First, yes, I do have the nerve to title this book the same as the Gil Scott Heron poem/song. Some white guy columbused it and I took offense, be mad with me not at me. We'll see if I can beat him when you search amazon for this title. Cross your fingers and buy a couple copies. This page should whet your appetite for the book by previewing all the goodies I pack into the book.
I will go so far as to say that this will be the book that you've been looking for. Why? Two reasons. First and foremost, because it answers the time-honored and mostly unanswered question: "what willI do?" That I as in you, not me. I've already started ... Get on board and catch up. Second, because this is the book I would have wanted to read. I've read hundreds of books for no other reason than to compile all of the goodies and put them into one book so you don't really have to read all the books that I've read. That's actually what most books are. Don't worry, each section will have a bibliography if you want audit my research and attempts to bullshit past the hard parts of what the revolution is/will be.
Many of the pro-black progressive and revolutionary books I've read or come across were analyses, explanations and critiques. This is not those. This is a manual. While and after you read it, you'll be able to answer the question"what can I do today and every day to help Black people." This will be chock full of things you can do, not just once a month for meetings or once every two to four years at the voting booth.
This page is an extended table of contents for the book that I'm writing (the title is above). What you see here is an overview of what you'll get in the book, section by section.
I tried to name each chapter after some relevant hip-hop verse, but then some became a Jazz album title ... or quote from another book. C'mon, cut me some slack. Some chapters had multiple contenders for the title, but I think these may be the most appropriate for what I want to talk about. Each of these sections has a fuller quote from the song that inspired it, names the artist, song and album selected for the chapter. I also explain a little about why I selected that in particular.
Second, I then make a comment on what prompted me to love, or hate, that song and a little background noise so that you know this book is written by a flesh and blood person, not abstract entity. I read way too many books that are all about the finished idea but not the process of why that idea was selected and what was disregarded. Writing book is just as much being a collector building a museum of ideas and instructions as your homeboy's sneaker fetish.
Third (yeah, second is buried in the previous overly-long paragraph). Third, I analyze the sections of each chapter in terms of the distinctions I laid out in the introduction to the whole book: scale and scope, perspective and ___. I do this because I want to show you the connectivity between the subchapters and how they flow together. This also shows that I'm at least trying to be systematic and rigorous with what I'm talking about instead of seeming to select and focus on topics at random. I figure if I want the revolution to be systemic and systematic, then this book has to be an example. This should help you identify what parts of the book are the most interesting and/or relevant to you and your life, and skip to that without having to read the whole thing. (cough, donate/support) In a sense, this is a more comprehensive and fleshed out table of contents and card catalog for the contents of this book. This also serves as my touchstone to keep me on point when I'm doing the writing and editing.
Fifth, I'm just messing with you again, we're at fourth. Fourth, well I don't have a fourth thing to say right now. So here, have some book.
I was down with Common Sense since Soul by the Pound. That was a song that I thought people should have paid more attention to, like Off the Books by the Beatnuts and Kill a Man by Cypress Hill (I'm still a little bitter about that song not ever reaching the top spot on the "Power 9 at 9"). His whole album was fluid. A co-worker a long time ago criticized the beats of Common's first album. After another listen I thought they could be better too. But I also got the sense that the beats imbued a particular Chi-town atmosphere in the album, much like everyone's customized beats did for Illmatic and all thos beats Jay-Z bought out from under Camp-Lo for Reasonable Doubt.
If I had a quarter for every person who claimed they love people watching, I would spend it all on ice-cream. This chapter teaches you how to sharpen your people watching skills while you're interacting with them, not just being a creepy observer. It teaches you how to categorize and respond to a few major modes of communicating in real time. This section focuses your attention on individual sentences or the turns that people take during a conversation.
When you learn programming, you learn how to be extra specific and comprehensive about what it is that you're instructing the computer to do. This chapter presents a format for talking, so that when you speak you include more of the relevant information for others to understand what you're saying and to help you solve the issue. This section highlights verbal behavior whereas the previous section highlights non-verbal behavior.
