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Reflection Eternal For HURRICANE STARRKEYSHA

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Editor’s Note: CHOCOLATE SNOWFLAKE took a trip to New Orleans to survey first hand the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She took a ton of pictures and then wrote me an emotional and heartfelt letter after returning to her hotel. It’s still impossible for me to imagine that America the beautiful could be mismanaged into Third World status, but the rate at which we have failed to prioritize our homeland concerns over liberating foreigners and subsequently have continued to give billions in aid to everyplace else, there may come the day when many other U.S. cities resemble the Ninth Ward.

My dearest of all,

New Orleans is a strange city. I imagine it was strange before Hurricane Katrina, but the ways in which the graciousness and hospitality of the people made up for the strangeness no longer hold. Not that folks aren’t still gracious. Quite the contrary, the degree of courtesy and the welcoming attitude is by far the most refreshing aspect of this trip. It’s just that it’s not quite enough to cover the economic and racial fault lines Hurricane Katrina exposed.

At our meeting today, a gentleman whose family encompasses three generations of progressive unionism spoke to us about what’s going on in the Southern Crescent, as he called it. The politicians, many of whom were elected on the backs of the labor movement — which comprises mostly of teachers and manual laborers — and the christian charity network of churches, have seized the “opportunity” presented by Hurricane Katrina to try to break the unions and eradicate anything resembling a living wage.

The public schools were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The school system lost millions of dollars in facilities and supplies — libraries, books, pencils, calculators, desks, etc. — not to mention the emotional toll it’s taken on the children who look toward the routine of school and seeing their classmates as a constant in lives that are already in turmoil by displacement. AFT, the teacher’s union, has raised a million and a half dollars which it has distributed directly to teachers in the form of cash grants to help them get situated, and find temporary shelter for them and their families.

So what does New Orleans do? They fire all the teachers, reconstitute the public schools as charter schools and tell teachers they’ll rehire them but only as non-union employees. If teachers are caught discussing they’re salaries, they’re fired. Students who can’t afford charter schools get rerouted to other districts, or are given vouchers for partial payment of tuition (with no collatoral to fund the other half) or are simply told that their schools won’t be rebuilt and that the teachers aren’t coming back. Naturally this impacts poor students, many of whom happen to be black and Latino.

Mayor Nagin has apparently also decided to locate a garbage dump — where all the debris from the “clean up” will be deposited — in the middle of an impoverished Vietnamese community that abuts a nature preserve.

The downtown area, where I’m staying, is a twilight zone. Within a two block radius of my hotel, you’d never know that a natural disaster went down. But turn a wrong corner and the smell, the boarded up stores, the watermarks on the buildings and the nastiest pigeons I have ever seen tell another story.

It may sound trivial, but when the pigeons — the pentultimate urban scavenger — are scrawny oily-necked avian refugees with matted feathers openly squabbling in the street over a crust of old bread smeared with shit, you know it’s bad.

The upcoming elections here are a joke. 26 contenders and not one of them able to do a damn thing about anything. Everyone I’ve spoken to laughs at Nagin, but the alternatives are insiders, the insiders’ insiders and the crazy uncle who prah’lee molested someone or something at some point and can’t get a job doing anything else. So he might as well be mayor.

The most tragic thing of all is that our people — and by that I mean simply human beings, our brothers, our sisters, our children, our parents — suffer while 20 miles away someone is sitting quite comfortably in their living room, watching it all on the evening news.

My cab driver from the airport — her father died in a hospital during Hurricane Katrina.

The porter, Ken, who brought my bags up, fled for his life to Texas with his parents in tow and was only able to return because he works at the only union hotel in town and therefore had a job waiting for him when the place reopened. He’s crashing on a friend’s couch because he can’t afford an apartment. His rent used to be $500 for a one bedroom; now, with the lack of housing and a general state of desperation, one bedrooms go for anything from $800 to $2300.

RiverWalk, the Mississippi River promenade where you can buy beignets and cafe au lait has been cleaned, Foot Locker has reopened, but the library is still boarded up and there are no public schools.

The moneyed elite has figured out that with HK, they can rebuild the city the way they want — New Orleans used to be a 70% black city, now it’s about 30-40% and dropping — as people seem less and less inclined to return to no homes, no jobs, no churches, no neighborhoods and the city uses eminent domain to seize their property for redevelopment.

But folks sure can drink and play some music. Whoo-wee. Good times.

As our speaker said today: The Southern Crescent of Missouri, Louisiana and Alabama was, according to the census, the poorest in the nation in the 1930s, the poorest in the 1960s and remained the poorest in 2000. The Federal Government didn’t abandon these people after Hurricane Katrina. They were abandoned a long time ago. Katrina just blew the covers off the bed of neglect on which Fat Cats, Greed and Corruption indulge in an unholy menage-a-disaster.

