 newspaper," portraying Flava as a "crispity, crackly, crunchity, coon." As for his role, Williams was supposed to refer to Flava Flav--who was to fly into the stadium on a wire, wearing a bright purple zoot suit, a viking helmet, and his customary oversized clock necklace--as a "flying monkey" (his actual lines were, in fact, "Look up in the sky, its a crow, its a bat, its fllllaaavaa flaaav." After Flava lands, Williams then quips, "Sir, that was quite an entrance. Makes you wonder where are the rest of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.") Williams joked that he was tempted to walk out on the roast after he got the script but couldn't bring himself to walk away from the lucrative payday. "I had already spent the money in my head," he confessed to raucous laughter.

The climax of Williams story was his encounter with Flav after the show. Fuming with the rest of the black participants backstage after the roast (Flav's children bounced midway through the show shedding tears of embarrassment and shame), William recounts that Flav sauntered into the group with a huge grin on his face, high-fiving everyone in sight. A perturbed Williams interrupted Flav's festive gallivanting by asking him pointblank how could he be so happy after being treated so derogatorily by Comedy Central and the producers of the show. Flav responds, ""I don't give a fuck what they think, they got to pay me booooooooooyyyyy!" and then bolts out of the door. Williams takes these comments to heart, noting that Flav was "absolutely right."

If racism was unavoidable in the entertainment industry, Williams mused, then why not play it out to your economic advantage. Williams then launched into a conflicting and conflicted diatribe, advising blacks on how best to negotiate such racist discourses in the mainstream, using Oprah Winfrey as the penultimate example of success. What immediately came to mind during Williams' tragic-comic performance was the well-worn saying in his hip hop culture, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game."

Tupac Shakir perhaps best exemplifies the meaning of this phrase in his song, "Keep Your Head Up," when he spits, "I was given this world I didn't make it." The idea being that black folks--because of racism, poverty, and structural inequality--have to employ whatever means available to them to carve out a living in the U.S., including criminal activities and so called "underground" economies. The message, then, for would-be critics of this survival-at-all-costs thinking is to hoist blame upon the system that creates and perpetuates racial inequalities, not the individuals who are forced to conform to its rules.

While one can certainly appreciate the rationale of this reasoning given the extent of continued white denial of black suffering (as institutions of power that orchestrate racial inequities are rarely held accountable for the ways they obstruct black self-determination), completely disavowing individual responsibility creates another kind of danger. In doing so, the individual abdicates the agency--provisional though it may be--at his disposal, indirectly propping up the very systems of power he claims to repudiate. If, say, dealing drugs is the hustle of my choice, a hustle that I justify on the basis of my dismal socioeconomic reality, then I have abdicated my individual responsibility to alter my social reality and accepted a priori that my destructive behavior--which negatively impacts my entire community--is somebody else's fault. While this ruthless individuality might seem revolutionary and liberating to some, its little more than a capitulation to cut-throat capitalism.

The real challenge before us on this score is to try to strike a workable balance between holding the system accountable as well as those that reside within our communities. What Katt Williams twisted rationale for "selling out" illuminates is the extent to which white society continues to reward blacks for accommodating racial stereotypes. However Williams tries to justify the circumstances under which he decided to the do the show, in the final analysis he accepted the payoff for "acting the fool for white folks" and, by extension, the emotional and psychological costs that come with compromising one's integrity repeatedly. No stranger to making such negotiations myself, I can certainly empathize with Williams' predicament. That one's success as an African American in the U.S. often hinges on how well one can navigate such racial land mines is most certainly a travesty. Be that as it may, we have to continue to resist the impulse to accept our subordinate social status as inevitable and institutionalized structural equalities as irreversible. In the short term that means, among other things, that there will be times where we'll need to refuse the capital of racial accommodation.

Quiet as its kept, there is a razor thin line between subverting the status quo and reinforcing it. Spike Lee captures this reality quite well in his controversial film, "Bamboozled," as does Aaron McGrudger in his wickedly acid parody of Martin Luther King's legacy in his "Boondocks" cartoon series. Gettin' paid at the direct expense of upholding the status quo, reinforcing racial stereotypes, or, worse, exploiting black communities, is not sexy or glamorous. To the contrary, it renders blacks complicit in destroying their communities.

So, alas, the time has come for us to start "hatin'" on the playa as well as on the game. Though we may ultimately be powerless to change the racial calculus that informs the dynamics that Williams outlines above, most of us can choose the terms upon which we participate in this racial theater. One thing's for sure, we can't cash the check of racial accommodation and expect for our racial realities to change. If you believe otherwise, I have a flashy purple zoot suit and a outsized necklace clock I can sell you cheap.

