Masculinity, the NFL, and Concussions
Masculinity, the NFL, and Concussions
The defenders of the National Football League (NFL) have been busy. In the wake of the suicide of Junior Seau, on the heels of several other untimely deaths, “bountygate,” several former lawsuits regarding concussions, and growing scientific literature highlighting the dangers of football, its protectors have gone on the offensive. From citing other potential factors that have led to ridiculous rates of suicide, traumatic brain injuries, and a life-after-football defined by depression, memory loss, neurological difficulties and a quality of life no one would associate with America’s heroes, to celebrating the NFL for its efforts to protect the players, the NFL hype machine has gone to great lengths to push back against the growing outcry against football.
Yet probably the most common response has been to place blame on the players, emphasizing their choices and responsibility. “I can’t blame the NFL for every issue that every former player in the NFL has,” noted former player and current ESPN football analyst Cris Carter. “I signed up to be in the NFL. It wasn’t like someone had to force me. I kinda knew what I was signing up for.” Responsibility resides with the men who play football and few else. In other words, while terrible, concussions and the long-term impact of those concussions is an unfortunate reality brought about by choices. Players understand the risks, and are rewarded because of the violence and danger, and thus the NFL and any of its partners bear little burden. Illustrating the ways that hegemony works and the illusion of choice, Carter’s comments reflect the erasure of power and ideology.
Greg Doyel, at CBS Sports, further encapsulates the “logic” and framing that turns the violence of football into a choice, one that may have consequences:
For me, it comes down to choice — and football players have a choice whether to play or not. It’s not a blind choice, either. This isn’t the 1960s, when Colts tight end John Mackey had no idea what the violent collisions were doing to his brain. The greatest tight end of his generation was showing signs of dementia in his 50s, in an assisted-living center at age 65, dead at 69. Mackey never knew the risks, but today’s players know. Playing football is like smoking a cigarette: This isn’t the 1960s; everyone knows the risks. . . . Football isn’t dog fighting, where mistreated animals take it out on each other in a cage. Those dogs have no choice. NFL players do. And let’s be honest: The lifestyle of an NFL player is incredible. Even if it ultimately shaves years off their lifespan — and lessens the quality of those remaining years — there’s an argument to be made that it’s worth it. The fortune, the fame. The thrill of the crowd. That’s a lifestyle they can’t get anywhere else. Live like a king at 30, hobbled at 50, dead at 65? Not sure I’d take it, but many would. And do.
Similarly, Karla Milner, who commented on The Washington Times website, offered the following:
… two words people: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY. We all make choices – not all of them are good. But they are our choices and we should own them. If you choose to smoke all your life you should NOT be able to sue the tobacco companies as in my lifetime there’s never been one second that we didn’t know it was bad for our health (and I’m over 50). And if you choose to play football (professionally or otherwise) you should not be able to sue over issues from concussions or other injuries because there’s no way in hell you could NOT know that the risk of injury and issues down the road was a possibility…
She wasn’t alone, with dozens of commenters reiterating the mantra of choice and accountability. One such person, Blair, agreed: “Like you were all forced into playing the game…. Look at boxers? Heck, who warned me that everytime (sic) I got on my bike after school I could get a concussion jumping ramps in the alley?” Patrick Hruby describes the fan and media reaction as follows:
1. Getting hit in the head is bad for you;
1a. Duh;
2. Former football players understood this risk when they signed on the NFL’s dotted line;
3. Ergo, the league is not responsible for helping players deal with subsequent memory loss, lack of emotional control, cognitive decline or early-onset dementia;
4. Also ergo, any former football player with the sheer gall to file a lawsuit is a greedy moocher trying to work the system, akin to the lady who sued McDonald’s over spilled hot coffee.
The ubiquitous links to McDonalds and tobacco are interesting in that in both those cases, the logics of capitalism and the instruments that protect the bottom line sought to minimize or, better said, quash any threats. The tobacco industry, in fact, sought to deny the consequences of tobacco, so why are we to think that such denials or reframes are little more than a tobacco-like distraction?
The constant references to players reportedly hiding symptoms or players refusing to listen to medical advice regarding concussions represent a narrative emphasizing choice. It is the players who bear responsibility for their choices; and more importantly, those who choose to remain in the league, who continue to live the American Dream playing America’s current pastime, do so knowing the risks.
