I was asked by a colleague to give a talk to Hopkins' Black Faculty-Staff Association this month. I wasn't able to because of time constraints, but I told her that if I did give a talk, it'd probably be titled "Why I Hate Black History Month". Actually, the title I gave her was not safe for viewing. But while I hate black history month, I probably hate the concept of "post-blackness" even more. 

Now, real talk, to the extent black artists use "post-blackness" as a vehicle to get out of the "black artist" box I'm with it. Black artists should be able to make their living like any other artist without fear of being ostracized because they don't do "black" art. 

But to the extent the term becomes a convenient way for us to dodge a commitment to fight inequality, I think it's "a bad look". 

So when the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle asked me to participate in a debate about the issue, I gladly agreed. Not just because I believe they are one of the reasons I love Baltimore, but because it gave me an opportunity to flesh out my strong opinions against the idea in public. The link below has the entire debate, plus a couple of incredible performances in between. Take a listen. I think I could have defended the "post-blackness" side, I'm glad I didn't have to. 

Is Blackness History?

I was invited yesterday to give a talk on drop-out prevention. Because I am pretty sensitive to the general critique that public intellectuals often go too far afield from the discipline they were trained in–Henry Louis Gates is rarely asked to pontificate on slave narratives, Michael Eric Dyson rarely is asked to speak on matters of religion–I try to use these opportunities to bring my expertise to bear. 

So I began my speech first talking about the numbers. The ratio of drop-outs to graduates has been steadily decreasing over the past few years in Baltimore City, and this decrease has come largely because of efforts to deal with the particular problems black males face. For me this is a signal that the problems of public school systems aren't necessarily intractable. Baltimore's poverty rate hasn't gone down appreciably over the past few years, nor have the rates of any other social indicator used to predict school outcomes. 

Long story short. Institutions matter. You can make structural changes in institutions that lead to improvements, even if there are no improvements in the context the institution is situated in. (You can change the school even if the neighborhood goes to hell.)

With that said there are still far too many people dropping out. And there are far too many folks skipping school. Which means there is much more work to be done.

Now the thing is, the literature is fairly clear about what works. We know that students are less likely to drop out if they are identified as a risk immediately. We know they are far less likely to drop out if some combination of peers and teachers consistently ask them about their long term vision, consistently emphasize goal-setting. We know they are far less likely to drop out if communication systems within schools (between teachers and students) and between schools and neighborhoods (between parents and teachers) exist.

Up to this point this sounds like a straightforward educator's lecture. I could very well be an Ed D or have a PhD in education. Where are the politics?

Who is the drop-out? Exactly why does he (and we are for the most part talking about "he") drop-out? If we think of care as a political resource that people compete over, where exactly is the "drop-out" in this care hierarchy? 

Similarly when we think of the costs of "dropping out" why do we consistently use economic metrics? (You can't drop out! You won't get a job!)

Through a series of tried and true techniques that have both intra- and inter-racial causes AND effects, we identify, track, and design strategies for bodies, classrooms, schools, neighborhoods, dividing them into ones that get care, and ones that don't.

Thinking about the drop-out in this manner we can think of the drop-out as not just a technical issue–what devices do we create to keep more kids in school? We can think of the drop-out as a serious POLITICAL issue. And then the question becomes, how do we increase the capacity of these kids to get more care for themselves.

I know I've already gone a bit long, but in the question and answer session a woman asked me how we can expand the views of these kids so they can know more than just their neighborhoods. I gave her an answer she probably didn't expect to hear–we don't need to get these kids to know more than just their neighborhoods. Everything they could possibly need to thrive and survive as full humans already EXISTS in their neighborhood. Getting them to dig THAT is the question. The knuckleheads in my neighborhood taught me more about resiliency and commitment and loyalty than any other group of individuals outside my fraternity (who themselves are…well…knuckleheads). 

