Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Angry Black White Boy The Play Opens Tonight!

Please come out tonight for the opening of Dan Wolf’s theatrical take on Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy at The Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco’s Mission District.

You can also join me and Hard Knock Radio’s Weyland Southon on Saturday night in welcoming Adam Mansbach his own angry self for the show and a special discussion afterwards.

If you can’t make it this weekend, the play continues through November 16th. Come on through!

posted by @ 10:59 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Voices of The New Majority :: A Hip-Hop Activist In Search Of Answers


Carlo Javier Garcia
Photo Courtesy B-Fresh Photography

In August, crowds gathered every day in the streets of Denver to protest at the Democratic National Convention.

On the day before the Convention opened, one in the crowd was a 22 year-old Puerto-Rican, University of Colorado student named Carlo Javier Garcia. He wore Swiss Army sunglasses, red and black Adidas, a red and black kaffiyah, camo shorts, and a black “Recreate ’68” t-shirt. He marched alongside anarchists.

At that same moment, two of his brothers were in Iraq, one on his second tour of duty. Another brother was at home after being wounded in combat in Afghanistan and awarded a Purple Heart. His father, an Army Lt. Colonel, had also done a tour there, and was still working part-time in the reserve in Miami.

Carlo was clearly from the black bloc of the family. But he saw the protests from a different perspective than many of his companions. His family’s service to the country, he said, inspired him to be there.

“There’s a warrior ethos in our family,” he said. “I was in ROTC for a year. The more I thought about it, the more I read and learned in college, I was like, I can’t be a part of this illegal imperialist war. You come to realize you don’t need to be a soldier in the army to be a warrior and fight.”

He spoke as the anti-war marchers and riot police stared each other down in front of the State Capitol. “This”, he said, “is me being a warrior and fighting.”

As an argument broke out among the marchers over whether or not to confront the police, Carlo and I spoke some more. He had helped organize the rally earlier that morning for Recreate 68, which had featured Green Party candidates Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente and Dead Prez.

“You think of what happened in the DNC in Chicago 1968. There were police riots, there was a police state. Look at it now,” he said, pointing to the lines of riot cops facing down the activists, “they are storm troopers going to battle. All the bad things that happened—no, that’s not what we’re trying to recreate. What we’re trying to recreate is the spirit of activism and unity that was so prevalent back then. Now it’s 2008, it’s time for us to reinspire everybody.”

I asked Carlo if he planned to vote. He had more surprises. He said that, unlike many of his fellow marchers, he did. And he was voting, as he had in the previous election, for the Democratic candidate. “Barack is an inspiration,” he said.

Why was he helping organize a protest at the DNC, I asked him, if he was voting Democratic?

He chuckled. He’d heard the question before. A lot.

He explained that his dad was a “yellow-dog Democrat”—an old term Southerners invented to describe voters who would vote for a yellow dog on a Democratic ticket over any Republican.

“Your vote isn’t necessarily significant. I voted in 2004 and 2006 and I’ve been disappointed both times,” Carlo admitted. But he felt the protesters played a crucial role in influencing the Democrats.

“We could go to the RNC and protest all we want. We could have the police state attack us and destroy us at the RNC—it’s not going to make a difference to John McCain and the rest of the Republicans. But we can come here to the DNC and potentially have Barack Obama see us in mass force, see the people movement, and inspire him for change.”

He added, “We have to hold them accountable. In 2006 we elected a Democratic Congress on the platform that they would end the war in Iraq and cut funding for the war. There’s been a troop surge. We’re still at war. My brothers are in there now on 15-month tours. This is my family. These are my problems.”

At that point, the activists seemed to have settled on a decision. They retreated and marched in the other direction toward downtown. The police dispersed. Garcia left to join the marchers.

Later that week, we caught up with each other at the Iraq War Veterans’ demonstration. He had been arrested the previous day, and because he had been on probation, he was facing potentially serious charges. Despite his concern, it seemed as if he had to be at this protest; it hit the closest to home.

He marched to the Pepsi Center then left for Boulder to help set up a Public Enemy concert, sponsored by his hip-hop collective, Mad Society Project. It was a good day—the War Veterans demonstration was the peak of the week for the street demonstrators and the Public Enemy show was a success.