Now that you're a more well-rounded communicator, this chapter lays out a format for how to have longer, tougher conversations. When you need to have a conversation that might blow into an argument or end the relationship, this will be your go-to chapter. While the previous sections focused on sentences and conversational turns, this is about a whole conversation between yourself and another person, possibly multiple people.
Now that you can charm the pants off of the man of the house, we move to bigger game. In this chapter you learn how to become the host/life of the party and a pillar in your communities. This chapter shifts focus from the conversations between you and other people, to the connections you make between the people that you know. This chapter teaches you how to build your own networks, not just to be on someone else's.
I included this chapter about communication and put it first, I think, for good reason. I took a psychodrama course by Vernell Lillie at U. of Pitt, and in the first class she gave us the instruction that we were on a stranded island and had to figure out how to get off, and sat back. At the end of class, as she predicted based on her many years of giving the same context to her students, shit got ugly fast. If you've ever heard of, read or saw Lord of the Flies you'll know what I'm talking about because that is exactly what happened. Maybe even survivor compares.
The point is that without conscious intervention, people break themselves into small groups that tend to turn into warring factions. The only way out of that morass is top notch communication skills among and across those in-group/out-group lines. So, people say Black people need to 'bridge the gaps' and achieve 'unity' but they never exactly tell you how to do that. This is how to do that, with excellent communication skills. That's why this chapter is the first and perhaps the most important chapter in the whole book.
When I first heard this verse I stopped the tape and rewound it three times even before the song was finished to make sure I heard him right. And of course the next few days, during and after school, I practiced saying it alound and under my breath until it rolled off my tongue. And I did this for a lot of his album, which I think is the GOAT album, not just the most underrated. But that's for another argument at another time.
I've been following this cat named Scott Sonnon after being put on to him by Steven Barnes. I first heard of Steven when I saw him on a panel with Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney at the Franklin Institute in Phila a few years back. I had the pleasure of asking a question that he seemed to think was a good question. So, in turn, I read all of his books. Firedance is my favorite, after that check the Lion's Blood duology. Buy them, read them twice, give 'em away and make 'em read it, repeat. The main Character of Firedance is this street-lethal (find the pun) cat named Aubrey who learned a yoga/caopiera-like movement ritual from his father at a young age. Performing this ritual daily made it so that he was one of the most lethal folks on the planet in hand-to-hand combat.
Barnes' epilogue to Firedance says that Aubrey's ability to move "like water over rocks" was inspired by Scott Sonnon's martial arts trainings and philosophy. Note that Barnes was a writer for Black Belt Magazine for a good while. And also note that the world is a small place because when I was young I bought an issue or two of that mag and saw some light skinned dude that looked a little too chunky to have a column in the magazine, but then I figured you didn't have to be cut to be able to whoop ass.
So this chapter is an attempt to get you to understand what's missing from your favorite tae-bo and jane fonda tapes, and maybe even what your personal trainer isn't integrating into your workouts.
This section gives you an overview of the different types and layers of training. Much of the fitness industry is focused on strength and endurance, but they tend to leave out developing mobility and agility. Good sports training has a nice solid foundation in mobility and agility drills and practices, whether its intense stretching routines, various drills using an agility ladder, or something similar.
Murda MA$E:
Mobility: moving joints through multi-planar ranges of motion
Agility: with control
Strength: with power and/or speed
Endurance: for long periods of time
MA$E is a pretty decent rapper, it's a complete co-incidence that this chapter has his name in it. Anyhow, this section broadens your attention from simply focusing on strength and endurance that much of the health and fitness industry is obsessed with. I explain why and encourage you to expand your workouts and stretching regimens include increasing your flexibility and ability to perform different varieties of movement.
High Intensity Interval Training
This chapter will talk about measures that are used at the top levels of competition: V02 max, Lactic thresholds, etc. The aim is to teach you how to maximize the workouts you perform.
FITT
Frequency: the frequency with which you do general and/or specific exercises
Intensity: the amount of effort that the activity demands
Time: the length of time engaged in the activity
Type: the assortment of activities you engage in
This FITT principle is half redundant when put side-by-side with the MA$E chatper. But its mention of frequency and its sequencing makes it worth its own section.
