Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

Martha Cooper’s We B*Girlz Iz Out!


I’ve been waiting all year for this one. Martha Cooper and Nika Kramer’s We B*Girlz is out!!!

Martha and Nika have been working on this labor of love for the better part of the last 2 years, capturing the top b-girls worldwide and documenting the movement. Our girl Rokafella did the introduction, the great Asia-One gets high billing, and they are all going to bring it on tour this fall and into next year. Check their website often for the info.

This is going to be as important a book as Subway Art was to all of us back in the day. In 2 years, the b-girl movement is going to be at a whole other level in terms of size, scale, and influence.

You can buy it here or, for a limited time, cop a signed copy here for a limited time. Do it now!

posted by @ 8:36 am | 2 Comments

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

Boom Year For Jamaican Music

A big month and a big year for Jamaican music already. Today, there’s news that Sean Paul’s The Trinity had the biggest reggae debut ever–107,000 copies sold, #7 on Billboard’s Top 200, #4 on R&B, and #1 at Reggae.

Check this: He broke the previous record, which was set two weeks before by Damian Marley’s Welcome to Jamrock, with 85,000 (also #7 on the Top 200).

A boom year dat.

The great thing for us longtime Jamaican music lovers is that these albums are very different from each other–so perhaps there is a spectrum opening up in US audiences for a broader range of Jamaican and Caribbean artists.

We’ll see.

Some revisions and some non-revisions on earlier posts are in order:

+ Welcome to Jamrock is the best Marley album ever by someone not named Bob. I’ve had my earlier words for breakfast already.

+ Sean Paul’s record was pretty good after all–even though the video was obviously a rush job–and the wait clearly didn’t hurt the record at all.

+ I Wayne’s album is still way overrated.

+ Why do people still sleep on Morgan Heritage?

posted by @ 7:42 am | 3 Comments

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

Against Apathy: Criticism That Sucks

When I used to read reviews like this one, I’d just be like, ennh whatever.

But now they are beginning to get me mad.

Not just because they’re overly self-conscious, indulgently snarky dismissals of artists, musicians, and writers I love–and full disclosure, who sometimes are, in fact, some of my closest friends or even me–but because they reflect a growing trend among young writers, the emergence of a new aesthetic that leads nowhere.

To me, being a critic means championing an alternative. The great critics became great not simply because they knew how to skewer a subject elegantly, but because they could make you believe that something new, urgent, and life-changing was arriving or had arrived. They championed a rebel aesthetic, and ideas like independence, difference, novelty, fun, antiauthoritarianism, you know, good shit.

These days, with the dot-com crash and a lot of alt-weeklies gone corporate, too many of us critics write like cubicle schmucks unlucky enough to not to land a job at Entertainment Weekly.

But it’s not the ambition that’s bothers me, it’s the lack of imagination.

There is no blood or fire. There’s just an unearned jaded-ness with the world. There isn’t a Johnny-Thunders-with-cigarette-and-guitar detachment, to be all Lester Bangs on folks, there is simply an utter lack of conviction masquerading as an outsider stance.

Which is ridiculous.

Because the one thing that so many of these critics don’t seem to appreciate at all is the desire for an alternative.

They’re basically engaged in creating an alternative to the alternative, which may not scan like “Laguna Beach” or “Extra!” at first, but sure isn’t challenging that kind of stuff at all.

Do you want the opposite of “conscious” aesthetics (a term I don’t believe in but let’s just make this point)? Here it is. Unconscious aesthetics–it isn’t self-aware in the remotest sense.

In fact, these unconscious critics get most rankled by folks who are still about being self-critical and trying to make a difference. At its most basic, it’s a knee-jerk remote-control reactionary aesthetics.

Really, you can’t trust their very definitions. Kenny Loggins=cool. Blackalicious=bland. ‘Nuff said.

The biggest struggle in their writing is a personal battle against boredom. (For the poor reader, it’s a battle to simply stay awake 500-word or even 100-word count.) The sum of it all is a thinly disguised effort to preserve the status quo–in politics, in art, in culture, in society.

Which is fine.

Let’s just call it what it is. A celebration of sameness. An indulgence of apathy. A reaction against change. A critical dead-end.

posted by @ 6:07 am | 2 Comments

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

The Birth of Hip-Hop Through The Lens of The Great Joe Conzo





He was there–and you probably weren’t!

