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The A List: 03.07.03
Compiled by Africana Staff

This week on the A-List:

1. R. Kelly's on top of the charts (and your daughters)
In its ongoing effort to remain true to the hallowed mandate to be your Gateway to Black World, Africana.com has over the last year-and-a-half seen fit to throw quite a few pixels at the various scandals occasioned by the alleged pervy predilections of singer R. Kelly. This coverage has run the expected gamut--pro-R, anti-R, sad-and-confused-about-R--but, surprisingly, the numerous articles produced a mini-flood of email, not attacking Kelly, but professing staunch support for the R. Our reaction to these letters was, as you'd imagine, negative. Constant exposure to everything from amateur psychologists suggesting Kelly was emulating a child-marrying Elvis, to Cochran-like cautions "not to rush to judgment," to poorly-written screeds instructing us to "be real and stop fronting" because sex between young girls and rich and famous R&B stars must be, by definition, consensual as "all those girls watching him on BET are dreaming of getting with him sexually anyway," to the literally dozens of maddening, rote and ultimately inane one-line missives opining that "I guess age really ain't nothing but a number after all!" --well, you'll understand if those letters had the A-List just a little convinced that black folks must really be the most screwed-up, self-hating, in-denial population in all god's creation. After all, here was a vaguely unattractive singer with a so-so vocal range and a lazy eye, a songwriter whose great professional innovation has been the idiot savant-like ability to reduce the complicated realties of black intimacy to chintzy, lyrical prime-numbers along the lines of "you remind me of my jeep" or "let's go half on a baby," a grown man who definitely married (and presumably had sex with) at least one underage girl and allegedly videotaped himself having sex with and urinating on another, and yet, not only was there no universal outcry against him, but dozens of morons were writing in to Africana every day demanding that we stop defaming their favorite (alleged) child molester. Shameful and sad was the only way to describe it.

After receding into blissful remission for almost a year with the ebb of R. Kelly-related headlines, our depression came back full bore when we learned that his latest loveman oeuvre, The Chocolate Factory had debuted at number one on the album charts last week. The A-List isn't in the demographics business, but we've got a strong, sad feeling that most of the over 500K consumers who ran to stores last week to buy were likely grown black women (who at some point or another were girls) or the genuine article itself: black girls exactly like the ones for which Kelly is accused of having an unhealthy yen. This means that, perversely enough, the same population that has been at greatest risk from Kelly is in large part helping pay for his still forthcoming legal defense, a defense that could quite likely leave him free to, as he so eloquently puts it in his latest hit "Ignition," "stick my key in" more underage girls. Kelly has denied any wrong doing (on The Chocolate Factory he croons ''It's all because I'm famous, you know what I'm sayin' I mean, if I wasn't famous, then all this wouldn't be happening'') and only with a few notable exceptions, the success of his latest album has been greeted with a kind of shrugging "go figure" cynicism by a groggy celebrity/music press still suffering from Michael Jackson insulin shock. What's clear to the A-List, though, is that the non-reaction to Kelly's alleged transgressions is par for the course in a culture that de-values black girls as completely as does ours. Had Kelly been accused of molesting boys a la Michael Jackson he'd be under hot lights crying for Barbara Walters faster than you can say "20/20." And if there was a video circulating with images that may or may not be Kelly having sex with a girl that looked like one of the Olson Twins, you'd better believe he'd be in a CO's office begging not to be put back in general population faster than you can say "protective custody."

But hey, what do we know, right? We don't have children the age of Kelly's alleged victims and except for the cuts featuring Ronald Isley, we don't really like his music. That's why the A-List wants to hear from you. Are you the African American parent of a girl aged 13-16 who went out and bought The Chocolate Factory with your own money in the first week of its release? If so, we'd like you to write and send us a short essay (<500 words) explaining "Why I can look my daughter in the eye." The best essay will be published on Africana.com, and the winner will receive a copy of Sapphire's Push appropriately inscribed with a personal message from the A-List.

2. MSNBC = "Mighty Stupid Network Broadcasting Crap"
In a desperate bid to out-fox the right-wing Fox News, low rated cable network MSNBC has hired the lunatic fringe's favorite author and radio commentator Michael Savage as a talking head. Known for racist, homophobic and sexist nonsense rants along the lines of " [Latino]'s breed like rabbits... The white people don't breed as often for whatever reason. I guess many homosexuals are involved," as well for calling non-white countries parts of the "turd-world," Savage is a bottom feeding shock-jock whose hateful antics are beyond the pale even in the increasingly extreme world of talk TV. MSNBC's black, Latino and gay staffers are organizing in hopes that they can mount an internal campaign to keep Savage's show from airing, and the A-List plans to support our fellow media workers by writing network honchos and informing them of our intention to boycott the channel until they publicly disavow Savage and cancel plans to put him on air. (If you write in, make sure you let them know the Africana A-List made you do it!)

