Kevin Powell: Open Letter to Hiphop America

Open Letter to Hiphop America
September 2010

Peace to all of you. I am writing this letter from Brooklyn, New York, where I am currently a Democratic candidate for Congress. For those who do not know, there are 435 United States Congresspersons in America, and 100 United States Senators, all based in Washington, D.C. when not in their home districts, and all of them together represent the 300 million Americans living in our nation. That is power. The power to provide resources, services, information, jobs, and loans for small businesses. The power to help people to help themselves.

That is why I am running for Congress. I come from a single-mother led household, I had no father figure whatsoever, and grew up in the kind of poverty, violence, and confusion I would not wish on anyone. But a few things definitely saved and empowered my life. One was a belief in God, instilled by mother. Second was definitely my moms and her giving me a love of education, in spite of she herself only having a grade school education. And finally it was definitely music and culture, especially hiphop as I came of age in the 1970s and through the 1980s.

I was a dancer and I tagged my nickname—“kepo1”—any and everywhere in my native Jersey City. I was at all the famous hiphop clubs of the 1980s, like Union Square, Funhouse, and The Rooftop. I helped to produce, along with youth activists like Sister Souljah, those big outdoor rap concerts on 125th Street in Harlem in the late 1980s. A writer since I was a child, I was a founding staff member at Vibe, and interviewed Tupac Shakur more than any other journalist when he was alive. And I was the curator of the very first exhibit on hiphop culture, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

I am hiphop. And I am also a public servant and activist for people, all people. For the past 25 years, in fact, since I was a youth.

That is why I am running for Congress. Not only would I be the first true hiphop head in Congress, but I also would be bringing a fresh take on leadership, blending the best of grassroots politics with Washington, D.C. maneuvering, all to that boom-bap beat.

And, as dead prez once famously said, this is actually bigger than hiphop. This is about my being a leader, a bridge-builder, and all of us weaned on hiphop music and culture understanding the power of this, the most dominant art form of the past 30 years.

If not us, then who?

Respectfully,

Kevin Powell

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Net Neutrality—Protecting Your Voice, and Mine

special to NewBlackMan

Net Neutrality—Protecting Your Voice, and Mine
by Kevin Powell

I believe deeply in freedom of speech, and the free exchange of ideas in our society. When we take a quick scan of America’s history, it is those fundamental principals that made it possible for everyone from “the founding fathers,” to anti-slavery activists, to women, to the muckrakers, to labor organizers, to Civil Rights activists, to the LGBT community, to Chicano farm workers, and every other kind of movement, moment, or march we can cite, to exist. And to win.

I think about this a great deal as I am currently campaigning for Congress here in Brooklyn, New York. No, nothing will ever beat going door-to-door, meeting people on the streets, at transportation stops, at various places of business. But I cannot tell you how many people we’ve touched—with job postings, with useful tips about voter registration, with tidbits about a timely news item or community concern—because of the internet.

For the internet is the great equalizer in our American democracy. And that is why “Net Neutrality” must be preserved, for the sake of all Americans.

To put it simply, Net Neutrality is a principle, until now, that has governed the internet and made all of us equals, as it should be in every arena of our country. That means all those bloggers you and I know, who pen article after article every single week, from their dorm rooms or their living rooms, on their Blackberry or their iPhone, are just as important as, say, a blogger for CNN or Fox News Channel. And just as accessible.

Because of Net Neutrality, millions of Americans who never previously had a voice now have one. Writers who could not get published now have huge audiences. Musical artists shunned by major record labels have created whole careers because of the internet. Filmmakers who otherwise could not get their movies or documentaries to the public now have a means to do so—freely.

And even President Barack Obama owes a huge debt to Net Neutrality, because it was the use of the internet in 2008, by millions and millions of Americans, especially younger folks, who generated all those donations, created all that hype and buzz, and propelled him to the White House.

So in trying to wrap my head around Net Neutrality, I always come back to one question: What if those who decide what is worthy and what is not on the internet decide, for any reason, that my voice should be relegated to the secondary internet proposed by Verizon and Google?

Please understand that’s what this debate really comes down to in the end. Verizon and Google can argue that some of what we do on the net slows down the net more than other things, and that those things that don’t slow it down should be given preference. And a slow Internet connection is annoying, especially when you want to watch your favorite show, read your favorite columnist, or download a song.

