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Here’s an audio/video mixtape from some of the best MJ mixes I’ve heard recently. How many times can we say “RIP Michael?!”

SIDE A : The MJ Warm Up

Track 1. Come On Come On Come On/Lemme Show You What It’s All About: Love the five-part Minding Michael podcast series from Qool DJ Marv Aural Memoirs & da Buttamilk Archives. Featuring the MJ hits I had forgotten along with those beloved pop standards, this podcast is not to be missed. My favorites are Part One, “A Good Time,” for its melancholy, and Part Three, “Grab Your Belt Buckle/Music’s Taking Over” for the disco hits that make you move even when you’re sitting down. “Roughly 75 percent of these songs, I’ve never played in public,” Qool DJ Marv wrote about Minding Michael. “This is my translation of Michael as a fan and DJ, as a boy who grew up with stronger together black family vibes and Black is Beautiful all up in my head, and as a man who still embraces that exuberant idealism by perpetuating it and sustaining it through the magic of the music in the mix.” (Ranging from 47 mins. to over an hour long)

Track 2. Shake It, Shake It, Baby: Eclectic Method’s The Michael Jackson Video: Don’t be deterred by the Peter Jennings intro to this MJ memory lane video mix. For my money, the highlight comes midway through the video when London-based Eclectic Method mashes up “Blame It On the Boogie” with “Black or White,” and then moves seamlessly into “Rock With You” on top of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Favorite parts of this video show not one, but TWO Michael Jackson videos that stream simultaneously. Shows just what a versatile dancer and performer Michael really was! (4:51 mins)

Track 3. You Can’t Run Away From/This Love I Got: Can’t even remember hearing Jackson Five do “Ready or Not Here I Come,” but you can groove to it here on Norwegian DJ and Producer Teddy Touch’s Memories MJ Tribute mix. Love mixing freestyling and beats with MJ’s classics. (40:04 mins)

SIDE B (The Flip Side)

Track 4. And Don’t Go Around Breaking Young Girls’ Hearts: If you like it when Michael Jackson goes all electronic on you, check out this Billie Jean remix from Philadelphia’s DJ Apt One. Guaranteed to make you move! (6:06 mins)

Track 5. Let Us Realize that a Change Can Only Come/When We Stand Together As One: Believe it or not, there are a handful of viral music videos out there that feature performances by inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, a maximum security prison in the central Philippines. (The prison management has inmates do choreographed dances there for exercise.) The CPDRC did a Thriller video remake in July of 2007, and a “We Are The World” Michael Jackson Tribute just days after Michael passed away. Neither performance needs any introduction. (4:26 and 3:39 mins)

Track 6. Never Can Say Goodbye: DJ Ayres did this Michael Jackson Mix for The Rub, a party that creates long lines around the block of Brooklyn’s Southpaw the first Saturday of every month. The mix is a great chronological history of Michael’s music from “Maybe Tomorrow” (the ’70s) to  “Butterflies” (2001). (53:47 mins) –AFS

Abbie Fentress Swanson is a freelance radio radio reporter (and music addict) based in Brooklyn, New York.

Uber-media critic Howard Kurtz has gotten it coming and going in the past month. First, CNN got lambasted for mis-covering the Iran election and protests. In an age where Twitter is fetishized, a hashtag (or searchable ID) called #CNNFail became all the rage.

This article on MediaBistro links to video of Kurtz’ own coverage of Twitter. Despite calls to mention #CNNFail in his Washington Post Column, Kurtz didn’t…so NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen led a charge to make Kurtz accountable. As a media critic, mind you, Kurtz’ entire conceit is give-no-favor journalism.

Now Kurtz is under fire for failing to look at the dynamics of race and privilege in reporting.

In a recent column asking whether black reporters have gone soft on Michelle Obama, Kurtz said:

They [the beat reporters assigned to the First Lady] are all African American women. Perhaps this gives them a richer cultural understanding of Obama as a trailblazer. Indeed, most write with enthusiasm, in some cases even admiration, about the first lady as a long-awaited role model for black women.

I will give Kurtz credit for speaking to a variety of voices, from Harvard-based academic and producer (Eyes on the Prize) Callie Crossley to Newsweek editor John Meacham to the black women-on-Michelle Obama-beat (including Allison Samuels, who I know personally, in disclosure). But Kurtz fails in two ways. First, he says the black women covering the First Lady are both biased and ineffective: “None of the beat writers has been granted an interview since the inauguration.” Second, he throws in the words that “the White House press corps remains predominantly white,” but he does not even attempt to explain how newsrooms are engines of “social replication”–where likes promote like–and of scrutiny and tokenism inhibiting the success of non-white employees. (Check out Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s seminal work, among others.)

One of the tropes of American life is that whites seem raceless, by default; and that only non-whites have racial attributes, and thus distinctions and biases. This presumption-of-transparency when it comes to whiteness is particularly dangerous in the newsroom. At the same time, for example, that my now-cancelled show “News and Notes” was scrutinized for any bias towards then-Senator Obama, one of the people constantly reminding us not to be biased would use the phrase “my friend Karl Rove” without the slightest sense of irony.

