I Am JANE ROE
ft. Aima The Dreamer, RyanNicole & Coco Peila
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prod. by Shy'an G
Coco Celebrated Earth Day
This Earth Day, Bay Area bred Hip Hop & alt-R&B flex, Rap god.dess MC, and cultural organizer Coco Peila celebrates the launch of her organization BlackGold Movement – and its new Hip Hop and Climate Justice Initiative, Whose World?
Coco Peila is a bicoastal MC, vocalist, songwriter, producer, and cultural organizer within Hip Hop and beyond. She's shared stages with artists and leaders like Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, Ledisi, and President Obama. Coco has worked in the artistic activism and anti-oppression facilitation world for over fifteen years alongside sharpening her musical craft, including serving as Director of Hip Hop & Climate Justice at Oakland-based youth-driven Climate Justice organization Youth vs. Apocalypse, and most recently being selected to participate in Women’s Earth Alliance’s 2021 U.S. Grassroots Accelerator For Women Environmental Leaders.
Peila is thrilled to launch her organization BlackGold Movement (BGM) with the powerful mission to “reverse the flow of resources from the West back to Africa along the transatlantic slave trade routes through Hip Hop, storytelling, & music of the African diaspora.” BGM is fiscally sponsored by San Francisco’s historic Intersection for the Arts.
Peila’s vision for BGM is multifold, but focuses on five key areas: Black Liberation (most recently seen in the Pretty Heist, an audio-visual initiative centered around Balck Women & Girls liberation), Hip Hop, Artist Liberation, Climate Justice, and Solidarity Building.
Vision
Her vision gained momentum after joining forces with Women’s Earth Alliance, a cutting-edge global organization on a mission to protect our environment, end the climate crisis, and ensure a just, thriving world by empowering women’s leadership, and Creative Wildfire, an innovative collaborative call to collective action from frontline communities, represented by the trifecta of Climate Justice Alliance, Movement Generation, and New Economy Coalition.
As the Creative Wildfire manifesto states, “We have histories of advancing bold, visionary solutions that nourish regenerative solidarity economies. We carefully and lovingly hold the threads of these histories in our present work as we repair relations and remember our way forward. It is time to assert OUR solutions. Creative solutions that ensure ecological, economic, and racial justice.”
BlackGold Movement’s Whose World? Initiative begins April 22nd, 2022 with a Hip Hop & Climate Justice interview series and her new single “Whose World? (Red Black and Green New Deal)” being featured on Spotify’s Earth Day playlist curated by Creative Wildfire’s very own Climate Justice Alliance. Coco will also be spotlighted on Spotify’s main page as a musician dedicated to climate justice and social change.
The Initiative will continue with the launch of Peila’s bicoastal Hip Hop and Climate Justice “Whose World? (The New Normal)” music project release and corresponding “Whose World? Cypher Series” filmed in Oakland and New York City that she produced during her participation in the Creative Wildfire project.
“It was important to me as someone who lives between NYC and Oakland to spark a conversation through Hip Hip articulated from the perspective of those of us on the front line, and highlighting the demands that reflect our lived experiences and the intersectional impacts of the climate emergency on us” Peila shares.
“The goal is to help change popular opinion, spread information, and awareness, and support our folks, through this cultural movement and organizing tool of Hip Hop, to connect the dots and engage with the climate movement -- all these issues we’ve been talking about for generations in our art, in movement circles, and in everyday conversation are directly connected to climate justice and the climate emergency.”
Stay tuned with Coco Peila and BlackGold Movement and their forthcoming releases by following @CocoPeila and @BlackGoldMovement on Instagram and Listen to the New Single Here: https://tinyurl.com/whoseworldrbgnd
"I Am Jane Roe"
BlackGold Movement launchef their newest initiative #IAmJaneRoe, a Hip Hop and Reproductive Justice audiovisual campaign and accompanying Social Media Challenge in June 2022. The initiative was designed to raise awareness and activate frontline communities and key stakeholders around abortion access, reproductive justice, and the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade. The initiative has been funded through the Urgent Action Fund for Women's Human Rights (UAF).
#IAmJaneRoe is designed to activate musicians, influencers, and their communities in an online challenge to explore reproductive justice through Hip Hop, storytelling, and music of the African diaspora. The campaign consists of a single release entitled “#IAmJaneRoe” and a Social Media Challenge with an open call for musicians and influencers to, write, perform, and post a verse about the issue to a provided instrumental, and pass on the challenge for other creators to participate.
The “#IAmJaneRoe” song features emcees Coco Peila and GRAMMY®-nominated multihyphenate RyanNicole, multidisciplinary artist Aïma the Dreamer who has worked for over 20 yrs locally and nationally to uplift the beauty and resilience of Oakland’s queer and trans* BIPOC community, a partnership with award-winning author, and UC Berkeley professor Aya de León, and beat production by Shy’an G .
The title of the campaign was inspired by Jane Roe an alias given to Norma McCorvey, née Norma Lea Nelson, an American activist who was the original plaintiff (anonymized as Jane Roe for her protection and privacy) in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade (1973), which made abortion legal throughout the United States, stating that during the first trimester of pregnancy a pregnant woman did have the right to have an abortion “free of interference by the State.”
As UAF states, “the United States Supreme Court is set to make a decision that has the potential to overturn Roe v. Wade. Beyond the threat to abortion rights, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has serious implications and potential consequences for other feminist causes, including birth control, gay marriage, transgender rights, and the safety and security of LGBTQ and feminist activists.”
The recent statement UAF released inspired BGM to think about the implications and potential consequences overturning Roe v. Wade would have on Black women in the United States.
“In the Black community, many of us use the famous James Baldwin quote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” as a North Star to help us remember that it is always the right time to interrupt oppression regardless of whether or not it’s being targeted at Black people. But for too long the oppression of women, sexism, and “Women’s Issues” have been viewed as separate, insignificant, and even non-existent social justice and human rights issues. Black women and Black feminists have been doing this work, examining the intersection of sexism and anti-black racism while liberating ourselves for hundreds of years now.
Without acknowledging and prioritizing the existence of the oppression of women, and Black women in particular, and the ways it impacts and limits our lives and autonomy we (Black people) can't accurately assess how anti-black racism functions and impacts all of us, or paint the full picture of what our liberation looks like. We can no longer afford to treat sexism as a secondary issue to be addressed after we bring about other types of social change. I think SCOTUS overturning Roe vs. Wade has shown us that.
There is enough space in this movement for everyone’s identities and the intersections at which those identities meet to be seen, heard, and valued. Whether you are Black, Brown, Indigenous, White, differently abled, feminist, female, woman, femme, butch, gay, queer, trans, straight, male...I stand in solidarity with you, and with every human and their humanity. I stand against all oppression and oppressive behaviors because they are impacting, limiting, and ending people’s lives. We’re all being targeted by systems of oppression and have more in common than not. I believe part of our work now more than ever is to learn how to stand with one another, stand up for each other, and not get tricked or distracted into attacking and dominating each other.
Those whose agendas attack and threaten our: lives, communities, and liberation, understand this vulnerability and continue to have no problem exploiting it, especially within powerful movements and movement-building communities. It’s not a coincidence that within our movements, those who are natural allies get pitted against each other. ‘Divide and conquer' is a strategy that has been used in war and oppressive societies throughout history.
We can’t let that go over our heads, particularly when we're addressing women's liberation and reproductive justice for all in the Black Community."
- Coco Peila, June 2022
Black Feminism
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Roe Vs. Wade
My New Channel
My New Channel