Category: media

The Lottery

ORJ10 Comments

In the era of education standards and accountability, the debate regarding the potential of charter schools to reform American public education, particularly for children of color, has heated up. Against this backdrop, several films have recently been released about charter schools. In anticipation of a classroom discussion I intend to conduct about one of them, I recently watched the “documentary” The Lottery. In this case, the quotation marks are intentional, because boy, was this one shoddy piece of documentary work.

My critiques of The Lottery are numerous, but I’ll start with data, or the lack thereof. Sackler, the film’s director, did not attempt to provide viewers with any data about charter school performance compared to traditional public schools. But then again, I don’t blame her. If she had, she would have had to admit that the most comprehensive study of charter schools to date found that fewer than 20% of the schools provided its students with better educations than public schools, almost half offered comparable educations, and more than a third offered their students inferior educations. Talk about your inconvenient truths.

But the absence of useful data was just one of many failures in the film, with unfair portrayals of the major players in education reform being the next problem. The Lottery shamelessly demonized teacher’s unions without bothering to interview even one union rep or pro-union advocate in defense of the organizations. This, despite the director’s decision to interview, almost exclusively, pro-charter advocates, some of whom likened unions to thugs and mafiosos. Now, I understand that there are plenty of villains to cast in the education reform debate. Even if, however, the unions are every bit as obstructionist as the movie suggests they are, and are dumping bodies in the river to boot, it is only fair to give them the opportunity to voice their perspective. If the director’s intent was to pin blame for public school failure on teachers, that’s fine, but she then shouldn’t have called her film a documentary. She should have called it propaganda, because that’s what it was.

Moreover, I have to defend the unions a little bit on this one. Anyone with an understanding of labor struggles in this country has to acknowledge that unions can and do play a vital role in protecting workers’ rights. Although it is true that union contracts have often enshrined due process procedures that result in the retention of many sub par teachers, it is not true that due process in itself is inherently problematic. Nor do I buy the argument that because these sorts of procedures are “never tolerated in the private sector,” they should not be tolerated in the public. To the contrary, due process is the name of the game in the public sector, and for good reason. Teaching at a public school is a public job, funded by public dollars, meaning that all qualified citizen are entitled to the job. And if, after having given the job to a citizen the government wants to take that job away, there are procedures that must be followed, for the government does not have the right to arbitrarily take away from citizens that which has been provided for only by citizens’ grace. I agree that some of these procedures have gotten out of hand, and that if we are to take the teaching profession seriously, it has to become easier to dismiss underperforming teachers while rewarding effective ones. But we cannot, and should not, get rid of due process. You want the freedom to engage in both justified and arbitrary firings? Go to the private sector.

While conveniently avoiding relevant data and scapegoating teachers and the unions that protect them, the movie lacks any substantive discussion about the real problems with American public education: segregation; funding disparities; poverty; inadequate health care and food insecurity among students. Instead, the film misleadingly suggests that reform is synonymous with charters. And it does so while exploiting black people to make the point. Prominently featured in the film is the contentious battle between a Harlem charter school that petitions to be housed in a soon-to-be-closed-down failing public school, and the black and brown parents who protest the charter school’s petition. Between participant interviews and clips from the heated public hearings on the issue, you walk away with the impression that parents of color are ignorantly opposing the very movement that is going to save their children. Missing from the film is any legitimate analysis of why these parents are so oppositional or what it feels like for a community to have their neighborhood school closed without education alternatives for their kids; most of these parents, after all, will not be able to obtain a spot for their sons and daughters in the new charter school. She never considers what it does to a community when a center in that community–a public school–is shut down. Needless to say, I didn’t appreciate the way in which Sackler’s portrayal legitimated the cultural deficit model that is regularly foisted on black people in this country.

And as if that weren’t enough, I was disgusted by the film’s presentation of the actual lottery. As has become all the rage, many oversubscribed charter schools hold public lotteries, at which anxious parents and their children gather in an auditorium to learn whether their child has won a coveted spot at the school. The parents of students’ whose names are called jump up triumphantly, running to the front of the auditorium, ushering their children towards clapping teachers and administrators who welcome the child to the school. The parents of students’ whose names are not called sit in the chairs despondently, ultimately heading home, clearly defeated by their bad luck. It is heartbreaking to see the looks on parents faces who had pinned their hopes on wining a spot, and the sad faces of their children who realize that their parents’ devastation has something to do with their limited opportunities. These schools say that they hold these lotteries to illustrate demand in poor communities for their services. I say they are exploiting the hopes and dreams of these families, and their beautiful black and brown babies, for a cheap publicity stunt, and that The Lottery was complicit in that exploitation. Not surprisingly, only 1 of the 4 families portrayed in the film won admission to the featured charter school.

