Camus, Obama & Torture: That Right There is Hell Breakin' Loose

8 June 1972: Kim Phúc, center left, running down a road near Trang Bang

after a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack.

Last week, I couldn't figure out why the issue of torture
was consistently being presented in the media. I have
been busy, writing about other things, and preparing to
go to graduate school.

I turned to my colleague, Matthew Birkhold and was like
"Dude, why are they tripping of the torture documents
and the pictures, I don't recall torture being
made illegal. Is it in the Constitution?"

He then turned to me, and stared for a minute.

Then I said, "Oh, snap, the Geneva Conventions!"
You see, none of the articles I read mentioned
The Geneva Convention, so I was unsure as
to scope of the implications of a charge of torture. In
the article What is a War Crime?, Tarik Kafala describes
the history and historical context of War Crimes. He writes,

The concept of war crimes is a recent one. Before World War II, it was generally accepted that the horrors of war were in the nature of war.

But during World War II the murder of several million people - mainly Jews- by Nazi Germany, and the mistreatment of both civilians and prisoners of war by the Japanese, prompted the Allied powers to prosecute the people they believed to be the perpetrators of these crimes.

The Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 led to 12 Nazi leaders being executed.

A similar process started in Tokyo in 1948. Seven Japanese commanders were hanged, though the Allies decided not to put Emperor Hirohito in the dock.

These trials were essentially the precedents for the cases that the modern-day tribunal in The Hague hears.

In addition, individual governments, feeling that justice has not been done, have acted on their own initiative.

...Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including... wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."

To cover his behind, President Bush provided retroactive
immunity for himself and his entire administration for
war crimes. What an amazing move in light of the information
that is being revealed.

I then began to put the pieces to together.
The alleged terrorist have to be housed outside of American
soil, less they be granted due process and a a trial within the
United States court system. So long as they are housed in
unknown prisons around the world, they will not be charged
and there is no incentive to proceed with due process and give
them their day in court.

President Obama made a campaign promise to close
Guantanamo, however, Congress is saying, no can do,
unless he has a plan.

While writing this, the just reported that President Obama
has decided to transfer Ahmed Ghailani to New York and
try him in civil court. The main issue is that some members
of the Senate don't want alleged terrorist's housed in
American prisons. The fear seems to be rational and I
am unsure as to why.

Andrew Sullivan (aka Mr. Cantankerous and awesome) of
The Atlantic.com, has eloquently summed up President
Obama's reversal on releasing the torture photos. Sullivan writes,

Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors'
war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to prosecute
them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing
evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and
the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt
his successor.

The rationale for the suppression is fatuous:
"their release would endanger the troops."

You mean releasing evidence of war crimes would
render US soldiers more vulnerable to attack? How?

This IS a Democracy. There is due process.

I was sort of excited to write this piece, not because of
the topic, but because so many elements that I have been
thinking about this year have coalesced in this issue.

For instance, back in December, Thaddeus Clark sent
me an Esquire article, The Falling Man, by Tom Junod,
about photos of taken of folks who jumped out of the
World Trade Center. Thaddeus and I started having a
conversation on Twitter about Camus, whom I was
reading a lot
of at the time.

Camus was notoriously anti-death penalty. In his era, folks
decapitated using a guillotine. Camus's rationale was
that in order for the death penalty to be exemplary and
actually discourage other people from
committing crimes, then the heads of the the decapitated
folks should be displayed for the entire town to see.

Yes. Displayed. Camus was no joke. He was a big believer
in the transparency of death, if the purpose of the death was
deter folks from committing future crimes or vicious acts.

In the essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, Camus
writes about the death penalty and watching his
father return home and throwing up, after witnessing
a public execution. He writes,

When the extreme penalty simply causes vomiting on the part of the respectable citizen, it is suppose to
protect, how can anyone mistaken that it is likely, as it
out to be, to bring peace and order into the community.

....People write about capital punishment as if they are a whisper... But when silence or tricks of language contributes to the maintaining abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak

In the article, Falling Man, Tom Junod discusses a
comment left on the website, Here is New York, which
speaks to the discomfort that we have with death and
photos of dead bodies. Junod writes,

.....on the Here Is New York Website, a visitor offers this commentary: "This image is what made me glad for censuring [sic] in the endless pursuant media coverage." More and more, the jumpers -- and their images -- were relegated to the Internet underbelly, where they became the provenance of the shock sites that also traffic in the autopsy photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and the videotape of Daniel Pearl's execution, and where it is impossible to look at them without attendant feelings of shame and guilt. In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers' experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.

