Let’s get this straight: nothing will ever “succeed” The Wire. For my money, The Wire captured the complexity, diversity, and pathology of the black community better than any series we’ve seen on the small screen.
But if The Wire can’t be topped, perhaps its brilliance can be repeated.
That’s the hope for the upcoming series Treme. This new TV series comes from David Simon, The Wire’s creator, producer, and primary author. Treme will be based in New Orleans, and will look at the lives of musicians in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (Treme is a neighborhood in New Orleans where many musicians live.)
Wendell Pierce, who is from New Orleans and played police detective Bunk Moreland on The Wire, will have a lead role in the new series. He shares his thoughts with the New Orleans weekly The Gambit. Clearly, he is overjoyed with the idea of doing a show that focuses on his hometown.
The show is expected to debut in 2010. I’m looking forward to it.
When a movie makes a lot of money in its theatrical release, they say it’s “boffo at the box office.”
The four most prominent black directors of the past 10-15 years are Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, John Singleton, and Keenan Ivory Wayans. Which of these four has had the most success at the box office?
I went to two sites that provide box office informtion by director: Box Office Mojo and The Numbers. The two sites differ slightly in the numbers they report. When there were differences, I took the average of the two sites.
Here are the box office numbers for the four directors.
Spike Lee
Tyler Perry
John Singleton
Keenan Wayans
Total Box Office
$373,204,582
$369,939,423
$436,302,252
$399,329,117
Average Box Office
$20,733,588
$52,848,489
$54,537,781
$66,554,853
In total, John Singleton has been the most successful in total box office, but Keenan Ivory Wayans has done the best on average.
These numbers reflect the domestic box office only. Foreign box office and rental numbers are not included, as they are harder to get. If I can find the time, I might go back and update this post with foreign and rental sales information.
These are the movies for each director, and their domestic box office:
If Lee’s numbers were adjusted for inflation, they’d look better compared to the other directors. But even so, it’s clear that Lee is not a big money maker. Only one of his films, Inside Man, did over $50 million at the box office.
This is sorta silly season in politics. - Barack Obama, during the 2008 Presidential campaign.
When is it NOT silly season in Washington? Our politics have become so shallow, so stuck on things that don’t matter, that they border on being irrelevant.
That’s true for many Washington politicians in general, and Republican politicians in particular.
Case in point: Republican Newt Gingrich, who was once Speaker of the House and a respected deep thinker. It seems he’s gone off the shallow end. For Gingrich, no attack on Obama is too trivial or trifling.
A couple of weeks ago, in the wake of the Somali pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama, Gingrich said it was time for Obama to show the world he was tough on piracy. As Gingrich noted on the ABC show This Week with George Stephanopoulos:
Look, this is the administration [Obama's] which keeps trying to find some kind of magical solution that doesn’t involve effort, and doesn’t involve risk, and doesn’t involve making hard decisions….. we ought to simply, as a civilized world, say we are gonna stop the pirates in the region. Period. It’s very good for the rest of the world to see that there’s someplace in the planet where people are willing to draw a line and say certain things won’t be tolerated.
Gingrich went on to say that piracy was a global threat along the lines of Iran, North Korea, and Mexico, and represented a test of the President’s resolve. That led Stephanopoulos to ask conservative commentator George Will whether the pirates were in fact a test for President Obama. Will responded
Good Heavens, no. The Speaker’s very litany of nuisances around the world — some rising considerably above nuisance — indicates just how down on the chain of concerns this should be. Again…. this is well below what mugging was in New York City, because as Paul [Krugamn] said the sea’s really quite safe.
Why did Gingrich elevate the piracy incident to the top of the list of foreign policy concerns? Because in the event that the pirate incident didn’t work out well-say, with the unfortunate death of Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips, whom the Somali pirates were holding hostage-Gingrich could call it big failure by Obama on the world stage.
One issue that Dr. Austin has addressed on numerous occasions is the mistaken beliefs held by some black intellectuals concerning black progress, or the lack thereof.
For example, consider these comments from Austin’s blog, regarding a review by Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford of the book More Than Just Race by William Julius Wilson.
The second sentence of your New York Times book review of William Julius Wilson’s More Than Just Race states: “The poverty, violence and hopelessness in America’s inner cities have become increasingly dire in the four decades since the height of the civil rights movement.” This statement is not correct.
