Archive | August, 2009

Where Obama Made A Mistake

25 Aug

Obama thoughtful

I remember in the campaign days, and most certainly after the election that current President Barack Obama was fashioning himself after this country’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln. I remember in my own mind that I thought that that was highly weird, but I figured that since he ran the best campaign this country has ever seen, I figured he knew what he was doing.  But, in hindsight, I’m even more convinced that he did not.

When he tossed his hat into the race in Springfield, Illinois on the steps of the Old Capitol, he was already taking the approach of Abraham Lincoln trying to united a divided country.  At least that was the underlying message and theme behind shaping himself after Lincoln.  But, in my own imagination, that just didn’t make sense to me because what kept replaying in the back of my head was that Lincoln was not this great emancipator that we still teach and ideologically believe.  The simple wording of the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the states that had not seceded from the Union of Kentucky, Delaware, Missouri or Maryland nor did it grant freedom to slaves in certain counties in Virginia (present-day West Virginia), New Orleans and some other assorted parishes nor was Tennessee to fall under this presidential act.

So, to see the first African American president align himself with Lincoln didn’t quite make sense.

FDRThis also with the fact that as the days to the election were coming to a close that the domestic issues of the economy more or less sealed the deal for Obama winning.  I just knew, I just knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I would have heard more echoes of another famous president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Now of course, the administration doesn’t want to fully embrace Rooseveltian ideas because of course Roosevelt was associated with the Great Depression and no one would want us to think that we were not just headed for a recession, but a depression instead.  It would undoubtedly begin to scare the citizenry and of course give much more fodder for critics.  However, where I think Obama could have taken a page out of FDR’s playbook was with regards to the infrastructure building that is so largely associated with FDR’s administration.

Obama hinted at it with the whole idea of “greening” the country, but of course to date we haven’t even heard mention of such plans.  What Roosevelt did was set up his famous WPA, Works Progress Administration which added 8,000,000 jobs during it’s existence from 1935 to 1943.  Using only $7,000,000,000 rather than the $700,000,000,000 of current TARP funds (yes, I am aware of inflation) that program effectively brought America even further into the 20th century and modernized much of the country and began to connect the far rural places with some of the modern conveniences of technology.  Given that there are still pockets in this country that don’t have a DSL hookup and they’re still operating on dial-up, in 2009, that’s the equivalent of not having electricity or a telephone in the 1950s; not the end of the world, but it most certainly doesn’t help a situation.

Also given that following the bridge collapse in the Twin Cities over the Mississippi River, it’s quite apparent that our infrastructure in this country needs to be addressed before it’s too late.  So wouldn’t it make sense if federal money went to create jobs in a civilian corps similar to the WPA and the various other “alphabet soup” programs established under the New Deal?

Of course not, this is Obama we’re talking about.

To be frank, it does seem like he’s taken on a bit more than he can chew.  So he signed an order to “close” Guantanamo Bay detention center within.  It’s my understanding that prisoners are still present on that end of the island as we speak and that given the Senate vote on funding to release prisoners, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.  Not to mention that him trying to address health care has seemed to prove that Obama may actually have a glass jaw–he’s unable to take a hit and thereby he positions himself where he really doesn’t have to.

I really wish Obama would find some intestinal fortitude and quickly.

I’m not saying that he necessarily needs to pull a Barney Frank and call his critics veritable dining room tables, but at minimum (and I’d never thought I be saying this either) take a George W. Bush standpoint and just fire back with a “so what” to all of his critics.  Or my personal favorite “fall back.”  Or even if you could get like Dick Cheney who made his friend apologize when he shot him.

That’s just classic on so many levels.

I just always imagined Obama being like Ludacris in “Stand Up” just being able to have this big ole exaggerated shoe and just putting his foot down and telling everyone, in the words of AverageBro “get down or lay down.”

What’s your current approval of Obama as of today?  Do you think he could have handled something’s differently?  Is he held to a different standard simply because he campaigned on so many issues but has yet to deliver a decisive blow on any of them?  OR is it still too early to tell?  What would be the make or break point for Obama?