But in general, the protests in Denver hardly matched the fervor of the ones in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention, let alone the outpouring of emotion that greeted Obama’s acceptance speech.

Since then, the economy has become the nation’s most pressing issue, but the wars rage on. In the last month, there have been 10 American and over 130 Iraqi civilian deaths.

A couple weeks ago, I emailed Carlo to check up. He wrote back, saying that he had as his court case loomed, he had thought a lot about what he and the Denver activists had called their “Days of Resistance”. He wasn’t entirely sure they had worked.

“The day of the large scale protest is dead,” he wrote. “I realized our protest wouldn’t change policy before it all went down, but I hoped it would inspire others, and to tell you the truth, ain’t shit changed. We gotta figure out a different formula to inspire the people who need to be inspired.”

He was still searching for answers.

I thought back to something he had said on the streets of Denver: “The Bronx was burning. That is us now. Our country is burning and there are people who are speaking out against it. Your average hip-hop head now should be an activist, should be going out and doing something.”

For more Voices of the New Majority, pick up the new issue of Vibe on stands now or check Vibe.com’s Politics page.

posted by @ 9:52 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

How Anti-Muslim Bigotry Pushed Powell To Obama

From Maureen Dowd’s powerful piece in today’s Times:

Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”

But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.

“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”

posted by @ 8:09 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Tipping Points :: Early Voting In Swing States

As this long campaign enters its final two weeks, attention has turned to massive get-out-the-vote efforts, especially early voting.

Since this year’s election could bring one of the highest turnouts on record, especially at precincts in communities of color and around colleges and universities, both parties and nonpartisan organizations like the League of Young Voters have already begun bringing people to the polls.

Early voting could very well make the difference. Nearly a third of all voters are expected to cast an early vote.

Polls show that Obama may be capturing sizable leads in the early vote. In part this may reflect the enthusiasm gap between the parties over their candidates. The Gallup Poll reported last week Democratic voters were 20-points more enthusiastic than their Republican counterparts about voting this year.

But the difference may also reflect the party’s diverging tactical decisions. While the McCain campaign seems to have been concentrating on fighting “voter registration fraud” and laws that ease voting restrictions in the courts and on the airwaves, the Obama campaign has been dedicating big resources into galvanizing the early vote.

In Ohio, perhaps the key swing state, many who lived through the last two elections won’t easily forget the long polling lines they faced. Some voters in 2006 waited in bad weather over 12 hours to cast their vote. Interest in early voting has been high, and not just among voters. Earlier this month, Republican officials unsuccessfully challenged the early voting laws. Ohio’s early voters have favored Obama over McCain.

For the past two days, Senator Obama has been in Florida, the other crucial swing state, which began early voting this week. The Obama campaign also has early voting outreach efforts up in the important battlegrounds of Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Montana.

In North Carolina–once a solidly red state–the Obama campaign has been putting together a particularly massive effort to encourage “1-stop voting”. North Carolina law allows voters to register and vote by absentee ballot at any county polling place right away. These efforts seemed to be paying off. Over 200,000 have already voted in North Carolina and Obama may be leading by as many as 30 points over McCain.

In all, thirty-one states allow unrestricted early voting. For information on early voting rules for your state, check the Early Voting Information Center website. To check on where you can cast an early vote, check GoVote. And for voter guides put together by other young folks in your area (or to put one together yourself), check TheBallot.org.

posted by @ 8:21 am | 0 Comments

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Rest In Power ED RICCO

Sad news about the founder of Sedgwick & Cedar…

posted by @ 11:47 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

McCain Lost Me

With watery red eyes that had him looking as if he’d just smoked a bowl of medical marijuana, Senator John McCain might have made me feel sorry for him.

I’m far from a conservative, as far as the suburbs of Honolulu are from the streets of Brooklyn. But this year I was willing to give John McCain a fair hearing. “Change is coming”, he had said in St. Paul and, weary of politics as usual, I was genuinely interested to see if he and the Republican Party were willing to back it up.

But last night I finally gave in. I broke. I was stomping around the house, scaring the kids, yelling at the radio and the television, and generally not digesting my dinner.

Here’s why. We’re now past silly season and into shitty season. Falling down in the polls like Michael Douglas, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin have gone negative, unleashing fear out of their little box of horrors.

