Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 968

Six Ways You Can Help End Gun Violence

Six Ways You Can Help End Gun Violence by Ryan Mack | HuffPost Black Voices
I have grown weary of the endless empty rhetoric regarding what we can do about the gun violence that occurs throughout communities, especially within urban communities where oftentimes the climate resembles a war zone. After looking at the statistics of deaths caused by guns in the US I can only say there are TOO MANY! You can look up the stats yourself as the purpose of this article is not to focus on the problem, but to shift our attention to some possible solutions. I have six ideas that we as individuals can begin to do starting RIGHT NOW to help solve this problem.
Before I present the solutions let me address the perpetual critics who are always the quickest to discredit the solutions of others. You know who I'm talking about ...those who never have a solution to present themselves but practically and some literally make a living from downplaying the attempts of others to correct a problem of our community.
NO...this piece IS NOT an attempt to make people think that solving this problem is easy or quick to solve. This is a very complex and difficult problem to solve and in no way should we ever feel that any solution when implemented will dissolve it easily or overnight. This will take time, this will take patience, this will take diligence, and this will take a unified effort from ALL within the community in order for us to make any progress.
NO...this article DOES NOT represent ALL SOLUTIONS. Of course there are many other ways to resolve this issue. You may not see one of the solutions you feel will effectively address this issue in this article. I urge you to continue to implement your ideas as ALL solutions and strategies should be on the table.
Now that we've determined what this article is and is not, let's look at 6 solutions you can start today to help end gun violence:

