Black America Breaking News for the African American Community
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This month, rapper and activist Noname has confirmed that she’s planning to do even more to help the Black community with the construction of her brick-and-mortar headquarters for the “Noname Book Club.”
On March 1, the Chicago-born poet named Fatimah Warner announced that she’d secured a physical space to serve as the official headquarters of her book club, which has grown into an activist network and community outreach program since it was launched in 2019.
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“Everything provided in this space will be FREE,” she wrote on her Instagram stories across photos of the book club’s space in progress. “We service the community. We cannot wait for Biden or any other white supremacist political to provide for the people. Capitalism doesn’t end by itself. We have to start building a worker-led solidarity economy. The government would rather bomb Somalia than pay your rent.”
The safe space will provide political education classes, book and food drives, book club meet-ups, tent drives, free art shows, free movie screenings, and more. It’ll also have a radical community library accessible to all.
In a sequence of tweets shared on Monday evening, Noname promised her supporters “good things on the way” and linked to a Patreon page where those who want to bolster these efforts can do so by subscribing for as little as one dollar per month.
Snow on tha Bluff
As we previously reported, Noname made headlines last year when conscious rapper J. Cole found himself in the crosshairs of controversy after fans seemingly deciphered that his surprise single “Snow on tha Bluff’ was directed at her.
In the track, the enigmatic 35-year-old kicks things off by lamenting, “It’s something about the queen tone that’s botherin’ me.”
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He opened up about how he feels when activists call out celebrities for not using their platforms during moments of civil unrest, explaining:
“There’s a young lady out there, she way smarter than me / I scrolled through her timeline in these wild times and I started to read / She mad at these crackers, she mad at these capitalists, mad at these murder police / She mad at my n***as, she mad at our ignorance, she wear her heart on her sleeve / She mad at the celebrities, low-key I be thinkin’ she talkin’ ’bout me.”
After the song dropped, several fans called Cole out, stating that it was both defensive and perhaps even misogynistic to dedicate a whole diss track to a Black woman on the frontlines, when he’s repeatedly admitted to not being equipped to do the same.
Despite Cole’s critique that the “young lady” in question condescends rather than educates, fans also pointed out that the Chicago native actually has an entire book club dedicated to teaching Black people about social justice issues and liberation.
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After a full day of debates, Noname responded with a track of her own called “Song 33.”
“I saw a demon on my shoulder/It’s looking like patriarchy,” she begins, making it clear exactly who and what she’s referencing, then comes to a conclusion, “I guess the ego hurt now/ It’s time to go to work/ Wow/Look at him go/He really bout to write about me when the world is in smokes?”
But later she admitted she regretted the clap back.
“i’ve been thinking a lot about it and i am not proud of myself for responding with song 33,” she tweeted regarding her Madlib-produced track. “i tried to use it as a moment to draw attention back to the issues i care about but i didn’t have to respond. my ego got the best of me. i apologize for any further distraction this caused.”
She later added, “madlib killed that beat and i see there’s a lot of people that resonate with the words so i’m leaving it up but i’ll be donating my portion of the song’s earnings to various mutual aid funds. black radical unity.”
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