http://www.rhapsody.com/sweet-honey-in-the-rock/live-at-carnegie-hall/are-my-hands-clean
Are My Hands Clean? Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Songtalk Publishing Co. 1985 Performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock from the album
Live at Carnegie Hall (1988)
I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world 35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America In the cotton fields of El Salvador In a province soaked in blood, Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun Pulling cotton for two dollars a day.
Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time In South Carolina At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of Dupont Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela Where oil riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world, Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas To the factories of Dupont On the way to the Burlington mills In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric for Sears Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea Headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free— Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications For three dollars a day My sisters make my blouse It leaves the third world for the last time Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse On sale for 20% discount Are my hands clean?
“ You bring the bomb which John Coltrane ws trying to put into black music beyond European diatonic conventions, models & all that. You didn’t adjust it, but you show the world that your origins are still beautiful, still acceptable, & still useful for your music. You bring followers of Coltrane, free jazz people, & the bebop police, together [in ur singing].
—
From Interview/Rehearsal 13 Jul 2009 with Abdoulaye Alhassane Touré at his apartment in Harlem USA above St. Nick’s Pub.
We are performing new arrangements of my music setting them to traditional African textures. Gig is 20 Jul 2009 at Cornelia Street Café NYC.
The transatlantic slave trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as transported commodities, and is usually considered the most defining element in the construction of the African Diaspora, but it is centuries of additional movements that have given shape to the nation we know today.
In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds…[O]nly the transatlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trades were coerced, the eleven other [migrations] were voluntary movements of resourceful and creative men and women, risk-takers in an exploitative and hostile environment.
Good journalism requires opening up topics not ending them. I followed the #Thatsafriccan Trending Topic for over 2 hours Sun 21 Jun 2009. 15 hours ago David Weiner wrote: RT@daweiner “my hastily put together piece” titled “When Twitter Went Racist?” on #thatsafrican: http://bit.ly/EYUDM…{click header for more] 
Read my response to the Huffington Post piece here. [The] trending topic was censored from the Topics list at 9:35pm due to racist complaints.