McCain argued last night that he has “repudiated every time someone has been out of line.” But he continues to allow his VP nominee—someone CNN’s Leslie Sanchez once said was “a vice president for the rest of us”—to insinuate Obama is not like the rest of us. He continues to flog non-stories about ACORN, a federation of community organizations working for poor people led by a woman of color, and Bill Ayers, a former Weather Underground radical who now is a respected voice in education.

McCain and Palin are betting that those who believe Obama is Arab or Muslim—and please so what if he were?—will also be scared of community organizers in poor communities and communities of color who have registered over a million new voters. Just for perspective, the false registrations—which afflict every voter registration campaign—represent less than half of one percent of all the new registrations—a pretty good rate, if you ask me.

McCain and Palin are betting that those who believe Obama is down with terrorists—because he actually lived and went to school in Indonesia once and what’s up with that middle name?—are still scared of 60s activists who have become distinguished professors and respected community leaders focusing on improving education for poor, inner-city students. Why focus on the real issue of how to fix the educational system for the nation’s future, when you can draw people back to the spectacle of battles that are 40 years old?

Full disclosure: I’ve knocked on doors and phone-banked for ACORN. I’ve written the Afterword for Bill Ayers’ new book, and I was honored that he asked. So call me a domestic terrorist threatening to destroy the fabric of American democracy.

But I don’t think I’m alone.

Voter registration fraud doesn’t mean that Mickey Mouse will show up and try to vote on November 4th. Voter suppression, however, is an active Republican strategy that’s been in place since the 1964 Voting Rights Act expanded enfranchisement. Is there any wonder why election protection groups feel they need to be in communities of color, working-class people, immigrants, and not in, say, Salt Lake City?

And if we want to talk Bill Ayers, let’s start with education. Ayers has quietly done important work in Chicago and earned the respect of the best education leaders in the country, liberals and conservatives alike.

McCain, on the other hand, asserted last night that the country had finally arrived at equal access to education, apparently unaware that school segregation has climbed since the Reagan era to levels unseen since the eve of Brown vs. Board of Education.

In his effort to push vouchers, he confused them with charter schools and lied—with a big smile—about Washington D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee’s position on them. McCain simply doesn’t seem to have as much knowledge or passion on education and higher education as he does about Obama’s supposedly scary relationships.

And here is the thing. No one really cares about my friend Bill Ayers and no one really cares about ACORN except for the right-wing nuts and racists in the party, the kind of folks who show up at rallies to yell “Kill him!” when Obama’s name is mentioned. Instead I think most voters, like me, want to know how the war can be ended, the economy be turned around, and the education system be fixed.

But McCain, despite his “I’m not George Bush” zinger, seemed more intent upon bringing back the ideas of the past. At times, he sounded like a GOP greatest hits compilation.

When the discussion turned to abortion, for instance, he said, “We have to change the culture of America,” he said. It was a conscious echo of Pat Buchanan’s famous 1992 culture war speech, the singular text of the right-wing backlash.

McCain tried to paint Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal, a throwback to the days when the elder Bush made Michael Dukakis ashamed of the “l-word”. And he revived Reagan-era disses—”class warfare” and “spreading the wealth”—to describe Obama’s economic plans.

Of course after four decades in which the wealth gap has yawned and a month in which government has set aside nearly a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street, class warfare and spreading the wealth don’t sound so bad to lots of middle-class and working-class voters.

No, Senator McCain, you’re not George W. Bush. Yes, you’ve been a warrior and you remain ready to fight. But you don’t look like you’re fighting for the future. You look like you’re still fighting the past.

posted by @ 11:02 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Racialicious Interview!

If you’re at all interested, here’s an interview for the Addicted To Race Premium podcast, one of the most consistently intriguing places for cutting-edge dialogue on race and culture. I was really honored to be asked to participate.

Thanks to Carmen Van Kerckhove and New Demographic!

posted by @ 8:44 am | 0 Comments

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Q+A :: Immortal Technique Breaks Down The American Empire

Immortal Technique is a steadfastly independent voice—from his music to his politics. The Lima-born, Harlem-raised rhymer broke through at the turn of the millennium after emerging from prison and the east coast battle-rap scene. He made his name with “Revolutionary, Volumes 1 and 2”, showcasing his fierce intellect and broad knowledge of history in hardcore skills.

