We deserve to feel, think and do as we please, respectfully, without being apologetic or submissive to anyone. If we put less effort into forcing ourselves into a tiny box of belief, we may find energy to find our own love so that we can appreciate the peace it brings to ourselves and everyone around us!
Long live ALL of the Kings and Queens struggling to find their royalty in this world. May your self-worth guide you into your eternal happiness!
-Bristol Mayo
Op-Ed Exclusive to Our Time Press
By Bristol Mayo
Black America is having a very difficult time producing a unified sentiment to express for the Royal Wedding. Arguments are compelling from all sides, making it difficult to commit to one feeling or another. Are we excited that a Black woman has joined the ranks of the Royals? Do we ignore the murderous history of the slave trade that was largely led by the English? Is the Duchess of Sussex worthy of the title “Black Woman,” or has she forfeited the right to boast about half her heritage due to her affinity for white men? What has she done for Black people? What will she do for Black people? What CAN she do for Black people? Does she owe us anything at all? Facebook is abuzz with the heated debate that has no resolution in sight! What say ye, Black people?!
It may come as a shock to the congregation of Blackness that all of our opinions are equally valid, and do not need to be forced into an umbrella of Group Think. I, for one, sat with my wife and ogled over every moment of the ceremony. We prepared by studying the history of the monarchy and the traditions of the wedding ceremony, where the Duke and Duchess’s children will fall into the line of succession, their dating history and any philanthropic platforms they may share in their celebrity.
And now that the event has passed, what cannot be denied is the Black American culture that permeated the entire ceremony, the thousand-year English traditions that bent the knee to the Duchess Meghan’s demands and the stunning display of love from the bride and groom throughout the courtship!
You see, I come from a family and church life that adores pomp and circumstance. This was a pinnacle event for people who appreciate such things and value the history involved. This is my story and reasoning for wanting to bear witness. I am not right or wrong, have pledged no allegiance to Crown and Country, nor have I renounced allegiance to my Blackness. I enjoyed seeing a Black woman happy, assuming a seat amongst the royalty that once captured and enslaved her ancestors. Not out of some great need to make amends or prove that they don’t hate Blacks, but out of the pure love for one another, history and traditions be damned.
Do I have questions for those that are staunchly against the marriage or its importance? Yes. But I know that their opinions stem from a life of experience and education all their own. We may struggle back and forth for understanding, but we do not have to agree on finite details. The myth of a single Black opinion is not completely our fault, but in instances such as this, we put too much effort into trying to convert Black belief into a single breath. This does a disservice to the African Diaspora from which we all descend.
We deserve to feel, think and do as we please, respectfully, without being apologetic or submissive to anyone. If we put less effort into forcing ourselves into a tiny box of belief, we may find energy to find our own love so that we can appreciate the peace it brings to ourselves and everyone around us!
Long live ALL of the Kings and Queens struggling to find their royalty in this world. May your self-worth guide you into your eternal happiness!
BlackTech Weekend Presented by Etsy, supported by Barclays – Brooklyn and Manhattan locations
6PM Thurs – 7PM Sat, May 19thStarting at $15
BlackTech Weekend is coming to NYC to connect with Black innovators, entrepreneurs and investors in tech, media and more! Among the presentations are: “The New Way In: Hybrid Roles at Tech Companies;” Building Your Career at Etsy;” “Sun, Sea and Innovation: the Caribbean Diaspora in Tech.” and many more. The weekend’s A- presenters from across the nation and offer networking opportunities and Etsy aims to hire 35 attendees.
Nerdy Thursdays
Design Night – Weeksville Heritage Center 5 -11PM
158 Buffalo Ave. Sugg donation $10
A “Preserving Black Spaces” panel will challenge perspectives (architectural, community engagement, education, design) on preserving Black spaces – from historic and institutional, to ephemeral, to social. The evening opens with mingling, then the discussion, an Amahle Society Screening of the film, Quilombo, and a Walking Tour hosted by NYCxDESIGN Edition
Friday, May 18th
Dancewave Showcase Kumble Theater at LIU Brooklyn
The 18th – Sun, May 20th /matinee & evening
1 University Plaza, Flatbush Ave. nr Willoughby St. BK
Tickets start at $10 & $15
Dancewave celebrates the young artists in its Company Program with special guests and School Program dancers. Featuring works by Camille A. Brown, Mike Esperanza, Jamal Jackson and Urban Bush Women.
