As you may know, I support gay marriage (yes, it is a civil rights issue.) As you may also know, I have a pretty interesting sense of humor. So when I saw this video (from 2009! it’s a shame i missed it) which breaks down what marriage is “biblically” I had to share it with you all. It’s amazing what we, humans, will use to selectively justify discrimination and exclusion. Let Sister Betty Bowers – “America’s Best Christian”- teach you what traditional marriage is.

If you can’t see the video, click here.

p.s. I’ll be awaiting some angry comments … I said awaiting, not necessarily replying to them

“Justice for Oscar Grant!” As I sit in front of these keys I know that I could have written this essay 100 a times before and will likely need to write it 100 more times before I die, simply because I knew there would be no justice for Oscar Grant. Justice for most would have been a conviction of Officer Mesherle on a second degree murder charge, but that still would not equal justice — that would simply be a small step on the path towards justice. Justice is larger than the Oscar Grant case, the Sean Bell case, or any of the host of assassinations of unarmed Black men by the police. Justice is about their totality and the space that lies between popular unshakable belief in state innocence and Black male criminality. Justice is knowing and doing something about, as Mos Def said, “the length of Black life [being] treated with short worth.” When Oscar grant was killed nearly 2 years ago at the age of 22, he would exit this planet knowing that this society had done him no justice and his family was reminded of that when the jury deliberated for 8 hours, about the misery they will have to cope with the rest of their lives. So many will wonder, is the judicial system even the place to look for justice?

Read more on the Social Text Blog

Not too long ago, I had a chance to discuss the question of a Black Agenda and President Obama with Kelli Goff- author of Party Crashing. The discussion is part of The Atlanta Post’s 50/50 segment and was moderated by China Okasi. There were some surprising points of agreement and disagreement. Click here and hear all three parts of the conversation.

*this conversation was taped in January 2010 so keep that in mind/ context.

The term racial profiling has been part of my vocabulary and reality for nearly 15 years now, but it shouldn’t be. While the terminology for the practice of profiling people based on their perceived race, ethnicity and nationality is regarded as taboo, many in this nation have a nasty habit of trying to re-introduce it over and over again. As African-Americans, we are well aware that, whether driving or walking, our skin color can be a legal liability. The problem is that we, as united communities, have not learned to speak out against the various forms of racial profiling that continue to be floated as legislation and policy. The controversy of SB 1090 in Arizona is a perfect time for us to join our voices against injustice, but too many of us are without comment and are missing the larger picture.

Recently, the Arizona legislature signed a bill which allows agencies to demand verification of immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person being questioned is an “illegal alien.” The minute I heard “reasonable suspicion,” I myself became suspicious of this bill given my own experiences with racial profiling. The sad reality is that there has been a continued emphasis on immigration control, not immigration reform, in a national culture that increasingly centers on fear. This culture of fear continues to allow racial profiling to curb the civil and human rights of Black and Brown people.

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Unless you have been in hiding, you have noticed the Census 2010 is in full swing now. From rapping commercials to inflatable census forms, there are a large amount of resources going into getting people to fill out the 10 Census questions. Despite all this hoopla, the biggest controversy has been the use of the word Negro on the Census. The word Negro is not new on the census and it’s there now because more than 56,000 Black folks wrote in “Negro” last Census. While many are in a tizzy about Negro, the count of prisoners should be getting us more riled up and more attention.

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I recently penned a piece for the new website The Atlanta Post about the passing of Malcolm X and the fear of the passing of his legacy on Black leadership. Check it out.

45 years. 45 years ago, Malcolm X, also known as El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, was taken from the earth. While I never knew Malcolm, I came of age believing that Malcolm X was the prototype for Black leadership. I wonder, will our children believe Barack Obama is what Black leadership means? In 2008, we organized, ran to the polls and chose the ballot over the bullet and elected Barack Obama. A year later, many of us are looking at Barack Obama wondering what has happened, but maybe we should be asking, “Where are the Malcolm X’s of today?” During the presidential campaign, many in our community embraced Obama as the continuation of a grassroots legacy.Well, if Obama is the continuation of that legacy, what remains is buried in politics. It’s now, more so than ever before, that we need a strong grassroots to push forward a truly progressive agenda for Black Americans.

