Hopeless in New York's 10th Congressional District
Edolphus Towns (D), the Representative from the 10th Congressional District in Brooklyn, faces several challengers for his seat in this year's election. Two of his three challengers are current officeholders. While it is not yet certain whether his incumbency is seriously threatened, it is worth noting that there seems to be a lack of viable choices.
Towns, a 12-term incumbent, has been AWOL from his duty to represent the people of the 10th District. And yet, while he has abandoned his official duty, Towns is rather active in the pasttime of talking.
GovTrack.us provides vital information on each member of Congress, including legislation and statistics. The statistics for Representative Towns are far from promising. The statistics were accessed on the database on Wednesday, March 22, 2006.
Since 1999, the database states that 4,165 votes were taken in the House. Ed Towns missed 446 of them. This might include an interesting, but disturbing, tidbit brought up by Room Eight (the post used for the purposes of this entry is authored by Gatemouth) that Towns "recently took a walk on a close and important budget vote."
Relative to his colleagues in the House and not by an arbitrary judgment on what is an acceptable threshold of votes missed, Towns performs poorly when compared to other representatives.
Towns has been quite active placing his name on bills. Since 1999, Towns has cosponsored 2,021 bills, "exceedingly many" compared to his peers in the House. However, he has 73 sponsored bills since 1999 that have yet to come to a vote, "extremely poor" according to GovTrack.us.
Although the four times that Towns has spoken on the House floor on an issue since 2003 is average, his 535 words per speech is considered "verbose."
The appropriate term to describe Towns's performance may be "all hat and no cattle." He is very active in getting his name on bills but is not able to pass anything through the House. Much of it is due to his membership in the minority party but even some locked out of the power in Congress manage to be effective representatives. And while he seems to have a fair amount to say on the House floor, he is absent ten percent of the time when votes are taken. How is that being an effective representative for the district?
Yet while the congressman has been far less than stellar in his performance as a representative, Towns has found time to amass a fairly sizeable campaign checking account.
According to opensecrets.org, at the last report on December 31, 2005, Towns raised $461,765, has already spent $315,761, and still has $208,275 on hand. He ranks 218th in the House in fundraising for this election cycle. He also ranks 169th in campaign money spent over the same time period.
Right in the middle of the 435 members of the House of Representatives and in the top 40% in campaign spending yet close to if not in the bottom third in performing the most basic requirement for the job he has? Ed Towns clearly does not have his priorities straight.
It would be one thing if the 10th Congressional District was a hotly contested seat between Democrats and Republicans. As Room Eight says, "ET's seat is prohibitively Democratic, and there's no concievable sceanario under which it will change partisan hands." After all, incumbents in districts like that has campaign war chests reaching seven figures.
But, the 10th Congressional District is far from one of those districts. Towns won the 2004 election with 92% of the vote. However, it was lower than the 98% he won in 2002. Perhaps that justifies the fundraising, given the strong threats Towns faced in the last general election. After all, at this rate of losing 6 percent each election, he will win only 50% of the vote in the 2018 election!
It would be another thing if Towns was supposed to face a tough primary this year. But that does not yet seem to be the case. According to a March 1, 2006 article in the New York Sun ("Barron on the Offensive in His Congressional Run"), Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY, 15th Congressional District) said that he did not think any of those who said they will challenge Towns will actually do so. "They are testing the waters, which we all do, and when they see the waters are not warm I don't think they are going to be candidates. Ed Towns has nothing to worry about."
So if there's no threat of being ousted, then why does Towns spend all that time raising cash when he could be...(gasp!)...voting on Capitol Hill?
From the Sun article:
"They are going to look really ridiculous because I have been an effective member of the United States Congress," he [Towns] said. "I'll be running on my record."
Apologies if you choked on your food or your beverage when you read that.
So what of the announced primary challengers?
First is Assemblyman Roger Green, who has a line on his record worse than anything Towns has done in his 24 years in Congress. In the Sun article, it states that Green pled guilty to three counts related to charges that he took free rides then got reimbursed by the state but later won his seat back. The Sun did not go into any detail of what kind of "free rides" Green took, but the TimesRatnerReport provides an excerpt from an earlier New York Times article on Green:
In early 2004, Mr. Green pleaded guilty to two counts of petty larceny and one count of filing a false instrument, acknowledging that he billed the Assembly for travel expenses although he had had free rides to Albany from a prison-services company seeking state contracts.
As part of his bargain with prosecutors in Albany, Mr. Green escaped having to plead guilty to a felony, which would have prevented him from standing for re-election. He agreed to be placed on probation for three years, pay back $3,000 to New York State and pay a fine of $2,000 for the petty larceny convictions.
After his conviction, the release of a secret report by the Assembly's ethics committee recommending sanctions against him, and a request from the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, to step down, Mr. Green resigned the seat he had held for more than two decades.
And this man deserves to be in Congress where he could have access to more money than he'd ever dream of in the State Assembly?
Roger Green
Does not deserve to be anywhere near the Congressional seat.