This conservative reactionary response is of little surprise given the links between the U.S. political establishment, the military, commercial culture, and football. The constant emphasis on choice, individual actions, on pulling oneself up by one’s cleat laces, on risks and rewards, is emblematic of the hegemony of a protestant work ethic trope and meritocracy. Never mind the lack of transparency and education that allows one to make “informed choices,” the efforts to defend the NFL and deny culpability erases the ways in which masculinity and dominant notions of good versus bad manhood constrain the choices that players and fans alike make regarding football.
Continue reading @ Masculinity, the NFL, and Concussions | The Feminist Wire.
Violence On And Off The Ice
Violence On And Off The Ice:
Twitter Racism And The NHL
By Guest Contributor David J. Leonard
Courtesy Bossip.comMoments after Joel Ward’s overtime goal secured a playoff victory for the Washington Capitals over Boston last month, the twittersphere exploded with a barrage of racial epithets, threats of violence, and stereotypes.
Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning under the cut–pictures of racist slurs
Here is but a sampling of the vitriol and hostility resulting from his goal (for complete list, go here):
Receiving national attention, such racism was dismissed through narratives of fan ignorance, fan drunkenness, fan anger, and a myriad of other excuses that explain the situation as of little importance to understanding race in contemporary society. For example, at DCist, shawnwhiteboy offered the following response to an article about these tweets:
The obvious problem with twitter is that any drunk asshole with a smart phone can use a hashtag and get ‘hits’. The problem with the media is that you cover these drunk assholes as news. When will this end? Is this comment I am typing news worthy? No! What’s worse, the last sentence of this article lumps all bruin fans together with those drunk assholes. Boston fans are passionate and sometimes obnoxious but not racist. Having lived in boston and dc for 5 years each, people are not more enlightened in one place over the other. Okay, rant over.. . Those racist comments are terrible, how server going to get back at those fuckers listed here?
In an ESPN story covering the backlash against Ward, another commenter offered a similar refrain, identifying the Internet as the reason for such outbursts: “It isn’t at all surprising to see the slew of racist comments after the game,” he wrote. “Social media allows total anonymity if the user desires; these things can be said with no fear of reprisal. Such bravery!” These explanations were commonplace not only in the aftermath of Ward’s game winning goal, but following a game less than two weeks later.
With less than a minute to go in a game versus the New York Rangers, with his team up by a goal, Ward committed a penalty that sent him to the box for four minutes. Before he would be able to step back onto the ice, the Rangers would score two power play goals, sending the Capitals to a crushing defeat. Less than two weeks after facing a barrage of racial taunts and epithets from Bruins fans, Ward now faced similar violence from Capitals fans.
A common response to both of these incidences has been to link them to hockey; that above all else, the hostility embodies racism in hockey culture. Seemingly ignoring and erasing online racism of all kinds and those particular to virtual sports landscapes, hockey fans have become the problem rather than a symptom. Ironically, such a narrative imagines hockey as the “South” of sports culture.
Given its whiteness and even the working-class demographic of its fan base, commentators have sought to identity this as reflective of hockey culture, rather than sports or even society at large. Race and nation have a particular history within hockey. As I wrote a couple months back following an incident where fans threw a banana at Boston’s Wayne Simmonds, whiteness, privilege, and racism are all part of the hockey story:
Others connected to the sport were not so willing (despite their having greater power and privilege) to reflect on the racial realities and hostilities of the NHL in this moment or elsewhere. While describing it as a “stupid and ignorant action,” Commissioner Gary Bettman made clear that incident was “in no way representative of our fans or the people of London, Ontario.” Maxine Talbot, a teammate of Simmonds, summarily dismissed the incident as “isolated” that said little about the state of hockey: “It’s not like there’s a problem with racism in our league. It’s one person!”
Dismissing it as an aberration and the work of some ignorant fans, the response fails to see the broader history of the NHL, not to mention the larger racial issues at work. While Bettman and others sought to isolate the incidence as the work of a single person who isn’t representative of hockey culture or society at large, others pointed to the persistence of racism within the NHL. Kevin Weeks, who had a banana thrown at him during the 2002 Stanley Cup Playoffs, noted his lack of surprise that Simmonds was subjected to such racism: “I’m not surprised. We have some people that still have their heads in the sand and some people that don’t necessarily want to evolve and aren’t necessarily all that comfortable with the fact that the game is evolving.”
