It’s Only a Game

By Robert Bell

The final week of the year (2006), one of the western world’s most regressive media institutions, the major broadcast networks in the United States, collectively decided that the critical news of the week was that the prosecution in the Duke lacrosse team sexual abuse case would drop the most serious of charges (rape) against the white defendants. Almost in unison the talking heads of NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox clamored about the unusual, “unfair” predicament, incensed that the renowned educational icon of the new South should be dragged through the mud. Duke University, the school that has brought us venerated coach Mike Krzyzewski and the rest of its basketball legends, had been seriously embarrassed at the allegations brought against several white athletes engaged in drunken frolicking that involved several black female strippers.

Not only were the corporate media elites elated at the dismissal of charges, but the sports talk show hosts and commentators were ebullient. Arguably the most pitiful refuse resulting from the seismic growth of big-ticket sports, these talkers, particularly those on radio, virtually define America’s descent into cultural triviality. A more unimportant, uniformed, over-paid bunch exists nowhere else in the world. They are the most bizarre example of commercial hype and misplaced value that results from this society’s ungodly worship and promotion of sports. More importantly and dangerously, the sports talk commentator (and writer) often assumes the role of jackleg political and social analyst, although most of them rarely have practical or academic knowledge about world events.


So, when word got out about the lacrosse team, the sports talkers weighed in, white and Negro. Naturally, the Negro would have to be even more outraged than the white boy. After all, where else have blacks excelled so completely as on the gridiron and the basketball courts? To have the perfect world of sports invaded by racial conflict is more than the black sports talker can stomach.

Witness cool Stephen A. Smith’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer (12/24/06) entitled, “Injustice has spoken in the Duke lacrosse case”. In it, like the prattle written by most new age sports talking heads (by new age I mean those born after the civil rights struggle, circa 1975), the article is loaded with frivolous commentary, finger pointing, accusations and simply riddled with simplistic opinions never ever supported by facts or empirical evidence. There are few current black activists with whom I don’t have issues, but it is absolutely disgusting to read a sports columnist who has never sacrificed a moment in the interest of social justice, lambasting Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

With the Smith article, it’s difficult to know what he is talking about in the first place. “And the issue that provokes the very reflection that permeates our thoughts as a people potentially ends up wasting our time, dividing black and white even further.” What the hell does this mean??

After this convoluted outburst Smith delves into the case, regurgitating what’s been reported in the mainstream press – i.e., that DNA evidence was withheld from defense attorneys and the fact that the plaintiff could not say that she had been penetrated by the defendants. A bit more research would have uncovered the e-mails circulated and written by one of the players (although not one of the accused) Ryan McFadyen immediately after the incident. McFadyen’s sick diatribe included the following passages - “To whom it may concern…tomorrow night, after tonights show, I’ve decided to have some strippers over to edends 2c. all are welcome.. however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as they walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex..”

As distressing as some of the remarks made by the players is the inane, naïve social commentary issued by Smith. “We will fall as a people if we don’t start reminding ourselves of this quickly (that we have to have character if we are to judge other people). We’ll languish in self-inflicted purgatory. And, unlike our ancestors, we won’t be able to garner sympathy because we won’t have any excuses.”

I’m quite sure that those of us still concerned with social justice and the demoralizing reality of black on black crime could care less about garnering sympathy. We would like a level playing field though and that requires that some restitution be made for a 246-year holocaust called slavery and 100 years of violations of the human and constitutional rights of black people. Instead, our rogue government is ready to spend/steal billions more to rebuild Iraq.

Smith thinks the public outcry over Rodney King and Sean Bell is justified, though there’s no evidence he has stepped up to the plate to lend any material support in these cases. We all know that a fair trial involving blacks and whites, particularly white police or persons of status is a tenuous matter. Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton have been at the forefront of challenging judicial and law enforcement bias. I hope Smith remembers that the next time he’s pulled over by a trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Music for your thoughts:

http://www.zshare.net/download/03-johnny-was-m4p.html

How do you like it? johnsonterrye@hotmail.com

The Loss of WHAT-AM in Philadelphia

When I first moved to Philadelphia in 1979, WDAS radio had a kickin' news department: Karen Warrington, E. Steven Collins, Thera Martin and many others kept the black community on alert. Cody Anderson helped to keep the community's conversation with itself flowing. But as the then black-owned station responded to the need for increased profits in the 1980s, WDAS's news division began to fade. Once the station was purchased by Clear Channel, any hint of concern for news was abolished.

My first radio appearance in Philadelphia on was Georgie Woods' program on WHAT. I was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time and Georgie and Terry Lee Barritte invited me on to talk about some article I had written. Georgie asked me one question and then said he had to briefly leave the studio, telling me to continue talking until he returned. I was one of hundreds of community voices that could be heard on WHAT talking about issues critical to the black community.

