Commentary
Robinswing, Black Kos Editor

America is a strange place in many ways. On one hand, it is a nation founded on the principles of liberty. This is without question. On the other it was prospered by kidnapping Africans and forcing them into slavery. No liberty. No freedom. No justice for all. For a long time.

What I question is if we are all operating with the same idea about the definition of the word free. I know what I mean by the word. Not sure about some folks.

I define free speech to mean that I have the right to say what I want. I do not have the right to insist that you also say it. That is tyranny.

(SistahSpeak con't.)


The law that makes abortion legal does not make it mandatory. Why do we have so much disagreement about what other people are doing or not doing?

As a happily single woman it seems to me that those willing to make a legal commitment to each other ought to be able to do that. None of my business. Gay or straight makes no difference. Won't impact me or my life in any way. In fact, I’ll admit that I once held the thought that since I couldn’t have him, I was glad no other woman would have Johnny Mathis. (I’ve long since forgiven myself for being so selfish.) Who you love or live with doesn’t interfere with my personal relationship with God. It doesn’t affect my life at any level. Is this concept really so hard to grasp?

When we pay taxes aren’t we all putting something into the pot for the common good? How is it socialism when we use this money for health care for all and not when we pay for policemen and firemen and infrastructure?

It affects my life if we as the citizenry have a fundamentally different view of what a democracy means. It simply cannot mean that if you get enough people together you can do anything you want to those in the minority. The name for that is oppression. Oppression of any falls at the feet of the many. The world has already seen too much of this. I’m personally tired of bullies. This country has had its fair share of bullies. Enough of them. The blackwoman is starting to lose patience.

When this country was founded every effort was made to insure that demagogues would not be able to arbitrarily and indefinitely oppress. Each time we have justified the denial of freedom for any part of society, voices have risen in protest and laws were eventually changed. Hearts are always slower. But they can and do change.

I grew up black and female in the fifties. I remember Emmett Till and the church bombing in Alabama. I have only to close my eyes and I can see the image of young Till in Jet magazine. His mother wanted us to see what had been done to her son. The image haunts me to this day. I am forever changed. I learned too early what man’s inhumanity to man looks like.

The images of my youth contain Life Magazine’s photos of women being knocked over backwards by fire-hoses held by men with mean eyes and cold hearts. German shepherds still make me nervous. The majority, so slow to comprehend what does not directly affect it, changed its mind after seeing those images. Hatred had a face. America saw it. It did not like what it saw.

The images of Kent State and the riots of Chicago changed a nation.

Where are the images of today? Life Magazine does not exist. Neither do the mass images of what is happening in our world. We do not see photos of the carnage in the Sudan any more that we saw what genocide looked like in Bosnia or Uganda. Most folks have to wait until Hollywood decides to make a movie to understand the horror that is real life in Africa or for that matter, on the streets of urban America.

Someone daily makes a decision on what images we see. That is how impacted we are by the photo worth a thousand words.

Things are different. Today hatred still has a face. The face has been surgically altered. Hatred can be manufactured using photo shop and sold in thirty second sound bites .Instead of Bull Connor we have Sean Hannity. Intolerance has a face though it is not contorted with the ravages of covert inhumanity. Racist today use images to convince and convict those who cannot be lynched except electronically. Our hearts have become hardened to the realities of violence and racial hatred. We tend not to think of it as unusual and often fail to hear it unless it shouts at us directly. Even then, too many are deaf.

I’ve seen violence. I’ve seen man’s inhumanity to man often enough to create a space within me that aches and cries out for justice and fairness.

I’ve looked into the faces of people who hated me without even seeing me. They were seeing only my skin color and that was enough for them to throw bottles and bricks. They called me and my mother names that would have gotten their butts kicked if I had not been marching for peace and justice.

The media, conceived as another check on the checks and balances does not want to educate the population. It seeks to entertain and titillate. Why in hell should I or anyone not a family member know what Paris Hilton’s favorite color is? Why in hell do quite a few folks still think Obama is a Muslim?

We are presented with a little information and the idea that there is a real need to tell two sides of a story instead of the facts. Facts are things to be researched. The truth must be searched for and found. Sad really. Not my idea of liberty at all. Certainly ain’t freedom. Time for a change.

