Angela Davis and Toni Morrison in NYC circa 1970s
LIVE from the NYPL:
Angela Davis and
Toni Morrison:
Literacy, Libraries
and Liberation
October 27, 2010
Uploaded by LIVEfromtheNYPL on Mar 10, 2011
Dambisa Moyo
Posted: July 16, 2012Author and economist Dambisa Moyo is an outspoken critic of foreign aid to Africa. In her best-selling book “Dead Aid“, she explains the state of post-colonial development policies in Africa and challenges the belief that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations helps reduce poverty and stimulate growth. To the contrary, she boldly confronts politicians and celebrities who have called for increasing aid to Africa by demonstrating that these policies have caused many African leaders to abandon national responsibilities to their citizens, increased the temptation for corruption, hindered the development of a middle-class in Africa, and altered the purpose of democratic elections on the continent. The failure of aid to “trickle down” to the grassroots level has resulted in the dramatic increase of well-intentioned charities and philanthropic organizations who act as surrogate providers of vital services, including healthcare and education.
Moyo makes it clear that she is not criticizing emergency relief aid that is necessary after natural disasters or unexpected circumstances. She also excludes the type of compassionate aid that connects people of one country to another.
While aid programs worked in post-World War II Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan and has been successful in Asian countries like South Korea, the same strategies have not worked in Africa. While aid continues to increase from wealthy countries to Africa, poverty rates have escalated and growth rates have declined. There is evidence that the continent is currently experiencing worse circumstances with massive foreign aid efforts than it experienced during the independence movement of the mid-20th century.
In this video, Moyo discusses her thoughts about foreign aid to Africa with Canadian pollster and media pundit Allan Gregg on “Allen Gregg In Conversation“. She moves beyond criticisms and provides ideas for self-reliance and sustainability regarding the future of Africa.
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Dambisa Moyo makes a compelling case for a new approach in Africa. Her message is that “Africa’s time is now”. It is time for Africans to assume full control over their economic and political destiny. Africans should grasp the many means and opportunities available to them for improving the quality of life.
—Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General
President, United Nations Security Council: Authorize AU & ECOWAS to protect UNESCO sites & people in Timbuktu & Gao
We ask the United Nations Security Council to issue an emergency resolution authorizing the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)—and each member state --to take all necessary steps to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Mali and to preserve the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Timbuktu and Gao.
In the guise of religious purification, foreign-backed Islamic extremists (Ansar Dine, MUJAO, Boko Haram), claiming alliance with Al-Qaeda of the Desert (AQMI), are savagely and single-mindedly attacking the people, sacred shrines and World Heritage Sites in Mali. This ominous destruction is not without precedent. History teaches that the real intent is not only to destroy Africa’s history and cultural legacy but to redesign the African continent according to foreign interests. Thus, the destiny of a race is also playing out in Mali. We cannot allow this history to repeat itself.
Malian Culture Minister Diallo Fadima Touré’s “Cry from the heart,” has been felt around the world, as centuries-old monuments and shrines are being leveled and swept away like so much rubbish. With a profound appreciation of African history as the world’s history, UNESCO stands with those in Mali who seek to preserve Africa’s heritage. We join the international community in demanding an end to these crimes against the people of Mali and against human civilization.
Why should everyone, especially African Americans, be outraged? In his 1987 book, The Journey of the Songhai People, the great historian and teacher, the recently deceased Dr. Edward Robinson, Jr., explained that the enslaved ancestors of many Africans in the Americas—whether from Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, etc.--came from areas that were once part of the Songhoy Empire. Yet, how many of us know that African American history does not begin with slavery in the Americas? Timbuktu, where these religious extremist forces now celebrate their destruction of ancient Islamic manuscripts, mausoleums and tombs—the creations of Africans--was the site of Sankore University, Africa’s great 15th century world-class center of learning.
Who appreciates that Songhoy Emperor Askya Mohammed financed this highly advanced educational institution? Who is aware that Sunni Ali Ber, the founder of the Songhoy Empire, liberated Timbuktu in 1464 from Arab slave-trading domination? How many realize that it was the defeat and destruction of the Songhoy Empire in 1591, by similar invading mercenaries, that opened the way for the massive deportation and enslavement of our African ancestors?
