Monday, January 19th, 2009

Notes On The Eve Of Day One

Barack Obama was born in Hawai’i only two years after my father’s generation voted for statehood, and that small fact illustrates the deep emotional cross-currents I am caught in over his inauguration. (more…)

posted by @ 10:16 pm | 3 Comments

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Students Occupy The New School

Last night students began what they call “an occupation” of the New School in New York City, demanding the ouster of university president Bob Kerrey and other school officials and direct student involvement in the school’s governance and investment policies. (more…)

posted by @ 8:19 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Farai Chideya’s News And Notes on NPR Has Been Cancelled

NPR is announcing it has cancelled Farai Chideya’s brilliant African American-themed talk show “News and Notes”. Argh.

Aside from being a good friend and a brilliant journalist, Farai has changed the game for people of color’s media, regularly broadcasting a smart, topical, and witty show on a national level. She was the first hip-hop gen host on NPR. Her show, on the air since 2005, was axed along with “Day To Day”. In all 64 journalists will lose their jobs.

NPR leadership blamed the layoffs on a decline in corporate sponsorships. Ain’t that ironic.

The truth is that NPR has been fickle with younger audiences and audiences of color. Its audience continues to age. The median age is 48.

While NPR has experimented with bringing in a more diverse listenership, it hasn’t shown much willingness to commit. The list of casualties includes Tavis Smiley (News and Notes’ predecessor) and Ed Gordon (Farai’s predecessor at News and Notes), not to mention a long list of young producers and staffers of color.

The only remaining show for African Americans on NPR–never mind Latinos and Asian Americans–will be Michel Martin’s relatively new “Tell Me More”.

Farai and her team will be on the air until March 20th. Whether they will be employed after that depends on you. Jasmyne Cannick has already set up email forms and petition forms to the NPR top brass. Let em know…

posted by @ 8:01 pm | 3 Comments

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

I Am Nixon

Large up T.A. Negro for rocking the hardcore David Frost to my Nixon in one of the best interviews I’ve ever had the opportunity to be a part of. Unfortunately my negotiating skills are suspect–I didn’t get paid anything close to $600,000 for this.

posted by @ 10:43 am | 0 Comments

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Shouldna Lef Ya…

…without a strong post to tempt you.

Sorry for this folks. Let me explain a little bit where I’ve been hiding and let you know what’s in store with this blog, website and me for the new year and beyond.

First off, thanks to all of you readers, longtime and new, for all the love you’ve showered on ya boy this year in the form of emails and comments and shouts. I’ve been one gratified dude, let me tell you. If you see me in the street, I might buy you a drink on GP.

Also I’ve been a little burnt out. Other than in a few moments of inspiration–thank you UCLA APC, Ferentz, Sin Yen, and the hip-hop generation!–I’ve been taking a bit of a break this past month from the daily hourly grind of reporting and blogging.

For now, I’ve stepped back too from the Vibe blog. That was an amazing experience, and a great outlet to push out the stories you don’t get on the front pages of your newspaper or news-aggregator or your favorite comedian’s fake news show. I’m very proud of what me and the Vibe fam accomplished this year.

But now it’s time to regroup for the next few years.

I’m in the midst of starting on a number of other projects, two of which I can talk about now.

Soon–very soon–we’ll be launching a revamp of this website. Yes, it’s finally time. Cantstopwontstop.com Version 2.0. We want to give you much more access to many of the pieces I’ve been writing over the years–in music, culture, politics, hip-hop history, and much more. The CSWS supercr3w is hard at work. Look for our efforts early in 2009.

The other big thing I can say is that I’ve begun working on a new book entitled Who We Be: The Colorization of America. It’s about how we got from the end of civil rights to Obama’s election.

The Colorization of America is a story about how visionaries–many you may not have ever heard of–forged a new vision for the U.S. against the context of rapidly shifting demographic change. It’s a story about the last three decades in America–and the world–and about how diversity became so mainstream that people could begin to use a strange term, “post-racial”, in a thousand different ways and mean a thousand different things, usually contradictory things.

Working on this book means that I get to think and talk about the visual arts, comics and cartoons, literature, politics, and a million other things that will be fun to think and talk about for the next few years. I’m not going to give away much more than that for now, only that it’s possible the book may be more relevant now than when I began pitching it over year or two ago, and for that reason I want to get it exactly right.

