Grand Theft Auto: The Underbelly of Cadillac Records

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Midway through the recently released Cadillac Records, director Darnell Martin’s film on the groundbreaking record label Chess Records, Martin depicts rock pioneer Chuck Berry unleashing his signature “Sweet Little Sixteen” guitar riffs against scenes of surfing revelry. Berry’s song was notoriously pilfered by the Beach Boys in their song “Surfin’ USA,” a homage to white California youth subculture. Chewed up and spat out by an imperialist marketing machine, Berry’s music becomes yet another Jim Crow soundtrack for Americana pleasure. The first African American female to direct a studio film, Martin’s take on the Chess saga breathes new life into the all too familiar history of gifted black musicians ripped off by a white record promoter. Chronicling the rise of Chess artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Berry, Little Walter and Etta James, Martin highlights their struggle to gain fair compensation and recognition in a culture whose appetite for “black music” would ripen into a multi-million dollar industry during the 1950s. The avarice of record company owner Leonard Chess, who amassed a fortune from the music of these artists, paying them off with Cadillac cars and shady contracts, is a vivid reminder of the plantation ethos that drives American pop music.

It’s no revelation to say that white appropriation of African American derived music and idioms has been a cornerstone of mainstream American cultural identity, yet Martin’s film throws the question of consumption, commerce and the capitalist subtext of white pleasure into vivid relief. In the film young white women flock to black guitar players at segregated concerts, parading their relative racial and sexual freedom, oblivious to the consequences for black men. For white Americana, the rise of 1950s rock and R&B transformed racial otherness into a more mainstream adventure, a resort vacation into unexplored vistas of self-discovery that even white consumers with a few cents for a 45 record could take. White postwar prosperity and suburbanization made blackness all the more appealing because of its transgressive potential. As long as actual black people remained “out there,” in segregated urban ghettos and rural communities, black cultural production would continue to be a seductive bromide.

The 1956 Interstate Highway Act paved the way to white suburbia and ignited a car culture that was baptized in the sounds of rock and R&B. As suburban white flight exacerbated residential segregation, black music became the commodity of choice for a new generation of young white consumers. Yet in the film, scene after scene of crushing poverty, racist police abuse and public humiliation endured by Waters and company underscores the parasitic relationship between white consumption and spatial apartheid. For scores of white record buyers and musicians, classics such as Wolf and Willie Dixon’s “Backdoor Man” and Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” would become standards, while segregated black spectators would grow up watching Hollywood scenes of white romance and redemption against the backdrop of black music.

Like Motown, Stax Records and other black-dominated labels, the work of the Chess artists established a new language for white self-invention while foregrounding the disparity between white and black postwar opportunities. The parallels between this history and the commodification of hip hop are compelling. As hip hop has spanned the globe netting mega millions for white corporations it has become another metaphor for imperialist exploitation of black America. Though Berry ultimately won song writing credit on Surfin’ USA after a threatened lawsuit, the film leaves us with the image of the hip swiveling Elvis Presley; his legacy and global empire forged on the backs of African American geniuses unknown and unrecognized in American music history.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.

Modeling Submission: Gender and Consumerism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

During the presidential campaign it became customary for ill-informed pundits to make declarations of gender equality because there were two female candidates running for high office. Feminist critics pondered the implications of having elite white women in the race, while Barack Obama gave a nod to gender by promising to address the pay equity gap when elected.

Now that the campaign has ended, the economy smolders and a trillion dollar bailout-fueled deficit looms, the prospect of seriously addressing the pay gap at the federal level looks bleak, due to opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Congressional wage reform bills. Despite all the inspirational sisterhood rhetoric that Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama inspired during the campaign, there was little focus on the actual circumstances of working women of color, who comprise the majority of the American (paid and unpaid) workforce and a big portion of American consumers. The myth that educated women of color have equal access to all professions regardless of their obligation to home and family persists despite a sweeping report from the Public Policy Institute of California which concluded that the gender divide in wages and occupational equity has widened. Women are still concentrated in lower-paying service sector jobs and excluded from more lucrative male-dominated science, engineering and technology fields. And women, surprise, surprise are still saddled with the majority of childcare.