In defense of the movie, some say that it at least “started a conversation,” but I don’t think the movie did anything positive to further an honest and realistic dialogue about public school reform in our country. Most people who saw the film are not like me or the other writers on this blog who are knowledgeable about public school education. Most viewers don’t realize that crucial data is missing. They don’t understand why parents in the film opposed the arrival of one small charter school in exchange for the closing of their neighborhood school. Most people sat down with a box of popcorn, were entertained by the drama which unfolded on the screen, and walked away with a skewed understanding of charters as the answer, unions as the devil, and black people as backwards for fighting the closing of their neighborhood school.

When discussing the film with one friend who happens to be an educator, she used the theory of “structural functionalism” to discuss what is happening with public education: poverty and marginalization of many exists to ensure wealth and access for the few. As a person with a B.A. in sociology, I agree that the theory is relevant here. And yet, social science terms can problematically make societal issues seem academic, objective and neutral, numbing us to the real injustice that is operating in the background. I’ve got a better way to sum up what was going on in that “documentary,” the charter school movement, and in American public education in general: this is some racist and classist $hit.

When Women Write . . .

Tanji2 Comments

When women write there are a number of walls that surround them. It calls into question not only the established science of geometry but also all the aesthetic parameters and creative possibilities of architecture. Because women live in so many rooms at once, including their homes, their jobs, their schools and their very bodies, the interconnectedness of these spaces defies necessarily separate designations.

I once lived in a room in Philadelphia, a one-bedroom apartment, with my son, my former fiancé, my books, my bed, and all of the odor and noise and silence of inner city high rises. I didn’t know it then but I very much lived inside my body, with everything I did, and thought I was, sort of layered on top of it like winter clothes. This is including the room.

I was raped in that room, lying, forced down, on a bed with no sheet, with my jeans ripped open and a torn Princeton Day School sweatshirt. I met him when I was just a baby. He was five years older then me and I had only just graduated from high school. He forced a pillow down over my face. Our son was screaming in the middle of the dining room. I remember him holding our son upside down by one ankle. I remember praying.

Yvonne Vera remembers,

“I learned to write when I was almost six and at the same time also discovered the magic of my body as a writing surface . . . Using the edges of my fingernails or pieces of dry grass broken from my grandmother’s broom I would start to write on my legs. Here we wrote near the bone and spread the words all the way to the ankles. We wrote deep into the skin where the words could not escape. Here, the skin was thirsty, it seemed, and we liked it.”

Although Vera insits elsewhere in this same article that the “best writing” is “ungendered,” I would argue that her own early experience with writing, outlined in the passage above, is dependent upon her arriving into girlhood and her discovery of her feminine form. Just as she learned as a girl to write her own history on her body, black women map their lives, single and collective, onto their body through writing and other forms of artistic expression. Film, is one of these forms, that is interconnected with writing and the body, particularly in the case of black feminist works. The black female body is a template for ideas, hidden and exposed, documented in diverse mediums.

Remembering writing, as Vera demonstrates, is an exercise intimately tied to the body. It involves imagining the body of the writer, and this is how race, gender and class become imposed on writing, as well as digesting writing inside your own form. I remember the writing of James Baldwin first; the forcefulness of The Fire Next Time, compounded with the eloquence of perfectly flawless lines and logic wrought from the body of an intensely marginalized, courageous man. I remember Krik? Krak!, the collection of short stories by Edwidge Danticat that I found in a high school book fair, right before she became my second-favorite writer. I re-mem[ber] Beloved and Toni Morrison, the kind of academic I want to be, like Lorene Cary and Toni Cade Bambara. I remember these writings/writers in a roll call that reflects our shared cultural heritage. This is in fact how I write.

On the pages of their writings, or “bodies of work”, I find my own. “Word!” “I don’t know if it’s that deep!” “So he does believe in God, he just believes that God is White and that is why Blacks have been given the shit end of the stick.” “My point exactly!” “Can I write like this someday?””If I ever write something major to be published I am going to use “she” as my pronoun throughout.” “memory.” “history.” “history + memory.”

