Jack & Jill Politics

Meant to post this a few days ago, but this is a big week:

More on the conference from Davey D here.

Speakers include filmmaker Byron Hurt, DJ Ed Lover and Kevin Powell. Clearly this is not the same Kevin Powell that ran the Federal Communications Commission. Here’s the real Kevin Powell’s intro letter:

We do not propose to have all the answers with this conference. Indeed, more questions will be asked than answered. What we do propose is that we not see this very critical life-saving and life-empowering work as rocket science.

Some of the proactive things we need to do are very simple: we’ve got to know our history, we’ve got to know who we are, where we’ve come from; we’ve got to have a plan of action for every aspect of our lives, even in the face of institutionalized racism; we’ve got to be willing to do whatever it takes, by any means necessary, to improve ourselves, to heal, to grow, to change, to move from being just males to men with a sense of purpose, honesty, transparency, accountability, and responsibility; we’ve got to move to a place of sincere respect for all the females in our lives, the women and the girls, and to a place of viewing them as our equals, as partners, as the givers of life who should be honored for what they have to endure in a world dominated and controlled by the male gender; and we’ve got to move away from very predictable and self-defeating male behavior around violence, around sex, around money, ego, senseless competition and jealousy, and materialism.

Frantz Fanon once said that each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. We got next, right now, and it is our time to have real talk with each other, to be the examples of manhood we want to see, and to create the kind of world we want for ourselves and for the generations not yet born.

Is anyone going to this? I wish I could. If you are going, please post some dispatches in the comments for this post.