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And one of them is not the use of the word Negro which has BEEN appearing, including on the 2000 census short and long forms.

1) The counting of prisoners – Currently prisoners are counted as residents of the counties in which they are imprisoned rather than their home communities. This serves to increase political representation in areas that tend to be rural and White, while decreasing the political representation of the home communities that folks come from.

2) Who is White? The extended racial definitions provided by OMB 15 say that, ” A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”  Notice something about that? I was certainly surprised that folks from North Africa and the Middle East remain classified as White, despite the socially distinct lives that many lead.

3) Undercounts. The issue of Negro was raised in response to the potential of people being offended and “opting out” of the Census. If seeing Negro makes you not fill out the Census form, I’m going to wager you weren’t going to fill it out in the first place. Many communities remain undercounted: the poor, the young, immigrant to name a few, this all matters for political resources. If you’re worried about undercounts, think also about the homeless. Their undercounting means fewer resources for those feeling the hardest brunts of the “land of opportunity.”

I am all for rallying around a cause. I’m just not sure I can meet ya’ll down at the Census offices for a protest over Negro. Focus groups, lettering writing campaigns, and write ins suggest some of our older brothers and sisters still support the term. Let’s focus energy in creating greater political clout, not appropriate nomenclature.

This is my reflection on Nia Purpose ”To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.”

While there is no one path, ritual creates a space for purpose to emerge and understanding to evolve. I think the rituals that we do can serve to build greater understanding of self and with each successive engagement expands the meaning of the ritual and principle. This year’s participation in rituals of writing daily on Kwanzaa served to enrich my understanding of each principle’s purpose and my own purpose.

From B I R D flickr photostream

I have been having conversations all Kwanzaa with adult brothers and sisters about celebrating it and there are a number of who respond, “I did when I was kid and it was cool then but ….” As someone who did not come up celebrating Kwanzaa, I’m from one of those Black families where members-only jackets were more common than dashikis, I have appreciated the adult understandings that have developed for me from the Nguzo Saba or Kawaida. While many enter the festival of Kwanzaa as a ritual where the Kinara needs to be there, corn and squash is around, and we should yell Harambee, this can be a part of Kwanzaa but the reflection on the principles as an individual and within a group are paramount. Through participation in the rituals associated with Kwanzaa (both reflection and actions) we have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of their purpose, our purpose, and often discover things that were beyond the original conception.

I recently was discussing Ujamaa with a sister online who was talking about explaining it to four year olds and how difficult it is. She had settled on an example of a lemonade stand. I added, “Maybe you can explain it as sharing. Tell them it’s about businesses that share with the community. Maybe point out businesses that share usually know your name or other folks in your community’s name.” While this was a rough and dirty way to explain it, I think it begins to get at some of the core dimensions of Cooperative Economics. Now I don’t think “businesses that share” is the limit of Ujamaa, instead as adults I think the purpose of the principle is to get us to think more deeply about the economic systems that we are involved in. Julius Nyerere enacted a system of Ujamaa which was a form of socialism in Tanzania. Imagine if in the same room we had young folks talking about sharing, adolescents discussing the validity of buying Black, and young adults and adults talking about the promise and pitfalls of differing economic systems and policies? Those types of discussions would invariably benefit our community. It seems with each step in one’s development, the purpose in the principle should be seen differently. Each year, we must bring the year’s gains, losses, and insights to the festival of harvest. While the ritual remains the same, the purpose does not change, it just grows as we do.