1. Pressure Your Local Political Officials
The NRA is strong, but it shouldn't be as strong as the voice of the people if we come together and make our voices heard. Common sense tells us that assault rifles shouldn't be available to anyone except those in the armed forces. Mitt Romney himself passed an assault weapons ban as the Governor of Massachusetts so at one point, probably before the influence of the NRA on his Presidential campaign kicked in, he rightfully felt it would be an effective solution. Don't sit on the sidelines...you must find your local Congressman, Senator, State Senator, Assemblyman, etc. and contact them through any means possible to pressure them to pass legislation to make these dangerous weapons illegal. This website will help you get the information you need to contact your local elected officials.
I feel the need to restate what I stated above because I can hear the critics in my head. NO...this IS NOT A SILVER BULLET to solve this problem! Passing legislation by itself WILL NOT solve the problem of gun violence but it will provide crucial aide to the issue by making these illegal weapons more difficult to obtain.
2. Snitch!
The safety of those in our communities should be more important than some prideful, ignorant, underground creed. One year after I moved to Brooklyn in 2000 a little girl was shot in the crossfire of some street gangs. Every day I walked to the subway I had to walk over the blood stained sidewalk. I could still see traces of that blood stain as long as a year after that incident occurred reminding me that this little girl, who was not even a teen, lost her life. There WERE many witnesses to this crime but no one stepped forward to assist with the investigation. Have we gotten that scared of these criminals that we are willing to allow them to be pseudo-vigilantes in our communities even at the risk of allowing our youth to be murdered? Have we adopted a sense of moronic pride that dictates how we must maintain our silence as our justice system attempts to bring these criminals to justice? Shame on anyone who feels they should not "snitch" on those criminals who put ALL our lives in jeopardy through their ruthless crime sprees.
3. Find Solutions in Your Community
We should all be aware of those community organizations in our neighborhood that are actively involved in making our communities stronger. In my community I know of many organizations such as Mentoring USA which helps place mentors to youth in need; Brooklyn Educational Opportunity Center which provides free training/education for the underserved in Brooklyn; the FORTUNE Society which helps reduce recidivism by helping those recently released from prison obtain jobs; the Eagle Academy which provides new and creative ways to educate community youth; or the Campaign for Black Male Achievement which provides funding to many organizations doing great work to empower many who are underserved. In many of our communities there are many solutions doing great work, but it is our job to first locate and identify these organizations so that you may have a solid understanding of who they are and what they do to empower those in your community.
4. Promote/Support Solutions in Your Community
Once we have located these organizations, we must inform others in the community of the work they are doing, where they are located, and how people can benefit from their services. In this difficult economy, many local organizations are having difficulty with funding to continue their vital services, and inevitably with a shortage of funding, their marketing budget is one of the first casualties. If you see a flier take a few and pass them out at your local church meeting; plan an event at your church and invite the local organizations doing good work to sit on the panel AND set up a booth to pass out information; follow them on Twitter or Facebook and share their accomplishments with your network as they post them; and do whatever you can to help spread the word about their services. If as a community we come together to promote our community organizations we could almost alleviate the need for a marketing budget!
An easier way to support these organizations is to contribute funding to their cause. Sure, you can give money to the Red Cross or United Way which are tremendous organizations doing great work, but have you seen their balance sheets lately? They are not suffering from a short fall of cash. You have an opportunity, through the support of a local grassroots organization that you see doing great work, to make a direct impact on those in your community which you encounter regularly. I can promise you there is a nonprofit in your community right now that is educating those coming from prison, helping at risk youth, or providing a means of empowerment for the homeless; however, at the same time they are wondering how they are going to keep their doors open for another year and continue their much needed mission. Do the research on the work they are doing and support their mission in the most tangible way possible...cutting them a check!
5. Join Solutions in Your Community
Currently, I am the sitting Chair of the Medgar Evers Educational Foundation. I joined the board because I no longer wanted to sit on the sidelines; I wanted to take an active role in an organization that I feel has a heavy footprint on the education of youth in my community. There is an organization in your community which I am sure can use your expertise, guidance, and support. Gather your family and adopt an organization where one to two days per year the entire family will come together to volunteer their time to support that local organization. Volunteer every weekend at the local church to tutor youth. Whatever it is you do, join in the movement of that organization and try to enhance its impact on your community.
6. Be a Solution in Your Community
I started my first youth organization by simply volunteering my time teaching "step" at a local elementary school. When I started my financial planning company I began teaching financial literacy to youth. I still continue to volunteer my time to teach financial literacy to youth today. I am certain that some of youth I worked with at one point believed that belonging to street gangs was their only option.
There are many ways you can be a solution in your community. If you are a lawyer you can use the local YMCA to give free legal classes, if you are a doctor you can use your local church to provide health screenings, if you are an accountant you can visit the local school 1-2x per year to teach the youth about what it means to be an accountant, etc. Whatever you decide to do be consistent and make it an integral component of your life in that community.
I repeat...this won't be easy, this won't be quick, the solutions above are a part of many others I am sure you may have, and I welcome and accept any ideas you have to join with these you see above. There is no idea or solution that is too small to be considered. The one solution that is totally unacceptable is to do nothing at all. Criticizing with no action is the equivalent of doing nothing. In the green room of CNN I had the opportunity to meet with Ted Sorensen, ghost writer of "Profiles of Courage" and speech writer for John F. Kennedy for almost 10 years. He told me this poem:
Bull fight critics row on row,Fill the enormous plaza full,But only one man is in the know,And he is the one who is fighting the bull.
We don't need more critics; we need bull fighters in the ring doing the work if we are to have any success in decreasing the pointless gun violence. I hope you find the courage within to join with the many, but at this point far too few, people who have decided to not sit on the sidelines and join the fight to take back our communities from the grips of crime and violence.
***
Ryan Mack has a life mission to build and develop a durable financial empire geared towards educating his community and beyond. In addition to being a financial advisor working with many prominent clients across the US, he charitably lends his support to inner-city communities by coordinating workshops and creating economic empowerment initiatives that teach the principles of understanding the power of financial literacy.
Follow Ryan Mack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ryancmack

@GoogleTalks Presents ?uestlove

At Google Talks  Acclaimed drummer, DJ, producer, culinary entrepreneur, and Co-Founder of the The Roots - Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, is making his way into the culinary world with ?uest Loves Food and his signature "Love's Drumsticks." ?uestlove is the unmistakable heartbeat of The Roots, Philadelphia's most influential hip-hop band. Beyond that, this Grammy award-winning musician's indisputable reputation has landed him musical directing positions with everyone from D'Angelo to Eminem to Jay-Z. He is the Musical Director for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and his beloved Roots crew serves as house band.
In addition to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,?uestlove is also the Musical Director for the Comedy Awards on Comedy Central and will be in several commercials this year.