American's are interesting. We enjoy death as entertainment
but are incapable of being a witness to the actual death's in
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, death committed in our name.

If those photographs are released, the entire tone and scope
and conversation around the Iraq and Afghanistan war's will change.

The men and woman (are their any women in Guantanamo)
who are being held in Guantanamo will be seen as both
human beings and as alleged terrorists. If they are tried
and found guilty of these awful acts, then they need to be
punished.

The American men and women, the American troops, who
have died will go from being abstract entities, in the minds
of the mainstream public, to human beings who have
died in our name.

We are all human beings.

We all have a mother.

We have all been children.

Someone changed all of our diapers.

The same way the photos of the My Lai Massacre
and of Kim Phuc significantly changed public opinion on
the Vietman war, the release of the torture photos will
change how we feel and hopefully inform our choices
around the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars.

It is time to release the photos.


Should the president release the photo's?

What kind of country has one set of rules for its
citizens and another for its prisoners?

Did President Bush plan on keeping the detainees
there forever? It seems like it, as there was no plan
to deal with them via release?

What kind of Democracy holds alleged criminals
indefinitely?

Black on Black Murder and Oscar Grant

It is simply impossible to have an intelligent discussion about Black
male murder, without grounding it in political economy, history and
labor.

Over the weekend, the New York Times featured a piece by Tobin
Warsaw on the Oakland Riots which is essentially about the ways
in which the double standard that some Black people have on Black on
Black violence versus white on Black violence.

In the post, Warsaw quotes Stanly Crouch who essentially
maintains that Black men are killing each other because they can
and that more black men have killed each other in the history
of American culture than white men ever have. One could easily
infer that Oscar Grant's death is relatively small in the grand scheme.
There is nothing restorative, just or humane about this line of thinking.
This logic is flawed. Crouch writes,

Before the victories of the civil-rights movement, many of the murders of black people during the most intense redneck reigns throughout the South were committed by those once infamously known as "poor white trash." What is now so appalling is that the street gangs that currently terrorize black communities across the nation do so with astonishing levels of murder and mayhem, but they are so often defined by supposedly empathetic liberals—of any color!—as victims of race and class.

I never heard this glib hogwash when the murderers were white and the resultant corpses were black. No one ever explained that the lower-class rednecks, who were responsible for terrorist actions and murder, did so because their own wretched poverty made them feel desperately inferior to the white upper class of the South. When the killers were white, the issues were justice and injustice, not social station or income. Perhaps what they actually thought was that white people, unlike black people, have responsibility for their actions.

By shifting the focus from the murder of a Black man by the
police in a city and a state that is notorious for sanctioning violence towards
Black people to the murder of Black men, by other Black men, Crouch
runs the risk of making light of the seriousness of the murder of Oscar Grant.

Furthermore in the above quote, Crouch fails to take into consideration
that poor whites have always had something that no Blacks have
every had, their whiteness.

Crouch's stance is also dangerous because it serves
to create a hierarchy of murder that doesn't take into consideration
the historical violence against Black people in this country and the ways
in which the legal and political system have united to perpetuate
oppression towards Black people.

Redlining, 3 Strikes, The 1986 Anti Crime Bill, Welfare Reform, Jim Crow.
Call it "The Confluence."

Conflating the murder of a black man by a a white cop serves to only mystify
and conceal the issues at hand which are the historical violence that
Black men and women have suffered in this country, the financial
incentives associated with maintaining the prison industrial complex
and black anti black racism.

Crouch, however, does get into why financial incentives involved
in remaining apathetic to Black on Black murder. He writes,

The social and fiscal conservatives should be alarmed by—if nothing else—the billions this country has to pay for the murders, the rehabilitation, the mutilations, the disability, the psychological trauma, and so on. But no: whether on the left or the right, they are all pigs at a trough of clichés.

Crouch mentions how expensive it is, but he fails to make a connection
between the livelihoods supported by black crime.

