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Amin Sharif, native of Baltimore, is co-editor
I
AM NEW ORLEANS & OTHER POEMS By Marcus B. Christian (1999) &
author of
The Story of Joseph: The Egyptian Elements in the Old
Testament (1994). Sharif also has several manuscripts of plays he has
written that are now in the process of revision. He is now also working
on a novel. While employed as a counselor, he will continue his program
of taking courses in mathematics in hope of obtaining a degree in that
field of study. Sharif is a contributing writer of ChickenBones: A
Journal.
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Table
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A Black Imam Breaks Ground in
Mecca—Two years ago, Sheik Adil
Kalbani dreamed that he had become an imam at
the
Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.
Waking up,
he dismissed the dream as a temptation to
vanity. Although he is known for his fine voice,
Sheik Adil is black, and the son of a poor
immigrant from the Persian Gulf. Leading prayers
at the Grand Mosque is an extraordinary honor,
usually reserved for pure-blooded Arabs from the
Saudi heartland.
So he was
taken aback when the phone rang last September
and a voice told him that
King Abdullah had chosen him as the first
black man to
lead prayers in Mecca. Days later Sheik
Adil’s unmistakably African features and his
deep baritone voice, echoing musically through
the Grand Mosque, were broadcast by satellite TV
to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the
world.
NYTimes |
Salaam—
Thank you for pointing
me to the article. This move by the Saudis is part of an
overall strategy to reclaim their leadership of the Umma—Islamic
Community. Recent timidity by the regime had put into
question what role they will play in the future, For years,
they went unchallenged relying of there historical role as
the guardians of the Kabbah to cover their indiscretions.
Now they face an aggressive Shia threat in the form of Iran
and Iraq. Will they be able to hold on to the leadership of
nearly a million Sunnis is the questions.
As you know there has
been a general decline in the appeal of Christianity in the
West. I am sure you have seen the latest cover of
Newsweek. You should pick up a copy. The greatest threat
to Christianity is not Islam but the secular ideas of the
West. Informed Muslims have said this for decades and now
their predictions of a secular West are coming true. Islamic
scholars have said that their best chance to influence the
United States policy may lie in Islam as an emerging force
among African American males. They see hundreds of thousands
of African American men as the next Obama—especially after
this phrase of Islamic extremism begins to wane.
Christianity in the
eyes of these scholars has been the arena of Black women and
white male preachers (conservatives) and drew its strength
from their economic status. Islam with its emphasis on
learning can easily counter this effect if it can retool
Black men—get them out of the gangster mode. This they
acknowledge may take several decades. But inroads are being
made. Knowledge that a Black man can reach the highest
positions in the United States and within the Umma can only
bolster the view that success can be found beyond the street
corner.
In any case, Islam by
all estimates is poised to be the first world religion to
have 2 billion members. It will be the largest religion in
the world within a century. And just the shear number of
Muslims in the world will be enough to change the political
landscape. The next phase of Islamic development will come
from a struggle to solve the question of modernity which
includes solving the woman question. But younger generations
of Muslims will be brought up under a system of
horizontal—not vertical power.
Surprisingly,
horizontal power is precisely how the Prophet (PBUH) wanted
Islam to develop. So, in a sense, modernity will be a kind
of return to the true fundamentals of the Faith.
Again, I thank you for
pointing me to the article. I also thank you for posting
White Dog so quickly.—Amin Sharif
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JazzTimes in B'more Town
By Amin Sharif
Salaam—
just back from the E.R.
at Good Samaritan. I’ve been watching CNN in the E. R. all
day. Folks are pissed off about AIG. I knew Obama should
have let those fuckers fail. I spoke with a young black guy
in the waiting room while I was reading the latest issue of
JazzTimes. We got into the Beyonce/Etta James thing.
I had to school him on Etta James. Let him know that
Beyonce did not have the chops or the experience to sing
like Etta. I told him that real fans of classic
African-American music had to stop that kind of shit before
it got started. Otherwise, they might have my favorite
rapper-Coolio
play
Sam Cooke or
Otis Redding in a film. Anyway, the whole Capitol Record
thing will probably be a flop—just like the Biggie film.
What a shame. Such
films could really present/be a window into the genius of
rap/hiphop culture and talent. Personally, I like Beyonce,
Jill Scott, etc.—the new brand of singers/actresses. I
find them more interesting than the men.
Beyonce is talented but she doesn't seem to able to
focus that talent into something timeless and classical. I
often point out to young folk how
Aretha Franklin and
Sarah Vaughan did it. Franklin was a soul singer
who producers attempted to turn into a jazz singer.
Sarah was a jazz singer who everyone wanted to sing pop.
Each artist found their voice in a genre that suited her
best.
Franklin became a great soul singer—maybe the greatest
of all times. Sarah became one of the five greatest singers
of jazz—depending on taste. My fear is that the kind of risk
taking and exploration that expands and validates talent
will not be part of the experience of the new generation.