?uest Loves Food begins its culinary quest in 2011, featuring Creole and Korean inspired soul food with a focus on locally sourced ingredients and "on-a-stick" decadence, for high profile industry events. ?uest Loves Food has battled David Chang of momofuku on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, taken over the cafeteria at Google, featured at Food & Wine Magazine's Best New Chefs Event, and "Love's Drumsticks have been featured in Food & Wine Magazine and Bon Appetit Magazine; listed in their "Top 25 Things to Eat, Drink, and Cook in 2012".

Lil' Kim: Diary of a Mirror

Lil' Kim: Diary of a Mirrorby Esther Armah | Ebony.com
'Emotional Justice' warrior Esther Armah ponders about Lil' Kim's—and all of ours—personal relationship with beauty
1996. Damn, even in the mug shot Lil' Kim is pretty. Brown, smooth skin, nice eyes, cute nose. We all checked pictures of the petite rapper and concluded God gave her genes-with-benefits.
No longer. The most recent pics of Lil' Kim remind me of arguments surrounding the merits of plastic surgery and the freedom and right of some to choose to re-arrange their image. Those arguments do indeed exist, but for Generation X and Y in particular, it’s hard to look at the Queen Bee now and make them. We remember when.
Of course, Kim is a grown ass woman making choices, but Black beauty is more than facial features; it is a complicated, precious, powerful living history that includes intimate connections with violence—and is tangled with stories of rejection, privilege, love and lack, favor and hatred. Black beauty’s mirror has never just been our individual reflection staring back at us, it has been a history of a relationship with nations all over the world, their lens on our features and bodies, their opinion, their version of our beauty, how that version has changed and stayed the same over time–the mirror is our intimate revolution.
Lil Kim's transformation isn't new, nor is it news, but I ran across some recent pictures of her and was stopped in my tracks. Not because of any individual feature. But rather because I was looking at a face that was almost other-worldly, alien, unknown, unfamiliar, bearing no resemblance to a self of several years ago. No-one looks like this. Her bone structure—now unrecognizable, carved with seeming self-hate and accentuated with blush—a nose that could stab rather than sniff and eyes permanently on stare. This is hard. That’s why ‘emotional justice’ matters. It’s the term I created to deal with our legacy of untreated trauma that has tumbled down from generation to generation and manifests in all different forms. Black beauty is one of those forms.
Read More
***
Esther Armah is a NY Radio host, playwright, national best-selling author. ‘Emotional Justice Unplugged’ is her annual arts & conversation series. Follow her on Twitter: @estherarmah #emotionaljustice or Facebook: www.facebook.com/emotionaljustice

Lakesia Johnson Discusses New Book 'Iconic: Decoding Images of the Revolutionary Black Woman'

Book Expo America 
Throughout American history, black women have evoked strong reaction from American media and have been imaged in ways that draw on the deep-seated stereotypes. In Iconic, Lakesia Johnson shows how truly revolutionary black women have not only controlled their own image despite such negative characterizations but done so for a greater good. Focusing on women from Sojourner Truth to Pam Grier and Alice Walker to Michelle Obama, Iconic shows how these icons continue to work to combat social justice and American racial prejudice.

Hey White Guys: A Public Service Announcement

Remembering Al Freeman, Jr. : The Dutchman (1967)

Based on a play by playwright Amiri Baraka, Dutchman is a 1967 film starring Al Freeman, Jr. (1934-2012) and Shirley Knight.