I contend that one of the reasons why there is complacency around
the murders of so many Black men is that the murder and
imprisonment of Black men and women keeps a lot of people
employed. In small largely white towns around the country prisons
have replaced steel mills and other factories as large employers.
Fernanda Santos of the New York Times writes about the impact of
the closing of prisons on rural towns,

As rural economies across the country crumbled in the 1980s and the population of prison inmates swelled, largely because of tougher drug laws, states pushed prison construction as an economic escape route of sorts. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, an average of four prisons were built each year in rural America; the rate quadrupled in the 1980s and reached 24 a year in the 1990s, according to the federal Agriculture Department’s economic research service.

When we think about the economic incentives for policy decisions
surrounding the creation and privatizations of prisons then perhaps
we can have a different conversation about Black men, crime and
reform.

When I lived in Oakland last year and was looking for work, my cousin
who works at juvenile hall, offered to help me get a job. An entry level, the
position paid $60k. I was floored. To top it off, it was a union position
and because I had college and some graduate school I could have
probably earned more than $60K. $60K is a lot of money to someone
who is looking for a job.

There is a connection between high unemployment, the easy
availability of guns, the drug/gun/murder culture in the hood,
and black anti black racism.

I maintain that only when the ways in which these issues intersect,
and that the policy, budgetary and community decision address
the above issues, point for point, will we make any headway.

That being said, what would the non-profits, charter schools,
after school programs do if Black men weren't killing each other?
What would they focus on then? What would rappers rap about?

Furthermore, what would the non-profit industrial complex do
without the prison industrial complex?

While I think that Crouch's argument about black on black and white
on black murder is flawed, I agree that the senseless
murdering of black men by black men needs to be addressed,
discussed and eliminated.

Let me be clear, I find the murder of Black men, by black
men to be racist. They aren't killing the symbols of power
that play a roll in upholding the system that oppresses them.
They don't kill the judges, the correction officers,
the probation officer's, task force or state troopers or
FBI agents.

They kill other black men.

Lewis R. Gordon a professor of Philosophy at Temple University
lays out the notion of Black Anti Black Racism, wherein he describes
how black people can act racist towards other black people.
Granted it is a difficult notion to swallow, but it is what it is.

Hate is hate.

I think that it is time that we cultivate dialectical thinking and dual
accountability.

Contact Ella Baker Center if you want to help.

Attack of the Borderless Relationships

Flick from "Im Through With White Girls"

Borderless relationships are dangerous because there is
only a matter of time before a border is crossed and the entire
spot gets blown. This past weekend, I fell back from Filthy.
He decided to take the time to deal with the impact of a
borderless relationship with a lady friend that preceded me.

When we take part of borderless relationships we do so out of a fear
of being rejected. Think about it, if you don't have boundaries, you don't
have to worry about losing the person, or about being accountable
to a relationship. The upside of Borderless Relationships is that
they operate in that zone of the mushy middle. The down side
is that when it goes all bad, it has a tendency to be nuclear.

On Thursday Filthy told me he wanted to limit contact this
weekend, so that he could, pray, fast, reflect and I responded
saying that I understood. We also decided to put some plans
to take a trip on hold. I did understand, but I also missed my
friend. The notion of putting the trip plans on pause lighweight
scared me, as he had been talking about it for a few weeks.
But I took the highroad and agreed to play it by ear.

On top of that my road dog is in Chicago networking at a conference,
so I took it upon myself to go to a cafe and work on sketching the
100 Visionaries website.

Last night, I walked into a cafe, set my stuff down and I hear a
man clear his throat, yet I say nothing, but my mind registers
that it sounds familiar. I proceed to pay for my tea, and as I
look for the honey, I felt eyes on me.

I turn and look and it is The Graduate, sitting there, with a pretty Black
lady. He is smiling and staring.

I return the gaze. I don't blink.

I thought to myself, God has an amazing sense of humor.

I haven't seen The Graduate since May '07. All I could think was, man,
you can't write better scenes than these. In many ways, my relationship
with The Graduate was a borderless relationship. While I have spoken
to him recently about grad school, I deaded having contact
with him as a realized last year that he was interested in me,
but he wasn't interested in doing the work to be with me.
This of course is the recipe for the Borderless Relationship Syndrome.

The chickens came home to roost, kick it and freestyle last night.

I grabbed my tea. I spoke to him and walk and set my stuff down. He
mentions something about not receiving a hug, and I call him an "ass".
I give him a hug, speak and I introduce myself to his lady friend.

Then she says, "You must know him pretty well to call him an ass".

I smiled.

He responds saying, "What, I didn't hear her call me that".

I responded playing it off- with, "Hey, Lisa, ladies gotta stick together,
moi, I said nothing of the sort ", and we all laughed.

Her statement was clever. She didn't know who I was, and she was letting
me and him know that she didn't know.

I spoke to young Filth about the run in and he responded, of course, saying,
"How you feel?" At the moment I was grateful that I was humble
enough to bring it up and for the fact that we have a friendship
where we can talk about ish like this. He responded saying, I been there
before, and it ain't pretty. We laughed.

This was a lot to deal with in one night. It many ways it goes to show
you how God tests you and provides challenges when you least expect them.

Been in any borderless relationships recently?

How do you deal with them?

Did it blow up?

FAKE CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS & THE NY TIMES DON'T CARE ABOUT BLACK MEN.

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.

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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, Executive Director New York Civil Rights Coalition

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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If You Are Considering Law School, Think About This.....

The median salary for lawyers is $62K.

The graph (shown above) illustrates the distribution of salaries for members of the law school Class of 2006 and is a surprise to many because of its dramatic bimodal peaks. Despite all the publicity about large law firms and their race for talent, the fact is that most new graduates neither take jobs in big firms nor start at salaries that have now reached $160,000 at many large firms. For the Class of 2006, the vast majority of graduates who were employed as of February 15, 2007 (71% of those employed) started work in small firms of 50 or fewer lawyers, or in non-firm settings, such as government, public interest, or business. Just 20% took jobs in firms of more than 100 lawyers.

I had been saving this chart and I knew that it was time to write this post
when I saw the Times article on the perks that lawyers receive at their firms.

In addition, the July bar passage scores were just released last weekend
and my aunt told me that a friend of hers didn't pass.

She missed it by 11 points.

I told her that a disproportionately number of Black and Brown folks
take the bar multiple times before they pass.

In fact, Black folks being an oral people, I mentioned that if the BAR were
an oral exam, 80% of attorneys would be Black.

"If the glove doesn't fit, then you must acquit".

My aunt then asked me why the the Black Lawyers teaching bar classes?

My response was that once folks have made it through the system,
a mindset sets in and they feel that OTHERS should go through
what they went through. That hazing sh*t.



Then I found this article on Black Bar Passage statistics and how
they aren't even available,

In issuing the report, the commission will be weighing in on two fairly heated controversies over affirmative action at law schools: a debate over the bar association’s diversity standards, which first came under attack by groups critical of affirmative action early last year, and a more recent fight by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles, to try to gain access to data from the State Bar of California showing bar-passage rates broken down by racial and ethnic group.

NOW how are we suppose to help a group of people when we don't
have the statistics?

Sounds like a classic case of hide the ball to me.

But. You know WHO does have the power to get the stats?
Current practicing Black lawyers.

And I commented that some Black People take multiple times
to pass the exam.

Now back to the "perks for lawyers" article.

Now peep game.

Top 20 firms offer 140K starting out, and top it off with bonuses
with the knowledge that they expect you to burn out.

“Money is not the only thing that drives these lawyers right now,” said Marina Sirras, who runs a recruitment firm in New York for lawyers. “They want to be able to have a family and enjoy their family. This has never been as hot an issue.”

Law firms have been slower than some other businesses to award benefits, in part because of their smaller, and often complex, private structures.

On offer now are concierge services, in which a lawyer can have the equivalent of a personal valet pick up theater and sports tickets, the dry cleaning, take a car to the repair shop or even choose a Halloween costume.

The schools want students to take summer and eventually full time jobs
with these firms because it raises the schools stature.

Once an L-school student receives their summer internship
with a top 50 firm, they are all but guaranteed a job after they graduate
granted they don't curse out a partner at the weekly Tuesday
night happy hour.

There is a mutually beneficial relationship working here.
The firms offer the students the jobs. The schools are happy
because of the placement. Further ensuring that the pipeline for fresh
meat is available next year.



When a first, second or third year lawyer is making $125/hour
and the firm is billing the work out at $400/hour the partners
split the $275/hr amongst themselves.

And don't even get me started on the loss of human capital
that occurs when women leave firms to start/raise families.

Lawyers say the conventional system of charging clients by the hour can make for very long days. Firms often require associates to bill 1,800 to 2,200 hours a year - up to 42 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.

Coupled with the time needed for non-billable tasks, that can translate into grueling 10- to 12-hour days, plus weekends.

