Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

Nichole Anderson
Wedding That’s All About The Bride

A marriage is not a relationship with oneself.  It is a melding of two personalities, styles, families, groups of friends and lives.  In that same respect, the planning of a couple’s wedding should not be a task handled by one. 
Weddings have held the connotation of the ‘bride’s day’.  A bride often incorporates her dreams, excluding her husband-to-be, in the majority of the efforts.  Commonly, many men remain on the side-lines of wedding planning because they don’t expect their opinions to be taken seriously and they often don’t like the idea of handling so many of the “feminine” nuances of wedding plans.     Married since 1999, Anthony Robertiello shared his view, “As a guy it can be hard to speak up during the planning process.  You don’t believe anyone cares about what you think.  When Adrienne and I were planning our wedding, she included me and valued my opinion.  It made me feel good.”
The truth is that a wedding is an observance of the unity of the bride and groom.   Weddings celebrate couples.  Having a wedding that isn’t a joint venture is a big mistake and an unsound way to begin a marriage – a true partnership between equals.  But men and women inherently have different characteristics and interests.  Often, it is very difficult for an engaged couple to unite their individual methodologies and weave together their separate ideas and goals, likes and dislikes, customs and traditions.  But there is hope for the “his wedding, her wedding” divide – a wedding planner. 
   Upscale and celebrity couples reap countless rewards by hiring wedding planners to assist in blending their dreams, creating weddings full of glamour and elegant impressions.  But many other couples miss out, perceiving a wedding planner as an additional, enormous expense.  A competent wedding planner is an informed and experienced professional, trained in everything from wedding-style consultation to effective budget management.  And the costs incurred for a planner are often offset by the money saved from the expertise of professionals who have working knowledge of the best people to go to for value. 
There are so many things to coordinate before the wedding day – choosing photographers and videographers, coordinating the rehearsal banquet, arranging the honeymoon, renting big, tricky items like outdoor tents or exhibitions, selecting entertainment, setting up a carriage, trolley or limousine.  A wedding is one of life’s most momentous occasions, the success of which is hidden in myriad of minutiae.  And these time-consuming and intricate details should not be left to chance.   Having a qualified wedding planner to handle these types of tasks, most often, minimizes last-minute complications and provides more effective use of a couple’s funds and resources.
An experienced wedding planner is also skilled in handling such burdensome and difficult responsibilities as guest-list management; familial intricacies and obstacles; budgeting constraints and hospitality, entertainment and transportation negotiations.  Couples rely on these specialists to effectively bring together the many complexities of designing a truly collaborative wedding.  A competent firm will be able to blend the bride and groom’s ethnicity, heritage and traditions into the ceremony and reception.  They are able to incorporate a style and experience that characterizes the uniqueness of a bride and a groom – what makes them unique as individuals and what characterizes them as a couple.  And, not to forget, their ability of making the event romantic and memorable for the couple.
There is one more important and often unsaid value of having a wedding planner.  Prior to their marriage, it is crucial that a couple spend some time alone talking about things not related to their wedding and doing the things that they both enjoy. This is fundamental to paving the way for a more calm and smooth transition into marriage.  In the midst of all the emotional and physical preparations for their marriage and the many stresses of wedding arrangements, a couple needs to be inspired by those very things that brought about their decision to marry.  The time and energy saved on the wedding planning minutiae handled by a wedding planner, will inevitably help to enrich the couple’s relationship. 
Walter Payton once said, “We are stronger together than we are alone.”  Helen Keller avowed,  “Alone, we can do so little; together we can do so much.”  A marriage requires plenty of cooperation, understanding and compromise.  The preparation for a wedding is the perfect time to learn how.  Benefiting from the resources and skills of the wedding planner, a couple can genuinely join forces to create a truly collaborative and impressive wedding event.   For great ideas and tips on wedding planning or to find wedding planners nationwide, visit:  www.partypop.com .

