Why The Bronx African American History Project is Starting a “Bronx” Column in African Trumpet
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
If you ask people about the Bronx, the first thing most people would mention would be the Yankees. Next would come the Zoo and the Botanical Gardens, after that Fordham University, then more negatively, a range of attributes associated with urban decay, such as gangs and drugs and arson, coupled with a some apologetic references to the Bronx’s significance in the development of Latin Music and Hip Hop.
What almost no one would mention would be African Immigration, yet that may be the most important single new feature of life in the Bronx today. The Bronx is home to the largest concentration of African immigrants in the Western Hemisphere, just under 62,000 according to Census estimates ( New York Times, October19, 2009) well over 100,000 if you speak to knowledgeable residents of this large and growing community. If you walk the streets of the Bronx, you cannot miss the African presence in the every corner of the borough’s life, ranging from the hundreds of new stores selling African products, to the scores of new churches and Islamic centers serving a mostly African population., to the colorfully dressed African women, many of them wearing hijabs, escorting their children to school, to the thousands of African men working as security guards at local hospitals and universities, fixing cars and driving trucks, and serving as street vendors or clerks in stores. You will also find thousands of African women working in area nursing homes, and tens of thousands of African children enrolled in the Bronx’s public schools, many of them graduating as honor students and attending the nation’s top colleges. Fueled by immigration from more than 20 Africa countries ranging from Togo to Sudan, from Algeria to Ghana and Congo, an African cultural, spiritual and economic renaissance is taking place in the Bronx which is transforming life in Bronx communities while creating excitement and hope in nations throughout the African Continent. “When I walk up Fordham Road.” says Kojo Ampah, head of Fordham University’s
African Cultural Exchange, “ it feels like I am in downtown Accra. I hear almost as much Twi ( a Ghanaian language) as I do English or Spanish.”
It was to document this extraordinary demographic revolution that the Bronx African American History Project decided, four years ago, to launch an African Immigration research initiative under the director of Dr Jane Edward, and it is for that reason that we have decided to start a special “Bronx Column” in the pages of African Trumpet. In the weeks and months that follow, we are going to bring you features on African life in the Bronx, ranging from a story about the remarkable music- a combination of hip hop and hip life- being produced in the studios of Ghanain music producer Felix Sarpong, to a report on the coming African Unity Day Parade in the Bronx, to an analysis of Christian Muslim relations in Bronx African communities, to a frank discussion of conflict in Bronx schools and neighborhoods between African and African American youth. We will also have portraits of interesting individuals of African immigrant backgrounds who live in the Bronx, such as the Ghanaian boxer Joshua Clottey, the French Algerian music promoters Karima Zerrou, and the remarkable Islamic leader Sheikh Moussa Drammeh whose approach to community organizing challenges every American stereotype about the Muslim religion.
We have great columnists lined up, some of them scholars like Dr Jane Edward and Dr Ben Hayford, some of them students and community leaders
We are deeply grateful to African Trumpet for allowing these voices to be heard.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Make No Mistake About It: When You Attack Public Workers Unions, You Attack New York’s Black Middle Class
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
During my forty plus years as a scholar, teacher, coach and community organizer, I have had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time in the outer boroughs, not only in neighborhoods adjoining Manhattan, but in places where the Manhattan skyline sometimes looks like a distant universe. Whether it was through conducting oral histories, coaching basketball and baseball games, doing workshops in schools or advising community organizations on how to better reach neighborhood youth, I can say, with confidence that I am spent time in every single neighborhood in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and in large portions of Queens and Staten Island
When I visit these neighborhoods, I can’t help but take note of the age and quality of the housing stock, the variety of stores in local business district, the atmosphere in the streets, and the demographic distribution of the population, not only in terms of race, but occupation.
I have learned many things from these visits, but one of the things that leaps at me is the size of the City’s Black middle class and the its almost complete physical separation from the majority white upper class that sets the tone, and has the power in Michael Bloomberg’s New York.
There are three large cooperative housing developments in New York City that I visit regularly that are majority Black and majority middle class—Rochdale Village in Queens, Starrett City in Brooklyn, and Co-Op City in the Bronx. Located at the very outskirts of each borough, more than ten miles from Manhattan- they are self contained communities with their own shopping centers, schools and ball fields. While they are not without problems, and have only a small number of white families left, for the most part they are safe, well kept communities which are good places to raise families and which, though they are far from Manhattan have excellent shopping, decent public services, and vibrant churches and community organizations.
There is one other thing about these communities, other than their racial composition that distinguishes them from most Manhattan neighborhoods and that is where the people who live in them work. Overwhelmingly, the people in these communities are civil servants or people who work in health care. They are teachers, transit workers, police officers, prison guards, nurses and nurses aids, bus drivers, and clerks and administrators in city agencies. Literally, they are the people who make New York City run.
