Black Culture Discussion Thread

I personally didn't give two drops of monkey piss about this wedding, but Al Sharpton just had to be the one

Al Sharpton Claims ‘White Male Supremacy’ Is ‘On Its Last Breath’ Because Harry Married Meghan

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During a National Action Network rally Saturday in Harlem, Rev. Al Sharpton said that the marriage between His Royal Highness Prince Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex, Earl of Dumbarton, and Baron Kilkeen, and Her Royal Highness Rachel Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Countess of Dumbarton, and Baroness Kilkeen—or Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for short—indicates that “white male supremacy is on its last breath” because “little white girls in Wales are saying, ‘I want to be like Meghan.’”
 
White Supremacy will just evolve and take on new forms. I thought it would die down but nah. I believe the structure will linger on until we are in a majority multicultural country. Then I see classism and the continuing destruction of the middle class and increased gap between the rich and the poor as a bigger problem. White Supremacy will continue to exist always.
 
gry60 said:
The issue I have with the politics of Jim Brown and approaching Black liberation from the angle of self-sufficiency is that its success is highly dependent on who controls the political, social, and economic institutions.

Jim Brown's politics worked in Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara because Burkinabe people were in control of their borders, resources, and courts. They were able to implement their ideas without disturbances from the outside (at first), which resulted in a very fast turnaround in terms of access to education, elimination of food insecurity, and general improvement of society.

You cannot apply the same tactics in the US because of demographics: Black people are not even the largest minority in the country; they don't control much in terms of wealth and politics. As a result, isolating themselves from US society at large in the quest for self-sufficiency is more likely to result in abandonment by society at large, especially when the unequal foundations on which this system is built continue to exist.
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This. There are benefits and limitations to both MLK and Malcolm X's approaches. No one has issues with the economic self-sufficiency route, but there are limitations to it. For example, you can have as much money and buying power as you like but if the ruling class of the country doesn't like you, then they can institute laws that negate your economic advancement. Look at redlining, it didn't matter how much money you had you can't live where near them. It doesn't matter how good your business plan is, you're not getting that loan, etc.
 
atlsfinest said:


This is what they think of us y'all. :smh:
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We have to stop caring about what "they" think. Too many of us, especially the "woke" ones, really just want white people to love and accept them, and that's NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. My people need to learn to be self validated.

Furthermore, who's responsibility is it to change the negative stereotypes about us? (Hint, its not white people.)
 
Who is the Fairest of Them All? Race, Attractiveness and Skin Color Sexual Dimorphism
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https://www.researchgate.net/public...tractiveness_and_skin_color_sexual_dimorphism
Abstract
Previous research has suggested that perceived attractiveness and personality are affected by the race such that White faces are more attractive but less masculine than Black faces. Such studies, however, have been based on very small stimulus sets. The current study investigated perceived attractiveness and personality for 600 Black, White and mixed-race faces. Many of the investigated personality traits were correlated with race when rated by White participants. Attractiveness specifically was greater for Black male faces than White male faces and among mixed-race faces. Blackness correlated with increased attractiveness. A reverse pattern was found for female faces with Whiteness being associated with attractiveness. The results are discussed in terms of the sexual dimorphism demonstrated in skin color.
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The Secret Romance of a Black Army Nurse and Nazi POW




The German POW Freidrich Albert (left) worked in the kitchen and wooed nurse Elinor Powell (right) with secretly made wiener schnitzel and apple strudel.

One glance, and the young soldier was spellbound. He strode across the mess hall and locked eyes with a regal woman in a nurse’s uniform.

“You should know my name,” he said. “I’m the man who’s going to marry you.”

She nearly laughed aloud: a Nazi prisoner of war and an African-American US Army officer in the middle of World War II? Ridiculous.

But Friedrich Albert had it right: Elinor Powell was the girl of his jazz-drenched dreams. Their secret romance began, for her, as a rebellion against the segregated Army’s racism — and deepened into a passion that overcame both war and prejudice. “Enemies in Love” (New Press), by journalist Alexis Clark, tells their story.

“I think I stayed angry most of my Army career,” Elinor said years later. “Going into a completely segregated situation was constantly a shock for me.