Was the disconnected chit-chat about Rove/Obama a racial failing, a political failing, a journalistic failing, or all three? Sometimes its hard to parse the reason because all these issues fall under an “intersectionality” of interests. (Thanks to Professor Kimberle Crenshaw for her work on intersectionality.)

Among the many issues of media favoritism that stands out in my mind is one concerning former President George W. Bush. As we all know, being vetted for offenses concerning alcohol and drug use is a part of the race for the presidency. And we also know that George W. Bush had an alcohol problem in the past.

Fine, you say.

But although the outcome of the elections may have been the same, at least one reporter played a critical role in covering up Bush’s actions… thus preventing what could have and should have been a robust discussion of responsibility early in the race.

As the American Journalism Review puts it:

In July [2000], [Portland Maine] Press Herald reporter Ted Cohen, 49, discovered George W. Bush’s 1976 drunk driving arrest in Kennebunkport, Maine–a story that mysteriously eluded the national media, which claimed to have combed through every inch of Bush’s background.

But his editor, a man named Andrew Russell, told him it was not a story.

I won’t comment further, except to say that Russell later regretted his decision. So did a lot of voters who we reporters promise to inform, so they as voters can decide.

So what’s the big picture here? It’s fairness and favor. And as if the fates were making a broader point to Kurtz and all of us who care about journalism, the Washington Post is now engaged in a much broader, more troubling controversy. In essence, the Post promised lobbyists and folks with $25,000 to a quarter of a million dollars paid access to newsmakers. Now the Post is apologizing, and Kurtz noted it in today’s CNN broadcast. That story is all over the ‘net and the NYT reports here, perhaps too gleefully.

Again, big picture: I would argue that reporters of color face a constant scrutiny about our motives that actually inhibits favoritism; and that white, heterosexual reporters, especially men, see themselves and their actions as neutral even when they are not. You may find a black reporter talking about her “sista-girl” circle in an article on Michelle Obama… but I’ve never seen an example in the mainstream media of a black reporter signing off on a program that broke one of the fundamental tenets of journalism–that paid access for lobbyists and journalism don’t mix. (Some of the pay-to-play antics of traditional African-American media outlets will be another story for another day…)

Of course, Kurtz went on CNN today to criticize the Washington Post. Who isn’t chiming in? But I wish Kurtz would do a deeper investigation of the fig leaf of white neutrality; and take a harder look in the mirror as well.

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Farai Chideya is a broadcaster, author, novelist (Kiss the Sky) and the founder of PopandPolitics.com

Farai’s disclaimers and IDs:
I used to work for Newsweek, which is cited in Kurtz’ article on black women reporters.
I know Newsweek reporter Allison Samuels.
I used to work for CNN and sometimes still appear on their air.
I don’t think #CNNFail was smart because it could have been #MSNBCFail and #FoxFail as well.
I wrote a seminal book on race and media titled Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans.
And I am a black woman, last time I checked.

I recently released Kiss the Sky, a novel about a black rock musician. Then I did an event with an actual black rock musician who read my book and said that the part about Michael Jackson was so eerie. I had forgotten all about it. But I found it…written years ago… and yes, eerie.

Tell me what you think about MJ and your memories… I am getting creeped out watching all the old footage, especially the ones of Diana calling Michael “sexy” while they are are both wearing those dark spangly shirts…

I wish he’d been happy. I find it hard to believe he was.

Peace,
F

____________________________________________________

Excerpt, Kiss the Sky, Atria Books, 2009
(Written from the P.O.V. of the main character.)

Drifted into a drowse and thought about the way music was my whole life.

My great grandfather sold Billie Holiday reefers, back when she was a bad little girl and he was a dirty old man. A withered up little yellow man. Always looking at the girls of school-age. A sailor, in and out of port. In town just long enough every time to get great-grandma pregnant. And wasn’t it just like me to love Billie, all of her, even her vices.

Then there was my first musical love, Michael Jackson. I was six, and to my child’s eyes he seemed just enough older to know a lot of things I wanted to learn. He was pure music, shimmering, shimmying, shaking, grooving, moving, liquid hipbones and fluid bell-bottomed pantlegs, denim, slouchy caps, a sexy choirboy backed up by his older brothers; plus television, dancing lions and tin-men, a too-old Diana as Dorothy. But wait, that last part was later.

Still, the Michael and “The Wiz” were always linked in my mind. When I was six, my Daddy and I went to see “The Wiz,” way before the movie with Michael and Diana, before the nose jobs and the skin lighteners and the hair straighteners and out-of-court settlements. Strange third-person memory: I see myself and my father walk towards the exit, along a half-lit aisle, with the play unfolding (bright reds and golds) behind us.

But: Michael. His was the music of longing, in a man-child’s voice that a little girl could understand before she truly knew desire. I liked Michael the same time Daddy liked to play the Isley Brothers. I didn’t understand the Isley’s lyrics (thank God), but their guitar licks and keyboards made it hard for me not to dance; their whispers tickled my ears.