Next is writer and activist Kevin Powell. Powell is the founder of a non-profit group called HipHop Speaks. An interview of Powell can be found here. However, it does not look like Powell has registered on the radar as far as seriously challenging Towns is concerned. But there is still time before the primaries and his ties to the group may prove beneficial to his campaign.
Kevin Powell
Does not seem to be viable yet.
Some choice excerpts:
In 2003, we plan separate summits on Black womanhood and Black manhood, as well as setting up a mentoring program here in Brooklyn, where I live. It is clear that Black leadership, on a national level, has let Black America down, has no national Black agenda, and is ignoring all the things destroying our communities right now, like the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the crisis in public school education, the on-going issue of institutionalized White racism, Black self-hatred, sexism and gender oppression, the prison-industrial complex, and more issues than I can list here. Hence, my life work is dedicated to telling the truth as I have lived it, and as I see it, and to helping my people, Black people, and all people, really. The slogan for Hiphop Speaks is "the leadership we are waiting for is us," and that is exactly how I feel.
6)- What would you like to say to aspiring young African American writers in college today, (like myself)? The African-American youth today?
I tell young Black writers to read everything you can get your hands on, Black writers, White writers, Latino writers, Asian writers, Native American writers, every kind of writer you can get to. But it is important that your foundation is the tradition of African American literature, because that is who we are. We do ourselves a disservice, I feel, to absorb other writers, other cultures, and not be familiar with our own.
I grew up reading Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats... Ernest Hemingway, all the so-called masters of Western literature. And I loved those cats because I have always loved reading. But I hated myself as a Black person because the public schools I attended in Jersey City, New Jersey, where I was born and raised, NEVER really brought up Black contributions to history, Black writers, none of that. Not knowing about yourself means, more than likely, you are not going to appreciate yourself, that you will, in fact, hate yourself, because you don't think that you and people who look like you are relevant.
So young African American writers must dive into Black literature, Black music, Black art, Black history, all of it. When I first read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, I felt like I was reading the stories of my mother and her sisters and, for the first time, I saw that the dialect my mother spoke, from her native South Carolina, was a beautiful language, not broken English. And I saw that all the stories my mother had given me was oral history, oral poetry, not some random, obscure tall tales.
Same thing with reading Richard Wright or Malcolm X's autobiography: everyone I know from the ghetto thinks no one has it as bad as we do, that no one gets what we are going through, how life in the 'hood is a series of domestic terrorist acts being waged against our minds, our bodies, and our spirits. That we are alive only because we are not dead. Wright and Malcolm spoke to me as a Black boy, as a Black man, in a way Shakespeare had never spoke to me. Those books changed my life, and young African American writers have to understand that the most important writing should strive to change lives, make the world better, empower people. And that writing is not about being rich or famous; it is about telling the truth. If it is meant for you to be rich and famous, it will happen. But you gotta love writing the way you love life, and it has to be as natural to you as breathing.
7)- Where were you on September 11th and how did it change your views on society? After over a year, what are your views, feelings, today?
I was in Syracuse, New York, on September 11th. The night before I had lectured to incoming first-year students. Ironically, that night I talked a lot about young people understanding the importance of knowing history, present-day events, the full history of America, all of that. While what happened on September 11th certainly affected me emotionally, spiritually, it did not change my views on this society.
As I have said, I am a political activist, and have been one since I was 18, which means I have always been into critical thinking, into raising questions about the world we live in, in challenging myself and my thinking every chance I get, in learning constantly. So while the human being that I am was deeply affected by September 11th, I am equally affected by the mental terrorism that ignores poor people, homeless people, the disenfranchised and marginalized in this country. While I hear a lot of folks talk about how badly women are treated in certain Arab countries, which may be true, I wonder why people don't talk about the fact that Black women are now the largest recipients of the HIV/AIDS virus right here in America. Or why folks are so quiet about how women, right here in America, are raped, daily, beaten, daily, commodified and objectified, daily, in the popular culture, to sell music, products, all of that.
So I did not jump on the patriotism bandwagon. How could I when I know really well the history of America, how the Native Americans were literally slaughtered and had their land stolen, how Africans were turned into niggas and made to work, for free, all those years as slaves? How those same Black people, even after physical slavery ended, had to endure another 100 years of second-class citizenship, of dodging the insanities of their White brothers and sisters. And how, even after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the majority of Black people remain poor, marginalized, stuck in America's ghettos, so where is the progress, really?
And I think about slow, domestic terrorism, in the form of racial profiling, police brutality, the dropping of drugs in our communities (and no one seems to know where the drugs came from), the number of Black people who are marched off to jail for chunks of their lives, even though they are nonviolent drug offenders. And why are they selling drugs? I am not condoning drug dealing because I understand we are ultimately selling death to our people, but where are the jobs in the ghettoes? And, as Marvin Gaye asked a long time ago, who really cares?