It was 1944 when both of them arrived at Camp Florence in a remote area of southern Arizona. Friedrich, a Luftwaffe medic who had been captured in Italy, was one of the 370,000 German fighters shipped to 600 work camps in the US as the war raged in Europe.

Elinor grew up in a mostly white but racially tolerant Boston suburb, where her family — including a grandmother who escaped slavery as a teen and came north via the Underground Railroad — were respected local leaders.


Before raising a family in Connecticut after the war, Elinor was a frustrated nurse and Friedrich a nicked-up German medic.

She seethed over her assignment to tend the foreign prisoners. Army policy barred nearly all black nurses from prestigious work in the war’s overseas theaters.

Friedrich came from cosmopolitan Vienna, the only son of a well-to-do but emotionally cold family. His parents gave him a fine education — he spoke fluent English — but little attention. He drew comfort from jazz music, especially the sultry sounds of New Orleans, and adored singers Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. For him, the tall, curvaceous Elinor was everything he imagined an American woman to be.

He wooed her with treats from the camp kitchen, where he worked as a cook. He would deliver a specially made apple strudel to her with a wink; she would theatrically blow him a kiss to get a laugh from other nurses at the table. He hoarded ingredients to make her wiener schnitzel when everyone else got meatloaf.

When Friedrich taught a baking class in a camp-recreation program, Elinor was the first to sign up. They made eyes at each other while kneading dough for bauernbrot and brötchen.

Encouraged, he volunteered to work at the camp hospital as a translator. Harried higher-ups never noticed how often he managed to sneak off with 2nd Lt. Powell for kisses and caresses in a quiet stairwell. “I could tell she was falling in love,” recalled Gwyneth Blessit Moore, another nurse at the camp. “The way she looked — we all knew.” An affair with an inmate could have gotten Elinor court-martialed. The nurses’ sisterhood kept her secret safe.

They finally consummated their love on an operating table in an unused surgical theater between procedures. With access to the hospital schedule, Elinor could strategically choose an empty room.

What might have been a passing — if risky — fling continued for more than a year, as Germany surrendered, atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and diplomats drew up peace plans.

The lovers were never exposed, even when Friedrich was caught leaving the prisoners’ barracks for a late-night rendezvous. The guards shaved his head and beat him but didn’t find out where he had been going.

No German POW could win a visa and remain in the United States. There was only one path to a postwar reunion, they decided: Friedrich must father Elinor’s American child.

Just before he boarded a ship back to Europe in April 1946, they conceived a son. Elinor hid her pregnancy through her final months of Army service, then returned to Massachusetts to give birth.

“You are a part of me,” he wrote her during their yearlong separation. “I need you terribly.”

Their plan worked: With baby Stephen’s birth certificate, Friedrich got his visa. On June 26, 1947, days after his return to the US, he and Elinor married in New York City. He changed his name to “Frederick” to signal the start of his new American life.

But making a home in a bigoted society turned out to be even harder than carrying on their forbidden romance. Over the next decade, they made countless moves across two continents in search of a community to welcome their mixed-race family, which soon included a second son, Chris.

In Boston, one landlord after another evicted them — some would-be neighbors objected to living near an ex-Nazi soldier; others could not bear a black woman next door. In Pennsylvania, Stephen was forced into a segregated elementary school despite state laws outlawing them. In Göttingen, Germany, where Frederick worked in his father’s new brick-making business, his mother’s racism drove them away. “How come Frika couldn’t marry someone white?” she railed.

At last they found Village Creek, a consciously integrated neighborhood in Norwalk, Conn., and settled down with their children.

Frederick transformed his trade in captivity into a career. He became a vice president at Pepperidge Farm, in charge of its experimental kitchen. One of its signature products was the apple-pie tart — an echo of the special strudels he created for Elinor decades before.

The Alberts remained in their Connecticut home until Frederick’s death in 2001 at age 75. Elinor succumbed to cancer, aged 84, in 2005. “They loved each other deeply until the day they died,” son Chris said.

Chris grew up to be a respected trumpeter who toured the world with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Music, he says, was the thread that bound him to his father. “That lack of warmth he felt growing up, he found it in jazz and when he saw my mother.”
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In a series of groundbreaking interviews produced by TRNN, Chuck D interviews fellow rap artists DMC and Joost about politics, the economy and their music while bringing African American history and music into context. Together we explore the current state of rap music and its societal impact.
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Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Defense Lawyer and Civil Rights Warrior, Dies at 104

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Dovey Johnson Roundtree. (Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree/Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...9d6d4814c4c_story.html?utm_term=.5832cc47ab67

Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a Washington criminal defense lawyer and courtroom warrior for civil rights who played a critical early role in the desegregation of interstate bus travel and mentored several generations of black lawyers, died May 21 at an assisted-living facility in Charlotte. She was 104.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said Jerry L. Hunter, her cousin and law partner.

In a career that spanned nearly half a century, Ms. Roundtree defended predominantly poor African American clients — as well as black churches, community groups and the occasional politician. She was, former Fisk University president Walter J. Leonard once told The Washington Post, “a legal-aid clinic before there were legal-aid clinics.”

Her best-known case involved the black day laborer accused in the 1964 killing of Georgetown socialite and painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, who reportedly had an affair with President John F. Kennedy. She won him an acquittal despite what initially appeared to be damning witness testimony.

Ms. Roundtree’s handling of the high-profile legal matter was later praised by Robert S. Bennett, who observed the proceedings as a clerk for the judge and decades later represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Ms. Roundtree, Bennett recalled in his memoir “In the Ring” (2008), “had a motherly warmth” and a “low-key, casual style” that appealed “not only to the mind but also the heart and soul of the jurors.”

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Julius Winfield Robertson and Dovey Johnson Roundtree, center, at the Supreme Court in about 1955. (Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree/Courtesy of Dovey Johnson Roundtree)

A Very Private Woman” (1998), by political reporter Nina Burleigh, Ms. Roundtree explained that the case had additional significance for her because the defendant, Raymond Crump Jr., was a black man accused of murdering a white woman.

“I think in the black community there was a feeling that even if Crump was innocent, he was a dead duck,” she said. “Even if he didn’t do it, he’s guilty. I took that as a personal challenge. I was caught up in civil rights, heart, body, and soul, but I felt law was one vehicle that would bring remedy.”

Bennett and Burleigh were among those convinced that Crump — a penniless alcoholic whom Ms. Roundtree described in her autobiography as “incapable” of “clear communication” or “complex thought” — was wrongly freed. He was later convicted of assault and arson, and the Meyer case remains unsolved.

Washington Mayor Walter E. Washington appointed Ms. Roundtree to the D.C. board of higher education in the early 1970s, and his successor as mayor, Marion Barry, considered her a trusted adviser, going so far as to call her one of his “Washington mothers.”

In addition, she mentored younger black lawyers — including Charles Ogletree, now a professor at Harvard Law School — and preached at Southeast Washington’s Allen Chapel AME Church, where she worked as a minister for 35 years before retiring to Charlotte in 1996.

In a phone interview, Katie McCabe, a Washington journalist who co-wrote Ms. Roundtree’s 2009 autobiography, “Justice Older Than the Law,” said Ms. Roundtree “transformed the legal canvas in Washington” by demonstrating that a black lawyer could win major cases before white judges and predominantly white juries.

Dismantling segregation

When Ms. Roundtree and her first legal partner, Julius Winfield Robertson, began taking cases in the early 1950s, there were few black lawyers in Washington and even fewer black female lawyers.

Those who did practice were banned from using the cafeteria, restrooms or law library at the District Courthouse, and legal organizations such as the Women’s Bar Association of D.C. — which Ms. Roundtree integrated in 1962 — had whites-only policies.

African American clients who brought personal injury or negligence suits were euphemistically “referred uptown” — directed to white lawyers who had a better chance of winning over judges. The “uptown” lawyers then paid black lawyers a fee for referring their clients.

But Ms. Roundtree and Robertson kept clients in their office, regardless of the case. “We worked for eggs and collard greens,” Ms. Roundtree once quipped, noting that she and her partner often accepted clients who couldn’t pay legal fees. For a time, they held second jobs to supplement their incomes.

In 1952, soon after they began their practice, the duo was introduced to a Women’s Army Corps private named Sarah Keys.

