Essay 4206

From The New York Times…

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The Long Run

In a Volatile City, a Stern Line on Race and Politics

By MICHAEL POWELL

Those were grim days for race relations in New York City, the early 1990s. There were nearly 2,000 murders each year, blacks and whites died in high-profile racial killings, and a riot held a divided Brooklyn neighborhood in thrall for three dangerous nights.

On Jan. 9, 1994, another match landed in this tinderbox: a caller reported a burglary at a Harlem mosque. The police ran in, and Nation of Islam guards threw punches and broke an officer’s nose.

The mosque’s minister, accompanied by the Rev. Al Sharpton, drove downtown to register their outrage with the police commissioner, a street theater ritual grudgingly tolerated by past mayors.

Except the new mayor — Rudolph W. Giuliani, fresh off his November victory over the city’s first black mayor, David N. Dinkins — decreed that no one would meet with Mr. Sharpton. No more antics, no more provocations.

“I’ve taken a golden opportunity to act like a sensible mayor rather than a mayor who will be moved in any direction,” he said. “I’m an observer of the last 10 years of this city, and I hope to God we don’t continue in that direction.”

More than any other Republican running for president, Mr. Giuliani has confronted the question of race, that most torturous of American legacies.

His 1993 mayoral campaign slogan, often repeated, of “one city, one standard,” emphasized his view that no ethnic or racial group should expect special treatment. And he spoke with a stunning bluntness about what he saw as the failings of the city’s black leadership.

His handling of the mosque fracas set the tone. In the years to come, Mr. Giuliani would rebuff not just the histrionic Mr. Sharpton but nearly every high-ranking black official in the city, even those of moderate politics: congressmen, a state comptroller, influential ministers.

But grabbing hold of the race dial proved easier than turning it to his will.

“I never thought Rudy Giuliani was a racist,” said Fran Reiter, one of Mr. Giuliani’s deputy mayors. “But he was obsessed with the notion there were certain groups he couldn’t win over. And he wasn’t even going to try.”

Black leaders, Mr. Giuliani said in 1994, had to “learn how to discipline themselves in the way in which they speak” if they expected to chat with him. The city’s welfare-state philosophy, he said later, was racist and “enslaved” black New Yorkers.

“We in this city went through years and years of subdividing people, and that became the most important thing, the subdivision people belonged to,” Mr. Giuliani said.

Certainly he knew such words resonated with white voters who formed the backbone of his electoral coalition. What is less certain is whether a man raised and schooled in a white world understood the force with which his harshest words rained down on black New Yorkers.

New York City is 45 percent white and 27 percent black, according to 2000 Census figures.

“He was not patronizing, he was not naïve and I admired that,” said Michael Meyers, president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, who once advised him. “But he could play on the edge of old racial antipathies.”

[Click on the essay title above to read the full story.]

Essay 4205

Inconvenient truths in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Al Gore’s son (pictured above) was charged with possession of marijuana and drugs, in addition to driving at over 100 mph. If convicted, he could spend up to three years in prison. And that’s the inconvenient truth.

• Last Wednesday, eleven food and beverage companies promised to stop advertising junk food during children’s programming. But critics aren’t satisfied. “We shouldn’t be counting on the food industry to safeguard public health,” said a Harvard professor and co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. “Corporations are bound by law to increase shareholder profits, not to promote the well-being of children.” The corporations continue to defend themselves. “All of our products are wholesome and suitable for consumers of all ages,” said a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola. “It’s a question of balance.” Actually, it’s a question of scales. And proportions. Additionally, to argue Coke offerings “are wholesome and suitable for consumers of all ages” sounds like sublymonal advertising—i.e., sugar-coated bullshit.

• 50 Cent is gunning for an online advertiser who produced a “Shoot the Rapper” pop-up ad featuring the artist’s image. The rap star filed a $1 million lawsuit on Friday. “It was very disturbing to him, and it certainly wasn’t funny,” said Fiddy’s lawyer. Wonder if the advertiser’s defense will be insisting he was only hoping to get rich or die trying.

