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Thank you for Moya and Jessica.

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For the last two years. Moya and Jessica have taken my calls, given me advice, listened to me while I was in tears and wanted to drop out.

Listened to me deal with breaking up with Filthy, listened to me deal with what it means to be a graduate student in a Research 1 University.

They are both hella busy.

Both dissertating. Both have jobs, family and Love bears of their own, yet they have taken the time to help me.

I am grateful, because they always challenge and support me.

Furthermore, they never play hide the ball on some “I ain’t gonna help her because she might get a job or fellowship I want” and they know #Blackgirlsarefromthefuture.
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You know how you call someone and say  “Hey, How do I go about finding a summer lecturing job doing the cold call” and you never hear back from them? Well, last week, I asked them both that question and they both answered quickly, with thorough assed answers.

I guess what I am trying to say is that you two have shown me what Love looks like while being Black womenin an academic space.

You don’t have to do what you do and I appreciate the fact, that, not only do you do it. But you do it consistently.

#Youareappreciated.

Love,

Renina.

Black Poets + Writers, Born to Stay Broke?

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Langston Hughes x Underpaid Poets x DJ Kool Herc’s Hospital Bills.

There are a few things going through my head, clearly.

The first is, a couple of weeks ago, poet and professor Thomas Sayers Ellis took the cardboard cut out of Langston Hughes from Busboys arguing that it was disrespectful and that the poets are not properly compensated for the work that they do. The owner of Busboys responded, then the poets responded back with a letter.

The second is that a couple of weeks ago as well, DJ Kool Herc was hospitalized, and unable to pay his medical bills. Several rappers, along with writer and homie Jeff Chang, went on the internet and twitter to fundraise to cover the cost of his expenses. Apparently even Russel Simmons got involved.

The third is a few weeks ago, my homie Simone,  wrote a post in the Couch Sessions that questioned the validity of a Jewish photographer, Mike Schreiber, presenting his book about Hip Hop at a Jewish Community Center, in Chocolate City. While I did find her tone to to be overly snarky in tone at times, there was some interesting dialogue generated and she made insightful points about the implications of the spaces we choose to host hip hop affiliated events.

The questions that she raised triggered a conversation around “who does hip hop culture belong to.” This is worth while as I think that rap music and hip hop culture has gone global, it is easy to forget that the music was created in response to the conditions of the lives of some Caribbean, African-American and Latino kids in the South Bronx.

In fact, I often think of how low income Black and Latino kids are in an interesting position in NYC. They live in one of the richest cities of the world, and produce fashion, language and music that is then taken by corporations and resold back to them and globally as well, all mostly without compensation. I get this analysis from Philippe Bourgois’s “In Search of Respect, Selling Crack in El Barrio.”

Lastly, another thing that I am thinking about is how last week a commenter left a message on my blog that my blog is a public service, and that I deserve to get paid for it, because public servants get paid. I thought this was interesting. I have been thinking about what he/she said, and what it means for a reader to tell a writer that they should be earning money based on what they do. #SociallyRelevantAds?

So I have 9 questions.

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Is it possible for people who benefit from from an exploitive system, a system premised on getting the most out of everything while paying the least possible, to turn around and critique that same system?

How much should the Busboys and Poets poets be compensated in order for the compensation system to be fair and equitable?

Do DC poets need a Union?

Do rappers need a Union?

Would Kool Herc or the Busboys poets be in the position they are in if they had a union?

Do the writers at Huffington Post, which just got acquired by AOL need a union?

Why is a model where the majority of the writers are unpaid sustainable?

Should I expect to get paid for my blog, if yes, how would that change my audience and voice?

You know what, I just wrote a post about the political economy of Black Poetry and Hip Hop. #boom.

How Oakland Brought Me #Aquemini

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On Saturday, I met #Aquemini.

I was posted up, waiting for someone, doing me. He then spoke, and asked if I was a professor. I had just come from writing the midterm and reading so I had a bag of books next to my chair. I responded no, I am a teacher. I asked him if he taught, he said, yes, once. He was a substitute teacher in East Oakland and he was just getting ready to talk shit about the Town and I said, “Baby, I’m from there.”

He responded, “Oh, really.” Yeah, Oakland.

I gave him another look, my undivided attention and said, “When is your birthday.” He stated, “June 11th.” I was like shit.

You are #Aquemini. It sounds really creepy as I write it, but I have been really deliberate about having a Gemini or Aquarius in my life.

I have been so specific about #Aqeumini that A dub walked over and said hello, and I introduced her to him and said girl, he is #aquemini, and she raised her eyebrows like word. Word.

I ask people their birthday’s before their names. Why? I am being purposeful.

So we conversate. Marinate. All that.

