The Hip Hop Anthropologist

With the dearth of Black newsmagazines that flourished in the '70s, there are virtually none left standing. And the Black new space has become a hellscape with the current cast of characters tantamount to allowing the inmates to run the asylum. I grew up watching Tony Brown, John Johnson, Melba Tolliver, Gil Noble, and Bill McCreary; listening to Wayne Gillman and Gary Byrd on Black-owned radio; reading Sepia, Jet, and Ebony magazines, which were a mainstay on the cocktail tables of every Black household. I was filled with pride to see well-groomed, well-read, and well-prepared hosts, reporters, and producers deliver content in solemn, measured tones devoid of amateurishness that characterizes two particularly reprehensible hosts, which spanned the Black experience. Those days are long gone. Now we are left with a seventy-year-old guy who looks like a babble head that crucifies the English language day in and day out unscripted on a syndicated radio show that he allows his "fr...

In 2000 Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the Late NYC Mayor Ed Koch famously announced a “second chance program” for non-violent, drug-offenders. Hugh Price then of the National Urban League, the NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume, and many other prominent civil rights and criminal justice advocacy programs, touted the initiative as a sane response to the “lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key” approach that had driven criminal justice policy with varying degrees of severity in this country; virtually since the inception of the United States prison system in 1796 on “the Hudson River’s east bank on Manhattan Island’s western shoreline, in Greenwich Village, a mile and a half north of City Hall.” Little has been said or done by Sharpton or Ogletree in the 16 years since to address the collateral consequences of criminal history records . Requests to Sharpton's Washington [National Action Network] office has not responded to requests for an interview. The “second chan...