This morning on Good Morning America, I was greeted with a disturbing story on a “gang” murder in suburbia, but I was less disturbed by the details of the death, which are sad, but more disturbed by the way it was reported. GMA went through great lengths to paint a portrait of perfect suburbia being impinged upon by a deadly gang force. Without using the words, the story signaled and screamed race. The practice of not talking about race explicitly but talking about race is common, but particularly dangerous in this case. The loss of Chris Jones’ life is one matter, but the underhanded sentencing of the lives of the boys who are alleged to have committed the crime is another.

The segment opens trying to draw viewers in by introducing the silent danger in suburbs … gangs!

“We have an interesting story for you. Many of us believe that gang violence is old news, you know about it, it’s in the inner cities, it’s about drugs. That’s not true, that’s not accurate, there’s a whole world of violence out there that puts kids in suburbs at risk. We want to tell you of this one mother in Maryland who did everything she could to protect her child from bullies, turned out they were gang members. And just a block from their home her son met a fate that even his mother had never imagined …”

Voice overs to the story give you information like townhouses in the area cost “350,000 dollars” and that Chris was an  “all American boy” who loved things like baseball, hockey, and wanted to be a police officer. The way the story is framed and unpacks it is meant to scream whiteness, suburban safety, and crisis. Chris’ death is discussed and eventually the “suspects” are splashed across the screen, they are Black youth. While the story doesn’t discuss it, the boys alleged in the attack attended the same school and presumably lived in the same community as Chris. The reality is that suburban Crofton, Maryland is like many areas, it is not all White and likely has not dealt well with the incorporation of non-Whites (in this case Black) into its community. While suburbia is painted as perfect, the reality is that suburbs are engineered spaces that have been used to “escape” some urban hazards and buffer their residents from the social world around them. Regardless of Crofton’s public image and its besmirchment, I am most disturbed that the reporting of Chris Jones’ murder serves exacerbate racial tensions; rather than open for spaces of dialogue.

A couple months back, the Atlantic published an article entitled “American Murder Mystery” about Memphis, Tennessee that discussed the issue of crime. The piece, which features the research of Richard Janikowski and Phyllis Betts who “crack” the mystery of American murder by uncomfortably suggesting residents who relocated from public housing to scattered site and mixed-income housing travelled to new areas and carried their “old ways” of violence and gangs. Recently, I sat in a GIS mapping workshop where approximately 1/3 of the participants were law enforcement agents from suburban areas who were interested in using mapping to find “crime hot spots” so they could more “effectively” patrol neighborhoods and groups. It reminded me of the sad reality that a little bit of social science knowledge can be a dangerous thing, particularly for those who are unjustly and unnecessarily targeted.

The overtone in GMA piece and the Atlantic piece suggest that neighborhoods that are “well off” will soon be over-run by dark violent, inner-city forces. Rather than open a dialogue about communities and responsibly dealing with difference, they feed into racial paranoia. Rather than explore the ways that policy can mitigate some of the tensions between communities, we receive more fodder for race conflict carried out using non-racial language but overt racial signals. Rather than look seriously at the lives of all people in suburban communities, both Black and White, right and poor, we get conviction on young Black boys in the public eye. Don’t believe me, read the comments on the piece.

I am no journalist, but I think I that the implications of pieces like these are huge. America is arguably more on “racial alert” now than it has been in the past. The arrival of an African American president has not been without impact in both positive and negative ways. We need to be informed about what is happening in the nation, but we also must be critical consumers. Having lived through the Central Park Five case and recognizing the railroading that young Black men have historically received in the American Judicial system, I cannot help but wonder, what was the goal of the piece: information or inflammation?