It’s depressing beyond belief. And I get to go home on Sunday. Can you imagine how depressed some of these folks must be?

Well, I’m thoroughly sick and disgusted. Tomorrow we go out and build a house for someone. It’s a drop, but even a drop is better than nothing. In the meantime, I’m going to lie on the bed, turn on the TV and escape into the 100 Most Shocking Moments on Television. Its a VH1 Marathon, so I’m guaranteed no Katrina coverage.

Love you, miss you,
C.S.

Posted in C.R.E.A.M., Jig Lit Review, Social Upheaval, When I Reminisce... | 16 Comments »

BILLY SUNDAY Explains ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Campbell’s Soup Can by ANDY WARHOL = teh ghey pop art masterpiece

It seems like another dance craze has captured the fancy of jig children in the ghettos. When these kids aren’t playing on the X-Box 360 consoles or smoking crack they are creating nifty little piccaninny dance moves. It’s part of the wonderful creative nature of jig babies which is sold to the world as wholesale archetypal racial behavior. One of the problems that we older jigs face is that the youth are constantly trying to parody our worst behavior. It’s not like the kids try to copy us when we are doing the right thing. But if we are out here fucking up you can best believe there will be a gang of munchkins trying to do what we do.

Do any of you rememeber the dance called the ‘Harlem Shake’? It was originally called the ‘Vibrator Orgasm’ after one of the little harlem jig kids watched his mother convulsing after she placed a Magic Wand inside her behind. Now the ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’ has replaced that dance. ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’ is the act of urinating on someone inside the shower. The ‘Can of Coke on the side’ is when you do a number two. I thought everyone knew this, but apparently the idea of these acts are all the rage of negros nationwide.

Do you know how long it took me to find a Black girl that would let me pee on her let alone defecate and smear it like it were cocoa butter?!? And now everyone is jumping around and dancing about it. I suppose I could blame ROBERT SYLVESTER KELLY for making this all popular with the youth, but who is responsible for this change of attitude with more mature females. I have been to restaurants with Black girls who won’t eat unless the flatware is washed in front of their eyes, and now they are dancing around to the notion of being peed upon. “Let it rain, clear it out, let it rain some more”. When did little Black girls become such freaks?!?

I guess I should just be patient and wait for some jig kid to invent the ‘Boston Clam Chowder with a glass of red Kool-Aid”.

Posted in Black Bullshit, Ghetto Celebs, Lust = Love, Social Upheaval | 10 Comments »

1000 WORDS… (2006 Black Weblog Awards Nominee)

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

Whoever said a picture was worth a thousand words was sorely mistaken, because the best pictures can transfer their meaning with only one word. The truth is that some words by themselves are worth a thousand words because their meaning wraps around our fundamental notions of the world itself. Love, hate and fear are just three words that can define almost everything around us. It’s primal shit like that people use to control us, to get us up to go to work every day, to make us bust our azz so that we don’t ever have to be with or without those three words.

The boogeyman is someone that we all fear. He lives under our bed or inside the darkened closet, but most of all the boogeyman lives in our hearts. He represents our fear of vulnerability. Forget about rational or irrational values because the boogeyman is real and he is out there somewhere, waiting to jump on us when we are relaxing and just minding our business. You can try to make me feel ashamed for being afraid of the boogeyman, but I retain this fear deep inside of me, and nothing you say can remove it from me. I know the boogeyman exists so you might as well be him.

The nigger is still the tragicomic hero of post-modernity. I have tried to explain to people that the word’s etymology describes someone’s profession and not their skin color. Whether you realize it or not, class is still the great divide among people in America. Have you ever met someone for the first time and been asked what you do? It’s as if you are defined by what type of work keeps your light bill paid. When America became an industrialized nation is when being a neggar held the lowest esteem. People were working in factories and offices, but if you were still in the field turning over crops and shoveling shitty ground you were just a lowly nigger.

As a matter of fact, even if you migrated to the industrialized centers to seek work you were still regarded as expendable so the name stuck with you. As a matter of fact you embraced the name as only you people can do. You made it your de facto endearment greeting. Nobody really took the time to examine how important the neggar really is. As the person who works directly with the foods that we will eventually consume you literally have the country’s health and well being in your hands. I ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant last night and I realized how great a role the Mexican plays in my life. From harvesting, to delivery, to preparation, up to serving my table there were Mexican hands on my food. I guess I am really lucky that Mexicans dig DALLASPENN dot COM.