Back in those days, when someone talked about African American leadership, the label didn't just apply to spineless elected officials. In those days, leadership came from the grassroots, although, admittedly, that form of leadership was being undermined. From a musical standpoint, regional African American music was on the wane too.

Now WHAT is gone. The broadcasters and workers were given their pink slips last week. All of this amounts to another blow to the black community at this most critical time: high rates of incarceration, unemployment, health disparities, etc.

Glen Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com has a nice piece on the loss of news on African American oriented radio. Later on this week, Rob Bell plans to jump in with his thoughts on the need to develop a progressive media policy.

"The absence of news on commercial Black radio has stunted our dreams and warped our politics for a generation, leaving Black America with no means to talk to itself in its own voices. Sparking a movement in our communities to demand the return of news to the Black commercial airwaves, argues Glen Ford , must be at the center of any meaningful black push for media reform."

Bring Back Black Radio News: The People’s Network

by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

“The people listen to commercial Black radio, and the struggle must be taken to the proprietors’ doorsteps.”

When 2,500 activists gather for the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis, this weekend, one of the chief villains of the event will be Clear Channel, the media giant that has sucked up and dumbed down 1,200 commercial radio stations, the vast bulk of them in the decade since the U.S. Congress ushered in a corporate feeding frenzy with its Telecommunications Act of 1996. If past Media Reform conferences (2003 and 2005) are any guide, participants will – correctly – rail against the strangling grip of a corporate media oligarchy that manipulates and distorts the purchasing behavior, moral judgment and global worldview of the nation. We at Black Agenda Report fear, however, that the African American corporate players in the Great Media Rip-Off will largely get a free pass – while discussion of the Black commercial radio scene will, as usual, be limited to the general precariousness of (small) Black station ownership, and the poisonous nature of the musical menus beamed to the inner cities.

To read the full article, click to:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33

Follow this link for some music for your thoughts:

We Shall Over Come by Toots and the Maytals:
http://www.zshare.net/download/1-13-we-shall-overcome-m4p.html

Post Modern Decay by Zion I:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/12-poems-4-post-modern-decay-feat-aesop-rock-mp3-cf4.html

Choice of Color by the Impressions:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/choice-of-color-mp3.html

Bush Lies and the Latino Attacks on African Americans

Of course I am pissed about the Bush Administration's pollution of language. They have used the term "war on terror" to hide the state terrorism they have waged in pursuit of oil and wealth for friends and allies. Now they have ushered out the term "surge" to describe their escalation of the military evasion of Iraq. The African American community has been against this mess from the beginning. We have long understood America's hypocrisy and willingness to use of violence for a bloody buck.

Though my intent is to limit posts on this blog to no more than five paragraphs, I feel compelled to heads up folk to this article from the January 7 issue of The Los Angeles Times. Check it out:

Roots of Latino/black anger
Longtime prejudices, not economic rivalry, fuel tensions.
By Tanya K. Hernandez, Tanya K. Hernandez is a professor of law at Rutgers University Law School.
January 7, 2007

THE ACRIMONIOUS relationship between Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles is growing hard to ignore. Although last weekend's black-versus-Latino race riot at Chino state prison is unfortunately not an aberration, the Dec. 15 murder in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood of Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old African American, allegedly by members of a Latino gang, was shocking.

Yet there was nothing really new about it. Rather, the murder was a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods. Just last August, federal prosecutors convicted four Latino gang members of engaging in a six-year conspiracy to assault and murder African Americans in Highland Park. During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that African American residents (with no gang ties at all) were being terrorized in an effort to force them out of a neighborhood now perceived as Latino.

For example, one African American resident was murdered by Latino gang members as he looked for a parking space near his Highland Park home. In another case, a woman was knocked off her bicycle and her husband was threatened with a box cutter by one of the defendants, who said, "You niggers have been here long enough."

At first blush, it may be mystifying why such animosity exists between two ethnic groups that share so many of the same socioeconomic deprivations. Over the years, the hostility has been explained as a natural reaction to competition for blue-collar jobs in a tight labor market, or as the result of turf battles and cultural disputes in changing neighborhoods. Others have suggested that perhaps Latinos have simply been adept at learning the U.S. lesson of anti-black racism, or that perhaps black Americans are resentful at having the benefits of the civil rights movement extended to Latinos.

Although there may be a degree of truth to some or all of these explanations, they are insufficient to explain the extremity of the ethnic violence.

Over the years, there's also been a tendency on the part of observers to blame the conflict more on African Americans (who are often portrayed as the aggressors) than on Latinos. But although it's certainly true that there's plenty of blame to go around, it's important not to ignore the effect of Latino culture and history in fueling the rift.