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Revisiting the Field Negro and the House Negro

21 Aug

dark-skin-light-skin-pic_edited-3

Recently as we’ve decided to talk a bit more candidly and intelligently about race in our own community, I’ve heard a slightly different take on the whole “light skinned” vs. “dark skinned” debate, or in other words, the whole field Negro versus house Negro dichotomy.  I had approached this topic back in May 2008 referring to “plantation politics” on the heels of the Jeremiah Wright debacle and the Obama campaign, but a year and some change later, my view point has changed somewhat.

Now, if you want the traditional approach to the whole thing, just dip over to The Field Negro’s blog spot and I’m sure for the most part he’ll give you what you’re looking for.  Or even check out the Malcolm X clip from YouTube when most certainly planted in our minds how we should view the field Negro versus the house Negro.  But in all honesty and fairness, I don’t read his blog quite everyday, so while I’m not trying to throw salt at him for where he stands on the issue, but I think partly that sort of mentality, in hindsight is what was part of the problem.

Spurred by AverageBro’s current blog for today entitled “The Lightskinned/Darkskinned Paradox,” and his typical ensuing question, “Why is it ok to hate on lightskinned, longhaired women, yet brownskinned sistas are “keepin’ it real’?” it got me to thinking about this thang and I started thinking back on this one conversation I had with two intergenerational women on campus.  Both of the women were what would be considered light skinned.  One was 50-something and the other was 26.  One grew up in St. Louis and the other grew up in Miami respectively.  And both of them told stories of woe based on their skin color.

light skinned vs dark skinned 2Initially I was saying to myself, what heartaches could you all have possibly experienced because of your skin color if you were always getting picked and chosen for the special jobs and being teachers pets and what not.  They went on to educate me that indeed while that may have been the case with some of the students that had “that look,” that they caught hell on the playground.  The playground just being the catch-all for all of their interactions with the kids; the rest of the students hated on them because they saw the favoritism showed them and it was more than apparent that it boiled down to hair and skin color.

I mean, take for instance, just this summer an older gentleman told me of his trips from Baton Rouge to a smaller town 50 miles west of the city to go to the Yambilee Fest when he was a teenager in the 1950s and that a blind lady would sit at the door and feel the young persons hair to see if they were eligible to get inside.  He told how he had tried his best to make his hair lay straight, and still he couldn’t get in.  He would have been in a prime position to just start hatin’ on the light skinned, straight haired kids who qualified to make it inside.

Even just this morning as I was waiting for my car to be repaired at the dealership, a young man came in carrying a baby that looked NOTHING like him.  The baby looked rather white if you want my honest opinion.  Blondish curly hair and very light skinned.  Now the man with him, presumably his father, was still of the lighter complexion, but his hair was still nappy enough to lock up and he did have dreadlocks.  As a result, the baby was rather friendly and got some comments from some of the other patrons.  I just can’t help but wonder would these same patrons have extended the same effusive emotions toward a darker skinned toddler with kinkier hair that maybe hadn’t grown in all the way.

Honest answer, I think it goes back to the idea of Willie Lynch.

Whether that letter was true or not, it makes sense in 2009.  Whites during slavery were quite successful at dividing and conquering those Africans in America.  How so Uppity?  I’m glad you asked.  Let the record show that a field Negro and a house Negro were both still slaves.  I think we keep on forgetting that.  While most of us try and identify with a field Negro motif decrying the fact that we were out in the fields busting our asses with manual labor from sunup to sundown all day everyday, sweating and getting darker and darker by the second as our skin was being not kissed, but burned by natures sun, we still forget or rather choose to forget that being inside the house was a different kind of torture.

plantation-slavesThe benefits of being in the house did not always outweigh the fact that one was still a slave.  Being in the house perhaps afforded some shade from the sun, some better clothes and perhaps a better diet, but at what cost?  The black women inside the house were still doing heavy manual labor with regards to cooking, doing laundry over a washboard on Mondays, which often did require one to leave the house and go to a running creek.  Or a house Negress was often times the “wet” nurse to the mistress’ children: in other words she breast fed the children of the white woman of the house.  Or often times the women were the object of sexual abuse (in tandem maybe) with that of the master of the house.  While the field Negroes were able to be away from that which had enslaved them, the house Negroes were forced every waking minute to be in the service of master and or mistress and had a whole different set of psychological difficulties to deal with.

Bottom line, a slave was still a slave.