The Census Bureau reports that in 1966 the black poverty rate was 41.8 percent. In 2007, it was 24.5 percent, 17.3 percentage points lower than in 1966. The Center for Disease Control’s Health, United States, 2008 reports that in 1970 the age-adjusted homicide rate for black men was 78.2 for every 100,000 men. In 2005, it was 37.3 per 100,000. For black females, the 1970 homicide rate was 14.7 and 6.1 in 2005.
Many of the leading black public intellectuals are nostalgic for the past, but this is only because they do not accurately remember how rough the 1960s and 1970s were.
Just about every leading black public intellectual who discusses the black poor recently gets these and other basic facts wrong. The consensus among these black elites is that there is an epidemic of bad behavior among lower-income blacks that has led to a big increase in black poverty. Juan Williams states, “too many poor and low-income black people are not taking advantage of opportunities to get themselves out of poverty.” Cynthia Tucker claims, “drug use, poor classroom performance and the embrace of outlaw culture have done nothing but cement the black underclass at the bottom of American society.” Henry Louis Gates argues that America now has “the largest [black] underclass in our history” and “it’s time to concede that, yes, there is a culture of poverty.” You see that your second sentence fits with this theme.
Apparently, none of these commentators took much time to examine the black poverty trends. Over the 1990s, when lower-income blacks were supposedly mired in a culture of poverty, they experienced the largest reduction in black poverty since the 1960s. In 1992, the black poverty rate was 33.4 percent. By 2000, it had reached its lowest level on record, 22.5 percent. The culture-of-poverty idea or the “tangle of pathology” as William Julius Wilson has called it does not help us understand this historic decline in black poverty.
Just to be clear: Austin would be the first to say that the African American community faces a number of challenges, including internal ones, in dealing with problems such as poverty, crime and violence.
But even so, the idea that black people are stuck in a hopeless and helpless pathological spiral is unwarranted by the facts. The fact is, the black community has made significant social progress over the past 50 years.
It seems that we place an inordinate of effort in articulating what’s wrong with the black community, as opposed to detailing our successes, and pinpointing what works.
We need to talk more about how black people can win.
There are now a record 628 African Americans in the legislatures of the 50 states, according to the National Black Caucus of State Legislatures and the National Conference of State Legislatures. Last year there were 622 Africans Americans state legislators.
How do you measure the quality of life in broad terms for nations, or large groups within nations?
Most quantitative measures of quality of life are based on standard of living statistics, which in turn are based mostly on income or other purely economic factors.
A group called the Human Development Project (the Project) finds fault with that approach, saying that other measures are needed to truly understand how well people are living:
The indicators most frequently deployed in evaluating public welfare-GDP, the Dow Jones and NASDAQ, consumer spending and the like-only address one aspect of the American experience.
The human development model emphasizes the broader, everyday experience of ordinary people, including the economic, social, legal, psychological, cultural, environmental processes that shape the range of options available to us.
This approach has gained support around the world as a valuable tool in analyzing the well-being of large population groups.
The Project has developed a rating system called the Human Development Index which measures achievement in three basic categories:
• long and healthy life (as indicated by life expectancy at birth)
• access to knowledge (indicated by al degree attainment and school enrollment)
• decent standard of living (indicated by median earnings)
By applying these measures, the Project has developed the following Human Development Index scores for the United States, by race and gender:
American Human Development Index (HD) Rankings by Race and Gender, 2005
* Enrollment can exceed 100% if persons 25 years old or more are enrolled in school. Source:The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009
Ellen Holly (1931- ) is an American actress, the first black actress ever to appear regularly on a soap opera. She played Carla Hall on “One Life to Live” from 1968 to 1985. She also played the president’s wife in “School Daze” (1988).
Holly grew up in New York, the daughter of a chemical engineer and a librarian. She studied acting at Hunter College and went on from there to act on stage. By 1956 she was on Broadway. She got in to the Actors Studio, the first black woman ever to do so. She later got parts in film and television too.
In 1968 Holly wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times about what it was like to be a light-skinned black woman. Agnes Dixon, who was then starting a new soap called “One Life to Live”, read that letter. It led her to create the character of Carla Gray (later Hall). She offered the part to Holly herself. Holly took it and became the first regular black female character on a soap. Other soaps soon followed their lead and had black characters of their own too.
I remember watching Holly on One Life to Live as a teenager. At the time, I didn’t appreciate that she was breaking new ground for black actors in the soaps.
I can see why so many people thought she was white: it wasn’t until the late 1960s that color TVs started selling in large numbers. On black and white TV, her light skin did make her look white.