Hip Hop's Double Consciousness by Regina Barnett

"I’m the dude playing a dude played by another dude" –Robert Downey, Jr., "Tropic Thunder"

I spent my Thanksgiving break trappin’. Yes folks, I had T.I.’s Trap Muzik (2003) on full blast marinating and negotiating ideas about gender politics and identity in rap music. And T.I. was my main subject. Clifford “T.I.” Harris is no newbie to the game, quickly closing in on a nearly ten year stint as one of THE emcees in Hip Hop Music. While many critics reflect on specific slivers of his identity, I’ve always wondered about the man as a whole. A former dope boy in the trap and a full time corporate hustler, Harris has performed in both ends of the black masculinity spectrum. And, in similar fashion to other men of color who attempt to negotiate or even establish a gray area of masculine existence, T.I. got lost in the hustle.

The 2007 shooting death of Harris’ best friend Philant “Big Phil” ‘Johnson triggered a violent emotional response within the rapper. The by product of that rage and grief was T.I. vs. T.I.P. (2007). Almost immediately following the release of T.I. vs. T.I.P. Harris was charged with illegal gun possession. On the album, Harris displays a nearly schizophrenic reaction to his place in society and lack of control over the internal rage slowly seeping out of his seams. He re-divides himself into two dueling personas, each trying to cope with the death of Johnson and their success.

French theorist Jacques Lacan’s fragmented body theory provides useful insight into understanding Harris’ triple personality (Harris, T.I., and T.I.P.). Lacan suggests that the psyche splits itself into a main and “alienating personality” after a “certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual.” The agitation of Johnson’s death and Harris’ inability to relay his grief forces T.I.P. re-emerge. T.I.P. considers himself raw, real, and confrontational. Because of his inability to discuss his traumatic experience, Harris regresses back into a trap boy, a familiar and recognized coping mechanism for him to explore the suppressed anxiety he experiences.

Due to the lack of available discourse for Harris to vent, T.I.P. embodies the reaction to and consequences of that underlying anger and guilt. He sees himself as coping with Harris’ traumatic experiences through angry tirades at the beginning of the album. T.I.P. attempts to voice his concerns and feelings of displacement – “Man I ain’t up for this shit/I lost my partner and lost my life homes/ Man fuck this shit I’m done.” The urgency and angst in Harris’ delivery here suggests his dissatisfaction with his career and the expectations placed upon him. He is no longer suiting his own needs and interests but is being tugged by Atlantic records and, more specifically, the CEO of Warner Music Group (WMG) Lyor Cohen. WMG owns Atlantic Records.

In a heated exchange between Cohen and T.I.P., Cohen tries to intimidate him back to a subservient role – “listen kid don’t play with my muthafuckin’ money” – with little impact. Cohen’s threat attempts to speak to Harris on a presumed and understood level of hood discourse or trap speak where the primary language is money. T.I.P. quickly fires back with a threat of his own, telling Cohen to “get it like the Red Cross” and hangs up. The allusion to the Red Cross, a symbol of aid in the face of disaster, speaks on two levels.

The first level is a physical threat of violence and the second is a threat of leaving Atlantic altogether for lack of consent to T.I.P’s demands. He believes his abandonment of the label and this latest rap project would cause an economic disaster for Atlantic Records. The tracks that follow the opening skit on T.I. vs. T.I.P. suggest a return to the trap discourse heard in I’m Serious and Trap Muzik. This throwback to Harris’ trap days suggests not only T.I.P.’s familiarity and comfort within the trap setting but also the days that Johnson was still alive. It is especially prominent in many of the songs in Act I including “Da Dopeman,” “Raw,” and “Hurt.”

What is fascinating about this album is T.I.’s unconsciousness about T.I.P.’s actions. In the opening skit of the next segment of the album “Act II: T.I.,” Harris awkwardly wakes up and is unsure of his previous actions. He notices his car parked in a different location and a host of urgent voicemails accusing him of “losing his damn mind.” Dazed and in denial about the conflict with Cohen, T.I. pleads his innocence about the previous night’s events with friends Jason Geter and Douglas Peterson. T.I.’s understanding of not only the hierarchy of the record label but the need for the label to support his endeavors is shown throughout the exchanges between Harris and the record executives. He represents Harris’ understanding of his brand.

Mark Anthony Neal suggests that branding solely exists within the framework of extremities seen within the performance of one’s identity. “What branding doesn’t help illuminate is the extent that the candidate and the thug(s) are dependent upon each other to lay claim to that which their brand doesn’t – and, quite frankly, can’t – allow,” Neal notes. Within the manufactured space of Atlantic Records/Warner Music Group, T.I. can not let T.I.P. interfere with the delicate balance of power and creative authority. Furthermore, T.I. and Harris in this instance cannot be in one accord or agreement with T.I.P. because Harris has to keep his desires (both commercial and personal) within the constraints of his signature brand as two distinct and accepted identities. Any sense of harmony or peaceful coexistence (which, prior to the breakout success of Urban Legend, somewhat existed) would not only throw off our understanding of Harris as a rapper, but also problematize the implications surrounding the performance of his manhood .