So I had two reactions to September 11th: one, spiritual, because I am human and am connected to other human beings so I feel things deeply, I mean, I am a writer, an artist, and we just are mad sensitive, hypersensitive. But the other reaction is equally important: a political analysis, a political take. Like if 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia, why was Afghanistan bombed? Or, why did Osama bin-Laden matter a year ago, and why is Saddam Hussein the biggest enemy now? Why was Hussein not dealt with 10 years, during the Persian Gulf War, if he is such a menace? Why was Iraq an ally of the United States in the 1980s, what role did the American government play in the creation of the Taliban? Or, why is America viewed, by many countries in the world at large, as an aggressor, and not the bastion of democracy that we portray ourselves as?
If this country is really a democracy, if we really believe in freedom, and not that knee-jerk stuff of waving a flag or learning a few patriotic songs because someone told you to, then you would ask the hard, critical questions. Unless you are a complete coward.
A look at his campaign website will reveal some of his overall stances. However, this does not come with more substantial plans. That is not to say that his ideas on his platform are not worthy goals, but the vehicles to achieve those goals have not been manufactured yet.
Perhaps he will continue to make his case in the 10th and launch himself from a minor candidate to a serious contender.
Last is City Councilman Charles Barron (42nd Councilmanic District).
Charles Barron...what a trainwreck. There is no issue on Earth that Barron could not insert a racial tone into the debate. If Barron does not get his way, it must be an insult to his entire race at the hands of the racists that are everywhere around us.
A recent skirmish, chronicled in the March 29th New York Daily News, gives us a view into the mind of Charles Barron.
Barron won $3.6 million in city funds to renovate Linden Park, an East New York park that resides in his councilmanic district. Normally, a councilman would be celebrating the victory. A councilman running for Congress, such as Barron, might even incorporate the accomplishment into the campaign, telling voters that he could deliver results better than his opponents. In the middle of a campaign, that grant is a gift. If only Barron would take this gift and run with it.
Instead, Barron is demanding that Linden Park be renamed after Sonny Carson, a black activist that was quite controversial and divisive.
Barron has stated that Mayor Michael Bloomberg flat-out rejected the idea of naming the park after Carson.
But instead of understanding that a politician might win some (and $3.6 million to renovate and make the park better for the community can be a nice feather in the cap) and lose a little (a name change that would not have much impact, if any, to better the lives of his constituents), Barron immediately threw a tantrum and used the race card.
"It's white male racist arrogance to tell us we can't name a park after someone we admire," said Barron, confusing himself with the word "we."
Maybe he might have a small point, if the Man really was beating him down.
While a Bloomberg spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the Parks Department made a comment.
"In the past, our tradition was to rename parks only for an individual related to the life of the park," Johnston said.
Johnston also added that Barron should formally request to rename the park.
Barron couldn't even bother to make that formal request, but he will not hesitate to whine and call those who do not cater to his demands and his tantrums white racists.
This is just par for the course for Barron.
In the March 1st article in the New York Sun, Barron defended one of his outbursts with...another outburst.
Mr. Barron is undeterred. During a sit-down conversation in his district office, decorated with African tapestries, he said he thinks President Bush is "racist" for neglecting Katrina victims in favor of the Iraq war, said that black people should form their own political party, declared that Republican black politicians like Condoleezza Rica and Colin Powell are "enemies to world peace," and remarked that it was time to "get over" the notorious comments he made at the 2002 rally.
"I verbally slapped white people," he said. "They lynched us, hung us, stuck something up Abner Louima's rectum, shot us 41 times. I verbally slapped them. Get over it. It was a rally comment that nobody cares about but the media."
It'd be interesting to know when he himself was shot 41 times or if the white people in the 10th congressional district even know that all this time, they were lynching and hanging black people while giving those cops a hand in assaulting Abner Louima and shooting each black person 41 times. I think they'd be shocked to know they did all that. I bet at least most of them have no memories of every going outside and doing that.
As a side note, I wonder why it was important for the Sun to point out that Barron's office was decorated with African tapestries.
The comment during that 2002 rally was brought up at the beginning of the article.
Charles Barron, the fiery City Council member who made national news nearly four years ago when he said at a rally for slavery reparations that he would like to go up to the closest white person and say: "'You can't understand this, it's a black thing,' then slap him, just for my mental health," is off to an aggressive start in his run for Congress.
How does he behave himself in the Council chamber, with there being white people in the Council and others in the gallery and in the media? And he wants to head to the Captiol, with more white people in it? It doesn't look like he wants to keep his mental health in top shape.
In addition to all his comments, Barron also brought dictator, "His Excellency", incredibly racist, and human rights violator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to City Hall.
So what of Sonny Carson? What of this activist that passed away in 2002 that Barron wants to honor by gracing Linden Park with his name?
Written in the Summer 1991 edition of City Journal is a long, but detailed article on Carson by Tamar Jacoby.