Older still: When my girl scout troop had a party I brought Stevie Wonder and my friend Ronnice brought Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” which was everything you needed to know about the difference between uncool and cool. Stevie was uplifting and parent-approved; the teenaged Michael was your best friend’s older brother, a boy who you had a crush on so bad you thought you might melt every time you saw him. Ronnice was in fifth grade and I was in third, which might have been part of my problem, but not all of it. She was what my mother called “fast”–loose with the boys, hard and unforgiving with the girls.

I loved Michael, don’t get me wrong. How could I not? He was my first. But I mounted a defense of Stevie, which all the girls took as a weak-assed move.

When I was in eighth grade, Ronnice had an abortion. Like most of my fast girlfriends, she loved house music, the kind you heard in the clubs she’d sneak into. She was underaged but built like a brick shithouse and nobody checked her I.D. When she got into LL Cool J, I was loving Prince.

Later I worked my way through alternative rock, romantic R&B, gay disco, Public Enemy, Madonna and Grace Jones. Music ecstatic and anthemic, smoke drifting through laser lights, tranny boys in platform heels and lip liner, parties on the subway platform, lots of drugs but not down my throat or up my nose, the music simply lifting me, carrying me like the wind under the cape of a superhero or a pigeon caught in an updraft from a subway grate.

The music, just the music, used to be enough for me. Everything else came later.

I wanted to get back to those days again.

____________________________________________

This is an excerpt from Kiss the Sky (Atria Books 2009) by Farai Chideya. Chideya is a multimedia journalist, author, and the founder of PopandPolitics.com

Michael Jackson seemed crushed under a weight of identity: black/man/star/brother/father/son. Add philanthropist/media-victim and -manipulator/accused pederast/primate owner/fashionista and dancer. Owner of, and now perhaps a returnee to, Neverland.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece asking what happened to the brownskinned boy who stole my heart and those of girls my age across the world. Why did he shed his color, and the sincerity of his smile?

As people gathered today on Twitter to share stories, sift the real news from the fake, and mourn, I saw reporter Lisa Ling post, “RIP Michael Jackson, My First Boyfriend.” I felt the same way. It wasn’t just a childhood crush. Over time, I felt like I was one of millions of people who wanted Michael Jackson to succeed. MTV at first refused to play his videos because black artists, no matter how successful, didn’t fit their idea of their format. Of course Michael, with the help of Quincy Jones, went on to become the King of Pop and the king of music video.
In the intro to Thriller, Michael says “I’m not like other guys” and “I’m different”… and then proceeds to transmogrify into a werewolf.

Pop cult from “Twilight” to “Harry Potter” has taken feelings of alienation and packaged them for wide consumption. Michael was one of the first masters of our modern era to do that well.

But what he could not seem to do is seize control of his own transformation and find his own center as a man, not just a creator. After all, the trope of successful transformation is that the hero becomes something else, but can return to his or her human emotions if not human form.

John Landis, the director of “Thriller,” has called Jackson a “tragic figure.” And that brings me, personally, back to race. Race added a very specific prism to the failed transformation of Michael Jackson. His plastic surgery bordered on pathology and racial caricature. His need for the spotlight brought him, arguably, into clashes with both the law and public opinion. I am thinking specifically of the charges of his treatment of children… others’, and his own.

Would he have felt freer to pursue his own alternative identity if we had not also wanted him to be what he could not seem to be… an adult black man who provided fodder for the fantasies we cherished when he was a child?

In the prelude to the Thriller video, Michael Jackson speaks to the black, bobbysox-wearing girl who is his love interest and says, “You know I like you… And I hope you like me the way I like you.” Sigh.

We always loved you, Michael. I hope you found peace in just being you, whoever you were, and despite what we all wanted you to be.

=====

Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.

This article is also cross-posted on The Grio.

Thinking,
Hoping the best for his family,
F
=======================

You were my first. Back when the other kids were swaying to nursery rhymes, I wanted to rock with you. I had everything I needed — a portable stereo and an album of you singing with the Jackson Five. According to my mother, I would drag around my little stereo, and I would put you on, and I would dance. Nothing else in the world could have made me happier.

I remember you. Your lips were full and your nose was wide and your face was brown. This only rates mentioning because it is no longer true, so untrue, in fact, that sometimes I wonder if I imagined you as you once were. I’m sure at night, as a child, I dreamed of the boy with the afro who sang and spun on his heels like a miniature James Brown.

I wish that boy had become a man. That wish seemed reasonable all the way through “Off the Wall,” when your nose grew narrower and hair more lank, but you were still visibly black. With every subsequent album your relationship to your original appearance grew fainter and fainter, until you were no longer even an echo of yourself. But the further you fled from black masculinity, the more international crowds lionized you. Today you are a grotesque.