Destroying Africa’s proud and informing history denies our heritage and resilient cultural identity and also robs all future generations of this vital human history. But there have always been fearless defenders who resisted, survived such onslaughts, and who did not forget. For example, in 1820, free Africans in New Jersey established a thriving community, which they named “Timbuctoo,” that was an important stop on the Underground Railroad. During this period when slavery was the law of the land, those African Americans were armed and valiantly defended themselves against “slave catchers.” This spirit of resistance exists in Mali today. Young people in Gao, facing-down heavily armed invaders with bare hands and brave hearts, have been shot dead. Undaunted, their present vigil protecting the ancient mosque of Askya Mohammed demands our support.
We call upon people of conscience of all backgrounds, everywhere, to stand with those in Mali determined to return legitimate power, peace and good democratic governance guided by ancient African wisdom to Mali’s citizens.
We ask that you sign this petition urging the UN Security Council—and all UN member states-- ECOWAS and the African Union to bring an immediate end to the attacks on the people and sacred sites of Timbuktu and Gao for the sake of the world’s precious heritage in Mali.
MAY/JUNE 2012Bodies with Histories
The New Search for the Biology of Race
Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W. W. Norton, $25.95 (cloth)
Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. University of California Press, $26.95 (paper)
Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. New Press, $29.95 (cloth)
National Cancer Institute
Have you heard this one? A sociologist, a lawyer, and a biologist walk into a bar, scoot their stools up to the counter, order drinks, and begin to chat. Suddenly, a booming voice (God, the bartender?) envelops them. “What is the meaning of race?” the voice asks.
While the question may seem straightforward on its face, it quickly spawns further questions, often vexing. Is race purely a political construct, or is it biologically encoded? Certainly there are aspects of human biology—skin color, hair color, the presence or absence of epicanthic folds, etc.—that are commonly associated with racial differences, but is race just the sum of these physical features, with all of the overlaps, exceptions, and ambiguities they involve? How do genes factor into the story? And what connection—if any—is there between biological markers of race and the social experiences of racial groups?
Each of the three drinking buddies has a lot to say to God or Sam Malone, and, by the way, their responses don’t end in laugh lines. The biologist, Richard Francis, engages other issues, though his concerns directly affect how we answer the loud voice. But the sociologist, Ann Morning, and the lawyer, Dorothy Roberts, are narrowly focused on the science of race and how medicine mediates racial experience. And with good reason: in the United States people of a darker hue (on average) die sooner than pink-skinned people. They are afflicted with higher rates of particular diseases, such as high blood pressure, strokes, and kidney failure. So the race you’re born with, or, rather, which race you are born into, might mean a healthier, longer life—or not.
These days large numbers of medical research dollars are devoted to finding genetic differences between races that might explain health disparities. But many students of biology and race, and at least some of our bar mates, think that is a bad idea. They are not against medical research per se but against bad research. Instead of looking for genes that cause race and attending health outcomes (the standard approach) they point to evidence strongly suggesting that everyday events alter our bodies, making them sicker or more resistant to disease—events that the political economy ensures are more or less common depending on which racial categories one is assigned to. Indeed, it may be that biology doesn’t create race but that racial marking creates new biological states via processes that all three of these thinkers discuss in new books.
• • •
In The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference, Morning gleans the meaning of race from interviews with university students and their professors and from close reading of high school textbooks. She presents detailed information with great care and enlivens the discussion with hilarious tongue-tied statements from students and professors as well as personal anecdotes. When she takes her two-week-old daughter for a doctor’s visit, the hospital admissions clerk won’t allow the baby to be seen without first having a racial designation. When Morning suggests “multiracial”—she usually identifies as black; her husband is Italian—the clerk replies, “That’s not an option” and settles instead for “race unknown,” as if that could offer significant clinical information.