The fact is that racism — and anti-black racism in particular — is a pervasive and historically entrenched reality of life in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 90% of the approximately 10 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean (by the French, Spanish and British, primarily), whereas only 4.6% were brought to the United States. By 1793, colonial Mexico had a population of 370,000 Africans (and descendants of Africans) — the largest concentration in all of Spanish America.

The legacy of the slave period in Latin America and the Caribbean is similar to that in the United States: Having lighter skin and European features increases the chances of socioeconomic opportunity, while having darker skin and African features severely limits social mobility.

White supremacy is deeply ingrained in Latin America and continues into the present. In Mexico, for instance, citizens of African descent (who are estimated to make up 1% of the population) report that they regularly experience racial harassment at the hands of local and state police, according to recent studies by Antonieta Gimeno, then of Mount Holyoke College, and Sagrario Cruz-Carretero of the University of Veracruz.

Mexican public discourse reflects the hostility toward blackness; consider such common phrases as "getting black" to denote getting angry, and "a supper of blacks" to describe a riotous gathering of people. Similarly, the word "black" is often used to mean "ugly." It is not surprising that Mexicans who have been surveyed indicate a disinclination to marry darker-skinned partners, as reported in a 2001 study by Bobby Vaughn, an anthropology professor at Notre Dame de Namur University.

Anti-black sentiment also manifests itself in Mexican politics. During the 2001 elections, for instance, Lazaro Cardenas, a candidate for governor of the state of Michoacan, is believed to have lost substantial support among voters for having an Afro Cuban wife. Even though Cardenas had great name recognition (as the grandson of Mexico's most popular president), he only won by 5 percentage points — largely because of the anti-black platform of his opponent, Alfredo Anaya, who said that "there is a great feeling that we want to be governed by our own race, by our own people."

Given this, it should not be surprising that migrants from Mexico and other areas of Latin America and the Caribbean arrive in the U.S. carrying the baggage of racism. Nor that this facet of Latino culture is in turn transmitted, to some degree, to younger generations along with all other manifestations of the culture.

The sociological concept of "social distance" measures the unease one ethnic or racial group has for interacting with another. Social science studies of Latino racial attitudes often indicate a preference for maintaining social distance from African Americans. And although the social distance level is largest for recent immigrants, more established communities of Latinos in the United States also show a marked social distance from African Americans.

For instance, in University of Houston sociologist Tatcho Mindiola's 2002 survey of 600 Latinos in Houston (two-thirds of whom were Mexican, the remainder Salvadoran and Colombian) and 600 African Americans, the African Americans had substantially more positive views of Latinos than Latinos had of African Americans. Although a slim majority of the U.S.-born Latinos used positive identifiers when describing African Americans, only a minority of the foreign-born Latinos did so. One typical foreign-born Latino respondent stated: "I just don't trust them…. The men, especially, all use drugs, and they all carry guns."

This same study found that 46% of Latino immigrants who lived in residential neighborhoods with African Americans reported almost no interaction with them.

The social distance of Latinos from African Americans is consistently reflected in Latino responses to survey questions. In a 2000 study of residential segregation, Camille Zubrinsky Charles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that Latinos were more likely to reject African Americans as neighbors than they were to reject members of other racial groups. In addition, in the 1999-2000 Lilly Survey of American Attitudes and Friendships, Latinos identified African Americans as their least desirable marriage partners, whereas African Americans proved to be more accepting of intermarriage with Latinos.

Ironically, African Americans, who are often depicted as being averse to coalition-building with Latinos, have repeatedly demonstrated in their survey responses that they feel less hostility toward Latinos than Latinos feel toward them.

Although some commentators have attributed the Latino hostility to African Americans to the stress of competition in the job market, a 1996 sociological study of racial group competition suggests otherwise. In a study of 477 Latinos from the 1992 Los Angeles County Social Survey, professors Lawrence Bobo, then of Harvard, and Vincent Hutchings of the University of Michigan found that underlying prejudices and existing animosities contribute to the perception that African Americans pose an economic threat — not the other way around.

It is certainly true that the acrimony between African Americans and Latinos cannot be resolved until both sides address their own unconscious biases about one another. But it would be a mistake to ignore the Latino side of the equation as some observers have done — particularly now, when the recent violence in Los Angeles has involved Latinos targeting peaceful African American citizens.

This conflict cannot be sloughed off as simply another generation of ethnic group competition in the United States (like the familiar rivalries between Irish, Italians and Jews in the early part of the last century). Rather, as the violence grows, the "diasporic" origins of the anti-black sentiment — the entrenched anti-black prejudice among Latinos that exists not just in the United States but across the Americas — will need to be directly confronted.


