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Category Archives: Culture
Kerry James Marshall creates images of Black ideal selves.
Black artists projecting images of Black ideal selves is no more racist than Asian artists projecting images of the Asian ideal selves. Certainly, no one ever sees racism when Euro-Americans project images of the Euro-American ideal selves.
Post by Channel 4 News.
…The Real Criminal.
Criminal justice
“Criminal” justice
Criminal “just us”
Criminal, just US(A)
Laura Izibor: What More Can They Do?
Laura Izibor’s WHAT MORE CAN THEY DO? and the community certified video rendition are both beautifully Black and powerfully inspiring.
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.
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.