Viewpoints
- Created on 15 May 2013
A Proud Citizen of Hip Hop
I’ve often debated with myself over the obvious ramifications the Hip Hop lifestyle imposes on society. Still, I proudly raise my flag and declare: I Am a Citizen of Hip Hop. But what does that mean? Does it mean I’m going to wear my pants low, love my hood and support the RAP artist who is No. 1 on the charts?
No, it means I embody the five elements of Hip Hop: the art of MCing, DJing, Graffiti Writing, Break Dancing and my favorite Knowledge. As a citizen, I represent the betterment of the Hip Hop community. I listen to and for authentic skills mixed with sensible lyrics over a complimenting beat. I dress to the occasion; OutKast describes the attitude best, “Ain’t Nobody Dope As Me, I’m Just So Fresh, So Clean.”
I stand on the principle that knowledge reigns supreme over nearly everyone. The most significant jewel I received from Hip Hop was when KRS-ONE’s “You Must Learn” video debuted. It spoke to my soul. He changed the way I looked at education. There is power in that.
Industry veteran DJ Sir Charles Dixon says “Hip Hop did not explode until it hit the Suburbs and it was the demand from the Suburbs that completely changed the game.” Today, more than two-thirds of all Hip Hop recordings are purchased by Whites. It is not an exaggeration to say that Hip Hop might have brought down more racial barriers than some of the famous Civil Rights marches of the 1960s.
For many like me, belonging to Nation of Hip Hop instills deep pride. It makes us believe that we can ourselves and live out our dreams. I had to have the latest, the newest, the first, the best, whatever was better than all the rest. It was motivation to be the greatest Jineea I could be with no disrespect towards or dislike of anyone else.
You had so many different types of artists speaking to different aspect of your personality. “Ladies First,” “Lean on Me,” “I Left my Wallet in El Segundo,, “Sally.” From the outside looking in, I thought if these people can will their way out of the ‘hood, dream about and live an elaborate life, so could I.
Unfortunately, anybody can be an MC. Like Charles said, once the demand for Hip Hop music was coming from the suburbs, the record labels responded to the demand with what they thought would earn them a percentage of this economic cash cow.
Consequently, the message was no longer important – they began creating stories and gimmicks to compete in the market. Everybody wanted in and would do whatever it took to get in. Major brands began budgeting for big paydays from Hip Hop endorsements in the songs and directly from the artists. Where it was once admirable to hear about a rags to riches story, the same story manufactured just to sell records is/was an appetite for destruction.
The stories and gimmicks began to backfire when the desire for money outweighed the desire to deliver a message. For instance, the media created an illusion that there was East Coast/West Coast beef and it resulted in the deaths of two iconic figures: Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. In this context, fantasy met real life; some people were simply playing a character and some people were dead serious. I call this the Biggie/Tupac Bait and Switch because after their deaths, no record labels wanted to take a chance. We didn’t hear a variety of artists with empowering personalities. Instead, we heard diluted messages that basically made no sense. How are you going to be a correction officer that brags about living like Larry Hoover? How does a guy kiss a guy and say he is not gay? How could you talk about the cell blocks but never been to jail?
These discrepancies caused a dilemma because Hip Hop once taught us how to strive to be better no matter what your circumstances. Now, no matter what your circumstances, you can strive to be a character in Hip Hop. The people who were once avid Hip Hop fans gave up on the music. They disappeared into the ranks and took the foundation and principles with them. The momentum that created honest millionaires was replaced with nursery rhymes and class clowns. To become a millionaire now, you have to be a 21st century minstral show. The system that empowered us is now set up with mixed messages that stagnate us.
Everybody can’t be an MC. Everybody can’t be trusted with the power to speak and lead responsibly, especially when most people are willing to compromise their souls for success. Hip Hop is a culture of people controlled by the another culture of people. The Citizens of Hip Hop need to reclaim our role. We can’t sit by and watch greatness be destroyed by greed. We need to re-build, re-package and re-sell the dream.
Jineea Butler, founder of the Social Services of Hip Hop and the Hip Hop Union, can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Tweet her at @flygirlladyjay
- Created on 15 May 2013
Mel Watt is Ideal Choice to Lead FHFA
President Obama recently nominated Melvin (Mel) Watt, a long-time North Carolina Congressman, to direct the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). While major news media reported on the development, few mentioned exactly what the new job would entail or the significance of an African-American potentially leading a key financial office.
