Real Talk

A student from my school was killed the other day. Walking down the street last Wednesday night, someone snuck up behind Jarren Lindsey and shot him.

I didn't know Jarren well. I had his cousins in a couple of my classes, but he was a tenth grader and I teach freshmen. I did take some pictures of him during an art project for another class. They were working on a project where they painted out a significant moment in their lives. It was amazing to look at the things the kids shared. The kids looked like "regular" teenagers, but they had these incredibly heavy stories behind them. Jarren's was no less heavy, but you could tell he was proud of the painting he had done. In one of the pictures he smiles at the camera, like he's telling a joke. In another, he's looks sober, older.

According to the newspaper, Jarren and his cousin had just walked some girls to the bus stop and were on their way home. That was the first week of spring break and the weather had just cleared up and was unseasonably warm. People were out and restless on the street. Out of the shadows, someone struck down Jarren and sent his cousin running for his life. Jarren was 16 years old. 
To be honest, I've tried not to mix the world of this blog with my teaching world. I'm a compartmentalizer and it's easier for me to deal with the demands of all my little worlds as long as I can keep them separate. I've tried not to write about personal stuff that's not directly tied to the topic at hand: funk, in all of its forms. Sticking to the script, so to speak, has been tough this year. The second year of teaching is no joke, and to go along with all of that, my school has been slated for closure because of test scores and budgetary reasons.

But something about this feels different. This is about Jarren, but it's also much bigger than Jarren. Two days before Jarren lost his life, I was heading out to play basketball at the rec center near my house. It was 9pm, which I consider early when it comes to playing ball, and my wife and I heard about six gun blasts near our house. We sat up and talked for a little while, but despite my wife's protestations, I grabbed my ball and got in the car. I was driving a block over when I noticed a bunch of guys standing in front of a house. They looked heated about something, but I didn't immediately connect it to the gunshots. When I saw unmarked police car waiting in the cut, I knew something was up.

And something was up. Soon after I left, the police stopped somebody on that corner and, according to the news, shot him after he drew a gun. Unfortunately another one of my students lives in a house right on the corner in front of where the shooting happened. I've chided her about being out late, but the whole thing happened right before her eyes. William Hardy, the young Black man who died, was 27 years old.

And just yesterday morning, a freshman at Douglass High named Danny Gilmore was on his way to school and was shot in front of a grocery store. He wasn't killed, but he is paralyzed. Police believe it might have just been a case of mistaken identity. The alleged shooter is 18. This all happened 8:15am, mind you.

As I get ready to teach my last quarter of freshman English, I've got all of this heavy stuff on my brains. I was planning on seeing my students again for the first time on Monday. I would have all my energetic, engaging lessons planned. I would lead us head-long into a journey of inquiry and discovery that would motivate them to give their best, even in the school's last moments.

But that's not exactly what's going to happen. Instead, I'll see many of my students at Jarren's funeral on Friday. Instead of having everything figured out and planned when I see them, I'll probably have just as many questions as they will.

Ironically, the feeling reminds me of how I felt when Obama was elected. I was caught up in all my reservations about the implications (political, social, economic,etc.) of having a Black president, but my students swept away all the reservations and allowed me to just feel that moment, even if the forces at work were too big for me to understand.

That's what makes this type of post so difficult, because the events of a life generally don't interest me as much as the causes or implications of those events. But lately it seems a little trite to talk about causes or implications. I could link to articles about the schools crisis. Or the gang crisis. Or the gun crisis. Or the drug crisis. Or the roots of poverty laid down by years of racial segregation in Chicago. But I guess this ain't the time for that.

Now's the time to mourn these young men who have had their lives shattered by violence, and pray that no one else falls victim. It's also time for me to continue to plan this last semester for my students. The goal won't be for me to explain all of the causes and implications of incomprehensible events, but instead help them develop the tools they can use to fashion new understandings of the world around them. Understandings that will change things. Understandings that might save lives.

But Friday comes first.

Mister Magic

Thank God for Spring break.