• Telemundo executives are deciding the fate of Mirthala Salinas, the TV news anchor who had a romantic affair with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Salinas also allegedly dated Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) and former City Council President Alex Padilla, currently a state senator. Telemundo is probably debating whether to fire Salinas or let her star in a new telenovela.

• Italian-American activist groups are protesting the upcoming debut of Mob Candy magazine (pictured below). “This is an outrage,” said an official with the Italian-American Political Action Committee. “What signal are we sending to our children?” Somebody’s probably gonna whack the publisher.

Essay 4204

This ad is weak, showing off girly-man typography skills.

Essay 4203

From The Chicago Tribune…

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RACIAL SOLIDARITY, SELF-INTEREST AND ‘THE MAN’

DIVIDED

As city gentrifies, black professionals squeezed in the middle

By Mary Pattillo

“No more blacks.” That was the forecast of a resident of the Oakland community when asked about the future of her South Side neighborhood.

“No more blacks?” I responded, worried in no small part because my research is about black gentrification.

“[A] couple of blacks” would be left, the woman then allowed. “They got money.”

This simple prediction is rich with meaning. For one thing, it helps establish the players in the widespread upscaling of Chicago: The little man. The middleman. And then, The Man.

The prediction also lays out what’s at stake, not just in Oakland and North Kenwood on the South Side, but in various Chicago neighborhoods. In the process of “building, breaking, rebuilding” the City of the Big Shoulders, as Chicago’s poet Carl Sandburg so eloquently put it, who is going to keep the little man from being left behind? Are Chicago’s shoulders big enough to serve, include and celebrate everyone?

This is an especially acute question, and a source of tension, for black professionals like me.

In the North Kenwood-Oakland area, where I have lived and done research since 1998, the little man is the public-housing resident or the low-income homeowner.

The middlemen are mostly newcomers, African-Americans with money.

And atop the power pyramid is The Man, the proverbial “they,” as in another resident’s proclamation that “they’re building all these homes knowing damn well most of us cannot afford them.”

“They’re trying to get the white people back in,” this resident complained. “And they want this lakefront back.”

All of these players, who, not incidentally, may be women, too, have a role in neighborhood development. But ultimately, it is The Man who has to get his priorities right. And when those priorities are skewed, it’s the job of the middleman, as the broker between two worlds, to stand up for and alongside the little man.

I don’t mean to let the little man off the hook. But the voices chastising poor people for their shortcomings and lack of initiative are everywhere in this country. I prefer to hold up a mirror and measure my own practices and pronouncements. How do we judge ourselves against the yardstick of inclusion?

The gentrifying black middle and upper classes recognize a shared history of oppression and the lingering effects of racism. They tend to be grounded by an upbringing in more humble black surroundings. Yet our society prizes individual success. It promotes aspirations to one day become The Man.

This creates a tension that few in the white middle class know much about. It tears at the middleman’s allegiances and alliances. And it means that, sometimes, in the pursuit of racial solidarity, we black professionals act in ways contrary to our own class interests.

For example, by deciding to move into North Kenwood-Oakland, many black professionals pit their class and racial interests against each other. Wanting to take part in the renaissance of a historic black community, many sacrifice the greater home value and appreciation that would more reliably come from buying in whiter areas of the city.

An appraiser told one North Kenwood couple that nearby public housing depressed home values enough that the couple could not borrow the money needed for a rehab. Marshaling knowledge of building codes and home-financing rules, the couple basically rewrote the appraisal to secure the loan.

“I made it justified based on floor space,” the wife said, explaining how she focused on the value of the large home itself and not on questions about the neighbors. “I can’t fight the subjective subtracting, [but] at a minimum I was going to get credit for my third floor.”

The benefits of this feisty insistence don’t help just the middleman; the little man who lives a block away might now get a fairer price for her house. Being a black middleman means standing up in the face of the kind of discrimination that has long denied mortgage capital to African-Americans across the city.

