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Nafisa_goma
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Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 12:24 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

At Door of Kush, we're very proud of Kam Williams's review of Kola Boof's autobiography on Euroweb this morning.

http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur28746.cfm


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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 01:01 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Well, you can't say that Kam is not objective. A very perceptive review which I'd give 3 stars. The only problem I had with it was that he referred to the color coded caste system as being a "taboo" subject. That says a little about his awareness. Color consciousness has never been a subject that blacks avoided discussing or exploring. The old saw about if you're white, you're all right; if you're yellow you're mellow; if you're brown, you stick around; if you black, you get back." has been a staple in the slave diaspora since the 1920s, - at least. Color-consciousness has always been an overt issue, a practice that has invariably been resented by the victims and flaunted by the victimizers. This is not a revelation.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 03:40 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Kam:

I told you Cynique was sometimey.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 - 03:42 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

And I told you I was discriminating, chrishayden. BTW, 3 out of 4 stars ain't bad.
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Troy
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Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 10:02 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

One will also find a link to the review here: http://aalbc.com/reviews/diary2.htm It is not like I don't want y'all to visit eurweb.com or anything.... (dag!)

The quote Kam pulled from the book was really struck me:

“The Hip Hop Holocaust would signal the birth of a new ideology amongst American blacks, a new cultural ethic that would eventually migrate to blacks all over the world—a cultural ethic that now openly embraced and promoted materialism, misogyny, disloyalty and anarchy. Whereas the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements had unified black people worldwide and brought about independence and nation-building in Africa, and a huge renaissance in self-love, unity and empowerment… – the Hip Hop Holocaust destroyed all that.

This was the music that eventually renamed the mothers of the men who performed it—‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ – and made it fashionable to be colorist (against black women) and self-centered (bling-bling). I call it a ‘holocaust’ because it effectively killed the core community in Black America and completely bamboozled the black youth and separated them from their true worth… no one was willing to stand up to the Hip Hop anarchists.


However I do not believe Hip-Hop is the cause of the "Holocaust" (and "Holocaust" is an appropriate term), it is a consequence of it.



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Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, September 28, 2006 - 02:28 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

This quote is dependent upon several myths--

The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements did not unify black people--there were Blacks who shunned these movements and there were other blacks who outright opposed them--your black conservatives and anti-communists and so on.

Time and time again I have to remind black people that many black people thought Martin Luther King was a troublemaker. When he came here to St. Louis in the Sixties no black church would let him speak and it wasn't because they were afraid it was because they were jealous of him.

When Martin Luther King got his brains blown out, most younger blacks had deserted him over the non violence and were following Stokeley, Hughey, and Eldridge and the older blacks had left him over his opposition to the War. Fact.


Additionally this analysis ignores the savage infighting between Civil Rights and Black Power Movements themselves--the turf battles between the NAACP and CORE and SCLC and SCLC and Operation PUSH, the Fighting between US and the Black Panthers on the coasts, the fighting between the Black P-Stone Nation and the Black Panthers in the midwest, fighting between Malcolm X's followers and other Muslim dissidents and the Nation of Islam, and so forth and so on.

Independence and nation building in Africa went on outside of Black American movements that were mostly concerned with the condition of American Blacks and ignorant of or unsympathetic to African Liberation movements--many were supposed to be communist, remember.

The actions and beliefs of a few black radicals, progressives, what have you, should not be taken for the attitudes and actions of the mass of blacks. Just because Blacks in St. Louis put on dashikis doesn't mean they even knew or cared who Nkrumah, Kenyatta, etc were.

The Hip Hop Holocaust did not destroy all that. Hip Hop started in the 70's in the South Bronx and only started to go national in 1979--Cointelpro had destroyed the Black Panthers and the Civil Rights movements long before that.

Whoever thinks the hip hoppers were the first black men to call black women bitches and hos has not at least read "Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, who was writing about black men doing it in the 30's and 40's.

