american black

The Terrifying Spectre of Revenge

The Huffington Post has a post by  Randall Robinson author of The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks

The question never posed by Americans, perhaps not even to themselves, is the question that obsesses the most resilient of the world’s cultural, political, and economic victims – Do we Americans see ourselves as we are seen by the eyes of the world?

My fear is that the Iraq war, which American leaders tragically misunderstood from the very beginning, may mark the opening of a horrific chapter in human history with painful implications for the entire planet.

Terrorism, put simply, is war, privatized. It is vastly more mobile, and easier to mount and prosecute successfully, than state-mounted war.

We must face the fact that our country has done hurtful things in the world that the vast majority of Americans know little to nothing about. The victims remember, however, even if we cannot.

We are now entering, I fear, Einstein’s doomsday nightmare.

In the beginning, only America had nuclear weapons. Then, Britain. Now North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Soon, if not already, (according to the writer Arundhati Roy), Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, South Korea, Cuba, Nepal, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Denmark, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Singapore, Burma, Uzbekistan. Even Afghanistan, and then, sooner or later, and probably sooner, much sooner, private religious, ethnic, and racial armies, where all wounds are fresh and well-remembered.

A little humility and a measure of foresight might have spared us all the monstrous forthcoming grief.

"I haven't been f*cked like that since grade school" (Tyler Durden, Danielle Gray and the Supreme Court)

I always get kinda Tyler Durden-ish  whenever I think about the Supreme Court. Ever since the 2000 debacle trust in the judiciary  has skewed downward. The power they abused in that Presidential election has now come to bite them in the proverbial ass and all of us will suffer for it for years to come.

That's why I was kinda surprised to read an admitted  federal judicial starf***er's post about incoming law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Danielle Gray. She seems like the kind of person the Justices and other young people need to be hanging around. Maybe the new over-achieving Black chick will be able to knock to sense into the heads of her soon to be power-broker colleagues. (And please do not confuse her with  Chantel Febus , a Janice Rogers Brown in training, clerking and trading lynch mob stories with Justice Clarence Thomas).
 

1. Danielle Gray (Harvard '03/Garland '03-'04)

Tidbits:

(a) after clerking for Big Pimpin' Feeder Judge Merrick Garland, Danielle Gray worked on the policy staff of Barack Obama's Senate campaign, then joined the Washington office of O'Melveny & Myers (her current place of employment);
(b) originally from Long Island, she went down south to Duke for college;
(c) not surprisingly, she is "an ardent Blue Devils fan," who "adores J.J. Redick and most of all Coach K";
(d) "she performed superbly in a 1L Ames [moot court] competition against two current members of the Elect, Michael Gottlieb and [Dorothy] Hien Tran (who were also outstanding, and who are now Danielle's good friends)";
(e) Danielle "came up with an incisive interpretation of Shaw v. Reno during a Law of Democracy class at Harvard Law School that was thereafter known as the 'Gray Thesis' (I'm not positive, but the Gray Thesis may have shown up on the exam)";
(f) she was one of the three primary authors of the Harvard BLSA (Black Law Students Association) amicus brief in Grutter v. Bollinger;
(g) she was voted "most likely to be a Supreme Court justice" by the HLS class of 2003 (the honor won by future Stevens clerk Sam Spital in 2004);
(h) she has "a keen sense of humor"; and
(i) she is "an all-around delightful person," "one of the most charming people you'll ever meet" -- "[i]f you don't like Danielle, you are per se a bad person!"

It's nice to see people like Ms. Gray having a chance to clerk despite the cheap-labor conservatives who have taken over the courts.

Underneath Their Robes has profiles of all the the folks who will be clerking at the Supreme Court, organized by justice: WHR, JPS, SOC, AS, AMK, DHS, CT, RBG, SGB. Very interesting reading. 

Tiger Woods Talks Race

I've never been a big Charles Barkley fan but his new book seems like an awesome read. Excerpts from it can be found on BlackVoices. The interview with Tiger Woods really helped me to understand him and his veiws on race. It moved Tiger up a few notches in my book. Below Tiger tells when he realized he was Black.

