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Irreplaceable. That’s pretty much the length of commitment our music and lifestyle promotes. The mindset that people and relationships are disposable is the anti-thesis of marriage and commitment. Beyonce and Jay know that their public personae don’t match their private one, yet I, like Jozen Cummings at The Root.com, cannot forgive them for not being more conscious about their lyrics. They know the state of black America—they grew up with us—yet they still promote men as soldiers and providers, and the sexes as in complete competition, and opposition, with one another.

Of course, that Venus vs. Mars narrative cannot sustain a marriage, or any genuine relationship, including a solid friendship. Yet, friends and lovers, like a Louis or Fendi, are replaceable. It probably has not occurred to the hottest couple in music at all that they are empowered enough to not only shape their respective genres of music, but to move Black America—and therefore America—forward.

Jozen Cummings’s post on The Root.com was prompted by a recent study published by the Yale Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course, claiming that there were few marriageable men for black women, partially because black women were less likely than their racialized male counterparts to wed outside racial bounds. Still, anyone visiting a college canteen can see the ratio of black men to women. Luckily, patriarchal masculinity is not disrupted by this ratio, and in facts rewards men for “conquering all that pussy”, according to much commercial rap music, as well as big and small screens.

Moreover, “Women are penalized for waiting to get married, while men are rewarded for their patience,” exclaims Niambi Carter, PhD on NPR’s Tell Me More, who carried a conversation about the Yale study under the rubric “Black Women: Successful and Still Unmarried”. The study has caused waves.

Despite their riches, B. and Jay-Z are no more liberated, and therefore powerful, than they were as basic negroes on the grind. Jay-Z might feel that he has nothing genuine to offer; the dominant images of hip-hop—the materialism, violence, misogyny, and self-hatred—demonstrate that most have yet to decolonize their minds.

Jay-Z knows that he’s not irreplaceable. B. went from “Nasty, put some clothes on,” with her girls Kelly and Michelle, to a Sugar Mama swinging on a ho-pole, willing to pay a man for his services; “Damn, I wanna buy you a short set,” Beyonce says in her video and stage reproduction, sucking on a caner stick, laid out, out of breath. Neither seems to have comprehended their own potential impact. If their wealth were not so ephemeral, ethereal even, they wouldn’t need to brag about it. The same goes for stardom.

“It’s a lie,” says Madonna to fans during her Confessions concert tour, after singing a smashing, high-powered rendition of her hit “Jump”. “I can’t make it alone,” she repeats, sitting on stage, taking gulps from a bottle of water, contradicting the song’s refrain. Even above 50, the “Material Girl” is still the crowned queen of reinvention . Her album Ray of Light marks one of her most remarkable shifts. From then on, Madonna has remained fiercely critical of materialism, racism, homophobia, the perils of stardom, and especially hypocrisy in politics and morality.

Reincarnating her image has gained Madonna’s stardom the staying power of a Trojan—wood or rubber. If fame were not so short-lived and insubstantial, if fans and stars were not so caught up into reproducing stardom as an end in itself, then perhaps our popular culture would have more genuine artists—we would have more self-aware professional entertainers. Otherwise, pop stars just titillate—ass and tits, or pecs and six-packs—it’s all just diamonds and pearls to please the crowd.

The disconnect is that fans like us would like to believe that they actually are irreplaceable. And why should stars believe otherwise—we’re the same fans that turned our backs on Michael Jackson until it was too late. We treated him like he was replaceable until he was dead, and that’s far too late. Were rappers to value themselves rightly, fans would surely have a richer pool of positive, life-affirming images from which to chose and gain pleasure. Now, if we want a good beat, we simply settle for scraps and scrubs.

—Diepiriye Kuku

We should all just be plain ole Americans, right? And we could all just get along because we all have the same fair chances, right? Just consider how many men and women in service suffer in silence. In his interview given to YouthRadio.org, young veteran Joseph Christopher Rocha comes out about how during his Middle East war tour, he suffered everything from “being duct-taped and locked in a dog kennel to being forced to simulate oral sex with other men”. Reporting this targeted hazing—which then becomes a hate crime—means loosing one’s career. Ain’t that America.  Y’all love that shit, doncha!