Roberta Flack - Mister Magic - 1970
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Questions

1. Who would have thought that America would have a Black president before it had universal health care?

2. Could Hillary Clinton, with all of the baggage from the first health care run 15 years ago, have passed health care if she was president?

3. Isn't the thought that this young brother hasn't even really hit his prime kind of scary?


Do yourself a favor and watch the President teach on why health care is a battle for America's character.

Teaching Writing and Blowing the Whistle

Lately I've been thinking quite a bit about teaching and why I'm doing what I do. Writing is a big part of what I do with my life. I would even like to make a (gasp!) living doing it. But it wasn't always like that for me. There was a time in school where I didn't really enjoy writing all that much.

When I was in the 7th grade my PE teacher, who I will simply call Coach (his mirrored sunglasses and obscenely bulging neck veins are crystal clear, his name a mystery) introduced us to our school’s “weight training facility”. Volleyball, football, and baseball had been the physical education staples up until this time. In junior high, however, we were crammed into a grimy portable classroom with a circuit of shiny machines that would help us “train”. Class would consist of us moving from one machine to the next, pumping away until we heard a shrill blast from Coach’s whistle.

Coach inspired us with fear (again, the veins and the sunglasses) but after awhile we learned how to slack off just enough that he wouldn’t fail us. Undoubtedly many of us exercised muscles that we never would have otherwise (I never understood the appeal of that weird leg-spreader machine) but there was an unreality to the experience that made it seem silly.

Previously, exercise had been a pleasant and unconscious byproduct of play, but PE class turned it into what seemed like a sophisticated punishment—something to be tolerated or avoided. Looking back on the reading and writing I did in school, I see a strong parallel.

Of course I was “prepared” by my school experience in the strictest sense of the word. Our trips to the weight training facility “prepared” me to interact physically with weight machines, but didn’t prepare me to address my most immediate athletic concern—improving my atrocious jump shot. Instead of motivating me to squeeze as many repetitions as I could out of the 90 seconds we had at each station, Coach’s glowering, punitive presence actually made me want to do less.

Similarly, school taught me how to write a standard five paragraph essay using a bare minimum amount of thought and time to achieve a satisfactory grade. Essays seemed less about discovery than recitation, and that wasn't of much interest to me. Grades were held over our heads to motivate us towards success, but too many times this was articulated as “not failing”. There was little inquiry about our own academic goals, beyond college, and we were rarely asked to synthesize what we learned in readings or in class to other areas of our education or lives. The experience was not much different than a visit to the "weight training facility" where you worked a single muscle with no thought towards coordinating those tissues towards flexible movement.

I realize that education is primarily a personal endeavor. Every student has to demand to be educated in order for anything to happen. And I’m not saying I learned nothing in school; I just wish they had expected and required more of me as a writer and a reader. With the focus on easily digestible bits of information, I think I got lost in the tedium of repetitive motion exercises. I wanted to write things that would change and engage the world, but I don’t feel like I was challenged to do that. So I was “prepared,” but just not in the way I needed.

I think about this a lot now that I am the keeper of Coach’s proverbial “whistle.” My high school students work on five-paragraph essays: five reps of hooks, two sets of contextualizing statements, three concrete detail crunches, and 60 seconds on the commentary sentence step machine. The mastery of these elements is important because they set the foundation for good writing and thinking. But the reality is that I’m also having them work on them because that’s what’s going to be on the test that’s going to be used to gauge how “educated” they are.

Tests have their place, but the danger is that this type of learning becomes rote if it consumes the entire learning experience of the student. It's also dangerous because it's easy to assess whether or not a kid knows how to write a standard thesis statement. It's much more difficult to assess whether a student can think for themselves and create something new. In a test-heavy environment, sometimes the learning that can be easily assessed is the learning that gets emphasized the most. (Coach could read the newspaper as long as he heard the squeaks of the metal equipment.) The English teachers I remember most fondly are those who were not concerned with just the recitation of knowledge, but how this knowledge might profoundly effect what I wanted to do with my life.

Kids need to master content and skills in order to be good writers, but if we never make a connection between a student’s interests and how what we’re learning can aid their pursuit of that interest, we can blow as hard as we want on our whistles; no one will be listening.

