I am afraid I owe President Bush an apology. All this time I thought he was Herbert Hoover and now come to find out he is really Abraham Lincoln according to Vice-President Cheney. Here is what I don’t understand, you have Dick Cheney and his ilk making preposterous claims like this unchallenged but when a black man, even a respected minister calls America on its hypocrisy they are lambasted. I am in no way condoning the statements of Pastor Wright, but I have to point out the inconsistency being displayed. The fact that Dick Cheney made this statement should enrage all men of conscious and it dishonors the memory of Abraham Lincoln as well as the men who died in one of our nations darkest hours. President Lincoln must have just rolled over in his grave at this one.
January 30, 2008 – 7:28 am
Here is my question, can a person in America change their race or opt out of their racial classification? Can someone who is defined by others as black check another box on the questionnaire? The reason I ask this question is the events that happened over the last few weeks in the golf world concerning Tiger Woods. For those who don’t know there was a major controversy when a Golf Channel anchorwoman, Kelly Tilghman made the comment that the best thing young golfers could do was to take Tiger Woods out in an alley and lynch him. The anchorwoman was suspended for two weeks. Then in an effort to sensationalize the issue and sell some magazines the vice-president and editor of Golfweek, Mr. Dave Seanor decided it would be a good idea to dramatize the issue with a picture of a noose on the cover. Mr. Seanor was immediately fired.
January 24, 2008 – 8:27 am
As a young Indian-American who had just arrived in Texas at the age of twelve, I was very, very confused at the political climate around me. I had grown up abroad and in a British school system, rather removed from the nasty back and forth of the Reagan years. I was raised as what you’d call a Rockefeller Republican - to us, the Democratic Party was full of Southern racists, union toughs and out of touch champagne socialists who had no idea about the conditions on the ground in the very slums and third world countries that they claimed to champion, but avoided like the plague. The joke in our family growing up was that every Democrat had one, and only one, black friend: The Reverend Jesse Jackson. Now, was this fair or accurate? Not at all. But it was what my parents thought, and so what we thought as kids, too. I remember being confused by how awful Reagan was, and thinking that there was going to be some kind of return to sanity when Bush was elected in ‘88.
Then came Bill Clinton. […]
January 7, 2008 – 8:02 am
Here’s a quick hit for you….There are people, both on our side and the opposition’s, who are discussing the possibility of Barack Obama being assassinated.
Someone very dear to me suggested that the best thing that he could do to save his life would be to put Hillary Clinton on the bottom of the ticket. […]
January 4, 2008 – 8:34 am
As the black men of Ossining High School,
We will be positive.
We will strive to succeed.
We will help one another.
We will not allow anyone to interfere with us achieving our goals.
Hashay!
The previous verse is an affirmation spoken daily. What makes this something of note is that it is being said by young black men at a high school. These young black men are part of a group called Project Earthquake that is in place at a high school in the Ossining, NY School District. Ossining, NY is located in Westchester County on the Hudson River. What makes Ossining unusual is that for decades the town has embraced the concept of school integration and has made it a priority. The district has developed and tried a number of innovations to create an environment to help all of its students to succeed. The problem has been that despite all of their efforts, there is still an achievement gap for its minority students, especially the black males. The graduation rate for Ossining is 93% for white students and 48% for black students.
December 20, 2007 – 7:22 am
This is the story of a mother who had to make the desperate choice of sending her son from one war zone (the mean streets of America) to another war zone (the streets of Liberia) in order to try and save his life. It is the choice no mother should ever have to make, but unfortunately it is a choice many black mothers have had to make over the years. Maybe it wasn’t the civil war of Liberia, but it could have been Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Many a black parent has sent a child off to war so they might escape the killing fields of urban America.
December 14, 2007 – 7:52 am
After reading about the following case, I know that it is going to elicit emotional responses from many different quarters with many different agendas. While I support the right of all citizens to protect their homes and their lives what occurred in this case does appear to support that doctrine. There were numerous forces at work that day in this neighborhood that all came to a head in the fatal shooting of two men. The case revolves around Joe Horn, a 61 year old retiree who happened to witness the burglary of a neighbor’s house. Mr. Horn did the neighborly thing and contacted 911 to report the crime in progress. So far so good, neighborhood watch is working. However, it is at this point where the story takes a tragic and bizarre twist.
December 13, 2007 – 7:47 am
In what is sure to become the new profit center for “legitimate banks”, many are now salivating at the check cashing/payday loan market. These customers were forced to go to the blood suckers at the payday loan offices because the legitimate banks had shunned them or did not have branches in their neighborhoods. Well, now that the market has ballooned into a 10 billion dollar a year enterprise guess who wants to reach out to these poor underserved consumers? The same banks that were under serving them, talk about the ultimate irony. The good news is that you escaped the werewolf; the bad news is you did it by running into Count Dracula’s castle and its after dark.
December 5, 2007 – 8:28 am
In what can surely be called unusual and frightening, it appears that black wealth cannot be transferred between generations. In a recent study done by the Economic Mobility Project, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a non-partisan think-tank; a staggering 45% of children whose parents were solidly middle-class have fallen completely to the bottom rung of the economic ladder. These were children who were raised middle-class; they went to the better schools and enjoyed the trappings of middle-America. So what happened?
November 28, 2007 – 8:17 am
In case there were any people left who were not sure about the racist and class objectives of the Republican Party, I think this should clear up any more doubt. The state of Mississippi and its Republican Governor Haley Barbour has decided to take money earmarked for rebuilding the Gulf Coast region which was damaged by Katrina and use it to provide relief and redevelopment money for the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Mississippi was the only state that requested and the only state granted the waiver to override the provision that atleast 50% of the Community Block Grants be spent on low income projects. In creating the program Congress wanted to insure that the low income population in the affected states would not be left out of the redevelopment funds.