At a news conference announcing the nomination, President Obama said, “Mel understands as well as anybody what caused the housing crisis. He knows what it’s going to take to help responsible homeowners fully recover. And he’s committed to helping folks just like his mom – Americans who work really hard, play by the rules day in and day out to provide for their families.”
When our nation faced the worst financial crisis since that of the Great Depression, the House Financial Services Committee faced dealing with the nation’s financial solvency on one hand and millions of homeowners who were in or approaching foreclosure on the other. Through a lengthy series of discussions and hearings, Rep. Watt emerged as a voice of reason, consistently fair and balanced in crafting solutions to complex problems.
Following the Watt nomination, the Center for Responsible Lending said of the nominee, “He was one of the first elected officials to recognize and warn about the dangers of subprime lending, offering legislation to nip predatory lending in the bud and tirelessly advocating for ways to prevent needless home foreclosures…The Senate should move quickly to confirm him.”
Created by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the FHFA oversees the nation’s secondary mortgage markets: 12 Federal Home Loan Banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. FHFA is also empowered to make policy, implement rules, and regularly report to Congress. In 2010, the combined debt and obligations of these 14 government-sponsored enterprises totaled $6.7 trillion.
Watt’s nomination is reminiscent of an earlier one in 1966. The late Andrew Brimmer, nominated by President Lyndon Johnson, became the first African-American member of the Federal Reserve Board. A Louisiana native, Brimmer attended segregated elementary and high schools but went on to earn in a Ph.D. in economics in 1957 from Harvard.
Watt, another son of the South raised from modest beginnings, became a 1967 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a result of having the highest academic average in its business school, he also became president of the business honors fraternity. Three years later, he earned a JD degree from Yale University Law School and was a published member of the Yale Law Journal.
Both men’s lives are proof that difficulty need not defeat a person’s dreams or goals. And further, what may appear improbable is not the same thing as being impossible.
On learning of Rep. Watt’s nomination, North Carolina U.S. Senator Richard Burr reached across the chamber’s partisan divide to offer his hopes for confirmation saying, “Having served with Mel, I know of his commitment to sustainable federal housing programs and am confident he will work hard to protect taxpayers from future exposure to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I look forward to working with Rep. Watt in his new role to find new ways to facilitate more private sector involvement in the housing and mortgage markets.”
Another U.S. Senator and chair of the chamber’s banking committee, South Dakota’s Sen. Tim Johnson, said, “Mel possesses the intelligence, temperament and depth of knowledge on housing finance policy necessary to succeed as Director.”
For communities of color that lost a trillion dollars in wealth during the housing crisis, we share an important stake in Rep. Watt’s nomination. It is an opportunity for an accomplished African-American to develop consumer-focused policy and implement rules to better serve all of America’s people.
Charlene Crowell is a communications manager with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
- Created on 14 May 2013
Our Era of Political Extremism
Last year, James Porter, the recently-elected president of the National Rifle Association, declared that President Obama was a “fake president …[whose] entire administration is anti-gun, anti-freedom, anti-Second Amendment.”
Earlier this month, Adam Kokesh, a failed Republican candidate for Congress from Arizona and Internet talk show host, declared he would lead a July 4 march in Washington, D.C. of thousands of followers with loaded rifles slung across their backs as a demonstration against “tyranny.”
District law bars private citizens from carrying firearms in public, and city police officials have said they won’t permit such a march. Kokesh said such action would show that “free people are not welcome in Washington, adding that “we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.”
The bipartisan Congressional effort to craft an immigration bill exploded in controversy last week when it was revealed that, Jason Richwine, a co-author of a heavily-criticized study on the subject submitted by the conservative Heritage Foundation, had previously asserted it was unlikely “Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites” and that, despite their long existence in America, Black Americans have yet to adapt properly to American culture.
You can believe that these three expressions of conservative political opinion – and scores of other similar ones – are unconnected. But that would be exactly the wrong analysis.
If the first term of the Obama presidency proved anything about today’s American political culture, it showed conclusively that we live in an era of conservative extremism.
The assertion of extreme ideas and actions spewing from conservative elected officials, office-seekers, political operatives, talk show hosts and donors has become so commonplace that it’s sometimes difficult to gauge the depth of this GOP-led corrupting of the traditional practice of politics.
