Showing posts with label unity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unity. Show all posts
Art and Youth
Awo. So much going on in this video. check baby's choreographical(?) pauses. See whole body free up. ...whole body use. There are levels to this **** (expression the 'bones knows'). Her moves influence their moves. information is made and shared. She catches this. The adults are teaching her how to 'teacher them' with her beauty with her creative (creator in her). AWO. This space is kin to spaces ProjectHipHop creates for Boston's young adult artists in their move for social justice. Please SUPPORT Them. & all spaces akin. There are (these) things we have not accessed in ourselves, necessary to fight the enemy on all fronts Go on Zaya. Rumble.
Mental Sag: we ARE this.
Hmm. (We are better than this.)
We are better than this?
Hypocrisy of the first order.
You are a part of we. You are not better than this.
Greatest lesson of 'U.S. civil rights' activism: to be approximately right > exactly wrong
We are better than this?
You are exactly wrong.
You left these kids. You left the community.
If not physically, then certainly Mentally. You (left) leave it in your mind every day.
...and posters like this soothe your conscience that tells you it was not worth it
to follow the dream (hollow mock) taught to you (to pursue at the cost of yourself) by the not-We.
You didn't listen to your Ancestors. (for they are only dead to you).
What are these kids doing?
What are they (who is a part of 'we') SAYING with their clothes?
Do you have a clue? Have you taken a look? (Yeah Yeah, jail culture blah blah blah...).
Try it yourself. Try doing what they do. Try to make your clothes look like they make.
Walk in their shoes. For real.
Can you, you Fool?
What is happening? You are making one body part longer, taller (spine, backbone)
at the expense of legs (legs -forward motion-are expendable).
In the society (of global 'no-love' power tradition) in which they walk (live), THEY FEEL SHORT.
THEY FEEL they've no BACKBONE.
Uprightness-Stability is even forsaken, they only want but to know BACKBONE: taller (human) feeling.
Sankofa yourself.
The last (national) person/group to show us our backbone where our wishbone currently lies was MLK, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (NOI and Tupac for a moment).
The same powers that eliminated them know too that 'WE' seeing a picture of the Obama family is a milisecond of backbone 'feeling' in the deep desert of our wishbone lives. ...curbs the want to get TALLER.
"UP YOU MIGHT RACE!" (Baba Garvey/Mama Harriet full-cry to us).
"We are better than this!" = "Up you sagging pants!" = all that you have to give?
Please.
How can you make that YOUTH feel TALLER (or tall enough) in and of himself?
Can you truly help him fight the meaning of the pants sag?
Or can't you see? Can't you hear? Or don't you want to?
Courage. (the civil rights generation had PLENTY of this...if not misdirected).
Hear WE. Hear 'your' kids. YOU RAISE THEIR PANTS. YOU RAISE THEIR IMAGE.
...and not with your fake ass education, fake ass jobs and fake as status.
You grinning American slave.
I bet you thought the billboard was a good investment of money.
(Was the money even yours? ...earned with clean hands?)
Your brain sag PUT the sag in their pants.
YOU tied up the youths feet (movement) with your POSING.
Can't blame them for saying F--- YOU and F--- YOUR 'BETTER'
in a way that no other younger generation has said to an older generation.
Its ok.
All of that is to say, if you love your own, (if you can love your 'we'), then LOVE THEM.
damn.
ref: http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/03/teach-negro-child-60-ways-to-despise.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2011/05/seen.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/07/energy-in-us.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/05/cuffs.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/04/sister-knowknew.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/03/ch-art-er-whey.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-this-fair.html
Haley's Ancestral Environment, Virginia & Modern Chaos Design
CAPTURE
"In 1976, the African-American writer Alex Haley traced the story of his black family in the popular book Roots. He discovered that his "furthest-back-person" in america was Kunta Kinte, a Gambian who had been brought in chains from West Africa to Annapolis, Maryland, in the 1760s aboard the English slave ship Lord Ligonier. Haley (who also wrote the powerful Autobiography of Malcolm X) was fortunate in knowing the name of his first American forebear and in being able to locate the exact ship on which he arrived. But the facts themselves are remarkably typical. On average, the furthest- back New World ancestor for any African American today would have reached these shores shortly before the American Revolution, just as Kunta Kinte did. (By comparison, the largest migrations of Europeans and asians to the United states began in the late 19th century and grew larger in the twentieth century. So the average white resident of the United States has a far shorter American ancestry, as does the average Asian-American citizen)."
