Kismet « Young Black Professional Guide

Link Love 12.1.08

By: Kismet
December 1, 2008
2 comments

Lost Slave Ship

NPR’s News and Views blog reports that researchers discovered a lost slave ship. The Spanish ship, Trouvadore, is “the only known wreck of a ship engaged in the illegal slave trade.” And several residents of the Turks and Caicos islands, where the wreck occured, are descendants of the 192 slaves who survived. Read more about this fascinating story here and here. When I think of this story I think of “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” by Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, which is also the introduction to Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, their edited volume. What do we learn when we do know? Or what do we think we know when know? What can a submerged, centuries old slave ship tell us about slavery in the Atlantic world? And what can’t it tell us about the experience of Africans caught in its knot?

Radmilla Cody

The Undercover Black Man introduces us to Navajo woman Radmilla Cody. The daughter of a Navajo woman and an African American man, she was Miss Navajo 1997 and an activist against domestic violence. Go be a fan here.

While looking back through some fun videos (I still get a kick out of Mos Def’s “If I Were President”) I came across Majora Carter. I am probably late in the game, but Majora is a Macarthur “genius” and is doing green activism in the South Bronx, where my people come from. I collect inspiration and I am adding her to the collection. Listen to her IIWP:

Yonmei at Feminist SF-The Blog! has insightful things to say about why she writes science-fiction and fantasy and why the genre is especially conducive to subverting and resisting gender roles but at the same time finds itself caught in the bind of privilege, power and oppression. At least that is what I take away from it. And I love it. Take what you will from it here.

Ever wonder about that oh so famous Obama logo? An interview with the designers is here.

Blackwell Compass is having an online, social sciences and humanities conference. This is the first of the virtual conference experiments that I think I will attend. It helps that it is free. Check out the call for papers here.

Last, if you can, say your prayers to your deity(s) for those killed in Mumbai–and the terrorists involved who are lost themselves–for those living with or living with someone living with AIDS, and for all those who did not have somewhere to go, food to eat, or someone to share their Thanksgiving holiday with.

Posted in: News

The Travesty of Prop 8 (and some POC Blame Game)

By: Kismet
November 7, 2008
2 comments

Dan Savage on “Black Homophobia” in response to the passing of Proposition 8. When you’re done there, go here and follow the comments. Don’t forget to leave some.

More on Blacks, Latina/os and Proposition 8:

VivirLatino: More Prop 8 Black and Latino Blaming
WOC, Ph.D.: Propositioning Privilege
elle, phd: WTF is Wrong With Us
The Kitchen Table: Blacks and the Passage of Prop 8

A New World brings new and old struggles to the fore. Roll up your sleeves, tuck up your skirt, and let’s get to work.

Posted in: News

Welcoming History

By: Kismet
November 6, 2008
1 comments

I’m still unsure how to think about what happened yesterday. I’m excited, hopeful, terrified, and overwhelmed. I have finally, I think, stopped crying at every CNN recap, but I still feel so full with all of the historic things that happened. Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Wow. Whew!!!!!! It is so hard to believe.

Welcoming History

Yesterday, like most people I know, I woke up and I ran to the TV because I was afraid it was a dream. And I was afraid that something terrible happened in the wee hours of the morning. But everything on Good Morning America was celebratory. In fact, come to find out, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio went blue for the first time in years. Today, Missouri is still up for grabs by about 6,000 votes, but that only amazes me more. If I ever believed my vote didn’t count–and who hasn’t?–I am assured now. Every single vote does count. Democracy can work. A black man can be elected President of one of the most virulently racist countries in the world and do so without widespread violence, without riots, without burning crosses on the White House lawn. At least not yet.

I was skeptical, up until the end. Oh, I drink the Koolaid, I don’t sip. I supported with money every time I could, and, in the end, with time (which was only a fraction of the time other volunteers spent). I blogged. But I was never fully convinced it would work. I am a student of history. History has said it was possible but never that it was probable. History has never said that when democracy works it is magic, it is not self-evident, and that magic is beautiful but rare.

I was skeptical most of the night. Even when he won Ohio and the volunteers around me erupted in triumph because no Republican candidate has ever won the election without Ohio. As we walked to a post-volunteer election watch party, I remained skeptical. The jubilation around me appeared misplaced, didn’t they know what could happen? Didn’t they remember 2000 and 2004? Didn’t they follow history? ANYTHING could happen.

CNN announced it at eleven o’clock. Barack Obama is projected to be the next President of the United States. And a wave of emotion flooded me. The same wave I am still riding. The same wave I started this post with. I keep cycling back to that moment, that feeling. Wow. Whew! Wow. Wow.