But black middlemen sometimes act in ways that dismiss the little man. Some black leaders in North Kenwood-Oakland have joined calls for the demolition of public housing. And they have criticized the lifestyles of their poor and working-class neighbors.

“When we’re thinking about working on Drexel Boulevard,” remarked a black police officer during a planning meeting in the neighborhood, “we should really think about discouraging some of the current uses there.”

Some objectionable uses included barbecuing, selling Sno-cones and drinking. It didn’t matter that people barbecued on Drexel’s wide parkway because they lived in apartment buildings with no grassy area for safely lighting the grill or spreading out a few chairs. No one seemed to recognize the Sno-cone vendor as a striving businessman. There was no hint of the double standard that said people drinking in Grant Park for city festivals was acceptable, but Chicagoans drinking on Drexel was not.

Instead, we middlemen pandered to the anti-urban ideal of nice, single-family homes with tidy back yards where people should do their barbecuing, drinking and socializing. And the meeting consensus drifted toward turning Drexel's parkway into a passive decorative space with large flower arrangements and sculptures.

Flowers and sculptures bring me to the priorities of The Man. No Chicagoan enjoys the spring tulips on Michigan Avenue, the summer petunias on Wacker Drive or the Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion more than I do. No one!

But I would be willing to sacrifice that enjoyment if it meant the city could afford the original bold proposal to set aside 25 percent of new housing units for affordable housing, rather than the 10 percent compromise recently passed in the City Council. Or to avoid the following farce: That demolishing the Lathrop Homes projects, which have become surrounded by a completely gentrified Lakeview, is being done to provide a “mixed-income community” for Lathrop residents.

I would even give up the Grant Park Outdoor Film Festival if it meant that more schools could get new funds.

I know it’s not that simple. (And I hope I don’t have to give up Summer Dance). But the City of the Big Shoulders has to make some choices between holding up the new “Cool Globes” lining Lake Shore Drive or supporting its residents, including the littlest of us.

Essay 4202

Kids’ stuff in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• For the second time in the past year, Hasbro has recalled the Easy-Bake oven. Kids were getting fingers stuck in the front opening, resulting in burns. Parents should give their young daughters much safer microwave ovens instead.

• A new study revealed 4 percent of kids online are asked to transmit sexual pictures of themselves. “They’re being asked to produce child pornography,” said an expert, noting that doing so is a felony. “We think most children don’t fully understand the stakes here. They may just see it as rudeness or sometimes even flattery.” Home computers are more dangerous than Easy-Bake ovens.

Essay 4201

Essay 4200

Minority mass appeal is not an oxymoron.

Essay 4199

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

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‘Ghetto tours’
Students, journalists, others get up-close view of CHA’s ‘good, bad, ugly’

BY KATE N. GROSSMAN, Staff Reporter

Beauty Turner, microphone in hand and crowd in tow, climbed off a yellow school bus onto a patch of cracked concrete where one of Chicago’s most notorious public housing projects, the Robert Taylor Homes, once stood.

“Come on,” Turner, a writer and former Taylor resident, beckoned to the tour group assembling at 53rd and State streets last week. “I want you to see what I see.”

“This was a community where people lived, played, stayed and died -- just like your community,” Turner said. “All the horror stories you hear in the newspapers – it’s not like that at all.”

For the next three hours, 40 curious onlookers, who paid $20 each for the privilege, hung on every word of Turner’s decidedly unofficial tour of what’s left of the Chicago Housing Authority’s projects. The CHA has razed most its high-rises and is remaking many into mixed-income communities.

Out with old, in with new
Turner’s “Ghetto Bus Tours” traverse the four-mile stretch of State Street that once housed tens of thousands of public housing families in decaying high-rises. They’re nearly all gone now. What’s left are weed-strewn lots, grassy fields and the early stages of handsome new three-flats and mid-rises where the poor, working class and market-rate tenants are starting to live.

Where CHA leaders see hope blooming, Turner sees communities destroyed and families cheated.