I invited two of the most committed and politically progressive schoolteachers I know to the event. One of them emailed me afterwards:

I wonder how many people understood what you meant when you talked about having learned from others in your neighborhood growing up, and about everything necessary being located right there–or right here–wherever we are.  I mean, I really wonder:  10%? 50%? probably not more than 50, but possibly a lot less.  I tend to be idealistic!

Anyway, one thing that I think very few people see, almost none of us actually, is that power in high schools already belongs to the young people.  Nothing happens in a high school that the young people don't tolerate.  Ultimately, the schools' weapons are only exclusion and force, because the students more or less completely reject the adults' weak attempts at persuasion. 

Another way to look at it is that there would be no "educational crisis" in the land if "those students" would just do what they were told–come to school, go to class, fill in the blanks on the worksheets, do their homework, etc. It is their refusal to do what they're told that provokes the crisis. Obviously there's a literature on black student resistance to school–I'm just taking it one step further to say that the resistance is actually setting the terms of the political fight over education resources (no child left behind, race to the top, squeezing teachers unions, etc.). "You can get access to some of this money, if you can figure out how to control the students." –only the students are not about to let themselves be controlled.

All of which is to say that the power to change schools is not only right in the neighborhood, but actually right in the school building, if the students' resistance can be organized rather than disorganized, or if we can learn to learn from what the students are trying to teach us.

This.  

This semester members of my urban policy class are tasked to create a group project. Below I present a set of resources that should help them with their goal. But as the resources are not class specific please feel free to share them with others.

Perhaps the first thing you'll need is some way to conduct group communications. At times you'll want to simply send an email to everyone in your group. At other times you'll want to have video conferences, and at yet other times you'll want face to face meetings. If you don't have a google account already I'd suggest you get one and join google +.  If the members in your group have google emails you can create groups you can use to send email to everyone simultaneously. Through google hangouts you can also have video conferences with up to ten other people, which can mitigate the number of face to face meetings you have. And although you should be able to use the blog to work on and edit ideas, you can also create documents in google docs that are editable by other members of your group.

Collecting links from the web should be helpful as you move forward. Through diigo you can easily create an index of bookmarks that are tagged and categorized. Over time the number of links you have can potentially look like this. I created a group for the class that enables us to share links and access some of diigo's premium options for free. If you're interested in a diigo account let me know. 

I mentioned that it'd be a good idea to get an RSS feed. RSS stands for "really simple syndication". An RSS feed quickly gives you access to all of the RSS enabled sites you read. Instead of going to the various blogs you read to see if something new has been put up, all you have to do is go to your rss site to see if it has been updated. I know it sounds like I'm getting paid by google (nope), but I use google reader. Once you get a google reader you can easily create a feed for the blogs you follow and are expected to comment on. 

I think that's it. If you've any questions please let me know.

I was recently asked to begin blogging on CNN's website. My first post appeared this week. In it I argued that college education should be an entitlement rather than a privilege open to those with the ability to pay for it. This isn't my idea–I wish it was! I borrowed it from Adolph Reed (UPenn political scientist), who organized for the issue in 2004.

Here's the key part:

…for me, politics isn’t just about the art of the possible—about what we can pass in the here and now. Politics is about expanding and extending that art, about pushing the borders to create space for even more change in the future.

How can we do that here?



What if, instead of proposing policies geared towards individual middle-class tax-payers that revolved around the assumption that higher education was an individual’s responsibility, the president instead proposed policies geared towards embedding higher education as an individual right. What if, instead of getting a tax write-off after you’ve already paid your son/daughter’s tuition, you instead didn’t have to worry about education because the government would pay for it?

The rest can be found here.

To say it's gotten traction is an understatement. As of right now there are over 700 comments, far more than anything I've written here. I didn't take the time to go through all of the comments–in fact, given the venue I'd say it's a bad look to do so. There's a great deal of anger and resentment in some of them and they make my head hurt. 

But what I want to do briefly is deal with two of the more thoughtful criticisms (based on an email exchange I had with a commenter):

1. On the idea that such a policy would explode college enrollments:

I figure college enrollments would probably increase, but given how small the costs of the program would be (even if we didn't take funds from some other line item) it'd be the equivalent of making penny candy nickel candy. In other words even 500% growth wouldn't be significant.

But more to the point if we ARE talking about a sizable increase in enrollments it makes my point because it suggests a number of people aren't attending college because they aren't smart enough, it suggests a number of them aren't attending because they don't have enough money.

2. On the idea that such a policy would reduce the value of a college education…

The association between "value" with "hard work" has become common sense. Here we suggest that perhaps making college free to students would make them less likely to appreciate or value it. I understand but don't buy the argument. Even if we allowed for the fact that someone like Paris Hilton may appreciate college less than someone who had to work five jobs, I'm not sure this works on average. On average I'd think there'd be less people who don't "appreciate" college than there are people who can't get in because they don't have the money in the first place.

In any case if this were demonstrably true we could attach such a program to work of some sort. Like the GI Bill.

Anyway, I appreciated the opportunity to chime in here. 

Late last year Jared Ball, Darius Wilmore, Lawrence Grandpre, Zeke Berzoff, Chris Baron, and I founded the Baltimore Mixtape Project as a vehicle with which we could both help produce and disseminate politically progressive hip-hop. We've gotten a lot of positive response from supporters, suggesting youth in general and to the extent we still think of hip-hop as a youth culture, hip-hop, is an undertapped resource. Battle Bar:None a contest that will award over $2000 in prizes to the best rap and spoken word that deals with the school to prison pipeline issue, is our first contest and will be held this spring. 

As part of a longer effort to make this project transparent enough to replicate I want to talk a bit about our funding mechanism. One of the tools we used to make this possible was Kickstarter, a web fundraising application. It allows you to draw support from across the world, with the only cost being the cost to create the startup page. In our case we created a video for the project and paid out about $200 for it. Our Kickstarter project goal was $2000–enough to pay out the cash prizes.

Kickstarter projects are searchable. An editor from The Atlantic Monthly caught wind of it and named the project one of twelve worth funding for the Christmas holiday. To be fair I don't think this led to a lot of contributions–probably because I wasn't aware of her post until ten days after she posted it. But the energy that post gave me, made it a lot easier to contact people directly to raise money. Although I had my doubts, we raised the cash prize money with ten days to spare. We're still looking for donations now, in an attempt to raise about half of the money for our total budget (which at this point stands at about $10,000). 

Yesterday I spoke at an Occupy rally held at the site of a proposed jail for "youth charged as adults". Brought my children with me for the first time. For me the event drove home the fact that we need more scholar activists (and for the first time I'm willing to claim and embrace that title). 

It also drove home how important the Baltimore Mixtape Project is.

I got into a brief argument with Cornel West in Seattle over Labor Day Weekend, over his argument that MLK would want a revolution rather than a memorial. I made two points: 

The first is that King is dead. He was assassinated 44 years ago. And if he were NOT assassinated, if by perchance he lived long enough to see this day, it isn't quite clear what he would say, what he would want. It's very possible he'd still be calling for a revolution of values, one that would transform the way we respond to poverty, the way we respond to developing nations (here I'm thinking of his critique against the Vietnam War). But we don't know. He isn't here to speak for himself. And while we do have his words and his speeches, those are words and speeches from a very different time. Every time we blithely turn to the past without recognizing the fundamental differences between "then" and "now", every time we we rip words, phrases, speeches, out of their context, placing them within another without consideration, we commit a kind of falsehood. A falsehood that in this particular case fits some of our politics but a falsehood nonetheless. We can use the past to make sense of the present, but more often we "cherry pick", choosing particular moments that fit our understandings of how the world should work. I see this dynamic in most attempts to use King politically. 

Furthermore, in choosing King we don't choose the King that had to be browbeaten into getting involved in what ended up being the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We don't choose the King that had to be browbeaten to continue the movement after victory was won. We choose King at the height of his oratorical powers. Not quite understanding how much we could learn if we came to recognize King's startling imperfections. There is a way to use King, and a way to use the past in general that helps us politically and is historically appropriate. We more often than not, turn our backs on that way.

