CAMRY DEAN
Staff Writer
After receiving his B.A.and M.A. in English from Fredonia in 1987 and 1993, alumnus Mark Anthony Neal returned to campus earlier this week to discuss black culture, activism and social media as a part of the English Department’s Writers@Work program.
During his two-day residency at Fredonia, Neal held both public discussions and writing workshops on Feb. 19 and 20.
Receiving his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo in 1996, Neal became a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. As an activist, writer and frequent NPR commentator, Neal has also written several books that highlight black masculinity and black popular culture.
“[Neal] has become a pioneer in black Twitter, in social media and in connecting social media and social justice,” Bruce Simon, chair of the English Department said. “Mark ought to be considered in the legacy of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. His work, which is still developing, I trust is going to have as large a social, cultural and political influence by the end of his career as these amazing black male intellectuals of past.”
On Feb. 19, Neal held a public talk titled “Will You (Tweet) About Me?: In the Afterlife of Digital Blackness.” The talk, which was a nod to Kendrick Lamar’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” discussed the memorialization of black humanity through pop culture and social media.
“I consider myself a digital evangelist, and that has nothing to do with religion because I’m not particularly religious,” Neal said. “But I do like to talk about the religion of digital culture and digital technology.”
Neal began exploring blackness in the digital realm by discussing Frederick Douglass as one of the most photographed individuals of the 19th century, and asked the audience what would happen if he had an Instagram.
“In a world in which black folks were regularly dehumanized, [Douglass] was committed to taking portraitures of himself as a counterbalance to the inhumanity that blackness generally represented,” Neal said. “He wanted to make sure his image served as an imagine of black humanity.”
From Douglass to more recent examples such as P. Diddy and Faith Evans using the melody of the traditional black Christian hymn “I’ll Fly Away” in their hit song “I’ll Be Missing You” as a memorial for the late Notorious B.I.G, the memorialization of blackness has been happening for years.
“Here we are connecting a practice that we see throughout [black] culture dating back to Frederick Douglass and beyond to contemporary hip-hop,” Neal said.
Another focus of Neal’s talks was the idea of memorializing black lives lost and injustices they faced.
“There are two signature moments in thinking about the emergence of blackness in the digital realm,” Neal said. “They both occur in the winter and the spring of 1991.”
In 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed in Los Angeles by Korean American store owner, Soon Ja Du. After an altercation in the store over the allegations of Harlin’s stealing a bottle of orange juice, Du shot Harlins in the back as she tried to leave.
The jury found Du guilty and recommended the maximum sentence of 16 years but the judge, Joyce Karlin, did not accept this and instead sentenced her to five years of probation and community service.
Tupac Shakur mentioned the death of Harlin’s in multiple songs throughout his career including “Something 2 Die 4 (Interlude),” “White Man’s World” and even wrote a song dedicated to her, “Keep Ya Head Up.” “Menace II Society,” a 1993 film that revolves around life in the projects of Los Angeles in the 1990s, opens with a scene that was directly inspired by the incident.
Almost two weeks prior to the death of Harlins, the beating of handcuffed motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers was caught on tape by George Holliday.
“For many black folks, this was the first time it was verifiable proof of the type of violence they face in the context of police brutality,” Neal said. “It also created a different kind of moment that with the advent of these new technologies, that suddenly the trauma of these beatings, and in some cases death, become a viral part of the everyday experience, particularly in the digital realm.”
Since the Rodney King beating, injustices, sometimes even deaths, have been caught on camera. In 2014, Eric Garner was killed by an illegal chokehold by an NYPD officer in Staten Island in the middle of the sidewalk for allegedly selling cigarettes. The incident was caught on camera. In 2016, Philando Castile was shot 7 times during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota after telling an officer he was licensed to carry a firearm and was doing so. After complying, Castille reached for his ID and was shot, all while his girlfriend was streaming the incident on Facebook. The introduction of digital means has exposed these instances of police brutality to the masses.
On Feb. 20, Dr. Neal held another lecture titled, “Teaching Social Justice from the Analog to the Digital Era” which discussed the relationship between social justice and social media.
According to Neal, the idea of “black social media” is not a new concept. Prior to the emancipation of slavery, singing and relaying a particular field song often passed messages between slaves. In 1960, the Greensboro Four, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond, orchestrated a sit-in in a racially segregated diner in South Carolina. They had used mimeograph machines to plan the peaceful protest.
Now, the idea of “hashtag politics” has surfaced on social media, particularly Twitter.
After the death of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in 2015, the media decided to use unflattering pictures in attempt to criminalize the victim although his high school graduation photo was being widely circulated.
“There’s always this feeling, this suspicion, that the news and media is much more interested in presenting the worst aspect of ourselves,” Neal said. This pattern by the media inspired a hashtag, “#IfTheyGunnedMeDown” which Twitter users used to compare “photos of their best selves and photos of how they thought the media would depict them if they were killed like Mike Brown,” said Neal.
“On one hand, this was incredibly disheartening because these are [college students] who already understood that the mainstream media had no interest in their humanity,” Neal said. “At the same time, it put pressure on mainstream media to talk about its biases.”
“[The story of Michael Brown] moved the way that it did because of the way young folks use social media in its efforts to do social justice.”