Political activists around the country are still absorbing the news of Geronimo ji Jaga’s death. For those of us who came of age in the 80s and 90s, the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s were in many ways a gateway for our examination of the history of Black political resistance in the US. Geronimo ji Jaga (formerly Geronimo Pratt) and his personal struggle, as well as his contributions to the fight for social justice were impossible to ignore. His commitment, humility, clear thinking as well as his sense of both the longevity and continuity of the Black Freedom Movement in the US all stood out to those who knew him.

I interviewed him for The Source magazine in early September 1997 about three months after he was released from prison, having served 27 years of a life sentence for a murder he didn’t commit. Three things stood out from the interview, all of which have been missed by recent commentary celebrating his life and impact.

First that famed attorney Johnnie Cochran was not only his lawyer when ji Jaga gained his freedom, but also represented him in his original trial. They were from the same hometown and, according to ji Jaga, Cochran’s conscious over the years was dogged by the injustice of the US criminal system that resulted in the 1970 sentence. Second, according to ji Jaga, he never formally joined the Black Panther Party. As he remembered it, he worked with several Black activist organizations and was captured by the police while working with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. And finally, his analysis of the UCLA 1969 shoot-out between Black Panthers and US Organization members that led to the death of his best friend Bunchy Carter and John Huggins is not a simple tale of Black in-fighting. Now is a good time to revisit all three.

Misinformation is so much part of our current political moment, particularly as the 24-hour news cycle converges with the ascendance of Fox News. In this climate, the conservative analysis of race has been normalized in mainstream discourse. This understanding of racial politics, along with the election of Barack Obama and a first term marked by little for Blacks to celebrate, makes it a particularly challenging time to be politically Black in the United States. Ask Jeremiah Wright, Shirley Sherrod, and Van Jones—all three serious advocates for the rights and humanity of everyday people whose critiques of politics and race made them far too easily demonized as anti-American.

If we have entered the era where the range of Black political thought beyond the mainstream liberal-conservative purview is delegitimized, Geronimo ji Jaga’s life and death is a reminder of our need to resist it.

EXCERPTS FROM THE 1997 INTERVIEW:

How did you get involved with the Black Panther Party?

Technically I never joined the Black Panther Party. After Martin Luther King’s death, an elder of mine who was related to Bunchy Carter’s elder and Johnnie Cochran’s elder requested that those of us in the South that had military training render some sort of discipline to brothers in urban areas who were running amuck getting shot right and left, running down the street shooting guns with bullets half filled which they were buying at the local hardware store. When I arrived at UCLA, Bunchy was just getting out of prison and needed college to help with his parole. We stayed together in the dorm room on campus. But we were mainly working to build the infrastructure of the Party.

You ended up as the Deputy Minister of Defense. How did that come about?

They did not have a Ministry of Defense when I came on the scene. There was one office in Oakland and a half an office in San Francisco. I helped build the San Francisco branch and all of the chapters throughout the South—New Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Memphis, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and other places. We did it under the banner of the Panthers because that’s what was feasible at the time. Because of shoot-outs and all that stuff, the work I did with the Panthers, overshadowed the stuff that I did with the Republic of New Afrika, the Mau Mau, the Black Liberation Army, the Brown Berets, the Black Berets, even the Fruit of Islam—but I saw my work with the Panthers as temporary. When Bunchy was killed, the Panthers wanted me to fill his position [as leader of the Southern California chapter]. I didn’t want to do it because I was already overloaded with other stuff. But it was just so hard to find someone who could handle LA given the problems with the police. So I ended up doing it, reluctantly. And this is how I ended up on the central committee of the Black Panther Party. I never took an oath and never joined the Party.

What was your role as Deputy Minister of Defense?

The Ministry of Defense was largely based on infrastructure: cell systems in the cities; creating an underground for situations when you need to get individuals out of the city or country. When you get shot by the police, you can’t be taken to no hospital. You gotta have medical underground as well. That’s where the preachers, bible school teachers and a lot of others behind the scenes got involved. When Huey got out of prison in 1970, this stuff blew his mind.

What were the strengths and weaknesses of the Party?

The main strength was the discipline which allowed for a brother or sister to feed children early in the morning, go to school and P.E. classes during the day, go to work and selling papers in the afternoon, and patrol the police at night. The weak points were our naiveté, our youth, and the lack of experience. But even at that I really salute the resistance of the generation! I have a problem saying it was just the Panthers `cause that’s not right. When you do that you x-out so much. There was more collective work going on than the popular written history of the period suggests. And when you talk about SNCC you are talking about a whole broader light than the Panther struggle. So you have to talk about that separate—that’s a bigger thing. They gave rise to the intelligence of a whole bunch of Panthers.

What was Bunchy Carter like?

He was a giant, a shining prince. He had been the head of the Slausons gang. He was transforming the gangbangers in Los Angeles into that revolutionary arm. He was my mentor. Such a warm and lovable, brainy brother. At the same time he was such a fierce brother. He was very dynamic—he was an ex-boxer, and he was even on The Little Rascals probably back in the fifties. His main claim to fame was what he did with the gangs in the city. And that was a monumental thing. All that was before Bunchy became a Panther.

Because of the death of Bunchy Carter as a result of the Panthers’ clash with Maulana Karenga’s US organization, even today rumors persists that Dr. Karenga was an informant. . .

Not true. Definitely not true.

What was the Panther clash with US all about?

We considered Karenga’s US organization to be a cultural-nationalist organization. We were considered revolutionary nationalist. So, we have a common denominator. We both are nationalist. We never had antagonistic contradictions, just ideological contradictions. The pig manipulated those contradictions to the extent that warfare jumped off. Truth is the first casualty in war. It began to be said that Karenga was rat, but that wasn’t true. The death of Bunchy and John Huggins on UCLA campus was caused by an agent creating a disturbance which caused a Panther to pull out a gun and which subsequently caused US members to pull out their guns to defend themselves. In the ensuing gun battle Bunchy Carter and John Huggins lay dead.

What’s your worst memory of the 27 years you spent in prison?

I accepted the fact that when I joined the movement I was gonna be killed. When we were sent off to these urban areas we were actually told, “Look, you’re either gonna get killed, put in prison, or if you’re lucky we can get you out the country before they do that. Those are the three options. To survive is only a dream.” So when I was captured, I began to disconnect. So it’s hard to say good or bad moments because this is a whole different reality that had a life of its own.

Many people would say that during those twenty-seven years that you lost something. How would you describe it?

I considered myself chopped off the game plan when I was arrested. But it was incumbent upon me to free myself and continue to struggle again. You can’t look back twenty-seven years and say it was a lost. I’m still living. I run about five miles every morning, and I can still bench press 300 pounds ten times. I can give you ten reps (laughter). Also I hope I’m a little more intelligent and I’m not crazy. It’s a hell of a gain that I survived.

What music most influenced you during that time?

In 1975 I heard some music on a prison radio. I hadn’t seen a television in six years until about 1976, and it was at the end of the tier. I couldn’t see it unless I stood up sideways against the bars. When I really got to see a television again was in 1977. So, I was basically without music and television for the first eight years when I was in the hole. When I was able to get on the main line and listen to music and see T.V., of course the things I wanted to hear were the things I heard when I was on the street. But by then those songs had to be at least nine years old. So, I would listen to oldies. And the new music it was hard to get into, but I slowly began to get into that. But when hip-hop began to come around, it caught on like wildfire. It reminds me how the Panthers and other groups started to catch on like wildfire. It reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron. He would spit that knowledge so clearly and that was the first thing that came to mind when I heard Grandmaster Flash, KRS-One, Paris, Public Enemy and Sista Soldier—the militancy.

What type of books were you reading?

We maintained study groups throughout when I was on main line. Much of the focus was on Cheik Anta Diop—He was considered by us to be the last Pharaoh. We also read the works compiled by Ivan Van Sertima. Of course, there were others.

In terms of a spiritual center, what helped you to get through?

Well the ancestors guided me back to the oldest religion known to man—Maat. We also studied those meditations that were developed by all of our ancestors—the Natives, the Hispanics, the Irish—not just the ones that were strictly African.

The youngest of seven children, Ji Jaga was born Elmer Pratt, in Morgan City, a port city in southwestern Louisiana, two hours south of New Orleans, on September 13 1947. 120 years earlier marked the death of Jean Lafitte, the so-called “gentleman’s pirate” of French ancestry who settled in Haiti in the early 1800s until he was run out with most other Europeans during the Haitian revolution. Lafitte’s claim to fame was smuggling enslaved Africans from the Caribbean to Louisiana during the Spanish embargo of the late 17th & early 18th centuries, often taking refuge in the same bayous that were Pratt’s childhood home. Pratt was dubbed Geronimo by Bunchy Carter and assumed the name ji Jaga in 1968. The Jaga were a West African clan of Angolan warriors who Geronimo says he descends from. Many of the Jaga came to Brazil with the Portuguese as free men and women and some were later found among maroon societies in Brazil. How Jaga descendants could have ended up in Louisiana is open to historical interpretation, as most Angolans who ended up in Louisiana and Mississippi and neighboring states entered the US via South Carolina. Some Jaga were possibly among the maroon communities in the Louisiana swamplands as well. According to the Pratt, the Jaga refused to accept slavery—hence his strong identification with the name.

What were some of your earliest early childhood memories?

Well, joyous times mostly. Morgan City was a very rural setting and very nationalistic, self-reliant, and self-determining. It was a very close-knit community. Until I was a ripe old age, I thought that I belonged to a nation that was run by Blacks. And across the street was another nation, a white nation. Segregation across the tracks. We had our own national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” our own police, and everything. We didn’t call on the man across the street for nothing and it was very good that I grew up that way. The worst memories were those of when the Klan would ride. During one of those rides, I lost a close friend at an early age named Clayborne Brown who was hit in the head by the Klan and drowned. They found his body three days later in the Chaparral River. And, we all went to the River and saw them pull him in. Clayborne was real dark-skinned and when they pulled him out of the river, his body was like translucent blue. Then a few years later, one Halloween night, the Klan jumped on my brother. So there are bad memories like that.

Does your mother still live there?

She’s gone off into senility, but she’s still living—94 years old this year. [She died in 2003 at 98 years-old] And every time I’ve left home, when I come back the first person I go to see is my mama. So, that’s what I did when I got out of prison. Mama has always stood by me. And, I understood why. She was a very brainy person. Our foreparents, her mother was the first to bring education into that part of the swampland and set up the first school. When I was growing up, Mama used to rock us in her chair on the front porch. We grew up in a shack and we were all born in that house, about what you would call a block from the Chaparral River. She would recite Shakespeare and Longfellow to us. All kind of stuff like that at an early age we were hearing from Mama—this Gumbo Creole woman (laughs). And she was very beautiful. Kept us in church, instilled all kinds of interests in us, morals and respect for the elders, respect for the young.