This past week, in fact, the telecom and internet giants proposed a series of regulations to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hoping to create a two-tiered internet system on the internet, and also hoping the FCC decides to stay out of regulating wireless altogether. Basically, they want to dictate to the FCC what they, Verizon and Google, think is best.

But that’s really the problem. I don’t want any corporation (even one claiming it has my best interests at heart) to decide what is best on the internet. No, not my wireless company. I want the American people and, if required, our government, to regulate the internet. And that’s all. I want a government that keeps illegal content from the internet. I want a people free to choose whether they want to read Gail Collins or watch a video of a pug who somehow barks the Batman theme (Have you seen this? It’s uncanny.) Us. We decide.

Just as many Americans rail against, say, the restrictions China has placed on its citizens, where the Chinese people are not able to send out or surf the internet for perspectives other than what their government gives them, we should have the same amount of passion and resolve to not allow this to happen in America. Ending Net Neutrality is certain to take us in that direction.

And as an African American, I am particularly disturbed and saddened by the numerous civil rights organizations and Black political leaders who are in opposition to Net Neutrality. How quickly we have forgotten (or have simply ignored) our own history of being denied opportunities to speak freely, to have spaces to spread information for, about, and on behalf of our communities. But when lobbyist money talks and is coming from certain telecom companies, strange bedfellows become the reality, even if it means selling out your constituents in the process.

That is precisely why I am running for Congress at this time. For only by leveraging the power of the internet can an insurgent Congressional campaign like mine hope to unseat an incumbent financially fed by the establishment. The Internet has opened new doors to new ideas, launched campaigns like mine, connected people with others whom they never would have met. And the internet and Net Neutrality are why you are reading this essay, for free, this very moment, and with great ease.

And, until now, we have decided what we want. We the people have been the directors of the internet. And it must remain free from any corporation’s influence, even if it would allow me to more quickly stream Drake, The Beatles, or Abbey Lincoln—whose magical jazz voice we sadly lost this past weekend.

So we must protect all the voices on the internet: yours, mine, even my opponent’s. And especially Abbey Lincoln’s.

For it is our Internet. Let us keep it that way.

Kevin Powell is a 2010 Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Brooklyn, New York’s 10th Congressional district. You can reach him at www.kevinpowell.net

Charlie Rangel Begat Ed Towns

from the Huffington Post

Charlie Rangel Begat Ed Towns: Something Is Broken In Brooklyn, Too
by Kevin Powell

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
--Abraham Lincoln

And the drama of Congressman Charlie Rangel continues to unfold with 13 charges of misconduct, even as I type this essay: Mr. Rangel faces a range of accusations stemming from accepting four rent-stabilized apartments and misusing his office to preserve a tax loophole worth half a billion dollars for an oil executive who pledged a donation for an educational center being built in Mr. Rangel's honor. In short, Mr. Rangel, one of the most powerful Democrats in the United States House of Representatives, has given his Republican foes much fodder to attack Dems as the November mid-term elections quickly approach.

While this saga continues, two questions dangle in the air: First, where did it all go so terribly wrong? And, second, did Mr. Rangel begat the lack of ethics also present in the career of his colleague, friend, and staunch ally Congressman Edolphus "Ed" Towns of Brooklyn, New York?

To answer these questions I think we must go back to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement's waning days. Dr. King was still alive, but his popularity had plummeted, which explains why, to this day, many people do not know his writings or sermons from those latter years. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of Harlem (Mr. Rangel's predecessor) was clinging to his seat amidst ethics battles of his own. The streets of Black America were on fire, as urban unrest became the language of the unheard ghetto masses. And in majority Black communities like Harlem and Brooklyn, Black leaders, emboldened by Civil Rights victories, chants of "Black Power," and a once-in-a-century opportunity for power, rushed through the kicked-in doors, into politics, into business, into film and television, into book publishing and magazines (or started their own), and into colleges and universities heretofore shuttered. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. The best because many really believed "change" was on the horizon. The worst because some Black movers and shakers were so happy to get inside that they came with no vision or a plan whatsoever for their followers.

Clearly very few even bothered to read Dr. King's landmark essay "Black Power Redefined," which sought to push Black leaders toward a programmatic agenda that included the poor and economically disenfranchised.

