WEEK IN REVIEW, MAY 25th 2007

There are 26 clueless Black People in America. If they were members of a civics club it would be no big deal. The problem is they are elected officials, they are members of the CBC.
26 members of the CBC have signed letters to Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards urging them to reconsider their decisions to skip a debate cosponsored by the CBC Institute and Fox News. Will they never learn? I am going to look into these 26 and see if they have recieved contributions from FOX executives.

Black Caucus leaders sent the letter to the entire field of Democratic presidential candidates, but the primary targets were Obama, Clinton and Edwards.

The caucus has 43 members from 22 states, who together represent about 40 million Americans, an official with the group said. Seventeen members of the Black Caucus represent districts that are less than 50 percent African-American, said caucus Chairwoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), who argued that the issues at the debate will also be of interest to other minority constituencies, such as Hispanics.

“It’s not just a black thing,” Kilpatrick said.

Thompson said presidential debates often ignore issues that are important to minority voters.

“Nobody is talking about the disproportionate statistics that we have in this country as it relates to minority population,” Thompson said. “You can look at healthcare, you can look at education, you can look at employment, you can look at housing, you can look at lending. All those [statistics] show a very bad picture for many constituents we represent.

“So we think Democratic and Republican candidates alike should have an opportunity to say what they plan to [do to] level the playing field,” he added.

By framing their decision to skip the debate as a missed opportunity to communicate to an important Democratic constituency, caucus leaders are ratcheting up the political pressure on the Democratic front-runners.

Thompson said that the CBC Institute, not Fox, would set the debate format and select the questions to be asked. He said Fox merely will broadcast the event.

So far, liberal opinion leaders have praised the Democrats’ decision to snub Fox.

Left-leaning columnist E.J. Dionne wrote last month that Democrats were well within their rights.

“Tell me again: Why do Democrats have an obligation to participate in debates on Fox?” Dionne wrote. “I am an avid reader of conservative magazines such as National Review and the Weekly Standard. But if these two publications teamed up to sponsor a Democratic debate, would anyone accuse Edwards, Obama and Clinton of ‘blacklisting’ if the candidates said, ‘no thanks’?”
The pressure may be particularly acute for Obama, who is a member of the Black Caucus. Obama has irked fellow CBC members by failing to respond to a request made early last year that he host a fundraiser for the Black Caucus’s political action committee (PAC). Clinton received a similar invitation and quickly followed through by headlining a CBC PAC fundraiser in March of 2006.

Once again this is clear evidence why I am such a HUGE E.J. Dionne fan.
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POLITICS
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Last year, Marcus Mason and a handful of other black lobbyists, many of them former congressional chiefs of staff, began working in earnest to boost the number of black aides on Capitol Hill.

Marcus Mason, a top transportation lobbyist, has always had an itch to get places fast.

At 20, he started his own photography business. At 21, he was tapped to run the congressional campaign of Walter Tucker, a Democrat then serving as mayor of Compton, Calif. After Tucker won, the 22-year-old Mason became the youngest chief of staff on Capitol Hill. By his early 30s, he was the No. 2 lobbyist at Amtrak.

Now 36, Mason is a newly minted contract lobbyist with the Madison Group, where he is busy representing the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. He is also pouring his energy into helping other blacks experience the sort of rapid rise that he has had in Washington.

“There’s a lot of great talent out there that just needs to be given a great opportunity to show what they can do,” Mason explained. “Somebody took a chance on me at 21, a real gamble.”

Last year, Mason and a handful of other black lobbyists, many of them former congressional chiefs of staff, began working in earnest to boost the number of black aides on Capitol Hill.

Seizing on the hot demand for staffers after the Democratic takeover, the group established a vetting committee and began collecting résumés from promising candidates. Mason created a résumé bank to streamline the effort, which is already bearing fruit. So far, the group has placed 36 blacks in congressional offices.

