Yea!!! It's Winter - Get Out and Play!!!

I know many of you have been skiing for years, but for others looking for new ways to experience the winter months, let yourself be inspired by the article below. I hope you're enjoying each season and all climates, no matter where you find yourself on our awesome planet!

Have fun,

Kentke

New York Ski Club Adds Black Faces to the Slopes

By LIZ LEYDEN
Published: February 20, 2012


QUEENSBURY, N.Y. — It was nearly time for lessons to begin, but Marcel and Kwesi could not be found. The West Mountain ski school director hurried into the rental shop looking for the missing students. Other members of the Nubian Empire Ski Club filled the benches, snapping stiff buckles into place.

Omoye Cooper, the club’s president, stood among the bent bodies, sorting tickets and fielding questions, including this latest: Where were Marcel and Kwesi?

Ms. Cooper pointed out the window toward the base lodge.

“You’ll see them,” she said, laughing. “They’re probably the only brown boys in there.”
At the small mountain about an hour north of Albany, the faces buried beneath helmets and neck gaiters were mostly white. But scattered among them were the Nubians, whose mission is to coax more African-Americans onto skis.

When Phil Littlejohn moved to the Albany area around 2001, he immediately saw what was missing. Mr. Littlejohn, 74, who first skied in the Poconos when he was 28, had joined black ski clubs wherever he lived.

“In Albany, there was no black ski club, and this is the gateway to ski country,” he said. The problem, he said, was “lack of exposure.”

“So many African-Americans don’t know what a great, great addition to their life skiing becomes,” he said.

In 2001, he and a skiing novice, Peggie Allen, persuaded a dozen people who had never skied to try. They named the group in honor of the black people of southern Egypt, and so began what Mr. Littlejohn described as a “labor of love.”

The Nubian Empire Ski Club, which is based in Albany, has since grown to more than 40 members: experts and beginners, first graders and retirees, professors and accountants. They have skied most mountains in New York and as far away as Chamonix-Mont-Blanc in the French Alps.

This season, despite a lack of snow, the club’s youth program has drawn nine participants. On a recent Sunday they gathered on the bunny trail at West Mountain for their second lesson of the season. Brown grass edged the trails, but no one seemed to mind, soon caught up in the silly language of learning: Pizza stop. Duck walk. Sit low to slow.

Do you remember when we couldn’t even turn?” one little girl shouted to the boy beside her. “When we used to fall and fall?”

Nisha Thomas, a 31-year-old employee in the state comptroller’s office, was one of three adults in the group of beginners. That Ms. Thomas ignored an oncoming cold to do so was as surprising to her as was the fact that she let Ms. Cooper, her mother-in-law, talk her into skiing at all.

“I’m from the Caribbean,” said Ms. Thomas, who lives in Albany. “I didn’t grow up dreaming about snow. I think this club helps because it’s a sort of mentorship.”

The Nubian Web site brims with instructions that people accustomed to winter sports take for granted, like layering on synthetic clothes and sunscreen, as well as the reason for buying water-resistant snow pants: “Your first day will acquaint your butt with the snow. Keep it warm and dry!”

Off-season, club members appear wherever they might find new recruits, visiting Kwanzaa and Juneteenth celebrations and setting up information booths in Walmarts.

When skeptics tell them “black people don’t ski,” Ms. Cooper notes that the National Brotherhood of Skiers, a black organization that formed in 1973, has 3,000 members. It has 59 member clubs, including three in New York City.

Kimberly Barksdale, executive secretary of the group, said that for people who did not grow up with snow sports, the clubs provided critical support.

“Our people in the clubs love to ski, and they also love to help others learn to,” Ms. Barksdale said. “They walk them through everything and really make sure they have a good time. And that sense of camaraderie makes it so much more likely that people stay with the sport.”

Of 67,000 skiers who responded to a question in a survey conducted by the National Ski Areas Association at the end of the 2010-11 season, 2 percent identified themselves as African-American.

Audrey Bennett, a communications professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, said she heard about the Nubians through word of mouth two years ago. Though her son Marcel was sure he would hate skiing, Ms. Bennett, 40, pushed him to try it. Now, Marcel, 14, races giant slalom and is applying to ski academies.