Photos by Joe Conzo Jr.

Here’s one very good story about the great Bronx photographer Joe Conzo Jr.. I met him this past February at that out-of-body experience called the Bronx book release party.

Joe was there, a youngster who came up after the 1971 peace treaty, and he was close to both the gangs and the activists. His grandmother, Evelina Antonetty, was the founder of United Bronx Parents, a kick-ass neighborhood organization that emerged in the early 70s to save the borough from the politics of abandonment.

After the peace treaty, Ms. Antonetty hired a lot of the gang peacemakers, including Benjy Melendez and other Ghetto Brothers, to literally serve the people. She was a powerful, if still largely unsung, positive force in the community.

When the next thing after the gangs came along–hip-hop–Joe was just learning how to use a camera. He tagged along with his homies from the Cold Crush and captured everything they all did together. The result was pure genius.

Imagine you have some of the earliest photos–that aren’t just historical documents, but works of beautiful art–of a culture that takes over the world. They’d be valuable, right? They’d be a hot commodity.

But here’s what you should know about Joe. He has kept it real all these years. He’s warm and humble and has never sought fame.

Instead, now fame has found him–his photos have been exhibited in London, Europe, and New York these past few months to widespread acclaim–and I think there couldn’t be another person more deserving.

It’s really interesting to see Joe’s photos of the Fort Apache protests, organized by Richie Perez and other Bronx community leaders, in the New York Times now.

Those protests proved very crucial for the development of what came to be known as the multiculturalism movement of the 80s, the grassroots cultural and political force that helped make icons of people like Greg Tate, Spike Lee, and Public Enemy. But it has largely been written out of the history books.

To me, it says a lot about Joe’s view of the world that he chose these images to represent his work in the New York Times. And this quote sums up his greatness:

“When I’m gone from this world, I hope my grandchildren can go to a library and see Joe Conzo images,” he said. “I am carrying on in the legacy of my grandmother, photographing music and the community. I don’t think I’ll get rich off this. But having this legacy is worth more than money.”

posted by @ 10:43 am | 2 Comments

Monday, October 3rd, 2005

Mike Davis & Anthony Fontenot On The Mysteries of New Orleans

On Mother Jones, 25 Questions About New Orleans.

posted by @ 11:27 am | 0 Comments

Friday, September 30th, 2005

Homeland Security?

Just received this news from folks trying to aid African Americans and Asian Americans displaced by the Hurricanes in Mississippi. Apparently Homeland Security officials are beginning to harass community relief workers on the Gulf Coast who are taking care of people abandoned by the Red Cross and FEMA.

Homeland Security Harasses Relief Workers in Waveland, MS
By Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Jen Soriano

Community relief workers Kevin Cupit and Au Huynh reported this
incident from the gulf coast:

An independent party of relief workers faced unexpected resistance from Homeland Security yesterday. Seven relief workers from Philadelphia, Houston, Colorado and Quebec were redistributing resources from Hancock County Mississippi — two hours East of New Orleans — to remote areas on the Gulf Coast. Three people in the party were stopped by Homeland Security agents and were asked to show passports, ids and proof of citizenship.

Homeland Security Agents temporarily seized the passports of two Canadian relief workers and ordered everyone in their party to leave the premises. In the exchange the Homeland security office told relief volunteers that they were, “Part of the problem.”

Red Cross and FEMA have failed to distribute supplies from drop-off centers to communities in the surrounding region. With no plans to caravan these materials to smaller communities, stocks of food, water and bedding are piling up in centers far away from those in need.

That’s where independently organized caravans of volunteers come in. Ad-hoc groups like Kevin and Au’s are crucial for distributing resources to small towns and communities from Port Arthur, LA to Mobile, AL. They successfully brought supplies to groups throughout the coast, including a Buddhist Temple in Broussard and Vietnamese communities in and around Waveland that had not received supplies or language support from mainstream agencies.

If Homeland Security gets away with preventing these relief efforts, many lives will be lost. We must hold Homeland Security and Mississippi Emergency Management officials accountable for both their failure to distribute supplies and their aggressive interventions against people trying to do the right thing.

Take action now!

Call or fax officials at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency and tell them Homeland Security should have no role in the relief efforts — demand that they ensure the safety of all volunteer relief workers and that they create a transparent effective plan to distribute supplies to all coast communities in need.