“This is for anyone who wants to know what’s really happening,” said Turner, a magnetic 50-year-old with a preacher’s gift for turning a phrase. “I want people to know what’s going on -- the good, the bad, the ugly.”

Turner has parlayed her oratorical skills and street smarts into a cottage industry. Over the years, Turner, assistant editor of a newspaper written by CHA tenants called Residents’ Journal, has guided scores of journalists into the projects. Cardinal Francis George took a tour; so have classes from Northwestern University.

‘Voices of the voiceless’
They’ve become so popular that We The People Media, the publisher of Residents’ Journal, has invited the general public and started charging to help keep their shoestring operation afloat. Filling seats on last week's tour were college students, a rabbi, journalists, Field Museum staffers and academics.

At 29th and State, the group hiked into the Dearborn Homes, one of a few projects that have yet to be demolished or slated for renovation. After climbing three flights of dirt-smeared concrete stairs, the group stopped at Carol Wallace’s door. She immediately ripped into the police.

Wallace, 63, said police are forcing residents to fill out “contact cards” with names, nicknames, tattoo details, Social Security numbers and more. As for the plan to tear down and rebuild: “I think it’s just a way to get us out of here.”

Back on the bus, Turner nodded approvingly: “I hope that helped you. You’re really listening to the voices of the voiceless,” she said, her vintage microphone and speaker squawking awkwardly.

The aging bus then headed south, stopping at a razed development at 39th and Cottage Grove. It has been replaced by a gleaming mixed community. Residents’ Journal editor-in-chief Mary Johns, a former resident there, said she was stranded when the CHA didn’t assign her a relocation counselor as her building closed.

By day’s end, it was clear Turner would say nothing good about CHA’s redevelopment plans.

Her bus blew by two new mixed communities with nary a comment, except that too few families will get a chance to move in. When asked about families relocated to apartments with vouchers, Turner focused on one forced to move 14 times. She said nothing about the studies that say families feel safer and their kids do better after they’ve left the projects.

Book may help fill a void
The CHA is well-known for squelching bad news. The opposite might be said of Turner.

“This is the anti-tour, in a way,” said Brad Hunt, a Roosevelt University professor on the bus. He’s writing a book on the history of the CHA. “It fills a void for people who don’t necessarily trust the standard line that everything is fine.”

As with the CHA’s word, the passengers didn’t buy everything from Turner. But she sure got them thinking.

“I think they’re saying the plan isn’t fair,” said Sofya Leonova, a University of Chicago student. “I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s definitely a possibility.”

Essay 4198

This ad is ridiculous.

Essay 4197

Essay 4196

Got muscle?

Essay 4195

A picture perfect MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Nicholas Minucci, the man convicted of beating an unarmed Black man with a baseball bat in Howard Beach, Queens, in 2005 is trying to convince everyone he’s not a racist. To prove his point, Minucci posed for photos with Black inmates (pictured above). However, Rev. Al Sharpton and victim Glenn Moore aren’t buying it. “It proves nothing either way,” said Sharpton. “He did a racist act. … If Fat Nick were to ask for my unsolicited advice, which he hasn’t, I would say not to use the photo albums of your friends in jail. Reach out for Glenn Moore.” Since Minucci is serving a 15-year prison sentence, he might want to inquire about bulk discounts with the nearest Ritz Photo Center.

• Michael Jackson has been ordered to pay over $256,000 in legal fees to a law firm that helped him during his 2005 child molestation trial. At this point, Jacko has paid more in legal fees than Jermaine and Tito will make in their lifetimes.

• Sting and his wife were ordered to pay $51,000 to a former chef who charged the couple fired her because she became pregnant. Wonder if she first called the Police.

Essay 4194

From The New York Times…

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At 23, the Youngest Pilot to Solo the Planet

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

The usual mix of celebrities and wiseguys were mingling at Rao’s on Monday night when Sonny Grasso entered with an entourage that included a young black man dressed in a brown flight suit.

