The Hip Hop Anthropologist

   The massive scandal brewing just across the border with embattled Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane fending off a career ending attack - that could land her in the pokey - by powerful government interests should be a wakeup call. It should serve notice on the arrogant, corrupt, entrenched bureaucrats, appointed and elected officials in Delaware who believe they are above the law.     With these inept, recycled legal hacks in key policy making roles Delaware has become little more than an open sewer, a cesspool of corruption, where disinterested individuals passing through - on their way to actual cities like DC or Philly - stop only long enough in Wilmington (its largest city and seat of business) to take a stinking, steaming shit or release a hot load right into the willing orifice of some eager young girl... or boy. (Delaware is third in the nation for reportable sexually transmitted diseases in young people 15-24 years of age.) Mos...

  A startling new economic study out of Princeton University found that working class whites without high school diplomas between the ages 45 to 54 were experiencing significantly higher than normal morbidity and mortality rates. The study compared working class whites living primarily in Appalachia, the Mid-West and the Deep South to similar working class whites throughout the industrialized English speaking world.    The correlations to “similarly situated” blacks these same poor whites loved to defame for unmerited “victimhood,” “race baiting,” “playing the race card,” and “dependency” are equally startling. Co-factors such as low, under or unemployment, high poverty, stress, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, drug and alcohol abuse abound within these populations. Sound familiar? It should.     Blacks have been enduring these same pathologies since Reconstruction: dying young, and then being blamed unfairly for deep-rooted socio-economic conditio...

   Public corruption poses a fundamental threat to our national security and way of life. “In the United States, an inspector general leads an organization charged with examining the actions of a government agency, military organization, or military contractor as a general auditor of their operations to ensure they are operating in compliance with generally established policies of the government, to audit the effectiveness of security procedures, or to discover the possibility of misconduct, waste, fraud, theft, or certain types of criminal activity by individuals or groups related to the agency's operation, usually involving some misuse of the organization's funds or credit. In the United States, there are numerous offices of inspector general at the federal, state, and local levels.”    A major reason for the rampant corruption evident at all levels of government in Delaware is that there is no provision under its Constitution for an independent Office of In...

   Your name means “a child who has been desired for a long time” in Àwọn ọmọ Yorùbá – the language of the Yoruba people in Africa. This is what you mean to me; you are my air and heir, baby boy. A long awaited son.    You are also a sweet child with a mischievous smile, generous nature, loving spirit, adventurous soul and inquisitive mind unlike those vipers who have rudely intruded on our dreams, hopes and aspirations. You are a handsome likeness of myself; a boy that I love, covet and miss immeasurably with each passing day, week, month and year.    Every waking moment you break through my reverie painfully reminding me that I am being hindered; stymied in a primordial quest to protect, nurture and guide you into manhood like most fathers want to do for their children free of ' isms ' that substitute a bigoted white man's paternal presumptions (ill-equipped intellectually, ill-suited temperamentally and ill-placed by virtue of his profession to ...

There is not one big Black nigger alive who has confronted law enforcement and lived to talk about it. Wait a minute now. There once lived an unlikely folk hero named   Larry Davis   from the boogie down Bronx who not only confronted but shot six White cops on a frigid Nov. 19, 1986 evening. Davis was out of control, and also out of his mind. But to us, he was a   bona fide   “revolutionary”-in-training. We do not often get to pick our heroes most of whom are deeply flawed, complex and, often, conflicted characters that nonetheless manage by a quirk of fate to become an agent of change, catalyst for revolution, at an exact moment in time. Like El Hajj Malik El Shabazz better known as Malcolm X, Davis who changed his name to Adam Abdul-Hakeem in 1989, was a gun toting, drug dealing, high school dropout. By all objective accounts, Davis’ drug trade was supplied by crooked cops who stole, beat, shot and set up other dealers. There is no honor among thieves, tho...

The debate swirling about income inequality reflects a tension drawn on simplistic conclusions from discredited conservative talking points, which upon deeper reflection are little more than cheap potshots against the “welfare state.” This flock of canards detracts us away from obvious truths. The Republicans and Democrats are flip sides of the same coin. And the body politic is rife with unbridled corruption by both. A more important issue that is sadly missed in flawed analyses by both liberals and conservatives is a race and class divide that pits poor and working class Whites against working and middle class Blacks, who should be natural allies. They have more in common than not. Case in point, Scott Walker in Wisconsin was allowed free reign to engage in union busting activities by unilaterally eliminating collective bargaining for public sector workers. Instead of working class Whites joining in the campaign to oust Scott, they cynically voted against their own be...

We submitted a job creation proposal to the City of Baltimore Deputy Mayor for Economic Development on November 19, 2014 (and a few times thereafter). After numerous false starts, the current Rawling’s administration chief of staff finally directed the Deputy Mayor to respond to our proposal. A relatively low level assistant from his office contacted us shortly thereafter asking a series of predictable questions relative to what other organizations we had approached for assistance in Baltimore city. We declined to answer specifically for obvious reasons but told her generally ‘all the economic development corporations’ encompassing Baltimore. In our experience progressive, fiscally responsible, well managed municipalities practically always entertain and, often, materially assist public-private partnerships that may (but not necessarily) lead to employment opportunities for its residents. Both the low level functionary as well as the Deputy Mayor stridently insisted on demanding ...