February 7, 2009





For Immediate Release: Hip-Hop Will Not Tolerate Racism!

A Musical Response to the Shameful Actions of “Sheriff Joe”



Contact: Jill Garvey (jill@newcomm.org)

Center for New Community

312-266-0319 or 773-787-6353 (mobile)



On Tuesday, February 10, 2009 the Hip-Hop community, represented by artists both local and national, will lift our voices to call for an end to the ongoing racist attacks on Maricopa County residents. Join us at the Stray Cat 2433 E. University Drive, Tempe, AZ at 8pm for “Stop the Circus! (Fight for Tolerance, Stop Arpaio)”. The event will feature renowned musical artists from Chicago, Detroit, and New York in addition to local artists (bios below). There will also be statements of support read on behalf of many national/international luminaries that are closely monitoring the situation in Maricopa County.



On Wednesday, February 4, 2009 in a shocking display of anti-immigrant racism, the man who calls himself the "Toughest Sheriff in America" publicly chained and paraded 220 immigrant detainees through a gauntlet of media cameras from the Maricopa county jail to outdoor tents. The immigrants housed in the “tent city” will be surrounded by electrified fencing and subject to different disciplinary standards than other prisoners. Disobedience of Sheriff Joe’s “tent city” rules is punishable by chain-gang labor; eerily reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.



These detainees were singled out for public humiliation, and segregated from other inmates simply because of their race. These antics are not the exception, but rather the rule in dealing with the issue of immigration under the reign of “Sheriff Joe”. According to the Immigration Policy Center, “Over the past year and a half, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio…has transformed his police department into an immigration-enforcement agency…”, and upwards of 2,700 lawsuits have been filed against Arpaio for civil rights violations. Arpaio is quickly turning an embarrassing situation for Arizona into a national spectacle. At a time when many feel as though our nation is turning crucial corners on the issue of race relations, Joe Arpaio and the actions of his police force are keeping us chained to an era rife with racial profiling, xenophobia, and brutality.



"Any time you treat people differently for no reason, you…violate rights. We treat people equally in America…" -- Mary Rose Wilcox; Maricopa County Supervisor



"You're…giving the message that it's OK to treat them like circus animals. He didn't have to make a spectacle. He could've moved them on buses." -- Alessandra Soler Meetze; Executive Director of ACLU of Arizona



“Parading shackled detainees for public viewing is disgusting. The dire situation in Arizona is a shameful insult to the democratic freedoms of this country, and should draw cries of outrage from anyone who values the sacrifices our nation has made in the face of oppression.” –Verbal Kent; Gravel Records Recording Artist





Performers (All performers will be made available to media):



One Be Lo (Subteraneous/Fat Beats)



An excellent performer, at any given moment you might find his calendar booked with shows all over the U.S. and even overseas. He' has performed major festivals, hosted and shared the stage with artists such as Rakim, KRS-One, Wu-Tang, Ludacris, Lupe Fiasco, Dead Prez, and Immortal Technique, to name a few. For 3 years He's performed on the Vans Warped Tour, a mostly Rock tour, and he's performed throughout the B-Boy circuit.



Wordsworth (EMC)



Wordsworth is an underground Hip-Hop MC from Brooklyn, and a graduate of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Wordsworth recorded with his partner Punchline on A Tribe Called Quest's The Love Movement and on Mos Def and Talib Kweli's Black Star. He was also involved in the critically acclaimed MTV comedy sketch series Lyricist Lounge. He made his solo debut in September 2004 with Mirror Music. He also featured in a Slam Bush music video where he's Hip-Hop "battling" a nervous George W. Bush. Words is a member of the supergroup eMC, alongside Masta Ace, Punchline and Strick.


Verbal Kent



Verbal Kent has been recording and performing Hip-Hop music since 1998. He has released three solo albums, "What Box" (2003), "Move With the Walls" (2006), and "Fist Shaking" (2008). He is set to release his fourth opus entitled "Brave New Rap" on April 1st, 2009. For a decade Verbal has toured and shared the stage with Hip-Hop Legend's KRS-1, Redman, GZA, The Pharcyde, Sadat X, Cypress Hill, Boot Camp Click, and De La Soul. He has also performed alongside Rap's next generation, artists such as Sean Price, Ill Bill, Little Brother, Atmosphere, Mr Lif, Akrobatik, and many more. Kent has toured the U.S. and several European countries, including the UK, France, and Germany. Over the years he has been involved in events to help the community, fundraising and lending his services to humanitarian organizations such as Chances by Choice and The Chicago Alliance to Help Homelessness. Verbal Kent is currently the coordinator of the Center for New Community's Hip Hop Project, building coalitions in Phoenix and Chicago to respond to anti-immigrant activities that threaten multiracial communities.