The Urban Educational System
Sephius1, Black Kos Editor

Last week we discussed the safety, health, & environmental issues that plaque the inner city. We talk about the journey an inner city kid has to take -- from home to school -- and the daily struggles attached to that journey like being exposed to drugs, abuse, deviant behavior, and unsanitary living and school conditions.

This week we'll take a look at how financial resources tie in at different points along the journey. Just to rehash where we are at:

Safety, Health, and the Environment - this includes drugs and other substances that can be abuse, sexually abuse, bullying, dilapidated housing, school buildings and community infrastructures.

Financial Resources - this includes the poverty levels of the students, surrounding community, and the resources the school has available.

People Resources - this includes the identifying the different learning levels of students early, their socio-economic status, those who play parental roles, inter-personal relationships, self-image.

This also includes hiring compotent teachers, having a reward process in place for teachers who do well in the classroom, instead linking a teachers livelyhood to the number of students they pass, getting teachers to think out of the box, and have more robust training for teachers to keep their skill up to date.

Solutions - I will propose solutions in this section to help develop a strategy at the school level.


1.2 Financial Resources

- Family -

Inner city kids are introduced, fairly early, to the concept of managing financial resources. Their first encounter is often with food, and clothing. A refrigerator that's never full, and stomach that's never quite full, gives a child a first hand account of just how intertwined finances are to their lives -- down to controlling whether they eat, or not.

In area of clothing, or more general, outwardly appearance, lies a true sore spot. The reason being that while you can hide your hunger, you can't hide the fact you might be wearing shoes that are falling apart, or clothing with holes in them because they are hand-me-downs. I can recall my mom, brother, and I going over to "big momma house" on occassion to pick threw some old clothes that had belong to her kids. We also would eat a good meal every once in a while, because our refrigerator was empty often. And during rough months (when our lights where turned off; we had an electric water tank), thus no hot water, we would get early to go take a bath at big momma's. Now, big momma wasn't my grandma, but was a "grandmotherly" figure of community. We don't have those anymore. There was a time, especially in black community, when the mother's of the commuinty would pray over the children, if a young girl got pregnant the mothers would show her how to take care of the baby, how to change diapers, feeding, cooking, and pressing her to finish school as to not become a statistic. The father's of the community handled the young man by teaching him different trades, the value of a dollar and a long days work, to not cut corners. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, "big momma" is 30 yrs old, trying download music to her ipod, trying to find her a man. Just ridiculous.

Medical issues also introduce kids to how family finances can be road blocks to staying healthy. For a child's first visit to an emergency room, they see others that may be in the same financial situation. As we all know emergency rooms are increasingly being used as a form of free health. The long waits, having no insurance, and interferences by HMOs, all lend themselves to a less than memorable visit.

- Community -

One of the first things you notice in the inner city is the urban decay. It's caused by things like white flight, redlining, and urban sprawl. White flight, in my opinion, is actually more devastating because it is based on perception and it reinforces bad stereotypes. Instead of staying and standing along with the minority community when fighting crime, and deviant behavour, whites fled. One of the results was that financial resources were removed from the community. That means less money to pay for law enforcement, and crime ultimately increases. High crime areas turn off businesses from setting up shop in the inner city. Less businesses means less job opportunity. Without job opportunities, people do not have money to buy homes. And with less businesses, and low home ownership, the amount of property taxes collected decrease, which means less resources for the schools to do renovations, buy books, fund after school programs, and pay teachers. Redlining, and urban sprawl, ensures that property values stay low and that certain class of people are kept from advancing. Throw in dilapidated buildings, gentrification, liquor stores on every block, inadequate grocery stores, and some payday loan companies and it's no wonder inner city kids have it bad.

As we see, finances are often used to plug up holes in the ship, that is, inner city life, rather than being used to build a new ship, that is, an inner city that reflects the good of its' community.

Next Week >> 1.3 People Resources








Art is often about pushing boundaries. Great art pushes people together across boundaries.