Think of it this way: These are the stories gay kids get to read about at their breakfast table while they’re figuring out how not to tell mom, how not to piss off dad, and how to stay outta trouble in school with other kids—because the first thing kids will say (even in the presence of adults whose silence betrays them), should anything go wrong, is “fucking faggot” (or, my personal favorite: “Sugar in his pants”). Girls might have some latitude, but by kindergarten, kids have plenty of hateful words used specifically to hurt and abuse them, too!

The Navy and the pettiness of DADT in the all-American school

The terror queer kids face at school is still left comfortably inside the closet, and on this account, both mainstream gay advocacy groups as well as death worshipping zealots converge. Rather than extending Christian fellowship to these kids, many modern fundamentalists anchor their cause around rejecting gay marriage and hate crimes initiatives. They fall silent when asked where kids learn to hate so much. So, former president Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy was already alive and well in the all-American school.  It was already a learned behavior from childhood. All Americans know exactly what I am talking about, but nothing brings this closer to the heartland than hearing an adolescent say something like: “That’s so gay!”

What about the gay lobbying group the Human Rights Campaign? HRC is advocating for gay and lesbian military conscription. The HRC “is the battered wife of the Democratic Party establishment, and its time to walk out,” according to longtime outspoken activist Andrew Sullivan.

Not soliciting whores alongside his fellow seamen was enough to out Rocha, and the teasing, taunting, and humiliation ballooned from there. “It made me feel that I was an animal, and the fact that this was done to me by my highest leadership in the United States military and the American military—a representative of the US government—was daunting to me.” It was not hazing, intended to bring a new trooper into the fold. This was a plain hate crime, and we ought to call a spade a nasty bastard and not retire him and his flock, but, think of more critical ways to… naw, just discharge him on the exact same terms as they discharged Rocha!

—Diepiriye Kuku

Chocolate City Washington D.C. recently moved to recognize same-sex unions and marriages from any American state. “Heather has two mommies,” sounds ridiculous when chided from a Black Christian fundamentalist’s mouth. All the Black Heathers any of us know have two, maybe three mommies and several surrogate daddies. Collectivism is our way of life, distinct from clanism in Asian joint families, or even the guilds throughout Europe. Each culture is distinct and with unique merits. So, where have African-American Christians gone wrong? Why is it that Blacks have so often been co-opted into serving as the mouthpiece on the ‘rong side of modern day civil liberties and human rights?

“To be sanctified by a clergy person,” probes Dr. Dyson (who doubles as a clergyman), is the central issue around all civil unions. Moreover, no relationship can sustain itself by itself. Rather, relationships are sustained by concerted efforts; those that are communal are stronger.

Same-same but different, scream the proponents regarding the justice of legal and socio-religious consecration of same-gender unions. And evoking the extremities as Americans always do, we might ask, what of bestiality, pedophilia and polygamy? Or, why even collapse these few and add stigma?

—Diepiriye Kuku

I currently work at the night desk of a small-town newspaper. Various arguments regarding journalism these days center around the notion that small-town newspapers aren’t as affected by the many budget cuts, firings and all-around sea-change most bigger-marketed newspapers seemingly have to take on each day.

Many argue that, because of the small-town flare that can showcase in depth local coverage better than a bigger paper that is based far away from these particular small towns, the smaller-market newspapers have a better chance of surviving, or, at the very least, not having to shoulder the burden of job loss that most major dailys have been forced to deal with for what has turned into a long time.

Part of that snuggly, warm feeling small-town newspapers can give a reader has always been the comfort of one Pauline Phillips, or, these days, her daughter, Jeanne Phillips. Those two women have been responsible for writing the daily “Dear Abby” columns that have become an absolute staple in most every newspaper across the nation, and, in fact, nearly 1,500 papers worldwide.