And an alleged child molester — that too? If we can believe what we see in the camera lens — that this pale alien being (recently parodied in “Scary Movie 3″) was once cute little Michael — then we can believe anything. The danger for us is that we will judge you by your appearance. The danger for you is that you have set up a situation, with your reckless behavior around your own children and others’, that we cannot help but judge.

In his book The Hip Hop Generation,” Bakari Kitwana relentlessly outlines America’s broken promise to black males. Mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and unbalanced enforcement of drug laws have helped make prison a waystation or home for many more black men than white. In Los Angeles and Cincinnati, frustrated youth up-end their own neighborhoods to draw attention to police brutality. The global economy undermines the fortunes of lower-skilled workers, many of them African-Americans. The military, in many cases, remains the only way out.

This social warfare has hardened many black men, aiding and abetting the culture of hypermasculinity that permeates hip hop. It’s hard to be a sister and be down with the bitch/’ho lyrics, hard to be down with men who spout rhymes full of anti-female fury. Commercial hip hop may appeal to young women who can pretend that the men are calling out someone else, but to an older head like myself it sounds as if they are speaking my name. I cannot listen to it. I cannot dance.

But I long to take the floor with the same childish glee that I did when you and I were together. I desperately want you to be there for me, to reassure me that things aren’t so bad that the primary options open to black men are hatred of black women or physical and mental disintegration. I would like to think that you, the shadow Michael who never had a chance to grow up, wouldn’t treat me the way those other men do. But I’m the furthest thing from your mind.

In your absence, the absence of a Michael I can relate to, I have only questions. Why does America destroy and pervert black men? Were you squeezed between racism and perfectionism until your very soul compressed? And what about those without your millions of dollars? What options are left for them?

I feel — and I know it cannot be true, for I still breathe — that if you cannot exist, I cannot exist. If there is no room for a loving black masculinity in the world, I fear there is little room for the black feminine as well. You, Michael Jackson, are not all black men, and for that I am grateful. But your decline says more about America than we can bear to hear.

====

Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.
This was posted on Alternet.org on November 26, 2003.

For the extremists who believe my father is a hero, it is imperative you understand what he did was an act of cowardice. To physically force your beliefs onto others with violence is not brave, but bullying. Doing so only serves to prove how weak those beliefs are. It is simply desperation, reminiscent of a temper tantrum when a child cannot get his way.

More controversially, Erik von Brunn also said:

I cannot express enough how deeply sorry I am it was Mr. Johns [the slain museum security guard], and not my father who lost their life.

It may well be that nothing could have stopped James von Brunn, and that no one–friends or family–could have reached him. But there are some people in hate movements or who are extremists/supremacists who can be reached… I offer my experience below.

It’s normal to want to close ranks when we see extremism turn deadly. Here in the U.S. we have had, back to back, the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed late-term abortions, and a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, both by dangerous, alienated men who made no secret of their (multiple) hatreds. If you want to raise your fear factor even higher, you can turn on the television and see coverage of the slaying of an anti-Taliban cleric in Pakistan…. or remember that the President-select of Iran is also a Holocaust denier.

But some of the most enlightening moments in my life have come from talking to men and women from hate movements, and I’ll tell you why.

Let me start with a story. One winter many years ago, after a blizzard that closed workplaces and schools, I drove from Washington, DC, to a park-n-ride lot in Frederick, Maryland. In that lot were piles of fresh, white snow and exactly one other car. I walked to the car and met the Roger Kelly, the Grand Dragon of a local klaveren of Ku Klux Klansmen. Make that Klansmen and -women. I specifically connected with him in order to speak to one of his followers about her role as a woman in the hate movement.

She was not the first Klanswoman I’d spoken to, but the first I’d met face to face. And so we, two women, one black and one white, stood eye to eye in the cold and I got as much information as I could about her life and beliefs.

Life had not been kind to her. She was worn out, with some missing teeth, lined skin, scraggly hair. I bet she was much younger than she looked. To her, being a part of the Klan — which of course not only rejects racial equality but espouses anti-Semitism — was part of her attempt to save America (and her family) from what she saw as the social, ethical, religious, and economic ravages of a racially mixed America.

While I certainly did not cotton to her views, I looked into her eyes and saw not just a member of the Klan, but a member of the human race. I do not say that with sentimentality. Humans are wonderful, transcendent… genocidal…loving…hateful. We are human precisely because members of our species can be all of these things. We are often fearful, which the Klanswoman was. She found solace in a place where she was validated for her fear and anger.

Yet another time I talked to a female leader of an armed, racist skinhead compound in the West… by phone… and revealed only at the end of the call that I was black. I asked what she would have done if she had known (or even asked) first. She said, “I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

That would have been a shame. I learned so much from her. She’d left her wealthy, priveleged family (whose name is in the Social Register) after feeling alienated and ignored. Judging by pictures I later saw of the skinhead leader, she was youthful and vital–the physical opposite of the Klanswoman I’d met. She’d spoken to me proudly over the phone of winning an athletic competition at an Aryan Nation gathering. In some ways, she seemed the gleaming, Amazonian superhero of hate. But inside, there was still that wounded girl who told me that she joined the hate movement because she wanted a family who loved her. She believed she had found it in white supremacy.

