The Winter Without Snow – A Wake-Up Call

BY RIVERA SUN

 DECEMBER 29, 2023
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We all have our reasons for getting alarmed about the climate crisis. With bare ground at Christmas and no snow on the horizon, my neighbors just got theirs. This Northern Maine valley nestles against the border of Canada – and winter without snow is unfathomable.

Snowmobiling is a big deal around here. While most of Maine suffers its tourist season along with the blackflies and summer sunburns, my neck of our vast woods gets its annual rush of visitors when the snow starts flying.

They come to these northern reaches with their snowmobiles on trailers to go joyriding over our endless miles of trail system. There’s a breathless thrill to speeding over three feet of glorious snow at 30-80 mph.

But not this year. The local hospitality bookings plummeted with cancellations when 40°F pouring rain melted our paltry snow in mid-December. My neighbors stare forlornly at the bare ground and reluctantly concede to taking their four-wheelers out instead of the snowmobiles.

The weather forecast is freakishly sunny and the 1-2 inches hesitantly projected for the New Year won’t be nearly enough to snowmobile on. We might not even break out our shovels.

For context, on a ‘normal’ year, by the time the second week of January plunges to -20°F in the daytime, we keep warm by hurling the latest 6-inch snowfall up over the 4-foot embankments along the driveway. Bare ground at this time of year is head-spinning.

This is the climate crisis.

Just down the road, the older gentleman who adamantly argued with me at the post office, denying the reality of global warming, must be scratching his head. A disquieted wondering must be going through him as he stares at the greenish grass.

It’s okay to change your mind, I want to murmur to him. Millions of Americans are doing the same thing.

They’re seeing their relatives evacuate their homes as forest fires – intensified through drought – burn closer and closer. They’re worried about older friends in the extreme heat that gets worse each summer.

They’re sending money to church groups that help with flood relief when the 500-year floods strike twice in a decade. They’re looking at the faces of their children and grandchildren and realizing that the dire predictions of climate scientists are not an abstract future anymore.

It’s the reality that their most precious loved ones will face. What will his grandchildren live through?

Up by the beautiful lake, where the ice-fishing shacks are still lined up on the shore waiting for the ice to thicken up enough to drive on, the local politicians – who have been ignoring the climate crisis like ostriches with their heads in the sand – must be tossing and turning with unease. Is it too late to do something? What can they do?

In the 100-year-old farmhouse that has sheltered seven generations of potato farmers, the mother of three children and eight grandchildren is wrestling with the contradictions of our culture. She wants to preserve her farm and worried about low yields after a hot, rainy summer.

She just got back from visiting one of her far-flung kids at Christmas. They say flying is one of the worst things for the environment. If she wants to save the farm, will she have to give up visiting her kids?

You can almost hear similar thoughts rumbling through our valley: Is this normal? (No.) Should we do something? Petition public officials? Hold a protest? Let the kids go on school strike? What will make a difference? Does any of it really matter? (The answer to the last two questions is yes, by the way. Your actions now do make a difference and they do matter to the future of humanity.)

In 2024, we need to ask ourselves these kinds of uncomfortable – and sometimes downright terrifying – questions. What will we give up so that humanity and the planet can have a livable future? What kinds of change will we embrace with open arms so that our children can have a fighting chance of survival? What will we do today, tomorrow, and the next day to make a shift to a sustainable society?

There are sacrifices to be made, of course. Families are taking on debt to convert their houses to renewables. Utilities are investing in the switch. Companies have to go out on a limb to push their industry to change. We cannot sustain the level of air travel we currently enjoy. And yes, it is possible that we can’t justify the energy expense of pleasure-riding on snowmobiles.

But if giving up your snowmobile could ensure a future for your children, would you do it? I know I would.

On the other hand, there is a future – a beautiful one – waiting for us. It is healthy, clean, hopeful. And it’s already on its way.

That potato farming mother has a solar farm in one of her fields.

This year, those local politicians worked with our state rep to secure $35 million to restore fish habitat for endangered alewives, trout, and Atlantic salmon.

Even my climate-denying neighbor put in a heat pump last year, grumbling about the jacked-up price of oil.

We need to escalate these kinds of actions exponentially. There is something for all of us to do.

Maybe you are a local loan officer who can approve energy efficiency loans to homeowners.

Or a senior citizen with a retirement fund you can divest from fossil fuels.

Perhaps you are a company manager who could cut back on air travel for your industry.

Or an alumni of a university that could make the switch to renewable power.

You may serve on a church committee that could help people prioritize care of the Earth this year.

Or maybe you’re on a school board, town council, or county commission that could pass important climate measures.

There are countless actions that we can take. And we must take them. Now, not next year. Let The Winter Without Snow be a wake-up call for all of us. There isn’t a moment to waste.

Rivera Sun is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, and the cofounder of the Love-In-Action Network.

