I still tear up every time I watch this video. But even then, we knew that it was not enough. Far from it.
Is "Black Leadership" Enough? Not For These Young Adults
by Chitown Kev
Like many other people, I cried when it was announced that my United States Senator, Barack Hussein Obama, was projected to become the 44th President of the United States of America.
Still, I did not fully "get" the symbolic power of that moment, of that event until early in 2009.
At the time, I was working for an educator who is also a longtime acquaintance of the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama. I was in a school auditorium with mostly black and Latino high school students. One of the students had done a short film life about...teenage life, in general, I suppose. For a moment, the Shepherd Fairey "Hope" illustration of President Obama appeared on the screen.
The kids cheered and jumped up and down and whooped it up as if it were the old Chicago Stadium and Michael Jeffrey Jordan had just hit a buzzer-beater.
Mind you, I doubt that any of the kids were even eligible to vote. Nevertheless, I think fondly of that day in a school auditorium and that moment it remains one of the most moving and powerful moments.
It is now 2015, over six and a half years into the administration of the first black president.
And while I can't pin down an exact and definitive number of black elected officials in this country (I'm working on that), I do know that as I write this, there are over 10,000 black elected officials in the United States.
Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing "the kids" sound off again.
If, as Dr. King maintained, "a riot is the language if the unheard" (and I believe that it is), then I do believe that when those who "rioted" (or their social peers, in this case) do speak, we should listen to them.
This "town hall" of the African-American young adults and teenagers of Baltimore comes in at about an hour and a half; I've already watched in its' entirety twice.
While I have a number of thoughts, opinions, and even criticisms of this program, I'm going to shelve them for the time being and let the participants speak for themselves.
Well...I will note this...Clearly, these audience participants did not take kindly to their elected mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and the President of the United States calling them and their peers "thugs" before national television audiences.
In fact, "the kids" are not particularly happy with "black leadership."
But I'll allow them to speak in their own words.
Thank you for reading.
h/t Truthdig
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Why integrating America’s neighborhoods and cities is harder than we think. Slate: White Out.
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Because of our egalitarian norms and the real wealth and income differences between blacks and whites, it’s easy to conclude that white preference for white neighborhoods is a kind of class discrimination, which we can fix through active, interventionist policy. But in this situation, the answer we might want isn’t the one that’s true. For white homebuyers, race matters, and not just as a proxy for class.
The main vehicles for this finding are a series of experiments from Maria Krysan, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In more than a decade’s worth of studies, Krysan and her collaborators have looked at the relationships among neighborhood desirability, class, and race, drawing from surveys and interviews with whites, blacks, and other groups.
In one experiment Krysan and her researchers developed 13 videos showing five neighborhoods of different social class levels: lower working class, upper working class, blemished middle class, unblemished middle class, and upper middle class. Participants would infer the wealth and income of neighborhoods in the short videos by aesthetic qualities: the size of the lots, the conditions of the homes, and so on. A blemished middle-class neighborhood would have homes with overgrown yards and boarded-up garages, while an unblemished one would have neither.
In addition to class characteristics, Krysan also added people. For four of the five neighborhoods—the fifth was empty, as a control—researchers made three variations. Each one had a different racial composition. In one version of the upper-middle-class video, the residents were white. In another they were black. And in another there was a mix. They would wear the same kinds of clothes and do the same kinds of activities. In private, participants would watch the videos—with random assignments for the racial composition—and then rate them in terms of home costs, property upkeep, safety, future property values, and school quality.
For all participants, white and black, class mattered. The wealthier the neighborhood—as inferred by characteristics—the higher the rank. But for whites race was a major influence. “Whites who saw an all-White neighborhood ranked the neighborhood significantly more positively than Whites who saw the identical neighborhood with all Black residents,” writes Krysan. And in turn mixed neighborhoods had higher ratings than black ones but lower ratings than the all-white alternatives. This was true in every neighborhood across every dimension other than property upkeep. If whites saw blacks in the unblemished middle-class neighborhood, for example, they assumed more crime and worse schools than if it were all-white. (Indeed, a 2001 study from sociologists Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager found that reports of crime and disorder increase with the proportion of black residents in a neighborhood even after you control for the actual levels of crime and disorder.)
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Progress but not enough. HuffingtonPost: 61 Years After Brown v. Board Of Education, Many Schools Remain Separate And Unequal.
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Decades after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared segregated schooling of black students unconstitutional, many American schools with high minority populations continue to receive fewer resources and provide an education that's inferior to schools with large white populations.
For Sunday's 61st anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which proclaimed "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," The Huffington Post takes a look at the state of education for black students in 2015.
In many states, there continues to be stark disparities in resources provided to black students and white students. In Nevada, for example, high-minority school districts receive significantly less state and local funding per pupil than low-minority districts.
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A Duke University professor has been placed on leave after posting racist comments online. Slate: Duke University Professor On Leave After Racist Online Comments Spark Outrage.