What about your father?

My father was very hard working. He wouldn’t work for no white man so he was what you could call a junk man. On the way home from school in Daddy’s old pick-up truck we would have to go to the dump and get all the metal that we could find as well as rope, rags, anything. When we got home, we unloaded the truck and separated the brass, copper, the aluminum, so we could sell it separate. That’s how he raised an entire family of seven and he did a damn good job. But he worked himself to death. He died from a stroke in 1956.

With an upbringing so nationalistic, what made you join the US military?

I considered myself a hell of an athlete. We had just started a Black football league. A few years earlier, Grambling came through and checked one of the guys out. So initially my ambition was to go to Grambling or Southern University and play ball. Because of the way the community was organized, the elders called the shots over a lot of the youngsters. They had a network that went all the way back to Marcus Garvey and the days when the United Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.) was organizing throughout the South in the 1920s. My uncle was a member of the legionnaires, the military arm of the U.N.I.A. Of the seventeen people in my graduating class, six of us were selected by the elders to go into the armed forces, the United States Air Force. The older generation was getting older and was concerned about who would protect the community.

Many of the brothers that went to Vietnam have never gotten past it. You seemed to have made a progressive transition. How have you done that?

I’ve never suffered the illusion that I was aligned to anything other than my elders. And my going to Vietnam was out on a sense of duty to them. When I learned how to deal with explosives, I’m listening at that training in terms of defending my community. Most of the brothers that I ran into in the service really bought into being Americans and “pow” when they were hit with the reality of all the racism and disrespect, they just couldn’t handle it.

What was it like to be a Black soldier in the US military in 1965?

This was my first experience with integration. But I was never was a victim of any racial attack or anything. During the whole first time I was in Vietnam—throughout 1966—I never heard the “N” word. And all of my officers were white. When I went back in 1968 that’s when you would see more manifestations of racial hatred, especially racial skirmishes between the soldiers. But first off there were so many battles and we were getting ambushed so much. Partners were dying. We were getting over run. I mean it was just madness. If you were shooting in the same direction, cool.

You were very successful in the military. Why did you get out?

On April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. I was due to terminate my service a month later. I wasn’t gonna do it. I was gonna re-up ‘cause I had made Sergeant at a very early age, in two tours of combat, so I could have been sitting pretty for the rest of my life in the military. I was loyal and patriotic to the African nation I grew up in who sent me into the service. And after Martin Luther King was killed, my elders ordered me to come on out of the service. King was the eldest Messiah. Malcolm was our generation’s Messiah. And now that their King was dead, it was like there’s no hope. So they actually unleashed us to do what we did. This is why when Newsweek took their survey in 1969, it was over 92% of the Black people in this country supported the Black Panther Party as their legitimate political arm. It blew the United States’ mind.

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NewsOne’s Bakari Kitwana interviews Vijay Prashad about the implications of the recent killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Ladan. Kitwana and Prashad discuss the American public’s euphoria surrounding this news and what this death means for the war in Afghanistan, and the future of America’s enemies—from Al Qaeda to the Taliban.

They also talk about the meaning of Bin Laden’s demise to the 2012 presidential race. Says Prashad, “Forget Obama. Forget 2012. What are the long-term implications for American power and authority in a world where others are trying to build up international law as a counter to cowboy-ism?”

Prashad also shares insight on the way he sees the death of Bin Laden already playing out in civil rights and human rights circles: “In 1981 Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which disallows the US from pursuing targeted assassinations. Likewise, international law forbids this type of action. I’m very disturbed that there is no qualified discussion about the legality of this type of action. People on the liberal to progressive side seem to have lost their bearings and are no longer able to be serious when it comes to the question of utilizing armed force overseas.”

Vijay Prashad is professor and director of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author eleven books, including his most recent The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2011)

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The overwhelming social transformation rendered in the 1950s and 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement is a milestone in American history of such magnitude that it assumes a mythological quality, almost willing us to define the future in its image. But our own post-civil rights movement era requires us to reframe what “civil rights” actually means. Changes in the way many Americans have come to think of the role of government, the overwhelming influence of corporate media, the disproportionate influence of America’s super rich, and today’s activists’ focus on human rights and social justice rather than simply civil rights make the question of civil rights leaders almost passé. Old standards of measures of civil rights success—mass movements and legislation for example—no longer apply.

Given the new reality the more accurate question is this: What individuals and organizations were essential in helping move the needle on the most important civil rights issues of this, the 21st century?

15. Majora Carter is the 2005 MacArthur genius who in 2001 started Sustainable South Bronx, an organization dedicated to environmentalism and the creation of Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training, a highly successful green jobs training and placement program. In 2008 she formed the Majora Carter Group [Facebook Page], LLC and serves as its president. In her current capacity, aside from being a highly sought speaker, she now advises companies, cities, and universities on environmental and business issues.

14. Van Jones [Facebook Page]—who cut his teeth as a grassroots activist using hip-hop as a tool to engage youth in social change around issues like police brutality, education, and incarceration via his organization, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights—turned his attention to green jobs as a way of alleviating dual issues of America’s environmental neglect and chronic joblessness in urban America and beyond. In 2008 he authored The Green Collar Economy. As White House Advisor on green jobs, he brought to America a plan for job creation at a time when business and political leaders have been otherwise stumped on how to do so. Within months of his appointment, conservative attacks led to his resignation and his return to the front lines of grassroots green jobs activism.

13. George Soros and Bill & Melinda Gates. Bill and Melinda Gates [Facebook Page] have raised the clarion call about disparities in health policy and provisions in developing countries. Likewise, George Soros [Facebook Page], founder of the Open Society Foundations, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy gave $332 million to his Open Society Institute in 2010, an organization that promotes education and democracy initiatives around the world.

12. Rosa Clemente. Hip-Hop political action groups have served as a catalyst of youth political involvement in electoral politics culminating in expanding the 18-29 youth vote from 40 percent participation in 2000 to 52 percent in 2008.  By 2008, when Cynthia McKinney became the Green Party’s presidential candidate, such was the influence of hip-hop organizing that McKinney chose hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente [Facebook Page] as her running mate. Clemente emerged in 2003 among a number of young activists who took the model of local hip-hop political activism to the national level and made political participation, as well as good old fashion grassroots activism, made sexy for a new generation. Organizations like The League of Young Voters, Hip-Hop Congress, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and The National Hip-Hop Political Convention were a catalyst for youth around the country. In June 2004, over 4000 young people from 30 states attend The National Hip-Hop Political Convention (which Clemente co-founded) in Newark, New Jersey, to create and endorse a political agenda for the hip-hop generation. Hip-Hop Caucus, headed by Reverend Lennox Yearwood, would follow with a grassroots appeal to youth poor and working class youth in 2008.

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11. Black Public Intellectuals. Public intellectualism has been seen as a gift and a curse. They are the talking heads that weigh in as experts reading the tea leaves of Black America for national media. From Ivy League-branded Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Michael Eric Dyson to activist-authors Alice Walker and many others in between, such as Boyce Watkins, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Tricia Rose, these are the voices of sanity that provide a counter-balance to the near white-out of Black hosts on network and cable news shows. They may not always consult us, but given the dearth of Black-controlled television media outlets, more often than not they provide voice to human rights and social justice issues of our time.

10. James Rucker. ColorofChange.com is a web-based advocacy group that James Rucker co-founded with Van Jones in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Rucker   had previously held several positions with the grassroots advocacy group MoveOn.org. COC has used social networking to address important issues from the Jena Six to lobbying companies not to advertise on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show because of his unsubstantiated remarks that President Obama “hates whites.”

9. Farhana Khera, founder of  Muslim Advocates. Muslim Advocates came into existence after 9-11 and the now infamous Patriot Act, which instantaneously curtailed many of the freedoms we take for granted. Focused on religious and racial profiling, the work of Muslim Advocates in many ways signals the expansion of the traditional civil rights movement – the broadening of issues and responses to them beyond the black/white divide. Muslim Advocates and the NAACP recently joined forces and sent a letter to Eric Holder, the Attorney General, requesting a full investigation of a FBI raid that resulted in the shooting death of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah in Michigan. Like Muslim Advocates, The ACLU has been at the forefront of fighting these issues. Over the decade, the ACLU has issued reports that document this work like last year’s “Sanctioned: Racial Profiling Since 9/11.” The ACLU was also part of a coalition that filed a class action suit that challenged SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious racial profiling law in 2010.

8. Trail of Dreams. In Jan 2010 four undocumented former students at Miami Dade University (Gaby Pacheco, Juan Rodriguez, Felipe Matos and Carlos Roa), led a 1500 mile march entitled “Trail of Dreams” from Miami to DC, inspiring similar students across the country. Immigration reform is still a major legislation issue in the U.S. that impacts the lives of approximately 11 million illegal immigrants in the nation. The Dream Act, a legislative proposal that has been a political football since 2001, would grant permanent citizenship rights to eligible undocumented students. On March 21, 2010, thousands of immigrants and their allies marched in Washington, D.C. in a show of solidarity to raise awareness about the plight of illegal immigrants as part of the Dream activist movement. Similar demonstrations were held in cities throughout the nation.

7. Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, and over the years has increasingly questioned America’s role as a superpower and foreign policy initiatives. His frank talk about the critical issue of Israel as it relates to the Palestinian question is exemplified in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter has also been at the forefront of the need for election oversight in any democracy, including the U.S. and beyond, via his Atlanta-based The Carter Center.

6.  Randall Robinson is the founder of TransAfrica Forum. He has been one of the singular voices and critiques of American foreign policy at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the overthrow of Jean Bertrand-Aristide in Haiti, and the economic policies that thwarted the growth of economies in the Caribbean. Robinson’s 2001 book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks brought the question of reparations to African Americans for slavery to the fore of national discussion.

5. Cynthia McKinney is a former six-term member of Congress from Georgia. She was the 2008 presidential candidate for the Green Party. McKinney garnered national attention as a legislator for her outspoken views on the war in Iraq, 9/11, military appropriations and the Bush administration’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina, which left thousands of people homeless. Likewise, as legislators more and more seem focused on issues beyond traditional civil rights concerns, Maxine Waters, (who voted against the Iraq War Resolution), former Senator Russ Feingold (the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act). John Conyers  (who recently proposed legislation against religious intolerance against Muslims) and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich and former Representative from Florida Alan Grayson are a handful of national lawmakers who remain on the right side of the issues.

