From BlackVoices

On the heels of receiving negative press a week ago, talk show titan Oprah Winfrey won’t allow her friend, gospel singer BeBe Winans to host her Karaoke Challenge on her daytime talk show.
Winfrey was accused of having “double standards” last week after TMZ reported how the media mogul publicly rebuked R&B star Chris Brown for his domestic dispute with singer Rihanna, but had longtime friend Winans on her show to promote his new CD with sister CeCe Winans.
BeBe & CeCe appeared on ‘Oprah’ on Friday, Oct. 23 and performed a new song called ‘Grace.’ After the performance, Winfrey announced: “You’ll be seeing more of BeBe in my Karaoke Challenge later this season.”
Winfrey rep Don Halcombe has now announced that Winans is off the karaoke segment and that the singer will not appear on her talk show until his domestic violence charges are resolved.

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In a recent interview on Chicago radio station, WCGI, rapper, Lupe Fiasco said that Hip Hop should take some of the blame for the recent beating death of Chicago student, Derrion Albert.

“Hip-Hop has to take some fault for that.  Just in the fact that the amount of violence and the amount of negativity that’s in Hip-Hop and the music, it attributes to so much that goes on, negatively, in the hood.”

Lupe Fiasco also criticized radio stations for not promoting positive Hip-Hop and commended Chicago rap artists like Rhymefest and Twista for addressing the Derrion Albert situation.

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GUANGZHOU, China — President Barack Obama’s half brother has broken his media silence to discuss his new novel – the semi-autobiographical story of an abusive parent patterned on their late father, the mostly absent figure Obama wrote about in his own memoir.

In his first interview, Mark Ndesandjo told The Associated Press that he wrote “Nairobi to Shenzhen” in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.

“My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don’t do that,” said Ndesandjo, whose mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.’s third wife. “It’s something which I think affected me for a long time, and it’s something that I’ve just recently come to terms with.”

Like his novel’s main character, Ndesandjo had an American mother who is Jewish and who divorced his Kenyan father. The novel, which goes on sale Wednesday by the self-publishing company Aventine Press, is one of several books in the works by relatives of the president.

President Obama’s parents separated two years after he was born in Hawaii in 1961. The senior Obama, a Kenyan exchange student, divorced the president’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in 1964 and had at least six other children in his native Kenya.

For the past seven years, Ndesandjo has been living in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, and has refused all interview requests until now.

Ndesandjo, who said he attended Obama’s inauguration as a family guest, declined to discuss his earliest memories of the president or describe their relationship over the years. However, he said he plans to meet his brother in Beijing when the president makes his first visit to China on Nov. 15-18.

“My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She is his biggest fan,” he said.

Shortly after divorcing the president’s mother, Obama Sr. met Nidesand while studying as a graduate student at Harvard University. Nidesand returned with Obama Sr. to his native Kenya in 1965, where Mark and his brother David were born and grew up. David later died in a motorcycle accident.

In Kenya, Obama Sr. also had four children with his first wife, Kezia, some of them while he was still married to Nidesand. Nidesand and Obama Sr. eventually divorced amid allegations of domestic abuse. Nidesand returned to the United States and later married a man whose surname Mark Ndesandjo took.

Obama Sr. died in an automobile accident in 1982 at age 46.

President Obama saw his father only once after his parents’ divorce, when he was 10 years old. In a best-selling memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama wrote about his fatherless upbringing and search for identity.

In it, Obama described a visit to Kenya to meet his half siblings and learn more about his father. While painting his father as abusive, he called Obama Sr. a gifted but erratic alcoholic who never lived up to his intellectual promise or his family responsibilities.

Obama, in his book, also quotes Ndesandjo criticizing their father, saying, “I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children. That was enough.”

Ndesandjo, who is an American citizen, spent most of his childhood in Kenya before moving to the U.S. to go to college and work in telecommunications and marketing. He has a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in physics and a master’s degree in the same subject from Stanford University. He also earned an MBA from Emory University in Atlanta, he said.

