So much for Sen. John McCain being a man of principle who stood up to the Bush Administration and fellow Republicans. (See previous post on waterboarding.) Turns out, he too is just another politician hungry for votes.
On Wednesday McCain voted against a Senate bill that would ban waterboarding and all forms of physical interrogation methods used by the CIA against terror suspects. The Senate passed the bill 51 to 45.
What happened to the presidential candidate who debated his Republican rivals by arguing that he understood torture because he spent five years as a prisoner of war? What happened to the politician who added a ban on torture to a defense spending bill in 2005?
I guess he decided it’s more important to win Conservative votes than to do what he feels is right. That sure is a hot campaign slogan. Good one, John.
It took a while to get used to. Here was a black leading man, very handsome, outrageously suave in a downright Cary Grant/James Bond kind of way who led a band of con artists performing elaborate grifts on the deservingly greedy. The white female lead was obviously in love with him; he obviously knew it, and would obviously have satisfied her had his station as group leader not prevented it. There was no mention of his race. There was no dramatic “reason†for him to be black. He simply was.
Then, in another show, there was this black man in charge of an outrageously powerful, well-funded effort to capture a valuable individual. The black man was, in every conceivable way, a righteous bastard. He hadn’t a single redeeming attribute. He once placed a small child in a public zoo lion’s cage in order to achieve his ends. Nobody liked him. Again, he simply was black. Not half-black, not kinda sorta… Just black, and a bastard.
And it happened a couple of more times: In one show, a black man had an unrequited crush on a white co-worker. In another, the young black supporting player was again in love with the white female lead; he was a bit of a bumbler, and didn’t have the stones to join her on her intergalactic travels, but for all that, he appeared simply human, not weak. In neither case was there a scintilla of the “black man chasing white women†stereotype.
One other thing about all of these shows: they were either British or British-bred.
As a Netflix devotee, I watch a lot of British drama, and one is struck blind by how differently black men are treated within them. We can be assholes, strong, suave, sexy, weak, sleazy, upper-class, working-class, effortless leaders, clueless followers. We can participate fully in the mainstream of whatever world we happen to be part of. We’re not relegated to cardboard second banana status as we are in American procedurals, nor to cardboard symbolic nobility as we are just about everywhere else (even Presidential races).
We don’t have to have a “reason†to exist within the world of the British TV show as we do on American television. The shows are not perpetually trumpeting our presence as their nod to “diversity†or their own progressiveness. Nor are we relegated to all-black worlds; we are allowed to interact with and play principal parts in the world at large. It’s the difference between a society that still suffers from just plain racism (the probably innate tendency toward prejudice against those who don’t look like you) and a society like ours, still stifled by a history of chattel slavery, in which blacks were not just different— but officially brutalized as subhuman.
On the British-based-and-bred Canadian series Hustle, Adrian Lester played Mickey Stone, a legendary genius of the elaborate “long con†who ran his own London “crew.†Here Lester played a character whose reputation and livelihood depended upon his ability to weave in and out of any social situation— from the most highfalutin’ upper-crust auction crowd to the night shift janitorial staff. This was a character with a mastery of the world in which he lived. It was a black male character unlike any I’d seen on American television.
In the Brit mini-series Jekyll, Paterson Joseph fakes an American accent to play Benjamin, the epitome of the barbarous “corporate man.†The only way black American TV actors are allowed to be this vicious if they’re drug dealers— and even then they’re “humanized†within an inch of their lives. Rarely would one get a chance at this kind of over-the-top grand guignol malevolence. Not to mention that this black man truly exercised life and death control over white ones. Might make the American audience a wee bit uncomfortable.
Our roles on American TV are usually token or political. Dennis Haysbert’s black President on 24 was as much a political statement as he was a character (as are just about all the characters on 24). The Wire’s excellent roles for black actors stem from the show’s social realism and extraordinary socio-political context. Many shows host a single black person (comedies, procedurals) simply to acknowledge the existence of non-whites and cover their asses. And then there are shows with principally black casts that, for better or worse, effectively divorce us from the bulk of American society.
We don’t get to express the full range of dramatic types because Americans, like all people, are victims of our history. And historically, American blacks have been seen less as people, and more as issues. To portray an issue, you must walk on eggshells in order not to offend one side or the other. You limit your expression when doing so. Watching Brit TV, you sometimes get to exhale and see yourself portrayed as a full-blooded, fully-functional human being. It’s contrast to American TV is proof that the term “post-racial†is no more than the mainstream’s self-aggrandizing crock.