The second point.

In this particular moment of rampant inequality, and government breakdown, it seems to me that we can make a very simple argument as to why Obama is neglecting his responsibility in more stridently calling for a more just world. One that doesn't necessitate going backwards, but instead one that looks at the present with open eyes and open heart. Every time we turn to King–a narrow King at that–we say we lack the imagination, the capacity to work with those around us in THIS moment. We say that the only thing we know how to do is look backwards. We say that the only thing that will move black people and the populations we care about are calls to glory. 

And this further reduces our ability to make sense of the present, our ability to politically organize citizens.

Of course West didn't agree with me. Few do.

Doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Ben Chavis, former National Director of the Million Man March, and current CEO and Co-Chairman of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network held a press conference announcing "Occupy the Dream" designed to create a bridge between the Occupy Movement and African American Leaders. The group has three demands–increasing grants for college education, ending home foreclosures, and a wall street created fund that will deal with pervasive unemployment.  Pastor Jamal Bryant (founder of Baltimore's Empowerment Temple) one of the spokespersons, promises a series of events (beginning with protests at federal reserve banks around the country on MLK Day) that will galvanize the country and bring added attention to the issue of inequality.

Call me skeptical.

One way to read this is that it is a natural and real response to the critique that occupies weren't quite inclusive enough. Occupy either can't or won't get access to the black community, and as a result either can't or won't respond to the particular needs of the African American Community. Chavis, Bryant, and others are black leaders. They speak for the black community. They can bring together their constituencies with the constituencies of occupy folk. Everyone wins here. The black community gets its needs met. Occupy expands its reach. 

I don't read it this way.

I read it as the attempt by black elites to broker deals for constituencies they care about. And the very act of brokerage will have the impact of increasing their own leverage and political capital. Along these lines such a move should be understood as part of a longer wave of black elite brokerage going back before the civil rights movement. The problem here is that such a move has a few problematic consequences:

1. It further crystallizes the concept of national black leaders outside of elected ones.

Even before the moment black men and women could legitimately vote, we have had the capacity to make political decisions and change ourselves. We've been able to articulate and work through our interests. We've been able to set up organizations in which we can hash these issues out. And every now and then, through political organizing, we can get some of our needs met. The national leaders we require need to be individuals we can elect, there needs to be a structure in place that allows us to see their behaviors, and their needs to be a way we can kick them out. The concept of "national leadership" implied here is NOT that concept. Ben Chavis for example was appointed CEO. The only people he is accountable to is the board of HSAN. Reverend Jamal Bryant is only accountable to his church body.

To the extent blacks and non-whites buy into the concept of Occupy The Dream, they buy into a problematic concept of black leadership we need to toss.

2. It neuters local organizing struggles.

Here in Baltimore there have been at least two responses to Occupy Baltimore lead by people of color. Furthermore the national organization Take Back the Land has begun work on staving off foreclosure eviction in Baltimore, empowering homeowners to take control of their own communities. I don't see how an organization like Occupy the Dream can co-exist alongside these local movements. More likely I see these local movements subsumed at best or dissolved at worst into a national movement, led by unaccountable charismatic male spokespeople. And this neuters the capacity of local development. And this neuters the likelihood that black alternatives to the status quo can be generated and fought for. 

3. It similarly neuters direct action.

Pastor Bryant promises a series of events designed to call attention to income inequality. What is the likelihood that national spokespersons, with their own agendas, their own aims, their own issues, would call for something like Occupy the Ports? Would have called for something like Occupy in the first place? Nationally, Chavis was critical in the promotion of the Million Man March. At a local level he was influential in the various HSAN led actions against the Rockefeller Drug Laws. But what were these actions, exactly? The Million Man March was a "permitted event" (that is to say, the Nation of Islam applied for and received a permit) that at its base was a protest NOT against government but against black men (read Minister Louis Farrakhan's speech). HSAN's biggest event was a march in New York City, one that was more critical, but also one that was "permitted". National organizations like Occupy the Dream tend to support an extremely narrow range of tactics, tactics that siphon energy away from local activities and towards the national organization (and leadership) itself. Tactics that generate the appearance of being anti-status quo but have the consequence of reproducing it.