Syllabus: Sampling Soul 3.0 with 9th Wonder & Mark Anthony Neal

Sampling Soul 3.0 Duke University Department of African & African American StudiesAAAS 334-01Fall 2012Tuesday 4:40pm – 7:10pmErnestine Friedl Bldg, 107
Instructors:Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. | @NewBlackMan 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) | @9thWonderMusic
Course Description Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s and became the secular soundtrack of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists such as Aretha Franklin and James Brown and record companies such as Motown and Stax, as well as the term “Soul” became symbols of black aspiration and black political engagement.  In the decades since the rise of “Soul,” the music and its icons are continuously referenced in contemporary popular culture via movie trailers, commercials, television sitcoms and of course music.  In the process “Soul” has become a significant and lucrative cultural archive, particularly for two generations of Hip-Hop artists and producers.
Co-taught by Grammy Award winning producer 9th Wonder and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, “Sampling Soul” will examine how the concept of “Soul” has functioned as raw data for contemporary forms of cultural expression. In addition the course will consider the broader cultural implications of sampling, in the practices of parody and collage, and the legal ramifications of sampling within the context of intellectual property law.  The course also offers the opportunity to rethink the concept of archival material in the digital age.
Books
Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations | Brian WardSoul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure | ed. Monique Guillory & Richard C. Green Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law | Richard L. Schur Creative License: the Law and Culture of Digital Sampling | Kembrew McLeod & Peter Dicola That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader | ed. Murray Forman & Mark Anthony Neal
Making Beats: the Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop | Joseph G. Schloss
The Grey Album: the Blackness of Blackness | Kevin Young

Week 1—Sampling SamplingThe Art and Aesthetics of SamplingAugust 28, 2012
Introduction to sampling as a practice. What are the historical and artistic contexts for sampling practices> How do terms like appropriation, borrowing, parody, pastiche, collage and “theft” factor into our understandings of sampling practices? How have sampling practices impacted contemporary art?

Week 2—Sampling The Birth of Rock &…er, Rhythm & BluesRace Music, Cover Scams, and Elvis Presley’s AssSeptember 4, 2012
Soul Music was the logical extension of the period of “Race Music”—as Black music was defined by the recording and radio industries from the 1920s—where the music was incubated in the segregated spaces of Black American life.  The music crossed over in the 1950s with the practice of “covers”—where White performers recorded songs originally recorded by Black Rhythm and Blues artists, to greater acclaim and financial reward—leading to the emergence  of Elvis Presley at the “King” of Rock & Roll.
Readings: Ward, Just My Soul Responding | Introduction; Part 1: Deliver me from the days of old (1-169)
Discussion Question: (Beta)

Week 3—Sampling SoulThe Politics of Soul; The Soul of PoliticsSeptember 11, 2012
Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s, combining the drive of rhythm and blues, with the flourishes of the black gospel tradition.  By the 1960s it was part of a broader social movement articulated politically in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, philosophically in the concept of Black Nationalism and the Black Arts Movement and stylistically in the flourishing of Afros.
Readings: Ward, Just My Soul Responding | Part 2: People get ready; Part 3: One nation (divisible) under a groove; Epilogue (173-452)
Discussion Question (# 1)

Week 4—Sampling Black Power & Politics The Cultural and Historical Legacy of SoulSeptember 18, 2012
In the 1970s Soul became  a “brand” invoked directly and indirectly in ad copy, television commercials, film and television and of course music.  Decades later ‘Soul’ has become a general phrase connected to a nostalgia for the period of the 1960s, often minus allusions to the political struggles of the era.
Readings: Guillory & Green, Soul  | Scott,  “It’s All in the Timing: The Latest Moves, James Brown’s Grooves and the Seventies Race Conscious Movement in Salvador, Bahia-Brazil” (9-22); Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia” (23-31); White, “Fragmented Souls: Call and Response with Renee Cox” (45-55); Fared, “Wailin’ Soul: Reggae’s Debt to Black American Music” (56-74); Rux, “Aunt Emma’s Zuni Recipe for Soul Transitions” (75-86).
Screening:  The Black Power Mixtape
Discussion Question (# 2)

