Archive for the 'Race' Category
This documentary film from Raymond Gayle examines “the struggles of the black rock musician and the stigma they face in the black community and the music industry.” It features tons of great performance footage and interviews with journalists and musicians like Angelo Moore of Fishbone, Vernon Reid of In Living Color, and Cody ChesnuTT. Although the film is a bit rough around the edges, it’s got a lot of heart and certainly tackles an interesting and timely subject. The success of bands like TV on the Radio (one white guy) and Bloc Party (fronted by a black guy) might signal a shift toward an acceptance of more rockers of color. Watch it here, or by all means go buy a copy.
And here’s the Saturday Night Live performance that first made me a Fishbone fan.
Fishbone – Everyday Sunshine Live at Saturday Night Live
daniele | MySpace Video
Do you also like logic? If you answered yes, you’d do well to read this piece by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports about the recent allegations that current Chicago Bull and former Memphis Tiger Derrick Rose may have had someone take his SAT for him and the idiocy of the NBA’s age limit.
If Rose sang or danced or wrote computer code, even if he hit forehands or curveballs and not free throws, his acumen at standardized questions concerning probability, diction and critical reading wouldn’t matter.
They do in basketball because NBA commissioner David Stern wanted to control long-term labor costs and use college ball to market his young stars. In 2005, his league began requiring American players (but not Europeans) to be at least one year out of high school to be drafted.
That essentially sends them to college ball, where outdated and hypocritical amateurism and academic rules exist not because they have any moral basis, but so the NCAA can avoid billions in local and federal taxes.
Isn’t it amazing how much clearer the picture gets when you follow the money?
De LA + Nike
Sorry, Naomi. You know I ride with you on the globalization tip. But…De La!
They were killed on the same day, in the same way. One of the deaths captured the attention of a city and spurred the Los Angeles Police Department into overdrive. The other slipped by unnoticed, leaving a lone detective with little more to go on than hope.
Some stories don’t even need commentary.
Well, not all Black people. But this is a perfect example of why the stereotype still persists. Writing about the new movie Obsessed, Stephen Holden said the following:
The movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends “Obsessed” a distasteful taint of exploitation.
The problem, of course, is the fact that Idris Elba and O.J. Simpson look nothing alike, save for one obvious similarity. They have different shaped heads, different facial structures, different features, different skin tones. They just both happen to be Black. And Ali Larter and Nicole Brown Simpson just both happen to be blond white women.
The only thing distasteful here is how the sight of a Black man on screen with a white woman still makes white people crazy enough to write stupid shit like this.
Not a fan mail.
From time to time I get an e-mail or a MySpace message from a stranger telling me that they enjoyed the book. This is the first time someone has taken the time out of their day to contact me expressing the opposite opinion. Today, I got this e-mail:
| XXXXXXX XXXXXX <xxxxx@xxxx.com> | Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:36 PM | |
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To: Nick.Adams@gmail.com
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Let’s dive right in, shall we?
I stumbled upon your book Making Friends with Black People, the other day while browsing at the bookstore on the campus of Prairie View A&M University. I quickly asked the manager to pull your book of the shelves, or at least put them on the bottom shelf. I don’t believe in stifling free speech, but truly this type of “literature” shouldn’t be promoted, and doesn’t help our community as whole.
So you don’t believe in stifling free speech, but you want my book pulled from bookshelves. Do you believe in irony? The point of this type of literature-or any type-isn’t to “help our community.” The point of literature is to entertain the reader. If you’re looking for something to validate your self-worth, or uplift the race, I’d suggest that you don’t look toward the “non-fiction humor” category next time. Something from the T.D. Jakes catalog, perhaps?
I know the Lord as [sic] blessed you to have great financial gain from your book, but even still he allows corrupt politicians, liars and abortionist to keep their jobs as well. So lets not look at your sales as the work of the Lord.
Of course, you have no idea how much money I’ve made from the book. Also, you don’t know that the Lord had anything to do with it. You don’t even know that such a being has ever existed. I agree. Let’s not look at my sales as the work of the Lord. Let’s look at my sales as the work of a man who put his ideas on paper, an agent who found someone interested in publishing those ideas, and a publisher who thought that there might be an audience for such a book.
