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Sister Souljah always drops jewels for us to marinate on. In the mid 90s she came by Oakland’s McClymonds High School for the Nommo Lecture series and gave us lots of mental food. This is an excerpt where she talks about the definition of an African woman trying to survive the storm of America..
Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner
Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the award-winning book “Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought,” and writes a daily blog titled The Kitchen Table.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell says black politics has come of age, with blacks as equal partners in electing Obama.
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PRINCETON, New Jersey (CNN) — It seems Tavis Smiley has been irritated with Barack Obama for a long time. Smiley is perhaps the most recognizable African-American journalist in the country. He is a fixture on radio and television, and has authored several books that are best-sellers among black readers.
One might suspect that Smiley would be enthusiastic about the opportunities presented by America’s election of a black president.
Instead, Smiley seems annoyed.
In February 2008, Smiley denounced then-candidate Obama for failing to make a personal appearance at Smiley’s annual State of the Black Union. His continuing criticism of Sen. Obama during the fall campaign produced substantial outcry from listeners of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, a popular radio program where Smiley had been a well-liked regular.
After Obama’s election, Smiley published a text titled “Accountable” and has repeatedly indicated his intention to hold President Obama “accountable” to an explicitly racial agenda.
The specific policies suggested by Smiley’s books are not substantially different from those of the Obama administration, but Smiley insists on explicit and repeated acknowledgement of race, while Obama typically seeks to address inequality within a racially neutral frame.
Despite writing about race in both of his books, addressing race in the historic Philadelphia speech during the Democratic primary and repeatedly acknowledging that racial inequality endures, Smiley’s critique implies that Obama’s approach to race is both inadequate and inauthentic.
On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of Smiley’s accountability campaign: a two-hour documentary titled “Stand.” Recycling Spike Lee’s Million Man March film, “Get On the Bus,” Smiley assembled a group of prominent black male public figures for a bus ride through the South.
Ostensibly, this bus trip would provide Smiley, professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, Dick Gregory and others an opportunity to reflect on the meaningful upheavals in American society and politics in the summer of 2008. “Stand” was an enormous disappointment.
Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.
The film and its participants (two of them my senior colleagues at Princeton University) appropriated the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans. They used King’s images and speeches, gathered on the balcony where King was assassinated, and explicitly asserted their desire to play King to Obama’s LBJ, and Frederick Douglass to Obama’s Lincoln.
On its face, this is not a bad model. Presidents are deeply constrained by the structural and political limitations of their office. A robust administration needs an active and informed citizenry to engage, push, cajole, criticize and applaud its efforts.
But this appropriation misrepresents rather than preserves King’s legacy. King was a powerful questioner and, at times, ally of President Johnson because he was at the helm of a massive social movement of men and women who were shut out of the ordinary political process. It was not King’s intellectual capacity or verbal dexterity that made him an effective advocate for racial issues; it was his own accountability to that movement.
This is not true of Smiley and his “soul patrol,” who are mostly public personalities and tenured professors largely unaccountable to the black constituency. King’s meager income, though supplemented by the lecture circuit, was grounded in the voluntary contributions of black churchgoers.
Smiley is backed by powerful corporations, like Wal-Mart and Nationwide, that have troubled relationships with these communities. The college profs on the bus are comfortably supported by well-endowed universities. This does not invalidate their views on race, but it does make the analogy with King a poor fit.
Further, Smiley and his “soul patrol” seemed to have missed the intervening 40 years between the era of King and the election of Obama. African-Americans are no longer fully disfranchised subjects of an oppressive state.
African-Americans are now citizens capable of running for office, holding officials accountable through democratic elections, publicly expressing divergent political preferences and, most importantly, engaging the full spectrum of American political issues, not only narrowly racial ones. The era of racial brokerage politics, when the voices of a few men stood in for the entire race, is now over. And thank goodness it is over. Black politics is growing up.
The men of “Stand” yearned for an imagined racial past. By their accounting, this racial past had better music, more charismatic leaders and a more-involved black church.
Their romanticism ignores the cultural contributions of contemporary black youth, forgets the dangerous limitations of charismatic leadership and revises the fraught, complicated relationship of black churches to struggles for racial equality. And these men ignored the democratizing effect of new media forms, which revolutionized the 2008 election.
Black people were not duped by some slick, media-generated candidate. African-Americans were co-authors of the Obama campaign. Through social networks, YouTube videos, political blogs and new-media echo chambers, black people were equal partners in shaping the candidate and his campaign. There was no need for the entrenched pundit class to tell black voters what to think or how to behave; they figured it out for themselves.
Still, there is plenty to criticize in the young Obama administration: the refusal to prosecute those implicated in the torture memos, civilian casualties caused by drone attacks, bank bailouts and inadequate defense of gay rights to name a few. But black communities are already engaged in these critiques and many others. Black local organizers, elected officials, bloggers, pundits and columnists have taken substantive, specific positions on a broad range of issues.
In black communities, nonprofit organizations continue to work for justice, and charities still try to fill the gap during tough economic times. African-Americans are engaged as mature citizens ought to be: in both discourse and action.
