Ambitionz Az A Writer

Killing The Vibe, Forgetting The Meaning

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:09:00 +0000

Kendrick Lamar and Misconceptions of Black Men

"I be off the slave ship...building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs"
Kendrick Lamar - HiiPower

The other day, I told my fiance that Biggie's most underrated line ever was:

"Considered a fool because I dropped out of high school/Stereotypes of a Black man misunderstood, and it's still all good..."

It's probably one of the most perceptive lyrics ever from B.I.G. But Juicy is so melodic, you can just fly right past it.

It also makes me reflect upon our society's general lack of belief in Black men's ability to be introspective. Or that they can practice healthy forms of ethos. There are really strong efforts currently underway to change those generalized views of Black male inability. But there is also a history and tradition that can be referenced and pointed to, which provides examples of how it can be done: from Wright, to Baldwin, to Biggie and Pac, to Saul Williams, to even Obama. An intellectual, experiential, expressive one.

I think about Kendrick Lamar's young body of work, and on the politics of carrying on the tradition within the new realities and narratives. Kendrick has moments when he puts this new paradigm for introspection, ethos, and social commentary, together in the mold of the great Black social commentators - in the tradition of story-telling. And those moments are so dope.

A few months ago, Ta-Neshi Coates wrote in the NY Times about how important K-Dot's album "good Kid, m.A.A.D. city" is for understanding what Black males and residents in urban cities face; that elites don't get it; and thus Black males seek to treat this misunderstanding and alienation through other means. Coates decides to emphasize the means of music and criminality: 1) rappers are masters of violence, 2) they are authors commenting on the new social structures, and 3) music is where they make fantasy parallel to reality, as a way of explaining the rules and strategies for mastering the new structures. In this logic, mastery equals survival.

"Hip-hop originates in communities where such hazards are taken as given. Rappers generally depict themselves as masters, not victims, of the attending violence. Their music is not so much interested in exalting to our preferred values as constructing a fantasy wherein the author has total control and is utterly invulnerable."

Coates-"Hip Hop Speaks to the Guns

He attempts to contextualize and nuance Black male rappers - the presumption embedded in the piece - "mastery of violence" through music and strategy, in order to not demonize it. But that approach seems..."stereotypical." Just a very stereotypical way for analyzing the lived reality of misunderstood Black men.

Instead, I really wished that he would of emphasized how Kendrick represents the Black male as social commentator. The Black male that uses the local, as his text. The Black male that uses words, to convey ethos. The Black male, who is capable of not just commentary, but also analysis and introspection. Rather than continue to be implicit that he, Coates, is unique because he is all those things, why not be explicit about how Kendrick is all those things too? Kendrick's social thought is just as important as his words. This point needs to be exalted more, and it goes beyond Coates' piece.

There is something troubling I've observed as K-Dot's music begins to find a broader audience and pop culture acceptance: his music is being reduced to choruses that put together finely chosen words and turn them into catchy phrases. The skits, track order, and coherent narrative which was thoughtfully and intelligently put together, is now signified through liquor in swimming pools and bitches that kill one's vibe.

Kendrick, isn't just the next great West Coast rapper, and not just a hip-hop artist who's music has a penchant for fitting the Top 40 format. He also is in the lauded tradition of Wright, Baldwin, and Obama, and less recognized aspects of Tupac, Biggie Smalls, and many others.

And that he's been doing this way before "good Kid, m.A.A.D. city."

Kendrick Lamar - "HiiiPower"

“Hiiipower: the three i’s represent heart, honor and respect. That’s how we carry ourselves in the streets, and just in the world, period. Hiiipower, it basically is the simplest form of representing just being above all the madness..."

Kendrick gives us an example of why we must listen closer. Not just for words, but for intellectual thought. Black men are capable of such. But they themselves, and us as a listening community, must begin the process of thinking and speaking like we believe it. And also behaving and acting in ways that develop what we have to say.

Study. Learn. Think. Respect. Remain Thoughtful. And Share. Let's call that HiiiPower.

A Letter to a Community In Need Of Healing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:43:00 +0000

"During the search for Christopher Dorner, and subsequent confrontation and murder, I thought often about Larry Davis. I concentrated on the fact that in mist of the media and journalistic efforts to characterize him as a scourge, and contextualize him as practically an enemy of the state, one key point had been dropped from the mainstream's narrative: the allegation of corruption and police misconduct in the LAPD.

This erasure coupled with the odd mixed messaging around the cabin fire believed to have taken Dorner's life. The sum of this situation, has pushed me to reflect on my views and understandings of criminality; justice; power; violence; and healing. It has led me into critical intellectual engagement with the ideas, practices, and compositions of family, community, and law enforcement--the things that are supposed to mediate. It also has become a point in time that is strained onto my consciousness, where racial history and experience confronts the impact of systems and present day socio-economic conditions.

I sent the trailer of a soon to be released documentary on Davis' life to a friend. I then wrote a follow up email to to reflect on all this; to try to make sense of it. I share it here, with a few edits, as a letter to our community in name of historical memory, healing, and strengthening."

The Larry Davis Project

I grew up hearing that story. Crazy. When people do not understand my trepidation with law enforcement and the criminal justice system, I have to explain that it is not because I am an apologist for those who commit crimes.

My angst is around this history of practicing corruption and the usage militaristic strategies and tactics to unjustly destroy communities and ruin lives. In combination with the lives destroyed by the drugs themselves (both street dealers and the White operatives that facilitated and profited from distribution), we cumulatively have:

1. fractured families

2. missing parents

3. psychological trauma

4. stigmatized communities

This has become multi-generational. Me and you see it now, almost two generations later, when we are trying to figure out why so many young people are directionless, why so many adults make such poor decisions and set such a poor example, and why the character and will does not exist within our people en mass. And that those who have not become overwhelmed by the above are the outliers, and not the median.

Broken homes; traumatized people; disrupted relationships between parents, children, families, adults, and communities.

How to understand this? How to think about beginning to strengthen the positives that exists, scaling them up, while also filling gaps and addressing persistent problems?

It makes me think about the Panthers, because their analysis was systemic, and they engaged in "wrap-around" services before social policy popularized it. From free breakfast, to community education, to health care.

It makes me think about Malcolm because he had a comprehensive analysis, and multifaceted rebuilding and strengthening program.

It makes me think about Tupac, because he too had a comprehensive analysis; and around the time of his passing, was expressing what a multifaceted empowerment program would look like with him at the lead.

It makes me remember anti-colonialist thinkers and activists.

It is not because they were radical or oppositional, that their work and thought endures. It is not just romanticism and being arrested by the past. Rather, it is that they cohesively explained and understood how all the parts matter--it was not just economic, or just cultural. The entire social prism; the entire life experience; they strove to learn about each component, and then developed strategies and actionable steps to address it. The approach is a model for us. It is the right frame. We just are looking at different picture; one altered by the events of the last three decades of the post-Black Freedom Movement.

So we look for models of people in this current moment, who are working on framing and changing the current picture. People like ____ are trying to rebuild and heal. Me and you are spending what must be the equivalent of weeks on g-chat talking through our ideas about what might be the causes and problems and solutions. And we read and think about what to do about this mess; like where to start. And then we volunteer, and listen, and reflect, as we try to grapple with what to do with our thoughts and our lessons-learned.

But we have a macro system that isn't invested in improvement, healing, and empowerment. We have a structure not designed to do those things either. It is premised on social inequality, and its strongest feature is its ability to reproduce itself. Which makes this observation saddening: our folks haven't had the clarity and balance to stop making it worst; to stop adding self-inflicted wounds to these problems. It makes what you and I want to achieve challenging. But thinking about this as a whole, it does not overwhelm me. Instead, it just reminds me how deep it is, and that it will take time. The project is big. We just gotta keep getting tools, keep working, and remembering that it takes time.

"My Umi said shine you light on the world..."

Let's keep shining.

Peace,
Michael

The Historical King, the Present West, and the Future Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:40:00 +0000

It is generally acknowledged that our society suffers from a certain historical amnesia in general, but especially on national holidays. In the instance of Martin Luther King Day, many implore the public to look beyond his calls for “racial harmony” and non-violence, and to not characterize the Black Freedom struggle that he participated in as a single person endeavor instead of a group-centered imperative. It is after this call that we then find very well written pieces which either incorporate the everyday people and local agents that heroically and bravely helped the nation confront its undemocratic legacy of exclusion and racial violence, or remind us of King’s important pivot towards economic justice and inclusiveness. Altogether, the project of contextualizing Dr. King as not just anti-racism and pro-colorblindness, but also as someone “who advocated for poor people, spoke up for workers' rights, defended unions, and condemned war” has been given much voice and has entered public discourse.

With the same spirit that pushes us to test what we have been collectively taught and what we individually understand, there is also the need to challenge our popular voices and public figures. It is well documented how Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have been appropriating this call to challenge, by critiquing and criticizing President Barack Obama. But it is a specific recent incident involving Dr. West, where the professor rebukes the President for using Dr. King’s bible to take the oath for his second term, that is concerning and requires evaluation and analysis.

What I find most interesting about Mr. West’s tirade is the relative amnesia it perpetrates regarding Dr. King's legacy as a leader. King was brilliant; a tireless worker; and a man of great dignity and fortitude. But during the entire period of the Civil Rights Movement, and the more expansive Black Freedom Movement, Dr. King was routinely criticized by those inside the movement for being:

Too complicit to the political mainstream.
Too accommodating of those resistant to anti-racist laws and legislation.
Far too willing to accept calls for gradualism and too accepting of passivity, in hope of changing the country's moral conscience over time.
Too readily accepting of the compromises needed to appease and appeal to the mostly White philanthropists who funded his work.
Too much in favor of top-down organizing.
Too comfortable with the bourgeois and liberals, and not “down enough” with those suffering in both urban and rural slums and ghettos

Noted figures like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, James Foreman, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, along with lesser-known members of SNCC, CORE, and other progressive organizations and grassroots efforts were routinely disappointed and upset at King for either some or all of the reasons listed above. To the present moment, what are Dr. West’s problems with President Obama’s political actions and economic philosophy?

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority.”

“I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running a muck. I was completely wrong.”

“He’s a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

West in a 2011 interview

Sounds pretty familiar right?

The point is not to equalize Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama, nor to be an apologist for both. Too often we make our analyses as if they are part of a zero-sum game; or we explain complexities as mutually exclusive phenomenon which cannot intersect or interact.

Going back to the earlier point about contextualization, an important reason for holistically understanding Dr. King’s activism and intellectual thought, and particularly his move towards eradicating poverty and promoting economic democracy, is that he was pushed to these actions by his dissenters and by critiques from the Left. The young people in Watts who rejected his prescriptions after the 1965 rebellion; the more radical elements of student organizers that wanted him to challenge the exclusion and inequality produced by the U.S. racial system in direct and confrontational language, not conciliatorily and passively; and the labor leaders and intellectuals that pressed upon him the urgency and profoundness of employment discrimination and economic exploitation—these are the central factors that led King to widen his scope and broaden his goals. In large part, that is how he ends up in Chicago protesting housing discrimination in 1966, at Riverside Church speaking out against the war in 1967, and organizing workers in Memphis in 1968. The public nudges and private pushes King received from supporters and others, caused him to make a political move to his left.

Perhaps that is Dr. West’s intention with the cajoling and agitation he has presented President Obama. That in fact he wants Obama to be much more like the King of 1965-1968. It certainly seems that this is his intention, given the comments he made regarding Dr. King’s bible.

But to hear West tell it, Martin Luther King Jr. was always the King of 65-68, and thus always articulated those political objectives. Careful historical examination, and a strong call to our historical memory, reminds us that in fact this is not true. King was just as flawed and problematic then, as West believes Obama is now. And to that point, dissenting and challenging the President is necessary—especially on the economic issues and militarism. But the lesson regarding King that Brother West needed to emphasize was how our leaders in the establishment can be compelled to become more populist and more progressive. Especially with President Obama arguably holding the more pronounced public profile that any Black figure has held since Dr. King, and during a period of social unrest and political economic transformation that threatens to markedly impact this country’s trajectory during the rest of the twenty-first century, we desperately need to understand how organizing, advocacy, and activism can influence the establishment and direct political will.

I do not think thirty minutes tirades at inaugural balls and incomplete narratives of the civil rights movement will achieve this understanding.

But still, outside of our “leaders,” each of us are able to think and talk about what we want of this society; and all of us are able to make actionable what must be done to create a more equitable, just, and inclusive society. In his own MLK Day piece that attempts to properly frame Dr. King’s work, Public Allies CEO Paul Schimtz provides a quote from civil rights historian Charles McKinney that can guide and inspire us to make that equitable, just, and inclusive society real:

"When we elevate leaders of particular movements to the mythic status of great man or woman, we do a disservice to everyone. By placing people on a historical pedestal, we forget that they grew, learned, made mistakes, and struggled throughout the tenure of their leadership, and we forget that these leaders were mentored, collaborated with other leaders, and had to get their followers to believe in their own capacity to step up and lead. Hero-worship relegates the work, thought, and effort of 'ordinary people' to something akin to pleasant background music. Local agents for change and progress lose their voice, and are mercilessly converted into mindless, thoughtless followers of the great man or woman who 'leads' them.”

“In order for us to understand and build on this history, we must honor the true leadership paradigm where leaders at all levels - those few who get recognized and the countless others who contribute silently - are necessary for change."

It will take the many hands that will struggle in the future, and the ones that have already worked in the past, to create the broad based leadership and mass movement we need in order to actualize “the change we can believe in.” Not solely the hands that have touched one leader’s bible.

Captains of the New Economy, Leaders of the New United States

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:16:00 +0000

Captains of the New Economy, Leaders of the “New” United States: How Will Young People Shape the Post-Great Recession Economy

Michael Partis

Young Movement, Chief Research and Policy Officer

November 11, 2011

In a recent article for New York Magazine, writer Frank Rich notes how the outpouring of praise for the business acumen and success of Steve Jobs, and the populist dissent against Wall Street exhibited by both the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements, are actually paradoxical to the direction of economic sensibilities seen throughout the country writ-large in recent history. “Finance long ago supplanted visionary entrepreneurial careers like Jobs’s as the most desired calling among America’s top-tier university students.“ The cord Rich struck with his incisive analysis is one that stands at the dividing line between the United States’ pre-Fall 2007, and since: what is the economic vision of the country post-“the Great Recession”? Indeed, what becomes more compelling about the tension is considering several of the global events that have taken place over the past year and a half.

Economically, there has been contestation and dissent over austerity measures and bailout proposals in the countries of Greece and Italy; and as the “too big to fail” philosophy that was used in defense of bailing out the U.S. financial and banking institutions has been mapped onto these southern European countries, nations like Germany have shown great hesitation towards adopting such an approach. Politically, the now infamous “Arab Spring” of late 2010-early 2011 raised hope that the power of social movement and protest politics still have efficacy, even in the face of the most rigid and time-tested socio-political orders. Students from Puerto Rico to London have protested the terms, conditions, and direction of colleges and universities in their homes, providing hope to those on the Left’s for a substantive student movement. However, the lines between political expression and state repression remain tenuous. This summer, several days of riots throughout the United Kingdom left commentators there searching for explanations for the social unrest and rebellion expressed by the country’s young people.

(source: The Atlantic August 9, 2011)

All these events coincided with a long-term phenomenon confronting our current social realities: the United States is coming to terms with the impact economic hardship, limited employment options, and vast income and wealth disparities among fellow citizens have had on young people dubbed the “Lost Generation.” While the losses in human capital cannot be fully measured until long from now, the costs we’re are paying in human suffering are deep. Perhaps the most pressing question is what impact will this have on the socio-economic fabric of the country today; and moreover, how might these ramifications influence the course of electoral politics and policy-making moving forward.

(Source EPI)

This larger framework is where the important questions arise. The ascent of the Tea Party and the surging energy of the “occupying” movements across the country, have already (and will continue too) elevate the political consciousness of this land and its people. The scale of the potential political reorganization is vast: we can have a Federalist approach to government which provides a socio-economic safety-net for those with the least economically, uses legality to protect citizens, and legitimizes legislation to incorporate fair decision-making; or we could move to a system where public officials are loosely tied together, exercise extremely limited decision making authority, and form a country with little uniformity in political practice or framework—essentially having 50 states that are uniform only under name, not by any organizational framework. In a country that is custom to its political reality being no more unpredictable than the swing of the pendulum, the poles of these extremes stretch the vision of what many can see for our country moving forward.