“I see myself in many ways as a person who has many places, has feet in many places,” he said.

Intensely private, Ndesandjo declined to answer several questions about himself. He even refused to give his age, saying only that “I’m younger than Barack.”

With a trim, athletic physique, he has a strong resemblance to his taller brother in Washington. His left ear is pierced, and he wore a black crew neck shirt under a dark jacket to the interview last week.

Ndesandjo moved to China after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when his job was cut in the rocky U.S. economy. He taught English, immersed himself in the study of Chinese culture and volunteered as a piano teacher at an orphanage.

He now speaks Mandarin and said he earns a living as a consultant in strategic marketing, though he would not elaborate on his business.

Ndesandjo said the White House was aware of the book project. A White House spokesman declined to comment on Ndesandjo’s interview or to discuss President Obama’s relationship with his half brother.

The author said 15 percent of the book’s proceeds would be donated to charities for children.

Closely patterned on Ndesandjo’s own life, the novel depicts David, an American who leaves the U.S. corporate world after the 9/11 attacks to create a new life in China. He falls in love with a Chinese dance instructor and develops a bond with an orphan who is a gifted pianist battling a serious illness.

In the book, David also writes letters to his American mother asking for details about her failed marriage to his late abusive Kenyan father.

In one passage, Ndesandjo writes, “David easily remembered the hulking man whose breath reeked of cheap Pilsner beer who had often beaten his mother. He had long searched for good memories of his father but had found none.”

Ndesandjo said such passages were drawn from his own experience.

“I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds,” he said in the interview, tears welling in his eyes. “I could hear thuds and screams, and my father’s voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn’t know where to go.”

Ndesandjo said his mother often called Obama Sr. “a brilliant man but a social failure.”

The novel never mentions other wives David’s father might have had. Nor does it include a half brother who would become the first black U.S. president.

On Wednesday, a week after speaking to the AP, Ndesandjo said at a book-launching news conference that his brother’s election victory, among other recent events, helped “peel away the hardness” that he developed emotionally during his difficult childhood.

“I became proud of being an Obama,” he said.

Since the election, he said the extra attention has changed his life, but he has coped by focusing on things that are important to him: music, writing, calligraphy and teaching piano to disadvantaged children.

“The simple things sort of help pull you through,” he said.

Watch The Video

Ndesandjo told the AP he didn’t want to touch on any political themes in the book. “I think my brother’s team is doing an extraordinary job and I really don’t want to cause him additional heartburn,” he said.

Besides the inauguration, he said he last visited his brother in Austin, Texas, before a debate last year with then-Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“He came up to me, and we hugged. I gave him a gift, a gift of calligraphy,” Ndesandjo told the AP. “I was just thinking of how happy I was and how proud and how much I loved him.”

“It was a very powerful experience.”

Another of the president’s half brothers, George Obama, 27, of Huruma, Kenya, has penned a memoir that will be published by Simon and Schuster in January 2010.

Other Obama relatives working on books include a half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of Obama’s mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro; and Craig Robinson, first lady Michelle Obama’s brother.

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From The New York Daily News

A blackface Halloween costume has left one Long Island teen with a lot of egg on his face.

Commack High School senior Dean Jeziorkowski was ordered to leave school Friday after he turned up dressed as the black Aunt Jemima character.

Jeziorkowski, 17, refused to back down over the brouhaha, and his family refused to comment yesterday.

Fellow student Danny Cuevas, 16, who was out trick-or-treating in Jeziorkowski’s neighborhood, defended the teen.

“I don’t think it’s that racist,” he said. “At one point in time, that might have been seen as racist but not now.”

Jeziorskowski told pals he has dressed as a woman for Halloween every year since the third grade. The teen donned a bandanna and wig as part of his Aunt Jemima getup. He darted in and out of classrooms toting a syrup bottle, asking, “You want some pancakes?”

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WASHINGTON – Someone had to hold Bill Cosby back to keep him from crawling over a balcony and joining fellow comedians on stage as the stars lined up to pay tribute to his life’s work.

When the lights went out for the start of the 12th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Cosby filled the dark silence Monday night. “Hellooo?” he called out at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And again, he had his audience laughing.

Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld saluted their fellow funny man with the nation’s top comedy prize, along with two co-stars from “The Cosby Show,” Phylicia Rashad and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. They hailed Cosby’s work breaking down racial barriers and stereotypes and replayed his standup routines.

Cosby quipped that usually when a man sees his life flash before his eyes, it’s for a bad reason. “But this is all right,” he said.

First lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, Vice President Joe Biden’s wife, were among those in Washington watching clips from Cosby’s long career — from his classic standup routine of Noah’s chat with God about building an ark to dealing with the stresses of raising a family as a TV dad.

Seinfeld and Rock shared the stage and said that as children they followed Cosby’s comedy albums, which inspired their own careers. Then they got lost in banter about how they could never measure up, after seeing Cosby together more recently at New York’s Apollo Theater.

“What was he wearing?” Rock said.

“Something ridiculous,” Seinfeld quipped. “But he did two hours — all new material.”
“I’m not that funny,” Rock said.

“I’m definitely not that funny,” Seinfeld said.
Instead, Seinfeld and Rock tossed to a clip of Cosby’s classic impression of a visit to the dentist.

“The first thing he grabs is an iron hook,” Cosby says. “Then he starts to drill and you see and smell smoke coming out of your mouth!”

As the clip ended, Cosby turned to his wife, Camille, who smiled and clapped. Cosby later said comedians’ wives often want autopsies of their husbands’ brains to see what’s going on in there.

Watch The Video

Comedian Dick Gregory chimed in with jokes about his long friendship with Cosby.

“When the stock market crashed last September, they was going to repossess my Rolls-Royce,” Gregory said. “I said, ‘Bill, what do I do?’”

Cosby’s response, according to Gregory: “Don’t park in front of the house!”

Critics often point out that “The Cosby Show,” which aired in the 1980s, broke new ground because it was about a successful black family with a father who’s a doctor and a mother, a lawyer, raising five children.
Gregory said Cosby started breaking barriers even earlier with the “I Spy” TV series, which cast a black man and a white man as co-stars. After that, Gregory said, promoters never again referred to him as a “Negro comic.”

“A billion years from now, you will be respected for what you were able to do,” he said, looking up at Cosby who was seated in a balcony. “You painted words with your mouth, and they will always exist, and they will always last.”

Of all his accomplishments as a comedian, actor, author and television producer, Cosby said he is most proud of the “Cosby Show,” which he carefully crafted.

Rashad, who played Claire Huxtable on the series, flew from London, where she is in rehearsal for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” to be part of the show at Cosby’s request.

On stage, she recalled the chemistry she and Cosby shared as TV parents.

“We could complete each other’s sentences,” she said.

Warner, who played Theo on the show, said he has been in touch with his TV dad ever since. Now, he said he is far enough removed to watch himself in reruns and said the show is a testament to Cosby’s genius.

“He always said in 20 years he wanted the show to still be relevant, and here we are,” Warner said.

Cosby, 72, has won other major awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. Still, the Mark Twain Prize is special, he said, because Twain was the “quintessential American writer — because he held his language and his love for words in perfect American form.”

Cosby apologized to a bust of Twain during his acceptance speech for bumping him and stealing some of his words.

The tribute will air Nov. 4 nationwide on PBS. Cosby insisted the performances be free of profanity and the show reflect his emphasis on education.

“The show is very, very important to me,” Cosby said in an interview. “It makes me aware that as a monologist and a writer and a performer, I’ve done some wonderful work.”