Gillette said an alternative system could measure performance and set salaries without reference to the number of hours billed, and instead focus on productivity, efficiency and quality of work.

In fact ANY industry that is willing to hemorrhage 10-20% of their employees/
year begs for scrutiny.

But it doesn't surprise me that current structure is resistant to change.

Many Fortune 500's are willing to tolerate their employees
racist behavior and risk a institution killing law suit rather
than monitor and discipline those who display soft bigotry.

When I was a young buck. I believed the hype.
Work hard. Get Cake. F*ck A Old (White) Boys Network.

Now, with the scars and years of experience under my belt I can see
that sh*t coming a mile away.

THEN.

I learned that the Old Boys Network is the Original Affirmative Action.

I was like hold up.

YOu are sitting up her questioning me, and my credentials, when you
got YOUR JOB because your Daddy is one of the firms biggest clients.

F*ck outta here!

=========
=========

What did you believe the hype about when
you were a young buck?

Did you become more cynical when you learned
the truth?

For the folks that have attended or OPTED not to attend grad school,
what role did you future earning potential play in your decision?

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=========

It Was Racist

I was reluctant about today's class going in.
.
We read Mary Waters Ethnic Options and her book Black Identity. I reviewed
Black Identity which focuses on the process of West Indian Americans
coming to identify or avoiding identifying as Black.

The book contained lot's of qualitative interview's with West Indian
folks talking about why they don't like African Americans,
why they are Black, but not like Black Americans, that Black Americans
are lazy, expect handouts etc.

I had no idea how the class was going to react to this.

Fascinating stuff, though, right?

Especially when you look at the presence of African Americans vs. West
Indian Americans on four year college campuses and in graduate,
law and business school in the Northeast.

The book is awesome in how it gets at how first generation verses second
generation West Indian immigrants deal with assimilation, with proving
that they are not Black and also with identifying as Black. The most
fascinating part for me was learning that women who worked as teachers
and nurses in Jamaica, came to the Brooklyn, worked as teacher and
nurses yet, class wise their lives were not the same.

The material difference is the on their salary in Jamaica, they were middle class,
so they could afford nannies and house keepers, and their housing was more
spacious and safer. In the US, housing was more expensive, there was more
opportunity for jobs and education for their children but the housing dollar
didn't go very far.

Which brings me to my classmate.

Jamaica's system is based on the British system, which means that children
are tested and tracked at a very young age. They either go into vocational
track or academic track.

Apparently Germany and much of Europe is the same way.

My Black classmate said, that he agrees with this.

I responded saying that standardized tests are measures of familial wealth
not student aptitude. And the aptitude of a four year old cannot be measured
because they have only been on the earth 48 months. He responded saying
that the British system is better because it separates the students early
and that there are some who shouldn't be in school and college.

I said that this was racist. We do not know what children are capable of at 4.

They responded saying that it wasn't racist.

I said, it was both racist AND classist because of the disparate
impact that the same policy has on Black boys in the US. Ann Fergusons
Bad Boys talks about this at length, if you want to read more about it. It's
an awesome study on a public elementary school in Berkeley,
hones in on the ways in which school policy and teacher subjectivity
impact how Black boys are disproportionately disciplined and placed
in special ed classes.

I asked him how he reconciled his approval of early testing and prediction
with the fact that standardized tests measure familial wealth not student
aptitude.

He responded saying "Yeah, tests are culturally biased but math isn't."

My eyes rolled. That did NOT refute nor address my argument.

Another classmate, a white woman who is in marketing asked, "Isn't it
better for us to asses the children at 4 rather than at 12 so that they
don't languish in the system?"

I responded no. The issue isn't when they are assessed the issue is
creating a system that serves their interests not the interests of school
administrators or corporations. We need to move out of binary
modes of thinking and ask ourselves whose interests are served by
that.

She said aren't all children about the same at four? I said no, all children are not the
same. Each child's education attainment is related to how much money her parents
earn and how much social capital her parents have and lastly how much
intergenerational wealth a family has.

I only wish that I asked them, "What would you do if your child
tests into the vocational track at 4?" I imagine, I hope the responses
would have been more compassionate.

It isn't lost on me that these people will be future professors,
bureaucrats, marketers, political advisers, researchers etc.

I see it as my job to say something.

I was proud of myself for calling a spade a spade, at least I was earlier,
this evening. As the night has warn on I am tired. School is awesome,
but in some ways the more I learn the more it appears that
racism is manifested on a civilizational level.

