A Requiem for Vine, Maybe and Other Musings...
Hey you lovely basket of adorables, thanks for subscribing to The Smactorialist!
You hung in there for the second installment. Woohoo! For this second newsletter ever, I've got three bits here. A longish bit, if you fancy it, but strategically placed at the end and for your reading leisure.
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The British Film Institute is spending the fall celebrating the magic and impact of Black Stars in film and television. I wrote an essay on Black America television stars for the companion booklet for the celebration. I think it might still be available through Amazon, but maybe order it through the BFI.
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So much really amazing writing and thinking out in these internet streets. I can hardly keep up. Haven’t stopped thinking about Gene Demby complicated reckoning with home and heritage all week. The most incredible piece I read this week is from Wesley Morris for the NYT Magazine’s Culture Issue and tbqh, it's required reading. BuzzFeed Reader dropped a short story from one of my favorite short story writers, Etgar Keret. And if you haven’t read Chimanada Adichie’s lovely love letter to Michelle Obama, really go get your life. Seriously. Rembert Browne and Hannah Giorgis have twin pieces on the Chicago Sound, which is super gratifying to see gain its national visibility after hearing quiet rumblings of these kids for nearly 8 years from teaching artists friends. This week’s track on repeat is this gem from Noname.
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#RIPVINE
I wrote the draft below in early 2014. Never found a home for it. But since Twitter kills our joy and fails at honoring our more humane requests — edit functions, effective troll block tools, protections from sulfur saturated online harassment—- I thought I share it here with you here. After thinking long and hard earlier this year about the role of black television stars, and their indelible impact on our culture, as well ass their long journey (struggle) to present our stories and humanity to the world, it seemed natural to bookend this installment of Smactorialist to resurrect an old tome to the DIY stars of Vine. These everyday heroes and entertainers made our world known, and yet, reaped no gain from it.
Vine is Dead. Long LIVE VINE!
Someone tweeted out a link to the best vines of 2013 and I’m watching a 6 second video of a black kid dancing. He is adorable; and he is killing it as the voice offstage suggests. I click play again and repeat this for 15 minutes. And I discover that I too want to do the same. I want to kill ‘em too. To the right, I see that this piece of confection on an otherwise mediocre New York minute has gotten over 50 million views.
The kid’s got moves tho. I stumble onto other tiny loop videos of Terio. Then, I google and discover Complex magazine’s interview with the first grader and his cousin. Then I see other pictures in the image search. Recent pictures of the first grader are troubling to anyone who can remember how overwhelming the adulation of adults are contingent to you being able to entertain them at a backyard barbeque.
How is it possible that I missed this?
Terio slayed us so hard that it saved Vine for a time. A series of imitation videos of brown and black folk mimicking the kids moves. It feels like a celebration. We want to slay ‘em with him. I’m not too sure his cousin Maleek gets that tho. The instant celebrity of just a normal day with a cute kid doing cute things has gotten a little dark and twisty. We see pictures of the child out way past bedtime or curfew for someone so young, surround by adult matters like clubs, Krystal, beautiful women.
But I wonder why such a small confection of a looped video of us being us in the privacy of our homes and communities would capture the internet’s imagination? What is absent from our lives today that a 6 second Vine would go viral?
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There is a scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God where two men are posted up on the front porch of the general store in the all black town of Eatonville to wax poetic and mock Matt Bonner on the whereabouts of his old ill-tempered mule. It is early 20th century America, a small southern town in Florida, and the mythical Eatonville represented here is in fact based on the real life town the author was born and raised and called home. The men begin to tell tall tales about the mule, to tease Matt and amuse themselves, laugh voraciously at the expense of Matt. Eventually, the town joins in, the stories of the delinquent mule goes, viral if you will, analog style in our new world media terms, men, women children, the mayor all tell stories about errant mule. The mule becomes entertainment and connection. Eventually, the mule dies, and the town mourns the loss, even goes so far as to have a funeral for the wretched animal. The mayor even eulogizes him.
I think of this when I consider how we have adapted media to tell our stories.