Last weekend, at the Malcolm X Grassroots Unity Brunch one of the topics covered was violence against LGBTQ people of color. I think it was Kenyon Farrow who mentioned the suicides of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera who are both Black boys who recently committed suicide because of peer bullying and hatred. Jewel Woods, of the Renaissance Male Project, writes a clear indictment of the ways that our schools allow torture and why boys of color are particularly at risk. What can we do to prevent torture in our schools and ensure a safe and whole development for all our children. PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE

Imagine the terror of a mother frantically trying to cut down her child seconds after finding him hanging from an extension cord in his bedroom. Picture the trauma of a 10-year-old girl desperately trying to hold up her older brother after finding him hanging from a noose in an upstairs closet.

These tragic scenes unfolded in the past several weeks as two beautiful 11-year-old black boys, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Massachusetts and Jaheem Herrera of DeKalb, Georgia, chose to end their lives rather than endure another day of being bullied in their schools.

According to reports, the parents of both children had repeatedly warned school officials about the daily torment and torture that their children were subjected to during school. However, neither parents nor educators were able to intervene in time.

While most acts of bullying do not lead to traumatic acts of suicide, bullying happens to young people all the time. Studies indicate that 65% of teens have been verbally or physically harassed or assaulted during the past year. 39% of teens report that students in their school are frequently harassed because of their physical appearance and another 33% report that students in their school are frequently harassed because of their perceived or actual sexual orientation.

But why are our kids killing themselves? Is there something different about bullying today that makes facing the daily onslaught more painful than life itself for some of our youth? Questions like these beckon to adults reeling from the shock of these events, in part because many think that that bullying is just a part of life–something that everyone has to deal with when they are growing up. Many adults are also puzzled by the impact of bullying on children who are targeted as “gay” because they assume that being gay, lesbian, and or bi-sexual is more acceptable today than in the past.

Click here to read full article

Today is a phenomenonally exciting day on the campus of the City College of New York. A series of lectures and talks will descend to bring some of the nation’s foremost scholars and activists, if you’re around you can hear Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton discuss “Race and the New Genomics.” The lecture will be in the Great Hall in Shepard Hall at 5:30pm.

After you’re done listening to a supremely academic discussion of race and science. You can head over to “Live from Death Row” featuring Pam Africa (remember Move in Philadelphia?), Yusef Salaam (remember the false conviction of the brothas with the central part jogger?), and others discuss the death penalty and its disproportionate use on poor, Black and Brown folks. This event is sponsored by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

These two events will likely be “contradictory” to many folks, but as an academic and activist, I think they really provide two great spaces to think about questions and realities of race. Check them out if you can!

Tomorrow, Wednesday evening, the City College of New York will host an important panel discussion on the No Child Left Behind Act. The panel is entitled, “Has No Child Left Behind Failed High Poverty Urban Schools?” was organized by Tiffany O’Neal a CCNY student and New York Life Fellow. I will be moderating the panel which features Christopher Edmin of Teacher’s College, Winthrop Holder teacher and author of Classroom Calypso, and Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute. More information on panelist is available here.
The panel will occur from 5 to 7pm in Shepard Hall Room 250.

The conversation promises to be lively and insightful.

This past week, renowned Psychologist Richard Nisbett published an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled, “Education Is All in the Mind.” While I’ve come to respect Nisbett for his research and advocacy against polemics such as The Bell Curve, his recent piece misses the mark. The central issue is that Nisbett privileges psychological factors over other factors and leaves the reader to think what it takes to repair schools essentially are “mind games.” This is not to suggest that there is not validity to some of the claims that he makes. However, I argue that the work he cites speaks to improving psychological processes which can have an impact on test performance, but these tell us little about what is necessary for educational reform. Nisbett’s argument and logic is one that is shared by a number of people advocating change in policy towards education that concentrates on “the mind”, but overlooks the schools, neighborhoods, and families that kids are nested in. Transforming educational opportunity takes both psychological effort but also in-depth systematic reform in schools and communities.