—— Leonce Gaiter’s work on social and cultural issues has appeared in numerous publications, from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times magazine. His noir novel “Bourbon Street” was published by Carroll & Graf.
Yesterday Sen. Obama knocked down the so-called Potomac Primary— that is, the combined primaries of Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC. Basically, the man lofted a long three-pointer and swished without even so much as a hand in his face. Voting statistics suggest the victory came as a result of Obama’s widest demographic appeal to date. In addition to his usual coalition of young people, well-educated people and young and well-educated and every other kind of black people, he drew the support of folks across all income brackets. White women as a group reportedly remain the last bloc of Hillary supporters, although that may be changing.
Henry Jenkins, the guy in the suspenders at the top of the post, is a professor at MIT and co-director of the university’s comparative media studies program. In addition to writing great forward-thinking books on media and popular culture, he is a persuasive public advocate for the rights of digital-era fans, gamers, bloggers. He defended gamers against legislative backlash after the Columbine school shootings, for example, made calls for increased media literacy with the Federal Communications Commission, and has made the case repeatedly in various settings for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property. He is, as Mimi Ito put it this past weekend at the USC 24/7 DIY Video Summit, one of the “superheroes of the internet” whose work in championing the tastes, activities, and intelligence of everyday people is an inspiration.
It came out at the Summit that Jenkins is, in his words, “an Obama boy.” He explained why in a way that reflects his thinking about how society has changed in the network era. “Adult leaders tend to talk about ‘I’ but young people online talk about ‘we’ … The difference between the ‘I’ campaign based on experience, a la Hillary, and the ‘we’ campaign based on bottom-up energy, a la Obama, speaks to two different models of what political change might look like… We don’t want to go back to the centralized mindset… I don’t want a president who feels my pain. I want someone who will get us to work together to solve the problem.”
Because he’s not yet a legal adult, sixteen-year-old master drummer Magatte Sow’s MySpace page is set to “private” and therefore gives precious little information. It tells us that he’s an African-American male and that he lives in Los Angeles, California. Three photos run in rotation: Magatte in a baseball cap over a do-rag; two drums lying on top of each other like lovers; and Magatte playing the talking drum. Next to the rotating photos are the words “mou serigne fallou,” which is Wolof, the language spoken by 90 percent of the population of Senegal and the Gambia, and they convey the facts that Magatte’s parents are Senegalese and that he is a practicing Musilm and a follower of Serigne Fallou, a Senegalese caliph of great renown. Perhaps the most telling thing about Magatte’s MySpace page, though, is his choice of mood icon, the little happy face graphic meant to describe the profilee’s overall mood. Of the many available mood icons (sexy, cheeky, sad, devilish, etc.) Magatte chose a green face with a toothy grin and the word “accomplished.”
By anyone’s standards, “accomplished” is an understatement. Magatte Sow is a master of several West-African percussion instruments: the talking drum or tama, the djembe, and the sabar. Like many other Americans of blended cultural identity, Magatte straddles two worlds: his “drumming life” and his “non-drumming life,” as he describes them. Asked if he considers himself American or Senegalese, he says he is both. He speaks Wolof at home with his parents and listens to Senegalese mbalax and to American rap. He fasts during the month of Ramadan and transferred to a high school farther from his Inglewood home to avoid gang violence. Still, in order to avoid trouble, he has to keep his head down and “stay in class.” He plays basketball on his school team and with his friends, some of whom have no idea about his “drumming life.” His weekends are spent playing djembe for his mother’s dance class, sabar for another class and performing at various events and shows around the city. His hands are often shredded and bloody.
Senegalese society is extremely conservative by American standards. It is devoutly Muslim. Both girls and boys are expected to save themselves for marriages that are still often arranged and respect for elders is deeply ingrained. To western eyes, a striking contradiction is the culture’s intensely sexual sabar dancing, characterized by suggestive gyrations and pure sensual joy. Perhaps Magatte’s American life is circumscribed and given meaning by the Senegalese customs followed by his family. It might explain his innate politeness and the discipline he brings to his playing. After opening for superstar Baaba Maal at a club in Hollywood, Magatte, then fifteen years old and set loose in a club, might have been expected to do what most other fifteen-year-olds would do: head for the bar to try and get a beer. Instead, he positioned himself in front of Baaba Maal’s sabar players and watched their every move.
