Yes, Serena is a rebel. She rebels in her dress, her intensity, and her ability to overcome unwarranted criticism. Yelling at the linesman “John McEnroe” style doesn’t become her. Hell, it didn’t become him. It was dumb sh*t when he did it, too.
Cultural Popularity Versus Populist Vulgarity
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There was always one person in the mob who ignited the spark. “You lie” equates to “the Ni**ers lyin’” in another period, or “get em, boys” in yet another. Congressman Joe Wilson was the one holdin’ the rope in a previous period.
Ode to John Holoman
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Thank you John for the difference you made in our world, in my world, and for being a man’s man. A living example that we can be all that we desire to be. We will miss you dearly.
LAPD’s Consent Decree May Be Partly Over, But Racial Profiling Is Alive and Well in America
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LAPD may be off parole as it relates to the federal consent decree, but they’re not off probation. Racial profiling is a primary indicator as to whether LAPD has really changed.
Obama To The NAACP: Health Care IS A Civil Rights Fight
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Quality health care is tied to wealth, work, and wellness, none of which seems to find its way into the black community on a parity basis.
Michael Jackson: The BADDEST Entertainer of Our Generation
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Our hearts have been heavy for about over a week now since the news broke that pop star Michael Jackson died suddenly from a heart attack (of some sort). Everything, and when I say everything – I mean EVERYTHING, has been bumped from the news cycle. Not just the 24-hour news cycle, or even the [...]
No Villaraigosa for Governor: LA Needs a Full-Time Mayor
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It’s been a while since I’ve been on the same page at the same time with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. As one of the few black stakeholders who backed his losing bid in 2001, and returned to support him in 2005, only to have to bash him for engaging in token reciprocity with the [...]
From Analog To Digital: Nothing’s Free Anymore
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Last week, the federal government moved forth with allowing public airwaves to be transitioned from the analog transmission to the newer, advanced digital forms of communication transmission. Now understand, we all must realize that everything must change. NOTHING remains the same. The advancement of technology has changed everything about television, making them larger, thinner and [...]
LAUSD Canceling Summer School: Do We Really Want to Go There?
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The Superintendent of the second largest school district in the United States, Ray Cortines, recently announced that the Los Angeles Unified School District will be canceling summer school as a cost-cutting remedy for the district’s $400 million dollar budget shortfall. Who thought of this bright idea? Can the School Board really be serious? The city [...]
Sonia Sotomayor – A “Safe” or Visionary Pick
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President Barack Obama has made his imprint on the history of the federal judiciary with the nomination of the first Latina to the United States Supreme Court. Federal Appeals Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, was at the top of the President’s “short list” from the time Associate Justice David Souter announced his retirement. There had been [...]
Los Angeles NAACP Life Achievement Award
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I had a déjà vu moment last week while watching Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, receive the Los Angeles NAACP Chapter’s Life Achievement Award. Watching Sterling try to find the words of why he merited the award was like watching George Wallace try to convince black voters that he had changed from his segregationist [...]
Now It’s Inglewood’s Turn to Have a Federal Police Department Watch Dog
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Sometimes it takes an event (or two) to make plain a reality that nobody wants to talk about. Pervasive police abuse and police misconduct are usually activities nobody wants to acknowledge and nobody wants to admit to. Police have a way of trying to convince you that everything they do is legal, even when it [...]
The President’s American Recovery & Reinvestment Act: What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
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One of the first things President Barack Obama did as our nation’s Chief Executive was to urge Congress to pass, then sign, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA), better known as the nation’s “economic stimulus” package. The $787 billion bill, the largest taxpayer footed bill ever passed, was viewed as the primary vehicle to [...]
100 Days: Is Obama’s Probation Period Over?
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The benchmarks in which we in America seek to establish “acceptance” in the labor force generally come without much fanfare. New hires commonly have 90-day, sometimes six-month, probation periods that affirm their competency and synergetic fit in the workplace. Now, we’ve seen probation periods before. We generally see them come and go. But never has [...]
The New William H. Parker Center Controversy: Revisionist History Cannnot Override Long Racial Legacy
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The City of Los Angeles is about to unveil its brand new “state-of-the-art,” world-class headquarters for what it considers its world-class law enforcement agency. Just know there’s one too many “world-class” attributes in that last sentence, and given the latest controversy — the public should decide where the “world-class” attribute should actually go. A month [...]
Stimulus Mania: Is It The 21st Century Soup Line?
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The efforts to jump start the economy in the United States, in hopes of causing a global ripple, have taken on an entirely new meaning as people and industry alike wait for the $787 billion dollar economic stimulus package to drop. It’s like a “mania” as so many cities, states, industries, school districts, homeowners, small [...]
