On The Cover
Staff
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • February 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 4 (pp. 2) | ||
| • November 2, 2003 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.7) from original. | ||
In Mexico City in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos appropriated the media hoopla of the Olympics to focus attention on American racism. Their simple gestures--bare feet representing black poverty, the black scarf and bowed heads refering to the history of lynchings, and their fists raised in a black power salute--outraged the Olympic Committee, the sports press, and the American mainstream media at large. Their actions were threatening because they enacted an extremely compressed yet keen analysis of racism. By making their statement during an event widely believed to epitomize international "neutrality" and "friendly competition," Smith and Carlos pointed out the racist divisions supressed by such nationalist mythologies as well as the institutional exploitation of those divisions, particularly in American athletics. By making use of the raised fist, Smith and Carlos included their specific criticism of racism within the larger political analyses and actions of revolutionary groups such as the Black Panthers (see Black Panther Party Platform and Program on facing page).
Throughout the late sixties such powerful images of black militancy seemed capable of nearly dominating mainstream media and forcing the American gaze to recognize institutional racism at home and its exported versions abroad (i.e., Vietnam, the Congo, Haiti, etc.). Now such images are almost all but forgotten as the mainstream press devotes itself to packaged and predictable representations of black "outrageousness": Minister Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, Rev. Sharpton, Don King. The media coverage given these figures sensationalizes the history and prolematis of racism, drawing attention away from its structural and institutional aspects, reducing it to merely a matter of hot-headed personalities. In recognition of Black History month (and in hoping to exceed its dehistoricizing containment of the interests and conditions of African Americans to "one month a year") we border our cover with a very partial list of past and present black intellectuals and artists each of whom have produced (and many continue to produce) important work, but none of whom makes the front page.
Jean-Michel Basquiat • C.L.R. James • Toni Morrison
Adrian Piper • David Hammons • Huey Newton
Matty Rich • Lorna Simpson • Charles Burnett
Pat Ward Williams • Franz Fanon • Michelle Wallace
bell hooks • the Beatnigs • Julian Bond
Angela Davis • Carrie Mae Weems • Henry Hampton
Richard Wright • Chester Himes • Cornel West
Manning Marable • Faith Ringgold