Mississippi Emergency Management Agency
Phone: 601-352-9100 (24 Hr) Fax: 601-352-8314

Call Todd Gee, chief of staff of Bennie Thompson Mississippi Representative and member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and ask Rep. Thompson to hold Homeland Security agents accountable for harassing relief workers and for allowing the safe and unhampered activity of all relief workers.

Phone: 202-225-5876

posted by @ 1:05 pm | 1 Comment

Sunday, September 25th, 2005

HKR/TWM/CSWS Report: Getting Home Before It’s Gone

+ Here is the second Gulf Coast report from the Hard Knock Radio/Third World Majority/Can’t Stop Won’t Stop team, up today at AlterNet.

+ For an updated list of grassroots news and organizing resources, including places to send your money other than the Red Cross, visit here: www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/2005/09/gulf-coast-emergency-linklist-blogroll.cfm

+ Here is a podcast of Jeff’s 9/21 interview with Curtis Muhammad:

Interview with Curtis Muhammad
As Aired On Hard Knock Radio, 9/21

Getting Home Before It’s Gone
By Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Anita Johnson, and Jeff Chang
Additional reporting done by Macho Cabrera Estévez

—>From Houston to Selma, community organizations have stepped in where FEMA and Red Cross have failed, especially for people of color. But as corporations get rich, real estate developers circle, and residents resettle far from home, they are shifting from relief to demanding the right of return.<---
A dozen miles north of Baton Rouge, in a rural Louisiana town called Baker, a new city is being erected for Katrina evacuees.

The structures they will live in aren’t the stylish, modernist prefab homes one might see in the architecture magazine, Dwell. They are airless metal trailers, poorly suited for 90-degree heat. In less than two weeks, 600 of these containers will be standing in a big field just off Groom Road. Rows of port-a-potties and showering facilities will complete the FEMA-funded trailer-home subdivision, swelling Baker’s pre-Katrina population of 13,500 by 2,000 more.

Baker’s trailer camp—and many others like it—are being developed by the Shaw Group, a politically well-connected Baton Rouge company that has received at least $200 million in FEMA funds for post-Katrina cleanup and reconstruction. The Shaw Group is a client of former FEMA director, now lobbyist and Salon.com-dubbed “disaster pimp” Joseph Allbaugh who resigned in 2003 and arranged for the disgraced Michael Brown to become his replacement.

Last week, Shaw’s CEO, Jim Bernhard, a close friend of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, stepped down from his post as the state’s Democratic Party chairman, allegedly to avoid the appearance of cronyism. The week before that, after the Shaw Group announced it had secured two FEMA no-bid contracts, its stock had surged to a three-year high.

Louisiana’s Shawvilles provide the outlines of what New Orleans organizer and journalist Jordan Flaherty has taken to calling “the Disaster Industrial Complex.”

According to FEMA, some 300,000 displaced families in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are in need of “temporary housing.” Those involved in the Baker project interpret “temporary” to mean anywhere from five months to five years. But a temporary house is not a home. And as FEMA attempts to meet President Bush’s request to close most shelters by mid-October, small white rural towns in Louisiana are reporting outbursts of NIMBY-ism.

The bigger picture, many community activists argue, is a resettlement policy that looks like selective depopulation. In New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast, predominantly poor communities and communities of color are being dispersed, as families are scattered across the country with one-way tickets and no way to get back home.

At Houston’s Reliant Center, Shawn, 34, waited in long FEMA lines for temporary housing. Like an overwhelming majority of evacuees we interviewed, he wanted to return home to New Orleans. Failing that, he wanted to go to Atlanta where he had a cousin. But he was resigned to accept wherever they would send him and his wife and children. “It’s like if they show it to you, if you want it (that’s good). If you don’t, you be waiting again. You’ll be on the bottom of the list,” he said. “So people are just going with whatever they could get. They just want get out of the Center.”

Curtis Muhammad, a longtime New Orleans resident and a leader of Community Labor United, an eight-year old coalition that has swelled to include 49 Crescent City community-based organizations, captures the sentiment of many of the displaced. “150,000 (New Orleans residents) are walking around somewhere in these United States,” he says. “They’re walking around wondering why their government wanted them there.”

At the same time, many fear that if the Bush Administration, FEMA, and the Red Cross don’t accomplish the depopulation of their neighborhoods, human greed will.

