Points of Negritude
by Chitown Kev
1. From the DOJ Ferguson PD Police Report we have multiple incidents of some sort of extremely petty offense called "A Manner of Walking":
The man responded with profanities. When the officer told him to watch his language and reminded him that he was not being arrested, the man continued using profanity and was arrested for Manner of Walking in Roadway....
Officers charged the two teenagers with a variety of offenses, including: Disorderly Conduct forgiving the middle finger and using obscenities; Manner of Walking for being in the street...
The sergeant shouted at those filming that they would be arrested for Manner of Walking if they did not back away out of the
street, even though it appears from the video recordings that the protesters and those recording were on the sidewalk at most, if not all, times...
Excuse me,
THIS is what you call "A Manner of Walking."
2. Speaking of Ferguson, MO, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart seems to have raised a bit of a kerfluffle with last week's "Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie". Chaunceydevega's take on Capehart's post also brought out the usually condescending and noxious but largely (though not entirely) harmless brew of caffeinated bullshit masquerading as a legal/cultural dissertation in "truth, justice, and the American Way" for darkies.
What I don't like about the column, for one, is the undertone with which Mr. Capehart calls the deceased (and murdered) Michael Brown a "thug;" that's playing a little too many BRP games for my tastes. But Capehart also said this:
Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger “Black Lives Matter.” In fact, the false Ferguson narrative stuck because of concern over a distressing pattern of other police killings of unarmed African American men and boys around the time of Brown’s death. Eric Garner was killed on a Staten Island street on July 17. John Crawford III was killed in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on Aug. 5, four days before Brown. Levar Jones survived being shot by a South Carolina state trooper on Sept. 4. Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was killed in a Cleveland park on Nov. 23, the day before the Ferguson grand jury opted not to indict Wilson. Sadly, the list has grown longer.
And of course, we needn't go into what rests in the collective unconscious of the overwhelming majority of black folks, especially black men. Heck, we can even talk about what lays firmly in the consciousness of (for example) a black honors student at the University of Virginia or the black son of a New York Times columnist at Yale.
3. Here's another one for The Black Nerd Files: Not only is former NBA All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (a longtime known Black Nerd) a Baker Street Irregular; Abdul-Jabbar is also (with Anna Waterhouse) writing his first novel titled "Mycroft Holmes" (Sherlock's older brother).
Set in England and Trinidad, the story centers on Mycroft, a recent university graduate working for the British Secretary of State for War. Mycroft learns from his best friend of troubling events occurring in Trinidad — mysterious disappearances, dead children and strange, backward facing footprints in the sand. Mycroft goes to Trinidad to investigate and to follow his fiancée, Georgiana, who was raised on the island. Sherlock has a cameo as a King’s College student.
My own personal favorite post-Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories are Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Percent Solution (which I read when I was 12) and Caleb Carr's
The Italian Secretary (which also featured Mycroft Holmes). I've long admired Abdul-Jabbar as much for his nerdiness (i.e. when considering a conversion to Islam at UCLA, he made it a point of studying Arabic) as for his athleticism. Here's yet another one
(sigh!) for my book stacks!
4. I surrender.
I will no longer cringe when the word "negritude" is used outside of the the very specific literary and cultural context I most familiar with. It seems that word is more often used to refer to something like "the quality and state of blackness" nowadays (and Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary indicates that it's been true for at least a decade).
Truthfully, I do think that negritude is a great word that occasionally comes up in awesome (albeit racist, at times) contexts. I mean, we all have a little negritude in us, right?
My own personal favorite usage of the word "negritude" is in Felice Picano's Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall when he was urging a book reviewer to review The Color Purple only to be told by the Village Voice reviewer that “we’re not particularly interested in lesbian negritude.”
Or the blackface Italian MP Gianluca Buonanno who accused Congelese-born minister Cecile Kyenge of endorsing immigration policies that "favored negritude."
Now those are simply the racist uses of the word; I've heard black people say, too, that they're simply "showing their negritude" at certain times, and there's certainly an appropriately sassy way to do that.
Sheooooit, I show my negritude all of the time.
I do wonder; would I accept a GOP politician accusing President Obama, for example, of "injecting negritude" into his policies and the office of the presidency? I will admit that I would probably giggle a bit if a GOP politician said that.
Then again, if spoken teabagger dialect is as nuanced as teabagger spelling, then that might not be such a good idea after all.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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If only this NFL player had committed a crime, then his name would be splashed allover the front pages. Bloomberg Business: Complex Study in a Math Journal.
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John Urschel, an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, recently co-authored a paper in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. It is titled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians" and apparently includes "a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue." I understand close to none of the words in that sentence, which comes from the paper's abstract. I probably never will. The rest of the study is similarly accessible. See some highlights below:
Urschel, who was drafted in 2014 to block for Joe Flacco, had a 4.0 grade point average at Penn State and has been published in several mathematical journals. He is also an accomplished chess player. For a living, he uses his body as a bulldozer. His family, he says, wonders why he would spend his time in such a way. The answer is, apparently, that he just enjoys leveling people.
"There’s a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I’m (for lack of a better word) addicted to," wrote Urschel in a post this week on the Players Tribune. Urschel said he was jealous of Chris Borland, the San Francisco 49ers linebacker who retired from football this month at the age of 24 because he was worried about head trauma. "Playing a hitting position in the NFL can’t possibly help your long-term mental health," Urschel acknowledged, before rattling off a list of reasons why his mental health might be particularly valuable, including a "bright career ahead of me in mathematics." The problem is that Urschel likes to crush his peers too much. ("I love hitting people," he confirms.) Too bad you can't hit people with pi.
