Monroe Anderson

Black-on-Black crime is KKK

    

    Director Spike Lee will shoot a movie about black-on-black crime this summer in Chicago. The working title is Chiraq. That's Chicago and Iraq truncated into one word. Get it? Here's my Chicago Defender column on what Spike's movie should use as its metaphor.

 

Spike Lee’s Chiraq could be KKK

By Monroe Anderson

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may not care for the title of Spike Lee’s movie slated to start shooting this summer in Englewood, but as an artist, an out-of-towner and a show business man, “Chiraq” makes perfectly good sense for America’s most iconic Black director.

    Popularized by Chief Keef, and other neo-gangster rappers in Chicago’s drill music set, the term Chiraq chronicles the violence in some of the city’s worst poverty pockets. Creating the phrase was a low-brainer, considering that when it comes to body count in Chitown’s most dangerous hoods- Fuller Park, Garfield Park and Englewood--more Blacks have been shot and killed on a year-to-year basis there than in war-torn Iraq.

Beyond that, Spike could certainly use a drive-by box office hit. In nearly a decade, the “Black Woody Allen” hasn’t able to do enough of the right thing to produce a feature film as relevant as director Ava Duvernay’s Selma or as entertaining as director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. A convincing argument could be made that in the past 20 years, the New York--based director has made only one smack down feature film, the 2006 The Inside Man, that can hold its own against his earlier efforts like She’s Got to Have It and Malcolm X.

While he made some memorable documentaries over the years, including 4 Little Girls, and the TV mini-series, When the Levees Broke, Lee’s feature-film efforts, such as Miracle of Saint Anna, Red Hook Summer and Oldboy, had more fizzle than sizzle.    

A modern day Menace II Society might do the trick in reviving Lee’s career but I seriously doubt if Chiraq will do the trick partly because it’s based on a misleading premise.

Contrary to what gets reported on the nightly news or in screaming newspaper headlines, Chicago’s murder rate is on the decline. It’s the lowest it has been in more than four decades. According to rankings made by NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that markets itself as providing “Enterprise-grade data for every neighborhood and city in the U.S.” the Windy City isn’t even on its list of America’s Top 30 murder capitals. Downstate East St. Louis is number one. Two suburbs across state lines, Gary is number three and East Chicago is ranks number 15.

In making another stab at recapturing  the ‘90s when his films’ shocked and awed viewers, Spike may be bringing too little, too late to the reality of Chicago’s Bronzeville, which is already showing signs of turning into D.C. or Harlem. No longer the Chocolate City, gentrification and incoming white flight, the Black population in the District of Columbia has slipped below 50 percent. Nor are Blacks the majority in Harlem anymore.

You can see it unfolding before your very eyes in Bronzeville. The hipsters are salting the South Side. They can be spotted walking their dogs, jogging or pushing their baby strollers on streets their parents and grandparents had either avoided or had forgotten.

You can trace it back to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his not so grand plan to transform Chicago into Paris. It was obvious with the flowers and the fences and the fancy hand operated sidewalk vacuums. It was clandestine with the razing of Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, which diluted the power of the city’s Black voting bloc and exiled the poor to, among other places, Gary, East Chicago and Harvey.

You can see why Chiraq is not the best title for what’s really happening here. So, I’ve got a better suggestion. I think Spike should look at the artwork of visual artist James Pate and either beg, borrow or buy his cutting edge artistic vision. A couple of years ago, Pate had a three-month exhibition at the DuSable Museum. Its title was KKK--Kin Killin Kin.

The detailed black and white drawings, beautiful yet powerful, were of boys from the hood, wearing Ku Klux Klan-like headgear with their black faces exposed or basketball jerseys with the initials KKK on them while pointing guns at each other’s heads. The bullets they fired were artistically frozen just before they entered each other’s heads.

That unnerving reality would make a much more powerful movie than a sequel to the Hughes brothers 1993 hit.

If Spike doesn’t want pursue the KKK metaphor, he can always change his filming location. Killadelphia won’t do because, like Chicago, the City of Brother Love’s murder rate is down.  But Baltimore might work. It has killer cops and urban uprisings right now and, unfortunately, a high enough murder rate: Charm City ranks #13 on the Top Murder Capitols list.