~To Make Our World Anew, by Robin D.G. Kelley, Earl Lewis
Ise MASSA'S FIDDLA
At minute 3:55 Fiddler tells sets about convincing an Afrikan that he is a nigger. “Yo name is Toby!” But Kunta (intact yut) stands up and prioritizes his real name.
"An Energy In Us"
"There was a third white destroyer: a missionary who wanted to replace all knowledge of our way with fables even our children laughed at then. We told the white missionary we had such fables too, but kept them for the entertainment of those yet growing up - fables of gods and devils and a supreme being above everything. We told him we knew soft minds needed such illusions, but that when any mind grew among us to adulthood it grew beyond these fables and came to understand that there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that that force is not something cut off, not something seperate from ourselves. It is an energy in us, strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments."
~Ayi Kwei Armah
When Will Adults Take Responsibility For Youth Violence
When Will Adults Take Responsibility For Youth Violence
By Tolu Olorunda
A couple of weeks back, Attorney General Eric Holder, responding to the horrific caught-on-tape death of 16-year-old Chicagoan Derrion Albert, hoped it would serve as a “stark wake-up call to a reality that can be easy for too many to ignore as they go about their daily lives.” More importantly, Holder poignantly explained why the ongoing onslaught of Youth-on-Youth attacks must be understood within a universal context: “Youth violence is not a Chicago problem anymore than it is a black problem, a white problem, or a Hispanic problem. … It is an American problem.”
What I wished the Attorney General would also say, which he failed to, was that as much as it is a national - and really international - “problem,” it’s also an adult problem. Often, when Youth channel their rage and righteous indignation unproductively, it is mostly a cry for attention and care, a tragic reaction to feelings of abandonment and invincibility.For as James Baldwin once cogently wrote, “Every child’s sense of himself is terrifyingly fragile. He is really at the mercy of his elders, and when he finds himself totally at the mercy of his peers, who know as little about themselves as he, it is because his peers’ elders have abandoned them. … But children, I submit, cannot be fooled.” [1]
Children - and Youth - cannot be fooled!
The death of Derrion Albert, sad as it was, might just be the catalyst needed to turn a sharper gaze upon the vulnerable conditions youth of color are subdued by - all the days of their lives.
If, however, we resort to the reactionary, repetitive recoil of rebuking young folk for their recalcitrance, that brutal scene, captured on camera, would be looped over and over again - to the pain and anguish of mothers like Anjanette Albert, Donna Hood, and Yeimi Tirado.Rev. Father Michael Pfleger, senior pastor of St. Sabina, located in the South Side of Chicago, called for a fast earlier this year, and flew the national flag above his church upside down, to raise consciousness about the horrifically high rate of teen shootings and deaths Chicago had produced in those few months alone. For this, he was attacked and protested. Those who remonstrated against him claimed to be just as sympathetic to the crisis at-hand, but, on the other hand, felt disrespected. Rev. Pfleger, to hear them tell it, was merely exploiting this pet-project to generate some controversy. The scores of lives lost in just a few months still hadn’t constituted adequately “a signal of dire distress,” it seemed they were trying to say.
But, for so long, such has been the narrative promulgated by too many adults. Rather than engaging substantively in constructive discussions about the future of youth, and the immediate invalidation their realities pose to any remote possibility of democracy, some adults have instead invoked personal childhood contrasts to defend their docility. In short, blaming young folk has gained ground as a legitimate response to undeniable suffering.