This political maturity is precisely the source of the black public intellectual crisis: What do Smiley and the Soul Patrol add to this process? Their bus never stopped at a Habitat for Humanity site to build a home or at a soup kitchen to serve the hungry. Their dialogue centered more on the relative merits of Aretha vs. Beyonce than on meaningful political issues.
Though they spoke with elders, their self-congratulatory revelry never paused to engage any elected officials, issues specialists or local activists. And while they talked a great deal about women, they never spoke to a woman.
“Stand” was sad because I still believe in a role for black public intellectuals. Scholars and journalists often have a particular capacity for curiosity, questioning and issue synthesis that has real value in public discourse. It was painfully clear that this particular accountability crusade is not informed by any of those skills. Instead, it seems determined to stand in the way of the maturation of African-American politics in order to maintain personal power.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Melissa Harris-Lacewell.
— Johannes Mehserle’s decision not to testify at a preliminary hearing left the judge hearing the case of the shooting of unarmed passenger Oscar Grant with no choice but to put the former BART Police Officer on trial for murder.
Killer cop Johannes Mehersele will stand trial for the Murder of Unarmed Oscar Grant
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OAKLAND (KRON) Judge C Don Clay told the court, “this case boils down to the state of mind of Mehserle at the time of the incident.”
Since Mehserle didn’t testify, Judge Clay says he couldn’t determine the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the shooting.
Mehserle shot and killed Grant while investigating a fight on a BART train early on New Year’s morning.
The former officer’s attorney, Michael Rains, tells KRON 4 he’s not happy with how things turned out, “”We are going to take a look at things and move forward to the next arraignment and see if we need to challenge the basis on the ruling. We need to get transcripts from the prelim, and than with utmost certainty we will look into if we need to challenge the way that the judge conducted himself during the entire case. We will be figuring out our plan of action over the next couple of days and will most likely have a decision soon if we are going to file any sort of appeal.”
Judge Clay said it was clear to him that Mehserle shot Grant, that the victim was unarmed, and that manslaughter can’t be determined without knowing Mehserle’s state of mind.
The judge also says he found a conflict in reports of Mehserle’s behavior immediately before and after the shooting. Officer Tony Pirone testified Mehserle told him to stand back because he was going to shoot Grant with a taser. However Judge Clay says that doesn’t square with the former officer’s remarks that he thought Grant had a gun. The judge says if Mehserle is going to argue a case of self defense, he would have to acknowledge the shooting was intentional and not an accident.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Mehserle intended to shoot Oscar Grant with a gun and not a Taser.” the judge said.
As to whether Grant was cooperating with officers, the judge said the victim “did nothing to warrant deadly force.”
Witnesses did say Mehserle said “Oh My God” several times after the shooting but Judge Clay says he didn’t know what that meant. He noted no one reported the officer as saying he made a mistake.
The judge said he wasn’t sure he trusted the testimony on Pirone. He did credit another officer’s statements that Mehserle’s mood was “elevated” following an earlier chase involving a man with a gun at the West Oakland station.
Mehserle is due to return to court June 18th for a formal arraignment. He could then learn a trial date in the case.
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As President Obama makes moves to try and repair relationships between the US and the Muslim world this is what some American born Jews living in Isreal have to say about his visit. To say the least its more than sad..
What makes this even sadder is that Isreal pressured Obama to go against the interest of Black folks and other communities of color by not attending the UN World Conference on Racism. I guess that wasn’t enough.
See Max Blumenthal’s shocking footage of the reaction by some Israelis and American Jews in Jerusalem to Obama’s speech to the Muslim world. Co-produced by Joseph Dana, aka Ibn Ezra:
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Piecing Together the Murder of Dr. George Tiller: Right-Wing Violence Rears Its Head
By AlterNet Staff, AlterNet. Posted June 1, 2009.
Tiller was the target of vicious on-air attacks by Bill O’Reilly. Could the murderer have been inspired by O’Reilly’s rants?
Dr. George Tiller , 67, one of the few OB-GYNs in the country who performed late-term abortions despite ongoing threats to his safety, was fatally shot yesterday while attending a church service in Wichita, Kan. Scott Roeder, 51, has been detained for questioning.
Roeder — a registered Republican previously arrested for having bomb materials in his car — posted this chilling message on an Operation Rescue Web site called Charge Tiller in 2007 (via the Daily Kos):
It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the “lawlessness” which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp “Mengele” of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation.
Tiller had long faced the threat of right-wing violence. The Tiller Women’s Health Clinic clinic was bombed in 1985; in 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms by abortion protester Rachelle Shannon. The heavily fortified clinic was guarded by a private security team, and Tiller relied on a bodyguard outside of work.
Recently, Tiller had aired concerns about his safety to federal investigators. The Associated Press reports:
[Tiller’s Attorney Dan] Monnat said Tiller had asked federal prosecutors to step up investigations of vandalism and other threats against the clinic out of fear that the incidents were increasing and that Tiller’s safety was in jeopardy. [Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom] Stolz, however, said police knew of no threats connected to the shooting.
In early May, Tiller had asked the FBI to investigate vandalism at his clinic, including cut wires to surveillance cameras and damage to the roof that sent rainwater pouring into the building.
