There isn’t enough ink to express our pain. Day after day, month after month, year after year, the pain of being Black in America globally is apparent. Moments ago I read the headlines and tweets that told me the NYPD officer  Dan Pantaleo (say his name until it can’t be forgotten, until he’s held responsible) the NYC cop that killed Eric Garner would not be indicted. A week and two days before that I heard news out of Ferguson, Missouri that Darren Wilson would not be indicted. That same day hours before, I watched my beautiful daughter be born into this world. Being Black is like that, valley, peak, valley—in that order.

No matter who it is, the time comes that you realize that being Black is hard and beautiful. You come to learn that your cool, your clothes, your rhythm is quested after like a golden fleece, and then you remember that you’re hated all the same for it. Hated for the thing you inherently possess and ultimately cannot dispossess—trust me, many are trying to give it up, but you can’t. Many are trying to recreate/generate it, but it has to be organic—we synthesize, it can’t be synthesized.

I recently got in an online disagreement with a family member. I gave up arguing online about 2 years ago and my life has been all the better for it, but this time suffering from sleep deprivation courtesy of our bundle of joy, I engaged. My cousin, one of closest loved ones on the planet, posted a status about shopping on Black Friday and tongue-in-cheek told folks to “say something” about her shopping. I was frustrated at her at life.

I remember when I first heard the calls to boycott Black Friday #notonedime, I knew that arm chair theoreticians and activists would sharpen their darts aiming at the hot air balloon of social activism. I knew it’d be a dog pile of, “How is that supposed to help?”, “We need new solutions!”, “What difference will it make?” –you know the standard chorus of consternation. I’d decided that for each post that someone put up like that I’d ignore it and write them off as disaffected, short-sighted haters (which they often are). But truthfully I understand them. I’ve been them. It’s kind of like being at a dance and not really knowing how to dance so rather than stepping out and risk being a fool, you talk about the DJ, you chit chat with your boys, you explain how you don’t like the newest fads … all the while the dance goes on, everyone else is sweating it out and having a good time, and you go home realizing you missed out, but never admitting it. It’s easy to be on the sidelines, it’s hard to put your shoes on the dance floor.

Moral and ethical courage are sometimes in short supply, but we have enough to move ahead, we never needed 100 percent to be on board, just a few committed ones. A few years ago an elder told me, “If everyone who claimed to have marched across that bridge [Edmund Pettus Bridge] was on that bridge the damn bridge would have fallen in!” They’ll come around later … or come around for the victory party. When Fidel Castro was asked about what he’d do differently regarding the Cuban Revolution he said he started with 82 men but he would have started with fewer men but ones who had absolute faith. That’s real rap!

Boycotting Black Friday or Cyber Monday may not be your cup of tea, but neither is the loss of Black life. I am in awe of the young people organizing out of Ferguson and the people who have poured into that community for the past 118 days. The boycotts on Friday or Monday were mass actions that allowed folks without much skin in the game to make a sacrifice, to symbolically and strategically show impact. It worked, no matter what mainstream media says. I’m still not really cool with my cousin for not participating, but she’s not alone. It just means we need to do more work to show folks why we matter, why boycotts matter, why protests matter, why Black lives matter.

We have too many servants and too few activists. Activism is sustained struggle. (Community) Service, often, is for a moment and done. Activism is not a visit to the soup kitchen; it’s not tutoring after school; it’s not collecting donors for a cancer run. Okay, it can be that, but that’s only a small part of it. Activism, in my estimation, has to do more than service the sick or un-well, it’s got to do the work of uprooting the things that injure and press to build a safe space for a thing to live and thrive. Too few of us have a heart for activism, because true activism means you give up something, not once, but daily. It’s a process of dying so others can live—it’s martyrdom, but without the fanfare.

The tweets, the appearances on news media, the op-eds will all die out soon enough, but our willingness to sacrifice and fight must not. We can’t accept a commitment to body cameras and tough language (not policies) around ending police misconduct. The legislation needs to change, I truly believe it does #changethenypd. But more than legislation our entire orientation to Black life must shift. And I mean the lives of Black men and women, all lives matter but our blood runs too freely for us not to demand special attention.

The police don’t love us, and they never did. My dad was a cop and even he knows this, but I’m not sure he’d admit it. No matter how many times you show me a teary eyed boy or a dancing cop, I can’t forget that those moments don’t compensate for the force that they use on our bodies and have been doing so for centuries. Du Bois was right. The police are a new articulation of slavery. He was right – It’s not about diagnosing the problem, the bigger and trickier task is to get people to care and then to act. You’ve read all this so I guess it’s wrong of me to ask, “do you still care?” but I have to ask these days.