Race is engrained in American medical practice. Sometimes beliefs about racial difference are even wired into medical diagnostic machines. For example, you can’t get a bone scan evaluated without designating a race, because the formulae programmed into bone densitometers use different standards for assessing bone thinning in white, Asian, Hispanic, and African American women. The evidence supporting different standards is rarely questioned and certainly unknown to the technicians who operate the machines. Often even the radiologists who evaluate the results don’t know much about the differing standards.
Or consider spirometers, which measure lung function. The normal functioning of black people’s lungs is typically presumed to be 10–15 percent below that of white people’s. As Lundy Braun, who studies the intersection of race and medical science and technology, has shown, the presumption stems from a poorly supported idea that blacks inherently have lesser lung capacities than whites. Yet spirometers are calibrated to account for this difference. Some machines actually have a “race” switch built into them, which technicians flip depending on what race they believe the patient to be. Pegging the lung function of blacks at a lower level means, among other things, that they have to be sicker than whites in order to qualify for worker’s compensation or other insurance for lung-related illness.
In The Nature of Race Morning uses the lenses of biology and medicine to isolate several conceptualizations of race. She finds that there is no consensus among either social or biological scientists and groups her respondents into three general categories: essentialists, anti-essentialists, and constructivists.
It may be that biology doesn’t create race but that racial marking creates new biological states.
Essentialists propose that there are biologically grounded human races that share some more or less immutable essence. In modern terms the essence is usually understood to be specific genes or groups of genes, or to result from evolutionary processes that have acted on genetically isolated populations.
Here is how one of Morning’s interlocutors, a biologist whom Morning classifies as an essentialist, chews over the definition of race:
Well, I think the textbook will say that there are three major races—Negroid, Caucasian, and Asian or Mongoloid . . . . So I guess in the old definition they’re like you would imagine they are: the edges are a little blurred, but the old classical definition of race is a lot clearer. And don’t we kind of look at people today [like that].Referring to Morning, this scientist continues:
I said you’re part Caucasian and part black, so I’m taking two of the standard races, and I’m mixing them in some proportion, and that’s probably the best I could do in terms of race: three races . . . blurring at the edges.But this blurring is a problem for anti-essentialists, who see the fuzziness of racial categories as a sign that they can’t be rigorously connected to particular genes. Anti-essentialists either emphasize the genetic unity of humans in a single race or highlight how difficult and arbitrary it is to draw biologically based racial boundary lines. Anti-essentialists agree that there is wide biological variation in human traits, but because groups of traits don’t link and vary together, this variation can’t be used to set up clear racial categories.
So anti-essentialists open the door to human agency in organizing racial groupings, but they don’t explain just how humans might construct and maintain racial groups. Enter the constructivists. Not only do they argue that race is a social category, but they also maintain that the science that produces claims of biological difference is itself shaped by social forces. One constructivist tells Morning the point
is not to . . . say it’s all cultural, it’s not biological, but rather to say that constructions of difference, be they characterized as cultural or biological . . . really operate in a sociopolitical framework that is about relations of inequality.If the science and social science faculty at major universities sound confused or at odds on the question of race, where does this leave the students? In Morning’s study, they reflect some of the same divisions found among faculty but also worry that they not offend peers by appearing racist. Many express genuine concern about racial inequality. Here is how one student tries to combine views about difference and equality:
So the genes make them different, but, because they look different—we look different—the environment is going to play a role. People have darker skin; they might be less prone to skin cancer because they have that protective layering. But it doesn’t make them different people, so . . . I don’t think people act—if you just take the U.S. and different races here, and if they were born here, and they’re different races, I don’t think that makes them act differently, makes them any different.Morning is surprised by the enduring strength of the biological view of race, given that many social scientists and some biologists still think that the biological concept of race disappeared after World War II, with the revelation of the horrific consequences of Nazi racial beliefs. She devotes considerable thought and analysis to the social and structural forces undergirding the idea that biology offers a good basis on which to construct our understanding of race. Morning believes that by moving from a view of race based on how we look (skin color, hair texture, etc.) to one based on genes, a biological explanation of human difference has been made suitable for the post-racial era in which we supposedly live. Essentialism has held its own against constructivism and anti-essentialism.
• • •
The persistence of biological understandings owes something to an unavoidable fact: race and health are inextricably intertwined. But this doesn’t mean biology produces race. It may be that race produces biology. A newer, but still embodied, view of human difference, one in which we conceptualize how social difference and deprivation change the body’s physiology, has yet to make inroads into public discussions of race. This is a concept that Roberts nails.
In Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, Roberts argues passionately and relentlessly—you can picture her making her case to a rapt jury—against the idea of race as a biological trait, which she calls, per her title, a fatal invention. Her evidence against biological causes (but not biological effects), and her insistence that believing in the biological basis of race is fatal to people of color, are compelling. Her case study of racial differences in breast cancer fatalities illustrates the point.
In Chicago in 1980, black and white women died of breast cancer at the same rate. Today, despite being slightly more likely to get breast cancer, white female Chicagoans are half as likely to die from it. Could the difference in death rates be due to genetic differences between black and white women? A wealth of evidence suggests otherwise.
In Chicago in 1980, black and white women died of breast cancer at the same rate. Today, the white women are half as likely to die from it.
First, the disparity is recent, so it is unlikely to be due to the slow evolution of genetic variations between populations. Second, the disparity is local. In New York City, where the disparity still favors white women, the difference is only 15 percent. Roberts interviews Dr. Steven Whitman, an epidemiologist at the aging Mt. Sinai Hospital—located in the overwhelmingly black community of North Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side—who seems to understand how such a huge divergence came about. As he explains, in the 1950s the residents of North Lawndale were white. But in that decade, 110,000 of the whites moved out and an equal number of blacks moved in. Then half the neighborhood burned down during the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s murder, and now only 40,000 residents remain. Their median income is about $28,000, whereas Chicago’s median is $46,700. Mount Sinai Hospital has suffered, so that comparing its bankroll and daily operating cash to that of Northwestern University’s Memorial Hospital is a bit like comparing an automobile assembly line worker’s income to Mitt Romney’s.
This disparity has consequences: the breast cancer death rate for Chicago’s black women has not changed since 1980. Women of color living in segregated neighborhoods have limited access to mammograms, sometimes having to travel on public transportation up to ten miles away, only to be told that their health insurance won’t cover the screening. Adding injury to insult, the quality of available mammograms is poor compared to what’s offered at the state-of-the-art facilities more commonly accessible to white women. Whitman cites a North Lawndale facility that catches only two cancers per thousand people screened, rather than the expected six. Getting advanced care is next to impossible for women living in black neighborhoods. In Whitman’s words, all “the fancy institutions . . . are in white neighborhoods.”
What ought to be done about the disparities in breast cancer deaths between blacks and whites in Chicago seems clear: build state-of-the-art hospitals in the black neighborhoods and treat women where they live. Or organize a transportation system that would bring women in need of high-quality screening and treatment to existing high-quality centers. But scientists instead seek funding for basic research focused on possible genetic explanations for race-based health disparities.
Roberts’s answer to the booming voice is clear:
Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health. Understanding race as a political category does not erase its impact on biology; instead, it redirects attention from genetic explanations to social ones.With this framing, the question for biologists changes. It is no longer, how does biology create race, but how does racism become part of one’s cellular- and systems-level physiology? How does the social become biological?
Four interlaced frameworks structure answers to this question: embodiment, allostasis, dynamic systems, and epigenetics.
Nancy Krieger, the epidemiologist who developed the embodiment framework, defines it as the “many different ways that we literally incorporate the world outside of us” into the biological responses in our bodies. Krieger points to studies showing that people who experience racial discrimination have higher essential hypertension and, among women, are more likely to give birth to low-weight babies.
