Favorite Interview of 2011

The green crusader reps the South Bronx, N.Y., in a new photo exhibit.

The National Portrait Gallery recently premiered AT&T Celebrates “The Black List,” an exhibition featuring 50 large-sized portraits of accomplished African Americans that will remain on display until April 22, 2012.

“The Black List” was conceived, photographed and filmed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders in his East Village apartment in New York City after a nudge from his friend, the acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison (who’s also a part of the exhibition). It was subsequently made into a documentary that aired on HBO in 2008.

Environmental Activist Majora Carter is one of the 50 distinguished African Americans included in “The Black List.” The Root caught up with Majora Carter at a special reception held at the gallery.

The Root: How does it feel to be “blacklisted”? And what’s been the response since appearing on the HBO documentary to now this traveling photo exhibition?

Majora Carter: [Laughs.] It’s a wonderful honor and I wish everyone could feel this way because everyone contributes a little bit of something to be a part of that list; we just don’t necessarily embrace it within ourselves.

Being on HBO and being in “The Black List” has put my work out there in a way that is extraordinary. People have begun to see environmental equality and equity as something that can happen in our lifetime as part of the civil rights movement and as part of something to create more economic diversity.

TR: In your video interview, you talked about being hesitant to tell people where you’re from. Why is it important to be proud — and an advocate — for where you’re from?

MC: Well, now I really do believe that you don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. All of my work is about really creating models for that to happen. To show that it’s more than a possibility but a reality. A continuation of my work is real estate development work — community development — which is for me, how do you build communities that allow people to be their best selves? So I’m really excited about that.

TR: So who would be on your personal Black List?

MC: Oh, my goodness! Everybody who was in this exhibit but there would also be people both inside and outside of this country, as well — Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental champion and spiritual godparent of mine who recently passed away. She was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

TR: What’s the riskiest thing you’ve ever done in your career to get “blacklisted”?

MC: I’ve literally been blacklisted in the New York City government. I challenged the notion of what development could be in a place like the South Bronx to usher in economic development, which wasn’t exactly taken well.

 This interview was originally published on The Root
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Contact:

Zarinah T. Washington                                                       

(323) 392-7984  

thepublicist.dc@gmail.com

AWARD-WINNING CREATIVE WRITER LAUNCHES WORKSHOP SERIES

Abdul Ali, consultant and feature writer with TheRoot.com, has designed college readiness and creative writing workshops for high school-aged and adult writers seeking enrichment. Workshops include Navigating the College Admission Essay, Navigating the Personal Statement,Communication Toolbox, Professional Toolbox and Releasing the Creative Writer Within. Workshops are scheduled to begin this Fall and will continue throughout 2012.

Washington, D.C. – October 10^th, 2011 – Whether you are a seasoned professional, a recent college graduate or high school student with collegiate or professional aspirations, effective communication is essential to your personal advancement. With this in mind, local DC creative writer, Abdul Ali has created a series of workshops for both youth and adults seeking an innovative and interactive approach to “brushing up on their communication skills.”

Each workshop is tailored to meet the acquired skill level and need of its participants and can be brought to local schools, organizations as well as workplace settings.  “In our workshops, we’ll use skits and writing exercises to find the most appropriate way to respond to all sorts of circumstances.”   This fusion of everyday communication and literary writing is what sets Abdul Ali’s workshops apart from the others.  The goal of the workshops is to assist participants in “understanding the power of words and their potential to yield a desired result.” 

Youth workshops address college readiness, communication tools and creative writing. Adult workshops go on to address subjects such as writing the personal statement, effective networking as well as social networking. However all workshops can include additional topics as the workshops are flexible and customizable. A full listing of workshops is available per request.

For more information about Abdul Ali, workshop topics or scheduling a workshop for your institution, please contact Zarinah T. Washington at (323) 392-7984 or email thepublicist.dc@gmail.com.

About Abdul Ali

Originally from New York City, Abdul Ali is a culture writer, poet and editor living in the District of Columbia. His literary writing appears in the anthologies It’s All Love (Doubleday, 2008) edited by Marita Golden and Full Moon on K Street (Plan B Press, 2010) edited by Kim Roberts. His poetry has also appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Amistad, The Washington Post, Tidal Basin Review, Gargoyle, and New Contrasts (South Africa), among others.

