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Media as a Weapon: New Orleans' 2-Cent
By Jordan Flaherty
May 22, 2009
The video grabs
your attention immediately. Young people in the Lower
Ninth Ward hold up signs that read: “looter,” “we’re
still here,” and “America did this.” Amid empty lots and
damaged houses, poet Nik Richard delivers this message:
“Hurricane Katrina was the biggest national disaster to
hit American soil, and nearly two years later, this area
is still devastated. But you know what? We made sure we
preserved it strictly for your tourism. For about $75,
you can take one of these many tour buses.”
Tourists drive by and people with cameras gawk. Richard
looks directly at the camera and says, “It looks like
there’s more money to be paid in devastation than
regeneration. If y’all keep paying your money to see it,
should we rebuild it?”
The short film
New Orleans For Sale, which has
garnered several awards, was made by
2-Cent
Entertainment, a group of young Black media makers
in New Orleans. The group, which currently has 10
members , made New Orleans for Sale to convey the
frustration felt by many New Orleanians as the city has
become a national spectacle and a backdrop for countless
national politicians, while the aid the city needs to
rebuild still hasn’t arrived. In 2008, the film won
several awards including an NAACP image award in a
competition, called Film Your Issue, which featured a
high-powered jury with the likes of news anchor Tom
Brokaw and media executives from MTV Networks, Lionsgate
Entertainment and USA Today.
Working at the intersection of art and justice, as well
as entertainment and enlightenment,
2-Cent has attracted
a wide and growing audience. In New Orleans, they’ve
also collaborated with the People’s Hurricane Relief
Fund, produced shows on local television and radio
stations, and created mix CDs and scores of short
videos. Beyond creating inspiring programming,
2-Cent members also seek to pass their skills onto the next
generation, and have taught and presented their work and
in New Orleans high schools and colleges.
“Huey Newton said the young people always inherit the
revolution,” says Brandan “B-Mike” Odums,
2-Cent’s
founder. “And that’s what
2-Cent is, it’s how our
generation responded to that call.”
Positive Images
The collective formed in 2004, when Odums gathered a
group of friends (most of them fellow students at the
University of New Orleans) to produce a TV show with a
message.
“A lot of TV promotes a monolithic way of thinking,
saying there’s only one way to be, or promoting
ignorance as cool,” says Odums. “We say it’s hot to
stand up for yourself and speak for yourself.”
The group was still newly formed when Hurricane Katrina
devastated New Orleans, and in the aftermath of the
storm, with
2-Cent members spread across the United
States, they nearly disbanded. “Katrina made us realize
that this is what we want to do,” says Odums. “We’d done
two episodes before the storm. Everybody was scattered.
We had to decide if this is something we really want to
do. Katrina forced us to make the decision.”
The collective briefly relocated together to Atlanta,
then made the decision together to return to New
Orleans.
Kevin Griffin, another of the founding members of
2-Cent, joined because he shares Odum’s desire to change
the images and messages delivered to today’s youth. “We
were seeing the images that BET and others were putting
out,” Griffin says. “And we wanted to do something
different, more positive.”
Griffin is not just a media activist; he is also one of
the leaders of a citywide movement spearheaded by the
Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, an organization
whose mission is to close the Youth Studies Center, the
city’s youth prison. The group has led campaigns to shut
down other youth prisons around the state including the
notorious youth prison in Tallulah, Louisiana, and they
are also working to create more options for young people
beyond jail.
For Griffin, these struggles have personal meaning. “At
the age of 10, I was sent to the Youth Studies Center,”
Griffin explains. “A year later I was moved to Tallulah,
which was known as the worst youth prison in the
country. I was 11. The next youngest person was 17, so I
was a child among adults. And I was there for five
years.”
When he was released, Griffin was determined to turn his
experience into something positive. “I could have stayed
on that path that was laid out for me,” says Griffin.
“But I didn’t want to become that.” He credits his
family for helping support him when he got out.
Griffin now works full-time at WBOK, a Black-owned talk
radio station (their slogan is “Talk back, talk Black”).
Art also runs in his family. His cousin Mannie Fresh,
the music impresario of New Orleans’ Cash Money record
label, produced much of the music that made New Orleans
hip hop famous.
