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For My People
Business In The Black
Pan-African World Institute
Afro-Brazil America
About David Rambeau
Detroit Black Theater
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Detroit Just Like Port au Prince |
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Detroit Just Like Port au Prince
by David Rambeau
In the 70s Gil Scott Heron in one of his lyrics sang, "Detroit just like Johannesburg." His was a political analysis. He also said, "The revolution will not be televised." It is being televised, on cable television and the Internet. Times change.
Today we can say, "Detroit just like Port au Prince." Mine is a social or cultural analysis, which includes politics and economics. No doubt the devastation in Detroit is comparatively smaller in size, elongated instead of instant, a 50 year end of an era instead of an earthquake, but still quite similar.
In Detroit the homeless measure about 10,000 persons instead of one million as in Port au Prince. Here 100,000 people have lost their electricity and water over the last five years; 50% are unemployed in Detroit compared to perhaps 85% in Port au Prince, all indices of a difference in quantity, but not in the quality of the social catastrophe. So if we talk about Haiti, we talk about Detroit. If we understand black Haiti, we understand black Detroit, Highland Park, Flint, Pontiac, Chicago, and New York.
When we see the tv news programs, we see row upon row of collapsed buildings and people milling in the street. But we never hear in-depth comments or analysis about why this happened. Where are the interviews with the architects, the builders, the seismologists? Where are the interviews and analysis from Haitians, from Haitian-Americans? Why would the UN occupy a 5 story cinder block building built on an earthquake faultline? Whoever made that decision should go to jail for 20 years. People were rescued from a five story super-market. Why would anyone build a 5 story building without reinforced structures? Why did the walls fall out into the street instead of inside the stores or houses?
What is needed now, and in the past, is low technology. They (and we) need brooms and shovels and plastic bags to clean up the debris. They need picks and rakes and sledge hammers and wheel barrows to demolish damaged buildings and to haul the concrete piles away. They don't need the large trucks, the earth-movers, the steam shovels. They need to put one million people to work with low tech tools and machines rather than have a few huge machines brought in to do 99% of the clean-up and reconstruction, while one million unemployed, idle people stand around and watch.
They need their own indigenous architects, builders and inspectors to design low tech one-story buildings with ample courtyard space that takes into consideration the after-shocks and the next earthquake that is inevitably coming, as well as the coming hurricanes. They need defensive construction in tune with nature.
They need security. The U.S has sent in 9,000 troops. Over a half century ago Marcus Garvey asked where is the blackman's army? He could ask the same question today, and get much the same answer. Where are the black medical professionals from the U. S. (40 million Afro-Americans), Brazil (90 million Afro-Brazilians), Haiti (10 million Afro-Haitians), the Dominican Republic (10 million Afro-Dominicans)? There are more Haitians practicing medicine in the U.S. than in Haiti. Why?
They need food, and yet I have never seen any video that relates to their farms, plantations or fisheries. They need water and yet they are part of an island surrounded by water. How does this occur? We offer prayers when they need plastic water jugs. They can pray for themselves.
They need sustainable development, production and distribution; they need trade as well as aid. They will need food, water, medical supplies, doctors, dentists, architects, builders and more for the foreseeable future. Have you considered this? Has anyone? And recognize that long-term aid from any entity regularly includes self-interest and exploitation. Nevertheless, do what you are interested in and capable of doing. Some jugglers can keep three balls aloft. Others can handle a dozen. Do what you can; it's all good.
Haiti needs energy and yet I have seen no mention of solar or wind or bio-fuel production. At one time the island had huge sugar cane plantations that today could produce all the bio-fuel the island would need, much like Brazil is doing. Why in what was France's richest colony are the people now the poorest in the hemisphere? Why in black Detroit which was the richest internal colony in the U.S. are the people now the poorest in the nation?
When you watch tv what do you see? What do you hear? What do you understand? Study the video; study its contents. Analyze the comments, the innuendos. Consider and compare, for example, the temporary shelter (tents), the clothing the people wear (or don't wear), the absence of experimental architecture instead of just cinder block construction found everywhere. Notice every detail. Consider them as process, not merely as end results.
