american black

Getting Black Kids Involved In the Video Game Industry

Everyone loves video games, even Black folks. But their are very few of us in the Video Game Industry.

Joseph Saulter, CEO of Entertainment Arts Research, is trying to change that with a new program.

Saulter is cofounding the Urban Video Game Academy in June. The free, five-week program in Baltimore will teach 50 African-American high-school students Game Programming 101. Shorter versions of the academy will launch in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The idea is not only to boost minorities' ranks in the industry, but to get gamers to look up from their screens and learn some math.

The UVGA brainchild icludes not only Joseph Saulter, [who is also professor of the game technology curriculum at American Intercontinental University (AiU)]; Mario Armstrong, TV and National Public Radio (NPR) digital technology guru; and Roderick Woodruff, president and co-founder of AAGAMER.com.

Welcome to the New Age...Same As The Old Age

Wall Street has won. This is the age of greed and selfishness. As proof I offer you Lawrence Lessig's comments at a recent conference in South Africa on Copyrights.

I said that while I had no problem at all with people paying to listen to music, or novels, we had to be extremely sensitive to the way price might block the spread of knowledge. And that for academic and scientific work, the best model for producing and spreading knowledge might not be one that meters each use. Professors should be paid. But let that be their compensation, and let the knowledge they produce spread widely.

Yet there was a general view at the conference that this was wrong. That we hurt developing nations, for example, if we give them knowledge for free. They should have to pay for the truths we create. It weakens them, the argument went, if they can just take what we have discovered. Better to encourage their industry of science than to destroy it by simply spreading the truths that science here has created.

The rational of the majority at this conference baffles me. They have no problem passing out cell phones to African nations so foreign companies can profit but see no need for them to understand the technology they leaped-frogged over. It really pisses me off, but read some more of Lessig...

Celebrating Malcolm X

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

This year marks both the 80th anniversary of Malcolm X's birth on May 19, 1925 and the 40th anniversary of his assassination on Feb. 21, 1965. Commemorations took place last week around the country. Oakland celebrated with a jazz festival Saturday. In New York City, a major exhibit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem opened Thursday.

Only in Berkeley does Malcolm X get the same treatment as MLK, Washington and Lincoln: City government offices were closed for business Friday. The Berkeley school district also formally recognized his birthday by closing for business last Friday.

Even cities with large and powerful black communities such as Oakland, Richmond, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago haven't followed Berkeley, where whites are 55 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent. In fact, news that Berkeley has had a Malcolm X holiday since 1979
came as a surprise to officials elsewhere.

Deborah Bolling, spokeswoman for the mayor's office in Philadelphia, applauded Berkeley when she heard about the holiday. But she added that even though city workers there might welcome another paid holiday, she didn't think the City of Brotherly Love would follow Berkeley.

"We just named our first street in Philadelphia after Martin Luther King, and he's not nearly as controversial," she said of her predominantly black city. "So it will be a long time before we celebrate Malcolm X Day."

Official Malcolm X Website

Free downloadable Audio Of Malcolm's speeches

Malcolm Quotes

Adult Education

Nationally, Black students are more than twice as likely as white youths to be suspended or expelled from schools. Another alarming trend, which is becoming more prevalent in the nation’s schools, is the suspension of Black students for wearing white T-shirts. The rationale behind the suspensions is that the T-shirts promote gang affiliation and culture.

The situation doesn't get much better in colleges.

We all hope that racism will have less of an effect on our children than it has had on us. Unfortunately that may not be the case.  Our children are getting a look at what it really means to be Black in America.

20th Anniversary of the bombing of MOVE

On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police dropped a firebomb on the home of the MOVE organization, a radical organization that protested police brutality and government policies. Five adults and six children were killed in the bombing. Despite two grand jury investigations, and a commission finding that top officials were grossly negligent, no one from city government was criminally charged.

Ramona Africa was the only adult survivor of the police bombing on MOVE. She escaped by crawling through a basement window with a 13 year-old boy then known as Birdie Africa. Ramona served seven years in prison on a riot charge. She was awarded $500,000 -- $400,000 for pain and suffering, and the remaining $100,000 for disfigurement.

Interview with Romona Africa

Planned protest to commemorate anniversary

The Soon-To-Be Death Of Black Studies And How To Save It

We live in a graceless age. This is the age of the rockstar. An Army of One. Brand You.

In times such as these, when everything is about the individual, where everyone's a broadcaster and everyone's famous for 15 minutes, certain institutions die. The smart ones adjust and tailor their message to the times. The Catholic Church has been around for thousands of years and has changed it's message constantly. It needs to change again many are saying, and it will. Because Christians are ruthless.

Another institution is struggling as well. And needs to change tacks quick. As we Black folk influence the world around us with music, clothes and fashion, the study of us, Black Studies, Africana Studies and the like, are dying at colleges everywhere. The following comes from Robin Wilson's article on the subject.

The number of students seeking degrees in African-American studies nationwide is minute. In the 2001-2 academic year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, just 668 undergraduates earned bachelor's degrees in the field, representing only 0.05 percent of all degrees conferred. That doesn't mean black-studies programs are short on students. In fact, on many campuses the courses are quite popular among students who are majoring in other subjects but want to have a black perspective on history or literature, for example. Within the financial politics of most universities, however, it is still the number of majors in a field that matters.

To stay alive, black-studies departments at many public universities are scrambling to reinvent themselves. They are changing their names to "Africana" and "African diaspora" studies and broadening their courses from a focus on black Americans to black people in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean.

In my opinion, that will not be enough.

Haitian Parents Sue

Parents of 12 Haitian middle school students want the city to pay them a total of $12 million for abuse perpetrated by a white teacher.

Brooklyn-based Attorney, Sanford Rubenstein, filed the suit on behalf of the Queens parents claiming the city was negligent in hiring the assistant principal, Nancy Miller.

As punishment for a fight only a few of the students were involved in, Miller forced all the students from the only bilingual class at P.S. 34 to sit on the floor and eat lunch with their hands back in March. She allegedly said she would treat them like animals like in their native country.

Howard Law Students Defeat Harvard

The Howard University School of Law Moot Court Trial Team participated in the American Bar Association Criminal Justice and John Marshall Law School competition and placed first in the event, the first Black college to do so.

Are Black Colleges Catching Up?

Prometheus 6 talks about the eBlack Studies website. Here's how the partners describe it:

eBlack Studies is a project in cyberspace.Its purpose is to provide information for students and scholars in all academic fields     that focus primarily on Africa and the African Diaspora.  Our mission is one stop     shopping for everyone in the field of Africana Studies, especially graduate students, faculty, librarians, departmental webmasters, and interested search engines.

The really cool part about the site though is the fact that they put some 60 hours of video, of The State of Black Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy, and Research online. It's about time Blacks put their knowledge online.

I've never been a big fan of college. It moves too slow for me. I like to learn shit at my own pace and study topics I'm really interested in.

I'm waiting for one of the Black colleges to take the lead and offer a free and open educational resource like MIT (for one) has done. Recently Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health joined MIT in putting every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free.

If eBlack Studies evolves into that then it would really be cool...