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December 10, 2001
Beef-a-Real
BET chief makes no apologies for picking profits over social agenda 
"What so ticked off the council is that Johnson made it clear, as he has since the beginning of BET two decades ago, that his first priority is profits, without regard to the betterment of a race of people. Johnson has always dismissed calls for 'meaningful entertainment' as the naivete of people who don't know how the real world works, saying if he handed over the controls to them, BET would be doomed." I had a conversation with a Greek on a list who said they'd need to see evidence before they'd boycott BET. Two others on the list were upset that the NPHC aired black folks' "dirty laundry" in public. In the meantime it's okay to wave thong thongthongthongs weekday afternoons? When I think of Bob Johnson I am reminded of Montgomery Burns from the Simpsons. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad. Star-Telegram
Beef-a-Real
Torn From the Land "Properties taken from blacks were often small - a 40-acre farm, a general store, a modest house. But the losses were devastating to families struggling to overcome the legacy of slavery. In the agrarian South, landownership was the ladder to respect and prosperity - the means to building economic security and passing wealth on to the next generation. When black families lost their land, they lost all of this." Associated Press
Political Animal
Voice Recognition "In two separate studies, Stanford University linguistics professor John Baugh showed that most Americans can identify race with incredible accuracy--sometimes with help of only a single word, a word most Americans use every day." ABC World News Tonight
December 2, 2001
Music
Western Philosophy "To talk about race in America is to talk about death. . . . The paradox of race relations in American civilization . . . is that black people have been on intimate relations with death in a civilization that is death-dodging, death-ducking and death-denying. That can drive you crazy . . . black folk dealing with forms of death. Slavery: social death. No legal status. No social status. No public value on the body which can be bought and sold. Jim Crow: civic death. No rights. No respect. And then psychic death. Every authority in the culture?from Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, and professors of psychology to journalists and scientists?all agreeing that [blacks] were less than human, that they had the wrong hips and lips and noses and hair texture and skin pigmentation, and that they ought to hate themselves because they're hated by a people who are better than them?namely white folk. Psychic death. How do you deal with that in a black body and be bombarded every day, every day, every day of your life?" OC Weekly
Books
The Black American Tragedy "There hadn't been anything in African-American literature to match the power of the slave narratives, it seemed, until Richard Wright published his collection of four long stories about racial violence in the South, Uncle Tom's Children (1938). In an autobiographical sketch that serves as a preface to the 1940 edition, Wright describes how in 1927, when he was eighteen years old, he found the courage to ask a white man at the place where he then worked if he could use his library card. As a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, the man was perhaps sympathetic to a black youth wanting to visit the segregated public library. Armed with a library card, Wright penned a note that read, 'Please let this nigger boy have the following books,' and signed the white man's name. Wright had not heard of the slave narratives any more than the slaves who could read and write had likely heard of Prometheus. However, like the fugitive slaves whose literacy was their freedom, Wright dared to reenact the theft of fire." New York Review of Books
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The Most Biased Name in News: Fox News Channel's extraordinary right-wing tilt "Fox News Channel wraps itself in slogans of journalistic objectivity like 'Fair and balanced' and 'We report, you decide,' but a new FAIR report finds a dramatic right-wing tilt in the network's news. Described by fellow Bush aide Lee Atwater as having 'two speeds--attack and destroy,' Ailes [Fox's ounder and president] once jocularly told a Time reporter (8/22/88): 'The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.' Later, as a producer for Rush Limbaugh's short-lived TV show, he was fond of calling Bill Clinton the 'hippie president' and lashing out at 'liberal bigots' (Washington Times, 5/11/93). It is these two sensibilities above all--right-wing talk radio and below-the-belt political campaigning--that Ailes brought with him to Fox, and his stamp is evident in all aspects of the network's programming." Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
Sports
