Our World with Marc Lamont Hill: Love & Relationships

Our World with Marc Lamont Hill | Black Enterprise

Love & Relationships featuring Mona Scott Young, Jimmy Briggs, and Esther Armah.

The Lonely Londoners: A Musical Essay on the 1981 Brixton Riots

The Lonely Londoners: 

A Musical Essay on the 1981 Brixton Riots

by Lynnee Denise

Drum and Bass is Black Music...

On the 30th anniversary of the 1981 Brixton riots (April 11 2011), a historic reaction to the violent and xenophobic environment that informed the policing of African and Caribbean immigrants, I examined the ruthless desire to "Keep Britain White." I read Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel “The Lonely Londoners,” which tells the story of the Caribbean community’s communal response to the English brand of white supremacy and their cultural preservation as a means for survival and sought the political, social, and musicological context of a sound that takes root in Sly and Robbie’s genre of Reggae Music—Drum and Bass. Inspired by these histories, I’ve created a musical essay that epitomizes my long-term relationship with Black Britain and the parallel strategies of resistance that Black Americans have employed to attain basic human rights. Shout out to drum and bass pioneers Roni Size, Goldie, LTJ Bukem, Kemistry and Storm, Krust, and all the other sons and daughters of “The Lonely Londoners.”

I'm excited to introduce a new series of liner notes. As a part of the WildSeed Cultural Group Independent Artist in Residence program in Atlanta, Georgia (2011-2012), I will be working with my favorite thinkers, writers, cultural critics and scholars to help contextualize my mixes. The first to launch the series is Esther Armah, a fierce Black British writer, speaker, moderator and leader in the emotional justice movement. Thank you Esther for being willing to participate in this project and for helping to make "Entertainment with a Thesis" a reality.

Liner Notes by Esther Armah*

We made it. Not bodies. They were battered, bruised, brutalized, buried. The drum beat landed. Intact. Slipped unnoticed between bodies, souls, minds carried from West Africa’s shores via the West Indies. Landed unbent and unbroken in this new land - West London. We were the language left when mother tongue was dragged screaming from its source, we were the unshed tears of the middle passage. Company came. Sought us out. Hands grabbed at us from Empire Wind-rush bodies, carried to this place from Caribbean islands. A new language, new accent from this new nation called England. Black backs bent and shaped by British labor, sweat collected from a generation invited and despised in the same breath. Our mamas and daddies, silent and deadly. That racism DNA pounded and flattened, birthed into frustrated beats and a new generation. Defiance became the breath of those born to these Caribbean bodies mangled seeking refuge from racist rants. This was now Black Britain. Sound changed. Started to gather new notes from new generation. April 1981. Brixton streets, injustice exploded, caught fire, consumed and cleansed. 

Remnants of those unshed tears from that middle passage put the fire out on the streets, left it burning within Black Britain. Fragments of rage wrapped in that drum, dirt from boots pounding those streets caught between notes. Fragments, pieces, floated, landed. Sound from snatched pieces of leftover 1960s signs that screamed: ‘No Niggers, No Dogs, No Irish’, sound dragged from police officers’ brutal batons before they rained rage on nappy heads, sound from untold injustice - all fashioned into language. Called it bass. The sound from an unwelcome land. The double consciousness in the mirror whose reflection you couldn’t see. Mangled beauty drenched in righteous rage. Drum n bass. 30 years on from Brixton; bodies, boots, batons echo, haunt, haint. Now. Press play.

Lessons & Legacies: Daughters & Mothers: A Conversation

Centric Productions & It Takes A Village Today.com present…

LESSONS & LEGACIES: DAUGHTERS & MOTHERS:
A Conversation

Daughters and mothers – a powerful, joy-filled, sometimes painful relationship. What lessons and legacies are shared and passed down from mother to daughter? Major life lessons, untreated trauma, untold legacies, unrevealed secrets? What would you share? What lessons did you learn? What did you have to unlearn?

Moderator: Esther Armah
Radio Host WBAI 99.5FM’s ‘Wake Up Call’, International Award-Winning Journalist, Playwright, Director Centric Productions, www.offthepage.net

Featuring Panelists:
Dian Brooks • Staceyann Chin • asha bandele • Stacey Patton

2 Hours • 1 Powerhouse Panel • 1 Provocative Conversation
this is the Emotional Justice Movement

Monday, April 25
7PM- 9PM

The Brecht Forum
451 West Street
(between between Bank & Bethune Streets)
New York, NY 10014

Admission: $10
For more information call 212.209.2812 or visit: www.brechtforum.org

Subway Directions: Take A, C, E Trains to 14th Street & 8th Avenue

This panel is part of Esther Armah’s Afrolicious 2011, the emotional justice arts & conversation series. The 2011 theme? Love=Revolution.

