Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

To Play In The Town You Gotta Have Heart


Sorry Dirk, Cuban, and the Mavs. You just can’t compete with underdog love.

posted by @ 9:24 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

Wisdom From Dr. Leon Litwack

The great Cal history professor Leon Litwack retires this week. With his retirement and that of the magnificent Ling-Chi Wang last year, some might say we’ve reached the end of an era.

Characteristically, neither chose to go quietly. Here’s Professor Litwack and his students in today’s Chron on the “messiness of history”, which he and Professor Wang taught us is always pouring over into the ugliness of the now:

Timothy Simmons said he attended a college alumni event in Maryland where all the guests were white and all the hired help was black. “No, I can’t be seeing this,” he recalled, “but I was.”

This is what Litwack means when he says history is messy. “At some point,” he said, “students have to confront the fact that we’re founded by slave-owning champions of liberty. We’re not the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

He believes the regression on race he has noticed since the 1970s can be explained by the theory that the impulse to integrate has been more economic than social. In his view, gains such an integrated Army and integrated schools in the 1950s were the result of post-war prudence.

“We would not be the leader of the free world” and maintain a segregated America,he said. “That had to end for the first time. The reason we had some advances is, for the first time race became a matter of national security.”

Litwack was asked how Don Imus’ comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team fits into America’s racial narrative.

“It was kind of an offhand remark,” he said. “Is it more racist than people who talk about their belief in black equality but whose actions or indifference suggest something else? There’s a great deal of hypocrisy in how we dealt with Imus.

“We react with such fury about what he said about the Rutgers basketball team and yet we absolutely seem to be indifferent to the decay of our public schools — the fact that every day blacks, and whites as well, are cheated of a decent education in this country,” he said. “That to me is obscene. That’s racist and obscene both.”

posted by @ 6:24 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

May Day On The Frontline (2007 Mix)

Daniel Hernandez delivers a first-person account of yesterday’s police riot in May Day L.A.:

Until Tuesday, the immigrant-rights movement had been defined by its bouyant, almost jubilant nature. Immigrants and their supporters had marched peacefully by the millions for more than a year in cities and towns across America. All that changed on May Day in L.A.’s MacArthur Park. In one evening of baton-swinging, camera-crushing good old-fashioned police work, the LAPD trampled upon the rosy optimism of countless L.A. families asserting their rights and dignity in the heart of the city’s Central American community. And the department immediately drew rebuke for its brutish, seemingly injudicious show of force. Again…

Read the whole thing.

Thanks to Ken Burns Hates Mexicans–but we heart you too Jim!

In other news, I guess I shouldn’t have called Dirk a loser. I’ll wait ’til tomorrow night.

But I can call Papelbon a loser. We pasted that fool. Buck you Red Sux! That’s 5 straight, not that I’m counting.

posted by @ 2:04 pm | 0 Comments

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

Mark Anthony Neal :: "What’s the Real Reason for the Sudden Attack on Hip Hop?"

Mark Anthony Neal turns in a classic on VIBE.com. This slams as hard as Baron Davis on Dirk No-game-ski:

In the context of these questions, we can also ask why the attacks on hip hop – and why now? That some people hoped to enact political retribution for the so-called victory of Don Imus’s firing, goes without saying. But I’d like to suggest that, more significantly, the current critique of hip hop is aimed at undermining the culture’s potential to politicize the generations of constituents that might claim hip hop as their social movement. After high profile voter registration campaigns in 2004 that were fronted by Russell Simmons, Sean Combs and others, much was made of the lack of impact that hip hop generation voters had on the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election. The hip hop generation, in fact, embraced the franchise in unprecedented numbers, but those numbers were obscured by the unprecedented turnout of religious fundamentalists who were galvanized by issues like same-sex marriage and threats of anti-American terrorism. With no candidate on the Right likely to galvanize religious fundamentalists, the hip hop nation – which has continued to organize since 2004 – represents a legitimate political bloc. With this political bloc comes demands for social justice, particularly within the realms of the prison industrial complex, the labor force, US foreign policy, law enforcement, the electoral process, mainstream corporate media, the economy, public education and a range of other concerns.

While there has long been criticism of hip hop culture from the standpoint of social conservatives, pro-hip hop feminists, religious groups, anti-homophobia activists and hip hop heads themselves, what marks this moment as different are the attempts to force mainstream black political leadership and Democratic Presidential candidates to repudiate hip hop culture (reminiscent of the pressures placed on Reverend Jesse Jackson to distance himself from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in 1984).

Emblematic of these pressures is a recent Chicago Tribune editorial, which asked,

“Will Obama scold David Geffen, the entertainment mogul who is one of
his most prominent contributors and who owns Snoop Dogg’s record label? Will
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton admonish rap impresario Timbaland, who recently
threw a benefit for her at his Miami home that raised $800,000?”

Asking figures like Reverend Al Sharpton, Senators Clinton and Obama, and Russell Simmons to publicly distance themselves from hip hop is a transparent attempt drive a wedge between them and a constituency that has both the energy and the creativity to galvanize a youth-based electorate in the 2008 election season.