She started out on the show doing a story line where she is a black person passing for white. A white male character on the show actually proposed to her, but she had to reject the proposal because she was not white. I later found out that the theme of the “tragic mulatto who passes for white” was a not an uncommon one for Hollywood (see Imitation of Life). But at the time, I was shocked that this kind of race-sensitive stuff was being shown on daytime television.
***
Monroe, Louisiana is a city of about 50,000 in north central Louisiana. It’s about a half hour drive from Grambling University. The following is from a recent story in the Monroe Free Press, which is one of the city’s African American newspapers:
It started a few years back when we started reporting about the tendency of our police chief to curse and use extremely foul and graphic language publicly. In one instance he even told the police chief of Sterlington to get under the table and suck his…
There were no reprimands, lost days of pay, or other slaps on the wrist. The subliminal message is that such language is acceptable for department heads…
The most recent problems occurred this year when Sean Benton the Superintendent of Monroe’s Water Distribution plant was accused of referring to black employees of his department as Niggas and routinely using foul language and expletives in his references to others. Police had to be called once when Benton took off his shirt to fight a subordinate…
What raises eyebrows is that Benton is black. Most of his “Nigga” comments were made to blacks. The issue that this raises is whether or not “Nigga” is an generally offensive by whites but acceptable when used by blacks.
Because Benton has not been fired or reprimanded by the city’s black mayor it appears to be an endorsement of “Nigga” as acceptable language for a black professional in a department head status to use toward subordinates.
***
There’s been a slew of articles written in the past year or so about Tyler Perry. A recent piece about him in Entertainment Weekly, titled Tyler Perry: The Controversy Over His Hit Movies, claims to go “inside black America’s secret culture war”:
American Violet is a new movie that is based on a true story of the Texas criminal (in)justice system. As described on Youtube,
Based on true events in the midst of the 2000 election, AMERICAN VIOLET tells the astonishing story of Dee Roberts (critically hailed newcomer Nicole Beharie), a 24 year-old African American single mother of four young girls living in a small Texas town who is barely making ends meet on a waitress salary and government subsidies.
On an early November morning while Dee works a shift at the local diner, the powerful local district attorney (Academy Award® nominee Michael OKeefe) leads an extensive drug bust, sweeping her Arlington Springs housing project with military precision. Police drag Dee from work in handcuffs, dumping her in the squalor of the womens county prison. Indicted based on the uncorroborated word of a single and dubious police informant facing his own drug charges, Dee soon discovers she has been charged as a drug dealer.
Even though Dee has no prior drug record and no drugs were found on her in the raid or any subsequent searches, she is offered a hellish choice: plead guilty and go home as a convicted felon or remain in prison and fight the charges thus, jeopardizing her custody and risking a long prison sentence.
Despite the urgings of her mother (Academy Award® nominee Alfre Woodard), and with her freedom and the custody of her children at stake, she chooses to fight the district attorney and the unyielding criminal justice system he represents. Joined in an unlikely alliance with an ACLU attorney (Tim Blake Nelson) and former local narcotics officer (Will Patton), Dee risks everything in a battle that forever changes her life and the Texas justice system. AMERICAN VIOLET also stars Emmy Award® winner Charles S. Dutton and Xzibit.
Here’s the movie trailer:
This is an independent movie, and is not in wide release. But if it is in your town, it might be worth a look.
The movie is based on a true story, which is detailed here. Another site has an engaging interview with Regina Kelly, upon whom the Dee Roberts character is based. Kindly enough, the video was placed on Youtube:
Today, Aptil 9th, is the 111th birthday of Paul Robeson. He is a giant of our culture whose contributions should be celebrated by all, black, white, or other.
Paul LeRoy Bustill Robeson (April 9, 1898–January 23, 1976) was an Afro-American actor of film and stage, All-American and professional athlete, writer, multi-lingual orator, lawyer, and basso profondo concert singer who was also noted for his wide-ranging social justice activism.
A forerunner of the civil rights movement, Robeson was a trades union activist, peace activist, Phi Beta Kappa Society laureate, and a recipient of the Spingarn Medal and Stalin Peace Prize. Robeson achieved worldwide fame and recognition during his life for his artistic accomplishments, and his outspoken, radical beliefs which largely clashed with the colonial powers of Western Europe and the Jim Crow climate of pre-civil rights America.
Paul Robeson was the first major concert star to popularize the performance of Negro spirituals and was the first black actor of the 20th century to portray William Shakespeare’s Othello. His 1943-44 Broadway run of Othello still holds the record for the longest running Shakespeare play. Despite Robeson’s vocal dissatisfaction with movie stereotypes, his roles in both the American and British film industry were some of the first parts ever created that displayed dignity and respect for the African American film actor, paving the way for Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.