Detroit hasn't had cataclysmic natural phenomena, (I don't consider them disasters) to disrupt the civilization (unless you include water, land and air pollution and climate change). We've had social phenomena of a cataclysmic nature: the exodus of the auto industry, automation, robotics, drugs, institutional gambling, incinerators, financial institutional fraud, organized crime and corrupt and inept government. The results have been much the same: wide-spread poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, ill-health, population migration, abandoned and dilapidated buildings, and government deficits. While we look at Port au Prince we ought also to look at ourselves.
David Rambeau
propjectbait.blakgold.net
youtube.com - projectbaitdet (in search box)
dbtcaf.com
afrobrazilamerica.com
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Detroit Just Like Port au Prince |
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Detroit Just Like Port au Prince
by David Rambeau
In the 70s Gil Scott Heron in one of his lyrics sang, "Detroit just like Johannesburg." His was a political analysis. He also said, "The revolution will not be televised." It is being televised, on cable television and the Internet. Times change.
Today we can say, "Detroit just like Port au Prince." Mine is a social or cultural analysis, which includes politics and economics. No doubt the devastation in Detroit is comparatively smaller in size, elongated instead of instant, a 50 year end of an era instead of an earthquake, but still quite similar.
In Detroit the homeless measure about 10,000 persons instead of one million as in Port au Prince. Here 100,000 people have lost their electricity and water over the last five years; 50% are unemployed in Detroit compared to perhaps 85% in Port au Prince, all indices of a difference in quantity, but not in the quality of the social catastrophe. So if we talk about Haiti, we talk about Detroit. If we understand black Haiti, we understand black Detroit, Highland Park, Flint, Pontiac, Chicago, and New York.
When we see the tv news programs, we see row upon row of collapsed buildings and people milling in the street. But we never hear in-depth comments or analysis about why this happened. Where are the interviews with the architects, the builders, the seismologists? Where are the interviews and analysis from Haitians, from Haitian-Americans? Why would the UN occupy a 5 story cinder block building built on an earthquake faultline? Whoever made that decision should go to jail for 20 years. People were rescued from a five story super-market. Why would anyone build a 5 story building without reinforced structures? Why did the walls fall out into the street instead of inside the stores or houses?
What is needed now, and in the past, is low technology. They (and we) need brooms and shovels and plastic bags to clean up the debris. They need picks and rakes and sledge hammers and wheel barrows to demolish damaged buildings and to haul the concrete piles away. They don't need the large trucks, the earth-movers, the steam shovels. They need to put one million people to work with low tech tools and machines rather than have a few huge machines brought in to do 99% of the clean-up and reconstruction, while one million unemployed, idle people stand around and watch.
They need their own indigenous architects, builders and inspectors to design low tech one-story buildings with ample courtyard space that takes into consideration the after-shocks and the next earthquake that is inevitably coming, as well as the coming hurricanes. They need defensive construction in tune with nature.
They need security. The U.S has sent in 9,000 troops. Over a half century ago Marcus Garvey asked where is the blackman's army? He could ask the same question today, and get much the same answer. Where are the black medical professionals from the U. S. (40 million Afro-Americans), Brazil (90 million Afro-Brazilians), Haiti (10 million Afro-Haitians), the Dominican Republic (10 million Afro-Dominicans)? There are more Haitians practicing medicine in the U.S. than in Haiti. Why?
They need food, and yet I have never seen any video that relates to their farms, plantations or fisheries. They need water and yet they are part of an island surrounded by water. How does this occur? We offer prayers when they need plastic water jugs. They can pray for themselves.
They need sustainable development, production and distribution; they need trade as well as aid. They will need food, water, medical supplies, doctors, dentists, architects, builders and more for the foreseeable future. Have you considered this? Has anyone? And recognize that long-term aid from any entity regularly includes self-interest and exploitation. Nevertheless, do what you are interested in and capable of doing. Some jugglers can keep three balls aloft. Others can handle a dozen. Do what you can; it's all good.
