Be carefull of "Conventional Wisdom" it's often very wrong, as the next story illustrates.
Are more black men behind bars than in college? The answer lies in who is doing the counting - and how.
Unfortunately, the claims from neither side of the debate provide an accurate picture of the issue. We need to get a handle on the answer so we are not distracted from pursuing the larger question of why so many black men are incarcerated.
Part of the tension around this subject has to do with the film What Black Men Think, which in part aims to debunk the popular negative notions about black men. One point the filmmaker, Janks Morton, argues is that the notion that there are more black men in jail and prison than in college is false. In the film, most of the criticism is directed toward the Justice Policy Institute, which produced a 2002 report that Mr. Morton says sparked all the hoopla. Mr. Morton calls the report a con to benefit the Justice Policy Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the institute, recently reiterated the validity of the report's findings. But the real answer lies between their arguments.
The numbers in question from the Justice Policy Institute report come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics. The report indicates that there were an estimated 791,600 black men in jail and prison in 2000 and a count of 603,032 in college in 1999. Mr. Morton agrees with the jail and prison number but asserts in his blog that the more reliable U.S. Census Bureau reports that there were 816,000 black men in college in 2000. In the film, he makes comparisons using the same data sources for 2005 and states this number to be 864,000. Furthermore, he argues that it is bad practice to use the entire age range of black males when making these comparisons, because the age range for college-going males is generally 18 to 24, not the 18 to 55 (and up) range of the jail and prison population. Viewed this way, the ratio of black men in college compared with jail and prison is 4-to-1.
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MONEY
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Tourists return to New Orleans as city mends
The number of tourists in this city, one of its strongest barometers for recovery, is on a pace to increase more than 60% this year as corporate conventions bring in billions of dollars in revenue. About 6 million people are projected to visit New Orleans by the end of the year, up from 3.7 million last year, according to Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau.
The estimate is based on upcoming conventions and corporate meetings that have already been booked. The city had 3 million visitors as of June 30.
This year's numbers fall short of the 10 million that visited in 2004, before the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 virtually halted tourism.
However, the post-Katrina crowds are spending more — about $4.25 billion this year, not far from the $4.9 billion raised in 2004, Perry said. "They're spending more dollars in restaurants, more dollars in retail, and they're actually staying longer," he said. Tourism revenue accounts for a third of the city's operating budget.
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You would never know that there is a new big money making movie producer if you only paid attention to who the MSM hypes. Tyler Perry's Money Machine
George Clooney is a big-time movie star. Cate Blanchett is a big-time movie star. But Tyler Perry's new movie did more box-office on its opening weekend than Clooney's and Blanchett's new movies combined, which makes Perry a big-time movie star, too, and also a phenomenon.
Perry's " Why Did I Get Married?" -- which features singers Janet Jackson and Jill Scott -- ruled the weekend with $21.5 million in sales. Clooney's thriller " Michael Clayton" struggled to earn half that much, while Blanchett's costume drama " Elizabeth: The Golden Age" barely broke $6 million.
What makes this worth noting? According to Perry's distributor, Lions Gate Films, around 90 percent of the audience for "Why Did I Get Married?" was African American. The ensemble cast is African American, too.
A playwright, actor and filmmaker -- based not in Hollywood but in somewhat less glamorous Atlanta -- Perry is making a habit of pulling this kind of stunt. Last year his " Madea's Family Reunion" opened with a $30 million weekend. Critics find Perry's films formulaic, but clearly he has found a formula that works. And he has found an untapped audience that literally can't wait to see itself on the big screen.
In his plays and movies, Perry shows African Americans as they . . . well, I was about to say he shows us as we really are, but that's not true. Reality is for documentaries; Perry's characters are unsubtle, his humor is broad, and his plots are soaked with melodrama. Among his big themes are love, fidelity and the importance of family, and his movies usually have religious overtones.
What Perry does is depict black Americans as people relating to other people -- not as mere plot devices and not as characters defined solely by how they relate to the white world. The rest of the movie industry would do well to take note.
In depicting African Americans, mainstream Hollywood still struggles to leave behind the "magic Negro" paradigm -- the idea, epitomized by " Driving Miss Daisy," that black characters exist solely to teach valuable lessons to white characters. We still don't get a lot of films in which black characters bestow their moral wisdom on one another. Even in " The Pursuit of Happyness," Will Smith's character was only secondarily a lesson-giver to his son; mostly, his role was to teach and uplift the audience.
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POLITICS
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One sad fact of modern American "punditry" is that many pundits are still stuck in 1968. When the Black police commish in Philly asked for 10,000 Black men to help form citizen patrols, major editorial boards saw shades of the Black power movement. Rather then see a people powered bottom up response to a problem they freaked. They of course can't write this so they need a straw man. So they see this as a form of surrender.
