Dan Freeman

I'm primarily motivated by this:
My passionate beliefs cause me to sometimes act like this:
I'm a proud Black man, but there were a couple moments during puberty when I wouldn't have been too upset if I looked like this:
As a geek and a nerd, I sometimes feel like this:
Despite my materialist grasp of the world, my utopian side sees life like this:
Your host is a communications, media, and technology consultant with over 15 years of experience in the corporate and non-profit arenas. He has worked with organizations such as Project Change (AntiRacismNet), Media Alliance (San Francisco), TAO Communications (now known as the Organization for Autonomous Communications), the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), the Black Radical Congress (BRC), and the Institute for Global Communications (The World's First Non-Profit Internet Service Provider), among many others.
He is widely regarded as a legend of grassroots technology activism and advocacy (at various times referred to as "Johnny Appleseed," "Moses," and "The Father of Pan-African Cyberspace"), and was the first person to explicitly research and document African and African-descendent sociocultural production and usage in virtual environments (that's just a fancy way of saying that before white folks discovered the Digital Divide, he discovered the online Underground Railroad). Out of this work came the first Pan-African guide to online resources (a Yahoo and Google equivalent for it's time), which subsequently inspired a growth in online activity by African-descendents which is still being felt to this day. His reputation is also due in no small part to the fact that he was instrumental in the formation of some of the first ethnically and culturally oriented virtual communities for African-Americans, going back to the early days of dialup bulletin board systems, proprietary commercial networks, and other precursors to today's Internet.
He is currently the principal consultant with Virtual Identity, a not-for-profit consultancy he founded, and a member and co-founder of the emerging Media Justice Network, a national coalition of grassroots activists and policy advocates who are putting a race, gender, and class analysis at the center of the movement to create a truly democratic media landscape. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Online Policy Group, a research, policy, and advocacy organization focused on equality in and equal access to cyberspace; the National Advisory Board of the Community Technology Centers' Network (CTCnet), an international association of public-access computer and media technology training centers; and is a member of the New Media Working Group of Amnesty International, the world's premier human rights organization.
In 2000, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by Marketing Opportunities in Business and Entertainment (MOBE) for his pioneering work as an "Influencer & Innovator of the Internet and Technology." In 2001, he was named an international "New Media Hero" by the Independent Media Institute (AlterNet).
He is currently in the planning stage for a book and film project that will explore African and African-descendent people's relation to and engagement with technology from an historical, contemporary, and futuristic perspective.
While the scope and influence of his work is international, he physically resides in the Bay Area of California, in the United States of America.
QUOTE: W.E.B. Du Bois
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"The Souls of Black Folk"
A.C. McClurg & Company
1903

QUOTE: X-Clan
Abra Cadabra
Allah Baby Professor
All hail Funkin' Lesson
Sweet tongue, grand writer of scrolls
Now behold, let the legend unfold
Born in the Cosmos
Where no time and space do exist
Live in the midst of the chaos
Mortals labeled me as illogical, mythological.
They couldn't comprehend when I brought The Word
A stick called Verb, a Black steel nerve
Teachin' those actors and actresses
Who write a couple lines on what Black is
Really?
Then they labeled me a sin
When a brother just speaks what's within
I guess I'm blacker than the shadow in the darkest alley
That they're always scared to go in
Boo!
X-Clan
"Funkin' Lesson"
To the East, Blackwards
4th & Broadway
1989

QUOTE: Ralph Ellison
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.
Ralph Ellison
"Invisible Man"
Random House
1952

QUOTE: Sun Ra
How do you know I'm real? I'm not real, I'm just like you. You don't exist -- in this society. If you did, your people wouldn't be seeking equal rights. You're not real. If you were, you'd have some status among the nations of the world. So we're both -- myths. I do not come to you as the reality, I come to you as the myth, because that's what Black people are -- myths. I came from a dream that the Black man dreamed long ago. I'm actually a present sent to you by your ancestors.
Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount (Sun Ra)
"Space Is The Place"
Rhapsody Films
1974

QUOTE: Nina Simone
As I became more knowledgeable I came to my own conclusions about separatism. In the white man's world the Black man would always lose out, so the idea of a separate black nation, whether it was in America or in Africa, made sense. But I didn't believe that there was any basic difference between the races -- whoever is on top uses whatever means they can to keep the other down, and if Black America was on top they'd use race as a way of oppressing whites in exactly the way they themselves were oppressed. Anyone who has power only has it at the expense of someone else, and to take that power away from them you have to use force, because they'll never give it up from choice. That is what I came to believe, and it was a big step forward in my political thinking because I realised that what we were really fighting for was the creation of a new society. When I had started out in the movement all I wanted were my rights under the constitution, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that no matter what the president or the supreme court might say, the only way we could get true equality was if America changed completely, top to bottom. And this change had to start with my own people, with Black revolution.
Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone)
"I Put A Spell On You:
The Autobiography of Nina Simone"
Pantheon Books
1992

QUOTE: James Baldwin
Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand -- or sleight-of-hand -- by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary -- without the faintest notion of what it really means -- the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.
James Baldwin
"Sermons and Blues"
New York Times Book Review
March 29, 1959

QUOTE: Arthur Jafa
The very proposition of an authentic Black cinema, a cinema as rich in its power and alienation as Black music, instills dread and anticipation in the hearts of those who want to consign Black creativity to the realm of 'freak n!@@&r shit,' as if it were no more the result of profound intellectual activity than the clotting of blood.
Arthur Jafa
"La Venus Negra"
Artforum
January 1992