zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric

Coming Soon!

2009-02-12T08:10:00.001-08:00

Cantstopwontstop.com V 2.0.
...

Notes On The Eve Of Day One

2009-01-19T22:16:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama was born in Hawai'i only two years after my father's generation voted for statehood, and that small fact illustrates the deep emotional cross-currents I am caught in over his inauguration.

On November 4th, when the TV pundits called the election for Obama, my two sons danced around the room in joy. Lourdes and I hugged, and then began to weep. Our boys stared. They already understand color lines, but they will never know how strange it was that we made a biracial Black man from Hawai'i the iconic face of hope and progress and change, then elected him president.

And yet Hawai'i is a conquered land, whose civil rights moment—the moment when cultural change, social integration, and political enfranchisement converged—came when a similar swelling of its darker-skinned classes voted in 1959 to give up their right to self-determination.

My father calls himself a pragmatist who voted for Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush twice each, but in Obama, he may have recognized the same kind of historic decision he faced as 24-year old. When he made up his mind, he didn't hesitate. My family and friends assumed I was long past the point of deciding, and I made a good show of it, but I hemmed and hawed and fussed until the end.

I finally decided that I wanted to stand with the arrival of the new majority. I wanted to join with millions in flipping a big bird to those who insisted this country was "center-right". No, I wanted to say, November 4th showed we are progressive-left. Perhaps even my father.

Still I couldn't get the words of Rosa Clemente—the 36 year-old Green Party vice-presidential candidate who was for many of us just as much a symbol of hope and progress and change—out of my head. "If we become the majority," she told me last summer, "then we're going to have more people like us put into these positions from really moving us towards justice."

As we look at who Obama has brought in to his administration thus far, I'm struck by the notion that perhaps even he doesn't yet recognize the transformative possibilities of the new majority that elected him.

Cornel West said last March, "I told Obama that when he wins—which I think he will—I will celebrate for one day, I'll breakdance in the morning and party in the afternoon. But the next day, I'll become one of his major critics."

When the flags are hoisted and that beautiful sea of hues gathers on the Mall and that biracial Black man from Hawai'i raises his hand to take an oath, call me fucking emo but I am sure I will cry again.

Onto this body of Barack Obama we have projected all possibility, and the faith that we are moving toward answers. And yet Obama also materializes the same question that has haunted people of color on American soil—the lands of native peoples—since long before W.E.B. Dubois articulated it over a century ago: how does it feel to still be a problem? Does our desire for hope and change and progress lead us further from the actual thought and practice of justice, or closer?

And yet if we really care about these questions, we will never have the luxury of doing nothing.

This moment will not mark the end of our struggles over questions of nation and race, nor will it mark the end of our Duboisian double consciousness. It's the beginning of something—I'm not sure what—but it's something that we, the new majority, must write.

This is cross-posted at the Asian Law Caucus's new blog Arc of 72, where you can read a whole bunch of other API perspectives on the inauguration.

Students Occupy The New School

2008-12-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

Last night students began what they call "an occupation" of the New School in New York City, demanding the ouster of university president Bob Kerrey and other school officials and direct student involvement in the school's governance and investment policies. Students have taken over the Graduate Faculty Center.

Certainly media will compare this to the Columbia occupation in 1968, but the more immediate echoes may be of the anti-apartheid divestment movement of the 80s and the anti-sweatshop movement of the 90s, a precursor to the Battle in Seattle.

In addition to their demands for SRI, socially responsible investment--a movement that was catalyzed by the divestment movement--the students have also been deliberate about claiming solidarity with the striking students in Greece.

In response, Kerrey--who recently received a "no confidence" vote from the faculty--has actually begun a blog, in which he discusses a student senate meeting tonight as an example of the school's "support of dialogue and dissent".

You can keep up on the latest by following the New School In Exile blog.

Farai Chideya's News And Notes on NPR Has Been Cancelled

2008-12-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

NPR is announcing it has cancelled Farai Chideya's brilliant African American-themed talk show "News and Notes". Argh.

Aside from being a good friend and a brilliant journalist, Farai has changed the game for people of color's media, regularly broadcasting a smart, topical, and witty show on a national level. She was the first hip-hop gen host on NPR. Her show, on the air since 2005, was axed along with "Day To Day". In all 64 journalists will lose their jobs.

NPR leadership blamed the layoffs on a decline in corporate sponsorships. Ain't that ironic.

The truth is that NPR has been fickle with younger audiences and audiences of color. Its audience continues to age. The median age is 48.

While NPR has experimented with bringing in a more diverse listenership, it hasn't shown much willingness to commit. The list of casualties includes Tavis Smiley (News and Notes' predecessor) and Ed Gordon (Farai's predecessor at News and Notes), not to mention a long list of young producers and staffers of color.

The only remaining show for African Americans on NPR--never mind Latinos and Asian Americans--will be Michel Martin's relatively new "Tell Me More".

Farai and her team will be on the air until March 20th. Whether they will be employed after that depends on you. Jasmyne Cannick has already set up email forms and petition forms to the NPR top brass. Let em know...

I Am Nixon

2008-12-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

Large up T.A. Negro for rocking the hardcore David Frost to my Nixon in one of the best interviews I've ever had the opportunity to be a part of. Unfortunately my negotiating skills are suspect--I didn't get paid anything close to $600,000 for this.

Shouldna Lef Ya...

2008-12-08T17:15:00.001-08:00

...without a strong post to tempt you.

Sorry for this folks. Let me explain a little bit where I've been hiding and let you know what's in store with this blog, website and me for the new year and beyond.

First off, thanks to all of you readers, longtime and new, for all the love you've showered on ya boy this year in the form of emails and comments and shouts. I've been one gratified dude, let me tell you. If you see me in the street, I might buy you a drink on GP.

Also I've been a little burnt out. Other than in a few moments of inspiration--thank you UCLA APC, Ferentz, Sin Yen, and the hip-hop generation!--I've been taking a bit of a break this past month from the daily hourly grind of reporting and blogging.

For now, I've stepped back too from the Vibe blog. That was an amazing experience, and a great outlet to push out the stories you don't get on the front pages of your newspaper or news-aggregator or your favorite comedian's fake news show. I'm very proud of what me and the Vibe fam accomplished this year.

But now it's time to regroup for the next few years.

I'm in the midst of starting on a number of other projects, two of which I can talk about now.

Soon--very soon--we'll be launching a revamp of this website. Yes, it's finally time. Cantstopwontstop.com Version 2.0. We want to give you much more access to many of the pieces I've been writing over the years--in music, culture, politics, hip-hop history, and much more. The CSWS supercr3w is hard at work. Look for our efforts early in 2009.

The other big thing I can say is that I've begun working on a new book entitled Who We Be: The Colorization of America. It's about how we got from the end of civil rights to Obama's election.

The Colorization of America is a story about how visionaries--many you may not have ever heard of--forged a new vision for the U.S. against the context of rapidly shifting demographic change. It's a story about the last three decades in America--and the world--and about how diversity became so mainstream that people could begin to use a strange term, "post-racial", in a thousand different ways and mean a thousand different things, usually contradictory things.

Working on this book means that I get to think and talk about the visual arts, comics and cartoons, literature, politics, and a million other things that will be fun to think and talk about for the next few years. I'm not going to give away much more than that for now, only that it's possible the book may be more relevant now than when I began pitching it over year or two ago, and for that reason I want to get it exactly right.

Finally, I was beginning to tell friends in the waning days of the election season that I was done with blogging for good. Good thing I didn't go Jay-Z or Jordan on myself and announce a retirement. Life will go back to different, slower rhythms and so will this blog. But it won't go away. There's too much to be said.

So here's to the next time the words won't wait. Hope to see you back here...

Thanks for reading!

2G2K Is Back! :: On Hillary, Again, And Foreign Policy

2008-11-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

Ferentz was inspired to write--wickedly, I must add--about Obama's impending Hillary appointment. Loved these lines on the quickening such news stirs in the hearts of the Blitzerites and Hardballers:

Like his predecessor Bill Clinton from whose staff Obama has poached many of his top advisers, and John F. Kennedy, the young American prince to whom he's often compared, Barack Obama has developed an uncanny knack for moving the needle.

Hilary Clinton, she of 18 million votes is no slouch herself when it comes to getting people to tune in, which means that her appointment guarantees us at least four years of soundbites from Freud impersonators dissecting her relationship with Obama.

Unfortunately I have to disagree with my brother's main point.

Ferentz would have loved to see Hillary appointed Secretary of Education, if only as a way to bring high-profile recognition to the office and the work. It's true that recent Education secretaries have been stunningly low-pro, even in the face of NCLB. Ferentz believes that's an indication of how low-priority the work is, and is worried about that.

Agreed, deeply.

But he also asserts this:

In my estimation, the whole restoring America's image abroad narrative has been blown slightly out of proportion. George W. Bush was an awful President who made a number of horrendous decisions, but outside of Iraq and Afghanistan most Americans have been largely unaffected by the Bush's regimes decisions abroad, and it will therefore be difficult for us to really assess how much the world's image of America has changed.

Well. No. How about the results of: Allowing turbulence in Africa and Asia to become ethnic cleansing? Botching the peace process in Palestine and Israel? Pretending climate change doesn't exist?

Sadly there's lots more where that came from. All corners of the globe have been scorched in this fire.

Bush's free-market unilateralism has indeed been disastrous. It even undergirds the global economic crisis that has finally come home like the chickens, as Malcolm might have said. It's not merely an aesthetic thing of whether they like us or not. We've really fucked it up.

I think Ferentz hints at the larger ideological question now being played out beneath the surface. The nation has serious war fatigue--and, coupled with the economic crisis, it is leading to a strong vibe of "let's handle our own right now".

There was a moment, I thought, a few years back when progressives were trying to make the case that the wars abroad were creating the chaos at home. I think we made the case very well--and Obama reflected this in his own campaign, morphing easily from the anti-war candidate to the steady-hand-on-the-economy candidate. McCain had no desire to link the two issues, and so the progressive line carried the day overwhelmingly.

Now though isn't the time to forget how interconnected domestic and global issues are. It's not an either/or, it's a both/and, and that's the difficulty of the moment that we're facing.

The Impact of The Hip-Hop Vote

2008-11-24T09:34:00.000-08:00

We now have some idea of how hip-hop may have impacted the presidential election. According to stats from CIRCLE, those under the age of 45 delivered all of Obama's margin of victory.

Those under 30 formed the core of his victory. 23 million young voters came out, and nearly 16 million voted for Obama. He won by 9 million votes.

Youth voter turnout increased to 53%, a 4% increase over 2004 and the highest turnout rate since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972.

All demographics under 30 voted for Obama by huge margins--including 95% of African Americans, 76% of Latinos and 54% of whites.

We don't yet know what the turnout rates were for young African Americans and Latinos, or the precise racial breakdown of young voters. But we do know that 36% of Under-30 voters were not white, an 8% difference from 30-45s and 20% difference from over-60s.

We also know that 2004 marked a turning point for young African American and Latino voters. That year, for the first time, they made up more than half of all new voters. In this election, 43% of young voters were first-time voters, including 45% of African Americans and 61% of Latinos.

Credit goes to a robust Obama operation. It's the first time that a party has taken full measure of the importance of young voters and post-Boomer voters of color.

Credit also belongs with the many organizing efforts in the hip-hop world that were largely--and quietly--responsible for the 2004 surge. It's clear that without their success back then, an Obama candidacy would have been unimaginable.

There is one significant down-note. CIRCLE notes that there remains an economic gap in the voting population. It turns up as a gap in voters' educational attainment. Those with at least some college-going experience were about twice as likely to vote as those without any.

There are still lots of hip-hop heads alienated from electoral politics. But it's possible to say that the electorate looks a lot more like the one hip-hop introduced to the mainstream over a decade ago than at any time in the past.

UCLA Education In Action Keynote Speech

2008-11-20T20:13:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt of the keynote speech that I gave this past Saturday at UCLA, for the "Education In Action" student conference organized by APC, and a number of other student, staff, and faculty groups on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Asian American Studies.

Schisms over race and generation have defined 40 years of politics in this country.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of the hip-hop generation. It's the story of the rise of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment. And the sorry results are all around us.

We have the tragedies of Katrina. The hurricane simply exposed the accumulated horrors this country's politics of abandonment have visited upon poor people of color for 40 years.

We have the biggest prison-industrial complex in the world, and an entire generation of young men and women of color behind bars in a society that no longer cares about rehabilitation, that's about locking people up and throwing away the key.

We have an immigration system that is inhumane and out-of-date, that divides families and closes the borders even as the destinies of nations are increasingly lashed together.

We have a nation torn asunder by economic policies that have exacerbated the wealth gap and hastened an environmental collapse.

We have pre-emptive shock-doctrine wars justified by Orientalist views of the world, and a ruthless disdain for its human toll.

Folks, we have issues.

Yet amidst all of this, conservatives wanted to raise the old racial fears in this election.

They returned the election to 1968, an era when racist housing covenants had only recently been made illegal and racial intermarriage had only recently been made legal.

Of course, it was the most ridiculous kind of nostalgia--a battle for a world that was already gone. But at the Republican National Convention, I watched Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin try to hype a newly discovered breed of subhuman: the community organizer.

They blew their racist dog whistles all the way until November 4th, and not without effect. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans were silenced by the loud racist whisper campaigns, until Colin Powell stepped up to ask the right question, "So what if Obama was Muslim?" Authorities foiled at least a half-dozen white supremacist schemes to kill Obama. And when McCain began his concession speech that night by celebrating Obama's history-making election as the first Black president, his supporters actually booed.

Conservatives all attempted to portray Obama as an unknowable Other. So maybe Obama really is our first API president? He was certainly treated like a stranger from a different shore.

And yet on November 4th, we saw past all of that.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and young people voted 2-1 to elect Barack Obama. In doing so, we became an essential part of the new majority.

Read the whole speech here.

A HUGE thank you to all of the organizers for a wonderful conference.

A Great Day In Baseball History

2008-11-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Don Wakamatsu, Major League Baseball's first Asian American manager. It's been far too long coming.

Won't be too much rooting for the Mariners, but will be rooting for Don, who was the A's bench coach this past year. Perhaps not so surprisingly, given the great number of them in the skipper position, Don played catcher in his college and 12-year pro career.

(While we're on the topic, here's a gratuitous shout-out to my childhood hero Lenn Sakata.)

Perhaps Don's rise means that someday the great Kurt Suzuki or any API will be able to do the damn thing if he so desires.

Happy Xmas : The War Is (Almost) Over...?

2008-11-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

And we're gonna celebrate with a little top-rock 6-step...

Hip-hop: The Universal Language of Peace

Your Boy Got An Award!

2008-11-10T08:05:00.000-08:00

From the official thang...

Today Jeff Chang was named a 2008 USA Ford Fellow in Literature by United States Artists, a national arts advocacy organization that invests in America's artists and illuminates the value of artists to society.

He was among 51 recipients of United States Artists' prestigious 2008 Fellows program.

Jeff is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and the editor of Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. He most recently covered the 2008 presidential election for Vibe and Vibe.com. (And here of course!)

Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai'i, Jeff now resides in Berkeley, California. He has begun writing his third book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America (St. Martin's Press), on the cultural transformation of the U.S. over the past three decades.

It's A New Day

2008-11-05T00:20:00.000-08:00

Loric Frye. Photo By Paradise Gray (c) 2008

Throughout the north side of Pittsburgh, one of the city's three major Black districts, they lined up before dawn, hundreds deep in the 47-degree weather as if they were waiting for history to be made. Even after the polling places opened into an instant crawl, they kept coming.

And they kept coming all day.

One of them was a 19-year old named Loric Frye. Frye was a Pennsylvanian, and because of that, he was a key voter in the presidential election. Senator John McCain had staked his strategy on winning the state, hoping to steal it from Senator Barack Obama in his comeback bid.

But Frye was far from the kind of clean-scrubbed, neatly partisan first-time voter Republicans would ever think to appeal to or CNN would ever bother to interview.

Frye was a young brother in oversized pants. His young son was at home and his girlfriend was pregnant with their daughter. He had no high-school diploma. He had no fancy title. Frye was, no, still is in the process of putting it all together.

If you went strictly by the stats, he wasn't even supposed to have found his way into the voting booth yesterday. And truth be told, he almost didn't.

He admits that up until this year, politics didn't interest him. Barack got his attention. But the person who really turned him around was a man named Paradise Gray, a legendary hip-hop promoter and activist, who got Frye work as a community organizer doing voter outreach.

Frye spent the year canvassing, registering and door-knocking with Khari Mosley and the League of Young Voters. He started to feel deeply invested in the election and the political process. He spent the last few weeks doing get-out-the-vote work. All politics remains local. All transformations begin with the personal.

So Loric Frye was excited to cast his first ballot yesterday.

But when he showed up with his voter registration card, he was told he "wasn't qualified", he said. " Something about it was illegal."

At first he thought it was the fact that he had been arrested once. But he had never been convicted or charged. He called Mosley and Gray. They came and took him down to the Board of Elections. There, Frye discovered that there were 6 registration forms in his name. Faced with conflicting information, including different social security numbers, some clerk had decided to qualify him.

It was true that he had moved twice since filling out his first form. When you're young and you're trying to get yourself together, that kind of thing happens. But he was so hyped to vote he made sure to re-register his new address every time that he moved.

When the Board of Elections official pulled out the other three forms, Frye could see that they were fakes. The registering agents were from ACORN. They had apparently used his name, invented addresses, and forged his signature 3 more times. The irony of the ACORN voter fraud case is that, in the few instances that it did impact real people, it didn't affect McCain supporters, it affected the poor people most fired up to vote for Obama.

When dawn had broken, a massive national effort at election protection got underway, born of the nightmares from the disputed 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. It was aided in part by web 2.0 tools. A fraudulent text message and a hacker-produced email at George Washington University that urged Obama voters to show up on Wednesday were both exposed via the internet.

In battleground states like Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio, the highest voter turnout in almost a century led to worries about a lack of ballots and slow lines. At South Carolina State University, a historically Black college, dozens of students were told that their polling places had changed. Student activists and the NAACP organized buses to get 32 students to the correct locations, but worried that at least 50 more were discouraged from voting.

Even Republicans circulated a memo detailing voting irregularities. Most of the incidents rose nowhere near the level of the kinds of voter suppression that Democrats faced in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004. In fact, the first listed on the memo, an accusation of intimidation by alleged members of the New Black Panther Party at a polling place in North Philadelphia, was little more than a hilarious televised encounter between a Fox News reporter and a Black poll-watcher that seemed as if it was scripted for The Boondocks.

Republicans also explored allegations of double-voting by students in Georgia and media in Kansas who may have voted both in person and through absentee ballots, unfilled absentee ballot requests in New Mexico, missing military absentee ballots in Virginia, and calls in Pennsylvania with fake polling information.

But hours later, all this seemed moot.

As soon as the polls closed in California, all of the networks called a landslide victory for Barack Obama. The margin was nowhere near close. In the popular vote, Obama beat McCain by nearly 6 million.

Over 90% of African Americans voted in record numbers for Obama. But he also won among women, split the white working class, and picked up a much larger number of white male voters than John Kerry had in 2004. Obama's electoral college tally corresponded to his margin of victory among young people, Asian Americans, and Latinos: 2-1.

The election of the first biracial African American president in the history of the U.S. set off ecstatic celebrations all across the country. Twitter's server stopped for a few minutes, overloaded by messages. In Oakland, Berkeley, and Seattle, people poured into the streets and instant block parties sprung up as if it was the Bronx in the summer of '77. Crowds marched cheering to the White House. They filled Times Square as if it was New Year's Eve. They came 1 million strong into Grant Park to hear Obama deliver his victory speech, the very place where the Democratic Party collapsed in police riots 40 years ago.

For a small group of people in Pittsburgh, the victory began earlier that day, when an elections official restored Frye's right to vote and handed him a ballot. For Mosley, the League's National Political Director, a longtime community organizer and a veteran of the 2004 battle, it was a gratifying moment.

"The biggest thing I've seen today is the number of young African Americans from the hood that have never voted—teenage parents, the formerly incarcerated, just an incredible number of people voting," he said. "We're really seeing a sea change. The college students have been voting. Now we're seeing a movement among those who never did go to college. That could be monumental not only on the local level but the national level."

"Man, I'm happy as hell I get to vote," Frye told Mosley. "I'm just so happy to get my voice heard."

The victory would not just belong to Barack Obama, but to Loric Frye. "I'm hoping for change," Frye said. "I know it ain't gon' come today or tomorrow, but I'm hoping for change. I'm pushing for change."

Your Election Day Questions Answered

2008-11-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

Got questions? Here are some important web resources that may have answers.

+ Need to find your polling place?

Check GoVote.org or use GoVote's mobile service by texting "pp" with your street address, and zip code, to 69866.

For instance, if you text the following to 69866: "pp 144 Biltmore Ave 28801"

you get a text back that reads:

"(govote.org) Vote at: Stephens Lee Community Center - 30 Washington Carver Street, Ashville, NC 28801 (by CREDO Mobile/NOI)"

+ Want a voter guide written by young voters in your area?

Check The League Of Young Voters' special website called TheBallot.org.

+ Worried about wearing your Obama or McCain tee to the polls?

Here's Wiretap Magazine's Top 8 Voting Myths.

+ Are you a student with questions about your rights?

Check this Brennan Center For Justice website.

+ Experiencing voting irregularities and need advice or to report them?

Call 1-866-OUR-VOTE for free legal advice. You can also visit www.866ourvote.org or www.nationalcampaignforfairelections.org or if you're on Twitter, hit the Twitter Vote Report to report the incident.

This One's For My Yellow Folks :: Kelly Tsai On The Elections

2008-11-03T14:55:00.000-08:00

What Time It Is :: Wendell Pierce With The Last Word

2008-11-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

For months, we have been telling you about how important tomorrow is. Now this is it. The last word.

We're going to Wendell Pierce, better known as Bunk Moreland from "The Wire". Maybe he's a dude you look up to. Maybe he's a dude you respect. He's not a hater, but he has a message.

Did you think hip-hop has helped or hurt Obama in his quest to become the first black president?

Well, I'm pretty much an old head so I don't listen to a lot of hip-hop. I mean you know, it's cool. Uh. You know, it's cool.

I mean, the fact is the youth of America, every election cycle has this sense of responsibility and sense of importance. But then it's inflated because they never vote. So while every election cycle we're like, 'Young people gon' get out and vote! P-Diddy said vote or die, what we're gon' do, you know man? I gon put this rap and talk about the real deal!' And you ask the majority of all those hip-hop heads, did you go out and vote?

See I don't see the lines of all those same young people that are sitting there trying to get into the Fox (Theater) in Atlanta...

But you should have seen Nas at Rock The Bells. He had 25,000 middle fingers in the air...

Right! I know. That's big. But you're not gonna see the same crowd outside the polling place. Cause I've never seen that. So if hip hop wants to impress me, bring that same amount of people and that same amount of energy at one time at one polling place.

I put a challenge out to Vibe. Show me in your December issue the pictures of the hundreds of thousands of hip-hop heads outside the polling places with their fingers up like that and their 'I voted' sticker on their lapel.

Hip hop has never ever had an impact besides selling records, popular culture. They've never made an impact on the political world because they've never been a part of it.

Can you imagine if we ever saw that many young people at 9am at one polling place in this country on November 4th?

I see Jay-Z sell out Madison Square Garden five nights in a row. If you would like to impress me, I would like to see those same numbers of people outside five polling places in New York City. When I see that, then hip-hop is gonna impress me.

That's a serious challenge.

Tell 'em that Wendell Pierce from 'The Wire' put out the challenge. And as Bunk would say, "Ya happy now, bitch?"

Q+A :: David Banner On What Tuesday Means

2008-11-02T11:56:00.000-08:00

Rapper and activist David Banner has been one of the most compelling voices on the politics of the hip-hop generation. He took some time out with us to talk about why he supports Barack Obama and what Tuesday means.

A lot of folks are talking about this election as one of the most important we've had in this generation. How are you feeling about this election?

I definitely think it’s one of the most important elections, if not in our generation, in history. I think people are concentrating too much on the fact that we may potentially have the opportunity to have a black president, but I think as important is that we actually have an opportunity to get new blood in, somebody who wasn't necessarily grown to be the president, somebody who actually is coming up from real people, who in actuality has lived a normal life and has had the struggles that ordinary people have had so in turn can understand the trials and tribulations of regular people.

Do you think that once he gets in he'll be able to take care of the issues that people haven't seen taken care of for the last 4 decades and beyond? Or do you think he's gonna be under pressures from other forces to do the same old same old?

Well, I think those pressures will always be there. It's up to the man to make the decision on what he wants to do. I think what people should also understand is that Obama potentially is coming behind the worst president in history. So that means that he has a lot to clean up also. And I think people should be patient with him and understand that he has to clean up a lot of stuff. Imagine that even if the day he came in, that he ended the war, it still would take a long time months and months if not years to slowly bring the troops back home, phase them out of Iraq. So for me, we just have to understand that he has a lot to clean up. We are in a recession, so before we can make it better, we first have to come out of it.

You've done a lot of work around the Gulf Coast, around Mississippi and Louisiana around the folks that have been affected by Bush's policies. A lot of stuff came out around race in the elections this year. Do you think Obama is going to be able to do anything about those issues or is he going to have to dial it back—be kind of a Jackie Robinson? Do you think he'll be able to deal with the issues that were left by Katrina?

Well, this is what I need America to understand. I need America to understand Obama is going to be the president of the United States. Not the president of Latino people. Not the president of white people. Not the president of Black people. So as a leader he has to do what's best for the United States. As a person who has been in a position of power, sometimes you have to make a decision as a leader, you have to tackle problems that's best for the American population as a whole. And that's what I was trying to get a lot of people to understand.

There are situations that, yes, need to be handled. But there are bigger problems right now, i.e. the war, the recession, gas prices, stuff like that. I think the best thing for Obama is for Obama to pick issues that are actually solvable and for him to start solving problems that he knows he can accomplish so people can actually see some change. I think what happens a lot of times is we have the best intentions but we try to tackle problems that are gonna take, that are bigger than us. This is my personal opinion. But I think for the American population they looking to Obama to solve some things. He should pick problems that he knows he can solve, solve them so people can see some change.

A lot of folks are talking about how the South is going to figure into this election. One of the things folks are saying that this is the election that shifts the South and I wonder if this is what you're seeing on the ground, a shift from the old conservative white Southern strategy Nixon coalition to the New South.

I definitely agree with that. But what I need people to understand is that this election won't be the end of anything. If anything, it's going to be the very beginning. People are looking at Obama as the savior. People are looking at this election as the all and all. That's not the truth and we shouldn't put that much into the election. Yes, it is a very important election. Yeah it may be the most important election in history, but it won't be anything that will change things by itself. It's just the beginning. We as Americans have to change our ways. You even look at the way that Obama is helping to change the way that the world views Americans. Obama is one of the few presidents in a a long time that's loved and adored overseas, we need that right now! But it's only the beginning. We're going to have to work hard. We're going to have to continue this process. Let's say if everyone in the South gets out to vote, Obama gets in, you know—will that trend continue? That is the important thing.

Here's a last question because it comes up over and over again in the south. What if the vote doesn't count? What if you have all of these folks of color, all of these young folks to get out and vote and they still find a way to do what they did in Florida in 2000. What then?

