A Black Man's View is back!. I have not updated my blog in a minute now. I really have no excuse as to why I have not been sharing my thoughts with you, my faithful readers, other than the fact that I have had writers block. I have had several ideas for posts, I just have not been able to form those ideas into writable sentences. Was there a co ordinated effort to evict Occupy Wall Street Movements from sea to shining sea? Is an elephant heavy?
The occupation is dead. Long live the occupation.
Amidst the massive media coverage of the military-style eviction Tuesday morning of the original Occupy Wall Street encampment at New York's Zuccotti Park, an interesting factoid surfaced thousands of miles away.
In an interview with the BBC, Oakland mayor Jean Quan, whose police force forcibly evicted that city's embattled Occupy encampment early Monday, casually mentioned that she "was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”
Sure enough, since the weekend there have been a string of such evictions - not just the highest-profile encampments in New York and Oakland, but also Detroit, Portland OR, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, and several other major US cities.
All I'm going to say is there was never a co ordinated effort to shut down Tea Party Rally's. There is more than a whiff of hypocrisy.
Alabama Governor Robert Bentley says Alabama's immigration law is not racist and it looks like the red, republican, controlled Alabama State Legislature quietly replaced Scott Beason with Scott Beason as chair of the rules committee. Read it and weep.
The lasting effects of slavery and Kin Solidarity
For the most part, we often stay separate from our extended family unless family reunions, funerals and other such events bring the family back together. It's a very individualistic streak that black Americans have taken to heart, as though that's how things are supposed to be.
I hate to pin the blame on slavery, but it's where blame is going. The lack of family cohesion thanks to the omnipresent threat of being separated and sold to persons unknown and shipped to parts unknown promoted a subconscious streak of kin independence out of sheer necessity, because you never knew when those family bonds would be severed for good. Other cultures never had to deal with that particular generational trauma, and it's something that has to be slowly but surely deprogrammed from our subconscious being if we want to practice any form of kin solidarity. It's a big step along the road of consolidating our own economic independence from the rest of America.
Who are the Super Debt Committee members who will decide our fate? 10 white men, 1 white woman and 1 black man. Will The SuperCommittee Offer Barack Obama His Neville Chamberlain Moment?
There are conservatives on both sides of the aisle still eager for a "grand bargain" that will trade away the hard-fought, meager lifeline for millions of Americans in return for some table scraps-- temporary table scraps at that-- from the 1%. The SuperCommittee, could well turn out to be Obama's Neville Chamberlain moment and could cement his place in history as firmly as the Munich Agreements cemented Chamberlain's.
Privilege of the powerful
Those in power, those at the top due to their privilege use discourse such as "poverty is not destiny" and "reclaim America" to keep all eyes on those trapped in poverty, thus away from the exact people with the power, money, and opportunity to create a path toward equity within our society and our schools.
Power of the Privileged
At the last board meeting on Thursday, November 3rd, Dr. Robinson defended her support of the superintendent’s recommendation to sign what was at the time a $1.7 million dollar contract with Teach for America by claiming that she had spent the week reviewing studies on TFA and the effectiveness of the teachers placed in a system by TFA.
She claimed that there were both “good” and “poor” studies concerning the effectiveness of the teachers that TFA hires. In short, she was convinced that TFA’ers were more effective than traditionally certified teachers. In an email from Dr. Wardynski that Dr. Robinson shared with me, he claimed, “We are making this investment because evidence has shown that the achievement gains provided by TFA exceed the gains afforded by a similar investment in alternative strategies” (November 9, 2011).
Translation-Huntsville City School board of education’s reduction in force plan laid off 154 certified teachers to pay TFA'er to learn to teach on other people's kids. What is wrong with that picture?
What's on your reading list today?
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