I feel grateful that I had the mix of reporterly curiosity and youthful bravado (or perhaps foolishness) that allowed me to do this reporting. It forever changed how I look at extremists, and how to I listen and talk to them.

I listen with an ear for degrees of hate-in-action. Sometimes I will go to white supremacist sites and blogs to see what’s being discussed. (You better believe they are reading broadly as well.) I read up via organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center on incidents and demographics of extremist groups. But I also, in some circumstances, will talk to hate-mongers themselves. I listen for subtext. The narrative of supremacy is domination. But the meta-narrative of the lives of many supremacists and extremists is a longing for belonging.

So, when we as a society begin to tune out or shy away from people who already have borderline extreme views, these people often turn deeper into their fears. At a time of social and economic upheaval like ours, there will be many people whose genuine need for security and community will go badly awry. Social isolation helps fuel paranoia. Paranoia is the best recruiting tool that supremacist groups have.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
I am not asking people to “hug a Klansman.” That may get you a beating, or worse. Some of the Klan groups in Maryland had murdered black people… and white rivals. I became convinced I could talk to these particular racists in Frederick face to face after interviewing musician Daryl Davis, author of Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan

. He played rock, country, and blues in local bars, and found out that his fans included white supremacists. One of those supremacist-fans was Roger Kelly, who Davis first observed and later, of all things, befriended. I met Kelly in the snowy parking lot years after he’d met Davis. And then years after Kelly and I spoke…he renounced his membership in the Klan. (I guess having a black friend and being in the Klan was just too much cognitive dissonance.)

If this were a movie (and someone should make a movie about Davis and Kelly), you would cue music and do a little fist bump of joy. While I believe listening to the nuances of extremist dialogue can prevent some deadly incidents, it will not prevent them all. We cannot listen to extremists with the expectation that they will change. We can listen with the expectation that we will change. Perhaps if we become less fearful, we will remain in dialogue with people who are on the margins… but not yet at the barracades of hate. 305 online download

I tweeted a garbled version of the breaking news, and then many voices chimed in online, most voicing outrage and some demanding military action.

Outrage is more than justified.

But the calls for military action seemed to come out of a void… a void where the only response to provocation and injustice is to start what we have no clear vision of finishing: that is, another war, on another front. Twenty years ago Afghanistan handed the Soviet forces their rear ends on a platter, in a conflict that is often equated to Vietnam. If a nation is willing to expend countless people to win a war; willing to accept mass casualties; then it is almost impossible to crush that nation militarily. North Korea is a very different military and government model than Afghanistan, but it too has already shown a willingness to let families die of famine (well over a million in recent years) rather than play ball with other nations.

The New York Times points out that both the US and the UN are considering sanctions against North Korea for its recent nuclear tests. But it also runs this telling quote:

“Our response would be to consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard-line measures,” the North Korea’s state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said in a commentary.

In other words, North Korea is spoiling for a fight. The sentencing of Lee and Ling may not be an attempt to guard against conflict, but rather to provoke it. (Note that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton , in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, already tried to apologize and broker a release… before the sentence came down.)

Why look for battle? To be seen as a “big man” in international affairs is no small thing. Many have defied the U.S. with fewer means to more than scattered applause from some quarters. Yes, some people were rooting for the Somali pirates who captured the U.S. vessel.

So: a nuclear equipped nation is spoiling for a fight with the world’s only superpower, a superpower which finds itself overextended militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two journalists are held in breach. Two young women are away from their families and lives, potentially for years, for doing their jobs.

It’s rare that Americans are put in this position, directly in the line of fire. Journalist Chauncey Bailey was killed in Oakland, California, in 2007 while investigating a possible murder cover up. Some American reporters have been wounded and died in Iraq. (I think of the moving writing of Michael Weisskopf of Time magazine, who tossed a grenade thrown into the vehicle he was riding in in Iraq out… saving his life and others’ but losing his arm.) But the people imprisoned or killed for “committing” journalism are usually not American or even Western. Countless Iraqui translators and reporters have been killed, often working as stringers for Western media. Latin America has seen journalists killed covering narcotrafficking, government corruption, and crime.

Groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists work on these issues every day. (Their website, linked above, runs the headlines “Tiananmen anniversary, obscured” and “Fifth Somali Journalist Killed this Year.”) Few people outside of the media industry even know that groups like the CPJ exist.

Of all the questions that come to mind when looking at the case of Lee, Ling, and North Korea, the one troubling most people I know (personally or in the Twitter-verse) is: What do I do? What do we

do? What can we do?

The first thing we can do is to inform ourselves, to get to know more about North Korea than its name. We need to learn more about the possible regime change in North Korea and how it could hinder diplomacy; what recent and past North Korean actions (from the nuclear tests to famines

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to the 1953 armistice with South Korea, which the North says it now will not honor) say about this government and its desires; who is negotiating on behalf of the U.S.; and how movements like the call for action in Darfur have or have not worked in addressing human rights issues.