It’s hard to continue to care. For many of us, by the time we heard the non-indictment of Garner come down we were numb. Some of us got numb when we saw loved ones beaten into within an inch of their lives by cops and realized that no one cared—not the grand jury, not internal affairs, not the mayor, not even the politician who promised to get tough on corruption. Some of us have been numbed by what we have access to—hey, who doesn’t want to get that 60 inch on deep discount? Some of us are numb because the cost of caring is reckoning with the vulnerability we all must come to grips with—you may have more degrees than a thermometer but your skin remains a target. We’ve got to care enough to fight.

We’ve got to fight the system. We’ve got to struggle with ourselves. Love ourselves enough to correct ourselves. Love each other enough to remind each other that we got this. That our ancestors have already showed us ways and walk with us now. We’ve got to love so that we can see a new day. When I look at my daughter in resting slumber I get haunted with visions of the reality that she will face. I get scared. I get angry. I fight that with ancestral love. I fight it with knowledge that if we wake up, nothing can put us to sleep. I fight because I love her. I love my nephews. I love my nieces. I love our elders.

Love wins not because we will have some “pie in the sky” kumbaya moment—we won’t, and if there is I ain’t showing up because I know it’d be a sham. Love wins because it stands up to injustice. It doesn’t ask for forgiveness for the person who is stomping on the vulnerable. Love kicks the ass of the person stomping, helps the vulnerable, and tells the one stomping to get help … or get more ass kicking. I don’t mean that literally, well maybe I do. It’s somewhere between what the Bible and George Jackson said. Love is patient …  Patience has its limits. Take it too far and it’s cowardice.

My ancestors want me to be patient, but not a coward. They want me to wake up, to wake my neighbors and to dream. Dream the other world. Build the other world. Fight this world that is trying to rob Black joy and Black life. Remind them Black is beautiful and if you don’t know you’re going to figure it out later, but we got a nation to build, a world to transform, a system to fuck reform overthrow eliminate. We’ve got to sacrifice what’s here to create what should be. I’m not waiting for a grand jury; I’m waiting for my cousin; I’m waiting for my comrades; I’m waiting for us to be sick and tired of being sick and tired. But don’t wait too long. Don’t be too tired.

The last words you hear from Eric Garner on the tape of him being killed are him saying, “I can’t breathe!” I feel him, but I want to change that. I want to make it clear. I can’t breathe; I can’t live right; I can’t stop thinking about the trees cut short before they could grow and give their gifts. I can’t and won’t breathe without thinking about what they came to teach us. I can’t and won’t breathe without remembering there is work to be done. Now the only thing I have left to ask is, “I can’t breathe, can you?”

Recently, Lupe Fiasco has been catapulted to national media attention, not (just) for his music but his political commentary. Two weeks ago on an internet interview with CBS Fiasco said, “To me the biggest terrorist is Obama in the United States of America. I’m trying to fight the terrorism that’s causing the other forms of terrorism. You know the root cause of terrorists is the stuff the U.S. government allows to happen. The foreign policies that we have in place in different countries that inspire people to become terrorists.” While this set off a firestorm of angry comments and media attention about Lupe’s uncritical eye and virulent condemnation of the continuing trope of Barack Obama as a terrorist, most of these comments miss the mark. Lupe Fiasco, as his name signals, routinely finds himself in controversial positions that are both contradictory and illuminating at the same time. Lupe’s comments about Obama and politics, in a way, channel Malcolm X’s and Martin Luther King Jr’s political commentary.

In November of 1963, Malcolm X commented on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination by suggesting the violence that took Kennedy’s life were “chickens coming home to roost.” At this time, Kennedy was thought of as a friendly president to Black folks and ultimately this became a wedge comment that alienated him from many Black Americans who identified as politically progressives but found his comments irresponsible given the contentious political climate.

Less well known, but equally allegorical Fiasco’s remarks eerily reflect Martin Luther King’s speech in 1967 at Riverside Church in Harlem where he said, “They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” While Lupe is no Martin Luther King, both were concerned with the government’s role in supporting violence locally and internationally. At the time of King’s comments the United States was enmeshed in a war that he found unconscionable and history would reveal was unnecessary.