Over the generations as miscegenation became a bit more prevalent and we saw the emergence of the caste system of mulattoes, quadroons and octaroons, then whites just merely capitalized on the division of labor and just made it yet another part of the seasoning of slaves and added yet another lock and link to the chains of psychological slavery.  And also, many times the ones working in the house over the years would actually be the direct blood descendants of the master of the house.  Also, please note that this is not all in the context of the proverbial hundred plus acred plantation with upwards of 50 slaves, this was often times the dichotomy between two or three slaves that one small “middle-class” equivalent family had scraped up to purchase.

I said all this to say that I think we need to quickly revisit this idea of “she acting like a house Negro” with reference to someone like a Condoleeza Rice. While I may at times wonder how in the hell was she able to sit under Bush and still maintain her black dignity, fact of the matter is that she is a testament to black women with brown skin breaking some sort of color barrier.  Or even referring to Clarence Thomas as a house Negro as well, or rather categorizing “house Negro” behavior as that which seeks to maintain the status quo or behavior that seeks to go along to get along, I think is as equally counterproductive as the labeling of certain blacks as house Negroes.

The reasoning is because who’s to say that house Negro behavior is the best for blacks in the long run.  No, I’m not suggesting we take a Clarence Thomas approach, not by a long shot, but who’s to say that “field Negro” rationale is the best.

Audre Lord has the famous quote that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”   While on the surface that sounds hot, the more I think about that concept, the more I disagree with it as an absolute.  Let’s say that the tools used to build the masters house were a hammer, a screwdriver and a saw–all acceptable utensils used in the building of a house.  That quote to me suggests that the field Negroes need to attack the house with some axes, some pitchforks, some anvils and just outright bulldoze the joint down from the outside.  The problem is that generally the master would already be on his porch with a shotgun waiting for us.  And even if the house Negroes did succeed in dismantling the house, there would be more than enough white folk waiting to quell the “mob of field Negroes” with plenty of shotguns and ropes and nooses.

Wouldn’t it be a much more stealth approach if on the inside the house Negroes would go and find the masters tools and began quietly, secretly, and above all strategically removing nails with the same hammer that had been driven in by the hammer of oppression that would helped maintain the walls that supported this masters house.  Or strategically getting a saw and cutting away underneath the house at the joists and 2 x 4 beams that upheld the masters house so that one day when the house Negro planned to be out of the house that just magically the house started to collapse and the masters wouldn’t even know what hit them–and then everyone else would blame it on termites.

I’m just saying.

I think we need to think this whole thing through again.

To what extent do you buy into the idea of the “field Negro” and “house Negro”?  Do you think it’s healthy or do you think I’m just way off base on this one.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

On The Road, I Encountered a Storm

20 Aug

Okay, yesterday was the second worse trip driving back to Chicago.  Nothing can ever trump the “wintry mix” I encountered last winter when I came home for Christmas break.  Well, nothing unless an accident actually happened which thankfully didn’t.  So last night apparently I drove through some counties with active tornado warnings in northwest Indiana and I shamelessly took some photos with my phone while traveling.  So enjoy.

2009-08-19 19.32.38

2009-08-19 19.26.59

2009-08-19 19.30.53

2009-08-19 19.31.03

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Long Time No See

19 Aug

on the road again

I think this is the longest I’ve went without a post, without me saying I was going to dip out for a minute.

Just for a status update, I’m actually in Atlanta now, about to head to Chicago after I fall back asleep for about an hour or so and get ready for that good ol’ 10 hour drive ahead of me today.  Gonna be there a week, say hello to everyone, and then it’s right back to Atlanta for the start of school.

Just want to say that the people in Jacksonville really took care of me, and for that, be blessed.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Good and Bad, See If I Care, Good and Bad Hair

8 Aug

“Any hair is good hair as long it covers my head.”
Mama Uppity

That’s a scene from the cult classic Spike Lee Joint “School Daze” as Lee grapples with the issues of young, at the time Afro-Americans who were in college.  The movie was set at the fictional Mission College in some remote Alabama or Georgia town filmed on location at the newly created Atlanta University Center where Clark University got it’s new namesake along with other historically black colleges of Morris Brown, Morehouse and Spelman.  And let the record show, the topic of light skinned vs. dark skinned and straight hair vs. nappy hair is age old and of course is still a big topic amongst our people.

