Today’s video of the shows Barack Obama’s response to Jeremiah Wright. Did Obama do the right thing or did he sell out?

When I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell
Cause I'm a piece of shit, it ain't hard to fuckin' tell
It don't make sense, goin' to heaven wit the goodie-goodies
Dressed in white, I like black Timbs and black hoodies
God will probably have me on some real strict shit
No sleepin' all day, no gettin my dick licked
Hangin' with the goodie-goodies loungin' in paradise
Fuck that shit, I wanna tote guns and shoot dice
All my life I been considered as the worst
Lyin' to my mother, even stealin' out her purse
Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion
I know my mother wished she got a fuckin' abortion
She don't even love me like she did when I was younger
Suckin' on her chest just to stop my fuckin' hunger
I wonder if I died, would tears come to her eyes?
Forgive me for my disrespect, forgive me for my lies
My babies' mothers 8 months, her little sister's 2
Who's to blame for both of them (naw nigga, not you)
I swear to God I just want to slit my wrists and end this bullshit
Throw the Magnum to my head, threaten to pull shit
And squeeze, until the bed's, completely red
I'm glad I'm dead, a worthless fuckin' buddah head
The stress is buildin' up, I can't,
I can't believe suicide's on my fuckin' mind
I want to leave, I swear to God I feel like death is fuckin' callin' me
Naw you wouldn't understand (nigga, talk to me please)
You see its kinda like the crack did to Pookie, in New Jack
Except when I cross over, there ain't no comin' back
Should I die on the train track, like Remo in Beatstreet
People at the funeral frontin' like they miss me
My baby momma kissed me but she glad I'm gone
She knew me and her sista had somethin' goin' on
I reach my peak, I can't speak,
Call my nigga Chic, tell him that my will is weak.
I'm sick of niggas lyin', I'm sick of bitches hawkin',
Matter of fact, I'm sick of talkin'.

Sean Bell: Moving Beyond Demands, Creating Justice
By Matthew Birkhold
Four hours after the acquittal of three New York City detectives who killed Sean Bell, my inbox filled with emails promoting a rally to demand justice for Sean Bell and his family.

I decided to take the trip from Brooklyn to Queens and enlisted the company of friends and fellow activists. We all felt going to the rally was the responsible thing to do but also felt troubled because justice can’t be demanded, it must be created.

I’ve been attending rallies and protests in the name of demanding justice for years. Unfortunately, my world has become no more just. After leaving this last rally, I’m convinced that half of New York State could have shown up to demand justice and nothing would have changed. The reason for this is simple.

Justice is not something that can be obtained by demands. When I hear, “Demand justice,” my next thought is, “From whom?” Luckily, I’m not alone. Because demanding justice from the same court that acquitted the officers makes little sense, groups like Peoples Justice and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement have taken steps to create justice.

Steps taken include very important Know Your Rights and Cop Watch campaigns. In a recent press release, People’s Justice coalition has gone a step further than these campaigns to demand that prosecutors who are independent of the state handle police brutality cases.

This is a very important step, because laws in the U.S. are designed to protect the interests of the state, of which police make up a military wing, and the job of prosecutors is to keep the state from losing power. Because prosecutors, judges, and police are all on the same side, convictions in police brutality cases are rare and independent prosecutors are needed. Important as these steps are they, they are not enough.

While necessary, these campaigns are not enough because they only react to the problem of rights’ violations and police brutality. While needed, demands for independent prosecutors are only a step to correct a broken justice system. These strategies are all reactionary because they only react to the problem and fail to address the problem’s cause.

Police brutality exists in oppressed communities, because the culture of policing is deeply rooted in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Police, more intensely than the rest of us, are taught to believe that the lives of all people who are not white, male, and wealthy are less valuable than the lives of those who are. If we expect the state to make this change, we are expecting nothing less than a revolution initiated by people in power.

Because people who work in policing won’t change it, we have to change it ourselves. We must not only watch cops but also be our own police. If we become our own police, instead of watching cops in hopes that they treat oppressed people with more humanity, we provide a powerful example of a model for formal police agencies to model themselves after and empower our communities in very real ways.

One example activists can draw from is the Safe OUTside the System collective, the anti-violence initiative of the Audre Lorde Project. As members of nonwhite communities, the SOS collective is guided by the belief that increased police presence does not make their neighborhoods safer. However, as LGBTQ community of color, they also experience homophobic violence in their communities. Instead of notifying the police of community violence, the SOS Collective uses strategies of community accountability to challenge violence.

By following the lead of the SOS Collective, we can create justice by eliminating violence in our own communities and eliminating police violence by creating a new model of policing.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based independent scholar, writer, and educator.  He can be reached at birkhold (at) gmail (dot.) com.

What the Judge and the Cos couldn’t see in that all-black Atlanta courtroom.

Frayed Bootstraps in the Black Mecca
By William Jelani Cobb

Early last year I was called for jury duty. I headed to the court building in downtown Atlanta, semi-grateful for the reprieve from admin meetings and hoping to get some grading done — until I wandered into the wrong courtroom and  was stunned by what I saw. The room was completely filled with black males, mostly teenagers; all were awaiting hearings for one criminal charge or another.

We hear in seemingly infinite detail about the over-incarceration of black men, it’s one of those hard facts that pop up on that never-ending ticker-tape of bad racial news. But reading those numbers is not the same as looking at 40 or 50 young black men who are, if those statistics hold true, on their way to prison. I eventually found the right courtroom and actually got to leave after only an hour in the jury pool, but that scene troubled me for the rest of the day.

That vision came back to me earlier this month when I heard about Superior Court Judge Marvin Arrington Sr. clearing the white people from his courtroom before delivering a stern lecture to the assemblage of young black defendants standing before him.

Arrington’s message of responsibility and self-help dovetailed neatly with the themes of Bill Cosby’s national “Call Outs” and that probably explains how the judge and the comic-turned-racial uplift preacher found themselves seated together in the auditorium of Benjamin E. Mays High School last Thursday night.On the surface, this could seem like more of Cosby’s Booker T. Washington remix, but there were other dynamics at play. Atlanta is a city that has deliberately come to be seen as synonymous with black success, but the truth is that we are plagued by the same problems that afflict most American cities.

What sets us apart is that there is enough black success to essentially camouflage our 24.4 percent poverty rate and the fact over 40 percent of the children in the city are poor. Our schools perpetually rank among the worst in the country and the “Black Mecca” suffers from a crime rate that is among the highest for a city its size. The result is that Atlanta is two black cities: one in which people strive and another in which they struggle; one of subdivisions and another of projects. One that seems insulated from the 1964 Civil Rights Act and one that is defined by the opportunities that law yielded.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Price Clubs Restricting Rice Sales

Because of incidents of hoarding, Sam’s Club and Costco have put limits on the amounts of certain kinds of rice consumers can buy. What do you think?

Clayton Jeffries,
Radio Engineer
“Oh no! Rice was my go-to side after they raised the cost of the spices with which I help my hamburger.”

Eliza Park,
Duck Decoy Carver
“What’s next? Reasonable portions at The Cheesecake Factory?”

Raphael Kula,
Meat Packer
“Then what will I have to go with all that sashimi in my basement?”