Tiller had also long been the target of vicious attacks by conservative pundits like Bill O’Reilly, who often denounced Tiller on his show. Brad Reed writes on Brad Blog following Tiller’s acquittal in March on charges that he had broken a Kansas abortion law:
O’Reilly continued his series of programs focusing on the Kansas physician, charging him with “operating a death mill” (video here), and alleging that he was “executing babies” (video here).
O’Reilly had previously been highly critical of the state’s Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, charging, during his “Talking Points” commentary in 2007, that she was “allowing [Tiller] to continue the slaughter.”
… there’s no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller’s name first appeared on The Factor on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O’Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as “Tiller the Baby Killer.”
Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.
O’Reilly has also frequently linked Tiller to his longtime obsession, child molestation and rape. Because a young teenager who received an abortion from Tiller could, by definition, have been a victim of statutory rape, O’Reilly frequently suggested that the clinic was covering up for child rapists (rather than teenage boyfriends) by refusing to release records on the abortions performed.
When Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, an O’Reilly favorite who faced harsh criticism for seeking Tiller’s records, was facing electoral defeat by challenger Paul Morrison, O’Reilly said, “Now we don’t endorse candidates here, but obviously, that would be a colossal mistake. Society must afford some protection for viable babies and children who are raped.” (Morrison ultimately unseated Kline.)
This is where O’Reilly’s campaign against George Tiller becomes dangerous. While he never advocated anything violent or illegal, the Fox bully repeatedly portrayed the doctor as a murderer on the loose, allowed to do whatever he wanted by corrupt and decadent authorities. “Also, it looks like Dr. Tiller, who some call Tiller the Baby Killer, is spending a large amount of money in order to get Mr. Morrison elected. That opens up all kinds of questions,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 6, 2006, in one of many suggestions that Tiller was improperly influencing the election.
Despite ongoing threats of violence and constant right-wing media attacks, Tiller continued running Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Service, one of just three facilities in the country providing access to abortion after the 21st week of pregnancy.
According to a statement issued by Planned Parenthood, Tiller bravely performed an invaluable service:
He provided critical reproductive health care services, including abortion services to women facing some of the most difficult medical circumstances. He was continually harassed by abortion opponents for much of his career — his clinic was burned down, he was shot by a health center protester, and he was recently targeted for investigation, only to be acquitted by a jury just a few months ago. None of this stopped George Tiller from his commitment to providing women and their families with compassionate care that others were unwilling to offer.
Tiller’s slaying has also brought forth personal testimonials from the women he helped, not just in his role as abortion provider but as an OB-GYN. A diarist writes on the Daily Kos:
In 1980, I was pregnant with my first child. I had no insurance and couldn’t afford a doctor’s appointment until I was approved for a medical card. … Mom told Dr. Tiller, and he brought me into his office where he examined me, free of charge. I can credit him with the very first picture taken of my son.The last story I have to share is about my friends who could not have children. Dr. Tiller’s office worked with several attorneys in the Wichita area to provide adoption services for his patients who wanted this option. My friends have a 10-year-old boy now, who is loved and adored.
Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America aired her concerns about the chilling effect Tiller’s killing would have on women’s health providers throughout the country:
Dr. Tiller’s murder will send a chill down the spines of the brave and courageous providers and other professionals who are part of reproductive-health centers that serve women across this country. We want them to know that they have our support as they move forward in providing these essential services in the aftermath of the shocking news from Wichita.
President Barack Obama also issued a statement denouncing the slaying: “I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”
Some anti-choice groups were quick to distance themselves from Tiller’s killing, while reiterating their opposition to Tiller’s work. The president of Operation Rescue, the group best known for organizing sometimes-violent protests outside abortion clinics in the 1980s, said the following, according to the New York Times:
“Our prayers go out to his family and the thousands of people this will impact,” [Troy] Newman said in a telephone interview from his home in Wichita.
“Operation Rescue has worked tirelessly on peaceful, nonviolent measures to bring him to justice through the legal system, the legislative system,” Mr. Newman said. “I’m a tireless advocate and spokesman for the pre-born children who are dying in clinics every day. Mr. Tiller was an abortionist. But this wasn’t personal. We are pro life, and this act was antithetical to what we believe.”
But statements by other extremist abortion opponents went so far as to blame Tiller for his own killing, including one by Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue. Randall stated:
George Tiller was a mass murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.
Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.
Meanwhile, Father Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, issued a statement questioning the link between Tiller’s slaying and abortion opponents:
I am saddened to hear of the killing of George Tiller this morning. At this point, we do not know the motives of this act, or who is behind it, whether an angry post-abortive man or woman, or a misguided activist, or an enemy within the abortion industry, or a political enemy frustrated with the way Tiller has escaped prosecution …
Tiller leaves behind a wife, four children and 10 grandchildren. In a statement issued several hours after the shooting, Tiller’s family said:
Our loss is also a loss for the City of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality heath care despite frequent threats and violence. We ask that he be remembered as a good husband, father and grandfather and a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.
Did Bill O'reilly's vicious slander of Dr Tiller cause him to be a victim to violence?
Writing for Salon
, Gabriel Winant argues that O’Reilly’s vicious slander of Tiller may well have served as a provocation for the shooting. Although O’Reilly certainly did not instruct his listeners to commit violence:
Dr George Tiller is the latest victim to so called Right to Lifers killing someone
You heard it here first: The next evolution of identity management in the U.S. will grow out of Facebook. So watch what you out in your profile.