NYTimes ≫ Dance: Pirouettes and Street Cred: Atlanta's Hip-Hop Ballet

THE rapper Antwan Patton was sitting in the sleek black Courvoisier Lounge tucked into the back of his recording studio here. Mr. Patton, better known as Big Boi, one-half of the progressive hip-hop duo OutKast, was taking a break from finishing his debut solo album, due out this summer. But he wasn’t talking music. He was talking ballet, zeroing in on its image problem.

“I’ve always seen the ballet as being, ‘Here’s a little tea pot, short and stout,’ ” he said, singing and miming the typical gestures of the nursery rhyme with his heavily tattooed arms. “Very, very step-by-step.”

Mr. Patton’s unassuming brick studio is on a sleepy side street, just a short drive from the Atlanta Ballet’s midtown headquarters. But judging from the glass-encased bottles of Cognac that stud his dimly lighted lounge or the OutKast posters trumpeting platinum-selling records and Grammy Awards, the cultural distance is immeasurable. What could tulle-clad classical dancers and a rap superstar possibly have to say to one another, after all?...... More ►

HuffingtonPost ≫ 40 Years after MLK's Death: DOJ's War on Black Voters

While remembering the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King, it's worth noting that Republican operatives and the Bush administration's Department of Justice have turned back the clock on civil rights. They have created a new set of Jim Crow-like policies and strategies with a still-active goal: stopping blacks, who lean Democratic, from casting ballots that count.

Have Justice Department officials and GOP loyalists become essentially an upscale, white-collar version of the Klan, armed with voting lists on their Palm Pilots rather than burning crosses and guns to keep blacks from voting?

This week, a series of articles have been published online underscoring the ways that the racist restrictions of the past have been revived, in often disturbing ways. In the Huffington Post, I reported how the FBI ignored threats to jail voters in Dallas during a hard-fought 2006 state legislative race. The Campaign Legal Center today demanded an in-depth Justice Department probe of its failure to investigate this blatant violations of civil rights. ...... More ►

It's not only China but also India is getting in the game.

The Root ≫ India Pledges Aid to African Leaders

India pledged Tuesday to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in development projects in Africa in an attempt to bolster its presence on the continent, where economic rival China has already invested billions of dollars.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, speaking to the leaders of 14 African nations attending the first India-Africa summit, said India will provide more than $500 million over the next five to six years in grants for development projects. "The time has come to create a new architecture for our engagement in the 21st century," Singh said....... More ►

These are sad lessons, but I really can't dispute them.

The New Republic ≫ Four lessons learned from Mugabe's horrific regime.

Robert Mugabe's defeat in the recent elections in Zimbabwe is the beginning of the end for that country's octogenarian tyrant. Although the government claims that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff election, only a massive fraud in the second round followed by a brutal clampdown on demonstrators will keep the man who has governed that country for three decades in power for a little longer.

Joseph Conrad could have been describing Mugabe's regime when the character Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, said about an ivory company: "reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage." Many lessons can be learned from Mugabe...... More ►

I had brief hope that with the election in Zimbabwe over maybe, just maybe this would end Mugabe's reign. I'm still hopefull, but less so now. The best source to keep track of the breaking news there is the BBC [ Zimbabwe election news ]

BBC ≫ Blame traded over Kenya deadlock.

There is a much-used saying about Kenya's accord and reconciliation process: "Three steps forward, two steps back." Sometimes it looks more like three steps forward, four steps back.

Certainly the process of forming a grand coalition government, as outlined in the agreement signed by President Mwai Kibaki, the leader of the ruling PNU, and his political rival, Raila Odinga, who heads the opposition ODM, has been slow going. It now appears to have come to a complete halt....... More ►

BBC ≫ Eyewitness tells of Haiti food protests.

"The protests actually started on Monday. But Tuesday was when the protests really escalated. I noticed no activity on the streets. There is normally a little market, cars - there was nothing, just the occasional motorcycle. People were protesting about massive hikes in the price of food.


There was a general atmosphere of disorganisation, I saw people running in panic all over the place. They seemed to be running away from the main crowd. We didn't really know what was going on.