Also, corrupt politicians, liars and abortionists don’t exist because of the benevolence of any higher power. They exist for the following reasons: power corrupts, human nature, and the need and/or desire for women to terminate pregnancies. Since you clearly don’t have a fundamental understanding of the non-fiction humor genre, perhaps you also don’t comprehend how politics, lying and abortions work, either?
What were you truly trying to accomplish from this book? It’s a mockery of true literature.
Holy shit, you accidentally made a point! Kind of. Mockery is defined as “ridicule, contempt, or derision.” There are definitely aspects of traditional literature that are ridiculed in the book, so pat yourself on the back. It took you a few paragraphs and some creative thinking on my part, but you finally made a little bit of sense.
When one reads, one should be able to complete said works and see the contribution that it has in our society. I was left dumbfounded that one could pen such stupidity. And your editors, they allowed this? God help us.
When one reads, one should be able to complete said work and have been entertained by it. Period. That’s it. That’s the goal. Everything else is extra. And if you haven’t grasped it yet, God definitely isn’t going to help us. If he were, I’m sure he would have started by preventing me from getting this inane e-mail.
Mr. Adams, I respect your craft of being a comedian, but I do really seek to know that your intentions were with this book? It doesn’t’ help race relations and it only sets up back to what they expect from us.
If you’re this bewildered and pissed off by my book, I doubt very seriously that you’d respect my stand-up act. And if you still don’t understand what my intentions were by publishing a non-fiction humor book, I doubt that my explaining it to you again would help much.
I feel as though you have let down those before you such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright and others….
I pray that this is your last book of this type.
Baldwin and Wright were both true artists, and intellectual firebrands. As such, I’m sure they would relish a Black man with a decent grasp of the English language, a sense of humor, and a strong point of view putting his thoughts and ideas out into the literary ether to amuse and entertain. And even if they didn’t find my book clever or thought-provoking, they would have the common sense to understand that it wasn’t doing harm to the foundation of Black society.
I really hope you’re an incoming freshman. If not, Prairie View A&M University has failed you miserably.
A Memo to America
Barack Obama is not your favorite uncle.
He’s not your BFF. He’s not a rock star. He’s not the short, but scrappy white guy who comes off the bench for your college basketball team to the delight of the student section.
He’s an elected official. He’s a civil servant. He works for you. It is both your right and your responsibility to scrutinize and question every single policy decision he makes. It is both your right and your responsibility to parse every public statement he gives. Our population’s failure to do these things is what gave BushCo the freedom to lie, cheat and steal this country into both the financial and moral bankruptcy. Failure to do so under the current administration will only make it worse. What we need from you is not knee-jerk defense of Barack Obama. What we need from you, fellow citizen, is vigilance.
A quick recap of what’s at stake:
- The financial sector is a shambles of foreclosed homes, insolvent banks and hundreds of thousands of recently unemployed men and women. Once again, the big guy has bent the little guy over and sodomized him with rolled up hundred dollar bills. Once again, he’s going to get away with it.
- Speaking of financial matters, half of all bankruptcies in this country are caused by medical bills. The wealthiest nation in history has a health care system which The World Health Organization ranked lower than Costa Rica, Morocco, Colombia and 33 other countries when it last produced it’s rankings in 2000. Silly socialists.
- Our love affair with rockets and tanks has left us with a bloated defense budget that is almost as large as the military expenditures of all the other countries in the world combined. We’ve been in Iraq longer than we were in WW II. During that time, we’ve murdered and/or caused the deaths of as many as a million people, displaced hundreds of thousands more, made cannon fodder of 4,000 Americans, created countless terrorists and spent as many as $3 trillion, according to some estimates. But if we leave too soon, you know…things might really fall apart.
- Despite our legal, moral and tactical failing in Iraq, we’re poised to redouble our efforts in that other illegal, immoral war of aggression in Afghanistan with a troop surge for that specific campaign and an increase in military spending in general. If at first you don’t succeed…
- Some Americans still hold on to the arrogant, ignorant notion that our homosexual brothers and sisters do not have the exact same rights as everyone else. (Do you think Barack and Michelle would have settled for a civil union?) While the nation’s gaze was focused on the passage of Proposition 8 in California—a heinous and hateful piece of legislation, to be sure—Arkansas, Florida and Arizona passed laws making it illegal for homosexual couples to adopt. Much better that thousands of children continue to be shuffled to and from various foster homes and orphanages, lest they end of living with a couple of dikes, huh?
