On a mission to save Black boys

~The Final Call News

Phillip Jackson was blunt: The first-class prisons are there, the juvenile offender lock-ups are there, but first-class education and opportunity are not available for young Black males…

Malcolm X ( May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965)

Happy Birthday, Malcolm

~The Root

We met Malcolm through the prism of popular culture, and we embraced him as a commodity, to signal our own disbelief in the American dream.    

 

On Malcolm X’s birthday, those of us who embraced him as a pop icon need to encounter him again.  We need to revisit Malcolm…

a dream deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

 

Langston Hughes

NY Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives

Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives, Study Shows

~The New York Times

But the study also warned of problems that could block upward mobility for members of the “second generation,” including persistent poverty and poor school performance among Dominicans and racial discrimination against black immigrants from the …

 

66 years later, 449 Japanese-American students honored in ceremony

~University of Washington Daily

Japanese-American students receive honorary degrees 66 years after internment…

 

Immigration agency plans new family detention centers

~The Los Angeles Times

The federal ICE, which already runs two such facilities, is taking bids for as many as three more. Critics say detaining families is punitive and unnecessary.

 

 

 

 

 

Youngest chief ever for NAACP

NAACP’s new chief youngest ever

~themorningcall.com

The NAACP on Saturday chose 35-year-old activist and former news executive Ben Jealous as its president, making him the youngest leader in the 99-year history of the nation’s largest civil rights organization.

The fear of white decline

The fear of white decline

~Los Angeles Times

Hillary Rodham Clinton is right. She has the broader and whiter political coalition, so she should, by all rights, be the Democratic presidential nominee. After all, in other realms of the political process, we routinely refer to “black districts” or …

 

Hillary Is White

~CommonDreams.org

Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness…