I was sad to see Spitzer go, but I was still excited about you in office. I didn’t know much about you, but I have to admit the black and blind thing made you kind of interesting. My thoughts–a man with that much handicap must be good or at least have some progressive ideas. Spitzer had ideas too, some that could have helped us avert the whole crazy Wall Street thing, but he also had hos. And we all know, hookers and politics don’t mix well.

So alas, it was your turn. And I was desperate for you to prove yourself. Even said “ha” to all the naysayers when you and your wife emerged to admit to extramarital affairs. Can’t get ‘em now, I said as I was dumb to think the only things tripping up politicians were camera women and interns. Anyway, a blind black man and his cheating wife. This is gonna be good and for a short time–it was. You scored major points with your support of stem cell research and I heard gay people weeping when you proposed a gay marriage bill. You were hitting all the right buttons and then you started slipping. Getting crushed actually, by that big ass budget deficit. So you thought, let’s just charge four percent on everything from music downloads to sleeping outside (camping). Of course, there was the 18% soda tax aka the “obesity tax” that has yet to be approved. Read more »

Tonight I attended a forum at my school about racial profiling. I heard various opinions about what people think it is, how to confront it, and what should be done if it happens. The theme of the night was sustaining the energy and outrage—when profiling does occur—so that change can be brought to the situation. The idea of using situations of profiling (or other situations of that bring shock to the multitudes) to create opportunities of mobilization makes sense to me. It also seems to be a pattern that once a couple weeks pass by, people tend to forget about a situation and the occasion to bring positive transformation gets lost. I saw this happen a week after the earthquake in Haiti hit. Or when I think back to Jena 6, how no one really cared about it after it became “old news.”

Overall, the lesson from the night, at least when it came to racial profiling when dealing with the police was knowing your rights. When I worked with the ACLU last Summer we would explain to people what their rights were when dealing with the police. Here are some tips to take into account is you are ever stopped by the police.

What to do if you’re stopped by the police

Think carefully about your words, movement, body language, and emotions. Don’t get into an argument with the police. Remember, anything you say or do can be used against you. Keep your hands where the police can see them. Don’t run. Don’t touch any police officer. Don’t resist even if you believe you are innocent. Don’t complain on the scene or tell the police they’re wrong or that you’re going to file a complaint. Do not make any statements regarding the incident . You also should not lie to a police officer.

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I’ve always been a fan of Dwayne Carter Jr. Before Young Money Entertainment existed, before all the Carter albums, and even before the “bling bling” phenomena I liked Weezy.  The pint-sized rapper from Hollygrove, New Orleans had a guttural delivery that was edgy and catchy at the same time. I can recall watching Hot Boys music videos after school and quickly turning the channel when my Mom walked in the room. In all honesty, I wouldn’t want my ten year old watching the “Block is Hot” either.  Nevertheless, I grew up in the age of “Rap City the Basement” and “106 and Park”, it was hard to keep most of my friends from this music too.

I digress.  Back to Mr. Weezy F. Baby, please say the baby.  So today Mr. “No Ceilings” was sentenced to a year of nothing but ceilings and cinderblock walls in New York’s Riker Island.  Although he plead guilty to criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree in October of 2009 he has been more evasive than O.J. Simpson in a White Bronco. Well that’s not too evasive. He’s been more evasive than Amy Winehouse at a detox center. Read more »

The last thing Daniel Merriweather wants is to be compared to Amy Winehouse. And that’s perfectly understandable; what artist needs media coverage of their work that consistently fashions links to a well-known, better peer? But when you’re white, not American, possess an emotion-drenched, Otis Redding-inspired vocal style, and Mark Ronson (the man responsible for producing half of Winehouse’s Back to Black) laces every single one of your tracks with that familiar Stax Records-meets-Phil Spector-meets-Hip Hop sound, you’re sort of asking for it.

Hailing from Melbourne, Australia (not London?!), Daniel Merriweather’s rise from down-under obscurity to potential Soul superstardom might have seemed unlikely, were it not for the unprecedented success of his not-so-distant, musical older cousin, Miss. Winehouse, and the almost immediate procession of like-minded/Caucasian artists that followed (i.e. Adele, Duffy, etc). Blue-eyed Soul is in ladies and gentlemen, and as long as these artists are putting out quality shit, I’m down with it. Besides, Merriweather’s been an active musician since the early 2000’s; there’s no sense of any sort of calculated opportunism going on with Merriweather’s debut album, the charming Love & War; just a handful of knockout compositions, some mediocre ones, a couple forgettables, and a big, wide-open space where Merriweather’s singular musical personality should have been, but isn’t.

Overall…not bad for a first try.

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Last week a student was arrested in the reg. So clearly if a person is arrested in this beautiful post-racial, progressive, and inclusive society, then it must be some just cause. Right? Witnesses say that this 5’6 black senior at University of Chicago was “wrestled to the ground and put in a headlock.” This must mean that he was threatening someone’s life or at least doing something minutely illegal. Right?

Wrong.

The student walked into the library and was told he was too loud and if he didn’t quiet down, then the police would be called.  The Chicago Maroon reported that the student was arrested in the basement of the library—where usually everyone is loud. He was charged and spent a night in jail because he refused to show officers his identification or leave the library for unruly behavior, witnesses deny that police asked the student for ID or that the student was causing a disturbance. They also said the arresting officer was inappropriately aggressive.