So this myth of equal access has particular relevance to the way girls and boys are “gender programmed” into their roles as providers and caregivers by consumer culture. Girls’ social construction as objects and boys’ construction as active subjects begins right out of the womb. From clothes to toys to media images, gender programming amounts to little more than political propaganda on how to be male or female. Non-gender conforming little girls and boys are marginalized by the near-Victorian enforcement of gender hierarchies for children. When navigating the explosions of pink and blue in the infant and toddler clothing aisles the divisions are clear—based upon the designs and insignias that manufacturers slap on their clothes, little girls are to be pampered, indulged as sweet, beautiful, precious and deferential. Boys, on the other hand, are to be productive, self-sufficient, enterprising, rough and, ultimately, violent. Despite the inroads women have made into “non-traditional” careers, many children’s catalogues still feature scenes of boys engaged in rough and tumble or discovery-oriented play and girls decoratively draped around toy stoves, kitchen sinks and life-size dollhouses. These images of domesticity reinforce the not-so mixed messages that girls get from Bratz Dolls hawking multiculti coquettishness to pop singer Ashanti’s Donna Reed-style sex kitten video “Good-Good”—namely, that having professional aspirations is fine but make sure that you are fetching, non-threatening and know how to keep your man happy in the process. Female submissiveness is a given that young women internalize and act out in their interpersonal relationships, even as they see strong women of color all around them struggle with raising families and working jobs with no benefits.

For boys, gender programming results in conformity to destructive social norms. When they talk about gender the teens I work with often reflect on how they are taught to suppress their emotions in order to appear strong and invulnerable. Invulnerability translates into acceptance from both their male “homies” and female peers. For some, life in working class black and brown communities demands adopting a code of “hardness,” one that is reinforced by the glorification of violent masculinity that they see in white-dominated TV, film, network news and video games. Yet while young white men are validated by the media regime, the stakes are higher for men of color. The heinous levels of assault and murder of black girls and women and the homicides of black boys who die at the hands of their so-called “niggas” exemplify the self-annihilating influence of sexism and patriarchy. Just as the national economic crisis imperils communities of color the crisis of destructive gender socialization amounts to low-intensity warfare on youth of color. And until we begin to empower young people to redefine and re-envision the boundaries of masculinity and femininity we will continue to be under siege.

http://www.blackfemlens.blogspot.com/

Thoughts on California and the Next Generation

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the excitement over the historic election of Barack Obama it is important to reflect on the landscape-altering impact of this year’s California ballot initiatives. Boasting one of the most divisive socially conservative agendas in recent memory, this year’s ballot initiatives highlighted why the initiative process has become a virtual cesspool for plutocratic special interests. At least four initiatives were bankrolled by millionaires, political action committees disguised as tax exempt faith-based initiatives and out-of-state GOP power brokers.

Voters rightly rejected the stentorian law and order Runner Initiative or Prop 6, yet also nixed humane treatment of non-violent drug offenders and potential reductions in the prison population by voting against Proposition 5. Voters approved an increase in the county sales tax for highways and public transit and backed millions for a high speed rail bond measure that the progressive Labor/Strategy Center argued will have little benefit for transit dependent L.A. communities of color. And as the nation now knows, voters backed Prop 8—the controversial anti-same sex marriage initiative that got overwhelming support from blacks and Latinos—yet they also rejected Prop 4’s parental notification for abortion policy by a slim majority.

If we examine the generational divide that exists between youth and adults on social issues such as sexual orientation, young people consistently express more tolerant views of gays and lesbians in polls than do older respondents. Last week, during an election forum at predominantly black and Latino Gardena High School, students spoke out against Proposition 8, arguing that using religious dogma to strip gays and lesbians of their constitutional right to marry was dead wrong. The generational divide is part of the reason why the margins of victory for this initiative have decreased when compared with over 60% of the electorate that supported a similar initiative, Proposition 22, in 2000. Although many have criticized the anti-Prop 8 forces for not mobilizing enough among communities of color, I believe that black folk in particular had a moral obligation and responsibility to reject this initiative. First, out of solidarity with lesbian and gay parents, families and caregivers in our communities, and second out of solidarity with our history of having been violently denied marriage rights as slaves and as racial others. On the flip side, the specter of state control over the bodies and destinies of young women moved the electorate and elicited outrage from young people over Prop 4. Regardless of their religious or ideological orientation, most young people were sensitive to the grave implications of encroaching upon the bodies and right to self-determination of young women. When the students learned who funded the initiative most scorned the right of a handful of white male millionaires to police the futures of young women.

While Obama’s mobilization of the youth vote inspired folk who had never voted before to go to the polls, not everyone felt empowered. When I went around to senior classes with my Women’s Leadership Project students to register 18 year-old voters a couple of young men were apprehensive about registering, moping that their vote wouldn’t count, so why register. I had to give them a mini primer on the bloody history of voting rights in this country, the thousands who fought and died, weathered literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and worse just to exercise their constitutional rights. In many regards this election has been a litmus test for that legacy of struggle. And while we celebrate Obama’s victory, the lessons from California remind us that it will only be through critically conscious engagement with the full diversity of our communities—challenging the anti-democratic ideology of religious fundamentalism—that black people will continue to be at the forefront of progressive social change in this country.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.

The Moral Choice: Blacks, Homophobia and Proposition 8

By Sikivu Hutchinson

On the corner of King Blvd and Crenshaw black street preachers goose step their way through anti-gay slogans, adding an unwelcome touch of street theater demagoguery to the flow of everyday pedestrian traffic. A few blocks away, Yes on Proposition 8 (the California ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution and outlaw same-sex marriage) signs have begun springing up like weeds, a final appeal to black and Latino conservatism by the anti-gay marriage regime.

The perception that black folk in particular are more receptive to homophobic propaganda is partly grounded in reality and partly grounded in stereotype. Polls have shown that African Americans are 10 percent more likely to support Prop 8 than other racial groups. Because the pro and con polling numbers for Prop 8 are so tight, black support for the measure could put it over the top. And what exactly do black straight people like me have to be threatened by? Cultural nationalist supporters of Prop 8 argue that homosexuality and the insidiously labeled “gay lifestyle” (a slur that presumes that gays and lesbians are monolithic) threaten the already besieged black family. Given this belief, African Americans are presumably more invested in propping up heterosexism because of the pathologization of black families. Yet Prop 8 rests on the same logic that prohibited interracial marriages, a premise that the California Supreme Court cited in its ruling in favor of legalizing same-sex marriages. Slavery and antebellum p atriarchy were rooted in rigid definitions of family and marriage aimed at preserving property rights, lines of descent and white purity. This legacy continues to influence the gender hierarchies underlying so-called traditional family structures and to police families that aren’t nuclear or heterosexual.

Voting to amend the California Constitution will extend this legacy. It signifies a concession to flat earth politics, a betrayal of civil rights principles and a hypocritical denial of some of the real crises that imperil black families. As straights we live in communities that are devastated by the large number of black children in foster care due to parents who are either unwilling or unable to take care of them. As straights we lament the absence of affirming role models for children in a racist hyperviolent culture that devalues black lives, yet fail to connect this to a cult of masculinity that demeans women and gays and lesbians. As straights we engage in the schizoid rhetoric of championing black self-determination yet vilify full citizenship for gays and lesbians as a “European” thing. As straights we cherry pick who is “rightfully” part of the community based upon heterosexual privilege while disrespecting the valiant heritage of black liberation struggle exemplified by gay freedom fighters such as Audre Lorde and Bayard Rustin.

Although there are several California-based African-American churches that have consistently advocated for gay and lesbian partnerships, black religious fundamentalism is still the number one barrier to aligning a progressive black civil rights agenda with LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) rights. Gay and lesbian families of color are invisible in the mainstream media, yet they are an integral part of communities of color. Contrary to the propaganda of black fundamentalists gay and lesbian caregivers, parents and grandparents nurture black children alongside and within so-called straight households. As a black atheist and parent, I want my seven month old daughter to grow up in a culture where—gay straight or bi—her entire range of personhood, love and commitment to another human being is not legally bound by the Paleolithic mores of religious fundamentalism. In this regard, voting no on Prop 8 is the only moral choice.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.

