Teach Our Children Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
I've had this song echoing in my head for the last couple of months.
Not jazz, not soul, but so what? It's the words that resonate in my head each day after I go to school.
I have my own criticisms of things the Democratic Party hasn't done yet, and my ideas on how we could do better in the future. I'll be talking about them in the months ahead. I am more interested right now in looking at what we have accomplished so far, and how we can take action to move a progressive agenda forward.
People of color scored some major victories in the midst of an election cycle that caused quite a bit of heartache for many. Were it not for our votes, places like CA would not be blue. We have to build on that towards the future. The face of America is changing. That's why so many scared white folks are screaming they want their country back (read - they want their white country back). Ain't gonna happen.
I am looking forward to the day in the not too distant future when we can retire the word "minority" as it is applied to us. We will be the majority.
The heart of the base of the Democratic Party has been black folks and unions. We are adding into that mix Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and young white people. We will be a powerful voice in the future, but more important is going to be the question, what will that voice demand of America?
There are a whole lot of our young folks who turned out in 2006, who haven't got a clue about why midterm elections are important. They are not engaged in local and state politics. They haven't got a fuckin' clue about legislation, and how it will affect their future. There are millions of 16 year olds who will be eligible to vote in the next election - and they have younger brothers and sisters who will be the voters, or non-voters of the future.
We talk about "get out the youth vote" but do little education about why they should vote. We don't do our job as adults to connect the dots. The main stream media ain't gonna do it for us. The schools aren't doing it either. "Civics" for the most part does not get taught, or if it does progressive high school teachers are constrained from "taking sides". Well, my hands are not tied, and neither are yours.
Anyone remember this?
We need something like this that is updated and geared to our kids.
You know I teach working class college students. Each year I am faced with groups of students who can't even name their Senators. They haven't got a clue about what district they are in, and cannot name any state elected officials at all, except they might know the name of the governor.
THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.
I've talked with teachers across the US about this. Many encourage their students to "go out and vote" but few are giving the tools to know how to vote and why.
Several young women in my women's studies class prior to this last election raised their hands and said "we are registered, and yes we are going to vote, but how do we figure out who to vote for? Where do we go to read about the issues that affect us? This would be their first foray into the electoral process and they didn't have some very basic tools. Even though these kids are on facebook, and myspace and have cell phones and text-messaging, all stuff I had no access to as a young activist, I had weekly face to face political education sessions, in my community. I had discussions about issues raised in the Black Panther paper, or Muhammmed Speaks or the Young Lords Paper "Pa'lante".
You might assume that because all these kids have all these shiny new tools that they are using them to get a political education. You'd be wrong.
We've got to fix this.
One of the key national grassroots groups that was doing face to face door to door training in our hoods was ACORN. They were assassinated. So who is left?
We need to start an education, and politicization program - right now. I am calling for your assistance.
In two months - with other volunteers I'm going to kick off a national Politicize Youth Project. Using social media to make hook-ups we will begin to do on the ground face to face training and education in community venues and in school clubs across the US. We plan to train youth peer educators and link them up with adult progressives in their areas.
Rock the Vote and other existing organizations that focus on young people will be linked in. I have promises of future funding from some unions and progressive foundations - but right now, no money is necessary. The will to organize and educate is.
We organized thousands and thousands of young people with nothing more than mimeograph machines and face to face political education...starting in the days of Freedom Summer, through the Civil rights movement and massive teach-ins on campuses during the anti-Vietnam War movement.
There are a slew of other websites with great information about our movements, causes and agendas. Problem is most of the websites that deal with voting are "non-partisan". Well, the hell with non-partisan. I'm biased.
None of the information that is already out there isn't going to be worth shit, if we don't have a way to translate information into organizing and educating and reach that sleeping giant that is going to be our future Democratic majority.
If this is something that you would like to get involved in planning - or if you know others that could be helpful please drop us a line at:
politicize.youth.project@gmail.com
Educate and organize.
