ANNOUNCEMENT
Walk The Plank (MY HOMIES SHOW ON NINA SIMONE)
Gallery 138
138 West 17th 5th floor NYC.
April 20th-May 18th 2006
Opening reception TONIGHT.
GYEEEAH. I will see yall tonight @ 5:45.
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I am feeling so good blog family. My family from cali just left. I cooked dinner for them. Baked Salmon, mashed potatoes,green salad, and I slid a chicken from BBq's in the on the low(a sista cain't make everything). So the garlic bread was a lil hard. Shit. Its hard out here for a _____. I got my favorite aunt (who is like a momma) some Monterey Resiling. She was all at BBq's asking for Reisling, I was like lord help us:)
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WARNING Neo this is one of those posts that you lovehatelovehate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is something special about eating with your family. I know I may be stating the obvious to you all, but when it goes RIGHT it is REALLY energizing.
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I also went to all three classes yesterday too. Big Wednesday is what I called them. Lemme find out though. Con law dude called on me again. How you 'gon have 125 people in your class and call on baby girl twice?!?!?!?!
Mind you it was a MAD SOPHISTICATED topic. The topic was how to determine when a private entity is a state actor (ie the goverment), which then would allow them to be sued for violated federal civl rights. So for instance, if a school/college is found to be discriminitory, the question whether they are a state actor, and if so, we can then can sue them for those violations. 
The entire class was buzzing when he called on me. I was looking cute that day. I ain't gonna lie I was in a little deer in the head lights. But you know what F&CK them. I was not going to give them little shark bait a$$ nigg@s the satisfaction of seeing me ask for a pass. So I knuckled up and answered the questions. Needless to say I got some pretty boy Floyd type swagger jumping off.
LL Cool J is a stand up dude. I saw him on Tavis the other day talking about BLACK WOMEN in music videos. I got to thinking. If anyone has the leverage to be the center of a coaltion on images of BLACK women in music videos, its LL. Peep part the transcript below.
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LL Cool J: I can give you a lot of positives, but the one critique, being as that's the word you used, the criticism I would give is that there's room for more love in the music. And there's room for better treatment of women in the music. Like it's interesting, I made songs about women my whole career, and love and relationships, and I did that before I had daughters.
So it's not like my daughters caused that. But as a guy who has three daughters in addition to a son, but three daughters, when I look at the way the girls are treated in the video, it's not that I don’t wanna see somebody look sexy. Please. It's not like I don’t think a woman can be in a bikini, that’s ridiculous.
But sometimes, it's the way they’re treated and the way they’re constantly portrayed that can get a little, I think, it can be a little disappointing. A little disappointing. I think that a woman has the right to look at this music and look at the videos and be inspired to be something more than just one thing. And I think that's the only thing that I see as a problem.
That, and just there's room for more love. I think a little less anger, a little more love; I think the music would be a lot healthier. I think it's just a little one-sided now.
Tavis: But you’re not hating on the "Around the Way Girl,” though.
LL Cool J: No, no. No, no, no, no. "Around the Way Girl,” but see, "Around the Way Girl” was about the girl next door, lifting her up. And I want a girl with extensions in her hair, bamboo earrings, like, I was...
Tavis: At least two pair.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CUNY and the NY TIMES DOES NOT CARE ABOUT BLACK MEN. Okay. Maybe the TIMES cares, but they are clearly sending out inconsistent messages regarding our plight. So let me get this straight.Black men are suffering, according to the NY Times. Well, duh, like WE didn't know that.
Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and a co-author of one
of the recent studies, typifies this attitude. Joblessness, he feels, is
due to largely weak schooling, a lack of reading and math skills at a time
when such skills are increasingly required even for blue-collar jobs, and
the poverty of black neighborhoods. Unable to find jobs, he claims, black
males turn to illegal activities, especially the drug trade and chronic
drug use, and often end up in prison. He also criticizes the practice of
withholding child-support payments from the wages of absentee fathers who
do find jobs, telling The Times that to these men, such levies "amount to
a tax on earnings."
His conclusions are shared by scholars like Ronald B. Mincy of Columbia,
the author of a study called "Black Males Left Behind," and Gary Orfield
of Harvard, who asserts that America is "pumping out boys with no honest
alternative."
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There is a program at CUNY that addresses the rentention of Black men in college.
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And low and behold, this organization says, says that the program is disciminitory.
CUNY Program to Help Black Men Is Called Discriminatory
A New York advocacy organization asked the United States Department of Education yesterday to look into whether programs aimed at helping black male students at the City University of New York and its Medgar Evers College discriminated against women and students who are not black.
In a complaint filed with the department's Office for Civil Rights, the group, the New York Civil Rights Coalition, asserted that the Male Development and Empowerment Center at Medgar Evers, and other programs at the college and at CUNY, violated federal regulations prohibiting discrimination by race or gender.
The student body at Medgar Evers, which is in Brooklyn, is 94 percent black and 76 percent female. The college created the center to help it attract and retain male students and to help them graduate. The center offers workshops and other services for men.
"This is plainly wrong," said Michael Meyers, executive director of the coalition, a 20-year-old group that describes itself as having been founded "to promote racial integration and racial reconciliation and to vigorously oppose racial separatism, segregation, prejudice and all other forms of racial idiocy."
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Michael Meyers is President and Executive Director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition (NYCRC), which he co-founded in 1986.
Meyers assumed the post of NYCRC Executive Director in 1991 from his senior staff position in the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, where he had served as Special Assistant to the Chancellor of Higher Education, T. Edward Hollander. Meyers took his B.A. from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH and his J.D. from Rutgers University School of Law. He has spent his entire professional career working in the fields of civil rights, civil liberties, law and education, and urban affairs, and, as such, is regarded as an expert on civil rights matters and race relations. Born in Harlem, Michael Meyers knows first-hand the ghetto experience which, as he puts it, "contributes to the defeat of the human spirit; the only way to end the ghetto is to get out of it." [ Clearly no love for the hood or the people that live in it]. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
You mean to tell me that an HONEST, WONDERFUL, TAX PAYER SUPPORTED program
is illegal because it excludes WHITE PEOPLE AND WOMEN.
How is Mr. Myers going to co-sign on eliminating a program that helps MEN that look just like him. *SHAKES MY HEAD*.
What are black men suppose to do? Just crawl under a rock and DIE?
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SHE WAS JUST A STRIPPER.
Peep this article and interview from the MSNBC. A cab driver who picked up two of the Lacross team players said he heard one of them say LOUD AND CLEAR, SHE WAS JUST A STRIPPER. [NICE].
In an interview on MSNBC, Mostafa said he returned to the house later to pick up another customer. He said he remembered that person “said in a loud voice, ‘She just a stripper.”’
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Wassup with it blog family? Its sunny outside. I am wearing the FLY 1940's fuschia, thats right, FUSCHIA dress to class today. LIKE WHAAAAT. Wassup for the weekend? Watchall' 'lissen to? Who got Roots tickets?
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Now there she goes/ again the dopest Ethiopian.....
though Newark has recently shown signs of revitalization -- the new arts center downtown has become a destination -- it's consistently ranked among the worst places to raise a child in America. James, who grew up in Newark, the son of a single mother who owned a restaurant, has tried to make their respective upbringings an issue, painting the contest in terms of race and authenticity. "You have to learn to be an African-American," he's said about Booker. "And we don't have time to train you."