This is what I tell people. Number one, the popular vote was way too close in both of those elections. This is why we have to get off our ass and make sure that we all vote. If the popular vote is too close then that leaves room for people to gibble and gabble, for people to hide in the darkness and the what-ifs. That is just the reason why we have to make sure that we get out and vote and it's obvious if they do it. Like the only time that you can hide a lie is if it's a little bit of the truth. Every lie has a little bit of the truth. But if Obama blows McCain out of the water, then people just have to righteously get up and take it. Then America will definitely expose itself for what it really is. So what we have to do is make sure that the popular vote is nowhere to being close.

LBTV :: More Blatherings On Hip-Hop

2008-10-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

I'm in the ether right now getting ready for the Born In The Bronx conference at Cornell--stay tuned for pics and highlights sometime next week after the elections.

In the meantime, here's another vid. Of course, I can't promise any more coherence in this one than the Bloggingheads one below. But you knew that already...

Thanks to Justin!

Bloggingheads :: Eli Lake and I Debating Hip-Hop & Politics

2008-10-29T06:44:00.001-07:00

Here's Eli Lake and I from today's Bloggingheads TV:

Eli and I talked about the Vibe cover story, Ice Cube's aspirationality, and debated crime policy and the Clipse, Bill Ayers and Too Short, and a lot more.

Not sure I was the most articulate dude in the face of Eli's ridiculously broad and deep intelligence--which ranges from Pakistan and nukes to SoulStrut.com and the Rawkus catalog--but I tried to hold my own and it was a very enjoyable conversation...

Musical Interlude :: Meters Drummer Rocks "Obamagroove"

2008-10-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Barack Obama's speech in Denver, where 3/4s of the Meters played at a New Orleans benefit, legendary drummer--really the best drummer of all-time--Zigaboo Modeliste decided to funk up his own tribute to the man in "Obamagroove"...

Here's the bonus house remix by Zig's son, Kelly "Spy Boy" Jones. It's got a NOLA-meets-Baltimore-inna-Manchester-stylee vibe...

Download the songs at www.obamagroove.com and Zig will personally send half the proceeds to the campaign.

10 days. Keep on marchin'!

Voices of The New Majority :: A Southern Son Finding A New Life

2008-10-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Nov 27
Photo Courtesy B-Fresh Photography

You look up and this cat is smiling at you. He's wearing a red shirt and his eyes are hidden behind shades, another rapper on the grind. He's here now in Las Vegas, where gaudy wealth and brutal poverty exist side-by-side, and a million simulations of the American dream are on sale around the clock. He's got a CD, and it's called "My America." He introduces himself. Some rappers name themselves after heroes, villains, cartoons. His name is a simple fact. Nov 27, his date of birth. It's the only thing he's sure of.

He was born James Price, in Little Rock, Arkansas, 28 years after nine African American students desegregated Central High School, 21 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. When he was born, when Bill and Hillary Clinton were still in the State Capitol and Little Rock's civil rights traumas were about to give way to gang-land traumas.

Nov 27 grew up all over town. "I didn't really have a stable home from time to time year to year," he says. His parents were still trying to live the party life. So he moved all over town to stay with grandparents, aunts, other relatives.
"When you're not in a stable environment, you can't adapt fully. You can never feel like you're safe."

He adds, "I was kinda homeless for a little bit, I had to deal with surviving on the streets when I was young. That made me learn how to survive through my mind. That's where rap comes from—surviving from the mind."

Some of his kin were Bloods, so he was too. Then, at 14—the year he began thinking of rapping seriously, the year he started hearing Cash Money and Busta Rhymes and Snoop and Dre in a whole new way—he found himself at a new school on the north side of town, the Black Disciples' and Gangsta Disciples' side of town. It was, he says, "the beginning of my troubles."

Wearing a red cap sideways to school one day, he was surrounded by 30 cats in black or blue. They told him they didn't like the way he was wearing his hat. He wouldn’t back down so he got beat down.

"That's just some of the stuff teens go through out here on the streets," he says.

"It's like, you can't surrender, you don't want to be considered a punk because these cats want you to throw your rag down or abide by their rules cause it's their side of town."

After two years of banging, he says, "I came to the realization I got to do something better. I can't indulge in this nonsense to where it could lead to the end of my life. There was times when I was like the only one representing for the gang that put me down. And I got these so-called homeboys? They weren't down. So it was like, what's the use? I got no backup."

His family sent him to Austin, Texas to cool out for a couple of years. And he did. But when he returned to Little Rock, back this time to a Blood neighborhood, trouble still seemed determined to stalk him.

"I was at a security job at Pacific Railroad. Friday night. I was gonna go holla at my homeboy. Something was telling me just stay home. I guess that was my conscience. 'Just stay home, just stay home.' 'Naw man, it's Friday I'm trying to see what's up with the night.'"

"I'm walking down the street. I see six cats over there approaching me like, 'What up?' I didn't say nothing to 'em, I kept walking. They surrounded me. I'm thinking I'm gonna have to squab with them cause they around every angle. I'm trying to get ready, see who's gonna make the first move. Then I hear clink-clink, paw-paw-paw-paw."

Bullets pierced his stomach and his arm. As he lay on the ground he wondered, "What did I do to deserve this?"

His wounds weren't fatal. But his emotions were a riot. "I went through my pain with that, my anger, my frustration. Listened to my conscience. I didn't retaliate because that just would have been another dead person on the street."

He shrugs.

"That's pretty much what Little Rock go through, man."

The violence didn’t end. A short time later, a group did a drive-by on his house. He was 20, had been shot 4 times in his own neighborhood. He knew he had reached the bottom.

"So I just went to sleep, and I woke up. That was a sign. Like, hey I'm still alive. After that, that was the turning point. I was like, 'I ain't finna be around here in this death trap.'"

He left for Austin for good. Got a job, rented an apartment, got back on his feet. Started rapping again, made contacts in the industry. He joined up with a group called Mafia Mob. He was searching for something.

Nov took a job as an elections clerk and was awed by the intensity of the Democratic primary caucuses. He started noticing how his neighborhood on the east side of Austin was becoming gentrified. He got interested in community events. He was going to one—a Department of Justice hearing on community policing—in the fall of 2007 to give a statement when trouble found him again.

As he was crossing the street, two whites stared him down and starting shouting at him. He stopped. They got out of the car. From behind his shades, Nov 27 told them, "I'm not trying to fight but I'll defend myself." They started scrapping.

When the police came, they took the two white men aside. They slammed Nov faced down on the asphalt. The men told the police Nov had thrown rocks at their car and challenged them to a fight. But when Nov tried to say that was a lie, they handcuffed him, pulled his shirt over his face, and took him to jail, charging him with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

But this time, the trouble ended up different. Nov landed an attorney, Kenavon "K.C." Carter, who took the case. After watching the police video, the judge offered to dismiss the charges dropped if Nov would stay out of trouble for 6 months. That wasn't going to be a problem this time. Carter took Nov to more community events, brought him to Las Vegas for the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.

So now this cat is standing in front of you. He's told his story. Behind his shades, his mind is spinning. He is meeting people he never would have met before, he is seeing possibilities he never would have seen before.

"In my raps, I try to tell people we don't have to blame nobody for our oppression because that leads to hating. That's where rap plays a role, it can relieve tension and bring people together," he says.

"Change can be a positive thing," he adds. "Bullets went through me but they didn't kill me, man. It's like I'm resurrected, a new me now."

Behind his shades, it seemed clear he was getting closer to what he was looking for. A tribe. A cause. Something to believe in, something that might last past tomorrow.

Angry Black White Boy The Play Opens Tonight!

2008-10-23T11:59:00.000-07:00

Please come out tonight for the opening of Dan Wolf's theatrical take on Adam Mansbach's Angry Black White Boy at The Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco's Mission District.

You can also join me and Hard Knock Radio's Weyland Southon on Saturday night in welcoming Adam Mansbach his own angry self for the show and a special discussion afterwards.

If you can't make it this weekend, the play continues through November 16th. Come on through!

Voices of The New Majority :: A Hip-Hop Activist In Search Of Answers

2008-10-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

Carlo Javier Garcia
Photo Courtesy B-Fresh Photography

In August, crowds gathered every day in the streets of Denver to protest at the Democratic National Convention.

On the day before the Convention opened, one in the crowd was a 22 year-old Puerto-Rican, University of Colorado student named Carlo Javier Garcia. He wore Swiss Army sunglasses, red and black Adidas, a red and black kaffiyah, camo shorts, and a black “Recreate ’68” t-shirt. He marched alongside anarchists.

At that same moment, two of his brothers were in Iraq, one on his second tour of duty. Another brother was at home after being wounded in combat in Afghanistan and awarded a Purple Heart. His father, an Army Lt. Colonel, had also done a tour there, and was still working part-time in the reserve in Miami.

Carlo was clearly from the black bloc of the family. But he saw the protests from a different perspective than many of his companions. His family's service to the country, he said, inspired him to be there.

"There's a warrior ethos in our family," he said. "I was in ROTC for a year. The more I thought about it, the more I read and learned in college, I was like, I can't be a part of this illegal imperialist war. You come to realize you don't need to be a soldier in the army to be a warrior and fight."

He spoke as the anti-war marchers and riot police stared each other down in front of the State Capitol. "This", he said, "is me being a warrior and fighting."

As an argument broke out among the marchers over whether or not to confront the police, Carlo and I spoke some more. He had helped organize the rally earlier that morning for Recreate 68, which had featured Green Party candidates Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente and Dead Prez.

"You think of what happened in the DNC in Chicago 1968. There were police riots, there was a police state. Look at it now," he said, pointing to the lines of riot cops facing down the activists, "they are storm troopers going to battle. All the bad things that happened—no, that's not what we're trying to recreate. What we're trying to recreate is the spirit of activism and unity that was so prevalent back then. Now it's 2008, it's time for us to reinspire everybody."

I asked Carlo if he planned to vote. He had more surprises. He said that, unlike many of his fellow marchers, he did. And he was voting, as he had in the previous election, for the Democratic candidate. "Barack is an inspiration," he said.

Why was he helping organize a protest at the DNC, I asked him, if he was voting Democratic?

He chuckled. He'd heard the question before. A lot.

He explained that his dad was a "yellow-dog Democrat"—an old term Southerners invented to describe voters who would vote for a yellow dog on a Democratic ticket over any Republican.

"Your vote isn't necessarily significant. I voted in 2004 and 2006 and I've been disappointed both times," Carlo admitted. But he felt the protesters played a crucial role in influencing the Democrats.

"We could go to the RNC and protest all we want. We could have the police state attack us and destroy us at the RNC—it's not going to make a difference to John McCain and the rest of the Republicans. But we can come here to the DNC and potentially have Barack Obama see us in mass force, see the people movement, and inspire him for change."

He added, "We have to hold them accountable. In 2006 we elected a Democratic Congress on the platform that they would end the war in Iraq and cut funding for the war. There's been a troop surge. We're still at war. My brothers are in there now on 15-month tours. This is my family. These are my problems."

At that point, the activists seemed to have settled on a decision. They retreated and marched in the other direction toward downtown. The police dispersed. Garcia left to join the marchers.

Later that week, we caught up with each other at the Iraq War Veterans' demonstration. He had been arrested the previous day, and because he had been on probation, he was facing potentially serious charges. Despite his concern, it seemed as if he had to be at this protest; it hit the closest to home.

He marched to the Pepsi Center then left for Boulder to help set up a Public Enemy concert, sponsored by his hip-hop collective, Mad Society Project. It was a good day—the War Veterans demonstration was the peak of the week for the street demonstrators and the Public Enemy show was a success.

But in general, the protests in Denver hardly matched the fervor of the ones in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention, let alone the outpouring of emotion that greeted Obama's acceptance speech.

Since then, the economy has become the nation's most pressing issue, but the wars rage on. In the last month, there have been 10 American and over 130 Iraqi civilian deaths.

A couple weeks ago, I emailed Carlo to check up. He wrote back, saying that he had as his court case loomed, he had thought a lot about what he and the Denver activists had called their "Days of Resistance". He wasn't entirely sure they had worked.

"The day of the large scale protest is dead," he wrote. "I realized our protest wouldn't change policy before it all went down, but I hoped it would inspire others, and to tell you the truth, ain't shit changed. We gotta figure out a different formula to inspire the people who need to be inspired."

He was still searching for answers.

I thought back to something he had said on the streets of Denver: "The Bronx was burning. That is us now. Our country is burning and there are people who are speaking out against it. Your average hip-hop head now should be an activist, should be going out and doing something."

For more Voices of the New Majority, pick up the new issue of Vibe on stands now or check Vibe.com's Politics page.

How Anti-Muslim Bigotry Pushed Powell To Obama

2008-10-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

From Maureen Dowd's powerful piece in today's Times:

Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party’s campaign this fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with which Republicans spit out the words “community organizer”; the Republicans’ argument that using taxes to “spread the wealth” was socialist when the purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin’s insidious notion that small towns in states that went for W. were “the real America.”

But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out was when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a mother pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name, Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and a crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.

“I stared at it for an hour,” he told me. “Who could debate that this kid lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational buddies was not a fine American?”

Tipping Points :: Early Voting In Swing States

2008-10-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

As this long campaign enters its final two weeks, attention has turned to massive get-out-the-vote efforts, especially early voting.

Since this year's election could bring one of the highest turnouts on record, especially at precincts in communities of color and around colleges and universities, both parties and nonpartisan organizations like the League of Young Voters have already begun bringing people to the polls.

Early voting could very well make the difference. Nearly a third of all voters are expected to cast an early vote.

Polls show that Obama may be capturing sizable leads in the early vote. In part this may reflect the enthusiasm gap between the parties over their candidates. The Gallup Poll reported last week Democratic voters were 20-points more enthusiastic than their Republican counterparts about voting this year.

But the difference may also reflect the party's diverging tactical decisions. While the McCain campaign seems to have been concentrating on fighting "voter registration fraud" and laws that ease voting restrictions in the courts and on the airwaves, the Obama campaign has been dedicating big resources into galvanizing the early vote.

In Ohio, perhaps the key swing state, many who lived through the last two elections won't easily forget the long polling lines they faced. Some voters in 2006 waited in bad weather over 12 hours to cast their vote. Interest in early voting has been high, and not just among voters. Earlier this month, Republican officials unsuccessfully challenged the early voting laws. Ohio's early voters have favored Obama over McCain.

For the past two days, Senator Obama has been in Florida, the other crucial swing state, which began early voting this week. The Obama campaign also has early voting outreach efforts up in the important battlegrounds of Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Montana.

In North Carolina--once a solidly red state--the Obama campaign has been putting together a particularly massive effort to encourage "1-stop voting". North Carolina law allows voters to register and vote by absentee ballot at any county polling place right away. These efforts seemed to be paying off. Over 200,000 have already voted in North Carolina and Obama may be leading by as many as 30 points over McCain.

In all, thirty-one states allow unrestricted early voting. For information on early voting rules for your state, check the Early Voting Information Center website. To check on where you can cast an early vote, check GoVote. And for voter guides put together by other young folks in your area (or to put one together yourself), check TheBallot.org.

Rest In Power ED RICCO

2008-10-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

Sad news about the founder of Sedgwick & Cedar...

McCain Lost Me

2008-10-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

With watery red eyes that had him looking as if he'd just smoked a bowl of medical marijuana, Senator John McCain might have made me feel sorry for him.

I'm far from a conservative, as far as the suburbs of Honolulu are from the streets of Brooklyn. But this year I was willing to give John McCain a fair hearing. "Change is coming", he had said in St. Paul and, weary of politics as usual, I was genuinely interested to see if he and the Republican Party were willing to back it up.

But last night I finally gave in. I broke. I was stomping around the house, scaring the kids, yelling at the radio and the television, and generally not digesting my dinner.

Here's why. We're now past silly season and into shitty season. Falling down in the polls like Michael Douglas, Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin have gone negative, unleashing fear out of their little box of horrors.

McCain argued last night that he has "repudiated every time someone has been out of line." But he continues to allow his VP nominee—someone CNN's Leslie Sanchez once said was "a vice president for the rest of us"—to insinuate Obama is not like the rest of us. He continues to flog non-stories about ACORN, a federation of community organizations working for poor people led by a woman of color, and Bill Ayers, a former Weather Underground radical who now is a respected voice in education.

McCain and Palin are betting that those who believe Obama is Arab or Muslim—and please so what if he were?—will also be scared of community organizers in poor communities and communities of color who have registered over a million new voters. Just for perspective, the false registrations—which afflict every voter registration campaign—represent less than half of one percent of all the new registrations—a pretty good rate, if you ask me.

McCain and Palin are betting that those who believe Obama is down with terrorists—because he actually lived and went to school in Indonesia once and what's up with that middle name?—are still scared of 60s activists who have become distinguished professors and respected community leaders focusing on improving education for poor, inner-city students. Why focus on the real issue of how to fix the educational system for the nation's future, when you can draw people back to the spectacle of battles that are 40 years old?

Full disclosure: I've knocked on doors and phone-banked for ACORN. I've written the Afterword for Bill Ayers' new book, and I was honored that he asked. So call me a domestic terrorist threatening to destroy the fabric of American democracy.

But I don't think I'm alone.

Voter registration fraud doesn't mean that Mickey Mouse will show up and try to vote on November 4th. Voter suppression, however, is an active Republican strategy that's been in place since the 1964 Voting Rights Act expanded enfranchisement. Is there any wonder why election protection groups feel they need to be in communities of color, working-class people, immigrants, and not in, say, Salt Lake City?

And if we want to talk Bill Ayers, let's start with education. Ayers has quietly done important work in Chicago and earned the respect of the best education leaders in the country, liberals and conservatives alike.

McCain, on the other hand, asserted last night that the country had finally arrived at equal access to education, apparently unaware that school segregation has climbed since the Reagan era to levels unseen since the eve of Brown vs. Board of Education.

In his effort to push vouchers, he confused them with charter schools and lied—with a big smile—about Washington D.C. superintendent Michelle Rhee's position on them. McCain simply doesn't seem to have as much knowledge or passion on education and higher education as he does about Obama's supposedly scary relationships.

And here is the thing. No one really cares about my friend Bill Ayers and no one really cares about ACORN except for the right-wing nuts and racists in the party, the kind of folks who show up at rallies to yell "Kill him!" when Obama's name is mentioned. Instead I think most voters, like me, want to know how the war can be ended, the economy be turned around, and the education system be fixed.

But McCain, despite his "I'm not George Bush" zinger, seemed more intent upon bringing back the ideas of the past. At times, he sounded like a GOP greatest hits compilation.

When the discussion turned to abortion, for instance, he said, "We have to change the culture of America," he said. It was a conscious echo of Pat Buchanan's famous 1992 culture war speech, the singular text of the right-wing backlash.

McCain tried to paint Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal, a throwback to the days when the elder Bush made Michael Dukakis ashamed of the "l-word". And he revived Reagan-era disses—"class warfare" and "spreading the wealth"—to describe Obama's economic plans.

Of course after four decades in which the wealth gap has yawned and a month in which government has set aside nearly a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street, class warfare and spreading the wealth don't sound so bad to lots of middle-class and working-class voters.

No, Senator McCain, you're not George W. Bush. Yes, you've been a warrior and you remain ready to fight. But you don't look like you're fighting for the future. You look like you're still fighting the past.

Racialicious Interview!

2008-10-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

If you're at all interested, here's an interview for the Addicted To Race Premium podcast, one of the most consistently intriguing places for cutting-edge dialogue on race and culture. I was really honored to be asked to participate.

Thanks to Carmen Van Kerckhove and New Demographic!

Q+A :: Immortal Technique Breaks Down The American Empire

2008-10-14T20:13:00.001-07:00

Immortal Technique is a steadfastly independent voice—from his music to his politics. The Lima-born, Harlem-raised rhymer broke through at the turn of the millennium after emerging from prison and the east coast battle-rap scene. He made his name with "Revolutionary, Volumes 1 and 2", showcasing his fierce intellect and broad knowledge of history in hardcore skills.

For the past 7 years, he's practiced what the politics he preaches, setting up an orphanage in Afghanistan, raising funds for children's hospitals overseas, and working closely with youths and prisoners' rights and immigrant rights groups.

He took some time out to talk about the elections with us while out touring his new Viper Records album, The 3rd World.

How do you feel about these elections?

None of these people will change the dynamic of the way America is set up. I think that at the end of the day that there are a lot of people that are looking for Barack Obama to change things and I think that there are things he will be able to change, but not things he’ll be able to stop. Like people will say, "Stop the war." But I think he’ll be able to change the war but I don’t think he’ll be able to stop the war. I think that he can do great amount of stuff for the social programs that exist in this country but it’s a whole other story when it comes to the amount of stuff that has to be done in terms of our interests overseas.

Are folks focusing too much on electoral politics when they’re trying to get change in this country?

It sounds horrible but people really only really respect harsh and tough change, you know what I mean?

What do you mean?

Every ounce of being we’ve ever had came from people fighting over it. For example, what made the fact that Greece was a part of the Roman Empire legitimate? Or that Egypt was part of it, or the southern part of England part of it. Was it some divine right or right of conquest? What makes the northern part of Mexico now California, New Mexico, Arizona? And the Roman Empire existed 6 or 700 years, Byzantine Empire even longer. So really when we think about it, in the span of things we as a nation barely got our feet wet in terms of what we have accomplished in terms of manipulating the form of government in bettering it.

I think as our democracy evolves, it's going evolve in one way or another. It’s going to have to become even more of respectful of civil liberties because that’s what democracy is all about. It’s about creating these institutions that protect the civil liberties of the people. Otherwise all we’re really doing is voting 25 times every century and we feel more secure.

If you want to get to the deeper question of it, I think it’s all about control. If we really believe in God, then the mind of God must contain every possibility for every single outcome based on the smallest random choice we make in life that increases exponentially throughout our lives. So really did we have a choice in making our destiny? And I think that’s the issue with man—the control we don’t have. We overcompensate by trying to conquer other people and our women. Try to overcompensate for the inescapable fact that we can’t conquer ourselves.

So I think that plays about a microcosm in local politics and presidential politics too. People want a candidate that is going to see things from their religious point of view, their economical point of view. It was your choice to not to get an abortion, but you want to have control so no other person gets an abortion. You forget you were an immigrant once upon a time in America.

When you talk about person being a “redneck”—a lot of people that came to this country were white were slaves. They didn’t call them slaves they called them indentured servants. But they were indentured 7 years to their masters. They were even cross bred with African slaves to create, quote-unquote “mulattoes” because those were more expensive to sell and you’d get more profit. But if you think about it, these white people toiled in the fields all day and since white people don’t tan too well when they took of their shirt, what did they have? A "red neck." And that meant you were a poor, white sharecropping farmer. These insults are based upon your social status in society.

So that’s what we dealing with right now, the inability for us to go back in time and look at what creates the image of what we are today as Americans, as whatever race we choose to identify with, and as people with a particular political agenda in the upcoming election.

You call your new album, 'The 3rd World.' The new census projections just came out. They were predicting that the US would turn majority-minority in 2050. They had to lower that projection to 2042, by 8 years. What do you think will happen with questions of racial justice in this country?

We always talk about building unity among the races but a lot of the times there’s not unity within the races themselves. I think the people who are most racist against one another are the people who look kind of like one another. I know when you're uneducated to another culture, it’s kind of hard to see the difference between an Indian and a Pakistani person. Or Korean and Japanese. And at the same time, these are individuals that when you go back in their recent history they had the most drama. They do not like one another. 50 years ago Peruvians and Ecuadorians hated each other, but at the same time, they’re the same people and that’s the craziest part.

I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen overnight because unfortunately the curriculum that we are taught in school doesn’t go back that far, it doesn’t want to deal with those specific issues. And those workshops are not being replicated on the street level to those individuals who need to be brought into the discussion. This doesn’t just need to be a discussion that just happens in some elite intellectual arena but it needs to be public domain. You know, education shouldn’t be a privilege but it should be a right.

Do you expect to vote this election?

Sure.

Who are you going to vote for?

I’m not going to vote for John McCain. I’ll put it like that, so that’s pretty much my answer. Some of the issues I wanted to put in the perspective of individuals who put immigration back on the perspective, people who are going to help repair the economy. Individuals that are looking to be not just respectful of our cultures but other people’s cultures and have open dialogue with other parts of the world.

You're voting Obama?

I don’t think that man is Black Jesus. I think he’s Black Caesar.

For the latest on the 2008 election, including voter registration deadlines, check Vibe.com's Politics page. Check Immortal Technique and many more speaking on the elections in the November issue, on newsstands soon.

"The Tipping Point" :: An Excerpt From My Vibe Cover Story

2008-10-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

Here it is:

“Tonight Freedom Rings!”

Reverend Bernice A. King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told the crowd on August 28, echoing her father’s epochal “I Have a Dream” speech given 45 years before. And now the flocks gathered at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High stadium would witness a giant step toward that dream’s realization in the historic nomination of Barack Obama. “This is one of the nation’s greatest defining moments,” she told the roaring audience.

The 85,000-plus people who gathered to hear Barack Obama accept his nomination as the Democratic Party’s first black presidential candidate were a rippling, multihued cloth of humanity—people of all faiths, colors, and generations in rapt anticipation, shedding tears of joy as the sun set over the snow- capped Rockies. But it was more than just a powerful, emotional gathering. It was the outline of a new American majority.

Backstage, as The Black Eyed Peas leader William “will.i.am” Adams prepared to step onstage to perform “Yes We Can” with John Legend and the Agape Choir—a song that, like the candidate it celebrated, seemed to emerge from nowhere to sound a note of idealism in a time of cynicism and strife—he was thinking about his old neighborhood.

In the projects where he was raised—the two-story Estrada Courts in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles—there’s a famous mural of Che Guevara pointing straight at you like Uncle Sam. The graffiti-style words next to Che read WE ARE NOT A MINORITY!! In Obama, Will saw a candidate who reflected his reality. “Obama is probably the first mirror of America,” he said. “The presidents we’ve had before, they’re still portraits that were painted a long time ago.”

People of color are now a majority in forerunner states like California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. More than two in five Americans under the age of 18 are nonwhite. Census data project that the United States could become majority-minority by 2042, a full eight years earlier than previously expected.

Thanks to hip hop, American popular culture has been thoroughly, to coin a word, colorized. These are all signs that we may be in the middle of an era of expansive racial change. For some, these signs point to fear. For us, they point to hope.

Rewind back to the bitter cold of this past January, when Iowans under the age of 25 delivered Obama’s margin of victory in that first caucus, jump-starting his historic march to the Democratic nomination. In the 14 most competitive states, young people made up more than half of the 3 million new registered voters. Through the primary season, young voters turned out at almost twice the rate they did in 2000.

Young people, urbanites, progressives, and people of color have been the driving force behind Obama’s presidential run. “Barack Obama owes his nomination, in large part, to the strength of those voters,” says BET News analyst Keli Goff, author of Party Crashing: HowThe Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic, 2008), “and the strength of people underestimating those voters.”

Forty years have passed since Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy fell to bullets. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won 57 percent of the electorate by campaigning for the so- called “Silent Majority,” stirring a white backlash against “student radicals” and “angry negroes.” Since that time, racism and generational fear have been a dependable, winning electoral strategy.

Politicos parsed the “Silent Majority” into demographic slivers to more deeply exploit those fears, a process that continues in coded stereotypes like “hockey moms” and “hard- working Americans.” kind of politics that abandoned and contained inner-city youths. In 1992, Pat Buchanan gave the backlash a new name: “cultural war.” Right-wingers went after the hip hop genera- tion in everything from censorship to policing. Would Bill Clinton have won without his Sister Souljah moment? (Google it.)

Get more at Vibe's Politics page.

V Is For Victorino

2008-10-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

Joe who? Manny who?

Give a Maui boy a little fire (not to mention some angels--the ancestral kind, not the other kind--in the outfield) and you better at least have a bullpen.

