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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
African-American News - November 30, 2010
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African American Short Hair Styles (Buzzle) Thinking, what are the popular African American short hair styles? Here are popular African American short hair styles for women and men. 
African-American News - November 30, 2010
Congress poised to clear settlement funding in American Indian, black farmer lawsuits (CW33 Dallas KDAF-TV)
Would-be farmer Carl Eggleston has been waiting nearly a decade to refile his claim against the government for the discrimination he says he faced when he tried to start a hog farm on his Virginia property. A Rookiea looks back on full life (Bend Bulletin)
" 'Rookie' looks back on full life; Through WWII and segregation, man counts his blessings" Retired Los Angeles City Firefighter Arnett Hartsfield, 92, dons an original Bakelite helmet from Fire Station 30, where he first started in 1940, during a visit to the African-American Firefighters Museum in Los Angeles on October 21. Bump Patrol, the No. 1 brand for eliminating razor bumps according to IRI Data, announces the debut of the Smooth Crew as part of an education campaign to help wipe out razor bumps, a common shaving problem particularly among men of color.
The nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization wants to sound the alarm on school resegregation, and is hoping a national educational summit will bring attention to what its members consider a huge problem, according to a news release from the NAACP.
CVS/pharmacy hopes to boost flu shot rates among African-Americans (Drug Store News)
NEW YORK CVS/pharmacy is encouraging African-Americans to get a seasonal flu shot as African-Americans have lower influenza and pneumococcal immunization rates, compared with the rest of the population. Race Is The Case In Neuroblastoma (RedOrbit)
Neuroblastoma is the most common extracranial solid cancer in childhood and the most common cancer in infancy, with an annual incidence of about 650 new cases per year in the United States.A Close to 50 percent of neuroblastoma cases occur in children younger than two years old.A A recent study has revealed that African American, Asian, and Native ... The sweet science of stereotyping (The Oregonian)
By Leonard Pitts Jr. A few words about black supremacy. Leonard Pitts Jr. Such words seem necessary in light of a minor controversy now roiling the sports world after boxer Bernard Hopkins, who is black, declared that boxer Manny Pacquiao, who is Filipino, is scared to face an African-American fighter. Marxists Meet, Part II: Dante's Inferno - The Marxist Plan to Use Race to Overthrow the U.S. Sunday, November 28th at 8:00PM EST No Comments This is the second in a three-part series of posts.
Monday, November 29, 2010
The Real Pat-Down Outrage
Published on The Root (http://www.theroot.com)
The Real Pat-Down Outrage
The Real Pat-Down Outrage
By: Cord Jefferson
Posted: November 29, 2010 at 12:43 AM
If the media want to focus on embarrassing frisks, they should look at what black and Hispanic Americans routinely deal with, courtesy of the police department.
As the fevered pitch around the Transportation Security Administration screenings gets even more fevered on the busiest travel days of the year, it's worth noting that, for some Americans, embarrassing frisks are de rigueur.
The man who first pointed this out to me is New York Times reporter David Carr, who tweeted, "White people aren't used to having the hands of state on them. Black folks know all about stop and frisk."
Carr is right about that, at least as far as New York City goes. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactic, in which officers stop citizens on the street and search their bodies and bags, was used on 149,753 New Yorkers in the first three months of 2010. Of those frisked, 85 percent were black or Latino. Even more shocking is that 87 percent of those stopped were completely innocent.
Juxtapose New York's stop-and-frisk nonsense with the TSA's new "pat-down searches," which many people are calling invasive. In many ways, it would seem more important to ensure that a flier doesn't have a bomb than to ensure that a New Yorker doesn't have an unregistered gun -- yet you wouldn't think it from the relative outrage among citizens and the media.
John Tyner, a traveler who warned a TSA agent not to touch his "junk" during a routine search, sparked a nationwide call for airline passengers to refuse full-body scans and force the pat-downs -- thus causing massive delays at the airport-security lines -- while heading home for the holidays. Ultimately, the call to boycott was largely ignored, but the issue of TSA boundaries is one that's surely set to divide the nation during the next several weeks of busy holiday travel. In fact, it's already taken up space in most, if not all, newspapers, magazines and blogs of record, with pundits of all stripes attacking the issue from every angle imaginable.
I personally think that people should deal with it. Vigorous searches related to air travel are the price one pays both to live in modernity and to enjoy the convenience of flying around the world on planes. Avoiding airport pat-downs -- the likes of which bouncers give at nightclubs all the time -- has never been a right, just as flying home for Thanksgiving instead of driving isn't a right.
But what's more interesting, especially amid all the TSA madness, is the dearth of attention given to the stop-and-frisk searches taking place across the country every single day. As Carr notes, invasive searches are a fact of life for many blacks, who can work to put themselves through Harvard and yet still be misidentified as "local gangbangers" by their neighbors.