Teach our children.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A federal investigation into former U.S. District Judge Jack Camp's admitted drug use and alleged bias against African-Americans may mean new trials or sentences for some people adjudicated in his courtrooms. Atlanta Journal Constitution: Camp convictions, sentences may be overturned
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A federal investigation into former U.S. District Judge Jack Camp's admitted drug use and alleged bias against African-Americans may mean new trials or sentences for some people adjudicated in his courtrooms.
U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates announced Thursday her office is conducting an investigation on how Camp's behavior and biases may have undermined justice.
Camp, 67, resigned as a federal judge and pleaded guilty Nov. 19 to a felony drug charge and two misdemeanors. The charges stemmed from a sex scandal involving cocaine, marijuana, prescription narcotics, guns and 27-year-old exotic dancer Sherry Ann Ramos, with whom the married judge had an affair between May and September 2010.
Yates said Camp had admitted using drugs during that period but denied using them before the affair or during court business. The investigation revealed no other drug use, Yates said.
She said the U.S. Attorney's Office "would not oppose" any defendant's request for a new sentencing if it was handed down during the five-month period Camp has admitted to using drugs. She said she did not have an opinion on how much weight to give the charges of racial bias.
But Stephanie Kearns, executive director of the Federal Defender Program in Atlanta, said it was the allegations of racial bias that might prove most vexing for federal prosecutors. Her office already identified a few cases in which its lawyers believe Camp may have shown prejudice against African- Americans during the course of a trial. That could mean a motion for a new trial in some cases, she said.
"We've already talked about some in our office," she said. "We're pulling the records and the (trial) transcripts."
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Race and Class in Latin America NYT: Dueling Beauty Pageants Put Income Gap on View
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The Champagne flowed. Cigar smoke floated in the thick air of the tropical night. Women in miniskirts and men in pressed guayaberas danced at Jet-Set magazine’s fete in this city’s Naval Museum, as the candidates for Miss Colombia sashayed about, flashing perfect smiles and impossibly high cheekbones.
Another party unfolded the same night last month outside Cartagena’s stone ramparts. In a slum called Boston, Ivonne Palencia, an elegant 19-year-old, tiptoed in the mud outside her family’s hovel. Amid the din of firecrackers and reggaetón music, neighbors toasted her victory as Miss Independence, the queen of this city’s slums, with beer.
"We have our queen," said a glowing Patricia Álvarez, 44, a social worker in Boston who led a collection drive to support Ms. Palencia’s candidacy. "They have theirs."
Despite making strides in stabilizing the economy in the last decade, Colombia has South America’s most unequal distribution of wealth, except for small Paraguay, according to the Center for Economic Development Studies in Bogotá. And each November this port city puts that inequality on open display, when it hosts two beauty pageants at the same time. The rival contests offer views not only of the country’s yawning income gap but of issues of race and class in a country that has, by some measures, the Spanish-speaking world’s largest black population.
Miss Colombia, the better-known event, features two dozen strutting candidates, many of them light-skinned daughters of prominent families. The pageant positions Cartagena as its boosters often market it: a playground for the global elite with $475-a-night boutique hotels and Audis prowling the narrow streets of a colonial gem once coveted by corsairs.
In the shadows of that opulence, Cartagena’s slums hold their own pageant celebrating the city’s declaration of independence from Spain in 1811. Largely featuring Afro-Colombian candidates, the contest, which unfolds during a tumultuous street festival, reveals rival concepts of beauty in a city that was also imperial Spain’s major port of entry for slaves being shipped to its South American colonies.