This analysis imagines that things in the black community were just fine before hip hop came along, and nothing could be further from the truth. And finally, it totally ignores the positive hip hop produced by such as Public Enemy, Arrested Development and others.

We do ourselves a great disservice making up myths. Black youths who know the truth look upon people who demonize hip hop (and ignore the sex and drug and violence drenched black music of before) as having some sinister agenda--why is the Black Youth who listens to hip hop better than his parents who listened to Junior Walker shout "Shotgun! Shoot him fore he run now!? James Brown's songs certainly were misogynists--when he shouted for a woman to "Get up offa that thing" what was that? And when George Clinton asked Little Miss Muffet "What's in the bag bitch?"
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, September 28, 2006 - 02:45 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Well, chrishayden, politics make strange bedfellows. I give you credit for your dead-on analysis of that quote. The hip-hop generation is so full of itself that it thinks everything radical originated within its ranks. With their "keeping it real" credo, hip-hoppers have yet to discern the difference between what's "real" and what's "true".
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, September 28, 2006 - 03:43 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

NOT. You know I was just kiddin, chrishayden. Your analysis was in depth but on further perusal, I don't agree with your attempt to exonorate hip hop. Just because the sordid aspect of it has all been done before doesn't address the issue of its negative impact The fact that the rap element of hip-hop carries on a tradition of abasement does not validate its worth.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Friday, September 29, 2006 - 12:09 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Your brain has all the power of a three minute egg.

Go back and re read the quote. The quote attempts to lay all the blame for the ills of black people on hip hop and paints the pre hip hop era as a golden age when all black people were united.

These two assertions I address not the worth of hip hop.

Sigh--all these years and negroes still can't read. Is it hopeless?
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Cynique
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Posted on Friday, September 29, 2006 - 12:21 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Maybe so, chrishayden. Obviously, I got mixed messages from what you wrote. And this is because you are always so quick to defuse the negative impact of gangsta rap.
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Abm
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Posted on Friday, September 29, 2006 - 12:25 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Chris,

Your "Your brain has all the power of a three minute egg." is a classic...CLASSIC Thumper's Corner line.


*laughingmyfrigginA$$off!!!*
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Cynique
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Posted on Friday, September 29, 2006 - 12:35 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I find Chris' remark a classic example of a mixed metaphor. It ain't like eggs are EVER associated with "power". tsk-tsk
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Troy
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Posted on Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 03:01 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Chris. Wow. I could have have said that better even if I sat down and studied the subject for another month.

BUT..

Are you seriously trying equate the negative impact, on our society, of Junior Walker, James Brown's and George Clinton with that of say a contemproary gangsta rapper like a 50 Cent?

Sure there have been some positive hip-hop artists BUT the posiitve impact of PE (My favorite Rap group) is, unfortunately, virtually nill today. PE legacy has been adulterated into the "Flavor of love". The average teenager has not clue who Arrested Development was.

Chris I belive that we (Black Americans) were on a much better trajectory for future sucess in the 30's and 40's than we are today.

Somewhere along the line we got derailed and gansta rap, pants below the butt, a failure to graduate high school is the result.

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Chrishayden
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Posted on Monday, October 02, 2006 - 03:09 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Troy:

In the 30's and 40's you, I and every other black person on this site couldn't even use the same TOILET as a white man. You went to MIT, right? You couldn't have mopped the floor there.

I wish you could go back there. Back there where a white man could come take your wife, and you couldn't do a damn thing about it. I wish you could have talked to some of the black men who actually lived back then while you are imagining some Negro Heaven.

Jobs, housing, career choices, there is not ONE category we are not doing better now than we were then.

In the 30's and 40's most black people were living in the south and sharecropping.

I hear all this we were doing better crap from people who don't even know how bad it was in the 50's and 60's--living in a dream world.

Just answer this question. Would you want it like it was then?