Perhaps the most interesting place to see the division over the vision of this country, how we differ greatly in what we see the future as, is in the economic realm. Like the political poles, our economic ones have great distance between models: from neoliberal privatization and free-markets, to classical economic conservatism which emphasizes nationalistic interests. What is stark though is who are the people that we see as the leaders of whichever, whatever, of our economic direction will be. If not Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Christina Romer, Paul Krugman and the economists of the left; if not Summers, Geithner, Orszag and the “elite” policy makers; if not Jamie Diamond and the leaders of the banking and finance industry that the country’s populists on both sides of the political spectrum have trouble with; if not any of these groups, then who?

(source Forbes Jan 17, 2011 )

It is in this context where Rich’s observation about the tendency of our young people with college degrees rings loudest. What is the likelihood that the next Steve Jobs will lead our economic vision? How likely is it that a great entrepreneur will stand at the leadership of where growth, job-creation, and income equity arises? Would the person capability of creating this possibility chose it, over the immediate wealth and opportunity presented at the doors of major banks and financial firms? Does anyone believe in the captain of industry anymore?

The political and economic matters of today require: attentive observation to what is happening currently; continuous reflection of what has happened over the course of an immediate period of time and recent events; and a deep awareness of the long history of both domestic and world events. We cannot over-simplify the present; we should not over-look history; and we are in no position to cast aside the events that carry us from point to point. Leadership and vision-setting requires not being limited by the magnetism of poles, and not settling for centrality or moderation. In order to set a collective action-plan, vision, and course that will move the country past this post-recession malaise, there must be a collaborative effort to listen, exchange, and plan. Partnership must be formed; experiences must be paid attention to; learning and teaching have to support each other.
There are a vast number of young people waiting to be tapped; and an equal number already actively engaged in creating the Post-Great Recession society and economy. Their political will is being expressed in platforms across images, words, and actions. The process of best utilizing that, gathering it, and empowering it to reach heights, is work to be done now.

Towards an Economic Vision of Empowerment and Collective Action

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:18:00 +0000

Towards an Economic Vision of Empowerment and Collective Action

Michael Partis

Chief Research and Policy Officer, Young Movement

The following remarks are from Young Movement Research and Policy Director Michael Partis, made at the organization’s “End of Welfare” Panel June 2011. The statement reflects Young Movement’s guiding premise: that young people must empower themselves and those around them by understanding the world past and present, in order to thoughtfully craft a vision for the world we need moving forward. Comments and thoughts can be sent to michael@youngmovement.org.

The intention of our panel tonight is two-fold. First, we are striving to provide a platform for innovative thinking and fresh ideas. Second, we are attempting to create a space where sharing and exchange occurs—a space where strategic approaches and best-practices come together in the spirit of communal, collective success. The goal of tonight’s panel, and a fundamental component of Young Movement’s organizational vision, is building a new framework for how young people in this country view our economic and financial landscape. Indeed, what we are striving for is a paradigm shift; a shift away from the determinism of maximum utility, from the limits of profit margins, or the narrow generalization of terms such as “too big to fail,” “corporate greed,” or “disaster capitalism.” Tonight’s discussion will focus on exploring alternatives to traditional employment paths, and creating a movement towards entrepreneurship. Our goal is to begin a long-term commitment to developing: new business models, new approaches to financial planning, and new economic thinking. Cumulatively, we believe this approach will allow young people to utilize their ingenuity, creativity, and skill-set to create a sustainable socio-economic future not only for themselves, but for the country at large. This is a future where economics and finance are tools which build the capacity and material well-being of not only individuals, but also of communities, neighborhoods, and families.

Hence, when we talk about “welfare” tonight, we are not specifically referring to those government entitlement programs which are typically intended for those who face financial hardship: programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), or AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). Nor are we in agreement with the view of welfare which: stigmatizes the poor as pathological; that advocates for “deficit-model” approach to understanding poverty; or that characterizes low-income populations as an “underclass” whose hardship is based on cultural and individualistic failures. Rather than these historic, yet still presently important, debates, the purpose of tonight’s event is to question a) the efficacy and pragmatism of relying on government services given our current economic context; and b) the validity of a “trickle-down” economic model which makes a large number of people financially dependent on a small number of people. In plain English—does it make sense to depend on our government, or large corporations, to maintain our personal economic and financial well-being?

From 1980 to 2005, the top one percent of income earners received eighty percent of the country’s increased income. Today this rich one percent accounts for 24 percent of our overall income (Noah 2010). And if we consider wealth instead of income, the same top one percent controls 40 percent of that as well (Stiglitz 2011). University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez is noted for his extensive research on U.S. income inequality. He writes that “we need to decide as a society whether this increase in income inequality is efficient and acceptable and, if not, what mix of institutional reforms should be developed to counter it” (Saez 2010).

The solution to this socio-economic inequality is often coupled into one response with two points: more education, and better job-training. However, this year marks the first time ever that college debt has surpassed credit card debt. College is often the first place most people receive their first legitimate job-training: through internships. Increasingly though, these internships have become problematic. According to the April 25 edition of The Economist, American organizations save $2 billion a year by not paying interns minimum wage, and researcher Ross Perlin explains that this free supplemental workforce effectively subsidizes labor for Fortune 500 companies. This point becomes even more critical as today’s New York Times (June 2, 2011) cover story on the country’s unemployment rate cite economic forecasters who predict only modest job growth until November 2012, and anticipate an increase in unemployment in tomorrow’s monthly employment report.
In a recent Vanity Fair essay, Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz argues “that a modern economy requires ‘collective action’,” and that the United States must return to working towards the common welfare of its people (2011). Indeed this is a sentiment Young Movement shares, and it is in that spirit that we hope to have an exciting, challenging, and progressive panel discussion here tonight.

The Legacy of March 9th

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:33:00 +0000

The Legacy of March 9th: How Hip-Hop Can Build a "Brave Community"
Michael Partis

Hip-Hop has two axioms:

1. "the greatest rapper of all-time died on March 9th"

2. "Where Brooklyn At?"

Ok...maybe they're not quite axioms.

What's indisputable though is the special place March 9th and Brooklyn holds in the consciousness and ethos of Hip-Hop. And in turn, why so many Rap junkies, Hip-Hop heads, and admirers of the culture feel such a deep connection to the person that intrinsically links art, event, and place: The Notorious B.I.G.

March 9th has become one of those days that shows you how dope Hip-Hop really is. The date commemorates the passing of our icon; but we spend the day going so hard celebrating and enjoying his life, accomplishments, and overall genius.

And accordingly, March 9th becomes a day where we get all types of goodies. Some are perpetual, like Mister Cee goes in on Hot 97. New traditions arise, like #biggieday becomes a trending topic. New jewels are dropped, like where the inspiration for the "Detroit players" line in Hypnotize comes from (Side note: dream hampton puts us ON this year...and did it from a very intimate part of herself...we all should be grateful).

It truly has become a beautiful thing. March 9th exemplifies the prophetic power within the phrase Life After Death.

But the most moving (and celebrated) aspect of the day's commemorations is the music. The endless recitation of Biggie lines forces every listener to reflect on the power of his words. Actor Will Smith once said that Big's 1st album, Ready To Die, was comparable to Richard Wright's Native Son in that both "should be studied in psychology classes to understand the plight of the black male in the inner city." Indeed the only voice that could merge rap and Bigger Thomas together was named by NPR as one of the 50 greatest of all time. In fact the totality of Big's artistry still inspires current MCs: Jay Electronica recently said that the Ghost of Christopher Wallace is "more than just the rhyme and the skill," but that it allows you to tap into the "spirit of the person."

Who's more the spirit of Brooklyn than B.I.G.? The Notorious B.I.G. is so Brooklyn. But how does today's Brooklyn compare to his?

Of course when it comes to Hip-Hop, BK still goes hard. Jay Decoded much of the complexity and confusion held by the public about Brooklyn and the low-income urban Black neighborhoods there and throughout the U.S. Musically, artists like Fabolous, Maino, Joell Ortiz and many others still let us know where Brooklyn at.

But in so many ways Brooklyn has become a very different place. Different from Mike Tyson's Brooklyn. Different than Sal's Pizza or the Huxtable's Brooklyn.

Borough President Marty Markowitz calls it the New Brooklyn:

"Brooklyn is changing and it's for the better! Change has come in the form of new stores, revamped neighborhoods and the fastest job growth in New York City. Today's Brooklyn is not your parents Brooklyn."

This "New Brooklyn" is one where the distinction between "DUMBO" and Fort Greene slowly erodes. Where Park Slope and Williamsburg are ever expanding. Where "Black Brooklyn" and Medgar Evers College are in deep struggle and contestation over how (and why) public higher education should serve a place and its residents. And where Atlantic Yards and Coney Island see a sports arena and a hotel as economically beneficial for the community.

Indeed you could call much of this revamped; or you could call it gentrified. But honestly, I'm the last person who should depict the details and essence between the "old" and "new" Brooklyn. However, they unequivocally speak to a more salient event: the making of a "new" New York City. But more troubling, is what is happening to the people of the "old" New York City. How do they fit? Where do they go? What is the color, the quality, the conditions, of their lives? What is the texture of the social fabric that makes the image and lived experience of New York City so unique?

It is a tension felt throughout the boroughs, communities, and neighborhoods. We see its passion and courage when residents pressure the City Council to seriously examine legislating a living wage, or to protect and to stand up for the purpose and function of ethnic studies at CUNY schools. Its vision is illuminated when people fight for a community-based model of planning and development. And its astute acumen is exhibited when it opposes large-chain retailers like Wal-Mart, arguing that these businesses are detrimental to their neighborhoods.

We also see the gloom of the "new" New York City. Where the richest man in the city can tyrannically decide to stay in power.

The changing New York City is emblematic of a changing urban America, and a changing country. But who's telling this story?

The sentiment; the essence; the spirit; the struggle; the emotion; the brilliance; the joy; the depth---how can we capture this? How does today's young Black male process Bigger Thomas' historical narrative, now living in the "Age of Obama"? Does the reality of a Black President impact their plight? What are the emerging communities and who are the people in it?

Who's willing to say I Got A Story To Tell?

The legacy of March 9th is that it demonstrates the power of storytelling. The Notorious B.I.G. compels a generation past and present to dive into his nuance and his specter. And every year on March 9th, we commemorate his life through the tradition of story-telling: pictures, remixes, drawings, mixtapes, tribute songs, and so much more---some essay form, some auditory, some in 140 characters or less.

March 9th reminds us of Hip-Hop's third axiom: the tradition of storytelling.

There are many lessons to learn from this tradition, and Biggie. We've certainly recognized the danger that weapons, violence, and "gangsterism" have both in ideas and in bodily action---and no doubt the sadness and lost we suffer when they all come together and manifest themselves in senseless murder and tragedy. The sexism; the violence against women (and any person); the most persistent challenge to mainstream Hip-Hop is breaking its objectifying and hierarchical expressions of gender relations. And the materialism (and frankly, borderline idolatry) we have of high end designer fashion certainly complicates the pursuit of a robust spirituality that emphasizes the principles of sacrifice, selflessness, and justice. Most definitely, the Hip-Hop tradition of storytelling includes the sharp critique of our missteps and misgivings; our faults and failures; our demons and indulgences; and a unrelenting call to become better.

But the lesson we can draw from what happens every March 9th, is another power the third axiom holds: it calls us to action. Our hyper-activity on this day should be seen as a ringing reminder that we must be actively engaged in creating the next stories that will be told, just as much as we are engaged in telling our history. Brave New Voices, writers, artists, scholars, academics, and others must move past the beloved community. We must form a brave community, one equipped with enough skill, and that is daring enough, to fearlessly confront this "new" New York City and all the other stories being made--from unions to education; from AmeriCorps to public housing. In the words of our Poet Laureate:

"Stay far from timid/only makes moves if your hearts in it/and live the phrase Sky's the Limit."

Rest in Peace, The Notorious B.I.G.

Michael Partis
michaelpartis@gmail.com

Can Education Help The Rat Get Away From Poverty?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 04:55:00 +0000

Allen Jones, New York Times October 10, 2010

"Can Education Help The Rat Get Away From Poverty?" Returning to Allen Jones and Mark Naison's The Rat That Got Away

I was recently asked to revisit my 2009 review of The Rat That Got Away, and create a longer essay on how it speaks to current issues in U.S. politics and public policy. I took on Jones' story again, but this time reading it against today's fierce debates over public education and community development; the fissure in policy over how to address poverty; and the academic battle royalty over the validity, utility, and relevance of the "culture of poverty" concept. Below is the new piece. Please feel free to share thoughts and feedback in the comments section, and also to look at the earlier review as well.

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.”

When President Barack spoke those words during his 2010 State of the Union address, it marked a profound shift in how education and poverty is handled in the United States. It highlighted what has become a catch-phrase for researchers and practitioners over recent years--“best practices.” The President made clear (here and in several other remarks and speeches) that poverty reduction was best sought through academic attainment and achievement.

Yet, Obama’s statement followed in the footsteps of a prior political, ideological, and policy approach to poverty. It parallels President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society and “War on Poverty” platforms for economic improvement; and as Johnson did, puts education at the center of its social project. When campaigning for the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Johnson said before Congress, "Poverty has many roots, but the taproot is ignorance."

Since Obama’s State of the Union, education and poverty have been two of the most hotly contested, often-discussed topics in 2010. To understand the ways in which it has been talked about would require a lengthy “who, what, where, why, how” explanation. The nascent, and most pervasive, themes though have been: who receives the highest quality education in this country, and how does poverty stay entrenched in certain places and certain people for so long.

Bluntly though, the conversation truly focuses on: why do so many schools in poor Black and Brown communities perform so poorly by most testing and assessment measures? Why do so many urban Black and Brown neighborhoods experience overwhelming economic poverty seemingly across generations?

Two heroes have emerged as the answer to these vexing issues: charter schools and the Harlem Children Zone.

Charter schools have been at the center of a long, protracted battle over the nature of schools---both their educational purpose and organizational structure. Its history is intrinsically linked to the desegregation of public schools; battles over community control of school boards and operations; arguments against and for vocational education; and the politics of mayoral control. Charters enter the educational debates of today through what have been two polarizing, divisive topics: teachers and their unions; and the privatization of public education.

And so for the first time since 1983 and the publication of A Nation At Risk, education reform has been a central issue in public life. It shook up media mainstream network media: NBC hosted a Fall Education Summit, devoting a week of on-air programming, webcasts, and town halls to focusing on education reform. Education has become such a rallying cry Oprah dedicated two shows in one week to the topic. Casted as protagonists this time have been “crusaders”; advocates that are characterized as tough and taking no prisoners like school superintendents Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, and proactive elected officials such as Newark Mayor Corey Booker. There are the wealthy entrepreneurs (i.e. Facebook founder and C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg) and business moguls (i.e. Bill Gates) who’s money and clout raise the profile of affiliated schools and educators; and entertainers such as R&B artist John Legend who attempt to engage the debate through social commentary and urgency, while also providing clout, publicity, and finance similar to Zuckerberg and Gates. Legend has stated widely that “education reform is the civil rights issue of our time.”

Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) and its CEO Geoffrey Canada have become among the most recognizable faces in this “poverty-fighting” work, with its most important affirmation coming from President Obama, who during his 2008 Presidential campaign said Harlem Children’s Zone is “an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck antipoverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children.” So convinced is Obama, he included it in his 2010 Fiscal Year Budget Proposal, with $10 million dollars set aside for twenty cities to replicate HCZ’s “Promise Neighborhoods” model. Within the HCZ model, charter schools named Promise Academies push the organization’s academic agenda and are at the center of an important question provocatively put forth in a recent Brookings Foundation report: do social programs make a difference in educational outcomes? Simply, should we spend federal money on them?

Thus the academic performance of Promise Academies and other charters are linked to arguments over what should be the social investment a country, a government, makes in addressing inequality and inequity. Does a “rising tide lift all boats”? Do we need an activist government to engage and interject in these issues, or is there a need to recalibrate our politics?