Earlier that year, Keys had been traveling home to North Carolina, in uniform and on furlough, when she refused a bus driver’s orders to give up her seat to a white Marine.

Incensed, the driver moved all of the passengers but Keys to a new bus in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. When Keys asked why she was not allowed on board, she was arrested by two police officers, jailed for 13 hours and fined $25 for disorderly conduct.

Ms. Roundtree and Robertson tried the case unsuccessfully at the U.S. District Court in Washington, which threw it out on jurisdictional grounds, before filing a complaint with the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission. The 11-member commission had acquired a reputation as “the Supreme Court of the Confederacy” for consistently ruling in favor of segregation.

Yet the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, gave Ms. Roundtree hope, as well as a legal framework upon which to build her case.

An ICC examiner initially found that the Brown decision “did not preclude segregation in a private business.” But Ms. Roundtree succeeded in applying pressure on the commission through an influential Harlem congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (D), who urged the ICC’s chairman to give the case a full hearing.

Ruling on Nov. 7, 1955, the commission agreed that “assignment of seats in interstate buses, so designed as to imply the inferiority of a traveler solely because of race or color, [was] unjust discrimination” and violated the Interstate Commerce Act.

The ICC gave states and bus companies six weeks to desegregate buses, as well as bus station waiting rooms and restrooms. (Station restaurants, the commission said, were not essentially connected to travel and could remain segregated.) In a companion case filed separately by the NAACP, the commission made a similar decision for interstate train travel.

But under a new segregationist chairman who had dissented in the Keys case, the ICC refused to enforce its own desegregation ruling: It took six years, not six weeks, after television broadcasts showed activists known as Freedom Riders being beaten and attacked by Ku Klux Klan-led mobs in Alabama as they tried to integrate interstate bus travel in the South.

Following a formal petition from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the ICC finally issued a desegregation order in September 1961 mandating that states enforce the Keys decision.

Raised in the Jim Crow South

Dovey Mae Johnson was born April 17, 1914, in Charlotte, where she recalled once hiding under the kitchen table while the Klan thundered past in the night on horseback. Her mother was a seamstress. Her father, a printer for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, died in the influenza pandemic of 1919.

After his death, the family lived with Ms. Roundtree’s maternal grandparents in a church parsonage, near the AME Zion church where her grandfather worked as a minister.

Soon after her 1938 graduation from historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, she moved to Washington to work as a research assistant for Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women.

After her service in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, Ms. Roundtree enrolled at Howard University’s law school on the G.I. Bill. A brief marriage around that time to William Roundtree ended in divorce.

At Howard, she assisted the NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall andJames M. Nabrit Jr. in their preparations for Brown v. Board and other court cases that challenged segregation. She graduated in 1950 and one year later started her law practice with Robertson. He died in 1961.

The Keys case aside, Ms. Roundtree was involved in few court cases that dealt explicitly with civil rights. Instead, she employed her ministerial courtroom style — which mixed a strategic deference to judges with scholarly references to biblical scripture and Shakespeare — primarily on criminal cases, taking clients whom other lawyers ignored.

One was Crump, who had allegedly been spotted standing over Meyer’s dead body. Crump told police officers he had been fishing and “almost got shot myself.”

Meyer, who had been shot twice while walking along the C & O Canal towpath in Georgetown, was the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, a top CIA official; the niece of Gifford Pinchot, a Pennsylvania governor and conservationist; and the sister-in-law of future Post editor Benjamin Bradlee.

Ms. Roundtree agreed to take Crump’s case for $1. She soon discovered that Crump had been jailed without a preliminary hearing, that police had not checked the body for fingerprints and that a coroner’s report was never filed.

Crump was acquitted after Ms. Roundtree called large swaths of circumstantial evidence into question — noting in particular that Crump was about five inches and 50 pounds smaller than the man whom witnesses described, and that a murder weapon had never been found.

In 1977, she helped win an acquittal for John Wesley Griffin, who was accused of joining other members of the Nation of Islam in murdering seven members of a rival group, the Hanafi Muslims. The killings helped spur the March 1977 takeover of several downtown Washington buildings by 12 Hanafis, who demanded that the convicted killers be turned over to them for further punishment.