The reality is that the bulk of educational reforms have done little to affect the achievement gaps between students along lines of race, language, poverty, etc. Some argue this is because schools do little to affect the unequal lives that children walk into schools with. While I understand this and has been substantiated by some key research (namely the Coleman Report), I come from a different perspective. While the unequal social worlds that children live in affect their school performance, schools remain some of the most important institutions in our society. Not because they provide “rags to riches” opportunity, which they usually do not, but because they are the one location that we have the ability to tinker with to produce social change. Legally, all children under 16 must go to school and US public schools must education everyone who walks through their doors, which makes it probably the most difficult institution to ensure high performance in. Tinkering and reforming to produce sustainable results in education, in my estimation, is probably one of THE MOST difficult of social engineering tasks.

So what’s the big deal? To some, Nisbett has pointed out that there are programs that “eliminate the gap” or “reduce the gap” quickly. That’s the catch, the quick elimination of a gap does not necessarily mean the effective elimination of a gap. The programs that he cites do deal with improving or manipulating psychological variables to increase performance. This is basic educational psychology where the better or more efficacious one feels about one’s self, the more likely they are to perform well. But this does not mean that gaps in education can be reduced by this manner for three main reasons:

1) Single tests of achievement may be unrelated or weakly related to overall school performance

2) There are multiple forms of achievement gaps

3) There is not just an achievement gap but also a skills gap

On point one, it is totally possible for someone to perform well on a laboratory administered test, not pass math, and perform below grade level on a state-standards test. Psychometricians and education evaluators have a long tradition of finding differing performance between metrics for the same people. Even finding differences in performance in laboratory setting and in non-laboratory settings. To assume high performance on one evaluation in one setting will be closely correlated to the next is actually fallacious.

On the second point, while the No Child Left Behind Act has placed the idea of “the achievement gap” front in center, in reality there are many different forms of achievement gaps. There are those that happen, between schools, within schools and they can fall along race, ethnicity, gender, poverty, language or a host of other lines. While psychological interventions can improve the performance of small groups at a time, there is little to no evidence that “large scaled” psychological interventions will provide similar results. Additionally, Tom Cook’s work from long ago (Sesame Street Revisited) suggested that when all students receive an equal treatment/intervention, gaps in performance can still widen because “all boats rise with the tide” and there is really no such thing as an  “equal treatment.”

On the third point, to suggest that performance can be “gamed” by mental exercises is a dangerous idea. Having spent copious time in schools by way of researching and speaking, I can assure you that not all observed gaps are simply artifacts of tests. There are variable skill levels that students posses. While some students may have the skills that they do not fully engage, I have not seen full evidence that gaps are simply “effort” or “culturally” based. While I do this with much caution and caveat, I take a page from Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom who argue that observed gaps have a basis in differing levels of skills that students bring to the table such as reading ability, computational ability, etc. While I disagree at the magnitude of the skills gap they suggest, it is unequivocal to the me that, on average, students’ from disadvantaged backgrounds carry fewer skills into and out of school. The assumption that simple psychological intervention or, to be trite, “mind games” will substantially impact the gap is both dangerous and rather unfounded.

But alas, this is an editorial right, it’s not necessariliy connected to real world policy. Not true at all! I find a conspicious link between Nisbett’s argument about psychological interventions netting positive and real gains to the work of Roland Fryer, economist and Cheif Equity Officer of the New York Public Schools. The Incentive program that is being run in NYC presumes that students already have the skills necessary or that an incentive will make them “work harder” to gain the skills necessary to succeed. These types of programs worry me because they assume a baseline of non-effort for youngsters. While my teacher colleagues and I disagree on this often, I find that children do work hard and it appears programs like the incentive one are drawn from a deficit model where we presuppose children lack effort and will to succeed.

As the nation’s political landscape changes we must also be vigilant at documenting what does not change among the most vulnerable. I applaud Nisbett for re-surfacing this issue despite my disagreements.  In the end, it takes more than simply “incentives”, “mind games” or “tinkering” to transform the schooling of children, particularly Black children. What do you think it will take?