I never believed it could happen. When it did, I damn near lost my mind.

And now what?

Entering Day #2 of election aftermath, the news is still flooded with Obamamania. Obama tapped Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff. An Appoint Jesse Jackson, Jr. to the Senate Facebook group has started.

On a more personal level, I couldn’t stay away from NPR, CNN or C-SPAN. Still can’t. I’ve never been very involved in the nitty-gritty of what some might call formal or traditional politics. But I can’t keep away now, and I know how much I’m changed on that level. My involvement, my surprise that the political structure can be used, the knowledge that it is only because of THE PEOPLE PUSHING HARD that it could be used.

Then there was a minor fight with Mr. over the meaning (or respectability) of Jesse Jackson’s tears. And a moment of awkwardness at my youth organizing program when my Executive Director noted he’d voted for Cynthia McKinney/Rosa Clemente. Awkwardness for both of us because what did our different choices say about our politics, our radicalism, our ability to, and our willingness to fight for social justice all around?

Then Proposition 8 passed with a majority of African American and Latina/o voters supporting the bill, and similar measures passed in Florida and Arizona. Measures banning gay couples from adopting passed in Arkansas.

Then CNN spoke with young, African American leaders, including South Carolina’s Bakari Sellers, but not a woman to be found amongst those tapped.

And it took me two hours to get a cab on Tuesday night. Why? Because cabs were passing black fares for white ones, literally passing black fares and pulling up ten feet away in front of white ones. Over and over–because there were plenty of white ones around and plenty of cabs around. With so many young, excited, presumably monied white people in the streets that night, the economics of racial profiling went into overdrive. Don’t believe me? I wouldn’t either if I were you. You almost had to see it to believe it. I got home by getting in the way of a cab dropping off his (white) passengers, letting him know I’d been waiting for two hours, and begging him to take me to my destination. He seemed surprised that I’d been waiting so long. Yeah, well so was I.

credit: TZA

Is Racism Dead?

Is racism dead?

I can see why someone might think so. Talking to Littlest Sis on the phone, absolutely hysterical over the win, barely able to choke out my words, it took me a moment to realize she wasn’t nearly so fazed as I was. “Yeah,” she finally asked at one point, “We are going to party tonight! What are you doing?”

Me? I’m still trying to breathe.

Right then, I couldn’t even imagine partying. And for a moment I was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm–but it was only a moment. A second of a second actually. Because I started to get excited. I started to see how amazing it must be twenty-something in college with only your dreams ahead of you and the inability to imagine that a more dangerous, sinister, hateful, and violent world ever existed. And I hope it is amazing for my Puerto Rican mother to see me so overwhelmed and excited, but in disbelief and not with a memory of mourning for friends lost, dreams broken, leaders killed.

Dreams Ahead

I can imagine what the world was like for her. I can’t even fathom the world my grandmothers lived in. And Littlest Sis will never understand the world I live in. I am B.B. Before Barack. From here on out, the young people in my life–youth organizers, siblings of a certain age, scholar of color mentees, and undergraduate students–are A.B. After Barack.

45 years. Two generations maybe. That close.

Wow. Whew! Wow.

But is racism dead?

No. Anyone who believes that has lost and/or forgotten something in this election. And since other bloggers are outlining the history of this campaign, let’s keep it simple and speak from lived experience.

When the youth organizers came into work yesterday, one expressed frustration that her prinicpal got on the loudspeaker to announce Obama’s win. Not because she wasn’t excited. But because he emphasized how anything is now possible, how now there are no excuses for not achieving.

She understood intrinsically–attending a predominantly black school but enrolled in Advanced Placement courses that are majority white, a youth organizer in the “continent” of southeast DC (the reputed hood of DC hoods)–she understood that racism didn’t disappear because Obama navigated its many quandries and secured a victory.

The Definition of Reverse Racism

Nothing can diminish the success and power of this moment. We elected a black President, a self-identified black President (not self-identified mixed or Kenyan-American, despite the best efforts of the pundits over the last two years) who is married to a self-identified and accomplished African American woman and has (absolutely gorgeous) African-American daughters.

Now, the way we speak of and think of “race” will have to evolve. The way we understand organizing, politics, elections, and policy in general will have to evolve. The way we understand oppression will have to evolve. Racism and racist structures of oppression haven’t disappeared. You can bet a $150,000 wardrobe they are evolving as well, right now, and the battles they wage against us will be subtle. Republicans are the new Klan, Latina/os are the new targets, and the gay community is the new offended. Oppression is the new racism.

But, intersectionality is the new social justice. The internet is the new grassroots. Young people are the new electorate.