And almost all of them are members of unions- the UFT, the PBA, the Transport Workers Union, DC 37, Local 1199. The people here – the older generation- are the ones who unionized
New York City’s health care industry in the 60’s and 70’s and helped those workers move into the middle class; they are the ones who led the Transit Strike in 2005, and they are the ones who stand to lose most if Andrew Cuomo’s budget goes through without a millionaire’s tax and
If Michael Bloomberg gets to lay off teachers without consideration of seniority.
Make no mistake about it, Cuomo and Bloomberg may think they are being “color blind” when they fire government workers and undermine the power of public sector unions, but the consequences of their policies are anything but.
Their budget proposals, if implemented, will have a direct and devastating impact on the New York’s large and vibrant Black middle class whose hard work all New Yorker’s benefit from, and will be felt with special harshness in Starrett City, Rochdale Village, and Co-Op City
Do Cuomo and Bloomberg, and their acolytes on the editorial board of New York newspapers know or care that this will happen? Probably not. After all, most of them have never been to the three housing developments I have mentioned, much less spoken to people who live there
This is Segregation, New York Style, in the year 2011.
And another good reason to stand up for unions and accept no attacks on collective bargaining rights in the City of New York
Mark Naison
March 17, 2011
.
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
During my forty plus years as a scholar, teacher, coach and community organizer, I have had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time in the outer boroughs, not only in neighborhoods adjoining Manhattan, but in places where the Manhattan skyline sometimes looks like a distant universe. Whether it was through conducting oral histories, coaching basketball and baseball games, doing workshops in schools or advising community organizations on how to better reach neighborhood youth, I can say, with confidence that I am spent time in every single neighborhood in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and in large portions of Queens and Staten Island
When I visit these neighborhoods, I can’t help but take note of the age and quality of the housing stock, the variety of stores in local business district, the atmosphere in the streets, and the demographic distribution of the population, not only in terms of race, but occupation.
I have learned many things from these visits, but one of the things that leaps at me is the size of the City’s Black middle class and the its almost complete physical separation from the majority white upper class that sets the tone, and has the power in Michael Bloomberg’s New York.
There are three large cooperative housing developments in New York City that I visit regularly that are majority Black and majority middle class—Rochdale Village in Queens, Starrett City in Brooklyn, and Co-Op City in the Bronx. Located at the very outskirts of each borough, more than ten miles from Manhattan- they are self contained communities with their own shopping centers, schools and ball fields. While they are not without problems, and have only a small number of white families left, for the most part they are safe, well kept communities which are good places to raise families and which, though they are far from Manhattan have excellent shopping, decent public services, and vibrant churches and community organizations.
There is one other thing about these communities, other than their racial composition that distinguishes them from most Manhattan neighborhoods and that is where the people who live in them work. Overwhelmingly, the people in these communities are civil servants or people who work in health care. They are teachers, transit workers, police officers, prison guards, nurses and nurses aids, bus drivers, and clerks and administrators in city agencies. Literally, they are the people who make New York City run.
And almost all of them are members of unions- the UFT, the PBA, the Transport Workers Union, DC 37, Local 1199. The people here – the older generation- are the ones who unionized
New York City’s health care industry in the 60’s and 70’s and helped those workers move into the middle class; they are the ones who led the Transit Strike in 2005, and they are the ones who stand to lose most if Andrew Cuomo’s budget goes through without a millionaire’s tax and
If Michael Bloomberg gets to lay off teachers without consideration of seniority.
Make no mistake about it, Cuomo and Bloomberg may think they are being “color blind” when they fire government workers and undermine the power of public sector unions, but the consequences of their policies are anything but.
Their budget proposals, if implemented, will have a direct and devastating impact on the New York’s large and vibrant Black middle class whose hard work all New Yorker’s benefit from, and will be felt with special harshness in Starrett City, Rochdale Village, and Co-Op City
Do Cuomo and Bloomberg, and their acolytes on the editorial board of New York newspapers know or care that this will happen? Probably not. After all, most of them have never been to the three housing developments I have mentioned, much less spoken to people who live there
This is Segregation, New York Style, in the year 2011.