Does Obama Want to Replace Your Facebook Profile with Your Social Security Card?
By Annalee Newitz, io9. Posted June 1, 2009.
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President Obama has a new cyberplan that rivals a sscary cenario straight outta the Big Brother playbook
Today U.S. President Obama announced plans for a “cyberspace strategy” that includes everything from possible offensive cyberwar strategies to education. It also contains a little-discussed “identity management” plan that makes me wonder if Facebook profiles are about to become the new Social Security cards.
The big news right now is who will be running Obama’s broad new cyberspace programs — in particular, who will manage the cybersecurity and cyberwarfare aspects. Right now, it appears that there will be a “cyberczar” (as yet unchosen) who will report to the National Security Council and National Economic Council (the latter because part of this role will involve bank security). The Pentagon may also be setting up its own cybersecurity division.
These are the immediate issues, but when I read through Obama’s Cyberspace Policy Review (released today with his announcements), I found an odd nugget of information buried at the bottom of his “near-term action plan”:
Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.
It sounds innocuous, but in fact it has profound implications that touch on security issues that have been giving the government (and industry) headaches for years.
Here is what a “cyber-security identity management vision” really is: A plan for how the government will establish and track your identity online. One of the biggest problems for law enforcement and business has been the way people can take on many identities online, which are very difficult to verify. This has allowed people to become prolific spammers (because you can send mail under any name you like), as well as fraudsters on sites like eBay. All of this is a result of the way web services “manage” identities — you can pick any name you like when you sign up for email or Paypal or whatever.
The government and its various federal agencies have been trying for years to figure out how to deal with this. Several years ago, I participated in a meeting at the Federal Trade Commission to discuss the possibility of creating an email system called “sender authentication” (to be implemented nationally) where you would have to verify your identity in a fairly rigorous way before being allowed to send email. No more fifty mailing addresses. The idea was to discourage spam and phishing, which is an understandable goal. But I and many others argued that this system would also crush free speech. No longer could you send an anonymous email, or participate in a mailing list under a pseudonym to protect your privacy.
I think Obama’s “identity management vision” falls squarely into this history of debate over how to prevent crime by rolling back the proliferation of identities online. Yes, the “strategy” as described rather vaguely in Obama’s “near-term action plan” involves a lot of hand-waving about privacy and civil liberties. But the fact is that if the government is coming up with an identity management plan, that means the government is trying in some sense to manage your identity or identities online — essentially to trace back your hottie77@gmail address to a real name, just in case hottie77 starts doing something illegal. Or allegedly illegal.
And here’s where my not-so-wild speculation about Facebook identities comes in. Many companies have turned to Facebook as an “identity management” system (including Gawker Media), allowing people to log into their services using their Facebook identity. The reason is simple: Most people only have one Facebook identity, and they stick with it. There’s a general notion that your Facebook identity is your authentic identity, or at least an identity that you keep over time, and that its characteristics can be traced back to who you are in real life. Therefore, having you log into every web service, from io9 comments to Digg to (possibly in the future) Paypal, is a way of managing your identities. Instead of having a separate identity for each of those services, you have one. Easy to manage, easy to trace.
Why shouldn’t Obama’s cyberczar just cut a deal with Facebook (and maybe a few other social networks like LinkedIn) and turn those profiles into your authentic identities? So you can send mail and buy things using your Facebook ID, and that’s how you’ll be tracked. Hey, you’re already on Facebook right? And you can set your profile to “private.” So it’s easy and “privacy enhancing.” (Never mind how easy it is to get around those privacy settings — pay no attention to that black hat behind the curtain.)
The scenario I’m describing is, in essence, how the Social Security Card became the twentieth century’s identity management system starting in the 1930s. These cards were not originally intended as ID cards, or as a way to authenticate your true identity. They were just a way to manage government assistance to those who needed it. But they became an ID card simply because everyone in the U.S. had been issued one. When the government and businesses needed a way to track people’s identities, it became the easy choice. Showing your social security card meant that you couldn’t just come up with random new names for yourself every time you signed a form or took a job.
Though people in the U.S. now think of the Social Security Card as the “obvious” form of ID, it took years for it to evolve from a simple social assistance card to an “identity management vision.”
You heard it here first: The next evolution of identity management in the U.S. will grow out of Facebook. So watch what you are putting in your profile. You may be using it to open bank accounts in years to come.
For those unfamiliar with Dr Ivan Van Sertima he penned the books They Came Before Columbus. He is also given dap by a number of rappers-most recently Nas who calimed in his song Sly Fox that Van Serimar changed his consciousness
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Major African Scholar/Historian Passes-Dr Ivan Van Sertima
By Oscar Ramjeet
http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/news-16762–6-6–.html
Guyanese have excelled and made significant contributions throughout the world, including the Caribbean, and it is very unfortunate that our own Caribbean leaders are now “belittling” them.
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| Oscar Ramjeet is an attorney at law who practices extensively throughout the wider Caribbean. He is also a special correspondent for Caribbean Net News. Feedback to: oscar@caribbeannetnews.com |
Several of them have made significant contributions to Barbados. I refer to Sir Kenneth Stoby who served as Chief Justice; Dr Richard Alsopp, distinguished educator, who wrote a Caribbean dictionary; Pat Thompson, outstanding economist and business entrepreneur; Olga Lope Seales; and Ken Corsbie in the cultural field, and dozens of others.