Yet, it would be a mistake to link these visible instances of racism to the whiteness of hockey, its racial politics, or resistance to integration given the ubiquity of racism online and offline. While comforting to construct racial hostility through hockey in that it allows to preserve the myths of integration and breaking down social distance as a weapon against racism, similar racial hostility and tweeted racial epithets can be seen with other sports as well. In the last week, these tweets have been sent out:
While the incidents involving Ward have received ample coverage in parts because of the comfort of blaming hockey, online racism directed at black athletes is not particular to one sport. Integration or greater presence has not led to full acceptance.
Continue reading @ Violence On And Off The Ice: Twitter Racism And The NHL | Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture.
NewBlackMan (in Exile): ESPN Must be High: Drugs & Jim Crow in Sports’ Reporting
ESPN Must be High: Drugs & Jim Crow in Sports’ Reporting
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
My concern and interest in sports often has little to do with sports. While I am clearly a fan, someone who enjoys watching and thinking about sports, I am often drawn into the world sports because of the larger implications and meanings. Sports are more than a game; it is a pedagogy, a technology, and an instrument of larger social, political, and racial processes. During a recent interview with Colorlines, I spoke about the danger in seeing sport as purely game, entertainment, or distraction:
One of the things that often strikes me is the disconnect between progressive and those engaged in anti-racist movement and struggles — and sports. Sports continues to be seen as antithetical or a distraction, or not part and parcel with the movements for justice. I think that when you have a society that is increasingly invested in and has been for the last 30 years, with incarceration, with a suspension culture, with racial profiling, it’s not a coincidence that you have a sports culture that’s equally invested in those practices. And invested in the language of the criminal justice system.
I consume and am consumed by sports not simply because of the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” but because of its potential as a source of social change. Yet, sports continue to be a site for the perpetuation of injustice, violence, and despair. As a critical scholar, as an anti-racist practitioner, and as someone committed to justice, my gaze is never just as fan. In watching games, listening to commentaries, and reading various sports publications, I am unable and unwilling to suspend this gaze. So, it should be no surprise that when I recently opened ESPN: The Magazine, to find an article on drug use and college football, it had my attention.
“Of 400,000 athletes, about 0.6 percent will be tested for marijuana by the NCAA.” The lead-to ESPN’s sensationalized and misleading story on marijuana use and collegiate football, thus, frames the story as one about both rampant illegal drug use and the absence of accountability. While attempting to draw readers into their stereotyped-ridden, sensationalized tabloid journalism masking as investigative reporting/journalistic expose, it reflects the dangerous in this piece. “College football players smoking marijuana is nothing new. Coaches and administrators have been battling the problem and disciplining players who do so for decades,” writes Mark Schlabach. He highlights the purported epidemic plaguing college football by citing the following:
NCAA statistics show a bump in the number of stoned athletes. In the NCAA’s latest drug-use survey, conducted in 2009 and released in January, 22.6 percent of athletes admitted to using marijuana in the previous 12 months, a 1.4 percentage point increase over a similar 2005 study. Some 26.7 percent of football players surveyed fessed up, a higher percentage than in any other major sport. (The use of other drugs, such as steroids and amphetamines, has declined or held steady.) A smaller percentage of athletes actually get caught, but those numbers are also on the rise. In the latest available postseason drug-testing results, positive pot tests increased in all three divisions, from 28 in 2008-09 to 71 the following school year.
It is important to examine the evidence because of the narrative being offered here and the larger context given the racial implications of the war on drugs.
According to Schlabach, 22.6 percent of football players acknowledging using marijuana; in student-athletes playing football were the most likely to acknowledge marijuana amongst those participating in MAJOR sports. While unclear how he is defining major sports, I would gather that those major sports include football, track, basketball, and baseball, coincidentally sports dominated by African Americans in disproportionate numbers. Why limit the discussion here other than to perpetuate a stereotype? Does the revenue or popularity of a sport require greater scrutiny? I think not.