There's more, but hopefully this is food for thought, food for thought we can continue in the conversation thread. If you are involved with Occupy and don't believe it to be inclusive enough on whatever axis (gender, race, sexuality, homeless status) then don't give that responsibility to someone with another agenda. Do the hard work on your own.

With that said though I really want to see what people think about this. Particularly supporters of Pastor Bryant. It's very possible that I am ignoring critical information. And because I tend to be skeptical of charismatic authority in general, it is also possible that my own biases are working against me here. 

At approximately 4am on Tuesday morning (December 13, 2011) riot police forced members of Occupy Baltimore to leave McKeldin Square. No one was arrested, and there was no violence. In a statement, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake affirmed the right of individuals to protest, but not to establish a permanent campsite. What follows are random (i.e. unordered) thoughts:

• In my previous post, I noted that sooner or later police would realize that the use of violence increases support for Occupies in general, and that supporters are going to have to figure out how to deal with the possibility of "peaceful" police evictions. Although police arrived at the site, unannounced in full riot gear (hence "peaceful" rather than peaceful), they did not explicitly wield any of the physical objects (batons, tasers, pepper spray, etc.) in forcing Occupy people to leave. This, combined with the time they chose, guaranteed that any media coverage garnered would be media coverage that implicitly privileged local government. The narrative becomes "after letting protestors use the square for more than two months, the mayor took the square back" rather than "peaceful protestors were beaten for occupying a public space". Although I wrote my previous post a few weeks ago, it is prescient in many ways.
• The most identifiable group of law breakers at any given time are the students at local universities who jaywalk while crossing the street to go to campus. For understandable reasons, police (with the exception of NYC) don't arrest or even ticket these students. I use this as an example to call attention to the ways that law enforcement and political officials can selectively decide when to site someone for illegal activity. There's a dumpsite in East Baltimore that has a two story high uncovered pile of broken glass. When the wind blows, people living in the neighborhood are struck by glass debris. I don't expect riot police to go to the institution responsible for the dump in full riot gear asking them to clean up the site. Part of that of course is because it isn't the responsibility of the police to deal with mismanaged environmental waste sites. But I believe my point remains. The use of law in this case was both disproportionate and unequal.
• There's a way to use this event as an opportunity. I've said this but don't think I've written this–the goal of occupy should not be to simply "hold" a space. Although doing so has symbolic importance given the slow death of public space and public political conversation, focusing on the space has the tendency to reify that space to the point that the movement becomes more about holding a particular space than it becomes about increasing action against inequality. And then the movement becomes that space, which then leads to easy and problematic "us" vs. "them" distinctions, with "us" here being the people that stay and build in that space, and "them" becomes people who don't stay and build in that space. As I think of it, this ends up flipping the entire concept of the 99% on its head, with the 1% (actually, much less) of people staying at McKeldin Square pitting themselves against the 99% of people who DON'T reside there. Getting evicted gives people an opportunity to proliferate the idea, and to take it back perhaps to its open source roots.
• There IS with that said, one population that does lose something very specific. Occupies to the extent they have taken public space have become home to populations without homes. We can intellectually make claims about how precarious life is for all of us at this moment, but at a base level if you've got a roof over your head and a paycheck, your life isn't quite as precarious as the life of someone "sleeping rough" (to use English slang). Moving occupies "into the cloud" so to speak, takes real stuff away from the one population that probably relies on occupies more than anything else.
• One way around this is to not move occupy "into the cloud" as much as simply move occupy. That is, have more than one site and to grow more than one site. There's an argument to move the site to a space that's more politically important. To a space that calls attention to a specific political issue. The discussion about which space to choose is, I believe a false choice. I know that bodies can't occupy more than one space at the same time. And that some issues may generate more support than others. But at the same time there is something to be said for extending the public, and not being comfortable in one space. In my public talks I've emphasized the concept of the swarm. That's an important idea to take hold of. 
• Finally a colleague of mine pointed out that Americans can learn a great deal about nonviolent action from people in authoritarian regimes who've been able to figure out legal, nonviolent, and fairly unstoppable means of registering dissent. The idea of getting people to walk to work for example is something that can be really powerful. But it entails organizing where people are. And becoming "we" rather than "them" vs. "us". And it entails shifting our perceptions about why people aren't active and aren't doing more. People aren't necessarily passive because they are brainwashed, or because they are sellouts.