Suggested off-season reading for the Dodgers: check out the story every Local kid knows about Maui and fire and some Mudhens.

Plus huge props to Matt Stairs and Joe Blanton, former A's who still get much love in the Town.

Underdog love still rules October.

Q+A :: De La Soul On Whether Obama Can Deliver

2008-10-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Feted spectacularly on last week's VH1 Hip-Hop Honors, De La Soul is still in motion—working on new projects for their AOI label and touring extensively around the world. They are also all family folks now, with grown man concerns, and lots of wisdom to drop.

Vibe recently caught up with Plugs Two and Three—Dave the rapper formerly known as Trugoy and Maseo the DJ formerly known as the P.A.—and got to talking about Barack Obama's success and what it means for the Black community.

Check for a guest appearance in this interview by Chief Xcel from Blackalicious, and a gratuitous (unendorsed) product placement.

Vibe: Do you think this is the most important election in our generation?

Dave: I think the Hip Hop generation is probably more involved, if you wanna say that. I think our age group, and the culture as a whole, I think it identifies with the issues of today. I think we are getting older. Hip Hop expands from the 16-year olds all the way up to the 35-year olds. So I think this year this election has more of a hip-hop presence involved, and it is important to us. We’re family men and women, we pay taxes, we deal with issues in our community, and so to be a part of molding what they future is in store is important to us, definitely. We wanna be a part of that.

Vibe: Do you think that Obama’s presence this year in the election changes things, makes things different at all?

Maseo: His presence gives hope. His presence overall gives hope. I don’t know if it’s gonna change much, but it gives a lot of hope. Just based on my opinion, everything is based on tradition. A lot of things traditionally just aren’t going to change. But I feel his presence does give a lot of hope for change.

Dave: In addition to that also it gives to a certain demographic to feel like they are involved. And unfortunately that might be ignorant, to feel like someone is of your color, is of your background, so you now be involved, but it is a part of it. We are all human beings, and I think when we see something or someone that we can stand by and be comfortable with, I think that’s a part of the whole process as well. Him being a black man running for the Presidency says a lot.

Maseo: Becoming President, that’s the change in itself. So let’s see where we go from there.

Vibe: You plan on voting this year?

Maseo: Absolutely!

Dave: Oh yeah.

Vibe: Can I ask you who you’re gonna vote for?

Dave: You know, I’m gonna vote for Obama.

Maseo: Me and McCain are starting a label! (laughs)

Vibe: What are the issues that are important to you?

Dave: This war. Just to hear casualties day after day after day, and not only from our side, which is important, but on that side as well. It’s time for some sort of resolution. And to hear that one candidate is willing to stay over there longer, or "stay the course" and another is trying to pull ‘em out and get ‘em home, that’s kinda important to me personally. I think it’s time for us to pull outta there, or try to find a way to pull outta there.

Vibe: So Maseo, you voting for McCain?

Maseo: (Makes Baby Huey sound) Duuuuuuuuuh. (laughs) Naw, Obama's my man.

Vibe: What are the issues for you? How about healthcare? Most artists don’t have healthcare.

Maseo: That’s one of the things I’ve kinda focused in on. Obama’s taken that really to heart because I believe that his mom died, poor healthcare, so I think he’s making that a prevalent issue in our country and I think it’s necessary. I have a mother-in-law who deals with some issues with her healthcare. So I like to see him make that possible out of all the other things he has to try and fix.

Dave: As much money as is being spent on the war, you would think that somebody could funnel a lot of that money into helping people who just need it, naturally. Whatever ailment or age, you see so many different countries have free healthcare, and it works. I think we can figure out a way to make it work.

Maseo: Healthcare and education is necessary. We got all the security in the world, what else are we gonna do now? I think we’re pretty much locked down slowly but surely, accepting martial law. You can see it. But for the most part, we need healthcare and education. Education is terrible. I can tell you the state of Florida right now, what they teaching in the school and the testing that they have to pass doesn’t coincide with the work they’re learning all year long.

Vibe: What do you say to people who aren't registered to vote?

Maseo: People just gotta step up and participate. You just can’t sit and complain. You have to come; you have to vote. You have to be a voice to be reckoned with. You have to first educate yourself on what you complaining about before you can even complain.

Dave: And if Obama’s a catalyst to get those out there to pay attention and learn about what’s going on, let it be. If he’s gonna be a reason, and I speak to my Black community, if he’s gonna be the reason for you to be interested, learn what’s going on, get some information, and then weigh the scale. You never know, McCain might be the person for you. But get involved, educate yourself, and make a decision.

Maceo: I guess the obvious change is Obama, and I feel like of course white people—some of them—don’t wanna reckon with him, but a lot of them are. Race is working for Obama, in a lot of respects. That’s what’s tripping me out. I’m hearing things like KKK is supporting him [laughter]. How true that may be, you don’t know, but I’m hearing things like that. It's funny because I'm not really political! But I'm just saying, 'cause I got a family it gets important.

Vibe: You guys did a whole album called 'Buhloone Mindstate'—talking about you might blow up but you won’t go pop. Is Obama at the stage now where he’s about to blow up and do you think he might go pop?

Dave: I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure.

Maseo: Popular culture’s popular culture! He’s a big part of it now, whether he likes it or not.

Dave: It’s a big pressure. Not only do you have an individual who’s trying to get in the house and run a country, but I’m sure there are a lot of people who are on one side of the field that’s expecting him to deliver for them. I think there’s gonna come a time where he has to separate politics from popularity. I think there’s people out there wavin’ that flag—Obama, Obama!—and literally, Black folks are out there waiting for our deliverance. But I think at the end of the day when that man gets into office he has to deal with politics, and politics are supposed to be for the benefit of the people. But when there’s a time when you have people who are waiting for this deliverance, you gotta kinda let that go, so they [Black people] may view that as him going pop; Black folks might be like, 'Well what’s up wit’ us? I thought we was supposed to be blowing up!'

Chief Xcel from Blackalicious: If he’s not gonna address those and deal with politics as you say, then why should he be our choice?

Dave: I think a lot of it has to do with the whole slogan of just “Change.” I think a lot of people are just looking for that change, that new face, that different thing, and obviously, how the country’s been ran like the whole last eight years, people are not comfortable with that happening for another four years, and I think that’s where the popularity is. But I think that there is a group of people who are waiting for more than just politics. They’re waiting for that deliverance!

Maseo: Everybody's got a job to do. It’s just that simple.

Vibe: Do you think hip-hop helped this country get to this moment, where we could actually visualize having a black President?

Dave: Absolutely! We've come a long way.

Maseo: It’s like Guinness, an acquired taste. (laughs)

For the latest on the 2008 election, including voter registration deadlines, check Vibe.com's Politics page. Check De La Soul and hundreds more on the elections in the November issue of Vibe, on newsstands soon!

Cey Adams & Bill Adler's Book On Hip-Hop Art & Design Out Tuesday!

2008-10-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

Hip-hop graphic designer Cey Adams and resident genius Bill Adler, both featured in Total Chaos have put together an amazing book called DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop. Featuring essays from folks like Sacha Jenkins, Franklin Sirmans, Armond White, Russell Simmons, Cheo Coker, and Bill, and tons of the visuals--by folks like LADY PINK, HAZE, Dapper Dan, Buddy Esquire, and Cey--that made hip-hop what it is, it's out tomorrow.

Click here to order.

Q + A :: Bun B On Why He Registered To Vote

2008-10-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

Bun B has been one of the strongest voices in hip-hop this election season. That comes as no surprise to headz who have been following his reality rhymes since the early 90s as a member of UGK.

But although Bun has had his mind in politics and thangs for a while, he admits he's still a relative newcomer to the election process.

Vibe caught up with him this past August when he came to Denver to see Barack Obama's nomination. He talked candidly about why he first registered to vote and why he only chose to vote lately.

(BTW our Politics page has all the state registration deadlines and links to register online. It's still not too if you live in one of the 20 states left.)

In many ways, Bun's interview sounds prophetic even now. Check what he had to say about O.J.

Who ya with in November?

Obama-Biden

Was it difficult to make the decision?

It wasn't easy. Like any decision a person has to make, I did my research. Went to Google and typed in 'Obama education', 'Obama energy', 'McCain oil'. You need a candidate that has an actual plan. People shouldn't lose sight of that. And there's gonna be a lot of elections—local, state, as well as national. So I hope that what I might be able to say helps get people involved in elections, period. Because it starts at the national level, people are really interested in the presidential race, but it filters down to the state level.

What are you trying to do this year?

My whole thing is I'm trying to help get not just youth, but folks who are disenfranchised from the system, get them back in the process. It's not for me to send people a certain way. But just to get them into the process. It doesn't stop with just voting. At the end of the day, we need to hold him accountable. Everything is just beginning in November, more so January. It's not the end when you vote. It's just the beginning.

Obama is not perfect—his ideology, what he'd like to do versus what he's able to do are two different things. It's not like, 'Great! we got a Black president' and it's all good. We all got hyped about Kwame Kilpatrick. We need to hold Obama to a higher standard than most.

Had you voted or been involved with voting over the past few years?

We got involved with Vote or Die (Diddy's Citizen Change campaign) eight years prior. People need direction and they follow me, so I understood my power as an artist: let me galvanize and get people into the process first. Then once they're in the process, we'll start at the national level, then we'll break it down how the congressional thing works, then on down to state, down to the alderman, down to your precincts.

When did you begin to vote?

That's a good question. In Texas, you get to register to vote when you renew your driver's license. I was absent-minded in my early years—probably due to all the extracurricular activities I was involved in (laughs)—but you get your license, and it asks you do you want to donate to this or that or get registered.

I was registered independent. But I never voted. Being in Texas, though, once Bush became president we had an idea of what the mentality was that would go into a Bush government and we told people this is what yo can expect. When it happened, we were right, and now he's one of the worse presidents we've ever had.

My family went off to war. My cousin is a marine and he was deployed to Afghanistan. So I was like, if my cousin dies over this shit, IT'S ON. I'll use all my power to do this. Even if he makes it back alive, it should still be on. From the beginning it's important to support the troops and then it's important to bring them home, and I was like, if things don't go your way, you have no reason to say you didn't try.

What's your biggest fear about this election?

That voters will get disenfranchised. Right now, there are so many people who are standing up and taking notice and they got people involved. You can't have the perception that their vote won't count. It's not even about Obama-Biden losing the election. A lot of people are hanging their hopes on this election.

I really feel like there's a silent majority. Like, the silent minority is disenfranchised, inner-city, possibly lower-class. Regardless, politicians will make decisions that won't help them. But there's also a silent majority—I feel like there's a lot of people that it's easy for them to say they're voting for Barack Obama so they can come across as politically correct or socially progressive. But at the end of the day I don't think they can bring themselves to vote for a Black president. Like I'm talking about the conversations you get to have sitting in the first class cabin. These are folks who if hillary didn't get the nomination, they wouldn't vote for the Democrats. I think the majority of Hillary's constituency has issues with minorities. It's not her fault, it's just the reality of world she and I both live in.

What are the issues that you're not hearing about that you want to have people talk about.

I really don't hear a lot at all about the youth. I want to hear what they have to say about No Child Left Behind, the fact that a lot of after-school funding has disappeared. The only schools getting funding already have money, and a lot of the inner-city schools are closing.

And immigration. I'd love to hear more about immigration reform. They don't want to go there now.

There are a lot of people who were feeling indifferent and now they're energized and I'd hate to see that go to waste. We can't be fair weather about this. We can't let the hip-hop community catch the O.J. Syndrome.

What do you mean?

I mean that as a black man, I don't want black people to support Barack Obama simply because he's black. Know what he stands for. In the future, we could have a Latino president, or a president of another color, another heritage, another culture. There are kids right now getting involved in politics and I don't want to see that go to waste.

For the latest on the 2008 election, check Vibe.com's Politics page. Check Bun B and hundreds more on the elections in the November issue of Vibe, on newsstands soon!

The Reveal + Register To Vote TODAY

2008-10-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

This is it, fam. It's coming down to the wire.

For many states, the voter registration deadline is SATURDAY, October 4 or MONDAY, October 6th.

(Click here to check your state.)

Register to vote at VoteForChange.com NOW!

Please spread the word.

Musical Interlude :: Z-Trip's Obama Mix

2008-10-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

Click above for the link to DJ Z-Trip's Obama Mix, recorded live in Denver at the Manifest Hope Gallery during the DNC.

Q+A :: Tom Morello On Obama, Race & The War

2008-10-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

As guitarist for Rage Against The Machine, Tom Morello brought turntable pyrotechnics to the guitar. This past August, he and his fellow bandmates supported anti-war demonstrators, especially Iraq Veterans Against the War, at concerts held during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

(Click here or here or here for coverage of the Denver protest.)

But before he was a Guitar Hero, Morello worked as an aide to California Senator Alan Cranston. He has seen the political system from both inside and out.

Vibe caught up with Tom Morello performing as The Nightwatchman at a Labor Day Concert for SEIU on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, which had been cancelled due to Hurricane Gustav.

Vibe: Do you think the 2008 election will be a historic turning point?

Tom Morello: I think it remains to be seen. I think that anytime we’ve seen real, substantive, progressive, radical, or revolutionary change, it has come from below, not from above.

Two important lessons I learned working with Senator Cranston—who is one of the most progressive guys on issues of the environment, immigration, civil rights, and peace issues—eighty percent of the time I was with him, he spent on the phone asking rich guys for money. That money doesn’t come for free. That is how this system operates. You can change the people in office, but you can’t change the system by pulling the ballot. You can’t.

How change happens, whether it's been women’s right to vote, desegregating lunch counters, eight-hour work days, is from the people who are not in office, standing up, organizing, struggling, fighting, and demanding their rights—much like the Iraq Veterans Against the War did. Had they backed down and said, ‘we’re going to go along with it and hope for the best’, they never would have gotten that audience. It’s a small microcosm of what this is about.

As the half-Kenyan, Harvard graduate from Illinois, in his early forties, who’s not running for office, I'd say this. If Obama is elected, problems of race don’t go away. This country has four pillars: baseball, apple pie, NASCAR, and racism to hold this shit up. And so it would certainly be a step towards civilization if the electorate were able to put a moderately progressive African American in office. But it should not mean problems of race would be over. We’d have to be extra vigilant against that.

Vibe: That’s one of the things some of the protesters were trying to make a point of out in Denver. They'd say, 'It’s about accountability and forcing the issue.'

Tom Morello: And memories tend to be short. It was two years ago when a Democratic Congress was elected, to end the war. And they cowardly rolled over like dogs, and didn’t do it. And why aren’t there barricades in the street over that? We put them in office, and they just weren’t held accountable, and that’s key. No matter who’s elected—on November 5th, is when the real work begins for you and me, because you have to make sure, if it’s McCain, you have to fight like a bobcat…in a sack! And if it’s Obama, you have to fight like a bobcat in a sack to make sure it doesn’t backslide.

Vibe: Talk a little bit about what you have been doing around the anti-war movement.

Tom Morello: Well I’ve been a part of the anti war movement since the 10 million person march before the war began. And I think Iraq veterans speak with the most authoritative voice, they set the stage. George W. Bush and I have something in common, neither one of us served under fire. Those men and women did and when you listen to their stories, it brings the reality of what that war is home. We visited them in the Veterans Hospital today, and soldiers lost half their bodies or half their heads, but that’s the reality of it. The whitewashing of the war of mainstream corporate media has been just criminal. We don’t see the maimed families and all the dead Iraqi civilians. All that is ‘Yo is the surge working or not?’ Well what the fuck does that mean? It isn’t working for the 22-year-old boy I saw who doesn’t have any body below his bellow button. It isn’t working for his 19-year-old wife, either. So, I think that Iraq Veterans Against the War not only have the right ideas, but the courage to take on whoever’s in office.

Vibe: Are there any other plans going into the fall, as the debates kick in?

Tom Morello: My touring starts right before the election, so it’ll probably ramp up to that. There’s no doubt that Obama’s going to be a better president than McCain.

Vibe: Are you going to endorse him?

Tom Morello: No. I think that in my music and in my politics, I’d like to keep them completely uncompromised. If there’s a candidate that I see eye to eye with up and down the line, then I’ll endorse that candidate. With his saber rattling about Iran, with his determination to continue an imperialist war in Afghanistan, there’s a lot that’s iffy about that, but he’s certainly better than McCain. I’m not going to give either one of them a chance to breathe when they’re in office. It’s important to continue to put the pedal down when either one of them is in office.

Vibe: Do you think we are on the verge of a new majority in this country?

Tom Morello: I think that race plays such a huge factor in anything in America. The fact that we’ve had these seven years, that we’ve had the worse presidency in the history of the republic, and that the polls show the two candidates, Republican and Democrat, in a dead heat?! Are you kidding me?! You should be able to run a barnyard animal against any Republican candidate and have it be ninety/ten.

Well there’s a simple answer to that. I think it’s an unspoken answer, but it permeates every poll and we’ll see. I was watching the Democratic Convention, and I don’t know if America can vote for a first lady who’s African American and smarter than they are.

Vibe: Whoa.

Tom Morello: I came from a small white town in central Illinois. I’m watching that through the eyes of the parents I grew up around, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t think they can pull that trigger’. 'I’ll take the soccer mom from Alaska who can shoot a gun.' Part of me is screaming in front of the TV: 'Give the Democrats a chance to fuck it up for once! Enough of that!'

For more on the 2008 election from Tom and many others, check the November issue of Vibe, on newsstands soon!

Tom Morello's new album, a solo record as The Nightwatchman called "The Fabled City" is out this week. A record with Boots Riley of The Coup and Stanton Moore of Galactic will follow in early 2009.

Special thanks to the intern crew for the transcriptions for this interview series:

Tanya Burnett
Damon Daniels
Crystal Fairweather
David Fromayan
Jason O’Connnor
Lauren Peterson
Merichelle Villapando

At Hip-Hop's Birthplace: Hope For The Best, Preparations For The Worst

2008-09-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

As the House of Representatives rejected an economic bailout proposal brought on by the national mortgage crisis, tenants of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue and their supporters awaited word today of the fate of the most famous address in hip-hop.

It was a day in which the drama of the nation was being mirrored at a place right the heart of hip-hop history, as tenants and their supporters began planning to save their homes while real estate developers scrambled to close a speculative deal against declining prospects for credit.

Late last week, a judge cleared the way for the landlord group behind the West Bronx apartment building to begin preparations to sell the building, whose value has been assessed at about $7 million.

The building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell threw their first party in late August 1973, is one of a declining number in New York City covered under an affordable housing mandate called the Mitchell-Lama program. It now represents the continuing decline of urban affordable housing.

But the judge's order allows the landlord group to pay off the rest of its outstanding $5 million mortgage and remove it from the affordable housing program.

Such an action, all sides believe, would clear the way for the purchase of the building by well-known real estate developer Mark Karasick, despite an offer on the table from the tenants, the city, and their supporters to purchase 1520 Sedgwick for $10 million—$3 million above the building's expected value.

Cindy Campbell and DJ Kool Herc have been at the head of an effort to have the building declared a historic landmark, but events have been moving quickly in the past year.

Today, Cindy Campbell worried that a sale of the building might displace over a hundred families.

"Winter is coming up. There's elderly people, children. Some of these people have been living there for over 30 years," she said. "People's lives are more important than a developer trying to flip over his money."

Dina Levy, director of organizing and policy with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, said today that tenants and supporters of 1520 Sedgwick were baffled as to why the landlord group has apparently rejected the tenants' offer, which was supported by New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and subsidized in part by the city.

She argued that even if the building were to be sold, the rents in the building likely would not rise because of city regulations and the depressed rental market. She said she felt the tenant deal on the table was a strong one. "I can't believe that they would not take that deal," Levy said. "It defies logic."

Levy added that she was unsure in this market what bank or lender might provide debt to Karasick to purchase 1520 Sedgwick.

Although the landlord group had signaled last week they intended to pay off the $5 million outstanding mortgage today, that had not occurred by the late afternoon. "There's still the hope that we can save the building," she said. "That's still the goal and that's still the hope."

But even if the building were to be sold, eviction could not begin right away, and the efforts to preserve the building as a historic landmark and an affordable housing building may redouble in the coming months.

"At this point what I can promise we will do, will be to train the tenants on what regulations are," Levy said. "This guy (Karsick) will not have a moment's sleep."

1520 Sedgwick Cleared To Be Sold

2008-09-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

Courts have cleared the way for 1520 Sedgwick, the birthplace of hip-hop, to be sold next week.

This comes after a year in which the courts first blocked the sale of the building, and tenants of the historic building where Cindy Campbell and DJ Kool Herc threw their first party raised $10 million to buy the building back. Efforts by the efforts of the Campbells and affordable housing activists were also made to grant the building historic preservation status.

This from the article:

“While the owners of 1520 Sedgwick have a legal right to buy out of the Mitchell-Lama program, the building’s residents have made an offer that we believe is more than fair,” said Shaun Donovan, the commissioner for the housing preservation department. “In this light, it is difficult to understand why the owners would choose to put the affordability of over 100 families’ homes at risk.”

Panic, Paralysis, Protests, and Presidents

2008-09-26T08:26:00.000-07:00

Panic, paralysis, protests, presidents-dead, alive, and prospective.

This news week's like tripling my crack order. The wrong part of me doesn't want anything fixed.

The Times today has a great piece on the drama that went on after the cameras left the room yesterday at the White House.

Meanwhile the news tickers went bonkers. Palin playing herself repeatedly in front of Katie Couric. Thousands of protesters in the streets around the country yesterday--at places like the AIG headquarters and the Federal Reserve Banks. Washington Mutual getting taken over by the FDIC and sold to JPMorgan Chase. (Free checking still? I don't think so.)

Oh, and there was supposed to be this debate thing tonight...

Here's Joe Klein's take on what went down yesterday and why McCain basically gave us all at least one more--probably a few more than that--days of being glued to the news.

So McCain "suspends" his campaign--he didn't, really--and equivocates about whether to debate because the financial emergency is so crucial--a week after he said the fundamentals of the economy were sound--and he flies to Washington where:

1. The House Republicans blow up a rare, and necessary, moment of true bipartisanship to make it look like McCain, who has no expertise in this area, has come to the rescue.

2. McCain sits mute in the White House summit arranged for his benefit. He doesn't even ask Paulson what he thinks of the House Republican plan.

3. He refuses to take a stand, one way or another, on the Republican plan.

In the meantime, Washington Mutual--the nation's largest thrift--fails. Other banks are teetering. Credit has dried up...and the world financial markets are watching to see if the United States has the political wherewithal to save itself. McCain's erratic, and irresponsible, behavior this week isn't happening in a vacuum. This isn't just politics--even George W. Bush, who never failed to take a partisan advantage in his presidency, realizes that. ...

Strange times are here.

UPDATE (9:05am) :: The debate is on.

James K. Galbraith :: We Don't Need A Bailout

2008-09-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here is economist James K. Galbraith in the Washington Post with some wisdom for the next president.

He asks this: Why try to save investment banks when the sector is pretty much gone?

His alternative? Strengthen the banking system through the FDIC, and save the folks who have been all but abandoned in this crisis from jump: besieged homeowners.

Here's an excerpt:

Is this bailout still necessary?

The point of the bailout is to buy assets that are illiquid but not worthless. But regular banks hold assets like that all the time. They're called "loans."

With banks, runs occur only when depositors panic, because they fear the loan book is bad. Deposit insurance takes care of that. So why not eliminate the pointless $100,000 cap on federal deposit insurance and go take inventory? If a bank is solvent, money market funds would flow in, eliminating the need to insure those separately. If it isn't, the FDIC has the bridge bank facility to take care of that.

Next, put half a trillion dollars into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. fund -- a cosmetic gesture -- and as much money into that agency and the FBI as is needed for examiners, auditors and investigators. Keep $200 billion or more in reserve, so the Treasury can recapitalize banks by buying preferred shares if necessary -- as Warren Buffett did this week with Goldman Sachs. Review the situation in three months, when Congress comes back. Hedge funds should be left on their own. You can't save everyone, and those investors aren't poor. ...

A voice of reason amidst the madness.

Naomi Klein On Wall Street's Shock Doctrine

2008-09-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein from Democracy Now:

Well, the thesis of my book, what I mean by the “shock doctrine,” is that it is in times of crisis, it is in times when people are panicked, when we’ve seen again and again the right push through radical pro-corporate policies, what they call “free market reforms,” precisely because it is in a crisis where the space for debate rapidly closes, and you can invoke this state of emergency to say we have no choice.

And I think we’re seeing a very dramatic example of this tactic right now with this really extortionist kind of tactics playing out in Washington. You know, “Sign this blank check, or we’re all going down, or Main Street is going down, or taxpayers—you know, the sky will fall in on them.”

I’m also arguing that this is only stage one of the shock doctrine. They’re getting this—they’re lobbying for this huge bailout, obviously, but this bailout is a kind of a time bomb, because it’s all these bad debts, and they are going to explode on the next administration. I mean, we know that the Bush administration has already left the next administration with huge debt and deficit problems. They’ve just exploded those, expanded them. And what that means is that whoever the next president is is going to be inheriting this economic crisis that is being exacerbated by this bailout.

So, in the case of McCain, I think—if he’s the president, then I think we know what he’ll do, because we know he wants to privatize Social Security, which is something that Wall Street’s been wanting for a long time, another bubble. We know he has said in the next—in the first 100 days of his administration he’ll look at every program and either reform it or shut it down. This is really a recipe for economic shock therapy. So, while you have all of these trivial issues being discussed in the election season, I think what we could—what we’re really—you know, under the surface, they’re actually being quite clear. They’re going to take—if they take power, it will be in the midst of an economic emergency. They’ll invoke that emergency to push through very, very radical changes. So, you know, what I’ve been saying is, this is not four more years of Bush; it’s much, much worse in the case of another Republican administration.

But there’s huge problems for Democrats, as well, if they win this election, because, you know, we need to only think back to the situation in which Clinton took power, where he ran an election on an economic populist platform, promising to renegotiate NAFTA. Then there was an economic crisis. Clinton came under intense lobbying by people like Robert Rubin, who’s also advising Obama right now, and by the time he took office, he had embraced economic austerity.

So, people need to understand these tactics, need to put pressure on the candidates, the parties, and reject this tactic. And I’ve actually been really heartened, Amy, that people are onto these shock tactics and aren’t falling for it. And, you know, to the extent that we’re seeing a little bit of spine from the Democrats, it is only, as Chris Dodd said, because they are hearing it from their constituents. So people need to keep up this pressure right now.

...

You know, Amy, I don’t think we can stress this enough. Henry Paulson is one of the key people, the top people, responsible for creating the crisis that he is now claiming he will solve, you know, and this is—if we think about the 9/11 analogy and, you know, the state of shock that Americans were in after 9/11 and the emergence of Rudy Giuliani as the savior—and, you know, people have so much regret about that. And in the book, I write about this as the state of regression that we go into when we’re frightened. And I think Henry Paulson has really been cast in this role as an economic Rudy Giuliani, saving the day, impartial, bipartisan, a strong leader.

I found this article in BusinessWeek that ran when Paulson was appointed to the Treasury, and I just want to read you one sentence, because I think it’s all we need to know about Henry Paulson. This is from BusinessWeek, when he got the appointment as Treasury Secretary in 2006. The headline of the article is “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington.” It says, “Think of Paulson as Mr. Risk. He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in [their] pursuit of profits. By some key measures, the securities industry is more leveraged now than it was at the height of the 1990s boom.”

