Parents of unarmed Black victims of police killings say, “Enough is Enough.”
Category Archives: History
Still Standing 2014…
African enslavement, 3/5 clause, Dred Scott decision,13th,14th and 15th Amendments, state property, KKK, lynch-mob justice, dis-enfranchisement, segregation, violent racial extremism, great depression, Tulsa, Scottsboro, J.E. Hoover, redlining, Mississippi, Emmett Till, King assassinated, cointelpro, war on poverty, Free Angela Davis, Assata takes flight, white backlash, Reagonomics, drug war, mass incarceration, housing collapse, too big to fail, Obama, great recession, organ harvesting, extra-judicial murder of Black men, NYPD chokehold returns, lynching cover-up… Funny thing is, We are still standing. Join #EricGarner in saying, “It Stops Today!” www.holleratascholar.com #ItStopsToday
USA Values (White) Property Over (Black) People.
This young Black leader is right and exact! He gives me hope for the future of our community. His political stance is grounded in a clear understanding of the Black experience in the USA.
Where Do You Stand on the Use of the Word Ngh?
Holler at a scholar to share you experience and let me know where you stand on the word ngh!
A white associate of mine, Miles (yes, after the horn-player extraordinaire), and I were talking recently when he casually drops the N-bomb. After a brief pause, he glances over to see my reaction. Unfazed, I keep a straight face. Then he begins ask if I was ok with his use of the term. According to Miles, the word is readily thrown about among his ethnically diverse group of friends on the Lower East Side. Within his circle, he tells me that the word is merely another way of saying guy. I could feel his explanation to a point; because that is the way that many of my Black peers carry it. In these cases, the word is less important than the adjective that precedes it. For instance, there is vast difference between describing one’s fellow-man as shiftless and describing him as industrious. The rub rests with the descriptor, not the guy (ngh). In Miles’ case however, I sensed a subtle awkwardness and hesitation in his delivery which belied his explanation. I know that his hesitation was the result of his own sense of guilt at the thought of uttering such an offense epithet in my presence conflicting with an overwhelming desire to be “down” with me and about that Hip-Hop. Instead of becoming the violent “ngr” reflecting the dark recesses of his own mind by putting the slap down on him like homie did that sister on the subway recently, I gave him some much needed advice. Hey, Miles, check yourself!
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.