It is no mystery how this might happen. Until recently physiologists viewed the body as a self-stabilizing, or homeostatic, machine. The thought behind homeostasis was that when events cause a loss of physiological balance, the body rights itself, kind of like the shmoo dolls from my own childhood—you could keep punching them over, and they always popped back upright. Homeostasis works, conceptually, when there is an occasional stressor. But when stress never lets up, the body’s response (release of cortisol and accompanying increased heart rate and blood pressure) becomes constant, or allostatic. The body learns from past experience to respond to expected future events. Allostasis is a late twentieth–century physiological mechanism that has the potential to explain how the experiences of racism, poverty, and other social stressors become embodied as illnesses such as essential hypertension. Under constant stress, blood pressure remains elevated; immune systems stay alert. The body is always ready for the next battle.
Which brings us back to breast cancer. Not only rates, but breast cancer patterns differ between black and white women. When diagnosed, black women are more likely to be under the age of 35 and to die by the age of 50. Some have argued that their tumors spread more quickly because they differ physiologically from white women. Black women tend to lack key hormone receptors, which means that tumors respond poorly to familiar hormone-based treatments.
People who experience racial discrimination have higher essential hypertension and are more likely to give birth to low-weight babies.
Physician and cancer researcher Olufunmilayo Olopade noticed these differences and originally assumed that they were due to genetic, race-based differences between white women and women of African origin. Recently, however, she has begun to see things differently, looking to how women of color embody the daily stresses of racism and economic deprivation. The absence of hormone receptors could be a function of environmental factors, but, seeking other explanations, Olopade has teamed up with University of Chicago biopsychologist Martha McClintock to ask a new kind of question. In a study of mice that primarily modeled the growth rate for human breast cancer, they have shown that socially stressed mice express certain genes differently in their mammary tissue. Specifically, the stressed mice demonstrate an uptick in expression for suites of genes involved in lipid metabolism and a biochemical pathway that converts sugars into energy. Both pathways contribute to breast cancer growth. The stressed mice are genetically the same as unstressed controls, but it’s not what genes you have that count so much as which genes your cells express.
When you join the concepts of allostasis and embodiment, disease emerges as something that happens in bodies with histories. Each body forms a dynamic system not only with its current environment, but also with its particular history. Bodies are always in process, reflecting the past and incorporating the present. Dynamic systems theory explains stability in an organism or in a cell, but also offers a way to understand how, when a contributing process goes awry, a system destabilizes. If we think of breast cancer as a destabilized system, then it makes sense to ask what contributes to stability and how destabilization occurs.
• • •
Back at the bar, Roberts has supported her ideas with a dozen different examples from science, medicine, pharmacology, and genetic surveillance. But by now the biologist has gotten antsy. Freelance writer and neurobiologist Richard Francis, author of Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance, is excited to explain how new understandings of a long-known, but until recently poorly understood, phenomenon called epigenetics form part of the story. Although Francis does not specifically address the question of race, he realizes from listening to his drinking mates that what he has to say directly relates to answering the booming voice. Like Morning and Roberts, Francis recounts a bit about the history of genetics, focusing briefly on Morgan, Mendel, and the relationship between genes and phenotypes, as in that fruit fly with a gene for the phenotype of white eyes.
The Morgan-Mendel tradition gave rise to a reductionist approach to genes as causes of traits. Francis, however, emphasizes another tradition, one represented in the work of geneticists Sewall Wright and C. H. Waddington. Both focused on the complex pathways that intervene between genes and traits. Francis echoes these scientists, viewing genes as tools or cellular resources, responding to environmental input. Modern epigenetics is the study of gene modifications induced by local changes in the environment. An epigenetic event is not a mutation, because there is no change in the genetic code. Instead small molecular add-ons to DNA regions that control gene expression can silence a gene or boost its expression. Epigenetic changes aren’t permanent, but they can endure for long periods of time, even across generations.
Consider the fetuses that were gestating in their mothers’ wombs during the famine that swept the Netherlands at the end of World War II. Not surprisingly, the infants born from starving mothers were undersized and not so healthy. Less expected is that members of this same cohort, examined in adulthood, were twice as likely to be obese as those born before or after the famine. They also had an elevated risk for developing schizophrenia and other mental disorders. Epigenetic modification ranks first on the list of possible mechanisms that underpin these second-generation effects. Francis explains the science behind these conclusions with clarity and forthrightness. His path crosses with Roberts, Krieger, Olopade, and others in his argument that genes are responsive elements in the cell. Environmental impingements, especially at critical developmental moments such as pregnancy and childhood, have long-term biological consequences, in some cases yea unto the grandchildren’s generation.
