Commentary
Robinswing, Black Kos Editor
Let me first say that motherhood changed me in ways I could never have imagined. I never knew it possible to love anything as deeply and completely as I love my sons. I have three of them. They are unique and unrepeatable miracles in my life.
I believe that children come here okay. How they leave is often a result of the decisions made by parents on how to raise them. Some of it is just pure luck. I was lucky.
Raising my sons was a balance of teaching them that they can do anything, go anywhere and live without limits and making sure they were aware enough to negotiate being black males in America and unafraid.
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Black women have often exercised strict discipline with their children. We could not afford to have sons and daughters who argued with us when we said stop or no. Many like my mother, perfected the art of giving you 'the look'. It was designed to stop you in your tracks. It was a protective mechanism.
When my mother was raising her sons, she knew that as black males they did not have the luxury of debate. Truly for generations of black women their ability to control the behavior of the sons might mean the difference between life and death.
I raised my sons mainly in areas where they stood alone as people of color in their schools. I once spent three weeks in my oldest son's classroom to insure his teacher understood that telling my son he 'couldn't ' do something was completely unacceptable. No second grader ought to hear 'you can't' when it comes to learning. My job as his mother was to make sure his teacher would not make that mistake twice. Didn't. Hasn't. Wouldn't. Not couldn't. Never couldn't.
I wondered at the time how he felt about my being in his class, daring his teacher to put her biases on him. It wasn't until he was grown that I found out. He told me as a grown man how proud he was of me. He said he knew I loved him and would always be there for him. He said it gave him confidence. He went on to academic achievement and to spend the rest of his elementary school experience in the 'Gifted' program. He also went on the become a two time All American National Champion in college track.
Dealing with teachers was a regular function of raising black males in white school environments. It seemed at the time that there was a conspiracy to turn black males off of academics. I wasn't having it.
My middle son had a teacher grab him roughly enough by the neck to leave a mark. Leaving a mark on a child with as much melanin as my middle son was no small feat. The teacher by his own admission grabbed my son when another boy jumped on him. Grabbed him by his neck. You cannot imagine the storm inside my head.
The following day, his father and I went to see the principle. My husband was a big man, a former college football player who scared the crap out of people by the sheer force of his physicality. When the principle sent for the teacher in question, his biggest fear was of a physical confrontation. He didn't see me coming. In that respect we were a good tag team. He was so unreasonable that folks thought they wanted to deal with me instead. Ha!
I asked the principle what figure he thought the courts would assess to my son's self esteem. I convinced him firing the teacher was the only way we could avoid finding out. The teacher was fired. This son went on to be a track star as well. By the time he was twenty-eight he was earning over a half million dollars a year in a business he and his wife ran together.
My youngest son was the easiest. When he transferred from one of the best school systems in the country to a lesser system and his 'Gifted' program teacher marked down one of his papers because the rest of the class hadn't learned to use quotations yet in their essays and then crossed out a correct spelling and put in a wrong one, I paid a visit.
He graduated with honors and was offered basketball scholarships to virtually every college and university in the country. He turned them down and instead took an academic scholarship to the University of Virginia. He went to the Navy became an officer and last year on a Dean's fellowship at Yale got two masters degrees. He is currently working on two more.
I am proud of the men they have become. I am thrilled for the opportunity of learning from them and seeing them grow up to be the men they are meant to be. I am blessed to have raised them to adulthood. Some of my friends lost their sons to the streets and guns and the traps that wait on those who are black and male in America.
The challenges of raising children are many. The balance of love and discipline has tripped up many a soul. The heartbreak of losing your child to an indifferent society can be devastating. It takes a lot of energy to raise a child. To nurse them in illness, to tolerate the various stages of growth.
Once my oldest son was taking care of his two oldest daughters without the presence of their mother. He called and asked me how I managed to not go crazy raising him and his brothers. I told I did lose my mind, he just had never known me any differently.
