Commentary
Dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
This coming Sunday is Father's Day and I can't help but think of my own father. He grew up at a time when "respectable" people would openly express the opinion that they didn't think people of color were as smart as white people. Growing up in Jamaica he was taught that the British had a "huge burden" they "had to" civilized the world. Much like President Obama my dad was abandoned by his dad at a young age. You see my grandfather was white and my grandmother was black.
When my grandfather passed away my grandparents wouldn't except my father or my grandmother as one of their own. The colonial government refused to give her any of my grandfather's pension.
This was 1932. My grandmom was poor and a widow in what today we would call a developing country. Three strikes against her. At first she tried to have a friend raise my dad. My dad went willingly because it was only three miles away. This turned into a nightmare, my dad because as a five year old, watched this poor women pass away in the dead of the night. My dad had to walk home 3 miles at well past midnight to reach his mom.
Even after going through this horror, it didn't change the underlying situation of my grandmother's poverty. Shortly there after my father was given up for adoption. My grandmother was too poor to raise all her children. As a "high yellow child" it was easiest for him to be adopted by a wealthy black family.
But the family he was given to never really wanted a son. They really wanted a live in servant. My father was forced to call his adopted brother and sister, "sir" and "ma'am". This type of practice was quite common at the time, and I have been told it still happens in places in the developing world.
The most amazing thing about my father having gone through this is that my father was never, ever, and angry man. He was hurt but never angry. When I was young I thought he MUST BE angry but as I grew older I realized he was more hurt. Anger is when you wish to seek vengance, hurt is when you feel sorry that some else is so hurt and angry. Maybe that is why things turned out so well for my father.
My father got his education through a correspondence school, while his step-brother bragged about getting excepted to a US school. See my uncle who thought he was better then my father (and had a british passport) was excepted to a school in Florida. When they found out that this "nice british boy" was actually a negro (one drop at it's worse) they literaly ran him out of the school (actually a group of white students threaten to burn down his lodgings).
My poor uncle in Jamaica he thought he was white, in the America of that time even a fellow "high yellow negro" was just a "light skin nigger". Yet my father never resented him for it (he tells me he never gloated but even i don't believe that!). My (now chastised) uncle transfered to a school in the UK and to this day my dad brags about him. My uncle became a judge on his return to Jamaica, his politics being what they were I know his journey to Florida changes his view (but he never set foot in America again).
When I was young I HATED my father's side of the family. But my dad would have none of it. He told me if he wasn't angry how could I be? I hated when we went to Jamaica he would make me visit my step-grandmom. But I hated them even more for how they treated my mom.
My mom is far darker them my dad. Some of the people in my dad's (adopted) family openly questioned him marrying a dark skinned lady. But he loved her and thought it was simply foolishness that his family was talking about. Only my uncle who got ran out of Florida defended my dad. So believe me during the 2007-2009 election campaign, I knew immediately how symbolic Barack being married to Michelle is. Because my dad was there in the 1950's.
Eventually my dad came to America, the company he worked for needed someone to work on some equipment in America and he and his best friend were the best at fixing this particular type of equipment. He moved to one of the whitest states in the USA with only his best friend. My dad didn't even own a peice of winter clothing, because he had never seen snow!
That first winter was tough. In the 1970's people still openly discriminated against people of color in housing. People refused to rent to my father. When he found a place to rent, other tenants threatened to move out of buildings he to rented. But my father worked hard and he was eventually able to send for the rest of the family. My dad bought his own house, and helped send us all to college.
All this time he did it with a strength and grace I will always envy.
This was my dad's life, he had to work so hard to help change the world. We have it much easier. We only have to vote, to blog, to donate time and money. So when ever the world seems like it's going to hell, I'm struck by words I first heard from my own father's lips as a child. Years before I ever thought I would be voting for someone whose life is such a close reflection of my father, my dad told me "yes you can!". See "yes we can" means a lot to me, it's my "dream of my father" it wasn't just a slogan.
So I have reconciled with my father's step family, we all just look back at those times as a sad part of history. Years ago one of my grandfather's grandchildren contacted us years ago, as she was trying to build her family tree. So there we are on a branch of an old Scottish family's tree. I still won't wear the kilt they sent me, I'm not that Scottish (LOL). The world has changed even if Teabaggers refuse to except the fact that we are in a new millenium. Even old family racial wounds heal with time.
