What new models of entrepreneurship are Black males creating?
Posted by bmb2025wealth on May 19, 2008
From the side-hustle that makes your corporate 9-to-5 just-bearable to the spirit of innovation that comes with being a Black man in America, many Black men may be unemployed but few are without the knack for “doing whatever it takes to make ends meet” And some are haivng fun while doing it. Like Jesus El, a young man from Oakland, CA, who has elevated the art of acrobatic slam dunks to an art form. Watch him change the game at www.2025bmb.org
Do you have a story of Black entrepreneurship that you think deserves a wider audience? Do you have wisdom to share? Share it with us here! The most compelling submissions and dialogues will be featured on the main BMB website.
Lama Choyin Rangdrol said
There is an international movement to reconnect the Black male experience in America with the continuum of Africans in early. Festival Canceled due to heavy rain promises to be the tipping point of awareness. Take a look at the trailer on my site and let me know your thoughts.
Press Release:
Buddhism and descendants of slaves in America have lived side by side since the importation of Asians as a replacement for slave labor following the Emancipation Proclamation.
From then until now, African Americans have lived, fought, married, bore children, and died with their Asian Buddhist neighbors including times of war in defense of our civil and religious freedoms. Yet, even today the Black American who adopts Buddhist philosophy, culture, family life, and religion risks being accused of “straying” away from his or her community at the very least, and at times is considered by some to be a “race traitor” condemned to eternal damnation for exercising freedom of religious choice outside the historical Christian civil rights legacy.
This film, “Festival Canceled Due to Heavy Rain,” forever corrects the misunderstanding about global black history, Buddhism, the African American experience. A misunderstanding that has gone on far too long as an extension of black America’s injury from slavery. Descendants of Africa and the Buddhist faith in Asia have an ancient relationship that predates the founding of America by a thousand years.
Rangdrol discusses the experience and shares never before seen footage of Buddha statues carved in the style of Egypt’s pharaohs and the Sphinx (nose still attached) once hidden deep in the jungle of Cambodia. Amazing to witness!
The documented event is an inspiration for anyone who longs to reconnect with an ancestral tradition on behalf of one’s self-image, confidence, and sanity. This is especially true for Black men and women. Lama Choyin Rangdrol, the only African American Buddhist teacher recognized by the First Conference of Tibetan Buddhist Centers in North and South America, born and baptized Episcopal, a career mental health professional, holder of a degree in Music, certificate of study from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London), and author of three books on the black Buddhist experience sensitively shares his personal story of escape and redemption from 1960’s urban turmoil including 17 years of living in a Los Angeles Crips neighborhood (Sintown). It is both a coming home story for an African American Buddhist Lama as well as a coming of age story about truth and human history.
Rangdrol recounts the story of his mother’s saving grace to send him, as a young teenager, to Japan in 1971 where he encounters Buddhist peace for the first time amid the quaint streets and temples of Kyoto, Osaka, and Mt. Fuji.
Thirty-Five years later, including two years of living at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center and 10 years of study with the abbot of the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, Rangdrol emerges as a respected Buddhist practitioner who’s teachings have been studied by students at 450 colleges and universities in over 100 countries.
His website, Rainbowdharma.com (1.7 million hits to date), is a welcoming resource for all seekers of new understandings and this documentary is the quintessence of his offering to humanity. Recognized and appreciated by his friends in the slums of India, crime centers in urban America, and Ivy League observers, Lama Rangdrol is a unique voice of mutuality and compassion in our challenged world.
“Rangdrol’s Rainbowdharma was created to be a tool of intentional inclusion in American Buddhism.” (Pluralism Project at Harvard University, August 2006). .
The power and influence of this film is inescapable. No human being of moral and ethical conscience will walk away unmoved after seeing this personal narrative unfold.
Trailer and Soundtrack:
http://www.myspace.com/lamachoyinrangdrol
Contact:
rainbowdharma@aol.com
BMBStaff said
Leave a comment! Let us know what you think. The Change starts with you.