Academics take on these questions in a number of ways. Theoretical concepts are abound to think through these issues, and also serve as analytical tools for looking at how societies and specific institutions and actors handle them. Civil society, participatory democracy, and neo-liberalism are a few of many that come to mind.

But among the world of pundits, experts, public figures, practitioners, and theoreticians, within the sphere of activists and advocates, there is continuous need to temper what we think, what we can abstract, and what we can extrapolate, from what literally is happening. Of course journalists are charged with this role and we depend on their periodicals to inform us. An ethnographer provides a similar service, and perhaps pushes our understanding further through analysis and intellectual rigor (provided their account incorporates those things in the first place). And to not limit our resources, the same can be provided by artists, performers, photographers and an array of others.

What has happened? In many regards this questions becomes paramount when looking at the context of a particular social issue. While poverty, “anti-poverty,” and education have been weaved together as a framework for lifting up those at the "bottom," the weaving still resonates with less comfortable connotations: namely, deficiency and pathology.

Indeed a work that can inform our understanding of this matrix of social, political, and economic issues is imperative. Especially a work that shines light on the contours of populations much discussed about, but not heard from in their proper context. James Baldwin has wrote that, "History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about." To not keep them anonymous, and to recognize that they are not voiceless, the elimination of “silence” has been an important project of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The attention we pay to their lives, how we appropriate their stories, and the way we incorporate they themselves into discussions and thinking on poverty, education, and other social issues is what must be considered.

(For a detailed review of The Rat That Got Away, please read my Summer 2009 review here.)

What does Jones’ memoir tell us about education, poverty, and poor urban neighborhoods? What can we take away from his story that can inform how we see and act in our world today?

What’s striking about The Rat That Got Away is the tangential way formal schools and institutions touch Jones’ life. He was dismissed or transferred from several South Bronx public schools throughout his secondary education. Interestingly though, two things stand out from Jones’ writing. One, he does not blame his teachers, or any of the school’s staff, for his short comings. There weren’t “inadequate” or “inefficient;” he does not suffer from “blame the school” syndrome. Second, and most interesting, is how a series of enrichment programs and out-of-tine educational activities supported him. Indeed it was the people who ran these programs and facilitated those activities that are the greatest influences in his life.

Jones and a majority of those in his neighborhood were not “Waiting for Superman.” Their life-chances were not determined by “The Lottery.” But a comprehensive, concerted set of programs and activities staffed mostly by people from the local neighborhood provided skills and exposure Jones uses later in life to negotiate structural inequalities and social stratification. Disorganization was not a hallmark of his community, and formal education was not the sole reason he avoided poverty in adulthood.

How we analyze life outcomes; how we understand life trajectories; the ways we formulate indicators, best practices, and solutions; these are three areas that must be given careful consideration. There will not be any one solution to poverty. Indeed any approach will need to be comprehensive and concerted. Schools are vital and education is invaluable; knowledge and learning are critical to understanding, improving, preserving, and accepting a complex set of issues within our society. This is something that often cannot be seen in a two year demonstration. It cannot be quantified and assessed by analyzing inputs and outputs; and a cost-benefit analysis cannot evaluate all benefits that can and will be gleaned. Allen Jones’ life implies this to us. Not a few years at a time, but over the course of time--the course of a lifetime. How we problem-solve current issues while keeping sight of incremental improvement needs to be interjected in our present discussions on educational reform.

“Place” situates the geographic dimensions of our experiences. Urban neighborhoods with larger Black and Brown populations are colored with particular dimensions, which temper the Black urban experience. Indeed it is different, and how we handle difference requires careful consideration. Jones describes South Bronx neighborhoods and a Patterson Houses’ community that in the 1950s and 1960s were multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural; with two-parent families; and residents that were poor, working-poor, and working-class. This mosaic composition is counter to popular generalization about urban poverty and urban communities. Further, it should provide an important intervention for more diachronic analysis of urban neighborhoods: again, what’s happened over time? While discussions over evolution, diffusion, and the like may seem either cliché or too bounded, the importance of theoretical framework must be emphasized. Memoirs such as Mr. Jones’ are important for historical accounts; ethnography, journalism, and all types of “recording” and “capturing” become the archive. The research though, must not betray a commitment to systemic analysis. Place is an important lens because it gives specificity and location, which allows us to measure internal and external dynamics; it is an important variable in social reproduction, and an important site for the study of social relationships. This addresses one of the most pressing questions for policy-makers and others concerned about poverty--causation. What causes poverty? Why are people poor? The considerations mentioned above must be incorporated into this topic, and also into how we research, think, and analyze these questions.

Finally, we need to examine cultural explanations, and how the culture concept is discussed and conceptualized. Accepting that our society is pluralistic does not relegate us to accepting relativism. Nor does seeking to understand behavior and thought imply or require being reductional, normative, or heterogenizing. Egalitarian notions of multi-cultural harmony must be tempered and critiqued, but need not be dismissed. Difference and power have the ability to bound and separate. But a polemical stance of unity and togetherness should not be characterized as immature. Does not the work on identity politics, social movements, and human rights provide insight on how to carefully analyze these issues, while still providing some sense how the actors involved see and negotiate the complexities?

As culture of poverty begins to reappear as an explanation of poverty, it is paramount that these issues of handling difference, boundedness, pluralism, and relativism be thoughtfully and rigorously interrogated. Pathology may be ill-equipped for explaining human behavior. But we must not be afraid to seek answers to the question why; to look for causes; to provide explanations; to strive to solve the problems of contemporary society, and in this case urban neighborhoods with high poverty and poorly performing schools. We also must not fetish “difference” to the point where it prevents us from looking at a politics of togetherness. And we cannot be so vulgar in solutions that apathy, paternalism, and deficiency mar our way forward.

Michael Partis

December 15th, 2010

REALLY Understanding Black and Brown Boys Educational Achievement

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:19:00 +0000

"A Call For Change"-My Response to the Council on Great City Schools Report on Black Males Educational "Failures"

There have been a series of commentaries and articles discussing the Council on Great City Schools recent report on young Black Males educational achievement. Below is my response to the report, and two excellent pieces: a great article by Mike Green in the Huffington Post, and a sharp commentary from Dr. Ivory A. Toldson on the Soros Foundation's Open Society blog.

I resoundingly agree with Mr. Green on the type of education we need--one that develops an agile, analytical mind. Here I feel he builds on something that I think Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) have correctly identified--the correlation between early childhood education and skill attainment. This connection must continue to be emphasized and worked on, and it also reinforces the greater need: to view educational outcomes as a "P-16" continuum--from preschool to college graduation. Further, it is important to create social programs that view child development as beginning at zero--translating to cultivating parenting skills during pregnancy.

In order to link social programs, educational achievement, and youth development into employment, careers, and better overall life outcomes for young Black and Brown men, we must begin to approach the situation strategically. However, it is certainly an urgent matter, and this is what makes Green's "from march to race" analogy apropos. In order to prepare these young men for our current job market we must be clear: it functions in a "the survival of the fittest" manner. While in the long-term we may want to create an economy and employment structure which does not reproduce inequity and uneven outcomes, we must prepare them for our current social reality. A radical change to curriculum and educational purpose could prepare students for the current job market, while simultaneously giving them the tools to conceive a different social structure (whether that be reform, revolution, or reviving older ideas). Regardless, both Green and the report point out that we are tragically under-preparing Black and Brown young men...from birth.

To that extent, we must look at how social reproduction occurs within Black and Brown communities. In that light we also must have sharp assessments of what our measures, statistics, and data means--what does it tell us exactly about groups, populations, communities, people. It is important to carefully explain and account for difference, without resorting to deficiency models and frameworks. Dr. Toldson correctly provides prospective on the meaning of the Black boys' "failures" by juxtaposing it with the "failures" of all U.S. students in the aggregate. Considering these educational outcomes, the Council's report is important for challenging political apathy and silence, calling for strategizing at the communal level, and impelling self-determination.

Yet not only does the report contain the methodology flaws and biases Toldson's points out, I think it also fails to account for the strong influence politics, legislation, and policy has had on creating this situation. The Council identifies how government officials at every level have failed to adequately address the plight of Black male students, but do not put forth an incisive analysis of how these stakeholders have either created or exacerbated the situation.

At minimum there are strong correlations between poverty and educational attainment; how this intersects with race, class, and ethnicity is an important socio-economic point, and directly tied to political decision-making. This is not deductive; one can point to the work of NYU's Pedro Noguera (and many others) to trace this trajectory. The ways poverty is perpetuated and inequality is accepted speaks to how entrenched racism and prejudice is structurally and ideologically. This recent analysis on U.S. dropout rates saliently illuminates these factors

http://www.patchworknation.org/content/where-dropout-rates-are-highest-and-lowest

In short, these complex social realities will need focused political attention, social action, and nuanced planning. This piece, along with the report, hopefully is a start.

Michael Partis
Research Associate
Howard Samuels Center-CUNY Graduate Center
New York, NY 10016
http://www.howardsamuelscenter.org/

Cultural Anthropology Doctoral Student
CUNY Graduate Center
michaelpartis.blogspot.com

It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:10:00 +0000

Recently I was asked to participate in the inaugural installment of the new City Limits web feature, City Conversations. I, along with several community activists, academics, and young people, wrote about the different effects hip-hop music has on New York City's youth today, more than 30 years after the art form first burst onto the scene.

We were asked to response to an article by Mustafa Sullivan about the negative effects of mainstream Hip-Hop music. Ms. Sullivan's article, and the abbreviated version of my response can be read here.

Below is the full length version of my response. The essay is entitled "One Card in a Full Deck." Thank you in advance for reading. Please feel free to post comments & responses! And do not hesitate to email thoughts and feedback. Peace.

One Card in a Full Deck: Understand Hip Hop and Political Change

By Michael Partis

“America got a thing for this gangster shit/They love it…”
50 Cent-Hustler’s Ambition

“Scarface the movie did more than Scarface the rapper to me/so that ain’t the blame for all the shit that’s happened to me”
Jay-Z-Ignorant Shit

To Mustafa and the brothers and sisters at Sistas and Brothas United,

I am a South Bronx resident: born there, raised there, and still living there. I am a young adult who’s coming of age was embedded in the post-Biggie/post-Tupac/hip-hop-becomes-corporate historical moment. And now I am an academic researcher who is deeply concerned with how the political context of neighborhoods and communities interact with the world-view of the young people who live in those places. It is for those reasons that I admire, respect, and appreciate your piece on Hip-Hop music. Your position, your voice, and your vision are desperately needed if we are going to seriously embark on incorporating Hip-Hop into a progressive, political movement.

I love your commitment to social justice. I love the mission which Sistas and Brothas United undertakes, and how it continues the organizing and advocacy tradition of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. In an approach which is intrinsic to the social justice tradition, I want to critically reflect on a few of the points you bring up in your article. In the spirit of love and respect, and in the spirit of being committed to creating a just society, I will also challenge you.

You have eloquently laid out the critical contexts and questions at hand:

Hip Hop music and Hip Hop culture has not only penetrated the daily workings of the global world, but has also profoundly impacted the public’s understandings of poverty, artistic expression, and the worldview of Black and Brown youth across the globe. The questions we face looking forward, are how can young people channel the culture’s transformative power; and how do progressive activists & community organizers address the negative aspects of the music—plainly, how can this complicated social phenomenon effect positive political change?

You talk exclusively about Hip-Hop music—specifically mainstream Hip-Hop music. I want to expand the conversation to also consider Hip-Hop culture, and for us to seriously meditate on where Hip-Hop music comes from. What are its origins?

Mainstream Hip-Hop has never been overly interested in “consciousness.” Mainstream Hip-Hop has never been overwhelmingly interested in political issues. It is important that we are clear about the history of Hip-Hop music, and not romanticize it. A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, and De La Soul were not a part of mainstream Hip-Hop. They did not sell as many records and were not as commercially successful as say 50 Cent, Ja Rule, DMX or the other rappers that came to fame in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Those artists represent Hip-Hop music’s corporate turn: marketable, sellable, and most importantly, profitable. They were incredibly popular to the general music consumer, broke records for album sales, and brought Hip-Hop music to Top 40 radio. “In the Club,” “Holla, Holla,” and “Where My Dogs At” is mainstream Hip-Hop. Not “Bonita Applebum,” “Fight the Power,” or “Me, Myself, and I.”

The most commercially successful and profitable Hip-Hop artists were not firebrands for activism and political action. Mainstream Hip-Hop is Run DMC; LL Cool J; Beastie Boys; Tupac; Biggie; Eminem; P Diddy; Jay-Z; Kanye West—artists and groups never associated with being political organizers, and who’s music and lives are deeply complicated and nuanced. Rather, they are artists and groups that have always been associated with: sex, drugs, and money; having fun, partying, and enjoying the best that life has to offer; rising from humble beginnings to enjoying luxurious and lavish lifestyles; and exhibiting a gangster bravado and social-defiance that often feeds our interest/obsession with “the bad guy.”

We may want mainstream Hip-Hop to be Dead Prez, Talib and Mos, Immortal Technique, and Common…but, it isn’t. Mainstream Hip-Hop music is commercially successful, profitability, and marketable—not revolutionary or political in the way we often think.

Thus, we have to consider what the roots of Hip-Hop music are. Hip-Hop music’s origins start with the party. It is dancing, DJs, and partying. The music is the fusion of dancehall, funk, and salsa. It is the innovation of blending two records together; of playing only the “break beats;” of extending certain parts of a song so people could dance longer. Hip-Hop music is the central component to break-dancing. The sound, the music, is made for you to dance; or nod your head. This is what Kool Herc and the early Hip-Hop DJs of the 70’s where trying to accomplish; this was Hip-Hop’s foundation. It was the party that Sugar Hill Gang gave us in “Rapper’s Delight” (1979). It was the party that the Beastie Boys fought for the right to have.

And maybe, that’s not a bad thing.

The roots of Hip-Hop culture come from the pinnacle of governmental disregard for the urban Black and Latino poor. Hip-Hop culture rises from the shadows of “benign neglect” and “planned shrinkage.” It is the outcome of President Ford telling New York City to “drop dead.” It is the result of fiscal crisis, tickle down economics, and neoliberalism. It is at the epicenter of the post-Civil Rights, post-Black Power, post-Vietnam War historical moment; a moment of disillusion, social reorganization, and political re-prioritization. Socio-economically, Hip-Hop’s origins come from the worst of times. Was it “Great Depression” or Jim Crow south bad…probably not. Was it a time of incredible hardship, struggle, and pain…absolutely.

How do we balance struggle and joy? How do we remain committed to a progressive political agenda, yet reconcile the problematic aspects of Hip-Hop music?

First we must always remember the poignant words of Dead Prez: “It’s bigger than Hip-Hop.”

It is not mandatory that we use Hip-Hop music to address the poverty, racism, and economic dislocation that Sistas and Brothas United want to address. The issues that confront the youth of the South Bronx, and ghettoes and hoods across the country, are not caused by a 50 Cent song; even the most vulgar, most despicable, most immoral Hip-Hop song, does not induce unemployment or budget cuts. These issues have a much larger context, and it is important that we always remember that. The decision-making process in the United States has many players, stakeholders, and operatives; people that effect policy, legislation, and political decisions, and that create the context of our neighborhoods, our communities, and our people. That reality…is bigger than Hip-Hop.

It is critically important that our young people understand that context. It is even more important for us organizers to teach young people about these systems; about this context; to help them and ourselves disentangle this complicated system of interactions, perceptions, and realities. Mentors and organizers have to teach young people that we can effect these systems; that we are actors; that we can affect the context, and make it our own.

And most importantly, we have to realize that the problems of the urban poor are multi-dimensional. Again, it’s bigger than Hip-Hop.

I am not arguing that we ignore Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop culture can play a critical role in our organizing. This is especially true because as you pointed out, it is a part of the daily life of many youth in our communities; it is fundamental in shaping their world-view. And for these very reasons I agree with you—we can’t allow the sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, gratuitously vulgar, unnecessarily violent thread of Hip-Hop music to continue unopposed. It has tremendous impact on the psycho-social health of our young people, and on how others perceive urban communities and the people who live there—it affects what they understand to be the social reality of these communities. The reality is more than pimps and drug dealers; or gangster rap. The reality includes Sistas and Brothas United, or Fordham University’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Or the Bronx Brotherhood Project (BBP), a college readiness and mentorship program for Black and Latino high school males which I co-created and co-direct. The reality is rooted in what is called “the beautiful struggle:” a confluence of pain, joy, hardship, resistance, strength, community, organizing, and support.