So what is the meaning of race? Morning and Roberts argue convincingly that race is a socially produced set of categories that has profound and often terrible biological consequences. Without putting words into Francis’s mouth, since he doesn’t discuss race per se, he would, I think, agree that epigenetics provides a well-understood tool that ought to be used more frequently in studies of biological correlates of racial inequality in health. If our goal is not just to understand race, but to improve health, then we don’t need research to find genes that cause essential hypertension as much as we need to address the sources of chronic stress. And let’s get those mammography machines into the inner cities and out into rural America.
Understanding race as a producer of health outcomes, but not a result of genetic programming, doesn’t suggest that we abandon biomedical research as it relates to race, but it does suggest that looking for race-oriented genetic precursors of disease is a fruitless labor. We need a different kind of investigation. Already, the National Institutes of Health devote significant resources to studying the epigenome. But NIH’s illustration of epigenetics emphasizes an exploded segment of DNA, not air pollution or the lack of fresh, high-quality produce in blighted city neighborhoods. And funding for research into the allostatic mechanisms by which, say, blood pressure becomes chronically elevated, is hard to come by.
The question of what exactly race is may be with us for while. But if we are dedicated to delivering social services and doing the right kind of laboratory research, we can, right now, address the comparative ill health of people of color, the poor, and the medically underserved.
Testimony of
Alexander Falconbridge
before a select committee
of the House of Commons,
March 8, 1790:
What is your present situation?
A surgeon.How many voyages have you been to the Coast of Africa?
I have been four voyages to the Coast of Africa.Do you examine the Slaves previous to purchasing them?
They are always examined by some officers on board; it is generally understood to be the surgeon’s business.Do they appear dejected when brought on board?
All that I have seen in my voyages did appear so.Did this dejection continue, or did it soon wear off?
With some it continued the whole voyage, and with others till death put a period to their misery.Have you known instances of Slaves refusing sustenance?
I have known several instances.With what design?
With a design to starve themselves, I am persuaded. …What was the mode used in stowing the Slaves in their night apartments?
They had not so much room as a man has in his coffin, neither in length or breadth, and it was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree of ease. I have had occasion very often to go from one side of their rooms to the other; before I attempted it I have always taken off my shoes, and notwithstanding I have trod with as much care as I possibly could to prevent pinching them, it has unavoidably happened that I did so; I have often had my feet bit and scratched by them, the marks of which I have now. …Are the consequences ever extremely noxious and nauseous of great number being ill at once of this latter disorder [dysentery]?
It was the case in the Alexander, as I have said before when I was taken ill — I cannot conceive any situation so dreadful and disgusting, the deck was covered with blood and mucus, and approached nearer to the resemblance of a slaughter-house than anything I can compare it to, the stench and foul air were likewise intolerable. …To what cause do you describe [instances of insanity among slaves on board ship]?
To their being torn from their nearest connections, and carried away from their country.
Anita Baker performing at the 13th Annual Art For Life East Hampton Benefit, a few weeks ago.
So here goes the day I’ve been waiting on for a minute.
Today is the day Anita’s new music from her ”Only Forever” project starts its arrival. Releasing her cover of Tyrese’s “Lately” as her lead single, Ms. Baker kicks the small promotional touring up a notch by releasing the track to the internet. Now I am usually picky about covers, but with Anita’s velvet-toned, smokey vocals on the track, she can probably sing my tax return and make it sound great.
Listen/Download the link below. When you’re done with that, check out this great interview she did with The Boombox at AOL music.
Anita Baker can’t sit still. The Ohio-born, Michigan-raised soul singer has about as much energy as a toddler on a sugar high as she speaks about Only Forever, her first album in seven years. She’s excited for the release, and rightfully so. The woman is on a mission to merge classic sounds with technological advancements.