Choice excerpts:
Sonny Carson makes no apologies for his racial politics. He likes to be thought of as a bad black man, someone who can hold his own fighting the white man’s power. As a youth, he was a defiant gang member. Later, on trial for kidnapping and murder, he cultivated the image of a ruthless militant. Most recently, during the last mayoral campaign, he tweaked New Yorkers’ noses by declaring proudly that he was “antiwhite.” A self-styled troublemaker with no visible political base, he hats made no effort over the years to disguise his faith in the politics of intimidation. Yet for more than two decades, he has been an important presence on the New York political scene, consistently embarrassing and outmaneuvering far more distinguished black leaders like David Dinkins. How he does it, the source of his shadowy power, is one of the most potent secrets of New York politics.
Carson led an angry but disciplined column of 7,500 demonstrators marching six abreast, brandishing placards and chanting rhythmically: “Whose streets? Our streets! What’s coming? War!” At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the demonstrators met a heavily armed police guard determined to prevent them from blocking traffic. Carson defiantly breached the police barrier and a 20-minute battle ensued. Forty-four cops and unnumbered protesters were injured, several of them seriously. But the biggest casualty, most New Yorkers agreed, was the promise of Dinkins’s candidacy. How could Dinkins deliver racial peace with a man like Carson gesturing menacingly behind his back?
He began to look around for a place to wield his growing influence and soon found the perfect target in the Bed-Stuy public schools. With no particular authority but that of Brooklyn CORE, he announced he was going to “evaluate” 32 teachers, and after a few weeks he declared that all but five of them were “fired.” He made no effort to disguise what he thought was their key shortcoming: Most of them were white. And, as ever, his main tactic was a threat: “If [the school superintendent] ... thinks we are kidding,” Carson told a reporter, “he had better wait until September and see what happens when those teachers ... try to come back to our community.”
When neither the Board of Education nor the teachers’ union responded, Carson took the battle directly to them. First, he and a group of followers took over the union’s Manhattan headquarters, spending a night on office couches and making free use of the telephones. Some weeks later, he tried the same tactic at the board’s central office at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. This time, the cops were there ahead of him, and—by Carson’s own admission—he and his group provoked a nasty brawl that landed one policeman in the hospital. (Patrolman John Clarke was struck on the head with a three-foot metal ashtray, then taunted with shouts of “I hope you die.”)
Also that summer, Carson invited Albert Shanker, head of the teachers’ union, to a “community” meeting in a Brooklyn school. Shanker was heckled and then prevented from leaving. When he appealed to Carson to call off the thugs at the door, Carson merely laughed at what he later described as “this great big honky union chief standing there, blotchy with apparent fright.” By September, Carson’s gang was illegally entering school buildings and accosting teachers in the halls, telling them, among other things, “The Germans did not do a good enough job with you Jews.”
On one of the worst days of the autumn, police tried to escort a group of union teachers to work. They were met on the school steps by Carson and some fifty of his men wearing police helmets and battle fatigues. After a tense standoff (Carson says there was violence), the teachers were allowed to enter the building, but not to teach. Shortly afterward they were told to report to an auditorium in another school. There, they found the walls lined with Carson and his followers, now carrying sticks and bandoliers of bullets. The teachers clustered in the middle of the room as Carson’s men began to curse at them. “Wait till we get the lights out,” the men shouted. “We’ll throw lye in your faces. You’ll be very visible.” The lights in the windowless hall were flicked on and off; teachers were pushed and shoved and told they would leave the room only “in pine boxes.”
This is the man that Charles Barron thinks is appropriate to have mentioned around today's youth? This is a man that Barron supports? This is who Barron says children should look up to when they see Carson's name on the park?
Read the full story for more details on Carson.
It's no wonder that Room Eight says that during Barron's appearance on Hannity and Whatever, Hannity took great delight to make it known that Barron was a Democrat.
Room Eight:
"Just this week on Fox, Sean Hannity took delight in displaying Barron in all his glory, while Barron's name flashed on the screen with a (D) next to it. Because Barron is currently little more than a local curiosity, the impact of such appearances is currently limited, in the same way that it was when klansman and former Louisiana legislator David Duke's name used to appear on television with an (R). But, Barron's election to Congress will convert him from a local curiosity to a national embarassment."
The strange thing is, when Barron attacks the incumbent Towns, he does so on policy, such as Towns voting for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) or his general failure to represent the people of the district by voting. And his assessment of the incumbent's performance is accurate.
From the Sun article:
"His time is up," Mr. Barron said during a walk through his district earlier this week. "He's simply been around too long and it's not because of his age, because Nelson Mandela ran a country at 80. If you decide to retire on the job, don't get mad at me because I want to see somebody come in here to fight."
Though if voters don't like the renaming of Linden Park, according to the Daily News:
"Too bad," he said. "They should vote for the other guy."
Room Eight puts it in a different light.
"I could go on for pages about ET's transgression, and promise I will find the time to do so in the near future. But, voting for Barron because you prefer his position on CAFTA or Atlantic Yards is like voting for Mussolini because you prefer his position on mass transit (you know, the thing about train schedules)."
Good idea. But where else can a voter turn? Why isn't there a candidate that seems worthy for the office? There is no viable Republican or third party candidate that can save the district from this plague. The situation is hopeless, even seven months before the election. New York's 10th will see yet another term of this plague and no end is in sight.