Haiti needs energy and yet I have seen no mention of solar or wind or bio-fuel production. At one time the island had huge sugar cane plantations that today could produce all the bio-fuel the island would need, much like Brazil is doing. Why in what was France's richest colony are the people now the poorest in the hemisphere? Why in black Detroit which was the richest internal colony in the U.S. are the people now the poorest in the nation?
When you watch tv what do you see? What do you hear? What do you understand? Study the video; study its contents. Analyze the comments, the innuendos. Consider and compare, for example, the temporary shelter (tents), the clothing the people wear (or don't wear), the absence of experimental architecture instead of just cinder block construction found everywhere. Notice every detail. Consider them as process, not merely as end results.
Detroit hasn't had cataclysmic natural phenomena, (I don't consider them disasters) to disrupt the civilization (unless you include water, land and air pollution and climate change). We've had social phenomena of a cataclysmic nature: the exodus of the auto industry, automation, robotics, drugs, institutional gambling, incinerators, financial institutional fraud, organized crime and corrupt and inept government. The results have been much the same: wide-spread poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, ill-health, population migration, abandoned and dilapidated buildings, and government deficits. While we look at Port au Prince we ought also to look at ourselves.
David Rambeau
propjectbait.blakgold.net
youtube.com - projectbaitdet (in search box)
dbtcaf.com
afrobrazilamerica.com
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Too Bad She Isn't Going To Howard. |
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Too Bad She Isn't Going To Howard
by David Rambeau
youtube.com/projectbaitdet
Every so often I get an email or read a story like this one and think, ''Too bad she isn't going to a university where she can get a real education, to a school like Howard University, where my daughter graduated. Too bad blacks are still so sick that they think a eurocentric environment (educational, employment, etc.) is where they should aspire to be. Sick as in a lack of personal self esteem and cultural orientation. Sick as in ready to sacrifice identity and culture for thirty pieces of alabaster. Sick to think the white boy's ice is colder. Sad isn't it that in 2010 they willingly still participate in what Carter G. Woodson called ''the miseducation of the negro''. Sick to think they still are afflicted by what Franz Fanon termed ''black skin, white mask.'' Sick to still be, as E. Franklin Frazier said, ''black bourgeoisie.'' Sick to work to be, as Nathan Hare wrote, black anglo-saxons."
Who cares where CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN are? Wherever they are, they're taking care of their media business, their white agenda. Don't you have an agenda to take care of. If you do, please attend to it. If you don't, please get a black agenda. One that includes a black college or university for the higher education of our youth. How in the living world is this young lady going to find a ''home'' in a fundamentally historically racist institution part of a coalition of elitist institutions, the Ivy League? In reality, she is still ''homeless', only now it's intellectual, spritual, cultural and psychological homelessness.
The tragedy in this story is not hers alone. The tragedy is that every step of the way, every step of her way, the brainwash, the white-wash was going on, and apparently will continue for four more years at her new ''home''. Don't cry for her; cry for yourself. You just don't understand America, and from the likes of your commentary, never will.
This is such an inspirational story!
Where's NBC, ABC & CNN on This One?
Oh I forgot this is a feel good positive image building story out of the Black community. The press can only focus on if she was a pregnant teenage mother or high school drop-out or a tattooed tongue-pierced gang member the typical newsworthy story in keeping that negative image alive. This is a made for Hollywood story waiting to be put on film.
From Homeless to Harvard
From the Los Angeles Times:
She finally has a home: Harvard
Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row.
By Esmeralda Bermudez
11:03 PM PDT, June 19, 2009
Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.
She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.
Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.
"No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her.
Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.
What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.
As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.
On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep - survival skills she applied with passion to her education.
Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret - not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.
"I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, 'You got the easy way out because you're homeless,' " she said. "I never saw it as an excuse."
A drive to succeed
"I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school . . . being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much," she wrote in her college essays. "I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people."
Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.