My dream is, at least, that the 'national sport' of Black folk in America and across the diaspora is Capoiera because of its dynamism. Even practicing for a few monts or years, esp during childhood before you become old and stiff, would go a long way to combatting obesity as well as serve as a replacement for lethal violence in a more structured context.
Goodie Mob : Soul Food
"Everybody's out hunting with tha family
Looking for a little soul food"
When this track dropped, me and my brother looked at eachother with that look like "instant classic". There isn't a lot of soulful rap going around because everyone is trying to be all hype and gangsta. Like Will asked "what about a groove that soothes and moves romance?". I also liked this because it gives you a window into aspects of black life that isn't popularized or mentioned a lot, like Jilly from Philly's Family Reunion.
So, my wife is a dietitian. I tell people that marying her made what she says both free and the most expensive dietary advice at the same time. So, a lot of this chapter will be by the grace of her assistance, plus me throwing all the good advice out and telling you to eat icecream and oreo cookies everyday.
The most important thing I learned from my wife about eating healthy is that the war is fought at the grocery store. One of the keys to winning the war for health is that you should go to the store with a list of all the things you're going to eat for the week. Most people don't have a plan or agenda when they go grocery shopping, hence the rising tide of obesity across America and in your spreading pants.
Learning to read food labels will give you way more information than you knew, most of it necessary. Subsituting foods and a host of other things will give you marginal victories that add up like compound interest. And, you really win not by eating cardboard, but by finding a set of delicious meals that you can make easily and eat repeatedly, put some jelly and hot sauce on your cardboard.
Shout out to Keith Ferazzi who's book Never Eat Alone was a fantastic bridge between all of the networking theory that I'd been reading (which, sadly he barely mentions) with what do to on a day-to-day basis (which, thankfully he has a lot of). He talks about never eating alone in terms of building a community or network of people around you by 1. hosting dinners and small gatherings, and 2. connecting people with one another so that they prosper, even if your benefit is indirect at best and has little prospect of immediate return. Pay it forward and you'll get some back.
But this chapter is more about the rhythms and rituals of meals and bringing up a family and participating in a community. Most religious rituals involve some type of food. The breaking of bread, metaphorical and literal, is on of the things that differentiate and identify communities. Hosting potlucks and bbqs are where it's at.
One of the main things with this small collection is to teach you to cook a few basic dishes with different flavor and ingredient profiles. A lot of dishes are variations of one another using different cooking techniques. Learning to make these things consistently will get your comfortable in the kitchen without breaking your budget or schedule (esp if you have sitting on the couch as a large part of your schedule).
When this song game out was I hardcore Afrocentric, thinking about being a socialist or something so I hated the song for political reasons. But I would jam so hard to that throbbing beat while downing shots of 151 while my homies played tekken. So, um, whatevs. I still have issues with this for cognitive reasons. First, property and ownership should come first, then money because you get money from your property (intellectual, physical and labor capital - yes, you own your abilities and trade them for salary and wages) and then power and who cares about respect. But "property money power" don't sound as catchy, and everyone overvalues respect (or at least the type they're talking about). And the beat goes on.
This chapter is mostly a bootleg version of my favorite financial blog "bad money advice" which sadly has stopped being written. It was a decent critique of just about all the finanical advice coming out by the likes of Suze Orman and Kiyosaki. In this chapter I wax poetic about books by Thomas Stanley and William Danko, and Dave Ramsey. Most of the other shit about finacial advice sucks, as you will see.
Another title contender was "sittin back, countin double-digit thousand stacks" but C.R.E.A.M. is a way more popular verse
The more you use credit cards, the harder it will be to get your financial life in order simply because money isn't real to you, they're blips on a phone just like a facebook update. Most people, me included, aren't very good at tracking their money when it's just 1's and 0's, then "insuff funds" at the ATM. Kids can count and do arithmetic pretty easily if you have an abacus, cuisinaire rods or some physical representation of the numbers. Doing numbers in your head isn't a skill that we are taught how to get good at during school, we usually have a pen and paper or a calculator. So, having money in your hand and watching that supply dwindle is the best teacher until you get your finances straight. Debit and credit cards are mad convenient ... for banks to charge you feeds, not for you to track your money.