Frankly, I blame Madame C.J. Walker.

Yeah, I said it.  I blame her!

No, she didn’t “invent the perm” as we know it, nor did she invent the hot comb either, but she most certainly popularized it.  She used the straightening comb in conjunction with her hair care products.  Some sources say she even faced criticism at the time, and she most certainly does from me today.

Let me say right now, I’m neither for or against natural hair on women or for or against processed hair on women.  What I am against is the polarization that occurs as a result of it.  Some women truly have forgotten their hair texture and what it really looks like underneath all that weave, sew-ins, wigs and all manner of colors and flips and highlights and plaits and whatever else.  While I understand it’s a business in our community and we sorely need every kind we can get our hands on, but isn’t it interesting how much money a woman drops at a beauty salon that could go to something else?  I mean, a man is giving away no more than $20 a week on a haircut.  A woman has to get her toes, her hands, her hair and not to mention how much some makeup may cost.

For what?

To prove to men that they look good?

If nothing else natural hair takes as much time and energy to make it look well, or else you end up looking like Rasputia without her wig on.

I say that to say, I hope Chris Rock’s new mockumentary does the black community well.  He’s releasing this movie called “Good Hair” that’s, well, all about black hair and doing some on the street interviews–namely barber and beautyshop banter.  And from the trailer below, he’s having some bombshell celebs that are going to be doing some interviews concerning their hair.

Even in the clip, there’s always this need for us to have the “wet out of the pool look.”  Our good friend Yung Berg made it quite plain for us last year  with the “pool test.”  He was under the belief that

…I don’t really like dark butts too much… It’s rare that I do dark butts. Like really rare… It’s like, no darker than me. No darker than me. I love the pool test…. If you can be like ‘Yo, baby. I met you in the club. Let’s go back to my house. Jump in the pool exactly like you are.’–And you don’t come looking better wet than you were before you got in the pool then that’s not a good look.”

And fact of the matter, for the rest of us darker blacks and the ones with the less than straight hair, it’s rather easy to develop a sense of jealousy for the others.  It’s a color/hair complex.  I went through it myself when I was about in 6th grade through about 9th grade and high school and just grew out of it.  But, when you flip on the television and you see the number of darker men and women models, anchoring the news or what not, you kinda put two and two together and figure out what the deal is.

And the same goes for men.

We can get away with it differently, but still, women just fawn over the light-skinned pretty boy with the curly hair or with the green eyes and the rest of us are just like “Damn! What the hell’s wrong with me.”  And then I remember my days when I had my long hair (yes, I had corn rows people) that some girls were like “ooooh, you got good hair” and I was saying to myself, “This is what they call good hair?”  And I realized that anything that wasn’t tight and nappy was considered “good hair.”  Usually when the girls said something I’d respond with the quote from Mama Uppity.

So, when I was randomly perusing Youtube last night and came across the following clip, you have to understand how far my heart sank when I heard a preacher actually say what he said from the pulpit.  Fast forward to minute 3:40

Should I excuse him because he’s COGIC?

Whatever the case is, that’s just a hot mess on all levels.

Press out the kinks?  Straighten out the kitchen.  Chemical press–known as a process.  Have a super process for the hair that was real kinky.

I’m done.

And them folks was going in offa that.

Whatever.

I just hope we can get past this.  Like, I’m not convinced that this is a hard issue to deal with.  I mean tackling parents not raising their kids properly or teenage pregnancy seems a bit tougher for me, but this one, this shoulda been done and over with in the 1960s.  But clearly it’s not.

Oh well, see if I care, good and bad hair.

What are your reactions to Chris Rock’s mockumentary?   Similarly, what are your reactions to the pastors sermon where he used nappy hair as a negative to illustrate a point?

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

The Emergence of the Newer Negro

6 Aug

aaron douglas art work

Well, I lied.

I said I was going to wait until after August 16th to drop a post, but I lied.  Circumstances dictated otherwise.

My heart was ceremoniously grieved and broken when a couple of weeks ago Fly With Bats had posted something a new single called “Whip It Like A Slave.”  And of course it gave me pause.  I was glad to see that FreshXpress Blog had a repost of an article originally on AllHipHop.com about the “crisis of coonery” surrounding this new single.

