Commentary
Robinswing, Black Kos Editor
Music tells me a lot about a person. I believe that I can look at your playlist and give a fair description of who you are.
I grew up listening to love songs. From "Un Bel Di" to the Isleys singing "At Your Best You Are Love". From, Pastsy singing a"Crazy’ to Miss Peaches singing "At Last." Even when the music was political, there were love songs. Beautiful love songs.
I remember as a teen getting my mother to sit and actually listen to a song that gave the young blackwoman shivers. Bad Girl. Smokey. When the song finished we were both silent for a moment. Me in the rapture of listening to the brother beg. Her...I didn’t really know until... I asked my mother what she thought about the song. She looked at me, smiled and pronounced, "His voice is too high."
♪ You’re not a bad girl because ♫
♫ You made me see how love could be ♪
♫ But she’s a bad girl because ♪
♪ She wants to be free. ♫
She did not try to hear my love song.
Later as my young sons were listening to and talking about Grand Master Flash and NWA I didn’t try to hear. I wasn’t interested and did not feel bad about it...until...I heard a friend of mine who is a little older than I start in about how bad rap music was. For her the music stopped sometime in the mid seventies. It was then I realized what getting old looked like. When you get to the point where everything that means something happened a while ago, you are definitely doing the old thing. I vowed silently to myself, to find a way to listen. And keep learning.
I watched a show dedicated to awards for rappers and I noticed something I found remarkable. It was an ad with a young obviously successful rapper. His very attractive female friend or wife was shopping in a high-end jewelry store. He was waiting in his Range Rover or some such for her to decide what she wanted. Finally he walks into the store. He is immediately seized upon by security. His money doesn’t change the way he is seen. He was just another niggah.
As it turns out though black folk are not monolithic, we tend to have the same experiences regardless of such things as social status and financial abilities. I saw an instant connection between my generation and theirs. As much as some things had changed, others remain stubbornly the same.
I was blown away at this communicating of the realities of the black experience to a younger generation. From that point on I started hearing the lyrics. I wanted to bridge the gap. I wanted to listen. And I did.
I listened to rap. Good rap. So-so rap. Blow you away rap. Most of what I heard was significant. Political. Love songs. Brothers still begging.
I love me some Mos Def. When one of the few old folk I know tries to crack about young people not knowing anything about love songs I repeat these lyrics.
In every loss, in every lie, in every truth that you'd deny
And each regret and each goodbye was a mistake too great to hide
And your voice was all I heard that I get what I deserve.
Can’t mistake a love song.
It is still about loving and losing. It is still about injustice and pain and joy and all the things that make the experience human. It has ever been about politics and impossible dreams and daydream believers.
I keep thinking if we would refuse to stop listening to each other, if we could hear each other’s love songs, maybe, just maybe we could bridge the gap. Young or old, black or white. We need to talk. We need to listen. To. Each. Other. And maybe write a love song together. Congratulations Mr. Nobel Peace Prize winning Obama. Wrote a love song for the world.
Now run and tell that.
_____________________________________________________________________________
News by Amazing Grace and dopper0189, Black Kos Editors
A fair shake is all that is being asked. The Los Angeles Sentinel: NNPA Chairman Bakewell Takes Capitol Hill by Storm
It was a closed-door face-to-face conversation between U. S. senators and the top leadership of the nation's premier Black institutions and new NNPA Chairman Danny Bakewell was on the front line for all of them.
"We've had landmark legislation in terms of the stimulus bill. Yet, when you talk to Black businesses, when you talk to newspaper publishers, where is the money? Where is the money," Bakewell demanded rhetorically as the audience inside the Mansfield Room of the U. S. Capitol broke into applause.
He continued, "General Motors got almost a hundred billion plus dollars of stimulus money. They have a billion plus dollars advertising budget. The Black Press probably cannot find $2 million dollars in advertising throughout the entire country of the United States...Where is the acknowledgement of our community? Where is the acknowledgement of Black businesses?"
___________________________________________________________________________
How many Albert Einsteins never get the chance in Africa? CNN: Malawian boy uses wind to power hope, electrify village
William Kamkwamba dreamed of powering his village with the only resource that was freely available to him.
His native Malawi had gone through one of its worst droughts seven years ago, killing thousands. His family and others were surviving on one meal a day. The red soil in his Masitala hometown was parched, leaving his father, a farmer, without any income.
But amid all the shortages, one thing was still abundant.
Wind.
"I wanted to do something to help and change things," he said. "Then I said to myself, 'If they can make electricity out of wind, I can try, too.'"
Kamkwamba was kicked out of school when he couldn't pay $80 in school fees, and he spent his days at the library, where a book with photographs of windmills caught his eye.
"I thought, this thing exists in this book, it means someone else managed to build this machine," he said.
Armed with the book, the then-14-year-old taught himself to build windmills. He scoured through junkyards for items, including bicycle parts, plastic pipes, tractor fans and car batteries. For the tower, he collected wood from blue-gum trees.
"Everyone laughed at me when I told them I was building a windmill. They thought I was crazy," he said. "Then I started telling them I was just playing with the parts. That sounded more normal."
That was 2002. Now, he has five windmills, the tallest at 37 feet. He built one at an area school that he used to teach classes on windmill-building.
***************************************
Developed by students at South Africa's Stellenbosch University and local space technology firm SunSpace, the "SumbandilaSat" micro-satellite, took off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome on 17 September. BBC: Africa joins the space race.
