Laura Izibor’s WHAT MORE CAN THEY DO? and the community certified video rendition are both beautifully Black and powerfully inspiring.
All posts by Dr. Tshombe
Asante Says Ferguson Crisis is an American Crisis.
Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Temple University places the killing of Michael Brown and subsequent police violence in and around St. Louis, MO within the context of the United States’ sordid history of anti-African violence.
Check it out:
Nas Reacts to Bill of Sale on PBS.
For over 20 years, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, the Queensbridge disciple has been known for keeping it real, on the mic and in the streets. A Hip-Hop icon, Nas nobly represents the righteous struggles of Africans in Americas with a sublime awareness that victory is at hand.
Anyone remember first time they listened to the N-GG-R album and studied its provocative cover art?
In the following video Nas reacts to the “Bill of Sale” of his ancestral grandmother, Pocahontas.
Did UNC Blackball Low-level Culprits in Eligiblity Cheating Scandal?
Holleratascholar.com is not a sports blog, but there is a recent story out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that I just had to jump on.
An 8-month investigation, commissioned by the UNC, headed by former federal prosecutor, Kenneth L. Wainstein titled, Investigation of Irregular Classes in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Wainstein report) found that between 1992 and 2012 the chair, Julius Nyang’oro and the administrator, Deborah Crowder of the Department of African Afro-American Studies were responsible for inflating the grades of student athletes and offering hundreds of no-show or “paper classes” designed to help them in meeting and maintaining athletic eligibility.
The investigation confirmed the college sports watching public’s worst fears: that for over 18 years more than three thousand UNC student-athletes maintained athletic eligibility thanks to the use of “paper classes” in African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) courses. “Paper classes” are described as no-show classes labeled “independent studies” in which the only requirement is a research paper submitted at the end of the academic term. These classes the report says, were part of a “shadow curriculum” developed by the then chair, Nyang’oro and department administrator, Crowder.
Evidence suggests that Ms. Crowder, who is not a member of the teaching faculty, often presided over the “classes”, met with student-athletes, assigned the research topics and graded papers for the sections in question. The scandal deepens as the report reveals that Ms. Crowder almost exclusively marked the papers with either A’s or high B’s regardless of the fact that most of them were written by tutors or contained plagiarized material.
I do not question whether the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill was ethically challenged, and lacked academic integrity. My question for the reader is, did they as the, UNC commissioned Wainstein report suggests, act alone or was the Department of African and Afro-American Studies part of a University wide athletic eligibility scandal?
For further insight into the story checkout:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1344054-full-wainstein-report.html
http://marciamountshoop.com/2014/10/24/the-seemers-and-the-schemers-the-wainstein-report-and-uncs-repeat-performance/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/10/23/did-wainstein-report-whitewash-high-level-culprits-in-unc-grade-scandal/
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/24/4261947/wainstein-roy-williams-lacked.html
From “Streetbeater” to “Beat Street”: Our Tradition of Soul.
http:/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12pwyzpOYh0
Classic example of the African American oral tradition in effect.
The two songs “Street Beater” and “Beat Street” represent quite different styles of music [Junkyard Funk and hardcore Hip-Hop respectively] while sharing a theme or message common to Black Art without regard to generation, genre, or geographic location. Irrespective of the fact that Ella Fitzgerald via Jazz came to represent African American elegance and refinement at the height of Jim Crow while Mel came to hold court on the street in the midst of Reaganomics they are bound by a history of expression originating on the continent of Africa and later nursed in American cane and rice swamps, tobacco patches, brothels, cotton fields, in churches, from the poplar tree, on picket lines, on chain gangs and battlefields, under sycamores, at back doors and “Colored” fountains, near blast furnaces, in Miss Anne’s kitchen or behind bars for several centuries.
Black art at its best, functions as a celebration of our collective experience and is engineered to evoke as well as stoke that elusive quality of spiritual resilience (or “Soul Power” as Brother James Brown put it) in the face of the unjust, adverse, and too often dire social, political and material conditions Black communities function in the midst of. It is exhorts us to take heart and reminds us to live as icons of human dignity in the face of the dying institutions of inhumanity. Black art documents and many times points the way to postures of sanity in a world drunk on the wines of greed and racial vanity.
Chopping It Up with Jada…
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