It was only later in the day that we were told by our security people that we had to leave everything because the main protest was going to pass us. They were coming up our street of our office building and might have guns. "...... More ►

The Root ≫ The American Embrace of Ignorance, and Why Blacks Need to Let Go

Our heroes are athletes and entertainers, while we fabricate un-endearing terms like "nerd" and "egghead" for successful students. Our national myth celebrates the self-made man who succeeds by native wit and guile; we've always been a little suspicious of the "pointy-headed" intellectual who succeeds by using his brain.

Until recently, African Americans' relationship to learning has been less conflicted. Through slavery and segregation, whites tried to keep it away from us, while we, recognizing it as the key to attaining whatever freedom was available, risked life and limb to get it. Only in the last 35 years, a period that produced the greatest expansion of opportunity for black Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation, have we adopted a kind of paradoxical schizophrenia about education that mimics the majority culture.

Thus America today is host to two kinds of anti-intellectualism —the mainstream culture's, and our own unique African-American brand. I've just finished reading two books -- one new, the other a few years older -- that take close and disturbing looks at each one. The new book, Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, paints a compelling portrait of a nation sinking into a quagmire of ignorance that renders America increasingly ill-equipped to confront the massive challenges we face.

The older, John McWhorter's Losing the Race, portrays an African-American community turning its back on the most effective tool available to end centuries of under-privilege. As an American, I find the combined message of these books sobering. As an African-American, I find it downright scary....... More ►

Black Kos: 'Passing' on the phone......More ►
┗ by never forget 2000 (dopper0189)




The Promised Land......More ►
┗ by DHinMI (dopper0189)



McCain didn't think MLK's assassination was "meaningful"......More ►
┗ by Kos (dopper0189)



More great diaries from StormBear (dopper0189)
┗ Black History: Slave Names......More ►
┗ Black History: Birth of Colonial Slavery......More ►



Michael Steele Will Choose Barack Obama If You'll Stop the Bitching......More ►
┗ by blacksnob (Interesting read - dopper0189)




The Black Backlash......More ►
┗ by Jezreel




Fun Stuff

Music is one of the few ways we can see into each other. Our musical taste tell as much about us, as our style of dress and who we hang around.

So I wanna know your Top 10 Favorite Group/Band? - Sephius1

Dopper0189
1. Earth, Wind, and Fire
2. Bob Marley and the Wailers
3. Gladys Knight & The Pips
4. The Fugees
5. Parliament Funkadelics
6. Boys II Men
7. Wutang
8. U-2
9. Dave Mathews
10. Monster Shack Crew (a reggae group)


Sephius1
1. Rufus (w/ Chaka Khan)
2. Gladys Knight & The Pips
3. Maze (w / Frankie Beverly)
4. Earth, Wind, and Fire
5. Parliament Funkadelics
6. Average White Band
7. Barkays
8. Atlantic Starr
9. Ohio Player
10. SOS Band


Robinswing
1. Ohio Players
2. Parliament Funkedelic
3. Isley Brothers
4. Rufus
5. Earth Wind ad Fire
6. Jr. Walker and the All Stars
7. Kool and the Gang
8. Commodores
9. Santana
10. Maze


Terrypinder
No favorites, but likes Jazz


IN CLOSING


Thank you for reading Black Kos. Hopefully this little corner of Daily Kos provides both an oasis of calm and sometimes a soap box where issues that people normally only whisper to people "just like them" can be talked of openly. The poll question "Approximately how many times in a given average week do you find yourself not a member of the majority racial population" is design to provoke thought. Do you only deal with people different then you on "your terms"? Do you have a friend of a different race or ethnicity? Have you ever gone to their church? Have you ever gone to a house party of theirs? Have you ever really tried to enter their world? How close is your friendship if you haven't? The more you try and understand, your neighboors, friends, and coworkers the stronger your community will be. - Dopper0189



What a week!

There are a lot of things going on and we try to make sure that you our readers are kept abreast of the latest happening ‘round here. Glad for the infusion of black writers as of late. Thrilled that so many are reading our efforts. Tickled that spring has sprung. Sending the thought this week that anyone reading this gets a huge intake of something wonderful. Hope you enjoyed the communal offerings.

Robinswing