The economy is in tatters because a good portion of it is built on credit-based spending. Your own finanical future is the same way.
Your credit score is the bank's prediction of how likely it is that you will default on a debt. It doesn't tell you whether you're on sound financial ground or whether it's likely that you'll be on such in the future. If you're paying attention to your credit score, you're barking up the wrong tree. This chapter talks about a different kind of score, built with your long-term financial stability and prosperity in mind, not just the interest rates on your debts.
People talk about houses as investments should be flogged. First, the home you own is a relatively free place to live (of course there's maintenance and taxes). Second, the home you own is an insurance policy for your loved ones, so they don't have to work when the breadwinner bites the dust. Third, and lastly, your house is an investemnt. I know I said people that say that should be flogged, but I really meant that if they put the investment angle above the other two things I mentioned they should be flogged. Hierarchy matters in this.
I fundamentally believe that most things your buy are constructed specifically to separate a fool from his hard-earned, or ill-gotten, dough. I don't trust the stock market, the insurance industry or anything like that. I think they're casinos in disguise. This chapter will explain this. What you don't own all of, you don't control. This is why I put my trust in real estate first.
Nasty Nas spit that verse sick.
This might be the most grating chapter in the whole book because I'm trying to drastically re-organize your understanding of money, what it is and how it works. Traditionally people say money is a measure or standard of 'value', but what that 'value' is or represents has remained undefined. I'm here asserting that that 'value' can now be defined. Money measures time.
The other heresy that I'm going to engage in is to say that while money is abstract and all, the best metaphor to use to talk about money in scale and perspective of the economy is money as blood coursing through a body. And no, I didn't get that thought from the verse. That verse has always attracted my attention and weirded me out, it just has all the major elements I talk about in this section.
This verse just barely beat out "hold myself down single-handed" by Nas. I didn't want to double up on Nasty, so I put this one in. What I love about this is that it communicates that Mr. Trotter is on-point at all times, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that he got a big-assed crew with him. Every crew needs everyone to pull their own weight somehow.
This chapter attempts to distill all the goodies from a wide range of psychology and self-help literature.is about the whole industry of self-development and motivational speaking. I read a lot of 'em': Covey, Robbins ... and some old ones: Chuang Tzu, Trungpa, etc. In addition, I've wrestled with some philosophers on what it is to be a self and have will and choice and all that.
Because I only deal with easy questions and answers right? In this chapter I tangle with what exactly it is to be a consicous soul inhabiting a human meatbag. Not only do you live in your sometimes stinky meatbag, you have to make it do what it do, or you get bedsores in the hospice. This section deals with consciousness, choice and action from a philosophical and then practical perspective. This won't be a hype session about psychological and social motivation or anything.
I tried to keep flava flav hype man out of the last chapter to focus on deeper issues. This chapter talks about a the major insights from marketers and people building billion-dollar companies organized around getting you to type more letters into a device and see other letters on screens just like they get rats to press levers.
Limitless is a fly ass movie. It's like the matrix but no computers, no slo-mo cinemetography and no Black people in Zion. The plot ges: the guy who played the teacher from Hangover gets introduced to and addicted to a pill that quadruples your intelligence. A struggling writer, he writes a certified masterpiece of a book while on it in like a few days, all the while cleaning his shitty apartment. Long story short, he learns to make the drug himself, optimizes the formula and weans himself off of it. All of this while people are trying to kill him and cut off his supply. The movie ends with him running for president. Apparently they're coming out with a show too.
Hopefully reading philosophy and self-help books has made this some of the most potent info you'll ever see on the subject. But if you never use it, the fuck are you reading my book for chump? Oh wait, this is just the intro page/first chapter. Sorry, please buy my book when it comes out!
This breaks my effort to put use all songs from before 2000 because as a (wrong) categorical statement by an aging hip-hop head, all artists after 2000 is trash. I don't believe that statement. I won't defend it. I'll just put it right there to get folks riled up.