Track fifteen (15) is a vicious confrontation between T.I. and T.I.P. Their medium is the mirror, symbolizing only the commonality of the physical body between both personalities. Lacan poses the mirror as a symbol of an innate understanding of self. One molds himself based upon the perception in the mirror. In the initial exchange, there is a noticeable and distinctive difference between the narratives of T.I. and T.I.P. T.I. presents himself as Harris’ logic, the accepted representative of Harris as the socially functioning member of American society.

T.I.P., through his rage, presents the suppressed and illegitimate portrayal of Harris – the criminally minded and explicit black man. He forces Harris to confront not only Johnson’s death, “do you think I meant for that shit to muthafuckin’ happen?!” but also why he feels T.I.P. is illegitimate to his commercial success, “Man T.I.P., you’d get us locked up every chance you get if I let you.” T.I.P. responds with an explosive reaction of expletives and defends his actions: “If you let me? You see what I’m saying man/how the fuck you gon’ let me do something?!” Not only is T.I.P. angry over being marginalized by social expectations, he is furious over T.I.’s belittling of his efforts. Through T.I.P.’s tirade T.I. weakly responds with “why you gotta take it like that?” accenting a thwarted attempt to distance himself from T.I.P. and questioning his own logic.

The line that most resonates in the skit is T.I.P.’s remark “Naw I don’t know everything/but I know bullshit when I see it” and his referral to T.I. as a “Hollywood nigga in a suit.” The act of performance here is negative and T.I.P. blasts T.I. for catering to that expectation. Not only is he referring to T.I. as bullshit, but also the mirage presented by him that success does not come without a sacrifice of self or self-actualization. T.I.P.’s categorization of T.I. as Hollywood demonstrates not only his belief of the plasticity of T.I.’s persona but also the lack of authentic lived experience that he professes for his audience.

T.I. is playing a role that is problematic for T.I.P. because he is being written out of existence and the rage that he represents is once again suppressed and illegitimate. Instead of inner city Atlanta, it is the manufactured space that T.I. functions within that becomes the trap. What is disturbing about the phenomenon exhibited on T.I. vs. T.I.P. is the fact that Harris still needs an alter ego(s) to stay in eyesight of the American public. Harris’ personification of the inner conflicts that haunt him reflect those of other young men of color facing the need to perform an overextended representation of blackness. In order to be acknowledged or able to work through a traumatic situation, Harris and other young black men create a persona that threatens or counters expectations of their anticipated response.

This alternative expression is needed to work around the embedded code of silent suffering forced upon men of color. While Harris does not directly state that his album is an accurate portrayal of reality, he does acknowledge the conflicts of interest between social expectation of his character and personal growth. Neal astutely suggests that black men do not exist within the restraints of polite (conservative) society.

While it is no surprise that rap music is a space designated for a nihilistic and often exaggerated representation of African American men, it is also the minimalized side view of society where black manhood – both imaginary and in actuality – exist. It often casts its shadow over not only the black community, but American society’s understanding and expectations of black masculinity. The fear of invisibility intertwined with feelings of desperation and anxiety result in not only the T.I.P.’s of the world, but a sorely misunderstood reality of the anxieties that black men continue to face in America.

RACE MATTERS IN THE FT. HOOD SHOOTINGS by George White

Ever since the Ft. Hood tragedy made the news, the Rabid Right has engaged in all manner of race-baiting and religious xenophobia to explain the catastrophic event. The most recent argument to come out of this camp is that the military and federal authorities failed to prevent the shootings because they were behaving in a “politically correct” manner. They argue that to resolve this problem our nation needs to condemn Islam at large and revert back to a version of racial/religious profiling.

A recent Op-Ed piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Wall Street Journal refined the extremist expressions into a more subtle polemic. Making the case for “respectable racism,” Gerecht blames the spasm of violence by Major Nidal Hassan on American law enforcement officials, generally, and President Obama, specifically. Gerecht’s rationale is that the President – as the icon of political correctness – has been unwilling to identify Islam as the nation’s enemy and, in failing to do so, has allowed terrorism to strike where it should not have. In short, Gerecht’s larger argument is that federal investigators could have stopped Major Hassan’s rampage had they not been concerned with the feelings and reactions of Muslims.