I've more thoughts, but these are the ones that stand out. Would be very interested in hearing your thoughts.  

As we enter the second season of the nascent Occupation movement police have responded viciously. To loosely quote Stuart Hall, “the Empire strikes back.” At UC Davis, police officers sprayed protestors with pepper spray. In a video making the rounds, we can see one police officer spraying protestors as a gardener might spray petunias. In Oakland, police officers shot a military veteran in the face with a rubber bullet, causing brain damage. Although it is possible here that he was shot inadvertently, more likely he was aimed at. And in the most startling image to me a member of the NYPD sprayed a protestor in the mouth. In these and in dozens of other similar instances these tactics reveal the fundamental disconnect between our supposed rights to protest and our practical rights to protest. And it’s also clear that there is a profound disconnect to how non-violent rule breakers are treated vs. Banks and other powerful institutions. Banks have routinely violated literally hundreds of rules and regulations in their desire to forcibly evict people from their homes, but it is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which police officers (or law enforcement officials of any sort) treat banks with the same type of cavalierly brutality they use to treat park and recreation violators. But rather than curtailing protest, these police actions usually have the negative effect, increasing rather than decreasing dissent. They increase the size of and support for the movement by revealing the stark contrast between the rules accorded to the 1% and the rules accorded to the “99%”. Movement supporters use this as evidence of growing power.  

While I’m sure they’re right, I think they’re missing the point.

What happens when the violence stops? What happens, when police officers and political representatives stop Bull Connoring protestors?

We’re all familiar by now with the development and deployment of nonviolent tactics made popular by the Civil Rights Movement. Proponents felt protestors would gain the moral high ground by using nonviolence. And in doing so they would both gain supporters and would turn some detractors in their favor. They weren’t totally wrong, as many victories were earned by their nonviolent struggle. Long before the civil rights bills of the sixties were passed, blacks had successfully overturned Jim Crow segregation laws in dozens of cities through the strength of nonviolence.

But there’s another side. 

By the early sixties Civil Rights Movement was in the midst of a transition. Many of the children involved in desegregating local school districts in the fifties had by now entered college. These students were still interested in desegregating public spaces, but they were also committed to increasing the political power of southern blacks. And they staunchly believed in non-violent tactics—indeed they called the organization they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).   In 1961 SNCC established a base in Albany, Georgia with the purpose of registering enough black voters so as to overturn the white supremacist political leadership of the city. But in their struggle with the city, SNCC’s forces were decimated, as the city imprisoned many of their leaders.

In stepped Martin Luther King. King called for a march on city hall. 250 people joined him. They were all arrested.

Now in dozens of other instances the arrests themselves were valuable to the movement, as southern police would brutally beat protestors as journalists (hence the country) looked on. 

But this instance was different. Rather than using brutal tactics against the protestors, rather than having their human much lesscivil rights called into question, Albany Chief of Police Laurie Prichett had his officers courteously arrest them. King and the protestors didn’t know how to respond. Instead of seeing peaceful protestors brutalized, Americans saw police arresting people who were disturbing the peace. When King returned to be tried for violating the law in regards to the rally he was offered the opportunity to pay $178 instead of having to serve time. King refused, believing that serving the time would only bring the contradictions of Albany’s racism into stark relief.

Recognizing this, the city paid his fine. 

