Arnold Perkins and Joshua Merchant ruminate during the Question Bridge panel discussion.
Published on Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Oakland Local Online
By Eric K. Arnold
One of the deeper discussions on black male identity in recent memory took place this past Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. The event - a roundtable panel discussion between several generations of black me, age 17-70 – was part of OMCA’s programming around Question Bridge: Black Males, an exhibit currently showing simultaneously at the Brooklyn Museum, Salt Lake City Arts Center and Atlanta’s Castain Arts gallery (earlier this year, it also was shown at the Sundance Film Festival).
One of the deeper discussions on black male identity in recent memory took place this past Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. The event - a roundtable panel discussion between several generations of black me, age 17-70 – was part of OMCA’s programming around Question Bridge: Black Males, an exhibit currently showing simultaneously at the Brooklyn Museum, Salt Lake City Arts Center and Atlanta’s Castain Arts gallery (earlier this year, it also was shown at the Sundance Film Festival).
Question Bridge is somewhat of an onomatopoeia of a video installation: It’s exactly what it sounds like – a Q&A exchange, which bridges the generation gap among African-American men from the hip-hop and Civil Rights generations. The installation, which runs through July 8 at OMCA, consists of 1,500 video exchanges between 150 black men recruited from 11 cities, including Oakland and San Francisco, along with Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta and Philadelphia, and collected by Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Kamal Sinclair and Oakland’s own Bayete Ross-Smith.
Why is this a big deal? Well, for one, it shatters many commonly-held stereotypes about black men - that they are angry, unemotional, non-communicative, inarticulate and blame racism for everything that has happened to them. Watching the exhibit, one is forced to reexamine one’s perceptions about African-American males. It’s a big rethink.
The afternoon began with a performance by Motif Performance Project with choreographer Rashad Pridgen, developed especially for Question Bridge, followed by a roundtable forum, which recreated much of the format of the exhibit, but in 3-D (rather than the two-dimensional back and forth of the video screens) with real, live, actual black men.
The panel included moderator Chris Chatmon, the Oakland Unified School District's executive officer of African-American Male Achievement, and a stellar group of panelists, including actor Delroy Lindo; spoken word artists Ise Lyfe and Joshua “Adonis” Merchant; photographer Pendarvis Harshaw; educators Greg Hodge; youth worker Abbas Khalid; social justice activist Abel Habtegeorgis; retired public health official Arnold Perkins; and student Sean Johnson.
If anything, the panel discussion - whose starting point was the question, "Why didn’t you leave us with the blueprint,” posed by a hip-hop generationer to a Civil Rights-era veteran - went even deeper into the African-American male psyche than the exhibit. Instead of a singular or small group learning experience, as might be expected of a museum viewing, the presence of an audience made for a more public experience and a stronger connection to community. Additionally, follow-up questions were asked and answered in real time.
Before the panel began, Question Bridge co-director Chris Johnson explained how speaking about the topic “really articulated truths” about the generational divide between black men, while addressing the lack of a “direct connection” between the hip-hop and Civil Rights eras.
If the purpose of Question Bridge was to address that disconnect and repair the hurt caused by it, it succeeded. First, the younger generation asked questions of the elders; then the elders asked questions from younger people. But who qualified as what wasn’t immediately apparent. Habtegeorgis noted that he was included in the group of community elders, yet was only 27.
Hodge cleared that up, however, by noting that “everybody here is somebody’s elder.”
During the panel, several revealing exchanges between the participants occurred, such as when Harshaw queried, “When do you learn how to tie a tie?”
“That is so profound,” Lindo replied, before recounting an anecdote about being on the way to rapper Heavy D’s funeral and being asked by a young black man he was riding with to tie his tie. Lyfe followed with his own anecdote, about being 22 years old, being invited to a black-tie event to accept an award and realizing he didn’t know how to tie a tie.
“I was so embarrassed,” he recalled. Later, he went to the library and checked out an etiquette book.
Johnson, the youngest panelist, discussed when he considered dropping out of high school. When asked why, he mentioned poor math grades and noted that Skyline has almost 500 juniors and just one counselor for them. Other panelists chimed in with supportive words.
“Frederick Douglass cajoled his education out of white people. Get the help,” Hodge said.
The difference, Lyfe said, between being 17 and 27 was having perspective on life.
“You can’t condemn yourself to a moment,” he added.
The panel resulted in many other quotable soundbites. Here are a few of the most notable and profound quips:
“Who are we considering young [people]?” (Lindo)
“If I’m 20 and a brother’s 80, asking me what to do … You had a 60-year-head start. That’s terrifying.” (Lyfe)
“Do my skinny jeans and non-prescription glasses make me safer walking around my neighborhood?” (Merchant)
“When will sagging go out of style?” (Hodge)
[As black men,] “We’re all going to be judged, all the time.” (Lindo)
“Why is it so hard for us to call ourselves African?” (Perkins)
“I am of African descent, but I am from Oakland” (Harshaw)
“It’s so normalized, not having your father in your life.” (Lyfe)
“Seventy-five percent of people I know, their father hasn’t been in their lives.” (Khalid)
“Since I was in the sixth grade, my dad has been in and out of jail.” (Khalid)
“We have to break the cycle.” (Khalid)
“Even [white people’s] resistance … is full of valor and vigor and privilege: ‘We occupying this.’” (Lyfe)
“Why are so many black people dying in Chicago when Barack Obama’s in office?” (Harshaw)
“For me, the blueprint is education because it created tremendous power in daily life.” (Perkins)
“Our charge is to be that continuum.” (Harshaw)
“What I need from elders and community leaders is the play.” (Lyfe)
“The fact of the matter is the goal posts shift all the time.” (Lindo)
An audience member asks a question as Chris Chatmon and Delroy Lindo look on.
Overall, the panel discussion offered two solid hours of deep reflection, brutal honesty, brave vulnerability – and a glimpse behind the cool pose and beyond the mean mug. It transcended both the saggy-pants conundrum and the Cosby-syndrome of misunderstanding. It created, as intended, the blueprint for discourse, giving hope that the elder generation and the youth will one day be able to see eye to eye.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this landmark intergenerational dialogue? Not once was the word “racism” mentioned.
Click here to visit the article, for a slideshow of images from the video installation.
Kentke
http://oaklandlocal.com/article/omca’s-question-bridge-panel-delves-deep-black-manhood-reviewreflection
About Eric K Arnold
Eric K. Arnold has been writing about urban music culture since the mid-1990s, when he was the Managing Editor of now-defunct 4080 Magazine. Since then, he’s been a columnist for such publications as The Source, XXL, Murder Dog, Africana.com, and the East Bay Express; his work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, Wax Poetics, SF Weekly, XLR8R, the Village Voice and Jamrock, as well as the academic anthologies Total Chaos and The Vinyl Ain’t Final. Eric began his journalistic career while DJing on college radio station KZSC, and remembers well the early days of hip-hop radio, before consolidation, and commercialization set in. He currently lives in Oakland, California.
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