Black Nouveau

(gentle music) (rhythmic music) - Hello everyone, and welcome to the September edition of "Black Nouveau."

I'm Earl Arms.

We have numerous events going on to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip hop.

One of them is the premiere of "Parental Advisory: A Breakbeat Play" by Idris Goodwin.

It premieres this month at the Milwaukee Rep. Our Alexandria Mack will introduce you to Chef Zakiya Courtney, owner of Vegan Soul, which puts a healthy spin on soul food samples.

However, this has not been a good year in Milwaukee for curbing youth violence.

There's a 17% increase in homicides in the city involving kids.

James Causey talks with staff from the Office of Violence Prevention about what's going on and what plans they have for addressing these issues.

But first, we begin with a reprise from the "Black Nouveau" vault.

10 years ago, a young Hannah White shared her talent with us, and now she has an international following.

(bright classical music) - [Liddie] Meet Wisconsin native Hannah White.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hannah White has played the violin since she was six years old, and is at a level where she now attends an academy in Illinois for gifted pre-college musicians.

Hannah enjoys the violin most when she performs and competes.

- I like the violin, but it could be a little humbling because you could be out of tune and make mistakes.

Its very hard to play it, but it pays off in the end.

- What's your favorite song or songs to play?

- I actually like every song I play, but my favorite composers are Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Sibelius and Khachaturian.

- Who accompanies you when you play?

- Oh, when I'm in Illinois, I use Mrs. Milana.

Otherwise, I use my brothers, Jonah White and Joshua White.

(intense piano music) (intense violin music) (intense music continues) (bright classical music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (rhythmic music) (lively music) - Knowing where it is that our food has come from, it is just the best thing in the world.

I am known as Chef Mama Zakiya.

My regular name is Zakiya Courtney.

I got some other names too, but it doesn't matter.

Those are the most important ones.

(lively music) I am the chef owner of Vegan Soul.

It is a business that specializes in vegan food, just as the name, and soul food, as the title says.

Well, I have a large family.

I'm the mother of six.

Together we have a blended extended family of about 15.

I got 52 grandchildren.

So, cooking was always something that I did.

But I think about it, I mean, we had pork chops, we had chitlins during the holidays.

We weren't impoverished, so we had access to all of those things.

But at the same time, we did not eat a lot of whole fresh, a lot of fresh food.

We didn't have at home, we didn't eat a lot of salad.

I don't ever remember hardly eating salads.

But 31 years ago, my husband and I made the decision to become plant-based and we primarily did it for health reasons.

My husband had been diagnosed as pre-diabetes and borderline hypertension.

And the doctor told him that he could either change his diet or go on medication.

So we decided to change our diet.

(rhythmic music) But my goal was to make whatever family favorites that they had, that they were accustomed to, when I became plant-based to make them equally or if not better.

(rhythmic music) My most favorite green to grow, as well as to cook are collards, all right?

Yeah, that definitely comes from the South.

But there's so many things that you can do with collards from eating them raw to putting it in salads and just making good old Southern greens.

One of my customer favorites is what we call black and white greens.

And that was passed on to me by my aunt who is now an ancestor.

And black and white greens is just simply collards and cabbage, and it is just so, so delicious.

I can make my greens taste good without any meat products whatsoever, and I would put it up against anybody who got a big old ham hock in theirs and for the flavor and the taste.

But when I talk to people about vegan, some people have had vegan food experiences or plant-based food experiences that were not good.

Food wasn't seasoned well, it was bland, it tastes like cardboard or whatever.

And I take great pride in being able to recreate whatever your favorite dish is.

(rhythmic food) Today is that there are so many options, so many more options available than there were 31 years ago.

And so what I say to people who have never had, and everybody's had plant-based food.

If you've had any vegetables, you've had plant-based food.

Well, when it comes down to the expense, it's like you pay now, you pay later.

You pay now in terms of getting good food for you or your family, or you pay later in prescription drugs and other things, because we didn't take care of ourselves the way that we could have if we had known.

A lot of things that we did, we just didn't know.

The biggest comparison I have is this, with my brothers and sisters, there were eight of us, okay?

Four of us had the same mother and father and I only say that for the purposes of genes.

And my family with those four in particular, us four in particular, everybody wound up on a hypertension medication in their 30s except me.

(rhythmic music) We grew up in same household, same set of parents, same kind of food experiences, except that when I became an adult then I changed my diet.

Have I had some health challenges?

I have had some health challenges, but any health challenges I've had didn't come to like my late 60s.

I'm 70 now, okay.

And I'm feeling pretty good.

(rhythmic music) I want people to know that they can, that they don't have to be dependent on these stores.

