Hello Liberator Readers,
I received the following anonymous email response to the Sean Bell shooting verdict, which I think we can all agree is shullbit, but not surprising:
What I'm tired of is people reacting to tragedy with false hope... with lazily organized boycotts and protests, etc...Quit being so reactionary people. Make a plan for 50 years and execute that slowly and steadily. If every time a black man gets killed we reinvent the wheel we ain't going no where for a long ass time. Stop pushing hope like it's crack... We need plans... history... insight... identity... not another protest and corny ass boycott that's organized via email or yahoo groups.Well, that letter is quite a doozy. And according to Dudley Did Right/Diddly Squat/Whatever Sean Combs Is Calling Himself These Days, bitchassness is totally out of style, so I agree that the people who think doing the same ineffective things over and over again is going to solve the rampant police brutality in this country, need to do this, immediately.
Bitch ass bitches.
Now look, I'm not saying this because I'm apathetic and think that we should just sit on our hands in the wake of this verdict. I already posted here about how hurt I was at the outcome of this tragedy. And I was not hurt because the verdict was shocking. I was hurt because, well, I was not shocked. Everyone played their roles to the T and at the end of the day, we have a system where a man can immediately go to jail for torturing animals, but somehow police officers are almost always justified in killing, beating, or maiming unarmed human beings.
Not to say Michael Vick wasn't dead wrong. Torturing animals says a great deal about someone's character, or lack thereof but come on. If we can have months of moral outrage over that unfortunate incident, surely more people can muster up the energy to tell the police you cannot come into our communities and kill a whole generation of fathers, brothers, uncles, nephews, husbands, and cousins simply because you feel like it.
Which leads me to why hope mongers (a.ka. hype mongers or BS Artists) need to sit the eff down and stay down. We're in dire straits, people. We're at the tipping point. I strongly believe 2008 can either be the year we say enough is enough and, like anonymous reader said, make a plan and execute it slowly or it can be the year all hell breaks loose. Kind of like 1968.
The choice is yours, readers. We can either keep doing the same ish that hasn't worked in years---boycotts, rallies, candlelight vigils, everything else that looks sexy on a TV screen and can be reduced to a cause on Facebook or a 30-second sound bite on someone's iPhone OR we can strengthen our communities. Get to know one another. Start caring about each other again. Make the police scared of us, instead of the other way around. How do we do that? I'll give some suggestions:
1) Start a book club. And don't feel like it has to be some humbug nerd session. Definitely read the classics, like DuBois and Ellison and hooks and Camus and Hemingway but don't think you can't throw in a little Zane every now and then. (But for the love of God, no Omar Tyree or Eric Jerome Dickey or Terry McMillan or Street Lit. Unless it's Iceberg Slim, so you know how not to live your life.)
2) Start a movie night with your friends. Again, don't feel like it has to be all arthouse, all the time. Get a Netflix subscription (or support a bootlegger, because if Hollywood still doesn't want to tell the stories of people who aren't Patrick Dempsey, Katherine Heigl, or Scarlett Johansson, then eff 'em and stop giving them your money), invite people over to your house and have fun! We can learn from art, no matter what form it takes.
3) Volunteer. Don't feel like the only time of year to volunteer is the holiday season. You can do something as simple as donate supplies to a local public school, which my mom has been doing for the grade school she went to back in the day. Just wait for all the back to school sales to start in September, and you could help ensure at least one class will have all of its students prepared and ready to go. It always starts with something small, folks. Don't try to take everything on all at once, even if it looks good as a photo op.
4) Donate unused, unread books, or maybe just books you're not interested in anymore. Lately, I've been mailing books because I'm weird and still like to send people things via USPS but you can always go to your local library or nearest school and brighten another bookworm's day.
5) Reach out to family members and friends. I know this is tough, because anyone who doesn't have some kind of family drama is either lying or...well, they're just lying. But we really need to build family networks again. John Donne said "no man is an island" and lately, I've been taking that to heart. Be the bigger person, reach out to family members and old friends, because when we feel like we're alone and no one has our backs, that's when the madness starts.
That's all I have for now, but feel free to leave comments and suggestions for real community building. Because if we want to survive, we need to do the work where it might take decades to see results; work that can't be boiled down to a pithy one-liner. We need to be more like Gus and less like Templeton. And if you get that reference, you're already 50 percent there.
And remember, if you have any personal grievances, or feel something or someone else needs to take a seat, send it to nomorefoolishness (at) liberatormagazine (dot) com. XoXo!
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9 comments:
i have to agree with the commentator. we do the same things over and over and expect a different result, what does that make us?
nice suggestions danielle.
i mentioned in this post: http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/2008/05/village-what-village.html
that i think we should make a regular habit of posting ideas on how people can begin to create organized groups around different activities and common interests.
the fact that the poll on what we should do in light of the verdict said that most people think we should strengthen our communities means that the next step is suggesting specific ways HOW to do that. thanks for the ideas.
Well ... I'm big on the information and communication aspect of community building so my ideas are mainly going to be coming from that perspective. One thing that I've been thinking about is how under-utilized our local black press outlets are.
Wait! Wait! Wait! Let me explain!
