August Wilson, in his own words. An excerpt from a 2004 interview that appeared in The Believer Mag.

I watched, in a bus station in downtown St. Paul, these four Japanese guys have breakfast. They sat there and chatted politely among themselves. One of em got up and took pictures. Now I found out from their conversation that they were taking Greyhound across the country to California to go to college. They can all afford to fly first class but they takin a bus, they havin adventure, to have some fun. So when the bill came, they all reached for their American Express cards to pay the bill. They paid the bill and they left.

So I asked myself, if it had been four black guys in here having breakfast, what would be the difference? The first thing I noticed is that there’s a jukebox there. It never occurred to any of these four Japanese guys to play the jukebox. But four black guys walk in, the first thing they do, somebody going to go over to the jukebox and put a quarter in, right? The other guy gonna come and say, “Hey man, play so-and-so!” “I ain’t playin with you, man. Put your own money in!” So he ain’t gonna play his music, right? The second thing I noticed, nobody said nothing to the waitress. The four black guys, I don’t care what she look like, somebody gonna say something to her. “Hey baby, how you doin?” “Look here, mama, what’s your phone number?” They gonna do that, right? “Nah, nah, don’t talk to him, he can’t read, blah blah.” And then the guy gonna get up to play another song, somebody gonna steal a piece of bacon off his plate, and he’s gonna come back and say, “Hey man, I ain’t playin with y’all, man, quit messin with my food.” Other than that, when the time comes for the bill, it’s that, “Leroy, lend me two dollars, man.” Right? It’s just the way we do it.

Now somebody sitting over here would say, “They don’t like each other. The guy didn’t let him play the record, he stole some food off his plate, they harassed the waitress.” So to them, the way you do things is all wrong. If you bring four white guys in, they’ll do it differently than the Japanese and the black guys. What white America does, it accepts the way the Japanese does it. It accepts the way the Czechs from the Czech Republic might do things different. But blacks are supposed to act like them; they say, “Y’all still ain’t learned how to do things.” August Wilson Playwright

Treat yourself. Read the entire interview.

h/t Mike @ Dallas Progress

Indeep

Last Night A DJ Saved My Life

The most magical aspect of being a DJ is the ability to pull people out of a constricted state of mind into an altered state of just feeling the music and moving to the beat. Any DJ worth their salt wants whatever crowd they’re playing for to end the evening drenched in sweat and exhilarated.

The highest compliment you can receive? “I can’t remember ever dancing like that!”

Since the first part of this conversation, I’ve been letting your thoughtful comments simmer in my mind. I’ve got more to say, but we’re moving tomorrow and I want to give this conversation the full attention it deserves. So, I promise we will pick it up on Monday.

But in the meantime, please think about and comment on this:

Since when did preaching the importance of personal responsibility and commitment to hard work become “elitist”? My mother and grandmother, who sometimes worked two and three jobs each to provide for me, drilled those concepts into me. And many (not all certainly) of my black and Latino friends at Yale were the first in their families to attend a 4 year college, just like me.

I am not saying everybody needs to go to college, and I don’t believe that hard work alone will bring you any kind of financial freedom or security. But I firmly believe we can fight for economic justice and pursue education reforms while advocating the value of hard work.

These are not mutually exclusive pursuits.

Continue Reading »

Several months ago, Topsoil Columnist Andrew Padula submitted a piece triggered by TI’s gun insanity. It was a good post, but in it Andrew made the observation that increasingly, there were two kinds of people in America. Beyond black and white or brown, there were those who were striving, adhering to the law and doing their best to fight for a taste of the American dream and there were others engaged in perpetually self and community destructive behaviors. He argued that the gulf between the two cultures was rapidly widening.

I regret to say, I flipped out. I argued that there is only one kind of person and most of those who are misdirected and losing in America just needed ‘bootstraps.’ They needed ‘bootstraps’ from both the private and public sector to find their way into the swim of the hardworking American ideal.

I now believe I was wrong. And my heart breaks to observe that there are generations of people lost to us and the best we may be able to do is to fight to save their young children.

Now the ‘us’ I refer to has absolutely nothing to do with race or socioeconomic bracket. I recall the time I spent as an adult literacy volunteer at the Urban League in South Central LA. The folks I worked with were black and Latino and I believe exclusively poor. But everyone worked: in fast food, as health aids, as janitors, as receptionists. Everyone consistently made it to the free and voluntary Saturday morning class eager to learn. Now I can certainly rail against the public education system that failed these students so miserably in during their school years, but the point is they weren’t giving up. I had a 56 year old man working on his GED! They is us. They is the we who have critical thinking skills. We have the ability to analyze and question and take advantage of whatever opportunities we find or create.

I am sure some of you are disagreeing with me. But as you structure your argument in rebuttal to my observations about critical thinking skills, you prove my point.