At the height of his fame, Paul Robeson decided to become a primarily political artist, speaking out against fascism and racism in the US and abroad as white America failed post-World War II to stand up for the rights of people of color. Robeson thus became a prime target of the Red Scare during the late 1940s through to the late 1950s.
His passport was revoked from 1950 to 1958 under the McCarran Act and he was under surveillance by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency and by British MI5 for well over three decades until his death in 1976. The reasoning behind his persecution centered not only on his beliefs in socialism and friendship with the peoples of the Soviet Union but also his tireless work towards the liberation of the colonial peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, his support of the International Brigades, his ardent efforts to push for anti-lynching legislation and the integration of major league baseball among many other causes that challenged worldwide white supremacy.
Condemnation of Robeson and his beliefs came swiftly, from both the white establishment of the US, including the United States Congress, and many mainstream black organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This mass vilification by the American establishment blacklisted and isolated Robeson for the latter part of his career.
Despite the fact that Paul Robeson was one of the most internationally famous cultural figures of his era, the persecution virtually erased him from mainstream culture and subsequent interpretations of 20th century history, including civil rights and black history.
Paul Robeson sings Ol’ Man River in the 2nd version (1936) of Showboat:“Colored folks work on de Mississippi / Colored folks work while de white folks play / Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset / Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day.”
—
The most notable aspect of Paul Robeson is that he always fought for the dignity and progress of the race, no matter what the personal cost. And as said above, that cost was very, very high.
To those who don’t know about Paul Robeson: please, find out and learn. This is a man who lost fortune, fame… everything… in the furtherance of the cause of African American progress.
His name deserves to be invoked among the pantheon of American and African American giants. Don’t let those who sought to destroy him and his legacy be successful.
In the previous blog entry, we mentioned that Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, expressed his desire to see more people of color represented within the Republican Party. Steele made this statement at a meeting of Florida Republicans. At the same meeting, Jim Greer, Florida’s party chairman, said that the party would focus on using technology to invigorate younger Republicans.
The folowing charts help to explain why Republicans might be concerned about ethnic and age diversity within their party. These are from the Young Voters in the 2008 Presidential Election Fact Sheet, which was prepared by CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
This first chart is not elegant aesthetically, but it makes a powerful point about the ethnic make-up of voters in the November elections. The chart shows the ethnicity of the electorate, broken-out by different age groups.
I know this is redundant, but let me go over the numbers on the above chart:
• For voters who are 60 years old or more, the ethnic composition of the vote was 85% white, 8% black, and 4% Hispanic
• For voters aged 45-59, the ethnicity was 80% white, 12% black, and 4% Hispanic
• For voters aged 30-44, the ethnicity was 72% white, 15% black, and 7% Hispanic
• For voters aged 18-29, the ethnicity was 64% white, 19% black, and 11% Hispanic
What we’re seeing is that the under-30 population has become more ethnically diverse than older age groups. Whites are a smaller portion of the electorate, while the percentage of African Americans and Hispanics is growing.
The problem for Republicans is that African Americans and Hispanics tend to vote for Democrats. The following chart shows the percentage of people who voted for Obama in the November elections, by ethnicity and age-group:
”Please send some folks to the convention that look like Florida. Could you help a brother out? No more national conventions with [only] 36 people of color in the room.”
- Michael Steele, Chairman, Republican National Committee, speaking at a meeting of Florida Republicans in early April.
They say that, to solve a problem, you first have to know what the problem is.
But after you know what the problem is… you need a way to solve the problem, otherwise, the problem doesn’t go away.
The 36 black delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul is the lowest total in 40 years for a Republican National Convention. These delegates represent 1.5 percent of the total number of delegates, substantially below the record setting 6.7 percent in 2004. (Editor’s note: The United States is 13% African American.)
Steele’s statement is useful, insofar it as it acknowledges the GOP’s obvious problem in attracting minorities, and signals that the Republican Party (or at least, that Michael Steele) wants minority input and participation.
The question is: where do they go from there? What is their plan to attract African Americans and Hispanics to the fold?
I have yet to hear it. If you have, drop me a line and let me know.
The Pew Research Center web site has prepared an excellent presentation showing population migration patterns in the United States. The presentation shows which states are gaining and losing population, and provides detailed information at the ethnic group level.