Towns, a 12-term incumbent, has been AWOL from his duty to represent the people of the 10th District. And yet, while he has abandoned his official duty, Towns is rather active in the pasttime of talking.
GovTrack.us provides vital information on each member of Congress, including legislation and statistics. The statistics for Representative Towns are far from promising. The statistics were accessed on the database on Wednesday, March 22, 2006.
Since 1999, the database states that 4,165 votes were taken in the House. Ed Towns missed 446 of them. This might include an interesting, but disturbing, tidbit brought up by Room Eight (the post used for the purposes of this entry is authored by Gatemouth) that Towns "recently took a walk on a close and important budget vote."
Relative to his colleagues in the House and not by an arbitrary judgment on what is an acceptable threshold of votes missed, Towns performs poorly when compared to other representatives.
Towns has been quite active placing his name on bills. Since 1999, Towns has cosponsored 2,021 bills, "exceedingly many" compared to his peers in the House. However, he has 73 sponsored bills since 1999 that have yet to come to a vote, "extremely poor" according to GovTrack.us.
Although the four times that Towns has spoken on the House floor on an issue since 2003 is average, his 535 words per speech is considered "verbose."
The appropriate term to describe Towns's performance may be "all hat and no cattle." He is very active in getting his name on bills but is not able to pass anything through the House. Much of it is due to his membership in the minority party but even some locked out of the power in Congress manage to be effective representatives. And while he seems to have a fair amount to say on the House floor, he is absent ten percent of the time when votes are taken. How is that being an effective representative for the district?
Yet while the congressman has been far less than stellar in his performance as a representative, Towns has found time to amass a fairly sizeable campaign checking account.
According to opensecrets.org, at the last report on December 31, 2005, Towns raised $461,765, has already spent $315,761, and still has $208,275 on hand. He ranks 218th in the House in fundraising for this election cycle. He also ranks 169th in campaign money spent over the same time period.
Right in the middle of the 435 members of the House of Representatives and in the top 40% in campaign spending yet close to if not in the bottom third in performing the most basic requirement for the job he has? Ed Towns clearly does not have his priorities straight.
It would be one thing if the 10th Congressional District was a hotly contested seat between Democrats and Republicans. As Room Eight says, "ET's seat is prohibitively Democratic, and there's no concievable sceanario under which it will change partisan hands." After all, incumbents in districts like that has campaign war chests reaching seven figures.
But, the 10th Congressional District is far from one of those districts. Towns won the 2004 election with 92% of the vote. However, it was lower than the 98% he won in 2002. Perhaps that justifies the fundraising, given the strong threats Towns faced in the last general election. After all, at this rate of losing 6 percent each election, he will win only 50% of the vote in the 2018 election!
It would be another thing if Towns was supposed to face a tough primary this year. But that does not yet seem to be the case. According to a March 1, 2006 article in the New York Sun ("Barron on the Offensive in His Congressional Run"), Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY, 15th Congressional District) said that he did not think any of those who said they will challenge Towns will actually do so. "They are testing the waters, which we all do, and when they see the waters are not warm I don't think they are going to be candidates. Ed Towns has nothing to worry about."
So if there's no threat of being ousted, then why does Towns spend all that time raising cash when he could be...(gasp!)...voting on Capitol Hill?
From the Sun article:
"They are going to look really ridiculous because I have been an effective member of the United States Congress," he [Towns] said. "I'll be running on my record."
Apologies if you choked on your food or your beverage when you read that.
So what of the announced primary challengers?
First is Assemblyman Roger Green, who has a line on his record worse than anything Towns has done in his 24 years in Congress. In the Sun article, it states that Green pled guilty to three counts related to charges that he took free rides then got reimbursed by the state but later won his seat back. The Sun did not go into any detail of what kind of "free rides" Green took, but the TimesRatnerReport provides an excerpt from an earlier New York Times article on Green:
In early 2004, Mr. Green pleaded guilty to two counts of petty larceny and one count of filing a false instrument, acknowledging that he billed the Assembly for travel expenses although he had had free rides to Albany from a prison-services company seeking state contracts.
As part of his bargain with prosecutors in Albany, Mr. Green escaped having to plead guilty to a felony, which would have prevented him from standing for re-election. He agreed to be placed on probation for three years, pay back $3,000 to New York State and pay a fine of $2,000 for the petty larceny convictions.
After his conviction, the release of a secret report by the Assembly's ethics committee recommending sanctions against him, and a request from the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, to step down, Mr. Green resigned the seat he had held for more than two decades.
And this man deserves to be in Congress where he could have access to more money than he'd ever dream of in the State Assembly?
Roger Green
Does not deserve to be anywhere near the Congressional seat.
Next is writer and activist Kevin Powell. Powell is the founder of a non-profit group called HipHop Speaks. An interview of Powell can be found here. However, it does not look like Powell has registered on the radar as far as seriously challenging Towns is concerned. But there is still time before the primaries and his ties to the group may prove beneficial to his campaign.