And that is bigger than Hip-Hop music. That is the root of Hip-Hop culture. While that may not be the mainstream understanding of Hip-Hop, it is a profound ethos that can realized if we deeply study the culture; if we have a clear understanding of the context behind the culture, and the origins of the music.

It’s Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message.” Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Tupac’s “Brenda Had a Baby.” Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” Biggie’s “Juicy” or “Everyday Struggle.” Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation. Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life.”

It is also the New York State Senate; City Hall; the Comptroller; the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation; the Right to the City; “The Race to the Top;” “Promise Neighborhoods;” charter schools; diminishing tax-bases; fiscal issues; job creation; finance capital; Community Voices Heard; and a long list that goes on.

The point is: social change does not happen in a vacuum, it takes a remarkable amount of actors and interactions. We cannot have singular explanation for our communities’ problems; we can’t have singular solutions either.

I admire you all for taking the first steps towards creating solutions. I look forward to learning more about your organization’s planning, process, implementation, and desired outcomes. I will continue to do my part to create impact, and work towards social change. And let us continue to think through how to reach our youth, and what role Hip-Hop can play.

Wordlife.

Turning Drum Majors into a Band

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Below is the text to a talk I gave last night at Fordham University. Please feel free to leave comments and thoughts. M.P.

April 28, 2010

Turning Drum Majors into a Band: Engaged Scholarship, Community Focus, and Praxis
Michael Partis

Presented at the Fordham University (Rose Hill) 2010 African American Studies Department/Urban Studies Thesis Dinner

I first want to thank Dr. Naison for inviting me to speak here tonight. It is an honor and privilege to share the podium with the outstanding student/scholars that will speak after me. This is also a special occasion for me personally, as I have the opportunity to speak at this dinner as a Fordham graduate; only a few years removed from me being here as an undergraduate student, presenting my own research.

In one of his most noted public statements against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Dr. King once said, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscious leaves me no other choice.” This quote spoke to me when I heard it again a few weeks ago; I felt it was speaking to what I should talk to you all about tonight. I want to talk a bit about consciousness; about having a “moral compass;” about how important it is.

My time at Fordham was formational for the development of my social consciousness. I’m sure my readings of Kant and my lessons on utilitarianism had something to do with it. But unequivocally, a major factor was my academic and intellectual engagement. There are certain moments that keenly stand out. I remember once Dr. James Marsh, who recently retired from the Philosophy department, telling my class: “If you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention.” I vividly remember the October 2007 morning when I sat in Dr. Judith Green’s classroom and listen to her read aloud James Baldwin’s "A Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation," a text that changed my life, and my view of family, race, and history.

But I can sincerely say the deepest academic impact I felt was from my coursework as an African American Studies major. One of the first lessons I learned was from Dr. Mangum, when he had us read the first two chapters of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That small snippet of what is no doubt an immensely popular book, changed my historical lens. To me it wasn’t “revisionist history.” It was literally the story of the untold; something slightly akin to what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls Silencing the Past. But the whole discussion in that class planted those first seeds of intellectual curiosity in my mind: recognition that there are many stories, many histories untold. The importance not being that there are many stories, and not to be overwhelmed with the task of uncovering them, but to think of history in the way Baldwin once said: "History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about."

For those of us in Black Studies and Urban Studies, we know all too well how many of the “anonymous” are Black folks and how they are often in urban areas. While the Census may find them difficult to count, those of us doing the work, those who are engaged and entrenched in those communities, are very familiar. This is something I learned through my senior thesis on public housing residents in the South Bronx; through interviewing and interacting with people; through recognizing one of the most important “methods” you need is the ability to listen. It is also something I learned about through my relationship with the Bronx African American History Project. The Project taught me that not only does your work matter; but the people you interact with…they matter even more so. How to allow them to speak for themselves, and to authentically capture the context of their lives; the environment, conditions, and ethos of where they’re at and where they come from--this is the task. As Sly and the Family Stone tell us, it’s about the “Everyday People.” I developed a consciousness about these folks, and wanted my academic background to tell me more about them.

Of course the irony is that there is no shortage of academic literature on Blacks in the U.S. or U.S. urban cities. My coursework with the Urban Studies and the African-American Studies department faculty taught me that the hard way. It also taught me that to truly understand American democracy, American history, the conventional stories that are told, and the people (all the people) who make it up, you have to dig deep; you have to read vociferously; your intellectual appetite has to be ferocious. I have to thank scholars like Dr. Naison and Dr. Purnell who not only showed me these requirements but forced me to practice these traits. To be a urban U.S. scholar or to study Blacks in the U.S. you have to understand that it is a deeply complicated, nuanced history. That there are complex historical processes with profound contemporary meaning-- and to study them in graduate school, or to become a policy maker, or to do local level community work, you have to have deep knowledge about these places and about their people. You must be steeped in social reality.

I want to end my talk tonight with a bit about social reality, and why this is so important to consciousness. Because social reality is what we live in right?

The reading, the writing, the scholarship we seek to produce (and that you tremendous seniors have produced for tonight) has to be grounded in social reality. It is important that we engage in praxis, even in its simplest form: combining theory with practice; trying to understand how the world works processually and historically, and attempting to make a world build on justice, equity, and dignity. Our study of people and places teach us that this is not some esoteric, abstract idea, something that we are removed from. But rather it is something that is intrinsic, engrained in the U.S. experience. It’s as real as the race riots in Tulsa and East St. Louis in 1917 and 1918. It’s as real as the great flood that hit New Orleans in 1927. It’s as real as the community organizing and political engagement in places like Harlem by Garvey, Clayton Powell Jr., and Arturo Schomburg in the 1920’s and 30’s. It’s as real as the multi-racial organizing done by groups like CORE during the Civil Rights Movement. It’s as real as the urban rebellions of the 1960’s. We’ve studied and continued to promote just how real this history is; to make the struggles of people and peoples not anonymous, not silent; but to continually raise their voices collectively with ours--to keep this history in the consciousness of the public.

What are today’s social realities? A few events can illuminate some things. The deaths of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Officer Omar Edwards tell us something about police interaction with Blacks today. Earlier this month, Newark, NJ celebrated its first homicide free month in over 40 years. This year, Chicago's only public all-male, all-African-American high school has 100 percent of its first senior class (107 students) accepted to four-year colleges. On Easter Sunday this year at New York’s Times Square, 33 were arrested and 4 people shot--the arrestees being mostly Black and Latino, with the alleged impetus being some gang ritual that has become commonplace every Easter Sunday. In Chicago there was the tragic death of Derrion Albert in 2009, and earlier this April a rash of violence in Black neighborhoods in the city’s South Side that resulted in 41 people being shot in 50 hours. On April 15 and April 16, during one 12 hour period, seven people were killed and 15 others were wounded in a wave of shootings across Chicago. Incidents such as these, and the rising rates of murder in the city, have lead some city politicians to call for the National Guard to come help control the violence.

I think the recent events in Chicago give us an important moment to pause, and to think about a urban city with tremendous historical significance for understanding the journey of Blacks in the U.S.; and about the issues people dealing in the urban context should consider. I want to share a small bit of a reflection from a young man who is currently volunteering with City Year, and is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s South Side:

“Chicago has become a war zone, and it will not change anytime soon. The past 3-4 years have gotten progressively worse because each year, the people doing the most crime are getting younger. Its not even gangs recruiting younger people or all that, but these kids have nothing to fear, no one to influence them enough not to do these things, and have no value for life. And when these issues and feelings are felt, these kids in Chicago are not going to hesitate to shoot yo ass. They know the camera lights in their neighborhood don't work, and they will not get caught, and if they do, are too young to go to jail anyway.

I was listening to a kid on the train and it was SOOOOO sad to hear his lack of value for life (his or anyone elses). For 20 minutes he said he's happy to have made it to 21, but since nobody loved him growing up he just doesn't care; he's gonna sell drugs forever; so all he has is drugs, robbing, shooting, jail, and rap. He said he would kill anybody for any reason they gave him. And he wasn't one of those mad teenagers venting, the boy was talking normal to somebody he was on the train with. Boy said he doesn't care whether he goes to heaven or hell. A bunch of things, and it was so sad because he's one of many that feel the same way. To hear the boy talk was so sad I wanted to reach out to him...but I didn't.”

What struck me most about what my friend said was not what he wasn’t doing, or what others were doing…but what was I doing. My Senior Thesis; my academic research; my background; the vast amount of knowledge I’ve built; and the ridiculous amount of work I’ve done in graduate school so far. Those are a part of praxis. How am I enacting the other part?

And so I thought back over the work I’ve done the past few years: going to Selma, Alabama and symbolically crossing the Edmund Petitus Bridge; doing relief-work and community organizing in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans; creating and directing a mentorship program for young Black and Latino high school males in New York; working on college prep and college awareness workshops for poor and low income students; sitting in on BAAHP interviews and traveling across the Bronx with Dr. Naison to hear the stories and see the work of incredible “everyday people.” I realized this was my consciousness: my personal experiences, and how they interact and share with others; the stories; the actual, physical people; and how they connect with what I’ve read and what I’ve debated in the Black Student Union or in classrooms. That’s the consciousness that propels us to really think critically about the world, and to act on what we know, and build on what others have done. Like Barack said in his famous “Joshua Generation” speech in Selma a few years ago: “I’m here because somebody marched.”

I close with one last word from Dr. King. Shortly before he passed he gave his “Drum Major” sermon, talking about the inclination to lead out of desire for recognition and glory. He said we should take that inclination, that desire to lead, to be “drum majors,” and orientate it towards a higher moral commitment. Rev. King said, “if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness.”

As a fellow thesis presenter, I say let your scholarship, your hard study, let that help build your consciousness and don’t forget to share it. Let your interaction with folks, your engagement with community, let that guide your moral compasses. Allow your work to enable you to be “drum majors” for the important issues faced by people of African descent and in urban areas. I hope we can become a band that marches towards scholarship, service, and work that is in the name of justice.

Thank you.

The True Measure of Education

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:45:00 +0000

Below I've written a response to The Case of Myron Rolle, an article on the Liberator Magazine's blog. It is my rejection of narrow solutions and simple explanations; my attempt to debunk anecdotal evidence as the answer to large social problems. The answer to racial and economic inequality will not happen with one key, or through one door.

The Myron Rolle article attempts to link the need for greater Black achievement, with engaging in a variety of cultural and social activities: sports, reading, chess, etc. The argument being: engaging in varied social behaviors and environments shouldn't be associated with "acting White," but rather as the model for socio-economic success. Educational achievement is the way for Blacks to achieve social equality.

Here is my response to this argument and the article overall. It is time for us to be real about the purpose and value of education.

-------------

We need to debunk the "education as the silver bullet to all social inequality" solution. I say that not to imply that educational success needs to be devalued or de-emphasized, but to cease education being isolated as the most important tool for a just society. Bottom line: how many college educated people you know who don't have a job? Scarier: how many of them are the kids who worked hard; did the right thing; studied crazy; all to achieve that other sacred goal: a college degree.

My point is that educational success is deeply embedded in the whole of society---in a racial, political, economic, gendered context. These social factors profoundly shape "achievement." They are the difference between charter schools and "regular" public schools; between those schools and private schools; and between a "regular" public school in the South Bronx or East New York, and one in Scarsdale or Rockland County.

So when the author of this post exhorts their educational success, the fact that they went to a private school matters...a lot. Yes, they had a high level of self-determination. Yes, they had a committed support system. And yes, those are most often the same traits we see in successful athletes and sports at all levels. Certainly I can agree that we need to replicate those best outcomes to better the situation of our folk. But there are other factors that significantly effect "success:" our families; our parents' jobs; incomes; family histories; public policy, etc. Many people overcome these things, and God bless them. But overcoming hindrances is the exception, not the rule.

You eat three meals a day? Certainly helps you study longer. Drinking organic apple juice ($5.99 and up) instead of Top Pop sodas (50 cents to a $1 in a hood near you), is definitely better for your health and your attention span. You have money to call the plumber to fix your drainage problem; instead of being mad at the landlord because they refuse to address your roach infestation problem? Absolutely a physical and mental health difference right?

THOSE THINGS AFFECT EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES. Just as much as "good" teachers; and "focused" students.

The author neglects this, as do too many educators. As a group, we got to start looking at problems this way; instead of in compartmental ways.

Most importantly we certain need to shift to a group achievement paradigm. But I think this has to happen not in an "every one is smart" type of way, because promoting equality like this isn't always healthy. Fact is: everyone can't run as fast as Usain Bolt; play ball like Lebron; write as lucidly as Baldwin or Morrison; or community organize like Ella Baker. This is not to quell the audacity to aspire for greatness. But it's to recognize what you do have; what you can do; what you do well. Of course the line between settling and striving, or practicality and dreaming, is very thin. Bottom line though, is our people need a group achievement model, and this model must include...EVERYTHING: poets, musicians, mathematicians, environmentalist, medical doctors, dramatist, etc.

Instead of making "intelligent" relative, why not make the dignity of every person fundamental; and respect their humanity. Sanitation workers are as valuable and respected as the Fortune 500 exec. The social worker is just as dignified as the heart surgeon. Respecting the dignity of every person's humanity, and exhibiting that respect in how we view abilities and talents, that should be our avenue to thinking as a group.

Michael Partis
michaelpartis@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/DaHoodsAdvocate
http://michaelpartis.blogspot.com/

Book Review: Allen Jones and Mark Naison’s The Rat That Got Away

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:25:00 +0000

“A Public View of a Bronx Life”
Allen Jones and Mark Naison’s The Rat That Got Away

“…I stopped by the East Side Center to let PJ know how I was doing, and during the conversation he said to me. ‘I know you don’t tell those white folks where you are from.’”

“Of course, he was wrong about that, but his comment reinforced something I already knew instinctively: how important it is to be proud of where I come from. A lot of black people who cut ties with their past to be accepted in the white world end up belonging nowhere. Though I was no historian, I was becoming a pretty good student of history, and I concluded that without a sense of your past, you can lose yourself. Once I became conscious of this fact, I decided to claim everything I did, for better or for worse, and keep in touch with my street side, even when I was hanging with the rich and famous.

“My conversation with PJ…helped me understand who I was.”

Allen Jones
The Rat That Got Away

Allen Jones’ story is the type of inspirational, “coming of age” account that inner-city teachers, youth workers, and scholars clamor for. From growing up poor in the South Bronx’s Paterson housing projects, Jones finds economic and social success in Europe. A well-known New York City schoolboy street basketball standout, in adulthood he transitions into an accomplished German banker. And after several years as a local drug dealer, and participating in the emerging gangster culture of the late 1960’s, Allen shifts his attention back to the moral foundations that were central to his childhood: family and church. The events of Allen Jones’ life point to redemptive possibilities that can be achieved in spite of early life mistakes and obstacles. In this way, knowing who he is, can help today’s young people know who they can be.

But the totality of Jones’ years is more than a collection of life lessons which end result is an interesting memoir and a cautionary tale. The Rat That Got Away provides a narrative with a richer historical lens, and a deeper social meaning than pure “factoids” can provide. Emanating from the Bronx African American History Project's oral history research, Naison and Jones provide an account which is historically true but also intensely personal. The elements that make his memoir so powerful are the poignancy of his experiences and the complexity of his journey. What we learn about the South Bronx and its residents is powerful.

Allen Jones’ life in the projects dramatically alters the standard perception of public housing. The projects have become synonymous with the concept of urban decay, and its residents with the underclass—with both placing the blame on the people in public housing for the literal and figurative deterioration of its space into “ghettos.” The South Bronx, who according to Jill Jonnes’ South Bronx, Rising has the highest concentration of public housing in the United States of America, becomes emblematic of this plight.

The Rat That Got Away successfully resists and complicates that stereotype. Jones’ tells readers of a time when Patterson Projects was a site where families believed they could thrive. The Patterson Community Center, local churches, public schools, and the Police Athletic League ran an assortment of programs that sent kids like Jones “home exhausted” and without “the energy to get into trouble.” A group of mentors and professionals all ran these centers and programs. Most importantly, Jones tells us how these people and institutions were of and for the community; all located either inside or in close proximity to the housing projects, and ran by local residents.