Alice Britton, a 47-year-old nurse from Atlanta, returned to her birth home in Biloxi, Mississippi, near the Gulf to clear the wreckage from the family property and pick up her elderly mother, who had ridden out the storm. She feared for the future of that Black community.

“This is a depressed population, a population that has been taken advantage of for generations, a population that has not been used to or accustomed to much,” she said. “Somebody comes in and talks their slick talk and the next thing you know there’s going to be $200,000 condos or townhomes that they can’t afford. Then they’ll bus all of them over to a new ghetto.”

The LA Times reported last week that Latter & Blum, one of New Orleans’ largest real estate brokerages, was receiving 20 buy calls for every sell call. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically,” James Reiss, a wealthy Uptown scion and New Orleans Regional Authority chairman, told the Wall Street Journal. “I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.”

Organizers worry that pro-developer efforts such as the city’s pre-Katrina “Hollywood South” campaign, which sought to lure filmmakers and tourism and real estate development through tax breaks, and its “urban renewal”-driven clearance of several large housing projects, may accelerate into a full-scale depopulation of poor, Black neighborhoods. Muhammad described seeing families in shelters hounded by real estate agents to sell their properties. Jordan Flaherty says, “I feel like the elites of New Orleans are moving very quickly on this, probably faster than we even know.”

In Uptown and the French Quarter, National Guardsmen have joined private security forces to secure and assist cleanup and reconstruction efforts. Things are going so well that even a Larry Flynt-owned strip club has reopened for business.

“We are watching them open up the white hotels already. We’re watching them rebuild the casinos. We’re watching them rebuild the oil rigs in the ocean. We see construction going on downtown. You wouldn’t believe it,” says Muhammad. “It’s almost back to normal.”

But last week, in largely poor and Black neighborhoods such as the Ninth Ward, there was almost no government presence. Instead, relief and rebuilding was being administered by groups like Community Labor United, the Common Ground Collective, and Food Not Bombs. With the second break of the Industrial Canal levee on Friday due to rains from Hurricane Rita, and the reflooding of the Ninth Ward, it was unclear how these grassroots operations would be affected.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, community organizations that had been working on issues such as police brutality, education, migrant workers rights, prisoners’ rights, and hip-hop activism quickly retooled themselves into urgent relief agencies. At the same time, long-standing institutions, such as Black churches and mosques, the New Black Panther Party, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the NAACP, and Buddhist and Hindu temples and migrant workers group Project Prep, sprang into action.

These efforts are likely to continue because FEMA and Red Cross shelters are under pressure to close. The Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson was recently cleared of displaced people so that a Disney on Ice “Finding Nemo” show could go on as planned.

At the same time, many evacuees of color increasingly feel patronized by shelter workers. “The volunteers are middle class and white, and folks coming out of these areas are poor Blacks and poor whites. There is already a problem there, because the volunteers have all these assumptions,” says Tarana Burke, who helped coordinate the celebrated Selma, Alabama, hip-hop activist organization 21st Century Youth Leadership Project’s relief efforts.

In many instances, FEMA and the Red Cross simply left African American populations unserved. In Biloxi, many African Americans remain camped outside of their demolished houses and apartments, and under highway overpasses, awaiting aid from FEMA and the Red Cross. In the poor, rural, still racially segregated Jefferson Davis County, the Red Cross set up at the single registered church, a white one, and African Americans watched as relief trucks drove past their towns and churches. “I can’t tell you what I think the Red Cross needs to be doing more because I can’t say that I have seen them,” says Pastor Luther Martin of Mississippi’s Crossroads Ministry.

Where FEMA and the Red Cross failed, the community organizations stepped in to provide food and shelter, medical aid, and family reunion information.

Across rural Mississippi, Black churches such as the Crossroads Ministry were the first responders to isolated residents. In Algiers, Louisiana, Malik Rahim’s Common Ground Collective has fed, housed and provided medical care to tens of thousands of people. The 21st Century Youth Leadership Project opened its camp outside of Selma, Alabama, to a surge of 200 families. The evacuees found the process empowering. In a reversal of the provider-victim model of traditional emergency services, the evacuees at the 21st Century camp organized themselves into cooking and cleaning shifts.

But as Shawvilles rise and Gulf Coast residents continue to be dispersed far from home, many of those same organizations now believe they must transition from relief issues to return issues.