Kevin Powell
Does not seem to be viable yet.
Some choice excerpts:
In 2003, we plan separate summits on Black womanhood and Black manhood, as well as setting up a mentoring program here in Brooklyn, where I live. It is clear that Black leadership, on a national level, has let Black America down, has no national Black agenda, and is ignoring all the things destroying our communities right now, like the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the crisis in public school education, the on-going issue of institutionalized White racism, Black self-hatred, sexism and gender oppression, the prison-industrial complex, and more issues than I can list here. Hence, my life work is dedicated to telling the truth as I have lived it, and as I see it, and to helping my people, Black people, and all people, really. The slogan for Hiphop Speaks is "the leadership we are waiting for is us," and that is exactly how I feel.
6)- What would you like to say to aspiring young African American writers in college today, (like myself)? The African-American youth today?
I tell young Black writers to read everything you can get your hands on, Black writers, White writers, Latino writers, Asian writers, Native American writers, every kind of writer you can get to. But it is important that your foundation is the tradition of African American literature, because that is who we are. We do ourselves a disservice, I feel, to absorb other writers, other cultures, and not be familiar with our own.
I grew up reading Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats... Ernest Hemingway, all the so-called masters of Western literature. And I loved those cats because I have always loved reading. But I hated myself as a Black person because the public schools I attended in Jersey City, New Jersey, where I was born and raised, NEVER really brought up Black contributions to history, Black writers, none of that. Not knowing about yourself means, more than likely, you are not going to appreciate yourself, that you will, in fact, hate yourself, because you don't think that you and people who look like you are relevant.
So young African American writers must dive into Black literature, Black music, Black art, Black history, all of it. When I first read Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, I felt like I was reading the stories of my mother and her sisters and, for the first time, I saw that the dialect my mother spoke, from her native South Carolina, was a beautiful language, not broken English. And I saw that all the stories my mother had given me was oral history, oral poetry, not some random, obscure tall tales.
Same thing with reading Richard Wright or Malcolm X's autobiography: everyone I know from the ghetto thinks no one has it as bad as we do, that no one gets what we are going through, how life in the 'hood is a series of domestic terrorist acts being waged against our minds, our bodies, and our spirits. That we are alive only because we are not dead. Wright and Malcolm spoke to me as a Black boy, as a Black man, in a way Shakespeare had never spoke to me. Those books changed my life, and young African American writers have to understand that the most important writing should strive to change lives, make the world better, empower people. And that writing is not about being rich or famous; it is about telling the truth. If it is meant for you to be rich and famous, it will happen. But you gotta love writing the way you love life, and it has to be as natural to you as breathing.
7)- Where were you on September 11th and how did it change your views on society? After over a year, what are your views, feelings, today?
I was in Syracuse, New York, on September 11th. The night before I had lectured to incoming first-year students. Ironically, that night I talked a lot about young people understanding the importance of knowing history, present-day events, the full history of America, all of that. While what happened on September 11th certainly affected me emotionally, spiritually, it did not change my views on this society.
As I have said, I am a political activist, and have been one since I was 18, which means I have always been into critical thinking, into raising questions about the world we live in, in challenging myself and my thinking every chance I get, in learning constantly. So while the human being that I am was deeply affected by September 11th, I am equally affected by the mental terrorism that ignores poor people, homeless people, the disenfranchised and marginalized in this country. While I hear a lot of folks talk about how badly women are treated in certain Arab countries, which may be true, I wonder why people don't talk about the fact that Black women are now the largest recipients of the HIV/AIDS virus right here in America. Or why folks are so quiet about how women, right here in America, are raped, daily, beaten, daily, commodified and objectified, daily, in the popular culture, to sell music, products, all of that.
So I did not jump on the patriotism bandwagon. How could I when I know really well the history of America, how the Native Americans were literally slaughtered and had their land stolen, how Africans were turned into niggas and made to work, for free, all those years as slaves? How those same Black people, even after physical slavery ended, had to endure another 100 years of second-class citizenship, of dodging the insanities of their White brothers and sisters. And how, even after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the majority of Black people remain poor, marginalized, stuck in America's ghettos, so where is the progress, really?
And I think about slow, domestic terrorism, in the form of racial profiling, police brutality, the dropping of drugs in our communities (and no one seems to know where the drugs came from), the number of Black people who are marched off to jail for chunks of their lives, even though they are nonviolent drug offenders. And why are they selling drugs? I am not condoning drug dealing because I understand we are ultimately selling death to our people, but where are the jobs in the ghettoes? And, as Marvin Gaye asked a long time ago, who really cares?
