"Keeping It Real": Being Stupid On Purpose

Can you believe that there are black people out here in the blogosphere who are now BLAMING OBAMA, LIKE THEY DID COSBY, FOR TELLING BLACK PEOPLE THAT WE NEED TO FOCUS ON GETTING AN EDUCATION?

Is there that much status in being stupid?

In being stupid ON PURPOSE?

Do you see any rappers still living on the streets they came from?

Hell no!

So why brainwash our children into believing that attitude and swagger mean anything when they have no brainpower to back them up, no knowledge base upon which to anchor them, and no way to communicate with the rest of the GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT ENGLISH speaking world, whether they are white, black or brown?

If "taking it to the streets" is all we are, then kill me now.

I've been hearing all this talk around the internet today about how the education we get here in the U.S. is "Eurocentric", but most motherfuckers who can't read don't really know anything about Africa except kente cloth, Roots, and the STUFF THEY SEE ON TV that has been programmed by the same "whitey" they swear they are afraid of acting like.

Nobody here is going back to Africa. I live in Atlanta, and the line for the one-way flights back to Africa is mighty, mighty short. Maybe they are swimming back these days. But believe me, NOBODY is headed back to Africa, despite all the "Afrocentric" rhetoric. Certainly not anybody I see standing on the corner, talking about "The Man" who is holding him down.

Why is an education important? Because these "black businesses" my crazy as a loon brethren are so in love with, the ones our phonetically challenged, mathematics deficient urbanites are going to simply pull out of their asses, cannot be financed by taking a loan out on a collection of Air Jordans.

But you CAN start a business IN THE HOOD with practically no money if you have an education. Brand new lawyers who have next to no experience hang out their shingles everyday. Young doctors with 125K in loans do it and can get paid Year One if they take Medicaid patients, which our HOODS are full of. Even if you don't get that far in school, you can either learn how to navigate the government grant system to get a loan to rehab your block, or start a small retail shop - BUT ONLY IF YOU CAN READ.

If I was Martin Luther King, Jr., or the beloved Malcolm X that so many dumb ass thug wannabees holler about while they wave their 9mm's around, killing up US, our own black people IN THE HOOD with impunity, I'd look down on their ridiculous asses and say "damn all of you fools who don't know any better than to believe this bullshit."

Malcolm didn't get to be Malcolm cause he sold drugs or wore a conk. He got to be Malcolm because when his ass could have been rotting in that jail, he took the time to master the language of the land, one word at a time.

Every African in Africa who has a bit of sense and the middle class luxuries many of us here in the States enjoy know two, three, or more languages, and they live on the biggest continent in the world. REAL AFRICANS have no fear of Eurocentric educations, enrolling at Oxford by the dozens whenever they can wangle admission.

So what the hell are we afraid of? Is our poverty and ignorance so precious to us that we simply can't bear to part with them? Can't we just get a wing for this shit at the Smithsonian Institute, so you can go look at it from time to time when you get nostalgic?

If you can learn to cook crack properly, you can learn to be a pharmaceutical technician, and mix legal drugs.

If you can hotwire a car, you can learn to pull conduit and wire a house.

And if you write rap songs, SINCE YOU PROBABLY AREN'T GOING TO GET A RECORDING CONTRACT, you can learn how to understand iambic pentameter, alliteration and onomatopoeia. Which means you can probably learn how to teach the next generation of Downtown Browns how to read.

The only reason you tunnel vision, "keeping it real" Negroes even have half a chance to spew this nonsense about RayRay in the HOOD not giving a damn about an education 'cause someone like Sarah Palin is revered for knowing nothing - guess what, it's because a whole lot of EDUCATED NEGROES took one for the team for the last hundred and fifty years, all the way back to Frederick Douglass, a real "G" if their ever was one. Douglass, A FORMER SLAVE, was the owner of one of the largest private libraries in D.C., "keeping it real" one page at a time.