Pilgrimage to the Grave of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz – 125th St & ACP Blvd. Manh 9:30AM
Free transportation
The Organization of African-American Unity, under the leadership of Professor James Small and the Sons of Africa invite the community to join their 53rd Annual Pilgrimage to the gravesite of our ancestor in celebration of his 93rd birthday. Ferncliff Cemetery in Ardsley, N.Y
Happy Birthday Malcolm & Lorraine! – Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 6:30-9:30 PM, 515 Malcolm X Blvd. at 135th St. Manh $10 Adm
The Schomburg Center celebrates the 18th Annual Commemoration of the Birthday of Malcolm X. This year, partnering with Changing Perceptions Theater, a new generation of Black playwrights interpreting portions of speeches, interviews and letters by the two celebrate their birthdays.
RestorationArt Community Day – Living Your Best Life / Pre-Opening of BAM’s Dance Africa
Restoration Plaza 10AM – 3PM
1368 Fulton St. Free/Open to Public
Youth Troupe Кestoration Arts
This year’s theme is “Living Your Best Life,” with artisans, healthy-living vendors, dance classes, music, yoga and performances by RestoratonART’s Youth Arts Academy. The DanceAfrica Council of Elders will pay homage to the ancestors with a procession. All are welcomed to participate.
718-636-6900 RestorationArt.org
The ME in WE First Annual Youth Fair – P.S. 316 10AM – 2PM
750 Classon Ave. Free/Open to Public
The Youth Education Committee of Community Board 8 presents a program dedicated to informing and supporting young people. Topics covered will include: 10 Things EVERY Youth Should Know; Financial Literacy; Job/Career Readiness; Civic Education and Culinary Arts;
It’s My Park Day – Lookout Hill, Prospect Park 10AM -1PM Free/Open to Public
Join Prospect Park Alliance and REI to care for your Park! Volunteer during It’s My Park Day, and participate in a citywide effort to care for our green spaces. Here at Prospect Park we’ll focus our efforts on Lookout Hill with some cleaning, path maintenance and woodland restoration.
2018 Women of Weeksville Luncheon – Weeksville Heritage Center 12:30 PM, 158 Buffalo Ave, Adm free
Thanks to the generous support of our sponsor Federal Home Loan Bank, we’re pleased to invite you to join us for this free luncheon celebration and consider a donation to sustain Weeksville Heritage. This year’s honorees are: Representative Yvette Clarke, (The Dr. Joan Maynard Award); Brooklyn philanthropic collective ALLINBKLYN (The Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward Award) and Kimberly Drew, arts activist and social media manager at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(The Maritcha Rémond Lyons Award).
Sunday, May 20th
Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke Invites You to an Endorsement Rally – Brooklyn Museum 2PM 200 Eastern Parkway
Admission Free http://bit.ly/endorsementrally2018
Celebrating Sonny Abubadika Carson – Community Room 1-9PM
305 Decatur St. at Stuyvesant Adm Free
The Sonny Abubadika Carson Tenant’s Association celebrates the birthday of its founder and leader w/ rotating screenings, starting at 1pm, of The Education of Sonny Carson and The Returning of the Bones. Included is a statement from Sundiata Acoli, free food at 3pm, and free cake and ice cream all day.
Monday, May 21st
Learning Through Art – Solomon r. Guggenheim Museum 10AM-5PM
1071 Fifth Ave. Manh Free w gen. adm: Adults $25 Kids 3-12 free
A Year with Children 2018, now in its 47th year, showcases select art by Grades 2-6, through six from 11 public schools. who participated in LTA during the 2017–18 school year. More than 100 imaginative collages, drawings, found objects, installations, paintings, sculpture, and prints.
Premiere of The Great American Read – An 8-Week PBS Series, Tuesdays at 8PM
Femi Kut
The Great American Read, an eight-part series celebrates the power of reading, through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels (chosen in a national survey). It investigates how and why writers create their fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected. The series features entertaining documentary segments and host Meredith Vieira conducts compelling interviews. Local publisher African Voices magazine publisher Carolyn Butts will discuss a novel in one episode.
Wednesday, May 23rd
Free Legal Resource Workshop – Employees and Job Applicants: Know Your Rights, Legal Hand 6PM 250 Kingston Ave. BK Free/Open to All
This week’s workshop will cover: minimum wage, salary history, tips, getting paid in cash, immigration status, criminal records and working overtime. RSVP at 718-619-4248 http://www.legalhand.org/
MARK YOUR CALENDARS
FREE SUMMER CONCERTS
40th Celebrate Brooklyn Fest 6/7-8/11 Prospect Park West at 9th St.