So I had two reactions to September 11th: one, spiritual, because I am human and am connected to other human beings so I feel things deeply, I mean, I am a writer, an artist, and we just are mad sensitive, hypersensitive. But the other reaction is equally important: a political analysis, a political take. Like if 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia, why was Afghanistan bombed? Or, why did Osama bin-Laden matter a year ago, and why is Saddam Hussein the biggest enemy now? Why was Hussein not dealt with 10 years, during the Persian Gulf War, if he is such a menace? Why was Iraq an ally of the United States in the 1980s, what role did the American government play in the creation of the Taliban? Or, why is America viewed, by many countries in the world at large, as an aggressor, and not the bastion of democracy that we portray ourselves as?
If this country is really a democracy, if we really believe in freedom, and not that knee-jerk stuff of waving a flag or learning a few patriotic songs because someone told you to, then you would ask the hard, critical questions. Unless you are a complete coward.
A look at his campaign website will reveal some of his overall stances. However, this does not come with more substantial plans. That is not to say that his ideas on his platform are not worthy goals, but the vehicles to achieve those goals have not been manufactured yet.
Perhaps he will continue to make his case in the 10th and launch himself from a minor candidate to a serious contender.
Last is City Councilman Charles Barron (42nd Councilmanic District).
Charles Barron...what a trainwreck. There is no issue on Earth that Barron could not insert a racial tone into the debate. If Barron does not get his way, it must be an insult to his entire race at the hands of the racists that are everywhere around us.
A recent skirmish, chronicled in the March 29th New York Daily News, gives us a view into the mind of Charles Barron.
Barron won $3.6 million in city funds to renovate Linden Park, an East New York park that resides in his councilmanic district. Normally, a councilman would be celebrating the victory. A councilman running for Congress, such as Barron, might even incorporate the accomplishment into the campaign, telling voters that he could deliver results better than his opponents. In the middle of a campaign, that grant is a gift. If only Barron would take this gift and run with it.
Instead, Barron is demanding that Linden Park be renamed after Sonny Carson, a black activist that was quite controversial and divisive.
Barron has stated that Mayor Michael Bloomberg flat-out rejected the idea of naming the park after Carson.
But instead of understanding that a politician might win some (and $3.6 million to renovate and make the park better for the community can be a nice feather in the cap) and lose a little (a name change that would not have much impact, if any, to better the lives of his constituents), Barron immediately threw a tantrum and used the race card.
"It's white male racist arrogance to tell us we can't name a park after someone we admire," said Barron, confusing himself with the word "we."
Maybe he might have a small point, if the Man really was beating him down.
While a Bloomberg spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, Warner Johnston, a spokesman for the Parks Department made a comment.
"In the past, our tradition was to rename parks only for an individual related to the life of the park," Johnston said.
Johnston also added that Barron should formally request to rename the park.
Barron couldn't even bother to make that formal request, but he will not hesitate to whine and call those who do not cater to his demands and his tantrums white racists.
This is just par for the course for Barron.
In the March 1st article in the New York Sun, Barron defended one of his outbursts with...another outburst.
Mr. Barron is undeterred. During a sit-down conversation in his district office, decorated with African tapestries, he said he thinks President Bush is "racist" for neglecting Katrina victims in favor of the Iraq war, said that black people should form their own political party, declared that Republican black politicians like Condoleezza Rica and Colin Powell are "enemies to world peace," and remarked that it was time to "get over" the notorious comments he made at the 2002 rally.
"I verbally slapped white people," he said. "They lynched us, hung us, stuck something up Abner Louima's rectum, shot us 41 times. I verbally slapped them. Get over it. It was a rally comment that nobody cares about but the media."
It'd be interesting to know when he himself was shot 41 times or if the white people in the 10th congressional district even know that all this time, they were lynching and hanging black people while giving those cops a hand in assaulting Abner Louima and shooting each black person 41 times. I think they'd be shocked to know they did all that. I bet at least most of them have no memories of every going outside and doing that.
As a side note, I wonder why it was important for the Sun to point out that Barron's office was decorated with African tapestries.
The comment during that 2002 rally was brought up at the beginning of the article.
Charles Barron, the fiery City Council member who made national news nearly four years ago when he said at a rally for slavery reparations that he would like to go up to the closest white person and say: "'You can't understand this, it's a black thing,' then slap him, just for my mental health," is off to an aggressive start in his run for Congress.
How does he behave himself in the Council chamber, with there being white people in the Council and others in the gallery and in the media? And he wants to head to the Captiol, with more white people in it? It doesn't look like he wants to keep his mental health in top shape.
In addition to all his comments, Barron also brought dictator, "His Excellency", incredibly racist, and human rights violator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to City Hall.
So what of Sonny Carson? What of this activist that passed away in 2002 that Barron wants to honor by gracing Linden Park with his name?
Written in the Summer 1991 edition of City Journal is a long, but detailed article on Carson by Tamar Jacoby.
Choice excerpts:
Sonny Carson makes no apologies for his racial politics. He likes to be thought of as a bad black man, someone who can hold his own fighting the white man’s power. As a youth, he was a defiant gang member. Later, on trial for kidnapping and murder, he cultivated the image of a ruthless militant. Most recently, during the last mayoral campaign, he tweaked New Yorkers’ noses by declaring proudly that he was “antiwhite.” A self-styled troublemaker with no visible political base, he hats made no effort over the years to disguise his faith in the politics of intimidation. Yet for more than two decades, he has been an important presence on the New York political scene, consistently embarrassing and outmaneuvering far more distinguished black leaders like David Dinkins. How he does it, the source of his shadowy power, is one of the most potent secrets of New York politics.