So this the Friday's edition before Father's Day I dedicate to you "pops", Happy Father's day old man, and thank you for everything!
<br/ > <br>To all the other dad out there, happy Father's Day!
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The Urban Educational System
Sephius1, Black Kos Editor
This week we begin Part III: A Strategy At The Governmental Level. We will discussing everything from changing the school year to better legistlation on education, to leveraging the political. The section are:
Remaking the Education System - We will be discussing redefining the traditional school year, and balancing the classroom size and teacher-to-student ratio.
Legistlation That Benefits Education - We will be discussing ways in which the government can reward bussinesses that support local school systems and make accomodations for parents.
Education, The New Third Rail - We will be discussing how to set up meetings, forums, and townhalls. Also how to do effective protesting, and hold the media accountable for not holding the politician accountable.
3.1 Remaking the Education System
- Traditional vs. New School Year -
One of the things I suggested in Part I was making a change to the traditional school year as well as the grade system -- the notion of K thru 12th grade. I would like the college model of the semester to be used. What I'm proposing is removing the notion of being left back a grade level, if you don't pass an end-of-year test, even if you excel in some subjects and struggle in others. Making this change does 3 thing:
- Allows the student to progress at their own rate. If you happen to be a 6th grader with an 8th grade understanding of math, but a 5th grade understanding of social studies, the student's educational plan should accomdate that.
- Makes some of the "internship" type programs, I mentioned in Part II of this series more feasible
- It helps parents, who under the traditional school year, would have to find daycare services during the summer
- Allows more study on fewer topics thus ensuring a student truly learns the material
- Balancing The Classrooms -
One of the things that I talked about in the Part I was to some how decrease classroom sizes, give teachers extra help, and make the teaching profession attractive. Essentially create a win-win. Well a part of that involves the government since they set educational guidelines. We need policies that make a environment conducive to learning:
- By changing to a semester system I believe the classroom sizes shrink since students will be taking less subjects. Kids would register for 2 or 3 subjects each semester.
- Each class would have the 1 full teacher, and several teachers-in-training - ie. education majors, as a requirement for their degree would have to have complete 2-years of being a teachers aid
- In exchange for the being teachers-in-training, and subsequent graduation, if the student gets a job as teacher in the local school system, then for each year worked the government will forgive $2500 dollars (up to $10,000 max) of their college loan. If the student has no college debt then they get check for that amount
By changing the school year and balancing the classroom dynamics, we have taken the first steps to ensuring the success of our young people.
Next Week >> 3.2 Legistlation That Benefits Education
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News by dopper0189 who now thinks his icon is silly......
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The old "I'm not a racist, but..." POLITICO: King stands by Obama bias claim.
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Rep. Steve King is not apologizing for saying that President Barack Obama "favors the black person," telling POLITICO Tuesday that his comments were not presented in their full context.
Asked in a phone interview if he regrets what he said during a recent appearance on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, the Iowa Republican said: "Not in any way."
King said his comments where first highlighted by Media Matters, which he said intentionally clipped his comments to remove context.
"The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race – on the side that favors the black person," media Matrers project PoliticalCorrection.org quoted King as saying.
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Art Fix daily: "Pattern, Costume and Ornament" Explores the Meanings of Decoration in Contemporary African and African-American Art.
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"Pattern, Costume and Ornament" opened at the Birmingham Museum of Art on June 6 in the Bohourfoush Gallery. The works gathered in the exhibition were created by African and African-American artists and drawn from the Museum's permanent collection and from local private collections.
Ron Platt, The Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, organized the exhibition. "These works are united by a visual presentation that emphasizes eye-catching arrangements, attention to detail and embellishment, and often both," says Platt.
Functional objects, including a quilt and a Haitian vodou flag, mingle with contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. Each work invites the viewer to consider the diverse cultural influences on personal identity, reaching out to ancestry, tradition, and community for iconography and understanding.
Aside from the complex meanings they evoke, these works also can be valued simply for the visual pleasure they impart. Eye-catching arrangements, attention to details, and interesting use of common materials draw the viewer into the pieces.
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This does bring back memories.... New York Times: Redoing Those ’80s ’Dos.
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In the evolution of black barbering according to Kamal Nuru, the list of begats begins with the Fade (which some folks refer to as the Jersey).
The era would have been around 1982. The Fade was a popular haircut dating to the golden age of hip-hop, one in which the sides were cropped close and the puffy hair on top was kept low, an effect achieved using clippers fitted with No. 1 and No. 2 blades.