We’ve come to expect the culture of the immigrant family in the U.S. to sputter its last breaths in the face of the indifference, even the disdain, of the Americanized first-generation children. Not so in the case of Magatte Sow. To be so good at what he does requires dedication and passion for the music, which is to say, the heart and soul of his Senegalese culture. He started playing djembe at age two (his father, Malik Sow, is a drummer) and sabar at age five. His uncle gave him his own tama when he was four, cutting the stick short to fit his tiny hand. For years, Magatte concentrated on the djembe and without ever having had a formal lesson, became a master by the time he was eleven or twelve. He did this while living in L.A., not Senegal. Although he visited there often when he was younger, he has not been back in seven years. There, children born into griot families— that is, families of traditional storytellers and musicians (in Senegal they are called nguewel)— are saturated in traditional rhythms. Not given to bold compliments, they might say about a good young drummer, “It’s in the blood.” Magatte’s mother, Mareme Faye, is nguewel. But no one seems ready with an explanation of how one could have mastered this art in so few years and so far from the land of its birth and practice. Asked what they would think of his playing in Senegal, Magatte shrugs. Perhaps he doesn’t know. There are many boys his age in Senegal who know as much as he does. Yet one wonders how common it is for any musician anywhere to make the music his own the way Magatte does. The question of talent doesn’t really arise in Senegal the way it does in the west. But Magatte’s explosive djembe and sabar, and his deeply expressive tama leave little doubt that by Western standards, he is a huge and precocious talent.
As a teenager, Magatte turned in earnest to the sabar and the tama, both played with a stick and a hand. He studied with the masters Aziz Faye and N’Dongo M’baye, who was for years one of Baaba Maal’s dancers. Although the tama is perhaps the most expressive of the instruments Magatte plays (it is called the talking drum because it is meant to do just that), tama players are the biggest showboaters. The drum is small and held under the arm, so tama players dance around wild-eyed, inciting the audience to throw cash at them and to stuff it into their mouths. Magatte does all of this, and yet his solos are gorgeously restrained and inventive, the work of a mature and sophisticated musical talent. He began playing tama just four years ago, when he was twelve years old. Of the instruments Magatte plays, the sabar may be the most notoriously difficult. Supporting the lightning quick, athletic sabar style of dance, the sabar is a family of six drums of varying pitch played as an ensemble. The polyrhythms are maddeningly complicated and difficult to master. To know all the parts of the sabar is to have memorized hundreds of complicated patterns and breaks (called bakks) and the puzzle of how they all fit together. None of it is written down. To top it off, the principal skill of master sabar player is to seamlessly follow the wildly frantic dancers as they improvise (not the other way around), anticipating each touch of the bare foot to the ground and punctuating it with a loud crack of the stick, as though dancer and drummer were one.
At Aziz Faye’s weekly sabar dance class, Magatte slouches into the room wearing baggy jeans, do-rag and T-shirt in neutral, non-gang colors. He checks his cell phone and then checks his look in the mirror. When he starts playing, a switch is turned on, his love of this music an electric current running through his tall thin frame. Within minutes, his drum is up on a chair and he is standing, pounding on it fiercely, stylishly, thumping his foot for those who have lost the beat. Shy no more, he catches the eye of whoever is watching as though to say “Watch this,” and then launches into a fiery lick. He moves from one drum to another as needed in deference to the older drummers, some of whom he has easily and almost embarrassingly surpassed. Occasionally he jumps out of the pack of drummers for a herky-jerky dance solo of his own. Pape Diouf, a master sabar player who drums with Magatte, nods his head and says in typical Senegalese understatement: “He’s ready.”
But ready for what? Great artists tend to defy categorization and maybe Magatte Sow is one of these. Watching him play begs the questions: How good can this kid get? Where does he go from here? Will he parlay his musical mastery into Western stardom, go to college, teach drumming like his father? For now, Magatte has more immediate concerns. He needs to finish school. He needs to earn money to fix the drum skins he regularly thrashes. He hopes to go to Senegal this year where they might well ask where this American kid learned to play so well. Just as it can be inferred that the culture of his parents is what guides Magatte through the stresses of being young and black in L.A., it is also true from the Senegalese perspective that the luck of his American birth keeps him from the grinding poverty of West Africa. On a recent Sunday after a particularly scorching dance class, Magatte helped carry the drums to the sidewalk where he was met by a couple of friends, all speaking Wolof. Indistinguishable from thousands of other L.A. teenagers in a woolen hat and black sweatshirt, Magatte waited for Aziz Faye to come out and pay him for providing the soundtrack for the dancers. He thanked Faye for the cash, put his leathery hands into his pockets and headed off with his friends to the Crenshaw Mall.
—— Laurie Lathem is a writer who lives in Los Angeles. Images and YouTubes: Lynette Wich. Thanks Lynette!