For the past 7 years, he’s practiced what the politics he preaches, setting up an orphanage in Afghanistan, raising funds for children’s hospitals overseas, and working closely with youths and prisoners’ rights and immigrant rights groups.

He took some time out to talk about the elections with us while out touring his new Viper Records album, The 3rd World.

How do you feel about these elections?

None of these people will change the dynamic of the way America is set up. I think that at the end of the day that there are a lot of people that are looking for Barack Obama to change things and I think that there are things he will be able to change, but not things he’ll be able to stop. Like people will say, “Stop the war.” But I think he’ll be able to change the war but I don’t think he’ll be able to stop the war. I think that he can do great amount of stuff for the social programs that exist in this country but it’s a whole other story when it comes to the amount of stuff that has to be done in terms of our interests overseas.

Are folks focusing too much on electoral politics when they’re trying to get change in this country?

It sounds horrible but people really only really respect harsh and tough change, you know what I mean?

What do you mean?

Every ounce of being we’ve ever had came from people fighting over it. For example, what made the fact that Greece was a part of the Roman Empire legitimate? Or that Egypt was part of it, or the southern part of England part of it. Was it some divine right or right of conquest? What makes the northern part of Mexico now California, New Mexico, Arizona? And the Roman Empire existed 6 or 700 years, Byzantine Empire even longer. So really when we think about it, in the span of things we as a nation barely got our feet wet in terms of what we have accomplished in terms of manipulating the form of government in bettering it.

I think as our democracy evolves, it’s going evolve in one way or another. It’s going to have to become even more of respectful of civil liberties because that’s what democracy is all about. It’s about creating these institutions that protect the civil liberties of the people. Otherwise all we’re really doing is voting 25 times every century and we feel more secure.

If you want to get to the deeper question of it, I think it’s all about control. If we really believe in God, then the mind of God must contain every possibility for every single outcome based on the smallest random choice we make in life that increases exponentially throughout our lives. So really did we have a choice in making our destiny? And I think that’s the issue with man—the control we don’t have. We overcompensate by trying to conquer other people and our women. Try to overcompensate for the inescapable fact that we can’t conquer ourselves.

So I think that plays about a microcosm in local politics and presidential politics too. People want a candidate that is going to see things from their religious point of view, their economical point of view. It was your choice to not to get an abortion, but you want to have control so no other person gets an abortion. You forget you were an immigrant once upon a time in America.

When you talk about person being a “redneck”—a lot of people that came to this country were white were slaves. They didn’t call them slaves they called them indentured servants. But they were indentured 7 years to their masters. They were even cross bred with African slaves to create, quote-unquote “mulattoes” because those were more expensive to sell and you’d get more profit. But if you think about it, these white people toiled in the fields all day and since white people don’t tan too well when they took of their shirt, what did they have? A “red neck.” And that meant you were a poor, white sharecropping farmer. These insults are based upon your social status in society.

So that’s what we dealing with right now, the inability for us to go back in time and look at what creates the image of what we are today as Americans, as whatever race we choose to identify with, and as people with a particular political agenda in the upcoming election.

You call your new album, ‘The 3rd World.’ The new census projections just came out. They were predicting that the US would turn majority-minority in 2050. They had to lower that projection to 2042, by 8 years. What do you think will happen with questions of racial justice in this country?

We always talk about building unity among the races but a lot of the times there’s not unity within the races themselves. I think the people who are most racist against one another are the people who look kind of like one another. I know when you’re uneducated to another culture, it’s kind of hard to see the difference between an Indian and a Pakistani person. Or Korean and Japanese. And at the same time, these are individuals that when you go back in their recent history they had the most drama. They do not like one another. 50 years ago Peruvians and Ecuadorians hated each other, but at the same time, they’re the same people and that’s the craziest part.

I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen overnight because unfortunately the curriculum that we are taught in school doesn’t go back that far, it doesn’t want to deal with those specific issues. And those workshops are not being replicated on the street level to those individuals who need to be brought into the discussion. This doesn’t just need to be a discussion that just happens in some elite intellectual arena but it needs to be public domain. You know, education shouldn’t be a privilege but it should be a right.

Do you expect to vote this election?

Sure.

Who are you going to vote for?