4. Craig Watkins/ Innocence Project /Human Rights Watch. One of the major issues civil rights issues of our time is the incarceration of disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino men (over 1 million of the current 2 million plus populating America’s prisons). The Innocence  Project, co-founded by Attorney Peter Neufeld and Attorney Barry Scheck of “Trial of the Century Fame,” has been at the forefront of demanding DNA evidence be used to exonerate those wrongfully imprisoned. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, the only African American DA in the state of Texas was elected in 2007. Since then he’s partnered with the Innocence Project to overturn over 20 wrongful convictions. Alongside The Innocence Project, Human Rights Watch has brought necessary attention to U.S. policy regarding disproportionate targeting of Black men for long prison sentences. Its 2008 report, “Targeting Blacks,” documents racial disparities among drug offenders sent to prison.

3. Jena Six. For those nostalgic about the civil rights era mass mobilizations, the community wave of resistance to the Jena Six trial in Jena, Louisiana was notable.  In 2007, famed civil rights leaders, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Rev. Jesse Jackson, led an estimated 50,000 people who came from all over the nation to protest inequality in the criminal system in Louisiana. Six black teenagers called the “Jena Six” were charged with attempted second-degree murder for beating a white classmate at Jena High School in 2006. The charge highlighted the acute racism in the justice system.  Days before the protest march in Jena, the charges against the teenagers were dropped.

2. Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, has evolved into sharing a role once dominated solely by Jesse Jackson, that of national civil rights spokesperson. In 2004, he borrowed from Jesse Jackson’s playbook of 1984 and 1988, when he ran unsuccessfully as a Democratic for president. Has been outspoken on issue of police brutality, and in 2008 led a series of protests in New York City in response to the acquittal of officers in the police shooting death of Sean Bell. In 2010 his National Action Network teamed up with the NAACP to lead the Reclaim the Dream March on the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington. In 2001 he was jailed for his participation in protests of US military bombing exercises on Puerto Rican island of Vieques. In 2000 he organized the Redeem the Dream March on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington to protest police brutality, drawing an estimated crowd of 100,000.

1. Barack Obama. The election of Barack Obama represents in some ways the culmination of the civil rights dream, described by Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington “I Have a Dream” speech. Can Black people be embraced for the content of their character rather than the color of their skin? Obama’s success at securing the highest office in the land signaled a significant if not a definitive “yes,” an idea embraced by both the left (Rep. James Clyburn) and the right (Bill Bennett). Forty-three percent of white Americans voted for Obama (not quite a majority). As president, Obama’s positions on jobs, healthcare, women’s rights, education, etc., all lean into a civil rights agenda. But his tendency to cave in to a moneyed elite concerns leaves his critics unconvinced.

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Bakari Kitwana’s interviews Mark Anthony Neal about the Nicki Minaj’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live as “The Bride of Blackenstein,” which interestingly generated very little serious media critique.

Here, they discuss the tame media response to the provocative image of Black women, as well as the predictable knee-jerk response regarding stereotypes. Kitwana asks Neal if the new media environment along with political correctness is smothering complex analyses of gender and race. Says Dr. Neal, “Nicki Minaj forces us to always think about how we come to terms with Black women’s physicality. What’s so smart about the SNL piece is that you see a connection not just to Black women’s physicality but also to how that physicality is a mode of resistance.”

Neal says he believes hip-hop is returning its earlier role as a catalyst for jumpstarting important national discussions: “We now have artists like Diddy and Lupe Fiasco who are pushing back in terms of trying to get President Obama to be much more accountable, particularly to the folks who helped put him in office.”

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University, host of the internet TV show Left of Black, and the author five books, including the forthcoming That’s The Joint II: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2011)

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Bakari Kitwana speaks with Amari Jackson and Anthony Browder about the current political uprising in Egypt. Novelist Amari Jackson talks about the relationship of his new novel, The Savion Sequence, to real life events in the Middle East. And Browder, who has conducted over 40 study tours to Egypt over the last two decades, examines the complex ways that today’s cry for freedom relates to ancient history.

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In this discussion both consider the relationship between ancient Egyptian history and contemporary events, fact and fiction, as well as personal and political freedom. Browder calls the movement in Egypt, “One of the best examples in our lifetime of people trying to achieve their freedom nonviolently.”

Amari Jackson is a journalist and the author of The Savion Sequence. Anthony Browder is a cultural historian and author of Egypt on the Potomac. Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

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In this week’s edition of Rap Sessions, NewsOne contributor Bakari Kitwana speaks with Dr. William Patterson about a new hip-hop and civic studies project modeled after the early 1900s Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver’s Jessup Agricultural Wagon. Whereas Washington and Carver brought Tuskegee University via a horse-drawn wagon to sharecroppers in the South, Patterson’s In Search of Hip-Hop Express brings civic studies from the University of Illinois Urban Champaign to Black youth around the US through a mobile airstream trailer retro-fitted with the latest technology.

Hip-hop Express teaches Black youth civic engagement and community-building while investigating and archiving the Black experience from a hip-hop perspective.  Patterson emphasizes here that his focus is to engage descendents of the sharecroppers: “Booker T Washington believed if sharecroppers were better educated about finance and the science and technology of agriculture then it would improve their quality of life.”

“Sharecroppers often worked seven days a week and had little free time—so Washington believed Tuskegee should go to them,” Patterson says, “One of the ways universities can engage urban youth today is to use technology and other educational tools, along with aesthetics of the city and hip-hop to be the engaging point to inspire community transformation. Our new crop that we have to cultivate is actually the young people in our community. If we provide the right science and appropriate media and technology they then become the stewards of the Black experience and contribute to that legacy.”

The creator of In Search of Hip-Hop Express, William Patterson is the founder and co-director of Youth Media Workshop. He teaches educational policy at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2011)

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Rap Sessions Podcasts

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In this week’s edition of Rap Sessions, NewsOne writer Bakari Kitwana speaks with Haki Madhubuti, Publisher of Third World Press, about the life and impact of Dr. Margaret Burroughs, the pioneering Chicago artist and co-founder of The DuSable Museum of African American History who died last month at the age of 95. Madhubuti, who volunteered at The DuSable Museum back in the early 1960s, talks about Burroughs’ impact on the political and cultural life of Chicago and the nation for over half a century.

About a month before her death, she was honored by the Art Institute of Chicago with its Legends and Legacy Award. At the gathering, Madhubuti publicly read a poem that he wrote for Dr. Burroughs entitled “Master of Colors and Canvas.” Here Madhubuti remembers Dr. Burroughs as a one-of-a-kind educator, artist, institution builder and community leader. “When Margaret Burroughs spoke everyone listened,” Madhubuti recalls. “She was never for the elite. She was always on the frontline trying to do that which is best, good, correct, and just for the great majority of people in this country and the world.”

Haki Madhubuti is the Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor at DePaul University and the founder and publisher of Third World Press. He is the author of 28 books including the most recent Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966-2009 for which he received the 2010 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era.

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Julianne Malveuax Speaks On The State Of Blacks In American Economy [Podcast]

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Let’s begin with the premise that no people, culture, religious, racial or ethnic group is by definition immoral. Not acknowledging this, at the core, is the problem with Juan Williams’ gross generalization about Muslims that recently got him fired from National Public Radio (NPR). But if NPR’s “Fresh Air” interview last week with the rapper Jay-Z about his new book Decoded is any indication, it’s a message still lost on Terry Gross.

To be sure, Juan Williams revealed his bias by openly expressing his personal opinion. Terry Gross didn’t do that. Instead the bias is more subtle and insidious and lurks in the line of questioning.

While not as shocking as the obvious blanket condemnation Juan Williams advanced, the Terry Gross/ Jay-Z interview is even more problematic because it illuminates a tendency pervasive in today’s news media. This is a moment in which Blacks can be embraced and promoted at the same time that their humanity is dismantled—all in a 30-second sound bite.

Throughout her interview with Jay-Z, Gross kept returning the discussion to those places that reinforce the idea of Black culture as immoral and Black people as corrupt and/or corruptible. Such anti-Black arguments that once lived primarily in conservative public policy debates have now worked their way into national culture (especially in film, television, news media and politics) to the degree that these views are now widely accepted as the norm.

In short, racial disparities in education, unemployment, criminal justice, wealth-building, and more are rooted in Black cultural failing alone. As this logic prevails, it’s impossible to gain traction on any targeted policy solutions regarding the problems disproportionately facing Blacks.

President Obama realizes this. Hence his colorblind politics, a policy approach that anti-racist activist Tim Wise documents in detail in his new book, Colorblind. However, one wonders to what extent even liberal journalists like Terry Gross realize they are collaborators.

To grasp the full extent to which Gross emboldens conservative ideas about race, one should listen to the entire 45-minute interview. For now, let this brief exchange illustrate the point,

GROSS: Your father left when you were very young. And you say that most of your friends’ fathers had left. You say, “Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced. But we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.” That’s really interesting that one of your things that your father leaves behind that you can use is his records.

JAY-Z: Yeah, I guess there’s a bright side to everything right?

GROSS: Yeah, well, that’s one way of looking at it.

Any great interviewer—and Gross is at the top of her game—knows the role he or she plays in the outcome. Part of the science is in framing the questions.

The advancing of conservative rhetoric about Blacks persists, whether Gross is bluntly asking Jay about crimes he committed 15 years ago (crack sales and assault), or inquiring about his mother’s parental decisions: “You ended up selling crack and helping your mother, as a single mother, support the family. Did she know that’s how you were making the money?”

What’s the takeaway message? That Jay’s mom was a single parent that made poor choices, let her teenage son sell drugs and is unprincipled because she knows the money he’s using to support the family comes from drug sales. It’s a narrative we’ve heard from the Republican Revolution of 1994 to the recent well-financed media blitz that resulted in the mid-term shellacking of the Democrats.

And Terry Gross never goes off message. In a nearly hour long interview with a self-made record executive mogul and entrepreneur worth at least half a billion, on the occasion of the publication of a book he deems a coming of age story for his generation, the most pressing questions on the table range from insight into drug dealing to why rappers grab their crotches?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that folks should boycott NPR or even “Fresh Air.” And I’m not saying Gross should be fired. What I’m after is something much larger—a radical shift away from the growing tendency to allow conservative race analysis to dominate the ways Americans think and talk about race.

Ironically, Jay-Z points us to the territory in at least one of his responses to Gross: “I know all sorts of people saw their lives destroyed—but in America, we process that sort of thing as a tragedy,” he tells Gross when she asks him about Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West and George Bush. “When it happens to black people, it feels like something else, like history rerunning its favorite loop.”

Given how pervasive this narrative have become, it’s going take much more than firing journalists like Gross and Williams to purge that “favorite loop” from our national culture.

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law-based think tank, The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2011).

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How Blacks are faring in today’s economy?

