Wednesday 23 May 2012
“Authentic” is a word that we hear a lot now, as in being an “authentic” reproduction of a chair or table, something that looks like the original but you know is not. Every Friday night for most of the year the jazz venue Jazz966 is not just “authentic”, it is the thing itself– a...
Several hundred marchers came from Brownsville to Wall Street last Saturday to protest the result of economic inequities and to speak on the many connections between the targets of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the situation of African-Americans. Not forgotten is that the 1% got to be the 1% by first stealing the...
The issues of home foreclosures and homes in jeopardy as well as the co-location of charter schools into “underused” public school buildings, are both rooted in the business models of hedge funds earning hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars a year. The bundling, leveraging and profit-taking from a base of home mortgages, has...
If we take President Obama at his word when he challenged the Congressional Black Caucus to press on for fairness, then the Occupy Wall Street protests taking place across the country are exactly what the president is asking for and needs, a mass movement against financial and political institutions that behave as self-imagined kings...
On the streets, in churches and in homes, vigils were held waiting on the slow-motion lynching that was the killing of Troy Anthony Davis by the state of Georgia. After the execution hour had passed we learned of a last appeal to the Supreme Court. Three hours later we were told that the Justices...
The encounter that initiated the charge of rape by Guinea-born hotel maid Naffisatau Diallo against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss Kahn, the subsequent dropping of the charges by District Attorney Cy Vance and the opportunism of NATO in its attack on oil-rich Libya, are all part of the European lustful and proprietary...
When we look at President Barack Obama, it is easy to forget that he does not share the psycho-social heritage of the descendents of chattel slavery and that he was raised by white folks. And while there is nothing wrong with that, his mother was an extraordinary woman herself, it does mean that his...
President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously told A. Philip Randolph, president of the Sleeping Car Porters union, that he agreed with Randolph on many thoughts he had about what steps the president should take, but he told him, “You have to make me do it.” President Barack Obama is in the same office and if...
Expressions such as, “He’s his own worst enemy,” have their basis in the wonders of the human mind and its ability to hide reality and self-awareness. The Transformational Leadership Summit at Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration is an ambitious and creative plan to jump-start positive change in the community by first jump-starting positive change in individuals by...
Reverend Clemson Brown stopped by the other day and asked us out to the car with something to show. The items were rusted relics of the slave era, that 340 years that Africans in the Americas were held as property with implements like what Rev. Brown had for us. He gave me the shackles...