The memoir’s valuable contribution is its insight on how neighborhoods and communities change. Jones life trajectory brings readers through the complicated and tumultuous decade of the 1960’s. Chapters like “The Summer of Unrest: 1964” and “The Streets are Alive: Summer of ‘65” allude to a well-documented time of strife and turmoil the country endured, and Jones’ story tells us how the hardships of the Vietnam War and proliferation of heroin use and sale are among the most devastating hits New York City’s Black and Latino communities take. The 70’s were no different, if not more extreme, as Jones narrates the tragic toll “Bitch Queen Heroin” takes on places like Patterson; and about people being “unable to resist the forces that were tearing apart black neighborhoods in the 70’s.” Most sharp is his observation on the matter: “America was killing us, but we were also killing each other.” Allen’s stories of selling and using drugs attest to this.

But it is here where the book’s strength emanates: the social commentary and personal reflection that accompanies the timeline. Allen Jones provides a memoir which speaks to the particular world-view, political consciousness, and life outlook of a Black man who lived through one of America’s most significant periods. After traveling through several European countries as a professional basketball player, Jones sees the place race occupies in other social environments. Upon his return, he juxtaposes his U.S. life with his Europe experiences, and with brutal honesty shares his thoughts:

“The home I was returning to had treated me, along with all my black brothers and sisters, both living and dead, like slaves, outlaws, second-class citizens, and worse. I knew that part of the reason for this was the history of our country. America had been founded by brutal, self-serving men who were concerned only about gaining wealth and didn’t care how they did it. They killed the Indians for their land and enslaved Africans to help them build their empire, and…I was seeing the long-term effects of what they did…Indians were not even seen in most American cities, and the vast majority of black people, when they were working at all, were doing the lowest-paying jobs. Racism was a way of life in America.”

This is an exemplar of The Rat That Got Away’s shining light: Jones' candor.

This frankness also unveils some of Jones’ shortcomings. When forced to recount his criminal endeavors into drug selling, robbery, and mugging, the author provides detailed reports of his exploits; and we the readers learn of a drug and crime culture very different from that which pervades every aspect of media today. Yet while being so giving of the details to his criminal activity (as should be expected in any memoir building itself as “honest”), Jones does not give us a full account of his personal decision-making process. He recounts how in his childhood peer pressure and the desire to be accepted by older “down brothers” pushed him to mischief and petty crimes. But those choices, and the serious ones that follow, are often clouded and subverted by claims of a “street code:”

“While I can’t defend my actions from that point, I can try to explain what was behind them. My way of thinking had become shaped completely by the street. I knew the rules I was living by and had gotten to the point where I didn’t question them. I knew that Gotham might seem like a high place, but it can become very small when you owe someone money on the streets. And I knew the maxim: ‘You pay or you die.’”

Does the way of the street engulf and envelope a person’s cognitive processes to the point where nothing outside exist? For those who have been completely immersed, bred, and nurtured in this lifestyle, perhaps. But for those, like Allen Jones, who’s frame of reference goes beyond this, and is steeped in parents, Christianity, and a family that taught him “good table manners and basic social graces,” the code of the street explanations are not enough. Much like Malcolm does in his autobiography, or Richard Wright’s depicts through Bigger in Native Son, the decision making process for Black men and their wrong choices have a greater context.

This is where we as scholars, social workers, community organizers, conscientious citizens, and all the sort need to incorporate The Rat That Got Away into our work. The parallels between what faced Allen Jones then and what faces young, poor people of color today are too strikingly similar. How do we cultivate young athletes beyond their physical activities, while also preparing them for their academic and social responsibilities? Can community institutions that train and employ its residents help keep a generation of young people on task and pointed towards success? How can we create organizations and maintain networks that provide assistance, mentorship, and guidance even when adolescents and teenagers stray down the wrong path? And are the prospects for success so dire for Blacks in our current urban landscape that leaving the community where you are from is the only option for success? This memoir gives plenty of fodder for us to delve into these profoundly important and pressing questions.

For these issues are not just important for those looking to “fix the South Bronx.” They are crucial for the creation of a more just, equitable society. Jones’ life gives testament to the redeeming power that determination, perseverance, and repentance can play in navigating through impoverished circumstances; and to the quite vital role that family, mentors, and community institutions play in shaping the lives of young Blacks. But his remarkable individual story is the impetus for questioning why such extraordinary feats are needed for not just success, but for survival; and not for just anybody, but for our society’s most racialized, stigmatized, and marginalized. The Rat That Got Away forces us to think about how to make this American society a more just place.

For about The Rat That Got Away
http://fordhampress.com/detail.html?id=9780823231027

For about Mark Naison's work and the Bronx African American History Project visit:
http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/bronx_african_americ/

and contact: naison@fordham.edu

Michael Partis
michaelpartis@gmail.com
www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com

From a Project Point of View

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:55:00 +0000

The South Bronx, and Public Housing.

The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor has brought both places to the public’s frame of reference over the past few weeks. That reference is also drenched in a confluence of negative stigmas, connotations, and stereotypes. This has allowed the South Bronx and the projects to proliferate in marginalization and isolation. Poverty and social neglect are realities that this American society refuses to acknowledge. Accountability for the condition of these places turns into a discourse on personal responsibility.

But the potential of a Supreme Court Justice rising from these circumstances both complicates and fits this narrative. It complicates how we think of public housing and its residents – it is not a Black Hole for potential, but rather it can cultivate the best and the brightest…just like the rest of the United States. And in this way it still fits the story we love to hear: an “American Dream” where anybody can make it; the cream rises to the top; and if she did it, then you can do it. While the New York Times chose to affirm this trope (see the May 29th article “Up and Out of NY’s Projects), the Washington Post opted to posit Sotomayor’s Bronxdale Housing Projects in a more sobering light. Rather than it being a beacon of opportunity, they confront the stark trouble and problems which Bronxdale’s residents endure today—some of recent, many for over a generation. As Biggie once poignantly told us, “Things done changed…”

As a former resident of Bronx public housing, a life-long resident of the South Bronx, and a researcher on contemporary life in Bronx public housing, this has been a conversation that has profoundly affected me; professionally and personally.
In response to the evolving and intensifying discussion of these issues in many circles, I wrote the following letter as a reflection of my time and my experiences, and as a testament to the shared experience and group ethos me and many of my peers were a part of.

In that spirit I hope this letter is a catalyst for the public and for concerned citizens and residents to think deeply about poverty, isolation, and treatment in our society. And that is pushes us to social and political action that improves access, opportunity, and justice in every economic, material, and theoretical facet of our country.

In Struggle,
Michael Partis
-------------------------------------

“Looking historically at Bronx public housing is quite jarring for someone who grew up there during the 90's. For seven years, I lived in the Castle Hill Projects. Moreover, a large amount of my friends are part of my peer group and came of age in NYC public housing: many in the Bronx (Mitchell, St. Mary's, Paterson, Edenwald, Soundview, Webster, Forest), and many in Harlem too (Polo Grounds, Wagner, Washington, Johnson, Taft).

We spent summers together in parks; winters in building hallways & stairwells. We tried to scam food stamps for real cash (before they turned them into EBT cards); played in basketball tournaments, drank Tropical Fantasy soda, and got into trouble. It wasn't deviant behavior or a culture of poverty. For us, it was life.

But for those like me who came up in the PJ's after the "Crack Era," the hood was the valley, the shadow, the death, and the Promised Land. No, it wasn't New Jack City. But drug dealing was unequivocally, unquestionably, the number one employer in the neighborhood. It certainly was partly ethos—in so many ways me, the friends I grew up with, and the people we all ran with, WANTED to hustle. Sure it was an easy economic opportunity. Nobody was paying to you work in their supermarket or bodega (immigrant adults did those jobs); nobody gave you a few dollars to sweep up hair at the barber shop; and "working class" families were few and far between. We weren't even in the working-class boat. Many of us lived on welfare; ate off Food Stamps; and grew up on WIC (all of this was before they started "Work-fare"). No doubt, some folks had disposable income from decent city or state jobs. But the rest of us were poor; like in poverty; like keeping the oven on to stay warm during the winter; making hot dogs and Chief Boyardee for dinner; and eating those terrible name brand knock-off WIC cereals for breakfast.

But a lot of us hustled because, it looked fly. It was cultural—not just an aesthetic, but also social capital. It built your street cred; built your name. It opened up business opportunities: you could expand your hustle to other buildings, down the street, and (if you were ready for war) other neighborhoods. And the younger you started, the better you could get. The hungrier you are; the greater your hustler's ambition; and the sooner you started stacking, you could make money and "get out."

Some people call it crime. We called it a dream. For us, it was our promise land.

Of course not everyone looked to this way out. But I'll refrain from going into the success stories of those who don't go this route. Sure you can overcome the poverty, and inequality, and become a Supreme Court nominee or a college graduate. But it doesn't mean the game should be set up that way...or that everyone can win.

This isn't a Donald Goines book, or a Terri Woods publication. It's not a screenplay written by the Hughes Brothers, or on set on some project bench. It's a story lived by many, embodied in many, and familiar to too many.

Scary thing is that this is the experiential for not just project kids, this is the experience for many U.S. kids who grow up Black and in poverty. And it's not just a 90's thing or a 2000's thing. You still see it in the Bronx to this day. You go walk through Edenwald today; visit Watson Ave or Colgate Ave; check out Soundview; travel around Mount Eden tonight. Guns, drugs, and the lifestyle it inflicts on its participants and viewers is a frightening site.

Of course there is plenty of blame to go around (isn’t there always?). And everybody should hold some accountability. But someone has to take accountability for structural inequality; and the inequality in access, resources, and opportunity.

Who makes public policy with inefficient "solutions" to address long-existing social problems? I don't think anyone in 2175 Lacombe Avenue did; and I know no one in apartment 8I did for damn sure. And...maybe that's the problem right there.

But indeed this poignant viewpoint and insight is what led me to do a case-study of youth in Bronx public housing for my undergraduate Senior Thesis at Fordham University. It’s why I am continuing this research as an ethnography and dissertation in Graduate school. And why public housing, inequality, poverty, policy, and socio-economic structures are my research interest. Because maybe, if we can allow those experiencing this lived reality to bring their own stories to the center of our public conversations...then maybe America can see how ugly the persistence of racism and discrimination is. Or realize the ramifications of local level officials’ impotence, neglect, and unabashed self-interest (see the absolute MESS occurring in the New York State legislature currently). Or truly recognize the ineffectiveness market-based economic solutions have; and just how sinful and self-indulgent economic empowerment zones, corporate giving, and the entire reform platform have been.

So there goes a personal narrative on life in public housing by someone who lived it. From a Black man who was influenced by sports, drugs, and violence, but now is a Ph.D. student. And who hopes to allow others from related backgrounds, with similar stories, and a shared lived experience to speak about their lives in the Bronx projects for themselves.

Michael Partis
Castle Hill Projects 1992-1999.
The Hood 1986-Present.
Fordham University-Rose Hill B.A. 2008
CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D 2014”
------------

If anybody would like to read my Senior Thesis on young people in the South Bronx's Mitchel Projects, or interested in and/or does research on public housing in the United States, please feel free to contact with me at michaelpartis@gmail.com.

Peace

A King and The Illest: Remembering Dr. King and The Notorious B.I.G.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Dr. Martin Luther King - I Have A Dream Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and The Notorious B.I.G. are two of the biggest cultural figures in American history. Dr. King is renowned for his political, theological, and civic work. Biggie Smalls is celebrated for his exceptional musical ability as a rapper. And both men were vital in two of the 20^th century’s greatest social, political, and cultural phenomenons: the Civil Rights Movement, and Hip-Hop.

Yet, we do not think of these men simultaneously. In fact, many might say it is blasphemous to even mention them in the same breath. But as we commemorate Dr. King’s birthday and holiday, and anticipate the release of Notorious (the first major studio film about the life of Biggie), we are afforded a unique opportunity: the chance to bridge generations by carefully looking at two icons. Looking at each man's life allows us to revisit our relationship to them; and to critically think about their virtues and their flaws. Most important though is this question: can we find mutuality and commonality with B.I.G. and King?

Without doubt, the differences between King and Biggie are stark and vast. (Continue below)

Martin was raised in the church, and grew up in the Jim Crow south. In adulthood, Dr. King lived by, and inspired numbers of people with, his philosophy of non-violence, and advocacy for unconditional love. He believed these forces were central to the political action that could rid racial discrimination and social injustice. King and the Civil Rights Movement generated change which eventually opened the doors of access for many; but it did not overthrow the structural racism that left a large population still outside of America’s promise.

Before becoming B.I.G., Christopher Wallace was the son of immigrants and grew up in the urban metropolis of Brooklyn, NY. Thanks to the struggle of his single mother, he did not grow up in abject poverty. Still, Christopher deals with the United States’ harsh truth: educated, poor, affluent, determined, resistant, hard-working, or humble—no matter what your make-up, racism still negatively affects your life-choices. Confronted with this reality, Biggie does was many before, after, and in his generation do: he chooses a life of selling drugs, violence, and crime. It is a life-choice that blurs the line of survival and necessity; of desire and force; of good and bad. To many it is a destructive force that tears apart communities of color. But to Biggie, he was “just trying to make some money to feed my daughter.”

While Dr. King was not able to see the stress, strife, and trauma of the crack epidemic that molded Biggie and the members of his generation, he was intimately familiar with the anger, hostility, and frustration of many in the Black community.

1964-1968 is noted as one of the most tumultuous periods in United States history. While the Civil Rights Movement continued to press on with the hope that faith, civil disobedience, and fortitude would bring equality to America, the racism that produced poverty persisted. These conditions brought many Blacks to “a boiling point.” The frustration turned into two things: political organizing and violence. This was challenging for King and other Civil Rights leaders. They wrestled with how to address the poverty, how to channel the anger, and how to join these new political struggles.

While rebellions in cities emerged and violence ensued, King dedicated what would be the final years of his life to the issue that dogged so many Blacks: poverty. He also strove to understand the sentiment of deep anger in many Black young people; and tried to empathize with their hurt while re-orientating them away from violence. This would become the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. until the moment of his tragic passing.

The Notorious B.I.G. certainly did not engage in the same work that Dr. King did. He did not live in King’s time. He was no political leader, no community organizer. Yet what ties him to King is Biggie’s place in the historical progression of African-American life. Biggie is apart of Bakari Kitwana’s “Hip-Hop Generation:” the one’s who come after the Civil Rights/Black Power struggle and inherit the world those movements left behind. What Biggie becomes, is this generation’s artistic icon; he ascends into a cultural hero.

As King represents the best in humanity and the quintessential symbol for a generation, B.I.G. serves as one generation’s definition of what a rapper should be and its most poignant example of success. And like W.E.B DuBois is forever linked with Booker T. Washington, or Martin Luther King with Malcolm X, Biggie is forever tied with the other defining luminary of his time—Tupac Shakur.

B.I.G.’s discussion of urban narratives, his poetic creations of imagined situations, and his story’s unique ability to resonate with the sentiments and conditions of a time, mirrors what we love and adore with so many of our artistic figures: the Odetta’s, Bob Marleys, Chuck D’s, Richard Wright’s, and Zora Neale Hurston’s of our culture.

There is no doubt that many of the stories which come forth from Biggie are disturbing, horrifying, and troubling. The “bitches,” “hoes,” guns, robberies, "stick-up kids," misogyny, crack sales, and patriarchy which these stories detail indeed are…difficult. Nor are the sentiments of “keeping it real,” “I write about what I see,” or “if she acts like a hoe then and Imma call her a hoe” valid—a culture that presents these explanations must be challenged, critiqued, and pushed.

But this is not the totality of Biggie’s work. The descriptions he provided indeed had truth in them. No doubt the behavior it associated with is problematic, but the presence of it is nothing new. No question violence, sexism, and drugs take a drastically different tone in present society. But pimping, hustling, and guns are not new. They certainly existed in Dr. King’s time. "Come on people," they even existed in Bill Cosby movies. Wallace took the alias of "Biggie Smalls" from the name of a gangster/hustler in Cosby and Sidney Poitier's 1975 movie Let's Do It Again.