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Hough told both the local ABC and Fox affiliates that he was on leave after his comments, in which he identified himself as a Duke professor, raised uproar on campus. In emailed statements, the political science professor defended his comments, saying “Martin Luther King was my hero” and insisting he is “strongly against the toleration of racial discrimination.” The key question, though, according to Hough, “is whether my comments were largely accurate. In writing me, no one has said I was wrong, just racist.”
The university has refused to comment on the professor’s situation at the school, although it did distance itself from the professor’s words. "The comments were noxious, offensive, and have no place in civil discourse," said Duke Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Affairs Michael Schoenfeld. "Duke University has a deeply-held commitment to inclusiveness grounded in respect for all, and we encourage our community to speak out when they feel that those ideals are challenged or undermined, as they were in this case." The comments caused particularly outrage at the university because they came only a few weeks after a Duke student a noose was found hanging in a tree in April, notes the News & Observer.
Hough’s full comments in the New York Times:
This editorial is what is wrong. The Democrats are an alliance of Westchester and Harlem, of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore. Westchester and Montgomery get a Citigroup asset stimulus policy that triples the market. The blacks get a decline in wages after inflation.
But the blacks get symbolic recognition in an utterly incompetent mayor who handled this so badly from beginning to end that her resignation would be demanded if she were white. The blacks get awful editorials like this that tell them to feel sorry for themselves.
In 1965 the Asians were discriminated against as least as badly as blacks. That was reflected in the word "colored." The racism against what even Eleanor Roosevelt called the yellow races was at least as bad.
So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn't feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.
I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.
It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King state. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.
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A Kenyan government initiative is helping a growing community of residents to tackle food insecurity in one of the largest slum areas in Africa.
The Guardian: How to grow food in a slum: lessons from the sack farmers of Kibera.
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In Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slums, residents have found a new way of responding to the challenge of food insecurity. In the heart of the bustling, informal settlement they are championing an unusual form of urban farming: the sack gardens of Kibera.
These urban farms consist of a series of sacks that are filled with manure, soil and small stones that enable water to drain. From the tops and sides of these sacks, often referred to as multi-storey gardens, farmers in Kibera grow kale, spinach, onions, tomatoes, vegetables and arrowroot.
The concept is a recent initiative of the National Youth Service (NYS), a government agency that promotes youth affairs through the ministry of devolution and planning. The approach is seen as a cheap and healthy solution to food insecurity and runaway unemployment in Nairobi’s slum. Kibera has thousands of sack gardens spread across 16 villages in the slum, according to Douglas Kangi, principal agricultural officer on the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Project at the ministry of agriculture. The government plans to introduce the initiative to Kisumu and Mombasa counties.
At Kambi Maruu, one of the villages in Kibera, young farmers start their day at around 8am, in the open field where they have their sack farming project. They water the plants, weed and prune them where necessary and spray them with insecticide.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
João da Cruz e Sousa was the son of freed slaves, born on the island side of what is now Florianopolis, in Southern Brazil. A pioneer of Symbolism in Afro-Brazilian literature, he was nonetheless shunned by his late 19th century peers. Fluent in French, Greek and Latin; and also a graduate of Math and Science taught by Fritz Mueller, Cruz e Sousa's intellectual contemporaries did not understand him and he held their work with contempt and disdain.
A racist mediocrity and the Parnassian Criticism that was currently en vogue, elicited the following anonymous "poetic review" of two collections he released in 1893, "Missal" and "Shields":
"A spiritualizing,
half-wit dunce
brought up
in distant Mozambique
has picked at true Art
with his beak
Swaying sickly,
with sonorous grunts.
And all the blacks from Senegal
do a buck-and-wing
as they caterwaul
and hail him
with rockets exploding in the air."
It is not hard to wonder why then, this little-studied Modern Renaissance Man, this Abolitionist Man of Letters, harbored a...
Sacred Hate
I bore,
like corpses lashed
lashed to my back
and incessantly
and interminably rotting,
all the empiricisms of prejudice,
the unknown layers
of long-dead strata,
of curious
and desolate
African races
that Physiology
had doomed forever
to nullify with the mocking papal
laughter of Haeckel!
All the doors and passage-ways
along the road of life are closed to me,
a poor Aryan artist-yes,
Aryan,
because I acquired,
by systematic study,
all the qualities of that great race.
To what end?
A sad black man,
detested by those with culture,
beaten down by society,
always humiliated,
cast out of every bed,
spat upon in every household
like some evil leper!
But how?
To be an artist and black?
O my hatred,
my majestic malice
my sacred,
pure and benign
malevolence
anoint my forehead
with your pure kiss
so that I may be both
proud and humble
Humble and generous
to the meek
but haughty to those lacking Desire,
lacking in Goodness and faith,
who know not the lamp of the gentle,
fecund sun.
O my hatred,
my blessed emblem
which flaps in the wind
of my soul's infinity
while the others' banners
droop Hearty,
benign hatred be my shield!
against those villains of love,
whose infamy resounds from the
Seven Towers of Mortal Sin.
-- João da Cruz e Sousa
"Sacred Hate"
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