There are just too many handlers out there who want to turn
these female talents into vanilla ice cream.
Anyway to get back to
the conversation I had with this young man in the E. R. He
pointed out how beautifully
Beyonce sang the National Anthem down on the mall. I
told him I would have liked to hear
Will I AM sing it. I also asked him had he ever heard
Marvin Gaye sing the
National Anthem back in the day. He said he was not
aware that Marvin Gaye ever recorded it. I responded that
Marvin's version was filled with tears rung from a thousand
broken promises—that it came up from the cotton fields of
Mississippi and the rhythm of brothers and sister walking
the streets of Harlem and Detroit.
Beyonce's National
Anthem was predicated on the "possible" fulfillment of those
broken promises. By making this distinction, I was able to
get him to see that what Beyonce accomplished and what
Marvin accomplished were very different things.
Beyonce held up a candle of hope at the dawn of a new
day.
Marvin held up a candle at darkest midnight. The
conversation turned to other things. But the young
man thanked me for the rap and the knowledge before he got
released.
I love talking to young
black men, Rahim. He did more for my mental and physical
health than all the IV's that they put in me today. The work
continues. peace.
(Read also
Etta
James: The Caged Bird Sings)
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Marvin Gaye and The Star Spangled Banner
By Mtume ya Salaam,
Breath
of Life Music
Commentary
Live Performance at the NBA
All-Star Game (1983)
video of the performance
Marvin Gaye - American National Anthem - 1979
Marvin Gaye sings the National Anthem at
Oakland Raiders
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Death of
Emmett Till
By Bob Dylan
'Twas down in Mississippi not
so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago town walked through a
Southern door.
This boy's fateful tragedy you should all remember
well,
The color of his skin was black and his name was
Emmett Till.
Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they
beat him up.
They said they had a reason, but I disremember what.
They tortured him and did some things too evil to
repeat.
There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there
was
laughing sounds out on the street.
Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a
blood-red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his
screaming pain.
The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure
it
ain’t no lie,
He was a Black skin boy so he was born to die
And then to stop the United States of yelling for a
trial,
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed
poor
Emmett Till.
But on the jury there were men who helped the
brothers
commit this awful crime,
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed
to mind.
I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin' down the courthouse
stairs.
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers
they went free,
While Emmett's body still floats the foam of a Jim
Crow southern sea.
If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a
crime
that's so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind
is
filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and
chains, and
your blood it must cease to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful
low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow
man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that
ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all us folks that thinks alike, if we gave
all we
could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater
place to live.
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan |
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Wild Women Don’t Have the
Blues
By Ida Cox
I hear these women raving 'bout their
monkey men
About their fighting husbands and their
no good friends
These poor women sit around all day and
moan
Wondering why their wandering papas
don't come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women
don't have the blues.
Now when you've got a man, don't ever be
on the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman
everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man
right
I keep 'em working hard both day and
night
because wild women don't worry, wild
women don't have no blues.
I've got a disposition and a way of my
own
When my man starts kicking I let him
find another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the
streets all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't
act right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues
You never get nothing by being an angel
child
You better change your ways and get real
wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't
tell you no lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever
get by
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't
have no blues.
Born
Ida
Prather,25 February 1896 in Toccoa,
Habersham County, Georgia, United
States. Died 10 November 1967 (aged 71)
Genres Jazz, Blues Instruments Vocalist. |
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Bill Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans
from the Civil War to World War II (2008)
The State of African Education
/
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
Go, Tell Michelle
African American Women Write to the New First Lady
Edited Barbara A. Seals Nevergold and Peggy
Brooks-Bertram
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Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story
of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today—generate these simple but revolutionary ideas: (The economy is not an efficient machine. It’s an effective garden that need tending. Freedom is responsibility. Government should be about the big what and the little how. True self interest is mutual interest. |
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. |
"Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights
Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship,
historian Lewis (Gonna
Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the
ragtag band of young men and women who formed the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Impatient
with what they considered the overly cautious and
accommodating pace of the NAACP and
Martin Luther King
Jr., the black college students and their white
allies, inspired by Gandhi's principles of
nonviolence and moral integrity, risked their lives
to challenge a deeply entrenched system. Fanning out
over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins,
voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and
protest marches. Despite early successes, the
movement disintegrated in the late 1960s, succeeded
by the militant Black Power movement. The highly
readable history follows the later careers of the
principal leaders. |
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Some, like
Stokely
Carmichael and H.
Rap Brown, became bitter and disillusioned.
Others, including
Marion Barry,
Julian Bond and
John
Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from
protest to politics, assuming positions of
leadership within the very institutions they had
challenged. According to the author, No organization
contributed more to the civil rights movement than
SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a
deserved tribute.—Publishers
Weekly
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
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Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
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27 May 2012
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