The Pew report has migration information that goes back to 1975-80, but for this blog entry, I am focusing on 2007. The following table shows net migration information that year, which is taken from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
There’s lots of interesting stuff here. The biggest black population gains are in Georgia, Texas, and the Southeast. The biggest losses are in New York, Louisiana, California, and the industrial Midwest. Here are a few comments.
• Georgia continues to be the biggest magnet for black migrators. The Atlanta area has been growing by leaps and bounds, and now sends three African Americans to the US Congress.
The influx of blacks could have political implications on a state-wide level. Last November, many were surprised when Barack Obama got 47% of the state’s vote in the presidential election, despite not doing much in the way of campaigning or advertising. Georgia is close to being 30% black, and the black folks here – especially in the Atlanta area – are politically active.
Georgia is not an unlikely place for a black governor or senator, if the right person comes along. Twelve-year Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who is African American, has announced that he’s in the race for governor’s seat in 2010. I don’t know if he’s the right person, but he is in it at least.
• The huge black migrations to Texas and from Louisiana are the result of the same thing: Hurricane Katrina. Katrina depopulated huge swaths of the New Orleans area, and many former residents moved to Houston, Dallas/Ft Worth, and eastern Texas.
The large population loss in Louisiana will probably mean that the state will lose a congressional seat following the 2010 Census. There have already been discussions about how to handle the state’s majority black congressional district, which is centered around New Orleans. That area was represented for years by former congressman William Jefferson. The current congressman there is Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao, who is first Vietnamese-American to be elected to Congress.
Some have suggested creating a new district that will combine the black neighborhoods of New Orleans and Baton Rouge. That would preserve a black majority district, but it would remove Democrats from surrounding districts, and make it easier for Republicans to win the state’s other congressional seats.
Frederick Dewayne (“Freddie”) Hubbard, one of the great American jazz trumpeters, died on December, 29 2008 at the age of 70. He will be missed.
Hubbard was an exponent of the so-called bebop and hard bop schools of jazz. He played with a number of jazz greats, from drummer Art Blakey to saxaphonist John Coltrane to pianist Herbie Hancock.His wikipedia entry gives a very good summary of his life and work.
(I sometimes hear the question, what is bop/bebop/hard bop? I am no expert on this, but here’s how I look at it. When jazz became a unique art form in the first half of the 20th century, it was mainly dance music. The rhythms and melodies were made to help dancers keep in step/rhythm with the beat.
Bop-style music still had a beat, but it wasn’t necessarily dance music, and lots of bop isn’t even dance-able (think John Coltrane). Bop is built a lot around jazz solos and improvisation. One way to tell early non-bop jazz from bop jazz is to listen to the bass player. In early jazz, the bass players pretty much plays a steady, uniform rhythm throughout piece. But in bop, the bass plays rhythmically, but not uniformly; the chords can go all over place, as the bass player helps to push the soloist through the music.
Or something like that.)
Freddie Hubbard was a favorite, perhaps the favorite, jazz musician of mine as I was grew up in New York City during the late sixties and early seventies. His trumpet solo on Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, from the album of the same name, is still like a gourmet dish to my ears. And his early work with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers is still a thrill to listen to.
Here are two videos featuring Hubbard. The first is from a Jazz Messengers re-union perfromance, with the band performing the tune A La Mode for a German TV special in 1989 celebrating Art Blakey’s 70th birthday. The band includes Freddie Hubbard and Terence Blanchard on trumpet, Wayne Shorter and Benny Golson on tenor sax, Jackie McLean on alto sax, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Walter Davis Jr. on piano, Buster Williams on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums. Art Blakey can be seen in the background, with a medium sized silver afro.
Hubbard plays the second trumpet solo.
The second video is from a 1984 live performance with the Jazz Messengers, with Art Blakey doing the drums. The band also includes Benny Golson on tenor sax, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Walter Davis Jr on piano, and Buster Williams on bass.
The tune is called I Remember Clifford, and is an ode to another jazz great, trumpeter Clifford Brown.
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Older African-Americans with HIV/AIDS frequently draw upon their spiritual beliefs to cope with the disease but rarely disclose it to friends inside or outside the church, according to a study conducted by University of Alabama researchers.
The study, accepted for publication in the journal AIDS Care, is one of the first to look at the stigma of AIDS in older, rural African-Americans in the South.
“While the people found religion and spirituality to be comforting in helping them through this, they did not identify either the church community or organized religion to be helpful at all,” Gaskins said. “When they went to church, they didn’t tell anybody because they weren’t hopeful of getting support.”
In 2005, older adults represented 24 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS, and rates of the disease in older adults are 12 times higher for African-Americans than whites, according to the CDC.