Griffin was cleared after Ms. Roundtree produced an alibi that placed him in Philadelphia at the time of the murders. “That was so simple,” she later said, reflecting on the case. “You don’t have to go to law school to do that.”

Nevertheless, Griffin returned to prison, where he was already serving a life sentence for the 1974 prison-cell murder of another defendant in the Hanafi case.

Ms. Roundtree co-founded the law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker in 1970, and three decades later the American Bar Association honored her for advancing female lawyers in the profession.

Over the decades, Ms. Roundtree shifted the focus of her work from criminal to family law. She had no children, but over the course of her life cared for many children in her own home, including a goddaughter, Charlene Pritchett-Stevenson, whom she considered a daughter. She also admitted that she sometimes approached her clients in a motherly manner.

“People do poorly by and for themselves,” Ms. Roundtree told The Post in 1995, acknowledging that many of her clients were less than perfect. Still, she added, “I make my clients my children. I can see stars where there’s nothing but a bunch of clay.”
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JC Penney Shares Plunge as CEO Marvin Ellison Leaves for Lowe's
  • Lowe's Companies is poaching J.C. Penney Company CEO Marvin R. Ellison.
  • J.C. Penny has been weighed down by debt and underperforming stores as it's been squeezed by Walmart and Target.
  • Ellison previously worked at Lowe's rival Home Depot.

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Marvin Ellison

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/lowes-names-jc-penney-ceo-marvin-ellison-as-its-new-ceo.html

The home improvement retailer announced Tuesday it is naming Ellison president and CEO, effective July 2. Ellison will take over for Robert A. Niblock, who previously announced his intention to retire.

Lowe's, under pressure from activist investor D.E. Shaw & Co, announced in March its CEO was stepping down.

Ellison is chairman and CEO of J.C. Penney, which he has attempted to steer through a turnaround. Prior to J.C. Penney, Ellison worked more than 12 years at Lowe's rival Home Depot, including serving as executive vice president of U.S. stores.

Shares of J.C. Penney were down nearly 3 percent, while shares of Lowe's were up 1.69 percent in early morning trading.

"The turnaround program that Ellison put in place at J.C. Penney has partly delivered but is still far from complete. There is now a question mark over how this plan will proceed and, indeed, whether J.C. Penney will remain on the same trajectory," said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail

"Indeed, exiting before his plan is complete is a tacit admission that he may not be able to deliver what investors are looking for."

A spokesperson for J.C. Penney told CNBC that it was just informed by Ellison a couple days ago of the move, and it was not aware when it last reported earnings. It currently has four executives filling in to run day-to-day decisions and is looking for both internal and external candidates.
The highly leveraged department store has struggled to compete within the quickly evolving retail landscape, as consumers shift their shopping online and away from the mall, where many J.C. Penney stores are located. Last year, it closed more than 100 stores.

Similarly affordable rival, Kohl's, meanwhile, has benefited from a store footprint situated away from malls. It has also taken bets like forging alliances with Amazon and Under Armour.

J.C. Penney also has been squeezed by discounters Walmart and Target, which have improved their clothing selections. Walmartrecently forged a relationship with Lord & Taylor as part of its efforts to make its website a destination for apparel. Target, meanwhile, has been focusing on building out its private label apparel brands, including its succesful Cat & Jack children's line.

Under Ellison, J.C. Penney has taken a number of efforts to help steward a turnaround, including a focus on beauty and appliances. In a bid to boost traffic, the retailer has focused on its salon business, hoping hair-dresser loyalty would turn into shopping frequency.

In March, it eliminated 230 positions and announced the departure of executive vice president of Penney's omnichannel business, Mike Amend.

Ellison is not the first CEO to struggle with a J.C. Penney turnaround. Ron Johnson, who joined J.C. Penney from Apple, took the job at the behest of activist Bill Ackman in 2011, but was ousted in 2013.

Lowe's board also named Richard W. Dreiling, a director of Lowe's since 2012, chairman, effective July 2.
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MalcolmNewton said:
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When I was younger we left a black church for a white church. My mom had stop attending with us and my pops thought a white church out in the burbs would get her back to attending church with us and it did. My mom had minor surgery and could not cook for us for a about a week but the people in from her and Fathers Sunday school class took turns cooking dinner delivered it hot to the house. The church was about a 30 min drive away and most of its parishioners lived another 10 to 20 minutes on the opposite side so these folks were damn near an hour away to deliver a hot meal. Funny thing is that my mom had already cooked enough food while she was out. No way in hell that would have happened at the Black church.