And I don't think Douglass hankered for one minute after that plantation he escaped.

So to all of you internet naysayers who think President Obama "overstepped his bounds", take these nursery rhyme fantasies back where you got them and quit fooling our black youth. What happens to the Sarah Palins of the world has no relevance for the average Joe "I Don't Know" Negro.

For every Sarah Palin who barely crawled out of college and blinked her way into making it big, there are three white chicks who get treated like total tricks when their ignorance shows, because all white chicks don't look like Sarah after having 5 kids, and if you don't believe how she looks didn't have anything to do with her skating her way into the governors mansion, I've got a stack of Martin Luther King's paper's to sell you.

Predicating the importance of the educations of our children on whether or not white people are overlooking these same standards for themselves is illogical. Not kinda dumb, not sorta stupid – it's the most idiotic motherfucking reasoning I can think of for just throwing in the towel on a whole generation of black kids.

The people - slaves, remember them - whose educations were eked out by candlelight when their lives were at stake didn't worry about how white men looked out for each other even if the ones who needed looking out for the most WERE stupid, BECAUSE THOSE SLAVES KNEW HOW POWERFUL IT WAS TO BE ABLE TO FIGURE OUT THE MORE COMPLEX THINGS IN THIS WORLD FOR THEMSELVES. Even if they had no freedom with which to use this knowledge.

If you are wrong, and many of us are wrong, a lot - then I owe it to you to give it to you straight. Your president owes it to you. Bill Cosby owes it to you. Lil Wayne owes it to you too - to tell you you've got a better chance of being in the NBA than having a hit rap record.

Maybe Jamie Foxx can give us a remix - "Blame It On The AC...AC-AC-AC...AC-ACADEMICS"

An education doesn't guarantee any particular job or income level, though - I'll be the first to admit that - but what it does do is provide its recipient with a better ability to see the machinations and complexities of the world for what they really are. And for many of our children, who are currently looking through poverty colored glasses, that little bit of improvement in their vision is all they need to see their way forward to their next way station in life.

So for my money, you Negroes who can make up any old bullshit reason why we shouldn't be putting on a fucking Carlton Banks outfit if we have to in order to get the knowledge we need can go catch one of those "keeping it real" bullets that always seem to be flying around the hood.

The only thing that will be "good in the hood" is when the last light in the last project finally goes out forever.

They play rap music in the suburbs too.

Cats at my Starbucks wear more Sean John than black folks.

We would still be black, though, if we had never rapped, break danced, ate collard greens or corn bread, or even if we had never once ripped a jazz solo.

Trust me.

Rush The Magic Ego

My buddy called me Tuesday afternoon. There was a little anger in his voice.

"Who are these people who listen to Rush Limbaugh? Aren't they the same people who have retirement accounts and stocks and bonds that are way down right now?"

"Dude, the niche market that Limbaugh talks to everyday figure you are the reason why their stocks are down."

"What?"

"You think I'm kidding - how many times have you heard the cause of the mortgage crisis was Community Reinvestment Act lending? 'Weakness in the moral fiber of minority communities caused stock market collapse' is the kind of shit you might be hearing soon."

My buddy paused for a minute, sighed, then asked, "have you been following this thing with Rush Limbaugh?"

"Which thing?"

"You know,” he continued, "the thing with the brother who is the RNC chairman - Michael Steele. What the hell is this?" It bothered him to no end that Limbaugh had the last word in this sparring through the media "If Steele is supposed to be the head of the RNC, then isn't he the head of the party? And if he’s the head of the party, then why is he apologizing to Limbaugh? A man doesn't do that."

And just like that, he had come to the crux of the matter. My buddy, who normally could care less about what was going on with the Republican Party, was steaming mad because Steele was not acting the way he thought a real man should, especially when Limbaugh wasn’t officially anything but a radio host.

