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Here’s an audio/video mixtape from some of the best MJ mixes I’ve heard recently. How many times can we say “RIP Michael?!”

SIDE A : The MJ Warm Up

Track 1. Come On Come On Come On/Lemme Show You What It’s All About: Love the five-part Minding Michael podcast series from Qool DJ Marv Aural Memoirs & da Buttamilk Archives. Featuring the MJ hits I had forgotten along with those beloved pop standards, this podcast is not to be missed. My favorites are Part One, “A Good Time,” for its melancholy, and Part Three, “Grab Your Belt Buckle/Music’s Taking Over” for the disco hits that make you move even when you’re sitting down. “Roughly 75 percent of these songs, I’ve never played in public,” Qool DJ Marv wrote about Minding Michael. “This is my translation of Michael as a fan and DJ, as a boy who grew up with stronger together black family vibes and Black is Beautiful all up in my head, and as a man who still embraces that exuberant idealism by perpetuating it and sustaining it through the magic of the music in the mix.” (Ranging from 47 mins. to over an hour long)

Track 2. Shake It, Shake It, Baby: Eclectic Method’s The Michael Jackson Video: Don’t be deterred by the Peter Jennings intro to this MJ memory lane video mix. For my money, the highlight comes midway through the video when London-based Eclectic Method mashes up “Blame It On the Boogie” with “Black or White,” and then moves seamlessly into “Rock With You” on top of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Favorite parts of this video show not one, but TWO Michael Jackson videos that stream simultaneously. Shows just what a versatile dancer and performer Michael really was! (4:51 mins)

Track 3. You Can’t Run Away From/This Love I Got: Can’t even remember hearing Jackson Five do “Ready or Not Here I Come,” but you can groove to it here on Norwegian DJ and Producer Teddy Touch’s Memories MJ Tribute mix. Love mixing freestyling and beats with MJ’s classics. (40:04 mins)

SIDE B (The Flip Side)

Track 4. And Don’t Go Around Breaking Young Girls’ Hearts: If you like it when Michael Jackson goes all electronic on you, check out this Billie Jean remix from Philadelphia’s DJ Apt One. Guaranteed to make you move! (6:06 mins)

Track 5. Let Us Realize that a Change Can Only Come/When We Stand Together As One: Believe it or not, there are a handful of viral music videos out there that feature performances by inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, a maximum security prison in the central Philippines. (The prison management has inmates do choreographed dances there for exercise.) The CPDRC did a Thriller video remake in July of 2007, and a “We Are The World” Michael Jackson Tribute just days after Michael passed away. Neither performance needs any introduction. (4:26 and 3:39 mins)

Track 6. Never Can Say Goodbye: DJ Ayres did this Michael Jackson Mix for The Rub, a party that creates long lines around the block of Brooklyn’s Southpaw the first Saturday of every month. The mix is a great chronological history of Michael’s music from “Maybe Tomorrow” (the ’70s) to  “Butterflies” (2001). (53:47 mins) –AFS

Abbie Fentress Swanson is a freelance radio radio reporter (and music addict) based in Brooklyn, New York.

Uber-media critic Howard Kurtz has gotten it coming and going in the past month. First, CNN got lambasted for mis-covering the Iran election and protests. In an age where Twitter is fetishized, a hashtag (or searchable ID) called #CNNFail became all the rage.

This article on MediaBistro links to video of Kurtz’ own coverage of Twitter. Despite calls to mention #CNNFail in his Washington Post Column, Kurtz didn’t…so NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen led a charge to make Kurtz accountable. As a media critic, mind you, Kurtz’ entire conceit is give-no-favor journalism.

Now Kurtz is under fire for failing to look at the dynamics of race and privilege in reporting.

In a recent column asking whether black reporters have gone soft on Michelle Obama, Kurtz said:

They [the beat reporters assigned to the First Lady] are all African American women. Perhaps this gives them a richer cultural understanding of Obama as a trailblazer. Indeed, most write with enthusiasm, in some cases even admiration, about the first lady as a long-awaited role model for black women.

I will give Kurtz credit for speaking to a variety of voices, from Harvard-based academic and producer (Eyes on the Prize) Callie Crossley to Newsweek editor John Meacham to the black women-on-Michelle Obama-beat (including Allison Samuels, who I know personally, in disclosure). But Kurtz fails in two ways. First, he says the black women covering the First Lady are both biased and ineffective: “None of the beat writers has been granted an interview since the inauguration.” Second, he throws in the words that “the White House press corps remains predominantly white,” but he does not even attempt to explain how newsrooms are engines of “social replication”–where likes promote like–and of scrutiny and tokenism inhibiting the success of non-white employees. (Check out Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s seminal work, among others.)

One of the tropes of American life is that whites seem raceless, by default; and that only non-whites have racial attributes, and thus distinctions and biases. This presumption-of-transparency when it comes to whiteness is particularly dangerous in the newsroom. At the same time, for example, that my now-cancelled show “News and Notes” was scrutinized for any bias towards then-Senator Obama, one of the people constantly reminding us not to be biased would use the phrase “my friend Karl Rove” without the slightest sense of irony.

Was the disconnected chit-chat about Rove/Obama a racial failing, a political failing, a journalistic failing, or all three? Sometimes its hard to parse the reason because all these issues fall under an “intersectionality” of interests. (Thanks to Professor Kimberle Crenshaw for her work on intersectionality.)

Among the many issues of media favoritism that stands out in my mind is one concerning former President George W. Bush. As we all know, being vetted for offenses concerning alcohol and drug use is a part of the race for the presidency. And we also know that George W. Bush had an alcohol problem in the past.

Fine, you say.

But although the outcome of the elections may have been the same, at least one reporter played a critical role in covering up Bush’s actions… thus preventing what could have and should have been a robust discussion of responsibility early in the race.

As the American Journalism Review puts it:

In July [2000], [Portland Maine] Press Herald reporter Ted Cohen, 49, discovered George W. Bush’s 1976 drunk driving arrest in Kennebunkport, Maine–a story that mysteriously eluded the national media, which claimed to have combed through every inch of Bush’s background.

But his editor, a man named Andrew Russell, told him it was not a story.

I won’t comment further, except to say that Russell later regretted his decision. So did a lot of voters who we reporters promise to inform, so they as voters can decide.

