Commentary
Robinswing, Black Kos Editor
To the young black men and woman.....
There is no unified experience of living black in America. There are many blacks who live far from the communities of other black folk. There are blacks in projects and those who live in gated communities. Even those communities that are predominately black are varied. Urban, rural, middle class, suburban. We live as minorities in white communities as diverse as Utah and Manhattan. The black experience in New York and Chicago is different than the experience of being black in Atlanta or Seattle. Most of us do have some common and shared experiences. Most of us have experienced being treated differently because we are black.
Hell, even Oprah was denied entrance into an exclusive shop long after she was famous because they only saw a black woman. Derrick Bell told a story about having one associate try to block entry into a large law firm that bore the name of that lawyer...because that lawyer was black, the young associate wasn't, and didn't know him.He assumed that the black man was out of place. He assumed that he was also trying to break in. I hope he assumed himself out of a job. Money and education, fame and celebrity don't act as buffers against the long held and well tended gardens of injustice, apathy and racial hatred. Not yet. You are going to have to step up to the plate on this one.
All black folk do not think alike. Thank God. All white folks don't think alike and again I thank God for this. Racist think alike and that is their weakness. They are predictable. Their actions foreseeable. Do not overlook the more subtle forms of racism. They are all around you.
My experiences of having lived in every decade since the forties informs me in ways that are not common to younger black folk who arrived on this planet a couple decades back. My sons grew up in a different America than I did. This is as it should be.
We did our job.
We did our job so that black people would have the opportunity to vote. This doesn't seem like such a big deal to generations who have never known anything different. There are bodies buried, black and white that made this possible. Some of those bodies were Jews. Don't believe anyone who tells you that Jews are the enemies of blacks. They have shown that they are not. Don't believe that all whites are your enemy. They too, have shown that they are not. I learned as a a child that what you do speaks so loud I don't have to listen to what you say.
We didn't finish. There is still so much to be done. Young black men are still viewed as threats. Just because some can afford the bling doesn't mean there is economic equity. You will have to work to insure that your children have a better chance at life . You will have to raise your voices and scream out loud for a while yet. We have on paper equal justice under the laws of this country. Our high rate of incarceration speaks of another reality, one that your generation must wage war against.
Young black women when they are visible, are often depicted in terms of their sexuality. You are more than your body. You are not bitches or 'ho's or anything near that. You can do more and go further than any generation of black women before. And a man is not a plan young sistahs. Sistah's been doin' it for themselves since the beginning of time. If you want to dig for gold do it within your own souls. There are riches within you beyond imagination
Family is important. Making the big money ought not estrange you from your children. Take time when they are young to nurture them and teach them. Support them in all ways, financially, emotionally, and spiritually. Do not break their spirits. Do not allow others to break their spirits. A broken spirit is the saddest of all the conditions of man.
I find it ironic that whites never have to take responsibility for the insane actions of other whites. Our identities as black people often are considered a reflection on other blacks. Interestingly enough if we don't fit the stereotype, we are told we are 'different'. One day, I hope that this too will change as we begin to see people and not color. We're not there yet. Be wary of whites who approach you with 'you're different'. Believing you are different can lead to becoming Clarence Thomas. This must be avoided at all cost.
Am I a feminist? No. I consider myself a womanist. If you don't know the difference, read Alice Walker. In fact, read Alice Walker anyway. And W.E.B. Du Bois. Read John Hope Franklin . Read Derrick Bell and Randall Robinson. Read Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin. Read as much and as often as you can. Read. Learn. Then live from your learning.
Step up and protect this planet. This is one of the single most important things you can do. Environmental issues affect us all.
Find your voice and cry out against Darfur. You are not your brother's keeper. You are your brother.
What do I think about politics? Do I think black people should vote for Obama because he is a black man? Yes and no. Yes in that he is qualified, articulate and smart as hell. Yes in the way poor white people ought not to vote against their own self interest and for republicans. No in that the right to vote is sacred. The right to vote was won with blood,sweat and tears. Vote your conscience. I got your back on this one. No matter who you vote for.
Every vote is sacred. Every vote counts. Our ancestors were slaves. Death was their only freedom. Now, you are able to raise your voice, vote your choice and file a lawsuit on anyone stupid enough to openly discriminate against you. Just know that all discrimination is not openly so.