In some ways, this experience showed me the racism runs on
a deep civilization level. I take this term from the paper "Coloring
Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?"

In the paper, James Sheurich and Michelle Young lay out three levels of racism.
I list them below:

The first is institutional racism, which exists when instituitons or ogranizations
have standard operating procedures, intended or unintended, hurt members
of one or more races in relation to members of the dominant race.

The second is societal racism exist when prevailing societal or cultural assumptions
or norms, concepts or habits favor on race over one or more other races. For
example, the OJ trial revealed societal racism.

The third is epistemologoical racism comes from or emerges out of
what we have labeled the civilizational level, the deepest, most primary level
of a culture of people. The civilizational level is the the level that emcompasses he
deepest, most primary assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology)...

On one level these experiences remind me of just how privilaged
I am, and have been, on another it reminds me of how other children
get screwed by bureaucrats on the regular.

It reminds me of how the teachers who stepped into my life when my city,
Oakland, and my family were both submerged by the crack epidemic.

It reminds me of how these angels saved my academic life.

I hope I can be an angel for someone else.

The social costs of being a model minority, of being a Black women are taxing.

I hope I don't go crazy trying to make sense of it all.

Pray for me.

One Mans Chicken is Another Mans Steak *EDIT*

God is gettin in my @ss yall.

Thursday. BL e-mailed me about my post.

AND.

Yesterday I RAN into The Graduate.[<-----Got deaded in this post]

I was like what the F-ck? IS TL 'gon pop his CAMUS
pronouncing foune @ss up. [HE got deaded in THIS post].

Prolly not, because HE SHOULD be in bar study :)

On top of that, a new jawn, is creepin' on the creep up come up.

BLOGS ARE WORDS TOO.
You see, BL never read my blog when we were together,
who KNEW that he read it now?

However, The e-mail he sent was, er, reasonable.

But there was one line that had me like this N*GGUH? HUNH?

Secondly, I sent you that email about the Hip Hop thing in an effort to perhaps initiate some contact again without it being a large production you know?

I immediatly thought, oh, so contacting a b*tch gotta be a large production? Can't just send a email saying,

"what up m, its been a hot minute. Just checkin' for you. Have no mal intent. We bound to run into each other, just trynna see how your summer poppin' off."

Easy.

As y'all know. I am one direct @ss black gurl.
In fact, in my dream last night, I was at a training at the SEC, in a small group session, and I was trying to get a word in, and this white dude kept interrupting me and the team leader let him do it. I turned into east oakland black gurl, and EVENTUALLY got my point across. Its was like, DAMMM, I gotta DO all 'LIS, to participate!

But. I digress.

So. I began thinking about how he could perceive recconecting w/ me as being a large production.

And, hey, everyone is entitled to their perceptions. NO?

And I thought about another situation earlier this week.

ITS HARD TO ASK FOR HELP
See, I was in a pinch, and I needed some help so I called the pet detective.

Now ol boy, man, I been trying bag for a hot minute. He's that DUDE. So he's doing his own thing. Not really pressed.
But.
He allways takes my calls, even if its to say "lemme hit you back in 15".
And. He knows I hate asking for help. So, in the midst of asking, he was like, hole' up, lemme you send you this text which read,

"If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that"

Thats that trill. Like damn. Ol' boy is a f*cking rydah.

So just thinking about the contrast between reconnection consitituting a"whole production" vs the "let me treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming". The distinction is not lost on me.

Which brings me to The Graduate.

THE GRADUATE REAPPEARS
Yesterday Im minding my own business. Doing ME.
At Barnes and Noble. Waiting for my date.

Im in mid convo w/ this random cat, breaking down John McWorter, and out the side of my eye, I peep, brown skin and broad shoulders and swag, b*tches, swag.

And I look up and, INSTANTLY SMILE, Hi [Insert Nickname here].

So I finish my McWhorter convo, kept it moving and The Grad comes back.

He has a book in his hands. Says it was a gift.
It is a book that he is clearly buying for a woman.
The kind of book that you buy for a woman that you adore.

Thank GAWD I was cayute yesterday.
Jeans wuz tiiiyuuut. <<<--Keeps it tiiiyut. Blouse was billowey, pink and transparent<<<<--NICE! We caught up a lil bit. PEEP THIS. I stood tall. DID not give 'em the new number! So. It went okay. Was my furst time experiencing something like that in a hot minute. Dude. Did I mention that he had the nerve to be bumping
Tribe in the pod? God he fly!