Ali was the 2007 winner of the College Language Association’s Creative Writing Contest. He was a finalist for the 2008 Larry Neal Award and in 2009, a recipient of an Artist Fellowship for Literature by the DC Commission on the Arts, and most recently, Mr. Ali co-founded with Crystyn Wright NeoBlack Cinema Project, an organization whose mission is to radically shift the images of people of color in film.  Check it out at www.neoblackcinema.com

Educated at the historic Howard University where he received a BA in English and Theater, Ali is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at American University.

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Lenny Kravitz Goes Gray on “Black and White”

 

 

 

 

Black and White America, Lenny Kravitz’s ninth studio album, is technically a very fine album. But if you’re not willing to overlook the fact that Lenny Kravitz sidesteps talking about race in America — which the title of his album suggests he will — then you might understandably dismiss the album as artistically dishonest and pandering to the pop culture machine.

“People used to yell obscenities and spit at them,” revealed the 47-year-old Grammy-award-winner about his parent’s interracial marriage during the tumultuous 1960s. He continues, “and this was in New York City, not in the South.”

Click here to view a Grio slideshow of 25 biggest black hipsters

Lenny Kravitz was born in New York City in 1964, to Sy Kravitz, a Jewish television producer with NBC, and the pioneering black actress, Roxie Roker, best known for her role on 70s the television sitcom, The Jeffersons.

In a recent article in USA Today Kravitz discusses his new album saying, “I was channel-surfing in the Bahamas one night and came across this documentary. I don’t remember what it was called, but it had all these people talking about President Obama. I know that there’s racism, but to hear people voice it in such a hateful way — I had to write a rebuttal.”

(Spoiler alert: Lenny Kravitz doesn’t rebut racism in his new album, Black and White America.)

It’s risky business when artists tack provocative titles onto their work and fail to follow-up on said title as if being provocative itself justifies the work. (Not to mention it insults the audience,eh hem). The initial shock value quickly turns to chagrin.

To continue reading, visit theGrio.

There Goes the Neighborhood: Why Clybourne Park Doesn’t Do Right by Its Inspiration

“There’s no way to escape the fact that I’m a racist,” Bruce Norris told New York magazine this February, two months before his play Clybourne Park won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. During his childhood, his family fled Houston in part because of school busing; until he was about 14, Norris said, his main exposure to African Americans was his family’s maid.

This revelation shouldn’t make audiences think less of Norris’ play, which was a massive hit at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2010 and has returned there this summer for a string of sellouts. (It runs through Aug. 14.) It’s a smart and witty work, a humorous consideration of white flight and gentrification that upends stereotypes of numerous groups.

In plumbing the racial anxieties that arise when neighborhoods experience profound demographic change, Norris borrows his characters and setting from one of the American theater canon’s greatest treatments of the topic, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. But in riffing on Raisin—and in exploring the ways in which both white and black people talk about race, as well as working through his own anxieties about racism—Norris sidesteps the very real issues of the African-American experience raised in Hansberry’s play.

To continue reading, visit The Washington City Paper

“Maid” in Hollywood: America’s Love Affair with “The Help”

Two weeks ago, my daughter and I snuck into a screening of “The Help.” It was a Bonnie-and-Clyde operation. (We weren’t officially on the press list.)  What made risking embarrassment worth it is that my daughter wants to be an actress. And like any doting father, I’ve taken to nurturing her nascent interest in acting. Her summer has been spent at theater camp. While she learns about stagecraft, her dad writes about film and theater—interviewing actors, playwrights, and directors at traveling productions that trickle to Washington from New York.

Though only twenty years separate us—in Hollywood years—one would think we’d be further along as a national cinema. Just as my parents and grandparents did, I grew up watching films in which black actresses portrayed maids and it seems my daughter has inherited a cultural legacy that should have phased out with paper bag tests, hot combs, Jheri curls (and a miscellany of other unflattering aspects of African American lore.)

We’ve spent hours watching films and discussing their political implications over the past couple of months. We watched “Sarafina,” and bobbed our heads to Miriam Makeba’s freedom song on Netflix. Much to my delight, my daughter independently made the connection between the South African apartheid of the 1990s and the American apartheid experienced here in the United States by millions of African Americans in her grandparent’s lifetime (or more accurately, great-grandparents.)

For two hours and seventeen minutes, my daughter and I watched a Julliard-trained thespian shrink on the screen as a slow-talking maid from Mississippi.