Also Performing:



-G-Owens, Fiyah Station, Nobuddie, Bliss-
Writers Bench: Hosted by Wild Life Refuge
+special guests



“It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop!”—dead prez



-end-

I am back at Goddard. It’s my final residency, entering into my final semester, finishing up my thesis. Supposedly I will be done May 18 with that, and then just have the technical requirements to complete. It seems difficult to see that from here, I’m not seeing how I will get from here to there in just a few short months.

It has been interesting this time… I feel a lot less invested. Call it senioritis, but maybe it’s also that the rest of my life is really taking me where I want to go. Even though I sometimes feel overwhelmed and stressed by all I do, everything I do, from teaching at the college to teaching fourth graders to high school, to performing, to writing, are all things that I love to do. I am feeling much more settled in my real life. I feel like I have a lot of what I have been searching for, and like the protaganist from The Alchemist, it was in front of me the whole time, I just wasn’t ready to see it yet.

What I’m working on now a lot of is vulnerability in my writing. As a performance poet, I tell a lot of personal things about myself. But they are often sanitized. As we all know, autobiography is often as much a creation as a novel, because not only is memory selective, we choose what sides of ourselves we want to share and show. I think I’m really struggling with being vulnerable when every sentence is hard to write, when it is a reality or a history or a part of you you would rather not see at all. Sharing something that is messy, that you haven’t processed or made peace with, that still wakes you up screaming in the night.

Our theme for this residency is aesthetic ambition. Which I didn’t really understand what the fuck that meant. It was interesting because we had the keynote address today, given by three different faculty and they all had really different conceptions of it. My advisor Matthew Shenoda was one of them, and really gave this powerful idea of pushing ourselves to understand the context and the history of our work, and that we are not divorced from the world but rather the world speaks through us, or, more poignantly, we have the opportunity to perhaps reshape and re-envision the world through our work. It’s really powerful to see him in the context of going to school here at Goddard, which is really as somewhere here said a “post hippie” experience. It’s sort of hippie means critic, and all of it conspires to erase the politicized ramifications and realities of the world we live in. I mean, I have continually pushed the idea here that who you are and your position is the world is directly related to what you write, and also how people see you.

Matthew mentioned that in his keynote, the idea that as a writer of color, you are fundamentally seen as suspect, as not objective, of having a hidden agenda lurking behind, and if you discuss issues of power and humanity, it confirms everyone’s idea that you are not “objective.” Objectivity of course being the sole purview of white men. One of the other faculty members, Neil Landau, was talking about this screenwriter Dave Kemp, I guess whose written a lot of big blockbuster movies like Jurassic Park and Spiderman. Someone had asked a question about mainstream appeal and how do you market the marketable in essence. Neil started off his response by saying that Dave was a white heterosexual man who was married with two kids. And he didn't follow that train of thought, but I thought it was an interesting response, the idea that he would reference Dave’s identity to prove that he was “normal” and therefore accessible to the “mainstream.” Which means the rest of us are not mainstream. But honestly, how many white heterosexual middle and upper class married men with two kids are there out there? Especially when we look at a global context? And why have we let them define themselves in that way? And why do we never question the idea of what the “mainstream” wants, or even who it is? I mean, I know why, but I just think we so rarely raise those questions, and so rarely think about different alternatives and realities where these things don’t have to be a fact.

Fact is another thing I have been struggling with. Before I came to Goddard, I felt like I clearly knew the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I feel now that those definitions are a stack of cards I’ve thrown up in the air. When is telling a story fabricating a story? When is a story based on real life retelling real life? the difference between authenticity and lying, the idea that there is a greater truth beyond the facts. We had a brief discussion about Margaret Seltzer’s book Love and Consequences, in which she purported to be a white woman raised by a foster family in the middle of the hood by black folks, and then it turned out that that was complete bullshit and she was some privileged white girl raised in a cushy suburb. But that book was huge, and (white) people loved it. Because it felt true to them. It supported their truth of race relations and reality. It was a fucked up book not just because she lied, but because she was inauthentic, because the black people she created were completely unbelievable, because it didn’t speak to a larger truth. But what does it mean that so many white people were able to accept that portrayal as true, to never question it?