So what’s the big picture here? It’s fairness and favor. And as if the fates were making a broader point to Kurtz and all of us who care about journalism, the Washington Post is now engaged in a much broader, more troubling controversy. In essence, the Post promised lobbyists and folks with $25,000 to a quarter of a million dollars paid access to newsmakers. Now the Post is apologizing, and Kurtz noted it in today’s CNN broadcast. That story is all over the ‘net and the NYT reports here, perhaps too gleefully.

Again, big picture: I would argue that reporters of color face a constant scrutiny about our motives that actually inhibits favoritism; and that white, heterosexual reporters, especially men, see themselves and their actions as neutral even when they are not. You may find a black reporter talking about her “sista-girl” circle in an article on Michelle Obama… but I’ve never seen an example in the mainstream media of a black reporter signing off on a program that broke one of the fundamental tenets of journalism–that paid access for lobbyists and journalism don’t mix. (Some of the pay-to-play antics of traditional African-American media outlets will be another story for another day…)

Of course, Kurtz went on CNN today to criticize the Washington Post. Who isn’t chiming in? But I wish Kurtz would do a deeper investigation of the fig leaf of white neutrality; and take a harder look in the mirror as well.

=======

Farai Chideya is a broadcaster, author, novelist (Kiss the Sky) and the founder of PopandPolitics.com

Farai’s disclaimers and IDs:
I used to work for Newsweek, which is cited in Kurtz’ article on black women reporters.
I know Newsweek reporter Allison Samuels.
I used to work for CNN and sometimes still appear on their air.
I don’t think #CNNFail was smart because it could have been #MSNBCFail and #FoxFail as well.
I wrote a seminal book on race and media titled Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans.
And I am a black woman, last time I checked.

New York-based writer, publicist, and activist April Silver says she continues to get feedback about a piece she wrote in response to this performance by Lil’ Wayne and Drake at the BET Awards 2009. Director Byron Hurt also responded, and wrote the following to BET’s Debra Lee on June 29:

“Sunday night’s BET Awards show was a disgrace. It’s sad and unfortunate that your network, owned by Viacom, continues to crank out mediocrity and perpetuate negative stereotypes of black men, women, and children. Although you likely received high ratings for the awards show, there is no honor in reinforcing the status quo’s opinion of black people. Your tribute to Michael Jackson and the overall show had its great moments, however, BET failed to deliver a solid, quality show. Rather than “raising the bar” and presenting African-Americans as a creative, proud, dignified people, BET lowered the bar for the entire world to see. The BET Awards drew a huge audience to watch a tribute to Michael Jackson, but left millions of viewers feeling disappointed, embarrassed, and reduced to classic stereotypes.

“During the most blatantly sexist performances of the night, the executives at BET failed to act and display intelligence, courage, and leadership. Show executives watched, approved, and applauded as artists Lil’ Wayne, Drake, and Cash Money brought young, under-aged girls onto the stage to dance and serve as window dressing while they performed ‘Every Girl,’ a song that reduces girls and women to sex objects. In a culture where one out of four girls and women are either raped or sexually assaulted – and where manipulative men routinely traffic vulnerable women into the sex industry – it is not okay that BET allowed this to happen. BET owes its entire audience – particularly girls and women around the world – an apology for its failure to intervene. BET should also take immediate steps to ensure that this kind of sexist performance does not happen again. Sunday night’s show epitomizes why so many black people worldwide are fed up with BET and feel strongly that your network inaccurately represents black men and women.”

# # #

“Last night, live at the BET Awards in Los Angeles, a room full of head-bobbing, consenting adults bounced to Drake and Lil Wayne’s back-to-back performances of the hit songs “Best I Ever Had” and “Every Girl.” I watched, underwhelmed. I wanted more “Michael” in what was supposed to be this award-show-turned-Michael-Jackson-tribute. I watched, ever puzzled by the Lil Wayne phenomena that has captivated the music industry. I watched, wondering when the set was going to end.

“Then the little girls came onstage…literally the little girls. “Are those children?” I asked out loud, in disbelief. Then the camera panned the audience. Everyone was still head-bobbing as the little Black girls huddled around these superstars.

“‘Are those little girls on stage…for this song?!?!‘ I, still in disbelief, lost breath and forced myself to exhale. ‘Why are these little girls featured on this performance? Is somebody going to stop this?’ Again, the show was live, though for a nano-second, I was hoping that a hunched-over stage manager would bust through from back stage to scoop up the children, rescuing them from harm’s way…from being associated from this song. But instead, what those girls witnessed from the stage was hundreds and hundreds of adults (mostly Black people) staring back at them, co-signing the performance. These girls, who all appeared to be pre-teens, were having their 15 minutes of glam on one of the biggest nights in televised Black entertainment history, with two of pop culture’s biggest stars at the moment, with millions of people watching. They must have been bubbling with girlish excitement, shimmering like princesses all night. Pure irony: one of them wore a red ballerina tutu for the special occasion. And we applauded them.

“But did no one care that Lil Wayne’s song Every Girl is about grown men and their sexual escapades with women? Did the meaning and intent of the song matter to anyone, this song whose hook and other lyrics required a re-write in order to get air play? ‘I wish I could love every girl in the world.‘ That’s the radio-friendly version of ‘I wish I could f–k every girl in the world.‘ But Lil Wayne’s BET performance was the clean edit of the song. Perhaps he (and the show producers) thought that there was nothing wrong in featuring the children in the clean version. Perhaps we were supposed to see the whole bit as cute and innocent. Absolutely not. There’s no other way to cut it: in presenting little girls in a performance of a song that is about sex, group sex, and more sex, BET and Lil Wayne set the stage for child pornography. It doesn’t matter what version of the song was played, much like a man who batters women is still an abusive man, even if uses flowery phrases while battering.

“In the song, Lil Wayne mentions superstar Miley Cyrus, but Cyrus gets a pass on this lyrical sex escapade because, as he acknowledges, she is a minor. Huh? Why, then, is he comfortable with featuring four minors, these four little Black girls, in the show? How deep exactly is this inability of some men to respect women, and how deep is Lil Wayne’s disregard for the safety of little girls?

“I’m told that one of the girls is Lil Wayne’s daughter. That doesn’t matter. In fact that makes it worse. Last night we were reminded that there are few safe spaces for our little girls to be children; that some of us are willing to trade their innocence for a good head nod. BET and Lil Wayne are beneath low because, in effect, they have given premium assurance to these and other little girls that their best value, their shining moment, their gifts to display to the world, all lie within a context that says they are fuckable.

