Check The Diagonal

It’s So Hard

I’m still around and will be back in time once I get some more time to do it in.  With the little spare time I do have I’ve been working on a developing a sales curriculum for inner city community centers to teach kids how to use very basic sales technique to chameleon based on audience in order to fit in anywhere and to sell themselves and their ideas with confidence regardless of background and economic circumstance. 

I give it to people who blog full time without getting paid to do it.  It is hard.

They get it. Come around my way…

Postbourgie’s Friday’s Random Ten is the perfect cap to a week filled with misunderstandings, generalizations and assumptions on the subject of interracial relationships. My basic take on the subject is: if you don’t like interracial relationships then don’t get into one. And that still stands.  But, the posting of LL’s “Around the Way Girl” just sums it all up beautifully for me, they get it.  Its that feeling you get after a long day downtown and you finally step off that train into your neighborhood, your battery is instantly recharged, you’re home.  And so I’m not sure race is the correct dissection point of interracial relationships, it’s culture. We gravitate to what we are most comfortable with because we need, love and appreciate it.

But now thanks to that LL joint, I’m feeling all Spring feverish and homesick for the sounds and people from Uptown.  I want a cold Presidente, and a park bench at Bennett, and I want to hear some merengue tipico and just hang with my people.

More after the jump if you like…

So tell me where you from…

We will be in Georgia 3 full years this June.  We moved here for the house you can buy in the suburbs with grass and trees and a yard, the quality public schools, the safety and the milder winters.  We did get all that, but with a price.  I sometimes lament the fact that in exchange for all the benefit this suburb offers my kids won’t get to grow up in place that is worthy of their being defined by.  I watch folks in our subdivision rocking front license plate covers that shout out our neighborhood and just shake my head.  That’s one of my fears.  This place cannot be allowed to define my children.  They cannot strive to want a license plate of a homogenized suburb to define them like so many of the people around us whose primary goal is to blend in by acting and looking as much like the next person as humanly possible.  No.  Not for mine.

Judgmental much? Indeed.  But understand, New Yorkers are insanely proud and territorial animals.  Any kid from Uptown to Coney Island can tell you why their 12-48 sq block hood is the greatest in the known universe.  And any New Yorker worth his bones can tell you why NYC > anywhere else on the planet. These things are fact.  From pizza to haute cuisine, hip-hop to punk rock, graffiti to MOMA, Denzel to DiNiro to Old Timers Day in El Barrio. NYC is the fount from which all great things flow.  And if you’re still talking you might just get mushed with Yankees Baseball.

Me, I’m from the single most shout out hood in hip-hop history.  While I’ve cleaned up well and graduated to these affluent suburbs for the betterment of my children you can take the kid out of the hood but can never take the hood out of the kid.

Lightening Up

It’s Friday.  Enough of racism and politics and disagreements and inflexibility and preconceptions.  I always just try to start from a point where I happily admit I don’t know shit and absorb from there.  Its served me well my entire career.  Being wrong is the best opportunity to learn.  But my brain needs a break.

More than anything right now, I wish I was in D.R., feeling that sweet sun, drinking una Presidente vestida de novia and listening to this…

Who Am I?

I talk about racism a lot.  That is basically how I spend my free time lately; thinking and talking about race and racism.  I attribute this new trend to the overabundance of racism we’ve experienced since moving to Georgia from New York City 3 years ago.  This new negative exposure has made me both hypersensitive and aware like never before.  But I like talking about it.  It raises my passion and it’s clearly necessary.  We do not talk about the subject honestly or nearly enough as far as I’m concerned. 

That said, let me be upfront, regardless of your own background, if you are framing your approach to the conversation of race and racism based on what you think you see in me, before you attempt to get to know me, you are going to be wrong.  I’m not not that guy.  If we could only agree on that one point before we begin I think we would be framing the conversation in the right way from jump.  Let’s agree that we don’t know each other.  And let’s us not be like those street corner MCs who try to act like they’re spitting freestyle when you know they wrote that shit at home last month.