Some people will...

...do thangs, do thangs, bad thangs with it.

This song is so funky that no matter what the time or occasion, it's always appropriate.

Misstra Knowitall's philosophy of technology education

A thought:

Merely, putting a pencil in a child’s hand does not teach writing. You have to begin with basic skills: how to hold a pencil, how to write within the margins of a lined sheet, how to erase mistakes, etc. Next, a child needs to learn how to interpret and shape the language they will use to record their thoughts. Grammar, syntax, metaphor, structure, etc. During this instruction, a child must learn the power of words; their role as vehicles for ideas; their potential to both liberate and tyrannize. That is writing instruction that will allow students to more clearly understand the world around them and articulate their understandings of that world.

If this is true, then why is it so often that we feel we are doing enough for our students by shoving computers underneath their noses without giving them a clear understanding of what they can, and should, do with the enormous power at their fingertips?

Needless to say, as our society becomes increasingly integrated with technology, students need to have a greater level of understanding about the technology that surrounds them and how it affects them as scholars, and more importantly, as people. Without these types of understandings, we are setting up our children to be mere consumers of technology (and culture), instead of producers.

As technology advances, people are required to use less and less of their brain cells. Calculators make the ability to add redundant. GPS systems make it even irrelevant to know where you are in the world.

Although students have access to more information than any previous generation, their ability to analyze and understand this information is not keeping pace. This raises a number of concerns, but one of the most important is the role it has in the diminishment of our students’ curiosity. Without an analytic filter to parse the useful from the useless, students are drowning under a tsunami of information that taxes their curiosity and makes them apathetic to learning. What’s the point in learning something new when you can just look it up on the internet?


It behooves us to help students understand how they can use technology to manipulate the world around them, but also how that technology can be used to manipulate their understandings of themselves.

Ron Banks and the Fabulous Dramatics

You know you're too busy when you miss the death of the lead singer of The Dramatics and you don't even hear about until a week later. Ron Banks died of a heart attack on March 4th. The Dramatics were one of the funkiest soul groups of their era. "What You See is What You Get" is up there with almost anything that the Stylistics or Temptations put out. And check those moves.



Some of you may be more familiar with their work in one of the greatest (ignant) video/songs in hip-hop history. The Dramatics sweet smooth touch was a perfect accompaniment to Dr. Dre's rumbling bass and Snoop's drawling vocals.

The Mystery of Chessboxing (Lego)

Perfectly captures an average Monday on my job.

The Best and the Brightest

Tiger offered a humble apology to everybody: his mama, his wife, his kids, his corporate sponsors (!), his non-profit foundation, his fans. But what about the real victims in all of this? Light skinned brothers

For those of you new to the program, I have been documenting the comeback of light skinned brothers for some time now. Back in 1997, Pierre prophetically predicted our re-ascension in "How To Be A Player," and the 2000s have been heady times for those of us who ace our paper bag tests. We were down for so long during the "Wesley era," where a "darker the berry" ethos made tan skin on a brother less popular than a ham sandwich at a Saviours' Day convention.

NeObama, Cory Booker, Harold Ford...heck, even Drake. Quietly, we've been turning back the clock to the DeBarge era. And it's all because of Tiger. His ability to hit a little white ball across a golf course, better than anyone in history, opened the door for us. We smiled as everyone talked about how he advanced the plight of Black people, but WE knew who was really going to benefit from it. And indeed we have.

Who you calling pretty pretty princess?

But lately, there's been a little trouble. NeO is less popular than ever. Cory's got trouble. Harold Ford is, well, Harold Ford. Drake got played to the left by Sade. And then there's Tiger.

Over the years he has been a steady producer for the cause. He showed how a light skinned brother could leverage double and triple consciousness into a formula for success and make billions. Instead of light skin weakness just being a foil for dark skin strength (think Barkley vs. Jordan), he was kicking ass and staring folks down with a bright boy swagger.

Ahhh...that's a familiar fit.

