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January 22, 2002
Beef-a-Real
Criticizing Cornel 
"Further, criticizing West in terms that suggest he lacks scholarly seriousness is just silly. Whatever else one might say about his work, that it is wrong or misguided, to suggest it lacks seriousness or scholarly integrity is dumb. TNR clearly -- if Leon Wieseltier's attack in TNR on West is any indication -- hates West and his politics, just as clearly, in fact, as West is hated by the National Review and Pat Buchanan crowd. And yet making the case that he's not serious about scholarship is damnably hard." MonkeyFist.com
January 21, 2002
Books
The N word "Crouch said that black vernacular derives its richness in relation to traditional English and that its invention and humor could only be appreciated by someone who knows what it's riffing on to begin with. (That's an appropriate argument coming from someone who's written so well about jazz. It's like saying you have to know 'Someday My Prince Will Come' or 'My Favorite Things' to appreciate the changes Miles Davis and John Coltrane wrought on them.) And 'nigger' is part of that heritage; the comedy of Richard Pryor, to cite one example, would be unthinkable without it. The power of 'Nigger' is that Kennedy writes fully of the word, neither condemning its every use nor fantasizing that it can ever become solely a means of empowerment. The word 'nigger,' in all its uses, will always be with us. The book 'Nigger,' for the pleasures of its clarity of thought and prose, deserves to be, too." Salon.com
Political Animal
Glenn Loury's About Face "'No, Shelby and I didn't agree,' Loury says now. 'I was always aware that, whatever I thought about race, I'm still black. Shelby's position. . . .' Loury starts to laugh. 'I was about to say, Shelby's position was that we had to completely transcend race, though I can imagine saying those words, too. But my heart wasn't in them, whereas he really meant it. How could it have been otherwise? His mother was a white woman. His wife is a white woman. When he looked at his own children's racial identity and wondered about an oppressive world that would say to those children, "Choose sides" -- a dilemma I'd never faced -- Shelby's angle of vision was really quite different from my own. So in all honesty, it was I who betrayed him, not he who betrayed me.' The two men have not spoken since that conversation. (Steele declined to be interviewed for this article.)" New York Times
January 20, 2002
The Stacks
Beginning Library Research on African American Studies "This research site provides a reference guide on the historical and contemporary experiences of African Americans. It was composed by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Services and contains numerous subject categories, including race/identity, press, literature, and history. It lists African American Studies Encyclopedias and Handbooks, biographical sources, book annotations, videos, and links to other related sites. It is an excellent place to start for those conducting research in the field of African American Studies." University of Stanford
Site Seeing
True Pictures "As Frederick Douglass saw it, Morse and Daguerre were two facets of the same democratizing revolution, a revolution that was fast uniting the world in communication (Morse) and in image (Daguerre). For Douglass, this universalizing and democratizing revolution involved more than a breaking down of class divisions; it also meant attacking what we might call the optics of racism, that is, how white Europeans had come to see black Africans as a nearly separate species, a view which corrupted painted portraits: 'Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists. It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features. And the reason is obvious. Artists, like all other white persons, have adopted a theory respecting the distinctive features of Negro physiognomy.'" common-place.org
Site Seeing
Mirror of Race "The working thesis of the project is that these images from 1839-1876 demonstrate that race in this period (spanning approximately forty years; before, during, and after the Civil War) was a much more fluid and ambiguous concept than we may now assume. The project?s aim would be in part to discern and address how these images from the past dislocate our own present presumptions about the representation of race. Of course, some images may seem only to confirm our expectations of that era?s depictions. This tension is what 'The Mirror of Race' intends to explore." MirrorofRace.org
Political Animal
The Miscegenation Hoax "The pamphlet opened with an explanation of its title. 'Miscegenation' was a word that the author of the pamphlet had coined, and so he explained that he had invented it by combining two latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus (race). He intended the term to describe a blending, or mixing of different races, thus replacing the word 'amalgamation' which was used at that time to describe interracial unions, but which he felt did not sound scientific enough." MuseumofHoaxes.com