Examination of the actual NCAA study tells a different story. Indeed, baseball (21.5%); basketball (22.2%), and track (16.0%) trail football. Only men’s golf and tennis, with numbers of 22.5% 23.2% trails football amongst non-major sports. If one compares reported marijuana use between collegiate football players to their peers in swimming (27.2%) ice hockey (27.4%), wrestling (27.7%), soccer (29.4%), and lacrosse (48.5%), it becomes clear that football is not the problem. Add women’s field hockey (35.7) and women’s lacrosse into that mix, and yet again it is clear who is getting high. In fact, when High Times or Bill Maher looks for a role model within collegiate sports, they are more likely to call upon soccer or lacrosse players than a football player.
ESPN further mischaracterizes the study by failing to sufficiently acknowledge the differences drug use in Division 1 football and Division III. The NCAA study found that marijuana use is least common amongst Division I student-athletes (16.9%), where Division II student-athletes (21.4%) and those from Division III having the highest level of usage with a number of 28.3%. Since the 2005 study, drug usage actually declined at the Division I level, while increases were seen in other two divisions.
via NewBlackMan (in Exile): ESPN Must be High: Drugs & Jim Crow in Sports’ Reporting.
NewBlackMan (in Exile): The Savior Syndrome: Patrick Willis and the Mystique of #WhiteLove
Patrick Willis’ Two Dads | Ruth Fremson, NYTimes
The Savior Syndrome: Patrick Willis and the Mystique of #WhiteLove
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
There is an epidemic of white love in America. From The Blind Side and The Help to Kony 2012, George Clooney saving Africa and countless white celebrities liberating black children via adoption, white love has become the antidote to the race problem of the twentieth century. Whereas “the race problem” defined the last years, the next 100 years are purportedly to be one of white love. While racial profiling and the prison industrial complex, persistent discrimination and poverty, education and health disparities continue to plague the nation amid a climate of heightened anti-black racism, immigrant scapegoating, and a rising tide of white nationalists movements, white love offers a ray of sunshine. Better than Barack Obama’s “hope we can believe in,” in the face of so much injustice “white love” is hope (white) society can believe in each and every day.
While watching The Blindside Elon James White highlighted the power of white love within the much celebrated film and society at large:
I DID NOT KNOW WHITE WOMEN COULD CREATE FOOTBALL STARS WITH 16 WORDS. THEY ARE MAGIC. THEY SHOULD BE TAUGHT AT HOGWARTZ!
See–poor Black dude is actually full of talent and wisdom–he just needs a healthy dose of White love to open his eyes. #WHITELOVE
What #TheBlindside teaches us is if White people find poor homeless Black dudes they can create highly sought after football stars.
Awww snap. Kathy Bates and Sandra Bullock are doing a Awesome White Lady TAG TEAM. Hitting him with #WhiteLove left & right…
Dear White People: Please bottle #WhiteLove & sell it. Then we could throw it out of car windows in the ghetto like malatov cocktails…
#WhiteLove is so magical the child of awesomely White Sandra Bullock is smarter & more savy than the poor black dude 10 yrs his senior.
Every White person in this family is AMAZING. The Dad who wasn’t even paying attention to poor black dude is now INSPIRING him.
I don’t want to watch this movie anymore. I HAVE DEADLINES–but #WhiteLove is drawing me in… I WANT SANDRA BULLOCK SAVE ME.
The power of white love isn’t unique to Hollywood fantasy but is commonplace within sport culture. This particular fantasy was on full display during a recently re-aired episode of ESPN’s E:60. Documenting the trials and tribulations of the 49ers Patrick Willis, whose life took him from a Trailer Park in rural Tennessee to the fame and fortune of the NFL; from poverty and abuse to the American Dream.
The “rags-to-riches” and pulling oneself up by shoelaces is nothing new to sports culture given the centrality of the American Dream and sports as economic escalator within sports media. Yet, the presented story of Willis is one less about the Protestant work ethic and more of white love. The story isn’t so much of his talent, hard work, intelligence, but the transformative power of whiteness, whereupon Willis life changed when he became part of a white family.
The story given on ESPN and elsewhere is rather simple: Willis and his siblings grew up poor in Tennessee. As a result of their mother leaving them and their father’s drug and alcohol problems, a difficult childhood became one of great pain and suffering because of physical abuse. Ultimately standing up to his father by first responding to the abuse and then telling school officials, the children faced the prospects of being split apart. This would never come to fruition as Willis’s coach, Mr. Findley, after a request from the school superintendant, agreed to take all 4 children into their home.