Hip Hop at 50: From Subculture to the Mainstream

BY AMY CODDIGTON

 DECEMBER 29, 2023

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As hip hop turns 50, many mainstream outlets have highlighted how it has utterly transformed U.S. popular culture. And they’re right: look around, and it’s hard to see or hear something that hasn’t been influenced by the young people of color who fashioned, developed, and championed hip hop culture. From Snoop Dogg hosting the Puppy Bowl to Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize, from the global popularity of K-pop boy band BTS’s rapped verses to country artists incorporating trap beats while maintaining some vocal twang, and from rap soundtracking almost every sports arena to breakdancing making its Olympic debut next year: hip hop isn’t so much part of today’s mainstream as it is the mainstream.

How exactly did this happen? How did this minority subcultural movement find its way out of the block and community center parties of the South Bronx and into the ears, eyes, and hearts of people across the United States? My book How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap and Race responds to these questions by looking at how one of hip hop’s musical elements, rap, came to be broadcast on U.S. commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the early 1980s, most commercial radio stations ignored rap, in large part because the genre had come to be synonymous with young, poor Black Americans. But in the late 1980s, previously cautious radio stations began to play the genre, turning LL Cool J, MC Hammer, Bell Biv Devoe, and —yes— Vanilla Ice, into household names. By the 1990s, rapping was everywhere, soundtracking feature films like The Addams Family and House Party, teaching viewers about conflict resolution on the show Kids Incorpo­rated, promoting household products like Sprite and Pillsbury in television advertisements, helping kids learn their multiplication tables on educational cassettes, and entertaining families when they sat down for game night.

Rap changed the commercial radio industry, as its multiracial and multiethnic appeal required those working at radio stations to rethink their programming practices. But the radio industry also changed rap, reframing the genre’s style and substance. For many stations that came to play the genre, rap couldn’t just be the voice of marginalized Black Americans. It also had to fit on their stations broadcasting the sound of young, hip, and majority-white America. Artists grappled with pressure to conform to the mostly white-controlled commercial radio industry’s musical preferences and struggled to maintain the genre’s identity as the radio industry took control of its main­streaming.

As we celebrate hip hop passing this milestone, it’s important to acknowledge the flipside of its mainstream success. While the mainstreaming of rap has put money into the hands of Black musicians and businesspeople, Greg Tate notes that it has failed to change the material realities of most Black Americans and has not “fully dismantled the prevalent, delimiting mythologies about Black intelligence, morality, and hierarchical place in America.” Instead, hip hop becoming mainstream meant that anyone, regardless of race, could profit from the genre, as the culture was quickly assimilated into the mostly white-owned profit-seeking media industries.

Rap can be revolutionary: it acts as a megaphone for marginalized artists to express their inimitable identities. But like all other popular music genres, it does this while selling records, and subsidizing the extractive music industries that were built on the unpaid labor of colonized people worldwide and Black musicians in the United States. Understanding just how hip hop became the mainstream force it is today helps us make sense of this duality, allowing us to comprehend just how rap became the most popular genre in the world without enacting substantive change to make that world more equitable.

Amy Coddington is an Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music. She is the author of How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race.

Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg’s Black Men are “Soulless Monsters”

BY ISHMAEL REED

 DECEMBER 29, 2023
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When I informed some prominent Black men, among them Academic and Media stars, that convicted serial rapist Harvey Weinstein was co-producer of the musical version of the recently released film, “The Color Purple,” they were shocked. A couple disputed my report. I directed them to Bloomberg News, which reported Weinstein’s involvement. Was Alice Walker aware of his involvement? What about feminist Marsha Norman, who wrote the book for the musical?

Alissa Wilkinson writes in The New York Times,Dec. 19,2023:

“… while this adaptation at least gives the men a little more humanity than previous versions, they still come off as basically soulless monsters. Hollywood movies are ill-suited to this kind of material, and the whole thing inevitably suffers as a result.” I was surprised to see this comment by a Black woman. Until now, those who object to Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of Alice Walker’s novel–her script was rejected in favor of one written by Menno Meyjes, a Dutch screenwriter and film director–have been dismissed as Black male malcontents led by me.

I got in trouble with the Purple Cult when I said on the “Today Show” that the film was the kind that was made about Jews in Nazi Germany. That’s because I attended a lecture presented by the San Francisco Holocaust Museum, which compared the similarity between the way the Nazis depicted Jewish men and how Black men are shown in  American films.

I was supposed to talk about my novel, Reckless Eyeballing, but one of the Today Show’s programmers, a Black woman, ambushed me with a debate about “The Color Purple.” My debating partner was journalist Clarence Page, who boasted about flying around the country defending the film. My book was not discussed. When I asked why, the programmer said, “WE DIDN’T GUARANTEE THAT YOUR BOOK WOULD BE MENTIONED!!!” I wondered whether St. Martin’s Press ever complained to NBC. They flew me in and paid for the hotel, ground transportation, and meals so I could talk about my book on the show.