If we can agree to make our conversation about race and racism about us getting to know each other than we might be able diffuse what I think are the two wrong ways to go about talking about race, which unsurprisingly happen to be the two most common ways to talk about race.  The first is making the conversation be confrontational.  If someone has got to “win”, or if I’ve got to feel like we might be throwing joints before its all over, we aren’t going to learn anything and someone is going to get their feelings hurt.   The second is stereotyping and we all do it when talking about race.  Its so easy to regurgitate all those things we’ve learned about someone we aren’t talking to at the moment if we can paint the person we are talking to with the broadest brush and then turn it on ourselves, its safe.  But we’ve heard it all before and its boring and won’t accomplish anything.  Talk to me about something I might not have already heard, something that will make me think, feel uncomfortable or happy.  But talk.

The Failure of the NAACP

My twitter feed and inbox was full of cheers over the NAACP Image Awards last night.  Most people loved it.  @NAACP retweeted comments which they were most proud of during and after the show, most of which equated to this year’s Image Awards being the best one of all time. The only consistent criticism I saw was either in protest of Sandra Bullock’s nomination for her work in “The Blind Side” (both because she is white and the movie is one big racist stereotype) or against the stereotypical freight train that is Tyler Perry Inc.  And THAT is exactly why the NAACP is an absolute failure in its current incarnation and how it has utterly failed people of color and America.

From The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People website, some history:

“The NAACP was formed partly in response to the continuing horrific practice of lynching and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, the capital of Illinois and resting place of President Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the violence that was committed against blacks, a group of white liberals that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Some 60 people, seven of whom were African American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln's birth.”

And the organizations mission statement, also from the NAACP website”

“The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”

The NAACP was formed 102 years ago in response to the appalling violence and injustice committed against people of color in America.  And in that past 102 years the NAACP has been responsible for a countless number of great accomplishments, including but by no means not limited to:

• The first African Americans to be commissioned officers in World War I
• IN 1920 taught America to be brave in the face of injustice and hate by holding their annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia-Stronghold of the Klan
• First broke segregation at the University of Maryland in 1935
• The Kerr Principle
• Morgan vs. Virginia
• Brown vs. the Board of Education
• The Civil and Voting Rights Acts

If the goal was to assimilate then I am sadly mistaken and you can stop reading now.  If the goal was to be accepted into the big house, through the front door, not because it’s our house, but because we have grown to look and act the same as they who now accept us, then the mission was accomplished, you can stop now, there is nothing left to fight over.

I hope to fucking God, not.  I spend a majority of my day feeling like ALL I ever do is complain.  My three beautiful babies are inheriting a world that is racially less diverse, more segregated and more insensitive than the one they might have been forced to navigate 40 years ago.  Racism and hatred in the form of perverse nationalism and populism has become mainstream and acceptable and it is broadcast live on Fox every single day.  A United States Senator, just yesterday said that Black people were better off as slaves than they are now and CNN won’t even give that two minutes of airtime, Fox News will applaud him for saying it every 30 minutes for the next week.  There will be no constructive outrage.  We are officially desensitized.

Last night I watched the only organization in America with the size, history and experience capable of mobilizing Americans against this growing surge in racial hatred as an acceptable political weapon condone it by paying the very people responsible for cultivating that same racism and hatred to host their Image Awards. The millions of African American advertising dollars spent on the NAACP Image Awards broadcast are free to be used to fund Roger Ailes campaign against minorities in America via Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.  In prouder days the NAACP would be at the forefront of the war against Fox and their exploitation of minority athletes on Fox Sports as a vehicle to fund racism and hatred on Fox News.  Today the NAACP merely makes its own contributes to the fund.

No, this is sickening tragedy, Shakespearian in quality.  The NAACP has turned its cheek and claimed great success as measured by how many people watched an award show. An award show which included the nomination of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” and Michael Jackson’s Funeral Services.  Since when do we celebrate stereotypes or perpetuate them ourselves?  I don’t get the sense that the NAACP is paying attention to the needs of minorities in America.  Maybe they are waiting for President Obama to their job for them ala Tavis Smiley’s search for a Black agenda.  Don’t search, lead.  Either way, the NAACP is currently worse than irrelevant, they are complicity part of the problem, and should therefore no longer be supported by minorities in America .   Those accomplishments I listed above were a really long time ago.  Those laurels done died.