Black Coaches: Still Not in the Game "'At a lot of these schools, the alumni and boosters are controlling the funds for these programs,' said Parker. 'If you control the money you have major influence on those decisions. Division I football is a big money business and when you disrupt people's comfort zones you disrupt people's money flows.'" AlterNet.org
Sports
Muhammad Speaks "But to blame our misunderstanding of Islam on Osama bin Laden alone is merely a convenience, and a self-exonerating one at that. He gives us a good excuse. He lets us forget that the current perception of Islam as not just alien but specifically anti-American has been with us for some time. It can be traced back decades before last month's attacks, and its origins are not what might be expected. As much as such things can be identified with a single event, the perception of Islam as a force opposed to all that Americans value was born one day in 1964, with the simple act of a young man publicly professing his beliefs. His name was Cassius Clay -- the man who would be Muhammad Ali." Killing the Buddha
Political Animal
The Reverend and The Movement "My mother reads it weekly and my brother works in the plant that prints them. There is something cosmic about Reverend Jesse Jackson, for whom I used to work, being in the same rag that regularly reports on space aliens. Now, every time I think of Reverend, Diana Ross's Love Child plays in my head. And I have gotten enough email cartoons. The one with Reverend's head (with a ponytail) on a little girl's body was low down-- as low down as the state of black and progressive politics. And that should be our real concern." CounterPunch
Political Animal
Race and the Drug War "In all its hypocrisy and cruelty the drug war drags on because it serves an important repressive function that no state is eager to abandon. If its real, as opposed to its proclaimed purpose is recognized, the drug war "works." And that purpose has never been the halting of production, shipment and consumption of drugs. Take a look at the history of drug wars over the past 150 years. These drug wars are either openly avowed or tacit enterprises that expand the drug trade, or they are pretexts for social and political repression." CounterPunch
Political Animal
Executive Order No. 9066 "On February 19, 1942, a 'day of infamy' as far as the Constitution is concerned, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which was the instrument by which just over 120,000 persons, two-thirds of them American citizens, were confined in concentration camps on American soil, in some cases for nearly four years. Yet the document itself is strangely reticent. It mentions no ethnic or racial group by name, nor does it specify place. President Roosevelt delegated to the Secretary of War and to 'the Military Commanders whom he may . . . designate' the authority to name 'military areas' from which 'any or all persons may be excluded' and indicated that transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations' may be provided for such persons 'until other arrangements are made.' All this was in the name of the 'successful prosecution of the war,' which lawyers later shortened to 'military necessity.'" Behold! History repeats itself. Modern American Poetry, UIUC
Political Animal
Waiting for the barbarians "The response of the empire is to regard the attackers as the ultimate Other. ('Barbarian', comes from an ancient Greek anecdote, that those who couldn't speak Greek just uttered strange sounds - "bar bar" - that didn't amount to a real language.) In the main, the Romans had no understanding of non civilisation: of different values, nomadic ways of life. Similarly, America views Islamic terrorism as completely irrational; there is no understanding of the political context of this activity, a context of American military attack on, or crippling economic sanctions against, a host of Arab nations - with unilateral support for Israel constituting the central, running sore." Guardian Unlimited
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Private Justice San Francisco Chronicle
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A Coming-Out Party "We came out swinging, yes we did. Raised as Muslim girls, wrapped in Muslim clothing from head to foot, there was only one way to come out, and that was swinging." drylongso.com
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Booty Politics "Picture this common sidewalk scene: A group of Jamaican guys walk by a babe in a tight, tight dress, accentuating the rolls o' fat on her stomach. Always, someone'll say, 'Mmm. Nice!'" Well, I suppose it beats getting ignored altogether.... Adventure Divas
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The Roots of Muslim Rage "For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third -- the last straw -- was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties." The Atlantic
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More unequal than others in the US "It takes money to make money. Whites not only own more, they earn more than African-Americans - a lot more. Economists estimate that 50% to 80% of lifetime wealth accumulation results from gifts from past generations of relatives: a down payment on a first home, a free college education, a bequest from a parent." Monde Diplomatique