“I just had this concept of walking into a digital universe with an analog heart [on Only Forever],” Baker tells The BoomBox. “So we’re kind of marrying the two. I started cutting analog down in Nashville, and once I knew what we were gonna do, we bounced it over to the digital format so that the 21st century producers like Harvey Mason, Jr., could manipulate it.
“I was just very focused on getting some analog energy in there somewhere. So it’s a lovely bridge that I’m trying to build tech-wise as well as musically.”
The first single off the effort, titled “Lately,” is actually a take on crooner Tyrese‘s 1999 track of the same name. Baker, who speaks fondly of the former model-turned-singer and actor, referring to him as one of her “handful of friends” and “second-born Capricorn son,” chose to recreate his original song in part because she wants him to continue sharing his gift. He’s set to appear on one of two versions of the track.
“['Lately' is] one of the first songs we cut, analog, in Nashville,” she reveals. “I brought in a live rhythm section. I brought it to L.A., and I called [Tyrese] into the studio and I played it for him; he had no idea. And he lost it, of course. He was like, ‘I know who has got to produce this!’ I’m like, ‘I already know, I got Harvey Mason, Jr., on tap.’”
Another song that will be featured on Only Forever is the title track, produced by world-renowned musician Nathan East, whose performed as part of the jazz quartet Fourplayand written for the likes of Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton, among others.
“I realized I’ve never cut a record without him on bass, ever,” the 54-year-old mother of two shares. “And I said, ‘You know what, man, it’s time for you.’ When he comes into a project, he’s so present that he is giving a lot of energy that’s almost like producing. So I said, ‘You’re gonna produce on this record.’”
Upon hearing “Only Forever,” Baker changed the direction of her forthcoming eighth studio album, which was originally titled 21st Century Love.
“Three months ago [East] sent me an email, which, if not for my young contemporaries I wouldn’t have email, and he said, ‘You know, this has been brewing for a long time,’” she states. “I got the file; it was ‘Only Forever.’ And when I heard it I was like, that’s our title cut, forget the concept. It was just organic, it was just real.”
The legendary songstress, known for delivering heartfelt lyrics on chart-topping songs like “Giving You the Best That I Got” and “Sweet Love,” which resonate with lovebirds and romantics worldwide, aims to do much of the same with the title track.
“The premise of the song is only everything, only all the time,” Baker explains. “In a push-button, instantly gratified, attention span of minutia, only always. Right? Whatever that means to you. But the sentiment is lovely and it’s applicable to everybody.”
Only Forever debuts Oct. 23.
ANITA BAKER
SESSIONS MIXTAPE
In case you haven’t heard as yet, the lady is back! Last Tuesday, I promised I would repost one of my favorite mixes by my brother from another Mother, DJ Phaze. In 2010, I had asked Phaze to put together a quintessential mix from Ms. Baker that I was able to share with you. He did that and then some. That mix was reposted twice over, by popular demand. And here we are, a third time around, giving you something you can feel.
To this day, I still play this mix like it’s going out of style. I sometimes start my day with this mix on the subway jamming on my way to work. I mean, you can’t go wrong with some Anita in the morning! With that said, please enjoy and share this link with those who you know enjoy a little Anita Baker in their aural stimulation set.
Also, please be sure to check out my boy DJ Phaze! You can find him penning reviews for my fam Bamalovesoul.com, over on his radio show on Banglounge.FM, and make sure to add him to your podcast roster for his stellar mixes!
You can find DJ Phaze in these social circles:
And without further adieu, I hope you enjoy the 45 minutes of bliss that awaits on the other end! Click right here to download The Anita Baker Sessions! Enjoy!
See y’all soon,
Soulafrodisiac
>via: http://www.soulafrodisiac.com/2012/08/12/the-anita-baker-sessions-take-3/
Atlantic Starr
– Unsung Full Episode
While never achieving supergroup status, Atlantic Starr was one of the most consistently successful – and underrated – soul bands of the 80s, with a basketful of memorable songs that still sound good today.