I didn’t wind up here by accident and I wasn’t kidnapped and shuttled to America. I was betrayed by someone that I thought would respect my freedom, because the color of his skin was the same as mine. White and Black is a purely fictional concept. That is the biggest fallacy that people have to deal with now. Wasn’t the African that sold my azz to the European traders at Goree Island also a Black man? You need to stop thinking that someone holds your values simply because they look like someone in your family. You can’t even get along with everyone in your family. I am not going to tell you to embrace any other folks just yet because there is still a system of privilege and supremacy firmly in place that other people have to openly recognize in order to dismantle.

Don’t hold your breath waiting on that either because the fear of being a neggar or worse, being captured by the boogeyman seems to be enough to keep everyone in their place. Just don’t let the world around you stop you from creating your own reality. Check for people that share your value system because that is where your community exists and it may mean getting to know a few Mexicans and a white or two.

Posted in Black Bullshit, Jig Lit Review, Social Upheaval | 2 Comments »

Reservations in the Sky: CO-OP CITY (2006 B.W.A. Nominee)

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Dedicated to JASON BRIAN BARCLAY 5.21.1977-8.15.2006
Rest in peace young brother, Section 5 for life.

I spent a lot of time when I was young in the care of my grandparents, particularly my great-grandmother. To this day she is probably my single most powerful connection to GOD. If you have a grandmother and she loves you a lot then multiply that feeling exponentially. There isn’t a more developmentally encouraging person that I can think of for someone under 5 years of age.

The GOD reference was apropo too since my great-grandmother lived on the 25th floor of her apartment building and you couldn’t convice me otherwise that her apartment wasn’t Heaven. On a foggy overcast morning if you looked out the window you looked down on the clouds. They were so thick and cumulus that some kids thought they could ride them away. Unfortunately back then the city had no laws requiring child safety bars for hi-rise apartment building windows and every so often a mother’s anguished banshee wail would echo through the cavernous canyons of buildings. I guess you can’t have Heaven if there is no Hell.

My great-grandmother knew that she didn’t have to worry about me losing my sense of perspective even at that early age. She kept me busy with her cooked food, her card games and her love for mystery novels. She was an avid reader and I don’t even recall her watching anything on television, except when she let me watch Sesame Street. Her transistor radio in the kitchen was never turned off, but it was never too loud either. Just a calm sound that couldn’t replace the din of an energetic three year old. True story is that I don’t remember being three years old, but I remember my great-grandmother. I remember her voice and I remember her food.

My great-grandma was old school before I had even gone to school. Great-grandma was born on the island of Nevis in 1894 so by the time I touched down she had already seen the best and worst of all people. Her husband was a tall Irish-American immigrant, Mr.O’LOUGHLIN, who was renowned for threatening all the neighborhood rapscallions that might gaze for too long at any of his daughters or nieces. Mr.O’LOUGHLIN passed away when I was too young to have known him, but everyone that knows us will tell you that I have at least two of his traits. His eye for beautiful women and his oversized liver.

My great-grandmother certainly made up for any of Mr.O’LOUGHLIN’s lessons that might have been issued to me. Later in the day I would be joined by my grandmother and my grandfather. My grandmother was more or less the captain of the team that lived in Co-op City. They had all moved from my great-grandmother’s house in Queens to this brand new development in the Bronx.

Modeled after some technologically tremendous European residential architecture(pictured above), Co-op City was one of the largest housing initiatives ever created. The City housed almost sixty-thousand people in over 15,000 housing units. There were incredible amenities in this City within the city. Apartments were heated and cooled with centralized air conditioning. Each building had a multi-user laundromat. The ground floors of the apartment buildings hosted various medical offices for all the seniors that were part of the development. I think that was the appeal for my grandmother on behalf of my great-grandmother. The City’s site plan was so organized that you didn’t have to cross a street to get to the supermarket, the deli, the dry cleaners or the schools. This was from its inception a master plan that lent its design to utopian communism. Co-op City also had the greatest number of Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white peoples living within the same zip code.

From the mind of a five year old child this was my favorite place on Earth, but under the surface of this faux forced utopia were the undercurrents of social unraveling on a grand scale. Co-op City for all of its charm and extravagance could not escape the real world right across the street. The Bronx is the poorest section of America per capita and Co-op City would not be exempted. In order for the developers of Co-op City to secure the Federal H.U.D. money to create the development there had to housing set aside for people receiving Federal and state income supplements. The developers designed the city so that this area where their ‘Section 8’ tenants would reside was separated from the primary housing block. They were provided with their own shopping cluster and primary grade schools, but the high school students would be required to travel by public bus. The area of Co-op City that housed primarily all of the developments welfare recipients was further sequestered from the larger complex by being on the opposite side of the Hutchinson River. Occasionally, the drawbridge that you had to cross to enter that section would be raised if there was a barge traveling up the river.