In the end, Charles Krauthammer couldn't care less when it's a black kid from the Bronx getting pushed against the wall and having his pockets emptied by the NYPD, but when he and his friends are faced with the indignity of being treated like criminals, he's livid:
Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm-election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare -- get out of my doctor's examining room; I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google -- Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport-security goon -- my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?
Yeah, do you really think he's a "Nigerian nut job"? He's white, isn't he?
Cord Jefferson is The Root's Washington reporter. Follow him on Twitter.
Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
African-American News - November 29, 2010
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Xenobia Bailey ~ Re-Possessed / Fiber Work ~ at The Fuller Craft Museum (Art Knowledge News) The Fuller Craft Museum presents Portions of the Re-Possessed: Fiber Work by Xenobia Bailey on exhibition in Fuller Craft Museum's Great Room August 2, 2008 through March 8, 2009.
African-American News - November 29, 2010
Community leaders in a suburb north of New York City plan to inventory grave sites and repair headstones at a noteworthy African-American cemetery where several black veterans are buried.
Author's Note: Please take the time to vote in the local ABC affiliate's First Amendment poll.
Analysis: Ga. Democrats fading away (Augusta Chronicle)
" Battered by defeats and bled by defections, Georgia Democrats are becoming a minority party. Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks (newsweek)
Leaked U.S. Intel documents listed the names and villages of Afghan collaborators - and the Taliban is starting to retaliate. After WikiLeaks published a trove of U.S. Intelligence documents—some of which listed the names and villages of Afghans who had been secretly cooperating with the American military—it didn't take long for the Taliban to react. A spokesman for the group quickly threatened to "punish" any Afghan listed as having "collaborated" with the U.S. And the Kabul authorities against the growing Taliban insurgency. In recent days, the Taliban has demonstrated how seriously those threats should be considered. Late last week, just four days after the documents were published, death threats began arriving at the homes of key tribal elders in southern Afghanistan. And over the weekend one tribal elder, Khalifa Abdullah, who the Taliban believed had been in close contact with the Americans, was taken from his home in Monar village, in Kandahar province's embattled Arghandab district, and executed by insurgent gunmen. Many in Latino and Black Community Avoid Getting Flu Shot Imperiling their Health (Hispanically Speaking)
Ita TMs flu season and as millions of Americana TMs get their flu shots there is a segment of the population that is not a ' minority communities. History and journalism combine for epic tale (Bend Bulletin)
"The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson Half a century after the Civil War set African-Americans free, another war gave them the chance finally to flee the brutal apartheid that had replaced slavery in the American South. Courtroom jury pools in racially diverse Alameda County have far fewer African American and Latino members than their share of the jury-eligible population, and one reason is the county's failure to contact people who fail to report for jury duty, the American Civil Liberties Union says in a new report.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
African-American News - November 28, 2010
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Former Professor Claims Nursing Textbook Contains Racial Stereotypes (The Afro American Newspaper) Originally published November 27, 2010 A former professor at the University of Central Florida recently filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming she was fired for refusing to use a textbook that contained offensive racial stereotypes.
African-American News - November 28, 2010
Bob Ray Sanders In the 1950s and 1960s, many middle-class black people looking for places to live in the North and South generally found homes in neighborhoods whites were abandoning.That was true in Fort Worth, in communities like Morningside, Rolling Hills and Polytechnic Heights.But one middle-class community on the city's southeast side was ...
Black cemetery for veterans in Rye gains renewed support, attention (The Patent Trader)
Edwin Purdy served with the Union Navy on an ironclad gunboat that traded cannonfire with a Confederate shore battery in the largest amphibious operation of the Civil War. Although death rates for patients with diabetes type 1 are falling, they are still seven times higher than in the rest of the population, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh wrote in the medical journal Diabetes Care .
http://www.AlphabetPhotography.com - On Nov.13 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a big surprise while enjoying their lunch. Over 100 participants in this awesome Christmas Flash Mob. This is a must see! This flash mob was organized by http://www.AlphabetPhotography.com to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! Special thanks to Robert Cooper and Chorus Niagara, The Welland Seaway Mall, and Fagan Media Group.
Forgotten black veterans will be honored at Rye cemetery (Journal News)
RYE - Community leaders plan to gather today in the African-American Cemetery for the first time to honor 22 black veterans buried there. Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Fitness Walking Programs in Fort Tryon Park
Fitness Walking Programs in Fort Tryon Park
Saturday, November 27, 2010
8:30 a.m.–9:30 a.m.
This event repeats every week on Saturday between 2/14/2009 and 12/25/2010.