When I heard this hook, I had to listen again to hear the whole progression up to this point. Hands down hottest hook of the year, maybe decade, and probably one of my favorite lines ever. That shit cray.
A contender for this title is Rakim's "some of the things I know, will be in your next bible" but I ain't want to offend someone with that hot ass line.
This prose love ballad to your Self is infused with the love of Rumi and the fuck-it-all of Chuang-tzu. Chuang Tzu is the ancient Chinese philosopher through which we hear of Lao tzu who brought us the Tao Te Ching. This chapter talks about God and my opinions on such
Wherein I make an ass of myself and use God's nicknames in the same paragraphs.
When people talk about 'The Supreme Being' they are highlighting the aspect of Existence that we call Consciousness.
Numbers and computation and stuff.
I wasn't going to write this chapter. When I told my wife I wasn't going to include it she said "you ain't really talking to Black people unless you talk about religion". But don't blame all of the heresy contained in here on her, that's all me. I just wrote this from the frontlines of someone who tends to regard himself as a seeker.
Listen. Hip-hop is cool and all, but Jazz is the greatest of all time. Maybe not, but how could I not pay homage to Coltrane? I'm bourgie, so I gotta act like Coltrane invented music and all the rest is detail.
This Chapter is all about dating, sex and relationships. You'll probably want to reach the chapter on sex first, it's a fucking doozy, pun intended.
Here I do what I've wanted to write a book about for a good while, looking at the similarities between dating and starting a business.
Alternate titles for this section:
Pound the Ponntang until it stinks
We came here to knock some boots
Hands down this will be the best sex advice you ever read, except if you read the other book I tell you to read, it has two sets of observations as potent as what I've remixed here. This chapter you get instructions, not advice, on how to get your stroke game up. This applies whether you're tryna get your name "written on her kitten" or trying to give someone the best head of their life. Either way, this is the sex advice text you've been looking for.
Run DMC killed that remix. This section talks about the nature and evolution of marriage. There's so much crap in this section that my wife might divorce me simply for saying it. A lot of this section is heresy promoted to stimulate your thinking. I believe about half of it ... and you already know by the way that this whole book is, this will also be a doozy.
Relationships: have a couple, no pun intended.
I still remember being transfixed by the mob scenery of that video spread over the throbbing beat. The real funny thing was that I saw the video way late as we didn't get cable in my house until '94. When I saw it I realized I literally couldn't imagine black gangstas in suits with tommy guns doing the shit that went on in that video. And re-watching it to refresh my memory had me thinking that if you filled the video with comedians, you would call the movie Harlem Nights. And a couple of scenes, if you threw Pookie in there ... well, you know.
This chapter gives you a fuller model of "leading". We tend to think in the simplistic model of leaders and followers. What about the people that implement the vision, the people that manage the execution? The audience, clients or customers? These are not all simple 'followers', they're breathing individuals with various roles in relation to various goals of the organization or movement. If you want to lead, you have to learn to respect the role of each and tailor your intentions and communication to help them fulfill oin those roles. This chapter assesses these things and helps you sort them out for yourself.
The most important question a leader answers is 'what should we be aiming for'. That question and answer orients the leader and all their many minions. My favorite book title for this is 'seeing around corners' which talks about a leader's responsibility to plan for things they can't see.
Once you know what to do, you have to break the work down, delegate, manage and choreograph all the pieces so the organization hits some kind of harmony and rhythm. This chapter talks about the skillset of doing that.
We see how you can apply more force to the road and to get a better grip where the rubber meets the road.
Though I wasn't really cool enough to be more than an also-ran in a backpack clique, Pharcyde was still one of my fav hip-hop groups. They're like Redman with less violence and more self-deprecating jokes. Imagining a black person as president was as comical as Your Momma and Please, don't pull me over Mr Officer!
Basically, this is kind of a platform.
The three-headed hydra that people talk about separately. We need to figure out how to build mathematical models and have conversations that talk about all of these simultaneously.