And another good reason to stand up for unions and accept no attacks on collective bargaining rights in the City of New York
Mark Naison
March 17, 2011
.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Notorious Phd on Teaching, School Reform and Social Justice in America- Talking Points for a Continuing Debate
Why I Support Teacher Tenure
Every good teacher I know supports teacher tenure because the harm that results from eliminating it would be greater than the harm that results from the small minority of incompetent teachers. Teachers work in the public domain and are beseiged with constituencies trying to influence what they do - often unfairly and unscrupulously, ranging from parents, to unscruplous politicians, to the media, to business interests trying to gain contracts in the schools. Teachers need protection from all of these, as well as the incompetent or authoritarian admistrators who occasionally come along. Far more public school teachers are heroes than incompetents. They are among our best public servants and we need to support them not make the scapegoats for our own failures as parents and citizens
Why Applying Business Models to Education Won't Work
Do you really think that business models would work in the classroom?. Are test results the measure of teacher performance? If I had people measuring my "results" as a professor at Fordham the way people want to rate the performance of public school teachers, I would have quit my job a long time ago. Students are not products. They are people whose imaginations need to be inspired and who need nurturing and support when they are in trouble and sometimes when they aren't. The most important thing great teachers do is build relationships. My colleague, Father Bentley Anderson says that the most important "results and outcomes" of teaching may take twenty years to fully emerge. Rating teachers on student performance on standardized tests will not only make students hate school by turning the entire experience into test prep, it will make every teacher withan ounce of pride leave the profession.
Why Public Schools May Be a Better Example of What's Right in the Nation than What's Wrong
What if this entire discussion is framed improperly. What if our public schools are the symbols of what's right in the nation rather than what's wrong. I can show you a public school in the heart of the South Bronx, surroun...ded by housing projects, shelters, and drug rehabilitation programs, that functions far better than any private business working in that neighborhod, or in any adjoiing community. It's a place where everyone greets you with a smile, where the walls are covered with amazing art work and exhibition of student projects, where community history is honored in an "Old School Museu," and where students, many of them living in desperate poverty, are loved and protected. This is PS 140, with Principal Paul Cannon. Not a charter school. This is America at its best. And does anybody ackowledge the people who work in this institution, and give them respect. No. Maybe private business should study how PS 140 works instead of trying to impose their operational model on PS 140
America's Heroes
To me, teachers, firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers, people who pave highways and collect tolls and bridges- these are American heroes They work hard every day and never get rich. Their union protections give them security. Why take that away?
Young People, Unions And School Reform
The attitudes of young people, including my former students, toward unions makes my physically sick. Unions were resonsible for allowing working people including the descendents of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, and Black people moving up from the South and the Caribbean to provide a decent life for themselves and their children in post war America. Will the young people growing up in the Bronx today have that opportunity. Do you think the "school reform movement: Is going to give it to them. When it is the richest people in the country, who stole the inheritance of working America, who are behind this reform. I used the think the school reform movement was led by idealistic but misguided people, Now I think it is the biggest hustle- or the biggest diversionary tactic- in the history of modern America, designed to take attention away from ecoomic inequality and regressive taxation.
Why I Support Teacher Tenure
Every good teacher I know supports teacher tenure because the harm that results from eliminating it would be greater than the harm that results from the small minority of incompetent teachers. Teachers work in the public domain and are beseiged with constituencies trying to influence what they do - often unfairly and unscrupulously, ranging from parents, to unscruplous politicians, to the media, to business interests trying to gain contracts in the schools. Teachers need protection from all of these, as well as the incompetent or authoritarian admistrators who occasionally come along. Far more public school teachers are heroes than incompetents. They are among our best public servants and we need to support them not make the scapegoats for our own failures as parents and citizens
Why Applying Business Models to Education Won't Work
Do you really think that business models would work in the classroom?. Are test results the measure of teacher performance? If I had people measuring my "results" as a professor at Fordham the way people want to rate the performance of public school teachers, I would have quit my job a long time ago. Students are not products. They are people whose imaginations need to be inspired and who need nurturing and support when they are in trouble and sometimes when they aren't. The most important thing great teachers do is build relationships. My colleague, Father Bentley Anderson says that the most important "results and outcomes" of teaching may take twenty years to fully emerge. Rating teachers on student performance on standardized tests will not only make students hate school by turning the entire experience into test prep, it will make every teacher withan ounce of pride leave the profession.
Why Public Schools May Be a Better Example of What's Right in the Nation than What's Wrong
What if this entire discussion is framed improperly. What if our public schools are the symbols of what's right in the nation rather than what's wrong. I can show you a public school in the heart of the South Bronx, surroun...ded by housing projects, shelters, and drug rehabilitation programs, that functions far better than any private business working in that neighborhod, or in any adjoiing community. It's a place where everyone greets you with a smile, where the walls are covered with amazing art work and exhibition of student projects, where community history is honored in an "Old School Museu," and where students, many of them living in desperate poverty, are loved and protected. This is PS 140, with Principal Paul Cannon. Not a charter school. This is America at its best. And does anybody ackowledge the people who work in this institution, and give them respect. No. Maybe private business should study how PS 140 works instead of trying to impose their operational model on PS 140
America's Heroes
To me, teachers, firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers, people who pave highways and collect tolls and bridges- these are American heroes They work hard every day and never get rich. Their union protections give them security. Why take that away?