No longer subjected to violence and poverty, yet together as a family, Willis began to thrive on and off the field. According to E:60, he no longer needed to focus on “basic needs” because of his father’s addiction or fending him beatings but instead could be a “normal child.” He was now able concentrate on himself on and off the field. Allowing Willis for the first time to experience love and a true childhood, Willis blossomed into an exceptional football player and even better story. The narrative frame that imagines blackness as pollutant and danger, as problem, juxtapose to whiteness as savior, as help, as goodness, and love is wrought with history and meaning. The only better than Hollywood’s vision of white love is the purported real thing.
continue reading @ NewBlackMan (in Exile): The Savior Syndrome: Patrick Willis and the Mystique of #WhiteLove.
NewBlackMan (in Exile): Jim Crow University?: The State of Racial Tolerance on America’s Campuses
Jim Crow University?: The State of Racial Tolerance on America’s Campuses
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
Racial slurs; racist graffiti; taunts and jeers; nooses hanging from doors; and blackface. No, I am not talking about the South circa 1960, but the climate of America’s colleges and universities. If you look around the country, it would seem that some want to take our colleges back to the Jim Crow era when schools and curriculum were white only.
In the last two months of the mockery of post-race America has been quite evident. The “N word” was scrawled on a dorm room and a bathroom at Fordham University. That same month, students at University of Wisconsin-Madison hurled bottles and racial slurs at two African American students who had the audacity to walk past THEIR fraternity house on THEIR campus. At Cornell University, black students walking through campus faced a barrage of racial epithets, flying bottles and catcalls of “Trayvon.” At the Ohio State University, since April, racist and anti-religious epithets have been found on a dorm room door and within the community, including the defacement of a mural of President Barack Obama. These incidents followed the appearance of “Long Live Zimmerman” on a campus building.
For white students the college experience is defined by parties, football games, and new experiences; for students of color it is one often defined by hostility, racist violence, and the same old experiences. Last year, “All N-word’s must die” was found at Williams College. At University of Alabama, a white student screamed a racial slur at a white student, with slurs popping up on campus sidewalks. At Murray State, a faculty member chastised a black student for arriving 15 minutes late to a film screening, noting, “slaves never show up on time.” And the list of incidences goes on and on. This is the sort of racism and violence that has become all too common at America’s liberal institutions of higher education, those places often praised as the breeding ground for the post-racial millennial generation.
Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans also face an increasingly racially hostile environment evidence in cowboy and Indian parties, anti-immigrant chants at basketball games, and countless other examples. While certainly more visible as a result of the power of social media, racism is obviously nothing new to America’s colleges and universities. Whether looking at the history of integration or the practice of “ghetto parties,” institutions of higher education have a long history of racial injustice.
Students of color and faculty of color experience this history each and every day. According to Howard J. Ehrlich, director of The Prejudice Institute, between 850,000 and one million students (roughly 25 percent of students of color and five percent of white students) experience racially and ethnically-based violence (name calling, verbal aggression, harassing phone calls and “other forms of psychological intimidation”) each year. And this only reflects what is reported and what is seen. As Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin have discovered with Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage, white students use the n-word and tell racist jokes with frequency, a reality that impacts the culture and environment of America’s colleges and universities.
The Jim Crow signs remain visible even as conservatives whine about liberal universities and the discrimination of conservative students. I haven’t seen any Bigots and Liberal parties, or groups of conservative student subjected to catcalls and slurs. There hasn’t been an assault on white history and literature, which remain central to the college experience.
It is also increasingly difficult for ethnic studies, evidence in the attacks on Mexican American Studies in Arizona or the recent blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excoriated as a “cause not a course of student,” and denounced as “promoting resentment toward a race or class of people” the white only signs are being constructed in classrooms and in college communities throughout the country. These unwelcome signs demonstrate a lack of commitment to and value in diversity, but also how the presence of students of color and the practices of African American and other ethnic programs challenges the very privileges of whiteness.
“What I’ve learned most explicitly about the often racist depictions of Back Studies at primarily White institutions, is that it is a by-product of the on-going project of the discipline to make explicit connections to the work that we do and the communities of folks that exist beyond the four walls of the classroom,” notes Mark Anthony Neal. “Even as some Black Studies faculty are no invested in such a project–and such a project looks very different now than it did during the 1960s, Black Studies continues to reject that idea that it exists in a vacuum.” The continued attacks on the fields of ethnic studies and students of color makes this all too clear.
via NewBlackMan (in Exile): Jim Crow University?: The State of Racial Tolerance on America’s Campuses.