Two beauty pageants in one country
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The Root's Teresa Wiltz traveled to the resilient West African nation and saw the imprint of its American heritage everywhere. The Root: Liberia: War-Weary, With Echoes of Old Dixie
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I'm zipping around Liberia in a turbo-charged tour of the West African country, ricocheting from public hospital to presidential digs to rubber plantation to rape clinic, taking it all in: the shell of a skyscraper where snipers once picked off their prey; the sewage-clogged beach; the exuberant billboards of "Mama Ellen" -- that would be the president -- reminding folks that everyone is connected, all one, and oh yes, don't forget to pay your taxes. In many ways, Liberia reminds me of Afghanistan circa 2002: war-weary country trying to right itself; bombed-out infrastructure; squabbling ethnic groups; battered women asserting themselves; warlords insisting that they've had a change of heart.
Of course, each country is weird in its own way, shaped by shared history, culture, prejudices, group neuroses. And Liberia has its own strange little history, one that is inextricably tied to the U.S.: In 1820, freed American slaves, many of them the mixed-race children of white slave owners, moved to Liberia as part of an abolitionist-sponsored back-to-Africa movement, naming the capital city Monrovia after President James Monroe.
A Racism Created in America's Image
By 1847 the "settlers," as they are called to this day, formed the Republic of Liberia, modeling it after American-style politics -- and instituting their own form of American-style Jim Crow, too. The lighter-skinned Americo-Liberians, who often sported top hats and tails in the tropical West African heat, lorded their power over the "country people" -- darker-skinned indigenous Africans who were not granted Liberian citizenship until 1904. Truly a case of power corrupting the formerly nonpowerful.
And that's the way things were for a long time. Resentments simmered while the Americo-Liberians, a tiny portion of the population, dominated everything until 1980, when Samuel K. Doe snatched power in a particularly nasty military coup. (The Root's own Jack White witnessed the beachside executions of 13 cabinet ministers back then.)
This legacy is visible everywhere in Liberia. You see it in the National Hall, where a parade of presidential portraits illustrates the country's color complex: The pictures progress through time from light to dark to medium: from Liberia's first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who folks here like to say was really Thomas Jefferson's son; to Doe, the first president of tribal descent; to subsequent dictator Charles Taylor; to the first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Harvard-educated granddaughter of a German immigrant.
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Opposition leader Alassane Ouattara is viewed as the winner by the international community, but incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, backed by the army, refuses to give up power. Separate swearing-in ceremonies are held. LA TIMES: Rival presidents each sworn in after disputed Ivory Coast election
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Ivory Coast's election was supposed to reunify and stabilize a country that recently fought a bitter civil war. Instead, there was a bizarre standoff Saturday: rival presidents inaugurated in dueling ceremonies and different electoral bodies promoting different winners.
The U.S., United Nations and European Union say that opposition leader Alassane Ouattara won. But the Ivory Coast army is backing the incumbent president, Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to give up power when the country's electoral commission announced he'd lost.
It didn't take long for the Constitutional Council, headed by one of Gbagbo's close allies, to overturn the commission's results. And thus the twin swearing-in ceremonies Saturday.
The election and its chaotic aftermath laid bare the ethnic and regional tensions in the central African nation. Ouattara's support base is in the Muslim north, a region held by rebels and divided from the south from the start of the civil war in 2002 until a peace accord in 2007. Gbagbo is strong in the south.
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AIDS and Malaria get much of the attention but there is a third large killer in Africa. NYT: New Meningitis Vaccine Brings Hope for Africa
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For over a century, epidemics of bacterial meningitis have swept across Africa, arriving with the dry harmattan winds to kill with terrifying speed. But on Monday, a drive starts to inoculate tens of millions of West Africans with a new vaccine in what scientists hope will be the beginning of the end of ravaging meningitis epidemics.
The aim is for these immunization campaigns to spread from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, bringing the disease under control and saving an estimated 150,000 lives by 2015 in a belt of 25 nations that girds the continent.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are still needed to accomplish that goal, public health officials say. But the meningitis vaccine itself is a milestone in developing inexpensive vaccines against neglected diseases that afflict poor countries, experts say.