Young People, Unions And School Reform
The attitudes of young people, including my former students, toward unions makes my physically sick. Unions were resonsible for allowing working people including the descendents of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, and Black people moving up from the South and the Caribbean to provide a decent life for themselves and their children in post war America. Will the young people growing up in the Bronx today have that opportunity. Do you think the "school reform movement: Is going to give it to them. When it is the richest people in the country, who stole the inheritance of working America, who are behind this reform. I used the think the school reform movement was led by idealistic but misguided people, Now I think it is the biggest hustle- or the biggest diversionary tactic- in the history of modern America, designed to take attention away from ecoomic inequality and regressive taxation.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Things We Had When New York Was a Union Town
Things We Had When New York Was A Union Town
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
With collective bargaining rights having just been eliminated in Wisconsin by legislative fiat, and with more states poised to do the same; with union teachers everywhere being made scapegoats for the nation’s educational problems; and with the most powerful business interests in the nation funding movements to privatize government services and decertify public employee unions, I thought it might be useful to look back at a time in New York City’s history when unions had far more power than they have today.
When New York City emerged from World War II, the most dynamic sectors of its economy- garment, electronics, transportation, construction, and food processing- were all heavily unionized. These union gains in the private sector were soon followed by the acquisition of collective bargaining rights by teachers, employees of state and city government and workers in health care.
Given what is being said about unions by elected officials and the media, one might expect that time in New York history- the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s- to be one of educational and cultural stagnation. One would expect that New York City today is a much more dynamic and democratic city than it was during a time when more than half the city’s work force was unionized.
But when you do some historical research and ask yourself the question, “Does New York City have better schools, public services and cultural and recreational opportunities for its poor and working class citizens than it did 50 years ago” the answer you come up with is a resounding “NO”.
I have spent the last nine years doing oral histories with Bronx residents through a project I lead called the Bronx African American History Project, and to a person, the people I interviewed feel that young people growing up in the Bronx had better opportunities in the 50’s and the 60’s than young people growing up there today. As Josh Freeman points out in his wonderful book
Working Class New York, many of the programs that my interviewees talked about that made their lives better were fought for by the city’s labor movement.
Here is a list of just a few of the programs which New York City unions fought for that are no longer with us today. I will leave it to you to decide whether we are better off without them.
1. Supervised recreation programs in every public elementary school in the city from 3-5 PM and 7-9 PM, which included sports, arts and crafts and music. These programs were free and open any young person who walked through the door.
2. First rate music programs in every public junior high school in the city featuring free instruction for students in bands, orchestras and music classes. Students in those classes could take home musical instruments to practice. Among the beneficiaries of these school music programs were some of the greats of Latin music in NYC, including Willie Colon, Eddie and Charlie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and Bobby Sanabria.
3. Recreation supervisors, as well as cleaners, in every public park in the city, including neighborhood vest pocket parks, who organized games and leagues and prevented fights. One of the greatest of these “parkies” Hilton White, organized a community basketball program that sent scores of Bronx youth to college on basketball scholarships including 3 who played on the 1966 Texas Western team which won the NCAA championship.
4. A public housing program that constructed tens of thousands of units of low and moderate income housing throughout the city and staffed these with housing police, ground crews and recreation staffs to make sure the projects were safe, clean and well policed.
5. Free tuition at the city university, at the community college, college and graduate levels, for all students who met the admissions standards.
6. Parks department policies which made sure that parks in the outer boroughs were kept as clean and environmentally sound as Central Park or parks in wealthy neighborhoods.
7. Free admission at all the city's major zoos and museums.
These policies, all of which were eliminated during the fiscal crisis of the 1970's, when a banker dominated Emergency Financial Control Board was put in charge of city finances, meant that children in poor and working class communities had access to recreational cultural and educational opportunities which are today only available to the children of the rich . These programs were not there because of the foresight and compassion of the city's business leadership. They were there because unions fought for them and demanded that elected officials they supported fund them.
This is not to say that unions are right in every dispute, or that they are immune from arrogance, greed and corruption. But it should give pause to those who think that our lives would be better in a union free environment.
Let me leave you with some numbers. In the early 1950's, when 35% of the American work force was unionized, the United States had the smallest wealth gap (between the top and bottom 20 percent of its population) of any advanced nation in the world. Now, when 11.9% of our workforce is unionized, we have the largest
Is this progress?
Let's think long and hard before we blame unions for the city's and the nation's economic problems
Mark Naison
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
With collective bargaining rights having just been eliminated in Wisconsin by legislative fiat, and with more states poised to do the same; with union teachers everywhere being made scapegoats for the nation’s educational problems; and with the most powerful business interests in the nation funding movements to privatize government services and decertify public employee unions, I thought it might be useful to look back at a time in New York City’s history when unions had far more power than they have today.