I will reiterate what I have said before that people keep missing--all that stuff about it being a paradise for black people that hip hop messed up is bull! The only way you can possibly equate somebody with pants hanging below the butt and somebody not even having any pants is because you folks are all on these computers and living in a dream world.

There ain't a damn problem we have that has been caused by 50 Cent. What about Steppin Fetchit sitting around scratching his butt and acting like an idiot? That was okay. Darkies on the screen with their eyes bugging out and running from ghosts. That didn't have a negative impact.

Why do you think Black folks tried so hard to get Amos and Andy off tv (they had to endure them on radio for 30 years)
Watch Eyes on the Prize since you apparently have to see something on televsion before you can believe it. Or talk to somebody who was alive back then about having to go in the back and get a sandwich or be out off the street by sundown or, even in your much loved liberal paradise New York City, having your best career choices being janitor or doorman.

You sittin' around, got a wife, kids, good job this website, go skiing and suffering--apparently you'd be better if some negro wasn't sitting around with his pants hanging down.

What about when a negro was hanging from a tree as they were wont to do in your wonderful 30's and 40's.

You negroes need to stop hanging around white folks if every bad thing a negro does somewhere makes you embarassed to stare em in the face.

They don't have no problem with a Jeffery Dahmer or a Congressman Foley and I don't have a problem with 50 Cent.
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Cynique
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Posted on Monday, October 02, 2006 - 04:48 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

What you insist on doing, chrishayden, is counterfeiting other people's black experience, because it doesn't fit into the little niche that you have isolated and deemed to be a microcosm of black life in general. There are 25,000,000 black people in America and you cannot divide them up by using your personal standards as a litmus test to declare who is what. There is a commonalities to being black, but there are also variations of being black in America whether you can bring yourself to admit this or not. Racism is a given. But to say that things are as bad as they were in the past, is not borne out by facts. Just because you have a problem with the black bourgeosie doesn't mean that you can banish them from the race or discount their upward mobility. They exist, and they are here to stay. And as a somebody who grew up during the 1930s and 40s in the north I can tell you that I never had to sit in the back of the bus or drink at a separate fountain or had a member of my family taken away in the night to be lynched. I lived in an intergrated town in an intergrated neighborhood and attended integrated schools. Now you can try all you want to ridicule this and tuck it away in a neat little package labled "Mayberry" but it makes no difference because you don't have the authority to do this. Who are you? Nobody. Just because my black experience is not alined with the one you want to hold up as typical does not neutralize it. I am not an anomly because there are millions of other black people who lived in little small towns in the north who led the kind of life that I did. It wasn't an ideal existence or am I naive enough to claim that racial prejudice wasn't rampant back then, but the lives we led were better than what our parents had gone through, and the way things were back then is not comparable to the way things are now. It's a whole new ball game. And if you think the thug life hasn't corrupted the black community in a way that it hasn't been corrupted before, then you are deluded. All you are doing is offering rationales because you and your "savior" complex fancy yourself the spokesman for the "misunderstood" and think that they need you to excuse them and to approve of how they are marching in place, continuing their counter-productive behavior. Yes, there is a white "power structure" and "institutionalized racism" does exist but blacks have to be careful to not let these buzz words stop them in their tracks, and discourage them from endeavoring to improve their lot in life. You try to label anybody who doesn't espouse your view point as a "negro", as if your saying this, makes it so. It doesn't. You are just an opinonated blow-hard. Your whole approach approach to blackness is to say that because whites do terrible things, that makes it all right and blacks should, therefore, emulate the worst in white folks. Hummmm. I never realized before how much alike you and that krazy kola are. You both think your views are the final word.
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Nafisa_goma
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Posted on Monday, October 02, 2006 - 05:25 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)


For those interested, Kam Williams's "excerpt" was edited down and some of Ms. Boof's points can seem out of context.

Kola has been reading the board the last two days and is unable physically to post.

