I’ve only ever seen my role as a scholar to be a curator of revolutionary ideas and histories meant to support and inspire parallel forms of political organization.
Jared A. Ball is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power ( 2020), second edition forthcoming Spring 2023. His research interests include the interaction between colonialism, mass media theory and history, as well as the development of underground journalism and cultural expression as mechanisms of social movements and political organization.
Ball is also host of the podcast iMiXWHATiLiKE! and co-founder of Black Power Media.
For generations Black people have been told they have what is now said to be more than one trillion dollars of "buying power," and this book argues that commentators have misused this claim largely to blame Black communities for their own poverty based on squandered economic opportunity.
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In a moment of increasing corporate control in the music industry, where three major labels call the shots on which artists are heard and seen, Jared Ball analyzes the colonization and control of popular music and posits the homemade hip-hop mixtape as an emancipatory tool for community resistance.
“This collection of essays by Black scholars and activists, edited by Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs, is a critical response to Manning Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
What to learn more about the Freedom Scholars?
Questions about the Freedom Scholar awards can be sent to freedomscholars@caseygrants.org.
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