“I loved it after the first run,” he said. “I felt like I was free, like I was flying down the mountain. All my stresses disappeared.”

By noon, most everyone on the beginner slope at West Mountain had turned toward the lodge for lunch — everyone but three small children who scooted back for one more run.

“Look, they snuck back up,” Ms. Cooper said, smiling. She watched the three, remembering her own beginnings on skis.

“I wanted to conquer that hill, not let it conquer me,” she said. “And then I was going to quit.”
But it was too late. “It was too addictive,” she said.

The children snaked down the hill. Wide smiles filled their faces as they reached the bottom without falling. Before they could jump back in line, Ms. Cooper glided toward them.

“Do not go back up,” she said. “We are going in for lunch. Exit stage left. Don’t worry. We’ll be back out.”

Click this link to view the 10 photo slide show:

The Nubian Empire Ski Club

Websites:

Nubian Empire Ski Club - http://www.nubianempireski.org/
National Brotherhood of Skiers - http://www.nbs.org/

Oakland Museum of California's Question Bridge Panel Delves Deep into Black Manhood (Review/Reflection)

Arnold Perkins and Joshua Merchant ruminate during the Question Bridge panel discussion.

Published on Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Oakland Local Online

By Eric K. Arnold


One of the deeper discussions on black male identity in recent memory took place this past Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. The event - a roundtable panel discussion between several generations of black me, age 17-70 – was part of OMCA’s programming around Question Bridge: Black Males, an exhibit currently showing simultaneously at the Brooklyn Museum, Salt Lake City Arts Center and Atlanta’s Castain Arts gallery (earlier this year, it also was shown at the Sundance Film Festival).

Question Bridge is somewhat of an onomatopoeia of a video installation: It’s exactly what it sounds like – a Q&A exchange, which bridges the generation gap among African-American men from the hip-hop and Civil Rights generations. The installation, which runs through July 8 at OMCA, consists of 1,500 video exchanges between 150 black men recruited from 11 cities, including Oakland and San Francisco, along with Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta and Philadelphia, and collected by Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Kamal Sinclair and Oakland’s own Bayete Ross-Smith.

Why is this a big deal? Well, for one, it shatters many commonly-held stereotypes about black men - that they are angry, unemotional, non-communicative, inarticulate and blame racism for everything that has happened to them. Watching the exhibit, one is forced to reexamine one’s perceptions about African-American males. It’s a big rethink.


The afternoon began with a performance by Motif Performance Project with choreographer Rashad Pridgen, developed especially for Question Bridge, followed by a roundtable forum, which recreated much of the format of the exhibit, but in 3-D (rather than the two-dimensional back and forth of the video screens) with real, live, actual black men.


The panel included moderator Chris Chatmon, the Oakland Unified School District's executive officer of African-American Male Achievement, and a stellar group of panelists, including actor Delroy Lindo; spoken word artists Ise Lyfe and Joshua “Adonis” Merchant; photographer Pendarvis Harshaw; educators Greg Hodge; youth worker Abbas Khalid; social justice activist Abel Habtegeorgis; retired public health official Arnold Perkins; and student Sean Johnson.


If anything, the panel discussion - whose starting point was the question, "Why didn’t you leave us with the blueprint,” posed by a hip-hop generationer to a Civil Rights-era veteran - went even deeper into the African-American male psyche than the exhibit. Instead of a singular or small group learning experience, as might be expected of a museum viewing, the presence of an audience made for a more public experience and a stronger connection to community. Additionally, follow-up questions were asked and answered in real time.


Before the panel began, Question Bridge co-director Chris Johnson explained how speaking about the topic “really articulated truths” about the generational divide between black men, while addressing the lack of a “direct connection” between the hip-hop and Civil Rights eras.
If the purpose of Question Bridge was to address that disconnect and repair the hurt caused by it, it succeeded. First, the younger generation asked questions of the elders; then the elders asked questions from younger people. But who qualified as what wasn’t immediately apparent. Habtegeorgis noted that he was included in the group of community elders, yet was only 27.



Hodge cleared that up, however, by noting that “everybody here is somebody’s elder.”