MSNBC Feedback
feedback@msnbc.com

Erik Sorenson, MSNBC President
Erik.Sorenson@MSNBC.com

Neal Shapiro, NBC News President
Neal.Shapiro@nbc.com

3. Reparations lawsuit lays groundwork for future justice
Just as Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund followed a careful, step-by-step plan to lay precedent for the overturning of legal segregation, so now has Harvard law prof Charles Ogletree's Committee on Reparations begun the groundwork for a legal revolution that could overturn centuries of uncompensated neglect. The A-List finds this a healthy, exciting development - and unlike some of the more, uhm, fanciful reparations demands (Indian casino-like dispensation to print money, say, or a lifetime discount on all cotton goods), this is a case we can all get behind. Even those white "friends" who get a little nervous when we start talking armed revol - we mean, reparations, seem to relax when we point out that the Tulsa Race Riots, for which Ogletree et al are now seeking redress, happened just 80 years ago and left behind specific identifiable victims (and their descendants). Surviving records even finger specific individual rioters who can be held accountable (seeking redress for the government's improper encouragement of the rioting, which left at least 300 victims, the suit has Oklahoma's current governor standing in for the man who held the office in 1921). We don't know enough about the law to handicap this case's chance to make history, but we admire the approach and applaud the lawyers for their crafty strategy of incremental dues-settling.

4. Black Girls Rule! All by their lonesomes :`(
Last week Newsweek magazine featured a trinity of black women on the cover. Can you guess why? Story about three member girl groups like Destiny's Child? Nope, even though A-List fave and futurebabymama, Beyonce Knowles is the one smiling on the left. (And you need to be real and stop frontin' and just call us, seeing how because you remind us of our Jeep. Let's go half on a baby, Beyonce! We can touch the sky, baby if only we believe!) Was it an an expose on --choose one --single mothers, poverty, AIDS, or public assistance? Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! (Although if you picked "single mother" you were half right.) The cover story, titled "The Black Gender Gap," frames the increasing gains black American women are making professionally as a marriage liability, mainstreaming the conventional wisdom of black female consumer mags like Essence that well educated black women are statistically doomed to live alone for lack of equally educated or monied black male partners. The standard set of options is outlined as solutions: A) date and marry other races, B) negotiate a relationship with a black male partner who is not intimidated by our superior intellect, vast wealth, and our mysterious alien technology, or C) pull a Celie-n-Shug and start kissing up on other women. (Okay, the article didn't mention that last option, but it makes a pretty mental picture and we wanted to put a plug in for our lesbian sisthren, who go unmentioned in the article.) While all this is hardly news --and it's nice that the story for once wasn't about prostitutes, poverty, AIDS, welfare queens or three member girl groups --the A-List is kind of tired of reading about the can't find/get/keep'a'man blues.

5. Air National Guard leader dismissed for racism, plus a mess of other violations
We're not quite sure whether this is a happy story or a sad one, as it can play either as "oh, how long we've come, that a roughneck Mississippi soldier is actually getting terminated for allowing racism to flourish under his watch!" or as "when will said Mississippi outgrow the racist impulse?" At any rate, with war looming, the A-List for one is glad that Col. David Weaver won't be representing the USA overseas. (Nothing undermines your respect for your enemy like being bombed by a racist.( According to published reports, Weaver not only undertook a systematic campaign to drum out his unit's only black flyer, he also ran an illegal liquor store on his base, cheated on exams and plagiarized papers. Now that's what we call one crazy southern boy!

6. Oprah says reading is fun-damental, revives book club. (Turns out she's hecka rich, too!)
A year after putting her phenomenally successful Oprah Book Club on hiatus, the talented Ms. Winfrey has just announced its imminent return. This time, however, Oprah says she'll eschew modern literature to focus on the classics: papers report she's been boning up on Shakespeare and Faulkner lately, and as a result, pretty soon so will you. The A-List loves reading as much as the next collective news blog, and even has harbored some fond hopes of writing something memorable someday, so --predictably --we're a tad conflicted about the new iteration of the OBC. Trading a multicultural stable of living authors for a wax museum comprising mostly dead white men could feel like backward progress. On the other hand, can Ms. Winfrey and her recently announced billion little friends be so wrong? If some extra money finds its way into the pockets of those kooky Hemingway survivors, so be it. The rich getting richer --Hemingway kids, Winfrey--just plain makes sense to us, in a way the lightening strike starmaking power of OBC never quite did. And we ain't worrying; we figure that novel will be done by the time the third OBC is unveiled.