After my appearance on the Today Show, I was threatened with a boycott by white feminists led by Prof. Emily Toth. When I arrived at the site of the boycott, the University of Louisiana at Baton Rouge, I was told that the boycott collapsed because, when questioned, none of the women had read my books.

I’m cited as one of the few Black men criticizing Spielberg’s interpretation of Ms. Walker’s novel in Jump Cut, a film magazine. In the magazine, Prof. Jacqueline Bobo said that I called “The Color Purple” “a Nazi Conspiracy.” Wrong. In two articles, I’m the villain: in The New Republic and The Village Voice, where I’m not only a misogynist but a homophobe; in The Nation, I’m just a misogynist. A hatchet job on my novel, The Terrible Twos. was commissioned by Elizabeth Pochoda, who got her job there because she knew Philip Roth. In two books, In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece, by Salamishah Tillet–she makes light of Walker’s association with Holocaust denier David Ickes– Tillet repeats the Jump Cut lie. In Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000, edited by the late Valerie Boyd, I’m also the heavy.

In a Ms. magazine article by Barbara Smith, whose scholarship is even worse than some of my other critics, I was cited as the ring leader of those who dissented against the film “The Color Purple.” At the time, Ms. was financed by a white patriarch group, Lang Communications. The other magazines and books where my comments are rendered falsely are owned by patriarchs. When The Village Voice dumped on me, it was carrying ads for  Backpage.com, where men could make dates with underage girls. The ads didn’t seem to bother the feminists who had editorial positions. A Black feminist told me that the Voice’s feminist editors were constantly goading her to attack Black men.

In the Boyd book, Ms. Walker even repeats a scurrilous rumor about my late mother, Thelma V. Reed, who wrote as well as Ms. Walker but didn’t have a powerful patron, like Gloria Steinem, whose connections to the CIA, according to Harriet Fraad, have never been clarified. (Check out my mother’s memoir, Black Girl From Tannery Flats.)

In an important, overlooked interview with author Cecil Brown published in The Massachusetts Review, Toni Morrison says that Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, would have been forgotten without Gloria Steinem’s promotion. My mother was a working-class woman who raised four children, all achievers. Single-handedly, my mother organized two strikes in Buffalo, New York, that improved the working conditions of Black women. Not once did my mother have a conversation with a horse.

The fact that the Purple cult would take a swipe at my mother shows that they are not to be crossed and play for keeps. None of those magazine and book editors fact-checked the statements made about me by The Purple Cult. Profs. Jacqueline Bobo and Salamishah Tillet have yet to answer my emails offering corrections of their false comments about my position on “Purple.” Victoria Bond’s editor, Chloë Schama, refused to print my letter challenging Ms. Bond, who repeated the Jump Cut lie that I called “Purple” the result of a Nazi conspiracy.

One of the cult members, the late June Jordan, told a radio audience that I tried to prevent the novel from being taught in public schools. That is not true; I supported the teaching of the book. She apologized.

Walker told a feminist audience that I was stalking her. No, Spielberg, who has gotten into trouble for maligning Indian and Chinese Americans in his films, is stalking Black men. The late comedian Paul Mooney said he expected a “Color Purple” on ice.

With Alissa Wilkinson calling the Black men in the movie, “Soulless Monsters,” she joins bell hooks, Michele Wallace, and Toni Morrison, who said that Black men had been singled out to take the rap for misogyny, Sonia Sanchez, and Trudier Harris, who said that when she criticized the book there was such a backlash from white feminists, she stopped talking about it. Former Black Panther Elaine Brown challenged Walker’s homophobia in The New York Times.

The portrayal of Purple critics as disgruntled Black men led by me, instead of including dissent from Black feminists, was part of a marketing strategy. Walker said I hated Black women writers. I’ve published many of them. Some of whom were little known when I published them. I’ve published Black women from England, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. My agent is a Black woman. One of my London publishers is a Black woman. My last four awards, including this year’s Hurston/Wright Foundation’s North Star award, were presented to me by organizations managed by Black women.

When asked about Harvey Weinstein’s participation, Spielberg refused to comment.

It’s bad enough that 20 percent of Black men are Trump supporters, but they are buying tickets to a movie in which they are shown as “soulless Monsters.” Isn’t that like Black men investing in souvenirs sold at their lynchings? Because he objected to the depiction of Black men by academic feminists, Tommy Curry couldn’t find work in the United States. He found a job at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

I asked him what he thought of the contradiction of Black men thrilled by a film in which Black men are portrayed as “soulless monsters.” He wrote: “The market for anti-Black misandry is as lucrative in Hollywood as it is in academia.”

Notes

The Making Of The Color Purple

Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com › news › articles › the-m…

… co-produced the movie and is a friend of Furman’s, joined as a producer. Film producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein got involved, as did businessman Gary Winnick

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/steven-spielberg-refuses-harvey-weinstein-talk-spielberg-premiere-1201884429/

Ishmael Reed’s latest play is “The Conductor.”

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