"A No. 1 is pretty close, so you can still see the scalp," Mr. Nuru said last week from behind the Dutch doors to an office that also serves as the coat closet at Levels Unisex, his bustling barbershop on Lexington Avenue in East Harlem.
"A zero," Mr. Nuru added, referring to clipper gauge, "would be bald."
Stepped up and set back from the street, Levels is an oasis of calm and tonsorial focus in a part of the city where an awful lot of agitated people can be seen bustling around. There is a homeless shelter across Lexington Avenue. There is a drug treatment facility around the corner. A more-or-less permanent cluster of transvestite prostitutes plies the corners of nearby 125th Street, clad in summery ensembles of Daisy Dukes and tube tops, accessorized with clutch purses that seem awfully tiny until one considers the modest dimensions of the tools of their trade.
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NY Daily News: Brooklyn's 'Soul' campaign spotlighting African-American culture sites is big draw for tourists. (Brooklyn Soul Founder Laurie Cumbo pictured).
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Brooklyn's got soul - and a new marketing campaign wants the world to know about it.
The borough's rich African-American culture will be at the center of advertisements, a printed guide and Web site called the "Soul of Brooklyn," aimed at bringing more tourists to Afro-centric historical sites, events, restaurants and businesses.
"We have this great culture of people from the African Diaspora," said Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art executive director Laurie Cumbo, who created the campaign. "We need to market this to bring tourist dollars to the borough."
Cumbo came up with the idea several years ago as she watched black-owned mom-and-pop shops close one after another in Fort Greene, pushed out by gentrification and a sagging economy.
She's hoping her strategy will get visitors to see the borough as a go-to spot for African-American history and culture on par with Harlem or New Orleans, bringing small businesses and cultural institutions here needed attention and cash.
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Publisher's Weekly: The World of Independent African American Comics
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After collaborating on a variety comics-related projects over the last 5 years, John Jennings and Damian Duffy have put together an anthology, Black Comix: African American Independent Comics, Art, and Culture, that showcases independent African American cartoonists and the subculture of conventions, websites, and awards surrounding them. The book will be published later this month by Mark Batty Publishers.
"It’s a growing comics scene a lot of people don’t know about," said Duffy. "I think of the book as an entry point into a culture as interesting as any other comics scene." Duffy and Jennings met at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Jennings is a professor of graphic design and Duffy was a graduate student at the time and is currently a PhD candidate. After discovering a mutual interest in race and identity issues as well as comics, they began working together. Their first project together was The Hole, a self-published sci-fi graphic novel that "deals with issues of identity and consumer culture," according to Jennings.
In response to the Masters of Cartooning exhibit, held in Los Angeles in 2005, they curated two art exhibitions. The first, "Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators, Characters, and Archetypes" at Jackson State University in Mississippi, which Duffy said "ended being a warm-up for the other show, ‘Out of Sequence’," but focused on the same topic: underrepresented voices in American comics." Out of Sequence, which featured a range of minority comics creators, was exhibited at the University of Chicago, as well as The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar in Belmar, Colorado and at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. "The "Masters of Cartooning" exhibit with no women in it and no one in it of color except George Herriman seemed to be a narrow view of comics," Duffy explained. However, the "Out of Sequence" exhibition dealt not only with under-representation in terms of the creators and their content and identities, Duffy said, but also "underrepresentation in the way people think of comics in terms of form," he explained. The show included, said Jennings, "abstract comics, different executions as well as webcomics, gallery comics, and comics on trash cans."
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While Black artists were denied opportunities elsewhere, the Robin Hood Dell - renamed the Mann Center - welcomed them with open arms from its inception in 1935. Philadelphia Inquirer: Annette John-Hall: Mann Center salute to Black opera voices.
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Nowadays, Angela M. Brown sings wherever she wants.
She's hit the high notes to critical acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera. She's performed at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, where she is a popular favorite. I wouldn't be surprised if she busts a few arias in the shower if the spirit moves her.
It's her voice, rich, pure, passionate, hailed as "the ideal Verdi soprano," that defines her - not her skin color.
"It doesn't matter what color you are," says Brown, 45, who is African American. "Just be excellent and let your cream rise to the top."
(Or chocolate sauce, whatever the case may be.)