The brilliance of the Notorious B.I.G., and of the Hip-Hop culture, is the point of view it provides. As Biggie put it, “from a young G’s perspective.”

The fact that Biggie could turned this perspective into a tool which enables him to reach financial success, this is what stands out to the Hip-Hop culture. Yes, it is absolutely steeped in capitalism’s excess, exploitation, and materialism. But for many people of color, it speaks to a truth and a desire. The work of changing what we desire, what we value, and what we want certainly is needed. If “money, hoes, and clothes is all a nigga knows,” then we have to expose that view to other ideas.

But it does not change the fact that it speaks to a generation, to a culture. Biggie Smalls speaks to the generation which lived through the crack epidemic, and to Hip-Hop culture. And what makes him their symbol is that... he is from it.

That is why Dr. King and The Notorious B.I.G. are celebrated. They represent something. They are of and apart of a community. The tie people have to them is not just marketed or mass-produced; the ability, talent, and work of these men tie us to them.

Their failures, flaws, and downsides are plentiful. They are problematic and complex. But such is life.

Regardless, these are our heroes.

R.I.P.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Christopher Wallace

Michael Partis

michaelpartis@gmail.com

www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com

myspace.com/hiphopthought

http://my.rawkus.com/profile/ForeThought

New York Hip-Hop STAND UP!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:47:00 +0000

Audio of me with Miz D on Juice Radio talking about the State of Hip-Hop. Can New York still represent in the Rap game? Can Hip-Hop still remain viable as an artform? What's the good, the bad, and the ugly?

Check it out:

Juice Radio feating Miz D-Can NY Hip-Hop make a Comeback?
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/JuiceRadio/2009/01/25/TBA

And here's a clip of the interview posted on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyD_9FY1yOo

Shouts out to Miz D and the Juice Radio Crew

And P.S. NY Rap still GETTIN IT! And the Bronx STILL makin it. Check out these MC's

Ray $ da Schola
http://myspace.com/dolladascholar
http://raydolladascholar.blogspot.com/
http://imeem.com/raydolla

S.T. & BeyAy Entertainment
www.myspace.com/beyayentertainment
http://www.youtube.com/user/BeyayTV

G.O.
www.myspace.com/goewp

Patty Dukes
http://www.pattydukes.com

Celebrating Life After Death-Biggie Smalls' Lesson on Joy and Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:40:00 +0000

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE LIBERATOR MAGAZINE WEBSITE
http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2009/01/celebrating-life-after-death.html

For the past few days I have seen a lot of negativity about Notorious, the new movie about the life of rapper Notorious B.I.G. Most of the criticism seems to stem from anger over the film's "glorification" of the street hustler ambition Biggie personifies. Others complain that the film fails to deliver the gravitas of Wallace's life; instead of a complicated, probing, thorough compilation, we get a glossy, "made-for-industry" story which archetypes the stereotypical "Black male" narrative.

You know like "Kick a few bars, so I can buy a few cars"

Or "I stay Coogi down to the socks/rings and watch filled with rocks."

I know ugly hurts the eyes, and ignorance hurts the soul. And without question, Hip-Hop can occasionally hurt us in excruciating ways.

But maybe, it is time we remember that life is "Joy and Pain." And sometimes, it doesn't hurt to embrace the joy...

A classic episode of the 1970's Black sitcom "Good Times" gives us an important lesson in Joy and Pain.

When James Evans (actor James Amos' role as patriarch of a poor Black Chicago family) dies, Michael, J.J. and Thelma wonder why their mother Florida (played by the venerable Esther Rolle) is not "grieving" over their father's death. In a brilliantly resonating, exceptionally poignant moment (the type of moment all to sorely missing from the series' latter days,) Rolle explains how we shouldn't think of death strictly as grim, devastating, and sad. Rather, Florida explains to her children that death can be seen as a time not to lament or bemoan...but as a time to celebrate--to celebrate one's life and to cherish what a person gave us. We give praise to life by remembering it. Death is the fulfillment of our journey. And we should celebrate it.

The greatness of the Evans family's TV moment is that Florida tells us that this is a tradition of the African culture. Celebrating death as the fulfillment of life is an African Diasporic tradition.

I think we need to recapture that sentiment, and remember it as we reflect on Biggie's life and watch his new movie.

All too often our community fails to maintain the fine balance that is critique and analysis; positive and negative; rhyme and reason. Either we find ourselves in uncritical, fallacious bliss; blind, unconditional denial; dogged, burdening negativity; or apathetic, resolved resign. Emotions are certainly a juggling act, and not a easy feat by no means. But we should always remind ourselves of time and place.

Undoubtedly, the life of the Notorious B.I.G. is troubled. His womanizing actions; his illegal activities; his role in capitalism's hi-jacking of Hip-Hop culture; his indulgent expressions of violence and vulgarity; this is no question disturbing and problematic. We need to look at these problems closely to grow and improve; and to gain a fuller understanding of how these issues come about, and what to do about their presence. Yes, looking at Biggie's life gives us a opportunity for all of this.

But it also gives us the opportunity to...celebrate.

Christopher Wallace was one of the most talented musicians of the 20th century. His extraordinary verbal fluidity, his lyrical prowess in rhyme, and his remarkable ability to convey imagery, metaphor, imagination, and experience into narrative form--these skills make him not only one of America's greatest story-tellers, but one of the African Diasporic communities most gifted individuals.

And there is nothing wrong with accepting that.

"Hypnotize," "Mo Money, Mo Problems," and "One More Chance," is music that can make you dance. Songs like "Juicy," or "Missing U," can make you introspective. And joints like "Kick in the Door," or "Get Money" can get you hyped.

Is there anything wrong with that?

The burden of being politically orientated, progressively leaning, and socially conscious can be exhaustive. It can definitely keep you working all day, and up all night (or more likely, working day and night). But sometimes we need to be reminded that life is more than that. Joy exists in struggle. Birth is precious; victory can be attained; happiness has a place...if we make room for it.

For a moment, for a time, we should allow ourselves to feel good.

Beyond Biggie though, we need to embrace the moments of joy we capture in this world. Hip-Hop may have many problems, but if it teaches us one thing...it is to celebrate.

As we embark on a several day journey where we will honor Dr. King, remember Biggie, and inaugurate the first Black president, let us seize the moment. We can worry about what is lacking, or what can go wrong, or what is already a problem, afterwards.

For a moment, let us not be afraid to... be happy.

We need to create spaces where we can reflect on our short-comings and problems. We need time to critique ourselves and each others in an attempt to be better.

But let us never forget to celebrate life... even after death.

P.S. We'll Always Love Big Poppa....

Michael Partis
michaelpartis@gmail.com
www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/hiphopthought

The Answer's Last Question-Can He Become a Legend?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:12:00 +0000

Originally Posted at The TSA Report.com
http://www.tsareport.com/#3

Allen Iverson is a generational icon. Iverson embodies the Black athlete who was birthed from the Hip-Hop culture. He personifies the Hip-Hop aesthetic: brash, relentless, and fearless. His free-wheeling, improvisational, lightening-fast game introduced the next phase of basketball - a phase that actualized a playground sensibility, and embraced the oppositional, self-defining world-view of the new athlete. The cornrows, the cross-over dribbles, the multiple tattoos, taking on Michael Jordan at the top of the key; these were the features and qualities that endeared Iverson to basketball fans throughout America’s urban landscape, and made him intriguing to the post Bird-Magic-Jordan NBA community. Iverson was NBA basketball…the remix.

But that was the 90’s.

As we close the first decade of the 21st century, Allen Iverson’s thirteen year NBA career and cultural status stand at a crossroads. No longer is A.I. the youthful “rebel without a cause” adored by all. In many ways his cultural resonance has been surpassed by the Lebrons, Carmelos, and Dwyanes of the perpetual “next generation.” The “ghetto fabulous” appearance and “take-no-prisoners” disposition that defined a cohort of players like Chris Webber, Latrell Sprewell, and Iverson, has given way to an economically driven sense of market-awareness and commercial appeal evident by the league’s new superstars. Symbolically, Chris Weber’s “Fab Five” has become D-Wade’s “Fave 5.” A.I.’s Reebok has become Lebron’s Nike.

The story that remains though is Iverson’s career on the court. Statistics certify his status as one of the greatest scorers in NBA history. The memories of fans and the highlight reels will certainly affirm him as pound-for-pound one of toughest players ever to step on the hardwood. But his one-man show in Philadelphia, and two-star attraction in Denver, did not achieve the accomplishment that distinguishes an NBA career: a championship ring. In fact, they barely produced playoff victories - note Denver’s 1-8 playoff record during the Iverson years.

And so, the legacy of Allen Iverson rests not on his cultural relevance, but on his basketball career. As he now stands in Detroit, he has become part of a Pistons group also trying to define itself in basketball history. Their one NBA championship is blemished with six consecutive trips to the Eastern Conference Finals without advancing to the NBA Finals. As this Pistons team searches to solidify their place among the greatest, so does Iverson. Can A.I. transcend them, and his career, to all-time stature?

“The Answer” remains to be seen.

Mr. Can't Tell Me Nothing: The Genius, Audacity, and Struggle of Kanye West

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 08:55:00 +0000

"You know how the game be/ I can't let em change me/ Cause on Judgment Day, you gon blame me/ Look God, it's the same me"

Kanye West-"Two Words"

Kanye is dropping what might be his most provocative musical work, in what might be one of his darkest personal periods. All while society is in one of the most politically, economically, and socially-charged times in recent history.

Is 808s and Heartbreak Kanye's official "Declaration of Independence?" Or is it a living testimony of his personal anguish?

Is this new found sound still Hip-Hop? And can the Hip-Hop community handle this "New Wave Hip-Hop?"

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"

William Shakespeare-"As You Like It"

The idea of Kanye West being a "genius" is not a new story. It is almost apart of every article or interview covering him; and he reminds us nearly every time he speaks about himself.

But the coverage surrounding his newest project, 808s and Heartbreak, and recent events in his life are not quite in this mold. What seems to be at the center of attention this time is not Kanye's narcissistic, self indulgent diatribes--he should of won this award; or we don't recognize how dope this is; and the proverbial not enough praise, not enough coverage, not enough recognition for something he created---a wide-spread celebration, critical acclaim of his artistic creativity is what he expects. However this time the story seems to be: What is this?

Fans don't know what to do with it, and neither do journalist.

Part seems to appreciate the audacity of the album, due to Ye's full out performance with the Auto-Tunes sound. Experimentation with the Auto-Tune/vocoder has been prevalent in Hip-Hop recently. It is a sound made notable lately by the success it has provided R&B artist T-Pain, and the popularity its garnered from one of Rap's current superstars: Lil' Wayne. 808's and Heartbreak takes it to another level, "a whole album of vocoder" level. For the most part, Kanye's venture marks the first time a Rap artist---and definitely a first for a Hip-Hop superstar with Pop culture crossover success--- makes a complete album featuring the device.

In this way it is standard West's: daring, different, and challenging the norm. It encompasses a certain boldness that has allowed him to create a sound, a mind frame, and fans that appreciate the artistic quality of his music. Keys, notes, kickdrums, cords, arrangements: the attention to these details, and the willingness to take these things to places others could not think of (or would not try too) is the trademark of the Kanye West sound.

But the vocoder is different. Hip-Hop has a love/hate relationship with it. It certainly has produced a sound embraced by many fans, and more readily used now by artist. But many Hip-Hop heads, critics, and listeners have no love for it. It has been labeled artificial, annoying, and cheap. Thus the sound and the music it produces has been subject to popular conversation throughout Hip-Hop over the past several month: Is it hot, or annoying?

Better put: is Hip-Hop ready for it?

It is not surprising that Common (another artist who in the past has faced intense scrutiny for doing something outside the Hip-Hop norm---see Electric Circle) seems to think so.

At an exclusive session session for his new album Universal Mind Control, Common shared with Real Talk NY and the audience how he felt Hip-Hop was ready to move into different sounds, different styles, and different places. About his own new project he said, "I just wanna make some music and have some fun...make you feel good. Take the music to the future...do something progressive." He explained how the influence of groups like N.E.R.D. and Gnarls Barkley; producers like The Neptunes; and the success of artist like Andre 3000, have created more room to be different---to take the music to another place.

With the mix of retro-styled groups like The Cool Kids; skateboarders in the mold of Lupe; and new artists like Kid Cudi, Jay Electronica, and Blu (and many, many more) complicating what we typically think Hip-Hop should look like and sound like, maybe we are expanding. Perhaps the horizon is broadening.

But a large part of the intrigue around Kanye's new album has nothing to do with this new sound. Much of it is surrounded around the rapper's seemingly turbulent, erratic emotional state.

Over the past year he has had a range of devastating, personal, and volatile incidents: the calling off of his engagement with Alexis Phifer; the death of his mother Donna West; and now recently several violent, widely reported run-in with paparazzi. Ye has been open about how these events how deeply affected him---and led to the "Heartbreak" aspect of the new album. And the album cuts that have been released and leaked clearly speak about feelings of pain, depression, and loneliness.

Kanye has always been explicitly open about his emotions and life experiences in his music. "Through The Wire," "Jesus Walks," "Diamonds From Sierra Leon," "Hey Mama"---all these songs deal with West giving us a piece of himself; sharing with us unabatedly his view on all aspects of life.

But 808's and Heartbreak is without a doubt different. A large part of the subject matter stings with hurt.

In the lyrics of joints like "Welcome to Heartbreak," "Love Lockdown," "Heartless," and "The Coldest Winter Ever" we see hear how strong his pain is. And through the many entries of his popular blog we read through his fluctuating, conflicting, tumultuous emotions of frustration, introspection, and reflection. We get "twelve minute misery freestyles," and messages of recovery, inspiration, and creativity (see Kanye's blog from yesterday here)

Kanye West expresses a quality that we see in Hip-Hop's when it is at its best: sincerity, vulnerability, and openness. The danger is... well as Ye' put, we see "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly:" cocky, egotistically, and at times petty actions. But its strength is its testimonial power: less of a marketing scheme; less fabrication; more life experiences---from the personal truth, to the creative expression of reality.

It is the genius of Kanye West to have the audacity to let us into his struggle.

But is Hip-Hop ready for this? That is the impending question.

Can our hyper-masculinity, homophobic, thug-constructed self-conscious allow us to listen to more sensitivity? Can our self-interested/industry-cultivated taste for music with a dance and a catch phase allow us to become in tune with our other emotions for a moment?

Can we learn to balance the party and the work; to be "wavy" and be socially-aware; to be strong, yet to be vulnerable?

And can we sound different---completely different? Can we handle mash-ups with Coldplay, infusions of trip-hop, and engagement with sounds not normal to the Hip-Hop feel?

Or will we just call it wack?

808's and Heartbreak is the beginning of the challenge to conventional Hip-Hop, with more and more fellow provocateurs coming.

Hopefully Mr. West's pain and genius can inspire; and does not break and martyr himself, and the audacity to be different.

Michael Partis

michaelpartis@gmail.com

www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/hiphopthought

http://my.rawkus.com/profile/ForeThought

Can All the M&M's Remain Together?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:26:00 +0000

Can All the M&M's Remain Together: Thinking About Obama's Multi-racial Coalition in Victory and in Defeat

On The Root.com yesterday, Wendi C. Thomas (metro columnist for Memphis, TN's The Commercial Appeal) wrote an article titled "Will White People Riot?"

Thomas hashed through the perpetual idea that Blacks act and behavior en mass, in response to a White man from Memphis asking her: "Would Black people riot if Sen. Barack Obama didn't win the election?"

Her article brought forth a thought-provoking analysis which posits that a more likely population to worry about rioting would be the loathing, race-baiting crowd seen at McCain GOP rallies (you know the one's that shout "TERRORIST!!!" and "KILL HIM!!!" at the mention of Obama's name).

For Thomas the question is not whether Black people can handle an Obama defeat, but can racist Whites handle an Obama victory.

When thinking about Obama, I always think about how he has this "multi-racial" thing going for him. We see it among supporters; we see it among campaign volunteers; we even saw it in Iowa.

We've seen it in good times, we have seen it in bad times, but will we see if it gets UGLY (or rather, uglier than it has already been)? Meaning IF (and I emphasize that it is an IF we really, really don't need), IF Obama loses the election on Nov. 4---what will happen then? What would a defeat do to the multi-racial Obama machine?