The right wing has found another token African American to defend their racism. He goes by the name of Lloyd Marcus. He recently defended Rush in a blog on the American Thinker.

While I stand beside my hero, Rush Limbaugh, as I stated earlier there is a much larger issue at stake extremely threatening to our freedom, liberty and culture.

Loyd Marcus seems to be mentally insane and is being exploited by the anti-Obama right and the Tea Party movement.

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Spike Lee has called Tyler Perry’s TBS sitcoms “Meet the Browns” and “House of Payne,”  “coonery and buffoonery.”

Perry responded to that criticism in a Sunday interview on “60 Minutes.”

“You know, that pisses me off,” Perry tells Byron Pitts. “It really does. Because it’s so insulting. It’s attitudes like that that make Hollywood think that these people do not exist and that’s why there’s no material speaking to them. I would love to read that to my fan base.”

Grammy-winning rapper Lil Wayne pleaded guilty to attempted weapon possession Thursday, and expects to receive a one-year jail sentence.

He previously had pleaded not guilty to illegal gun-possession charges that carried at least 31/2 years in prison upon conviction.

Police said a gun was found on his tour bus in Manhattan in 2007.

The rapper, born Dwayne Carter, won last year’s best rap solo performance Grammy for A Milli . His albums include Tha Carter , Tha Carter II and Tha Carter III .

His trial had been due to start Jan. 20.

The judge had been holding a hearing on a debated DNA profiling technique used to tie the rapper to the gun.

Lil Wayne, 27, also is scheduled for trial in Arizona on felony drug-possession and weapons charges. He has pleaded not guilty in that case, which arose from an arrest at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in January, 2008.

Manhattan prosecutors said small amounts of DNA found on the loaded weapon connected it to the platinum-selling artist. Defence lawyer Stacey Richman said the gun wasn’t Lil Wayne’s, and the testing technique was too problematic to prove otherwise.

Police pulled over Lil Wayne’s tour bus in Columbus Circle on July 22, 2007. They said they had seen and smelled marijuana smoke wafting out the door before the bus left a concert venue minutes earlier.

Police said that as an officer approached, the rapper tossed away a Louis Vuitton bag containing a gun.
The defense disputed officers’ basis for searching the bus and noted that more than a dozen other people were aboard.

NEW YORK — Lil Wayne has a date in a Manhattan courtroom, but DNA science will take center stage.

A hearing on a DNA profiling technique used in the rapper’s 2007 gun-possession case was due to start Wednesday. It concerns a process used for identifying people from tiny amounts of DNA — including some that prosecutors say ties the Grammy Award-winner to a gun found on his tour bus after a concert.

The 27-year-old has pleaded not guilty. He faces at least 3 1/2 years in prison if convicted.
The hearing aims to establish whether what’s known as low copy number DNA profiling has general scientific acceptance.

Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Carter, won last year’s best rap solo performance Grammy for “A Milli.” His albums include “Tha Carter,” “Tha Carter II” and “Tha Carter III.”

LOS ANGELES — Dave Chappelle could be holding Hollywood’s comedy endurance record if he’d only been able to hold something else.

The comic, who famously walked away from a $50 million deal four years ago to continue his Comedy Central TV show, was on stage at the Laugh Factory on Sunday, seemingly on his way to setting the club’s endurance record for continuous standup comedy.

But then, five hours into his routine, he walked away to go to the bathroom and was disqualified, said club owner Jamie Masada.

The audience wasn’t happy, Masada said, but he insisted that rules are rules where endurance comedy is concerned.

“There are only two rules,” Masada said Tuesday. “You have to continuously tell jokes that are funny and you can’t leave the stage, even to go to the bathroom.”

The result: the seven-hour, 34-minute marathon performance that Dane Cook turned in last year stands as the club’s record.

The late Richard Pryor set the original record, two hours and 41 minutes, in 1980. Cook broke it 27 years later with a three-hour, 50-minute set.

