blackosphere: activist extraordinaire
DESCRIPTION
A Comic Life Project for my Blackness 2.0 course.TRANSCRIPT
What did i just read?!
Girl, let me tell you what i heard just went down in jena...
"Yo..word on the street is that three nooses were found under the 'white tree' son…after
that black dude sat there yesterday..."
no way!!!
Post-racial society, my ass!!!
I feel so awkward.
sorry, that i ran out of class...but some of
those people back in there are so damn ignorant about racial issues
man, i might have to check
somebody up in here...
as you should, white boy.
get up and do something,
principal!!!
frankly, administration ain't
sh*t.
that wasn't a prank!
ni**er.
You gon' learn
today...
F**k these crackers…and f**k this school too!!!
yeah, my friend did it…and???
mhmm…i have no reason to
worry. at least, i'm not the one
locked up
i'M NOT EVEN THE ONE YOU SHOULD BE ARRESTING… NEITHER ARE MY BOYS!!!
since mainstream media won't cover it, i will.
Wtf?!
Lord have
mercy...
Somebody about to get knocked the
f**k out
"Dear Mykal,
[I read a blog post about your story], and I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous. It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union. Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America. Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students ‘niggers’; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mykal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mykal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children. Mykal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain: “You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not ‘niggers’; you are God’s children.”
Godspeed Mykal.
Your brother in the struggle,
Joseph" (Young 2007)
Cheryl's son Joseph wrote the
most eloquent letter to them jena
6 boys…lawd knows he did!!!
MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT HE FOUND OUT
ABOUT THEM JENA 6 BOYS ON SOME BLOG, MABEL
AUNT BAM, wHAT YOU SAY NOW? ON A
"BLOG"? WHAT THE HELL IS A "BLOG"???
why you so slow, mabel??? catch up… blogs are like diary
entries on the internet that
publicize issues...
…LIKE WE'RE IN GEORGIA, AND
JENA IS IN LOUISIANA…AND WE HEARD THROUGH WORD OF MOUTH BUT JOSEPH
HEARD ABOUT THEM BOYS ONLINE
THAT'S REAL CUTE BAM, BUT YOU KNOW GOOD AND WELL THAT THEM BLOGS AIN'T GONNA DO anything UNTIL "SHARPTON OR JACKSON MAKE AN
APPEARANCE" (kvasny et al)
madea, don't forget we go waaaay back in the day!!! fyi, i'm in jena right now…aunt bam called me
and told me you were talking s**t.
she was shook
wasn't she? hahaha you know
she was, joe!
that negro only went because he was "seeking [some damn]
attention" (kvasny et al).
mabel, you always
were a big 'ol bag of salt…just plain salty
word.
Sharpton, you are a liar. how
about you think about your motives. remember now, the lawd looks at the
heart, not the outward, rev! thanks for being there for us black folks, i guess, but
do it in the right spirit, that's all i'm saying. that
goes for you too jesse!!!
what we do to her???
Aunt bam told her about blogging, and now she thinks we haven't given credit
to the blackosphere, or "online discussions taking place in the black
blogging community [that] provide authentic accounts of african american discursive
practices, lived experiences and cultural perspectives" (kvasny et al).
in other words, we
showed up, took the credit, when really
we didn't do all the work.
remember those blog posts we looked at, jesse?
we responded to them, and the media responded to us.
wow, all that blogging paid
off. this is incredible.
if we don't get down to jena and
cover this story, our image will be
ruined.
why is this even a
debate? cnn is there.
sure, my voice has been heard,
but do the people know that it was
my voice?
i did read once that "[WEB] networks have always been key
sources of power, providing access to social and financial capital." Only thing now is that these networks are "faster…
larger…more complex and more efficient" (watkins, 195).
anD I THOUGHT "THE TRUTH WOULD SET US FREE," WHEN REALLY IT HURTS LIKE HELL…i guess "black blogging
communities [actually] are important because they provide an alternative venue for information dissemination and social
action to promote economic, social, judicial and educational equity" (kVASNY ET AL).