As we move into May, the month of Nana Haji Malcolm’s coming into being, I would like to share some thoughts from this text in commemoration and celebration of his radically instructive and uplifting life and legacy.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau held a press conference to announce its first local level findings from the 2020 data collection cycle.
Col. Jerry Carter, a U.S. Army veteran, will oversee the work of 160 officers statewide.
Kenyans living with HIV say their lives are in danger due to a shortage of anti-retroviral drugs donated by the United States amid a dispute between the U.S. aid agency and the Kenyan government.
The European Union and the United States pledged a combined $1.2 billion in aid Tuesday to help tackle war-ravaged Syria’s deepening humanitarian and economic crises.
Over the past year, COVID-19 and its variants have plagued the globe taking lives and interrupting normal activities in virtually all areas of life. For Black America, already plagued with steep health, income and wealth disparities, coping with the pandemic has been even more painful.
While reading the November issue of Forbes, I discovered a new social media app called LUNCH CLUB. It’s an AI super-connector that makes introductions for 1:1 video meetings to advance your career. During one of the first LunchClub meetings, I met composer Matthew Wang who told me about the Composers Diversity Collective which was co-started by Michael Abels who is best known for his scores for Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning film “Get Out,” and “Us,” for which, Abels won the World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, an Image Award nomination, and multiple critics awards. The hip-hop-influenced score for US was short-listed for the Oscar and was even named “Score of the Decade” by online publication The Wrap.
Now the interrelated moral imperative to be ourselves and to free ourselves is intimately related to our commitment as advocates of Us to the principle and practice of unbudging Blackness and the deep-rooted and irreversible embrace of Africa as our moral ideal. To talk of our Blackness, again, is to talk not simply of our color, i.e., our appearance and genetic makeup, but also and most defining in distinctiveness, our culture and our self-conscious practice of it. In a word, Blackness at its core is about culture and consciousness and commitment to constantly maintain, cultivate and expand both without dismissing or diminishing respect for our color in its various shades as identifying attributes.
Now, it is Min. Malcolm who said, “There are signs for those who would see,” those who look for signs of the times to understand where we are in history and “where we fit in the scheme of things” in the time in which we live, work and struggle. And if we read the signs rightly, every sign is an indication of obligation to understand and act in definitive ways. Thus, we cannot see and hear the whirlwind and not know the obligation Marcus Garvey left us as a legacy to free Africa and Africans everywhere. Nor can we see the transformative fires of today’s struggle or remember those of the past and not realize their significance as signs and obligations of fierce, righteous and relentless resistance.
Clearly, there are several lessons to be gleaned from the legacy of these freedom warriors and workers for a new society and world. And the first is to rightfully locate them in Black history among their people, our people in the midst of an unfinished and ongoing Black freedom struggle. Indeed, there can be no correct understanding, appropriate appreciation or honest emulation of their lives and the lives of all those who preceded them and made them and us possible and of those who were their co-combatants, unless we place them all in the context of their people, our people, Black people and our struggle.
Meditation for March and the whole year. Sometimes it is good to stop in the midst of the hustle and bustle of every day and sit down and remember and reflect on people we’ve known and know; places we’ve been and are in now; positions we’ve taken and take now; where we’ve come from and are going; and what we’ve done and want to keep doing, regardless.
During the 51st Annual NAACP Image Awards celebration, the accomplishments of the industry’s top artists and contributors were highlighted in an atmosphere of Black love and acceptance
The 51st Annual NAACP Image Awards kicked off Black History Month with a bang, hosting it’s nominee luncheon to celebrate those who’ve set the bar high in Black arts and entertainment. The swanky nominee luncheon was held at the W Hotel in Hollywood, where the preceding year’s creatives, actors, writers, producers, directors and the like gathered for a moment to celebrate each other in melanated glory.
For it is on their tall shoulders we stand and look back into our past and forward into our future, extracting and applying the instructive lessons of their legacy. And it is in their long and sheltering shadows that we continue the legacy they left in the life-affirming and liberating ways we live our lives, do our work, and wage our struggle for liberation and good in the world. Indeed, as Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune taught us, our obligation is and must be a “ceaseless striving” and struggle for the Good for ourselves, others and the world.
Winston Duke, star of Jordan Peele’s new movie ‘Us’, dives deep into the symbolism in the film. The ‘Black Panther’ star also describes how empathy is his biggest tool to life.