Thank you all – for bringing the passion and brainpower to our struggle to gain focus on where we need to go from here.
We DEFINITELY need to be collecting these suggestions in a master doc, and preparing them for presentation at our “AfroSpear Black Constitutional Convention” and to be implemented thereafter.
We will need to concretize what actions (which will include educating/propaganda, economic, political, social thrusts) we gon’ do! How do we relate to a criminal gov? (For those of us living in the States) Do we want a piece of the pie (that rapes globally)? Or do we find a way to go “off the grid” by degrees? Do we hoard our economic power? Barter? Live in more communal ways? The ruling class want us to populate “nuclear family buying units” that will have a lawnmower for every house, rather than sharing one per block.
If we are going to really change our fortunes, we are going to have to divest ourselves of, at minimum, the excesses of capitalist culture. Analyze it and figure out how it enslaves us. How many cars do we need? Should we drive, if so, how much? Can we carpool? Public transp? These are not jive questions; we’re talking about defunding this imperialist society. We pay, with our tax dollars, this government to target us, imprison us, shoot us – globally. We help prop up an imperialist government. It must be stopped. And our becoming independent from and taking our money out of it, helps us separate ourselves from it and weakens it at the same time.
Should we eat meat, knowing that the use of resources in the mass production of it affects the ozone layer, is furthering global warming. We have to see how we are made complicit in a planetary disaster. We’re gonna have to pull our chips off of the table that they control and place our bets elsewhere. Put our chips in the AfroSpear and create an explicit, alternative, liberatory black culture.
I believe we need to begin re-segregating as we simultaneously interact with the larger culture. We can’t help but keep a foot in – at this time – but we also need to have a foot out, in “OUR THING.”
Just briefly on Sylvia’s NAACP post: there are a number of ways to look at it. One is, the NAACP is a group that claims to work on our behalf but is funded primarily by white capital. That necessarily skews the mission, makes them somewhat schizophrenic. They can’t do anything without worrying about the PR-implications of their actions. That’s their straitjacket.
We don’t have those constraints. We aren’t going to allow ourselves to be owned by other people, therefore, our solutions should be free of any coercive restraints. As we look outward at these groups, we learn from their structure, see how they are shackled and we make sure we are free. We can be what the NAACP was supposed to be – only we don’t want to keep our people on a plantation. We want to help create a post-plantation society.
Sorry to be so random but…
Among other things, I’m an African American web developer. I’ve been working on a site to show “what’s happening now” in the Black Blogosphere. I’ve put your blog and a few other blogs into the site I’m working on. I hope in the future to track the entire “Afrosphere.”
Please check it out, create an account, set the tags for your blog, spread the word and give me feedback on how to make the site really useful. The url is Afronary.Com and send your feed back to webmaster@afronary.com.
Phil
I like the word cloud thing. It would be good to have something like that on the front page or maybe on the Afrospear Online Newspaper opinion page. It would be good for use to get a daily summary of what all Black blogs are talking about. If you have some type of widgit, feed or something so that I can add the info to the paper then I will add it once and if I can figure out how.
Bronze, We definitely need somebody with that kind of web savvy to hook us up! I’m sure we’d all be down with something like that.
All right, you asked for 5, here are 17 and some of these I will start moving on immediately.
1) Get the UN to stop the war in Darfur. Join organizations and promote the cause until the UN or someone steps in to stop the African World War. Post a Stop the War in Darfur button or image on your blog or website at the very least.
2) Make Poverty History. Join One.org and support organizations that are working to end poverty. Spend the dollar atleast and get the bracelet.
3) Black Leader Recruitment and Promotion. If you know positive Black role models then promote them, ask them to get involved, help them to make changes, and work with them. Make a website of good Black role models so they become famous and so that they are called when the media wants to hear from the Black Community.
4) Convict Workforce. Hire ex-cons who no one else will hire and have them fix up Black communities in return for food, shelter, clothing, recommendation letters, and help finding another job. Employ them as security guards and construction and maintenance workers.
5) Citizen Police Surveillance. Videotape cops whenever they are around and post it to a website so that we can catch corruption and police brutality. Use cellphones to post instantly and anomously to the site.
6) Marry Your Baby Daddy. Campaign started by author Maryanne Reid. Encourage people to get married and raise children as families. Its not cool to raise kids in broken homes or to have children when you do not have the means to support them.
7) Sex Education Website. If parents don’t want their children to get pregnant and catch STDs, schools only teach abstinence, and parents are too afraid to talk about sex then make an interactive website that will do the talking for them and answer questions.
8) Why Are You Wasting Your Money Campaign. Make ads showing how much money we waste in a year on booze, cigarettes, designer clothes, and other crap and compare it to the cost of a house, university education, tutor for a year, company shares, and other expenditures that would actually improve the African Diaspora.
