george floyd
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: Andrew J Cunningham / Getty
In an interview with Ari Melber on MSNBC, Erykah Badu talked about her 2008 song, “Master Teacher” which is often credited as most recently popularizing the term “woke.”
The song, which also featured Georgia Anne Muldrow, had a chorus that said, “I stay woke,” and the 52-year-old singer further explained her role in popularizing the phrase. “There’s a song on [New Amerykah Part One] called ‘Master Teacher,’ and in that song… the chorus is ‘I stay woke,’ so ‘stay woke’ was introduced to the world by this album,” the 52-year-old neo-soul icon said. “And I tweeted it about this group that was detained, Pussy Riot… In my tweet, I said ‘Free Pussy Riot…stay woke.’ After that, ‘woke’ took off.”
Related Stories
The word woke has most recently been used by the GOP as a buzzword for any part of the liberal agenda from teaching Black history to protecting LGBTQ rights.
But, when asked directly what Badu thinks conservatives mean when they use the word, she said plainly, “I think they mean ‘Black,’” the singer said. “It’s just another way to say ‘thug’ or something else, right?”
She also noted, “It is what it is. It doesn’t belong to us anymore, and once something goes out into the world, it takes a life of its own. It has an energy of its own.”
The term woke has found its way into the mainstream lexicon with Republicans using it daily to describe almost anything that they disagree with. The most significant legislative action was the passage of the Stop WOKE Act signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022. The legislation restricts how racism and other parts of history can be taught in schools and workplaces. It even includes language that is supposed to prevent white students from “feeling bad” about actual American History.
The act is behind the banning of several books in the state as well as sanitized versions of Black historical facts like Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
While the popular and eclectic singer may have brought the term back to the forefront of American culture, social and culture historians note that the phrase can be traced back to as far as the 1930s.
According to MadameNoire, American folk legend Huddie Michael Ledbetter (aka Lead Belly) coined the term during an interview discussing his hit song “Scottsboro Boys,” according to NewsOne. In the 1938 interview, Belly urged Black people to stay vigilant when traveling through Alabama to avoid racial tension.
African American author Melvin Kelley also used the phrase in a New York Times essay where he examined Black language and idioms as a pushback against white supremacy called, “If You’re Woke You Dig It.”
The most recent use and retaliation against the phrase originated in 2020 during national protests against the police state in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.
Badu said in the interview that the true meaning of the expression belongs to the people who created it.
“It means being aware, being in alignment with nature,” the Grammy-winning singer added. “It’s not only in the political arena. That means with your health, that means in your relationships, that means in your home, that means in your car, that means in your sleep.”
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: Anadolu Agency / Getty
The city of New York is poised to settle a lawsuit brought against them by protesters in the Bronx over the New York Police Department tactics involving “kettling” at a protest for George Floyd in 2020.
According to reports, the city is preparing to pay a large sum of money to settle a class action suit brought on by individuals who were part of a racial justice protest in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx on June 4, 2020. In the documents filed in federal court, the sum ranges between $4 million and $6 million. Each person of the hundreds involved could receive $21,500. Those who were issued desk appearance summons could net an additional $2,500, and the plaintiffs named who brought the suit could get another $21,500.
The city will also shell out $2,550,000 to pay the fees of the attorneys involved. Amali Sierra, one of the lead plaintiffs, spoke about the settlement in a statement: “This settlement serves as testimony of the wrongdoing by the hands of the NYPD. It is a reminder that this institution is not built to protect Black and Brown communities.”
Sierra and her sister, Samira, were among the group of over 300 people protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the direction of then-Chief of Department Terence Monahan in coordination with the NYPD’s legal team, officers on the scene at E.136th Street cornered the protesters preventing them from leaving until after the imposed 8 p.m. curfew that was in effect at the time.
NYPD officers then proceeded to pepper spray the protesters and strike them with batons before arresting them en masse. Legal observers from the Legal Aid Society and the National Lawyers Guild were also detained and handcuffed along with those passing by. The Legal Aid Society sent out word of the incident via Twitter at the time, which was responded to with video footage.
A spokesperson for the NYPD issued a statement denying any wrongdoing by the department: “It was a challenging moment for the department as officers who themselves were suffering under the strains of a global pandemic did their utmost to help facilitate people’s rights to peaceful expression while addressing acts of lawlessness including wide-scale rioting, mass chaos, violence, and destruction.”