You don't have to be dependent on processed food or take out food.

You don't have to think that everything takes forever to make.

You can make a vegan meal in 30 minutes.

Soil quality, water, all of those issues still continue to exist in our world.

But we have to learn how to be self-sustaining.

We have to know that if something happened today, if we got locked in this garden right now and couldn't go anywhere else, one of the things that we would not do is starve.

(rhythmic music) - Last August, Ashanti Hamilton was chosen to lead Milwaukee's Office of Violence Prevention after the mayor's office fired director Arnita Holliman.

So far in 2023, data shows a 17% increase in all homicides in the city involving kids, and 14% of the homicide suspects were kids.

Milwaukee leaders are demanding action.

Hamilton and Quinn Taylor, a violence interrupter with OVP joins us now to discuss what's causing youth violence spikes.

Men, thanks for joining us.

- Thanks for having us.

- So Ashanti, what's behind the spike in youth violence that we're seeing?

- Yeah, I don't think there are any easy answers to this.

What we are seeing is some national trends that are trending that way across the nation.

We know that we're still reeling from some of the effects of the COVID pandemic and we're also seeing an increase in the development and participation in what's been come to be called as youth pain-based groups.

A lot of turmoil happened in between a lot of these young cliques that seemed to have created a bond around some kind of tragic event or some common experience.

And the use of social media in egging on many of these conflicts has proven to be a very strong igniter of these conflicts in the city.

- So, is this violence gang related?

- So, in the traditional sense of gangs, these are young people who have decided to associate with each other, and a lot of times they have names that they're calling their group.

Not the same as traditional gangs when it comes to a hierarchy and a common set of rules.

It's more about relationships and support that they kind of create these bonds.

- Quinn, what are you seeing as a violence interrupter?

- What I'm seeing is a lot of youth just looking for a outlet, looking for a way to release energy.

We have a name that we all know of now is the Kia Boyz.

We have a lot of good youth that's associated with the Kia Boyz.

I just wanted to be known that the term Kia Boyz is just a conduit.

And a lot of the youth almost is forced to be a part of the Kia Boyz and a lot of these youth organizations, there's a murder that will happen and then they form a bond through that and cliques are formed.

- So, talk about how you interact with people as a violence interrupter.

Take me through what that looks like.

- Well, for me it's connecting the community to resources.

A lot of our community organizations that's designed to help individuals navigate through some of the things that they're dealing with in life, my job is to connect them to those resources, to help them to navigate through that process and try to do it in a way of not violating their sense of wellbeing.

There's a lot of trust that our community has lost over time and what my focus is to rebuild that trust.

- But how do you do that?

So do you go into the community, you talk to the families that were hurt by crime?

Do you also talk to the people who committed the crimes?

- Yes, some of both.

One thing that I have to my disposal is our MKE Promise Keepers.

So I oversee 13 teams of Promise Keepers, credible messengers that have lived experiences, that knows how to navigate through these systems.

So, we do a lot of community outreach, a lot of engagements, and use the different resources that we have to connect them to the resources that's needed.

- Ashanti, it's been a year now.

What are you seeing?

Have you filled out your team of people at OVP yet, or are you short?

- Yeah, so we're still operating with less than half of the staff that the office is designed to have.

So, most of this year we've been operating with just a third of that staff.

- [James] What's a third?

How many people do you have?

- So that would've been three people in an administrative staff.

So, it's been about four people.

We're currently at seven and we're interviewing now for two manager positions and three coordinator positions.

That'll be the most that the office has been staffed up in two years.

And so, I think it'll be good because it's a infrastructure that we needed to build.

I went through a reorganizing of the office to really focus in on a lot of the preventative work.

You mentioned the violence interrupters.

A lot of people know of the Office of Violence Prevention because of that particular work.

There are other folks that's doing violence interruption work, too.

Quinn mentioned the credible messengers.

You know, we have some of those that are really being led through the county that's doing case management with some of the most high risk violent offenders in the city.

So, that's happening over at the county.

That's working in conjunction with the team that we have over at MCW, which is 414Life, which is doing some of the most intense violence interruption, building relationships with a lot of the pain-based groups.

Many of them have already had relationships with them.

So, when you have an incident that happens in the city, they can actually speak to both sides to try to mitigate some of those situations.

And then the team that Quinn is leading, which is really trying to do a lot of that primary prevention work organizing communities, getting, addressing some of the environmental effects in the city and neighborhoods.

So, there's different ways of being able to do that.

You need a staff that's able to carry out all of that work because we're building relationships with many community-based organizations in the city.

And that level of coordination to address these major issues, it takes staff to do it.