DEAR WHITE FOLKS: You Need Black Studies Classes (and Here’s Why) – News & Views – EBONY
DEAR WHITE FOLKS:
You Need Black Studies Classes (and Here’s Why)
by David J. Leonard
Recent months have seen a wave of campus racism at America’s colleges and universities, including Fordham University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and the Ohio State University. While racism is as commonplace at America’s “liberal” training grounds as binge drinking, I found myself wondering about occupying America’s universities. I found myself wondering how Black studies and ethnic studies have the potential to change America’s racial path. How Black studies and understanding the ongoing history of racism is essential to a quest for a “more perfect union.”
Imagine if every student took at least one Black studies course per year during college alongside of Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies and Native American Studies. What if students, what if white students, starting in kindergarten and through graduate school, American’s future leaders, teachers, and voters learned a 4th R – racism – alongside ‘reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic? Surely institutional racism would remain an obstacle, but Whites who inhabit those institutions, from the classroom to the Capital, would likely be changed.
Learning about minstrelsy and the history of racist imagery would surely impact the decision from White students to don blackface for the sake of fun, parties and Halloween. Learning about the history of slavery and lynchings would hopefully encourage thought from entire communities the next time a noose appeared on campus, the next time someone scrawled lynch on a chalkboard or dorm room door. There would be no more excuses and claims of ignorance about these histories.
Can we imagine a world where White students didn’t commonly use the “N-word” behind closed doors because they understood the history of racial violence? Would the hurling of racist jokes and epithets lessened as all students began to think about the consequences and daily harm? Would the exposure to alternative perspectives, to unseen history, and to conversations with students of color, change those students? I would hope so.
Through knowledge, critical thinking and dialogue, colleges can transform themselves–and their students. According to Howard J. Ehrlich, director of The Prejudice Institute, between 850,000 and one million students (roughly 25 percent of students of color and five percent of White students) experience racially and ethnically-based violence (name calling, verbal aggression, harassing phone calls and “other forms of psychological intimidation”) each year. What if each of the students who hurled the slurs at Cornell or graffitied “Long live Zimmerman” at the Ohio State University taken a Black studies course surely there worldview would have been different. Surely, those White students who sat idly by, who watched and said nothing, would have challenge their peers had they any real knowledge of race and racism.
Knowledge about Black culture, history, and identity would come not from Basketball Wives or The Help but in James Baldwin and Tayari Jones, Daughters of the Dust and Killer of Sheep.
Yet, the need for a world of Black Studies as multi-year required isn’t simply to teach White students about prejudice, but the erased experiences and voices of Black people. Knowledge about Black culture, history, and identity would come not from Basketball Wives or The Help but in James Baldwin and Tayari Jones, Daughters of the Dust and Killer of Sheep. We would no longer hear about Martin Luther King’s dream of colorblindness, but instead his dream of justice, reparations, and equality of outcome. The civil rights movement would be a history told not through King and one great speech, but people like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, heroes and sheroes who refused to accept American Apartheid. This is my dream, a dream where White students learn alongside of students of color about the history of racism, about privilege, and inequality; about the contributions and humanity of communities of color; about histories of resistance from “Aint I a woman?” to “Let freedom ring.”
While a freshman at the University of Oregon, I took my first African American history class. This class and so many others changed my life. Beyond learning about African American history, beyond reading the likes of DuBois, Frederick Douglas and Carter G. Woodson, beyond hearing for the first time names like Turner, Garvey, Delany, and Hamer, I learned to think for myself, asking why wasn’t I learning this history and what does it mean that the history, literature, and culture I learned during my formative years was a story of whites.
continue reading @ DEAR WHITE FOLKS: You Need Black Studies Classes (and Here’s Why) – News & Views – EBONY.
From Jack Johnson to Metta World Peace – David Leonard and Theresa Runstedtler
Theresa Runstedtler, whose new book on Jack Johnson, and myself are pairing up for a mini book tour. If interested, in having us come into your community, to your school, or otherwise, speak let us know