She asked me to post the Chapter here un-edited:





THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF/Chapter 6

Page 95 picks after 8 year old Naima is recorded as the youngest person in the history of Washington D.C. to have a "heart attack" (1979) and after being hospitalized at D.C. General Hospital is discovered to have been vaginally infibulated/circumcised back in Sudan. Her Black American parents, the Johnsons want to have this corrected, but Kola refuses as it's the only thing connecting her to her birth mother.




But I do have my clit...and I did survive to grow up. I have a poem in which I state: “America is my husband now...and he is good to me.” This is really a true statement, because along with having my clit, I had America itself to help me become Kola Boof. This is the best country on earth for women, trust me.

I fell head over heels for a Black American boy/man--a student at Howard University and a rapper--his name was “Truce”.

He could have told me the moon was made of blue cheese and I would have fought anyone who tried to tell me different. I believed everything he said. I expected to someday be his wife. My dad was my “dad”, but Truce was my “daddy”.

I was a bad girl, too. An angst-ridden teenaged ghetto Isis. Neurotic. Angry, brilliant, sensitive...lost.

God, where do I begin?

There was so much that happened before the abortion and before I ran away to Israel and before Osama Bin Laden. It’s like my life was always in a hurry, you know. Just fast, fast, fast.

I suppose for those reading this book one hundred years from now, I should go back a little and touch on the era in American history in which I lived, became a person. I call it the “Hip Hop Holocaust” era.

95

_________

Arriving in America right after Christmas 1979...and immediately suffering a heart attack, I was released from the hospital just in time for my first New Year’s Eve celebration...the ushering in of the year 1980.

This meant the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency, the beginning of the worldwide AIDS epidemic, which came about quite sudden and mysteriously, and of course, the beginning of the Hip Hop Holocaust...the rap music based social movement that would replace the 1960’s Civil Rights and 1970’s Black Power movements among the newly christened “African-Americans” (before that they had been called in this order...West Africans...niggers (slavery), negroes, coloreds, and finally, the best name for all of us worldwide...blacks). The Hip Hop Holocaust would signal the birth of a new ideology amongst American blacks, a new cultural ethic that would eventually migrate to blacks all over the world--a cultural ethic that now openly embraced and promoted materialism, misogyny, disloyalty and anarchy. Whereas the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movements had unified black people worldwide and brought about independence and nation building in Africa and a huge renaissance in self-love, unity and empowerment and building up of moral character among the Black Americans, who in the 1960’s and 1970’s, were the mightiest most innovative black people on earth--the Hip Hop Holocaust destroyed all that. This was the music that eventually renamed the mothers of the men who performed it--”bitches and Hos”--and made it fashionable to be colorist (against black women) and self-centered (bling-bling). Already, the black community was plagued by drug dealers and gangs (in no part of America--do they respect the “elders”, the children run the grown up people over here), so no one was willing to stand up to the Hip Hop anarchists. I call it a “holocaust”, because it effectively killed the core community in Black America and completely bamboozled the black youth and separated them from their true worth.

96

__________

I was there, a new American and a Black child in 1980, so my version of the history is not to put down my own Black American brothers and sisters, but simply to leave a written record of what I saw with my own eyes. What others praise and regard as a revolutionary new expression of the “black man’s” experience in America...I regard, in retrospect, as a poison against the people, because it wasted the people’s lives.


Nonetheless, I’m also being a hypocrite, because I was an active fly girl in the Hip Hop Holocaust myself. MC Lyte was my idol. I bought everything she put out and I remember now, with regret, how desperate I was to see her perform live in concert (at just thirteen, I showed my breast buds to a group of adult security guards, black men, who would let under aged girls into the concert as long as we degraded ourselves by showing them). I loved K.R.S. One and Public Enemy (Eric B. and Rakim being, in my opinion, two of the most important poets to emerge in the latter twentieth century), and I was a huge fan of Tupac Shakur, Young MC, Salt N’ Pepa and later Lauryn Hill.