Chappelle raised the bar to six hours, seven minutes before Cook took the record back last year.

Watch A Video From His Performance

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)—Text messages between a woman and former NFL quarterback Steve McNair(notes) made in the hours before police say she shot him to death and turned the gun on herself support authorities’ contention that she was spiraling out of control.

Nashville police released the 50 text messages Monday night as part of a case summary and detailed the exchanges between the two hours before the July 4 murder-suicide.

Sahel Kazemi (sah-HEHL’ kah-ZEE’-mee) texted McNair on July 3 to say she was so stressed she might have a breakdown and asked for $2,000 to pay bills. One text said she might need to go to a hospital because she could hardly breathe.

Police say texts show McNair had someone transfer the money. The texts also show Kazemi meeting McNair at the Nashville condominium where he was shot. He asked her to leave the front door open for him.

Spokesman Don Aaron said he has been working to summarize the case for weeks and denied it was a response to a two-part report on CBS’ “The Early Show” questioning the original investigation.

“If anyone has information that needs to come to the attention of the police department, we’ll be happy to receive it as part of this investigation,” Aaron told The Associated Press. “But at this juncture, there has been nothing uncovered that suggests this is not a murder-suicide.”

The CBS report Monday interviewed friends portraying Kazemi as happy and showed that she had approximately $2,500 in her bank account at the time of her death.

Kazemi’s texts to McNair talk of her showing furniture she planned to sell to some people and how she was at a store “trying to fix” her phone. She wanted to pay bills before going to work. When she said she could hardly breathe, McNair asked if she wanted him to come over. She said she would take a nap.
McNair texted her that afternoon, saying he had someone transfer the money.

Kazemi later texted McNair three times asking to be with him that night. He said he was having trouble getting his sons to sleep. But at that time, McNair was seen at a restaurant with friends. Kazemi texted she was going to his condo. He texted back at 12:38 a.m. that he was on his way and asked her to open the front door at 12:52 a.m. Kazemi told him at 1:14 a.m. it was open.

The last text was at 2:23 with Kazemi saying, “I am going to the store.” But police say the message received by McNair’s phone seemed oddly placed in the stream of messages and out of synch. A T-Mobile specialist told police it could be a service or technical problem that caused a delay in the delivery of the message.

The summary also details how police checked video footage from businesses in the area and found a law firm camera caught the backside of the condo where their bodies were found later July 4. The footage did not show any suspicious activity or departure in the early hours of that morning.

Police also list the shift manager at the restaurant where Kazemi worked who told officers something seemed to be bothering Kazemi on July 3. Sonya New said she asked Kazemi if everything was all right when the server told her of her DUI arrest on July 2. The manager also knew of Kazemi’s roommate moving and asked about McNair’s divorce.

“And she (Kazemi) just rolled her eyes. New said at the end of the conversation, Kazemi said, “My life is just (awful) and I should end it.”

Business was slow that night when Kazemi asked if she could leave early. She clocked out at 10:07 p.m.
The summary also includes new information from the woman Kazemi followed from McNair’s condo, suspicious that he was involved with someone else.

Police also say Leah Ignagni confirmed she was dating McNair and recalled seeing a woman in a black Cadillac Escalade parked outside his condo two or three weeks before his murder. Ignagni saw the woman follow her and later saw the Escalade circling her block or parked outside her apartment a week or two later. A 2007 black Escalade was co-registered both to Kazemi and McNair.

Ignagni told police McNair visited her around 4 a.m. on July 2—a couple hours after Kazemi’s arrest—to tell her “Jenni” had been arrested for DUI. McNair then spent the night of July 2 at Ignagni’s apartment but left early July 3.

The report also includes details from the crime scene that blood stains showed Kazemi’s upper body was in McNair’s lap before sliding to the floor. Police also found the gun under Kazemi’s head with an impression in the carpet the summary said indicates neither the gun nor Kazemi’s body was moved before officers arrived.

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