On the off chance someone at the NAACP reads this, there is an army of intelligent, angry and frustrated Americans waiting for someone to organize them in the cause against racism and hatred as a weapon in America if you would only show the courage and vision to do the work your founders so vigilantly did before you. In other words, wake the fuck up por favor.

Just Nothing

I had this re-launch of me all mapped out.  It took long enough.  I have so many different versions of what I was going to say, all long winded and elaborate.  It was going to be full of autobiography and cleverness so that people who came here by accident could understand where I come from and stay.  It was going to be wrapped in old school hip-hop and urban myths explaining why my particular ghetto is better than any other ghetto.  At one point I think LL was even gonna remind folks not to call it a comeback.  And then I heard Joe Unger died.  He was a 41 year old father of five in the best shape of his life and he died of a heart attack.  Big Joe was the biggest kid in my JHS class at 187 and I was the smallest and he was my friend.  And in missing the man I never got to know Big Joe to be I just can’t bring myself to write the look at how unique I am post that I was planning and instead am just going to continue my experience here the way I started it.

Black History Month Reading Project

I’m still going back and forth on how the site will look when it’s done but while I’m going through that, the list of things I thought I wanted to write about is growing quickly and quickly becoming irrelevant and the little hater is starting to play tricks on me. 

My childhood home was filled with great books and if nothing else inspired a great love for reading in me that has thankfully passed on to my twins. About a year ago I realized that they are able to read just about anything I do.  Since then we have had great fun reading together and have made a bit of a game out of it. Here's what we do: I read everything they read when they are reading it and then we have lots to talk about together. It's magical really, I essentially never run out of things to talk to the twins about, in fact we are always talking about something (for you parents out there, trust me, communication is everything). Every other book (or series of books) they read is recommended by me that way I can introduce my favorites to them and vise versa. I’ve painfully suffered through the Twilight series with Cassandra (in keeping up my end I’ve read a lot of 12 yr old popular fiction!) but I’ve handed them “Candide”, “Sidhartha”, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “A Lesson Before Dying”, “The Last Lecture”, “The Alchemist”, “Oscar Wao” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  I felt I had arrived at a really good place with the twins when Cassandra slammed Candide for ridiculously marrying Cunegonde in the end or when Nicky got the point of Santiago’s return to exactly where his journey began.   12 is such an amazing age for little people.  They are wide open and asking all the right questions.

Now February is Black History Month but I’m not really sure what that means exactly.  The public schools here in the suburbs of Atlanta have not acknowledged it in any way.  There hasn’t been a single book or movie recommendation to come home from the twins’ English or History classes.  To me, this is much worse than what has happened to Dr. King’s day, everyone is so happy to have the day off without caring why they’ve got it off in the first place.  Isn’t is bad enough Black History Month is during the shortest month of the year, now it has to be completely ignored?  My wife Andrea and I feel like the institutions here work very hard to help our children forget their minority heritage.  Not my three.  This weekend we decided to modify our reading game in honor of Black History Month.  For the month of February I will recommend all the books we read.  This weekend we finished “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” and after their kicks and screams and tears of disbelief I am pleased and encouraged by their ability to understand.  We are going to read “A-Train-Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman” by Charles Dryden next.

I’m collecting recommendations. Drop me a note or a comment.

Me all 2.0 and ish

After about 6 months of mostly talking to myself on here and enjoying it, I’m going to stick around.  Some of the good folks at Typepad are doing some redecorating for me so I feel more at home.  In the meanwhile I’m testing some of my new connections to Facebook and Twitter.  Interesting live flow going on tonight for the President’s SOTU at Postbourgie.

I’ll be back.

Happy Birthday Dr. King

Help Haiti

My father-in-law felt tremors and was cleaning up broken dishes in his kitchen 300 miles away from Port-au-Prince in La Isabella.   Port-au-Prince is destroyed.

