The McEducation of the Negro

Franchising is an outstanding model for selling Big Macs. But it can be toxic to classrooms.

The McEducation of the Negro
by Natalie Hopkinson | The Root

Something wasn't right at the high school that Darwin Bridgers' son attends, so he sat in on the class to see for himself. All morning long, the instructor at the Washington, D.C., charter school pointed to a list of ground rules, a detailed list of rewards and punishments posted on a wall near the front of the class filled with black and Latino students.

Then the students filled out worksheets. That's how it went: rewards and punishments, then worksheets. No instruction, just worksheets. At the end of the class, Bridgers, who works as an exterminator, pulled aside the teacher, a young white male and recent graduate.

"I wanted to know when he was going to do some, you know, teaching," Bridgers explained to me recently. "You know, like, how we used to have in school? She would stand in front of the class … "

I nodded my head. I attended K-12 at schools in Canada, Indiana and Florida in the '80s and '90s, but I knew exactly what he meant. There would be assignments to read from textbooks. A teacher would give a lecture and randomly call on students. Students would ask questions and write things down. Then there would be some sort of written exam to see what you'd learned.

Of course, today the "reformers" say that that way of teaching is old school. It was fine before the days of social media and the "information revolution" and the global economy. But now, as the argument goes in films like Waiting for Superman, no self-respecting parent would ever send his or her child to a "failing" public school like the one that generations of Bridgers' family attended in their neighborhood in Northeast Washington.

For Bridgers' son and a disproportionate number of black students around the country, charter schools have become the preferred choice. The idea is that charters can find a model that produces results -- measured in test scores -- then apply it to different campuses. They can raise and spend money independently. They can have management consultants, and they can compete -- just like a business. As the charter school movement picks up steam nationwide, the District of Columbia may provide a glimpse of the future of "choice": Roughly 40 percent of children enrolled in District of Columbia public schools attend charters.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

The Myth of Black on Black Crime?

As we head into another long, hot summer, the media -- and black folks -- need to retire this loaded term.

The Myth of Black-on-Black Violence

by Natalie Hopkinson

This year's Black History Month was a particularly bloody one in Shelby County, S.C. Sergio Leary, Ja'cole Wilson, Karon Barrow and Leon Thurman Jr., all young people in their 20s, were all shot dead, according to local news reports.

The Shelby Star's analysis of the burst of violence, hit on all the usual crime reporting clichés: ''black,'' ''at-risk youth,'' ''subcultures that don't value'' life. And then, there's the clincher. ''Despite overall crime numbers falling in recent years, black-on-black [emphasis added] violence remains a prevalent issue,'' the newspaper reported.

You can expect to hear these key phrases on a local television news report near you as temperatures--and tempers--rise this summer. Black clergy like Al Sharpton, prominent black thinkers like Kevin Powell, and writers at black journals like the Urban Politico will shake their heads at this ''black'' scourge, self-flagellating that ''we gotta do better.''

Of course, any loss of life is cause to scream from the mountaintops. But explaining the tragedies by using loaded phrases like ''black-on-black'' violence is dangerously wrong. First, in a country that is essentially still segregated (and not necessarily by black people's choice) what race do you expect for both victim and perpetrators to be? Language like ''black-on-black violence'' effectively smacks a racial label on problems that are socioeconomic and thus the collective, moral responsibility of every American.

At this particular moment in our history, it is more important than ever to reject these kinds of racialized explanations. They are being used to slander public school children as incapable of learning; to deem affordable housing a hopeless cause. In gentrifying cities, ''black-on-black crime'' is used as a weapon to encourage public policies that treat black people as blights on the new urban aesthetic. There is a moral imperative to challenge these assumptions.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Natalie Hopkinson is a media and culture critic based in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter.

Hip--Hop, Homophobia and Wale

Wale Rhymes With Gay:

Is hip-hop finally being held accountable for its homophobia?

by Natalie Hopkinson

By any objective measure--moral, legal, ethical, the eyes of his horrified mother--the hip-hopper Wale screwed up. Management for the gifted artist best known for his duet with Lady Gaga contracted him to perform at D.C. Black Pride, a 20-year-old festival--for 45 minutes and $18,000. At the last minute, his team backed out, claiming they did not realize Pride was a gay and lesbian event.

Whooops!

Furious Pride organizers put him on blast in the local media, vowed to explore their legal options, and quickly arranged for another artist, the tatted-out R&B crooner J. Holiday to take his place. In the middle of J. Holiday's Memorial Day Weekend performance, I watched Wale make an unpaid appearance to do a little damage control. He said once his mother informed him of the controversy which aired on local TV, he immediately came back from his trip to Miami to make things right.