I mean, it’s official that we’ve taken this to another level.  I guess bitches and hoes weren’t enough.  I guess it wasn’t enough having lyrics ever seeking revenge through a .9mm.  I guess talking about how good the pussy and the dick were wasn’t enough.  I guess talking about the Chevy that’s “clean on the inside and cream on the outside” was enough.  I guess it wasn’t enough to just “hop out the bed and turn my swag on.”  I guess it just wasn’t enough.  No, we have to now, “whip it like a slave.”

This is some official fried chicken and watermelon ish!

I could go on and on and on and on about where the hell we have come, but that would be beating a dead horse–or whipping a slave–just totally redundant.  Instead, I’m interested in the emergence of the Newer Negro.

The New NegroIn 1925 when Alain Locke published The New Negro half essay of the same title and half anthology of poems and other essays and fiction writing, most historians realised that something new had emerged.  There was a collective uprising, in the era of culture within the black community.  For the first time, blacks were merging the African with the American in a tangible way on all levels of culture that for the first time drew the interest of white Americans.  Of course even in the antebellum period there was always a culture associated with blacks, but from approximately 1920 through the end of World War II, there was a concentrated effort pouring from northern African Americans in the various fields of literature, drama, music, visual art, dance, philosophy, history and sociology.  As a result, we have what we commonly recognize as the Harlem Renaissance.

It was an inward turn to our own communities for guidance and leadership.  We took our cultural cues from a non-commercialized source.  In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, blacks owned our own grocery stores, banks, clothing stores, mercantiles, meat markets–you name it, we owned it.  We had our own publishing companies, magazines, we did it big and we did it bad.  We turned over our money in our own community.  Media that we received was disseminated by us and for our community.  Just think about the plethora of black owned newspapers in the country in circulation in the 1920s.  Not to mention the number of magazines that began publishing essays and poems and short stories outside the purview of white conglomerates.  We did so because we had to.  No white media outlet was giving blacks en masse the time of day.  To the large white community we were still a novelty, and for some an aberration.  The only way to create the Harlem Renaissance was from within.

Lift Every Voice and SingAs a result we did well and produced works too many to name for the sake of this blog and we produced the greats like Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, James Weldon Johnson just to name the big timers, and not to mention largely unheard people like Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, or Aaron Douglas.  What makes me swell with pride is that although some of the work of these people got national platforms from the ever benevolent white person to open doors for them like Carl Van Vechten, they still did it for the sake of wider community.  Their work was meant to speak to a larger mass of coloreds just like them.  Yes, while some of them did it for the sake of proving to whites that we were indeed human and a part of the “native land” of America just as much as they were, there still was some of their work that pointed back to the community while looking forward into the future.

But with the emergence of the newer Negro, we have art work that tells me to “whip it like a slave.”

I mean, damn.

That’s just demoralizing on a level that I can’t even wrap my mind around.  Is this what we fought for?  Is this what it has all amounted to?  And for the record, I’m taking the side of black conservative John McWhorter on this one that clearly, if this is what hip hop is producing for mass consumption, there’s no way in hell a revolution is going to be started and by all accounts hip hop will not be saving black Americans any time soon!

The newer Negro is not like the New Negro.  You see Newer Negro stands on the side of history with integration and unbridled capitalism.  In 2009, it’s all about how you look.  Just like that old commercial with the guy riding around on his lawn mower telling all about his trappings of success and he finally says “and I’m up to my eyeballs in debt.”  These young people are all about appearance and no substance.  Don’t get me wrong, in the 1920s, it was very much about going out to the clubs and wearing the latest zoot suit and what young woman had on a low cut dress and the hem line being above the knee, but all of that operated in tandem with those that were producing great cultural icons and contributing to the forward movement of a generation.

omar tyree urban novelNowadays, your average 18-30 year old in black America would be hard pressed to name contemporary greats in a roll call fashion like you could in the Harlem Renaissance.  And the 18 and under demographic–you can forget it on all accounts.  Hell, even this uppity Negro of this blog couldn’t readily rattle off the names of contemporary black dancers, or poets or most certainly not visual artists.  One glimmer of hope, and I believe it’s merely a glimmer, is that I personally do celebrate the black urban literature in the form of an Omar Tyree, E. Lynn Harris or Sister Souljah and who could forget Eric Jerome Dickey and even Terry McMillan.  I’m pretty sure if you interviewed these people you wouldn’t hear much in the idea of community uplift.  Their comments, I would assume, would be along the lines of “you don’t hear about blacks in this ________ situation, and I wanted to be the voice that spoke for the black community on such slice of life issues as this.”