“At first we were overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem. We were still in a state of shock,” says Shana Sassoon of the New Orleans Network, a federation of organizations now trying to map the community assets of the evacuated neighborhoods. “But now ideas like the right of return, the right to reconstruct the city ourselves—those terms are starting to become clearer to us.”

Derrick Johnson, the State Conference President of the Mississippi NAACP, says the main question now is: “How is the government going to support these people it betrayed? What is going to do to make these cities and these peoples whole? We believe part of it is making sure our communities they betrayed are at the table for reconstruction, awarding of contracts, and the development of affordable housing.”

On Sept. 8, with news reports that up to $50 billion in government aid might be released, Community Labor United convened dozens of activists in Baton Rouge to form the People’s Hurricane Relief & Reconstruction Project. “The most fundamental demand,” reads the Project’s manifesto, “must be the right of people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to return to their homes and their communities and participate in reconstruction.”

Demands also included government funds for family reunions, including making the databases of FEMA and the Red Cross; a Victims Compensation Fund like the one created in New York after 9/11; representation on all boards that are making decisions on spending public dollars for relief and reconstruction; public work jobs at union wages for the displaced workers and residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; and transparency in the entire reconstruction process.

The lesson of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad says, is self-determination. “Those dollars that are being sent to the government, that are being sent to the Red Cross by the international community, all these stars raising money, giving it to this and giving it to that, they really still believe the government is going to help us,” he said. “Maybe that’s the blessing in all of this—that maybe we needed to know that we were alone and that we needed to look out for our own. Our self-determination comes from the realization that we’re all we got.”

______________
To support the People’s Hurricane Relief & Reconstruction Project, go here.

————
Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Anita Johnson are reporting from the Gulf Coast for Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority. Jeff Chang reported from Berkeley, California and wrote this article. Additional reporting done by Macho Cabrera Estévez.

posted by @ 11:06 pm | 0 Comments

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Ninth Ward Underwater Again

This just in from AP: Water sloshes over levee in New Orleans, causing new flooding. Meanwhile, Bush is flying to Texas ahead of the storm. I’m so angry I can’t even write anymore.

Links to real-time reports are here or simply scroll down a few entries.

posted by @ 7:04 am | 1 Comment

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

Jordan Flaherty: Shelter and Safety

Here’s Jordan Flaherty’s latest dispatch. This one is from Baton Rouge. You can subscribe to his email list at jordanhurricane-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

His past articles are here.

For an updated list of news and where to direct your money to grassroots community relief and rebuilding efforts, click here or simply scroll down a few entries.

Shelter And Safety

by Jordan Flaherty

September 20, 2005

Last New Year’s Eve, a Black Georgia Southern University student named Levon Jones was killed by bouncers in the Bourbon Street club Razzoo’s. The outrage led to near-daily protests outside the club, threats of a Black tourist boycott of New Orleans, and a city commission to explore the issue of racism in the French Quarter. Despite widely-publicized advance warning, a “secret shopper” audit of the Quarter found rampant discrimination in French Quarter businesses, including different dress codes, admission prices, and drink prices, all based on whether the patron was black or white.

“The French Quarter is not a place for Black people,” one community organizer told me pre-hurricane. “You don’t see Black folks working in the front of house in French Quarter restaurants or hotels, and you don’t see them as customers.”

Just north of the French Quarter, a few blocks from Razzoo’s, is the historic Treme neighborhood. Settled in the early 1800s, it’s known as the oldest free African-American community in the US. Residents fear for the post-reconstruction stability of communities like Treme. “There’s nothing some developers would like more than a ring of white neighborhoods around the French Quarter,” said one Treme resident recently. The widespread fear among organizers is that the exclusionary, “tourists only” atmosphere of the French Quarter will be multiplied and expanded across the city, and that many residents simply wont be able to return home.

Chui Clark is a longtime community organizer from New Orleans, and was one of the leaders of the protests against Razzoo’s. He now stays in Baton Rouge’s River Street shelter. “This is a lily-white operation,” he reports. “You have white FEMA and Red Cross workers watching us like we’re some kind of amusement.” Despite repeated assurances of housing placements from Red Cross and government officials, the population of the Baton Rouge shelters does not appear to be decreasing, according to Clark. “You have new arrivals all the time. Folks who were staying with families for a week or two are getting kicked out and they got no where else to go.”