“The programming at BET has been heavily criticized by artists, concerned citizens, college students, parent groups, social justice organizations, media reform activists, and many others for over a decade now. Their programming seems hell bent on broadcasting the worst pathologies in the Black community. Some have joined the anti-BET movement by simply tuning out. Others have been more pro-active. National letter-writing campaigns and other activities designed to shame and/or pressure the network into improving its programming have been in play for some time now. Boycotts have been called as well. Two years ago, for example, the network found itself in the line of fire as it planned to air the very controversial series “Hot Ghetto Mess.” Advertisers, such as State Farm Insurance and Home Depot, responded to pressure and requested that their ads be disassociated with the series (though, their ads could be placed in other programming slots). None of this has made a difference. In fact, it seems to have emboldened the network, for it is now expanding. In the fall, BET is due to launch another channel.

“As a social entrepreneur and activist, my entire life/work has been dedicated to standing up for what’s right, especially within the culture of hip hop. When identifying what cancerous elements exist within the Black community, many fellow activists agree with Chuck D (of Public Enemy), and even Aaron McGruder (of The Boondocks), when they targeted BET as one of those elements. That said, I didn’t think that we would ever have to take the network to task for what amounts to child pornography.

“But millions of Black people are not offended by the network and welcome anything BET has to offer, no matter how much it continues to unravel the fabric of our community. Imagine, if you will, BET as a human being and the viewers as the community. You would have to imagine BET as a drug dealer, with his swag on…perhaps outside standing atop a truck, the community crowded beneath him. Imagine him throwing nicely wrapped gifts into the crowed, or giving away turkeys at Thanksgiving. Or maybe it’s Mother’s Day and he buys dinner and teddy bears to all the single moms and grandmothers around the way. Despite his best efforts and despite the approval of his fans, he is still a drug dealer, pimping death to the masses.

“Proverbs is full of sacred text that teaches us that there will always be fools amongst us. Some of them will be highly paid, protected, and given world-wide platforms to show off what they do best. And these fools (be they performers, corporate executives, or others), will have fans and loyal supporters, and a place to call home, like a BET.

“But as long as there will be fools amongst us, there will also be wise ones – a small group of people concerned about the long term health and well being of the community. This small group will often go unheard and they will be outmatched. They will struggle over which problem to address first: the child pornographer, the batterer, the pimp, the prostitute, the thief, the slumlord, or the system that enables it all. They will get tired and their defense will pale in comparison to the almost crushing offense. And they will be betrayed from within. Historically and universally, this is what happens in the struggle for what is right. But eventually, with continued pressure, something will shift. A radical new thinking will emerge, and the fools will lose their stronghold.

“The sure expectation of victory, however, can not be understated. It is a concrete ingredient in the struggle against the death that is being paraded in our community…as necessary as letter writing campaigns, economic boycotts, symbolic and actual protests, and other pressure-oriented activities. It is indeed possible to bring more life into our community.

Copyright 2009, by April R. Silver. Silver is a social entrepreneur, activist and writer/editor. She is also founder of the communications agency AKILA WORKSONGS, Inc. Her first book is the critically acclaimed anthology “BE A FATHER TO YOUR CHILD: REAL TALK FROM BLACK MEN ON FAMILY, LOVE AND FATHERHOOD.” Contact Info: silver@aprilsilver.com or www.aprilsilver.com.

###

BET responded July 3 in a statement to AllHipHop.com:

“BET Networks deeply regrets the performance by Young Money at the BET AWARDS ‘09 (featuring Lil Wayne, Drake, Gudda Gudda and Mack Maine). Elements of the performance were unplanned and should not have happened.”

BET also said it found viewers’ opinions, like Hurt’s and Silver’s, useful. “We have edited Young Money’s performance for all BET Awards ‘09 encore presentations,” a representative said.

BET Awards 2009

I recently released Kiss the Sky, a novel about a black rock musician. Then I did an event with an actual black rock musician who read my book and said that the part about Michael Jackson was so eerie. I had forgotten all about it. But I found it…written years ago… and yes, eerie.

Tell me what you think about MJ and your memories… I am getting creeped out watching all the old footage, especially the ones of Diana calling Michael “sexy” while they are are both wearing those dark spangly shirts…

I wish he’d been happy. I find it hard to believe he was.

Peace,
F

____________________________________________________

Excerpt, Kiss the Sky, Atria Books, 2009
(Written from the P.O.V. of the main character.)

Drifted into a drowse and thought about the way music was my whole life.

My great grandfather sold Billie Holiday reefers, back when she was a bad little girl and he was a dirty old man. A withered up little yellow man. Always looking at the girls of school-age. A sailor, in and out of port. In town just long enough every time to get great-grandma pregnant. And wasn’t it just like me to love Billie, all of her, even her vices.

Then there was my first musical love, Michael Jackson. I was six, and to my child’s eyes he seemed just enough older to know a lot of things I wanted to learn. He was pure music, shimmering, shimmying, shaking, grooving, moving, liquid hipbones and fluid bell-bottomed pantlegs, denim, slouchy caps, a sexy choirboy backed up by his older brothers; plus television, dancing lions and tin-men, a too-old Diana as Dorothy. But wait, that last part was later.

Still, the Michael and “The Wiz” were always linked in my mind. When I was six, my Daddy and I went to see “The Wiz,” way before the movie with Michael and Diana, before the nose jobs and the skin lighteners and the hair straighteners and out-of-court settlements. Strange third-person memory: I see myself and my father walk towards the exit, along a half-lit aisle, with the play unfolding (bright reds and golds) behind us.

But: Michael. His was the music of longing, in a man-child’s voice that a little girl could understand before she truly knew desire. I liked Michael the same time Daddy liked to play the Isley Brothers. I didn’t understand the Isley’s lyrics (thank God), but their guitar licks and keyboards made it hard for me not to dance; their whispers tickled my ears.

Older still: When my girl scout troop had a party I brought Stevie Wonder and my friend Ronnice brought Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” which was everything you needed to know about the difference between uncool and cool. Stevie was uplifting and parent-approved; the teenaged Michael was your best friend’s older brother, a boy who you had a crush on so bad you thought you might melt every time you saw him. Ronnice was in fifth grade and I was in third, which might have been part of my problem, but not all of it. She was what my mother called “fast”–loose with the boys, hard and unforgiving with the girls.

I loved Michael, don’t get me wrong. How could I not? He was my first. But I mounted a defense of Stevie, which all the girls took as a weak-assed move.

When I was in eighth grade, Ronnice had an abortion. Like most of my fast girlfriends, she loved house music, the kind you heard in the clubs she’d sneak into. She was underaged but built like a brick shithouse and nobody checked her I.D. When she got into LL Cool J, I was loving Prince.