My earliest memories of writing are set in my elementary school librarian’s castle, a maze of wooden bookshelves with a rectangle of desks and chairs in the middle, adjacent to an office, covered in frogs. I remember writing “L.E.V.E.R.E.T.T.,” while reciting it in a singsong, over and over at the front desk; so proud to be the early reader and expert speller Mrs. Leverett pegged me to be. I remember Frog and Toad and Little Miss Bossy, and that my current investment in teaching, first, before any other occupation, has everything to do with a history of exemplary educators, fully committed to seeing me reach my full potential, starting with Mrs. Leverett.

In and between these memories is the realization that writing, even more so than speaking, for black women, gets at that intricate dance that black women do in order to negotiate their private and public selves. If silence, as Katherine Dunham, has noted, is a necessary component for achieving a total self, then my work has to both speak and listen, and in this sense it is not only a platform, but also a conversation. “We need to be able to be quiet too.”

Being silent as a writer is enabling, and here is where my other self, as a documentary video and photography artist enters in. The experience of standing in rooms, behind the camera, opening up the opportunity for subjects to share their own voices is a valuable experience for a writer/educator. I see this as my opportunity to be totally silent, to pull myself out of the room and into my body in order so that others can speak, uninhibited.

I do not know why the experience of witnessing is similar to the one that both myself and others have lived through during rape, but I know it must have something to do with this paradoxical need that black women have for being silent and finding a voice.

Survivor, Salamishah Tillet, recalls in NO! that during her rape,

“[She] became emotionally numb. [She] withdrew from the experience. [She] didn’t want to be there, and [she] didn’t scream. [She] didn’t know how to scream. [She] was just there, kind of numb, dead, watching it happen to [her].”

I prayed during my rape because I was afraid of being killed. I thought that if I was silent I could not make him any angrier. I probably thought that to a certain degree my mouth had gotten me “into that trouble in the first place.” I was silent because if I stayed alive then I could make sure my son stayed alive also. I was silent because I feared that this might be the night that he decided to silence us all for good.

Writing this, right now, means that I have learned as a black woman to voice myself, even when no one is listening because while our voice should not ever have to be confined to the body or walls we have surrounding us, we have to know that we can speak there too, always.

fu!k Tyler Perry . . .

Tanji4 Comments

When I snuck and watched the film Friday (though I had previously sworn off any more TP movies), I sat thinking that you go see a for colored girls for all the collaborative, disciplined work of the black female actresses. You also go to see what can be considered the radical reality of having a black female playwright’s work be adapted for the Big Screen. It is this type of work that encourages these women, undoubtedly, to set aside their own critiques of TP, and of the overwhelmingly masculinst culture of Hollywood, and contribute to the only commercial feminist film production so far this millenium. There is no perfect feminism! Even if Shange had directed the work herself for a commercial audience she would have undoubtedly been plagued by some measure of heteronormativity (remember there are no alternative sexualities explicitly engaged in the play). She also may not have invoked any semblance of Diaspora (beyond the, arguably, Africanist religious practices of Alice/White in the film). She may; moreover, have likewise represented the fractured, discordant trajectories of black, brown, Ghanaian, Nigerian, refugee, African-American, Afro-American, hoodrat, babymama, buppie, butch . . . “colored” girls in a convenient, “framed” (as in frame story) social network, as if we all live in Harlem, by way of some African-American migration story, in a brownstone, or are seperated from a Harlem brownstone by one degree of separation at the most.

On the low, despite any warranted judgements of TP’s systematic Black Church narratives in all other films, I would like to suggest that Mr. Perry excercised a somewhat subversive move in the film. Piggybacking on Ntosake Shange’s assertion that “god” is a “her” (to be loved “fiercely”), I was struck by TP’s willingness to present all of the women together on the roof at the end, except Alice/White. He essentially ostracized the only outwardly religious character in the film.

Yes, there are ways in which Alice/White’s character did not represent traditional notions of Black Christianity in the play, particularly when she poured, “bacon grease,” as the woman sitting nearest to me in the theatre deciphered it to be, on to her daughter to pray over her. Yet, she was too holy to attend her daughter’s graduation party because they were playing the devil’s music. She also spent her days inundating Harlem residents with leaflets dutifully inviting them to her church. In her film poster, she literally totes the Bible. She is this new “colored” woman (there is no lady in white in the play) that TP deliberately includes to ultimately exclude.