To support his position, Gerecht claimed that the FBI “reflects American legal ethics,” thereby casting the Bureau as innocent and naïve when confronted with domestic “jihadists.” Given the multitude of well-researched works regarding the FBI’s coordinated attacks on American citizens under COINTELPRO, this assertion cannot withstand serious scrutiny as Clayborne Carson’s “Malcolm X: The FBI Files,” Brian Glick’s pithy “War At Home,” and Jeffrey Haas’ recently published “The Assassination of Fred Hampton” all dramatically demonstrate.

Even in the present period, the FBI has engaged in “racial mapping” of ethnic/religious communities and intimidated individuals into becoming informants. And lest we forget, FBI agents killed Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah in Detroit – a community leader supposedly linked to “radical” Muslims like the former Black Panther H. Rap Brown – roughly a week before the shootings at Ft. Hood.

The rhetoric of the Rabid Right – that “political correctness” may be killing us – is all the more disingenuous because there are a number of viable alternative explanations for the shootings at Ft. Hood. Even if the investigation into Major Hassan's affairs proves that he was indeed a terrorist, it does not mean a priori that political correctness (read: racial sensitivity) was the culprit. Given what has already come to light about the case--like the fact that Hassan was promoted after receiving a poor performance evaluation--, the true culprit here is more likely internal corruption, incompetence, and bureaucratic in-fighting. Government whistle-blowers Coleen Rowley and Sibel Edmonds showed us that those three factors, at the very least, played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But the Right would have us sweep to the side all of these inconvenient truths. The arguments of Gerecht and his ilk suggest that scapegoating and racial/religious profiling are necessary to keep Americans safe. By turns, Muslims are guilty until proven innocent. Democracy and fairness be damned.

But, alas, proponents of this thinking should be careful what they wish for. Racial profiling does not work; it casts too broad a net to be effective and rewards racism and laziness. Like torture, it is a tactic that provides a sense of comfort and control to the perpetrator but provides little, if anything, in terms of collective safety. In addition, it comes at a tremendous cost of blindness. Not only does it distort the dominant culture's perception of the "othered" groups, but it also distorts their vision of themselves as "innocent" and rational thinkers.

Thus, I leave you with a story from the PBS series “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.” In one of the episodes, groups of Black folk described inter-personal interactions with whites during the years of legalized racial segregation. One man told the story of walking along a road, seeing something disturbing at a nearby house, then rushing to warn the occupants. As he approached the structure, a white woman appeared at the front door and began cursing and threatening him: “What do want here, nigger? What’s the meaning of you coming up to my house? You better get out of here!” In the face of such invective, he turned and headed back toward the road. As he strolled, he yelled over his shoulder, “I was just coming to tell you that your house is on fire.”

Black Women on the Auction Block: A Black Feminist Response to “The Princess and the Frog”

~ Beauty Bragg

Listening to an NPR feature on the Disney film The Princess and the Frog on opening day, I was struck by the uniformity of black opinion celebrating the fact that now we, too, could participate in the commodification of our images. The overwhelming sentiment was “finally” we can buy a Disney princess that looks just like us. This was on top of my previous shock about the Carol’s Daughter hair and body product tie-ins featuring the princess. This reaction—our eagerness as producers and consumers—is too simplistic. I mean, it is a reaction that essentially says we know we’ve achieved when we can participate in our own commodification. Then again, perhaps we truly are, finally, real Americans—willing to buy and sell anything.

Instead of offering a critique of market values or at least attempting to resist them, what we are witnessing is the celebration of the beginning of a process of brand loyalty and personal identity formation through products consumed—the branding of our children. Now for people whose ancestors have been literally branded this ought to spark concern not celebration. This seems a sorry state of affairs for people descended from people who constituted one of the first mass-market commodities and have witnessed first-hand the damage wrought by submitting to the ethics of the market place. As if the lessons of slavery aren’t enough of a lesson in the nature of exploitive labor and the extraction of profits from the bodies of black people, recent developments in the popular entertainment sphere should warn us about being too eager to assume that our presence in the market place is always positive and beneficial.

Numerous critics have cited the ways in which various contemporary black artists have become complicit in the reproduction of problematic representations as well as the erasure of historical context and radical politics for current images. In a really useful chapter of his 1999 book Pan Africanism: Exploring the Contradictions, William B. Ackah, suggests that, as a result of the dominance of American cultural productions globally, “American” representations of blackness become the dominant representations of blackness and often subsume other more progressive discourses on black identity and politics. If this is true, then African Americans in particular have a responsibility to exercise special care with regard to the images of blackness we consume and endorse (and not only in relation to everyone’s favorite whipping boys, rappers). In fact, given the extensive history of negative and , largely, uncontested representations of African American women already cited in Ikard’s blog “Why Baby-Girl Won’t Be Going to see Disney’s ‘The Frog and the Princess,’” we should be especially vehement in our rejection of this new commodification of black women’s bodies. That it is repackaged as a New Orleans “romance” should in fact heighten our attention to history since this was a space in which the murky ethics of trading in humans as commodities was amplified in the practice of the system of concubinage in which black women could trade their bodies and sexuality for a few of the privileges of freedom. Certainly this twisted conflation of commercial value with social equality can provide a lesson for us today.