There was certainly a distinction made between the residents of Section 5 and the rest of the Co-op City residents in Sections 1-4 (no relation to ‘Section 8’). These differences would manifest themelves at the local high school, HARRY S. TRUMAN, where children from middle class aspiring parents comingled with the children of parent(s) who may not have shared those same values. I believe this was the failure of Co-op City and the subsequent failure of residential communities of even smaller scales. A community’s value system will be reflected by it’s most mediocre denizens, where those that have a higher value system will displace themselves or be shunted altogether. High rise apartment complexes work in European cities because they are occupied by residents who share the same class value system. There won’t be any pissing in the hallways in Glasglow, not because they are more civilized, but because that is never projected as an option to using the bathroom.

The residents in Co-op City began to reflect the values of people that feel like they have no stake in the place that they reside. Simple issues like litter can become tremendous issues when you contemplate the magnitude of 60,000 people all living within the same 300 acres. Trust me, there’s no longer any room to breathe. Co-op City barely made it through New York City’s fiscal crisis during the 1970’s. City services like mass transit and garbage collection were severely halted. Roadway repair was also non-existant and this was an area of the Bronx that residents needed to drive to and from their jobs if they had one. Now try to imagine the resulting clamor when the mid-1980’s recession and drug explosion took hold of the city. This much ballyhooed model community was under siege. The last remaining white residents fled from Co-op City as if it were the Titanic sinking in the middle of the ocean.

The diversity that began when this city first opened its doors was no more. It was now metamorphisized into the largest Federal housing project in the country. More reflective of the southern Bronx neighborhoods like SoundView and Hunts Point as opposed to the diverse middle class western Bronx enclaves like Marble Hill and Riverdale. Co-op City is a great study in urban design and planning, but I think it serves as a better example for socio-economic trends. This is why many whites are opposed to sharing zip codes with different peoples. If the vales of new residents doesn’t at least meet those of the incumbent community you will have a loss of property value. Transversely, if new residents into a community value their property they will be able to displace the incumbent community who does not have those values.

So now when I look at high rise apartment buildings I see them as just ‘Reservations in the Sky’. Instead of giving away multi-acre tracts of land for people to establish their communities the government is stacking houses on top of one another so much like LEGO blocks.

Posted in Jig Lit Review, Social Upheaval, T.O.N.Y., When I Reminisce... | 4 Comments »

It’s A WHITE Thing… You Wouldn’t Understand (2006 B.W.A. Nominee)

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

I watched the FX networks surreality show ‘Black/white’ in the hopes that there would be some substance to this program. FX boasted during their campaign of hype that this program would forever change my precepts about race in America.

Just back in December scientists at Penn State discovered the DNA mutation that causes the lighter skin complection found on most Europeans and north Asian peoples. It turns out that it was only a single letter out of the over 3 billion letter code that is the human genome. The collegiate study means that there are far more similarities among people than we already knew.

In the end I see why the producers had to borrow ICE CUBE to move this show forward. The main characters are more like racial caricatures when they describe their stereotyped notions of society. The editors found every cliche soundbite that was ever said. No new ground was unearthed. No breakthrough. The flaw in this primetime television experiment is the notion that Blackness and whiteness are representative of skin color. Or the way that someone speaks. If I annunciate when I talk is that a renunciation of my Blackness? If I wear a dashiki does that affirm my Blackness?

It boggles my mind that this issue remains such a sore spot to so many people. Let me be clear now by saying that racism is VERY necessary to maintain our American way of life. Racism keeps the lights on in this land and without it this whole thing called living that we occasionally enjoy would become quite a hell. Can you imagine for two seconds if there were no privilege to being white?

Can you imagine telling those folks that their neighborhoods would have to be used for the trafficking of narcotics? What about other vices like prostitution? How crazy would that be if you had to drive into the ‘white’ neighborhood to find a liquor store open on Sunday? As long as white folks comprise the majority of people here in America we need to keep racism and privilege in place. You don’t want a whole bunch of German-descended folks carrying their pitchforks and burning stakes through your neighborhood because all of a sudden they have to ride on the back of the bus.

You do remember TIMOTHY McVEIGH don’t you? Disaffected arabs target the financial institutions and buildings that support the military industrial complex like the Pentagon. Pissed off Americans blow up day care centers filled with other white kids. That is some hell’a way to get out of paying your child support obligations.

As a matter of fact you should hug the next white that you see, or at least hold the door for them. When the day comes that they realize that the levees are broken that is going to be one helluva flood.

Posted in Black Bullshit, Social Upheaval | 2 Comments »