During the panel, several revealing exchanges between the participants occurred, such as when Harshaw queried, “When do you learn how to tie a tie?”


“That is so profound,” Lindo replied, before recounting an anecdote about being on the way to rapper Heavy D’s funeral and being asked by a young black man he was riding with to tie his tie. Lyfe followed with his own anecdote, about being 22 years old, being invited to a black-tie event to accept an award and realizing he didn’t know how to tie a tie.


“I was so embarrassed,” he recalled. Later, he went to the library and checked out an etiquette book.


Johnson, the youngest panelist, discussed when he considered dropping out of high school. When asked why, he mentioned poor math grades and noted that Skyline has almost 500 juniors and just one counselor for them. Other panelists chimed in with supportive words.


“Frederick Douglass cajoled his education out of white people. Get the help,” Hodge said.


The difference, Lyfe said, between being 17 and 27 was having perspective on life.
“You can’t condemn yourself to a moment,” he added.


The panel resulted in many other quotable soundbites. Here are a few of the most notable and profound quips:

“Who are we considering young [people]?” (Lindo)
“If I’m 20 and a brother’s 80, asking me what to do … You had a 60-year-head start. That’s terrifying.” (Lyfe)
“Do my skinny jeans and non-prescription glasses make me safer walking around my neighborhood?” (Merchant)
“When will sagging go out of style?” (Hodge)
[As black men,] “We’re all going to be judged, all the time.” (Lindo)
“Why is it so hard for us to call ourselves African?” (Perkins)
“I am of African descent, but I am from Oakland” (Harshaw)
“It’s so normalized, not having your father in your life.” (Lyfe)
“Seventy-five percent of people I know, their father hasn’t been in their lives.” (Khalid)
“Since I was in the sixth grade, my dad has been in and out of jail.” (Khalid)
“We have to break the cycle.” (Khalid)
“Even [white people’s] resistance … is full of valor and vigor and privilege: ‘We occupying this.’” (Lyfe)
“Why are so many black people dying in Chicago when Barack Obama’s in office?” (Harshaw)
“For me, the blueprint is education because it created tremendous power in daily life.” (Perkins)
“Our charge is to be that continuum.” (Harshaw)
“What I need from elders and community leaders is the play.” (Lyfe)
“The fact of the matter is the goal posts shift all the time.” (Lindo)


An audience member asks a question as Chris Chatmon and Delroy Lindo look on.

Overall, the panel discussion offered two solid hours of deep reflection, brutal honesty, brave vulnerability – and a glimpse behind the cool pose and beyond the mean mug. It transcended both the saggy-pants conundrum and the Cosby-syndrome of misunderstanding. It created, as intended, the blueprint for discourse, giving hope that the elder generation and the youth will one day be able to see eye to eye.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this landmark intergenerational dialogue? Not once was the word “racism” mentioned.

Click here to visit the article, for a slideshow of images from the video installation.
Kentke
http://oaklandlocal.com/article/omca’s-question-bridge-panel-delves-deep-black-manhood-reviewreflection


About Eric K Arnold
Eric K. Arnold has been writing about urban music culture since the mid-1990s, when he was the Managing Editor of now-defunct 4080 Magazine. Since then, he’s been a columnist for such publications as The Source, XXL, Murder Dog, Africana.com, and the East Bay Express; his work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Vibe, Wax Poetics, SF Weekly, XLR8R, the Village Voice and Jamrock, as well as the academic anthologies Total Chaos and The Vinyl Ain’t Final. Eric began his journalistic career while DJing on college radio station KZSC, and remembers well the early days of hip-hop radio, before consolidation, and commercialization set in. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

I am the first to declare South Africa has found it's own Condeleezza Rice

Lindiwe Mazibuko

Delusions ... and Illusions...

or ...When a Tool Doesn't Know that it's Being Mis-Used...

Uhmm......What to name this post!?!??!!!!

Since Nelson Mandela left the office of President of South Africa, I don't believe that the voices, needs and dreams of the masses of the nation, --- those Africans whose potential was most denied and retarded by the system of apartheid and the white supremist thinking of the regime --- have yet to be handed their proper place in the nation's priororities.