But this is how Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, two longtime and respected students of Washington governance, put it in an April 27, 2012 op-ed column for the Washington Post: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The “old” American political tradition enshrined the “win-some-lose-some” notion of compromise as the only way a nation full of competing political, social and business interests (a nation that was from the beginning multiracial) could continue to exist.
Of course, no one knows better than Black Americans that for most of American history the White majority’s adherence to compromise cost them and other people of color dearly – because their rights were often “compromised” out of existence.
But they bore that burden for centuries because of their faith in the ultimate triumph of the American Ideal. Albeit slowly, the fruit of their labors and patience was that a critical segment of White Americans came to understand what democracy means.
It’s long been clear, however, that not all Americans – especially those on the right – want to accept that lesson.
There’s seemingly no end to the bizarre notions and tough-guy posturing and outright racism, sexism and homophobia that represent conservatism today. This nihilistic politics has underscored that conservatism is rooted in callousness, and the more it comes under pressure from the movement toward greater equality of opportunity, the more deranged it becomes.
Thus, as the three examples above show: The resort to conspiracy theories, especially those involving federal government “tyranny.” Concomitantly, the indulgence in fantasy notions of the lone-hero super White man, armed to the teeth and ready to preserve his I-made-it-all-myself “independence.” And, most of all, the designation of “enemies” who are, first, dehumanized – so they can be dealt with without mercy.
This perspective on the conservative movement’s unyielding obstructionism to anything President Obama proposes, whether it be legislative policies or appointees to the cabinet and federal judgeships, makes his achievements in office all the more impressive.
But it also indicates what grievous damage has been done to the president’s program – and to the American political tradition. In their Washington Post op-ed column of last year, Mann and Ornstein looked ahead to the November presidential election and ruefully predicted that no matter who won, “If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections.”
Unfortunately, they were right about that, too.
Lee A. Daniels is a longtime journalist based in New York City. His latest book is Last Chance: The Political Threat to Black America.
- Created on 15 May 2013
Riding Dirty: Who Are The Real Car Insurance Criminals?
I am a criminal.
I have a car but no insurance.
After my beloved truck broke down, I was carless for 16 months in the Motor City — hustling rides, waiting for buses and cabs that never showed, popping bike tires in gaping potholes at 3 a.m. in neighborhoods with no working streetlights.
During this time, I let my old car insurance policy expire without renewing it. Why would I renew it? I had nothing to insure. Last December, I bought a 1998 Honda Civic for $2,300 in cash. I headed straight to a side-by-side Secretary of State and LA Insurance office. What a joy to drive again! But this time, I was going to get it right. Buy auto insurance. For real. I’m 33 and making steady money. Maybe now is the time for the real symbol of American adulthood: FULL COVERAGE.
Confident of my driving record, I asked for the amount of minimal coverage.
“$387,” she told me.
A MONTH?!
“That’s right. You can pay $2,322 today or pay $1,200 down today and $1,122 in two months.”
“WHAT?!!! That’s more than the price of the car.”
She responded, “You live in Detroit.”
And that’s when I found out the secret that everyone knows. Insurance companies charge Detroiters double what they charge suburbanites for the exact same services. And it’s mandated by law.
“We don’t make the prices. The insurers do, most of which are headquartered out of state,” I was told.
To add insult to injury, she continued, “Also policies cost more if you haven’t been insured for a while, even if you didn’t have a car.”
Which means in addition to the geographic penalty, there is a poverty penalty. And there was nothing she can do about it.
I couldn’t afford any of that. But I needed proof of insurance just to get a license plate. I felt defeated, impotent and trapped. On the day I should have been celebrating my hard-earned purchase, my four wheels of freedom, I was about to cry onto the two-inch-thick bulletproof glass separating me from a woman I had just met.
She tells me about one last option, the seven-day policy. A seven-day policy is insurance coverage for just seven days. People buy it so they have something to show the Secretary of State when they renew their tabs. They drive with an easy mind for the following six days. Then for the rest of the year they drive with one eye on the rearview mirror.
I gave her $250 bucks. She gave me a piece of paper that said I had car insurance for a week. The company underwriting that worthless seven-day policy just got a big chunk of my hard-earned money for free so I could get a license plate.
After months of riding dirty, I’m sick of being paranoid every time I get in the car. So like all outlaws, I consider committing a couple more crimes on my path to getting straight. The same crimes most of my friends in the city commit. Insurance fraud. Tax evasion. I go to another agency to find out the cost if I have a suburban address.
