The Hip Hop Anthropologist

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 ...