Welcome to the New World.

Posted in: News

Colin Powell Endorses Obama (Video)

By: Kismet
October 20, 2008
3 comments

In case you live under a rock…or you were at Howard Homecoming all weekend.

Video below:

And the Obama campaign raised $150 million (3.1 million contributions, $86/person on average, 632,000 new donors).

Wow. and Wow.

Go vote early. So you can help others exercise their civil right.

Posted in: News

The Audacity of Hip Hop

By: Kismet
September 26, 2008
4 comments

From Newsweek.

When superstar lyricist Nas declared, “Hip-hop is dead!” in 2006, he reignited a long-running debate among artists and observers in the rap community. While the money-guns-girls wing of commercial rap is certainly here to stay, many fans insist that hip hop’s political roots are rotting. But on the eve of an election in which a presidential candidate is a professed Jay-Z fan who brushes off his shoulders in speeches and fist-bumps his wife, it appears that the political soul of hip hop is primed for a reawakening.

credit: The Curse Of Brian
The Audacity of Hip Hop

It’s no secret that the most widely covered news stories involving hip hop in the last few years have been less than flattering. Rapper Ludacris recently made headlines with a pro-Obama song he released in July. On “Politics as Usual,” he rhymes in support of Obama about Sen. John McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton: “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant; McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralyzed.” The lyrics prompted an Obama campaign spokesman to condemn the song as “outrageously offensive.” Then there was Don Imus’s referral to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” last April. What followed was a national backlash that pinpointed commercial rap as the source of the kind of misogyny many felt he had aimed at a group of young black women. The Imus comment, and the anti-rap fallout, became such a big deal that Oprah devoted a show to the subject of misogyny in rap music. Hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons and rapper Common appeared on the show, defending rap artists as poets who simply paint pictures of the world as they see it.

It wasn’t the first time Simmons was called upon to defend the culture of rap. In 2001, he founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), a non-partisan organization dedicated to fighting poverty and injustice through voter education and other programs. With commercials on MTV and through initiatives such as Hip Hop Team and “Vote For It ‘08,” HSAN is making voter registration and political education as easy as poking friends on Facebook. (In March 2008, Simmons stepped down from his leadership role to publicly endorse Obama, who he said “represents the best candidate to suit the ideas that matter most to meÃ¢â‚¬â€eradicating poverty, conflict resolution, the environment and foreign policy.”)

Another hip-hop political organization, The Hip Hop Caucus, founded by the Rev. Lennox Yearwood in 2004, has recruited artists like T.I. to evangelize. Voting is a particularly personal issue for T.I. who will not be allowed to pull the lever for any candidate on Nov. 4, because of a prior felony conviction for gun possession. So T.I. (born Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.) has joined forces with the Caucus as the spokesman for its “Respect My Vote” campaign. “If I can’t vote, the least I can do is to make up for my minus-one by urging others to vote,” he says.

Perhaps the best evidence that hip hop’s political consciousness is still simmering just beneath the surface is the success of the annual Rock the Bells Festival. Now in its tenth year, Rock the Bells has become the Lollapalooza of hip hop, bringing together some of the most prolific, and politically conscious artists of the last 30 years, selling out stadiums in the process. This year’s lineup included A Tribe Called Quest, Nas and De La Soul as well as more polemical rap-activistsÃ¢â‚¬â€Dead Prez and Immortal Technique. In backstage interviews, reactions to politics and the presidential election varied from full support of Obama from rap artists Rakim and Redman to frustration and disillusionment from Ghostface and Method Man. Rakim remarked, “Get out and vote for who you think is going to make a difference. For me, I think Barack is that candidate.” Pioneering female rapper MC Lyte encourages her fellow artists to take the responsibility that comes with their influence seriously. She wants luminaries of the hip-hop community to be “extremely certain in whatever it is [they] do.”

Back among the crowd, concertgoer Priscilla Simon, a Howard University senior, said, “I’m so excited to be voting for the first time and the words of these prolific artists have only encouraged me to have my voice heard.”

Hip hop’s adults aren’t merely urging kids to voteÃ¢â‚¬â€they’re running for Congress. Kevin Powell, a cast-member of MTV’s first season of “Real World” and a founding editor of Vibe magazine, ran in the Democratic primary for a seat in the 10th District of New York this month. (Powell, who was unsuccessful in his bid, says he will run again in 2010.) At a fundraiser in New York City in July, Powell said, “The time is now to take back our communities! As a son of the hip-hop generation, it is my duty to speak for my disenfranchised brothers and sisters. Change is coming to Washington!” Obama supporters are hoping it’s the “change we need.”