The Hip Hop Anthropologist

 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sean-combs-prison-sentence-personal-letter-1235439918/ How much time is Sean Combs going to be sentenced to? No less than five years, but probably eight. No one in the history of the U.S. has gotten more time for being so stupid. He wanted to play a thug in real life, threatening rivals, intimidating competitors, assaulting enemies, and beating up girls. He had every opportunity to straighten up and fly right. But from his time with Jennifer Lopez shooting up a club—that one of his flunkies took the fall for—this mfer has been a nightmare. I mean the sheer, unmitigated hubris to think that nobody is watching a wealthy, high-profile cat like this, f***ing boys and girls, wrecking shop and careers, and then expect to get away with that sh** by turning himself in. He had to suspect those white folks were going to dig in that ass. If he didn't, he's stupider than I thought. Bottom line is, if he had any sense, that mfer should have tak...

 Obviously, nothing is disqualifying any longer if mediocre why tees with marginal experiences in the departments they were imprudently nominated to run (into the ground) are allowed to skirt FBI national security background checks (an exhaustive process that normally takes upwards of six months) in chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka klueless the klown's zeal wreak havoc on the administrative state: a vast, sprawling, and complex federal bureaucracy, poised to hinder his wacky schemes. Instead of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy, we must insist on criminal justice reform as it relates to criminal history reporting requirements. If undereducated Black men who have been trying to turn around their lives after a criminal conviction for a non-violent crime in their distant past cannot pass a criminal background (forget about a national security) check for an entry-level job paying roughly $50k/annum, activists need to affirmatively be demanding criminal background check r...

...this is an outrageous miscarriage of justice ... ...and if the system  worked for blacks equally, the Judge would have immediately set aside the verdict in the interest of justice... you simply cannot condemn a  promising young man with absolutely no previous criminal involvement to  prison for 12-years; and, brand him with a lifetime sexual predator label when he's only 20-years old! And only had a consensual, (if ill-advised) make-out session with a 17-year-old, which is the age of consent in virtually every state of the union. That white jury didn't see him as anything other than an archetypal, hypersexual beast defiling a virtuous, little, young, corn-fed, alabaster beauty. Beauty and the beast. The King  Kong metaphor played out in a cramped courtroom surrounded by flat plains filled with endless cornfields in the heart[less]land of  America... Welcome to Kansas... After all, it was the scene of the infamous Scopes "Monkey" trial back in the day. Forget...

A cultural shift has begun in this country with respect to criminal justice policy generally and policing particularly as Ferguson Police Department has become the latest poster child in a long awaited campaign to out rogue law enforcement agencies for unfair extra-judicial processes and procedures that have had catastrophic consequences for those persons of color unfortunate enough to get caught up in “the system.” Unwarranted [pun intended] police contact is a dark portal through which many unwary, law abiding Blacks enter into a hostile, racist and patently unfair criminal justice system. To those brothas and, to a lesser degree, sistas suffering the indignity of false arrest is not the end but very often beginning of an insult that always has unforeseen collateral consequences. Those overcharged for minor often non-criminal offenses, like misdemeanor traffic infractions, possession of small amounts of marijuana, or other “quality of life” violations, these “criminal justice” ...

                                                                            Us Black Folks                                                                         By Dennis Shipman    Unlike any other ethnic group or, more accurately, sub-group in the United States, upwardly mobile Black folks have been all too willing to sacrifice cultural affinity on the self-serving altar of rugged individualism than any other group on earth. Individualism is a concept that does not exist among any indigenous group found in Africa. Social scientists often argue, only to be cast as apologists for tribalism, that this phenomenon ...