That said, as part of cutbacks at the particular newspaper I work at, we have been told that in order to save money, we will publish our final “Dear Abby” column Friday, making way for a less-expensive, dumbed-down version of an advice column from a different outlet, set to be published in Saturday’s edition.

Wow.

“Do you know what this is going to do?” I asked my publisher when she broke the news a couple weeks ago. “People are going to go mad. This is the one thing almost everyone turns to when they pick up a newspaper. It’s been that way forever. You might not read the sports. You might not even read the council stories. But you always read Abby.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’d rather have to cut columns than people. And really, we have no choice.”

She’s right. I certainly can’t complain about having the ability to live another day in the world of newspapers while many other, much more talented journalists ponder what it is they are now going to try and do with their lives. But that doesn’t mean this news comes easy. Aside from the crossword puzzle, I can’t imagine anything else that has been as much of a staple in newspapers for such a long amount of time.

I mean, come on. Where else can you get tales about a 15-year-old girl who is afraid to ask her crush to the upcoming dance? Or about how awkward it was at dinner when a mother-in-law burped so loud, it awoke a sleeping cat? Or how about the times when those bastardly cheating husbands slip up and get caught by their wives, forcing the women to make that awful decision of weather or not to stick around for the kids?

It’s going to be sad to see Abby go. In fact, I, myself, may even turn to other newspapers simply to check in on whose life Ms. Phillips is saving now. As for the rest of our readers? Here’s hoping this move doesn’t drive too many of them away. Many of our customers tend to be older, so now that the comfort of that long-lasting advice column won’t be there, one has to think our phones will be flooded. And here’s hoping most other newspapers don’t have to resort to this. It’s a move that is bold, yet understandably necessary, and, with that said, a little bit unsettling as well.

Yes, it is better to cut columns than people, but now that changes such as this have worked their way into smaller markets, one has to wonder how much longer it will be before the columns run out.

—Colin McGuire

It can’t get no more personal than this. I am sitting here, listening to streaming radio, writing on my laptop, with full WIFI coverage. Crickets and croakers in the background—someone speeds by in their boat—the motor roars. It’s 1:30 AM, and one wonders why these boys are speeding by?

I look out at the house nearest by, and it’s my uncle over there with his wife. His mother lived here, grew up here; and we are all here because he had the courage, and foresight, to genuinely, stake out a place on his ancestors’ location. They were poor- and so are we, by many measures—but poverty was never part of the equation.

We were wealthy—wealth, of course, measured right! Wealth measured by cash and shown in ostentatiousness is vulgar. Why is Africa poor? Ask yourself.

—Diepiriye Kuku

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Investigative Reporting Conference: “It’s Over”

In “State of Play,” a recent movie set in the last-gasp world of newspaper journalism, Russell Crowe’s character is an investigative print reporter who joins forces with a young blogger to bring down a powerful senator and expose the evil intentions of a Haliburton-like company bent on world domination. It’s a great flick for celebrating old-fashioned shoe leather journalism.

But only briefly. The final image on screen is a sobering reminder of reality, i.e., printing presses stamping ink onto the front page of the paper while a mournful ballad fills the soundtrack. Message to old-fashioned shoe leather journalists everywhere: It’s over.

As it turns out, “State of Play” was a perfect set-up for the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference I attended in Baltimore earlier in the summer. Because even as industry leaders tried to be as optimistic as possible about the prospects for investigative journalism in a post-newspaper world, and even as they tried to extend a hand to Internet pioneers and talk up blogging, there was a palpable sense of doom.

The signs were everywhere. First of all, many of the presenters were wearing name tags that said “free lance” under where you were supposed to identify your news organization, which in most cases meant they had been laid off, some only the week before. During one session, I ran into an old friend with a highly successful political blog who said he expected his newspaper to terminate his contract shortly—as in, it could happen any day, which it did.

To its credit, IRE addressed employment anxiety at its conference by organizing a panel on free-lancing and setting up sessions such as “Doing great work in tough times.” The panel on “Alternative models for investigative reporting” was a slice of good news, a reminder that not-for-profit investigative journalism is increasingly finding a home on the Internet. Meanwhile, IRE also offered its usual sessions on court reporting, database searching and watchdog investigations to keep government accountable—all of which remain necessary endeavors in a democracy, to be sure.