Political Animal
Fingerprint evidence "This is the first ruling of its kind in the American courts, although fingerprinting evidence has been open to such a challenge for years. In the 1990s America's Supreme Court deemed it the responsibility of federal judges to insist that expert witnesses testify about the reliability of a forensic-scientific method only if the method in question has been tested so that the range of its error rate is known. Fingerprinting experts have long claimed that their error rate in matching prints is zero?but without any supporting evidence." Economist.com
January 19, 2002
Sports
Don't wanna be like mike "Even with that admission of guilt, Jordan managed to deny any sort of problem. He told player friendly NBC reporter Ahmad Rashad 'If I had a [gambling] problem, I'd be starving. I'd be hocking this watch, my championship rings, I would sell my house. My kids would be starving. I do not have a problem. I enjoy gambling.' [4] For a man that made hundreds of millions of dollars to claim that 'if' he had a gambling problem, he'd be 'starving' is quite laughable. He went on to say to Rashad, 'My wife, if I had a problem, would have left me or certainly would have come and said seek help . . . my wife never said anything, and she's the chief of finances in our household.' It's obvious she must've known something since she's the one who originally paid Esquinas." Some insight perhaps on the collapse of the Jordan marriage. Disinformation.com
January 16, 2002
Beef-a-Real
Actor's plaque mistakenly honors King's assassin "Over a background featuring stamps of famous black Americans, including King, the erroneous plaque read, 'Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive.'" CNN
Interview
Not Just Any Day "I remember the riots [after Dr. King's assassination]. Those of us who grew up asyoung kids in the '60s [saw] all of our leaders killed, and there's a grief that we all carry. There is a collective consciousness about it." Written By
Political Animal
Huey Freeman: American Hero "But the cartoonist knew that the controversy he would stir in the weeks after September 11 would be different from any he had provoked before. What he did not know was that, unlike Trudeau in the Watergate era, he and his preteen characters would challenge a popular President and his policies with little cover from allies in the media or Congress. 'Sometimes, 'The Boondocks is not an alternative weekly strip. This is not a website strip. This is in the Washington Post,' he explains. 'It just seemed like nobody else was going to say the things that needed to be said in the places where I had an opportunity to raise questions about the war--in newspapers that millions of people read every day.'" The Nation
January 15, 2002
Political Animal
White America Misuses MLK Day "King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. He is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be ridiculed as a relic or buffoon." Alternet via Working for Change
January 14, 2002
Political Animal
Safety in the Skies "What we ought to do is beef up security for a small percentage of passengers deemed to be high-risk. The airlines already have in place a screening technology of this sort, known as CAPPS -- Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System. When a ticket is purchased on a domestic flight in the United States, the passenger is rated according to approximately forty pieces of data. Though the parameters are classified, they appear to include the traveller's address, credit history, and destination; whether he or she is travelling alone; whether the ticket was paid for in cash; how long before the departure it was bought; and whether it is one way. (A recent review by the Department of Justice affirmed that the criteria are not discriminatory on the basis of ethnicity.)..." Suuuuuuuuure it's not discriminatory. drylongso.com
Political Animal
The Secret of World Wide-Drug Prohibition "Even if crack was as bad as Republicans, Democrats, and the media said, it probably still could not have caused all the enduring problems they blamed on it. But the truth about crack cocaine is even more startling than the myths. Crack cocaine, "the most addicting drug known to man," turned out to be a drug that almost nobody liked to keep using. Many Americans tried crack, but very few people continued using it heavily for a long time. Mainly this is because most people cannot physically tolerate, much less enjoy, frequent encounters with crack's brutally brief, extreme up and down effects. Crack use in America is now so low that the U.S. government does not even include crack use in its press releases about the prevalence of drug use. Nor has crack become popular anywhere in the world. Heavy, long-term crack smoking appeals only to a small number of deeply troubled people, most of whom are also impoverished. Because frequent bingeing on the drug is so unappealing, there was never any danger of an epidemic of crack addiction spreading across America, especially not to middle-class families in the suburbs." HereInstead.com