On that last score, two more phrases come to mind: celebrity and social networking. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), perhaps the most followed person in the Twitter-verse, chimed in to say, among several things, that he was exploring ways to network a coalition of supporters. I do believe it matters than Laura comes from an already well-network family. (Her sister Lisa Ling does or has worked for outlets including Oprah and ABC; Lisa and I briefly overlapped at ABC). I do believe it is critical for celebrities and other people who connect the media to the masses (i.e., most of us) get their talking points ready. And those talking points must include an actual depth of knowledge about the situation.

So: what do we do? We listen, we learn. Let me repeat that: we learn. We learn about the situation; the diplomatic interventions; and who can help. Whether we are journalists, celebrities, news consumers, even diplomats, we can constantly refresh our knowledge of the situation and strive to help from a position of educated power and compassion.

To the speedy freedom of these two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee; to a renewal of our interest in and championing of brave journalism as well as brave journalists.

If you are still following me, or if you are not, I am talking about guilt.

This scenario–interviewing the mother of a murdered child–happened when I was a cub reporter twenty years ago. I made note of the room, the way we were seated (bereaved to the left; police information officer to the right). I noticed, and will never forget, that the mother of the murdered woman kept picking at her fingernail beds and that they were raw to the point of bleeding.

I teared up but did not cry as she described how her daughter dated this controlling man; how she ended their relationship and then started a healthy one; and then how, one day, the man who was her ex walked up to the home she shared with her fiancee and shot the couple dead.

So: I showed feelings during my interview. Was that bad? I don’t think so. Sympathy. But on the knife’s edge. Control is important too.

The movie “Broadcast News” uses actor William Hurt as a perfect example of journalism gone bad. (SPOILER ALERT). During a one-camera shoot, after his main interview, he asks the cameraman to turn the camera on him and he effortlessly produces tears. They cut that into the “reaction shot” of what looks like a two-camera shoot.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “one camera shoot” versus two, just think of it literally. We are now much more advanced (and film and cameras are cheaper) than the ’80s, ENG-cam broadcast news heyday. But imagine a one-camera shoot. You have one man behind the camera. (S)he can either shoot the subject; the interviewer; or the scene (commonly known as “B-roll”). If the interviewer and subject are seated next to each other, (s)he can shoot both talkers at the same time.

What you cannot do, and what “Broadcast News” explored and exposed, is have a tight shot of the face of the person being interviewed and get the simultaneous reaction of the reporter.

A facial tight shot is money. We react to the mirroring effect of seeing someone else up close. Thus, once we figured out the economics of shooting television, we moved towards two-camera shoots, where you can alternate close-ups of different people; or multi-camera shoots, where you can freely intercut different perspectives on the same narrative.

I bring this up only because–and I wish I remember who said this–the ultimate discretion of the journalist is what to leave out. What we often leave out is any trace that a journalist has feelings.

Too much evidence that the reporter is reacting to the subject/narrative is “soft” and sentimental. No evidence at all and the reporter might as well be… well, a camera. Or a microphone.

So where do those of us who practice journalism find the space between feeling and telling?

Think and hold that… more soon.

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In 1962 Crayola changed the name of their “Flesh” crayon to “Peach”, out of respect for the then-burgeoning civil rights movement. The crayon company’s cultural sensitivity memo apparently never trickled down to some typically female-oriented industries. You can hit up any department store and find an array of foundation garments labelled “nude.” But if your skin color is anything darker than beige, you’re fresh outta luck for finding a pair of control panties that exactly match you. And the same thing goes for makeup. Most specifically, lipstick.

As spring turns to summer every year, the magazines all start sounding the trumpet. Nude makeup is back! Get that hot nude look!

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And with reason — it makes for a very glam, very feminine, eternally fresh look. When done right, a nude lip doesn’t make you look washed out or corpse-like, au contraire. A smokey eye and a nude lip, so timeless, so gorgeous.

But guess what — nude isn’t a universal shade (according to my experience, at any rate. The Sephora bloggers have been convinced otherwise . I’ll have to do some research and get back to you on that one).

Lipsticks called “nude” frequently look just plain crazy on me. Consider some of the hottest options available online. Yves Saint Laurent Sparkling Touch For Lips in Sparkling Nude would be too pink, Philosophy Big Mouth lip sheer in nude, too peach. L’Oreal Endless Kissable Lipcolor in Shamelessly Nude 870 is too light, and I don’t know whose skintone Maybelline Moisture Extreme Lipstick in Nude Blush is supposed to match. Even my palest friends might have a hard time with a pink that wan and opaque.