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Jump starting black entrepreneurship. Color Lines: Google Backs Opps for Latino and Black Entrepreneurs in 3 Cities.
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Latino and black entrepreneurs in Chicago, Austin and Durham are getting an assist from Google. Through Code2040, which helps to diversify the tech pipeline, Google will provide a one-year stipend and free office space for start-ups. Entrepreneurs are also expected to “build bridges to technology for minorities in those communities,” USA Today reports. The new program sends an important message: you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to do tech.
The SXSW announcement by Code2040’s co-founder Laura Weidman Powers comes about a year after Google began releasing employment diversity data to the public. Silicon Valley had long had a reputation for employing low numbers of Latinos and African-Americans as tech workers (at Google, 2 percent are Hispanic, 1 percent African-American). And while Asian-Americans are well-represented, they appear to hit a ceiling when it comes to executive-level leadership.
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Africans continue to innovate. New York Times: Bringing African Shoppers to the Global Mall.
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Last year, when Tunde Adebayo needed three inflatable bouncy castles for KidzPlay, his event-planning business in Lagos, Nigeria, he turned to an online shopping service called MallforAfrica.
“In Nigeria we’re sometimes skeptical about online businesses,” Mr. Adebayo says. So he tested the service two years ago with an inexpensive purchase, and that transaction went smoothly. Now he says he frequently shops on MallforAfrica. His purchases have included the castles, which his company takes to parties for children to jump around in, and personal items.
“I buy most of my children’s clothing and my own clothing from there,” he says of the service.
Chris and Tope Folayan, two brothers who grew up in Nigeria and attended college in the United States, founded MallforAfrica in 2013. Tope earned an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. After graduating, he returned to Lagos, while Chris remained in the United States.
Their company makes it easier for Nigerians to place online orders for American and British products that are difficult to find in Nigerian stores and that online retailers don’t offer directly to most African consumers because of troublesome customs duties and paperwork, shipping costs and the fear of fraud.
MallforAfrica is part of a growing tech industry in Nigeria that is attracting foreign investors, including venture capital firms like Silicon Valley’s EchoVC Partners and the British private equity and venture capital firm Helios Investment Partners, which invested in MallforAfrica in 2013.
Chris Folayan, a co-founder of MallforAfrica. Credit Thomas Patterson for The New York Times
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Snoop Dogg developing series about the effects of Reaganomics. Rawstory: Snoop Dogg’s HBO series will look at LA inner-city life during Reagan era.
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Snoop Dogg announced during Friday’s keynote at SXSW that he has partnered with filmmaker Allen Hughes on a series that's being developed for HBO. Set in the 1980s, the show will tell the story of what happens to one family living in inner-city Los Angeles as Reagan-era social policies and legislation begin to take effect.
Snoop, 43, whose real name is Cordozar Calvin Broadus Jr., told a packed ballroom Friday that he is excited to tell a story that is familiar to him and his collaborators. “Allen Hughes made one of my favorite movies ever,” Broadus said. In addition to direction from Hughes, the untitled series will be written by Rodney Barnes, whose credits include the TV series "Boondocks" and "Everybody Hates Chris." Ted Chung, Broadus’ longtime manager and a partner at Stampede Management, will be one of the executive producers.
Snoop Dogg chats with his manager, Ted Chung, during Friday's keynote session at SXSW.Max Willens/IBTimes
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
A neighborhood can contain the whole world. Every country, every religion, every heartache, tragedy and triumph can live there. A neighborhood can be an isolated ocean liner on a desolate sea, or a lush island of diverse plenty built on feet shredding rock.
A neighborhood can be a street. A neighborhood can be an alley.
A neighborhood can be a Home.
5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2
Sometimes we would get hungry for the neighborhood.
Walk up the sidewalk towards Chestnut Street.
Speak to the Rev holding the light-skinned baby,
ask his son to come put a new inner tube on my bike.
Cross Ludlow, past the mailbox on the corner,
Risqué Video, Dino's Pizza, and the Emerald Laundromat.
The fruit trucks tucked into 44th Street on the left,
house eyes shut with boards, fringes of children.
Once we went into a store sunk into the street,
owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything,
from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th,
where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita,
draped in cucumber sauce. The pregnant woman
behind the counter writes our order out in Arabic.
We grab a juice from the freezer, some chips,
eye the bean and sweet potato pies.
Back into the hot breath of West Philly, sun is setting.
The sky is smeared squash, tangerines in a glaze.
Three girls and one boy jump doubledutch. A white man
hustles from the video store with a black plastic bag.
We look for money in the street, steal flowers
from the church lawn. The shit stain from the wino
is still on our step. Mr. Jim is washing a car for cash.
John is cleaning his rims to Buju Banton.
Noel is talking sweetly to the big blue-eyed woman.
Linda, on her way to the restaurant. The sister
in the wheelchair buzzes by with her headphones on.
One night, a man was shot and killed on this block,
right outside our thick wood door. But not today.
Today is one of those days to come home from walking
in the world, leave the windows open, start a pot of
black beans. Smoke some Alice Coltrane. Cut up
some fruit, toenails. Hold on to the moment
as if time is taking your blood pressure.
-- Yolanda Wisher
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.