Why Baby-Girl and I Won't Be Going to See Disney's "The Princess and the Frog"

In case you haven’t heard, Disney has decided after close to 90 years in existence to create an animation featuring a black princess. As you can probably guess from my title, I’m not going to take my soon-to-be-four-years-old daughter to see the film. Beyond the fact that Disney has a long and torrid history of distorting non-white ethnic folks in general and African Americans in particular, I think its of critical importance—as a father and anti-sexist black man—to monitor what goes in the smart, beautiful, afro-ed, head of my little daughter. Though as a black man with black feminist political leanings, I try desperately to recalibrate how my children (I also have a boy that is 7 years old) conceptualize their socially prescribed gender roles, I am fully aware that--despite my hyper-vigilant parenting--pervasive notions of gender, race, class, and sexuality will have a major impact on how they negotiate their social environment and their value—or lack thereof—in it.

Suffice it to say, that the U.S. has not been kind to black women as it regards portraits of beauty, sexuality, and moral character. Indeed, during the antebellum period it was generally accepted—and, at the time, backed up by so-called “hard science”—that African women preferred the sexual company of primates over that of men, that black women gave off a particular sexual pheromone which enticed white men to have sex with them, that they lacked the emotional feeling and attachment to their children compared to whites, that theirs was not a femininity worthy of acknowledgment. Ever wonder why the white mistress in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God blames Nanny and not her white powerful master-husband for the sexual acts (read: rape) that resulted in the birth of Janie’s mother? There you have it.

Black men have also been stigmatized sexually as primitive and targeted on this basis, often in the name of protecting white women’s honor, as a means of white masculine dominance. Who can forget the anti-black man propaganda that was the first Hollywood “blockbuster” in Birth of a Nation—based on Thomas Dixon’s novel/play Clansman—or the 1955 brutal slaying of baby-faced, Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi for purportedly whistling at a white woman.

Regrettable though it is, however, black men have—for various complex and problematic reasons—had a direct hand in perpetuating these negative images of black women over the course of U.S. history. Providing a useful context for this phenomenon, Patricia Hill-Collins explains in her essay “A Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength, and Black Masculinities,” that “virtually all of the representations of black masculinity [in the public domain] pivot on questions of weakness, whether it is a weakness associated with an inability to control violent impulses, sexual urges, or their black female heterosexual partners or a weakness attributed to men whose lack of education, employment patterns, and criminal records relegate them to inferior social spaces.”

As Hill-Collins makes clear, controlling black women's behavior and bodies became inextricably bound up with attaining manhood, and by extension, social equality for black men. The masculine weakness attributed to black men’s inability to control “their women” was, to be sure, a featured hypothesis in the notorious 1965 “Moynihan Report.” Crafted by U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a trained sociologist), the document was used to explain why black men and the black family were in such dire straights. Characterizing the black community as a “tangle of pathology . . . capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,” the document conveniently blamed emasculating black women—not white oppression—for the black communitys' failing. As Donna L. Franklin explains in What’s Love Got to Do With It, many prominent black leaders signed off on this report, including the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins (director of the NAACP), and Whitney Young (President of the National Urban League).

To be sure, King, Wilkins, and Young held white people’s feet to the fire for skirting their central roles in perpetuating this so-called “tangle of pathology” but nary a word was uttered in rejection of the black-woman-as-black-emasculator thesis. This dynamic is important to this conversation because it illustrates, in part, why black women—especially those that have attained a certain level of economic success—are cast in rap videos, black church sermons, and in black popular culture in general as “uppity,” “bitchy,” “domineering,” “black-man-hating,” and "ruthless." It is thus hardly surprising that most black women steer clear of the label “black feminist” like the plague although a great many of them—in their actions, politics, and worldviews—espouse key black feminist principles, including that nonreciprocating gender self-sacrifice is unhealthy and self-defeating.

That black women have been emotionally damaged by demeaning portraits within and outside the black community is no more evident than in the ways that they have flocked virtually en masse to Tyler Perry movies, ministries like those of T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar, and make books, like comedian Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, top-sellers. Even though all of these men adhere, at bottom, to conventional notions of masculinity wherein women are expected to cater emotionally, financially, and culturally to black men, they garner so much support—and dollars—from black women because they are, by turns, moderately less patriarchal in their thinking than most black men and black-male-centric institutions. I guess in a world where black women get so little love from within and beyond the black community, meager acknowledgment of their marginalized status goes a long way. This pattern should fill black men with shame not comfort. Rather than explode the racial stigmas that have dogged black women over the course of U.S. history, we have become co-conspirators with the dominant culture—new age pimps, if you will—in exploiting black women’s pain and suffering.

My Baby-Girl and I won’t be going to see Disney’s “Princess and the Frog” because I will not be a party to warping my daughter’s notion of self-worth. Did you know that the original title of the movie was “Frog Princess” or that, according to Arifa Akbar, the original story line featured the black princess as a chambermaid working for a spoilt, white Southern debutante. She was—like a black Cinderella—to be helped by a voodoo priestess fairy godmother to “win the heart of a white prince, after he rescued her from the clutches of a voodoo magician.” In the new storyline the princess is of color—though tellingly not black—and the name of the character has been changed from Maddy (evidently it sounded too much like Mammy) to Tiana. According to the Disney promo, the story is set in the “charming elegance and grandeur of New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter during the Jazz Age.” Need we bother to ask if there will be an inkling of how it was really like for blacks and black women in particular living in that era. This may turn out to be, in fact, the biggest fairy tale that Disney has ever told.

This morning I came across a story about how Google is sorry for an offensive pic of Michelle Obama that comes up on its search engine when you type in the First Lady’s name. (In case you're wondering, the pic is of a monkey superimposed on Michelle's face) This happened because the search engine automatically brings up the most visited websites linked to that particular search item. So, what this means fundamentally is that there are swarms of folks interested in such offensive portraits of Michelle and black women. Alas, this is the world within which I am forced to raise my smart, fun-loving, energetic, and--yes--incredibly beautiful daughter. Nope, baby-girl will not get to see Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” this go-round and something tells me she'll be disappointed. But, I guess now is as good a time as any to prepare her for the bumpy road that lies ahead for her as a black girl and woman. Hopefully, my love for her will absorb some of the shock. One can only hope.

"Queer Eye For the Black Guy" by Regina Barnett

"Don't Laugh, America." -Rollo (The Cleveland Show)

So, this is not a note to diss The Cleveland Show. As a matter of fact, I could have spearheaded the initiative for Cleveland (from Family Guy fame) to get his own show. I was ecstatic! Needless to say, last night’s episode, “A Brown Thanksgiving,” shot down the last shreds of my optimism. What started as a parody of Tyler Perry ended up a nightmare and a re-entrenchment of whiteness and its influence on black manhood.

Dominant culture’s obsession with black masculinity in American popular culture is certainly not a new phenomenon. The often grotesque fascination with not only the physical body but what the body represents – hypersexuality, menacing intentions, and the straight up “bad nigger” – are often the consumptive domain for many black male characters on television. Cleveland Brown, however, goes in the opposite direction; he’s lovable, goofy, and downright non-threatening. One could argue that he is the reconstruction of an Uncle Tom or Coon figure seen so often in minstrel shows at the end of the nineteenth and early 20^th centuries.

What strikes me as odd about Cleveland, however, is his laughing in awkward situations when, say, expressions of anger, frustration, or despair would be more cognitively appropriate. Whether intentionally done by the producers or not, what is highlighted is a lack of available discourse for black men to relay a healthy emotional response to crisis-moments. If Cleveland were a real person, he’d have hypertension, high blood pressure, and a zero chance of making it to retirement age. He’d also be in line for going postal. Indeed, Christ Rock used to joke that white folks were afraid of the wrong Negroes. The visibly hostile black men were virtually harmless, Rock quipped, compared to those unassuming and genuflecting, old black men that white folks always see as fun-loving and easy-going. Rock reported that underneath all of those toothy grins and warm handshakes were some of the bitterest, white-folk-hating black men on the planet.

Chris Rock’s observations aside, Cleveland’s laugh is especially prevalent in this episode of The Cleveland Show. The central focus is Auntie Mama, the matriarch figure of Cleveland’s wife Donna. Voiced by Kym Whitley, who is often the sexual Jezebel in most of her performances (which is a discussion for another day) Auntie Mama excuses her sexually explicit actions with “I’m Outrageous!” This is a double entendre – outrageous as in shock value and outrageous as in “I’m offensive and exaggerated.” She is literally sketched like an animated Muh Dear – grey hair, big breasted, and big boned. In short, Auntie Mama refigures black womanhood and black women’s sexuality. While she appears to be a 2009 Mammy figure, she laces her verbal exchanges with sexual escapades with various men. Off the rip, Auntie Mama could be Madea’s folk. Tyler Perry’s wildly popular envision of the strong black matriarch, Madea too distances herself from the traditional mammy caricature with sexual innuendos, a piece, and a girdle.