Later I worked my way through alternative rock, romantic R&B, gay disco, Public Enemy, Madonna and Grace Jones. Music ecstatic and anthemic, smoke drifting through laser lights, tranny boys in platform heels and lip liner, parties on the subway platform, lots of drugs but not down my throat or up my nose, the music simply lifting me, carrying me like the wind under the cape of a superhero or a pigeon caught in an updraft from a subway grate.

The music, just the music, used to be enough for me. Everything else came later.

I wanted to get back to those days again.

____________________________________________

This is an excerpt from Kiss the Sky (Atria Books 2009) by Farai Chideya. Chideya is a multimedia journalist, author, and the founder of PopandPolitics.com

Michael Jackson seemed crushed under a weight of identity: black/man/star/brother/father/son. Add philanthropist/media-victim and -manipulator/accused pederast/primate owner/fashionista and dancer. Owner of, and now perhaps a returnee to, Neverland.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece asking what happened to the brownskinned boy who stole my heart and those of girls my age across the world. Why did he shed his color, and the sincerity of his smile?

As people gathered today on Twitter to share stories, sift the real news from the fake, and mourn, I saw reporter Lisa Ling post, “RIP Michael Jackson, My First Boyfriend.” I felt the same way. It wasn’t just a childhood crush. Over time, I felt like I was one of millions of people who wanted Michael Jackson to succeed. MTV at first refused to play his videos because black artists, no matter how successful, didn’t fit their idea of their format. Of course Michael, with the help of Quincy Jones, went on to become the King of Pop and the king of music video.
In the intro to Thriller, Michael says “I’m not like other guys” and “I’m different”… and then proceeds to transmogrify into a werewolf.

Pop cult from “Twilight” to “Harry Potter” has taken feelings of alienation and packaged them for wide consumption. Michael was one of the first masters of our modern era to do that well.

But what he could not seem to do is seize control of his own transformation and find his own center as a man, not just a creator. After all, the trope of successful transformation is that the hero becomes something else, but can return to his or her human emotions if not human form.

John Landis, the director of “Thriller,” has called Jackson a “tragic figure.” And that brings me, personally, back to race. Race added a very specific prism to the failed transformation of Michael Jackson. His plastic surgery bordered on pathology and racial caricature. His need for the spotlight brought him, arguably, into clashes with both the law and public opinion. I am thinking specifically of the charges of his treatment of children… others’, and his own.

Would he have felt freer to pursue his own alternative identity if we had not also wanted him to be what he could not seem to be… an adult black man who provided fodder for the fantasies we cherished when he was a child?

In the prelude to the Thriller video, Michael Jackson speaks to the black, bobbysox-wearing girl who is his love interest and says, “You know I like you… And I hope you like me the way I like you.” Sigh.

We always loved you, Michael. I hope you found peace in just being you, whoever you were, and despite what we all wanted you to be.

=====

Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.

This article is also cross-posted on The Grio.

Thinking,
Hoping the best for his family,
F
=======================

You were my first. Back when the other kids were swaying to nursery rhymes, I wanted to rock with you. I had everything I needed — a portable stereo and an album of you singing with the Jackson Five. According to my mother, I would drag around my little stereo, and I would put you on, and I would dance. Nothing else in the world could have made me happier.

I remember you. Your lips were full and your nose was wide and your face was brown. This only rates mentioning because it is no longer true, so untrue, in fact, that sometimes I wonder if I imagined you as you once were. I’m sure at night, as a child, I dreamed of the boy with the afro who sang and spun on his heels like a miniature James Brown.

I wish that boy had become a man. That wish seemed reasonable all the way through “Off the Wall,” when your nose grew narrower and hair more lank, but you were still visibly black. With every subsequent album your relationship to your original appearance grew fainter and fainter, until you were no longer even an echo of yourself. But the further you fled from black masculinity, the more international crowds lionized you. Today you are a grotesque.

And an alleged child molester — that too? If we can believe what we see in the camera lens — that this pale alien being (recently parodied in “Scary Movie 3″) was once cute little Michael — then we can believe anything. The danger for us is that we will judge you by your appearance. The danger for you is that you have set up a situation, with your reckless behavior around your own children and others’, that we cannot help but judge.

In his book The Hip Hop Generation,” Bakari Kitwana relentlessly outlines America’s broken promise to black males. Mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and unbalanced enforcement of drug laws have helped make prison a waystation or home for many more black men than white. In Los Angeles and Cincinnati, frustrated youth up-end their own neighborhoods to draw attention to police brutality. The global economy undermines the fortunes of lower-skilled workers, many of them African-Americans. The military, in many cases, remains the only way out.

This social warfare has hardened many black men, aiding and abetting the culture of hypermasculinity that permeates hip hop. It’s hard to be a sister and be down with the bitch/’ho lyrics, hard to be down with men who spout rhymes full of anti-female fury. Commercial hip hop may appeal to young women who can pretend that the men are calling out someone else, but to an older head like myself it sounds as if they are speaking my name. I cannot listen to it. I cannot dance.

But I long to take the floor with the same childish glee that I did when you and I were together. I desperately want you to be there for me, to reassure me that things aren’t so bad that the primary options open to black men are hatred of black women or physical and mental disintegration. I would like to think that you, the shadow Michael who never had a chance to grow up, wouldn’t treat me the way those other men do. But I’m the furthest thing from your mind.

In your absence, the absence of a Michael I can relate to, I have only questions. Why does America destroy and pervert black men? Were you squeezed between racism and perfectionism until your very soul compressed? And what about those without your millions of dollars? What options are left for them?

I feel — and I know it cannot be true, for I still breathe — that if you cannot exist, I cannot exist. If there is no room for a loving black masculinity in the world, I fear there is little room for the black feminine as well. You, Michael Jackson, are not all black men, and for that I am grateful. But your decline says more about America than we can bear to hear.

====

Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.
This was posted on Alternet.org on November 26, 2003.

For the extremists who believe my father is a hero, it is imperative you understand what he did was an act of cowardice. To physically force your beliefs onto others with violence is not brave, but bullying. Doing so only serves to prove how weak those beliefs are. It is simply desperation, reminiscent of a temper tantrum when a child cannot get his way.

More controversially, Erik von Brunn also said:

I cannot express enough how deeply sorry I am it was Mr. Johns [the slain museum security guard], and not my father who lost their life.