Join us for one hour of walking, stretching, strengthening, and body toning using only the park, our own bodies, and gravity. All levels welcome; we modify the program to meet your level of ability. These walks are year-round. Heavy rain cancels.
The program is free but pre-registration is required. To register, email Nancy at healthwriter2@aol.com. For more information, call Linda at (212) 795-1388 ext. 304.
The program is free but pre-registration is required. To register, email Nancy at healthwriter2@aol.com. For more information, call Linda at (212) 795-1388 ext. 304.
Please note: We offer weekday Fitness Walking programs on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7:30 a.m. - 8:30 a.m. The meeting place is the same.
Margaret Corbin Circle (in Fort Tryon Park), Manhattan
Directions to this location
Monday, November 22, 2010
African-American News - November 22, 2010
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African-American News - November 22, 2010
Dumbing down of the American family (Daily Democrat)
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, nationally syndicated columnist Bob Herbert focused on a study by the Council of Great City Schools titled, "Call for Change," which discussed the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of the black population, especially black males.
Founder of Chicago's DuSable Museum dies (SavannahNow)
A founder of one of the oldest African-American history museums in the country has died. Column: If young black men don't learn, we'll all pay (Wausau Daily Herald)
As I read the Council of the Great City Schools report on the problems of black males in urban schools, my mind raced back to a day in the fall of 2006 when I took my then-13-year-old daughter to her piano lesson. African-Americans Counter Cord-Cutting Trend: Horowitz Study (Multichannel News)
Bucking the current cord-cutting trend, African-Americans are increasing their cable subscriber numbers compared to last year, according to a Horowitz Associates survey. My Turn: African-Americans left out of election process (Burlington Free Press)
The elections are over, the candidates are basking in the glow of being chosen to their perspective offices, and voters are pleased and satisfied, and some understandably disappointed at the losses. Fraternity marks 99 years of service (The Jackson Sun)
Jackson members of Omega Psi Phi fraternity will celebrate the predominantly black community service organization's 99th year of service with a Founder's Day program at 5 p.m. Today at Lane College. Friday, November 19, 2010
Spare Times for Nov. 19-25
El Museo del Barrio Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., “We Love Musica,” part of “Super Sábado!,” with music, storytelling, crafts workshops and dance lessons. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem , (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org; free.
Culture Trolley Saturday, begins this Saturday and will celebrate an artisans festival with free rides to many free events at organizations in the South Bronx, including arts displays, workshops and a dance class. It begins at the Longwood Gallery at Hostos Community College, 450 Grand Concourse, at 149th Street, Mott Haven. The trolley runs from noon to 5 p.m. Sponsored by the Bronx Council on the Arts. (718) 931-9500, Ext. 23, bronxarts.org.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the 84th annual parade of floats, bands and balloons, on Thursday beginning at 9 a.m. at West 77th Street and Central Park West. The parade heads down Central Park West to Columbus Circle and continues down Central Park South to Seventh Avenue, then on Seventh Avenue through Times Square to 42nd Street, turning east to Avenue of the Americas before traveling south to 34th Street. NBC will broadcast the event live from 9 a.m. to noon. (212) 494-4495.
New York Road Runners Saturday at 8 a.m., the Knickerbocker 60K, a 37.2-mile run in Central Park that begins on the East Park Drive and 90th Street. Registration fee, $30 by Friday ($25 for members) or $35 on the race day ($30 for members). Sunday at 11:30 a.m., the Fred Lebow Cross-Country 5K in Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx, beginning at the Tortoise and Hare statue, Broadway and 248th Street. Registration fee by Friday, $7 ($5 for those 62+ and 14 and younger); limited race-day registration: $10 and $7. (212) 860-4455, nyrr.org. ANNE MANCUSO
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Comité Noviembre's Annual Puerto Rican Artisan's Fair & Exhibit
Hostos Community College will once again host Comité Noviembre's Annual Puerto Rican Artisan's Fair & Exhibit, a fun filled cultural experience celebrating the arts and culture of Puerto Rico as part of Puerto Rican Heritage Month. The event will be held this Saturday, November 20th from 11AM to 9PM and will be in the Hostos gymnasium.
Last year's event was a beautiful experience of sight and sound with so many Puerto Rican artisans displaying their creations with the cacophony of live music of traditional Bomba and Plena permeating the air. Several live performances evoked the traditional jibaro (affectionate term for a hick) life in Puerto Rico which is important to our culture as it was a time of a more self-sustaining culture living off the land - a simpler time compared to today's faced-paced cosmopolitan and metropolitan lifestyles that have invaded the island and are now pretty much the norm. This year's event promises to be just as exciting and enriching as last year's as well. This is a great opportunity for art lovers to purchase some beautiful pieces.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Strict gun laws are bad for blacks: Why African-Americans should value Second Amendment protections
Strict gun laws are bad for blacks: Why African-Americans should value Second Amendment protections
By Marc Lamont Hill
Wednesday, November 17th 2010, 4:00 AM
As expected, the midterm elections produced huge victories for the GOP and the Tea Party. Still, there was an even bigger winner in the recent drubbing of the Democratic Party: the pro-gun movement. The House of Representatives, which has always had a strong bipartisan pro-gun majority, added nearly 20 pro-gun votes.