I know that there's sort of a sense of disillusionment with them because they're simply not living up to their potential. But historically, the black press has been a major, longstanding institution in our communities. And by golly they have a charge that they still have to live up to.
What I'm suggesting is that in addition to contributing to the liberator print and online, we also literally take what's being said HERE and blast it out to these black press weekly papers which are reaching another segment of our community.
TRUST they are struggling for content. A lot of times they accept and simply reprint unsolicited press releases and "specials" from almost anybody. There are more than 200 papers, and I can see us officially submitting an editorial or one of our posts every week on their deadline either as a letter to the editor or commentary from us here as a collective body (kinda like how KTS did with The Hilltop for a little bit. HU wasn't ready!!! But it was so necessary!)
In conjunction with that, I can also see people doing it on their own timetable for more local issues, like just getting in the habit of writing into their local papers and engaging the community in dialogue; reporting back here; and making that local/national/international connection.
Or, for the current students and budding scholars out there, send your papers that you're working on to the black press newspapers (and cc them to the liberator, of course). I mean, why not??? Cats back in the days were dropping knowledge in these black press newspapers.
I think this can definitely be considered an aspect of community-building because we would be expanding the reach of this very important conversation, even if it's for no other purpose than to provide a balance for otherwise sensational and reactionary rhetoric and reporting; as well as other communication methods that reveal themselves in the form of hope mongering. :)
very dope idea kamille.
the thing with the black press is that they are do disorganized it's hard to know all of the individual deadlines...
and i think the nnpa website and umbrella may be a bit protective to run columns outside of their staff if we asked them to... but i'm down to ask...
the thing is who do we ask? trice-eady? the new editor? or the individual publications?
if the latter, it just seems like we have to get to the work of taking an inventory of black press contacts and deadlines... then i guess we could email the selected liberator column submission out to them all at once....
but then aren't we sorta playing the role of the nnpa??? lol
Definitely don't want to play nnpa's role! LOL.
Re: Individual publication deadlines
I think we could go about this two ways. The first way is to just start big and pick the major black press paper for every city we distribute in and simply call them and ask them their deadlines. It’s only like 8-10 of them: (and I'm just picking randomly from our black press ranking a while back. These don't have to be the ones)
NY Amsterdam News
Philly Inquirer
Chicago Defender
Spokesman-Recorder
Los Angeles Sentinel
The Afro-American
The Washington Informer
Atlanta Voice: I know that their deadlines are on Tuesdays by 6 p.m.
The second way is more of a passive, hands-off approach ... not really concerning ourselves with their deadlines and just submitting to all of them on one day anyway, like on Thursday morning, for example. Whether or not they use it for the very next issue or the one after the next, or if they use it at all, is not really that big of a deal. If it’s of value to them, then they’ll find a way to use it, whether we get it in on deadline or not. This way we won't really be affected by their disorganization anyway.
Re: Who to ask?
I think it functions both ways: The nnpa might receive direct submissions that they post on their sight and the local papers pull it off the wire for their local papers, or sometimes, the local papers might receive direct submissions that they print and post on their web sites and the nnpa sees it and takes notice then they'll post it on their site.
So, I think we could hit it on both fronts. Personally, I think we would have more success with the individual publications, like hitting up the managing editors for the ones listed above, and just rapping with them about their process for editorial submissions. But I also looked at the nnpa Web site and they have op eds from various people, and reps from different institutes and think tanks that are not necessarily on the staff. They have a pretty extensive letters to the editor section as well.
So ... I think there are ways to go about it and I don't think it has to be an extremely involved process, especially since we're not necessarily creating new content, we're just using what we already have and are just pointing folks in the direction. We just have to figure out if it's really worth it especially in relation to other community building ideas that people continue to post or have it be done in conjunction with everything.
Kamille, that is a wonderful idea. And you are so right about the disillusionment factor when it comes to the black press. But maybe if they received some of the ideas we've all been posting online and in print it could spark some kind of renaissance.
And on that note, another idea could be to start encouraging more college students and grad students we know to send in papers to various conferences and symposia, to get younger and more diverse voices heard in academia.
i like the idea of picking the big ones and contacting them...
that way we can actually gauge if they are open to the idea or not...
how do we choose which liberator pieces to pitch them?
should it always be the best? (i.e. the cover story?)
or should there be another one we choose?
danielle, i think we were off to a good start with getting KTS involved with the liberator.
i'm more apt to try and get students to submit their papers to the liberator because i think it bridges the ivory tower of academia with everyday folks who need to be just as much apart of those conversations....
can we put together a similar list of student organizations who we can pitch to? and invite them to submit?
or ought we branch off the "study" section to maybe include solicitation from students for essays?
achali, I really like the idea of encouraging students to submit articles and essays to the Liberator.
I also think the study section could branch off and include academic and research papers submitted by high school, undergrads and grad students.
But I still really do think it's important to maybe regularly compile a list of conferences for students to submit work to. That way people will have more than just one avenue to raise the issues that need to be talked about.
I definitely think we should avoid the ivory tower approach and make sure that "every day" folks can read and respond to these issues.
But at the same time, academia tends to be very insular and stuffy and it could benefit from contributions from younger and more racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse scholars.
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