It may well be that nothing could have stopped James von Brunn, and that no one–friends or family–could have reached him. But there are some people in hate movements or who are extremists/supremacists who can be reached… I offer my experience below.

It’s normal to want to close ranks when we see extremism turn deadly. Here in the U.S. we have had, back to back, the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed late-term abortions, and a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, both by dangerous, alienated men who made no secret of their (multiple) hatreds. If you want to raise your fear factor even higher, you can turn on the television and see coverage of the slaying of an anti-Taliban cleric in Pakistan…. or remember that the President-select of Iran is also a Holocaust denier.

But some of the most enlightening moments in my life have come from talking to men and women from hate movements, and I’ll tell you why.

Let me start with a story. One winter many years ago, after a blizzard that closed workplaces and schools, I drove from Washington, DC, to a park-n-ride lot in Frederick, Maryland. In that lot were piles of fresh, white snow and exactly one other car. I walked to the car and met the Roger Kelly, the Grand Dragon of a local klaveren of Ku Klux Klansmen. Make that Klansmen and -women. I specifically connected with him in order to speak to one of his followers about her role as a woman in the hate movement.

She was not the first Klanswoman I’d spoken to, but the first I’d met face to face. And so we, two women, one black and one white, stood eye to eye in the cold and I got as much information as I could about her life and beliefs.

Life had not been kind to her. She was worn out, with some missing teeth, lined skin, scraggly hair. I bet she was much younger than she looked. To her, being a part of the Klan — which of course not only rejects racial equality but espouses anti-Semitism — was part of her attempt to save America (and her family) from what she saw as the social, ethical, religious, and economic ravages of a racially mixed America.

While I certainly did not cotton to her views, I looked into her eyes and saw not just a member of the Klan, but a member of the human race. I do not say that with sentimentality. Humans are wonderful, transcendent… genocidal…loving…hateful. We are human precisely because members of our species can be all of these things. We are often fearful, which the Klanswoman was. She found solace in a place where she was validated for her fear and anger.

Yet another time I talked to a female leader of an armed, racist skinhead compound in the West… by phone… and revealed only at the end of the call that I was black. I asked what she would have done if she had known (or even asked) first. She said, “I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

That would have been a shame. I learned so much from her. She’d left her wealthy, priveleged family (whose name is in the Social Register) after feeling alienated and ignored. Judging by pictures I later saw of the skinhead leader, she was youthful and vital–the physical opposite of the Klanswoman I’d met. She’d spoken to me proudly over the phone of winning an athletic competition at an Aryan Nation gathering. In some ways, she seemed the gleaming, Amazonian superhero of hate. But inside, there was still that wounded girl who told me that she joined the hate movement because she wanted a family who loved her. She believed she had found it in white supremacy.

I feel grateful that I had the mix of reporterly curiosity and youthful bravado (or perhaps foolishness) that allowed me to do this reporting. It forever changed how I look at extremists, and how to I listen and talk to them.

I listen with an ear for degrees of hate-in-action. Sometimes I will go to white supremacist sites and blogs to see what’s being discussed. (You better believe they are reading broadly as well.) I read up via organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center on incidents and demographics of extremist groups. But I also, in some circumstances, will talk to hate-mongers themselves. I listen for subtext. The narrative of supremacy is domination. But the meta-narrative of the lives of many supremacists and extremists is a longing for belonging.

So, when we as a society begin to tune out or shy away from people who already have borderline extreme views, these people often turn deeper into their fears. At a time of social and economic upheaval like ours, there will be many people whose genuine need for security and community will go badly awry. Social isolation helps fuel paranoia. Paranoia is the best recruiting tool that supremacist groups have.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
I am not asking people to “hug a Klansman.” That may get you a beating, or worse. Some of the Klan groups in Maryland had murdered black people… and white rivals. I became convinced I could talk to these particular racists in Frederick face to face after interviewing musician Daryl Davis, author of Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan

. He played rock, country, and blues in local bars, and found out that his fans included white supremacists. One of those supremacist-fans was Roger Kelly, who Davis first observed and later, of all things, befriended. I met Kelly in the snowy parking lot years after he’d met Davis. And then years after Kelly and I spoke…he renounced his membership in the Klan. (I guess having a black friend and being in the Klan was just too much cognitive dissonance.)

If this were a movie (and someone should make a movie about Davis and Kelly), you would cue music and do a little fist bump of joy. While I believe listening to the nuances of extremist dialogue can prevent some deadly incidents, it will not prevent them all. We cannot listen to extremists with the expectation that they will change. We can listen with the expectation that we will change. Perhaps if we become less fearful, we will remain in dialogue with people who are on the margins… but not yet at the barracades of hate. 305 online download

I tweeted a garbled version of the breaking news, and then many voices chimed in online, most voicing outrage and some demanding military action.

Outrage is more than justified.

But the calls for military action seemed to come out of a void… a void where the only response to provocation and injustice is to start what we have no clear vision of finishing: that is, another war, on another front. Twenty years ago Afghanistan handed the Soviet forces their rear ends on a platter, in a conflict that is often equated to Vietnam. If a nation is willing to expend countless people to win a war; willing to accept mass casualties; then it is almost impossible to crush that nation militarily. North Korea is a very different military and government model than Afghanistan, but it too has already shown a willingness to let families die of famine (well over a million in recent years) rather than play ball with other nations.

The New York Times points out that both the US and the UN are considering sanctions against North Korea for its recent nuclear tests. But it also runs this telling quote:

“Our response would be to consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard-line measures,” the North Korea’s state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said in a commentary.

In other words, North Korea is spoiling for a fight. The sentencing of Lee and Ling may not be an attempt to guard against conflict, but rather to provoke it. (Note that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton , in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, already tried to apologize and broker a release… before the sentence came down.)

Why look for battle? To be seen as a “big man” in international affairs is no small thing. Many have defied the U.S. with fewer means to more than scattered applause from some quarters. Yes, some people were rooting for the Somali pirates who captured the U.S. vessel.

So: a nuclear equipped nation is spoiling for a fight with the world’s only superpower, a superpower which finds itself overextended militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two journalists are held in breach. Two young women are away from their families and lives, potentially for years, for doing their jobs.

It’s rare that Americans are put in this position, directly in the line of fire. Journalist Chauncey Bailey was killed in Oakland, California, in 2007 while investigating a possible murder cover up. Some American reporters have been wounded and died in Iraq. (I think of the moving writing of Michael Weisskopf of Time magazine, who tossed a grenade thrown into the vehicle he was riding in in Iraq out… saving his life and others’ but losing his arm.) But the people imprisoned or killed for “committing” journalism are usually not American or even Western. Countless Iraqui translators and reporters have been killed, often working as stringers for Western media. Latin America has seen journalists killed covering narcotrafficking, government corruption, and crime.

Groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists work on these issues every day. (Their website, linked above, runs the headlines “Tiananmen anniversary, obscured” and “Fifth Somali Journalist Killed this Year.”) Few people outside of the media industry even know that groups like the CPJ exist.

Of all the questions that come to mind when looking at the case of Lee, Ling, and North Korea, the one troubling most people I know (personally or in the Twitter-verse) is: What do I do? What do we

do? What can we do?

The first thing we can do is to inform ourselves, to get to know more about North Korea than its name. We need to learn more about the possible regime change in North Korea and how it could hinder diplomacy; what recent and past North Korean actions (from the nuclear tests to famines

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to the 1953 armistice with South Korea, which the North says it now will not honor) say about this government and its desires; who is negotiating on behalf of the U.S.; and how movements like the call for action in Darfur have or have not worked in addressing human rights issues.

On that last score, two more phrases come to mind: celebrity and social networking. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), perhaps the most followed person in the Twitter-verse, chimed in to say, among several things, that he was exploring ways to network a coalition of supporters. I do believe it matters than Laura comes from an already well-network family. (Her sister Lisa Ling does or has worked for outlets including Oprah and ABC; Lisa and I briefly overlapped at ABC). I do believe it is critical for celebrities and other people who connect the media to the masses (i.e., most of us) get their talking points ready. And those talking points must include an actual depth of knowledge about the situation.

So: what do we do? We listen, we learn. Let me repeat that: we learn. We learn about the situation; the diplomatic interventions; and who can help. Whether we are journalists, celebrities, news consumers, even diplomats, we can constantly refresh our knowledge of the situation and strive to help from a position of educated power and compassion.

To the speedy freedom of these two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee; to a renewal of our interest in and championing of brave journalism as well as brave journalists.

If you are still following me, or if you are not, I am talking about guilt.

This scenario–interviewing the mother of a murdered child–happened when I was a cub reporter twenty years ago. I made note of the room, the way we were seated (bereaved to the left; police information officer to the right). I noticed, and will never forget, that the mother of the murdered woman kept picking at her fingernail beds and that they were raw to the point of bleeding.

I teared up but did not cry as she described how her daughter dated this controlling man; how she ended their relationship and then started a healthy one; and then how, one day, the man who was her ex walked up to the home she shared with her fiancee and shot the couple dead.

So: I showed feelings during my interview. Was that bad? I don’t think so. Sympathy. But on the knife’s edge. Control is important too.

The movie “Broadcast News” uses actor William Hurt as a perfect example of journalism gone bad. (SPOILER ALERT). During a one-camera shoot, after his main interview, he asks the cameraman to turn the camera on him and he effortlessly produces tears. They cut that into the “reaction shot” of what looks like a two-camera shoot.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “one camera shoot” versus two, just think of it literally. We are now much more advanced (and film and cameras are cheaper) than the ’80s, ENG-cam broadcast news heyday. But imagine a one-camera shoot. You have one man behind the camera. (S)he can either shoot the subject; the interviewer; or the scene (commonly known as “B-roll”). If the interviewer and subject are seated next to each other, (s)he can shoot both talkers at the same time.

What you cannot do, and what “Broadcast News” explored and exposed, is have a tight shot of the face of the person being interviewed and get the simultaneous reaction of the reporter.

A facial tight shot is money. We react to the mirroring effect of seeing someone else up close. Thus, once we figured out the economics of shooting television, we moved towards two-camera shoots, where you can alternate close-ups of different people; or multi-camera shoots, where you can freely intercut different perspectives on the same narrative.

I bring this up only because–and I wish I remember who said this–the ultimate discretion of the journalist is what to leave out. What we often leave out is any trace that a journalist has feelings.

Too much evidence that the reporter is reacting to the subject/narrative is “soft” and sentimental. No evidence at all and the reporter might as well be… well, a camera. Or a microphone.

So where do those of us who practice journalism find the space between feeling and telling?

Think and hold that… more soon.

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In 1962 Crayola changed the name of their “Flesh” crayon to “Peach”, out of respect for the then-burgeoning civil rights movement. The crayon company’s cultural sensitivity memo apparently never trickled down to some typically female-oriented industries. You can hit up any department store and find an array of foundation garments labelled “nude.” But if your skin color is anything darker than beige, you’re fresh outta luck for finding a pair of control panties that exactly match you. And the same thing goes for makeup. Most specifically, lipstick.

As spring turns to summer every year, the magazines all start sounding the trumpet. Nude makeup is back! Get that hot nude look!

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And with reason — it makes for a very glam, very feminine, eternally fresh look. When done right, a nude lip doesn’t make you look washed out or corpse-like, au contraire. A smokey eye and a nude lip, so timeless, so gorgeous.

But guess what — nude isn’t a universal shade (according to my experience, at any rate. The Sephora bloggers have been convinced otherwise . I’ll have to do some research and get back to you on that one).

Lipsticks called “nude” frequently look just plain crazy on me. Consider some of the hottest options available online. Yves Saint Laurent Sparkling Touch For Lips in Sparkling Nude would be too pink, Philosophy Big Mouth lip sheer in nude, too peach. L’Oreal Endless Kissable Lipcolor in Shamelessly Nude 870 is too light, and I don’t know whose skintone Maybelline Moisture Extreme Lipstick in Nude Blush is supposed to match. Even my palest friends might have a hard time with a pink that wan and opaque.

The point is, the typical nude probably isn’t my nude. And most of the time, the products called “nude” are made for a very limited and narrow-minded perspective of what “nude” is. Does that mean that the look doesn’t work for women of color? No siree — it just means you gotta look a little harder for the right nude for you.
The perfect nude should match your skin tone almost perfectly, covering over any slight discoloration your lips may have. A touch of shimmer or gloss amps up the look, but subtle beauty is the watchword. How can you tell that you’ve found your perfect nude? If you try it on the back of your hand, it should almost completely disappear, leaving only slight, pretty shine to let you know where it is.