Finally, I was beginning to tell friends in the waning days of the election season that I was done with blogging for good. Good thing I didn’t go Jay-Z or Jordan on myself and announce a retirement. Life will go back to different, slower rhythms and so will this blog. But it won’t go away. There’s too much to be said.

So here’s to the next time the words won’t wait. Hope to see you back here…

Thanks for reading!

posted by @ 5:15 pm | 5 Comments

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

2G2K Is Back! :: On Hillary, Again, And Foreign Policy

Ferentz was inspired to write–wickedly, I must add–about Obama’s impending Hillary appointment. (more…)

posted by @ 7:58 am | 2 Comments

Monday, November 24th, 2008

The Impact of The Hip-Hop Vote

We now have some idea of how hip-hop activism may have impacted the presidential election. According to stats from CIRCLE, those under the age of 45 delivered all of Obama’s margin of victory.

Those under 30 formed the core of his victory. 23 million young voters came out, and nearly 16 million voted for Obama. He won by 9 million votes. (more…)

posted by @ 9:34 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

UCLA Education In Action Keynote Speech

Here’s an excerpt of the keynote speech that I gave this past Saturday at UCLA, for the “Education In Action” student conference organized by APC, and a number of other student, staff, and faculty groups on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Asian American Studies.

Schisms over race and generation have defined 40 years of politics in this country.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of the hip-hop generation. It’s the story of the rise of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment. And the sorry results are all around us.

We have the tragedies of Katrina. The hurricane simply exposed the accumulated horrors this country’s politics of abandonment have visited upon poor people of color for 40 years.

We have the biggest prison-industrial complex in the world, and an entire generation of young men and women of color behind bars in a society that no longer cares about rehabilitation, that’s about locking people up and throwing away the key.

We have an immigration system that is inhumane and out-of-date, that divides families and closes the borders even as the destinies of nations are increasingly lashed together.

We have a nation torn asunder by economic policies that have exacerbated the wealth gap and hastened an environmental collapse.

We have pre-emptive shock-doctrine wars justified by Orientalist views of the world, and a ruthless disdain for its human toll.

Folks, we have issues.

Yet amidst all of this, conservatives wanted to raise the old racial fears in this election.

They returned the election to 1968, an era when racist housing covenants had only recently been made illegal and racial intermarriage had only recently been made legal.

Of course, it was the most ridiculous kind of nostalgia–a battle for a world that was already gone. But at the Republican National Convention, I watched Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin try to hype a newly discovered breed of subhuman: the community organizer.

They blew their racist dog whistles all the way until November 4th, and not without effect. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans were silenced by the loud racist whisper campaigns, until Colin Powell stepped up to ask the right question, “So what if Obama was Muslim?” Authorities foiled at least a half-dozen white supremacist schemes to kill Obama. And when McCain began his concession speech that night by celebrating Obama’s history-making election as the first Black president, his supporters actually booed.

Conservatives all attempted to portray Obama as an unknowable Other. So maybe Obama really is our first API president? He was certainly treated like a stranger from a different shore.

And yet on November 4th, we saw past all of that.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and young people voted 2-1 to elect Barack Obama. In doing so, we became an essential part of the new majority.

Read the whole speech here.

A HUGE thank you to all of the organizers for a wonderful conference.

posted by @ 8:13 pm | 2 Comments

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

A Great Day In Baseball History

Congratulations to Don Wakamatsu, Major League Baseball’s first Asian American manager. It’s been far too long coming.

Won’t be too much rooting for the Mariners, but will be rooting for Don, who was the A’s bench coach this past year. Perhaps not so surprisingly, given the great number of them in the skipper position, Don played catcher in his college and 12-year pro career.

(While we’re on the topic, here’s a gratuitous shout-out to my childhood hero Lenn Sakata.)

Perhaps Don’s rise means that someday the great Kurt Suzuki or any API will be able to do the damn thing if he so desires.

posted by @ 1:29 pm | 2 Comments

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Happy Xmas : The War Is (Almost) Over…?


And we’re gonna celebrate with a little top-rock 6-step…

Hip-hop: The Universal Language of Peace

posted by @ 9:05 am | 2 Comments



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