- And you guys conducted a interview, not a press conference in July, and I noticed it was, you.

You were there, the mayor was there, Denita Ball, the sheriff, and also the police chief.

And I constantly heard people, the group criticizing parents saying the parents need to do more.

What do you want parents to do?

- Yeah.

And I would frame it more as a invitation to parents.

There's a level of activity that I feel like only people in that young person's life that they already look up to can have an influence over.

And one of the things that we've been working on through the course of the year is an effort called Rebuilding the Village.

How do we reestablish the type of relationships in our community where there's a sense of both responsibility collectively for the young people that exist here.

And Quinn mentioned building trust.

One of the things that's been a common theme when we're addressing young people in the city is the belief that nobody caress about them.

And this demonstrated by how our institutions and how the community in general is serving them and giving them the types of things that they need in order to be successful.

We have to fix that relationship.

And we can't just do it in isolation with youth.

We have to work with the families that they belong to, as well.

- Well, we're gonna continue this conversation for sure, but I thank you for the work that you do and we'll have you back.

- Yeah, thanks you, thank you.

(rhythmic music) - We say live, you say life.

Live.

- Life!

- Live.

- Life!

- When we say do it, you say all night.

- [Everett] Amir Abdullah and Marvin Quijada are rehearsing their roles for "Parental Advisory" which will have its world premier at the Milwaukee Rep later this month.

The two-character musical will challenge audience members with important questions about parenthood, censorship and at what age is it appropriate to introduce your children to the Wu-Tang Clan?

- I want them to think about censorship and I want them to think about what type of art gets censored and who gets censored, 'cause I think those are some of the questions that the play itself asks, which I think is very thought-provoking and something that I hadn't really thought about until honestly, this show.

Like, it'd been in the back burner, but never in the forefront, and now it's in the forefront, in which case then I'm just like, ooh, this is a fascinating conversation.

Like, who does get the parental advisory label?

- One of the central arguments in this production is the way that explicit lyrics have been brought to the dinner table in a lot of ways, to the school yard in a lot of ways, not just in a lyrical sense, but making the argument that people speak in various ways all of the time.

Children are exposed to various things all of the time.

At what point, when is the right time to introduce these languages, or at least have a conversation around what the power of these words are?

What is the correct time to have that?

- [Everett] Written by Idris Goodwin and directed by Kyle Haden, the production is a celebration of hip hop, humor and fatherhood.

- Hip hop is celebrating its like 50 year anniversary.

I think hip hop, however, is a branch on the tree of art of the diaspora, of the African diaspora, particularly here in the Americas, right?

Which means that it has a lot of weight to carry, which is that it is entertainment, it is engaging, it is catharsis, but it is also the Wikipedia of the people.

It is where the stories and the histories live.

I think more than any other kinds of music, hip hop is by its very design, subversive.

Its origins were not on the piano.

It's origins were with a DJ who was not using the turntable as it was intended to be used, right?

More or less, hip hop is about self-expression and it's about this belief that any individual may put on a cape and be a superhero if he or she or they make that decision.

And no one, no music teacher, no instructor, no Juilliard's or whatever is gonna tell them otherwise.

If you look at where our Dr. Dres come from and where our Eminems come from, I mean, it's not a shocker that a lot of our icons come from so-called humble beginnings, right?

- I think part of the problem with theater in general has been that there's this not only a perception, but a reality in some instances that it is for people that don't look like me, that it's for people with a lot of money.

It's for white people.

And I think it should be for everybody.

And I think Idris and I are really passionate about, hey, how can we broaden the tent?

How can we make these stories accessible to as many people as possible?

And part of that is going out and reaching people, but part of that is about the stories that we tell.

And for us, this is a story that we're telling that's for everybody, right?

Hip hop should be for everybody.

So, by telling the story, by writing the story, by directing the story, we're trying to tell a story with broad reach.

That's part one.

Part two now is about us going out and getting people to come to see it.

So we can't, he can't write the show.

I can't direct the show and then sit back and expect the theater to just make it all happen.

So for me, I'm really looking forward to like getting out and meeting people in Milwaukee, kind of going into these community centers, going into the schools.

I've told the theater that I'm really excited and looking forward to meeting people.

So we're excited to do that.

And to their credit, they've really stepped up and have a whole list of things that they're excited and engaged to do.

So we're looking forward to being part of that.

- [Everett] The Rep has a very ambitious outreach plan for "Parental Advisory".

The music will begin September 26th at the Milwaukee Rep. - And that's our program for this month.

Remember to follow us on our social media platforms and let us know when you've got a story for us.

On behalf of the "Black Nouveau" team, have a good evening.

(rhythmic music)