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CULTURE
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Trumpeting Diversity A Rare Majority-Black Orchestra Tries to Build Cultural and Racial Bridges

What strikes you first are the musicians -- most are African American, and on this night, they are decked out in, to use street parlance, "high-low" -- blazers over T-shirts and jeans instead of penguin suits and long black skirts.

There is Denna Purdie of Upper Marlboro, a former cellist with "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band. On violin, Wayman McCoy III, a marketing and sales executive from Germantown. And California resident John Wineglass, an Emmy-winning daytime television music composer, helps on viola.

They number 75 in all -- classically or church trained musicians who come together to play their own brand of music under the banner of the Soulful Symphony, led by native Washingtonian and award-winning musician Darin Atwater, 36. The charismatic Atwater, who lives in Baltimore, oversees music programs at Celebration Church in Columbia. He said he created the symphony in 2000 as a way to present African American cultural expression to a wider audience and to bring more minorities to symphonic music.

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an exhibit at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center that examines the black experience in Vietnam in the context of the era's domestic social fabric.

A pair of combat boots. A wristband woven from boot laces with several bullets dangling. A photo of black servicemen standing outside a makeshift African temple.

The items are part of "Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era," an exhibit at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center that examines the black experience in Vietnam in the context of the era's domestic social fabric.

Samuel Black, curator of the center's African American Collections, conceived the exhibit, in part because his older brother, Jimmy McNeil, served two years in Vietnam.

Black was 4 years old when his brother was sent to Vietnam. He died in 1971, unrelated to the conflict, and Black said he really never knew what his brother's experience was.

Black found that much had been written about the role of blacks in other wars, particularly the Civil War and World War II, but there was little about blacks in Vietnam.

As he researched, he found the black experience in Vietnam was linked to social changes on U.S. soil. The civil rights movement was in full swing. The Black Power movement was growing.

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Being of 100% Jamaican decent I am always biased to these stories.
In the cool environs of 10A West King's House Road, Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah announced to a buzzing gathering on Thursday night that her acclaimed novel Joseph: A Rasta Reggae Fable is to be made into a feature film.

The novel, Joseph, now published in paperback, was also re-displayed alongside Blake-Hannah's newest book: Rastafari: The New Creation (December 2006). Both her books have been published by her own media company, Jamaica Media Productions, but more significantly, Blake Hannah secured a publishing deal with Macmillan Caribbean, one of the premier book publishers in the world, through Novelty Trading. The film Joseph is to be produced by Jamaica Media Productions with Grange as executive producer.

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Here is a profile of a man of many first.Wilder's career dotted with firsts

Lawrence Douglas Wilder made history by becoming governor of Virginia, a state where his grandparents had been slaves.

His victory in that 1989 election made him the first black person to be elected a governor in the United States.

Born in Richmond on Jan. 17, 1931, Wilder was raised during the Great Depression in what he called "gentle poverty." During this time, black people and white people were segregated by race and black people were treated as second-class citizens.

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INTERNATIONAL
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The truth about reconciling. We, as South Africans, are not honest about our attitudes to race - and racism, for that matter

So now we have to talk about race, right. We need, according to some, a "TRC process" to deal with the issue of race in South Africa. The big question that has been asked is: "Does race matter?"

Of course not. Racism does. But, okay, maybe I'm just being pedantic about a simple matter of semantics. So one assumes that when people say we should talk about race, they mean we should talk about racism, and that we need a TRC process to deal with racism.

Forgive me for being cynical, but I don't think that a "truth and reconciliation process" will work when we talk about racism.

For one thing, there will be no truth.

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Toronto Star: Almost two years into the redevelopment of Regent Park, relocated residents insist their community bonds are being bulldozed in the name of gentrification.

Almost two years into the redevelopment of Regent Park, relocated residents insist their community bonds are being bulldozed in the name of gentrification.

The $1 billion project has stressed out most of the 1,160 people displaced so far in the redevelopment of the subsidized housing project.

Residents initially thought they had the right to return to an apartment in the area. But they're now realizing the city-owned landlord, Toronto Community Housing, is counting on many not coming back. "People are worried that it will only be for the rich," says relocated resident Sureya Ibrahim, 29.

