Black Male Multiple Choice: Unemployed, High School Dropout or Incarcerated

from the Huffington Post

Black Male Multiple Choice:
Unemployed, High School Dropout or Incarcerated
by Russell Simmons and Andre Harrell

If a black boy is born in the US today, he will have a 33 percent chance of going to prison in his lifetime. Stated another way -- one in three black boys born today will face prison time. It has become a sad normality, almost a backwards rite of passage, for black young men to enter the penal system and never return to our communities. And if we are "lucky" enough for them to return, they usually are much hardened criminals than they ever were before. Black men represent 8 percent of the population of the United States but comprise 3 percent of all college undergrads, 48 percent of inmates in prison and are five times more likely to die from HIV/AIDS than white men. 50 percent of black boys do not finish high school, 72 percent of black male dropouts in their 20s are unemployed and 60 percent of black male dropouts are eventually incarcerated.

To respond to this deepening crisis, the Open Society Foundation founded by George Soros developed a grant-making fund to improve black males' life outcomes. This fund is called the Campaign for Black Male Achievement (CBMA). While CBMA has had great success in building initiatives around fatherhood and family, education, living wage, and other areas, the campaign recognizes it needs to invest more in strategic communications to promote positive messages and frames about black men and boys.

CMBA and the Knight Foundation are partnering with the American Values Institute (AVI), founded by Alexis McGill Johnson, to create a conversation on December 7 and 8 called "Black Male: Re-Imagined," to explore opportunities to invest in art, culture, and communications to change the negative perceptions of black men. The questions guiding this conversation are: If we could create a campaign or set of campaigns that would change the way we look at black males over time, what would that look like?

What is "Black Male: Re-Imagined"?

"Black Male: Re-Imagined" is a two-day, invitation-only, closed-door, summit of 60 of the most thoughtful and creative media influencers, foundation executives, and the organizations they fund. We are gathering together to consider what kind of real financial investment can be made to influence media and culture to change perceptions about black males. We are honored to take part in this.

Our goals will be to: 1) discuss campaign strategies to "rebrand and re-imagine" black men. 2) explain the business models of various communications methods so that foundations can invest wisely. 3) Develop a working group to continue the conversation.

We have built brands our whole lives, that is what we do. It is time we reinvent the brand of the black male and stop the cradle-to-prison pipeline and replace it with a world that is much more hopeful and optimistic for young black men. For no child should ever think that they have a one in three chance of going to prison. There has to be another choice on the test.

Co-authored with Andre Harrell. Andre Harrell is founder of the record label, Uptown Records, who signed Mary J. Blige, Heavy D amongst many others. Harrell also served as president/CEO of Motown Records.

Motown: 'High Negro Style'

High Negro Style: The Motown Effect
by Mark Anthony Neal

When Berry Gordy founded Motown records in January of 1959, his efforts were little more than a hunch and a hustle. At the time Gordy could not have imagined that his little Detroit-based record company would go on to produce some of the most timeless music of the 20th century. For all of the two-and-a-half minute classics that came off the label’s automobile-like assembly line, there is perhaps no more endearing tribute to Motown than the image of upscale sophistication that so many of the label’s artists embodied during the 1960s. Motown’s “High Negro Style” as one of its later heads would term it, is on full display on new the release Motown the DVD: Definitive Performances.

Andre Harrell took over the helm of Motown Records in 1995, when the label was well removed from its heyday as one of the premier record companies in the country. Harrell was faced with the daunting, and ultimately unsuccessful, task of making the label relevant to an industry that had long passed it by. Though the label boasted the talents of the platinum-selling group Boyz II Men on its roster—Harrell’s tenure with the label coincides with the beginning of the group’s descent from the top of the pop charts—the label’s most notable commodity was its tradition and back catalogue.

To his credit, Harrell understood the value of that tradition and began to place his own stamp on the aging brand as an example of what he called “High Negro Style”—upscale, urban, urbane, and just street enough to remind you that the Detroit housing projects supplied Motown with much of its talent in the early 1960s. “Ghetto glamour,” as Harrell described “High Negro Style” in a 1995 cover story for New York magazine, would have been incomprehensible for those audiences who flocked to Motown performances in the 1960s. There’s no denying though, that just below the sheen of respectability and mainstream acceptance that Gordy craved, were the gritty realities of the social world that made his hustle palpable.

Read the Full Essay @ Soul Summer