Then it goes on to say that when Paulson took over Goldman Sachs in 1999, they had $20 billion in debts. When he—in these high-risk gambles. When he left, they had $100 billion, which means he took their risk level from $20 billion to $100 billion. So it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Henry Paulson, far from speaking for Main Street, is actually bailing out his colleagues for some of the very debts that he himself accumulated. This is an extraordinary conflict of interest.

Her original HuffPo piece is here.

Here website is here.

The Audacity Of Despair, Or Homeless Again

2008-09-23T20:49:00.001-07:00

"The 90s may have spoiled us, b!"

That was the great Joan Morgan, in one of a million conversations this past weekend about the economy.

Things done changed since the Cristal-sipping days, back when artists routinely dropped a milli on their videos. But now all of the chickens have come home to roost.

In the late 90s, the dealings in Lower Manhattan partly help make the hip-hop bubble possible. People were making money off making money. And hip-hop made them look good. We made it so that even if you weren’t hip-hop, you could go down to Soho—yes, Soho—and buy in.

This past weekend, the one after our economy collapsed, it was clear on the hard cobblestone streets of Soho that our days of dancing for dollars were over. In just the past year, Phat Farm and Stussy's flagship stores have shuttered. Bape, Supreme, and Union's traffic are mostly European and Asian tourists. Even Clientele's clientele is thin these days. Adidas stays in the game by discounting its limited edition shoes and shifting most of its floor space to clothing.

What did they used to say? When America coughs, urban America is in the sickbed. America is long past coughing at this point.

Now the dealings in War-shington could define a whole new era, or lead us back to 1973.

On Sunday, as his old company Goldman Sachs looked like it was ready to leap off the precipice, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson went on the morning shows to propose himself as the Monarch of the Economy and to have Congress approve the idea by the end of the week.

When deregulation is your mantra, democracy—the people—cannot be trusted to regulate the market. So Paulson claimed decision-making power above the review of the court or other agencies—"greater powers (over the economy)," according to one finance industry insider, "than even the President enjoys."

When trickle-down is your economic theory, corporations are the only individuals worth rehabilitating. So Paulson proposed a Troubled Asset Relief Program—TARP, as its called—to use $700 billion or more of your money to purchase nearly worthless assets from some of the biggest corporate debt abusers.

There is a hip-hop analogy here: in the Bronx in the '70s, slumlords bought up apartment buildings, then hired arsonists to burn them down so that they could pocket the insurance money. Who was left homeless? Not the slumlords.

With the TARP in place, Paulson and his friends can leave their posts at the end of the year and return to a still-bottoming Wall Street that grazes on lucrative funds from War-shington as real folk continue to lose their homes. Critics call this process nationalizing the risk and debt while privatizing the profit.

Talk about the Audacity of Despair.

That’s why finance industry lobbyists are licking their chops over Paulson's proposal. Some news reports suggest that this particular bailout plan was sitting on the shelf for the right moment. Conspiracy theory, anyone?

Conspiracy or not, there are shades here of the Shock Doctrine—Naomi Klein's name for the strategy of free-marketeers and their governments to use catastrophes as opportunities to lay waste to countries while creating secure economic, social, and political Green Zones for the rich. What happens in Baghdad—and Santiago and Buenos Aires and Jakarta and…—eventually comes home to New York and War-shington.

Paulson's TARP proposal locks into place the same lack of accountability and transparency that came to define the Patriot Act, the Iraq War Resolution, pro-torture policy, and more for the entire funny-money economy.

And where was W. in all of this, our fair President? After speaking on the economy for short minutes this past weekend, he presumably retired to the West Wing to continue putting together his favorite things for his Presidential Library.

Yesterday, he sent Cheney out on his first Congressional mission since the Iraq War Resolution. He rewrote a speech to the UN yesterday to reassure the world.
Goodnight Bush, indeed.

I said it a while ago and I stand by it: W. is our generation's Herbert Hoover, the Republican president who led us into the Great Depression. We are now staring down into our own economic depths. The bankers want to make sure it won't be them leaping out of the buildings this time.

But if Paulson's deal is so good to Wall Street, why is the market still plunging? The spin is that markets are now reacting to instability in War-shington. There may be a better explanation.

Over the past decade, corporate hucksters sold a fantasy of pure profit, from Enron through Lehman—one that hip-hop all too often bought in our desire to identify with those large and in charge. But markets cannot function for long on a foundation of obscure financial instruments, accounting shell-games, and corporate lies.

The markets come back down to the people, and perhaps the people are now finding the word now to sum up their judgment.

Enough.

The Break/s TONIGHT!!!

2008-09-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

Click on the image for the full 100...

Today and Thursday through Saturday at NYU's Skirball Center.

Get tickets here!

Marvin Gaye On The 2008 Elections

2008-09-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

In 1972, Marvin Gaye was coming off breakthrough success with What's Going On. He moved to Los Angeles and turned his attention to the 1972 presidential election, which pitted Richard Nixon against George McGovern.

Nixon was trying to solidify what's become known as the "Southern Strategy", using racially coded language--crime, busing, welfare, radicalism--to mobilize a "Silent Majority" of white voters. McGovern, on the other hand, was depending on a coalition of anti-war progressives, young voters, and communities of color.

You can guess which side Marvin was on. His "You're The Man" single ripped into Nixon for his lies.

Nixon went on to crush McGovern in the general in one of the most lopsided victories in recent memory. The Southern Strategy's race-baiting politics is now one of the dominant electoral strategies in the country. It's so ingrained in the fabric of post-civil rights electoral politics, we take it for granted.

If you have any doubt that the U.S. is far from "post-racial", just check the latest mini-controversy prompted by Obama Waffles. The entrepreneurs behind these campaign products are so casually racist, it seems not much has changed among hard-line Republicans since 1972.

Many commentators have said that Obama's coalition has many similarities to the McGovern campaign. But there is a key difference. Demographics have shifted strongly away from Nixonland. The rise of young voters and communities of color have completely changed the landscape of politics. In this context, Sarah Palin is an anomaly. Time itself is not on the side of the aging Nixonland electorate. But what happens in November remains to be seen.

Gaye cut another song in 1972, this time with the brilliant, largely unsung Mizell Brothers, called "Where Are We Going?" This one was much less angry--it was more of a mountaintop view of a turbulent and crucial season.

It ought to become the theme song for this historic election as well.

Thanks to O-Dub for the tech assist.

Lip Glossing :: The Silly Season Is In

2008-09-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

The latest in the Lipstick "controversy"...

For those not following, yesterday on the stump Barack Obama made a comment referring to McCain's claims of being an agent of change.

"That's just calling something that's the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig," he said, then paused for the line to sink in. "You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper and call it change. It's still going to stink, after eight years.

No truth, by the way, to the rumor that Obama's next line was, "When we start the revolution all they'll probably do is squeal." Too bad.

The line became the top news story in many markets around the country. Because Palin had made a joke about pitbulls, lipstick, and hockey moms, the question was: did Obama call Palin a pig?

This morning the Republicans released this web ad.

This morning, the lipstick crisis took Obama out of his game. He had planned to talk about education at a rally in Norfolk, Virginia. Instead, he had to address the McCain campaign:

"Enough. I don't care what they say about me. But I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and Swift Boat politics. Enough is enough."

We've got an energy crisis. We have an education system that is not working for too many of our children and making us less competitive. We have an economy that is creating hardship for families all across America. We've got two wars going on, veterans coming home not being cared for -- and this is what they want to talk about.

You know who ends up losing at the end of the day? It's not the Democratic candidate. It's not the Republican candidate. It's you, the American people. Because then we go another year, or another four years or another eight years without addressing the issues that matter to you."

Bring on the debates already.

Bigger Than Hip-Hop :: A Q+A With Kevin Powell

2008-09-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, New York voters will go to the polls in an important Democratic primary. 42 year-old, former Vibe writer Kevin Powell faces off against 74 year-old, 26-year veteran Congressman Edolphus Towns for one of Brooklyn's 3 House seats in Washington D.C.

It's one of the most closely watched races in the country, in no small part because of the contest's implications for generational change. There are echoes here of the Obama-McCain battle.

Powell calls himself a voice for change, and has hammered at Towns for backsliding on crucial issues like free trade, and for losing touch with his community. (Towns supported Rudy Giuliani for mayor in 1997 and barely won his last primary in 2004.) Yet Towns holds a major fundraising advantage, and has said that Brooklyn voters have no time for on-the-job training for Powell.

I recently had a chance to correspond with Powell on his candidacy and the meaning of the 2008 elections as he was jetting back from Obama's nomination speech in Denver. Here's what he had to say, uncut:

Q: A lot of attention has been focused on the presidential race this year. But how much do so-called "down-ticket" races such as yours mean to young urban voters?

A: My election is not actually a down ticket at all. It is a Democratic primary on Tuesday, September 9th in a majority Democratic city, which means that whoever wins my Congressional race, will be the next Congressperson for Brooklyn, NY's 10th Congressional district. Obviously I plan on winning.

Additionally, I have been a community organizer and political activist for the past 24 years, since I was a youth and student activist back in the 1980s. It is not just young Americans of all different backgrounds who need to become more politically aware, it is all Americans.

From back in the day to my campaign now, I cannot begin to tell you how many people, regardless of age and background, who do not understand electoral politics at all, be it the presidential election every four years, or local races like mine. In fact, I would argue that local races are far more important because they directly impact the day to day lives of our communities.

It is local electeds who determine what kind of money and resources flow back to our communities, what kinds of businesses and industries come, or don't come, what kinds of schools we have, and so on. So part of my mission as a leader in these times is very serious political education, not just getting folks to vote for me.

We've got to cease being a nation of hype. That is, we get hyped for a political candidate because she or he is younger, hipper, hip-hop, or something like that. And that is simply not good enough.

As I sat in that Denver stadium the other day listening to Barack Obama with those other 80,000 people, naturally I was very proud. But I also thought to myself I have been a part of incredible movements before, back in the 1980s when folks like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan were moving millions of younger people. And there still has not been, for me, no single more incredible gathering than the Million Man March in 1995.

But we need movement in America now, a progressive and multicultural movement of people from Generations X and Y. Young people who understand hiphop and pop culture in general, technology including the various handheld devices and social networks, the history of America and the world on at least a basic level, contemporary issues on at least a basic level, and are able to relate to a range of people, because they are culturally multilingual.

My point in all of this is that this is so much bigger than me or Barack Obama. Because after I get elected and Barack Obama gets elected we are still going to have racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, religious intolerance, ignorance, poverty, a terrible healthcare system, wars everywhere, including in Iraq, a polluted environment, mediocre public schools, and so on.

So younger people, of all backgrounds need to do what some of us did back in the 1980s: Jesse Jackson and his campaigns for president were the spark for our activism, for our social awareness, but then we took upon ourselves to become full-fledged leaders because we began to understand voting was just a piece of the work that needed to be done.

And that is the case today, too. Young Berg, the new hip-hop artist, asked me recently when was this CHANGE Barack Obama is promising going to happen? My response was simple: When YOU become the change you want to see, when YOU make it happen, when YOU understand the leadership we are waiting for is US. That is the message we need to be putting out there very clearly to young America.

Q: In many ways, your candidacy has echoes of the presidential primary and general election contests, with your theme of "new leadership" pitted against your opponent's theme of "experience". What do you think really separates young hip-hop generation leaders from a previous generation of leaders?

A: I think there is an overemphasis on hip-hop, number one. Back in the 1980s there was a wave of us who were, without question, hip-hop heads. Myself, Sister Souljah, Ras Baraka, and many others who understood that just given the world we were a part of, that hip-hop had to be a part of the conversation.

For example, I came up as a graf writer and b-boy and could recite any and every hip-hop lyric of that era, and certainly dressed the part. But we NEVER referred to ourselves as hip-hop leaders, or hip-hop activists, or anything of the sort. This is a very new thing, and, to me, a very tired thing, just the way back in the 1970s people felt compelled to put the word SOUL on everything.

A leader is a leader, an activist is an activist, as long as she or he is doing the work.

But I do need to say we worked very tirelessly with hip-hop artists of that time, the leading ones, like Public Enemy, like KRS-One, like LL Cool J, like Heavy D, like Ice Cube, and many others because we understood, instinctively, that, as Souljah said twenty years ago, any movement that post-Civil Rights generations have MUST be mass marketed to the people.

Well, clearly hip-hop is the greatest mass marketing tool we've ever created. And obviously, now hip-hop America is multiple generations. There is no one hip-hop generation, so we need to stop saying that. I see that as I campaign every single day in Brooklyn: there are folks between the ages of 35 and nearly 50 who came of age with hip-hop, who are hip-hop heads, who know my work as a hip-hop head. Then there are the teenagers and 20-somethings, also hip-hop heads.

So one of the main things that separates us from the old guard is our natural ability to relate to wide age ranges of people in our community. On top of that, we know the different ways to communicate in the 21st century, which is why my campaign does not just knock on doors and pass our flyers. We also do mad e-blasts, we have myspace, facebook, and other social network pages, we do text messaging to handheld devices, we have a mixed cd produced by DJ Reborn and hosted by DJ Drama (who I have known since he was a pre-teen, and whose parents are both old school activists), and we do nonstop parties and media that appeals to young America, be they hip-hop or not.

The type of leadership I am representing is not interested solely in protest and marching and complaining of being a victim. Those days are over. I represent leadership that is about practical and proactive solutions.

For example, my 9th book is just coming out. It is called The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life. Every single contributor to the book, be it BET's Jeff Johnson, the actor Hill Harper, filmmaker Byron Hurt, or scholar Jelani Cobb, is of what we call the hip-hop era.

So as folks read the books of essays around spirituality, political awareness, redefining Black manhood away from sexism, violence, and misogyny, hip-hop culture vs. the hip-hop industry, mental wellness, physical health, and stopping violence against women and girls, they are getting these solutions in the language of us, of the 21st century.

We are tired of leadership that is simply about reports and studies and conferences where the same people show up again and again, say the same things over and over again, and we walk with nothing practical and life-affirming to give our communities. That is what makes us different.

Others talk about it. We make it happen. And that making it happen, now, is being translated into our taking over the leadership of communities once and for all. It is time, and we have no other choice.

Q: What has been the most inspiring moment in your campaign so far this season?

A: Every single day for the past 12 months we've been campaigning has been inspiring. I love people, all people, and I could not imagine doing anything else with my life other than being a public servant, of being an activist and advocate for the people.

This is why I quit journalism many years back. I am always going to be a writer. Always, but even my writing is simply a tool to get information out to the people, to spark dialogue, which is why I write essays more than anything else now.

You want an inspiring moment: last night we had a pre-Labor Day fundraiser in the heart of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Great crowd, music being blazed by my dude DJ CEO. I addressed the crowd briefly, to thank them. I thought I was done for the night.

A young man named Richard came up to me, quite serious and passionate, and said he wanted to know why I was really running for Congress, and asked if I could get back on the mic. He basically challenged me, at 1am in the morning, to talk to the people.

So we turned the music off, and for the next 90 minutes, at a club, we held an impromptu townhall meeting covering issues like education, the state of young America, violence, you name it. And as always, the people asking questions and making comments realized, as I guided the dialogue and answered questions, that the solutions are right in front of us.

But it is only when we realize our individual and collective power that things will change in America, and on this planet. Erica Perkins, my Campaign Manager, and I left that club like WOW. This is what this work is about.

Wherever people want to think and talk, you give them that space to do their thing. And Richard, as I said to him over and over again from the stage, is a leader. That is what this is about, that is what inspires me. To get as many people as possible to know that self-empowerment and community empowerment is the route we must take. Anything less means we will forever see ourselves as powerless victims.

So folks walked away from the party last night ready to do, as you better believe I steered the conversation toward DOING. Great to talk, pontificate, theorize, all of that. But we need action, now, more than ever. That is what inspires me about this campaign, about Barack's campaign: all the multitudes who are stepping up to do something. But it has to continue, as I said, beyond voting, it has to become a movement for change nationwide.

Vibe.com@RNC :: Day 4: The C-Word

2008-09-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

John McCain walked onstage at 9:11pm, to chants of "USA! USA!"

Outside, 400 more were being arrested as National Guard guarded the entrance to the Xcel Center, bringing the total to 818 for the week, a count smaller than only the 2004 Republican Convention held in New York City.

Eleven minutes into McCain's speech, two protesters from Code Pink--sitting behind stage left near the nowhere that networks MSNBC and Al-Jazeera had been assigned to--began shouting "U.S. Out Of Iraq!" The crowd at the Xcel Center interrupted McCain's speech again with more cries of "USA!"

And then it was all McCain's stage.

He didn't try to match the fervor of VP nominee Sarah Palin's address the evening before. Instead he tried to portray himself as an experienced, determined fighter and above all, a break from the recent Republican past.

He spoke sometimes as if he wished the Bush II administration had never happened. He pointed the finger at corruption, big government, oil companies. "We lost [people's] trust when we valued our power over our principles," he said.

He received one of the biggest cheers of the night when he said, "We're going to recover the people's trust by standing up again for the values Americans admire. The party of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan is going to get back to basics."

But he also reached out to new constituencies, "the Latina daughter of migrant workers", urban children in failing schools. He even proposed bridge pay and job retraining for unemployed workers, a proposal that labor and Democrats began making during the Reagan/Bush I years.

Still, his major domestic initiative, what he called "the most ambitious national project in decades", was an energy plan that depended most of all on new oil drilling. Wednesday night, Sarah Palin offered her own semi-pristine Alaskan North Slope wilderness as a place to start as Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele, the only elected African American to address the RNC, coined a new phrase: "Drill, baby, drill!"

This is hardly seems the kind of domestic agenda that can reinvigorate a new Republican Party. This year, less than 2% of the Republican delegates were African American, less than 5% were Hispanic, and the count of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders not from Hawai'i was negligible.

Throughout the week, black and brown Republicans spoke about how frustrated they were to see the party going backward in time. Efforts to bring communities of color into the party, after all, had been a major initiative of Karl Rove and RNC Chair (and former Harvard Law classmate of Obama) Ken Mehlman. In 2004, 44% of Hispanics and 11% of African Americans voted for Dubya.

Yet since the retirement of J.C. Watts, the Republicans have had no prominent national elected African American. Their delegate total this year is the lowest in 40 years.

And although McCain has been well-respected in the Hispanic community for his stance on immigration reform, over two-thirds are expected to vote for Obama.

Michael Steele--who had won the support of Russell Simmons in his failed 2006 bid for the Senate--was candid in interviews this week. The lack of outreach is a recipe for disaster.

Ask the 20-year old white mayor of Muskogee, Oklahoma, John Hammons--where Hammons says, per Merle Haggard, they still fly the American flag and respect the college dean.

He was 13 when 9/11 happened, and it became one of the formative events of his young life. But he calls himself not a "neoconservative" but a "new conservative", distinguishing himself from older culture-war Republicans.

His generation, he says, views the nation and the world differently. He says his best friends are Vietnamese and Dominican, Buddhist and non-Christian. His town is now only 61% white. And as a young person, he too has been moved by the historic nature of Obama's candidacy, even though he's a solid McCain Republican.

"We're letting go of some of those irrational fears that we have," he says. "When you do something from fear, you regret it."

John McCain asked the Xcel Center crowd to stand up and fight with him. He flipped an Obama line like jiujitsu, saying, "Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big spending, do nothing, me-first country-second Warshington crowd: change is coming."

But in the Grand Ole Party, it may be that change is not coming fast enough.

Vibe.com@RNC :: Day 3: Red Meat

2008-09-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

Props where they're due: Sarah Palin came in with expectations lower than a bug, and delivered like a ninja.

Her mission: set herself up as the mother-next-door, then lance Barack Obama as an uptown liberal.

Boom boom.

She trotted out her son Track, who is about to deploy to Iraq. Her daughters (with no appearance from Bristol's baby daddy). Her part Yup'ik Eskimo husband, the world champion snow machine racer. Even her infant with Downs Syndrome.

Before a crowd in which the only hand-painted signs either read "Palin Power" or "Hockey Moms 4 Palin", she retold her single hockey mom/pit bull joke. The Michigan delegation, outfitted in hockey jerseys for the occasion, went craaazy.

Then she started it up. She tossed the red meat again, following the path of her warm-up, the king of the parade of the also-rans featuring Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee—Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani suggested Obama didn’t think Palin's hometown Wasilla was "cosmopolitan enough". (Obama has never said anything of the sort.) But Palin evoked old-school red-baiting: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer', except that you have actual responsibilities."

(Ain't it funny how the meaning of 'red' has changed?)

Giuliani called Obama out of touch. Palin said, "In small towns, we don't quote know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening. We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco."

She raised the experience issue. "Listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform—not even in the state senate."

The partisan crowd—which even at its most alive seemed straining to fill the arena—roared like a kennel of red nose pits.

They had chanted "Sarah" all night. For Obama, they chanted "Zero".

Palin even dissed Obama's "Styrofoam Greek columns" and all but dismissed his supporters as brainwashed followers.

"In politics," she said, "there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those who, like John McCain, use their careers to promote change."

Palin came off like Tina Fey beyond her most Hillaryest, delivering her punch lines like a savvy fighter. All this after a week in which Republicans had set expectations so low by giving the press over to her daughter's baby troubles, that Palin could hit it off a tee and get on base. She stepped up and blasted it over the next block.

And yet if this were actually a battle cypher, let it be noted Palin got through round one with a pocket full of writtens.

It's hardly clear how Palin will do on October 2nd at Washington University when she is separated from her teleprompters and facing off against Joe Biden, who has years of debates under his belt.

All that is certain is that the next two months will be no friendly game of baseball.

Vibe.com@RNC :: Day 2: Once Again It's On

2008-09-02T23:20:00.000-07:00

Day 2 of the Republican convention came off with a frenzy of activity in the Xcel Center to get back up to speed after Hurricane Gustav rained on the parade. Scheduling wasn't clear for much of the day. Delegates and media struggled to figure out what was up.

By showtime tonight, seats in the Center were still empty, even for a night-capping speech by Joe Lieberman that seemed repurposed from his short-lived glory days as Al Gore's second fiddle, history repeating as parody. If his career ended tomorrow it would still be too soon.

The shortened convention may serve as an official explanation, but certainly this was the smallest role a sitting president has ever been given in recent memory. President Bush II--beamed in via satellite from a safe distance in the White House--seemed overshadowed even by the presence of his father and mother. The big chill between McCain and Dubya will go down in history as colder than even the arctic cool that blew between Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 2000.

Meanwhile, those on Cheney watch got stinking drunk for yet another night. They could be in the hospital with alcohol poisoning by Thursday.

Outside, there was a light rain all day, accompanied by purple clouds of tear gas. What looked like mere police incompetence and bullying on Monday--when added up with actions both over the weekend and through today--now looks like a pattern of suppression.

Convergence centers were raided, continuing a daily operation that began last Friday before the convention. The Ripple Effect concert was shut down early, before Rage Against The Machine was able to make an unannounced performance. Crowds trying to leave were barricaded.

A peaceful Poor People's March turned ugly when pedestrians and protestors alike were pepper-sprayed. Even trad media cameramen and reporters were badgered by horse-riding cops.

Long after the protests ended this evening, innocent bicyclists in downtown Minneapolis were still being stopped randomly by police--brought in from as far away as Philadelphia. (And we already told you how much folks love bikes in this town.)

Sample line of questioning:

Are you anarchists?

Uh, no sir, we're heading to The Wedge to buy some locally-grown organic lettuce.

Perhaps the most fun to be had today was at the Ron Paul rally, where the speaker list ranged from the entertaining (Jesse Ventura) to the abhorrent (Grover Norquist). Attracting over 10,000 committed libertarians and confused liberals, the day-long Rally for the Republic was like a rock show without the rock. Paul even speaks like Underdog. Ventura, in the Hulk role, announced interest in running in 4 years. Paul-Ventura, 2012? There's no need to fear.

Tomorrow, Governor Sarah Palin should draw a full house for her time in the spotlight, family, future son-in-law and all. Another anti-war march is planned. Will that lettuce still be on the shelf?

B+'s Photos Of The DNC

2008-09-02T21:50:00.001-07:00

Don't miss these galleries at Vibe.com that chronicle last week's events through the eyes of the brilliant B+.

Vibe.com@RNC :: Day 1: Music And Teargas

2008-09-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as Atmosphere stepped onstage at Harriet Island to rock a crowd of 10,000--Slug sporting a fashionable "Obama '08" shirt--riot police just across the Mississippi were firing tear-gas cannisters and preventing hundreds more from crossing the bridge to get to the show.

Earlier that day, 20,000 had marched through the concrete canyons of St. Paul, carrying signs like "To Work Hard and Overtime, It Is Not A Crime: Immigration Reform First 100 Days", "School Is For Learning, Not For Recruiting", and "Heck Of A Job, Bushy". Encompassing anti-war, pro-immigrant, and anti-Bush groups, the march was larger than anything seen in Denver, more diverse and celebratory.

A marching band played near a giant inflated globe. In front of the St. Paul Children's Museum, little girls stared at the horses the riot cops sat on.

By 2pm, the main demonstration dissipated. The family marchers left across the bridge to Harriet Island for the SEIU concert and rally, and the day-long skirmishes between the anarchists and police intensified. A few hours later, unsuspecting stragglers to the concert found themselves caught in a militarized zone.

Black-bandanna'd anarchists hurled rocks, bricks, and trash at the black-suited riot police. Riot police fired rubber bullets back. Some who wanted an afternoon of music in the park were left bloodied and angry.

Hundreds of arrests later, the concert on the Minneapolis side of the river ended. As the show attendees walked back into St. Paul across the Robert Street bridge, at the request of Hennepin County police, squadrons of riot police arrived to block them. It was as if, unleashed and having drawn blood, they couldn't wait to get more.

This was the news on a day the Republican Convention suspended most of its business and focused on Hurricane Gustav.

Cindy McCain and Laura Bush urged the delegates gathered in the otherwise strikingly empty Xcel Center to donate to the victims of Gustav. Hoping not to be outpositioned, Obama--perhaps the first candidate in recent memory not to receive a convention poll bounce, even after delivering a keynote that clocked Super Bowl ratings--cell-spammed supporters with a text message asking them to give $5 to the Red Cross, and to "Please fwd."

At the demonstration, one marcher had held a sign on which he drew the southern part of the U.S., added a big hurricane symbol, and inscribed "Republicans: There When It Benefits Them." By the end of this unusual day, though, the irony had become meta: Republicans seemed to be stacking benefits like chips.

On Slate.com :: Randy Newman's "Korean Parents"

2008-09-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

Here's my piece on Randy Newman's "Korean Parents" and his new album, Harps & Angels. A teaser...

Post-racial may be the new black, but race humor is as perilous as it ever was. This summer, satirists—from second-time offender Don Imus to The New Yorker's Barry Blitt—have found being funny on race hard to do. The latest entertainer to step into this spotlight is Randy Newman, whose new album, Harps and Angels, includes an uproarious song titled "Korean Parents."

The song will probably not prompt boycotts the way Ice Cube's "Black Korea" did months before the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Nor will it lead to confrontations with activists like those that Sarah Silverman faced in 2000 after telling Conan O'Brien that her friend advised her to avoid jury duty by writing, "I hate Chinks" on her form. She told O'Brien that she wrote, "I love Chinks! And who doesn't?" If the race dialogue in this country—such as it is—has moved from culture-war rancor to lame meta-satire, perhaps that's progress. But Newman, with "Korean Parents," offers a more enjoyable way forward.

He has always shown a particular fondness for picking at the scabs left by America's ongoing racial unease. Against the backdrop of Nixonland backlash, he devised a carny for 1972's "Sail Away" who pitched slaves on a free ride across the Middle Passage. "In America you'll get food to eat, won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet," the carny sang. "It's great to be an American."

