Excerpt from KPCC Interview "AirTalk" with Larry Mantle
http://techknowlogist.info/media/mp3s/2015-12-4-kpcc.mp3
The following audio is an excerpt from the interview I participated in on KPCC's AirTalk with host Larry Mantle.
[Direct download]
Keepin' It One Hunned – Race, Representation and How To Get Blocked On Twitter
A short video clip following up on the events surrounding the Today Show's hosting of a panel of all non-black Muslims talking about Islam in America.
Posted on February 26, 2014 January 25, 2017
Being Black and Muslim – al-Jazeera Stream
Join Hind Makki, Ibrahim Abdul Matin, Nsenga Knight and myself, and others tomorrow, 2:30pm on al-Jazeera Stream (@AJStream) for "What is it like #BeingBlackAndMuslim?": http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201402132007-0023473. please tweet questions and comments using the hashtag #AJStream.
Hind Makki
The daughter of African immigrants to the American Midwest, Hind Makki (@HindMakki)has long been interested in understanding the impact of migration, race, religion on shaping the development of Western Muslim consciousness. Hind has appeared on Al Jazeera's "The Stream," Chicago Public Radio and Huffington Post Live; her work is featured in Alarabiya News, AltMuslimah, The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, Common Ground News, The Economist, The Huffington Post, Islamic Horizons, National Public Radio, PolicyMic; and she has published pieces in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Hind holds a degree in International Relations from Brown University.
Ibrahim Abdul Matin
The author of The Green Deen, Ibrahim (@IbrahimSalih) is a former National Urban Fellow and policy advisor to Mayor Bloomberg. He spends his days pounding political and executive corridors to find integrated solutions to complex business and social challenges.
Nsenga Knight
Nsenga Knight (@Nsenga_K) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her work expands upon the common aesthetic and conceptual inclinations in Islamic Art, American and European abstraction and the conceptual arts movement, reflecting her interests in ritual, subjectivity, history, archiving and intervention. Nsenga's artistic process is as tied to the medium of drawing and performance art as it is to photography and the aesthetics of cinema, particularly experimental films. For more on her work, see her web site here.
WHAT IS THE STREAM?
The Stream is a social media community with its own daily television program, focusing on stories that are ongoing, global, and sourced from social media. The Stream is an aggregator of online sources and discussion, seeking out unheard voices, new perspectives from people on the ground and untold angles related to the most compelling stories of the day. We also share the platform with artists, celebrities and intellectuals who are an integral part of the social media community.
The program is critically acclaimed, having won the prestigious Royal Television Society Award in the UK for 'the most innovative news show' and an Emmy nomination in the US for its "best new approaches to news and documentaries".
The show appears live on Al Jazeera English TV channel and repeats at 04:30 GMT, 08:30GMT, 14:30GMT.
You can watch this episode here.
Normalized Domination
"Why is Mindy Kaling only shown from the chest up?", asks the article, regarding the cover from January 2014 cover of Elle. At first blush, one is tempted to concede the argument has been fully articulated. Once again (and perhaps justifiably accused), the media has reinforced unhealthy stereotypes and social pressures regarding women, image and self-worth. What isn't interrogated in this article is, quoting Dr. Sherman Jackson, the "normalized domination" of women, white western women in particular, revealing themselves. For in the end, as I see it, there is more than one crime here being committed. In summary, the converse of this situation is that no one's interrogating the presumed value of exposing oneself. As this social norm goes, the more a woman is perceived to be desirable the more she is enticed, encouraged, cajoled and even coerced, into exposing herself. So while Mindy Kaling's photo may indeed represent body-image issues, it also represents a number of other issues worth discussing as well. The idea that a person's, not solely a woman's, sexuality should not be available for public consumption, is foreign to popular wisdom.
I am reminded by two passages from Dr. Sherman Jackson's article, Literalism, Empricism, and Induction: Apprehending And Concretizing Islamic Law's Maqasid aL-Shari'ah In the Modern World which uses the discussion of race as a point of departure:
"In a real sense, blacks in America, like all other orphans of modernity ('Third-Worlders,' 'primitives,' or even 'Middle Easterners') were 'created' by the forces of white supremacy and the theoretical disciplines of the (French) Enlightenment. This 'second creation' had the cumulative effect of placing between blacks and primordial knowledge a normative regime of sense that was sponsored and controlled by the dominant group. At the same time, the invisibility of whiteness (only non-whites were raced) placed whites in the position of being 'just people,' who could speak not only in the name of their specific group, but also for humanity as a whole. This had the effect of conferring upon their fears, assumptions, proclivities, prejudices, and specific genius, the status of 'normal.' In effect, this reflected a transcendent natural order, whose validity was obvious to all, save the stupid, the primitive, or the morally depraved."
"The tacit (or in some instances, not so tacit) requirement that blacks recognize and conform to this normative regime of sense and 'normal' behavior translated into a socio-cultural order I refer to elsewhere as 'normalized domination.' Normalized domination occurs when humans are reduced to such a state of self-doubt and or self-contempt that they internalize the vague but inextricable feeling that they can only redeem themselves by living up to the norms and expectations of those who seek to exploit them. When this happens, their ability to engage in reasoned critiques of the prevailing order is drastically reduced, because the feelings of triumph that occur as they approach redemption tend to obliterate any recognition of the provenance or falseness of the criterion upon which their redemption is based. In this context, ontological and even meta-cognitive truths that contradict the reigning paradigm are confronted agnostically, and one is given over to formalized ideologies, popular morality, or simply 'the ways of the forefathers'."
What Does It Mean To Be An American Muslim
My apologies to Aliya. I couldn't adjust the camera to include you in the angle. I'll try and see about uploading a higher rez version at some point. From the Islam Today Radio Show on 900am WURD.
What Does It Mean To Be An American Muslim from Marc Manley on Vimeo.