And if there were any communities in Black America to test Dr. King's vision, they were Harlem and Brooklyn. Brooklyn has Black America's largest concentration of people of African descent. But Harlem, in particular, was the symbolic capital of Black America, and it was there that the now famous Gang of Four--Percy Sutton, Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins, and Basil Paterson--planned and plotted a course for their community, and themselves. Rangel replaced Powell in Congress and became the dean of New York politics. Sutton would first be a successful politician himself, then eventually start Inner City Broadcasting, a major person of color owned media enterprise; Basil Paterson would be, among other things, New York State Senator, Deputy Mayor of New York City, and New York Secretary of State; and David Dinkins, of course, became the first Black mayor of New York City.

Truth be told Mr. Rangel and his colleagues had an incredible vision and really did nothing differently than their White predecessors had been doing for decades in America: they saw an opportunity for a taste of power and they took it. (And at least the Gang of Four brought an economic empowerment zone to Harlem, something Congressman Towns pretended to want to do in the mid-1990s for Brooklyn, then mysteriously backed away from, instead endorsing then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's re-election bid, with Brooklyn never hearing about that zone again.)

Indeed, as I was coming of age as a student and youth activist in the 1980s, and as a then-reporter with various Black newspapers in the New York City area, I remember well hearing their names mentioned often. And, to a lesser extent, the names of their Black political peers in Brooklyn like Al Vann, Major Owens, and Sonny Carson. It was awe-inspiring, because I did not know that Black folks were leaders in this way. The pinnacle of this Black political ascension in New York City, without question, was the election of David Dinkins in 1989. For New York was the last of the major American cities to produce a Black mayor.

But something stopped during Dinkins' years in City Hall. Black New York was unable to shake off the catastrophic effects of the 1980s crack cocaine scourge, or Reagan-era social policies. Meanwhile, Black leadership in New York, rather than nurture and prepare the next generation of Black voices to succeed them, did exactly what their White forerunners had done: they dug their heels deeper into the sands of power and have instead become leaders of what I call "a ghetto monarchy." In other words, the community-first values of the Civil Rights era have been replaced by the post-Civil Rights era values of me-first, career first, and control and domination of my building, my block, my housing projects, my district, my part of the community (if not all of it), my church, my community center, or my organization, by any means necessary. For as long as possible. And often for as much money, privilege, and access to power as one can get with a "career" as a Black leader or figurehead.

And that, my friends, is what leads us, again, to the sad spectacles of the two senior most Congresspersons in New York State: Charlie Rangel of Harlem, and my representative in Brooklyn, Congressman Edolphus "Ed" Towns.

For it is so clear that the leadership path of Congressman Rangel begat the leadership path of Congressman Towns. Both may have been well intentioned at the beginning of their careers. Both may very well believe in the goodness, as I do, of public service for the people. But something has gone terribly wrong, the longer they have stayed in office (40 years now, for Mr. Rangel, and 27 long years for Mr. Towns); something that, I believe, has sapped them of their ability to serve effectively. That has sapped them of sound moral, political and ethical judgment. That has led both to be disconnected from the very people they claim to serve, both younger and older people alike.

And you see this pattern with old school Black political leaders nationwide. For ghettos exist wherever you see Black city council or alderpersons. Ghettos exist wherever you see Black state senators and assemblypersons. And ghettos exist for most of the Congressional districts, too, represented by Black House members. 40-plus long years of Black political representation, in record numbers, in fact, but it seems our communities are worse off than even before the Civil Rights Movement.

Now I am very clear that systemic racism has done a number on these communities from coast to coast, from how financial institutions have treated urban areas, to the deterioration of our public schools when White flight became real in the 1960s and 1970s, to loss of factories, and other job incubators, to the often combative relationship between our communities and local police. And let us not begin to talk about the effects of gentrification on urban areas across America the past decade and a half.

But if a leader really has any vision, she or he figures out some way to help the people to help themselves. You simply do not retreat to what is safe, secure, and predictable in terms of your actions, or lack thereof. Doing that means you simply have given up. Or, worse, you just do not care.