Side Note: There was this bad lil white chick in my Sunday school class and she was like the head cheerleader at her school iirc she was a year or two below me. Just so happens her parents had gotten to know my parents really well and her parents had sent her to deliver the food. I was out back in the pool, I run in the house for drink and she’s at the door. I could tell she was irritated but it changed when I opened the door. Up till that point we had never spoken a word. She comes in we are both surprised and chit chat and I’m like your free to hang out we are just out back swimming. She says she has her friends in the car could they join and I’m like sure! Three more girls come in. Instant pool party. They came over damn near everyday to swim and suntan until I left for the Navy.

My mom got better and got to doing what she does in the kitchen and her food had those white girls strung out on soul food.
 
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'This Shows People Do Care': Georgia Jury Awards Rape Victim $1bn in Damages
Victim say her case proves ‘you may not get it immediately, but you will get what you’re worth’

From left, mother Renetta M. Cheston-Thornton, lawyer Chris Stewart and Hope Cheston. Hope Cheston has been awarded a billion dollars in damages by a Georgia jury. Photograph: Facebook/ Chris Stewart
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...are-georgia-jury-awards-victim-1bn-in-damages

A Georgia jury has awarded a $1bn damages verdict against a security company after an apartment complex guard was convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.

Hope Cheston – who has chosen to be identified – was outside by some picnic tables with her boyfriend during a party in 2012 when an armed security guard approached, attorney L. Chris Stewart told the Associated Press on Wednesday. The guard told the boyfriend not to move and raped Cheston, Stewart said.

The guard, identified in the lawsuit as Brandon Lamar Zachary, was convicted of statutory rape and is serving a 20-year prison sentence, online prison records show.

Brandon Lamar Zachary, an apartment complex guard who was convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl. Photograph: AP
Renatta Cheston-Thornton filed a lawsuit in March 2015 on behalf of her daughter, who was still a minor at the time. The jury on Tuesday handed down the verdict against Crime Prevention Agency, the security company that employed Zachary.

Zachary, who was 22 at the time of the rape, should never have been hired because he wasn’t licensed to be an armed guard, Stewart said.

The judge had already determined the security company was liable, so the jury was only determining damages, Stewart said. After reading the verdict, Stewart said, jurors immediately left the jury box – without waiting for the judge’s permission – to hug Cheston and her mother.

Crime Prevention Agency was dissolved in 2016, according to online corporate registration records. Attempts to contact Mario Watts, who is named on the corporate registration as the CEO and identified in the lawsuit as the company’s registered agent, were unsuccessful.

Stewart, who has tried a lot of sexual assault cases, said he was shocked when he heard the verdict. He said he had asked jurors to really determine the value of the pain caused by the rape. “I was really proud of the jury because there is no basis in the legal world for how high a rape verdict can be,” he said.

Verdicts in the tens of millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions, are not uncommon, Jeff Dion, director of the National Crime Victim Bar Association said in an email. But he had never heard of a $1bn verdict in a case with a single victim. “This jury was clearly trying to send a message about bad conduct on the part of the company,” Dion wrote.

It is more than likely that the security company will appeal against the verdict, said Georgia State University law professor Jessica Gabel Cino. An appeals court would consider the reasonableness of the verdict and would also compare it to those awarded in similar cases to see if it is proportional, and it is likely to be lowered, she said.

Cino agreed the verdict was highly unusual but said the allegations in the case seemed especially egregious. “The facts are just so in the plaintiff’s favor when you put all of this together,” she said. “I mean, it’s really kind of serving up the right case on a platter to the jury.”
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Jazz Musician Wynton Marsalis Says Rap and Hip-Hop are ‘More Damaging Than a Statue of Robert E. Lee’


Jazz great Wynton Marsalis, co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, talks with The Post’s Jonathan Capehart on the “Cape Up” podcast at the Jazz at Lincoln Center offices in New York City on May 14. (Jonathan Capehart/The Washington Post)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...-more-damaging-than-a-statue-of-robert-e-lee/

“My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we should have a music talking about ******s and bytches and ****. It had no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.”