Great White Hope

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Cindy McCain has spoken. Shellacked white blond hair bristling with outrage, the beermeister lit into Barack Obama recently at an election rally, accusing him of voting against troop supply funding for soldiers in Iraq and thus endangering her enlisted son. The beermeister’s liberation from St John power suit-cosseted trophy wife to mother bear-firebrand has been hastened by Sarah Palin’s transformation into the self-styled attack dog of the McCain campaign. The visual choreography of McCain events now spotlights the two in tandem—Palin rallying the Christian soldiers onward with her nationalist screeds on homeland security while the beermeister hovers close behind in all her Stepford glory. Snatching a page from their nativist 19th century white feminist forebears, the beermeister and the demagogue evoke a nightmare vision of black insurgency. Linking Obama to William Ayers and domestic terrorism, Palin exhorted that “this is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” to her rapt audiences. Despite all his efforts to distance himself from a black agenda, the assiduously race-averse Obama is still playing as a fist in the air black Muslim to the American Legionnaires in East Overshoe. In response to Palin’s innuendo, lynch mob chants of “terrorist,” “treason” and “kill him” have been gleefully hurled at Obama, eliciting the usual tepid condemnations from the McCain camp. McCain’s contempt for Obama as lawn jockey crashing the country club was on snarling display during Tuesday’s debate when the uber male American war hero couldn’t bring himself to look at the Senator and infamously referred to him as “that one.” In a desperate attempt to reverse his falling poll numbers, McCain melds xenophobic and Orientalist rhetoric, conjuring up the dark inscrutable treasonous other when he asks “who is the real Barack Obama.”

Yet it is Palin who is the great white hope, mobilizing the faithful in the hinterlands while exploiting the far right electorate’s bloodlust. And what better messenger to paint Obama as a black subversive than Palin, whose pro-death views would even prohibit a woman from getting an abortion in cases of rape and incest? Far right prohibitions on women exercising rights over their own bodies and destinies have a direct correlation with the preservation of God, country and the virtues of white womanhood. Nationhood and the territorialization of white femininity have always been inextricably linked in the American imagination. D.W. Griffith’s anti-Reconstruction epic Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, associated black rule with miscegenation and the rape of white women. Racial terrorism against Reconstruction-era black legislators was justified on the grounds of protecting the Union from the scourge of race-mixing and a slide into anarchy. Insofar as an Obama presidency foreshadows these primal threats to home and hearth it won’t matter that McCain backs welfare handouts for the Wall Street and multinationals and shrugs off his ignorance about how many houses he has while morphing into a populist.

By evoking this symbolism, the McCain-Palin doubletalk express taps into the deepest reservoirs of white racial angst. It has become a truism among many white left progressives that working class whites are essentially voting against their class interests when they vote conservative, but are they really? The scores of white Democrat undecided voters and the all white legions who throng to the McCain-Palin circus tent revivals prove that white class solidarity has been, and always will be, about the the defense of the homeland from the incursions of the other.

Sikivu's commentaries can be heard on Fridays @KPFK 90.7 FM

State of South L.A.?

By Sikivu Hutchinson

The South L.A. flank of Manchester Boulevard remains largely unchanged from the street of my childhood memory. There are nail places, fast food chains, motels, car washes, an orgy of little strip malls, and a theatre, boarded up and cadaverous since the early 80s, that juts out on the corner of 5th Avenue in Inglewood. It is easy to miss the theatre in the ruckus of westward traffic, easy to assign it to the category of visual bric-a-brac as yet another figment of South L.A.’s past. When the theatre was open during the 70s and 80s it was a B movie haven that provided local Morningside Park kids, steeped in our largely black insular world, with a dependable weekend hangout. Now, with one exception, movie theatres in 21st century South L.A. are as common as meteor showers. The disappearance of recreational public spaces for youth is a subtext of the bleak portrait presented in the UCLA School of Public Affairs’ recent State of South L.A. report. There are no major revelations in the report, which focuses on jobs, education, crime, poverty, housing and the considerable demographic shift that’s occurred since the 1992 uprising. Now predominantly Latino, South L.A.’s black population continues to shrink by the year. Motivated by lower housing prices and the desire for better living conditions, African Americans have migrated to the Inland Empire and the South in greater numbers since the 1990s. Despite these patterns of black out-migration, the severity of black residential concentration in South L.A. is still pronounced, with nearly 90% of the black population in the county represented in South L.A. Over half a century after restrictive covenants, African Americans have the least residential mobility. Put simply, even the most affluent black Angelenos, the Baldwin Hills/View Park/Windsor Hills dwelling elites, are living in relative poverty conditions when viewed in the context of the county as a whole. All of the disposable income, advanced degrees and ability to code switch with white culture in the world won’t mitigate the reality reflected in surveys nationwide—namely, when it comes to living in the same neighborhoods as black folk white respondents invariably express a greater willingness to welcome Latinos or Asians into the block club.