He apparently saw me before. And spoke last summer. I asked if I was nice. Sometimes I shut it down. He said yeah, “You were nice, but it was clear that I were reading your book and didn’t want to be bothered.” That DO be the case sometimes and I am entitled to that. Time and place for everything, no?

He is currently and anti war lobbyist, adorable and White honey. Like Kevin Costner eye crinkles and everything. As I contemplate the politics of puttering around on that interracial in DC. Man listen.

Black girls pay a social cost when they date someone other then Black men. Because I walk like I have a right to be in the city, the threat of violence is always there. Our current sex/gender system says that women are not entitled to be in public, let alone claim the right to occupy city space publicly. Domination is maintained through violence and the threat of violence.

Ah, but the synchronicity of the night.
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So, first there is the Oakland connection. Then some how he brings up Ta-Nehisi’s blog. And I say #ummp.

He says, the man has awesome prose. And I respond saying, well he does, however I had a really public conversation with Ta-Nehisi last fall when he asked whether or not For Colored Girls was a classic at a White publication in front of a largely White audience, even though he hadn’t read the book since he was a teenager. #Ummp.

I went on to say that Ta-Nehisi didn’t respond well to being challenged intellectually around his gender politics, and I am referring to his willingness to read a Black feminist text to broaden his analysis, and that I found this unwillingness to be problematic.

He was like, what “That was you” and kinda put his hand over his mouth like “Oh Shit.”  I answered yes. Now see, this is surreal because I am not use to my work preceding me.

Further it speaks to importance of remembering that your words go places that YOU don’t go.

Lastly he has done work in South Africa around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. You and I both know I Love me some TRC’s. So. Um. Yeah.

I can’t call it.

Oh. And I don’t think we exchanged info. #Extra. So Yeah. #Aquemini. Holler @cha girl. You know where to find me @2:26 sec.

#BoomandPow

#VulnerableyFearless

Can you believe that East Oakland ‘ish?

Peace to the Gemini’s.

What Women Have to Do With It: A Response to Chrystia Freeland’s Rise of the New Global Elite.

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Chrystia Freeland at The Atlantic has written an interesting article “Rise of the New Global Elite” analyzing the new transnational elite.

Her main points are that in the US we are “plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble” that the members who comprise this elite group are are becoming a “transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.”

She argues that the reason why wealth accumulation in 2011 is different from other periods in history is that “The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade.” While this is true another material factor influencing global accumulation of capital has been the low to nearly no wages of women factory workers gobaly in China, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Bangledesh, Haiti, Jamaica and the Phillpines.

My understanding of women and labor comes from Rhacel Parrenas’ book Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work and Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders. Parrenas states that global capitalism functions through and maintains and overarching world-system that organizes nations into unequal relations and creates a larger structural linkage between sending and receiving countries in migration. To put it another way, countries look the way that they do because they are apart of a system designed to get the most profit at all times. If we look at various countries at the same time, then we get a clearer picture of why Haiti looks the way it does versus why Venezuela looks the way it does. Why Egypt looks the way it does versus the United States and so on.

What do women have to do with it?

If we take women workers out of the equation then global profits seem like they magically appear from Pluto. Or they seem to be a consequence of technology or they are a function of Wall Street.

The reality is there 40% of the global population lives off of $2 per day, many of these people are women and children workers. In Feminism Without Borders Mohanty quotes Zilla Eisenstein who states that “women do two thirds of the worlds work and earn less than one-tenth of the income.” This is some serious wage inequity which could buy a lot of child care, food, pay some mortgages and send some people to grade school through college.

In short in many ways the global accumulation of capital and profits pivots on the labor of women, largely comprised of women of color.

Again, the work of women is central to the rise of the new global elite. Someone has to assemble our phones, gadgets, tv and clothing. And I say this not to run some sort of guilt trip, as that wouldn’t be useful to neither you or me. I say it make the women who do this work visible. Often times the work of women is neither unrecognized, unacknowledged and it is often underpaid.

Back to the article.
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I learned two significant things from this article. The first was that transnational conferences are in many ways the new status symbol for the transglobal elite.The second is that the status symbols aren’t just jets and international vacations but “a philanthropic foundation—and, more than that, one actively managed in ways that show its sponsor has big ideas for reshaping the world.”

If you shape ideas, you can shape society, how people think.

This makes sense. A year ago I said in a post about Beyonce that culture is hegemony’s goon. This is also the reason why I contended seriously with Jeff Chang’s idea of culture before politics in this post I wrote last month along with Rob Bland.

This article is also significant because we never get to hear about the day to day lives of the people who run the corporations and institutions that shape our lives. In this article we hear their voices. Freeland demonstrates this when she writes,

“The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

This is really good narrative.

