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Cardi B is “Making Money Moves” … With Gen-Xers & Millennials

Lisa Durden
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Cardi B is “Making Money Moves” … With Gen-Xers & Millennials

Born Belcalis Almanzar on October 11, 1992 in the Bronx, New York, Cardi B grew up a wild child. Although she looked like a nun in high school, she was far from it.

At the age of 16, she was a member of the Bloods street gang and going nowhere real fast.

When she was 19, Cardi B worked for two seconds at a local Manhattan supermarket before getting fired, then landed on a stripper pole as an exotic dancer in a hood club, in hopes of making enough money to escape poverty and her abusive relationship.

Although stripping is a perfectly legitimate, legal profession, it’s not perceived by most as a successful career move. Don’t judge! Everybody counted Cardi B out until she went viral as an #Instagram influencer, reaching over 17 million followers with her larger-than-life personality, unapologetic foul mouth, sharing a healthy dose of her X-rated sexual exploits, dropping F-bombs and throwing shade at the haters. The girl had zero filter. She didn’t just #SpillTheTea, she spilled that strong Lipton Tea with sour lemon. Now, Cardi B is “making money moves” with Gen-Xers and Millennials. #ClapForThat!

Let me break it down for you. Generation-Xers were raised to believe if you go to college, it was your way out of the ghetto. That sounded cute in theory, but we found out it was a big fat lie. The fact of the matter is, many of us graduated from college and landed right on the unemployment line or in a “go nowhere job,” which is why there was an exodus of Gen-Xers who left Corporate America in our thirties to start our own businesses in search of empowerment. However, the Millennials didn’t buy into the #WACK notion that the only road to success is through obtaining a degree and getting a 9 to 5 J.O.B. They see their ideas and skillsets as intellectual property with a high price tag attached.

This common denominator is why we all love Cardi B like a fresh fruit salad. She gives us life because she is the poster child for making it out of the ghetto on her own terms. She was uneducated! She was the underdog! She was dismissed! She was broke! But as my mother would say, “She ain’t beg nobody for a piece of bread”. Almost overnight, Cardi B became an Internet celebrity and made big “schmoney” by brilliantly sharing her arrogance and confidence on social media. Hilarious lines like, “People be talking like strippers don’t be working hard and sh@t, like that’s some easy job, but you b@tches can’t walk a whole entire block with heals on and we be f@cking doing splits and somersaults for hours in them shits….HOURS”, are classic Cardi B.

Cardi B’s days of dancing in high school talent shows served her well as a stripper because she wasn’t just an exotic dancer, she was an entertainer. She was known as a “garbage bag girl”; she made so much money stripping it had to go in a garbage bag because it wouldn’t fit in a dance bag.

Cardi B, all grown up

However, stripping was a means to an end, so she fixed her teeth, did a little nip and tuck and made some radical moves toward her rap career. Cardi B didn’t just dream, she took initiative! People try to trash Cardi because she doesn’t speak the king’s English, but you have to give her her props, she set a whole lot of folks all the way straight when she tore up social media with her popular kitschy content; amassing $4.5 million in media value.

As they say, “Build it and they will come”. In 2015, Mona Scott-Young, the creator of VH-1’s “Love & Hip-Hop: New York”, said ka-ching when she learned of Cardi B’s viral Vine, over 17 million #Instagram followers and over 2 million #Twitter followers, so she sought her out and signed her on as a regular cast member of the popular show.

Of course, Cardi B killed it!! She became a huge reality TV star and the first female rapper to top the U.S. Billboard chart since Lauryn Hill in 1998 with her single “Bodak Yellow”. Cardi B is making money moves by signing a major recording deal with Atlantic Records, launching her Steve Madden shoe collection and her upcoming 2018 tour dates, including, as recently announced, hitting the road with Bruno Mars for his Grammy-sweeping “24K Magic”.

Generation-Xers and Millennials are feeling Cardi B because she’s real! Her truth is her brand! My favorite “Bodak Yellow” lyrics are, “I ain’t got no time to chill. Dropped two mixtapes in six months what b@tch working as hard as me. I’m a boss you a worker b___.”

In other words, don’t come for her unless you are grindin.’

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Lisa Durden, TV personality and subject matter expert in the areas of pop culture, politics and social issues, who’s an “A-Plus Panel” Contributor at My9’s “Chasing News”. She also makes appearances on Dr. Oz, Pix11 Morning News, CT Style & Fox News Channel. Lisa’s voice is her activism!

Twitter: @lisardurden

View From Here: Black History, American History

David Mark Greaves
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View From Here: Black History, American History

February is Black History Month, but when should Black history begin? Certainly, not during the Civil Rights Movement or Reconstruction, or slavery or our arrival on these shores. Black history begins, as all human history does, in Africa. Perhaps in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania or in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia three-and-a-half million years ago. And over that time, these hominids came into humanhood along the Nile and in North Africa and then onto to what is now Europe, Asia and throughout the world.