More than a million cases of meningitis have been reported in Africa over the past two decades, and the vaccine works against the group A meningitis strain that causes more than 8 out of 10 cases on the continent. Moreover, it costs less than 50 cents a dose. In the United States, Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur market a single dose of meningitis vaccines against multiple strains of the disease for $80 to $100.
"Wow, that’s remarkable!" exclaimed Dr. Gregory A. Poland, head of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, when he heard how little the new vaccine would cost.
Bill Gates, whose foundation largely financed the endeavor, contrasted the undertaking with the development of vaccines for measles, smallpox and polio.
"All those things were created because rich people got sick," he said in an interview. "This is the first vaccine that went through the whole process where there was no rich world market, and it had to be optimized at a very low price."
Meningitis Belt
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Fearing that the obscure xylophone-like instrument could be a casualty as Afro-Colombian traditions disperse amid migration and other pressures, officials are taking steps to preserve and promote the unique music. LA TIMES: Colombia works to keep marimba traditions alive
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The performing style of the man Angel Marino calls the greatest marimba player ever may help explain why the instrument is so obscure outside the villages along Colombia's Pacific Coast mangroves.
"He only played after dark and usually naked," Marino said.
Marino, a virtuoso player of the xylophone-like instrument, said that until recently marimba masters kept it hidden from outsiders to preserve its mystical power to drive away evil spirits.
The last time the marimba was in the international spotlight, Brian Jones was playing it on the Rolling Stones hit "Under My Thumb." But that may be about to change.
UNESCO, the U.N.'s cultural and educational arm, this month added Colombian marimba to its list of customs and practices that constitute mankind's "intangible cultural heritage." The designation has been given around the world, to falconry in Jordan and masked dances in Bhutan, often because they are either under-recognized or in danger of extinction.
In Colombia, the marimba is at the heart of what's known here as the "Music of the Pacific."
As Marino sang about the piangueras, Afro-Colombian women who dig clams in the coastal estuaries, he hammered out a festive yet melancholic melody on his 30-key marimba using two rubber tipped mallets. Four musicians accompanied him on cununos, or drums, and guasas, a hollow tree branch with seeds inside that produces a rasping sound when shaken. Four singers acted as his respondadoras, or chorus.
Miguel Verona Nov 27, 2010
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Let's start a dialogue to make that 4 percent figure outdated. Philadelphia Inquirer: Boardrooms need more diversity
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One hundred years ago, the Negro Business Directory was published. It identified black-owned businesses and listed the sectors that employed sizable numbers of black workers in Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia, the directory identified five black-owned insurance companies and an astounding 20 newspapers. It reported that more than 3,000 blacks were employed in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits," and nearly 4,000 in "trade and transportation." It listed 30 black physicians, 16 lawyers, 11 dentists, and two druggists. The directory didn't survey corporate boards of directors, but it likely would have found no African Americans on them.
In the intervening 100 years, we've certainly made some strides, but not as many as you might think.
Today, the Urban League of Philadelphia and KPMG's Philadelphia office are releasing a survey of African American participation on the boards of public companies in our region, "Opportunity at the Top: Leadership and Diversity of Corporate Boards." The results are sobering.
While African Americans make up 44 percent of the population of Philadelphia and 20 percent of the region, they account for just 4 percent of the 678 directors of companies that responded to the survey. Twenty-six percent of the responding companies said they have one African American board member; less than 2 percent have more than one.
The business case for more diversity in the boardroom is simple enough. As Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen wrote in the report, "Companies can only benefit from the better policy guidance they receive from diverse boards of directors. And the symbolic value - internally and externally - of diverse directors of high-profile companies also cannot be overstated."
Isaiah Harris Jr., the chairman of the board of Cigna and the only African American serving in that position in our region, wrote in the report that "any company that seeks to be relevant and competitive will see the importance of diversity. ..." Harris recommends that companies find diverse slates of candidates when seeking additions to their boards, adding, "High-quality, experienced diversity professionals are available. Identification is a matter of priority." Engage a search firm if necessary, he says.