Week 5—Sampling The Pleasure(s) of SoulThe Soul of Black FolkSeptember 25, 2012
By the late 1960s ‘Soul’ became a cultural reference point related to notions of style and feeling, that marked Black bodies as exotic in the context of the mid-20th century.  Soul located the slippery slope between exoticism and pathology, played out within a landscape of Black sexual politics.
Readings: Guillory & Green, Soul  |  Serlin, “From Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock: Urban Pedagogy and Soul Iconography in the 1970s” (105-120); Wald, “Soul’s Revival: White Soul, Nostalgia, and the Culturally Constructed Past” (139-158); Jackson, “Ethnophyisicality, or an Ethnography of Some Body” (172-190); Guillory,  “Black Bodies Swingin’: Race, Gender, and Jazz” (191-215); DeFrantz, “Stoned Soul Picnic: Alvin Ailey and the Struggle to Define Official Black Culture” (216-226); Gonzales, “The Legend of Soul: Curtis Mayfield!” (227-235); Simon, “The Stigmatization of ‘Blaxploitation’” (236, 249)
Discussion Question (# 3)

Week 6— Sampling BlacknessBlack Culture as Intellectual PropertyOctober 2, 2012
Though various forms of black culture have circulated freely in the United States and across the globe, they have often done so as the property of corporate entities. What is the relationship between black bodies as chattel and black culture as property?  What happens when the cultural expressions of a formerly enslaved peoples becomes intellectual property?
Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership  | Chap 1: From Chattel to Intellectual Property; Chap 2: Critical Race Theory, Signifyin’ and Cultural Ownership;  Chap 3: Defining Hip-Hop Aesthetics; Chap 4: Claiming Ownership in the Post-Civil Rights Era (1-98)
Discussion Question (# 4)

Week 7—Sampling Hip-Hop AestheticsTransformative Uses: Parody, Memory, CommunityOctober 9, 2012
How have the aesthetics of Hip-Hop challenged the legitimacy of Intellectual Property Law and in the process transformed how we think about intellectual property and its value?
Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership  | Chap 5: “Fair Use” and the Circulation of Racialized Texts; Chap 6: “Transformative Uses”: Parody and Memory; Chap 7: From Invisibility to Erasure? The Consequences of Hip-hop Aesthetics
Neal, Ebony.com | "Fair Use," Al Green and President Obama’s Reelection Campaign (http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/fair-use-al-green-and-president-obamas-reelection-campaign)
Discussion Question (# 5)

Week 8— Sampling SamplingThe Culture of Digital Sampling October 23, 2012
Is sampling beats “stealing” music and evidence of a lazy, uncreative impulse in contemporary art? Or is it a legitimate art form?
Readings: McLeod & DiCola, Creative License
Screening:  Copyright Criminals (dir. Benjamin Franzen, 2009)
Discussion Question (# 6)
Mid-term Examination Distributed


Week 9—Sampling Hip-Hip (Origins)Hip-Hop Origins? Origins of Hip-hop?October 30, 2012
Hip-Hop was born nearly forty-years ago in the borough of the Bronx, in the city of New York, but it’s roots arguably can be traced to much earlier forms of black vernacular expression including the Jamaican “sound systems” that a young Clive Campbell was exposed to in his native Jamaica, before he migrated to New York City in the late 1960s as part of a wave of immigrants in the aftermath of the 1965 Immigration Act. Yet every place and space that has embraced Hip-Hop has done so with its own narratives of origin.
Readings: Murray & Neal, That’s the Joint! | Castleman, “The Politics of Graffiti” (13-22); Chang, “Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown” (23-39); George, “Hip-Hop Founding Fathers Speak the Truth” (43-55); Pabon, “Physical Graffiti: The History of Hip-Hop Dance” (56-62); Tate, “Hip-Hop Turns 30: Watcha Celebratin’ For?” (63-67);  Flores, “Puerto Rocks: Roots, Rap, and Amnesia” (73-91); Rodman, “Race...and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity” (179-198); Wang, “Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC” (199-223).
Mid-Term Examination Due