Humor and Style
2-Cent videos are notable for both humor and great
production values. “We liked a lot of the messages you
would see on Public Access TV,” explains Griffin. “But
we wanted to make something with better production.”
This combination of form and content, and a mix of
serious and comic, defines the 2-Cent style.
“We take education and comedy and we mix it all
together,” says collective member Manda B, who writes
and acts in many of the group’s videos. “We can trick
people into learning. We built it off a foundation of
edutainment. Even with our most crazy and bizarre
scripts, we have a meaning.”
The group seems to have limitless energy and ideas, and
they bring new angles to their subjects, finding humor
in unexpected places, and bringing ideas to young people
by using that humor. Their piece on Jena, Louisiana, is
filmed at the September 20, 2007 protests in Jena, when
tens of thousands of young people converged in what was
called the birth of the 21st century civil rights
movement. But the 2-Cent video intercuts with one of
their members—an effortlessly humorous young performer
named Stiggidy Steve—wandering confused on Jena Street
in New Orleans and wondering where everyone is.
“Older folks may try to put out similar ideas,” says
Manda B. “But it’s like they’re preaching. I think we
know how to connect with our generation.”
These young media activists praise Gil Scott Heron, who
said the revolution will not be televised, but for
2-Cent, media is a tool to be taken and used for the
mission of social change.
“Other generations marched, and we march too,” says
Odums. “But in this age we have a whole new range of
weapons, and we’re trying to use those weapons. I think
Martin Luther King, Jr. would want to be on YouTube, to
have his speeches distributed that way. Malcolm X would
love to make mixtapes, have those out on the streets.
The same reasons they boycotted and had protests in that
era are our reasons too. We’re coming from that same
mindset, but we’re using new tools, trying to get our
inheritance.”
After nearly five years together, the group has survived
Katrina and all the connected stresses of living in New
Orleans during this time, and their bonds become
stronger and closer. When asked what aspect of their
work they were most proud of, various
2-Cent members
expressed the same sentiment as Manda B, who explained,
“For me, the best element of all this is that we’re
family.”
For a large collective,
2-Cent seems to have no problem
working together, creating new content every week, and
continually expanding the range of work they do and the
audiences they reach. “We’re all together like family,”
says Griffin. “And we can’t imagine not staying
together.”
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based
in New Orleans, and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. He
was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six
to a national audience and his reporting on post-Katrina
New Orleans shared a journalism award from New America
Media. His work has been published and broadcast in
outlets including Die Zeit (in Germany), Clarin (in
Argentina), Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now. He
is also co-director of PATOIS: The New Orleans
International Human Rights Film Festival. He can be
reached at
neworleans@leftturn.org.
posted 22 May
2009
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More about 2-Cent:
http://2-cent.com
Other Resources:
Left Turn Magazine -
http://www.leftturn.org
PATOIS: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film
Festival -
http://patoisfilmfest.org
Other recent reporting by Jordan Flaherty:
Torture at Angola Prison -
http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/flaherty270109.html
New Orleans reactions to Obama’s election (in Spanish) -
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2008/11/10/elmundo/i-01799537.htm
Video report for Democracy Now during Hurricane Gustav -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtfcMkdoNhk
Floodlines
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the
Jena Six
By Jordan Flaherty
Preface by Tracie Washington
/ Foreward by Amy Goodman
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black
America
By
Eugene Robinson
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The Great Divergence
America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can
Do about It
By Timothy
Noah
For the past three decades, America has steadily
become a nation of haves and have-nots. Our incomes
are increasingly drastically unequal: the top 1% of
Americans collect almost 20% of the nation’s
income—more than double their share in 1973. We have
less equality of income than Venezuela, Kenya, or
Yemen. What economics Nobelist Paul Krugman terms
"the Great Divergence" has until now been treated as
little more than a talking point, a club to be
wielded in ideological battles. But it may be the
most important change in this country during our
lifetimes—a sharp, fundamental shift in the
character of American society, and not at all for
the better. The income gap has been blamed on
everything from computers to immigration, but its
causes and consequences call for a patient,
non-partisan exploration.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. — WashingtonPost
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ChickenBones Store
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update 12 May
2012
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