In similar fashion to Perry, Auntie Mama’s character is the matriarch of the family, portrayed as the savior figure of the black family. And, in similar fashion, both characters are men dressed in drag. The question begs to be asked: is the queering of the black male body in this episode a backdoor way – pun intended – for black men to affirm normative black manhood on the figurative backs of pathologized black women characters?

In this sense, Auntie Mama and Madea are the literal and figurative queering of the black male body. Literal in the sense that they are in drag and representative of their assumptions of black womanhood and figuratively because they place themselves in the space of interpretation that extends beyond “normal” behavior for black men. There is a blurring of masculine and feminine identity here that ventures into the gray (and avoided like the plague) discussions of black sexuality.

What fascinates me about Auntie Mama and Madea is their choice of how they portray themselves as black women. They are not representative of the flamboyant cross dressers of yesteryear like In Living Color’s “Men on Film” series with Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier, but rather the Big Mama character so beloved in black culture and mourned by comedians like the late, great Bernie Mac. While Wayans’ and Grier’s characters lack any representation of heterosexual normativity, Madea and Auntie Mama replace daintiness and femininity with masculine characteristics of dominance and hyper-sexuality. The asexuality of the mammy/matriarch figure leaves room for Perry and Auntie Mama to perform and explore expressions of black masculinity.

In the case of “The Cleveland Show,” Auntie Mama’s character reaffirms the misconceptions of black women as sex crazed and hungry creatures of habit. Even the updated Jezebel trope (i.e., the black groupie) overlays Mama’s character. She compiles a list of popular athletes and musicians with whom she is willing to exchange sex for basking in their limelight. Her sexual interaction with Cleveland’s father Freight Train, however, moves the conversation away from discussions of black womanhood to black masculinity.

Cleveland’s father “Freight Train” reaffirms almost every negative connotation of black men’s existence. He’s violent, an absentee father, a womanizer, hypermasculine, and threatening. He is the “bad nigger” par excellence. Even his name (or nickname, I got to re-watch the episode) suggests a train wreck of an existence. Freight Train continuously denigrates and feminizes Cleveland, in one instance associating him with more feminine features than his mother. Freight Train establishes and maintains his dominance through physical prowess.

Early in the episode, Cleveland discovers Auntie Mama is a man and contemplates telling the other members of the family. His father overtly flirts with Auntie Mama and their “teasing” culminates with sex. Cleveland struggles through telling his father Auntie Mama is a man or letting him sleep with the man unknowingly. He makes his decision to keep silent against the prodding of the good and evil consciences symbolized by Hall and Oates (two popular white recording artists).

Auntie Mama’s conquest over Freight Train signifies the rape-conquest relationship of prison discourse. The body is collateral and used as an instrument of subjugation for social dominance within the prison social hierarchy. What is fascinating here, however, is the reversal of roles between Auntie Mama and Freight Train. You have two cases of extreme masculine expression – the “womanly” Auntie Mama and the “Knuck if You Buck” Freight Train. While it would seem that Freight Train forces his masculinity upon Auntie Mama (who, we later learn, is really Uncle Kevin) it is Auntie Mama who overshadows Freight Train’s identity—“she got him shook.” His willingness to be subservient to Auntie Mama because of her sexual prowess suggests his hypermasculinity being quelled by Auntie Mama’s queered masculinity. Once Cleveland tells Freight Train of Auntie Mama’s real identity, Freight Train recoils in horror and vomits, desperately trying to purge himself of his affiliation (both personal and sexual) with Auntie Mama.

Of course, the question also remains about the intended audience for The Cleveland Show. There are numerous implications of whiteness and the black male body. For starters, Cleveland is voiced by Mike Henry, a white actor. The show’s producers, who are also majority white, bank on our affiliation of the characters with stereotypical representations of blackness as humorous. However, the exploitations of these cultural expressions are in fact reaffirming longstanding paradigms of institutionalized racial bias. While this episode parodies Tyler Perry’s character Madea, it also uses our assumptions and familiarity with Perry’s character to reaffirm voyeuristically the marginalized practices of cross-dressing and the doubly marginalized black male cross dressing body. This in turn problematizes and reiterates the black community’s homophobic tendencies and innate desires to ostracize those who fall into the queer category.