"Dude," I said, "you’ve lived down here in the South for a long time, but you don't get it yet. You, you look at the president, and you see a well educated, intelligent, thoughtful, organized, motivated black man who has just as much right as anybody else to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

But there are quite a few people in this country who see Buckwheat.

A Buckwheat who outsmarted their all-time favorite enemy, the Wicked Witch form Arkansas. To them, Obama is Buckwheat with a haircut and a blue suit on. Do you remember the Little Rascals? Buckwheat was cool with Spanky and the gang so long as they could laugh at him. Could you imagine him trying to take Spanky's place?"

"Then what the hell is Steele there for? Why would he stay in a job like that when he has no power? That brother needs to resign. Just quit."

"The kind of brother you want him to be doesn't get to be the head of the RNC. Although as you were talking, I was wondering how old J.C. Watts would have handled this if he had been in the same position."

For all the square jawed, resolute eyed men you normally associate with the Republican Party, these last two national minority representatives of the GOP do not fit the mold. Steele and Jindal do not have the "take no prisoners", "bulldozer" type of mentality that we often identify with Republican Party leaders. They do not look like the kind of men who are willing to take as much punishment as they dish out.

For that matter, Limbaugh doesn't either, but then again, he's never had to be elected to anything. His value isn't just followers - it is his ability to get people to send millions of dollars to a candidate or a cause, millions that Steele and Jindal can't generate, that comprises the real throne Limbaugh sits on.

"Dude," I continued, "you know how I am about this kind of stuff, since my father is a Republican. I don't take railing against Republicans lightly. But I don't think this is really about the Republican Party. Limbaugh might have dropped out of college, but even he can count – a 131 million people voted in the last election. It was a big turnout - there probably will be a whole lot less people voting in 2012 - but the 13 million or 14 million listeners he has have a problem.

They don't multiply well."

The kind of person who is a true believer in the stuff Limbaugh says are the kind of people who turn others off with their fanatical ideological rigidity. What the Republicans need right now are the kind of people who can turn people on."

Rush Limbaugh is well on his way to becoming another in a long line of men, like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, or Eugene McCarthy, who reach an apogee as a social change agent and then harden in place, their stances becoming more anachronistic by the day as the winds of change inevitably blow society in another direction until they turned into caricatures of their former selves.

It hit me later, when I was reading an interview Mr. Limbaugh did last year for the London Telegraph at his radio studio in Florida, that he is to politics what Richard Pryor was to comedy – an entertainer on the edge who is willing go into the political unknown. "That Cracker's Crazy", a play on Pryor's famous comedy album "That Nigger's Crazy" leaped into my head. If you watch Limbaugh's facial expressions while he's speaking, you quickly see that he has the comedian's instinct for satirical irony, a distinction that some of his listening audience is not always so quick to recognize.

When you look at all of the facets of Limbaugh's life that he compresses into the energy powering his three hour radio show everyday – his hearing loss, his multiple marriages, his larger than life father and grandfather, the drug abuse, his fear of being labeled a "racist" – you realize, the same way you did with Richard Pryor, that this is what living on the edge looks like.

'I don't have guests on my show because I don't care what other people think,' he tells me. 'Most guests are boring.' But it's not only others he is bored with, it is also, perhaps, himself. This may be what explains his recklessness, his bravado, his determination to say the unsayable. And perhaps it also explains why he never misses a beat, until you draw him out about himself — how he is difficult to live with, how he cried when his cat died, how, to his surprise, he found it helpful talking to a therapist. Only then does he hesitate.


Excerpt from the Telegraph.co.uk

Limbaugh seems to be the cat's meow right now, but he is as vulnerable as these men were. One of the worst things you can do is turn a friend into an enemy, because they know all your weak spots and all your intimate secrets. And when Limbaugh's political friends begin to realize that the Obama agenda is to actively continue to expand the electorate in the hopes of capturing even more congressional seats for the Democrats, while all they have is "1 X 1 = 1", the GOP hatchet men will be out for the frat boy with a vengeance as they try to keep the party from dying.

