farai chideya

Michael As Memory

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

michael-jackson

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

(more…)

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The Journey of the Journalist: Part 1: Why is saving journalism not enough?

Friday, June 5th, 2009

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I’ve been a journalist for 20 years– through full-time jobs at Newsweek, MTV, CNN, ABC, Oxygen, and NPR; part-time ones at One Economy, KALW, and WNYC; the founding and (ongoing) rebuilding of PopandPolitics.com; and three non-fiction books on race, politics, and media. I’ve rolled with the punches and thrown a few. But now more than ever, the business that I entered at the age of sixteen, with my first national publication, is, well, in a hell of hurt. Many of my highly skilled friends who report, edit, or run newsrooms are unemployed, underemployed, or just plain scared.

I say this to set the table for a series of blog pots/musings. I’m a practitioner of journalism; a consumer of journalism; a critic… sometimes a journalism educator; sometimes an entrepreneur. I’m worried, and not just for myself. (I would be lying if I said I don’t have many jobs and opportunities; and disingenuous if I said I was calm.)

Lots of people are worried about the fate of reporting and media in America. Organizations are going bankrupt or out of business, including scores of America’s daily newspapers. Tens of thousands of journalists are being given their walking papers and finding they cannot re-enter the industry. We have created ways that entirely new forms of media can upend “old media,” but that digital victory is without a clear profit model. Yes, in the short term, media is the crushed anthill: damage, death, panic, rushing disorder. But I believe that journalists, like our smaller, more resilient, and far more numerous insect cousins, are prone and programmed to rebuild.

Rebuilding is great. But is it enough? What if we put the profit back in media? What if you can build new media empires that make the owners rich or the foundation heads lauded; the employees comfortable; and the consumers reasonably satisfied? What then? Do we in the business breathe with relief, pay off our credit card bills, and settle in for another round of who-gets-the-corner-office? We’re worried about the means and the method of rebuilding media. But judging from my personal on- and off- the record discussions with for- and non-profit media businesses, as well as interactions at an endless numbers of “whither this/whither that” panels and conferences (and looking at the demographics of who’s in the room)… we’re not ready to face our biggest demon. That demon is exclusion: the way many Americans are cut out of media production and consumption, and the way many of us in the business are sanguine about it.

We in the media are not “the people,” nor do we represent them as fully as we often claim to. “Citizen journalism,” as we now call it, may be valuable and produced by non-traditional journalists. But most of the people who create it are still more educated, more technologically skilled, and more likely to be white than the demographics of the overall U.S. population. (By and large, “citizen journalists” are also less skilled at tasks like investigative reporting and historical research than traditional journalists.)

When forty percent of Americans are of limited literacy, let alone whatever digital divide still remains, then we have a much bigger problem than trying to build innovative blog rings, aggregators, local news sites or content engines. When the ranks of non-white journalists, already limited, are falling faster in the era of cutbacks than they were before–we have a problem. When organizations question the objectivity of people who fall outside of institutional norms… in some newsrooms, say, gays and lesbians; in others, Southerners or rural people … but they DON’T question the means and motives of people who fit the majority: that is a problem. When the journalism organizations designed to champion diversity have drawn so many checks from corporations that they cannot afford to challenge business owners… or only realize too late (once the checks are gone) that they should be… that too is a problem.

We are only as good as our willingness to change. And while the journalism industry is willing to rebuild itself, I am not convinced we’re challenging ourselves to provide an ethical context around reporting on a diverse society in transition.

Recently I met in a newsroom with a younger journalist who said: “It’s ridiculous that the newsroom is this white in a city this diverse.”

I shrugged and nodded. It wasn’t a “you’re wrong” shrug and nod. It was more a “yeah, been there, done that, wrote the book, fought the layoff, got my butt whipped, still standing, what did you expect?” gesture. The reality is, I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t have anything to say that would have inspired this person.

Now, after much reflection, I do. I say to myself as much as to anyone else in media: “Keep fighting for your ideals… if you don’t win, you will at least know why you are in the game.” I believe good journalism usually comes from a mix of vocation, or personal calling, and avocation– the latter in the sense of having a “day job” rather than having a hobby. Most successful journalists I know are, as one college student who recently interviewed me put it, “hustlers”– people whose mix of skill, institutional memory, luck, and self-promotional tendencies make them formidable at staying in the game.

Most of us will have not just several jobs but several careers in our lifetime. I don’t count on being a working journalist forever. (No, I’m not planning to leave the profession any time soon.) I believe journalism has changed me, mainly but not always the land before time ii the great valley adventure dvd for the better. I will always have the eyes and ears of a journalist, which is a valuable skill but sometimes puts me in an alienating social position.

This series of blog columns, “The Journey of the Journalist,” is my attempt to think and write at the same time. It’s not a finished product in the same sense a magazine article or television piece is, but rather a data point for a conversation. My motivation is to share some of my journey and simultaneously record and reflect on it; to share and to learn; to listen and learn from others.

I don’t know what form this will ultimately take, but I’ve set off the journey.

See you on the road.

Peace,
Farai

@faraichideya
www.faraichideya.com

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Educational Opportunity in the Age of Obama

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

obamagrad
The man leaned out over the podium, looking at the robed students seated in the first rows of the auditorium.

“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 .

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Letter from Farai: We Are Not On Our Knees

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

spiritofdetroit

In his address to Congress Tuesday, President Barack Obama said, “We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

It sounds good. Will it happen? It’s very much up to us.

We live in a country that, until recently, floated on a bubble of consumer spending. Every time we ran up our credit cards, we made it a little easier to generate economic indicators (like the Gross Domestic Product) that said we were fine. We were producing and consuming. Who cares if we were also spending to excess, speculating on homes we couldn’t afford, and failing to save? We ignored those indicators, to our peril.

I say this not as a financial goody two shoes. Though I am lucky enough to have some savings and no debt RIGHT NOW, I have been tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt in the past. I learned that scrounging for change to buy lunch is not a fun way to live when you KNOW you could have had money in the bank if only you didn’t take that vacation, buy those shoes, and speculate on money you thought was coming in but didn’t. I had to learn that lesson dozens of humiliating times before I finally said, “I ain’t doin’ that no more.”

Of course, there are times when some of us are buying groceries off of credit cards, not because we are spending too much but because there seem to be no options. It for folks who have spent as wisely as they can and are still backed against the wall that we have to figure out how to rejigger this economy. How can we sort out how to help people who are trying their best and not just funnel the money into tax breaks for people who jacked us to begin with?

I believe the first thing to do is to read the news and to educate ourselves about the economics of the nation at large and of the communities we live in.

I’ll be posting some more on jobs and economics soon… a lot more. And you can read the full version of Obama’s speech here.

Rise Up, Stay Strong

On my way back from a long trip that included my stop in Detroit, I ended up watching the airplane movie. I hate airplane movies. They usually pick the worst thing that failed in the theatres and throw it on the screen 33,000 feet in the sky.

Then I saw Ice Cube, one of my favorite “blacktresses,” Tasha Smith, and this wonderful teen, who I found out was KeKe Palmer of “Akeelah and the Bee.” The movie is called The Longshots and it’s about a girl whose spirit-broken, ex-football star uncle (Cube) teaches her to be a Pop Warner football quarterback in a broke-down factory town. It sounds treacly, right? Well, I loved it. It’s a straight up feel good movie. And my favorite part is when the salty bar owner gives a speech about how no one is going to come rescue this town, but they can up their own game, clean up their own streets, and take some pride in who they are. This girl’s ambition helps lift folks up. Best of all, it’s a true story.

My Pollyanna side says we can make more of those true stories… the kind about people finding pride in their towns and their friends, family, and creative talents. Money pays the rent but it doesn’t make people happy. I believe that. Of course I’m hustling for mine, but we can either face the hard times with some heart or fall apart. We do have choices, even if they’re only how we react to the challenges at hand.

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Black on Black: The Remix of Pop, Politics, and Power

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

al_b_sure

Pop your collar, give me some dap… and tell me what’s next in black cultural iconography.

We now have a President who has not only broadened the audience for but shown the power of black cultural tropes in a national and international context.

I asked a few friends, bloggers, and thinkers to give their take on the remix. Here’s a sample of what they had to say:
Artist Susan Smith Pinelo

“My friend told me that her husband was “Gonna buy a flag on Wednesday.”  Hm. Wow. This crunked out, beer drinking black garbage man who don’t think much about nothing felt proud. Not proud to be black—he already was—I think. Not proud to be finally free—he already was. He was proud to be American. Hm. Wow.

So I started thinking, what if just half of the Black Americans started being proud about being Americans. Maybe we start figuring things out with a new perspective—the perspective of not being victims, second class citizens who are angry with the man—the government—the police.

We stop being angry with the system and start combating with the stereotypes of our drug dealing, welfare cheat baby mommas, and cousins who don’t pay taxes and fathers who are serving time in the “university.” Maybe, just maybe, we can become captains of their own destiny. Hm. Wow.

Thank you Barack for commanding that we think that we can.”

Alyson Palmer, musician/mother/activist

“Having a Black president lifts the racial profile. However, the fact that Barack Obama is the child of a Black African, not a Black American should not be overlooked.  There is none of the downtrodden, hopeless, already beaten-by-The-Man gene in him that I’ve seen in all my relatives, even the most successful. I am praying that he becomes a new Daddy to all African-Americans, a new paradigm of personhood and fatherhood and citizenship.  If we slave-descended Americans can look at him as to a mirror and see reflected somewhere in us that ease with power, I think our inner strength can grow beyond any transitory economic concerns.

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for in myself.”

Tamika Morrison, marketing guru for The Writestylz PR Firm

“As a 30-something person who’s African American, I do believe blackness is “so over” in a sense that’s it can’t be used as an excuse for mediocre living and behavior.  We now have proven evidence as a minority, particularly, African-American, that you really can live the ultimate American Dream if we apply ourselves. Our identity is now woven in the fabric of ALL Americans—Black, White, Red, Orange and Yellow—and it’s imperative that we learn how to relate across the board or else.”

Carmen Dixon, All About Race

“I haven’t seen blackness so celebrated since the days of ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud’ in the late 60’s. Even then it was black folks awakening to their beauty and power. Now you have Larry King’s son wishing he was black, and I heard an MSNBC commentator saying that her daughter wants to be Sasha or Malia! That is so powerful especially when I remember that I wanted to be Marcia Brady when I was a youngster.”

Princeton University political scientist Melissa Harris Lacewell gave some wonderful deep answers too but I had to laugh at this:

“I think light-skinned brothers are coming back into style. After an era of Michael Jordan-inspired worship of the bald, athletic brown man, I think we will see a re-ascendance of the light-skinned brothers. Al B. Sure is making a new album!”

;-)

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