Read it all here...

Vibe.com@RNC :: Day 0: Storm Clouds

2008-08-31T17:30:00.001-07:00

History could be made this week, but not the kind that Republicans were planning for.

With Hurricane Gustav steaming into the Gulf Coast and likely to make landfall Monday afternoon, and the threat of flooding extending from Texas to Mississippi, the party's presidential nominee John McCain said today that the first day of the Republican Convention will be all but cancelled.

"This is a time when we have to do away with our party politics and we have to act as Americans," he said.

Speeches that were expected from President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and First Lady Laura Bush have all been scrapped. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had previously announced he would not be attending because the state is now over two months past its budget deadline.

Instead the party will quietly conduct its internal business beginning at 3pm, roughly the time Hurricane Gustav is expected to hit land, and will adjourn before 5:30pm.

God forbid Gustav should cause storm surges that might lead to the re-flooding of New Orleans, but if it does, Republicans will have difficult decisions on how to present themselves during their convention week.

Earlier reports suggested that the convention could be turned into a telethon for storm victims. McCain has also been highly critical of the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. In fact, some argue that hurricane politics has played into McCain's hands, by removing the long shadow made by W. and Cheney.

On the other hand, McCain may win support if he is able to demonstrate a deft and sympathetic hand around this unprecedented confluence of events.

Whatever the case may be, McCain has sounded the right note as Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast. Party politics are never more important than saving and restoring lives.

Our prayers go out to all the residents of the Gulf Coast for safety and strength.

Vibe.com@DNC :: Day 4: The Mirror

2008-08-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Democrats worked hard to link Barack Obama's speech to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

On the floor near to the stage, the delegation from Minnesota roared when the Reverend Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "This is one of our nation's greatest defining moments."

It was impossible to be at Mile High Stadium yesterday and not be struck by how much the Democratic Party has changed, even from 4 years ago.

A quarter of the 4,400 Democratic delegates in town this week were African American. In fact, the Minnesota delegation seemed a mirror to the future. Fifty of the 80 elected delegates were of color. The median age of that state's delegation seemed to have dropped by a decade in the last four years.

As Will.I.Am prepared to take the stage with John Legend, he had his own analogy in mind. "Obama is probably the first mirror of America," he said. "The presidents that we have had before have been portraits, painted a long time ago."

The massive crowd of 85,000—invited in to celebrate Obama's nomination—looked even more diverse than the one at an average Denver Broncos game.

Seats in the house were certainly much more difficult to land than tickets to a Broncos game. But people were motivated.

Aaron Johnson, a 37-year old animator from Ontario, California, had shown up with his family and friends in Denver without seats. But after a contact came through, he rounded up the crew to get to Mile High 7 hours before Obama took the stage. They avoided the mile-long lines that characterized the afternoon for most attendees who hadn't yet starred in a hit Hollywood movie.

His seats seemed a mile high from the portico-style dais, which he couldn't see. He had all the hot summer sunshine he might have wanted, and a great view of the back of the stage. But he wouldn't have missed the moment. "We were gonna go whether we got tickets or not," he said.

He looked on the bright side, "You can see the city from up above."

Sitting nearby in section 538—"Upper Northeast", the ticket read—sat Mavis Brooks and her 16 year-old niece Lashay, from Chesapeake, Virginia. Mavis bought her airline tickets and hotel reservations to Denver in January, long before it seemed like her candidate was going to secure the nomination. She failed to land Virginia "community credentials", but she was determined to go anyway.

And so there she was, after a lot of footwork, sitting in the heat high atop Mile High. "We had faith and we had hope, so that's what we came out here with," she said. "There's a lot of people out here just like me."

+++++

Not long after Obama's speech, the celebrations began. And even the celebrations looked different.

On one side of town, The Cool Kids and The Clipse—The Clipse?!!—rocked a Democrats' party. On the other, Will.I.Am's star-studded "Yes We Can" party, first-time delegate Anton Gunn marveled at how far hip-hop had come. He had screamed himself hoarse on Tuesday at a show featuring Slick Rick, UTFO, and Whodini.

How could he have even imagined this night back in those Fresh Fest days?

Gunn was leaving early the next morning back to South Carolina to get back to work: he's an African American candidate in a close race for a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Onstage, another of his heroes, Biz Markie had stepped up to the mic as a familiar beat dropped.

"O-bama, you!" the Biz sang. You got what I ne-eeed!"

And the whole crowd joined right in.

Vibe.com@DNC :: Day 3: The Battle Of Denver

2008-08-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was the day that the party and its discontents decided to party.

At highly exclusive big-donor events, the Black Eyed Peas and Fergie rocked a prObama concert for the entertainment industry foundation, The Creative Coalition, while Kanye West headlined the One Campaign/RIAA event.

Rosario Dawson hosted a party for her organization, Voto Latino, as Bun B, Fat Joe, Big Boi, Jessica Alba, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Eve Longoria, and J-Lo were spotted around town.

At the Manifest Hope Gallery, DJ Z-Trip entertained the party people. And in Boulder, Chuck D—fresh from his wedding party—led Public Enemy at a free show for an audience decidedly more critical of the Democrats.

But the biggest and most unlikely gathering of the day started the earliest—at 11 in the morning—at the Denver Coliseum, an aged arena best known for horse shows and "Disney On Ice", five miles away from the glittering new Pepsi Center and Invesco Field where Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech tonight.

There, 10,000 fans gathered to see powerful sets from Denver's biggest hip-hop crew the Flobots, a newly black-rockified The Coup, and the reunited Rage Against The Machine. This was the Tent State Music Festival. Tickets were free. The guests of honor were the Iraq Veterans Against The War.

Between sets, 22-year old vet Wendy Barranco drew a cheer when she urged the audience to march with them towards downtown where Iraq Veterans Against The War hoped to deliver a letter to Senator Barack Obama calling for immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, full health benefits for all returning veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people.

Just two years before, Barranco had been an Army combat medic based for 9 months in Tikrit, tending to wounded soldiers, Iraqi people, even insurgents. She had grown up in Echo Park and enlisted right of Belmont High School, which has one of the highest dropout rates in Los Angeles.

"I wanted to see the world. I got a paid vacation to the sandbox", she said. "All I knew was my family didn't have money and so therefore I couldn't go to college."

She had come into the Army in the full hoo-rah of the first months of the invasion, and was deployed with the 47th Combat Support Hospital in 2005. "I fell for the mission hook line and sinker. I was like, let's go kick some hajji ass," she said. "You had to be that way. The moment you realize you don't have a purpose you fucking lose it."

In 2006, she got her papers and was able to be discharged. Half of her peers, she thinks, weren't so lucky, and had to return for a second deployment. She enrolled in Pasadena City College, eager to get on with her life.

One day she wondered into a campus forum on the war where two members of Iraq Veterans Against The War were speaking. "I was so pissed off. I kept thinking why are they biting the hand that fed them for so long. What the fuck is wrong with them?" she said. "But I still felt used (by the military)."

When she grabbed the mic to address the panel, she thought she'd give them a piece of her mind.

Instead, it all came back. The tactics the recruiters had used to lure her in. The soldiers she'd tended to who had been blown up by IEDs. The Iraqi families and children burned over large parts of their bodies.

"As I was fucking speaking, a light bulb went off," said Barranco. "Everything I was saying, they had said." That began the process that led her to the Denver Coliseum yesterday afternoon.

At 3:15 pm, after closing with a rousing version of "Killing In The Name", Zack De La Rocha and the rest of Rage Against The Machine rushed out into the street to join the march. Boots Riley from the Coup and Jonny 5 of the Flobots held a banner reading "Support G.I. Resistance". Three thousand followed. At the front, 50 servicemen and servicewomen from the Marines and the Army in uniform or combat fatigues, including Barranco, marched toward downtown in formation.

When they arrived at the Pepsi Center at almost 5 p.m., the crowd had swelled to between 4,000 and 6,000, according to Denver Police Lieutenant Vince Porter. The march briefly shut down parts of the downtown.

They came up Speer Boulevard towards the Center, where hundreds of delegates and others credentialed for the Convention were arriving. Hundreds of riot cops met them in the streets, on horses, and on trucks, both inside the Center perimeter and out.

The demonstration was diverted around the Center into a 'free speech zone', what protestors have called 'freedom cages'. Penned in from all sides, the veterans decided to march back out to the convention entrance on Speer and Market. There, convention attendees, Denver residents, and onlookers confronted the strange sight of unarmed Army and Marine soldiers in full uniform facing down riot police holding tear-gas rifles.

But although tensions built, this was a different kind of protest.

Marshals kept protestors to the march route for the entire five miles. There were no breakaway clashes with police, and not a single person was arrested. Marine Lance Corporal Jeff Key carefully explained on the cell phone to Denver police that they wanted a meeting with an Obama representative to deliver their letter. They were prepared to stay as long as it took, and some veterans were ready to get arrested.

As the crowd grew, Army Specialist Jason Eric Hurd got on the bullhorn and addressed it. "I was that man with the baton in the uniform. I know what it feels like. I have to live with those nightmares," he said. "I want to remind everyone that these police are good people, and that they are under orders."

The troops then saluted the riot police. And there they stood, the veterans and the thousands behind them, mostly silent.

At about 7:30, word came back through the line. Former Texas Lt Governor Ben Barnes would accept their letter. Denver police escorted Key and former Marine Liam Madden into the convention center for a meeting with Phil Carter, the Obama campaign's staffer for veteran's affairs.

In the streets, the veterans broke formation to let out a roar. Barranco, other servicemen, and many of the young activists shared some tears. For her, after 5 years of seeing the worst of humanity, it was a small victory, a ray of light. From the back of the line, protesters spontaneously began chanting "Yes we can!" and "Si Se Puede".

Then the veterans snapped back to attention. Mission accomplished, they about-faced and marched back into the dusk.

Vibe.com@DNC :: Day 2: Night Of The Hillary Voters

2008-08-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

Last night, Hillary Clinton asked of her supporters, "Were you in this campaign just for me?"

And for the past two days, it has been easy to spot women here—mostly white and in their 40s or 50s, but some African Americans too—gripping Hillary placards and arguing with Obama supporters in the streets. McCain supporters have been opportunistic, running through town chanting, "Clintons for McCain".

So Hillary's speech tonight was well anticipated. Most of the tens of thousands credentialed to enter the Pepsi Center came early to grab their seats. By 8 p.m., it was standing-room only.

Even San Francisco Assessor Phil Ting—the co-chair of Asian Americans for Hillary Clinton, a group that helped give her part of the margin in the Super Tuesday California primary—had to find a seat in the aisle high up in the press section, so high Rita Marley would have approved.

He might have been pardoned for thinking, is this what voting for experience gets you? And yet Ting—like the thousands of Hillary delegates whose votes have not yet been released, and whom the media were picking off for quotes left and right as they left the Pepsi Center—sounded a conciliatory tone.

"Look, this election was historic. You had women and you had African American voters, and in order to move forward, we can't lose a single person. We have to go into November with unity," Ting said. "The Asian Americans who supported Hillary that I know are all going to vote for Barack Obama."

Loretta Tuell, a Beltway lobbyist and organizer from Hillary's Native American outreach committee, also said she was getting behind Obama. But she admitted that Hillary's Tuesday speech was bittersweet.

"I feel like she's done all the right things, that she's qualified to run for president," she said, still speaking in the present tense.

Did Loretta think Hillary was the right person for the wrong time?

She took a deep breath and said, "I don't think that her career is over. I think at this time, at this moment, it wasn't hers to take. But you can look at history and say that of many people."

"It's not over for Hillary, and that's the exciting part for me," she said.

But the more she talked, the more she seemed pained. "I tell you I was surprised in the beginning in how difficult it was for me to get past the energy and all the spirit you put behind a campaign."

"Towards the end, [the campaign] learned their lessons but they learned them too late," she said. "As supporters you could see that if there were enough time, we could be the nominee. Being so close, it hurts."

Tuell wanted Hillary to be offered the choice to decide whether or not to be vice president. She felt that Hillary had earned that respect. "People aren't anti-Biden," she said. "They're just disappointed."

She felt that Obama's campaign reached out to Clinton's campaign and her supporters too slowly. "I think as a party you could never take for granted any constituency," she said. "All constituencies need to be respected and heard."

She did feel that the unity efforts were accelerating. "But you don't want to feel disenfranchised from your own party and that's what folks are feeling a little bit," she said. "Words are important, but actions count. And action is what we're lacking. I think if you put your actions into words you'll get a unified party."

Vibe.com@DNC :: Day 1: Looking Forward

2008-08-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

Michelle Obama did some of the work of repairing the party's fissures last night. Her speech was a corrective against Democratic infighting and a strike against further Republican charges of elitism.

Hillary Clinton's race-baiting advisor Mark Penn established the Obama-as-scary-foreigner scenario early in the primaries. So tonight's speeches—beginning with a speech by Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, running through Ted Kennedy's surprise appearance and Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's introduction of Michelle's brother, Craig Robinson—repeated theme words like "American story" and "American dream".

There are probably still Hillary voters or undecided women who finished watching her speech—and Sasha Obama's scene-stealing mic moments during the crowd-pleasing family teleconference—with hardened hearts.

But the Obamas do not want to let this nomination victory be about bitterness and looking backward. Michelle shouted out Hillary and the anniversary of women's suffrage. She evoked MLK and the March of Washington. Both were, in this context, American stories, American victories.

What was most notable was Michelle's tone. There was no trace of stridency, a punditocracy caricature. Instead, she was by turns, soothing, soaring, and full of gratitude.

And when Michelle drove it home, with what my son's teacher calls "little moments"—the meaning of a parent's goodnight kiss, the portrait of Barack Obama driving their new baby home with supreme caution—she left many in the hall in tears, including, let's not front, many grown men. Forget all those TV shots of weeping women.

The girls came unscripted—Malia wiping her tears away with a big hand, Sasha holding the mic like a grudge. They became unwitting icons: they may be to the hip-hop generation the equivalent of what Caroline and John Kennedy were to the boomers.

This afternoon, the future was alive at the Congressional Black Caucus' Young Leaders forum. The panel had its star appeal. Kerry Washington and Will.I.Am both gave generational conversion stories that would be echoed in the closing lines of Michelle's speech—stories in which they "decided to stop doubting and to start dreaming."

Washington, as moderator, also introduced a number of new young leaders: 29-year old Georgia assemblywoman Alisha Thomas Morgan; 29-year old Tallahassee city commissioner Andrew Gillum; hip-hop activist and pastor Reverend Tony Lee; and businessman and motivational speaker Ephren Taylor.

But the 24-year old Bakari Sellers, elected 2 years ago to the South Carolina House of Representatives, closed it down with a speech that seemed to capture the spirit of the moment—a sense, especially among young African American Democrats, that now is the time, that Barack Obama has finally legitimized the value and potency of youth.

He recalled his father's story of the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, the deadly university shooting at South Carolina State that predated Kent State. "The South Carolina motto is 'Dum Spiro Spero', 'While I breathe, I hope'," he said, linking it to an Obama quote. "In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."

Sellers drew Obama-esque images, linking the laid-off postindustrial worker in San Francisco to the rural teacher in Marlboro, South Carolina, to the accountant in New Orleans who has turned carpenter because no one else will rebuild.

"There are those who will say that we are too young, too inexperienced, and too idealistic. They'll tell us that it's too hard. They'll tell us that you can't make people care. They'll tell us that one day when we're older we may understand," he said. "But we know better and America knows better."

Just check Sasha Obama. When her dad asked her what she thought of her mother's speech, she answered, "I think she did good". She didn't stutter. Her little voice seemed rich with pride, but also a little bit of insouciance, even a little bit of sass, as if to say just give me a little bit and then you can ask me what mommy thinks of my speech.

Perhaps this election might simply be about making it good to be young again.

Vibe.com@DNC :: Day 0: De Colores

2008-08-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

On the way in from the airport, highway cops are pulling over speeding, oblivious California drivers. It's a ticketing bonanza. The highway alert signs read, "Welcome to Denver and Colorful Colorado."

For that past two decades, that color has mostly been red—the latest polls show McCain ahead of Obama by a single point. But there's no doubt now the Democrats have now taken over Denver.

The sign at the Conoco gas station down Speer from the Pepsi Center says, "Welcome to Obamarado." And the National Black Republican Association billboards in this Highland neighborhood—where crack heads and dog owners, liquor stores and 4-star restaurants, new condo owners and working-class brown families share the streets—have been altered. This morning they read, "Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican". This afternoon they read, "Martin Luther King Jr. is a Obama-can."

Perhaps the most unmistakeable sign that the Democrats were in town this morning—beyond the hipsters in black Run DNC tees and the masses on the 16th Street Mall flying their blue credentials—was the overwhelming presence of riot cops. Not just Denver PD, but hundreds more imported from Aurora and Lakewood.

They were outside the Record Exchange spot on Colfax, pissing off the aloha-shirted owner. They were at Union Station protecting the Patron Tequila Express train car. They were roaming the streets, nine deep astride white O.J. Broncos. They were waving to the pro-war demonstrators who cheered them when they drove by. They were gone by the time the pro-war demonstrators handed their mic to a woman who sang a rendition of "God Bless America" as if she were auditioning for a 7th inning in the Bronx.

And after a large gathering on the Capitol steps this morning headlined by Dead Prez and Green Party VP nominee Rosa Clemente (with presidential nominee Cynthia McKinney watching), they were chasing down a thousand protestors riding under the bizarre banner of "Recreate '68" as the marchers headed to the Pepsi Center.

Protesters made holding the Democrats accountable to their two-year promise to the end the war the theme of the day. In the afternoon, a second set of marchers went through the 16th Street Mall, shut down traffic in parts of the downtown area, and resulted in some stand-offs with riot cops.

But aside from traffic tie-ups and ritualized stand-offs, these were not the stunning surgical strikes that greeted the Republicans in Philadelphia in the summer of 2000, shut down the city for a day, and resulted in hundreds of arrests and not a few bashed heads. Nor were they Rage Against The Machine's Battle of Los Angeles at the Democratic Convention that year, which ended in a teargas-clouded police riot before the band even hit the stage.

No, although one white R68 organizer Jill Dreier told me it was racist to ask her whether some voters didn't think Obama might represent change because he was of color—interesting definition of racism, that—the feel wasn't so much in-your-face as lazy Sunday afternoon.

Shit was so chill that those 200 afternoon marchers who had set out for the Capitol finally arrived there about a half-hour after Blue Scholars and Common Market had finished their blazing set. (The performers had even started, as asked, on hip-hop time—an hour late.)

Tourists and bicyclists—Denverites love bicycles—stopped to gawk at all the cute kids in their fashionable black bandanas, their orange and black flags, their blue "Riot 4 Peace" sign. Food Not Bombs even fed a few of them. Then the marchers, after a brief facedown with the cops, took off down 17th Street, leaving the frustrated old soundman to dismantle the entire speaker system with his wife.

Three other groups of demonstrators marched in the other direction, to the north, gathering in Cuernavaca Park for a different rally. The Tent State gathering, assembled by organizers who broke off from R68 earlier this year, attracted 10,000 to call on the Democrats to end the war. On Wednesday, they will take over Denver Coliseum for a morning show with Rage Against The Machine, Flobots, and The Coup. And on Thursday, R68 and Tent State both expect to support a massive rally for immigration rights.

There will be a lot more color to see this week, and once the Convention opens Monday night with a keynote by Michelle Obama, that color may be primarily blue.

Stay tuned.

Vibe.com@DNC :: Obama Chooses

2008-08-23T03:58:00.000-07:00

Obama has texted America his choice. It's Senator Joseph Biden.

Biden, the 65 year-old Senator from Delaware, doesn't just provide an older white maleness to Obama's young Blackness. He's the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and has spent most of his adult life as an elected official as a Senator. He's expected to wow the skeptical Budweiser voters who chose Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

Biden is also known for being as loose-lipped as Obama is careful. Last year, as an opponent for the Democratic nomination, Biden spoke about Obama's candidacy in these words:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Obama texted supporters early this morning. He's set to make an appearance with Biden at noon Eastern Standard Time in Illinois.

Come back here to Vibe.com@DNC to follow all the latest breaking news from the Democratic National Convention.

Hip Hop VP: A Q+A With Rosa Clemente

2008-08-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

As cell phone users await Barack Obama's text message informing them who his Vice President choice is, we present a Q+A with Green Party VP nominee Rosa Clemente.

The 36-year old hip-hop activist took some time in Las Vegas at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention last month to talk candidly with us about her historic run, the state of hip-hop activism, the Green Party and its discontents, and how she really feels about Hillary Clinton and Obama. What follows are excerpts from a long interview.

Q: How did this nomination happen for you?

Cynthia called me on July 5th. It happened very quick. I didn't hesitate because that's just my personality. But by the time I got to the convention in Chicago, it was such a whirlwind. It was so fast, the nomination, meeting hundreds of Green Party members. It wasn't 'til I got off that stage that I was like, holy shit. I'm gonna be on a ballot in 40 states. That is so surreal.

In 2001, I had submitted a proposal to a foundation and it was called Hip-Hop Vote. They rejected me and they said that there was no way that a hip-hop generation—no matter how it was being defined—was going to make headway in voting. They could not see young people being so engaged in the electoral political system. And it's funny because now that's all they do. Any foundation is trying to fund young people like Generation Vote, Russell Simmons (Hip-Hop Summit Action Network), the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.

Q: How is it that you got involved with Cynthia McKinney?

I came to know about Cynthia McKinney when she had the hearings on political prisoners in Congress. And then she started talking about Tupac and his files and trying to get the files from the FBI. I was in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and we were working on so much around political prisoners. She started bringing me out to her brain trust as part of the Congressional Black Caucus. She was involved in the State of the Black World with Ron Daniels which I was involved with. And then she brought me out to this big Tupac event in Atlanta with Chuck D. Of course when they got her out of office, she went to Cornell to teach one of those two-week things and she just got so harassed. She got death threats. This was after the September 11 hearings where she was grilling Rumsfeld, after they arrested her—whatever the capitol police did to her. I hadn't talked to her in a long time. I just know that I joined the Green Party in Brooklyn.

People always say they want their officials to be held accountable. Here she is, being held accountable, because her party didn't keep to their promises in '06 when they all got in. Pelosi and Conyers and all them finally get these ranks and—no impeachment and no pullout of the war. She actually stood to their principles. She could just have stayed in the DNC. She could have stayed the incumbent and she just didn't.

People have always said, 'You gotta tone it down Rosa, you're too honest. You can't always say what you say.' And I think everything I did got me to this position, because I think I am genuine and I think that a lot of cats aren't. It has come at the expense of a lot of shit. I know that. But I can't be any other way. And I think Cynthia is just, she's completely uncompromising. That is the most needed value right now in our movement.

Q: Were you prepared to understand what the politics of the Green Party itself was, particularly the racial politics of the Green Party? Because this ticket is a big departure and it seems like there's been a little bit of a backlash within the Party around Cynthia's nomination and your nomination.

I feel much of that is based on some serious misinformation on who we are as a generation but also the non-ability for most progressives to particularly see women of color leading. I'm still grasping how local people feel about the Greens. I don’t know I just, I'm ready to follow Cynthia in that regard. And second, I don't see hip-hop being represented any way politically at the level that it should be. So I'm going with people who are at least moving out the way for us to have space.

I haven't felt uncomfortable. The young people in the Green Party—the mostly white young people—have whole different racial and class analysis. (They) were clear that they came into politics because they had gone to some hip-hop event. They had seen Dead Prez perform, they had seen Immortal Technique, they had read something on Tupac, and they said they felt no other party was paying attention to their issues. So I don't want to be like Pollyanna and say I ignore it. But the Greens are a national party, it's a national organization, and there are over a hundred Greens running for all different types of offices. They nominated me and Cynthia.

Q: The hip-hop generation has been successful in terms of bringing more folks out to the polls. Every election has been landmark numbers. But the numbers that, in terms of registration, they're mostly the college kids. How do you reach the working-class young people, the youths of color who are completely alienated, the overwhelming majority of young people who still aren’t even registed to vote?

That's what I'm trying to stay focused on. It's a difficult situation. You can get into the communities because you now have a name, but you might not even have the resources to get a flight there. And that's how real it is in our campaign. Even though the Green Party has been infrastructured for 25 years, they don't get matching funds. And the less we're in the media, the less people know we exist so there's no money in the coffers to do that type of campaigning which is what I want to do. I want to get to the cats that aren't even registered to vote. I don't give a fuck about turning no Barack Obama Democrat around. I'm not even trying to waste my time.

It's interesting that with the new vote rising, it's defaulting to the Democrats. Who is gonna vote for John McCain? So what it essentially is, the Democrats in the back of their minds gotta be thinking we ain't even got to talk about these young people's issues. There's this fervor because of all the work we've been putting down since 2003—all these hip-hop organizations—there's the fervor to get out there and to register vote but it's essentially defaulted Democrat anyway.

I think the Greens are gonna have to put in some serious infrastructure planning for the next 20 years, if we're gonna even move all the people who aren't even registered to vote to have any faith in the political system. Because that's essentially what they're saying—they're withholding their vote.

So what it becomes incumbent upon me to say is: am I doing this for the Green party or am I doing it for my generation? Is that connected? If it is, how does that play out? And I'm trying to stay really focused on getting to the people that are completely dissatisfied and completely marginalized, not necessarily from joining the Green Party which would be great, but to begin to tell them that this two-party system—that has to stop now. We cannot afford another two-party election. But within hip-hop, actually, that conversation becomes very difficult.

Q: How do you mean?

I think anybody running a hip-hop organization now that has a grant, they can't just drop their shit and support the Green party. I think that's the danger of the whole non-profit grant system that most of the hip-hop organizations are in. Finally you have a party that if 5% of the hip-hoppers voted would give us 5% of the electorate, and everybody's scared now? Now that it's right in front of you everybody's backing up.

Q: Well, they're going to Obama.

Of course. They're either going to Obama or they're saying they're not, but they default to that. You have a voter registration drive, would you be pushing the Greens? We're not even on the ballots. You can't push us in 10 states. Most cats are not registering Republican. Default to the Democrats.

That's gonna require a lot of cats in hip-hop making some real choices right now. Are you gonna back up a party that nominated not me, but nominated a hip-hop activist, a person that's been out here for 7-8 years on the forefront of hip-hop work? At this moment, cats can't say they're for me and Cynthia because they're afraid they're gonna lose their GOTV money?

Q: But on the other hand, Nader didn't have any problem raising any money. He raised millions of dollars. Has the Green party abandoned you and Cynthia?

I think (when Nader ran) in 1996 and 2000, it was so much easier to have a third party, in that the media was still at least doing its job, giving equal time. Eight years after the stolen election and Bush, the media is such a farce. The fact that they will not let Nader, Bob Barr, or Cynthia in any of the debates speaks volumes. And I think that is simply because at the end of the day, the Democratic machine and the Republican machine would rather ebb and flow power than concede power together to a third, fourth, or fifth party.

Has the Green Party abandoned us? I don't know. I've only been here for less than a month. I don't think the Green party is ready, I don't think the apparatus is there.

Q: Is it the Green Party apparatus? Is it will? Or is it race?

I think it's the apparatus and I think it also has to do with how you fundraise in this day and age and how media is used as it relates to young people. I don't think they have a grasp of any of that. I truly believe that you have to market this. You have to brand it and there's not a brand. Nader was the brand. So when Nader in 2000 gets 2% of the vote, that's a big deal. But now 8 years later, look at how they destroyed Nader. If it wasn't for him Gore would have won, now we're the spoiler spoiler spoiler. So no longer are we the third party, the Green party is now the spoiler party.