"I still remember that exact number," Khadijah said. "It meant only 0.01 students tested better than I did."
In the years that followed, her mother, Chantwuan Williams, pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn't feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles , San Francisco , Ventura , San Diego , San Bernardino and Orange County , staying for months, at most, in one place.
She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego . Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino .
At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program.. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.
At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. "You ain't college-bound," the pimps barked. "You live in skid row!"
In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.
When she enrolled in the fall of her junior year at Jefferson High School , she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work.
This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school's track and field team.
"That's when I was really stressed," she says, at once sighing and laughing.
Khadijah graduated Friday evening with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities nationwide, including Brown, Columbia , Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.
Early adversity
She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.
There are questions about her mother Khadijah is not ready to ask, answers she is not ready to hear. How did her mother end up on the streets? How come she never found a stable home for her daughters? Why wasn't there family to turn to, no father, no grandparents? And what will become of her little sister?
"I don't know. I don't know," is often her response. Ask personal questions about her mother and the fire in Khadijah's eyes turns dim. She knows when she arrives in Cambridge , Mass. , she will need to seek counseling. So much of her life is a blur.
She knows she was born in Brooklyn , N.Y. , to a 14-year-old mother. She thinks Chantwuan might have been ostracized from her family. She may have tried to attend school, but the stress of a baby proved too much. When Khadijah was a toddler, they moved to California . A few years later, Jeanine was born.
She has chosen not to criticize her mother. Instead Khadijah said she inspired her to learn. "She would tell me I had a gift, she would call me Oprah."
When her college applications were due in December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays.
When they went to return her to skid row, her mother and sister were gone.
Khadijah accepted the Londons ' invitation to spend the rest of her school year with them.
In their comfortable hilltop home, Khadijah learned a new set of lessons. The orthopedic doctor and nurse taught her table manners, money management and grooming.
She won't be the first homeless student to arrive at Harvard.
Julie Hilden, the Harvard interviewer who met with Khadijah to gauge whether she should be accepted, said it was clear from the start that Khadijah was a top candidate. But school officials had to make sure they could provide what she needed to make the transition successful.
They plan to connect her with faculty mentors and potentially, a host family to check in with every so often. She will also attend a Harvard summer program at Cornell to take college-prep courses.
"I strongly recommended her," Hilden said. "I told them, 'If you don't take her, you might be missing out on the next Michelle Obama. Don't make this mistake.' "
Seeking connections
"I think about how I can convince my peers about the value of education.. . . . I have found that after all the teasing, these peers start to respect me . . . . I decided that I could be the one to uplift my peers . . .. . My work is far reaching and never finished."
Khadijah expected to feel more connected after nearly two years at Jefferson , to make at least one good friend.
Students flock to the smart girl for help with homework and tests and class questions. She walks through campus tenderly waving and smiling and complimenting everyone she knows.
But when prom pictures arrive, they show her posing alone in a silky black and white dress. In her yearbook, hundreds of familiar faces look back, but the memories are missing.
"It's a nice, glossy, shiny, colorful yearbook," she said. "But it feels like they're all strangers. I'm nowhere in these pages."
In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times and on Thursday tried to find her. Khadijah headed to a South-Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings.
She found Chantwuan sitting on a garbage bag full of clothes.
"Khadijah's here!" her sister Jeanine yells. Chantwuan's face lit up.
She explained the details of her graduation, the bus route to get there and gave her mother a prom picture. She said she would leave for summer school Friday.
There is no talk of coming home of for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Proudly, Khadijah modeled her hunter green graduation cap and gown and practiced switching the tassel from right to left as she would during the ceremony.
"Look at you," her mother says. "You're really going to Harvard, huh?"
"Yeah," she says, pausing. "I'm going to Harvard."
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Six Years, Six Years - A Short-Short Story
by
David Rambeau
Late one weekday evening I was watching the 11:00 p.m. news and caught a headline that promised a bit of grief to be doled out to some city bureacrats for dissing a tax-payer petitioner for six years. I knew immediately the tale would be too poignant to miss.
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