So for all of you who are mothers, I salute you. Do not allow yourself to be driven crazy be the process of raising your children. When it's time to go crazy... walk.
Now run and tell that.
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Confining notions of how a black man should look and act can have dangerous consequences.
The Root === When Bullying Leads to Suicide
I wish I could've spoken to Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera before they decided to kill themselves.
Not to tell them that they're far too young to take their lives at 11. Evidently both felt otherwise. I wouldn't have bothered repeating the trite adage "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you." Because words can sometimes be more painful than any physical blow you can throw at a person. I wouldn't act as if the slurs, insults and taunts that haunted them at school would end anytime soon ... if ever.
What I would have told them is that they're not alone. That they are not the first to be targeted by bullies for possibly being different. Or that they are not the only ones who have been called a faggot in the hallway.
I wish I could've told them that I know exactly how they feel.
Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old Massachusetts student, hanged himself after enduring bullying at school. Although Walker-Hoover himself never identified as such, he was the victim of daily taunts of being called gay. Not long after his suicide, another 11-year-old, Jaheem Herrera, was discovered by his younger sister, hanging by an extension cord in their DeKalb County apartment in Georgia.
He, too, was bullied by his classmates and was routinely called gay and a snitch.
I know all too well about kids going after anyone they suspect as gay or "soft." Whether I was stepping onto a school bus, into a classroom or inside the cafeteria, I felt like a target. I was that kid who went through school listening as other students--and in some cases teachers--made jokes about the way I walked and talked.......More
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NY Times === Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism.
Although the civil rights movement gave Samuel Sallis equality under the law a long time ago, he was left wanting most of his life, he says, for the subtle courtesies and respect he thought would come with it. Being a working-class black man downtown here meant being mostly ignored, living a life invisible and unacknowledged in a larger white world.
"I've been working downtown for 30 years, so I've got a good feeling for it," Mr. Sallis said. "Since President Obama started campaigning, if I go almost anywhere, it's: 'Hi! Hello, how are you, sir?' I'm talking about strangers. Calling me 'sir.' "
He added: "It makes you feel different, like, hey -- maybe we are all equals. I'm no different than before. It's just that other people seem to be realizing these things all around me."
In dozens of interviews in seven states over the last several days, black men and women like Mr. Sallis said they were feeling more optimistic about race relations than even a year ago, when Mr. Obama emerged as a serious presidential contender after a string of primary and caucus victories. Many whites said they were feeling better, too, expressing an invigorated sense of openness toward people of other races........More
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Desirée Rogers--the former Mardi Gras queen who holds the keys to Brand Obama.
Wall St. Journal === Desirée Rogers' Brand Obama
Desirée Glapion Rogers is the descendant of a Creole voodoo priestess named Marie Laveau Glapion. The first time I meet her, she welcomes me into her East Wing lair--a rhythm and blues tune plays on a white iPod, a potted white orchid perches between two windows, fresh flowers sit on a heavy wooden desk. This is a woman who never sees a wilted bloom. The 49-year-old turns on just enough Southern charm to camouflage an aura of self-assuredness typically reserved for runway models or first ladies. Wearing a crisp white shirt, black patent flats and high-waisted navy slacks that would look terrible on almost anyone else, Rogers talks about her job as White House social secretary.
If there's one thing Desirée Rogers and Desirée Rogers' staff want you to know--and will keep reminding you until you get it--it's that the president and Michelle Obama plan to open up the White House and once again make it the "people's house." They want to create an environment where average Americans might stop by and catch the first lady serving homemade huckleberry cobbler and caramel ice cream to students, tending to the vegetable garden on the South Lawn or watching the romantic comedy "He's Just Not That Into You" with her girlfriends. The president is, of course, meeting with foreign dignitaries. In one of the most visible roles in the Obama administration, Rogers is out to solidify the first family as one of the most memorable in presidential history, and the Ivy League—educated first lady, in particular, as the most popular mom-in-chief........More
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The Root === Vlogging While Black.