Week 10—Sampling Gender, Sampling SexualityHe/She/Queer Sounds | He/She/Queer SamplesNovember 6, 2012
Although African American musical forms like rap music are now accepted forms of mainstream popular music, not all of the music produced within these  genres are accepted.  Sampling Queer offers a critical way of thinking about how various sonic tropes that are sampled are often rendered queer by virtue of not adhering to conventional understandings of soul, hip hop, and R&B.
Readings: Murray & Neal, That’s the Joint! | Clay, “I Used to be Scared of the Dick: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity” (348-357); Dyson & Hurt: Violence, Machismo, Sexism and Homophobia” (358-369); Hill, “Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness” (382-398); Morgan, “Hip-Hop Feminist” (413-418); Royster, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 19, Number 1, March 2009 , pp. 77-94(18) |“Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no”: Grace Jones and the performance of Strange in the Post-Soul Moment, ”Francesca Royster; Discussion Question (# 7)

Week 11—Sampling Race, Space & ResistanceThe Politics of SoundNovember 13, 2012
Arguably what has always made rap music political has been its sound—a sound that has regularly transformed the spaces the it has inhabited.  The larger question is how often have rap narratives matched the political urgency of it’s sound—and does it matter whether it does?
Readings: Murray & Neal, That’s the Joint! | Miller, “Rap’s Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture” (270-293); Perry, “Global Black Self-Fashionings: Hip-Hop as Diasporic Space” (294-314); Lena, “Voyeurism and Resistance in Rap Music Videos” (462-475); Perry, “My Mic Sounds Nice: Art, Community, and Consciousness” (503-517); Peterson, “Dead Prezence: Money and Mortal Themes in Hip-hop Culture” (595-608); Holmes Smith, “I Don’t Like to Dream About Getting Paid: Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul” (672-689).Discussion Question (# 8)

Week 12—Sampling BeatsThe Art of Sample Based Hip-HopNovember 20, 2012
In Making Beats, ethnomusicologist Joe Schloss argues that sample-based hip-hop is a legitimate art form unto itself.
Readings: Schloss, Making Beats.
Discussion Question (#9)
 
Week 13—Sampling the Blackness of BlacknessOn the Black Art of EscapeNovember 27, 2012
Part one of a meditation on blackness, using the mashup as metaphor.
Readings:  Young, The Grey Album | Overture; Book One: Elsewhere; Book Two: Strange Fruit (3-188)
Discussion Question (#10)

Week 14—Blackening the Sampling of BlacknessTowards a Post-Soul PoeticsDecember 4, 2012
Part one of a meditation on blackness, using the mashup as metaphor.
Readings:  Young, The Grey Album | Book Three: Heaven is Negro; Book Four: Cosmic Slop (189-406)
Discussion Question (#11)
Final Examination Distributed

Market Place: Why Do Women Get Smaller Raises Than Men?

Market Place :
Women still lag behind men when it comes to earnings and promotions. Some attribute this to factors like poorer negotiating skills. But this new study offers something else: Ammunition, for women who want to break that cycle. Professor Maura Belliveau of Long Island University in New York set out to learn why men land more significant raises and promotions than men.
Belliveau's study found that two-thirds of available money for raises went to men. She posits that this gap occurs because managers believe that women are more willing to accept "symbollic rewards," such as more respect over pay. The attitude, she says, is more "I get to do something nice for her."

'Awkward Black Girl'--"The Jingle" (S2, E3)

i am OTHER 
Just when things were looking up, J's mother's unsolicited judgment leaves J questioning the direction in which her life is heading.