You may not win every battle. This too, is the way of things. The most important battle for you to win is the battle for self respect and dignity. Hold your head up high. Never hesitate to do what you know to be right. Never allow losing a battle to cause you to stop fighting the war. There are still dreams to dream and songs to sing and a world to save. Reach for the dreams. Sing the songs and change the world.
I guess it's time to pass the baton to you. Back in the day when we marched, got jailed and threatened,spit on and hit with bottles and cans, we did so with the faint hope that America might someday find a place for black people to sit at the table. Obama is sitting at the table. Many of you are sitting at the table. I cannot tell you how proud I am of this. It's your turn now. Let's see what you do with it. I believe in you.
Now run and tell that.
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Commentary
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Otis Boykin proves that, while education is important, it is not the only thing that defines your future. Boykin was forced to leave college becuase he was not able to handle the tuition. Yet he had ambition and became a great inventor.
Otis F. Boykin was born on August 29, 1920 in Dallas, Texas. After graduating high school, he attended Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee. He graduated in 1941 and took a job as a laboratory assistant with the Majestic Radio and TV Corporation in Chicago, Illinois. He undertook various tasks but excelled at testing automatic aircraft controls, ultimately serving as a supervisor. Three years laster he left Majestic and took a position as a research engineer with the P.J. Nilsen Reseach Laboratories. Soon thereafter, he decided to try to develop a business of his own a founded Boykin-Fruth, Incorporated. At the same time, he decided to continue his education, pursuing graduate studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. He attended classes in 1946 and 1947 but was forced to drop out because he lacked the funds to pay the next year's tuition.
Despite this setback, Boykin realized that a Masters Degree was not a pre-requisite for inventive competence. He set out to work on project that he had contemplated while in school. At the time, the field of electronics was very popular among the science community and Boykin took a special interest in working with resistors. A resistor is an electronic component that slows the flow of an electrical current. This is necessary to prevent too much electricity from passing through a component than is necessary or even safe. Boykin sought and received a patent for a wire precision resistor on June 16, 1959....Read More >>
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Todays News by Amazinggrace and dopper0189, Black Kos Editor and Managing Editor
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A good read. New York Times: Race in the South in the Age of Obama.
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SEVERAL DAYS A WEEK, a tall, broad-shouldered African-American Methodist preacher named James Fields drives his black pickup truck toward the quiet Alabama city of Cullman. An hour into the red-dirt hills above Birmingham, Cullman is the seat of a farming county where the strongest legal drink you can buy at the pool hall is Pepsi; the kegs at the annual Oktoberfest hold only root beer. "Welcome to Mayberry!" strangers are greeted. And then, "We all do have bathrooms and wear shoes!" With its steeples, grain elevators, striped barber poles, fireflies and wisteria, Cullman has the faraway feel of a small Southern town untroubled by time. "Sweet Cullman!" Fields sometimes says when he’s on his way in. "It’s home!"
For Fields, the trip to Cullman takes him 17 miles north. He lives in Colony, a mountainous backwoods hamlet that in Cullman is usually called the Colony. Among the 81,000 people in Cullman County, there are only 401 African-American voters, and all reside, as far as most people in Cullman know, in the small houses and rusting trailers scattered through Colony’s hollows. Fields serves on several boards in Cullman, with white men who, in the midst of conversations with him, may refer to Colony citizens as "those people down there." A composed, practical person, Fields responds without expression. He’s similarly inscrutable when he hears claims that what is known in Cullman as "the sign" never existed. Even though Fields says, "It was there and folks know it," he doesn’t push back: "You just let it go. Sometimes things like that need to stay buried. That was in the past. Let us move forward."
Versions of Cullman’s old sundown sign hung beside county roads well into the 1970s, and all of them repeated the message that the travel writer Carl Carmer saw when he visited Cullman in the late 1920s: "Nigger Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town." The sign was notorious all over Alabama, and coupled with Cullman’s powerful Ku Klux Klan, it created a racial deterrent so effective that even today, Cullman’s are exits off the Interstate that most African-Americans avoid. A district judge at the Cullman courthouse named Kim Chaney told me, "I do have black people who are very reluctant to come to court here because of the reputation we’ve had for so many years.
read more here -->
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UC San Diego's racial problems are not limited to one incident. And other UC campuses show troubling signs of intolerance. LA TIMES: Beyond a 'Compton Cookout'
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Now we know the truth. The infamous "Compton Cookout" at UC San Diego, where members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity invited guests to celebrate Black History Month dressed as their favorite ghetto stereotypes, was not an isolated incident. Nor can it be chalked up to standard-issue frat behavior, in which a degree of misogyny, bigotry and drunken insensitivity is often shrugged off as normal college hijinks.