He tried to return to Albany again, but given his previous behavior the city was able to get a federal injunction against him. Although eventually Jim Crow segregation fell in Albany as it did elsewhere, nonviolent protest in Albany was arguably a failure. Indeed some argue it was King’s greatest failure. King was forced to leave. The type of nonviolent protest civil rights protestors used always relies on heavy handed violence, and a media willing to film it. Remove either element and it fails.

The growth of the occupy movement in hundreds of cities across the country is aided and abetted by the use of violent tactics by law enforcement officials. Their use of violence helps occupy forces crystallize differences between the “99%” and the “1%”. In so doing it increases the physical and social support for the movement’s activities, and increases the number of people willing to occupy. 

However, sooner or later someone’s going to realize that this particular tactic is easily countered, by simply letting protestors say their peace, and arresting them with dignity when they break the law. And when this mode of arrest proliferates with the same speed and ferocity of the Occupy Movement, the various occupies will be left with a question that up until now they haven’t had to answer.

What next? 

I, like many others, have up until now believed that the lack of substantive demands does not necessarily hamper the movement. Perhaps because we live on “internet time” we tend to forget that the movement really is barely 100 days old if that. And I believe that the proliferation of dozens of different occupies is a boon rather than a bane. But the more occupies rely on the use of force to garner support, the less likely it is it will be able to bring the change into the world we seek.  

One of the questions I never asked in Stare in the Darkness (because it wasn't a "how to" book) was "how might we use rap and hip-hop progressively?" There are literally dozens of efforts across the world to connect rap and hip-hop to progressive movements. Although hip-hop wasn't responsible for the Egyptian uprising, it definitely represented the soundtrack. 

Inspired by Jared Ball's I Mix What I Like, I came up with an idea about inspiring the creation of locally produced politically important rap and hip-hop, via the concept of the MC battle/poetry slam.

I talked to Jared, to Zeke Berzoff-Cohen (co-founder of The Intersection), Chris Baron (High School Debate Program Manager of The Baltimore Urban Debate League, Lawrence Grandpre Vice-President of Research for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, and Darius Wilmore (one of hip-hop's first graphic designers). We'd sponsor a contest and give prizes to the best rap and spoken word. And we'd call it The Baltimore Mixtape Project.

Where does the politics come in?

THe rap/spoken word has to deal with a pertinent local political issue. Perhaps the most important issue facing Baltimore youth is the school to prison pipeline. In the City of Baltimore plans are underfoot to build a $100million prison complex for the purpose of housing youth charged as adults. So we chose that as the issue. The name of the first contest? Battle:Bar None. 

We rolled out the project for the public on Marc Steiner. Listen here.

We're trying to do it on a scale that allows for duplication with limited resources. We're keeping it local to keep it manageable. We're using networks we have in the school and in the neighborhood to raise awareness about it. There's already a pre-existing movement around the issue here in Baltimore so we're not trying to create a movement from scratch as much as we are trying to help give legs to activists who've already been working on the issue. And there's already a powerful local rap and hip-hop community here. There are kids making beats and rhymes for DAYS here. It's just about nudging what's here.

And although we are giving prizes to the top three folk, our plan is to use as much of the submissions as we can to create a several volume mixtape that we'd then distribute throughout the city.

If you've read up to now I assume you're interested. How can you help?

Three ways:

1. We've started a Kickstarter page to raise money for the project. Kickstarter for those unaware is a web-based way to fundraise. If you're interested enough to donate to the cause please feel free. And if you don't have money but have product (art, books–i'm giving away signed copies of Stare in the Darkness, Jared Ball is giving away signed copies of The Mixtape Manifesto) to lend to the effort contact me. 

2. If you know institutions who'd be interested in funding part of this please let us know.

3. If you'd like to help with the judging or any other aspect of the event (generating publicity, interviewing people associated with it, talking to kids about it, giving kids with the rhymes but no resources access to studios and the like) please contact me. 

4. Spread the word. We've got the Kickstarter page, we've got a Facebook page. The website is coming.

We're all pretty excited about this and would love to see it spread. 

Help us.