By Debra Brunson, Betty Davis & Deborah Jacobs

Historically, the Department of Education (the DOE, formerly known as the Board of Education) has prevented people of color from being hired into its system until the onset of the Human Rights/Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. The DOE has expanded its war (waged against our youth) most recently by attacking any educator of color who is
( Successful in educating our children
( Willing to expose economic or any other type of fraud or impropriety within the DOE (i.e., whistle blowers)
( Willing to inform the community about problems and policies that are within the system (e.g., removing academically effective programs) that negatively impact upon the education of our children
( Is well-qualified and willing to not only educate but advocate for the academic, professional and personal success of the children

The strategy to continually weaken and destroy communities of color used by the DOE has been to deny adequate education to those communities. Removal of dedicated educationed personnel of color has increasingly become a major tool by which the DOE has affected this negative policy. We call this policy Ethnic Cleansing, which is the systematic removal and replacement of individuals of an identifiable ethnicity. Essentially, any educator of color or like- mindedness who exhibits qualities of commitment, dedication and has success in educating and inspiring students is systematically targeted for all manner of harassment and at worst, U or Unsatisfactory ratings on their annual rating and terminated via the DOE 3020a hearings.
Although educators of color make up a small percentage of the teaching and administrative force, they are experiencing disproportionate numbers of disciplinary actions within the DOE. Case in point, in one high school on Staten Island, although black and Latinos were only 2% of the workforce, they received over 80% of the U or Unsatisfactory annual ratings. This is reminiscent of an analogous situation going on within the transit system. Once the color of the transit workers changed from white to black, the disciplinary rules became more severe and utilized with greater severity and frequency.
Educators of color (e.g., teachers, para-professionals, guidance counselors, assistant principals and principals) are increasingly being brought up on a myriad of false charges (e.g., corporal punishment, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, inappropriate behavior) and accused of incompetence. The tenure system has not worked in our favor as the DOE is using the 3020a hearing procedure to remove tenured personnel so charged from their positions and to strip them of their licensure. A negative outcome of the 3020a hearing procedure renders a DOE employee totally ineligible to serve as an educator from K-12 anywhere in New York State.
Concurrent to the DOE implementation of its policy of Ethnic Cleansing is a policy of replacing eliminated educators of color by persons who are not stake-holders to the communities of children that they serve. The DOE recruits teachers from countries in Europe, the Philippines, the Caribbean and other parts of the world to work in low- performance schools which are primarily in neighborhoods of color (i.e., the Teacher Fellows Program). When the bottom fell out of the technology industries, the DOE began  massive recruitment and training from other states and professions, individuals to man the helms of these same schools as principals. Rather than using the time honored practice of training and preparing principals from the teaching ranks, principals having virtually no pedagogical experience are now being recruited to take over failing schools. Experienced teachers are being excluded from job vacancies at job fairs conducted by the DOE which permit only those individuals who have no work history within the DOE whatsoever to interview and be hired to fill teaching vacancies.
The lack of cultural awareness of these pedagogues and administrators has had disastrous effects upon children of color. It was clearly stated by Paolo Freire that the primary tenet of literacy is that the teacher must be able to translate the world and culture of students in order to be able to help them to successfully connect with the lesson and the text. The resulting inability to relate and communicate with the students has only served to alienate these new pedagogues and administrators from their students thereby reducing their ability to educate. The more extreme results of these scenarios have been our children being hung in coat closets and having been accosted by adults who have more than abused their authority. Moreover, educators of color are targeted and even blamed for the failure of the public school system.
Teachers of color are all potentially targets of this policy of Ethnic Cleansing by the DOE even if no action has to date been brought against them. Until a systemwide effort has been made to effectively put the brakes on Ethnic Cleansing, educators of color must be mindful of their potential vulnerability and prepared to avoid certain situations or to effectively defend their positions if they are going to remain educators within the DOE.