If Steele goes, at least he can say he was there. But if he stays on, he can shelve the hip hop initiative. Cancel the urban outreach. Just quit throwing good money after bad. Because the image that is playing in the minds of many black American men right now is not a good one.

"Mike Check, One Two One Two"

My buddy called me Tuesday night. "Hey man-"

I cut him off. "You calling me about that damn Jessie Jackson, ain't you?"

"Did you see this negro?"

Naw, but I've been reading about it on the internet. Just when you think this election can't
get any crazier-"

"So you didn't see it?" my buddy asked me, sounding as if he was unable to comprehend
why my eyes weren't glued to my TV.

"No."

"You've GOT to see his face."

"Didn't I tell you this was going to get wild?"

"I don't think we we've really seen crazy yet. Dude, these are BLACK FOLKS doing this!
Can you imagine what'll happen once the white folks chime in?"

"Yeah," I said, "it's going to be a long year."

The first thing most of us who are not public speakers do when we come across a live microphone is talk into it. It is exciting - for those of us who do not speak to crowds
from stages, who do not wear clip-on microphones while being interviewed, who are not used to press conferences, where dozens of microphones are stuck at us all at once - to hear the sound of our amplified voice, even if it is being projected into an empty auditorium.

Some of us blow on them.

Some of us say "testing, one two three testing" if we are older, or "mic check one two one two" if we are younger.

Sooner or later, almost all of us come to realize, even if there are only a few people around, that talking in front of a crowd is harder than it looks.

But for the verbally agile microphone fiends who earn their daily bread speaking into them, they are as familiar as your cell phone is to you.

Jessie Jackson has been speaking into microphones his whole life. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he THOUGHT the mic was off, as he says. Or maybe someone was out to play a trick on him, as those in the media are wont to do.

Despite the pinstriped suits, the silk ties, the carefully barbered hair, and the manicured hands, Jackson has always had a certain country boy coarseness about him, a rough and ready air that has contributed to his distinctive persona.

It was the set of the jaw muscles in Jessie Jackson's face as he made the now famous gesture of a farm boy gelding a hog that had me laughing out loud as I watched the Youtube clip. The words he said were almost inconsequential when it got to the sudden upward wrenching motion that he made with his right arm, right there on camera for all the world to see.

Whatever the reason, the raw, naked thought that probably ran through his head and sprung from his lips almost simultaneously - "I'm going to cut his nuts off" will live on forever in sound bite land, alongside "Hymietown" and the photo of him embracing Momar Qaddafi.

The thing that bothers me the most about this is the glee with which the mainstream political pundits have seized upon this off-camera moment, boiling this down to the same old binary analysis – “Obama good, Jackson bad,” as if the only people worthy of supporting Obama have to be seen wearing their halos of devotion at all times.

If that’s the case, Obama’s surrogates can “renounce and reject” me right now, because I have moments, as I am sure all of you do, when I am VERY unhappy with something he’s said or something he’s done. The FISA crowd, as aggravating as they have been, are SUPPOSED to criticize Obama when they feel they have been wronged by a stance he takes. I myself am starting to get riled by the weekly apologies Obama seems to offer to some maligned group or cause.

The look on Jackson’s face at the press conference he held to express regret about his actions was as telling as the violent thrust of his shoulder was on the FOX videotape. He looked as if he could see his own future in this fall's campaign, his powerful voice of advocacy muted by his own carelessness, by his own all-too-human envy.

George Carlin: Political Animal

"These days many politicians are demanding change. Just like homeless people."

George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Even die-hard Obamaholics have to appreciate the irony in that joke. George Carlin's biography has been plastered all over the airwaves and the newspapers the last few days. Most of it is concerned with a chronological ordering of his accomplishments - you can check out any of the major news networks if you want a blow by blow of his life story. From where I sit, his relentless questioning of the status quo - "taking it to 'The Man'" - gave him his counterculture persona, but it was the inventive way in which he examined our everyday lives that made him famous.

"Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?"

I saw him in the eighties, when he came to my college to do one of those shows the student union put with the student dues they collected. I'd never heard of him. One of my pals from Detroit was incredulous. "You've never seen Carlin? Man, you would REALLY like him! He's more intellectual than the average comedian, dude. I CAN'T BELIEVE you've never heard Carlin!"

We went to the show, and Carlin was as advertised - his riff on "the importance of stuff" is still funny. He was only just turning fifty one but he already looked old, with the graying ponytail, the gonzo beard, and his trademark black outfit.

"This country was founded by a group of slave owners who wanted to be. Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free! So they killed a lot of white English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people, in order to move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto for this country ought to be? 'You give us a color, we'll wipe it out.'"

Carlin was as much a political animal as he was a comedian. A self-avowed atheist, in later years his comedy seemed to be one long rant against religion and government.

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality.

They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.'"

As sour as Carlin's joke sounds, though, in real life, in a March interview at Huffington Post, Carlin professed "Yes, I think the Obama story is an inspirational story, it's a wonderfully unique American story and it's exciting and fun to watch but even if he's elected and makes a lot of changes I still retain the right not to belong. I just like it out here."

Even though Carlin loved being anti-everything, I figured a guy like him would be on the O-Train.

The Finish Line Has Moved - 64 To Go

Delegates:	Pledged	Super	Total	Needed
Obama	1,724.5	328.5	2,053	64
Clinton	1,586.5	290	1,876.5	240.5
Remaining	86	205	291
(2,117 delegates needed for victory)

183 To Go

183 to go.



That’s the number I stayed up until three o’clock in the morning ON A WEEKNIGHT to find out. That’s the number of delegates of any variety – pledged, super, rocky road, mint chocolate chip – that Barack Obama’s campaign needs to be able to plant the flag of victory at the Democratic National Convention later this year.


If you watched the Hillary Clinton victory speech in Indianapolis last night, you saw what I saw – a woman who was going through the motions as she spoke, her voice hollow, her posture limp, her eyes vacant as she willed herself to recite the meaningless campaign rhetoric to a crowd who could barely fake the listless level of enthusiasm they showed. Her husband’s face was red, his crimson cheeks and cherry colored forehead much more revealing than the professional politician’s innocuous smile he wore as she droned on about her will to win, her resolve to stay in the race, and her need, now more than ever, for more money to continue her odyssey towards the nomination.


I was on the phone with my brother as she spoke, spinning an alcohol-induced conspiracy theory about the lone county in Indiana that was refusing to report ANY vote totals as we got closer to midnight. I stopped in mid ramble – “Dude, this sounds like a concession speech – let me call you back!” – as her halting words came through the speakers. I didn’t need the detail of high definition TV to see her in a way the majority of the political commentators tried desperately to avoid describing accurately.



183 to go.



I think in a lot of ways it is harder for those of the pundit class to accept the fact that Hillary Clinton has absolutely no chance of earning – I’ll say it again here, EARNING – the Democratic nomination as the candidate the party will back for the presidency of the United States of America than it will be for the man in the street. These people have had to face the thing that the rest of America has been able to avoid up to this point – that in November, if you want to support the Democratic presidential candidate, you will be touching that screen or pulling that lever or checking that box for a man with brown skin.


If its still hard for me, a confessed political junkie these past few months, to deal with the enormousness of a black man who is one step away from being the president of this country, I know it must be three times as hard for those who have always expected to be led by someone who looks like them instead of someone who looks like me.



183 to go.



The Clinton campaign has canceled Hillary’s round of post primary public appearances on TV and radio that were scheduled to begin in a few hours. If you heard what I heard in the tone of Hillary Clinton’s voice as she claimed victory for the Indiana primary, you would recognize the sound of a woman who is wondering what just happened.

I know the feeling myself.