7. Michael Jackson gets hit by (hit by!) a smooth voodoo priest!
There are always two sides to every story. And for Michael Jackson, one side is typically nutty and the other, much, much nuttier. Even the A-List's old eyes, scaled by cynicism, desensitized and lidded, were dazzled by the sheer craziness packed into the latest MJ narrative being offered up in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. If the mag and its sources are to believed, three well-worn Jacksonisms are now proven as unequivocally true. First, the vitiligo-defense of his whitened skin is really B.S. (he really has been bleaching); second, his features are as fake as they look (he wears a pageboy wig and a prosthesis on the tip of his nose); and, third, his blackness spooks the hell out of him (he disparagingly calls black people "spabooks" --whatever the heck that means. This cat is so weird he even has his own private ethnic slurs! Seriously, what in sweet Jesus' holy name is the derivation of "spabook?") What really had the A-List going, though, is the allegation that Jackson paid what is described as an "African voodoo priest" $150,000 for a ritual intended to cast death spells on director Steven Spielberg, music mogul David Geffen and 23 others on his personal blacklist. Apparently salty after not getting the Peter Pan role in Spielberg's 1991 movie, Hook, Jackson ordered the voodoo ceremony in Switzerland, which included a "blood bath" and the slaughtering of 42 cows. Crazy, you say? Yeah, and that's our Michael!

8. Shame!
The A-List is simply horrified by this next item. Back when the A-List was a girl growing up in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, we remember many a snowball fight on Adelphi Street with the bigger kids from Rothschild JHS --aka Ruffchile --who would fire off iceballs at us and the other kids at our elementary school, P.S. 20 (and yes, nosey, we were in the same class with Kimberley Jones aka Lil' Kim, only she wasn't so beautiful and famous and perfect like she is now.). Fortunately for us, their aim was pretty bad and they drew a few tears at worst and a hail of return snowballs at best. Which is how snowball fights should be. This tender upbringing of ours leaves us wholly unprepared to process or understand the dementia of adults like Cynthia Powell, 36 and Joseph Best, 32, who --after Sunday church service no less --drove up to a group of school-aged girls and opened fire with guns to avenge their daughter being hit in the face by a snowball. One of the five bullets fired hit 10-year-old Ebony Smith in the head, who, as if this matters, was not even involved in the snowball fight. The common-law husband and wife have both been charged with attempted murder while Ebony lies in a hospital bed in Philadelphia fighting for her life. We're praying for you, Ebony and may your assaulters rot in hell.

9. Friends Jumps Shark and Finally Gets a Black Cast Member
Five years ago if you had told the A-List that NBC's hit sitcom Friends would someday have a black cast member we would have laughed our cynical little butts off. But, golly! were we shocked when we heard that the ever-loquacious Aisha Tyler would be joining the cast. The colored addition to the all-white line-up is, of course, long overdue, with Tyler (best known for her slapstick commentary as the host of Entertainment Channel's Talk Soup as well as the dating show Fifth Wheel) slated to play a professor of paleontology trapped like negative Oreo cookie filling between potential love interests Ross (David Schwimmer) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc).

The writers of Friends argue that adding a black cast member will give the show a more universal appeal, and that they hope to close the black/white viewer-ship gap for the sitcom, which ranks as the sixth most watched show with white audiences, but 65th among African Americans. (Tiger Woods is probably one of those viewers.) But like Happy Days' decision to have the Fonz jump a pool of sharks on water skis, the addition of the black cast member also heralds that unfortunate, fateful moment in every creatively exhausted sitcom's life when it goes and does something so outrageous that it undermines its own underlying creative logic, thereby hastening cancellation. (Picture that "Very Special" episode of What's Happening when ReRun bootlegs the Doobie Brother's concert, or the episode of Diff'rent Strokes where poor little Dudley is "touched" by R. Kel--we mean Gordon Jump!) As much as NBC may deny it, having a top rated sitcom about a group of "friends" who live in a bland, insular, all-white fantasyland is basically what this show is, has been, and forever shall be about, making the addition of Tyler officially the first scene of the show's last act. Bye bye, Friends! We always hated you all!

10. And that's all folks!
That's it for the A-List, so check back next week for more. (And if you liked what you read, make sure to forward it to 10 people, or else our voodoo priest will get you!)

About the Author: The A-List doesn't want R. Kelly in the same state as our kids.