Bakari Kitwana speaks with economist Julianne Malveaux about key strategies that Blacks must deploy in order to survive in the current economy.

For Malveaux this includes being equipped with the tools to dissect and act upon the recent Labor Department statistics on Black unemployment (15.7%), as well as the Economic Policy Institute’s findings on Black college graduates—over 15 percent of who are also unemployed. While she offers hope, reflecting on her new book, Surviving and Thriving: 365 Facts in Black Economic History, here Dr. Malveaux is unflinching in her criticism of colorblind policy as a solution for economic woes disproportionately impacting the African American community.

“There is no such thing as colorblindness,” Malveaux says. “Colorblindness is blind trip into color-focused oblivion. The challenge with Obama Administration has been in an attempt to govern broadly, there has been a narrow exclusion of people who have already been excluded.”

Julianne Malveaux is an economist, syndicated columnist and president of Bennett College. She is the author of numerous books on Blacks and the economy, including the newly released Surviving and Thriving: 365 Facts About Black Economic History (Last World Productions, 2010).

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

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RAP SESSIONS: Quannell X Rails Against Wave Of Police Brutality In Houston

RAP SESSIONS: Conrad Tillard On Rangel’s Huge Congressional Fight

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Bakari Kitwana speaks with Oakland Activist Dereca Blackmon about last week’s sentencing of ex-transit officer Johannes Mehserle, who earlier this year was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 videotaped shooting death of Oscar Grant. Blackmon was one of the organizers of protests in the days immediately following the shooting of the unarmed 22-year-old Grant on a train platform on New Year’s Day.  Blackmon talks with newsone.com about where do we go from here, and practical responses to incidents like these that persist around the country.

“We have to be more organized if we are going to hold people accountable to our communities, says Blackmon. “And that means we need to put more thought, investment and dollars into answering the question, what does accountable policing looks like?” Equally important, she says, is the average citizen, who “has to continue to be vigilant in expressing their voice and concern about these issues.”

Dereca Blackmon is co-founder of the Coalition Against Police Executions, which formed in the aftermath of the police shooting death of Oscar Grant and the former Executive Director of Leadership Excellence, a leadership and social justice organization for African America youth.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

Dereca Blackmon is Executive Director of Leadership Excellence which operates under the leadership of a ten-member Board of Directors, a fifteen member youth advisory board, and a dedicated staff of eight. We are a community-based, non-profit organization committed to Black youth wellness. For over 20 years, we have helped children, teens and their families transform their lives and their communities through self-awareness and critical thinking.

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Bakari Kitwana speaks Midterm Elections with Keli Goff

Bakari Kitwana: Will the youth vote trump Tea Party in Midterm Elections

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Bakari Kitwana speaks with political analyst Keli Goff about mid-term elections results around the country. Goff responds to what she sees as surprising and not so surprising in key elections from Delaware and Nevada to West Virginia and Kentucky. Goff also shares insight on the problem that the Tea Party movement now poses from Republican establishment—rather than for President Obama.

She makes a strong case that we will see establishment Republican Party insiders attempting to tone down the hateful rhetoric that targeted immigrants, Muslims and African Americans leading up to Nov 2.

Kitwana asks Goff, “What’s the take-away message for the Black community from last night’s results?” She responds: “It was a mistake for Democrats to assume that a vote for Barack Obama was a long-term vote of loyalty for the Democratic Party.

Not only can you not take the Black vote for granted, but also you have to work for their vote beyond the election year. It has to be a long-term ongoing process.” Goff adds, “Because of what happened last night, starting today the Democrats will begin laying the ground work for turning out the Black vote for the 2012 Election.”

Keli Goff is a writer and political analyst whose comments regularly on youth and minority voters. A contributor to the Loop21.com, she’s the author of Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

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Midterm Elections: What’s at stake for the Black community [Podcast]

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RAP SESSIONS WITH BAKARI KITWANA

Bakari Kitwana speaks with political strategist, writer and organizer Alexis McGill Johnson about key mid-term election races that she’s watching today. They also discuss what is at stake for the Black community overall in today’s mid-term elections. McGill Johnson tells newsone.com why Senate and House races, key races in California and Nevada, and the youth vote are all crucial. She says that a progressive agenda is important for all communities, particularly the Black community.

“Right now we are looking at a potential reversal of healthcare reform and an inability to address the foreclosure crisis,” says McGill Johnson.  “And those two things should be enough, more than anything else, to motivate people to go to the polls today.”

Alexis McGill Johnson is the Executive Director of the American Values Institute, which studies racial anxiety and unconscious bias in electoral politics. She’s the former Political Director of The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and the former Executive Director of Citizen Change, where, in 2004, she launched P. Diddy’s Vote or Die campaign.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

Boyd, who also traveled to Haiti immediately after the earthquake and produced the documentary Cri De Coeur (Cry From the Heart) with filmmaker Eddie Harris, talks with NewsOne.com about the potential for the outbreak of cholera, the upcoming November 28th election, the still delayed $1.1 billion in reconstruction aid from the US, and the lack of progress he witness in Port-Au-Prince since his last visit in February.

“This trip was a follow-up trip to see to what extent there has been progress in rebuilding this earthquake shaken nation,” says Boyd. “Eight months later, there is very little progress. In fact, in some places it looked even worse than it did when we visited earlier.”

Herb Boyd is an award-winning author and journalist who has published 17 books, including his most recent Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin (Atria Books). His documentary film Cri De Coeur (Cry From the Heart), with filmmaker Eddie Harris, focuses on the children of Haiti in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

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Last week, The Houston, Texas local Fox affiliate framed the question like this: “Youth Vote: Obama Boost or Backlash?” or as reporter Greg Googan put it, “Twenty-four recession-racked months later, the question now looms: Is it still ‘change’ young Americans can believe in?”

When it comes to young voters, has the Obama Administration gone far enough?

University of Chicago Political Science Professor Cathy Cohen suggests in her new book Democracy Remixed, which should be required reading for any politician serious about the future of our democracy, that this sentiment taps into the reality staring young voters in the face everyday: failing schools, a cost of living out of sync with limited job options, an unforgiving criminal justice system, and an escalating war in Afghanistan with 20 and 30-somethings disproportionately on the frontlines, to name a few.

Read more at Huffington Post

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law based think tank The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2010).

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By Hakim Hasan:

Dr. Ronald Walters, 72, one of the foremost authorities on Black-American politics, died on Friday (September 10) of cancer.  He was born on July 20, 1938 in Witchita, Kansas, a grim period in American life when blacks could not vote and were subjected to blatant racism. This, undoubtedly, shaped his lifelong and evolved worldview as a political scientist and activist.

Although Dr. Walters held many visiting professorships at major universities during his distinguished academic career, he spent the majority of   his career as a professor and chair of the political science department at Howard University from the mid-1970s until 1996. From 1996 until his retirement in 2009, he was a professor of political science and Director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland.

Herb Boyd, “New York Amsterdam News” reporter, soberly recalls: “Most recently I was with him at Howard University where he was summoned to participate in the making of a documentary about the history of the NAACP. His analysis, like his historical insight, was concise, crisp, and to the point. Nothing wasted. No fanfare or one-upmanship.”

One of  the enduring legacies of Dr. Walter’s scholarship and activism was his constant struggle to marry political theory to civic engagement and the grueling practicalities of electoral politics (“the tightrope” that politicians have to walk.) For example, his essay “Leverage Rainbow Politics,” which appeared on the Independent Politics Network website in 2008, can be read as a prophetic understanding of  the right-wing—and even liberal—backlash against President Barack Obama. He writes, “Blacks can be tricked because the attraction of the first black or the first woman to do this or that seemingly fits into the legacy of civil rights, a syndrome that can be disastrous if it turns out wrong.”

Dr. Ron Daniels, former Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City and  Distinguished  Lecturer at York College  makes the pointed observation: “No one more than Dr. Ronald Walters hammered home the relevance of “leverage politics” as a time tested vehicle for organized interest groups and constituencies to extract benefits from the American political system.  He created a living laboratory for his leverage theory of politics as the Issues Director and principal strategist for Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s  electrifying campaign for President in 1984.”

Dr. Walters published well over one hundred scholarly papers and many books including Black Presidential Politics, which won the Ralph Bunche Prize and Best Book Prize from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

To the general public, however, Dr. Walters is probably best remembered as a constant fixture and engaging political analyst on major television news programs especially when he served as a major advisor to the Reverend Jesse Jackson when he ran for president in 1984.

A public viewing and memorial service for Dr. Walters will be held at Crampton Hall at Howard University in Washington, D.C. on September 19 (3:00-5:00 P.M.). Reverend Jesse Jackson will preside over the funeral services on September 20 held at Shiloh Baptist Church (10:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M.) in Washington, D.C.

Hakim Hasan writes frequently about social issues and politics. He is the former Director of Public Programs at the Museum of the City of New York.

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RELATED:

Long serving Howard Professor Ron Walters Dies At 72

At the MTV VMA’s this past weekend, Will.i.am caused controversy with his appearance in blackface.

Recently, Newsone contributor Bakari Kitwana spoke with Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the State University of Buffalo, John Jennings, about recent visual images of Blacks on the American popular culture scene—from Will.i.am’s Blackface to the signage at the recent 9/12 Tea Party Rally in Washington, DC. Jennings offers a crash course in media literacy, and stereotypes that he says continue to reproduce themselves in American culture.

He likens the Tea Party signs to previous eras where American racists target Jews, Irish, etc and says of blackface: “Because of the deep history of minstrelsy throughout history, I don’t think you can take it out of the history of racialization.” Such stereotypes, he says,  “are like logos.”
Curator, Illustrator, Cartoonist and Graphic Novelist, John Jennings is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the State University of New York Buffalo and the author of the new book Black Comix: African-American Independent Comics, Art and Culture, which he co-wrote with Damian Duffy. He teaches graphic art and design and his research focuses on challenging African-American stereotypes in the media and popular culture.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era.

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Can the youth vote trump the Tea Party in midterms

Bakari Kitwana discusses Obama’s stimlus

Recently, Bakari Kitwana, who is one of our exclusive bloggers and CEO of Rapsessions.org , landed an exclusive interview with Minnijean Brown-Trickey, who is a member of the Little Rock Nine, the group of African-American students who, against fierce racist opposition, desegregated their Arkansas high school. He spoke to her about the recent death of Jefferson Thomas and how it’s affected her. The interview also speaks on the personal relationship she had with Thomas whose funeral is occurring today.

Click here for a bio of Jefferson Thomas and more information on the Little Rock Nine.

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In this exclusive interview, NewsOne contributing editor Bakari Kitwana spoke with Zenovia N. Evans, JD, who started a hunger strike on August 5^th to protest law school transparency. Speaking about developments with the movement to hold law schools accountable to graduates with rising debt and declining job opportunities, she confirms that she ended the strike on Saturday under medical advice—after losing sixteen pounds.

