Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
Benjamin Banneker, who lived from 1731 to 1806, was the first black man to devise an almanac and predict a solar eclipse accurately. He was also appointed to the commission that surveyed and laid out what is now Washington, D.C. On 19 August 1791, Banneker composed a letter to Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, in which he included his almanac and an entreaty to uphold the Founder's doctrine that there were truths that were...
... Self evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certan inalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness.”
On 30 August 1791, without directly addressing the charge of inequality, Jefferson replied,
... no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them.
Jefferson's letter to the Marquis de Condorcet was rather effusive,
I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician. I promised him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Patowmac, & in the intervals of his leisure, while on that work, he made an almanac for the next year, which he sent to me in his own handwriting, & which I inclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him. add to this that he is a very respectable member of society. he is a free man. I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talent observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.
Three years after Banneker's death though, Jefferson expressed some doubts as to the authenticity of Banneker's abilities,
The whole do not amount, in point of evidence, to what we know ourselves of Banneker. We know he had spherical trigonometry enough to make almanacs, but not without the suspicion of aid from Ellicot, who was his neighbor and friend, and never missed an opportunity of puffing him. I have a long letter from Banneker, which shows him to have had a mind of very common stature indeed.
So there you have it. Even the great man Jefferson, the man of letters, a dignitary of the Renaissance and Liberal Tradition, the author of the doctrine of all men as created equal; doubted that a black man could be equal, that any accomplishment was an exaggeration or a fraud.
When I consider the hurdles Obama or any Person of Color in America must surpass, I can see that these views have not changed much these last two hundred and twenty-two years.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Vote as if someone's life depended on it. It might be your own.
Banneker
What did he do except lie
under a pear tree, wrapped in
a great cloak, and meditate
on the heavenly bodies?
Venerable, the good people of Baltimore
whispered, shocked and more than
a little afraid. After all it was said
he took to strong drink.
Why else would he stay out
under the stars all night
and why hadn’t he married?
But who would want him! Neither
Ethiopian nor English, neither
lucky nor crazy, a capacious bird
humming as he penned in his mind
another enflamed letter
to President Jefferson—he imagined
the reply, polite and rhetorical.
Those who had been to Philadelphia
reported the statue
of Benjamin Franklin
before the library
his very size and likeness.
A wife? No, thank you.
At dawn he milked
the cows, then went inside
and put on a pot to stew
while he slept. The clock
he whittled as a boy
still ran. Neighbors
woke him up
with warm bread and quilts.
At nightfall he took out
his rifle—a white-maned
figure stalking the darkened
breast of the Union—and
shot at the stars, and by chance
one went out. Had he killed?
I assure thee, my dear Sir!
Lowering his eyes to fields
sweet with the rot of spring, he could see
a government’s domed city
rising from the morass and spreading
in a spiral of lights....
-- Rita Dove
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Education professor Christopher Emdin is famous for incorporating hip-hop (and The GZA!) into science education. In his new book, "For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education," he explains how White teachers at urban schools can overcome their class and race privilege and truly connect with their students. Color Lines: How Can White Teachers Do Better by Urban Kids of Color?
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Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" describes the complexities of [B]lackness in America and captures the ways that the segregated South and its ugly history of racism had inscribed itself so indelibly into the nation's collective psyche that it rendered African Americans invisible. The book’s unnamed protagonist is so shaped by the conditions of his time that he becomes a distorted version of himself, his “true self” rendered invisible. The haunting and powerful story resonates with the experiences of urban youth in today’s urban classrooms. The Poet Adrienne Rich affirmed this sense of negation when she observed that “when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.”
Consider a common scenario in urban schools, and one I have witnessed often, where the teacher and student have different conceptions about what it means to be on time and prepared for class. For many students, being on time and prepared means being in or around the physical space of the classroom at the appointed hour and being able to access whatever materials are necessary for the day’s instruction. This runs counter to a more narrowly defined, traditional perception of being prepared for learning, and can result in students being made invisible to the teacher. I experienced a perfect example of this “making invisible” process during a pre-suspension meeting for a student whose science teacher had accused her of being disruptive, unprepared for class, and habitually tardy. As the teacher began to describe the reasons for the suspension, the student stood up and said, “That’s not true, that’s just not true.” Calmly, the principal asked the student to stop being disrespectful. The student looked bewildered and sat down with tears streaming down her face, biting at her thumb, her knee shaking so forcefully I thought she might knock the principal’s desk over. At the end of the meeting, she snatched the pink sheet of paper that described the procedures for her two-day suspension and stormed out of the office. Her teacher seemed frozen to her seat as the scenario played out, unsure of what to do next.