At last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he were starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the U.S.,” he explained. “The pull to be close to the customers—most of them in Asia—is enormous.” Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

What is interesting to me about this is that Michael Splinter has basically said that the collapse and elimination of the middle class (to be crude, single family home owners), with an investment in the future of their neighborhood, is basically a part of the process. And if the middle class in the US shrinks but the middle class in India or China grows, then so be it. When I mentioned this to Rob, he said, well he can say that, he isn’t a politician. And I thought, well don’t corporations and employees influence politicians through donations? So then….

In sum, I hope that, in reading this I was able to shed some light the role that women play globally in the rise of the new transnational elite.

Where you aware of the connection between low wage women workers and global profits?

What did you think of the article?

As a man or woman have you learned that you were underpaid, what did you do about it? Did you have evidence?

The Politics of Making a “Black Film” in Obama’s America

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Image of director Kasi Lemmons courtesy of Professor Sussoro’s Blog

Last fall I tweeted that a barometer of Black women’s freedom would be their ability to control, tell, and distribute their own stories.

Having seen Push, and now For Colored Girls, two movies based on texts written by Black women about Black women, but directed by Black men, I am incredibly mindful of who gets to tell which story and why. Story telling is powerful because it is through stories that we come to see who we are in the world. Our stories define us. Stories tell us what is possible.

Consequently I was really excited when I learned that Pariah, directed by Dee Rees had been acquired by Focus Features last week.

A story, by a Black woman, about a Black girl. #Awesome.

In thinking about Pariah I was reminded of a Professor Michelle Wallace’s commentary on Spike Lee nearly fifteen years ago and what it means to make “Black Films.” In the article “Doin’ the Right Thing” she writes,

” …implicit in this formulation of Blacks having their own films was the nagging question as to whether such representations would somehow make black
peoples lives better overall. Regardless whether representation weather a film has value as any value as art, it can , if it chooses closely mirror or reflect the problems
and inequities of society. People make the mistake of thinking that a film can therefor correct inequities. This because we as a culture, are still trying to figure out what representation fully means in still new and exponentially expanding forms: what such forms can and can’t do, what we should and should not ask from them.”

She also say’s something in the article that has stuck with me which speaks to the idea that,

“we can now see that the notion of blacks making their “own” films presupposed the existence of a monolithic black community, unified enough to
posses a common ideology, ethics, morality, and culture, sufficient to override such competing and divisive interests as class, gender, sexuality, age and
education.”

This morning @tkoed Sent me a link from Ta-Nehisi’s blog where Neil Drumming, a screen writer and journalist, talks about about whether he would make “Black films.”

The article talks about how films by several NYU alums made it to Sundance this year. Full disclosure, as a little bear I worked for several years at NYU’s film school as an office manager. NYU’s Black film making culture is a part of me. It is in seeing grad and undergrad student filmmakers grind to make their dreams work that, that in some ways I developed the courage to openly pursue being an artist. Filmmakers taught me the power of story and how to analyze a film.

My homie Jase has just came back from Sundance after working on a doc on Harry Belafonte, Sing Your Song, #wingsup.

My homie’s Marquette Jones and Qwesi Davis both have films in the San Diego Black Film Festival this month.
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I also found this article to be interesting, in that it speaks to how hyper segregated both Hollywood AND the art world is. Furthermore, it is related to a conversation that I was having last week with a Black woman journalist friend about how segregated Washington’s journalism corps are, and what this means for the careers of Black people in general and women of color in particular. It appears that one can operate in the White circle or the Black circle, but not both. Where does this leave people who are neither White nor Black? o.O

Work mirrors life?

Was it this rigid in New York? I don’t recall.

What is material to me is that Neil never disclosed his race. I read the article again, looking then I asked @tkoed if Neil was White. @Tkoed says that this is because regular readers know who he is, and that may be true. But I am not a regular reader, so I finished the article wondering is this a White, mixed race or Black person analyzing what it means to have negro characters in their movies.

Perhaps given how marginalized Black films are, to choose to make Black movies is a choice to have your work live on the margins. This can be tough to reconcile for some.

The homie Dame also sent me a link to an article titled “Can Revolutionary Films Hinder Social Action.” Read it here. This article looks at how the top 1% can use the medium of film
to transmit messages to the masses that then absolve the masses from taking action. For example, if you know that “The Matrix” exists, are you obligated to do something about it?

Oh and Rob has a piece up at The Liberator about the Black Creative Class. He makes some interesting points about who makes up this class and although his timeline throws me a bit, I like
the idea of inter-generational Black struggle that’s not linear and impacted by art. In some ways I think our posts are in conversation with each other.

Excited about Pariah?

Why did we assume that having more Black Films would change the lives of Black people?

Can we have a conversation about the forces that create a “Black Film” genre in the first place?

Race and racism are draining.