“I became aware of my racial identity on my first day of school, on my first day of kindergarten. A group of sixth graders tied me to a tree, spray-painted the word ‘nigger’ on me, and threw rocks at me. That was my first day of school. And the teacher really didn’t do much of anything. I used to live across the street from school and kind of down the way a little bit. The teacher said, ‘Okay, just go home.’ So I had to outrun all these kids going home, which I was able to do. It was certainly an eye-opening experience, you know, being five years old. We were the only minority family in all of Cypress, California."

The AB Four (Live Aid and Drug-Dealer-Turned-Good Edition)

*With just $100 to her name and the simple dream of getting out of debt and bankruptcy, Lisa Price left her 9-5 job and founded her own cosmetics company entitled Carol’s Daughter, an all-natural line of bath and beauty products that would soon see profits of $2 million and make loyal customers out of Halle Berry, Jada Pinkett-Smith and David Sanborn, among others.

Remember "Live Aid"? Um...maybe it didn't work.

Question:  How confident are you that U.S. policies in Iraq will be successful?
May 2005
Confident:  25%
Not confident:  54%
Not sure:  20%

Mar. 2005
Confident:  30%
Not confident:  49%
Not sure:  21%

The rise of Hip Hop literature and the story of drug dealer turned publisher Vickie Stringer.

Micheal King continues attacking Dyson

I have a dirty little secret. I read Micheal King's blog everyday.

I know I make fun of his picture and criticize everything he says, but I do find his blog interesting, which is more than I can say for most conservatives.

That being said, Mr. King continued to this week to bash Michael Eric Dyson. He said Mr. Dyson is basically destroying the idea of "personal responsibility in the black community."

Now I do not know much about Dyson. I haven't read his books. I haven't watched him on TV. But I do know cheap labor conservatives and what they mean when they say "personal responsibility".

Book of the day

I was given a copy of Mark Anthony Neal's New Black Man. I haven't read it yet but here's what folks are saying...

I admire Mark Anthony Neal's mix of scholar, hip-hop, and feminisim. His writing is acessible and smart, down-to-earth and provocative. The book isn't preachy, but more of one man's realization of his need to change his thinking and actions beyond the box that is the StrongBlackMan. The theory of the StrongBlackMan could have been a book in itself, but Neal also tackles being a father in a world filled with misogynistic images, teaching students that blackness is broad and fluid, and trying to match his public thoughts with his personal actions.

Being "Tough On Crime" does not reduce crime

Douglas A. Berman is recommending an interesting just published book entitled Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration by Michael Jacobson. A review of the book had this interesting tidbit:

In Downsizing Prisons, Michael Jacobson points to New York as a prime example of why states can’t simply incarcerate their way out of crime epidemics. There is, he writes, “no apparent relationship...between increased use of prisons and crime reductions.”

Now before the cheap labor conservatives start bitching that Michael Jacobson doesn't know what he's talking about, the review continues:

Jacobson is particularly well credentialed to make these arguments. Currently president of the Vera Institute of Justice and professor of criminology at John Jay College, he has behind him a long public service career--as a deputy budget director for New York City and as commissioner of the city’s Probation and Correction agencies. He’s got an insider’s understanding of which policies are good-sense social interventions and which are likely to be counter-productive, tools for demagogues and headline hunters that look “tough on crime” on paper but in practice cost a fortune and have very little impact.

Cheap labor conservatives are always screaming about being tough on crime saying it will lower the crime rate. Jeez. Are these people right about anything?

The New Drug War

My Ex-wife and I were very interested in the problem with anti-depression drugs years ago. High profile cases like Phil Hartman's murder/suicide, Andrea Yates's child murder, Michael McDerrmott, and Columbine all had those drugs in common so it was nice to see the FDA finally do something about it. Nowhere near enough, but at least something. I'm sure real advocates like Dr. Ann Blake Tracy must be thrilled.

Learning about the problems with those drugs 5 years ago taught me something. Big drug companies are not to be trusted. And verifying that was Dr. Marcia Angell. Dr. Angell is former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She is currently a member of Harvard University Medical School's Department of Social Medicine. She also wrote a book called "The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What We Can Do About It."

In the book Dr. Angell mentions a lot of things posted by loren in her blog. Both should be required reading...I just hope it doesn't take as long to fix the problems with these corporations as it took to fix the one with Prozac.

You can listen to Dr. Angell on NPR here.