In many ways Lupe has been outspoken about Obama’s military advocacy and in 2008 found himself in a flap with another Chicago rapper turned political candidate RhymeFest. Fiasco is no stranger to politically complex views, which he laments are often “dumbed down” into sound bites. Later in the CBS interview, Fiasco states that he does not vote and that his own beliefs about what a vote endorses keep him from the ballot box. Not surprisingly many have responded “If you don’t vote you can’t complain.” To Lupe’s credit he follows in a long line of Black commentators and activists who chose not to vote but offer critical commentary. For many, including Fiasco, voting in a two party system connotes support for a system that they find too limiting and non-representative. In “Words I Never Said”, Fiasco outs himself as a non-voter, “Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say sh*t/That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one either.” His decision not to cast a ballot doesn’t curtail his speaking or even wearing his politics on his chest. Fiasco, as an avowed Muslim, has been known to rock “Free Gaza” shirts on stage just as easily as he does designer fashions. For Lupe, the continued instability of the Middle East is directly linked to United States involvement which makes Obama culpable given he is Commander-in-Chief of the US Military.

While we may not all share Lupe’s critical stance on Obama or American politics (and most of us don’t read the wikileaks wires, though we should) there is a line of logic and historical precedence for his comments. In listening to the knee-jerk responses to Fiasco’s words the significance of his hit single “Words I Never Said” rings out. The song is a critique of the curtailing of rights, particularly free speech, in an era of perceived freedom and liberty. If we don’t listen and take Lupe’s words seriously, it’s almost as if we’ve made his point even louder.

This pic is hilarious to me

While many are calling for his resignation, Steele’s outspokenness has made the question of war and public opinion resurface in the American media. The War in Afghanistan has quietly slipped out of the media’s topics and from the American public’s consciousness. While Steele has been wrong on many statements his comments leave me believing the adage, “even a broken clock is right two times a day.”

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*The title of the post is a play on Black like Me, get it?

First up, video interviews with K’Naan by Davey D. K’Naan is a phenomenal voice for Somalian struggle with his first two albums: The Dust Foot Philosopher and Troubadour. Remember when Chuck D said rap was Black America’s CNN, K’Naan has taken that to heart in his discussion of his life and his people’s lives.

Second up, an article that recently appeared in GQ magazine (yeah, Gentleman’s Quarterly) by Jeffrey Gettlemen of the NY Times. The article is one of most context sensitive mainstream press article on the situation, though it has its limitations.

Third up, Black Agenda Report was one of the first analyses of the Pirates that went beyond “Pirates after booty”/”maritime terrorist” approach of mainstream media. The deeper you dig, the more you see the manipulation of political powers for the good of few and the pain of the majority. Here is a piece from December on Sadia Ali Aden on some of the US involvement in the struggles happening there.

Keep informing yourself and keep on believing in the value of human life. As K’Naan said T.I.A.

Shout out to K’Naan and Davey  D’s twitter feeds where I got a lot of this and you can find much more… see people twitter can be useful for more than telling us what you ate today or your complaints about the weather ;)

hattip to Drew Citron

This past weekend I shelled over my hard earned bills to see Blood Diamond at the theaters. Going in, I had my expectations set at the level that I set them when I’m going to listen to a Method Man album (that’s pretty darn low). But I was rather impressed with the film. Of course there were your standard issues of gender and race (e.g. Black Africans find White woman in the bush and she charms them with her camera — don’t even get me started) but the message about conflict diamonds was very clear to me. Conflict diamonds help support war and distinguishing between a conflict diamond and free diamond is damn near impossible. Neither of which were new concepts to me, but I thought they were both well illustrated in the film.

When the film was rolling out, I was interested to see that Nelson Mandela came out with a statement about diamonds and their positive impact on African economies. I was immediately a little bit concerned, as were others. Eventually, I had to wrestle with Mandela potentially selling out or if there was a degree of pragmatism attached to support of the diamond trade for the wealth or rather reduction of gross debt for African nations. I think my history with Nelson Mandela allowed me to take his statements within a larger context, when Russell Simmons opened his mouth however, I heard cash registers ringing.

Who the hell died and made Russell chief of Diasporic Affairs? And can I really take him seriously if Jim Jones is on his side with a diamond crusted bracelet? Okay, that’s just my bias! For years, I saw Russell Simmons as I saw Bob Johnson, a damn good Black capitalist (not endorsing this just calling em like I see em). Now with his explicit support and retort to Blood Diamond, I see he’s graduated to a damn good (Black) capitalist pawn… I wonder is there a difference between the two?