“Soul!” (Famous!) TV Program with Ellis Haizlip

Soul! was a publicly funded cultural affairs television program that aired for five seasons on Public Broadcasting Service affiliates in the United States from 1968 to 1973. Its first season aired on New York public television, and after that it was distributed nationally via the Public Broadcasting Service. A showcase for Black arts, culture, and politics, Soul! was closely associated with the producer and host Ellis Haizlip, a Black gay man, who emphasized a vision of “soul” culture that was eclectic, inclusive, and aligned with the radical political energies of the Black Power movement. Soul! provided a powerful platform for Black musicians and other artists and public figures at a time when their access to national TV was severely constrained. It also employed Black women in significant on- and off-camera roles and helped vault the poet Nikki Giovanni to national prominence. Filmed live in a small New York studio, Soul! included an in-studio audience within its representational frame, giving viewers an opportunity to see audiences reacting to guests. These guests ranged from the gospel singer Marion Williams to the soul singer Al Green; from the dancer George Faison to the spoken-word group The Last Poets; and from the activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte to Black Panthers leader Kathleen Cleaver. Other notable Soul! guests included Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, writer and activist James Baldwin, singer-actor Novella Nelson, and musicians including Labelle, Earth, Wind and Fire, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Horace Silver, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Valerie Ashford and Nick Simpson. As a Black-produced TV show aimed explicitly at Black audiences, Soul!’s trajectory was always precarious. Early funding for the show came from New York public broadcasting and the Ford Foundation, liberal institutions eager to support Black media in the wake of uprisings following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. However, backlash to the Black Power movement—as represented by the election of “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election—translated into attempts to silence Black public media. Despite evidence that it resonated powerfully with Black viewers, the show was cancelled in 1973. Soul! inspired innumerable writers, performers, and technicians to seek opportunities in television. It set a mark for television that sought to entertain and educate, keeping an eye on diversity within the Black collective.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM IN ANGIE THOMAS’ THE HATE U GIVE

Yanti, N. R. and Fanani, Abu (2020). Institutional Racism in Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give. Keywords: racism, institutional racism, African American literary criticism. This article tries to analyze a novel written by Angie Thomas entitled The Hate U Give and focuses on the main character named Starr Carter. The purpose of this article is to know racism that occurs in the novel and the way Starr has to deal with it. The method used in this study is qualitative research or library research, it means the data are concerned with texts, written words, phrases or symbols. Primary data source of this research is taken from the novel while secondary data sources are taken from articles, journals, websites, and books that relate with this analysis. The collected data are analyzed by applying institutional racism theory in African American literary criticism. As the result of the analysis it is found that there are three parts of institutional racism portrayed in this novel, those are ignorance toward Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, the shooting in license checking, and physical punishment in police patrol.

FEMALE HIP HOP ACTIVIST. AN INTERSECTIONAL CROSSROAD

With the demise of twentieth-century social classes, the intersec-tion of gender, race and class no longer seems to constitute a para-digm, but rather a construct with a variable structure in which, from time to time, one of the three constituent elements emerges as the driving force. This also has repercussions inthe field of art and cul-ture. In the context of Hip Hop, for example, African American female rappers propose a female image in which the vindication of one’s blackness is accompanied by an awareness of the fluidity of sexual identity and the need to break certain stereotypes for which political commitment must necessarily coincide with “sobriety” of behavior. Intheir video clips there are frames that recall the Black Panthers or the Black Lives Matter movement, one can fight against racial and class discrimination without renouncing a politics of de-sire, which opens up interesting educational reflections.

Queer Connections

This article examines the gay French author Jean Genet’s 1970 tour of the United States with the Black Panther Party, using Genet’s unusual relationship with the Panthers as a lens for analyzing the possibilities and pitfalls of radical coalition politics in the long sixties. I rely on mainstream and alternative media coverage of the tour, articles by Black Panthers and gay liberationists, and Genet’s own writings and interviews to argue that Genet’s connection with the Panthers provided a queer bridge between the Black Power and gay liberation movements. Their story challenges the neglect of such coalitions by historians of the decade and illuminates some of the reasons the Panthers decided to support gay liberation. At the same time, Genet distanced himself from the gay liberation movement, and his unusual connection with the Panthers highlights some of the difficulties activists faced in building and sustaining such alliances on a broad scale.