It was hard to see so many worried faces and it probably didn’t help when former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr., himself the recipient of a buyout, bluntly told a packed auditorium that “It’s over,” meaning that the network and newspaper news monopoly had ended and that a new model has yet to emerge. He acknowledged that it was going to be tough times for traditional news reporters in their 40s and 50s. (It should be noted that Downie, unlike many displaced reporters, has a lifeboat available to him: academia.)

Downie was part of a two-man “Showcase panel” at IRE in which he shared the stage with Bob Woodward (portrayed in another great journalism movie, “All the President‘s Men”).
In their dialogue, the two commiserated over the torment of enduring lunch with the long-winded Al Gore. They promoted Woodward’s new book in the works, an examination of the Obama Administration—not exactly a departure from his old books on previous administrations. Downie got to throw some jabs at Internet maven Arianna Huffington and then managed to get himself elected to IRE’s Board of Directors during the course of the conference.

As always at professional conferences, some unfortunates drank the Kool-Aid: One starstruck man in the audience prefaced his question for Woodward by saying that it was “an honor to breathe the same air” as the journalism legend. (Hey, I show “All the Prez” to my journalism class and I respect the man’s body of work. But this was overkill.)

If, at IRE, Woodward-Downie’s message was “see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya” to the rank and file journalists in the crowd, it was refreshing to see other presenters offering more inspiring and empowering lessons. The panel I liked best was an all-female trio under the heading of “Invisible populations.”

It featured Mimi Chakarova, who combines photography and recorded interview on dark topics such as human trafficking in Eastern Europe and rape in post-invasion Iraq. (Memo to Downie and Woodward: while you guys were suffering through lunch with Gore, Chakarova was posing as a prostitute in Eastern Europe and had to run for her life before the pimps settled on a price and conscripted her into human slavery!) She said it took years to earn the trust of the women she interviewed and photographed, and that many don’t have an understanding of what being on the Internet means, which poses an ethical dilemma as she approaches them about sharing their stories and being identified in photographs. She said some human trafficking victims have offered to remove their shirts in photos to show the burn marks of cigarettes that were put out on their breasts by abusive johns. In a rare show of concern for subjects by a journalist, Chakarova declined to take them up on their offer, powerful as these photos would have been.

Two other women on the panel also showed the kind of passionate commitment that makes the best journalism so fresh and exciting. Karyn Spencer, of the Omaha World-Herald, investigated the state of Nebraska’s irregularities in medical examinations. It seems that autopsies in Nebraska are routinely performed by county attorneys with no medical training and they often take their best guesses at cause of death—not a bad deal if you plan to murder someone. The other panelist, Ruth Teichroeb, who worked at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer until it closed in March, talked about the importance of reporters giving vulnerable people control over when and where the interview takes place, and how they want to be quoted.

Teichroeb and her fellow panelists represent a newer school of journalism in which reporters think about the effect of their work on the lives of the subjects they write about. But as IRE proved, it wasn’t time to write off old-school journalists yet.

In a lively panel discussion with Sy Hersh and James Bamford, prize-winning journalistic veterans who both write about national security, the outlook was a bit more uptempo than among some of the other old-timers. Bamford said he loved alternative media, citing Alternet in particular, and Hersh disparaged editors (“We could probably lop off 70% of editors and be better off”) and pretended to scoff at the notion of reading up on a topic before writing about it. He even mocked the New York Times for raising its rates while offering “an inferior product.”

Not surprisingly, Jill Abramson, managing editor of the Times, projected a far more sanguine outlook on the ‘grey lady’ during another IRE panel discussion. She told the audience she was “bullish” on her paper’s future, citing its still-large newsroom, successful website and undiluted commitment to news.  While I am a great fan of her newspaper/website, I didn’t quite believe her words of cheer. I hope I’m wrong on that one.

—Amy DePaul