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And Now, the Good News About Smallpox "More recent data supports the Liverpool experience. In a 1996 study published in the Journal of Virology, a group led by Francis Ennis at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center pulled immune cells out of people who had received the smallpox vaccine decades before. When they tickled these cells to see whether they remembered the lesson the vaccine had taught them, they found that 'immunity can persist for up to 50 years after immunization against smallpox.'" Slate.com
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This Is a Religious War "This is the voice of fundamentalism. Faith cannot exist alone in a single person. Indeed, faith needs others for it to survive -- and the more complete the culture of faith, the wider it is, and the more total its infiltration of the world, the better. It is hard for us to wrap our minds around this today, but it is quite clear from the accounts of the Inquisition and, indeed, of the religious wars that continued to rage in Europe for nearly three centuries, that many of the fanatics who burned human beings at the stake were acting out of what they genuinely thought were the best interests of the victims. ... " Registration Required. New York Times
Site Seeing
Seeing The Horror Contents Page "With the country in mourning, photographers on the front lines quietly produced some of the most astonishing images the world has ever seen; astonishing in part because of the nature of the tragedy; in part because of the speed of dissemination, in part because photographers were eyewitnesses to events as they unfolded, not only as after-the-fact documentarians. Two photographers lost their lives, others faced life threatening injuries and many, perhaps not surprisingly, have experienced emotional trauma." Extensive set of pictures from the WTC collapse. The Digital Journalist
Site Seeing
All Look Same Here's a test to see if you can distinguish between Chinese, Japanese and Korean ethnicities. Beware, the editor took it with a Chinese co-worker and only scored a nine. Make sure to read the background for the site. alllooksame.com
Site Seeing
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit "Unseen to the eye, during that hazy summer, immense economic, social and political forces, that had been set in motion years prior, were to render large sections of the city and its industrial structures into ruination. Could one be instantly transported from that time forward twenty year it would appear as if large areas of the city had been carpet bombed leaving behind huge hulking ruins -- ruins larger and more extensive than those I found in my travels to Zimbabwe, El Tajin, Ephesus, Athens, or Rome."Check out Soulful Detroit for a pictorial tour of Motown and Blues landmarks. Nice site. DetroitYes.com
Site Seeing
The "Segregation Tax": The Cost of Racial Segregation to Black Homeowners "This paper finds that neighborhood segregation hurts the home values of black homeowners, thus undermining the wealth-creating potential of homeownership." Brookings Institute
Site Seeing
Safety in the Skies "How far can airline safety go? '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.)...'" gladwell dot com
Interview
Internal Constraints: John McWhorter Interviewed by Cathy Young and Michael W. Lynch "The event I attended today for Empower America is actually the only thing I've done where I was the only black. This event was definitely Token Black City. I don?t have any ambivalence about it. If conservatives need to show their message is not anti-black, and I believe very often it isn't, and if one way they want to show that is by having a black person be in their company, I don't consider that to be discrimination. 'Token black' is a term that we've heard so long that we don't always think about the meaning anymore. It's not that they don't want me there. It's not that they don't agree with what I'm saying. It's that they want to show that they are not anti-black. And if they are not, then I consider myself to be doing a service by appearing." Reason.com
Poetry
The First Time/I Made Love/To A Woman I could only try to love her./I knew all the right places; drylongso.com
Poetry
FANTASY: For Beth in my dreams you will not/resist me not run or walk simply/away from my advances drylongso.com
Poetry
Conjugal Visit The ghost of my hand glimmers up muscles on your open thighs. drylongso.com
Poetry
T H I R S T Caramel mountains rise majestically over a dark river/Flowing southward to its steamy treasure/I dive back into the lake drylongso.com
Poetry
S C O O P S Creamy, milky, sexy, sweet/Just the dish to beat the heat/No preservatives, all natural flavor/31 varieties for my senses to savor drylongso.com
Fiction
To Those That Wait He could hear her eagerness. His lips moved through the soft jungle of hair framing her treasure. He was glad she paid attention to the upkeep. drylongso.com