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An Ode to a ‘Poor Black Kid’ I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong – News – GOOD
…one day things got scary enough that [the teacher], accompanied by a police officer, felt it necessary to escort the student home to speak with his parents. When they got to his apartment about a mile away from the school, the weeks of mystery surrounding the [boy's] behavior were replaced with instant clarity. His mother, his only guardian, answered the door ashamedly, and out scurried a man, her most recent john.
…The reason the “problem student” behaved so badly is because he knew that if his tantrums were chronic, he’d be sent home. And that was a good thing, because when he was home, his mother couldn’t work as a prostitute. He couldn’t tell any of his teachers this, of course, because then he’d run the risk of child welfare services taking him away from his mother, and he needed to be there to protect her. The boy never hated school, he just loved his mom more.
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“If I Was A Poor Black Kid,” A Once Poor Black Kid Responds | Dominion of New York
The architects of equality before the law, or equality of opportunity, knew that it would only allow a few special black people to succeed, and shrugged their shoulders about the rest. As the Reverend Horace James, the former Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, said in 1865, “Give the colored man equality, not of social condition, but equality before the law, and if he proves himself the superior of the Anglo Saxon, who can hinder it? If he falls below him, who can help it?” (Side note: lynch mobs were the south’s response to the question who can hinder successful black people.)
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A Muscular Empathy – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic
We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.
Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. …
This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. …
The answers are out there. But they will not improve your self-esteem.
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Daily Kos: Indians 101: The Lenni Lenape and the Revolutionary War
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The Top 10 Best and Worst of U.S. Politics in 2011 | California Progress Report
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Post-Racial? Not Even Close | California Progress Report
To assess attitudes toward race as we approach Obama’s reelection campaign, we analyzed data from one of the most highly regarded academic surveys of political opinion…
All the official statistics point in the same direction: U.S. blacks, on average, have markedly lower incomes than whites. They also have less wealth and significantly higher rates of unemployment. The reasons for these gaps can be debated, but their existence cannot.
Except that a majority of white Americans have no clue, believing that whites’ and blacks’ incomes are “about the same.”
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Wikimedia blog » How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia
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Setting the Record Straight on SOPA: Some Evidence-Based Analysis | Electronic Frontier Foundation
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Fight the Blacklist: A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism | Electronic Frontier Foundation
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What’s On the Blacklist? Three Sites That SOPA Could Put at Risk | Electronic Frontier Foundation
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An Alternative to SOPA: An Open Process Befitting an Open Internet | Electronic Frontier Foundation
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Flash cards, vocabulary memorization, and study games | Quizlet
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Flashcard Machine – Create, Study and Share Online Flash Cards
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Forbes magazine has posted a column by Gene Marks, a middle aged white guy, who wants to give advice to poor black kids about how to be successful in America. Of course, these young black kids read Forbes everyday and will internalize his wisdom. There is no poverty porn, noblesse oblige, white paternalism, compassionate conservative masturbation, navel gazing at work here. No. None at all.
…[I don't] know what Gene Marks’ intentions were in writing his Forbes’ essay. However, I am mighty curious about the intentions of Forbes’ editors in publishing such a problematic piece of work.
[See also the comment by Shahryar on Tue Dec 13, 2011 at 05:50:49 PM PST --L.]
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Watch This Lizard Kick Ass At A Video Game With His Tongue | Kotaku.com
…this Bearded Dragon doesn’t need opposable thumbs to master the art of gaming…
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The Senate voted last Thursday to pass S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which would authorize the president to send the military literally anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial. Prison based on suspicion alone. …the president would be able to direct the military to use its powers within the United States itself, and even lock up American citizens without charge or trial.
No corner of the world, not even your own home, would be off-limits to the military. … has no limitations whatsoever based on geography, duration or citizenship. And the entire Senate bill was drafted in secret, with no hearing, and with committee votes behind closed doors.
…[Senators] also ignored every top national security official opposed to the provisions. Opposition to the detention provisions came from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, White House Advisor for Counterterrorism John Brennan, and DOJ National Security Division head Lisa Monaco. …
… a provision authorizing worldwide war wherever any terrorism suspect resides, even if there is no threat to America or Americans.
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Newburgh Four: poor, black, and jailed under FBI ‘entrapment’ tactics | World news | guardian.co.uk
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Prison camp discloses secret discipline unit – Guantánamo – MiamiHerald.com
In releasing a photo of the so-called discipline unit called “Five Echo,” the military at Guantánamo was showing to the public a detention block the media don’t see.
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Beyond Guantánamo, a Web of Prisons for Terrorism Inmates – NYTimes.com
In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.
The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, an examination of how the prisons have handled the challenge of extremist violence reveals some striking facts: …
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User talk:Jimbo Wales – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately. As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of “Stop Online Piracy Act’ is working its way through Congress on a bit of a fast track. … My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case. There are obviously many questions about whether the strike should be geotargetted (US-only), etc. (One possible view is that because the law would seriously impact the functioning of Wikipedia for everyone, a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government.) At the same time, it’s of course a very very big deal to do something like this, it is unprecedented for English Wikipedia. …
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Occupy Movement Targets Foreclosed Properties | Mother Jones
The increasing political sophistication of the local squatters has convinced some fairly mainstream affordable-housing groups to lend a hand this time.
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Occupy aims to shut down west coast ports – as it happened | World news | guardian.co.uk
[liveblog]
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Trust him, he knows. As someone who worked 14 hour days, seven days a week, plus taking a full college course load, he definitely knows what it’s like to support yourself on minimum wage. Except for the part where he wasn’t paying rent or supporting anyone. …
Think Progress [link] cites the inconvenient data about how “a nontrivial fraction of workers” actually do spend a significant part of their working lives at or right near the minimum wage, and how this disproportionately affects women, people of color, and less educated people.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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