Graduate student protest blogs like Ms. Evans’s unemployedjd.com want law schools to make public salary and employment data of recent graduates. “The strike is over, but the protest continues,” she says.

Zenovia N. Evans, JD is a 2009 graduate of Thomas M. Cooley Law School. She started the blog unemployedjd.com writing under the pseudonym Ethan Haines.

Click here for exclusive audio of interview

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Daughter Of Civil Rights Lawyer William Kunstler Release Tell All Documentary

Bakari Kitwana speaks with Lisa Fager Bediako about the absence of African Americans in mainstream prime time positions as anchors and hosts on cable and network television. Reflecting on the recent provocative CNN Reliable Sources segment, Bediako takes us inside the industry that she’s both worked in and monitored for years. From recent telecommunications legislation and new trends, she describes where things have gone wrong, reflects of what the dearth of representation means for the Black community and suggests ways for moving forward.

Media justice activist Lisa Fager Bediako is the co-founder and president of Industry Ears (industryears.com), a watchdog group that focuses on the impact that the media has on communities of color.

 Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

 See CNN story on the dearth of black television anchors

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Rap Sessions: Conrad Tillard on Charlie Rangel’s Fight for Congressional Seat

Rap Sessions: Quannell X Rails Against Wave of Police Brutality in Houston

Bakari Kitwana speaks with Chandra Bhatnagar about the legal ramifications of racial profiling as it relates to recent legislation targeting illegal immigrants. Bhatnagar reflects on the recent lawsuit filed by the ACLU against Arizona and questions how constitutional and international law experts might respond to recent legislation in Massachusetts that would create a hotline for anonymously reporting on suspected illegal immigrants.

Chandra Bhatnagar is staff attorney with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Human Rights Program. He’s also the principle author of “The Persistence of Racial and Ethnic Profiling in the United States,” a report recently submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

READ Chandra Bhatnagar’s CNN blog on Arizona immigration law, SB1070 here.

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RAP SESSIONS: Quannell X Rails Against Police Brutality In Houston

RAP SESSIONS: Another Black Harvard Professor Defends Elena Kagan, Supreme Court Nominee

RAP SESSIONS: Conrad Tillard On Charlie Rangel’s Fight For Congressional Seat

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Since the news broke that Alvin Greene won the South Carolina Democratic Party Primary Election for US Senate, countless media and political elites, have filled several rounds of the news cycle looking down their noses at the unlikely winner. But more important than questioning where he got the $10,400 filing fee and feigning outrage in response to the obscenity charge, those who claim to love democracy should be asking this: “why are freedom-loving political insiders asking Greene to step aside?”

The same folks leading the charge against Greene, in part suggesting that he’s not smart enough to have really won, are the same public servants unable to protect us from banks smart enough to rip us off, but too dumb to fail, and oversized multinational corporations smart enough to drill, but clueless about how to stop the greatest oil spill in American history.

So until said elected officials have figured out a solution to these pressing issues, alongside the unemployment crisis, the budget crises, and recurring voting irregularities in national elections that nurture a climate for more of the same, I’m rooting for Alvin Greene.

RELATED: Congressman Believes Black Candidate Was “Planted” By Rich People

Here are five reasons why:

First, if Alvin Greene is the legitimate winner, and I think politicians should find that out with a fair investigation before asking him to step aside (as Congressman James Clyburn and Democratic Party State leader Carol Fowler have done), his win reinforces the notion that grassroots everyday people can still win elections in America—that the country, imagine this, still actually belongs to the people. Political elites reveal how far removed they are from this idea when central to their criticism of Greene is the notion that Senate primary wins are impossible without big bucks and establishment support.

I’m also rooting for Alvin Greene because he’s an underdog, the quintessential outsider, so much so, his own party claims they never heard of him. That plus the fact that any non-millionaire deserves our support when he proves he can ruffle the feathers of the mainstream political establishment—those same politicians who get sent to Washington to represent the interest of the people back at home, but fail to support the majority will on pressing issues of the day.

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Third, Green deserves our support because he is a candidate who went for broke and did the unthinkable: he put his money where his mouth is. If indeed his filing fee was his own money—which is as plausible to me as his win—then it’s a compelling story about the will of everyday people in search of democracy. This is the type of inspirational narrative all Americans should be embracing—not imaginary populous movements that run politically connected candidates (Rand Paul are u listening?) and pass them off as a revolution.

Greene wants to do something to save the country sans name-calling, racial slurs or spitting on politicians he disagrees with. Instead, the 32-year-old college grad truly believes in public service—if his military record is any indication.

RELATED: VIDEO: Alvin Greene Gives Nervous Interview With Keith Olbermann

Which leads me to my final two points: Greene’s a military veteran and a post baby-boomer, two groups underrepresented in the Senate. Sure, Washington insiders spend a lot of time giving lip service to the troops when it’s politically expedient. However, when a 13-year military veteran runs for office, these “support the troops” cheerleaders are focused on discrediting him.

According to the Department of Defense, over 75 percent of the armed forces is comprised of Americans under 30 years old. Likewise, young voters 18-29 years old in the last three national elections have been steadily increasing their engagement. It’s time their numbers are more significantly represented in Washington.

It may be revealed in the days ahead that Alvin Greene’s win was no win at all. If so, the culprit will likely be something far more plausible than a “Republican plant.” Although an electronic voting machine glitch, diabolical voting machine tampering, or massive crossover voting lead my list, I’m hoping that won’t be the case.

But whether Alvin Greene is manufactured, an accident or for real, those crying foul should see his entry on the political scene as an opportunity to re-evaluate their commitment to the nation’s ideals—rather than to continue to dismantle them.

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law based think tank The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2010).

Bakari Kitwana speaks with Minister Quannell X about a recent wave of police brutality incidents in Houston, Texas, targeting young Black males. This issue is especially relevant considering the recent police brutality cases of Aiyana Jones and the troubling case of Chicago cop, Lt. Jon Burge, accused of torturing black men.Recently the alleged beating of 16 year-old Chad Holley by eight police officers heightened tensions in that city. Quannell X talks with newsone.com about a videotape of the incident captured by an area business surveillance camera, which Minister X viewed and turned over to the mayor and police chief.

Quannell X is a Houston area community activist and leader of the New Black Panther Nation. He has been leading protests in that city in response to the beating of Chad Holley and the recent acquittal of police officers responsible for shooting an unarmed Robert Tolan, son of former major league baseball player Bobby Tolan, in his driveway.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010).

LISTEN HERE:

WATCH Chad Holley tell his story here:

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RAP SESSIONS: Another Black Harvard Professor Defends Elena Kagan, Supreme Court Nominee

RAP SESSIONS: Conrad Tillard On Charlie Rangel’s Fight For Congressional Seat

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Bakari Kitwana speaks with Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan about the Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan. Critics of the Obama Administration have raised questions about Solicitor General Kagan’s minority hiring record when she was Dean of Harvard Law. Pointing to Kagan’s record on race and social justice, including her decision to refuse the oldest endowed chair at Harvard Law because of its connection to the Atlantic Slave Trade, Sullivan responds.

Specifically, he asserts that many of the criticisms leveled against Kagan are unfounded and taken out of context. While he concedes there are equally qualified Black women who were on Obama’s short list and who could have been nominated, he feels we should not “demean Kagan.”

Professor Ronald Sullivan is the Director of Harvard Criminal Justice Institute and Jamestown Project Fellow. As an attorney, he’s represented clients in local and federal courts across the US, including one of the Jena Six defendants. A Clinical Law Professor at Harvard, he was recruited four years ago by Elena Kagan to join the faculty at Harvard Law.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

LISTEN HERE:

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RAP SESSIONS: Conrad Tillard On Charlie Rangel’s Fight For Congressional Seat

EVENT: Rap Sessions Kicks Off 5th Annual Tour

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One of the most important unasked questions this midterm election year is this: “Will the youth vote be a factor in 2010?” Given the actual impact of the youth vote in 2008, it’s a far more important question than the ones daily raised by the media manufactured so-called Tea Party Movement–despite the latter’s success at striking fear in the hearts of incumbents.

The Tea Party murmuring is hardly a movement. It has not a single political victory to speak of. Not so easy to dismiss are young voters who two years ago turned out in record numbers to vote in the presidential election. Two-thirds of the 23 million voters 18-29 who voted for president in 2008, voted for Barack Obama.

“The election of Barack Obama was a major electoral politics victory for the youth vote,” says Angela Woodson who co-chaired the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which brought together 4000 young voters from across the US. “But it doesn’t help the president to move their agenda if he isn’t backed by a strong legislative body with the same vision.”

The primary races unfolding this spring and summer (Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina had theirs this week) will lay the groundwork for important midterm elections this November. Both will determine if President Barack Obama can move forward effectively with his change agenda or if young voters will see common sense policies that they voted for in 2008 erupt into ugly, year-long knock down, drag out debates–the ways healthcare and economic reform have.

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Over the last year and a half, young voters have for the most part remained on the sidelines of mainstream political debates. And a Gallup poll last week found that young voters are less enthusiastic about voting in midterm elections than older voters.

Is the youth vote simply elated by what it achieved in 2008 or exhausted from the effort?

Rob Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters Education Fund, an organization that has been mobilizing young voters since 2003 says it’s neither.

“Community institutions and capacity have been weakened by the economy, says Baker. But I don’t think that youth have been quiet. The mainstream media just isn’t focusing on their activism.”

When the Chris Brown and Rihanna incident pushed dating violence into the media spotlight early last year, young voters missed an opportunity to translate their newly won political leverage into much needed dating violence reform. Young voters were mostly silent on the healthcare debate. They were even quieter on student loan reform. Both were signed into law despite lackluster support from the youth voting bloc.

However, Baker points to other issues where youth have taken the lead, such as activism around immigration (in Arizona) and police brutality (Oscar Grant in Oakland).

“Young people are engaged in these issues and extremely present in on-line advocacy,” says Biko, pointing to a recent survey that found that African Americans were more likely to be on Twitter. “But despite their sophistication, we need to identify a tangible agenda around which to heighten that engagement.”

Already this year, the country has witnessed the white backlash against Obama under the auspices of a Tea Party Movement, the rising conservative state’s rights agenda in the form of Arizona immigrant laws and Texas textbook reform, and the even more extreme antigovernment militias threatening violence to thwart an inevitably more inclusive America. With important congressional, senate and governor races approaching, all three may be tangible catalysts for youth electoral politics engagement.

Given the significant number of independent voters in their ranks (42 percent of college students and 35 percent of African Americans under 30 are independent), such a turning point will require young voters to rethink their independent status in the primary in order to assure the most viable candidates are on the ballot on November 2.

