feeding kids, helping them with homework, teaching them about injustice through rap — fuck yea (see dawn raid for one of the historical reasons the polynesian panthers organised). am less sold on their movement from a revolutionary organisation to a professional voicebox of assimilation.

i agree that it's important to affirm ethnicity (in an age where the grounds of our social being are fragmented by commodity consumption and globalised production), but i don't think becoming integrated as a professional, and raising that up as the image of success, is an emancipatory praxis. that's gentrification of the mind, the reduction of cultural practices to ethnic decor atop a capitalist framework. we should never measure the success of our children, friends, family and comrades on how many awards, grants or prestigious jobs they've attained.