I went to the River Road shelter as part of a project initiated by Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) to help displaced New Orleans residents reconnect with loved ones who are lost in the labyrinth of Louisiana’s corrections system.

Everyone I met was desperately trying to find a sister or brother or child or other family member lost in the system. Many people who were picked up for minor infractions in the days before the hurricane ended up being shipped to the infamous Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where it’s estimated over 90% of the inmates currently incarcerated will die within its walls. Most of the family members I spoke with just wanted to get a message to their loved ones, “Tell him that we’ve been looking for him, that we made it out of New Orleans, and that we love him,” said a former East New Orleans resident named Angela.

While Barbara Bush speaks of how fortunate the shelter residents are, in the real world New Orleans evacuees have been feeling anything but sheltered. One woman I spoke with in the River Street shelter said that she’s barely slept since she arrived in the shelter system. “I sleep with one eye open,” she told me. “Its not safe in there.”

According to Christina Kucera, a feminist organizer from New Orleans, “issues of safety and shelter are intricately tied to gender. This has hit women particularly hard. It’s the collapse of community. We’ve lost neighbors and systems within our communities that helped keep us safe.”

Where once everyone in a neighborhood knew each other, now residents from each block are spread across several states. Communities and relationships that came together over decades were dispersed in hours.

Kucera lists the problems she’s heard, “There have been reports of rapes and assaults before evacuation and in the shelters. And that’s just the beginning. There are continuing safety and healthcare needs. There are women who were planning on having children who now no longer have the stability to raise a child and want an abortion, but they have no money, and nowhere to go to get one. Six of the thirteen rape crisis centers in Louisiana were closed by the hurricane.”

One longtime community organizer from the New Orleans chapter of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence has written, “We have to have some form of community accountability for the sexual and physical violence women and children endured. I’m not interested in developing an action plan to rebuild or organize a people’s agenda in New Orleans without a gender analysis and a demand for community accountability.”

We are already unsettled, and now Hurricane Rita threatens a new wave of evacuations. Astrodome residents are being out on buses and planes. While communities continue to be dispersed, some New Orleanians are staying and building. Diane “Momma D” Frenchcoat never evacuated out of her Treme home on North Dorgenois Street, and has been helping feed and support 50 families, coordinating a relief and rebuilding effort consisting of, at its peak, 30 volunteers known as the Soul Patrol.

“I ain’t going nowhere,” one Soul Patrol member told the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper in a september 18 article about Momma D. “I’m the son of a bricklayer. I’m ready to cut some sheetrock, lay some block, anything to rebuild the city.”

Asked about her plan, Momma D had these words, “Rescue. Return. Restore. Can you hear what I’m saying, baby? Listen to those words again. Rescue, return, restore. We want the young, able-bodied men who are still here to stay to help those in need. And the ones that have been evacuated, we want them to come home and help clean up and rebuild this city. How can the city demand that we evacuate our homes but then have thousands of people from across this country volunteering to do the things that we can do ourselves?”

Community organizers like Momma D in Treme and Malik Rahim, who has a similar network in the Algiers neighborhood, are the forces for relief and rebuilding that need our help. The biggest disaster was not a hurricane, but the dispersal of communities, and that’s the disaster that needs to be addressed first.

Yesterday a friend told me through tears, “I just want to go back as if this never happened. I want to go back to my friends and my neighbors and my community.” It’s our community that has brought us security. People I know in New Orleans don’t feel safer when they see Blackwater mercenaries on their block, but they do feel security from knowing their neighbors are watching out for them. And that’s why the police and national guard and security companies on our streets haven’t brought us the security we’ve been looking for, and why discussions of razing neighborhoods makes us feel cold.

When we say we want our city back, we don’t mean the structures and the institutions, and we don’t mean “law and order,” we mean our community, the people we love. And that’s the city we want to fight for.

======================================================
Jordan Flaherty is an organizer with the Service Employees International Union and an editor of Left Turn Magazine.  This is his sixth article from New Orleans. 

posted by @ 12:03 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

George Bush Don’t Like Black Video

The infamous Legendary K.O. track now has a video. Check out submedia’s brilliant Birth Of A Nation style “George Bush Don’t Like Black People” at the Guerrilla News Network. A must-see.

posted by @ 10:24 am | 1 Comment



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