I'm a national guy and an international guy. I have a Local Deeds category and I haven't really used it much because I haven't really been local half the year. The past 24 months, I've spent most of my time in Seattle, Cleveland, Ft. Worth, Houston and Cincinatti. Still, I did manage to follow the Jamiel's Law topic well enough to get on radio. BTW, I think the matter has been addressed at the appropriate level although I'm not 100% behind the current solution. So most of the time I'm interested in national politics and culture.
It has been a while since a local issue of black interest has caught my attention, and when they do, it's usually something I sneer at because of the level at which it springs to national attention. You know the drill. Some racist asswipe in some backwater makes some outrageous statement or commits some felony and every African American on the Kwaku Network is sending me a 20 page diatribe with 400 email addresses on it. Then homeboy Howard Witt from Chicago sends out his email and it's on. A day later the Jackson or Sharpton camps have descended or not and then the mainstream media chimes in. Rarely do I get caught up in the rapture. Then if and when I do, I take my angle, get beat up about it until I make a video and then people say 'oh'. Or not.
There has been one singular local issue that I've taken up fully and that was the capital case against Tookie Williams. I was right. I tend to believe that my dismissive attitude towards these sorts of matters in general will be vindicated popularly with the inevitable progress of black America. I have a great deal of confidence in my perspective, but... There are a lot of Americans that have problems discussing black people as if they were people. I don't. Nor do I give any ground to those whose ethics force them to discuss black people as if they were special people. It makes me controversial, what can I say?
But to the extent that somebody has got to talk about black Americans from a local perspective, I am failing the blogosphere. I'm just not that attached to the 'hood. And one of the reasons I'm interested in the Urban Conservative Agenda is because I want to recognize those people who are. Actually, I don't care whether they are conservative or not, quite frankly, because I think black Americans are poorly served on a local level by all news organizations - nobody is doing a good job telling us what's up in Jena before it becomes JENA. Now we know too much - like Britney Spears or whomever is the Spears of the now. (Kwaku Network alerted me that one of the Jena Six shot himself last week - and this means what to the Obama Administration?)
Before I blogged my blog (brainstorm) I was a host at Cafe Utne's Society Conference. At the time I was a Progressive deeply steeped in black political and avant garde cultural traditions and as ignorant of Conservatism as most black Americans remain. It was my convention then, but not so much now, to ask people to tell me where they were coming from - literally. Gimme your zipcode. At the time, I was operating under the premise that a great deal could and should be assumed from the perspective of your demographic environs. I still think that's important but not when you're talking about national and international stuff - then you have to deal with political philosophy and history. In the context of the American Dream and the Struggle, the local details matter. In the global picture they most assuredly do not.
In the Conservative Brotherhood, one blogger in particular has impressed me above all by remaining focused on State and Local politics and that is Akindele Akinyemi. He is focused like a laser on what's happening in Detroit and in the Michigan Statehouse. I haven't really paid as much attention to him as I might have liked, then again, I'm a nationally and internationally focused writer.
The Coalition of the Damned, is by necessity, a local organization. If Houston has bad cops, then some Houstonians need to be raising their pitchforks and torches. But that has nothing to do with LA. The lesson I learned from studying the Rodney King thing to death decades ago was that the rules of engagement for cops is very different. In California, a majority of the state's police chiefs had beef with Darryl Gates. Most people didn't know that. The LAPD used to have rules of engagement that allowed officers to fire on fleeing suspect vehicles. In Houston, they banned that practice 10 years prior to the incident in LA that had me looking at police reform back in the day. The problem then, with the Coalition of the Damned is that in fact they are not a nationwide police watchdog group or dues paying organization with real leadership and an agenda and yet pretend to be. Why? Because of the failure of a real such organization to adequately do what it's supposed to. There is an October 22 Coalition run out of a post office box in NYC and somewhere perhaps there is a Stolen Lives database, but they're evidently short of some technical talent and obviously money. This continues to be the case, sad but true.
I would expect there to be some linkages to black blogging - a dedication to local matters with some discipline. Once upon a time in Los Angeles, I had such dedication. But I am intellectually incapable of making myself that person. I have never lived anywhere more than 6 years since 1982 except here in an upscale beach community in Southern California. I'm not cut out for the task of loving my town and following it around. People even see it on my indifferent face at the local highschool football game. That's what makes me good on the national, philosophical and theological. Somebody has got to have that local spirit, and I think that's exactly what CF's beef is as I interpret it. Let me tell it from my perspective, briefly.
After the Riot in LA when there was a Rebuild LA deal put together by local poohbahs (and if I remember correctly this was the beginning of Magic Johnson's role as big muck in LA) to get the black community back rolling. At this distance, it has worked very well - all of the chain stores are back on Crenshaw. But at the time when the racial tension between blacks and Koreans was at its peak, especially vis a vis LaTasha Harlins, black professionals like me were rolling our eyes. The fundamental question was why blacks didn't own the liquor stores and local retail establishments that Koreans were running in the black community. The answer was nobody black who went to college to be a business major had any intention on running a goddamned 7/11 in the hood. We were all headed to Corporate America. Black local entrepreneurship just wasn't interesting. Getting a 50K small business loan and franchising a Popeye's Chicken, maybe - but only after you hit the glass ceiling at Proctor & Gamble. It wasn't rocket science and among my peers there was no great mystery. Black people (like us) didn't want to be merchants.
CF has this experience in Atlanta. Black people like me wanted to live out at Nisky Lake and work for CocaCola. We didn't want to own a jewelry concession in Little Five Points or a taco joint in Decatur. Nulan understands very well, as I do, that there is a huge managerial brain drain on the 'hood and the ghetto. There simply isn't an economic base there that we are interested in where we were born. This is something my generation of college educated blackfolks share with lots of groups in the global economy and throughout history. See Thomas Sowell for details on nurses from the Philippines, Overseas Chinese and Indian IT workers in America. It's nothing new - entire classes of ethnics leave home, follow the bleeding edge of integration and take their families into middle class circumstances. It has been that way ever since the invention of indentures.
For some black Americans who have decided to cast their lot in the neighborhoods that reared them, we are at a great loss to hear them in their original forms. The blogosphere is the creation I always knew that the internet would provide; Digital Divide my ass. So what are black Americans doing to preserve and communicate ground level activity on a daily and weekly basis? Who are the local black bloggers and what are they talking about? Why is it that I have to learn about KIPP from Malcolm Gladwell? (Or did I hear about something like that the last time we were talking about Oakland?)
Perhaps it is the attitude of Cobb that suppresses that kind of discussion. I certainly don't want it to be. What I want it to be is something approaching the kind of heat and light surrounding the strip club shooting in Queens last year, where people from Queens logged on. But not just for the outrages, because that's not what life is all about.
I know we're never going to outdo Beyonce's music videos on YouTube, but there's got to be somebody out there who can do better than sending along the same tired Obama jokes and pictures by email.
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