Perhaps, after his “investment” in Precious, TP really is moving away from conservative Christian portrayals.

Tanji would like to apologize for purposely, and painfully, avoiding reading her colleague, LaToya’s post until today. Ironically, she was trying to avoid being “influenced” prior to her own screening of the film.

Ya’ll have me thinking…

Salina18 Comments

I’m constantly thinking about parenting, specifically, how to do it in a way that will “guarantee” that my son grows into a responsible, healthy, spiritual, generous, socially active, loving, compassionate warrior. There are times when the task is daunting, especially when I dare venture into the world of popular media culture.

Yes, I’m talking the world of “106 and Park”, the various music award shows, and lord help me, the radio stations with POWER, KISS, and LIVE in front.  Each time I’m more distraught, terrified even at the thought that the young folk today are being “raised” on sex, sex, and more sex.  Casual sex.  Unprotected sex. Irresponsible sex. And my worst fear: Teen sex.  They can’t escape it-  the teenage musical icons: Rihanna, Drake, Lil Wayne, and even Miley Cyrus have ALL made sexually provocative and explicit songs and videos.  It absolutely boggles my mind.

I’m sure we could all share anecdotes about young girls and boys reciting sexually explicit lyrics, simulating the infamous ‘stripper dance’ to the obvious delight of all within visual distance.  I imagine we’ve all swapped stories, appalled by the mamas who let their young daughters go out dressed in ‘booty’ shorts and barely there tops, quickly passing judgment on their questionable parenting styles. How many of us were ready to storm BET after watching Lil Wayne, Drake, and whoever else perform “I wanna ….. every girl in the world” while those young girls came out on stage, dancing and performing for the audience?  Yet since then Drake has become one of the biggest selling rap artists in the last few years.

I bring this up because media is a powerful cultural transmitter. Society’s values, norms, and even expectations are reflected in the music, film, television, and even social networking sites.  Research shows that young people interact with some form of media for multiple hours everyday. They can’t escape it.

So I have a question, should we do everything in our power to keep children from interacting with media, in hopes to keep them safe from it’s influence?  Do we stage local and national protests? Do we write letters? Do we boycott? What do we do?

Or do we even care?

Mean Sleep: Part 1 of 2

Salina17 Comments

Been thinking a lot lately about the future. Ruminations inspired I suppose, by a combination of Octavia Butler’s futuristic, prophetic tale of Olamina in the Parables and the constant Facebook “breaking news” updates from my ever shrinking friends list. Anxiety exacerbated by AC 360 and his frontline exposes on Haiti, the Crisis in the Gulf, and the culture of war.  Worrying myself into a frenzy , wondering if I’d be wise to build my survival kit: water, first aid, solar powered radio and flashlights. You know what I mean. New tires, oil change, storage bins and plenty of non-perishables. Oh, and blankets, coats, and hiking boots, in case we have to flee to the mountains. Tents, backpacks, and sleeping bags. Maybe we need sturdy new bikes in the event we run out of gas. That means I need to purchase a bike rack  to store and carry the bikes on the car…

Wishing I had some wilderness friend, completely off the grid, who I could call when the time comes. As it will. Won’t it?

My mind swirling, heart palpitating, fear of the unknown future threatening to send me spiraling downward into that place of total mental incapacitation. How do I prepare? What do I do to provide safety and survival for my son? What is my emergency plan?  Where do I find the money to purchase whatever it is I need for whatever life shattering event is bound to happen (right)?  Amidst the daily reports of gloom and doom, I can only wonder. What is our obligation to our children? How do we negotiate recession, war, natural disaster,  and still provide the space and opportunity for laughter and joy?  How do we live in the now, in spite of the ominous news reports? Do we turn it off?  Unplug? Disengage?

Help!

nazie13 Comments

I was at a literary festival this past week and had the opportunity to meet Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help, and hear her speak about her blockbuster book about three Southern women–a young, white, recent college graduate and two African-American housekeepers–set in 1960s Mississippi.

It’s difficult not to like Stockett. She is nice, cute, perky and well-polished, and had the mostly well-to-do audience in Aspen wrapped around her little finger for most of her humorous lecture, which she delivered with a two-beats-per-vowel Southern drawl.

She told stories about having lived in New York for over a decade, about how hard she worked at a New York magazine, how she lived downtown after 9/11, how she was sometimes condescended to for being a Southerner.