In conclusion, we wish to state that this struggle should  not be viewed as only a battle to save the careers and livelihoods of our members   and others having similar experiences. The quest for solvency within the DOE can also be considered our right to carry out what should be called a sacred duty. This sacred duty is our responsibility to protect the rights of our children to receive a proper education. As conscious educators of color, ours is the quest to not only save our jobs, but to insure that we are able to be the role models, teachers and mentors that our children so desperately need. We must be free to share not only our academic expertise, but the spiritual, cultural and social knowledge we possess that will enable our children to overcome that which so often impedes their academic success. Teachers of color must have people in every level of the DOE in order that our children are effectively educated in a safe, nurturing and inspirational school system.

niform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) in the proposed West Side Complex in Manhattan and the Nets Arena in Brooklyn, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki and financial-driven interests, are conspiring to deny not only New Yorkers in general (a voice in the future of the city), they are specifically targeting the black and brown majority by ensuring that white- male controlled entities will continue to receive black and brown tax dollars for generations to come according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. 
As the report states, ” HYIC approach leaves three-fourths of the debt service for the Phase I infrastructure investments to be paid after 2020, long after the subway extension and the platform are built and beyond the useful life of some of the assets being financed. Some payments will continue through 2054. By comparison,
43 percent of GO debt service would be paid by 2020. When using long-term debt to finance infrastructure, the public sector is responsible for safeguarding the welfare of future generations as well as the current generation. Under the HYIC plan, because much of the debt service costs from 2005 to 2019 will be borrowed and then refinanced in 2020, users of the new infrastructure in the first decades of the project will enjoy the benefits of the investment while leaving much of the cost to be borne by future taxpayers.”
We contacted Bonnie Brower, executive director of City Project, who said that future taxpayers are going to have a lot of paying to do. “There is an increasing proportion of every new revenue dollar that is going to pay off old debt.”  Municipal Assistance Corporation bonds, which would have been paid off in five years, have been extended for 30 years.  “This refinancing of old operating debt is especially appalling,” “This plan means it will have taken.three and a half  generations to pay off the 70’s fiscal crisis.”  
With the approval of the NBA to the sale of the New Jersey Nets to Bruce Ratner, Mr. Ratner has crossed one hurdle on his run for a 24-acre Nets arena and housing/commercial complex.   But local politicians and community groups came up with ten more at a press conference on the steps of City Hall last month.  Declaring that the NBA “blew the call” in approving the sale of the New Jersey Nets to Bruce Ratner, City Councilmember Letitia James and Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) called on the city government to scrutinize the developer’s $2.5 billion plan, which they characterized as a “secretive, taxpayer-subsidized, sweetheart arena deal.” 
Defining the nature of the conflict, Councilwoman James declared, “I didn’t get elected to serve the interests of big developers and corporations.  I was elected to serve the interests of the people and that’s why I’m here.”
James and DDDB were joined for the first time by City Council Members Larry B. Seabrook (Bronx) and Deputy Majority Leader Bill Perkins (Harlem), as well as by Christine Quinn (West Side), whose district faces the proposed Jets stadium, Francis Byrd (57th AD, Assembly District Democrat Committeeman) and Scott Turner, coordinator of Fans for Fair Play.
To ensure  public oversight and accountability, they demanded the following:
Step #1: Immediate implementation of the city’s standard Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) to allow community review of the Ratner Plan. The city council must demand that the mayor and governor ensure that this plan goes through ULURP.
Step #2: As part of the ULURP process, open public hearings to explore and establish (a) the best development plan for the MTA/LIRR’s Atlantic Yards and (b) the best and most appropriate location for a proposed Nets arena (possible alternative sites to be considered — Coney Island, East New York, Brooklyn Navy Yard, sites to be determined in Queens).
Step #3: Full public disclosure of all city and state subsidies being requested by the developer, including but not limited to:  True cost of the rail yards, based on intended use; moving and/or platforming over the rail yards; true cost of the city streets to be acquired and demapped; development and improvement of infrastructure, including (but not limited to) new and/or upgraded roadways and transit facilities, schools, police and fire services, sanitation, water, power, etc.; subsidies to incorporate tenants to induce them to occupy the office space; rent paid by city or state agencies to occupy the office space.
Step #4: Open bidding process to determine true value of the MTA/LIRR’s Atlantic Yards site – which Ratner is proposing to use for his development – including an independent, verifiable, published appraisal based on the intended future use of the site, not its current state.
Step #5: Formal analysis by NYC’s Independent Budget Office, the State and City Comptrollers, the City Council’s Economic Development Committee and the State Financial Control Board to establish the economic impact of the Ratner Plan on the taxpayers of New York City and State.
Step #6: Eminent domain and the threat of eminent domain must NOT be used for this project. Therefore, full public disclosure of the exact boundaries of the Ratner Plan footprint to determine which residences, businesses and community resources will be directly affected, must be forthcoming immediately.