When New York City emerged from World War II, the most dynamic sectors of its economy- garment, electronics, transportation, construction, and food processing- were all heavily unionized. These union gains in the private sector were soon followed by the acquisition of collective bargaining rights by teachers, employees of state and city government and workers in health care.
Given what is being said about unions by elected officials and the media, one might expect that time in New York history- the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s- to be one of educational and cultural stagnation. One would expect that New York City today is a much more dynamic and democratic city than it was during a time when more than half the city’s work force was unionized.
But when you do some historical research and ask yourself the question, “Does New York City have better schools, public services and cultural and recreational opportunities for its poor and working class citizens than it did 50 years ago” the answer you come up with is a resounding “NO”.
I have spent the last nine years doing oral histories with Bronx residents through a project I lead called the Bronx African American History Project, and to a person, the people I interviewed feel that young people growing up in the Bronx had better opportunities in the 50’s and the 60’s than young people growing up there today. As Josh Freeman points out in his wonderful book
Working Class New York, many of the programs that my interviewees talked about that made their lives better were fought for by the city’s labor movement.
Here is a list of just a few of the programs which New York City unions fought for that are no longer with us today. I will leave it to you to decide whether we are better off without them.
1. Supervised recreation programs in every public elementary school in the city from 3-5 PM and 7-9 PM, which included sports, arts and crafts and music. These programs were free and open any young person who walked through the door.
2. First rate music programs in every public junior high school in the city featuring free instruction for students in bands, orchestras and music classes. Students in those classes could take home musical instruments to practice. Among the beneficiaries of these school music programs were some of the greats of Latin music in NYC, including Willie Colon, Eddie and Charlie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, and Bobby Sanabria.
3. Recreation supervisors, as well as cleaners, in every public park in the city, including neighborhood vest pocket parks, who organized games and leagues and prevented fights. One of the greatest of these “parkies” Hilton White, organized a community basketball program that sent scores of Bronx youth to college on basketball scholarships including 3 who played on the 1966 Texas Western team which won the NCAA championship.
4. A public housing program that constructed tens of thousands of units of low and moderate income housing throughout the city and staffed these with housing police, ground crews and recreation staffs to make sure the projects were safe, clean and well policed.
5. Free tuition at the city university, at the community college, college and graduate levels, for all students who met the admissions standards.
6. Parks department policies which made sure that parks in the outer boroughs were kept as clean and environmentally sound as Central Park or parks in wealthy neighborhoods.
7. Free admission at all the city's major zoos and museums.
These policies, all of which were eliminated during the fiscal crisis of the 1970's, when a banker dominated Emergency Financial Control Board was put in charge of city finances, meant that children in poor and working class communities had access to recreational cultural and educational opportunities which are today only available to the children of the rich . These programs were not there because of the foresight and compassion of the city's business leadership. They were there because unions fought for them and demanded that elected officials they supported fund them.
This is not to say that unions are right in every dispute, or that they are immune from arrogance, greed and corruption. But it should give pause to those who think that our lives would be better in a union free environment.
Let me leave you with some numbers. In the early 1950's, when 35% of the American work force was unionized, the United States had the smallest wealth gap (between the top and bottom 20 percent of its population) of any advanced nation in the world. Now, when 11.9% of our workforce is unionized, we have the largest
Is this progress?
Let's think long and hard before we blame unions for the city's and the nation's economic problems
Mark Naison
Thursday, March 10, 2011
How Gentrification Has Destroyed Biggie’s Brooklyn
This is a wonderful tribute to Biggie, but it understates how much Brooklyn has changed since Biggie died! Bottom line, gentrification is remaking Biggie's old haunts, and JZ's old haunts, so that they are unrecognizable. Have you been to the Marcy Projects recently? It is surrounded by new housing developments put up by Williamsburg Hasidim, and more recently, by luxury housing aimed at yuppies priced out of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. No great MC is going to come out of Marcy. We will be lucky, once the budget cuts come to public housing from Congressional Republicans, if most of Marcy's current residents aren't evicted
Everything you say in the piece about the continuing influence of Biggie's music is on point, but the Brooklyn that produced Biggie may be gone forever. All of North Brooklyn from Park Slope, to Red Hook, to Gowanus and Cobble Hill, to Prospect Heights and Fort Greene, to Bed Stuy and Bushwick, to Williamsburg and Greenpoint, have been transformed so that people who lived there 20 years ago wouldn't recognize them. And those people are being forced out, almost daily by rising rents. Black working class Brooklyn has been scattered and pushed South. You find it now, in dense concentrations only in Flatbush, Canarsie and East New York Public housing is also under assault. As section 8 subsidies are eliminated and funding for services are cut, the city will increasing plan to convert projects to market level housing
As for the music, your tributes to Biggies significance lyrically and musically, sent chills through me. But can you imagine a celebration for a deceased Brooklyn rapper. Brooklyn rapper taking place on Fulton Street today? Have you been to Fulton Street lately. One boutique and cute cafe after another.