Days after the cookout, the editor of the Koala, a campus publication known for mocking Muslims, Latinos and Asians, appeared on the university's student-run TV station to defend the event. While on the air, he referred to offended black classmates as "ungrateful niggers." The following day, a sign with the words "Compton Lynching" was found at the TV station. And on Thursday, a noose was hung in the Geisel Library.
At parties, on air, in public -- anything goes, it seems. It turns out the problem wasn't just a singlepartybut an all-too-permissive culture in which some UCSD students apparently feel free to express racial malice with a breezy, unconcerned openness.
read more here -->
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If handled right the GLBT shouldn't have to do outreach to the black community because they are part of the black community. There are lessons to be "learnt" here. Atlanta Journal Constitution: In DC, blacks were crucial to gay marriage debate.
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Gay and lesbian couples will soon be able to marry in Washington, but the debate over same-sex marriage has sounded different here, with references to interracial marriage and Martin Luther King.
Over the past year, both sides have courted the support of Washington's black community, a majority of the city's 600,000 residents and one traditionally perceived as opposed to same-sex marriage.
"In D.C., outreach to African-Americans wasn't part of the campaign. It was the campaign," said Michael Crawford, the leader of a pro-same-sex union group, D.C. For Marriage.
Crawford, who is black, said other residents weren't ignored, but his group and others weighed the city's racial makeup in planning their message. That made the debate here different than in other places that have considered gay marriage — places like California, where about 7 percent of residents are black, or Maine, where 1 percent are. Voters in both states struck down gay marriage laws.
read more here -->
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Some see her departure as a sign that the Obama administration will begin cleaning house. The Root: Hometown Crowd Sticks By Desiree Rogers.
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When Desiree Rogers quietly stepped down as White House social secretary last week, it came as no surprise to Chicago’s political movers and shakers, such as U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., a longtime African-American leader. "I never expected Desiree Rogers to make a career out of being a social secretary,’’ Davis said.
You see, Rogers, a Chicago socialite and corporate power broker who was previously president of the Illinois utility company Peoples Energy, has long been known as someone who works out front rather than behind the scenes—which is essentially the job of a social secretary). So it was just a matter of time before she said thanks, but no thanks to the job. She will be replaced next month by Julianna Smoot, who served as finance director for Obama’s presidential campaign.
"She did a great job at helping to open up the White House," said Davis. "In fact, I attended several functions. They were great in terms of interactions and inter-relations with people who do not traditionally go to the White House. She accomplished what she set out to do and she’s ready to move on to the next challenge. I think she went in as a friend, and she leaves as a friend.’’
read more here -->
(note: consider this my revenge for the Van Jones photo from Tuesday's Chile! dopper0189)
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Most of Paterson problems are his own doings, but have the scrutiny been more than normal? Hard to say. But he should have expected that fact. New York Times: Some Black Democrats Suggest Race Is Factor in Pressure on the Governor.
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Some top black New York Democrats questioned on Monday whether calls for Gov. David A. Paterson either to resign or to transfer some of his authority to the lieutenant governor were prompted by a racial double
The comments agitated long-simmering racial tensions among state legislators and threatened to inject the volatile issue of race into a political atmosphere in Albany that is already deeply unsettled.
"You do have to raise the question: Why hasn’t there been an outcry of this magnitude previously?" said Senator Eric Adams, a black Democrat from Brooklyn who has been highly critical of those calling for the governor’s resignation. "This is not the first time a governor has been under scrutiny. This is not the first time a governor has been investigated. To prematurely call for him to have his powers circumvented or have him removed, I think it’s unfair."
Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, a Democrat from the Bronx, said many lawmakers in racial minorities tended to believe that Mr. Paterson was being singled out. "Those who aren’t black or minority need to be sympathetic to where this comes from," he said. "As an African-American who knows this nation’s history, I can understand it."
Other Democrats, even those critical of the governor, agreed that lawmakers needed to be aware of how criticism of Mr. Paterson was being perceived.
read more here -->
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Some little known Canadian history. Race Talk: Africville apology is a start, not an end.