Step #7: Public Scoping Hearing to determine which elements of the Ratner Plan requires an environmental impact study and how that study will proceed.
Step #8: Signed, legally binding guarantees from the developer (or developers) regarding pollution, noise and rat abatement if and when construction begins.
Step #9: Signed, legally binding contract with the City committing to publicly promised job creation and affordable housing targets based on Brooklyn’s median income with clear definitions and specific numbers for all categories.
Step #10: Approval by City Council, State Assembly and State Senate of any Memorandum of Understanding executed by unaccountable state corporations and/or authorities (MTA, ESDC) and a private developer that commits any city or state subsidies to the project.
“We are willing to go to court on any and all of these items,” Goldstein said.  “If Mr. Ratner thinks that Brooklyn is going to roll over and play dead the way the NBA did, he’s got another think coming.”
“They tell me this is all about money,” said Councilmember James.  “They tell me money will win the day.  But people will win the day.  Taxpayers will win the day.  They will not separate us by race, by class.  We all stand together.”

By David Mark Greaves
The House of the Lord Church, pastored by Reverend Herbert Daughtry in Brooklyn, was again filled to the rafters when the energy to elect Charles Barron Mayor of New York, paused for a moment to coalesce, raise some money, $8,000 that night to be matched 4-to-1 by Campaign Financing bringing it to $40,000, and  to speak on the rightness of their quest.
Among the many speakers on Councilman Barron’s behalf was Tiffany Schley, the high school valedictorian who was refused her diploma for speaking her mind, who said, “This experience has opened my eyes.  When Black people start up and do things, they want to knock us down.  We need someone from the street who knows our struggle.”  And then speaking of those who say that the councilman helping her was “All about politics,” Ms. Schley says, they’re right.  “They labeled it, ‘All about politics’ and it is…elect Charles Barron Mayor!” 
Poet Amiri Baraka, speaking of the Greek Myth of Sisyphus, he condemned to pushing a huge stone up a high hill, only to have it roll back down for him to start again, said that the struggle of African people here in the Americas has been a lot like that.  “All those things we had in the Sixties have been taken away… Down in Florida there was a right-wing coup.  When they worked outside the constitution of the United States. Abolishing the Voter Registration Act of 1965, taking us back and making it a confederate victory in 1863, rather than the Emancipation Proclamation.”   Baraka himself took us back to the first black political convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1971.  Where as co-convener, he sent out the cry of Black Power and organization that they thought would change the world.  Remembering those exciting days of Black politics, and after an extended poetic riff on Black “firsts”, he said,  “I’m just back on the scene to say Black Power.   Back on the scene to say it’s time to rise again.  Time to rise, time to get to that higher ground.”
Many of the speakers spoke of what separates Councilman Barron from others in office.  As one said, “Most politicians, you can smell the selling out pouring off of them, but there is none of that from Barron.” 
After going over his qualifications for the job, the budgets passed, the positions taken, Mr. Barron said that one of the tenets of his campaign is that white men have too much power.  
He said that candidates will come and talk about quality education, affordable housing, health care, waste management programs and all the rest of it and all the candidates will have programs to deal with those issues, as he, Barron, does.   “But unless they come to you and say white men have too much power and that they are going to address the structural racism in the system, then all of that will mean nothing.”
The councilman expects to have a lot of progressive white support, but, “Don’t tell me to tone it down, to get it.  And the same goes for middle-class Blacks who say, “He’s too Black.”   To those who feel that way he says, “I don’t know how to be a little bit Black.”
This is a movement that is going to take New York like a quiet storm, suddenly it will be all around you.  Mr. Barron said former Congresswoman McKinney counseled him to “keep your strategy to yourself,” and sometime next year the mass media is going to look up and say, “Charles Barron might win what?”  
And Ms. McKinney, in private conversation, told the councilman who the special interests are and what they come with when they come hard, as they did when they came after her and got her out of office.  Mr. Barron no doubt listened attentively to the strategies of the Right and the political twists, but as a former Black Panther, a student of history and someone who did thirty days for civil disobedience, he comes to this race knowing it’s a gauntlet, but the prize is for Black people to wield power, not just influence, in New York.   And for a man who cannot be vaguely Black, that’s worth the run.