A few minutes later, having heard the teacher’s litany of complaints that had led to the student’s suspension, I walked through the school building and spotted the student in the middle of a crowd of friends. They had rallied around her and seemed to be consoling her. When I asked her if we could talk, she looked up reluctantly and slowly walked toward me. As she did so, a bell rang signaling the change of classroom periods. The students who had gathered around their friend quickly dispersed, heading to their respective classrooms. I noticed that a significant number of them stood at the doors of the classrooms or lingered between the doorways, shouting greetings to their friends who were passing by. As we walked the hallway, she pointed to a friend who pointed back at her, then asked me, “Is he late? Is he unprepared for class?” She then motioned to another friend who was straddling the doorway to a class and asked, “Is she late? Is she distracting the class?” I didn’t quite know how to respond and so I didn’t. She took that to mean that I understood her. “Exactly,” she said. “I’m always ready for that lady’s class and she gets me suspended because she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She sees what she wants to see.” As we talked more, I mentioned that the teacher said she never had her books with her for class. She responded that a friend shares her books with her and lends her something to write with whenever she needs it. For her, that made it obvious that she was prepared to learn. She then mentioned that she was always on time for class. “I’m always at the door when that bell rings. I’m always there.” The student saw herself as prepared and on time, but the teacher did not see the student the way she saw herself.
The point here is not to debate whether the teacher or the student was right or wrong; there isn’t a clear answer to that question. What’s important to note is that the teacher in this scenario had rendered the student’s self-image as “prepared and on time” invisible. That image had been replaced with one in which the student was seen as disruptive, chronically late, and unprepared, a distortion of the student’s self-image.
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Universal Studios was able to show completely different trailers for Straight Outta Compton, the biopic of rap group NWA, to different racial groups on Facebook, thanks to a little-known feature on the social network called “racial affinity targeting”.
The feature, which has been available to marketers since November 2014, categorises users in terms of their interests like many other Facebook advertising tools. But it uniquely categorises those clusters of interests in terms of related racial groups, allowing Universal to show very different versions of the Straight Outta Compton trailer to white and black audiences.
The movie studio revealed the marketing strategy in a panel at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where both Universal and Facebook representatives discussed the feature. But the sudden attention paid to Facebook’s racial affinity targeting has left the social network scrambling to explain how it is different from simple racial profiling – something Facebook apparently does not want to be associated with.
The two trailers were created, Universal’s EVP of digital marketing Doug Neil said, because NWA’s image was very different inside and outside the black community. While African Americans know the band and recall it fondly, the “general population” (the group of people that Facebook has not identified as African American, Hispanic, or Asian American) instead knows Ice Cube as an actor, and Dr Dre as the face of Apple’s Beats brand.
So the former group were shown a trailer which focuses on the political art at the heart of NWA, while the latter were shown a very different trailer that makes the film look more like a gangster movie than a biopic.
But while Universal was happy with the ability to advertise differently to different audiences, Facebook is at pains to point out that the tools, which are currently only available to the US, don’t allow advertisers to segregate by race. Instead, the company lets advertisers pick who to advertise to based on “ethnic affinity”; bundling people who like similar racially-coded pages together, and letting advertisers sell to them.
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He was a wry and agile rapper from Queens who THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, would refer frequently to his home base; Linden Boulevard and 192nd Street. He died on Tuesday at his home in the San Francisco Bay Area at age 45. The New York Times: Malik Taylor, Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, Dies at 45.
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Mr. Taylor’s family and his manager, Dion Liverpool, confirmed the death, and said the cause was complications from diabetes.
Mr. Taylor learned he had diabetes in 1990 — “When was the last time you heard a funky diabetic?” he once rapped — and received a kidney transplant in 2008. His health problems and self-proclaimed sugar addiction were a point of tension in the 2011 documentary“Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest,” which followed the group during a reunion tour.
A Tribe Called Quest formed in New York in 1985 and went on to release five albums, including the jazz-sampling rap classics “The Low End Theory” and “Midnight Marauders,” before disbanding for the first time in 1998. With hits like “Scenario,” “Can I Kick It?” and “Bonita Applebum,” the group sold millions of albums while also serving as a more socially conscious and overtly political alternative to the gangster rap and pop rhymers of the day.
On recordings, the proudly diminutive Phife Dawg played a more frenetic and high-pitched counterpart to his childhood friend Q-Tip (born Jonathan Davis), A Tribe Called Quest’s lead M.C. (The group also included the D.J. and producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad and, occasionally, the rapper Jarobi White.)