The sexism, misogyny, violence, anti-intellectualism and homophobia that rap music traffics in is real – but it is also reflective of where American society is at this moment. Remove offensive and vulgar lyrics from rap music, and we are still faced with a society that is largely sexist, misogynistic, violent, anti-intellectual and homophobic. The real story here, is that as the hip hop generation(s) have come to maturity and begun to realize their civic, social and political responsibility, that there are many in the larger society who are disconcerted – and they should be.

Such is the reality of social change.

Bravo.

posted by @ 5:27 pm | 0 Comments

Monday, April 30th, 2007

We Got This

posted by @ 7:03 am | 1 Comment

Monday, April 30th, 2007

They Don’t

posted by @ 7:00 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Going Home To New Orleans? :: Housing and Public Policy


We want the real rebirth!
Poster of Philip Frazier by Terance Osborne

As thousands of tourists head to New Orleans for the opening of JazzFest today, featuring performances everyone from Eddie Bo to Norah Jones to the Rebirth Brass Band, plus the bittersweet return of the Hot 8, it’s important to remember that thousands of families still cannot return home.

Poor, pre-flood New Orleans residents are confronting a massive housing crisis in the as-yet unrebuilt city and the proposed destruction of public housing. At the same time, legislation now pending in Senate that might help solve the problem is being blocked by local politicians and development interests.

Tram Nguyen’s forthcoming ColorLines cover story, “A Game of Monopoly”, featured here in an exclusive sneak-peak, brings the stakes home in an emotional way:

About 4,000 of the 5,146 families who lived in New Orleans public housing remain displaced. As bureaucrats, politicians, developers and lawyers fight over the city’s redevelopment plans for low-income housing, these buildings remain closed, and residents have been told they’d have to wait for another three or five more years to return home. In all likelihood, without a drastic change of power and planning, many will never be able to come back and live in their city.

So as the Jazzfest celebration continues into next week, we ask that you please take a moment out to add your voice to the multitudes who are supporting HR 1227-the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007. Props to ColorOfChange.org and ColorLines for focusing on this important issue.

posted by @ 9:07 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Quote of the Millennium

“The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”
-Pfc. Jessica Lynch testifying in Congress yesterday alongside the family of Pat Tillman

posted by @ 7:15 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Me on Chuck Brown’s Great New Album


Chuck baby don’t give a f—!

Here ya go. It’s a great record yall.

posted by @ 7:07 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Who gets to use the N word? :: Mark Anthony Neal on Jabari Asim

Yet another great piece today from our man Mark Anthony Neal here in Salon interviewing Jabari Asim about his new book, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why::

Mark: Were you conflicted at all when the conversation inevitably had to go to hip-hop? I mean, I imagine that there were all kinds of pressures around you as you turned in the manuscript to make it sexier, and sexier at this moment includes an indictment of hip-hop. But you dealt with hip-hop as it presented itself in a logical way. I thought it was interesting that you could take a so-called conscious rapper like Mos Def and so-called gangsta rappers like N.W.A. and acknowledge that there was a very real consciousness, especially in the case of N.W.A., behind how they employed the N-word.

Jabari: I didn’t set out to do that. I’ve never had strong emotions about hip-hop, one way or the other. I’ve never been a hip-hop head, though members of my generation are. I never felt that it spoke to me in particular or told my story. I thought that quite a bit of the criticism of hip-hop — and I say this as an outsider and a resolute non-expert — is superficial, in that it comes from people who perhaps have never sat down to listen to a hip-hop recording. Criticism, if it’s gonna serve any constructive purpose, must be deeply informed. So I had to listen to all that N.W.A. and I had to read those lyrics. And so as I listened to it. There were songs that confirmed what I had heard about these guys — this is some awful stuff. And then there were other songs that seem to meet all the criteria. My hastily assembled yardstick for the use of the N-word is that I think art is sacred and you just don’t respond to it the way you respond to other things. Secondly, if the use of the N-word advances our understanding of the culture in some way, then to me it is valid. N.W.A.’s lyrics easily meet that criteria. People talk about hip-hop spreading the N-word through the culture, but I take pains to point out that popular culture has always spread the N-word. There is serious precedent — in the 1920s and 1930s, you went into a white middle-class home and the N-word was everywhere. It was on the shelves, it was in the cookbooks, the sheet music on the piano, the toys children played with. Let’s not talk about hip-hop introducing this word in some new and unprecedented fashion. The only difference is that hip-hop exists during a period of high technology and spreads these things a lot faster. But let’s not pretend that hip-hop has somehow confused white people regarding the use of the word. I think that’s a very disingenuous argument.

posted by @ 6:26 am | 0 Comments



Previous Posts

Feed Me!

Revolutions

Word

Fiyahlinks


twitter_logo

@zentronix

Come follow me now...

Archives

We work with the Creative Commons license and exercise a "Some Rights Reserved" policy. Feel free to link, distribute, and share written material from cantstopwontstop.com for non-commercial uses.

Requests for commercial uses of any content here are welcome: come correct.

Creative Commons License