I visited South Africa in 1967. At the time in order for me (and 14 other young Black women) to walk the streets of Capetown and Durban without being arrested for having none of the documents that would allow Blacks to freely walk the streets of these cities, the Parliament had to pass a special law for our two week visit. Eversince my law-changing visit, I've followed the history and politics of the nation.The article below is therefore quite interesting to me. But it should also be of interest to all that stood up to free that nation from apartheid.

As my opening paragraph mentioned, I don't think the work is finished there. So I hope we'll all pay attention, and watch the "new" tactics afoot....or maybe not so knew.

The article will introduce you to a young woman that being the prescient mystic that I am, I can see assuming a role in South African politics similar to the one played by Condeleezza Rice for the Republican party on the American political stage. We had "Condi", and they are about to get their dose of "Lindi" who now leads the Democratic Alliance, the party in opposition to the African National Congress in South Africa's Parliament.

There are similarities in the backgrounds of the two women. Both come from middle class households, with traditional values. It also seems that their alliegence to their political parties began because they were impressed by a kindness which either they or their family experienced at the hands of the party they now support. Both women also share a strong love of music, and began their college studies pursuing music degrees.

Also each enjoyed the opportunity of close and personal involvment with the theoreticians of their parties. This fostering later resulted in their quick rise to positions of importance and leadership. For as both parties carry the banner of the white the political establishment in their countries, they understand that they must at least attempt to reach out to Blacks and people of color, and also demonstrate that women are important in their vision. With women such as Condi and Lindi, on their teams, they get a real bargain. Especially with their apparent preference for the status quo. There are many articles on Lindiwe Mazibuko, so google her and get your own feel for this new face on the scene.

Oh, and both women, have nice smiles.

Kentke

A South African Party’s New Face, and Lightning Rod

January 27, 2012
CAPE TOWN

SHE has unmistakably African roots, from her birthplace (the kingdom of Swaziland) to one of her native tongues (isiZulu) to her mocha skin.

But for many people, Lindiwe Mazibuko is just not black enough.

During a parliamentary session this year, a government minister here called her a coconut (white on the inside, brown on the outside). One political opponent described Ms. Mazibuko as the tea girl, or servant, for the leader of the country’s chief opposition party. Twitter users have flung racial slurs at her, called her a token and said she was naïve.

Even a member of her own party was quoted as saying that when you closed your eyes and listened to Ms. Mazibuko, “you would say a white person is talking to you.”

There is a profound ambivalence surrounding Ms. Mazibuko, 31 — and it represents the stiff challenge facing her party, the Democratic Alliance, in its effort to wrestle power from the dominant governing party, the African National Congress.

Ms. Mazibuko became the first black leader of the alliance’s parliamentary caucus after an internal party vote in October. She is now the face of an effort to diversify the party’s leadership, shed its stereotype as the party of South Africa's white elite and give it any hope of catching up to the A.N.C., which captured more than 65 percent of the vote to the alliance’s 16 percent during the last national election in 2009.

Yet Ms. Mazibuko remains dogged by critics who say her private school education and refined British accent are signs that she is out of touch with most black South Africans. Critics have said that her party pushed Ms. Mazibuko into the second most powerful position, despite her inexperience, simply because she was black and might help broaden the alliance’s appeal.

“She can only attract a particular type of black, young person, not the whole spectrum of black, young people,” said Baleka Mbete, the chairwoman of the A.N.C. “I don’t think the people she would attract are the majority.”

BUT what opponents view as Ms. Mazibuko’s weakness, her party, supported by about 5 percent of black South Africans, sees as potential.

There is an untapped population of young black voters raised in middle-class environments like Ms. Mazibuko’s, voters who talk like her, were born after apartheid and will be able to vote for president for the first time in 2014. The Democratic Alliance’s hope is that those voters do not feel the same emotional attachment as their elders to the A.N.C., which liberated blacks from apartheid. Instead, the alliance hopes that young blacks will look to leaders like Ms. Mazibuko as someone who represents their interests.