All in all, I think I made it through that
interaction w/ my dignity intact.

Speaking of acting w/ dignity, lemme speak on your
boy SJ.

ONE MANS CHICKEN IS ANOTHER MANS STEAK
So. You ever be cool with somebody. Y'all talk on the phone?

There is a subcurrent of sexy tension there, but you don't pay it no mind.

Then they say something to you that clearly indicates that they are interested, like,

"Well, I didn't mean it like that, if it means that it would push you away from me"?

***Cues Bonita Appleum in my head ****.

I looked at the phone, like, I think this n*gga like me?
Here WE go.

Here is the rub. Old boy is heavy into jesus. I mean, my nick name
for 'em is Sweet Jesus, *wink nod wink*.

He KNOW im greasy. In fact one of my jokes is that if I walk
into a church, the altar would catch on fire.

However, several of my core principals, according to him,
are very Christian-like. I personally think they
are Buddhist, but tomatoTO-MAH-toe.

And I have allways had love for Jesus on the strength.
So we shall see how me and SJ turns out.

As for SJ, he's a stand up dude, he love Black
people, which is one of my biggest pre-reqs
along w/ being a b-boy and/or b-girl friendly.

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Thats a lot of personal business in one post.
But sh*t.
Yall been here for the last 6 months of M.dot's trials and tribs,
can't start skimpin' now. LOL.

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America's Failure to Educate Black Students* is Soft Genocide.

*For brevity's sake I said Black students, but it applies to latinos, under resourced white kids and a plethora of other immigrant groups as well.

Did you know that certain governor's base the number of prison beds on

3rd grade reading scores? The notion is, the worse the scores, the more beds will be needed.

Statistics show that a baby that doesn't know how to read at 8yrs old/3rd grade,
will likely NEVER catch up.

I am obsessed with education.

Yall know that.

So when I came across an article this morning titled, Racism alive and well in S.F. schools - here's proof, I knew it was about to be on and poppin'. The article actually represents a rare, candid discussion on public education.

Last spring, Cal graduate student Mandy Johnson wrote a paper looking at why parents picked certain schools in the choice-based San Francisco district.

The top factors correlated with low demand were the prevalence of low-income students and - here's the really troubling one - race. Specifically, Johnson found, "as the percentage of African American students in the school increases, kindergarten demand decreases."

Then it gets even more in the gristle and delicious:

Chris Rosenberg, principal of ethnically diverse Starr King Elementary, laid it out for me in clear terms.

"The bottom line is that many people do not feel comfortable sending their kids to a school with a lot of African American students," says Rosenberg, who has been at Starr King for 12 years, four as principal. "It's a crying shame. It's terrible. But it is a sad and obvious truth in our schools. And no one wants to touch it."

Nobody wants to read with the negros. Eh?

And here comes the big bad finance wolf:

With African American families leaving San Francisco, schools are losing black students. But as Sanchez says, when students leave those predominantly black schools, "nobody is willing to fill those seats." The result is that schools in minority neighborhoods are continually threatened with closure because they are losing enrollment.

THIS. BLOG FAMILY. HAD.ME.ON.THE.FLOOR. I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE THAT SOMEONE SAID, IT LET ALONE PRINTED IT.

Skeptics will say we are exaggerating the problem. After all, it may not be racial. Who wants to send their kid to a school in a bad neighborhood? Rosenberg admits that Starr King is not far from the Potrero housing projects.

"I get a lot of questions from parents about safety," says Rosenberg, a white man who majored in African American studies in college. "But John Yehall Chin Elementary (on Broadway) is a really good school with a lot of strip clubs around it. Do you think they get asked about safety? The fact is, people don't care so much about the environment when it does not include black people."

Which brings me to Rudy Crew. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up his new book.

He is the former superintendent of schools for NYC.

On the cover he looks proud. The rich money green background contrast's nicley
with his bronze tone.
BUT.

People are like books, its whats inside that matters.

After reading the table of contents and the chapters of interest, I came to the conclusion
that there was a fundamental problem with the book.

There was NO mention of the history of public education and how the school finance formula fundamentally screws urban schools.

Education is expensive. Right? Right!

Why else are property taxes high as h*ll in Jersey and Conneticut BUT families pay it
because they understand that a meaningful education COSTS MONEY.