And Sara J Hale HS where Biggie used to hang out- and Lil Kim and Big Dady Kane attended-(fondly called Sara Jail back in the day) has been divided into a whole bunch of mini schools some of which serve the fast growing population of yuppies in Gowanus and Cobble Hill.!
Look, no one will mourn the passing of the crack epidemic and the murders that accompanied it. But today's New York is the most unequal city on the planet and its young people of color have been scattered and divided and hyper policed to the point that they have virtually no voice in the public domain. Damn, Brooklyn doesn't even produce good basketball players any more, how can it produce great rappers
A little more rage, my brother, a little more rage. We've lost something precious and we have to COME HARD to get it back
Notorious Phd
This is a wonderful tribute to Biggie, but it understates how much Brooklyn has changed since Biggie died! Bottom line, gentrification is remaking Biggie's old haunts, and JZ's old haunts, so that they are unrecognizable. Have you been to the Marcy Projects recently? It is surrounded by new housing developments put up by Williamsburg Hasidim, and more recently, by luxury housing aimed at yuppies priced out of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. No great MC is going to come out of Marcy. We will be lucky, once the budget cuts come to public housing from Congressional Republicans, if most of Marcy's current residents aren't evicted
Everything you say in the piece about the continuing influence of Biggie's music is on point, but the Brooklyn that produced Biggie may be gone forever. All of North Brooklyn from Park Slope, to Red Hook, to Gowanus and Cobble Hill, to Prospect Heights and Fort Greene, to Bed Stuy and Bushwick, to Williamsburg and Greenpoint, have been transformed so that people who lived there 20 years ago wouldn't recognize them. And those people are being forced out, almost daily by rising rents. Black working class Brooklyn has been scattered and pushed South. You find it now, in dense concentrations only in Flatbush, Canarsie and East New York Public housing is also under assault. As section 8 subsidies are eliminated and funding for services are cut, the city will increasing plan to convert projects to market level housing
As for the music, your tributes to Biggies significance lyrically and musically, sent chills through me. But can you imagine a celebration for a deceased Brooklyn rapper. Brooklyn rapper taking place on Fulton Street today? Have you been to Fulton Street lately. One boutique and cute cafe after another.
And Sara J Hale HS where Biggie used to hang out- and Lil Kim and Big Dady Kane attended-(fondly called Sara Jail back in the day) has been divided into a whole bunch of mini schools some of which serve the fast growing population of yuppies in Gowanus and Cobble Hill.!
Look, no one will mourn the passing of the crack epidemic and the murders that accompanied it. But today's New York is the most unequal city on the planet and its young people of color have been scattered and divided and hyper policed to the point that they have virtually no voice in the public domain. Damn, Brooklyn doesn't even produce good basketball players any more, how can it produce great rappers
A little more rage, my brother, a little more rage. We've lost something precious and we have to COME HARD to get it back
Notorious Phd
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
For All Those Waiting for Hip Hop, She’s Here” Akua Naru’s show at Rodrigue’s Café
Shows We Are Not Prisoners of Hip Hop’s Conventions and Cliches”
Last night, poet and rapper Akua Naru gave a lecture and performance in an intimate club setting on Fordham University’s Bronx Campus. The club, Rodrigue’s café, is set up like a living room, with couches and lounge chairs and enough floor space so maybe forty or fifty people could sit with their legs crossed. An unusual place for a hip hop performance, but then again Akua Naru is not your ordinary hip hop performer. Part poet (think Sonia Sanchez), part novelist ( think ToniMorrison) part jazz singer( think Billie Holliday) and part battle rapper ( think Lady of Rage) this artist kept an audience of 70 Fordham students mesmerized with stories told in prose and rhyme. In all my years at Fordham, I have only heard one other person combine lecture and performance that way without missing a beat –literally- and that was the great jazz percussionist and composer Bobby Sanabria.
But this was hip hop, not jazz. And hip hop as we know, is responsible for dumbing down and corrupting the great musical and poetic traditions of the African Diaspora, for privileging acquisitive individualism over communal solidarity, for sanctioning violence against women and reducing the metaphorical richness of African American speech to the mindless repetition of race and gender based epithets.