Hurston’s novel received a lot of criticism from the would-be tastemakers and denizens of respectability politics during her day. She wrote a book that structurally embraced the oral tradition of the African American community and documented that tradition by decisively presenting the story in the language of that community. Richard Wright, her most vehement critic felt that she presented a blackness to be received by a white America that was embarrassing. Yet, his criticism reflects limited representation of black American life and womanhood. Thankfully, Hurston’s work survived Wright’s scathing reduction to provide a link to a legacy to our folkloric traditions.
Our classic culture of narrative storytelling and imagined myths like the dudes in Hurston’s Eatonville reminded me of the inventive and playful genius of hastags created to share a laugh with strangers we never met about the world we witness. It is a way of seeing the wide home of the black community across cities and state lines, building a kind of intimacy between strangers.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is like nesting dolls of stories upon stories, told from the point of view of a black woman at the dawn of the new century after slavery. This is important to underscore. Our stories and our voices were absent in the literary canon of the American experiment or driven to point of erasure. Hurston told a story of community and women and life on the margins of society, and nearly 80 years later and here I realize that we’re not new to creating spaces in media that would otherwise render us invisible. Janie Crawford Starks is an ordinary woman looking to discover a whole self as a black America seeks to live out an ordinary life free from racial violence and discrimination. The right to be ordinary people and not be punished for it.
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In the October 2013 issue of Essence, featured a study indicated that the feeling was the majority of imagery associated with African American woman was heavily negative – nearly 85% of respondents recorded negative depictions of black women in media (TV, internet and film) rooted in stereotypes of “gold diggers”, “jezebels”, “angry black women” and “uneducated”. While on one hand, I question the demographic of the women who determined these outcomes, wondering if they were falling to a ‘respectability politic’ lens an expectation of black / uprightedness perfection to the white gaze, I realize that no brown woman in America is immune to this filter – a series of a photos of President Obama occupied with a world leader selfie and a serious demeanor from Michelle Obama resulted in an internet gaslighting of the First Lady, her image became eponymous with ‘Angry Black Woman’.
Shortly after the release of the Essence study, Melissa Harris Perry hosted a roundtable on her then eponymous show, posing the question to her guests that whether or not we were in our consumption of images and stories of black women were losing “the humanity of the “baby mamas” and the complexities of African American lives to a respectability politic, making them become an “invisible middle.”
The ‘invisible middle’ of stories of ordinary African American women, rather than exceptional is something that we have yet to render in all her complexities on television. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned to the internet into something that belongs to us.
That infrastructure of conversation, community and connection became essential in supporting online activism. Genie Lauren generates a petition to implore a book agent from facilitating a book by Juror B37 from the Zimmerman trial. dream hampton creates a video to document the protest and activism that led to force Wayne County Police Department to pursue criminal charges for the shooting death of Renisha McBride. Mykki Kendall facilitates an international conversation around feminism and intersectionality, and later a powerful conversation and storytelling around the culture of hypersexualizing black women and girls. A flippant comment by Kenan Thompson leads to a firestorm in the twitterverse and subsequent criticism of the absence of black women writers and comics on Saturday Night Live and a surprisingly swift response by Michaels in hiring Sasheer Zamata to join the repertory players and the addition of writers Leslie Jones and LaKendra Tookes. Beyoncé trolled us and gave us a product that speaks to the interiority of black female identity – maiden, wife, and mother-- and launched a complex set of questions for all of us to interrogate feminism and womanism in it’s myriad of incarnations ---academic, corporate, practiced, cyborg and global--- without spending a singular dollar on marketing and promotion. Because she knows: we outchea.
Social media has been our weapon and champion to get our stories and storytellers out there. While some segments of American media landscape remain reticent to bend to our will, African Americans, and African American women, have been critical to pushing the boundaries of possibility in presenting all sides of black life and identities, demanding fuller representations of our humanity. If TV can’t do it, we’ll direct our energies to a universe we can control, which in some ways, explains the popularity of Vine to me. We have adapted all other media to conform to a world we know exists that make black stories and lives seen and known.
We out here: trying to tell our stories and be seen by our immediate community and by extension the whole of America. We live in incredible times that enable us to do so. While there are still conversations and representations of the black female body that is subjected to scrutiny from the white gaze, remarkably, we are able to respond with speed and dexterity against such nonsense, and reclaim our space out in these media streets. We’re everywhere, demanding that all will see us as real, beautiful, complex, woman deserving of empathy and humanity.