There's been the occasional hiccup, of course. We grimaced when we heard about the whole Cablinasian thing. It reeked of Tragic Mulatto and sounded dumb enough that even White people felt comfortable making jokes about it.

Cablinasian Bruce Leroy

There is also a stereotype that light skinned brothers have a problem with Black women, so we would have preferred that he find a wife that was a little less...well...Nordic. But of course we'll be the last ones to talk down on interracial marriage. We secretly realize that no matter who we're with, our marriages are all going to be "interracial."

But the last three months have been trying times for our people. Cheating on his wife was bad enough, but with cocktail waitresses, porn stars and strippers? You are one of the most powerful men on the planet, and that's the best you could come up with? Lord knows that Black folks are willing to forgive the infidelities and sexual deviance of their male public figures [see: Michael (any of them), R. Kelly, MLK (sorry, true), Jessie, etc.] but it gets a whole lot more complicated when his taste in women is so, forgive me, White and skanky.

Now every time a light skinned brother tries to talk to a Black woman, a Tiger resemblance is a liability.

You gotsta step you're game up, player!

But we haven't given up hope on you, Tiger. You've got a couple of things going for you still. No matter how much your competition runs their mouth about you "disrespecting the game," they are all still trembling. You're lucky enough to be playing in a sport where a player's "prime" can last for two decades, so when you come back and hit that ball long enough, this thing will blow over. Golf is still a White man's game and that's who pays your bills. He doesn't really care about the infidelity thing. The White woman thing is an irritant, but the rule is that you're just not supposed to flaunt it like that.

Word.

So, it's okay that you didn't apologize, Tiger. We'll be alright, just make sure to put on a couple more green jackets. Give it some time and NeO will be able to return your calls again (Michelle still checks the Blackberry).

And our revolution will continue. Besides, you know the gods are with us when Vin Diesel is still getting work.

The KKK Member

So, John Mayer says his privates are racist, but his heart isn't. Wow, that's a new perspective for a White man. About this I have several thoughts.

1. The news media was tripping over itself to get the perspective of Black women on this issue (that's right, clean it up Holly Robinson Peete), but what about White women? If we extend (ahem) Mayer's KKK metaphor into the broader historical context, we see that the rallying cry for White supremacists has long been the preservation of White female purity. However, the subtext of this "purity" has always been control of the White female body. White supremacists want their woman on a high pedestal so they knows where she is at all times and can control what she's doing. Mayer was not only insulting Black women, he was checking White women to let them know that his "c***" was an instrument of domination. Message: Your body is a wonderland, so stay in your lane. Read the whole interview if you have any doubts.

So many times we understand race as just an issue that effects Black people, but it's tied into a complex set of systems of domination (also involving class and gender) that touch everyone's lives. It's more than just a Blackthang.

2. I'm usually against the whole punitive iPod purging that some people advocate after an artist does or says something despicable (see: Chris Brown). To me it smacks of digital book burning, and in this evanescent age, I can't help wonder how quickly and easily a voice might disappear forever if we all decided that it was too "wrong" to be heard. Plus, most of my favorite artists, from James Brown to Michael Jackson to Amy Winehouse (!) to Marvin Gaye, were either unsavory, or half-crazed, or both. Funk stinks sometimes, by the way.

Funky, without a doubt

3. So, I won't be deleting Mayer from my iTunes, but after listening to some of his music again, I have to say it makes me pretty disappointed. My favorite song of his "Daughters," talks about the impact that a fathers can have on the type of relationships a woman has later on. It's a really wise, sweet song. I always thought of it as a nice (almost feminist) take on the importance of valuing women. But now, not so much.

4. My father warned me about you, John Mayer.

Scene: Driving in my car with my wife in the passenger seat and my father in the backseat. We have just come back from dinner. My dad, Doctra Knowitall, gives me a look in the rearview mirror when John Mayer comes on. I ignore it.

"Uhh...I don't really like that dude," he says, undeterred.

I could feel myself stiffen, becoming defensive. I want to remind him that no one asked him. "Why you don't like him?" I said, trying to remain casual.