Part 1: Coonery and Bafoonery: Spike Lee vs. Tyler Perry

Never one to mince words, Spike dropped a bomb during an interview at the 14th Annual Black Enterprise Conference when he referred to Tyler Perry's tv series "Meet the Browns" and "House of Payne" as examples of "coonery" and "bafoonery." Though Lee made clear that black artists "should be allowed to pursue their artistic endeavors," he added that they should take care not to slip into demeaning portraits of black folks that reproduce longstanding white stereotypes about black moral and social dysfunctions. In an interview with "60 Minutes," Perry punched back, saying that his use of comical black characters was politically strategic. He says, "Madea, Brown and all of these characters are bait. Disarming, charming, make-you-laugh bait so that I can slap Madea in something and talk about God, love, faith, forgiveness, family -- any of those things -- you know." Framing Spike Lee as an elitist gatekeeper of black respectability, Perry asserts that his work speaks to the black masses and their unique experiences--experiences that have been largely ignored in Hollywood until now.

Of the sparse commentary that exists on this public feud, I was particularly struck by Keith Josef Adkins' op-ed article at the Root.com. Though he agreed with Lee's assessment of Perry's depictions of African Americans, he spent the bulk of his time critiquing Lee's penchant to cast light-skinned blacks and Latinos as his black leads' love interests. This is not to say that Adkins' observations about Lee miss the mark. The pattern that Adkins identifies is surely evident in Lee's work and should be held up to scrutiny, especially given the extent to which Lee has engaged colorist, caste, and class politics in his films. The conspicuous gap in the essay, of course, is a serious interrogation of Perry's work. And, here, I'm not simply talking about a critique of the coonery and bafoonery to which Lee refers. To borrow my mother's phraseology, a blind man could see the resemblances between Perry's depiction of black folks and the minstrelsy tradition that Lee's ascribes to his work. In other words, we needn't waste precious time debating this issue. As a cultural critic recently remarked, if Perry were white, the black receptivity would be radically different. Rather than celebrating his achievements, they would be boycotting his movies and lampooning him as a racist.

I'm nick-picking Adkin's article to highlight our collective reticence as a community to both hold what we deem "good black men" accountable for their actions and, more particularly in this case, to confront the pain that such demeaning, comical images mask. More to the point, my proverbial dog in this fight has to do with the extent to which Perry's meteoric rise pivots on exploiting--consciously and unconsciously--the unhealthy ways that blacks cope with suffering.

The late writer-activist Toni Cade Bambara once wrote that black folks have been socialized "to ignore or laugh at the [spiritual] damage" that we have suffered historically under white supremacy in the U.S. On some level, this dynamic explains why blacks reacted so intensely to Hurricane Katrina compared to whites. Conditioned as we've become to dodge our hurt, many of us were emotionally ambushed by the magnitude of black suffering that was paraded before us on a daily basis. When Kanye West broke with the prepared script during the Hurricane Katrina Fundraiser and declared to the world that George Bush didn't like black people, many of us cheered him on--not because what he said was profound or even well-articulated, but because he vomited up his hurt, confusion, and anger over the events in a raw, uncensored way that we could relate to on a visceral level as oppressed people. Indeed, his speech became such a spectacle, in part, because it has become so rare in our hyper-bling era to see artists, athletes, and even preachers (think Rev. T.D. Jakes and Rev. Creflo Dollar-Bill-Ya'll) risk tarnishing their marketability potential--i.e, pissing off a segment of their fan base--to address such hot-button racial issues in the public domain.

Spike Lee was addressing this phenomenon, albeit indirectly, when he pointed out that when artists like John Singleton make movies like "Rosewood"--which dramatized a horrific racial massacre in 1923 of a small black community in Florida--black people didn't show up to support it. (I happened to see "Rosewood," by the way, and it was a good movie, if not one of Singleton's best.) Though I have no way of confirming this, my suspicion is that African Americans tend not to patronize these movies--not because they are poorly made--but because they throw back at us issues of suffering and pain for which we have no adequate language and for which we dare not allow ourselves to feel. Though Kanye West managed to emerge from his political ordeal with his career still firmly intact (which was due in no small part by his counseled decision to keep his mouth shut about the issue afterward), the media attacks that followed--most notably from the political Right--offered a stark reminder to West and the rest of us that confronting the (white) sources of black pain comes at a high emotional, social, and economic cost.

So, when Perry talks of making movies that cater to the needs/tastes of "the people,"--that is, black folks furthest down the class hierarchy--he is speaking truthfully. The problem, of course, is that he is not necessarily contributing to a healing and empowering discourse as much as he is capitalizing on our unhealthy coping mechanisms with lingering white oppression. Consider the fact that his last installment of the Madea series--"I Can Do Bad All By My Self" topped all movies in September, grossing $24 million in the first weekend. Clearly, if not predictably, black folks were not the only ones interested in the "dysfunctional" images of blackness that Perry was peddling. To be honest, I have difficulty watching Perry's movies to this day--not because they are poorly made, though some surely are--but because I recognize the emotional cover-up masked in jocularity. This cover-up for me is the real "House of Pain" for black folks.