The D.A. has to grapple with the perception that it is a white party and it is interested in preserving white privilege,” said Sejamothopo Motau, a member of Parliament for the alliance. “Its leadership has to reflect that the party has gone beyond that — that the party is a party of all South Africans. So having Lindiwe as one of the two leaders of the party at the national level is quite significant.”

Yet one of Ms. Mazibuko’s loudest critics was a member of her own party, Masizole Mnqasela, a member of Parliament, who wrote a letter months ago to the party’s leader, Helen Zille, saying that Ms. Mazibuko “does not have a strong resonance with the black constituencies, and it will defeat our objective of trying to attract black votes.”

Mr. Mnqasela, facing disciplinary charges from his party because of those and other comments, was more supportive in an interview, saying, “It is an opportunity to have a black leader, and especially a black woman — it is an opportunity in itself for the organization.”

Ms. Zille, one of Ms. Mazibuko’s biggest supporters, said it was ridiculous to suggest that Ms. Mazibuko was elected only because she was black.

“Can’t people be judged for who they are?” Ms. Zille asked. “She’s highly intelligent, she’s very capable, she’s extremely articulate, she’s a very good politician and she’s black.”

Ms. Mazibuko has maintained a tough exterior amid the questions about her blackness, saying she has heard them since her childhood. Suggesting that all black people must be a certain way was an apartheid way of thinking, she said. During some of her radio appearances, she said, people called in demanding to hear her speak isiZulu.

“I refuse to do that,” she said. “I don’t believe being black is a prize people can award to you.”
Ms. Mazibuko was born in the tiny kingdom of Swaziland, tucked between South Africa and Mozambique. Her father was a banker and small-business owner, and her mother was a nurse.
When she was 6, her parents moved the family to apartheid-torn South Africa, believing that, despite the racism, the country would provide them with new opportunities.

For six years, Ms. Mazibuko lived in Umlazi, a black township, but her family maintained her middle-class lifestyle. She attended a Jewish school because her parents could not get her into the Catholic school. Every June 16, on the anniversary of the Soweto uprising, a protest in 1976 against the education system under apartheid, her parents sneaked her past street demonstrations to get her to school, even going so far as hiding her in the trunk of their car, she said.

After her father died, her mother moved the family to an affluent neighborhood in north Durban in 1992. Ms. Mazibuko went off to an Anglican boarding school.

POLITICS were never big in her household.

She said she voted for the A.N.C. in her younger days because “that’s what I thought black people did.”

Her inner politician began surfacing after she moved to England to study classical singing.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened, and she was disturbed by the way Muslims were negatively portrayed. It smacked of the racism that had defined South African politics, she said, and had the feel of the crusades.

“It made me pause, and it made me think about things I could do in the future, I suppose, to shed a bit of light on that,” Ms. Mazibuko said.

At the same time, she was looking at South Africa from afar and began to change her view of the role government should play in people’s lives. Whereas township life had led her to believe that government needed to pull people up, she said, she began to adopt the view that government empowers people to help themselves.

She left her music studies to pursue political journalism. While working on a research paper on Ms. Zille for an honors degree, Ms. Mazibuko said, she found common ground with the party’s leader and its politics. Ms. Mazibuko parlayed the assignment into a job as a researcher for the Democratic Alliance. In 2009, she was appointed the party’s national spokeswoman and selected by it to serve in Parliament.

When she speaks about her value to the party, Ms. Mazibuko mentions her age before her race, saying it gives her the ability to communicate in a different way from that of party veterans.
When she ran for parliamentary leader, she hired a media strategist and ran a public campaign, the first time that had been done for one of the alliance’s internal elections.

“Because of that, a number of members of Parliament were pressurized by their own constituencies to support her,” said Ian Ollis, an alliance member in Parliament who supported Ms. Mazibuko. “For the first time, we saw constituencies telephoning their member of Parliament and saying, ‘I want you to vote for Lindiwe Mazibuko.’ ”

But in her Twitter messages, politics take a back seat to intimate life details, like what she is cooking for dinner or how she styles her hair.

When one user asked whether she should wear a hair weave or braids, Ms. Mazibuko responded, “Braids, so you can hit the beach this summer,” under the hash tag “blackgirlsolutions.”