As a teenager, my only dream in life was to be a housewife (like Mommysweet and other respectable women of Sudan) and be married to Larenz Tate, my favorite movie actor back then. Or Tupac Shakur or Michael Jordan or the writer Nelson George or John Edgar Wideman, and then later, Ed Gordan from BET News and Evander Holyfield, the boxer. In my dreams, I was always fantasizing about being loved and adored by one of these men and baring his children. I studied them and kept scrapbooks with their pictures and accomplishments, and I was constantly learning how to cook different recipes, all in preparation of being a “black King’s” wife. It was silly, but since all the other teenaged girls did it, too, I didn’t feel so bad.

What I did feel embarrassed about was my insatiable love for white girl singers like Olivia Newton-John and The Go Go’s. I couldn’t even speak English when the Go Go’s came out (1981), but for nearly
five years straight, I drove the black people in Anacostia Park crazy

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_____________

by blasting, singing and dancing: ”Jump baaad...’an round...round ‘n round and round....’n Wheeeeeee...We got the beat!...We got the beat!...ah, We got the beat!”

And after overdosing on Olivia Newton-John (I still love her), I became the biggest Madonna fan in the world. My Black American family would be like, “What is it with these corny ass white girls? Shit, at least bust out some Teena Marie!”

I couldn’t help it. As much as I loved Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston, it was Madonna that I considered to be the absolute queen of my generation, musically. I still do. She was unapologetic, political, the total consumate artist and a woman-identified woman. Despite the essay by bell hooks (another woman I greatly love and was influenced by) castigating Madonna for being an artist who pimped black culture, I feel that Madonna exemplified the African goddess concept of the female having “sexual power” within the society. She seemed to love being white, whereas the voice of my heart, Mary J. Blige, would often come out sporting fake blue eyes and long platinum blond hair. This image caused me to have less respect for Mary and to sort of pity her. While I love Mary’s music (especially her classic CD, entitled simply “MARY”), I sometimes felt embarrassed to sit through her music videos. To me, she was so devastatingly beautiful and yet like Serena Williams, the tennis player, and Angelique Kidjoe, the West African singer, Mary fucked up her looks by violating and selling out her own flavor. Her self-hatred (or high esteemed blondness) reminded me of how Black mothers poison their own children by becoming walking billboards for the general society’s message that whiteness is superior. And don’t get me wrong--I’m not against hair extentions or beauty aids (I wear weaves), but Mary’s white girl drag went on for decades, and although she was the voice of my heart, she seemed inferior. Madonna was better. Better than all of them. She wasn’t weak or desperate and it wasn’t until Black womanist artists like Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott, Res, India Arie,

98
________

and Erykuh Badu came along that I lost interest in Madonna.
Lauryn Hill became my new #1 favorite (I even love her Unplugged CD--it’s a masterpiece!) and I started listening to Anita Baker, Chrissie Hynde, Cassandra Wilson and to classic superstars like Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughn, Barbra Streisand, Gladys Knight, Kim Weston (from the 60’s), Dionne Warwick and especially Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan and Natalie Cole...whew!...and although Whitney Houston did take a disappointing fall and became self-destructive, I truly loved her more and more as her vulnerability and toughness showed through. Her music got deeper as she took more risks and I really started loving Whitney in the way that I love Bessie Smith, a sort of--no matter what--I love Whitney attitude, but still, out of all the 1980’s and beyond women--Lauryn Hill and Madonna are the only two that I would label “genius”. Oh, and let’s not forget Grace Jones. She could barely sing and yet her music was so ahead of its time, and very often you will hear Black Americans refer to a woman as looking like a “Nubian Queen”--but Grace Jones actually looks like a pure blooded Nubian woman. She doesn’t look West African or Jamaican. She looks like a Nubian goddess, and I’ve heard several other Sudanese say it as well. I was shocked when I found out that she’s from Jamaica and isn’t Nubian.


