Too Stupid for words

Remind me not to eat random food I find laying on tables... oh wait I have enough sense not to do that to start with.

Talk at Pomona College

If you're in the Los Angeles area or particularly at Pomona College I'll be doing a talk there on Thursday at noon. The flier is below, I look forward to checking out the sagehens.

Somebody get the gauze...

... In a month or so my ears are going to bleeding. Bill Cosby, Black America's favorite father, has decided to release a Hip-Hop album next month. Thankfully Cosby had the foresight to not rap on it ... thank you God, for real! But the album will be 'positive'. Call me the eternal cynic but there are very few rap albums that have fit this mold over the years that have been worth listening to. If you're not wearing a dashiki, locks or flowers, I don't want to hear it. And for all the folks who have been wondering about Cosby's recent rantings and if they a function of "old Black man disease" then check out this Atlantic Monthly article. For the record, I think the Atlantic monthly article is interesting but really skews what conservatism means and personal responsibility is.

1 picture = how many words?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. One of the most striking images I've ever encountered and occasionally have on my desktop is "The Soiling of Old Glory." For me, the image captured the complex (albeit negative) emotions that surrounded busing as a solution to school segregation. While we often think of racial antagonisms as rooted in the South, these tensions were present all over the nation. The stain of racism is sometimes deepest in the parts of the country where White and Black live near, but not always next to, where we compete for resources, and where the things to be gained from hatred are the smallest. Boston, in the case of this photo, typifies that reality. Recently Slate ran a slideshow series on the image to accompany the new book on it. I don't have the book, but I wonder could words ever capture the meanings and magnitude of this photo. I surely know I couldn't.

A Sunday Chuckle

So the "national dialog" on race has begun. Here is a HILARIOUS take on it.

Thanks to Atlasien on Rachel's Tavern for posting it first.

Butter Nut Reduction.

Okay, so this video is pretty funny, it's from SUPERDELUXE. It made smile.

Step Into a World... again?

I'm sort of in a different mood today. I could tell from the first time I woke up that I'd be moving and thinking a little different. For a couple of moments now I've been caught up in nostalgia of the past, but I know that the past is just that. As I was looking at HarlemWorld the other day I saw that reality. It was recently announced that Harlem will be the new home to a luxury car dealership. I had to pause and think for a while about it. Think about it, not just about gentrification, I know all about that. In fact, I've put some of my feelings out there already.

But really what does it mean to live in a place where the poor and the rich meet, but never really meet? NY is gotham city, it is the place where race, class, and reality have to come together, but somehow never do. It's almost a dream world. As I thought about this, I could hear the Blondie and KRS mash up (yeah, we didn't call it that when it came out but that's what it would be called now) Step Into a World. The airy vocals of Deborah Harry of Blondie, the chanting and braggadocio of KRS collide to capture a sound clash. But it's the clash that's beautiful and slightly cacophonous, full but empty? It's all there, but something is missing. In many ways, it's almost like the 80s in redux.

While it's easy to talk about progress and distress, in reality, people are at the center of these battles between development, renewal, and changes. In many ways the only thing left are our memories, but what happens when memories fade? What happens when the place you want to take someone to remember is no longer there? How do we create new memories? Can we really even "create" memories?

When the Sociological becomes Personal

My job as a professor really gives me a great opportunity to talk to folks about the sociology that we live through everyday. This past week in my Sociology of the African-American Experience we had some involved conversations about Black men, unemployment, and culture. We, like good sociologists, talked about the structural issues associated with getting ahead, the cultural dimensions of what it takes to keep jobs, and the ways employers view urban Black men. The conversation was maginificant, but when I asked students what could be done to shift Black men's employment opportunities, it felt like all our suggestions were like tossing starfish into the ocean one by one. That however is not the biggest issues of when the sociological becomes personal, it is when we have to individually make sense of larger sociological problems like unemployment, etc.

This morning I was leaving the train station and watched a man struggle down the steps with a large suitcase. As he descended the stairs clumsily, I saw a man about 45 or so begin to descend next to him, but not heading down the stairs. As I watched, the second man reached his hand into the pocket of the man with the suitcase. For a minute the men were so close I thought, wait they must know each other. Then the man with the suitcase felt his hand and looked over and noticed it was a pickpocket attempt. Immediately the man with the suitcase was like, "Hey!" and took the other man's hand out of his pocket. The guy who was attempting the pickpocket buzzed down the steps and tried to divert attention by yelling, "Don't block the stairs again man!"

As an onlooker I had like ten things going through simultaneously.Here were a few, "what would I have done if it was my pocket?" I wondered, "Why didn't you say anything?" "Should you call the cops?" "What good would calling the cops do?" When the issues of the world become personal, are we able to understand and contextualize behavior or do we go back to saying folks who do crime, etc. are just deviant? It's too easy to dismiss the situation and suggest that the offender is just a bad apple. It's also too simple to say that there are no jobs. In both cases, we know NOTHING about the life of the guy who attempted the pickpocket. But I think when things become personal, we too easily forget about the context that informs the behaviors folks employ to "make it." In many conversations among friends and colleagues, over the years, I've heard folks provide context to all sorts of actions but when it came to their personal well being being threatened discussions began to sound like AM talk radio. When the sociological becomes personal, what is your first reaction... and your second?

On American Empire?

The video beneath is powerful, truthful, and only 8 and a half minutes. Please watch.


It is an adaptation from Howard Zinn's new graphic novel A People's History of Empire. Yeah, that's right, Zinn has a graphic novel. I think his commentary is quite appropriate given King's speech on April 4th, 1967.

40 years, One day and the reconstruction of Dr. King's Legacy

Inevitably April 4th will be marked all over the internet with folks interpreting King's legacy. I look forward to reading these reflections, but I can't help but find it ironic that we are able to tap into his true legacy more on his death then on the day that he has a nationally recognized holiday. As we contemplate a national holiday for another American giant, the issue of co-optation looms large. While it is beautiful to celebrate King's legacy on the day that he was taken from us, it would be even more beautiful to take back his holiday to its true meaning.

Part of the reason that I think the holiday has become such a thorn in the side to folks with progressive politics is that Martin's legacy has been distilled, sanitized, and re-packaged to be comfortable. There was nothing comfortable about what he called for and there was little that was popular about his opinion. Remember, just days after the March on Washington, four little girls lost their lives in Birmingham. But that will never make it in a McDonald's commercial. That will never be the subject of a school play. But how do we remind folks, particularly Black folks, that Dr. King embraced a radical tradition, a tradition of challenge, a tradition of forgiveness, and a tradition of change?

For me, it starts with shattering myths that suggest we have reached the mountain top. It continues by entering the difficult conversations about race and poverty. These conversations will involve not only talking about structure but also how our own individual actions contribute to everyday inequality.It moves towards King's vision when it goes from our heads to our hearts then to our hands.