TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: The Brotherhood Council on Barack Obama

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6 PM Mountain Time

Tonight on the show, we’re beginning a new regular feature: The Brotherhood Council.

The Brotherhood Council will meet at least four times this year to discuss international, national and local issues of concern to the Afrikan community, in the realms of the political, economic and social, to the personal, interpersonal and psychological.

And yes, before you can say “Gender bias!”, don’t worry, we’ll also be meeting with the Sisterhood Council an equal number of times.

Tonight’s council is made of three Brothers, plus myself:

Young Mav is the leader of Politic Live, E-Town’s premiere hip hop band. As DJ Arlo Maverick, Young Mav is also a long-time CJSR broadcaster on his highly popular Saturday night hip hop show, Urban Hang Suite. He’s a journalist, the city’s leading historian of the local hip hop scene, a music promoter, a mentor to many local musicians, and the founder of Hip Hop for Hunger, which for six years has raised money and food through hip hop to fund and feed Edmonton’s food back. He’s of Jamaican extraction.

Nene Khalema from South Africa is completing his doctorate in Education. He’s worked in Edmonton’s Afrikan communities for years, particularly as an advocate for educational reform. Currently he works with students of diverse immigrant backgrounds who face difficulties from lack of acculturation to post-traumatic stress disorder.

George Ishiekwene of Liberia works among disenfranchished youth in Edmonton. With colleagues such as Nene Khalema, he presented “Project Youth: Integration & Education - A Collaborative Model to Nurture Refugee Youth Capacities to Integrate.”

Tonight we’re going to discuss the remarkable ascendancy and everyday changing fortunes of Barack Obama, the Kenyan-American candidate for the presidential nomination of the US Democratic Party. Born in 1961, Obama was raised in Hawaii, Indonesia and New York. He became editor of the Harvard Law Review, a civil rights lawyer, a community organiser, the author of two autobiographies, a state senator, and now a federal senator.

His candidacy has been controversial. He’s young, relatively inexperienced in federal politics with only two years’ experience; he’s challenging the entitlement of the Clinton clan; and his presence has made some in the US question which of race or gender is the greater obstacle to the presidency.

Of course, above all these matters should be Obama’s policy statements and record, but we’ll get to those.

To start off, we’ll hear Malcolm X discussing, in the early 1960s, differing Euro-American attitudes towards people from the Afrikan continent, and Afrikan-Americans. Malcolm X understood then, as is still the case, that Euro-American nationalists prize the myth of their own history. To them, anyone who is ignorant of his own past is not respectable.

And by and large, Afrikans in the United States had their historical consciousness destroyed. Their ancestors were claimed by the scores of millions in the Maafa centuries before; they were taught that they came not from civilisations, but from barbarism.