I had a heart sickening epiphany the other day. I was listening to an urban radio call in show when a young man called in. I think he said he was 23 and he had fathered 4 children by 4 different women and took care of exactly none of them. And he was proud of the fact that he had “4 kids.” I thought to myself, he would make any slave owner proud. And then I realized that he was measuring his own worth in the exact same way a century gone slave owner would have measured his worth, “How strong is this black buck’s back?”

That young man has exactly zero critical thinking skills. Of course there is clearly low self esteem, I understand that. But that young man and hundreds of thousands like him have no ability to ask themselves seemingly simple questions, “Does this make sense for me?” “Does this make sense for my community?” “Does this make sense a new human life?’

In April, the New York Times did a piece on the efforts to address disproportionate rates of black infant mortality in poor rural Mississippi. In one family profiled, there were multiple generations of women without high school diplomas, on welfare and with multiple children. The youngest mother of the bunch refused the social workers offer to help her children. She just refused to participate. Such a choice does not make any sense. I argue that this woman does not even have the skills necessary to make a decision that makes sense.

So here is where I come back to we have to save and teach those children. We have to make sure that the neighborhood school is clean, safe and staffed with qualified motivated teachers. We have to enforce truancy laws and provide after school programs like sports and school clubs to engage the minds of kids early. Let them get addicted to learning.

More tomorrow. Please comment. I am anxious to hear your thoughts.

So this is the lion in winter? Is this what a denied and now all red and inflamed sense of entitlement looks like? During the primary campaign, former President Bill Clinton has already heaped a mountain of tarnish on his own legacy. And now, he’s about to insure that his prolonged toddler tantrum will eclipse all remembrance of the positive aspects of his terms in office.

According to the Telegraph:

It has long been known that Mr Clinton is angry at the way his own reputation was tarnished during the primary battle when several of his comments were interpreted as racist.

But his lingering fury has shocked his friends. The Democrat told the Telegraph: “He’s been angry for a while. But everyone thought he would get over it. He hasn’t. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who he’s been in contact with and he is mad as hell.

“He’s saying he’s not going to reach out, that Obama has to come to him. One person told me that Bill said Obama would have to quote kiss my ass close quote, if he wants his support.

“You can’t talk like that about Obama - he’s the nominee of your party, not some house boy you can order around. Bill Clinton says Barack Obama must ‘kiss my ass’ for his support, Telegraph

Poor Hillary. At least she’s trying to do the right thing. Bill’s behavior makes her future presidential bid more unappealing.

Read More at Huffington Post

Blue Scholars

“Joe Metro”

What? Did you expect something else??

Peace.

I’ve been posting like a mad woman over at the ‘day job.’ I am still figuring how to juggle my ideas, but I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been writing about over there. I’d love to hear your thoughts…here or there.

Are menthols racist? And why do so many black folks (75% of black smokers) smoke them??

Mass murder in Zimbabwe. We don’t care. Sadly, notice there are only 2 comments. We really don’t care.

Proud black men promote R. Kelly boycott. I felt so proud of the petition sponsors and so hopeless after reading so many comments defending R. Kelly and calling his detractors “haters” or worse.

Black Power, Afro-Latin Style. Finally, Central and South Americans are taking pride in their African heritage and confronting longstanding racism. It’s like the 60’s here without the riots and fire hoses.

Mauricia Grant Hits NASCAR With $225M Lawsuit. I’ve been working on a post for AAR entitled “To Sue or not to Sue” I’ll work on getting that done. But in the meantime, you can weigh in over at BlackSpin.

A wonderful friend of mine keeps trying to convince me to go to Denver with him to attend the Democratic National Convention. You see, he is an intimate of some of Hillary Clinton’s most major donors and passionate supporters. He promises that if I go, he’ll bring the “lawn chairs” and we will have front row, or shall I say, ringside seats to one of the largest protests this country has ever seen.

As certain blog sites are hinting, my friend claims to have first hand knowledge that untold numbers of “angry Hillary ladies” are galvanized, organizing and determined to wreak havoc in Denver. He tells me, “This is gonna be just like ’68!” And he was at ’68. Continue Reading »

A maverick has passed.
Continue Reading »

According to an ABC News-Washington Post poll reported in the Washington Post today, 3 out of 10 Americans acknowledge racial bias in assessing Barack Obama.

Lingering racial bias affects the public’s assessments of the Democrat from Illinois, but offsetting advantages and Sen. John McCain’s age could be bigger factors in determining the next occupant of the White House.

Continue Reading »

Yo Yo

You Can’t Play With My Yo-Yo

On my first trip from the East coast to LA in 1990, fate kissed me on the forehead at the car rental desk. I was assigned a convertible with a booming sound system instead of the super discount subcompact paid for by my company. After immediately noticing the golden sun tone that rests on everything in Southern California, and the palm trees, what caught my attention was the different sound of West coast hip hop. Continue Reading »

On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War had ended and those who had been slaves were now free. There are a number of accounts as to why freedom took so long to arrive in Texas: Continue Reading »

Well it’s Wednesday, which means another sports journalist has been suspended for lacking the most basic understanding of historic atrocities and their present day reverberations. Continue Reading »