Guyanese have not only contributed to the Caribbean, but the entire world.
I just learned of the passing of Dr Ivan Van Sertima, a former professor of the University of Rutgers and an important son of the soil, who told the United Nations that Columbus did not in fact discover the Americas.
Van Sertima was a Guyanese-British historian, linguist and anthropologist. He was a noted for his Afrocentric theory of pre-Columbian contact between Africa and the Americas.
He went to London in 1959 for university. In addition to producing an array of creative writing, Van Sertima completed undergraduate studies in African languages and literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London in 1959, where he graduated with honours. During his studies, he became fluent in Swahili and Hungarian languages.
He worked for several years in Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. In doing field work in Africa, he compiled a dictionary of Swahili legal terms.
In 1970, he immigrated to the United States, where he entered Rudgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for graduate work.
Van Sertima taught for 30 years at Rutgers and was Associate Professor of African Studies and Editor of the Journal of African civilization and author of numerous books. He has addressed topics in literature, linguistics, anthropology and history. He has written a number of books in which he argues that the Ancient Egyptians were black.
His 1976 book “They came Before Columbus” was a bestseller and achieved widespread fame for his claims of prehistoric African influences in Central and South America,
In 1987 he appeared before a United States Congressional Committee to challenge giving credit for the discovery of America to Christopher Columbus.
The Guyana Cultural Association New York Inc/Guyana Folk Festival broke the news of the passing of the world famed professor and we all extend our condolences to his widow, Jacqueline, who lives at Highland Park, in New Jersey.
One has to wonder where are the Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannity’s with their pompous, holier than thou rhetoric now that we see white folks have continued to have segregated proms and other activities which in turn has sparked Black students to hold their opwn events.. mmmm I hear silence.. hahaha Just what I thought
-Davey D-
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A Prom Divided-Whites Only Prom in Georgia
by SARA CORBETT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24prom-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
About now, high-school seniors everywhere slip into a glorious sort of limbo. Waiting out the final weeks of the school year, they begin rightfully to revel in the shared thrill of moving on. It is no different in south-central Georgia’s Montgomery County, made up of a few small towns set between fields of wire grass and sweet onion. The music is turned up. Homework languishes. The future looms large. But for the 54 students in the class of 2009 at Montgomery County High School, so, too, does the past. On May 1 — a balmy Friday evening — the white students held their senior prom. And the following night — a balmy Saturday — the black students had theirs.
Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County High School students — referred to by many students as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school through student committees with the help of parents. All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed. According to Timothy Wiggs, the outgoing student council president and one of 21 black students graduating this year, “We just never get anywhere with it.” Principal Luke Smith says the school has no plans to sponsor a prom, noting that when it did so in 1995, attendance was poor.
Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”
“It’s awkward,” acknowledges JonPaul Edge, a senior who is white. “I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.” Trying to explain the continued existence of segregated proms, Edge falls back on the same reasoning offered by a number of white students and their parents. “It’s how it’s always been,” he says. “It’s just a tradition.”
Earlier this month, on the Friday night of the white prom, Kera Nobles, a senior who is black, and six of her black classmates drove over to the local community center where it was being held. Standing amid a crowd of about 80 parents, siblings and grandparents, they snapped pictures and whooped appreciatively as their white friends — blow-dried, boutonniered and glittering in a way that only high-school seniors can — did their “senior walk,” parading in elegant pairs into the prom. “We got stared at a little, being there,” said one black student, “but it wasn’t too bad.”
After the last couple were announced, after they watched the white people’s father-daughter dance and then, along with the other bystanders, were ushered by chaperones out the door, Kera and her friends piled into a nearby KFC to eat. Whatever elation they felt for their dressed-up classmates was quickly wearing off.
“My best friend is white,” said one senior girl, a little glumly. “She’s in there. She’s real cool, but I don’t understand. If they can be in there, why can’t everybody else?”
The seven teenagers — a mix of girls and boys — slowly worked their way through two buckets of fried chicken. They cracked jokes about the white people’s prom (“I feel bad for them! Their prom is lame!”). They puzzled merrily over white girls’ devotion both to tanning beds (“You don’t like black people, but you’re working your hardest to get as brown as I am!”) and also to the very boys who were excluded from the dance (“Half of those girls, when they get home, they’re gonna text a black boy”). They mused about whether white parents really believed that by keeping black people out of the prom, it would keep them out of their children’s lives (“You think there aren’t going to be black boys at college?”). And finally, more somberly, they questioned their white friends’ professed helplessness in the face of their parents’ prejudice (“You’re 18 years old! You’re old enough to smoke, drive, do whatever else you want to. Why aren’t you able to step up and say, ‘I want to have my senior prom with the people I’m graduating with?’ ”).
It was getting late now. KFC was closing. Another black teenager was mopping the floor nearby. A couple of the boys mentioned they had to wash their cars in the morning. Kera had an early hair appointment. The next night, they would dress up and dance raucously for four hours before tumbling back outside, one step closer to graduating. In the meantime, a girl named Angel checked her cellphone to see if any of the white kids had texted from inside their prom. They hadn’t. Angel shrugged. “I really don’t understand,” she said. “Because I’m thinking that these people love me and I love them, but I don’t know. Tonight’s a different story.”
Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner
As word spreads about John Conyer’s Bill HR 848 conversations around the state of Black radio continue to emerge..many are feeling Conyer’s bill is some sort of savior because they hate the way radio has been sounding these days. Well bad news folks it isn’t.. Tune into the show jared ball put together and you’ll hear why..
-Davey D-
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May 25, 2009 by freemixradio
This week’s “redux” featured a journalist roundtable discussion of HR 848 and the impact of payola, advertising and the politics of domination on media – Black radio in particular.
Bruce Dixon from BlackAgendaReport.com, DaveyD from DaveyD.com and Paul Porter from IndustryEars.com comprised the panel all offering the insight of nearly 100 years of journalistic/radio experience.
This was an extension of previous coverage of the issue which can be found here.
Part 2, below, included the return of Dr. Mark “Hate” Bolden for a discussion of The Fanon Project and an interview with Mrs. Tyra Simpkins of MS Y.A.N.A. (You Are Not Alone) – an African American multiple sclerosis empowerment group.
If you wish to stream this radio show head on over to Jared ball’s site Vox Union to get the feed there..
http://www.voxunion.com/?p=1217
Below is an article from Bruce Dixon on this topic
Black Radio and the “Performance Rights” Toll Booth
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
Will Saving Black Radio Save Local News And Public Service?
A few weeks ago Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, echoed by Tom Joyner and dozens of other radio personalities, sounded the alarm. HR 848 they cried, a bill to make stations pay a “performance rights” fee for every song played, was a mortal threat to black radio. In a widely circulated blog post which was echo-blasted to everybody on any Radio One email list, Hughes cited black radio’s stellar contributions of news, diversity and local content as reasons why African American communities should rally to protect it. She even claimed black talk and gospel were “money losing formats” as if these were public services and tithes offered out of Radio One’s bottomless reservoir of corporate good will.
The laughter was pretty hard to suppress. Commentators like Paul Scott and Mark Anthony Neal ran columns titled “Should We Save Black Radio?” and “Should Black Radio Die?” to which they answered “probably not” and “maybe.”
The widely known fact, as BAR’s Glen Ford pointed out six years ago in “Who Killed Black Radio News” is that Radio One led the industry in purging news, public service and local content of all kinds from its airwaves in favor of cheap, syndicated, uninformed talk, mostly about celebrities and relationships. Radio One’s payola-influenced playlists are indistinguishable from its white-owned black radio competitors. Perhaps to protect their audiences from too many confusing facts, Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and the rest of the “save black radio” posse never mention that white broadcasters, the National Association of Broadcasters in fact, are just as opposed to HR 848 as they are, for most of the same reasons. So the truth is surely more complicated than Cathy Hughes and her posse would have us believe.
HR 848, the so-called Performance Rights Act, which Hughes says may be the death knell of black radio is sponsored by Detroit congressman John Conyers. It has dozens of high-profile celebrity boosters. The legislation will supposedly compensate performing artists – authors, composers and copyright holders are already taken care of by other intellectual property laws – when their work is played on the radio. Putting aside for the moment the economics of radio stations, it doesn’t sound like an inherently bad idea. Artistry is work, and work ought to be paid, right?
Will Revenue From the Performance Rights Act Actually Reach Performers?
The answers here are: not much and not likely. Given the historic business practices of the industry, and the provisions of HR 848, it’s safe to say artists won’t see much of this money. It will be extracted from radio stations,and collected and disbursed by Sound Exchange or other representatives of the same suits who have made an industry out of stealing from artists since the dawn of time, or at least since recording business managed to make the recorded product it distributed and controlled, instead of the artists’ live performances which it did not control, the music industry’s main revenue stream. HR 848 also guarantees industry execs the right to rake an unspecified portion off the top for handling charges.
Section 6(1)(1)(a) of the law says that entitlement of the artist to these payments is “…in accordance with the terms of the artist’s contract,” rather than in addition to or outside of and not subject to the contract. In plain English that means a cleverly written or dishonestly administered contract can easily divert these new “performance royalties” to pockets other than those of the performers.
As Mark Anthony Neal put it:
“Record companies are simply disingenuous when they suggest that artists will benefit from the passing of HR 848, when their own business practices guarantee the average artist less than 10-percent of profits generated from the sale of their recordings and the companies will themselves take part of the proceeds generated from the collection of a “performance tax.” If the RIAA and Record companies were really so concerned with the plight of artist, they would create less exploitive relationships with artists. ”
The representatives of RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, clearly wrote this law for their own benefit, not that of artists. It’s no secret that CD sales, and recording industry profits have been on the downtourn for years. The RIAA blames this on digital technologies and downloading, and it has used its lobbying muscle in Congress to pass one law after another against what it calls digital “piracy.”.