As a black progressive, I am tempted to echo the sentiments of most liberals, who regard this pro-gun turn as a full-fledged civic crisis. For most of them, gun ownership is an expendable rather than inalienable right, one worth ceding in exchange for a more peaceful society.
While I understand this position, the price of the ticket, at least for black people, is simply too high.
We live in a nation founded on revolutionary violence and held together, at least in its tumultuous first century, through violent practices. The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms not only to safeguard their homes and property but to stave off the possibility, albeit remote, of a tyrannical government.
In other words, our democracy in its founding document protects citizens' right to guard themselves from danger. For blacks, who have repeatedly been left unprotected by the government, this right should be viewed as a nonnegotiable component of citizenship.
It's little-known that throughout its history, the United States government has gone to great lengths to disarm black people - from early "slave codes" that prohibited blacks from possessing firearms to exorbitant postwar gun tariffs that priced blacks out of the gun market.
As a result, blacks were rendered especially vulnerable. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan would probably have been far less effective if blacks had the same access to guns as the white citizens under hoods. The threat remains today - though the culprit is not white men under hoods but crime perpetrators of all colors.
Today's gun control laws may be racially neutral on their face, but they have a clear and disproportionate impact on poor communities of color, which are often left defenseless against predators in their own backyards.
Over the past 20 years, many states and cities have imposed gun laws that allow police and other state agencies to determine which individuals are worthy of gun ownership.
Consistently, blacks are overrepresented among the "unworthy," despite being statistically more likely to confront random violence. Gun bans against public housing residents, supposedly designed to prevent violent crime, have served to disarm poor blacks almost exclusively.
Such laws prompted Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old black Chicago resident, to successfully sue the City of Chicago to affirm his right to defend himself. The suit went all the way to the Supreme Court, which correctly affirmed his constitutional right to self-defense.
Hopefully, this decision will spark similar pushback around the country. Indeed, the New York Police Department is already lowering the financial barriers for gun possession in the home out of a fear that the courts could strike down its current policies.
Gun violence is a plague, and reasonable gun control makes perfect sense. We must support laws that ban gun show sales, straw purchases, interstate gun trafficking and other loopholes that enable handguns to get into the hands of criminals. And I find no good reason to allow private citizens to buy weapons of mass destruction that have no sporting or self-defense purpose - or to let felons or mentally ill people get hold of firearms.
But while it would be naive to suggest that guns will solve the problem of urban violence, it would be equally shortsighted to ignore the dangers of further disarming the people who need the most help.
Hill is an associate professor of education and anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and host of "Our World With Black Enterprise," which airs Sundays at 1 PM on ABC-7.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/11/17/2010-11-17_strict_gun_laws_are_bad_for_blacks_why_africanamericans_should_value_second_amen.html#ixzz15ZYL5P2i
Strict gun laws are bad for blacks: Why African-Americans should value Second Amendment protections.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
New York City Police Photograph Irises of Suspects
New York City Police Photograph Irises of Suspects
By RAY RIVERA and AL BAKER
The New York Police Department has begun photographing the irises of people who are arrested in an effort to prevent escapes as suspects move through the court system, a police official said Monday.
The program was instituted after two embarrassing episodes early this year in which prisoners arrested on serious charges tricked the authorities into freeing them by posing at arraignment as suspects facing minor cases. The occurrences exposed weaknesses in the city’s handling of suspects as they move from police custody into the maze of court systems in the five boroughs.
With the new system, the authorities are using a hand-held scanning device that can check a prisoner’s identity in seconds when the suspect is presented in court, said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman.
Officials began photographing the irises of suspects arrested for any reason on Monday at Manhattan Central Booking and expect to expand the program to all five boroughs by early December, Mr. Browne said.
The department has been working on the program for months, Mr. Browne said. But the effort caught many in the city’s legal circles by surprise as news of it began trickling out late last week. It is raising concerns among civil libertarians and privacy advocates, who say the authorities’ cataloging of the new data could put innocent people under permanent suspicion.
“It’s really distressing that the Police Department is once again undertaking a new regime of personal data collection without any public discourse,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “and we don’t know the reason for it, whether this is a necessary program, whether it’s effective to address the concerns that it’s designed to address, and whether in this day and age it’s even cost-effective, not to mention whether there are any protections in place against the misuse of the data that’s collected.”