The perfect “nude” lippie for a brown skinned bella might be a warm rose pink, it might be bronze, it might even be a plum or berry, or a deep, fabulous brown. Valana Minerals Sweet Spice collection has a gorgeous range of deep browns that could work wonderfully for my dark skinned bellas. Cordial Spice is a deep berry, and Nutmeg Spice is deep, dark, delicious brown with gold highlights. Layered under some Carol’s Daughter Candy Paint Lip Gloss in Bubbling Brown Sugar — oh, honey. Don’t hurt ‘em!

Philosophy the supernatural lip gloss in neutral is a great, very universal slightly-sheer warm pinky-brown lipgloss that would work great for many brown skinned bellas.

The standout nude lipstick for me is Cover Girl Queen Collection in Shiny Cinnamon. It’s a warm, creamy pinky brown that is incredibly subtle and stunning on me. When I put it on, I feel liberated to go with really bold eye makeup — a nude lip sets off bangin’ eye drama like nothing else. I love this look for outdoorsy days – it’s very clean, very fresh, and it goes perfectly with my happy spring wardrobe!

Do you rock the nude look, bellas? Or have you not found your perfect shade yet?

This post originally appeared on Afrobella’s blog.

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“Dude should come clean and tell the truth” … That’s what Jump Smokers say in effort to make moolah from the Brown/Rihanna hoopla in their latest song “My Flow So Tight (Anti-Breezy).” According to the Jump Smokers’ official Web site, part of the proceeds of the unflattering Breezy track will be going to “various organizations for battered women.” Mmkay, if that’s what you say.

On the other side of the respectable spectrum … New York hip hop legends Run DMC, along with Metallica and Jeff Beck, are the latest to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Only the second hip hop act to received the achievement (Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five were first), Run DMC was honored by a speech from contemporary rapper Eminem, stating the rappers “grabbed hold of my ears and changed my life.”

FOB join another scene, the political one … Scenester band Fall Out Boy pulled another in-crowd during the launch of the “Believers Never Die, Part Deux” tour in Mesa, Arizona Friday night. Dressed in suits, Donald Trump wigs, and black eyes, the band made a decent attempt to put corporate America on blast for their recent bust for wrongdoings. Needless to say, the getup didn’t last long, as they followed the rest of the night in their typical skinny jeans and guyliner. Gag.

Guess who’s back … Lauryn…Lauryn Hill, is that you? It is! Ms. Hill will be one out of 1,000 artists performing at Europe’s prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in the Swiss Stravinski Auditorium. She will be joining Dianne Reeves, Lizz Wright, and Angelique Kidjo for an all-out tribute to soulful jazz legend Nina Simone. The festival, which stretches from July 3-18, will also feature artists like BB King, Black Eyed Peas, and Herbie Hancock.

“Coldplay” and “free” in a sentence, huh?… British band Coldplay have announced that they will be giving a free live album to fans who will be attending their “Viva La Vida” summer tour. The album LeftRightLeftRight will be a 9-track collection of recordings from different cities over time, and will also be available for download beginning May 15 (the start of their tour). “Playing live is what we love,” said Coldplay in a statement. “This album is a thank you to our fans – the people who give us a reason to do it and make it happen.”

What about “John Legend’ and “eco-friendly?”… John Legend is putting out a more believable offer by teaming up with REVERB, a nonprofit environmental organization, to make his “Evolver” tour as green as possible. According to Billboard, this includes “coordination with venues and local caterers to ensure and facilitate the use of green products and practices, along with neutralizing CO2 emissions from venue energy use, hotels, flights and touring vehicle.”  Last month, Legend topped Billboard’s Green 10 list for his increased efforts on behalf of various environmental causes. Go ‘head, Johnny!

De La Soul is “just doing it” … Rap trio De La Soul is teaming up with Apple and the NIKE+ campaign to produce a 45-minute track made for runners to jam to. “We’d worked with Nike before, designing kicks and playing some of their marathons,” says Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos. “We were excited when they approached us because we’re the first actual band to do one of these tracks.” This is the first time the rappers have made new music in five years. De La Soul are planning tours of Australia, Europe, and the UK and will be working on a new full-length album this year.

I’ve been a journalist for 20 years– through full-time jobs at Newsweek, MTV, CNN, ABC, Oxygen, and NPR; part-time ones at One Economy, KALW, and WNYC; the founding and (ongoing) rebuilding of PopandPolitics.com; and three non-fiction books on race, politics, and media. I’ve rolled with the punches and thrown a few. But now more than ever, the business that I entered at the age of sixteen, with my first national publication, is, well, in a hell of hurt. Many of my highly skilled friends who report, edit, or run newsrooms are unemployed, underemployed, or just plain scared.

I say this to set the table for a series of blog pots/musings. I’m a practitioner of journalism; a consumer of journalism; a critic… sometimes a journalism educator; sometimes an entrepreneur. I’m worried, and not just for myself. (I would be lying if I said I don’t have many jobs and opportunities; and disingenuous if I said I was calm.)

Lots of people are worried about the fate of reporting and media in America. Organizations are going bankrupt or out of business, including scores of America’s daily newspapers. Tens of thousands of journalists are being given their walking papers and finding they cannot re-enter the industry. We have created ways that entirely new forms of media can upend “old media,” but that digital victory is without a clear profit model. Yes, in the short term, media is the crushed anthill: damage, death, panic, rushing disorder. But I believe that journalists, like our smaller, more resilient, and far more numerous insect cousins, are prone and programmed to rebuild.

Rebuilding is great. But is it enough? What if we put the profit back in media? What if you can build new media empires that make the owners rich or the foundation heads lauded; the employees comfortable; and the consumers reasonably satisfied? What then? Do we in the business breathe with relief, pay off our credit card bills, and settle in for another round of who-gets-the-corner-office? We’re worried about the means and the method of rebuilding media. But judging from my personal on- and off- the record discussions with for- and non-profit media businesses, as well as interactions at an endless numbers of “whither this/whither that” panels and conferences (and looking at the demographics of who’s in the room)… we’re not ready to face our biggest demon. That demon is exclusion: the way many Americans are cut out of media production and consumption, and the way many of us in the business are sanguine about it.

We in the media are not “the people,” nor do we represent them as fully as we often claim to. “Citizen journalism,” as we now call it, may be valuable and produced by non-traditional journalists. But most of the people who create it are still more educated, more technologically skilled, and more likely to be white than the demographics of the overall U.S. population. (By and large, “citizen journalists” are also less skilled at tasks like investigative reporting and historical research than traditional journalists.)