''One thing I stand for is hip-hop music,'' Wale, the son of Nigerian immigrants, told the crowd. ''Hip-hop music knows no race, no color, no age, no gender, no sexuality, none of that .... But I will say, in this business, sometimes you get aligned with people who don't understand that, or who don't necessarily have the same belief system as you do. And I apologize for not putting my best foot forward and not understanding the people I'm in business with. And I'm gonna do better--as we all do. People, every day we gotta get better.''

So what exactly did we just witness? Was it a step forward for compassionate understanding of our friends in ''the life''? Did Wale just avert a boycott/lawsuit or discrimination charges? Is this the beginning of the end of folks tolerating homophobia? Could it be signs of actual--*gasp*--maturity in popular hip-hop?

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Lamenting the Loss of 'Go-Go'

Go-Go Music is the Soul of Washington, but It's Slipping Away
by Natalie Hopkinson

It was just another gig at a D.C. area nightclub, one of several shows the band Suttle Thoughts plays each week, drawing hundreds of young professionals in their 20s and 30s -- a self-proclaimed "grown and sexy" crowd. But a club manager stopped the band at the door when he noticed one of the musicians bringing in a set of conga drums, bandleader Chi Ali told me.

If you are in or near the District and you see a young black bandleader trailed by a horn section, guitars, keyboards, cow bells and congas, that can only mean one thing: They play go-go music, the area's unique style of funk. And if you run a club, having a go-go band perform can be complicated. On the upside, the place is going to be packed, and you will rake it in at the bar. On the downside, the crowds can get volatile, drawing extra police scrutiny.

On that day early this year, the club manager didn't want to bother. So he told the band to get its things and go.

This is what it has come to: one of the city's only true indigenous art forms -- the one generations of Washingtonians have grooved to -- unceremoniously cast away. Not only is go-go being shut out from clubs that could still support it, the retail stores that nurtured the music are fading away.

Read the Full Essay @ The Washington Post

The Benefits of White Privilege?

It takes a special kind of talent to take a civil rights novel about black maids to Hollywood. But do you also have to be Caucasian?

It 'Helps' To Be White
by Natalie Hopkinson

In one scene in the best-selling novel The Help, a spirited black woman has second thoughts about sharing the gory details of her life as a Mississippi domestic with a white writer who is part of the town's bridge-and-tennis-playing aristocracy.

"What am I doing?" Minny says, in an uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt. "I must be crazy, giving the sworn secrets a the colored race to a white lady." Later, she justifies speaking out in 1960s Jackson, even though she faces violence and never getting work again. "I ... just want things to be better for the kids. But it's a sorry fact that it's a white woman doing this."

I am kind of with Minny. I absolutely loved The Help, Kathryn Stockett's wonderful book-within-a-book about segregation in her native, Mississippi. Here was a novel that tells the heroic story of black women who nursed white children and cleaned white homes while never missing a church tithing on Sunday. These women did the literal and figurative dirty work of the civil rights movement, sitting silently in the pews while the men in front of the pulpit made the magazine covers.

But with the movie version of The Help coming soon via Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks and the book making best-seller lists from Biloxi to Boston, Minny's troublesome observation about white privilege is still relevant 50 years later. In the world of publishing and Hollywood, it helps to be talented, as Stockett clearly is. But it also helps to be white. The book's title referred to 1960s maids, but the "sorry fact" is that in 2010 if colored people want to have a voice--and more importantly one that carries far and wide--you still need white help.

Read the Full Review @ The Root

The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted?

Does this mean the beginning of the end of journalism as we know it? Or the start of a new revolution?

Twitter’s DIY Journalism
by Natalie Hopkinson

I first realized that our democracy had kicked into another gear last September, when in the middle of President Barack Obama’s speech rallying Congress to pass a health care bill, someone in the U.S. Capitol chamber screamed, “YOU LIE!”

Even Obama looked a bit shaken, as I was, sitting in my living room, one eye on CNN, and the other eye on my Twitter feed.

On Twitter, within seconds, someone had produced a name of the heckler. Just as quickly, someone else listed his office phone number and Web site, which quickly crashed. Minutes later, a link was produced to a site raising money for the alleged heckler’s political opponent. Then came the links to old articles of the alleged heckler dissing the black daughter of Sen. Strom Thurmond. By the end of the night, thousands of dollars were raised in a South Carolina congressional race.

At the end of the speech, a CNN anchor announced she believed they could identify the heckler, but they were double-checking to make sure before airing his name.

Watching it all unfold, I felt both hopelessly uninformed and over-informed at the same time. What if it wasn’t actually Rep. Joe Wilson, but someone else, who made the rude break in decorum? And what if Joe Wilson’s Congressional opponent turned out to be a moron of the Blago ilk? What do any of those people donating money on the Net know about the politics of Aiken County, S.C., anyways?

This is a picture of our democracy at work at Twitter speed. Max Fisher at The Atlantic Wire recently did a great roundup of the recent debate over what is the best medium to convey information; a pair of The New Yorker essays scoffing at Twitter had launched the debate. No, Steve Coll, there is no moral judgment to be made about Twitter’s characteristics. And no, George Packer, I am not “uncritically cheerleading Twitter,” leading to my own destruction as a journalist.