According to Lawrence Lessig, RIAA has aided the Department of Justice in prosecuting 25,000 people over the last few years for downloading songs over the internet without paying license fees. As far as anybody knows not a penny recovered has gone to artists. Two years ago RIAA imposed a similar fee structure on internet radio, making it prohibitively expensive for many of those stations to incorporate any sort of music in their programming. The defenders of internet radio saw the handwriting on the wall; they predicted that broadcast radio would be next. Tom Joyner, Cathy Hughes and the rest did nothing, and now the wolf is at their door.
How HR 848 Will Work in the Real World: More Payola and the Same Old Songs
In the real world, there are two economies. There’s a real economy where goods and services are produced, and where wealth is created by labor of one kind or another. There is also a fake economy, a parasite on the real one comprised mostly of the FIRE sector, (finance, insurance and real estate) along with the intellectual property racket. This fake economy lives on rents, interest payments, user fees and government subsidies. Its agents are always on the lookout for places in the real economy where they can plant toll booths to extract revenue without the bother of providing any service or adding any value.
The so-called Performance Rights bill is a toll booth the recording industry wants to place in the middle of radio broadcasting. It creates a new class of “intellectual property” supposedly for the benefit of performing artists, but subject to the artist’s contract, administered, and easily tapped by the record labels and their reps. The possibilities for abuse by labels and the recording industry are mind boggling, and include the outright legalization of longstanding industry practices of payola and reverse payola. While standard fees will be set, rates are open to bargaining between broadcasters and labels who supposedly represent artists. Labels will be able to offer one station or chain of them a lower rate on the songs of preferred artists if they take less preferred ones as part of the package. Labels already pay for remotes, contest premiums, and the personal appearances of station personalities with their artists. The “performance rights” revenue stream will be just one more channel they can adjust upward or downward in their bargaining with broadcasters.
They can offer a station or chain a lower rate for reducing the airplay of a competitor’s music or scrubbing it from the playlists altogether. Labels can demand a higher compensation rate than that offered to other artists, and where they have the bargaining power, some stations can demand lower rates than other stations. The largest chains, like Clear Channel, will be in a better bargaining position than smaller ones like Radio One. Just as Cathy Hughes and the “save black radio” crowd are saying, smaller chains, smaller stations, and the relative few minority station owners will be disproportionately endangered. Black radio as we know it truly is in mortal danger.
Will HR 848 Put More Money in the Pockets of Up and Coming Artists?
No way. Beyond the fact that the suits will intercept most of the funds before artists ever see them, you have to get radio airplay to get paid. Most artists can’t get played on the radio now, and HR 848 doesn’t change that. Labels will have little incentive to press lesser known and new artists onto the stations, since they’ll make more money on the higher fees established artists will command.
If Cathy Hughes and black broadcasters wanted to call the bluff of RIAA and the pro “performance rights” people on showcasing new artists, they could garner unprecedented public support and look like real heroes in this. All it would take, one industry insider told BAR, would be for them to throw away their payola-influenced playlists for a couple days each week and play nothing but new, unknown, up-and-coming artists. “That’s what they’d do if they really wanted to be the good guys in this, if they had the imagination and the nerve,” we were told. But don’t look for that to happen.
Where Will the Recording Industry Plant its Next Revenue- Extracting Toll Booth?
Two years ago it was internet radio. This season broadcast radio is in the crosshairs. Once the “performance rights” toll booth is planted in broadcast radio, it won’t be long before the RIAA demands payments from nightclub disk jockeys, who unlike radio broadcasters, do not have their own paid lobbyists, or from the guy down the street you hired to spin records at a birthday party last week. Think about it. What if innovators like DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambatta were forced to pay a “performance rights” fee?
Ultimately, this is where the creation and expansion of new and old “intellectual property” rights leads us: to the place where artistic innovation and simple truth telling are squashed by the need to maximize the profit of somebody who doesn’t do the creating, the labor and the performing in the first place.
Runaway “intellectual property” rights are the problem, not the solution
Eyes On The Prize, the award winning 14-hour documentary first aired on PBS in 1987 and 1990 is a great example of how intellectual property rights are used to strangle free expression in the public interest. When the work was produced in the 1990s, its authors could only raise the money to get time-limited rights to the archival news footage and music used in this thirty-year chronicle of the Freedom Movement and its aftermath. When the rights to the music and news footage ran out in the 1990s, the program could no longer be broadcast anywhere in the U.S. Copies were pulled from shelves no DVDs of it were produced. By 2005 the asking price for copies of Eyes On The Prize was $1,500 on ebay, and the only publicly viewable copies were on the shelves of public libraries. This invaluable history was lost to a new generation. Why?
Because major news organizations like CBS and NBC claimed they had to get a cut every time it was broadcast since pieces of their news footage was in it. The authors and composers of songs played in the documentary insisted their “rights” were violated if the show was broadcast and they were not reimbursed. There’s a scene in which Dr. martin Luther King’s aides surprise him with a birthday cake and sing a verse of “Happy Birthday.” The multinational firm which owned the rights to the song demanded $20,000 to keep the scene intact. It’s all a perfectly legal part of the intellectual property racket.
Another example of the absurdly parasitic nature of the intellectual property regime, is the classic 1942 movie Casablanca. Since it was made almost seventy years ago, every human being involved in writing, producing, performing, and editing it, those who catered the food, mixed the sound, worked the cameras, sets, costumes and makeup and the rest have all passed away, most of them decades ago. We don’t have to worry about the movie’s revenues encouraging these people to keep up their creative work because they are long dead.