Young voters need to understand that the primary structure was created for the two-party system,” says Woodson, the former director of Outreach for Faith-based and Community Initiatives for the Ohio governor’s office, who now heads the consulting firm Gelic Group. “In order to use the same aggressiveness for midterm elections that they did during the presidential race, the youth vote has to learn how to play the independent game and switch parties when it makes sense.”

Such thinking is not unprecedented. During the 2008 Democratic Primary Election, Republicans crossed over and voted for the Democrat they believed to be the easier opponent for their Republican contender, then switched back to “Republican” for the general election. It made concrete political sense and is well within the rules.

The question is, will young voters abandon their fierce independent convictions in the short term to advance their long-term goals?

If they can do this, then they are closer to building a movement than so-called Tea Party supporters can imagine.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of NewsOne.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

From Laurel May @ 944.com:

Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop has teamed up with Harvard Law-based think tank, The Jamestown Project to present its fifth annual national discussion tour. These townhall-style meetings will bring together a panel of leading hip-hop activists, artists and experts for public dialogue exploring the possible ways hip-hop’s entrepreneurial spirit could dovetail with economic recovery and to inform youth about the various ways the current economic shift affects them personally.

Bakari Kitwana, the CEO of Rap Sessions, is co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention. He is the author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, which is used as a coursebook at over 100 colleges and universities.

Throughout 2010, Rap Sessions are scheduled in ten cities across the United States, with panelists including: M-1 (one-half of the hip-hop duo dead prez); Blitz The Ambassador (Ghanaian hip-hop artist); Toni Blackman (Global Hip-Hop Ambassador, US State Department); Hip-Hop educator Martha Diaz (president of The Hip-Hop Association and Global Hip-Hop Film Festival); Columbia University Associate Professor Marc Lamont Hill (Political contributor to the Fox News Channel and author of Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life); youth organizer Keisha Senter (Director of Clinton Global Initiative University); Ben Herson (founder of the global hip-hop record label Nomadic Wax); and youth entrepreneur expert Darryl Williams (The Kauffman Foundation).

Says Kitwana,“Now more than ever, we need our youth to think more broadly about global economics, democracy, diversity, community activism, innovation and new models of leadership.”

Learn more and view digital stories from the tour at http://www.rapsessions.org/

RELATED:

RAP SESSIONS: Conrad Tillard On Charlie Rangel’s Fight For Congressional Seat

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RAP SESSIONS WITH BAKARI KITWANA

Bakari Kitwana speaks with Reverend Conrad Tillard about the Democratic Primary battle ramping up this election year between longtime Congressman Charles Rangel and Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV for New York’s 15^th Congressional District, the Congressional seat once held by the great Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. New York’s first Black Congressman.

Conrad Tillard is Senior Pastor of Nazarene Congregational United Church of Christ in Brooklyn, NY. Licensed and ordained at Abyssinian Baptist Church, the church founded in Harlem by the father of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Tillard is also the former minister of Nation of Islam Mosque #7 in Harlem.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of NewsOne.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

Click here to view photos:

The decision by parents across the country to keep their children home from school today rather than have students listen to the President’s stay in school address follows an ugly pattern that began to emerge in the months since the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Conservative opposition to Obama in elite political and media circles in recent weeks has turned into routine disgruntled post-election partisan bickering to vile anti-American and racist rhetoric.

From opposition to President Obama’s push for an Economic Stimulus bill in February, and disdain for his selection of Sonia Sotomayor to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, to contempt for his current campaign for health care reform, this voice of unreason has grown louder and more belligerent. The decision by conservative leaders to encourage parents to keep their children home from school today under the auspices that the president’s message is hellbent on socialist indoctrination, as Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer claimed, is the latest manifestation.

The National Keep Your Child at Home Day follows a trend that most notably included the anti- Obama barbs thrown by former US Vice President Dick Cheney back in April. A vice president of an immediately previous administration speaking out within months of the transition of power is something unheard of in recent US history. (Former VP Al Gore waited for eight months before criticizing President George H.W. Bush).

Cheney’s departure from tradition was just the beginning. Since the new presidential administration has been underway, conservative leaders seem to have flipped from advocacy to derision on similar positions they supported under Republican presidents. The $700 Billion Wall Street Bailout was a necessary evil. But, for them, the $787 Billion Economic Stimulus marked the end of capitalism. Support for the war in Iraq under President Bush was pro-American. Under Obama, the idea of not criticizing a war president has been entirely abandoned.

Conservatives fought against Democratic Party attacks on President Ronald Reagan’s school address in 1988. Three year later, they similarly supported President George H.W. Bush’s school address. With President Obama in the White House, a president speaking to the nation’s students, instead summons up a return to the cold war—this time within our own borders.

Certainly conservative media is stoking the flames. Fox News’ Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Laura Ingraham, for example, have for months been ratcheting up the racist and cold war sentiment on their programs, suggesting that the president and his supporters vacillate between hating white people and fomenting socialist revolution.

Even as President Obama tries to strike a middle ground on healthcare and the high school address, conservative talkshow hosts, bloggers and some elected officials continue to escalate the antagonism, hostility and name calling (demonizing the president as Hitler and his team as communists, socialists, and Marxists).

These voices daily are helping to nurture an atmosphere of racial confrontation and in the process bring the hatred above ground. According to the February 2009 report of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the United States, the number of active hate groups (926 vs. 888 in 2007) in the US has grown by 54 percent since 2000. SPLC contributes this rise to immigration fears, a failing economy and the election of Barack Obama.

Likewise, the findings of a recent Pew Research Center poll suggest that the ways that racial opposition has been subtly, and not so subtly, infused in these debates is taking a toll on white Obama supporters as well. The survey found that among white Democrats, Obama’s approval rating has dropped 11 points since April. Among white independents it’s dropped 9 points, and among white women it’s dropped 12 percentage points.

Barack Obama’s loss of white supporters may bode well for a GOP win in 2012. However, is breeding racial hostility in the best interest of a nation increasingly diverse, racially, culturally and in terms of political perspectives?

During the height of the 2008 election when a similar trend emerged, Newt Gingrich made a public call for conservatives to turn down the anti-American and racist rhetoric. The country needs his or like leadership now.

At a bare minimum, such leadership should remind conservatives across the board that ideological differences with the new commander in chief is no excuse to abandon core principles of our Democratic Republic—especially when your opinions and beliefs represent the minority.

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law –based think tank The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era.

New Muslim Cool comes at a time when daily we observe in our national culture old-guard gatekeepers (can you say Dick Cheney?) who work tirelessly to impose on the younger generation a shared American identity that is dated, simple, and in white and black. The magic of Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s important new film, which recently aired on PBS, is found in its ability to provide a bird’s eye view of a freshly minted generation of Americans. Fighting against being defined by America’s bygone eras, New Muslim Cool points us toward a more complicated future.

It’s a journey full of collisions-mainly because the very act of shining a spotlight on the ways race, politics, religion and generational rifts have evolved, something that Taylor does quite well, is a process that slowly gleans viewers from the self-identity America has for decades projected as status quo to the world. Welcome to a nation at the crossroads between old and new.

Thank goodness, this is the story of the new America that is unfolding-the one that young Americans across traditional divides are claiming everyday as their own.

Enter Hamza Perez. The film traces the ups and downs in the life of this northeastern seaboard urban native who is transplanted to post-industrial Pittsburgh for a new start, just as the US is on the verge of the most significant economic decline since the Great Depression. Perez, a Puerto Rican American hip-hop artist, is also Muslim. His conversion from Catholicism brings him face-to-face with what freedom of religion looks like in the throes of the war on terror. (One of the film’s high points is an unprovoked and unjustified FBI raid on Perez’s mosque).

Absent of his other identities, Perez’s story is incomplete: A street hustler turned anti-drug counselor; a father embarking on a second marriage; a young man struggling to find a workable definition of masculinity; an unsigned hip-hop artist for whom hip-hop culture provides both the foundation for his anti-drug advocacy and a medium through which he projects his new faith.

The film is most powerful when it meets all of these varying and sometimes overlapping identities head-on. It does this best when embracing the complexities of the three-part axis on which New Muslim Cool turns.

First, we are presented a vivid portrait of hip-hop through the eyes of an independent hip-hop artist (one-half of the rap duo Mujahideen Team) for whom a commercial industry record deal isn’t an end goal. And despite hip-hop’s decline as a cash cow for the record industry, the culture is revealed as an asset that enhances Perez’s life choices-just as it does for countless young Americans.

In a similar way, the film hones in on the intricacies behind the scenes of Latino America culture. Latino in this case, but not always, means Puerto Rican. And part of Perez’s personal and political struggle is a firm but nebulous connection to his island roots. As a second generation immigrant, Perez is at times at odds with his elders’ perspective (both his mom and grandmother), from his marriage to an African-American woman to his choice of religion.

Finally, the film’s treatment of Islam as an actual religion that guides practitioners on a spiritual path forces viewers to grapple with the last eight years of U.S. propaganda that portrays Islam as a religion of hate. That American homegrown Muslims, of Puerto Rican rather than Middle Eastern descent, are central in the film makes this crash course even more jarring.

U.S. anti-Muslim propaganda and religious profiling stands in sharp contrast to the more positive ideas of freedom of religion, free speech and other civil liberties that America once represented to the world. This is a significant part of the film’s message.

Considering the Pew Research Center survey released yesterday, which found that the generation gap between young and old Americans is the largest it’s been in the last 40 years, a film with such a message could be easily lost on either young or old. But New Muslim Cool is no ordinary film. In the tradition of Byron Hurt’s Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (another PBS hit), this is a film that makes you want to do something.

To that end, New Muslim Cool will certainly speak directly to the heart of hip-hop audiences. As a result, across the nation young people will likely view it widely and dissect its strengths and weaknesses.

And if Taylor and Perez are correct about the nation’s future, babyboomers and World War II generationers must not only tune in, but they too should find it impossible to remain on the sidelines of a discussion so crucial to the future of our nation.

With the national euphoria of inauguration, the multi-billion dollar corporate bailouts, and even the historic economic stimulus all recent memories, one untold story of the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency remains-the advent of a concise, bold and fearless new racial politics.

“Subverting race,” Jabari Asim, editor of the Crisis magazine, calls it in his important new book What Obama Means.

And President Obama’s uncanny knack for it takes on even greater significance post election-not simply avoiding the predicable knee-jerk behavior of traditional politics that for too long has governed race business, but advancing a more enlightened, informed and balanced racial outlook that shifts the debate at the same time.

It’s a new racial politics for a US president that, if maintained and amplified in the days ahead, will fly in the face of Barack Obama’s predecessors.