- Oh yeah. Cops are still murdering Black men in the street.
Excuse the fuck out of me if I take a second from admiring how Black and cool my president is to spend time worrying about the actual issues.
“But, Nick. Obama just got into the White House! He didn’t cause all that other stuff!”
As a United States Senator, Obama was complicit in and/or did absolutely nothing to resolve most of the aforementioned issues. (The fact that he was not in the Senate for the Iraq war vote and has said repeatedly that he would not have voted for it is balanced out by the fact that he voted to give President Bush every single dollar he wanted to fight the war.) He may not have been the guy holding Jodie Foster down on the pool table, but he was definitely cheering by the bar.
If I have to hear, read or see one more pundit falling back on some version of that toothless “he just got elected” canard, I’m going to challenge Stephon Marbury to a head-butting competition.
The next friend or family member who allows that idiotic, “He just said that to get elected”, The Spook Who Sat by the Door theory to escape their lips should be given the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange with the violent images replaced with Noam Chomsky speeches.
Yes, the Obamas seem to be a well-adjusted, loving, beautiful family. Who gives a fuck? We have more important things to talk about than what sort of dog Malia and Sasha will get or whether or not Barack is smoking again.
The campaign is over. “Yes we can” should be removed from your vocabulary and deposited in the dust bin of political propaganda forever. Take that limited edition Shepard Fairy print down off your fucking wall, roll it up really tight, and shove it up your ass. You don’t make idols out of employees. The time has come for Americans to stop being cheerleaders and start being play by play analysts. (Think Hubie Brown, not Dick Vitale.)
What America needs is more informed, passionate debate on the merits of the issues. What America does not need is more mealy-mouthed defenses of Barack Obama.
Someone is already bending over backwards to defend this moron, Ashley Todd. A blogger named CajunTechie writes:
I don’t think Ms. Todd is psycho. I think she’s someone with good intentions and who deeply loves her country. She is, like many people, concerned about the direction her country will take if the wrong person becomes president. I believe she sees this election on a moral ground and, as such, all bets are off.
In an odd way, I understand her thoughts..
In an odd way, I actually respect her.
This woman faked a savage attack for the sole purpose of creating more racial hatred for Barack Obama, but somehow she had good intentions and loves her country? While law enforcement officials could have been out working to keep the streets safe, they had to waste their time and energy dealing with this racist bullshit, but he understands her thoughts? Given the history of abuse that Black men have suffered at the hands of police, there was a strong chance that some innocent guy could have been arrested and assaulted himself before everyone figured out that this was a hoax, but he respects her? If only we all got the same benefit of the doubt that America sees fit to extend to white women.
Dumbest shit I’ve ever read in my life.
I’ll tell you this, I think for the next month every Black man that sees Ashley Todd on the street should punch her in her face and then walk to the nearest police station and turn themselves in. I’d be more than willing to take an assault beef to teach that racist troglodyte a lesson.
Rep. Henry Waxman
Senator Dianne Feinstein
Senator Barbara Boxer
Representatives,
It’s me, Nick Adams, again. I’m sure you guys are well aware of the report issued by the Global Cannabis Commission. You know, the international group of scientists who studied the issue of global cannabis policy and then released their findings in a 226-page paper, Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate? Just in case you haven’t gotten around to reading all about it, I thought I’d point out some of the highlights of their report.
The enforcement effort has not had much success in deterring use.
Translation: With regards to marijuana, the drug war has been a failure.
The probability and scale of harm among heavy cannabis users is modest
compared with that caused by many other psychoactive substances, both
legal and illegal, in common use, namely, alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines,
cocaine and heroin.
Translation: It’s less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.
The rationale for severe penalties for possession offenses is weak on both
normative and practical grounds. In many developed countries a majority of
adults born in the past half-century have used cannabis. Control regimes that
criminalize users are intrusive on privacy, socially divisive and expensive.
Thus it is worth considering alternatives.
Translation: Our current marijuana laws are costly and infringe on our civil liberties.
In countries where data are available, arrest rates are sharply higher for many
minority and socially disadvantaged groups.
Translation: The war on marijuana disproportionately effects minorities and poor people.
Given this data, I’m sure that you will all immediately reconsider your illogical and counter-productive stance on the continued criminalization of marijuana.