The spokesperson followed up by adding that they’ve “re-envisioned” their policies since 2020. The news comes as the city is currently seeking to settle more lawsuits over the department’s behavior that year.
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: NurPhoto / Getty
It seems Mayor Eric Adams has some more work to do. It has been reported over 150 New York City police offers have been involved in misconduct responding to George Floyd’s passing.
As spotted on The Grio the New York Police Department could have responded better to the tragic killing of that turned the world upside down. According to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, or “CCRB”, over 600 complaints were received when the Big Apple collectively protested police brutality. On Monday, February 6 the organization released their findings via The 2020 Protest Report. Their investigation found that 150 badges were guilty of misconduct during the uproar including excessive force.
On May 30, 2020 multiple protestors were knocked over by a police vehicle. Another lawman reportedly pulled another protestor’s COVID-19 mask down and pepper sprayed them in the face. That same day a different set of offices tackled protestors and hit them over the head with batons. It was also confirmed others used physical force, such as pushes and shoves, against civilians in violation of NYPD Guidelines, abused their authority against members of the press and civilians who were not involved in protests and failed to provide medical attention to injured civilians.
The CCRB also faced multiple hurdles when investigating these complaints, many of which led to complaints being closed as “Officer Unidentified” because the CCRB could not determine which officers were involved in the alleged misconduct. Chief among these challenges were:
(1) the actions NYPD members took to conceal their identities, which prevented them from being identified by complainants, victims, and witnesses.
(2) the NYPD’s failure to track and document where officers, vehicles, and equipment were deployed.
(3) the NYPD’s failure to provide dispositive responses to requests for footage from BWCs and other NYPD-controlled cameras that resulted in delayed responses, false positives, false negatives, and inconsistent responses.
(4) investigative delays resulting from officers refusing to be interviewed remotely.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board is an independent oversight agency that investigates, mediates and prosecutes complaints of NYPD misconduct. You can read The 2020 Protest Report here.
Photo: George Floyd
Lawyers for George Floyd’s family say they’re getting ready to file a lawsuit against Ye, the artist and entrepreneur formally known as Kanye West, seeking $250 million in damages over his recent claims that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose rather than at the hands of police.
Attorneys for Roxie Washington, the mother of Floyd’s daughter, said Tuesday (Oct. 18) that they plan to sue West for harassment, misappropriation, defamation and infliction of emotional distress over the rapper’s controversial statements, which he made during an appearance on the Drink Champs podcast.
“George Floyd’s daughter is being retraumatized by Kanye West’s comments and he’s creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for her,” said Nuru Witherspoon, Washington’s attorney. “Kanye’s comments are a repugnant attempt to discount George Floyd’s life and to profit from his inhumane death. We will hold Mr. West accountable for his flagrant remarks against Mr. Floyd’s legacy.”
The case will be filed by Washington on behalf of her daughter with Floyd, the attorneys said. It’s unclear when or where the case will be filed. The attorneys said they would seek $250 million in damages, but such claims have little bearing on what is actually awarded at the end of a successful lawsuit.
Washington is represented by Witherspoon’s firm, as well as another firm called Dixon & Dixon.
West could not be reached for comment on the looming litigation.
Floyd, whose May 2020 death sparked national demonstrations against police brutality, was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck for nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on the street, suffocating him to death. Chauvin was later convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
But in an interview released this weekend by Drink Champs, a popular podcast hosted on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt media channel, West said he saw things differently: “They hit him with the fentanyl. If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that.”
Drink Champs host N.O.R.E., who conducted the interview, has already apologized for the episode, and the episode has been pulled from both Revolt’s site and its YouTube channel.
Multiple cases against Kanye are now potentially in the works by Floyd’s family. On Sunday, civil rights attorney Lee Merritt posted to Twitter that he had been alerted to the comments Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, and was considering how to bring a case against West.
“While one cannot defame the dead, the family of #GeorgeFloyd is considering suit for Kanye’s false statements about the manner of his death,” Merritt tweeted. “Claiming Floyd died from fentanyl not the brutality established criminally and civilly undermines & diminishes the Floyd family’s fight.”
West’s comments about Floyd came amid a storm of controversy for the once-beloved rapper. First he wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt to a show at Paris Fashion Week, then he was banned from both Instagram and Twitter over a string of anti-Semitic statements. Later in the same Drink Champs interview, he made more attacks on Jewish people, claiming they control the media and blaming “Jewish Zionists” for coverage about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her former boyfriend Pete Davidson.
-
Pages