One of my favorite students is in France right now and I asked her to send me some French hip-hop.
This is what she dropped on me. I wonder if the man in the video is a stand-in for Sarkozy (or a supporter at any rate)?
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I wrote a story set in a military installation years ago, based on a vivid dream I had. The details of the story remain fuzzy…and it’s likely that I never completed it. One thing I do remember though was the idea of cameras embedded in tiny mechanical objects the size of dragonflies. They would be used for riot surveillance, and inevitably, control.
Combine this with the fact that we’re less than five years away from invisible fabric?
More from Mafia K1 Fry from the album La Cerise Sur Le Ghetto (“The Fruit of the Ghetto”).
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Ths is the singularity. The best fictional description of a society dealing with the consequences of the singularity is Accelerando.
We’ve been operating under the general auspices of the early twentieth century even as we move deeper and deeper into the 21st. Why the hell, for example do we organize our data into “files” and “folders” rather than a term more appropriate? Why do we still use scarcity as the basis of pop culture economics when the means of production AND distribution have been so widely distributed as to reduce the price point of these objects to zero?
There are two very recent news pieces that indicate a signal shift in human society is around the corner.
This one I just read about a second ago.
The other one I read about a couple of days ago.
These two findings combined with the increases in computing production and distribution means that we have in effect reached the precipice. There is no going back. You and I will probably not see the benefits/consequences of this directly–there is too much cultural baggage that our generation has been saddled with. But to our grandchildren hacking their own code will seem as obvious and natural as taking a pill to stave off pregnancy. What this means for black people is much much deeper than the prospect of “changing our race with a pill” as George Schuyler posited in Black Like Me.
For those interested in the cultural consequences of this and other significant civilization-altering events from a black partisan perspective check out Craig Nulan’s new spot. It was through Craig that I understood the problems presented by the reality of Peak Oil, and the possibilities present in doing internet-enabled collaborative work.
Several months ago I got tagged with one of those “thinking blogger” joints. A lot of blogs make me laugh (and that’s not always a good thing). A few blogs give me information (Earl stands out here). But if anyone deserves that tag it’s Craig.
I do not know if this new justice movement has legs, but I wrote earlier that this is about justice for EVERYONE that simply STARTS with black children. Trickle up politics at its best.
In writing about the Shaquanda Cotton case many of us blogged (and Howard Witt wrote) about a young white girl who received probation for burning her house down. This compared to Ms. Cotton who was sentenced for a minor altercation with a teacher.
Anyway, turns out that the young girl violated the terms of her probation. And suffered a fate far worse than Ms. Cotton. Even after being routinely assaulted sexually by a prison guard she remains in prison–in fact her prison sentence was extended.
Now if the white progressive blogosphere was anything like the black progressive blogosphere–concerned with concrete domestic issues as well as foreign policy ones–I’d suspect we’d see an array of folks mobilizing to get this girl out.
This story is interesting to me for a couple of different reasons.
I went to school in Dearborn. Beginning in the sixties Chaldeans moved into Dearborn from the Middle East to work at Ford. But Dearborn stayed more or less 90% white until the mid to late eighties. A lot of the (white) kids I went to school with in grade school attended Fordson for high school. I would have never imagined that the Middle Eastern population would explode to the point that the entire team (plus the coach) would either be Muslim or be from the Middle East.
The second thing is that this is the type of story that in another context would probably make a nice made-for-television movie or something like it. Ramadan is a supreme test of discipline, and to pull it off AND still be able to compete? Requires a great deal of perseverance.
For some reason I don’t think that movie will be coming anytime soon. Check out that first comment after the story to get a sense of what I mean. This isn’t just sour grapes speaking…Dearborn was well known throughout the country as one of the whitest cities in the North, and this change hasn’t gone over easy.
(I wish I could make this story replace the stories about Isiah Thomas coming in the wake of his sexual harassment of a black Madison Square Garden employee. I liked but really didn’t care about Marion Jones and the steroid deal. But the Thomas story has been more than disappointing.)
This is Mafia K1 Fry. The track is called “Pour Ceux” (“For Those”). The group reminds me a lot of the Wu. Even if you can’t understand French (I can translate on the written page ok, but I can’t translate from hearing it) you should get the jist easy enough.
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Kimberly Wilder is a member of the Green Party of New York, and is an education advocate AND activist. She wrote a piece on Jena from her standpoint as both a white progressive and an education advocate and gave me a heads up about it. A quote:
One piece of logic which is missing from many people’s examination of the case is the whole body of education law. I work at an education advocacy center. Due to my experience there, I can see clearly the many junctures where this whole situation was handled in an absolutely unfair, negligent, and biased way by the school administrators and government people involved. Through the paradigm of education rights, law and processes, the whole Jena 6 saga – from nooses, to months of racial conflict that was not addressed properly, to the prosecution of the 6 black young men – was all handled entirely wrong and entirely biased.
I realize that it is a lot to call upon a casual observer and commentator on the Jena 6 Students’ case to have a deep understanding of education law. But, I would say: If you believe you have a right to publicly assert that these children should face criminal charges, then you should have a responsibility to know something about the law which exists, and these children’s rights under that law.
There are at least 3 federal laws, and 1 Louisiana law, which, if followed by the school system, would probably have stopped the whole Jena situation somewhere at (or maybe even before) the hanging of the nooses. If someone wants to assert that justice demands that Mychal Bell deserves some criminal charges because he did something wrong, then justice would have to admit that school administrators deserve criminal charges as well.
Many of us have known that school officials were extremely derelict in their duties. But this really drives it home and in doing so brings to light the much larger issues that should concern ALL with school aged children (at least). The full post can be found here. This is GOOD work.
Picked this up through Open Culture:
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Needless to say…this is hip-hop.
Yesterday while writing about Jena, and Paris, I noted the role of the black media (talk radio, journalists, black bloggers) in rendering rural racism transparent. (As an aside I’d like to check on whether there has been an attempt to differentiate between rural, suburban, and urban racism.) I argued that the white progressive blogosphere are disincentivized to ignore domestic racism, and when it cannot be ignored to use exceedingly high standards in evaluating claims brought by blacks.
In writing about this I made a mistake that is worth acknowledging (and covering in other blogs).
The writer who broke both the Paris and Jena stories, is named Howard Witt. He’s the (white) Southwest Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune. I mistakenly assumed that Witt was an African American. I’m betting that mistake gets made a lot given his writing.
There has been a significant decline in investigative journalism over the last twenty five years, as well as a decline in stories about racism (as opposed to race relations). I’m glad to see there are a few writers who are still fighting the good fight. And that some of them are white.
On that note, I missed Witt’s latest. This is the type of thing that transparency can aid us in uncovering but inevitably what is needed here is a different level of organizing than that used against old-fashioned rural racism.