BUTTERFLY EMBLEM

At fourteen, while in the midst of the new hip hop culture, the Madonna revolution and the Reagan-Bush Aids epidemic, I finally learned to speak the English language, fluently, and through the special language tutor that Amethyst arranged for me at Ketchum Elemntary’s open space program, I met the man who would, by the time I was

99
___________

eventeen, take my virginity--my reading skills instructor, Truce Harding. He was a tall, handsome twenty year old economics major at Howard University and fronted his own rap group when we first met. He had a girlfriend who looked exactly like the actress Jada Pinkett Smith, only her name was Summer, and they used to pick me up on Sundays and take me to church with them.

I believe that Truce (who I originally called Mr. Harding) felt sorry for me, because my difficulties with English kept me from having many friends at school, and I also think that once he discovered that I was under the care of a psychiatrist and was considered “a troubled child”, he felt as though he had to provide some sort of “Big Brother” role. By fourteen, I had already figured out from all that Mahdi Pappuh had taught me about “racial history” in Egypt and Sudan that there were two types of “Black Americans”...the authentic blacks (Lauryn Hill, Denzel Washington, Toni Morrison, Michael Eric Dyson, columnist Alicia Banks, poets Mari Evans, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, politicians Winnie Mandela and Maxine Waters, Kalamu ya Salaam, Sister Souljah)...and what I perceived to be the niggerstock (Beyonce, Russell Simmons, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, the BET network, Kofi Annan, the Jackson family).

As I warned you when my autobiography started--you should not come into this book expecting to like Kola Boof. My purpose as a literary artist is not to be liked, but to be understood--regardless of whether I’m right or wrong. I really could give a fuck. Like most little black girls, I spent my whole life being “dictated to” by American media and nigger media about what to believe and think--and so now it’s my turn, as an African woman and wombbearer, to do the dictating. If you don’t appreciate my candor--then write your own goddamned book; this one is mines. So anyway--by fourteen, I was no longer insecure about my spoon-headed North African beauty or my blackness. I was

100
______




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Cynique
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Posted on Monday, October 02, 2006 - 05:47 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Oh, jeeze. Why did we open up this can of worms?? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 02:39 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Cynique:

You must be insane.

See the thread above for what the hip hoppers think of your crawfishin'!
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 02:45 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Whereas the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movements had unified black people worldwide and brought about independence and nation building in Africa and a huge renaissance in self-love, unity and empowerment and building up of moral character among the Black Americans, who in the 1960’s and 1970’s, were the mightiest most innovative black people on earth--the Hip Hop Holocaust destroyed all that.

The above is fantasy. Did hip hoppers shoot Malcolm, Martin, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton? Did hip hoppers frame Geronimo Pratt? Did hip hoppers set US and the Panthers to fighting?

Did Hip Hoppers flood the ghetto with drugs (which started in the 60's) did Hip Hoppers send the jobs overseas and close the factories? Did hip hoppers make all the upper and middle class blacks flee to the suburbs?

You know who did this and you refuse to face it.

It's the kick the cat syndrome. The Sgt kicks the private and the private kicks the cat.

But people who were here know the truth.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 03:01 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Cynique:

I bet when you went to U of I you couldn't stay on the campus. You had to stay with one of the black sororities or in town.

Go on. Tell the truth!

And here you are trying to act like none of that was going on.

For shame! For shame!
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 03:04 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

See, this is why that African Ancestor system can't work here in America, Kola Boof.

The average Negro over the age of 40 has had his or her ass kicked so bad they can't even think straight!