After the Dance: Conversations on Michael Jackson's Black America

After the Dance:

Conversations on Michael Jackson's Black America

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Langston Hughes Auditorium
Friday June 4, 2010 at 6pm
Saturday June 5, 2010 at 11am

Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest on June 25, 2009. After a year of media-sanctioned mourning through concert tributes, film specials, video marathons and an extravagance of merchandising, who will bear the questions of music industry exploitation, self-hate, sexuality, addiction and apparent madness that Michael’s life and death urge us to ask? Who will discuss the value of Michael’s Philanthropy an environmental consciousness? Michael’s story echoes the ongoing crises of experience and identity faced not only by Black America, but the Black Diaspora. These conversations demand space beyond a video tribute.

Day 1:

Friday, June 4

6 p.m. Opening Reception

7 p.m. Opening Plenary with featured guests Nelson George, Author, Filmmaker, Television producer, and Critic & Touré, Music journalist, Cultural critic

9 p.m. Closing Reception: Jackson Rhythms provided by WildSeed Music NY

** Sugested $10 donation at the door.

Day 2:
Saturday, June 5

11 a.m. Can You Feel It? A Multi-Media Collage of the Decades-Long Jackson Family Musical Career

Panel Discussions

12 p.m. To be White, Gifted and Black: Managing Acceptable Representations of Blackness as the "King of Pop"

Moderator: Esther Armah, International journalist, Published author, Public speaker, Radio host, and Playwright.

Panelists:Arthur Jafa, Filmmaker, Cinematographer, Writer; Dream Hampton, Hip Hop journalist; dj lynnee denise, WildSeed Music NYC; and DJ Qool Marv

2 p.m. Keep it in the Closet: The Historic Speculation Around Michael Jackson’s Gender Bending Persona

Moderator: Steven Fullwood, Schomburg Center

Panelists: Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University, and Author; Asadullah Muhammad, Educator, Father, Poet, Writer; and DJ Reborn, Music Consultant and Teaching Artist; and DJ Selly

4 p.m. Black Ain’t Green: Honoring Michael’s Environmental Consciousness and Philanthropic Endeavors

Moderator: Walker Sands, Majora Carter Group

Panelists: Andres Carter, Sustainable South Bronx; William Thomas, Green Jobs Leader, Trainer, Business Man; and Anisa Keith, Sustainanble Business Committee, Co-founder

5 p.m. Closing: Jackson Rhythms

Trouble Man: Black Male Privilege?--A Forum

The Brecht Forum
Monday May 17, 2010 @ 7:30pm
Co-sponsored by Centric Productions

Trouble Man:Black, Male Privilege
A Contradiction? An Illusion? A Reality?

Byron Hurt
L'Hereux Lewis
Marc Lamont Hill
Mark Anthony Neal
Esther Amrah (Moderator)

This panel is part of Esther Armah's New Monthly Live Interactive Emotional Justice Conversation Series -Afrolicious

Black men are in crisis. Prison, schools, racism, brutality. But, what about black male privilege? What does it look like? How do we define it? How and who does it hurt or help? How does it inform our relationships? Is it our silent reality: undiscussed, unspoken, unrevealed? Byron Hurt, Marc Lamont Hill, Mark Anthony Neal, L'Heureux Lewis take on black male privilege and break it down.

*Esther Armah (Moderator): International Award winning Journalist, Radio Host of Wake Up Call and Off the Page WBAI 99.5 FM, Playwright

*Marc Lamont Hill, Associate Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and Author of Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life

*Byron Hurt, Award winning filmmaker, Hip Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Barack&Curtis, and Soul Food Junkies, anti sexism activist, Essayist

*R.L. Heureux Lewis, Assistant Professor Sociology and Black Studies at the City College of New York

*Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University and Author of New Black Man


The Brecht Forum
451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets)
New York, NY 10014
Phone: (212) 242-4201

BLACK MALE PRIVILEGE? A CONTRADICTION, AN ILLUSION OR A REALITY?

BLACK MALE PRIVILEGE? A CONTRADICTION, AN ILLUSION OR A REALITY?

Define Black Male Privilege? That is exactly what Dr L'Hereux Lewis, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at CUNY says he can do. His work is part of a new segment on Wake Up Call on masculinity called: *'Between Peril & Privilege'.*

The recession has been dubbed a 'man'-cession' due its disproportionate impact on men; blue collar white men, middle class white men, Hispanics and African Americans. With destroyed industries and upward spiraling unemployment; the rise and rise of Rush Limbaugh who takes white middle class male sense of failure and turns it into rage, the ascent of a black man as president and a new generation of scholars - black and white - arguing we must re-define masculinity, Wake Up Call brings you this new segment. For social justice black men are so often in peril; in so many other elements of society white men enjoy privilege.

'Between Peril & Privilege' is the segment where Wake Up Call brings you provocative, critical analysis on masculinity. BYRON HURT, award winning film-maker, essayist and gender activist and MARK ANTHONY NEAL, a professor at Duke University and the author of New Black Man: Re-thinking Black Masculinity join Wake Up Call host, Esther Armah.

Listen Here (Segment begins at 46:00)