"By the Time I get to Arizona," Toki Wright style

Toki Wright, long time local emcee, activist, and rising hip-hop star is mad as hell about Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) that essentially legalizes racial profiling. He's turned his rage into art by creating an amazing remake of the Public Enemy classic "By the Time I Get to Arizona," called "By the Time I Get to Arizona 2010." He wrote and mixed the track just last night and released it this morning. You can listen to it here.

The song pays homage to Chuck D and the social and political activism he inspired in rap music through PE and much more. His activism continues today. Read what Toki says about his relationship to the original PE classic (about Arizona's refusal to recognize the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday), Chuck D, and the all-night process to create the remake here.

Video for the track will be shot this Saturday on May Day at a protest against SB 1070 taking place right here in South Mpls. at Martin Luther King park. Very fitting as Toki is a child of this city and has worked tirelessly on behalf of our city's youth (Yo! The Movement being one example). (And, well you know, the name of the park and all that, too.)

I met Toki when he was 15 and was part of a youth organization where I worked. Since then, I've watched him (from the sidelines) grow from a youth activist to an activist for youth to a community activist and emcee and hip hop artist who is now making a national name for himself. I couldn't be prouder even if no personal claim to pride is due me.

The seeds for this protest song were sewn in part when Toki asked, "What would Chuck D do?" When I read that, I thought, "This song." So maybe a better question is "What would Toki Wright do?" Because the answer is "This song."

Related post: He Got Game and Fight the Power: Lovin' PE

Imagine if the Tea Party was black

Read this AMAZING post by Tim Wise, a white man who is an anti-racist activist and writes frequently about white privilege. Below is a link to the whole post and a couple of excerpts:

Imagine if Tea Party was black
by Tim Wise

...Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington...

...Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?...

...And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

Then and Now

I've noticed that many of my forty-something friends don't like it when I lumped them into "middle age." They are in their final years where they can claim being on the older side of young, and are not yet ready to face (claim?) what's ahead. Here's why:




And one for the guys:
Now each of these celebrities looks great, then and now. But those of us who are their age just have the hardest time admitting we are that old, too. Even though we are glad to be alive. Even though we look good, too. It's a thing. In our heads we think we look how we did then. Celeb photos like these shock us into reality. If you are there, you get it. If not, wait a few years and you'll understand.

And let's keep it real. My own then and now:

Age 24
Age 54
And last fall for a drag show I channeled what's coming in a couple of decades:
(All of these examples show the wrinkly-prone aging of white folks, thanks to our lack of melanin. The comparison of aging across skin color -- now that's another post for another day.)

Related posts:

I feel bad about my neck, too
P!nk is my inner doppleganger
Dory is my new hero but I can't remember why
Why did Dove's Pro Age campaign fail?
I wanna be like Nikki Giovanni when I'm 65
I forget to remember I had breast cancer
"It's Complicated" -- A plausible romantic comedy for aging baby boomers

"Becoming the race of white"

"Becoming the race of white." How strange does that sound? "What the!?" you may wonder. Is this some kind of white supremacy crap that has been hacked onto this otherwise progressively leaning blog?

No! Exactly the opposite!

"Becoming the race of white" is a phrase from "White Noise and Queer Families," an amazing article written by Susan Raffo that moves forward the thinking and groundwork for anti-racist work by embedding it right into the heart of a family -- her family. And she offers clear suggestions for others to follow suit.

The article, which is a guest post on the Bilerco Project blog, is a thoughtful, intensely personal (yet accessible) account of thinking about, thinking through, and then acting with intention about what it means to be white parents (in their case white queer parents) raising a white child in our world of skin-color privilege.

Please go to that post and read the whole thing! (It's long and you miss way too much if you skip reading all of it.) Here is one passage that I found to be particularly engaging:

Whiteness

"...I love my daughter. I love to watch her naked - the way her body shifts and moves, the muscles playing out beneath her skin, the crazy exploding vitality of this skin, hair, nails that is constantly becoming as she grows and grows. It's a beautiful thing to watch.

Did you know that in utero, the same cells that eventually become the brain and the nervous system also become the skin? Some folks call skin our "outside brain." In the ways in which skin receives information about the world around us which is then interpreted through our nervous system, the whole thing is our brain. And we have defined this outside brain by race. And my beautiful daughter's skin is white. And that can never be neutral.

So in loving this child with white skin, my partner and I decided we wanted to pay attention to how our daughter becomes the race of white. What does it mean for her to slowly grow in to the racism and white privilege that is part of the story of that skin that surrounds her?

Paying attention to how our child becomes white is about a lot of things: and we already know that we don't know half of them. Sometimes it means paying attention to all of the ways in which being white gives her a kind of "get out of jail free" card, a kind of free pass into an adult life of better jobs, more income, and less stress and struggle. It means recognizing her access to having something like an "innocent" childhood, to unchallenged attendance at parks, dance classes, and a lineage of belonging. It means watching and learning from what happens when she pops out of me, all instinct for survival and connection to mama, and starts to grow a personality and set of understandings about herself and the world..."

I can't recall in growing up that I ever once got any sort of overt message that taught me to understand that I was part of "the race of white" and what that meant in the larger context of the world. We just were. Anybody else was them, the other.

Then, as a white parent of two children of color, I did lots of conscious parenting while raising them about learning to love and embrace all of who you are, to be strong, self aware, culturally aware, and especially to be prepared for a racist world. Would I have spent the same amount of love and energy in (or seen the value of) teaching them the same stuff if they were white? Honestly, probably not.

I think Susan, her partner, and those who have come together to do this work are doing truly groundbreaking stuff. They are taking work typically reserved for the world of white adults (such as understanding white privilege), and making that work as essential to parenting -- and as everyday -- as buckling your seat belt, learning your letters and numbers, and how to ride a bike.

Now that's a revolution.

Susan Raffo lives in Minneapolis where she writes, is a bodyworker, parents, lives in communal housing, organizes and, when the weather permits, gardens.

Susan Raffo