I’m not going to vote for John McCain. I’ll put it like that, so that’s pretty much my answer. Some of the issues I wanted to put in the perspective of individuals who put immigration back on the perspective, people who are going to help repair the economy. Individuals that are looking to be not just respectful of our cultures but other people’s cultures and have open dialogue with other parts of the world.

You’re voting Obama?

I don’t think that man is Black Jesus. I think he’s Black Caesar.

For the latest on the 2008 election, including voter registration deadlines, check Vibe.com’s Politics page. Check Immortal Technique and many more speaking on the elections in the November issue, on newsstands soon.

posted by @ 7:13 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

"The Tipping Point" :: An Excerpt From My Vibe Cover Story

Here it is:

“Tonight Freedom Rings!”

Reverend Bernice A. King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told the crowd on August 28, echoing her father’s epochal “I Have a Dream” speech given 45 years before. And now the flocks gathered at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High stadium would witness a giant step toward that dream’s realization in the historic nomination of Barack Obama. “This is one of the nation’s greatest defining moments,” she told the roaring audience.

The 85,000-plus people who gathered to hear Barack Obama accept his nomination as the Democratic Party’s first black presidential candidate were a rippling, multihued cloth of humanity—people of all faiths, colors, and generations in rapt anticipation, shedding tears of joy as the sun set over the snow- capped Rockies. But it was more than just a powerful, emotional gathering. It was the outline of a new American majority.

Backstage, as The Black Eyed Peas leader William “will.i.am” Adams prepared to step onstage to perform “Yes We Can” with John Legend and the Agape Choir—a song that, like the candidate it celebrated, seemed to emerge from nowhere to sound a note of idealism in a time of cynicism and strife—he was thinking about his old neighborhood.

In the projects where he was raised—the two-story Estrada Courts in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles—there’s a famous mural of Che Guevara pointing straight at you like Uncle Sam. The graffiti-style words next to Che read WE ARE NOT A MINORITY!! In Obama, Will saw a candidate who reflected his reality. “Obama is probably the first mirror of America,” he said. “The presidents we’ve had before, they’re still portraits that were painted a long time ago.”

People of color are now a majority in forerunner states like California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. More than two in five Americans under the age of 18 are nonwhite. Census data project that the United States could become majority-minority by 2042, a full eight years earlier than previously expected.

Thanks to hip hop, American popular culture has been thoroughly, to coin a word, colorized. These are all signs that we may be in the middle of an era of expansive racial change. For some, these signs point to fear. For us, they point to hope.

Rewind back to the bitter cold of this past January, when Iowans under the age of 25 delivered Obama’s margin of victory in that first caucus, jump-starting his historic march to the Democratic nomination. In the 14 most competitive states, young people made up more than half of the 3 million new registered voters. Through the primary season, young voters turned out at almost twice the rate they did in 2000.

Young people, urbanites, progressives, and people of color have been the driving force behind Obama’s presidential run. “Barack Obama owes his nomination, in large part, to the strength of those voters,” says BET News analyst Keli Goff, author of Party Crashing: HowThe Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic, 2008), “and the strength of people underestimating those voters.”

Forty years have passed since Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy fell to bullets. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won 57 percent of the electorate by campaigning for the so- called “Silent Majority,” stirring a white backlash against “student radicals” and “angry negroes.” Since that time, racism and generational fear have been a dependable, winning electoral strategy.

Politicos parsed the “Silent Majority” into demographic slivers to more deeply exploit those fears, a process that continues in coded stereotypes like “hockey moms” and “hard- working Americans.” kind of politics that abandoned and contained inner-city youths. In 1992, Pat Buchanan gave the backlash a new name: “cultural war.” Right-wingers went after the hip hop genera- tion in everything from censorship to policing. Would Bill Clinton have won without his Sister Souljah moment? (Google it.)

Get more at Vibe’s Politics page.

posted by @ 10:32 am | 0 Comments

Monday, October 13th, 2008

V Is For Victorino

Joe who? Manny who?

Give a Maui boy a little fire (not to mention some angels–the ancestral kind, not the other kind–in the outfield) and you better at least have a bullpen.

Suggested off-season reading for the Dodgers: check out the story every Local kid knows about Maui and fire and some Mudhens.

Plus huge props to Matt Stairs and Joe Blanton, former A’s who still get much love in the Town.

Underdog love still rules October.

posted by @ 8:13 pm | 0 Comments



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