I say we amend whatever law to make voting polls open for a whole week. Also, have not just debates, but moderated interviews where each candidate fields questions from multiple 'petitioners' in the primary. The petitioners should include allies, rivals and voters. No personal questions allowed. And what about having candidates come out with their political platform by a certain date or they won't be included in the debate/interview schedule?
Cut their budgets. I just saw a video where on 9/10/2010 Donald Rumsfeld said there was 2.3 trillion dollars in unaccounted for money throughout the Pentagon. Start firing (at) miliarty personnel folks from the top down until we get that shit in check, pun intended. That's Trillion with a 'T'.
America spends more on and has more guns and weapons than most all other nations combined. We could not spend a dollar on new equipment for a decade and still be competitive (keep up maintenance tho). And since we're the most industrialized nation on the planet, it'd be easy to ramp up military production in case of war. We have lasers and railguns now. Stick some on drone planes and submarines to create what Reagan-era envisioned as 'star wars'. Yeah, I just invoked Reagan ... paradoxes abound.
Re-write the laws by substituting "African-American" for "Minority".
This chapter is not about trying to convince someone about the moral or legal basis for reparations for Black Americans. This chapter is about explaingin what I think the moral and legal bases for it is, and an explanation of what reparations should look like, and maybe put a price tag on it.
I didn't know my first exposure to Dead Prez was actually Dead Prez. I had heard their single "it's bigger than hip-hop" for a few weeks before my brother copped the album. When I heard "happiness" I was like yo! This that song from that mixtape I been running (forget the name of it) into the ground. I'd bet a few dollars that the same tape also had my first exposure to Slim Shady wildin' out and maybe a Method Man track on it.
TSATUSWWNTKTS really had an impact on me because I really resonated with, well, the title of the song. I had been lamenting that Afrocentric movement because reading those books did nothing to teach me how to do something productive enough to pay bills. For me, the song applied both to the regular curriculum and Afrocentric books (Diop, Sertima, etc). So I stared making lists of shit I'd want to learn in school to make life easy and happy like grow my own food, sweet talk my wife, Chinese massage therapy, balance a checkbook. Literally quality of life & community type shit.
This was around the time or shortly after I was trolling black righteous space yahoo groups as cheela em amen. Cheela means student, and I was reading like two books a week at the time, in addition to scraping by in my classes and reading things from the bibliographies of the books in those classes. Anyhow, somewhere on the interwebs someone was criticizing this album saying it wasn't hip-hop because they didn't use any metaphors or similes, that everything they said was literal, like rhyming prose. I immediately got up from the computer livid, went home and listened again. Before I turned en fuego on that cat I realized how much of an accomplishment that is. DP (got that crazy shit) was talking real shit, to beat. Sure, Animal and Man is a great rendition of the book and that is a metaphor, plus Wolves, but everything else was literal. That should make it oe kind of landmark in the history of hip-hop.
The worst thing about the current education system is that graduates don't know how to do anything. Sure, reading about history is great, and so is learning your numbers. But people need to be able to balance their checkbooks, cook a healthy meal for their family, and do basic household maintenance. Humans weren't and aren't built to only think abstractly about things, cemented to uncomfortable chairs, our intelligence was built using physical tools. We need to redesign the curriculum around:
first, what skills do people need to live a good life
Second, what skills do businesses need to employ our graduates
And let me be clear, our curriculum should also be redesigned along the lines of topics instead of subjects. For instance, you might be better at math when you learn the origins, history and evolution of arithmetic, algebra and calculus. Add in what what problems these methods were invented to solve and where you can apply them elsewhere, and you have a great beginning. When someone chooses a language to learn, they should also learn the cultures and civilizations that gave rise to the language ... what words were invented when, why, and what did people know/not know before they had that word? I think the Swedish or Danish just did something like this. Let's do that.
I have a great book called, wait for it ...'Practical Intelligence'. It's a collection of psychologicy articles about people with the ability to do all kinds of things that are, you guessed it, practical. We need to take the same approach and research and create courses to teach folks to do things that happen in the world like welding, building cabinets and writing comics. Most of the interesting people you know know how to do a lot of things, not just know a lot of things.