Like the many types of media that came before YouTube, the black vloggers who get noticed can often fit a stereotype. From the bizarre to the hilarious to the inspirational, here's a sampling of some of the up-and-coming black vloggers and their winning formula........More
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NPR === Pullman Porters Helped Build Black Middle Class.
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown were descendants of Pullman porters -- that distinctive and distinguished figure from yesteryear -- the uniformed African-American train worker, who forged his way into the middle class.
As part of this year's National Train Day celebration on Saturday, Amtrak is honoring the legacy of Pullman porters in Philadelphia. The porters served first-class passengers traveling in the luxurious Pullman sleeping cars, and the safe, steady work that allowed tens of thousands of African-Americans access to middle-class life........More
We touched on this story a few months back. It works it's way from the black blogospere, into the general progressive blogosphere, and now finally the traditional media is starting to notice.
JackAndJillPolitics.com === Small Town Texas Cops Rob Out Of Town Black Drivers To The Tune Of $3 Million.......More
NY Times === In a Senegalese Slum, a Building Material Both Primitive and Perilous.
Aba Dione, 7 years old, met his end six weeks ago in the trash-filled corner of an abandoned dwelling here, as good a place to play as any, it seemed, when the other options were garbage and more garbage.
Except that in this case the thick carpet of crushed plastic bottles and bags, clothing shreds, old flip-flops and muck was deceptively floating on several feet of water; unknowing, Aba fell in and drowned.
Garbage might have seemed safe to the boy because it is everywhere in this forlorn, dun-colored slum abutting Dakar, the capital. Delivered on order for a few pennies a load by rickety horse-drawn carts speeding through the dirt streets of the Médina Gounass neighborhood of Guédiawaye, it is as pervasive as the hot midday sun in which it bakes. The people use it to shore up their flood-prone houses and streets in this low-lying area near the Atlantic coast; they have no choice.
Garbage, packed down tight and then covered with a thin layer of sand, is used to raise the floors of houses that flood regularly in the brief but intense summer rainy season, and it is packed into the dusty streets that otherwise become canals. The water lingers for months in the low-lying terrain of this bone-dry country.
Garbage is a surrogate building material, a critical filler to deal with the stagnant water -- cheap, instantly accessible and never diminishing. The plastic-laden spillover from these foul-smelling deliveries pokes up through the sandy lots, covers the ground between the crumbling cinder-block houses, becomes grazing ground for goats, playground for barefoot, runny-nosed children and breeding ground for swarms of flies. Disease flourishes here, aid groups say: cholera, malaria, yellow fever and tuberculosis........More
Slate.com === Out of Africa? Foreign aid is part of the problem, but so is corrupt politics.
Far too many regimes in Africa have become patronage machines in which political power is sought by "big men" for the sole purpose of acquiring resources--resources that are funneled either back to the networks of supporters who helped a particular leader come to power or else into the proverbial Swiss bank account. There is no concept of public good; politics has devolved instead into a zero-sum struggle to appropriate the state and whatever assets it can control.
All of the region's other problems derive from this destructive dynamic. Natural resources, whether diamonds or oil or timber, have quickly turned into a curse, because they greatly raise the stakes of the political struggle. Ethnicity and tribe, social constructs of often dubious historical provenance, have been exploited by political leaders in their quests for power. The advent of democracy has not changed the aims of politics but simply shifted the method of struggle. Only thus can we explain a phenomenon like Nigeria, which took in some $300 billion in oil revenues over a generation and yet saw declining per capita income during that same period........More
Ebony / Jet === I'm Not Crazy, Black America's Discomfort with Mental Illness
Forensically trained medical doctors, such as me, are tasked with assessing and treating a variety of mental health disorders. They range from a single occurrence of depression to more chronic and recurring mental conditions, such as schizophrenia. But in most instances by the time a person comes to the attention of a Forensic Psychiatrist in a correctional setting, the situation has gone way too far, and the subject has already been adjudicated for a crime or is facing severe legal charges. One of the most common and exhausting challenges we face, in general and in forensic psychiatry is the issue of non-compliance with treatment or in too many cases, no treatment at all. And as you may have surmised, many of the people in this circumstance are African America.