D.L. Hughley: Dear Chick-Fil-A

Dear Chick-Fil-A by D.L. Hughley | HuffPost Black Voices
Dear Chick-Fil-A,
You and I sure have had our share of good times. I fondly recall the first moment I ever met you: it was at the Atlanta airport. I'd always heard about you, and was a little nervous to approach. You were everything everyone said you were and more. It was truly love at first bite. I told you I'd come back, and I did -- time and time again. We met in various cities all over the country, each time better than the last, as if we'd never been apart. Isn't that what true love is, where it picks up right it left off?
You can imagine my excitement when I heard you were moving west to my city, Los Angeles. I'd be able to see you as much as I wanted, with no shame or recriminations. Our love would no longer have to be in secret. We could love out loud, for the entire world to see. I was in bliss, and for a time I was truly truly happy.
But baby, lately you've been doing me dirty. You've been speaking with a forked tongue, spewing hate instead of frying love. Who would have thought that a chicken sandwich would become a symbol for both free speech and intolerance at the same time? It brings a whole new meaning to the question, "Do you it want light or dark?"
I don't understand why you're jeopardizing what we have. You're forcing me to choose between my heart and my stomach. Your president has said that you believe that a marriage is only between a man and a woman. But if anyone keeps eating at your establishment, the only relationship that'll matter is between a man and his cardiologist. It's not like anyone, gay or straight, is getting married in your restaurant – nor   will any gay couple ever be serving fried food at their nuptials.
You say that gay marriage is a sin, like in Leviticus 19:22. But a preceding verse, Leviticus 17:14, says, "You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off." You don't cook your chicken in a kosher way. On what grounds are you picking and choosing which edicts to follow?
Is this all because your President, Dan Cathy, has both male and female names? I can see how that can lead to a confusion with one's gender identity. But whether he's transgendered, cisgendered, questioning, or in transition, he's still one of God's children deserving of empathy and compassion.
Don't get me wrong. I support Mr. Cathy's right to think what he wants and vote however he sees fit. But like the Good Book says, we need sanctuaries in this world, places where a man can go to escape his thoughts. That used to be you. Now I have to wonder if I'm doing the right thing when I step inside your doors, if I am subsidizing perspectives that I am vehemently opposed to. Ignorance is bliss, girl, especially in your industry. Do you really want your customers to start thinking when they step foot in your doors? They'd run out of there faster than – and  you'll pardon the expression – a  bat out of hell. They'll go looking to put something healthier into the God-given temple that is their body.
When have fast food and politics ever intermingled before? Arthur Treacher's has never impressed sailors into the British navy, not even once. Burger King didn't send his royal troops to support us in Iraq. Long John Silver has left his pirating days behind him, and now is a peaceful member of our community. Pizza Hut did not try to declare itself a Habitat for a Humanity. It's not the gay community that is freaky, outspoken and different. It's you, baby.
You say that that's a good thing, that you operate under your own rules. You point out that, unlike your rivals, you're closed on Sunday. Isn't it ironic that Sunday is the most socially segregated day of the week? We go to church, a place where everyone looks like us, talks like us and thinks like us. Not only is Chick-Fil-A closed on Sundays; but so are many hearts and minds. Apparently, you think this is a good thing.
So Chick-Fil-A, baby, I guess what I'm struggling to say, as I fight back the tears and wipe the grease from my fingers, is this. It's not that I don't love you; we both know that's not true. I know I'll never find another like you. But baby, we are growing in two different directions. I'm afraid I won't be able to see you anymore.
May God bless and keep you,
D. L. Hughley
PS I would have written this on one of your fine napkins, but it was just too painful a reminder of the way we were.
***
D.L. Hughleyis perhaps best known as the star of the ABC/UPN sitcom The Hughleys, and as one of the four comedians featured in the Spike Lee film The Original Kings of Comedy. Additionally, he has been the host of CNN's D. L. Hughley Breaks the News, a correspondent for The Jay Leno Show on NBC, and a local radio personality in New York City.