(Akiit.com) A few weeks ago, I saw part of the Pan Africanist dream come true.

It was during the closing ceremony at an African dance conference. To a man — and they were all men — the drummers and teachers came from Africa. To a woman — and we were all women — the dancers were African American. Among the spectators sat a Trinidadian; her Senegalese husband and his twin led the class. As we circled, I realized that Africa’s children had been reunited.

Then the circle broke, and the class ended. As we drifted away, I wondered: “What kind of black are we now?”

That used to be an easy question for Americans to answer.

African American identity was built on two criteria: African ancestry and an ancestral connection to chattel slavery. We looked at skin color, hair texture, and the size of noses and lips to determine whether a person met the first criterion. The second was assumed: If you were black in this country, somebody in your family had been enslaved.

In the past 30 years, however, 1 million people have come from Africa to the United States — more than were brought during the transatlantic slave trade. According to the most recent census figures, 1.5 million blacks claim Caribbean ancestry. In fact, scholars say, the United States is the only place in the world where all of Africa’s children — native-born Africans, Afro Caribbeans, Afro Hispanics, Afro Europeans and African Americans — are represented.
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(Akiit.com) One of my four brothers graduated from the University of Iowa, but being a black male, I don’t think I want to spend too much time in the Hawkeye state. Only about 2 percent of Iowa’s population is black, but blacks are 13.6 times more likely than whites to be imprisoned there. That’s more than twice the national average, which itself is bad enough. Hispanics nationally are imprisoned at double the rate of whites.

I shouldn’t pick on Iowa, though. I live in New Jersey, where blacks are imprisoned at 10 times the rate of whites. Over in Pennsylvania, it’s five times. You would think the disparities would be worse in the Old South states. But in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, where blacks make up larger parts of the population, they are only about three times more likely to be imprisoned than whites.

These incarceration statistics, released last week by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group that promotes alternatives to prison, are sure to prompt recitations of that old Richard Pryor joke: I went to the courthouse to find justice, and that’s exactly what I found: Just us!

The racists among us will be quick to attribute the imprisonment disparity to the misguided belief that blacks are inherently prone to criminality. I’ve seen no valid studies supporting that view. But numerous scholars have correlated crime to conditions of poverty — and blacks remain disproportionately poor.
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(Akiit.com) Are you black enough?

Despite the rising American death toll in a divisive war, record gasoline prices and homes lost to foreclosure in historic numbers, this was the one question that I knew Sen. Barack Obama would be asked by Internet voters at the Democratic CNN-YouTube debate.

It is a question that dogs not only the first viable African American presidential candidate in our nation’s history but all blacks who defy some intangible, inexplicable standard for racial authenticity. Why is this question still being asked in 2007?

As a middle-class black man, raised and currently residing in the suburbs, I too have been the target of this question. Not too long along ago, I received an anonymous letter at the radio station where I work. It was clear and concise: “As an African American, I am disgusted every time I hear your voice because YOU are not a genuine black man!”

That letter inspired me to explore why this charge continues to be leveled at me and other successful black professionals. It’s a comment I’ve heard for years from people both black and white. “You’re not really black.”

Why do people say this to me? Is it the way I dress and speak? The music I listen to? The fact that I TiVo “Frasier“? More important, who has the right to decide what it means to be “genuinely black” in this society?
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(Akiit.com) A recent report by the Washington D.C.-based Sentencing Project underscores something we already know: Blacks are being locked up in droves.

And while the report says blacks, we know who it’s really talking about: black men.

The criminal justice system is skewed.

How often is “driving while white” an issue? Why are the participants in Roanoke’s drug court, a worthwhile program that gives drug offenders another chance, overwhelmingly white?

Jerome Miller, author of “Search and Destroy: African Americans in the Criminal Justice System,” contends that prisons are big business.

“The money we spend to keep this system going,” Miller said from his Northern Virginia office. “Prisons and state training schools, some of them are there to sustain public myths. There’s so much into feeding that myth.”

If Miller is right, prisons are clearly bad business for black men. There’s only one thing to do, black men: Boycott the nation’s jails and prisons. Stay off the path that leads there.

According to the Sentencing Project report, blacks nationally are incarcerated at 5.6 times that of whites, and Hispanics at nearly double the rate. In Virginia, the rate for blacks is even higher: 5.8.
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(Akiit.com) When I was about 11 or 12 years old, every kid in my neighborhood used to look up to this guy called Baby Daryl.

Baby Daryl was a bona fide drug-dealing, gun-toting gangsta on the west side of Detroit. While grown-ups would cross the street when they saw him coming, my friends and I would run up to Baby D with open arms because he would hook us up with watermelon-flavored Now and Laters and handfuls of Bazooka gum. He looked after us, taught us how to ball and talked to us about sex.

I won’t say what it was but let’s just say Baby Daryl gave me my first job. One day I was on my way to the “office” to find out it was closed. Apparently Baby Daryl was shot in the head the night before.

You would think that was enough to set me on the straight and narrow.

It wasn’t.

I fell in with another bad group of guys, and another, and another. All the way through high school I constantly toyed with my own mortality and I have a small lump on the back of my head — courtesy of a baseball bat — to remind me how close I came to following in Baby Daryl’s shoes.
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