As I returned to my state of Michigan a few weeks ago, I was greeted with the image of a dark skinned man sporting a fedora tipped to the side with a magenta shirt, and a white striped suit strolling out of the courthouse. In a matter of moments, for better or for worse, I knew I was home. As I visited my favorite Internet sites, I saw the image of Nathaniel Abraham splattered around. Abraham’s flamboyance in dress attracted heavy media attention, but just 8 years ago his use of shotgun grabbed national attention. As I turned on the news, video of him strolling in the parking lot in his suit was accompanied by voice overs discussing how residents were up in arms that Abraham was going free and would live in an apartment and attend college on the state’s dime. It was almost as if I could her the music entering as the news described the scary welfare queen in redux, this time only in the form of the cold blooded Black male killer. Let me make this clear up front, this piece is not about supporting Nathaniel Abraham’s killing, nor his dress, nor anything of that sort. This piece is about understanding what Nathaniel Abraham means to us and what he should represent to us, not what we’ve come to represent him as.

The heresy with which Michigan residents were disgusted by the prospect of Abraham being eligible for programs designed for abandoned youth, is the same disgust they should have felt when he was tried as an adult. It is the same disgust that we should hold when young men and women of color are released back into a society with few social supports. To me, it’s not a mystery that when a person, is isolated from social opportunities from childhood, and then you force them to “participate” fully there will be issues. As the old adage goes, “you gotta crawl before you ball.” Spending nearly half your life in prison cannot prepare you to succeed outside of prison. As the cameras snapped images of a man in outlandish attire, I could only see a manchild.

Recently when I was spending time with my little brother who is 11 and we began talking about independence and what his mother let’s him do. A typical conversation among pre-teens. As we talked, eventually we ended up telling him the story of Nathaniel Abraham, he looked on in shock and disbelief. My little brother is smart, top of his class, has his “head on straight” and I quickly realized the idea of leaving society and returning in 9 years was unimaginable. He, probably like most 11 year olds, found the prospect hard to swallow. As we talked more he repeatedly asked me questions like, “What happened to Nathaniel?” “Why’d he do (the murder) what he did?” These were difficult questions to answer. I still cannot fully answer them, but even my inability to answer speaks volumes.

I wonder about Nathaniel, not simply because he’s a human, but because I wonder what kind of world produces a manchild like him. I remember reading Fox Butterfield’s account of Willie Bosket and thinking that he told part of the story. Though I may not be able to retrace Nathaniel’s life, I’m sure there are more than enough elements that would trouble us. While the national cameras usually fixate on Detroit as a city in decline or post decline, seldom do people think of Pontiac. Pontiac, which sits not far from Detroit, is just as ripe with social ills and dangers: high amounts of crime, drugs, unemployment, and single headed households. While we all love the stories of “beating the odds” and want to highlight the exceptions to the rules of poverty, these stories are in many ways disingenuous. I think Nathaniel represents the rule, the rule that we need to grapple with, simply put: Your chances for success (however you define it) are severely limited (if not eliminated) if you grow up poor, Black, and male in America.

As the media spins images of Nathaniel “pimping the system” and people grow concerned that a “monster” lives on state support, we still have to ask, what/who created this “monster”? In reality, we all did. When we neglect and ignore the conditions of the youth, particularly poor and Black youth, we are assured that Nathaniel will not be the last Nathaniel. When there is bipartisan support for cutting social programs, we assure the development of the manchild. When we assume that things “aren’t that bad” because we can see downtown Detroit open a few shops, we ink poor children’s fates. Unfortunately, there will be more Nathaniels, people locked away with little ability to transition back into “society.” So the next time you hear of them getting “social support” before you ask “How could this happen?” you should ask “How did this happen?” In my estimation, his apartment and some tuition are a pittance compared to the life that we allowed Nathaniel to live before. Lastly, ask yourself, if you were Nathaniel, could you live up to the request of Judge Eugene Moore, “Show us all that you have become a caring, productive member of society”, without assistance.