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From 8:00 AM to 3:04 PM, 5 days a week, I am a high school student, meaning that there are teachers, administrators and other faculty members all around who can tell me what to do. On top of being a student, I am also only a sophomore. And that means that not only are there authoritative adults in the building but there are also hundreds of upperclassmen, no more than a couple years my senior. Most of whom think they know oh so much more because of their varsity status or newly issued driver’s license. Truth is we’re not much different and “underclassmen” is just another title giving someone else license to feel superior and restrict our adolescent freedom.

I may be a student in the high school hierarchy most of the time but, for a couple hours on Monday afternoons I am a tutor at a local elementary school. I am personally responsible for showing up on time, without warning bells like in my high school hallways. Read more »

When I was young I had horrible dance moves. If Urkel and Carlton Banks could be synthesized into one super nerd they’d still be cooler than me. Whenever my mom would turn on the song “electric slide” in the living room I would always bump into her because my turn wasn’t that smooth. But that all changed the day I saw Deion Sanders juke in a Dallas Cowboys game. By juke I don’t mean evade a defender I, mean get funky in the end zone. This moment is the first time I recall seeing any kind of touchdown celebration. As Deion did the infamous stride into the end zone with the prance to the left, prance to the right shuffle, my eyes became fixated on the television screen. The next 2 weeks straight I practiced the “Deion Dance” so I could show it off to my family for Thanksgiving. I nailed it, but unfortunately my cousin upstaged me. Nevertheless, I still learned a valuable lesson- celebration in sports is awesome and should most definitely be permitted.  So here are my 5 reasons why Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the National Football League, should reverse the ban on  touchdown celebrations. Read more »

Despite all the recent news stories of well-intentioned whites bombarding American borders with black babies--colored children are not in high demand. They are not, as celebrity child-collectors would have you believe, the next big thing. Instead, they are in America and abroad, getting their asses kicked by hunger, by poverty, by disease, by parent-less homes, by poor education, by mass incarceration, and by violence. And they are angry. Look at this website! Hell, look at the photo I put up there. Do you see that girl’s face?

Recently in Atlanta, aka America’s next Detroit, a series of billboards proclaiming “Black Children Are an Endangered Species” made their debut across the city. Since then, public opinion has vacillated between abortion of blacks as a form of genocide to it’s a woman’s right to choose. Ryan Bomberger, the black guy at the beginning of this video believes the former. And judging by the testosterone heavy anti-abortion rallies, the hecklers, and the Scott Roeder’s of the world, most men believe they have a dog in this fight. They don’t. Hence, it would make more sense for Mr. Bomberger to send his wife, who heads the Radiance Foundation to make the argument against black abortion. But news flash--she ain’t a sista!

Long before arguments for building up the black population as a political strategy, white supremacists (nationalists) from Hitler to David Duke (Grand Wizard) sought to keep the white race pure by only breeding with their own. Beyond their sexual ideologies, they took it a step further and actively sought to intimidate and exterminate people of color and minorities via the Holocaust and the KKK. Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist also touted contraception as a way to control populations but how much progress would she have made without W.E.B. DuBois? The “Endangered Species” ad plays off this history and then haphazardly points to the ethnicity of its producers to assuage people’s negative reactions. Relax, a black person produced this.

But DuBois wasn’t all that black and neither is Bomberger. And yes, I’m going to make the same color argument I’ve been making--skin color matters. It is the primary reason Bomberger is at liberty to make suggestions about black behaviors while he continues to live as far away from the margins as possible. His own multicultural upbringing may have made him appreciative of diversity, but it has done little to make him sensitive to the differences that confront the racial minorities of melting pot families. Thus while I can look at Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts’ brood and think what a wonderful experience it must be to create your own little home of equality, at the end of the day, I know better. Bomberger doesn’t.

Love is not all we need. At least not all of us. For every Haitian child pulled from the rubble by a concerned citizen another black child awaits adoption in America. Judging by the trends, this child will continue to wait as the number of black adoptions continue to decline. Black children are not only aborted because their parents don’t want them--no one does. If they do happen to get here, they are more likely to live on the streets, more likely to drop out of school, more likely to go to jail, and more likely to end up on death row. Seems to me, abortion or not, extinction is imminent.

Anytime an underground art becomes commercialized it is simultaneously at risk of becoming compromised. We saw this happen in the ballroom scene, rap music and hip hop culture. The same issue surfaced in the poetry scene when Russell Sims began to take spoken word and turn it into a commercialized art. Nothing is wrong with commercialization, but it becomes a matter of how the art is presented to the world and if it keeps the honesty that it exhibited in its purest form. In 2008 Russell Sims tried to do the same thing with Brave New Voices, only this time the youth didn’t like it.

There are always positives and negatives when underground things move into the mainstream. The positives to the HBO Brave New Voices documentary was  that more people would know about the movement, more young people would be able to have their voices heard and the world would now hear the phrase that BNV has been shouting for more than a decade, “because the next generation can speak for itself.” James Kass the director of Youth Speaks—the organization that puts together BNV every year–had good intentions for HBO Documentary, but many of the youth who were suppose to be “speaking for themselves” didn’t agree with HBO’s message and overall vibe that they brought to the inter-national competition back in 2008.

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