9) Stop Using the N-Word. Stop saying it, tolerating it, and purchasing music that uses it.
10) Elect Barak Obama. Stop the monopoly by getting registered to vote and voting for Barak Obama. Make history and change the way Black people are viewed in the world by making a Black man the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Choose a leader and get together and back him!
11) Make Education Cool. Stop paying attention and promoting ignorant behaviour and people. Make educated involved citizens our heroes by writing about positive Black Role models and flooding the media with stories about them and demanding that they are aired.
12 Make Gangstas Uncool. Stop looking up to gangstas and buying there stuff. Stop acting like them, dressing like them, and buying their music. Make a website of bad Black role models and make them look like the idiots and losers they are.
13) Afrospere Online Newspapers. I have already started one but other people can get out there, find content relevant to different parts of the world and different interests so that we make it easy for people to get involved and knowledgeable about African Diaspora issues. If you don’t like the media then make alternative media sources available.
14) Positive Hip Hop Free Promotion Campaign. If you don’t like gangsta rap then promote positive, conscious hip hop artists on your blog or website until it becomes the mainstream.
15) Plus 1 Minus 1. Created by Young Black Professionals Guide. Only buy CDs and mp3s from artists who do not make the African Diaspora look bad and hurt our members.
16) Internet Public Service Announcements. Use YouTube, paintshop, and any means you can to promote these issues. Make interesting, inspiring, moving, funny, or any announcement that gets our causes noticed. You can find freeware and online sites so you don’t even need a cent to make them. Find announcements that have already been made and keep them them on your site.
Thats off the top of my head and it wasn’t hard to come up with these ideas with abolutely no research. So lets hear some more ideas.
[...] now I see evidence of it everywhere, in the up-and-running group blog AfroSpear, for example, where the free slave writes: If we are going to really change our fortunes, we are going to have to divest ourselves of, [...]
Bronze trinity
” 7) Sex Education Website. If parents don’t want their children to get pregnant and catch STDs, schools only teach abstinence, and parents are too afraid to talk about sex then make an interactive website that will do the talking for them and answer questions.”
mark bey: Bronze trinity thank you so much for mentioning this, the black church and all black parents need to get serious about giving black youth the best chance for survival and of having success which should include advise all unmarried black people to practice safe sex.
Especially when you factor in the obvious fact that the majority of people in america have sex before marraige and that the majority of black children are born out of wedlock and when you factor in the truly sad rate of hiv infection amongst black people in my oppinion for the church and black parents not to be forthcomming on the issue of premarital sex is not only hypocritical but is causing thousands of black people thier lives do to deaths caused by Hiv.
bronze trinity
” 6) Marry Your Baby Daddy. Campaign started by author Maryanne Reid. Encourage people to get married and raise children as families. Its not cool to raise kids in broken homes or to have children when you do not have the means to support them.”
mark bey: Bronze this is a great sentiment but I dont think people should get married unless both parties are willing to put the children first and make personal sacrifices for the family and each other. Thier are some babie dadies (or baby mothers for that matter) who should be no where near the children I learned this working in variour group homes for children taken away from thier parents and trust me some of those parents should never have the chance to hurt those kids they way they have in the past.
Now for those who are mentally capable of getting along in marraige I believe that before they do get married they should be advise to take marraige and finacial literacy classes in my oppinion.
Laslty broken homes and single parents homes arent neccassirly the same thing. But I am completely with you we should promote the beauty of having children and bieng progressive fathers and mothers. All black churches should offer comprehensive and parenting classes.
Although I dont quite agree with everything in your comment I love where your comming from and your ideas are exciting and vibrant also thank you for sharing those links they will come in handy big time especially that link on how to be an activist also feeling the You tube campaign to get our messages across.
Something I think we all can do because it involves our own hometowns and regions: we should put together a body of resources — names, addresses, phone numbers, and websites — of health care initiatives, day care centers, community programs geared towards helping people of African descent. In one place. Perhaps another blog or website?
We need to develop it as a center for sharing information about what we’re already doing in case we’re stepping on the toes of organizations getting started in agitating in our communities.
If everyone on the AfroSphere started collecting and spreading news about what we’re trying to do, we should be able to build up something akin to Craigslist — jobs, concerts, events, commerce. Except it’d be for the benefit of black folk. You get where I’m going with this? And we need to launch it soon.
While I understand the importance of basebuilding, it’s also important to start projects or follow up with past and ongoing projects so that people know what the basebuilding’s for. If we get people talking and moving, it lends more credibility to our mission and starts with immediately felt results.
I think in the next couple of days, I’ll get started on widgets for this site specifically that call attention to what we did with Shaquanda Cotton, what’s going on with Ron and Roy Pettaway, the growing development of the Imus campaign… if you have more suggestions, e-mail me links and ideas. Perhaps we should also put together a contact form here?