One of the city’s best free concert series returns! This season opens with Common and rolls out with Robert Glasper, Toshi Reagon, Branford Marsalis, Ruthie Foster, Tarrus Riley, Gary Clark, Jr., and more.
BAM R&B Festival at MetroTech 6/7-8/9 MetroTech Commons
Jay, Myrtle & Flatbush, Thursdays at noon
This 20 year-old lunchtime series has lots of loyal fans. This year’s lineup includes Bernard Purdie, Vivian Green, Terri Lynne Carrington, Savion Glover, Terence Blanchard, PJ Morton, Marcus Miller and more.
Presenting over 100 shows in 18 parks across the five boroughs, Summerstage is the largest concert series. Femi Kuti, Gregory Porter, Rhiannon Giddens, Big Daddy Kane, Kool & the Gang, Melba Moore, Raheem Devaughn, Jazzmeia Horn, Oshun, Talib Kweli, Melanie Fiona, Third World, Barringotn Levy & more.
Featuring music, dance, theater and great programming for kids. This year: Raphael Sasdiq, RZA, The Dance Theater of Harlem, DJ Rekha, Sun Ra Arkestra, Bobby Sanabria’s “West Side Story Reimagined,” and more.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, addressing the graduating class of Campbell University School of Law in Raleigh, NC (see excerpts on page 8,) spoke about consequential decisions versus random events that occur in life. Mr. Rosenstein rightly says, “You cannot control random events,” as though the arise from the purity of chaos. That is not the case and randomness differs depending on the world you inhabit.
Random events are different for Black people. In our universe, the dice are loaded, the field tilted, and the historic, inherent and unseen random acts of racism by White people makes the air too thick to breathe. Once, while working for a major financial corporation, I found a binder of resumes of Black business school graduates at Columbia University. It was in the garbage. All of those hopes tossed because they were of no matter. Little things like that. Every day events that are called “random” but when exponentially multiplied and added to the systemic racism of institutions, well, that’s why the air gets thick and there is wonderment by all, that Black people can’t seem to get it together.
Enter the smartphone and viral videos, delivering pixels of random acts that fill in their spots, along with criminal justice statistics, mortality rates, health disparities, wealth disparities, education, lack of a two-parent home, the low rate of income, put them all together and the tip of the iceberg of racism confronted by Black people across the country begins to appear.
And yet we survive and will thrive, because it is in our nature. Rosenstein is right again when he says there is no point in wasting time harping on random events. Our history has brought us here and we must live in this moment, fighting the battles we have been called to fight. We don’t get to pick them, they are the random assignments of Time.
In honor of el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz aka Malcolm X’s birthday on May 19, 1925, below are excerpts from one of his more famous speeches, The Ballot or the Bullet. He was, as actor Ossie Davis said in his eulogy “Our Shining Black Prince.”
By Malcolm X
April 3, 1964
Cleveland, Ohio
Although I’m still a Muslim, I’m not here tonight to discuss my religion. I’m not here to try and change your religion. I’m not here to argue or discuss anything that we differ about, because it’s time for us to submerge our differences and realize that it is best for us to first see that we have the same problem, a common problem, a problem that will make you catch hell whether you’re a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a Muslim, or a nationalist. Whether you’re educated or illiterate, whether you live on the boulevard or in the alley, you’re going to catch hell just like I am. We’re all in the same boat and we all are going to catch the same hell from the same man. He just happens to be a white man. All of us have suffered here, in this country, political oppression at the hands of the white man, economic exploitation at the hands of the white man, and social degradation at the hands of the white man.
Now in speaking like this, it doesn’t mean that we’re anti-white, but it does mean we’re anti-exploitation, we’re anti-degradation, we’re anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn’t want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us. Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man. If the late President Kennedy could get together with Khrushchev and exchange some wheat, we certainly have more in common with each other than Kennedy and Khrushchev had with each other.
If we don’t do something real soon, I think you’ll have to agree that we’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It’s one or the other in 1964. It isn’t that time is running out — time has run out!
I’m not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I’m not a student of much of anything. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican, and I don’t even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there’d be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they’re already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren’t Americans yet.