Carson led an angry but disciplined column of 7,500 demonstrators marching six abreast, brandishing placards and chanting rhythmically: “Whose streets? Our streets! What’s coming? War!” At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the demonstrators met a heavily armed police guard determined to prevent them from blocking traffic. Carson defiantly breached the police barrier and a 20-minute battle ensued. Forty-four cops and unnumbered protesters were injured, several of them seriously. But the biggest casualty, most New Yorkers agreed, was the promise of Dinkins’s candidacy. How could Dinkins deliver racial peace with a man like Carson gesturing menacingly behind his back?
He began to look around for a place to wield his growing influence and soon found the perfect target in the Bed-Stuy public schools. With no particular authority but that of Brooklyn CORE, he announced he was going to “evaluate” 32 teachers, and after a few weeks he declared that all but five of them were “fired.” He made no effort to disguise what he thought was their key shortcoming: Most of them were white. And, as ever, his main tactic was a threat: “If [the school superintendent] ... thinks we are kidding,” Carson told a reporter, “he had better wait until September and see what happens when those teachers ... try to come back to our community.”
When neither the Board of Education nor the teachers’ union responded, Carson took the battle directly to them. First, he and a group of followers took over the union’s Manhattan headquarters, spending a night on office couches and making free use of the telephones. Some weeks later, he tried the same tactic at the board’s central office at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. This time, the cops were there ahead of him, and—by Carson’s own admission—he and his group provoked a nasty brawl that landed one policeman in the hospital. (Patrolman John Clarke was struck on the head with a three-foot metal ashtray, then taunted with shouts of “I hope you die.”)
Also that summer, Carson invited Albert Shanker, head of the teachers’ union, to a “community” meeting in a Brooklyn school. Shanker was heckled and then prevented from leaving. When he appealed to Carson to call off the thugs at the door, Carson merely laughed at what he later described as “this great big honky union chief standing there, blotchy with apparent fright.” By September, Carson’s gang was illegally entering school buildings and accosting teachers in the halls, telling them, among other things, “The Germans did not do a good enough job with you Jews.”
On one of the worst days of the autumn, police tried to escort a group of union teachers to work. They were met on the school steps by Carson and some fifty of his men wearing police helmets and battle fatigues. After a tense standoff (Carson says there was violence), the teachers were allowed to enter the building, but not to teach. Shortly afterward they were told to report to an auditorium in another school. There, they found the walls lined with Carson and his followers, now carrying sticks and bandoliers of bullets. The teachers clustered in the middle of the room as Carson’s men began to curse at them. “Wait till we get the lights out,” the men shouted. “We’ll throw lye in your faces. You’ll be very visible.” The lights in the windowless hall were flicked on and off; teachers were pushed and shoved and told they would leave the room only “in pine boxes.”
This is the man that Charles Barron thinks is appropriate to have mentioned around today's youth? This is a man that Barron supports? This is who Barron says children should look up to when they see Carson's name on the park?
Read the full story for more details on Carson.
It's no wonder that Room Eight says that during Barron's appearance on Hannity and Whatever, Hannity took great delight to make it known that Barron was a Democrat.
Room Eight:
"Just this week on Fox, Sean Hannity took delight in displaying Barron in all his glory, while Barron's name flashed on the screen with a (D) next to it. Because Barron is currently little more than a local curiosity, the impact of such appearances is currently limited, in the same way that it was when klansman and former Louisiana legislator David Duke's name used to appear on television with an (R). But, Barron's election to Congress will convert him from a local curiosity to a national embarassment."
The strange thing is, when Barron attacks the incumbent Towns, he does so on policy, such as Towns voting for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) or his general failure to represent the people of the district by voting. And his assessment of the incumbent's performance is accurate.
From the Sun article:
"His time is up," Mr. Barron said during a walk through his district earlier this week. "He's simply been around too long and it's not because of his age, because Nelson Mandela ran a country at 80. If you decide to retire on the job, don't get mad at me because I want to see somebody come in here to fight."
Though if voters don't like the renaming of Linden Park, according to the Daily News:
"Too bad," he said. "They should vote for the other guy."
Room Eight puts it in a different light.
"I could go on for pages about ET's transgression, and promise I will find the time to do so in the near future. But, voting for Barron because you prefer his position on CAFTA or Atlantic Yards is like voting for Mussolini because you prefer his position on mass transit (you know, the thing about train schedules)."
Good idea. But where else can a voter turn? Why isn't there a candidate that seems worthy for the office? There is no viable Republican or third party candidate that can save the district from this plague. The situation is hopeless, even seven months before the election. New York's 10th will see yet another term of this plague and no end is in sight.
posted by Will at 1:21 AM
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