"I don't know, something about him..."

I could feel him nodding a doctor's prognosis: terminal whiteboy.

"Well, he's got some good songs," I said finally. My car, my stereo. So: there.

I cringe at the memory, but I know there are a lot of innocent Black men out there, just like me. Kanye, Jay-Z, Dave Chapelle, they all let you borrow their "nigger" pass (as you say). And look what you did, John. Usually I'm pretty good about not being taken advantage of Jazz Singers such as yourself. I NEVER liked Vanilla Ice or his dumbass song. I KNEW Justin Timberlake was a phony long before he talked mess about Prince and threw Janet (and her piercings) under the bus. Now, I feel like such a fool.

After the State of the Union address, Chris Matthews said that Obama's speech was so good that Matthews had forgotten he was a Negro. People got upset, but I know just how he felt. That's how I used to think of you, John. You sung good enough that I almost forgot you were a Cracketycracker. Almost.


5. The dumbass comments came up within the context of a remark about Mayer talking about people saying he has a "hood" pass because he sings "bluesish" music and has been on a couple of hip hop albums. He made an interesting observation about how the term "hood" is really just a stand in for the word nigger. That's a good point, but he also went out of his way to say the actual "N" word. He had to know that the use of the word would take away from the intent of what he was saying, especially in our soundbyte culture.

But I tend to think it wasn't about questioning how society uses new words for old concepts. No, I think he was trying to be "edgy" by demonstrating that you are so post-racial that you could actually make it cool to be a racist. Just because double-consciousness is something new to you, that doesn't mean that your racial deconstructionist navel gazing is profound. In the words of Jay-Z, "we don't believe you, you need more people."


6. As I was brainstorming a list of White artists with "hood passes," I couldn't avoid the most obvious choice: Eminem. In some ways Eminem is a whole lot smarter than Mayer because he knows that there are some topics within the genre that are off limits to him. He learned long ago that he could not say the "N" word, and that all of the women that he raped and killed in his lyrics would have to remain White, no matter how many records he sold. (Mariah Carey was about as close as he could get, and even ended up taking an L on that when she made a hit song at his expense)

Don't make Nick take it to the streets.

Although Mayer may have been stupid for running his mouth, I appreciate his willingness to take a risk. One of the things that has stunted Eminem's growth as an artist over the last decade has been his timidity. He talks big about being able to say whatever he wants, but he stays securely in his lane. He is the crazy White boy with lethal lyrics, but he talks about nothing and beefs with whomever he sees on MTV that can't fight back. He sells millions of records and is acclaimed as a genius, but still plays the role of the crucified (ax-murdering) savior. He talks about real hip hop, but supports one of the biggest underachieving, sellout musicians of all time: 50 Cent.

Yeah. Definitely...definitely...definitely going to sell a million records. Definitely. Yeah.

I give Eminem credit for being one of the first major artists to question President Bush after 9/11 when he released "Square Dance" in 2002, but it seems like after the re-election in 2004, he gave up. If Eminem really wanted to do something as an artist, he would have to step out of his lane and examine himself in a different way. He's smart enough to recognize White privilege. He has seen first hand the psychotic cycle of violence that robs so many young Black men, like his childhood friend Proof, of their lives. He has seen corporatism rob hip hop of its heart (he was actually an accessory to this robbery). He's got stuff to talk about.

But it's not just about making political or social statements in the music. I want an artist to level with me; show vulnerability in a way that is not necessarily cool or accepted. Take a risk. I promise I won't delete you from my iPod.


7. Something about my last comment seemed a little too safe, on second thought. It's easy to wag your finger at someone who has a complete body of music and say they haven't done enough. As artists, don't we all constantly fight that battle of wanting to be loved ($), versus telling a "truth," that can often seem so illusory or crazy or wrong?

But I guess that's what's required to make art that is truly great. And that's also why it's easier to talk about then do.


8. The Mayer interview is worth reading. I disagree with those that say he needs to shut up completely just because what he said was offensive. He has some (interesting/smart/stupid) things to say about fame, love, race, and even (gasp!) masturbation.