Pictures of the momentous event were streamed live over the internet and South Africa's Science and Technology Minister, Naledi Pandor, was in Kazakhstan for the launch.
Taking its name from the Venda word meaning "pioneer", the SumbandilaSat will gather crucial information about weather patterns and how climate change is affecting Africa.
It heralds a huge milestone in Africa's space ambitions. Experts predict that before too long similar projects will be underway, at the cutting edge of communications and even defence.
**********************************************
Somali Dr Hafsa Abdurrahman Mohamed, 26, describes what it is like working at a hospital in Marere, a town in the southern Islamist-controlled part of the country. BBC: 'My life as a Somali doctor'
She was one of the 20 student doctors to graduate from a medical school in the capital, Mogadishu, in December 2008 - the first to do so for nearly two decades.
The best thing about my work is when the baby is born and together with the mother, they are both safe; the moment when the baby cries out.
All the women are so welcoming. Especially the pregnant women - they are very happy to have a female doctor
I want to help Somali women.
It was difficult studying in Mogadishu. Sometimes it was difficult to travel to the university because of the fighting. And then if you made it to the class but there was fighting near the university, you would worry how you would get home.
****************************************************
Father Elkin Nazrallah is a Catholic priest who works in an unremarkable church in the small riverside town of Riosucio, one of the backwaters in the poorest part of Colombia. BBC: The devil wears military boots.
Riosucio means dirty river. It is a town populated mainly by Afro-Colombians. They are descendants of African slaves brought here as forced labour by Spanish colonisers when the indigenous Amerindians began dying off from imported diseases.
Father Elkin is a small man, but his bravery is breathtaking.
Father Elkin Nazrallah has taken a stand against local paramilitaries.
"The devil walked through here," he says, referring to a dark chapter in the history of the Riosucio region that began in 1996.
"The devil came down the river wearing a green combat uniform with military boots."
Father Elkin's devil was a paramilitary group led by businessmen and landowners - and, to my astonishment and admiration, he was not afraid to say so, quite openly, to the BBC.
__________________________________________________________________________
Year after year this keeps happening. WSJ: U.S. Data Show High Mortgage-Denial Rate for Blacks
A Federal Reserve report on home mortgage data showed that blacks and Hispanic whites were far more likely than non-Hispanic whites to be denied last year in applying to refinance.
The annual report is based on data collected from more than 8,000 mortgage lenders nationwide under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, known as HMDA.
For applications to refinance conventional mortgages, those that aren't insured by the federal government, the denial rate for blacks or African Americans was 61%. That compares with 51% for Hispanic whites and 32% for non-Hispanic whites.
The gap may partly reflect the larger proportion of minority borrowers who got subprime loans during the housing boom and ended up in homes whose values have crashed.
*******************************************
The title says it all. The Daily Voice: When rich black people should know better.
It's no secret that I have some longstanding political disagreements with Bob Johnson, the co-founder of BET Networks.
Johnson supported George Bush's plans to privatize Social Security, that would have left millions of seniors in trouble after last year's financial collapse. And he also worked with Bush to eliminate the horribly onerous inheritance tax that disproportionately affects about 7 or 8 super rich black people in America.
Then last year Johnson mocked Barack Obama, suggesting that he was busy doing drugs while Hillary Clinton was caring about black people. "I am frankly insulted," Johnson said, "that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book."
But there's a more positive and inspiring side to Bob Johnson and his former wife Sheila. As partners, they developed a hugely successful business model at BET that revolved around low production costs and high revenue generated from cheap advertisement.
The Johnsons sold their BET holdings to Viacom in 1999, and the quality of BET has improved since then, in part, because of a greater emphasis on content instead of capital. To be sure, BET still has some issues. I've worked as a TV commentator and host for BET for several years now, through good and bad times, and I've heard all the complaints. But this isn't a story about BET. It's a story about the Johnsons, who no longer run BET.
__________________________________________________________________________
A new book and a new incident expose the need for change in street culture. EbonyJet: Snitching, Revisited
Now that the shocking and eye-opening video moment that is the killing of Chicago youth Derrion Albert has run its course, the story has returned to its less-shocking and entirely predictable next episode - the one where police try to get information from witnesses to close a case and come up with absolutely nothing.
Despite a video showing dozens of people in, around and near the melee, Chicago police have only been able to pull the most obvious perpetrators from the tape. Out of fear, mistrust, self-interest or a twisted sense of justice, no one will speak up about what they obviously know. That’s not anything new but given the circumstances of this particular case, it’s still appalling.
But street marketing is power, and the code of the streets that influenced the "Stop Snitching" campaign in jail houses, on street corners and in rap music has had a major impact on the ability of authorities to gather information, and the ability of communities to seek and get justice.
It seems everyone in that particular South Side neighborhood has taken that bit of code to heart, those who participated and those who only watched on the sidelines. But according to a new book on the subject by Alexandra Natapoff, a Loyola law professor who has been studying the subject for ten years, the neighbors and bystanders in have it all wrong. The "Stop Snitching" campaign that has become street code and cultural phenomenon was not intended for the innocent but for the guilty.
__________________________________________________________________________
In case you missed it: Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile by Black Kos
White Friends, Black Friends: The Personal Nature of Racial Politics by RaceProject
Slavery Is Funny If It's For A Good Cause ? by Vita Brevis
The power of one white voice against racism-Lillian Smith. by RadioGirl
_________________________________________________________________________
Congratulations to our President on wining the Noble Peace prize!