Although there have been other sightings (Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement in February that when it comes to race, America “is a nation of cowards,” for example), mostly this new racial politics has come in the form of Obama’s foreign policy overtures: toward European leaders as partners we actually respect, and the recognition of Iran, Korea, Cuba and others as sovereign nations with their own national interests.

Of course there was also President Obama’s strike back at the handshake backlash:

“It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.”

A New York Times/ CBS poll released last week hints that something is afoot. Its chief finding was that Americans across race since the election of Barack Obama were more optimistic about race relations. 66 percent surveyed last month said race relations are good, compared to 53 percent who said the same nearly a year ago.

The right, which has long advocated the old racial politics at home and abroad, especially when dealing with non-Western (read: black and brown) leaders, has spent much of the last three months struggling for a response. This has meant rifling through their well-worn playbook and hurling literal sticks and stones like “dictators,” “national security,” and “anti-Americanism.”

All seem desperate attempts to maintain a global racial politics perfected during the Bush years, especially when one of the “dictators” in question is the democratically elected leader of his country.

What else could have pushed former Vice President Dick Cheney to make more prominently positioned media appearances in a week than during most of the last eight years?

“He has gone to Europe, for example, and seemed to apologize profusely,” Cheney said expressing his disdain for the new president’s way of engaging world leaders, “and then to Mexico, and apologized there…Both our friends and our foes will be quick to take advantage of a situation if they think they’re dealing with a weak president or one who is not going to stand up and aggressively defend America’s interests.”

Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential hopeful in-waiting, added to this in his April 21st appearance on Fox News: “If the president recently bowed to the Saudi King, he has been friendly to the Iranians . . . he basically backed off his threat to the North Koreans, he has made life easier for the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, why not be friendly with Hugo Chavez? It sends a terrible signal . . . to how the administration regards dictators.”

From Cheney and Gingrich right on down the food chain, these proclamations parallel the stuff of the slave codes of the 18th and 19th centuries, those laws enacted to govern behavior between whites and blacks in order to ensure that white supremacy wouldn’t be a matter of chance. If both are as fixated on symbols as their comments suggest, are these metaphoric calls for the return to the good old days?

Luckily for the future of the country, Americans across the board aren’t buying in. The same New York Times / CBS poll referenced above found Barack Obama’s job approval rating (68 percent) to be higher than any recent US President.

Such support is fortunate, as President Obama attempts to swing the pendulum on race.
It turns out that the “change we can believe in” includes a change in racial politics after all. Who knew?

To be sure, as is the case of any social transformation, real progress is going to take the effort of everyday people. And that will require organizations like the NAACP, Urban League, and emerging activists of the younger generation to get out of the proverbial deer-in-the-headlights awe of having elected the first Black president.

Instead, now is the time to begin to supplement these new day efforts.

Walter Kimbrough, the 41 year-old president of Philander Smith College, speaks with Bakari Kitwana about the current state of Historically Black College and Universities. “HBCUs will be irrelevant without a revolution of leadership,” says Kimbrough, who shares success stories from his own experience as president for the last four years. Kimbrough’s strategies at Philander Smith have resulted in increased enrollment as other HBCUs have suffered a recent decline. For Kimbrough, who’s regularly on Facebook communicating with students and who hosts the popular hip-hop lecture series on his campus, “Bless the Mic,” direct, personal contact is the key. Dr. Kimbrough also speaks here about his forthcoming book, which continues his research into Black Greek letter organizations-observing that when it comes to the new Black leadership in the Obama administration: “it’s devoid both of HBCU graduates and members of Black fraternities and sororities.”  He insists that this a historical shift, and “a wake up call,” for these nearly century-old Black institutions.

Walter Kimbrough is president of Philander Smith College, a leading researcher on Black Greek letter organizations, and the author of Black Greek 101.

WATCH THE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW HERE:

From HuffingtonPost.com:

Dr. John Hope Franklin, the wildly accomplished historian who documented Blacks’ place in the great American story, firmly believed in reparations — the idea that the descendants of slaves in the United States should be compensated for the centuries of free labor that enriched slaveowners and their descendants and the American empire. It is a fact overlooked by the recent flurry of mainstream media coverage commemorating his life work. (He died at the age of 94 late last month.) But it is no small detail.

Consider his response in 2007 to state legislators in North Carolina and Virginia who balked at apologies for slavery introduced by their peers. For him a mere verbal apology wasn’t enough.

Click here to read more.

CLICK HERE for JHF: By The Numbers!

I recently caught up with longtime Black political activist Haki Madhubuti to discuss the Obama economic stimulus package and the economic downturn’s impact on Black America. Here, Madhubuti delves deeply into some of the economic maneuverings that derailed the US economy. He also spoke about Obama’s cabinet picks, particularly those in education and foreign policy. I wanted to know, given Madhubuti’s extensive career as an educator (he and his wife, Dr. Carol Lee, founded New Concept Development Center in 1972), how he felt about the selection of Chicago Public Schools head Arne Duncan as Education Secretary. Being from Chicago, like Duncan, he cut to the chase. Likewise, Madhubuti is a Little Rock, Arkansas native and held no punches when speaking of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and how former president Bill Clinton complicates her role. Given what’s at stake in the arenas of the economy, education, foreign policy in the days ahead, Madhubuti offers a crash course.

Haki Madhubuti is university professor at Chicago State University, the founder of Third World Press and the author of over 20 books, including the most recent, Yellow Black.

WATCH the interview here:

For nearly an entire week, the Chris Brown/Rihanna alleged abuse incident has dominated major news media headlines. Unfortunately, these sensationalized reports did less to elucidate the national epidemic of violence against women and more to cement into our national psyche the idea that the new face of domestic abuse is young, Black and hip-hop. Instead of accepting sole responsibility for one of America’s most neglected pathologies, young Americans should turn this tragedy into an opportunity.

In the last two election cycles, hip-hop led the way in making involvement in national elections fashionable among youth. Hip-hop political organizers could do the same in extending that influence into the arena of public policy with the goal of establishing an innovative solution to abuse that shifts the way the nation thinks about its treatment of women.

The election of President Barack Obama, with young people across race supporting him long before even the African American community’s vote was solidified, marked the first political victory for this generation. Two-thirds of the 23 million young Americans 18-29 who voted in the 2008 presidential election voted for Barack Obama. These same young people taking the lead on a public policy solution to end dating violence would be an important second act.

Contrary to public opinion the hip-hop community has a long history of resisting the status quo of domestic abuse, misogyny and gender inequity. From books like Tracy Sharpley-Whiting’s Pimps Up, Hos Down and films like Aishah Simmons’ No! The Rape Documentary to organizations like the Center for Young Women’s development and Industry Ears, Inc., there is an emerging hip-hop generation leadership that has its finger on the pulse of a change agenda for women.

Such an agenda is reflected in the nearly 5000 comments posted on Blackplanet.com responding to Chris Brown and Rihanna newsone.com updates. The overwhelming mood of these comments was that the Black community needed to separate itself from stereotypes of domestic violence. Blackplanet.com members even spontaneously created online discussion groups to address the issue.

The media’s obsession with the Chris Brown/Rihanna incident, alongside a new administration that seems to take the debt it owes young voters seriously, offers young political organizers a rare opportunity for this generation to take the lead on dating and domestic abuse.

Although hip-hop didn’t create America’s gender problem, its mainstream dominant representations certainly helped reinforce it. Today’s young Americans—especially those in the Chris Brown and Rihanna age group and the legions of even younger fans who idolize them—have come of age consuming a steady diet of these images. Few would argue that they are healthier or wiser as a result.

At the same time, there are very few places in our culture where we require young men to learn appropriate behavior for engaging their female counterparts, especially when relationships turn sour. (Rhode Island and Virginia law for high school instruction on dating are rare exceptions.) This advancing the status quo, alongside our failure as a society to entrench a workable solution into the fabric of our culture, is a deadly combination.

A recent report from the Bureau of Justice found that 1 in 3 girls in the US is a victim of physical, emotional or verbal abuse from a dating partner. 13 percent of teen girls say they were physically hurt or hit and 40 percent of teenage girls 14-17 years old say they know someone their age that has been hit by a boyfriend. And a 2003 nationwide survey from the Center for Disease Control of 15,000 9-12 grade high school students found that nearly 9 percent experienced physical dating violence, with rates among Black females (14 percent) nearly twice their white counterparts (7 percent). The rate for Latino females was 9.3 percent.

Now is not the time for young people inspired during the last election cycle to fall back into complacency. Instead this energy should be channeled into the creation of a concrete national agenda committed to ending domestic violence.

This certainly will require an institutional approach. In the same way that sex education worked its way into our schools, we need a similar curriculum from the earliest grades upward to change the ways Americans think about dating violence, domestic abuse and gender equity. At a bare minimum, this curriculum must teach boys that physical and emotional violence toward their girlfriends or any boys or men toward women is never an option.

Such a move would have several benefits: it would help create the major societal shift needed to curtail violence against women; it would allow hip-hop to reveal to the world that it has a moral center; and it would solidify a new movement for a new generation. All are important steps on the road to transforming America into a county that reflects, more accurately than our media representations, the generation currently preparing to inherit it.

Bakari Kitwana is the co-author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2009) and a visiting scholar at Columbia College’s Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media.

RELATED:

GALLERY: Celebrities Who Overcame Domestic Abuse | CLICK HERE

GALLERY: Chris Brown & Rihanna, Happy Days | CLICK HERE

GALLERY: Chris Brown’s Court Hearing | CLICK HERE

Yesterday, as I prepared for the kick-off to the national discussion tour focused on the theme “Is America Really Post-Racial?” which will convene in ten US cities this spring, I received emails from around the country commenting on The New York Post cartoon that depicts a chimpanzee being shot by two white police officers. The cartoon prominently displays one of the officers saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The commentary comes on the heels of the historic election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president. During the campaign, Obama had been likened to the famed children’s book protagonist and monkey, “Curious George,” and numerous Americans openly expressing their discontent with the very idea of the US president for the first time not being a white male.

Likewise, the recurring backdrop to the historic campaign with an African American as frontrunner was the need for secret service protection for Obama due to the overwhelming number of death threats and the subsequent concern that some nut case might attempt to bring him harm-an idea reiterated by at least one attempted plan in Colorado to make good on the threats during the Democratic National Convention.

One of the routines that have long played out in American electoral politics when it comes to race is politics by suggestion and association. Willie Horton ads, Bill Clinton’s remark about Sister Souljah in 1992, the racially-charged commentary at McCain-Palin rallies during the primaries-all were designed with the intent that Americans would make an emotional connection to previously held ideas about race, racial cues if you will. This cartoon is no different.