Well, I am one who doesn’t believe in deluding myself. I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn’t need any legislation; you wouldn’t need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn’t be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don’t have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.
No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver — no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.
…
So, what I’m trying to impress upon you, in essence, is this: You and I in America are faced not with a segregationist conspiracy, we’re faced with a government conspiracy. Everyone who’s filibustering is a senator — that’s the government. Everyone who’s finagling in Washington, D.C., is a congressman — that’s the government. You don’t have anybody putting blocks in your path but people who are a part of the government. The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don’t need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro.
“The grandchild of stop-and-frisk is marijuana arrests based on race”, said the Rev. Al Sharpton at a City Council hearing on Monday, May 14th. Many gathered were in agreement, including Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who will collaborate with Sharpton on remedies for the inequities in marijuana sentencing in New York City.
“We have to make sure that those communities that have been harmed and devastated by marijuana arrests get the first shot at this industry. We prioritize them in terms of licenses. It’s a form of reparations.” Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon
At the attending press conference, Sharpton and Johnson advocated for summonses over arrests for low-level possession, though making the point that racial disparities in policing would have to be curtailed as well.
“The numbers don’t make any sense,” Johnson said. “They don’t match, you go precinct by precinct, call by call, and the numbers don’t add up. It made me angry to see that.”
Mayor de Blasio, though reluctant to commit to real reform until recently, is changing his tune rather than be drowned-out by the choir. “We must, and we will end unnecessary arrests and end disparity in enforcement,” de Blasio said. “It is time for those to be a thing of the past in New York City and all over this country.” The mayor says that although there were 100,000 fewer marijuana arrests than three years ago, the city can unquestionably do better. His new stance is of interest to The Drug Policy Alliance, which was on the receiving end of his derision last year. He disputed their report on the number of marijuana arrests, calling it ‘misleading,” only to be later confronted with roughly the same numbers. The Alliance has long advocated for attention to be paid to the racial disparities in marijuana arrests. The Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus praised the show of solidarity by Johnson and Sharpton with communities of color who first sounded the alarm about the disparities.
“The work of the Council in highlighting the department is innate prejudice towards Blacks and Latinos was instrumental in prompting the subsequent policy overhaul announcement by the administration,” the caucus said in a statement.
Police Commissioner James OiNeill says the NYPD will get on board, announcing a 30-day working group review of marijuana enforcement. A diverse cross section of NYPD executive leadership will purportedly review procedures the NYPD follows. The group will also seek expert opinions outside of the force, advocacy organizations, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, nonprofit organizations and attorneys.
Black and brown people were nearly 10 times as likely to be arrested for possession in 2017, comprising 86% of arrests, according to the NYPD’s own data. National data has been reported to show that there is equal marijuana use among the races. O’Neill chose a dose of denial saying, “The NYPD does not target people based on race or other demographics. Among the reasons for enforcement are officer observations and community complaints received from 911 and 311 calls.” But according to the New York Times, the Daily News and POLITICO, the majority of marijuana arrests don’t happen where the largest number of 911 and 311 complaints are made.
And there is wider movement on the marijuana legalization front. Governor Cuomo announced a study to look into the issue and City Comptroller Scott Stringer recently released an estimation of a potential $3.1 billion adult-use marijuana market for New York State, including a $1.1 billion New York City market. He also said that the city could realize $336 million in tax revenue from legalizing adult-use marijuana on top of $436 million for the state.
Gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon also supports legalizing marijuana and has gone a step ñ a big step ñ further in asserting that the marijuana industry in New York should be under the control of Black people. She made her case to a crowd gathered in Union Square for the NYC Cannabis Parade on May 5th.
“Now that cannabis is exploding as an industry,” said Nixon, “we have to make sure that those communities that have been harmed and devastated by marijuana arrests get the first shot at this industry. We prioritize them in terms of licenses. It’s a form of reparations.” In April, Nixon had announced marijuana legalization as her first policy commitment, a position with which 62 percent of New Yorkers agree. At that time, she’d said, “Arresting people particularly people of color for cannabis is the crown jewel in the racist war on drugs and we must pluck it down,” she said. “We must expunge people’s records; we must get people out of prison. The use of marijuana has been effectively legal for white people for a really long time,” says Nixon.
Oakland, California’s history-making equity program gives first dibs on marijuana business licenses to people who had been convicted of possession. And a statewide equity program in Massachusetts also helps these entrepreneurs to raise money for their start-ups. Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey is also taking a serious look at the issue.