Q: Talk about the platform. What do you think the Green Party has over the other parties?

This is the only party that even has social justice as its core principle. When we say ending the war, we mean all the wars. We need to get all the military out of every country, we need to begin to deal with issues of what peace can look like, how do you sustain that. Obviously, the green party is at the forefront of pushing the environment as a core value, that was innovative then. There should be an end to imprisoning young people, an immediate stop to the death penalty, a livable wage, not a minimum wage. Impeachment for George Bush and them is critical. I think if we don't hold them accountable as a people, then anybody can do the same shit that they did.

Words are words, but we can make the words into deeds. If people would even open up the platform, they would see that neither the Democrats and Republicans would even talk about young people having rights and that we should be signing some of these international treaties, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The hardest part is to literally get people to open it up and want to be exposed.

Q: Do you think the Obama campaign is a false hope? A false kind of change?

It's hard for me to see Obama and not feel like there's a good heart in that. So I feel like it's not false hope if he's not a pessimistic or opportunistic person. Because when I see him, sometimes it's magical. You're like, damn. But then I weigh it. Is it just because we've been under 8 years of Bush and company?

When Obama comes around, first it's historical. No matter how it goes down, it's history. There's a moment when I watched him become the presumptive nominee that I have to recognize that is historic. I'm married to a black man in America. I could see if you're African American in this country and you're over 50, that is a moment of brilliance and shine. Like, this is what I fought for. This is why I fought for the vote.

You respect that. And I don’t agree with any of the racial shit that Fox puts out on Michelle or him just like I didn't agree with that when Hillary Clinton was running, even though I'm completely opposed to her politics. As a woman, why you talking about her ankles, her chest? She's running for president of the United States. To me, I've been very clear to people—look, I'm not hating on him because he's Barack Obama or because he's a black man, OK? I'm hating on him because his policies are wack. (laughs) They're wack and we should just say that. We understand the historical nature and then we get back to the accountability factor. That's how I see it.

Q: But if you and Cynthia get elected, that would also be historic.

Wouldn't that be incredible. (laughs) That would be amazing.

Q: But it is a question that comes up. "Why even run if you don't really have a chance?" Especially amongst folks in the community who feel like, "We got an historic opportunity now. You don't want to be what Nader was to Gore for us because that's gonna devastate us so much more in so many different types of ways." How do you answer that?

I mean history was made. But history can be good or bad. You know? Cynthia said that when she got to Washington DC, there's a table where people sit at, where the Democrats were and the Republicans were and they had locked the doors and everybody else was looking on the outside. And she said her goal is to get 5% of the electorate so she can pull up a chair at that table. That's what I say. I'm trying to get 5% of that electorate. I want to be at that table. I don't want to be outside. I don't want to be petitioning to get in anymore. Because I think once we're at that table and we're treated as a legitimate major party and get access to it, in the $18 million that each party gets just with taxpayer money, what we could do with that money just in spreading the platform and principles of the Green party—we would conquer this within 4 to 8 more years. I believe that.

Scenes From An Uprising? Part 1

2008-08-18T12:21:00.001-07:00

On Saturday at the Rock The Bells festival in the Bay Area, 20,000 middle fingers were raised against Fox News.

"They are the past. We are the future," Nas shouted from center stage, before dropping the beat from "Black President". "We can change the world."

Hip-hop gatherings seem lately to have been taking on the feel of political rallies or cadre discussions. Could it be that there's a new wind blowing?

At the Ozone Awards, Davey D asked an artist panel what their role might be in the upcoming elections. Rather than shrug, as rappers have often done in the past, Killer Mike responded like a seasoned strategist, outlining the moment in the context of a history of Black politics. It didn't seem out of the ordinary.

Backstage at Rock The Bells, folks like De La Soul, Dead Prez, and Immortal Technique had a lot to say about politics, but so did folks like Redman, Wu-Tang producer Mathematics and rapper Streetlife, and many others. They talked about whether or not to vote, and whether, as YZ once put it, a Black President might be the solution or just another question.

"I've been doing this for 15 years," Method Man laughed. "And ever since I've been doing this, there hasn't been this many questions about the election. Nobody has ever asked me that until Obama started running."

On the grounds at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, hundreds of kids in colorful Obama shirts roamed through the crowd. One kid wore a black tee that altered De La Soul's "Stakes Is High" logo into a statement: "Gas Is High".

Rock The Bells promoter Chang Weisberg said the tenor of the festival had changed since last year. "People are not happy with gas prices, they're not happy with the mortgage crisis, they're not happy with their life in general," he said.

When the festival comes to Denver next week to informally open the Democratic Convention week there, it will signal the arrival of a number of hip-hop artists the likes of which no political convention has ever seen in this country.

Aside from the RTB lineup, folks like Bun B, The Coup, Rage Against The Machine, Rebel Diaz, Blue Scholars, Wyclef, John Legend, and the Black Eyed Peas will be in town. Celebs like Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson will also be on hand.

Some will come to participate in the Convention, some to protest it, some to party with the party, some to party in spite of the party—most to witness the history they might finally feel like they have a hand in making.

Silhouetted against the sunset on Saturday, Nas looked out into the crowd and said, "I don't believe in politicians or none of that. I believe in the people."

And the people roared.

Obama Comes Home

2008-08-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

It was like almost any other day in a Honolulu waterfront park. Ka'au Crater Boys playing on the sound system. Kids throwing a football around. Tradewinds blowing savory smoke in from the barbecue pits at the far end of the parking lot, and the occasional light rain against a sunny sky.

Except for the line of 4,000 people that stretched all the way around the perimeter of the park.

They had come to witness the first visit by a major presidential candidate to the islands since Richard Nixon in 1960, and the first ever nominee from Hawai'i. When he bounded up with his wife onto the small makeshift stage, threw up a shaka, and shouted, "Howzit!" into the mic, the crowd went crazy. Barack Obama had come home.

The rally was a last-minute addition to what was supposed to be a quiet family vacation. "I didn't come here to politick," Obama, dressed in a black polo and pleated khakis, told the crowd in their "One In A Million" and "Obama 'Ohana" shirts. "I'm going to get a plate lunch. I'm going to go get some shave ice. I might bodysurf at an undisclosed location."

But after a week of taking a battering from the McCain camp for having the audacity to take a short week-long summer break, Obama campaign staff looked his schedule—which only had a Tuesday $1 million fundraiser at the uber-bougie Kahala Hotel—and hastily added an appearance for the people.

In claiming Ke'ehi Lagoon Park, they displaced the ceremonies for Samoan Flag Day—the biggest Samoan community celebration of the year—and everyone knows you don't get the clans angry. Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann surely had some roundtable diplomacy to do.

By Obama standards, the rally—which most islanders only found out about when it was announced on the front-page of the morning paper—was ragged. There were no Obama merch vendors, the volunteer staff looked thin, the program was barely over a half-hour from beginning to end.

Obama himself seemed a bit exhausted. He turned his "non-political" speech into a brief version of his stump, but barely touched on the economy and missed opportunities to craft his message to local concerns, like the proposed rapid transit system or environmental issues. This state is bluer than the Pacific; no politicking was necessary.

But the crowd didn't care. Here was a genuine keiki o ka 'aina, a child of the land, Hawai'i's own. Instead of playing to their needs, Obama played to their dreams. Islanders want nothing more than to be respected as equal Americans, but respect is hard to come by when you've been reduced to giving leis to haoles from Japan or "the mainland".

So the local political luminaries who introduced Obama—from Senator Daniel Akaka to old Obama family friend Congressman Neil Abercrombie to Hannemann—spent their few CSPAN minutes talking up Hawai'i's diversity.

Hannemann, in particular, recalled seeing John F. Kennedy speaking here in 1963, making an impression on the young politico by saying that Hawai'i represented where the rest of the country needed to go. Forty-five years later, the culturally literate Obama is the living proof.

Where Obama's 20-minute address was thin in details, it was long in history. "A lot of people ask me how Hawai'i has shaped me", he said. He told them that it was the aloha spirit that taught him the value of empathy, gave him the understanding that everyone needs to be responsible for each other.

He spoke of how his haole grandparents saw the islands as "the New Frontier", a place where they could still reach the American dream. "Everybody here understands that," Obama said, "whether they're coming from east or west. We've got to make sure that the dream still lives."

Lofty, sure, but it's also what indigenous people call the 'settler' narrative. The sad truth is that Hawai'i has never been as racially egalitarian as it likes to make itself out to be. The day before Obama's speech, Native Hawaiians at Naue on the north shore of Kaua'i blockaded a haole developer from tearing up 30 ancient gravesites to build himself an ocean-front McMansion.

But we do figure out ways to get along. In a small space bounded by water on all sides, you must learn to.

The hope of Obama—whom everyone in the crowd understood was in a hurry to go and see his tutu, his grandma from Kansas—is that he can help make things pono, make things right. The worry is that he won't find the correct balance.

In Hawai'i, the space where the water meets the land is a place of celebration and gathering or where dreams and histories get paved for parking lots.

Before descending to shake hands and give hugs to the home crowd, Obama grinned broadly and waved.

"I'll see you on the beach!" he shouted.

Bakari Kitwana On Luda & Obama

2008-08-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

Bakari Kitwana on Luda-Obama. A worthy read:

"Obama will likely weather this storm even easier than the previous ones. But what the Ludacris controversy reveals for the hip-hop activist community is much more profound: the baggage presented by hip-hop’s public image compromises the hip-hop activist community’s attempts to place its issues on the national agenda."

Luda Could Use Some Education

2008-08-01T08:53:00.001-07:00

The hum on the opening day at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention was that Ludacris had played himself. Badly.

Green Party vice presidential candidate Rosa Clemente put it best, "I have no love for Hillary's politics and what it's done to our folks, but I could feel her going through all the stuff she's had to go through as a woman."

Rap can say whatever it wants, and right now it wants to talk about the elections. That's cool.

But Ludacris seemed to want to reduce serious politics to stale old battle rhymes. Come on, man. You got a degree from Georgia State. Rap deserves more than that.

We know that these days it's gangsta to be political. But if you really want to battle on that level, step up your game, else you'll just become another tool for the right-wing talk-show circuit.

Shoot, even Jeezy came with it when it was his turn.

Oddly enough, all this came on a day that the National Hip-Hop Political Convention focused on the educational possibilities of hip-hop. Hip-hop artists, teachers, professors, grad students, folks from the Hip-Hop Think Tank, and not a few young heads from the street came to UNLV yesterday to get into the ability of hip-hop to open minds.

Among the talks, rapper Asheru presented curriculum he had put together, using hip-hop songs by Nas, Common, Lauryn Hill, and even his own work for The Boondocks. He showed how you could take one song--say Mos Def's "New World Water"--and break it down for english teachers, social studies teachers, and science teachers, using it to teach lessons about everything from poetry to hydrology. All of this was news we could use.

Listening, Luda?

As Marc Lamont Hill put it in his rousing closing address yesterday re: Lupe, right now is no time to dumb it down.

National Hip-Hop Political Convention Opens

2008-07-31T07:01:00.000-07:00

Today, the National Hip-Hop Political Convention opens in Las Vegas.

Thousands are expected to attend the Convention, with some coming from as far as Colombia and South Korea yesterday for the opening b-boy battle, that featured a showdown between Las Vegas's Knucklehead Zoo and the R16 champs, Gamblerz.

They will be discussing issues like the criminalization of youth, youth violence, the right of return on the Gulf Coast, media justice, sexism in hip-hop, economic justice, Black-Brown solidarity, global warming, liberation theology, and vote disenfranchisement. (I'm speaking today at an all-day symposium on the place of hip-hop in academia. alongside folks like Asheru, Byron Hurt, Marc Lamont Hill, and many others.)

Dozens of skills-building trainings around voter registration, lobbying, organizing, media, film making, and even krumping will be held, showing that the organizers draw no distinction between arts and social justice. Some of the best recent underground films on hip-hop--including "African Underground: Democracy in Dakar" and "Masizakhe: Let Us Build Together"--bring a distinctly global view of hip-hop to the event.

On Sunday Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney will give the closing address and the Convention will revise and update their hip-hop political agenda.

Keep your eye here for reports back over the coming days.

Throwback Friday :: Conspiracies & The X-Files After 9/11

2008-07-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

In honor of The X-Files opening tonight, here's a throwback piece I did for the late, great newsstand edition of Punk Planet shortly after 9/11.

It was about the wave of CIA/FBI/Intelligence-themed shows. From a TV perspective, it seems a little dated now. "Alias" jumped the shark really fast, "The Agency" lasted less than a blink, and we now know "24" was the work of a right-winger.

Still, I am pretty proud of this piece for trying to capture the vibe of the time, a vibe that today--after the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Katrina, and more--hardly seems marginal anymore.

It also gets to why I still love Chris Carter's Mulder and Scully so much.

Enjoy...

NOTES ON THE NEW FACES OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
By Jeff Chang

I.

These are the times that demand entertainment. In this New War, police and fireman continue to recover 4000 bodies, the FBI interrogates a list of 5000 suspects, and countless more (they won’t tell us how many) sit in Federal and INS detention centers. And every week, 5000 resumes arrive at the C.I.A. while 20 million viewers tune in to see the new faces of central intelligence.

These faces are emotionally cold lone gunmen, like “24”’s Jack Bauer on “24”. They are built for speed but haunted by death, like “Alias”’s Sydney Bristow. They fall in love with beautiful, dark-skinned agents of Al-Qaeda, like the hapless, balding Jackson Haisley of “The Agency”.

Sometimes they fight with their daughters or turn in their homework late. In a typical 9 to 5, they might manufacture ancient Buddhist scrolls and dot them with monkey piss to prevent the destabilization of Tibet. They get their coffee and drive their SUVs to work in offices that look like last-year’s dot-com.

They’re your spooks next door. They have emotional attachments and cell phones. They have friends of other races. They hope for somebody to love and trust. They’re no longer the reclusive ROTC recruit in the next dorm room, they’re walking signboards for the 21st Century intelligence agent.

All of these shows reveal a huge debt to “The X-Files” and its exemplars of anti-intelligence, FBI agents Dana Scully and the now-departed Fox Mulder of “The X-Files”. And the timing couldn’t be better. Because of network competition to fill the void soon to be left by the slow-motion exit of “The X-Files” and tragic coincidence, the shows have arrived on network television just in time to run between news clips of the New War.

But while Mulder and Scully fought for their future with rebel hearts under a hopeless rallying cry—“The truth is out there”—the career spooks of “The Agency” adhere to the company line: “Truth is what we make it.” (“Alias” has an even dumber tag: “Sometimes the truth hurts.”) It seems as if the new agents were born to fight for the past—restoring the Old Normal of the Cold War, when intelligence and “failure” weren’t synonymous.

II.

Meanwhile, the New War continues.

Dr. Siddharth Shah, 29, cuts a fine profile—tall, dark, handsome, with chiseled cheekbones and a strong chin. On Monday, September 17, as he was leaving the Kansas City airport, he was stopped by a Missouri state trooper.

He had just arrived from New York City to visit a terminally ill friend. The trooper told them he was stopping Shah and his South Asian friend for a loud muffler. No, a quick lane change. Finally he simply asked for what he really wanted—their ID’s. “I’m just giving you a warning’”, the cop said. “I don’t mean to give you a ticket.”

Another officer pulled up and together they did a computer check. It seemed to take a long time. When the cop returned to the car, Shah asked why they had been stopped. The cop answered, “I think you’d agree if I didn’t do this, I wouldn’t be doing my job.” Somewhat embarassed, the cop released them and admitted, ‘This is a great lesson in diversity for me.’”

The next day, when Shah tried to depart from Kansas City International Airport, an announcement came over the p.a. system, “There has been an equipment change which will require the shifting of some seats. Would Mr. S-H-A-H please come to the desk?” When Shah went to the desk, he was met by a police officer and an FBI officer who took him to a windowless room and began interrogating him.

They asked where he had been born, if he was a citizen. Shah was born in Houston, Texas. They asked him why he was leaving so quickly. He explained that, as a doctor, he had very little time off. They asked for his physician’s badge, and he produced it. They replied, “We’re very sorry. We’re responding to the airlines’ worries. Your name is on a list of Muslim names.”

Shah laughs at the memory: “My first name points them to me probably being Buddhist, Jain, or Hindu. And I explained to them, ‘Did you know that Shah is the second most common last name among Indian Americans?’” The agent replied, “I’m sorry. We’re very ignorant about your culture. I’m sorry for your inconvenience.’”

III.

On the night of November 5, 2001, M. William Cooper did not die on his knees. One of the two Apache County sheriffs that came for him received a bullet in the head. The other shot Cooper dead on the desolate stretch of Arizona desert where he lived with his shortwave radio, two dogs, a rooster, and a chicken.

In recent months, the author of *Behold A Pale Horse* was being sought for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and charges of endangerment, the result of incidents in which Cooper threatened people who had stopped near his home. He had previously been sought for tax evasion. After he sent his family overseas, he used his popular shortwave and Internet radio broadcasts to boast that he would not be taken alive.

His death did not only raise fears within the Patriot movement for whom he was a hero. In Harlem, at the Universal Zulu Nation’s annual celebration of Hip-Hop Month, Brother Ernie Pannicioli spoke to a gathering about Cooper’s death, placing it alongside New Black Panther Party leader Khallid Abdul Muhammad’s February death by aneurysm. “The sleeping is over,” Pannicioli thundered. “They’re coming for our freedom fighters.”

What made Cooper so compelling to rural white militiamen and street peace-makers in communities of color? His worldview grafted post-COINTELPRO conspiracy onto New World Order paranoia. *Behold A Pale Horse*, which has reportedly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is like an overstuffed folder, 500 pages of autobiography, news clippings, photos, and allegedly top secret documents meant to document the creation of a malign, shadowy one-world government. Armageddon’s already here, Cooper was saying. *Behold A Pale Horse* is your late pass.

The book’s influence remains stunning. South African health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang recently stirred an international outcry when she distributed to fellow African health officials a memo and excerpts of the book that argued that AIDS was introduced into Africa in 1978 by the Illuminati. “Protect your continent now”, the memo said. Cooper’s eclecticism had become a worldview.

While he probably expected his readership would largely be high-plains tax protestors and free-land patriots, the book found a willing readership on the streets as well. For many, it confirmed what they had believed for years, in sometimes prescient fashion. Cooper spoke of CIA ops that smuggled drugs into the ghetto to finance covert political operations. The proof would later be uncovered by reporter Gary Webb in his famous “Dark Alliance” series, and further investigated by Congresswoman Maxine Waters in hearings.

Cooper argued that drug war legislation and the FEMA act was laying the ground-work for the establishment of a police state, reviving memories of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO. But, as further evidence of the New World Order, Cooper also offered up the long-discredited “Protocols of The Elders of Zion” (to which he affixed instructions that “any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’”).

Cooper’s worldview—sans its apparently anti-Semitic leanings—hit the mainstream on September 10, 1993 when “The X-Files” debuted. Fox Mulder’s Cooper-esque rantings about one-world government, master-race plotters, alien abductees, secret torture chambers, and massive Tuskegee-style bioterror experiments felt realer than reality, like a speculative history of the Cold War in which the actual struggle was between the leaders and the people. Set against end-of-history crowing and wwweb ecstasy, the “X-Files” message was subversive and immediate: Evil still walks among us. Governments and nation-states are involved. All of humanity’s survival is at stake.

For the small screen, it was a pretty big picture.

IV.

These days, the picture on the screen is merely pretty, as if to melt the images of September 11 with beauty and quick-cuts.

“Alias”’s Sydney Bristow (played by Jennifer Garner, GQ’s September 2001 “Woman On Our Mind”) is thin as an arrow, and runs like Franka Potente’s Lola around a very short track. Recruited off the UCLA campus before she could legally drink, she came to the agency wide-eyed seven years ago, and now is trapped on a treadmill of fear.

Her fiancé is dead because she revealed to him that she was a C.I.A. agent. She has since learned that she actually works for SD-6, a rogue agency moved by unseen hands. She has become a double-agent, working with the real C.I.A. to bring down SD-6, whom she blames for her fiancé’s murder. She reports to her father, whose own shifting loyalties may have directly led to her mother’s murder (Sydney’s Samantha Mulder).

These are neat circular plot devices, and each episode plays just like the tight loops of driving techno playing beneath. The exotic locales, body-tight costumes, and decent kick-boxing, are softened by intimate interludes of “normalcy” among friends. “Sydney”, wrote Joyce Millman in the New York Times, “is the perfect television heroine for the times.”

The shows display a west-coast 21st century multiculti sheen. Unlike the real C.I.A., affirmative action apparently seems to have worked. Translating Middle Eastern languages will be no problem. Sydney’s best friends and her SD-6 partner are African American. “24” adds a twist.

Its day-in-the-life story arc centers on a plot to kill David Palmer, the first Black presidential candidate, a moderate with a real chance to win the White House (no apologies to Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton). "24"’s Jack Bauer, played by the scruffily handsome Kiefer Sutherland, is runs a federal Counter Terrorism Unit office in Los Angeles. Like Clinton, Bauer is an effective leader, but a personal fuck-up. “24”’s eye-popping split screens capture Bauer’s compartmentalized conscience.

Bauer soon learns that the assassins have ties within the Agency, and that they may be also involved with the kidnapping of his daughter. Jack Bauer’s mission is to keep hope alive—and if he fails, his daughter dies and the country will descend into race riots. “24”, too, is set in Los Angeles.

Unlike most Cold War spy-hero dramas, these stories require the intelligence community to be dirty. (Indeed, “The Agency” sucks because it has no such tension.) But most of the enemies will remain dark-skinned and conveniently foreign. You will probably not see agents providing military and intelligence training to guerillas with dubious political agendas who support their war-making by growing opium or coca. You will not see agents devastating the ghettos by cutting drugs-for-arms deals. You will not see the surveillance and harassment of nonviolent peace, anti-prison, and anti-globalization activists. You will not see dragnet roundups of thousands of innocent Arab, South Asian, and Muslim men and women. They will not be rescued from their indefinite detentions by lock-picking spooks like Sydney.

Sydney and Jack, along with the redundant cast of Cold-War dust-offs in “The Agency”, live in a safely fictional world in which Dark Alliances and COINTELPRO never occurred. The worlds are hermetically sealed, most secure from insecure global realities. A symptomatic theme is the loss of memory. In “Alias”, the Irishman who killed Sydney’s fiancé is a sleeper, remotely programmed by SD-6 to murder during black-outs that he can only recover during dream time. He is therefore completely innocent of his crimes. Sydney efficiently and obediently carries out her dual orders from the C.I.A. and SD-6. Whenever death happens, she is shocked anew to learn that her work has bloody consequences.

The “X-Files” never strayed far from the relationship of knowledge to justice: what you did not know could not only kill you, but millions of other innocents. But “24” and “Alias” operate on a “need to know” basis. Everything you need to know is right there on its shiny, quickly moving surfaces. As Karl Rove and Jack Valenti bring together politicians and entertainment execs to figure out new ways of collaborating in the New War, Sydney and Jack are signs of redemption. They bend “trust no one” into a closed question. They mark the end to Beltway/Hollywood culture-wars. They fight for an undivided America we want to remember, one that never existed. The new faces of central intelligence represent a future without a past, well insulated from the present.

Obama's Award Tour

2008-07-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

In Berlin, Germany, Barack Obama had a rally for 200,000 people. They wanted to believe.

Meanwhile, John McCain ate a bratwurst with businessmen and bored reporters in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio.

For the past week, Obama has been on award tour, and his message has been greeted with the kind of fervor that now makes U.S. reporters--overly sensitive to Clinton/McCain-esque charges that they are giving the guy kid-glove treatment--highly uneasy and eager to downplay.

Obama has modified his two Americas speech to talk about reconciling the world. In Germany, where at the Berlin Wall the First World once ended and the Second began, he said,

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

It was high theater. Obama was being consciously Reagan-like, consciously Kennedy-like, consciously presidential.

Earlier in the week, Iraq Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, despite being pressured by Bushites, signaled his agreement with Obama's call for withdrawal. Suddenly Obama's foreign policy didn't look plagued by inexperience, but blessed with prescience.

Meanwhile, McCain cancelled a visit to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico because of Hurricane Dolly. Then a massive oil spill along the Mississippi River in New Orleans kind of spoiled the whole idea that McCain might be able to steal Obama's thunder in the Mideast by championing the virtues of domestic drilling.

But for the Obama campaign--now well stocked with images of the true believers in Kabul, Ramallah, and Berlin to match those in Chicago, Boston, and Des Moines--the real battle will still be fought on home soil.

Despite Obama's award tour, he has not moved the meter much. He still has a slight lead in all national polls, and there are signs that at least one key red state--Florida--is getting grapes.

But with bad news coming down the wire every day on oil prices, mortgages, and the economy, the next month leading up to the conventions will look more like trench warfare than a love parade.

Welcome back Senator Obama. Back to the grind.

Nas On Fox And Colbert

2008-07-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Ferentz has the update here.

Nas Joins ColorOfChange To Put Fox News On Blast

2008-07-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Nas, ColorOfChange.org, and MoveOn.org will deliver petitions to Fox News signed by over 600,000 people protesting their racist coverage of people of color, particularly Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle.

“Fox poisons the country with racist propaganda and tries to call it news,” said Nas.

“Watch what you watchin', FOX keeps feeding us toxins, Stop sleeping, Start thinking.” he raps on his song "Sly Fox". “I pledge allegiance to the fair and balanced truth/Not the biased truth/Not the liar's truth/But the highest truth.”

The protest itself is historic, bringing together one of the top rappers with the two most dynamic political netroots organizations.

MoveOn.org launched the netroots revolution after 9/11 and now boasts over 3 million members. ColorOfChange.org is the largest netroots of color organization, with a membership of almost half a million members, and is best known for its national call for demonstrations in support of the Jena 6 last fall. Together the organizations launched protests than prevented Fox News from broadcasting a Democratic presidential debate last year.

ColorOfChange.org gathered the 620,217 signatures over the last month as Fox News's attacks on the Obamas increased, from the "terrorist fist jab" to "baby mama" comments.

National Hip-Hop Political Convention Opens In 2 Weeks

2008-07-17T15:29:00.000-07:00

Like most of the others, this one's xposted to Vibe.com...

Since the first National Hip-Hop Political Convention was held in Newark New Jersey in the summer of 2004, young voters have come to the polls in big turnouts, driven by a landmark surge of young voters of color. This surprised many long-time political observers, but not the organizers of the Convention—full disclosure: I was there—who had seen the growth of hip-hop activism and organizing around the country.

After the Convention, those efforts continued around the country, joined by high-profile voter registration campaigns by Diddy and Russell Simmons. Those efforts continue today. Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network has taken Hip-Hop Team Vote to a number of campuses. T.I. is joining the Hip-Hop Caucus's efforts to register and turn out young people to vote in 12 target states, including swing states like Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio.

When the third National Hip-Hop Political Convention opens in Las Vegas on July 30th—in the heart of another swing state, Nevada—it can boast of its role in expanding the field of hip-hop generation elected officials and candidates, including co-founder Rosa Clemente who will be addressing the body as the Green Party vice presidential candidate. Representatives of the Democratic and Republican National Committees will also be speaking. The focus will be the Convention's political agenda, first forged in Newark in 2004.

2008 Convention Chair Troy Nkrumah took time away from a heavy load of emails, text messages, and phone calls to talk with Vibe.com about the importance of the Convention and its agenda, and what role it hopes to play in this historic election and beyond.