The point is, the typical nude probably isn’t my nude. And most of the time, the products called “nude” are made for a very limited and narrow-minded perspective of what “nude” is. Does that mean that the look doesn’t work for women of color? No siree — it just means you gotta look a little harder for the right nude for you.
The perfect nude should match your skin tone almost perfectly, covering over any slight discoloration your lips may have. A touch of shimmer or gloss amps up the look, but subtle beauty is the watchword. How can you tell that you’ve found your perfect nude? If you try it on the back of your hand, it should almost completely disappear, leaving only slight, pretty shine to let you know where it is.

The perfect “nude” lippie for a brown skinned bella might be a warm rose pink, it might be bronze, it might even be a plum or berry, or a deep, fabulous brown. Valana Minerals Sweet Spice collection has a gorgeous range of deep browns that could work wonderfully for my dark skinned bellas. Cordial Spice is a deep berry, and Nutmeg Spice is deep, dark, delicious brown with gold highlights. Layered under some Carol’s Daughter Candy Paint Lip Gloss in Bubbling Brown Sugar — oh, honey. Don’t hurt ‘em!

Philosophy the supernatural lip gloss in neutral is a great, very universal slightly-sheer warm pinky-brown lipgloss that would work great for many brown skinned bellas.

The standout nude lipstick for me is Cover Girl Queen Collection in Shiny Cinnamon. It’s a warm, creamy pinky brown that is incredibly subtle and stunning on me. When I put it on, I feel liberated to go with really bold eye makeup — a nude lip sets off bangin’ eye drama like nothing else. I love this look for outdoorsy days – it’s very clean, very fresh, and it goes perfectly with my happy spring wardrobe!

Do you rock the nude look, bellas? Or have you not found your perfect shade yet?

This post originally appeared on Afrobella’s blog.

“You’re multicultural with different lifestyles and beliefs,” he said, “and together, you represent the face of America.”

Those words could have come from the mouth of another of last weekend’s commencement speakers, President Barack Obama. The President has made multiculturalism as American as apple pie, and invested what used to be fraught cultural territory with a sense of shared destiny. In this case, though, I was listening to Dr. John Ruffin of the National Institutes of Health address the 25th graduating class of Morehouse Medical School, a class which includes my cousin.

The medical school is affiliated with Morehouse College, a historically black male undergraduate institution founded after the Civil War. Yet though the majority of students and families were black American, other families helping to robe the newly-minted doctors included women in saris or wearing Muslim headscarves; mothers and fathers in lavish matching garb from West Africa; parents with the last name Chen or Rodriguez; and families from our nation’s racial majority for another three decades, plus or minus: white Americans.

Just a decade ago, America was in denial about our rapidly changing racial and cultural landscape. The U.S. Census had released projections that by the year 2050, America would have no racial majority. Today, they’ve moved that projected date up to 2042.

Some people think that having a black President means we can afford to put away the topic of race altogether. That complacency, combined with our current economic crisis, could put the lives and futures of students at risk. Education is what turns the American Dream into the American Reality. And education is in deep trouble, first as a thing-in-itself, and also as an indicator of our racial future.

As Dr. Ruffin called on these young doctors to end health disparities, I flashed back to experiences I’d had a decade ago reporting a book called “The Color of Our Future.” For two years, I crisscrossed America from the Crow reservation in Montana to the Georgia/Florida line, to get teens’ take on the role of race in their lives. Many of them struggled to reconcile the fact that the deck was stacked against them–because of race, income, immigration status, and more–with their own righteous belief that they could break through the barriers and fulfill their dreams.

The Media Academy at Fremont High School in Oakland put those struggles in plain sight. It lies on a street filled with idling day laborers, and operates out of worn trailers or “portables” over a decade old. But it has a track record of doing big things with tough or educationally challenged kids.

Earlier this year, I brought graduate students from the journalism school at The University of California, Berkeley, to meet the teens at Fremont High. The grad students were a mix of races, themselves; but the Fremont students included immigrants from several countries including Vietnam and El Salvador as well as black students born in the neighborhood. As was true a decade ago, the high school was what I call “ABW”–Anything But White.

We talked about media, education funding cuts and local school closures (which one brave Fremont student was investigating, much to the consternation of some officials), plus issues including the economy and the fatal shooting of a cuffed man by transit police on New Year’s day. A mix of student and professional crews videotaped the event so we could leave some record of who we were and what are struggling with in our time.

In another environment, many of these kids would be tracked low-achieving or low-literacy and put on the back burner of society. Instead, this graduation season brings moments of joy as students from this tough little program get their diplomas and gear up to go to college. That kind of scene doesn’t happen often enough.

Yes, the Obama Administration is juggling the crises of jobs, foreclosures, banking, wars, and healthcare. We still have to ask when our President intends to foreground educational opportunity, and what he will ask of us as a nation. For example: how will we balance short-term stopgapping (like the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds) with “big think” long term change? Why are so many public schools today, even high-achieving ones, “ABW”? Is school integration effectively dead, fifty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education? How can not just white but middle- and upper-middle-income families be reconnected to public schooling? Will the new political rainbow coalition lose its might once people start debating who should get affirmative action–rich and black, or poor and white? Will “equality,” in this economic crisis, mean that more white Americans are poorly educated, as opposed to more students of color doing well? (That prospect should chill our bones.)