Surrender? No, the papers misunderstand . . . or worse
IF YOU WERE to judge by the editorial positions of the city's two biggest newspapers, you'd think the police commissioner was turning out a horde of unarmed black men to confront gun-toting thugs.
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An Inquirer editorial asserts that the police commissioner's "earnest plea" for 10,000 civilian men "is more pitiful than powerful."
Their conclusion: "It represents the attribute the next mayor should not seek in replacing Johnson - defeatism."
What could be more defeatist than for people who say they don't know what it's about to raise these spurious concerns while the call is still going out?
So why this premature emasculation? Are we trying to reduce the number of volunteers?
The approach of the Daily News Editorial Board, which I serve on proudly, is to raise concerns. Well, I've got a couple of concerns. I will always be concerned when the People Paper downplays a movement of the people.
We write editorial after editorial to encourage, applaud and support citizen action. But we launch a pre-emptive strike against this one.
I'm concerned when some of this town's top journalists and best thinkers start erecting straw men to knock down before they know what's really going on.
It is a straw man to suggest that calling for volunteers is tantamount to "giving up on designing effective policing strategies" as the Inquirer asserts. When the Daily News proclaims "the call should be for 10,000 jobs not 10,000 men" it's as if we believe the two things are mutually exclusive. We know better. The Inquirer says "there's a big question mark about how many will meet the commitment."
So what?
What if only 800 show up and they can put only 40 men in each of the 20 toughest neighborhoods? What would be wrong with that? "If policing the streets with police won't work," the Daily News asks, "why will policing streets with citizens work?"
Talk about a straw man. The commissioner has never, ever said that policing the streets with police doesn't work. What he has said, and what we all agree with, is that it won't work by itself.
The most ridiculous "concern" is the idea that, by calling for black men, the organizers are playing some kind of race card.
Last year, an Inquirer article applauded the fact that a town watch in Chinatown had grown from 15 to 50 volunteers. They were trained by the Police Department, just as these men will be; they were given jackets and two-way radios and security devices.
No one ever suggested that they should have reached out for more non-Asian volunteers or that town watches in predominantly white neighborhoods should reach out to other people. In the Daily News, our way of approaching this suspicion about a call from and for black men is this paternalistic, politically correct pronouncement:
"Why is the African-American community expected to do far more to police themselves?"
I'll tell you why. Because the black community has a bigger problem; they should be a bigger part of the solution. Because we have lost 2,889 men under the age of 34 to violence in the last 10 years.
If that's a racist statement, I'm the racist who made it and I'll be bold enough to stand by it.
These concerns and snide put-downs are an ad hominem argument, meaning against the man as opposed to against the principle that he espouses and we embrace. There are more than 700 town watches that deploy some 20,000 volunteers in Philadelphia.
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RACISM
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I remember when people used to say this sort of junk to me. It was always funny how if you mentioned that Asians scored highest on test, and asked them if "Asians are smarter then Whites" they suddenly changed their story.Race remarks get Nobel winner in trouble, James Watson: Tests show Africans are not as intelligent as Europeans
London's Science Museum canceled a Friday talk by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson after the co-discoverer of DNA's structure told a newspaper that Africans and Europeans had different levels of intelligence.
James Watson provoked widespread outrage with his comments to The Sunday Times, which quoted the 79-year-old American as saying he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really."
He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
By the way it gets worse. I still wonder why people invite right-wingers to lecture or speak on TV then act shocked when they say stuff like this?
The Independent catalogued a series of controversial statements from Watson, including one in which he reportedly suggested women should have the right to have abortions if tests could determine their children would be homosexual.
In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced a theory about a link between skin color and sex drive.
His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin — which give skin its color — had been found to boost subjects' sex drive.
"That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."
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This is a sad part of life in many parts of Black America...Party for light-skinned blacks bombs
The party was canceled last week after its promoter, who is black, received dozens of complaints. But for Toney and other black women, the issue reopened old, deep wounds as word of the party spread through the Internet.
How black women are viewed — and treat each other — depending on the hue of their skin, eye color, and the length and grade of their hair has long been a point of contention for many in the black community.
Many women with lighter skin frequently are accused of believing they are better than those with darker complexions. Many women with brown or dark-brown complexions complain that they too often are not treated as well socially or professionally as those with fairer skin.
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DIARIES OF NOTE ON DAILY KOS
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This is powerfull stuff...It's okay to kill black males by diarist Robinswing
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I have been trying for months to get more CBC members to pst. Thank you Mrs. Kilpatrick CONGRESSSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS CONDEMNS COLLAPSE OF SCHIP by diarist Congresswoman Kilpatrick
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I think this is sad but I have heard many people say this to me personally, so I know it's true..."Obama Will Be Killed, So I'm Voting Against Him" by diarist Michael D
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How big a problem is Racism in America? w/ poll by diarist Sacramento Dem