Note I said average, not all.
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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 04:41 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

You're wrong, as usual, chrishayden. I stayed at both Evans and Busey Hall and quite a few girls stayed at Lincoln Avenue residence all of which were integrated and located on campus. There were black guys who stayed in the Men's dorm, which was also integraged. The black sorority and fraternities houses were all located on campus and were members of the Pan Hellenic association. A black AKA name Clarice Davis was elected homecoming queen. Look it up. It was 1952. J. C. Caroline a black running back was BMOC as was Mickey Bates his running mate. And I might add that all of the kids down there at that time came from all over the state of Illinois, including Chicago, and many of them were from little towns where they were not subjected to Jim Crow Laws, even if they did experence racial prejudice. So get your facts, straight, chump. Also there were kids down there at that time chose to attend Illinois because their parents had gone there.
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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 04:51 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

And incidentally the hiphoppers didn't kill their heroes because they only heroes they had to kill were gangtstas like Tupac. You try to throw out red herrings to distract from the truth. Things are worse now than they were back then because back then we had HOPE. These kids nowadays have been so hypnotized by the bling and the Rap cadence that all they want is instant gratification. They know very little about black history or anything else that didn't happen yesteday.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 04:56 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

You don't know anything about kids or what they think other than what you discuss with the other old bats in your bridge club.

You said you had grandchildren--are they hopeless thugged out gangstas? Huh?

If you stayed at Evans and Busey Hall in 1952 it was because you wuz de cook.
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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 04:59 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

And did I mention that you are insane, chrishayden, because you have absolutely no perspective. You are an angry black man and your emotions rule your reason, not to mention that you suffer from delusions of grandeur. LMAO.
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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 05:09 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I wasn't the cook at Busey. I stayed in Room 326 and and spent a lot of time playing bridge and engaging in girl talk and smoking Pall Malls. It says a lot about you that you have to resort to lies in order to try and make your case. The U of I, I believe, integrated its dormitories in 1949. As for my grandchildren, yeah, the street got my grandson. He was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2005 at the age of 21. I try to do everything I can to add a little balance to the lives of my other grandkids but it's hard because the lure of the hip-hop life is very seductive.
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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 10:19 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

BTW, black Alpha Kappa Alpha soror Clarice Davis was Illinois' homecoming queen in the 1951-52 school year when I was a freshman. And Illini half back J.C. Caroline went on to become a star for The Chicago Bears. Chrishayden wasn't even born then yet he presumes to tell me what was going on. As I have observed on may occasions, the period during 1950s was a golden age for U. of I. black students. There were a substantial amount of them on campus, enough to comprise a little black community. We did everything the white students did but we did it in living color. Things changed in the 1960s. For some reason the black student body dwindled and never again become a very visible presence on this huge Big 10 campus. Some say this was because black students who came along later found this state school too academically challenging and all the really smart kids went East to Ivy League schools where they were in demand to fulfill affirmative action requirements. Just a little trivia. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 - 10:33 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

As a post script I have to add that back then, its residents ate their meals in the dormitory dining room, and here all of us black girls were, choosing to segregate ourselves, all seated at the same table, being served by white waiters, students who took these jobs in order to get their meals free. I repeat. This was 1951-52. Just a another facet of the black experience.
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Kam
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Posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006 - 08:38 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Note: I tried to post this response a couple of weeks ago, but there were a lot of porn links just posted and I was locked out.

Cynique, I think you and I are of about the same generation. Maybe, I should've used another word. But when you're writing a dozen articles per week, you don't have the luxury of lingering on every word.
Lucent, I'm a book reviewer, not a private investigator. Keep that in mind when you critique my critique. I'm simply reading a book and then giving my honest reaction to the book, not to rumors I have no way of proving one way or the other. If you've got some proof of Kola being a fraud, why don't you write your own article.

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Cynique
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Posted on Monday, October 16, 2006 - 12:14 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Kam, I am old enough to be your grandmother which is why I was trying to prod you into putting things into context and avoid the trap of being impressed with style over substance. IMO reviewing a non fiction book should be more than just a critiquing its content, it should also be about acknowledging the controversial aspects of its veracity.
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Nolanfane
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Posted on Monday, October 16, 2006 - 04:09 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Yo Cynique. Like most negroes I can speak street talk when I want to and switch back to Cary Grant when it's nessumsary. Mind your biz.

