Welcome to Poverty's Demise .Org

The realization of my dream to work with computers in China, ultimately came in the form of my own Internet start-up company called "Wild Styles Productions" (meant to be a dedication to the Wild Wild 100's in Chicago).

To the general public Wild Styles Productions(WSP) appeared to be a hip hop themed event management company, but behind the scenes WSP was broadband video-on-demand content company.

I used Beijing nightclubs to produce live events, digitally recorded the content of the events, and then made the video highlights available on the web.

As the head of WSP, I established the first full time Hip Hop nightclub in China, called VICS and below are some highlights of my adventures in China.

October 29, 2002

StartMeUp: Hip Hop Evangelism

Local promotion company WildStyles looks to develop Beijing’s hip hop talent

Company at a glance: WildStyles promotes hip hop events in Beijing
Manager: Darryl Penrice
Contact info: darryl@wildstylesproductions.com, www.wildstylesproductions.com

that’s: What’s the mission of Wild Styles?
Darryl: Wild Styles is dedicated to bringing quality hip hop to China. There are lots of cats in Beijing who claim to be the best MC, DJ or dancer, and over the next four months, we aim to make them prove it. I’ve been personally mentoring up-and-coming DJs and MCs to raise their skill levels.

Club House: Funk Soul Brothers

Back to the Hiphop Source

Once upon a time, hiphop migrated over the Pacific Ocean, settled into Beijing, and spawned a new club movement based on a deep love of smooth beats and flowing rhymes. Thousands of Chinese youths began to listen to this new form of music and were inspired, giving rise to veritable army of home-grown MCs and DJs. Hiphop became a national art form, supplanting traditional Peking Opera as the music of the common man.

Actually, 'once upon a time' was three years ago, and we're still a long way from a hiphop utopia. But the movement has begun, and Darryl Penrice, one of the first party organisers to get MCs on the programme, is doing his best to fan the flames. The early success of Vogue as a hiphop location was due to Penrice, with the help of DJs Wesley, Ranks and Morgan, and even Vics' raging popularity can be traced back to Penrice's 'Hiphop Invasion' party, which featured the all-female dance team Fetysh.

Community Feature: Grass Roots

China’s First African-American Community Group Gets Off the Ground

There are less than 50 African-Americans residing in Beijing. For all of the capital’s claims to internationality – there are upwards of 100,000 foreigners living here – this is a shocking statistic. There are probably more Quakers. These 50 run the gamut of potential expat occupations, including students, businessmen, diplomats and ‘foreign experts,’ but until now there has been no cohesive means for these people to meet, share their experiences and resources, and address the problems and issues specific to Black Americans living in China.

Ebony In Asia (EIA) was formed precisely for this purpose. Founders Darryl Penrice and Fred Sharp saw the gaping need, and EIA took shape on December 20th of last year. The group has three main purposes: to provide a means of networking among African-Americans living in Beijing, to provide resources for scholars and businessmen outside of China who want to know more about the Chinese environment and to introduce African-American history and culture to curious Chinese. Penrice notes that there has been a marked increase of African Americans living in or travelling to China (when he first came in 1996, there were five), and that along with this “there has been an astronomical increase in the local Chinese community’s interest in African-American cultural products such as jazz, the blues, hiphop, and R&B.” He goes on to mention that perceptions of African-Americans among the Chinese are mostly based on what they see in movies or hear in hip hop music, and this has led to some pretty skewed ideas. Part of EIA’s mission will be to give locals a more balanced view of Black Americans, mostly through music events or educational lectures.

First, if you honestly don't know why this commercial is interculturally offensive, please do not volunteer. Next, I include this video to really highlight racial hegemony that exist in America that is spreading around the world via major media outlets.

Minority populations of the world if you want physically healthy and mentally strong children, turn off major media. This commercial and many more like it that exist in our media sphere promote "White Skin" as a standard for excellence. Exposing children to this type of racial propaganda only creates issues of low self-esteem for them... see what happened to Michael Jackson?

For those you with white skin, no one is attacking you, but there are some among you that beleive assimilation should be the end all goal for minorities... which is the biggest waste of time and energy I have ever seen. Its called a mirror folks, works by the same laws of physics all over the world.

Another problem is that ideas and innovations that have changed the world have come fromm all the races of the world and if we allow only one race to be the voice of intellectualism and advancement... we all loose.

Finally commercials like the one above create scenarios such as this:

The block that I lived on in Chicago was between the Gangsta Disciple and Vicelord gang turfs... And the GD's decided to make everyone on my block join or eliminate us. As part of this plan there were the occassional "sweeps." On one of these occasions, I had been given a revolver to hold by friend not even realizing that a sweep had begun.

I heard footsteps alongside one of my neighbor's house, not knowing who was coming, I went up onto another porch to find a hiding spot. I heard the footsteps get louder and my heart began to race and I am ducked down hidden from site on this porch.

My blood flowed, my instinct kicked in, and here I am... 13 years old, gun in my hand, unseen by two GD's that were hunting me to begin with. They stopped in front of the porch that I was crouched behind and even discussed how they were going bust on anyone us that they found, all the while not knowing that I was less than 4 feet away.

My brain, said "shoot!" They would shoot me if they found me, I knew that. They would shoot one of my friends if they found one, I knew that. Then without any fanfare, no voice of God, no spiritual vision... I simply decided that I am not a killer.

I haven't carried a weapon since that day.

I'm not some super-hero, had I never left Chicago... in time I probably would have changed my mind because thugs aren't born, they're made.