For me, no clearer evidence than the other day when I was campaigning for Congress in the Marcy Projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the Marcy Projects made famous in the lyrics of hip-hop superstar and Brooklyn native son Jay-Z. The 60-year-old Marcy Projects is so huge a housing complex that it swallows whole Myrtle and Park and Flushing Avenues between Nostrand and Marcy. It consists of 27 buildings, over 1,700 apartments, and approximately 5,000 residents. And except for areas like Fort Greene (excluding its own projects), Clinton Hill, Boerum Hill, and parts of Dumbo, Bed-Stuy, East Flatbush, and Canarsie, most of Mr. Towns' district is as impoverished, under-served, and as forgotten as Marcy Projects.

There is the sight of several elderly women sitting on benches in the middle of this aging complex, frustrated with the state of their lives, their meager incomes, the bags of garbage strewn about them, and the rats that have created dirt holes so big around each building that a small human head could fit through most of them. When I ask these women where the nearest senior citizen center is, so they could have some measure of relief, they say, in unison, "Right here, outside, where we are sitting now, these benches. This is the safest place we got."

There is the sight of children, pre-teens and teens, running, jumping, over piss-stained asphalt, scraping their knees on the ground filled with broken bottles and broken promises. There also is no community center open in Marcy any longer. Why that is the case, no Marcy resident can tell me. What they do tell me is that Marcy Playground is being renovated. And indeed it is. But the residents feel it is not for them, that it is for "the new White people coming into the area, and the new Black people who have some money."

There is the sight of all those Black and Latino males standing on this or that corner, in front of this or that building, the hands of their lives shoved deep into their pockets, their hunger for something better fed by a Newport cigarette, a taste of malt liquor or Hennessey, a pull on a marijuana stick. And then the ritual happens: a police car shows up, males and females of all ages are asked for identification, are thrown up against a wall, against the squad car, or to the ground, asked where they live, where they are going, why are they standing there, what is in their shoes, in their underwear. Or they are accused of trespassing for going from one building to another, even if they are simply visiting a relative or friend.

This is not just life in Marcy Projects, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. This is what ghetto monarchs like Congressman Towns and Congressman Rangel preside over in Black communities nationwide. Perhaps, once more, they really cared at one point--maybe they really did. But circa 2010, Charlie Rangel's problems are Ed Towns' problems because the apple does not fall very far from the tree. Yes, cite Mr. Rangel's litany of indiscretions, but let us not forget Mr. Towns' own timeline of indiscretions while overseeing his district (see the timeline below for Mr. Towns), for nearly three decades, with, among other things, some of the bloodiest violence in America, the highest HIV/AIDS rates in America, the most under-achieving schools (with a few notable exceptions), and vast disparities between the haves and the have-nots. Right here in Brooklyn, New York.

Is it little wonder that as I travel this Congressional district, meeting with Jewish folks in Boerum HIill, Chinese folks in Williamsburg, West Indian folks in East Flatbush and Canarsie, or African American and Puerto Rican folks in East New York, I hear the same things time and again: "We never see Mr. Towns except maybe when he needs our vote," or, "I have never seen Mr. Towns in my life," or, "I have called Mr. Towns' office many times and never gotten the help I need," or, "I just do not trust any of these politicians at all. They all lie."

This is why voter turnout is perpetually low. This is why incumbents get to stay in office decade after decade. The formula is very simple for electeds like Congressman Ed Towns: Identify the loyal voters and only cater to them (helping them get election poll jobs, or regular jobs, helping their children get into schools, paying for trips out of town to some casino or amusement park or cookout). Stay out of sight of all the other registered Democratic voters, banking on them simply pulling the lever for "Democrats" every election cycle without any fuss or questions. Never debate an insurgent opponent for fear of being exposed for who you really are, and for what you have not done for the community. Turn your political seat into a business, one where your family member and circle of friends and colleagues benefit from the powerful reach of your position.

So why would you want to give that up? Why would you even bother to do more than is absolutely necessary when you are able to enjoy the perks of a long political career without much effort, without much sweat equity at all? Why would you even think that taking on the values of political corruption are unethical at all, if there has been no one to hold you accountable for so very long?

And why would you see that Brooklyn, and the Brooklyns of America, are broken, so very terribly broken, even though it is clear as day to the people in your community?

***

Kevin Powell is a 2010 Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Brooklyn, New York's 10th Congressional district. You can contact him at kevinpowell.net.

Brooklyn! Who is Your Congressman?

Kevin Powell for Congress!