“The Help” presented a heavy burden as an African American father. This proved to be much more than a daddy-and-daughter’s night out. In effect, I had to sift through a century-old racial narrative in American film with my seven-year-old. Viola Davis’s character, Abilene, triggered numerous questions for my daughter.

Every five minutes or so, she’d lean in whispering Why don’t those ladies take care of their own baby? Why can’t the black women use the same bathroom as everyone else? Was this during slavery days, you know, back in the day?

Having to shh my daughter after each question brought home the fact that this film presented a larger quandary than I had bargained for: how does a seven year-old reconcile the image of a black woman playing a maid from the 1960s with the image of her mother, a professional woman, or say, Michelle Obama, our first lady or even her first grade teacher? Will the roles of black actresses ever catch up with the times?

It’s stunning how Hollywood has progressed in inches in the past two decades. When I was my daughter’s age, I remember seeing films like “Claudine” (1974) starring Diahann Carroll, who plays a maid.

And while actress isn’t uppermost in many people’s minds when we think of Oprah Winfrey, I still believe that she gave one of the finest performances I’ve witnessed in American film in the past almost three decades as the strong-willed Sophia in “The Color Purple” (1985). Though she initially tells the mayor’s wife “hell no” when solicited “How would you like to come work for me, be my maid.” In a heartwrenching twist,  Sophia (Oprah Winfrey)  ends up being a maid to the mayor’s wife until old age–a sobering reality of how the agency of black women have been severed thanks to white racism.

There was Whoopi Goldberg who starred in “Corrina Corrina” (1994) where she plays a maid for the Singer family but quickly becomes the love interest, a huge shift from the typical narrative of black maids, suggesting a progressive strand after all in Hollywood studios, albeit belated.

This isn’t to say that my daughter (and kids her age) should be protected from a very real aspect of American history. But as a father who happens to love film how do I temper my frustration with a Hollywood that probably will never create the kinds of roles that serious African Americans train for years in hopes of one day getting a big break—as a maid.

“Sometimes we’re so concerned with image and message, and not excellence. No one ever ask white actresses like Meryl Streep or Jodie Foster what messages they’re going to take away from their films” Viola Davis told Essence magazine recently.

It’s hard to disagree with Davis. I get that African Americans can be overly concerned about image (but for legitimate reasons.)

As the theater lights turned on, I noticed my daughter’s eyes were glossy. I didn’t need to say a word. As we walked out of the theater I said, “Aren’t you glad you were born in 2004, instead of 1904?” She nodded, shot me a pensive looks then said, “When I grow up I’m going to be educated.”

I nearly bit my tongue as Viola Davis went to the Julliard School, one of the finest training grounds for serious talent. If only a good education could save a black actress from pushing a broom across the silver screen. I’m her father but does that give me the right to burst my daughter’s dream? What are the chances of her becoming the first black actress who didn’t have to play a maid? Possible. But, this is one conversation I don’t look forward to having when she gets old enough to know that to make it as a black actress is to be “maid” in Hollywood.

Abdul Ali is a freelance culture writer who resides in Washington, D.C.

Check, Please: Black Folks and Tipping

The summer before I started college, almost 10 years ago in Baltimore County, I became a waiter. It was a rite of passage into the workforce, albeit an unglamorous one. Working in a restaurant gave me my first real experience interacting with all sorts of people in an intimate way. At the end of the day, regardless of socioeconomic class, a hungry person is a hungry person — making people unpredictable, and their tips negotiable.

Elderly people, the soup-salad-and-bread-stick thrifty types:horrible tippers. And those high-rolling suited professionals who were quick to flash their American Express cards: shamefully bad tippers.And to my kinfolk in the black community, I must say: If slavery wasn’t acceptable when we fought the Civil War … (more on this later).

To continue reading this article on TheRoot, click here.

 

 

 

Review: Beats, Rhymes & Life

Lights flash disco-style on a middle-aged Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad as the three harmonize in front of a pumped audience for the 2008 Rock the Bells Festival. The crowd is hyped. The camera pans across an audience of bobbing heads and swaying arms.

This is how the new documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, directed by actor Michael Rapaport, opens. Despite the controversy that has threatened to eclipse this new film — reports surfaced that Q-Tip didn’t attend the Sundance premiere in protest of the project — the scandal likely won’t hurt the project, instead doing the opposite, as die-hard hip-hop fans will want to draw conclusions independently.