The education system's obsession with language and math is too damn high, or whatever. Back in the 80's Howard Gardner wrote a book outlining about 7 intelligences that are valued across cultures, have a biological basis in the brain, and are learnable. Our curriculum should focus on identifying and creating customized curriculum to developing the various intelligences in all of our children. Subjects and skills from each of the intelligences should be major grades.
So the reason I want to homeschool my kids isn't because I think I can teach them calculus better, but because I can teach them to use calculus to analyze their budget, gas consumption, and game programming.
Here I go, breaking my rules all again and shit. This is a quote from McArthur Grant winning Octavia Butler's Hugo Award winning novel Parable of the Sower (bi-winning). It's a story about an 18 year old Black chick from Cali during an American Apocalypse who walks to Oregon through robberies and firestorms after her family is murdered separately and when folks burn down her gated community. Real shit yo. I'm sure she might have heard that hip-hop existed before she was set up and killed (I'm part conspiracy theorist, what can I say) so this counts.
This is the 'swing for the fences' chapter. Herein I talk about the couple of grand vision things that all people, African or not should get behind.
Black people need to get behind investing in public transportation throughout every city in which we have a significant population. The lack of ability to get reach jobs hinders our ability to earn more money.
In large metropolitan areas, Black people should be full-throttle behind local and state candidates that support the re-introduction of robust rail-based transportation networks within and between cities. For older cities, the first step is to resurrect transit lines that were previously existing instead of spending billions on feasibility studies. Source in-city design. And for further convenience, transportation hubs, interchanges and endpoints would have fleets of electric car-shares and bike-shares available for hourly rates on the first level of parking garages attached to the endpoints.
Translation: A Historically Black College and University Credit Union. Not Only are HBCU's laudable institutions, despite their troubles, they are also large monetary pass-throughs. We should build an effort to build a credit union specifically for HBCU students and graduates, instead of funding large for-profit banks. And yes, like USAA, people should be grandfathered in if one of their relatives (up to 1st cousin) or ancestors attended one.
Also, if HBCU alumni associations get their lists together, they can combine lists so that the Credit Union knows where to build banks and put ATMs with already deep concentrations of graduates. This effort would be more useful in non-Southern cities.
Also note that the endowments of the top 10 HBCU's are 1.7 billion dollars. Sure returns on deposits are a pittance versus investing, but this would go a long way by just moving that money to the SPDR index, "managed" by a Black owned brokerage.
Bitcoin is the new hotness in currency. We should create an alternate currency just like bitcoin to trade services among the black community. Notice I only said 'services'. This means we still buy groceries and supplies from regular stores, but when you need a plumbing repair or your roof fixed, you can pay them in BlackCoin. The general name for this is a 'time bank', look it up. And, everyone who signs onto the system, is automagially gifted some amount so they can use it immediately. There should also be caps or some kind of progressive tax or depreciation for stale or hoarded funds.
Create a bitcoin spin-off so that Continental and Diasporean people can use the currency for payments and exchange with their phones. Build into the system a rule that no entity or account can possess more than some % of the total amount of currency. Also, because corporate person-hood is a farce, no accounts can be owned or held by companies, just people. I would call each 'dollar' a Cabral after Amilcar Cabral.
I'm talking making Akon's efforts seem like small change. I say we design and build large-scale solar and wind farms at West, South and East points of the Sahara to power the rest of the continent. Energy can either be transmitted via wires (bad idea) or put in high density batteries and shipped around the continent via railroads (great idea) and on trucks. Build in places to send energy instead of having dams, which cover and drown usually arable land.
Build massive pipelines that bring ocean water into the Sahara. On the way build desalinating processes so that the water is potable and can support cities of up to 10 million, connected by hyperloops. Maybe even use 3d printing to automate building the infrastructure and structures on this planet.
HBCU's and African Universities collaborate on submersible oceanic self-sustained metropolises, each capable of supporting 100,000 people indefinitely.
Design and build 3D printers to create infrastructure and habitable structures on different planets. Fly them into space. Put them on planets. move people there. Repeat infinity.
Thing big right?
The Revolution is here, it's just unevenly distributed
Revolution: the Book
apparently it is