Steven Banks, attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, said his office learned about the program on Friday in a phone call from the mayor’s criminal justice coordinator.
“This is an unnecessary process,” Mr. Banks said. “It’s unauthorized by the statutes and of questionable legality at best. The statutes specifically authorize collecting fingerprints. There has been great legislative debate about the extent to which DNA evidence can be collected, and it is limited to certain types of cases. So the idea that the Police Department can forge ahead and use a totally new technology without any statutory authorization is certainly suspect.”
Mr. Browne said a legal review by the department had concluded that legislative authorization was not necessary.
“Our legal review determined that these are photographs and should be treated the same as mug shots, which are destroyed when arrests are sealed,” he said.
The technology uses high-resolution images to identify unique patterns in the iris, the colored part of the eye. It is considered less intrusive than retinal scanning, which looks at patterns in the blood vessels in the back of the eye and can reveal information about a person’s health, raising privacy concerns.
The department’s collection and use of electronic data have long been controversial. A new state law forced the department to halt electronic storage of the names and addresses of people stopped under the stop-and-frisk program but not charged or arrested.
The iris database has other implications as well, potentially providing the department with a tool in the fight against terrorism. The military has been using similar biometric technology in Iraq and Afghanistan to develop a database of potential insurgents, though Mr. Browne said that the Police Department’s data was not intended for that use and that there had been no coordination with the Defense Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the program.
Other police agencies and correctional facilities across the country also use iris recognition, though it was unclear on Monday how widespread the practice is.
Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which focuses on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues, said that law and policy had developed over time on the collection of fingerprints, and more recently DNA, in the criminal justice system, and that iris scans fell somewhere in between.
“It’s a more accurate form of identification,” Mr. Rotenberg said of the scans, “but at the same time doesn’t raise the same privacy concerns that DNA data has.”
The program will cost the city $500,000 to implement and is being paid for through a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Browne said.
In March, a suspect charged in a string of robberies, who had served time in prison for attempted murder, claimed to be another man, who was facing a charge of marijuana possession, as they were about to be arraigned on Staten Island. The ruse worked and the suspect, Freddie Thompson, was released and remained free for 56 hours before he was recaptured. Another suspect, Michael Bautista, who was facing charges of assault and criminal mischief in the Bronx, escaped in the same manner in February and remains at large.
Mr. Browne said he had no statistics on how often suspects had escaped in this manner, but he said the problem was not widespread.
Monday, November 15, 2010
African-American News - November 15, 2010
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Michigan Chronicle publisher known for bold stances (Detroit Free Press) Observing Sam Logan navigate sensitive political, educational and social issues, it's not difficult to imagine him as a young U.S. Army paratrooper boldly leaping from planes.
African-American News - November 15, 2010
Low levels of vitamin D, the essential nutrient obtained from milk, fortified cereals and exposure to sunlight, doubles the risk of stroke in whites, but not in blacks, according to a new report by researchers at Johns Hopkins.
Chaplain in Navy ministers in Toledo (Toledo Blade)
The Rev. Kevin Bedford has seen much of the world during his 24 years as a Navy chaplain, but the place where he says he really wants to be is Toledo's central city. When Michael Hill needed a doctoral program with the flexibility to let him continue working full-time as a Lincoln University administrator, he chose an online degree from another institution.
Awards and scholarships highlight NAACP banquet (Statesman Journal)
Each of the 115 guests placed an order at the door Saturday night as they attended the Salem/Keizer NAACP's second annual Freedom Fund Banquet. Women Snub HPV Vaccination (ABC News)
Less than a third of women who start out getting the human papillomavirus vaccine wind up receiving all three necessary doses, researchers said here. Upper West Side Residents Allowed to Double Park During Street Cleaning - DNAinfo.com
Upper West Side Residents Allowed to Double Park During Street Cleaning November 15, 2010
Upper West Side Residents Enjoying Special Parking Rules
By Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER WEST SIDE — While most drivers are forced to sit in their cars or drive around in circles for hours during alternate side no-parking times, Sydney Johnson is free to return home while the street sweeper makes its rounds.
That's because Johnson, a teacher by trade, lives on the Upper West Side, where police allow residents to double park their cars illegally during street cleaning regulation times without the fear of ticketing.
Police and local leaders describe the unofficial arrangement, which is common throughout the outer boroughs but rarer in Manhattan, as a courtesy to residents that has gone on as long as anyone can remember.
"That’s how it's always been," said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side and has lived in the neighborhood for more than 40 years.
"I thought it was the case everywhere," she added.
Under official Department of Transportation rules, "Double parking of passenger vehicles is illegal at all times, including Alternate Side Parking Regulation days, regardless of location, purpose or duration."