Postbourgie posted this via Ackerman.  It’s only $5, go do it now.

After 8 long years, this.

"Ultimately, the buck stops with me,"

-President Obama

Colbert brilliance

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Ideal or No Deal
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Punks jump up to get beat down

It’s interesting to watch a collective Republican response to the Christmas Day attack that is based purely on their fear and lack of faith in American fortitude.  This post from the White House is the exact way to handle the Dick Cheney Right these days.  They are the party of irrational hysteria and fear and should be spanked with impunity.

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.

 

And

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.

The Chicago Way.  Watch and learn, Dick.

and that is all.

Joe Klein via Andrew:

"The denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not. For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration—the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts—that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension," -Joe Klein

More Al Franken Please

When John McCain starts denouncing birthers and deathers and lying obstructionists in his own party maybe I’d give a shit about his position on comity in the Senate.

UPDATE:  I'm not the least bit surprised that John McCain is a hypocrite on this too.  Not only has he seen this type of thing before, he has done it.  Here's the story at Think Progress.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator’s time has expired.

Mr. DAYTON. I ask for unanimous consent that I have 30 seconds more to finish my remarks.

Mr. McCAIN. I object.

On Hope

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.”   -Reinhold Niebuhr

 

 

I take a lot of heat for my unwavering support of President Obama. But you’ve got to understand my perspective before we go there.

I grew up in a time and place where the greatest limits we faced as children were the ones we created in our own mind.  The public schools we attended were halfway houses filled with stillborn brilliance and parental guidance was most often a shining beacon of exactly what not to do.  Hope was a luxury reserved for other, more fortunate children growing up somewhere else.  Instead our wishes were all ones of instant gratification filled with band-aids for our future which looked more dismal than our present. That’s why welfare children in the ghetto are the best dressed, it’s why our sneakers were our prize possession, and why the lure of the live for today life on the street was so strong.  These things allowed me to forget that there was very little to be hopeful for.  Instead we learned to survive a day at a time. And that’s the tragedy of a hopeless existence; living day by day and check to check forces us to live in the NOW, hope becomes tomorrow’s unaffordable luxury.  Fuck a dollar and a dream, ya heard?

Perhaps I do resemble a fan when it comes to Obama.  I can find no wrong in his consistent effort to change our conversations and outlook and direction in positive and substantive ways.  Conversely I find nothing at all redeeming about an opposition refusing to play out of spite.  What matters is that we pay attention. Progressives who are angered about the Afghanistan escalation and Hawks who were pleased with the Nobel Speech clearly have not been paying attention to Obama these past few years.  Those positions are old and he is exactly who he said he was.  If we are going to allow others to spoon feed their opinions to us, pawned off as our own, we are going to be disappointed and misled.  

I have plenty of policy and tactical disagreements with the President.  He has been slow on GITMO and DODT and DOMA and weak on equal rights for same sex partners.  I think there should be top level war crime prosecutions for the torture administration and I think Joe Liebermann and Republican obstructionism should be publically unveiled for what it is and punished.  But I didn’t vote for Obama to carry my water to the White House and enact policy the way I think he should.  I voted for him because of his character and his intellect and his willingness to try hard.  Hope is not a strategy and it’s not blind optimism either, but what the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve and President Obama has given that power back to me and others in this country and for that he has my support.   

 

“We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” 

-Barack Obama

 

 

The further adventures of Shep Smith being the man

I keep taking bets on how much longer before Shep Smith gets canned by Fox News.  He would be fantastic doing the evening news hours on cable where he could just speak his mind.    The guy keeps it real by spitting in the face of his network's obvious bias every day.

There is no such thing as a bad kid

This is why I am working towards becoming a teacher.  Because kids are not made for throwing away.

The petition to free Sara Kruzan is here.  Sign it, standing up and speaking out works.

Columbus Day

My wife was born and raised in the Dominican Republic.  Her mother lives in La Isabela, the place where Columbus first landed in the New World, built his first settlement and the first Catholic Church.  The legacy of the people he left behind on the island is not a glamorous or heroic one.

It is worth re-thinking the holiday.