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An unusual exhibit of photographs of middle-class African Americans at the Paris Expo of 1900 was a declaration of war against racial stereotypes -- and a forerunner of class conflict among blacks. The Root: W.E.B. Du Bois' Talented Tenth in Pictures
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Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and college students.
Mounted to counter stereotypes of blacks as backward and culturally bankrupt, the photographs in W.E.B. Du Bois' two albums, Types of American Negroes and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., at the Paris Expo focused on successful African Americans who thoroughly embodied American middle-class values. These albums constituted a political act, a declaration of inherent nobility in the war over the politics of respectability and the nature of the Negro.
These remarkable images depicted dignified, well-dressed men and women living in comfortable and even lavish homes whose furnishings reflected the occupants' sophisticated taste and refinement. One imagines that Du Bois selected this particular array of "types" primarily for two reasons: first, to present a counter-discourse to "types" of Negroes summoned in the work of anthropologists such as Louis Agassiz half a century before; and second, to create a text or archive of images that could be drawn upon and vastly expanded to refute the extremely popular images of black people as deracinated "Sambos" and lascivious "coons" that peppered trade cards, postcards, advertisements, sheet music and virtually every other form of popular visual culture during the 1890s. At precisely the same time, Jim Crow segregation was being legalized, culminating in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" Supreme Court decision of 1896.
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A new report says that blacks are less attached than other groups to the places where they live. How did it come to this? The Root: Still Down With Our Communities? Meh
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There was a time when blacks were so closely tied to their communities that adult neighbors were almost like a second set of parents to children. From hulking high-rise housing projects in Detroit to single-story houses on tree-lined streets in Gary, Ind., neighbors would inform parents what time a child arrived home from school and with whom, as well as how long a visitor stayed -- especially if it was someone of the opposite sex!
Retired men and women manned windowsills like neighborhood watch commanders, gossiping and watching out for mischief. Neighbors were veritable support systems for one another in the same way that family members were.
But such communities have been fractured by industrialism and post-industrialism, and eroded by the Great Migration of African Americans from about 1910 to 1930. That river of humanity swept blacks from the agrarian culture of the South to the industrial culture of the North and Midwest, said C. Jama Adams, chairman of the department of African American studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
IT Stock Free
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
Both of my sisters were raped by the time they were sophomores in high school. The younger one was raped twice more by the time she graduated. They don't mind that I mention these facts. They have counseled young girls and women on rape; and we all worked at rape and suicide crisis call-in centers when we were in our teens and early twenties.
Zona, is a year younger than me and put in 25 years as an RN in intensive care pediatric oncology at Children's Hospital in Orange County. She thought she was retiring, then the economy went bad. She now teaches high school science and does some private nursing. Zreata, is four years younger and was a calendar model jetting around the world until she was almost thirty. She looks like a cross between Sophia Loren and Pam Grier, so she was scantily clad in photo shoots from Malibu to Madrid. Afterwards. she was a deputy sheriff for about 7 years and later started her own bounty hunter operation. She sold the business a few years ago and now takes care of our aging mother.
I would hold them and console them during convulsive sobbing nights in our youth, both apologizing and condemning men for their brutish actions; and all the injustices we perpetuate on women. Fearing that I was failing in convincing them they were not the ones in the wrong; the one litany they both lamented was,
"What about my rights?"
Yes, what about their rights? Why is it that my sisters, my nieces, or any woman must consider what she wears, or the time of day or night, before she goes to the store? Why are women treated as spoils of war, or objects of abuse in abusive relationships?
Though their right to merely go about their days without fear was denied, both of my sisters exercised what rights were left them, took their rapists to court and won convictions. Though, with my sister Zreata's stint in law enforcement, I couldn't help but think of her when June Jordon published the following in 2005:
Poem about My Rights
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a
boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one/a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
-- June Jordan
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The front porch is now open!
Hot cider and a hearty stew on the table for those who are starting to feel winter's chill.