She did a reading from her book—the part of one of the black maids—because Octavia, her friend who travels with her during her book tour to read the part of the African-American housekeepers, is off filming the movie being made based on the book. She did a pretty good job. Her book has been a New York Times bestseller for over a year and I assume she has the spiel down pat.

Many of the writers at the festival had read her book already and most endorsed it enthusiastically. I picked it up and read a few lines, written in the voice of one of the black maids, but then closed it quickly and put it back down.

Will I be reading the book? I don’t know. I don’t think so. It makes me uncomfortable. I wasn’t born in the States and wasn’t around for any of the racial trauma of the 1960s and 1970s, but I do know my American history—both the past and the present—and I must say that the idea of a young white Southern woman giving voice to Black women in the particular way that Stockett did leaves me supremely wary. I admit that it could be my own hang-up. And as a writer, I don’t believe in censorship unless what’s at issue is something extreme, like hate speech inciting violence.

My discomfort has sat with me for days now, since I saw her. Most of the reviews I’ve read claim that she has handled the nuances of the characters well, some going so far as to say that her representation of both the white and black characters are “pitch perfect.”

I will leave you with something interesting that I myself didn’t notice but that was pointed out to me by another one of the attendees–a brilliant young writer. Toward the end of her talk, Stockett held up the picture which will be used for the cover of the British version of The Help. It’s a picture she said was found at the Library of Congress of two black women caring for a white child in an old-style stroller. The photograph was said to have been taken in Mississippi in the 1960s. Stockett told the story of how she saw the photo and then called someone in her town to find out who the people in the photo were. Why, that’s just so and so, the person told her, describing exactly who the baby was. Well, my friend wondered, what about the black women? Who were they? And why were they invisible and only relevant in reference to the white baby? It was odd and off-putting to my friend–and to me, once it was pointed out.

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the book. Anyone care to throw in their two cents?

Black Weblog Awards

Benee1 Comment

It’s that time of year again!

Nominations are being accepted for the Black Weblog Awards!!

While Cocoa Mamas is a fairly new blog, we’d like to think we offer insightful, intelligent, and relatable commentary on raising brown children in this world. We would love to get the word out about our blog and what better way than winning a Weblog award?

So, readers, subscribers, contibutors, pelase take a moment to go to Black Weblog Awards and nominate us in a few categories, namely Best Parenting Blog, Best New Blog, Best Group Blog, and Best Blog people don’t know about

Thanks,

Cocoa Mama Benee 🙂

Little Women

Dr. Mama Esq.2 Comments

So apparently there is a lot of “outrage” surrounding this video, which features 7 and 8 year old girls performing in a dance competition, dancing to Beyonce’s Single Ladies. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

And while I have my own personal views on whether little girls should be doing such dances, I am more than a little annoyed at the national press this “story” is getting. For I cannot help but notice the color of these little girls. Or more to the point, the color they are not. Because of course they are White.

My thing is this: Where was the national outrage when Drake and Lil Wayne had little girls – including Wayne’s daughter – on the stage at the BET awards while they sang about wanting to f*ck every girl in the world?? Do y’all remember the Juvenile video for Back That Ass Up when you knew it was 13 year old girls up in this video? Where was the national outrage when this was a summertime hit across the country, when it was OUR girls dancing inappropriately for their age?

How many times have you been at a talent show or dance competition and seen Black little girls doing all kinds of dances that you feel like you want to cover your eyes cause it just don’t seem right? Where is the national outrage any time OUR girls are treated like little women, instead of the children they are? Why does it take little White girls to gyrate for someone to say that there is a problem? There has BEEN a problem. It just must not have been the right color.

But of course, the media hasn’t even identified the problem correctly. They are blaming the parents – what’s wrong with these parents, they are asking. And perhaps some blame belongs there, perhaps. But like one of the parents said, this is an extremely popular song, with an extremely popular video. And Beyonce has every right to make it – she’s a grown ass woman.

But has anyone asked, why is this video on in the middle of the day? Is it appropriate for children? And the answer that is clear, judging by the media coverage, is that its okay for OUR kids, for OUR girls. As long as they thought only our girls were mimicking these videos, dressing like prostitutes and shaking what they mamas gave ’em, everything was all good.  But as soon as it soils the lily-white purity of THEIR girls – oh no, we have a problem. A national problem worthy of morning news while two wars are being fought, bombs are being set, the economy is being tripped by computer glitches, and so on.

This is some bull-ish. But who am I to complain – we got a black President. Hallelujah.