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HEALTH
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Public Health Predominately Black Communities in Boston Have Higher Rates of Lupus; Exposure to Petroleum Products Examined as Cause

Residents of two predominately black communities in Boston -- Roxbury and Mattapan -- have higher rates of lupus compared with other neighborhoods, according to a report conducted by the state Department of Public Health, the Boston Globe reports.

Concerns about the rise of lupus diagnoses among black women from three Boston neighborhoods prompted the department to conduct a comparative study based on neighborhoods. For the study, researchers examined local care providers' medical records from 1999 to 2004 from all of the city's 17 neighborhoods.

Researchers found 178 cases of definite or probable lupus diagnoses between 1999 and 2004, and 37 of those cases were among people from Roxbury. According to the public health department, five out of every 100,000 Boston residents are diagnosed with lupus annually; the rate in Roxbury is 10.4 lupus diagnoses per 100,000 residents and the rate in Mattapan is 7.9 diagnoses per 100,000 people.

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LAW
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Justice Dept. Sues New York City, Citing Bias in Hiring Firefighters

The United States Department of Justice filed a civil rights suit against New York City yesterday over the Fire Department’s written entrance exam, which black and Hispanic candidates fail at much higher rates than whites. The suit claims that the city has never proved a link between test scores and performance as a firefighter.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
A group of black firefighters gathered at City Hall for the announcement of a suit against the city.
The suit is the latest in a series of legal attempts going back decades to diversify the Fire Department, which is more than 90 percent white. Three percent of the department’s 11,000 firefighters are black and 4.5 percent are Hispanic, a tiny proportion in a city where more than half the population is black or Hispanic.

The city’s testing practices “do not select the firefighter applicants who will best perform their important public safety mission, while disproportionately screening out large numbers of qualified black and Hispanic applicants,” Wan J. Kim, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

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Maybe some one should have informed a manager that Black Woman have been wearing braids for thousand of years.
Hairstyle Leads to Unemployment and Allegations of Racism

What is trendy? What is inappropriate? Those are the questions at the center of a personal dispute at one Virginia correctional facility, which has now left one woman without a job and another woman in fear of getting fired.

The NAACP of Virginia says the way one warden is interpreting a department of corrections grooming guideline is nothing short of racist and they are now taking their fight to the state Capitol.

"They fired me on May 16th...and said that I had an extreme hairdo...I am now not allowed back on the compound," said Donna Alison.

Alison is now jobless after her superiors fired her for having braids in her hair. The issue is a February 2007 grooming guideline that leaves some interpretation up to a supervisor.

"'Supervisors will judge the appropriateness of a particular hairstyle by the appearance of headgear when worn'...and here's the kicker...'Extreme or eccentric or trendy haircuts or hairstyles are not authorized,'" stated King Salim Khalfani with the NAACP of Virginia, quoting the guidelines.

For Alison, and her former colleague Juanita Hudson, they say their braided hairstyles are not eccentric or trendy.

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Milloy: Seeking to Close the Book on a Bad Law. No other drug law makes such a peculiar distinction between different forms of the same drug. Blacks comprisie 80 % of those charged and convicted of crack-related offenses.

For Arthur Burnett, a senior D.C. Superior Court judge, few drug cases have tested his judicial temperament like those involving crack cocaine. What infuriates Burnett most is not the users but the law itself: a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for possessing five grams of crack cocaine -- about as much as two packets of sugar.

No other drug law metes out so much punishment for such a small offense, Burnett points out.

No other drug law makes such a peculiar distinction between different forms of the same drug: If a person has powdered cocaine, it takes 100 grams to get five years -- even though crack is nothing more than a heated mixture of powdered cocaine and baking soda.

Worse yet, with blacks comprising 80 percent of those charged and convicted of crack-related offenses, the law is widely perceived as being unjustly applied.

And "mandatory" means there's no case-by-case consideration.

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