Despite the ill-intent of others over the years to harm my mother's son, I've never turned back to the way of sword and I can honestly say that I will never return to the way of the sword, in any scenario.

Not for any spiritual or altruistic reason other than I've seen enough death to know the value of life.

Violence is the refuge of a weak mind.

Though I am agnostic, I was always raised under the notion that "Evil wins when good men do nothing" and unfortunately this saying has proven itself true more than once in my life.

The racial stratification of our nation has created quite the unforeseeable situation of me walking around New York City with a way to feed millions of Americans and having very very few people in power take action. When I designed PDO, I never once imagined that my race would be enough to hold back a paradigm shift in soical welfare.

I say that confidently because the the trained experts that have bothered to read the website and my PDO development files have agreed that PDO simply works. Though many philanthropy offices have somehow found every possible reason to disqualify me as an entrepreneur, the fact remains that after 17 months, not one person or organization has disproven PDO's ability to fight poverty on the scale of millons of people. In fact, in the past 17 months, I have managed to build quite the collection of recommendations and endorsements.

Some will point to my ongoing disagreement The Earth Institute as a hendrence, but simply put, if there is one thing I learned from Martin Luther King, Jr. is never to allow myself to be treated as a second class citizen, so if that means taking the longer route at times filled with more risk, rather than keeping my head down and accepting a life of being a second class citizen so be it. This is an instance where the principle and the lessons taught through conflict will eventually benefit all.

Culturally aware African Americans grow up knowing that you can't fight all issues of discrimination, nor is every little instance worth fighting because even nice people say stupid things, so we pick and choose our fights very carefully.

Fancy name or not, the way The Earth Institute has behaved was / is disgusting and this is a disagreement worth seeking resolution to, if for no other reason than it will make them seriously consider the way by which interact with minorities.

Minority intellectuals at home and abroad, won't have a degree in poverty from Harvard but will communicate the views and experiences of their societies' and for people working in philanthropic positions being able to understand and interpret their communications is essential to accomplishing the philanthropic mission.

I won't waste my time going into the details of my adventures in the philanthropy world, but it really does disturb me when I hear folks declare that there is no more racism, worst yet... non-minorities who readily explain to me and other minorities what constitutes "discrimination" and what doesn't because watching television somehow negates real-world statistcial facts and life experiences of those being discriminated against.

Anyway sooner or later folks will take the blinders off and PDO will be developed. I have included this section because the only way things get better is if we first acknowledge the problem.

Evil wins when good men do nothing...

At my last high school Northfield Mount Hermon, the #5 boarding school in the U.S., and the place where I first began to study Mandarin Chinese the student body walked around calling themselves the "future leaders of tomorrow." And while, many studnets in many schools utter these reassuring words, those words struck fear into my heart.

What scared me was the fact that they were right. My classmates were the sons and daughters of politicians, businessmen, entertainers, etc and I knew from their level of generational wealth that they would indeed grow to lead our nation one day.

The scary aspect of their rise to power for me, was/is that most of them lacked any comprehension of how minority neighborhoods worked, but would one day find themselves presiding over legislation that would affect millions of minorities.

It just seemed a waste not to relate my own experience as much I could, with the hopes of enlightening at least one of my classmates that might be in that position of power one day, so with the help of the other African Americans at the school we set-up the first observance of the MLK Day holiday at the school and I gave my first public speech at the age of 17.

I gave a workshop called,"Gangs in the '90's" where I related my experiences growing up on Chicago's Southside. The first year that I did the workshop I did it traditional lecture style, with me talking for 2 hours. Everyone appluaded, then went right back to their lives as if they had just finished watching a movie.

So the following year, I decided to do it all "question & answer" which is the style that I still use today when I give public speeches. I chose to stick with this style because I found that if I or anyone else creates an environment where people can ask honest questions about race without the fear of being attacked or labelled, then that is how you reach them.

I have given speeches on race, gangs, and American society at Northfield Mount Hermon and The University of Michigan at the request of educators and professors that just took the time to know me and realize that my talent and my life experience can be a helpful teaching tool.

For everyone wondering "who is Darryl Penrice?" you should know the following things:

My father and I share the same name, but my father suffers from chemical dependence and has an arrest record. (There is also another "Darryl Penrice" residing in Texas that I know nothing about.)

I have never been arrested or charged with a crime.

In October 2006, I purchased a copy of my own and my father's background report from Intelius.com, the premier background checking services for the general consumer market.The background report that Intelius.com generated for me contained several errors and confuses me with my father. For example, the link below will show you that they believe a 60 year old man resided in my freshman dormitory at The Univ. of Michigan - Ann Arbor.

http://www.povertysdemie.org/mistakenidentity.html

Intelius's legal waivers protects it from being responsible for inaccurate reports, so you will notice they were unsuccessful in my finding my father's crimnal record.

My next question was "how many other companies are misreporting my background info?"

CLICK HERE to see a series of screenshots that I took from background checking services that cater to the general public. (The large data brokers only do business to business corporate sales of the background databases and are unregulated by the government, which means potentially 3 million Americans might unknowingly have inaccurate criminal backgrounds because of the collecting and reporting of inaccurate information.)

To learn more about the problem of Identity Theft please visit Privacy.org a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting victims and ensuring consumer privacy rights, just CLICK HERE.

October 29, 2002

StartMeUp: Hip Hop Evangelism

January 25, 2004

Club House: Funk Soul Brothers

February 28, 2004

Community Feature: Grass Roots