Talib Kweli Makes it Plain - INFORUM - A Commonwealth Club Presentation

March 20, 2015. Talib Kweli - INFORUM - Commonwealth Club.  “All good art takes cues from the community. It responds to our struggles,” said rapper Talib Kweli during his conversation, Race, Justice and Hip Hop, with Judge LaDoris H. Cordell on Friday night at the Commonwealth’s Inforum event held at the historic Castro Theatre. And to an audience of hip-hop fans, Commonwealth members and social activists spanning different age groups, races, religions and sexualities, Kweli explained that hip-hop is no different. He likened good hip-hop to that of negro spirituals, exploring how both genres are the lamentation of the black community’s discontent and pain due to systematic oppression in a white supremacist society. Kweli stressed that a good hip-hop artist’s voice should amplify, impact and and belong to the community.

This portion of the conversation reminded me of an MTV interview with Diddy several years back where he drew similar comparisons:

“I always relate hip-hop to our old Negro spirituals. They were sung in the cotton fields to help us get by, to help us not kill ourselves by going crazy under the word oppression in the world. The music, the soulfulness, the spiritual-ness expressed in song helped us get through another day. “That’s the same impact hip-hop has had on this generation. Hip-hop has helped us make it through our life in the inner cities.”- Diddy

Kweli, considered by many as a “conscious rapper” (although he is reluctant to be boxed in to the category), grew up in a Black Nationalist household with parents who were active in the Civil Rights era and has been outspoken on racial justice issues. But he knows that all Twitter talk and conscious, poetic verses can be cheap. Kweli is one of very few celebrities who visited Ferguson and marched alongside protesters in the name of Michael Brown and all the unarmed black men who came before and after him.

During his talk, Kweli noted that these injustices have deep roots, dating back to slavery when white supremacy was invented to justify the slave trade and it has since evolved to Jim Crow and then onto to the prison industrial complex and the unjustified shootings of unarmed black men.

When discussing his Ferguson trip, he explained, “We don’t stand up. We don’t protest because we hate cops or white people. We do it because we love ourselves.”

While Kweli shouted out rappers like Kendrick Lamar, whose recent album addresses collective pain while instilling black self-love, he admitted there are many rappers whose verses are damaging, misogynistic, homophobic and perpetuate negative stereotypes in the black community. However, he held a “take the good with the bad” attitude on conscious vs. “flashy” hip-hop music that plays into the capitalist mentality.  “It’s convenient to love hip-hop when it’s beautiful but both types go hand in hand,” said Kweli.  

Written by: Rahel Marsie-Hazen

Tech Talk: 91 Year Old Tech Designer | CODE 2040 | Toddler Tech | Pandora's Diversity Program

Toddler Tech: YouTube. Can you image your 3 year child being memorized for hours and hours by a bright screen with vibrant colors and lots of movement dancing across the screen?  Have we considered what this does from an educational learning perspective or even more importantly from a physical one?  When it comes to marketing, dollars and corporate brand, these questions, I would imagine, are nowhere close to the top of the list.  Google jumped into the world of toddler tech when it introduced YouTube Kids late last month, marking Silicon Valley's first big step in appealing to a lucrative and largely untapped demographic of mobile device users: kids under 5. Amazon launched a kid-safe tablet in the fall, and other companies are likely to follow.  YouTube Kids offers a solution to the problem of uncontrolled viewing with a timer parents can set. And by giving parents more control over what children watch, Google and other tech companies are trying to earn the keys to a well-protected kingdom.  Educators and healthcare professionals are chiming in on this conversation and I am sure we will be hearing more from these industries.  What in the world will happen to programs such as First 5 or Head Start?  Details at 11.

Founded in 2012, CODE2040 has a simple mission that dovetails with the growing and resounding message pressing Silicon Valley to use its significant brainpower to make tech less of an ivory tower.  CODE2040 provides college-age African-American and Latino students who have shown an interest in computer science with both an encouraging network of peers and, more pointedly, a summer internship program aimed at placing them at tech companies whose narrowly focused recruiting efforts often overlook them.  Tristan Walker, Co-Founder of CODE2040 and CEO of Walker & Company Brands, is quoted in USA Today saying "If you're a smart company, you'll want an ethnically diverse team empathetic about the needs of your diverse consumers. What we're doing at CODE2040 isn't charity work. We're trying to help tech organizations because there is a real business imperative here."

Pandora's Diversity Program.  Last year, Pandora, located in downtown Oakland, joined a wave of Silicon Valley companies that revealed the makeup of their workforces. The music streaming site said that about 70% of its U.S. employees are white, and 3% are African-American..  More recently the numbers have shown that nearly half of Pandora employees are women, a far better gender balance than most tech companies have achieved, but the majority of them are White.  This diversity in tech conversation will go on for many years, but it's important to track certain companies and their efforts in, at least, working on more diversity in the field.  When Lisa Lee, Diversity Program Manager, joined the company last spring, she spent her first month simply listening and learning about what people were already doing. “She asked them about some of the things they were proud of that had happened in the past and what else they would like to see in the future. Instead of instructing employees on what they should do, Lisa incorporated their opinions and insights as she drafted the company’s diversity strategy.  The strategy of empowering different employee groups so they can have a voice in the diversity dialogue, both in the company’s culture and the way it conducts business is critical to inviting employees to drive diversity initiatives. 

As a young girl, Barbara Beskind dreamed of becoming an inventor. Now, at 91 years old, she's seeing it through.  Beskind works as a tech designer for IDEO, a Silicon Valley design firm. Two years ago, she read an article about IDEO, which is famous for creating the first mouse for Apple, and decided to apply for a job, saying: Beskind primarily works on projects pertaining to aging. She feels like her coworkers can't always put themselves in the shoes of the elderly.

 

And go!