Wynton Marsalis covered all the bases. Race. His role in New Orleans’s removal of Confederate statues last year. His deep antipathy to rap and hip-hop. And the damage he believes the genres inflict on African Americans. “I feel that that’s much more of a racial issue than taking Robert E. Lee’s statue down,” Marsalis told me in the latest episode of “Cape Up.” “There’s more ******s in that than there is in Robert E. Lee’s statue.”

Marsalis was the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997 with “Blood on the Fields,” a vocal and orchestral rumination on slavery. It came 12 years after the release of “Black Codes (From the Underground),” which won two Grammy Awards in 1986, and 10 years before “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary.” Marsalis will add to his collection of commissions that blend his fluency in jazz and matters of race with the debut of “the ever-funky lowdown” on June 7. Actor Wendell Pierce, another New Orleans native, will serve as narrator. If you’re not in New York you can watch the premiere via a free live webcast athttp://jazz.org/live.

LISTEN HERE

For more conversations like this, subscribe to “Cape UP” on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Marsalis began composing “the ever-funky lowdown” in 2015 and was still writing when we sat down in the Jazz at Lincoln Center offices on May 14. “Not only am I still writing, I have a long way to go writing. I’m not close,” Marsalis told me after singing and scatting portions of his new work.

In the exploration of America’s relationship with race, “the ever-funky lowdown,” Marsalis said, “just builds on the question of ‘who is we?’ That’s the question.” The composition takes the listener through a series of games with a protagonist named Mr. Game. In the end, Marsalis said, we learn that the ever-funky lowdown is “that you will act absolutely against your best interests because you want more to get this person … because you’re fixated on who you think is your enemy.”

Marsalis then explained how the ever-funky lowdown also manifests itself in the consumption of damaging mythology about African Americans.

It plays on how you think — what you think — the mythology you’re given. You’re given this mythology — all these movies and shows. Black people commit crimes. Black people call each other ******s. Black people call each other bytches. Black people — all this. Everybody lives in drug-infested communities [ph], everybody shoots this, they don’t have any respect — every black person has no integrity. You could have a movie with no black people in it, the one black person in it would be the one with no integrity. That’s just mythology. So if I’ll get you to buy into that, okay, that’s the ever-funky lowdown.

This is America” and its singer, Childish Gambino. “I applaud his creativity and what he’s doing,” Marsalis told me before delivering the hammer. “From a social standpoint, it’s hard to decry a thing that you depict. That’s difficult.”

I then asked Marsalis for his thoughts on Kanye West. You’ll recall that the rap phenom said during a TMZ interview earlier this month, “When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison.” Marsalis was not impressed, neither by what West said nor by the import given to what he said.

“I think Kanye West makes products. He’s going to put his product out, and he wants his product to sell,” Marsalis said about the rapper, who has a lot of “products” in the form of new recordings that are about to drop shortly.

“I would not give seriousness to what he said, in that way. Okay? This guy is making products. He’s making him some money, got probably a product coming out that he’s selling. He’s saying stuff. People talking about him. They’re going to buy his product,” Marsalis said. “It’s not like Martin Luther King said it, a person who knows or is conscious of a certain thing. … [H]e’s entitled to whatever it is he wants to say. The quality of his thought is in the products he makes.”

Listen to the podcast to hear Marsalis talk more in depth about “the ever-funky lowdown” and how he came to help then-New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu remove Confederate statues from his hometown. “It’s just really two middle-aged people who played trumpet in high school, who’ve known each other for years, sitting down, having breakfast, talking,” Marsalis said with humility. And he goes in deep on his problems with rap and hip-hop.

“You can’t have a pipeline of filth be your default position” and not have it take a toll on society, Marsalis told me. “It’s just like the toll the minstrel show took on black folks and on white folks. Now, all this ‘****** this,’ ‘bytch that,’ ‘ho that,’ that’s just a fact at this point. For me, it was not a default position in the ’80s. Now that it is the default position, how you like me now? You like what it’s yielding? Something is wrong with you — you need your head examined if you like this.”
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