You could hear a diamond brooch drop as the entourage made its way to their table amid the fortunate diners who had managed to get a table at Rao’s, the East Harlem restaurant legendary for its exclusivity. The men and women in suits and skirts paused, their forks lowered and their eyebrows raised. “Who’s that?” asked a man in a silk shirt sitting at a back table beneath an autographed photo of Jerry Lewis. “Where’s he from?”

A few minutes later, Mr. Grasso, one of the two real-life cops depicted in the movie “The French Connection,” held a drink high over his head, and asked everyone — including Conan O’Brien, who was seated at a nearby table — to join him in a toast to Barrington Irving, a 23-year-old pilot from Miami Gardens, Fla.

Mr. Irving, a senior majoring in aeronautical science at Florida Memorial University, completed a solo flight around the world in a single-engine plane last month to become the youngest and first black pilot to accomplish that feat.

“My plane had no radar and no de-icing equipment,” said Mr. Irving, enjoying a plate filled with chicken and roasted peppers shortly after the Rao’s crowd welcomed him back to earth with a warm ovation. “It was just me up there, alone, flying on gut instinct — pretty much the way Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart did it.”

Sitting in the cockpit of a Columbia 400 he named Inspiration — “because that’s what I want to be to younger people,” he said — Mr. Irving began his journey on March 23 from Opa-Locka Airport near Miami, and ended there on June 27, 96 days, 150 hours (of flight time) and 26,800 miles later.

The trip, which cost roughly a million dollars, was rejected by more than 50 different sponsors whom Mr. Irving began approaching about two and a half years ago.

“At the time, I had just a little over 600 hours of flight experience,” he said. “So people thought I was both too young and too inexperienced.”

But eventually, sponsors began accepting and donating money and aircraft parts.

From Florida, Mr. Irving headed to Ohio and Farmingdale, N.Y., and continued to Newfoundland, the Azores, Madrid, Rome, Athens, Cairo, and through sandstorms to get to Dubai.

Mr. Irving, who said he grew lonely and frustrated for long stretches, refueled his plane and his spirits after each landing by communicating with fans over a Web site, www.experienceaviation.org.

“People were asking me everything from how I was able to go to the bathroom while flying to what it was like to fly over ancient ruins in Greece and Italy,” he said. “Their enthusiasm kept me going.”

So he pointed Inspiration’s nose toward India, trying to avoid thumping monsoons, which followed the course all the way to Bangkok and Hong Kong.

He reached Japan, where skies began to brighten, then turned for home, dealing with poor visibility and high, shifting winds when crossing the North Pacific en route to Anchorage, Alaska.

“I got nervous because I began to experience turbulence,” he said. “I saw cloud formations I had never seen before.”

He made his way to Seattle, then Denver and Houston, and Mobile, Ala. — where he stopped to meet the engineers who built his TSIO 550, 310-horsepower engine — before flying back to Florida.

When Mr. Irving was done with his main course at Rao’s, he picked at a piece of cheesecake and discussed his place in history.

“It’s humbling, especially in this day and age, when a lot of young black men are getting caught up in the wrong things,” said Mr. Irving, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Miami. “I feel blessed that I had a chance to maybe inspire kids out there, black or white, to become pilots or engineers or air traffic controllers, or to make a positive impact in any other area of life.”

Essay 4193

Essay 4192

Pimp your pumped physique.

Essay 4191

The item below appeared in Advertising Age’s Letters To The Editor. A brief MultiCultClassics reaction immediately follows…

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Use of ‘refugee’ not to be taken lightly

RE: “Five Crispin Refugees Set up Shop in L.A.” (AA, July 9). To use the word “refugee” to refer to five ad-agency employees who resigned to form their own boutique is poor form. Are these five former employees, as a result of events occurring before January 1, 1951 and owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, outside of their countries of nationality and unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of those countries? Or do they lack a nationality and, being outside the country of their former habitual residence, are they unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to return? Regardless of how many awards Crispin has won, the agency is not considered a country of origin, nor is it considered a nationality (the last time I checked).