In his seminal text, Race Matters, Princeton professor Cornel West took to task the indifference youth of color are, disproportionately, asked to cope with as they journey through life. Parental imperfection, he argued, coupled with corporate aggressiveness is recipe for a life extinguished of all hope: “The tragic plight of our children clearly reveals our deep disregard for public well-being. … Most of our children - neglected by overburdened parents and bombarded by the market values of profit-hungry corporations - are ill-equipped to live lives of spiritual and cultural quality.” [2]
Thankfully, no group is monolithic.So that, while some elderly folk felt it necessary to enlist the National Guard or other State-sponsored apparatus to put pressure on the wrongdoers, others, like Rev. Marcia Dyson, understood that an arms-race in the ghetto - between youth of color and the police (who are already authorized to carry M-4 carbines, anyway) - would only exacerbate the casualties - rather than provide much-needed assuagement. Earlier this year, she asked that the Black Community join her in fasting and praying for peace concerning the raging violence in Chicago - her hometown.Of course, it’s never just about youth-on-youth activities. What the grave truth many fail to admit is that the society of which we are a part has not only made youth of low priority, but in many instances, of no priority. Youth are, often, perceived - treated - as nothing but a problem, a hassle, a nuisance to the freedom adults worked their whole lives to attain. This line-of-thinking is at work in the mind of the teenage new mother who dumps her daughter in the trash can. [3]
That same mother, who we are quick to vilify, quick to demonize, quick to ostracize, is but a mere reflection of the society that now turns its back on her.She is very perceptive. She understands that the same society which has built billion dollar prisons - money which could be put into much, much, much better use (i.e. education, shelter, employment opportunities, social programs, etc.) - to house her, and those who look, act, think like her, is in no moral position to wag its finger in her face, or shake its head in disappointment.She can also see young men around her whose lives have been handed over to the State - custodian of the futures of many (once) young, promising souls.
Young people aren’t stupid. They’ve witnessed, in little over three decades, a complete disregard for the high esteem society once treated its young with.What is soullessness but the inability of a people to make the connection between children and the future?It seems some have deluded themselves into thinking mortality isn’t real - or inevitable: I’m gonna live forever/ I’m gonna learn how to fly!As Henry Giroux writes in his powerful new text, Youth in a Suspect Society, “If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized.” [4]
The problem is society does not want to be bankrupt (too late!) - and it sees Youth as a very real, but containable, danger to its financial stability. Containment is easy. Society knows this. When you have a problem, the speediest way to get rid of it is - to get rid of it. In society’s eyes, youth are the - not just a - problem. And the increases in prison-funding, the increases in militarized school complexes, the increases in arbitrary police power, are all indicators of the need to get rid - as fast as possible! - of this ever growing problem: Young people.Giroux expands more on this phenomenon in Youth:More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct. [5]
A couple of weeks back, video surfaced of a 15-year-old Black boy, Marshawn Pitts, recounting an experience that left him scars, bruises, fractures, and a broken nose. Pitts, a special needs student, was walking to his locker when a police officer began verbally abusing him, then flung him across the hall, smashed his face into the floor, and made punching bags of his cheeks. His crime? An untucked shirt. It would sound unbelievable to some and made up to others, but, luckily for Pitts, the attack was caught on tape.Pitts’ story, regrettably, is but a mere microcosm of the reality most poor Youth of color currently live under the shadow of.Being smashed into walls, cussed out, teased, mocked, and attacked at school is, in many ways, for a number of students, an inextricable part of the educational experience. The only difference, now, is that unlike the days of old when it was one’s classmates exhibiting such demented displays of moral ineptitude, police officers, increasingly, have begun adopting similar measures to contain the threat factor they believe students - no matter how young or unintimidating - pose to their wellbeing (and ego).
Of course, the parallel hardly exists. Unlike your classmate who could be reported to the principal’s office and, soon after, corrected, reprimanded, or, as last resort, suspended, the men in blue are inordinately unaccountable in school settings. And the litany of reports detailing hostile confrontations between teachers, parents, and administrators, with the paid security personnel - due to allegations of misconduct - show just why any militarized measures to monitor or manage kids’ conducts often leads to even more deleterious consequences - for all involved.In that sense, the Prison culture, the inescapable future for many Youth - of all stripes, color, and creed - must be understood for what it is - a cowardly construction to dispose of those members of society we have no use for anymore.If this, indeed, is all society has to offer its young, what possible future can tomorrow’s leaders count on?
I.F. Stone had it right: “[I]f there were no handful of the desperate in the ghetto and on the campus to make threats and hurl rocks, who in our smug and complacent established order would begin to listen and to move a little?” [6]
[1] Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998, p. 794.
[2] West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 7.
[3] Allusion to: Tupac Shakur, “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” 2Pacalypse Now, 1991. (A powerfully-provoking song from a much-misunderstood soul.)
[4] Giroux, Henry. Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 29.
[5] Ibid. Youth, p. 72.
[6] Stone, I.F. “Who Are The Real Kooks In Our Society?” I.F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly 9 March 1970.
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