Baltimore, courtesy of The Wire, has a controversial colloquialism just as good as Chiraq. That would be Bodymore, Murdaland.

 

 

It's must-be TV for Blacks in Hollywood

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

 

    Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

    On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

    It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

    The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

    “Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

    Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

    And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

    Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

    Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

    More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

    Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives,  is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

    Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

    More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny.  While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid  $1 million each per episode.

    That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while  glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

     Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

    It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.  

    “We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

    Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

 

Remembering Abbey Lincoln

 

 

I knew who Abbey Lincoln was before I invited the legendary Max Roach to my Prairie Shores apartment for dinner in 1973. I’d seen and appreciated her performance as Josie in the movie, Nothing But A Man, which had come out nine years earlier. Although in reality, that was Ivan Dixon’s movie, not hers. I’d seen her with Sidney Poitier five years earlier in For the Love of Ivy, but she hadn’t quite registered because, in today’s parlance, it was too much of a chick flick for the younger me.

Her name had resonance, for reasons I couldn’t empirically explain.

I knew that she was a renowned jazz singer but I would have been hard pressed to name what she had sung. And although Roach was at my home assisting me in putting together what would be the first of the short-lived Ebony Black Music Poll, he hadn’t gotten around to mentioning her at all.

He talked about his life and fabled three-decades long career as a jazz percussionist. He talked about playing with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins.

He told me about that rainy night in 1956, when band members Clifford Brown and Richie Powell were killed in a car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The two were being driven from Philadelphia to Chicago by Powell's wife, Nancy, in the quintet’s car caravan. Roach told me that Powell and Brown had violated the code of never letting a woman drive when they were on the road.

He didn’t tell me that in 1960 he and Lincoln had recorded, We Insist!--Freedom Now, the landmark civil rights jazz song. I think he thought I should have known. I don’t think it occurred to him that I was just becoming a teenager when their collaboration went vinyl.

I don’t remember if Roach told me, as we sat in my Southside Chicago apartment, that she was from the Windy City. I do remember that Roach’s date that night was this beautiful, willowy woman who was about my age. She said she was a model who boasted that she maintained her flawless dark skin by drinking her own urine, which she claimed had some sort of cleansing effect.

As you might imagine, her sharing her beauty secret was a conversation stopper. But not for long. Abbey Lincoln took charge. Roach began talking about her and what she meant to his life.  He didn’t go into a great deal of detail about their working together. Instead he talked about their lives together.

I can still hear the love and faint pain in his voice as he talked about Abbey Lincoln. And that’s how I remember him referring to her. Not as Abbey, but as Abbey Lincoln.

At the beginning of their eight-year marriage, Roach told me that he was a heroin addict. Lincoln had supported him and nurtured him through withdrawal and off the drug. He said he then became an alcoholic. Once again, Lincoln stood by her man, helping him through that crisis.

After that, he said she had nothing left so she left him. Roach spoke of his love and appreciation for his ex-wife even as the young, gorgeous model listened in. And even back then, all I could think about was what a strong, amazing woman Abbey Lincoln was.

When I learned of her death on Saturday, I could have thought about her jazz recordings and compositions or her roles in those two 1960s movies or her 1990s role as Denzel Washington’s mother in Mo’ Better Blues, but I didn’t.

I thought about how sorry I had been when I heard of Roach’s death three years ago and about what he’d shared with me about Abbey Lincoln. I’m sorry I never met her in person but thanks to her ex-husband’s stories about her, I know that we lost a very special woman.

 

 

Black History Month is still not history

 

    Besides holding down her job as my wife and mother of my two sons, Scott and Kyle, Joyce Owens is an artist and a professor and curator at Chicago State University. When she's not eyeballs deep in one of those five jobs, she takes time out to curate an exhibition for Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists here in Chicago.

Without fail, this is the time of the year when the S & C's can bank on an exhibition somewhere. Black History Month really is predictable. And without fail, this is the time of the year when I was a captive sounding board, forced to hear Joyce complain about how this was the only time of the year that it occurred to white galleries, universities and community centers that showing art by black women is a good thing to do.

I understand all too well.

Although I'm available year round, my best speaking engagement in 2009 was a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr./President Barack Obama Celebration for the City of Chicago Height, Illinois. Of course, Obama's Inauguration was a true historical moment. The King Holiday and Black History Month, on the other hand, have become as regular as a Gregorian Calendar.  The two African American observation's have sort of blended into Black History Season, which begins the day after Christmas for Kwanza and rolls on through the end of February. As for the rest of the year--forget about us.