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Last week’s apology by city of Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly, for the evictions and razing of the African-Canadian community of Africville in Nova Scotia during the 1960s, marks a small but significant moment in the history of slavery and racism in Canada. The official apology issued February 24, 2010, made on behalf of Halifax Regional Council and Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), was accompanied by terms of the 2005 agreement reached between the municipality and the Africville Genealogy Society, which, along with a formal acknowledgment of loss, included:
read more here -->
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Why the continent's conflicts never end. Foreign Policy Magazine: Africa's Forever Wars.
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There is a very simple reason why some of Africa's bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don't have much of an ideology; they don't have clear goals. They couldn't care less about taking over capitals or major cities -- in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today's rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people's children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing. Look closely at some of the continent's most intractable conflicts, from the rebel-laden creeks of the Niger Delta to the inferno in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this is what you will find.
What we are seeing is the decline of the classic African liberation movement and the proliferation of something else -- something wilder, messier, more violent, and harder to wrap our heads around. If you'd like to call this war, fine. But what is spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic is actually just opportunistic, heavily armed banditry. My job as the New York Times' East Africa bureau chief is to cover news and feature stories in 12 countries. But most of my time is spent immersed in these un-wars.
I've witnessed up close -- often way too close -- how combat has morphed from soldier vs. soldier (now a rarity in Africa) to soldier vs. civilian. Most of today's African fighters are not rebels with a cause; they're predators. That's why we see stunning atrocities like eastern Congo's rape epidemic, where armed groups in recent years have sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women, often so sadistically that the victims are left incontinent for life. What is the military or political objective of ramming an assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Terror has become an end, not just a means.
read more here -->
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It may never be known how many people actually died in the Haitian earthquake as government figures fluctuate. Miami Herald: In Haiti, death toll remains a mystery.
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The view from the busy two-lane road is spectacular: tall limestone mountains rising to the east and the turquoise Caribbean shimmering to the west.
But this is no tourist resort. It's the site of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mass graves where government crews buried tens of thousands of people killed by January's 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
While many of the mass graves are clearly marked with white wooden crosses atop mounds of dirt, the precise number of people buried beneath them may never be known. That's because since the earthquake, the Haitian government has not provided a precise accounting of the number of victims.
The disparate figures that government officials have provided over time cannot be verified. However, accounts by truck drivers who transported many of the bodies and workers who helped bury the victims suggest that official figures may not be incorrect.
read more here -->
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A Rastafarian church in Jamaica is continuing its 14-year fight for legal recognition by the country's lawmakers. BBC: Rasta church
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The Church of Haile Selassie I the first submitted its petition for incorporation in October 1996.
But despite pleas by the church and its legal representatives, the organisation is yet to receive parliamentary approval.
At issue is the Church of Haile Selassie I's use of certain herbs in its religious sacraments, which it says has been misinterpreted by some as promoting the use of marijuana during worship.
read more here -->
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There is an economic depression in Black America. Race Talk: Why Lord?
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"Black America stands at the precipice. African American unemployment is at its highest in 25 years. Thirty-five percent of our children live in poor families. Inadequate healthcare, rampant incarceration, home foreclosures, and a general sense of helplessness overwhelm many of our fellows," said Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. in his recent The Huffington Post article, "The Black Church is Dead."
Glaude laments the absence of press conferences and impassioned efforts around black children living in poverty, and organizing for jobs and health care reform, in lieu of anti-abortion and anti same sex-marriage protests.
For those of you who are not familiar with Humanism, they would prioritize prison reform, and value that as a "right to life. "So I’d like to ask Black Christians, "Can you afford to dismiss the Humanists, the way some dismissed Malcolm X because he wasn’t a Christian?"
Two days after Glaude’s blog posting, representatives of the Obama Administration met with about 60 people with the Secular Coalition for America although the President did not attend.
read more here -->
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Prosecution may be impossible at this point in many of these cases. But at least the families may get answers. Washington Post: Civil rights-era killings yield secrets to FBI probe.
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Three years after the FBI pledged to investigate more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings, the agency is ready to close all but a handful. Investigators say they have solved most of the mysteries behind the cases, but few will result in indictments, given the passage of decades, the deaths of prime suspects and the challenge of gathering evidence.
"There's maybe five to seven cases where we don't know who did it," said FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau's effort. "Some we know; others we know but can't prove. For every other case, we got it."
Even without taking cases to court, the project has filled in broad gaps in the stories of the murdered, many of whom were forgotten victims from a brutal chapter of American history.