Turns out he can get me a “friends only” deal. $1,890 for 6 months in Detroit.
And if I “move” to Ferndale? $1,022 for six months.
Ferndale and Detroit are separated by a single road. That means by living on the south side of the street, I pay $145 a month — 85 percent — more than if I lived on the north side of the street. For the same “product.”
So, youngsters from the suburbs rent houses and apartments in the city. Go to college in the city. Drink in city bars. Eat in city restaurants. Post on Facebook and Twitter about how meaningful it is to participate in Detroit. But according to their driver’s licenses, they actually live in Ferndale or Rochester Hills, Livonia or Romeo.
Because of that “little white lie” they don’t pay city income tax. How many millions of tax dollars are lost to the city because people keep suburban addresses to avoid exaggerated insurance costs? And for a city in “financial emergency,” paying taxes is a big deal.
Many born-in-Detroiters lack access to a fraudulent address. Which means residents of one of the poorest cities in the United States have no choice but to pay the nation’s highest auto insurance rates or go without it.
According to the State of Michigan’s Web site, “If you own a car and you drive it, or allow someone else to drive it without basic no-fault insurance, you can be sued and held personally liable. You may also be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined from $200 to $500 or put in jail for up to one year, or both.”
This effectively criminalizes Detroit residents. Ever since the virulent racist and ruthless profiteer, Henry Ford, ripped out the street rail system, Detroiters have needed cars to get around. One third of Detroit residents live below the poverty line ($23,550 for a family of four in 2013). The median income for a household of four in the city is $26,098. That means the average family in Detroit makes just about $212 a month more than what is considered poverty and the insurance price quoted to me for one car is equivalent to 15 percent of the average Detroit family’s yearly income. People living at or close to poverty cannot afford 15 percent of their income for something that provides them with entirely no tangible value.
In fact, if you subtract my quoted yearly price of $3,780 from the Detroit median income of $26,098, you get $22,318 (below the poverty line), so it could be said that car insurance rates are keeping the average family in Detroit living in poverty.
At minimum coverage, if your car gets stolen/wrecked, you’ll still have to pay the insurance for a car you no longer have.
Additionally, although I’ll save the discussion on racial profiling in police traffic stops for when an insurance-less driver gets pulled over, it can set off a chain reaction that can ruin lives. High-priced tickets. Suspended licenses. Driver’s Responsibility fees. For poor people, the same inability to pay for insurance renders them unable to pay state-mandated fines for not having insurance.
Inability to pay can lead to jail time. Jail time leads to loss of work and to the inability to support their families. According to recent statistics, most families in Detroit are single parent families. The absence of a parent for one night or even a few hours due to arrest can be traumatic and dangerous for a child. Let alone weeks/months. I’d be interested to see some research on the instances of incarceration originating with insurance-related offenses in the city. I’d bet there are so many correlations. This state-mandated criminalization of poverty and city residents doesn’t just affect Detroiters and the poor, it destabilizes countless families, which increases crime and social ills of all kinds for our whole region. Is it a surprise to you that America’s poorest cities are the most violent and crime-ridden?
Why not just do without a car? Go green and ride a bike? Most people I know work in an entirely different community from where they live. Some neighborhoods have decent grocery stores and health services but many in the massive 138-square mile city don’t.
I can ride my bike eight miles in about 30 minutes. On average, it takes me one hour and 45 minutes to make the same trip on the city bus system. Bikes are great but not in the rain, snow or with groceries. Not to arrive at a professional job free of sweat, without grease on your pant leg or wrinkles on your shirt. Not to transport children. The #12 Conant bus I take stops running at midnight; I get off work at 3 a.m. A car is the only consistent way to traverse the sprawling “motor city.”
Meanwhile, the law-abiders strengthen the companies to oppress us even more. Massive unregulated profit levels allow insurance companies to spend huge amounts on lobbyists and political campaigns. Corporations then entrench their privileges in laws.
Last week, State Rep. Peter Lund, R-Shelby Township, introduced a bill into the legislature to cap Michigan’s unlimited personal injury protection at $1 million ostensibly to lower insurance rates. Under the proposed plan, the savings would be $125 a year. That would make my quoted monthly Detroit insurance rate fall from $315 to $305. YIPPPEEEE! Wow, I would save $10 a month. But if I am in a catastrophic crash, I might just find myself on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars of medical bills. Thanks for looking out, Pete! By the way, 33.7 percent of Peter Lund’s campaign financing in the election he won last November came from the insurance industry alone.