Media and political elites intent on playing the game of American’s old racial politics have in the last several decades become quite adept at two primary tried and tested strategies: feigning innocent when they get called on their racist behavior; and when that doesn’t work, defending racist ploys by claiming those offended should get over their sensitivities and toughen their skin.

While it is true that a pet chimpanzee was shot days ago in Stamford, Connecticut that chimpanzee had absolutely nothing to do with the economic stimulus bill. President Barack Obama, by contrast, has been associated with the economic stimulus package from nearly day one of his administration.

So it is nearly impossible to not make some association between the Sean Delonas cartoon and recent current events. And it was painfully obvious to see those on the wrong side of the issue do this usual dance.

The good news is that those strategies have run their course. And like other divide and conquer approaches, such tactics, I believe, will continue fall flat in a post civil rights politics environment.

Make no mistake. The problem with the cartoon is that those not offended by it either don’t get it or don’t want to.

If Delonas didn’t realize how the cartoon would be perceived, certainly the editorial staff at the post should have. It’s hard to fathom that given the history of derogatory references to people of African descent as “monkeys” that The Post’s editorial team wouldn’t anticipate that African Americans would take offense.

Either both The New York Post and Delonas were asleep at the wheel and failed in their professional responsibility or there was intent on the part of one or both to fan the flames of America’s old racial politics. Either they lack cultural sophistication, desire a tantalizing media buzz, or they simply just don’t care. There really is no middle ground.

Almost a year ago on March 18th, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama gave a speech entitled “a more perfect union” in which he challenged Americans to own up the to fact that race is an issue “this nation cannot afford to ignore .  . ., a part of our union we have yet to perfect.”

This cartoon’s arrival on newsstands is way out of step with the times. Regardless of its intention, it reinforces the notion that national conversations on race are long over due.

Bakari Kitwana is the CEO of Rap Sessions and the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and The New Reality of Race in America.

Bakari Kitwana Asks: Common

What will an Obama Presidency mean to young Americans?

Bakari Kitwana sat down with Grammy award-winning hip-hop artist and actor Common to discuss the significance of Barack Obama’s presidency for young Americans, one of Obama’s key voting bloc’s in yesterday’s election. In their conversation, Common talks about the impact of hip-hop culture on America’s racial landscape.

What was it like to grow up in Windy City during the historic campaign and mayoral reign of Mayor Harold Washington? Common makes it plain: “Brother Harold” loomed large, but Obama even before last night had already taken on an even greater local significance, says the Chicago native. In the interview, he makes projects about what President-elect Obama’s victory will mean to America and the world.

Finally, Common carefully delves into some of the highs and lows, innovations and missteps of election 2008—from heartfelt moments of his involvement with the making of Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can,” video to the impact of Reverend Jeremiah Wright on the nation during the primary and beyond. Throughout Barack Obama’s nearly 2-year journey to the White House, his relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright is the question that wouldn’t go away. Common, a long time member of Wright’s Trinity Church of Christ talks about the impact of Wright on his own development and shares why he thinks Wright is misunderstood.

Common is an author of The Mirror and Me. His new album out next month is entitled Universal Mind Control (GOOD Music/Geffen) and his upcoming film is Terminator Salvation (May 2009).

]]> http://newsone.com/nation/bakari-kitwana/exclusive-common-talks-about-obama-presidency/feed/ 3 http://newsone.com/obama/bakari-kitwana/kitwana-election-quotes-from-notable-intellectuals/ http://newsone.com/obama/bakari-kitwana/kitwana-election-quotes-from-notable-intellectuals/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:11:20 +0000 Bakari Kitwana http://newsone.com/?p=29631 HARTFORD, CT "I wanted to dwell over the line I drew to help the electronic scanner read my vote for Obama. That black line burst not only with history, but mainly for what it will mean for us: an opportunity to build a new kind of covenant within America and between America and the world. Today was the day when the ‘still... Read more..]]>

HARTFORD, CT

“I wanted to dwell over the line I drew to help the electronic scanner read my vote for Obama. That black line burst not only with history, but mainly for what it will mean for us: an opportunity to build a new kind of covenant within America and between America and the world. Today was the day when the ‘still small voice’ vibrated, allowing the heart to pant, life to glow, and struggles to envelop us, not saying ‘no’ alone but also ‘this way forward.’
-Vijay Prashad, Director of International Studies at Trinity College and author of The Darker Nations: A Peoples History of The Third World

KINGSTON, NY
“I was really anxious yesterday until I spoke to my Mom and little brother. My brother reminded me that no matter what happens tonight we’ve already won when you consider that black people couldn’t vote 50 years ago. My Mom advised me to tune out the polls, the media, and the emails and feel the spirit of this time we’re in.

‘When have you ever known a candidate to be internationally lifted up by so much goodwill and prayer, she asked. Stopped thinking of this as an election, and see it for the movement of sheer will and Spirit it is.’

I took my son and a picture of my deceased Dad in the booth with me today when my son and I pulled the lever. We wanted to share the glory of this day with our Ancestors so humbled and grateful, am I for the sacrifices they’ve made to bring us here. And that, my brother, is where I am. The curry goat deh a fire. The champagne is chilling in the fridge. I am confident, grateful and peaceful. Congratulations Barack Hussein Obama. Let the work and the healing begin.”
-Joan Morgan
Journalist and author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

MILWAUKEE, WI
“Today I traveled from my solidly blue Illinois to the nearby swing state (and my native state) of Wisconsin to work the Obama campaign’s Get Out the Vote effort. After having spent the last few weekends canvassing in less than sympathetic white suburbs of Milwaukee, I was thrilled today to instead be in the city’s black neighborhoods where I grew up. We hit the block of my high school sweetheart’s house, over to the park where I learned how to swim, and up to the North Lawn projects-where a passing woman asked ‘Is your name Mary’ and we realized we had gone to high school together. Tiffany was on her way to vote. Today, I felt like after months of fooling with the ‘undecided’ voters, it was OUR turn to bring it on home and we were bringing our A-game. Passing the long lines of black folks at polling places and the vans full of volunteers fanning out to bring more people to vote, and chatting it up with a man sporting his ‘I voted today’ sticker while drinking his morning beer, I thought of one of Obama’s stump lines and smiled: We are the people we’ve been waiting for!”
-Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University

SAN JOSE, CA
“By all account’s what we are witnessing today is a historic turn in all of American history. While one should never make predictions in politics, by all accounts it looks like the people are speaking primarily on Barack Obama’s behalf and, in particular youth and people of color. After today, in many ways we will live in a different America and in many ways our struggles will remain the same, if not more intense. It’s a sight to behold, and it is powerful contemplating the possibilities of such a new future with such a chaotic and unknowable backdrop helping to direct the course: the economy, the war, global warming, health care and a slew of other critical issues confronting our country and a new administration, party and president to confront them.”
-Shamako Noble aka The Sword of the West, Executive Director-Hip Hop Congress

ATLANTA, GA
“It’s a crisp, perfect fall night in Atlanta and you can feel that current of excitement. I just drove past the King Center. The streets are choked with traffic, helicopters buzz overhead and people are jammed along the sidewalks waiting for word of the returns. It reminds me of watch parties Black people held on the eve of emancipation. The polls close here in six minutes and all the talk is of projections and returns. Across town a security guard was struggling to maintain order at one of the dozens of watch parties in the commercial district. I asked him if he thought he’d live to see this. ‘I never contemplated it,’ he told me. ‘But it’s going to happen because they can’t stop that brother now.’”
-Jelani Cobb, author of The Devil and Dave Chappelle and Professor of History at Spelman College

CLEVELAND, OH

“I left my state of Texas to help Ohio for we all know what happen in 2004 and can afford to allow that to happen again in this great state. It is too historic to miss this opportunity. We need Ohio; America needs Ohio to put the Senator Obama in the White House to Change America for the better.”
-Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee, to those in line waiting to go in to early vote Sunday night outside from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland,
Ohio.

It was ten minutes after 1 p.m., the official closing time, but the office was still open. A line of several hundred people waiting to vote wrapped around the building and down the block.

Nearly all the folks in line were young Blacks in their 20s and 30s. Seasoned Obama staffers, anticipating long lines, and concerned folks might give up and go home, had arranged for a live hip-hop DJ to entertain the throng.

Across the street on the corner of Euclid and 30th, music blared from speakers and a makeshift booth set up on the sidewalk outside the Methodist church there. DJ Chela, from Raleigh, N.C., played classic hip-hop, funk, soul and even some gospel. No one seemed to mind the wait. Some people even came over to make requests. Chela had been in town for week, volunteering. She said she’d be back tomorrow, and the next day.

Law enforcement was on hand, but their presence was not overbearing. Everyone who was on line before 1:30 p.m. got to vote. After that, they started turning people away.

All of the components of what has made this election year historic were on display: folks from all racial backgrounds eager to cast their vote, younger Black voters anxious to get their slice of the American dream, and older folks of all races proud to pass the baton to another generation of Americans.

What does the economic downturn mean for already struggling Black families?

In part two of our Bakari Kitwana’s discussion with Cornel West, Dr. West delves into the significance of the racist incidents and responses that reared their head on the campaign trial this year-from the McCain supporter’s taunts to John Lewis’ criticism. West points to the new danger posed by citizens willing to “sow the seeds” of racism of the George Wallace variety. The conversation then turned to the current financial crisis, including the budget challenges facing states and cities, and how Blacks will fare as the country seems headed to a second Great Depression. You know the saying, when white America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu? Here West carefully critiques what he sees as the 40-year economic depression that Blacks have suffered under for the last four decades in the US. For him, the economic downturn will only make matters worse-”depression on top of depression.” Once again, he says, Black churches, mosques and community centers will have to step it up, even as a Barack Obama presidency offers hope.

Cornel West is University Professor at Princeton University in the Center for African American Studies. The author of the 1993 groundbreaking Race Matters, his new book is entitled Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (Hay House, 2008).

What challenges face Black Leadership under a Barack Obama Presidency?

We caught up with Dr. Cornel West in Cleveland, Ohio last week in the midst of his crisscrossing the state to help get out the early vote for Barack Obama. Dr. West has been publicly critical of the Obama campaign and how Blacks might fare under an Obama presidency—given the tenor of the campaign trail that increasingly assuages white fear and anxiety of a Black president.

Dr. West has been particularly outspoken about Obama’s strategic omission of Dr. Martin Luther King’s name from his nomination acceptance speech at the DNC. Here West talks about the fallout from his critical comments in August, his mixture of support and criticism, and his views on what an Obama presidency will mean to Black American Leadership.

Cornel West is University Professor at Princeton University in the Center for African American Studies. The author of the 1993 groundbreaking Race Matters, his forthcoming book out next week is entitled Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (Hay House, 2008).