The reassessment of the “identity” of South L.A. comes during a period when the national political profile of blacks would appear to be on the rise. Yet, the South L.A. centered 2nd District supervisorial race between Councilman Bernard Parks and Senator Mark Ridley Thomas is widely predicted to be the last to feature two African American candidates. For the past decade, the obscenely long terms of the supervisors have bred abdication of leadership around King-Harbor, gang conflict, education and development in a district that has the highest number of black and brown residents living below the poverty line. Thrust together by circumstance in a climate that does little to validate their shared history, blacks and browns coexist from Watts to Inglewood to Baldwin Village. However, it is generally believed by African American community activists that blacks have taken the lead in black-brown collaborations. As Latino political capital is on the ascendant, tensions over the receding black identity of the community will fester if the perception that Latino leadership is resistant to reaching out to African Americans persists. Countering this perception, and making sure that the next supervisor pushes an agenda that addresses the culturally specific dynamics blacks and browns face in divide and conquer economic conditions is one of the key challenges for the new state of South L.A.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: Gender Politics and Palin Propaganda

By Sikivu Hutchinson

With her rifle on one hip and baby Trig on the other, Sarah Palin’s tabloid VP candidacy proves that only in America could a flat-earther who espouses antediluvian policies consigning women to second class citizenship be hailed as a feminist icon. The fierce cult of celebrity worship that has sprung up around the Palin nomination has displaced any serious mainstream critique of McCain’s lock step march with Bush-style imperialism. In her recent interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson Palin’s ignorance of the so-called Bush doctrine of preemptive defense and her reflexive get tough on Muslim extremists swagger was enough to inspire a run for Canada. While the heartland swoons for Palin, allegations of scandal, double dealing, racist slander, civil liberties infringement and bug-eyed Christian fundamentalism continue to bounce off Palin’s Teflon power blazers because unrepentant reactionary white femininity suddenly has fresh currency in national politics. Let’s break it down—the Palin choice was a transparently racist bid for the votes of white women enraged by the prospect of a black man in Hillary’s White House. When Palin burst onto the national scene proclaiming that “the women of America aren’t finished yet” she clearly wasn’t thinking about inviting women of color into her sister friend council because Black women are certainly not having it. Had it not been for the success of Clinton’s race-baiting appeals to hard working white Americans a white female candidate would not have been seriously considered for the Republican ticket. Thus far Clinton has remained muted in her criticism of Palin. According to Clinton insiders, she has no intention of directly addressing the implications of the Palin candidacy nor of urging her white female supporters to look past the sisterhood hype.

In a reality show besotted culture that fetishizes white female soap operatics in rags like Us magazine, People, and the National Enquirer it is not surprising that the Palin sideshow is playing big in Peoria. The GOP’s silence about Palin’s pregnant teen daughter’s departure from the traditional family values script highlights its racist hypocrisy. For, clearly, had the Palin family soap opera played out in the Obama household his bid for the presidency would have been gutted by right wing hysteria about promiscuous black welfare mothers in training and irresponsible baby daddies. For white folk though, the national narrative of family has always extolled the kinder gentler virtues of “tolerance” about life’s “circumstances.” Middle and working class white families that experience an unplanned teen pregnancy in the public eye garner sympathy and disease of the week prime time TV while families of color elicit policy screeds about immorality.

Having benefited from the women’s and civil rights movements while touting anti-choice policies and abstinence only education, Palin is a poster child for GOP-style affirmative action for white women. But the insidious reversals don’t end there. McCain has attacked recent comments Obama made comparing McCain’s policies to putting lipstick on a pig as a sexist slam of Palin. This from a candidate that has endorsed the Bush administration’s savaging of family planning, pro-choice, anti-domestic violence legislation and equal pay for equal work policies that support real women with families that aren’t blessed with the divine providence of oil dividends. The McCain-Palin ticket’s attempt to portray itself as a maverick change agent is akin to Orwell’s totalitarian metaphor two plus two equals five; that is, if we speak in tongues enough times to a captive audience in defense of the homeland it will be true, and Oceania has, and always will be, at war with East Asia.