Meh, not the end of the world, but the one’s I listed are among the ones I’d be much more ready to consider substantive literature.  I mean walk into your local Borders or Barnes and Nobles and you can see Ernest GainesA Lesson Before Dying next to some book entitled Thug Lovin’ that looks like it got printed in someone’s basement printing press.  To which I say, come on y’all.

david talbertAnother glimmer is this era of gospel plays.  While many people are criticizing the likes of Tyler Perry or David Talbert, I must applaud them for their effort.  Generally it’s easy to see some overarching theme of uplift throughout the play.  Usually these productions appeal to the sense of family and community to pull through whatever the problem presented in the play.  And I rather like that.  Interestingly enough, the audience knows what’s right, they always clap after some sappy line that’s supposed to provide the epiphany for the antagonist of the play or sometimes for the protagonist.

All of that being said, I don’t think the New Negro would be pleased at their progeny of the Newer Negro.  And frankly, neither am I!

Some will say it’s because we don’t live in an era that’s ripe for a movement or revolution of the same caliber as in the 1960s and that’s most certainly the truth and indisputable in my opinion.  However, even if we live in this rarefied era, a time and space that isn’t where the action takes place, let’s remember that civil rights in this country had been going on in this country since the 1600s and the first Africans brought to this country realized they were slaves and did what they could to get out of it.  The modern decades of the 1950s and 1960s was just a mere culmination of a series of events that had been in place for nearly 350 years.  So as the epoch goes through the process of rarefaction yet again let us realize that we, this generation and every successive one afterwards is laying the foundation and the groundwork for yet another some sort of civil reckoning at some point in our existence.

Will it be like it was in the 1960s?  I hope not.  We were fighting a horse of an entirely different color.  The issues that face black Americans today may have their roots in the social thought and consciousness of the 1960s but today’s problems, some of which weren’t even remotely an issue (think HIV/AIDS), must be attacked differently than that of Jim Crow and blatant segregation.  For me that means that much of our message needs to change.

It goes without saying that the lyrics of pop-Hip Hop, or the ring tone friendly hooks are simply atrocious, but even that of what’s considered “conscious” hip hop maybe needs to be re-evaluated.  Also, the traditional thought to approach civil rights issues per the NAACP and most certainly from the Concerned Clergy of ________ (insert any metropolitan city in this country) and the fact that they generally only trot out when it’s time to be in front of the camera–that’s fine, but they do no footwork when the camera is off.

The message needs to change.

I think the Harlem Renaissance is a workable model however.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had enclaves where young blacks could go off and be around each other and engage in cultural activities like they did in the Harlem Renaissance?  Where you could go away from some people peering over your shoulder and hone your skills and your craft and have somewhere where there were resources at your disposal to—

Oh wait, it’s called HBCUs.

I digress, we’ve just got to do better.  I’m sick and damn tired of us losing at every turn.  It pains me literally to hear about this latest delve into sheer coonery.  Our ancestors wouldn’t be pleased, and dammit, I’m not either.

What do you think should happen concerning a resurgence of young black social consciousness?  Has Lil’ Wayne lost it completely or was this some high-powered execs idea of a cruel joke with Wayne lookin’ a fool?!?

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL

Stay Tuned….Please Stand By

3 Aug

standby

Given some events going on at my internship and the fact that I WILL blog about them, even though they are anonymous except for the city, I am going to stay on vacation until August 18th when my first post will drop, and oh will they drop.  I’m going to be keeping up with the current events because if y’all think I wasn’t going to say something about the whole Henry Louis Gates then you got another thing coming.  I’m going to keep up with the posts of contemporary stuff such as weighing in on President Obama and the health care and how I think Obama’s administration should have approached this presidency differently, but I’m not going to drop them until after the 18th when I’m in the all clear with my internship. Also, look out for some book reviews of the five books so far I’ve knocked out this summer.  In the meantime, check out the vlog post below.

Keep it uppity and keep it truthfully radical, JLL


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