Violators can be slapped with $115 fines — nearly twice as much as if they hadn't bothering moving their cars for street cleaning below 96th Street in the first place.
But in large sections of the Upper West Side, drivers are routinely permitted to double park their cars on the opposite side of the street as it's being cleaned. Many leave notes on their dashboards with their telephone numbers in case the owners of the boxed-in cars want to leave.
Drivers can then go home to their families, jobs, or run errands, as long as they return an hour and a half later to re-park their cars on the newly cleaned side of the street.
"It's amazing," Johnson said. "It's a perfect system."
Psychologist Bob Strauss, who has lived on his Upper West Side block for nearly six years, agreed.
"It would be very unfair if you couldn't double park. Where would you go?" he asked, confused. "You'd have to drive around the neighborhood for a long time."
But not everyone approves of the special treatment.
"It's not fair at all," said George Rodriguez, 40, who frequently parks on the Upper East Side, where double-parking laws are strictly enforced.
Rodriguez, a retired police officer who was born and raised in Washington Heights, said the rules should be the same for everybody.
"It should be the same. It's one city," Rodriguez said after finally finding a parking spot on the Upper East Side after circling for an hour.
Double parking is permitted on certain residential and one-way blocks in Washington Heights, sources said.
Upper Manhattan City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who has introduced legislation that would allow all residents to legally park on the restricted side of the street once the street sweeper has passed by, agreed.
Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20101115/upper-west-side/upper-west-side-residents-allowed-double-park-during-street-cleaning#ixzz15MzbPDEC
Upper West Side Residents Allowed to Double Park During Street Cleaning - DNAinfo.com.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
African-American News - November 14, 2010
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Little church with spirit fights decay (Montreal Gazette) Union United Church, led by Rev. Emmanuel Ofori, is launching a fundraising campaign to help it rebuild.
African-American News - November 14, 2010
Pam Foreman's kindergarten report card made history. Enlarge The Times-Picayune U.S. Deputy Marshals escort six-year-old Ruby Bridges from William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, La., in Nov.
About 19,000 U.S. Marines who trained at Montford Point at Camp Lejeune over a seven-year period have an important place in history.
Clyburn will get House post, avoiding Democratic spat (Myrtle Beach Online)
Speaker Nancy Pelosi will create a new leadership post for Rep. Jim Clyburn as Democrats prepare to cede control of the House of Representatives to Republicans in January. Detroit Branch NAACP suspended over debt to national headquarters (Detroit Free Press)
The Detroit Branch NAACP, one of the oldest and largest chapters in the national civil rights organization, has been suspended for failing to turn over money to the national headquarters, the Free Press has learned. Heritage Days: SC Gullahs celebrate culture (Clover Herald)
Discovering that her great-grandfather was a steamboat captain and connecting her family to historic Tombee Plantation are some of the more exciting things Rosalyn Browne has learned through her genealogical research. Jim Pappas accused of making racial slur By Gregory Childress gchildress@heraldsun.com; 419-6645 Chapel Hill -- Jim Pappas, the athletic director and basketball coach at Cedar Ridge High School, has been suspended with pay pending the outcome of an investigation into charges that he made a racially offensive remark to a 15-year-old student.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Fw: Here is Monty Alexander
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Here is Monty Alexander,
The great Jamaican pianist,
At the Montreax Jazz Festival,
With his trio in 1976.
They are playing "Satin Doll."
- Lester Perkins
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Please share Jazz on the Tube with your
Friends and colleagues.
If they like jazz, they're going to love this.
================================
Friday, November 12, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Shall We Call Ourselves 'African American'?
Shall We Call Ourselves 'African American'?
Thursday, 11 November 2010 01:09
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
Advocates for the term "African American" (with or with a hyphen) are the most vocal and object in the strongest terms and reasons as to why the term "Black American" is not proper for "What Shall We Call Ourselves?"
First, they say it is disrespectful and disempowering to label the cultural identity of any person by use of a single homogenous color, particularly if this label is historically connected with negative, social and cultural connotations. To uphold the color coding system of ethnicity maintains an offensive hierarchical system of a perceived cultural supremacy and dominance.
Second, historically, the miscellaneous use of the label ‘Black’ reflects its contemporary use as a means to denote a specific socio-cultural and political context.
Third, "Black" is recognized as a colloquial term fashioned as a reactionary concept to derogatory racial epithets in the 1960’s. Fourth, just as "colored" and "negro" were acceptable terms of reference in their time, 'black' must also be recognized for the socially loaded term that it is--i.e. being linked to the words negro, negre, nigra and the highly offensive "N"-word.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
'The Scottsboro Boys' Actors Walk a Very Fine Line - NYTimes.com
Hard Steps to Walk a Fine Line in ‘Scottsboro’
By PATRICIA COHEN
In the new Broadway musical “The Scottsboro Boys,” a black actor plays the part of Samuel Leibowitz, a white Jewish lawyer from New York who defends nine African-American youths wrongly imprisoned for raping two white women in the Alabama town Scottsboro in 1931.