Kam you the man. That review was on point. I don't see why a serious reviewer or journalist would give too much speculation to gossip that can't be proven. Kola's story is published in book form so that's proof she told her story and he criticeques the story she told. Not whether it was a lie or not. I happen to believe whatever old girl wants me to believe. :-)

People on here attacking the man have ulterior motives anyway. Like he said if she's such a fraud when is the media that hates her so much going to prove it? That speaks volumes.



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Cynique
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Posted on Monday, October 16, 2006 - 04:21 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Yo, "nolandfane", as I implied before, whatever vernacular you write in, your posts reek with the phoniness of a sock puppet. zzzzzzzzzzzz
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Kam
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Posted on Sunday, October 29, 2006 - 09:59 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Cynique, I value your feedback, but you are only old enough to be my big sister. I hope to address some of the extraneous Kola controversies in my interview with her.
Nolanfane, thanks for the support.
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Cynique
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Posted on Sunday, October 29, 2006 - 11:09 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

You are lax in your research, Kam. There are ways that you could've found out that I am actually 73 years of age, and am, indeed, old enough to be your grandmother, my dear. tsk-tsk.
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Kam
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Posted on Saturday, November 04, 2006 - 05:30 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I'm 53. I rest my case.
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Cynique
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Posted on Saturday, November 04, 2006 - 07:22 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Sorry! I thought you said you were in your late 20s. And actually I'm still old enough to be your mother, and I would just add that at 53 I'd think you'd be more judicious about taking a work of non-fiction at face value when reviewing it, you naughty boy. LOL
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Cynique
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Posted on Saturday, November 04, 2006 - 07:29 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

And of course, Kam, you didn't help your case by the way you grovelled over the idea of being back in the graces of chrishayden who is just about the same age as you. 2 naughty boys! Where my switch? heh-heh.
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Troy
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Posted on Thursday, November 09, 2006 - 08:18 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Cynique, you 73 -- get out. There are not many septuagenarians who can wield a keyboard and mouse like you.

I hope we meet in person one day. I would have also liked to have met the 20 year old Cynique too.

Actually I'd like to meet all of y'all.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, November 09, 2006 - 11:13 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Yes, Troy, it's true. I'm 73. I wish now I'd never revealed my true age because everyone has pre-conceived notions about people my age. It's like racist white people who think all niggas are ignorant and hostile. Ageism comes into play when younger people think all old folks are out of it. Of course most of them are. LMAO. But I still manage to remember what day and year it is. Who knows, maybe one day we'll meet.:-)
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Mzuri
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Posted on Friday, November 10, 2006 - 12:59 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Troy - 70 is the new 40 so Ms. Cynique is really much younger than is perceived!
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Troy
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Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 - 02:30 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Mzuri, then what is new 40, 10? Perhaps that explains the current crisis. :-)

Cyniqe, your age helps explain your wisdom.

Would you believe I'm on jury duty right now. NY provides laptops with internet access
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Cynique
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Posted on Monday, November 13, 2006 - 04:03 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Well, Troy, it doesn't take much "wisdom" to understand that the reason for your success is that you are a "visionary" - something this forum for ideas can be grateful for. And - wouldn't it be interesting if you got picked to serve on a jury for a murder trial?? I can picture it now. You standing up for a poor black brother being railroaded by The System, lecturing your fellow jurors about how police can beat confessions out of innocent people.
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Kam
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Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 06:09 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Troy, you don't want to get a murder trial, or any case that can keep you there for weeks and waste your time. But if you do, I hope you have a 12 Angry Men type experience, and are able to enlighten your fellow jurors. Shock the judge with a little jury nullification!

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