America's Most Livable City? | New Video by Jasiri X

from Jasiri X:

"America's Most Livable City" highlights the city of Pittsburgh's recent honor, despite according to the U.S. Census Bureau, having the highest rate of poverty among working age Black people in the United States. This is the Pittsburgh they don't show when your watching the Steelers, the REAL Pittsburgh.

To see more footage of these poor undeserved communities and the Black Men stepping up to provide solutions go to to view our series, "Is Pittsburgh America's Most Livable City?"

LYRICS

Welcome to America's Most Livable City

Please ignore the invisibles with me

See Pittsburgh rebuilt it's economy

But we still lead the Nation in black poverty

Welcome to America's Most Livable City

Just ignore the invisibles with me

And state ya business, cause here the place ya living

depends on ya race and privilege

They call it Clipsburgh Pistolvania

Where block dictators will launch missiles to bang ya

Where hot metal come whistling out the chamber

To maim ya twisting you like wrestlemania

And what's crazier the bishop wont pray for ya

Ya families so poor they can't even afford a crate for ya

And in them skyscrapers Brah they can't wait for us

To move out the hood so they can take it lace it up

Transit cuts a brother can't even take the bus

This is the ugly truth no need to make it up

Then some magazine comes along and places us

As most livable in the USA what?

Say what? Guess they didn't survey us

Cause life is cut shorter than razors where they raise us

Judges are racists and quick to hang us

And police taze us until we never wake up

Welcome to America's Most Livable City

Please ignore the invisibles with me

See Pittsburgh rebuilt it's economy

But we still lead the Nation in black poverty

Welcome to America's Most Livable City

Just ignore the invisibles with me

And state ya business, cause here the place ya living

depends on ya race and privilege

And downtown it's a bunch of new buildings

Glass and steel cathedrals the cost a few million

They make billions to treat a dudes illness

With medicine and pharmaceuticals so who's dealing

But the schools are failing screw children

Just make sure the office has a see through ceiling

Pitt University and CMU killin

classes cost thousands I don't see you fill em

How we gonna get a job in biotechnology

if all we ever learn is survival psychology

and why we so poor if yall revived the economy

but we don't get nothing besides and apology

Tear down the projects and put up a target

then build new homes so they can stimulate the market

But move us out the neighborhood so we can never harvest

the only thing we guaranteed in Pittsburgh is charges

Welcome to America's Most Livable City

Please ignore the invisibles with me

See Pittsburgh rebuilt it's economy

But we still lead the Nation in black poverty

Welcome to America's Most Livable City

Just ignore the invisibles with me

And state ya business, cause here the place ya living

depends on ya race and privilege

'Left of Black': Episode #29 featuring Kimberly Ellis and Randal Jelks

Left of Black #29
w/ Kimberly Ellis and Randal Jelks
March 21, 2011

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Pittsburgh based scholar, activist, and artist Kimberly Ellis aka Dr. Goddess in a conversation about Pittsburgh’s Hill District and the release of the new DVD Dr. Goddess Goes to Jail. Later Neal talks with Randal Jelks, Professor of African-American Studies at the University of Kansas, about the recent ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Fab 5.

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→Named one of the “Most Influential Black Women on Twitter” by “For Harriet” Digital Magazine, Kimberly Ellis aka Dr. Goddess is a writer, an entertainer, an entrepreneur, a scholar, and activist. Dr. Goddess is also an award-winning poet, playwright and performing artist, who is presently on tour with, Dr. Goddess!: A One Woman Show and screenings of its sequel, the ensemble production of Dr. Goddess Goes to Jail: A Spoken Word, Musical Comedy (Unfortunately) Based on a True Story, now on DVD. Follow her on Twitter @DrGoddess.

→Randal Jelks is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas with a joint appointment in African and African American Studies. He is the author of African Americans in the Furniture City: the Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is currently finishing a book on Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentor titled Benjamin Elijah Mays, A Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South: An Intellectual Biography to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Bakari Kitwana on "New Muslim Cool"

New Muslim Cool Forges Path for New America
by Bakari Kitwana

New Muslim Cool comes at a time when daily we observe in our national culture old-guard gatekeepers (can you say Dick Cheney?) who work tirelessly to impose on the younger generation a shared American identity that is dated, simple, and in white and black. The magic of Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's important new film, which recently aired on PBS, is found in its ability to provide a bird's eye view of a freshly minted generation of Americans. Fighting against being defined by America's bygone eras, New Muslim Cool points us toward a more complicated future.

It's a journey full of collisions -- mainly because the very act of shining a spotlight on the ways race, politics, religion and generational rifts have evolved, something that Taylor does quite well, is a process that slowly gleans viewers from the self-identity America has for decades projected as status quo to the world. Welcome to a nation at the crossroads between old and new.

Thank goodness, this is the story of the new America that is unfolding -- the one that young Americans across traditional divides are claiming every day as their own.

Enter Hamza Perez. The film traces the ups and downs in the life of this northeastern seaboard urban native who is transplanted to post-industrial Pittsburgh for a new start, just as the US is on the verge of the most significant economic decline since the Great Depression. Perez, a Puerto Rican American hip-hop artist, is also Muslim. His conversion from Catholicism brings him face-to-face with what freedom of religion looks like in the throes of the war on terror. (One of the film's high points is an unprovoked and unjustified FBI raid on Perez's mosque.)

Absent of his other identities, Perez's story is incomplete: A street hustler turned anti-drug counselor; a father embarking on a second marriage; a young man struggling to find a workable definition of masculinity; an unsigned hip-hop artist for whom hip-hop culture provides both the foundation for his anti-drug advocacy and a medium through which he projects his new faith.

The film is most powerful when it meets all of these varying and sometimes overlapping identities head-on. It does this best when embracing the complexities of the three-part axis on which New Muslim Cool turns.

Read the Full Essay @ THE HUFFINGTON POST

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Bakari Kitwana is a journalist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on major media outlets including CNN, FOX News and NPR. Kitwana is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the author of several books including, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.