Watch Full Episode Below:
In Memory of A Late President
(John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills)
In mockery, you countered with a smile
With humor, your opponents' ridicule diffused
In muddiness, yet your slate stands untainted
Man of peace and humility
Fallen but with grace and dignity
Indeed, death does conquer all
But not your clean seat and high raised flag!
Following President Mills’ shocking death, online poetry magazine One Ghana, One Voice is devoting itself exclusively to publishing poems memorializing the late President.
Poetry holds a special place in memorializing President Mills. Across Ghanaian cultures, when a great man goes to the village, there are several events that commemorate that man's life. There are dirges, dances, discussions and dedications. Out of all the literary genres, poetry tends to be the kind that symbolizes, and captures, the brevity of our sojourn on earth, together with an appropriate summary of our deeds. The various poems on One Ghana, One Voice evoke the essence of this patriot worthy of emulation.
If readers have a poem they would like to contribute, or feel inspired to write one, they are encouraged to submit their work to oneghanaonevoice@gmail.com. The poems are already being posted at One Ghana, One Voice, and will continue to be posted daily as they come in.
One Ghana, One Voice was established in March 2007 as a joint effort by Ghanaian poet Julian Adomako-Gyimah and Canadian poet Rob Taylor. The magazine profiles a new poem and poet every Saturday.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: oneghanaonevoice@gmail.com
Website: http://oneghanaonevoice.com
BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW
LITERARY CONTEST
Eighth-Annual Contest Now Open
All entries must be submitted by September 1, 2012.
We’re honored to have as our guest judges:
Mary Caponegro (Fiction/Prose)
Sabrina Orah Mark (Poetry)
Maggie Nelson (Nonfiction)Winners in each genre receive a $1,000 prize and publication in BWR 39.2, our Spring/Summer 2013 issue. Finalists receive notation in that issue and are considered for publication.
Please submit your $15 entry fee at store.osm.ua.edu, then enter your Payment Gateway Reference number with your submission at bwrsubmissions.ua.edu
Each entry is $15 and comes with a one-year subscription to BWR. For Fiction/Prose and Nonfiction, the entry fee covers one 7500 word story or essay. For Poetry, the entry fee covers one packet of up to three poems.
You may submit multiple entries. We accept only previously unpublished work. We do allow simultaneous submissions, but we ask that you notify us promptly of publication elsewhere. Conflicts of Interest: Similar to our regular editorial policy, students, faculty, staff, or administrators currently affiliated with University of Alabama are ineligible for consideration or publication. Additionally, anyone with affiliation with a judge is ineligible to enter in that category. We ask that previous winners wait three years after their winning entry is published before entering again.
Black Warrior Review adheres to the CLMP Contest Code of Ethics. You can find the CLMP Code of Ethics and our Contest Procedures here, and do email any questions to blackwarriorreview@gmail.com.
Call for Submissions:
Collection of Essays on
the Role of Music
in Multicultural Activism
(Praeger Publishing)
Deadline: 1 October 2012
This book is a two volume series of essays telling stories of the ways in which music has propelled resistance and revolutionary movements in the United States and around the world.
The two-volume series will illustrate a consistent pattern of musical influence on political resistance movements by providing accounts describing a vast array of musical styles from diverse parts of the world and their use in these movements. One volume covers movements in the U.S. and the other has an international focus. The purpose of this series is to encompass a wide perspective on the role of music in political activism.
We are especially interested in essays that deal with the following:
- Northern Africa
- Brazil
- Middle East
- Southeast Asia
- Indonesia
- Australia/New Zealand
- Ireland
Please submit completed essays of 6000-9000 words with citations in Chicago Manual of Style endnotes by October 1, 2012 to Lindsay Michie Eades and Eunice Rojas. Contributors will be notified of acceptance by October 15, 2012. The series is under contract and scheduled for publication with Praeger Publishing Company in August 2013.CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: eades.l@lynchburg.edu and rojas.e@lynchburg.edu