Music for your thoughts:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/edwinstarr-twenty-fivemiles-mp3.html

http://www.zshare.net/audio/americanskin-mp3.html

http://www.zshare.net/audio/americanskin-mp3-hz8.html

Black and Proud?

by Robert Bell
The most important musician in modern rock and roll history has passed on, and it has been inspirational to see so many pay homage to the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. His legacy - of being one of the few entertainers who literally changed music - is only eclipsed by his determination to be black and proud, regardless of the odds. It will be interesting to see how our current crop of Negro leaders, professionals and fans carry on after brother Brown. If the past decade is any indication, the days of black radio and music reflecting the pride, excellence and resistance of African Americans are just about over. The black music industry is doing quite well financially, but despite its influence and purported power, black music is relegated to a subordinate position in terms of public perception and media exposure. Unfortunately, most Negroes accept this contemporary “Jim Crow” environment and passively or ignorantly allow their culture and music to be portrayed in whatever fashion the mainstream press deems fit.

I was recently told by a friend that a certain black female entertainer had formed a white rock band. When being interviewed by some media talking head, she stated that black folks had abandoned rock and roll. Now I’m not going to mention the entertainer’s name because I haven’t been able to verify the story. It’s interesting though because I was in a coffee shop the other day (black owned) and the two African-American employees were listening to a local white rock station. Moreover, a year or so ago, I read an article where a sister who is a musician was interviewed and commented on how so-called r & b music and rap were too restrictive for her.

All of this is quite disconcerting and it has been for several years now. So much so that I spent a considerable amount of time writing a book about the history and current state of popular music entitled, “The Myth of Rock and Roll: The Racial Politics of American Popular Music; 1945-2005”. What’s quite clear to me is that the idea of white supremacy is becoming ever more dominant in this country, and many black folks don’t realize it and are unwittingly contributing to the problem.

Despite the fact that black music and culture have been incredibly pervasive and indeed, dominant in terms of records sales, chart position, etcetera, the corporate media would have you believe that it’s the white rock genre that is on the cutting edge of the artistic world. And unfortunately, far too many believe it. Media consolidation, led and controlled by corporate elites has been the primary contributor to the ruse. But the indifference and apathy of African-American media business persons and professionals is also a major contributor. In their case, the problem starts with knowing and appreciating your history.

Without going into all the details, a simple review of rock history and where it all started can be done by looking at the so-called definitive rock and roll institution, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s there because of Alan Freed, a Jewish DJ who lived and worked there circa 1949 through 1954. He is reputed to have popularized the term rock and roll. But, just what was Freed playing on his legendary radio station in 1951? By Freed’s own admission, he was playing r & b – at least four years before Elvis and others would become famous.

Most music critics know this fact but over the years, particularly after the emergence of the Beatles (the British interpretation of the blues), the white media has commandeered the term rock and applied it to – whatever it wishes. White folks claiming ownership and superiority over something it neither owns nor creates is not new, but what is disturbing is how Negroes within the industry have so easily surrendered the nomenclature to the powers that be. In its place we have accepted the flaccid term – r & b – a term without origins in the black community. Rather, it was a lame substitute assigned by legendary Atlantic record executive, Jerry Wexler, for Billboard Magazine’s official term for black popular music – race music.

Not only has the Negro media establishment failed to claim its central role in rock history, but it is failing to raise the standard and consciousness of new generations of listeners and fans. Black radio is only a façade of what it once was (in the ‘70s) and as a result creates the impression, particularly with younger listeners, that black music is no longer on the cutting edge of music innovation. Black radio’s proclivity for narrowly formatted programs is becoming staid and boring – and in some cases downright ridiculous. Far too many inventive musicians who are playing brilliant forms of black music are being ignored by radio programmers, and the results will be incalculable. When once we could hear ‘What’s the Word from Johannesburg?”, on commercial radio, we are now overdosing with pop sludge. Radio segregates music styles ad naseum, and in periodicals and newspapers across the country, the media elite busies itself saluting music that hovers between garbage and so-so.

As the majority media was covering and saluting James Brown, it was a tragic irony that a black newscaster from MSNBC interviewed the editor of Rolling Stone magazine for his analysis on brother Brown’s career and significance. The world’s preeminent white rock magazine world never could find the space for James Brown on its cherished front cover during the height of his career (1967-1973). We will have heard many accolades and laudations about the one and only James Brown during the few weeks after his death. At a time when we need it most, will we ever hear “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” again on commercial radio?

Music for your thoughts:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/08-like-it-is-like-it-was-part-2-mp3-uff.html

http://www.zshare.net/audio/05-say-it-loud-im-black-and-im-proud-1-mp3.html