Officials now believe, for example, that an Alabama state trooper killed an unarmed civil rights protester in 1965, a case that helped inspire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march in the state. In the deaths of two North Carolina men in police custody -- one found in 1956 with a crushed skull and the other who refused medical treatment in 1960 after a heart attack -- the agency concluded that there was no federal law it could use to pursue the cases.
read more here -->
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I plan on checking both Black and other writing in Caribbean (dopper0189). Atlanta Journal Constitution: Caribbeans urged to write in ancestry on US Census.
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Identify yourself as being of "Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin" on the 2010 U.S. Census questionnaire, and you will get to be more specific about your ancestry, such as Mexican-American, Cuban or Puerto Rican.
But check the box for "black, African-American or Negro" and there will be no place to show whether you trace your identity to the African continent, a Caribbean island or a pre-Civil War plantation.
Some Caribbean-American leaders are urging their communities to write their nationalities on the line under "some other race" on the forms arriving in mailboxes next month, along with checking the racial categories they feel identify them best.
It's another step in the evolution of the Census, which has moved well beyond general categories like "black" and "white" to allow people to identify themselves as multi-racial, and, in some cases, by national origin.
The wording of the questions for race and ethnicity changes with almost every Census, making room for the people who say, "I don't see how I fit in exactly," Census Bureau director Robert Groves told reporters in December. "This will always keep changing in this country as it becomes more and more diverse."
In another push tied to the 2010 Census, advocates are urging indigenous immigrants from Mexico and Central America to write in groups such as Maya, Nahua or Mixtec so the Census Bureau can tally them for the first time.
The campaign in the multiethnic Caribbean community reflects a tendency, born from multiple waves of migration, to establish identity first by country, then by race.
"We are completely undercounted because there isn't an accurate way of self-identifying forpeople from the Caribbean," said Felicia Persaud, chairwoman of CaribID 2010, a New York-based campaign to get a category on the census form for Caribbean-Americans or West Indians.
About 2.4 percent of the U.S. population — more than 6.8 million people — identified on the 2000 Census as belonging to two or more races. A little less than 1 percent of the population — more than 1.8 million people — wrote in their West Indian ancestry.
And about 874,000 people — or 0.3 percent of the population — ticked boxes for Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders that year. If those islanders could get their own categories on the form, Caribbean-American leaders say, why not their communities?
Their lobbying efforts led to a bill in Congress requiring a box to indicate Caribbean descent on the census form, but it did not pass.
"We've really pushed so we can tell our story in numbers the way the Latino community has done by getting the origin category on the form," Persaud said.
Accurate counts in the once-a-decade survey ensure recognition from the federal government and the fair allocation of resources to state and local governments, advocates say.
While most Caribbeans are expected to at least check the box for "black," lumping them together with all African-Americans means corporations and politicians won't see the political, economic and social issues specific to their immigrant communities, Persaud said. They also won't see the size of those communities or get a sense of the diversity of experiences among Afro-Caribbean groups.
read more here -->
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Food for thought. The Loop 21: Truth in media: How a polarized media perpetuates a divided America.
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With the rise of opinion-based journalism, comes a growing disconnect in terms of race relations in America. Are those two issues related? Of course they are.
Each news outlet, whether its FOX News or MSNBC has resorted to preaching to its own choir as opposed to objectively presenting the news. Meanwhile, ethnic media sites have also penetrated the marketplace, offering yet another alternative to the mainstream news. While this has resulted in a more diverse media landscape, especially for minority communities who have for years felt underrepresented and largely ignored by the mainstream media, it comes at a cost.
That cost: Collectively we are not coming to the table with an established set of facts. Based upon the outlets we frequent, we are getting divergent information, and there is a growing uncertainty on whether there is an objective truth anymore. The other cost: We are quickly devolving into various tribes as opposed to one electorate.
You could argue those tribes have always existed. And you would be right. But my point is that the current state of American journalism is furthering that gap as oppose to shrinking it.
"There's no doubt that polarization matters," said David Wilson, a political psychologist. "The problem with the news media is it all depends on your perspective."
read more here -->
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The arrogance of being president while being black (Updated) by blackwaterdog
Sunday Concert--Black History Edition by zenbassoon
The Madness of Apartheid by Inoljt (a great read!!!)
Would Tavis Smiley's 'Black Agenda' Help the Black Community, by Wattree
My Blackness Goes Before Me! by cherbear
Jewish origins: Vol. 3 - Africa by fizziks
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----FRIDAY WAKE UP MUSIC ----- Gregory Isaacs -- "Night Nurse" ------