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July 31, 2003
Poetry
Roundtable Participants 
This is the first of a series of Drylongso Roundtable Discussions organized in an effort to critically examine current issues and events. Transcripts from our distinguished panelists appear below. Just who are our panelists? What are their life experiences? Take a look.
July 30, 2003
Fnord
Race Plays Role in New Drug Trials "'I think it's just bizarre, marketing a drug just to people who are black. The scientific evidence supporting the notion that there's a differential response in race is weak or nonexistent,' said Richard A. Cooper, chairman of the preventive medicine and epidemiology department at Loyola University in Illinois, who has written extensively about race and medicine." Nonetheless, the article is sympathetic to the idea of race-based medicines. Washington Post
Fnord
Dusty Baker Has Nature on His Side "Note that sprinters of West African ancestry, including African-Americans, hold 494 of the top 500 100-meter times. Their genetically prescribed morphology and physiology is a disaster for endurance events--there are almost no elite endurance runners of West African ancestry--but a goldmine for sprinting and jumping. Allowing for individual variation, Snyder was intuitively right." Jon Entine has books to sell. Opinion Journal
July 29, 2003
Political Animal
Beautiful young shock troops for Bush "Chen seemed so mild and centrist that at one point I called him a closet Democrat. Taken aback, he replied: 'How am I a closet Democrat? I'm racist, I love guns and I hate welfare.'
He wasn't kidding. 'I'm racist against anybody who doesn't work for a living,' said Chen, whose family comes from Taiwan. 'We're in Washington D.C. You can guess who that is.' He's no fan of religion, but says he's less bothered about paying tax dollars to faith-based programs than to 'crack whores who have eight kids because it's easier than working.'" Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad. Salon
July 26, 2003
Political Animal
Sword of Honour "That is not to say that everything is as it was. In the case of the American South, for instance, honour was once based on race. What chiefly conferred worth on a white man, be he rich or poor, was the fact that he was neither black nor female. Things now are rather different. There is a ‘New South’, the rich, modern, urban, forward-looking society one discovers in contemporary Atlanta. Time has moved on. But as the Michigan experiments demonstrated, southerners retain two vital aspects of the old honour system: a high degree of sensitivity to insults and a tendency to respond with violence and aggression. This has important consequences today, as it did in America’s past. Indeed, the parallels between the present and the Civil War era are very striking, and may lead one to believe that despite the growth of the New South not so very much has changed."
and
"In a much discussed recent book, Walter Russell Mead identifies four strands of American foreign policy: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian. Jacksonians follow the ideas of President Andrew Jackson, the archetype of ante-bellum, aggressive southern honour, who fought more than a dozen duels. They see the pursuit of national honour as the prime purpose of policy. Right now, Jacksonianism reigns triumphant in the halls of American power. The South’s political influence has possibly never been greater. It was Al Gore’s failure to win a single state in the old Confederacy that lost him the presidency, and George Bush Sr’s nemesis came in the form of Ross Perot, a Texan who in 1953 almost singlehandedly devised the current Honour Code of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis." The Spectator
July 15, 2003
Fiction
Pop American Teen Idol Jasmine Ambrosia Marguerite Walker wants to be a star, and she knows just the way to do it. Next week, Jasmine plans on losing her virginity over the Internet to one of three lucky bachelors who have already been pre-selected by the more than 15 million weekly visitors to her website (www.Jasmineslostcherry.com). For ten dollars, payable by MasterCard or Visa, visitors can vote for Dyrell Jefferson, the all-American football player, Rodney Williams, the seventeen year old Harvard medical school graduate, or Bloodie Killa, the glamorous bad boy rapper of F U Hard Records. For an additional twenty dollars, visitors can decide other less essential elements of the rendezvous—the type of condom to be used (ribbed, flavored, etc.), bed sheets (silk or satin), music, and lighting (candlelight is Jasmine’s choice, but she knows it will lose to florescent because the people, of course, want to see as much as possible).
Fiction
The Gender Warriors In every mail list or usenet group on the internet, there are people who see relationships as a War. Battles for Equality and/or Respect that must be waged if the state of Black relationships is to remain honest. It is the purpose of these self-appointed warriors to insure that members of their gender “Keep It Real.”
Fiction
Evolution of War Mine…MINE…MY TEDDY!