That would be tricky enough if the script played it straight. It doesn’t.
The actor, Forrest McClendon, is playing an actor playing the lawyer. Specifically, he portrays a comic fixture of old-time minstrel shows, here called Mister Tambo, who delivers lines and lyrics in a broadly caricatured style.
The idea is to use the minstrel-show tradition, so clearly offensive to modern sensibilities, to drive home the horror of one of American history’s most shameful episodes of racial injustice. And Mr. McClendon doesn’t mind saying this was one very fraught assignment.
“It was absolutely a very, very fine line to walk,” he explained, as he sat with some of his fellow cast members in the lower lobby of the Lyceum Theater before a recent performance.
The challenge was a result of a bold decision by the musical’s white creators, John Kander and Fred Ebb (who died in 2004) — the celebrated authors of “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” blockbuster hits also with a subversive strain — to use provocative, buffoonish and theatrically extreme language to dramatize a disturbing chapter in American history.
For the African-American actors, however, it means inhabiting roles that in their original incarnations — when minstrel shows constituted the most popular form of live entertainment in 19th-century America — were meant to debase blacks and sentimentalize slavery.
At the same time, the cast must bring the audience members along for the ride, making them comfortable enough to laugh at cartoonish portrayals of blustering white sheriffs, prancing Southern belles and shuffling former slaves while connecting to the anguish of lives ruined by bigotry.
Mr. McClendon said he started by treating Leibowitz as realistically as possible. “I literally prepared an astrological chart for him to really just do everything that I could to channel his real spirit,” he said with a laugh. Then, selecting details garnered from a filmed interview with Leibowitz’s son, Mr. McClendon took the character to a ridiculous extreme.
“His own son talked about how quick he was with a one-liner, how he had this baritone voice he would use to just chilling effect,” Mr. McClendon said. “I used certain aspects of his speaking voice with a little bit of Cagney and a little bit of Jolson.”
When trying out different characterizations, he said he was encouraged when Mr. Kander told him: “You cannot go too far. Just go. ”
Mr. McClendon, like J. C. Montgomery, his understudy, had played the minstrel before as part of different theatrical productions about the American songwriter Stephen Foster. Mr. McClendon also appeared in blackface as the master of ceremonies during a production of “The Threepenny Opera.” In his eyes a subversive thread ran through the minstrel tradition.
By contrast, Joshua Henry, who stars as one of the boys, Haywood Patterson, was initially shocked by it.
“Just hearing it was a minstrel show kind of repelled me immediately,” Mr. Henry said. After reading the script, however, he understood that the creative team, which included the Tony-winning director Susan Stroman and the librettist David Thompson, were using it to underscore the era’s racism: “The boys at the end take control of the story and the way that it’s told.”
Patterson is the moral center of the show, refusing to admit falsely to a crime even to obtain his freedom, and his part is the most naturalistic. There is one scene during the first of a series of trials, though, when Patterson adopts the shucking, submissive stance expected by the white judge and prosecutors in an attempt to persuade them that he is telling the truth.
“I hated it,” Mr. Henry said, recalling the early rehearsals. “It made my skin crawl.” But he found it true to the way Patterson described his own experiences in a 1950 book. “If he needed something, a roll of toilet paper, he would have to raise his voice up a little bit and say, ‘Yessir boss, yessir boss,’ and put on a big smile,” Mr. Henry said.
“That was a very foreign feeling to give over to 100 percent,” he added. “It is probably one of the hardest sections of the show, even now.”
The youngest cast member, Jeremy Gumbs, 12, was probably more puzzled than disturbed by the minstrel form. He admits that even after reading the script and score a couple of times, “I still didn’t understand it.” Now, he said, he sees it as a useful device for weaving horrifying historical details into the story line. His character, Eugene Williams, just shy of his 13th birthday when he was arrested, was forced to sleep near the electric chair. His nightmares are brought to life onstage in a tap-dance number titled “Electric Chair” that mixes the comic and the grotesque.
Colman Domingo, who plays Mr. Bones, the sheriff and an assortment of other roles, had no experience with minstrelsy, but said all he needed to hear was that Mr. Kander, Mr. Ebb and Ms. Stroman were involved. “I’m so drawn to unconventional and daring storytelling,” said Mr. Domingo, who has appeared in “Passing Strange,” “Chicago” and “Well” on Broadway.