Although the campaign I ran for student body president of my high school almost twenty five years ago was not in the same league as a presidential bid, the dynamics were similar. I was the favored candidate, with lavish red, white and blue trimmed campaign boaters my supporters fought over, professionally rendered campaign posters, a slick slogan, and access to the school intercom as a voice behind the morning announcements. My opponent was a girl from across the tracks who was never organized and always late to everything.

In a student body of two thousand students, I lost by twelve votes.

The student council advisor was almost in tears. “I counted them three times,” she said to me. “I’m sorry.”

I had been so sure of victory that I had worn one of my campaign boaters to her office. How could I have lost? What went wrong? Who the hell were the thirteen idiots who couldn’t see that I was the better candidate?

After the anger faded I was embarrassed, ashamed that I had thought so much of myself, and humiliated by the thought of being beat by someone with less advantages on her side. It took awhile for me to see the things I’d done wrong. The things I’d ignored. And to understand that I had put more faith in symbols, like campaign hats, than the kind of substance that could make a few more students believe.

Mrs. Clinton has lived in another world, one that some have dubbed HillaryLand, for the past fifteen months. Emerging from the confines of this cocoon will be painful. It will be embarrassing, even though she will try not to show it.

She will survive.


Meanwhile, the O-Man will continue on his quest – on our quest – to be seated behind the desk in the Oval Office.


No red, white and blue trimmed Styrofoam boaters required.

Does Obama Need To Come Out Hard Against Rev Wright?

My buddy and I went at it this morning. He wants Obama to come out hard - not to denounce Wright, or dissassociate himself from Wright, but to tell Wright publicly that he needs to "shut his mouth" for the good of the campaign.

I couldn't believe I was hearing this come out of my pal's mouth - he is an accomplished lawyer who has been the campaign manager for a couple of local judiciary elections himself.

"Dude," I said, "there is NO way he can say that."

"What do you mean he can't say that? If he can't show the American people that he can handle one loud mouth negro, then why should they believe that he can rule the country?"

"Come on, man," I said. "You cannot manhandle a negro like this. He doesn't have anything to lose. And he will use whatever you do against you, to show how he has defied yet another attempt by 'The Man' or his surrogates to silence someone who is speaking truth to power. That's the new black political phrase, you know - 'speak truth to power'."

We went back and forth awhile, until the need to get back to work intruded on our argument.

There is a reason Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, Sidney Poitier was Hollywood's first leading man, and Obama is likely to be the first black Democratic nominee for president, the same reason that Michael Jordan still gets more love from NBA fans than Shaq, Kobe, and Iverson combined, the same reason that Tiger Woods has the fans twenty deep around the greens.

My buddy wants Obama to show some teeth to Wright. I think its a waste of time, that the news cycles are so short now that this will die back down next week of its own accord, especially after the primary results come in and everyone has to re-handicap Hillary's odds of winning the nomination.

Now, if Obama had gotten to where he is today by being direct, by being forthright, by confronting issues head on, I might have had some kind of reason to agree with my buddy.

To ask a man to do something against his nature is the worst kind of political pandering, especially if its sole reason is to "look presidential". We haven't had a coalition building president in a long time. I am finding it refreshing that we have someone who does not have to resort to he-man antics to get his point across. The warrior king is a relic. Our presidents these days are exactly what the title says they are - chief executive officers.

If Jackie Robinson had thrown things back at the people who threw things at him from the bleachers, had hunted down those who made death threats against him, had taken his bat to the players who taunted him on the field with racial epithets, he wouldn't have lived as long as he did - hell, he wouldn't have played as long as he did.

If Michael Jordan had supported Jessie Jackson for president - publicly - if he had divorced his wife years ago and dated the kind of chicks he really wanted - a lot of the air would have been let out of His Airness's image.

Obama and his strategists have done pretty well so far. I think they can get things back on track and continue to execute their gameplan without overhauling the Obama personality at this late date.