(Stomp, cry, yell)
Poetry
Least Expected ten years full of wanting
of waiting. . .
his eyes a grace
finally turn to me
Poetry
Afroam Woman Most of y’all
motherfuckers
who ain’t really
motherfuckers
become
motherfuckers
when you don’t pucker up
to say shit.
Poetry
Her Wired Black Body Whether looking up a site, checking my email, or visiting some of my favorite African American online haunts I cautiously keep an eye out for language and images that threaten my definition as an African American woman.
Poetry
360 Degrees of Love Mickey and Sylvia told us back in 1956 with their hit record, that “Love Is Strange”. Not only is it strange, it’s also predictable.
Poetry
NO! for Aishah Shahidah Simmons Will us black boys ever learn that power
can’t be pulled from the meat of our third leg
like the last taste of malt liquor sucked from the
bottom of a bottle? ...
Poetry
GUARDIAN OF THE FLAME: Big Chief Donald Harrison It was a summer day in December. The sky was high, powder blue with cotton clouds. The scorching sun bounced off the white of the church building facade. Coming around the corner, brother man pulled (and sometimes pushed) a blue shopping cart that held a yellow fifty gallon trash can with an ice pick stuck on the top perimeter of the plastic container. Dude had a fist full of dollar bills in his left hand. I knew what he was doing. He was selling beer.
Poetry
Imagining a Gender Neutral Black Male/Female Relationship Not too long ago, many lauded the great equalizing affects of the Internet. In these praises proponents pointed to the anonymous nature of the virtual identity, in which a non-ethnic specific or non-gender specific cybername enables an Internet user to mask his or her color, and therefore ethnicity, or gender. And while on many levels, cyberspace does democratize communication it truly depends on the context. Because of this, cyberspace enables a new paradigm for exploring the social construct of black male/female relationships. Instead of destructive and non-communicative relationships, cyberspace enables black men and women to forge relationships via new pathways.
July 6, 2003
Review
The CEO and the Lynch Mob “There are sheets draped over framed paintings to protect them from the light. Parks follows as I amble from frame to frame, then, at my request, she lifts the cotton from a sheet of glass, like drawing a curtain, revealing a Western Union telegram from Columbia University dated 2002 and addressed to Parks. ‘Congratulations,’ it says. ‘You have just won the Pulitzer Prize.’” LA Weekly
July 5, 2003
Political Animal
Mugging Frederick Douglass “Thomas figures if he can get people to believe that unassailable black heroes would smile upon his assault on black people, he will not be arrested as the cowardly black hitman for organized racism. Organized racism, led by conservative think tanks and right-wing politicians, has been trying this for over a decade, trying to kill affirmative action by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 line about not judging people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. They always dump the King that said near the end of his life, ‘America is deeply racist, and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially … White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.’” Boston Globe
Political Animal
Beyond Ghetto Fabulous “When rap and hip-hop developed into the dominant youth culture movement in the ’90s, its idols began to become absorbed by the corporate world, and ghetto fabulous took on a dark undercurrent. ‘With the loss of irony, ghetto fabulous surrendered itself to the capitalist system and sacrificed its radical voice at the altar of Mammon,’ says Glenn Belverio, former New York editor of the Paris-based fashion bible Dutch magazine. ‘Now it’s just slavery to logos coming out of shapely assholes. It doesn’t advance the cause of improved race relations or class differences — it actually widens the class gap. Do these wealthy rappers help their brothers and sisters living in poverty? In the last few years ghetto fab has been all about being selfish, “I gots mine, and I don’t care about you.”’” LA Weekly
Political Animal
The price of a holiday fling "She says it is the attention, more than the sex, that she enjoys. 'I wondered what it would be like to be with a Jamaican man. The notion I have of them is that they love English women. I thought I'd be popular and accepted, but I had no idea that you really could have the pick of the bunch. They're around you like bees around a honey pot.'" Guardian Unlimited
Political Animal
Black Medical Schools Struggle To Compete "At Howard, a scathing internal report in 1990 sharply criticized the faculty at the medical school for lack of participation in medical research. According to accounts published in the Washington Post, while the study praised teachers for their dedication, it also said the faculty was 'totally out of touch with the latest trends in teaching equipment, technology and methods.' The students were criticized as being below par." Hartford Courant