This pair’s repartee would serve as the most obvious example of Tribe’s magnetic, brotherly bond, a chemistry that was palpable on record. “You on point, Phife?” Q-Tip volleyed to his fellow M.C. on “Check the Rhime.”
“All the time, Tip,” Phife Dawg replied.
“We bounce off of each other like yin and yang, nice and smooth, you know?” Mr. Taylor said of the partnership in an interview last year, as A Tribe Called Quest marked the 25th anniversary of its debut album, “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.”
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The Los Angeles artist Rodney McMillian has an ambivalent relationship with mass-produced home furnishings. On the one hand, he has rescued several examples from oblivion, like the time-ravaged lounge chair he wrestled into his car on a corner of Sunset Boulevard and later declared an artwork — untouched, stuffing spewing forth. It’s the kind of ready-made that Duchamp might have chosen if he had grown up in a working-class African-American family in Columbia, S.C., as Mr. McMillian did.
But Mr. McMillian, 47, has also subjected seemingly blameless appliances and other pieces of furniture to some pretty serious violence. “Couch,” from 2012, is what its title describes, but the artist has chopped it in half with a Sawzall reciprocating saw and sutured it back together with a gob of rough concrete, making it whole again in a disturbingly dysfunctional way.
The couch is front and center in “Rodney McMillian: Views of Main Street,”an exhibition that opens on Thursday at the Studio Museum in Harlem, one of three East Coast shows of his work that will run concurrently, introducing many viewers to the full sweep of a 15-year career that has delved deeply, and often with haunting beauty, into questions of class, race and American belonging.
At the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, “The Black Show,”which continues through Aug. 14, focuses partly on Mr. McMillian’s video work, which often involves his wandering unrecognizable through urban and rural landscapes like a kind of overgrown Halloween character. (In “Migration Tale,” made in 2014 and 2015, he dresses in a priest’s cassock and silver space-creature mask, making a lonely latter-day Great Migration from South Carolina to Harlem.)
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How a forgotten sandlot of a country became a hub of international power games. Bloomberg: Djibouti Is Hot.
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The restaurant, La Chaumière, sits on a corner of the central square in Djibouti, the capital city in the tiny African country of the same name, which until recently was of little consequence to anyone who didn’t live there. La Chaumière’s menu pushes the outer limits of fusion as Wang caters to his evolving clientele. East African seafood dishes, Asian stir fries, French stews, American sandwiches, they’re all here. “If we don’t have what you want,” Wang tells me, “we’ll make it for you.”
It’s my first night in Djibouti, and I’ve come to La Chaumière because I was told it would be full of soldiers, speculators, diplomats, spies, aid workers, contractors—all the outsiders who are turning Djibouti into an unlikely epicenter of 21st century geopolitics. Thomas Kelly, the American ambassador here, likes to say that Djibouti today feels like what Casablanca must have felt like in 1940. “All the different nationalities elbowing into each other,” he says. “All the intrigue.” Wang stands in the center of the mix, walking from table to table, slipping from language to language, witnessing Djibouti’s transformation at close range. Born to an Ethiopian mother and a Chinese father, he roamed East Africa with his family before settling here in 1977, the year Djibouti declared independence from France. He was 7 years old, an exotic import in a place no one ever visited, where nothing ever happened.
Back then, Djibouti, a country about the size of New Jersey, had one paved road and less than a square mile of arable land. The Associated Press deemed it perfectly devoid of resources, “except for sand, salt, and 20,000 camels.” The New York Timesguessed the new nation might get swallowed up by one of its neighbors—Ethiopia or Somalia, maybe—because it was “so impoverished that it cannot stand on its own.”
Years passed, and those neighbors were too preoccupied with wars, famine, and civil anarchy to pay much attention to it. Such upheavals, and almost everything else, skirted Djibouti. Then the new century rolled around and, seemingly overnight, the country’s sleepiness became a valuable commodity.
After Sept. 11, the U.S. military rushed to establish its first base dedicated to counterterrorism, and Djibouti was about the only country in the neighborhood that wasn’t on fire. Sitting beside the narrow Bab el-Mandeb strait—a gateway to the Suez Canal at the mouth of the Red Sea, and one of the most trafficked shipping lanes in the world—it provided easy access to hot spots in both Africa and the Middle East. A few years later, when Somali pirates started threatening the global shipping industry, the militaries of Germany, Italy, and Spain joined France, which has maintained a base since colonial times, by moving troops to Djibouti. Japan arrived in 2011, opening its first military base on foreign soil since World War II. Last year, refugees displaced by war in Yemen—just 13 miles across the strait—began arriving by the thousands, attracting aid workers and NGOs looking for a stable regional base.
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