Like the other cast members, Mr. Domingo did research and watched clips from minstrel shows, from which he occasionally borrowed.
Both the creators and actors worked hard at finding the right tone for each character. For the sadistic sheriff, he said, Ms. Stroman told him to experiment first with playing the character completely realistically (“that threw the show off balance”) to an over-the-top spoof (“that would have colored it too brightly”).
Later, Mr. Domingo, as the prosecuting lawyer, sings a song based on an actual statement made by the Attorney General to the jury: “Is justice in this case going to be bought and sold in Alabama with Jew money from New York?”
“The biggest question I had was how ‘Jew money’ would land in New York,” Mr. Domingo said.
He remembers that when the musical first ran Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater, a woman booed him; there have been walkouts on Broadway since the show’s opening. Last week a writer in The Amsterdam News said she was “offended” and “unamused” by the show. “Off-color songs were being sung and offensive lines said as actors acted like buffoons,” she wrote. And this past Saturday a small group of protesters, most of whom had not seen the musical, picketed the Lyceum.
Theatergoers do receive an insert in their Playbills that recounts the history of the Scottsboro incident and describes the minstrel tradition. Still, Mr. Domingo said he understood how some people might initially be thrown off balance in the first minutes of the show. He remembers Mr. Kander telling him how his “Cabaret” team ended up cutting a derogatory reference to Jews in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” after out-of-town audiences reacted negatively in 1966. (The full lyrics were restored in the 1972 movie and subsequent revivals.)
Audience members at “The Scottsboro Boys” are sometimes unsure how to respond to the buffoonery, Mr. Domingo said. From his perch onstage, he said, the show goes over best when there is a more even mix of black and white audience members.
“It becomes easier,” he said, “for people to understand they can actually laugh.”
'The Scottsboro Boys' Actors Walk a Very Fine Line - NYTimes.com.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Brazilian Blowout hair treatment may be hazardous to health | 7online.com
Hair relaxing solution may pose dangers
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Carolina Leid
More: Bio, Facebook, News Team
NEW YORK (WABC) -- The latest sensation in hair care is the so-called Brazilian hair-relaxing treatments, but there appear to be potential dangers.
The process of converting frizzy or kinky hair into smooth locks produces significant fumes. It is believed the chemical reactions are triggered when the solution is heated during ironing and blow-drying the hair, necessary steps in the use of the product.
Complaints of nosebleeds, breathing problems and eye irritation led to lab tests by the occupational health agency in Oregon, which found significant levels of formaldehyde in Brazilian Blowout last month.
The hair-smoothing solution is marketed as a "formaldehyde-free" product, and an alternative to chemical straightening products. Formaldehyde is a recognized carcinogen if it is present at high levels. The makers of Brazilian Blowout have questioned the lab test results.
But, Canada's health department also found up to 12 percent formaldehyde and warned people to stop using it. They cited complaints from consumers of "burning eyes, nose, and throat, breathing difficulties and one report of hair loss associated with use of the product." The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is now working with state and local authorities to determine if these hair products are safe.
The FDA says its investigation began after it received complaints from consumers and salons associated with the use of Brazilian Blowout.
Those complaints included breathing difficulties, headaches, eye irritation, rashes and fainting.
You can find more information on the FDA's website at https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/medwatch.
To report problems to the FDA, you can fill out a Medwatch form online at www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/medwatch or call 1-800-332-1088 to request a reporting form by mail.
(Copyright ©2010 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)
Brazilian Blowout hair treatment may be hazardous to health | 7online.com.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Crib Sheet - The 10 Things to Talk About This Weekend - NYTimes.com
November 3, 2010
The 10 Things to Talk About This Weekend
By HENRY ALFORD
1. Google may have sent as many as 700,000 people to the wrong polling places. “Did you mean: polo places?”
2. John Boehner cries. He’s not the only one.
3. Katrina Is Just Another Woman’s Name: George W. Bush says the all-time low of his presidency was Kanye West saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
4. That overripe, fruity smell in the wind. The end of fresh fig season, or previews for the movie “Burlesque” with Cher and Christina Aguilera?
5. “I Remember Nothing,” a new essay collection from the actress Denise Richards..
6. Giants win World Series. San Francisco’s sourdough bread bowls runneth over.
7. Pranksters hijack Sarah Palin’s and Glenn Beck’s Facebook pages. The giveaway was all the correct grammar.
8. How to throw a party, November 2010 edition: 10 cases Four Loko alcoholic energy drink + 1 “Whip My Hair” video
9. The spectral, doomy Mary Matalin should guest-star on “Glee” as Sue Sylvester’s Endora.
10. The rent. It’s still too damn high.
Crib Sheet - The 10 Things to Talk About This Weekend - NYTimes.com.
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