I was reminded of this peculiarity when I read the latest post of my friend Jack White, Buckwheat's Black History Month Tour, on the Washington Post's black website, The Root. This visit to "the Home of Retired Racial Stereotypes" is a funny as Jack's drop in last April. Check it out and then tell me--if you can--why Black History Month shouldn't be integrated into American history, 24/7/52?

Here's Jack's post:

Buckwheat’s Black History Month Tour

By: Jack White

Posted: February 1, 2010 at 6:38 AM

Forget all the black public intellectuals. The Our Gang character has a few things to get off his chest. I came across Buckwheat packing a Kente cloth suitcase in his suite at the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes. He was softly humming, “On the Road Again.”   

"Going somewhere?” I inquired.

“Course I is, White,” squeaked the famous Our Gang character. “It’s Feb’rary and that means it’s time for my annual Black His’try Month speakin’ tour.”

“Your what?” I responded. 

“My annual Black His’try Month speakin’ tour!” said my diminutive friend in a high-pitched voice as he carefully folded a colorful dashiki and placed it in the valise. 

“This the month when black public in-tee-leck-shals like me rakes in ‘nuf speakin’ fees to pay the bills the rest of the year when nobody wants to hear nothin’ we got to say,” said Buckwheat. “It’s kinda like bears eatin’ ‘nuf salmon durin’ the spawnin’ run to get them through the winter.”

“I never thought of it like that,” I observed.

“Where will you be chowing down … I meant, speaking?” “Oh, I’m booked solid,” said Buckwheat proudly. “I’m as pop’lar as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Lacewell and Clarence Page put together. I got a Black His’try road show with a bus and everythin’! ”

“But how could you possibly compete with such a gallery of brilliant minds?” I asked, skeptically.

“All of them just talks ‘bout black his’try,” he ranted, his voice rising into higher and higher registers.

“I lives it. I don’t just talk about racial stereotypes—I IS one! Nobody can say ‘Here I is’ or ‘Otay’ like me! Those are MY trademarks!!! I is an icon!! I is an original!!! WHEN YOU SAY BUCKWHEAT, YOU SAY BLACK HIS’TRY!!!!!”

His tiny fists were pumping in the air, and he was shrieking at such a high pitch it fractured the crystal glasses in the dining room.

“Is that so,” I remarked.

“Yeah, and I got a book comin’ out to prove it. It’s called The Negro Squeaks of Rivers,” Buckwheat boasted. “PBS is plannin’ a 19-part series based on it. They think it could be bigger than Roots.”

Just then, I heard the growl of an engine and an enormous red, black and green touring bus pulled up at the door. It looked like the Kingfish was at the wheel.

“That’s my ride! Gotta go get paid!” shouted Buckwheat, lugging the bulging suitcase toward the door. “So long, White. Be seein’ you in March!”

I waved goodbye, shook my head and closed the door.

Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.

This column has also been cross-posted on the African American Opinion.com website.

Movie Monsters, Barack Obama, Mother Nature and other terrifying things

 

The original The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, was on satellite TV the other morning. My wife, Joyce, watched. I didn't.

Even when I was a young, easy-to-frighten child, The Mummy didn't scare me much. As long as I didn't let myself get cornered, The Mummy wasn't about to get me. I could outrun the dead man walking. Same thing with the Frankenstein Monster. He was way too slow and clumsy to catch me with the quick reflexes and the fast feet.

But, the Werewolf was different. He was fast, strong and vicious. Unlike the embalmed moving mannequin and the blockhead assembled from the booty of grave robbers, The Wolf Man was VERY scary--when the moon was right.

I remember my eight-year-old imagination playing havoc with me after seeing a rerun of the 1941 Wolf Man on our black-and-white TV set. During the next full moon, as I undressed for bed, I'd stare at my feet, just checking to make sure they were not sprouting wolf hair ala Lon Chaney. And I had no interest in wandering around our small, Gary, Indiana backyard when the moon was bright and round. I often would toss and turn before finally getting to sleep.

That fear, of course, was a once a month or so event. The rest of the time, I lived a fairly fright free life--unless I happened to catch a Dracula movie on the boob tube.

Talk about scary; there was no movie monster more blood curdling than the Count. He was lightening-fast. He could morph into a bat. He could vaporize into a mist and slip underneath your bedroom door. There was no evading or escaping him.

Thank God he feared the cross. I took to wearing one for weeks after seeing any of the Hollywood reincarnations of Bram Stoker's masterpiece. The Crucifix was comforting but not a panacea for the lingering terror the movie had injected into my psyche. Even now, as a card-carrying AARP member who's on the brink of senior citizenship, celluloid vampires can put me on edge. I watch True Blood for fun and for the sheer adrenaline rush.

All that's to say, when I hear the wingnuts going on about President Obama and how they fear for America, I understand. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Sarah Palin routinely contribute to the mass hysteria by summoning up imaginary monsters that make The Werewolf look like the family Labrador retriever and Dracula look like the Count Muppet on Sesame Street.

To hear the Birthers, the Deathers, the Tea-Baggers and the Republican leadership tell it, President Obama is a James Cameron creation. Or as Kyle Reese put it: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

The wingnut terrors, of course, are about as real as my youthful fears of the wolf man and the vampire.

Meanwhile, today's headlines force me to recall another low-budget movie monster: The Zombie. In these old black-and-whites, Voodoo sorcerers from Haiti summoned up the dead to wreak havoc and to reckon revenge.

The devastation and horror of the worst earthquake to hit Haiti in 200 years, and the countless number of lives lost, put fear and power in the proper perspective: There are real horrors in life; horrors that don't come with popcorn or silly little tea-bags hanging from your straw hat.

---

 

 This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox and Newsvine websites.

Black to the future: Bringing the Blaxploitation genre back

I was there when the Blaxploitation craze hit the silver screen. Fresh out of college and living in Washington, D.C. I laughed through Cotton Comes to Harlem and cheered at the end of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song when the movie promised that the pimp-turned-revolutionary be back taking names and collecting dues. Like many a young black man my age, I wanted to be Shaft, strutting through the black community with Isaac's Haye's lyrics, "who is the man who would risk his life for his brother man," playing in my head.

For the second time around, it was a first. Not since the 1920s and '30, when the pioneering black film director Oscar Michaeux shot more than 30 movies in Chicago, could we see black actors starring in black films about black people.

Then came Superfly, the dope dealer who dressed like a pimp and who surely inspired the cable TV show, Pimp My Ride. Superfly's ride was a Caddy with an oversized,  customized chrome grill that soon had life imitating art. In no time flat, Harlem hustlers  and Chi Town players were doing the gangster lean in their own deuce and a quarter. The big screen car that spawned the ones in the ghetto may have singlehandedly wrecked General Motors' rep as America's most prestigious ride and driven rich white Americans in droves to buy a Mercedes Benz.

With the exception of middle-age and older Jews, who harbored no fond feeling about German engineering, after Superfly, the only time white Americans who could afford them wanted to be caught in a Cadillac was when it was the hearst carrying their dead body.

But, in the hood, Superfly was a smash hit, helping to give birth to scores of other movies that exploited its black American audience. Before long, Hollywood was churning out one low-budget, stereotypical and formulaic movie after the next. Set in the ghetto with drug dealers, pimps and whores as the hero or heroine were always out to get "the man."

      There was Trouble Man, where Marvin Gaye's theme song, like Curtis Mayfield's for Superfly, was far superior to the flick. There were the Rudy Ray Moore movies, Dolemite and The Human Tornado and the Pam Grier flicks, Coffy and Foxy Brown. Fred Williamson's Hammer, Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem were just three of more than a dozen blaxploitation films the former AFL star starred in.

Of course, that was back then and we are right now. If Black Dynamite has it's way, a blaxploitation flick will be playing next year in a cineplex near you. From it's trailer, the movie looks to be a satire on the '70s genre. Since the flicks of in that era quickly became a put-on of themselves, it's hard to tell if this parody will play in Richard Pryor's hometown, Peoria.

It's also hard to tell whether Black Dynamite is going to be as good as Undercover Brother or as awful as Soul Plane. The movie is due out next year.
Here's the trailer now.

And this video may be a clue to how serious Black Dynamite actually is.