The skanner., December 26, 2012, Page 6, Image 6

Arts & Entertainment
BOOKS: Iconic — Decoding Images
of the Revolutionary Black Woman
By Kam Williams
Special To The Skanner News
“This book asks what it means to repre-
sent black womanhood and explores how
these representations
are connected to a
long history of rep-
resentational depic-
tions and choices
that communicate
the role of black
women in social
movements.
On the one hand,
Iconic explores how
representations of
strong, revolutionary
black women within
popular culture are
used to reinforce
dominant, lingering,
and mostly negative
stereotypes… On the
other hand, Iconic
traces the numerous
ways African-Amer-
ican women activists, actors, writers, and
musicians have negotiated, confronted, and
resisted stereotypical representations of
black womanhood.”
— Excerpted from Chapter 1 (pg. 1)
hen Barack Obama first ran for
President, a strategy employed by
those seeking to torpedo his cam-
paign was to portray his wife, Michelle, as
the proverbial “angry black woman.” The
W
New Yorker even went so far as to put a
drawing of her on the cover of the magazine
wearing camouflage fatigues while sporting
a huge afro and brandishing a rifle.
To counter this incessant attempt by
detractors to depict
her as an unstable
militant,
Mrs.
Obama agreed to do
an interview on
CNN with Larry
King. On the show,
he repeatedly asked
her if she were
“angry” or “mad,”
oddly ignoring her
earlier responses as
if they were untrue.
But she “patiently
tolerated
Larry
King’s
persistent
questioning and sub-
verted his attempts
to depict her as an
angry
black
woman…
by
emphasizing her role
as mother, wife, and nurturer of the nation.”
Although Michelle managed to sidestep the
effort to pigeonhole her as problematical,
this was not the first time the media tried to
marginalize an intelligent black female in
this fashion.
The history of such mistreatment from
Sojourner Truth in the 19th Century to
Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver in the
20th up to the First Lady in the 21st is the
subject of Iconic, a ground-
breaking book which delin-
eates
precisely
how
African-American women
have been plagued by belit-
tling imagery in the media
for ages. This insightful
opus was written by Profes-
sor Lakesia Johnson who
teaches courses on race,
feminism and pop culture at
Grinnell College in Iowa.
Information is
Today’s Currency
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Page 6 The Portland Skanner December 26, 2012
Premium Rush DVD Review
Levitt and Ramirez Co-
Star in Adrenaline-Fueled
Bike Thriller
by Kam Williams
Traffic is so congested in Manhattan
nowadays, it’s hard to see that terminally-
gridlocked terrain as a viable setting for
high-octane chase scenes. Yet, that is pre-
cisely what we have in Premium Rush, an
adrenaline-fueled adventure revolving
around the derring-do of daring bike mes-
sengers who dart between cars and dodge
pedestrians to make their deliveries.
At the film’s point of departure, we’re
introduced to several staff members of a
The author does a masterful job of
demonstrating how revolutionary black
women have miraculously maintained con-
trol of their images in the face of a flood of
negative characterizations. She states that
these sisters are “not afraid to speak truth to
power… in the fight for social justice.”
bonded company called Security Courier.
Employee of the Year Wilee (Joseph Gor-
don-Levitt) is a Columbia Law School
graduate who prefers this liberating line
of work to being stuck sitting behind a
desk in a business suit every day.
Similarly, his gorgeous girlfriend,
Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), sees it as a
refreshing alternative to waiting tables in
See RUSH on page 7
That’s because “at her core, she is free, and
it is this freedom that makes her a threat.”
An eloquent argument on behalf of those
black women who have been willing to
challenge harmful stereotypes, the status
quo and, above all, an establishment fearful
of their power.