So why do we delay or not seek the appropriate treatment for mental/emotional anguish, symptoms or discord? Mental disorders can be found worldwide. Its presentation is recognizable and similar around the globe. There exists, however, a set of shared beliefs, or culture, which influences our acceptance of a condition and the motivation to seek treatment. Why are many racial and ethnic minorities less inclined to seek treatment?
The answers are varied and rooted in many social challenges -- coping styles, systematic mistrust, financial constraints, accessibility, lack of culturally similar professionals and a troubling lack of culturally- based research........More
The Charlotte Post === Bill would address USDA bias against black farmers.
A bill introduced today in the U.S. Senate would compensate black farmers for government discrimination in lending.
Democrat Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa are co-sponsoring legislation that would pay African American farmers money owed them under Pigford v. Glickman, a lawsuit that was initially settled in 1999. The Pigford Claims Funding Act of 2009, introduced by Grassley, would help more than 4,000 eligible black farmers in North Carolina.
"Years ago, thousands of African American farmers were found to have been unfairly discriminated against when applying for loans, credit, and other forms of financial help to ensure their farm's success," said Hagan. "The 2008 Farm Bill passed without adequately addressing the costs required to settle the claims in the Pigford case, and ultimately, help right the injustices these farmers faced so many years ago. This legislation seeks to correct that problem, and ensures the farmers who were discriminated against receive what is fairly due to them.".......More
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We as progressives need to pay special attention to these ditricts.
CQ Politics === Democratic 'Oboomers' to Defend Black-Influenced Congressional Districts
Republican Steve Chabot thinks he knows why he lost the Cincinnati-based seat in Congress he had held for 14 years.
In Chabot's view, President Barack Obama , the first African-American atop a national ticket, sowed the seeds of his down-ballot defeat by driving the city's black voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers.
"It was a key factor in our loss, probably the most substantial factor," said Chabot, who answered the phone at his 2010 campaign headquarters. "With the turnout model you saw this past election cycle in a district like mine, it was just impossible to overcome."
Banking on a different electorate in Obama's first midterm -- one with less energy among African Americans and first-time voters -- Chabot is confident that he can oust freshman Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus in a district in which 27 percent of residents are black.
Not so fast, says Driehaus, one of a handful of Democratic victors in competitive districts influenced by African American voters -- call them the Oboomers -- whose first re-election bids will be watched closely by political strategists in both parties.
"We actually thought there would be a greater turnout in 2008," Driehaus said. "While the African-American vote made a difference, it was all of it together."
Last summer, David Bositis, an expert on black voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, identified 15 competitive districts -- some held by Democrats and some by Republicans -- in which the black voting age population was 10 percent or more.
If the nine GOP-held seats, seven flipped into Democratic hands in the November election. One of the six Democratic-held seats, Louisana's 6th District, fell into Republican hands. In several others, Democratic incumbents who had won narrowly in the past held onto their districts easily........More
Forbes === The Wealthiest Black Americans
With a net worth of $2.7 billion, Winfrey tops the inaugural Forbes list of the Wealthiest Black Americans. She is the only billionaire on the list of 20 tycoons, all of whom are self-made. The group built their fortunes across a spectrum of industries spanning athletics and entertainment, media, investments, real estate, construction and restaurants........More
SOME FRIDAY WAKE-UP MUSIC
I've Been Waiting by Incognito featuring Maysa (some more of that British soul invasion)
A courageous diary, I am a racist by Audri
Every Black Man - with one possible exception - Needs an Alibi by Kenyada
Why Do "Blacks" Still Reject G.O.P. "Outreach"? by WeBetterWinThisTime