I know, I know. At this point we need to be putting all our positive energy and thoughts into an Obama victory. But we have to keep in the back of our mind the dark side too.

Would they rally together? Or splinter apart?

Historically in America, we have seen Blacks in rebellion (Watts '65, Detroit '68, Harlem '64, etc); we have seen Whites come together in resistance (the early 20th century race riots in places like Tulsa or East St. Louis; in racist and discriminatory legislation; hell in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan).

But we have also seen many coalitions of multi-racial, multi-issue, multi-community support. It is a progressive model that has been set forth throughout history: the abolitionist movement; radical organizers in the Communist party and others in the early 20th century U.S.; in CORE and other groups involved in the Civil Rights Movement. And such this has been the model called for, advocated for, and exercised by many organizers and activists.

But much in the way all these movements came to a head over divisive issues and events---particularly in the late 1960's---we are coming to a similar junction in these times.

This head has two parts though: first, what will happen in the event of an Obama defeat? Could all the M&M's mobilize together still? And if defeat did lead to rebellion and resistance, could all the M&M's rebel together?

But the second point is a bit more intriguing: what happens if Obama wins?

In so many ways, a Black man becoming President of the United States of America would be the fulfillment of the greater possibility so many Americans have worked, sweat, bled, and even died for. That we could surpass historic and living attitudes of racist, discrimination, and hate; and overcome injustice and inequality.

As Barack put it in early March: "that this nation is more than the sum of its parts-that out of our many, we are truly one."

But what happens next? How does the multi-racial, multi-issue, multi-community Obama movement deal with victory?

It is so crucial for all the interest-groups and all the supporters to continue to move united, progressively, and with forward-vision.

Ironically enough, victory would be the opportune time for division. And so, the bag of M&M's must begin planning for its united future.

Michael Partis
michaelpartis@gmail.com
michaelpartis.blogspot.com
myspace.com/hiphopthought

Either Your Slinging Crack Rock or You Got a Wicked Jumpshot: Sports, Politics, and Economic Opportunity in the 21st Century's Racial Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:11:00 +0000

Forty years ago this month, the 1968 Olympic Games was defined by the political statement of two Black athletes. With Black fist raised high, and an ode to the Black Power movement displayed, Tommie Smith and John Carlos made one of the most profound political statements ever seen at an international sporting event.

The beauty and the significance of the statement was the weight and poignancy of its symbolism. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to symbolize Black pride, and Carlos wore beads around his in recognition of the Blacks who lost their life on the Middle Passage. Both wore black socks but no shoes, to symbolize the pervasive poverty numerous Blacks faced. Each had on a black glove on the raised fists, emboldening the Black Power cry.

Smith and Carlos' act was not a "rebel without a cause" moment, but an attempt to raise awareness about the condition of those who materially have the least and work mightily to obtain more. They represented not just the Texas and Harlem neighborhoods their came from, but struggle of those in the African Diaspora. Class, race, and human rights all came together in sports.

Would Terrell Owens put up a fist for "Black Power" after he scores his next touchdown? Would Lebron James lead a voter registration drive in his home-state of Ohio? Is Floyd Mayweather going to comment on the need to restructure America's health care system?

When the Celtics visited the White House for their NBA Championship visit, did Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett talk to President Bush about his tax plan? Will Candice Parker and Lisa Leslie come out and endorse Cynthia Mckinney and Rosa Clemente for President?

And if they did, would Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and all their other sponsors take away their endorsement deals?

When Jim Brown criticized Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and today's Black athletes a few days ago, he touched on an important issue---the role of the Black athlete in contemporary society, and their responsibility to themselves and the Black community.

Certainly it isn't a new discussion. But given the times, it seems all the more pertinent to think about.

The Black athlete in today's society is perhaps the most notable figure in the Black community. They are certainly among the wealthiest; and among young Blacks, perhaps the most influential. While it may not be a position they asked for, it is one they occupy none the less---no matter who thinks they shouldn't be, and no matter how much the athletes may say they don't want to be.

The question becomes what does their social position and privilege mean in today's society. Should we expect them to be more than athletes? Do they have a greater responsibility?

For the Black community, sports have always been about more than achievement. In fact one of sports main functions in Black life during the first half of the 20th century was disproving the idea of Blacks being biologically inferior. Contest on the field, in the ring, and on the court were challenges to White supremacy (biologically and ideologically). This is why the fights of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, the races of Jesse Owens, and the success of Jackie Roberson are monumental events in American history. It is where not only did we see sports, but racial struggle played out.

For the Black community, sports was political. The 68' Olympics Black Power moment defines this.

But it was also economical.

Sports opened financial and entrepreneurial opportunities for Blacks. Successful athletes were able to open businesses in Black communities, and some members in those communities sought to use sports to create business enterprises (i.e. the Negro Leagues).

Many athletes felt a duty came with this success: a commitment to advocate for Black rights, a responsibility to stand against injustice and the violation of human rights, a mandate to use financial success and social recognition as a tool for community building.

You didn't just play a sport. You were compelled to have a moral stance, a social consciousness, and a political awareness. The lives and work of Black leaders like Paul Robeson, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, and Muhammad Ali are a testament to this.

Sports, race, politics, economics, morality, community---they were not separate, it all went together.

There is no question Black athletes like Serena Williams, Lebron James, or Carmelo Anthony know about the struggle of many Blacks in urban cities today. Being raised and growing up in areas like Compton, CA, Akron, OH, and Baltimore, MD make that reality unmistakable. Living in cities marked by racial segregation; plagued by the economic troubles of unemployment, gentrification, and de-industrialization; and haunted by racial inequalities embed this reality in them. They and many other Black athletes have lived the other side of the Civil Rights Movement's success: the continuance of racial segregation, unequal access to resources, and inequality in living conditions. The issues that Smith and Carlos attempted to raise are still issue today.

Many of these athletes have a Black consciousness, constructed by living through the success, hardship, pride, and complexity of race in America. And many of them understand the economic situation of those who have the least.

It is being young, Black, and successful in America, and the burden and challenges it brings that they struggle with. It is not financial obligation or charity that is difficult for them, it is the accountability of political advocacy and the fight for justice that is the burden.

"Do You," "Give Back," "Stand Up," or "Say Something," these are the choices and pressures our Black athletes face today. A pressure added to the fact that many have to grow up and mature in front of the whole world; making their missteps, mistakes, and learning experiences subject to the scrutiny of the public.

This all combines to create a tremendous tension over what is their role---to be role models for the Black community; to dedicate themselves to giving back to those who have less; and to use their global name recognition, ample resources, and media access to advocate for social justice and human rights issues; in short, to become more than sports heroes---to become role models, and community-orientated, politically involved leaders.

There's no doubt your parents, your teacher, or someone in the community should be young people's role models; these are the people they should look up to.

The problem is how many young Black kids grow up without parents, without teachers who care, and with adults who certainly are not role models.

The fact that so many Blacks have chosen to use sports as a healthy, legal way to provide for themselves and their families should be commended. But doesn't it show that their lives and their stories, the perseverance, dedication, and determination used to reach their level of achievement, their accomplishments, doesn't those things deserve to be so much more than example of how to succeed in a sport?

This is the point we should take from Jim Brown's comments. These young Black women and men lives are bigger than sports; it means more than money. Their lives are so much more meaningful than those things.

In life we all live together, not separate. We affect each other, and we can affect anything. Jim Brown's comments attempt to explain this. Tommie Smith's and John Carlos' statement reminds of this.

This is why we must ask Black athletes to do more---because our life is more than sports.

And until we develop ways to keep more parents involved in young people's lives; until we economically, spiritually, and emotionally empower those Black communities in the deepest struggle; and most importantly, until make sure that the parents, teachers, mentors, guidance counselors, educators, sanitation workers, rappers, nurses, case worker and everyone else who deserve to be role models are seen as such, we have to ask for our Black athletes to lead the way.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE:

The Carmelo Anthony Youth Development Center

(And I am sure there are more. Please feel free to mention them in the comments section)

THINGS TO READ, PEOPLE TO KNOW:

Paul Robeson

Roberto Clemente

Dr. Harry Edwards

Common Bond for Uncommon Men: Roberto Clemente and Martin Luther King Jr-David Zirin

Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete-William C. Rhoden

Darwin's Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race-John Hoberman

Michael Partis

michaelpartis@gmail.com

www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/hiphopthought

http://my.rawkus.com/profile/ForeThought

The 7 Day Theory: Remembering Why Tupac is Important

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:29:00 +0000

I had a conversation with a couple of people the other day about the importance of Tupac. Somebody told me that Tupac wasn't one of the most globally known, or internationally recognized Black people ever. Another person said that his music wasn't politically or socially relevant; that he wasn't as important to Black music as Bob Marley.

All of this is just a couple of weeks after Blender Magazine said Pac was the most overrated musician of all-time.

So is the world coming to the end? Was Tupac really not that important, then and now?

Tupac was the most important Hip-Hop artist ever. He was important not just for what he did, but for what he said.

Whether it is twelve years after he pasted away, or seven days after the anniversary of his death, we must never forget what Pac contributed to the world in his short time here.

With the amount of books, documentaries, and articles produced on Tupac's life, I never thought I'd be put in a position to have to defend Pac's importance to Black people. I thought the fact that scholars like Michael Eric Dyson and Mark Anthony Neal, and institutions like University of Cal-Berkeley, studied Tupac was enough to justify his significance. I figured the murals of him in Brazil, the respect for him in Cuba, and the people who asked me about him in South Africa was a testament to his global impact. Perhaps being studied in a college classroom isn't enough to show Pac's importance to American history. And maybe Brazil and Cuba don't show his global meaning.

Maybe time makes us forgetful.

But for those of us that love Hip-Hop, and believe in the struggle and glory of Black people in this world, we must always remember and celebrate how important what our prince did (and the message he brought) was to this world.

Tupac was the window to the soul of the first post-Black Power/Civil Rights generation. He is indicative of that generation in so many tangible and intangible ways.

His name shows his ties to the African Diasporic tradition: Pac was named after the Tupac Amaru, the leader of Peru's indigenous rebellion against the Spanish Empire's conquest of the Inca people. His mother (Afeni Shakur) and stepfather (Mutulu Shakur) were Black Panthers, and instilled in him a Black consciousness that showed him the history and power of his people. He enjoyed the best that America had to offer: Pac had a childhood education that allowed him to read Shakespeare, study Theater, and participate in the arts; he was well read, as evident by his reading and studing of political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince leading him to name his last recorded album The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. His music allowed him to reap the financial benefits our society offers.

Growing up without a father, raised by a mother battling a drug addiction, and living in Harlem, Baltimore, and Oakland, he also saw the dark side of his generation: Drugs, poverty, and broken homes.

Education. Success. Poverty. It's indicative of the struggle; the gift and the curse.

This story, this complexity, came out in the way Pac lived his life and in the music he produced. He wrote about how much he loved his mother despite her addiction (Dear Mama). He was misogynistic, sexist, and vulgar. He displayed sophistication and militancy in his music (Rebel of the Underground), while expressing charisma and intellect in his interviews. He crafted stories of urban Black life that was resonating for the time (Brenda's Got a Baby). He could uplift and inspire (Keep Ya Head Up). But most importantly, he wasn't afraid to be vulnerable (So Many Tears, Pain); Pac wasn't afraid to bear his soul as witness to the struggle and pride of being Black in America.

Author, educator, and artist Dax-Devlon Ross gives perhaps one of the most poignant testimonies to what Tupac meant in his book, "The Nightmare and the Dream: Nas, Jay-Z, and the History of Conflict in African-American Culture:"

"I was a 21 year-old college student the night 'Pac died. I wasn't a thug or a gangsta. I hadn't grown up in poverty. My parents hadn't marched with King. I'd never been to jail. I'd never been shot. I'd never sold drugs...Existentially, though, we were kindred spirits. He showed me that I didn't have to be the most intelligent or gifted person to bear my soul on the page...He let me know that it was ok to be vulnerable.

More than any other artist, Tupac explored the tensions stemming from our generation's desire, and in some senses demand, to 'keep it real.' Hip-hop was born and bred by those people and in those communities that were left behind; by the children and grandchildren of those who didn't make it to college and couldn't enter the middle class...For Tupac that cultural experience wasn't embedded in a single community, but in the soul of every community that knew poverty and the chaos it wrought."

It is all these things that endeared Tupac Shakur to a generation, to the public, and to people all over the world.

This is why the life of Tupac Shakur is so important.

Many of us know this; millions of people across the world know this. And that is exactly why we must continue to remember him, and never downplay his significant because he is that important to us...Until The End Of Time.

Michael Partis

www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com

myspace.com/hiphopthought

http://my.rawkus.com/profile/ForeThought

michaelpartis@gmail.com

Speak What I Want I Don't Care How Ya'll Feel: Nas Untitled Album

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:16:00 +0000

“Speak What I Want, I Don’t Care How Ya’ll Feel”

Nas’ Untitled Album and the Consequences of Censorship on Cultural Expression

(I originally published this article in The Coup Magazine’s September 2008 “Censorship issue. Reposting it to my blog, in light of all the recent discussion on the album's ghostwriters.)

“…So untitled it is

I never change nothin'

But people remember this

If Nas can't say it, think about these talented kids

With new ideas being told what they can and can't spit

I can't sit and watch it”

Nas- “Hero”

Words have the power to express, advocate, share, and transform. They exist in the abstract, in the realm of ideas. Yet they go beyond the tangential because of their power to invoke and to inspire. Words may come in all parts of speech, but their greatest relationship to us is how they all function as verbs in our life. In living, words are action.

It is that very spirit that makes speech important; so important that it is the first right protected and ensured in the United States’ essential legal and organizational framework: The Constitution.

The controversy behind the title of rapper Nas’ ninth album pushes the greater public, the Hip-Hop community, and (most specifically) the socially-conscious members of the African Diaspora to examine how significant words are to societal ideas. They are asked to consider what censorship does to artistic expression that is rooted in cultural practice. How is art (and the artist) tied to social change?

In several interviews Nas cited his reason for naming his album Nigger was to create critical discussion on the term’s historical development, and how that relates to the variance in its contemporary usage. Subsequently, the album would highlight why the current usage has created oppositional, mutually-exclusive views on the word.

In an October 2007 interview with MTV News, Nas’ discussed what he felt was a rush judgment on the album, based on stereotypes associated with rappers. "If Cornel West was making an album called Nigger, they would know he's got something intellectual to say," he said. "To think I'm gonna say something that's not intellectual is calling me a nigger, and to be called a nigger by Jesse Jackson and the NAACP is counterproductive, counter-revolutionary."

Illuminated here is the challenge: to see Nas’ work in the proper context.
Is this attempt any different than Richard Wright’s or James Baldwin’s work of social fiction? What differentiates Nas’ album about the history of the word nigger from Kara Walker’s provocative artistic exploration of race relations, sexual practice, and gender politics? Would Nigger be more like The Lost Poets’ “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” or Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy’s “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word?”

The deeper question though, is can an artistic treatise on the word Nigger produce social change?

The artist’s role in political matters is a topic much discussed. One of their greatest powers is the ability to reach multitudes of people; they have a number fans, supporters, critics, and detractors as their audience. Hip-Hop artists are prime examples of this, as the culture has created music, art, fashion, and aesthetics that speak for the post-Civil Rights generations and for some of the most under-represented populations in America. Some Hip-Hop participants use this great stage as artistic license to create individual forms of expression that somehow speak for the under-represented. Some take the treads of political consciousness that are historically intrinsic to the legacy of the African Diaspora, and contemporary societal issues, to deliver social commentary.

Nas’ attempt to name his album Nigger tries to do all of these things. In fact it also highlights an important moment in Hip-Hop music.

While Hip-Hop contains a large range of perspectives and personalities, a stigmatized, stereotyped, misconstrued image of the culture is still pervasive in popular society. This image is produced partially by the immature, brash, sexist, vulgar nature of some Hip-Hop; and partially due to the one-dimensional, narrow, and judgmental view of conservative critics and older Black leaders (most notably those older Blacks who were leaders and participants in the Civil Rights movement) who reduce the complexity and breath of the art form to “hoes,” drugs, “bitches,” and…”niggas.”