Vibe: This is the third National Hip-Hop Political Convention. Why is it important to hold this convention in 2008?

Troy Nkrumah: The whole idea from the start was to develop a political agenda for the hip hop generation. The political agenda is a living document. It's not set in stone like the Ten Commandments. So the Convention needs to continue to happen to keep the agenda relevant. This convention is even more important than the last because there is more of a possibility of getting at least parts of this agenda implemented with the change of administration coming up. Now that we have people actually expressing that agenda on the national stage, then it makes the other parties look at it.

It's a time for us as the hip-hop generation to step up and say, we put this agenda out and now we want to see where people really stand on it and we're calling you to task. You can't take us for granted anymore.

Vibe: What are the main issues that you'll be pushing?

TN: The first one is the Katrina issue. We want to keep it fresh in everybody's minds that this has not been resolved. There are still people with no right to return because they can't afford to. We have issues on gender relations, exposing the troublesome sexual politics of the hip-hop generation. Criminal justice is going to be top on the agenda. We have artists and activists—Rebel Diaz, a rap group out of Chicago who were recently abused by NYPD, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, and Regina Kelley out of Texas who was thrown in jail by a drug task force over a confidential informant who lied.

Vibe: Over the last 4 years, there has been a sharp increase in numbers of young people and people of color going out to vote. A number of hip-hop generation candidates, such as Kevin Powell and Rosa Clemente, are running across the country. What role has the Convention played in developing the space for hip-hop generation candidates?

TN: After the first convention, I think a lot of people left Newark, New Jersey, with this feeling like,

'Why are we depending on these other candidates who will tell us whatever we want to hear, why don't we start our own people? So what we saw was a lot of people running for office,

running for school board or city council. And now we see people like Kevin Powell who has a really good chance of beating an incumbent. It's the work of the Convention to show people that it goes beyond demanding people recognize our agenda. If they're not going to, we have no choice but to run ourselves. This year we're going to push that a little further and start preparing for the mid-term elections in 2010.

It's hard to measure how much of an impact hip-hop activism has played. Some people say that it played a really big role, that the work that we did in 2003 and 2004 is the reason Obama can be taken seriously today. Without laying the foundation, a lot of young people would be still saying, 'The hell with voting. It doesn't do anything. But we've changed that perception.

It goes beyond the presidential elections. We didn't really take into consideration that the prosecutors and judges who are locking up a lot of Brown and Black people are in elected positions. So I think the 2004 convention educated a lot of the activist community in hip-hop to say we have to take the electoral part seriously. We can't depend on it as the only outlet. But they're using it against us, so why not switch it and use it for us?

Vibe: Do you expect we're going to see big interest in the elections this year?

TN: We know that there are going to be record turnouts at the polls. Now whether or not the elections are going to be fair and whether all the votes are going to be counted is a whole 'nother story. The question is: If Obama gets the election stolen from him, as did Gore and Kerry, is he going to be willing to fight it? Gore wasn't. Nor was Kerrey. If the elections are stolen again, if the Democrats don't step up to the plate, they're going to lose an entire generation putting their last bit of faith in the electoral system.

However, it's going to be powerful to see how big of an impact these young, first time progressive voters actually affect this election. If they do decide this election, then they can understand that they can decide every election. It's up to us—the activists, the organizers who do this year round—to channel that energy to go beyond November and make it a part of hip-hop culture.

Why The Papers Are Getting The Race Polls Wrong

2008-07-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

So many race polls, so little insight.

Today's sober NY Times poll on the presidential election and race relations comes to the very same conclusions that the wacky Washington Post poll—which turned into a game of "White People: So You Think You're Not Racist?"—found last month: Blacks really love Obama and whites kinda like McCain.

Good work, fellas!

The Obama campaign hit back hard this morning, saying basically, "Hey! A lot of whites other than his grandma actually like him. And Michelle, too."

White liberals like Bill Scher back them up. Scher notes that although Obama trails McCain by 9 points, he is running much better among whites than John Kerry did in 2004, especially among working-class whites.

The Times headline—"Obama's Run Isn't Closing Divide On Race"—is only half-right. In fact, the race polls on the race show that he may be running well enough among whites to secure enough votes to win. Why is the press not getting this?

Partly because, again big surprise, it's stuck in the past. Since the pivotal 1968 election, when Richard Nixon and George C. Wallace turned racial backlash into a Republican majority, the partisan divide has largely been a reflection of racial divide. Just as demagoguery on civil rights put African Americans in the blue column, demagoguery on immigration has put Latinos and Asian Americans there for decades to come.

In 2008, another demographic shift is on. Obama's coalition could forge a new majority, one rooted in large part by racially progressive, not reactionary, politics. The MSM is still very late to the game here.

Instead they have conflated two huge stories in these polls. The first story is whether or not Obama is leading in the race for the presidency. Here the evidence points solidly to a new majority.

The second is what does the race for the presidency say about race? This is an aspirational story. News editors are making the same leap that many people of color are making. (Which is not, in my opinion, a bad decision, even from the business/publishing side.)

They are jumping to this question: Would the election of Barack Obama improve race relations?

In both polls, whites are loudly saying, "No". Very few in the MSM have yet thought to ask, "Why?"

But there's where your real story is.

Kevin Powell :: It's Time For New Leadership

2008-07-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Vibe contributor Kevin Powell drops what he has said may be his last essay on the need for new Black leadership in today's Huffington Post.

It's a bomb. Not the kind of turn-the-other-cheek thing we have come to expect from Barack Obama every time he's dissed by an elder Black leader. He writes:

I certainly acknowledge and appreciate what the Civil Righters have done, but we younger African Americans are saying now, loudly, the jig is up and it is time for you to go, especially if you have not created hope and plans of action for our communities. The days of marching and protesting without a clear purpose are over. The days of voting for someone just because they are Black are over. Indeed, the multicultural legion of young Americans who've flocked to Obama's campaign suggest that we want leadership that builds bridges, not be stuck in the rhetoric and realities of the past.

Powell, of course, is in a battle to unseat Brooklyn Congressman Edolphus Towns. He's raised the kind of money and has the staff and machine that may make this September 9th primary competitive. Politicos predict Powell will run a close race in this changing district, a largely African American district with a sizable orthodox Jewish community that has also become more Latino and Afro-Caribbean in recent years.

Towns, a Baptist minister who has been in the position for 15 years, barely fought off a 3-way challenge in 2006 from Roger Green and City Councilman Charles Barron, who has endorsed Powell and who lost that race by only 4000 votes.

Powell's list of supporters is no joke. RZA, Chris Rock, ?uestlove, and Fab Five Freddy all made appearances at his big fundraiser last week. Gloria Steinem and Afeni Shakur have offered endorsements.

Although the blogosphere was abuzz with the news that the headliner, Dave Chappelle, didn't show, that will matter little on September 9th.

The intergenerational struggle that played out in 2002's Newark mayoral election between Corey Booker and Sharpe James, and again in this year's presidential election, most certainly will.

New Yorker Goes Imus On Obamas

2008-07-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker is having an Imus moment.

Today, it was slammed by the Obama campaign, Muslim Americans and African Americans for its July 21st cover of Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as Islamic terrorists doing a fist bump. See it here.

Bill Burton, spokesman for the Obama campaign, stated today, "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

(McCain's staff was like, "Ditto.")

A coalition of organizations, including hip-hop media justice organization Industry Ears, Muslim American media watch group Project Islamic Hope and the Los Angeles chapter of Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network, are calling for newsstands and stores to pull their magazines from its sales racks, and for advertisers to pull their ads immediately.

Paul Porter of Industry Ears, said to Vibe.com, "Afro's and AK 47's are no way to portray Michelle Obama. Add the Arab garb to Barack Obama and you achieve a racist satire."

He added, "We are just tired of the same old media bias game. It's always 'satire' with people of color when you're reaffirming fears and stereotypes. The New Yorker is just reinforcing and profiting from divisive media."

What were they thinking? Editor David Remnick told the Huffington Post this morning:

I respect people's reactions -- I'm just trying to as calmly and as clearly as possible talk about what this image means and what it was intended to mean and what I think most people will see -- when they think it through -- that it means. The fact is, it's not a satire about Obama - it's a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.

Writing in today's Huffington Post, author and satirist Leonce Gaiter calls the image "red meat for Red States" and says,

There seem to be two possibilities. The first: they truly find the idea depicted in the image so ridiculous that they couldn't conceive of anyone taking it seriously. However, if that were the case, there'd be no need for the satire in the first place. Attempting to satirize it acknowledges the idea's prevalence.

The other possibility is that somewhere, deep in the recesses of their upper east and west side white minds, lurks a restive "fear of black." To provide such an image without context is to accept its message to some degree. No similar cartoon would have ever appeared about a white candidate.

As I've noted in earlier blogs, polls show that up to 15% of the country believes Barack Obama is Muslim, roughly the same percentage that also tells pollsters they wouldn't vote for him because he is Black.

HKR Radio :: Rosa Clemente On Her VP Run

2008-07-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

Here's Rosa Clemente on yesterday's Hard Knock Radio discussing her VP run. (Streaming audio)

Green Party Taps Hip-Hop Activist Rosa Clemente For VP

2008-07-09T10:26:00.001-07:00

Signaling it is serious about courting the hip-hop vote, Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has tapped respected hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente as her Vice Presidential pick.

If the Green Party accepts McKinney's nomination this weekend at its convention, Clemente will make history as the first hip-hop generation candidate on a presidential ticket, and together with McKinney make up the first all-female of color ticket in U.S. history. McKinney is African American. Clemente identifies herself as Puerto Rican of African descent.

Clemente joins Brooklyn Congressional candidate Brooklyn Congressional candidate Kevin Powell as another prominent hip-hop writer/activist competing in the 2008 elections. Maryland hip-hop activist and scholar Jared Ball also competed for the Green Party presidential nomination, ending his run this past January.

"This campaign is the opportunity the Hip-Hop generation has been working for," Clemente wrote in an email to supporters this morning. "This is our time to address the issues affecting our communities - rising unemployment, the high cost of food and housing, a lack of quality public education and access to higher education, the prison-industrial complex, and unaccountable corporate media. These issues are not being addressed by either the Republican or Democratic nominee."

Clemente has been one of the most prominent national hip-hop activists for nearly a decade. She was one of the co-founders of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and of REACHip-Hop, a New York City-based coalition that launched a boycott of Hot 97 for greater accountability and balance on the airwaves. Affiliated with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Clemente has been a prominent national organizer around securing aid to Gulf Coast victims of Katrina, and against the verdicts in the Sean Bell case.

Clemente's potential VP run was welcomed by many in the hip-hop community.

"I've never voted in the Presidential election; I've never felt strongly enough about a candidate to, said rapper M1 of Dead Prez. "I feel that now is the greatest opportunity for the Hip-Hop community to put our collective strength and power to the test and vote for someone who represents who we are and what we stand for."

"It's a good sign of political maturity for hip-hop," Troy Nkrumah, 2008 Chair of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, said of Clemente's run. "There are issues we've been screaming about to the candidates and they've ignored them--whether police accountability, the prison system, or the war in Iraq. They touch the issues on the surface, they talk about change, but their policies are in line with Bush. A lot of us were turned off."

"But Rosa is one of the people that knows we need systemic change, especially the youth community," he added. "She has a history of speaking her mind, not holding her tongue, and telling the truth."

McCain :: My Crew, My Dogs

2008-07-08T11:24:00.000-07:00

Late-breaking polls show that Obama is deeply in trouble with one key demographic.

If the election were held today, the AP-Yahoo poll all but guarantees McCain would stomp Obama among--angry rednecks? white women? retired army generals?--no, dog-owners.

Said one voter, "I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person - caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners."

McCain owns 2 dogs, an English springer spaniel and a mutt.

While currently petless, Obama has announced he is buying his girls a dog when the election is over, win or lose.

Big Boi, holla at your candidate. The future of the nation could depend on it.

Rinku Sen on Immigration and The Meaning of July 4th

2008-07-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

A great piece here by Rinku, publisher of Colorlines and the president of ARC::

On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970's, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs -- straight from a can. Hotdogs were "invented" by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren't considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880's, the press reported these incidents as "race riots."

I'll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hotdogs, we'll have tacos, samosas, falafel. According to one side of immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn't want them, or us.

Young Jeezy & The Power of Words

2008-07-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

No disrespect to Young Jeezy, but he's been spinning like a Korean b-boy this past week after jumping in the presidential cypher in this month's cover story.

Jeezy raised eyebrows when he told Benjamin Meadows-Ingram:

"No disrespect to my man Barack, but I f**ked with John McCain. He greeted me like a god."

But by yesterday, the rapper had issued a press release and a video saying that no, he in fact supports Obama.

(You think I could have ever written something like I just did back when MC Eiht was first saying, "Geeeeeeeaaaahh"? When you have to show you're gangsta by saying you vote and you vote Democratic and you vote Black and you quote Aristotle to support that, something big has just happened.)

Jeezy says that the whole episode taught him "the power of words." I wish he had thought about that when he was writing his lyrics for "Love In This Club".

But now that he's moved beyond bagging groceries, he had some profound thoughts on the elections in his MTV interview:

"..my mama is about to have surgery that I gotta pay for out of my pocket because she can't get insurance. I don't really feel McCain. It ain't just because Barack is Black; he can make change. Just like Bush equals recession, Barack equals progression. I really feel that, all bullsh-- aside. He's gotta come in and keep it right."

Which goes to what many of us have been saying all along: if folks felt free to rap more about what they actually think, rather than what they think they need to in order to get money (to pay for health insurance and other sh*t), it'd be a different world right now.

Jeezy says he'll be putting up a song called "My President Is Black" on his website the Monday after July 4th.

Me? My head is still spinning.

2G2K Circus :: Obama as Billy Beane?

2008-07-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

Uh oh! Ferentz went there by comparing Barack Obama to Billy Beane. Here we go now.

While I love the equating the two people who probably most inspire in me the most intense mix of fanboy awe and bar-side cynicism, I'm not sure the analogy is perfect. You might say that the campaign is Billy Beane-like, and the candidate is much older-school.

I think Michael Lewis was trying to show how Billy Beane had rationalized the game for the 21st Century, removed it from the mystical realm of old scouts and false indicators. And I think he did it because Oakland is one of the poorest drawing teams in the league--we're consistently in the bottom quarter, I mean, shit, we're moving to freakin Fremont.

He's the epitome of the restless Adam Smith-style capitalist, relentlessly destroying the team to remake it. He's probably the least wedded to narrative of anyone in the game. Every die-hard A's fan--of which I am beyond one--knows their heart will get broken in the fall.

Nick Swisher or Danny Haren or Tim Hudson or Miguel Tejada--Miguel Tejada! whom Beane found on the cheap in the DR and built up from a scrawny little, um, beanpole into one of the best in the game--all of these were heroes who conformed to Oakland's sense of underdog love and bootstrap pride. None of them got the long-term contract, and all of them were traded before their time.

The story Billy Beane delivers every year is this one: we'll have a new crop of underachivers, outcasts, past-their-prime stars, and hot young stars on the field. And then when the year's over, we'll lose half of them--some to bigger paychecks (the Hankees, the Gnats) and some to oblivion. But don't get too attached.

That's certainly the mentality of the permanent party operatives, especially Dems who have been mainly out of power for the last forty years. The candidate is the candidate, and next year there will be another. Obama is Mr. Field of Dreams, though, and that's why I agree with your conclusion. The campaign may be underestimating the damage it is doing with the standard post-primary rightward swing thing.

I think the essential tug-of-war in the Democratic party is between its idealism and its pragmatism. Most long-time observers don't want to go there--they correctly point to 1968 and 1972 as times when this intraparty fight ended in disaster.

But no one can get to a new majority without some leaps of imagination, and that's where numbers, statistics, and damn lies can strand this presidential campaign like the last two.

Actually Don't Read My Posts

2008-07-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

Just read Humanity Critic. Man! I should just quit.

The Long Days Of Obama's Summer

2008-07-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Ain't no fun being Obama these days. Just ask the candidate, who cracked to the press corps the other day, "It's not allowed."

Although his lead in the polls seems to be holding steady, he's been caught out there in the long days of summer. A lot of it is of his own making, as he moves his campaign to the right for the general election after a long primary season that was about motivating his base on the left.

Obama has riled them by refusing public financing after promising he would, reversing his position to back a law that allows the government to use telecom companies in warrantless wiretapping, and throwing Wesley Clark under a bus over his comments on McCain's time in the military.

By yesterday, folks were scratching their heads.

To recap: Obama likes campaign finance reform but refuses spending limits. He opposes government spying and media consolidation, but if the two issues come together, he'll reconsider. He says McCain's war experience does not automatically make him the best presidential candidate, but if another military man voices the same thing, it's wrong. What happened?

And on top of all that, Obama is also under fire for receiving campaign support from Chicago slumlord developers, who took advantage of weakened federal oversight and enforcement to secure federal funds to gentrify Chicago and leave affordable housing in shambles. Plus a quarter of Americans still think he's unpatriotic, and a tenth believe he's Muslim.

It's getting hot in here.

No wonder he's now begun making a point of his opposition to initiatives that would ban gay marriage. (It was the headline in today's San Francisco Chronicle.)

One initative will be on the ballot in California-where Governor Schwarzenegger holds the same position and Obama is expected to win easily. The other is in Arizona, McCain's home state, where the Republican candidate declared his support for the ban. The last will play out in Florida, and we all know about Florida.

Here's the question many Obama supporters are raising now: is he simply doing the same thing the Republicans have been doing for their conservative base for years--playing up cultural issues while backsliding on some of the most important economic and political ones? Will issues like gay marriage, affirmative action, and green jobs simply become triangulation for the same old politics of big money and bad government?

That wouldn't be change now, would it?

A Final Farewell To Cody's

2008-07-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Matt Richtel says one last goodbye to Cody's. We'll all miss it deeply.

How Korean B-Boys Took Over The World

2008-06-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Rivers Crew in the flow.
Photo by the incomparable magnificent Joe Conzo. Biters will be beheaded.

My piece on R16 and the evolution of Korean b-boying is finally done and up. Big big big up to the super-supreme Joy Yoon, the R16 lifers in Seoul and New York (you know who you is), my patient fixers/translators James, Erica, Anna, and Joe and all of the dancers, producers, and rappers, whom I met but couldn't include, especially Sean II Slow who hosted us for an evening at his studio in Hongdae.

A teaser here:

This summer, the United States is reaching new heights of dance fever as TV shows like Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" and MTV's "Randy Jackson Presents: America's Top Dance Crew" have returned to the airwaves. MTV's runaway hit is considered especially cutting edge, showcasing hip-hop dance groups from across America. But if MTV really wants the best dance crew, it should be looking in South Korea.

"Of the top six or seven crews in the world, I'd say half of them are from Korea," says Christopher "Cros One" Wright, 33, an American dance promoter and b-boy who was recently in Suwon, South Korea, to judge the second annual global invitational hip-hop dance competition, called R16, that was held at the end of May.

The development of South Koreans' hip-hop dancing could be seen a cultural parallel to their sharp global ascendance in electronics and automaking. A decade ago, Koreans were struggling to imitate the Bronx-style b-boy and West Coast funk styles that are the backbone of the genre. Now, a handful of these crews are the safest bets to win any competition anywhere.

Certainly no country takes its hip-hop dance more seriously. The Korean government -- through its tourism board and the city of Suwon -- invested nearly $2 million in this year's competition. Two of the most successful teams, Gamblers and Rivers, have been designated official ambassadors of Korean culture. Once considered outcasts, the b-boys now seem to embody precisely the kind of dynamic, dexterous and youthful excellence that the government wants to project.

Although hip-hop dance goes back at least 35 years, the top Korean b-boys trace their histories back just 11 years, to 1997, the Year Zero of Korean breaking. By 2001, the first year that a Korean crew entered the Battle of the Year -- the world's biggest b-boy contest -- they won "best show" honors and a fourth-place trophy. Every year since, a Korean crew has placed first or second. Says Battle of the Year founder Thomas Hergenrother, "Korea is on a different planet at the moment."

...

The full thang is here. If ya dig, then Digg. If ya buzz, then Buzz.

BTW here's my earlier wrap-up on R16 and direct links to the semis and finals videos.

Is The Republican Party Dead?

2008-06-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

In his blog, Ferentz asks the question of the week: "What on earth happened to the Republicans?"

Topical, yeah?

It's the question behind Joe Bruno's surprising resignation from the New York State Senate, which in the long term, could mean a shift in state power back to the Dems for decades to come.

It's the question behind Scott McClellan's supposed imminent conversion to the Democratic party.

And it's the topic on the table for the cover of Harper's Magazine this month, as conservatives Kevin Phillips, Scott McConnell and others weigh in under the banner headline: WHY THE GOP MUST DIE.

The upshot is that the party of Bush and Rove have led conservatives into a blind alley with the wars and the economy because they insisted on governing from the Right with a paper-thin majority.

It's fun to see conservatives putting their own party on blast. Here's Phillips: "A major Republican weakness that doesn't get noticed is their inability, despite all their macho muscle-flexing, to bring foreign wars to a successful finish." Zing!

And it's also great to see folks who really understand that demographic changes force Democrats to forge a new majority not merely to pander to soccer moms and angry white men. Of course, these guys don't work for the Democrats. They're way too smart for that.

So before Democrats get too happy, some words of warning from Phillips, the most compelling conservative ever:

PHILLIPS :: ...the public showed that it can produce a significant swing in 2006, in electoral terms. But the issues on which they suppopsedly voted are not being addressed. How do you vote to get everybody out of Iraq for example? Vote for the Democrats? That hasn't worked so far.

MCCONNELL :: And it cuts both ways. The people who have been voting Republican for the past thirty years on cultural rather than class issues--i.e. culturally conservative Reagan Democrats--have gotten nothing for their votes either. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they are going to stop voting Republican.

KEVIN BAKER, Harper's Magazine contributing editor :: It's like you have this weird inversion of Tammany. They don't get you out of jail, they don't give you a turkey at Christmas, they don't do anything for you, and yet somehow they keep winning.

THOMAS SCHALLER, professor University of Maryland :: The irony is that today the government has far more power than in the past. It is a much larger part of the economy, and so when it moves a lever, it can expect a dramatic effect.

PHILLIPS :: And yet people increasingly seem to believe that their votes don't matter, that these parties aren't any different from each other. It's all just a big game. Democrats are the not-Republicans and Republicans are the non-Democrats. And if None Of The Above could be on the ballot, it would scare the bejesus out of everybody. What a choice that would be!

Breakin' The Vote! :: The Best PrObama Video Yet

2008-06-25T09:39:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of Shecky Green...

Muslims, Obama, And The Potential Perils of Victory

2008-06-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on a well-reported piece about the Obama campaign's apparent Islamophobia. The piece resonates with a number of things I've been writing about, right up through yesterday.

I was writing about communities of color expecting a certain kind of "change" in Obama's message, that is, a greater push for racial justice.

Here's Minha Husaini, an Muslim American in her 30s now working in the Obama campaign:

“He gives me hope,” Ms. Husaini said in an interview last month, shortly before she joined the campaign on a fellowship. But she sighed when the conversation turned to his denials of being Muslim, “as if it’s something bad,” she said.

In fact, the article reports, the campaign is even stricter about regulating Obama's appearances--and even the appearance of subordinates--at Muslim American events, culminating in last week's resitting of two young women wearing hijabs. Obama himself called the young women to apologize.

Truth be told, for many Muslim American activists and other grassroots progressives, the Obama campaign can be, at best, a big buzzkill machine and, at worst, a wheel-shattering brake on "change" and "hope".

Throughout the primaries, Muslim groups often failed to persuade Mr. Obama’s campaign to at least send a surrogate to speak to voters at their events, said Ms. Ghori, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Before the Virginia primary in February, some of the nation’s leading Muslim organizations nearly canceled an event at a mosque in Sterling because they could not arrange for representatives from any of the major presidential campaigns to attend. At the last minute, they succeeded in wooing surrogates from the Clinton and Obama campaigns by telling each that the other was planning to attend, Mr. Bray said.

The most frustrated surrogate of all is Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, the nation's first Muslim congressman, who has seen efforts to bring the Muslim communities in greater contact with Obama stopped dead by the campaign.

It's hard not to notice that this is where the "change" message gets run over by the still largely white mainstream Democratic party operatives who control Obama's campaign. Again, to all those who want to complain about allegedly coalition-fragmenting "identity politics", here are the real identity politics at work.

Muslims, like other communities of color, confront this problem: Do you trust the candidate to do right once elected or do you accede to the reality of the campaign and sit it out?

Which leads to the second thread I've been talking about: the fact of formerly marginalized communities becoming (re)energized in the electoral process over the last 8 years--whether the young, women, communities of color, or non-Christians.

These minorities are facing the difficulty of moving their vote from emergent to insurgent, from one that can get ignored or vaguely patronized to one that can make things happen.

Here's the article again on the Muslim American vote:

American Muslims have experienced a political awakening in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. Before the attacks, Muslim political leadership in the United States was dominated by well-heeled South Asian and Arab immigrants, whose communities account for a majority of the nation’s Muslims. (Another 20 percent are estimated to be African-American.) The number of American Muslims remains in dispute as the Census Bureau does not collect data on religious orientation; most estimates range from 2.35 million to 6 million.

A coalition of immigrant Muslim groups endorsed George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign, only to find themselves ignored by Bush administration officials as their communities were rocked by the carrying out of the USA Patriot Act, the detention and deportation of Muslim immigrants and other security measures after Sept. 11.

As a result, Muslim organizations began mobilizing supporters across the country to register to vote and run for local offices, and political action committees started tracking registered Muslim voters. The character of Muslim political organizations also began to change.

“We moved away from political leadership primarily by doctors, lawyers and elite professionals to real savvy grass-roots operatives,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, a political group in Washington. “We went back to the base.”

In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.

By itself, these kinds of elections are transformative. They will help build lines of access to change for the communities. No one who is serious about gaining power can ignore the electoral process.

But what happens when groups turn out, get their candidate elected, but still can't influence the process?

If Obama wins, this is a problem Muslim Americans, communities of color, and all those minorities who took the mantra of "hope" and "change" to heart may find themselves in by the middle of 2009.

That's about when the new majority that the Democrats didn't really want and certainly didn't know how to create starts making its claims.

The Politics of Identity Politics

2008-06-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

Last weekend's Washington Post/ABC poll of white and Black voters racial attitudes revealed, well, not much at all.

The headline was "3 in 10 Americans Admit To Racial Bias". According to this poll, when asked the useless question of whether one experiences "feelings of personal racial prejudice", Blacks (34% of respondents) rate worse than whites (30%). (I say Black respondents are more truthful. Meanwhile, yellow and brown apparently are still not worth polling at all.)

But the piece really focused on some obscure "racial sensitivity index" whose methodology apparently couldn't be fully disclosed for fear someone might actually call b.s. on it. According to this fantastical statistical invention, whites who have a Black friend on speed-dial, just bought a brownstone in Harlem, and have downloaded a Weezy mixtape in the last 3 years are about 20% more likely to vote for Barack Obama thank their Lil Abner cousins.

(In the fog of a rowdy Saturday night wedding reception, I watched Sunday morning pundits making big hay of this "fact". Not to stereotype unfairly, but White Northeastern pundits shouldn't be so self-congratulatory. If I was a Southern white, well, I guess I wouldn't hate 'em any less than I do now. You see? I don't stereotype unfairly.)

So after creating a thoroughly bunk way of measuring how racist white American voters actually are--the numbers go: 21% "congratulations you're not racist", 50% "you're pretty much not racist or probably you are a little", and 29% "you're embarrassing to us so please stay home unless John King needs to interview you"--much of the poll's conclusions are completely useless.