Nationalizing Banks and Industry: Why Capitalists Hate Socialism
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The United States has always been a political economy, requiring government regulation of its finance and money markets, and using government stimulation on its labor force. “Free Market” enterprise is based on the notion that open markets and the competition derived from competing ideas for consumer patronage will create a market balance (equilibrium) that will [...]
Rejecting Post-Raciality: An Ode to the Life of John Hope Franklin
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The death of preeminent historian and race scholar, John Hope Franklin, and his life-long contribution to helping America understand the legacies of slavery and racial vestiges that have been carried forward, is a true loss. Franklin helped those who followed his work to understand that race is still the most entrenched socio-economic-political issue of our [...]
Black, Male, Released from Prison, and Unemployed: A Recipe for Social Estrangement
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Young men who are re-entering society from prison can’t find work. Recent studies on prisoner re-entry suggest that, in California, nearly 400 prisoners, A DAY, are being released into the community, with 70% to 90% of them being unemployed because only 20% of the state’s employers are willing to hire persons with convictions (no matter how long ago).
Economic Recovery Will Be More than Trusting President Obama’s Stimulus Plan
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The Audacity Of Greed should be the title of President Obama’s next book. Never could he have imagined how tough getting out of an economic recession (borderline depression) when he signed up for the presidency. He knew the job was tough when he took it, he just didn’t know that greed would continue to trump [...]
Between the Lines: The Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Who Made the Hard Sell of Trust
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The passing of Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police, Kenny Garner, has left a stunned community pondering the question, “Who do we call now, when we want answers from LAPD?” Kenny Garner was a friend to me, the community, and most he met, and he had the hardest job of anyone in the community; convincing [...]
Who’s Leading the Republican Party? Rush Limbaugh and the Resurrection of “Massive Resistance”
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The Republican Party put all its business in the streets as talk radio rhetorician, Rush Limbaugh, went on the offensive (even more than he’s been on the offensive since Obama has taken office) at the Conservative Party Convention this past weekend. Stating that he wanted to see President Obama fail, and that it is reasonable [...]
Octuplet Mom: If She Can Care for Fourteen Children Without Welfare, She Can Fix the Economy
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The one thing American popular culture loves is a good “freak show.” Anything out of the ordinary gets our society’s attention, but the more bizarre it is, the more media attention it receives. The demand for the outlandish is so outrageous that so-called media conglomerates are willing to pay millions of dollars for the rights [...]
The NAACP’s 100th Anniversary: What’s the Future Hold for the Granddaddy of Civil Rights Groups?
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This week, the most venerable of civil rights organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, more commonly known as the NAACP, turns 100 years old. Founded on Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday (February 12th, 1809), the organization had a controversial start. The organization was born out of what started as an effort by [...]
Michael Steele — The Republican’s First Black Party Chair: For Real, or Another Cheap Trick?
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Last week, after six ballots, the Republican Party elected its first African American party chair in the history of the party, former Maryland Lt. Governor, Michael Steele. This new “lovefest” with black America is almost too much to handle. First, a black president — now a black Republican Party Chair. We just don’t know what [...]
Obama’s First Week in Office: The Nonsense Has Started Already
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President Barack Obama’s first week in office was certainly filled with only the highest of expectation, given the eight years of Republican elephant poo-poo that was left on the White House floor for him. That’s a lot of poo-poo: Over 180,000 more jobs lost in January (60,000 in a single day during his first week [...]
Barack H. Obama, 44th President Of The United States: Has “The Dream” Been Fulfilled?
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The day of an African American President of the United States is no longer coming. That day is here. Witnessing Barack Obama take the oath of office, in the freezing cold with a million other people, is surely one of the seven highlights of my life (along with the witnessing the birth of my four [...]
Response to ACLU Racial Profiling Study: Los Angeles Police Department Never Met a Reform Report It Agrees With
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The nation’s most abusive, and aggrieved law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles Police Department, is still “doin’ what it do” as it presented its response this week to a racial profiling study released to its civilian Police Commission in October 2008. The study, titled, “Racial Profiling & The LAPD,” documents that deep and pervasive racial [...]
2009 as a Litmus Test for Change: Contact Sport or Spectator Sport
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The expectations of the New Year has us all expecting change on some level. Change in the nation’s political direction; change in the global situation; change in the economy; change in the job markets; change in the schools; change in our local communities; change in our personal lives. Funny thing about change? It’s much like [...]
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Between the Lines: New York Post “Chimp” Cartoon — Incendiary Satire Has a Dangerous Past
The New York Post issued a “sideways” explanation (I really wouldn’t call it an apology) on a provocative and highly incendiary political cartoon it ran on February 18th. Combining two news events of the day, one in which a Connecticut woman named Charla Nash was attacked by her “pet” chimpanzee — which nearly ripped off [...]