The formula used to fund public education, mainly using property taxes on homes, automatically short shifts the hood.

Folks in the hood don't own their homes, that makes for fewer tax dollars, which equals underfunded schools. Throw in hella apartment complexes full of kids and you
have an interesting prison situation.

A whole 'lotta kids. And a little bit of cake.

In his book there was a great analysis of Demand Parents aka, those parents that demand things from their schools and their kids.

He gave valuable tips on how to become a demand parent.
He also gave examples of what happens when you are NOT a demand parent.
BUT.

He did not go into the economic or a historical analysis of the system,
which undermines his credibility.
How can an educator expect a parent to leverage power in an instution when the parent has no idea of the institution's history, and how the institution funds itself?

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Are there any parents or teachers reading?
What has your experience been with No Child Left Behind?

What do you think of "Every Third Grader Will Read" as the alternate slogan?

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Why Can't the Obama's Send Their Kids to Public School?

Apparently the Obama's send their daughters to a private school

in Chicago.

I find it tre interesting that we are questioning whether 

his daughters should go to private or public school

and what it says about Senator Obama as a leader

when we don't question the decisions of our elected leaders, 

school teachers and administrators to send not send  their 

children to the public schools that they work for.

Chicago schools have been in the news lately.

Last week, in order to bring attention to the inequity in school

funding, 1000 Chicago Public School students boarded buses

and headed to a suburban school district and attempted to 

enroll to shed light on inequitable funding between school

districts. In New Trier, a suburb, spending tops at $17K per student,

whereas in Chicago, it tops off at $10,400K per student.

In light of this funding discrepancy, why is Senator Obama

expected to send his kids to schools, that teachers,

white Teachers (the majority of public school teachers in this country

are white women) would never send their children to?

I am torn on this. As a product of both public and private institutions

they both have their merits and drawbacks. What I do know, is

that education is expensive, and that until we acknowledge that

nothing will be done and analyze why what stops folks from

acting, nothing meaningful will be done.

I also know that failure creates jobs and that people would 

rather talk about "a culture of poverty" rather than about

how many people pay their mortgages off of jobs related

to the academic failure of low income students.

As parents, we all want to give our children better than what we had.

However, public servants are obligated to serve not only their families

interests but the interests of the public as well.

Perhaps, the question then becomes, where does Obama's public life

end and his private life began.

Rather than be interested in where the Obama daughters attend school,

perhaps we should be more interested in how inequitable schools are 

funded in Chicago between low income districts and affluence districts.

Providing quality education to all is a benchmark of a healthy democracy.

As a rule, I listen to a persons words, and I also watch their actions.

It is clear that commenter's are interested "they own", the rest be damned.

It ain't blatant neglect, but it is neglect just the same.

Look at the following comments it appears that folks want a better 

educational system. In the meantime, their children are enrolled 

in Chicago Day Prep school. No time for fake ones. Check out some 

of the comments for the Times article,

"Any parent who doesn't send their child to the school that best

meets their needs is irresponsible"

"I am not a believer in sacrificing my child for the potential- but not

certain- benefit for society"

"Children are not the sacrificial lambs for the greater good. As someone

who attended public school all her life, and managed to get into and 

graduate from The University of Chicago...I would have loved to have

attended the Lab School". 

What would happen of all the parents of students at underfunded schools

said that they wouldn't send them there any longer unless they were funded equitably.

Logistically, it would be a nightmare, but it would sure bring attention to the situation.

Black people in this country have a had a real tenuous relationship with 

education. Throughout history, we have always been fighting to learn.

At first it was illegal for us to read. Then we were allowed to read 

but in our sub par schools, just the same, we made do with what we had.

Then the schools were "desegregated", but first little Black boys and

girls had to be escorted to schools by the national guard because racists

where not interested in going to school with them.

Implicit in the spirit of many of the commenter's messages from the 

quoted above is that the lives of some children are worth more than others.

A few weeks ago, Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice cited a report that

stated that only 32 percent of Black men enrolled in high school in

New York graduated on schedule. Yes. 32 percent. If this is the case in

New York City, then I wonder what the case is in say, LA, Chicago, 

Baltimore and Philly.

The bottom line is until we treat the education of ALL children the way 

we treat the education of "our" children the 2008 Jim Crow system of 

education will persist.

As long as we have two educational systems we will have two America's.

Where is the Democracy in that?