When forty percent of Americans are of limited literacy, let alone whatever digital divide still remains, then we have a much bigger problem than trying to build innovative blog rings, aggregators, local news sites or content engines. When the ranks of non-white journalists, already limited, are falling faster in the era of cutbacks than they were before–we have a problem. When organizations question the objectivity of people who fall outside of institutional norms… in some newsrooms, say, gays and lesbians; in others, Southerners or rural people … but they DON’T question the means and motives of people who fit the majority: that is a problem. When the journalism organizations designed to champion diversity have drawn so many checks from corporations that they cannot afford to challenge business owners… or only realize too late (once the checks are gone) that they should be… that too is a problem.

We are only as good as our willingness to change. And while the journalism industry is willing to rebuild itself, I am not convinced we’re challenging ourselves to provide an ethical context around reporting on a diverse society in transition.

Recently I met in a newsroom with a younger journalist who said: “It’s ridiculous that the newsroom is this white in a city this diverse.”

I shrugged and nodded. It wasn’t a “you’re wrong” shrug and nod. It was more a “yeah, been there, done that, wrote the book, fought the layoff, got my butt whipped, still standing, what did you expect?” gesture. The reality is, I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t have anything to say that would have inspired this person.

Now, after much reflection, I do. I say to myself as much as to anyone else in media: “Keep fighting for your ideals… if you don’t win, you will at least know why you are in the game.” I believe good journalism usually comes from a mix of vocation, or personal calling, and avocation– the latter in the sense of having a “day job” rather than having a hobby. Most successful journalists I know are, as one college student who recently interviewed me put it, “hustlers”– people whose mix of skill, institutional memory, luck, and self-promotional tendencies make them formidable at staying in the game.

Most of us will have not just several jobs but several careers in our lifetime. I don’t count on being a working journalist forever. (No, I’m not planning to leave the profession any time soon.) I believe journalism has changed me, mainly but not always the land before time ii the great valley adventure dvd for the better. I will always have the eyes and ears of a journalist, which is a valuable skill but sometimes puts me in an alienating social position.

This series of blog columns, “The Journey of the Journalist,” is my attempt to think and write at the same time. It’s not a finished product in the same sense a magazine article or television piece is, but rather a data point for a conversation. My motivation is to share some of my journey and simultaneously record and reflect on it; to share and to learn; to listen and learn from others.

I don’t know what form this will ultimately take, but I’ve set off the journey.

See you on the road.

Peace,
Farai

@faraichideya
www.faraichideya.com

“You’re multicultural with different lifestyles and beliefs,” he said, “and together, you represent the face of America.”

Those words could have come from the mouth of another of last weekend’s commencement speakers, President Barack Obama. The President has made multiculturalism as American as apple pie, and invested what used to be fraught cultural territory with a sense of shared destiny. In this case, though, I was listening to Dr. John Ruffin of the National Institutes of Health address the 25th graduating class of Morehouse Medical School, a class which includes my cousin.

The medical school is affiliated with Morehouse College, a historically black male undergraduate institution founded after the Civil War. Yet though the majority of students and families were black American, other families helping to robe the newly-minted doctors included women in saris or wearing Muslim headscarves; mothers and fathers in lavish matching garb from West Africa; parents with the last name Chen or Rodriguez; and families from our nation’s racial majority for another three decades, plus or minus: white Americans.

Just a decade ago, America was in denial about our rapidly changing racial and cultural landscape. The U.S. Census had released projections that by the year 2050, America would have no racial majority. Today, they’ve moved that projected date up to 2042.

Some people think that having a black President means we can afford to put away the topic of race altogether. That complacency, combined with our current economic crisis, could put the lives and futures of students at risk. Education is what turns the American Dream into the American Reality. And education is in deep trouble, first as a thing-in-itself, and also as an indicator of our racial future.

As Dr. Ruffin called on these young doctors to end health disparities, I flashed back to experiences I’d had a decade ago reporting a book called “The Color of Our Future.” For two years, I crisscrossed America from the Crow reservation in Montana to the Georgia/Florida line, to get teens’ take on the role of race in their lives. Many of them struggled to reconcile the fact that the deck was stacked against them–because of race, income, immigration status, and more–with their own righteous belief that they could break through the barriers and fulfill their dreams.

The Media Academy at Fremont High School in Oakland put those struggles in plain sight. It lies on a street filled with idling day laborers, and operates out of worn trailers or “portables” over a decade old. But it has a track record of doing big things with tough or educationally challenged kids.

Earlier this year, I brought graduate students from the journalism school at The University of California, Berkeley, to meet the teens at Fremont High. The grad students were a mix of races, themselves; but the Fremont students included immigrants from several countries including Vietnam and El Salvador as well as black students born in the neighborhood. As was true a decade ago, the high school was what I call “ABW”–Anything But White.

We talked about media, education funding cuts and local school closures (which one brave Fremont student was investigating, much to the consternation of some officials), plus issues including the economy and the fatal shooting of a cuffed man by transit police on New Year’s day. A mix of student and professional crews videotaped the event so we could leave some record of who we were and what are struggling with in our time.

In another environment, many of these kids would be tracked low-achieving or low-literacy and put on the back burner of society. Instead, this graduation season brings moments of joy as students from this tough little program get their diplomas and gear up to go to college. That kind of scene doesn’t happen often enough.

Yes, the Obama Administration is juggling the crises of jobs, foreclosures, banking, wars, and healthcare. We still have to ask when our President intends to foreground educational opportunity, and what he will ask of us as a nation. For example: how will we balance short-term stopgapping (like the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds) with “big think” long term change? Why are so many public schools today, even high-achieving ones, “ABW”? Is school integration effectively dead, fifty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education? How can not just white but middle- and upper-middle-income families be reconnected to public schooling? Will the new political rainbow coalition lose its might once people start debating who should get affirmative action–rich and black, or poor and white? Will “equality,” in this economic crisis, mean that more white Americans are poorly educated, as opposed to more students of color doing well? (That prospect should chill our bones.)

Let’s take a moment during this graduation season to ask how we can raise the profile of educational equality among the issues our nation faces. When I looked at the smiling, multi-ethnic group of newly minted doctors marching out of Morehouse Medical School, I saw an extraordinary example of how shared struggle and success brings people together. The question for all of us is how we can take this kind of achievement, broaden it to the education system at large…and make it the rule, not the exception.

_________

Farai Chideya is an award-winning journalist who has written three nonfiction books on media, politics and race, including “The Color of Our Future”; plus the newly released novel “Kiss the Sky.” She is now researching “The Color of Our Future in the Age of Obama.”

You can find the rough cut of the video about the Media Academy and U.C. Berkeley students here download the return .