But when it comes to hip hop stereotypes, Akua Naru breaks the mold. Slim, dark skinned, with long dreads and a funky style of dress that more befits a doctoral student in American studies- which she is- than a stage performer, Naru draws in her audience through the richness of her imagery, the dexterity and speed of her rhymes, and her sly but infectious sense of humor. You have to listen pretty carefully to capture all the literary references and plays on words, but the subjects, whether they be drive by shootings, backyard barbecues, or slave auctions are so vividly rendered that you find yourself transported into different places and times. But those moments of reverie are short lived because you find your shoulders moving and your feet tapping to the beat. Naru is more like a sorcerer than a preacher. She takes you to the strangest places and reaches into corners where you worked hard to keep your emotions hidden, and by the end you are totally in her power, but she never raises her voice. You have been mesmerized by poetry set to rhythm. Think Billie Holliday; think Sam Cooke, think Ibrahim Ferrer ( Buena Vista Social Club) think the Odyssey. Different worlds open up to you, separated by space and time, and different emotions, too. No matter who you are, if you have an imagination and a heart, you become part of Black Women’s Historic Journey.
So this is hip hop, you say. It will never get on BET. It will never be on stage at Yankee Stadium. It will never be the sound track of the dance party or the strip club. You won’t hear it in Las Vegas, or when jeeps cruise the strip with the music on at top volume
But this night at Fordham University, in this small club, it is everything people ever dreamed of when they thought of what art can do to enhance the richness of human experience and expand the boundaries of imagination.
Or as Arkua Naru put it, in a song from her new album “For all those waiting for Hip Hop- She’s Here”
Mark Naison
March 9, 2011
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Shows We Are Not Prisoners of Hip Hop’s Conventions and Cliches”
Last night, poet and rapper Akua Naru gave a lecture and performance in an intimate club setting on Fordham University’s Bronx Campus. The club, Rodrigue’s café, is set up like a living room, with couches and lounge chairs and enough floor space so maybe forty or fifty people could sit with their legs crossed. An unusual place for a hip hop performance, but then again Akua Naru is not your ordinary hip hop performer. Part poet (think Sonia Sanchez), part novelist ( think ToniMorrison) part jazz singer( think Billie Holliday) and part battle rapper ( think Lady of Rage) this artist kept an audience of 70 Fordham students mesmerized with stories told in prose and rhyme. In all my years at Fordham, I have only heard one other person combine lecture and performance that way without missing a beat –literally- and that was the great jazz percussionist and composer Bobby Sanabria.
But this was hip hop, not jazz. And hip hop as we know, is responsible for dumbing down and corrupting the great musical and poetic traditions of the African Diaspora, for privileging acquisitive individualism over communal solidarity, for sanctioning violence against women and reducing the metaphorical richness of African American speech to the mindless repetition of race and gender based epithets.
But when it comes to hip hop stereotypes, Akua Naru breaks the mold. Slim, dark skinned, with long dreads and a funky style of dress that more befits a doctoral student in American studies- which she is- than a stage performer, Naru draws in her audience through the richness of her imagery, the dexterity and speed of her rhymes, and her sly but infectious sense of humor. You have to listen pretty carefully to capture all the literary references and plays on words, but the subjects, whether they be drive by shootings, backyard barbecues, or slave auctions are so vividly rendered that you find yourself transported into different places and times. But those moments of reverie are short lived because you find your shoulders moving and your feet tapping to the beat. Naru is more like a sorcerer than a preacher. She takes you to the strangest places and reaches into corners where you worked hard to keep your emotions hidden, and by the end you are totally in her power, but she never raises her voice. You have been mesmerized by poetry set to rhythm. Think Billie Holliday; think Sam Cooke, think Ibrahim Ferrer ( Buena Vista Social Club) think the Odyssey. Different worlds open up to you, separated by space and time, and different emotions, too. No matter who you are, if you have an imagination and a heart, you become part of Black Women’s Historic Journey.
So this is hip hop, you say. It will never get on BET. It will never be on stage at Yankee Stadium. It will never be the sound track of the dance party or the strip club. You won’t hear it in Las Vegas, or when jeeps cruise the strip with the music on at top volume
But this night at Fordham University, in this small club, it is everything people ever dreamed of when they thought of what art can do to enhance the richness of human experience and expand the boundaries of imagination.
Or as Arkua Naru put it, in a song from her new album “For all those waiting for Hip Hop- She’s Here”
Mark Naison
March 9, 2011
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Thursday, March 3, 2011
How Public School Budget Cuts Herald the End of Equality in the United States- Even As an Ideal
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
Throughout the United States, the nation’s public school system is being savaged by budget cuts that will make a mockery of federal legislation designed to reduce the achievement gap between children in low income and high income districts.
In Detroit Michigan, the school district has been told by the state to close half of its schools to close a 347 million dollar deficit, leading to high school classes that could contain as many as 60 students. Providence Rhode Island just handed out pink slips to its nearly 2,000 teachers to reduce its deficit; and Austin Texas may do the same in a response to a ten percent reduction in state funding. And in thousands of school districts throughout the country, teachers are being fired, sports and arts programs are being shut down, AP classes are being cancelled, and class size is going through the roof while state and local governments radically cut education funding to balance their budgets.
Make no mistake about it, these budget cuts will have a disproportionate effect in the poorest school districts, where parents depend on schools to impart skills, which because of educational background or language issues, they often lack. You cut arts and science programs in a upper middle class school district, parents will compensate by finding private tutors or funding additional classes through the PTA. In poor neighborhoods, once such programs are gone, they are gone for good. You can squeeze the teachers in poor districts all you want to produce magical results on test days; as opportunities to give students individual attention and special training in arts and science disappear, the test score gap will grow wider, the dropout rate will increase, and college admission from such districts will plummet.
What makes this a bitter pill to swallow that the Dream these budget cuts will destroy was one nurtured by a Republican President, George W Bush. Never mind that the dream was based on false data the Houston school district, never mind that it was used, by politicians, business leaders and the media, to divert attention from confronting sources of inequality outside the school system; it still held as a goal the fact that every child in America had the right to a great education and an opportunity to attend college if they took advantage of that opportunity.
Now that very Dream is in Tatters, not just because of the decision they made to cut public school budgets- but because of the decision they didn’t make, to TAX THE RICH. Make no mistake about it, in every state where these budget cuts are being made, the vast majority of these cuts could have been avoided if taxes were raised on the wealthiest five percent of the population, who control nearly 40 percent of national income! Yet in state after state throughout this country, as well as in the Congress of the United States, such taxes were declared “off limits” by politicians of both parties.
Let us be very blunt about the consequences of this choice. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern US history, our political leadership has decided to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice while tragically weakening the one avenue our society had identified for reducing inequality in the nation-our public schools.
Not only is it profoundly immoral to impose hardship on the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, targeting schools for such huge cuts does violence to the very ideal of Equality of Opportunity which once used to unite Liberals and Conservatives.
If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working class children are doomed, by inferior training, to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.
I don’t know about you, but this sounds more like the Ancien Order in France or Pre-Revolutionary Russia than the a country which Abraham Lincoln once praised “for lifting artificial burdens off the shoulders of men.”
The American Dream is dying before our eyes.
Will we have the courage to rescue it?
Mark Naison
March 3, 2011
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
Throughout the United States, the nation’s public school system is being savaged by budget cuts that will make a mockery of federal legislation designed to reduce the achievement gap between children in low income and high income districts.
In Detroit Michigan, the school district has been told by the state to close half of its schools to close a 347 million dollar deficit, leading to high school classes that could contain as many as 60 students. Providence Rhode Island just handed out pink slips to its nearly 2,000 teachers to reduce its deficit; and Austin Texas may do the same in a response to a ten percent reduction in state funding. And in thousands of school districts throughout the country, teachers are being fired, sports and arts programs are being shut down, AP classes are being cancelled, and class size is going through the roof while state and local governments radically cut education funding to balance their budgets.
Make no mistake about it, these budget cuts will have a disproportionate effect in the poorest school districts, where parents depend on schools to impart skills, which because of educational background or language issues, they often lack. You cut arts and science programs in a upper middle class school district, parents will compensate by finding private tutors or funding additional classes through the PTA. In poor neighborhoods, once such programs are gone, they are gone for good. You can squeeze the teachers in poor districts all you want to produce magical results on test days; as opportunities to give students individual attention and special training in arts and science disappear, the test score gap will grow wider, the dropout rate will increase, and college admission from such districts will plummet.
What makes this a bitter pill to swallow that the Dream these budget cuts will destroy was one nurtured by a Republican President, George W Bush. Never mind that the dream was based on false data the Houston school district, never mind that it was used, by politicians, business leaders and the media, to divert attention from confronting sources of inequality outside the school system; it still held as a goal the fact that every child in America had the right to a great education and an opportunity to attend college if they took advantage of that opportunity.
Now that very Dream is in Tatters, not just because of the decision they made to cut public school budgets- but because of the decision they didn’t make, to TAX THE RICH. Make no mistake about it, in every state where these budget cuts are being made, the vast majority of these cuts could have been avoided if taxes were raised on the wealthiest five percent of the population, who control nearly 40 percent of national income! Yet in state after state throughout this country, as well as in the Congress of the United States, such taxes were declared “off limits” by politicians of both parties.
Let us be very blunt about the consequences of this choice. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern US history, our political leadership has decided to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice while tragically weakening the one avenue our society had identified for reducing inequality in the nation-our public schools.
Not only is it profoundly immoral to impose hardship on the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, targeting schools for such huge cuts does violence to the very ideal of Equality of Opportunity which once used to unite Liberals and Conservatives.
If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working class children are doomed, by inferior training, to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.
I don’t know about you, but this sounds more like the Ancien Order in France or Pre-Revolutionary Russia than the a country which Abraham Lincoln once praised “for lifting artificial burdens off the shoulders of men.”
The American Dream is dying before our eyes.
Will we have the courage to rescue it?
Mark Naison
March 3, 2011
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