It would be a horrendous criminal situation if we are only talking about 100 young Black men and women. But we are talking about witnessing tens of thousands of kindergarten-aged beautiful, inquisitive Black children being sent into these anti-education centers to be transformed into intellectual zombies destined to be bling-bling consumers, prisoners and warriors protecting white supremacists’ wealth in the name of “Democracy.” We are also talking about us Black adults complying with these terrible institutional acts to render our children 21st Century slaves.
At the start of the 2004-05 school year we, African-American adult citizens of New York City, are allowing nearly 36,000 5 to 7-year-old Black children to enter the first stages of educational genocide*. Let’s never forget that some 520,000 elementary and secondary Black children are also being subjected to this educational genocide policy.
*Educational Genocide: the systematic institutional miseducation of African- American, Latino and Asian youth based on the racist assumptions and policies of white supremacy that are embedded within the very structures of the US educational system.
This systematic and institutional mis-education process renders our children and our future “superfluous”(useless) to the needs of capitalism and white supremacy. At the start of the school year, we eagerly look forward to seeing our children go into these buildings of Education Hell. Sometimes we smile. Sometimes they smile or cry. We cry with pride & joy and with an undying assumption that our sons and daughters will learn and grow into prosperous men and women. We hope beyond hope that their experiences will be better than what happened to us.
Many of us either deny the horrors we see right in front of us or have fallen under the white supremacist spell that this is the best we can do because of our limited intellectual capacities. But since 1954, the reality is monstrously opposite of our dreams. For out of the 36,000 beautiful, bright Black tots happily skipping or tearfully being torn from moms or pops on that first day of school, 31,000 will end up with miserable lives of dropouts: jail, death, drug addiction, hustling, prostitution, teenage moms with no support, AIDS, dead-end jobs¼. If we allow school year 2004-05 to go on as business as usual.
Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE) is here to say that we don’t have to have “business as usual” with Bloomberg and Klein cranking up their educational genocide machine preparing to transform our children’s brilliance into madness and criminal self-centeredness. BNYEE – Black men and women who are educators, parents and students – is here to take a stand and organize to regain community control of public schools so as to implement a curriculum that stimulates intellectual growth, critical thinking, scientific & technological knowledge, Black pride and respect for community.
BNYEE is prepared to go into every corner of the Black community to help build a mass movement to not only combat educational genocide currently operating within the public school systems, but we are also prepared to implement a totally different, more egalitarian, educational system where parents and students have a direct and equal say (as do the teachers and administrators) in the day-to-day operations of schools and the entire system.
BNYEE is a fighting organization. We know that this $12-14 billion/year educational system is run by ruthless men and women primarily concerned with making a profit and maintaining the criminalization and dumbing-down process of Black and Latino children. They are not going to give up their control through moral suasion and nice negotiations. They have a “white supremacist” mandate to carry out¼ and have the backing from the governor, the US president and Congress through all kinds of racist and criminal policies including the No Child Left Behind Act that’s leaving our children behind at faster and faster rates than back in 1954.
A half-century after Brown v. Board’s promise of Black freedom and equality, we now have the possibility to unite and confront the educational genocide currently ravaging Black America in general and New York City in particular. BNYEE is just a local representation that is growing across Black America: organized resistance and struggle for education  and liberation. It is ONLY You and I reading this that can fight to make this Black Freedom Promise a Reality. BNYEE invites you to join us in this righteous work to bring educational excellence to our children. For information about our next meeting and actions please call: 718-270-6287.
 (S. E. Anderson is Education Director, Medgar Ecers College Center for Law and Social Justice,  and author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners.)