Still, Casablanca remains the private intellectual property of its vampire owners, who had nothing to do with creating it. You cannot broadcast, perform, duplicate or sell a DVD of it without paying them. This is precisely what the Performance Rights Bill will do for radio; it will set up another deathless toll booth to extract payments, mostly for works decades old, on behalf of investors who had nothing to do with creating or performing it, but supposedly in the name of the performing artists themselves.
Two wrongs are just twice as wrong: oppose HR 848
HR 848 is bad news, no doubt about it, and should be defeated. Cathy Hughes and her posse dare not tell us exactly why, because the more we understand about the recording and radio industries the guiltier she and her colleagues look for helping construct and profit from this system which has now turned upon them. Black commercial radio is very much corporate radio and every bit as much the enemy as the corrupt recording industry. Commercial black radio does not deliver news or public service or local content. It doesn’t showcase new talent. Black radio as we know it has never defended nonprofit community radio stations, or low power FM radio. Like the black business class itself, black radio has become incapable of defending itself by painting an accurate picture and simply telling the truth – black radio refused to step up when the performance rights toll booth was imposed on internet radio, by which time any fool could see they were the next target.
Where Do We Go From Here?
We have to look beyond old John Conyers, his celebrity spokespeople and the lobbyists who pull their strings. We have to ignore the hypocritical squeals of Cathy Hughes and corporate black radio. The broadcast radio and intellectual property regimes are both in need of deep and thorough reform.
Corporate actors need to be held responsible directly by the people. Black audiences need to demand that the corporations who aim their broadcasts at black communities:
Support HR 1147, the Community Low Power Radio Act
This law enables nonprofit community broadcasters to operate low power radio stations with three to six mile footprints in thousands of urban, suburban and rural communities. Low power nonprofit broadcasters will provide news and public service and access to audiences for local artists.
Support community radio and nonprofit broadcasting
Hundreds of community radio stations already exist to provide cultural and news programming that corporate outlets refuse to. They too will be adversely affected by the performance rights toll booth.
Remove the “performance rights” toll booth from internet radio, and prevent its extension to deejays and others
The proliferation of “intellectual property” toll booth is virtually strangling the new medium of communication in its cradle, and the reach of the intellectual property rackets threaten film, video, the internet and the emergence of new art, artists and means of expression. Ways must be found to compensate artists, not investors.
Allow CDs and DVD mixtapes and videos to be sent through the mail at no cost
For most of the 19th century, newspaper postage was free. When Frederick Douglass and others started anti-slavery newspapers they paid no postage, and newspapers were most of the post office’s traffic. Technological advances have placed audio and video production within the reach of many, but corporate lobbyists have rigged the postal code to prevent the sharing of CDs and DVDs with mass audiences.
Demand that the FCC conduct real inquiries into payola
This is the dead dog in the room that neither the “save black radio” crowd nor the recording industry will talk about. But it’s real, and it’s the main barrier to new and diverse artists being heard on the airwaves.
Shorten the broadcast license term to three years
Under Ronald Reagan broadcast licenses were extended to eight years, making broadcasters much less responsible to the public and thwarting the public accountability at renewal times. Acting FCC Commissioner Michael Kopps has already suggested this reform, though he says it will be up to his successor appointed by the Obama administration to carry it out. That means it’s up to us to demand it.
Demand that black radio employ journalists and a newsgathering operation or lose the good will of black communities.
This is a demand communities can make directly upon the corporate license holders. A generation ago black radio did exactly that, and provided news and public service to its audience, something we will not see again without a demand.
Use the transition to digital radio as the occasion to redistribute broadcast licenses.
Like the transition to digital TV, the switch to digital radio broadcasting means that many more frequencies will be available. But instead of the time for voices to be heard, a corrupt deal gave all the new digital TV channels to existing holders of broadcast TV licenses. That must not happen with digital radio.
BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon can be contacted at Bruce.Dixon(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
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Its a good move by Obama to nominate a Latina as his choice for Supreme Court justice. It adds to the diversity. Judge Sonia Sotomayor will be the nations first Latina on the Highest Court. However, as anti-latino sentiment grows particularly amongst the far right it will be interesting to see how things unfold if the GOP follows through with their threat to filibuster
-Davey D-
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Obama Chooses Sotomayor for Supreme Court Nominee
By Jeff Zeleny http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/obama-makes-decision-on-supreme-court-nominee/
President Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court, officials said Tuesday, and has scheduled an announcement for 10:15 a.m. at the White House.
Ms. Sotomayor, 54, will be the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court if her nomination is approved by the Senate.
The president reached his decision over the long Memorial Day weekend, aides said, but it was not disclosed until Tuesday morning when he informed his advisers of his choice less than three hours before the announcement was scheduled to take place.
The president narrowed his list to four, according to people close to the selection process, including Federal Appeals Judge Diane P. Wood of Chicago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Solicitor General Elena Kagan.
In what may be her best-known ruling, Judge Sotomayor issued an injunction against major league baseball owners in April 1995, effectively ending a baseball strike of nearly eight months, the longest work stoppage in professional sports history, which had led to the cancellation of the World Series for the first time in 90 years.