Moreover, do these five employees risk serious human-rights abuses because of who they are or what they believe? Do they face persecution or torture? I doubt it. To use “refugee” in this context dilutes the word’s potency and true meaning.

Nina Bastianelli
Chicago

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With all due respect to refugees past and present, if the ex-Crispin employees feared facing torture or “being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” well, they’d just be typical minorities on Madison Avenue.

Essay 4190

A mini-MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• The New York Post is ripping rapper Remy Ma with a lot of in-depth reporting surrounding her recent arrest (see Essay 4184). The newspaper interviewed a man that the rapper shot at a few years ago. “I hate her. How would you feel if someone pulled a gun on you? You wouldn’t have love for them,” said the man. The Post also listed Remy Ma’s prior criminal acts, which included punching a girl in a homeless shelter. Editors at the Post might want to consider beefing up their personal security.

• IHOP has agreed to purchase Applebee’s for $1.9 billion. Sounds like a case of the bland leading the bland.

Essay 4189

Essay 4188

Muscle gain makes you want to rewrite the Declaration of Independence.

Essay 4187

From The New York Daily News…

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Good riddance
Burying the N-word, driving stake through the heart of hip-hop’s demons

By Stanley Crouch

We have all become accustomed to as much hustle and hot air from so-called black leadership as we have the kind of substance that has inarguably made the United States so much more civilized than it was when racism held sway.

That familiar hot air is why some people scoffed when the NAACP had its yearly convention last week in Detroit and symbolically buried the N-word in a pine box to the cheers of hundreds gathered for the ceremony.

Kwame Kilpatrick — the so-called hip-hop mayor — said something that seems to suggest a major shift in cultural consciousness, one aimed to attack the dragon of gangster rap and everything else that degrades and dehumanizes.

“Today,” Kilpatrick said, “we are not just burying the N-word, we’re taking it out of our spirit. We gather burying all of the things that go with the N-word. We have to bury the pimps and the ho’s that go with it.”

I think columnist Errol Louis is right when he says that this could be as large a change in vision as the point at which Jesse Jackson told black America that it should no longer think of itself as anything other than African-Americans. The white folks bought it so fast that we are now stuck with it, regardless of the term’s inaccuracies.

There was no confusion on Kilpatrick’s part or on the parts of others who addressed the issue of the degradation. In the opening address of the convention, NAACP National Board Chairman Julian Bond alluded to the firestorm of sudden consciousness brought about by Don Imus when he insulted the Rutgers basketball team. “If he can’t refer to our women as ‘ho’s,’ then we shouldn’t either.”

White people looking on might wonder why all of the ongoing uproar now. It has been at least a decade since Delores Tucker alienated herself from young black people when she called out hip hop and the parent corporations that promoted entertainers whose stock in trade was obscenity, glamorized criminality and misogyny.

Tucker, who died in 2005, was viciously attacked in hip-hop material by both Tupac Shakur and Eminem. As the girlfriend of a high-profile member of the civil rights establishment said of the matter, “They all shied away from criticizing the content of rap music because they were afraid of having their names put in rap songs, which would alienate them from young black people.”

That no longer seems to be the case. This all started when Tipper Gore led the fight to have labels put on recordings that contained lewd material — before the issue of censorship confused the discussion and chased her from the field.

Tucker, urged on by women such as Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore, fearlessly fought the dragon and soon found that she was alone because of the cowardice that distinguished those who should have stood with her. She accepted support from Bill Bennett, a move interpreted by the hip-hop defenders as a betrayal of black entertainers and black people at large. That worked for 10 years.

But now it is clear that group solidarity and supporting ambitious young men have nothing to do with accepting material that promotes violence and criminality while degrading and dehumanizing women.

It is an expanding moment of awareness in which we can all share. That is why the NAACP was absolutely right in symbolically burying the N-word — and the pimps and ho’s that went with it. The dragon of hip hop continues to receive more wounds from a growing number of dragon slayers.