The film makes an earnest effort to give the legendary hip-hop quartet its props, while critically looking at reasons for the band’s breakup. Though group member Jarobi White is a part of the cast, it’s revealed that his real passion is culinary arts, paring the group down to a threesome: Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

Candid scenes reveal Kamal “Q-Tip” Fareed’s outsized ego, his perfectionist leanings and ambition that eventually spark a petty beef between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg that Rapaport captures dramatically on film backstage at the Rock the Bells Festival.

In truth, Beats is a documentary within a documentary.

The 98-minute documentary film is evenly split. The first half of the film establishes the history — how ATCQ met, where they went to school, how they got their start. The early footage — interviews, early concerts, house parties — recreate the early days of hip-hop pre-stardom. The second half of the film is more exposé, however, focusing on the internal tension within the group that ultimately causes their fall.

To continue reading, click here.

Tupac at 40: What if He Survived?

For the past month, in anticipation of what would have been his fortieth birthday, I’ve become a obsessed with Tupac Shakur — torn between the very public shape-shifter that he was who scrawled THUG LIFE on his abdomen and the relatively young man who grew up without a father, and transitioned into manhood under the harshest of circumstances.

I became curious in Tupac insofar as he represents a litmus test on whether progress has been made in terms of reversing trends in black men’s life expectancy, incarceration numbers, and on the whole, having more options for manhood beyond the archetypal Thug or Gangster or in the extreme opposite, the bourgie Negro devoid of a political consciousness.

For Tupac, and many black men, there’s little middle ground in terms of life choices: It’s life or death; college or prison; hardcore or soft; a thug or a  (insert expletive.) Contrary to mainstream media, Tupac Shakur was a complicated figure who had so much more to give the world, if only we lived in a world where black men aren’t made to feel lucky if they live long enough to collect social security.

In an unofficial survey I conducted with a group of poets and writers, culture critics, and academics, I posed the question: If Tupac Shakur was still alive, what might he be doing?

Continue reading on TheGrio

The Jury of Live Theater: A Chat with A Time to Kill’s Sebastian Arcelus

courtesy of Arena Stage

A Time to Kill is now enjoying its third life. The play is set in Mississippi in the 1980s, when two drunken white men gang rape a 10-year-old  black girl. Fearing that the men will receive a mere slap on the wrist, the girl’s father Carl Lee takes the law in his own hands, shooting them as they are led from court. So begins John Grisham‘s first novel, which was originally rejected by publishers and in 1996 was adapted into a film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey. Rupert Holmes‘ adaptation of the story opened last month at Arena Stage, and it runs to June 19.

Actor Sebastian Arcelus plays Jake Brigance, the lawyer who defends Carl Lee. Arcelus spoke to Arts Desk about  Brigance’s surprising complexities, and about how the play departs from its cinematic counterpart.

Washington City Paper: A Time to Kill departs from the film in significant ways. Was it me or was the play rather too funny? The play poked fun at the legal system moreso than focusing on the characters directly harmed by the heinous rape like the film did.

Sebastian Arcelus: Our writer, Rupert Holmes, has found many choice moments to tastefully guide us through that delicate balance with the use of humor. But, no, I certainly don’t think our play is about  fun of the legal system or not fully dramatizing the facts of the case. On the contrary, our director, Ethan McSweeney, guided us to dive deeply into the heart of all of these issues, whether they be  intellectual, legal, racial, or otherwise. And at the end of the day, audiences are super-adept at recognizing truth, and one way to do that is certainly with laughter. It also probably doesn’t hurt that we’re presenting a smart, fast-paced legal thriller in a town known for its lawyers…

Continue reading at Washington City Paper

Summer is Here

My spring semester concluded right before May 1st. All and all, my first year of graduate school was successful. The thing of it is that with so many deadlines and competing deadlines I found myself unable to get inside the right headspace to discover, play, and write the things I wanted to write. So, here I am with some money in the bank, lots of time on my hand, and opportunity.

It occurred to me the other day that having a lot of free time can be a dangerous thing for me. While I crave freedom, I work well within some kind of structure. Thus, I’m creating my own writing projects and deadlines. I’m also looking for an easy part-time job to bring in some extra dough.  But as for production I have an ambitious list of things I want to do this summer:

1. Work on a couple poetic sequences

2. Rewrite my play about Nina Simone

3. Research on fatherhood

4. Get steady work from online and print magazines

5. Get physically fit.

Things sounds like a lot, huh?