Let’s take a moment during this graduation season to ask how we can raise the profile of educational equality among the issues our nation faces. When I looked at the smiling, multi-ethnic group of newly minted doctors marching out of Morehouse Medical School, I saw an extraordinary example of how shared struggle and success brings people together. The question for all of us is how we can take this kind of achievement, broaden it to the education system at large…and make it the rule, not the exception.

_________

Farai Chideya is an award-winning journalist who has written three nonfiction books on media, politics and race, including “The Color of Our Future”; plus the newly released novel “Kiss the Sky.” She is now researching “The Color of Our Future in the Age of Obama.”

You can find the rough cut of the video about the Media Academy and U.C. Berkeley students here download the return .

Far be it from me to oppose a good passionate grassroots movement. Maybe I’m dating myself here, but I still remember big, huge marches and demonstrations that energized the heart and focused our nation’s gaze on high ideas—at least for the day. I support the scattered message tea partiers who have every right to take to the streets, distort history, wave their offensive signs and spout misinformation about the “inevitable” consequences of the proposed Federal tax increases.

And believe it or not, I don’t think the anti-spending battle cry is primarily about race per se. Although the prevalence of racist ideas promoted at some rallies was pretty un-American I’d say. I actually think the overarching motivation is something more fundamentally democratic than that. I think the tea parties are about people trying to find a way to push back on feelings of powerlessness. I think the tea parties are a fear-based reaction to change that many just cannot digest. Reasons vary, I suppose. It’s ironic given that the tea party people are now calling for ‘revolution’. [As an aside, I just would like to know exactly what this imagined “revolt” would lead to exactly? If anyone knows what America would look like the day after a successful “tea party revolution,” please explain in the comments section.]

With the election of President Obama, and our economy in the pooper, I think many of the protesters are finally facing the fact that “the land of their fathers” is gone – for good. What mystifies me is that it is impossible for some tea party protesters to acknowledge that a particular brand of American Dream has been pulling away from most of us at an alarming pace for the past eight years.

And to those who are genuinely panicked and taking to the streets out of concern for our country’s fiscal health? I would suggest that those within your ranks who compare Barack Obama to Hitler or Stalin, or who make light of the Holocaust by calling taxpayers “Jews for Obama’s ovens” are making your movement look tone deaf and hostile to independents like me. Their prominence, and your acceptance of them stepping into your movement, clouds and diminishes any argument you make. You simply cannot see President Barack Obama as Hitler, after 90 days in office, and not be suffering from extreme color arousal disorder, otherwise known as racism.

Protesting Obama as Overspender-in-chief? I get it. I, too, have mixed feelings about the federal stimulus price tag. Protesting against Obama because he’s the new Hitler or Stalin? Crazy.

This article originally appeared on Carmen Dixon’s blog, All About Race.

With the current economic crisis, rising unemployment and dwindling oil reserves, many people including President Obama are talking about developing a green economy. One Los Angeles school district is well on its way to training tomorrow’s green workers.

We have a special report.

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Tippin’ hats to Tip … In response to T.I.’s prison sentence of one year and and a day, some of Hip Hop’s famous have sent warm-hearted goodbyes, saying that the down south rapper will be missed. “From I’m Serious to Paper Trail, T.I. (and T.I.P. for that matter) has shown incredible growth as an artist, businessman and a friend,” Bun B said in a statement to MTV News. T.I. is serving time in Atlanta for felony weapons charges that occured on the eve of the BET Hip Hop Awards.

Pete Wentz, move out of the way … The original guylined punk rocker is back — Billie Joe Armstrong and the rest of Green Day are returning with their eighth studio release 21st Century Breakdown, slated to drop on Friday, May 15. The long-awaited album will be their first full-length since 2004’s American Idiot, and is produced by Butch Vig (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage). The first single, “Know Your Enemy,” hits digital vendors in April.

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mix … The buzz around rapper P.O.S. gets even louder as the versatile DJ/producer released a video covering Pearl Jam’s famous track “Why Go?” featuring his talent on the mic, some keys, and the tables. The dude knocks the use of autotune and uses his true blue vocals in the pretty stellar rendition. Check it out here:

America loses some soul this week … New Orleans bluesman Eddie Bo (79) and Motown’s Funk Brothers drummer Uriel Jones (74) died this week, two significant losses in the African American music community. Bo, whose death was confirmed by his booking agent Friday, suffered a “sudden massive heart attack,” while Jones relapsed from complications of a recent heart attack also, according to his sister-in-law. Eddie Bo was known mostly for his New Orleansesque hit single “Check Mr. Popeye,” while Uriel Jones was best known for his psychedelic touches on the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine,” and “I Can’t Get Next To You.”

The judge, Charles Pannell Jr. of Northern Georgia District Court, praised T.I. Writes Eonline,

“I think this has been a great experiment. I hope this experience can lead to other experiments so others won’t make the same mistake at all. I congratulate you.”

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