In northeastern Africa around 5000 B.C., agricultural communities were born while others were still nomads populating the earth. The French historian Count Volney, writing in “The Ruins”, his work on ancient African empires, spoke of them this way: “They’re a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men, now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.”

These empires of Ethiopia, Egypt, Mali, Ghana lasted for hundreds of years before they fell. The United States of America has been a republic for 242 years and an empire for only 50 of that. This is so blindingly fast in historical time, that it cannot be measured in the proverbial blink of an eye, and its dissolution is at risk to be faster than that.

The nation is being led by a disturbed individual with a bad history and bad intentions. He is being aided and abetted by a Republican Congress that has no need for what is taught in every high school in the country, that ours is a system of “checks and balances” with equal branches of government. However, with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan receiving $500,000 from the Koch Brothers in campaign donations right after the tax bill passed, and other “legislators” receiving their cut of the tens of millions doled out in what are called campaign contributions, the nation is at risk of becoming, not “the shining city on the hill”, but a dark and dangerous place marked by fear, pain and early death. A place like that inhabited by Africans on this continent from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the present day.

Black history is American history, and white people would be wise to be mindful of the lesson we’ve learned, that the everyday perpetrators of evil will not stop on their own accord, we’ve seen this before, the Indigenous People have seen this before, and we’ve seen that they know no limits.

What is happening to the country is not something that will get better on its own. Watching his people being called in for questioning by the special counsel who already knows the answers, Trump hears the hounds of fate scratching at his door, and he will do whatever it takes to stop them. That is when the people have to rise up like they did in 1917, when African-Americans, dressed in their Sunday best marching ten thousand strong against lynching, race riots and white terrorism in general in the “Silent Protest Parade”, where only the sounds of footsteps and muffled drums were heard on New York’s 5th Avenue.

White Americans should again take note that there has been a century of Black marches and protests since then, and this is as far as it’s brought us. And I don’t think there is the luxury of a century to save the nation, more like ten minutes, relatively speaking.

Take it from a people who in the past have ruled for hundreds of years before falling on hard times, only resilience and resistance will carry you through. The midterm election results is the big prize and Vladimir Putin and the Russian oligarchs and Donald Trump and the American plutocrats have their operatives all focused on mitigating any damage and perhaps again surprising all. They are a formidable opponent and combating them will require skills in recognizing those who smile in your face as they plot your demise and the use of encryption and social media, instead of drums and lyrics in the field, giving word when the time to act has come.

Remember that a hundred years after the Silent Protest Parade, African-Americans still have to march and demonstrate against white violence and we’ve all seen in Charlottesville how quickly these “very fine people”, as Trump called them, can become emboldened.

These midterm elections are one more act in the Civil War that began in 1863 over race, and like the history of Black folks continues to this day. Historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote in “The Souls of Black Folks” in 1903 that, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”. And now we see it remains the problem of the 21st century as well.

Me the People

Treasonous for not clapping for him at the “State of The Union” address? Un-American for Democrats to sit while Republicans stood and applauded? And now he’s told the Pentagon that he wants a big military parade to watch go by with tanks and armaments. In reaction, Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, tweeted: “Cool. Just like in North Korea and Russia. But what do we do about those traitors who don’t clap during our Dear Leader’s speech?”

Week after week we hear the expression, “He’s hit a new low”, in reference to President Trump. I think we’ve learned by now that this will keep going on because the truth is that he has no bottom. There is no negative thought to be left unspoken. No price too high to protect his ego. The lives of hundreds of thousands of people, be they Dreamers or North and South Koreans, are dependent on a man who would sacrifice them all to have his way and protect himself. As we have determined, his sense of morality is a bottomless pit, the depths of which he is determined to explore and revel in. If you wanted to live in a time that mattered, that will be remembered as long as the republic lasts, welcome to Now.

 

Dr. Chandra Warns: Don’t Flirt with the Flu This Year!

Priscilla Mensah
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Dr. Chandra Warns: Don’t Flirt with the Flu This Year!

Dr. Prandeep Chandra warns Brooklynites not to flirt with the flu. The Chief Medical Officer at Brooklyn’s Interfaith Medical Center has seen firsthand the damage this year’s flu can do. It’s a strain that doesn’t care about your plans, obligations or deadlines; it’s coming soon to a home or workplace near you and it’s bringing the blues with it. Dr. Chandra thinks you should get a flu shot.

Dr. Prandeep Chandra

New York City has declared an official – and unusual – “flu emergency” as the epidemic careens across the city. According to Dr. Chandra, while flu season usually begins in November, it doesn’t end until May (!) with December through February seeing the greatest number of cases. And although Dr. Chandra is recommending it, he admits that this year’s flu vaccine is just “17% effective. However, he says that it can also, “…prevent complications and decrease both the severity and duration of the flu.”

This season’s H3N2 strain of the flu is more aggressive than others and is particularly dangerous for young children, elders, diabetics, cancer patients, persons with HIV, heart failure or kidney disease and others with weakened immune systems. It starts like a cold, with congestion in the nose, significant fatigue, pain and high fever and can last, “… between seven to ten days,” says Dr. Chandra, “unless treated by antiviral drugs like Tamiflu, which can reduce it to one to two days.”

Dr. Chandra recommends wearing a germ-protective face mask at the very least if, for example, you are against being vaccinated on grounds of religion. Those who object to taking the vaccine should take Tamiflu upon displaying the earliest symptoms, he says. However, because of the recent uptick in flu incidences, Tamiflu has been sold out in many drugstores. So Dr. Chandra stresses the importance of considering being vaccinated during this particularly threatening flu season.

Priscilla Mensah, a highly spirited scholar, enjoys topics related to improving health and wellness. She is also a former Health Reporting Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached at pmensahbrooklyn@gmail.com.

Majesty in the Ministry: Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker

Editor, Our Time Press
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Majesty in the Ministry: Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker

Wyatt Tee Walker, civil rights leader, pastor and theologian, was born on August 16, 1929 in Brockton, Massachusetts to John Wise and Maude Pin Walker. Wyatt attended elementary and high school in Merchantville, New Jersey and earned a B.S. in chemistry and physics from Virginia Union University in Richmond in 1950. That same year, he married Theresa Ann Walker, with whom he’d have four children. In 1953, Walker received his Master of Divinity degree from Virginia Union’s Graduate School of Religion.

Later in 1953, Walker became pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. He also served as president of the local NAACP and as director of the state’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Walker founded the Petersburg Improvement Association, patterned after the Montgomery Improvement Association. In 1958, Walker became a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He rose quickly in the organization; in 1960, King appointed Walker the executive director of SCLC and he was made King’s chief of staff, a post he held until 1964.

Walker’s civil rights participation reached beyond his administrative duties. On May 25, 1961, he was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for participating in a Freedom Ride. Two years later, he helped organize the 1963 March on Washington.

On September 1, 1967, Walker relocated to New York City to become pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. Under his dynamic leadership, Canaan’s congregation grew from 800 to 3,000. During this period, he also served as Urban Affairs Specialist to New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. In 1975, Walker earned a Doctorate of Ministry degree from Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. Four years later, he released his first of several books: Somebody’s Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change.

During the 1980s, Walker continued his community activism. He became a member of the National Committee on the American Committee on Africa. In 1988, he co-founded the Religious Action Network of Africa to challenge the repressive apartheid system in South Africa, and he served as chair of the Central Harlem Local Development Corporation, which built low-income housing.

In 1993, Walker received national recognition when Ebony magazine named him one of America’s “15 Greatest Black Preachers”. In 2004, Walker retired as pastor of Canaan. He earned more acclaim in 2008 when he was inducted into the Civil Rights “Walk of Fame” in Atlanta, Georgia. On January 18, 2009, during the inauguration events in Washington, D.C. for President Barack Obama, Walker received the “Keepers of the Flame” Award at the African-American Church Inaugural Ball.

Wyatt T. Walker passed away in Chester, Virginia on January 23, 2018.  He was 88.

 

Fanatical Whites Adoring Their Savior: On Making America White Again

Editor, Our Time Press
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Fanatical Whites Adoring Their Savior: On Making America White Again

 

By Playthell Benjamin

It was nauseating to witness Donald Trump, surrounded by grinning handkerchief-head Black quislings, read a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King. The bumbling fashion in which he read the text made it clear that he was not familiar with the facts, nor was it coming from the heart.   Like so much about Trump, it came across as phony.   That was certainly how it struck Congressman John Lewis, who walked with Dr. King in the heat of the Civil Rights battle and was brutally beaten by racist redneck cops on the Edmund Pettis bridge during the voter registration drive in Lowndes County, Alabama.

When asked by reporter Katy Tur if he thought Trump’s remarks praising Dr. King was sincere, Congressman Lewis said no; pointing out that you cannot make racist statements one day and praise Dr. King’s legacy the next, yet he expects to be taken seriously.  He said that he will not attend the upcoming State of the Union Address because he does not consider Trump’s election to be legit, given the role played by Russian intelligence agencies in sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The racist statement Lewis was referencing was Trump’s declaration that the US should not welcome immigrants from “shithole” nations like Haiti and African countries.  Trump said he would prefer more immigrants from “Norway” instead.   There was no shame in mighty whitey’s game.  Aside from the fact that Trump’s comments about Haitians and Nigerians during a discussion of immigration policy in the Oval Office, exposed his abysmal ignorance about Black people once more, they also conjured up memories of some of the most racist episodes of the last century.