Why haven’t the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP done something about this? Don’t they have skin in this game?
Separate rates for equal cities is inherently unequal. For a city where 82.7 percent of the population is Black, the insurance rate disparity is overtly racist. If not deliberately racist in its intent, then definitively racist in its execution. It increases the friction between city-folk and suburbanites. It effectively steals much needed taxes from the city. It encourages fraud over honesty. It rewards the rich and penalizes the poor.
So what to do?
First of all, if you live in Detroit but your legal address is in the suburbs, e-mail the state legislators in your suburban district. Remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Make legislators statewide (if they haven’t been bought out by the insurance companies already) know this problem affects us all. Then change your freaking address and pay your darn taxes.
Secondly, since the government forces all drivers to buy from insurance companies, it should force insurance companies to make coverage affordable for all drivers.
The governor could encourage the creation of a nonprofit that offers low cost insurance. Michigan insurance companies collected over $2 billion more than they paid out in claims in 2011. I imagine that $2 billion would bring down insurance prices for Detroiters a great deal. Such a nonprofit would provide more new jobs for Michiganders, and get more people insured. I think city tax revenues would increase immediately and taxpayer funded court/jail costs would decrease.
I’m sure there are wiser people in this city with better ideas about how to deal with this injustice than me. Speak up! Please! And if you already are, speak even louder! We all need your help. We all want to be legal and law-abiding; it is so much less stressful.
Until we do find the right solution, I, however, will be riding dirty. And driving with one eye on the rearview mirror.
- Created on 14 May 2013
Black Revolutionary Assata Shakur is No Terrorist
When the FBI announced that they were placing fugitive Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) on the list of most wanted terrorists and that they were offering an additional $1 million for her capture, it caught most of the world by complete surprise. Assata has been living quietly in exile in Cuba where she was given political asylum for 30 years.
The former member of the Black Liberation Army escaped captivity after being tried and convicted—under controversial circumstances—in connection with the killing of a New Jersey State policeman. Several other allegations against her were dropped either through acquittals or mistrials.
Assata Shakur had been a member of the Black Panther Party, later joining the Black Liberation Army. Like many other Black activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she witnessed the vicious repression of the Black Freedom Movement—and other movements of the time—by agencies of the U.S. government, including through the use of the now notorious COINTELPRO (the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program). COINTELPRO involved the infiltration and disruption of organizations that the FBI concluded were a threat to the U.S. elite. Disruption included rumor-mongering, provocation, the encouraging of splits, imprisonment and murder.
The intensity of the repression of the Black Freedom Movement, in this case, led many activists to conclude that, at a minimum, self-defense was necessary. For others the conclusion was that a military arm of the Black Freedom Movement was needed.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the conclusions arrived at by Assata Shakur, one thing is very important: she was never a terrorist. Let us be clear about the meaning of this word that we hear so regularly these days. A “terrorist” is someone who uses military methods/violence against civilians in order to advance a political objective. There is nothing in the activism of Assata Shakur that displays anything approaching terrorism. Additionally, since her exile, she has not been involved with any activities in the U.S. that could be construed as terrorist.
So, what is this about? It appears that the main inspiration for this outrage is to derail any efforts at the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. Upon the reelection of President Obama, there have been rumors circulating that there might be efforts to remove Cuba from the list of countries supporting terrorism. There were additional suggestions that there might be efforts towards normalization.
There are groups in the U.S. who oppose normalization of relations with Cuba and they will do anything that they can to disrupt such efforts. Whether those elements convinced the FBI to take this step is irrelevant. The fact is that this step complicates discussions about changing the terms of U.S./Cuban relations. Right-wing Cuban exiles as well as ultra-conservative elements in our political establishment have an interest in the status quo; most of this country is more interested in improvement in relations with Cuba.
For this reason, we need to understand the upping of the ante on Assata as not only a threat to her existence, a violation of Cuban and international law, but also a cynical move to disrupt efforts to end the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.
Now is the time to demand that President Obama and Attorney General Holder reverse the decision of the FBI. Let’s end this ridiculous melodrama.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. Follow him at www.billfletcherjr.com.