Conversations around the “N-Word” often produce heated debates and divisive results. It shows an aspect of the Black community that fragments the group cohesion needed to address the large scale problems still faced almost forty years after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

This is what makes the Nigger album important: that it attempts to push the younger generation into a constructive discussion of the word by using the forum that speaks to a large number of its generation, and allows those older members of the community to revisit the complicated usage the word has in today’s youth culture. If seen in a broader scope, the album is a form of community organizing.

The challenge is to open the lens wide enough to understand this view.
In a May 2007 interview with PBS’s Bill Moyers, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell spoke about the need to have a broad understanding of contemporary race relations and to embrace new ways to actively resist and change the inequality it causes. She asked that we re-examine our approach stating, “…I often say that Jim Crow, we could think of Jim Crow as a nail. And the protest against Jim Crow was a hammer. A hammer is an extremely effective tool when you're dealing with a nail...Contemporary racial inequality is a screw, and if you take a hammer and start pounding on a screw, you just end up with a mess which means we have to live with the fact that a new generation is going to have to innovate a screwdriver to deal with the new problem. And that screwdriver might not look anything like the hammer. And we can't keep yelling at them to use a hammer for a new problem.”

Hip-Hop artists arguably have the closest, most intimate connection with young people of color. Instead of suppressing the movement, perhaps there needs to be a more collective attempt to cultivate it. Maybe with more historical context taught and with more encouragement and mentorship from veterans of past movements the political potential of the culture can be tapped.

Maybe a Nas album that quotes James Baldwin, critiques Fox News, explores the hypocritical nature of American society, reflects on the possibility of a Black president, and expresses stories of racism, poverty, and struggle by young Black people has the power to inspire.

Can we afford to have the power to create, explore, and inspire suppressed?
What opportunity can censorship in this issue afford us?

By Michael Partis

@ The Coup Magazine

It Was All a Dream-Barack, King, and Hip-Hop

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:35:00 +0000

“They said this day would never come.”

Those were the first words of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech on January 3th, 2008, the night that he won the Democratic Party’s Iowa primary. Eight months later, those words are metaphoric for the perseverance of Black people in this country. It is a perseverance that was exhibited by the conscious citizens and dedicated activists of the Civil Rights Movement, and defined by the inspirational leadership and words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a perseverance that is emblematic in the work of the Hip-Hop Community and young Blacks today.

The discrimination, injustice, and inequality that people of the African Diaspora have faced in the over two hundred plus year history of the United States are among the ugliest scars inflicted in history. Yet these scars could not destroy the splendor seen in the spirit of these people.

The bravery of slaves to escape the oppression of slavery; the determination of abolitionists; the passion and fire of activist like Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X; the bravery of Freedom Summer volunteers to be beaten and bloodied for the sake of continuing the mission of voter-registration for Southern Blacks; the courage of Civil Rights leaders to march in Selma, Alabama and cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, knowing the violence that waited for them. And through the pain, the character that Blacks have shown displays the beauty of their spirit.

It is this beauty that could allow rappers like Talib Kweli and writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates to describe the Black experience as “The Beautiful Struggle.”

This exact struggle, this exact experience, is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr described on August 28, 1963, in his “I Have a Dream” speech. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation claimed to free Blacks from slavery, and set the course for their equality, Dr. King explained how “the negro still languishes in the corners of society… and still finds himself an exile in his own land.”

Yet while King eloquently and poignantly narrated how the rights that America claims to protect, and the promises it claims to ensure, had been intentionally and systematically denied to Black people, he also explained how it was not an undefeatable situation; for him, it was not a permanent condition. On this day, Dr. King championed a call to defeat this injustice. He announced to the world that a movement was underway, filled with citizens who would no longer stand for the indignity of racism to continue.

Most lasting though, was how Dr. King explained that this movement would be the fulfillment of a dream. A dream steeped in Blacks having equal rights; a dream where racism would be eliminated; a dream where Blacks would be apart of the American promise: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Martin Luther King, Jr wanted the future to have “the America dream.”

On the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Barack Obama’s accepted the nomination as the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate. In becoming the first Black to receive the Presidential nomination from a major political party, Obama embodies a piece of King’s dream.

In his nomination acceptance speech Obama laid out not only a political agenda, but a vision for a transformation of America. One that focused on Americans seeing their common humanity, and which highlighted that the “change” his campaign has focused on means developing a communal effort to make America’s promise available to all its citizens. This speech set forth a plan.

It is Barack’s ability to do grassroots organizing on a national level; his way of transforming words about tomorrow into actions we can do today; and his capability to make many believe that we are not bound to where we are at and that we can turn this society into what we want it to be, that makes Obama’s leadership apart of Dr. King’s dream.

And as Obama’s leadership attempts to continue Dr. King’s dream, it is the Hip-Hop community that can guide the change on ground.

The Hip-Hop community is the quintessential example of “the beautiful struggle.” The range of Hip-Hop music serves as a narrative that speaks about the post-Civil Rights Movement Black experience, through the voice of its youth. The music tells stories of pain, struggle, fun, isolation, poverty, success, exploitation, violence, coming-of-age, and sexuality. For many, the culture became a tool for survival; an outlet used to express the complicated dealings and circumstance a new generation was (and is) dealing with.

Hip-Hop is also intrinsically tied to the ideas of optimism, hope, and dreams. In its formative years, the music was seen to be nothing more than a fad. It was not viewed as viable. They said the day would never come when Hip-Hop would be more than a pasting trend.

A generation of young people believed in it. They saw its potential and worked not only for the art form to be respected, but for it to be sustained as well. They were not afraid to dream.

Now, the dream is a global cultural phenomenon, a respected musical platform, and a source of economic opportunity.

The strength of the Hip-Hop community is its ability to be innovative, creative, determined, and…to organize. Often the culture does not receive the credit it deserves for its ability to bring young people together.

Hip-Hop has an outstanding ability to disseminate information, spread a message, and organize itself. It is an art form that requires constantly being attuned to the latest cultural trends in urban communities, and to the work being done by a number of artist in the genre (regardless of whether they are famous or not). Hip-Hop fans are among the most technologically astute communities. Viral marketing, social networking, message boards and blogs are how members develop fan bases, share news, pass along information, and expand its audience. All of this shows a tremendous ability on the part of the Hip-Hop community.

In addition to this tremendous skill-set there is a political consciousness fermenting not just in “progressive” Hip-Hop circles, but in mainstream music too. This summer has seen Rap superstars Young Jeezy and (infamously) Ludacris both make politically-charged songs like “Obama is Here” and “My President is Black.” These songs show keen connectedness to the current political climate.

There is also historical awareness as well. West Coast artist The Game teamed with Nas to record a track entitled “A Letter to the King.” With Hip-Hop’s large youth audience, these are powerful messages.

During the Civil Right Movement and the Black Freedom Movement, young people were at the center of the work and vital to spreading the movement’s message. Groups like SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) were founded and/or maintained by students and young people. They were inspired by leaders like King, Ella Baker, and others to organize and work for the cause.

It is undoubted that Barack Obama is in the mold of these great Black leaders. It is also undoubted that in this campaign he has seized an overwhelming majority of not only Black voters, but young voters as well; and this was mostly due to a campaign team filled with young people that utilized the internet and technology in ways never seen before in a Presidential election.

But the involvement of the Hip-Hop community could not only expand the audience, but also actively engage many of the young Americans who are the most furthest removed from the promise of America. Not only could this help them become politically involved and lay the seeds for change in some of the largest areas of concentrated Black poverty, but it could provide the leadership training and political mentorship that creates a structure for organizing. And while the Hip-Hop community has exhibited political awareness, how powerful, and how much more skilled, could it be with Barack Obama’s mentorship?

James Baldwin once said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

Barack Obama is a leader prepared to bring America past the terrible history that is still present. The day has come for those who have endured the beautiful struggle to be fully included. That will bring the dream to reality.

Let The Truth Be Told

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:13:00 +0000

Last night HBO showed a documentary entitled, "The Black List, Volume One." The program features Blacks from various backgrounds talking about their life, their memories, their hopes, their fears, their opinions, their present, and their future. It was candid in that it truly conveyed the variety of people from the African Diaspora, and allowed them an uninterrupted opportunity to just talk.

On the show, Chris Rock spoke about something his father use to share with him. His father said that "you can not beat the White man by a point or two; you can't have 6 and he have 5. You can't let the scorecard go to the judges, because you'll lose. You have to knock em out."

That story made me think of something my mentor Fordham University professor Dr. Mark Naison said this week. He cited how Barack Obama needs to follow the example Harry S. Truman and James Brown by tirelessly working. To be at every single place were you can find working-class people. He said this is how Barack can win over working-class America.

Chris Rock’s story made me think of Dr. Naison’s analogy: Barack Obama is going to have to knock out his opponent; and the only way to do this is to outwork him.

My other mentor, Dr. Brian Purnell, pointed out that he needs to out work him in a way that is meaningful. Dr. Purnell spoke about the work of Bobby Kennedy. He said

“Before his decision to run, Bobby spent time in some of the poorest, most struggling sections of not only the country, but the world!

As Senator Kennedy, before he was the official candidate, Bobby visited America's urban and rural impoverished ghettos; he even toured mines and slums in South America.

By the time King was murdered, Bobby was able to speak…to people who were enraged and hurt and they felt him in a way that would have been impossible if he did not learn to empathize, internalize, as well as intellectualize people's economic and social pain in an honest, direct way.”

Indeed, this comment brought me back to the work Senator Obama did before he was even a senator; when he was a community organizer in Chicago. And it reminded me what Obama needs to continue doing.

He needs to be in the housing projects of the Bronx; in Atlanta's or Michigan's troubled school systems; in the streets of urban Philadelphia and Baltimore; in towns like Flint, MI, or Youngstown, OH; in the communities of Liberty City, FL. Senator Obama needs to be there not for photo-ops, but to hear and (most importantly) feel the struggle.

What makes a leader great is their ability to feel their people's struggle enough that they can resonate it to any crowd, to any audience. And that feeling within them, becomes strong enough for the people to believe in them.

Barack's brilliance is that he attempts to convince all of us to be leaders, by trying to make us see the best within ourselves. Obama is trying to follow in the spirit of what a great leader does: Love us at our worst, because you want to help us be our best.

Racism, sexism, patriarchy, elitism----all of these show America at its worst. And all these things have been salient over the past twelve months of this Presidential election. It has been really ugly. But most illuminating, it shows we may not be as far past prejudice, inequality, discrimination, and segregation as we would like to believe.

On Charlie Rose yesterday, Connie Schultz of the Cleveland's Plain Dealer said how people that say "they don't really know Barack Obama," "is he patriotic," or "is he really one of us," are all code for race. For me, it sounds like "I don't know this Black man; and I don't trust him either."

For nineteen months Barack has been trying to transcend the idea of race. Even his Philadelphia speech attempted to directly face his own identity within America's racial construct, but to confront it in a way that allows us to move past it. And as Schultz evaluation points out, it hasn't quite worked out.

Obama can only attempt to inspire change. The rest is left for us: to really look inside ourselves, and examine our beliefs and behaviors.

In the face of mainstream press coverage that over the past ten days has ridiculously emphasized every negative and every doubt that exists about Barack's resonance with "working-class America" (AKA White people who are not convinced yet); in the face of still being bombarded with rhetoric about a Democratic candidate who lost already, but yet the media still harps on every single day; in the face of a Democratic political dynasty that is still visibly upset about their improbable lost during this campaign, and still will not exhibit a visible, sincere advocacy for the winner of the contest; in the face of all of this, last night Michelle Obama still found a way to give a exceptional opening night speech that exulted her roots, her husband, her political party, and even the unyielding Hillary Clinton.

She was truly inspirational.

And so tonight, my only hope is that Hillary Clinton is gracious. Gracious enough to humbly acknowledge her defeat head-on, to recognize the large constituency that still clings to her, and to be self-less enough to turn it into a sincere call to support Barack Obama.

Otherwise, she and the Clinton legacy will only mirror the very bitterness and resentment Barack pointed out in his March race speech.

Race is still an issue in America because of all the other issues that come along with it: prison-industrial complex, funding for public schools, etc. Race is still an issue because it underpins some of the foundational problems of this country dating back to it "founding fathers." Race is still an issue because it works at the intersection of so many of America's contemporary problems.

This election brings out the issues of the times, if you can look past the political squabbling and media rhetoric.

What we need from a President, what we need from our leaders, what we need in all our communities, are truth-tellers that help us see these issues. We need people who love us at our worst, because they want to help us become our best.

That's what we need in a President.

You Ain't Sayin Nuthin: Rap Music's Lost Message

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 06:10:00 +0000

"People thinking MC is shorthand for misconception"

Talib Kweli-"Definition"

Maybe sales are down because nobody wants to hear what you have to say...

"I think I chose to become a rapper because I had alot of things I wanted to say and I wanted to make sure it reached the people. I didn't want it to go over the heads of people, and at that point R&B music wasn't really being used to make any statements. It was Hip-Hop...it was message music. I was inspired to have a conscious statement, a conscious message in my lyrics....That's why I started rhyming, that's why I started rappin." Lauryn Hill

Hip-Hop is NOT dead. (Just wanted to get that out the way.)

But it is missing something.

We still have rappers talking about their paper chase. We still have the gun-toting, drug narratives being rapped about. Videos still have cars, jewelry, and (of course) the video girl(s). There's a bit more dancing, a little less head-nodding. And there's no decline in rappers who "put on" for they city (or at least think they are); reppin your block, hood, or city is still mandatory.

But where are the rappers who want to do more than that? Where are the rapper who see themselves as more than rappers?

What made Hip-Hop grow beyond a "fade" or another form of artistic expression, was it's ability to produce social commentary. Rappers were literally the Master of Ceremonies: they were in charge of telling the greater public about the reality of urban American life, particularly the daily reality for people of color in this society.

And that is why stories of drugs, guns, and the sort came forth. It is not the entire reality, but it is certainly a part of it. Rapping was an exercise in truth-telling, not fantasy.

This isn't to box Rap music into one category. Of course it could more than that. Of course it could be different than that. Music can be whatever the musicians decide it to be. Culture can be produced by a variety of experiences, opinions, and expressions.

What made Rap music so special was that is could provide social commentary. Delivering a message is at the root of being a MC. A conscious message about the social condition of a people; a people who historically have been underrepresented and faced political, economic, and racial injustice. It is that power that made rapping more than just music; it is what made Hip-Hop a movement.

This is the core of what made America stand up and pay attention to Hip-Hop. This is what legitimized it.

Today we see less acknowledgment and engagement of Hip-Hop's social consciousness. A large part of it is that now the culture is big business. The beauty of the artform is that it allowed those who have financial difficulty access to MONEY. Money that would address many of the struggles chronicled in their music. You can't blame rappers for protecting their economic interest.

And you can't blame consumers for not buying it.

The height of Hip-Hop records sales came when the music was at it's most diverse, most introspective, and most creative. You have MC's who could construct stories as good as any novelist. Rappers who could craft narratives and string words together like a poet laureate. They could bring alive vivid images and detailed storylines just like a skilled film director or a gifted storyteller. They could speak about violence, murder, hope, and family all in the same breath; and that is a gift indeed. The music was art because the musicians respected its artistry and its skill.

People wanted to hear that. Masses wanted to share in the cultural, musical, and artistic excellence Hip-Hop provided.

But it is undeniable that we have lost that strive for excellence. Perhaps it is because music doesn't share a message anymore.

Maybe people want to hear about how gentrification is affecting the residents of inner-city communities. Maybe people want to hear how South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem residents feel about condos being built in their neighborhoods. Maybe they want to know how young Black and Latino women feel about HIV/AIDS and why they are the disease's number one victims. Maybe people want to hear how Obama's Presidential run in influencing Black youth. Maybe people want to hear about how these hard economic times is affecting the hood. Maybe people want to hear what a generation of wealthy rappers plan to do to provide economic opportunity to a community of people who still struggle financially. Maybe listeners want to hear about what is going on in our society.

Perhaps MC's, rappers, and Hip-Hop need to remember it's roots as message music.

Michael Partis
www.michaelpartis.blogspot.com
myspace.com/hiphopthought
michaelpartis@gmail.com