It is obvious that Trump knows nothing about the role played in the American War of Independence by Les Chasseurs Volontaires de Saint Domingue, ten companies of Haitian soldiers numbering 500 each who fought heroically in the Battle of Savanna during 1799.  They were repaid a few years later with racist American opposition to their own heroic revolution against their French oppressors, despite the fact the Haitian Revolution was based upon the same ideals as the US and French Revolutions: “Liberty, Brotherhood and equality.”  As CLR James says: “It was one of three great bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century” that helped shape the modern world.

Savanna Monument to Haitian Heroes of 1799

Lest  We Forget?

 It is equally clear that Trump does not understand the contributions Nigerian immigrants are now making to the US.  As a community, Nigerian-Americans are model citizens.  They earn college degrees at a rate 10% higher than native-born Americans. According to the Houston Chronicle of January 12, “Nigerian immigrants have the highest levels of education in this city and the nation, surpassing whites and Asians, according to Census data bolstered by an analysis of 13 annual Houston-area surveys conducted by Rice University”.

These figures are reflected in the three Nigerians in my building: an international lawyer, a medical doctor and a mechanical engineer who has worked for Con-Edison, keeping the lights on in Trump Tower for the last 15 years.  I could cite many outstanding Nigerians contributing to the US in a variety of fields if I had the space.

Alas, none of this matters to Donald Trump because his concern is keeping America white and, given his choice of Norwegians as the ideal immigrant, the whiter the better!  In this attitude, Trump has taken us back 100 years to the ideas of another white New Yorker, Madison Grant.  A Columbia University graduate, Grant really did have the Ivy League education Trump bogusly brags about.  The President of the New York Zoological Society, and a leading voice in the racist Eugenics Movement – which advocated selective breeding to improve the human species – Grant published a 1917 book titled The Passing of the Great Race. 

This book was written as a warning against the Superior Teutonic “race”, whose ideal prototype was the blue-eyed blond, represented in America by the “conquering Anglo-Saxon”, intermixing with the “lesser races”. And here Grant was talking about European “races”, such as Greeks and Italians, whom he labeled “men from failed civilizations”.

In Grant’s view, the ancient civilization of Greece and Rome was built by blond-haired Teutons, and it was their bad judgement in breeding with the darker races that brought on the decay and collapse of their civilization. There was a special warning against Jews.  Africans and other subhuman “colored races” were strictly off limits.

One way to prevent this dreaded intermixing with inferior racial stock was by controlling their presence in the American population through immigration policy.  However, Grant was elaborating on the ideas of another rich New Yorker, Teddy Roosevelt, who cultivated the role of Anglo-Saxon superman to the hilt; even buying a ranch in Wyoming where he was said to have led posses against outlaws in the late 19th century.

This image was enhanced after he led the “Rough Riders” in the Battle of San Juan Hill in Santiago, Cuba during the Spanish-American War.  Roosevelt felt that the paramount objective of reproductive practices was to prevent overly fertile “lesser breeds” from outbreeding the superior Anglo-Saxons.  He was quite open in his views on the superiority of Anglo-Saxons and felt that the decimation of American Indians and the conquest of the Philippines were acts of God.

These ideas would inform the passage of the racist National Origins Act of 1924, which set quotas on immigrants based on the countries from which they came.  The act provided that visas be issued to 2% of each ethnic group based on the 1890 Census, which would ensure that Anglo-Saxon’s would forever remain the majority.  One big fan of this law was Adolf Hitler, who praised it in “Mein Kempf”:

“There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason, at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle…by simply excluding certain races from naturalization.”

Hitler was also a big fan of Madison Grant’s “Passing of the Great Race”, from which he lifted his Teutonic master race theory.  We know this because historians have uncovered a letter Hitler wrote to Madison Grant in which the Nazi leader thanked him profusely and gushed: “Your book is my bible!”  It was these all-American ideas that informed and inspired the Nazi “racial hygienists” to exterminate six million of their Jewish countrymen by industrializing mass murder and launching a World War which resulted in 50 million deaths.

This is the tradition Donald Trump has so passionately embraced, a set of racist ideas that resulted in the enslavement of Africans and their descendants for 250 years, and the extermination of Indigenous Native Americans resulting in the greatest land theft in history!  Of course, Dumb Donnie Dimwit is too ignorant of history to know any of this – and based on his racist behavior many thoughtful observers believe it wouldn’t matter if he did – he is propagating these ideas nevertheless.

Ignorance is no excuse in any case.  After all, he ran for the presidency, he was not drafted. That he should attempt to associate himself with the prophetic legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, an Apostle of Peace and Justice, with the aid of genuflecting Sambos, is beyond shameful: It is blasphemy!

Playthell G. Benjamin, Harlem, New York, January 29, 2018

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