In our clumsy forays into Twitter, many of us are desperately trying to find out: Who are the true gatekeepers of information these days? As a friend observed recently, the debate typically boils down to: Old Guy insisting that journalism has gone to hell versus Young Guy insisting that New Media is going to save us.

I think part of the crisis of confidence in the field of journalism is that neither one gets to decide. Both are just going to have to evolve.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Yinka Shonibare MBE @ the Smithsonian

Yinka Shonibare MBE’s career retrospective at the Smithsonian just goes to show how strange things get when the empire strikes black.

The (Not So) New World Order
by Natalie Hopkinson

How “explicit” could the images be? Queen Elizabeth II herself proclaimed the artist The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Yinka Shonibare MBE, the Brit-Nigerian art world star, toast of two continents, was having a mid-career retrospective at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

So my kindergartener and I sailed past the warning signs, past the objections of the concerned security guard, turned a corner and immediately understood:

One headless female mannequin, bathed in classic Victorian crinoline dress rendered in an African textile print, stood bent over, rear end raised doggy-style to meet the groin of another headless male. Behind him, another headless man penetrated him. Steps away, another crinoline-clad woman kneeled, her head tucked beneath a swatch of African cloth as she pleasured another headless woman. Still another headless woman sat on a wooden bench, legs spread-eagled, shoulders thrown back in the throes of passion.

The art installation, “Gallery and Criminal Conversation,” was a play on the Victorian morality, norms, manners and social structures that have come to define the British Empire. The orgiastic scene was the London-born/Lagos-reared artist’s way of throwing all this supposed order into chaos. Kind of like the time he arrived at his London art opening trailed by two white slaves.

These days, life is indeed stranger than art. The Eurocentric world order has been turned upside down. This little show by the Yoruba trickster-artist is just another picture of what happens when the empire strikes black.

Read Full Essay @ The ROOT

Why No One Talks Back to Cathy Hughes

The empress of black radio is using public airwaves to personally attack her enemies in Congress in the name of black progress. Who's going to put her in check?

Why No One Talks Back to Cathy Hughes
by Natalie Hopkinson

If you’ve tuned in to black radio in the past few months, chances are you’ve heard “Reality Radio,” a series of announcements in which radio pioneer Cathy Hughes asks the black community to fight a new law in Congress that she claims would “murder black-owned radio.”

Her definition of homicide? Performance Rights Act (HR 848), a bill that would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists for playing their music. The potential winners and losers in the bill being considered by Congress has been a source of heated debate. But it clearly would dim the already free-falling profits of Hughes’ company Radio One, the nation’s largest chain of black radio stations.

Now, your average multimillionaire business mogul might respond to a congressional threat by heading directly to K Street to hire the most powerful lobbyist money can buy. But we are talking about Cathy Hughes, BLACK multimillionaire business mogul, someone who has a long track record of using the airwaves to throw her weight around on behalf of the Darker Nation.

Thus Hughes’ calculus for the “Reality Radio” spots goes something like this: I am a black person + my business is under threat = black people are under threat.

“This bill is not in the interest of black people!” Hughes tells the 12 million listeners who tune in to Radio One stations each week, in spots that air as many as a dozen times a day. In one episode, Hughes publicly scolds bill co-sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston for assuring radio execs that HR 848 would not put them out of business. “She has never worked at, managed nor owned a radio station in her life,” Hughes says. “So how could she possibly know anything about what it takes or doesn’t take to operate a broadcasting facility?”

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Don Corleone--Health Care Provider

The real reason why health care reform has stalled is because too many people are getting rich.

Why Health Care is Organized Crime
by Natalie Hopkinson

The irony is that the government is paying for their stinking doctors—only at a much higher moral and financial cost. Taxpayers have shelled out more than $150,000 and counting for Mary’s care—all for a cancer that could have easily been prevented and treated with a routine doctor’s visit.

Truth is, America is a wealthy country and can afford to pay for health care. The sad fact is that the inefficiencies and vagaries of the current system are the stuff that American-style capitalism thrives on. The status quo is making a lot of people rich; the doctors, the drug companies, the lawyers, the lobbyists are all getting paid.

My neighbor Mark puts it best: “The problem with our health care system is that it’s organized crime.” Indeed, medical scans that would cost Mary $1,350 out of pocket, companies are billing the government for $3,000. Two anti-nausea pills alone cost $400; a post-chemotherapy injection to boost blood cells runs the government $7,000 a pop.

Many of the drug companies are based here in the U.S., and they get away with charging these exorbitant prices for their products because they can. In places such as Canada and Europe where there is a public health care system, the government is able to negotiate lower costs for the same drugs.

Not so here in the U.S., where the hodgepodge health care system is like the Wild Wild West, creating boom times for the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root