Still, Brown wouldn't be in a position to make the merit argument had it not been for the many African American artists who in the 1930s and '40s blazed the trail - a trail marked with racial discrimination that often barred them from performing in opera houses and concert halls.
What most folks don't realize is that while black artists were denied opportunities elsewhere, the Robin Hood Dell - briefly known as the Robin Hood Dell West and renamed the Mann Center for the Performing Arts - welcomed them with open arms from its inception in 1935.
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Mrs. Dopper0189 and I recently watched an old video where just for fun we counted 19 members in a 70's era band (included the 3 folks "playing" the cymbals)
Loop21: Why Black bands are near extinction
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It’s summertime and the living is easy. The summer music tours are gearing up and I, for one, am looking forward to it. The current touring schedules feature a lot of oldies but goodies like Earth Wind & Fire and Maze featuring Frankie Beverly is still a summer mainstay that can’t be missed. I wax nostalgic for acts like Cameo, The SOS Band, Midnight Star, The Dazz Band and The Bar Kays.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to bands from my hometown in Southwest Ohio, who brought their own flavor to the funk of the 70s and 80s: Slave, Lakeside, Zapp featuring Roger and The Ohio Players. While I love all of the old bands, it makes me wonder why there haven’t been any new bands on the scene for the last decade and a half. I have to ask, "What happened to all of the R&B bands"?
Just like video killed the radio star, it appears that hip hop killed the R&B band. Rap music, for the most part, dispensed with the use of live instruments for new techniques like sampling and drum machines. One of the benefits of hip hop is that it opened up musical expression for a whole new group that didn’t have traditional training and instruments.
The innumerable R&B/funk bands of the past have dwindled down to The Roots (ironically, a hip hop band) and Mint Condition. Once the legendary Roots Crew hit the scene, I was hopeful that we’d see more bands evolving with the hip hop generation. Alas, it was not to be. The Roots are staying relevant as the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, but where are their peers and subsequent generations of Black bands?
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PHYSORG: Children living in areas where homicides committed have lower reading, verbal test scores.
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Children living in areas where homicides are committed have lower reading and verbal test scores, a study by New York University Sociology Professor Patrick Sharkey shows. The research, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined test scores of children living in Chicago.
"These findings make clear the impact violence can have on children living in the area, regardless of whether they witness violence directly or are personally victimized," said Sharkey, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Sociology. "The results suggest that children may carry the burden of violence with them as they take part in daily life within the neighborhood or school settings."
To conduct the study, Sharkey combined data on reported homicides occurring in Chicago from 1994 through 2002 with a survey of children and families interviewed through the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) that was conducted over the same time period. He then replicated his analysis using another independent survey of youth in Chicago—the "Three City Study of Welfare, Children and Families," a longitudinal survey of low-income families living in Chicago and two other cities.
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An interesting take... The Root: How Slavery Spoiled the World Cup
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While speaking last evening with a friend, I fell upon the realization that, besides hundreds of years of financial, emotional and political strife, slavery has also engendered in the African American community a difficulty watching the World Cup.
Before I encounter the faceless rage of The Internet, let me preface the rest of this post by saying that in no way is comfort while watching sports as important a subject as practically every other issue facing black Americans today. But minor annoyances, as anyone who’s tried to sleep in a room with one mosquito knows, can occasionally feel large—especially when talking about the biggest sporting event in the world.
Anyway, last night, my former college roommate, a Bostonian by way of Sicily, told me he roots for Italy when watching the World Cup. Despite having been to his ancestral homeland only once, he roots for the Italians with the same brio he uses to root for Landon Donovan et al. In fact, considering how much better it is at handling the soccer ball, it’s very possible he actually cheers harder for the Italian team. His sister does the same, as does a friend of mine in Los Angeles, though technically he’s only half Tuscan.
An Arizonan I know with the surname Rapier goes for France, while the striker on my own soccer team in high school was a diehard fan of England, where his grandparents still lived. I have Greek friends cheering on Greece this year, and Japanese friends cheering on Japan. I even have a Bosnian friend who cheers for Serbia, troubled history be damned.
Amongst most of my white friends interested in the World Cup is the consensus that you root for the US by default, as a holdover trait from when you were forced daily to recite The Pledge. Once the Americans lose, however, you then root in earnest for your country of origin, which is generally better and more exciting to watch. It’s a fun way to hedge your bets and double the pleasure of the World Cup. It also noticeably excludes practically every African American I know.
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