Uptown Notes

This Sunday’s Unity Brunch of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and The Women of Color Caucus will present a Film Screening and Panel discussion of the film No! The Rape Documentary. Guaranteed to be a powerful, insightful and uplifting. Come on out!

Today CCNY will feature a lecture by Kwame Appiah on “Race and Genomics” as well as host a stop on the “Live from Death Row” tour. Great chance to think about race theoretically and practically.

This week, my dear friend Yusef Ramelize, took on the issue of homelessness. No, he didn’t decide to volunteer at a soup kitchen. No he didn’t decide to give out change to someone he saw as he was exiting the platform. No he didn’t email his friends and tell them they should join a “homelessness sucks” cause on facebook. He decided to raise awareness about the issue of homelessness by getting a first person experience. Yusef is going homeless for one week.

The term revolutionary is often batted about and is bestowed upon most anyone who finds their ideas falling to the left of the political mainstream. For that reason we have more coffee shop revolutionaries than I can shake a vegan biscotti at! Now I don’t mean that as pot-shot against coffee shop poets (okay, well maybe I did a mean it a little) but really its about the question, “What does it take to be revolutionary?” I was left deeply reflecting on that after watching Che.

Over a year ago, controversy over the Kahlil Gibran International Academy unfolded, if you don’t know who Kahlil Gibran was stop reading and click here – yeah, he’s that important, in Brooklyn. The visible battle over the mission of the school, its practices, and its leadership put the academy in the national spotlight for discussions of ethnicity, language, religion and identity. But soon, this spotlight faded and many have forgotten that the school still is in operation. Colorlines runs a great web article by Seth Wessler entitled, “Silenced in the classroom” on what is happening with the school now.

In an age when grassroots Black leadership has become distilled, sanitized, and all too often co-opted, we are often left […]

So in bizarro world news yesterday, my phone and twitter started blowing up about the commuting of sentence that John […]

The campaign and victory of Barack Obama were historic. In leading up the election I received a text that said, “Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obama ran so our children can fly!” This message, while inspirational, demonstrates the ways that one of the most historic and powerful presidential runs ever gets looked over, if not just downright ignored. In 1972, the campaign of Shirley Chisholm broke both the gender and race barrier in American presidential politics, but her campaign is still relatively unknown. Let me start this with an admission, I knew thatChisholm ran in 1972 but I had no idea about the discourse she pushed, assassination attempts, and what was certainly more than a symbolic run. After watching Chisholm 72- Unbossed and Unbought, I was amazed at her vision, inspired by her bravery, and humbled by the ways we leave her out of history. That is a living example of why we need herstory, particularly within the Black community.

Over the past week, the media and everyone who could jump on the bandwagon of wagging fingers, frowned brows, and […]

While most folks will look at the election of Obama as act of racial transcendence, in reality, it represents one of the most sophisticated, yet grounded electoral campaigns in modern history. Having working with the Democratic party in the past, I can imagine the transition to the Obama model of organizing wasn’t without bumps and imperfections, but the end result was powerful. Despite Guiliani and Palin smearing (and this was indeed a smear to them) community organizers, the Obama campaign embrassed these everyday folks with a deep commitment for community development and change. While many of us contributed in our own ways to the campaign, I am forever impressed and indebted to the brave folks who went to organizing for the Obama Campaign fulltime. I’m thinking particular of folks who gave up steady jobs for the prospect of a campaign that was often counted out before he began. My hat is off to the folks I know personally who made that sacrifice and brought the victory home…