Or just plain tiresome. Of the racially insensitive 29%, the Post intones, "Obama has some convincing to do..." Yes, colored folk--when your boss calls you a terrorist-fist-bumping radical Muslim baby daddy, you must excuse him and tell him nicely no, he's wrong, would he like to have a conversation about it. (Please excuse us if we spit instead.)

What was news to me was that the gaps in perceptions of race relations are as bad as they were on the eve of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as "not so good" or "poor," while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination.

Right.

After Katrina, No Child Left Behind, Incarceration Nation, and two oil wars, it's apparently more difficult than ever to find any consensus that race relations aren't so great and racial discrimination still exists.

That's not just depressing, it's "two Americas" depressing to both of my consciousnesses.

But wait it gets worse.

To wit:

Many think Obama has the potential to transform current racial politics. Nearly six in 10 believe his candidacy will shake up the racial status quo, for better or worse.

...

African Americans are much more optimistic than whites on this score: Sixty percent said Obama's candidacy will do more to help race relations, compared with 38 percent of whites.

Is it possible that Blacks--and the great, underpolled mass of Latinos and Asian Americans (who will likely vote Obama in much greater majorities than whites)--place too much faith that Obama can reverse the national course on institutional racism?

And why are whites--who say they are overwhelmingly ready to elect a "Black president" (one almost hears the caveat "if he's qualified" being attached like a reflex)--less likely to believe that race relations will get better if Obama wins? Do they know what's in the Kool-Aid? Or are they are sober about what may happen if Obama actually challenges white privilege?

It's impossible not to appreciate the kind of Jackie Robinson-like line Barack Obama must walk right now in this campaign. All of this comes in the face of the growing list of white pundits who would presume to lecture Obama on just how to win white voters, from the soccer moms to the lunchpail dads. Yes, forget all you've heard about angry feminists and people of color and feminists of color, because here are the real identity politics at work.

For as unilluminating as this poll is, it poses a key question for Obama's supporters and anyone concerned with racial justice, not just "feelings of racial prejudice": how do you find and engage those who don't want to know what change really looks like?

Marc Bamuthi Joseph's "the break/s" Opens In The Bay!!!

2008-06-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

Yerba Buena Center For The Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco
Thursday, June 19th, 8:00pm
Friday, June 20th, 8:00pm (with post-show discussion!)
Saturday, June 21th, 8:00pm

This is it folks!

I've been honored and privileged to follow my man Bamuthi around the Bay and across the country to Louisville and Minneapolis as he has brought this brilliant work to life. It's his very personal take on hip-hop's roots and future in the age of globalization, and it's a masterful performance. It's already drawn rave notices and sold-out crowds at the prestigious Humana and Spoleto Festivals this year, and at its world premiere at the Walker Art Center.

the break/s is a mixtape for the stage, and Bamuthi's performance is blessed with live music by DJ Excess and Tommy Shepherd aka Soulati, choreography by Stacy Printz, multimedia visuals by Eli Jacobs-Fauntauzzi and David Szlasa. It was dramaturged by Brian Freeman, and directed by Michael John Garces. I really think it's a new level of hip-hop theatre.

You might hear Bamuthi say that he was inspired by Can't Stop Won't Stop, but the truth is that large portions of my book were inspired by his lyricality and vision. In fact, my upcoming book project was catalyzed by his trilogy of plays--Word Becomes Flesh, Scourge, and now, the break/s, as you'll see...!

If you're in the Bay, you get three chances to see it this weekend on Bamuthi's home turf. Click above or here to get tickets before it sells out. After that, it's on to the Kennedy Center in D.C. and the Skirball in NYC and beyond...

Here's what they're already saying...

"Mr. Joseph is a naturally captivating dancer, moving with transfixing grace at any number of speeds. The performance is gloriously eloquent. . ."
--The New York Times

"Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s world premiere the break/s, a "mixtape for the stage” as the subtitle describes it, is an impressive extension of hip-hop as an art form. Wheeling through speech, rhythmic spoken word, dance, beat-box, and mixed beats and mixed film, is a story at once personal and universal, a story about identity, race, and love—an important story for our time."
--Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine

"...many have written about it. But I’ve never seen the paradox of double consciousness expressed in theatrical form the way that Marc Bamuthi Joseph did with the break/s, which ended a mere three-show run at the Spoleto Festival USA over the weekend. Like Amistad, it cut to the quick of the American soul. But unlike Amistad, it’s fresher and far more touching."
--Charleston City Paper

+ KQED's Spark interview (video)

+ Smithsonian Magazine Innovators (article)

+ Youth Speaks homepage

2G2K Circus Returns! :: Talking Michelle + Affirmative Action

2008-06-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

Our man in Brooklyn Ferentz LaFargue is back, after forswearing these crazy elections as bad for his health. Nope, Fox's "Baby Mama" drama has pulled him off the fence.

He writes:

...Fox is not a news network, the only difference between them and The Daily Show is that most people, or rather most people that I know, don't find their sense of humor funny. It's one thing to poke fun at racism and xenophobia like Colbert and Stewart sometimes do, but it's completely something else to perpetually peddle racist and xenophobic viewpoints.

Isn't it funny--wrong word hmm--that their actual attempt at a humor show failed so miserably? Kinda like the Democrats for most of the past three decades. When you get a choice between fake humor and faker humor, you choose the fake.

While we're on the topic of Michelle, Jalylah pointed out Linda Hirshman's stupefyingly bad reading, as in so bad it seems deliberate, of Kimberle Crenshaw's idea of intersectionality. Jalylah and others see Hirshman as trying to redefine feminism as a privileged white women's thing, so they don't find it suprising that Hirshman and others have had nothing to say about about the Don Imusing of Michelle Obama.

This election has been fascinating in the way it's revived all of the passionate debates of the 90s around identity. So the affirmative action debate is back like neon breakers' jackets.

A few weeks back there was an article on Obama and race in which the author--let's just say his background makes him likely part of the Lieberman constituency--gratuitously called on Obama to completely disavow affirmative action as a way of winning the white vote. He won't need to, polls show him doing exactly what he needs to do to win the election. (See the post below...) But I don't doubt Ward Connerly's efforts to eradicate affirmative action in Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona and Missouri (swing states all with the exception of Nebraska...yes, even Arizona) will keep the issue live going into November...

Does McCain Have A Chance?

2008-06-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Sure, it's only June. We're only halfway through the 3rd quarter. But things don't look good for the senator from Arizona.

Obama is consolidating. He hired Clinton's former campaign chief and got Al Gore to endorse him yesterday. McCain is out on the stump fighting off comparisons to George W. Bush.

The latest poll shows Obama winning the election 49% to 45%.

Previous polls had Obama leading McCain amongst all the groups Hillary Clinton warned he might be soft in--women, Hispanics, Catholics, working-class voters. This latest poll confirms some of those numbers.

Obama leads among men by 7 points and women by 6. True, he trails McCain among whites overall by 12 points, but Kerry lost by 25 and Gore lost by 24.

Historians--people who get paid to think about this stuff for a living--don't rate McCain's chances at all. Look at who he gets compared to--Adlai Stevenson in 1952, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1980, folks who just got murked at the polls.

McCain is ahead 20 points among married white women, and splits the independents. But independents are clearly against the war, and feminists are solidly supporting Obama. Obama's "50-state strategy" is aimed at winning over folks on the fence with old-school community organizing-style person-to-person appeals in their neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the biggest worry for McCain is that he can't seem to get folks excited about his candidacy. That's a long-term problem: he won't be able to raise the money he needs or develop a sufficient ground operation if he can't rally his base. On the other hand, dismissed Republican candidate Ron Paul's supporters are preparing a huge rally in Minneapolis the week that the GOP formally nominates McCain there.

Well, that should be fun.

"Baby Mama" Drama For Michelle Obama

2008-06-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

2008's Imus moment went down last night.

Where else? On Fox News.

A chyron on the following clip from Fox News reads "Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking On Obama's Baby Mama!"

Nice to be reminded of how far we've come in this post-racial nation from, um, "Nappy Headed Hos".

Or maybe last week with that "Terrorist Jab" fist-bump.

Here's the video. Check out Michelle Malkin for added irony.

I'm certain you'll be hearing about this a lot more from my esteemed Vibe bloggers and many others--Oprah, where ya at?--but in the meantime, some questions...

Damn. If Hillary brought out the misogyny in (far too many) pundits, where are they headed with Michelle?

Will Hillary supporters so outraged by sexism they are vowing to vote for McCain come back to the fold now? Or will they, as Tim Wise wrote last week, continue to let their whiteness show?

Are those male civil rights leaders going to make any noise about this? You know who I'm talking about.

Will Fox News blame their stupidity on hip-hop?

Idle Hands :: Why The Candidates Must Focus On America's Youth

2008-06-11T08:01:00.001-07:00

This summer could be the worst ever for teens looking for work, according to experts. Less than one in three youths may find summer jobs.

In recent years, the youth jobless rate has soared to record highs. In cities like Chicago, three in four teens, including seven in eight Black teens, did not work in 2006. But this summer could mark the highest level of youth joblessness since the end of World War II.

The shrinking economy and rising unemployment rates are to blame, as laid-off workers compete with young people for shrinking piece of the pie. Budget cuts have led to the ending of federal, state, and city youth jobs programs.

But the biggest problem is a lack of political interest.

Earlier this year, George W. Bush and Democratic Congressional leadership killed a $1 billion proposal to create youth jobs. At the same time, the Justice Department gave a $500,000 grant to a George H.W. Bush-chaired golf program supposedly meant to stop juvenile crime.

"We need something really attractive to engage the gangs and the street kids," the Justice Department's administrator was quoted as saying. "Golf is the hook."

Dozens of other effective programs were denied. Many grants were disbursed via affirmative action for friends of the administration, the domestic equivalent of handing out no-bid work to firms for "Iraqi reconstruction".

It was still more proof that politicians have neither a clue nor a care as to how to really address the needs of young Americans.

The team at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies has been trying to call attention to the historic rise in youth joblessless. But in a recent shocking, but sadly not-yet-influential report, they posed the question right in the title: "Does Anybody Care?" The issue has not been raised in any of the presidential debates.

But the Center's researchers say the developing trend represents nothing less than "the collapse of the teen job market". They sketch the problem in starkest terms for youth of color. Even the poorest white teens are more likely to find work than the wealthiest Black teens. Wealthy white teens are two and a half times more likely to be employed than the poorest Black teens, whose employment rate was merely 18.9% last summer.

They write, "Low income, Black and Hispanic teens face the equivalent of a Great Depression."

Bob Herbert from the New York Times outlined the consequences in a recent editorial:

There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small -- and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: "I hustle," which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor's car to running the occasional errand.

Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.

To the hip-hop generation--and the authorities charged with containing it--this is all hardly news.

Violent crime rates, which have taken disturbing leaps in some inner cities over the past few years, tend to rise during the summer. Idle hands are the devil's tools. But this is an extreme--and simplistic--way to understand a deep problem.

Experts make an economic argument. Idled hands mean less productivity for the nation. Idled minds mean decreased competitiveness in the global economy now and in the future.

There is another argument: youths who want work and cannot find it are being sent the wrong message. Is this a country that really respects hard work if it places no value on creating work?

Indeed, what message does this nation want to send its young?

John F. Kennedy famously implored a new generation not to ask what their country could do for them, but to ask what they could do for their country. In 1963, he followed up with a wide-ranging address outlining the nation's responsibility to its young. In it, he discussed the creation of the Peace Corps, a National Service Corps, and a youth jobs program. He said, "The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth."

What does it mean that, almost a half century later, young Americans face record rates of joblessness?

Since the '60s, youth policy has less often been discussed in terms of harnessing energies, than in terms of suppressing problems. There has been a massive shift towards harsher criminal and juvenile justice policies. The stunning rise in youth joblessness is a symptom of a larger national neglect, a neglect that is interrupted only by--ironic at best, disingenuous at worst--episodes of hand-wringing over young people's corruptibility and directionlessness. Punishment, it seems, has been the only coherent national youth policy since Kennedy.

Senator McCain, perhaps unsurprisingly, has been mostly silent on these issues, save vows to clean up the student loan mess. But even Senator Obama, who has clearly benefited by the enthusiasm of the young and who understands perhaps better than any politician youths' skepticism toward politics, has not yet outlined a place for them in his vision of America.

He supports focusing closely on job development and student achievement in 20 impoverished areas, what he calls "Promise Neighborhoods". More intriguingly, he backs a program of green-collar jobs for inner-city youths first pioneered by hip-hop activists in the Bay Area. But even these worthy programs are hardly more than a drop in the bucket, and don't by themselves add up to anything close to a national youth policy.

Senator Obama knows that the creative energies of young people can never be underestimated. In his interview with Vibe last year, he noted that hip-hop is a vast make-work project, a way of harnessing and channeling vast energies of young people. (This is partly why the up-by-the-bootstraps mythology--a narrative easily twisted into a celebration of consumerism that demagogues are then quick to criticize--has become so deeply interwoven into hip-hop culture.) But how could hip-hop be enough to reverse Great Depression-sized problems?

After four decades of the politics of abandonment and containment, now is the time for the presidential candidates to recognize young Americans are more than just a vote to be courted through late-night TV, more than a wellspring of videos, posters, music, and art, more than just an enthusiastic rally crowd.

Inspiration has been good, hope has been good, but both are not good enough.

The candidates must put young America to work, and involve the rest of us in taking full measure of the future promise of our nation.

More Beef Protests In Korea

2008-06-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

Seoul in motion.

From today's New York Times:

Speaking to a group of businessmen at his office, Mr. Lee gave his first comment on the massive rally against his four-month-old government that brought at least 100,000 people into the streets of Seoul on Tuesday and prompted his entire cabinet to offer to resign.

The beef protests have dealt a sharp blow to Mr. Lee, who was elected in December championing a new “pragmatic” approach to ties with Washington.

He made rebuilding South Korea’s political and economic alliance with the United States his top priority, while taking a much harder line on North Korea than his predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

Bush administration officials have expressed hopes that Mr. Lee’s firm stance on North Korea’s nuclear program, which reversed South Korea’s previous policy to embrace its neighbor, could persuade the North to end its nuclear program. North Korea promised to dismantle its nuclear weapons facilities under an international accord that has yet to achieve lasting results.

Both Mr. Lee and President Bush also hoped that Mr. Lee’s decision in April to end the five-year ban on American beef would help win support in Congress for a free-trade agreement struck between the governments last year, thus improving relations while helping to revive the sluggish South Korean economy.

But some South Korean analysts say Mr. Lee may now come under pressure to take a less accommodating line with Washington.

Mr. Lee was himself a former student activist imprisoned by the country’s then military regime. During the current protests, many student protesters called Mr. Lee “authoritarian” and in his comments Wednesday the president appeared to have understood the irony.

“As a former participant in a pro-democracy student movement myself, I had many thoughts watching yesterday’s demonstration," Mr. Lee was quoted as saying by his office. "My government intends to have a new beginning with a new resolution."

...

Seoul reverberated with antigovernment slogans until well past midnight. While people marched by candlelight, loudspeakers blared the songs South Koreans used to sing during their struggle against the military dictators of the 1970s and 1980s.

The protests Tuesday took place on the 21st anniversary of the huge pro-democracy demonstrations that helped end authoritarian rule. Overhead, balloons carried banners that said "Judgment day for Lee Myung-bak" and "Renegotiate the beef deal." One widely distributed leaflet said, "Mad cow drives our people mad!"

The agriculture minister, Chung Won-chun, visited the protest site to offer an apology in a speech, but protesters quickly surrounded him, chanting "Traitor!" and he was forced to leave.

Mr. Lee urged the police and protesters to avoid clashes. He promised to be "humble before the people’s voices" and called for national unity to overcome an economic crisis spawned by stagnant growth and surging prices for oil and other raw materials.

Robots Take Credit For Clinton Defeat

2008-06-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

The robots declare victory over the Clintons.

Really, what's not to love about robots, especially if they live to avenge hip-hop or if they look like Grace Park?

Into The Mind Of Ned Sublette

2008-06-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

Credits:: Ned Sublette, Jennifer Kotter and Bomb Magazine

Bomb Magazine's website features an interview with Ned Sublette by the great Jamaican-American journalist Garnette Cadogan. It's an amazing read, offering Ned's bracing worldview via the history of New Orleans.

It's a taster of the complete argument he lays out in The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, a red pill of a book that reframes the entirety of American history and music. Fuck what you know about John Adams or Bob Dylan. (Understand: no disrespect intended at all, but I believe with a convert's zeal that Ned's works ought to be as widely known and debated as Greil Marcus's.) In fact, forget even the notion that America is defined by what Chuck D has called the "48 state box". Ned's outside-the-box thinking begins with an expansive definition of "America" that points directly to a post-George W. Bush world.

Ned has been one of the most influential intellectuals on me over the past few years, transforming the way I understand hip-hop's music, its history, and its future. If I had written CSWS after digesting Ned's works, it likely would have been a much different book.

So devour this interview with Garnette, and then run to get his two masterpieces, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, and The World That Made New Orleans:

Garnette ...New Orleans is both a place and idea. Moreover, as place and idea, people like to think of it as difference. You, however, insist that it’s both a peculiar and representative American spot.

Ned Not merely a peculiar spot, but the logical outcome of competing international forces.

GC Your argument, then, is that New Orleans is at the crux of America’s…

NS At the absolute crossroads of American history! Over and over again. Including now.

GC New Orleans—distinctly American and singularly un-American!

NS I use the word “American” in its larger sense, always, so I think it’s extremely American. It’s the most American city in a lot of ways.

GC Other cities can justifiably make that claim. Your fellow New Yorkers, among others, will surely take you to task. How is New Orleans the most American?

NS The most fully realized, in that it participated in all of the waves of culture that rolled across the hemisphere, practically. The French, the Spanish, the Anglo-American, each of which was associated with a different black wave: the Bambara, the Bakongo, the Baptists. From 1769 to 1803—that was a transcendental moment in history, the last third of the 18th century—Spain held Louisiana during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, three events of maximum impact on world history, and each of which affected Louisiana vitally. During the Spanish period, New Orleans became a city. It became a port of importance. I think that there are a variety of reasons, which I discuss in the book, why the Spanish years in New Orleans have been so consistently underplayed in importance, but I see them as absolutely crucial to understanding the town.

GC And New Orleans itself is crucial to understanding America. After all, its history is replete with the perennial American themes and struggles: self-making, liberty, equality, immigration, pluralism, religion, the tension between Europe and America, the influence of the South, and so on. And, of course: frontier.

NS New Orleans was the Wild West! In many ways, it never stopped being the Wild West. A place where you might see a gunfight on a main street. You still might see that. It had that image from very early on. When Thomas Jefferson annexed it, it went from being El Norte, the northernmost edge of the Saints and Festivals Belt, to being the West. We often think of it as the South, but you have to think of the Civil War in terms of both the South and the West, because a primary determinant in forcing the issue of civil was whether or not slave traders could expand their markets into the new western territories, the ones beyond New Orleans. DeBow’s Review, the Fortune magazine of the slaveowning South, published in New Orleans, was DeBow’s Review of the South and the West. New Orleans was the South and West.

Garnette: Picking up on your idea of perception…there are few ideas as central to the American character as renewal and transformation—as Ted Widmer brilliantly shows in Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, “[W]hat idea has been more powerful in [America’s] history than the hope that something wonderful…waits over the next horizon?”—and what is New Orleans if not a place of renewal and transformation? (Though I can already hear a host of people objecting that this Babylon of a place is anything but!) In your book you emphasize how music is crucial to the city’s formation and renewal; for you, music is a skeleton key that unlocks New Orleans’s history and reveals its character.

Ned: Absolutely. I look at music as a key to understanding history. In my books I use music as a tool for reading history, and vice versa...

Read the whole interview here.

R16 2008 Hi-Res Video Of Finals & Semis

2008-06-05T16:02:00.001-07:00

Here's a hi-quality video of the R16 Semis & Finals from Imeem...

For hi-res videos from the entire contest + interviews, go to the Imeem R16 homepage.

Obama, The New Majority, And The Race (Card) Ahead

2008-06-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

Last night Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with grace and poise, a history-making achievement that neither John McCain or Hillary Clinton could bring themselves to recognize.

One hundred thirty six years after Frederick Douglass became the first African American on a presidential ticket (as vice presidential candidate for the Equal Rights Party) and 36 years after Shirley Chisholm's path-breaking Democratic presidential run, Obama attained the necessary number of delegates to become the first African American presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

He dedicated the night to his grandmother. He has described her as a white woman not immune to the prejudices of an earlier era but who now lives comfortably with multiracial brood in Hawai'i. Surely she would understand the historical significance of her grandson's victory.

On the other hand, Hillary dedicated her night to her 18 million voters, many of whom chanted "Denver!" as if they wanted to fight on until the Democratic Convention in August. If Hillary's speech was meant to be a tribute to those who helped her in a hard-fought campaign, the images of her rabidly desperate followers reduced it to something like a shocking display of vanity.

Obama won only after one of the most racially divisive election seasons in history. Despite his desire to remain Jackie Robinson-like, his opponents raised race as soon as he began to rack up a series of surprising wins.

Progressive feminists like Gloria Steinem suggested--without much evidence--that the wave of support for Obama's candidacy was a sign that gender discrimination remained more immovable than racial discrimination.

Later, former President Bill Clinton dismissed Obama's win in South Carolina by comparing it to failed presidential candidate Jesse Jackson's wins in 1984 and 1988. Black voters vote for black candidates, after all, he suggested.

And in the last two months, as the contest shifted to states where Appalachian voters play a key role, Hillary Clinton suggested that she was the candidate of white working-class voters.

Newsweek's cover story, "Memo to Senator Obama", cites surveys showing 45% of white voters hold unfavorable views of Obama, as opposed to 35% for McCain. (Non-whites' unfavorable numbers for Obama are half as much.)

So author Ethan Thomas gives Obama a primer on how to win back white voters. He writes that despite Internet lies--Obama is Muslim, he believes the national anthem conveys a warlike message, he's sympathetic to terrorists, etc.--Obama should play it soft on race:

It's hard to think of what would turn off whites quicker than playing the thin-skinned victim.

Thomas seems to have already forgotten that, in the middle of a racialized firestorm not of his own making, Obama delivered one of the most nuanced and sensible speeches on race in decades.

Thomas also urges Obama to take a position "that plays against prejudice or typecasting": to oppose affirmative action as "a powerful signal" to white working-class voters allegedly enraged at black privilege. For his part, Obama has said he is for affirmative action, but has expressed doubts about whether his own daughters should benefit from such policies.

Thomas may be correct that white, working-class voters will remain a key battleground in the general election. Polls have shown that as much as one-third of Hillary's base may desert Obama in the general election by voting for McCain or staying home.

But Obama may only need to win a portion of those voters, some are lost to him in any case, and it's not clear that reversing himself on the wedge issues of the 80s and 90s gains anything for him as much it loses his base.

Much of the mainstream media's attention has been on the "ignored" white working-class voters of the heartland. They may be the most documented "ignored" demographic in history. You might remember this media-homogenized group as the Silent Majority, the Reagan Democrats, the NASCAR electorate, the Kansas voters, etc.

But Obama's candidacy rests on a new electoral landscape.

Obama has reaped the benefits of demographic shifts that Jackson foresaw over two decades ago in plotting his own campaign--the emergence of sizable communities of color and a progressive, multicultural generation of voters. In 2050, more than half the U.S. will be of color. But 2008 may be the year that this electorate arrives.

Urban gentrification in the West has led to an African American exodus back to the South, forming emerging majorities of long-time residents and new urban migrants. Obama's stunning primary victories may portend part of the South's swing back to blue.

Although Latinos voted largely for Clinton in the primaries, and Asian Americans appeared split, there are still few indications that they may shift to McCain. To his credit, McCain recognizes that we are a country that remains pro-immigrant. But after years of race-baiting campaigns, McCain's party has thoroughly alienated Latinos and Asian Americans. At the same time, the war, the environment and the domestic politics of abandonment and containment have made young voters the most Democratic-leaning in generations.

McCain clearly faces a tougher time making his case than Obama, whose own story parallels the immigrant story and whose energy has inspired the young. With an uninspired Republican base, it seems McCain needs the race card more than Hillary ever did, yet he plays it only at his--and his party's--future peril. Over the next four decades, the demographics are hardly with them.

As much as the Clintons depended on an old majority, Obama could be handing Democrats the new majority. But the Democrats aren't much different than the record industry: give them a sure thing and they'll always figure out how to screw it up.

As Marjorie Valbrun of TheRoot.com wrote in the same issue of Newsweek this week:

A woman educated at Yale and Wellesley who can afford to lend her campaign $20 million becomes the standard-bearer for working-class white people? She's clearly not a coal miner's daughter. So how did she do this? She appealed to their most base racial fears and resentments. It's worth remembering that Clinton started the race with a large base of black support. Then she made it easy for black women to abandon her.

Obama is the son of a white working-class family from Kansas, and a Black farming family from Kenya. Only in America, he has said, a new America.

If the Dems don't want to be abandoned by the new America, they would do well in the coming weeks to bring closure to the divisive primary season not by pandering to old resentments, but by waking up to the future.

Also Worth Reading:

+ John Zogby on The End of Boomerism

R16 2008 Wrap

2008-06-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

Top 9 Crew's prize-winning show from night 1 of R16.

UPDATE: JUNE 5 :: Click here for the high-quality Imeem version of the Semis & Finals.

Back home from R16...

If you hadn't heard already, here's how it went down:

Best Show: Top 9 (Russia)
Battle Semifinal: Riverz (Korea) vs. Top 9 (Russia), Winner: Top 9

The video is here, but warning to the purists out there...it's edited. (Not sure if it was edited for TV or by the Youtube poster.) This starts about 2-3 minutes into the battle right after Russian B-Boy Robin's controversial chinky-eye taunt--he's the b-boy with the cap and stripes--although it does get C-4's response--he's the b-boy in the black tee. The incident that preceded this included a little dustup between Korean b-boy Physics and Russian b-boy Flying Buddha. Physics entered the cypher before Flying Buddha was finished.

Battle Semifinal: Gamblerz (Korea) vs. Brasil All-Stars, Winner: Gamblerz

4th Place ($1000): Riverz
3rd Place ($4000): Brasil
(Check the battle here.)

2nd Place ($10,000): Top 9
Champs ($15,000): Gamblerz

UPDATE: JUNE 5 :: The semis and finals are here.

Gamblerz announced they will be going next to do some benefit performances in China and will be donating their winnings and a portion of their earnings this summer to the victims in Myanmar and China.

In other news, the success of Benson Lee's indie "Planet B-Boy"--which opened last week in Canada on its continuing run--may have helped seal a $25 million Hollywood signing for the Young Films production company project, "Hype Nation". Gamblerz, who played prominent roles in Planet B-Boy, will be featured as the chief dancefloor opponents of teen idol Omarion and his crew, B2K.

Check all the R16 video highlights here.

More soon from me in feature-length form...

Jena 6 :: Judge Recusal Delayed

2008-05-31T16:44:00.000-07:00

From the Chicago Tribune:

Lawyers for the five remaining defendants facing trial in the racially divisive Jena 6 incident in Louisiana presented evidence Friday of what they said was bias on the part of the judge presiding over the cases and sought his removal.

After four hours of testimony, a visiting judge appointed by the Louisiana Supreme Court to hear the recusal motion against LaSalle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray asked for more evidence and postponed a ruling until at least July...

Click here for the rest.